Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Review: Necrovision
The premise of Necrovision is that an allied soldier in World War 1 happens finds that not only must he fight Germans, but that vampires and zombies and all manner of supernatural creatures are suddenly and inexplicably attacking him. Thus he must descend into the bowels of no-man's land to hunt the undead and save his soul. If you thought this was the short description of the shittiest game in existence, you were right. I'm sorry, usually I try to make my opening paragraph a teaser, but the absolute awfulness of this game makes it impossible to contain my bile entirely below the jump.
Graphics -
Never has current gen graphics (not to mention the havok physics engine) been abused to no good purpose. Most of the models are well done, the textures are high res, but the models you see most in cutscenes must have been done in a hurry at the last minute because they bend and twist their polygons in odd fashion and make you think you're watching something from 10 years ago only in higher res. Throw into the mix that half the game is too dark and cluttered for you to see what the hell you're supposed to be shooting at, much less appreciate any of the artistry that has gone into any of the game material. 
Sound -
It's really hard to screw up the sound portion. Usually the worst I can say about a game is "there is sound, but it is not especially noteworthy." Well, Necrovision takes us to new lows. Even from a technical standpoint. The loud portions are too loud, the soft portions are too soft, there is no way to independently adjust these separate portions, and for some reason the game decides to disable my ability to adjust my computer's volume via the volume controls at the top of my keyboard. Even getting past that, the dialogue is some of the worst gobbledygook that has ever assaulted my ears in either game, tv show, or movie. And that's saying a lot, because I've watched A Polish Vampire in Burbank. Every other line uttered by the protagonist left me audibly asking "...whuh?" He's supposed to be American, but I can't imagine an American (even in 1916) saying the things he says. It makes me think he's using some kind of slavic turns of phrase that don't translate well. I shot somebody with a rifle, and my guy said "Now you're well cooked, and easy on the onions!" ...What? Half the time it also sounds like the wrong dialog files got put in my character's audio folder. Between shouts of "Yee haw! Take that sucker!" and "Screw this!" in an accent that can't decide whether it's midwestern or texan, suddenly my guy will bellow "Respect my skills!" like some kind of poorly translated samurai movie. The germans are not immune to silly phrases either. Often, one of them will shout "I am defending!" as if he thinks this is not patently obvious, or perhaps he expects a medal for shooting back at attackers.
Control -
Usually I don't need to put in a section on Control any more. Most First Person Shooters have the same controls. WASD to move, click to shoot, some minor variations after that, but usually it's not something you have to write about. But I have to bring it up here because the controls are unresponsive and clunky. Your character is also completely incapable of stepping over the lowest of obstacles (such as a corpse) without you using the jump key... and for some reason early 20th century Americans seem to be able to jump higher than Super Mario. That's right, I can clear entire barbed wire walls in a single bound, but I can't step over a two-by-four lying in my path. The "Crouch" key is also near worthless since your guy ducks about a grand total of eight inches. The scheme for weapon selection is nigh-unforgivable. Sure, you've got 3 for rifle, 4 for shotgun, 5 for machine gun... but then you have about 8 different weapon combinations that you can cycle through by hitting "1." And that's where things you need like dynamite to blow open closed passages or grenades to throw at enemies in cover are. Sure, you're just cruising along, blowing away creatures of the night and the kaiser's finest, and oop, you need to throw a grenade. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. click. Oh look, they moved. Of course they moved. They saw you switch to pistol, then take out a bayonet, then a second pistol, then a shovel, and it doesn't take them a lot to guess the grenade is coming soon. Oy.
Story -
Look, you read the first paragraph. I don't know what more to say. The story exposition does not improve on the initial premise. Not only that but it contradicts itself. After the first level, a cinematic shows your character fighting some kind of undead creature that uses barbed wire for deadly tentacles, armed only with some kind of claw-sprouting metal gauntlet (which, I'm sorry, looks to be completely lifted right out of Witchblade lock stock and barrel). But when the cinematic is over, you don't have the gauntlet, you're not even in the same place where the fight took place, and you don't make any references that lead the audience to believe that the preceding situation even happened at all. Not only that, but often the germans can't seem to decide whether they want to shoot you or talk to you for hours at a stretch. Very early in the game you are put behind their lines, and sometimes they notice you but don't seem to care, and sometimes they talk with you in a cutscene to explain vital plot points (which will then be entirely lost upon you because they make no sense). The whole thing is intolerable. It pries at your sanity like a crowbar forged of madness and heat-tempered in a septic tank. It's like the game was written by the same person who wrote Doom: Repercussions of Evil.
Gameplay -
So far, there has not been a section of this review that has not shown Necrovision to be an abject failure in each category. This category shall be no different. Even if you overlook the terrible visual direction, the abysmal dialog, the insane story exposition and all the rest, is there at least a fun to play game under all the detritus? No. Good lord, but no. The game is a neverending exercise in irritation. 
