zadrotimus
4 reviews liked by zadrotimus
Mass Effect
2007
With the mixed reception, failure to meet financial expectations, and eventual abandonment of Anthem, BioWare became yet another victim of EA's money-driven decisions hollowing out the spirit of the company, and the disappointing release of Mass Effect: Andromeda just two years earlier made this blow hit just that much harder. Before all of this happened, though, their legacy as a studio responsible for continuously making innovative and gripping RPGs was virtually untainted, and since Mass Effect is probably their most popular original IP, I wanted to have the first game in the series serve as my intro to their games. Although I have been quite busy over the past month and had to devote most of my time to other things, my actual playthrough of Mass Effect only took roughly 12 hours, and while not every element of this game clicked with me, I still liked enough of its elements to say that I've enjoyed my time with it overall.
When it comes to these kinds of space opera games, I often find their core stories more interesting than their backstories and other bits of extra information, but I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case here. Don't get me wrong, the plot of Mass Effect had me invested right from the outset, but I found the game's lore to be genuinely fascinating, and I ended up having a lot more fun reading about the different races, wars, planets, politics, and technology that surrounded Commander Shepard's attempts at stopping the reawakening of the Reapers than I thought I would, and they also complimented the sleek art direction and awesome synth score. The varied cast of characters in Mass Effect also helped sell this game's world to me, because even with the stiff, robotic animations and use of real-time cutscenes where textures only render about half the time, the game's solid writing and especially great voice acting made each member of my crew feel three-dimensional. Despite the binary morality system at play here where you can only really choose to be either explicitly good or explicitly bad, the more major decisions you make throughout Mass Effect are able to transcend that entirely, as they heavily affect the outcome of the story while also having enough layers to them to make choosing the best option a much more complicated process than it initially seems.
In terms of its writing, presentation, and role-playing elements, Mass Effect was really strong, but what held it back for me was its actual gameplay. The game's combat is definitely playable, but it shows its age in almost every way, with the imbalanced weapons, clunky menus for using your abilities, and a barely functioning cover system made each shootout feel less like a game of tactical decision-making and more like randomly firing at whatever's in front of you and hoping that you don't get killed in the process. Speaking of which, the squad-based elements of Mass Effect didn't work at all for me, as the limited commands and genuinely awful AI from my squad mates just ended up making me use them as distractions or human shields more than anything. The worst element of Mass Effect would easily be the Mako, with its unreliable controls and the repetitive enemies and layouts for its sequences made using it feel like a chore during the campaign and a complete waste of time whenever it came to the already forgettable side content. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with Mass Effect overall, and while I do plan on completing the trilogy at some point, I'm pretty sure that my next BioWare game will be Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
When it comes to these kinds of space opera games, I often find their core stories more interesting than their backstories and other bits of extra information, but I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case here. Don't get me wrong, the plot of Mass Effect had me invested right from the outset, but I found the game's lore to be genuinely fascinating, and I ended up having a lot more fun reading about the different races, wars, planets, politics, and technology that surrounded Commander Shepard's attempts at stopping the reawakening of the Reapers than I thought I would, and they also complimented the sleek art direction and awesome synth score. The varied cast of characters in Mass Effect also helped sell this game's world to me, because even with the stiff, robotic animations and use of real-time cutscenes where textures only render about half the time, the game's solid writing and especially great voice acting made each member of my crew feel three-dimensional. Despite the binary morality system at play here where you can only really choose to be either explicitly good or explicitly bad, the more major decisions you make throughout Mass Effect are able to transcend that entirely, as they heavily affect the outcome of the story while also having enough layers to them to make choosing the best option a much more complicated process than it initially seems.
In terms of its writing, presentation, and role-playing elements, Mass Effect was really strong, but what held it back for me was its actual gameplay. The game's combat is definitely playable, but it shows its age in almost every way, with the imbalanced weapons, clunky menus for using your abilities, and a barely functioning cover system made each shootout feel less like a game of tactical decision-making and more like randomly firing at whatever's in front of you and hoping that you don't get killed in the process. Speaking of which, the squad-based elements of Mass Effect didn't work at all for me, as the limited commands and genuinely awful AI from my squad mates just ended up making me use them as distractions or human shields more than anything. The worst element of Mass Effect would easily be the Mako, with its unreliable controls and the repetitive enemies and layouts for its sequences made using it feel like a chore during the campaign and a complete waste of time whenever it came to the already forgettable side content. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with Mass Effect overall, and while I do plan on completing the trilogy at some point, I'm pretty sure that my next BioWare game will be Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Doom
2016
almost a good game, held back by memes and insecurity
doom (1993) is a game entirely focused on level design. you are 'exploring the level' at all times. combat encounters are part of the exploration. weapon pickups are part of the exploration. secret hunting is part of the exploration. every single action you take, sans the minutiae of combat (projectile dodging, bfg trickery, etc), is you engaging with the design of the level. you can beat every map in the game launched directly, with just the starting pistol and health. this is not an accident. levels are not scenes in a movie, or episodes in a show, but songs in an album. in this sense it (and doom 2, and quake) is much like an early mario, or sonic, or dungeon crawler. that hint of dungeon crawl is extremely important to doom; many spaces are designed to mess with you. you need to master the spaces to even finish the level. they're called "maps" for a reason!
