Hey all, it's been a long time. Let's dive back in!
Bloodborne is the new horror action RPG from Japanese developers From Software, and the fourth game in the "Souls series" (because most of them have the word Souls in the title). Director Hidetaka Miyazaki brings his trademark blend of challenge, exploration, mystery, and a coherent overarching vision to the land of Gothic and Lovecraftian horror, and creates what may be the best game in the series.
Let's put it this way: I bought a PS4 primarily to play Bloodborne, and I'm satisfied with that decision. That's how good this game is. So, why is it such a success?
First, Bloodborne keeps most of the elements that made previous Souls games special. The core combat engine is excellent, relying on a slow pace to encourage tactical thinking and featuring strong but fragile enemies in small groups to encourage picking your battles and seizing the right moment to strike. The core loop of risk versus reward in a single currency is still the beating heart of an intoxicating, addictive system designed to stretch your limits. The passive multiplayer system, where you can leave notes and hints for other players, or watch the ghostly forms of others as they die, still gives you a sense of community and hope in an otherwise unrelentingly dreary and miserable setting, as well as alerting you to traps and secrets that would otherwise be well-hidden. The game has a clear and consistent vision and a great sense of pacing, like a well-directed movie, so that almost nothing pulls you out of the experience. The game is allergic to cutscenes, quick-time events and tutorials, and the plot is minimalist and unclear unless you read every scrap of text in the item descriptions. The community is still divided over which of the 3 possible endings is the "good ending", for instance.
Second, Bloodborne trims a lot of the mechanical fat from previous installments. Instead of a surfeit of slightly different weapons and armor to collect, there are barely a dozen, but each one has a far greater variety of possible moves. Instead of an upgrade tree with half a dozen different materials to collect, there is a single linear upgrade path, plus a bunch of freely configurable gems that encourage you to try new builds without having to restart the game. Instead of Dark Souls 2's nine stats, there are only six, and each one has a clear effect on your character. Vast swathes of the game are completely optional, and in a stroke of genius, there's a whole second campaign of increasingly difficult pseudo-random "chalice dungeons" which provide a source of end-game content beyond simply replaying the game on a higher difficulty level. You don't have to worry about how much your character can carry, the quality of your armor, how many spells you have left, or any of the other make-work that plagued previous games, although there are still half a dozen too many potions, elixirs and bombs in your inventory that I rarely used.
Third, Bloodborne brings a new setting and a new feel to the table to differentiate itself from the competition as well as its predecessors. The Victorian Gothic city of Yharnam is a relentless profusion of fog, closed doors, twisty alleyways, and gabled roofs, which starts out vaguely menacing and edges closer and closer to ruin and madness as the game progresses. If anything, the new game is too busy, full of boxes and coffins and railings that can make it difficult to figure out where you're supposed to go in these circuitous levels full of shortcuts and hidden side paths. From the mechanical end, you now carry a gun instead of a shield, you can dodge much faster and more often, and you can regain health by attacking immediately after you were hit. The gun is much weaker than your melee weapons, but it's great at interrupting or staggering enemies, leading you to use it more as a counterattack or parry than a long-range sniping tool. Similarly, the lack of a shield, the fast movement, and the health regain system encourage you to stay in close quarters with your enemy, darting in and out of their blows like a fencer or a boxer, rather than inching forward with your shield up like an armored knight. The move to Victorian quasi-steampunk from medieval fantasy allows the perfect opportunity to rename or reinvent staple elements. These aren't magic rings, they're magic runs you memorize while sitting at your desk! That's not a bonfire, it's a lantern! That's not a zombie, it's an angry villager with a pitchfork! Presented in new ways, and with a much greater focus on staying active and putting yourself in high-risk, high-reward situations, the game feels liberated.
The last element is the introduction of a stiff challenge, and here Bloodborne also succeeds, perhaps a bit too well. Souls games are not difficult in the "Nintendo Hard" sense of requiring perfect timing and coordination, although they're certainly geared towards people who have played a lot of video games before. Instead, they contradict a lot of standard "video game logic" assumptions, forcing you to re-train your mind to succeed. The game is tough but fair: almost every time you die, you feel like it's your fault, that you could have pulled through if you just dodged better, or if you didn't rush blindly into that ambush, or if you had traveled back to town and spent your money on better gear or more levels. Once you've cracked the code, learned the patterns of the enemies and become comfortable with your trusty weapon, the game becomes almost easy, and the thrill of mastery floods through you. (Then, usually, you go online to brag about how great you are and how dumb everyone is who's still stuck on the first boss. But that's just Internet macho culture at work.)
Souls games are special because they respect you as an adult. You reap rewards for being observant, thorough, cautious, and decisive. There is no voice-over explaining why you're doing what you're doing, but if you pay attention you will figure it out without being told. If you draw your sword on your allies, they will be hostile to you forever. If you forget to use your invitation to Cainhurst Castle, home of the vampires, before finishing the game, no one will remind you and you'll just have to try again next time. If you ask for help from other players online, you don't know whether the other person will help you, or try to kill you; you can only hope that your respectful bow will motivate him to deal honorably with you.
Bloodborne looks great, it sounds great, it plays great, and it's just a delightful game overall. I highly recommend it.
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2015
Monday, March 17, 2014
First Impressions: Dark Souls 2
I'm maybe halfway done with Dark Souls 2 by now, and it has gripped me with its iron fist just like the previous entries in the series. This time the mail is wrapped in silk, but underneath it stays true to the spirit of the franchise, which is to say two of the best games of the generation. And it keeps getting better as it goes, so I'm excited to continue.
DS2 has not totally blown my socks off with every single new area or enemy like the previous games, but I suspect this is not the game's fault. The original Demon's Souls was such a ray of fresh air, and Dark Souls such a master class in environment design, that the enchantment cannot be repeated through the golden haze of nostalgia. The problems of the previous games are still there, shuffled around some, and the strengths have been slightly improved, but generally you are signing up for another 40+ hours of Dark Souls. There is a palpable homage to both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls (and probably King's Field, the more distant ancestors which I haven't played) throughout, to the point where I've started half-jokingly calling the game Demon's Souls 2. So I'll be comparing to previous entries in the series throughout, but not as a criticism; if you're going to copy a game, you should copy games so good that websites run features like, "How can you make an RPG after Dark Souls?"
The biggest move towards accessibility is in the storyline. Take this with a grain of salt, because the subversion of the basic narrative of the previous games was hidden away where only a walkthrough could take you, but I find a lot of the dialogue and character design to be too explicit, too "on the nose" about what's happening. For instance, most boss enemies in the series are based on emotions or primal desires gone wrong. Where previous games would present you with a Gaping Dragon whose mouth is so large it stretches down to its intestines, with no explanation of any kind, this one will give you an entire paragraph about the origins of the Covetous Demon before you step into the room to fight Jabba the Hutt.
