It's a cry you may have come across: "Keep politics out of games!" Some are more guilty of being politically charged than others but there is just no need for personal political agendas to appear in works of art or in our brainless pastimes. Ultimately, we just want to sit down and play video games, not be preached to about how the right wing millionaires profiting off our hobby are all evil control freaks. Some games exist solely as vessels for political statements, like the latest Deus EX or FIFA 17 the Journey, but for most the politics are utterly unnecessary and should be taken out. Here's a list of the seven worst offenders.
1. DOOM (2016)
DOOM (2016)'s anti-hell agenda is disgusting. The game is little more than a gory anti-satanist campaign with its central hero, the all-American superhero with no personality Doomslayer, clearly driving a propaganda train akin to the 1930s Nazi party.
The demons' personal struggles are completely disregarded and despite them being welcomed by an outstanding member of the community, whom the Doomslayer murders in protest (like a fascist), they're persecuted by the 'hero'.
Olivia Pearce opens the gates and welcomes the demons of Hell with a kind heart only to get brutally murdered by the Doomslayer. This, however, isn't enough for the terrorist; he not only bans demons from Mars but also invades their home. A truly appalling narrative that adds nothing to a game that could've simply been a very fun arena shooter. Sad!
2. Papers, Please
When I first heard about the immigration office simulator I was teeming with excitement. I thought, "Finally, a game about doing a job and doing it well." I convinced myself I was in for a good old office simulator perfect for blowing off steam. Instead it was Steam that blew me off!
The game shamelessly flaunts political propaganda like "Aristrotzka is the best!" even though Aristrotzka isn't even a real place and never has been. It just sounds like a rubbish made up name for an Eastern European autocratic state and not a real place you might visit for a weekend like Croatia or Uzbekistan.
You get given a wife, son and uncle; further fueling the political tensions and nonsense this game desperately doesn't need. A gender specific partner and a gender specific child in this day and age are nothing if not begging for an endless argument. Having the uncle as an oppressive male influence on an unformed child is another obvious criticism of the Balkan culture that is just not welcome in an otherwise cheerful office sim.
3. Assassins/Assassin's/Assassins' Creed
You might expect an assassin's creed to read like "kill for a living, no remorse" or "no one's wanted dead for being innocent" but Ubisoft reckons it would be "nothing is true, everything is permitted." And that's not even the half of it. This should be a series about jumping off rooftops and diving into people's necks blade first, (and to be fair to poor old Ubi, to some extent it is) but it's laden with BS political agenda like the notion that the XBOX One camera constantly watching what you're up to is a breach of civil rights and your privacy. Boo hoo.
The game boasts two secret societies - the assassins and the templar, a very vague not entirely associated group and a very specific group based on a historical organisation. As obsessed with left-wing politics as it Ubisoft is, it obviously hands player control of the anarchist mess that are the assassins and tasks the player with ancient terrorism. Not to get political myself here but I expect no less from French Canadians. Oh, wait; that's not political, just bigoted. That's fine.
4. Democracy
There's so much more to democracy than just politics. Great shows like House of Cards and The Thick Of It have shown us just that. How great a game could democracy have been if it focused more on the mechanical than the ideological? Bribes and coercion, public image and the burying and digging up of compromising information, earning and returning favours, bending the rules to achieve a goal against all odds.
Instead we have a shallow game purely about policy, more concerned with "politics" than the democratic machine. Using sliders for all policy making was a nice but faint touch at hinting the great cogs and chains of parliaments and congresses. A game where your success is dependent on your politics and not your skill at convincing people that you know best, it's a poor and unrealistic attempt at a political simulator.
5. Shadow of Mordor
What started out as an amazing Lord of the Rings spin-off, soon descended into political hell. A game that should be about revenge and murder is instead completely enveloped in orc politics.
The orcs have a hierarchy of warlords directly affected by your actions, forcing you into the political machinations of the greenskins. See, the orcs are savages and should just be left to it really, but instead the player is expected to help some rise in the ranks while exterminating others; and all that to further their own agenda and schemes.
A fantasy game about slaying orcs is instead a dreadful simulation of subterfuge and espionage weighed down with its overbearing political message nobody wants to frigging hear.
6. Metal Gear Solid
The only thing that can ruin sneaking around and fighting massive machines is, you've guessed it: politics! Hideo Kojima is a great mind and with a name like Hideo, he was obviously destined to make video games for a living and coin the phrase Hideo Games (which astonishingly he still hasn't done). Instead he decided that a name like Kojima (small island) lends itself better to a political preaching career but the sun does indeed set on old Hideo.
Each game features needless political discussions between characters that are nothing but mouthpieces for Kojima furthering his own agenda. In typically awkward Japanese fashion, the first game in the series was originally the third game in the timeline and eventually the sixth game in the timeline. Confusing chronology is just a political tool for Kojima who bangs on about how bad war is and how those who fight it are never really the ones with a vested interest in it and don't stand to gain a profit but all we really wanna do is pretend to be a cardboard box and leave nude magazines around to distract guards before he choke them to death; you can stop with the preaching already.
A series that gives you massive robots, stealth suits, half-naked female spies, eating snakes and ballooning goats, also decides that it needs to bear you down with 30 minute lectures about nuclear deterence and nationalism. Kojima could truly be one of the greatest game-makers in history if he could just let go of his political hang-ups.
