gaming-rabbot

[gaming-rabbot]

Salmon Run and Presentation

A (not so) brief dissertation on narrative framing in video games, featuring Splatoon 2

With the holidays in full swing, I took advantage of a deal one day when I went into town, and finally got my hands on Splatoon 2. Having loved the prior game as much as I did, waiting this long to get the sequel felt almost wrong. But like many another fellow meandering corpus of conscious flesh, I am made neither of time nor money.

Finally diving in, I figured I might take this excuse to remember that I write game reviews, sometimes. You know, when the tide is high, the moon blue, and the writer slightly less depressed. I ended up scrapping my first couple drafts, however. You see, a funny thing was happening; I kept veering back into talking about Salmon Run, the new optional game mode the sequel introduces.

Also I might look at the Octo Expansion later, on its own. After I get around to it…

Look, the base game already has a lot of content to explore, and as previously stated, I am sadly corporeal, and not strung together with the metaphysical concept of time itself.

My overall thoughts, however, proved brief, so I’ll try to keep this short.

(Mild spoilers coming along.)

Gameplay wise, I think the story mode is much improved upon by handing you different weapons for certain levels which were specifically built with them in mind. Whereas the prior game left you stuck with a variant of the starter splattershot all the way through. This keeps things interesting, pushes me outside of my comfort zone, and it’s a good way to make sure players will come from a well-informed place when deciding what weapon they want for multiplayer; which, let’s face it, is the real meat of these games and where most players are going to log the most time.

I also love the way bosses are introduced with the heavy drums and rhythmic chants and the dramatic light show. It endows the moment with a fantastic sense of gravitas, and manages to hype me up every time. Then the boss will have an aspect of their design which feels a bit silly or some how rather off, keeping the overall tone heavily grounded in the toony aesthetics the series already established for itself.

Narratively, I felt rather okay about the story aspect of Story Mode. The collectible pages in the levels still have a certain amount of world building, though this time it seems more skewed toward explaining what pop culture looks like in this world, such as, an allusion to this world’s equivalent to Instagram.

Cynical as it is…

That’s definitely still interesting in its own right, though perhaps it’s less of a revelatory gut-punch as slowly piecing it together that the game takes place in the post-apocalypse of Earth itself, and the inklings copied ancient human culture.

We still got some backstory for this game’s idol duo, though. And that, I appreciate. It means Pearl and Marina still feel like a part of this world, rather than seeming obligatory for the sake of familiarity, given the first game had an idol duo as well.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is a bit obvious that Marie’s cousin, Callie, has gone rogue, and that she is the mysterious entity cracking into the radio transmissions between her and Agent 4. If I recall correctly, that was a working theory that came about with the first trailer or two. That, or she had died.

As soon as Marie says aloud she wonders where Callie has gone, I knew right away. And that’s just in the introduction.

That said, on some level, after stomaching through certain other games and such that actively lie or withhold information to force an arbitrary plot twist for plot twist sake, it feels almost nice to go back to a narrative that actually bothers to foreshadow these things. Plus, having gotten already invested in Callie as a character from the first game, I still felt motivated to see the story through to find out why she went rogue. And, loving the Squid Sisters already, there was a hope in me that she could be redeemed, or at least understood. In terms of building off the prior game’s story, Splatoon 2 is moderately decent.

Also, I mean, c’mon. The big narrative drive might be a tad predictable, but hey, this game is for kids. It’s fine.

That, I think, is something I love the most about Splatoon. Despite feeling like you’re playing in a Saturday morning cartoon, and being aimed primarily at children, it doesn’t shy away from fairly heavy subjects. Such as the aforementioned fact that the humans are all long dead and you’re basically playing paintball in the ruins of their consumerist culture.

Which brings me to what fascinates me so much about Splatoon 2: the way in which Salmon Run is framed.

You see, on the surface, Salmon Run appears to be your typical horde mode; a cooperative team (typically comprised of randoms) fights off gaggles of foes as they take turns approaching their base in waves. Pretty standard for online shooters these days, as was modernly popularized by Gears of War 2, and Halo ODST.

I say “modernly,” as the notion of fighting enemies as they approach in waves is not exactly a new concept for mechanical goals within video games. Rather, the term itself, as applied to multiplayer shooters, “horde mode,” became a point of game discussion when Gears of War 2 introduced the new game mode by that same name back in… 2008?

No, no that can’t be right. I played Gears 2 back in high school (I had worse taste back then, okay?). Which, from my perspective, was basically yesterday. That game being ten years old would mean I myself am old now, and that just can’t be. I’m hip. I’m young.

I am, to stay on theme here, fresh.

But okay, existential crises and game talk terms aside, the writing team behind Splatoon 2 probably decided to absolutely flex when it came to the narrative surrounding Salmon Run. It is one of the most gleaming examples of the nontraditional things you can do with writing in video games, to really elevate the experience.

Let me explain.

You see, narrative in video games typically falls into one of two categories: either the story sits comfortably inside of the game, utilizing it like a vehicle to arrive at the destination that is its audience’s waiting eyes and ears. Or the narrative, on some level, exists rather nebulously, primarily to provide something resembling context for why the pixels look the way they do, and why the goals are what they are.

Not to say this is a binary state of existence for game writing; narrative will of course always provide context for characters, should there be any. It’s primarily older, or retro games that give you a pamphlet or brief intro with little in the way of worrying over character motivation, and the deeper philosophical implications of the plot, etc (though not for lack of trying). These would be your classic Mario Bros. and what have you, where the actual game part of the video game is nearly all there is to explore in the overall experience.

Then you have games like Hotline Miami that purposely sets up shop right in the middle to make a meta commentary about the state of game narrative, using the ideological endpoint of violent 80’s era action and revenge-fantasy genre film as inspiration and the starting point to draw comparison between the two. It’s bizarre, and I could drone on about this topic.

But I digress.

Despite falling into that latter category, that is to say having mainly just an introduction to the narrative context so you can get on with playing the game, Salmon Run is a stellar example of how you can make every bit of that context count (even if it does require the added context of the rest of the game, sort of, which I’ll explain, trust me).

First, a (very) brief explanation of how the game itself works, for the maybe three of you who haven’t played it yet.

A team of up to four inklings (and/or octolings) have a small island out in open waters. Salmonid enemies storm the beaches from various angles in waves. Each wave also comes with (at least) one of eight unique boss variants, who all drop three golden eggs upon defeat. Players are tasked with gathering a number of said golden eggs each round, for three rounds, after which their failure or success in doing so shows slow or fast progress towards in-game rewards.

And it’s all an allegory for the poor treatment of labor/workers, utilizing the fishing industry as both an example and a thematically appropriate analogue. Yes, I’m serious.

First, Salmon Run is not available through the main doors like the other multiplayer modes. Rather, it is off to the side, down a dingy looking alley. And when you’re shown its location, either because you finally entered the Inkopolis plaza for the first time, or because the mode has entered rotation again, Marina very expressly describes it as a job.

A job you should only do if you are absolutely, desperately hard strapped for cash. You know, the sort of job you turn to if, for one reason or another, you can’t find a better one.

