Tag: ps4

Prey Review

Prey Review

The First 15

Right away I have to say that the start screen music is perfect.

First I have to choose my gender. I’m male so I choose male. It’s the year 2032.

I leave my apartment and get onto a helicopter. The city looks really good. I can see the mix of new buildings along with “old” 2017 buildings. I arrive at the company headquarters and am greeted by a science probe which informs me that my brother is waiting for me.

I go through a series of very basic tests. The scientists are making this out to be some kind of huge deal, but I can’t figure out why. After the third test the scientist gets attacked by some kind of alien creature.

I wake up the next morning and find that things aren’t quite right. For instance, the hallway doesn’t go where it normally did. I grab a wrench and use it break the glass windows of my apartment so that I can escape…

…and walk out onto a soundstage. What the hell is going on?

Story

Several decades ago astronauts encountered the Typhon. The Typhon are an alien species with an unknown origin. America and Russia team up in secret to build a space station where scientists began studying the Typhon. Eventually they develop a device called a neuromod. A neuromod can teach a person any skill in a matter of seconds by remapping a person’s brain as if they had actually learned the skill.

Of course, everything eventually goes horribly wrong. The Typhon break containment and begin killing the people on the station while simultaneously growing some kind of weave, purpose unknown.

The story for Prey is as shallow or deep as you want it to be. A lot of the story is about the Typhon running amuck and trying to decide how to handle it. This mostly involves a lot of shooting things until they die. But there’s a deeper undercurrent that talks about memory, identity, and what it means to be an individual. There are choices that have to be made and repercussions for each decision. Players can dive into this or choose to ignore it as they wish.

Interface and Controls

You can set weapons to left, right, and down on the D-Pad to quickly swap between them which is nice. Up is reserved for the flashlight, which you almost never use. I wish the game allowed you to set a weapon to up as well.

The inventory has a number of issues that should be simple to fix (which leaves one to wonder why they weren’t fixed before release). These issues mostly arise when the player’s inventory is nearly full. The first issue is that items which should stack, don’t always stack when they enter the inventory. A single push of a button sorts them into a single stack, but having to go into the inventory, sort it, and exit out every time the player collects another item which fills their inventory gets annoying. The other issue is that if the player tries to pick up a weapon which takes up more than one inventory slot, the game will claim the player’s inventory is full even if the player has enough room but doesn’t have enough open inventory blocks that are side by side. Again, going into the inventory, sorting, and exiting out will fix the problem, but it’s bad design that such a thing is even necessary. Simply put, the inventory needs to auto-stack items that enter the player’s inventory, and if necessary auto-sort to fit larger items such as weapons.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out where I needed to go for some of the objectives. A few times I would follow a quest marker only to realize that it was just leading me to another area of the ship entirely. Other quests simply didn’t have a quest marker and reading the quest text still didn’t tell me where to go. The quest indicator should be another color if it’s in a different area of the station, and another QC pass on the quest text would have been nice.

I ran into an issue during spacewalks where it was next to impossible to track points of interest. The green dots would appear, but the only way that I could get the labels for these dots was to turn off all primary and secondary objective markers. The developers need to make it so that the labels will appear around all markers in the direction you are looking rather than one at a time.

Gameplay

The best part about Prey is how the game rewards the player for exploring. There is the primary objective and several secondary objectives, but a lot of the best gameplay is when players try poking their heads in nearby rooms, exploring down unknown corridors, or sometimes even just visiting entirely different sections of the ship. Unlike a lot of games that only let players go a little ways off the beaten path, Prey lets players explore for hours if they so choose in whatever direction they want. Some areas can only be accessed by progressing the story of course, but by and large the station is one giant playground to explore.

One of the core concepts of the game is the neuromods. Neuromods allow the player to learn new skills to fight better, hack doors, repair broken systems on the station, and a myriad of other things. I was particularly impressed with how I found every potential upgrade worth taking. At the start I wanted them all. And that was before the game doubled the amount that I had available to me. Mostly the player has to find neuromods, but they can also be constructed, up to a point. Once the player tries to make too many, the game locks them out and requires the player to go on a sidequest to unlock them again. I enjoyed how completing that sidequest became the most important goal to me even over the primary objective.

Eventually the player finds a scanner with which to scan the Typhon. Doing so unlocks new Typhon abilities that the player can learn. These include every ability the Typhon know such as mimicing objects, hurling fireballs, mind controlling people, and more. The ability to mimic objects was particularly interested because it allows the player to enter areas that normally are inaccessible. It takes a big mental shift to consider that the way past a locked door is to transform into a coffee cup and roll in through the mail slot.

The concept of the Mimic enemy is very cool. Mimics will (as the name suggests) mimic another nearby object and lie in wait. When the player gets too close the creature will drop the disguise and attack. This creates a lot of tension and leads to some interesting gameplay moments. When players first explore an area, they have to keep an eye out for duplicate items (one of which could be a mimic). And if they ever go back through an area, they must be wary of anything that wasn’t there before.

Turrets add another interesting element to the game. When I found my first turret I felt like I’d found my savior. I would carry it around with me while I explored the lobby and let it do the shooting since I had a very hard time hitting the fast moving mimics with my pistol (and the turret has unlimited ammo). Each time I walked in front of it, the turret would scan me and declare me free of Typhon material. It wasn’t until later that I realized why this was so important. If you choose to install Typhon neuromods, the turrets will start to attack you on sight. In this way they go from being a savior, to being another enemy. I found it to be a very interesting role reversal.

I especially liked the way the game handles spacewalks. I sometimes got turned around, and upside down, but it felt like a “natural” part of floating in space. The controls felt intuitive despite the lack of up and down.

The GLOO Cannon is Prey’s equivalent to Half-Life’s gravity gun. The GLOO Cannon does serve a purpose in combat, but its real use is for climbing walls and putting out fires. It gives the player a freedom of movement that takes a while to fully comprehend. Areas that at first appear flat hide a verticality that takes some getting used to. The game does a good job of showcasing what you can do with the weapon to get players started.

Another interesting weapon is the Q-Beam. The Q-Beam does reverse damage. This means that rather than lower the enemy’s health like most weapons, it begins to fill the enemy’s health bar from left to right. Once it fills the enemy’s health bar completely, the enemy disintegrates into its base elements that the player can collect. Since the beam only has to reach the enemy’s current health, players can combo other weapons with the Q-Beam if needed. My only complaint about this weapon is that the energy buildup decays very quickly. This makes it hard to use any other weapon after building up any kind of charge in an enemy. I would like to see the energy from the Q-Beam never decay once it applies to an enemy.

Grenades in this game are the worst weapon to try and use. Throwing a grenade is often times a study in futility. Without some kind of trajectory indicator it’s hard to tell where the grenade will go. Sometimes it doesn’t go far enough or it goes too far and misses the intended targets. Other times it bounces off something that the player might not even realize is in the way. This actually killed me when a grenade I threw bounced off a box and landed right underneath me before going off (though I did get an achievement for it). I would like to see the developers add in a system that shows the player the trajectory of the grenade before it gets thrown.

Then there’s the shotgun. The shotgun is by far the strongest weapon in the game and pretty much renders the others obsolete. The problem is that even with such a powerful weapon I still found myself crafting tons of ammo for it so it was actually fairly well balanced. But it highlights that the other weapons just aren’t good enough to keep up with the enemies of the game. I would like to see the designers boost the strength of the other weapons a bit rather than nerf the one gun that seems to really work. Also, it would be nice if players could upgrade the wrench to make it a more viable option rather than that thing players have to use when they run out of ammo.

