Video portion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a_vmMJ2wXg
It is told nearly verbatim so you won't lose anything watching it instead of reading it.
I've only watched, what, the first twenty minutes of Pitch Black before being pulled away by some chore? Therefore, I'm very neutral to the Chronicles of Riddick film series almost entirely. I forgot to watch the rest of it on this DVD I have lying around. Who knows, maybe I'll do that some time soon. Maybe I'll forget about it entirely. However, I have played both of the Chronicles of Riddick games fully and know a bit about the franchise's story along with some help of Wikipedia, of course.
Apparently, unlike most other film or television franchise-based games, the stories of these are part of the authentic Chronicles, so what story there is will probably be more exciting to fans. All I really care about is that Richard B. Riddick is a total badass. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena is actually a package of games, specifically a graphically reworked edition of the previous entry in the series, Escape From Butcher Bay, and the titular sequel. This review will be specifically on said titular sequel. If you need a review of Escape From Butcher Bay, I suggest you watch the antisocialfatman's review contained in this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Ho0KLnqV0 It basically describes my feelings of the game to a T. If you're too lazy to watch, I would just like to tell you that it is an absolutely amazing stealth game with tons of variety found in other genres sprinkled on top that anyone who wants to look totally cool amongst their friends and break out of prison with an assortment of sharp objects should play.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Dark Athena. It is much more reminiscent of an expansion pack for the original made by a newer developer trying to make its way up by working on other people's franchises, but alas, this is Starbreeze, the same group of people who made the previous masterpiece that is Butcher Bay.
There are some truly amazing parts of Dark Athena, and I mean amazing, underlined, bold, and italicized. However, the problem is that these amazing aspects used in the game are just quite simply marred by total piss. It's not like it's an amazing game with one poor, incredibly frustrating level thrown in. It's all these neat things being mixed with just plain awful design choices.
For instance, there is still what can be technically described as stealth gameplay strewn throughout, but it nearly always falls flat on its face, and then its butt. Enemies are usually far too thick or far too omniscient to make me feel like I'm being stealthy. There are times when I use a stun pistol to try to take out groups of enemies from afar before they can run up to me and give me a harsh beating. But hey! They don't even notice that their friends are being tasered. Other times, I try sneaking up on someone. I'm not making any noise at all and I am by no means in any sort of field of view of his, but he instantly sees me through the eyes in the back of his head. There are some amazing segments, such as when I had to sneak past two bad dudes in large guard suits, platform my way up to a control room, and launch them out into space, but no matter what, I found out that there is light cast upon me right when I enter the room, and if I try to take it out, they begin to search for who did it, and apparently have night vision, despite me not having it when I commandeer a suit earlier in the game.
The same fifty-fifty quality goes for other parts of the game, too. The ulaks, two curved blades built by caring hands for the cleanest slice of a throat, are the video game industry's greatest melee weapon accomplishment, but there are various high-ranking people you have to kill who all tend to have blade repellent all over their clothes, making the entire effect like shooting peas at your enemy.
Bullets also seem to be somewhat lacking in the qualities of being bullets, often not killing things fast enough and getting to where their original target was after he has already moved halfway across the room. This often means you have to fire at someone going out of cover instantly or else barely anything will hit him.
As for the pros of the ranged weapons in the game, about two thirds of the way through the game, a gun named the SCAR is introduced. It is not, in fact, a modern day assault rifle of the same name, but rather a remotely detonated sticky bomb launcher, and not only does using it on regular enemies feel really cool, but the bombs are really shiny, if that sense of weapon style matters to you. However, there are some, you guessed it, gigantic cons. At the same point in the game, the video game industry's worst enemy accomplishment is introduced. It is this little spider thing that crawls along the walls with a ridiculous field of view and expert marksmanship that takes away more health than any other enemy introduced before. It is also not very loud. When not being awesome, the SCAR is specifically designed to kill these pests as well as complete cheesy physics puzzles as well as kill a boss.
