Category: Game Reviews

Categories
Game Reviews

Assassin’s Creed Origins

I tell people I have a love/hate relationship with the Assassin’s Creed series, but I’m going to be totally honest here: it’s mostly a love/annoyed relationship. I find them to be brainless timesinks, and that’s not really a bad thing. They’re a reliable, often enjoyable 20 something hours of game. I haven’t played all of them, and the ones I have played are often regarded as the bad ones, but I almost always get one when I want to kill time. Assassin’s Creed Origins, however, is better than a time killer. It’s a great game.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes the history-skipping game way back to ancient Egypt, in the times when Cleopatra’s brother occupies her throne, and he’s propped up by a Greek army. You play as Bayek, a Medjay, and you’re hunting down the people who killed your son. This mission will take Bayek all across Egypt and lead to uncovering a greater conspiracy.

Origins bins a lot of hallmarks of the Assassin’s Creed series. In doing so, it becomes a much more enjoyable game, and probably a more accessible game, but it loses some of what makes Assassin’s Creed unique. Origins presents a huge, sprawling Egypt, that you’re free to explore and engage with on your terms.

Origins took a lot of, let’s call it, inspiration from The Witcher 3. It’s very much about having a lot of stuff to do, and letting you do it in whatever priority you want. Often, you can even run off in the middle of a quest to do something else and then come back and pick it right up. While the quests aren’t quite as well written as The Witcher 3, and they rarely do that thing where it acknowledges when you’ve already solved a step in the quest ahead of time, they are competent. They don’t feel like a waste of time. Bayek himself, along with the rest of the cast, is also well written. Compared to some of the rest of the Assassin’s Creed series, this is the best it’s been.

What is loses is the strict focus on stealth. Bayek can get into a lot of fights and leave most of them alive, where most Assassin’s Creed protagonists would wilt like a flower. Additionally, if you do find yourself in over your head, you can simply run away and it’ll almost always work. This is in stark contrast with other games in the series, where enemies are almost omniscient and ever-preset to the point that being spotted means reloading a checkpoint. Add in that you no longer have the ability, or much need, to blend in with crowds, nor much need to run along rooftops to avoid being seen, means this Assassin’s Creed feels least like a game in this series. If it weren’t in a historical setting, with a single “assassinate” button, and good climbing mechanics, it’d be a different game entirely.

Some people aren’t going to like this shift; I’m not one of those people. I loved it. Like The Witcher 3, it hooked me early on and I spent a lot of long stretches of time playing it. Unplayed games notwithstanding, this is the best game in the series. The extra time Ubisoft put into its development clearly paid off; they made an Assassin’s Creed that I just loved.

Reference: Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed Origins [Ubisoft, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Categories
Game Reviews

Night in the Woods

There’s an audience for Night in the Woods that this game will hit harder than the rest. Here are just a few touch points this audience will identify: instant messenger, away messages, sleeping until 4pm, dropping out of college, being in a band that never plays a show, working in a low paying, low skill job for too long, bailing on said job as often as possible, living in a dying town but coming back because it’s home. All of these things come together to form a picture of Night in the Woods, and it’s not going to connect with everyone.

You play as Mae, who’s recently dropped out of college and returned home. You pick things up with your old friends, learn what they’ve been up to since you’ve left, but there’s something else going on in Possum Springs. Mae has nightmares or visions and strange things around town that cannot be easily explained seem to follow her.

To Night in the Woods‘ credit, the characters are well-defined, and it’s a pretty big cast. Each has a unique voice and the often more to them than their initial presentation. This clarity of character definition extends to the beautiful art of the game. Night in the Woods has a distinct, clean art style that never looks bad or dull.

Where it didn’t quite come together for me was in the narrative and gameplay. It took a long time for the story to build to a point where it had to hooked. It is a slow starter. This may be purposeful, as a lot of the draw of the game is the connection you should feel to the characters, but it felt tedious at times. Adding to this tedium is the gameplay loop.

