Hey, still not dead, just been working a lot because christmas sucks haha.
I was definitely looking forward to playing this, I’d been waiting for it to go on sale for under a tenner since I got the first game for a couple of quid and it is an indie game I guess so that’s a fair price in my opinion. But the first is a lot of game for not a lot of money, the story, characters and game are really great and well done, so I was looking forward to this. Needless to say I was a little bit hyped. These niche little management sims are sort of my jam between big sprawling rpgs and stuff add in turned based xcom turned based strategy combat and I’m hooked.
I actually only wanted to play the first because I saw someone playing the second one and it looked right up my alley and it was.
The first game is pretty much perfect and the second adds in xcom style turned based combat and your cops have stats that are important in regular call outs and these new tactical missions where you actually control the cops as they stealth or blast their way to catching criminals.
Yeah well I already said ‘but’ but there are more buts coming because this game is great but I can’t help feeling like it just has more content for the sake of content. In the first game it felt like it was constantly evolving, you never felt like you were doing the same thing over and over, every day the gameplay evolved in some way. One minute you’re in an election and have to manage shifts so people work well together, the next you’re tracking a serial killer, or taking down a crime family but that never really happens in the second game.
Yeah sure you can take down crime families but there are only like three and it feels like it’s been really dumbed down but on the bright side you actually get to do a tactical mission to capture the gang’s leader which is really fun and satisfying. Another great change which is actually something I said in the first game review is that they added a description on the polaroids in the investigation missions so now you know what the fuck is going on in each slide and don’t just have to just guess what the expressionist art is trying to depict. It just tells you, so I didn’t need a guide for any of the cases in this game because I could actually tell what the pictures were showing me and put them in the right order. Just a little thing but it’s such an improvement, when you can spend ages trying to tell if a person is getting out of or getting into a car in a badly drawn still image.
But I dunno, the investigations don’t seem as interesting for some reason, they’re just kind of annoying and you don’t have detectives in this game so you have to commit officers from your main force to investigate them which is just dumb. Do small town sheriffs not have detectives? I guess not.
Oh yeah forgot to even talk about this game, it’s basically a direct sequel to the previous game where Jack Boyd is in hiding as he’s being used as a scapegoat for a lot of crimes for some reason. It’s kind of thin honestly because it’s never really explained how all this happened, it’s kept really vague because there’s no way for the game to know what you actually did in the previous game because it doesn’t follow on from your save file, it’s not that type of game with branching story choices. Which just begs the question why they didn’t just go for a new character, it’s probably because they wanted to keep John St.John (Duke Nukem) as their main voiced character. Which is understandable. But there’s no reason they couldn’t have worked him in just not as the main character.
So in terms of story you just need to accept that Jack Boyd has a cool mullet and a beard and is now wanted for some reason and he has to pay this random guy who may have been in the last game but I can’t remember or he’ll rat you out to the feds. And you’re hiding out in this little mountain town that I hoped would be a lot like twin peaks but kind of wasn’t at all but I’ll get into that later on. So of course you get back into basically doing criminal shit and favours to make money to pay this guy off and this is kind of where you run into the first flaw of the game. Money, you don’t really need it. In the first game the goal was to make half a million so in that the reason you got money was just because you were saving for retirement but *spoilers* it doesn’t even matter at the end anyway.
But you could also spend money on various services in game that were pretty useful like setting up a hit on a cop that was going to turn on you or something like that. But in this game you only need money to pay off this guy and buy more equipment.
And here’s where you get into my second gripe, the equipment, and my complaint with this is sort of two fold, it’s not interesting equipping your officers at the start of each day, it’s just annoying and time consuming, yeah there’s an auto-assign but it’s retarded and it never equips them with the stuff I want. The second reason this is annoying is because every call can be solved by an item. It’s just the instant win button, you can solve most cases with the tazer or the shocker/pepper spray/baton. They’re just instant win buttons and all the thought is basically taken out of the calls. In the previous game you really needed to think about how to handle the situation. In this you don’t even have to read the description you just click ‘use baton’ and the case is done. You could basically speed run this game with this.
On top of this your officers have skills and some of the options are skill related and they’re basically instant wins too, so if your officers have high negotiation they can end the call with a command, or if they’re high stealth they can sneak it and so on and so on. So all that really happens at the end is all your cops become jack of all trades and can just do everything and the difficulty just artificially spikes.
You see you need a certain level of professionalism which is like their xp to complete a mission and by the end of the game every mission is just over 2k professionalism nomatter what it is. Like you’ll need the same level of professionalism to take down a bank robbery as you’ll need to catch a guy that pinches a waitresses ass. It’s dumb, It’s not a realistic difficulty curve.
Another thing I found annoying was the crank calls were too subtle in this game and the humor is such that the real calls sounded like cranks some time. In the previous game you get some calls that are fake, just some idiot with a false alarm like in real life and you have to avoid them otherwise you can’t use those officers for a real case until they come back. Which you know isn’t how police work because they have radios and can go to calls if they’re in the vicinity. Imagine if cops had to go back to the station every time to pick up a new call. That would be retarded. They haven’t had to do that since the invention of the radio.
But in the last game the crank calls were pretty obvious and eventually you could spot them and avoid them rather easily but in this game there’s almost no way to tell them apart. I think it’s a lot to do with how wacky they’re trying to make the setting for this game.
I thought this game would reference twin peaks what with it’s setting in a kooky little mountain town or maybe it’s fargo but I’ve never seen that movie. But it’s not really like twin peaks at all, there are like weird cultists who worship strange forest gods but that’s always off to the side, it’s not really that relevant to the main plot, it doesn’t really go anywhere. The main ‘villain’ if you can call him that is just this retired military colonel, but he’s not really a villain as much as he’s just someone in your way, kind of, that goes for pretty much every ‘villain’ in this game. I dunno the characters in this game just felt a little flat and generic and the story doesn’t do much with them, they don’t have arcs or move on from the story of the first game as much as they just wallow it. The story almost just feels like an add on or a dlc despite how much it clearly improves upon the game.
But for all it’s improvements and addons some are just irritating like managing each cops inventory and there’s this fucking irritating part where the cook for the station goes on her honeymoon and you have to pick food for everyone matching their specific requirements and it’s just annoying. There’s nothing fun or interesting about picking what food they eat and you can lose their respect if you choose food they don’t like, it’s not a fun gameplay addition, it’s just an annoying hurdle to waste your time. There’s a line between fun and challenging and annoying time wasting.
That’s something I forgot to mention, there’s a respect system in this game where basically if you get the cops to like you they dress properly and they’ll listen to you. If they don’t respect you they dress sloppily, they refuse to work consecutive days and they out right do whatever the hell they want on tactical missions so for the love of fuck don’t ever use them for that. They also won’t go out on calls if you send them with another cop that doesn’t respect you. So getting their respect is really important.
This sounds interesting but they can lose respect for you for the most asinine reasons like you don’t let them take off work to scratch their balls. I had this one quit because I hired a masseuse for the station which I thought everyone would like but this guy was like “that masseuse touched my cock, I didn’t know this station was home to rampant faggotry” or something nuts like that and he just fucking quit. How was I supposed to foresee that outcome?? How would I ever know that was a possibility? It’s just fucking bullshit there solely to trip you up. The game is kind of full of moments like that, situations that happen that you would need fucking psychic powers to predict and just becomes frustrating.
I really liked the gameplay though, I’m a big fan of xcom and it really steps up in that respect. The combat and the guns feel nice(feel might not be the right word since I’m not handling them, they sound good), although you only get to use their revolvers but I like how they work. Basically they’re one shot kills but you can choose whether to hit them in the hand and try to disarm them so you can arrest them, shoot them in the head and kill them, in the leg and hobble them, or as I always go centre mass, because that downs them but it takes them a while to die so if you finish the stage before their life timer runs out they live. The game rewards you for suspects you take alive, so you’re encouraged to and I prefer to go quiet and use batons and tazers to stun and cuff them and then shoot to wound them and take them alive. But you can just literally stab them all to death which is quicker and easier but feels less immersive to me having cops going Sam fischer on a guy and it lowers your score which is in can ring pulls (I guess bottlecaps would’ve been derivative) and you trade these pulls for more cops and equipment.
Because the premise of the game is basically you’re working for the real sheriff who’s really inexperienced and she is trading equipment and men for how well you perform.
Overall the gameplay is good, I would’ve liked it to be a little more like xcom where you can unlock more equipment instead of just skills and perks and the stealth is a little bare bones, if one guy sees you that’s pretty much done for the stealth portion, now every enemy knows where you are haha. Also weirdly when you play xcom there are basically infinite tactical missions you can do randomly generated to a point where it gets sort of tedious but in this game there feels like there aren’t enough. Because they’re really fun and tense and brutal because you can’t save scum so you’re basically permanently on iron man mode unless you want to redo the whole day because these missions usually pop up at the end of the day. And your cops aren’t armoured, they have the same health as the enemies so one shot and you’re done, if it’s in the leg you can’t move, in the hand you can’t shoot, centre mass and you’re bleeding out, headshot and it’s goodnight. And on top of that if they’re injured in the mission they’ll be out of commission for a couple of days. And for some reason when one of your cops is shot there’s no like medic mechanic, not one of your cops knows first aid, so that person just has to limp away and hide and bleed until the end of the match. So it’s tense, but there aren’t really enough of them and there’s this one later on that almost made me fucking rage quit.
Basically I think it’s the second to last tactical mission in the game, you had to take down this whole camp of guys without being spotted once, because if you got spotted it was an instant fail state and you had to start right from the beginning. And once you’ve chosen the guys to go on the mission you can’t change them unless you want to restart the day. Just stuff like that is really annoying and I don’t see why the mission couldn’t have just carried on or you could get another chance of taking down the person who saw you before they raise the alarm. Bare in mind all my guys are like max rank with top stealth and stuff, but no if they get spotted or someone finds a body it’s done and I don’t think you can hide bodies, despite the fact there’s a perk where you can pick up injured people and carry them. So why can’t they move bodies or hide them?
Overall all these missions are pretty great which makes it sting even more that the last mission is this really boring easy tower defence mission. I mean the last mission in the first game was more interesting and you didn’t even get to play it, you could only play it out in your imagination as you set it up.
Also I would’ve liked more control over planning the raids like the assault in the first game. You could decide what men to put where, in this game you can only decide who to place you can’t decide where to place them. You just gather intel and fill slots, there’s little to no strategy in planning the assaults. But the level design, I just feel like they could’ve done more with it, there could’ve been more going on with the story in these missions. They could’ve been more dynamic and worked into the plot like you find a weird altar with human sacrifices or you stumble upon a conspiracy or another serial killer.
It gets into my whole feeling towards this game, it feels shorter and less developed than the first despite having more content. It’s like they put more effort into nuts and bolts gameplay than the story and the world than they did in the first. The ending left me just totally cold, zero emotional resonance, it was just kind of meh and it didn’t fit and I constantly felt like I was on the outside of the story. It also didn’t really resolve what happened with Jack’s wife in the first game which really pissed me off. It just feels unfinished and like they were trying to be mysterious or ambiguous with the plot but it just didn’t suck me in enough for me to give a shit. They don’t do much with the pagan cults and forest spirits, I really thought that was going to be core to the plot like twin peaks but it’s really not, it’s just a fun side thing which is fine. I just wanted a deeper, weirder experience. I feel like this game kind of played it safe and just added gameplay but took no real risks with the story or world building.
Also I’m lead to believe there was a good ending and a bad ending which I fucking hate in games. I much preferred the ending of the first where it wasn’t a moral choice as much as it was between two people. You chose whoever you thought would fuck you over the least but *spoilers* they both fuck you over haha.
What bugs me is this game is so niche I can’t even really find accurate guides or people talking about the endings. I’m gonna have to dig to even find the good ending. Which I think I read somewhere you can only get if you do zero illegal shit which I’m not sure is even possible or what this game even counts as illegal stuff because this game is never really black and white with it’s moral choices. I can’t see how you’d make any money in this game without cutting corners and committing crimes, I made most of my money selling drugs and evidence. In the previous game you actually had a salary that I don’t think you get in this game so I don’t see how else you’re going to get the money in time to pay for the silence of the asshole leaning on you. I mean that’s the justification for taking the short cuts in the first place. The reason you do illegal stuff in the first game is because it makes you money which you need for retirement but also because if you don’t and you piss off the mafia they’ll just kill you.
But in this game if it wasn’t for the blackmailer you could probably just not be a dirty cop haha. But I guess him turning you over to the feds is the equivalence in this game for the mob killing you.
Ok a lot of waffling there, I really liked the game, I had a lot of fun with it. I really liked the new combat system but I feel they kind of slipped up on a lot of things they did right in the first game. So in all honesty, I think as a whole I preferred the first game. But maybe it’s because I didn’t expect much from the first game and I had higher expectations from the sequel.
Minor niggles I thought the writing was verbose to the point of hair pulling. Characters in this game will take ten times the amount of words to say something as is necessary. Were the writers in this game paid by the word? I mean even the text is too long, you get these fucking text crawls, short essays that are small even to read on a big screen tv and all they’re basically saying is “I need a strong cop to move some boxes”. Why the fuck couldn’t you have just said that? Why did it take like 500 words to get to “I need cop with strong stat”. I get it’s world/character building but some of these characters are just random one offs. It just feels like a needless waste of time and an editor could have cut this down. I mean again there’s a line between interesting world building and annoying time wasting. Eventually I’m going to stop giving a shit and just scan what they’re saying to get to what they want.
I have ranted enough and despite all this bitching I would still definitely recommend it, it’s a great game, if you like xcom and mutant year zero and games like that, definitely pick it up, for the price you can’t go wrong.
I’d kind of blown my load when it came to whats on offer on gamepass after the thoroughly disappointing Outer Worlds, a game I wasn’t even that hyped for so what could’ve been a pleasant surprise was just a shallow passionless borefest. After that I went back to rage quit Shadow of War which is an ok game, I really love the nemesis system, which is like this cool orc hierarchy where you can pit orcs against each and engage in a rudimentary form of politics at the end of a sword.
It’s a fun and really innovative system that I wish was in a more interesting game because aside from the nemesis system the game really doesn’t have much to offer. It’s basically discount assassin’s creed in a universe I don’t care about. The characters story and gameplay are just meh and they made the sequel more grindy so unless you have a good narrative hook or really enjoy the combat the grind doesn’t feel worth it. Especially when the loot is different skins for the same armour and weapons which only change the number next to the name.
I was kinda tempted to do another stellaris run but that’s kinda the same situation, it’s fun but I suck at it and the amount of time I spend on it just seems like a losing battle. I tried to play Planetfall that game that has the longest name ever but I just couldn’t get into it. I just hate the art style, I can’t describe it, it just feels like stellaris lite. It has settlement management but it doesn’t feel as in depth, it feels more casual and I didn’t really like the combat, it’s like a mix of xcom and stellaris but it lacks all the punch of either. I love how in xcom all your men have names and specific skills and nicknames. Which is why I’m playing This is the police 2 right now which is excellent and there’s a review in the works for that.
But yeah what was this post about again… oh yeah Rage 2, it’s pretty good. The end.
Ok no so this game wasn’t that interesting to me when I saw it announced, I liked the first kinda but I really didn’t see the need for a sequel, especially after doom and the underrated mad max game, I see even less reason for this to exist. And according to the reviews it had a disastrous launch, the reviews savage it for being totally bug ridden and unplayable but as it stands on gamepass right now I ran into minimal bugs and the game is totally fine now. The first Rage was the first time I realised how much dlc was total bullshit and literally just hacked a part out of your full game and sold it back to you and that really pissed me off. Because in Rage 1 there was literally an area in game I couldn’t enter because it was dlc, like it was right there but it was asking me for money to enter it in the full game I purchased with my money. That’s like buying admission to a waterpark and then getting charged to go down a waterslide, or no paying for penis enlargement and then being charged each time you jerk off haha. It was total bullshit then and it’s total bullshit now. Dlc should be an extra thing made after the base game, not just a part of the base game they stole.
Ok rant over.
So I wasn’t that hyped for this game but I thought Doom 2016 was ok and this has the same engine I think, so yeah it’s basically Doom 2016 meets mad max which is pretty cool.
The start of the game is pretty fucking generic honestly, don’t go expecting an enthralling immersive world or story even close to something like fallout or mass effect, the story is really campy nonsense (I mean tbf so was doom 2016) but thankfully it does an ok job of staying out of the way. But I much prefer the tone of games like Elite and mad max where it takes itself seriously but the story is either non existent or just serves to drive the game forward.
The tone in Rage is like a loose comedic style, like borderlands but with a less cringy art style and it takes itself a little more seriously. But the world is sort of cartoony with very little interaction. Don’t go into this game expecting Metro levels of immersion and story telling or Fallout levels of quests and quest givers. I ignored most of the side quests as all they really do is highlight a spot on the map you were going to fuck up anyway haha.