An aside: technically, playing Salmon Run does not automatically net you in-game currency, with which to buy things, as regular multiplayer modes do. Rather, your “pay” is a gauge you fill by playing, which comes with reward drops at certain thresholds; some randomized gacha style capsules, and one specific piece of gear which gets advertised, to incentivize playing.

The capsules themselves drop actual paychecks in the form of aforementioned currency, or meal tickets to get temporary buffs that help you progress in the multiplayer faster via one way or another. Which, hey, you know, that helps you earn more money also. Working to get “paid,” so you can get things you want, though, still works perfectly for the metaphor it creates.

When I first saw it open up for rotation, I found out you had to be at least a level four to participate. Pretty par for the course, considering it’s the same deal with the gear shops. But, again, it’s all in the presentation; Mr. Grizz does not simply say something akin to the usual “you must be this tall to ride.” He says he cannot hire inexperienced inklings such as yourself, because it’s a legal liability.

After returning with three extra levels, I was handed off to basic, on-the-job training. Which is only offered after Mr. Grizz (not ever physically present, mind you, but communicating with you via radio), the head of Grizzco, uses fairly typical hard sell rhetoric when it comes to dangerous, or otherwise undesirable work: calls you kid, talks about shaping the future and making the world a better place, refers to new hires as “fresh young talent,” says you’ll be “a part of something bigger than yourself.” You know, the usual balancing act of flattery, with just the right amount of belittlement.

Whoa, hang on, sorry; just had a bad case of deja vu from when the recruiter that worked with the ROTC back in high school tried to get me to enlist… several times… Guess he saw the hippie glasses and long hair and figured I'd be a gratifying challenge.

The fisher imagery really kicks in when you play. Which, I figure a dev team working out of Japan might have a pretty decent frame of reference for that. A boat whisks you out to sea with your team, and everyone’s given a matching uniform involving a bright orange jumper, and rubber boots and gloves. If you've ever seen the viral video of the fisherman up to his waist in water telling you not to give up, you have a rough idea. Oh, and don't forget your official Grizzco trademark hats.

It’s on the job itself where a lot of what I'm talking about comes up the most; that is to say, despite buttering you up initially, Mr. Grizz shows his true colors pretty quickly. While playing, he seems to only be concerned with egg collecting, even when his employees are actively hurting. This is established and compounded by his dialogue prior to the intermediate training level, in which informs you about the various boss fish.

Before you can do anything remotely risky, even boss salmonid training, Mr. Grizz tells you he has to go over this 338 page workplace health and safety manual with you. But, oops, the new hire boat sounds the horn as you flip to page 1, so he sends you off unprepared. “Let’s just say you’ve read it,” he tells you, insisting that learning by doing is best.

This flagrant disregard employee safety, in the name of met quotas; the fact we never see Mr. Grizz face to face, making him this vague presence that presides over you, evaluating your stressed performance with condescension; that we are not simply given the rewards as we pass thresholds to earn them, having to instead speak with another, unknown npc for our pay… It all drives toward the point so well.

The icing on the cake for me is when a match ends. You, the player, are not asked if you’d like to go back into matchmaking for another fun round of playtime. Rather, you are asked if you would like to “work another shift.”

The pieces all fit so well together. I shouldn’t be surprised that, once a theme is chosen, Splatoon can stick to it like my hand to rubber cement that one time. It has already proven it can do that much for sure. But it’s just so… funny? It’s bitterly, cynically hilarious.

Bless the individual(s) who sat in front of their keyboard, staring at the early script drafts, and asked aloud if they were really about to turn Mr. Grizz into a projection of all the worst aspects of the awful bosses they’ve had to deal with in life. The answer to that question being “yes” has led to some of my favorite writing in a video game.

All of these thoughts, as they started forming in my skull, really began to bubble when I noticed Salmon Run shifts become available during my first Splatfest.

Splatfest is, to try and put it in realistic terms, basically a huge, celebratory sporting event. Participation nets you a free commemorative t-shirt and access to a pumping concert featuring some of the hottest artists currently gracing the Inkopolis charts.

The idea, the notion, that a hip young inkling (or octoling) might miss out on one of the biggest parties of the year because they need money more than they need fun? It’s downright depressing.

It got me thinking. I looked at my fellow egg collectors. In-universe, we were a bunch of teen-to-young-adult aged denizens missing out on all the fun because we desperately needed the cash. We became stressed together, overworked together, yelled at by our boss together. But in those sweetest victories, where we’d far surpassed our quota? We celebrated together.

Spam-crouching, and mashing the taunt, something changed. I felt a greater sense of comradery with these squids and octos than I did in nearly any other coop game. And it’s all thanks to the rhetorical framing of the game mode.

It accomplishes so many things. It’s world building which wholistically immerses you in the setting. But mainly, its dedication to highly specific word choice does exactly what I mentioned earlier: it elevates the experience to one I could really sit down and think about, rather than use to while away the hours, then move on to something else. So many games make horde modes that feel inconsequential like that; it’s just for fun.

There’s nothing wrong with fun being the only mission statement for a game, or an optional mode of play. But this is exactly what I mean when I say this is the nontraditional writing games can do so much more with. And Splatoon 2 saw that opportunity, and took it. And what a fantastic example of bittersweet, cold reality, in this, a bright, colorful game meant mainly for children…

Happy Holidays, everyone!

[gaming-rabbot]

Rabbot Reviews: Far Cry 5

Great taste, empty calories.

Far Cry 5 is the latest game in quite the lineage of a series known, as you might surmise, as Far Cry. Game number 6, actually, dependent on how canon you feel Primal was. FC as it stands now, though, is a bit of a… how to put it? A long call? A distant yell? An outlying wail? A remote shout? No, a far cry from the original two games, before Ubisoft bought the franchise.

(Yeah, that’s the phrase. Glad I thought of it, though I don’t know where I got it.)

((Incidentally, Remote Shout is the name of my new indie punk garage band. Album drops: never, because this is a joke.))

Starting after Far Cry 3, Ubisoft has been telling their dev teams to make lightning strike twice. Thus, each game hereafter has been an excited waiting game of seeing how they’ll try and ultimately fail to match the demented, yet incredibly charismatic villain that was Vaas.

And 5 feels like this illogical conclusion of just that. Because you have not one, not two, but four scenery-eating, rompy villains. Less a refined, precise attempt at the concept, and more of a blunderbuss approach; hoping to tickle a little of everyone’s villain fancy.

That, I feel, is the perfect metaphor for the game in general.

Last call to avoid spoilers.

Speaking of fitting descriptions of the entire game, let’s start with the intro. Because I have mixed feelings about it, at best. There’s a lot it does right, and some things it simply gets wrong, in regards to the rest of the narrative as a whole.

The pacing and atmosphere are phenomenal. The very air feels heavy around you as you enter into the church, here to take the titular Joseph Seed away from his flock. The pressure of the stakes are established flawlessly, leaving a feeling of palpitation, and a true understanding of just how dangerous Joseph is. Surprised as I was, the game even managed to shock me a little.

In that respect, it’s fantastic.

But then the game uses the cop crew you rolled in with as your motivation for the entire rest of the game, in the form of saving them from the Seed family, and oh god, it’s Fallout 4 all over again.

