Tag: open world

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Game Reviews

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

The best Assassin’s Creed game yet!

I love Monolith. I’ve loved them since way back when they made Blood. They have always made solid games with interesting twists, such as F.E.A.R. and first-person slow-mo, and Condemned: Criminal Origins with its melee and crime investigation focus. They did it again with Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

Shadow of Mordor is a third-person action game that plays like a combination of Assassin’s Creed and Batman: Arkham Asylum. In the Assassin’s Creed vein, there is a lot of climbing on buildings, sneaking around, stabbing orcs, interrogating informants, and finding collectibles. Shadow of Mordor does all of these better than Assassin’s Creed has in the past. The climbing feels better and it’s more obvious where you can and cannot climb. The stealth makes more sense, as breaking line of sight gives a ghostly outline to show where you were last spotted. This makes following enemies seem less omniscient and not unlimited in numbers, while still presenting overwhelming amounts of enemies. The informants are also better done in Shadow of Mordor. Taking a page from the Arkham games, information on your particular target can be gained by grabbing a particular orc, instead of tediously following NPCs, or (even worse) innately somehow knowing everything about your enemy from the start. This last one is something Assassin’s Creed has botched badly in the last couple games.

Taking pages from Arkham, the combat in Mordor is very much influenced by those games, with the same attack, counter, evade, and stun face buttons. It’s a well-done imitation, and I found that my skills learned from the Arkham games translated perfectly to Mordor. Also taking a page from Arkham‘s books, the collectibles include bits of Middle-earth lore which makes them something that (as a Middle-earth fan) I want to collect, rather than just boxes to check to completionists.

What Mordor does that neither of those games do is introduce the nemesis system. You see, true to Middle-earth lore, Uruk-hai lead the orcs and they are nasty. They’re mean, they fight each other, and power is the rule of law. In the game, there are around 20 Uruk captains. They all have unique names. They all have a unique mix of strengths, weaknesses, fears, and hatreds. For example, a particular captain might be invulnerable to stealth attacks, weak against fire, afraid of Caragoar (large four-legged beast), and a hatred of losing. This would mean that stealth is useless against him, and he will regenerate his health if you take his health down but not out, but fire will do more damage, and he’ll lose all of his strengths and hatreds if he sees a Caragoar.

Controlling the 20 something Uruk captains are five warchiefs, with more power and unique attributes themselves. They also have bodyguards, which are Uruk captains. Taking on a warchief without accounting for their bodyguards is a good way to find yourself fighting a lot of powerful Uruk. But you don’t know any of these attributes or command hierarchy from the start. You don’t even know these Uruk’s names. You have to collect intel to learn these things. You can go into these fights blind, but it’s much easier when you know what to expect and who might show up. Later in the game, you can exploit the command hierarchy by turning bodyguards against their warchief, or turning warchiefs and captains against each other.

Reading this, none of it might sound particularly compelling, but it is so well done that it makes the entire game. The named Uruk must have thousands of lines of dialog because repeat encounters result in them bringing up things that I had done to them in the past. Where Assassin’s Creed forced me to collect intel just to put me in the same sneak, murder, run away cycle, Mordor made intel optional, and made the unique Uruk attributes a way of forcing me to be creative with my approach. The nemesis system created stories in Mordor that few games can replicate even with crafted encounters. I’ve written up a great example of one of these stories involving Orthog the Crafty at my blog.

Despite all of these strengths, Mordor isn’t perfect. In fact, where it is lacking is in the crafted story. You play as Talion, and, right from the start, your wife and son are fridged and you’re killed by a minion of Sauron. However, you learn that Talion can’t die because he’s possessed by a wraith. The wraith doesn’t know who he is, but his power keeps Talion from dying in his quest for revenge. The story isn’t particularly bad in itself, but it suffers from too much fan service. You run into a handful of antagonists modeled accurately from their characters in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy who seem to just pop up for no good reason. Or at least, not good enough reasons. It’s a bummer, because I loved all of the collectibles and their stories and found them much more interesting than dragging out movie characters for the apparent purpose of saying “HEY THIS GAME IS LIKE THOSE MOVIES! REMEMBER THOSE?” It’s the movie poster cover art on the latest print of a classic novel. Tacky and unnecessary. The game itself stands alone great without the ham-fisted cameos.

