Tuesday 27 August 2013

Guns....lots of guns

Spec Ops: The Line
Hadn't heard much about this game. It grabbed my attention immediately when the main character had to fight with renegade US soldiers. That isn't too common in games. Most games don't make you think about the consequences about violence. It's a core theme in Spec Ops. As the violence escalates in the game, the characters are drawn more and more into a bloody hell. War crimes are committed and the characters have to face the moral consequences of their actions.

Technically, the game looks great with it's dust storms and semi-destructible environments. However, artistically, it was somewhat bland. All of the action takes place in the desert and the game is mostly shades of brown. The controls were a little awkward for getting into and out of cover, but nothing too bad.

With a title like Spec Ops, I was expecting a shooter. What I got was a shooter with a conscience. It was a very pleasant surprise. 8.5/10


Alpha Protocol
When ever a game advertises itself as an "espionage" game, it means stealth with very little killing. Alpha Protocol gives the option of stealth, but also lots and lots of killing. I'm not a big fan of sneaking around. For me, the action is the juice.

Things the game did well:
 - RPG elements. Lots of choices, lots of consequences.
 - voice acting. Each character sounded authentic.
 - character customization. Tons of gun & armour mods. Could've used a few more character options.
 - map design. even though this wasn't a completely open world game, the maps felt spacious with many options to move around.

Things the game did not do well:
 - camera movement. This PC port seemed like an after thought. The camera controls were clunky and sometimes, there would be long pauses while panning around. It was extremely annoying.
 - pistols are broken. Chain shot is completely OP. Boss fights are trivial with this ability. I ended the Sis fight in 1 second.

Overall, I enjoyed Alpha Protocol. The game ended with the possibility of a sequel. I'm looking forward to it. 8/10




Thursday 15 August 2013

Welcome to Earf!

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
I know Will Smith actually says the line correctly, but it's standard greeting for aliens coming to earth. In this case, the aliens are from the X-Com franchise dating back to the mid 90s. First of all, I must preface this review by saying I was a HUGE fan of the original (not so much the sequel). And after playing this game, I think the developers were fans too. There were a ton of homages and nods to the original. What they did was take the original game, beef up the graphics, streamlined the gameplay a lot and delivered one of the most satisfying and original games I've played in a while. Original may be a strange choice of words considering it is a sequel in a franchise with lots of entries. I say original because the gameplay is so unique. I don't think I've played another game with the same mechanics. The first X-Com comes closest, but that was released almost 20 years ago.

When I first started playing , I encountered a serious bug. Occasionally, the game would crash during a specific cutscene. This happened even if I exited the game and reloaded my previous saved game. This essentially corrupted my save game file. I had to restart all over again twice! I finally figured out the Steam cache was getting corrupted. After refreshing it, the game was fine.

Aside from that bug, the game was a fantastic experience. Lots of fun, strategy and satisfying alien murder. The bug keeps this from being a perfect 10. 9/10.

Thursday 18 July 2013

Games I've Already Finished

Just for the record, I had finished a few of the games in my Steam library prior to starting this blog.

Aliens vs. Predator
Atom Zombie Smasher
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
COD: MW3
Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike: Source
Defense Grid: The Awakening
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Dungeon Defenders
FEAR
Fallout: New Vegas (and all DLC)
Far Cry
Freedom Force
Frontlines: Fuel Of War
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Kane & Lynch
Kane & Lynch 2
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead 2
Max Payne
Max Payne 2
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
Plants vs. Zombies
Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
Team Fortress Classic
Team Fortress 2
Warhammer 40k: Dawn Of War
X-Com: UFO Defense
X-Com: Terror From the Deep



Jamestown: Legend Of The Lost Colony (of crap)

Jamestown: Legend Of The Lost Colony
Vertical scrolling shooters were popular when I was growing up. Games such as 1942, 1943, Truxton, Twin Cobra, and Raiden consumed many childhood hours. However, since the 90s, these types of games seemed to be on the decline. Jamestown is supposed to be an homage to this old-school genre. It's even done with 8-bit graphics.

