On Thu, 01 Sep 2022 17:27:21 +0000,
ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
No post yet? I will start it! I finished Black Mesa last week. Sheesh,
Xen is still wacky like its Interloper! Fun and pretty overall though.
I starterd Skyrim. Controls and usability are wack IMO.
OK, your turn. ;)
Well, I didn't get to be the one who reminds everybody about the free
"Mafia" offer on Steam, but at least I have my regular "What Have You
Been Playing" thread. I always like writing those; it's a great way to
start the month.
Except... what's this? What's this? Ant beat me again? God dammit,
Ant!!1!!
<more fist shaking>
(and now that's out of the way...)
Just the Games
------------------------------
* Control (replay)
* The Ascent (new)
* American Truck Simulator: Montana DLC (replay/new)
* Wolfenstein: Youngblood (replay)
* Terminator: Resistance (new)
More Detail Than You Want
---------------------------------------
* Control (replay)
"Control" is a competently made game. It's got solid gameplay,
pleasing visuals, an interesting setting, fun characters and a neat
gimmick with its physics-based gameplay. It's fun to play and engaging
enough to keep you going until the end.
But as good as it is, it's not a /great/ game, although it's difficult
for me to put my finger on why it doesn't achieve the latter. Maybe
it's the lack of variety. The vast bulk of the game takes place in the concrete-grey corridors of the 'Federal Bureau of Control' office
building, and - while the developers do some amazing tricks with level
geometry and design - it doesn't help that in the end you are still
stuck wandering an immense office complex for ten hours. Similarly,
almost all the monsters are mutated humans with guns. Sure, some fly,
others telekinetically fling rocks at you, and others suicide-explode
in your face - there's variety in gameplay, definitely - but the
monsters themselves all feel very... samey.
The story is fun, and the setting is very imaginative but - by nature
of its genre (a modern-day paranormal/conspiracy thriller) - it's
focused on overloading the player with more and more questions it
never has any intention of answering. It's delightfully weird and
surreal, but - like with Lost and X-Files - it comes to a point where
you're just overloaded and any later revelations are met more with
ennui than engagement. The game's main villain - a supernatural
sentient sound that's too alien to ever understand its motives -
doesn't make for the most compelling foe either.
I liked "Control"; I really did. I've played through its campaign
multiple times, and I am likely to do so some time again in the
future. I wouldn't mind revisiting its world in a sequel either; it's
ripe with possibilities. The gunplay is fun, especially after you
accumulate your full range of powers; it's a frantic power-fantasy
come to life.
I just don't /love/ the game.
* The Ascent (new)
"The Ascent" was not the game I thought it was going to be. Not that I
had done much research on the game before I played it; I made my
judgment based on the game's store-page description text and its
handful of screenshots. But I expected it to be a near-future
cyberpunk action/strategy game, something like was done to X-Com
except with "Syndicate" as its inspiration.
Instead, "The Ascent" is much more akin to "Diablo"; it's a top-down action-RPG, albeit with a sci-fi setting. Even that isn't a fair
comparison; "The Ascent" is a much simpler game, lacking "Diablo's"
classes and extensive collection of loot and weapons. It's
"Diablo-Lite"... very lite.
Regardless of the deficiencies in its gameplay, the game is very
impressive on the visual front. It's world is extravagantly detailed
and features excellent lighting (well, it uses the Unreal engine so I
suppose that's a given). It's unfortunate that the top-down viewpoint
means we only get to see the world from that one angle; I'd love to
wonder its twists 'n' turns in first person. Unfortunately, this
excess detail often works against the gameplay; too often I'd have a
hard time seeing my own character amongst all the explosions and
greebles, and more than once I got sniped by an enemy I couldn't even
see because of the too-short view-distance.
The game suffers from a lack of variety too. The bulk of the game
takes place in the slum-like levels of a vast arcology, and I tired of
that tileset pretty quickly. Most enemies are human and while they
have differing appearances, ultimately they're all pretty identical
when it comes to combat (the game also features some mutants and a
handful of giant mechs, but these are comparatively few). Weapons are
doled out unevenly too; for the first half of the game you have only a
handful of guns and skills to play with. The gunplay becomes much more interesting later, but that first half is quite a trudge due to the
limited armory.
The gameplay is, as mentioned, fairly simplistic; get a quest, wander
the labyrinth to find the quest boss (killing low-level monsters along
the way), return to get your reward. There's very little variety here
either, and the rewards are never very satisfying. Despite the lushly
detailed visuals, the world itself feels very generic and none of the characters or encounters are very memorable.
