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Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

FIFA 17

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In some gamers’ minds, the yearly update of EA Sports games like FIFA is an indication of what’s wrong with Triple A games. Being asked year after year to pay for what they see as a roster update is akin to nothing but the worst form of corporate greed. However, every year EA Sports and FIFA try to do something new, something to give fans of the series a reason to buy the yearly update, and not simply stick with the year before, or whichever year the fans vehemently argue was the best. Sometimes that works, like the introduction of FUT a number of years ago. Sometimes that fails, like the upgrade of engines when we first went from Xbox to Xbox360. This year, EA Sports have taken a risk and not only upgraded the engine, but added a whole new way of playing.

The big engine change is upgrading to the Frostbyte engine. Whilst FIFA has always looked good, sometimes the players and reactions to the way the match was played seemed a little off. Like when all the players played the same animation before the kick off. Like when the players seemed to do inappropriate actions to one another when one fell over. Frostbyte seeks to change all that, and does a reasonable job at it too. What this means is the game feels more lifelike than ever. Players sweat. Player breath frosts in the cold air. Players move around like players should – for the most part. There are still some odd results of the physics engine, such as often it appears players will kiss and feel each other up, which can be hilarious if you have the mind of a 12 year old (which I have).

Animations, whist still canned, appear far more varied and lifelike. The way players twist their body away from free kicks, for example, is far more realistic than previous years. Player movement feels smoother overall, and whilst close ups of players still force you into the uncanny valley, the players look far less ghoulish than in previous years.

The impact on the way FIFA plays in general is harder to recognise at first. The ball play does feel a little zippier, and the bounce and movement feel a little more realistic, although there are times where the ball does still feels glued to player’s feet. Because of the physicality of the engine, the game feels more brutal than in past iterations. Players are grabbed off the ball and physically blocked from the path of the ball. They’ve even introduced handball! It doesn’t occur often and can be switched off, but I liked having it on, because it did up the realism.

There are small changes to the way penalties and corners are handled now. There’s a movable aiming spot which allows you to pick out your man. It is deliberately imprecise and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing, as my I used to be rely on corners to get goals more often. You can choose to be the receiver of a corner or throw-in, allowing for more tactical outcomes however. Penalties are prefaced with a controlled run up now as well, which makes them just a little more difficult to execute.

The other big reason they introduced the new engine is the new mode – The Journey. In this mode you play as young Alex Hunter, rising from humble lower class beginnings to rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons of the FIFA sporting code. In a very RPG light-ish fashion, you improve your skills via training and playing, face and overcome several ‘big’ challenges, and make a bunch of decisions which will change your life forever… or at least to the end of the 15 or so hours you’ll be playing it. There are several animated vignettes which push the story along, as well as reaction pieces where you can be fiery, cool, or balanced and these slightly influence the game in terms of how you are seen by your peers and fans.

I must admit I was extremely dubious about this when it was first announced. PES also had a career mode which was like an RPG, but it was pretty awful, predictable and tacky. FIFA went to the expense of getting “authenticity coaches” to help with the plausibility of the story, and I must say I’m impressed. Yes, the story is tacky and predictable, but it’s played with such conviction, I even started to get angry with fake twitter feed when they would riff on Alex’s performance! Alex himself, played by Adetomiwa Edun, is likable enough, and it’s his gruff Grandfather, asshole ex-best-mate-now-rival Gareth Walker, and comic relief Danny Williams who joins you when you’re slumming in the lower league who make the story shine.

You earn your spot in the team by doing well in training, which leverages the minigames to more than just loading screen shenanigans. The mode itself can be played as a team or solo in the “play as a pro” style. I preferred team, because as is usual with the Pro mode, if your team is a bit rubbish (I chose Burnley because Claret and Blue!) then you don’t get to see much of the ball, so your score doesn’t improve as much as playing as the whole team. Playing as a team does have its drawbacks though – you can’t control the team’s formation, subs, or attack / defence approach like you can in the other modes.

There are a few other annoying nags about the mode in general. Training feels a bit grindy, however if you skip it you tend to score D or F, which means you won’t qualify for the starting line-up. It’s frustrating particularly later in the mode, because you’re doing so well during the match, which is the most fun part of the game after all, but skipping a session means you don’t get to play. You can’t skip or restart a match, although there are times, either for story purposes or because you don’t qualify for a game, that a match is skipped, so it feels a little odd. And there are odd story moments too – like being told your team faces relegation although you have won the majority of the games you played.

FUT has had some minor changes, the impact of which will depend on how interested you are in the mode. The “Ones to Watch” and Holiday Specials (the latest is a Halloween flavoured one called “Scream Team”) are new ways for prices of certain players to be artificially raised. They’ve also introduced Squad Building Challenges, which offer rewards for doing certain things, like putting a back four together all from the same country. However, the rewards are non-tradable, and be aware that doing challenges will remove those players from your club, so choose to do these wisely, especially if you have traded high value cards or even spent money on packs and players.

The other modes such as Manager Mode and the International Women’s Tournament all remain pretty much the same. Japan has been introduced to the International Women’s Tournament, and the mode is still pretty strong, feeling different enough from the men’s game, and I’m fairly certain FIFA is the only sports game to feature a women’s league at all. It would be nicer if this wasn’t tucked away behind menus this year though. Manager Mode focuses a little more on your objectives as a manager, and these are tailored more to your team. Choosing a lower division team means you won’t be asked to win the FA Cup to survive in your role, for example. However, gaining a place in the cup will give your team a financial boost. It’s a more realistic approach, which is appreciated, but doesn’t substantially alter the mode.

Conclusion:
EA took a risk with FIFA this year and it’s paid off. The new Journey mode is ultimately silly, but it’s surprisingly engaging and a lot of fun. The new engine makes the game better, not in leaps and bounds, but subtly so, and it’s not until a few hours of playing whatever mode you prefer that you appreciate the differences and the sense of realism the changes bring.

Pros:
New Engine improves the way the players look as well as the way the game plays.
New mode is surprisingly engaging and fun, leveraging disparate parts into a whole.
Women’s football remains a strong part of the game and difference to other sports games.

Cons:
Changes to FUT can result in the loss of paid for content if you’re not paying attention.
Women’s football mode is hidden behind the menus.

80/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

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Mirror’s Edge was a breath of fresh air when it was released in 2008. Featuring an Asian female lead who was appropriately proportioned when most other games featured buff marine types or buxom wenches; a game world that was full of stark white splashed with bold colours amongst a sea of drab brown and grey game worlds; and featured a fluidity of movement in a world full of stop-start gun fighty games. It certainly wasn’t without its flaws and had many detractors throughout the game community, but it was bold, especially for a big publisher like EA, and full of promise for those of us who wanted something new.

Unfortunately, we had to wait 8 years for a sequel and 8 years is a long time in game development terms, and particularly with what has happened to the games industry lately. The games market has completely fragmented, with PC and the console market dominance being smashed by iPhone and Android games. The rise of the casual gamer and indie developer has pushed games in directions unheard of 8 years ago in terms of art and action. Diversity of representation, which has always been in the back of developer’s minds, has been pushed to the forefront of the conversation surrounding games.