Frankly, this game was terrible. The graphics are passable, but nothing special. Forget about a story. The maps were too small. That is, there isn't a lot of room to manoeuvre your ship. When the screen fills with enemy ships, bullets and missiles, there has to be somewhere to go. Unfortunately, the view is zoomed in way too much. The ship takes up a large chunk of real estate and the enemy projectiles are also big.

There are 4 ships available to play and all of them are boring. The only power up is a temporary shield and increased damage. That's so lame. All of the old games I listed above have lots of power ups and bombs. This reeks of lazy design.

When I started, I wanted to get through the game as fast as possible so I choose Normal difficulty. The first couple of stages were no problem. Seems like I'd finish in a couple of sessions. However, the subsequent levels requires you to go back and finish the previous level on Hard. Ok, fine. The level after that required me to go back and finish the previous levels on an even higher difficulty setting. That's a cheesy and bullshit game "design" to get more replay out of the game. It's inexcusable that I'd have to replay the same levels 3-4 times each just to finish the game. What they should've done is add increasingly difficult maps.

I'm happy I never have to play this POS again. Congratulations Jamestown, you get my first 1/10 rating.

Tuesday 9 July 2013

All aboard!

Metro 2033
Ukrainian-developed, post-apocalyptic, FPS set in the Moscow metro system. This game was based on a book of the same name. I had never heard of it, let alone read it. I expected the story to be deep and involving. Instead, I was disappointed at how disjointed it was. The plot has your character going through the subway tunnels trying to find a way to beat The Dark Ones. The Dark Ones weren't shown very much until the very end but every time they were on the screen, it was scary! They were these ghostly shadows which blended into the environment very well. The problem was, The Dark Ones has so little screen time. It was mostly fighting mutants and Nazis (wtf, why?!). Cut out the unnecessary Nazi story element and focus more on the Dark Ones. The ending gave you a choice and I went with the obvious "kill everything" one. I read about the other ending and it made no sense to me. There was nothing in the preceding hours of gameplay that would lead me to that conclusion.

Each "station" was a mini-town and could've been an interesting setting, but they weren't given a lot of attention. No interesting characters. No cool places to hangout. Basically a vendor and the next quest giver. Boring!

The missions themselves were too short. 5-10 minute mission, followed by 3 minute cutscene. Repeat for a few hours. And the mission layouts were confusing. You don't get an in-game map so I figured there'd be multiple ways to finish a mission. Nope. Only 1 exit and you have a useless compass to help you navigate. Some maps were so frustrating because I couldn't find the damned exit. A compass doesn't tell you which floor of a building to go to. Bad, bad level design.

So what did this game do well? The graphics engine provided some of the best lighting and environmental effects I've seen on a PC game. Lots of great looking fog and shadows. It helped create a creepy atmosphere, but unfortunately, the story could not utilize it.

The other neat thing was the voice acting. A fellow gamer & friend recommended I switch the audio to Russian with English subtitle. It was nice little touch.

6/10


After Metro 2033, I was supposed to move onto Jamestown: Legend Of The Lost Colony, however, I get derailed and played Diablo 3.

Diablo 3
Ok,  I had finished Diablo 3 a week or two after it came out. A pretty looking game without the brilliance of the first two (fuck you, Jay Wilson). It held very little replaybility value so I shelved it for a year. Only recently did I get back into it so I could solo it on the hardest difficulty level. I'll admit, Inferno is pretty hard with the crap gear I had. Instead of grinding endlessly for better gear, I just went to the AH and bought a set of kick-ass Legendary-class equipment. One I had my new gear, it didn't take much time to kill Diablo. Time to shelve it again.

7/10


Next: Jamestown (it's so bad)...

Monday 24 June 2013

Cyborgs & Ninjas

Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Finally figured out what was making me sick. Turns out the refresh rate of the game was set to 59Hz. The native resolution on my monitor is 60Hz. Once I made that adjustment, everything was good.

