So Alan Wake was a game I was very interested in during production.  I’m a big fan of HP Lovecraft, and this seemed to be all about that from the previews.  The game turns out to be more Stephen King than Lovecraft, and not the King that knows how to end his books.  That said, there was some fun to be had along the way.

But instead of talking about fun, I think I’ll talk about what I don’t like.

This is the first game that made me want to throw the controller not because of anything within the gameplay, but by the constant equipment resets.  In every chapter you get stripped of all your gear.  Many times within a chapter you’ll also find that all the cool stuff you had is just… gone.  No flaregun, no shotgun, no high-power halogen death-beam… you’re back to the basic, crappy flashlight and maybe a pistol.  This gets old really fast.  I get that this game is about survival and such, but you’re supposed to up the ante against the player, not constantly reset them to make basic encounters “exciting” all over again.

The first several chapters of the game play like this.  Gameplay is essentially aim at enemies to burn off darkness, dodge any attacks, then shoot them.  Repeat in every encounter.  Fortunately, the latter chapters make up for it by offering new gameplay dynamics and adding NPCs that fight with you, which makes the experience a lot more enjoyable since they throw a good deal of enemies at you during those sequences.

Enemies aren’t very creative, either.  All of them lurch / run at you and attack.  One can rush you.  That’s it.  No massive enemy that you have to dodge first in order to defeat, or any that require any precise locational-based shooting (like in the back).  This is good and bad.  From a starting the game standpoint, it’s great.  I just learn to point and shoot and dodge.  It’s once you’ve got that down that the lack of diversity starts to become an issue.  I don’t want to say the game has no strategy to combat — the tight-in camera makes for claustrophobic encounters and enemies will take advantage of that by always trying to encircle you.  You have to use crowd-control techniques like flares to keep opponents herded to your front and out of melee range.  There’s just not enough of it, IMO.

There’s an interesting story buried in layers and layers of twisting narrative.  With a few less layers, the story would be pretty bad-ass.  If I was to compare it to King, it would be almost like IT, where a force is feeding off of the energy of a town while also keeping it alive in a sense.  In this case, the energy feeds by drawing powerfully creative people to it (musicians, poets, writers) and then attempting to make them re-write reality so that the darkness can gain power and eventually be released.  In essence, the darkness becomes the artist’s muse and grants them the power to twist reality, goading them into releasing it.  That’s pretty cool… if it wasn’t for the two extra layers of a writer writing a story about a writer in a story that was put in place by a writer/poet with a fail-safe shoebox so the writer would know that in childhood he knew how to fight the… yeah.  I don’t know what I’m saying either at this point.

Atmosphere wise, the game is a knockout.  The forests are creepy, the mines decrepit, the town appropriately deserted, and the constant fog and bleeding ink effect used all over the place is really well done.  It’s more reminiscent of a Silent Hill (still the king of atmosphere games) than a Resident Evil, and that’s a huge plus in my book, especially after RE5′s complete lack of horror.

Being Remedy, there’s plenty of side-content to watch, including a Tales from the Darkside themed live show called Night Springs on TVs, a talk radio show that matches the happenings around town, and the unfinished manuscript pages you find along the way.  I found the side content very engaging… sometimes more than the main plot.

My final peeve is that for a hero, Alan Wake isn’t really one.  Everything he does is motivated by someone else.  He never makes one decision for himself, but just follows along when someone tells him he needs to go somewhere, or hints that person X may know something.  By the end of the game you can argue that it’s appropriate based on what’s really going on, but still… it gets annoying that the protagonist is so weak.  Even Lovecraft’s doomed heroes would try to break the rules… they’d just all go insane for trying.

And a final nitpick – if you have collectible items in your game levels, and once I’m finished I can choose to play any chapter / part again, please put collection counters on the chapter / part select screen so that I know which ones I need to play in order to find the things I missed!  It’s great there’s a summary screen but not when it doesn’t tell me where I missed things!

So play it knowing it gets better as it goes.  It has its share of frustrations, but it’s a fun distraction for the few nights of gaming that it lasts (6-8 hours).  There’s at least 2 more chapters of DLC, one available now.  Given the ending, I’m curious to see how the DLC fits into the story… but not curious enough to purchase it for 800 points.

7/10

There’s a point in this game that gives you a brief glimpse into the Payne side of things, and boy was that cool.  Hearing just a few snippets of the old dialogue voiced by the same guy made me interested in playing through Max Payne again.  Hopefully the upcoming one will be just as brooding and dark as the original.

Highborn on the App Store!

10 hour solo campaign, multiplayer via FB connect, witty repartee — what more could you want?  A puppy?  pffh.

Because our new iPhone / iDevice game, Highborn, is nearing completion and we’re all very busy getting it ready for release!

In the meantime, here’s a few tidbits on what I’ve recently played:

Super Street Fighter IV : A great fighting game, now better than before.  I think I’m to the point that I have issue with some of the advanced things found in fighting games these days (like kara stuff), since they just don’t seem to reward thinking, are hidden from all but the hard-hardcore players, and and only reward constant muscle memory practice.  I had high hopes for Makoto, but she seems nerfed from her 3rd strike days.  Juri is surprisingly awesome.

Ratchet & Clank Future : A Crack in Time : I enjoyed playing through this, but the first R&CF game was better.  This one felt lighter on content and larger on fluff to pad it out.  Not a bad game by any means, and certainly charming in its core characters, but just not as deep and playable as the first.  Some really fun weapons though.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 : I usually don’t go for shooters focused on multiplayer, but this game is just awesome.  Buy it.  Get in to multiplay.  The campaign is fun for the writing, but multiplayer is where it’s at.  You have no idea how odd it is for me to say that.  The class system is great, the balance of kits interesting, and now that they toned down a few crazy things like the Medic MGs a bit, much more enjoyable.  Want a lesson in how to constantly reward players for anything they do and encourage teamwork?  Check this game out.  I was looking forward to SSFIV for months, but once I started playing this, I can’t find time to go back to Street Fighter.  I’ve not played the Reach beta, but I can’t believe it could even compare to this game’s MP experience.  Modern Warfare what?