Said boss leads into another problem: the manner in which the game handles repetition. This happens to be in the worst possible way, actually, because it repeats the bad sections mostly, and what is not originally bad ends up becoming a mundane task. The Dark Athena is a pirate ship, taken over by some vagrant found on the side of the road, and she takes over the place and uses its dead crew and some bodies from colonies she milked dry as AI drones, making up the cannon fodder for the game. This is all well and good, but there apparently seems to be an abundance in dead members of some sort of species of Colossus lying around, because about three quarters of the way through you're forced to fight giant drone after giant drone after giant drone, and they can only be killed if a whole magazine of SCAR rounds is detonated on them simultaneously, which is a recipe for very watery vanilla pudding.
Considering the large amount of repetition and not enough good stuff actually being prominent in the game, it occurs to me that the problem behind all of this is that there is just not enough stuff happening. Take, for instance, the roleplaying element, and compare it to that of Escape From Butcher Bay. In Butcher Bay, the level design was built around a bunch of large hubs, full of inmates who needed a fix of their smack or a shiv, and even a pair of glasses, and all of the things you had to do for them were enthralling in one manner or another. There was also a currency system that could be used sometimes for things such as health or, if recent memory serves, bonus items, et cetera and it could be earned by performing tasks for people or getting into awesome fights. In Assault on Dark Athena, all you have is one measly cell block where people tell you what to do in order to continue the plot. They may have dug into their "content" budget after depleting their "fantastic visual effects, acting, and motion capture" budget.
One major highlight that I have to definitely give kudos to the game for is something you would least expect in a video game about a badass picking off guards one at a time and farting one-liners. The game has a very nicely done child sidekick. She is not annoying at all and plays a major role in the plot rather than an escort mission dispenser, and even I, being not afraid of the Silentest of Hills, being not disturbed in the slightest by the goriest of gore, really felt sorry for her as the tides of the story swept here away into a sea of sewer liquid.
Briefly touched upon earlier was the game's esthetic qualities, which I must also very much congratulate for having the best high dynamic range technology ever and having the best 3D animations ever seen in a video game. The thing is that most games are either cinematic in a way, or compelling in a way, filling up one glass but leaving the other empty. Even while the game itself looks fantastic during actual gameplay, it is overall compellingly cinematic. It's not just a Mass Effect with fancy camera angles and all the personality of a steel corridor, and it's not the grandiosity and emotion of Prey without any fancy camera angles. It has the best of both worlds. A cinematic game can be excused from video game hell if there are most parts of two things completed: the cinematic quality doesn't interfere with gameplay, and the cinematic quality is as well done as it is in Assault on Dark Athena. Assault on Dark Athena does arguably at least one of these, and I'm willing to vouch for it successfully working both tasks. It kept me wanting to go onward whenever I encountered a setpiece, whatever anyone's definition of one may be.
What this boils down to is that regardless of what negatives I've given to the audience, there is some good if you look long and hard enough. I'm exaggerating. There are definitely fantastic parts that anyone will love. And if the titular campaign is not enough for you, you will always have a copy of the original Escape from Butcher Bay for you to play in a remastered bit of glorious high definition.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
I review Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason again
This review is better written than the last one.
If you don't feel like reading there is a YouTube video found here. So now you will have video footage as well as regular narration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oggDhRIVUI
Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason is a game in which psychic meteorologist Alexander Nesterov must board a crashed nuclear icebreaker somewhere along the Arctic Circle and relive the memories of its crewmembers in order to try to save them from their fate. That sounds weird, doesn't it? There's no fancy way to describe it, really.
Cryostasis can be technically defined as both a first person shooter and a puzzle adventure. However, the game by very few means fits in either genre. It contains the basics of both, but not much more. If you are a shooterhead you will find basic AI with which to battle and pretty basic but meaty guns. If you are an adventurer you will find easy puzzles that sometimes even instruct you on what to do. If you are either or both you won't find much fun doing it all in corridors either, no matter how shiny they are.