Here’s the loop: wake up and check your computer for messages from your friends. Talk to mom in the kitchen. Walk all over town, talking to everyone. They’re always in the same places, but they always have something new to say. After you’ve talked to everyone, go back to the one friend you want to hang out with that night and tell them so. Then go to a character specific scene that nudges the story forward a little bit. These end at home where you talk to dad, check your computer for more messages, and go to sleep.

Again, this may be purposeful. They’re replicating some of the tedium of living in a small town, where you know everyone and they’re all going through a similar routine. But it’s not particularly thrilling and I wish there were a way to move a bit faster. Mae’s not a quick walker and I got a bit tired of walking all over town at her slow pace. It plays like Super Mario Bros. at half speed and, instead of squishing dangerous mushrooms, you’re chatting up your friends and neighbors. If it moved a bit faster, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me nine hours to complete a story that could’ve fit within maybe a quarter of that time.

I picked up Night in the Woods because so many people whose opinions I respect loved it. I get why they loved it, because the writing is good and the characters are great. But I found it pedestrian to the point of being just okay. It’s got its moments but they’re deep in there, surrounded by a lot of slow walking and repetitive gameplay. I was honestly quite surprised to find this game has an Overwhelmingly Positive user rating on Steam. It is very much not going to please everyone.

Reference: Infinite Fall. Night in the Woods [Finji, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Categories
Game Reviews

Get Even

The number of video games that actually do something with medium that less interactive media (movies, TV) can’t accomplish is so vanishingly small. Video games are so frequently linear affairs without much opportunity for deviation that the rare ones that do something different stand out. Get Even stands out.

You are Cole Black and you can only remember one thing, a hostage rescue gone wrong. You wake up in a run down asylum where Red, your captor, has strapped a headset to you that can explore and replay memories. By replaying these memories and exploring the asylum, you have to put together the pieces to try to find out who you are, what you were doing, and who’s behind all of it.

In a lot of ways, Get Even reminds me of Condemned: Criminal Origins. Like Condemned, you have a handful of non-gun tools to explore environments and collect evidence, like blacklights, thermal vision, and an environment scanner. Collecting this information and finding documents are an important part of the game as you attempt to sort out Black’s memories. While using these tools to meticulously scour rooms is kind of fun, often I just found myself in rooms littered with documents to dump a lot of information.

However, this isn’t a walking simulator. There are guards and mercenaries everywhere. Black is equipped with a couple useful weapons, but discouraged from using them. This means most levels are stealthy affairs, and the stealth in the game isn’t exactly great. You can view enemy vision cones with your map, but the enemy’s vision extends far beyond what the cone indicates. This is no Metal Gear Solid. Additionally, you’re told upfront that your actions, including killing people in your memories, have consequences. So you’re given a cool weapon to play with, and told not to use it.

What Get Even does really well is mess with the player. At the start of the game, you know as much as Black does, so the game can reveal things to you and Black at the same time. This exploring of Black’s memories where Black doesn’t know what happens next leads to some situations where you as the player can and should question whether what you’re seeing is what actually happened or only how Black wanted to remember it. This merging of perspectives and unreliable narration are head games that other media can’t pull off, so Get Even‘s experience is pretty unique.

Looking at The Farm 51’s past titles, Get Even should be the game that gets them more positive attention. It’s a cool game that tries to create a different experience from most games and succeeds in many ways. Get Even seems to have flown under a lot of people’s’ radars, and it deserves more attention.

Reference: The Farm 51. Get Even [Namco Bandai, 2017]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Categories
Game Reviews

Oxenfree

One of the things video games struggle with is human dialog, especially when they introduce player choices. It’s often stilted and flows poorly, if it’s written well at all. Many games can get serious kudos if they manage to get dialog and conversations right. Oxenfree is a game that gets it very right and it might be enough to cover its flaws.

In Oxenfree, you control Alex, a high schooler who’s gone to a beach party on a small island with her friends. However, the island has a dark history and Alex and her friends have to uncover it to find a way to save themselves when the night takes a turn for the worst.