With this context in mind, fans of Mirror’s Edge were excited to see what EA could come up with. With the story rebooted and an entire city open to explore, would Mirror’s Edge live up to its promise and could Catalyst become the next big thing ™? Well, in a word, no. Regrettably, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst tries hard, but when held up to its competitors it falls quite short.

Let’s start with the character Faith. I can excuse the developers for having her iconic sleave tattoo absent at the start of the game and turning it into a reward. As a player, it’s kind of cool to play through wondering how she gets it. But, without spoiling it too much, the when it’s rewarded is really too late in the story, and the way it’s rewarded is kind of lame. But that’s not the worst of it for Faith. Her strength of character has been greatly reduced by the weak story. The predictable plot and one dimensional villains strip her of agency, and instead of acting on her own and for her own sake, she gets pulled along inexorably and the player is simply there for the ride. It doesn’t help that Faith is still depicted as a teenager. I’m completely aware that I’m nowhere near being a teenager any more, but this doesn’t excuse the poor writing and plotting. We’ve all grown in 8 years, but Faith hasn’t and she seems wildly immature and predictably whinny.

Arguably, story comes after gameplay, and strong gameplay can erase the bad taste the story can leave in your mouth. Unfortunately here the game stumbles too. Quite often. Into an abyss. Where you wait an eternity for a loading screen to bring you back to the action. The first Mirror’s Edge was criticised for poor controls and 8 years on the developers haven’t figured it out yet either. Which is a shame because when it works, like games such as Sunset Overdrive, Dishonored, Assassin’s Creed, Batman’s Arkham and Infamous series, where exploration and movement are put in the forefront of design, the movement in the game brings an almost Zen-like sense of calm and achievement to the player.

And in a world where those games exist, it’s not like the makers of Catalyst had nothing to emulate. The Up/Down mechanic is a great idea – you hold the left bumper for contextual up movements like jump and climb, and squeeze the left trigger for contextual down movements like slide and drop. The idea is you get a rhythm going as you move through the world, stringing movements together and flowing through the game. Unfortunately, the poor execution results in Faith falling to her death constantly. The biggest issue is the amount of things the left bumper is used for – jumping, wall running, attaching your rope, jumping off the rope, grabbing a ladder – compared to the trigger which is simply slide down/under and land. Quite often you’ll want to do a standing jump but wall run, or want to leap from a wall run but continue in the direction without jumping. I suspect the bumper isn’t as reliable as the trigger, and fervently wish I could remap the up and down to the left and right triggers so I could get a better flow going when playing. Another idea would be to have the facebuttons mapped to contextual movements, so pressing the bumper and pressing A would make you wall run, pressing Y would make shoot your rope out for example.

Speaking of shooting, thankfully faith doesn’t ever use guns this time around. One of the biggest complaints about the original game was the weapon sections. This time, Faith exclusively uses her fists and legs to fight. You’re meant to use the environment and your speed overwhelm the game’s enemies – leap up the wall, fly kick off a flywire, and so forth. And yet again, the game underwhelms with tedious AI where it just bunches together so you can kick the enemies into one another. You can defeat all the enemies using the same move (Y and joystick back or to the side). Every. Single. Fight. Some fights you can pretty much ignore, though towards the end of the game you’re frequently locked in a room and have to fight all the guards to enable you to proceed which feels like shoddy game design.

What’s most frustrating about these issues is the open world City Of Glass is actually spectacular, and you really want to spend time here exploring. The world is sterile, stark, cold and beautiful. Although it’s pretty much non-interactive – people stand around and exist just for you to interact with them, you can’t knock chairs and tables and ornaments flying – like many open world games, there are a heap of secrets to find which fill in backstory and give you things to do. My favourite was the screen hacking. After doing missions or winning achievements you’re rewarded with runner packs, containing logos and backgrounds which you can put together on the Mirror’s Edge website and then hack billboards showing your logo across the city and in your friend’s worlds. The billboards are quite often difficult to get to, and it’s fun exploring how to activate them (but not constantly dying and seeing a reload screen). Also as in the previous game, you can also set up and complete with other players runs, trying to beat their time or infuriate them with near impossible paths to follow.

Conclusion
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst unfortunately misses its mark. Following on from the first game, the ambition and desire is present, and doesn’t completely fail but doesn’t quite succeed either. Maybe if it came out 5-6 years ago I could appreciate it more, but with some many other fabulous open-world games out there to compare it to, plus a very weak story which lets the series down, it’s mechanical flaws really stand out, and it feels like a let down.

Pros:
The World of Glass is fabulous and itches to be explored.
When you can string moves together the game really shines.

Cons:
Stringing moves together happens rarely. You die because of the controls, not because of the game’s intention or difficulty level.
The enemy AI is stupid and fights are always the same.
The loading screen takes too long to get you back into the action.
The story is predictable and Faith feels diminished as a character because of it.

70/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Unravel

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As a former game developer I can really sympathise with Coldwood Interactive, the developers of Unravel. As a middle tier developer, they spent many years developing games that were critically dismissed, but people enjoyed and more importantly, sold enough copies to keep them in business. But as time went on, the studio grew weary of making games where they had little creative control, and didn’t really say or mean anything. The sense that you’re working in a dream job starts to feel like a nightmare as you devolve into just going through the motions in a daily grind, constrained by the wills of others and not contributing to your own creative development.

On a camping trip in Sweden, Coldwood’s creative director Martin Sahlin found some discarded wire and fashioned a little man out of it. Later, he met some other campers, one who had a big yarn of red wool, which he borrowed to wrap around the wire. Thus Yarny, was born, and so too the desire to make something unique and profound surrounding this cute little invention.

Yarny is the protagonist of Unravel. It’s a 2.5 D side scrolling platform puzzle game whose uniqueness comes from the beautiful near photo realistic artwork and tethering game design. Yarny is made from yarn and as he moves across the screen he unravels, leaving a trail of bright fuzzy red yarn in his wake. Yarny can tether to sparkling points in the environment, and from this he can swing, tie knots, bounce and even push and pull environmental objects along the trail. You’ll use these mechanisms to solve the various puzzles in the level to avoid water, long drops, crushing gears and even wildlife. Yarny’s yarn is not endless, and as he unravels he becomes skinnier, and once you see the first knot in the yarn, you know it’s about to run out. Luckily there are places where you can restock your yarn to help complete levels. Whilst it’s not an earth shattering addition to regular side scrolling game mechanics, it does make a tired conceit feel refreshed.

What is also refreshing is the game never treats the player like an idiot. There’s not much handholding, and everything you need to complete the level is shown to you and it’s up to you to figure it out. It’s a game which invites you to explore and experiment. There’s no time limit to any of the levels, so you can play at your own pace. Although you’re constrained by the length of yarn, the checkpoints to refill are nearly always placed on screen, allowing contemplation and planning. You can always backtrack, although this uses your yarn, or respawn to the checkpoints and try a different route. Collectables are hidden throughout the level, often in plain sight, and quite often trying to reach them will reveal new tricks and multiple ways of solving the level.