doom 2016 is a game about systems. encounter design, weapon pickups, and secret hunting are all constrained based on how they want you to engage with the combat and progression systems. levels get cleaved into two modes: "looking around for stuff to unlock" and "boxed off combat." let me explain.
this game is structured around upgrades. in order to fully kit out doomslayer, you need to find all of the:
-weapons
-points to unlock weapon mods (hot-swappable altfire modes, two per weapon)
-points to upgrade weapon mods (2-3 per weapon mod)
-"mastery" upgrades for fully upgraded weapon mods
-points to upgrade the praetor suit
-second type of points for second type of praetor suit upgrade
-runes (think CoD perk system, or old LoL runepages), unlocked for doing specific instanced challenges
-slots for runes, unlocked for doing an amount of instanced challenges
-"mastery" upgrades for runes
that's nine different types of unlock. nine. for reference, the only one of these systems in the original games is "finding the weapons."
these upgrades aren't tiny, either. there's no Path of Exile "+1.3% Shock damage to Undead type enemies (Melee only)" here. instead you're unlocking things like "weapon switch speed." "immunity to explosive barrels." "bullet penetration." "reload speed for your altfire." "maximum health." these aren't minor things, they are the fundamentals of the actual combat system, the sort of thing you argue about in a competitive game. and because the game is entirely focused on its combat system, this means you only get to start playing The Actual Game - juggling weapons with the actual swap speed, using the various types of weapon mod, being able to double-jump with proper air control, or do glory kills from full range - once you find the right number of these upgrades. it's maddening.
note i am saying "find." not "get," but "find." because, yes, the obsession with upgrade systems infected the secrets too. the upgrades , or the challenges you have to do to get the upgrades, are scattered around the levels in random dead ends, or vents, at the end of "platforming" segments, or occasionally in actually optional chunks of level. you are often given three paths, two which lead to objectives (sometimes the same objective) and one slightly hidden one which leads you to the body of an Elite Guard with a Praetor Token, or an Argent Cell, or a portal to a Rune Trial, or one of 48 collectible Funko Pops, or some other nonsense. i think this is done to make secrets "Feel Rewarding," compared to the original Doom, where you'd usually just be given full health and armor, or maybe a temporary powerup. but really, it does the opposite. you have to find secrets, or else you are going to be behind on upgrades, and the secrets can't be too secret or else people won't be able to find them. the automap marks them on the map screen before you even find them, because they know you are going to need them. so, you are not engaging with the design of the level. there is no feeling of solving a puzzle, or "getting the joke," or just finding something interesting. you are just checking things off a list in the corner of the map screen.
i can imagine some rebuttals to this. "you can just not get the upgrade points," etc. sure. they can also "just" not make me unlock half of the mechanics in the game. this is one of the oldest complaints about Devil May Cry (a game these designers are clearly enamored with), or God of War, or any other Action-First Action Game w/ this sort of system - "the game doesn't start until you unlock a bunch of moves," "why can't you just start with Enemy Step," etc. I am not really fond of DMC in the first place, but it does eventually become a very good game once you get over that hump. i do not understand why idsoft decided to triple down on this, instead. and either way, these "you control the buttons you press" type responses ignore the actual incentives set by the progression systems, which the designers were clearly quite excited about having come up with, what with it dictating every part of the game. nobody would make a complaint like this if they hadn't built the game in this way!
anyways, while you're scrounging for upgrade points, you will eventually find yourself in a Combat Zone. these are (either functionally or actually) boxed off areas where enemies spawn, repeatedly, for a certain amount of time, much like DMC, or Serious Sam, or Painkiller, or other games I don't really enjoy specifically because of this "boxes connected by hallways" format. but at least the actual combat you do in here is pretty good. ultraviolence difficulty forces you to do a lot of weapon swapping, a la Quake 3 rocket/clan arena mode, with the positioning dances of Quake 1 or a Halo. the glory kill system is cool and gives fights a nice ebb and flow. it's pretty fun! at least, once you unlock the fun version of the game, where you're able to do the weapon swapping and do glory kills from full range and take more than 150 damage before dying and and and...