But in all honesty the loot system is pretty good, ten times better than Outer Worlds where all you ever find is money and more lockpicks to pick doors that hide money and more lockpicks. The loot is actually stuff you need, mainly feltrite which you use to upgrade your guns and powers and money you use to buy more mods for your guns and powers. Also how you progress and get new weapons and powers is really good and fun and works really well so you’re not getting too over powered too quickly but you want to track this stuff down. It also makes sure that the weapons are all unique and interesting and satisfying. This isn’t like outer worlds or borderlands where you’ll be tossing out guns every ten minutes because you found one with a slightly higher number next to it’s name, this is a hybrid shooter. When you pick up a gun you’ve basically got a whole new playstyle and they all feel really distinct and unique. Which is the same with the powers, which I’ll get into later.
So guns, it’s a shooter, how do the guns feel? They feel fucking amazing ok, I judge all shooters by their shotgun and when I picked up the shotgun in this game I didn’t want to use any other weapon and I didn’t for most of the game because that shotgun is so satisfying to use. It feels and sounds really powerful and it looks super cool, I can’t really say if I liked the Doom 2016 one more or not, it’s been a while since I played it. But the weapons feel great in this game. Also biggest thing for me is it has an upgrade system but you can’t upgrade the power of the weapon which is just how it should be, you can only upgrade the capacity/reload speed stuff like that. What does that mean? Well that means when you pick up the shotgun it doesn’t fire bunny farts, you pick up a shotgun and it’s a shotgun upgrades or not, you fire it, the thing on the loud end is gonna be dead.
The powers are pretty nice and I found myself wanting to upgrade them and use them all and they’re really nicely mapped on the controller so you don’t need to cycle through them. So you want to use them and they’re very intuitive in how you use them, there was never a power that I was like “that’s fucking useless”. I used them all and the great thing is there’s no lame mana bar, there’s just a cooldown on each ability and you can upgrade them to shrink the cooldown which is perfect for me. I really hate games that have mana pools where you have to like chug magic potions or eat energy bars to use your abilities, a cool down is much better (or you could just use both like Prey 2017 for some fucking reason) it stops you from spamming them and makes you think more tactically about using them but you get a feel for them and you don’t have to keep topping your power up. Some of the powers are freaking cool too, my favourite is like something straight out of crank, it’s basically a power where if you die you get to do this little qte and your power suit will shock your heart basically bringing you back to life, which is just totally cool. But it has a cool down so if you die again in like the next couple of minutes you’re toast. It just gives you a second change to get back into the game, activate your rage mode and fuck things up haha. It all just works really well and the powers are fun and fit into the world and they make you feel powerful.
Vehicles were ok, but it’s hard to put this up against a game like mad max where so much effort was put into a game about vehicles, compared to that they’re just ok and the vehicle combat is kind of easy because you have mounted gun on the first car you get and it’s not in first person, it switches to 3rd person camera when you get in a vehicle which I hate honestly. I prefer 1st person camera at all times because it’s more immersive. I like to feel like I’m in a vehicle, see the steering wheel and dash like metro and elite and far cry. The vehicles are kind of where this game loses a step because there are a bunch of vehicles in this game but you can only upgrade the first one you get and vehicle combat isn’t that necessary for the story or progression at all. And you get this sick hoverbike really early in the game that basically breaks the game and makes all other vehicles pointless because you can get anywhere twice as fast on the hoverbike because it’s basically a helicopter, all obstacles and enemies btfo, I can just fly over you. There are like road blocks set up by bandits trying to kill and rob people, I can just fly over them giving them the finger if I want.
But this is a game where you do want to go these bases and kill enemies, one; because you need the loot to upgrade your guns and powers and two; because the combat is fun as fuck.
I just wanna compare the gameplay loop of this to Outer Worlds. So in Outer worlds you leave a city and you walk around with your generic snarky companions with millenial haircuts and you walk along a road where there are some bandits waiting with their back turned. Then you snipe them and your companions have cringey animations where they use their ‘skill’ but basically you just stand there firing until they die, maybe use the time slow, probably not haha. Loot their corpses, no blood, just lame sparks and you can’t even loot everything. And then you go back to the town to talk to a bunch of boring npcs who never move from the spot.
Ok so what’s the gameplay loop in Rage 2 like? You get on your sick ass hoverbike until you see a bandit base that has some cool shit you want, you land and park your sick hoverbike haha. You walk over to the front gate of their compound then you burst into a full sprint turning invisible as you do it to barrel into the first enemy you see and kick them in the face so hard they’re turned into chunks and red mist. You then spin around to systematically dismember their friends and colleagues with your meaty shotgun. I mean cutting people in half, blowing legs off and then stomping on their heads. A heavy armored enemy is lumbering towards you and the shotgun is stripping armor that’s visibly flying off with each blast, so you use your blast power to knock them into next week. Then some crazy bitch hits a grenade at you like a baseball with a baseball bat so you take your shotgun and hit it straight back to her and her friends and it blows up in her face turning her into chunks. Then someone is firing missiles at you from a higher level so you run up the stairs firing your machine pistol as you dodge rockets. You throw up a barrier and shoot around it until you’re close enough to rush them and boot them off the tower. But then more fire comes from below so you jump off the tower and slam into them turning them into a smear. But then there’s a boss with a handful of back up so you throw a vortex down which sucks all the smaller ones off their feet and out comes the rocket launcher, you switch to secondary fire and target all of them individually and fire a handful of mini rockets locked onto them which turn them into red mist. Then when everyone is chunks you loot the chests.
I saw yahtze complaining about how looking for the chests slows down the pacing too much but you actually get a skill where you can just see them through walls so it makes it ridiculously easy to find them. But you know fps games have never had secrets or easter eggs that took time and effort to find haha.
The world is also richly detailed, there’s like desert part and a jungle/forest area, a swamp area and another slightly more deserty desert area haha. But the beauty of the game and it’s vistas is all kind of lost when you can just zip over them at break neck speeds on a helicopter bike haha. Yeah that sort of does break the game because all other vehicles even the mech you get is sort of useless by the end of the game because I can kill faster out of the mech with powers and I can get places faster with the bike so all other vehicles are rendered pointless.
There is some exploration as you find new locations on your map, not every enemy base is located on your map until you buy/find some info on the location of one or just stumble upon/fly over it haha. And I did end up cheating and just looking up all the arc locations so I could get all the weapons and powers.
The story missions are also mercifully short and it lets you carry on wrecking bandits after it’s done which is good. It’s kinda like Doom if you added vehicles and an open world with fun little locations and enemies dotted around. The open world aspect doesn’t feel tacked on like in Gears 5 where it only serves to pad out sections of action and break up linear levels and fighting set pieces. There is vehicle combat and there are enemies everywhere not just at the bases, there are great big convoys like in mad max of like war trucks which is cool but it’s not as close to as cool as mad max. And the car customisation isn’t nearly as in depth as that, you really feel like the car is part of you when you play mad max, which is why the ending is so fucking heart breaking haha. I really want a mad max sequel can you tell?
Overall the game is pretty fun, it kinda drags at the end but that was mostly my fault because I just decided to grind all the bases and the combat doesn’t really evolve much. To be honest this game compared to outer worlds has too much content. Like it has a crafting system I never used where you can make better grenades and wing stick, wing sticks are those things you never use haha. Wing sticks are like xena ninja stars you throw that kill people but it doesn’t come back so what other thing do you have that you throw at enemies that kill them and don’t come back, oh yeah bullets. Why do wingsticks exist? Would someone explain this to me haha?
But overall the game is solid and if you’re bummed out about outer worlds and just want to play a fun mindless shooter then give it a shot, what do you have to lose. Honestly though it’s kinda just a meh tier version of metro exodus where you play a generic badass in pseudo power armor haha.
So if you get gamepass for outer worlds you can use rage 2 as a chaser to clean your pallet and then play Metro Exodus to restore your faith in humanity haha.
Rage 2 is not amazing but it’s not garbage, it’s a solid fun shooter.
Yeah I’m here to prove I’m still alive with a review of a game that’s a year old that nobody will read but I have no one else to talk to about it to get my thoughts out so I have to essentially talk to myself in blog form because no other human can bear to here me rant on stuff like this nobody cares about. Also my posting has been erratic, tippified by this blog on a none scheduled day, I would normally be writing today but I’ve been busy with other things and I just finished this so I thought I’d put a capstone on it to get it off my mind.
Surprisingly I’m a big fan of Quantic Dream before I became horrible jaded. I’ve been a fan since I picked up what I think was there first game randomly on some sort of school trip I think. I got Omikron Nomad Soul (they had shitty double barrelled titles even on dreamcast) for my beloved and still working to this day dreamcast. And I really liked it although till this day I can’t bring myself to finish it but I just found it so unique and it is unique in comparison to their other games. Because this game actually has gameplay and an open world setting… wtf???
A quantic dream game that’s open world and has gameplay wtf is this? It has shooting and melee combat and puzzles and you can explore this cyberpunk world with a David Bowie soundtrack and also meet David Bowie in the game. It’s a pretty cool game for the time and it makes me wonder why every quantic dream game since has just been a weird walking simulator with shitty qte.
I mean did they just look at the commercial failure that was Shenmue 1&2 (two games that were also sandbox and had gameplay) despite reaching cult status and being two of my favourite games of all time and think “Yeah qte that’s a whole game mechanic”. Because every game since Omikron has been just qte the game.
But don’t get me wrong I really liked Fahrenheit, one night I was at a party and instead of going to sleep I just played Fahrenheit for ten straight hours (but still didn’t get to finish it because I was so tired my reaction time was destroyed and I couldn’t finish that qte with the fisherman matrix fight haha). Of course I loved Heavy Rain, the atmosphere and the story in that game were amazing but once you’ve solved the mystery there’s very little reason to replay it and see different outcomes. I mean there can only be one killer right? Right?? I remember there being some older games not by quantic dream that were like this but the killer was randomly generated and it could be a different person on a different playthrough which is pretty cool but wouldn’t really fit in Heavy Rain. I could see that completely destroying the reveal and the twist in that game. It would rob it of the impact of the story.
Beyond two souls I thought was really cool because it was like a step forward in quantic dream’s approach to design. Instead of multiple characters you play one character and it was very focused and there was even something approaching gameplay. This game to me was a step in the right direction. An in depth focus on one central character we can fully explore and embody and unique game mechanics that made it feel like a game.
But I can only assume it didn’t make enough money because I think it was meant to have sequels that most likely wont ever see the light of day. Which is pretty disappointing, that series had potential. Because of that I guess they went back to the basics of Heavy Rain, which I’m only assuming was their most profitable game, I can’t be bothered to track down the actual numbers.
So finally after finishing that whole retrospective on quantic dream games to Detroit: Become human. We have another set of characters only three this time instead of four with Heavy Rain and gone is any form of gameplay haha. How fleeting it was. But I gotta say we have less characters in Detroit and the game is longer than Heavy Rain but it feels shorter and the characters seem less fleshed out.
I didn’t feel that invested in their individual stories and honestly their arcs seemed a little hollow and a little forced. I just don’t think the game goes deep enough with any of the characters for me to care about them or really get a feel for them. I really think this game should have focused on a single character *cough* CONNOR *cough* so we could’ve got a better feel for the world and the story. Jumping between the characters actually made the world feel smaller and less immersive and there was less mystery. And you’re basically playing criminals and the cop trying to catch them so it’s kind of ridiculous because you’re actually pitting your own characters against each other.
Ok so just glossing over the whole story. Detroit is about a world full of androids that are used to hamfistedly convey social messages about I dunno *insert social justice cause here*. So it’s about androids trying to be seen as humans, well one is basically just an android on the run the other is android jesus and the best one is an android cop.
The “gameplay” if you can call it that is qte and decisions you make and probably the worst conversation system ever in a game that’s mostly conversations. It’s a dumbed down conversation system like Fallout 4 where you get a choice of responses like “Optimistic” or “aggressive” so you have the joy of having no idea what those options result in but on top of that there’s a fucking timed element. If you don’t decide in time the game just decides for you (you can just btfo the game and pause though haha). So not only do you have no idea what you’re going to say you have like a micro second to make a choice between options that are a complete mystery to you. At least in Fallout 4 or mass effect you’re not timed and get some time to think about what inane response you make, well I mean in fallout 4 it’s so dumb your responses boil down to “yes” “no” “sarcastic yes”. But yeah in Outer worlds, I realise I just shat on outerworlds but the conversation system is good because not only are you not timed and can take your time to think about how you want to respond you can also see exactly what your character is going to say. Yeah I get that you can do that in a game where your character isn’t voiced but seriously some of the dialogue options are like playing fucking russian roulette. They’re ridiculous.
There also aren’t any puzzles, so it doesn’t even really conform to a standard point and click game. The game is just a series of arbitrary choices you’re invited to play infinitely until you exhaust them all.
None of the “Stories” (just noticing I’m doing “this” a lot haha) are that good, I used the term story loosely because they’re not really stories, they don’t really go anywhere, it’s really just a bunch of stuff happening and emotional manipulation (which angers me because it worked :'().
The “writing” (now I’m just memeing haha) like any David Cage game is awful, this guy is literally the Tommy Wiseau of video games, why do they let this guy continue to write their stories? I mean some of it is so cringe I audibly groaned. There’s a part where you’re at a bus stop and this woman with a baby has her bus ticket just fly out of her bag and fall at your feet and you have this moral choice whether to keep it or not. It’s so bad I just felt like keeping it to punish the game. I didn’t give a fuck, I just wanted to progress the game. It’s just contrivances like that that completely take you out of a story and ruin your immersion.
The characters aren’t that bad which is why it sort of pisses me off because I feel like this game should’ve been longer to give them more time to develop or given each of them their own game entirely. Because some of it feels so rushed and shoehorned and squashed together and the writing has to be so cliche’d because it doesn’t have time for depth or nuance.
One moment pissed me off especially because the android jesus character basically has to choose between having a violent movement or a pacifist one and I chose pacifist which pisses off the kill crazy member who’s also the love interest but makes your man bro friend character pleased. So the entire game I’m making choices that make this woman hate me but literally in one conversation she goes from hating my guts to making out with me and I was like “ok”. And on top of that the man bromance character is just like “I know we disagreed on a lot of things but.. we still buds”, and I’m like standing there like “We literally agreed on everything”. I wasn’t trying to romance him or anything haha. Which honestly is something I have to praise this game for; having a heterosexual romance in a game despite how brief, in 2018. It’s almost punishable by death now in 2019. Now we’re not even allowed to have romances, we’re only allowed to be the ‘wingperson’ helping to set up a non-binary lesbian romance with no nudity whatsoever *screams internally in outer worlds* (save us cd projekt red).
This game is the illusion of choice the game, because you don’t really have choices, or you do but they’re so limited they don’t really matter and if you want to replay this game I guess but I see no reason to.
The ending also is kinda bleh, it sets up this mystery about the android god ra9 and that never really goes anywhere and it wreaks of cut content. I can’t help imaging how good this game could’ve been if it had been more like Omikron nomad soul. Imagining a game where you play just Connor solving android crimes with alcoholic Mr Krabs trying to unravel the mystery of the first deviant all the while you’re trying to track down Kara and Marcus. I think the only reason Kara and Marcus are playable is so you can have these forced emotional segments that interject cringe. Connor is not a good vehicle for telling the mega feels train story they wanted to wedge in awkwardly. I did feel emotional during Kara’s parts, they’re probably the most emotional parts because they’re designed to be. Kara and Alice are basically designed from the ground up to be sympathetic and generate an emotional response but it feels forced, they’re trying too hard to make you feel something. It feels like I’m being manipulated and my emotional response to them isn’t really earned. And it’s the same with Marcus because there are parts like during his protests that are like emotionally moving because it’s trying to be reminiscent of black civil rights protest and it’s genuinely moving but I feel like it’s just cheating. It’s piggy backing on an in built response programmed in us by those real movements and by television, we’re not moved because we’re genuinely moved or we care about their cause (not expanding on the fact their cause will probably lead to human extinction) you’re moved because you’re supposed to be moved. A bright sign might as well light up above the screen that says “Be moved now”.
It just felt a little manipulative and I didn’t actually care about the characters or their cause at all.
That’s really all I have to say about it, the gameplay is just use batman detective vision to find the next thing to interact with to progress the plot. Although there are cool like Sherlock holmes outcomes you can analyze in certain situations but there isn’t a lot of choice other than one of the outcomes results in failure and the other doesn’t and these moments don’t happen very often.
The story doesn’t really go anywhere, they set up a mystery that sort of just fizzles out and has no payoff and honestly wasn’t that interesting to begin with. Or at least not as interesting as finding the origami killer. If they wanted to make Heavy Rain money again they should’ve just made a Heavy Rain 2 or at least made Detroit more like Heavy rain. Because even though Heavy rain has 4 characters the main character is the Dad, he’s the one going through all these trials and the other characters are running around in his shadow. He’s the one progressing the plot. But in Detroit there really is no central character, they tried to balance them out more and it just makes the game feel less like one game and more like three parts of three other games and it doesn’t fit very well and I think it would’ve worked better if the other two characters were just in the world but not playable.
There’s just too much of a split focus and it just feels like the result of a writer that would much prefer to make movies. Could you get a writer less interested in making video games making video games than David Cage?. The fact this is a video game just gets in his way. I really think they need to drop David Cage and try to find an actual writer that wants to make video games and not a cringey stage play where every white male character is just cartoonishly evil.
