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twitter didnt appreciate this one

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nintendo is taking down the 3ds and wii u eshops next year

and they had this lovingly made totally not taunting message to leave about their virtual console legacy they’re destroying

(that they’ve, fun fact, taken down from their site now :])

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by  saeed farhangian

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[thehallofgame]

This city will bleed you dry.

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE - BLOODLINES 2 (2020)

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I was kind of hyped for some FF7:Remake news at E3 when I made this. Too bad Square’s conference was so lame. Oh well! Enjoy this Aerith art nouveau.

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Review - From Dust

Release: 2011

Technical Score: 6/10

Enjoyability Score: 6/10

Following the path of the Ancients

                I don’t know if this game was falsely advertised or if I just didn’t read the fine text, but man was it a let down. Repetitive, replete with frame drop issues, and with about no sense of advancement, From Dust doesn’t go anywhere. That’s kind of sad in a game about a pilgrimage.

              The concept here was to put the player into the role of a god whose role is shepherding a nomadic people along a journey and protecting them by manipulating the very environment in which they live. What actually happens doesn’t quite live up to expectation, however, as the game is largely based on two mechanics and some questionable AI.

              The player has control of The Breath, a magical force capable of changing the environment that is represented by a swirling cursor and controlled by the mouse. The breath tells a group of migrating human people what their next goal is by clicking on one of a few options: village sites, totems, or magical gateways that lead the people to the next level. The environments the people settle in along their journey are increasingly hostile, with periodic flooding, volcanic eruptions, implausible tectonic activities and more. It is the player’s job to manipulate the landscape to prevent these events from destroying the human’s villages. Therefore, the main mechanic in the game is lifting things up and putting them down. As the game continues the player’s repertoire of things they can lift up and put down expands, but this remains the core mechanic. Dirt is the first option, it can be used to form pathways, raise the elevation of important objects, and provide space for the greenery and animals attracted by the humans to expand to. Later, the player gains the ability to move water and even lava, which creates more permanent barriers than dirt when it cools.

              Most maps require multiple villages to be successfully settled in order to unlock the door to the next map. Each village settled, up to four per map, gives the player access to powers that enhance the Breath. Mapped to number keys 1 through 4, these powers either make resource movement faster or help to stave off disaster. This is supposed to add strategy elements to the game as gaining powers makes difficult places to settle more accessible or safer. In reality, however, strategy is usually overshadowed by the urgent need for speed. Villagers are limited and if they all die out it’s a game over. Therefore, particularly on the later game maps, it’s a race to get villagers settled and fortified behind dirt or lava-stone walls before flood or fire can kill them all.

              Then it’s onwards to the next settlement or goal, which is where things become ‘interesting’ (read: frustrating). In order to settle a new village 5 humans must successfully travel to the site and establish the settlement. They need The Breath to help them by making the paths safe, which is fairly self explanatory. However, you can lead a human to the safe path, but apparently you can’t make the AI choose to take it. The humans attempt to take a path of least resistance, but tend to get stuck, call for help (endlessly) and then attempt to improvise. As natural disasters in the game occur cyclically, about one a minute, there’s a limited window of safety to move villagers in. When they get stuck, or go rogue, they soon end up scattered, isolated, and dying to the forces of nature. Meanwhile, the game erodes the protection of earlier settlements, so while the player is out trying to herd humans across the big, obvious land bridge they built, it’s a good bet an earlier settlement has just flooded out and will need to be re-settled. The one saving grace of this system is that if a human is successfully dispatched to study at idols around the map it will give the villagers of their home village access to magic, called songs in game, to prevent natural disasters. After one village is protected, a runner will be sent to other villages and if he can be maneuvered successfully, all the villages will be safe from then on.

              Annnd… that’s it. Populating all of the villages allows the player to send the humans through a magical tunnel to the next map where it all happens all over again. If you’re interested in the story you can always send the men to investigate additional totems or make the land safe enough for a large amount of animal life to get established, which will unlock bits of flavor text to further explain the origins of these people and that of the ancestors they believe they’re following. The gameplay and the story is pretty much an endless repetition, however, and while each map might nudge the difficulty up or introduce a new tweak to the powers, nothing ever feels surprising enough to warrant playing this game all the way through.

              This feels and plays like a beta. It’s not even polished enough to be a demo. There’s framedrop issues, the AI is terrible, the game’s graphics are horribly limited and the map design isn’t terribly creative. Maybe the gimmick was cute when this game came out, but it certainly hasn’t aged well. I’m rarely enthused to have to use Ubisoft’s Uplay to access a game, and this time the reward certainly wasn’t worth the headache.

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Review - The Evil Within

Release: 2014

Technical Score: 7

Enjoyability Score: 7

              Were it not for being released at precisely the right time, in the wake of the horror revival caused by The Last of Us, The Evil Within might have flown under the radar. The game has little to recommend it other than that it scratches the itch for old-school survival horror gameplay and tropes. There is precious little innovation here and the story doesn’t do much to make up the difference. Gameplay is very similar to that of Resident Evil 4, the game’s insane asylum meets dimension-hopping story is a little stale, tragically undermined by awful dialogue and game design that falls into old mistakes. It doesn’t help that the PS4 port I played for this review seemed to enhance only flat character model textures, jerky animations, and framerate drop issues. There is a great deal of throw-back charm here, but the game is also caught in the same limbo survival horror had been largely trapped in for the last several years: the game isn’t sure if it’s a shooter or a stealth game, if it’s psychological horror or b-movie jump scare/body horror.

