Video edition can be found here.
Amnesia. When I think of that word in relation to a video game, the voices inside my head shriek, "Damn it all! That's so cheap!" Images flood my head of mediocre, distinctly non-special games that all use amnesia as a lazy and arbitrary way to try to make a mystery out of all of the dumb crap you already know is about to happen in an incredibly predictable world and then you find out nonsensical and farfetched yet still predictable things like that you're actually your own grandfather and your kid is doing LSD and you raped your own dog.
Well this is why we need more games that handle a case of amnesia like the aptly named Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Instead of going through a world you've already figured out simply to find out your own boring identity, which ends up to have been pretty obvious all along, this game takes that formula and uses its exact opposite. You do have amnesia and you do learn about your complex past over time, but who you are and why you have to go and do something very spoilery is easily made clear, while what is happening in the dark Prussian castle surrounding you is the big mystery.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a horror adventure game from the sexy Swedish developers Frictional Games, creators of the Penumbra trilogy. It follows in its older brother's footsteps dealing with a venture into the dark unknown with no protection or hindsight. So far this has proved a winning combination for a horror game, because Penumbra was kickass, and so is Amnesia. Amnesia is the epitome of the concept of vulnerability in a video game.
As Daniel, the protagonist, wakes up from a dark slumber in a beautiful rainy corridor you almost instantly realize that he's defecating his own grey matter. One of the neatest things about this game is the sanity system. Though other games try to make psychological horror simply by making the player handicapped in some way, Amnesia drives you with its liberal use of brain damage to make you choose between the options of a fight-or-flight response.
A supernatural shadow-like blanket is coming to envelop you and the entire castle in which you reside, and it's very angry. When hiding in the darkness or being near an enemy, this "Shadow" likes to take advantage of your fear of the unknown by screwing with your sight and control over Danny. There are ways to go so ridiculously insane over time that you can find yourself dragging your face around on the floor with bugs crawling all over your screen. This, at times, very rare times, can feel simply like baggage, but often the atmosphere and actual danger can reinforce how damn unlucky you are. Going insane can make it easier for monsters to notice you and make it harder to progress through the environment.
This brings us to the aforementioned atmosphere. It absolutely could not. be. better. unless it was happening in real life. The development team seem to have the right idea about how to convey a horror atmosphere. Sound. Through fancy expensive visuals you cannot and will not ever be able to make someone as afraid of the unknown as through good, detailed noises and brilliant nightmare fuel music. The sound in this game is perfect, absolutely, totally amazing. Every single ambient, unimportant noise helps reinforce your fear of the unknown. Hear those dragging feet? Are they real? Is there actually a flesh-eating creature waiting behind that door? Or is it on the floor above you? And why did a small animal just start yelping on the other side of the level?
If you answered, "...," to one or more of these questions, then you'd be even more scared to know that quite a few parts of the game have random triggers, and this just keeps adding to the uncertainty of continuing onward. There were times where so much crazy nonsense was going on but I never encountered a monster once, and even now I am completely unsure if I was just lucky or if no confrontation was ever supposed to actually happen. The randomness ends up ranging from monster encounters to simple environmental anomalies.
But your brain fluids leaking out of your nipples is not the only means of scaring you that the game has to offer! Remember when I mentioned a fight-or-flight response? Well, that's... actually more of a... "run-or-hide" response. Stealth is a pretty viable option in the game, as in the Penumbra series, but it is much harder at times without thinking on your feet constantly. Other times, the closet-hiding action has never been simpler and more effective.
When not crawling in a hole and hoping to die in your sleep, running away is even more frightening. Actually coming face to face with the creatures is absolutely terrifying. They are brutal, both in imagery and in strength. These scary freaks are unimaginably... unimaginable in terms of appearance, as if photographs of deformed and mutilated corpses were mixed with Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" painting. Despite their agonizing appearance, they can also rush toward you pretty fast, and they do a lot of damage. In fact, one type of enemy can kill you in one blow, but it never gets frustrating.
This is because Amnesia has a very unique way of dealing with monsters and their death-dealing abilities. Since it's so easy to make a repeated event become tedious, even if it is horrific the first few times, the game completely circumvents the traditional method of dealing with death that simply reloads save games. Instead, it assumes that whatever horror that killed you has been pulled off pretty successfully, and there's no real need to try it again. Often when you respawn, you have all of your progress to do with puzzles kept as it was so there is no boring backtracking involved, and there are environment changes, often having to do with monster placement. If something killed you, it's probably not there anymore. Or it may have been replaced with a different monster. Who knows?
This is an absolutely brilliant system and more developers should use it, assuming they do it correctly, because it prevents a lot of tedium and can sometimes even make the game scarier. For example, you could be trekking through a large, open, and dark area, making your way to wherever you have to go, but bam! a monster is lurking, and you're unfortunate enough to fail at your stealth routine. Normally a game would put you back at the start of the level, but in the minds of these crazy bastards from Sweden, why not put you somewhere in the middle of this looming expanse with no directions where to go? Exactly.
It's not a perfect system, however, since death can bypass certain challenges. If you just let yourself get killed by a certain enemy, there's a chance that the enemy will not be in the level when you respawn, meaning that someone who isn't immersed can exploit this and systematically destroy the potential experience of it all. It's a double-edged sword, one side being able to chop trial and error in half, the other side being able to water down the atmosphere. It's fine if you keep it pointed away from yourself, but some people aren't that good at playing with swords.
Amnesia is also partially an adventure game, as it's not all simply about survival, and puzzles are offered in order to make the game more diverse. One of the things the developers were trying with this release was to minimize the aspects of trial and error gameplay that frustrate people. This would be in order to make these puzzles feel like part of a progressing story, rather than mandatory sections that break up all the action. Things like your progress and inventory being kept after you die can help lead to a much nicer flow between exploration and/or hiding and puzzle solving, but not everything is melted together flawlessly.
The puzzles are good, though a bit basic for an adventure game, and they all make sense and provide relevance to the story. Nothing is particularly challenging, but I found myself stuck on some occasions looking for certain objects that I didn't notice a million times over before actually finding them. To be fair, I played at night, in the dark, when I was feeling the most tired and vulnerable, as was suggested in the little demotivational text that appears when the game is opened for the first time. My thought process wasn't that straight either considering how insane I had already become, but some things could have definitely been more noticeable.
But instructions on what to do are made very clear and still leave room for a little dexterity of your own to be added into the mix, and plenty of puzzles have the multiple solution-y goodness that makes the world feel so dynamic. This I would take any day over the promise of perfect flow through the world. These are puzzles, and that means you're supposed to think. They aren't as complex as the ones found in the Penumbra series, which is kind of a shame, and they aren't smooth enough to make every bit fluid, but the middle ground is A-okay, and I still love plenty of the challenges involving intelligence I had to overcome during my play through the game.
The main motivation of the attempt at seamlessness in the way Amnesia flows was to help create not just an immersive environment, but also an immersive story, and for the most part, it's very successful. Along with amnesia, Danny seems to have been injected with a good dose of telepathy (or something, I'm not really sure), which helps to trigger audible flashbacks in familiar areas that tell of his past. You will also find his and others' notes and diaries throughout the depths of the castle, and while some of the placement of these items seems a bit... odd to say the least, all of the documents you'll find will help explain your immediate surroundings, while also tying up loose ends from other parts of the game. It's possible to skip over some notes and not really understand the story by the end of the game, but everything is reasonably noticeable and it's very easy to find everything that you'd need to get an A+ on your history lesson.
One of the things I don't particularly like about the story, though, is that it rarely communicates directly with you, but rather stays affixed on your past. Compare this to Penumbra, which worked with classic objectives such as a damsel in distress perfectly by keeping in contact with characters but never allowing you to actually reach them. This made me feel like I'm a real character with friends in need, but Amnesia handles the story differently, populating the game mostly with poor conversationalists. It's not particularly bad, no, not at all, but it doesn't seem to fit with the idea of Daniel as a character. He is alive, but playing as him, I felt sort of like a ghost, almost similar to the character Alexander Nesterov in Cryostasis. While it worked perfectly there, this is a survival horror game and piecing together peoples' pasts and solving self-assigned quests doesn't feel like enough to make me feel as attached to Danny as I should be at times.
