Category: Tier Three

Star Wars: Dark Forces
by LepcisMagna

Dark Forces is the grandfather of the Jedi Knight series and a surprising combination of Doom and Ultima.  Well, just the music style from Ultima – which was a surprising choice for a Star Wars game (though probably just a limitation of the hardware).  The rest of the game is Doom clone all the way – until you get a lightsaber, but I never got that far.

I went back and forth on putting this in Tier Three or Tier Two.  I felt like putting it into Tier Three was unfair since many of my complaints are due to the game’s age and comparatively lackluster design.  At the same time, I feel that many of my complaints are legitimate: movement is floaty and you have the magical ability to bend your blaster bolts towards enemies as long as you are pointing your weapon in generally the right direction (and I miss vertical look, but I’ll let that slide).  The environments are complex, but provide little direction or visual cues.  In fact, due to the Star Wars aesthetic, enemies and switches often blend into the background.  One of those ten panels may be a switch, but there’s little to indicate it.

What clinched putting it into Tier Three is that it came out two years after Doom, a year after Marathon, and the same year as Marathon 2: Durandal.  Those three games are fantastic – from exquisite level and enemy design in Doom to the fantastic story of Marathon and Durandal, they are deserving of their places as classics of the shooter genre.  Dark Forces just feels like a reskinned Doom with little to recommend it as a first-person shooter – except that it’s Star Wars.  Which is almost enough.

Steam link

Skyrim (Completed) – Chezni’s Take
by Chezni

Yes. But.

Unless you lived on some remote electricity void mountain located in some impossibly pronounced country like Arstotzka” (*ahem,* your papers please) then you must have heard the word Skyrim at least once in your life, even if it was whispered out of the mouths of a huddle of the deepest darkest nerds in your frequented place of gathering. Skyrim, took the gaming world by force and its influence is so incredibly powerful that in spite of it being six years old, Bethesda is in no hurry to release the sixth Elder Scrolls game, instead re-releasing the fifth one twice. Ask your average gamer if Skyrim is good and you’ll get a resounding “YES!” from not just the person you asked but also anyone else in the room who’s played the game. I suppose that makes Lepcis and I the un-average gamer, since we might respond with, “Yes but–” There is always a but. Is the world incredibly large? “Yes but–” Does the player have complete freedom over how they level up their character? “Yes but–” Are there tons of magical monsters and creatures? “Yes but–” Are there countless quests and dungeons? “Yes. But.”

It’s difficult to critique this game, for any time you speak out against it, it seems foolish in consideration of the mountain of content that the game presents. A critic of your critique may sarcastically respond “Oh, I’m sorry over 1,000 NPCs wasn’t enough for you,” or “I’m sorry you got bored doing over 400 quests spanning hundreds of hours of content.” The fact is, trying to say anything bad about Skyrim is almost like trying to file a complaint with Mother Theresa–something that is well within your right to do I supposed, but very hard to make stick.

However, I am here to submit that very statement to you. I am here to tell you, that Skyrim in many glaring ways is not a good game. You may disagree with me–and that is completely valid. You may overlook the issues I have with the game and frankly, your tastes may just be different than mine. In spite of this, whether you agree with me or not, I hope to make pleasant conversation, bringing light to several aspects of the game that I find fault with, that ultimately would lead me to not recommend this game to anyone, placing it into Tier 3.

 

(*sigh* Fine, here’s the obligatory caveat dammit; if you have access to mods, then the game is a clean Tier 1 but shutup you, those don’t exist for now.)

 

As it stands, I am a much more a mechanics/immersion driven player, and as such I shall focus more on these topics while I discuss the game. Skyrim is complex enough that you could write an entire book on the subject (considering that Skyrim itself also has several “books” written within it as well) so it helps to limit the scope for the sake of conciseness. If, however, you wish you read up on a viewpoint differing from mine, Lepcis approaches the game from a much more narrative/lore angle found here. Otherwise, prepare yourselves for a primary analyses of Skyrim’s mechanics with a secondary overview of immersion.

 

Why are Mechanics Important?

Mechanics are important because they are a game’s differentiating characteristic from itself and other forms of media. Don’t get me wrong, a game often needs a good story, but a good story on its own is just that–a story. A game often benefits from attractive or stylistic visuals, but attractive or stylistic visuals on their own are just art. Similarly, a game needs a great soundtrack to rest in the back of everything that’s going on within the game, but a great soundtrack on its own is just music. A ball tied to string tied to a cup though? That is a game. A 3 x 3 grid to soon be filled in with X’s and O’s? That is a game. An empty recyclable bottle that is spun in a circle? This too, is a game. The fact is, that without a game’s mechanics–without the rules and the required objects governed by those rules–you don’t have a game, you have pictures or sound or words and so on. These things can be combined to add to a game and make a good game fantastic, but on their own they simply represent themselves. We often use the word “game” to imply the final product of all these things wrapped up into one bundle but truly the mechanics are the “game” part of the game. They are the part that is played. You can’t “play” art. You can’t “win” music. Therefore, borrowing from what was said above, we can make these two statements:

 

A game is a set of mechanics.

Game mechanics are the combination of a set of rules and the things governed by those rules. 

 

In this way, a game can be about music if the music is governed by a set of rules, such as in Guitar Hero. Likewise a game can be about art if the art is governed by a set of rules, such as in Pictionary and so forth. Once again, music is not the game, nor is art, but the game’s mechanics can be structured around both. This has always been a point of my own contention when discussing “games” with people. Someone might tell me that “Her Story,” is a “good game.” Her Story is a terrible game–it barely qualifies as a point-and-click adventure, the mechanics are tedious after a while and there is no defined purpose for the player to fulfill. However, I would probably respond to the person I was talking to with, “Yeah, it was definitely an interesting game. I’m not quite sure what the message was, but it was a fun way to spend an hour.” You see, we actually aren’t talking about Her Story as a game at all, even though that’s how we’re referring to it. What we’re really saying is that Her Story is an engaging interactive media experience that we both enjoyed.

Over the years the definition of “game” has melted, similar to René Descartes’ famous “Wax Argument.” At what point does the melting wax of a candle set by the fireside cause it to cease becoming a candle? Likewise, at what point does the conjoining of various add-ons to a game cause it to cease being a game? Or even further; at what point does the very word we use to describe the idea of a set of rules and the things governed by those rules become false?

–Enter Rabbit Hole–

Now it is true that some might say, “But there are many rules and things that are governed by them that aren’t games.” Well, with the exclusion of Rules, or Laws, of Nature (“You win again gravity!“) do not all rules have a winner or a loser? Have we not taken the mundane rules of our world and turned them into a game? What is “Papers Please” if not a game about surviving the oppressive nature of a communistic government? What is “Cooking Mama” if not a game about preparing food? What is “Surgeon Simulator?” We don’t use language to describe it as such, but does a doctor not “win” if he saves his patient? Does an artist not “win” if she releases a successful album? Some may say, “Life is just a game,” to mean that everything is a joke and nothing matters but I say anyway, “Life is a game!” We have goals, objectives, quests, adventures, misadventures, setbacks, downfalls, struggles, obstacles and ultimately an ending. If “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” then how are we not players of the world’s stage-like game?

At some point though, the concept of “game” became lost with the explosion of the gaming market. I will not sit here and argue with you that “The Stanley Parable” is a bad game. I will argue however, that calling the Stanley Parable a “game” is a misnomer. After all, it’s called a “walking simulator” for a reason–primarily all you do is move your perspective from one location of a slightly interactive world to another. Stated again, the conflict is that what we are talking about when we refer to the Stanley Parable is not a game but an “interactive media experience.” When I was five years old, I had a computer program that told a story if you clicked on enough of the little pictures to make it continue. I didn’t call it game, it didn’t call itself a game, and in fact, it wasn’t a game. Nowadays, products like this get released on Steam and the like all the time and word “game” is applied to them without a second thought.