              To describe the story too much would be to give major spoilers as the core of the game’s plot is the main character’s quest to figure out what’s happening and reunite with other people he knows. The player steps into the curiously old fashioned looking shoes of Detective Sebastian Castellanos. He, along with his partner Joseph and a trainee named Kidman, have been called to a disturbance at the local mental hospital. When they enter, they see an absolute bloodbath as staff, patients, and responding officers have all been massacred. Soon after, every surviving person is transported into a series of strange worlds infested by zombie-like creatures.

              Generally, the aim of each of the game’s chapters is to explore to try and find clues to what is going on and/or other non-hostile people. Different worlds have different themes, though it’s not uncommon to visit the same ones repeatedly, slightly changed. Alongside the linear story worlds is a mirror universe that can be accessed at will by looking into certain mirrors. Inside the mirror universe, Sebastian finds himself in what appears to be a small mental hospital. Therein the player can manually save the game (otherwise only available at the end of chapters), read some newspapers that give insight into events occurring outside the strange mental hospital, and use keys hidden around the game to open storage lockers. The lockers contain ammunition for Sebastian’s weapons and bonus bottles of a mysterious green gel, which acts as the currency to improve Sebastian’s skills. Finding these keys adds incentive for exploring the game carefully, if finding the documents and audio-recordings that add context to events going on around Sebastian weren’t enough.

              Green gel is the key to advancement, and perhaps the only truly developed-feeling feature of gameplay. Sebastian begins the game as weak as a kitten, sprinting like an overweight chain-smoker, and with the inventory capac3ity of a baby holding things in their clenched fists. Gel, and the ability to customize Sebastian is, therefore, the most precious resource in a game with extremely limited resources. Gel is hidden around maps, and occasionally dropped by enemies, but is ultimately much more limited than a player would like. The player will be forced to customize their play style via upgrades as the gel controls everything from Sebastian’s health and sprint speed to his weapon damage and inventory space. Upgrades are all very specific and there are many of them. To pursue a balanced approach is to be master of nothing, which is a dangerous line to walk.

              Most gameplay is a mix of stealth segments and combat. Ammunition is very limited and quite easy to run out of, so the idea is to use stealth systems and environmental features to maximize deadliness and minimize ammo expenditure. Like many stealth-shooter hybrids the system shines in some scenarios and feels horribly awkward and forced in others. Crouching and sneaking up behind enemies allows Sebastian to kill most basic enemies without expending resources. However, later in the game enemies can be briefly blinded or stunned and then stealth killed, which involves sprinting up to the enemies, running behind them and crouching before being able to deliver the coup de grace, which wastes the precious time before enemies aren’t vulnerable any longer. Like many games in this genre, there is the ubiquitious “throw bottle to distract enemies “ mechanic, which works as well as it always does: about half of the time. It doesn’t help that one usually has to leave cover to toss the bottle, and with enemies’ line of sight being unpredictable, it’s just a toss up whether the player will get the desired result or a frustration headache instead.

              Another of the game’s systems is based on fire, and particularly matches, another consumable resource. Basically, all enemies in the game are extremely flammable, which makes fire a potent weapon. Some environmental objects can be set on fire, but more importantly, the bodies of enemies that are either actually dead or just laying in wait can be set on fire. With good enough timing, lighting a body on fire can also light up any enemies around it or that walk over it. This is a useful mechanic, and occasionally it’s literally necessary to get through the level. So it’s major bummer that having things that should burn not prompt the command to light a match is probably the game’s most common glitch.

              Another fun gimmick is traps scattered throughout the levels. Most troublesome are the hard to see trip-wires and the pipe-bombs, which involve a minigame to disarm. Failing the minigame results in the bomb going off in Sebastian’s face. Every other trap can be disarmed without so much drama, though, and salvaged for materials. Said materials can then be used to craft bolts for the Agony Crossbow, the game’s signature weapon. While all the other weapons have one ammo type the crossbow has an assortment of bolts cycled via the reload button. Each bolt has a different effect and tends to be very useful both in crowd clearing and boss fights.

              Combat is otherwise fairly standard, and leans to the high-stakes side. Enemies do a lot of damage, Sebastian does comparatively little. For example, taking a headshot only lends a certain (upgradable) percent chance of a critical hit. Most enemies are just fine after having their head blown off without the critical. All weapons, including the thrown ones, use the left trigger to aim and the right trigger to fire. Sebastian also has a melee attack, but unless an enemy is prone, it’s more useful for smashing open crates than damaging enemies. Generally, the combat system feels good, but occasionally bogs down when large groups attack in small spaces.

              Mechanics are fine. What unfortunately undermines the game the most is some truly horrific scenario designs. The game likes to have the player sprint away from something, turning the camera to face Sebastian’s front so that the player can see whatever’s chasing him, but not the obstacles they’re supposed to be dodging. Likewise, the game likes to have set-piece traps where the player has to do or shoot the right thing before getting gruesomely killed. Often the solutions to these situations are unintuitive, and the auto-save system doesn’t always pick up the slack. This is a shame because when the game doesn’t rely on gimmicks and set pieces it does put together some good sandboxes for using stealth tactics, or provide boss battles with environmental features that can be used to defeat enemies with guile instead of brawn.

              The is the kind of game that comes out and people shrug and say merely that the intellectual property has potential. And this one does. The Evil Within took advantage of a space in the market for a new horror franchise, but it didn’t manage to carve out its own unique identity or nail any particular gameplay feel. All that really sets it apart is a somewhat incomprehensible plot that sometimes features and sometimes manages to obscure moments of good writing and/or game design. The game feels a bit too long, a bit too stagnant, and a bit repetitive. But it’s not bad. It’s just a bit too unpolished. What it is, also, is potential for a survival horror renaissance that sees big developers turn a more thoughtful eye to scaring players with ambiance and plot instead of jump scares and the newest, most detailed blood effects.