That only has to do with the main protagonist, though. The rest of the story is all about the history of the place surrounding you. I would go to great lengths to say that it is one of the most disturbing and mature stories in the history of video games. This is the kind of thing that screams ideologically sensitive material into your face as it mutilates all your loved ones. This is not a nice game, and it never had any intention to be, but when comparing it to other types of horror, even the kinds that I consider scary, this quite simply is something that attacks your brain unlike anything else. The story of Amnesia catalogues the lowest of lows that human beings can stoop to in defense of their own lives, and the best part is that it really makes you think about whatever sacrifices you've made on behalf of others for your own benefit.
It's pure survival instinct and dexterity mixed with a very, very sorrowful, disturbing tale. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the scariest horror game I've ever played, and probably the scariest you'll ever play too. Its flow is almost perfect and its atmosphere is so refined that it feels real, something many horror games only see as a glimmer on the distant horizon. It is worth buying, and it's worth not being able to sleep over. Even if after you buy it you're just going to watch someone else play it on YouTube because you’re a stupid wimp.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
I review Penumbra: Overture
Video edition on YouChoob.
I don't think there's an emotion in the human mind more powerful than fear. I can't really say there's one more treacherous either. This is probably because fear is a reflex that tries to stop us from doing the unsafe. Many horror games don't seem to grasp the basis of fear. For some reason, though, many still frighten a very large group of people, perhaps because those people are pansies, often resorting to silly hallucinations of little girls or instances where monsters jump out of holes in the wall. They often make the protagonist too tough for their own good. One single monster in Doom 3 or Dead Space can never jump out fast enough to actually cause you to lose something you really wouldn't like to lose. The little girl in F.E.A.R. (that's First Encounter Assault Recon, not the emotion) does give you the feeling of being watched sometimes, but never actually tries to harm you, and she's a fucking little girl, so what. I was scared by neither of these silly clichés.
Survival horror is on the decline from good old terror, being more about startling the player. People can get angry and retaliatory about that comment, but screw you, you're all wimps. I, on the other hand, am happy to not have a soul. Next to nothing at all scares me. This is why I am incredibly picky with horror games, and like a slice of cake after a year without any dessert, Penumbra has refreshed me so. Fear, the aforementioned response to any unsafe stimulus is very present because, in Penumbra, nearly every byte, nearly every single bit of the game is entirely unsafe.
Penumbra: Overture is the beginning of the trilogy of survival horror titles chronicling the massively unsafe adventures of Philip Buchanon. It opens the series on the travel to a place in uninhabited Northern Greenland, an area marked on an odd map sent to you by your father, a supposedly deceased man who left your mother before you were born. Intrigued by the possible learning of your father's fate, you begin a glorious trek to find shelter nearby, only to become trapped, alone in the darkness a few hundred feet below ground.
Overture is a mixture of adventure and stealth gameplay. It alternates between the two styles constantly. Every actual plot event that occurs is fueled by the solving of puzzles. These puzzles are many times normally about finding various facsimiles of keys for various facsimiles of doors, but occasionally a few show up that require you to be a little dextrous and are very unique.
Between these, or sometimes during these puzzles, the stealth and horror part kicks in full-throttle. The game gets its horror by not protecting you. Between individual areas where puzzles are prompted are very large hub levels, these vast, hollow, long networks of corridors. Getting to the other side is a puzzle in and of itself, as the remains of some sort of force of watchdogs patrol the halls. Getting from point A to point B is focused around stealth and avoidance of these vile things. This requires dexterity and is incredibly tense.
It has some faults, though. You're given some tools for environmental manipulation that takes place in some puzzles, such as a hammer or pickaxe, but in a pinch these can be used as weapons. Unfortunately, going in and just killing the bad guys with these can become tedious. People who are used to shooters or horror games being about combat will do this, and it's not their fault. They won't recognize that sneaking past is an option, and will use it more to sneak up behind and repeatedly bash something until it dies. There's nothing stopping anyone from doing this, and it's a big problem that can take a lot away from the horror element. So I prescribe that anyone who thinks about using the game's combat plays on the hard difficulty level, which makes the combat harder and less effective.
That's not to say combat is completely useless, as there are some parts where you'll probably need to fight for your life, or use the environment to stun an enemy. It's just that in these parts, it's very sad that the controls for swinging an object are rather stiff, but the difficulty of this sort of thing does make you feel like the scrawny English physics professor that you are.
One of Penumbra's unique assets is its focus on physical interaction. The physics engine is superb and nearly everything that you'd expect to have realistic physical properties has realistic physical properties. You can pick up, push, or nudge any item in the environment depending on its design. Certain objects such as doors or drawers must be opened by swinging the mouse, and valves must be turned by moving the mouse in a circle. Though it sounds miniscule, this helps give the environment a much more realistic feel, comparative to nearly all other games which simply have you press the use key to interact with the environment. This isn't just for show, though. Puzzles often make use of objects all around the environments. Nearly anything can be thrown as well, meaning physics can play a large role in combat if you don't have your pickaxe at the ready.
The events of the game are woven together through a rather tiny but great narrative. Overall, your objective in this episode is simply to get to a mysterious man and free him with the promise of I'm not sure what. In return, he gives you information about where to go. The relationship between player and objective is strengthened, however, by the writing. Not only is this man shrouded in a mystery by his distance, but he is also this poetic and completely insane personality he carries. The way you are forced to make friends with him draws you in with no turning back.
As if that is not enough the environment is also very well-designed and stories are told about it. Notes and diaries can be found strewn throughout the mines that document characters that you will never meet in-game and their downfall to whatever evil has come over them. Many of these diaries are very long and require a few minutes for a good read through, but none of your time is wasted because they all provide backstory and entertain with amazingly fleshed-out characters. The story remains meaty because of this until the very last drop of gameplay.
Story alone doesn't drive you through Overture, though. Neither does gameplay. The atmosphere of the game is absolutely superb. It's possibly so rich and thick that you could run a chainsaw through it and it would still be a daunting task to cut it open. This is heavily in part to the absolutely incredible sound design and music. From footsteps to monster sounds to the thing behind you banging into walls, everything is real and works perfectly. Music from the insanely great composer Mikko Tarmia is put to good use, and it's full of panicky, tense melodies and roaring, violent percussion that works so well.
Graphics in the game don't stand up to the superb audio, however. Textures are pretty low-resolution and some models lack plenty of detail. But the engine on which the game is built has some very nice techniques for things like lighting and motion blur. Both of these features help to make a very dark and warped atmosphere where the low resolution textures do not. Especially since the game's often so dark that you can't see the flaws for the most part anyway.
Penumbra: Overture is an absolutely superb horror game that makes use of a dark and mysterious tale and a bleak, lonesome atmosphere. Coupled with this is the superb adventure gameplay and an amazingly terrifying stealth mechanic. Even despite its flaws which occur under certain circumstances, there is a world to explore and there are pants to be shat. It all leads up to a very distinct and emotional ending carrying you into the even darker land of the sequel, Black Plague.
I don't think there's an emotion in the human mind more powerful than fear. I can't really say there's one more treacherous either. This is probably because fear is a reflex that tries to stop us from doing the unsafe. Many horror games don't seem to grasp the basis of fear. For some reason, though, many still frighten a very large group of people, perhaps because those people are pansies, often resorting to silly hallucinations of little girls or instances where monsters jump out of holes in the wall. They often make the protagonist too tough for their own good. One single monster in Doom 3 or Dead Space can never jump out fast enough to actually cause you to lose something you really wouldn't like to lose. The little girl in F.E.A.R. (that's First Encounter Assault Recon, not the emotion) does give you the feeling of being watched sometimes, but never actually tries to harm you, and she's a fucking little girl, so what. I was scared by neither of these silly clichés.
