Azeroth to Zork

Dusk Review

2018-12-29T19:10:00.003-08:00

They say they don’t make them like they used to. But when they do? They make a game like Dusk.

Tale from the Crypt

Dusk is a loving homage to the first generation of true 3D shooters. Loud, fast, violent, playful and a bit grungy. Graphics are deliberately low-poly, the particle effects delightfully pixelated. The tone and aesthetic is that of a gloomy metal album cover. If Quake retired and moved out to the country this is the grandchild of that line.

Your first lesson: MOVE

The game gets right to the point. You are “Dusk Dude” and you wake up on meat hooks in the kind of basement you find people up on meat hooks in. A guttural voice growls “Kill the Intruder” and three burly fellows wearing burlap sacks over their heads come racing out of the dark revving chainsaws. Act fast.

Every element of the design is deliberately, proudly old-school. You can carry every weapon simultaneously and none need manual reloading. Movement is blisteringly fast and mastering the bunny-hop allows for feats of tremendous speed and agility. Enemies ignore allies in their line of fire and are quick to in-fight. Every attack can be dodged, health does not regenerate, and falls from any height do no harm.

Creepy Klan-esk cultists are the most common opposition.

Dusk is not afraid to be playful either. Most objects can be destroyed, for a brief tactical advantage or the sheer joy of destruction. Ambiguous chunks of meat can be roasted and devoured to restore health and beer bottles quaffed to improve morale. Crates can be stacked into make-shift stairs and bars of soap hurled to gibb enemies on contact. Almost everything can, of course, be flushed down a working toilet.

Spilling Blood

Combat is happy to reward speed, precision, and aggression, though it’s certainly possible to hang back and cheese some encounters if that’s your idea of a good time. You’re faster than most foes and hit-scan attacks are completely absent. Weapon switching is speedy and all are tactically useful, giving a strong incentive to seek out the many secrets and expand your arsenal as soon as possible.

Ludicrous gibs, like God intended.

Weaponry is chunky and powerful, immensely satisfying to use. The double-barreled shotgun sounds and feels appropriately devastating. Most of your selection is workman-like, but a magic crossbow pierces whole conga-lines of enemies and even kills through walls. The Riveter rocket launcher can rip through even the meatiest boss health bar (and its ammo stock) in seconds.

The campaign is split into three acts, each with a distinctive setting and tone. In true classic shooter fashion each is a self-contained experience (complete with secret level) that starts you with an empty arsenal and builds to a climactic boss fight. While there’s an obvious narrative arc and difficulty curve the acts can be played in any order.

Passion Play

Act One has a strong rural-horror vibe, with its quaint farmhouses and dreary woods. These places were normal, lived-in, once. Before the force below the town warped the minds of the inhabitants to murderous devotion and madness. The setting is reminiscent of Build engine classic Blood, with a hint of the distant banjos of Redneck Rampage.

Bloody scarecrows with glowing red eyes? Perfectly safe.

Act Two is more industrial, militant in tone. The soldiers and scientists here were trying to understand and harness the power they discovered, not just worship it. The tone and setting owe much to Half-Life. Mundane warehouses and loading-yards give way to labs where the fabric of reality is first teased, then violently torn. Glimpses of a greater weirdness leer through the rips.

Nice to see the old Black Mesa staff are still getting work.

Act Three is pure Quake, as you leave behind our reality for an eldritch fever dream. Impossible cathedrals stand on endless plains beneath a bloody sky. You tread the frozen surfaces of worlds where the sun itself has been devoured. Concepts like relative size and gravity become arbitrary. The journey becomes less physical and more metaphorical. Are these the memories of the Dusk Dude? The dreams of a sleeping god? And at the end, the voice of an old friend greets you.

Such Sights to Show You

While you pick through plenty of rusty corridors and run down rooms Dusk has a real sense of spectacle, especially once you enter the less grounded later acts. Many levels have a genuine “Wow!” moment. The sky splitting open to reveal the scale of the underground space you inhabit. A walk down an elevated path into an industrial meat grinder of dizzying speed and ferocity. A crimson tornado the size of a skyscraper bearing down.

Not every in-door space is claustrophobic.

Almost jarringly, Dusk is more than happy to let you treat it as a toy rather than a carefully curated experience. The game is a speed-runners delight, its only demand that you reach the level exit. Whether you do that by carefully combing the level for every secret, item, and enemy or get there in thirty seconds through a cunning combination of bunny hopping, prop manipulation, and rocket jumping is up to you. Even bosses can be neatly side-stepped, with bonus achievements for finishing a level without killing anything. (Or killing everything.)

Feel the Noise

Dusk owes its atmosphere to strong environmental design and sound work. The game is far more action that horror, but there are effective quieter moments amid the carnage. Moving through gloomy autumnal woods to skittering dried leaves like claws down your spine. Creeping through catacombs with a broken flashlight while the gurgling gasps of unseen horrors fill the darkness. Slower, tenser sections never wear out their welcome, but do much to pace game-play.

The witching hour

The music is just about perfect, plenty of thumping aggressive guitar supporting the grimy industrial synth and crunchy metal. It’s by Andrew Hulshult, a man making a well-earned name for himself in classic shooter soundtracks. Give this sample a listen.

While the campaign is the reason to buy the game, the “Duskworld” multiplayer is a more than welcome addition. As expected from a game taking its cues from Quake, map control and mastery of movement are the keys to victory. If you’re not bunny hopping to build speed at all times you’re doing it wrong. An endless wave based horde mode rounds out the feature list.

Reasons to Play: Excellent old-school true 3D shooter design. Three episodes of escalating gameplay challenge and creative mapping. High speed Quake-style death-matching.

Reasons to Pass: Allergy to low polygon counts.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Nefarious Review

2017-04-02T16:12:00.004-07:00

Not many games let you actually play the villain. Not just choose the selfish or cruel option on a conversation wheel, but step into the boots of the villain of the story. Any thug can bully the weak. Conquering the world with style and vision is not so trivial a task. Nefarious is a welcome entry into a lightly populated field, earning a place alongside such black-hearted classics as Dungeon Keeper and Overlord.

Nefarious is an affectionate parody of the classic hero/villain rivalries of gaming. Playing as Crow, latest in a long line of bird-themed air pirates, your quest is to travel to each of the lands of your world, defeat the resident hero, and kidnap the resident princess. Once you have enough of them to run your royalty powered doomsday device you can finally give the world the conquering it so richly deserves.

Each level has a clear art direction and theme. Tsarist era Russia and dwarves go together well.

Least the story appear a bit regressive it quickly becomes clear that each princess is a character in their own right, not just a McGuffin. The narrative has a lot of fun with the classic trope, giving it due homage without becoming too predictable or dull. In some cases what Crow insists is a kidnapping looks more like a rescue. Other princess are formidable enough that Crow looks more like the one who needs to be saved.

Villainy Victorious

Nefarious is also a much needed example of the Kickstarter model of development done right. This is an era when other high profile projects like Mighty No. 9 land with a resounding flop, and John Romero himself can’t get a project funded. Despite just barely hitting their funding goal of a modest 50k the team at Starblade delivered an excellent final product. It’s encouraging to see somebody pulling off a success and delivering what was promised, avoiding cardinal sins like bloat, feature creep, and the abyss of forum drama.

A good villain bestrides worlds like a Titan, planetarium models or otherwise.

Nefarious’ core gameplay is classic 2-D side-scrolling platforming. Crow runs and jumps his way through levels, disposing of enemies and obstacles with a swing of his oversized mechanical fist. More intriguingly Crow can launch bouncing grenades from a limited but automatically regenerating supply.

Crow takes no damage from his own grenades, but when carefully timed their explosions send him hurtling through the air. Grenade jumping takes a while to get the hang of, but once you manage it makes movement an explosive joy. Speed runners and collectible hunters will find mastering the technique worth their time.

Not every level is pure platforming.

Nefarious is also un-afraid to shake up its core mechanics. Once kidnapped each princesses changes Crow’s abilities for the duration of your escape. This can be as simple as a floaty jump or as complex as letting your grenades create short lived platforms. A few levels, such as a mellow undersea exploration sequence, change up gameplay entirely.

Like a Boss

Boss fights with heroes cleverly reverse the traditional formula. Crow, after all, is a videogame boss himself. When he goes toe to toe with a hero it is inevitably from the cockpit of some sort of giant death machine. These fights are short but sweet, quick to learn and tremendous fun. For once you’re the one trying to to crush, smash, or vaporize a smaller, more nimble opponent while protecting your giant obvious weak point.

It's nice to be the one in the giant robot, for once.

The difficulty curve is sharp. While the opening level might lull you into a false sense of security, the platforming skills and reflexes demanded to progress quickly become demanding. The optional levels and alternate ending boss are just straight up Nintendo hard, though this is certainly appropriate given the source material.

Fortunately you have unlimited lives. The checkpoint system is challenging but not sadistic. Deaths tank your rating for a level, but this is only relevant if you are going for the related achievement. Death also shaves off a modest percentage of your current cash, but this can be recovered simply by reaching that point again. Generally you can hurl Crow into the acid/lava as many times as necessary to memorize a sequence and finally get it right.

Late game levels can get quite demanding.

Much like the early platformers it pays homage to, Nefarious is not a lengthy game. Most first runs are unlikely to take more than 4-6 hours. Multiple endings, optional levels, and a host of challenge based achievements add a lot of value for the dedicated. The tight scope and design keeps the game from wearing out its welcome.

Devils and Details

While voice acting is quite sparse the character portraits that accompany dialog are crisp and full of personality. A few of the in game characters can look a bit crude or even fuzzy by comparison. Hitboxes are also slightly wonky, especially when Crow is lugging a princess over his shoulder. Crow himself has just a touch more momentum than I like in a platformer that asks for this level of precision.

Between mission interludes occur on Crow's command ship, the Sovereign.

These minor polish issues are likely a result of Nefarious’s modest indie budget. To be fair I only really noticed them because I was having so much fun with the game I gave it a second playthrough. More seriously some achievements were not awarding properly, and one strange bug left the Sovereign (Crow’s skyship and mission hub) almost un-populated on re-loading a saved game, interfering with progression and access to some of the optional missions.

An excellent sound-track and surprisingly strong writing and characterization rounds out the experience. Some tracks are quite catchy (Give the train robbery level music a listen below), and each does a great job setting the atmosphere of the level. Characters are coherent and consistent. Crow himself is amusingly aware of the tropes that govern his world and how to navigate them to his advantage without it coming off as obnoxious.

If you have any appetite for platforming I highly recommend Nefarious. While the reverse boss battles alone likely could have carried the game, Nefarious works hard to deliver compelling gameplay within its tightly controlled scope. The game handles its source material with respect and affection while being unafraid to build its own memorable world and cast.

Reasons to Play: Clever use of premise and reverse boss battles. Excellent sound track. Indie Kickstarter development done right.

Reasons to Pass: Slight polish issues. Sharp difficulty curve.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

DOOM (2016) Review

2016-09-08T23:07:00.003-07:00

The Doom series has long been one of gaming’s flagships. The original, its sequel, and the million and one mods and map-packs they spawned remain highly playable even today. The fast, brutal, accessible gameplay endures the test of time.

A History of Violence

Doom 3, released in 2004, was a surprising departure from the earlier style of the series. Doom 3 made use of a technologically astounding (for the time) lighting engine to create an extremely dark but atmospheric demon infested Mars base. The core gameplay and atmosphere seemed to be trying to imitate Doom’s own distant descendants, the Half-Life and System Shock series.

Rather than running and gunning against hordes of foes players found themselves picking their way through cramped, shadowy settings. Combat came in the form off a series of haunted house style ambushes by small numbers of enemies. The raw speed and frantic action of the earlier games was replaced with something more akin to survival horror. The constant tension was gripping, even exhausting, but to many players the game didn’t feel like Doom.

Hell looks appropriately like a metal album cover.

What little information we received about Doom 4 during development was even less encouraging. Screenshots featured rubble-strewn modern urban settings and unhappy people in tattered military gear. It looked like we were in for a miserably serious slog with nothing in common with the classic Doom gameplay. The news that development was being scrapped and rebooted entirely was met with hesitant relief. When the game was finally released earlier this year expectations were hopeful but not high.

Note: For the rest of this review, Doom refers to the series in general, while DOOM specifically means the 2016 reboot. It’s an ALL CAPS kinda game.

At Doom’s Gate

The opening to DOOM puts any concerns to rest immediately. Within seconds of starting the campaign you are killing. In scant minutes more you are armed, armored, and blasting imps with a shotgun across a demon infested Mars. DOOM understands and embraces what made the first two games so enduring and fun, while updating elements to account for 20 years of technological advancement.

Outdoor sections make a nice contract to the classic gore-strewn corridors.

The Marine still moves with the ground devouring stride of the classic FPS protagonist. Weapons do not need reloading and can be fired until your ammo runs dry. Maps are complex and three-dimensional, often non-linear, and full of valuable secrets that encourage exploration.

While there’s no regenerating health or cover mechanics the march of time has changed some elements. In the original games swarms of enemies were often peppered across a level, creating a constant mix of combat and exploration. Here most combat takes place in discrete arenas. You enter an area, the doors seal, and waves of demons teleport in until you’ve killed them all.

The Martian vistas drive home the destructive scale of the invasion.

The creatures of DOOM’s bestiary are far faster, smarter, and more dangerous on a one to one basis than their sprite-sheet ancestors. They also take up a lot more processing power. As a technological necessity you’re generally fighting a dozen demons at most, rather than the mobs that could populate the original game’s levels.

Rip and Tear…

Above all else DOOM rewards speed and aggression. The best way to stay alive is to stay in motion. Hell devours the indolent. As in the original games the Marine is faster and more nimble than most of his foes, able to dodge most attacks and (new to DOOM) rapidly pull himself up onto any ledge he can reach. The level of mobility and lack of falling damage is intoxicating, especially once you unlock the double-jump.

The biggest addition to combat is the new takedown mechanic, dubbed “Glory Kills”. When a demon is near death they’ll reel in place while their outline flashes red. Get close enough and tap the appropriate button and the Marine lunges at the afflicted demon and kills them with his bare hands.

Battles are highly mobile affairs. Keep moving.

By design Glory Kill animations are as short as they are brutal, which is good because they’re central to the DOOM combat loop. They save ammo, buy you a few frames of invincibility, and (with the right upgrades) can even function as a sort of battlefield teleportation to stay one step ahead of your enemies. Most importantly, Glory killed enemies yield health, with a higher payout the closer you are to death.

While health can be found in the environment, the most reliable source in the heat of combat is beat it out of the enemy. The lesson is clear. If you’re getting your ass kicked don’t run away and hide. Attack harder and faster to survive.

…Until it is Done

Both the chainsaw and BFG return, but with some design tweaks. The chainsaw instantly kills any non-boss, causing them to erupt into a fountain of gore and ammo pickups. Every chainsaw kill depletes a limited stock of fuel, and bigger demons take more fuel to saw through. The BFG is simply a breathtaking emergency “Kill Everything” button.

The UAC's attempts to blend high science and demonology went predictably poorly.

In keeping with modern game design, DOOM has a generous helping of character and weapon advancement systems. Probably at least one more than it really needs. There are alternate fire modes to unlock, suit upgrade tokens to hunt down, demonic runes to earn and level up and more. It could be argued that RPG elements detract from the purity of the combat, but they reward skillful play and dedicated secret hunting. Some of the demonic runes are almost brokenly powerful, but all the upgrade systems are rewarding and combine to give you a sense of steadily increasing might across the campaign.

Man and Myth

While story has never been a core element of the Doom series there is one to be found, if you care to look. This time around the Union Aerospace Corporation (A corporate entity that appears in every Doom game) has literally been exploiting Hell as an energy source. This went predictably, spectacularly wrong. The head of the UAC, a cyborg named Samuel Hayden with a smoothly authoritative voice, periodically attempts to explain and justify this to the Marine. The Marine, in turn, ignores him whenever possible and destroys every expensive machine Hayden asks him to gently power down.

The most fascinating character may well be the Doom Marine himself. If this DOOM he’s not just a grunt in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s a figure of myth and dark legend. The UAC recovered him from a sealed tomb during one of their forays into Hell, and the Marine is clearly not native to this place and time. He’s an unstoppable force, loosed upon Mars to wreak a terrible vengeance upon demonkind.

Hayden has a lot to say, but the Marine isn't interested in his excuses.

The Doom Marine never speaks a word, nor should he. This does not mean he is devoid of personality. The Marine talks with his hands, and he talks the loudest when he gets those hands on his enemies. The “Glory Kill” animations tell you everything you need to know about the Marine’s relationship and history with the forces of Hell.

The Marine will wrench horns and limbs from a foe and use them to bludgeon or impale. Smaller monsters are brutalized or bodily torn in half. Bigger demons are force-fed their own explosive body-parts.

The Marine HATES the demons. There’s no fear in him of their monstrous nature, no respect for their power. Only contempt and endless fury. He wants them to suffer, but even more than that he wants them to die. The moment his latest victim is dead the Marine discards them and moves on, already seeking another.

Map and Tear

DOOM nails the soundtrack perfectly. A thumping onslaught of power metal with a generous slathering of synth, the music beautifully matches the tone of the game. Many of the tracks pay homage to signature tracks from the previous games. Keep an ear out for the remix of the immortal “At Doom’s Gate.”

DOOM’s robust single player campaign is more than strong enough to carry the game on its own, but it also comes with the expected multiplayer mode and an unexpected level editor.

Snap Map is the built in level editor. As an introduction to level building and scripting it’s an amazingly accessible piece of software. Between the tutorials and intuitive interface anyone can be slapping together a playable level within minutes.

Unfortunately Snap Map has some odd limitations that hold it back. Unlike in the campaign you can’t hold more than two weapons at once, and demons don’t spawn properly if you have too many already in play. Some sort of proper system for debugging scripts as they are executed would be a godsend.

Some familiar foes return.

Snap Map also restricts you to using its set of prefabricated rooms, which sharply limits the kind of levels you can build. Play enough Snap Maps and you’ll start to see a LOT of the same rooms over and over. With no way to import custom assets or build your own rooms or terrain I don’t see it as having anywhere near the longevity of the modding and mapping community for the original Doom.

Frag Fest

The multiplayer component of the game was developed by the same studio that does a lot of the CoD and Halo map packs, and it shows. Classic free-for-all death matching is oddly absent. You are restricted to a two-weapon loadout going into the match, although powerful demon transformation runes and limited use superweapons keep map control and awareness important. Winning (or even finishing) a match showers you with cosmetic rewards like armor customization options and taunt emotes.

To the developers credit the high speed and mobility of combat remain carried over from the single player campaign, and the basic act of tagging an enemy player with a direct rocket hit or super-shotgun blast remains viscerally satisfying. Less effective are the inclusion of a class of expendable “Hack Module” items that provide brief benefits, like displaying the location of the highest scoring enemy. Try as I might I never felt like I understood how to properly manage, conserve, or trigger these items, and couldn’t really find any documentation explaining them.

Sections of classic levels are hidden across the campaign.

Finally there were a number of unexplained crashes to desktop. These happened just enough to be annoying but not crippling, and didn’t seem to be associated with any particular level, weapon, etc…

None of these minor issues should discourage you from getting DOOM. It’s the best shooter yet of 2016 and more than earns its name.

Reasons to play: Glorious classic Doom gameplay brought into the 21st century. High mobility combat, levels that reward exploration, and brutal Glory Kills. Great soundtrack. Highly accessible level editor.

Reasons to pass: Odd lack of classic death-matching. Slight technical instability.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Slave Zero Retro Review

2015-09-28T19:54:00.001-07:00

Nostalgia can be a powerful, if misleading force. It colors our memories of the past as it shapes our perception of the present. Games and other pieces of media that are fondly remembered do not always hold up under the harsh glare of today’s expectations.

I first played Slave Zero not long after it came out, in the distant past of 2000 or so. I recall it as having been fun if not particularly deep, and still have fond memories of the game. The game didn’t make much in the way of an impact, and it’s not really remembered as a classic (or much at all) these days. Let’s take a look and see what remains once we’ve peeled away the nostalgia.

Get in the Robot, Chan

Slave Zero’s plot is simple comic book pulp, mostly developed through people yelling at you only to be drowned out by the soundtrack and thunder of combat. The evil SovKhan rules an enormous futuristic eastern-flavored megacity. You play as Chan, a member of an organization called the Guardians that is attempting to overthrow the SovKhan, for reasons.

Tiny helicopters and tanks oppose you in the early game.

Since the SovKhan has an army of giant robots, and what few Guardians we see are armed with sticks, the Guardians steal the SovKhan’s prototype weapon to even things up. Chan pilots (becomes?) Zero, the first of a line of giant biomechanical war machines called Slaves. For an entity made of so few polygons Zero projects a surprising level of personality between his eternal smirk and swaggering, simian lope.

A few throwaway lines imply that Chan is permanently fused to Zero somehow, but this is never further developed or explained. This is too bad. Sacrificing your humanity to become a giant fighting machine could have been a fascinating concept to build a story around, but such narrative finesse is beyond a game this big and loud.

The soundtrack holds up well. A collection of thumping techno with strong organic bass serves as perfect accompaniment to the giant robot on giant robot violence, helping to bring the neon cityscape to life. Give it a listen here.

Built to Scale

Let's be upfront. By modern graphical standards this is an ugly game. Textures are often muddy and polygons scarce. Where Slave Zero succeeds, even despite the obvious technical limitations of the era, is in giving the action a sense of size and scope.

Tiny cars valiantly attempting to commute through a robot war-zone.

The ground shakes beneath Zero’s mighty swaggering stride while tiny low-poly humans cower and flee. Cars wreck harmlessly against his massive feet as he crosses busy freeways. The helicopters, jets, and tanks that assail you in the early game are as toylike as they are ineffective. Vehicles and other debris can be scooped up and flung like baseballs.

Amusingly the massive civilian casualties and collateral damage your battles through the city must be causing are never mentioned or addressed. Still, nobody ever won a revolution without inflicting a healthy amount of carnage and horror upon the people the revolution is ostensibly being fought for.

The city has a way of dwarfing even Zero.

The bulk of your opposition consists of robots Zero’s size and larger. Often much larger. A generous helping of destructible buildings and other elements about Zero’s size further deliver a sense of the firepower getting tossed around. Finally the massive, colorful neo-Tokyo cityscape towers over everything, making even you and your ten story opponents seem insignificant.

Kauju War

Gameplay is not complex. You thunder through highly linear levels, destroying everything in your path. Exploration is minimal and backtracking almost non-existent. Occasional arenas halt forward progress until you explode every other giant robot in the vicinity. Irregular platforming has Zero hopping from skyscraper to skyscraper while rare static segments charge you with destroying or defending something while waves of enemy reinforcement pour in.

Don't stand in front of these guys...

Enemy AI is weak and most foes are not very mobile. Fragile hovering mechs seek you out and harry you from above while heavier units unleash blistering firepower from fixed positions. Zero’s not really nimble enough to dodge, so you must seek cover and retaliate between barrages. While you can occasionally pick the enemy to pieces with the railgun sniper solid level design and enemy placement keeps combat engaging.

...because they do that.

Zero can carry a mere three weapons at a time, swapping between handheld bullet and energy guns while firing missiles from a shoulder mounted launcher. Aside from a succession of bigger, louder guns (some so comically oversized they are nearly the size of Zero himself) there is no character progression or upgrade system. While the arsenal is satisfyingly destructive simply grabbing the next biggest gun you find is not always the best option.

Logistical Errors

The sheer rate at which they burn through ammo makes most of the high tier weapons impractical. The giant beam cannon, for example, consumes your entire stock of energy in about two seconds. Supplies are normally so plentiful this isn’t a big deal, but a number of major fights trap you in an arena with a giant damage sponge and a limited number of pickups. There’s simply not enough ammo in many encounters to win if you are carrying the most powerful but inefficient weapons.

There’s no garage or armory function to let you tweak your loadout between levels. The practical result of all this is that pressing forward with the wrong weapons can render some fights, indeed the game itself, un-winnable. Indeed, I’m honestly not sure there is enough ammo to beat the final boss on hard. For a game based around using big, simple, powerful weapons to destroy everything in sight discouraging the use of the biggest and most powerful is a bizarre design decision, bordering on a major flaw.

It's lonely at the top of a miles high city. Watch you step.

Boss fights are (as they should be) among the game’s most memorable encounters. Each pits you against a massive enemy Slave that dwarfs Zero. One boss fight sees you climbing a vertical chamber flooding with lethal acid while the hovering boss blasts away at you from the center. Another gives you an extremely limited number of skyscrapers to safely stand on, which the boss steadily demolishes over the course of your duel. Managing ammo supplies and collecting more without wasting it is at least as important in these encounters as dodging attacks.

Code Rot

The inevitable change of hardware and software over time have left Slave Zero with some considerable technical issues. Downloading the latest version of nGlide helped remove the savage stuttering the game suffered from, but I could never fix the resolution so my shots didn’t pull to the left of my crosshair. This made long range sniping difficult and broke homing missiles entirely.

More seriously Slave Zero crashed every time I got close to or took a shot at a specific kind of late-game enemy. I couldn’t find a technical fix and this bug almost scrapped my run of the game. Fortunately there weren’t many of this particular enemy and a few dozen crashes and some weird footwork was enough to get me past them.


The sewers are visually dull and full of robot spiders.

Slave Zero is not a long or complex game. You can probably blow through it in a weekend or less. The core gameplay is simple and accessible enough that it holds up today. Other games attempting to convey a sense of relative size and scale between giant characters and environments should look at what Slave Zero accomplishes even with its technical limitations. As a gaming artifact it provides an excellent example of big, dumb, loud fun, left dangerously close to unplayable on a modern machine by the march of time.

Reasons to play: Game sells the sense of size and scope of being a giant robot. Thumping techno soundtrack.

Reasons to pass: Simple gameplay and weird weapon/ammo balance. Serious technical glitches on modern machines.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Short Games Double Review

2015-06-09T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last updated this blog, but unfortunately I haven't had as much time for gaming as I'd like. If you find yourself with a similarly busy schedule here's a few more short games that can be enjoyed to completion without committing to an epic six-month slog.