The game ends weakly, and leaves the doors wide swinging open for the sequel, and I personally cannot wait. Maybe they’ll get the story right next time, but if they don’t, I’ll hope to make my own, better stories with an improved nemesis system. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is one of those rare games where the gameplay mechanics create better, more interesting stories than what was written for it, and I hope that we see more of the nemesis system in these type of open world action games in the future.

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Game Reviews

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

Trouble in the Capitol

After the wreck that was Anthem, I was ready for a better shlooter. After playing the open and closed beta, I knew that The Division 2 was that game. But having spent ~30 hours in the game, I’ve come to learn it improves a lot of issues (compared to Anthem, but also The Division) but it still isn’t perfect.

The Division 2 is a third-person cover shooter with loot collection. It picks some time after The Division, but in Washington, DC rather than New York City. Like NYC in the previous, DC was ravaged by the Green Poison (a manufactured smallpox variant) and is in a state of rebuilding rather than the simple survival focus of The Division. But there isn’t a whole lot of plot here either because it also retreads a lot of “reestablishment of society” beats from The Division.

The Division 2, if anything, has a lot to do and collect. Every area of the map is simply littered with missions and landmarks, and these tasks give you plentiful amounts of loot. The world of The Division 2 has knee pads, backpacks, body armor, sanitary masks, and other protective gear everywhere. And guns! It’s like a prepper hive lives in every basement, and most of them exploded up to the surface in the ensuing disaster. All this gear has a handful of levels of rarity and numbers go up in a satisfying fashion if you’re compelled by seeing numbers go up.

The Division 2 improves on the first game’s skill selection (which are things that you can do in combat on a timer, like drop a turret or pull up a shield) and enemy tactics. In the first game, a solo player like myself could do very well simply by dropping an automated turret and then flanking the enemies as they take cover from the turret. That doesn’t work so well in The Division 2, because enemies outnumber and flank you, and tougher ones will simply rush your turret and kick it to death. To compensate, you’ve got a much bigger selection of tools to adapt to enemy tactics. Where The Division had four, The Division 2 has eight, and each of those has three variants. You can only pick two configurations out of the possible 24, and it’s a hard choice. That turret that draws enemy attention is still useful, but sometimes I’d rather have the grenade launcher that drains enemy armor, or the drone that heals me.

This variety in gear and tactical options doesn’t change the basic gameplay loop though, and it wears on after a while. With some exceptions, weapons are just bullet hoses, and the enemies are just more goons with a guns shooting at you. A lot of the missions take place in museums and DC landmarks, which is cool because they’re beautiful environments with neat set pieces, but what you do in the missions rarely changes. You enter a room full of enemies, take cover, and then shoot at them until they die. That sounds like an oversimplification, but it really isn’t. The action feels good but I’ve mowed down hundreds of enemies. This isn’t a big change from the last Division, where I also cleared rooms and mowed down hundreds of enemies with automatic weapons.

The huge amount of stuff in the game but limited variety in core gameplay has worn out my interest in playing it more. I’ve honestly not completed the main mission branch, and I’m going to need to take a break and come back to it later before I start to resent this game. It’s a fun game for the first 20 something hours and numbers go up, but numbers going up isn’t cutting it for me anymore. It is more fun to play with others, and matchmaking exists for every activity, but even playing with others doesn’t change the core gameplay loop. The good(?) news is that this is a “live service” type game that will be getting more stuff over time, and Ubisoft has demonstrated their dedication to supporting their games with The Division (which markedly improved over time), and other titles like For Honor and Rainbow Six: Siege. I’m fairly confident I’ll come back to The Division 2 in a couple months, wrap up the main missions, and play more of the new stuff they add to it. The Division 2 is fun but wears out its welcome before you finish all of what it offers.

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Game Reviews

RAGE 2

I’m terribly disappointed in RAGE 2 so before I go on and on about why I think it sucks, here’s what I liked, in bullet point form:

  • Enemy heads have a huge hitbox and pop in a satisfying manner
  • The ground punch attack feels great
  • It looks good and there’s no loading once you’re in the world
  • The cars sound meaty
  • Exploring the world is fun even if a lot of the map markers are just boring “kill everything” activities

The game starts off okay, with The Authority (the primary antagonist in RAGE) razing your fledgling community. After this tutorial (and honestly, who needs a tutorial in a FPS anymore?), you’re given a car and an open map and set to work. The work is meeting three characters that will help you overthrow The Authority. You gain their support by completing open world activities.