The game allows players to equip chip mods which give various passive effects. I like the chip system, but one chip specifically I do not like. One of the chips allows players to detect Mimics while they are hiding as other objects. I feel like this removes a major element of the game and cheapens the experience. On the plus side, the chip does not work on Greater Mimics, but I still feel that it should be removed from the game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a game that rewards exploration and has more than a few jump scares.

You will not like this game if you want a more linear experience or if you strongly dislike jump scares. The game has some sense of horror to it, but after a while you get used to the Typhon.

I enjoyed this game mostly for the freedom it gave me in exploring the station. The combat is interesting and I felt challenged even on Normal difficulty. The Typhon abilities are also a nice touch with mimic being the most unique.

Nier: Automata Review

Nier: Automata Review

The First 15

I go to start up the game and find out there is a 2.6 GB update file. Time to do something else while that downloads.

Finally the download is finished. Here we go.

The game opens up with me and my team on an attack run. My teammates keep getting shot out of the sky. This is not going well.

I’m taking out more and more enemies. My fighter just transformed into a gundam. Now instead of just shooting forward I can turn and shoot all around me. And there goes the last of my teammates. Now it’s up to me.

I destroyed everything and I have arrived at the target location, but my suit/ship was destroyed so now I’m on foot. For some reason there’s a giant buzzsaw trying to kill me.

Story

The story takes place in the very far future. In this future, aliens have invaded earth with an army of machines. What remains of humanity now lives solely in a fortified bunker on the moon. Humanity then creates the NoRHa, an army of combat androids to use against the machines. Of course, things aren’t quite that simple. Players begin the game as a combat android named 2B whose team has been sent in to eliminate an enemy threat.

Nier: Automata definitely channels some elements of Ghost in the Shell in how it explores both the lives of the androids and the lives of the machines left behind by the aliens who for some reason haven’t been heard from for centuries. Some of it is almost human, while other aspects are completely alien.

Players get paired with another unit named 9S who tends to be the more thoughtful one. He does a lot of talking where he discusses his ideas about the past and thoughts on life itself. 9S makes himself likeable with his humor, and shows his depth when discussing more metaphysical subjects. He has a deep desire to explore which acts as a nice balance to 2B’s more militaristic approach to the world.

The player’s character, and the other NoRHa, can be recreated from backup copies and put back into the field. The story explores this idea of limited rebirth with some characters “forgetting” things that happened after their last backup when they are reassembled due to death.

While exploring out in the world the characters often come across pieces of the distant past from a time when humanity still lived on earth. This is probably intentional by the writers, but more often than not the resulting conversation becomes about how weird humanity was.

I also want to highlight the music in this game. A lot of it was somehow both creepy and yet appropriate. A few areas are designed to have players wonder “what the hell is going on?” and the music in those areas is absolutely perfect.

Interface and Controls

There is an option in the settings menu to self-destruct on death. It doesn’t really seem to do anything, but the game requires you to enable it as part of the opening sequence. I found it very telling that both characters seemed to find this completely normal.

By default the game automatically adjusts the camera while running. At first it was driving me nuts because it kept moving the camera down and I was having trouble seeing things in front of me over my character’s head. Thankfully the developers included an option to turn off vertical auto-adjust without also having to turn off horizontal auto-adjust. I wish more games, especially third person action adventure games, had this option.

I found the chip system to be particularly compelling. With this system players acquire chips that provide enhancements for a cost. Players can equip as many chips as they want so long as the total cost of the chips is less than the character’s maximum allowed cost. Players can even choose to unequip parts of the interface such as the health bar or the minimap to free up space for other chips if they wish. Interestingly, even chips that do the same thing can have differing costs. Players can upgrade chips by combining two of the same level. Of course, upgrading a chip increases the cost. The new cost for an upgraded chip is based on the cost of the two chips being fused together. The cheaper the base chips, the cheaper the resulting chip. This created a lot of interesting decisions about which chips to upgrade and which to wait and see if I could find another of the same time with a lower cost. My one complaint about this system is the chip that restores health upon killing an enemy. In a game where you are constantly defeating numerous enemies this provides the player with almost limitless health outside of boss battles. This is especially true during the shooting minigames where enemies are constantly streaming in from the sides of the screen. It led to me almost never having to use any healing items and thus having a plethora of them whenever it came time for a boss battle. I feel that the designers should make this chip only equipable on easy mode as they did with several other chips.

Something that’s created a bit of a controversy is players can buy trophies/achievements using the in-game currency. Once players complete the game three times, they unlock a merchant who will sell them trophy unlocks. So rather than have to do a given task, players can instead farm money and then buy the completion of that task. I personally don’t like this as it leaves no distinction between those who did it the “hard” way, and those who simply bought it. Also, there are guides online telling players how to add their save file to the cloud, buy a bunch of trophies, then restore that save and buy a bunch more. Since trophies are tied to the account and not the save data, players keep the trophies even though they overrode their save file with the one from the cloud. I feel like there are too many negatives with a system such as this one for it to have made it into the final game.

Gameplay

One of the first things to happen to me was I reached the first major boss of the game and died. Rather than start again from a checkpoint, the game actually ended. I got a screen telling me that my failure led to the machines wiping out the remainder of the NoRHa, and then the credits began to roll. When I went to start a new game, it told me I had unlocked ending W. I found it interesting that they “hid” an ending in the opening sequence of the game.

My second time through the beginning stage I noticed a number of hidden routes which then unlocked access points to different areas I’d been to previously. Strangely, this idea of creating shortcuts to areas players previously had to reach using the long way never really continued through the remainder of the game. There was the occasional opening of a blocker between zones, but nothing to the extent of what was available in the starting area. Most likely this idea was something the designers toyed around with early on but ultimately abandoned for the remainder of the game.

Having played the original Nier I was expecting a game which involved a series of constantly shifting game types and I was not disappointed. At any time the game can shift from a third person action adventure to a top down shooter to a side scroller and back all within minutes of one another. The original Nier even had an entire dungeon that was one big text adventure, though I have not found anything similar in this game as of yet. The developers have done an amazing job allowing the gameplay to transition from one game type to the next rather frequently without it feeling disorienting or frustrating. This more than any other system is where this game truly shines. During your second playthrough you can even initiate this transition when you hack enemies. This is done through a simple top down shooter minigame similar to Geometry Wars. Although, this version requires you to press a button to fire in addition to moving and aiming with both sticks.

During the first playthrough as 2B, players come across corpses. These corpses represent other players who have died during their own playthroughs. Other games have done similar things, but this game is unique in how it enables you to interact with these corpses. When players activate a corpse, they first choose to pray or not to pray. Praying for a corpse will create and send an item to the owner of that corpse. Then players can harvest the corpse for money and materials, or reactivate that corpse at which point the fallen player’s character becomes an ally for a short time. That ally will be as strong as the player whose corpse it is was when they died including their weapons and level. Players mostly tend to find corpses for players who are the same level since players tend to reach each part of the game at roughly the same level. But every once in a while one of those corpses turns out to be a real monster and for a time cutting through enemies is a breeze.