Spirits of Xanadu is a first person, minimalist sci-fi horror game. There’s a bit of shooting, a bit of puzzle solving, and a lot of subtle atmosphere. The game’s DNA owes a bit to Deus Ex, a bit to the films like The Black Hole and 2001, and a great deal to System Shock 2. If (like me) you crave being trapped in space on a ship where something has gone Horribly Wrong™ you’ll be right at home.

SoX is set rather anachronistically in an alternate 80’s, which gives artistic license to all the boxy robots, tape decks, and ship-wide smoking permit. You’ve been dispatched to investigate the silence of the research ship Xanadu, in orbit over a distant world, and bring her home. You dock to find the small crew missing, the on-board security system berserk, and the ship deliberately sabotaged.

Space Madness

There is also the small matter that you may be going insane. Eerie Kabuki masks stare at you from cupboards and corners before fading without a trace. Brief thumping sounds come from the next room over. At one point it appears to rain inside the ship, completely without explanation, stopping just as suddenly.

SoX’s horror is a bit more psychological and cerebral than many similar offerings. While there are hints of some sort of affliction among the now vanished crew there are no zombies, mutants or necromorphs stalking the corridors. Body horror is conspicuously absent, and the few traces of blood stand out all the more for their rarity. The Xanadu’s robots are creepy, but the silence and sense of isolation on the ship when everything is quiet is more un-nerving than any number of homicidal machines.

Nice to see the Daleks are still getting work.

There is a certain amount of robot shooting to be done, but this is more an adventure game than a blistering FPS or resource scarce survival horror excursion. Health regenerates and your laser weapons never run out of ammo. The Xanadu’s security system puts up a decent fight and will likely kill you a few times, but this just results in you being hauled to the easily escape-able brig.

Indeed this is the source of SoX’s only real gameplay annoyance. Every time you die the bulk of the Xanadu’s robot population respawns, including a batch right outside the brig. You’ll likely need to shoot this same group of bots a few too many times on your first playthough. Careful and observant explorers can eventually find weapons beyond the starting pistol that all but trivialize combat, and ways to deactivate large parts of the security system. If you truly find the combat intolerable there’s even a menu option to remove it altogether.

The Missing

While you (arguably) never meet the Xanadu’s missing crew they left a host of notes, files, and audio recordings detailing the events of their mission. Picking through what these people left behind where they lived and worked and getting to know them is one of the subtle pleasures SoX offers. Each crew member is a fully fleshed out character with their own history, personality, strengths, and failings. Eventually you’ll be able to tell who sat where in the cafeteria just by examining what is on each table.

I can't wait to find the pie all this strawberry jam came from.

Graphics are sparse but effective, with detail where it’s important. Not everything needs to look like the latest installment of the Crysis series. The sound work and voice acting is excellent, especially in the crew audio-logs.

There is a refreshing amount of interactivity to be found in the environment, reminiscent of games like Deus Ex. Food and drink can be scarfed, toilets can be flushed, and drawers can be opened to check for items of interest. Shoot out enough power boxes and you can even kill the lights for that area. These touches help bring the relatively simple geometry of the ship to life.

The Xanadu is a long way from home. Perhaps it should stay that way.

The Xanadu is not a large ship and this is not a lengthy game. While your first playthrough will likely take a few hours it is possible to speed-run the game in ten minutes or less. Indeed there is an achievement for doing so. The bulk of your time not shooting robots will be spent figuring out how to get the Xanadu’s various sub-systems up and running again. There are multiple endings, some obvious and others obtuse, so there is replay value to be found.

If you’re hungry for an excuse to dismember space-zombies, or a survival-horror gauntlet that makes you count each bullet, Spirits of Xanadu may not be quite what you’re looking for. The horror is real but subtle. Exploring the decks of the Xanadu is an absorbing way to spend a few hours, and an experience that will likely stay with you long after you finally steer the ship to its ultimate fate.

Reasons to play: Atmospheric, creepy, sharp writing, and good replayability.

Reasons to pass: Very short. Slightly annoying death/enemy respawn system.

Guns, Gore, and Cannoli is a 2-D side scrolling shooter with highly polished gameplay and attractive, cartoony, hand-drawn animation. Both art style and gameplay owe a lot to the colorful Metal Slug arcade series. It’s the best lighthearted, gangster themed shooter set in a zombie apocalypse you’ll play this year.

GGC benefits from a strong sense of place, set firmly in an enjoyably exaggerated roaring twenties. As mob enforcer and made man Vinnie Cannoli you arrive in town to conduct some “Legitimate Business”, only to discover the city overrun by hordes of hungry undead. The simple setup sees Vinnie blasting his way through lovingly detailed seedy docks, speakeasies, tenements, and more.

Deadfellows

The game is a lean, pure experience. There are no leaderboards, point totals, character advancement, or progression systems. All possible fat has been trimmed out. The core gameplay is more than strong enough to stand on its own without such fripperies.

The cartoony environments are lovingly detailed.

You fight your way from left to right, wielding a slowly growing arsenal of generally era appropriate weapons and explosives. Vinnie can jump, crouch, and kick to fend of smaller enemies while re-loading. Tremendous care has clearly been paid towards ensuring jumping, movement, and shooting feels just right. The occasional platforming section and movement/timing based puzzles are a joy instead of an exercise in hair pulling aggravation.

GGC is punishing on higher difficulties but never unfair. This is a game un-afraid to deliver bracing, deeply satisfying challenge. Checkpoint and health pacing feels just about perfect. Vinnie can take a few hits but the game is balanced around the expectation that you’ll be dodging damage, not face-tanking it. While memorizing the level layout and enemy spawn patterns will give you some advantage good reflexes and quick decision making are more important.

Mooks, Goons, and Palookas

Vinnie battles a diverse array of zombie types, each with their own weaknesses and attack patterns. Swollen butchers shuffle forward hurtling meat-cleavers, detonating in a cloud of cartoonish gore that damages everything around them. Zombified soldiers wear helmets that block headshots while spraying tommy-gun fire in a downward arc. Infected rats boil towards you in giant swarms, prompting a hasty grab for the flamethrower. Combat is absorbing and never repetitive.

Gangster flick aficionados may spot familiar (if decaying) faces.

Aside from zombies you also face rival Mafia enforcers and military soldiers. Human opponents fight more defensively than the undead, using firearms and cover. Their presence helps vary up the combat and keep it from becoming stale. In a nice touch humans and zombies will attack one another on sight, which makes sense and creates some interesting tactical situations when both factions are on-screen at once.

Enemy AI is robust for a 2D shooter. More agile zombie types have no trouble navigating a path to you if one exists. Human opponents recognize grenades and move to avoid them. Far from idly waiting to be killed they’ll employ explosives and poison gas canisters of their own to flush you out.

Boss fights represent major difficulty spikes and are can get quite brutal. Each will likely kill you a few times as you try to understand their movement and attack patterns. Fortunately checkpoint placement is more than fair, especially on the multi-stage final encounter.

No true mobster can carry on a conversation without the use of their hands.

Tying it all together is a simple but functional and admirably coherent story. Characters are broadly drawn and entertaining without dipping into obnoxious or offensive territory. The well animated cartoon cut-scenes are a high point, and as you would expect characters talk a lot with their hands.

GGC’s campaign is unlikely to run you longer than 4-5 hours the first time through. Unfortunately once the credits roll there’s not much left to the game but to replay it on a higher difficulty (which I did). Co-op is limited to local only, which is awkward at best, but don’t let these minor issues discourage you from playing this meticulously polished indie gem.

Reasons to play: Meticulously tuned, deeply satisfying 2-D shooter gameplay. High quality hand-drawn animation. Very high level of polish.

Reasons to pass: Just one short campaign. Local co-op only.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Short Games Triple Pack

2015-01-01T18:34:00.002-08:00

The immersion of an epic length game can be very rewarding. Unfortunately life is deeply unfair and we often find ourselves without the dozens of hours and big blocks of uninterrupted time necessary to properly enjoy a mammoth RPG or other all-encompassing experience. What’s a time pressed gamer to do?

We could try free-to-play clickfest Facebook games. We could also jam burning coals into our ears. As an alternative I offer three very different games. All three offer real gameplay with the most modest of time demands.

Crypt of the Necrodancer combines a simple rhythm game with a top-down, 2D roguelike.

An undead wizard has stolen your heart (not romantically, the actual organ). As a result you can only move to the beat of each level’s song. Enemies each have their own movement and attack patterns controlled by the beat as well. The result is literal dance-fighting.

The game is extremely accessible, controlled with only the directional keys and clearly designed to be played with a dance pad as well. Moving to the beat multiplies gold dropped by enemies, used to buy things from shops and as a high-score. You can simply stop moving, (indeed doing so makes fighting some enemies much simpler) but your gold multiplier drops the moment you miss a beat.

Floor tiles light up to let you know when a beat multiplier is in effect.

Looted diamonds can be spent after each death to buy a few permanent upgrades or unlock new potential loot. As CotN runs are short and prone to ending violently this offers a nice sense of progression. Unspent diamonds are lost on starting a new run, so unlocking the more expensive items requires you to survive at least a few levels.

Levels are short, consisting of only a few rooms. Each is unlikely to take more than a few minutes, even if you pause to dig around for secret items and clear all enemies. Indeed if you’re still loitering in a level when the song ends you’re unceremoniously dumped into the next. This does much to keep the pace breezy and the game moving forward.

Shopkeepers sing along to the music,.

Survive a modest brace of levels and you’re treated to a boss fight. CotN’s bosses are surprisingly creative and one of the strongest elements. One encounter features conga lines of zombies controlled by a giant angry ape. Another plays out as a real-time game of chess, with you battling an entire team of enemy pieces on your own.

CotN can be quite challenging. Expect to get trampled by a mob of tough enemies a lot in later zones before you can acquire a toe-hold of useful items and weapons. Even with a good weapon and some armor you’re never more than a few missed steps from death. Since most CotN runs aren’t more than fifteen minutes death isn’t as punishing as it can be in many roguelikes.

Later levels can begin with a brutal rush of enemies.

The soundtrack is excellent, as one would hope for a game based around rhythm and music. The songs for the early zones are a bit more thumping, but all are worth listening to and work for purposes of the game’s core mechanic.

For a game still technically in alpha Crypt of the Necrodancer plays smoothly and (most importantly) is tremendous fun. The moment to moment gameplay is great and the combining of two relatively simple ideas into a whole works beautifully. The addition of a co-op mode even tentatively pushes CotN into the territory of a viable party game.

Reasons to play: Clever core mechanic. Accessible gameplay. Thumping soundtrack.

Reasons to pass: High difficulty. If you lack a sense of rhythm.

The Fall is a dark, 2d adventure/puzzle game with light combat elements. The premise is unique and intriguing. You play as ARID, the onboard AI for a suit of advanced combat armor. You come online literally falling from orbit towards an unknown planet. Kinetic energy shields narrowly save you from becoming an impact crater, but your human pilot is worryingly unresponsive. With nothing else to go on you set out to locate medical aid and any clue as to what’s going on.

The world you find yourself stranded on is a dark and gloomy place. The largely subterranean environments are stark, with most things viewed only in outline. Something bad clearly went down before you got here, judging by the sheer number of decaying human and robot remains to be found.

Environments are dank and somber, with spots of color and light standing out all the more.

Puzzles are generally logical, although you can sometimes just resort to trial and error. So long as you remember what abilities you’ve unlocked and what you’re carrying you shouldn’t get stuck for long. Even with your flashlight beam highlighting critical hotspots in the environment some are frustratingly hard to spot, and missing these is what held me up more than anything else.

Combat is sparse and largely trivial. There are basic cover and even stealth mechanics, but don’t come into The Fall expecting a true Metroid-like experience. The brief action sequences still make a nice pallet cleanser between the more dialog and puzzle heavy sections of the game.

Opportunities to stealth-kill enemy bots are rare, but do exist.

One of the core themes of the game is that ARID is locked out of most of the combat suit’s functions. As a work around she can over-ride these locks if she needs a particular function to preserve the life of her pilot. Perversely you quickly discover that, to unlock new abilities, progress through the game, and ultimately save your pilot, you must constantly, deliberately put ARID and her pilot in mortal danger.

The logical gymnastics this puts ARID though contributes heavily to her character development. To fulfill her programming, she’s forced to blatantly violate it. This occasionally taps into a streak of subtle but potent dark humor as ARID takes the most direct and destructive route through the arbitrary and absurd tasks other characters throw in her way.

ARID may be military hardware, but she is more than a mere machine.

While the game’s puzzles are functional it is the characters and dialog that make up The Fall’s strongest element. With no living humans about (aside from ARID’s uncommunicative pilot) the cast consists entirely of robots and other Artificial Intelligences. Far from being written as just metallic people their actions are often inhuman and un-nerving from the point of view of a more meat-based sentience.

A critically damaged fellow combat suit mildly agrees ARID should cannibalize it for parts, since she has a greater chance of surviving. This isn’t presented as an act of noble self-sacrifice by either party, but just the logic thing to do. Even something as basic as gender identity is difficult to apply. While the combat suit has a clearly male physique it’s impossible to think of ARID as anything other than female after hearing her speak.

In keeping with our theme The Fall is a short game. Unless you get seriously stuck it’s unlikely to run you more than 3-4 hours. The story concludes with a somewhat unsatisfying ending that leaves a lot of questions unresolved, but The Fall is only part one of an intended trilogy.

Reasons to Play: Foreboding atmosphere. Satisfying, logical puzzles. Intriguing set up and characters.

Reasons to Pass: Short play time. As act One of Three, raises more questions than it answers. Awkward but trivial combat.

Luftrausers is a 2-D side-scrolling shooter with an old-school arcade vibe. There’s no real campaign, story, or linear missions. Just endless waves of enemies over a featureless ocean, a high score to chase, and a few progression systems.

Death is merely an excuse to try again. When inevitably shot down by the bullet-hell like spread of enemy fire you can be back in the air with a new plane configuration in seconds. The only true penalty for destruction is losing your combo multiplier and shot at a new high score.

Battleships require concentrated fire to sink and fill the sky with projectiles.

A constant stream of kills is necessary to build the combo multiplier and get a worthwhile score. Basic strategy encourages building the multiplier on swarming small planes before trying to tackle a high value target. Conversely you only repair damage when not firing, which is not conducive to racking up kills. Walking the razors edge between keeping your combo going and staying in the air makes for frantic second to second gameplay.

Each launch challenges you further with a brace of quantifiable mini-objectives that do much to keep gameplay from growing monotonous. These missions provide a sense of accomplishment and progression and often encourage new styles of play. An easy mission might task you with simply downing a certain number of enemy planes in a single life. A more challenging one might require sinking a battleship while on fire or while in free-fall.

Short term missions add additional challenge to the arcade action.

Accomplishing these mini-missions and racking up sizable combos contributes towards unlocking new engines, hulls, and weapons. These parts can be freely mixed and matched, allowing for some fascinating combinations with truly unique kinds of play. One configuration might boost your armor and render you immune to collision damage, making it more practical to ram enemies than to shoot them. Another might let you dart out of the ocean to sweep the skies with a laser beam before sinking back safely below the waves.

No one weapon or configuration excels at fighting every enemy type. Much of Luftrauser’s appeal comes from experimenting with different parts and learning how to exploit each combination’s strengths and weaknesses. Some might lend themselves to a particular playstyle more than others, but all are fun to try.

As you unlock new parts dozens of configurations become available.

A suitably martial soundtrack enhances the action. The music actually changes slightly depending on your plane configuration, which provides another convenient excuse to experiment with all the combinations.

Luftrausers makes for an ideal five-minute break game. The frantic core action combines well with the parts and missions systems to add welcome variety and a sense of progression.

Reasons to play: Well tuned arcade action. Swappable plane configurations offer depth and variety.

Reasons to pass: High difficulty. Short, repetitive core gameplay.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Costume Quest / Our Darker Purpose Reviews

2014-08-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

It’s the very dog days of summer as I write this, but slowly, mercifully, we creep towards Fall. With Fall comes Halloween, the modern incarnation of the old pagan rite of disguising your kids as monsters and sending them out to rob the neighbors. We’re going to review a couple of seasonably appropriate games featuring child protagonists.

Tim Schafer and his company, Double Fine Productions, have made a number of my favorite games over the years. The art direction and writing for games like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend is memorable and endearing. While developed under a much more modest time and resource budget than other Double Fine projects Costume Quest loses none of the charm.

Costume Quest is set on Halloween night, casting you as one of a pair of twins setting out on the annual candy harvest. Unfortunately monsters bent on pilfering Earth’s candy supply mistake your twin’s goofy candy corn costume for the real thing and kidnap them. Your mission is to recover your abducted sibling, along with as much candy as humanly possible.

The sibling interaction is just combative enough to ring true.

The exaggerated, cartoony art style and atmosphere really captures the spirit of Halloween. Not the spirit of fear or the supernatural, but the sense of being a kid on Halloween night. The night is about the costumes and the candy, and any monsters that get in the way of that are going to get wrecked.

Transform and Roll Out

Normally combating a monster invasion without weapons, training, or adult support would be a tall order, but the cast of Costume Quest has an unusual advantage. When confronted by monsters the children transform into giant combat-ready versions of their costumes. A boxy, cardboard robot suit becomes a towering mech, complete with rocket-punch. An adorable French-fry costume becomes an altogether more alarming tuber-based crab creature, showering unlucky monsters with white hot grease and salt.

The various costume transformations are a treat.

Gameplay is that of a very lite RPG. Refreshingly there are no random encounters, with monsters visible in the environment before combat begins. With patience you can even exploit patrol patterns and gain the first strike by whacking them from behind with your candy pail.

The turn based combat is enhanced by various quick-time events that reward attention and reflexes with additional offense and defense. Every few turns a special meter fills up and allows you to unleash some extra powerful attack or support ability. Combat is simple but never dull. If you do get whomped you’re allowed to try the fight again at no penalty.

Combat is surprisingly cinematic

While you eventually acquire two allied children to fill out your party costumes can be swapped between them interchangeably. Choice of costume defines a character’s role and abilities in combat. The armored medieval knight excels at taking damage and protecting allies, while the Statue of Liberty can provide patriotism induced healing. “Battle Stamps”, lootable and purchasable with candy, offer a welcome extra bit of customization in the form of additional stat boosts or powers.

Samhain Shuffle

Environments visited include a suburban neighborhood, a mall, and fall carnival, all thematically decorated and populated with background characters amusingly oblivious to the monster invasion. You can’t advance till you hit up every trick-or-treating location on the map, and the trick-or-treat mechanic has a nice bit of tension as you wait to find out if there’s free candy or a monster fight behind the door. Simple puzzles based around using your costume’s special abilities and exploration based quests round out the game.

There are a few side-quests and mini-games between whomping monsters.

Costume Quest is a compact, digestible experience that knows not to overstay its welcome. Even if you take your time to nab every stray piece of candy and finish every side-quest completion is unlikely to take you more than 4-6 hours. This all makes for a charming, accessible game that fans of Double Fine and anyone looking for a seasonably appropriate diversion will enjoy.

Publishers should be less afraid of modest projects. Not every game need be a budget breaking behemoth that must to sell a million copies to turn a profit. There is an elegance to be found in keeping a tightly contained scope.

Reasons to play: Cute art style. Sincere humor. Accessible and appropriate for all ages.

Reasons to Pass: Short. Forgiving difficulty.

Our Darker Purpose is a top-down action roguelike with light RPG elements and a deliciously dark, gothic set of sensibilities. The game has bits of “The Binding of Isaac” and “Don’t Starve” in its family tree. The humor and art owe a bit to Tim Burton and a great deal to Edward Gory.

Movement and combat is in the classic twin-stick style. You comb a floor of randomly laid out rooms for useful items and the chamber of the boss guarding the way forward. Each time you enter a room you’re locked in until you’ve cleared all enemies or overcome some other hazard, so you can’t just rush through.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

ODP is set in a towering, Victorian, half boarding school, half orphanage called Edgewood. The school is a nightmare Hogwarts, teaming with darkly comic fates for poorly behaved or unwary students and ruled by an unseen but amusingly malevolent administrator. The bits of lore and narrative slowly unlocked through play are gothic black-humor at their finest.

At least they're feeding the children at Edgewood.
Possibly to each-other.

You play as Cordy, an adorably pale waif with a permanent expression of bemused worry. When the faculty and staff of Edgewood abruptly vanish Cordy barely survives the purge of the small, weak, awkward, and unpopular children that immediately follows. With nothing to lose and nowhere to go but up she sets out for the top floor of the building, searching for answers and a way out. Provided she can survive the savage gangs of fellow children that have formed in the absence of adult supervision and the stranger things scuttling in the shadows and crawling across the chalkboards of the darkened school.

Fortunately Cordy has inexplicably developed the ability to hurl small darts of flame to defend herself. While Cordy can only hurl flame in the four cardinal directions she can move and shoot independently. An extremely limited number of chalk-bombs and an evasive roll (crucial to avoiding damage) round out her modest set of starting abilities.

On occasion ODP dips into Bullet-Hell territory.

Early attempts to ascend Edgewood invariably end in failure and death, a fact the game itself is quick to tell you to expect. Indeed it’s not mechanically possible to clear ODP on your first playthrough. Overcoming a major boss for the first time advances the narrative and adds a new set of variables to the game, but also ends that particular run. Like all true roguelikes ODP is intended to be played many, many times before completion.

Learning by Rote

Edgewood is a stark, relentlessly hostile environment. Healing juice-boxes, money, and other useful items are in short supply and invariably guarded. Attrition as much as anything else usually ends a run. Learning the attack patterns of the various inhabitants and hazards is critical to long term progress. Finishing a floor without taking damage is an accomplishment to be lauded.

ODP is highly challenging and carless play will end a run in short order. Each attempt does help you slowly unlock new items to be found and build up a modest set of permanent bonuses. This helps create a sense of progression and that your efforts are being rewarded, even as you die time and time again.

Level-up bonuses are awarded in the form of a choice of books.

While primarily an action game ODP does manage to offer meaningful character development choices and interesting items. Each level-up offers two randomly selected but sizable stat upgrades. Some options include penalties still worth considering, like a permanently slower move speed in exchange for a large chunk of cash.

Many of the items that can be scavenged from Edgewood’s chambers change Cordy in fundamental ways, like giving a massive boost to attack rate while making her formerly accurate shots spray out in a random arc. Some of the most powerful bits of gear break after you absorb a certain amount of damage (as if you needed another reason to dodge), while others require completing difficult challenges to unlock their power.

Even the most minor of treasures have alarming guardians.

Of course there’s no guarantee you’ll be offered useful items or upgrades, and everything is lost when you die anyway. This is normal for Roguelikes, but it can still be frustrating when bad luck dooms an otherwise promising run. The game’s other chief sin (significantly harder to forgive) is that creature hit-boxes don’t always match up with their models. While the game is two dimensional the “camera” is implied to be at a slight angle, meaning shots often pass behind an enemy’s head.

Reasons to play: Deliciously dark, gothic humor and art. Challenging twin-stick style gameplay. Meaningful progression from run to run.

Reasons to pass: Very high difficulty level. Slightly miss-leading hit-boxes.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Saints Row 4 Review

2014-07-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

Open world games need to deliver two things: Power and Freedom. Saints Row 4 delivers both, along with generous helpings of style and humor.

Top of the World

As the opening remind us the Third Street Saints have gone from thuggish street gang to something more akin to an international multimedia empire. The series has followed a similar trajectory, starting as an off-brand Grand Theft Auto and evolving to embrace an ever escalating level of absurdity. Anyone who played the third game might ask, not unreasonably, where the series can possibly go next.

The answer is straight to the top and over. The opening mission concludes with the Boss (the player character) disarming a nuclear missile in mid-air to the tune of Aerosmith’s "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing". Events then jump five years into the future where the Boss has (improbably) parlayed their heroism into a successful run for the office of US president.

Choices, choices.

There’s a brief pause here to allow for SR4’s ridiculously detailed character customization. If you enjoyed spending hours tweaking brow and chin sliders in Mass Effect you’ll find plenty to keep you busy here. Appearance and even voice and gender can be changed later for a token fee so don’t spend too long sweating over it. Scores of unlockable clothing items also allow you to dress your custom Boss in whatever fashion you see fit, from business casual to biker gimp and beyond.

Commander in Chief

We rejoin the story in the middle of an average presidential day of signing bills to cure cancer, discussing policy with Vice President and talented actor Keith David, and punching obnoxious senators in the groin. Sadly before we can finish out the term in the shoes of the POTUS an alien invasion arrives. Despite a brief, valiant battle through the White House the Boss and the rest of the Saints find themselves captured and imprisoned in a series of virtual reality simulations.

The Zin empire bought their vehicles straight from the TRON surplus sale.

You see where this is going? Every time it appears events have hit the level of maximum absurdity the game boldly states: “That’s nothing. Watch this!” Even if whatever is going on doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense the energy is infectious. Like a hyperactive friend rattling off directly from their stream of consciousness SR4 is clearly having so much fun it’s hard not to get carried along by the enthusiasm.

All this setup is an elaborate excuse to turn you lose in a virtual version of Steelport, now featuring hostile red Tron lines and an alien mothership hovering ominously overhead. Of course any computer program can be hacked and manipulated. After a mission or two of getting your bearings the Boss finds themself armed with what amount to superpowers.

Man of Steel

Once you obtain your first set of powers the Boss can sprint up the side of buildings, glide from rooftop to rooftop, and hurtle vast distances in a single bound. Cars and even helicopters quickly become obsolete. These powers put SR4 more in common with the Prototype and Crackdown series than its crime-themed themed roots.

Melee enemies at super speed to trigger a brutal takedown.

Moving around the city is a kinetic joy. At full speed the Boss can effortlessly plough through fences, pedestrians, and even oncoming cars, giving you a perpetual and destructive right of way. Few enemies approach your level of raw mobility and disengaging from a losing fight is just a charged leap away. Literally hundreds of collectables scattered over the city rooftops encourage exploration and using your powers to the fullest.

