Review: Deadlight

Ever wanted to parkour your way through depleted buildings, crushed hopes and lots of undead people? Deadlight is the game for you.

At the core, Deadlight is an incredibly linear sidescrolling action game or simply put, a “metroidvania” game. Oddly, Deadlight deviates from the metroidvania style, because being labeled as such a game would suggest a huge emphasis on exploration, in which Deadlight has none.

Huge surplus of pretty graphics, though.

That said, Deadlight is a game that I very much adore for the graphics, gameplay and overall story. Yet, I believe the reason I love it so is because it reminds me of a lower budget Shadow Complex clone mixed with The Walking Dead.

Even Big Bird wants you gone.

The game starts off in the post apocalypse where you play as Randall, a former Washington State Patrolman who now looks like a hobo version of Solid Snake. As with all zombie stories, Randall has to split up from his group and claims he will meet up with them soon. Thus he gets to walk around the zombie infested world until he finds a gas station.

On approach he believes the occupants of the building to be friendly but surprise surprise, all the other survivors want to kill anyone that moves because why the hell not? Along this journey to meet up with his group again, he often splits off to go find his wife and daughter because every protagonist not only has to live in a zombie scenario, but they MUST break character and be super clumsy and somehow lose their family.

So he sets off trying to get to Seattle, only to find that Seattle is home to a lot of dead things. Not just the Mariners, but tons of zombies.

Haven’t done anything for a while, let’s force the player to fight a bunch of zombies, with an axe that barely does anything! YEAH!

As such it’s up to the player to navigate around the city and try to find shelter. The levels feel very surreal and feature a LOT of atmosphere despite because of how desolate things are. Despite some of its pitfalls, the story is fairly well written, and leads up to a very gripping conclusion.

If you’ve played Metroid or Castlevania or Shadow Complex or any metroidvania like game, Deadlight is basically no different. You need to crawl, roll, run, jump, skedaddle and get smacked in the face a lot to survive. The gameplay formula is exactly the same, leaving the player with a classic playing experience seasoned with the addition of the undead. And the occasional moment of bad gameplay pacing.

In games such as these, you would hope that the physics would feel tight and fluid because of the amount of running and maneuvering you have to do to get around. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

PHYSICS, PLEASE DON’T FAIL ME NOW.

See Deadlight suffers from “You can only grab this ledge if it’s a Wednesday and the little indicator appears” syndrome. This disease can lead to annoying symptoms such as “your jump distance will change based on how awesome we can make this jump look” and “You haven’t really climbed the wall all the way, even though you are gripping the edge and should totally be able to move over the wall.”

This became really frustrating in some levels because you have no idea if you’ll make that jump reliably or not. And of course, when you miss, the physics engine acts like the kid on the playground who never plays by the rules and taunts you on how you died for the 40 billionth time.

Sadly, Deadlight is not a very long game. At most it lasts about four to six hours, but it really offers a really interesting twist on zombie games. If anything, it’s definitely worth a look.

Verdict: BUY

Review: Warhammer 40K: Space Marine

WE ARE THE SPACE MARINES, OUR ENEMIES DIE! Warhammer 40k: Space Marine is a pretty major turn from the earlier Warhammer games. Instead of being a strategy game like the previous iterations, the developers decided it would be much more interesting to try a third person shooter.

And they pretty much nailed it on the head. The combination of quick gunplay and vicious hack and slash mechanics really makes Space Marine’s combat rather enjoyable. Granted, the fight mechanics are nowhere near the level of the Batman series, but the game does pretty well on its own. The easiest way to picture is Devil May Cry gameplay but with less puzzles and more fun.

The story is rather interesting, the planet is invaded by orks and so the empire sends in the Space Marines to save the day. It’s the typical “we must save the day and defeat the enemies!” story, however, the plot twist that happens near the middle of the game is quite unexpected and executed fairly well. Unfortunately, the campaign is plagued by waaaay too many cutscenes. There is literally a cutscene for just taking a step forward, there is a cutscene for picking your nose, and there are several for acknowledging that you are a Space Marine. There are just way too many pointless cutscenes.