–Exit Rabbit Hole–

So now return and answer the question “Why are mechanics important?” Why, because life is important! But realistically, it is because mechanics are the life of a game. They must be changed, adapted, filtered, mended, tempered, discarded and created in order for a game to thrive, just as a person must do the same things to themselves if they are to live in this world. Basketball is not the same game it was 50 years ago. Mario is not the same game it was 25 years ago. Even Chess, one of our oldest currently-played games is still technically changing. After all, the idea of playing chess against anyone across the world within a couple seconds without actually touching real pieces may have seemed like science fiction to our grandparents but today, we can do just that. This only creates very minor mechanical changes (there is no longer any argument concerning the “when your hand has left the piece” and you don’t have to physically “hit” a timer to end your turn, as the program does so automatically), but they are still changes nonetheless. Mechanics are important because they are the very structure of what a game is, spanning across and beyond human history. Without mechanics there can be no game. Without mechanics, there is no motivation, no goal–absolutely nothing at all.

 

Wasn’t This Supposed to Be About Skyrim?

You can probably see where I’m going with this, but yes, let’s look back at Skyrim. Skyrim may be an entertaining “interactive media experience,” but it is, at best, something that only simulates a game. Large portions of the “game experience” are artificial. Rules are communicated very poorly to the player, if they are ever communicated at all. Balance of the game’s mechanics range from mediocre to down-right awful. Counterplay in certain circumstances is almost completely removed. The worst part about it–the part that makes me grind my teeth the most when I try to critique this game–is that the world absolutely loves Skyrim and that worries me as a mechanics-devoted gamer. It worries me because I think that I must live in a world where my fellow gamer does not desire quality, only the illusion of quality. I feel alone in that instead of recognizing the falsehoods of easily accessed grandeur and inorganic replicated “challenges,” the majority of the gaming world wants to be spoon-fed their magnificence from a prosthetic arm.

Look, if I’m honest, there are plenty of crap games out there with bunk mechanics that offer immediate gratuity for less-than-authentic repetitive action. Sometimes you just want to play a game that gives you sword (or in my case a staff), puts you in a field with monsters and progressively gives you a bigger and bigger sword after you’ve wacked the monsters enough times. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying this kind of game as long as the player understands what’s going on. It’s sort of like a box of Little Debbie’s snack cakes. If you’re hungry, have a few dollars and are short on time, a box of corn-syrup, pre-processed flour, powdered sugar treats are probably going to be awesome. You would never make the claim that Little Debbies had somehow managed to reach the Nirvana of baking–you probably wouldn’t even claim that they were healthy for you or made of wholesome ingredients–but for what they are they taste good in small doses. The same can be said for games of the pre-described nature.

The problem is that Skyrim isn’t described, seen or even rationalized in this way. Instead it’s seen as this Nirvana, this golden pinnacle of gaming that somehow only the “best” games can reach and the rest must settle in the lowly dredges of non-accomplishment. The masses overlook its cardboard-cut-out nature, its shallow design. Sometimes I feel like a conspiracy theorist or a street-preacher when I complain about it. Enough though; I’ve done a lot of blabbering with little backup, so let’s get into the core of some the actual mechanics themselves so I can show you what I mean.

 

Questing – Show Don’t Tell

Quests are horrible. This may come as a bit of a shock to you, but I’m going to say it again. Quests. Of any kind. Are. Horrible. And this is why.

My favorite game to this day, is Lands of Lore II. I’m not sure whether it’s as good as I think it is, or if I developed a pseudo-Stockholm syndrome-esque attachment to it after doing nothing but locking myself up in my room and playing it for two weeks straight after the death of my father. Either way, I have so many good things to say about it. The world is beautiful, the characters are engaging and the plot is interesting. More than anything though, I loved getting lost in the world. The game never told you what to do or where to go. Well, I mean sure, there was a plot that gave general agency to the meaning of your actions but the best part about LoL II is just wandering around and discovering things that are hidden in clever and meaningful ways.

Sometimes the things discovered were big but oftentimes they are small. A lightning crystal hidden in the water here, a tiny cave exposed by draining a small pond there–outside of the game’s extremely light “tutorial,” every single thing you find in the game is your own. The game never points you towards any of it, save for the very clues to the puzzle’s answer themselves. Nowadays they would be considered “side quests,” but there are plenty of optional characters to talk to and little “quests” (by the definition of the word) that you can go on but at no point is a reward guaranteed or necessarily implied. The point of doing these quests was simply to discover more of the world. While the motivation to complete them may have been to discover what you’ll get out of it, the acquisition of a new thing was only secondary to how it was obtained. A skeleton key may be stolen from a fellow thief, a dagger may be given to a lost son, a charm may be unearthed from a locked temple; none of these things are mandatory in the game but upon doing them the game becomes more complex and more interesting.

How horrible LoL II would have been if each time something interesting happened, the game had to tell me that I should find it interesting. How horrible would it be if instead of being allowed to discover the interesting bits of the world, the game merely activated variables which gave me access to pieces of text which just laid out all the interesting parts of the locations I visited. The mystery of discovering new things would be lost. The control of being allowed to guide my own hand to my own destiny would be gone. The thrill of finding a new way to solve a quest that you thought was binary would evaporate. “Quests,” as they commonly exist in modern day games ruin large portions of what makes a good game by falling into the trap of telling instead of showing.

Humans are rather finite–we can only take in so much of something before what we already have up in our noggin starts to leak out when we try to put more in there. This is why initially a quest log may seem appealing for both the game player and the designer. “Oh boy, I’ll never forget what I need to do!” says the player. “Oh boy, they won’t get frustrated from not knowing what to do!” says the designer. The truth is, if your game relies heavily on a quest log, there’s probably something wrong with your game.

You see, if your (designer’s) quest is worth making, the player should want to finish it whether the game is telling them to or not. It won’t matter if it’s game-critical. It won’t matter if they get a reward. Your player will look at it and say “I want to do that. I need to know what happens from that. I need to discover that,” and then they will go out and do it. They don’t need to be told to do something. They shouldn’t be told to do something. A player doesn’t turn on a game to be told what to do, a player should turn on a game and be inspired by it to the point where they want to go out and do those things on their own. A player turns on a game to discover a new world for a little while–to be shown a world of adventure, not be told about it. A quest log is nothing more than a to-do list. It bleaches all the fun out of the game by removing any and all forms of self-motivated discovery. It immediately divides all information the player is receiving into two kinds of categories: information that I can get something from and information I can’t get something from and they will never have to think about which is which.

Hear a story about a drunken bartender? Well, it didn’t get added to my quest log, so it’s worthless. Vague mentioning of some kind of gem that I wasn’t really paying attention to? Immediately got added to my quest log in addition to where I need to go to find it, so it must be important. I cannot stress enough how bad of a mechanic this is–how horrible a method of player dictation this is. You’re literally telling the player what they should think is interesting and uninteresting instead of showing the player what is interesting and trusting them. As a designer, you need to have enough confidence in your creation that the player will want  discover the things they think are interesting on their own. Quest logs simply cater to an audience that is too impatient or too stupid to invest themselves into something.

What’s worse is that it ruins the game’s immersion. Players feel this constant pressure to be accomplishing quests and if they aren’t following the pre-laid footsteps of a quest’s pathing they feel as if they aren’t accomplishing anything, which is criminal. A player should feel like each step they take into the unknown is accomplishing something. They should feel that each creature they slay, big or small, hard or easy is a worthy task. Quests logs instead make the player switch “quest on” and “quest off,” which takes away any need the player’s need to think. Players immediately know when a quest ends if it finishes in their log. They know when a quest begins when it gets entered into their log. There’s no uncertainty or anticipation or ability to make your own decisions concerning what you as a player think is worth your time.

When we slay the Talamar at the college, we know he’s dead because the quest told us it was finished. Imagine if the game didn’t tell us–we might be confident that things have wrapped up or we might think, “What if he comes back? What if he finds a way to seek revenge? Is this truly the end?” When we defend a stronghold from the damn rebel scum (because Ulfric is a dick and no one should side with him) we immediately know when the attack is finished and when we can just completely drop our guard, because the quest told us so. We don’t have to think “what if there’s another attack” or “maybe there is a remainder of the guards that I missed planning to sneak in?” No, it’s just a flip to your quest log which says “Yup, you killed all the things, now go back to a camp so you can go to another X,Y coordinate and kill more things.”