The thing that Oxenfree does best is its conversations between characters. Your four friends are fairly chatty. The dialog is natural and well-written, but what Oxenfree brings to it is that you’re given up to three dialog choices, and when you makes those choices, you can interrupt your friends. Mass Effect did this, but your friends in Oxenfree actually react to it. It’s such a minor thing, but it goes a long way toward immersing you in what is going on.

Night School Studio is comprised of some former Telltale Games developers, so it should be no surprise that your dialog choices affect the story and how other characters think of you. However, instead of an outright “character B will remember this” type statement, you don’t really get a lot of feedback on when you’re changing hearts and minds. The only feedback you get is a little thought bubble over someone’s head with someone else’s face in it. It gives some indication that they’re thinking about that person, but not explicitly why. I like this a lot because it made my own choices feel more natural and less like I’m trying to push a friendship slider in one direction or another.

What might turn some people off is that there isn’t a lot more going on here than walking around this island and talking to your friends about the weird stuff that’s happening. There’s some very light puzzle solving, and you can choose to do a lot of backtracking to find collectible items that flesh out more of the mysterious island, but don’t expect to manage an inventory, or jump on a platform, or shoot anything. I’m not sure there was any point in time I could’ve “failed”, just dozens of opportunities to alter the story in negative ways.

While the gameplay is very light, I could not stop playing Oxenfree. I played it all over the course of a single day with the game lasting about 5 hours. The intrigue-filled story and the immersive dialog kept me around. If I was going to put it down at any time, it would’ve been during some of the item finding I did, where there wasn’t a lot of dialog but still got some payoff by finding another piece of the mystery. It nails a foreboding and dark story without being totally grim or colorless. It’s the perfect way to spend a winter weekend.

Reference: Night School Studio. Oxenfree [Night School Studio, 2016]

Source: Purchased from Steam store.

Categories
Game Reviews

What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch reminds me a lot of Dear Esther, possibly the first “walking simulator”. Maybe it’s the narration, or the tone, or the setting, or faulty memory (it’s been a very long time since I’ve played Dear Esther) but I finished Edith Finch thinking about replaying Dear Esther. That’s not bad company to be in; Dear Esther was good but What Remains of Edith Finch is truly moving.

You are Edith Finch and you are exploring your old family home. Though you’ve been gone from it, it’s where your family always lived, and where you explore their lives and deaths. You see, you’re (probably) the last Finch.

The patchwork Finch home is an experience to explore. Every room is incredibly detailed, and they’re decorated in the manner fitting their occupants. Nearly every family member had their own rooms, and they’re all lovingly preserved. It’s kind of like going through the house of a historical figure, like the Lincoln home. It’s not quite as thoroughly interactive as Gone Home, but this is made up for by the vignettes.

While exploring, you’ll find bits and pieces of your family’s lives that take you to a little vignette about them. They seemed to all have a different style or approach, so no two were the same. Sometimes more interactive than others, these break up the exploration of the Finch house perfectly.

There’s no way to discuss the Finch family without ruining the experience, but I left the game knowing each of the Finchs by name (and there are about a dozen of them) and their personalities. It’s amazing how well their stories are constructed to be memorable and unique.

I really don’t have any criticisms of this game. It’s a beautiful, emotional experience. Pass on seeing a movie this weekend and play this game about family and death.

Reference: Giant Sparrow (developer). What Remains of Edith Finch [Annapurna Interactive, 2017]

Source: Purchased via Steam Store

Categories
Game Reviews

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

The New Colossus is not The New Order. That much should be obvious from the title, but I want to make it perfectly clear. If you go into The New Colossus expecting more of the tone or content of The New Order, you will be disappointed. I know this because for the first half of the game, I was disappointed.

The New Colossus picks up immediately after the events of The New Order. You’ve dealt the Nazis a defeat, but not a killing blow, and they’re still in charge. But instead of liberating Europe, you’re moving on to free America. America surrendered after the Nazis dropped an atomic bomb on New York City, so you and your team of misfits are going to start a new American revolution.