The multiplayer is rather enjoyable, featuring a lot of gamemodes and quite a few maps. Sadly, multiplayer games can be rather laggy due to the lack of dedicated servers, leaving players to rely on p2p hosting. Basically, your mileage may vary with the multiplayer. However, if you get a couple of friends together, you’ll probably not have to run into a lot of the network problems that hurt the game’s public matchmaking.

Overall, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is a fun game that can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone that likes third person shooters/hack-n-slashers. Being a Warhammer fan is not required, and you won’t be at a disadvantage for having no knowledge of the franchise.

Verdict: BUY

Review: Fable 3

I’m going to cut to the chase: Fable 3 is one of the biggest downgrades of a franchise in the last decade. It is full of so many stupid design choices and idiotic features that it makes Fable 3 not worth playing.

The story is incredibly predictable, despite all the support characters gasping in shock every four seconds at plot details we learned two hours ago. Pokemon Red had a better implementation of reiterating plot points and it’s not even the same kind of RPG! It as if Lionhead Studios assumes that people playing RPGs won’t be paying attention to the story.

That is if you can even call this game an RPG. Fable 3 is split up into two parts, where the first section is rather enjoyable, but extremely tedious, and the second part is just sit on the throne and do QTEs. Oh yeah, spoiler alert: You become king, as if it wasn’t obvious already because the marketing material gave it away.

Your first order of business as king is to make decisions that affect the racial community.

See, the first part is an RPGish thing, it’s more of an adventure game than anything. Sometimes the game throws in some stupid moral choice stuff with options that range from “yeah fix the burning orphanage” to “DESTROY THE WORLD WITH A WANNABE NUKE”. They did add a middleground to some of these choices, but you’ll very rarely choose it.

Interacting with cardboard cutouts of NPCs actually sounds more enjoyable, now that I think about it.

But the critical flaw of Fable 3 is how it handles NPC interactions. This is a critical mechanic for RPGs to implement, and Fable 3 just tripped over a spec of dust and completely fucking flopped on this task. In order to interact with a person, you must stand somewhat nearby them and wait quite a while before a “Interact” button will fly over their head.

Only then you are able to interact with them. There’s no more group interactions, and with it went the lock-on-targetting NPC interaction system that took literally no time at all.

Once the game has recognized you want to interact with an NPC, it transitions to a black screen before you’re able to do anything. It actually loads up the interaction that you are about to have. That’s stupid. If I want to talk to someone, I don’t want to have to wait for the game to load up the person before I can say something to them. I’m standing right next to them, what the hell?!

Additionally, Fable 3 introduces four EXTREMELY ANNOYING mechanics that make me want to throw my computer at the wall:

This guy cannot pay me enough to make me want to continue doing these “Hold hands with the criminals” missions. It’s so frustrating.

First: The hand mechanic. To get a person to follow you or to be able to escort them, you must hold their hand. To do so, you wait about 10 seconds for the “Hold Hands” prompt to pop up. Then you have to walk at their speed to wherever your destination is.

In very rare occasions you will be able to run, but then other NPCs (and your dumbass dog) will decide it is a good idea to cut inbetween you and the NPC you are dragging, thus causing the hand link to break, which is frustrating. And to make it worse, if there is more than one NPC in the area, the game will reset everyone’s pathfinding.

Basically, towns and bridges become a clusterfuck really quickly.

Second: The “Accept this item” mechanic. No matter what you do, should it be having bought an item, getting a quest reward or receiving the key for the quest from an NPC, you must accept the fact that you have this item by pressing a button. This is a great addition because there is no button to deny receiving the item, THUS RENDERING THIS STEP UTTERLY POINTLESS.

It’s just yet another stupid button press between getting each item. So when you buy an item and accept paying it, you then have to accept the fact that you just got the item. Thank you Peter Molyneux for making getting rewards annoying as hell.

Third: The “I want to be your friend” bullshit. In order to do pretty much anything, the villagers have determined that you must earn their trust by doing remedial fetch, courier and/or gift missions.