Progression is uneven, and often I had to wander previous explored
areas killing and re-killing monsters until I could level up my
weapons and armor so I could survive the next part of the main quest.
I found the combat to be a bit finicky. It is almost entirely
gun-based (there's one or two skills that let you do a ground-pound or
punch but these have annoying cool-down times), and - between the
fast-moving enemies and brawler-monsters, I often found myself getting
mobbed. I'd brought a gun to a knife fight and I was still on the
losing side; that didn't seem right.
Another annoyance was the incredible amount of walking back and forth.
Most games - after completing a dungeon - open a door that give you a
shortcut back to where you started; not "The Ascent". After you finish
a dungeon, you have the joy of wandering back the way you came through
its depopulated corridors. At least a quarter of playthrough was spent
walking back and forth between quest points.
Visually, "The Ascent" is quite impressive but everything else about
the game is average at best. I found the gameplay to be a chore and I
struggled to get to the end.
* American Truck Simulator: Montana DLC (replay/new)
I posted my review for this earlier this month. I did that because I
wanted to throw a review up on Steam too, but Usenet always gets
priority ;-). Anyway, if you're too lazy to go back and find that
earlier post, the gist was that I loved the expansion; it had great
visuals and did far more with elevation changes than any of the
previously released map-packs. The only downside was that there were
few actual destinations which meant that more often I was driving
/through/ than to Montana. Still, it was a thoroughly pleasant
experience and one I'm happy I bought day one.
* Wolfenstein: Youngblood
You know what's great about "Youngblood"? It doesn't have a crafting
feature. Too many developers try to stuff a crafting mechanic into
their games where it doesn't fit, but that's not the case with
"Youngblood". It's refreshing to have an FPS where scrounging for junk
just to have useable weapons isn't core to the game-play.
You know what else is great about "Youngblood"? Nothing. Neither is
there anything truly awful about the game, but - like too many modern
triple-A games - neither is there anything that makes the game stand
out amongst the crowd, and it has an unfortunate number of flaws that
make the experience less exciting than it should be.
Take the visuals, for instance. They're fine. Even when the game was
new - in the long ago year of 2019 - the game wasn't on the cusp of
graphic fidelity (an odd thing to say about an Id game), but they
served the purpose. The game is... well, I'm hesitant to use the word
'pretty' when describing the Brutalist and swastika-drenched
architecture of Nazi-occupied Paris, but surprisingly well detailed.
The colors are all a bit over-saturated, giving a somewhat cartoony
appearance to the game, but that's fine. Individually, the various
models for all the clutter and set-pieces are well made and varied.
But the entire game takes place in the same city and - after ten hours
or so - the novelty had long since paled. There's only so many wartorn
streets, sewers and ornate Nazi headquarters I can explore before I
start yearning for something new. It doesn't help that the developers
oddly decided to follow the model of the least loved Wolfenstein game, "Wolfenstein (2009)", and it's semi-open world approach; even the best
level becomes tired after traversing it for the tenth time.
And the combat? It's okay... except the enemies are all a lot spongier
than seems appropriate for this sort of game. That an average soldier
can take two or three shotgun blasts to the face makes fights a lot
less fun than I'd like. Too many of the larger enemies have
weak-points (often poorly telegraphed to the player) that must be shot
to take them down, most often on the back where they're hard to reach.
I suppose this is so one player can distract the enemy in the front
while the other circles around, but that doesn't work that well in single-player.
Oh, yeah; this is one of those single-player/co-op games of the sort
from the early 2010s and seem oddly resurrected here. It wasn't a very
popular genre ten years ago and "Youngblood" does little to convince
anyone of its merits. It's one thing to play multiplayer if you've a
large world to explore, or if you can finish a match in half an hour,
but being closely tethered to another player for 20 hours is
annoyingly restrictive. The fast-paced gunplay don't encourage
teamwork either; there's little opportunity for strategy in the small
arenas and with enemy soldiers respawning everywhere.
The story is as unremarkable as the rest of the game, and does little
to expand the Wolfenstein universe. It's obvious this game was
intended as a placeholder until the next game in the series pushed the narrative. Limited to just Paris, it doesn't say much beyond "Nazis
plus super-weapons are bad". There's nothing you've seen in this game
that hasn't been covered in earlier titles. The story might have been
better had the protagonists not been such annoying, unlikable twerps,
or even if their in-mission chatter wasn't so limited ("Yes Sophia, I
/would/ like to use stealth here... just like the other thousand times
you asked").