Just like the Bethesda example above, this aspect of the intro simply doesn’t work. And not just because it’s asking me to unconditionally care about cops.

This sequence of the narrative focuses on every other aspect of narrative setup except for the characters that you’re supposed to get invested in. You get but the most cursory taste of who they are as people. Such a small amount of time can mainly attach their personalities to a specific emotion.

Whitehorse is the calm voice of reason. Marshall Burke is frustrated. Pratt is nervous. And Hudson is… there too, I guess. Look, I’ll be honest, I had to look up half these people’s names for this review. Which I’m sure is only a good sign.

With so little to go on, I found I simply didn’t care whenever a cultist bigwig dangled one of them in front of me on a string, expecting me to bat like a good little kitten. Instead, I yawned and wandered off to play with the packaging the toy had come in.

Like a mischievous little kitten.

Which is such a shame, because there are so many other more interesting characters I actually did care about. And in the few scenes where the Seeds held them to ransom instead, the game suddenly had actual stakes.

Nick and Kim Rye were delightful every time they showed up. Virgil was so honestly sincere, I couldn’t help but like him; and his past, as it unfolded, was interesting to dive into. And Jerome was pretty much cool by default, and an excellent concept for a foil to the cultist bad guys, and everything they stood for.

But the story feels almost unconfident in its execution. Like the team is scared you’ll get bored. So the solution, write more story, or rather, several seemingly self-contained stories across the three separate regions.

With no overarching theme or plot threads besides “Joseph Seed probably gave the command for this at some point,” however, the connection feels loose at best. And this looseness makes the narrative feel all the weaker.

I’d much rather the story had been more focused and condensed. If they’d honed in on about one third as many characters, and if the villains felt a little less redundant, the overall narrative could’ve been much more refined and interesting.

Even the gameplay, while fun, has the same issue.

When traversing from place to place, you can’t drive for five minutes without a dozen random encounters passing you by, whether they travel by wheel or foot or paw. What should be a ten minute trek can sometimes take 30.

Again, it feels like the game is nervous. Like it’s worried that if I’m not firing a gun every two minutes, I’m losing interest. Look, I know this is the age of the internet, but my attention span hasn’t deteriorated that bad.

What were we talking about again?

But it’s sad though, as it detracts from what could be some very nice vistas and scenic routes. I can barely enjoy the quiet, introspective new addition of fishing without a randomly spawned cultist with an exaggerated country accent shouting “Fay-oond ‘eem!” and scaring away all the darn fish with a wild assault rifle volley.

Speaking of guns, let’s talk about politics. Something that could only ever be fun and only ever go over very well.

I don’t want to get too deep into this, as it’s been covered to death, and more eloquently than I’ll probably put it. For a better dive into the subject, I’d recommend watching Errant Signal’s “The Art of Saying Nothing.” To sum it up though, while at face value, FC5 might seem as though it’s about to lay down a scathing indictment of certain aspects of American culture, it really doesn’t.

Not for lack of bringing it up though.

The lady who owns Peaches the cougar, that is to say, the former owner of this sweet large kitten (no I’m not looking up the name this time; she’s not even a narrative footnote), is a prejudicial old woman who lives alone in the woods.

Immediately upon entering her domicile so I could acquire my new kitty and leave, she mentioned that my player character looked vaguely Italian, and made an off-color comment about not wanting her silver/jewels to go missing.

What is this, the turn of the century, last century?

At Hurk’s place, you can meet his dad, who wants to build a wall. What, no, not a wall down there. A wall in the north, to keep out those accursed Canadians and their liberal ideology.

Addressing controversy by obfuscating the real world equivalent is cute, but it lacks the punch that makes it such that it’s proving some kind of point. Here, it’s npc’s that you’re expected to stay on good terms with, so that you can get more quests and goodies, like a new pet or ride.

(Shame you never get a new pet who is also your new ride, though.)

And why? Because they’re supposedly better than the cultists who only physically hurt and impede people different than themselves? What’s the takeaway here supposed to be, that it’s only physical extremism that’s bad and--oh god wait no, it’s Bioshock Infinite all over again.

Of course, we all know the real reason why. To offend as few people as possible. Because every offended party is a potential lost sale. Hence why despite clearly using Christian/Baptist imagery and motifs, no cultist ever actually mentions Jesus by name, and the peggy symbol only vaguely and technically resembles that of a cross.

I’ve bad news for you, though, Ubisoft; it’s too late. If you wanted to offend as few people as possible, it was already over the instant you let writers set it in a rural, dominantly Christian, dominantly white community, in America. Right wing talking heads were lining up to be officially offended the instance promos started showing bad guys toting guns, bibles, and the American flag.

Because despite bragging about having thick skin, when it comes down to it, they typically don’t.

At some point, you almost want to lean in uncomfortably close to the game’s face and tell it “Go on. Say what you really mean.” And it never does. Making it satire with no teeth, which isn’t actually satire, but parody. It’s a flag-waving, gun-toting parody of American culture. It’s an American beer commercial meets Saint’s Row. It’s a romanticized outdoorsy rural locale with tacky looking guns and gruesome murder set to made-up gospel and old rock hits.

Which doesn’t feel that far off from a Saint’s Row game, but it wildly conflicts with the tone Far Cry 5 very quickly establishes for itself. And it’s such a waste, because to use an on-theme colloquialism, “bless its little heart.”

It’s trying so hard, and there are some things I can’t help but enjoy about it.

There was a moment early on, when I was creeping through the bushes of a small neighborhood as slowly and quietly as I could. I had not but a bow and a pistol to my name. Cultists were stacking dead bodies while their speaker-mounted truck played their very own choir, singing about water washing away sin. As they were finishing up, they began to sing along.

It was as First Blood meets Jim Jones as the entire game felt, and it all just clicked. The gameplay and tone all lined up so perfectly and felt so right. Where did that go?

Luckily, the game is also pretty charming in various other inadvertent or otherwise unintentional ways.

Obviously it’s cute and wholesome that you can pet all the non-hostile animals. But it’s completely adorable how Peaches growls at you when you go where she can’t follow.

There’s also random npc’s you can recruit for the game’s buddy system, aside from the nine named specialty partners. At first, I seriously wondered how any of them could compare to Peaches, the oversized mewling kitten, or Grace, the cool as a cucumber sniper lady.

But then I found some lady named Evie, who looked like somebody’s mom, and I honestly found it hard to part with her. There was something so ernest and amusing about the idea of somebody’s mom who used to embarrass them at every PTA meeting or bake sale, now in an awkwardly-fitting militia vest yelling “Get some!” to every other cultist who dared cross our path.

The gameplay is also varied enough with timed races, and puzzling treasure hunting segments. The latter in particular, I really enjoyed. They had me doing everything navigating mazes of fire to hopping and swinging along successive grapple lines under a bridge, skirting river water along the way. It’s good, varied fun.

I also really appreciate the organic way in which story beats are unlocked, which is really saying something for a sandbox. Normally, there are specific missions that unlock the next cutscene that actually matters, and everything else feels like so much filler and padding.