Survival horror is on the decline from good old terror, being more about startling the player. People can get angry and retaliatory about that comment, but screw you, you're all wimps. I, on the other hand, am happy to not have a soul. Next to nothing at all scares me. This is why I am incredibly picky with horror games, and like a slice of cake after a year without any dessert, Penumbra has refreshed me so. Fear, the aforementioned response to any unsafe stimulus is very present because, in Penumbra, nearly every byte, nearly every single bit of the game is entirely unsafe.
Penumbra: Overture is the beginning of the trilogy of survival horror titles chronicling the massively unsafe adventures of Philip Buchanon. It opens the series on the travel to a place in uninhabited Northern Greenland, an area marked on an odd map sent to you by your father, a supposedly deceased man who left your mother before you were born. Intrigued by the possible learning of your father's fate, you begin a glorious trek to find shelter nearby, only to become trapped, alone in the darkness a few hundred feet below ground.
Overture is a mixture of adventure and stealth gameplay. It alternates between the two styles constantly. Every actual plot event that occurs is fueled by the solving of puzzles. These puzzles are many times normally about finding various facsimiles of keys for various facsimiles of doors, but occasionally a few show up that require you to be a little dextrous and are very unique.
Between these, or sometimes during these puzzles, the stealth and horror part kicks in full-throttle. The game gets its horror by not protecting you. Between individual areas where puzzles are prompted are very large hub levels, these vast, hollow, long networks of corridors. Getting to the other side is a puzzle in and of itself, as the remains of some sort of force of watchdogs patrol the halls. Getting from point A to point B is focused around stealth and avoidance of these vile things. This requires dexterity and is incredibly tense.
It has some faults, though. You're given some tools for environmental manipulation that takes place in some puzzles, such as a hammer or pickaxe, but in a pinch these can be used as weapons. Unfortunately, going in and just killing the bad guys with these can become tedious. People who are used to shooters or horror games being about combat will do this, and it's not their fault. They won't recognize that sneaking past is an option, and will use it more to sneak up behind and repeatedly bash something until it dies. There's nothing stopping anyone from doing this, and it's a big problem that can take a lot away from the horror element. So I prescribe that anyone who thinks about using the game's combat plays on the hard difficulty level, which makes the combat harder and less effective.
That's not to say combat is completely useless, as there are some parts where you'll probably need to fight for your life, or use the environment to stun an enemy. It's just that in these parts, it's very sad that the controls for swinging an object are rather stiff, but the difficulty of this sort of thing does make you feel like the scrawny English physics professor that you are.
One of Penumbra's unique assets is its focus on physical interaction. The physics engine is superb and nearly everything that you'd expect to have realistic physical properties has realistic physical properties. You can pick up, push, or nudge any item in the environment depending on its design. Certain objects such as doors or drawers must be opened by swinging the mouse, and valves must be turned by moving the mouse in a circle. Though it sounds miniscule, this helps give the environment a much more realistic feel, comparative to nearly all other games which simply have you press the use key to interact with the environment. This isn't just for show, though. Puzzles often make use of objects all around the environments. Nearly anything can be thrown as well, meaning physics can play a large role in combat if you don't have your pickaxe at the ready.
The events of the game are woven together through a rather tiny but great narrative. Overall, your objective in this episode is simply to get to a mysterious man and free him with the promise of I'm not sure what. In return, he gives you information about where to go. The relationship between player and objective is strengthened, however, by the writing. Not only is this man shrouded in a mystery by his distance, but he is also this poetic and completely insane personality he carries. The way you are forced to make friends with him draws you in with no turning back.
As if that is not enough the environment is also very well-designed and stories are told about it. Notes and diaries can be found strewn throughout the mines that document characters that you will never meet in-game and their downfall to whatever evil has come over them. Many of these diaries are very long and require a few minutes for a good read through, but none of your time is wasted because they all provide backstory and entertain with amazingly fleshed-out characters. The story remains meaty because of this until the very last drop of gameplay.
Story alone doesn't drive you through Overture, though. Neither does gameplay. The atmosphere of the game is absolutely superb. It's possibly so rich and thick that you could run a chainsaw through it and it would still be a daunting task to cut it open. This is heavily in part to the absolutely incredible sound design and music. From footsteps to monster sounds to the thing behind you banging into walls, everything is real and works perfectly. Music from the insanely great composer Mikko Tarmia is put to good use, and it's full of panicky, tense melodies and roaring, violent percussion that works so well.
Graphics in the game don't stand up to the superb audio, however. Textures are pretty low-resolution and some models lack plenty of detail. But the engine on which the game is built has some very nice techniques for things like lighting and motion blur. Both of these features help to make a very dark and warped atmosphere where the low resolution textures do not. Especially since the game's often so dark that you can't see the flaws for the most part anyway.
Penumbra: Overture is an absolutely superb horror game that makes use of a dark and mysterious tale and a bleak, lonesome atmosphere. Coupled with this is the superb adventure gameplay and an amazingly terrifying stealth mechanic. Even despite its flaws which occur under certain circumstances, there is a world to explore and there are pants to be shat. It all leads up to a very distinct and emotional ending carrying you into the even darker land of the sequel, Black Plague.
I review Metro 2033
Video edition can be found on YouTube in two parts.
Disclaimer: I don't know jack shit about the book.
I'm a huge fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, but it's hard for me to not recognize the gaping flaws in each game, from Shadow of Chernobyl's lack of intricate scripted events to Clear Sky's ridiculously accurate and grenade spamming artificial stupidity. I often wondered what it would be like if a magical mod was created for each game to solve all of its flaws and make it presentable in each department. Sadly, nothing has come close to that yet.
I was, however, delighted to hear that people who broke off of GSC's lead designer team during the development of Shadow of Chernobyl because of how god damn long it was taking to finish one game that started in 2001 were creating a little project called Metro 2033. I was excited at first, but also worried. Even with the new engine being touted by the developers at 4A games, there would always be the chance that bits of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. spirit would show up at times and manifest in some very game breaking faults. But this is not the case. Instead, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. spirit manifests itself in the game through general design philosophy. If you've played any bit of the series and loved the game for its negative charm, the feeling that you needed to tread carefully on its ground, but wished for something more polished, Metro 2033 is most likely for you.
Or if you've never played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or just want to understand what the hell I'm babbling about, read on.
The world ended, as is common in all the well-known Ukrainian games out there, and this time the story is centered around Moscow in its underground subway tunnels. As is traditional, mutants run rampant and often attack settlements. A new and particularly dangerous threat has arisen, dubbed the "Dark Ones" by the people of the Metro. These ghoul-like beings have begun attacks on the people of the Underground with the use of fancy telepathic powers, driving them insane to the point where they claw their own faces off and stuff, but a plan has been developed to stop them, and since someone has to do it, it might as well be you, Artyom, the everyman.
The greatest strength of the game outright is its wide variety of adventures upon which you will embark. As you can't just fill a book up with samey gunfights and fending off of animals, this translates to the game very well. The entirety of the storyline has to do with some sort of combat, but you'll never be shooting at the same thing or using the same tactics for too long, basically. Unfortunately, this can be a very big turnoff for many. Going from one set piece to another that's completely unrelated and involves a different style of combat that you are perhaps not as good at can be frustrating.
That is where the spirit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shows itself. The design philosophy is to be unforgiving. Traversing the Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without making plans for the best and treading lightly can often lead to a depletion of resources or even instant death. A certain loadout can lead to a hopeless attempt at combating military, while it's perfect for defending yourself against a pack of wild blind dogs. Unfortunately, while kicking various asses of blind dogs, you may trip over an electric anomaly that takes away two thirds of your health and makes you much weaker.
Metro 2033 is unforgiving. It's full of traps and dangerous areas that, if mishandled, can lead to a total fuck-up. Constant vigilance is required to play it to its fullest potential, and some people just don't have such patience to make sure everything is going right. However, to those who keep thinking on their feet throughout, it's easier for this game design philosophy to coalesce peacefully with the oppressive atmosphere, as was intended by the developers. In fact, I can't think of anything better for a game with such a dark story. Making it as simple as Call of Duty 6 would definitely not work out.