During my first playthrough I encountered a number of chained chests that I could not open. My one complaint about them is that the game doesn’t ever tell you that there is no way to open them until your second playthrough. I kept wondering if maybe there was a sidequest that would allow me to open them until eventually I looked it up online. Players run into them constantly, so it is particularly annoying to think that maybe they missed something that would allow players to open them. I wish the game had been a little more upfront about when players would gain access to these chests. All it would have taken was a message when players tried to open them stating something like, “This container cannot be opened until events have reached their ultimate conclusion.” This would have helped to alleviate a lot of frustration.

As I’ve mentioned several times already this game is designed to be played through more than once. The core story is excellent and feels mostly complete once you reach the end for the first time. That is…until you start the game again, this time as another character and you begin to see that there’s more going on than you initially thought. Then you beat the game a second time, and start it again. And that’s when things start really going downhill. The ways in which the developers leverage the New Game+ mechanic are impressive. I wish more games took the time to explore the possibilities of a New Game+ as this one does. It turns out there are actually 26 different endings, one for each letter of the alphabet.

As is becoming the norm these days, when players die they leave behind their corpse. They must then retrace their steps and collect their corpse to restore things such as their chips. Nier: Automata takes things one step further in that if the player dies again before recovering their corpse, then the corpse with all of their things is lost forever. I personally never had an issue recovering my corpse the few times I died. But I feel like potentially deleting items that might have taken entire playthroughs to collect/construct is a bit too harsh. I feel that corpses should last forever until you collect them since it is intended for the player to be able to collect their corpse.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a game that is constantly shifting gameplay types. Nier: Automata is about having to constantly change how you play. Each area can include multiple gameplay types. The exploration of being a machine and the questions about life are also a strong draw for those who enjoy such things.

You will not like this game if you want to play a specific type of game. Nier: Automata is many different games all rolled into one. The transitions between them are very smooth, but if you dislike constant change than you find the gameplay frustrating.

I personally very much enjoyed my time with Nier: Automata. The story was compelling, there was enough “unexplained” events to keep me wondering, and the differing gameplay types kept things from ever feeling stale. This game represents a perfect example of how to take multiple, seemingly disjointed ideas, and roll them up into one coherent package.

Horizon Zero Dawn Review

Horizon Zero Dawn Review

The First 15

First comes a lot of cutscenes that cement my place as an outcast. I’m also getting a lot of shots of the wilderness which is admittedly quite beautiful.

It seems my name is Aloy (similar to alloy, which I doubt is a coincidence). One day while out and about as a child I manage to fall into a hole in the ground and find myself in a cavern that looks like the ruins of an old underground installation. I’m exploring the space while my character makes comments. It seems that this game takes place a great deal of time after the fall of human civilization.

I come across a room with a strange metal object inside, but I’m unable to get in due to the rocks in my way. Maybe I can find another way inside further in. I come across a dead body with something on its ear. I pick up the object and place it on mine. The object appears to be a computer complete with heads up display. I find it very interesting that I just ‘found’ my interface for the game.

I continue on and encounter a room with a bunch of recordings. After listening to them I believe I’ve encountered what I think is a group of people who planned on committing suicide. That’s not at all creepy considering I’m currently playing as a small child. At last I manage to make my way through the ruins and find my way back outside.

Story

Horizon Zero Dawn takes place many years after the fall of civilization. The only thing left behind from that civilization are old ruins and a nearly infinite number of machine creatures. The main character, Aloy, is raised as an outcast from a tribe of hunters but goes back to compete in a trial that allows her to become a member. But more important to her, if she wins then she can demand the leaders tell her who her mother is.

Despite some complications, Aloy leaves the lands of her tribe in search of answers. Unfortunately for her, those answers are quite dangerous and a number of people will stand against her. Of course, even when she does manage to find some answers they only seem to lead to more questions. And naturally, to find those answers Aloy must face even greater dangers.

I want to commend the writers for managing to keep the story feeling personal throughout. Even as the world and story continues to expand and grow, players remain rooted in the character who at times really could not care less about some of the things she discovers. She has her own goals and despite the worldwide implications of what she finds her search remains personal.

Something I found particularly impressive was the way in which the writers handled religion within Aloy’s tribe. The tribesmen would pray to the AllMother which could have felt awkward or pathetic, but the writers never made the people feel obnoxious or naive for believing as they do. In fact, a few moments even manage to highlight the beauty of their religion and its ceremonies. In our world where, more and more, people tend to make fun of other people’s religion, it’s nice to see a story treat even a fake religion with such reverence.

There exists a unique dichotomy between the world aboveground of the wilds and the world belowground of the ‘world of metal’ as Aloy calls it. Going from one to the other is both jarring and completely natural. You can see how each has influenced the other even though both worlds stand very much in opposition. Unfortunately the story doesn’t explore this ying-yang relationship as much as I would have liked.

Interface and Controls

I alluded to this earlier, but the way in which players acquire the game’s interface rather than have it available to them from the start is quite unique. I like the way in which they did this, though I think they could have done more with it. Since the interface is a part of the game, I would have liked to see players be able to collect different visual overlays for the interface. For instance, players could unlock a futuristic overlay, or maybe one which makes gives the effect of being constructed using watercolors. The interface would still function exactly the same regardless of which overlay is used, but the option to make custom alterations to the look would have been nice.

Your spear vanishes whenever the character sheathes it on her back. I realize it’s a bug, but it’s extremely noticeable and damages the sense of immersion to see it constantly appear and disappear.

There are several different types of quests. One of those is tutorial quests. Tutorial quests become available whenever you unlock/acquire a new weapon. They’re a great way of getting the player to try out a new weapon. The one problem with them is that they won’t progress unless they are set as the active quest. So even if you use the new weapon in the correct way to complete the tutorial quest, it won’t update until you set it to be the active quest and do it again.

Photo Mode is something I completely wasn’t expecting, but which I now wish every game had. In short, whenever you pause the game you can enter Photo Mode. In Photo Mode, the game remains paused but now you can manipulate the camera to zoom in, zoom out, or change the angle the camera is looking at the main character. There are also a wide selection of filters and effects you can apply to the camera. Then, once you’ve got everything set, you can take a screenshot. The result is some absolutely incredible shots that truly feel epic and can help capture moments from your journey.

Easily the worst part of Horizon Zero Dawn is dealing with the camera during battle. Since there is no way of locking onto a target, you must manually rotate the camera in order to keep an enemy in view. This is especially annoying since several enemies will charge at you (and then past you when you dodge out of the way). This also leads to a lot of getting hit by enemies from offscreen. I would like for there to be a way in which you could lock onto a target and have the camera automatically follow that target. For the controls, the designers could remap L1 to be target lock/unlock, and have the touchpad on the PS4 controller bring up the weapon wheel.

The other annoyance with the camera occurs when aiming at things in the sky (such as flying machines). The camera is positioned a little behind the character, which means that if you are crouching or standing in tall vegetation when aiming up the plants will obscure the camera even though the vegetation is not between Aloy’s eyes and the target. The game needs to fade out any objects that are between the camera and Aloy.

Items are rather annoying to use since you have to cycle through them all one at a time using left and right on the D-pad and then press down to activate the one currently selected. Instead, I would prefer if you could assign an item to left, right, and down the same way in which weapons are assigned to the weapon wheel. Players would also have the option of activating an item from within the inventory menu as well.

Gameplay

I like that one of the first things you can do once you gain the ability to move around freely is revisit the cavern which you fell into as a young child. Now that you’re older you have the strength to break through some of the rocks that previously barred your way into certain areas. It created a nice dynamic to see an area both before and after so close to one another.