Minus the grinding to build support, the game is more or less just 7 story missions. It’s amazing how short the story is. There was just so little in the narrative to keep me interested. The open world activities are mostly just “kill everything”. There’s one ally whose support is gained through search and recovery missions, which I found to be not only the most interesting but the most rewarding. There are arks scattered across the world, where the game dispenses either a new weapon or a new ability. Since they’re so rewarding, they’re well worth searching out and they build your support with one ally. I finished the game with that ally’s support maxed out and all the others only half full because their missions are just slogs through enemy nests that give you resources to buy things.

The problem with dispensing abilities and weapons through open world activities is that if you never find that ark, you miss out on something that makes the game more fun. When I finished, the map revealed the rest of the arks I hadn’t found and I finished the game without three weapons and two abilities. Considering I found use for almost every weapon and ability I did have, it’s baffling that the game was perfectly happy with letting me finish it and not give me the tools to make the game more enjoyable. I specifically sought out arks because they give gameplay-affecting tools, but I guess that was my bad because I could’ve finished it with just a pistol, an assault rifle, and a shotgun. I’m really curious what the bare minimum of this game you have to play before hitting the credits.

Beyond taking away the things that make the game fun and hiding them on an enormous open world map, the travel between points was worse than boring, it’s a waste of time. Driving from one area to another in an open world wasteland should be more dangerous, but I was rarely attacked, and everything that attacked me was easily shrugged off or ran away from. At one point I unlocked a flying motorcycle that just hovered high enough above the ground to make all ground obstacles pointless and I couldn’t be attacked, so I was making straight line flights from one point to another. I may as well have had fast travel.

So most missions are a grind, exploring isn’t necessary, and travel is a waste of time, but how’s the shooting? It’s okay. Nothing has the id Software signature feel to it. Enemies are mostly bullet sponges unless you aim for the head, which is comically easy to hit. It’s like bullets are magnetically attracted to their skulls. I found that most fights boiled down to whether I shoot them in the head at a distance with the assault rifle, or run up to shotgun them in the torso. I had a rocket launcher that was useful for big enemies, and a pistol that shot rounds that would catch on fire that I didn’t find particularly useful, but, again, I didn’t find three of the weapons in this game. Maybe they were super cool. I’ll never know!

The worst part of RAGE 2, the unforgivable part of it, is the bugs. Holy hell. One location never flagged as 100% complete because I opened a chest, died, and the chest remained opened but the counter locked it at unopened. There were a handful of times when the game just hard locked. Once the game crashed my OS. One time I beat a boss but died at the same time. It played the “you beat the boss” cutscene, but I came back dead and had to quit to restart it.

I didn’t think RAGE would ever get a sequel, and I question what this is doing for anyone. The original wasn’t a great game by any stretch but it was better than this one in almost every measure. There’s a lot more to do in RAGE 2 and the open world aspect might appeal to some people, where RAGE was more of linear game, but more to do isn’t a benefit when what you’re doing isn’t fun to begin with.

Reference: Avalanche Studios and id Software. RAGE 2 (Bethesda Softworks, 2019)

Source: Purchased from Steam

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Game Reviews

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (ACO) is a role-playing game. I know I said it was moving in this direction with last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, but this entry in the series is as much of a RPG as The Witcher 3. But where Origins last year pushed Assassin’s Creed further into RPG territory and further away from the focus of assassinations, ACO takes this series even further from its roots. In fact, this entry may as well be an entirely different franchise.

In ACO, you can select from the start whether you want to play as Kassandra (woman) or Alexios (man). Either way, you are a Spartan in exile, a descendant of Leonidas himself, during the Peloponnesian War. In the broad game world, Sparta and Athens are at each other’s throats. In the story’s winding path, you learn more about your destiny and how the Cult of Kosmos is attempting to leverage your bloodline to control the world.

This game is enormous, and I could spend hundreds of words describing just the game. Instead, I’ll sum it by saying this is a third person character RPG in a historical setting. Even though killing people isn’t your only course of action, most missions are resolved with murder and there are four different power structures to be murdered: the Cult of Kosmos, a seemingly endless string of mercenaries, an arena full of champions, and the national leadership of the Greek states. This may sound like a lot and it is; each of those is a different tweak on the game.

The cult is hunted through finding clues, usually by killing other cultists, sometimes through sidequests. Hunting the cult is some of the most fun this game has and it ties deepest into the main plot. While most cultists are just a name, some are given personality and character, and there are some genuinely surprising reveals.