Skyrim isn’t the only game that suffers from this, but just consider the effect it has on the world. Reading anything in the game is no longer a method of uncovering the mysteries of the world internally–if what you were reading was important, it gets added to your quest log. Otherwise, you can just throw it away and forget about it. Rumors or stories that you hear characters say are immediately forgotten if they don’t trigger a quest. What’s the point of remembering them? Emphasis in the game isn’t placed on discovery or morality or even just a decency to help people–it’s replaced with getting the blasted check box in your to-do list marked off so you can get your reward and move on to the next one! Any thing you discover in the world–anything that isn’t quest related or doesn’t have a reward attached to it–immediately feels less valuable in this kind of system. All the little detail in Skyrim is overshadowed by the desire to follow the pattern of “do thing, get thing.”

Players want to do something interesting. They want to go on an adventure–they want to change their world and they want to grow stronger. If all of the quests in your game are so numerous and so forgettable that you feel you must rely on an auto-filling quest-book to motivate the player to do them, then you should have never made them at all. A player who is inspired by your world will find something to do on their own. They will remember the things that interested them or excited them and they will venture out into the fantasy world to be their conqueror. Once they’ve completed the things that interested them the most, if you did your job right, they will hunger for more and dive back into the collection of interesting things you’ve set up for them to do. You need to let the players choose what they care about and what they deem worth their time. A quest-book sends the message to the player that they have to do everything. They have to do all the chores and if you’ve played Skyrim for more than a few hours, you really start to feel like all those quests piling up are just that–chores. Frankly, if your quest wasn’t interesting enough for the player to remember and complete on their own volition, it’s either because they were too busy being engaged by some other awesome quest that you put into the game (which is a good thing), or because your quest is refuse and is so forgettable that it isn’t worth anyone’s time.

 

 

Level Scaling

This is the greatest sinner of the bunch, and it’s probably the most mechanics heavy. Level scaling is the DEVIL. Like, if I die and go to Hell, there’s going to be two things going on. Number 1: I’m going to be in my horrid Walmart uniform stuck at a checkout lane forced to listen to the endlessly repeating commercials on the TV above me and Number 2: every time I get better at some aspect of checking out my customers, something will happen so that my improvement is completely removed. My job will be just as hard as when I started, meaning that my accomplishment meant nothing. Taking a look at the latter, the sad part is, is that’s essentially what game developers are telling you when they make their game’s level scale–you have accomplished nothing. In fact, in some cases, level scaling can create the phenomenal effect of your strength going backwards.

I’ll use a simpler example than Skyrim to show what I mean. Secret of Magia also used level scaling. Admittedly, Secret of Magia is one of the worst, under-designed, non-fleshed out piece of crap games I’ve ever played, but avoiding all of that and looking directly at its level scaling system, it exhibits level scaling’s fatal flaw perfectly. Every time you level up in SoM, every single enemy levels up with you at a fixed and uncapped rate of growth. Since the growth rate is fixed and since the stats are built up the same from level 1, if you disregard your character’s equipment, a fight against a monster at level 1 would be identical to a fight against a monster at level 5. The problem is that when you add in equipment, it becomes a whole new beast.

 

 

The first graph here is a simplification of the player’s power in relation to their level and equipment, versus a monster’s power based on level. As you can see, a level one player with enough equipment to equal two more level’s worth of stats would match up against a scaled enemy with a ratio of 3:1, or 300% power over the enemy. Now let’s add 3 more levels to our player, keeping the equipment power the same because equipment does not scale with level. Now instead of a 3:1 ratio, we have a 3:2 ratio or 150% percent power over the enemy. As you can see, in this instance gaining 3 levels actually cut our character’s power in half which is ridiculous.

Skyrim, (and any game with level scaling really) while more complicated, functions in much the same way under the same principles with an additional few aggravations. The same problem with equipment persists, in that because equipment does not scale and considering that half if not more of the enemies in the game do not wear gear (and I’m not even sure if humanoid enemy’s equipment are actually even factored into a monster’s stats) leveling up still makes you weaker against enemies that scales with you. It gets worse though when you add perks to the mix. The perks on their own are not bad–a bit bland, maybe, but in and of themselves they are not the cause of the problem; the level scaling is. You see, by choosing a non-combative perk, you create the same problem as the equipment dilemma. Want an easier time picking Novice locks? That could have been an extra 10% damage on your axe swing, or it could have been halving the cost of your Adept Destruction Magick, allowing you to cast more spells to deal more damage. By picking the Novice pick lock skill, you are no stronger (aside from the 10 points in HP, MP or Stamina) than you were a level ago, but the foes you face will be one level stronger.

What’s even funnier is how Bethesda tried to band-aid fix this problem. It’s clear that someone in the studio caught wind of this problem and wanted to do something about it but the final product just creates a different problem. You wouldn’t necessarily figure it out just from playing the game, but Skyrim has tiered difficulties for certain enemies and dungeons. They essentially have caps both at the bottom and top of their level ranges so that even if your level is lower or higher than theirs, their level cannot be lower or higher than a certain defined integer. To further muck things about, they also decided to that certain tiered enemies wouldn’t show up until the player was a certain level either. For example, Dungeon ABC contains Bandits and Skeever. The Dungeon itself has a level range of of 10-30. This means that if you go into the dungeon below level 10, all enemies will be at least level 10. If you go into the dungeon above level 30, dungeon enemies will only be level 30. Enemies themselves have their own individual level ranges as well–for instance, maybe the Skeever’s is level 10 while the bandit’s is level 30. This means that Skeevers in the dungeon will always be level 10, but if the player enters in at a level higher than 10, the Skeevers will still remain at level 10. The bandits might be a different story though, since they might have tiered bandit archetypes. At level 15, the “Bandit Ruffian” might appear, and at level 25 the “Bandit Chieftan” might appear.

While in theory, this sounds all fine and well, it’s not in practice. As stated, it is a band-aid solution at best which just introduces different problems. Enemy power rankings are still completely variable with no indication to the player what kind of strength the foe they are facing possesses. A level 1 player who a little while ago was happily killing the level 1 scaled Skeevers near Riverwood may stumble into this dungeon and suddenly be beset upon by murderous level 10 Skeevers that look and act identical to the ones he was fighting previously. A level 24 player may run around the dungeon feeling quite powerful, but a level 25 player will enter the dungeon and struggle against the difficulty spike created by the introduction of the new Bandit Chieftan. Once again, by gaining levels the player is punished with absolutely no indication or warning to the player to the contrary, save for a different enemy text name, one that certainly blends in with all the other tiers of bandits that they’ve likely been encountering.

Developers need to get rid of level scaling forever. It creates complete chaos and inconsistency in the world. The player has no real way of knowing what to expect when they enter into a dungeon–but not in a good way. It’s true, as a general rule, the dungeons around Riverwood are a lower level–but this is just a general rule, and it hardly has much of a pattern outside the Skyrim’s beginning area. The developers delved too greedily and too deep; they pridefully tried to create a game that was completely accessible to low level players while still maintaining some semblance of matched difficulty to the player’s power. Instead what they created was an inconsistent mess that rides wild and unpredictable difficulty spikes that ultimately peter out at around level 40, where at that point most of the dungeons are either relatively scaled to the player power or laughably easy.

The fix for this? Keep the damned enemy’s power level consistent you morons! Quit being afraid that if your player doesn’t have access to each and every location in the game right away that they’ll start whining and quit! With level scaling, there is no progression! It takes as much effort to kill a mammoth at level 5 as it does level 25–why did I even bother gaining the 20 levels in between? It’s no wonder I feel empty inside when I clear out another dungeon, because I know that the game gave me a lukewarm challenge that was tailored to my skill level. There’s no need to be afraid or concerned when walking into a dungeon since I’ll always know that it will be scaled to my level–except when the dungeon’s lower level cap is 20 levels higher than me and I’m getting ROFLstomped by bandits and wizards that look identical to the level 1 bandits and wizards I was fighting in the last dungeon! Just make things consistent in power level–make the giants these foreboding doom-creatures that it really means something when you finally get the ability to kill them. Allow a low-level player to slay smaller spiders with relative ease, but make the massive ones truly deadly!

