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Game Ramblings #227 – 007 First Light

More Info from IO Interactive

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows, Switch 2

I’ve always been a general fan of the Hitman series and have jumped into the recent trilogy a number of times. The way that you could take things on in a number of different ways and carefully plan the missions has always been really engaging. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of how they handled failure. It’s always felt too cut and dry to me. When things go incredibly wrong you basically fail and restart rather than adapt. In making the game focused on the Bond IP, First Light solved a lot of that problem for me.

There are certain expectations around the Bond IP that come from decades of films and videogames. Sure, he’s going to be the ladykiller spy with cool gadgets and an ability to adapt to his environment. However, the important thing for this game is that when things go wrong in a Bond movie – and they always do at some point – he will action star his way out of trouble. That is the biggest thing about this as a difference against Hitman. I can carefully plan my infiltration to areas and make sure to stealth or fake or distract my way through areas, but when things go wrong I don’t reset. I punch and I shoot and I laser gadget and I explosive my way through. Sure, I can reset the scenario and try a different approach but it doesn’t feel like as much of a punishment as it did for me in Hitman because the action escape is simply another part of the experience and another tool in my bag.

This obviously wouldn’t work if the action parts weren’t fun. Luckily, the experience here is sharp. Melee is your typical experience at this point. The AI will generally line up attacks one at a time to avoid overwhelming the player. There are color coded tells for parry and dodge-focused defense. You can punch and grab and throw things to get in offense. It’s fine and it works. What surprised me is how good the gunplay was.

This plays a lot closer to something like a Tomb Raider than a Goldeneye 64 when gunplay is active, and that’s a huge benefit to the game. There’s a pretty narrow variety of weapons, but they cover a few specific wider types. There’s a couple pistols, a couple SMGs, a few rifles, and a couple shotguns. They’ve got enough coverage to be useful in generally different ranges but you also don’t really sit on them for too long. The game plays a pretty tight line where ammo is not overly abundant so you are frequently changing out weapons to kind of whatever is nearby. This also leads to the thing that I really liked in that careful targeting is very important, but the game is also generous with its aim assists. As an example, headshots are incredibly important in reducing ammo use as they are a guaranteed kill. However, there are a lot of enemies that wear helmets. These are a guaranteed two shot kill done well – the first shot pops the helmet off in a satisfying way and the second shot is your kill shot. All of this encourages the player to efficiently dispatch enemies and preserve ammo as it can become a hazard to get out of cover to find more weapons.

This would all be incredibly more annoying if the game wasn’t fairly generous with its aim assists. It doesn’t necessarily aim correct much but it definitely leans into camera magnetism in a way that lets the player pan and scan and get close enough to an enemy’s weak point before getting pulled in to the target. This obviously helps with general clumsiness of gamepad inputs, but it also helps more importantly in preserving the speed of gameplay. The skill is in identifying targets and getting over there, and the game provides that last push once you’ve gotten to the right spot, rather than fumbling around to hit the perfect final tap of the stick. It feels like the team approached the reality of gamepad-focused gameplay with a lot more realistic of a mindset of what benefits the game as a whole, rather than being focused on whether or not there should be a skill wall involved, and I think the game ends up being better on the other side of it as a result.

Where I kind of think this falls apart a bit is in boss fights. They all kind of felt too scripted and too heavy handed. You generally can’t just melee your way through these fights or shoot your way through these fights. They generally require you to use things like gadget moves to distract the enemy and get a hit in, then run away to find a new unique distraction to do. They generally require some specific melee combo of a parry of a very telegraphed attack into a single hit, then some waiting around for it to happen again. What they are is generally slow and not really presenting the player with actual choices they can make to impact the experience. In a game so heavily leaning into letting the player approach situations in any way that they felt like, the change to heavy scripting felt jarring in a negative way.