7. Civilisation
Politics have ruined Civilisation. A game about our steady progression from a small nomadic people into the rulers of planet Earth divided into tribes-come-nations and fighting to be the dominant one RUINED by "diplomacy" and "politics". You can't go two turns without some nation or other saying "ooh, we dislike your warmongering, we're not gonna trade with you" or "ooh, look at you and your culture trying to infiltrate our country with your pop stars and whatnot." Sick of it. It's just music and dress sense and language and social habits, nothing to do with culture!
A splendid series of deep and interesting games ruined because someone decides to throw their own agenda in there. "War is bad" mechanics and "globalisation is the death of nationalistic competition" win conditions ruin the strategy game of the ages. This is where something completely apolitical like Red Alert or Age of the Empires excels and runs circle around the old Civ.
Politics has no place in Civilisation, it's needless and corrupts the otherwise spectacular experience. Wouldn't a world with no coffee shop debates about the morality of eating cuisine one has no genetic link to be much better?
Monday, 22 May 2017
Sunday, 7 May 2017
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is an adventure game with RPG elements and card-based combat, I think. It doesn't quite hit the mark at the start and it only goes South from there with a predictable story and unpredictable mechanics.
The game begins with a quick introduction to its core gameplay loop of clicking on things until something attacks you and you play kind-of-cards. Herein lies the problem: the kind-of-cards are kind of random. In my four hours playing Northmark I hadn't quite figured out how to determine how much damage my attacks would do. How it works, in theory, is that the player character has stat modifiers and the three hero cards have further stat modifiers determining attack and defense, each hero has hit points which determine how much damage you must do to kill them and once all your heroes are dead, you lose. You have two types of cards in your hand - buffs/debuffs and attacks. You play the attack cards which get added to your modifiers to cause damage to your opponent's heroes. All sounds pretty standard and straight forward but the numbers never quite added up for me.
So, here's an example: my character's attack mod is 2, hero's mod is 3 and I've used buffs worth of 5, which gives me a total attack bonus of 10. My opponent's defenses are 2+1+3, adding up to 6 and they have 20 hit points. In theory, a 6 attack should do 10 points of damage but instead it does 15. WHERE THE HELL DID THE EXTRA 5 COME FROM?! Another time a 5 attack with 2+4+4 does 3 damage to a 2+1+0 character. The thing you might notice missing from all this is consistency, something trading card games tend to rely on, allowing players to plan their moves effectively. Here instead, I found myself buffing up and hoping for the best. It's lucky really, that the combat never becomes a real challenge so this randomness doesn't become a source of frustration. The downside of course, is that the combat is altogether boring and the game relies on its narrative instead.
And here's why the game isn't notable: the one thing it truly relies on to carry it - the plot. It opens with the obvious plotting villain and then drags you through several stereotype-filled fantasy locations to arrive at the conclusion that the obvious plotting villain whom we've stayed away from for most of the game is a plotting villain. The only reason I still remembered the villain is because I was waiting for the obvious reveal. Now, that could be the point - fantasy plots often have an obvious evil guy paraded as not necessarily bad (Final Fantasy X is my favourite culprit). It could be a Trump reference (it's not, the game came out in August 2014). The problem is that it doesn't actually make any point, it just happens to be a bad plot. There are amusing aspects to the story: there's a bit where you run into a bar owner that looks just like a vendor in another city and the game points that out to you citing indie devs' limited funds; there is a bit where you get sent to rescue a young woman from barbarians only to find she actually conquered them. Those and the general light-hearted nature of the game make it bearable but not wholly enjoyable,
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is playing Texas Hold 'Em with a mixture of Yu-Gi Oh! and Pokemon cards against Adam Sandler, Michael McIntyre and a random nerd/10
The game begins with a quick introduction to its core gameplay loop of clicking on things until something attacks you and you play kind-of-cards. Herein lies the problem: the kind-of-cards are kind of random. In my four hours playing Northmark I hadn't quite figured out how to determine how much damage my attacks would do. How it works, in theory, is that the player character has stat modifiers and the three hero cards have further stat modifiers determining attack and defense, each hero has hit points which determine how much damage you must do to kill them and once all your heroes are dead, you lose. You have two types of cards in your hand - buffs/debuffs and attacks. You play the attack cards which get added to your modifiers to cause damage to your opponent's heroes. All sounds pretty standard and straight forward but the numbers never quite added up for me.
So, here's an example: my character's attack mod is 2, hero's mod is 3 and I've used buffs worth of 5, which gives me a total attack bonus of 10. My opponent's defenses are 2+1+3, adding up to 6 and they have 20 hit points. In theory, a 6 attack should do 10 points of damage but instead it does 15. WHERE THE HELL DID THE EXTRA 5 COME FROM?! Another time a 5 attack with 2+4+4 does 3 damage to a 2+1+0 character. The thing you might notice missing from all this is consistency, something trading card games tend to rely on, allowing players to plan their moves effectively. Here instead, I found myself buffing up and hoping for the best. It's lucky really, that the combat never becomes a real challenge so this randomness doesn't become a source of frustration. The downside of course, is that the combat is altogether boring and the game relies on its narrative instead.