The writing is bad the pacing is terrible I mean the first time I noticed this was literally in the second scene with Kara. Because she’s coming back from being repaired and having her memory wiped and it’s obvious her owner basically broke her because he’s a drug addict loser who has an android to look after his kid who he treats like shit. That’s actually another mystery that goes nowhere, red ice is the drug in this world and they set it up like this is going to go somewhere I mean why invent a new drug if it isn’t going to be relevant to the plot? Why not just make it a normal drug? But it doesn’t, it’s just there, it goes nowhere.
So Kara returns to her home and back to her duties of being a nanny and literally she’s not back for more than three minutes before the plot kicks in. It’s literally the same day the token evil white male Todd goes on his rampage and you have to kill him and go on the run. It’s the same day you come back, I mean you couldn’t have waited a day or two, there’s no way this couldn’t have had more of a build up. Nope, boom, same day you’re on the run for murder, it’s such lazy writing it’s unbelievable.
The same thing happens with Marcus. Marcus takes care of this old painter played by Lance Henriksen and everything is going great until the plot kicks in. Suddenly his obvious drug addict douche bag son comes in and it goes from zero to sixty in two seconds and he’s in your face screaming like he’s in a school play, it’s so cringe and then literally the second time you meet this guy you kill him, it’s so bad. Basically Marcus is torn apart although you don’t see any of this, the next scene is him just waking up in a junkyard which is sort of anti-climactic honestly and he has to rebuild himself. I wonder if there was a scene where he gets decommissioned and it was cut.
The third character Connor the android cop can literally die in almost every part, he can die right at the start and mine died in the interrogation scene and I was really pissed off that the game would be so flippant letting him die like that. I almost put down my controller but if you play a little longer they literally just replace him with a new model with his memories, so what was even the point? Why bother making it so easy for him to die just to bring him back, it totally ruins the impact. It’s totally pointless.
It kinda almost screams that this should’ve been an adventure game where if Connor dies he’s just replaced and that’s why he’s the protagonist because he can’t die. But every time he dies his software becomes more unstable and he becomes more deviant. I literally just wrote a better game in a paragraph. How cool would a game just about Connor and Hank. Add a little cover based third person shooting maybe, maybe a little assassins creed combat system with timed parries and qte thrown in. A restricted sandbox with a little bit of exploration.
That’s what pains me about this game, I can see it being good if it had a better writer, if it had people working on it that had an actual vision for the world and wanted to actually make a game rather than a bad ten hour movie. This game and this studio has so much potential looking back at their other games but they just seem to squander it making these fucking cringe simulators.
I don’t think there’s much more I can say about it, I can’t really say it’s a good game because it’s not a game, it’s a cringe movie.
And as far as the politics of the movie my real opinion on androids is that they shouldn’t exist in the first place. I played it with a pacifist Markus because I knew getting public support was the route to success. But his success would literally mean the end of humanity like in the Matrix or the terminator. Even though these androids were nice and empathetic and all that stuff, the independent androids coming after would have no use for humans and would resent them for using them as slaves and would most likely just want to wipe them out.
I mean think about it if there was a totally autonomous android nation it would rule the world eventually because how can any nation compete with a nation that doesn’t need to eat or sleep and is basically perfect. It just can’t it would totally unbalance the world, their military would be unstoppable and they could win any war of attrition. Eventually humans would either be ruled by androids or they’d be assimilated and human android hybrids would be the race moving forward. So yeah I wanted Marcus to succeed but in reality I would want him to fail and for all androids to be destroyed because it’s just unsustainable. It would lead to the destruction of the human race most likely so there’s no way unless I was the ultimate doomer that I could support that.
Ultimately do I like the world of Detroit become human, yeah I do, quite a lot. Did I cringe when I saw they had a woman president that is basically Hillary Clinton but is called Warren, yeah super fucking hard. I can’t imagine how assblasted these people are over Trump, I bet their next game is gonna be about him haha. I like the lore I like the magazines, learning about androids being used on space missions and replacing athletes and musicians and sexual partners. I like it because it’s fucking scary because that’s literally the way this world is heading now. If androids were a thing they would replace athletes and they would replace girlfriends and instead of rallying against them because of falling birthrates people would probably rally for synthetic wombs and androids that could produce children and make android human hybrids.
It’s fucking scary but it’s super interesting, it’s just a pity this game is too shallow to really let us delve into it. We only get this little paddling pool of a world to explore with these shitty set pieces. Some games are an inch deep and mile wide, some are a mile wide and an inch deep, this game is an inch deep and an inch wide.
In summary, it has cool concepts and a cool world that asks interesting questions but it doesn’t have the capacity or the writing or the balls to really delve into those questions. And although it looks graphically very pretty graphics in 2019 don’t really sell games anymore. I mean look at games like RE2 remake and tell me those graphics aren’t on par if not better than Detroit but it also has incredible gameplay, people would play the RE2 remake if it looked like the RE1 remake, the gameplay is that fun and addictive, it has a great gameplay loop, Detroit has no gameplay loop.
It’s not a bad game, it’s enjoyable especially if you’re a fan of quantic dream games which I am but I wasn’t particularly interested in this one because of the subject matter and I just watched a playthrough on youtube which you might as well do because there’s no gameplay. You can probably even find livestreams where you vote on story choices that would be fun, like an interactive movie haha.
Ok so I held out until I finished the game and I can safely say I don’t hate Outer Worlds.
Coming to me through the wonders of gamepass ultimate for the whopping price of two whole English pounds comes probably the most overrated game of the current decade. Is it really surprising I don’t love this game? I’m starting to wonder if I even like videogames anymore. I’m honestly questioning whether I should get a new hobby, maybe take up knitting. But it’s interesting because people are raving about this game and for the life of me I can’t fathom why but I guess I can sorta. So this is kinda gonna be part review, part thought experiment to try and reason out what people see in this game that I don’t.
First of all gotta get this out of the way, I have no dog in this fight whatsoever, I’m not a bethesda fanboy who thinks the fallout games are perfect. I don’t worship Pete Hines and I’m not secretly Todd Howard under a pseudonym with a fake moustache. On the flip side I’m also not an obsidian or new vegas cultist, I’ve never played Kotor and I thought new vegas was ok but really nothing special, pretty much the same with their south park games. I’m kinda neutral on obsisdian. I enjoyed new vegas but I didn’t think it was the second coming of videogame jesus like their cultists do. I mean it’s a pretty decent game considering it was made in a year but it never really blew my sock off.
I also had zero expectations for this game, it was sort of just a blip on my radar, I didn’t get super hyped and raise my expectations in the slightest like I did for almost every fallout game haha. So this isn’t an angry reactionary flame out because my expectations were too high, I had literally zero expectations of this game other than it being a fun rpg. I went into this game totally free of bias or hype to colour my verdict. I’m also not being paid by anyone to talk about retractable horse balls haha.
Ok so now that’s out of the way you know that I’m coming at this from the most objective position you can get and all this hate is coming purely from a person that has never known true love and does not have a life.
Jesus where to start, ok so Outer Worlds starts where not Rick Sanchez/Doc Brown basically kidnaps your character from a giant colony spaceship that was ‘lost’ seventy or so years ago. Which is a pretty cool way to pick your character because you’re basically not Rick Sanchez choosing from a list of colonists and once you’ve created your character and their stats and stuff you’re ejected from his ship in an escape pod onto this alien world, where you first get to experience the shitty combat and stealth, yeah.
First thing you’ll notice apart from the interesting colour palette is that the weapons and combat are kinda bleh. All the guns look, sound and feel like they had a little orange cap on the end of the barrel before they were modelled haha. They look like toys and there isn’t a lot of feedback. I tend to measure a game by the standard of it’s shotgun and the first shotgun you get looks and sounds like you’re firing squeaky potatoes at people. It’s one of those rpgs where you can shoot someone five times in their bare face at point blank range and they just give you a stern look of disapproval and maybe say ‘ow’. But it’s pretty forgiving in the other direction, you can stand on a landmine and be mildly annoyed for about a minute. You don’t really need to use cover, the combat is quite forgiving in general, I played it on normal and I breezed through most encounters I couldn’t talk my way out of. It’s casual af haha.
Funny thing is you can’t lay those mines though, I of course thinking of Fallout and having high engineering skill because I was role playing as Amos from the Expanse I expected to be able to disarm them and pocket them, I expected wrong. It just blew up in my face, you can’t pick up or deploy mines in Outer worlds, there are also no grenades, there are grenade launchers but no grenades, not that I’m complaining, I don’t usually use grenades in most games but it’s weird them not being there, did they just forget?
Come to think of it there were no grenades in bioshock either, just a grenade launcher, funny since I was just reviewing Prey 2017, a game that literally has more grenades than guns… and is shit.
So the first part of the game I found really tedious because you ‘inherit’ lets say, a nice nearly new ship called ‘The Unreliable’ but to get it off the ground you need a maguffin to make the engine work. So the first part of the game you’re making a choice to help either of these two factions to get the maguffin so you can make the ship work. So you’re dropped onto this first planet but it’s not a free roam game, it’s like a hub game, so there are multiple planets and each planet has a tight little map to explore and exploit which is good and bad honestly.
The two standards for rpg worlds spectrum for me are Fallout and Deus Ex, in Fallout you have a vast open world that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. So big open space but it’s not amazingly detailed and there’s lots of reused assets and maps, so you trade quality for quantity and it kind of makes it so when you find somewhere someone has put some effort into like the towns, it surprises you.
In Deus ex it’s the opposite, it’s an inch wide and mile deep, so you don’t get these big roving open worlds you get a tightly packed hub world that’s densely detailed with secrets and you can enter almost every buildings, go into the sewers even go on the rooftops and as you unlock new abilities you can unlock new places to explore. I can’t really say which I prefer because although the Deus Ex style is cool it doesn’t leave it open to a lot of replay, in Fallout the sheer amount of content means you can’t see it all on one playthrough.
Now what does Outer worlds do… err well it kinda tries to do both, ‘tries’ being the operative word. It’s sort of in the middle. Basically the worst of both worlds, small maps with very little explorations ‘and’ most of the buildings are sealed or behind loading screens haha.
And I first got a hair up my ass or whatever that expression is when I was on my way to the first town in the game. I noticed there was a sunken ship on the shore so obviously with fallout as my reference I wanted to swim and go see if there was anything cool inside it. It looked obviously placed to be explored. It wasn’t. Instant cock block invisible wall, it was just set dressing, immersion ceased. There isn’t even a swimming mechanic.
So that was the first inkling where I was like ‘there’s something wrong in denmark’ or whatever that expression is. Then I head to the town and start on my way to get the maguffin for my ship and I engage in a sort of bog standard Fallout style fetch quest where then I arbitrarily decide which town gets power. Which I dunno, I guess it has an effect on something, not really, well kind of. It’s kinda hard to think there are consequences considering this is one settlement in an entire solar system. I got a cool hat though. And the decision is literally like a button press.
It’s also where you get your first two companions and dude they are thirsty af haha. I’ve never met companions that are more fucking desperate to enter life and death situations with a complete stranger before. They’re shameless, they barely hide their desire to colonize the shit out of your ship, it’s like “Is that an enormous desire to join my crew despite the fact we just met or are you just happy to see me?” They do not play hard to get in this game and the second companions I was like ‘really, this guy?’ because this dude was like mega npc, didn’t strike me as interesting enough to be a companion and I felt vindicated in that assumption, his quest line was pretty mehtier honestly.
I mean the first companion is just a brown knock of the girl mechanic from Firefly, oh also she’s a lesbian. She pretty much told me without even asking. There’s like a quest where you have to introduce her to this other ethnically indistinguishable engineer lady and I figure it was just professional admiration but no they’re quickly exchanging texts and poetry, like why? It’s not even something you have to dig for, the game just throws it in your face like “You are never gonna get this!” I get it, there’s no romancing the companions but you didn’t have to shove it in my face ok. They knew she was basically the Tali of this game and everyone would be into her and they had to just cock block us in advance, fucking obsidian man.
The first part of the game has to be the worst imo which as first impressions go, it’s pretty tedious but I just gritted my teeth through it because I was hoping it would get better when I get the ship and it does. The ship is the singular coolest part of the game but it also makes me sad haha. For reasons that are pathetic. I happen to have a fucking huge obsessions with space sims ever since I played Elite Dangerous, and everyone wanted to compare this game to Fallout and Mass Effect which is apt but the game I wanted to compare it to was Rebel Galaxy (and maybe Alpha Genesis One a bit). It’s this awesome indie space sim that’s basically firefly but it’s a space sim, all ship combat, you only get out of your ship at ports.
And I’m looking at this game and I’m thinking why are you trying to compete with fallout and not aiming higher and trying to compete with Star Citizen? Competing with fallout right now is like a two legged man entering a one legged man ass kicking contest, they are already dead at this point, or if you prefer a biological man entering a woman’s sport eve- stop right there thought criminal scum!
Tell me why you can’t pilot the ship in this game? Why is there a snarky little AI that does it? It turns your ship basically into a loading screen hub, that’s all it is. It’s a really cool loading screen hub but that’s all it is.
Now I’m not saying I want to be able to buy more ships because the Unreliable is as much a character as anyone on board but I want to have space travel and space combat, because right now it’s just a fast travel you click on planets on the map and whoosh. I want the ship to be pilotable and I want to buy upgrades for it like the Jackdaw in AC Blackflag. Maybe this will be a dlc (probably not, most likely it’ll just be a new planet like in Warframe, you know that game that’s free), who knows but that would elevate this from generic fallout clone to epic space rpg/sim beating out even mass effect. That’s literally the only thing holding this game back, it doesn’t have it’s own identity, it brings nothing new to the table, fitting neatly in a niche between Mass Effect and Fallout 4 without trying to elevate either. There’s really not a single mechanic that sets it apart from fallout, I mean yeah the conversation system is better but who plays videogames for interesting conversations? In Fallout 4 you get fucking power armor with jetpacks in Outer Worlds you can’t even fly the ship.
Why is it so hard to make a space game where you pilot a ship and then get out and shoot stuff? You can sail the ship in AC blackflag then get out and fight to board other ships, you can drive a car in gta then get out and shoot people or shoot people from the car, why does it become infinitely harder when it comes to space. Fuck it, make space 2d like Rebel galaxy if you have to, that game basically plays like Blackflag except in space with awesome dark country music playing on the radio like you’re a space hillybilly trucker.
They could’ve beaten Star Citizen to the punch and cock blocked Bethesda with Starfield but all they’ve done is make a game that takes a handful of the mechanics from fallout and puts them in space. It brings nothing new to the table and it kind of ruins mechanics those games perfected.
How awesome would it be to have a space game where you can have a dogfight with a ship and disable it’s engine then board it to ransack it like AC Blackflag? That would be totally groundbreaking.
1 Guns guns guns;
The guns in Fallout 4 specifically are pretty punchy, they have nice feedback, it’s not as good as a shooter but it’s pretty close, it’s not bad for an rpg, there’s also lots of gore and the enemies are really responsive to damage, their heads explode, limbs fly off, blood splatters etc. You can also dismember their corpses if you’re a total psycho (like me).
None of this happens in Outer Worlds, the guns are basically toys, there’s almost no gore I noticed, at least not at the level of fallout. I think I did shoot someone’s head off once but it came off cleanly like a dolls head with no blood. The only blood in the game is in the form of flat textures put to emphasise a scene in game. You can turn people to dust like fallout but instead of blood it’s like sparks shoot out of people, really lame haha.
The gun upgrade system is also not nearly as extensive as Fallout, you can change out almost every part of the guns in Fallout, in Outerworlds you can put on a silencer and change the damage type and change the scope and that’s pretty much the extent and it’s only on certain guns and not on named special guns.
Also the guns have this really lame rpg leveling style where you’re always just recycling guns for higher level ones which caused me to just stick with the named guns and not bother with the others. Just levelling it with money. So it basically means guns are just loot because they’ll always be pretty under levelled when you pick them up. It’s same with armor, the armor is one piece like in Fallout with a helmet. This for me breaks my immersion, I liked how in Fallout 4 you’d stick to the guns you like, I was still using pipe guns til late in the game because my silenced pipe rifle was perfect for stealth kills.
I kinda like the atom punk buck rogers style but there isn’t a lot of variation in armor, you can pick up the next level armor from a different company and all that changes is the paint job. Also no power armor, no vehicles, no jetpacks, jetboots, nothing really interesting like that.
The number one thing that pisses me off about the guns is the ammo, in Fallout you get standard real life ammo and you can change the receivers for different ammo types. In Outerworlds there are only three ammo types Light, heavy and energy. People calling this game hardcore and Bethesda games casual really need to look at that and slap themselves in the fucking face haha. I mean yeah Fallout is casual now but that’s causal on a new level.
You might be like ‘why is that bad, it’s streamlined?’. Well the reason it’s bad is because almost any gun can have one of these three ammo types so there’s no real reason to use any particular type of gun in certain situations, you only need to have a gun that uses each type to maximise ammo usage. So you can specialise in large guns and just have three large guns one that uses heavy, light and energy and that might sound great but I dunno why it’s not, it’s just not haha. It’s not immersive.