First of all, as reference earlier, everything is too dark, too foggy, too reflective, too cluttered and too dynamic for you to be able to reliably tell what is a random pile of crap and what is an enemy shooting at you. Second of all, because a large number of the game's enemies are zombies, they have an annoying tendency to climb up out of the ground, literally materializing behind you with only the faintest of audio cues which are then of course buried in the noise of combat and awkward english. Third of all, the game delights in giving you lots of ammo and weapons and then dropping enemies around you on which your pitiful mortal weapons have no effect. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Fourth, it seems the developers couldn't decide whether they wanted your health to regenerate or to make you hunt down health packs to heal... so they decided to do both. You will regenerate to 50% health, but to get higher requires a med kit. 50% health is about enough to take 2 hits, the third killing you. However, any time you find a med kit, you'll find 3 or 4, meaning most of them will go to waste and you won't be able to get back to them when you need them later. Also, after healing to full, you will invariably be mobbed and be hacked back down under 50% again within seconds.
Fifth: The boss battle. Let me just clue you developers in - Boss battles are for console tards, not FPS games. If your game has a sequence in which something the player is to fight needs to display a health bar across the entire top of the screen, you've already done something terribly wrong. Furthermore, the boss battles in this game are stupid beyond belief. Take the first boss for example. The helpful UI tells you to "Defeat the wizard." But actually attacking the wizard doesn't even enter into the fight. Instead, how you lower his health bar is by killing the undead things he summons and sends to fight you. The same exact undead things you've been fighting all along thus far, except now you have a robed asshole teleporting from roof to roof shooting fire at you at the same time. When you kill enough them, another disjointed, confusing cinematic will attempt to convey to you the death of the wizard, which has no visible cause, before a door opens near you and a german hits you in the head, knocking you out. I just killed 50 things way tougher than a german with a blunt object. I apparently just murdered a wizard with supernatural powers. And now some kind of idiotic reverse-deus ex machina is my reward, and what is needed to bridge one level to the next? Really?!
What am I on now, item six? It doesn't matter. There's too many to bother numbering. There are sections where inexhaustible numbers of enemies will continue to flood the room you are in until you do something special (which is naturally almost never explained to you), there's plenty of "instant enemies" popping up all around you, some of which are in places you can't even get to. The game never really seems to worry about explaining what is going on or how you even came to find yourself in whatever your current situation is. Your character has ever increasingly stupid things to say about said circumstances. Really, the only way I was able to not think myself into a nosebleed during this game was to convince myself that it was supposed to be the artistic first-person perspective presentation of the inner workings of the mind of a soldier who has suffered shell shock or PTSD or combat fatigue or all three with a healthy dose of hallucinogenic drugs to boot. But even that couldn't keep me playing it for long. It's just. That. Awful. Just... Awful.
Conclusion -
This is probably the worst game I have played since... well, quite a while. I am slightly reminded of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, but in many ways this game is worse. At least I could laugh at TP:FoL. Here?... Unwatchable. Unlistenable. Unplayable. Unenjoyable. Un-freaking-believable.
Grade: F. Usually a game has to be bugged to unplayability to garner this grade, but in Necrovision, the unplayability is entirely by design. I hope that every employee of this dev house loses their fingers to frostbite so they can never code such an abomination again.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Review: Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
Another game that snuck up on me. The FPS/Survival horror hybrid "Cryostasis" had little fanfare or hype preceding it. I'm never sure whether this biases me for or against a title. On the one hand, I hate how crappy shovelware games are overhyped to make them sound so much better than they are, but on the other hand, being completely off my radar until launch often also means there's nothing to recommend a game... so is Cryostasis another foreign-made sleeper hit, a-la Serious Sam, or just another low budget stinker from a small foreign dev house? Read on.
Graphics -
Clearly these guys were going for the brass ring here, and you'll need some heavy duty hardware to pull it off properly. The minimum specs for an Nvidia 7800, but it recommends an 8800. The game is very high poly count(though some of the textures are a teensy low res), and there's a whole lot of post production filters and aftereffects being applied to assist with the visuals. The game is also the first to use PhysX water effects (as seen in engine tech demo footage here). Overall they did a very good job of creating a gloomy, rotten, oppressive atmosphere full of quasi-human monstrosities. There is a minor irritation in that your character often chooses the oddest moments to randomly lift up his gun for inspection, obstructing the center of your viewing area. But this is quickly remedied with a right click.
Audio -
The sound effects are good quality, and the ambient noise adds to the atmosphere and suspense. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the voice acting and how few awkward translations were in the dialogue. The hollow clunking and groaning of a gigantic derelict ship locked in a glacier makes for a very eerie setting. I can't help shake the feeling though that the noises made by the enemy creatures are snagged from another game... I want to say MDK or possibly Everquest. It's a small nit to pick though.
Gameplay
Cryostasis, as mentioned earlier, is an FPS with a strong bias for the Survival Horror genre. It is 1981, and your character has been sent to investigate a stranded nuclear icebreaker ship. It immediately becomes apparent that most of the crew has either died or fled the ship (to die in the arctic ice), and those that have not (and perhaps even some that did) have somehow been changed into what I came to call "Creatures of the Cold."