Far Cry 5 had the genius idea that everything should contribute to an overall progress bar. This makes it that nothing feels like padding, as you’ll always be working toward the next story beat, even if you’re doing what feel like side quests.

But it’s one step forth and one step back with you, isn’t it Far Cry 5?

Once you’ve unlocked the next story beat, you’ll be whisked away to the next cutscene to have one of the villains get in your face for the next five minutes, whether you were ready for that or not. It gets annoying after the second time, and downright numb the fifth or sixth.

It’s also where the writing starts to fall apart some more.

You know that old James Bond trope where the bad guy has him right where they want him? But then because the villain is so contrived in how they want to handle him, he ends up getting away? Well that happens almost every time. It’s cheesy.

Also where some of the worst writing in the game comes into play.

Jacob Seed has a neat gimmick, I’ll admit. He’s all about classic conditioning, A Clockwork Orange style. Alright, interesting enough. And instead of escaping, you wake up, presumably days later, having finally escaped his mind control. It was a neat twist at first.

What’s incredibly stupid though is everyone points it out. Dutch, Eli, all characters who know about Jacob’s MO, and none of them think anything suspicious about it. Nope, just “Hey, now that I can finally get in contact with you after an entire week of you not responding, come back and get uncomfortably close to me and people I care about.”

Nobody thinks anything’s up with that? Even after it happens three or four times?? And not even my own character thinks to warn them that I’m being psychologically manipulated to kill them???

Oh. Look at that. The game made me kill Eli. How very unsurprising. What is that, something like four hours of build up to a twist anyone could see coming if they’ve ever seen a story?

“Who cares, it’s fun, isn’t it?”

I mean, yes, sure. It’s very fun, in fact. Fewer things have been more satisfying than timing it just right to take down three baddies at once, with a sniper shot from Grace, a mauling from Peaches, and a throwing knife from myself.

And like I said before, the gameplay is just varied enough to not grow dull. But what should be a good game is held back by mediocre writing and a lack of commitment.

Weirder than any of it though is the troves of people lining up to say it doesn’t matter, because the game is fun. Listen, I can enjoy the gameplay for hours of mind-numbing fun, but still be able to pick apart everything wrong with the overall experience. There’s nothing really wrong with that. It doesn’t completely impede what enjoyment I, or anybody else, was able to get out of it.

I really don’t get this, though. This is no critique of the game itself, mind you, but it is at fault for bringing it up again, even if by accident. So it bears discussion.

Clean Prince was right when he said that Far Cry 5 brought up a lot of what’s wrong with modern gaming culture. Yet I can’t help but disagree with his reasoning behind this statement. Because he, like many, asked why any of it matters, so long as the game is fun.

Look.

Gamers clamored for years, demanding our hobby be taken seriously. Entire groups and brands like Extra Credits formed, to try and gain for games the same respect film and literature already had.

Nowadays, we have critics aplenty, like Super Bunny Hop, and the above-mentioned Errant Signal, who regularly dissect games with the same attention to detail movies, shows, and novels receive.

We did it. We’re here. We made it, right?

No.

People tear down bad writing in games, and suddenly it doesn’t matter. The game being fun is the only feature that matters, now that it’s convenient to dismiss anything that seemingly gets in the way of your enjoyment.

Even though it doesn’t.

If Far Cry 5 were a film, people would be trampling over each other to repeat the critics’ disregard of its milquetoast shotgun approach to writing, and lack of commitment to an actual point, despite advertising itself as any kind of satire.

It’s not like having an actual statement is foreign to Far Cry either. Far Cry 2 had a well implemented theme of deterioration in every aspect; your character’s health thanks to the malaria, the guns falling apart from being old, fire spreading wildly out of control.

It’s not even necessarily a Ubisoft problem either.

Far Cry 3 was all about the lengths you’d go to for the people you care about, and how growing and changing as a person ends up alienating you from them anyway. There was also an underlying theme about there being no real winners in a setting so deeply seeded with violence.

Ending sucks too. That’s not a good transition, but it’s as good of one as it deserves, to be frank.

It’s awful, but not because it’s unsatisfying and you don’t get to technically win. Not every game needs to end on a positive note, just because you work for it. Spec Ops: The Line had some of my favorite gut-punch endings in a game.

But the takeaway is just bad, for either ending.

Either you walk away from Joseph at the end, and Jacob’s conditioning kicks in again, and you kill everyone you just saved, or randomly and completely out of bumbling nowhere, several nuclear warheads go off around the tristate area. And everyone you just saved dies in irradiated fire anyway.

What’s the takeaway here? That we should just let dangerous people get away with violent uprisings, because hey, who knows, they may actually have been right all along?

The nuclear ending especially is just bad writing. It’s a twist out of left field meant to shock, and take you by surprise, but only because there’s nothing to indicate it’s going to happen. It’s trying, and failing, to ape the nuke scene from the first Modern Warfare game. But that scene was the dramatic release after an entire level’s worth of building tension regarding the bomb which was mentioned earlier. Of which said established tension, there’s simply none here.

Each region even caps off with you burning out the cult’s various bomb shelters. Only to find out, what? That you should’ve given up and let them kill and maim and steal all they like, so you could huddle down next to them in their bunkers? All because some uninformed zealot who doesn’t even sound like he’s actually looked at a bible lately made a lucky guess?

No thanks.

Instead of inspiring shock and awe, the ending feels random and nonsensical. Once again destroying any coherency the overall tone the game could’ve had. Is this supposed to be a fun, silly game to be enjoyed with a beer or a friend? 

Or a serious and somber game where you face the deepest human fear of all: how people manage to justify overt acts of pure evil as “the right thing?”

All in all, Far Cry 5 is like a cheap burger from a fast-food joint. The taste is fine and it’ll tide you over, but it’s probably not very good for you. And you can’t help but think about how much better it looks in the pictures on the menu.

[gaming-rabbot]

Rabbot Reviews: Night in the Woods

Painfully relatable, wonderfully colorful, delightfully charming, and exasperatingly existential.

Imagine a much tamer BoJack Horseman, with a colorful flourish and sense of nostalgia reminiscent of Hotline Miami, mixed with the millennial Scooby-Doo gang vibe of Oxenfree. Also imagine if Life is Strange felt less artificial with its blatant farce of an attempt at understanding hip kid lingo, and that Firewatch actually bothered going somewhere with its thriller esque setup and plot hooks.

That’s a jumbled mess of words, but also a perfect descriptor for the subject of this review: Night in the Woods.

Night in the Woods stars the unassuming Mae Borrowski, a 20 year old college dropout who has returned to her podunk, middle-of-nowhere, boring town, where nothing good ever happened to anybody, least of all Mae.

Upon return, she’s met with passive-aggression spiced concern from parents who honestly just want to know what their only child is going through, and friends who all either already have or are in the process of growing up and moving on in life. Thus, her return meant to ease her back into the comforts of nostalgia and something resembling normalcy only seem to cause her more anxiety and strife.

Also the crushingly slow and depressing realization that life has no meaning and nothing we do in the universe actually matters. But hey, one thing at a time, right guys?

Last call for a (mild) spoiler warning.