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An Update

So, due to a series of events, I’ve not been able to keep up with this blog. Hopefully after I graduate in the spring and if/when the local earthquake epidemic calms down I’ll be able to resume more regular posts. For now, however, I’m afraid I’ll have to continue a irregular schedule. I’m hoping to button up my Tomb Raider review series shortly. Alongside that I’ll probably be reviewing a lot of Kingdom Hearts games because I’m very excited for the new one. 

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Review - This is the Police

Release: 2016

Technical Score: 7

Enjoyability Score:5

Before you shake your game for the press, you should probably see how the professionals do it. (Make a game, that is).

                I was the target audience for this game and I was so ready. A strategy game about becoming a hardboiled cop months from retirement juggling his own corruption, politics, and subordinate policemen sounded great. I had my blinds half- closed, my noire soundtrack playing, and my coffee brewed darker and more bitter than these mean, mean city streets. So you can imagine my disappointment when I found the game slow, repetitive, and offensive to the senses.

              This game had a great concept but it seems like the devs stopped there. Basically, it’s a management sim that puts the player into the shoes of an aging police chief. A scandal has numbered their days in office and it’s up to the player to earn a comfortable sum for the chief to retire on. Agreeing to the mayor’s fickle demands can be leveraged for wages, favors for ‘friends’ nets some cash under the table, bigger favors for local mafia bosses nets even more cash, and occasionally, doing the police’s job right brings in a bounty on a wanted criminal.

              The game occurs in a (long) series of days in the chief’s life. The chief wakes up, gets some newspapers that provide the state of the city, goes to work, and sometimes afterwards there’s a bit of story cutscene that provides the context to the chief’s actions and allows the player to make some decisions to steer the story.

              There are two shifts of officers that work on alternating days. These shifts are composed of beat cops, a few detectives, a swat team, and later a paddy wagon (aka a big prisoner transport van). The action takes place on a city map. Emergency calls come in from across the city the chief dispatches resources. Most cases can be handled with a few officers, but others need a crowd of officers or could benefit from swat and/or the paddy wagon. Every dispatch takes a certain time to reach, respond to and return from, which means the officers are unavailable until they make it all the way back to the station (unlike in real life, where police forces have radios). Swat and the paddy wagon may only be used once a day, making them very precious resources. Occasionally, officers in the field will call in for the chief to make a decision about how they should approach a scenario, or to call for backup. This provides some limited interaction from the player, but that’s about as lively as the day gets. Detectives work in a similar way, except that they are instead dispatched to investigate crimes that have already happened such as robberies or murders. There’s a lead detective that gets sent out to get the ball rolling, and then once the investigation is started the chief can add more detectives from the cases menu. It’s usually a good idea to have detectives from both shifts working the case, because otherwise the case can only be advanced every other day.

              Solving the detective’s cases is an odd sort of mini-game. Initially the detectives come back with interview statements from witnesses that give the player a good idea of what happened. Then, day by day the detectives bring in literal picture snapshots of events. The player must arrange the correct snapshots in order to portray the crime, which breaks the case and allows the perpetrator to be arrested. Unfortunately, this minigame feels very silly in the first place because the interviews gathered on the first day are apparently all it takes to break the case, but it takes about an in-game week and some random guessing to, apparently, receive divine revelation of who the detectives should be sent to arrest.

              All of this stinks of wasted opportunity. All emergency calls boil down to deciding whether or not to respond, and how many people to send. There was an excellent chance to have even a simple tactical gameplay system, or even just a more in-depth choice system. Or at the very least some more variety as the calls the police get are the same over and over. Likewise, the detective’s cases were a wasted opportunity to get the player involved in selecting actual leads to follow and people to interview.

              As the game advances the chief has to navigate the pitfalls of his relationship with a selfish and capricious mayor, as well as a murderous local mob boss. Usually, both of these parties ask for officers to be sent or specifically not sent out as they require. Sometimes, either party has more complicated requests that involve changing staff or, ultimately, spending money.

              The chief’s money pool is the other major resource in the game beside his officers. Doing favors for private citizens or the mob earns big payouts, and staying in the mayor’s good books makes him more amenable to granting raises to the chief’s weekly salary. The goal of the game, after all, is to acquire 500,000 on the side in six months. However, there are constant draws on the money. Some are above-board, like arranging barbecues to keep officers happy or hiring consultants to help detectives. Other options become available over the course of the game that are more shady. These include ability to bribe officers so they don’t rat on the chief to government investigators, as well as increasingly dark mafia favors up to and including assassination of police personal in order to make space on the police force for new hires, which is a lot easier than finding reasons to fire cops. In fact, the system for dealing with politics and money-dispensation is a lot more expanded and detailed than any of the policing that takes up most of the time. I didn’t even unlock all of the options because I never made it far enough into the game.

              Why? First of all, the core gameplay is boring and repetitive. Every day the player fields the same handful of requests to skip work from officers, answers the same calls, and usually waits for a countdown to expire: time to the next mafia assignment, time till the mayor’s office can be approached for a favor again, time until officers return to the station, so they can be sent somewhere else. Second of all, the game is ugly. The city map the player spends all their time looking at is a white and grey representation of a downtown and some suburbs. It’s static, nothing moves except for the lighting that changes every several hours and the glowing lines of police cars going to destinations. The game was going for a simple, evocative art style that really works in the cutscenes. But in gameplay the stark lack of detail or shading makes for an eye-sore. Likewise, the game gets hard to listen to after a while. At the start of every day the player selects a vintage record to play while they manipulate events on the police map. The initial choices are jazz or one classical record. More can be ordered through a in-game catalog at great expense to the in-game currency, but there is never enough variety to prevent listening to the same music over and over and over. Of course, there’s always the option to go with silence instead.