There are issues with the platforming which mar the experience of Unravel. Often judging jumping distance and gaps often feels like Hail Marys, especially in later levels. Timing puzzles can be frustrating, and there are a couple of points where the respawn is too close to an insta-death situation, and you’ll repeat the same sequence over and over. The addition of a mechanic near the end of the game, whilst it’s interesting at first, changes the leisurely pace to glacial and the combination of having to hold too many buttons at once plus the difference in pace makes playing the level a tedious chore.

However, these minor issues don’t detract too much from the joy playing the game, much of which comes from the spectacular environments. Set amongst the forests and plains of Sweden, the game is full of beauty and colour. Although the levels are essentially flat, the combination of photorealism, dreamy lighting, and background movement is designed to make them feel alive and give an amazing sense of playing in real places. It’s helped by the fabulous animation of Yarny himself, as he gazes around in astonishment, flees in panic, shivers in the cold, and gets heavy in the wet rain.

Colour also plays an important part in helping creating the mood of an environment, with the colour cues helping present a feeling to the player. The sun dappled fields are alive with colourful flowers and softly move in the unseen breeze invoke joy. The industrial wastelands with the murky yellows, drab greens and dirty browns associated with toxic wastelands arouse disquiet and disgust. The frozen forest with its crisp, white snow hanging from deep green branches feel calm and pristine.

There’s not much of a story told to you, but you learn about what the game is imparting to you through the mis en scene (fancy word for environment). Throughout all the levels, there is something happening in the background with a story told through the mis en scene, from the set dressing and the props to animals and insects and even the weather, and it’s absolutely delightful to see developers use something integral to the nature of the visual medium in such a way. There’s no need for dialogue as everything you need to know is presented in the frame you move through. Unlike of what so many other games (and movies and TV shows) do and literally spell out what they want you to think, Unravel encourages you to think and wonder and come to your own conclusions.

Conclusion
Unravel sits in that space between indie game and “game as art”, whilst not being either. It’s clever, not wanky. It’s contemplative, not prescriptive. This is from an established if not truly successful studio, and published by one of the biggest publishers in the world. However, if nothing else, it shows that the most imaginative, beautiful and fun games can still come from anywhere, and there’s still a place for middle tier studios and even publishers.

Pros:
Absolutely beautiful game
Very cute character.
The string mechanic is a nice addition to the side scrolling platform genre

Cons:
Sometimes the platforming can let you down
Could be considered a little short.

90/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Need For Speed (2015)

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As someone who doesn’t drive nor own a car in real life, I feel like I’m probably missing something when I play most driving games. I certainly don’t get into the whole tweak this setting to make the car run at 1 horse power over its registered limit so the car goes 3 km/h faster than it normally would. I don’t get making the car look like it’s been thrown up on by an artist with a fetish for plastic airplane wings. What I do like is the sound of the engine and the feel of speed generated by the game. If there is a cop car chase and a cool soundtrack thrown in, then I’m happy.

So I should be delighted with the new Need For Speed. After taking a year off to develop for the new consoles, the Ghost crew working with the Frostbyte Engine have put together a really nice looking game. It’s quite possibly one of the nicest looking games I’ve played in this generation. The environments you drive around are beautiful, although most of the time you’re travelling too fast to notice. The only disappointment is you’re always driving at night. There is a moment where the sky brightens as if it’s going to be dawn, and then dawn never comes, but it’s still beautiful.

The cars themselves are spectacular. There are moments when the FMV cuts from the actors to your car, and it’s near impossible to tell the car is rendered in 3D and not actually there on set. And sound wise, this game pushes all my buttons. The cars sound as good as they look, with the V8s being particularly growly. The music is a cool blend of EDM, newer DnB and some rock, and thankfully not a dubstep track in earshot.

“Wait!?” I hear you cry. “Did you say FMV?” Yes, yes I did. And yes, I mean Full Motion Video, like Night Trap and Mad Dog Mcree, games that came out on Arcade or CD Rom in the early 1990s. And no, this isn’t any better 25 years later. Well, ok, that’s not very fair – they certainly look better as the 3D integration between the actors and non-physical assets is now seamless. This would have been completely shot on green screen, and much like modern movies, it is near impossible to tell what’s real and what’s rendered.

The actors do a valiant job, talking into the camera at “you”, but it feels very amateurish. The script is nonsensical and doesn’t actually contain any coherent story, which means any connection between you and these actors is difficult to form and maintain. There is no plot, no usual story elements, no “bad guys” to battle against. There’s this crew of misfit road racers, and you decide to drive around with them, and there’s kind of a love triangle or hexagon that’s hinted at, and then you meet someone’s idol (who is apparently a real life racing identity – who knew? *shrug*) and race with them, and that’s kind of it. Oh, and fist bumping. So much fist bumping. Every time there is a new scene, there is a fist bump. Every time someone leaves a scene, there is a fist bump. This game should have been called “Need for Fist Bump”.

It seriously baffles me why they decided to go with FMV. I imagine, however, the conversation went a little like this:
Mike: (Management Type Dude) “Holy Fuck, we forgot to include a story! We have Monster product placement but forgot to write a goddamn story for that product placement! John, run out and make some people and scenes for us! Dan, write a story”
Dan: (Lead Designer who once studied English/Journalism) “My job is try to make games fun, not write the story. I don’t know anything about the underground racer scene. I haven’t even seen “Fast and Furious”!
Mike: “It doesn’t need to be War and Peace, Dan, it’s a game about driving fucking fast cars at night. Just copy the F&F synopsis online, but take out the sex and violence… this game needs to be PG. Write it now or we’ll put you back on the match 4 mobile games team.”
Mike: “And put fist bumps in it. Kids love the fist bump.”
John: (Lead Art Producer Type dude) “Mike, we make cars, not people, and you’ve promised another 150 cars for DLC. We don’t have the time nor the team. But we are working with EA, so go get an animation team from another studio to help out.”
Mike: “Shit, we don’t have any animators free – everyone is tied up making Madden 16, Sims 4 and FIFA 16 – it has women in it now you know! Remember what Activision said… it’s TRUE!!”
John: “Damn the FIFA team. Well, shit, I don’t know, get some voice actors or something, and some real car dudes, but we’ll film them on green screen.”
Mike: “Fantastic idea! You’re promoted to Studio Head! Fist bump?”

The driving itself is rather fun, which is good, because at the end of the day, this a driving game, not a fist bump simulator. But let’s get something out of the way first – Need For Speed is an arcade racer. The driving is ‘loose’ and ‘unrealistic’. Your car will slip and slide and turn and do things it probably wouldn’t do in real life or in other car games. It’s meant to be that way and is not, and hopefully never will be, a simulator. Having said this, overall there is a little unresponsiveness when turning that is apparent in all cars. It feels like there is a lag between moving the joystick and the car reacting, and it’s not fixed through tuning the car. It is, however, a minor annoyance that will become less noticeable as you play the game.