Combat in Horizon Zero Dawn is about a lot more than simply unloading damage into an enemy machine. Instead, every machine has different weak points that can be targeted. And each of these weak points needs to be targeted in a different way. For instance, if a machine has a canister of blaze (essentially fuel) on it, then hitting that canister with a fire arrow will cause the canister to explode. On weaker machines that might be enough to destroy it, and on other machines being on fire might reveal previously hidden weaknesses for players to exploit. Some enemies can even have their weapons removed and turned against them if players can manage to pick them up. Boss battles tend to take this system to the limit and require the exploitation of these weaknesses in order to defeat. This system of strategic dismemberment makes for some extremely compelling gameplay and makes fighting the machines quite enjoyable.

The development team did a fantastic job on their climbing system. Climbing along surfaces feels very fluid and near effortless. My only complaint is that the actual climbing areas are all rather simplistic. I would have liked to see a bit more complexity involved with areas you climb around on.

Early on you come across a merchant (and all merchants after him) who will sell you maps that show you where all of the important collectibles can be located.  The maps themselves only show you a general location and it is still up to you to snoop around to find the item. I really like this idea of introducing such maps near the start of the game rather than at the end

The fast travel system is a little awkward. Traveling itself is fine, but each time you travel you must consume a fast travel pack to do so. What makes this feel weird is you end up having an almost limitless supply of fast travel packs as you play through the game. Eventually you can even buy a fast travel pack that truly is infinite. I always felt like the travel packs served no purpose other than to take up inventory space. I would like to see the designers remove the need for these packs from the game altogether.

In this game the cauldrons act as dungeons. At first glance they all seem the same, but each has its own setup that makes it feel unique. And as with any good dungeon there is a boss fight at the end. Cauldrons do a great job of both reminding players of the metal world hidden beneath the surface as well as taking what is mostly an open world game and for a while narrowing the focus down to one room at a time.

Players can compete in trials that earn them marks for completing the trial within a certain amount of time. Each trial has three rankings depending on how fast you finish it. The problem with hunter marks is that they are only useful once you’ve visited all of the sites and completed all of the trials. Rather than have bronze, silver, and gold rankings for each trial, I would prefer it if each of the trials only had a single pass/fail ranking and the Hunter’s Lodge handed out rewards for completing 5, 10, and finally all 15 of the trials instead.

As you go through the game you find merchants who will sell you more and more powerful weapons. Often times you can even skip straight from the normal version to the most powerful shadow version. In a game that has you gathering so many different resources, it feels odd to simply buy better weapons rather than acquiring a base model for a weapon and having to craft upgrades onto it until it becomes the most powerful version. I would have liked to see them add in a crafting system for weapons where possibly players would acquire designs and then have to collect the necessary resources to construct the design. Each weapon would have a basic design, and then be upgradeable using upgrade components. The designs for these upgrade components could be bought from merchants with each upgrade component affecting several different weapons. For instance, a bowstring upgrade component could be applied to either of the bows available. I also dislike that you cannot upgrade your spear with the exception of a single side quest.

One nice quality of life feature in this game that I hope to see in more games is that whenever you have to follow other characters they will move at your speed. So if you walk, then they will walk. If you start to run, then they will run as well. This gave me the ability to slow down if I wanted to listen to a conversation and speed up if I wanted to get things moving along.

Treasure boxes hold an odd place in the game. These boxes can be found in various places, or handed out after completing a mission. Opening the box reveals the contents which players can remove and their inventory. I believe this was the developers’ way of ensuring that players always got their rewards even if they did not have any inventory space. And, every time players encounter a new merchant, the merchant ‘sells’ players a free treasure box with some common resources inside. There is no limit to the number of boxes the player can hold. As a result, this led me to often times hold onto a box and leave the contents inside since it allowed me to hold onto more resources than my inventory would usually allow. In essence, the boxes became a sort of pseudo second inventory. I like having the boxes be for rewards from completing missions, but I think the designers went too far with it when they allowed players to collect boxes from corpses and chests. I feel like they should have restricted them solely as objective rewards.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy a good personal story and a unique way of thinking about combat. Both are compelling and will keep you interested all the way up until the end.

You will not like this game if you dislike combat with a lot of constant motion. You spend almost as much time dodging out of the way as you do firing arrows. Combat also requires a lot of very precise hits which can be difficult for some people especially on consoles.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a very enjoyable game with a strong story and a unique take on combat. Thinking about enemies as a series of different parts rather than simply a target to unload damage into gives each machine a truly unique feel to it. I very much enjoyed this game and I believe others will as well.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

The First 15

The story starts with two videos from my character’s girlfriend. The first one is happy and carefree. The second one is decidedly creepy and frantic.

The gameplay opens up with me talking to a friend on the phone about why I’m here. Good to know that I’m smart enough to at least let someone know where I am.

I spend a few minutes walking through the forest. This game really loves its invisible walls. Fortunately it’s daytime. There are a few creepy objects lying about, but nothing too scary yet.

Eventually I come upon a rundown house. I open the side door and peer into what looks like a gaping maw of pure blackness. I am being told that I have to leave the safety of the daylight and enter the blackness if I want to search for my missing girlfriend. Against my better judgement, I step on through.

Inside is complete darkness. Fortunately I brought along a flashlight. I wish I had brought along a brighter flashlight, but I’ll take what I can get. I very slowly start to explore the house. It’s seen better days. The food is all rotting. The boards creak as I walk over them.

Wait, was that a person I just saw?

Story

The main story manages to remain creepy from start to finish. Even as you learn more about what’s going on the knowledge never really makes things any less scary, it just transforms them into a different kind of horror. That they can maintain such an atmosphere for the entire duration of the game is quite impressive.

Occasionally you find VHS tapes. Watching these tapes puts you in the shoes of another character for a short time. I found these to be a very clever way to expand the story while maintaining the sense of immersion.

Interface and Controls

Many times throughout the game I found myself wondering where I was supposed to go next. The map lists objectives, but doesn’t tell you where to go to complete those objectives. A line of dialogue sometimes points you in the right direction. But if you quit playing and continue again later, you may have forgotten where you were told to go. Of course other times the game just never says. Having such unclear objectives often times lowered the tension since I spent so much time just wandering around areas I’d already cleared trying to figure out what to do next.

As you approach an item a small indicator appears above the item. When you get close enough it displays the button for you to press to interact with that item. Out of all of the systems in Resident Evil VII, I found this to be the most distracting. The pop-up icons look so out of place that frankly they caused me to lose my sense of immersion every time I went to pick up an item. And as with all horror games, there are items everywhere if you take the time to look for them. This only gets worse when you use a supplement. The supplement allows you to see the pop-up icon for items from much further away and through walls. So while the supplement lasts, you constantly see a bunch of tiny icons floating all around you.

Personally, I would like the pop-up icon be replaced by a white outline of the item once the player is close enough to ‘notice’ the item. The item itself would then gain a grainy white filter over top of it once the player was close enough to pick up the item. As for the supplement, I would rather the supplement cause some sort of synesthesia reaction. This would cause items to create sound that players could follow to locate the item. The supplement would need to last longer than it does currently to allow players time to track down the item making noise, but I feel like this would be far less damaging to the game’s sense of immersion than the current system.

Inventory space is limited which is supposed to create decisions about what to keep and what to toss. Unfortunately what actually happens is you waste a bunch of time going back and forth to your chest where you can store all of your unneeded items. This is mostly due to the need to actually store quest items.