I think maybe I have rose-tinted glasses when thinking back to The New Order, because I recall handily beating that game on “I am Death Incarnate” difficulty (the highest you can start with) and loving it. I started The New Colossus the same way and immediately died over and over until I realized that this isn’t fun and dialed the difficulty down to their version of “medium”. Even with the difficulty turned down, the game is still very challenging because you die very quickly if you don’t have armor. Even when you do have armor, there isn’t much indicating you’re being shot or where you’re being shot from until that armor has evaporated, and then you’re essentially done for.

However, the shooting and action does feel great. Enemies visibly react to being shot, weapons all have an appropriate punch to them, and heavy weapons can make you feel invincible. When you’re not sneaking around( which is still an option), you can run, dodge, shoot from cover, and melee, all of the options you want from an solid action game.

Thematically, The New Colossus is about revolution, and not the dour, grim game that The New Order frequently was. It rapidly switches from Nazi oppression and fascism on display to humor and humanity. It’s more rollercoaster than whiplash though, handled in a manner that few games can pull off. It’s a game that will shock you sometimes, but the shocks aren’t meaningless. They serve a purpose.

I’ve heard plenty of other people say that anyone wanting to play Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus should turn the difficulty down to easy and run through it, which I don’t particularly agree with. The action is fun and worth engaging with, even though it does suffer from lack of feedback. And running through the levels to get to the next cutscene neglects the wealth of background information in the well-done collectibles as well as the beautifully designed levels themselves. Maybe take one approach or the other, but play it. It doesn’t quite live up to The New Order, but it’s still an excellent addition to the series.

Below the cut are some thoughts and notes that will contain spoilers. This is your only warning.

Reference: Machine Games (developer). Wolfenstein 2: The New Colosssus [Bethesda Softworks, 2017]

Source: Purchased via Humble Store

Continue reading “Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus”
Categories
Game Reviews

ICEY

ICEY calls itself a meta game in disguise but that disguise is real thin. When the game exits the prologue, there is a narrator constantly commentating on your actions. The narrator is the meta game part of this otherwise familiar 2D action game, and one of its biggest detractors.

You play as ICEY, a clone in a tank, or maybe a cyborg, and you have to find and kill Judas. He’s the bringer of the apocalypse, that wicked devil. At the start, that’s it. The narrator and environment reveals more of the story, sort of.

The gameplay is simple sidescrolling action. Move to the right, mash the light or heavy attack until the enemies die, then use money to upgrade your combos or life meter. It’s competent and mostly fun without getting too repetitive, but the game is rather short.

What makes ICEY unique is the Stanley Parable-esque narrator. He tells you where to go or not to go, what to do, sometimes even why you’re doing it. The narrator frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the player directly. He talks a lot, and the game touches on a broad range of stuff from player choice to the elder gods.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It feels like there’s something to it, some message, but it’s all given to you in bits and pieces. None of it really adds up. Also, the voice acting on the narrator is bad. It’s lifeless, and stiff. Worse, the narrator is ever present. The bad narration follows you everywhere. If you can’t get over it, you’re never going to enjoy the game.

Some of the ideas may have been lost in translation. The developers are Chinese, so it may make more sense if it were played in Chinese. But there’s not a lot of excuses for the narrator. He’s a central figure in the game and one of the least enjoyable parts. Despite these problems, I enjoyed ICEY. It’s got enough weird in it that I wanted to press on to see what else it’d do, and the action is fun. But it’s hard to deny that the time wouldn’t be better spent on The Stanley Parable and Dust: An Elysian Tail, both of which do well the narration and action parts (respectively) of what ICEY tries to accomplish.