Once the world becomes consistent to the player, they can begin to gauge the power of the things they are facing in relation to their own power. They can begin to understand which dungeons are heavily guarded and which ones are simply filled with bandit rabble. This kind of balance usually leads to a stronger community base since you have speedrunners and game-breaker enthusiasts banding together and asking each other “Just how can a level 1 creature sneak past the troll?” or “How can I get my level 5 wizard to kill the giants guarding the cave that’s meant for high-level players?”

By creating level-scaling, players will never feel accomplished because they never know what to expect. Enemy names, types and even the models themselves almost become meaningless since they won’t know how strong something until they give it a wack, even if it’s the same monster they’ve encounter time and time again. Level scaling is nothing more than a cheap method for the developers to try to instill an artificial feeling of “balance” in their game, when really all they’re doing is washing their hands free of any kind of progression design or real balance, not to mention the complete way it breaks immersion when I’m never afraid to go anywhere or fight anything at level 1.

 

Combat/Equipment/Balance

Herein are miscellaneous complaints that are worth mentioning, but are not necessarily large enough to require an entire section devoted to them.

Melee Combat in the game is incredibly simple–horribly so. If you are a fighter, it’s swing, swing or swing. You might occasionally block, you might charge up a swing, but in the end, it’s just swing or be swinged.

Archery Combat consists of clipping enemies on rocks or trees and then filling them full of an inordinate amount of missiles while they stand there staring at you.

Magic is a let-down. Not only are spells lackluster, but they are rather barbaric in their straight-forwardness. Lightning is laughably useless unless the enemy is using it on you. Frost is ok, but not really worth it in the face of Fire’s DPS. The starting fire spell is one of the most efficient DPS spells in the game, especially if you stutter cast it, which isn’t even a bug–it’s simply a method of conserving mana while maintaining the same level of DPS. You never truly feel like a powerful wizard, no matter how many points of destruction magic you have. Healing magic has a similar problem–the starting healing spell is the most efficient; why bother using anything else?

Equipment is a joke. Medium armor is pointless–light armor is somewhat useable, but once fully perked there is almost no disadvantage to heavy armor for any character. Since classes don’t exist, any character can wear whatever they want. No need to use your brain when equipping things either since everything is a binary progression up to a higher number for defense. Glass armor will always be better than steel. Steel will always be better than iron. The armors are nothing more than numbers.

The problem mentioned earlier concerning equipment not scaling in relation to the player’s level can actually be abused by players focusing on equipment crafting, giving them an incredibly powerful but artificial power boost. Coupled with enchantments allowing magic to be cast for free in addition with the lackluster scaling on spells means that a player wearing armor that lets them cast spells for free will be nearly as powerful as a wizard who has spent all their perks into magic.

Enemy wizards are extremely broken. At this point, I have played several different types of characters and put my stat points into several different areas. I can tell you that if you play as a wizard, you will never even come close to the strength possessed by enemy wizards. Likewise, in a playthrough where I put every single point I had in HP, I was one-shotted at full ~300HP health by an enemy wizard who was using the level 1 lightning spell.

The only time you will be “challenged” by an enemy in Skyrim is when you face one that can one-shot you, or very nearly so. This isn’t really a challenge, since such an occurrence offers little to no counterplay. Additionally, because of the relatively shallow battle mecahnics, any other kind of fight in the game is brainlessly winnable for several reasons. 1. You probably have enough potions to health-spam your way through an enemy. 2. If you need to, you can just heal with your MP. 3. You probably have enough MP potions to MP-spam your way through an enemy or 4. You probably have enough MP potions to MP-spam-heal your way through an enemy. 5. You can probably just run away and shoot an enemy to death with magic and/or the 1000+ weightless arrows you’re carrying. 6. If you get really desperate, you can eat all that odd food you’re probably carrying from when you accidentally picked it up earlier. 7. You probably have an essential ally that will never die with you that you can use to face-tank. 8. If all else fails, you can just run away, heal and come back again. It’s not like the enemies are going anywhere, or your quest has a time-limit.

Dragons are laughably easy to kill.

Dragons can laughably easily kill you with their instant-death chomp regardless of what level you are.

Dungeons have burning torches and fresh fruit.

The majority of the game’s treasure is randomly generated, making everything you get feel like random code and not a unique piece of equipment.

Fast Travel sucks because it takes all the excitement of traveling away. Walking from place to place sucks because there’s nothing interesting or valuable to discover along the way.

I think that’s enough for now.

 

In Closing

Skyrim is an awful game. It’s mechanics are pure garbage, and its immersion suffers heavily for it. Skyrim is the only Elders Scrolls game I’ve played, which makes me sad because all through my life I’d heard good things about the franchise. So I leave you with one necessary and crucial piece of information that will help cement what you’ve read here, as well as what you know about me as an author let it be known: Skyrim is a disgusting puddle of sheeple worshiped fan-hype…

…that I have put 375 hours into because mods are @&$%!*# amazing.

Steam Link

 

Kingdoms Rise
by Chezni

 

More like Kingdoms Fall, AMIRITE?

 

I’m not going to waste your time on this one. Kingdoms Rise is unfinished and generally abandoned. It once held the potential to be an exciting PvP Sword/Magicplay combat game with an emphasis on melee combat. It has a slew of weapons, spells and skills and enough depth to be regarded with some interest by PvP enthusiasts. While the graphics are unpolished, they’re quite pretty in their raw form and feel big. Character creation is fun and you are able to customize a lot of pieces of your character’s outfit–including things like right and left shoulder pads individually and even the codpiece.

 

 

So why the bum review? Well, there’s a couple different ways to approach it, but here’s the list: 1. Early Access. 2. Nature of PvP. 3. Microtransactions.

  1. Early Access: at this point we’ve probably all been burned by Early Access games on Steam. We’ve all felt like we’ve been scammed, tricked or generally had our money taken and not given something that was promised by a game. Kingdoms Rise is one of those games. It’s been in “Early Access” for 4+ years, but the devs have been largely inattentive of the product for the last 2. While it should be on the buyer’s shoulders to understand that if if they pay money for an early access game that they are not guaranteed to have anything more than what is present in the game when it is purchased–but it still sucks that the product seems to have no intention of being finished.
  2. Nature of PvP: Player vs. Player games are tricky business for both the player and the creator. In my opinion, they are the hardest games for the devs to make and the most risky games for the players to invest in. If a dev makes a PvP game, they must be willing to constantly upkeep the game essentially until the end of time–if they don’t the game will die. Likewise, the player base must be willing to play the game and invest in it (both time and money) continually, or the game will die. Kingdoms Rise seems to be a mix of both–a stagnant player based combined with devs who have left the game. As it stands, there are no available games being hosted for Kingdoms Rise, essentially making the game completely unplayable.
  3. Microtransactions: the most sure-fire way to tell if a PvP game is failing is the introduction of heavy microtransactions and “Pay to Win” bonuses. It’s a sign that the game owner is trying to squeeze the last cash (and life) out of a product when they are willing to accept bribes to let another player win. As I read up on the game,  I came across the somewhat frequent comment that “pay to win microtransactions are ruining the game.” It’s hard to determine the accuracy of these kinds of statements since oftentimes they are made by an ignorant player who is just upset that someone beat them with a tool that they don’t understand. What I can tell however, is that there is a DLC section for this game. DLC. For a game that is unfinished. That feels icky just saying it.

 


 

Also, I don’t know what “Event Begins” in 6 days and at this point I’m afraid to ask. Maybe it’s like the Midnight Channel in Persona 4?