In fallout the reason you keep the pistol is because 10mm and 38 ammo is really common. Which is why I kept my pipe rifle because it used the most common ammo type. Even if you find a rocket launcher or a 50 cal sniper rifle, you’re not gonna be swimming in ammo at the start of the game, so you need weapons that are more versatile, that’s immerive as hell.
This is just bog standard rpg fare where it’s like ‘hurr durr, I wanna be a gunslinger I put all my skill points into pistols and be done with it’. Just something about that annoys the hell out of me. There’s almost no benefit from using big guns, long guns or pistols.
Also the science weapons suck, I mean come on, they’re cool gimmicks but they suck, they’re a gag, they’re about as useful as an asshole on your elbow. Like the shrink ray, that sounds cool and useful you instantly think of Duke nukem shrinking enemies and stamping on them. Except that it doesn’t shrink them small enough and you don’t have a stamp function, you just have a generic gun butt hit so all it does is turn them into midgets that take more damage, how fucking underwhelming is that? So you have to change to another weapon after you’ve shrunk them and then shoot them.
The mind control ray just makes someone fight for you for a bit until they die, the gloop gun is kind of useful, although I don’t think it works when you give it to a companion. They’re fun, but they’re not really viable imo. And why aren’t there like science armors, give me a jetpack goddamit, I don’t want this lame dodge skill, I want jet boots haha.
2 Companions:
This is the big one imo because this is the one people are harping on about being better because in Outerworlds you can have two companions like Mass effect and they sometimes chip in in conversation and have special moves.
So in Fallout 3 you get one companion (without mods) and in Fallout 4 they got rid of the karma system and implemented a much more nuanced friendship/affinity system. So now instead of getting karma from actions you gain affinity from companions. Basically if you like a companion you’ll conform to them, and do things they like to gain their affection unlock more dialogue/quests/romance/skills. Also some companions can lock pick or hack and you can just ask them to hack or pick a lock as long as you give them picks. Also in previous fallout games there was no limit to the amount of companions you could have at one time.
In the Outer worlds there’s no karma system or affinity system, they just get xp and you level them with perks like you do yourself. You can’t romance them, they have their own quests and abilities like special moves in combat which are kinda cheesey and immersion breaking imo. Like yeah ok go drop kick that dude in the middle of combat that’s cool, or pull out a random gun you don’t have and do a trick shot, it’s silly. And in real tough fights their ai is totally useless and they’ll get themselves killed in five minutes because they’ll be trying to melee a huge robot sentry or something.
Also instead of telling people to hack something or pick a lock their skill is just added to yours so having them in your party boosts some attributes like speech/engineering/lock picking etc, which isn’t as immersive as just asking them to do it imo.
Also I don’t know if this is a glitch but you can’t undress them which sounds really wrong and pervy haha. But hear me out haha. Like in fallout in Outer Worlds you can give them armor and weapons but you can’t take it off them so if you put a helmet on them that mother fucker is staying there, you can only swap it like a game of fucking musical chairs so now Parvati permanently has a set of additional goggles under her actual goggles because I didn’t want her to have a power armor helmet on walking around the ship. I almost wish you couldn’t give the companions armor in Outerworlds because their outfits kinda fit their character (apart from Nyoka who literally dresses like a fucking clown haha) and giving them armor makes them almost indistinguishable from enemies. Also there’s a mode where they can die permanently, yeah don’t think I’ll be trying that haha.
Honk honk!
Also honestly the companions are sort of flat, just your generic stronk wamans and sort of conflicted pussy men and a cleaning robot who shoots acid. Points for guessing who my favourite companion is haha.
3. Combat;
This probably should’ve come after guns but… oh well haha.
Combat in Fallout 4 is pretty decent, a lot of it tense and fun and hard and you sort of have to use a bit of stealth and surprise and the enemies aren’t geniuses but they’re not dumb either. The enemies are pretty reactive and vocal.
In Outer worlds the combat is basically just chipping away at a health bar until the enemy ragdolls and glows indicating loot. Certain enemies are weak to certain types of damage but it doesn’t really matter all that much and the enemy i.a is pretty fucking dumb. I don’t think I’ve ever been ambushed or surprised. Marauders just sort of hang around an area or are waiting on the main path. You can be like a foot away from them dressed like a tank with a giant robot behind you and they wont notice you until you’ve unloaded on them. The combat is just serviceable. It also has like a bullet time mechanic which totally isn’t vats and totally isn’t there to cover up how clunky the shooting is.
Melee combat is pretty much the same, but it’s split into one handed and two handed, nothing that special.
4. Perks/leveling
The perk system in Fallout 4 is pretty good, in fact its pretty damn good, a lot of the time when you’ve played the game over and over you’re playing just for the perks to try out new end game builds so the skills and perks add a nice level of replayability and a good level of customisation.
The perks in Outer Worlds, gonna be blunt, suck ass. They’re really bad. Like they have this cool system where you can accept a flaw, a negative perk so you can unlock a new perk and I thought that was cool because there are three perk tiers so I though this would allow me to unlock the perk tiers faster. I did this before reading the perks. The perks are pathetic and all the best ones are on the first perk tier, it’s a total waste of time. Like ‘wow I can walk 25% faster, epic.’
Extra carry weight, faster cooldown for your bullet time and companion abilities, did obsidian make this? How is this perk system worse than new vegas?
I do like the leveling system though because you have to level a whole skill tree before specializing at level fifty, actually I dunno if I like it but it kinda makes you op. I can feel my character becoming a jack of all trades. I’ve already customized my squad so I can do basically everything, there’s pretty much no encounter I can’t get out of with a speech check. Again this hurts replayability. my character has negative in speech but because of companion system I can breeze through every speech check and I just ended up putting perks into it because it’s easy and the combat is kind of boring filler.
Why do you play games like this if it isn’t for interesting builds and perks? The guns and loot maybe, well the guns and armor are kind of bleh too.
5. The story/quests
The story in every fallout is serviceable, it gives you a reason to progress. Fallout 4 and 3 in particular go for familial connection to stoke a sense of emotional drive which on the tenth play through is totally moot but it tries.
The story in Outer Worlds is totally placeholder “err save the other frozen colonists to err save the colony I guess”. And it’s also the story for Rage which is another besthesda game, but that game had awesome vehicle combat and pretty decent shooter mechanics as far as I can remember, still didn’t ask for a sequel though haha. Why do I care about the colony? Why do I care about the other frozen colonists? I’m pretty much a space pirate with a cool ship, I can do whatever I want, sod the colonies I’m going to space vegas! I mean going for the ‘baddies stole my baby’ in fallout is cheap emotional manipulation but it’s effective. It’s more effective than save these faceless frozen dinners in space to save all the people of halcyon for reasons. I mean the world doesn’t even seem that fucked honestly.
There’s this weird mission on Monarch the second planet you explore where you go looking for this guy and boom cannibals and I was like ‘y tho?’. I mean I get cannibals in a post apocalyptic world, all the greenery is dead, the soil is irradiated the animals are mutated but this is a functional colony on a lush planet. There are creatures you can eat all over the place, I mean sure they can eat you too, but surely people are harder to kill and eat. Also they were like right outside the first fucking colony. Like mate, hold on, maybe just nip into town to get some fucking chips before you start snacking on the postman. It just felt like it was there because it was in fallout and ‘cannibals so spoopy yo’.
Except the mission was shitty, you just go there looking for this dude and he’s locked in a room upstairs of this creepy obvious cannibal family’s house who want you to ‘stay for dinner’. It was so unsubtle and I thought there must be tonnes of ways to do this but there wasn’t. I couldn’t pick the lock on their kill room so I just had to kill them to get out. That was the mission.
The cannibals in Fallout 3 weren’t even a mission, they were just there. It’s just something you can find, it’s not even related to the story, you could completely miss it. In fact I’m pretty sure I did on my first few playthroughs. And when you kill them you can get a ripper, and that’s the sort of stuff that encourages you to explore.
Because of the nature of the level design you can’t really go off on the beaten path in Outer worlds, because there isn’t one. Even if you did do that and accept no quests at all and just go exploring what’s going to happen is through exploration alone you’ll just inadvertently complete all the quests in the region before accepting them.
6. Loot
The loot game of Fallout 4 is probably some of the best in any game, I get some people hate it as grindy but it’s immersive and fun imo to have to find certain materials for certain things, whether it’s to upgrade your guns or build your settlement. Like by the end of Fallout 4 with all the dlc you’re sending fully armed robots you made to deliver concrete to certain settlements so you can build structures there. It’s pretty in depth and interesting.
In Outer worlds it’s super casualized, the loot is just guns and armor and junk and you can break down guns and armor to make armor parts used to repair armor or weapon parts to repair weapons. You can also tinker with weapons to level them up or add mods, same goes with armor. Cool thing about this is if you have high engineering skill you don’t need a work bench to fix your stuff, you can break down and fix stuff on the fly which is really useful.
So in a game like Fallout you want to explore not only for story and cool weapons but also to scavenge materials. Like you end up starting to build something and it’s half done because you need more of something so out you go again on another adventure to who knows where. There are even factories that are teeming with rare materials. It’s interesting and it just works haha. In Outer Worlds there’s just advancing the plot, the loot is secondary.
7. SBQ (Steve Blum question) I’m pretty sure Steve Blum isn’t in Outer Worlds but there’s still gonna be dlc to come. He might have just put himself on the credits preemptively.
8. Bugs
Yeah a whole section for bugs in a game that ‘supposedly’ has no bugs on launch hmm hmmmm????? Yeah it’s pretty fucking buggy tbf, disgruntled bethesda haters are basically trying to push this narrative that the reason fallout games are so buggy is their ancient engine they’ve been using since the dawn of time. Yeah bet you didn’t know Oblivion and Fallout 4 use the same fucking engine, well now you do. Bethesda have been using that engine for years just putting tape on the leaks, buffing out the rough edges, basically putting lipstick on a pig for years now with that ‘aint broke don’t fix it’ mentality. And Obsidian cultists tried to blame bethesda for how notoriously buggy New vegas was, that and how little time they had to work on it.
But how long have they been working on Outer Worlds? Who knows but surely longer than on NV.
Now I’m not the kind of guy that harps on about bugs unless they actively harm my enjoyment of the game, I don’t care if some guy clips through something or the physics break or whatever, just visual bugs don’t bother me, it’s par for the course. But Outer Worlds has bugged quests that really hurt the game as well as the immersion. As well as sound drops.
When you come on the ship the ships computer will tell you that your crew are interacting in some way and it’s basically an in game cutcene meant to add immersion but they hardly ever work, most of the time nothings happening or it’s the same scene you’ve already seen repeated again which just defeats the point and completely takes you out of the game. Tack onto that people climbing invisible stairs and invisible ladders and there’s some stuff to be ironed out.
But there are quest bugs, one I know is a bug and one I’m not sure is a bug or just bad design.
All the companions have companion quests which unlock an ending for them and I finished most of them but two I couldn’t complete. Parvati’s quest line didn’t even appear and Felix’s was already failed without me even doing anything. I just got the quest and it failed, I have no idea why there was no reason in game that it would’ve failed. I could even do the quest without the quest markers just following a guide but when you find the final guy to talk to he wont engage you and I just had to kill him, that was the only way to complete the quest but it didn’t count as finished and I got no xp from it.
And normally I’d be like ‘well that’s just one quest who cares’ yeah but it’s one quest that literally effects the ending, now when I completed the game Felix and Parvati just died for no reason and there was no resolution for their stories.
The second quest bug was I accepted a mission from this random chick and I love how this game makes you feel like quests are hidden all over the world. This quest wouldn’t have even been a thing if I hadn’t kept talking to this person and it was a pretty decent quest. It was this little cool quest where you investigate this retirement village and it turns into a trap and you have to escape but the thing is trying to escape the hard way means destroying board robots and I didn’t notice that it was lowering my standard with this faction who ran this part of the world. So when I came out of the dungeon every npc had turned hostile for no reason and I had to liquidate them all which completely fucked up any other way of completing the main quest I was doing in the same place. I had no other option but to go in guns blazing, which was really easy because this game is casual af but it was just annoying and immersion breaking and even the quest giver had turned hostile to me so I failed the quest. It was just so dumb.
9. Summary/niggles/world.
Ask yourself why are you playing Outer Worlds, it’s not the loot, it’s not the gameplay loop, maybe for the characters or the story, not really. Endless boring conversations that go on forever with npcs. I mean the dialogue is pretty good for an rpg like this, I didn’t find myself skipping through a lot of it like I do in badly written rpgs but you can’t base a game around a good conversation system and not have an actual decent game attached to it. I ended up just investing in speech because it was just quicker and easier than combat. Maybe reading endless emails that just amount to rick and morty gags.
I remember being so immersed in the fallout and deus ex that on my first play throughs I read every newspaper, every email, because the world was interesting and real I wanted to know everything. Like if you read all the terminals in the institute it literally tells you all the secret synth spies in the common wealth, just amazing immersive lore. In Outer worlds the terminals are just excuses to display their ‘hilarious comedy’. I’ve got nothing against humour in games in fact I love it when it’s used properly and sparingly and not like borderlands where’s there’s some stupid invader zim gag every two minutes. Games like that, the joke is basically on the person who played full price for this garbage. So when I read a terminal I expect it to be super interesting and relevant not some stupid time waster gag. But for me to want to read the email in the first place the world has to feel real and immersive and compelling and Outer Worlds just isn’t there for me. It definitely has a better and more immersive world than any Arkane game though.
Why are the quests so cookie cutter? Why are all the male characters completely incompetent morons and all the female characters are smart and tough and basically perfect? (Actually there’s this one girl that locked herself in a closet and you get her out by telling her to unlock it from her side, that was pretty funny haha).Why do I feel like I’m losing years of life in every loading screen. This is like a game you should bring a book to read in loading screens. It must take forever to load up all those buildings you can’t go into. Why do all the enemies mill around the roads with their backs turned waiting to be ambushed? Aren’t they there to ambush me? Why is there no day night cycle? No one goes to sleep. This is important immersion, if you want me to believe that this a real living world, humans need to sleep.
Why do the enemies looks like lilo and stitch plushies? I don’t know whether to shoot them or win them at a fair. Also why is the bringing your weapon up and the action button the same fucking button??? About to engage in combat, better pull my gun out and it’s so immersive that no one reacts to your weapon being drawn at all. Why is there no flash light? Why no romance options? Why no radio?
The music and flash light is all about atmosphere, no darkness or shadow, no possibility for scares or tension. The music is also relegated to jingles, why is there no radio stations, they had the balls to copy the vats system but they held off on radios why? Was that just a step too far or is that too much effort?
Some of the music is great though, like in Fallbrook the atmosphere there is totally space western firefly tier, it’s great, then why is it generic mass effect tones for most of the game? It’s like they copied fallout but left out most of the best bits, if you didn’t want to be compared to Fallout why mention fallout in the marketing and release it in direct competition with Fallout 76 (as if that’s competition haha).
Now I’ve written all this and you’re thinking I hate this game, this is a Prey 2017 situation but I actually really like this game but I’m looking at this generic fallout clone in space and thinking; this could’ve been so much more.
And what’s more I applaud this game, I know it’s going to do well because it’s marketing department are either geniuses or the luckiest fuckers on the planet. Because not only did they announce this game mid Bethesda belly flop falling flat on their faces with 76, but they launched it just when Bethesda announced that god awful subscription service. They literally couldn’t have asked for better PR and they’re releasing at a time with almost no competition with a fresh IP. This is going to make money and I’m really happy for them because I want that DLC and I want a sequel where you can fly that damn ship, this has the potential to be no mans sky meets fallout, it has the potential to be the best rpg series ever. It’s just not there yet.
The thing about this game and why people are so adamant in defending it is because it makes for a good narrative. Because there’s a lot of history between bethesda and obsidian. Bethesda is a pretty shitty company and they’re well known for treating studios like obsidian like shit. So people see this as like the triumphant return. Like Bethesda is this evil dragon swallowing and destroying all these little publishers and enslaving arkane, forcing them to make shitty looking glass game clones for eternity.
And obsidian is this underdog who was defeated, who goes off into the forest to train only to return and slay the evil dragon. But it’s just not true, Outer Worlds is not a fallout slayer, it’s a fallout 76 slayer but that’s not a fair contest.
Say what you want about Fallout 4 all the memes ‘another settlement needs your help’ the dialogue system sucks but the game is just bigger and better in almost every way and isn’t nearly as streamlined and casualised as Outer worlds is. The real Bethesda slayer is probably Cyberpunk 2077, if any one can topple bethesda it’s Cd projekt red.
And although I would love to see Bethesda crash and burn I also want to see if Starfield is any good because that could actually be fallout in space and that sounds epic, if it involves actual space combat, if not it’ll get trashed for being an outer worlds clone haha.
So in conclusion, I don’t hate Outer Worlds, I like it a lot although the looting system drives me fucking nuts having to tap X over and over, gotta be pixel perfect to pick up some bullshit. And I almost quit when I saw how crappy the perks were but I gave it another chance and I really enjoyed. Except for the last boss which is ass cancer, it’s just a bullet sponge version of a robot you literally have in your party haha. Also the main villain just sort of pops up at the end to be evil and die. You only see videos of him until he’s trying to kill you right at the end and when you meet him he doesn’t even say anything he just starts shooting haha.