And here's why the game isn't notable: the one thing it truly relies on to carry it - the plot. It opens with the obvious plotting villain and then drags you through several stereotype-filled fantasy locations to arrive at the conclusion that the obvious plotting villain whom we've stayed away from for most of the game is a plotting villain. The only reason I still remembered the villain is because I was waiting for the obvious reveal. Now, that could be the point - fantasy plots often have an obvious evil guy paraded as not necessarily bad (Final Fantasy X is my favourite culprit). It could be a Trump reference (it's not, the game came out in August 2014). The problem is that it doesn't actually make any point, it just happens to be a bad plot. There are amusing aspects to the story: there's a bit where you run into a bar owner that looks just like a vendor in another city and the game points that out to you citing indie devs' limited funds; there is a bit where you get sent to rescue a young woman from barbarians only to find she actually conquered them. Those and the general light-hearted nature of the game make it bearable but not wholly enjoyable,
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is playing Texas Hold 'Em with a mixture of Yu-Gi Oh! and Pokemon cards against Adam Sandler, Michael McIntyre and a random nerd/10
Thursday, 19 January 2017
Mother Russia Bleeds
Mother Russia Bleeds is a side-scrolling pixel art brawler published by Devolver. It's a game that sits comfortably in their publishing portfolio alongside the likes of Hotline Miami. Less cerebral, though equally brutal to the smash hit top-down massacre, Mother Russia Bleeds is a solid game not devoid of problems common in its genre.
Mother Russia Bleeds is a period drama. The period is the 60s and the setting is the Indie Mecca of semi-fictional newly broken up USSR. Mother Russia could comfortably co-habit the same fictional universe as Papers, Please. The plot of the game is classically Brawlery: someone did you wrong - smash their bloody face in. It's a game about freedom more than anything else. Whichever of the four characters you pick, they start off as a gypsy street fighter and end up as a freedom fighter facing a shady military force. Your character begins as a free spirit only to be captured and experimented on until they gather the strength to fight for their emancipation. After breaking out of the labs they were kept in, they have to break out of jail with both the guards and the inmates posing a threat. There is very little in Mother Russia Bleeds that isn't trying to kill you and the blend of mobsters and military special forces creates a world of stereotypical Balkan corruption. The plot not only covers the fight for legal and political freedom but also psychological freedom - freedom from addiction. One of the main themes running through the story is the abuse of psychoactive drugs to enhance combat ability. It's the ugly face of war.
Where in Hotline Miami the degree to which drugs played part and the extent of the player's experience that was reliable was purposely ambiguous and open to our personal interpretation, Mother Russia serves us a healthy warm dose of the 'real' and then our junkie hallucinations on a cold, blood-spattered platter. Nekro the drug becomes Nekro the super-villain. The story mode offers two endings for defeating Nekro in different ways. Should you use the drug to heal or power up at any point during the final fight, your character will find themselves overdosing and despite saving the day won't live long enough to see it. If you manage to, however, beat all three stages of the final boss fight without using Nekro once, your character will beat their addiction and cement their place in history as a war hero and the five or six hours of over indulgent gory freedom fighting will be skimmed over in schools.
I expected Mother Russia to have a throwaway story about how Soviet oppression was bad and made good people mad and violent. Instead, the game deftly explores friendship, betrayal, patriotism and aforementioned addiction. The dialogue is vulgar but never too cringey. One of the levels opens with an exchange between two soon-to-be enemies which shines a little light on how many of your victims are simply doing a job, moral reservations aside. This humanises some of your foes and adds another angle to the massacre - I almost felt guilty smashing in soldiers' skulls.
On the technical side of things, Mother Russia Bleeds suffers many of the gripes and shortcomings of 2D brawlers. Hit boxes. I played through the game as Natasha and her tiny female fists didn't seem to connect half as much as they should have and the salt pouring out of me screams, "Sexism!" But the rational part of me whispers, "Bullshit hit boxes." Or is it the other way around? You get a weak punch and strong kick which you can combine into nice chains with hidden moves including stuns and knockdowns; all really satisfying, well animated stuff. But whenever I run into trouble (read: forty-plus enemies at once) I just used the jumping kick exploit. See, the kick move knocks enemies onto the ground and the jump works (most of the time) as a form of a dodge. It looks ridiculous but works - blue cheese. The game is rather geared to fast-paced offense since your only defensive capability is an unreliable horizontal dodge with about 20 frames of invincibility. This is probably my biggest technical gripe (get it? Because the hit boxes are tiny): why is there no vertical dodge?! The jump leaves you exposed as your lowest extremity at the highest point of the jump is below your highest extremity on the ground. Pressing jump and dodge yields nothing and it begs the question, could such a function be patched in? If the game has a vertical dodge I'd be much more inclined to explore the arena mode to its full extent.
The game has a very solid Co-op option. Playing with someone else is actually the best way to enjoy the frenzied free-for-all to its fullest. In all honesty, I don't think I could've gotten through the final two stages without help, I was stuck on the coliseum boss for a little while and being able to draw the beast out with one character to attack with the other made all the difference. The Nekro used for healing and entering a rage can be used to revive your fallen comrade. The Nekro creates an interesting health economy for the game. At full charge, you get three shots each of which will heal about a third of your health or make your character faster and stronger for a few seconds. The only way to recharge is to draw Nekro from the the twitching corpse of an enemy. The first catch here is that only about one-in-twenty of the bastards twitch and the second is that drawing Nekro leaves you defenseless. A Co-op partner comes in handy again but the sheer volume of minions means that you still have to be quick and aware. The use and acquisition of Nekro is what separates Mother Russia from other games in its genre and takes it a class above most of the others.