See, temperature is the central focus of this game. Your core body temperature is your health meter, and it gradually lowers or raises depending on the ambient temperature of your surroundings. When a Creature of the Cold attacks you, the damage comes in the form of your internal body temperature plummeting a few degrees. If you are in an extremely cold environment (such as outside during a full blown arctic snowstorm with winds around 60mph and visibility of about arm's length) you periodically take "damage," and if you do something egregiously dumb like go for a swim without thermal scuba gear, you can be frozen to death instantly.
So the game quickly becomes a quest to survive from one heat source to the next. You heal yourself by warming up at something hot, such as a fire, a running engine, even a desk lamp if you're really in a pinch (and you often will be). Every heat source will not be enough to raise you to full (particularly not desk lamps), but the game is pretty good about giving you good heat sources when it thinks you're going to need to take a lot of damage in the near future. Of course, once you figure this out, this has the side effect of making you feel the least nervous when your temperature is almost zero and there's no heat sources around, because you know the game won't drop a creature on you until you come to a part of the level that has a heat source in it, so ironically you feel safest when you are closest to dying.
The weaponry in the game consists of three melee weapons and a variety of firearms. The first weapon you improvise by wrapping a lock and chain around one fist and punching with it. The second is a waterpipe valve you happen to rip from its place and use like brass knuckles. At a fairly early point you will come upon a fire axe and start doing some respectable damage; three hits from the fire axe kills most creatures, though it does have a slightly disorienting effect on your point of view since you "put your back into it" so to speak and your viewpoint reflects the realistic movement of your head in the swing... IE, you see your arms, then you see the floor, then you stand up again. There's a bolt action rifle, the same rifle with a sniper scope, a semi auto rifle, a SMG and even a flare gun which is supposed to be able to distract enemies with its heat in addition to damaging them. Your life is complicated by the fact that there is no targeting reticle... if you aren't right clicking to aim down the barrel, you literally are having to "eyeball it" which means you'll probably miss a lot. 
The creatures themselves also follow a similar progression, and range from your standard frozen zombie looking guy to nightmare fuel not of this earth. There's the regular unarmed zombie guy (fat and thin versions), the zombie guy with an axe, the zombie guy with welder's gear, the zombie guy with a rifle, the zombie guy with the semi auto rifle, the zombie guy with a machine gun whose HEAD has been scooped out from the front with a fist sized melon-baller and had a blue light put in the cavity with a metal grate over it, the guy who's mutated into some kind of flying insect... all immune to cold and bearing limitless hostility toward anything exothermic. One particular "boss" type mob I find particularly perplexing... because he basically looks like a guy in a raincoat and a metal hat who has secured SMGs to each elbow with leather belts because his hands are too busy holding flashlights and being bolted through the wrists, secured to his helmet. The result is almost comical with a dash of "wtf" and an aftertaste of "yecch." The brig section also introduces "guy with goggles wrapped up like a mummy holding jail keys between his fingers clawing you up like he thinks he's wolverine." Uh. Ok.
But that's not all... apparently your character is some manner of psychic, though it may just be a side effect of whatever the hell is going on in this creaky old boat at the north pole. Often you will come across the frozen corpse of a crewman, usually in such an arrangement that it is part of some obstacle to your progress. For instance, you may find a corpsicle half sticking out of a block of ice and snow protruding from a door that was forced open by a deluge and the accumulation of frozen water is now blocking your path onward. Your character has some kind of psych ability that is part vulcan mind meld, part quantum leap. By touching the corpse, you will then experience the past through the eyes of the dead man, but you can have him behave differently so that history is changed and he does not die. To continue the above example, you could touch the corpse half-sticking out of the ice and snow buildup, and relive his final moments in the boat's accident, but instead of dying when the door bursts open and the frigid water overwhelms him, you might find a wrench on the ground and quickly use it to open a nearby valve, draining the adjacent room of the water threatening to overwhelm the bulkhead, thus saving the crewman's life. When you return to your own body, you'll find the corpse no longer there, the ice and snow absent, and the door undamaged, allowing you to continue on your way.
Pity I can't seem to find the captain's corpse, or I could have just quantum leaped into him and had him turn the boat straight south and sail away from the arctic. But then, I guess we wouldn't have a game, then, would we?