Similar to other Need For Speed games, you rack up points when driving, and need these points to pass missions and unlock levels to upgrade your cars. There are a variety of skills which you can score against when driving: Speed, Style, Crew, Build, and Outlaw. Speed is self-explanatory – pull off speed tricks like 0-100 and maintaining your top speed. Style is maintaining good driving lines and drifts around corners. Crew is earned when you drive in concert with your AI opponents, like chain a drift around corners. Build is based on your build, and it’s suitability to the type of race and manoeuvres you pull off. Outlaw is about causing destruction and how long cops will chase you. I really like this system, as it’s fairer to drivers like myself who aren’t always the best drivers, but do enjoy silly things like knocking down street signs.

Points aren’t the only currency to earn in races though. You also earn cash, which is used to purchase new parts or new cars once they’re unlocked by points. It’s important to own at least two cars and get them early, upgrading and tuning them to different specs – one as a drifter to help you slip and slide around corners, and one built for pure speed. I initially wanted to “save” money by only having one car and modding it, but you end up spending more money on tuning and retuning rather than just having two different cars, and there are races which simply cannot be won with the wrong specced car.

The world you inhabit is Ventura Bay, which is apparently based on Los Angeles. I’ve never been to LA, so can’t compare. It does feel very similar to Los Santos though. It’s an always online world, much like Burnout: Paradise City, and you’ll see other players driving about, usually on the map or parked at the garage. We’ll get to more into that in a moment, but apparently a lot of people were bitching about this when it was announced. I don’t understand why, I’ve never had any issues with connection nor drop outs and only once was my experience negatively impacted, when Xbox decided it was time to update in the middle of a race, but that was ultimately my fault.

The entire map is unlocked at the start of the game, so you can drive around to your hearts content. Driving around earns you points just the same as the missions, and although you can always teleport to the missions, I suggest driving to the missions at first to give you some much needed level advancement. The game story is where you earn cash, and designed around five main characters who will fist bump you in the FMV story scenes to give you missions, corresponding to the five styles of driving. For example, Spike is usually represented by a green icon, which is Speed, so most of his missions will be races. Yellow represents Style races. Purple is Build races, so usually you need a specific type of car or motor or mod. Blue is Crew, so these always involve racing in teams, and Red is Outlaw, so usually mean racing causing destruction or with cops chasing you. The characters sometimes shift in what they want you to do, so there’s plenty of variety in the story missions.

Some missions you need to come first in either the race or by amount of points earned, whilst some are there just to further the story and placement doesn’t matter. The ones where you have to earn the highest points are usually quite fun, because it’s all about how well you drive. You make more points drifting in a pack than alone and feel more inclined to take unusual risks, like jump ramps, drive into on-coming traffic, and hand break turns.

The races where you have to win outright are downright annoying, because the rubber banding is extreme. You can be winning by a huge lead and then slow down to avoid a collision, and then be overtaken by not only the second place, but third and fourth. It’s controller throwing frustrating. There’s one race in particular which I’ve found impossible to win, and looking online I’m not the only one. Another annoyance is the other road traffic. There’s not much on the road, which is good, because it’s moronic. It deliberately veers into you and it also glitches – it can appear one moment and disappear the next, meaning you can swerve to miss something which is essentially not there.

I mentioned cop car chases, and they’re quite annoying too. As you break more laws, you rack up a higher fine which you pay on getting caught. The cops will set up road blocks and so on to stop you, which you can normally get away from, until they drop tire spikes, meaning you lose speed and control if you run over them. In free mode, this is fine, because you normally don’t spend a lot of time near the cops to warrant tire spikes, and the cops are stupidly easy to get away from. However, during an Outlaw race, where you have to do the race whilst being chased and rack up lots of Outlaw points, the degree of Outlaw-ness continues after the race. So whilst it’s rare to get tire spikes dropped during the race, after the race when you want to go to the next mission or whatever, there are tire spikes everywhere and you will lose any cash you earned from the race in fines.

I’ve only done one race in multiplayer, and the player took the first turn and glitched out, taking the opponents out with him. I was incredibly grateful to that player, as it was the race I have not won yet… however the extreme rubber banding meant the AI cars came and overtook me at the last corner. If you’re in a story mode race and haven’t opted to race with another player, you appear on the map to them, but you can’t see them. So on the map you’ll see what is clearly a race with the little arrows going around a course, but if you’re in the locality won’t see any cars or players. I guess this is to stop players trolling each other and parking cars along the route, but it’s very odd situation and creates a lack of cohesion between single and multiplayer. If you’re going to do this, why not make a single player and multi-player version of the maps, and allow one to be offline?

Conclusion:
Need For Speed lost its footing some time ago, and is still trying to find it. Whilst the game looks and sounds amazing, and the driving is fun for the most part, there were a lot of odd decisions made with this one – the FMV, the Always Online, Driving at Night, No Weather – which would have been expensive in terms of time and money but don’t really add any value to the game. My advice for the developers is to scale back the game, focus on what made Need For Speed so good back in the day, and forget trying to shoehorn in this and that to appease the masses.

Pros:
Amazing looking game
Great car sounds and good soundtrack.
The points system is far fairer than other driving games
Good variety in types of races / missions

Cons:
Car turning is a little unresponsive / sticky.
Rubber banding is ridiculous
Glitches of cars vanishing
Glitches in multiplayer races

60/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Goat Simulator

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When I agreed to review Goat Simulator for XBW I was prepared to get my snark on. I was geared up to rip it a new one, lament at how the democratisation of technology is a double barrel shot gun to the head of games quality, because on the one hand now everybody plays games so people make games anybody can play, and conversely allows anyone to make games so nearly everybody does, both which have affected the quality of the games we play.

But after playing Goat Simulator for a mere 5 minutes, my mind changed. Because, despite of everything, this game is FUN. Even though it’s full of flaws it’s still very much a fun game. And people have fun blowing up spaceships and jumping onto ledges and simulating armies of orcs and goblins, so why not have fun being a goat? After all, that’s meant to be the whole idea of games, right? It’s so ludicrous that it can’t do anything but make you laugh and smile.

The game is simple as hell. You’re a goat, and your goal is to create as much havoc as possible in the open world playground you find yourself in. Think of it as GTA, but instead of a homicidal maniac, you’re a goat. Or Skate, but instead of a skater, you’re a goat. You run around using the sticks to control the goat and the camera, and headbutt with the right trigger. Running into objects causes the physics engine to do its work, sending shit flying everywhere, racking up points. The more damage you do and the more tricks you string together, the higher your multiplier. Tricks include licking things with the X button, which acts as a kind of rubber band on items. You jump with the A button, meaning you can do some platforming and mid-air acrobatics. Press B and you fall into rag-doll. You can manual as well, that is walk on your forelegs, by flicking the sticks up and down, which is incredibly hard to pull off.