Mother Russia Bleeds is: Christmas in a chav home/10
Mother Russia Bleeds is a period drama. The period is the 60s and the setting is the Indie Mecca of semi-fictional newly broken up USSR. Mother Russia could comfortably co-habit the same fictional universe as Papers, Please. The plot of the game is classically Brawlery: someone did you wrong - smash their bloody face in. It's a game about freedom more than anything else. Whichever of the four characters you pick, they start off as a gypsy street fighter and end up as a freedom fighter facing a shady military force. Your character begins as a free spirit only to be captured and experimented on until they gather the strength to fight for their emancipation. After breaking out of the labs they were kept in, they have to break out of jail with both the guards and the inmates posing a threat. There is very little in Mother Russia Bleeds that isn't trying to kill you and the blend of mobsters and military special forces creates a world of stereotypical Balkan corruption. The plot not only covers the fight for legal and political freedom but also psychological freedom - freedom from addiction. One of the main themes running through the story is the abuse of psychoactive drugs to enhance combat ability. It's the ugly face of war.
Where in Hotline Miami the degree to which drugs played part and the extent of the player's experience that was reliable was purposely ambiguous and open to our personal interpretation, Mother Russia serves us a healthy warm dose of the 'real' and then our junkie hallucinations on a cold, blood-spattered platter. Nekro the drug becomes Nekro the super-villain. The story mode offers two endings for defeating Nekro in different ways. Should you use the drug to heal or power up at any point during the final fight, your character will find themselves overdosing and despite saving the day won't live long enough to see it. If you manage to, however, beat all three stages of the final boss fight without using Nekro once, your character will beat their addiction and cement their place in history as a war hero and the five or six hours of over indulgent gory freedom fighting will be skimmed over in schools.
I expected Mother Russia to have a throwaway story about how Soviet oppression was bad and made good people mad and violent. Instead, the game deftly explores friendship, betrayal, patriotism and aforementioned addiction. The dialogue is vulgar but never too cringey. One of the levels opens with an exchange between two soon-to-be enemies which shines a little light on how many of your victims are simply doing a job, moral reservations aside. This humanises some of your foes and adds another angle to the massacre - I almost felt guilty smashing in soldiers' skulls.
On the technical side of things, Mother Russia Bleeds suffers many of the gripes and shortcomings of 2D brawlers. Hit boxes. I played through the game as Natasha and her tiny female fists didn't seem to connect half as much as they should have and the salt pouring out of me screams, "Sexism!" But the rational part of me whispers, "Bullshit hit boxes." Or is it the other way around? You get a weak punch and strong kick which you can combine into nice chains with hidden moves including stuns and knockdowns; all really satisfying, well animated stuff. But whenever I run into trouble (read: forty-plus enemies at once) I just used the jumping kick exploit. See, the kick move knocks enemies onto the ground and the jump works (most of the time) as a form of a dodge. It looks ridiculous but works - blue cheese. The game is rather geared to fast-paced offense since your only defensive capability is an unreliable horizontal dodge with about 20 frames of invincibility. This is probably my biggest technical gripe (get it? Because the hit boxes are tiny): why is there no vertical dodge?! The jump leaves you exposed as your lowest extremity at the highest point of the jump is below your highest extremity on the ground. Pressing jump and dodge yields nothing and it begs the question, could such a function be patched in? If the game has a vertical dodge I'd be much more inclined to explore the arena mode to its full extent.
The game has a very solid Co-op option. Playing with someone else is actually the best way to enjoy the frenzied free-for-all to its fullest. In all honesty, I don't think I could've gotten through the final two stages without help, I was stuck on the coliseum boss for a little while and being able to draw the beast out with one character to attack with the other made all the difference. The Nekro used for healing and entering a rage can be used to revive your fallen comrade. The Nekro creates an interesting health economy for the game. At full charge, you get three shots each of which will heal about a third of your health or make your character faster and stronger for a few seconds. The only way to recharge is to draw Nekro from the the twitching corpse of an enemy. The first catch here is that only about one-in-twenty of the bastards twitch and the second is that drawing Nekro leaves you defenseless. A Co-op partner comes in handy again but the sheer volume of minions means that you still have to be quick and aware. The use and acquisition of Nekro is what separates Mother Russia from other games in its genre and takes it a class above most of the others.
Mother Russia Bleeds is: Christmas in a chav home/10
Friday, 6 January 2017
Bethesda's Fallouts just aren't that S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
The original Fallout is one of the earliest games I've ever played. I was about six when it came out and it made up a pretty important part of my childhood. If I was asked to name my all-time favourite game, Fallout would instantly enter the conversation. What makes Fallout so special for me is its S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system.
Fallout adopted GURPS – Generic Universal Role Playing System – by Steve Jackson Games and moulded it to its own needs. At its very core, S.P.E.C.I.A.L is made up of stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These stats are set at the very beginning of the game and are permanent. The player is given 40 points to distribute among these stats with values between one and ten. It all seems pretty straight forward until you realise just how much of an impact your decision here makes. Low Luck will make guns blow up in your face. Low Agility will make you drop your weapons through clumsiness. Low Perception will make you borderline blind. Low Intelligence will make you not sentence good. If you thought picking your starter Pokémon was tough, try building a Fallout character you're happy with.