Now, it does have a bug here and there. There's been a few times that I loaded a saved game only to crash in the middle of the load, or when the load completed found that some bug has rendered progress impossible. For example, there's a part where you first get a rifle and ammo, and you need it to shoot a ladder so it falls to where you can climb it... the game autosaved when I picked up the rifle, then I picked up the ammo and shot the ladder. I climbed up and died shortly after to a Creature... the autosave put me back down after having gotten the rifle but the ammo was not there, thus I could not shoot the ladder. I had to go to an earlier save to get past that. Save early, save often, and don't always overwrite your save. There was also a part in the ship's brig (I swear there was something like 40 people in this brig, this is one hell of a ship) where I shot what I thought was a Creature of the Cold, but for some reason shooting THIS creature killed me instantly as if I had shot myself in the head. Oh, that was a nice surprise, I guess I'm not allowed to shoot certain monsters. Fortunately that only happens in that one part of the game, it seems. Sometimes the pathing on the Creatures hiccups somewhat, and they can get stuck on a corner or in a door. One boss gunner I actually got to walk back and forth in and out of the same door while I shot him with impunity.
Also, the game's puzzles of progression can sometimes get infuriatingly obscure. "What the hell do you want me to DO here, game?!" is a thought that often starts to find voice in the second half of the game. The game taciturnly refuses to offer any answers, or even any hints, and you are forced to operate by trial and error, enduring a loading sequence every time an error kills you. By the 15th level or so, you'll also get tired of "jack in the box" style attacks by creatures of the cold popping up in every room in just perfect places to kill you before you can react, and you start making 2 runs at each room, the first intentionally suicidal to trigger all the enemy spawns so you'll know where they are when you do it the second time for real.
Conclusion
Despite a few irritations, the game is engrossing. The atmosphere does make for palpable tension, and the exposition of the narrative compels you to continue through the game to find out what the hell happened, why, and who is behind it. Despite stretching the suspension of disbelief to its limit, the psychic do-overs do add an interesting wrinkle to the game as well. To get the true benefit of the game's experience though, you'll need at least an Nvidia 8800.
Verdict: B.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Review: Warhammer 40,000 - Dawn of War 2
The highly anticipated next entry into the Dawn of War franchise has finally hit, and I must admit I've been looking forward to it. I had my misgivings, though. A lot of the press leading up to it rubbed me the wrong way. Only 4 factions? Fewer units in a squad? So it was with cautious hope I dove in.
Graphics
While DOW1 (and its many, many expansions) was no graphical slouch, it was starting to look ever so slightly dated thanks mostly to models that didn't age very well. While incredibly detailed for their time, today they have comparatively low polygon counts and some of the movement patterns left them a little cartoony. DOW2 is very pretty to look at and needs some horsepower to make it so. Unfortunately, there's a very limited number of locations to the game, and so it is very easy to get bogged down in visual monotony even in a lush jungle of millions of colors if it's your 15th trip through that exact same jungle.
Sound
Similar to previous DOW titles, the auditory experience for DOW2 consists largely of yelling, battle cacophony and status updates over a backdrop of grim martial musical scores. It is capably handled.
Gameplay
This is going to be a long one.
Dawn of War 2 feels very different from DOW1's legacy. By its last expansion, DOW1 had 9 factions and myriad different unit types. The first thing you notice in DOW2 is that the factions have been whittled back down to 4, although one of them never made it into DOW1: the Tyranids.
In the single player campaign, the player takes the role of the Space Marines (the Blood Ravens chapter again, of course), dealing with an Ork uprising in their home subsector. It is revealed that the Orks are being subtly incited by Eldar, and conflict is joined with the space-elves as well. Then, the reason for the Eldar's abetting of the Orks is discovered when a Tyranid hive fleet descends upon the sector and starts raining fanged, taloned death on the planets there.
The game then becomes one of repeatedly deploying to the same 10 or so locations repeatedly, balancing efforts to stall the Tyranid invasion while simultaneously trying to attack Ork and Eldar targets of opportunity. It quickly starts to feel like "Warhammer 40,000: Whack-a-Mole edition." Exacerbating the repetitive nature of the game is the fact that there is almost no variety between each mission; they all consist of "make your way across the map to where you have a boss fight with an artificially tough enemy boss." Seriously. Boss fights in an RTS, complete with big "boss battle life bars" right in the middle of the screen.
The method of progression across each level brings me to another change from the previous paradigm - there are no bases. You are initially dropped with your full complement of troops in a drop pod at one end of the level, and you never get more than you start with. To reinforce troops killed in battle, you must either return to the drop pod or take a strategic point on the map, around which you can reinforce. No buildings, no tech tree, nothing.
Furthermore, your "full complement" of troops consists of never more than 4 squads (including your commander character, counted as his own squad), of never more than 4 units per squad including squad leader (and usually less). The squad leaders gain experience through combat and slain enemies drop loot for you to pick up and equip: more powerful bolters, chainswords, armor, etc. Yes, you heard me right. DOW2 has taken a hard right, exiting the RTS freeway and circling around onto the RPG express loop.
Another important change is that the rudimentary (you could even call it slap-dash) cover system from DoW1 has been replaced with the more obstacle-focused cover dynamic used in Company of Heroes. But this doesn't stop the game from feeling less the excercise in strategy and more the RPG session. If I had to compare the feeling I got playing it to any other game, it actually reminded me more of Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights 2 than any RTS title. Just with less cutscenes and dialog.