This means that you must take whatever item they have and chuck it into the nearest firepit for them to consider you a good person. Luckily, Fable 3 does not require-OH WAIT, IT TOTALLY DOES.

There are several main quests that require you to be friends with people in order to build a better standing with the town/place. To do so, you must interact with every NPC individually. Fantastic.

Fourth: The “there is no health bar in real life, so we don’t have one” mechanic. A good RPG would have a life bar during fights, or atleast some extremely obvious way to tell that you have 5% of your health left. It would also be reliable, and would show up at the first sign, all the time. NOPE, we can’t have that. You are assumed to know when you are about to die or not. The first and only warning sign is your world becomes incredibly gray and there is a faded red border around your screen. The issue here is that the hint appears sporadically, ranging anywhere between 65% of your health, to 5%. There is no way to tell I was about to die until it happened.

What the hell. If I’m supposed to fight a billion enemies all at once, I’d atleast like to know how much health I have before I die, dammit.

All in all, your dog is an idiot, and you should skip Fable 3.

Verdict: PASS

Review: Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Assault on Dark Athena is totally worth it. It’s like three games in one (Butcher Bay Director’s Cut, Assault on Dark Athena and the MP) and Butcher Bay is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve ever had. This game is the definition of a top notch game. The atmosphere is perfect, the dialogue is badass, the levels are interesting, the game is challenging, and the characters are really defined. If anything, you are buying one game and getting two for free, and I cannot stress this enough, if you have not played Butcher Bay before, you MUST buy this game. Like now. Do it.

I have not been able to play the MP or the Dark Athena campaign yet. But that should not stop you from taking a look.

Verdict: BUY

Review: Driver San Francisco

Driver SF is a very, very frustrating game. I feel it’s best played with a controller, but that will not stop you from getting annoyed. For some odd reason, the civilian AI cars get really derp and decide that instead of trying to get themselves to safety, the best thing to do is to drive right in front of the guy who is trying to stop/cause trouble. It’s like they were all programmed to be the hero or something.

You think your quick reaction times will help you avoid it?

FUCK NO.

These idiots will not stop until they make you rage, it is impossible to drive without spinning out, crashing or failing a mission. This even happens when you are in your cop car. Forget that you’re a cop with sirens and people should be getting the hell out of your way, no no no, San Francisco stops for no one. It’s ridiculously annoying. I feel like Driver would be much better if it wasn’t set in San Francisco, because it is a fucking mess there.

The campaign story is not all that great. You are basically told the ending at the start of the game. I mean, come on. Why should I continue playing? So I can know that I’m in a coma and should get out so I can stop the bad guy that I’ll end up stopping anyways? And the reasons for doing side missions are so stupid that the developers deemed that the side missions should be required in order to move on with the main mission.

Which introduces the topic of how dumb the side missions are, for example, you must evade the cops for a certain amount of time or you will fail a mission. Sounds easy right? Nope. All of the AI cop cars have the ability to plow through AI cars and not stop. Yeah. And if you crash, you’re basically screwed, because then more cop cars will show up.

Luckily you could just skip this side mission and do a different one, right?

NOPE.

With the side missions, Ubisoft basically made it impossible to move on until you complete ALL of the side missions. Thus you end up having to do team racing (where your partner is the most stupid thing ever [You finish in first, partner gets second to last, you fail the mission]) and more of these stupid getaway missions.

This game is the most frustrating, rage inducing game ever. Ubisoft, fucking stop it. You’re being stupid. Stop doing shit implementations of driving games.

Verdict: PASS

Review: Binary Domain

Binary Domain can be easily described as I, Robot the game.

One of the key features of Binary Domain is the ability to use your voice to give commands. Unfortunately, the voice recognition is really shitty and the game relies too heavily on it.

In fact, in order to even give this game a “try it” rating, I would highly recommend that you turn off the voice input setting. If left on, all that’s going to happen is extreme frustration. Sure, the recognition is hilariously bad at first, but after about twenty minutes of your teammates going “HUH” and “WHAT WAS THAT, I DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU” to almost every single prompt, you just want to throw your computer at a wall.