Cryostasis should be defined only as a mystery game. That is truly what it is, but the lack of a steadily conclusive ending is what gives it its low ratings and makes people call it a shooter. Take Condemned as an example of what can technically be defined as a mystery game. While the player is given forensic tools, the story is utter nonsense and the entire mystery portion is an adventure in on-screen instruction following. Condemned should be defined only as a first person fighting game.
The two games are polar opposites, both prime examples of games misunderstood in terms of genre, but I digress with my little speech about Condemned. I digress about that terrible pile of faeces and am moving onward toward the situation with Cryostasis. Cryostasis is a mystery game and nothing more. Despite the poor shooting and easy puzzles, it is still something magical.
The story in Cryostasis is the best story I have ever found in a video game, and possibly the best science fiction story I have ever come across in my entire life. It covers the chronicles of the Soviet Russian Nuclear Icebreaker North Wind before, during, after, and distantly after a collision with an iceberg proving less than fatal to the entire ship only by chance.
When you play Cryostasis, the story takes precedent in every part of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. The storytelling, however, is what makes the game amazing. A good story isn't as great without an amazing way to tell it, and in my opinion, Cryostasis is the only game with a storytelling method that can only be found in a video game.
The shooting is part of the storytelling. If you play it as a simple first person shooter you will be disappointed because the plan of the game is not to throw a challenge at you, but rather show you the mutations of the crew. You can look at the man who has two PPSHs and searchlights attached to his arms who emits a siren sound when he sees you. You can see him as a weird monster who you have to shoot. You could also see him and wonder what character he represents and how that ties into the story. It's kind of obvious what he represents when I spell it out like that but there is so much symbolism strewn throughout the game.
The puzzles are present in order to simply add realism, but not much else. I'm fairly certain that there are doors on nuclear icebreakers with more than one handle. However, it doesn't get more complex than that in this game.
The real puzzle solving is the storytelling. That is the real gameplay. Because you don't use the controls to do something doesn't always mean what you're doing is not gameplay. Not many developers, and not many reviewers seem to realize this. The game requires forward thinkers, or at least people who like to learn to discern the plot for themselves, at least, the plot other than the basic synopsis. It is up to them to figure out everything that is happening. There is no specific conclusion to the plot given, where, say, in another mystery, the murderer is revealed no matter how thick the player is. The game treats its mystery like a real mystery, rather than that to which many gamers have become accustomed. If someone goes in thinking everything will be revealed throughout the course of the game and that that's the only reason Alexander Nesterov's Mental Echo ability is there, it's not entirely his fault that he gets slapped violently on the wrist and then hit with a confusion stick.
Cryostasis is designed for the gameplay to last much longer than the eight hours that will be taken to finish the game in a traditional sense. It's a lot like how good horror (note how I said good horror) will leave the player with a sense of dread walking up to his bedroom in the pitch black staircase after getting a midnight snack and possibly a pickaxe for safe measure. Cryostasis' goal is to make the player think about everything. The story is not just told through its human characters. It is told through its personified characters as well. No other game had me thinking about what a color scheme represented, what the fable of a man and his leading of the exiled population of a primitive village represented, what the heat and the cold represented. Some give me such a feeling slightly, such as Penumbra or Silent Hill 2, but nothing has gone as far as this.
This is not only a step forward in storytelling, it is also executed very well. However, I feel obliged to say that a large portion of humanity is pretty stupid. I'm not saying anyone who does not favor the game is pretty stupid. I'm not even saying that anyone who overlooks the gameplay of the mystery is stupid. I'm saying that people who oppose such a thing are stupid. They are the sort of people who can go back to yelling that they commenced in sexual intercourse with whomever's mother in retaliation to being teabagged. Maybe even by me.
If I may take a few minutes to get my slobber off of how this game plays, I would also like to comment on the esthetics of it as well. Let's start off with the graphics, shall we. Well, they are nearly perfect, what with everything being very shiny. The environments, despite being very samey throughout, have a large amount of depth thanks to the fancy technology, which means that seeing water streaming down the walls of a recently lit room never gets old. I also need to incredibly commend the developers for making me feel like a human without being nauseated by weird screen movements. The feel of simply standing around after having saved someone's life is fantastic, as my player character Alexander Nesterov pants like a dog. Animations and physics all around are very nice.