It really bothers me to be so negative about this game; it's obvious
the developers had a vision and the talent to deliver on that vision.
This isn't one of those games where the gameplay is broken because of
a lack of experience, or the engine just wasn't up to task. The
developers made the game they wanted, and made it as well as they
could. It's just not a game I - or, judging by its lack of success in
the market, anyone else - thought was in any way fun.
* Terminator: Resistance (new)
There's a genre of games often referred to as "SlavJank". Typically
developed in Eastern Europe (hence the - often geoculturally
inaccurate - 'Slav prefix), the games universally lack polished
gameplay (thus, 'jank', a cut-down version of janky, meaning of poor
quality).
"Terminator: Resistance" is indubitably an example of SlavJank.
It actually surprises me that Teyon - the Polish team behind this
creation and perhaps best known for their unimpressive PS3 "Rambo" -
managed to acquire the license; it says more about how little valued
the Terminator IP has become than it does the skill of the developers.
After a string of poorly-performing movies - and equally uninspired
games - it is no wonder that none of the larger publishers were
interested in wary of taking on the project. Teyon was likely the best
the IP's owner could get.
And - I'll be frank - Teyon's team did not put together an impressive
package with "Terminator: Resistance". From the start, the technology
behind the game looks old (it is supposedly using the Unreal 4 engine,
but It looks as if it might be Unreal 3... or maybe even Unreal 2. It
often looks that old). The texturing is unimpressive and the
animations are laughable (many robots seem to glide rather than walk
across the post-apocalyptic battlefield, greatly decreasing their
sense of menace). The voice-acting is extremely poor, the story and
characters are predictable and the level design is pedestrian.
The game's worst flaws were its stealth mechanic and its boss fights.
The latter - fortunately rare - conflicts were just two scripted to be enjoyable; one, for example, had you locked in an arena against a
heavily-armed but immobile tank, tediously strafing around to get to
its weak spot. Another had an unkillable enemy that soaked up damage
until its code demanded it retreat to the next arena where it would
repeat the process. Those bits were the weakest parts of the game and
seemed included only because they seemed de rigueur for this type of
game.
Worse, though, was the stealth, since sneaking was such an important
part of the game. The AI lacked the intelligence to make it a real
threat, and it was never entirely clear when I was hidden; sometimes
the baddies didn't notice me even when standing inches away, other
times they noticed me from halfway across the map. It was maddeningly inconsistent.
All in all, it's easy to say that "Terminator: Resistance" is just not
that good of a game.
And yet... it's strangely fun.
In truth, I'd be hard-pressed to decide whether I enjoyed the game
more because of its license or because there was something
mysteriously compelling about its gameplay. "Resistance" does an
excellent job of recapturing the atmosphere of the original movies,
and I happily threw myself into the fantasy of an out-gunned
resistance fighter scampering in the shadows trying to get that one
perfect shot before I was overrun by unstoppable murder-bots. There
was a good variety in weapons - even if about half of them were
duplicates firing differently-shaded laser blasts of existing guns -
and the enemies all had a foreboding threat to them that made me want
to avoid direct conflict even when I knew I had the necessary
firepower to overwhelm. Oddly enough, the least frightening was the
eponymous flesh-clad T-800 from the first-movie. It was just too
spongey to take seriously as a foe, and whenever I faced down against
one I tended to go toe-to-toe with the thing (or as toe-to-toe as any
battle with plasma rifles can be), trading fire and egregiously
topping up my health with healing packs as necessary.
The levels weren't ambitious in their artistry, with far too heavy a
reliance on grays to make the game's 10-hour playthrough a comfortable experience for the eyes. Still, I quite enjoyed sneaking through the
ruins looking for scavenged trade-goods and ammo whilst being chased
by hunter-killers, and the occasional diversions into the slightly
greener suburbs helped alleviate some of the depressing visuals. And
its use - although sadly too rarely- of the movie's recognizable
soundtrack always enhanced the overall experience.
"Terminator: Resistance" is not a good game. Given its origins, it
never was going to be a good game. But it's still a better game than
it deserves to be and - for lovers of the franchise willing to
overlook its numerous problems - it offers an unexpectedly enjoyable experience.
------
So that's what I played in August 2022? You happy now, Ant, you
first-to-post thread-stealer? ;-)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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