Despite it being unforgiving, however, I refuse to say that it's like this because the developers were unfair. Every style of gameplay that is showcased is masterfully crafted, be it stealth or tower defense, or anything in between. Throughout and above the tunnels deep down under Moscow all sorts of dark things lurk, both man and monster, and each presents a great threat.
Doglike monsters infest every place ever, and fighting them is a thrill. They are both tough and behave like real animals would. When they attack it becomes similar to a horde shooter, but far more badass and dangerous. Amazing clusterfucks can appear that, despite being, well, clusterfucky, are enthralling as you run for your life and at the same time try to fend off this group of creepy circus freaks.
When not confronting them in Serious-Sam-like fashion, but with more depth of course, another vessel by which combat against nasty monsters is introduced is the always fun trolley ride. There are plenty of occasions when traveling from point A to point B on a handcart that you will pass through crazy cokehead monster territory. These scenes are uncontrollably fast-paced and designed to give you a testosterone rush of amazing measurements. Generally, you have a good buddy doing the hand-cranking for you and maybe a sidekick for good luck, which adds to the fun. These parts are basically a sort of castle defense, just with a crappy hand-cart instead of a castle.
On the human side of things, combat is awesome as well. Enemies are very dextrous and use cover very properly. Though it is hard to do so in a small environment, they use flanking tactics whenever they can and respond to the player's distance by throwing grenades. They respond to when their numbers begin to dwindle and have dialog that suggests they are real people, not just obstacles. The circumstances in which you fight human opponents are less varied than those for monsters, but the game more than makes up for that with various approaches to each situation. With light but definitive roleplaying elements, which I will touch upon later, any situation can be handled in a player's own personal manner.
Stealth is a very viable option in Metro. There are plenty of silenced weapons to be found in places where they are needed, and being devious never felt so good. Enemies are very keen and aware of what is going on around them, but they never actually become unfairly omniscient. However, the stealth is much more difficult than in most games that are based entirely around stealth. Every area with human enemies, despite being normally confined to closed spaces underground, is sprawling and has many routes that can be taken. There are many places to hide and lots of secrets to be found. This can also mean, though, that you don't really know what lies ahead of you. Enemies are also realistically well-prepared for a covert invasion, and have various traps set up. Broken glass that crackles when you step on it lines the floor, and tripwires attached to bells can be found as obstacles in many possible routes.
It takes even more cunning than normal to do such feats of stealth. Fortunately, however, if you mess up, the game doesn't punish you with instant failure or clunky combat. It offers a nice and stark contrast. One moment you're crawling along train tracks that people have left unchecked, hoping to not catch their attention. The next, you accidentally bumped into alarm cans hanging from the ceiling. People have recognized the noise, and a gruesome, sudden, satisfyingly violent and bloody gunfight has broken out. The best part about the stealth, though, is the fact that, even if you aren't the best at it and fail multiple times, it's reward enough to have passed as far through enemy defenses as possible. Even sneaking past the bad guys for a short time in order to get a tactical advantage is worth it.
The guns with which one shoots at the gushy meatbags in his or her way range from pretty damn cool to rather dull. Ranged weapon slots include one for a revolver, one for a traditional automatic weapon, and another for a situational weapon, such as a shotgun or a silent pneumatic rifle. The game starts out with intentions to keep the atmosphere tense with a simple revolver and really poorly constructed rifles and shotguns, and despite the fact that, you know, they're shit, it's because they're supposed to be shit, and they're still fun to shoot and good at making things fall over when shot. As you progress, societies more profitable than your own will have fancier weapons, such as a pneumatic sniper rifle or a VSK-94. All of these weapons are unique to one another with their own strengths, and varieties of these sold at shops with certain attachments make for really great customization.
(Also a little note: There's this one really frustrating part that lasts about five minutes and I'm not sure whose asshole it came out of but he or she should be hit in the shin with a bat. You'll know exactly which part I mean. Continue playing after that and the game returns to normal. I just needed to mention it and get it off my chest.)
The story segwaying people through all of the set pieces offered is rather good. The Dark Ones actually feel like a real threat and the environments are often believable, or as believable as a post-apocalyptic world full of monsters can be. However, the storyline has a ridiculously massive case of Deus Ex Machina. Most of the areas you reach have a tendency of making your life turn from bad to worse, and many encounters with enemies lead to large uncontrollable scripted events where everything goes out of control. People normally die and you normally almost do. However, since Artyom is the protagonist, the developers can't kill him off. That would be very cheap. Therefore, the crazy cutscenes always end up with you getting saved, whether by pure luck or someone you are with. Take the beginning moment of the game for instance. You are climbing up a rusty old ladder with your good pal Miller who is asking in your general direction about what you were thinking when you first left your home station. All of a sudden, just as you reach the top, the ladder falls apart, and you're left dangling from a ledge. Just as you're about to fall, you are caught by what might as well be the hand of some deity. At times there are quick-time events to further how silly this is, but they're actually rather few and very easy. I never failed one once. Don't worry about them.
I wouldn't be calling a story good if all that mattered was its preposterous way of continuing the narrative, though. The great part about Metro's story is all of its side-stories. With so many set-pieces it seems to be almost able to be divided into episodes. The varying environments you trudge gloomily through often tell their own stories about the unfortunate who died there, or about those who are still trying to survive there. Each quest you receive often provides imagery of a place's history, and it's nearly all told in a very indirect manner. Little blatant exposition happens but much of it is very easy to understand and even think about, while still having a deeper tale to tell than what most gamers think about.
The story is made even better by what I presume comes from its literate roots. While a game can be sold on the gameplay and basic storyline alone, a book needs good characters to sell. I've of course never actually read it because I'm illiterate, but I presume it's not written with the same stupid Hollywood-O-Vision of a novel such as City of Thieves or of a game such as Call of Duty 6. All characters in Metro 2033 are simply fabulously written and three-dimensional. None of them are limited to an arbitrary small number of quirks that they constantly need to adhere to, and they often take realistic action and make realistic decisions and act like humans. They become people someone can actually care about and want to help.
Metro 2033 comes with a small amount of roleplaying. It's about the same amount as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has, except it's used in a more linear fashion. The blunt of it is used in order to shape Artyom into your own little Marionette, through options such as weapon loadout and suit style. There is enough customization to allow for completely different tactics. Choosing silenced weapons and a light suit leads toward the building of a stealth character and makes a big difference. Choosing a heavier, more armored suit and some nice balls-to-the-wall weapons is much more suitable for an action gamer. There are things you can mix and match for your own playstyle, but it's overall not that intricate.
There are also many choices to be made. These often manifest as black-and-white choices to help or not help the people of the Metro, whether it's delivering a distress call to a radio transmitter or giving a little boy a shiny new military-grade bullet that he can use to go buy some hallucinogenic candy or something. The magic about the "choice" system of the game is that it is not always that blatant.
Choices are also made throughout the game in something that I believe to be unique to Metro 2033 and no game I can think of in recent memory. Deep down, more matters than just giving a hobo some cash, and that's how you play the game itself. The game keeps track of your psychology, how you choose to handle various missions and how you treat various environments. I'm not going to say how this will apply to certain situations, but suffice it to say that the way it is implemented is very deep.
The point of all of these choices is to lead up to which ending will occur. There are only two endings, but despite one being designated "good" and another being designated "bad" by the game itself, each is deeper than simple black-or-white nature, has its own characteristics, and decides the complex fate of the people living beneath Artyom's feet. This kind of complex ending sequence would not be very well-done if choices were like those in BioShock, simply being a series of the same boring choice over and over again. The intricacy of the system used in the game adds greatly to the experience of the world and makes very good use of the roleplaying element.
Metro 2033 is not only a nice game in its own right, but it is also very masterfully aesthetically designed. The 4A engine, despite using a hell of a lot of third party technology which many developers have proven they don't know how to utilize, is incredibly well-constructed and put to great use. On the graphics side, the engine is optimized beyond comparison. Though the lowest settings are still rather demanding toward lower-end computers, what is there is amazingly pretty and it's a miracle that all of the things featured in the engine are present without your computer or console exploding. For the people with enough power (a.k.a. not me), the engine supports some fancy DirectX 11 techniques, advanced PhysX, and has graphical settings not seen on the XBox 360 edition.