Of course, experienced players have found optimal builds and there are secret ways of improving certain stats during the course of the game, but 'dumb' playthroughs are still incredibly popular. S.P.E.C.I.A.L not only lets you build a character, it lets you role-play. With low Endurance your character will be more susceptible to addiction but the points you free up can go into Intelligence and Perception and you can role play a post-apocalyptic Gregory House or Rick Sanchez. On your first go you're likely to try building an all-rounder who ends up being really mediocre or unknowingly force yourself into a specialisation with practically your first choice of the game. And that's great - it offers a different challenge. But then Bethesda got their hands on the franchise.
I was actually a big proponent of Fallout 3 becoming a First Person Action RPG, it was the most logical place for the franchise to go, especially with Bethesda involved. I remember a lot of people worrying about Fallout 3 being "Oblivion with guns" at the time and my rebuttal of that worry always involved S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Little was I to know that what has always been a massive and much loved feature would be revamped the way Bethesda has been revamping its Elder Scrolls series - by trimming.
Where in the first two Fallouts your stats built a foundation for who your character is in a meaningful, often obscure way, Bethesda's Fallouts have a much more mundane attitude towards them. You occasionally might get a strength or intelligence check in the game but those are telegraphed along with the needed stat points. Mostly, Intelligence gives more skill points at level up, Strength lets you carry more, Agility gives you more action points for V.A.T.S. It's all predictable and unimaginative. It's boring. The joy of Fallout no longer comes from playing a character, only from meeting characters and 'doing stuff', removing much of the role-playing the game was so good at.
This begs the question: with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity enjoying success, could we have a smaller developer (not indie perhaps, but AA) attempt to recreate the style of role-play from the original Fallout games? Wouldn't it be great if you could doom a character to being a klutz or make them so lucky they run into hidden stashes of weapons on accident? Wouldn't it be great if you could mould a different path for your experience with a game every time you start it over to that degree? Make RPGs great again, make them S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Bethesda's Fallouts are: your best friend after a lobotomy/10
Fallout adopted GURPS – Generic Universal Role Playing System – by Steve Jackson Games and moulded it to its own needs. At its very core, S.P.E.C.I.A.L is made up of stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These stats are set at the very beginning of the game and are permanent. The player is given 40 points to distribute among these stats with values between one and ten. It all seems pretty straight forward until you realise just how much of an impact your decision here makes. Low Luck will make guns blow up in your face. Low Agility will make you drop your weapons through clumsiness. Low Perception will make you borderline blind. Low Intelligence will make you not sentence good. If you thought picking your starter Pokémon was tough, try building a Fallout character you're happy with.
Of course, experienced players have found optimal builds and there are secret ways of improving certain stats during the course of the game, but 'dumb' playthroughs are still incredibly popular. S.P.E.C.I.A.L not only lets you build a character, it lets you role-play. With low Endurance your character will be more susceptible to addiction but the points you free up can go into Intelligence and Perception and you can role play a post-apocalyptic Gregory House or Rick Sanchez. On your first go you're likely to try building an all-rounder who ends up being really mediocre or unknowingly force yourself into a specialisation with practically your first choice of the game. And that's great - it offers a different challenge. But then Bethesda got their hands on the franchise.
I was actually a big proponent of Fallout 3 becoming a First Person Action RPG, it was the most logical place for the franchise to go, especially with Bethesda involved. I remember a lot of people worrying about Fallout 3 being "Oblivion with guns" at the time and my rebuttal of that worry always involved S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Little was I to know that what has always been a massive and much loved feature would be revamped the way Bethesda has been revamping its Elder Scrolls series - by trimming.
Where in the first two Fallouts your stats built a foundation for who your character is in a meaningful, often obscure way, Bethesda's Fallouts have a much more mundane attitude towards them. You occasionally might get a strength or intelligence check in the game but those are telegraphed along with the needed stat points. Mostly, Intelligence gives more skill points at level up, Strength lets you carry more, Agility gives you more action points for V.A.T.S. It's all predictable and unimaginative. It's boring. The joy of Fallout no longer comes from playing a character, only from meeting characters and 'doing stuff', removing much of the role-playing the game was so good at.
This begs the question: with the likes of Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity enjoying success, could we have a smaller developer (not indie perhaps, but AA) attempt to recreate the style of role-play from the original Fallout games? Wouldn't it be great if you could doom a character to being a klutz or make them so lucky they run into hidden stashes of weapons on accident? Wouldn't it be great if you could mould a different path for your experience with a game every time you start it over to that degree? Make RPGs great again, make them S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
Bethesda's Fallouts are: your best friend after a lobotomy/10
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
DOOM (2016)
DOOM
is a welcome throwback to the shooters of old, benefiting from all
the technical advances of today. The game does away with pre-rendered
cut scenes and heavy exposition. Instead, it goes with dynamic
story-telling and heavy demolition. Remember at the beginning of
Half-Life when
they made you sit through a train ride and really set a mood before
you shoved a piece of stool through the fan? DOOM
does
away with that too. Straight and to the point like a shotgun blast to
the head seems to be the agenda here. The game simply hands you a gun
and throws you into a playground populated with toys for you to blow
up. And boy, is it fun.