The multiplayer side of the game alters things a little bit. There, there IS a base, but it is a single building from which you requisition units and you never build any other buildings or defenses. The units all feel "down a man" because the squad leaders are not present, although you can at least get more than 4 squads.
There are some positive changes, however. Melee units are now a much more viable option than they were previously due to changes in the nature of combat and collision, as well as improvements to the jump pack mechanism. No longer simply a method of moving across terrain marginally faster or jumping obstacles, jetpacking into combat is now an excellent tactical move. It is quick and devastating, because landing on top of your target now knocks them over/down/back for a few seconds, giving your assault marines/storm boyz/whatever time to start carving them up, and they tear stuff up really well. In fact, the plain old vanilla space marines with their bolters and whatnot actually start to feel kind of low damage by comparison. Of course, it's rather hard to melee from behind cover or from the inside of a building.
Conclusion
So basically, rather than the sequel to DOW1, it feels more like Company of Heroes and World in Conflict got together, had a baby, sent it to school at RPG academy, and somewhere along the line it got hooked on Warhammer 40k. All in all, it's not a bad game, but to be honest I was rather expecting Dawn of War 2 to feel... well, like a Dawn of War title, not an RPG where you slog the same ground over and over. The plus side of this however is that it does actually come across as a decent proof of concept that the 40k universe CAN make the RPG transition, and therefore, the MMO transition.
Verdict: B. Ok, it's fun and all, but it feels kinda wrong... and where's my damned Imperial Guard? I'll definitely be looking into the expansions when they arrive.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Review: F.E.A.R. 2 - Project Origin
When the first F.E.A.R. came out, I liked it pretty well. It was an interesting mixture of FPS with horror elements. Pretty novel stuff, and the first game I remember playing to incorporate at-will time distortion (though I now know Max Payne did it first, I didn't play it). It's been almost a year since they had a contest to name the sequel, so I'd really forgotten all about it coming out.. until it did just last week.
Graphics
Nothing to complain about here, for certain. The Lithtech engine (with the Havok physics engine) is certainly up to par for latest gen games. Environments are incredibly detailed, the special effects (especially on slow-mo bullets, ghosts, that sort of thing) are absolutely top shelf. Really, it's the sort of production values that I'd expect from a high budget movie. The only blemish on the otherwise flawless visual experience is the movements of your allied AI characters, especially the female commander. Their ambulation seems artificial, perhaps contrived. While the movement is smooth, it still gives the impression of being stiff and mechanical. But it's a small gripe, and as you will be alone (so very, very frightningly alone) for the vast majority of the game, it doesn't detract very much from the overall experience. The enemy AI models are spot on. And the graphical representation of psychic phenomena and "ghosts" (for lack of a better word) are incredibly adept at making the surreal... uncomfortably real.
Sound
If you are going to build an atmosphere conducive to fright, you can't scrimp on the auditory angle. F.E.A.R. 2 definitely does it right on this one. The voice acting is top notch (the aforementioned female commander is also voiced by the same voice actress who voiced Cortana from Halo, Zoey from Left 4 Dead, and Cate Archer from NOLF 2... she kinda sounds like a bossy Zoey). The music is good at setting the tone and is high quality stuff, and the ambient noise really helps the atmosphere. There will be times where you'll hear whispers or laughter or crying that will set you on edge. There is definitely more than one "I think I just felt a little pee come out" moment in this game, and the audio plays a big part in that.
Gameplay
The old F.E.A.R. game had good gameplay, and the new game mostly improves on it. It's still a FPS with freaky paranormal interludes, but the psychic bits feel a little less contrived this time. There's less of the "oh look, a blank hallway, this will certainly have a paranormal cutscene in it" thing going on, though there are still plenty of little paranormal jolts to go at you. It's just you can't tell one is going to happen as often/easily as you could in the first, so they're more effective at unsettling you.
The old familiar "reflex time" mechanic is back, and just like before you really need to use the heck out of it to stand a chance. The enemy AI in this game is very good at hiding behind stuff and keeping you distracted while other enemies move to flank you.
There's also a bit of a different dynamic here. In the first game, your character spent much of his time chasing creepy little Alma... but this game picks up at the end of the first one with a different protagonist who sends most of his time being chased BY a now even creepier grown-up Alma. And while in the first, you weren't particularly sure you wanted to catch her... here you definitely know you don't want to be caught.
There's also some new things to toy with here. The laser weapon is kinda neat, and the armored mech levels are fun too (if a bit easy). The environments are much different than the first, which was mostly limited to the insides of office buildings. Here, there are city streets, industrial levels, underground tunnels, and yes, office buildings too. The action tends to pendulum back and forth between "this part is for normal fighting of groups of enemies" and "this part is for freaking you out with the supernatural" with the two rarely overlapping. What gets you is you can't tell when there's a transition until it's already made. There's a little warning sometimes about paranormal activity by way of flickering lights and failing hi-tech electronics, just like in the first one.