The mercenaries hunt you when you’ve committed crimes, usually murder, sometimes theft or destruction of property. They’re an endless stream of difficult enemies with unique qualities (“takes less assassination damage”, “has a wolf companion”) in a way that sort of makes it like the Nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, except this is far less fleshed out. It’s one of the game’s biggest missed opportunities. With any amount of personality ascribed to these mercenaries, it might have added something significant to the mindless murder, but instead it’s just another long chain of bodies.

The arena, by comparison to the rest, is fairly simple; fight waves of enemies in an arena and then kill their champion boss. The fights aren’t particularly different from what you do in the game world, but they do take place in an arena full of obstacles to avoid and exploit. There’s a story to this arena that’s worth seeing to the end, but that’s about it.

The least fun of these are the nation takeovers. You have to first lower national threat levels by infiltrating forts and destroying supplies, stealing their war chest, and killing their leadership. Then you can take to the battlefield in a mass combat scenario that’s a lot less fun than it sounds. It’s just a lot of the same combat except with more enemies on screen, and most of them are occupied in fighting other nameless soldiers that are on your side, until one of the two nations wins. Your influence is in killing enemy captains and heroes, which are just the same enemies except with more hitpoints. If you were on the winning side, you get a big reward of gear. If you were on the losing side, you still get some gear. It ultimately does not matter whether Athens or Sparta controls a region, so it’s really just another lost opportunity but maybe it’s commentary on the game world.

I highlight these power structures because they’re the vast majority of the game, and where it loses the most Assassin’s Creed flavor. The focus of these power structures is mostly built on killing the people at the top, which is what you’d expect an assassin to do, but you’re not playing an assassin. The word “assassin” might not ever be used in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Where Origins reduced the functionality of the “single-button murder” that was a staple of the series, it’s almost entirely removed in ACO. No longer does catching somebody by surprise and pressing the murder button kill them outright. For most non-fodder enemies, it only takes a large chunk off of their health. The satisfaction I derived from this game was looking out over an enemy infested fort, sneaking around to kill all of the fodder stealthily, and then getting the drop on the cultist, national leader, general I was there to kill and fighting them without backup because I killed all their backup. This is a formula Ubisoft has been building on since Far Cry 2. It’s still fun, but Assassin’s Creed used to make sneaking in and just killing that one target without engaging in mass murder feasible.

Another major change is the addition of dialog options. Sometimes, you can talk your way out of bad situations. None of these are influenced by your character’s stats, which are solely focused on how easily you can kill someone, so the choice of dialog often feels like a guessing game. ACO doesn’t pretend that these choices are particularly meaningful, except that at six points in the main plot they can influence which of the nine conclusions the story reaches. Even then, the results are largely the same but who comes to the end with you changes.

This is emblematic of ACO. It presents the illusion of choice, but there’s really not much choice at all. Your choices don’t have far reaching consequences for being a story largely centered around your character’s special bloodline. The game world is wide open but it’s a static thing. Killing one nation’s leader just results in another filling in their place. Killing one mercenary moves you up the ladder, but another mercenary fills in behind you. Random name, random traits, no personality. The only murders that count are those against the Cult of Kosmos, but even half of those are just faceless people. I found two of the last ones just sitting alone in the woods. It seems that as Assassin’s Creed has opened up the world over the course of the series, it has reduced the player’s impact on it. Prior games were more linear affairs that could do things like jump 20 years in the future, or kill major characters and show the impacts of those deaths. In ACO, no one’s death means anything. By the end of the game, my character’s actions have had no meaningful impact on the game’s world. Maybe it’s a direct contradiction of the game’s “chosen one” story, or maybe it’s commentary on the meta narrative of the series, which is that all of this is largely meaningless because this world has been simulated to completion. Ancient aliens solved all of this long ago and humanity is just going through the motions. The ones who thought they could change things were wrong.

In this Assassin’s Creed game, you are not an assassin, you’re not part of a group of assassins, and you hardly assassinate anyone. In most aspects, this game and Origins before it are unlike any others in the series, and they benefit from it in some ways, but calling them “Assassin’s Creed” is a misnomer. The game is still historical tourism, with appearances by famous Greeks such as Socrates, Leonidas, Herodotus, and Pericles, among others, but it’s otherwise an entirely different animal from the series that came before Origins. I look back on the 70ish hours I’ve spent in the game, and I enjoyed my time playing it, but it’s a sort of hollow enjoyment. This is a popcorn game, tasty but void of nutrition or substance.

Reference: Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft, 2018)

Source: Purchased from Green Man Gaming.