SR4 hurls concepts like balance boldly out the window in the name of joyfully broken, chaotic fun. The power to materialize a tank at will (available quite early) is but one of the least of your abilities. Basic enemies serve more as physics props than a combat challenge. Once you’ve secured a few upgrades the difference between a squad of alien warriors and a squad of alien warriors that are exploding, on fire, and hurling through the air all at the same time is less than two seconds.

Why drive when you can glide?

Guns remain useful but superpowers are unquestionably the stars of the show in combat. All are fun and tremendously satisfying to unleash on hapless Zin troopers or random pedestrians. Icy blasts turn foes into frozen statues, shattering at the slightest touch. Telekinesis (one of the better implementations of this kind of ability I’ve seen) turns enemies and vehicles into improvised projectiles or simply lets you send them soaring over the horizon. Even simply ploughing through a pack of infantry with super speed engaged knocks them over like bowling pins.

Dangerous Toys

Outside of the more linear and scripted missions you generally have the freedom to tackle enemies in whatever way you see fit. If you want to faff around on rooftops and pick at guys with the sniper rifle that’s certainly an option. You’ll probably have more fun calling in a squad of backup Saints and wading in with powers and guns blazing. As mentioned powerful vehicles are available quite early on, so summoning the appropriate ride and obliterating the opposition with hovercraft missiles or tank cannon fire does the job nicely.

Cultured but ruthless alien emperor Zinyak fills out the antagonist role with style.

Completing SR4’s missions and activities supplies a constant stream of rewards beyond just XP and cash. Weapons, powers, vehicles, and allies are all doled out at a steady clip, ensuring you’ve always got something new to try. Their actual effectiveness can range from purely cosmetic to ridiculously overpowered, but as is appropriate for an open world game there is no shortage of toys to play with.

City control returns, bringing with it a host of optional activates that let you wrest control of the simulation away from the Zin piece by piece. There are an embarrassment of things to do, though the super-speed racing and telekinetic object hurtling stand out. Success rewards you with an ever increasing regular income, generic Saints backup in areas you control, and the satisfaction of slowly turning the city from hostile red to soothing blue.

Wardens take a combination of superpowers, concentrated fire, and a QTE to finally take down.

Since much of the game, even within its own context, takes place within a VR simulation there’s little reason not to run amuck whenever the mood takes you. While you can’t demolish buildings the various cars, pedestrians, and smaller environmental props can all be hurtled, ignited, and exploded at whim. Causing enough chaos eventually causes a hulking “Warden” mini-boss to be dispatched to the scene. These creatures provide a much needed combat challenge at first, though the quick-time event required to finish them off eventually becomes a bit monotonous.

Represent

SR4 is unafraid to wear its geek cred on its sleeves. The game is unashamedly crammed with references from stock material like the Matrix and Mass Effect to more eclectic cult favorites like They Live. Fans of the series will enjoy a host of returning characters and nods to previous games. Even amid all the superpowers and general lunacy the game takes a few moments to make peace with its gangland origins and tie off dangling plot and character threads in satisfying fashion.

A great many characters, gangs, and locations from previous games show up at one point or another.

The often playful back and forth between the Boss and the rest of the Saints is the core of the game’s humor. An open-world game can conceivably get away with minimal cast and characterization but SR4 delivers consistently strong character work and dialog. There is a level of fourth wall breaking meta awareness that may annoy some tastes, but it’s generally used with an appropriate level of restraint.

Even with a cast of strong characters (including some returning fan favorites) alien emperor Zinyak earns his place as a memorable and worthwhile antagonist. His introduction establishes him as a more than credible threat: intellectually, physically, and technologically superior to the Boss. Excellent voice acting presents him a man who maintains a thin veneer of culture and playful civility over a core of utter ruthlessness. Every time Zinyak and the Boss square off it’s a treat, and he stands bulbous head and spiky shoulders above your average video game villain.

SR4 never misses a chance to lampoon another game.

Past the introductory set of missions the core structure becomes an oddly effective Mass Effect Two parody/homage. Each member of the Saint’s crew needs to be rescued from the simulation and, once secured, bolstered with a loyalty mission. These missions allow some one on one time and character development with each member of the gang, but also let the designers and writers to cut loose and fit in as many loving parodies of other games as possible. Keep an eye out for the excellent side-scrolling beat-em-up.

Riding Dirty

While a beautiful example of the open world genre there are a few issues with SR4. The super speed and jump, while ridiculously fun, are frustratingly imprecise at times. They’re fine for traveling vast distances but can be infuriating when trying to pluck a collectable off a narrow surface or perform any sort of other precision maneuver. Some sort of setting between the sluggish normal movement and blisteringly fast and powerful super-movement might have helped.

All clothing is purely cosmetic, so free and breezy (with built in censoring) is a legitimate way to play.

Late game rampages also become awkwardly paced. As you processed through missions the game shifts from throwing large numbers of basic troops at you in response to open world chaos to deploying smaller numbers of tougher and more specialized enemies. Alert levels also seem to ramp up much more quickly. It starts to feel like you can barely get a good rampage started before you find yourself facing a Warden. All this can make grinding for the many kill related challenges and achievements a pain, if you care about that sort of thing.

Finally a few of mini-games (particularly the bomb tossing one) are more annoying than fun. None of these things should dissuade you from trying the game if you enjoy open-word style gameplay at all. Saint’s Row 4 consistently delivers over the top fun with a healthy dose of genuine humor and serves as a worthy capstone to the long running series.

Reasons to play: Excellent navigation and combat superpowers. Huge toybox of weapons, powers and vehicles to play with. Hilarious characters and dialog. Infinite cosmetic character customization.

Reasons to pass: Movement superpowers can be frustratingly imprecise. Grindy challenges and achievements, especially in the late game.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Unreal Retro Review

2014-05-18T21:19:00.000-07:00

For this retro review we’re going back to the long-lost days of the late 90’s and the dawn of the true 3D shooter. Id Software’s now venerable Quake, released in 1996, broke the first ground. Quake was a huge technological leap forward, replacing the sprite sheet monsters and 2.5D geometry of the Doom and Build engines with a bestiary and world cut from tactile polygons.

Level design this open and non-linear is tragically rare today.

The Quake engine didn’t need to trick the eye and mind into believing it was 3D because it was true 3D. For a few years Quake, along with its various sequels and expansions, quite rightfully dominated the field it had founded. Then 1998 rolled around and publisher Epic MegaGames released their own contender: Unreal.

Technological Superiority

For the time Unreal was a graphical and technical tour-de force. The engine boasted some of the best colored lighting seen to date, animated textures, reflective surfaces, and more. It created colorful, lively environments that contrasted sharply with Quake’s muddy, grittier pallet. Though most of the models are laughably low poly by modern standards Unreal’s creatures still move, strike, and gesture with surprising grace even today.

Flags that flap in the breeze? Inconceivable!

Epic set out to produce far more than just an engine demo. The story (and there was a story to be found) kicks off when a prison transport ship crash lands on the mysterious alien planet of Na-Pali. As the sole surviving prisoner you find yourself stranded on a vivid world of mystic natives, dangerous wildlife, rapacious reptilian invaders, and more.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Unreal builds a cohesive, continuous world. Levels connect to one another in more or less logical fashion, giving the sense of an epic journey across the planet. While there are plenty of switches to hit, enemies to shoot, and pickups to grab the game goes out of its way to make levels feel like living environments. Na-Pali has that most rare and delicate of features, a genuine sense of place.

After escaping the prison ship the next level allows you to explore the exterior.

These are not the abstract spaces of Doom and Quake. Outdoors scavenger birds circle high overhead while harmless rabbit creatures hop about. The indigenous four-armed Nali cower from gunfire and lead you to valuable secrets if kept alive. It’s possible to surprise enemies sleeping, gambling, and working at consoles.

The peaceful Nali are harmless and like to lead you to secrets and powerups.
Try not to shoot them.

The translator, acquired in the opening moments of the game, allows you to decipher human and alien text. As you never encounter living humans and the Nali don’t speak English the translator quickly becomes a valuable tool for learning more about this world and its inhabitants. Careful reading can give hints as to the way forward, how to find hidden items, or just the grisly fate of whatever poor soul you just stumbled across the remains of. The device does a good job of dropping little bits of narrative and world building into a genre that hadn’t had much of those things beforehand.

The long way home

The single player campaign is of formidable length by today’s shooter standards, easily breaking a dozen hours. This isn’t a game you polish off in a short afternoon. The campaign has time to breath and indeed, starts quite slow. The difficulty curve is gentle at first but not shallow. Unreal takes its time building up the world of Na-Pali and the creatures that live there. If anything a few of the locations start to overstay their welcome but there’s always something new on the horizon.

A good skybox is a work of art.

Over the course of the game you explore Nali temples and villages, grounded spaceships both human and alien, and a host of expansive outdoor areas. While modern games often feature far more complex environments it is rare that they approach the sheer scope and scale of the alien vistas of Na-Pali. A sky full of stars and planets hanging overhead and an evocative, top notch soundtrack give Unreal an exotic ambiance all its own.

Deadliest of the Species

Unreal rarely throws more than a handful of foes at you at once. Most battles are really duels, fought against one or two opponents. Individual enemies are significant threats, especially while you still have low level weaponry, and take time and attention to dispatch.

You're unlikely to forget the first pitch black Skaarj ambush.

This design philosophy is epitomized by the Skaarj. These alien warriors are gracefully, convincingly mobile in a way I’ve rarely seen matched in a shooter, leaping about the environment to attack while smoothly rolling out of the way of your rockets. While clearly Predator inspired they manage to be a distinctive and iconic foe, tormenting the Nali, plundering the planet, and opposing you at every turn. In battle they’re are fast, tough, and murderously aggressive. Duels with Skaarj warriors are easily the highlight of Unreal’s combat, excellent training for death-matching.

Skaarj AI holds up well even today.

Weaponry is an eclectic mix of cruel Skaarj implements of war, clearly improvised self-defense tools, and a few more conventional human firearms. While the odd secret might grant you a weapon a level or two early your arsenal is doled out at a deliberate pace across the campaign. There’s plenty of time to become comfortable with the strengths, role, and limitations of each.

Massive Titans serve as boss encounters, hurling boulders that gib the player on contact.

Many of your weapons are a touch more exotic than the already established shotgun/machine-gun/rocket-launcher lineup. The vicious Skaarj Razorjack fires rotating shiruken than decapitate foes and ricochet around corners. The unashamedly brutal Flack Cannon reduces creatures to crimson gibs at close range via a mass of jagged, hypervelocity metal that puts standard shotguns to shame. Unreal’s signature weapon, the formidable “Eightball” launcher, offers nothing less than a multi-shot, homing mode, bouncing grenade launcher, and nearly every conceivable combination thereof. These guns have character.

Future Kill

Unreal also delivered an outstanding death-matching experience, easily on par with the Quake series. The multiplayer focused Unreal Tournament, released a few years later, remains a LAN-party favorite to this day. Multiplayer gameplay and the art of the death-match quickly came to dominate the future of the series.

Most interiors are spartan, but in a few places the designers really got to show off.

Aside from one short expansion pack, Return to Na Pali, and a forgettable sequel the Unreal franchise has gone on to largely ignore the single player experience. This is a shame, but the original game remains well worth playing for any shooter fan. It’s a beautiful example of how to build an absorbing alien world with the most modest of polygon budgets.

Epic recently revealed that the 2014 incarnation of Unreal Tournament will be both free and largely crowd-sourced. Anyone will be able to download and play the game but those with a subscription to the engine will be able to use it as a development tool, selling their work through Epic’s upcoming marketplace. Embracing the power of the fan community is a sharp decision and should help the franchise thrive long into the twenty-first century. Perhaps someone will even take us back to Na-Pali for another jaunt across that vivid, alien landscape.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Shadow Warrior Review

2014-02-11T22:21:00.001-08:00

The original 1997 Shadow Warrior was one of the lesser but still lively spawn of the Build engine. The game was explosive and colorful fun but (like many Build engine games) crude, full of heavily pixilated gore and near nudity. It also featured a generous dollop of the kind of racist stereotypes and jokes that are only really funny when you’re twelve, and even then not very. A modern reboot of the franchise can be understandably met with skepticism. The recent Duke Nukem Forever did not establish a good precedent for bringing the old Build engine magic into the twenty-first century.

The developer might also give pause. Flying Wild Hog has only one previous offering, the frantic old-school shooter Hard Reset. Hard Reset offered solid explosive action but suffered from a punishing difficulty curve and a story that veered off into incoherent around level two and never looked back.

Retro secret areas pay homage to the original game.

Given the nature of the source material and the mixed success of the developer’s previous work the Shadow Warrior reboot had all the ingredients on hand for an agonizingly bad game. Mercifully, amazingly, gloriously, it is not. Shadow Warrior is far better, far smarter game than it has any right to be.

No Ordinary Wang

This is a complete reboot of the franchise. Gone are the unfortunate racial caricatures. Still to be found is the playful humor and sense of fun. Improved and polished to a Hanzo steel edge is the explosive combat. New and unexpected but more than welcome is an entertaining story with coherently written characters. Shadow Warrior has grown up.

Lo Wang is back, but strong voice work and a wry personality with ever so slightly geeky sensibilities grow the character beyond a dick joke. A prolog combining a gorgeous Japanese estate, a Katana brawl out of Kill Bill, and 80’s theme song “The Touch” (AKA the music from the Transformers movie. No, not that one. The real one.) sets the tone beautifully.

Sometimes rude but always funny fortune cookies remain worth tracking down.

Wang’s mission to buy an ancient sword for certainly not evil megacorp CEO Orochi Zilla rapidly escalates into violence, and then gets interrupted entirely by rampaging demons. Wang is quickly driven by necessity to cut a deal with rogue demon Hoji to survive. Now wielding potent Ki powers in addition to his own martial prowess the assassin sets off to recover the sword, discover the reason behind the invasion, and dismember a few hundred demons along the way.

Hoji, masked demon trickster, mandatory voice in your head, and source of your Ki powers, is an excellent character in his own right. At first I expected his slightly nasal voice to grate but less than a level later his wit and barbed but never quite ghoulish humor had won me over. Despite being trapped in an expressionless magic mask Hoji is an incredibly emotive creature, courtesy of sharp writing and well choreographed animation. He’s one of the best support characters in memory and steals nearly every scene he’s in.

Hoji's motion capture is a treat. With an immobile mask for a face he talks with his hands.

It would have been all too easy to make Wang a gruff and serious straight man to Hojo’s snark, but the writers took a different and surprisingly effective direction. Wang and Hoji are both snarky, sarcastic dudes, and they play off one another beautifully. The back and forth between the two makes for an entertaining dynamic and is Shadow Warrior’s chief way of building both character and world.

A Storm of Limbs

Combat is a frantic affair, very much in the vein of Serious Sam, and Painkiller. You saunter into an area, enemies appear, and you get to leave when they’re all dead. Battlefields are packed with things that explode, burn, and electrocute when shot, proving the Flying Wild Hog learned all the right lessons from their previous Hard Reset. Battles quickly escalate into lethal Rube-Goldberg machines as one detonation triggers another and then another, sending primed explosives hurtling in all directions.

Never a dull moment.

The action is relentless so long as enemies are left standing. Waves of demons boil towards you, lead by lumbering behemoths that empower their minions or summon skeletal reinforcements. Foes left alive too long enter a berserk state, burning with power as their speed and damage increase. Attacks can and should be evaded with proper use of the handy directional dodge. In the best old school style standing still for a moment is to court brutal death.

The level of carnage is intense, visceral, and eminently satisfying. Demons shred apart under the onslaught of bullets or fall in neat halves from Katana strokes. Maimed monsters stumble across the battlefield, clutching at stumps before acknowledging your supremacy and dashing themselves to death against the ground. Each skirmish leaves the ground littered with blood, limbs, and still twitching viscera.

Even minor skirmishes leave a mess.

Instant Karma

Of course survival is not quite the same thing as winning with style. Each major battle rates your performance between one to five stars. Rating seems to be based on a combination of speed, variety of weapons and powers used, and not getting the tar kicked out of you. The higher the rating the more Karma points you earn and the more skills you can buy.

The flamethrower is pretty, but at this range you're better off with the Katana.

Shadow Warrior features a robust set of upgrade systems and trees, enough to almost make it a FPS/RPG hybrid. Cash, looted from the environment, is spent to unlock alternate fire modes and upgrade specific weapons. (Get the explosive bolts for the crossbow ASAP) Dark crystals, doled out at a deliberate pace but usually hard to miss, improve core Ki powers. Finally Karma points, eared (as described above) through killing demons and looking good while doing so, are spent on skills that encompass a grab bag of miscellaneous upgrades. New Katana moves are probably the most immediately useful, but don’t neglect passive perks like more health or stamina and the ability to wield severed demon heads as improvised laser cannons.

Katana Enthusiast

First person melee combat takes a lot of work to get just right, which is why so many FPS games relegate melee weapons to stealth kills or a last resort. Not so Shadow Warrior. The Katana is central to the story but also a fun and powerful weapon in its own right. While you do eventually get a suitably destructive rocket launcher this reboot trades the explosives spam of the original Shadow Warrior for an altogether more personal weapon. If anything many of the guns feel a bit anemic compared to the limb-severing, head-lopping, torso cleaving power the blade offers.

Bigger demons stay dangerous even as they lose bits and pieces.

Simply slashing wildly will only deal with the weakest demons. The combo system, once unlocked, grants access to special strikes like a piercing lunge and 360 degree whirlwind attack. Sword strikes and Ki powers are charged by double tapping a directional key, then holding down the left or right mouse button. The system proves elegant and surprisingly easy to remember even amid a mass of screaming demons.

While there aren’t a lot of special sword moves each is powerful and fills a clear tactical role. They also combine well with Ki powers. A Shockwave knocks a hulking Troll warrior to the ground long enough to line up a piercing strike that severs the prone beast’s head. Powers and sword moves don’t consume any sort of resource but the seconds needed to charge them are as precious as anything else in the heat of battle.

“All in the Reflexes”

Shadow Warrior doesn’t try to simulate true swordplay. There are no blocks, clashes, or parries. Most of your foes are too bestial to use weapons or too mighty to make meeting them blade to blade practical. Wang is not a defensive fighter. Mobility, speed, and aggression are your best chance at surviving the Demonic onslaught.

With the right skill upgrades demon body parts make potent weapons.

The core combat loop also neatly avoids the trap of leaving you stuck too low on health to survive the next encounter without throwing up its hands and giving you Call of Duty style regeneration. You can always channel Ki power to heal, but the effect is slow and only good up to a certain percentage. More interestingly the right upgrades add a vampiric effect to special sword strikes and boost the frequency of healing powerups left by slain demons. Once you get to grips with the ebb and flow of combat the best way to stay healed is to hurl yourself into the thick of the fray and stay on the offensive.

Rising Sun

While Shadow Warrior lacks any sort of multiplayer component the lengthy and challenging campaign more than holds up on its own. The opening act is atmospheric and gorgeous, full of somber temples, meditation gardens, and swaying bamboo forests. These areas are so pretty it’s almost a shame to litter them with burning demon giblets. The engine and level designers work together to do amazing things with colored lighting once the sun goes down.

The graveyard temple at night might be the most striking are in the game.

The environments suffer an unfortunate slump in the second act, taking place in the same sort of industrial haze of docks and warehouses any gamer will have already seen a hundred times. Fortunately the combat only gets better as the game progresses and the story holds up well. Shadow Warrior never quite rises back to the sheer beauty of the opening brace of levels, but the final act in Zilla’s snow-bound mountain fortress still manages some impressive visuals.

Bosses this big take time to wear down. Keep your own health up.

Each act is punctuated by a massive boss; building-sized juggernauts fought one on one in arenas set aside for the purpose. These encounters are epic but can become time consuming and even a slog. Remember to quick save periodically because these guys can easily 1-shot you. Boss fights also stand out as one of the few points where guns are more useful than the Katana. The blade can’t reach their conveniently glowing weak points.

Make it Right

All this builds to a strong ending with memorable tragic elements. Too many games putter to a stop or tack on a “to be continued” sign at the end. Shadow Warrior ends on conclusive and surprisingly stark note. While I certainly wouldn’t object to a sequel it is refreshing to see a self contained story that can stand on its own.

Attractive cut-scenes reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints break up the acts.
The story they tell isn't destined for a happy ending.

If the campaign leaves you still hungry you can take all your karma upgrades and weapons with you and run through it again in the New Game + mode. You can even crank up the difficulty and keep all your stuff, which wasn’t allowed in Hard Reset. A run through on normal is a good way to build yourself up if you’re planning on hunting some of the tougher achievements, many of which are locked at lower difficulty levels. Flying Wild Hog also just recently added a survival mode, a welcome addition that distills the game down to bracing combat with no distractions.

In conclusion Shadow Warrior is the game Duke Nukem Forever should have been. It’s full of affectionate references to the source material while growing past the immature mentality. The charm and humor are real, but there is a serious story and real character work holding up the demon dismemberment and laughs. It’s one of the best and certainly the most under-rated shooter of 2013.

Reasons to Play: Frantic limb-hewing combat. Sword is a joy to use. Surprisingly strong character work and story. Emulates all the best parts of the source material while still growing up.

Reasons to pass: Later acts have visually weaker environments. Boss fights can become a slog. No multiplayer component, if you crave the classic version’s deathmatch.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Lovecraftian Indie Horror

2014-01-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

Cosmic Horror is a genre that emphasizes the fear of the unknown and the unknowable. While not necessarily the first or even best H.P. Lovecraft is considered the genre’s figurehead and founder. Pop culture knows him for his most recognizable creation: the monstrous, slumbering, squid-god Cthulhu. The sleeping cephalopod master of sunken Rl’yeh is so iconic that simply slapping tentacles on something has become shorthand for “ancient, unfathomable evil.” (See the first Hellboy movie, D&D’s mindflayers, and countless other examples.)

Most of Lovecraft’s stories end with his protagonists insane or worse from the mind-shattering entities and implications they encounter. Cosmic horror is about being an insignificant spec in the face of incomprehensible malevolent forces that can’t fought, can’t be stopped, and can’t even be understood without melting your brain. So as you might imagine it’s a difficult concept to build a game around.

At their core most games are about building power, exercising control, and mastering a comprehensible set of rules to achieve success. Concepts like insanity are tough to convey effectively through game mechanics and it’s hard to pit the player against unkillable alien god-monsters in a way that feels fair, much less entertaining. This hasn’t stopped some intrepid developers from giving it a shot, with varying levels of success. We’re going to take a look at two indie games and their very different takes on Lovecraft’s dark vision.

“Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land” is a tactical, turn-based RPG set during World War One. The pulpy story pits a squad of British soldiers, adventurers, and mystics against cultists, shambling zombies, and a host of classic Lovecraft Mythos monsters pouring into the Western Front. Weapons, armor, and equipment are all pulled from the time period.

Trench Warfare

The game plays like a lite version of the X-Com franchise, spending Action Points to move your squad around the map and attack enemies. A basic cover and over-watch mechanic helps keep battles tactically interesting. Other elements are heavily simplified in the name of accessibility. There’s no ammo or weapon maintenance to keep track if. Characters are unable to go prone and you can safely blast away with shotguns and machine guns from the back of your formation without worrying about friendly fire.

Enjoy defending a trench while you can. Later missions have you pushing across no-man's land.

The Wasted Land is also a short game. The campaign features less than a dozen missions, including a few very short dream sequences. Most missions have you advancing slowly through small maps, beating down waves of enemies that spawn in from all directions. Poison gas, time limits, underground areas (where artillery doesn’t work), and the occasional defensive stand provide much needed variety. The timed missions are arguably the best, forcing you to keep moving forwards and not pick your enemies apart from a distance.

Later levels start to feature a lot of rushes by bullet sponge melee bruisers. With elephant guns, point-blank shotgun blasts, and artillery strikes in the mix the game needs them just to give you something to focus fire on. Against the background of WW1 it’s hard to argue against humans being brutally effective killers able to match even lesser Mythos creatures. In “The Wasted Land” Lovecraft’s monsters are vulnerable to guns if the guns are big enough.

Shell Shocked

While ripping apart the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath with massed machine-gun fire isn’t quite in the spirit of the source material The Wasted Land does show that confronting Mythos creatures takes a mental toll. Attacking or being attacked by monsters drains sanity. Spells, while powerful, also cost the caster a hefty number of sanity points. Insane characters can freeze up in terror (which is bad) or go berserk and gain a massive speed and attack rate increase for a few turns.

Massed zombie attacks push body and mind to the breaking point.

Dealing with sanity becomes an interesting tactical consideration. When his sanity drains away a berserk machine-gunner can mow down an entire pack of lumbering lobster-mutants. He can just as easily freeze up and be devoured. Insanity eventually disables a character but the short term boost it provided turned the tide of more than one desperate encounter.

A character with the appropriate skill and a psychology book can restore lost sanity points, which I like to imagine involves simply smacking the patient with the book while shouting “Snap out of it!” In later missions a designated combat psychologist becomes as much a necessity as a medic, if not more so. A few rounds of holding off skittering gribblies is all it takes to reduce a character’s brain to mush without Psychiatric support.

Over The Top

Between missions you can buy new equipment and spend accumulated XP to upgrade stats and skills. Oddly enough all XP is dumped into a common pool where it can be spent on any character. This means it’s pretty easy to max out someone’s primary weapon skill early in the campaign, playing havoc with the difficulty curve. I’m not sure why XP isn’t evenly split between your squad but doing so would have helped pace character progression.

Dialog is more on the pulpy end of the spectrum.

I played The Wasted Land on PC but the game was originally made for the iOS. It shows in the form of an uneven port. The Character and Inventory screens would sometimes be go completely black, requiring a game restart to fix. The sound-track also tended to cut in and out at random. These bugs were annoying but not game breaking.

I had fun playing The Wasted Land, and I appreciate developers Red Wasp making a PC port. It stacks up better in its native mobile environment than in competition with similar PC games like X-Com though. Additional content beyond the single short campaign would have also added a lot of value.