The general idea is that
guns go BANG and make the demons go SPLAT. The guns and the demons
get more impressive as the game goes on, but I found that the SPLAT
peaked a little early. This is probably the harshest criticism I have
for DOOM: the way the demons
die gets a bit boring. It's both a genuine unsettling problem and an
easily overlooked detail, depending on where and how closely you look
and I intend to explore both angles. I wanna get the SPLAT out of the
way now, so I can gush all about the BANG later. The combat is
dynamic and encourages a good mixture of long and short range
tactics. Bringing enemies' health down to a bare minimum stuns them
and creates an opening for one of the finishing moves, which is a
short cut scene where Doomguy obliterates a demon. There's a small
variety of these based on the angle you take on your victim but I
only really remember maybe five different ones.
Using
these finishers almost always yields health packs, encouraging
players to be aggressive and dive right into the hordes of hell. Add
to that movement speed three times that of an average modern shooter
and you have a recipe for infernally fun mayhem. Everything happens
at neck-breaking pace, so it's lucky really that Doomguy has no neck.
It's also lucky that the finishers merely punctuate a symphony of
death and destruction. Thanks to a high damage yield and relatively
small amount of placed health packs, the player is forced to either
dodge bullets or punch the shit out of demons and both are as fun as
they sound but one without the other soon becomes tedious.
The bad, then. These cut scenes can take up three or four seconds at a time and even though every demon type gets its own personalised death, the sheer volume of enemies means you'll be re-watching the same cut scene hundreds of times. Note that I keep calling them cut scenes and not animations. See, the game kind of stops for a moment while Doomguy does his thing, removing player agency – I felt more a spectator than a participant. Sure, DOOM is just a dumb shooter and not an artsy game designed to make you feel as one with the character and force you to think about how difficult their job is (hint, hint). It's just a game that asks you to point the crosshair and pull the trigger. Still, whenever it wrested control from me it felt like the protagonist rebelling in some way, really letting his anger out. I felt that Doomguy was annoyed with me for going easy on these arseholes from hell and just blowing them up, like they deserve to be dismembered instead. But every time Doomguy raged out and had his fun, mine briefly stopped. The SPLAT becomes a mere formality somewhere along the way and what early on in the game would bring a massive maniacal grin on my face, within about six hours wouldn't even merit a smirk. You kill a lot of demons in DOOM, and I appreciate that resources were needed elsewhere, but just a few more (say, twenty or so) death animations for the hell-fiends would have made all the difference for me. When the SPLAT ceases to be a distraction, you might pay more attention to the gunplay and that is lacking in many aspects from hitboxes to damage output. Probably the reason why the game hasn't been a massive multiplayer hit.
The good, then. The BANG. It starts with a laser pistol and ends with a total annihilation launcher. The shotgun becomes a machine gun, the machine gun becomes a rocket launcher and the rocket launcher becomes a better rocket launcher. All weapons in DOOM are customisable, although that customisation only extends to two predetermined mods per gun. I'm underselling here, a shotgun that shoots explosive shells or a machine-rocket-gun never boring. This is the area where DOOM truly shines, taking mundane, been-there-done-that, run-of-the-mills guns and making them exciting.
Your
first proper weapon – the shotgun – can become a rapid-shot
shotgun or an explosive shotgun and I don't think I need to tell you
which I went with. You get a Plasma rifle that can have an AOE shot
that stuns or damages enemies and both come in handy at different
times. The assault rifle can either get zoom or a mini rocket
launcher (a mini rocket launcher that after a few upgrades doesn't
need to reload and basically has the same rate of fire as the default
setting of the rifle). You do, of course, get a rocket launcher. But
DOOM's rocket launcher isn't just your regular RPG – no, no
– DOOM's rocket launcher lets you detonate your rockets
mid-air and even add splash damage to them. The sniper rifle is a
super-powerful laser cannon that can also be turned into a turret if
you ever get tired of the running around. The only two 'boring' guns
are the Super Shotgun and the minigun. Now, the Super Shotgun has
some redeeming qualities (mainly the fact it's an absolute beast of a
cannon) but I must concede that the minigun was genuinely boring. And
then comes the BFG. Ah yes, this one gets very limited special ammo,
no more than three shots at a time and obliterates basically
everything in view. There only four kinds of ammo for all these guns
though: shotgun shells for the two shotguns, plasma for the plasma
rifle and the gauss cannon, assault rifle bullets for the rifle and
the minigun and rockets. Once you've run out of ammo it's chainsaw
time – the classic melee weapon makes a return as a special
one-shot-kill weapon that also makes its victim drops ammo.
DOOM has
a plot if you're into that. It's about how demons are shit-scared of
Doomguy and how he hates their guts. Or loves them. Loves ripping
them out, anyway. It's also about authoritarian manipulation,
fanaticism, dangers of experimentation and GUNS.
Level
design and level art fall somewhere between the good and the bad. The
art is beautiful throughout and Hell is really pretty to look at but
the skeletal design isn't always great. Each level has its own
secrets, some better hidden than others. These secrets can often be
found just by looking at the mini map and there is an unlockable perk
to have all collectibles and secrets revealed on the mini map from
the beginning of a level which does kind of defeat the whole 'explore
to find goodies' angle. Each level is fitted with a secret area taken
straight from the original Doom,
480p graphics and all. These are fun to find but a couple are nothing
but dead ends with a bit of ammo and I can't help but feel like Id
really missed a trick there.