Quest items also take up inventory space, though I honestly can’t figure out why. Each time you acquire a quest item you typically use it a time or two right away, then never need it ever again. And so all they seem to do is limit your inventory space until you manage to dump them into your chest. There’s also the issue of having to pick up items during a fight. The game doesn’t warn you that you’re going to need the extra space before the fight starts, so you end up having to spend time clearing your inventory in the middle of a fight which usually gets you killed. Of course once you die you then have plenty of time to clear enough inventory space before retrying the fight, but it just feels awkward. Instead they should give you less overall inventory space, but remove the need to store quest items in that space. It also might be worth exploring the idea of removing the chest as well.

Gameplay

This game utilizes a system of checkpoints for if you die. Unfortunately the designers have a tendency to be somewhat sparing with where they place these checkpoints. I imagine they did this to create a sense of fear over dying. Unfortunately, it had the complete opposite effect. When you die and reset, everything is in exactly the same place as it was the last time you went through. Enemies appear in the same locations, items are in the same hiding places, everything is exactly the same. What the designers failed to anticipate is that when you walk through the exact same hallway knowing nothing is going to jump out at you, fight the exact same creature knowing exactly what it is and where it’ll come from, and find the exact same items knowing that picking them up isn’t going to trigger anything (or even if you know one of them will trigger something), the game stops being scary. There was a particularly egregious section in the basement. I only died 4 times, but the entire area is a series fights and dying on any one of them forces you to redo all of them. As a result of this repetitive section, it absolutely killed any sense of terror I had about the game since I knew where everything was and how it would come at me. This loss of fear stayed with me for a while after I made it through this section of the game and had a negative impact on the remainder of my gameplay. I’m not saying that bad checkpoints ruined the game, I enjoyed Resident Evil VII. But the predictability of the environment gave me a chance to concentrate on the enemies long enough to learn all of their tricks so that they too became predictable. The game could benefit immensely from some randomization. Having enemies appear in different locations and shifting items/traps around would go a long way towards keeping players on their toes even when they are repeating a section of the game due to a death.

One other complaint about the gameplay was the lack of indication about a boss’ health. There’s often no indication that you’re actually damaging a boss rather than just making it angry and wasting ammo. One of the bosses would flee whenever I damaged it, making me think that all I could do was scare it off. As a result, I wasted a lot of time wandering around trying to find a way to actually kill the boss when all I had to do was chase it down and unload more bullets into it. It would have been nice if periodically the boss would indicate it was actually being damaged such as having pieces of it break off. I don’t need an HP bar on the screen, but I do need some indication that I’m actually doing damage.

Something very odd was going on with the health and/or damage I dealt to enemies. One enemy would go down with 4 shots from the pistol, and the next identical enemy would take an entire clip plus a shotgun blast to take down even though I shot it in the exact same spot as the first. I’m not sure if this was due to enemies having different amounts of health, weapons doing variable amounts of damage, or some other mechanic which I wasn’t aware of, but whatever the case, it made dealing with enemies odd since some went down easy while others required an obscene amount of hot lead before they died. This might have been intentional to make enemies feel more unpredictable, or it could simply be a bug. In the end though it seemed to simply lead to a lot of cheap deaths when an enemy hit me despite the clip of ammo unloaded into its head.

I should point out that despite the negative aspects of the gameplay listed above, I did very much enjoy my playthrough. The game certainly has its flaws, but it succeeds at creating a compelling horror experience despite them. Remember this site is largely about dissecting a game and trying to find ways to improve upon it.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like a well crafted story which will scare and creep you out on a consistent basis. The type of horror you experience shifts many times but never goes away.

You will not enjoy this game if you frighten easily. This game is designed to scare you and it certainly will do that at some point (even if you don’t frighten easily).

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard is a well crafted game with a more personal story than your usual Resident Evil title. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the story manages to maintain a constant sense of horror. The gameplay suffers a bit from some aspects becoming predictable if you die often enough in the same area (often enough being 3 or more times). All in all though, I enjoyed my time playing this game.

Dishonored 2 Review

Dishonored 2 Review

The First 15

I boot up the game and have to install the day 1 patch. It’s 9 GB! The game is 37 GB total. I just had to download a quarter of the game, which took hours. Whatever happened to games being ready out of the box?

Once I finally start up the game it asks if I want to go through the tutorial. I decide I do and the game has me playing as Emily as Corvo runs her through an obstacle course. The tutorial is short and rather effective. I think I’m ready for the main game. I choose Medium difficulty.

The story starts out all smiles and rainbows but very suddenly turns into blood and death.

You have to choose whether to play as Corvo Attano, the main character of the first game, or Emily Kaldwin, the ruler of Dunwald. I chose to play as Emily Kaldwin.

Something I remember from playing the first game is that there was a method in which you could play through the game without killing anyone. I check through the trophies (playing on PS4) and sure enough there is one for not killing anyone. There’s also one for never being spotted. I decide to do a stealth, no-killing playthrough.

It actually took me a rather long time to figure out that I could escape the room they locked me in by opening the window and walking along the balcony. This early on it would be nice if the game did a little more to make me aware that windows even can be opened.

Now out I get my first chance to deal with an enemy. I sneak up behind him and choke him unconscious. Easy enough. I sneak downstairs and do the same to the next guy.

Next there are three guys with one of them boasting about what’s happened. I kind of want to kill them, but I’m doing a no-kill playthrough. Eventually the one boasting walks towards me so I hide around the corner. Once his back is turned I sneak up and choke him unconscious. Now I get back my ring so that I can use the secret exit.

At this point the game tells me that I can fulfil the requirement of ‘neutralizing’ the man I just choked out by either killing him, or by locking him inside of the hidden room. I carry him into the room and Emily makes a wicked comment about how she hopes he enjoys being surrounded by wealth but unable to use any of it since he is completely locked inside. This was so much better than killing him.

Now I exit the room and continue on with the game.

Story

The overall story is a little too formulaic. Everything starts out as rainbows and butterflies until the evil relative comes in and starts killing the nobility. She then uses her magic to turn whichever character you’re not playing as into stone. From there the main character is forced to flee and sets out on a quest to retake the throne. This sort of story has been done before many times, and sadly Dishonored 2 doesn’t do anything to help set itself apart. There aren’t that many characters and even the characters that do exist don’t seem to interact very much.

Everything you do is for the “good of Dunwald” or its people. But frankly, I never really saw any people worth retaking the throne for. Where are the people who make me want to save them? Everyone I meet (soldiers and civilians) is either selfish or just plain evil. All of the quests (even the optional ones) are about getting someone something they want in exchange for something I want. Where are the characters who just want a safe place to sleep? Where are the mini-storylines where a frightened child asks me to save her family only for me to arrive too late? Where are the people for whom all I can do is give them one of my healing potions and have to apologize that I don’t have the power to do more for them? Emily keeps going on and on about how she always wished she could be free from the throne. Well now she is. But she insists that she has to retake the throne despite the fact that I never really meet anyone who I feel is worth retaking the throne for.

For the sake of keeping the game going the storyline works. But it stops at being just “good enough” and relies on the gameplay to carry the majority of the game.

Interface and Controls

There is no indicator when you go to pick something up that your actions will be seen as theft. You only get find out it’s theft when all of a sudden a civilian runs away screaming and/or the guards show up and try to kill you.