Reference: FantaBlade Network (developer). ICEY [X.D. Network, 2017]

Source: Purchased via Steam

Categories
Game Reviews

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

If Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is anything other than an enjoyable video game, it’s a value proposition. Developers Ninja Theory are no stranger to big budgets; they made Heavenly Sword for Sony, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West for just about every platform, and the most recent Devil May Cry game for Capcom. They know how to spend money, so it’s interesting that they’ve separated from big publishers to develop and publish Hellblade at a $30 price. The end product is mostly good.

In Hellblade, you play as titular Senua, traveling deep into Nordic territory to rescue the soul of your murdered lover. In the vein of what Ninja Theory does best, it’s a third person character action game. What makes Hellblade unique is that Senua suffers from hearing disembodied voices and seeing things that don’t exist.

A lot of the marketing around the game has to do with the challenge in trying to portray a character with mental illness. Plenty of games have tried and it’s almost always a flat portrayal of someone who’s zany or unpredictable without a lot of nuance. With the help of consultants in the neurological sciences, Ninja Theory has crafted a tortured, sympathetic character in Senua.

Another aspect of the game that reflects Ninja Theory’s experience and skill is in the look of it. It’s a beautiful game with some really incredible motion capture, particularly in the faces. They don’t look like video game faces; they’re expressive and emotional every time you see them. This really helps with connecting to the characters and feeling what they feel.

While they nailed the characters and look of the game, the game parts are kind of lacking. Each level of the game will have you doing one of two things: finding hidden objects in the environment, or fighting. The hidden object stuff is mostly clever, but it’s almost always boiled down to aligning objects in the right perspective to find the symbol you’re looking for. It doesn’t change much from beginning to end.

The combat is also not very robust. There are five enemies, excluding bosses, that you will encounter in small groups. The challenge is to keep them away from your back as they’ll try to flank you to attack. With infinite ability to dodge, and most attacks blockable, the only thing that has to be figured out is reading attacks to time blocks (or dodge), and how many whacks it’s going to take to kill the enemy. It’s fun for a while, but it really wore me down by the end. You’ve got one weapon, so once you’ve figured out how to use it, combat loses its shine.

But the thin combat and environment puzzles couldn’t keep me from seeing it through to the end. Senua and the darkness that haunts her was compelling enough on her own to keep me playing. What Ninja Theory set out to do, make a high quality game at an indie price point, is successful as long as you keep your expectations at the sub-blockbuster level.

Reference: Ninja Theory (developer). Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice [Ninja Theory, 2017]

Source: Purchased via Humble Store

Categories
Game Reviews

Tacoma

Tacoma is the not-at-all related followup to the critically acclaimed Gone Home and Fullbright’s second game. The sophomore game stereotypes suffer the same problems as a sophomore album from a band. Can they repeat success? Will they try to strike out in a different direction and potentially lose their fans with a bold change, or will they try to recapture and build upon the success of their first release? In Tacoma, you will find less of the former and more of the latter.

You are Amy Ferrier, a contractor for Venturis Corporation. Your task is to retrieve the AI named ODIN from Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma. While you’re there, you can also learn the fates of the crew who are mysteriously absent. It doesn’t take long to find out that a disaster aboard Tacoma is the cause of their disappearance.

Playing Tacoma is going to feel extremely familiar to fans of Gone Home. You’re in space, on a space station, but you’re still largely picking through other people’s stuff and listening to their stories as you collect data on ODIN. The mechanical twist to Tacoma is that the stories are told mostly through wireframe mannequins of the crew presented in an alternate reality (AR) interface. ODIN was recording these scenes and allows you to view some of them. You can fast-forward, rewind, interact with physical objects and AR interfaces as you follow the crew through these scenes. The way these scenes play out is easily the most natural feeling presentation of video game cutscenes I’ve ever seen. A scene may start with half of the crew present, but some will walk in, others will walk out, and you can follow them through the scene to catch different conversations. It’s really cool to watch in motion, and allows the game to present multiple storylines in an extremely seamless way.