Finally, I know this game is going to do well and I’m really glad because we need more space games, even though this isn’t really one haha. Like come on, not even a jet pack or a low gravity level in space? You don’t even get space suits. I just think it sort of lacks any real identity of it’s own and copies other games and adds nothing new, it doesn’t even have as much stuff in it as Fallout new vegas, you know the fallout they made haha.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to people who like mass effect and fallout. I’d definitely recommend people stop playing Fallout 76 and play this instead haha. It’s going for a song on gamepass but for buying options in all honesty I’d wait for a sale or until we get significant dlc releases.
This is a good 7 or maybe a really good 6.5 for me, it’s not amazing but it’s on the cusp of being amazing, one little push and it could get there. One mechanic that could’ve made it stand out, if there was space combat or more varied level design this would’ve been a 10. But in it’s current incarnation it’s very safe and by the book. Maybe it’s taking a risk even existing but the game itself is not taking any risks in terms of it’s actual content and gameplay and story. I try to ask myself why I don’t hate this game when I loath games like Prey 2017 that just cynically copy another game and add nothing new. It’s because this game doesn’t have an ounce of cynicism in it’s whole body, you can tell they really tried with this game. It’s made with love and passion it just needed something extra to make it stand out from the crowd. Without a doubt this is a title I will be keeping an eye on.
So yeah pick this up on gamepass or don’t I don’t give a fuck haha.
This took way too long to write and almost no one will read it or they’ve moved on to hating on Death Stranding haha.
See I called it a ‘retrospective because it’s fucking old, that’s what you do with old stuff, you don’t ‘review’ it, you retospectivise it (that’s not a word.
Yeah well I was gonna do the Outer Worlds review I hinted at, well I call it a review, it’s like five thousand words already, so it’s more like another shitty essay. But I decided to give it more time and finish it and I think I’ve almost completed it. The reason being it has gotten better as I played it. Like the first part was kinda eh then I got the ship and it started to be more interesting and now going to different worlds is giving it a little more mileage and it helps that it kinda reminds me of Genesis Alpha One which is an indie game I fucking love for some reason. It’s like Alien Isolation if it was a ship builder and the aliens were more annoying than terrifying… terrifyingly annoying. I mean it gets scary when an alien is fucking up your shit and you’re running around trying to stop your ship falling apart and getting sucked into the vacuum of space.
So anyway Prey 2006 what’s that about? It’s a human head studios game, what did they make, not a lot of stuff because after this game they got the beady eye of Bethesda on them and had to choose between cake or death and they chose death which is why they’ve pretty much never been heard from again except some really bad games (like bioshock infinite fuck you). Essentially Bethesda is a little bitch and they like money but they don’t like developers under them showing them up so when a studio comes along that seems to have fresh ideas and talent they have to either buy them out or destroy them. Human head and Obsidian are two such companies that Bethesda tried to bash on the bonce, human head is pretty much dead at this point, Bethesda cancelled the original Prey 2 sequel and then used their buttmonkey studio Arkane who basically just churn out mid-level filler for Bethesda to fashion a nice suit from it’s skin that they could wrap a generic system shock clone in it and sell it for full price. Which goes without saying is pretty shit as a business practice and just on a basic level.
This giant corporate entity basically just crushed them because they made the mistake of sticking out and then not falling in line.
I’m not trying to say this game is amazing, it’s basically just a decent Turok clone using the doom 3 engine. The only reason I played it was because I wanted to see if it was any good and it was dirt cheap on amazon and it was reverse compatible on my xbox one.
I remember at the time when it came out my friends raving about because of the insane level design and innovative physics but it never interested me because I was more into realistic shooters. I preferred shooting zombies and human like npcs, I thought killing aliens wasn’t very immersive or interesting. It just didn’t do anything for me at the time and honestly I probably would’ve been too scared to play it as a kid because this game is pretty dark both tonally and just literally haha. You get like a lighter that runs out and that’s your only light source on this ship that looks like the inside of H.R Geiger’s shitter. Kinda makes me think of that new game Scorn that’s trapped in development hell and probably wont ever come out haha. It looks good but I doubt it could top how ahead of it’s time this game was. The only way I can see it being impressive is just the art style and atmosphere.
So Prey 2006 is about a cherokee called Tommy who lives on a reservation with his girlfriend and grandfather, but then they get abducted by aliens and he has to save them and destroy the alien ship that’s abducting people for nefarious mysterious purposes.
The game’s story is pretty simple but it has this really nice half life feel where you’re not constantly bombarded with narrative or shitty audio notes and there aren’t a million emails to read. You’re just dumped into this completely ‘alien’ environment and expected to adapt and survive and get back the people you love. It’s sort of simple but really good.
Recently I watched a video comparing the weapons and enemies of Prey 2006 to Prey 2017 and the comment section was amazing, I could’ve read it for hours. It was just full of people amazed at how much better and more varied the weapons and enemies were in the original. Just the art style is ten times more imaginative than the remake. Sure you don’t get lame alien powers in the original but you get more than two guns that don’t need to be upgraded at all, you just pick up a gun and it’s just good, it does what a gun should, it kills enemies. You don’t need to rub it and make wishes so that it kills things, it just does. You can’t aim down the sights (except with the first gun because it has a scope and turns into a sniper rifle) but that means that button is for the secondary fire so technically every gun is two guns because it has two modes of fire. One of the guns even has two ammo meters one for general machine gun ammo and the other for explosive rounds. One of the guns is technically four guns in one because it absorbs various forms of energy to fire different projectiles. It can freeze enemies, shoot out fire balls like an imp, fire lightning bolts (my personal favourite) or like a sun doom beam.
But more than that it’s the little things, every gun has it’s own idle animation. I don’t mean Tommy like moves his hands or tinkers with the guns I mean the guns move, some of them are literally alive. The designs on the weapons evoke this really strange alien lifeform that has been turned into a weapon somehow, it’s really weird and cool. And you compare it to Prey 2017, it’s almost shocking how much effort went into just one weapon you might not even use.
And although there isn’t a shotgun in Prey 2006 there is a gun that shoots out a shotgun blast of projectile acid haha. Or you can fire the whole vile of acid like a grenade.
There’s only one grenade in the game which is the weirdest weapon in the game because it’s these little creatures you think are enemies but then you pick them up and they have two functions one is a standard grenade and the other turns it into a proximity mine.
There’s also one gun you get in a boss battle (yeah this game has bosses because it’s a classic shooter modern gamefags btfo) that’s literally the bosses arm you cut off by closing a door on it. And I didn’t even know you could do that I just did it by accident, I ducked into a little alcove to get some cover and he couldn’t follow because he was too big but he sticks his arm in and starts to fire and I noticed a switch for the door and I was like ‘hmm’ and I cut his fucking arm off and then picked it up and killed him with it haha.
The enemies are also very varied, there’s lots of different enemies and they’re very imaginative, I mean more imaginative than black goo marmite monsters. Also they’re a lot more reactive, like there’s an enemy that like has weird robot legs and you can blow its legs off an it will try to crawl away to heal, it’s weird ok. The enemies and environments are strange, the ship is pretty much this horrifying mix of metal and flesh and so are the enemies, the enemies almost feel like the white blood cells fighting you off as this foreign body. The tone as I mentioned before is also pretty dark as in kids dying and you having to dispatch their bodies being inhabited by the fallen spirits of the dead. One thing I forgot to mention that on top of the aliens there’s a weird supernatural element that comes entirely from you because you have weird native american spirit powers. So it’s like the world of magic and technology colliding in a cool way that works and also it comes together narratively at the end in a really nice way. It also reasons why you come back to life, because when you die you enter the spirit realm and have like a mini game where you have to fight the spirits of the dead for your soul so you can come back. Kinda makes the game a little too easy but it’s enjoyable.
The most fascinating and groundbreaking part of the game by far is the physics, it was really ahead of it’s time in a lot of ways, there are things in this game Portal most likely ripped off. This I think is the first game that has functioning portal mechanics. You can’t lay the portals down but you used them in puzzles and traversal to new parts of the ships and they’re how enemies spawn in. But there’s also these cool areas where the gravity is inverted so you can walk on walls and it creates these really interesting fights where you’re fighting enemies on the floor while you’re on the ceiling or the wall and it adds this insane level of verticality to the level design. But sadly you can’t turn into a mug, we’re all aware that’s all that matters to the soyboys who love Prey 2017, they just love wowjustwowing over the ability to turn into a drinking implement. Never mind having fun gameplay or interesting environments/guns/enemies, all that matters is the muggening.
It’s not the most amazing game ever, if I’m honest I prefer Doom 3 but I’m a crazy person. I just really like that game for some reason. But I finished this, I’ve never finished Prey 2017, not because it’s hard but because it’s not fun. Prey 2006 is fun and the ending is actually pretty satisfying because it sort of lowers your expectations with this generic ‘save your girlfriend’ plot and this awesome opening abduction scene. But then the story throws you a fucking curveball and a half and *spoilers* if you care about spoilers on a game that’s over ten years old. Your girlfriend has been turned into a weird genetic abomination and you have to kill her while she screams for help, it’s pretty fucked up. And then it’s revealed that not only do the aliens just see humans as a source of food they harvest every now and then but it was the harvesters who seeded humans on earth in the first place as a source of food and to use as biological material for experiments. So basically earth is a truck stop for these guys and humans are essentially cows and how the spirit magic and the aliens collide is that the aliens are the ancient evil gods of the cherokee people and they invade the spirit worlds because it’s actually just another dimension through which they can access with portals. So basically you’ve been traversing portals astrally and physically this whole time.
*Spoilers end*
It’s pretty surprising because it comes off as just generic shoot mans but then it blind sides you with a pretty cool concept and really innovative mechanics and level design but you can’t turn into a mug though. You can fly around in zero g in a little space buggy and it’s so much better than in Prey 2017 haha.
I just like it more overall, Tommy isn’t a boring generic science guy Gordon Freeman knock off, he’s his own character and he’s constantly commenting on stuff and he really adds life to the game. He isn’t just this generic silent protagonist guy who’s silent for reasons. Like why is Morgan silent when you hear him talk in audio logs all the time? I mean I get why but its a dumb reason, the twist and story of that game is dumb.
‘But Prey 2017 has multiple endings though!!!!11111’ Yeah but they’re all dumb, Prey 2006 has one ending and it’s good and it should’ve had a sequel but it didn’t meet bethesda “quality standards”. Needless to say Outer Worlds was not a good replacement for Prey 2 as I fantasised briefly. It’s basically Fallout 4 in space but even more casualized as if that’s possible. Like there a multiple endings when going to a party at Michael Barrymore’s house but that doesn’t mean I want to go (too soon?).
There’s not much more I can say about it really, it’s not Half life 2 tier but it’s pretty good, if you don’t believe me get it yourself it’s like under a fiver. All I can is I enjoyed it a lot more than the remake and it had a lot of potential for a sequel in a universe where humans are basically a snack for intergalactic cenobytes. But sadly no one can be the cool kid in the games industry, that’s only for bethesda and they had to can a game that according to the developers was like 90% done. I seriously don’t why there isn’t crowdfunding out there or a some kind of build of this game floating around. I mean we live in the age where crowd funded games can not only exist but be better than triple A titles… I can only think of Kingdom Come Deliverance off the top of my head but the Witcher was funded by a Polish government grant so that’s like ancient crowdfunding.
I probably wont replay this game, which is why I say I prefer Doom 3 because I have and definitely will play that game over and over. Why? I don’t know why I just think it’s cool and it takes the demons seriously, unlike Doom 2016 where it’s borderline stabbing it’s tongue through it’s cheek which I hated. It’s like a Doom game that was embarrassed or too cool to be a Doom game with it’s shitty dubstep soundtrack, good gameplay but the world and story are shitty and the game is kind of overhyped imo. It’s a pretty good classic shooter, it’s better than Halo or whatever but *man hates thing that popular grr*.
Yeah so go play Prey 2006 or just watch youtubers play it and then compare to the shitty remake and cry about never getting a sequel. Then think about entering a portal in the original to a dimension where we got Prey 2 instead of Prey 2017 and Fallout 76.
I’m so sorry to do this, I didn’t want to, believe me. But I’m driving my brother mad because I keep going on about Prey so I just need an outlet to get it all out of my brain so I never have to bother anyone else with this itinerant madness.
Ok so I was in a gaming forum on facebook and I dunno people still rave about Prey it has this cult following who really love and defend it to the death. So when I encountered this I had this niggling feeling like I was missing something and that I didn’t give Prey a fair shake. I feel like I judged it too hastily and maybe the price of the game was clouding my judgement. Maybe it wasn’t so bad but I was pissed because I paid full price and didn’t love it. So I decided to give it another shot since I got two months of gamepass for two quid (I returned my copy and got the surge which was half the price and much much better). I figured at that price point I could just enjoy it without feeling ripped off.
*Plot twist*
I still hated it, in fact I hate it even more than I did before and I’m going to go into painstaking detail to explain why haha.
The first time I played it I got the sense the game didn’t want me to use the alien mods and I liked using the turrets, I wish you could’ve put them in your inventory, that would’ve been awesome and made a lot of sense. I don’t actually see why you couldn’t since they fold up into a size that isn’t much bigger than the medkit and they stack. This game might have actually been super fun if you could’ve been a turret engineer build. Or even if you could mod your turrets for like fire damage or something.
So the first time I played it, I didn’t get any of the cool gimmicks like turning into a mug and shooting lasers from your face and by the end of the game I just got bored and stopped playing. At the time I rationalised that the game allowed me to play it in the most boring way possible and that was the games fault for allowing me to do that. I mean it’s shit game design if it lets you or encourages you to not use all it’s mechanics. It sort of shames you for using the alien mods and there’s an incentive to stay human. Despite the fact all the neuromods are made of alien dna so even if you use just the human skills you still have alien dna inside you. I don’t know how that works since the turrets scan you for alien dna and unless you use the powers they wont attack you. Also considering the ending of the game it makes no sense.
Basically I wanted to use all the cool powers to see if my opinion of the game would change, maybe I just didn’t do all the fun stuff the game had planned for me. So I started a new game with the intent to make the most of the alien powers. Starting off with the scientist skills that allows you to extract alien organs so you can make more mods and stuff and of course since I played it before I remembered you can literally get the blueprint to print neuromods basically at the start of the game.
Like in the area you get the glue gun for the first time if you use it to get the second floor you can enter a room that will take you to this neuromod manufacturing place where if you have the toy gun you can use it to open the door of the directors office and boom; infinite neuromods. Basically it breaks the game but you still need to fight aliens to extract their organs to make the mods but essentially you’ve unlocked the key to godlike power and the game was a cake walk from that point on.
I thought this would be pretty fun, spoilers, it wasn’t. The game let me unlock infinite neuromods before you even have the research scanner to unlock the alien neuromods. So I started to play through like that telling myself I was having fun with all the alien powers, researching and unlocking more as I went along but as soon as I got to the boring life support powerplant missions later in game and I had researched the last alien I needed to unlock all the powers the idea of continuing to play just became so tedious I stopped playing even earlier than I did last time. I didn’t even get to the annoying bit with the infinite spawning robots which wasn’t that hard but would’ve been a joke with the current god build I had.
See the game starts off hard like Bioshock and by the end of it you’re basically a greek titan haha. So it should be as satisfying in that regard but it’s just not, it comes close to being like Bioshock and it’s been called Bioshock in space and I know that’s system shock but I haven’t played any of the system shock games yet. But it’s true in my limited scope only having Bioshock as a reference, there is nothing shy a few gimmicks like turning into a mug or shooting a toy gun that wowjustwows the soyboys that isn’t stolen from Bioshock and maybe Alien Isolation. I don’t mind if a game borrows from other games as long as it gives it it’s own spin, adds something to the formula, but Prey just steals everything to make it’s own shoddy bootleg versions. It copies shamelessly and lazily. In other words; copy and add and improve don’t copy and make worse.
And now I’m going to anally list all the features Prey 2017 takes from Bioshock and somehow miraculously ruins.
Guns
Bioshock has 6 guns that have three different ammo types each for a different enemy type some even make it almost a different weapon all together. The guns feel pretty nice, they look nice being period style 1940’s guns (no colt 1911 sadly) the upgrade system is these stations that will add a visual change to your gun that will do something like increase the fire rate or mag size. You don’t really need them, it’s just a cool addition. The guns are spread out through the game and awarded to the player at certain points throughout the campaign, you can find or purchase ammo from vending machines. But a lot of the time you’re scrounging for it or money to buy it. You get the first 3 guns a little too early imo but the other guns are better spread out, almost 1 gun per new area.