The game kept giving me tips about ways in which I could use certain abilities. It especially liked to tell me about possession. It took me a bit to realize that possession is unique to Corvo whereas I was playing as Emily. The game should only show tips for abilities that your current character can use.

I disliked that I always had to have the sword equipped. While doing a no-kill playthrough, the sword was only useful for killing bloodflies or breaking boards. But every time I went to cast Dark Vision or do anything else I had to pull out my sword. This is more of a roleplaying feature, but I would like it if equipping an item to my left hand or using magic didn’t automatically pull out my sword.

Spending mana is odd. Some abilities cost mana, but then that mana regenerates provided you don’t try to use another power before it’s done regenerating. Others cost some mana and regenerate some, while others cost mana and don’t regenerate any mana at all. None of the abilities warn you about the cost, so you mostly just have to learn by using them. Though in the end mana starts to feel pointless since you almost never spend it fast enough. I played through most of the game holding 10 mana vials (the most you can hold) and only ever used them if I found another mana vial and wasn’t already at max mana (which wasn’t that often). I would have liked to see the designers be a little more creative with their resource system.

When playing as Emily Kaldwin, she has an ability that allows her to teleport a fair distance. One of the upgrades allows her to instead teleport objects and enemies to her. This can be useful for grabbing hard to reach items or pulling an enemy into a chokehold. But since both versions of the ability are tied together and the ability auto-adjusts based on what you’re targeting, I would occasionally pull something to me (like a corpse) when I meant to jump behind an enemy. The pull is considered non-stealthy and so it would cause nearby enemies to spot me. I would have liked to see these two abilities be actual separate abilities.

I dislike that you can’t sell things to merchants. I spent most of the game with a full supply of various grenades and other traps that I’m never going to use because they are lethal and I was doing a non-lethal playthrough. I also spent most of the game with ten health and mana potions since ten is the max you can hold and I never really needed them. This is probably more of a comment about the uselessness of some items during certain types of gameplay (in my case non-lethal stealth), but I explored a lot and ended just leaving behind a lot of what I found since I was already maxed out.

Gameplay

I chose to do a no-kill, no-alert playthrough and to play as Emily Kaldwin. This means that I can’t kill anyone (included bosses) and I can’t be spotted (so I have to use stealth). This meant a lot of saving and loading when things didn’t go quite the way I wanted.

I want to commend the level designers on creating some absolutely superb levels to move around in. Very quickly you learn that there is always another way to get to where you want to go. Most of the time that means going up or down and jumping from balconies or crawling through alleyways. With the use of powers players can access even more areas. Also, not only are the levels beautifully laid out, but the attention to detail is superb. They clearly spent a lot of time placing odd bits and ends such as trash, benches, and other objects the exist solely to dress up the scene. Each level

One nice addition to the typical stealth formula is that guards will notice if other guards go missing. If a guard walks away and comes back to find a fellow missing, that guard will start investigating the area. Ironically this actually tends to make taking down the second guard easier since you don’t have to do anything to get him away from his normal patrol which allows you to sneak up and take him down too.

If you’re going for no-deaths or no-alerts playthrough you have to babysit it. Every time you go to save you have to check the stats page to make sure no one died or spotted you. Several times I’ve gone to check my stats only to find out that someone, somewhere, somehow died even though I never killed anyone. One time I managed to subdue all of the enemies between me and the end of the level. I checked the stats after subduing the last enemy, no alerts. I walked to the end of the level probably 100 feet away and somehow when the end of level stats page came up I had one alert. So I had to reload the save and walk that same 100 feet again, this time without any alerts. They really need to do a better job on this because it started to get really annoying when I had to check my stats every single time before I saved.

The AI cheats. What I mean by this is that the enemies will always walk in your general direction whenever they’re searching for you. It’s easy enough to test. Just bang on something to alert the enemies in the area, then go hide somewhere. No matter where you hide, the enemies will always path towards you without fail. I suspect the designers did this intentionally to try and create extra tension, but instead all it does is cause a break in the immersion of the game because you can literally see the game feeding the AI scripts controlling the enemies information about where you are that they shouldn’t have. They designed a good stealth system, but this kind of heavy handedness creates a negative play experience that cheapens their efforts and ultimately undermines the player’s sense of immersion.

Something I found very odd is that civilians are amazingly good at noticing the player. Guards gradually notice the player. The longer they see you or the more flashy your actions the sooner they realize what’s happening. But a civilian will go from uninterested to screaming in terror in a flash. Not only does this feel extremely odd that the guards are worse at spotting the player in stealth than the civilians, but it’s also annoying that there is no state between being hidden and being spotted for civilians. I would like to see civilians be given the same sort of gradual detection system that guards have.

There is a very noticeable lack of stealth oriented bone charms in the game. There are plenty of ones that help in combat, but I found a grand total of one bone charm that did anything for me while in stealth for the first half of the game. Even when I did find a few more they didn’t really do much besides make health and mana potions even more useless than they already were. I would have liked to see a bit more creativity and diversity with the bone charms.

One of the best parts about the original Dishonored game that makes a grand reappearance in Dishonored 2 is the ability to beat the game without killing anyone. This includes major story characters (aka bosses). Every major enemy has a way in which they can be defeated without killing them. Sometimes this causes the character to become friendly, other times one could argue the end result might actually be worse than killing them. But either way, it’s neat to really explore the level and discover alternate pathways to victory beside a straight up fight.

There is a “no-powers” mode which I did toy around with for a bit, but frankly I found it to be rather boring. When you chose to forgo the mark you don’t just give up your powers, you actually give up everything in the upgrade tree. Runes you collect now just give you a chunk of money instead. Powers are one of the best parts about the Dishonored series and without them the game feels like so much less. I’m not against them offering this as an option, but I feel like the designers did themselves a disservice by adding a trophy/achievement to beat the game using this mode. Doing so exposes how shallow their game becomes without them. I would like to see the “no-powers” option still lock the player out of using magic, but allows the player to earn passive abilities at a cost. For instance, maybe for every rune spent upgrading your character it lowered your maximum health, or caused you to take extra damage. Or maybe the runes cause you to glow which makes it easier for enemies to spot you. Either way, I feel like locking the player out of the entire upgrade tree was a mistake and they should have tried to find something of a middle ground.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you’re a fan of dark fantasy games which offer a fun arsenal of weapons and abilities. This game excels with its level design and also offers strong replayability though it’s different gameplay types.

You will not like this game is you are looking for a strong story or do not have much patience. There will be a lot of saving and reloading especially if you decide to try and complete the game without being spotted.

Dishonored 2 is a fun game. The level design is top notch and the arsenal of weapons and powers truly allows you to become the master of your environment. Unfortunately a weak story and a few design flaws prevent this game from truly becoming the masterpiece it’s trying to be. That said, I had a lot of fun with it and I think most people will too.

Metal Gear Solid V Review

Metal Gear Solid V Review

First 15

The game starts off very slow. Following the opening cutscene in which Snake is injured, you spend the first 15 minutes of the game sitting in a hospital bed. There really isn’t much else to say because not much else happens. You spend a lot of time moving your head around and simply observing the doctor and nurses as they take care of you and the patient next to you. You even have to be sedated a few times after you have a panic attack over some of the things the doctor tells you. I will say it was interesting to see a game that’s not afraid to have such a boring opening in favor of a more cinematic feel. That said, I did feel like the game had made its point about how long it takes Snake to recover from his injuries long before the first actually interesting thing happened.