actually, no, let's talk about the combat. it's the only thing this game has going for it, so i have to give it more than two sentences. i want to compare it, again, to doom 93, because its the only way to explain the differences between the two.
the combat in the original doom is extremely similar to arcade scrolling shooters - gradius, xevious, eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package, etc etc. you can strafe, you can fire hitscan weapons, you can fire projectile weapons, you can fire slower projectile weapons that explode on impact. some enemies shoot hitscan, others shoot projectiles, others do melee stuff. the game mostly boils down to dodging projectiles, circle strafing, and occasional cover peeking. this is not a problem. it's simple, it's fun to handle, and given good level and encounter design, it can be incredibly fun and interesting. your ammo economy decisions happen across the entire level: "i won't use this weapon in this fight because i want to have ammo for it in the next fight, which has these enemies," etc. this is, again, a strategic decision that can be fun, or interesting, or stressful, or whathaveyou, in the hands of the right designer. in this way, Doom is closer to an older dungeon crawler than a modern first-person shooter. remember that the original inspiration for the id FPS games was Carmack seeing a demo of Ultima Underworld at a trade show, and going "I could do that, but faster!" Ultima Underworld is a very slow, simulationist game about having to survive in a locked dungeon. It was a direct response to Dungeon Master, which itself was a real-time, semi-simulationist take on the Wizardry/Bard's Tale/Might&Magic style of first-person party-based grid-movement dungeon crawler (if you've played Legend of Grimrock, you've basically played Dungeon Master). With this info, we can start to understand these early id games as a type of dungeon crawler. The first of the "real" FPS games they made, Catacomb 3D (Hovertank is a tech demo shut up), lifted heavily from Gauntlet, an early arcade Action RPG. Wolf3D is faster, more refined Catacomb. Doom is faster, more refined Wolf3D. Quake is... etc. This is why the level design is like that. This is why the item economy is like that, why Wolf3D had "meaningless" rooms where you pick up treasure, why you were meant to get lost. Even the "bumping into walls trying to find the last secret in the map" bullshit is lifted directly from Wizardry.
unfortunately, while making their weird arcade-action dungeon crawler, they also decided to give it a gory, hypermasculine speed metal aesthetic to complement its Blazing Fast Graphics. this opened them up to controversy, reinterpretation, and controversy-fueled reinterpretation. Doom, a game where you stumble your way through weird pitch black corridors filled with nonsense monsters, became something you played to prove you were a Real, Hardened Man of a 17 year old. (yes, it always had the chainsaw, the rampage powerup, the gore sprites - i've played it dozens of times, I know). this feedback loop brings us to the doom comic.
in 1996, which I want to remind you was four years after doom came out, Marvel released a one-off Doom promotional comic. it cold opens with Doomguy punching a bunch of demons while dropping bad one-liners. "I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!" "Knock knock, who's there? ME!" etc. on page 3, Methguy finds himself a cyberdemon. he exclaims, "You are huge! That means you have huge guts! Rip and tear! Rip and tear your guts!" And then he, well, who cares. Nobody cared at the time, at least. Only a few more people cared after Lowtax (eugh) dug it up for a Planetquake article 5 years later. But eventually, through the power of memetics, the phrase "Rip And Tear Your Guts," a dumb one-liner from a comic nobody had ever read, became the soul of Doom, to a certain kind of person. When the mod "Brutal Doom" came out in 2010, and added fancier gore, headshot mechanics, Mortal Kombat fatalities, and a bunch of other superfluous dumb shit, that impression of Doom went well beyond the Doomworld shitposters and landed straight in people's Youtube recommendations. That, I'm fairly sure, is how Doom 2016 ended up more inspired by a line from an ad than the actual game it's actually meant to "reboot."