              Unfortunately, This is the Police is a sad shadow of what it could have been. There’s great content in here somewhere. Many of the plot threads are intriguing and I’d have liked to see where they lead, but I didn’t have the endurance to make it through endless repetitions for long enough to resolve any of the game’s conflicts. Staring at the same scenery all the time, for hours on end just adds to the monotony. It’s hard to overstate how much the ball has been dropped here. With all the controversy surrounding policing all over the world right now it’s either the best or the worst time to make a game handling the intricacies of police corruption. But one thing’s for sure: it’s never a good time to waste a good concept on a bad game.

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Review - Frostpunk

Release: 2018

Technical Score: 9

Enjoyability Score: 9

The Frost is Here

              Just when you fought steampunk was finally dead, 11bit studios shows up late to the party with Starbucks. It’s probably iced coffee though because Frostpunk is all about keeping things cool.

              In a loosely defined alternate version of the nineteenth century, the apocalypse arrives in the form of an endless winter that promises only to get worse. Survivors from London trek ‘north’ to somewhere rich in coal deposits with which to power revolutionary steam generators that promise to sustain new colonies.

              The core gameplay of Frostpunk marries city building to resource management. While this isn’t a new concept, despite what the game’s advertising might have you believe, 11bit did do a first-rate job of perfecting the genre. Each of the game’s four core scenarios tells a unique story, offers a steep difficulty curve, and keeps things interesting all the way to the nail-biting end of each scenario. My only complaint here is that some of the stories feel too short, and that I’d love to see extended scenarios where the long-term story of the colonies are explored. That’s definitely a DLC I’d be willing to pay for, however, so maybe my complaint will eventually be resolved.

              The game’s first and core scenario is the least constrained story, but each follows the same general format. Survivors arrive at a generator site and the player, who is called The Captain, is to tell them what to do whilst keeping the populace alive and happy. The first order of business is gather coal to power the generator and resources to build a town. The people need shelter, food, medical care, and eventually an organizational structure to keep them content or quiet, as the case may be. All the while the player is fighting resource scarcity, the clock, the cold, and public opinion. It’s a volatile cocktail on normal difficulty, and on subsequent runs of the game there are plenty of options to tweak the difficulty further.

              While the learning curve is steep, and many players will probably have to restart a few times before getting the hang of things, there are several different and equally viable approaches to take to even the earliest stage of the game. Heating is the most critical resource and the only source of heat is the generator. All buildings are built in a circle around it, with streets carrying steam-pipes underneath to nearby buildings. Without steam the buildings don’t run, and if the buildings don’t run society quickly collapses. It’s an unforgiving concept, but unlike some strategy games, bad luck or mistakes don’t usually put the player in a death-spiral they can’t pull out of.

              The game begins with caches of resources piled around the generator that can be gathered by workers on foot, but those soon run out. The precious few buildings that can be erected with these resources act like the opening moves in a chess game. There’s a lot of ways to go about this, but some moves are more viable than others. A laboratory is essential in researching new technologies to erect new buildings and stretch resources. Critically, the beacon opens up the world map for exploration by scouts who advance the story and bring home desperately needed resources. Also needed, however, are houses for people to live in, sources of food, healthcare, and new buildings that allow the populace to retrieve the resources they need from their glaciated surroundings.

              Through it all the simple infallibility of being human hampers efforts. A law system allows the player to change their gameplay abilities, to extend working shifts, protect or exploit the workers, or placate them. The twin ratings of hope and discontent judge how comfortable the people are with their leader. Maximizing discontent or losing all hope will result in a game over (though given the unrelenting tone of the game this might come as something of a relief). Meanwhile, illness and infirmity also take their tolls. The sick and starving will die without help. People in treatment for ailments won’t go to work. People who live in too cold conditions lose limbs and become dependents.

              Meanwhile, in order to prevent all of this, the community must work like a machine to produce the resources needed to ensure their own continuity. Coal is the most indispensable resource because when the generator runs out the community can’t function properly. People can work in the cold, but at enormous risk to their health. Wood, steel, and food are necessary to sustain and expand the community. Engineers are specialized workers and the only ones capable of becoming researchers or doctors and are a particularly precious resource as, if there is a deficit at one of the positions, regular workers can’t be juggled into their place. Eventually, giant automatons become available to the player which can take over even engineering jobs with the proper upgrades. These units work 24 hours a day, unlike humans, though they’re much less efficient. But they also don’t require heating or get sick. Juggling the work force and their working hours is often essential to success, as the continued operation of buildings or the accumulation of desperately needed resources often hangs by a thread. Overworked employees tend to revolt, however, so the game becomes a constant dance of competing necessitates.

              Automatons, and upgraded forms of many buildings, require the most precious resource in the game: steam cores. These can’t be manufactured by the workers but must be found out in the wastes surrounding the generators or harvested from less-needed buildings/automatons. In all but one scenario there is a strictly limited amount of these cores, which makes their dispensation a white-knuckled experience in a game that is already stressful most of the time.

              The game is impressively story driven for a city building game. There’s always either a goal or a looming disaster to prepare for. The plot is either advanced by making discoveries out in the wild or by events occurring in the city after a certain period of time. These developments rarely feel forced, however, and ensue the entire game has a tight, driving narrative.

              The game balance hear is nearly perfect. Unlike many strategy games the late game doesn’t become boring, due in large part because if the player doesn’t advance the story, the game will take the choice out of their hands. There’s always something to prepare for or to react to, and that keeps things interesting right up until the bitter end. Frostpunk is a game you can play hours and hours playing, not even noticing the passage of time. Its design is familiar and simple but its concept is wholly original and so engaging as to make the game a unique experience.