 

 

Sometimes good PvP games fall flat and it’s not really anyone’s fault. Sometimes there just isn’t a big enough player base to support the game. In the case of Kingdoms Rise however, records seem to point to a large part of the blame being on the shoulders of the devs. This disregard for the spirit of gaming as well as the player base itself angers me, and would normally lead me to relegate the game to Tier 4 except… I just can’t. What’s present in the game is really cool. The customization (both visual and combative) seems like it had a lot of potential. At some point in this games development, someone must have been putting their heart into the content. I’m not sure why they stopped. Motivation is a hard thing to maintain; that I understand. I lose passion for many of my hobbies and it becomes difficult to continue them. However, when a product is being sold, it must be treated completely different than a hobby–it becomes a job. It was the dev’s job to keep up with this game. It was their job to ensure the game’s success, for better or for worse. In light of this, Kingdoms Rise barely escapes Tier 4 by the skin of its teeth and nestles in the dredges of the Tier 3 category.

Steam Link

 

Retro City Rampage DX
by Chezni

 

Ugh… would like a heaping serving of pointless game design matched with a bigger scoop of nonstop 80’s references? Well then you must have a hankering for…

 

Okay, so when I bought this game, I expected it to be a little shallow. I expected it to not be the most revolutionary mechanical masterpiece of the century filled with surprising twist after twist. Gameplay is something like a 2-D GTA, involving the theft of vehicles and the squishing of many civilians and cops under said vehicle’s wheels. What I didn’t expect it to be though was a consequence-less coagulation of never, ending, ceaseless, REFERENCES supported by weak gameplay.

 

 

 

The game seems to start off well, in perfect parody to any NES game from the 80’s. It’s all here, from the music, to the graphics to the menu progressions–it matches 80’s gaming perfectly. At first it seemed to promise a good return on investment of time… until you get to the actual game itself. Games from the 80’s were more than just a look and feel; they were about brutal mechanics and difficult enemies. While I certainly understand that in the name of player accessibility you would not wish to create something quite as brutal as your average 80’s NES game, I also didn’t expect to play a near challenge-less, near infinite-health adventure that feels so spastic that it would be guaranteed to grab the attention of even the most inattentive tree-dwelling park-rodent. That’s not even the worst though. The worst, as you might have gathered, are the constant bombardment of 80’s references. After I got through the first “level,” was when they swarmed in.

 

A Megaman II reference.

 

A Duck Hun Reference.


A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game reference combined with a Mario reference…


A Duck Tales reference.


 

It doesn’t stop there either. There’s a Frogger reference, a Sonic reference, another Sonic reference, a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure reference, a Back to the Future reference,  a Ghost Busters reference, an A-Team reference with the obligatory Mr. T reference and a Mario 2 reference. All of this happens within the span of about 10 minutes, and those were just the references that I noticed. I’m sure there were plenty that I didn’t catch or just didn’t know about. Look, references are funny from time to time and can be clever if done correctly. They’re a great way for the developer to bring attention to something that they love and presumably what their audience loves. It can be used for a quick laugh or if done subtly can make the player feel like they’re “in” on a secret joke. When they’re just shoved in the player’s face one right after another like this, it feels much less like references and much more like some mook from the 80’s waving his metaphorical genitalia in your face whilst giving you a history lesson of 80’s pop-culture.

 

 

I gave the game about 20 minutes after this to change its ways, but it just doesn’t. There’s really not much of a game here and what is present is spastic at best. It doesn’t deserve to try to make these references solely on the fact that you need to have an entertaining form of media (in this case the game itself) before you can start making them in the first place. Make sure your cake is good before you start piling on a massive amount of icing and sprinkles. Even though it does visually and audibly nail an 80’s gaming, it relies on cheap references and gimmicky subtexts that just aren’t worth a true gamer’s time–just give this one a pass.

Steam Link

Deadly Sin 2
by Chezni

There’s a difference between a game that is needed to satisfy an idea, and an idea that is made to satisfy the need for a game. Deadly Sin 2, is the latter.

 

It’s always a bit hard to critique a RPG Maker game. My gut impulse is to reject the game as being a recycled collection of frankensprites, visual effects and coded plugins scavenged from the deepest ends of the internet. This opinion is not entirely non-subjective either, as many poorly made RPG Maker games that I’ve played fit this bill. In the spirit of fairness however, I always try to remind myself that reused assets and codes should not stop me from discovering a game that might really enjoy. Even with this mindset I can say that Deadly Sin 2 isn’t worth playing.

 

 

You can forgive a lot from an indie game, but there has to something–some spark or unique shine–that makes pushing past the game’s roughness worth it. The problem is that Deadly Sin 2 just doesn’t have anything like that. The opening is generic, the party members are super generic, quests are generic, story is unbearably generic–on top of being made up of a mishmash of sprites and tilesets. Now, I do feel a tad bad saying this because there are some parts of the game that are worth pointing out as being moderately decent. For instance:

 

 

All your characters in combat are animated with some pretty sweet pixel-work. They ready their weapons and attack, or do a special animation for their skills or magic. It’s tight, looks nice and flows really well–and is completely unique to this game. The combat is a little more advanced than your typical take-turn combat as well, with the addition of a threat mechanic which influnces who an enemy will attack. I also appreciate the way that you can increase character’s skills through the use of skill points that you find throughout the world. It’s nice to have customization over your characters and reading up on the skills is fun.

 

 

These things alone though aren’t strong enough to create anything worth trying. The Threat mechanic is nice but isn’t that profound. The animations are nice, but since the combat is weak, they’re just something flashy and distracting instead of being the icing on the cake. Combat feels imbalanced in more ways than just the stats themselves (although that is part of the issue)–the pacing feels wrong. Having access to all the skills right off the bat leaves little to work towards. Enemies feel random and aren’t really introduced in a way that allows the player to understand the world that they exist in–the monsters don’t tell a story or fit in, they’re just “there.” Treasure is littered everywhere, making its discovery a chore instead of something exciting. Seriously; after the game’s introduction, I played about 10 minutes and found this…

This…

 

And this…

 

And that’s not even all of them. When there’s treasure everywhere, it’s stops being treasure and just becomes junk. Add to this that I’m not being facetious when I say that everything about the world, story and characters are so uninspiring. The mage in the party refers to enemies as “scrubs.” “Scrub” is a word that was invented by the online gaming community somewhat recently to refer to someone is is of a “lower tier” than them. A “scrub” is someone of such a lower skill level than you, that they aren’t worth your time. To hear one of my party members uses this word breaks all immersion of what I assume is supposed to be a high fantasy world. Add to this that the two “main character’s” introductions both generically involve their sweethearts, both look like generic warriors, both have no personality whatsoever, the hero’s castle at the beginning is burned down, there’s some vague and super boring political “intrigue” involving invading kingdoms and political tension that after a short-while I was ready to quietly pack this one away for good. I wasn’t really insulted by this one, but it still belongs in Tier 3, since I would never recommend it to anyone.

Steam Link

BIT.TRIP RUNNER and Perfection in Video Games
by LepcisMagna

Perfection is a tricky thing in video games, and perfection is what BIT.TRIP RUNNER (or, BTR) demands of you.  The best way I can describe this is by saying that BTR feels like an arcade machine; but it feels like an arcade machine that was designed to eat your quarters rather than to be fun (even though there are no lives and no Game Over-s).  It attracts you with colorful lights and interesting sounds tied together by a well-thought-out pixel art aesthetic.  There is a simple control scheme – press space bar to jump and use the arrow keys to execute maneuvers while the screen scrolls ever forward toward the finish line.  It seems straightforward and quite possibly fun.

The problem arises that in BTR, any failure means restarting the level.  The levels are short enough that this isn’t an immediate problem, but as the difficulty ramps, you find yourself playing the exact same parts of levels for 90% of your time to try the tough bits 10% of the time.  This just becomes grinding, since the levels require the exact same set of inputs to get to the point where you failed before.  Aside: there are technically alternate paths for brief sections, but those alternate routes give you no advantage so there is no reason to memorize them.