The opening cutscene of 2016 ends with the line "rip and tear until it is done." The glory kill, the game's Clever Mechanic, is a "rip and tear" button. That's not to say it's not fun. Being able to turn enemies into health is cool, and keeps the game from feeling as bland as other "boxes in a row" shooters. But it serves that meme revisionism just as much as it serves the game design. This game is not in conversation with Doom. It is not building on what id was doing with Doom. It does not "bring Doom forward to a new generation." It is an adaptation of one single panel from a shitty advertisement comic book the creators had no hand in, by way of mechanics from "Character Action" games and the worst Eurotrash shooters of the mid 2000s. This frustrated me in 2016, and it frustrates me now, years after the initial disappointment wore off.
so. the level design sucks. the cutscenes suck. (have i mentioned this game has unskippable cutscenes? they're bad!). the sections where you have to stand around and listen to someone tell you that someone is trying to access someone's secret files through the Vega terminus in the ruins of the Archon reprocessor core or whatever before you can start playing the level, suck. they even do that Whedon thing where the protagonist, in world, gets mad that someone would have the gall to make him sit through an exposition dump in a Doom game, in the first five minutes of the game, and then they keep fucking doing it! the platforming, something they stuck in here even having eighteen years to take a semicritical look at Half-Life, also kinda sucks, until halfway thru the game when you find the challenge to unlock tier 1 of the perk that gives you vaguely Quake air-control instead of Halo floatiness. really, every part of the game, outside the boxes where you're doing combat, is either bland, or annoying, or Actively Bad. and the combat's only good once you've spent a few hours dealing with the upgrade system, which also sucks. the most fun I've had is cranking the difficulty in arcade mode, which lets you skip most of that fluff. not all, just most. i dunno, man!
I am sure the people who were peeing their pants over this game in 2016 were doing so sincerely. but i find myself wondering how many of them had played the original game, or how long it had been since they'd done so, and what they would say they liked about it if asked, because absolutely none of what's kept that game fun, interesting good for thirty years is present here. just download some mods for that instead.
doom (1993) is a game entirely focused on level design. you are 'exploring the level' at all times. combat encounters are part of the exploration. weapon pickups are part of the exploration. secret hunting is part of the exploration. every single action you take, sans the minutiae of combat (projectile dodging, bfg trickery, etc), is you engaging with the design of the level. you can beat every map in the game launched directly, with just the starting pistol and health. this is not an accident. levels are not scenes in a movie, or episodes in a show, but songs in an album. in this sense it (and doom 2, and quake) is much like an early mario, or sonic, or dungeon crawler. that hint of dungeon crawl is extremely important to doom; many spaces are designed to mess with you. you need to master the spaces to even finish the level. they're called "maps" for a reason!
doom 2016 is a game about systems. encounter design, weapon pickups, and secret hunting are all constrained based on how they want you to engage with the combat and progression systems. levels get cleaved into two modes: "looking around for stuff to unlock" and "boxed off combat." let me explain.
this game is structured around upgrades. in order to fully kit out doomslayer, you need to find all of the:
-weapons
-points to unlock weapon mods (hot-swappable altfire modes, two per weapon)
-points to upgrade weapon mods (2-3 per weapon mod)
-"mastery" upgrades for fully upgraded weapon mods
-points to upgrade the praetor suit
-second type of points for second type of praetor suit upgrade
-runes (think CoD perk system, or old LoL runepages), unlocked for doing specific instanced challenges
-slots for runes, unlocked for doing an amount of instanced challenges
-"mastery" upgrades for runes
that's nine different types of unlock. nine. for reference, the only one of these systems in the original games is "finding the weapons."
these upgrades aren't tiny, either. there's no Path of Exile "+1.3% Shock damage to Undead type enemies (Melee only)" here. instead you're unlocking things like "weapon switch speed." "immunity to explosive barrels." "bullet penetration." "reload speed for your altfire." "maximum health." these aren't minor things, they are the fundamentals of the actual combat system, the sort of thing you argue about in a competitive game. and because the game is entirely focused on its combat system, this means you only get to start playing The Actual Game - juggling weapons with the actual swap speed, using the various types of weapon mod, being able to double-jump with proper air control, or do glory kills from full range - once you find the right number of these upgrades. it's maddening.
note i am saying "find." not "get," but "find." because, yes, the obsession with upgrade systems infected the secrets too. the upgrades , or the challenges you have to do to get the upgrades, are scattered around the levels in random dead ends, or vents, at the end of "platforming" segments, or occasionally in actually optional chunks of level. you are often given three paths, two which lead to objectives (sometimes the same objective) and one slightly hidden one which leads you to the body of an Elite Guard with a Praetor Token, or an Argent Cell, or a portal to a Rune Trial, or one of 48 collectible Funko Pops, or some other nonsense. i think this is done to make secrets "Feel Rewarding," compared to the original Doom, where you'd usually just be given full health and armor, or maybe a temporary powerup. but really, it does the opposite. you have to find secrets, or else you are going to be behind on upgrades, and the secrets can't be too secret or else people won't be able to find them. the automap marks them on the map screen before you even find them, because they know you are going to need them. so, you are not engaging with the design of the level. there is no feeling of solving a puzzle, or "getting the joke," or just finding something interesting. you are just checking things off a list in the corner of the map screen.