I’m still working on my rather long and likely controversial-to-some writeup on RTS in a Console world, but that’ll be a bit.

Back to Highborn testing!

Anyway, I digress.  My fascination with Bayonetta had earned enough merit to put it in the queue, but it was constantly bumped down in favor of other games that I wanted to play more.

So, I end up getting it in the mail last week, and at first I’m a bit disappointed that it wasn’t a game I’d had higher in the queue, but I figure how bad can it be?  After all, it has a 90 (360 version) metacritic.  Yes, I know metacritic isn’t the beat-all end-all of scoring sites. I mean, CoD2 has a 94 on there… which is an 85 at best IMO.  But even assuming that there’s padding and fanboys in there, that’s an insanely good score for the type of game it is.  It’s also made by Platinum Games, which is the ex-Clover guys.  The guys who created Okami and Madworld, just to name two.

Side note: Okami is an absolutely wonderful game and one of the most criminally over-looked games (in sales) that I’ve ever played.  If you’ve not played it, go get it.  It’s on PS2 or Wii.  It’s cheap.  Get it right now.  Stop reading this, seriously.  Go play that game.  You will not regret it.

So anyway, two points in Bayonetta’s favor right out of the gate.  A great semi-meaningful score, and a great developer behind it.

I was a fan of the Devil May Cry series (for a while) and figured that Bayonetta was some kind of knockoff.  It’s even done by the same game director.  I figured it would play about the same as DMC did — endless button mashing that quickly gets tedious, way too many and mostly useless combos, mostly useless weapons, a story that makes no sense, generally useless move upgrades, lots of violence, and level repetition — and boy did Bayonetta not live up to most of those expectations.

Yes, I said it did not live up to those expectations.  I totally expected a knock-off of the DMC games… and that’s not what I got.  Not only is Bayonetta a good game, it’s a really good game.  I have to say in many ways it has the kind of simple-yet-deep gameplay that Batman: Arkham Asylum had.  The combat system isn’t as refined as Arkham’s, and it doesn’t do environments in the same open free-roaming kind of way, but it’s going for a different type of experience, so it emphasizes different things.

First up, the story.  It’s insane… but it works by the end of it.  Bayonetta is a witch who hunts angels because if she doesn’t she gets dragged down to hell.  Sucks to be a witch.  So, her life is one big game of baiting angelic creatures into attacking and then slaughtering them all to appease the devil she’s made a deal with in exchange for her powers.  Her order (the umbran witches) was one of two factions which kept balance in the world.  The witches are all hunted to extinction after a catastrophic event in the past.  Bayonetta is sealed away — banished — and got overlooked in the witch hunt.  Waking up some time later, she can’t remember anything about her past, but she still has to appease the devil, so off to hunt angels it is.  Of course, the sages (the counterpart to the witches) have run without balance for a long time, their own apocalyptic plans near fruition when Bayonetta comes back on the scene.  Long story short, Bayonetta has to kill her way through Paradiso’s forces (i.e. Heaven) to stop the apocalypse.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist.  The supporting cast you meet on her way includes a buffoon rogue guy, a little kid (not as annoying as you’d think), a fellow witch with an agenda, the ex-angel demonic weapons dealer doing his best Shaft impersonation, and a fat whiny schlub that screams of Joe Pesci from the Lethal Weapon films.

As for the main character herself, Bayonetta is part runway model, part stripper, part gymnast, part gunkata master, part commando, and all ass-kicker.  She slinks around the board in this amazing gymnastic style that is raunchy and classically sophisticated at the same time.  She poses like a model in a photo shoot after certain kills, complete with shutter click sounds and effects.  She does slinky stripper dances for taunts.  This crazy hyper J-pop version of “fly me to the moon” plays as she does her outrageous super attacks.  Her skin-tight outfit is also her hair, which is stripped away from time to time when you unleash finishing moves on bosses and enemies.  There’s no nudity, but it comes about as close as possible without showing anything directly.  It’s certainly risque.  She’s also British… because the accent is just cool, right?

The bread and butter of this game is close-range combat.  There’s a really solid underpinning to it that I didn’t see at first, but made the game immensely more enjoyable once I figured it out.  So yes, you can button-mash in this game like you did in any DMC.  You’ll get through most of the game on normal difficulty with just button mashing, and certainly on easy.  But you know what?  You’ll spend about 75% more time than necessary by doing so.  Although button mashing one button is cool looking and fancy, it does the least amount of damage of any of her attacks.  Multi-button mash combos are more rewarding, but again they’re wasteful.  Instead, patient use of the three attack buttons (guns, arms, and legs) in short bursts yields the most rewarding results.

For example, if I have the sword equipped and mash the attack button 7 times, I’ll get this fancy combo string that takes 15 or so seconds total and does about 20% of the total damage on a large enemy.  Now if I do a nice three-hit  combo alternating hands / feet / hands on that same enemy, I can do over 50% of its health in ~5 seconds.  So finesse is not only faster but it’s also more rewarding.  The entire game is like this.  Some of the best combos are short ones that require timing rather than mashing.  Once you start being patient with the game’s combat, it’s immensely more enjoyable… and less taxing on your button fingers.

There’s a combo string system very similar to the one found in Arkham Asylum.  It’s not as unforgiving as the Batman one, allowing you a window of time to do damage to anything in order to preserve your current combo.  You can rack up some insane combos and multipliers by chaining together different attacks and combos from one enemy to the other.  The main way you do this is through what they call “witch time”, which is just bullet time… for witches.  All it takes to use is nothing more than timing your dodges.  Dodge an enemy attack at the right moment and the world (except for you) slows down, allowing you to unleash some huge combos without fear of immediate retaliation.  Dodging is easy to do (tap RT), and except for a few completely visually insane fights, all the monsters telegraph their attacks with visual and audio cues.  If you pay attention, it’s easy to know when to use it successfully.  There are items in the game you can get that make it easier to do… and even automatically when you get hit.

