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Aug 29th, 2018 at 20:30:11 - A Way Out (PC) |
A Way Out, the reason I signed up for EA's premiere subscription for a month! This is the next game from the people who did Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but co-op instead of single-player. It's also got traces of LA Noire, Telltale games, and Quantic Dream games in interactive movie fashion. I played A Way Out over two sessions with my friend Patrick. I thought it was just a prison break game, but that's less than half of it. I was on the one hand pleasantly surprised there was more to it, but on the other wanted a co-op experience purely about breaking out of prison.
The two characters, Vincent and Leo, meet in prison and wind up reluctantly cooperating in order to escape and get revenge on the man who put them both there. The story unfolds really predictably, with a little complexity by adding their families in, until the end where there is a twist. If the story sucked, the game would be worse for it, but the 3/5-star story and acting allowed the gameplay to be foregrounded, which is the point of this experience.
Vincent and Leo need each other to distract guards, to pass items back and forth, to help each other up ledges, to peel away sheet metal, to shoot bad guys, to drive and shoot from a car, to climb up an air shaft, to bust down doors, and so on. This is a world where you need a friend, as everything seems to require two people. We found the interaction with objects and between characters to be smooth and made sense (e.g., time a button press to both shove a door open; each hold RT to fill a meter to grip hands and one pulls the other up a ledge; etc.). The controls were simple, and thankfully quicktime fights were minimal. I'm trying to think if any parts were difficult (maybe riding motorcycles could be a little tricky), and concluding that the game as a whole was very easy, which lends authenticity to the interactive movie-ness of it.
We thoroughly enjoyed the game, even if the endings weren't what we wanted to happen. (And it wasn't a tough choice because you can just re-load and see the other one). BUT, when you do get to the end, there is a very cool piece of design that affects character speed, and thus, the ending you get, and I won't say more for spoilers. That was one of my favorite parts though.
Now to decide whether or not to play with Duskers for a day before EA trial expires or just save it for another time.
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Aug 26th, 2018 at 14:10:45 - Titanfall 2 (PC) |
Holy wow. This is an outstanding FPS. I played through the campaign over the last couple weeks and had some truly memorable experiences. I haven't played a new FPS in a while (and I know this is 2 years old), but Titanfall has some things I've never seen before.
For one, the titan/pilot relationships are very cool. Sometimes you play as the pilot, and this feels very 90s FPS with double jumping and wall running. The movement is fairly quick, and you can go invisible for a few seconds from time to time. I used this a lot because it was fun to invisibly run up to enemies and melee kill them. Other missions are more titan oriented, where you hop in the hulking robot and take on larger enemies. Titans have a bunch of different load outs focusing on ranged or melee or close combat, taking out bunches of small enemies, or one-on-one with other titans, etc. Some of my favorite missions switched back and forth between the pilot and the titan. But what I really found neat, like I said, was the relationship. In the story, pilots have a neural link to their titan, and BT-42whatever was such a good character. He doesn't understand humor and nuance too well, and will respond matter-of-factly to Cooper, which is often funny. You really develop a liking for the two of them during the campaign.
The other thing I have to call out is that specific chapter with time shifting. Extremely interesting to play. In this chapter, Cooper (your character), is exploring a ruined facility to follow data remnants of another pilot (who you earlier find dead). You have this device that can shift between the present and the past so you can see what the facility was like when the other pilot infiltrated. You use this to avoid enemies in one time, and to navigate past obstacles (e.g., a fire in the present? go to the past and pass the area). What's bizarre is that the facility in the past reacts to YOU, so you really are transported to the past. Which raises a tiiiime paradox because this arc weapon was moved and all this stuff happened because the facility is responding to you in the past, which presumably only happens because you're in the present following Anderson's trail. So did this whole timeline happen because you got that time shift gadget and you're stuck in a loop? Of course time goes forward as you pass that chapter, but then at the end of the game, there's evidence that BT is lost in time or something. I haven't thought about it too hard and I'm sure there are reddit threads aplenty. Get your binary translator ready at the end.
The gameplay, visuals, audio, etc. are extremely polished. I encountered no bugs, only some stuttering on my machine because unfortunately I'm starting to come up against games from a couple years ago that it struggles to run perfectly. It got a lot better when I turned down some graphics settings. I went into multiplayer for a couple team deathmatches, which seemed fun, but I got killed pretty handily. It's cool that multiplayer is so movement oriented with pilots jumping and wall running and using grappling hooks to zip around the map. You can call in your titan too, and then rampage around launching rockets, though in my experience, I was easily destroyed by enemy titans / highly skilled players.