Of course, once things got interesting, they got really interesting.

Story

The story is quite dark and revolves around a world similar to our own history in which war is the norm and lives are given the same value as ammunition. Most countries use private military contractors to carry out their less savory work while keeping their own hands clean. In the midst of all of this, there is Solid Snake and his company which tries to bring a little good to the world. Unfortunately, that mentality invites predators whom ultimately destroy the organization in the opening cinematic.

The beginning of the game is about Snake literally dragging himself back from the dead so that he can start anew. The opening story mission is graphic, gut wrenching, and not for the faint of heart. It paints a very bleak picture of the world that has developed while its best champion has been out of commission. The first mission, minus the seemingly endless time spent stuck in bed, is precisely what I want to play. It is the kind of story/gameplay that has made the Metal Gear Solid series such a powerful force.

There are two major highlights of this series that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain does not forget. The first is people with powers and abilities that go beyond the norm. In this game those characters are front and center right from the start and every time you encounter them they bring a sense of both dread and wonder. The second is the metal gears, from which the series gains its name. Here too the game hits its mark as the player slowly catches tantalizing glimpses of a metal gear as the story progresses.

All this probably sounds fantastic, and it is. The problem is, the story comes to a screeching halt once you gain access to the base. Now with a base of your own, you must go out and gather resources in order to upgrade your base, research weapons, recruit soldiers, and whole host of other management type things that frankly do absolutely nothing to further the storyline. I’ll go into this more in the Gameplay section, but suffice it to say that the game does a great job of starting strong only to shoot itself in the foot.

One thing that never made any sense to me was the way in which you recruit new soldiers. Some are earned through mission rewards which makes sense, but the majority of early recruits you get by incapacitating enemy soldiers and then having them airlifted back to base where suddenly they convert from wanting to kill you on sight to deciding that you’re the commander they’ve always wanted to follow and they will lay down their lives for your cause. The game offers some sorry excuse about “reprogramming” them as justification, but frankly the whole thing just felt weird every time.

Interface

One thing I will say for the developers, despite the fact that there are a million different things you need to do in a menu, for the most part everything is laid out in such a way that you can very quickly and easily find what you need. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part if I needed to see something, I could find it without any real trouble. The one big exception to this was I wish they would put extraction points on the normal map. If you want to know where to go for an extraction, you have to navigate away from the map and pull up the extraction menu to see where they are. It’s a minor issue, but you run into it at the end of every mission so it’s quite noticeable.

They make clever use of the PS4 touchpad in that the bottom left corner brings up a menu while the bottom right corner takes you directly to the map. It feels natural to use despite technically being the same button. I have a feeling I’ll start seeing other games doing the same.

I very much dislike that you can’t see optional objectives until after you complete a mission. Often times the optional objectives require only a minor variation on what you’re already doing, but you won’t know that until after you’ve completed a mission which then forces you to repeat the mission if you want to go after them. Frankly it just feels like a cheap way to add “replayability” without having to actually add anything to the game.

I don’t know why, but it seems like every time anything at all happens, the game decides that it’s a good time to start putting some credits on the screen. I probably saw Hideo Kojima’s name ten times in the first three hours of the game alone. Eventually I started wondering if this was some kind of gag (the series is famous for its subtle jokes), but they never really presented it as one. So I’m just left to wonder if I really need another reminder of the people who made this game.

Gameplay

The core gameplay is quite well done and each of the systems works rather well with the others. The main flow is to approach a new town or outpost, scan for threats from afar and mark them using the binoculars, then move in and systematically kill or incapacitate all of the threats without being spotted. Once all of the threats have been eliminated, finish up any mission objectives, collect any available resources, and then move on to the next area. Eliminating enemies generally takes up the lion’s share of your time due to waiting on opportunities to separate one soldier from the rest in order to take him down without alerting the others. This gameplay and the tools the game provides to facilitate it mesh very well with one another into a coherent whole. On the other hand, you can certainly go in guns blazing. But even if you prefer the direct approach, it’s still probably worth your while to do a bit of sneaking to eliminate a few enemies before you open fire.

Reflex mode is a new addition to the series wherein after being spotted the player has a few seconds during which everything slows down. This allows you a brief window to try and quickly take out the enemy before they have time to call out of backup. These moments are very high tension and create a nice sense of spiking adrenaline. This contrasts nicely with the more slow and even stealth gameplay.

The evac system is both extremely useful and somewhat hilarious. You gain the ability to attach a balloon to an unconscious character (human or large animal) which causes them to rise up into the air for a few seconds, before they go rocketing into the sky to be picked up by a recon plane. The game does this very tongue in cheek as the person or animal being evaced gives a very amusing cries of dismay whenever he/she/it goes rocketing into the sky. From a gameplay perspective this system strikes a nice balance between still having to carry a person you wish to evac (since you can’t evac a person while indoors) while thankfully not forcing you to carry a person for leagues and leagues to a landing zone as you have to do in the prologue mission if you wish to rescue all of the prisoners.

One thing I found extremely annoying was that the silencer has durability. This means that you can only fire a weapon ten or so times before the silencer breaks. This might have been fine if I could bring some backup silencers with me, but I can’t. And once the silencer breaks, I have to call in a chopper to airlift me out before I can get another one. You can eventually research better weapons which have silencers that last longer, but it takes a lot of time to unlock those upgrades and in the meantime you’re stuck with the worst silencers in the history of any video game ever.

As I alluded to in the Story section, the joy of the game comes to a grinding halt once you start getting invested in the base. The storyline vanishes and you’re forced to grind through a dozen or more nearly identical missions whose sole purpose seems to be to prolong the game while enabling to the designers to reuse the same assets. Sometimes you have to kill a general, others are to extract a prisoner, or maybe even collect some intel. But in the end all of the missions basically play out the same and you very quickly start to get bored with the repetitiveness of it all. Every mission basically comes down to: approach settlement, scan for threats with binoculars, sneak around eliminating enemies (unless you just use the direct approach because you’re so tired of waiting for enemies to patrol), finish eliminating enemies, gather resources, complete objectives (if any), and move on to the next settlement. Rinse and repeat. It’s fun at first, but when you do this three to five times a mission with almost nothing to change it up, by mission thirteen the fun is pretty much used up.

There is even a daily login bonus. A daily login bonus! This alone should have thrown up giant red warning signs to the developers that something was desperately wrong and the game had gone quite far astray. I bought this game to play a gripping single player story campaign, not so I would have to treat it like a free-to-play iPhone game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy micromanaging a base and a roster of recruits or if you’re willing to at least wade through a ton of menus and side missions each time you wish to advance the story.

You will not enjoy this game if you don’t like repetitive missions or if you don’t like sifting through dozens of menus after each mission.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that contains two games. The first is the exactly the kind of game I was hoping for from a sequel to the excellent Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots. Sadly though, that game is trapped behind another game which is a mess of menus and repetitive side missions that you must wade through in order to play the game you actually want to play. You would think that in the Definitive Edition at least they would have given you the option to bypass the busy work, but sadly they are sticking to their guns and the game as a whole suffers for it.

Song of the Deep Review

Song of the Deep Review

The First 15

I chose intermediate difficulty.

A very big part of this game will be the strength of its art. So far all of the artwork is beautiful and if the game maintains this level of talent than I will be very impressed.