As a whole, this is a really impressive experience. On its own it proves to be a really fun mix of Hitman stealth/planning with more typical action-oriented gameplay possibilities when things go wrong. It feels a lot more weighted toward real time adaptation over resetting than Hitman and that’s a huge win. Add in the fact that this is a Bond game that feels like how I imagine Bond would be and that adds up to an incredible experience. Goldeneye was fun, but it was distinctly an action FPS and had nothing else to really feel like Bond. The games that came after it never really stepped out of its FPS shadow. First Light feels like the franchise finally merging the movies with videogames in a way that feels correct to the IP and all it took was bending the rules of Hitman a bit to make it more shooty.

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Game Ramblings #226 – American Truck Simulator

More Info from SCS Software

  • Genre: Simulation
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series

I’m not generally a fan of score-based reviews. I don’t think they really map the subjectivity of user preferences to the objectivity of a number. For me it comes down to two buckets – recommended or not. Sometimes there’s a third bucket for me – games that are perfect for me right now. Sometimes it’s games that are legitimately great like Super Mario World as a kid. More often than not it’s games that I just vibe with perfectly like Final Fantasy XII. American Truck Simulator for whatever reason is one of those.

On its surface this is a game with legitimate obvious problems for a simulation game involving long haul trucking. Visually it’s fine but not a stand out experience with most areas only vaguely looking like their namesake with a couple particular things to match the real world. Traffic density never really changes whether you’re in a city or in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. The game has a real loose understanding of how traffic works in the US with a distinct lack of things like blinking yellow left turns. Traffic laws are extremely exploitable with things like being able to blast through the shoulder at full speed or run cops off the road to avoid speeding tickets. But really, none of that mattered as soon as I started vibing with the game.

When you’re driving around the environment really does become enough to convince you you’re in reality because I can recognize things that I’ve driven through. The curve of I-5 through downtown San Diego isn’t really the right scale but it’s there. The stupid giant cross in Effingham, Illinois is just as bizarre as it was when I moved west. The drive south past the Tacoma Dome and down through the coast of Oregon is convincing enough. I-70 through the midwest and I-5 through the central valley of California are both horrendously boring. It’s all just so compressed that you see highlights that are close enough and lose all the things between there that you hit a really good pace of something interesting to see very frequently while otherwise trying to deliver goods all over the country. I suspect as things continue to push east into other areas of the country that I’ve lived in I’ll continue to have those hits of familiarity.

It does help that the simple act of driving in the game is a lot of fun. I play enough racing games that I’ve got my wheel setup ready for a game like this, and that’s definitely part of it. It’s just fun to sit behind the wheel of something as large as a big rig in a way that I can drive without the danger of….having to avoid crashing. I can sit there and try to row through 12 or 18 gears without really caring about wrecking a transmission with poor clutch usage. However, the simulation-enough aspect of driving also has interesting side effects where I can’t treat this like a racing game. I have to properly manage my gear selection to make sure that I have enough torque to make it up hills. I have to maintain my momentum through uphills to try and avoid scrubbing too much speed. I have to manage my speed through engine braking going downhill so I don’t just runaway and risk tipping over. It sits in a very narrow band somewhere between simulation and arcade that pushes into the fun side of things over the realistic side of things.

There’s then enough on the business side of trucking to give me enough outside of driving to be interesting. The money I’m making is going toward equipment and garage purchases and hiring of drivers. Over time my ability to make money is becoming less and less important as my drivers are taking on more and more of the percentage of revenue of my company as a whole. What I assume my path will end up being is that over time I will simply stop doing deliveries and just managing and driving. There’s a lot of side content around discovery of towns to offer more locations to find jobs at or picture locations to discover for landmarks or dealers to purchase trucks from, and that’s awkward to do when you’re on deliveries. Right now you can purchase a truck and drive around without a trailer attached to do that, but they are also planning on releasing a DLC around Ford pickups, and that feels incredibly intentional. The long term of the game from the business side is that you become a manager and not a driver, and it feels like it’ll be much more fun to do the discovery driving in a regular vehicle.

