Tag: action

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Game Ramblings #60 – Agents of Mayhem

More Info from Volition

  • Genre: Open-world Action
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Great mix of characters with different capabilities, ranging from melee to various ranges of projectile-based weaponry.  Hot swapping of characters leads to good real-time tactical changes.
  • Story is a silly, but fun take on the 80s action cartoon.  Unfortunately ends abruptly in a cliffhanger.
  • Environment severely lacking in variety, particularly with enemy lairs.

In a lot of ways this feels like a natural (if not subdued) extension of where the Saints Row series had been moving in IV and Gat Out of Hell.  You play a series of more or less super powered humans, some of which have unnatural abilities, and some of which are simply taking advantage of unrealistic technology.  The action itself is still all there, with a large variety of weapons to take advantage of.   The open world is there, filled with missions, small side tasks, and a bunch of things to collect.  The over the top plot is there, where you’re trying to stop an evil doctor from recreating the world.  However, despite the core of the game being really solid, it never quite reaches the heights of the Saints Row games.  I couldn’t quite place my finger on what happened – perhaps being their first game designed for the PS4/Xbone generation, perhaps they just ran out of time to release – but the experience never really coalesced into a strong whole.

One of the first signs of restricted content is this hallway. You see this theme about every 10 minutes for every enemy lair.

In general, there’s just a lot of signs that something caused a severe cut or restriction in content in the game.

One of the core pieces of the game’s progress loop is that missions will invariably send you to invade and disrupt LEGION lairs, the hiding places for the game’s primary antagonist group.  However, apart from a few that were carefully constructed for particular story reasons, the rest all follow the same visual theme.  I couldn’t tell you how many times you enter the same hallway, go through the same half dozen rooms and connecting pieces, find treasure chests in the exact same room 100 different times, fight the same half dozen trash enemies in each one.  It just feels like they got the gameplay loop in place, then ran out of time before fleshing out the rest of the system.

This also to some extent extends to the story.  I’d estimate roughly the first 75% of the game follows a pattern of recruit new story-relevant agent through a few missions -> find and capture/kill an enemy lieutenant through a few missions.  There are also some side agents to recruit, and each one has a dedicated secondary mission, but those agents fill more of a gameplay gap than a story one. However, the last three lieutenants simply go back to back to back in a set of missions that starts fantastically, but starts to feel like it falls off.  By the time you get to the ultimate baddy, the game drops you into a fantastically cool new environment filled with very little to do but kill some trash enemies, then a boss fight that abruptly ends mid-fight and throws you into a cliffhanger story cutscene.  It was another case where it just felt like they had the core in place, then ran out of time and had to patch everything together to get the game out the door.

The boss fights are some of the best parts of the game, including this one against a giant ass robot.

Luckily the gameplay does to some extent redeem the game.  While the combat isn’t in practice that much different than Saints Row, the practice of swapping entire characters instead of swapping weapon inventory feels really powerful.  Each character is basically the combination of a personality, a weapon, and two special abilities, and running out into the city becomes a practice of finding the right mix of these to flesh out your party enough to be successful.  You’ve got your general gun-based characters running from short-range shotguns to pistols to SMGs to assault rifles.  There’s also some a really satisfying to use archer hijacking the name Rama, a melee-based assassin that is a ton of fun, and a ice-powered Russian that can freeze and shatter enemies.  Probably my favorite character ended up being a female engineer that could lay down turrets while she went through firing a plasma stream weapon, giving me a lot of flexibility in attacking enemies from two directions.

The flexibility here is really important in keeping the combat fresh.  Despite fighting the same enemies repeatedly, I could switch out to different characters based on the tactical advantages of the environment.  If I’m climbing a tower, I could switch to a long-range gun or archer to pick off enemies one by one from far away.  If I’m in close quarters, a shotgun could wreak havoc to enemies.  If I needed to sneak around and distract enemies while hacking consoles, the turret engineer was a great call.  By being able to form my team in this way, I could fit the team to multiple styles, while still being able to play how I wanted at any one time.  Without fail, the characters also felt fun to use, so it was never a chore to go around sending baddies to their doom.

This all takes place in a relatively compact, but extremely full version of Seoul.  Beside the actual missions to do, there’s a ton of side content.  On the simple end, this is simple vehicle races, patrol take outs, and hostage rescues.  The complexity moves up a bit in taking out a variety of large weaponry, from ice cannons to gravity portals.  Ultimately, you can also invade and take over a handful of enemy strong holds.  The city is also scattered with treasure chests filled with money, resources, and cosmetics, as well as a ton of crystals that can be used to buy further upgrades for the agents.  Basically, you’ll never be out of things to do as there’s always something around the next corner to keep you happily distracted.

While some of the outfits are probably legally questionable, you can always be ready to cruise the city in style.