To figure out why this is a problem, I’d like to talk about perfection for a bit.

Perfection

Let me be up front: I think games that demand constant perfection are taking shortcuts to difficulty and are generally not worth my time.  Take Dark Souls or Legend of Grimrock II, for example.  Dark Souls does not require perfection.  It asks for excellence and an understanding of the rules, but it lets you make mistakes, and few mistakes (well, except in Blighttown) are immediately fatal.  I think this design philosophy becomes clear when, in the progression from the Dark Souls I to III, you’ll die less frequently from stun-lock.  In LoG, the only time you’ll really find yourself in a place that means almost certain death is if you let two tough enemies get on either side of you.

This is not to say that having segments that require perfection is bad or that rewarding perfection would be bad.  Guitar Hero (or my favored knock-off, Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 4) is difficult and complex enough that perfection is a worthy goal, but you aren’t required to be immediately perfect.  Beyond that, perfection in the context of music makes sense (and the problems of requiring perfection in music is even the subject of a movie).  In other sorts of games, a segment that requires perfection can be a way to increase tension, as long as it isn’t extensive or represent a fundamental change to the game mechanics (like QTEs).  Speedrunning a game perfectly can show an incredible mastery, but it shouldn’t be the only way to beat a game.

The trouble only arises when perfection is your only path to progress or when using an unfamiliar set of mechanics.  I’ve tried figuring this out with Chezni, and the best thing we came up with was this: perfection is not human.  Failure is a part of learning and growth, and requiring perfection eliminates the possibility of learning anything valuable from a mistake.  This view ties back in to BTR nicely: when I play perfection games, it makes me feel like I should just write a script to beat the game for me.  There is an exact set of inputs that I must enter to progress, and no other set will lead to success – so why should I bother if I have no meaningful input?  (Aside: this is also the reason I stopped playing Klondike: it’s only winnable 80% of the time and even a perfect algorithm can’t save you)  If I watched a YouTube Let’s Play, I would see the exact same thing as if I had played it.  The obvious exception here is that in puzzle games, it’s a challenge that I would have to solve before I could tell a computer to do it – which is the very growth that other such games lack.

Back to BIT.TRIP RUNNER

I couldn’t find any place to put this, but I thought it important to include: the audio cues in BTR take place as the event happens, rather than when you need to hit the button.  In other words, the audio for the rhythm game doesn’t actually help you.  As you may imagine, this becomes quickly frustrating as the screen fills with sprites and makes it hard to tell precisely when you should jump.

The entire challenge in BTR lies in learning the mechanics and then implementing them.  There’s no motivation to do so – you’re learning the mechanics so you can learn more mechanics.  You’re implementing the mechanics so you can implement the mechanics.  In Tetris you’re seeing how far you can get and trying to beat the top score.  In SCGMD4, you want some participation in some good music.  In an RPG you want to hear more of the story.  But in BTR, the exact same game has been played in the exact same way hundreds of times and all you’re doing is retreading the same path as everyone before you.  BTR functions and has a good aesthetic which saves it from Tier Four, but it is firmly in Tier Three for its constant, unyielding requirement of perfection.

Steam link

Serious Sam Franchise
by Chezni

Lepcis’s First Impression of SSHD:FE

Lepcis’s First Impression of the SS Franchise

 

As I sat down and took a serious look at the Serious Sam franchise, I couldn’t help but continually think, “What a wreck.” Having read Lepcis’s reviews, I knew what was coming and I wasn’t looking forward to it. You can read the reviews for yourself by using the links above if you like, but one line he wrote sums the whole thing up. “Croteam made 1.5 good Serious Sam games […] and have just been repeating the same game ever since.” I can’t find a better way to describe this mess. There are 9 Serious Sam games loaded in my Steam folder. 2 of them are disjointed outsourced spin-offs. 1 is a terrible sequel. 1 is the original game and 5 are remakes of the original game. Let that sink in. There are 5 remakes of the same game. As much as I dislike the franchise, at least each Call of Duty game has a new Single-Player story (the caveat being that I’ve never really played a COD game). But Serious Sam? Naw, why try? Why use creativity? Just re-hash the same damn thing that achieved pseudo-popularity years ago. I’m not even kidding. Take these 6 games and put them in a pile: 1 is the original game, one is an expansion of the original game, one is an HD remake of the original game, one is an HD remake of the expansion of the original game, 1 is an unfinished fan-made remake of the original game and the last is a prequel of the original game that reuses many of the same jokes and monsters. What. The. Hell.

 

In spite of my strong feelings of anger, insult and disgust associated with a company that feels so confident that the stupidity of their intended audience is so intense that the won’t even notice that they’re just buying the same game 6 times, I can’t really say anything that Lepcis hasn’t said already. So I’ll try not to. What follows instead is a brief comparison of one game to another built up from the original seed of the first Serious Sam game–short and sweet. You’ll still be able to find the Tier that I believe the game belongs to but I will forego the usual lengthy explanation. Without further ado, let’s get into the excrement deluge that is the Serious Sam series.

 

Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter: Tier 3

Floaty. Poor level design exasperated by bland enemy AI and non-existent enemy placement due to “teleport-spawning” enemies. Strategy against every enemy is exactly the same–kite and shoot. Instead of quality you get quantity–hoards of enemies, but none of them create a need for intelligent play since they die as fast as they teleport in. Might as well be a point-and-click adventure. Enemy visual design is creative and unique and the game is very fast paced with relative smoothness. Sam has a few interesting one-liners that are cringy, but that’s the point.  Large levels, but no motivation to explore them and little meaningful player interaction with them while fighting enemies due to simplistic designs and teleport-spawning. No need to even fight enemies either, just run through the levels until the developers force you to fight a hoard through use of a locked door or raised wall because their game isn’t well-developed enough otherwise to create meaningful confrontation between the player and enemies otherwise. For its time, mediocre. Nowadays, it’s forgettable. The original Timesplitters, a game with smaller worlds and fewer enemies, was more fun to play, and it came out a year before this.

 

Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter: Tier 2

A huge improvement over the original. Yes, it uses the same engine, assets, monsters etc. The biggest difference is that the level design in this blows the first’s out of the water. There are far fewer enemies that just teleport-spawn out of nowhere. Level designs create meaningful play without boxing the player in all the time and forcing them to fight arena style. When you are boxed in, it feels acceptable and isn’t overdone. Level pacing feels much better as well, not to mention more interesting looking. It just goes to show you, it’s not how pretty your graphics are, or how many enemies you’ve designed–it’s how you use them.

 

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter: Tier 2

A direct remake but many improvements over the original. Floatiness is nearly gone. Weapon animations are more believable (there actually is animation for the pistol now). AI is still bland and arena fighting problem still exists. Teleport-spawning still exists, and level design is still relatively poor. Teleport-spawning has been altered so that enemies no longer fall into cliffs from the sky and clip to solid ground. Gone is the headless bomber riding the bull monster (or at least I didn’t see him). You can still just run through the level fighting a minimal amount of enemies. Barely nets T2, but overall just feels better.

 

 

Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter: Tier 2

Once again, a strong improvement over the First Encounter. Contains much more content. Seems to contain several campaigns (including the levels from FE) as well as a survival mode. Makes me wonder why they didn’t just release FE and SE as one game. Biggest complaint is that they’re just recycling the old Sam voice clips, which I didn’t think were that great to begin with. He barely passes as being some sort of troll or ogre–definitely doesn’t pass off as being human. Otherwise, this is the strongest one yet. Definitely would suggest just playing this one and skipping the previous 3. They are, after all, just the same game repeated.

 

Serious Sam Classic: Revolution: Tier 3

Sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t repeat what Lepcis said, but I have to for this. Why does this exist? Just, why? Literally another remake of FE and SE, only with the original textures and physics.  Does Croteam think it’s really worth it sell this fan project? The only advantage to this existing at all is that the old mods that worked with the SS Classics games will work with this since it it’s got the same framework. Otherwise, this is just waste of space. It runs smoother than the Classics versions and that’s about it. It’s not even finished. Don’t even waste your time.