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Review - Tomb Raider (2013)

Enjoyability Score: 9

Gameplay Score: 8.5

Tomb Raider Review Series: 9/11ish

              Tomb Raider is a series that loves a reboot. This time around it’s a hard reboot that aimed to change the essential feeling of the series and tell an origin story for Lara Croft. The game is almost perfect, with only the most minor of complaints marring the beautifully rendered blood and mud smeared masterpiece. The hard turn into a more adult-oriented, grungier aesthetic served the series well and somewhat offset the head-to-head competition the series was having with the Uncharted games. However, where it had drawbacks was in the game’s unprecedented, for the series, linearity, and the occasional awkwardness of the series’s characteristic high drama divorced from it’s original campy undertones.

              The game centers around a very young, too smart for her own good Lara Croft on her first archaeological expedition. Lara, and the whole expedition, wind up marooned on the mythical Japanese island they were hoping to find. Things rapidly get very deadly, fairly grisly, and extremely implausible. While Tomb Raider games don’t shy away from melodramatic plots about ancient magic, lost civilizations, and world ending calamities only Lara Croft can prevent, this time the game takes itself much more seriously. The story of the game is good, taking the player through what is essentially a coming of age narrative alongside a fight for survival (but against a crazy god-queen worshipping cult, nothing so mundane as starvation or other shipwreck related ailments). The writing is quite heavy handed in that it leans on many American movie tropes that lands it somewhere between an action-thriller movie and the adventure movies that originally inspired the series. Additionally, the game’s characterization sometimes frustrates by repeatedly making Lara a universally and instantly competent person at whatever she puts her hand to, and also with a great deal of story-telling gameplay dissonance. The most famous example of this is the way Lara bemoans killing in cutscenes but then mows down enemies without a flinch during normal gameplay. Another thing that occurs is the fact that Lara is suddenly much less deadly during dramatic story events than during normal gameplay. Normally I’d handwave this as gameplay contrivance, but it is irksome in a game that’s so cinematic in nature.

              Like the campy tone, much of the series’s flashier gameplay contrivances are gone. Lara’s signature dual wielding of pistols is over, replaced instead with a new signature weapon: a bow. Likewise, the over the top gymnastic feats of the earlier game have been pared down to more realistic scrambles and weighty-feeling leaps. However, this doesn’t drag the platforming down. It feels fluid and fun, with only the occasional hang-up on glitching collision mesh or when the game doesn’t properly register what the player is trying to do. The auto-save and checkpoint system is reliable enough that this is rarely an issue at all. It’s far less noticeable than the overwhelming fluidity of having Lara run up walls, leap across chasms, hurtle down zip lines, and use the climbing axe to traverse cliff faces.

              It’s a shame, then, that the game often interrupts these sequences with quick-time events that are little more than button mashing and slow-motion segments. These choices weren’t well received in the previous two games, and their unfortunate removal of player agency is even more of a head-scratcher when compared with several segments of linear platforming across collapsing structures that leave the player in control. Perhaps there were simply too many instances in the game that called for dramatic, collapsing set pieces for all of them to be timed escape runs, but that indicates a bad design decision, not a good reason to put in flawed gameplay mechanics.

              I’ve already mentioned the game’s linear nature, so I’ll get into it now. The island of Yamatai, on which the whole game takes place, is divided into a series of environments that basically follow one of two formulas: either a long winding corridor with puzzles and/or setpieces, or a large open area with narrow entrance and exit paths. The game feels like it’s funneling the player constantly forward, and it somewhat undermines the sense of exploration fostered in the earlier Tomb Raider games when a cutscene or a quick-time sequence interrupts the player’s wanderings to send them hurtling into the next level, unable to get back until they reach the level’s fast travel hub. It lends the story the sense of urgency it’s meant to convey and highlights the changes to narrative structure that came with the reboot, but it means that the game also feels a lot more like a 3rd person shooter than an adventure game.

              Luckily, the over-the-shoulder combat is solid and feels pretty good. It uses a fairly standard aim button and fire button system that is familiar and comfortable. Lara finds four projectile weapons over the course of the game, and her climbing axe is used as a melee weapons. Each of the weapons is upgradeable through a series of salvaged materials and specific parts scattered around the levels. By the end of the game each weapon will have an alternate firing method that can be used to launch grenades or grapples, and some have multiple types of ammunition with different effects. There’s a stealth system in play that’s fairly optional, though the player is strongly encouraged to use it in certain sections.

              The stealth system is largely dependent on the ‘survival instincts’ ability, which is new to this game. While standing still the player can hit a button which will render the world in grey-scale, highlighting interactable items in yellow, enemies who will cause an alarm if killed in red, and enemies who can be safely stealth killed in white. The yellow object act as a hint system, highlighting puzzle-solving objects, collectibles, and animals that can be hunted for extra experience points and salvage. The enemy coloration is supposed to help with the stealth system, and it does to a degree, though unreliably. Where enemies are mobile and moving around one another it’s easy enough to line up a shot with a silent weapon or to sneak up on them, but when enemies are stationary the mechanics meant to separate them don’t always work as intended and often triggers the alarm the player was trying to prevent. An alert causes at least one wave, often several, of enemies to appear and turn the fight into a bullet storm.

              A limited level-based progression system exists, with some choice in the order Lara obtains certain bonuses, though with the fact that all the options will be taken in the course of the game there’s little real customization available. That said, these choices do allow tailoring to playstyle in the beginning to middle in the game. Basically, there are three types of skills: experience bonuses, item-collecting bonuses, and combat bonuses.

              A big feature of the game is exploration and collectibles. Documents containing background information and boxes containing valuable relics are the flashiest rewards, with each relic having a unique look and some cultural/historical information for Lara to expound on when it’s discovered. While these kinds of goodies are always a delight, they make the game’s optional tombs all the more a disappointment. The optional tombs are really just a single platforming puzzle with a big box of salvage materials at the end. They’re more boring than the rest of the game and don’t provide new world-building information nor treasures. Which is, for lack of a better word, lame in a game literally called Tomb Raider.