Weapon-wise, almost everything they give you has places that they are useful.  The weapon selection is diverse, from swords and guns to lasers, whips, shotguns, rocket launchers, and razor-sharp ice skates.  Yeah, ice skates.  You even get Nightmare on Elm street-type claws that if you wear on your legs, the claw tips become the stiletto part of her heels.  Nice.  Aside from the whip, I found every weapon to be useful versus different creatures.  The sword ended up serving me the best for most of the game, but everything else (sans whip) had frequent use.

The amount of combos you can unleash are… well there’s so many I didn’t get close to doing all of them.  You can check what you have and have not completed, and I’m not even close.  It doesn’t help that every weapon combination you equip (and you can equip different weapons on your arms and legs) has different combos associated with them.  Did I mention there’s at least 8 different weapons in this game?  6 or so of which can be on your arms or legs?  Thank god there’s no achievement for doing every move at least once.

Level-wise, the game is paced really well.  There’s a nice diversity in the intensity and duration of fights on any level and the amount of puzzle & exploration time between each.  There’s maybe 10 different enemies you encounter on a regular basis, with a few larger ones and bosses scattered in-between.  This allows you to learn the behaviors of each so you’ll have a good idea how to fight them.  Some are nasty if you don’t pay attention.

The game is longer than you’d first think, clocking in at 10 to 12 hours on first play-through on normal, assuming you’re mashing for some of it.  Likely you could get that down to 8 or so if you paid more dedicated attention to learning the combo system than I did.  Unlike DMC4, none of the levels are repeats, so you won’t be backtracking at all.

It’s also a fairly diverse experience for the type of game it is.  You ride a motorcycle in a racing type game at several points, fly on a giant missile in a huge homage to Space Harrier for one entire level (down to the classic spinning oval shots and enemy patterns), fight on a raft plunging down a whirlpool, outrun several lava tidal-waves, hurtle buildings at monsters, dodge orbital weapons, and have a few battles that completely twist your sense of space and direction.  There’s wall running, ceiling running, spinning gravity platforms… the works.  They really try to mix up the game play in every way they can.  You even get a sequence that’s akin to a scene from the movie “Wanted” as you guide the final bullet in slo-mo directly into one boss’ forehead.

I wonder how well this game did sales-wise, as it is so easy to dismiss it as a DMC knockoff from seeing screenshots and press videos.  Even though it’s directed by the same guy that made DMC (and Viewitful Joe, Okami, and Resident Evil 2!), this game shows a lot more love and thought than the DMC games have had in their latest incarnations.  Maybe he’s had time to improve the formula since leaving that franchise.  The last few DMC games had no where near this level of finesse behind the scenes.  Whatever he did, it worked, as this is the superior game in the genre.

If you can put up with the absurdity of the story, the over-the-top dialogue, silly characters, and the fact you’re playing as a bad-ass stripper / runway model with guns, the game delivers…  especially if you look just a little deeper than what the surface may suggest.  There’s nothing in this game that’s revolutionary, but there’s a lot of well-thought through evolution on display for the genre.

Did I mention that after finishing it on normal difficulty, there’s two more difficulties to unlock, a secret boss, a full secret level, hidden weapons, time challenges, and two other playable characters to play with their own unique move sets?  A gamerscore fiend will have their hands full with this one for sure.

Maybe this is blasphemy, but GoW3 is a great game that suffers from the “how can we top the last one?” problem.  They try, really, really, really hard.  Cameras zoom in and out, scale is massive, environments are detailed, deaths are elaborate, bosses are sometimes epic… but for me, never once did it hit the high of that Colossus fight in the beginning of GoW2.  Actually, in many ways, I think GoW2 is the superior game.

So why do I say that?

First, there’s the weapons.  The whip and hooks are too similar to the blades in too many ways in GoW3.  They all whip out, do kinda-sorta the same level of damage with one unique thing to each.  I never felt that either of those weapons had a truly unique identity and demanded I use them in different circumstances.  The whip ended up having more individuality than the hooks, but really, the blades are just too close in nature to both of them.  The Cestus is the real stand-out.  That weapon was different enough from the others and very, powerful… until you get to the end.  We’ll get into that in a minute.  The weapon selection in 2 was just more dynamic; The blades, the spear, the hammer, and the sword all felt very unique.  Sure, they weren’t as equally powerful, but all had their moments and made Kratos behave very differently.  I didn’t get that as much in GoW3.

Next, monster encounters.  There’s only two non-boss fight in GoW3 that had my pulse racing, and both are towards the end when you’re dealing with raising the Labyrinth.  One involved cheap death, where you have to time jumping to a harpy when spikes will pop from the floor, killing everything and then waiting for the entire space to rotate.  I’m not as happy with that one than I am with the second one, where waves on waves of enemies pour at you with no respite and constant demands that you nurse your enemies that can heal you or charge your magic until just when you need to exploit them.  That was a great fight.  Everything else… well, not as good as that.  And by “not good”, you have to understand that I mean that they weren’t intense; they didn’t exhaust me or draw me in to them as much as I think they should have.  They were entertaining sure, but not demanding.

Of course, not every fight should be demanding, or you’ll exhaust your players.  However, there needed to be more demanding fights in GoW3.  Not constantly, just more of them.  2 had more of these types of fights throughout it.