Similarly, there is now an extensive tutorial that uses the restrictive architecture of the branches of the World Trees to introduce you slowly to all the game's mechanics. The tutorial exits onto a safe and welcoming central hub, with most of the high-level areas initially blocked off, where you can spend a pleasant hour chatting with everyone in town and learning the basic concepts of your life as an Undead. This is similar to the Nexus in Demon's Souls, but exchanging the bleak architecture and fearful travelers for enigmatic merchants under an eternal sunrise lifts one's spirits indescribably. Majula feels like home, to the point where I wish I could repair the shopkeeper's rotting roof to repay him for his kindness.
The order of the levels and boss enemies also creates a more gentle learning curve. The first few bosses in DS2 are just ramped-up versions of the same sword fights you've been having, as opposed to the outlandish and varied challenges of the initial encounters in Demon's and Dark Souls. The truly weird and inventive stuff is saved for later areas, after you've gotten the hang of the combat system and you've had a chance to level up and build a decent character. This means the opening hours lack the incredible punch they used to have, but new players won't be stopped by a huge difficulty spike. (I'd guess that most people stop playing Dark Souls 1 either at the tutorial boss or at the Capra Demon, who is capable of killing you within 3 seconds of opening the door.)
Technically, the game is a step backwards even from the early beta tests and trailers, with what I can only imagine were late-arriving performance issues caused by their brand-new engine. As a result, lighting and textures are muddy and flat, with all the "dark and spooky" areas but one being lightened up to a dull grey to avoid the crippling framerate problems of Blighttown. The online play is better explained and supported, but remains twitchy and full of people much better prepared than you are. I joined the Bell Keepers to defend the bell tower against all comers, but quickly found myself fighting mostly other Bell Keepers against their ostensible trespassing, which fit in well with the game's statements about the futility and avarice of Undead duels but made for a wearisome siege.
By contrast, the combat designers have made big strides in trimming the fat from the core game systems. The major "feel bad" moments of the previous games - accidentally killing a crucial merchant forever, spending all your precious upgrade materials on a subpar weapon, walking for ten minutes through enemy territory to make a shopping trip, leveling up badly to make the late game super tough - have been mitigated without compromising the feeling of hostility and indifference the series is so famous for creating. You can now fast travel to anywhere you've visited at any time, and after killing the same zombie a dozen times they will die permanently, so that you can always power through a rough spot instead of being either permanently stuck or invited to farm low-level enemies for pointless hours. Instead of making the game feel rushed and disconnected, it now feels more like a tournament of individual areas, like Demon's Souls with way more forgiving checkpoints instead of a 30-minute slog through a fetid swamp.
The more jaded corners of the Internet denounce these changes as removing part of the challenge that made victory so exhilarating in the first game in the series. This is absolutely not the case; defeat is still punishing and victory still gets your heart pumping wildly. You will still curse yourself as your own greed and carelessness loses you everything, like some demented fantasy stock market bubble. You will still grow to meet the challenge, then laugh in the face of formerly daunting foes. Dark Souls is back, and not a moment too soon.
DS2 has not totally blown my socks off with every single new area or enemy like the previous games, but I suspect this is not the game's fault. The original Demon's Souls was such a ray of fresh air, and Dark Souls such a master class in environment design, that the enchantment cannot be repeated through the golden haze of nostalgia. The problems of the previous games are still there, shuffled around some, and the strengths have been slightly improved, but generally you are signing up for another 40+ hours of Dark Souls. There is a palpable homage to both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls (and probably King's Field, the more distant ancestors which I haven't played) throughout, to the point where I've started half-jokingly calling the game Demon's Souls 2. So I'll be comparing to previous entries in the series throughout, but not as a criticism; if you're going to copy a game, you should copy games so good that websites run features like, "How can you make an RPG after Dark Souls?"
The biggest move towards accessibility is in the storyline. Take this with a grain of salt, because the subversion of the basic narrative of the previous games was hidden away where only a walkthrough could take you, but I find a lot of the dialogue and character design to be too explicit, too "on the nose" about what's happening. For instance, most boss enemies in the series are based on emotions or primal desires gone wrong. Where previous games would present you with a Gaping Dragon whose mouth is so large it stretches down to its intestines, with no explanation of any kind, this one will give you an entire paragraph about the origins of the Covetous Demon before you step into the room to fight Jabba the Hutt.
Similarly, there is now an extensive tutorial that uses the restrictive architecture of the branches of the World Trees to introduce you slowly to all the game's mechanics. The tutorial exits onto a safe and welcoming central hub, with most of the high-level areas initially blocked off, where you can spend a pleasant hour chatting with everyone in town and learning the basic concepts of your life as an Undead. This is similar to the Nexus in Demon's Souls, but exchanging the bleak architecture and fearful travelers for enigmatic merchants under an eternal sunrise lifts one's spirits indescribably. Majula feels like home, to the point where I wish I could repair the shopkeeper's rotting roof to repay him for his kindness.
The order of the levels and boss enemies also creates a more gentle learning curve. The first few bosses in DS2 are just ramped-up versions of the same sword fights you've been having, as opposed to the outlandish and varied challenges of the initial encounters in Demon's and Dark Souls. The truly weird and inventive stuff is saved for later areas, after you've gotten the hang of the combat system and you've had a chance to level up and build a decent character. This means the opening hours lack the incredible punch they used to have, but new players won't be stopped by a huge difficulty spike. (I'd guess that most people stop playing Dark Souls 1 either at the tutorial boss or at the Capra Demon, who is capable of killing you within 3 seconds of opening the door.)
Technically, the game is a step backwards even from the early beta tests and trailers, with what I can only imagine were late-arriving performance issues caused by their brand-new engine. As a result, lighting and textures are muddy and flat, with all the "dark and spooky" areas but one being lightened up to a dull grey to avoid the crippling framerate problems of Blighttown. The online play is better explained and supported, but remains twitchy and full of people much better prepared than you are. I joined the Bell Keepers to defend the bell tower against all comers, but quickly found myself fighting mostly other Bell Keepers against their ostensible trespassing, which fit in well with the game's statements about the futility and avarice of Undead duels but made for a wearisome siege.
By contrast, the combat designers have made big strides in trimming the fat from the core game systems. The major "feel bad" moments of the previous games - accidentally killing a crucial merchant forever, spending all your precious upgrade materials on a subpar weapon, walking for ten minutes through enemy territory to make a shopping trip, leveling up badly to make the late game super tough - have been mitigated without compromising the feeling of hostility and indifference the series is so famous for creating. You can now fast travel to anywhere you've visited at any time, and after killing the same zombie a dozen times they will die permanently, so that you can always power through a rough spot instead of being either permanently stuck or invited to farm low-level enemies for pointless hours. Instead of making the game feel rushed and disconnected, it now feels more like a tournament of individual areas, like Demon's Souls with way more forgiving checkpoints instead of a 30-minute slog through a fetid swamp.
The more jaded corners of the Internet denounce these changes as removing part of the challenge that made victory so exhilarating in the first game in the series. This is absolutely not the case; defeat is still punishing and victory still gets your heart pumping wildly. You will still curse yourself as your own greed and carelessness loses you everything, like some demented fantasy stock market bubble. You will still grow to meet the challenge, then laugh in the face of formerly daunting foes. Dark Souls is back, and not a moment too soon.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Tomb Raider (2013)
I had heard that the new Tomb Raider reboot was good, but I certainly didn't expect it to be this good. It's the game that Uncharted 3 should have been.