Reasons to Play: Accessible “X-Com lite” gameplay. Tactically meaningful Sanity mechanic. Solid use of WW1 setting.

Reasons to Pass: Short campaign. Uneven PC port. Some tactical elements can be considered over-simplified.

Eldritch is First Person action-adventure game that successfully combines Roguelike mechanics with elements of the Lovecraft mythos, with just a dash of Minecraft for flavor. Roguelikes, if you’re not familiar with the term, are a style of game that generally features randomized levels, high difficulty, and perma-death. Being plunged into an unknown but hostile environment full of lurking danger is certainly in the spirit of Lovecraft, so I have to give Eldritch a point right off the bat.

Strange, Far Places

Each playthrough begins by dropping your nameless character into a mysterious library, complete with tutorial messages, bits of lore, and a few other amenities. Once you’ve gotten the basics of movement and item use down a set of ominously glowing books tempt further investigation. Each book serves to whisk you away to a series of self contained worlds loosely based off the dark gods of Lovecraft’s stories.

From there you’ll shank happily burbling fishmen, flee nameless horrors immune to your paltry weapons, and haggle with surprisingly dapper Star-Spawn over the price of dynamite you need to blast a path to the exit. Or you can murder the inhuman merchant, help yourself to his inventory, and use your newly acquired tinning kit to eat his corpse. While options in the Lovecraft Mythos are usually limited to “Die hideously” or “Go mad” Eldritch grants the player a pleasing level of freedom to meet its challenges.

Cultists and lesser enemies are vulnerable to the classic knife-tickle.

You’re restricted to a mere two weapons (including expendable stuff like dynamite) and a single spell at a time. A few slots for equipment like boots and amulets grant additional abilities, but Eldritch doesn’t bother with RPG style character development. The right equipment or spell will let you tunnel through walls, levitate across a room or create new blocks to form makeshift stairs and seal up enemies. There’s always a way over, under, through, or around any obstacle if you’re properly equipped.

Thoughts and Dreams

Block-based modular levels aside Eldritch should not be confused with Minecraft or its various imitators. While items and abilities exist that let you destroy and create blocks you don’t start with them and there’s always an associated cost. This is a game about exploration and survival, not building things. A well designed map helps tremendously, letting you see the general area you’ve explored and pointing out major features like exits and shops but leaving hidden nooks for you to discover on your own.

Head on attacks are a bad idea.

Movement is a high mobility affair, reminding me a bit of the old Thief series. You can crouch, jump, sprint, sneak, slide, mantle up low ledges, and lean around corners. Falling damage can kill but never feels unfair. Scrambling, sliding, and climbing around the environment is a tactile joy.

Stealth and mobility are preferable over direct combat. Sound queues help you track enemy location and alertness level. Mercifully you’re faster than most creatures and those that can be killed are vulnerable to sneak attacks. Creature loot is generally paltry, and looting the body makes them re-spawn nearby in short order. You don’t necessarily need to get your own hands dirty though. Some enemy types will fight one another and one rampaging Shoggoth can clear most of a level for you if you can stay out of its way.

Level layout gets quite vertical. Watch your step.

Madness and Death

The difficulty level is high but not impossible. One or two bad decisions can easily set you from well equipped with full health to dead. Your character is fragile and can’t carry healing items for later use. The “Weeping Angel” inspired statues are particularly brutal and will likely kill you a few times before you figure out how they work.

Death, when it invariably comes at the psuedopods of some gibbering horror, wipes your progress and re-randomizes the worlds. Banked artifacts (which fuel your special abilities and can be spent as currency at shops) are saved and unlocked worlds remain unlocked, but that’s it. Anything you’re carrying is lost, including the maguffins you need to complete the game.

Do not taunt happy-fun-shoggoth.

It is very much to Eldritch’s credit that deaths made me want to jump back in and try again, now armed with the knowledge of whatever killed me, rather than snap my keyboard in half. Most were due to carelessness and overconfidence or not understanding some new hazard. Though you can visit unlocked worlds in any order you’ll likely want to start with the first one each time to properly equip yourself for the challenges of the later. Difficulty spikes sharply as the world’s progress. Eldritch isn’t a very long game, but the randomization and high difficulty give it a lot of replay value.

The Thing on the Hard Drive

Descending through the depths is a matter of constantly balancing exploring for resources VS risking damage and death. Sometimes it is safer to make a rush for the exit and not chance blundering into something horrible. Other times it’s better to carefully sneak and backstab your way past enemies, carefully evading and disarming traps. Learning to read the environment and balance risk and reward on the fly is the key to survival and success.

Eldritch lacks a sanity mechanic (not that one would necessarily have improved this type of gameplay), and the slightly cartoony graphics don’t do much to inspire dread at first. The sound work is wonderfully atmospheric though and you’ll quickly learn to identify nearby creatures and other elements long before you see them. There’s also a certain pucker factor to being cornered by a roiling mass of ravenous, indestructible flesh or picking your way through a group of slumbering ten-foot squid beasts. Scattered journals and the fact that your character re-incarnates after each death hint that you may not be entirely mortal yourself.

The free "Mountains of Madness" expansion gets downright unsettling at the mountain's core.

If you have any tolerance for the Roguelike genre Eldritch is an easy game to recommend, packed with challenge, replayability, and character. If you hate losing progress the game will likely make for a more stressful than enjoyable experience. With strange eons even death may die, but Eldritch will send you to your doom far earlier and more frequently than that.

Reasons to Play: Entertaining mix of Roguelike mechanics and Lovecraft Mythos. Excellent First-Person movement and exploration. Wide range of effective tools and tactics. Strong sound design. Giant Penguin VS Shoggoth fights.

Reasons to Pass: High difficulty and punishing death penalty for players unused to Rogue-like gameplay. Slightly cartoony graphics and most creature design not particularly horrifying.

http://redwaspdesign.wordpress.com/call-of-cthulhu/

http://www.eldritchgame.com/

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Secret World Review

2013-12-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

Reviewing an MMO is a daunting prospect. The sheer size and scope of such games makes it difficult to give more than a limited impression. Every MMO today must also stand in the shadow of Blizzard’s industry dominating 2-ton gorilla. However one feels about World of Warcraft there’s no denying that Blizzard has had nearly a decade to refine their core gameplay into a relentlessly accessible buttery smooth experience that anyone can pick up and enjoy.

Funcom’s The Secret World is definitely not World of Warcraft, nor do differences in scope and age make it entirely fair to compare the two. What not as polished or accessible it is a fascinating experiment. A fusion of traditional MMO mechanics, strong character customization, and surprisingly sharp writing and directing. Since the game recently went Free-To-Play, as all MMO’s seem destined to do, I thought I’d give it a try and share my impressions.

High Society

Character creation in The Secret World (TSW for future reference) is simple. Clothing and appearance can all be changed later and have no effect on combat effectiveness. The only significant and irreversible decision is between one of three distinct and morally ambiguous Secret Societies.

The New York based Illuminati (my own choice) focus on accumulating wealth and power, with a ruthlessly corporate attitude to building their New World Order and an amusing flexible approach to ethics. In direct opposition stand the London based Templars, featuring centuries of honor, militant tradition, class, and a willingness to pursue Evil no matter who else ends up in the line of fire. Finally the Seoul based Dragon seem to be a loose collection of Asian flavored anarchic hackers and chaos theorists, with a master plan no one else can make heads or tails of. Or they’re just making things up as they go.

Just surviving initiation is an adventure in itself.

While choice of faction is important you can still group with characters from other Societies. Only in discrete PvP battlefields do you find yourself trading blows and bullets with them. Faction nominally determines your home city, but since the bank and auction house are in London that’s where everybody spends their time. Factional differences are largely cosmetic or flavor. All weapons and abilities are accessible to every character.

Once you pick side you are treated to a cutscene of your character getting magic powers by eating a bee (it makes sense in context) and then being invited to join your Society. Provided you can survive your initiation and a tutorial in the form of a flashback to an apocalyptic outbreak in Tokyo. Finally you’re turned loose in rural Maine, where the real game begins and where the dead rising to devour the living is the least of the problems plaguing the region.

Everything is True

Setting is one of TSW’s strongest elements. This isn’t some random fantasy world, infested with elves that dress like strippers and names with too many syllables. This is Earth, today. And our world is in serious trouble.

Waves of once-human creatures stumble out of the New England surf, breeding on the beaches and massing to push inland. In the Egyptian desert biblical plagues hammer the land while sun maddened cultists make blood sacrifice at the foot of the Black Pyramid. In the Outer Dark things with Event Horizon mouths watch and wait and hunger.

A nightmare of broken moons and endless cold.

In short every myth, urban legend, horror story, and conspiracy theory is true. And most of them are coming to eat us. Or worse. Standing against them, though hardly as a united front and often for the most selfish of reasons, are the Secret Societies. As a Society member and chosen of Gaia you’re going to spend plenty of time cracking monster skulls.

Magic Bullets

Combat is serviceable but not the very best you’ve ever seen, and you’re going to be seeing plenty. Animations are functional but floaty and low on visceral impact. There is no auto-attack, so be prepared to hit the “1” key a lot. More interestingly enemies broadcast powerful attacks by painting shapes on the ground, encouraging you to use the evasive roll to get out of the way. Movement and positioning are crucial. The closely packed enemy population means it’s easy to blunder into more monsters in the middle of a fight.

Anyone named "King of Red Shadows" probably needs killing anyway.

TSW lacks a traditional class structure. Your attacks and active abilities are determined by your choice of what two weapons you carry. Every weapon can obviously do damage but each also lends itself to certain roles. Hammers generate heavy agro and block attacks, excelling at tanking. Elemental magic comes with plenty of AOE and crowd clearing abilities. Assault Rifles drain health from enemies (just go with it) and redistribute it to you and your team-mates, making them the healing firearm of choice.

Dead Man’s Hand

While you can always look up workable cookie-cutter combinations TSW doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to buying and choosing powers. You’re restricted to a “Deck” of only seven active and passive abilities at a time, not unlike Diablo 3 or Guild Wars 2. You can freely swap out any powers you’ve already bought any and save favorite combinations, so experimentation is encouraged. I was able to eventually create one deck for bringing down beefy single targets and another that let me rip through packs of weaker enemies.

It’s easy for a new player to get lost in the giant power wheel. More expensive higher tier powers aren’t necessarily stronger but tend to be more specialized and situational. It is more important to find a set of abilities that work well together. If your basic attack includes a Damage-Over-Time (DOT) effect then a follow up power that does bonus damage to enemies suffering from a DOT would be a good choice.

You'll eventually want to build a deck for fighting groups. Ghouls rarely hunt alone.

Vertical character progression is strongly gear dependent. While every character has access to scores of powers how hard you actually hit, heal, or take hits with those abilities is mostly dependent on your equipment. Thus far I’ve found simply proceeding through each zone and doing all the quests you encounter will keep you in shape to deal with the current crop of enemies. If you outstrip a zone’s rewards a quick trip to the auction house will keep your talismans and weapons up to date.

As any character can eventually obtain every ability and max out every skill there’s never any reason to “re-roll”, unless you really want to see another faction’s handful of exclusive quests. XP rewards increase exponentially in later zones. You’re free, for example, to build up your set of healing powers while continuing to actually play as a damage focused character. A developed character will find it much easier to try a new weapon or role than a newbie.

Transmit – Receive – Witness

In MMO’s the setting and story frequently serve as mere set dressing for gameplay. In TSW it’s almost the other way around. The characters you meet are memorable; from cynical hard drinking horror writers to suave undead merchant-princes. The cut scenes that introduce each mission are a high point, featuring excellent voice acting and camera direction. Your own character is silent (so prepare to spend a lot of time getting monologed at) but it’s worth hearing what everyone has to say.

You meet a number of immortals. They're not having as much fun as you might expect.

Bits of lore are scattered across the zones, concentrated in the form of golden honeycombs and narrated by a (probably) benevolent entity called “The Buzzing.” While you never actually encounter The Buzzing it’s easily one of the best characters. The entity addresses you with equal parts affection, gentle amusement, and a deep undercurrent of creepiness as it shares the secret histories of the world. The writing is excellent and my only complaint was that many lore nodes were well hidden and required a guide to track down.

TSW’s quest structure is... different, but not necessarily in a bad way. Aside from the central story you can only have one main quest active at a time. There’s no reaching a new quest hub, grabbing a half dozen exclamation marks, and heading out into the wilderness to do them all on one sweep. TSW’s mission quests are more like ten-to-thirty minute mini quest chains. They can contain as many as a half-dozen or more steps, often leading you through a zone in a circular motion and dropping you off near another major mission or a bread-crumb trail back to one.

Golden lore honeycombs are always a treat to read. So long as you don't mind being called "Sweetling".

Scores of shorter, more traditional opportunistic fetch-this-kill-that quests also dot the landscape. You can have up to three of these minor tasks in progress at a time. It usually makes sense to be working on at least one or more while doing any major quest in the area. The quest system is well designed and feels rewarding, but can take some adjustment for players like myself more used to loading up their log with a bunch of tasks to be worked through over the next few hours. By far the best feature, which every other MMO should copy immediately if not sooner, is that completed quests can be turned in from anywhere via cell phone.

Digging Deeper

Many of TSW’s missions can be completed just by following your waypoints, interacting with anything you find, and killing anything in your path. Others demand a bit more. “Investigation” missions are among TSW’s most unique and polarizing features. These quests would be more at home in a MYST style puzzle game, requiring intensive research, copious note taking, and a willingness to spend a lot of time working through problems. Be prepared to learn Morse code, translate Latin to English and then into Demonic runes, and dig up obscure literary references.

On one hand I feel Funcom should be lauded for trying a new style of gameplay not seen before in a MMO. On the other many Investigation missions are painfully unintuitive and frustrating. Too many of them require knowledge from outside the game itself, a serious design flaw. To TSW’s credit it includes a surprisingly effective in-game web browser (Another excellent feature every MMO should copy) to aid in research. Still, any fun I was having with the Investigation quests ended the moment I actually had to stop playing the game itself and bring up the browser.

Other quest types provide more accessible fun, like this "Tower Defense" mini-game.

When I log into an MMO I’m there to explore, enjoy the lore, and fight monsters. I’m not playing to take the SAT. I gave the first couple of investigation quests an honest go, but after spending a few hours without making much progress I have to confess I’ve just started looking up the answers. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the ease of gameplay in other MMO’s, and there’s nothing wrong with requiring basic mental activity, but all the information you need to solve a puzzle must be contained within the game itself.

Fight together, Die alone

There aren’t a lot of open world zones in TSW, but they’re large and full of plenty to do. Monster populations are densely packed and respawn quickly. Most missions eventually reset and can be completed repeatedly for additional rewards. While this means you never run out of content it does contribute to the sense of a world frozen in time that many MMO’s suffer from. There were zombies attacking the police station on your first visit and there will still be zombies attacking it on your hundredth. It would have been interesting to see what the developers could have put together if they’d had access to the “Phasing” technology used to great effect in WoW’s later expansions.

For an engine not really built for it Funcom does a credible job of faking some stealth missions.

Most of the open world content can be tackled solo by an appropriately equipped character. You’ve got a certain amount of leeway in personal skill, build, etc… TSW’s 5-man dungeons are much more traditional affairs, built around the expectation that players are bringing the holy trinity of tanking/healing/DPS to the fight. On the plus side there are very few trash mobs between bosses and most boss fights emphasize fun and clearly communicated movement and positioning mechanics. A party wipe simply drops you back before that specific boss.

Ancient evils, Modern technology

Like so very many MMO’s today TSW began its life as a subscription based game before transitioning to Free-To-Play. You still need to buy the actual game so it’s a pleasant surprise that it holds up well without needing to spend any more. The cash shop is unobtrusive and stocked with largely cosmetic and vanity items. Almost everything else can be earned or bought in-game for a reasonable time or in-game money investment. The only exceptions are a few “Issues” of new content, but these are only relevant to high level characters and after scores of hours of gameplay.

If TSW has a technical problem it is the load times. Teleporting back to the hub dimension, going to London to use the Bank, and then getting back to whatever zone you were questing in can take a combined five or more minutes of loading screens. Moving full speed through some zones can outpace the game’s ability to load creatures and other elements, resulting in running into invisible walls and enemies. London itself is especially problematic, possible because of player and NPC density. I’ve had to wait a few minutes at the bank just for the clerk to load in and let me access my stuff.

This isn't space/time warping magic, the bank's walls just haven't loaded yet.

Crafting exists, requiring arranging materials on a grid not unlike Minecraft. An in-game reference for the different shapes and patterns would have been invaluable, and it’s of limited utility and unlikely something will be an upgrade by the time you can make it. PvP is also present, though to be honest I haven’t tried it much. Following the zerg in the “Fusang Projects” warzone was a fun distraction.

Home for the Holidays

The Halloween events that went live while I was playing make a nice microcosm of everything TSW gets right and wrong. One extended Halloween quest had you roaming the starter area of Solomon Island, investigating and collecting entertainingly written spooky stories from the inhabitants. Despite taking place in the starter area these seasonal quests were tuned for characters in max level gear, making them suicidal for new players who stumbled across them or wanted to get in on the fun.

One Halloween quest in particular took place in its own little basement subzone, pitting you against wave after wave of organ harvesting fiends. When they invariably killed any low level character (like myself) the game would respawn you still in the basement with 10% of your health. Right next to the pack of now fully healed machete wielding maniacs. I ultimately had to log out and back in to escape.

TSW's support staff isn't this bad, but they're clearly stretched thin.

A pumpkin themed world boss caused hair-pulling frustration, requiring players to place a group of jack-o-lanterns just so to summon the beast. Each player attempting the quest received exactly one jack-o-lantern, which would de-spawn a short time after being placed. If you miss-placed a single pumpkin, misunderstood the quest, or otherwise failed to use your jack-o-lantern exactly right the very first time, well too bad for you. There was no way to get a new one to try again. All you could do was hang around the pumpkin patch hoping a different group came along and got it right.

In the interest of fairness Funcom did eventually patch these and other sundry problems, about a week into a limited time two week event. I suspect they were less a result of any sort of negligence or systemic incompetence and more due to the severely limited development and support resources available. No MMO will ever be bug free or introduce completely flawless new content, but much of the seasonal event was an unwelcome reminder that not every company has the raw dollars and manpower to throw at problems that Blizzard can muster.

Ultimately the excellent setting and writing and strong character customizability make The Secret World a game I can recommend to experienced MMO gamers looking for something a little different. Entry level and casual player will likely end up frustrated and confused.

Reasons to play: Strong setting. High production value writing and mission cinematics. Flexible “Deck” based character customization. Free to play without intrusive cash shop. Investigation quests try a different style of gameplay.

Reasons to pass: Long load times. Middling combat. Investigation quests often highly unintuitive and require outside game knowledge. Uneven support and bug response. Limited content for PvP addicts.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Dead Space 3 Review

2013-09-16T20:50:00.001-07:00

The Dead Space series has been a favorite of mine since its debut in 2008. The creepy, insanity inducing “Marker” artifacts, the sinister Unitologist cult that worships them and the horrific Necromorphs the Markers spawn make for a memorable combination. The previous Dead Space games learned the lessons of design, ambience, and gameplay that classics like Resident Evil 4 and System Shock 2 worked so hard to teach.

When I saw that EA was putting Dead Space 3 up as part of a Humble Bundle charity sale I wasted no time in snapping it up. Having slugged my way through the campaign I’m forced to say I would have been severely disappointed if I had paid $60 for this game when it first came out.

Dead Space 3 (DS3 for short) is a game with problems. Serious problems. Technical problems, gameplay problems, narrative problems, and deeply rooted design problems. Problems that drag the game down on every level. Problems clinging tumor-like to the skeletal frame of a once strong survival-horror IP, choking the solid core gameplay and few cool new ideas.

De-Optomized

First and foremost DS3 suffers from savagely bad PC optimization. My machine can run other modern games at moderate settings without problems. Even on low settings I experienced severe stuttering that pushed the game almost into the unplayable range.

He's more dangerous dead than alive. At least to your frame-rate.

This was most notable whenever I acted on physics objects. A single brush turned dead bodies into awkwardly flailing masses that would cartwheel impossibly through the air, plunging my frame-rate into a slide-show. Given that DS3 is essentially a game about turning space zombies into meaty physics props this was crippling, turning nearly every fight into a performance killing epileptic fit.

Despite spending several hours troubleshooting and scouring the EA support boards I was never able to get the problem to go away. The game seemed to have trouble using both of my computer’s CPU cores, but there didn’t seem to be any patch or work around.

Origin, EA’s own ersatz Steam, helpfully disabled sound and controls after every new chapter loaded up or any time an achievement was awarded. Once I disabled the “Origin In-Game” element that particular problem went away. If your own delivery platform is forcing the player to regularly restart the game you’ve created an extra bug, not a feature.

Follow the onscreen prompt to die over and over.

DS3 also shares the same quicktime problem of its predecessor. When the game instructs you to “Press E” to avoid hideous death, the developers expect you to read their minds from across time and space and understand they actually mean “Press E and F”. Because if you don’t you die. I don’t even know who to begin to blame for this, but until I remembered this problem from the previous game getting grabbed by any Necromorph was a death sentence and certain quick-time hazards become impassable blocks.

Perhaps all these issues are less prevent or absent in the console version of the game, but it’s still the most problematic PC port I’ve played in memory. But let’s assume you’ve somehow made it past the fusterclug of technical issues and battered the game into a playable state. Or perhaps you’re playing on console.

Cold and Silence

DS3 starts up in the middle of a Unitologist cult attack and subsequent Necromorph outbreak on Earth’s moon. The government, having apparently learned nothing at all from the previous games, has started building the insanity inducing and space zombie creating Markers everywhere. This really seems like the sort of thing that should be restricted to an isolated lab with a built in self destruct mechanism until the aforementioned flaws get worked out.

Isaac Clark, the Unitologists now actively gunning for him, is caught up in the mess. In short order he’s rescued by a small band of scientists and soldiers (who are surely not doomed to be picked off one at a time over the next few hours) and makes his way to the world of Tau Volantis. This desolate, frozen planet is where the signal controlling the Markers seems to be coming from, so any answers about how to stop them will be found here.

Just you and the void.

Isaac’s little band isn’t the first group of people to have visited the planet. While the previous expedition was destroyed by the Terrible Secrets™ they unearthed they left behind a flotilla in orbit, installations on the ground, and piles of freeze dried bodies that have since reanimated into Necromorphs. The previous Tau Volantis expedition was supposedly 200 years ago, so it’s a little improbable that everything is still working after two centuries of exposure to hard vacuum, constant blizzards, and sub-zero temperatures.

The hungry, hungry void.

The game’s early chapters are spent exploring the derelicts in orbit. The zero-g sections are arguably the best part of the game, with Isaac able to move and fight gracefully in three dimensions. Your air supply is more generous than previous games, allowing for a degree of exploration. The cramped corridors of the ruined ships contrast nicely with the open void and amazing views of the planet below.

Crazy for You

Isaac comes off as surprisingly sane in this installment. Perhaps he’s built up some sort of immunity to the Markers or perhaps he finally put his demons to rest for good. This is an odd choice given that hallucinations and putting the player characters own sanity in doubt was one of the more interesting narrative twists Dead Space had going. It seems like throwing away a perfectly good, already established way to up the creepiness and paranoia factors.

Some narrative elements work better than others. In particular the love triangle between Isaac, Ellie (his love interest from the second game), and a rival for Ellie’s affections named Norton comes off as exceptionally goofy. It’s never established why Ellie fell for this new guy in the first place beyond an attempt to manufacture a little additional drama. Norton’s sole distinguishing trait seems to be that he’s a jealous and insecure jerk.

If Derp-face over on the right has any redeeming features we never see them.

A stronger direction might have been to make Norton a more noble and mission focused character. If Isaac was still obviously suffering from insanity and had sent Ellie away out of concern for her safely the whole dynamic would make a lot more sense and been a lot more interesting. None of this really gets in the way of shooting Necromorphs, but it’s still poor characterization.

Land of Plenty

One of the signature traits of Survival Horror games is limited resources. The previous Dead Space games gave you enough to make every supply cache meaningful and never enough to be wasteful. DS3 inundates you in health packs and ammo from the start and you can make more very cheaply at any workbench. Even on hard difficult I never felt pinched for supplies. Once you start finding deployable scavenger bots the concept of scarcity vanishes entirely, and DS3 becomes a war of attrition very much in your favor.

We could sneak past these creepy Feeders, but why bother?
They'll drop more supplies than we'll spend killing them.

This is compounded by a weird save system that always remembers your inventory, but only sporadically updates your actual game progress. Items, some enemies, and resource caches respawn whenever you save and quit. In an especially obnoxious and inexplicable twist optional missions only save at the start and end, meaning you need to replay the whole thing if you stop at any point.

All this makes the inclusion of micro-transactions that let you buy extra resources or improve the efficiency of your scavenger bots a bit inexplicable. Between natural abundance, re-spawning pickups, and your scavenger bots it is almost inconceivable that anyone would need to spend real world money on in-game supplies. It feels like EA is trying to sell snow-cones on free ice cream day.

...and let's not forget Greed is one of the seven deadliest.

I suppose it is to EA’s credit that survival isn’t tuned around needing to shell out yet more real world money. Still, the very inclusion of Facebook game style micro-transactions in what is supposed to be a $60 AAA game is obnoxious at best. Either give me a free-to-play game with a cash shop or just sell me a game that’s a complete package upfront. Don’t try and take my money twice. It’s indecent.

Killgineering

New to the Dead Space series is weapon crafting. As you pick through the wreckage to Tau Volantis you find weapon frames, barrels, attachments, and more. These can be cobbled together at any bench into a variety of tools of dismemberment. A number of pre-made blueprints (including plans to produce classic Dead Space weapons) are already available. Or you can freely mix and match parts, building new component from raw materials.

More information about exactly what parts are compatible with one another would have been helpful and the part inventory interface is a bit clunky, but it costs nothing to experiment. Weapons can be broken back down into their component parts for free and obsolete or redundant parts can be melted down into more resources. Past the first few chapters you’ll generally have the resources to build whatever you like.