So now to bosses.  The initial fight with Poseidon was very show-offy with the camera going every which way and such, but it wasn’t a really fun fight.  Nothing about it surprised me.  This was the pattern for most boss fights — they were EPIC, but not surprising.  I was never shocked, and what’s worse, most of the “shocking’ parts of any death were telegraphed a million miles away (cutting off Hermes’ legs?! didn’t see that coming!).  I did like the very end of the Poseidon fight however, where it was from the victim’s POV.  That was new.  The Hercules fight was also great just for the sheer raw brutality of it.  Again, nothing beat 2′s Colossus, the high-water mark of boss fights in the series.

So here’s the rub: I don’t have a lot of immediate suggestions for how to top what they did have.  I think they were stuck.  I do think Zeus should have been much more involved with the story than he was, especially as the rest of the gods were killed off.  I would have loved to see him toying with you and actively trying to stop you throughout the entire second half of the game, instead of waiting at the very “end” so you could eventually get there and fight him.

Now to that specific end fight… or at least a few parts of it.  I realize that the chain blades are Kratos’ signature weapon of the series, but if you give me multiple weapons and allow me to use them in a boss fight, nerfing their damage behind the scenes is really, really lame.  When you’re fighting Zeus in the end, your Cestus don’t do shit for damage — none of the other weapons do.  You can beat on Zeus for 5 minutes straight with anything but the blades, and he’ll bleed, and recoil… and never will he weaken so you can grab him and advance the combat.  Bust the blades of chaos out for only a minute though, and bam!  He’s ready to be grabbed.  I can’t stress how lame that is.  It’s like the designers knew the Cestus would destroy him in 15 seconds, and instead of fictionalizing a way around them being used, they just nerfed the damage on any non-blade weapon, figuring (rightfully so) that you’d eventually get frustrated of dying repeatedly and switch weapons.  Maybe this is because of the quicktime events between boss stages which use the blades exclusively… but earlier in the game Kratos would switch on demand for QTE and there was no problem with what weapon I used.  >shrug<

What I did appreciate in this game was that not a lot changed in how the game worked.  Still had health, still had magic.  Still opened chests to collect orbs and replenish bars, and still purchased upgrades in the same way since the original.  Still dodged with the right stick, and all my face buttons worked the exact same way.  No confusion and no rug-pulling of my expectations.  I liked the new sub-weapon energy bar, but found that extending its power only made any difference for the bow alone (a great sub-weapon, BTW).  Seems like that whole bar / power system could have been exploited further.  The GoW guys could take a lesson from Castlevania’s staple collection of awesome sub-weapons / heart usage dynamic.

I really didn’t like the flying sequences.  Too many of them and all identical in obstacles.  Also, the music sequence was poorly designed and seemed completely out of place.  What would have been funnier is that you start the music game sequence and then Kratos just smashes the entire thing into submission after a few notes because he knows it’s dumb too.  That would have been completely in character and awesome.

So in the end GoW3 is an 8.5 for me, with GoW2 being a 10 and GoW being a 7.5 on the God of War scale.  Of course, you have to factor in that the God of War scale is its own beast; most other really good games can’t even chart an 8 on it.  I’m glad to see the series end however, as I think there’s not a lot more room to grow with the Greek gods.  It’s about time that the team moved on to another franchise on which they can reset the scale of expectations yet again and deliver another 3 or so games in incredibly epic style.  And if they want to stick with the whole “mortal tears down gods” angle, I figure they can tackle Norse, Chinese, or Hindu gods next.

Fighting Kali in God of War style?  That already sounds awesome.

So let’s get this out of the way — I can see that there’s a game in here that is fun for what it is, but to me, what it is not is a core C&C game.

Of course I have my own definition of what constitutes a core C&C game.  Everyone has their own definition, and it’s changed over the years from lead to lead and project to project.  Look at C&C3 to a small extent and Red Alert 3 for a larger one and you’ll see that even then the perception of what makes a C&C game great was changing with each iteration.  C&C4 however is such a radical departure from what most people would expect that I know I’m not alone in saying that this is not what I thought we’d get.

So here’s what you do get in C&C4: A very multiplayer-centric melee / skirmish game that involves you and team mates trying to win via a point system (ala Battlefield) by capturing control points and holding them.  The longer you hold them, the more points you get.  Get to 2500 points first, and you win.  I assume you can also win by blowing up a team’s existing supply of crawlers, but this was never a win condition I achieved.  Along the way, you get experience that slowly (slowly, no really) gains you levels, which unlocks new units, but only after a match.  There has to be upwards of 40 units per faction in the game by the time you’ve unlocked everything.  I have to assume that many of these units are very similar damage / stat wise to something on the opposing side, as I don’t see 40+ radically unique units (per side!) having any semblance of balance.  Fortunately, at least the units I had access to didn’t have a lot of special abilities you had to micro.  If there’s more of those down the road… ugh.

Harvesting is out, but Tiberium is in the game (dropped in care packages from space) as an upgrade device.  You can fight over it and either blow it up (the damage was relatively unimpressive from green Tiberium) or move it back to a landing zone and use it to upgrade your units or unlock higher tech levels.  So there’s a battle going on over those as well as a battle over the control points.  They’re in different locations on the map, so you can’t be everywhere at once.  Do you go for points now, or rush tech for better units to make capturing control points easier later?

Then there’s landing zones, where you’re allowed to drop new crawlers if you need one or want to switch types.  Again, in different places, so if you’re forced to change-up your crawler, you need a zone you can do it in.  The default one is in the far corner of a map, far away from where battles will take place.  Crawler’s aren’t fast, so it’s in your best interest to keep a drop zone open in case of emergency or if you need to change up.

So all of that is very clever and all, and it’s a tight design loop of all the systems, but you know what?  This feels like a downloadable RTS game, one I’d pay $20 dollars for on Steam.