Ultimately, the downfall of this game isn’t the quality of the gameplay, it’s that it feels incomplete.  What is there is a lot of fun and basically plays out like a videogame version of every stupid 80s action cartoon that I used to watch as a kid.  As a natural extension of the Saints Row universe, it also feels entirely in place to the style and attitude of those games.  I can only speculate as to what happened to get the game shipped in this state, but hopefully it doesn’t prevent from further use of the IP.  Given a second chance, I suspect we’d be looking at a game that a lot of people would remember for quite a while.

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Game Ramblings #58 – Assassin’s Creed Origins

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Combat’s is serviceable.  Best part of actual combat is in the capabilities around stealth and distraction-based kills
  • Fantastically gorgeous imagining of what ancient Egypt may have looked like
  • Story serves as an interesting starting point to the lore for the overall story, without the usual distractions of the assassin vs. templar nonsense

So after a year off, I suppose the question became Is this game actually good?  In general, the answer to that is a pretty resounding yes.  However, I also enjoyed Unity and Syndicate a lot, despite them being an obvious step back from Black Flag.  What this one has managed to do is smooth out a lot of the core mechanics in the previous titles, while also shedding a lot of the collection madness that plagues later entries.

The visuals of the game are an obvious starting point. They’re pretty universally fantastic.

I’ll start with the obvious one and keep this quick, this game is up there on the list of best looking games ever.  A lot of this feels like the culmination of a lot of past games.  The water from Black Flag is used here a lot, whether it’s in sailing down the Nile or puttering around the edge of the Mediterranean.  When sandstorm are rolling in they look imposing; when you’re stuck in a sandstorm it’s threatening.  Humans during cutscenes are significantly less derpy than in the past, and now actually do a good job of getting the emotion of the scenes out there, even if hair is still a bit of a struggle.  Even moving into the non-desert areas in the northwest, the plains full of grass and flowers swaying in the breeze are a sight to see.

However, that’s not important in the grand scheme of things.  Let’s get into gameplay.

Climbing and exploring is still a huge part of the game, and pyramids everywhere give you lots of opportunity.

I suspect most people would talk combat, but to me the core of the Assassin’s Creed games that I enjoyed was the exploration and stealth, and that’s still a great thing here elevated to even greater heights thanks to the landmarks you get to climb.

The synchronize points were always a fun distraction in past AC games.  However, it’s another entire level when the point is at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza or at the top of the Pharos of Alexandria.  These areas have some of the better pure climbing in the game, and the views from up top are always spectacular.  Even better is the fact that any of the historical landmarks you go up to generally have some sort of puzzle-based temple in them.  While these are generally quick hitters, some of them get into some pretty neat use of weight-based physics segments to make sure that crashing a temple isn’t just about climbing in a straight line.

Getting around is easy thanks to autopilot camels.

Exploration is aided by the fact that moving around in the environment just doing random things is generally just really easy and a lot of fun to do.  Origins has had a severe reduction in pure STUFF to do.  Ya there’s still sync points, there’s still side quests, but there’s no longer fluff things in the map like paintings or unguarded treasures.  What this has been replaced by are small areas such as forts, trading posts, abandoned temples, etc that may contain things to collect.  Ultimately this ends up resulting in a lot of time in-stealth either shanking or avoiding enemies, but at least providing some amount of gameplay beyond just walking up to a thousand icons on the map.

The best part of all of this though the process of moving around the world.  At the end of the day, the game feels a lot like Black Flag despite the lack of pirates and sailing, and it comes down to how you travel.  The lack of a distinct singular large city opens up the map.  Sure, you have larger areas like Alexandria or Memphis, but the bulk of the map is small villages with a few shops and people, similar to the smaller forts and villages in Black Flag that were found just in sailing around the Caribbean.

The horses and camels basically become your sailing replacement.  Sure you can move around manually, but the best thing to do is set autopilot and let the horse do its thing.  This combines with the ability to swap to the main character’s eagle, allowing you to scan for resources, look out for enemies, or search for objectives all while your horse heads towards where you want.  It takes a lot of the tedium out of travelling, allowing you to focus on other things as you go.

I can’t avoid the topic of fire. It’s everywhere and always great.

I guess that leaves us at combat.  In a lot of ways it’s definitely the weakest part of the game, but not necessarily because it’s bad.  In general it’s just kind of simple, and feels like the backup for when things don’t go as you want.  There’s both bow & arrow and melee weapons in place.  When going into melee, you can do a shield bash as a parry or a dodge maneuver, both of which can be timed against solid and obvious tells in the enemy actions.  However, that’s about it.  Ya there’s some subtleties in the usage of the attacks, but it’s basically details at that point.  The real strength of the combat systems is when you avoid it entirely.

Pure stealth is still the ideal way to go about the game.  You’ve got your straight stealth kills, which is still an effective way to deal with baddies.  There’s also a number of tools in place to cause havoc.  A couple of the highlights are the ability to set poison traps on dead bodies or the ability to enrage enemies resulting in them attacking each other.  There’s also the little use of fire.  You can have swords with fire, bows with fire, set horses on fire, shoot pots that explode into fire.  Basically, when things go on fire it usually results in hilarious things, even if it’s a bit dangerous to be around.