I finished the single player campaign and while the overall experience was good. A common complaint I've read about is the poor quality of the boss fights. For the most part, I was ok with the boss fights since I customized my character for combat/hacking (the fights weren't friendly for stealth builds). However, the final boss fight was anti-climatic. It was just so easy. At no point was I ever in any danger of losing. And it wasn't a very creative fight either. Shoot some turrets and robots. By then, I had tons of powerful weapons. With that said, I must've saved a hundred times during the campaign.

Usually, I don't get into video game stories that much, but I liked the DXHR plot. It fully embraced its cyberpunk roots. Reminded me a lot of the old Cyberpunk pen & paper RPG. Good times. I'm looking forward to the next installment. 9/10


Mark Of The Ninja
Other than watching a few gameplay videos, I knew nothing of this game. The artwork looked pretty in the vids. That's the extent of my knowledge.

The first thing that hit me about this game was it's sense of style. It had a very Genndy Tartakovsky look to it. The animation is smooth and the artwork, despite being a stealth (i.e. shadowy) game, is stunning. It's like playing a well-animated cartoon. The gameplay matched the graphics in terms of quality. Lots of different moves were available with a relatively simple control set.

One problem I had was the game punished killing. At the end of every level, points were awarded, but some points were not given if a mob was killed. I don't understand punishing the player for that when half of the skill/talent tree is dedicated to killing. That and I'm a ninja. A cold-blooded killer hiding in the shadows. A ninja that doesn't kill is just a dude in black pajamas.

This was a pretty short game (roughly 9 hours) but I think it was the right amount. Any more and the game would probably start feeling repetitive. I normally find games with puzzles very boring as it typically involves a lot of running around and/or collecting stuff. The puzzles in MOTN were very well designed. Complex enough to be fun, yet did not require a lot of farming or wasting time. Plus, there were multiple ways to solve some of the puzzles. Good job, game designers!

The story was fairly generic, but I can overlook that given the fantastic graphics and gameplay. The voice acting was on par as well. The female ninja sounded like Kelly Hu.

8/10

Monday 17 June 2013

Work!

Ok, work has been insanely busy for the past few months. So many late nights and weekends at the office. It hasn't left me with a lot of time for games. However, I got back into the swing of things a few weeks ago.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops
Standard entry in the COD series: soldier shoots people in exotic locations. The gameplay was solid but uninspired. It didn't bring anything new to the table. The setting was different, but I'm not a huge fan of Vietnam era military weapons. The "plot twist" was somewhat predictable too and the the single player campaign was far too short. I'll give it a 6.5/10.

FTL: Faster Than Light
I started playing this after a co-worker recommended it. It's a nice little indie game from Subset Games. You  control of a ship and try to make across several sector of space while a huge armada is chasing you. Along the way, there are random encounters with space pirates, slavers, etc. There are several ways to customize your ship, i.e. you can focus on engines, shields, weapons and various other subsystems. The gameplay is simple, yet refreshing. Each game only lasts 30-45 mins. You either beat the game or die. So far, I've only died. Even at Easy, it's an incredibly difficult game. I've gotten to the end boss several times, but cannot make it more than 25% into the final battle. The graphics aren't that great but they're acceptable. I'll probably shelve this game for now...8.5/10

Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I was a huge fan of the original Deus Ex, so I was really looking forward to the latest instalment of the series. 3 hrs in and it's lived up to my lofty expectations. The graphics look fantastic, especially the HUD. The story and voice acting are engaging as well. The game has a heavy stealth element to it, but I've abandoned it completely. Going in guns blazing!

My only complaint, and this is going to sound weird, is the nausea. I can't play for more than 30 mins without getting dizzy and wanting to puke all over my keyboard. I don't know what's going in. In 30+ years of gaming, this never happened to me. Maybe I'll take some Gravol before my next Deus Ex session.