Tag Archives: 2015

Review, Video Games, Writing, XboxWorld

Need For Speed (2015)

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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