Tacoma is packed with little side stories. If you were to solely follow the AR scenes or watch them only once, you’d absolutely get the gist of the main plot. However, in almost every drawer there’s highly detailed notebook or tablet full of details that make Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma a place in the world, and make the wireframe cutouts into people. Tacoma accomplishes an incredible task of humanizing a seven person crew, in a video game, in a short amount of time.

The short play time is what will cause the most heartache for people. Like Gone Home, my personal playtime with Tacoma clocked in at a brief two and a half hours. I’m thorough too; I watched every AR cutscene multiple times to follow all of the characters in each scene, I read every AR interface, and I unlocked every locked door. A speedrun of Tacoma would only be limited to the amount of time it takes to watch each AR scene once, which is likely far less than 30 minutes total. If the short playtime doesn’t discourage you, looking for anything more than a futuristic, AR-enhanced version of Gone Home might also bring disappointment. Make no mistake, for better or worse, Tacoma is very much a product of the team that made Gone Home. It didn’t suddenly turn into System Shock or The Walking Dead. The puzzles to be solved are simple, and there is almost zero player input. In some ways, Tacoma would almost entirely complete itself without the player. In fact, you don’t even need to watch the AR scenes. You can accomplish your mission by watching slow moving progress bars fill in over the course of three hours.

But you should watch those AR scenes, and interact with the objects around you, and get attached to these very human characters. Tacoma has some of the finest video game storytelling you will ever find. Just don’t go looking for something more than that, because you won’t find it. Tacoma is excellent, but it rides on the shoulders of Gone Home.

Categories
Game Reviews

The Signal From Tölva

An hour into The Signal from Tölva, I was not impressed. I was wandering around a lot of wide open, empty yet somehow linear valleys with a couple simple gameplay tools and objectives. It seemed like there wasn’t much to it. And there isn’t. But it comes together in surprising ways.

Those sparse landscapes are littered with wreckage. As I progressed through the game, it was quickly obvious that this was a place that used to be important. There are wrecked space ships, wrecked factories, even derelict giant robots, rusting and half-buried in the dirt. The character you play as is working for a mysterious information broker and doesn’t actually set foot on the planet. You possess the chassis of surveyor robots, who are the mortal enemies of bandit robots and zealot robots. None of them particularly look or behave differently, which adds a real nihilistic angle to the conflict. Surveyors, bandits, and zealots are all fighting for control over this scrap heap planet to no particular purpose.

You do have to fight for control though. Progress in the game is largely measured by how many bunkers you control, which are where you can change your weaponry and items, read the story tidbits that fall out of items you collect, and where friendly surveyors spawn. To take control of a bunker, you have to eliminate all of the bandit and/or zealot robots in the immediate vicinity. To aid you, you can fill one of your two weapon slots with a command item which lets you enlist surveyors. They’ll follow you around and attack enemies. But draw off too many surveyors to help you take one bunker can result in a previously captured bunker being overrun by enemies and lost. It’s a tricky, and somewhat annoying balance. Some of those bunkers are not easy to capture and having to recapture them more than once can be frustrating.

Calling it Far Cry with robots is both reductive and giving it too much credit, because Far Cry makes a better first impression and has a lot more to do, but I really enjoyed this game for reasons that are more difficult to quantify than most games. Tölva has a mystery to it and it’s got a melancholy atmosphere. The landscapes are littered with dead machinery, and it took this article by Lewis Gordon to really recognize why they seemed so familiar. I drive past the abandoned, dormant remnants of industry every single day. Its former and current purpose gives me the same feeling of wonder at what it was like when they were in use as I do wandering the planet Tölva. This is not something everyone is going to connect with, but it absolutely increased my appreciation for this game.

I recognize that it’s difficult to recommend a game based on my personal experience with the environment it’s portraying, especially when the game parts are mechanically unremarkable. But reviews are not impartial, and I more-or-less played The Signal From Tölva to death because it’s got a unique feeling to it and I wanted to experience that as much as I could. A free expansion is in the works, and, for a game that sincerely underwhelmed me at first impressions, I’m very much looking forward to it. I may even read the 48-page lore PDF that the game comes with.