The only bad thing I have to say about it really is you can tell it's a "console FPS." It's difficult to put into words, but a dedicated PC gamer can tell, can just sense when a game was developed with a console in mind. It just feels different to play it, like it's on a leash. This feeling is also sharpened by other game devices - the game saves exclusively on a checkpoint system completely removing the player's ability to save (which also has the side effect of ratcheting up the tension, but I still don't like this dynamic), there's more weapons and armor lying around than in the inside of most military armories as well as enough first aid to heal you 5 times over what is necessary, and the game relies too much on fast-clicking quicktime events. It made me think of the "test your might" interstitial minigames from Mortal Kombat.
Conclusion
But, for the most part, It's a very engrossing experience and a fun game. I've tried not to spoil the story, because it's an integral part of the game as much as the action.
Verdict: A-
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Review: Mirror's Edge
In a nutshell, when you combine equal parts parkour, cel shaded animation, inane anti-establishment pap and overuse of primary colors, you get this game.
Overview/Plot -
Basically, in the future America has become a super-fascist/corporate dictatorship/police state. You know, all the conflicting babble that neo-hippies these days rant about, usually injecting the word halliburton or a slur against (now thankfully) former President Gee Dubya Bush in the mix for good measure. It's so over the top it's practically become a cartoon unto itself (a bit ironic, considering the cut scenes are all cel-shaded but the gameplay itself tries for hyper-realistic detail).
The last few pockets of la resistance can only exist because they communicate via a group of athletic young iconoclasts called "runners" who afford their daily bread carrying contraband and sedition in bright yellow and black nylon carrying cases, leaping from rooftop to rooftop.
This game is the wet dream made real for every parkour enthusiast who ever jumped an alleyway pretending he was on the run from "the man." Because that's what you're doing in this game, only the fate of the WORLD rests upon your skinny, scuffed self being able to navigate 4 blocks of shiny, glistening downtown rooftops without falling to your death, being shot by snipers or plain old beaten up by cops with sticks.
The protagonist in Mirror's Edge is a scrappy girl from the streets of undisclosed Asian origin. In the cut scenes, the method of animation, body language and voice acting makes it appear suspiciously close to as if someone had taken a certain female animated insurance spokesbabe, strapped down her chest under an ace bandage, and dipped her head in black printer's ink. That's right: Emo Esurance.
Graphics -
In the cut scenes, the world is a dark, gritty, and flat. This is a direct contrast with the gameplay which is bright, clean, shiny and incredibly detailed. In fact, I'd say the visual effects in the game are incredibly impressive. The levels are intricately designed, the models are elegantly authored, the textures are rich in color and detail. The strongest thing this game has going for it is how impressive the visual experience is. If you have an Aegia PhysX card (or an 8000 or 9000 series nVidia card), there is PhysX support which comes into play mostly in the area of flapping/tearing fabric or plastic or shattering glass, both to impressive effect.
Sound -
The voice acting is pretty good, too. There's not a whole lot in the way of background music, but the ambience is pretty good as well. One amusing note is that with all the jumping, landing, grabbing, vaulting, struggling, punching, and getting punched that is involved in this game, the constant grunts and exclamations of your protagonist might make somebody in the next room think you were playing a game of a more salacious nature.
Gameplay -
The problem is, the authors of this game were so caught up in making it impressive that they largely neglected to make it fun. The punishment for even the slightest failure is either instant death, or falling to the bottom of a tedious section you will have to repeat (making you instead WISH for instant death). The game does supply you with a handy "push this button to get pointed to your goal" button, but often it is entirely unobvious (if not unfathomable) how one is supposed to navigate there, even given your character's nigh-superhuman preternatural ability to run along and jump off of perfectly smooth vertical surfaces.
And the one area where the game decides to eschew fantasy and embrace reality is the area of how much physical abuse you can endure before loss of consciousness. Being stuck by a melee attack (which always seems to involve the butt of a large gun to the head) twice causes you slump to the floor and black out, and at best you can suffer through 3 distinct bullet wounds, the fourth causing you to spontaneously shuffle off your skinny mortal coil. The "quick push the button" quicktime event that is every single melee encounter in the game is excruciatingly unforgiving with a despairingly narrow window in which pushing the button has any effect. Think the Call of Duty 4 "press V to kill the dog before it rips out your throat" dynamic, but with the difficulty setting on "sadistic." I was completely unable to ever successfully complete any such encounter without first using bullet time.
The game is also (perhaps mercifully) short, bordering on the abrupt. Even with multiple deaths and having to repeat certain sections 20 times or more, I still finished this game in my first sitting in around 4 hours. Compounding this problem is the static, limited, and surprisingly linear (especially for a game supposed to be about the limitless freedom of parkour) nature of the levels makes the replay value of the title virtually zilch, unless you're obsessive about getting the best time on time trial, which frankly never resonated with me in any game.
I'm not one for wanting to spoil plot points either, but there's also a massively obvious case of "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" going on here that got telegraphed within the first 30 minutes of the game.