The land in which the story takes place is incredibly beautiful. I'd be more than willing to say that Crysis has met its match and lost to it in terms of environments. Textures are consistently high-resolution, models consistently high-poly, lighting consistently beautiful, and special effects consistently pretty, but that's not the only thing that matters. There is an incredible amount of detail put into every bit of the environment. Much of it is incredibly unique, and full of little nuances that are just unmatched by any other game. The few trips above the Moscow Metro into the dead city itself are absolutely fabulous and have an air of authenticity to them. At least, they're as authentic as a post-apocalyptic city could probably be without knowing what one looks like first-hand.
Character models are very well-done and real-seeming. Full-body animations are top-notch. However, at times, a little bit of cloning seems to be going on, but that's nothing new, and it rarely occurs, comparable to most other games of or near this amount of graphical detail. Face animations could have used some more work, as they seem to have as many variables as those in Crysis or Half-Life 2, but just aren't animated well. They seem to go from one static expression to another. These are only minor complaints on the grand scheme of things, however.
The engine also has amazing sound technology, and though it's nowhere near as complex as the graphics technology, it still matters a lot. One of the most satisfying things in a shooter is to have realistically loud guns, and the game really delivers on that with what I believe the developers described as "high dynamic range sound" or something like that, meaning that gunshots, grenade explosions, et cetera are all very good at making you go deaf. That's about all the sound engine has going for it that isn't already widely used, but it still deserves a lot of commendation on how good the actual sounds are.
The sound design in Metro 2033 is absolutely amazing and kicks ass and is awesome and is incredible and I love it. Whoever did the coding got the reverberation and muffling effects just right. As if having amazing ambient and non-ambient noises was not enough, the entire environment rings vibrantly with each step anyone takes and very few have matched that quality of just plain being in the moment. From gunshots to their own bullet impacts in a crackly light source, everything is masterfully composed.
Voice acting in the game is overall very nice. The main characters have top-notch actors who sound like real people, which helps to accentuate how real they actually are. Unimportant characters sometimes have pretty bad actors but I presume it would be very hard to find a cast of incredibly competent Russian people who can all speak English fluently without sometimes seeming robotic when they get to a big word. This is presumably why the game also includes the original Russian voice overs as well. Overall the Russian localization has far better acting, and it's fully subtitled so you don't get confused if you don't know Russian, but I do stick to the English version for one reason: Artyom's voice. He is mainly a silent protagonist apart from a few expletives he gives off when his life is in danger, but he also reads off little blurbs of information between levels, and his voice is just this abnormal calm that works so well. In the Russian version, it's just this guy who probably ate Brillo Pads for dinner the night before the recording session and has roughly the same voice as the ever-so-dull Marcus Fenix in Gears of War. The calm English version of Artyom works so well for me because it feels as though he's telling a story to us and reminiscing about it in the process.
All of these aesthetic pieces of awesome pie lead up to an absolutely tangible atmosphere, almost so thick you can slice it with your bayonet. The Metro stations are all as gloomy as can be thanks to how detailed everything is in order to look dirty. Cigarette smoke fills the air as crepuscular rays break through clotheslines and doorways and such objects. A million little finishing touches have been used to make this amazingly realistic, and you definitely begin to feel the plight of the survivors of a twenty-year-old nuclear war better than in any other game with similar subject matter.
Metro 2033 is, in conclusion, not just a game, but rather an experience. It varies from person to person like few other games, what with the difficulty curve being rather tough, but not all of the Triple-A titles in the world are for everyone. But if you're looking for something that depicts such a dark subject matter within a fluid story and aren't afraid to get your toes wet, or rather irradiated, then this game is an experience for you.
Disclaimer: I don't know jack shit about the book.
I'm a huge fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, but it's hard for me to not recognize the gaping flaws in each game, from Shadow of Chernobyl's lack of intricate scripted events to Clear Sky's ridiculously accurate and grenade spamming artificial stupidity. I often wondered what it would be like if a magical mod was created for each game to solve all of its flaws and make it presentable in each department. Sadly, nothing has come close to that yet.
I was, however, delighted to hear that people who broke off of GSC's lead designer team during the development of Shadow of Chernobyl because of how god damn long it was taking to finish one game that started in 2001 were creating a little project called Metro 2033. I was excited at first, but also worried. Even with the new engine being touted by the developers at 4A games, there would always be the chance that bits of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. spirit would show up at times and manifest in some very game breaking faults. But this is not the case. Instead, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. spirit manifests itself in the game through general design philosophy. If you've played any bit of the series and loved the game for its negative charm, the feeling that you needed to tread carefully on its ground, but wished for something more polished, Metro 2033 is most likely for you.
Or if you've never played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or just want to understand what the hell I'm babbling about, read on.
The world ended, as is common in all the well-known Ukrainian games out there, and this time the story is centered around Moscow in its underground subway tunnels. As is traditional, mutants run rampant and often attack settlements. A new and particularly dangerous threat has arisen, dubbed the "Dark Ones" by the people of the Metro. These ghoul-like beings have begun attacks on the people of the Underground with the use of fancy telepathic powers, driving them insane to the point where they claw their own faces off and stuff, but a plan has been developed to stop them, and since someone has to do it, it might as well be you, Artyom, the everyman.
The greatest strength of the game outright is its wide variety of adventures upon which you will embark. As you can't just fill a book up with samey gunfights and fending off of animals, this translates to the game very well. The entirety of the storyline has to do with some sort of combat, but you'll never be shooting at the same thing or using the same tactics for too long, basically. Unfortunately, this can be a very big turnoff for many. Going from one set piece to another that's completely unrelated and involves a different style of combat that you are perhaps not as good at can be frustrating.
That is where the spirit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shows itself. The design philosophy is to be unforgiving. Traversing the Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without making plans for the best and treading lightly can often lead to a depletion of resources or even instant death. A certain loadout can lead to a hopeless attempt at combating military, while it's perfect for defending yourself against a pack of wild blind dogs. Unfortunately, while kicking various asses of blind dogs, you may trip over an electric anomaly that takes away two thirds of your health and makes you much weaker.
Metro 2033 is unforgiving. It's full of traps and dangerous areas that, if mishandled, can lead to a total fuck-up. Constant vigilance is required to play it to its fullest potential, and some people just don't have such patience to make sure everything is going right. However, to those who keep thinking on their feet throughout, it's easier for this game design philosophy to coalesce peacefully with the oppressive atmosphere, as was intended by the developers. In fact, I can't think of anything better for a game with such a dark story. Making it as simple as Call of Duty 6 would definitely not work out.
Despite it being unforgiving, however, I refuse to say that it's like this because the developers were unfair. Every style of gameplay that is showcased is masterfully crafted, be it stealth or tower defense, or anything in between. Throughout and above the tunnels deep down under Moscow all sorts of dark things lurk, both man and monster, and each presents a great threat.
Doglike monsters infest every place ever, and fighting them is a thrill. They are both tough and behave like real animals would. When they attack it becomes similar to a horde shooter, but far more badass and dangerous. Amazing clusterfucks can appear that, despite being, well, clusterfucky, are enthralling as you run for your life and at the same time try to fend off this group of creepy circus freaks.
When not confronting them in Serious-Sam-like fashion, but with more depth of course, another vessel by which combat against nasty monsters is introduced is the always fun trolley ride. There are plenty of occasions when traveling from point A to point B on a handcart that you will pass through crazy cokehead monster territory. These scenes are uncontrollably fast-paced and designed to give you a testosterone rush of amazing measurements. Generally, you have a good buddy doing the hand-cranking for you and maybe a sidekick for good luck, which adds to the fun. These parts are basically a sort of castle defense, just with a crappy hand-cart instead of a castle.
On the human side of things, combat is awesome as well. Enemies are very dextrous and use cover very properly. Though it is hard to do so in a small environment, they use flanking tactics whenever they can and respond to the player's distance by throwing grenades. They respond to when their numbers begin to dwindle and have dialog that suggests they are real people, not just obstacles. The circumstances in which you fight human opponents are less varied than those for monsters, but the game more than makes up for that with various approaches to each situation. With light but definitive roleplaying elements, which I will touch upon later, any situation can be handled in a player's own personal manner.