Such a pretty face.

There are too many parts of the campaign that require you to stop every four seconds so that a teammate can tell you how scratchy their butt is at the moment. It really just kills the immersion because those prompts are designed for you to have voice recognition on, but you, hopefully trying to save yourself from pain, will likely have turned it off. Teammate interaction gets even worse because everytime you get injured, you must issue a command to your teammates that you are okay, otherwise they’ll get mad at you and stop firing their weapons because their AI doesn’t know what to do.

The campaign is decent but that might be because the developers ripped off I, Robot a lot, so the story is fairly intriguing. But I have to mention how Binary Domain has very smooth cutscenes that flow seemlessly with the actual gameplay. It’s something that can be appreciated considering almost every other game always has a black screen or some sort of abrupt transition between a cutscene and actual gameplay.

Multiplayer is mostly deserted, but you should be able to find atleast four people to play the firefight like gamemode with you. Just don’t expect to play any PVP gametypes, because it’s incredibly rare to find the required six people to start the game. Otherwise, the game just ends up being like this:

Overall, the experience is quite good, but it’s not the greatest thing ever. I would recommend a try, and then buy it if you can get it for under ten dollars.

Verdict: TRY, BUY IF ON SALE

Review: Quantum Conundrum

Quantum Conundrum is Airtight Games’s newest title and yes, while it does have Kim Swift on the design team, that does NOT mean you can just say “Oh Portal was good” and leave your review at that. I’m looking at you Machinima/Giant Bomb/MetaCritic blurbs/(Stupid Review Website I hate).

Anywho, Quantum Conundrum is basically a quirky puzzle game that focuses on using different dimensions in order to solve puzzles. The game claims that “there is a dimension for that”, where “that” is the solution to some puzzle (for example, a high up ledge that you can’t reach because you are the height of a four year old boy). It’s an obvious play on the iPhone’s “There’s an app for that” marketing shenanzo that quite honestly,-blah blah blah blah blah fuck it.

It would have been super cool to have more than four dimensions, as difficult as that would be to make, the team totally could have pulled it off.

As cool as the marketing blurb makes that sound, it really means that you get four different dimensions and the game doesn’t really expand much from there on out, which is a shame because it would have been interesting to really have a dimension for almost anything.

That rant aside, QC is as Portal as you can get without adding Valve to the mix. But don’t most puzzle games (let’s all stop and stare at ‘Splosion Man for the XBLA) try to do that now? I mean, let’s look at the similarities between the two games:

1. There’s a song at the end of the game
2. There’s an unseen character (for 90% of the game) who watches your progress while providing humorous commentary
3. You are mostly alone
4. The floor is lava
5. Lazers
6. Puzzles
7. Puzzle Lazers
8. Momentum puzzles
9. Momentum puzzles…WITH LAZERS! :O
10. There are several objects that the player is intended to build an attachment to (which actually seems to work unlike the Weighted Companion Cube in Portal)
11. Just being in the facility is some sort of hazard to the character’s health
12. The story kinda ends on a semi-cliffhanger (you know the end of Portal where you are laying there on the concrete parking lot at the end of the game? QC’s ending is a lot like that. It doesn’t explain if you escaped the house or not, it just ends)
13. Story plot is built up in between levels (Portal had the elevators, QC has the hallways).
14. You explore outside the main “testing environment” at some point
15. The game is kinda short. Portal was supposed to be a game that would take eight hours long. Portal ended up being about 4-6 max, really. QC sits right at eight.
16. There are challenge modes that (for lack of a better word) challenge you to complete puzzles in fewest number of (portals|shifts) as well as how fast you can complete the level

Oh that Bob Ross reference.

Well…I guess that is kind of a lot, but you can’t really blame them too much, because Portal was a really successful game. However, that is a good thing to a degree, despite a few physics bugs that plague the game, Quantum Conundrum is definitely worth a try. It’s funny, well written, clever, witty and has really good voice acting.