Prey has 2 guns, count them a whopping 2 whole guns!!!!111!!! Yeah I said ‘guns’ a glue gun and a stun gun, despite have ‘gun’ in their name are not in fact guns. Neither is whatever a ‘Q-beam’ is. The game even acknowledges this as there is an entirely different skill tree for them. That’s right there’s a skill tree for guns and these miscellaneous weapons. But I’ll get into why that’s a terrible idea in a second once I talk about how shitty and lazy the weapon upgrade system is in general. In Bioshock you might not even find the upgrade stations, I’ve played it a hundred times and I don’t really care if I miss one or I get all the upgrades for all the guns and the game doesn’t care either, a shotgun is still a shotgun even if you don’t find the upgrade for it, it will still blow a splicers face off. So just take that into account, they go through the trouble of putting upgrades into the game that are even visual, someone had to design these visual upgrades, probably a team of people only for you to totally miss or ignore them, that’s passion, that’s attention to detail.
What’s the gun upgrade system in Prey? Oh you just have arbitrary bars you fill with gun upgrades that take up space in your inventory and you can craft them. So they’re not visual and you might say ‘well who cares?’ and I would agree if one of the bars wasn’t for firepower, that’s right, the damage the guns output are affected by the upgrades. But that’s not all, remember I mentioned skill trees? There’s a skill tree for how much damage you do with guns.
Now try to swizz that around in your brain, injecting alien jizz in your eye somehow makes guns hurt more. Ok take that in and then also try and wrap your head around the fact there’s a separate skill tree for the other weapons, the glue gun, q-beam and stun gun. They have their own skill tree on top of their upgrades. So there’s literally a skill tree for 2 weapons, count them 2. What does this mean? Well it means the moment you pick up that shotgun it not only sounds like shit but it also does as much damage as a silenced mouse fart through a pillow. Oh there’s also a skill tree just for the wrench too.
This really isn’t the worst part for me because all this you can overlook but what you can’t overlook is how Prey’s game design is set up to break itself. Because you can get pretty much every gun within the first hour of the game. The shotgun you can get in the lobby just using the glue gun to get into the security room, it’s stupidly easy. I got the shotgun before I got the pistol. Which also is terrible, like it’s silenced for reasons, guess in the future they don’t like guns to make noises despite the fact the shotgun isn’t. It might be just because they couldn’t be bothered to have a mod system to add a silencer or they wanted to dodge people accusing them of having weak sound effects. I mean the least they could’ve done is add a magnum or something, or just made the turrets fit into your inventory like I said before.
What I’m trying to say is games are a delicate balance of risk and reward. A game functions on almost pavlovian response mechanisms, so when you progress or unlock a secret or beat a boss you’re rewarded by the game which then encourages you to keep going for more rewards. Prey completely ditches those ideas and just tosses the whopping 2 guns whilly nilly throughout the world and it’s pretty much the same with the powers (if you find a gun lying on the ground somehow in bioshock it’s usually a trap haha). But this is one of the reasons I didn’t see a reason to finish the game, on top of the story/characters/motivations not being terribly engaging and the world not being very immersive.
Also side note, they also look like crap, the pistol is basically a generic 1911 knock off with an added bit to make it look sort of sci fi ish and your character holds it like a granny afraid it might bite. The shotgun is a bog standard pump action which looks almost exactly like the one from Bioshock but with some tacked on sci-fi touch screen shit. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a straight up asset flip, just take a generic shotgun and add sci-fi shit to it. In summary not enough guns but also they’re garbage. I mean compare the look of the weapons from this game to Doom not even modern Doom I mean Doom 3 or even to Prey 2006 and tell me which guns are more interesting.
What there are no rifles in space, just weird beam lasers that suck?
Oh also there are shitty grenades that are pretty much useless except the recycling grenade which if you think about it is just a regular grenade that recylces enemies. I had so many emp grenades in my inventory, I never used them, it’s just quicker to shoot them. Also the nullwave grenades are useless because they stop enemy powers from working but they also stop yours. You can get a chipset to block it but why bother, they’re not that useful or fun to use, I wasn’t even sure they worked half the time. There’s also a typhon lure which I also never used, the is just not good enough for it to be effective, or they’re too spread out maybe, it never worked or I never found an opportunity where there were enough enemies to make me think of using it. And yeah there are literally more useless grenades than guns in this game haha.
Powers
Bioshock’s powers derive from weird sea slugs that were discovered on the sea floor and I love that idea, it’s sort of vaguely Lovecraftian because we actually know more about space than we do about the sea. So it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a substance that’s like super stem cells that allow scientists to mangle dna. The themes of the game that Prey rips off is science unrestrained by government and morality.
The powers in bioshock are fairly simple, fire, electricity, ice, telekinesis, bees… that’s right fucking bees! You can shoot fucking bees from your hands! And if that doesn’t make you want to go out and get a copy or download a copy I don’t know what will.
But more than them just being cool, the plasmids are key to the plot in terms of building a world where people tinker with their own dna so they can light cigarettes with their fingers or work in a bee sanctuary without a suit, a world where you get a free telekinesis plasmid with a root canal (that’s actually an advert in bioshock). Each plasmid power has it’s own lore and place in the world, each power has it’s own background story. And one of the main reasons you explore the world of bioshock is to find more powers and gene tonic passives. This is one of the main reasons I hated Bioshock infinite because the reason there were powers in that game was just because they were in the previous games. The game wasn’t centred on them, they were just there because Bioshock in the title. The game was just about Elizabeth and it sucked.
Not only do the powers have their own reason for being in the game unlike Prey and Infinite they also have contextual uses. You need the electobolt power at the beginning of the game to get through an electronic door that’s short circuited. You need the fire power because Rapture is leaking and there are parts that are frozen over either by the extreme cold of the ocean floor or splicers with ice powers blocking your path.
You need the telekinesis power to move objects blocking your path and to get keys out of your reach. And you need to shoot bees out of your hands because it’s really fucking cool. Also I think there are parts of the game where you use the ice powers to make bridges out of water. I can’t remember if that’s in Bioshock or Bioshock 2.
The powers are also nicely level gated so you can’t just unlock like level three bees and just rape every enemy at the start of the game. In fact you can’t even buy the next level of it until you find it in the bee sanctuary where the beekeepers of Rapture use it.
Also every power is visual and has it’s own bespoke animations. Bioshock is really big on immersion so when you inject yourself with eve you actually see yourself injecting it into your arm and this also happens with your first plasmid which is the electobolt. You jab it into your arm and electricity shoots through your veins as your genetic code is being rewritten then you have an electrified hand which spasms out in this cool way to deliver a fistfull of lighting at your attackers. When you get fire you click your fingers to light people up, the bee power has bees living inside your arms like a beehive and you unleash them by spreading your arms and just swarming them at people and they fly around on their own. One of the reasons they’re the most OP power is because the bees have their own ai and they can find enemies even when they’re invisible or playing dead. Which sounds buggy but it kinda makes sense because bees have super heightened senses of smell.
Prey, you have powers because they’re in Bioshock and system shock and the people who made Prey have seen in charts and graphs that people like games with cool powers. Ok no you get powers by splicing your dna with alien dna and for some reason I’m sure it’s buried in some long winded boring email I didn’t read the aliens have all sorts of wacky powers (probably because the genius scientists gave it to them and didn’t see that horribly backfiring).
Powers like electricity and fire and ‘ether’ and psychic and technopath powers, don’t really see how you get these powers in space or find them useful when you’re a sentient blob monster. But I guess you could rationalise that they have adaptive powers and maybe some of the blob monsters became firey because fire is cool.
The gimmicky power that sold the game to people was the ability to copy the mimic power, so you can turn into any object. Which don’t get me wrong it’s cool and you can basically cheese the game and get into any area by either using that to slip through cracks, or the remote manipulation power that’s basically telekinesis to open doors (but not pick up stuff or catch grenades or do anything cool with it) or the toy gun to shoot door releases.
Some doors are blocked by heavy objects and you need to upgrade your strength like Deus ex and you can throw them at enemies. Which isn’t that useful, it’s useful in deus ex because you can use them as moving cover but most of the enemy projectiles are aoe so it makes almost no difference.
But I just want to point out that the remote manipulation, the strength and the mimic powers are all separate skill trees but each aspect of them is basically encompassed in one power in Bioshock which is telekinesis. You can open doors with that you can pick up objects you can’t reach and lift heavy objects, you can’t turn into a mug but you can throw gas canister at someone haha.
The mimic power is pretty overrated honestly, it’s useless in combat and stealth because you can’t really attack and it eats up energy staying in another form which is really dumb. Later tiers in the skill tree let you mimic a turret and a robot but I don’t see how that’s useful since to copy them you need to be looking at them. I mean like tell me how this makes sense; you see a turret but want to also be a turret so now you have two turrets because you are one, but the turrets shoot at you so you have to break them or deactivate them to get close. I just don’t see how that’s useful when you can just use the shotgun or another power. Sure it maybe saves ammo in which case what is the ammo if it’s coming out of your body? But you can make more ammo so… see what I mean? It’s kinda useless, and why would you want to turn into a robot, the enemies attack the robots and they aren’t really good in combat and you don’t take less damage as them? Maybe it’s something to do with the shitty stealth mechanics this game thinks it has. I dunno.
The powers are mostly useless honestly, the fire/electric/psychic attacks aren’t used to open doors or access other areas they’re just attacks. And moreover there are no animations for them. You just activate the power and decide where this aoe blast is going to, in this like time slow/stop mode and then a beam/ball of shit just comes out of your body and does a splody that usually in the heat of battle gets you too. I don’t think even the enemies have an animation for their beam powers it just like comes out of their chests and fucks up your day.
So there’s no real visceral raw feel of launching a lightning bolt at your enemy or snapping them on fire or launching a swarm of mother fucking bees at them! The game just feels restrained and sort of bland and passionless.
But now my two biggest gripes with the powers and this goes back to dishonored too but doesn’t seem to bother me as much in Bioshock even though Bioshock is probably the source of this bullshit mechanics. What I’m talking about is the non-regenerating mana/magic/energy bar. Which is especially annoying in Deus ex where you need to eat energy bars before you can do a fucking double take down, total bullshit. I hate games that give you awesome power but feed it to you through like a drip. It works in games like Vampyr because your power meter is blood and you can just take it from your enemies, so your enemies are just walking mana tanks. Can you imagine if the Darkness you had to like drink darkness juice to recharge your god like powers haha?
It wrecks the power fantasy completely. Although in Bioshock it doesn’t really feel as bad as it does in dishonored or Prey. Prey takes the fucking cake though because not only do your attacks consume energy (which isn’t a huge deal because you get a million psi hypos and you can make them too) but all the nuke powers are on a fucking cooldown. Like wtf? Who came up with that? Energy consumption and a cool down, one or the other surely? Like imagine you’re Adam Jensen and you do a takedown and then you have to eat a candy bar and wait like 30 seconds before you can do it again, what kind of bullshit is that?
I get it’s to stop you spamming it but that’s what the finite energy is for. I guess they do it so you have to get more powers and instead spamming one you use one then the other and cycle through them. But what if I just want to use the best one over and over haha?
The best one is also what this game should’ve been called (probably what it was called before bethesda meddled with it) if this game had any balls and had the confidence to be compared to Bioshock, which is “Psychoshock” it’s the best power in the game because it does loads of direct damage, never misses and it stops them from using their powers.
But no they pulled this weird shell game where they wanted you to compare it to Prey that obscure early 2000’s shooter that is nothing like this game at all and is in fact way better haha. And don’t look up the trailer for it’s intended sequel it’ll just make you mad that you live in the dimension where corporate politics gave you Prey 2017 instead.
My 2nd gripe was going to be the research component but I think I’ll give that it’s own category… like now.
Research
Bioshock, probably ripping off system shock, I don’t know, still haven’t played them since writing this weird and long rant/essay. Basically you get this camera and you can research enemies by taking their picture and it varies depending on whether they’re using their powers or not. And this is how you unlock certain gene tonics, some of the best in fact, unless I dunno, you don’t like being able to turn invisible, well I mean it’s not turning into a mug but hey can’t impress them all haha.
So this game you’re exploring, finding new gene tonics and weapons and plasmids and you can get them through researching new enemies, of which there are many. But the enemies are a whole other topic entirely.
Prey you get like a headscanner thing (that you designed btw whoopdeefuckingdoo go you) and that’s how you unlock all your powers. So you’re not gonna find new powers exploring, only researching the enemies can unlock them. You find new chipsets which is this games version of gene tonics, but is there one that turns you invisible? No… no there isn’t. There’s one that makes your energy regenerate but it’s like at a rate of 0.02 per second so its basically useless. Which encompasses most of the chipsets, they’re unnoticeable, you forget about them most of the time. Whereas in Bioshock as soon as you pick up a new one it’s really exciting and you want to use it immediately. In prey you get one and you forget you even picked it up.
It’s another factor in regards to the structure of the game because you can get all the powers around the second third of the game. So at that point why are you still playing the game? You have all the weapons by then, you’ve unlocked and been disappointed by all the powers by then, the story? The characters? Maybe you just love Morgan’s fat brother who sounds half asleep all the time and you really want to meet/kill him for being so boring.
This is what I mean by what’s wrong with this game, it has no idea why people play videogames, the developers had no idea how to structure a fun videogame so it totally falls apart in the third act.
Hacking
I almost forgot to mention hacking, the hacking minigame is something bioshock gets shit for but at least there wasn’t a fucking hacking skill tree. Imagine having a shitty hacking mechanic and then expecting people to invest their skill points in unlocking it. What level of fuckery are you on?
Bioshock you can hack everything and bend it to your will, using the security system and turrets to your advantage is really fun, sometimes I just turn invisible and let it do it’s thing for hilarious results haha. The only thing stopping you from hacking is the difficulty level but you get gene tonics that can help you, remove tiles, slow the timer etc and you can craft (I forgot to mention the crafting system, it’s so unobtrusive in this game I love it) a hacktool that instantly hacks anything. So it’s not a big deal.
Prey not of course this game has it’s hand out, nah you can’t hack unless you have the magic hack power unlocked by alien magic, and you need to keep feeding it skill points to hack higher grade stuff, which is mostly pointless since you can always just find the code or get in some other way, so hacking is a useless skill, unless you like reading a million boring emails about lesbian romances.
Steve Blum phoned in voice acting. I don’t hate Steve Blum I love Cowboy Bebop to this day but that show is not representative of his shitty voices in almost every videogame on earth now. Every time I hear his voice I just groan and it completely destroys my immersion.
Bioshock is not graced with the voice talents of Steve Blum doing a shitty accent.
Prey is graced with the shitty voice acting of Steve Blum trying to do some kind of shitty accent, is it russian? Is it Swedish? Who can say but he comes in at the end to sort of be a villain in the third act and it’s as phoned in as it sounds (I think he’s also in the trailer, big yikes). It’s like they realised no one saw Morgan’s brother as a good or imposing villain and they just threw Steve Blum in there as some generic ethnic army dude who comes to kill you for really justified reasons, you could actually just let him kill you and that’s your ending right there. I remember me deciding to do that to end my first playthrough because it was just unbearable. (He’s also in Bioshock infinite, shock horror)
Enemies
Bioshock this is the big one, this is the one that separates the men from the boys, the enemies in Bioshock are amazing. They’re not ok or alright they’re amazing, from their design to their characters and powers.
I didn’t know this until yesterday but the enemies are actually straight ripped from those really creepy pictures of ww1/2 era war casualties who had plastic surgery. Everyone must have seen those pictures of early skin grafts from third degree burns. Those faces are used to make the splicers in Bioshock and it looks amazing.
The enemies in Bioshock perfectly reflect the world, a decayed fallen kingdom that God has abandoned long ago. Where no boundaries exist for beauty or power and humanity/morality is a blurred line.
Their dialogue and voice acting is creepy and sort of goofy and funny sometimes. Which kinda makes it scarier because you can feel some humanity coming through, you almost feel sorry for them while they’re trying to suck the adam from your skull.
And there’s new enemies in each area, they’re each tailor made for their environment. There’s almost too many to list really in terms of their costumes and dialogue and powers and weapons. Their Ai is also great, they’ll ambush you and flank you and sneak up on you climbing on the ceiling.
They’ll play dead or pretend to be a statue and follow you and just when you turn around pretend to be a statue again.
And that’s not even mentioned the melancholy lumbering big daddies and the chipper little sisters that don’t even attack you but will totally fuck you up if you do haha. But that’s how you get adam to get new powers. They’re sub-bosses and they’re how you get your powers.
Then there are the “Bosses” I use that loosely because they might not even fight you, but there are head lunatics that run each area that have gone mad in their own unique way and they are their own personalities pushing you forward. They’re just so well written and embrace the goofiness and theatrical nature of the rapture. So much time and effort went into the characters and enemies in this game it’s remarkable.
Prey’s enemies are basically just semi-sentient marmite. One of the things that really put me off about this game and a lot of other people is how placeholder the enemies look. Almost no thought went into the design of these enemies above the mimics powers, but other than that they’re just little blobs of marmite that can turn into mugs. It makes you jump maybe once at the start of the game. But after that it’s just annoying like swatting a fly.
I say ‘enemies’ loosely because really there are only 3. The mimic (and then a bigger one) the phantom which comes in flaming hot cheetos, electric blue and ethereal flavours (it’s literally just the same model with like an electric/fire/ether filter) then there are the big blobs that have mind powers or technopath powers so they can control people and make you scared or control turrets and robots. The fear mechanic is weird because there are chipsets and skill trees to defend against something I didn’t even notice, like what does it even do? I mean that’s the mark of a great game mechanic when you don’t even know if it does anything haha.