Stealth is a very viable option in Metro. There are plenty of silenced weapons to be found in places where they are needed, and being devious never felt so good. Enemies are very keen and aware of what is going on around them, but they never actually become unfairly omniscient. However, the stealth is much more difficult than in most games that are based entirely around stealth. Every area with human enemies, despite being normally confined to closed spaces underground, is sprawling and has many routes that can be taken. There are many places to hide and lots of secrets to be found. This can also mean, though, that you don't really know what lies ahead of you. Enemies are also realistically well-prepared for a covert invasion, and have various traps set up. Broken glass that crackles when you step on it lines the floor, and tripwires attached to bells can be found as obstacles in many possible routes.
It takes even more cunning than normal to do such feats of stealth. Fortunately, however, if you mess up, the game doesn't punish you with instant failure or clunky combat. It offers a nice and stark contrast. One moment you're crawling along train tracks that people have left unchecked, hoping to not catch their attention. The next, you accidentally bumped into alarm cans hanging from the ceiling. People have recognized the noise, and a gruesome, sudden, satisfyingly violent and bloody gunfight has broken out. The best part about the stealth, though, is the fact that, even if you aren't the best at it and fail multiple times, it's reward enough to have passed as far through enemy defenses as possible. Even sneaking past the bad guys for a short time in order to get a tactical advantage is worth it.
The guns with which one shoots at the gushy meatbags in his or her way range from pretty damn cool to rather dull. Ranged weapon slots include one for a revolver, one for a traditional automatic weapon, and another for a situational weapon, such as a shotgun or a silent pneumatic rifle. The game starts out with intentions to keep the atmosphere tense with a simple revolver and really poorly constructed rifles and shotguns, and despite the fact that, you know, they're shit, it's because they're supposed to be shit, and they're still fun to shoot and good at making things fall over when shot. As you progress, societies more profitable than your own will have fancier weapons, such as a pneumatic sniper rifle or a VSK-94. All of these weapons are unique to one another with their own strengths, and varieties of these sold at shops with certain attachments make for really great customization.
(Also a little note: There's this one really frustrating part that lasts about five minutes and I'm not sure whose asshole it came out of but he or she should be hit in the shin with a bat. You'll know exactly which part I mean. Continue playing after that and the game returns to normal. I just needed to mention it and get it off my chest.)
The story segwaying people through all of the set pieces offered is rather good. The Dark Ones actually feel like a real threat and the environments are often believable, or as believable as a post-apocalyptic world full of monsters can be. However, the storyline has a ridiculously massive case of Deus Ex Machina. Most of the areas you reach have a tendency of making your life turn from bad to worse, and many encounters with enemies lead to large uncontrollable scripted events where everything goes out of control. People normally die and you normally almost do. However, since Artyom is the protagonist, the developers can't kill him off. That would be very cheap. Therefore, the crazy cutscenes always end up with you getting saved, whether by pure luck or someone you are with. Take the beginning moment of the game for instance. You are climbing up a rusty old ladder with your good pal Miller who is asking in your general direction about what you were thinking when you first left your home station. All of a sudden, just as you reach the top, the ladder falls apart, and you're left dangling from a ledge. Just as you're about to fall, you are caught by what might as well be the hand of some deity. At times there are quick-time events to further how silly this is, but they're actually rather few and very easy. I never failed one once. Don't worry about them.
I wouldn't be calling a story good if all that mattered was its preposterous way of continuing the narrative, though. The great part about Metro's story is all of its side-stories. With so many set-pieces it seems to be almost able to be divided into episodes. The varying environments you trudge gloomily through often tell their own stories about the unfortunate who died there, or about those who are still trying to survive there. Each quest you receive often provides imagery of a place's history, and it's nearly all told in a very indirect manner. Little blatant exposition happens but much of it is very easy to understand and even think about, while still having a deeper tale to tell than what most gamers think about.
The story is made even better by what I presume comes from its literate roots. While a game can be sold on the gameplay and basic storyline alone, a book needs good characters to sell. I've of course never actually read it because I'm illiterate, but I presume it's not written with the same stupid Hollywood-O-Vision of a novel such as City of Thieves or of a game such as Call of Duty 6. All characters in Metro 2033 are simply fabulously written and three-dimensional. None of them are limited to an arbitrary small number of quirks that they constantly need to adhere to, and they often take realistic action and make realistic decisions and act like humans. They become people someone can actually care about and want to help.
Metro 2033 comes with a small amount of roleplaying. It's about the same amount as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has, except it's used in a more linear fashion. The blunt of it is used in order to shape Artyom into your own little Marionette, through options such as weapon loadout and suit style. There is enough customization to allow for completely different tactics. Choosing silenced weapons and a light suit leads toward the building of a stealth character and makes a big difference. Choosing a heavier, more armored suit and some nice balls-to-the-wall weapons is much more suitable for an action gamer. There are things you can mix and match for your own playstyle, but it's overall not that intricate.
There are also many choices to be made. These often manifest as black-and-white choices to help or not help the people of the Metro, whether it's delivering a distress call to a radio transmitter or giving a little boy a shiny new military-grade bullet that he can use to go buy some hallucinogenic candy or something. The magic about the "choice" system of the game is that it is not always that blatant.
Choices are also made throughout the game in something that I believe to be unique to Metro 2033 and no game I can think of in recent memory. Deep down, more matters than just giving a hobo some cash, and that's how you play the game itself. The game keeps track of your psychology, how you choose to handle various missions and how you treat various environments. I'm not going to say how this will apply to certain situations, but suffice it to say that the way it is implemented is very deep.
The point of all of these choices is to lead up to which ending will occur. There are only two endings, but despite one being designated "good" and another being designated "bad" by the game itself, each is deeper than simple black-or-white nature, has its own characteristics, and decides the complex fate of the people living beneath Artyom's feet. This kind of complex ending sequence would not be very well-done if choices were like those in BioShock, simply being a series of the same boring choice over and over again. The intricacy of the system used in the game adds greatly to the experience of the world and makes very good use of the roleplaying element.
Metro 2033 is not only a nice game in its own right, but it is also very masterfully aesthetically designed. The 4A engine, despite using a hell of a lot of third party technology which many developers have proven they don't know how to utilize, is incredibly well-constructed and put to great use. On the graphics side, the engine is optimized beyond comparison. Though the lowest settings are still rather demanding toward lower-end computers, what is there is amazingly pretty and it's a miracle that all of the things featured in the engine are present without your computer or console exploding. For the people with enough power (a.k.a. not me), the engine supports some fancy DirectX 11 techniques, advanced PhysX, and has graphical settings not seen on the XBox 360 edition.
The land in which the story takes place is incredibly beautiful. I'd be more than willing to say that Crysis has met its match and lost to it in terms of environments. Textures are consistently high-resolution, models consistently high-poly, lighting consistently beautiful, and special effects consistently pretty, but that's not the only thing that matters. There is an incredible amount of detail put into every bit of the environment. Much of it is incredibly unique, and full of little nuances that are just unmatched by any other game. The few trips above the Moscow Metro into the dead city itself are absolutely fabulous and have an air of authenticity to them. At least, they're as authentic as a post-apocalyptic city could probably be without knowing what one looks like first-hand.
Character models are very well-done and real-seeming. Full-body animations are top-notch. However, at times, a little bit of cloning seems to be going on, but that's nothing new, and it rarely occurs, comparable to most other games of or near this amount of graphical detail. Face animations could have used some more work, as they seem to have as many variables as those in Crysis or Half-Life 2, but just aren't animated well. They seem to go from one static expression to another. These are only minor complaints on the grand scheme of things, however.
The engine also has amazing sound technology, and though it's nowhere near as complex as the graphics technology, it still matters a lot. One of the most satisfying things in a shooter is to have realistically loud guns, and the game really delivers on that with what I believe the developers described as "high dynamic range sound" or something like that, meaning that gunshots, grenade explosions, et cetera are all very good at making you go deaf. That's about all the sound engine has going for it that isn't already widely used, but it still deserves a lot of commendation on how good the actual sounds are.