Part of the joy of the game is experimenting with the physics. Seeing what you can lick, hit and jump on. You can climb ladders and jump off highrises onto trampolines and be flung across the map on air vents. You can ragdoll in empty pools, effectively skating them. Of course, the game isn’t too well polished, and you can end up in some very odd situations. You can get your goat’s head stuck in things. Sometimes you’ll hit the right combination of things and get flung forever or through a building. In any other game this would be frowned upon, by the creators gleefully tell you if you do get weirdness beyond the normal, just respawn. It’s not like you have lives or a mission or anything to worry about losing.

Mutators are probably the best part of the game. What’s a mutator? Why mutators mutate your goat, obviously. By pressing Y, these allow you to do silly things like double jump, or dance, or spin really fast in a circle, or float, or tie rockets to your goat’s back, or turn into a giraffe. You can combine these all together, so pressing Y might make you shoot off your rockets and then float.

The game is full of surreal moments. It was, mutated into a giraffe, when I was laughing like a little kid on too much red cordial – as you run about, terrorising the humans who populate the world, they say stupid shit like “Never trust an animal with 4 hoofs” and “is that a goat?”. As the giraffe, hearing someone say “is that a goat?” is just perfect. Another surreal moment was finding an elevator and riding it to open to a rooftop nightclub. As I terrorised the club I ended up head butting the DJ, who is in a Deadmou5 helmet, and then found the helmet stuck on my head and the electrobeats pumping every time I pressed the Y button.

There are achievements in the game, with a long list of things to do when you start the game, as well as xbox live achievements. One problem with the in game achievements is they reset every time you start a new game, which feels a bit cheap. It doesn’t really record what you have done, so there’s absolutely no sense of progression. Luckily you keep your mutators. There are also goat collectables, and finding these unlocks more mutators. There are also timed races, where you can add your score to the global rankings. One nice thing about the Xbox One version is you can play local multiplayer. Obviously, this makes the ridiculous become even more so, as 4 player wreak havoc on an unsuspecting town.

But one of its major flaws is it is ugly. Not only do the physics do odd things to your goat’s head, stretching the textures weirdly, other game textures and models are pretty blocky and basic. It adds a kind of charm admittedly, but at the same time we are dealing with what is meant to be next generation gaming here. Not all games need to be super realistic, but games are meant to have a certain degree of finesse, and this lacks it.

It’s not a long lasting game either, as there’s no real sense of progression from session to session. Although there is a lot to explore and find – it is fun trying to get to the high places in the map and grab that collectable in the container – the two worlds you get to choose from do feel quite small compared to other open world games. There’s no real reason to return to the game, either. I’ve probably only played it for 4 hours, and that’s more than enough. I’ll show it to friends, have a laugh, but I’m not going to play it and come back to it later, like I do with FIFA or GTA, even for the xboxlive achievements.

Conclusion.
Ok, so how to rate this game? It’s buggy. It’s ugly. It’s ridiculous. It’s fun. It has a charm that is quite unique to this game. But is that enough?
Well, for $10 bucks, yeah.

Pros:
Unique charm
Surreal and funny
Lots to explore

Cons:
Very Ugly
No sense of progression
Gets boring after a few hours.

70/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Evolve

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Sometimes I’m not sure if my passion for gaming is dying, or if I’m just choosing really poor games to suit my lifestyle. I’ve realised I spend more time on both the PS4 and XboxOne watching video through the Plex and Youtube Apps. I got games with my Xbox I haven’t even looked at! And yet when I do play games, I feel cheated. I feel that “Next Generation” is really the same as other marketing bullshit like “Fresh Frozen” and “Organic”.

Evolve, the latest game added to my collection, feels like such a game. I’ve bought into the marketing hype and come out disappointed. Evolve is like a collection of everything from last generation scrambled up and packed as next generation. The four classes of tank, healer, support, and hunter is standard fare of any multiplayer game out in the last decade. The idea of 4 against 1 was introduced in games like Unreal and refined in Left4Dead. The witty banter mistakenly written to provide characterisation to dull, insipid character tropes has been here for as long as we’ve had 3D characters.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It looks fantastic. The character models look amazing, and are highly detailed. For example, the way the robotic eye moves on Markov the tank is a nice little detail which would have been difficult and expensive (CPU wise) on previous generation machines. It’s just a pity you only ever see this kind of thing when you start the game. Sure, you see the other players when you’re playing the game, but you’re never close enough to see good detail, and there are usually so much other shit on the screen to actually bother to care. I get it, this is “next generation” so I should be impressed with the amount of effects and filters and animals and shiny which can be rendered on my screen. But it’s amazing that graphics and displays can be so detailed we can use them to see inside far away galaxies and into our own very cells, but yet I can’t tell if I’m shooting at an enemy, another team member, or a rock.

The game plays well enough too. The balance between the monster and the monster hunters feels fairly even. You can still take down a monster when it’s fully evolved as long as you have all members of your team alive. But speaking of monsters, this whole evolve thing is a crock. All that is happening is the monster levels up during the game. Big fucking deal. Like seriously, this is meant to be “evolution”? The same thing happens in Left4Dead.

Worse still, it doesn’t even feel like a threat. In Left4Dead, it was always scary when you see that alert flash up. You know that if you’re caught alone, you’re screwed. In Evolve, you see the warning and most of the time you haven’t even seen the monster! Maybe that’s just the sign of good monster playing, but yet the best games I’ve played is where the monster struggles against the players a couple of times. Playing as the monster, when you evolve, you get stronger and get to add points into the abilities you already have. So, during a good game, you might catch a player out on their own at level 1, kill them (each character has 3 resurrections and then are out of the round for good), then run off to evolve so you can take on the whole team later. The old cat and mouse. It’s a poor game when you don’t even see the cat.

A major issue is finding games and people to play with. The offline solo mode is reasonably similar to the online game. The game uses AI to fill in your roster of hunters and monsters, and you earn XP after a game. You can play Hunt, a one off match, or Evacuation, which is a series of 5 games. After each game, the world “evolves”, so if the monster wins, the next match he might have plants which can help it evolve faster, or if the hunters win turrets pop up in certain parts of the map. It’s not a terrible tacked on story mode which is good, but it’s not as fun as playing with other players.

However, finding those players seems difficult. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of people playing the game. That’s when the servers are up. I know that server downtime is to be expected in this day and age, and I don’t know if it was unfortunate timing or an ongoing issue, but on more than one occasion my game time was stymied by the servers being down. When the servers are running, it seems to take a long time to find games, and I find I’m always on with the same people. Again, it’s hard to tell if this is a feature and I’m matching with similar players, or if there just aren’t too many people playing. Those who do play also tend to leave their headsets off. There’s no communication. I guess it’s better than screaming kids dropping the N word, but still, in a game focussing on co-operation it’s annoying no one is communicating.

I think another major problem is the grind of the game. Yes, you level your monster up during games, but it’s only momentarily and as I said, it’s only upgrades to your existing form. No new powers, and you don’t even look that different. After the match you’re rewarded XP like every other game these days and you ever so slowly unlock slightly better upgrades and even more slowly, new monsters / characters. The new monsters and characters go through the same slow grind to upgrade their weapons and unlock more new characters. Why? This type of progression is taken from Dungeons and Dragons which is 40 years old now. Why do I have to start off with a shit character and grind to be better? Why haven’t we come up with a better system yet? This sense of false progression is becoming really tedious.