This is why you pay attention in Shop Class.

Trying different combinations, like a harpoon gun with attached electric shotgun or a brutal hydraulic hammer that can also fire stasis-inducing rotary saws, is easily DS3’s best new feature. You are restricted to a mere two weapons at a time, so intelligently choosing alternate fire modes and tactical functionality is important.

Unfortunately some weapons (notably the rocket launcher and other explosives) are so powerful that once you can craft them they break the difficulty curve. Ammo is plentiful and universal, so even the most powerful weapons can be used freely. At least three or four different ammo types for broad weapon categories (Plasma, explosive, physical, etc…) could have gone a long way towards keeping some of the old survival horror resource conservation in the game. Rockets that one-hit kill 90% of enemies on Hard should at least be rare or expensive enough to make me think twice before firing one.

Tooth and Nailgun

Past the opening acts combat rapidly deteriorates into a sloppy mess. Since the player is flush with health and ammo at all times, and can craft some gruesomely powerful weapons, the designers were forced to compensate to create any sort of challenge. As often as not later battles resort to trapping you in a small area and throwing wave after wave of the same aggravatingly durable enemy type at you. A few sequences have more of a Serious Sam vibe than anything like survival horror.

It quickly becomes as predictable as it is monotonous. Every time you enter a new area a monster pops out of the vent in front of you and another behind you, and then the same thing happens three-to-five more times. It stops being surprising. The side missions, which recycle the same room set, are especially egregious offenders. Many fights devolved into putting my back to a wall, chugging health packs and blazing away into a mass of thrashing, twitching, frame-rate killing ragdolls until everything finally stopped moving.

Now kill these guys four more times and you can move on.

Arenas like this existed in previous games but were rare. The dearth of resources and better mix of monsters on display made them more frantic brawls for survival. Too many of Dead Space 3’s fights quickly become a grinding, repetitive chore.

Even dismemberment and Stasis, two of the core elements of Dead Space combat, feel wrong. Necromorphs are faster and give less visual feedback as their limbs take damage. The most common new type of monster is strangely resistant to precision amputations. Enemies shrug off the effects of your Stasis blasts much faster than in previous games.

Perhaps these changes were an effort to keep combat challenging. You can find or buy so much ammo and so many Stasis packs that you can just spam Stasis and blaze away at center mass. Carefully severing limbs to conserve ammo and sweating over each use of Stasis no longer makes sense.

Most human enemies aren't worth taking cover from.

The addition of human enemies ends up being more comic relief than anything else. The Unitologist soldiers you battle occasionally aren’t very good shots and are as fragile as you would expect living humans to be against Dead Space’s body-shattering weaponry. They also spend a lot of time either committing suicide or getting murdered by the same Necromorphs they supposedly worship. Still, they make for a nice change of pace and enemy infighting is always entertaining to watch.

Dangerous to go Alone

Perhaps strangest of all DS3 was built with a fully functional co-op mode. While running around blasting Necromorphs alongside a buddy does absolutely nothing to help convey a sense of dread or isolation it is solid fun. Friendly fire is mercifully disabled and you can effortlessly pass supplies and even favorite weapon blueprints back and forth.

Unless you're playing solo. But at least you don't need to babysit him.

The second playable character is a standard-issue hard-assed space marine named Carver. He doesn’t get much characterization beyond being angry, but if you’re playing solo the game does a reasonable job of explaining where else he is and what he’s doing. You don’t need to babysit an AI character like in Resident Evil 5, and during boss fights he occasionally shouts advice from off-screen. If the Dead Space series is going to completely ditch its survival-horror roots it might as well take on the better action game elements like co-op.

Fear and Loathing

Dead Space 3 isn’t really a scary game, but under all the mess there is some surprisingly effective traces of horror. The logs left behind by the last doomed expedition to Tau Volantis detail a distressing descent into murder, privation, madness, cannibalism, and death. The bits featuring soldiers willingly, calmly executing their compatriots and then themselves approach genuinely chilling.

Things got ugly before the end came for the last expedition.

The desolation of Tau Volantis itself, both from orbit and down amid the icy wastes, is one of DS3’s most memorable elements. Even without the hordes of freezer-burned space zombies it is clear this world is relentlessly hostile to the human race and all organic life. The frozen, alien landscape and the awful secrets buried beneath it do more to convey an atmosphere of isolation and hopelessness than anything else in the game.

Absolute desolation.

Ultimately Dead Space 3 is a very difficult game to recommend. If I had paid full price for it when it first came out I would have been mad as hell. We’re left with the shambling, hungry shell of a strong IP, relentlessly sabotaged by technical problems and design decisions at odds with everything the series has traditionally done right.

Series fans and people looking for a solid co-op game should still consider giving DS3 a look. If you fit either of those categories and can find it for cheap I would say go ahead and pick it up. Otherwise let the dead rest.

Reasons to Play: Weapon crafting. Zero-G sequences. Solid co-op play.

Reasons to Pass: Extreme technical problems. Obnoxious micro-transactions. Messy, repetitive combat. Survival horror dynamics, like conservation of resources, gone. Weird save system.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Bastion Review

2013-07-10T20:48:00.000-07:00

Bastion is a top-down, 2-D action game with light RPG elements and an amazing fusion of non-conventional storytelling and world building. The music is pretty good too.

Bastion doesn’t kick off with any sort of background exposition or introductory cut-scene. The protagonist, a white-haired and capable young man referred to as The Kid, wakes up one morning to find the world has been destroyed. What ground remains now floats in the sky, each individual piece rising up to form the way forward in a striking and unique visual effect.

Bastion's art would be right at home in a children's book.

The art is bold and colorful, mostly slightly cartoony 2-D images. Characters are lightly animated, although enemies do broadcast when they’re about to attack. Atmospheric effects like rain, falling cinders, and clouds drifting below the floating ground help bring the world to life.

A Proper Story

From the moment the game begins Bastion is not just experienced, but narrated. Every action The Kid takes, every obstacle he overcomes, and every area, creature, and object he encounters is described and commented on by an unseen Narrator with a voice like honeyed whisky. The Narrator’s constant stream of commentary and advice fit seamlessly into the game, slowly building up a world we know nothing about into a place rich with history and flavor.

The Narrator blames the destruction on an event he calls The Calamity. His understated, sorrowful descriptions of the now obliterated city of Caelondia and the regions beyond bring the world to life and make the destruction of a world we’ve never seen before actually mean something. Close listeners may catch on that the Narrator may not be giving a completely unbiased description of past events, but there is no denying that his voice defines the game.

The Narrator gets a bit morally suspect as the game progresses. He has his reasons.

Bastion is mission based, with the Narrator directing the Kid to surviving locations of interest. Each mission is a digestible twenty minutes or so of exploration and combat. It’s not possible to save in mid-mission, but they’re never long enough to become tedious. Successful completion allows you to improve the central hub, the Bastion itself, constructing buildings like workshops to upgrade your weapons or a memorial that unlocks lucrative in-game achievements.

(Note: Bastion is the name of the game. The Bastion is the game’s central location and the focus of much of the story.)

“A Cross Between a Zoo and a Prison Break.”

While the people of Caelondia were destroyed by the Calamity a great many creatures, security systems, and other hazards remain. Combat is fast paced and finely tuned, rewarding both good reflexes and intelligent tactics. The basic lock-on system is handy but not critical. To defend himself the Kid can carry a mere two weapons at a time, plus a single special ability. Weapons range from more primitive gear like a fast-striking machete and sniper bow to surprisingly advanced tech like a short range flamethrower and devastating mortar.

Anklegators attack from below. Keep moving.

While all of Bastion’s weapons are useful considering the right load-out for the challenge at hand is critical. The bow or carbine are great for clearing a field of turrets or thorn-throwing Pincushion plants, but won’t be much use against a swarm of fast-moving flyers. You can’t change your equipment on the fly, though new weapons are introduced just when needed. Both The Kid and other creatures can be sent hurtling over the edge into the abyss, though the Kid always lands back on solid ground with minor injuries.

On the defensive the Kid has an extremely handy evasive Roll and an indestructible shield that offers near total protection in whatever direction you’re facing. You can’t attack while shielding yourself, but you can still move at a reduced rate and bring it up just as an enemy is attacking to reflect the damage back in his face. Quick and skillful use of both abilities will let you avoid most damage.

“A Mighty Fast Learner.”

Special Skills are powerful, often enough to function as a panic button, but consume one of a limited supply of Tonics when used. Some are tied to specific weapons and let them perform unique and even screen-clearing attacks. Others grant more general abilities like summoning allies or snaring nearby enemies in place. The one Special Skill at a time limit feels a little strict and means many will never see use. A limit of three hot-keyed skills at a time, all pulling from your same limited stock of Tonics, would have been fair while allowing more diverse tactics.

Each weapon has a bonus level that tests your skills. Here The Kid must defeat enemies with only the Shield.

Bastion isn’t quite an action-RPG in the vein of Diablo but you do earn XP and level up, slightly increasing your health and increasing the number of slots allowed for passive perks. Amusingly enough these perks are granted by various alcoholic drinks from the Bastion’s distillery, implying The Kid is constantly wasted through his entire adventure. With enough money and raw materials weapons can also be upgraded through several tiers of mutually exclusive improvements. Your choice of upgrades and alcoholic perks can be freely changed between missions, so if one is giving you trouble tuning your load-out and trying again is an entirely valid.

“The Gods… they’re all Undone.”

By default this is a forgiving game. The Kid’s defensive abilities and stock of healing potions will see him through most battles, and for those only interested in the art and story there’s a “No Sweat” mode that allows unlimited continues. The focus is on delivering a diverse rather than a grueling array of challenges. One mission has you racing across a series of collapsing pathways, while another has you fending off ambushes in neck high grass. There’s always some new weapon, enemy, or mechanic to familiarize yourself with, right up until the very end where many games have long since emptied their hand.

The Narrator has something to say about everything you find.

For those who crave a greater challenge Bastion has a surprisingly elegant system that lets the difficulty to be tuned to taste. As you upgrade the Bastion you eventually construct a shrine, containing idols to the various gods of the Caelondian Pantheon. Each idol you invoke grants a stacking bonus to money and XP rewards, but also grants enemies a specific power like increased speed or exploding on death. Invoke the aid of enough gods and Bastion starts to become an altogether more brutal game.

The battle hungry can also tackle a series of optional arena-style dream sequences. These pit The Kid against waves of monsters to earn yet more money and XP, while the Narrator explains a character’s back-story in greater detail. These sequences aren’t necessary to complete the game, but they’re a good place to test different weapon load-outs and the secrets revealed add much to the characterization of Bastion’s small cast of Calamity survivors.

Coming Home

While I can’t fault Bastion’s gameplay and combat it is ultimately the story and world that make the game a unique and memorable experience. Before the Calamity this was a world of bold pioneers, vast, hostile wilderness, terrible ethnic conflicts, and reckless technological advancement. Western and Steampunk elements blend cleanly into the narrative and art. The handful of characters are well developed, likeable, and believable, even if you never hear most of them speak. The game is a triumph of non-traditional storytelling and world building.

Rare voiced illustrations help bring the cast to life.

The Soundtrack is a stand out and well worth a listen. It makes good use of guitar and harmonica to give a Western flavor while maintaining a distinct identity. The few songs with vocals are used to great effect during the game and final credit sequence.

Finally it’s worth mentioning that Bastion has an excellent New Game + mode to help extend its playable life. You’re unlikely to reach the maximum level or be able to afford all upgrades the first time through, but you can bring all that progress with you on restarting the campaign. There are multiple endings to experience, and the second play-through gives you a few extra options and perks that weren’t available the first time around.

Reasons to Play: Vivid, unconventional world-building. Satisfying and tightly tuned isometric combat engine. Clever adjustable difficulty mechanic. Constant stream of new weapons, mechanics and challenges. Excellent Soundtrack.

Reasons to Pass: Intense fear of falling off the world? None, really.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Review

2013-05-23T22:07:00.002-07:00

Do you remember the 80s? I don’t. But I tell you, the 80s live.

Blood Dragon is both a love letter too and an affectionate parody of 80’s action films, in all their ridiculousness and excess. The game is packed with homage’s to the iconic films of the era, from Robocop’s gun to an opening helicopter sequence ripped from the script of Predator. With a “Mark IV Cyber Commando” named Rex Power Colt as the protagonist (voiced by Michael Biehn of Terminator and Aliens fame!) Blood Dragon wastes no time in embracing the explosive and ludicrous nature of its source material.

You see Blood Dragon never tries to be smart. Blood Dragon does try it’s damndest to be fun, funny, and unrelentingly true to its deliberately chosen style and feel. It succeeds from start to finish.

The cyber-apocalyptic future. 2007

The tropical paradise of Far Cry 3 returns, but this time around the island is soaked in TRON style neon and chrome. A heavy sky crackles with dramatic lightning and the horizon is a skyline of ruined cities backlit by mushroom clouds. Nearby explosions send VHS scan lines tracking across your vision. The synthesizer heavy soundtrack, almost worth the cost of purchase alone, has to be heard to be believed.

For some reason my screenshot program made all blue colors red and vice-versa.
This Blood Dragon is actually really angry and warming up his laser beam eyes.

All creatures and enemies have received an overhaul that leaves them right at home in their new surroundings. Cobra commandos with computerized voices and convincingly low budget costumes replace pirates and privateers. Cyborg sharks and gorgeous Black Velvet tigers replace their real world counterparts. Blood Dragon adds a delicious layer of 80’s flavor, spray cheese style, atop of the rock solid FC3 engine. You can almost feel the muggy Miami humidity on the atomic breeze.

The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense (something about missiles and your former commander gone rogue) but then it doesn’t really need to. No part of Blood Dragon, from the deliberately intrusive and tongue-in-cheek tutorial to the cheesy dialog to the ridiculous weapon and creature descriptions, takes itself in any way seriously. Rex growls out groan worthy one-liners with every kill. At one point your mission objective becomes, quite literally, to jump the shark. The developers worked hard to make every aspect of the game so bad it’s good.

No Fate

The FC3 engine allows for a seamless flow between tactical stealth and balls-to-the wall action. Either is an equally viable, rewarding, and fun approach. Enemy cyborgs are easy to sneak up on or pick off with the bow, but when alerted aggressively search the area and home in on gunfire. You always have a good sense of how close to being detected you are. When you get spotted it doesn’t feel like a reason to re-load the game, just an excuse to break out the heavy weapons.

Sneaking up on and knife-tickling hapless goons remains a joy.

Roaming the island and preying on your Omega Force foes is both entertaining and profitable. Stealth takedowns return from FC3 and can be chained together to silently wipe out an entire squad. Patrolling jeeps and all the soldiers inside can be eliminated with a well placed mine in the road or a single explosive round. You can hang back and tag a garrison full of guards with your “Cyber Eye” to see them through walls. Or you can kick down the front door, blazing away with the classic shotgun from the Terminator films and reenacting the police station scene.

The major gameplay addition is the titular Blood Dragons themselves. These massive, glowing neon dinosaurs roam the island, devouring everything within reach and blasting everything else with their mighty laser-beam eyes. Immune to fire and extraordinarily resistant to conventional weapons each encounter with a Blood Dragon is a mini-boss fight in itself.

One Blood Dragon can usually clear an enemy garrison on it's own.
Of course then you have a Blood Dragon sitting in your new base.

Fortunately Blood Dragons can be manipulated to your advantage. If you destroy or deactivate the barriers protecting enemy garrisons then the Dragons will rush in, doing most of your work for you amid a chorus of cyborg screams and weapons fire. The beasts also have an appetite for cybernetic hearts, which can be harvested from your enemies and thrown to distract attacking Blood Dragons or sic them on Omega Force patrols. The dynamic encounters between Omega Force, the friendly scientist faction, the cybernetic wildlife, and the almost unstoppable Blood Dragons makes the island a lively and dangerous place.

Ain’t got time to bleed

Blood Dragon is a shorter, sleeker, more focused game than its parent. It trims out a lot of the Far-Cry 3 fat, like crafting and vehicle challenges. You’re given access to a potent suite of weapons, explosives, and abilities right out of the gate. As a Mark IV series cyborg Rex can run as fast as a jeep, leap from any height without injury, and breathe underwater. This isn’t a game about going from a spoiled thrill seeker to a badass warrior. Rex starts as a badass able to bail out of a hang-glider from 100 feet up, shank the hapless cyber-goon he lands on, and then mow down a dozen of said goon’s friends with a chain-gun.

The Mini-Gun. Old Painless. Hold down the trigger and roar along!

There is still a basic XP and level-up system in place, but it’s entirely linear with no assigning of points. More difficult kills, like stealth takedowns and headshots, award generous dollops of XP. Rex is a bit fragile at the start of the game but each level adds extra bars of health and other perks, many adapted from the FC3 skill trees.

Blood Dragon’s campaign is quite short and can be polished off in a few hours if you rush straight through the handful of missions. Side content takes the form of liberating garrisons, converting them into friendly bases that function as re-supply and fast travel points and allowing access to hunting and hostage rescue missions. There are also VHS tapes (each with descriptions parodying a popular 80’s film genre) and other collectables scattered around the island, along with a scavenger hunt of various animals to kill.

Big cats are even more majestic with full chrome bodies.

The point of all this is to unlock attachments and upgrades for your weapons. The assault rifle gains laser bullets, while the sniper rifle upgrades to explosive rounds that can one-shot a light vehicle (turning it into essentially a hit-scan rocket launcher with a scope). The shotgun eventually evolves into an amazing quad-barreled semi-automatic monster that sets enemies on fire.

Blood Dragon’s core gameplay is so much fun I found myself finishing all the side missions and still hungry for more. Even if you 100% everything gameplay clocks in at a modest 8-10 hours. Perhaps it’s for the best that Blood Dragon doesn’t overstay its welcome. The game builds to a finale that manages to start at utterly ludicrous and yet somehow keep topping itself, piling excess atop excess on the way to complete sensory overload.

Game Over Man!

Blood Dragon is tremendous fun from both a gameplay and stylistic perspective, but it does have a few rough spots. The dark color scheme, scan line filter, and heavy use of neon can start to tire the eye after a few hours. There’s no “New Game +” mode or way to reset the island’s garrisons, so by the time you’ve leveled up Rex and unlocked all the upgrades for your guns you’ve finished all of Blood Dragon’s content. Ubisoft also deserves a slap on the wrist for forcing the instillation of their Uplay digital distribution system when I’ve already bought the game on Steam.

Blood Dragon features frantic pitched battles over traditional boss encounters.

Blood Dragon’s lower budget means that many climactic moments, including your final showdown with your traitorous commander, are done in deliberately low-rez cutscenes that would feel at home on an NES cartridge rather than via gameplay. This is likely a necessary trade-off to keep the cost of the game and production time down, but it’s still slightly disappointing. To be fair it’s not like the original FC3 had great boss fights either.

These minor complaints aside Blood Dragon is a perfect example of the way DLC should be done. Rather than just delivering a mission pack of more of the same the developers took their already polished and playable engine and took it in a different direction, taking a real risk they probably couldn’t have gotten away with in a $60 core game. The game sets out to achieve a very deliberate stylistic vision and it succeeds brilliantly. Other developers with finished engines and an interest in producing DLC should take note.

Winners don't charge $10 for 2 hours of re-hashed content. Blood Dragon is a Winner.

Reasons to Play: Hilarious tribute to everything awesome and excessive about 80’s entertainment. Kicking synthesizer soundtrack. Seamless blend of tactical stealth and explosive action. Roam the island harvesting cyborg hearts and battling giant lizards with laser-eyes.

Reasons to Pass: Life threatening allergy to synthesizers and neon.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Red Faction: Armageddon Review

2013-03-13T14:23:00.001-07:00

Note: Since I started writing this review Armageddon publisher THQ has filed for bankruptcy. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but perhaps we can learn something by examining the last games they published.

The Red Faction series has always been a bit uneven. The first two entries were middling FPS games that tried but never quite managed to satisfyingly implement their “Geo-Mod” technology, allowing the player to blow holes in everything around them. The series finally hit its stride with the third-person Grand Theft Auto style demolition fest that was Red Faction: Guerrilla, turning you lose on the surface of Mars to lead a rebellion via blowing up all the fascist occupiers’ buildings and anything else that got in the way.

Red Faction: Armageddon certainly holds true to the uneven pacing of the franchise. The game moves the series forward by offering fun and interesting weapons while at the same time dragging the player down from the free-roaming world of Guerrilla into claustrophobic underground caverns. Things have changed on Mars, and not entirely for the better.

Get your ass to Mars

Guerrilla established that Mars had been terraformed, meaning you can run around outside in shirtsleeves rather than a space suit. At the start of Armageddon a group of cultists with vaguely defined plans and a love of spiky armor attack the Terraformer keeping the planet habitable. You, in the boots of Darius Mason, snarky son of the protagonist from Guerrilla, are sent to stop them.

If it's man-made, you can unmake it.

Just to spoil things you don’t succeed. The surface of the Red Planet is reduced to a storm racked wasteland and the Martian colonists flee underground. On one hand it’s always a bit annoying to be handed a defeat that you, as the player, have no way around. On the other I appreciate that you at least get to fight through the battle at the Terraformer first hand rather than sitting through an extended cut-scene. As always the strength of games is in letting you do stuff yourself, not just watch passively.

Demolition Man

Like Guerrilla before it Armageddon is played from a third person “over the shoulder” perspective. Also like Guerrilla large parts of Armageddon’s environments are highly destructible. Any man-made structure is susceptible to explosive weapons, demolition charges, or just beating the hell out of it with your mighty sledgehammer. Many enemies have explosive attacks, meaning no piece of cover lasts long in a pitched battle.

Anything broken can be fixed by waggling you magic bracer or "Nano-Forge" at it.

New to the series is the ability to rebuild anything that’s been destroyed through the sci-fi magic of your Nano-Forge. This device handily lets you rebuild demolished cover in the middle of a fight and repair destroyed critical paths. While it would have been cool to materialize turrets or defensive barriers on the fly you’re restricted to only rebuilding what existed beforehand. The effect is visually interesting and prevents wanton destruction from making any area impossible to complete.

Weapon selection is strong, with plenty of satisfyingly loud and destructive ways to obliterate your enemies and anything nearby. Conventional assault rifles and shotguns mix it up with more exotic fare like a wall piercing sniper rifle, disintegration beams, and a terrifyingly destructive black hole launcher. There’s hardly a bad option to be found in Armageddon’s arsenal.

Tools of the Proletariat

The Magnet gun deserves special mention. This device lets you fire two magnets at different objects, which then rush together with bone-splintering speed. You can splatter enemies against the ceiling, crush them under a mass of rubble, or slam them into their buddies with a sickening “CRUNCH”. The possibilities are nearly limitless, and there’s a perverse pleasure to be found in sending a three-ton monster slamming up into the ceiling every time it tries to struggle to its feet. The Magnet gun is such a unique and fun weapon it could almost carry a physics puzzle type game on its own.

The strongest gameplay addition is in the form of a handful of pseudo-magical powers fueled by the Nano-Forge. You start with a simple directional kinetic blast, but soon unlock tactically interesting abilities like a defensive energy shell and a shockwave that leaves enemies dangling helplessly in mid-air. All are great fun, recharge quickly, and when used intelligently make Darius just short of unstoppable.

The Shockwave power leaves enemies floating helplessly, perfect for skeet shooting.

The biggest disappointment with this latest addition to the Red Faction series is that you’re no longer free to roam Mars at will. Armageddon takes place largely underground, in a series of heavily scripted and linear levels. The socialistic revolutionary theme and oppressive human foes of previous games have been replaced with an army of giant alien bugs. This particular breed of space-bug is colorful and agile, but they could be seamlessly dropped into any sci-fi shooter. They’re not bad enemies, just generic and symptomatic of Armageddon’s problems.

God of War

Darius makes for a tough and resilient player character, an interesting decision when many modern shooter protagonists are more on the squishy side. Between weapons and nano-powers it’s almost trivial to tear through space-bugs by the dozens, especially once you get a few upgrades under your belt. Melee is so effective and powerful it felt like the giant alien bugs should be running away from me, not the other way around. Even on hard difficulty I rarely felt seriously threatened.

Combat is more forgiving and less cover based than it was in Guerrilla. As ugly and numerous as the alien swarm is they lack the automatic weapons, keen aim, and air superiority that made the EDF soldiers in the previous game so dangerous. The human cultists certainly feel dumber and less threatening on the rare occasions in the campaign they show up.

Vehicles, like this Leo Armor, are so powerful you'll wonder how the bugs are supposed to be winning.

Vehicle segments serve as palate cleansers between the on-foot action. There are a few variants of mech suits, insectoid walkers, and a VTOL hovercraft, but all are blisteringly powerful. Armageddon’s vehicles aren’t deep in terms of gameplay, but they do let you cut loose and obliterate everything in your path without needing to think about it. If anything the vehicle sections go on a bit long.

Rounding out gameplay is a “Horde Style” Multiplayer mode that lets you and up to three other schlubs fend off wave after increasingly difficult wave of bugs across a handful of maps. Like much of Armageddon it’s not tactically complex, but it can make for chaotic fun if you’re willing to crank up the difficulty and use basic communication and coordination. Playing alien volleyball with magnet-guns is well worth the price of admission.

The co-op multiplayer is a good excuse to explode things with friends.

As a nice touch upgrades and upgrade currency carry over between multiplayer and single player. It’s not hard to max out your character long before finishing the campaign. Finally there are a few small free-form demolition maps that might kill a few minutes of playing with explosives.

Start the reactor. Free Mars…

Plot has never been the strongest point in the Red Faction series, but Armageddon’s is especially problematic. The story holds together for the first third of the lengthy single player campaign before it starts to fragment, with Darius jumping from location to location with steadily less explanation or flow. It feels like the developers ran out of time and resources and were forced to curt a fair bit of content, then weren’t quite able to calk over the cracks.

A sniper-rifle that lets you see and shoot through walls is almost cheating.