i can imagine some rebuttals to this. "you can just not get the upgrade points," etc. sure. they can also "just" not make me unlock half of the mechanics in the game. this is one of the oldest complaints about Devil May Cry (a game these designers are clearly enamored with), or God of War, or any other Action-First Action Game w/ this sort of system - "the game doesn't start until you unlock a bunch of moves," "why can't you just start with Enemy Step," etc. I am not really fond of DMC in the first place, but it does eventually become a very good game once you get over that hump. i do not understand why idsoft decided to triple down on this, instead. and either way, these "you control the buttons you press" type responses ignore the actual incentives set by the progression systems, which the designers were clearly quite excited about having come up with, what with it dictating every part of the game. nobody would make a complaint like this if they hadn't built the game in this way!
anyways, while you're scrounging for upgrade points, you will eventually find yourself in a Combat Zone. these are (either functionally or actually) boxed off areas where enemies spawn, repeatedly, for a certain amount of time, much like DMC, or Serious Sam, or Painkiller, or other games I don't really enjoy specifically because of this "boxes connected by hallways" format. but at least the actual combat you do in here is pretty good. ultraviolence difficulty forces you to do a lot of weapon swapping, a la Quake 3 rocket/clan arena mode, with the positioning dances of Quake 1 or a Halo. the glory kill system is cool and gives fights a nice ebb and flow. it's pretty fun! at least, once you unlock the fun version of the game, where you're able to do the weapon swapping and do glory kills from full range and take more than 150 damage before dying and and and...
actually, no, let's talk about the combat. it's the only thing this game has going for it, so i have to give it more than two sentences. i want to compare it, again, to doom 93, because its the only way to explain the differences between the two.
the combat in the original doom is extremely similar to arcade scrolling shooters - gradius, xevious, eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package, etc etc. you can strafe, you can fire hitscan weapons, you can fire projectile weapons, you can fire slower projectile weapons that explode on impact. some enemies shoot hitscan, others shoot projectiles, others do melee stuff. the game mostly boils down to dodging projectiles, circle strafing, and occasional cover peeking. this is not a problem. it's simple, it's fun to handle, and given good level and encounter design, it can be incredibly fun and interesting. your ammo economy decisions happen across the entire level: "i won't use this weapon in this fight because i want to have ammo for it in the next fight, which has these enemies," etc. this is, again, a strategic decision that can be fun, or interesting, or stressful, or whathaveyou, in the hands of the right designer. in this way, Doom is closer to an older dungeon crawler than a modern first-person shooter. remember that the original inspiration for the id FPS games was Carmack seeing a demo of Ultima Underworld at a trade show, and going "I could do that, but faster!" Ultima Underworld is a very slow, simulationist game about having to survive in a locked dungeon. It was a direct response to Dungeon Master, which itself was a real-time, semi-simulationist take on the Wizardry/Bard's Tale/Might&Magic style of first-person party-based grid-movement dungeon crawler (if you've played Legend of Grimrock, you've basically played Dungeon Master). With this info, we can start to understand these early id games as a type of dungeon crawler. The first of the "real" FPS games they made, Catacomb 3D (Hovertank is a tech demo shut up), lifted heavily from Gauntlet, an early arcade Action RPG. Wolf3D is faster, more refined Catacomb. Doom is faster, more refined Wolf3D. Quake is... etc. This is why the level design is like that. This is why the item economy is like that, why Wolf3D had "meaningless" rooms where you pick up treasure, why you were meant to get lost. Even the "bumping into walls trying to find the last secret in the map" bullshit is lifted directly from Wizardry.
unfortunately, while making their weird arcade-action dungeon crawler, they also decided to give it a gory, hypermasculine speed metal aesthetic to complement its Blazing Fast Graphics. this opened them up to controversy, reinterpretation, and controversy-fueled reinterpretation. Doom, a game where you stumble your way through weird pitch black corridors filled with nonsense monsters, became something you played to prove you were a Real, Hardened Man of a 17 year old. (yes, it always had the chainsaw, the rampage powerup, the gore sprites - i've played it dozens of times, I know). this feedback loop brings us to the doom comic.