DOOM is
the most fun I've had with a game released in 2016 – it's fast,
brutal, unpretentious, humorous and, most importantly, fun. There is
still much I haven't tried (because I don't really care) like the map
building mode, Snap Map, which is basically Mario Maker
but DOOM. The game
brings back memories and creates new great ones of its own, I won't
be forgetting DOOM (2016) anytime
soon.
DOOM is:
your 25-year-old dog finding its long-lost childhood toy/10
Wednesday, 26 October 2016
All the things Red Dead Redemption 2 should have been called
Rockstar
recently announced Red Dead Redemption 2 and a portion of the
Internet exploded with complaints about the title. Red Dead
Redemption 2 is set to be the third game in the Red Dead series and a
sequel to Red Dead Redemption, having the Internet argue that
Rockstar should've kept up their titling convention of naming the
games Red Dead R...
So I've decided to explore the possibilities and here are the titles Rockstar should've gone with:
READ DEAD RELOADED starring Keanu Reeves in the role of Jack Morston, realising that the entire affair was just some video game made by cruel, evil Scotsmen. Kind of Mogworld meets Matrix meets Unforgiven. Jack realises everyone whom he murdered was just an NPC and his scruples disappear, letting him go on an absolute rampage. The game ends in a glitch sequence similar to Pony Island or Undertale.
RED DEAD RESURRECTION where John comes back to life as an undead necromancer, realises that having a wholesome life wasn't for him after all, resurrects his old partners and sells his soul for a ghost ship called Black Pearl to sail the seas and plunder. Kind of a Black Flag affair, seeing you sail the waters of the frontier and terrify anyone you encounter. John could even have Shang Tsung-like soul-sucking powers to make currency more interesting.
RED DEAD REFERENDUM where Jack Morston campaigns for a complete overhaul to the taxing system and for free health care and education for all white people living in the West, ultimately getting murdered by multiple gunmen for being 'a poncy lefty'.
RED DEAD ROASTING where instead of guns, all characters use witty insults to hurt each other. The entire game plays out like a political debate or a comedian's birthday party. Saints Row special effects included.
RED DEAD REVOLUTION where Jack Morston moves to Canada, learns French and begins beheading the upper classes. Filled with romance and existentialism, the game features dialogue options and branching paths. A healthy cross between a working Assassin's Creed Unity and Mass Effect.
RED DEAD RING where Jack finally gives in to his unwholesome urges and commits a series of anal rapes. Extra points are scored for attacking bandits and politicians.
So I've decided to explore the possibilities and here are the titles Rockstar should've gone with:
READ DEAD RELOADED starring Keanu Reeves in the role of Jack Morston, realising that the entire affair was just some video game made by cruel, evil Scotsmen. Kind of Mogworld meets Matrix meets Unforgiven. Jack realises everyone whom he murdered was just an NPC and his scruples disappear, letting him go on an absolute rampage. The game ends in a glitch sequence similar to Pony Island or Undertale.
RED DEAD RESURRECTION where John comes back to life as an undead necromancer, realises that having a wholesome life wasn't for him after all, resurrects his old partners and sells his soul for a ghost ship called Black Pearl to sail the seas and plunder. Kind of a Black Flag affair, seeing you sail the waters of the frontier and terrify anyone you encounter. John could even have Shang Tsung-like soul-sucking powers to make currency more interesting.
RED DEAD REFERENDUM where Jack Morston campaigns for a complete overhaul to the taxing system and for free health care and education for all white people living in the West, ultimately getting murdered by multiple gunmen for being 'a poncy lefty'.
RED DEAD ROASTING where instead of guns, all characters use witty insults to hurt each other. The entire game plays out like a political debate or a comedian's birthday party. Saints Row special effects included.
RED DEAD REVOLUTION where Jack Morston moves to Canada, learns French and begins beheading the upper classes. Filled with romance and existentialism, the game features dialogue options and branching paths. A healthy cross between a working Assassin's Creed Unity and Mass Effect.
RED DEAD RING where Jack finally gives in to his unwholesome urges and commits a series of anal rapes. Extra points are scored for attacking bandits and politicians.
RED DEAD REVEANGANCE sees the series
make a shift from its traditional third-person shooter genre into the
fast-paced and demanding world of spectacle hack'n'slash. Jack dies a
death akin to his father's but is brought back with a fantasy
frontier technology and goes on a quest for revenge spanning with
pistol and sabre in tow.
RED DEAD REFORMED sees Jack Mortson
lead a quiet family life. Each passing day tests our hero's patience
and the challenge comes from not murdering all the pricks you come
across. Satisfaction not guaranteed.
RED DEAD REALITY a VR Western shooter
with more gimmicks than your hands will know what to do with. Would
come with VR pistol for shooting, VR reigns for horse riding, VR dice
for dice throwing, VR knife for playing five finger fillet, a deck of
VR cards for playing poker, a pair of VR sneaking shoes and a
Fleshlight for the brothel gameplay.
RED DEAD ROULETTE a roguelite version
of RED DEAD starring Jack as a functioning alcoholic mercenary who
decides to stare the Grim Reaper dead in the eye and only load five
bullets into the drum. All duels would be pot luck and the game would
feature finishing shots that would see Jack aim at his temple,
Persona 4 style, and then off his victim.
RED DEAD RUSSIAN same but in Siberia.
RED DEAD RUSSIAN same but in Siberia.