I am squarely in Tomb Raider's target demographic, having little to no exposure to the previous games in the series but a fondness for linear, heavily authored third-person action games. The story is extremely perfunctory, and would probably have no emotional punch whatsoever if I hadn't read the prequel comic that came with the special edition, which introduced the characters in a much more sympathetic way than their one-dimensional portrayal in the actual game. It doesn't help that half the cast is clearly just there to die in protagonist Lara Croft's arms for a Tragic Character Arc, when the game has plenty of other scripted events that provide real character development for her anyway. This isn't inconsistent on the game's part; rather, Tomb Raider is great at letting you connect with Lara when you're playing, and doesn't really know what to do with her when you aren't.
The mechanical heart of Tomb Raider is very strong. The basic methods of interacting with the game are quickly established: climbing things, shooting things, solving physics-based puzzles, exploring for hidden collectibles, and taking tremendous amounts of physical punishment in cut scenes. Because it is 2013, there are a bunch of expensive scripted scenes where the player's only contribution is Press X to Not Die, or Run and Jump in a Straight Line to Not Die, uneasily coexisting with the actual cut scenes where the plot moves forward. Loading screens are elegantly disguised with narrow rock passages or high windows Lara must wiggle through, and generally everything comes off very well and the pacing is tight, with plenty of breathers in the large open areas to explore. Because it is the Year of the Bow, Lara has the option to silently take down enemies, allowing you to bring your environment traversal skills to bear on the combat in a refreshing manner. The bow is also mandatory for the non-combat sections of the game, used to light things on fire, attach rope to things, and hunt animals, which encourages you to use it against enemies as well.
Upgrades are plentiful, with the unusual but very apt decision to make 100% completion of all upgrades possible by the end of the game, rather than forcing players to replay to see the other skill trees. This makes total sense with the story arc of "Lara Croft develops from a callow youth into Indiana Jones and/or Batman". The order in which the skills unlock essentially co-opts the player into telling the story through gameplay: first you buy a bunch of "Survival" upgrades which provide boosts to resource collection and have an exploration and hunting theme, then you buy the combat upgrades as Lara gets more comfortable (way too comfortable) with her arsenal of melee weapons and guns, then you unlock the gratuitous finishing moves and flashy weapon upgrades. By the end of the game, your cute camisole may be ripped, but you are squarely in action video game territory, as you graduate to napalm arrows, melee combos, and a silenced assault rifle. To deal with your expanding prowess, the game narrows in scope: the exploratory sections become few and far between, the role of nature recedes and the dingy corridors of a thousand military shooters full of faceless bad guys reappear. You are occasionally asked to feel sorry for the men you brutally murder, but it's not really effective after reading a dozen audio logs from their low-rent cult leader.
Why am I even discussing how shocking the violence is in this game, especially considering it's much more tasteful than Bioshock Infinite? Because it pulls the same trick as Bioshock, of setting you up in the opening hour with a very different and much more interesting game, before turning up the Rambo meter. Lara is scared, she complains, she has a fear of heights, she freaks out after killing her first enemy, she stalks deer with her Important Objects Vision (straight from Batman: Arkham Asylum) in the forest. She is instantly relatable, she invests the player in the story, and she's beautiful without being overly sexualized to boot. So when the game drops that conceit and starts mowing through waves of enemies and awarding extra points for brutal kills, it falls into the same trap as Uncharted. Because Lara has been so strongly set up as a character who doesn't have decades of experience with headshots, it strikes a wrong note when she sets about the task so quietly and efficiently. At least Bioshock takes pains to mention that you, the player, are a scary dude, and this is not your first combat engagement or even your first war crime. Tomb Raider shoves Lara into these action-hero situations, but forgets to really develop her into someone who can handle it. She gives the impression of simply being too tired and too driven by necessity to care.
The other element that deserves to be touched on here is the ridiculous amount of bodies strewn everywhere. The first time I saw the interior of an enemy-occupied cave, with at least a dozen human skeletons, I thought it was a little excessive. The first time I saw a pile of decomposing human corpses with some tastefully arranged red candles on a skull (the universal symbol for "crazy cultist it is ethically OK to choke with your bow"), I started asking myself how many shipwrecked survivors really landed on this island, and why every single room would be full of bodies in the way most games are full of crates. This really bugged me and broke the immersion, because it is so gratuitous, unnecessary and nonsensical. There is absolutely no reason for the cultists to be this comfortable around death, and they would definitely all have contracted some horrible disease and died because they left a dozen or more dismembered rotting corpses in each tiny cave. Yes, I get that they are bad guys, but they're actually pretty sensible for evil cultists. They have a totally reasonable master plan, they play chess on duty, they're wearing regular clothes - basically, their comical lack of hygiene (to the point where the elevator will let you off next to a skeleton of a soldier killed in World War II, still propped up against the wall with his diary) doesn't mesh with the overall realistic tone of the game. Indiana Jones fights actual Nazis and they don't have this much of a body count on their hands.
While this post has a rather negative tone, it's because the game makes such a great first impression that I feel the need to nitpick about it so much. Its mechanics remain fun all the way up to the end, allowing you that moment of cathartic power fantasy as you unlock the ridiculous final upgrades. The story is prone to extremely convenient collapsing objects, and for a genius archaeologist Lara Croft is as dumb as a bag of hammers when it comes to figuring out the cultists' plan, but overall Tomb Raider makes me overlook its many flaws to earn a spot on my favorites list. It doesn't have the sheer awe of worldbuilding that Bioshock Infinite does, but it feels competent, self-assured and complete in a way that Bioshock doesn't. Every plot thread and theme gets an answer, every annoying player action is upgraded to a cool and effortless one, and the ending is satisfying without resorting to a surprise plot twist. It displays what a lot of games are missing: a soul.
I am squarely in Tomb Raider's target demographic, having little to no exposure to the previous games in the series but a fondness for linear, heavily authored third-person action games. The story is extremely perfunctory, and would probably have no emotional punch whatsoever if I hadn't read the prequel comic that came with the special edition, which introduced the characters in a much more sympathetic way than their one-dimensional portrayal in the actual game. It doesn't help that half the cast is clearly just there to die in protagonist Lara Croft's arms for a Tragic Character Arc, when the game has plenty of other scripted events that provide real character development for her anyway. This isn't inconsistent on the game's part; rather, Tomb Raider is great at letting you connect with Lara when you're playing, and doesn't really know what to do with her when you aren't.
The mechanical heart of Tomb Raider is very strong. The basic methods of interacting with the game are quickly established: climbing things, shooting things, solving physics-based puzzles, exploring for hidden collectibles, and taking tremendous amounts of physical punishment in cut scenes. Because it is 2013, there are a bunch of expensive scripted scenes where the player's only contribution is Press X to Not Die, or Run and Jump in a Straight Line to Not Die, uneasily coexisting with the actual cut scenes where the plot moves forward. Loading screens are elegantly disguised with narrow rock passages or high windows Lara must wiggle through, and generally everything comes off very well and the pacing is tight, with plenty of breathers in the large open areas to explore. Because it is the Year of the Bow, Lara has the option to silently take down enemies, allowing you to bring your environment traversal skills to bear on the combat in a refreshing manner. The bow is also mandatory for the non-combat sections of the game, used to light things on fire, attach rope to things, and hunt animals, which encourages you to use it against enemies as well.