The very first thing to note is that Night in the Woods is a certain type of game. And if you grit your teeth and practically feel your blood boil at the very thought of this type of game, first I might suggest seeing a doctor, but second and more importantly, NitW more than likely will not change your mind about this type of game.

I am referring, of course, to the ever-fun and totally-never-controversial-topic, the walking simulator. Where things like failure states scarcely show their faces, and gameplay mostly takes a backseat to narrative.

And by backseat, this sometimes means a bus. A very long bus.

I’ve talked about it before, but nobody reads my reviews, so I’ll say it again: I personally have absolutely no qualm nor quibble with the existence of this new and befuddling genre of video game. At least, not at face value. When the only thing a game is properly offering is a narrative, then I won’t hold that against the game, so long as said narrative can deliver. Not like Firewatch or Life is Strange, where the lack of an actual game further hampers the lack of a good or wholly competent story.

Besides, variety is the spice of life, my friend, despite what certain YouTube personalities will tell you. And a diverse offering of games means a diverse offering of self-proclaimed “gamers,” which goes on to mean the industry can only grow and get better as a whole with market expansion. You know, the only good part of capitalism; more media getting produced to the point where that incredibly niche thing you always wanted to see get made, well, finally getting made.

You know the one.

More to the point, I ask that narrative heavy games deliver. And deliver Night in the Woods did, with a fairly agreeable amount of competence.

It is at this point in the review, where the review has yet to actually begin, that I’d like to announce that I had been looking forward to this game for three years, ever since I first laid eyes on the Kickstarter trailer.

(Which, by the way, this game was funded via Kickstarter, so take that extra tidbit for what you will. I know it’s a touchy subject after things like Mighty No. 9.)

After which point, however, the game experienced something like three or four release delays, which speaks to me of a dev team possibly severely underestimating how long it takes to actually make a game. Or overestimating their own capabilities? Who knows.

Part of me worries that I can’t be objective, though. The game seemed to have won my heart long before I’d ever get to see a finished product. Could I have been blinded by my bias?

No. The answer is no.

Almost entirely for those aforementioned, nigh-constant release delays. Couple that with Infinite Falls putting out not one, but two mini games set in universe, instead of, oh I don’t know, the game people paid them to make? In an ounce of fairness, I’ve come to retroactively appreciate said mini games, as they do add to the lore.

And I’m a sucker for lore.

Perhaps I’m being petty, and somehow retroactively less petty, but my bias and unconditional love and goodwill slowly faded in direct relation to every year after the originally announced release date I had to wait. And as I sat down to start, and even as I completed the game, I asked myself: was it worth the wait?

Mm. Yeah, pretty much.

Okay, I should probably slow down. Maybe give some kind of buildup before spilling the final thoughts all out like that.

One of the first things you notice about Evening in the Forest, aside from how humorously long it takes to actually see all the characters in the woods at night time, is the screen constantly saturated with lots of orange, red, and brown. The fall colors are heavily emphasized, not merely because that’s the season the story takes place in, but the colors are exaggeratedly warm, so to match the cozy comforts the protagonist, Mae (remember Mae?), is seeking to feel deep down in her guts again.

But rather than that being the case, Mae’s hometown immediately feels cold and unfamiliar, which the game emphasizes by instead starting you off on the outskirts in the dead of night mostly by yourself. And the game world is introduced with lots of dark colors, mainly blues.

It’s easy to tell that color-play was set to be a key design aesthetic early in development.

This is matched and mirrored as even the primary cast are color coded in much the same way. Mae’s parents who forgot about her first night back are both dark, ash gray; cold. Gregg gives Mae the most excited welcome back of the crew, and he’s a ruddy orange; warm. Bea is distant at first, making undercutting jabs at Mae’s character, and she’s a muted teal; cold. Finally, Angus is friendly enough, if a tad mellow, and he’s the brown bear (who’s also a bear, ha (bam, super funny, original joke)); yeah, pretty warm.

The next to overkill levels of clear-cut color-play give the game a sort of story book vibe, which is further highlighted by the simple shapes that make up the models and the cartoonish proportions all the characters have; e.g., eyes make up a third of the real estate on any given face, which can sometimes be as tall or wide as the body it’s sitting on.

The bright, saturated, vivid colors of any given background, the color coding of warm and cold characters, the toony looks; it all drives home to evoke that very same feeling of familiarity and nostalgia Mae is seeking at the start of the game. As though to remind the player of simpler, more innocent times. It’s waking up on a Saturday morning at a young age to watch cartoons, that sort of thing. It’s the charming bait that demands your attention first. And the player, much like Mae, finds the hook a lot less charming with the panged stings of being proverbially stabbed by a cold and indifferent reality.

Reality tends to set in on this game like a sack of bricks. I found myself saying “that got a little too real there for a sec” so often, I figure it may as well be on the box.

(Well. You know. If the game had a box.)

It’s around this point, after the main cast is thoroughly introduced, that the game starts to really pick up. The pacing is solid enough; I never felt complacent, like I was waiting for the next bit of plot to happen. It’s slow exactly when and where it needs to feel slow. And for the rest of the time, the game is throwing sudden Guitar Hero segments at you.

When chatting with a friend about this, he admitted he found Mae’s movement speed plodding and felt it dragged the pacing down too much. It’s not something that bothered me, but I can see where there’s a case for it.

Here’s where the more “gamey,” for lack of a better term, side of the game comes in. At various intervals, the game will introduce a brand new mini game with its own self-contained set of mechanics. There’s a lot of variety here, and for the most part, they never outstay their welcome.

The only properly recurring one is the bass-playing segment. And though it’s possible to fail these (very possible in the case of the Pumpkin Head Guy song), the game will carry on regardless. In a way, Night in the Woods does actually have failure states, but the player doesn’t lose any progress when it happens.

Then the gang finds a severed arm!

Around that part, though, the game introduces a game within the game, in the form of a game on Mae’s laptop by the name of Demontower. And what a pleasant surprise, it’s a decent all around top down slash and dash, action affair. The amount of effort that went into it is shocking, considering it could’ve easily just been a cute little one-off gag. But no, it’s a completely legitimate game, with a full tale, its own set of mechanics, and several decently challenging boss fights punctuating each randomized level.

It’s the kind of thing I’d pay maybe ten bucks for (usd), but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the value of my purchase with NitW go up a bit, considering there’s basically two games for the price of one here. Plus it might just placate one who finds dialogue heavy games dull. Who knows, but it’s a stellar addition either way.

I also adore that the developers wasted no opportunity to try and enhance their story, as they even worked symbolism relevant to the story at hand into the miniature side game on Mae’s laptop. The very first boss of any Demontower run looks remarkably like a certain muted teal gothic gator girl.

But, and here’s the kicker: this boss doesn’t do anything, and dies in one hit.

Surely it’s a reference to Bea’s semi-combative nature toward Mae at the start, and how easily that folds away when she remembers their shared history. It’s a really unnecessary metaphor they didn’t have to include, but it stuck with me that they even did. Although, in the interest of fairness, I feel I must admit it’s not exactly subtle.

In fact, it’s about as subtle as that severed arm I mentioned earlier, then stopped talking about.