Monday, 22 August 2016
Reigns
Platform: PC
Price paid: £1.99
Reigns is a strange game. It's also a strange game to describe. It's not a difficult game to describe: it's a text-based dual-choice resource management game with roguelike elements putting the player in the role of a monarch. But that is strange. It's another one of those really inexpensive little indie games with Satan in it.
Steam is overrun with humorous, gimmicky indie games and most of them have some form of a devil. There's never much in the way of gameplay and there is always a moment that's designed to mess with your head and make your jaw drop. There is always a girl and there is always a lighthouse type shit. What sets Reigns apart is the fact that it is actually funny and challenging. As king, you must keep the kingdom's resources in the balance. These resources are the church, the people, the army and the treasury. Throughout the game you are faced with situations demanding you make one of two possible choices, either supplementing or depleting your supplies in varying degrees. The game is nice enough to let you know how big an impact your decision will make with a little circle above the concerned resource but you're left in the dark as to whether it will be going up or down. You might think it adds a degree of strategy. It doesn't. There are only about 50 different situations and you'll see them all within an hour. If variety is the spice of life, Reigns was cooked by white people. The challenge lies in the fact that you lose when any one of the resources is either completely empty or completely full. Reigns is probably the first game I've come across to punish me for doing too well. Narratively, they are all very different types of failure and you should definitely try to max out the people and the money resources.
Reigns is more suited to quick, short plays than to hour-long sessions. It is literally just text and weird, blocky portraits. And jokes. Haha. Admittedly, some of the humour is bang-on but a lot of it is just random stoner nonsense and I get the feeling the writer(s?) was trying to tick too many boxes. It's a very LOLRANDOM kind of game but has just enough charm and clever design to be endearing like a blind dog pissing on your feet rather than painful like a blind bloke shoving his walking stick up your read end. The player starts off completely blind (I was always going somewhere with this, even if you couldn't see it) and gains more and more insight into just what is going on until we meet the devil himself. Every 666 years. Haha. Now, I can't in all honesty tell you whether there is a point to it all because I stopped playing after meeting the devil for the second time and it being, for all I could tell, identical to our first meeting. Except that he told me the game would end after 1998 turns, or in the year 1998. That's probably a reference I don't get. Probably something to do with Windows 2000 and ME, the two OS following Windows 98, being an absolute pile of shit. But then again, it all plays like something made and especially written by an 18-year-old. So who knows?
Reigns is cheaper than a large bag of chips and infernally fun with friends and alcohol, maybe not so much on your Jack Jones. If you've got an evening free and some friends round, it's a two pound game that will probably offer you two hours of fun and with the state of Steam as it is, Reigns falls into the top 15% of games on the storefront in terms of overall quality.
Reigns is: going to the pub with Philosophy students/10
Price paid: £1.99
Reigns is a strange game. It's also a strange game to describe. It's not a difficult game to describe: it's a text-based dual-choice resource management game with roguelike elements putting the player in the role of a monarch. But that is strange. It's another one of those really inexpensive little indie games with Satan in it.
Steam is overrun with humorous, gimmicky indie games and most of them have some form of a devil. There's never much in the way of gameplay and there is always a moment that's designed to mess with your head and make your jaw drop. There is always a girl and there is always a lighthouse type shit. What sets Reigns apart is the fact that it is actually funny and challenging. As king, you must keep the kingdom's resources in the balance. These resources are the church, the people, the army and the treasury. Throughout the game you are faced with situations demanding you make one of two possible choices, either supplementing or depleting your supplies in varying degrees. The game is nice enough to let you know how big an impact your decision will make with a little circle above the concerned resource but you're left in the dark as to whether it will be going up or down. You might think it adds a degree of strategy. It doesn't. There are only about 50 different situations and you'll see them all within an hour. If variety is the spice of life, Reigns was cooked by white people. The challenge lies in the fact that you lose when any one of the resources is either completely empty or completely full. Reigns is probably the first game I've come across to punish me for doing too well. Narratively, they are all very different types of failure and you should definitely try to max out the people and the money resources.
Reigns is more suited to quick, short plays than to hour-long sessions. It is literally just text and weird, blocky portraits. And jokes. Haha. Admittedly, some of the humour is bang-on but a lot of it is just random stoner nonsense and I get the feeling the writer(s?) was trying to tick too many boxes. It's a very LOLRANDOM kind of game but has just enough charm and clever design to be endearing like a blind dog pissing on your feet rather than painful like a blind bloke shoving his walking stick up your read end. The player starts off completely blind (I was always going somewhere with this, even if you couldn't see it) and gains more and more insight into just what is going on until we meet the devil himself. Every 666 years. Haha. Now, I can't in all honesty tell you whether there is a point to it all because I stopped playing after meeting the devil for the second time and it being, for all I could tell, identical to our first meeting. Except that he told me the game would end after 1998 turns, or in the year 1998. That's probably a reference I don't get. Probably something to do with Windows 2000 and ME, the two OS following Windows 98, being an absolute pile of shit. But then again, it all plays like something made and especially written by an 18-year-old. So who knows?Reigns is cheaper than a large bag of chips and infernally fun with friends and alcohol, maybe not so much on your Jack Jones. If you've got an evening free and some friends round, it's a two pound game that will probably offer you two hours of fun and with the state of Steam as it is, Reigns falls into the top 15% of games on the storefront in terms of overall quality.
Reigns is: going to the pub with Philosophy students/10
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