Many elements, like the your Marauder allies and their exotic technology, are given a cursory explanation if covered at all. The main human villain dies with a surprising number of chapters left to go, ham-stringing much of what dramatic tension the narrative has been able to muster. The story finally coasts to a face-palm inducing “We didn’t think of this solution before because we’re brain-damaged” conclusion. None of this will stop you from enjoying exploding hundreds of alien bugs, but it certainly doesn’t help.

Ultimately Armageddon just isn’t as strong at its predecessor. It sacrifices much of what made Guerrilla interesting without adding a lot in return, becoming a generic sci-fi action shooter. Its unsurprising that the game sold poorly, leading to the cancellation of the series and perhaps contributing to the collapse of THQ as a whole. If all you need is fun weapons and explosions Armageddon will probably scratch your gaming itch, but fans of Guerrilla expecting a sequel that builds on the successes of the first will be disappointed.

Reasons to Play: Powerful weapons and destructible environments. Fun “Nano-Forge” powers. Decent co-op Horde mode. Magnet gun.

Reasons to Pass: Mindless action soon becomes repetitive. Discards free-roaming world of previous game for linear levels. Story loses steam, becoming steadily less interesting and coherent.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Indie Micro Reviews

2012-12-28T20:43:00.002-08:00

If you’re not aware of Indie Royal and the periodic bundles their website offers they’re worth keeping an eye on. The gaming industry has loads in indie talent that can sometimes get buried under all the AAA hubbub, and the site is a great resource. I picked up a number of their recent bundles for pocket change, and we’ll be taking a look at a few of the standouts.

Mutant Mudds

Mutant Mudds (MM for short) is a 2D side scrolling platformer, a genre I’m forced to admit I don’t have a lot of experience with. My first console was an N64 and the golden age of the 2D platformer was a bit before my time. The game has a strong retro/classic feel. If you cut your gaming teeth on Nintendo’s early platformers you’ll feel right at home.

Controlling the blond bespectacled protagonist is easy to learn but challenging to master. He comes equipped with water cannon for blasting the titular Mutant Mudd monsters and a jetpack that allows a precious second or two of hover time. Understanding and exploiting the idiosyncrasies and limitations of both is key to success.

MM’s graphics are made up of colorful and charmingly detailed but deliberately heavily pixeleated sprites. A soundtrack of catchy chiptunes accompanies the action as you hop and shoot your way through level sets with such timeless themes as “ice world” and “lava world.” The controls are extremely tight and responsive and I always felt in complete control of the character. This is critical, because bad controls would have changed the high difficulty level from tough to tooth-pulling.

Many level have you hopping between the fore and background.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the forgiving nature of modern design philosophy, but Mutant Mudds feels like a very challenging game. Even brutally so. You can sustain a mere three hits from enemies per level. Falls and most hazards spell instant death.

While you have unlimited lives you’re rarely more than one or two slight mistakes from the restart screen. Fortunately the game isn’t strictly linear. If you find yourself completely stumped on one level there will always be several others you can attempt at the same time. Many of the more challenging levels might take dozens of attempts.

The gameplay is compelling enough that you’ll usually want to jump right back in, but after the tenth time replaying the same sequence you might, not unreasonably, start to wish for a checkpoint system of some sort. Power and progress in MM doesn’t come from leveling up or finding better weapons but from memorizing level layouts and understanding the behavior of enemies and hazards. One timed sequence stumped me to near hair-pulling frustration until I checked a video-walkthrough and learned the exact animation frame to start my jump. Once I knew that I had it mastered in minutes.

While levels are short the game still feels slow and deliberate. The pacing is more Mario than Sonic. There are no time limits. It’s usually safest to pick apart enemy groups without exposing yourself to risk and to stop and carefully observe a hazard before flinging yourself into it. This is a game that rewards per-pixel precision and split second timing.

Mudd Mutants are dangerous but predictable. Learn their patterns and pick them off.

Your goal in each level is to collect the giant “Water Gem” at the end. Each first tier level also contains one hundred “Golden Diamonds”. You don’t need to collect them all in a single run of the level (indeed doing so usually puts you in even greater risk) but you’ll want to get them all eventually because they’re needed to unlock three different and mutually exclusive upgrades.

You’ll ultimately be able to swap between a faster and farther firing water cannon, an extended hover for your jetpack, and a powerful vertical boost. The boost in particular is great fun. Intelligent use can allow you to skip whole sections of some levels, although there’s always the risk of ceiling spikes.

The unlockable upgrades also let you reach the second tier of levels. These are even more challenging than the first set and usually test your mastery of some specific skill or mechanic. Collecting every Water Gem and Golden Diamond in the game allows use of all three upgrades at once and unlocks a final tier of bonus levels that demand nothing less than perfection.

As tough as they are the levels are well designed and extremely satisfying to finally beat. There’s a clever mechanic where jump pads can launch you into the foreground or background, allowing you to enter areas you can see in the distance. The game is also good about educating you on new hazards and required maneuvers, letting you experience them in less dangerous scenarios before combining them and amping up the challenge.

There are a few rare occasions where the game forces you to jump blind from one dangerous scenario into another with no chance to stop and see what’s next. You will then almost invariably die. You’re already dying a lot, but these deaths are the only ones that feel unfair. At worst at least you now know the second hazard is there and can play accordingly.

The ultra-tough "Grandma" levels allow you to use all power-ups at once. You'll need them.

Finally a boss fight or two would have been a nice way to tie off the game, although narrative, combat, or bosses isn’t really what MM is about. Anyone who enjoys high-challenge platforming should check this delightful indie gem out. More casual games might find themselves put off by the intense difficulty level.

Reasons to Play: Extremely tight, responsive controls. Well built levels. Charming retro graphics and sound. Precision platforming bliss.

Reasons to pass: Extremely high difficulty level. No boss fights to cap off game. Occasional unfair blind jumps.

Pineapple Smash Crew

Pineapple Smash Crew (PSC) is a top-down “dual stick” style shooter in the vein of the Cannon Fodder series. The art style is charmingly retro and the chiptunes that provide the soundtrack are catchy. Notably the game was developed by “RichMakeGame”, a company consisting of one man, or possibly a talented man-shaped robot.

The player controls a group of four tiny-headed, meme spouting and heavily armed mercenaries, moving with the keyboard and shooting with the mouse. Your mercs always move and fight in close formation. In practice they’re less a tactical squad and more a single body with four discrete guns and health bars.

Gameplay is fast and furious. You race your team through a series of randomly generated derelict ships at breakneck speed, blasting and exploding every robot and monster in their way and grabbing up the power-ups and experience cubes left behind. There are a handful of basic mission types, but they boil down to killing or smashing everything in a particular room. Levels have a tight time limit on all but the easiest difficulty level. Exceed it and your squad starts to suffer constant damage, killing them in short order.

Combat has some interesting twists in that your guns aren’t actually very strong. It can take concentrated fire from the entire squad and draining the regenerating ammo bar to drop many mid and late game enemies. Superior firepower and tactical depth are provided in the form of a host of grenade style deployables, hurled with the right mouse button. These range from destructive grenades and rockets, to support items like healing fields and defensive shields, to more exotic fare like teleporter beacons and lasers that can punch through walls. Each character can only carry one item at a time.

The best place to shoot an enemy is from around a corner.

The emphasis on these remote one-shot weapons is what sets PSC apart from most twin-stick style shooter, and much effort was clearly put towards making their use and control feel natural. When you fling a deployable item the camera zooms out, allowing you to rotate and guide the device in mid flight before triggering it with a second click. You can (and should) move your squad at the same time. Deftly splitting your attention between using a remote turret to blast a nest of enemies while maneuvering to safety feels just about perfect.

Deployables are scattered plentifully through the environment and dropped by enemies. Leveling up your squad lets you choose to unlock one of two new randomly selected items. Your selection then has a chance to spawn alongside all your other unlocked choices. It’s all quite random, with no guarantee you’ll be able to find or even unlock a particular item. It’s up to you to make use of what the level generator gives you on a room by room basis.

PSC isn’t a particularly deep game. By design it’s well suited to quick bursts of frantic fun, playing a mission or two at a time. This is great in the early and even the mid-game, when levels take only a few minutes to complete. Unfortunately it starts to break down as the game wears on.

The size and difficulty of later missions start to push them out of the “bite-sized” range. While PSC’s enemies aren’t particularly smart they become exponentially tougher and more numerous, sometimes taking a ludicrous amount of damage to kill. I would often find myself exhausting an area’s supply of items before its population of enemies.

Bosses are protected by modular layers of guns and armor, each of which can be destroyed.

This is especially annoying when fighting PSC’s modular bosses, who seal you inside the room with them to fight to the death. Once you’ve used up all your grenades and shields and whatnot these fights are reduced to circle strafing around the boss over and over until your guns finally wear them down or the level timer kills you. Having additional power-ups spawn in continually would have helped a lot.

Experienced mercenaries become more damage resistant, but are still ultimately expendable. If slain they’re replaced with raw level one recruits. (Unless you’re playing on hard where they’re not replaced at all.) It’s possible to lose an entire veteran squad and have to press on with a bunch of squishy noobies.

Losses can easily lead to more losses, creating a self-reinforcing death loop. It would have been nice to be able to use the cash you earn on missions to resurrect dead mercenaries, or at least train up new recruits to near the squad’s average level. As it is money just functions as a sort of score, or to buy cosmetic hats.

For a game developed entirely by one man (soundtrack excluded) PSC is a significant accomplishment. Tuning and balance is tricky enough with an entire play-testing department. The game plays smoothly, never crashed or bugged out on me, and is perfectly suited for a quick five-minute action break. It’s just unfortunate that the pacing starts to grind.

Reasons to play: Fast paced action. Interesting use of grenade types and mechanics. Rocking chiptunes.

Reasons to pass: Punishing time limit on all but easiest difficulty. Gameplay gets repetitive after a few missions. Boss fights become a chore.

They Breath

They Breath is a quick play and a strange one at that, almost more of a demo than full game. It only took me about 45 minutes to complete. A disproportionate amount of that was on the game’s final encounter, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The premise and gameplay is simple. You play as a frog, controlled from a 2D side view, descending down into the depths of a flooded forest. You can move in any direction and tap the spacebar for a little burst of extra speed. That’s the extent of your abilities and the information you’re given on how to play.

As you work your way down through the flooded forest you’ll quickly discover a bizarre ecosystem based around oxygen. O2 functions as both a time limit and your health and requires constant replenishment by collecting the bubbles drifting up from below. You’re not the only creature in the water though.

Gameplay is strictly linear. Waves of creatures of various types swim onscreen. Each interacts differently with you, each other, and the vital supply of oxygen. Since you’re a frog and not a killing machine you survive by evading and manipulating creatures as you come to understand more and more about the sunken ecosystem. Once every creature in a wave is dealt with, one way or another, you resume your descent. If you suffocate or meet a worse fate you simply restart at the beginning of the wave.

Those aren't moose.

They Breath quickly becomes a sort of wordless, interactive biological horror story. I won’t do you the disservice of spoiling the twists, but I enjoyed them. The sparse but ominous music and ambient sound design help create an eerie atmosphere.

The game makes for a good case study in teaching the player mechanics without cumbersome tutorials, intrusive onscreen text, or somebody yelling orders at you via radio. Nothing is ever explained, only demonstrated. It’s up to you to figure out the relationships between the different creatures and how to deal with them through experimentation and observation.

The final encounter of the game is memorable and even subtly horrifying, but took me almost as long as the rest of this very short game combined. Most players will need to repeat it anywhere up to a dozen times. A smoother difficulty curve would have been better for They Breath’s pacing and prevented frustrated. It’s also possible and even necessary to swim off-screen during much of the game, and the camera should really zoom out during the later encounters with larger numbers of creatures.

Reasons to Play: Fascinating wordless horror story. Good case study in teaching the player mechanics unobtrusively. Cheap.

Reasons to Pass: Very short. Aggravating final encounter.

Links

http://www.indieroyale.com/

http://www.renegadekid.com/mutantmudds.htm

http://www.richmakegame.com/

http://www.theworkingparts.com/theybreathe/

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Banner Saga Interview

2012-11-23T22:29:00.003-08:00

Stoic Studios is a new Austin based indie development studio. They’ve been hard at work on their first release: the beautifully illustrated and Nordic themed tactical strategy game The Banner Saga. John Watson, Stoic’s Technical Director, has agreed to share some of the details with us.

Stoic is made up of ex Bioware employees. What made you decide to set out to create a game with deliberate, tactical turn-based combat at its core, so different from games like The Old Republic and other traditional Bioware staples?

There are definitely a couple reasons for this. The first is that I've been a huge fan of turn-based games growing up ever since Final Fantasy Tactics, so making a game like this has always been one of the things you work toward in your career. Conveniently, it's also a genre we can produce with a small team, but this really is a labor of love and I think most developers have a couple ideas that they always think "one day I'll make that". We've been incredibly lucky to be in that position.

You’ve stated that one of your goals with The Banner Saga’s single player component is to tell a mature story based around human (and giant) relationships and tough decisions. How do you plan to get the player emotionally involved with the characters and their struggles?

One of the tricks we did pick up from BioWare is how to make compelling dialogue in a role-playing game. The story is largely conversation-driven, and when you talk to people it's in a cinematic, movie-quality sort of way, which works perfectly with our art style. You can see the person you're talking to look around, blink, breathing mist in the cold air, and it makes a big difference. The story we're writing is about connecting with these people who are traveling with you in a caravan, and that's our second key component. You're not just worried about being the lone hero saving the world, you're not just a team of heroes, you're actually traveling with an entire society of people and you get to know them as a whole along the way through lots of events, similar to King of Dragon Pass.

Combat looks highly tactical. For example balancing attacks between striking enemy armor to make them more vulnerable and striking enemy strength to weaken them offensively looks very important. Are there any other similarly cool and elegant systems you’re excited about?

Actually, yes, there are a couple things that are very exciting to me as a player and a designer. We originally set out to make a "simple to learn, hard to master" sort of game and found out that we had made something a lot more deep and complex than people expected. In fact, it's been difficult explaining the system as a whole because as you understand one system at a time it kind of peels layers away to a bigger picture, and we've been really focused making sure that players understand just to top level so far.

Willpower lets you add bonus points to your actions so you can do more damage or move further, but your pool of willpower is finite, making the use of it very strategic. Exertion determines how much willpower you can use on each turn, so you can throw three will into an attack to really cripple someone early. The tradeoff is that you have a limited number of upgrades when creating your character, so upgrading exertion and willpower means you'll have lower strength and armor. I think our greatest strength of design is that we've made every stat equally important even though they all do wildly different things.

One of the most important game changers is that each character moves according to his initiative but you always have a guaranteed turn, so as your characters die, you discover that your surviving characters act more frequently. At the end of a match if you're down to one powerful character in good health he could easily mop up an opponent who has four characters left, all on the verge of death. We've created a really unique system in which on top of all the decisions about hitting strength or armor, whether to add willpower and deciding when to use your abilities, it's also vitally important to know when to maim and when to kill. Sometimes it's better to leave an enemy with little strength than killing him outright, and knowing which is better becomes a skill within itself.

There are a lot of subtleties like this that emerge when you really get into playing the game that are hard to describe in a single sentence.

What’s been the biggest challenge so far in establishing an indie studio and creating Banner Saga? Have there been any positive surprises?

The biggest challenge by far has been promotion and dealing with large numbers of people interested in the game. It sounds weird to say but if you think about it, we have a lot of experience making games, and not much interacting with the public. Marketing has got to be at least 50% of your success, and if you don't have a budget for marketing you have to make all those connections yourself. That's why Kickstarter and Factions have been invaluable for us - it's insanely important that we foster a community and keep players happy, and it's hard work. I probably spend about half of my time producing updates, videos, interviews and talking to people. The rare occasion that we get to spend a whole day just working on the game is like relaxation.

If I had to pick something in production though, the clear winner is UI. With a relatively complex game your UI (user interface) and usability has to be perfect and we went through a lot of iteration to get it to the point where people can just sit down and figure out how to play the game without reading any guides. It's not a matter of making it looks pretty, but how do you present information in a clean and intuitive way that doesn't confuse or overwhelm the player. It's incredibly tricky.

The art and animation in this game is gorgeous. Aside from the obvious Norse and Scandinavian influences what sources did Stoic draw upon to create the world of Banner Saga?

Our biggest influence in the art style has always been Eyvind Earle, an American master painter and the art director on Sleeping Beauty. We take a lot of cues from that movie, in fact, often deciding that something we designed wouldn't fit in that world. We spent a lot of time early in the project researching different art styles and the second we saw Sleeping Beauty we knew that's what we wanted to do. Making a 2D game allows to make it look exactly how we paint it and create a look that many people have never seen before. It also helps that we have Arnie Jorgensen as Art Director, who has literally done all the non-animation art in the entire game. There aren't many people out there who can do what he does.

You’re releasing the combat engine as a free, stand alone multiplayer game: Banner Saga Factions. Any tips on emerging triumphant in battle?

Definitely. If you're just starting out, remember that knocking down armor, especially early in the game is probably even more important than damaging strength. Make some characters who are dedicated armor breakers and other characters who are good at doing strength damage. A well balanced team actually dominates min/maxing in The Banner Saga. And make sure you know how exertion works before hitting the battlefield! Each page has a question mark button that tells you how everything works. Good luck!

For more information check out: http://stoicstudio.com

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Mass Effect Retrospect, Part Two

2012-10-21T21:04:00.002-07:00

Welcome back to our Mass Effect series retrospect. We continue with the second game in the series, which features cleaner and more tightly focused gameplay but shifts to an even less linear story and narrative structure.

Mass Effect 2 (ME 2 for future reference) wastes no time in upping the stakes. Within the opening few minutes the Normandy is attacked by a malevolent bug-like race called the Collectors. Most of the crew escape, but Shepard perishes in the battle and the Normandy is destroyed.

The scene is all the more effective by having you actually play through part of it. I’ve long maintained that the strength of games as a medium is in letting you experience things first hand rather than absorbing it passively. It’s one thing to see the Normandy being shot up in a pre-rendered cutscene, but guiding Sheppard through the burning and breached ship yourself drives home the seriousness of the situation in a way nothing else could.

We can Rebuild Him

Shepard’s default face is all over the box art, so it would be unusual if Bioware left the commander dead and forged ahead with a replacement lead. Instead the body is rescued by a radical pro-human organization called Cerberus. They spend the next two years rather improbably bringing Shepard back from the dead, which provides a convenient justification for you to choose a new appearance and even character class if you chose to import a character from the first Mass Effect. Sheppard having literally been dead comes up surprisingly little, and Sheppard remembers nothing between death and resurrection. All this also has some potentially disturbing theological implications that never come, but so it goes.

Your mysterious benefactor and leader of the morally suspect Cerberus.

Those of you who did a lot of the side content in the first Mass Effect might remember that Cerberus was a minor antagonist faction. Most of their plans seemed to revolve around trying to control or breed various alien killing machines, then acting surprised when they lost control and were devoured. Their leader, the sharply dressed and charismatic Illusive Man, hand waves away past misdeeds before sending you back into the fight. He did just spend a gazillion space-bucks snatching you back from the icy talons of death and building you a bigger and even more advanced replacement Normandy, plus it’s hard to get too mad at anyone voiced by Martin Sheen.

Casting Call

The basic narrative structure of ME 2 has you building up a team of specialists, mercenaries, scientists, and a few psychopaths thrown in for flavor. Once you’re staffed up Shepard will then pursue the Collectors beyond the ominous “Omega 4” relay and confront them on their home turf. The game is at least as non-linear as its predecessor. Missions are loosely divided into a few different acts, but for the most part you can tackle them in almost any order.

As we’ve come to expect with Bioware games your growing crew is made up of a diverse array of humans, aliens, and more. Standouts include a fast talking and hilariously written ex-special forces scientist and a Geth scout who provides some fascinating insight into the nature and culture of that race of aggregate AI’s.

Moradin steals the show as best recruit able team member.

The bulk of ME 2’s missions are based around either recruiting a new character or resolving some sort of outstanding issue that’s troubling one you’ve already obtained. Once you’ve helped them gain whatever vengeance, redemption, absolution, or revelation they needed Sheppard secures their Loyalty. Earning a character’s loyalty unlocks an additional power and has important implications for the final mission.

None of these missions or the characters they’re built around is outright bad in terms of story and gameplay. Some missions are a bit stronger than others, but all are at least entertaining and devoid of any obnoxious mechanics. You’re free to tackle them in almost any order and there can be a half dozen or more waiting for your attention at once by the mid-game.

Clear up any outstanding business before heading to the derelict Reaper.
(Level design courtesy Ridley Scott)

All this has the effect of making the game feel like a collection of only loosely related character driven vignettes, rather than a single sweeping story with galactic level stakes. The structure might be better suited for a more freeform game where you play as a pirate captain or mercenary commander putting together a crew to explore and pillage. It would have helped if the main villains, the Collectors, had appeared more frequently.

Nemesis

For example for much of the game you’re fighting either generic security robots or one of the various color coded mercenary factions. They’re enjoyable enough to shoot at but have nothing to do with the central story. In ME 1’s main missions you were battling the minions of antagonist Saren at every turn. Here the Collectors hardly appear at all. You don’t even get to fight them until the beginning of the second act.

If, as the story implies, the Collectors are so interested in Sheppard they don’t put a lot of effort into showing it. During the opening mission why do you find yourself fighting boring security bots, rather than a Collector strike force sent to make sure the newly revived Sheppard stays dead? Why not have them drop in to attack you during unrelated missions, reminding you that they’re still out there and gunning for you?

The Collector general “Harbinger” could have been an interesting antagonist. With his ability to directly possess any of his followers he should have been a constant presence in the story, taunting and trying to thwart Shepard at every turn. As implemented his only memorable trait is over-clocking a random Collector in combat, making them moderately more dangerous.

The Collectors will need to work harder if they want to be worth Grunt's time.

While Saren could have had more appearances in ME 1 at least he managed an interesting characterization as a powerful and driven individual slowly being subsumed by an even more powerful and terrible force. A good “save the universe” story needs a good villain. Harbinger really doesn’t get the screen time or character development necessary to be one.

Past and Present

One of the more unique and exciting features the ME series promised was the ability to import a finished save file to the next game. In theory your decisions in the previous game affect the story in the sequel. I chose to import my file and found, while it does have a notable impact, it’s not as dramatic as I was expecting.

It’s understandable but slightly disappointing that the effects of importing a save are mostly in the form of small bonuses, side quests, and minor narrative deviations. For example if you chose to spare the Rachnai Queen in ME1 you receive a brief message from her, but the Rachnai don’t actually show up anywhere in gameplay or the central storyline. I guess it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to pour valuable development resources into content that a player might not even see based on previous decisions.

A great many characters from ME1 return, assuming they survived the events of the first game. It is pretty cool to see a character you had the chance to slay but didn’t still alive, and it gives a bit of weight to the decisions you made a whole game ago. The impact of other decisions is only hinted at via newscasts or background conversations, but it’s nice to see the nod to what you’ve done.

While most of your old team from ME1 pop up at some point or another Garrus and Tali are the only characters to actually rejoin you. Seth Green also reprises his role as “Joker”, the Normandy’s skilled but brittle boned pilot. While a relatively minor character he’s clearly having a great deal of fun with the part, and the scenes where he interacts with the Normandy’s experimental AI are always entertaining.

The "Blood Dragon" armor is a Dragon Age DLC bonus.

ME2 still tends to resort to showing cool stuff in cutscenes rather than letting you do it firsthand more than it should, but the new dynamic Interrupt system helps. During a conversation you occasionally see brief prompts that a Paragon on Renegade interrupt is possible. Tapping the appropriate mouse button and Sheppard leaps into action while the other party is still blathering.

Paragon interrupts have Sheppard heading off violence or offering a shoulder to cry on. Renegade interrupts are of the bad-ass “Han shoots first” variety, allowing Sheppard to end the conversation in a flurry of gunfire or fling the offender from a great height. They’re a tremendously fun addition that makes conversations more cinematic and dynamic. Sometimes it’s just better to shoot the villain in the face while he’s in mid-rant.

Lessons Learned

Character progression has been trimmed down and streamlined. Every class has a handful of powers that share a collective cooldown and so can’t be spammed one after another. Each power has only a few ranks, but the difference each rank makes is significant. Unlike ME 1 there’s no scaling, so even a +10% damage bonus means a lot when mercenary grunts don’t magically get tougher as you level up.

There’s no random loot either. Some upgrades can be purchased, but others must be found and then researched in the Normandy’s lab. ME 2 leaves you with less flexibility to shape and specialize Shepard and your team, but individual upgrades and power ranks are much more meaningful.

The Mako is gone, as is dropping in on unexplored planets and wandering around to see what you could find. While ME 1’s unexplored worlds were mostly poorly made terrain and a whole lot of nothing ME 2 loses a bit of the sense of size and scale of its predecessor. The carefully scripted missions are one of the ME 2’ greatest strengths, but there’s no denying they’re very linear.

Hard cover (or bulletproof glass in this case) beats the best shields and armor any day.

Combat is tighter, deadlier, and much more cover based than it was before. You can tell when a fight is coming just by looking for the chest high walls, and you’ll want to get behind those ASAP before you get shot to pieces. Shields and health are easily stripped away but both regenerate quickly. Guns have been downgraded to needing ammo in the form of “Thermal Clips”, but remembering to reload and grabbing the occasional ammo cache isn’t that big a deal.

The relationship between defenses, weapons and powers is more complex and interesting, with a rock/paper/scissors element. Tougher enemies have multiple defensive bars layered over their health that must be stripped away in sequence. Against a robotic foe you might use the Overload power to knock out its Shields, exposing the lumbering machine’s Health bar and leaving it vulnerable to being AI hacked and turned against its allies. Krogan protected by Armor forge ahead relentlessly until you burn their protection away with Incinerate, letting biotic powers toss them across the room.

All this creates a welcome level of tactical depth and gives you incentive to think carefully about what squad-mates to bring and what selection of powers and weapons you’ll have during a given mission. Your HUD tells you what powers an enemy is currently resistant to whenever you target them, removing guesswork and letting you focus on the fight.