Here’s the other thing – this game has microtransactions, but they don’t help you overcome the progression blocks. Yes, I know everyone hates microtransactions, you should pay for the whole game, blah blah blah, but the old model of making money from games has collapsed due to the global economy, piracy, ease of distribution across networks, the pricing mechanism of App Stores and so on and so forth, so the games industry had to change their methods of making money or they would have vanished. It’s here now, if you don’t like it get over it.

However, what is annoying is when games don’t do it correctly, and this is what we should be focusing on criticising. Buying skins in a game which makes you grind to level up shows these guys have no idea how to properly monetise their game. Good monetisation comes from a well designed level flow which limits your progression and only prompts you to spend money when you get stuck or want to do something faster. If these skins allowed you to earn XP faster, or gave you unique but balanced abilities, sure, by all means put them in. But this is just pure nickel and dimeing and the resources wasted putting this together could have been used elsewhere in the game.

Conclusion
As I said, Evolve isn’t a poor game. It simply doesn’t live up to the expectations and the hype the “Next Generation” promised us. And I think people who got the game quickly realised this and stopped playing. Its progression system seems deliberately tedious, meaning even the people love it dropped off perhaps quicker than they would have in other situations.

Pros
Well balanced 4 versus 1 gameplay
Great graphics

Cons
Absolutely nothing next generation on offer apart from the graphics
Progression too tedious
Can’t find people to play with online
Crap microtransations

70/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Dragon Age Inquisition Preview

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A day before PAX Aus, Xboxworld was invited to a preview of Dragon Age Inquisition at the very cool venue of Rutherglen House in Melbourne, down one of the city’s many laneways. Decked out like a hunting lodge with wood panelling walls and paintings covering every available surface and toilets and other rooms hidden behind seemingly innocuous panels, the portraits of the characters of the game blended in well with the surrounds.

My first shock was there wasn’t an Xbox One version of Dragon Age Inquisition playable. So this preview is based on the PS 4 / PC version. My second shock was just how nice the Playstation 4 controller was to use. This is why I don’t have either incidentally – every time I make up my mind to buy one or the other another reason crops up to change my mind. I’ll probably save up and get both during the inevitable Boxing Day stocktake sales.

Diving into the game, I was impressed by the depth of the character creator. I could have spent hours sculpting my Qunari Warrior, but instead I just pressed random because I wanted to jump straight into the game. And starting the game, it felt instantly familiar. The familiar ancillary characters from other games look better than ever thanks to the Frostbyte Engine, the sweeping orchestral sound track, and the wonderful environments took me to a place I have wanted to explore and learn more about since first setting foot many years ago.

But Dragon Age Inquisition didn’t grab me like it should have. Nothing immediately leapt out at me, shook me by the shoulders and said “you must rush out and pre-order this game”! Maybe I’ve spent too long in the mobile /indie space, where the market is so competitive you need to be grabbed by the balls right from the get go, otherwise you’re likely to wander off.

Maybe it’s because I chose to play a warrior, when my usual class is mage. I did this to get through the preview tutorial as quickly as possible, but now I kind of regret it. Don’t get me wrong, the combat felt nice, and I loved switching between real time and tactical battles so smoothly, but I found that I was sticking with my party caster more than my main character, with the melee combat not feeling as visceral as I would have liked. Magic has always been a far better mechanism in these games, and I’m definitely going to roll a mage when the game comes out.

And maybe it’s because I’m tired of the “Misunderstood Hero Trope” fantasy games so often use to tell their stories. Not giving too much away, you start out as a prisoner with a mystical ability and at the end of the tutorial wind up a hero, but then have to continue to prove yourself again and again and again. You know, just once I’d like to play a fantasy game where everyone realises, after I do something bloody awesome that no one else has been able to do, that I am actually bloody awesome, and everyone should love me, and stop double guessing me.

However, this criticism was short lived, because after the tutorial portion, the game opens up immensely and I got a glimpse of the variety of missions available, the fairly comprehensive crafting system, and a small hint at something darker within the storyline through some of the characters I met. It feels like there is great depth to the game, and it’s clear with the slow start this is a slow burn kind of game, as I do keep thinking about things I experienced during my brief time with the game, and I’m keen to get back to it.

I absolutely loved Dragon Age Origins. I’m one of the few people who enjoyed Dragon Age 2 for what it was. Hell, I even liked the Facebook game Dragon Age Legends! And from the small amount of time I spent with Dragon Age Inquisition, I know I’m going to be spending a lot of time with the game.

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Magic 2015

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Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 (from here on in called Magic 2015) is the latest iteration of Stainless Software’s attempt to bring Magic The Gathering: The Card Game (from now on referred to as simply MTG) to screens. Whilst the previous versions were well received, the game has never been without its faults, with often fun features from one version cut and replaced with others of questionable value, and some design decisions which made the game somewhat unwieldy.

Until this year, Stainless could kind of rest on their laurels, as there was no real competitor. The previous “official” MTG games before Stainless were atrocious messes which completely ignored the card aspect altogether, or were woefully inadequate for playing online against others. Other Collectable Card Games (CCG) which were brought to screens were ok, but none could hope to match the complexity and artwork Wizards of the Coast brought the MTG series, nor have the polish Stainless brought to the screen versions.

But this year Magic 2015 has a competitor. Blizzard’s Hearthstone has leapt onto screen and into gamer’s hearts (and wallets) with an unexpected ferocity. When it was first announced Blizzard were going to a CCG the internet collectively went “wha!?” Little did we know that Blizzard not only had a completely serviceable online CCG in terms of playability, but that the humour and style of the Warcraft universe would be so suited to this new way of playing together. And Blizzard’s amazing understanding of gamer attitudes to multiplayer matches and buying items online created a fantastic and fair system for people to compete on an even level.

Magic 2015 starts you with the tutorial, even if you’ve played before and know the rules of the game quite well, you can’t skip it. For those who have never played Magic and reading this, you play the game with a deck of cards classed into 2 major types – land and spells. Lands grant you mana, in which you use to cast spells. Spells include Creatures, Artefacts, Instants, Sorcery and Enchantments. Each type of spell can only be used at particular points in a round. The tutorial walks you through all this, and for total beginners it’s really quite useful, but it doesn’t introduce you to any of the new types of cards and combinations that the new 2015 card set brings, so in that respect it’s annoying to be forced to play it.

After playing through it, you get to choose a deck of two colours. These starter decks are not unlike the starter decks they offer at expos and in stores. They’re functional and work reasonably well to play, with a usual spread of decent monsters and other spells. What it doesn’t provide are any special land cards, nor any artefact cards. There are some cards which work in good combination, but on the whole these decks are based around getting creatures out and killing your opponent before they kill you.