Upgrades are plentiful, with the unusual but very apt decision to make 100% completion of all upgrades possible by the end of the game, rather than forcing players to replay to see the other skill trees. This makes total sense with the story arc of "Lara Croft develops from a callow youth into Indiana Jones and/or Batman". The order in which the skills unlock essentially co-opts the player into telling the story through gameplay: first you buy a bunch of "Survival" upgrades which provide boosts to resource collection and have an exploration and hunting theme, then you buy the combat upgrades as Lara gets more comfortable (way too comfortable) with her arsenal of melee weapons and guns, then you unlock the gratuitous finishing moves and flashy weapon upgrades. By the end of the game, your cute camisole may be ripped, but you are squarely in action video game territory, as you graduate to napalm arrows, melee combos, and a silenced assault rifle. To deal with your expanding prowess, the game narrows in scope: the exploratory sections become few and far between, the role of nature recedes and the dingy corridors of a thousand military shooters full of faceless bad guys reappear. You are occasionally asked to feel sorry for the men you brutally murder, but it's not really effective after reading a dozen audio logs from their low-rent cult leader.
Why am I even discussing how shocking the violence is in this game, especially considering it's much more tasteful than Bioshock Infinite? Because it pulls the same trick as Bioshock, of setting you up in the opening hour with a very different and much more interesting game, before turning up the Rambo meter. Lara is scared, she complains, she has a fear of heights, she freaks out after killing her first enemy, she stalks deer with her Important Objects Vision (straight from Batman: Arkham Asylum) in the forest. She is instantly relatable, she invests the player in the story, and she's beautiful without being overly sexualized to boot. So when the game drops that conceit and starts mowing through waves of enemies and awarding extra points for brutal kills, it falls into the same trap as Uncharted. Because Lara has been so strongly set up as a character who doesn't have decades of experience with headshots, it strikes a wrong note when she sets about the task so quietly and efficiently. At least Bioshock takes pains to mention that you, the player, are a scary dude, and this is not your first combat engagement or even your first war crime. Tomb Raider shoves Lara into these action-hero situations, but forgets to really develop her into someone who can handle it. She gives the impression of simply being too tired and too driven by necessity to care.
The other element that deserves to be touched on here is the ridiculous amount of bodies strewn everywhere. The first time I saw the interior of an enemy-occupied cave, with at least a dozen human skeletons, I thought it was a little excessive. The first time I saw a pile of decomposing human corpses with some tastefully arranged red candles on a skull (the universal symbol for "crazy cultist it is ethically OK to choke with your bow"), I started asking myself how many shipwrecked survivors really landed on this island, and why every single room would be full of bodies in the way most games are full of crates. This really bugged me and broke the immersion, because it is so gratuitous, unnecessary and nonsensical. There is absolutely no reason for the cultists to be this comfortable around death, and they would definitely all have contracted some horrible disease and died because they left a dozen or more dismembered rotting corpses in each tiny cave. Yes, I get that they are bad guys, but they're actually pretty sensible for evil cultists. They have a totally reasonable master plan, they play chess on duty, they're wearing regular clothes - basically, their comical lack of hygiene (to the point where the elevator will let you off next to a skeleton of a soldier killed in World War II, still propped up against the wall with his diary) doesn't mesh with the overall realistic tone of the game. Indiana Jones fights actual Nazis and they don't have this much of a body count on their hands.
While this post has a rather negative tone, it's because the game makes such a great first impression that I feel the need to nitpick about it so much. Its mechanics remain fun all the way up to the end, allowing you that moment of cathartic power fantasy as you unlock the ridiculous final upgrades. The story is prone to extremely convenient collapsing objects, and for a genius archaeologist Lara Croft is as dumb as a bag of hammers when it comes to figuring out the cultists' plan, but overall Tomb Raider makes me overlook its many flaws to earn a spot on my favorites list. It doesn't have the sheer awe of worldbuilding that Bioshock Infinite does, but it feels competent, self-assured and complete in a way that Bioshock doesn't. Every plot thread and theme gets an answer, every annoying player action is upgraded to a cool and effortless one, and the ending is satisfying without resorting to a surprise plot twist. It displays what a lot of games are missing: a soul.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Far Cry 3
What can I say about Far Cry 3? I can come up with a dozen reasons why it is shallow, lacking the emergent panic that Far Cry 2 was so good at generating or the narrative punch of Spec Ops or the thematic cohesion of Dark Souls. Yet I liked it enough to play all the way through to the end and complete every optional side quest, every collection-based achievement, every time trial leaderboard challenge. The core feedback loop that drives the player to feel good about mastering this beautiful, refreshing virtual environment is refined to within an inch of its life, always giving the player the benefit of the doubt and enabling them to play however they want, even if it's a sub-optimal decision.
Not many people liked Far Cry 2, which was a highbrow attempt to put you in the shoes of a mercenary in war-torn Africa. Everything about the game is deliberately unpleasant: the infinitely respawning enemies with armed jeeps, the randomized malaria attacks and constant gun jamming, the need to frantically look down at a paper map while driving, the interchangeable corrupt factions. The side quests took the form of requests from your buddies to commit war crimes, each more vile than the last, until by the end of the game you have devastated the entire country and even the arms dealer is more noble than you are. The most effective way to smoke an enemy out from behind cover was to set the entire jungle on fire, and the best you could expect from the local shop most of the time was an AK-47 in working condition, which was significantly better than what your foes were using. If you want to make a best-selling video game, regardless of how incisive your social commentary is, you need players to be enjoying themselves long enough to experience it. So Far Cry 3 erases or minimizes all those distinctive quirks, in favor of a more traditional open world power fantasy. Your guns are completely reliable, ammo and health are liberally dispensed to the point where you can whip up a half-dozen med kits and an invincibility potion in the pause menu, and there are not only civilians but an entire local resistance (helpfully color-coded) who will be pathetically grateful for any of the favors you grant, despite being able to mount competent sorties from their secret base even without your help. All the random odd jobs littered around these tropical island will shower you with money and skill points, and the only serious resource constraint is tied to how assiduous you are about hunting animals and skinning them for better equipment. Do you want to sneak around with a silenced sniper rifle? Do you want to barge in with a dozen grenades and a machine gun? Do you want to run around with a knife and a longbow? How about encouraging tigers and bears to attack your enemies? All these are joyful, easy, and actively rewarded by the game. Come on in, the water's fine, it says.