              Ultimately, I’ve been griping about a lot of small things. By in large the updates the developers made to the series revitalized it, differentiated it from Uncharted, and made the game accessible to a more mainstream audience. While a lot of the things that were hallmarks of the series are gone there’s a strong argument to be made that it was past time for some of them to go. Tomb Raider tells a good story that, while over the top at times, feels like an updated version of the action-scientist tropes that inspired the series in the first place. Further, Lara’s origin story concurrent with her discovery that unexplained phenomena exist in the world sets the stage for the games that were to follow.

[thehallofgame]

Review - Tomb Raider Underworld

Release: 2008

Tomb Raider Review Series: 8/11ish

Technical Score: 8/10

Enjoyability Score: 8/10

Puppet no Longer

                Tomb Raider: Underworld picks up where Tomb Raider: Legend left off and is the final game in what has since come to be known as the Tomb Raider Trilogy. (The remake of the original Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider: Anniversary is the third game in the trilogy. I don’t plan to review it as part of the current series). Lara is now following the trail of her father who, with his untimely death, left behind an unfinished search for Avalon. Underworld quickly leaves the Arthurian themes of the previous game behind and replaces them with Norse mythological underpinnings. Avalon, it seems, is intimately related to one of several ancient Norse underworlds, each with physical locations around the world. Villain Amanda Everett returns from Legend, joined by Jaqueline Natla (from the original game/Anniversary), to foil Lara’s efforts.

              Underworld is a somewhat more polished extension of Legend, and for the most part, improved. The game is just a touch edgier, just a touch more explosion-y, and tonally closer to pre-Legend games. Among the best changes are that quick time events are gone, the worst of the player-killing camera angles are gone, and inventory space is expanded to remove the limitations on how many health packs can be carried. The game is beautiful and has the music to match, though some of the environments and ruin-interiors can get a little samey after a while. The one thing that really detracts from the beauty is that the exaggerated artistic stylings of Legend don’t play as well in HD, and there’s clearly been less attention devoted to the supporting character’s models. Standing side by side with Lara, her support staff, Zip, Alistair, and her trusty butler look like they’re from a much lower budget game.  

              Ultimately, this is the theme that’s going to characterize this whole review: point and counterpoint. Tomb Raider Underworld is more or less on par with its predecessor. It’s a solid game but hard to follow without having played Legend. If you played and liked Tomb Raider Legend, you’ll like this game. If you didn’t like Legend, you probably won’t like this one.

              My biggest gripe with Tomb Raider Legend, a game I love, is with the camera and how it interacts with combat. For the most part that’s been cleaned up in Underworld. The camera sometimes still sticks in unfortunate angles during platforming, but during combat, it tends to follow Lara a lot closer and rarely causes mishaps. Once again, Lara can carry two sets of weapons: her pistols and another gun that’s selected by the player at the start of every mission. The bonus gun has limited ammunition so it’s best to use this weapon judiciously. Likewise, Lara begins every mission with several grenades that won’t be restocked. Weapon aiming uses the same system as before, in that it locks on to the closest visible enemy and the analogue switch must be tilted to swap targets. Overall, combing firing weapons, platforming, and performing evasive dodges and jumps is smoother than ever. There’s even a system that allows the player to use ‘adrenaline’ that charges as Lara deals damage. Adrenaline slows time down, during it Lara does more damage, and can also, as it happens, do some pretty cool melee moves on targets. Melee attacks take a bigger role than they did in the previous game, perhaps simply because enemies tend to get closer than they once did, but either way it’s pretty satisfying to roundhouse shot-gun wielding goons before finishing them off with your weapon of choice. The returning grenades are useful in a couple of contexts, not just crowd clearing but also in damaging some of the bigger or faster enemies in the game. They can be a double-edged sword though because they’re ‘sticky’ grenades that will adhere to enemies, potentially blowing Lara up with them if the enemy reaches her before the grenade detonates.

              Platforming is largely exactly as it was in Legend. The magnetic grappling hook makes a big return for use in some dramatic and stunning puzzles, though it takes on a whole new scope as the environments are far bigger than they were in Legend. A major-ish new addition was the ability for Lara to do wall-kicks to traverse upwards between two smooth rock faces. Unfortunately, given a certain floatiness and slight delay to the controls which is easy to adapt to for most other parts of the game, the timing required for the wall kicks can be fiddly, evenly smugly reluctant to work right. While fun in concept, the wall kick platforming leads to a lot of falls, damage, and often deaths that would have been avoided by having the typical series of ledges and rock walls to traverse. Lara feels heavier and slower than she did before, perhaps as a nod to realism. For me, this led to some timing issues as Lara didn’t react as fast I wanted. This usually wasn’t an issue, but as this game replaced quick time event sequences by events where time slows down and Lara must use lighting reflexes to escape a surprise attack or a crumbling hand-hold, fast reflexes on the player’s part were pretty much punished. Basically, the average player is going to input commands much faster than Lara executes them during these scenes as a matter of habit. I can’t count how many times my muscle memory over corrected because Lara hadn’t moved yet, and when she did move I’d already sealed her fate (death) by my instinctive reactions. So, in this way, while most of the technical platforming issues of Legend were ironed out, the platforming and daring gymnastic feats had lost their weightless acrobatic feel.