But wait, there’s Nod and GDI and Kane and dialogue and stuff, Adam!  Yes, there is, but I think it’s no longer accessible.  I can bet that any new C&C player would have no idea of what was going on within the first five minutes of the C&C4 campaign.  I can no longer empathize with the characters or understand what is going on.  I can’t even easily tell what GDI or Nod stand for in this new game.  There’s not nearly as clear of a delineation as previous games.  There’s a LOT of fan service but it’s catering exclusively to hard-core fans.  Most of C&C’s casual fans only got to the 10% depth level of C&C’s lore, and that was enough.  This game goes to a depth that is commendable, but way too involved with itself to see that it’s alienating everyone that wasn’t hard-core about it to begin with.

Here’s a list of things that made me scratch my head while playing:

• An enemy obelisk hit my basic assault tank over 8 times (with linking bonus!) without destroying it.
• There are structures scattered around the map that infantry can garrison in.  I wasn’t playing with infantry, so I blew them up so the enemy couldn’t use them.  You know what?  They auto-repaired themselves.  In a C&C game.  A C&C game with engineers.  Which – you know – can repair stuff.
• All you have to worry about when building is control points.  No resources, no way to cut off an enemy from constantly building crap and throwing it at you.  Also, since you can’t cut off tech upgrades once they’re applied, you can’t ever stop mammoth tanks from rolling out once they can build them.
• The units don’t have a lot of individuality / personality, both in visual design and dialogue.  Design is all over the place and I have a hard time seeing a consistent theme across factions.  Audio is “hip military” type stuff.  Maybe the L20 Kodiak has more character?
• Nothing you get early on feels fun and unique or powerful.  Generic tank, rocket guy, mini-gunner, etc.  You always should have cool stuff to play with immediately, or play with the basic stuff in a cool way.
• Orcas are now the size of a Chinook.  Tech got clunkier in the future instead of smaller / sleeker?
• The crawler isn’t really a mobile base.  No defenses, not many upgrades.  I think we did a much better job at that in U@W.
• Hey, a bottom bar.  Way to maintain that C&C franchise identity.
• I’m amazed that right-click scrolling survived intact.  I wish that SC2 and HoN had this option.  It’s completely superior to edge scrolling and arrow keys.
• Hey, my wife is crying again.
• When you design an escort mission, having the unit(s) you’re escorting blaze along a waypoint path while barely waiting for the units that are supposed to defend them is a very flawed design.  This was easily remedied in previous C&C games (have the escorts guard the player’s units, thereby following them) so I have to assume that this new C&C engine isn’t as fully featured as the old one on the design side.
• How to win most of the time:  Hit Q twice (haha QQ) and click on the thing you want to kill.  Make sure your build queue is maxed and you have stuff in the hopper just waiting for command points.  The differences in damage and weaknesses are so smoothed out that you’re better off with brute force than building, micro-managing, and attacking with the perfect counter unit.  It’s like a 15% damage difference at most, or at least it seems that way.
• Unit selection and logic appears to have taken a step backwards.  Rarely can I get units to do what I want unless I QQ (heh).  Band-box and right-click a target and half of them just stand there and do nothing, especially if some of them are already in range of the target.
• I jump in to check things out in skirmish and… I can build 4 units.  Total.  WOW.  Let’s switch crawlers, and… wow 3 units… and a turret.  Epic.  Ok, so I’ll level up.  It can’t be that hard, right?  After the first game and getting some achievements, I get around 1000 XP for next level.  Game after that… 300 maybe, with another 1000+ to go.  I’m not a fan of this.
• During solo play (every mode actually), you earn XP.  While playing I’ll get text that tells me I’ve gained an achievement, leveled, etc.  I can see the XP bar at the bottom of the screen moving along.  Oh, but if you fail the mission you lose all the XP you gained.  That’s just stupid.  You either always let the user keep their XP (the right thing to do in this kind of game) or you don’t reward any XP until after the mission is complete, when you can clearly say win / loss.  A mission that I learn by death in doesn’t become more fun when all my XP that helped with my learning is stripped from me and I have to do it over, especially if I had to do specific things within a level to earn some of those achievements.
• I have to always be on-line, where XP gain can be validated, yet I can’t keep the paltry amount I earn in solo if I fail?  Was someone really that paranoid that people might break the XP system and “grind” on solo play to gain levels?  You know what?  I paid for the game.  Let me have my fun as I want to have it.
• There are so many units that I have no idea what to use for what and why.  They all blend together, and the weapon semantics and classes don’t help me.  Again, maybe there’s more unique ones at the very high end, but even my titans once I unlocked them were just meh this time around.
• It’s difficult to get information on enemy units.  Idling the mouse over them doesn’t produce an info pop-up.  Hard-selecting them and going to a spot on the UI does, but it’s too much work in a fast-paced game.
• So wait, Tiberium is dropped from orbit, and then I collect it and bring it back to my landing area / zone… and where does it go?  Back up into space?  The design mechanic of the upgrade system works, but fictionally makes no sense.  I don’t even have to bring the Tiberium to my crawler, any controlled landing zone will do.
• Solo play balance: Civilians with firebombs shouldn’t be tougher than a tank to take out.  Embrace expectations, don’t fly in the face of them.

I had a theory that this game didn’t start out as a core C&C title.  After talking to various folks, turns out I’m not completely off base with that assumption, which explains a lot.

I applaud the EA folk for actually trying something new, but I don’t think that messing around with the finale in a franchise and story that’s 15 years in the making was the right moment to get experimental.  You know what’s funny?  If they’d taken everything they cut from this game and made that into a game, we’d be much closer to a classic C&C than what was produced.

I don’t personally see C&C4 as a core C&C game.  But, if you treat it as a stand-alone multiplayer-centric game and have a group of friends you can play regularly with, go for it.

I had a lot of hope for Dark Void when it was announced.  There’s so much potential in the idea of a free-flying Rocketeer type game.  Sure, it seemed like it was biting off more than it could chew (flying, ground combat, platforming, etc.), but there was such a great road map of things to avoid (the Iron Man game for one) and plenty to inspire (The Rocketeer film, Crimson Skies… which this team made!) that I thought this one would “get it” and go towards the latter rather than the former.