Simultaneously, Far Cry 3 has a narrative which half-heartedly calls all this into question. As an entitled rich white dude with no combat training, your mission is to parachute onto this remote tropical island and colonize it like the British Empire, in the name of saving your fellow spoiled buddies. Many interesting themes are alluded to here - there are frequent quotes from Lewis Carroll, allusions to Apocalypse Now, and all boss fights are replaced with mystical visions that are some combination of ancient forces, bad drug trips, and your player character being an unreliable narrator - but these themes all disappear after a couple lines have been said about them. Virtually every other named character is either a romantic interest or a double of your character, but the "good ending" simply leaves all those questions and themes hanging, letting you insist that you are not in fact a crazed killer who spends most of his free time hunting sharks with assault weapons, then go right back to doing so.
It is the very friendliness of the game that undermines its narrative pretensions, in fact. The villain Vaas, in a superb performance, points out that you have become just like him in your wanton quest for power at any cost - but almost every quest you undertake has a clear villain, a half-dozen remorseless killers in front of him, and a pure virtuous innocent whose bacon you are saving. Your girlfriend, another great character whose actress nails the line between horror and concern, worries that you are becoming a totally different person, but you rudely shrug her off, probably because whenever she calls you she is undercut by the presence of an impending mission whose urgency is undeniable. If she picked up the phone to nag you about how you spent the last two hours stealing ancient relics from the natives you were supposed to be saving so that you could earn those last couple skill points, it would strike a lot truer. There are 3 or 4 poker games in the plot, and a fully implemented set of poker games you can go to, but you never have to play the game itself because a scripted event will occur before you could possibly lose. The last third of the game showers you in new areas, weapons, and abilities, but you have already become an impossibly powerful death-dealing machine, so all you can think about is how much more boring this corporate villain and his mercenary band is than the flamboyant, scrappy pirates you were up against earlier. The center of gravity in the story is Citra, apparently the only eligible female on the island, who (of course) falls for the player immediately, providing everything from super powers to tribal tattoos to sex to an excuse to kill more dudes. You get the impression she does this act with every foreigner who parachutes onto the island, but only you the player are able to set events in motion. There's no reason to mistrust the patently unreliable narrator when it's clear that everyone involved wants Jason to do one of two things: (a) embrace the jungle and become an unstoppable killing machine, or (b) kill a hundred people to save five innocents and kick back with a Mai Tai. Nobody pushes back against you, so you have no reason to doubt yourself.
Still, the escapist fun of this game has a strong pull. Hunting animals, hang gliding and sky diving and exploring the wilderness, climbing tall towers and planning your assault on enemy outposts: all these things set the bar very high for an open-world game, be it Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto or Elder Scrolls. The game is loads of fun, but it doesn't really mean anything anymore.
Not many people liked Far Cry 2, which was a highbrow attempt to put you in the shoes of a mercenary in war-torn Africa. Everything about the game is deliberately unpleasant: the infinitely respawning enemies with armed jeeps, the randomized malaria attacks and constant gun jamming, the need to frantically look down at a paper map while driving, the interchangeable corrupt factions. The side quests took the form of requests from your buddies to commit war crimes, each more vile than the last, until by the end of the game you have devastated the entire country and even the arms dealer is more noble than you are. The most effective way to smoke an enemy out from behind cover was to set the entire jungle on fire, and the best you could expect from the local shop most of the time was an AK-47 in working condition, which was significantly better than what your foes were using. If you want to make a best-selling video game, regardless of how incisive your social commentary is, you need players to be enjoying themselves long enough to experience it. So Far Cry 3 erases or minimizes all those distinctive quirks, in favor of a more traditional open world power fantasy. Your guns are completely reliable, ammo and health are liberally dispensed to the point where you can whip up a half-dozen med kits and an invincibility potion in the pause menu, and there are not only civilians but an entire local resistance (helpfully color-coded) who will be pathetically grateful for any of the favors you grant, despite being able to mount competent sorties from their secret base even without your help. All the random odd jobs littered around these tropical island will shower you with money and skill points, and the only serious resource constraint is tied to how assiduous you are about hunting animals and skinning them for better equipment. Do you want to sneak around with a silenced sniper rifle? Do you want to barge in with a dozen grenades and a machine gun? Do you want to run around with a knife and a longbow? How about encouraging tigers and bears to attack your enemies? All these are joyful, easy, and actively rewarded by the game. Come on in, the water's fine, it says.
Simultaneously, Far Cry 3 has a narrative which half-heartedly calls all this into question. As an entitled rich white dude with no combat training, your mission is to parachute onto this remote tropical island and colonize it like the British Empire, in the name of saving your fellow spoiled buddies. Many interesting themes are alluded to here - there are frequent quotes from Lewis Carroll, allusions to Apocalypse Now, and all boss fights are replaced with mystical visions that are some combination of ancient forces, bad drug trips, and your player character being an unreliable narrator - but these themes all disappear after a couple lines have been said about them. Virtually every other named character is either a romantic interest or a double of your character, but the "good ending" simply leaves all those questions and themes hanging, letting you insist that you are not in fact a crazed killer who spends most of his free time hunting sharks with assault weapons, then go right back to doing so.
It is the very friendliness of the game that undermines its narrative pretensions, in fact. The villain Vaas, in a superb performance, points out that you have become just like him in your wanton quest for power at any cost - but almost every quest you undertake has a clear villain, a half-dozen remorseless killers in front of him, and a pure virtuous innocent whose bacon you are saving. Your girlfriend, another great character whose actress nails the line between horror and concern, worries that you are becoming a totally different person, but you rudely shrug her off, probably because whenever she calls you she is undercut by the presence of an impending mission whose urgency is undeniable. If she picked up the phone to nag you about how you spent the last two hours stealing ancient relics from the natives you were supposed to be saving so that you could earn those last couple skill points, it would strike a lot truer. There are 3 or 4 poker games in the plot, and a fully implemented set of poker games you can go to, but you never have to play the game itself because a scripted event will occur before you could possibly lose. The last third of the game showers you in new areas, weapons, and abilities, but you have already become an impossibly powerful death-dealing machine, so all you can think about is how much more boring this corporate villain and his mercenary band is than the flamboyant, scrappy pirates you were up against earlier. The center of gravity in the story is Citra, apparently the only eligible female on the island, who (of course) falls for the player immediately, providing everything from super powers to tribal tattoos to sex to an excuse to kill more dudes. You get the impression she does this act with every foreigner who parachutes onto the island, but only you the player are able to set events in motion. There's no reason to mistrust the patently unreliable narrator when it's clear that everyone involved wants Jason to do one of two things: (a) embrace the jungle and become an unstoppable killing machine, or (b) kill a hundred people to save five innocents and kick back with a Mai Tai. Nobody pushes back against you, so you have no reason to doubt yourself.
Still, the escapist fun of this game has a strong pull. Hunting animals, hang gliding and sky diving and exploring the wilderness, climbing tall towers and planning your assault on enemy outposts: all these things set the bar very high for an open-world game, be it Assassin's Creed or Grand Theft Auto or Elder Scrolls. The game is loads of fun, but it doesn't really mean anything anymore.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Dark Souls
Dark Souls is built from the ground up for the "hardcore gamer": the kind of person who is always telling you they value gameplay over graphics and they don't make video games like they used to in the good old days, even if they personally were 4 years old during the good old days. The kind of person who treats gaming as a hobby, a thing you spend lots of time and money on in order to have really high-quality fun. For this audience, it surpasses expectations. If you already know what major games are coming out this year and how you feel about each of them, Dark Souls is right up your alley, and well worth your time.