I did this to draw comparison the somewhat noticeable lull between traumatic and supernatural events. Because while I said the story beats in of themselves never felt too far apart, I have to admit, again in fairness, that it seems to take a good while for the payoff of things like this. I will say though, payoff does come in due time, and NitW more or less sticks the landing well enough.

Take the backstory of Mae beating a kid’s face in with a metal bat during her little league game, for example.

To be perfectly frank, I figured the game would never have any kind of payoff for this at all. This or the actual reason why Mae came home from college. The cynic in me is alive and well, and I fully believed the writers would take the easy route and leave it all up to the imagination. But no, they actually explain it all, and explain it fairly well.

Mae has a mental thing where she rarely loses touch with reality, seeing only basic shapes where actual things and people are supposed to be. And a statue at college made up of basic shapes caused a mental relapse in her psyche, sending her spiraling into extremely self-destructive habits she couldn’t break herself out of. I’m certain there’s a proper term for this, but I’m not well read enough to know what it might be.

Effort like that put into creating a solid trunk for the rest of the story to branch off of is grand. And a relief, after dealing with games like Firewatch, where the backstory is so inconsequential, it’s picked out of a seemingly random assortment of vague synopses so as to snugly slot in any old referential dialogue between the bread of real plot.

In that regard, Dusk in the Trees fits nicely on the same shelf of Oxenfree.

Now that I think of it, both games are on that same shelf for a lot of similarities; the gaggle of young adults having complex relationships filled with strife and friction, the overt metaphor of them struggling to deal with supernatural elements where said supernature stands in for the responsible adulthood they’re on the precipice of, branching dialogue options used to explore character relations, the heavy and pervasive sense of nostalgia on the air like so many flitting dust particles in an old abandoned barn at sunset, etc.

Not that I mind having a couple eerily similar games, though. They’re a couple of the only games I’ve ever been able to relate to on such a deeply emotional and personal level. And I feel like that’s kind of the big foundation at the bottom of it all; relatability and realness to keep you grounded amidst all the severed arms, and ghost stories, and murder cults.

Whenever I watched Mae talk to her mom, I felt twinges of chills. Because I could almost swear I’d had those exact conversations with my own mother. We snark at each other in much of the same sarcastic way Mae and her mom do. I’ve even felt similar pressure Mae has about her education and how she’s going to handle the entire rest of her life.

It… hurts. It actually sort of hurts just how relatable this all is.

When walking down the main drag through Possum Springs (the ingame town), deja vu washed over me time and again. The urban decay of old businesses that never seem to last, the new franchised ones that seemingly cropped up from nowhere, the random animal people walking by who remarkably resemble random human people I’ve walked by in my own small, nothing special hometown; it all felt entirely too familiar.

It’s truly astounding how a game where the main character dreams about meeting god, and it’s not absolutely clear whether it actually happened, somehow managed to feel this real to life.

I’ve often commented on how relatability is not the end-all, be-all of good storytelling, let alone good character building. Though it does help, it’s better when the characters are this fun, charming, and sincere. And I feel like the writers really nailed that aspect, instead of relying on all the chest clutching of players like me who felt they’ve been there before.

Whatever smaller qualms I have with the story at large, I can’t deny how hard Infinite Falls got me to fall madly in love with this cast.

This game found me at I feel the perfect time in my life. It’s the angsty teen to young adult adventure I always wanted to see in a video game. This is my “that incredibly niche thing you always wanted to see get made, finally getting made.” And if you’re anything like me, then the story will resonate with you too.

Honestly, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s not as perfect as I make it sound; there are a few grammar mistakes and a couple graphical issues. But if you can look past that, and gameplay ultimately not being the point, you’ll find a pretty solid, genuine-feeling story.

[gaming-rabbot]

Dig deep down into the salt mines. Only then will you find a way through. 

[gaming-rabbot]

Out of the cave and into the frying pan. Watch as I go from one of the easiest boss fights in the game to one of the toughest.

[gaming-rabbot]

Amazing chests, glittering gold, and preparations.

[gaming-rabbot]

Wait. Wait, no…

[gaming-rabbot]

If I were a popstar I’d be Katy PARRY. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

[gaming-rabbot]

Time to appreciate fine art. And classic waifu bait.

[gaming-rabbot]

Anor Londo. Beautiful city. And beautifuler statues. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[gaming-rabbot]

The fortress defends herself!

[gaming-rabbot]

Dizzying heights, and even dizzyinger poisons…

[gaming-rabbot]

Pastor skeleton knows what you’re into. And he’s very disappointed.

[gaming-rabbot]

What’s the deal with video games and sewer levels? What’s up with that??? 

In this episode we talk about dragons and vaginas. Two of my favorite topics!

[gaming-rabbot]

Reconquered old grounds, tried not to drown, met a dead woman, and killed a butterfly. Eventul night.

[gaming-rabbot]

Prepare for, well, what the original game should’ve been in the first place.

Titanfall 2 is the sequel, you guessed it, to Titanfall. Originally an XBox exclusive, the successor has now been let off the leash to sit in nearly every other camp. Prefaced with “nearly,” since Nintendo doesn’t typically get all the cross-platform games of this nature; and that is to say, “this nature,” referring to online military shooters. And the second catch to the “nearly” clause is that EA is still clinging to the idea that their online service will someday rival that of Steam.

And thus, if you want Titanfall 2 for PC, you’d better dust off that Origin account Mass Effect 3 or something forced you to create four years ago, whereafter you promptly forgot about it.

(Warning: I’m about to spoil certain elements that you might find more interesting or enjoyable if they come as (at least a little bit of) a surprise. But I’ve got to, in order to properly discuss them.)

Continuing more or less off the setup of the first game, Titanfall 2 is set in a distant future, where not only has humanity colonized deep space, it’s also somehow economically viable for giant robot factories to hover above the atmosphere to launch down a new mech every time a pilot demands another when their old one breaks. Like a spoiled child and a very, very expensive toy.

And because there’s so much money involved in this brave new frontier, big business is all the bigger and even businessier than ever. Your basic Weyland-Yutani stand-in is there to try and crack open every single planet like a candy egg to suck up all gooey, sugary yolk for themselves. Whereupon your typical spunky space rebels step in, because they’d really like to have some planets left in the galaxy to actually live on at some point.

But now that I’ve let you know all that, don’t worry about it much. Because it doesn’t matter. Not really, anyway. Because the actual plot of TF2 is that you are Jack “everyman” Cooper, a humble rifleman in the rebel forces. And your dreams of becoming a pilot with your very own titan come true a little sooner than you’d hoped, after your first mission goes horribly wrong.

Though I’ll let you in on a little secret: when your commanding officer character has the word “last” hidden somewhere in their name, you really shouldn’t be too surprised if they bite it in the first ten minutes.

Thus do Jack human and BT “totally not a mech please respect our specific and unique terminology” set out on their wayward adventure together.

I’ll go ahead and let it be known. I really enjoyed the single player campaign for Titanfall 2. Way more than I ever thought I would, considering the “campaign” of the first game left a lot to be desired.