Technobabble

As tightly constructed as the core combat and missions are its unfortunate that you’ll spend so much time staring at a loading screen between encounters. ME 2 has load times so lengthy and frequent I started keeping a magazine near my computer. Even just moving to a different deck on the Normandy requires sitting though a load screen, and it really drags down the flow of the game.

Probing planets, the primary way to find resources for researching upgrades, is also dull and tedious. Fortunately you don’t actually need that many resources to research everything, and there are plenty of mineral rich planets scattered around. You can likely stockpile everything you need in about half an hour total and then forget about it for the rest of the game.

ME 2 wraps up with an epic, multi-stage mission that feels like a Stargate or Star Trek season finale. It’s possible to launch the finale with a bare minimum of characters recruited, but realistically you’ll want to spend as much time building up your team, ship, and arsenal as possible. Your choices during the final mission and level of preparedness beforehand determine who lives and dies. It’s probably safe to assume characters that perish in the final assault won’t reappear in ME 3. It’s even possible to finish the game with Sheppard dead for the second time, in which case presumably you won’t be able to import that save.

As per gameing bylaw #412 you do shoot zombies on occasion.

Finally ME 2 has a solidly implemented postgame. Assuming you and any of your team survive the final mission you’re allowed to go back and travel the galaxy cleaning up any content you missed. This includes any DLC, which is handy if you discover some that interests you after finish.

Speaking of which ME 2 has gobs of DLC. A decent amount of it is free if you’re willing to register on the appropriate website and have bought a new copy of the game. The game came out nearly three years ago though, and much of the DLC is still being sold individually and at full price. Games like Borderlands and Fallout 3 at least had the sense to roll everything into a “Game of the Year” edition to try to tempt new players.

If Bioware and EA had any common sense they’d have bundled all the DLC together for a single payment of $10 bucks by now or included it with the latest edition of the game. They apparently don’t, because everything is still being sold piecemeal for too much money and I honestly can’t muster the energy or burn the cash to deal with it. The free DLC was decent but nothing spectacular. I enjoyed the bouncy hovertank.

Illium. Like Coruscant, but with even more blue women.

Ultimately Mass Effect 2 is a good game but not quite a great game. Bioware was able to smooth out a lot of the rougher edges to the gameplay and write a host of interesting characters, but weren’t able to make as strong a core story or antagonist. Still, the third game promises a true Galactic scale war, much lamented ending an all. I might as well take my save file and finish the fight.

Reasons to Play: Strong writing and characters. Tightly balanced cover based combat. Interrupts make conversations more dynamic and let you feel like a badass.

Reasons to Pass: Too long and too frequent load times. Weaker core story and villain. DLC hasn’t yet been bundled yet. Save File import feature less exciting than it initially appeared.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Mass Effect Retrospective

2012-10-06T23:13:00.001-07:00

The Mass Effect series is a trilogy of sci-fi action RPG’s from Bioware. I played about halfway through the first game when it came out five years ago before getting distracted. If you’ve been following gaming news you’re probably aware there has been a bit of a backlash about the ending to the third game, which perversely has renewed my interest in the series.

As such I’m going to attempt a play through and review of the entire trilogy. My goal is less a “buy/pass” breakdown of the game and more a study of how the design has evolved from iteration to iteration. I’m also curious about the ability to carry my save from game to game.

The Mass Effect series has the almost unique property of allowing you to import your saves from one game to the next, in theory remembering major choices you’ve made and adjusting the game world accordingly. A few old school RPG’s like the Wizardry series would let you import an old party into a sequel, but nothing with such a dramatic effect on the game world and story. It’s a tremendously cool idea and I’m eager to see if Bioware was able to implement it successfully.

Captain on Deck

Mass Effect puts you in the boots of Commander Shepard, a capable soldier of variable appearance, gender, and background. Aside from the usual facial customization you can also chose between six different combat classes, each wielding a different mix of weapon, tech, and biotic skills. Weapon skills are self explanatory and Tech skills do things like strip enemy shields or overheat weapons. The Force-like biotic powers are especially fun to use, sending enemies and objects hurtling about or floating helplessly through the air.

Biotics reduce even giant alien bugs to physics props.

With character creation complete Shepard is launched into a tale of rogue secret agents, murderous machine intelligences, ancient alien legacies, and (of course) the fate of the galaxy. The opening mission does a solid job of establishing the setting, stakes, and primary antagonists. It’s a strong enough start but the pacing stumbles a bit after the gunfire dies down and you’re sent to the seat of galactic government, the enormous Citadel space station.

The Citadel is mostly elevators and un-interesting side quests. Fortunately these are also largely inconsequential can be safely ignored. If you can put up with an hour or two of running back and forth, elevator riding, and petty politicking you’re ultimately handed your own ship and sent back out into the wider galaxy. In classic Bioware style you’re given a list of major plot missions and the freedom to tackle them in any order.

Strange New Worlds

It’s a big galaxy out there, with plenty of unexplored worlds. Almost every system has a planet you can land on and explore, both on foot and in a powerful APC called the Mako. The Mako is incredibly durable but handles like nothing you would expect from an armored vehicle, bouncing around like a giant chunk of Styrofoam and grinding up almost 90 degree inclines. It’s more goofy than annoying most of the time but feels very arcade like compared to the rest of the game.

The Spice must flow...

Unfortunately most planets outside of the core story missions aren’t worth the trip. Mass Effect’s unexplored worlds are barren, featureless wastelands that feel like they were cranked out in five minutes with a random terrain generator. Only the Mako’s own improbable physics model makes it possible to clamber up and down the obnoxiously hard to navigate valleys and mountains. There’s little to do but prospect the occasional mineral node for a marginal reward and try not to get eaten by the rare giant sandworm, which have the charming habit of randomly emerging directly underneath your tank for an unavoidable one-hit kill. Many of the alien sky-scapes are quite pretty though.

You can also shoot through the same few rooms over and over again. I’m not kidding. Each unexplored world’s “dungeon”, whether a pirate base, rogue genetics lab, or lost colony, has the exact same layout. I understand development resources for peripheral content are limited, but this level of blatant recycling is ridiculous.

Be prepared to see this room a lot if you do any side quests.

Set to Kill

Combat is a significant part of Mass Effect, and unfortunately this is not the very best third person shooting you’ve ever seen. The cover system gets the job done but could be tighter. Weapons, especially sniper rifles, are aggravatingly inaccurate until you’ve made significant upgrades to your skills and equipment. You can pause at any point to shuffle equipment, queue up powers, and give commands to your teammates, which keeps things from getting too out of hand.

Enemies with rocket launchers or special tech or biotic powers can be dangerous but don’t coordinate with each other. In outdoor areas they’re sniper bait, if you don’t simply vaporize them with the Mako’s cannon. Indoors foes are a bit better about using cover but still tend to trickle towards you a few at a time, letting your squad pick them apart piecemeal. Victory yields the expected XP, levels, and points applicable towards improving Shepard’s skills.

This guy picked a bad day not to call in sick.

The character development system isn’t the most complex but still allows a degree of flexibility and specialization. Improving an active skill usually also provides a passive bonus, and there are never quite enough points to get everything you want. Squad mates level up at the same time Shepard does, so you never need worry about characters falling behind.

Making leveling systems work in a game this non-linear is tricky, and Mass Effect attempts to remain challenging by having everything scale along with you. XP and money rewards, equipment drops, and enemy strength all grow at the same rate you do. This robs leveling up of some of its impact but Mass Effect’s free-roaming structure makes it a necessary evil. It also keeps looting interesting by ensuring you’re constantly finding slight upgrades, and you can conveniently recycle your old junk into “Omni-gel”, a magic paste that picks locks, repairs the Mako, and allow you to skip certain puzzles.

Engine Trouble

A few of the set pieces look good, but many of Mass Effect’s environments are sparse and dull. The frame rate was also surprisingly jerky at times for a five year old game. Loading sequences disguised as painfully slow elevators are common.

For an armored vehicle the Mako can catch some serious air.

Moving from technology to design one of the minor but ubiquitous problems Mass Effect suffers from is a general lack of player feedback. It can be hard to tell when you’re taking hits in combat, especially from awkwardly animated melee enemies. The galactic map doesn’t tell you where you’ve already been, and where side quest you’ve accepted can be found. Character and power information is terse and vague. If an item gives me a bonus of fifteen to power cooldowns, what exactly does that mean? Fifteen seconds less? Fifteen percent? Does it stack with similar effects? It’s a mystery.

Finally the equipment interface is clunky. Equipping your team is a real chore, one that would have been largely removed with a drag-and-drop paper doll interface. It’s still a significant improvement from the original console interface but could have been better implemented. Other PC specific upgrades, like hotkeys for player and squad-mate powers, are more effective.

Away Team

Over the course of the game Shepard assembles a small group of human and alien support characters. Two of them always accompany you in combat and they can be chatted up between missions for tidbits about the Mass Effect universe. Voice acting is well above par and everyone has a distinct personality and back-story, though as often as not it boils down to complaints about their relationship with their parents.

Krogan, like Wrex on the left here, are fiendishly tough to kill.

Your squad mates can generally hold their own in combat. There’s an interface to micromanage them, but I found it more trouble that it was worth and just let them do whatever they wanted. They’re at their best when allowed to use their special powers freely.

I particularly enjoyed how biotic characters would yank enemies out of cover and leave them flailing helplessly in midair. There’s no damage from friendly fire, which is good because squad marksmanship is a bit less impressive. I had my aim thrown off regularly by allies shooting me in the back of the head.

As you’ve likely gathered by now Mass Effect’s gameplay, especially its combat, is a bit uneven. Never outright broken or bad, but some elements (like biotics) work a lot better than others (enemy AI, the Mako, etc.) The greatest strength of the game comes from offering interesting, difficult choices without a clear cut answer and letting you resolve them as you see fit.

Prime Directive

Rather than the standard good/evil dichotomy Shepard’s actions are broken down a bit differently. Talking down a frightened civilian waving a gun at you is a Paragon action. Punching the man unconscious or shooting him in the hand to disarm him is a Renegade response. The Paragon and Renegade bars fill up independent of one another, unlocking new and generally beneficial dialog options as they do.

Lets be honest. As a starship captain hitting on blue alien women is practically Shepard's job.

It’s a well handled system. Shepard never breaks character to act cartoonish evil or lawful stupid. Shepard is a military agent on a save-the-galaxy mission, not a random adventurer or mercenary, but how hard-ass, violent, or by-the-book Shepard acts is up to you. You’re also free to approach each new situation on a case by case basis. Unlike Bioware’s Old Republic games there is no penalty for acting against your dominant “alignment”.

The choices you’re called upon to make over the course of Mass Effect have real consequences, including what major characters live or die. Supposedly many of these consequences will carry over and affect the later games in the trilogy. Having only finished the first game I can’t yet judge how effective this is, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

The dialog is snappy and the writing engaging, with bits of slightly self-aware humor when appropriate. It holds to the level of quality we’ve come to expect from Bioware. Finally there are a number of genuinely epic and memorable moments, especially towards the last few hours.

Bouncing off into the sunset.

In spite of some general gameplay and technical clunkyness Mass Effect is still able to get by and then some on the strength of its writing, its characters, and the vivid sci-fi universe it creates. The sequels supposedly tighten up many of the gameplay elements I’ve complained about, and I’m deeply interested in seeing if Bioware is able to make my decisions feel meaningful when I import my save into ME 2. I’ll let you know as soon as I finish.

Reasons to play: Galaxy spanning adventure. Biotic powers are a hoot. Game asks you do make difficult and interesting decisions.

Reasons to pass: Dull, repetitive side quests. Moderately awkward combat. General lack of feedback. Loading elevators everywhere.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Legend of Grimrock Review

2012-08-13T19:09:00.006-07:00

Computer RPG’s have changed dramatically since they first emerged in the eighties. The first entries in signature series like Wizardry, and Dungeon Master were shaped as much by technical limitations as by design choices. These games were classics in their own time and are fondly remembered today, but unfortunately they have not aged particularly well. For better or worse game design and player expectations have changed dramatically, and the hardware limits that shaped the industry at its birth have long been exceeded. The brutal difficulty and obtuse design decisions of early RPG’s make them inaccessible to most modern audiences.

Wayback Machine

Legend of Grimrock is the first game released by Finnish indie studio Almost Human. Grimrock successfully embraces both the style and spirit of those earliest RPG’s while being highly playable. The game is a triumph of accessibility, retaining what made old school dungeon crawlers fun while presenting an interface and difficulty curve in line with the best of modern gaming conventions.

Grimrock takes place entirely within the confines of the cloud piercing titular Mt. Grimrock. Periodically small groups of prisoners are given a royal pardon, taken to the top by airship, and tossed down a pit into the monster infested, trap riddled labyrinth below. None are ever seen again, and your little band is next.

Dungeon Crawling Fools

Character creation is quick, painless, and more or less intuitive. You create a party of four from a handful of options like burly minotaurs, sneaky lizard men, and the classic triumvirate of fighter/mage/thief. After a brief and beautifully illustrated intro sequence your party is dumped into the upper levels of the mountain with nothing to lose but their lives and nowhere to go but down.

It's not an RPG without animated skeletons in it somewhere.

The mountain’s dungeons are built along a grid pattern a la Dungeon Master and other similar classics. You can even turn off the handy automap and chart the levels yourself with graph paper, if you’re so inclined. Movement is by discrete squares, one square at a time. Your understandably anxious party sticks together in a two by two formation that occupies a single square, which you control from a slightly abstract first person perspective. The characters in front can attack with short range melee weapons while those in the rear are free to sling spells and arrows from relative safety.

The interface is intuitive and almost entirely mouse driven. Everything happens in real time, including combat. When some horrible beastie comes scuttling out of the dark you right click on your characters equipped weapons to attack while maneuvering the entire party around with the keyboard. You can toss and place any object you can pick up. Sadly there are no landmines, but any object can be flung at foes and heavier ones will do damage.

Short Rations

Grimrock is pleasingly challenging but never unfair. It will never, for example, trap you in a room full of poison gas with no way out because you missed a hidden switch two levels ago. Food, light, and carrying capacity are all limited and must be carefully considered and constantly managed. Given that you’re trapped deep in the bowels of a hellish murder-mountain there are no shops, towns, or friendly NPC’s to be found so scavenging is a must. If you're willing search your environment and use your brain you can find what you need and more.

Voices in your dreams guide you ever downward.

Early on your band of prisoners must rely on rocks and fists just to defend themselves. The rusting swords and rotting leather armor you’d throw away in other games is desperately needed survival gear inside Grimrock. Most enemies only drop chunks of edible monster flesh if they leave behind anything useful at all. You’ll be glad when you can finally equip everyone with a pair of raggedy pants, much less magic swords and plate mail.

The game’s narrative is spare but effective. There are no info-dumps or exposition laden cutscenes. Notes left by previous explorers and a mysterious voice that visits you in dreams of grinding gears draw you deeper and deeper into the mountain.

Sound design is likewise lean but well designed. Aside from the main menu there is very little music. The ambient background sounds of the dungeon are delightfully spooky, punctuated by what sound like distant howls, faint whispering, and the hum of hidden machinery. You can usually hear monsters moving around long before you run into them, and the click of panels or grinding sound of a wall sliding back heralds the discovery of a new secret or a dangerous ambush.

Crab Battle Shuffle

Combat is a savage but oddly formal dance. Like your own party monsters are restricted to grid-based movement and cannot move or attack diagonally. Mobility is essential. Ranged attacks can and should be dodged simply by side-stepping out of the way. Armor and defensive skills and spells help, but Grimrock is built around the expectation that the player will be moving the party around to minimize the number of hits they take. Just standing toe to toe with the tougher monsters and bashing away will get everyone killed in a hurry.

Ice spells freeze enemies like this Cave Crab solid.

Sometimes monsters are polite enough to file down a narrow corridor into the blades of your armored front rank warriors but you can’t depend on it. Bigger fights are frantic brawls that have you dodging, spinning, and hacking away, desperately trying to land hits and dodge attacks while not getting flanked or surrounded. It’s critical to avoid exposing your more vulnerable rear support characters to monster teeth and claws.

All characters require a short rest after attacking, varying by weapon speed and skills. This creates a natural rhythm of darting in to make attacks and leaping away to avoid retaliation. If you need to swap weapons, chug a healing potion, or change ammo types you’ll do it while the monsters are still gnawing away at you. Anyone clamoring for hotkeys or a turn-based combat mode is missing the point. The challenge of Grimrock’s combat comes from juggling attacks, movement, spell casting, and inventory management all at once, all in real time.

Spell casting requires punching in a specific combination of runes on a simple 3x3 grid. It’s a workable system and it’s fairly intuitive to figure out the combination of new spells as you unlock them. Some sort of spell book that recorded the combinations you’ve already discovered wouldn’t have gone amiss, but you can always note them down by hand and any one mage isn’t going to unlock more than a handful spells over the course of the game.

Something's always scuttling out of the dark to turn you inside-out.

Few combat spells require more than two runes but casting still requires more mouse clicks and attention than just swinging a weapon. The correct combination must be punched in every time single time you want to cast a spell. The mechanics mean it’s difficult to play effectively with more than one mage in your party. Spells are potentially very powerful though, so this isn’t unreasonable from a balance standpoint.

Devices in the Dark

Puzzles are the finely crafted core of the game’s challenge. The developers continually come up with interesting ways to use and combine the basic elements at their disposal. Buttons, switches, pressure pads, and teleporters are all put to good use. The puzzles are less in the abstract vein of Myst and more along the lines of the tactile challenges of Portal. Disarming a trap or unlocking a door isn’t a matter of having a thief with the right skills. You, the human player, need to find that hidden button or throw those switches into the right combination.

Grimrock does a good job of slowly teaching you the rules that it operates by and sticking to them over the course of the game. A combination of careful exploration, observation, and logic usually get you through, and it’s immensely rewarding when everything finally “clicks” and the way forward slides open. I’d encourage you to resist the temptation to use a walk-through, although I’m forced to admit I got stuck once or twice and needed a hint.

Even with it's limited tile set Grimrock manages a desolate and spooky atmosphere.

There are also dozens of optional secret areas hidden throughout the mountain, full of valuable food, weapons, and other supplies. Few of them are ever accessed the same way twice. You’ll need a sharp eye and a keen mind to find them all, plus the patience to check hundreds of wall segments for hidden buttons.

Last Torch

Grimrock’s gameplay elements are deliberate and mostly carefully considered, but there are a few missteps. Most of these are oddities related to character development. For example in Grimrock ranged attacks, be they arrows, spells, or flung rocks, always hit whatever is in front of the party. You can’t miss with a bow unless the monster steps out of the way. Strength boosts both melee and ranged damage while Dexterity, the traditional ranged attacker attribute, affects only melee accuracy and defense.

Each class only has a few skills, but points to improve them must be spent with care.

Why is it then that dumping points into the archery skill improves Dexterity, a stat that archers counter intuitively have almost no use for? It feels like someone missed a memo somewhere. Of course Grimrock isn’t the kind of game that requires perfectly optimized characters to survive. Victory in combat is at least as dependent on the player’s manual skill and what weapons and supplies they’ve wrested from the dungeon.

I feel like a bit of a jerk for even raising this point, but Grimrock is also a strictly linear game without a lot of replay value. This is less a flaw and more the game’s own meticulously put together and never randomized nature. It’s important to understand that Grimrock is not a “Roguelike”, and will always be laid out the same each time. Once you’ve solved the dungeons cleverly constructed puzzles, survived its traps, and uncovered its secrets once they’re unlikely to be as absorbing a second time around.

This accusation feels unfair, not the least because Grimrock offers at least a strong 10-15 hours of high quality gameplay at a more than reasonable indie game price. It’s unlikely that the average player will find all the secrets and goodies in a single play-through and there are plenty of valid party builds to try. There’s also a neat unlockable easter egg mode that can make for an interesting and challenging replay.

Release the Kraken!

Finally the developers are hard at work on a very cool looking level editor which they plan to release for free. This is an excellent decision and will do wonders for the game’s longevity and community. The engine is rock solid and perfectly suited for its intended purpose of dungeon crawling. I’m already looking forward to seeing what sort of deathtraps the fan community is able to create.

Reasons to play: Smoothly and enjoyably meshes old school design with modern hardware and sensibilities. Clever, satisfying puzzles. Challenging but absolutely fair.

Reasons to pass: A few odd systemic choices for character attributes and skills. Very linear, with low replayability.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Loadout Interview

2012-08-01T16:44:00.063-07:00

Mark Nau is the creative director at Edge of Reality, a venerable and largely console focused studio with a release history going back to the Nintendo 64. Mark himself has worked on everything from Spiderman games and the Call of Duty franchise to quirkier fair like the 1998 Hack-And-Slasher Die by the Sword. Mark has graciously agreed to talk with us for a bit about their upcoming fast-faced, highly customizable, free-to-play shooter Loadout.

True machismo needs no body armor

Tell us a little bit about Loadout. From the description it sounds like the highly customizable weapons are the stars of game.

Absolutely. That’s the centerpiece right there. Players can assemble all these different crazy weapon pieces together to make any weapon they want. And I’m not talking about just little number tweaks, either. I’m talking about “Hey I just made a sniper rifle that can shoot cluster-fire proximity mines!”

Many of Edge of Reality’s previous projects have been franchise based, with a single player emphasis. What made you guys decide to tackle a free-to-play shooter?

We’ve got an opportunity now to make a game we love. This game from start to finish was what we wanted to make. The team is making the game the way they want it to be made, because this is our baby. We’re making a kick-ass, high-action, multiplayer shooter with this outrageous weapon customization. And we’re doing it on our own.

Free-to-play is a great way an independent studio like us can fund an awesome game like Loadout and get it directly to the players.

You can only model so many AK-47s.

What has most surprised you about developing a game like Loadout? For example were there any gameplay or design issues that came as a complete surprise?

When we were floating the idea of allowing players to make their own weapons from parts, with like a ka-zillion possible crazy combinations. The designers were all “This is awesome and fantastic and totally horrifying, all at the same time.” We thought we might have to back off, or severely limit the scope of creativity. But no. It’s full-on weapon invention. I’m amazed the team pulled it off, but it’s in there.

As Creative Director, what sort input do you get on game development? Do you wrangle other developers, do design work yourself, or some combination thereof?

I’m the head of the design department at Edge. My style is to find out places that obstacles exist and try to kick them down so the team can do its work. All the stuff in Loadout, that’s 100% the people on the team deciding how to make a great game.


Fiery death is the best death.

Monetization of free-to-play games is a tricky and sometimes controversial issue. Can you share anything about how you plan to make Loadout fun and accessible when played for free while still tempting players to drop actual cash?

We’ve got a list of principles for monetization for Loadout. #1 is “The free player has an awesome time, feels like we’re treating him fairly, and tells all his friends that Loadout is the game to be playing.” Other games have shown that if you make a great game and people love it, they will be willing to pay money for cool extras, to show support, and to fine-tune their equipment. You don’t need a pay-to-win sledgehammer to get people to chip in.

Just from watching the videos many of the weapon types look exotic and quite creative. I saw electric beams, remote control missiles and scuttling explosive payloads, to name a few. Just for fun, do you have a favorite weapon component or combination?

I sure do! We even make “What’s your Loadout” video clips and post them on our YouTube channel. I just got done making a gun I call “Blue Balls,” because it shoots a huge scatter of bouncing blue balls that careen all around the level. It’s terrible for precise shooting or wide-open spaces, but total magic for close-quarters spray-and-pray.

Thank you very much for your time. Best of luck with Loadout and your future projects!

You can check http://www.loadout.com/ for future update and potential Beta access.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Skyrim Review

2012-07-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. It's been awhile since my last post, and I apologize for my prolonged absence. I've been busy with classes and other responsibilities. To make up for it here's an epic length review of a massive game.

Skyrim is the latest installment in the “Elder Scrolls” series, a long running collection of single player RPGs nearing the end of its second decade. Series signatures include massive, content packed worlds, character progression that breaks from the usual XP/Level system, and (unfortunately) loads of bugs. On a more positive note Elder Scrolls games are also renowned for their high level of fun, immersion, and mod-ability.

The Orc with no name

Like all Elder Scrolls games Skyrim starts with your anonymous character imprisoned and, this time around, moments from execution. As this would make for an extremely short game it’s no surprise that a massive dragon interrupts the headsman and allows you to make a break for freedom. Dragons may be ubiquitous in many RPG settings, but in Skyrim they’ve been mercifully gone for a great many lifetimes. One showing up from out of the blue is unexpected, to say the least.

Skyrim's wilds range from rolling tundra to icy wastes.

The introductory sequence also integrates character creation, which has been vastly simplified from earlier Elder Scrolls games. There are no stat points to assign and no fussing with class or skill packages. You chose your name, appearance, and race and you’re ready to play.

Race is the only choice at character creation with real impact on gameplay. You can choose from the usual spread of human and elf subtypes, along with a few more exotic options like lizard and cat people. Your choice gives you some largely inconsequential skill bonuses and a unique ability or two.

While a few racial abilities are more useful than others any race can ultimately thrive at any play style. If you really want to break type and play a Nord (Viking) thief or Khajiit (cat person) mage it’s entirely possible to do so and thrive at it. Since you’ll be staring at your character for a great many hours to come there’s nothing wrong with simply choosing a character that looks as cool as possible and plunging boldly ahead.

Brave New World

After dodging dragon fire and finishing a brief tutorial dungeon Skyrim finally kicks you out into a beautiful high-mountain meadow, hands you a lead for the main quest, and tells you to go do whatever you please. It’s an intoxicating moment, and usually the time you notice that great gods of graphics cards this game is pretty. The world has a vast, open, semi-realistic design that’s a huge step up from the series of corridors disguised as canyons that so many games pass off as outdoors. If you can see a place on the horizon you can likely get there, although you may need to get creative with the jump key to get up some of the geometry.

To give you a sense of the game I’ll briefly describe my opening experiences:

So there I was, a wanted criminal stranded alone in a harsh land. My skills and weapons were meager and my supplies sparse. A civil war was brewing between the native Stormcloaks and Skyrim’s longtime Imperial occupiers that threatened to tear the province apart. Supposedly extinct draconic death-machines could strike from the sky at any moment. Danger lurked around every corner and my chances of survival seemed slim.