Almost to a man, reviewers gush with praise over many aspects of the game. The art and sound design is fantastic, perfectly executing on the core premise of a dark fantasy world that is rich and varied yet creepy, twisted and ruined. This is good, because the music is almost nonexistent, appearing only at key moments or during boss fights where you will not be paying attention anyway. The mood is laid on thick, with heavy use of color and sound filters to convey the emotional tone in a largely isolated world. (In one enormous banquet hall, even the menu sounds boom and echo.) In a particularly oldschool turn, the story is not in the player's face whatsoever; key plot points are hidden away inside the item descriptions submenu, accessible by pressing Start, A, D-Pad right, D-Pad down ten times, X, X. The world is chock-full of secrets, hidden passageways and unique encounters, to the point where the player can be genuinely surprised after upwards of 50 hours of playing time - a rare feat for any media, not just games.
All this moodiness and inaccessibility is balanced out by a very "realistic" core gameplay system and a well-defined, voluminous set of animations to match. "Realistic" is one of those words that gamers say when they don't know how to describe an experience that is weighty, that has the ring of truth about it even if it does not match the real world in any way, that responds consistently and well to the player's desires. What they really mean about the medieval combat that is the core of Dark Souls is that it is sufficiently awkward, violent, difficult, and deep that the player has a glimpse of what it actually means to charge an enemy knight with your shield and spear. A big part of this feeling is the player's fragility: the same enemies you can dispatch with one well-timed parry and riposte can do the same to you, except that you are required to take on a half-dozen of them, each armed with a different weapon and fighting style. Even the lowliest zombie, barely clutching the broken hilt of a sword, can pose a serious threat to a reckless player who charges in headlong.
As I write, the online system is incredible in concept but broken in practice, thanks to the kind of trivial design decision that is easily overlooked in the rush to polish a voluminous work. Theoretically, other players leave you helpful messages or lie to you; you see their ghostly forms as they die, learning from their grisly demise which kind of terror awaits you in the next room; you can summon them to assist you or see them invade you in search of your hard-earned money. You can join elaborate covenants with specific goals, like "steal ten Dragon Scales from players who have killed dragons", or "enact vengeance upon the previous group," or "set traps for unwary players at the risk of being ganged up on by three irate victims". All of these provide a great sense of community, of variety, and of human interaction in a forbidding and austere world. Unfortunately, the population is inexplicably split among several servers, so the world feels extremely empty, and many of the multiplayer options require players to be fairly close together in terms of game progress and to use rare items to play, further decreasing the potential helpers. This could easily be fixed by increasing the tolerance for the game to contact other players, and hopefully developer From Software will pay attention.
Because Dark Souls is so captivating, engaging, and frankly such a long game - 50+ hours even for skilled players - it is held to a very high standard. As a result, what would normally be niggles and nitpicks are magnified to the status of full-fledged design flaws. Here are the ones I found:
Almost to a man, reviewers gush with praise over many aspects of the game. The art and sound design is fantastic, perfectly executing on the core premise of a dark fantasy world that is rich and varied yet creepy, twisted and ruined. This is good, because the music is almost nonexistent, appearing only at key moments or during boss fights where you will not be paying attention anyway. The mood is laid on thick, with heavy use of color and sound filters to convey the emotional tone in a largely isolated world. (In one enormous banquet hall, even the menu sounds boom and echo.) In a particularly oldschool turn, the story is not in the player's face whatsoever; key plot points are hidden away inside the item descriptions submenu, accessible by pressing Start, A, D-Pad right, D-Pad down ten times, X, X. The world is chock-full of secrets, hidden passageways and unique encounters, to the point where the player can be genuinely surprised after upwards of 50 hours of playing time - a rare feat for any media, not just games.
All this moodiness and inaccessibility is balanced out by a very "realistic" core gameplay system and a well-defined, voluminous set of animations to match. "Realistic" is one of those words that gamers say when they don't know how to describe an experience that is weighty, that has the ring of truth about it even if it does not match the real world in any way, that responds consistently and well to the player's desires. What they really mean about the medieval combat that is the core of Dark Souls is that it is sufficiently awkward, violent, difficult, and deep that the player has a glimpse of what it actually means to charge an enemy knight with your shield and spear. A big part of this feeling is the player's fragility: the same enemies you can dispatch with one well-timed parry and riposte can do the same to you, except that you are required to take on a half-dozen of them, each armed with a different weapon and fighting style. Even the lowliest zombie, barely clutching the broken hilt of a sword, can pose a serious threat to a reckless player who charges in headlong.
As I write, the online system is incredible in concept but broken in practice, thanks to the kind of trivial design decision that is easily overlooked in the rush to polish a voluminous work. Theoretically, other players leave you helpful messages or lie to you; you see their ghostly forms as they die, learning from their grisly demise which kind of terror awaits you in the next room; you can summon them to assist you or see them invade you in search of your hard-earned money. You can join elaborate covenants with specific goals, like "steal ten Dragon Scales from players who have killed dragons", or "enact vengeance upon the previous group," or "set traps for unwary players at the risk of being ganged up on by three irate victims". All of these provide a great sense of community, of variety, and of human interaction in a forbidding and austere world. Unfortunately, the population is inexplicably split among several servers, so the world feels extremely empty, and many of the multiplayer options require players to be fairly close together in terms of game progress and to use rare items to play, further decreasing the potential helpers. This could easily be fixed by increasing the tolerance for the game to contact other players, and hopefully developer From Software will pay attention.
Because Dark Souls is so captivating, engaging, and frankly such a long game - 50+ hours even for skilled players - it is held to a very high standard. As a result, what would normally be niggles and nitpicks are magnified to the status of full-fledged design flaws. Here are the ones I found:
- Human form (the core resource of online play) is lost when the host dies, instead of being recoverable after death like the game's other resources; this is the single largest contributor to the small pool of online players
- Enemies are too difficult to stagger or interrupt, meaning defensively-oriented weapons like spears and rapiers have an advantage over offensively-oriented weapons like clubs, arrows, swords, axes, halberds, katanas, scythes, magic wands, etc.
- It is too easy to be effective with techniques and equipment requiring no long-term commitment or specialization from your character, such as lightning or pyromancy, compared to those which require a dedicated plan to use, such as heavy armor or magic spells or longbows or chaos.
- The level designers use players' ability to leave messages as a crutch, hiding extremely important game elements in places no sane person would look, and giving the player several opportunities to accidentally miss out on content.
- The engine programming is, frankly, bad. The framerate is a mess, especially in Blighttown and the Painted World, where it feels like the artists ran over their texture budget and the game has to cycle things to and from disk all the time. This shouldn't happen, and frankly the places where it does are not the game's prettiest or most fun parts anyway.
- Several reviews note that the game sometimes drops inputs or pauses before executing inputs. I've noticed that this happens when the player is interrupted; instead of clearing the input buffer at this point, sometimes the game will just keep the buffer around while the animation plays (which could take two seconds or longer) and immediately execute afterward. This is completely wrong and very frustrating when it happens, because the game is otherwise so consistent and so demanding that the player do all their inputs correctly.