Wow, was I wrong.

So if you’re making a game involving shooting and guns, you really should get those right.  The default weapon in the game (a machine gun) is buggy.  The problem: the gun can’t hit anything up close.  Apparently the bullet emitter is just a bit too far ahead of the muzzle on the model, or they’re moving to fast, or it’s just bad logic; the shit is broke regardless.  At point-blank range, only one in every 10 bullets or so doesn’t spawn past an enemy in front of you.  Sigh.  This gets worse as you upgrade the gun, too.  At one point, it seems I was doing no damage at all with it while closing for a melee attack.  The shots were hitting the wall behind the enemy instead.

Speaking of melee, it doesn’t fare any better.  Instead of making melee a dynamic part of the game, there’s canned animations for every melee attack.  This means that once you start a melee attack, you’re locked into it and can’t move or shoot until the animation is over.  The canned thing is nice when you need health to regenerate (you’re apparently invulnerable while doing melee), but isn’t nice for game play flow.  It’s jarring and very unsatisfying.  Damage from melee is a joke too.  The basic robots you fight you can 1-hit kill.  Everything else?  Try 3 to 6 melee attacks.  Or better yet, don’t try it, because it isn’t worth doing.

Machine-gun aside, there are other weapons that are more fun to use, notably the alien version of the machine gun, which has none of the basic machine gun issues and has upgrades that make it well worth using.  This likely has to do with the bullets being projectiles rather than raycasts with effect.  The other weapons vary from kinda meh to not really that useful.  The gravity gun seems fun, but there’s nothing to do with it outside of one level that you get it on.  The sniper rifle, even fully upgraded, can’t headshot and quickly kill most enemies… most of the time.  Again I’m thinking they have some really bad collision detection with raycast weapons.  The tesla cannon is fun for the mission you get it in, but not much else.

Lastly, the game makes one horrible mistake with aiming.  Where I’m looking (center screen) when I go into aiming mode doesn’t naturally become where the reticule is looking.  So, even if I’m in cover and move the camera to basically center on an enemy in the distance, as the view zooms in, I’ll be looking somewhere completely different, requiring me to re-aim once I’m zoomed in, making the entire point of general aiming worthless.  Any modern shooter has this working correctly, but not in this game.

So ground combat isn’t great, but then again the game is about flying, right?  With a cool jetpack!  That’s awesome!

Well, it should be, but it’s not.

Flying is a mess.  You have a poor sensation of speed.  The boost and brake abilities don’t do enough to speed you up or slow you down; Boost is too slow, and flying with brakes on feels still too fast.  There’s no way to lock on to enemies and get even a basic targeting / gutter arrow to tell you the direction of your target.  You can hold down a button to focus on the nearest enemy while trying to steer, shoot, and aim, but it’s uncomfortable on your hand to do so for more than a few seconds at a time.  Some enemies have flight trails behind them, but they’re not long enough and you can’t vary your speed enough to track them well anyway.  It’s easier to boost away from stuff, U-turn, then just shoot and repeat.  Dog-fighting is not enjoyable… in a game about dog-fighting.

Enemies have targeting reticules around them to call them out from friendly aircraft… sometimes.  There is no rhyme or reason to why you sometimes see them and sometimes don’t.  It’s not distance based, and has nothing to do with their health or yours.  Sometimes you just don’t get reticules to call out enemies, and other times you do.

You have a context action that you can do while flying to hijack an enemy craft or kill a few “boss” type enemies.  It’s tedious and boring, and like melee attacks, locks you into a canned animation as you fly automatically to the enemy craft.  This is really fun when the brilliant AI of an enemy decides to suicide below the game horizon, or is shot down by one of your AA guns and falls to its death as your guy is flying to the ship.  You end up flying right after it and directly into the abyss.  Some checkpoints can be far enough apart that this makes replaying the same mission sequence very tedious.

If you avoid canned death and get to the craft, you end up in this bad version of a simon game, except to win their version of Simon, you just hold down one button.  If the enemy shoots at you, you have to stop holding the button and move to another part of the ship… and just sit there unable to progress with the hijack until it stops shooting.  sometimes it tries to shake you off, requiring you to mash a random face button for a few moments.  Once that’s done, you move back to the panel and hold the button down more.  You repeat this until you pull off the panel to get to the pilot, then wiggle the stick to kill him and take the craft.  I can’t understand the call to make the path to success the most boring choice possible.  Where’s the quicktime event of hitting a few buttons in rapid succession?  Man, just take a look at any larger monster fight in God of War for inspiration.  Taking over an enemy craft has never been so unexciting.  Well, I guess it could have been more boring — just don’t do anything in order to succeed.

The other problem with many of the aerial levels is that it’s actually more efficient to jump into one of the AA turrets and shoot down the enemies.  The AA guns do more damage, are more accurate, and take a more punishment than you can with your rocket pack, even when upgraded with better guns.  When the main draw of your game isn’t the most efficient and rewarding way to fight enemies, you have a serious problem.

Finally, the story is bad.  Not cheesy and somewhat fun in a bad way like Darkstalkers was… like just bad.  Here’s an example:  You’re fighting robots and UFOs the entire game… and then suddenly at the end you’re fighting a giant mecha-dragon.  HUH?  Or what about Nikola Tesla being killed by an impostor Tesla who then doesn’t take Tesla’s place and cause havoc, but just stabbity-stab-stabs and… leaves?!  He doesn’t even try to sabotage your ship while he’s right there.  So weak.

I could go on, but this game doesn’t deserve any more words spent on it.

The TLDR version: Lack of good feedback on actions, poor controls, weak weapon balance, poorly paced upgrades, bad story, mediocre graphics.

6/10 on a good day.  Ouch.