The real joy of MTG comes from deck building. Getting the right kind of cards and combinations that make your deck really competitive when playing with others. Whilst the deck builder in Magic 2015 is quite good, allowing you to see all your cards, filter by colour and type and so on, there is a real issue with this usually great part of the game this year. In previous Magic games, as you progressed in the game, battling various planeswalkers in the story mode, you’d unlock their decks to play with. This year, however, you’re not rewarded decks to play with, only booster packs. The issue this brings is you’re locked into a decision which you might regret. For example, I started with the Black / Blue deck and I found it rather weak, but because you only unlock boosters when playing through, I found I couldn’t change my deck around too much and felt like I was stuck.

The solution to this this time around is to grind through the “explore” mode, which is indeed a grind and just feels like a pointless add on to destroy your time and force you to buy cards, or to opt into the monetisation method and buy more boosters. Whilst this is precisely the same method of monetisation for the physical card game, it works because you can sell or trade cards you don’t want with other players. With Magic 2015 being digital and not offering a way to trade, it really becomes a matter of “he who spends the most money wins”. Even though the boosters are cheap, you have to spend about $20 on them to be assured of the cards you really need to flesh out your deck to truly competitive levels.

Previous Magic games gave us other modes, like the two headed Giant mode, Revenge, and Arch Enemy modes. All these modes are conspicuously absent, meaning the replayability comes purely from the online mode. As someone who doesn’t like online games and usually only plays with friends, this is a real head scratcher of a decision. These previous modes were fun, and although they swapped them out one year to the next, removing them altogether just seems like a stupid and ultimately a brand damaging decision.

Lastly and something I find most surprising is the game itself is drab. The menus are really plain and need a lot of clicks and swipes to get through, and quite often become unresponsive. The sound will stutter as different areas load, and overall it’s doesn’t feel technically competent. The cards themselves are amazing and feature some true greats of the fantasy world illustrating them, but this amazing artwork that used to adorn the loading screens and story screens has been replaced by black and white images. These images are still great, but they’re not really helping to sell the brand. Considering the amazing artwork on the cards, it seems a shame not to see them in the game wherever possible.

Conclusion:
Maybe Stainless couldn’t cope with making this game work on all platforms. Maybe there were design decisions and issues between them and Wizards of the Coast. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by Hearthstone. For whatever reason, Magic 2015 feels unfinished. When they could have re-skinned Magic 2014 and just added more cards and would have fans flocking to play, taking away modes and adding in questionable monetisation methods means many fans are going to be disappointed, and will be hesitant to pick it up again next year.

Pros:
Great looking cards as usual.
Great tutorial for new players
Deck Builder is really robust.

Cons:
Unpolished interface
Removal of some of the cool modes of previous games
Questionable monetisation strategy

60/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Tony Hawk’s Project 8

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Never before have I had so much difficulty deciding if I like a game or not. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Tony Hawk franchise, and Project 8 is one of the best Tony Hawk games in a while. But the problem I have is that even with the new skate tricks, the new completely open world, the new graphics engine that makes things look prettier than ever is that it still feels just like every other Tony Hawk game.

On the one hand, this is good – the Tony Hawk games have always been great at creating a skating simulation yet I still feel there needs to be something more in the game to keep me interested long-term.

The story in Project 8 is a little light, but serves its purpose. Tony Hawk is in town, and is seeking the top 8 skaters for his competition. You begin ranked at 200, and have to work your way up the rankings by skating and tricking around the city. The city isn’t a real location, but rather an ‘Anytown USA’ type amalgamation of previous locations found in the series. The city is huge, and although certain areas are locked at first, once it’s opened up is completely skateable. If you’re good enough, you could grind around the entire area, from the starting point, a white washed and picket fenced suburb, to the capital district complete with faux capital building and beyond, to a hardcore industrial SUV factory.

To help you achieve ranking are the various pro skaters and celebrities who direct you to perform in skate shows, as well as try to achieve different activities around the city. This time around instead of choosing which level of difficulty you’ve going to try to attempt activities there are Spot Challenges. With these it’s all up to how well you perform the moves. For example, there’s a task early on which requires you to natas spin on a number of poles. Get a certain number of poles, linking them with manuals, and you’ll get an Amateur ranking. Spin on a few more, and you’ll get Pro. Tricks are conveniently marked too, so grinding lines have graffiti spots telling you how far to grind before you’re awarded with Amateur, Pro or Sick. It allows a much better flow to the game, and you can re-try tricks to get better scores and thus a better story ranking.

Each Tony Hawk game introduces a new feature, and the new ‘Nail the Trick’ mode is especially cool. At any time, you can click the controller joysticks and you’ll go into a bullet time slow motion, with the camera zooming in and the joysticks becoming your feet. Moving the joysticks will flip or rotate the board, and you can do any number of awesome moves. It’s tricky, as you have to get used to a whole new timing mini-game, moving the sticks back to their original position at precisely the right moment, or you’ll bail in spectacular fashion.

But now even bailing is fun. If you stack it, you can bail out and cause massive damage to yourself, racking up a hospital bill and breaking bones. Pressing Y bounces you along and whilst only having minor impact on the overall game, it’s still fun bouncing along racking up points for failing to being able to pull off moves. Whilst the hospital bills are weighed in Stokens, the in-game currency, money doesn’t play any role except to tell you how gnarly you are.. Stokens are gained by impressing the locals in the area with tricks, as well as knocking people over and stealing from them. But if you don’t skate away quickly enough, they come after you and knock you off the board, stealing all your hard earned cash.

One of the biggest changes to the game is the updated graphics. Finally here is a Tony Hawk game for the Xbox 360. The graphics are great, and although the character models sometimes look a little off, it’s probably more to do with the Uncanny Valley effect than something wrong with the graphics themselves. When you go into “Nail the Trick’ mode, in the slow motion you can see the wheels of the board spin independently as you flip and manipulate the board. Moreover, the board is completely separate from the skater – not that the game ever felt like you were riding with your feet nailed to a plank, but it gives you a better sense of freedom from the board now as it is a completely independent entity.

Tony Hawk games have always had awesome soundtracks, and this one is no different. Featuring Australia’s own Wolfmother, punk like The Ramones and Sonic Youth, to rockers like NIN and Ministry, to hiphop from Ugly Duckling and Hieroglyphics, plus a few oddities like Gnarls Barkley and Toots & the Maytals. But on top of that the sound engine has been totally reworked. You can actually hear the wheels spinning independently on their ball bearings. You can hear the wheels clacking over the joins in the ramps. And you immediately notice when the surface underneath your feet changes through the tone and pitch of the board.

Even with all the new stuff packed into the game, I have to admit that maybe I’ve had enough of the Tony Hawk games. Which is a really hard thing for me to admit, and I’m sure that Tony Hawk fans will lynch me for saying so but I found myself getting bored really early on in the game, and simply didn’t feel that addictiveness that is often found in the series. I guess it’s partly the fact the series has been so damn good at representing skating in computer game form. But I just felt I was doing the same thing over and over, and although the difficulty was ramped up, I never felt the pay off was worth the effort.