in 1996, which I want to remind you was four years after doom came out, Marvel released a one-off Doom promotional comic. it cold opens with Doomguy punching a bunch of demons while dropping bad one-liners. "I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!" "Knock knock, who's there? ME!" etc. on page 3, Methguy finds himself a cyberdemon. he exclaims, "You are huge! That means you have huge guts! Rip and tear! Rip and tear your guts!" And then he, well, who cares. Nobody cared at the time, at least. Only a few more people cared after Lowtax (eugh) dug it up for a Planetquake article 5 years later. But eventually, through the power of memetics, the phrase "Rip And Tear Your Guts," a dumb one-liner from a comic nobody had ever read, became the soul of Doom, to a certain kind of person. When the mod "Brutal Doom" came out in 2010, and added fancier gore, headshot mechanics, Mortal Kombat fatalities, and a bunch of other superfluous dumb shit, that impression of Doom went well beyond the Doomworld shitposters and landed straight in people's Youtube recommendations. That, I'm fairly sure, is how Doom 2016 ended up more inspired by a line from an ad than the actual game it's actually meant to "reboot."
The opening cutscene of 2016 ends with the line "rip and tear until it is done." The glory kill, the game's Clever Mechanic, is a "rip and tear" button. That's not to say it's not fun. Being able to turn enemies into health is cool, and keeps the game from feeling as bland as other "boxes in a row" shooters. But it serves that meme revisionism just as much as it serves the game design. This game is not in conversation with Doom. It is not building on what id was doing with Doom. It does not "bring Doom forward to a new generation." It is an adaptation of one single panel from a shitty advertisement comic book the creators had no hand in, by way of mechanics from "Character Action" games and the worst Eurotrash shooters of the mid 2000s. This frustrated me in 2016, and it frustrates me now, years after the initial disappointment wore off.
so. the level design sucks. the cutscenes suck. (have i mentioned this game has unskippable cutscenes? they're bad!). the sections where you have to stand around and listen to someone tell you that someone is trying to access someone's secret files through the Vega terminus in the ruins of the Archon reprocessor core or whatever before you can start playing the level, suck. they even do that Whedon thing where the protagonist, in world, gets mad that someone would have the gall to make him sit through an exposition dump in a Doom game, in the first five minutes of the game, and then they keep fucking doing it! the platforming, something they stuck in here even having eighteen years to take a semicritical look at Half-Life, also kinda sucks, until halfway thru the game when you find the challenge to unlock tier 1 of the perk that gives you vaguely Quake air-control instead of Halo floatiness. really, every part of the game, outside the boxes where you're doing combat, is either bland, or annoying, or Actively Bad. and the combat's only good once you've spent a few hours dealing with the upgrade system, which also sucks. the most fun I've had is cranking the difficulty in arcade mode, which lets you skip most of that fluff. not all, just most. i dunno, man!
I am sure the people who were peeing their pants over this game in 2016 were doing so sincerely. but i find myself wondering how many of them had played the original game, or how long it had been since they'd done so, and what they would say they liked about it if asked, because absolutely none of what's kept that game fun, interesting good for thirty years is present here. just download some mods for that instead.
God of War
2018
Despite how recently it was released, God of War has not only been considered by many as one of the PlayStation 4's best exclusives, but also one of the best video game rebootquels in recent memory and even one of the best games of the 2010s. Since it beat Red Dead Redemption II for Game of the Year back in 2018, I was curious to see what apparently made this game better than one of my very favorite games of all time, and after beating the game, I'm still wondering that, because God of War felt like a complete chore to play. This game did get one thing right, though, and I'll go over it quickly before getting into why I found the overall experience to be so unfun and derivative. Although practically every new AAA release tries to look and feel "cinematic", God of War did just enough in that aspect for it to feel at least a little fresh, as the use of one continuous take meshed really well with the game's lifelike visuals, rugged art direction, and ancient Scandinavian setting.
For every step that the game's atmosphere takes, the writing, gameplay, and heavy dependence on tired mechanics and systems make the game take a thousand steps back before ensuring that it steps on a giant bear trap. Now, I've only been able to play God of War III due to the unavailability of the first two games on eighth generation consoles, but I still thought that this game's combat was a huge step down from the original trilogy, as Kratos felt clunky to control with how slow his attacks, dodges, and parries were to execute. Fighting several enemies at once made me feel like I was about to have an aneurysm, as the issues of attacks from both you and your spongy enemies suddenly deciding when to land and when to miss are suddenly quadrupled when you have to deal with all of these other similarly annoying enemies, along with how the camera is so close to Kratos at all times that you can't even see more than one enemy on screen. What I especially disliked about the game's enemy encounters was how almost every single boss in God of War was a troll with a giant rock, complete with the exact same attacks and death animations that you have to see over and over again.