Bioshock 2 makes me think there’s a bit of both going on.

Before I get to the story, let’s talk about the game.  It’s Bioshock.  More.  Not as fresh this time around just because the newness is gone.  Still beautiful, still under the water.  Still doesn’t use water as much as it should.  Still has the goal arrow, still has Gatherer’s gardens and Circus of Value, gene tonics, plasmids, weapons, weapon upgrade stations, and vita chambers are all around.  Still has big daddies and little sisters.  Most enemies are the same, except for a new big fat one and of course, the big sisters.

This time around, you’re a big daddy prototype that apparently had a lot more free will and ability than other big daddies.  You can use plasmids and do all kinds of things that the regular models can’t.  There’s some logic questions to scratch your head about, but whatever.  You also have this nice diving helmet masking part of your view for the entire game.  Yeah, turn that off and the game is more enjoyable.

You immediately get your goal — rescue your little sister — and from there the entire game is a stream of movement towards that goal, with roadblocks thrown up to make you detour elsewhere.  The areas you travel to in the massive city aren’t as connected to the story.  They’re just places that have problems.  You travel to different areas because you have to (you’re following a train route), stopped each time by some impassible gate that requires you to take detours into whatever crux problem each area has and deal with it in order to eliminate that gate and progress further; Powers are doled out, moral decisions made.

All the plasmids return from the first game (I think — it’s been a while) with a few optimizations and refinements to make the choice a bit less overwhelming.  However, they’re not that special any longer.  You just find them and buy them and you’re off using them.  Remember the drama the first time you injected yourself with the swarm tonic in Bioshock?  Your character screamed as the hive burrowed out of your skin.  That kind of stuff is just glossed over this time around.  The idea of splicing is taken for granted.

Kudos to allowing me to use both weapons and plasmids at once this time around though — that’s the biggest improvement over the first game without a doubt.

Weapon selection wise, they’re all kinda standard templates for FPS weapons.  Gun, machine gun, shotgun, sniper, rocket launcher, melee, and two tools for combat / exploration support.  Some of the weapon upgrades are fun to play with, although others (tesla shotgun?) I don’t see how they’d be useful.  Maybe there’s a nice mix of plasmids and tonics that would make them beneficial that I didn’t see.  After I got the option to go completely plasmids and melee alone, that’s what I did.  The drill charge was just too much fun not to use constantly.

As for playing uniquely, my combat style worked out to letting bees out everywhere, then dropping a decoy and mini turrets.  While everyone is busy hitting the decoy (and healing me by doing so) I’d drill charge or use telekinesis to grab enemies, melee them to death with the drill (also giving me back health) while holding them up in front of me, loot them, then hurtle their corpse at another enemy to weaken them.  Yeah, that was fun.

The level designers did a good job in presenting you with plenty of turrets, objects, and oil / water pools to allow you a wide range of plasmid / weapon strategies.  The new research mechanic, while clunky to start up, at least was not overly taxing in order to get full research on any one type of thing.  Very doable with one play-through of the game.  Getting full research was a pain in Bioshock 1, so I’m glad to see that it’s easier this time around.

The mechanic with the little sisters, which you had to “liberate” from a big daddy, then harvest OR use to collect ADAM, THEN either harvest OR release was… OK.  I’ll talk more about this in the story section, since it contains spoilers.

Bioshock 2′s moral pivot, which the nemesis (Dr. Lamb) balances her scheme on is one that I’m still having difficulty groking, even after finishing the game.  Since this part is laden with plot spoilers, I’d suggest not reading any further if you’ve not completed the game or have any interest in doing so.  Really.

Not kidding.  Stop reading, right now.

Ok, so here we go.

If your master plan is to kill everyone in order to gather all their ADAM (i.e. talent / morals / consciousness) and then put that all into one person to create a new “Utopian”, do you really think everyone is going to be willing to go along with this plan?  Especially the people you’re taking the material from, who die in the process?  Even if you brainwash them to believe in the greater good and that this new creature you’re creating is everyone’s “child”?  It seems like Dr. Lamb’s entire cult should have been dead by the time you got to the end of the game… maybe you interrupted the methodical suicides and they couldn’t get around to the rest of the cult?  Her “family”, the cult members, are all just pieces towards the creation of a new whole… but not really.  It’s like she sold most of the riff-raff on the idea of creating this new being but without including them in its creation.  Interestingly enough, she wasn’t including herself in this merger either.  Kinda convenient, as someone would need to hold the leash.

So all this ADAM is supposed to all be put into Eleanor (your little sister) and create the first Utopian, a selfless embodiment of intelligence, creativity, and love that exists only to serve the greater good.  Sounds more like a robot than a person, tbh.

Of course, your arrival screws all this up, and in the end Eleanor forges her moral compass for the use of this new power from your direct actions as you ventured through the game, adopting your moral choices as her roadmap, rather than remain neutral and free of morals as Lamb wants.  Ok, that’s at least neat at the end.  If you were good, you’ve instilled her with good.  If you were evil… like father, like daughter.

I can’t help but wonder if the game would have been more interesting if you’d rescued her very early on… like immediately.  Then, you’re just fighting to get the hell out with Lamb and her cult hot on your heels, throwing up roadblocks and forcing you to divert from any direct exit options.  Since you’re in the suit and your little sister isn’t, you have to find a safe way out of the city, which is where the rub comes in.

If Eleanor is supposed to be this amazing creature that can be “a dancer, a scientist, an architect at will” as Lamb says, wouldn’t that have been much cooler for puzzles and play?  You have to find certain types of people’s ADAM in order to allow your daughter to harness their powers and unlock areas / puzzles / abilities.  Of course, you could have made moral choices along the way as to how you got those samples too… It would have been like you had an angel or a devil on you shoulder while beating an escape out of Rapture.

