Some Stuff What I've Played: A Compilation of Words etc.

It's that low point of the month again, when I've splurged nearly all of my last pay cheque on food and shelter and I'm only left with a pittance to spend on the important things, like games and cinema tickets. To that end, there hasn't been a proper game title that I want to review for a good few months now, and so instead I present to you a few words on a few things.

Bastion

I'd heard a lot about this, Indie Game of The Year 2011, Best Art/OST of 2011 etc. and thought I could shell out a few quid for it.

Turns out, not a bad game. The plot is a bit thin, there's very little in the way of explanation for anything which I suspect is in an attempt to add "mystique" to the game. The combat and upgrade system are fairly mundane, but sufficient to keep the player interested.

Hit with hammer. Repeat.

The big draw is the presentation. There's a smooth talking narrator who guides you through not only the plot but also describes each level, upgrade, item etc. completely removing all need for dialogue. Essentially think of POP:Sands of Time; the entire game is The Prince attempting to convince Farah he is who he says he is and occasionally if you fall to your death he'll chime in with "No no, that's not how it happened..." Bastion's narrator is like that, but slowly moving from interesting to invasive and irritating. Prime example, there's an arena map that can be replayed (by getting high) to earn resources by fighting 20 waves of enemies. Each time you attempt it you have to listen to him drone on about The Kid and his hard life. The art style and visual presentation have been most praised, with the world creating itself piece by piece as you walk around. Seems like a nice idea, keeps the scenery active and interesting....but was probably introduced to save on memory usage, this being an XBLA port.

Arbitrary number score: 6/10. For fans of Indie/artsy/casual gaming.

Killzone 3

Let me first start by stating that I was a massive fan of the original PS2 game, and somewhat enjoyed the PS3 sequel. THIS, however, does not belong anywhere near those other two games. Generic and bland from start to finish, with an abhorrent colour pallet of brown, other brown, slightly shiny brown, grey and poorly rendered green lighting.

The shooting bits seem to have gotten worse since Killzone 2, and there are god awful rail-shooter vehicle sections, but apart from that it appears to just be most of the second game copy pasted with some slightly different art styles and tweaks to the interface. Most notable being an ammo crate every five yards, meaning all the special weapons like the flamethrower, bolt gun and the man-exploding flubber cannon (yeah, you heard me) can pretty much be used constantly. Level design suffers heavily from the chest-high wall plague meaning you can spot an "ambush" a mile off. Even worse is the cover system that uses those chest-high walls doesn't even protect you from the hideous amount of incoming enemy fire you'll be under most of the time. I think somewhere along the road the development team decided that including the ability to have your allies revive you meant that the difficultly curve could be abandoned all together. What they failed to do was path the AI properly so over half of the time I'd Rambo my way into the enemy forces, kill half of them and sacrifice myself relying on The Mouth to resurrect me, only to have the shot list to the side framing him sprinting towards me....stuck on a single brick. URGH.

Nobody Cares

The game says it comes with PS Move enabled, but that's only for single player, doesn't work on co-op and barely works at all. The fine control accuracy and fluidity of movement needed for a non-rail shooter is far too high for motion controls that have trouble navigating a simple menu. Oh, it can be played in 3D, which I strongly advise against as the saturation of awful colours nearly drove me mad, and I was only playing it in 2D.

Arbitrary score: 3/10. For people who require another reason to champion this series but are unaware what makes a good game.

WHY AM I IN THIS GAME?!? - Ray Winstone

Driver San Francisco

You'd be forgiven for thinking that a game called Driver, with a big yellow car on the front and in a series of games all to do with....driving that Driver SF would be a pure racing/driving game. And you're....well, right and wrong.

Just kill them all, Tanner...

So, yes, it does present itself as a driving game. Notice I said GAME, not simulator. For a driving sim you can fuck off back to GT5 with all its neck-beardy P-2-WR accurate cars that handle like drunk cats. This game's got power slides, and even when you don't ask for them it's still got them. But the more important part of this particular fairly generic Burnout-esque title is the interesting and frankly just good use of a single game mechanic. Early on in the story, about 20mins in so I don't consider this a spoiler, Tanner (you) has a car accident and ends up in a coma. Because of this you can astrally project (go with it) yourself into the body of any driver across the entire city at any time. During races you can drive oncoming traffic into your fellow racers, you can use trucks and tankers to block the paths of escaping criminals or just fling mini-van driving "soccer moms" at them til they crash into the nearest lamp post. Totally consequence free, but thankfully not in the "it's OK because you're Russian/evil/12 and trying to piss off your parents" way GTA handles consequence free collateral damage. Oh no, Driver just flat out ignores it.

Aside from that one brilliantly constructed and implemented mechanic, the rest of the game is fairly standard. Story, voice acting, visuals and physics are "enough" to carry the game forward whilst you dick about making two petrol tankers jump each other over and over.

Arbitrary score: 7/10. For people who enjoy Burnout and want a side order of story to go with that big juice car-burger.

Transformers: War For Cybertron

What can I say, it was on sale for £3.50 and I like Transformers so I thought I'd risk it.

All the worst things from...just so many games, I imagine the development team would've had to go out of their way to make this game so bad.

I've played, at time of writing, 30minutes of this. And I intend to give it at least another hour, just to be sure. But I'm fairly certain it is indeed the utter, UTTER shite that it appears to be. Shocking controls, an out-dated engine, offensively original art style (to me at least), repetitive missions and voice acting that is literally unbelievable. As in, how were the publishers happy with A) the script written for the VA's and B) the delivery of nearly every single word. Mind officially boggled. Not to mention the entire game seems to be built around coaxing you to play online, setting up another third part account (last count, I have 12) just to access those parts of the game. Oddly, my main two problems are not unlike those in my last Transformers game review (here), a mostly copy pasted single player and pushing you into playing online mp. I can only hope that, should I ever play it, the tie-in for Dark of The Moon doesn't follow this seemingly compulsory game structure.

Arbitrary score: 2/10. For people with too much time/money/Hasbro fanboyism.

Beat Hazard 

Ending on a high note, thankfully. Beat Hazard is the latest in the music-game genre, previously championed by titles such as Audiosurf. The premise being that you can choose any audio file on your hard drive and the game will map a level around it, with changes in tempo, volume and rhythm all affecting the difficulty, visual style and pace of the game. Whereas Audiosurf managed to take a simple idea and try and complicate it by ramming in different characters and an odd Connect 4-esque in-game mini-game (far too many hyphens) Beat Hazard has literally gone back to basics, by emulating the classic title Asteroids.

An XBLA/PC title with simple controls and a potentially infinite lifespan means that I will be playing this game regularly and perpetually, as it has now taken up residence as my go-to casual game, filling time between all my important business meetings and fundraiser events with the Duke etc.

Here, look at this, click on it to enlarge if you like.

I struggle to see anything there that's not to like, assuming you like A) music, B) space ships with lots of guns, C) asteroids or D) all of the above and are not epileptic. That's a serious point, this shit causes seizures.

Arbitrary score: 8/10. For anyone who likes casual games, music and bleeding eyeballs.

N.B.

Depending on feedback, I might start doing this sort of things more often, a few short reviews in one post instead of a longer article on a single topic.