- The enemy AI is incredibly stupid, and the game is crafted around this. For example, a half-dozen bull demons will be sitting around on a flat plain looking vaguely in your direction, and when you shoot one in the eye with an arrow, only one of his fellows or maybe none at all will notice you even exist. This never breaks the game, as you are sure to die if all half-dozen see you, but it breaks the verisimilitude that the rest of the team worked so hard to create.
- Snuggly the Crow uses the same awful, tedious barter mechanic that wasted over an hour of my life looking at the loading screen in Demon's Souls. The user should never be required to quit and restart the game to progress, especially when the desired action could easily be accomplished without it.
- The late game wastes a lot of the player's time, and clearly was not as well-tested as the early game. Early merchants will move to the central hub once found; early areas unlock shortcuts from the central hub allowing you to bypass most enemies; early bosses have interesting strategies and create tense moments. Late merchants stay several minutes of running away from one another; late areas are heavily linear and very far away from each other; late bosses are either incredibly easy using techniques the previous boss just tested, or so high-level that unimaginative brute force techniques are required to succeed.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Dark Souls (not a review)
I have spent an awful lot of time playing Dark Souls in the last three weeks, resulting in the following breakdown:
It is difficult to be objective about something which has its hooks so deep in me. Dark Souls is The Wire or the T.S. Eliot of video games: highbrow, moody, exacting, tedious, and meticulously crafted to appeal to the connoisseur, not least by instilling a sense of elitist satisfaction. "This game isn't hard!" you will tell yourself, after you are finished, in the same way that Richard Feynman used to call engineering problems "trivial" if they could be solved with applications of existing theory. If you play games for mastery and exploration, rather than for socialization or escapism, you will probably love this one. (If you are a fan of socialization and escapism, I hear this year's FIFA is pretty good, and doesn't require you to win 5-0 against Barcelona to unlock them.)
To a reviewer, Dark Souls is a never-ending parade of misery, practical jokes upon the player, and brief shining moments of victory and elation that makes your imminent crushing defeat to the next challenge even crueler. To a designer, the game world is carefully crafted to give paranoid, observant and informed players a leg up on the competition. Will you be crushed by a giant rolling ball from Indiana Jones while walking up an innocuous stairway? Yes. Could you have predicted this by looking at a big spherical dent in the opposite wall? Always. Are there objects of incredible power that are accessible only through arcane and finicky means? Yes. Are there game systems in place to inform the player anyway? Yes. Does the game waste untold amounts of time making you walk back and forth through a sprawling open world? Often. Do strategically placed shortcuts open up at particularly difficult areas? Usually, although there are a couple notable exceptions. In this way, exploration feeds into mastery, providing tangible reminders of your progress. The game is even more aggressively focused on gear than its predecessor Demon's Souls, so a deficiency in mastery can even be made up for with exploration, and vice versa. The game is careful not to crush your spirit, except during boss fights, with many systems that reward you for making a small amount of progress and then dying.
The final piece of the addictive puzzle is the death mechanic, the primary driver of tension and compulsive behavior in the game. Essentially, you are not given a bank account, and you drop your wallet when you die. (You will die often, especially when exploring a new area.) You only have one spare wallet, so you must venture forth immediately to the site of your demise or forfeit everything. To gamers used to a steady diet of affirmation and steady difficulty curves, having to walk away from up to an hour's worth of progress or run away with your tail between your legs is gut-wrenching. This mechanic has the qualities of greatness: easy to learn, hard to master, encouraging behavior (giving the tough spot another try) that helps push the players on to completing the game.
A proper review is forthcoming, which you can expect to follow my usual pattern of offering suggestions for improvement.
- First time playing the game, largely alone and offline: 50 hours
- Second time playing the game, after reading the wiki: 25 hours
- Achievement hunting and grinding: Additional 5 hours each playthrough
- Abortive third playthrough: 6 hours
- Talking to others about Dark Souls: 6 hours, from dates to birthday parties to water cooler chatter
- Reading the wiki, online reviews and other helpful guides: 10 hours
It is difficult to be objective about something which has its hooks so deep in me. Dark Souls is The Wire or the T.S. Eliot of video games: highbrow, moody, exacting, tedious, and meticulously crafted to appeal to the connoisseur, not least by instilling a sense of elitist satisfaction. "This game isn't hard!" you will tell yourself, after you are finished, in the same way that Richard Feynman used to call engineering problems "trivial" if they could be solved with applications of existing theory. If you play games for mastery and exploration, rather than for socialization or escapism, you will probably love this one. (If you are a fan of socialization and escapism, I hear this year's FIFA is pretty good, and doesn't require you to win 5-0 against Barcelona to unlock them.)
To a reviewer, Dark Souls is a never-ending parade of misery, practical jokes upon the player, and brief shining moments of victory and elation that makes your imminent crushing defeat to the next challenge even crueler. To a designer, the game world is carefully crafted to give paranoid, observant and informed players a leg up on the competition. Will you be crushed by a giant rolling ball from Indiana Jones while walking up an innocuous stairway? Yes. Could you have predicted this by looking at a big spherical dent in the opposite wall? Always. Are there objects of incredible power that are accessible only through arcane and finicky means? Yes. Are there game systems in place to inform the player anyway? Yes. Does the game waste untold amounts of time making you walk back and forth through a sprawling open world? Often. Do strategically placed shortcuts open up at particularly difficult areas? Usually, although there are a couple notable exceptions. In this way, exploration feeds into mastery, providing tangible reminders of your progress. The game is even more aggressively focused on gear than its predecessor Demon's Souls, so a deficiency in mastery can even be made up for with exploration, and vice versa. The game is careful not to crush your spirit, except during boss fights, with many systems that reward you for making a small amount of progress and then dying.
The final piece of the addictive puzzle is the death mechanic, the primary driver of tension and compulsive behavior in the game. Essentially, you are not given a bank account, and you drop your wallet when you die. (You will die often, especially when exploring a new area.) You only have one spare wallet, so you must venture forth immediately to the site of your demise or forfeit everything. To gamers used to a steady diet of affirmation and steady difficulty curves, having to walk away from up to an hour's worth of progress or run away with your tail between your legs is gut-wrenching. This mechanic has the qualities of greatness: easy to learn, hard to master, encouraging behavior (giving the tough spot another try) that helps push the players on to completing the game.
A proper review is forthcoming, which you can expect to follow my usual pattern of offering suggestions for improvement.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Early Bird
Over the last few weeks, I've been playing a lot of iPhone games. They largely fall into two categories: ports of console games and bite-size touch screen games. There is intense, brutal competition in both, and the cream of the crop tends to be both genuinely enjoyable, replayable, and extremely cheap, ranging from $1 to $5. But not every game is healthy fare, and that's where Early Bird comes in.