Now that’s not to say that I don’t think games can focus on being exclusively multiplayer. For me to say that would make me a huge hypocrite, considering all the hours I’ve put into Overwatch. However, I feel the half measures of Titanfall 1 just didn’t work. They tried to have their cake and eat it too by cramming the campaign bits into the multiplayer. But like an exciting first date, you need to know when and where it’s okay to cram things.

Having other players jump and dance around in a cutscene, and plot important characters trying to tell you necessary information to appreciate the story at all while you’re frantically running away from a hostile giant robot looking to paint their boots a stylish new shade of red via the medium of your guts?

Yeah. That didn’t work.

Here, in Mech Drop the Second, having kept both camps from pitching their tents too close to one another, you’re free to appreciate the plot and characters at your leisure. At the same time, there’s also what I like to call the “wading period,” of the campaign familiarizing you with the controls. This allows newer players to have at least some idea of what they’re doing when they decide to brave the deep end of online competitive mutliplayer.

Again, I’m not advocating every single shooter in the world having a singleplayer campaign component. And vice versa, for that matter. Some shooters just don’t need multiplayer. Look at DOOM, for example.

Being allowed to buckle down and focus on only one and not the other can allow a dev team to hone in and really refine the kind of experience they want to deliver on. Again, Overwatch. Though it helps that Overwatch has a pretty solid tutorial.

Speaking of great tutorials though, Titanfall 2… is the topic of this review, that’s right. And it has an absolutely fantastic tutorial.

This tutorial reminds me very much of the famously exceptional tutorial from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I get the feeling that’s intentional. It beautifully illustrates everything that’s similar, but also different between CoD and TF.

In both examples, the player is challenged with running through an obstacle course as fast as they can, downing fake enemies along the way. Both games are alike, in that they are about running around, looking down the sights of various guns to blast various enemies of the free world(s), and that you can bet your bottom dollar at least one named character isn’t making it through to the very end.

Key difference between the latest Walker-Tank Trip, and the latest Call of Duty: “what are they even naming them anymore, I honestly can’t remember, oh they called it Infinite Warfare, that’s hilarious,” is that though the new CoD also has wall running and double jumping, just like Big-Bot Descension, the levels themselves aren’t actually built around that.

As though it was decided as a core gameplay mechanic early on, and not added in later in some ravenous attempt to eat up fans of other games.

The tutorial acclimates you perfectly to the plethora of of walls you’ll be running along and double-jumping off of. And the rest of the game world is built around that freedom of movement. There’s even some very neat and clever platforming challenges that do wonders for the variety of the gameplay. There’s also, gasp… puzzles? In a first-person military shooter? It’s almost as if the developers thought that doing the same one thing over and over might actually get stale or something bizarre like that.

Platforming behaves extremely well, and fewer things are more satisfying than pulling off a good string. Like double-jumping off a wall run, shooting one guy, burning the second with a flaming shuriken, landing and rock-and-roll knee-sliding over their corpses behind cover, turning invisible, sprinting around to their buddy and stabbing him the back? It feels amazing.

It plays like a less complex Mirror’s Edge mixed with CoD, and a little DOOM influence just for good measure. There are few games that plain and simply feel this good to just play. Even thinking about it now makes me want to play more. It’s good, wholesome, albeit ridiculous video game fun.

And in addition to the platforming, and puzzles, and platforming puzzles, there is, of course, the Titan itself. All the variety keeps things from getting boring, after all.

Titan gameplay feels exactly as big, lumbering, and empowering as it should. But rather than swapping weapons with a button press, and exchanging them for guns on the ground with another button, like you can as a mechless pilot, you change your entire loadout on the fly. Gun, equipment, abilities, and all. New loadouts are unlocked throughout the campaign, usually after hitting some milestone or other. Like beating a boss fight.

Oh yeah! There are boss fights! In this military first-person shooter!

The game introduces the people you’ll be killing in long, grueling, heavy fights with the kind of cinematic over the topness that befits the ridiculous setting you’re playing in to a T. And that’s something that I really appreciate about TF2. It takes itself just seriously enough for you to get a good grasp on the characters and the situation they find themselves in. But it doesn’t shy away from having bombastic people show up, point at you, and loudly proclaim that you and them are about to throw down and that it’s going to be awesome.

It’s on the other side of the spectrum of something like the Gears of War franchise, which I’ve come to despise over the years, for always taking itself so deathly serious. Typically right before you turn around and shove your goofy chainsaw-gun up a pair of disturbingly toned alien buttcheeks, too.

Freudian to say the least.

TF2 even seems to make a point of spoofing this very trope. There’s a boss fight at one point, with an enemy pilot who has a flying mech. But do you have this fight down on the ground, with some kind of gimmick of predicting his flight patterns so you can time your shots and take cover?

No.

You face him in the open, standing on top of a giant flying ship that’s speeding over the landscape at something like 200 mph. And the entire time, you hear him over the radio chatter, constantly spouting off completely real (sounding) jet pilot jargon.

The juxtaposition hit me so hard, my head spun. But I couldn’t help but laugh. All the other boss fights had become completely mundane the instant I stepped out on top of a giant ship and a flying mech came out of nowhere. And yet, somehow, in the most ludicrous fight of all, I was up against the most normal, by-the-book foe I’d come across in the entire game.

It’s that kind of bizarre, fun logic that makes the writing in the game shine the most.

Speaking of fun writing though, at certain points throughout the campaign, the player gets the chance to make Jack converse directly with BT, rather than letting their scripted conversations have all the fun. Sure, there’s only ever two dialogue options, but it’s something. Each time, it allows the player to decide how snarky or professional they interpret Jack as being.

Admittedly, this is where the writing walks a fine line between decent humor and smug one-liners that might make you want to punch Jack in the face. Several times. And which side of that very fine line you’re on is going to differ from person to person.

Personally, I never found the jokes at these moments to be too painfully smug to bear listening to. I must not have, anyway, considering they were always the option I picked. And I know it’s not much in the way of choice, considering your Jack cracking off one extra joke affects literally nothing in the plot. But it goes right back to what I was saying. It’s refreshing to have the game offer me the option of Jack not taking this all too seriously.

Because I don’t know if you missed it, but I mentioned flaming shurikens, parkour shootouts, and a boss fight in the sky on top of giant aircraft carrier sized aircraft.

Writing Jack as being as solemn and gritty as protagonists in these types of games almost always inevitably are would’ve been the worst, most boring thing. And it would’ve created a massive disconnect between what the player was getting to experience and the character’s demeanor.

I have but two major complaints, regarding this campaign, which I have thus far only been complimenting.

For one thing, it’s very short. Four to six hours, depending on how much trouble that flying mech boss gives you. Not criminal, but definitely the kind of thing that’ll disappoint some people. For my money, I’ll admit, it left me wanting more. Not to say it felt rushed. The pacing was just fine. But what was there was pretty good, and I want a second helping. So far I haven’t heard anything about plans for DLC, as in a proper expansion with new missions and all, but I’d buy it. Seems like all the planned DLC is focused on the sprucing up that separate multiplayer camp though.

Problem number two is a lack of time spent with ally pilots. There’s a segment toward the end where you get to run with a whole squad of pilots who can all dash and jump and shoot like the player can. And it’s a total blast.