The sound design in Metro 2033 is absolutely amazing and kicks ass and is awesome and is incredible and I love it. Whoever did the coding got the reverberation and muffling effects just right. As if having amazing ambient and non-ambient noises was not enough, the entire environment rings vibrantly with each step anyone takes and very few have matched that quality of just plain being in the moment. From gunshots to their own bullet impacts in a crackly light source, everything is masterfully composed.
Voice acting in the game is overall very nice. The main characters have top-notch actors who sound like real people, which helps to accentuate how real they actually are. Unimportant characters sometimes have pretty bad actors but I presume it would be very hard to find a cast of incredibly competent Russian people who can all speak English fluently without sometimes seeming robotic when they get to a big word. This is presumably why the game also includes the original Russian voice overs as well. Overall the Russian localization has far better acting, and it's fully subtitled so you don't get confused if you don't know Russian, but I do stick to the English version for one reason: Artyom's voice. He is mainly a silent protagonist apart from a few expletives he gives off when his life is in danger, but he also reads off little blurbs of information between levels, and his voice is just this abnormal calm that works so well. In the Russian version, it's just this guy who probably ate Brillo Pads for dinner the night before the recording session and has roughly the same voice as the ever-so-dull Marcus Fenix in Gears of War. The calm English version of Artyom works so well for me because it feels as though he's telling a story to us and reminiscing about it in the process.
All of these aesthetic pieces of awesome pie lead up to an absolutely tangible atmosphere, almost so thick you can slice it with your bayonet. The Metro stations are all as gloomy as can be thanks to how detailed everything is in order to look dirty. Cigarette smoke fills the air as crepuscular rays break through clotheslines and doorways and such objects. A million little finishing touches have been used to make this amazingly realistic, and you definitely begin to feel the plight of the survivors of a twenty-year-old nuclear war better than in any other game with similar subject matter.
Metro 2033 is, in conclusion, not just a game, but rather an experience. It varies from person to person like few other games, what with the difficulty curve being rather tough, but not all of the Triple-A titles in the world are for everyone. But if you're looking for something that depicts such a dark subject matter within a fluid story and aren't afraid to get your toes wet, or rather irradiated, then this game is an experience for you.
Monday, July 5, 2010
I review Singularity
Singula"Я"ity
Less boring edition here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RjQz9mwOHc
It's a very common thing for developers to copy their ideas. It is also very common for the developer to not improve upon that idea one iota, just reskin it and make changes. Not improvements. Changes. It takes a developer that's at least good to realize that if they're going to manufacture the same thing they can at least work on what surrounds the formula.
A brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged territory of an evil world power and must use guns and supernatural powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. If this sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking of Wolfenstein 2009 right now, Raven Software's previous piss-awful shooter. This is also the exact same formula for Singularity. The only thing is that Singularity is remarkably better in quite a few ways that count, making Raven a good developer if you involve proving things by the use of science. They aren't a great developer. They were, but considering how few games I have to look forward to, I will gladly shelter a good one.
In Singularity, Captain Nate Renko, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged Katorga 12, a territory of Russia, an evil world power, and must use guns and supernatural time-travel-based powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. That is the gist of the entire story right there. The characters are also just mission dispensers with no real character development for the most part. However, despite the been-there-done-that setup of the whole thing, the actual narrative is incredibly creative. The game is well-paced and does a fantastic job at thrusting the player into imaginatively spectacular and diverse set pieces.
The gameplay consists of everything Wolfenstein had minus the dumb useless sandbox. Nearly everything is about the same quality as it as well except for what actually matters in a Raven game: the shooting. However, I would like to take a minute to focus on the smaller aspects that are still trash for the most part.
Puzzles are, as always, straightforward crate-stacking or time-stopping roadblocks that often repeat themselves, more to cater to the console gaming kiddies who don't realize they've done the same thing thirteen times before than anyone else. Of course, if you've seen any preview videos at all, you'll have noticed that and you'll be buying this certainly not for the puzzles.
There is a pretty actually useful upgrade system that allows for certain powers to be expanded upon, but nothing becomes ridiculously overpowered and so much of an end-all-be-all that you use it and nothing else. Unfortunately, they took a lot of good quality out of their formula for a superpower shooter: the fact that your money for upgrades is finite. I am an exploraholic, and since exploring in this game is not much of a challenge at all, I had nearly all power upgrades possible installed by the end of the game.
Other upgrades are for weapons, and they happen to be much harder to trip over but are rather useless. The upgrades are the same for each weapon. Magazine size and reload speed don't matter as much to a skilled sniper with his hands on a rifle as much as they do to someone with an AR, so that's where uselessness comes into play.
As for what matters, the combat, for most of the game, the player will be fighting off various monsters, and that right there is the selling point of the game. It isn't particularly a horde shooter like you would find in the older id Software catalog but still pulls off large groups of instinctually different enemies. Each creature type has its own tactical bit of creativity put into its design. One monster class will sprint at and charge the player and knock his living daylights out of him when he's unprepared while another can become invulnerable for a short amount of time and flank him.
Boss battles are also handled in awesome ways, but Raven don't receive any awards for having awesome boss fights anymore. It's just that these don't just feel great, they play well too. Two out of three of them required me to fight them with all of the techniques learned previously with the Time Manipulation Device and a little wit and then some.
Occasionally a few Russian soldiers will appear and will need to be killed, and there's nothing that great to talk about. The enemies aren't total idiots. They are rather intelligent about when to take cover and throw grenades but nothing apart from a few scripted sequences could come close to convincing anyone that they are all that intelligent in terms of flanking or other nice flavors of combat.
However, despite the overall niceness of the combat, the game's difficulty curve is pretty screwed up. I played on the hardest difficulty level and found that the hardest part of the game was the introduction. Enemies are vicious throughout, and on the hard level the first enemies that I faced took out half of my health with each strike, and without any upgrades, medkits do not do a very generous job of keeping someone healthy. Combine this with the fact that the player is given a revolver with limited ammunition and a slow rate of fire and you have an incredibly tense atmosphere.
The thing is that it should have stayed that tense, with ammo that does not grow on trees, bushes, and even blades of grass, or not been that tense at all. After that, it turns into a different kind of shooter entirely. It's still good with the aforementioned kickass monster fights, but it's a shame that the unique feeling of being on a deserted, mutated island with an exploding DeLorean in the center got scrapped after about twenty minutes. The difficulty is overall something most good gamers can handle but what if I want to play a game that makes me feel special for my survival prowess throughout?
As for the rest of the difficulty curve, one or two boss battles may have to scratching your head for a little while. There are also gigantic spikes in the difficulty every time the player encounters these tick things, the first scene with them stumping the hell out of me until I realized I had to use my deadlock ability that slows time in a certain radius in an incredibly professional manner, something very hard to do since it happened right after I was first given the power.
That said, the combat is overall a solid "good" and the narrative is a solid "fun" as well. The sad thing is that though the monsters and twists and turns the narrative takes are both well-done there is nearly no work put into anything else. The phrase that could best describe the manner in which the game tells its story would be "American Cryostasis," a story about stuff falling apart because of the sins and faults of their creator told through ghostly flashbacks, notes, and an unbelievable amount of audio logs, except minus a ton of symbolism and mystery and intriguing characters and all of the plot devices are incredibly, annoyingly, conveniently placed. So let's actually scrap the idea of it being an "American Cryostasis" and call it what it really relates to: "BioShock 2: Temporal Boogaloo."
The game also contains a sense of style if that sort of thing matters to you. The design aesthetic is an intentional sort of cheap, which will definitely make a few Russkiys go batshit insane about how Raven butchered their alphabet and mixed up some history, but I really like how it's done. It was the developer's intention to make the art style resemble that of a United States propaganda film from the 1950's mixed with science fiction elements from cinema of basically the entire first half of the twentieth century, with all of the gaudy machinery and mishandled backwards R's you can imagine.