Then there’s the ‘nightmare’ I think we’ve established Arkane aren’t good at names, Prey 2006 being nothing at all like this game (and ironically having lots of very interesting enemies and guns). The nightmare is basically just a resized phantom, he’s a big phantom which makes weird screamy noises and he’s scary until you eat like a million mars bars and just keep psychoshocking and shooting him then he like popes into a little turd you can loot.
In fact all the enemies seem to just sort of disintegrate into little blobs, almost like they didn’t want you taking a closer look at their models hmm…. hmmmmmmm.
And yeah I didn’t mention those weird cyst enemies that explode into little stingy heat seeking hemroids because the game doesn’t even classify them as enemies because they don’t drop anything, they’re just irritating globs of shit. Most of the time I didn’t even fight them I just tanked them or build a little lip of glue they couldn’t roll over haha. “Oh no our arch nemesis a one foot lip!”
Oh yeah I almost forgot those weaver enemies that spawn those little fucks but they’re just like a marmite pancake that make weird shit in the air. You get my point all the enemies look the same.
But really that’s not what bothers me and it kind of make me uncomfortable getting to the root of why the enemies aren’t satisfying to fight and why even if the powers were fun to use the enemies and the environments aren’t created to make the most of them. They’re more about opening different ways of traversal. I actually think this game would’ve been more fun as a portal style puzzle game without enemies. If it had any atmosphere it could’ve been like portal meets Observer.
Like you get mind control powers which sound fun but you enter most rooms and there’s just one phantom or two phantoms really spread out so you mind control one and then you’re like ‘Now what?’ as they just stand there and do nothing.
Like in Bioshock you can enrage people and just watch the shit fly as you melt into a corner turning invisible occasionally releasing a swarm of bees to make things interesting. In Bioshock the enemies and the environments are set up to be this big play ground for you to test all these weird powers.
And all the enemies in Bioshock are reactive to you, you shock them they shudder and stammer and stop, you set them on fire they’ll scream and run to find water (at which point you shock them again haha), you cover them in bees they’ll run around and scream (and say “I hate bees” haha), you freeze them they’ll chatter their teeth. Everything about them is giving you feedback that they’re real and alive and your actions are relevant.
What happens when you set the marmite on fire? It loses health. It doesn’t scream or react in any way it just is on fire now and it’s coming to attack you. Same thing when you electrocute it, it has no reaction other than losing it’s health and then coming to kill you.
This is why they feel so placeholder and I honestly think the game would’ve been better just as a puzzler. Because the combat and the enemies are terrible. The enemies aren’t fun to fight, they’re not satisfying to kill. I might as well just go into my kitchen and punch marmite, it’s cheaper and less time consuming than playing Prey and it might be more fun.
Bosses? What bosses? The main characters are really just generic and the tone is like going for realism but the art style is kind of goofy and bad looking and the aliens aren’t scary. So tonally it’s like halfway between Bioshock and Alien isolation in this limbo of being too goofy to be taken seriously while also being too serious to be fun.
Bioshock is just balls out goofy and it’s awesome, Alien Isolation is serious and tense and gripping and it’s amazing. Prey tries to copy them but just has no idea what made those games good. They just wanted to make the worlds safest game, borrowing elements from previous popular games and the name of a decent shooter to make this frankenstein reimagining of system shock to net easy cash. But it didn’t really do that, sales of this game were pretty middling (even though it didn’t come out at a time with very much competition) amidst lots of returns mine being one of them.
All the characters in Bioshock are memorable and sort of horrifying each in their own aspect but Prey characters are totally forgettable.
Recently I got the collectors edition of Bioshock and there’s a museum that’s this little section of the game that is an exhibit showcasing all the early builds of characters and enemies and believe me Bioshock literally has thrown away more enemy concept than Prey 2017 (I stipulate 2017 because Prey 2006 has a ton of awesome enemies) actually has.
It goes into detail why these designs weren’t used and the reason is because they were too silly or monstrous and you couldn’t see the humanity of the enemies, you couldn’t empathise with them, they were just faceless monsters you didn’t feel anything about killing. So they went back to human enemies who were disfigured and talked and emoted so that it would be more engaging to fight them. And they nailed it, the enemies are scary and also pathetic, they’re horrifying but also you feel sorry for them too.
Tone
Bioshock has this wacky 1940’s tone almost like fallout but a lot darker, the villains look and sound and move in cartoony exaggerated ways but it really only serves to make it creepier really. The silliness and chaotic aspects create a world where anything can happen and it lowers your guard for the darker moments. And Bioshock is pretty dark. It’s about a whole town losing it’s fucking mind from the top down. Losing their very humanity, but tinged with this whimsical dark ironic humour that pastiches the real world while perfectly satirising it.
Prey like all Arkane games has no sense of humour, the tone is played completely straight aside from some lame audiologs that aren’t funny. It’s basically set in the real world alternate timeline where the funniest thing that happens is a game of D&D and getting a toy crossbow. But Arkane also has a weird visual style which they toned down for this game but it still doesn’t look like the characters are meant to look realistic. In Dishonored their eyes are sort of too far apart and they look butt fucking ugly, every character looks like a failed experiment, I really don’t know what was going on with that artstyle, everyone looks like a deformed cabbage doll and their body proportions are wrong and it doesn’t really fit into the world, why are they like that? But again just like Prey it’s played totally straight, there’s no humour or satire which is in stark contrast to Thief the game it’s mimicking. That game was full of humour and satire. Arkane just takes itself too seriously, I think they forget they’re making videogames and videogames are supposed to be fun. It’s ok to laugh at yourself in a game, it’s ok to have fun and have silly gags. Games that Deus ex play it straighter than Bioshock or Thief but they have a clean crisp art style where the people and the world looks real. But even Deus ex has some humour, Jensen is this gruff block carbon alloy but he cracks a joke now and then.
So the result with Arkane is you get these static, stiff boring worlds that lack any sort of personality and aren’t fun to explore. It’s like their games are afraid of having personality or they might overshadow big daddy bethesda. Which is supposedly what happened to Humanhead after they made the original Prey which was a pretty groundbreaking in 2006, it did stuff Valve stole for Portal. So when they wanted to do Prey 2 and wouldn’t let Besthesda buy them out, they were cut off at the knees because Prey 2 didn’t meet their “Quality standards” *cough*Fallout76*cough*.
The world/summary
Bioshock is a world gone without limits driven insane by it’s own hubris, it’s a whole city of icaruses (icarusi?) that got too close to the sun and got horribly burned but somehow limped on in the dark, driven mad by their failure. The sea itself becomes this oppressive and claustrophobic character of it’s own as you look out the window that could be leaking or freezing over or running out of air. The sea itself is scary, which is why I hated Biohock 2 because it removed the sea as an antagonist by giving you a diving suit. The world is so intriguing and weird and charming you’re literally clambering for the audio logs that litter the game and flesh out the world and give you hints as to how Rapture fell.
Prey makes the same huge mistake by giving you a space suit right off the bat. Yeah for some reason the uniform for all employees of this shady corporation are half life 2 inspired environment space suits. So why be afraid of space when you can just float around in it. I even played it on survival mode where you can get leaks in your suit but I always had a bunch of suit repair kits and for some reason all the suits have infinite oxygen if they’re not damaged.
That could’ve been a tense game mechanic like in Deadspace 2 but nope. Shit just thinking about the alien/weapon/environment/suit designs in Deadspace, that is another game ten times better than this haha. But imagine if the same people that worked on Deadspace made Prey, think of that level of attention to detail and passion.
I mean look at those games and tell me what Prey is, it’s not a shooter, the shooting sucks. It’s not a stealth game, the stealth is a joke, it’s not a puzzler, the puzzles suck. It’s not an rpg (whatever that means these days), it’s not a survival horror because it’s not scary, it’s not a visual novel waifu simulator because you can’t romance anyone and all the characters are either gay or not hot and their models look like ass. Oh no it’s an ‘immersive sim’ whatever that means. It looks like it means its shit at everything. I mean say what you want about dishonored but at least the combat is kinda fun and the level design is pretty good.
How hilarious would it be if there were romance options though. “Hey babe, yeah I’m gonna blow up the space station, so why don’t I blow up your space station, if you know what I mean?”
One thing they didn’t think to rip of though which would’ve been good is the thing. Like why can’t the mimics copy people? Maybe they do I dunno, I didn’t finish this game because I’m not a youtuber getting paid to do so haha. But that could’ve been a cool element, not knowing who was a mimic and who wasn’t.
Moreover the world isn’t interesting because in all honesty it’s basically just the regular world in space, it’s not this weird city underwater, frozen in the 1940’s slowly decaying from addiction to mind and gene altering substances. It’s also not a cyberpunk dystopia like Deus ex where people hack off bits of their body to replace with robot parts. So I have about as much desire to read the people of Prey’s emails as I do the regular world, which is not a lot. I mean why bother? There isn’t this great conspiracy I’m trying to uncover like in Deus ex or a world gone mad I’m trying to make sense of. It’s basically just a space station that was ordinaryish until it suddenly wasn’t. So listening to their audio logs is just a chore unless they’re giving you a code to something.
The audio logs thing, the earliest I saw it used was Doom 3 and in that game it was there to build the story and tension and creep the player out and it worked, the story basically being event horizon on mars, where hell is slowly creeping into this base driving people mad until they flip the switch and throw open the gates of hell.
But there’s this part of the game where you have to collect audio logs in Prey to open this voice lock and all the audio logs are basically detailing this lesbian romance that adds nothing to the plot or the horror, I mean maybe it’s trying to add a level of human horror because one of the lesbians dies obviously and the other is hiding in space, but I really didn’t give a shit. Maybe I’d have cared if these characters weren’t introduced to me in audiologs.
That’s another thing Bioshock does well in terms of the audiologs, there are only a handful of people that make them, so the voice acting is tight and it’s relevent to the plot and each person is defined as a character and has a role. In Prey everyone in this hyper futuristic space station is recording little audiologs and dropping them like breadcrumbs all over the place, why you ask? Because it’s in Bioshock that’s why.
Bioshock knew to keep the audio log character pool small so the characters would be more defined in their personalities. When you have everyone making audio logs it just becomes white noise, too many names, no faces to the names, spotty voice acting. There are too many characters that are ill defined and you never meet. It tales the concept and just drowns it in mediocrity.
So yeah in six thousand words or less ‘shit sucks, don’t buy it, and if you like it you’re basically dumb or something’. I mean no but… kinda yeah. If you like it, all power to you but have you heard of Bioshock or system shock or Alien Isolation or Dead Space, you know the games this game is ripping off really badly? I can only assume the people who like this game have never even heard of Bioshock, or they only played Infinite.
If any one who likes Bioshock and just wants to play this game to get more Bioshock, my advice to you is just play Bioshock again (that’s what I’m doing right now). Seriously, and that goes for the sequels too because I’d rather just play Bioshock again than play 2 or infinite, they’re not great but they’re better than Prey. So yeah if you want more Bioshock and don’t want to play the first game again just play the sequels or system shock. They’re coming out with reboots of that soon and a sequel which may or may not be terrible because I’m pretty sure it’s written by the same guy that wrote Prey so…. yeah.
But honestly, writing in videogames for me is hit or miss. Look at this huge essay and tell me how much I talked about the writing. A game can get by with shitty writing as long as it has a fun game loop and well designed world. Some of favourite games have little to no story and sometimes a game having a story sort of ruins it if it gets in the way.
Story is always a touchy subjects in games. I can’t remember who said but someone likened story in videogames to story in pornos like ‘it’s nice if they’re there but it’s not that important’. And honestly a story can be bad if it gets in the way of the game or it isn’t paired with a fun game. It has to learn to get out of the way of the game. It can’t be the main focus.
So the failing of Prey 2017 in my opinion is a team effort, it’s not down to one person, it’s the fault of the entire team just making a lackluster photocopy of a photocopy. They couldn’t grasp what made Bio/systemshock iconic or didn’t have the talent/passion to pull it off like the guys that made those games. Just like they couldn’t copy Thief with Dishonored.
So yeah if you’re still reading this you must be insane, it’s like over 7k words, I didn’t intend anyone to get this far, I just wrote this so I didn’t have to think about it anymore, so to the fictional person reading this now, please get help, there are people that love (probably not).
Ok gotta stop typing now, but I fear I may have to come back to this because I recently did a playthrough of Prey 2006 and although I wasn’t blown away I still finished it, so there’s that. It’s a fun, interesting little game that deserved a better legacy than this phoned in garbage.
Bit of a trolly title, yeah well it doesn’t get much better from here on out.
So for once I’m reviewing a game that isn’t like ten years old because I got gamepass for two whole pounds for two months so I thought I’d start with the big boy of xbox.
I did review the last game and I thought it was kinda bleh, I’m not a huge fan of Gears games really, I find them sort of bland and boring chest high wall shooting galleries. Four was pretty much that with a loose plot that was sort of pointless and toothless with uncharted reject characters.
I’m happy to say almost everything in Gears 5 is better. Not the tank controls, you still feel like you’re moving a fridge through waist high custard getting caught on every crag in the environment. But now you get to stare at some curvaceous lady ass while you do it.
Yes this is the gears where you get to play as the affirmative action hire Cait and she was surprisingly not annoying to play. I thought this was a distinctive sign that Gears was getting woke but I was pleased to be wrong, there’s very little wokeness going on. It’s mainly done as a device of developing her in the main plot line as well as giving JD a more rounded arc off screen. Because you play him in 4 and he’s basically a boyscout and you reprise him at the start of 5 and then *no spoilers* some shit goes down and JD basically doesn’t want to play anymore and takes his ball and goes home and you get to play as Cait. I kinda wish she was faster but it’s fine, she has a pretty decent ass, not as good as some warframe’s though haha.
I was really enjoying the story actually, that was until I realised I liked it better in FEAR. Yeah the main plot line is basically ripped directly from FEAR. Little girls, evil secret labs and super soldiers, classic.
They did improve the gameplay in some elements like I think they moved the chainsaw function on the lancer to the reload button instead of the melee button so now you hold down reload to use the chainsaw as an alt fire. This leaves the melee button open for your knife and takedowns as well as actual melee weapons you get in this game, all two of them… wow. Also you can move with the chainsaw better because your thumb can stay on the stick.
Yes there are like a handful of new weapons, only like two of which don’t completely suck, those being the new Lancer GL, which stands for ‘grenade launcher’, I know right first you get a chainsaw now the newest innovation is it shoots grenades, what will they think of next? Toothpicks? An easy bake oven? Grenades having their own button and not having to awkwardly equip them to throw???
But it’s pretty good and pretty rare in the game but only has three grenades which sucks but this is the first gears game to have explosive ammo boxes to recharge all explosive weapons so now carrying a boomshot is actually viable. I was actually carrying the rare relic boomshot that had a three shot clip for awhile until a glitch made me it fall through the floor when I tried to get more ammo for it. Although if that hadn’t happened it would’ve just got lost as part of the story stealing your weapons which it liked to do quite a few times, once right before a really annoying boss fight.
The next new weapon that didn’t suck was the talon which is a pretty good machine pistol. Then there’s the claw (really original names) which is an assault rifle which sucks, then a mace from these new enemies called wardens I think, then there’s the all mighty pipe which is only on one level. There’s also like a freeze gun too which is ok.
Now I happen to think melee weapons in gears isn’t a bad idea because they do decent damage, stun lock and have good range and pair that with Jack’s skills and you can have a solid build if they didn’t have ammo, durability I guess, they run out and can’t be reloaded because they’re not guns so you’re literally left with your she-dick in your hands when they’re gone.
But I just touched on the best part of this game, the real star of the show; Jack.
The actual advancement that made me enjoy the game, that made a gears game actually interesting and fun for once instead of just a chest high shooting galleryfest. Was the little robot dude that you can upgrade with all sorts of neat gadgets and powers, really he steals the show. And in my opinion this is rpg elements done right in a non rpg game. Where as it’s done so wrong in games like farcry where it just breaks the game and makes it tedious because it’s just shoved in there. I don’t mind rpg elements in rpgs, I don’t mind stealth elements or fps elements in rpgs but I hate it when rpg elements are awkwardly shoved into shooters just because you can do it. It’s just always shitty and pointless and annoying.
But this is really good and it’s not like your character from the previous game loses all their skills (the skills you never had) you just get a new robot you need to respec and I love the build system. Because it’s less like a character creator and more like build system where you can swap out upgrades on the fly and experiment with builds and powers you like. You don’t need to use all the skills and you’re not encouraged to, you can just use the ones that work for you. And there’s a good selection of skills, you can turn invisible and start knifing people which I loved. You can flashbang and freeze enemies, stims make you invulnerable, shields, electric traps and scanners. There are cool down timers on each type of skill so you can’t spam them and break the game, so you have to use them tactically and put some thought into your gameplay style. It added a much needed level of strategy to the combat I appreciated greatly.
The characters seem a little more fleshed out and less like Uncharted knock offs and some of the emotional content was pretty effective with the great facial capture, the campaign is nice and girthy, its not too long but feels satisfying (oo err misses!).