All my stellar abilities which helped me dominate normal ground soldiers got put into this whole new perspective when I was surrounded by people who could keep up with me. It helps the believability of what you’re capable of. Plus, fun activities often seem funner in a group. And something I really liked about it was the banter between pilots, as they challenged each other over certain jumps and patted each other on the back after others.

But then I realized what an outsider Jack actually was, as the other pilots suddenly stopped me to demonstrate how to do a particularly hard jump.

Game wise it made no sense, considering I’d been jumping all this time just fine. But logically it makes perfect sense. Jack never finished his pilot training, and these were all seasoned pros.

And that’s when it hit me.

I would have loved an entire game that was just that: a fresh rookie pilot gets thrown in with a bunch of skeptical veterans. He has to prove himself as he fails, jokes, and works his way into their good graces. What I got was good, don’t get me wrong. I loved watching the blossoming friendship between man and machine. But I briefly tasted something along these other lines in that one mission, and it made me realize how much more they could’ve done.

But of course, this goes back to problem A. Such a story would’ve required the game be longer. And I suppose I shouldn’t lament what something isn’t, rather than talk about what it is. And what it is, is a really solid, albeit very short campaign.

Oh, and I guess I should talk about the multiplayer at some point. Ok. Here goes.

The thing you have to understand with the multiplayer side of a game like this, is that you love it or you don’t. Player characters die very, very quickly. Thus, the outcome of most encounters will boil down to who spots whom first and pulls the trigger. And that kind of thing can get very frustrating very quickly if you simply don’t have the patience for it.

And that’s ok!

Make no mistake, I don’t mean that as a jab at anyone. It’s just that it’s hard to even talk about the multiplayer side of a game when it’s just not so many people’s cup of tea. I could go on and on about the rich flavor of this one particular type of tea, but if you simply prefer coffee, then my critique isn’t going to change your opinion on tea.

I guess I could say I appreciate the creative addition of game modes like bounty hunt.

Like with Splatoon, I’ve come to dote on games that give players ways of aiding the team without always having to directly engage enemy players. Bounty hunt loads the maps with waves of non-player fodder for each team to try and rack up as many points as possible. It’s way easier and more lucrative to lay into the non-player enemies than to engage enemy team members, so there’s something for everyone to do, despite possible skill gaps.

Only catch is, your points only count if you hit the bank with your deposit. And if you die along the way, you drop half your wallet, which other players get when they get you.

Similarly, they put a twist on the old multiple zone capture game mode that has the same effect. Rather than just capping the zone as per normal, and swiftly moving on, one or more players can choose to stay behind to double tap the zone, so to speak.

They call it amping, and though it takes a second to do, an amped zone gives your team double points. The amped status slowly fades away, so someone can always go back to it to refresh the amp. It’s a big help, without even having to aggress opponents in the open field. You still need to watch your back, of course, but it’s nice to have game modes where one can contribute to the team without having to be every bit as good as them at running, jumping, and shooting.

It’s just solid game design. It allows newer and less experienced players to have a more flexible learning curve, while still contributing something to the team effort.

Speaking of team effort, one of my new favorite mechanics is the addition of batteries. When you hop onto an enemy titan, or run through the wreckage of one as a pilot, you can steal or pick up an extra large battery. And then you can point at a friendly titan in action, call out to them to let let them know about the extra battery, and run up to slot it in. This regenerates the titan’s healthbar. You could even hold onto batteries or seek them out for your own titan. Either way, it adds a great extra wrinkle of a strategic element to the game.

What’s that? Actual strategic play that encourages and rewards team coordination by weakening foes and reinvigorating allies? In a game not too dissimilar from CoD of all things? Madness.

It almost sounds as if the developers care about the design of their game or something abnormal like that.

Guess there’s no point in trying to hide it, now. I think TF2 is a better CoD than CoD. Or at least, it’s a stellar alternative. The complex movement can create a higher skill barrier, true. But once you get the gist of it, at least, there’s so much more you can do with it than CoD will do for you.

Not to say it’s perfect though. Which it’s definitely not.

For example, I never could find any kind of use for any of the assault rifles. Sure, they have better range than anything in the SMG list. But SMG’s with their higher fire rates yielded better results for me every time. Even in mid range encounters, it consistently felt like simply spraying more projectiles per second to canvas a target area just worked better. Since it doesn’t take much damage to polish off a pilot.

Certain other aspects of balance in general leave a little to be desired as well.

Sometimes, a match is pretty much decided the instant one team unlocks a titan first. Being the first team to have a tank amongst infantry can cause a breakaway lead. And a huge enough gap early on can feel downright impossible to close, all other things being equal.

Maybe a mechanic could be implemented to offer the highest scoring player on a losing team easier access to their titan? That would at least give losers a stronger fighting chance.

Of course, it might also help if certain titans weren’t plain better than others.

I feel safe in saying Ion is the objectively worst titan on the entire list. Nobody ever falls for your giant glowing tripwire trap. Nobody. It’s completely useless. Northstar’s tether trap has a similar effect, but actually works. Only, Northstar’s greatest advantage is also its biggest weakness; hovering high in the air is great for sniping over cover, but it also makes you a sitting duck, with the lowest health bar among the titans to boot.

Main issue I have is that dodging and shielding effectively achieve the same goal: not taking damage. Only, while dodging you can’t attack. Whereas titans with shield abilities such as Tone and Legion can negate damage and deal it at the exact same time. Couple that with Scorch and its extreme damage over a massive potential area, and it didn’t take long for those three titans to start occupying every match I came across.

Scorch’s flame shield also deals damage to anything it touches while blocking projectiles, come to think of it.

Perhaps if there was some kind of caveat, the tank and spank method could become less prominent. Like if the tankier titans had a much longer cooldown rate on the generic anti-infantry tool that keeps pilots from clambering all over titans and stomping on them. I feel like it should kind of be the point of having bigger, slower units: that they can take a lot of abuse, but not be able to avoid a good finishing blow where it counts.

That’s just me though. I’m not deep enough into the game to discuss all the delicate intricacies of its mechanics and counter mechanics. What I can tell you though is that it still feels great to play. There’s even more fun mobility options in the multiplayer side of things. Using the grappling hook to chase down and mount titans, friend and foe alike, was always satisfying.

It reminded me of that one really popular anime that everyone loved until they didn’t.

All said and done though, if you don’t like the genre, Titanfall 2 probably isn’t going to do quite enough to change your mind. But if you’re anything like me, you’re still sort of interested in the genre but feeling pretty cynical and ultimately burnt out on the very notion of a multiplayer focused, run and gun, “no shields, we die like men,” sort of game. In that case, TF2 might be just what the doctor ordered. There’s definitely enough different juices flowing through it to revitalize my interest in the concept, at least.

There is a tough road ahead of this one though, given it released sandwiched between the new Call of Duty and Battlefield, the two single biggest multiplayer shooter franchises of the last decade. But as far as I’m concerned, this titan has done more than enough to earn its place beside those juggernauts.

Plus, I can actually play the game offline this time around!

[gaming-rabbot]

Of ice and salt. So, so very much salt. 

If I may quote Plague of Gripes, because it’s very fitting: 

“I enjoy it in my own way. By hating it.”