Conclusion -
Mirror's edge makes for a very impressive proof of concept, and an excellent and beautiful tech demo. The controls are even pretty good, for a console port. No, the problem here is the actual game itself. I found playing it an exercise in frustration (one that insulted my intelligence to boot), and actually sort of thankful it was so short. I can safely say I do not feel the need to ever play it again.
Grade: C, and it only got that high on technical merit.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Review: Saints Row 2 (PC)
Good ports of console games to PC are the exception rather than the rule. Recently I found one of those surprising and pleasing exceptions in the form of GTA4... which probably biased me a bit against Saints Row 2, since the games are so very similar but the quality of each port have a wide gulf between them.
Comparisons between SR2 and GTA4 are inevitable, so hunker in and get ready for them.
Graphics -
While the overall look and feel of the game is a degree simpler than the detail of GTA4, the human character models I found to actually be of better quality, especially the textures. The plot love interest in GTA4 for example, Kate, often looked hunched and/or blurred and ugly, with dark smudges marring her face and really for a purported love interest I felt they did a horrible job. You don't run into this sort of unintentional ugliness in SR2. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of fat, ugly and old people who can look of varying degrees between comedic and revolting, but when they do it's intentional.
Where everything in GTA4 was dull, dark, muted, realistic and oppressive, SR2 is over the top, cartoony, bright, flashy and somewhat surreal really. At least that's what they were going for. The port was not kind here, and the game takes a noticeable performance hit vs the console version, where things often don't look quite as good or run nearly as smooth. There are frequent stutters and framerate drops for little reason. The lighting effects in particular are completely jacked up.
Inexplicably, several widescreen format resolutions are completely missing from the selection, as the widescreen resolution choices jump from 1280x720 to 1920x1200. That's basically a jump from a 17" wide LCD to a 24" wide LCD, ignoring the resolutions common to the widescreen LCDs ranging from 19 to 22 inches (where the best deals of size vs price are commonly found)... no 1440x900 or 1680x1050 to be found.
Sound -
One thing the game definitely has going for it is the voice acting. The delivery of the lines are believable, 99% of the time anyway. There's quite a bit of extremely foul language, sometimes bordering on the 13-year-old "I'm cussing because mom's out of earshot" level. I realize this is how "gangstas" talk for the most part, but it does get downright gratuitous to the point of sometimes sounding unnaturally forced. On the whole though, the dialogue is well done (and it's a b-star studded cast. I think I heard Doogie Howser at one point). I do wish they'd provided more audio "personality" options for your character, but seeing as how every personality option requires basically the entire range of dialogue for the main character for the entire game to be rerecorded by a different actor, I can see why they limited it to 3 men and 3 women.
Volume is a constant problem though... people talking even a small distance away from you can sound almost silent while you yourself can be incredibly deafening. I've seen this sometimes in other games (especially World of Warcraft), and the problem usually lies in Creative Labs' EAX. In the other games, disabling EAX support fixed the problem but I haven't found the way to do that here yet. Naturally, if this is the case, people without Sound Blaster cards won't experience this problem.
The radio selection, and the number of songs on each, leave quite a bit to be desired though. What can I say, I miss Vladivostok FM.
Control -
This usually doesn't get its own section in my reviews, but it does this time because it's such a problem. The graphics and sound have their little hiccups due to the transition from console, but the controls often have real problems. The cross from dual analog gamepad to mouse and keyboard here was slapdash, and it shows. Some activities, such as graffiti tagging, are frustratingly unresponsive because the mouse sensitivity and ballistics are suddenly shunted into the "insufferable" playability band. A number of the controls are unintuitive (sometimes bordering on the random), and at least once every minute or two the keyboard stopped accepting movement input for me altogether, causing me to miss a turn, crash, or stand there getting shot for a second or so until the game decided I was allowed to control my movement again. Some of the cars in the game are downright undrivable at any speed and in any circumstance.
One control gimmick that is not the fault of the conversion, but is just an inborn game flaw, is the "precision accuracy" shooting mode is frequently anything but. Since the view switches to zoom in AND move to the side, your shots often become blocked by things that don't appear to obstruct line of sight. Also, the targeting reticle lights up to indicate when it is on a target, but it does this even if you don't have line of sight... so if you're ducking behind a couch and try to shoot somebody, the reticle will trick you into thinking you CAN shoot them when in reality your bullets are just hitting the couch immediately in front of you. It would have just been better to have an option to switch to first person perspective for "precision accuracy" rather than this nonsense.
Movement as a pedestrian is also very much imprecise, with no way to turn your character's facing without also taking a step in that direction. The "walk" key is inconveniently bound to caps lock (and yet is counter-intuitively a hold-down modifier instead of a simple toggle on/off switch... and there's few things in the PC gamer's mind that will fry as many little circuits as having to hold down caps lock with your pinky to modify something).
Gameplay -
But unlike GTA4, at least you don't have friends and relations calling you up every 30 seconds to go to bowling alleys, bars, and strip clubs or else they won't like you any more. That alone was enough to merit some kudos from me. There are other differences, of course, some better and some worse.