Early Bird is clearly inspired by the smash hit Angry Birds, where a swipe determines the angle and force of your projectiles as you attempt to knock down buildings for points. Early Bird similarly tasks you with carrying the bird to its destination via swipes, with various bonus points awarded for side goals like "bounce really high on this coiled spring." The cutesy art style, help-a-baby-bird and bouncy sound design are similarly echoes of Tiny Wings, but touch the ol' heart strings all the same. Like seemingly all iPhone puzzle games, there are lots of levels, each of which can be completed in 5 minutes or less, organized loosely by theme. An additional charmingly unique factor is the end-of-level report, where a surly worm (presumably, the one you just enabled the early bird to get) congratulates you in semi-ironic fashion with messages like "Yippee."
Unfortunately, this attractive package is wrapped around a vicious shell of bad design that hollows out the game in a way only veteran players will spot. It is the Hostess Cakes of bird-based puzzle games: tastes great, no filling, leaves you sick to your stomach at the end. This is a serious charge, so I'll detail my reasoning:
Early Bird is clearly inspired by the smash hit Angry Birds, where a swipe determines the angle and force of your projectiles as you attempt to knock down buildings for points. Early Bird similarly tasks you with carrying the bird to its destination via swipes, with various bonus points awarded for side goals like "bounce really high on this coiled spring." The cutesy art style, help-a-baby-bird and bouncy sound design are similarly echoes of Tiny Wings, but touch the ol' heart strings all the same. Like seemingly all iPhone puzzle games, there are lots of levels, each of which can be completed in 5 minutes or less, organized loosely by theme. An additional charmingly unique factor is the end-of-level report, where a surly worm (presumably, the one you just enabled the early bird to get) congratulates you in semi-ironic fashion with messages like "Yippee."
Unfortunately, this attractive package is wrapped around a vicious shell of bad design that hollows out the game in a way only veteran players will spot. It is the Hostess Cakes of bird-based puzzle games: tastes great, no filling, leaves you sick to your stomach at the end. This is a serious charge, so I'll detail my reasoning:
- The scoring system (from 1 to 3 stars) is completely broken. There are lots of small, inventive bonuses that make you feel good about finding the right solution, or salve you for getting stuck in a bad situation, adding up to ~4000 points per level. There is a time bonus, to the tune of ~1500 points. There is a bonus of 5,000 points for a bullseye. Then each unused swipe gives you 10,000 points. It takes 20,000 points to get the maximum 3 stars, and each level is designed to be solvable with 2 unused swipes. I like to call a scoring system like this Quidditch Syndrome. Lots of things are happening, but every game is won or lost by Harry Potter. This removes the rewards they carefully built for the player in favor of a single metric that is the same for every level. In other words, it removes strategy and variety, without providing any benefits, in a system that is very easy to fix.
- The level design is extremely linear and holds the player's hand to an astonishing degree. The ideal path for every level is marked with floating bugs in the exact arc the player should swipe, and other paths are carefully blocked off. Usually, there is a complicated series of springs, fans, bouncers, etc. that can be completed in one perfect swipe or 5 smaller ones, and the ideal path will hit every single one of them - there are no red herrings. In later levels, instant death spikes adorn areas next to your target path, removing what little leeway you have. Because of the scoring system above, there is no chance of success with anything but the fewest possible number of swipes, so you are basically riding the Early Bird train every single time for 100+ levels. This is probably a deliberate design decision, but it could also be simple incompetence.
- The "pinball bumpers" mechanic, appearing at level 25 or so, seems designed to bring tears to the eyes of easily frustrated players - you know, the kind who would appreciate all the hand-holding and simple score system I discussed above. In a momentum-based game, tightly spaced obstacles which give you lots of negative momentum can range from a +1 swipe tax to instant death depending on the level. Only a perfect shot will get through them, and because the levels are bird-powered Rube Goldberg machines, you usually can't even see the proper shot before you make it. This trial and error instantly sapped the remaining fun of the game from me. Again, it is easily fixable simply by increasing the space between bumpers so that a shot at 40 degrees instead of 45 would still make it past.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Rift
I picked up Rift’s free trial mode after the link was published in Penny Arcade, played for a couple hours, got frustrated by the tutorial and starting zone, and turned it off. After talking with Austin and Matthew about it, I decided to give the game another shot, this time making it several hours in (level 12) before real life intervened. I don’t particularly feel the need to sign back on, although I might try to see a full-scale invasion (which I mostly missed because I was questing at the time). So this review is not exhaustive; then again, there’s a good reason for that.
Final Verdict: Rift is a cover band who finally made it big, with a slick record deal and a professional engineer. It looks great, it runs very well on my mid-grade PC, and virtually every genre feature that everyone has said, “I wish that were present in game X!” about is present and accounted for. This puts it several steps above most other online games, but from my interior perspective, it just means I’m not seething in frustration. Everything is fairly polished, although the basic feedback loop is rather slower than I’d like. Everything is executed adequately, and no further than adequately. I would recommend this in a vacuum over World of Warcraft, simply because it is newer and shinier, but there is absolutely no reason to double up between them unless you have friends in both places.
For Non-WoW Players: Rift is a Western MMO, a “Massively Multiplayer Online” game, extremely similar to World of Warcraft (WoW). This means you will spend several dozen hours doing menial labor to build up your character, either alone or with a small group of friends. Virtually everyone you talk to will have a task for you to complete, such as “Those wolves are killing our sheep. Kill six wolves and bring me their pelts!” or “Our supplies of leather pants are running low. Sew a dozen pairs for me and I’ll pay you!” or mostly, “Vorenclex the Wicked in his futile but bitter feud with Alvala of Ergeron has cursed our beloved trees. Pray at these three shrines to shine the holy light of cleansing upon them!” Each of these actions rewards you with increasing amounts of experience and loot, and slowly lead you to explore the enormous map and build up your character into a unique and special snowflake. (Or, more realistically, you will be Legolas Knockoff #47913.) Meanwhile, several thousand other people are doing the same thing at the same time, so you will often pass them in the wilderness, helping them out of a jam or waiting for them to finish killing wolves so you can take your turn. This creates a mindless but entertaining feedback loop during which you can easily listen to background TV, talk to friends, or just numb the pain of an uncomfortable existence by escaping into a world where your actions are always positive and someone pops in every hour or two to announce that you’ve earned some new toy. Like Facebook, the only real value in this game is being a social lubricant. If the idea of signing up to kill some demons with Bob and Linda, or with 4 people you’ve never met, is an exciting way to help people out while relaxing, Rift is an excellent tool for this purpose. It’s very easy to join a group either formally or informally, and your computerized allies’ incompetence creates frequent opportunities to save them from the slavering demon hordes, so enjoy. If you want something you will be having deep thoughts about in the car tomorrow morning, look elsewhere.
For Current or Former WoW Players: Rift is virtually identical to WoW, except it looks prettier and the titular “rifts” are semi-random, optional opportunities to join a temporary group to fight in a miniature dungeon. There is absolutely no reason to recommend it unless you quit WoW for reasons unrelated to the game itself (stopped being single, grew apart from your friends, etc.) because it is only slightly less tedious than what you’ve already seen. There are no evolutionary leaps forward here; it earns a solid B for “Meets Expectations” in every category.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)