Anyway, highly recommended to play through the campaign. It's a neat story with likable characters, menacing bad guys (with Australian accents), and tons of action.
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Aug 8th, 2018 at 23:54:35 - Inside (PC) |
Outstanding game. I believe I will be showing this one to people and would like to watch others play through it. Better than Limbo. There's more story embedded in the dialogue-free game this time around. I won't pretend to have it figured out, but will spend time soon attempting to interpret it.
One thing that struck me is that I encountered 0 bugs or glitches. The game played flawlessly. Audio was minimalist and sounded oppressive with headphones. Visuals were more colorful than Limbo. I liked the reds, which made its dystopian industrial setting more ominous. Controls were smooth and near perfect for the platforming.
Several things in Inside stuck out to me, including the violence with which the protagonist is repeatedly killed, as well as the ending when you control the blob or hive mind or whatever it is. The way that thing moves is so fucking creepy and neat to watch, all those arms and legs sticking out and all those voices groaning.
Nightmare city.
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Aug 4th, 2018 at 11:47:11 - Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition (PC) |
Wow! Pleasantly blown away by Bulletstorm. This one was never really on my radar when it originally released, but I caught press of the Full Clip edition and apparently it's a game that sticks with people. My three-word review is "big dumb fun," which is a solid review. It's like Gears of War meets a more mature, less offensive, and more self aware Duke Nukem. I'd read that you can actually play as Duke, fully voiced with new lines, in this Full Clip edition, but I actually played Bulletstorm "Lite," which I gather is just the single player part of Full Clip, and unfortunately without Duke's voiceover. I did find a Duke Nukem figurine on a table near the end of the game. Couldn't interact with it, but neat surprise.
It's well enough that I only had Gray's (the main character) original lines because they're good. The language is very colorful and R rated, but I usually found it funny, or so exaggerated as to be funny. The bad guy has a habit of using racial slurs against an Asian character, Ishi, but I guess that's why he's the bad guy. Ishi even says at one point something to the effect of "If you use another racial slur, I will punch you in the face." Does using racism in humorous context, even in a self aware way, make it okay? A question for the ages...Ishi's humor, in contrast to other characters, is dark. In the beginning of the game, he gets melded with a robot AI, and constantly battles for control of himself, but it causes him to have really dark and deadpan humor that I loved. Ishi made me laugh more than anyone else, with Gray a close second.
Okay okay, so while the characters are fun and the story is well done, that's not why you would play Bulletstorm. The name says it all. This is a game about murdering enemies in deliciously brutal ways. At any time, you can have three guns and your "leash" equipped. Guns are varied and all have secondary fire, or "charge," modes. Your standard assault rifle can charge a powerful blast. One gun launches bouncing bowling-ball sized mines. You can control when they explode, and you can, when charged, cause multiple explosions. Zoom in with the sniper rifle, and you can guide the bullet, which is super fun and deadly. Charge up the drill and you can use it to melee enemies. You upgrade guns and purchase ammo using skill points, which are granted for fashionably killing enemies. Headshots, ballshots, buttshots are some standard methods that yield extra skill points. There are like 150 specific kinds of skill shots to figure out though! Each weapon has like 10, there are skill shots for killing bosses and minibosses in various ways, and there are, my favorite, environmental skill shots.
You see, Bulletstorm isn't just about bullets. It's about using your leash (the closest comparison off the top of my head is the grappling hook from Just Cause) to grab enemies from afar and fling them into spikes, off ledges, into man-eating plants, into dangling electrical wires, etc., and using your boot to kick enemies into same. The environment is littered with killing opportunities, including a liberal amount of exploding barrels. All of this makes Bulletstorm a massive playground for combining these elements. What felt especially novel is that the more you use the tools at your disposal, and the more creative you are in your killing, the more skill points you get. So it becomes this cycle where you get creative to earn more skill points, use the skill points to buy more and fancier weapons and ammo and charges, which allows you to cause even more mayhem, which rewards even more skill points, etc. The loop is brilliant.
The game is fast, flashy, and sounds good too. The Gears reference comes from the look of the game, the exaggerated military gruffness of the characters, and the fact that like half the settings are ripped from the franchise. Totally fun, totally self aware, totally worth it if you want a few fun gory evenings in a video game. OH, and I played this because of EA Origin's "premier" membership launch. I've wanted to play A Way Out with a friend, and I went to see how much it would cost. Found out about Origin's new model, and saw they'd greatly expanded their library. So I'm subscribing for a month to play A Way Out, and saw a handful of other games on my wishlist, including Bulletstorm, Titanfall 2, Inside, The Witness, and Duskers. So I'll be trying to burn through some of those in August, which is most certainly a bad idea given that school is starting.
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