Northern Lights

I elected to do the only logical thing and chase butterflies in the sunlight. I was happy to find I could both loot and eat them, and spent some time checking the meadows flora and fauna to see if they were poisonous enough to kill me. A wolf pack that wandered by proved aggressive but flammable.

I eventually stumbled across a hunter with a small camp. I tried to sell him my fine selection of charred wolf pelts and random insects and plants, but he kept taking them from my inventory without actually paying me for them. (This turned out to be a game bug, not robbery.) Sadly he then mysteriously burst into flames while I heroically rescued his few valuables. Still in search of a working merchant I decided to swim a rushing mountain river down to the plains below, grabbing and eating live salmon from the waters and fending off alpine crab attacks the entire way.

At this point I realized several hours had passed, I’d already encountered a couple of bugs, and I’d made no notable progress on the main quest or any other. I was also having a tremendous amount of fun. Skyrim is a game of constant distraction. Ending the draconic menace can wait, and wait it will. You can take as much time as you like to explore, make giant piles of dead guards, experiment with alchemy, and sneak into people’s houses while they’re sleeping and replace all their earthly possessions with cheese wheels.

The sheer size and scope of the world can be a little intimidating, but it has a node based fast travel system like Fallout 3’s. Any place you’ve been before you can easily return to, and handy carriages will take you to any major city for a modest fee. One of Skyrim’s many pleasures is simply picking a random direction and hiking off into the wilds to see what you can find. (Usually angry bears.) The ability to put down your own map notes and waypoints would have been nice, but the system works well enough.

Nordal Kombat

While a stealthy character is extremely viable and a high speech skill can save you a certain number of fights eventually you’re going to want and need to murder someone. When that time comes you’ll quickly discover that the beating heart of Skyrim’s combat engine is two fisted. You can hold a weapon, shield, or spell in either hand and make use of both with the left and right mouse buttons. It’s a great system, and quickly becomes second nature.

Bows and big weapons obviously take two hands to use, but there’s a lot of fun to be found trying unconventional combinations. I found a shield and an offensive spell surprisingly viable. The bold can always simply wade in with a sword or fireball in either hand.

Summoned creatures help even the odds nicely.

Health, mana, and stamina all regenerate naturally, slowly in combat and rapidly when nobody’s trying to kill you. As a mage many early fights boiled down to me emptying my mana at an enemy and then running away until it recharged. Natural regeneration won’t save you from repeated hammer blows to the face, but you rarely need to micromanage your basic resources between fights. If you can survive an encounter you’ll be back at 100% by the time the next one rolls around.

If you are getting savagely beaten you can always pause the game and chug as much healing potions and food as you want. I like to imagine this translates to your character holding up one hand for a time out while stuffing whole cabbages into their mouth with the other. This can have some weird effects on combat pacing and difficulty. Tough fights take on a stutter-stop feel as you constantly pause the action to root through your inventory and replenish yourself. So long as you have a decent stock of consumables and the enemy can’t kill you with a single hit you rarely need worry about death.

Dragon Slayer

Dragons are usually endgame enemies, but in Skyrim you’re dealing with them from Day One, 8:00 AM. These beautifully animated battles are epic in scope and easily one of the highlights of the game. Nearby guards and even bandits and monsters tend to drop whatever they’re doing and join in. It’s not unusual to come across an attack already in progress, burning corpses and all. A tremendous amount of effort was clearly put into making sure you feel like you’re trying to bring down something appropriately big, mobile, and dangerous.

Now this is what RPGs are all about.

Dragons fully exploit their ability to fly, and grounding one down requires judicious use of arrows or spells. Their bat-like body structure makes them slightly more awkward on the ground, but they can still grab humanoids in their jaws and toss them around like ragdolls. It’s hilarious when they’re gobbling down guards and terrifying when you’re the one between their jaws.

Designing fights against giant creatures that don’t just feel like you’re stabbing at their toes has always been tricky. Skyrim succeeds brilliantly. When the epic theme music kicks in and you hear that distinctive roar you’ve got to fight.

Battle Cries

As the plot quickly reveals your character is the “Dhovakin”, the only one able to slay a dragon permanently and absorb its soul. Dragon souls are then spent to unlock the “Dragon Shouts” you find carved on ancient rune walls scattered across the world. Dragon Shouts are discrete from normal magic and useable by any character. They represent a goodie bag of fun and powerful abilities that nicely reward both dungeon crawling to learn new Shouts and slaughtering dragons to unlock them.

The now meme-worthy “Fus-Ro-Dah” (Force-Balance-Push) Shout hurls people bodily through the air, and need only be combined with a high place for instant hilarity. Other Shouts encase enemies in ice, send them fleeing in fear, or do otherwise unique things like clearing the sky of rain and snow.

You equip and use Shouts independent of your normal weapons and spells (because you’re shouting them, not holding or casting them with your hands, see?) and all Shouts share a collective cool down, so knowing which Shout to ready and when to hurl it is an important tactical consideration.

You can recruit a host of different followers, but only one at a time. Backup in combat is always handy but they seem to have trouble spotting traps and make sneaking difficult. Once killed they can’t be resurrected (save as a zombie, if you’ve got the appropriate spells) so I elected to leave them at home most of the time and use expendable summoned demons for my dirty work.

There's no shortage of dirty work that needs doing. Skyrim is crammed with content. The main quest line is actually one of the weaker parts of the game, but if you run through it at a dead sprint you’re doing Elder Scrolls wrong. Indeed I challenge anyone to focus on any one thing for any length of time in this game.

Aside from the main quest there’s an entirely optional Civil War to sort out, four major guilds with their own extensive quest lines, and hundreds upon hundreds of side quests. Many are procedurally generated and basically just exist to point you to some dungeon or another, but you really can’t expect to ever complain about running out of things to do.

Underground barrows teem with treasure, the undead, and spooky ambiance.

The land is sprinkled with scores of caves, forts, ruins, magic outhouses, and so on. You’re constantly tripping over them as you wander through the countryside, tempting you to explore as you pass. Each of these scenic lairs is invariably infested with bandits, vampires, C.H.U.D’s, trolls, evil mages, giant spiders, undead Vikings, and other undesirables. Each offers a nicely self contained 20-40 minutes of adventure, combat, and worry free pillaging, with the occasional light puzzle solving.

There’s obviously a lot of art and asset re-use, but almost every dungeon manages to have a unique layout and most have interesting story or game play elements. While generally linear each dungeon also dumps you back out near the entrance after you plunder the cache of loot at the end. This is not realistic, but it is good game design.

Learning by doing (bad things to people)

Like previous Elder Scrolls games Skyrim dispenses with experience points and has you improve by doing. Shoot a bunch of guys with bows and you’ll get better with bows. Cast a bunch of healing spells and get better at healing magic. Pick a bunch of pockets and get better at putting your hands down the pants of strange Orcs. With no class or statistical restrictions every character has access to every skill, so if you want to be a master magician who also picks locks or wears heavy armor go for it.

If you play normally the system makes character growth feel organic, but it does lend itself to a certain amount of abuse and blatant grinding. The most efficient rout to ultimate power is not necessarily plundering ancient crypts or battling fearsome foes, but standing in a muddy streambed letting a large crab pinch your toes, healing yourself with one hand and blocking its attacks with the other. Why? Because you’re leveling your armor, block, and healing skills, that’s why.

A few fan favorite characters return, like the ever lovable Lord of Madness.

Any character can max out any skill, although some skills (especially primary combat skills, which require live enemies) are more difficult to improve than others. True character customization and growth comes from sinking your Perk points (earned at a rate of one per level) into the skill’s unique Perk tree. Perks are game changers that open up new abilities and define your play style, like zoom and slow-mo with a bow, a rushing shield bash, or improved damage with fire spells.

The absence of experience points also means that most quests simply award gold and/or loot. If you’re an obsessive looter (like me) then gold is a non-issue for most of the game, and this all makes quests a bit less rewarding. There aren’t a lot of cash sinks in Skyrim, partially because the game’s streamlined out some of the RPG busywork.

Weapons and armor require no care or maintenance, and health and mana all recover quickly on their own. Aside from more skill training and spells I didn’t find much worth buying that wasn’t already lying around free to take. Players less likely to end up on A&E’s Hoarder’s might find quest rewards more useful.

Running to stand still

One quirk of the leveling system is that as you level up, many parts of the world scale up in difficulty along with you. It’s not nearly as jarring as in earlier games but it is noticeable. Plain old vanilla Bandits start to be accompanied by, say, Bandit Facebreakers, and eventually Bandit Murderkings. Weaker enemies never disappear entirely so you do get a sense of progression, but most of the major enemy types come in several distinct tiers. Higher end foes start to sport truly ridiculous health pools.

The appearance of tougher enemies is based on your overall level, not your combat abilities. It’s important to keep this in mind, because it means that while you’re honing your lock-picking and practicing your alchemy your enemies are getting better at beating you to a pulp. If you haven’t been keeping up your combat skills tight dungeon corridors and linear design can still turn these areas into grueling slugfests. Characters will likely want to focus on at least one primary combat skill to ensure survival. Remember, the Draugr are training.

Any character can pick up and use any item, so quest rewards and loot scale based on your level as well. You can’t simply memorize the location of the Kill-everybody sword and run there thirty minutes after starting a new game, which was entirely possible in earlier games. More powerful equipment won’t even start to appear until you’ve reached a sufficient level.

Giants are tough. Even this dragon should think twice before pressing his attack.

All this can make for an unwieldy difficulty curve. I was able to steamroll most early encounters, but by the midgame I was spending a lot of time playing keep-away from foes who took several minutes to kill and could drop me in one or two hits. In a classic Elder Scrolls moment I dug into the pile of raw materials I had stashed, churned out a few hundred iron daggers, and then burned up several dozen of the cheapest soul gems to enchant each of them.

The point of all this was to max out my blacksmithing and enchanting skills, and then swap my flimsy mage robes for a set of custom crafted magic armor so powerful I never replaced it for the rest of the 40+ hours I spent in Skyrim. If I had wanted to be truly abusive I could have made entire schools of magic free to cast, made weapons that paralyzed enemies while healing me, and other brokenly powerful stuff. For all I’ve harped on the difficulty curve it’s possible to use the crafting skills to break the game over your knee. It could be argued that this is what the Elder Scrolls series has always been about.

Trouble in Valhalla

Skyrim is an amazing and absorbing game, but it does have some considerable design flaws. Chief amongst these is that inventory management is pure hell. The default UI is clearly designed to accommodate console users and is agonizing for anyone using a mouse and keyboard. Everything you own is dumped into a long alphabetized list of names with limited filtering. You’re forced to scroll through the whole thing, starting at letter A, every time you want to change gear, use a potion, ready a spell, or otherwise get any goddamn thing done.

There are limited hotkeys, but they were so poorly explained I had to check YouTube to figure out how to use them and they don’t really work with dual wielding or casting. After the hundredth time pausing the game to scroll through dozens of names I would have cheerfully killed for a grid and mouse based inventory.

Characters are also fairly restricted in the amount of weight they can haul around, especially in the early game. As a compulsive looter and scavenger I had to spend a disproportionate amount of time grappling with the horrible inventory interface to sort, stow, and toss junk. Even I was forced to admit I probably didn’t need to be carrying that many brooms and potatoes and start paying attention to the value/weight ratio of stuff. To exacerbate the problem most merchants only keep a limited amount of gold on hand. Liquidating your loot can require a tour of the entire province.

Skyrim, very much in character for the Elder Scrolls series, is also a buggy game. Playing months and a good number of major patches after release I was still encountering broken quests, weird NPC behavior, and in one case a mob of un-killable guys with the same name all standing waist deep in the ground. There’s nothing game-breaking and performance was generally stable, but be prepared for a constant stream of oddities, minor annoyances, and general weirdness.

World without End

Once you acclimatize to this Skyrim is a world that’s packed with flavor and life. NPC’s follow regular schedules and chat with one another. The wilds are full of wandering ambient life and events already in progress when you ride by. Dozens of surprisingly well written in-game books flesh out the world and provide optional back-story. Most importantly people heckle you if you’re running around naked, which is always nice touch.

It’s not quite total freedom. A lot of the plot critical NPCs can’t actually be killed before their time. Your ability to enforce permanent change on the world is limited. You can’t, for example, clear a fort of bandits and then hire soldiers and workers to repair it into your personal fortress. Even completing the civil war just changes the uniforms of the guards in half the towns.

When you’re tired of being a roving heavily armed murder-hobo you can settle down, buy a house, and even get married. None of this is crucial, but it’s a great touch and provides some worthwhile benefits. As a compulsive hoarder my home quickly became crammed with junk which my spouse dutifully tolerated, kicking her way through the piles of discarded shields, books, and dragon bones to get around. Amusingly any marriageable NPC can be convinced to fall for you regardless of gender. Make sure you’re ready to spend the rest of your life with that particular elf though, because Skyrim doesn’t allow divorce or re-marriage.

Sometimes you just need to stop and admire the view.

Finally, do yourself a favor and play this game on a PC. If you don’t own a machine that can run it, wait till you do. Why? Mods.

Like Morrowind and Oblivion before it Skyrim hosts a huge and thriving mod community. A few of my favorite include Sky UI, which totally revamps the inventory into something actually useable, a giant compilation of fan made bug fixes, and a mod that lets you spend Dragon Souls as an alternative to perk points. While there are certainly a lot of junk and borderline creepy mods out there the community is generally good about up-voting the coolest and most useful ones, and Steam makes installing them a snap. Collectively they afford Skyrim a degree of flexibility, utility, and constant free new content rarely seen.

Ultimately I’ve sunk far, far too many hours into Skyrim not to honestly recommend it. It’s the kind of game you can play for months, if not years, and never truly finish. Anyone who enjoys RPGs and games in general should strongly consider getting it, if they haven’t already.

Reasons to play: Massive, beautiful, expansive world. Tons of content. Dragon battles. Shout people over cliffs.

Reasons to pass: Awful inventory UI. Loads of minor bugs and general weirdness. Character progression system can create awkward difficulty curve.

Note: I played on the fourth most challenging out of five difficulty levels. The difficulty curve issues I’ve noted are likely much less notable at lower levels.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Bulletstorm Review

2012-05-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

Bulletstorm is a high action FPS from Polish based developer “People Can Fly”, perhaps best known for its old school shooter Painkiller and the work they did on the PC version of Gears of War. Bulletstorm takes more after the Painkiller school of gameplay than Microsoft’s cover based shooter, bringing a frantic energy to the increasingly stale conventions of the modern linear, cinematic shooter. The game is a lively, gore-spattered, obscenity riddled thrill ride with tremendously satisfying combat mechanics and a breakneck pace that rarely lets up.

Made for TV

Bulletstorm’s story is straight from a Sci-Fi channel movie, but the strength is in the telling rather than what’s being told. You play as Grayson Hunt, member of a futuristic and morally suspect special-ops team called Dead Echo. The game doesn’t just tell you these things however. It doesn’t even show you. It has you do.

When sent to kill a man who turns out to be an innocent reporter documenting Dead Echo atrocities the game doesn’t just show via passive cut-scene. The game has you, the player, walking down the side of a skyscraper in gravity boots and pulling the trigger yourself. Flashing forward 10 years to Grayson as a drunken pirate the game doesn’t just tell you that Grayson is now a hunted man, but has you physically booting a bounty hunter into the airlock and flushing the luckless lowlife out into space.

This game has really pretty backdrops.

When Grayson spots the much more powerful ship of his former commander, the deliciously foul mouthed and repugnant general Sarrano, you don’t just watch a cinematic space battle. You get an up close view manning the turrets as Grayson’s suicidal attack run cripples both ships and sends them crashing to the desolate planet below.

The strength of games as a medium has always been their level of immersion and interactivity. This goes double for FPS games, which can achieve a level of direct intimacy that’s hard to beat. Like the Half-Life series before it Bulletstorm recognizes this and capitalizes on it to plunge you neck deep into the action. After all, why just show the player something when you can let them do it themselves?

I mean flat-out gorgeous.

The planet Grayson finds himself stranded on proves to have once been a holiday resort for the rich and powerful. Today it’s a hellish but still beautiful place crawling with murderous gangs, feral mutants, and giant carnivorous plants battling one another through the gaudy ruins. Fortunately combat is one of Bulletstorm’s greatest strengths.

Whipping it good

This is the kind of game where simply shooting your enemies to death in center mass is not only ineffective but creatively bankrupt. Grayson, while not able to leap or climb outside of scripted sequences, is fast, resilient, and highly mobile. Success in combat comes from capitalizing on your abilities and weapons to move yourself out of harm’s way while flinging your enemies into it.

Grayson’s a formidable man without even needing to pull a trigger, possessing a powerful melee kick that sends enemies hurtling backwards and a ridiculously fun ground-eating slide maneuver. Early on you also gain access to a sort of “energy whip” that can grab people and objects and yank them through the air towards you. Anyone hit by whip, boot, or slide becomes trapped in slow motion and surrounded by a distinctive blue glow for several seconds, giving plenty of time to line up precision shots or redirect them into one of the many, many hazards that litter Bulletstorm’s battlefields.

He'll be fine. The ground will break his fall.

And what hazards they are, from the classic explosive barrels and lethal falls to impaling cacti and spores whose fumes trigger indiscriminant berserker rage. The world around you is easily as lethal a weapon as the gun in your hand, if not more so. Combat is not a deliberate, tactical skirmish but a savage, highly kinetic brawl. Using the environment and your abilities to creatively and messily dispose of enemies is immensely satisfying, and a good way to save ammo too.

Grayson is such amobile, and resilient character that hiding behind cover feels like a waste. It’s more effective to slide around dodging fire, especially if most of your enemies are flying through the air themselves from a case of boot-to-the-face. Health regeneration feels just right, allowing you to throw yourself into the thick of combat but not to be careless.

Fwzaaapppp!

The gloriously destructive “Thumper” ability deserves special mention, snapping every nearby enemy into the air to splatter against the ceiling or hang helplessly suspended. It’s tremendous fun to use and a great way to even the odds in the larger and more frantic fights. Thumper charges are appropriately expensive for their power, but have the potential to earn back their cost and more if used skillfully.

Skill Kill Kult

You see Bulletstorm awards points on every kill. These points are then spent at “Dropkits” scattered across the planet on an assortment of ammo types and weapon unlocks. Simply shooting an enemy to death provides a piddling bonus but performing a “Skillshot”, or killing an enemy in a challenging or creative way, earns you significant rewards. The game encourages you to continuously try new weapons, tactics, and techniques in combat, rewarding you for being awesome and skillful.

Some Skillshots are environmental based, like kicking an enemy into a fire or off a cliff. Impaling a thug on a giant cactus spine nets you the “Pricked” Skillshot. Others are dependent on stunts with a particular weapon, firing mode, or enemy. Shooting a howling mutant in the groin and then the head earns you the “Mercy” Skillshot. (And gives you an idea of Bulletstorm’s juvenile but still entertaining humor.)


Skillshots pay the bills.

Not every Skillpoint comes from combat. First person games have grappled with getting the player to look where they want them for ages. There’s no point in putting a lot of effort into a detailed set piece if you can’t guarantee the player won’t be off in the corner grubbing for ammo when it plays out. That’s why so many FPS games just use cutscenes or lock your view in place for certain sequences.

Bulletstorm deals with this particular problem in a clever and rewarding way. When something dramatic is about to happen the game gives you a quicktime prompt. Hitting the button locks your view onto whatever is exploding, on fire, or coming to kill you (or all three). The faster you react, the more free Skillpoints you’re awarded. Bulletstorm literally pays you to pay attention.

There are dozens of possible Skillshots, ranging from the very easy to the highly tricky and situational. You’ll discover a lot of them just through luck and chance but the reward for pulling off a new one makes them well worthwhile. You don’t need to obsessively try to unlock every single Skillshot to succeed, (indeed you can generally scrape by with the ammo enemies drop and the rare supply crate) but most of the really fun alternate fire ammo charges require a steady stream of points to afford. In turn they allow for some lucrative Skillshots themselves, making for a gory positive feedback loop.

Why yes, that is a giant Murdersaw bearing down on us.

The weapons you’ll use to make those Skillshots are powerful and a cut more exotic than the classic FPS load-out, firing bouncing bombs, explosive bolos, and heat-seeking drills. Even the traditional shotgun has a ridiculous four barrels, sawing mutants in half at point blank range. As mentioned above all weapons have an explosive and deadly alternate fire mode that can clear a room and rack up some serious Skillshots to justify their cost. You’re restricted to only three guns at a time, including the default assault rifle, but you can change your load out at any of the ubiquitous Dropkits. A few weapons are introduced so late you don’t get to spend much time with them, but they’re all fun to use.

Ain’t got time to breath

Bulletstorm sets a breakneck pace. Grayson and company move from one precarious scenario to the next with barely a pause for breath. Set piece after set piece places you in increasingly improbably and hilariously dangerous situations and balls remain firmly attached to the wall for the entire game. You’re continually crashing, fleeing, and watching everything explode around you.

One moment you’re fighting atop a massive hydroelectric dam as battle damage and millions of tons of water pressure tear it apart. The next you’re sprinting through a fallen skyscraper that bridges a bottomless chasm, trying to cross before the building gives way and slides into the abyss. A particularly memorable segment has you aboard a train trying to outrun a giant spinning buzz-saw of doom. Many sections include a visible timer counting down to horrific death and destruction, spurring you to fight harder and move faster to stay alive. These sections are frantic, but when you’re inevitably a hair too slow you needn’t replay too much content.

Other set pieces are just bizarre fun. Bulletstorm is packed with awesome moments, from mowing down gyrocopters with a mini-gun to battling gangers on the dance floor of a still functioning disco. One of the highlights puts you briefly in control of a death-spewing robot dinosaur and lets you turn it loose of a mob of hapless mutants. There’s almost always something cool and memorable going on. There is one oddly out of place traditional boss fight against a giant plant, but it’s quickly out of the way.

Always nice to see Piranha Plant is still getting work outside the Mario series.

The graphics are sharp and solid design keeps most levels feeling a lot larger and more open than they actually are. What really stand out are the backdrops. Bulletstorm has gorgeous backgrounds that also give you a great sense of progression and place in the world. A city glimpsed in the distance during the early levels grows steadily larger and more detailed as you fight your way towards it.

Worst Family Fun Vacation Ever

Bulletstorm’s tone is that of constant giddy hyperkinetic violence, with traces of seriousness whenever there’s a pause for air. The game has a juvenile but genuinely funny sense of humor. Much of it comes from the interplay between Grayson and his grimly serious cyberneticly enhanced buddy Ishi, who acts as the straight man to Grayson’s clowning and the ongoing carnage filled lunacy constantly erupting around the duo.

Grayson himself comes across as a not particularly mature or clever but fundamentally good natured fighting man. His constant stream of expletives feels less out of malice and more simply his default mode of expression. By contrast everything the relentlessly hateful antagonist Sarrano says seems calculated to tick off and hurt whomever he’s talking too as much as possible.

A motley and foul mouthed crew, but no babysitting required.

You’re never without at least one ally fighting alongside, usually Ishi. Their constant chatter adds flavor and humor and they’re quick to point out the way forward if your progress stalls. Bulletstorm avoids some of the cardinal sins of game design in that your companions can’t be killed, never get lost, and are useful in combat but not enough to upstage you. I point these things out because companion AI can be done wrong so many ways it deserves a mention whenever a developer makes it painless.

As goofy and juvenile as a lot of Bulletstorm is it manages the occasional clever moment. One escape sequence cuts you off repeatedly, toying with the player’s expectation that the game won’t leave them to die. One of the last encounters in the game pits you against an opponent equipped with the same energy whip and gravity boots as you, forcing you to experience first-hand what you’ve already done to scores of enemies.

Final Echoes

For all its many strengths Bulletstorm is still as linear and highly scripted as the Call of Duty and Halo series that it mocks in its commercials. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfLDz6Y31rc) There’s very little in the way of exploration, and most of the few puzzles actually solve themselves via explosion if you don’t figure them out fast enough. You just don’t get the Skillpoint reward. That’s fine, because a linear and cinematic thrill ride is clearly what the designers set out to create and succeeded brilliantly in doing.

Walking's fer sissies. Real men power-slide to get around.

Aside from the more than satisfactory single player campaign Bulletstorm features “Anarchy Mode” as its sole multiplayer option. Anarchy Mode takes the now ubiquitous Gears-of-War style Horde mode and adds the welcome twist of team based Skillshots. Leashing, kicking, and blasting mooks back and forth between players is the best way to keep the points rolling in and secure a high score. There’s no deathmatch style gameplay to be found, which is unsurprising because trying to balance elements like the whip and slide-boot for PvP gameplay would have been tricky and distracting at best.

Finally “Echo” mode lets you enjoy Bulletstorm in its purest form, replaying five minute sections of the best of the single-player campaign without any story or dialog to get in the way of the carnage. You can chase online leader-board scores if that’s your idea of a good time, but for the most part it’s just a great way to get a quick adrenalin booster shot of action.

It’s impossible not to recommend Bulletstorm to anyone who even remotely enjoys action and shooter games. It’s a welcome break from trudging through dreary realistic settings, shooting people from other countries with the same handful of real world weapons.

Reasons to Play: Unrelenting onslaught of awesome set pieces. Creative weapons and over the top combat mechanics. Rewarding Skillshot system. Everything on fire, exploding, or both.

Reasons to Pass: Highly linear and scripted. Lack of a traditional multiplayer shooter mode. Some may find the constant swearing excessively and goofy. You possess a strong aversion to fun.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Beta Key Contest Concluded

2012-04-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

Our FireFall Beta Key give away contest is now concluded.

Congrats to the lucky winner, who should be receiving an e-mail with more information very shortly.

Please reply to that e-mail to claim your prize.

As for everyone else who still wants a shot at a Beta Key, stay tuned.
If and when Red5 decided to allow additional Beta invites we may offer them in a new drawing.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.