 

Serious Sam 2: Tier 3

Identity of the game is completely confused. You’d think that a game where you ride dinosaurs, shoot giant monsters and have a sexy blue-skinned assistant would be awesome but… it’s not. Not really. The pacing of the game is severely dropped from previous installments. Enemies are completely new and feel very different from before; the staple headless monster is replaced by a sort of space-ogre. I’ll give them one thing, and that’s that they tried something new. I don’t know if it was a step in the wrong direction, but I do know it just isn’t implemented well. It feels like a strange mix between Halo and Banjo Kazooie, but not in a good way.

 

Serious Sam 3: BFE: Tier 2

Once you get past the familiar enemies and repeated jokes from the previous installments, this one’s not that bad. I think I’d still rather play SS HD SE, but mechanically speaking this is the stronger title. Finally, there’s a new VA for Sam in a game that also contains the headless monsters. Not a fan of the instant-kill melee attack that Sam always possesses, but DOOM needs to take a leaf out of BFE’s book–you’re not invulnerable while you do it and health doesn’t spurt out of an enemy when you kill them with it, meaning that there’s a bit more strategy to it (but only a bit). I approve of infinite handgun bullets–it allows the devs to create levels that aren’t cluttered with ammo constantly, and it makes the bullets you get for the other weapons a bit more meaningful, since you’re expected early on to use the handgun quite a bit. Sam talks a bit more but isn’t quite as cringy–the VA still sounds like an ogre but it’s a little cleaner so it’s easier on the ears. Level design is pretty solid with plenty of secrets. Enemies have been re-balanced in meaningful ways. For example, the headless bombers now flinch when you shoot them, and explode on the second shot, meaning that you can point blank shoot one that is right next to you and still have time to back away before the final exploding shot. I no longer feel like the devs are just throwing swarms of enemies at you pointlessly–enemies are well-placed, don’t teleport-spawn in and make the levels fun.

 

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter: Tier 3 (Completed)

I beat this one a while back and… it just is not worth it. It’s buggy as hell but that’s not even the worst of it. It passes off as a flash game, but I’ve played flash games that are better. The first time you play, it might take you 2 hours to beat. If you knew what you were doing, it would probably take less than an hour. Guns and enemies are not really balanced, and the niches that each gun is supposed to fill is obsolete in the face of the need for constant AOE DPS. There’s a few lame jokes that might get a small “guffaw,” here and there but nothing that Duke Nukem’s or Shadow Warrior’s humor doesn’t put to shame. It barely escapes Tier 4 because I like the concept of the game–it’s just that this is a horrible representation of it. If you want to know something weird, I met one of the guys who worked on this game at PAX. The game he was advertising at the convention wasn’t that great either.  I felt a little embarrassed for him.

 

Serious Sam Double D XXL: Tier 4

Nope. I’m not playing this game. The game’s title, immediate sexualization of your female sidekick and the way that Sam portrait looks like a pile of shit tells me everything I need to know about this game–but even then, I was willing to give it a go. Surprisingly, it was the screenshot below that was the final nail in the coffin. “My programmers wanted me to remind you that instant enemy spawning is totally acceptable. That’s the way things are supposed to work.” Nope. Just because you have one of your characters blatantly state that I’m supposed to treat a big pile of steaming excrement as something acceptable does not mean that I’ll do so–so when you tell me that teleport-spawning enemies is how “things are supposed to work,” then I’m even less inclined to accept it. Because you’re too ignorant to understand it Mr. Dev, I’ll spell it out for you. Teleport-spawning enemies changes the rules of the game in a bad way. A few enemies teleport-spawning is sometimes ok. A certain kind of enemy who’s calling card is to teleport-spawn is also ok. However, when all enemies can teleport spawn, you’re building your game’s “difficulty” based upon lies, with no reasonable counterplay. You are telling the player one thing, and then doing another. Your player can receive input visually and audibly that “you cleared out this room” which becomes false when he gets killed from behind by a hoard that immediately spawns in. There is no reasonable counterplay, since you did nothing to communicate to the player that there was danger. You’re too lazy to make a game that gives the player meaningful input so instead you design a game that requires prior knowledge. It’s the equivalent of blindfolding someone and then punching them in the face and when they don’t block it you tell them “well this is how it’s supposed to work.” Just because you told them you were going to do it does not somehow make it better. If you’re reading this, just leave this piece of refuse be and move on to something, anything more meaningful. It won’t be hard at all to find.

 

Might and Magic X – Legacy
by Chezni

Oh mah goodnyess. What is this.

 

Nostolgia is not a factor for me when I look at the Might & Magic series since I played my first MM only a year ago. Therefore, I would posit that my review of games from the franchise may be less biased than a die-hard fan’s. For the record, I’ve played in its entirety MMVI, which was a whopping 108 hour adventure that while I can’t say was even close to being a perfect game, it was at least a game that I could find certain aspects which held value. MMX on the other hand is a perplexing mess–a failed growth of the franchise that comprises a stagnation of poor choices that pile up on top of each other to create a pointless experience.

 

 

Now, often the opening of a game doesnt’ make total sense to the player. Dark Souls 1 and 3 (and to some extent 2) all actually do this purposefully. Watch any of these game’s openings without playing the game, and you’ll have no idea what you just saw. Watch the opening after playing the entire game (and possibly reading a few pages on a wiki) and it will make perfect sense. The thing is though, is that even without making sense, the openings are fun to watch. You don’t need to know who “Nito, First of the Dead” is to enjoy watching a giant skeleton monster with a scythe walk around spreading corruption. You don’t need to know who “Yhorm the Giant” is when he pops up and Kindles himself because he just looks awesome and the mood of the cinematic makes the scene feel exciting. The opening of MMX makes no sense… but lacks any sort of interest or excitement whatsoever. It’s a confusing malaise of a tired narrator bleating out line after line of dialogue concerning the history of a dozen characters that are all introduced and swept away so quickly that you can’t keep track of them and whatever exploit the narrator describes of them is meaningless. It got to a point where I actually started laughing at how ridiculous the opening was becoming–I kept expecting it to end but the moment they wrapped up the 20 second exploit of one character, the narrator switched gears and started talking about another. I have no idea what mood or plot or setting the developers were trying to create with this kickoff to the game but whatever it was it only created a profound sense of boredom and confusion within me.

 

 

The best part of the game was creating the characters but even that really wasn’t that great. Traditional to the old MM’s, you set up a party of 4 and stat them up for adventure. For a game where you can only use 4 party members total, there are almost too many classes–12. You can only choose 2 voices for each race’s gender as well, which makes the idea of role-playing a party kind of difficult. Honestly though, this is the least of our worries. Where the game goes South is that they seemed to have kept all the bad things from the older games and got rid of all the good. First off, you move on a grid. This was surprising to me, since one of the interesting parts of MMVI was that you in fact moved free-form. This meant that to a certain degree, platforming became a part of the game, which really made the dungeons and terrain feel open. It also allowed for some interesting puzzle solving that forced you to adapt to a 3-D environment in order to find secret levers, switches, etc. It’s not that a party-based 3-D grid-based RPG is a bad idea–far from it. It’s just that as far as I can tell, the MM games moved away from grids in order to create a more diverse and unique game. A step back to it just feels confining now. No longer can you fly, or swim, or jump up on top of buildings–you’re just stuck on your little grid, moving along at a snail’s pace.

 

 

Gone is real-time combat as well. If you didn’t know, in MMVI you had the option of playing the game in a take-turn fashion or fighting in real-time. Typically, this meant that if you were fighting enemies that you knew you could beat easily, you fought them in real-time because it was faster and in some ways a little more fun. If the enemies were strong, you played in take-turn mode so that you could carefully and precisely guide the actions of each of your characters. Back to MMX, you are restricted to take-turn combat only which is just dull. It’s exactly like Grimrock in that the enemies move around in the world on the grid with you, but unlike Grimrock you are forced to freeze in place while they move and vice verse for them.