However, the game's technology is very powerful and plenty of people, and I mean plenty of people have complained about it running very slowly, or it not being to run at all on even Herculean computers. I suggest that you check across the Internet about how well it runs on hardware similar to yours and make sure you have the patch if you buy the game.
There is no musical score to the game other than a main menu theme and odd synth mixed with odd percussion, but there might as well be. The sound technology in Cryostasis is quite fantastic in nearly every way. Not only does nearly every asset of the game sound pretty great by itself, but the echoes of a Soviet wartime rifle down a long ventilation shaft has never sounded this real apart from actual real life. The high volume of every single noise going on adds to tension where there would otherwise be little in some little horror tricks the game plays on you.
As it stands, it is my opinion that Cryostasis is the best video game I've ever played because of the leap forward in trying to morph major elements of video games together. I'm not against video games that have great stories and still go by traditional ways of telling them, such as Metro 2033 or Penumbra, and Action Forms' formula will definitely not work for many games based on story at all, but it works in Cryostasis, and it is truly intelligent. This is entirely the antithesis of a pretty closed-minded old woman's conclusion that all video games have something to do with the downfall of society. This is the kind of thing, that if it happened in someone's dream, it would leave Sigmund Freud studying it for months to try to uncover what all was happening. It is revolutionary.
If you don't feel like reading there is a YouTube video found here. So now you will have video footage as well as regular narration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oggDhRIVUI
Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason is a game in which psychic meteorologist Alexander Nesterov must board a crashed nuclear icebreaker somewhere along the Arctic Circle and relive the memories of its crewmembers in order to try to save them from their fate. That sounds weird, doesn't it? There's no fancy way to describe it, really.
Cryostasis can be technically defined as both a first person shooter and a puzzle adventure. However, the game by very few means fits in either genre. It contains the basics of both, but not much more. If you are a shooterhead you will find basic AI with which to battle and pretty basic but meaty guns. If you are an adventurer you will find easy puzzles that sometimes even instruct you on what to do. If you are either or both you won't find much fun doing it all in corridors either, no matter how shiny they are.
Cryostasis should be defined only as a mystery game. That is truly what it is, but the lack of a steadily conclusive ending is what gives it its low ratings and makes people call it a shooter. Take Condemned as an example of what can technically be defined as a mystery game. While the player is given forensic tools, the story is utter nonsense and the entire mystery portion is an adventure in on-screen instruction following. Condemned should be defined only as a first person fighting game.
The two games are polar opposites, both prime examples of games misunderstood in terms of genre, but I digress with my little speech about Condemned. I digress about that terrible pile of faeces and am moving onward toward the situation with Cryostasis. Cryostasis is a mystery game and nothing more. Despite the poor shooting and easy puzzles, it is still something magical.
The story in Cryostasis is the best story I have ever found in a video game, and possibly the best science fiction story I have ever come across in my entire life. It covers the chronicles of the Soviet Russian Nuclear Icebreaker North Wind before, during, after, and distantly after a collision with an iceberg proving less than fatal to the entire ship only by chance.
When you play Cryostasis, the story takes precedent in every part of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. The storytelling, however, is what makes the game amazing. A good story isn't as great without an amazing way to tell it, and in my opinion, Cryostasis is the only game with a storytelling method that can only be found in a video game.
The shooting is part of the storytelling. If you play it as a simple first person shooter you will be disappointed because the plan of the game is not to throw a challenge at you, but rather show you the mutations of the crew. You can look at the man who has two PPSHs and searchlights attached to his arms who emits a siren sound when he sees you. You can see him as a weird monster who you have to shoot. You could also see him and wonder what character he represents and how that ties into the story. It's kind of obvious what he represents when I spell it out like that but there is so much symbolism strewn throughout the game.
The puzzles are present in order to simply add realism, but not much else. I'm fairly certain that there are doors on nuclear icebreakers with more than one handle. However, it doesn't get more complex than that in this game.