              The puzzles and set-pieces are larger and more dramatic than ever before. You can tell Crystal Dynamics were having a field day with the bright new horizons of high definition gaming. There are 6 locales in the game, each location is broken up into several levels. Sometimes an entire level will be one massive puzzle. This involves a lot of backtracking, and more than one timed sprint across the entire level. I found that the sheer size and wonder of manipulating moving pieces across monolithic sized temples and sprawling labyrinths make up for any annoyance. As does the fact that as Lara’s repertoire of gadgets and magical artifacts expand so too do the ways said tools are used to solve puzzles.  Sometimes the question of how to proceed can have no obvious answers, and it’s possible to get lost in the weeds (sometimes literally). While this is heavily reminiscent of earlier games, what’s not is the in-game help system that can be accessed through the menu that’s more apt to tell you that you need to go to the big obvious thing, rather than tell you how to get there. That kind of adds insults to injury in a way the early games didn’t.

              Two things that Tomb Raider Legend did well in comparison to previous entries make a very noticeable return: swimming and driving. For a swimming system, Underworld does acceptably. It takes a long time, especially as diving down to undersea ruins in a recurring theme. As in the previous game, the player can mash a button to have Lara swim (and shimmy along ledges) faster, but changing direction is awkward and often disorienting. Combat can be difficult underwater as it can only be accomplished with the spear gun that has to be selected at the start of the level. That’s not always useful anyway as it takes a long time to reload and is noticeably inaccurate, even if you wait to fire until Lara is staring down a shark’s throat. Driving, meanwhile, is fairly fun when it’s casual. The bike is fast and, using a controller at least, I had a good time drifting around corners and jumping off of ramps. But, especially on PC versions of this game, some timed races on the bike are utterly unforgiving for the uncoordinated. To make matters worse, given the size of the level resetting and trying again can take minutes.

              Forgive me for not going into depth here, but I’ve played many of these games this year and Tomb Raider has always had a slow growth-curve. Which is a good thing considering it’s a series that, for the most part, has nailed a winning formula for decades. Tomb Raider is no exception. The only differences in gameplay between Legend and Underworld are tweaks, and whether they comparatively improve the game or not is down to taste. I definitely don’t recommend playing Underworld without first playing Legend, and that’s played into my brevity. They’re both good games, but they’re better together.

[thehallofgame]

Review - DreadOut

Release: 2014

Technical Score: 5/10

Enjoyability Score: 8/10

We’re all dying waiting for you to get here.

              I can’t tell you where I first heard of this game. It just showed up in the consciousness of the survival horror gaming community one day. It combined the gameplay and tonal leanings of Fatal Frame with the unique and engrossing mythology of Indonesia. The result was a two-part game that struggled valiantly to display good writing and awesome game direction through buggy mechanics and outdated graphics. It’s also worth an honorable mention right off the bat that the game had a significant gap in release dates between parts one and two, and that part two fixed many of the problems that plagued part one.

              This is a game that by its very nature isn’t going to appeal to everyone. DreadOut is heavily inspired by 2000’s era survival horror and the Fatal Frame series (also known as Project Zero) in particular. It does, however, fit cozily into a niche that had been left void outside Japan for a long while. The main character is Linda, one of several teenagers whose van becomes lost on a school trip, stranding them in an abandoned village. As Linda drifts between waking and dreams she finds herself alone except for a myriad of strange creatures she can only drive away by photographing them with her cellphone.

              Part 1 features the outskirts of the town and a large high school building in traditional survival horror tone, and part 2 has faster paced action-oriented segments throughout the residential areas of the town. The story is extremely vague, told through documents and the occasional chatty enemy. What can be pieced together from hints and the game’s visual storytelling is often contradictory, and it soon becomes apparent that someone or something has been lying. If you’re not familiar with Indonesian mythology it makes the story, and the tropes supporting it, completely unfamiliar. For me, that was a breath of fresh air after decades of the same horror tropes. It also means that all the pondering in the world may not make the story clear to a non-Indonesian player. The only problem I have with the story, however, is that the protagonist, Linda, is completely silent alongside a voice acted cast.

              Concept and game design are really solid. Unfortunately, it’s clearly the engine that lets the game down. Many people are turned off immediately by the game’s graphics, which look about ten years out of date. Combine that with buggy gameplay and clunky controls and it’s another black mark against the game. Finally, playing this game on PC caused me some motion-induced nausea, though it went away when I switched to playing on my TV. However, that remains something to take into account for fellow sufferers.

              For the most part, gameplay is centered around exploration, searching for items and the solutions to puzzles. Many puzzles make use of the camera mechanic, having the player frame photos in certain ways to reveal secrets or to effect the environment via Linda’s mysterious power. These puzzles are highly hit and miss. When they work, they’re clever and satisfying, but sometimes they’re incomprehensible, require unintuitive steps, or are heavily prone to frustrating, otherwise undetectable glitches. When something seems like it should be working and isn’t rebooting the game is usually the answer.

              As Linda variously explores or tries to escape she encounters various entities from Indonesian mythology and folklore. Most enemies can be defeated by photographing them with Linda’s trusty cell phone or the more modern camera she finds later on, but other enemies require special tricks or puzzles to be solved before defeating them. Others must merely be endured. Enemy encounters, particularly boss battles, are where DreadOut really shines. What developers Digital Happiness couldn’t do with their technological capabilities they more than made up with gameplay design. I’d have to give spoilers to say more, but many enemy encounters in the game are among the most dynamic I’ve played in this genre. Both their obstacles and solutions are clever, tricky, and surprisingly intuitive. The system in the second half of the game in which Linda has two camera options is an innovative twist. The phone is useful as a flashlight, and ‘sees’ better in the dark, but has a smaller viewfinder than the SLR camera. The camera also has a flash feature which lights up an entire room for a moment, which is useful in and out of combat.