The best way I can summarize the difference is GTA4 feels more like a simulator and SR2 feels more like an arcade game. GTA's pace is more sedate, the action more cerebral, the controls more precise and responsive, the effects understated and often subtle. Saints Row 2 doesn't really encourage you to fire from cover or be careful and precise in any way... or even to think things through. You run, you gun, you blow stuff up. Sometimes it's satisfying to be much more direct and less convoluted in your methodry. The phrase that first occurred to me while playing it was "Fisher Price My First GTA Clone." But as you play it, it grows on you, and once you accept it isn't GTA and adapt to the direct, brute force style the game wants, it grows on you.
Basically how the game progresses is thus... to do the missions that advance the plot, you have to earn enough "respect" to start a mission. The respect meter is filled by doing stunts, driving recklessly, and playing subgames they call "activities." These activities are all over the city, and entail such things as causing as much monetary damage as possible in a given area, spraying graffiti, acting bodyguard for celebrities, impersonating police officers to commit acts of atrocity on camera, vehicle racing, or ultimate fighting. The entire city is open to exploration from the start, so it is very open ended to the player to decide where to go and what to do first.
The missions themselves are much what you'd expect. Go here before time runs out, kill these people, protect this other person, destroy that other guy before he gets away, storm the rival gang's hideout and kill them all, rob this other joint, get away from the cops, and so forth. This isn't to say the missions are boring, just that those familiar with the genre will not be stretched too hard. Speaking of which, the amount of damage you can take, and how your health regenerates on its own if you don't take damage for a while kind of makes things a smidge on the easy side, even on normal difficulty level.
One nice touch is how customizable the player's character is. You can be male or female, skinny, fat, muscular, or anything inbetween. You can customize a far-too-numerous-to-actually-be-worth-bothering-with number of aspects of appearance, ranging from control sliders that control cheekbone position to ones that control how much your body sags from age. You can also visit a plastic surgeon to change any aspect (or all of them at once, even gender and voice/personality) of your appearance for a very small fee during the game. As previously mentioned, there are also 3 male and 3 female voice personalities to choose from, which change your character's voice during all cut scenes and other spoken lines. Throw in the number of clothes stores scattered around town, and you can pretty much completely customize your character how you want. This part actually reminded me a little of the character generation process in City of Heroes, which got me thinking that while I never considered GTA a likely candidate for a MMO, Saints Row got me thinking such a thing might not be so far fetched.
Speaking of which, there is multiplayer to the game as well. The single player experience can be played cooperatively by 2 players, and though I haven't tried it myself reports seem to be that it works rather well. There's also competitive modes with the usual deathmatch/team deathmatch variants as well as competing in the activity subgames.
Conclusion:
Saints Row 2 is a decent gaming experience sullied by a very poor job of porting the game to PC. If you want to play the game, I recommend doing so on its native consoles if at all possible. Definitely not for the kids, of course.
Verdict: C-. Would have been much better if I'd played it on console, most likely.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Games I played when I should have been blogging roundup
Left 4 Dead - A+. Excellent cooperative zombie horror experience. Great replayability. Best played with friends.
Fallout 3 - A. A very good post apocalyptic FPS/RPG hybrid. Decent story, lots of side quests, completely open ended. Some minor annoyances.
Call of Duty 5: World at war - A-. Nice game. Kinda short. Excellent Co-op. Limited color pallette, "real is brown" and bloom abuse.
Grand Theft Auto 4 (PC): A. Extremely good job porting to PC from console. Annoying that I have to load rockstar social club and games for windows live to play. Some ugly models, but a great next step in the series. I especially like the GPS in every car so I don't have to memorize a million damn streets in a completely fictional city.
Forumwarz: B+. Pretty cool free online RPG based on forum flame wars. Have to pay 10 bucks for the second half of the game, but first half is free. Very addictive. Kind of in the same vein as Urban Dead or Kingdom of Loathing.
That'll do for now. Hopefully I can get back to full review structure shortly.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Zero Punctuation Reviews: Sonic Unleashed
The embedded video problem seems to be something wrong with escapist, not with blogger or how I'm copying the embed code, because the videos from a month or two back are still working. So here's the url because I know the embed just won't work-
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/472-Sonic-Unleashed
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Yes, I Know I Suck
So I haven't written a review in quite some times. The ZP updates are stacking up. Here's why -
First and foremost, I'm still having too much fun in Warhammer Online to stop to play something else.
Second, ZP keeps beating me to the punch >_<
Thirdly, it's the holiday season and between travel and sickness my free time's gotten pretty... not free.
Seriously, I actually have managed to take a look at the odd other game (such as Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: World at War), but somehow the spirit just doesn't move when it's time to put pen to metaphorical paper. I have other games stacked up ready to go for review, but as I mentioned my ability to churn through them is a little choked right now.
But I do intend to do something about it. At some point.
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