The real puzzle solving is the storytelling. That is the real gameplay. Because you don't use the controls to do something doesn't always mean what you're doing is not gameplay. Not many developers, and not many reviewers seem to realize this. The game requires forward thinkers, or at least people who like to learn to discern the plot for themselves, at least, the plot other than the basic synopsis. It is up to them to figure out everything that is happening. There is no specific conclusion to the plot given, where, say, in another mystery, the murderer is revealed no matter how thick the player is. The game treats its mystery like a real mystery, rather than that to which many gamers have become accustomed. If someone goes in thinking everything will be revealed throughout the course of the game and that that's the only reason Alexander Nesterov's Mental Echo ability is there, it's not entirely his fault that he gets slapped violently on the wrist and then hit with a confusion stick.
Cryostasis is designed for the gameplay to last much longer than the eight hours that will be taken to finish the game in a traditional sense. It's a lot like how good horror (note how I said good horror) will leave the player with a sense of dread walking up to his bedroom in the pitch black staircase after getting a midnight snack and possibly a pickaxe for safe measure. Cryostasis' goal is to make the player think about everything. The story is not just told through its human characters. It is told through its personified characters as well. No other game had me thinking about what a color scheme represented, what the fable of a man and his leading of the exiled population of a primitive village represented, what the heat and the cold represented. Some give me such a feeling slightly, such as Penumbra or Silent Hill 2, but nothing has gone as far as this.
This is not only a step forward in storytelling, it is also executed very well. However, I feel obliged to say that a large portion of humanity is pretty stupid. I'm not saying anyone who does not favor the game is pretty stupid. I'm not even saying that anyone who overlooks the gameplay of the mystery is stupid. I'm saying that people who oppose such a thing are stupid. They are the sort of people who can go back to yelling that they commenced in sexual intercourse with whomever's mother in retaliation to being teabagged. Maybe even by me.
If I may take a few minutes to get my slobber off of how this game plays, I would also like to comment on the esthetics of it as well. Let's start off with the graphics, shall we. Well, they are nearly perfect, what with everything being very shiny. The environments, despite being very samey throughout, have a large amount of depth thanks to the fancy technology, which means that seeing water streaming down the walls of a recently lit room never gets old. I also need to incredibly commend the developers for making me feel like a human without being nauseated by weird screen movements. The feel of simply standing around after having saved someone's life is fantastic, as my player character Alexander Nesterov pants like a dog. Animations and physics all around are very nice.
However, the game's technology is very powerful and plenty of people, and I mean plenty of people have complained about it running very slowly, or it not being to run at all on even Herculean computers. I suggest that you check across the Internet about how well it runs on hardware similar to yours and make sure you have the patch if you buy the game.
There is no musical score to the game other than a main menu theme and odd synth mixed with odd percussion, but there might as well be. The sound technology in Cryostasis is quite fantastic in nearly every way. Not only does nearly every asset of the game sound pretty great by itself, but the echoes of a Soviet wartime rifle down a long ventilation shaft has never sounded this real apart from actual real life. The high volume of every single noise going on adds to tension where there would otherwise be little in some little horror tricks the game plays on you.
As it stands, it is my opinion that Cryostasis is the best video game I've ever played because of the leap forward in trying to morph major elements of video games together. I'm not against video games that have great stories and still go by traditional ways of telling them, such as Metro 2033 or Penumbra, and Action Forms' formula will definitely not work for many games based on story at all, but it works in Cryostasis, and it is truly intelligent. This is entirely the antithesis of a pretty closed-minded old woman's conclusion that all video games have something to do with the downfall of society. This is the kind of thing, that if it happened in someone's dream, it would leave Sigmund Freud studying it for months to try to uncover what all was happening. It is revolutionary.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
I review Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason
There was a review here. It's gone now because I didn't like how I wrote it.
There is a different one here if you'd still like to read a review of Cryostasis: http://liopleurodons.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-review-cryostasis-sleep-of-reason_10.html
There is a different one here if you'd still like to read a review of Cryostasis: http://liopleurodons.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-review-cryostasis-sleep-of-reason_10.html
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