The unintuitive and awkward combat of God of War ties in with another one of its bigger issues, as this game felt like a mishmash of every single unoriginal trend that is present in so many modern AAA releases, and the use of those tropes is worsened by how halfhearted their executions were. In addition to the repetitive combat, God of War is plagued with a skill tree and a crafting/upgrade system that we've seen a thousand times before, and the former system doesn't work because almost none of the abilities you unlock for your weapons are nearly as effective as just pressing R1 or R2, while the latter system doesn't work because everyone is going to play this game in the exact same way, which makes the idea of locking the resources needed to craft high-level armor pieces behind a treasure trove of predictable and boring side quests even more puzzling than it already is. Speaking of which, God of War can't decide whether it wants to be an open world game or something more linear, so it decides to combine worse versions of each by filling the game with asinine collectibles and tasks that you literally have no reason to go for, with the only ones that were of any real use being Iðunn's Apples and Horns of Blood Mead.
Pretty much all of the clichés that I had just mentioned were entirely related to the gameplay, but they unfortunately made their way to the story. Not only is God of War yet another story about a grizzled old man and a bratty younger sidekick going on a journey together, but it also features the video game storytelling equivalent to bureaucracy in the form of having the plot constantly grind itself to a halt so that you have to grab some item or talk to some person before having to do those exact things again. As bad and uninspired as all of those aspects of this game were, nothing about God of War got on my nerves nearly as much as its aggravating dialogue and unbearable inclusions of humor, and that especially goes for literally everything that came out of Atreus' mouth. Throughout all 20+ hours of this game, this useless little kid never stops running his mouth, which also means that he tells you the answer to every puzzle before you even get the chance to think, comments on every single thing that happens in the game with some variation of "Well, that happened!", and constantly screams phrases like "FIRE, INCOMING!" and "WATCH OUT!" over and over again in his infuriatingly screechy voice during every single enemy encounter. Atreus is definitely the worst offender when it came to keeping me infuriated throughout the game, but he wasn't the only one to do so, as Mímir did the exact same things while also constantly spouting exposition during boat trips, and Sindri's running gag about his aversion to anything gross or dirty started out annoying before getting more and more anger-inducing as the game went on. Pretty much everything about God of War felt so market-tested, risk-free, tedious, and dull that I wondered what it was that so many people even saw in this game, and since God of War Ragnarök looks like more of the same, I really don't want to play that game at all.
For every step that the game's atmosphere takes, the writing, gameplay, and heavy dependence on tired mechanics and systems make the game take a thousand steps back before ensuring that it steps on a giant bear trap. Now, I've only been able to play God of War III due to the unavailability of the first two games on eighth generation consoles, but I still thought that this game's combat was a huge step down from the original trilogy, as Kratos felt clunky to control with how slow his attacks, dodges, and parries were to execute. Fighting several enemies at once made me feel like I was about to have an aneurysm, as the issues of attacks from both you and your spongy enemies suddenly deciding when to land and when to miss are suddenly quadrupled when you have to deal with all of these other similarly annoying enemies, along with how the camera is so close to Kratos at all times that you can't even see more than one enemy on screen. What I especially disliked about the game's enemy encounters was how almost every single boss in God of War was a troll with a giant rock, complete with the exact same attacks and death animations that you have to see over and over again.
The unintuitive and awkward combat of God of War ties in with another one of its bigger issues, as this game felt like a mishmash of every single unoriginal trend that is present in so many modern AAA releases, and the use of those tropes is worsened by how halfhearted their executions were. In addition to the repetitive combat, God of War is plagued with a skill tree and a crafting/upgrade system that we've seen a thousand times before, and the former system doesn't work because almost none of the abilities you unlock for your weapons are nearly as effective as just pressing R1 or R2, while the latter system doesn't work because everyone is going to play this game in the exact same way, which makes the idea of locking the resources needed to craft high-level armor pieces behind a treasure trove of predictable and boring side quests even more puzzling than it already is. Speaking of which, God of War can't decide whether it wants to be an open world game or something more linear, so it decides to combine worse versions of each by filling the game with asinine collectibles and tasks that you literally have no reason to go for, with the only ones that were of any real use being Iðunn's Apples and Horns of Blood Mead.