The main narrator/scientist uncle is voiced by John De Lancie, who I believe was a fantastic choice for the game. His passive aggressive tone just really adds to the overall quirkiness of the game. It’s honestly a fun game, sure you may die a lot and there will be a lot of rage, but you’ll have a lot of fun (except when you throw your keyboard at the wall for the physics deciding to derp right at the last second) while doing it. I would totally recommend a buy of this game…

BUT

I have two really big issues with this game.

First: Even towards the end of the game, it doesn’t feel like I’ve mastered the controls at all. Seriously, I would expect that I never accidentally switch into a dimension that I didn’t mean to, but even towards the final few levels, I was STILL making that mistake. It was extremely frustrating, considering that the last puzzles require almost perfect timing and dimension switching. It honestly feels like the game might have been better controlled on a controller than it would have on a keyboard.

Second: The story pulls a Hard Reset and just ends. No real wrap up, it just ends. That’s it, there’s nothing else. Judging from the fact the game already has achievements for future DLC, I’m assuming that near the end of development the developers decided to stop working on the story and focus on working on DLC stuff. It’s really lame.

Swine DLC!

Overall, Quantum Conundrum is a very hard game to recommend, it’s enjoyable and whimsical, however, there are a lot of issues that get in the way of the overall immersion. You can get trapped in puzzles, the physics likes to derp out every now and then (Oh, this platform magically lost its collision again, fantastic), and quite a few portions that just induce rage. But on the other hand, it’s a humorous puzzler that can be quite challenging. Either way, I say try it, but I’d lean towards buying it if it is on sale.

Verdict: TRY, BUY ON SALE

Review: Hard Reset

Here, have a short review. Hard Reset is a good shooter with gorgeous graphics for an indie game. The electro gun is good, easy to make into a god weapon. Which is great because there’s nothing better than seeing a huge swarm of robots blow up into itty bitty electrified pieces. Seriously. The major downside is that the game doesn’t last very long, topping out at about four hours max and that the story just ends suddenly. There’s no real closure or anything. It just stops.

Verdict: PASS

Review: James Bond: Blood Stone

Do you like James Bond? Do you like high action? Yes? Blood Stone is great for about four hours of exhilarating Bond action. It actually feels like you are James Bond, something that I feel only Nightfire and Goldeneye have pulled off in the past.

Blood Stone is quite the experience, the car chases, the over the top action moments. It’s just pure fun.

However, with all of these awesome action parts, you are stuck with quite a few firefight moments that honestly take way too much time. Enemies take too long to go down, long repetitive corridors and annoying enemy dialog spoil a lot of the fun. It’s kind of nitpicky to claim that the dialog is rather annoying, but it ranks up near the award winning “I WILL DESTROY YOU” line from Mass Effect.

The biggest downfalls are that the game is incredibly short, offers no replay value and it feels like you are playing a shell of a game, as the developers who made Blood Stone no longer exist. And it’s rather sad, because Blood Stone doesn’t do Bizarre Creations justice. That and the fact that there will never be any patches, more maps, or bug fixes leaves the game rather dead. Don’t even bother with the multiplayer, I couldn’t get it to work.

And that’s the problem with Blood Stone, as amazing the action sequences are, there are a lot of design choices (or forced choices) that were made for the worst. Like for example, making all of James Bond’s cars handle like shit. It really spoiled the specular chase scenes, and to make it worse, a lot of the driving sequences require you to make split second decisions, something that Bond’s cars cannot handle at all, thus causing you to go for a dip in the pond. Again.

In the end, James Bond: Blood Stone has a lot of awesome action parts, but combined with confusing level design and fight sequences that honestly aren’t worth it, it makes up for a rather bland game. It has amazing set pieces, but the filling is just stale.

Verdict: PASS

Review: Yesterday

Yesterday I had a presentation, and then I ate ice cream and cleaned my apartment. After that I…what? oh.