 

 

Quests were a big part of MMVI, but oftentimes if you stumbled upon a dungeon early, you could explore it without needing to have received its quest. In contrast, in MMX I was wandering around clueless in first city where I found a well. The well looked suspicious. I tried to click on the well. I tried to move into the well. I even noticed that the mini-map was telling me that there was something interesting in the square with the well. Turns out, I wasn’t allowed to go into the well until I’d talked to the right guard who was all like, “Hey, let’s go kill spiders in the well.” That’s just stupid, coming from a franchise that previously was comfortable with letting adventurers explore to a large degree at their own will.

 

 

Part of the fun of MMVI was seeking out teachers to buff up the skills of all your party members, and eventually training your characters’ abilities up to the Master level which got you some really cool spells and abilities. Characters were limited on what skills they could learn by class but as long as you could learn it, you could achieve master level. Back once again to MMX, your characters are still limited by what skills they can learn but they can only achieve master in a few areas. This means that you’re pretty much locked into what you’ll be doing in the game right when you pick your classes. After that, there will be no free-will in skill growth, no exploratory skill combinations, and no sense of great power at the end of the game. Yes, in some ways by the time I got to the end of MMVI it was a bit silly that everyone was a Master in almost all of their useful skills–but I stress almost. For starters, my characters were level 90 dammit, so I felt justified that they had become masters in their crafts but secondly, in spite of being level 90, there were so many skills available in the game, that there were still plenty of abilities that I was only an Expert in and some still that I was just simply trained in with no title. By confining the player’s skill choice right at the beginning of the game before they’ve had a chance to understand what skills are good for their party, what skills are bad, and what skills are even interesting to them, chances are they are going to end up with skills and abilities that they don’t want or that are bad. Essentially, the only way for them to know which classes they should pick, they will either have to have played your game before, or look it up online–neither of which are an acceptable solution to the problem.

 

 

And don’t get me started on the insane number of tutorial pop-up windows that treat you like a moron. I guess it’s my fault for not clicking the “Don’t Show Hints” button earlier, but I kept expecting them to teach me something useful. I guess they thought “rest to regain your HP” was the most useful thing they could tell players.

 

 

The last roast is on the combat itself. To be fair, MMVI didn’t really have complicated combat. This would actually be one of my main complaints about the game. Sure there were a lot of spells and things to equip and skills to learn, but combat usually consisted of telling fighters to swing their weapons, and loading up the best spell your mages could cast that wouldn’t immediately drain their entire MP pool and then letting it all rip with the same button push for each character (the “s” key). So, I’ll say it again–intricacies of combat were not MMVI’s strong suite. That being said, if you encountered a stronger foe, you always had a few limited forms of counterplay (run away and shoot, run away and shoot) and unless you got teleported to a room without an exit, you could always run away to fight another day. Both of these things are severely limited in MMX. You can no longer run away from an enemy once it has engaged you in melee combat. While I understand maybe imposing some sort of penalty for leaving a melee attacker’s range makes sense thematically and mechanically (i.e. attacks of opportunity in DnD), but completely removing your ability to escape from a more powerful foe says just one thing to the player “Why didn’t you know exactly the strength of the monsters that you were going to encounter in the dungeon beforehand?” I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not freaking psychic you stupid developer. This creates an illusion of difficulty, since you can and will suddenly will die when you encounter a monster that no matter how intelligently you use your skills and healing consumables you have no chance of winning against. The reason it is an illusion is because there is no counterplay or forgiveness for this “mistake” (at which it is more the mistake of the developer for giving you the option to encounter the monster and then slapping you on the wrist for doing so). You simply have to die, hope that you saved recently and move on. Ultimately, the way that movement has been completely removed from combat makes me feel like I belong to the British army from the colonial era and I long so bad for the guerrilla warfare tactics that the Americans are using.

 


There’s so much more as well. Theses pictures you see may *look* nice, but don’t be fooled. The textures are of a very low resolution. While I’ve never let graphics get in the way of enjoying a good game, well, this isn’t a good game, and so when I can barely read a town sign because the words on it are all blurry I tend to be a bit cross. I mean, this game came out in 2014–these graphics are practically a generation behind where they should be. I wouldn’t be so hard on this point if the game didn’t A. Come from Ubisoft, a AAA company that is fully capable of better. B. The play-testing time saved by dumbing the game down to a grid should have freed up internal resources in the game company to make the other parts of the game better. C. Legend of Grimrock, a game made by a FOUR man team from FINLAND made a game that was better graphically (and mechanically for that matter). How is that even possible? Music is dull. NPCs are dull. The world is dull. You’re railroaded the moment you start the game by being here on some dumb quest for your master, but in spite of this the only thing you can do at  the beginning of the game is wander around, trapped in a dull city forced to take a slew of pointless side-quests simply so you can kill something in an attempt to assuage the tirade of boredom from not being allowed to explore the world you find yourself in. MMX is simply a time-wasting Tier 3 sesspool that Ubisoft crapped out in an attempt to make money off the MM crowd, while completely missing the point and soul of the original franchise, which is actually a pity.

Steam Link

 

Risen 2: Dark Waters
by LepcisMagna

I was prepared to very much dislike this game, especially after playing a bit of Risen.  And in the first few minutes, it felt like all my fears were confirmed.  The main character is cliche and unlikable.  The sidekick is cliche and unlikable.  I decided to be a jerk, since my character is supposed to be a jerk.  But then I found out that if you kill people in this game, they just become “offended” and stop fighting you.

 

If you’re wondering why my character is walking around with no shirt or shoes, it’s not because I didn’t have clothing.  It’s because my clothing was pirate clothing, which my character refused to wear until he was actually a pirate – as he reminded me every time I tried equipping it.  He persisted in saying this even when we were trying to enter the pirate camp so he could become a pirate, where I would have thought pirate clothing might come in handy.

And if you’re wondering why I tried to kill the fellow in the screenshot, it’s because he wouldn’t let me into the pirate camp.  And to be fair, killing him wasn’t my first choice.  First, I tried to bluff my way in.  Well, I say bluff – I was actually telling what I believe was the truth.  But my Silver Tongue skill wasn’t high enough – so even though the option was there, I was unable to use it.  When I tried, my character just told me he wasn’t good enough to do that.

 

Maybe it’s a lot to expect.  But when you have an RPG, you kinda expect some amount of RPG-ing to go on.  Not an open world where only very specific things are allowed.  Where Risen seemed to have at least some number of choice and decisions to be made, Risen 2 feels like every other boring open world game out there.  Where Risen had you eaten by sea monsters when you tried to swim (which, hey, was at least an effort), Risen 2 just backs up the game about three seconds every time you enter the water.  When you can entertain yourself more by repeatedly jumping into the water while NPCs continue to talk like nothing happened, it’s a little silly.  You can also attack pretty much anybody and they’ll be fine with it ten seconds later.  So maybe I just played the game in all the wrong ways in my first hour, but most good RPGs at least give you the option to be a terrible person.

This review started out by putting Risen 2 into Tier 2, since it is pretty, fixed a bunch of issues I had with Risen (except the combat), and seemed to have at least some amount of interesting story.  Those were the reasons I didn’t feel like playing more of Risen.  But the more I think about my time playing, the less I want to return.  The more I think about it, Risen 2 seems more and more aggressively mediocre.  So Tier Three it is.

Steam link

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies
by Chezni

 

Nope. Noope. Nooooope.

I’ve played this game already. I’ve written this review already.

Please see: Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol (the original)

Seriously. It’s the same game.

It’s just as bad.

… Why are you still here? You desire something more convincing?

 

You still fly planes around by clicking blue arrows until you get the green arrows that let you do damage to the bad planes.

All the pilots still make you want to punch them in the face. Repeatedly.

It still doesn’t matter which skills you pick, and you’ll just end up clicking through on random ones.

The only thing resembling an improvement is the ability to choose a nation. Don’t be fooled though–there’s only two to choose from. They’re just listed twice with a Navy/Army variant of each.

Tier 3 all the way.

Steam Link