So is this a big redeeming game that was worth Ubisoft skipping a year for? I dunno.  It feels like a natural extension of Black Flag, and not something that they spent an extra year doing something groundbreaking.  However, it’s still a pretty solid game.  If you enjoyed Black Flag but were pretty cold on the games since, this is a pretty solid spot to jump back into the story.

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Game Ramblings #52 – Metroid: Samus Returns

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Originally Released on: Game Boy

TL;DR

  • Fantastic re-imagining of Game Boy’s Metroid II: Return of Samus
  • Additions to game break some of the expectations of the genre, but allow for a much higher challenge level of the base game
  • Core loop of 40 effective mini boss fights keeps action high, but doesn’t get stale due to increasing power level of the Metroids
  • Random note since it gave it to me, but my clear time was 8:38:13, which seems a bit on the low side of average to my surprise.

Nintendo is having one hell of a year.  Breath of the Wild and the Switch in general have been a runaway success.  Mario + Rabbids showed they could give control of their games to someone else and still maintain the high quality Nintendo feel.  Now with Metroid: Samus Returns, they’ve shown there is both life remaining in the 3DS, as well as some new ground that can be explored in one of their storied IPs.  This re-imagining of Metroid II is another fine example of what can happen when this series is given to outside developers, much like Retro and the Prime series, and also shows that 2D Metroid games don’t have to stick to their conventions and still be fantastic on their own.

Since some fans of the Metroid series are going to find these controversial, let’s start with some of the little changes and additions that this remake brings.  Fights against Metroids start and end with checkpoints, allowing you to not have to trek all over the place to guarantee save locations.  Along with some more generally helpful abilities, you have a rechargeable map scanner that also acts as a way to show blocks that can be broken.  In addition to the usual save points and ammo/energy recharge stations, there are also now teleport stations as a means of fast travel.  All of these things in general break some of the mold of exploring every little bit of land in Metroid games, and also break some of the re-traversal expectations of the series.  However, the actual end result is that the developers have been able to drastically increase the difficulty across the board, much to the game’s advantage.

Traversal in most Metroid experiences has usually brought relatively little danger outside of boss fights.  Enemies would do damage if you got hit, but more often than not the health drops they left behind would more than suffice to heal you back up.  This one definitely doesn’t follow that pattern.  It’s not unusual for a melee hit from a normal enemy to do half an energy tank or more of damage, and that’s just on normal difficulty.  Once you get to the Metroids and eventually bosses, multiple energy tank loss from one hit is expected.  The short version here is that even by end game, I could expect to maybe take 4-5 hits in a boss fight before I was dead, so being able to respawn in a checkpoint next to the boss room was particularly appreciated while I was learning fights.

This is particularly important, because the combat system in place definitely had some things that have to be learned for Metroid veterans.  On the smaller side of things, Samus can now root herself in place and aim 360 degrees with the analog stick.  While this does offer up significantly better precision for attacks, it also leaves her extremely vulnerable to quick attacks.  This is balanced by the new melee counter attacks.  If an enemy flashes, Samus can activate a melee swing to counter an enemy, leaving them open for high impact damage.  For boss fights in particular, this activates a little mini-cutscene where you can unload missiles without repercussions, which ends up being the biggest damage dealer against Metroids.

In general, these changes were a much larger positive than I was expecting.  The 360 aim opened up a lot of possibilities for much more dynamic boss fights, where they would hover around the room in spots where I had to play a balance of moving to avoid projectiles vs. stopping in place to get off a few precision shots for damage.  Once the enemy then came in range, the timing skill behind watching for opportunities for melee counters gave the game a feel more typical of heavy melee action games, which Metroid typically has not been.  Given that the developer MercurySteam was also behind the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games, this perhaps isn’t that surprising, but it was very welcoming.

I think the best way to wrap this up is that I’m pleasantly surprised.  The studio behind this has released some great games, but it’s been a while since a 2D Metroid came out (seriously, Zero Mission was in 2004) and I was surprised they were being given so much of a chance to take liberties with the core gameplay.  By and large they’ve also worked really well.  The studio has been on record saying that they had originally pitched a remake demo of Metroid Fusion and been turned down, which led to this project.  It’s clear they had a lot of passion for the franchise anyway and it’s evident in the quality of the game they’ve released.  It’s also worth noting that a post-credits scene shows the rise of the X parasite from Fusion, which makes sense given it also takes place on the planet SR388 of this game.  Whether or not that’s just there as a tongue in cheek reference to their original hopes or the sign of something else, I can only hope that this and the upcoming Metroid Prime 4 are the beginning of more for this franchise.  It’s been on the side lines for way too long.