              With all this going for the game it’s a shame the engine wasn’t just a touch more stable. Aside from the fact that sometimes things that should work simply don’t, another issue is the game’s performance itself. It looks old, it feels old, but it needed settings cranked up to maximum on my PC to run smoothly. Meanwhile, the camera was jerky, and in finder mode it can be hard to track enemies as smoothly as desired. The camera has a nasty habit of jerking or over-correcting at poor moments. Death has limited consequences, merely a repetitive sequence of Linda running back towards an increasingly distant light, but it can be very frequent in the hardest boss battles. Anything the makes deaths more frequent, especially when it’s the game’s fault and not the player’s, is not appreciated. Meanwhile, Linda and the camera are both clunky and prone to not going where the player wants. Again, not game-ruining, but certainly a persistent inconvenience.

              DreadOut makes the best out of limited components. Back in the day, Gamespot used to attach ‘stickers’ to the tops of their reviews that gave the highlights of a game’s features. Right now, I wish I could borrow the ‘better than the sum of its parts’ sticker. Because at the end of the day, that’s exactly what DreadOut is. Despite being hamstrung by technological limitations it did what it wanted to do and managed to display some impressive creative chops in the process. It wasn’t going to win any awards overseas, but it has generated a small cult following, and apparently enough profit to enable a sequel which I eagerly await. DreadOut is just the right length and difficulty to fill a weekend, and with a low pricetag on steam might be just right for anyone looking to get spooked just a little off the beaten path.

[thehallofgame]

Review - Tomb Raider Legend

Release: 2006

Technical Score: 7

Enjoyability Score: 8

Tomb Raider Review Series: 7/11ish

This is always what it’s been about.

              The second soft reboot in what would soon prove to be a chain of them, Tomb Raider: Legend both eschewed the sequelential numbering system and the cliff-hanger ending of Tomb Raider 6: Angel of Darkness. No one seemed to mind much. Legend managed to do what the developers had been trying to do since Tomb Raider 4, that is: update the gameplay, incorporate more active story-telling, and yet still maintain the sense of starry-eyed discovery. The game is by no means perfect and most of the complaints lodged against it are valid. Its occasionally odd camera angles lead to poorly aimed jumps with often deadly results, it relies on quick time events which can be a nightmare on PC, and the levels are very linear. Combine that with the fact the game swapped the silent isolation of the early games for two wise-cracking sidekicks pipping in via radio, and Tomb Raider: Legend feels almost as big a departure as Angel of Darkness was. The difference is that this departure actually went somewhere.

              Legend opens with Lara climbing up a sheer cliff in Bolivia, leaving the grunge-goth of the early 2000s and any mention of the previous game behind her. She is on the trail of her past in the form of a mysterious stone artifact that was involved in the decades-old disappearance of her mother. In a storyline very similar to that of the early tomb raider games, Lara is opposed by a shadowy group of thugs looking for the same clues she is. The race to claim a collection of ancient sword fragments takes Lara all over the world, bouncing between a pleasing mix of urban, rural, and ancient-ruin maps. Along the way she is supported by a small staff of characters who banter about Lara’s exploits in the field via radio and appear in vignettes between levels. Lara’s tech guy Zip and her butler both made appearances in earlier games, but the sardonic historian Alistair is a new character.

              Exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat were redesigned to evoke a flowing, seamless stream of motion reminiscent of the (at the time) fast-expanding parkour-based genre. It largely works, with the player able to move Lara from jump, to dive, to rope swing with speed and grace, provided they got the timing right. Near misses can often be resolved by responding to a quick button prompt to have Lara fix her grip on the ledge she was sliding off of. Meanwhile, formerly slow and tedious processes like shimmying across ledges and swimming across the surface of water can be sped up, once again, by pressing a button in time to Lara’s motion. The only significantly new addition to Lara’s platforming arsenal (aside from a self-recharging flashlight) is a magnetic grappling hook that both allows Lara to set up ropes to swing on/climb and to manipulate out-of-reach metal objects to solve environmental puzzles.

              Combat follows suit and is both faster and more streamlined than in previous games. Lara has her signature pistols and one other weapon slot she can fill with guns dropped by her enemies. Weapons are swapped easily by the tap of a button without having to pause combat. Likewise, Lara can carry up to four grenades and chuck them with a button press. Medi-packs are also mapped to a button and deploy with a tap to restore a set amount of HP. Aiming is automatic, with each weapon having a different effective distance. The system is fairly reliable at targeting the closest enemy on screen, but the lock-on is iffy and must be swapped to the next nearest enemy with a button press. This doesn’t always cycle to the desired enemy. Between a sometimes inconvenient camera, the need to manually swap between enemies, and the necessity of dodging and rolling around the battlefield, combat is both fast paced and tricky.

              This issue is further exacerbated by the multiple motorcycle combats in the game. The driving controls are simple enough: turn, accelerate, brake, and shoot. It is the high speed, tight turns, and the required mastery of both while also engaging in combat that make these segments both fun and quick to overstay their welcome. Trying to chase down enemies at high speeds is distracting and leads to a lot of crashes or slow deaths because grabbing health packs while on motorcycle-back is tricky.

              This all adds up to a fun, if occasionally frustrating, game. The story is tighter and more cinematic than in previous games. It gets a little campy at times, but that’s deeply reflective of the earlier Tomb Raider games. All told, Legend is technically solid and it finally gave the series the revamp it needed. Even the least charitable players will usually admit Legend and its two sequels, together often dubbed the Tomb Raider Trilogy, were the fuel that kept the series going until its wildly successful reboot by Sqaure Enix in 2013. As for me, Legend was the first Tomb Raider game that I really sunk my teeth into, and it’s still my favorite.

[thehallofgame]

A brief comeback

Hi guys! I’m back for a little while, probably until mid-January when I head back to school. I can’t promise any sort of schedule, but I hope to post on Sundays for a while.

In other news, I’m going to try and go to a 2-score model for a while to see how it goes. one score for raw enjoyability, and another for technical performance of the game.

[thehallofgame]