So Yesterday, an adventure game that likes to dabble in multiple timelines and lots of crazy mystical cult folklore. You start off playing as two kids who are basically the equivalent of the boy scouts as they are going around trying to help out the homeless. At some point, they meet up with John Yesterday, a fellow who cannot remember what happened but for some reason has an odd Y scar on his hand.

The story is very convoluted up until you reach the midpoint of the game, where the plot sways between real suspense and predictability. That said, Yesterday does have a way of keeping you on the edge of your seat, and manages to pull off a great atmosphere.

Because the music, dear god the music, it’s not the best soundtrack I’ve ever heard, but it really brings feeling to the game’s locations as well as its characters. In fact, it’s easy to tell that the budget was mostly spent on the fantastic art (not as much as the 3d models), voice acting and fairly decent music. In fact, it was the backgrounds that really, really, really, really got me interested in this game.

Yes, I know this is not as interesting, but if I showed anything else, it would be spoiler city.

So in order to be spoiler free, I've decided to censor out the parts of the screenshots that give away the story.

Overall, the story was not as interesting, and truth be told, all the screenshots on the store page of the game give away A LOT of events before they happen. Which is quite unfortunate, because I’d get into a really neat segment and then I’ll remember a screenshot and the following pops into my mind: “Oh, the character survives in the end because they were in that screenshot of that place I haven’t been to yet. Man, I could really go for some chocolate right now. I wonder if the world is made of butter….pannnnnnnts.”

In all seriousness, I cannot stress this enough: the screenshots on the storepage really do hurt the game more than help it, considering the game is only about three hours long and you can beat it in a single sitting and basically move on.

It is quite unfortunate as there isn’t any other point to actually exploring anything any further, considering you basically have to interact with everything on your first playthrough to actually progress through the story.

And that’s where I have to mention the puzzles. The difficulty curve of Yesterday starts out by just throwing you out into a tunnel and basically saying: “wait, you wanted to know how to play? Fuck you, solve this puzzle. Are you confused? Here’s a hint: ‘Solve it, you idiot.’” And then the subsequent hints are no help either.

I admit that there are some puzzles that are fairly trivial, but the majority of Yesterday’s puzzles have incredibly incomprehensible solutions. The game expects you to know stuff that unless you were on the team making the game (or you are into odd culty stuff), you wouldn’t know. For example, at one point I had to figure out the alchemy symbols for Mercury, Fire, Sulfur and Salt. There are no other clues in the game to help you solve what symbols they are, you are just expected to know them already. Do you know the symbols for these elements offhand? Shut up.

Yay for solving!

I have to mention, getting shot with a gun means nothing in this universe. People get shot in the head and literally stand back up again. It’s incredibly stupid, especially for a game that at least tries to be realistic in the first segment.

Overall, Yesterday is a game where, quite frankly, you have a small experience and then you’re pretty much done. It’s like an ice cream cake, you have it, and in three hours it goes bad because you forgot to freeze it.

Yesterday is a great little experience that’s pretty interesting, but is it worth $30? Hell no.

Verdict: PASS

Review: Dear Esther

Dear Esther,

It’s with a broken heart, and a frail mind that I write to you. I spend days on the island contemplating the existence of man. I tread long, and tiring paths leading to what I hope to be is redemption. Many of my letters are scattered here, I watch as the grass sways in the ocean breeze, taking my letters and delivering them to the sea.

I contemplate life, read the scrawls splattered on the walls. Who made these, why was it written? My life torn apart. I grow old Esther, old like this island that I’m forced to spend my last days on. Maybe it’s punishment.

Or maybe I’m already dead, exiled to my last thoughts as a being. The path I travel on is split in many ways. Do I go left, or right? Or does it not even matter? Maybe I will never find the answers, maybe I will understand. While this mystery may never have a solution, I am glad to at least experience it.

The accident left crevasses into my mind and out from the cracks sprawl the nightmares of a thousand demons. He wasn’t drunk. He was not drunk.

But as long as I remember you, my dear Esther, then you are still alive to me.

And one day, I will float to the sea.

Sincerely,

You

Verdict: BUY