Whilst most of the time the game played smoother than the proverbial, there were a few times where I encountered some really odd bugs and framerate drops. Once I was grinding along the edge of a locked area, and all of a sudden I was shot high into the air, just floating in space. Another time I was getting air and did a flip, and the flip animation bugged out, so I was caught in a continuous loop for about 3 seconds. And sometimes, especially when you do a spine transfer from a ramp into a wall, you can find yourself stuck, and you go back and forth hitting the back of the ramp and front of the wall.

Online is the game’s biggest let down. There’s only one new mode called “walls” which is like the light cycles in Tron – as you move a wall is formed behind you. Hit another player’s wall, and you are out of the game. Unlike Tron though, you can hit your own walls without penalty, so it’s much less of a challenge. The other modes are trick attack, score challenge, combo mambo, graffiti, and horse. There are a heap of online leaderboards and achievements, but I’m not someone who is really all that competitive, and would like something more than the usual lists of ultimately useless numbers.

Conclusion:
Not being a skater this series has allowed me to live out my fantasies of being a hella cool skater thrashing and grinding and getting wicked air. And Project 8 takes it to a whole new level of authenticity. You can hear the different pitch and wail and see the wheels rotating independently when you go into the air during “Nail the Trick”. But even with all the new bells and whistles, I was left feeling Project 8 needed something different, something more. Truth be told, I became bored with the game rather quickly, and being the fan of the series I am, this rather disappointed me. I’m not entirely sure what is needed, but the series definitely needs something more to get me to excited about the next one.

Pros
spot challenges allow a continuous feel to the game
‘nail the trick’ is really awesome
excellent new graphics engine
superb use of sound

Cons
the multiplayer modes offer nothing new
the entire game can feel repetitive
a little buggy at times when doing tricks

80/100

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Omerta: City of Gangsters

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Omerta is, according to Wikipedia, a popular cultural attitude and code of honour that places heavy importance on a deep-rooted ‘code of silence’, non-cooperation with authorities, and non-interference in the illegal (and legal) actions of others. So, if you’re a gangster, and see another gangster do something terrible, you are not meant to say anything to the authorities. A similar thing exists in the game development world, where game developers aren’t supposed to be critical of other games. Of course, this gets broken all the time, and I’m about to break it again.

Because the game, Omerta: City of Gangsters, is the sum of all my fears with recent developments in video games. It takes all the crap iPhone / Facebook game ‘features’ and puts it into a full priced packaged retail box, and expects people to be ok with this. Well, I’m sorry, it’s not ok. Not in the slightest. Thankfully it doesn’t do the ultimate sin of iPhone / Facebook and charge for the ‘privilege’ of playing piecemeal, but the mechanics are the same.

Let me explain. Omerta teases you into thinking it is a strategy game. It has a small city map, representative of a neighbourhood in Atlantic City circa 1920, populated with little people walking about, with large icons scattered across it. You have a headquarters, and you have a bunch of goons to do things for you. In the first level of the game you have to establish a Speakeasy, in order to sell illegal alcohol to make some money for your empire. So you click the icon for “joint” and send your little dude out. It’s cool you can watch him actually do this. Then you wait, and the icon changes and a pop up tells you it’s now yours. Then you’ve got to click again and select a Speakeasy. And wait. Once this is done, your “dirty money” value increases slowly. The next task is to set up a brewery to supply to Speakeasy. So you select a goon, click on the icon, wait, click, wait, click, wait, and then click OK when it pops up finished. Rinse and Repeat.

Later, you’ve got to earn “clean money”. Yes, another different currency which can be exchanged for the first currency, usually at a loss, and accompanied with a period of waiting. But the process of setting up places to earn this second currency is exactly the same. Click, wait, wait, click. You can upgrade all the buildings you own by spending cash (either dirty or clean) and luckily here you don’t have to wait, but given the interface here I suspect this wait period was taken out.

Anyone familiar with the ‘Ville type of games will recognise these mechanics, and maybe that’s what the people behind Omerta wanted – an accessible strategy game for all audiences. But it makes absolutely no sense on the Xbox platform. We’ve got some really good quality strategy games on the xbox, and no one, absolutely no one, is crying out for Farmville on the console. Hell, if you absolutely need to play this type of game with a controller, there’s an inbuilt browser so there’s no reason to buy Omerta.

If there is one redeeming feature it’s the combat sections. Even though here they’ve completely ripped off Fallout 1 & 2, by assigning Stats to characters which determine initiative, Action(AP) and Movement(AP) points, and even the types of weapons and perks for characters, it’s still a fun system after all these years. If you haven’t played Fallout 1, it’s a top-down hex-based ‘dice’ system. The computer rolls dice and adds your player stats to see when you can move, how far you can move, if you can see an enemy, if you can hit an enemy, and how much damage you do to that enemy. Omerta removes the grid system, but else it’s pretty much exactly the same. And it’s fun, and to be fair the designers have tried to shake things up with missions now and then, like with the boxing missions where you can’t use weapons apart from fist weapons. But they do get repetitive really quick.

Although the world you play in looks ok, there’s nothing exceedingly impressive from one level to the next, and it all rather looks the same. This criticism applies to both the various neighbourhood screens and the combat sections. In the Neighbourhood screens, the icons on the main world view aren’t distinctive enough, so it’s easy to not be able to find various places you may need to. For example, it may tell you to upgrade a hotel, so you zip about the map looking for it and often can’t find the icon. The minimap is hopeless and is useless for navigation. There are coloured dots indicating if a place is yours or not, but it’s cluttered and some are different sizes without having a reason for the size difference.

Being set in the 1920s the sound track is groovy gangster jazz, and the voices are all typical ethnic “wise guys” and “slapper girls”. But the music and sound suffered from a terrible skipping. I can only hope this is due to a dodgy review copy CD pressing and not actually in the final game, as there still hasn’t been an update for it and it is incredibly distracting.
There is multiplayer and co-operative, but I never once got past the “looking for games” screen. Again, I can’t be sure if this is an issue because I have a review copy, or if it’s simply broken. I suspect the latter because it didn’t even tell me “sorry, no games found” – just sat on the search screen until I exited it.

Conclusion:
If Omerta had a persistent world in single player, rather than neighbourhoods which you played then left never to have an impact on you again, or more in depth strategy system when it came to earning money and resources, action cut scenes rather than stills, ok, so it still wouldn’t be the greatest game ever, but it would have been worth spending time with.

After playing two or three levels though, I knew I had seen all I had to see and simply persisted because of the review. Which is sad, because I really wanted to like Omerta. It’s a great idea by a small company and given the climate of games development at the moment it’s precisely the sort of thing we should be supporting. But by choosing to develop the game in this simplistic, “accessible” way, they’ve probably alienated the very people who would support a game like this.

Pros:
Cool battle mechanics (even if they are completely copied from Fallout)

Cons:
Boring mission structure
Overly simplistic strategy based on facebook waiting games
Confusing icons and maps
Stuttering audio
Online functionality never worked

55/100