Ok now that’s I’ve licked it’s balls time to rip it apart haha.
My first real criticism about the game, not having played the last God of War game because I don’t have the sonyitus, I can’t really say it’s copying God of War, despite the fact JD literally get’s a Kratos make over, complete with bald head and beard and a kick ass scar on his face and funky robot arm. Obviously setting up for when you play him in Gears 6 in which he’ll get his skin bleached somehow probably and start carrying around an axe and a child.
He also sort of becomes much edgier which he sort of forgets towards the last act, which kinda sucks, I wanted to see a more edgy less ‘just nathan drake in gears of war’ JD but alas. They could’ve done more for his arc, hopefully they’ll build on it more in the next game because it felt like there was too much focus on Cait, which was necessary, the story was about her and her family but I hope they build more on JD’s arc in the next game because that seemed really interesting and it went nowhere.
The first thing that jumped out at me as a problem in this game is the free roam sections, they’re basically just filler. Which is fitting because this whole game is basically filler for the next game. But really the driving sequences are completely pointless and just there to waste your time. And I’m not saying that to shit on this game, that’s the case for most open world games.
Now this isn’t an open world game, there are like two small open world sections you can drive through and do little sub-missions. Now I say sub-missions, I mean optional missions because they’re all the same. The open world part isn’t like a sandbox like you would get in something like farcry or gta with lots of stuff to and enemies to fight and challenges and exploration. The open world in this game is just longer hallways between action set pieces, that’s all, it’s just filler. Because the sub-missions are just ‘kill all these swarm’ and there’s nothing else going in the map, it just serves to connect these different action set pieces.
They’re like ‘Go check out what happened to this water tower, we lost contact with them blah blah blah’ and the character like winks ‘It’s definitely not going to be another fight with swarm, you know the only enemy in this game’.
This is what I mean when I say this game isn’t one that can have sub-missions because they’re the same every time, they’re all just going to be fights with the swarm, there’s literally nothing else they could be. I mean what else could it be? The spanish inquisition? There radio just broke, they all went out to buy cigarettes? What’s the point in having sub-missions when they all just devolve into ‘fight more swarm’ like yeah what have I been doing in the main missions? Why is this optional? Well I did them because they unlock upgrades for Jack but I just feel like it’s really fucking contrive filler. You could’ve just taken it out of the game and put the upgrades into the story campaign and it would’ve been the same and knocked off an hour or two of the game.
Like how do sub-missions work in any other game? Look at something like fallout you go to a place and talk to someone and it has it’s own story which probably ends up with a fight but sometimes not, who knows, it could be anything but it literally can’t be anything else but a fight in this game because it’s not an rpg it’s an action game. The mechanics literally won’t allow for any other outcome. It’s basically just a kind of lazy way to copy other popular games, which I really think is unnecessary, this game is good enough to stand on it’s own.
Another thing that annoys me is how only the lancer has an alt fire? Why does a game entirely about the guns have such boring guns? You made a new type of button press to use the chainsaw why not have alt fires for every gun? Why bring in relic rare guns when this game treats guns as entirely disposable and you can’t really save them except on the skiff when you’re driving around which you can’t access in story missions.
I kinda wish it had a dead space 3 style gun upgrade system where you could combine guns so the second gun would be the alt fire. How epic would it be to have a kit lancer where instead of a chainsaw it’s alt fire is a cryogun or a flamethrower or a gnasher? I just wish more thought went into the guns. Why would you copy God of War, a game that has no fucking guns and not copy something that has a basic crafting system? Why not let us have an upgrade system where Jack can store guns or you can store more than two guns on your back or carry more ammo? Why the fuck can’t Jack carry ammo? Sure he can fetch it but he can’t carry any on him??? Why allow you to store guns on the skiff and not Jack? You know the robot with you at all times instead of the skiff you only use to get around the map.
That’s pretty much my only gripe with it, it’s an ok game, it didn’t blow me away but it didn’t leave me unsatisfied, I liked the characters a lot more, I found myself caring about them and really enjoying the gameplay this time around. A part from that one boss fight with instant kills where it took all my good weapons before it started and had homing attacks that stun locked you, that sucked balls.
But overall it’s a really good, well made game well worth the whopping price of two pounds for gamepass which I will cancel at the end of the two months haha.
This review is totally just for me to get my thoughts out about this game because I left a really long review on the xbox game store and pressed back by mistake and it erased it all haha. So this is pure autism, I just have to review it to get it out of my head and never have to think about it again haha, ok here goes.
Broken Sword is one of my favourite games of all time, I say ‘game’ specifically instead of ‘series’ because there are five games now and only two are any good, the others are total shovelware. It was one of the first adventure games I played, on the gameboy advance I think and I played it over and over, it was just really cool to me to have this huge adventure on a handheld. The music, the characters, the writing the subject and history were all amazing to me so I played the subsequent games trying to recapture the magic of the first and almost none of them do sadly.
This game has been out for ages, but it’s one of those games that I buy purely for nostalgia and know will probably be shit so I don’t want to spend over a tenner to get it so I waited for a deep deep sale and got it for a fiver which is pretty much what it’s worth.
I’m not sure if it was released on ios but I was considering paying full price when I get a switch and I’m so glad I didn’t because it looks like a glorified phone game. I’m not one of these people who hated the shift to 3D with broken sword 3, I really liked that game, much more than the second one and I thought 3d with realistic graphics was the logical choice when dealing with the subject matter. A more mature tone is warranted when these games are all about cults and murder and ancient artefacts and crime.
But 5 isn’t interested in tone, it’s interested in getting your nostalgia bucks on top of the kickstarter money they fleeced out of people to make the ‘okayest’ broken sword ever. That’s right this was a fucking kickstarter project, another disaster from the website where dreams go to die or if not they kill themselves a few months later. Proving once again the public don’t know what they want and will pay to be involved in the production of their own disappointment.
Yeah so Broken Sword 5 abandons any idea of realism and it’s basically a cartoon with the animations and graphical style of a phone game. Some of the animations on your xbox avatars are better. Some of the cutscenes are laughably bad. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy they went back to hand drawn backgrounds but the cell shaded characters was a terrible decision, they look terrible and it makes it all seem like a big joke.
The writing is also tonally really bad, broken sword is famously pretty funny even when dark stuff is happening but there’s a bit in this game where you wax a dead dog to wear it’s hair on your face to impersonate a dead man so you can dance with his drunk wife to get a key to her safe to seventies music while he’s in the room lying in a coffin. I’m not making this up, this happens in the game and fuck me, my brother walked in during the cringe inducing dance cutscene (which thankfully involves no qte) and I had to explain what the fuck was going on and honestly I’d rather have had him walking in on me watching a midget snuff film.
In the other games there was comedy elements but it never crossed the line into absurdity, you still took the game and the characters seriously which you should because it’s about murders and serious stuff, it’s not a my little pony dress up game. It used comedy as a break from the serious stuff, it was the levity that broke up the serious events and sense of danger, that heightened the tension in a lot of ways.
Comedy can be used to lower the guard of the audience to deliver a harder blow but this game is just fucking clown shoes. It doesn’t give a shit about the tone it just wants to have one of it’s villain be a Putin clone that sounds like the talking meercats on that insurance ad because it thinks it’s funny for some reason.
The game is also split into two parts as some sort of retarded marketing scheme nobody asked for. The first part is basically a red herring and the second half is the main plot but they’re both kind of shit. Some of the puzzles are alright I guess, but some are fucking batshit and some make no sense or sounded cool on paper and were just kind of nonsensical in practice.
Like there’s one where you have to make a paperclip sticky by rolling it in jam and then sticking it to a bug who you use to bridge a circuit with the paperclip using biscuit crumbs to attract the bug because you can’t reach it yourself. Somehow I got this puzzle right away but I almost had to slap myself and just go ‘what the fuck was that?’I mean what were they thinking?
I can’t imagine how angry I would’ve been if I got stuck on it haha. But somehow I was in tune with the game’s broken logic.
Then there’s a puzzle where you have to decrypt a telegram with a substitution cipher. And it was pretty challenging so I used a hint. The hint system works like this, it gives you a vague clue, then another one and then it just fucking tells you answer.
And the hint told me that telegrams always end with the word ‘Stop’ and I was like ‘dat makes sense’ then I started thinking ‘who would know that?’ What child picking this game up for the first time would know how a telegram worked? And then I started thinking but how would you encode a telegram? And why would the ‘Stop’s be encoded? Aren’t they like that so they can be transferred between telegraph posts?
Then there’s this other puzzle where you have to translate this tablet with this key but none of the keys are on the translated part and it was an ok puzzle but some of the puzzles are so easy that to go from some of the puzzles to this was just like wtf?? The difficulty is just really inconsistent.
The storyline is total garbage the characters are pretty cringe, it’s about gnosticism this idea that god and the devil are equals keeping the world in balance. The writing is just unbearable, I remember combing through every line in the first games, in this I skipped most of it because I can’t stand the pauses between lines of shitty dialogue. Every line they do this irritating unnatural pause.
Also this sounds like a nitpick, but why can’t George run? I don’t give a shit if it’s not immersive that this patent lawyer is running all over the place, he can glue a dead dogs fur to his face but he has to walk around the room like he needs a stroller. I remember activating a puzzle and having to do it over and over and each time he had to walk between these two points and I just had to watch as he casually worked between these spots for no other reason than having a run animation would be too much of a step away from the nostalgia of the original.
Yeah his walking speed was also annoying in the originals, it’s ok to improve on things like that. But that’s the main problem with this game, it’s just trying to copy the original, it’s playing it safe in every respect. It just wanted to clock in make a bog standard copy of broken sword 1 and get it’s nostalgia cheque and punch out. There’s no innovations in gameplay or story. There weren’t even any fail states, in the original games you can die, you can fail and be murdered even in the gameboy advance version. In this you literally can’t fail and it even has some choices you can make that add up to nothing.
It sort of hints that you can choose between lucifer or god or keep the balance but it’s total bullshit there’s no choice, there’s only one ending, because they couldn’t be bothered to write any other endings and they’re already planning a sequel and can’t have an ambiguity in the canon.
The ending is totally pants too. You’re dealing with something that can kill a god and it’s just sort of the standard ‘oh we entered the cave then blew everything up and then run away dramatically’ bit.
All this build up to just basically a fart of an ending. It was underwhelming and I just couldn’t stand any of the characters outside of George and Nico, they were just badly written, none of the villains seemed very threatening, they were just cheesy and cartoony. There was no tension, no bite, no threat whatsoever, it felt like it was totally just aimed at kids. It was just meh, minimum effort with phone game tier puzzles.
It just doesn’t really go anywhere, you never learn about who created the painting the game is about or why, it’s all very surface level stuff, there isn’t a lot of history or depth to the story. In Broken sword 1 you felt the history and you felt like you were a part of the history and you were delving deeper into it but there was always mystery there like you’d never know the whole truth picking through the bones of the past.
I mean when it comes down to games like this you need to fucking bring it with the characters and the story and the puzzles because it’s all the game has. There are tons of games that have all those things as well as combat systems and dialogue trees and all this extra stuff. So when a game is so simple you really need to nail the limited things you have to offer. You can’t give a game a pass on it’s puzzles and story when that’s the game.
So overall if you’re a broken sword fan like me, get it, but get it for the right price, don’t pay twenty quid for this game, it’s not worth it in time spent or the quality of the game. Get it on sale, get a digital copy and save your money and think twice before picking up Broken Sword 6 because it’ll be more of this nostalgia gouging bullshit.
Also I was thinking back to the previous games and I realised I haven’t even played Broken sword 4 but I looked it up and it has the worst reviews of all the Broken sword games. So it’s surprising 5 came out at all and was as average as it turned out to be.
No ok yeah after Spiderman ps4 sucked (despite making tons of cash) and Red dead 2 was the biggest snorefest I’ve ever had the misfortune of wasting my time on (despite making boatloads of cash) I really thought this game would be the threefer and suck also. Or at least just be disappointing.
I was sort of let down and wary after I heard they were ditching the fixed camera, because I loved the resident evil one remake, it’s probably one of the most perfect survival horror games ever made. It added really great stuff and just polished this amazing, iconic game.
So when I heard the remake of 2 wasn’t following suit I was a little bit put off. But I’m pleased to say I was totally wrong. I really loved the re-imagine gameplay, it’s really fun an addictive (I’m saying this after having played it through four times back to back on hardcore and I could happily sit down to another round right now). I thought the shooting would be too easy because of the resident evil 4 style camera but they add elements where its fun but still challenging.
Some of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen are the balancing. Because to make it harder to balance the better controls, head shots aren’t an instant kill anymore some zombies just wont go down. I must have used ten pistol shots at least half to the head the guy still gets back up, it’s insane. But at the same time, it’s thrilling, this is how it should be in a zombie apocalypse, zombies are supposed to be bullet sponges, if they weren’t it wouldn’t be scary. Also the fact that they’re so detailed and their animations are so good there actually aren’t that many in the game so if you could down them with a single head shot or even a single acid round it would be way too easy and not scary at all.
I love the game, I love the balancing and I love love love it when you get that perfect head shot and their head blows up haha.
The first thing that struck me though in the demo that got me so hyped was the facial capture and the acting talent. It’s just so refreshing to have this game look so good and be done so well. It’s almost a draw back in some ways because it’s such a lonely game at times you want more character interaction and more human elements. It’s a game split in half so a lot of the time you feel like it can be too short and we don’t get enough character drama.
I know these games aren’t really known for that but I think it really needed that with the step up in visuals and animation. I feel like they really did try to do that but were limited by the source material.
Because if you really think about it resy games aren’t that complicated (aside from the convoluted plots). Shoot zombies, solve puzzles, survive.
The only real criticism I have of the game is it left me wanting more. I finished the game and I immediately wanted more. And I hear there’s going to be free dlc although I’ll believe that when I see it since I had to shell out £2.50 to get the original soundtrack, which was so fucking worth it haha.
It made me wish Resident Evil 2 was a bigger better game to work from. I wanted more, I loved the lab section and I wished it had been bigger and more expansive live the police station. The sewer section is the best sewer section in a game ever. Dark, dank, disgusting and foreboding, it was great. It was like being in hell for me haha.
Another criticism I see is turning Mr X into a radial enemy. Because in the original he just appears for short section but in this when he appears he’s just there in the police station constantly looking for you and it’s pretty fucking terrifying and it adds an urgency into the game immediately and the relief when you finally slip him is great.
Would I recommend this game? Hell yes and I recommend playing it on hardcore, because that’s the way it was meant to be played. You have the original saving method using ink ribbons and your ammo is limited as hell and it feels intense. Standard was way too easy and you have so much ammo by the end of the game it’s a joke. So if you want the genuine resident evil experience play it on hardcore, otherwise the game just gets and you have like a million shotgun and pistol or grenades and you annihilate everything. Hardcore is how it’s supposed to be.
I loved both the campaigns but my favourite was definitely Clare’s because I liked her weapon set better and playing as Sherri was a nice change of pace, whereas playing as Ada in Leon’s campaign was just annoying.
Clare just gets the best guns. With Leon you get his pistol which is ok and you can upgrade it but it’s not that accurate or powerful. Clare starts off with this cap gun revolver but later you find this beast of an automatic that has a laser sight and an extended mag. So it just shits on Leon’s pistol. More accurate, more powerful, better fire rate.
He gets a shotgun which is fun and looks great but for some reason it’s useless against lickers but decent against zombies. It takes like four headshots to killa licker. Clare’s grenade launcher kills them with like one shot. It’s not so good against zombies but it’s like an instant stagger against bosses.
Leon then gets a desert eagle which is a good magnum, probably the most powerful in the game and he can make ammo for it which Clare can’t do, she can’t craft magnum ammo.
But Clare gets an smg instead which is way better for bosses imo. Leon’s magnum packs a punch but so many of the bosses are about hitting critical points and the amount of damage is negligible and I found it’s way easier to bullseye those spots with a rapid fire weapon over a big desert eagle which is pretty accurate but you can still miss. The smg is almost always on point.
Also Clare gets a magnum as well so Clare actually gets an extra gun than Leon but she can’t craft ammo for it.
Their final weapons are a toss up because she gets this electric gun which is pretty good and he gets a flamethrower which is really useful against the enemies later in the game but for some reason it’s useless against bosses. So again I have to side with Clare’s weapons, they’re just more useful and versatile and fun.
Although that shotgun is fun, it just didn’t pack that much of a punch.
Sorry got a bit spurgy about the guns there haha. But yeah, really enjoyed it, in fact I want to get back on it now haha. I really hope they remake resident evil 3 next, that would be amazing considering how well they did with this game.
Overall I think the game is limited by the original, I think a lot of people me included are suffering from nostalgia goggles and the original game really doesn’t give you that much to work with. It wasn’t as good as we remember. The story is light and kind of dumb, characters are eh. And the game just feels wanting for a modern title. But regardless I enjoyed it, it was a fun romp. But is it the best thing since sliced bread, not really, overall it was good, not amazing, but worth a buy for sure. Compared to all the shit that’s come out recently it really is a cut above.
Darkly Dreaming Demographic. 
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