Singularity is also basically a very pretty-looking game. The Unreal Engine lends its slightly modified self for really cool special effects and that's about it. The visuals really shine because of the actual colorful environments and amazing animations, especially those that happen when enemies are hurt. Watching a legless mutant writhe in pain while still trying to attack anything that moves is satisfying enough to justify shooting it. I just hope that some day someone will change the fact that it takes forever for textures to fully load on the Unreal Engine, and it happens a real lot in Singularity in particular. However, I'm guessing it's because of the gigantic lack of loading screens, which is always a pretty cool thing to brag about.
If you're looking forward to buying Singularity because you think it will expand upon its intriguing premise in a number of interesting and cool manners feel free to be disappointed, but if you're thinking any Raven game can have a good story you're living in the past. Ten years in the past to be precise. What's cool about Singularity is the way it pushes the player through various neat set pieces and boss battles by way of a totally freakin' awesome thrill ride through time. You will be buying to see awesome monster combat with unique weapons involving time manipulation and with that said it's a one-trick pony, but it's a pony that can jump ten feet in the air and do a somersault.
I'd certainly like to see a real pony do that. Especially without its jockey getting harmed.
Less boring edition here: http://www.youtube.com/wat
It's a very common thing for developers to copy their ideas. It is also very common for the developer to not improve upon that idea one iota, just reskin it and make changes. Not improvements. Changes. It takes a developer that's at least good to realize that if they're going to manufacture the same thing they can at least work on what surrounds the formula.
A brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged territory of an evil world power and must use guns and supernatural powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. If this sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking of Wolfenstein 2009 right now, Raven Software's previous piss-awful shooter. This is also the exact same formula for Singularity. The only thing is that Singularity is remarkably better in quite a few ways that count, making Raven a good developer if you involve proving things by the use of science. They aren't a great developer. They were, but considering how few games I have to look forward to, I will gladly shelter a good one.
In Singularity, Captain Nate Renko, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, slightly unshaven all-American mute badass is sent into the ravaged Katorga 12, a territory of Russia, an evil world power, and must use guns and supernatural time-travel-based powers to fight alongside a bunch of people who do nothing but tell him what to do against large forces of grunts and monsters in order to save the world. That is the gist of the entire story right there. The characters are also just mission dispensers with no real character development for the most part. However, despite the been-there-done-that setup of the whole thing, the actual narrative is incredibly creative. The game is well-paced and does a fantastic job at thrusting the player into imaginatively spectacular and diverse set pieces.
The gameplay consists of everything Wolfenstein had minus the dumb useless sandbox. Nearly everything is about the same quality as it as well except for what actually matters in a Raven game: the shooting. However, I would like to take a minute to focus on the smaller aspects that are still trash for the most part.
Puzzles are, as always, straightforward crate-stacking or time-stopping roadblocks that often repeat themselves, more to cater to the console gaming kiddies who don't realize they've done the same thing thirteen times before than anyone else. Of course, if you've seen any preview videos at all, you'll have noticed that and you'll be buying this certainly not for the puzzles.
There is a pretty actually useful upgrade system that allows for certain powers to be expanded upon, but nothing becomes ridiculously overpowered and so much of an end-all-be-all that you use it and nothing else. Unfortunately, they took a lot of good quality out of their formula for a superpower shooter: the fact that your money for upgrades is finite. I am an exploraholic, and since exploring in this game is not much of a challenge at all, I had nearly all power upgrades possible installed by the end of the game.
Other upgrades are for weapons, and they happen to be much harder to trip over but are rather useless. The upgrades are the same for each weapon. Magazine size and reload speed don't matter as much to a skilled sniper with his hands on a rifle as much as they do to someone with an AR, so that's where uselessness comes into play.
As for what matters, the combat, for most of the game, the player will be fighting off various monsters, and that right there is the selling point of the game. It isn't particularly a horde shooter like you would find in the older id Software catalog but still pulls off large groups of instinctually different enemies. Each creature type has its own tactical bit of creativity put into its design. One monster class will sprint at and charge the player and knock his living daylights out of him when he's unprepared while another can become invulnerable for a short amount of time and flank him.
Boss battles are also handled in awesome ways, but Raven don't receive any awards for having awesome boss fights anymore. It's just that these don't just feel great, they play well too. Two out of three of them required me to fight them with all of the techniques learned previously with the Time Manipulation Device and a little wit and then some.
Occasionally a few Russian soldiers will appear and will need to be killed, and there's nothing that great to talk about. The enemies aren't total idiots. They are rather intelligent about when to take cover and throw grenades but nothing apart from a few scripted sequences could come close to convincing anyone that they are all that intelligent in terms of flanking or other nice flavors of combat.
However, despite the overall niceness of the combat, the game's difficulty curve is pretty screwed up. I played on the hardest difficulty level and found that the hardest part of the game was the introduction. Enemies are vicious throughout, and on the hard level the first enemies that I faced took out half of my health with each strike, and without any upgrades, medkits do not do a very generous job of keeping someone healthy. Combine this with the fact that the player is given a revolver with limited ammunition and a slow rate of fire and you have an incredibly tense atmosphere.
The thing is that it should have stayed that tense, with ammo that does not grow on trees, bushes, and even blades of grass, or not been that tense at all. After that, it turns into a different kind of shooter entirely. It's still good with the aforementioned kickass monster fights, but it's a shame that the unique feeling of being on a deserted, mutated island with an exploding DeLorean in the center got scrapped after about twenty minutes. The difficulty is overall something most good gamers can handle but what if I want to play a game that makes me feel special for my survival prowess throughout?
As for the rest of the difficulty curve, one or two boss battles may have to scratching your head for a little while. There are also gigantic spikes in the difficulty every time the player encounters these tick things, the first scene with them stumping the hell out of me until I realized I had to use my deadlock ability that slows time in a certain radius in an incredibly professional manner, something very hard to do since it happened right after I was first given the power.
That said, the combat is overall a solid "good" and the narrative is a solid "fun" as well. The sad thing is that though the monsters and twists and turns the narrative takes are both well-done there is nearly no work put into anything else. The phrase that could best describe the manner in which the game tells its story would be "American Cryostasis," a story about stuff falling apart because of the sins and faults of their creator told through ghostly flashbacks, notes, and an unbelievable amount of audio logs, except minus a ton of symbolism and mystery and intriguing characters and all of the plot devices are incredibly, annoyingly, conveniently placed. So let's actually scrap the idea of it being an "American Cryostasis" and call it what it really relates to: "BioShock 2: Temporal Boogaloo."
The game also contains a sense of style if that sort of thing matters to you. The design aesthetic is an intentional sort of cheap, which will definitely make a few Russkiys go batshit insane about how Raven butchered their alphabet and mixed up some history, but I really like how it's done. It was the developer's intention to make the art style resemble that of a United States propaganda film from the 1950's mixed with science fiction elements from cinema of basically the entire first half of the twentieth century, with all of the gaudy machinery and mishandled backwards R's you can imagine.
Singularity is also basically a very pretty-looking game. The Unreal Engine lends its slightly modified self for really cool special effects and that's about it. The visuals really shine because of the actual colorful environments and amazing animations, especially those that happen when enemies are hurt. Watching a legless mutant writhe in pain while still trying to attack anything that moves is satisfying enough to justify shooting it. I just hope that some day someone will change the fact that it takes forever for textures to fully load on the Unreal Engine, and it happens a real lot in Singularity in particular. However, I'm guessing it's because of the gigantic lack of loading screens, which is always a pretty cool thing to brag about.
If you're looking forward to buying Singularity because you think it will expand upon its intriguing premise in a number of interesting and cool manners feel free to be disappointed, but if you're thinking any Raven game can have a good story you're living in the past. Ten years in the past to be precise. What's cool about Singularity is the way it pushes the player through various neat set pieces and boss battles by way of a totally freakin' awesome thrill ride through time. You will be buying to see awesome monster combat with unique weapons involving time manipulation and with that said it's a one-trick pony, but it's a pony that can jump ten feet in the air and do a somersault.
I'd certainly like to see a real pony do that. Especially without its jockey getting harmed.
Friday, April 30, 2010
I review The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
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.
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.
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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