She could also be the only little sister you have in the game, so you have to protect her against splicers and intervene if she gets stolen by them.  A merger of what they’ve got now with a bit of Ico, I guess.  The entire dilemma of the separation anxiety / death they only very briefly explore at the end would have made more impact as well.  Get too far from her, you die / suffer consequences.

But that’s not what they did.  In the end, there’s some cool moments (how little sisters see the world was especially cool) and some neat areas, but none of them felt like Cohen’s maniacal hold on Fort Frolic, if that makes any sense.

All in all, Bioshock 2 was not a bad game by any means.  A solid 8/10.  I don’t think it did enough to separate itself from the original and introduce a new way to play with all the cool stuff you got used to in the first game.  The ending tagline “Rapture is only the beginning” has me a bit worried for the future of the series, but we’ll see what the inevitable Bioshock 3 brings.

Multiplayer?  I didn’t touch it.  Why include it in a solo player focused game?

Mechanic wise, ME2 strips a lot of the heavier RPG stuff out of the equation from the previous Mass Effect outing.  Want to know how much damage a gun does?  Not going to happen.  What about weapon attachments?  Nope, gone.  Armor for your allies?  Bzzzt.  Yet for some reason they show you shield numbers and health on the character screen.  I almost have to ask — why?  I never more than glanced at it, since there was no way to compare those numbers to any enemy damage values to get an idea how much you can take.

The only new game mechanic I can think of is the new ammo / heat system.  This is a nice addition, since it forces you to switch weapons and manage your ammo for what you think a mission will throw at you.  Maybe it was the difficulty I played on (Veteran), but ammo drops were not frequent enough to spam weapons fire.  I enjoyed this.  Playing a sniper, I certainly made every shot count, and would switch weapons in order to conserve my precious sniper shots for high-threat targets.  That was a welcome intellectual consideration while in the middle of battles.  The barrier / shield / armor / health layer system also presented some nice mix-ups for which power you’d use at what time and on what enemy.  It wasn’t so deep that I got lost with it, but it was deep enough that I did find myself using specific powers on specific layers of enemy defense.  Since allies also have unique abilities that are better at certain types of enemies or not, the choice of ally became important to what you thought you’d encounter on each mission.  It did become more rote as you get further into the game though, since the pattern of use never changes up.

So I’d say that 94% of this game is completely enjoyable.  However, there’s just a bit that’s not. Some of the side missions you can discover via anomalies are more dramatic and exciting than several of the main-line missions.  The green-fogged geth planet, the sandstorm (although that could have been even more intense, IMO), the chlorine gas / beacon, and the geth husk swarm missions all stand out… and they’re all optional.  Early on in the main game while getting your team together, there’s a great mission that involves the player staying out of direct sunlight, but after that, there’s no interesting environmental “twists” in many of the mainline missions.  I think this is a missed opportunity.  As a game maker, it feels like the mainline missions were done first, which allowed the designers to learn what they could really do with the scripting system.  Armed with more knowledge of the engine’s limitations, the side missions — which were done after — were a bit more “risky” and thus more creative.

Because I don’t want to give anything away, I’m not going to talk about the story any more than saying that it makes a lot of sense and has some nice pace… until it just doesn’t.  There’s a moment later in the game that comes out of no where and without a warning.  Once it happens, there’s different outcomes to the later game depending on your next immediate action, which goes against the “play at your speed” ideal the rest of the game upholds.  For a completionist like me, I was annoyed that they were hurrying me along, and punishing me (as I found out later) if I didn’t hurry, since I still had a few things to do.

The game has an interesting balance to it.  Imagine there’s a difficulty curve, and a player weapon power curve.  The power curve rises faster over time than difficulty, so eventually the power curve overtakes the difficulty, and then the game becomes easier.  Setting the game’s difficulty to higher levels only delays that moment.  I played on Veteran, which became easier to survive the further I went into the game.  I’m not complaining though — some of the early combats against large mechs were nasty, with multiple deaths before being able to overcome them.  I’m not complaining, though.  It kept me interested.  Even when things get a bit easier, are a few enemy biotics that are always deadly, and you can still die rather easily if you don’t use cover.  Enemies are never as powerful as your team is, which feels like a bit of an oversight, but it’s not as noticeable as in say Borderlands.

I still have the same issue with the dialogue UI that I had in the first game.  When you have subtitles turned on, you tend to read faster than they speak, so you occasionally hit the B button to skip dialogue sequences.  Of course, B also quits you out of conversations.  Sometimes the next dialogue choice tree comes up before the dialogue finishes… sometimes the moment you’re hitting B to skip it.  You then quit the conversation.  I don’t approve of that consolidation.  You end up screwing up a lot and dropping yourself out of some dialogue paths… some of which you can’t get back to without reloading a save.  Punishing me for not wanting to hear a repeated dialogue path isn’t very nice.

And now a moment of comparison.  Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect 2 –

Maybe it’s because it was sci-fi.  Maybe it’s because the game part was a shooter, catering to console.  Maybe it’s because it was a sequel and I could import my character.  Maybe it’s because the returning characters were ones I really liked in the first game.  Maybe it’s because I couldn’t play “who’s the tool / traitor / dead guy” as predictably.  Maybe it was because the AI for my allies was actually decent.  Maybe it was because ME2 feels like a console game, while DA felt like a port of a PC game, with large deficiencies in the UI and character control.  All in all I’m completely in the Mass Effect camp.  Really, there’s no comparison in my book.  ME2 is a better product… IMO, of course.

The low down: Highly recommended if you liked Mass Effect 1 or if you like fun sci-fi RPGs.  I use the “RPG” part loosely here, since there’s not a lot of that to it.  The normal and easy difficulties should make the game approachable for any level of player, even if you usually shy away from shooters.  If you’re even competent at shooters, play veteran or above.  You’ll enjoy the challenge.

Also, the game has an excellent and never obtrusive auto-save system, which makes playing a fluid experience.