Pretty much all of the clichés that I had just mentioned were entirely related to the gameplay, but they unfortunately made their way to the story. Not only is God of War yet another story about a grizzled old man and a bratty younger sidekick going on a journey together, but it also features the video game storytelling equivalent to bureaucracy in the form of having the plot constantly grind itself to a halt so that you have to grab some item or talk to some person before having to do those exact things again. As bad and uninspired as all of those aspects of this game were, nothing about God of War got on my nerves nearly as much as its aggravating dialogue and unbearable inclusions of humor, and that especially goes for literally everything that came out of Atreus' mouth. Throughout all 20+ hours of this game, this useless little kid never stops running his mouth, which also means that he tells you the answer to every puzzle before you even get the chance to think, comments on every single thing that happens in the game with some variation of "Well, that happened!", and constantly screams phrases like "FIRE, INCOMING!" and "WATCH OUT!" over and over again in his infuriatingly screechy voice during every single enemy encounter. Atreus is definitely the worst offender when it came to keeping me infuriated throughout the game, but he wasn't the only one to do so, as Mímir did the exact same things while also constantly spouting exposition during boat trips, and Sindri's running gag about his aversion to anything gross or dirty started out annoying before getting more and more anger-inducing as the game went on. Pretty much everything about God of War felt so market-tested, risk-free, tedious, and dull that I wondered what it was that so many people even saw in this game, and since God of War Ragnarök looks like more of the same, I really don't want to play that game at all.
Manhunt
2003
Disappointing.
I can absolutely see why this game was considered a cult classic at the time, but looking back at it now, I struggle to find any enjoyment in it. And that's besides the fact that you need fan patches to make it work properly on PC. Yes, it sucks, but I play old games on Steam all the time, it's not something I'm not used to.
The stealth is janky as fuck. I am not expecting Hitman levels of detail, but the AI is clearly very bare-bones and easy to cheese. They never felt that threatening, my strategy often devolved into baiting them into the shadows and just quickly killing them off, and that was on the higher difficulty. Using sound and objects to distract the enemies felt like it had very random levels of effectiveness, and never felt like I could do it consistently. The combat itself is clearly intended to be the last resort, but it feels like it's rather easy to abuse as well, and can be the easier way to get past. The first couple levels I did get past felt incredibly linear and not really remarkable in any way.
Perhaps it's the disturbing feel and context of the game that is intended to be the real hook, but I have not felt even remotely absorbed in it. It all feels too scripted. The basic AI aside, the enemies just sometimes feel like they're explicitly lined up for you to be killed. I know the setting is that you're basically helping a guy record his snuff film, but with how everyone seems to be right in for the show, it almost feels like a silly battle royale or something. Maybe I'd be more accepting if the game wouldn't feel so fucking pleased about how "disturbing" it is. Also, while I'm not advocating vigilante justice, when you're explicitly told most of these people you kill range anywhere between a serial rapist and Hitler, it's a bit hard to find this game that morally questionable. The most messed up thing I did was kill a bunch of pretty much objectively evil dudes, which sums up almost every violent video game I've played.
In summary, I've played Postal 1 before, a game with even more basic gameplay, fewer graphics, even less narrative and detail, and it managed to feel more disturbing and morally questionable than this game, which I see as proof that it's mainly the fundamental design decisions that aged like rotten milk.
I can absolutely see why this game was considered a cult classic at the time, but looking back at it now, I struggle to find any enjoyment in it. And that's besides the fact that you need fan patches to make it work properly on PC. Yes, it sucks, but I play old games on Steam all the time, it's not something I'm not used to.
The stealth is janky as fuck. I am not expecting Hitman levels of detail, but the AI is clearly very bare-bones and easy to cheese. They never felt that threatening, my strategy often devolved into baiting them into the shadows and just quickly killing them off, and that was on the higher difficulty. Using sound and objects to distract the enemies felt like it had very random levels of effectiveness, and never felt like I could do it consistently. The combat itself is clearly intended to be the last resort, but it feels like it's rather easy to abuse as well, and can be the easier way to get past. The first couple levels I did get past felt incredibly linear and not really remarkable in any way.
Perhaps it's the disturbing feel and context of the game that is intended to be the real hook, but I have not felt even remotely absorbed in it. It all feels too scripted. The basic AI aside, the enemies just sometimes feel like they're explicitly lined up for you to be killed. I know the setting is that you're basically helping a guy record his snuff film, but with how everyone seems to be right in for the show, it almost feels like a silly battle royale or something. Maybe I'd be more accepting if the game wouldn't feel so fucking pleased about how "disturbing" it is. Also, while I'm not advocating vigilante justice, when you're explicitly told most of these people you kill range anywhere between a serial rapist and Hitler, it's a bit hard to find this game that morally questionable. The most messed up thing I did was kill a bunch of pretty much objectively evil dudes, which sums up almost every violent video game I've played.
In summary, I've played Postal 1 before, a game with even more basic gameplay, fewer graphics, even less narrative and detail, and it managed to feel more disturbing and morally questionable than this game, which I see as proof that it's mainly the fundamental design decisions that aged like rotten milk.