So then why is this a perfect game for me now? It’s incredibly drop-in friendly. I’m in the middle of a project completion pass and time is inconsistent. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to kill waiting on a build to finish to test, and I can complete a local delivery. Sometimes I’ve got to kill several hours because I’m waiting on things like a multiplatform shader cache update and I can do a long haul trip of several thousand miles. Sometimes I need to distract a 5 year old and I can sit him on my lap and drive around because he loves to see big trucks. It hits such a wide band of my current potential use cases while not really requiring me to think too deeply about what I’m doing. I simply jump in, pick a goal, and drive. For right now, it’s simply perfect.

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Shelved It #23 – Saros

More Info from Housemarque

  • Genre: Third-Person Shooter
  • Platform: PS5

This is a somewhat unusual shelved it in that this is a really well made game and I really have enjoyed my time in it. The…problem as it were? I just don’t enjoy roguelite loops. I can deal with it to a certain extent if the loops are quick but I usually hit a point where the growth of the experience has either stopped because it’s out of new mechanics or because it’s at a wall and I grew bored. I’m more at the first for this one at the 6th boss. However, for me it’s a bit of a miracle that I’ve played a roguelite for 11 hours and counting to begin with, and I can see this one slotting into the type of game that I occasionally return to and eventually just get through via time.

The thing I will absolutely call out here is how good the combat is and I think it comes down to one specific thing – despite being a “shooter” I’m not often doing a lot of aiming. Saros recognizes that it’s first and foremost a game about dodging projectiles, and not so much about creating projectiles. The entire experience is then built around that. You have a rapid dodge that allows you to go through some projectiles. You have a shield that allows you to absorb other projectiles to return as attacks. You have a parry that allows you to block other projectiles. Choosing the correct defensive maneuver is by far the most important part of combat with offense then being a secondary consideration.

This only works because the attacks that are coming at you are very clear and give you enough time to react. Blue can be absorbed, yellow can be dodged through, red should be parried (and additionally, red shields should be hit with a melee attack with the same button). You constantly move to stay at a range where you can still attack but have time to react and never stop being in some form of fast action. It’s fast and relentless but always feels fair. In the classic roguelite pattern it also feels like I’m constantly learning and using that to reinforce the upgrades I’m getting to move further every time.

The lack of aim is completely built into the weapon system. Most weapons have auto-hit with large aim correction built-in, with some specific weapons being instead built and balanced around auto-hit being off. Despite not really aiming though, the weapons still had important variety in letting me build the way that I felt comfortable. There’s things like shotguns and chakram discs that I totally disliked using because their damage felt so inconsistent around how much I was playing a run and gun style. On the other hand there were rifles and pistols that were reliable damage dealers if I needed an upgrade. When I got particularly lucky I was getting one of the crossbow types which were universally a ton of fun for my preferred style, putting out slower shots but much larger damage at a time.

This is then backed by the stat upgrades typical of the genre that have interesting modifications when in the eclipse state. This morphs upgrades from simple stat increases to things with drawbacks. Sure you might get some resilience, but now you take fall damage. You might get increased weapon power, but now you can’t stay still. You may bet better shields and absorption, but now you may have decreased damage at low health. It adds the type of fun decision making typical of the genre in a way built very well around the core gameplay of Saros. I knew I could always comfortably take the penalties standing still or the fall damage penalties because avoiding those things was crucial to my more run and gun play style and tailoring my build to that always felt incredibly effective.

However, the roguelite part of the game caught up to me at around the 10 hour mark near the 6th boss. Each biome introduced new mechanics but over time they were becoming less important because they were starting to become minor modifications to combat instead of large changes. I started seeing fewer new enemy types, and those that were new started to be some clear combinations of existing enemy types. It’s typical of the roguelite meta loop, but for me it doesn’t really work unless the loop is fast, and here it isn’t.

The death loops here are typically 25-30 minutes and that is just far too long for me. It works fine when I feel like I’m making progress, but I just zone out when I get some bad RNG and make no progress in a loop of that length. But that’s the genre expectation and it just doesn’t typically work for me. Getting the 11+ hours I got out of this one is highly unusual. Getting that far was only because the core combat in the game really was simply that good.