The story is told as if the player were being read to from a storybook. The format works very well and meshes nicely with the art style. That is except for one massively glaring plot hole, which I’ll go over in more detail in the story section of my review.

Moving through the kelp causes it to glow. This is both visually appealing to watch as well as good for reinforcing the idea that the world is actively responding to the actions of the player.

I like that there are hidden treasures even right from the start for players who are willing to explore around the edges.

The story continues to charm both with how it is told and the artwork to go with it.

I ran into something that the game was quick to inform me I could not kill yet. It’s nice that it warned me before I wasted a bunch of time trying to kill it, but it should have found a way in which to tell me that made the warning feel like part of the story.

Story

Song of the Deep is a game that relies heavily on its story, and for the vast majority of the game the story holds up very well. That said, there is one gaping plot hole that comes during the opening cutscene. First though I want to talk about something known as ‘suspension of disbelief’. Suspension of disbelief is not unique to games but instead applies to anything where the reader/viewer/player is being asked to temporarily suspend the idea that what they’re reading/watching/playing is not realistically possible. We do this all the time when we read a fantasy novel, or watch a science fiction movie, or, in this case, play a game about a girl in a submarine exploring a magical underwater land. Suspension of disbelief is only possible because the reader/viewer/player wants to play along. S/he wants to be entertained by something, and the player is willing to accept things that aren’t normal in order to gain the full enjoyment. But even though the player is willing to play along, the writer/director/designer must do their own due diligence in providing a reasonable explanation for how something normally impossible can be done. And it is on the subject of an explanation where Song of the Deep runs into trouble.

In the opening cutscene, the young girl decides to go look for her father after he fails to return home. So she grabs a few pieces of wood, some metal, and some glass, and then she somehow builds herself a complete submarine with an infinite air supply! As I said earlier, players want to be entertained, but there is only so far a storyteller can push things before these impossible things start to interfere rather than enhance a player’s sense of enjoyment. In this case, we have a young girl who has lived her entire life on the edge of the ocean. The only person she has ever seen is her father (no idea where the mother is). She has little to no training in anything other than probably household chores (though even that isn’t explicitly stated) and yet somehow she suddenly becomes this mechanical prodigy overnight and creates a perfect submarine out of a few bits and pieces she found lying around. This right here is simply too much to expect the player to just accept without some sort of explanation. In order to maintain the suspension of disbelief, the player needs some sort of hook that might explain how she could build such an elaborate device. Maybe she really is some kind of mechanical prodigy who spends all of her free time building things in her workshop. (Keep in mind this game is designed to feel like stepping into a child’s storybook.) Or maybe her father built the submarine as a birthday present for her. Also there is something in the game called Tyne which the game gives zero explanation for at all. Is this what gives her submarine an infinite air supply? I could keep going, but the point I’m trying to make is that when designing a game or even simply telling a story, any time you do something wildly out of character, there must be a hook or idea that allows the reader/viewer/player to bridge the gap between their understanding of the fictional world up to that point and their new understanding of it now. In this case, that disconnect comes at a pivotal moment in which Merryn constructs the device which will become one of the primary focuses of the entire game.

Now, I know I just spent a lot of time bashing the story for having such a massive plot hole, but that one misstep really is the only issue I had with the story as a whole. If you can just get past that one area, then you really are in for a treat because the rest of the game is beautifully told and certainly worth experiencing. The way in which they blend together story, artwork, and gameplay is masterfully done and something to which I hope other developers pay attention.

Interface and Controls

The controls are well laid out and eventually start to feel second nature, as all good control schemes should. There are a few alternate control setups to try out, but everything works and overall I always felt like I had complete control of the submarine. That became a little less true though when it came to controlling the main character herself.

Later on in the game (no spoilers, I promise) the player gains the ability to have Merryn to leave her submarine and swim around on her own. This lets her get into narrow passages that are too small for the submarine to fit through. The problem comes from the controls for picking up items and for attacking, which are both bound to the same button (in this case SQUARE since I am playing on a Playstation 4). In the submarine, the claw can be used to attack monsters or to grab things. They tried to keep it similar when you control Merryn directly, but it becomes more frustrating rather than helpful. Outside of the submarine, the young girl has a dagger that she uses to attack, and she can pick up objects. But with both attack and grab/throw being tied to the same button you physically cannot attack something without also dropping whatever you happen to be carrying at the time. This led to a lot of extremely frustrating moments spent chasing after an object that I hadn’t intended on letting go of quite yet. The developers need to separate attack and grab/throw when playing as the main character directly.

Boosting in this game can be a little awkward because at times it is difficult to tell how much boost the player has left. The interface has an indicator for health and Tyne (energy), but not one for boost. I eventually realized that there is a minor change to the ship when the boost meter is full or not, but it’s very subtle and is not good at indicating how much boost the player has left. I wish they had added a boost meter to the interface to go along with the health and Tyne readouts.

One of my big pet peeves in other games similar to this one is that if you decide to try collecting everything, at some point you end up having to resort to watching YouTube videos to find the last few items you missed. Song of the Deep ensures you will never have to do this by doing two things. First, when you reveal an area the game highlights all of the treasures located in that area (even if you don’t have the upgrades to get them yet). Most you can figure out how to collect with a bit of trial and error, but some are much harder to acquire. Normally you end up swimming blindly into the reef walls searching for a passage or resorting to YouTube to find that one small opening that would have taken you an hour to locate. Near the end of Song of the Deep, however, the game gives you a device which then helps you to map out the cavern wall in a large area all at once. This device allows the developers to create these hidden passageways for enterprising players who can sniff them out early on in the game (rewarding them with more coins to spend on upgrading the submarine) but also to avoid frustrating players when they can’t find that one tiny opening when they come back around to collect all of the treasures they missed the first time through.

Gameplay

A lot of the gameplay for Song of the Deep revolves around various puzzles. These puzzles range from super simple which take 5 seconds to figure out, to more complex machinations that can take 15 minutes or more to complete. All in all, I enjoyed the puzzles and felt a strong sense of accomplishment for having completed each one. The game will also provide you with hints (told in storybook format) if it feels you are having trouble.

There are also several boss fights and closed room combat encounters spread throughout the game. Early on these are treated more like real time puzzles in that they provide you with places you can hide while you try to analyze a particular boss mechanic. But later on they take away that luxury and it really does come down to sink or swim. Despite having the primary focus of this game be on puzzle solving and exploration, the combat system is robust enough that I found these encounters to be quite fun.

It’s a small thing, but I found the clamshells to be a nice touch. Clamshells are giant clams that will give you a treasure if you bring them the right item for them to ‘eat’. The trick is that while they don’t explicitly tell you what item they want, the color of the clam matches the color of the item they want. This was a clever little mini-game the developers added to the normal treasure hunt.

A minor complaint, but Merryn actually swims faster than her sub. It just feels a little weird.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like games with a great story lots of puzzles leading to hidden passages and secret areas to find and explore. While there is combat, Song of the Deep is more about the experience of exploration and wonder. Players who like collecting things will find plenty to keep them entertained.

You will not enjoy this game if you are looking for something with lots of action. While there are some high adrenaline moments, the vast majority of the game is spent exploring and solving puzzles.

Song of the Deep is a beautiful and charming game that relies not on the complexity of its combat but on the atmosphere of its artwork and story. Both of these are beautifully done (with one exception) and do a fantastic job of making the player feel as if s/he is really exploring an underwater world full of wonder and mystery.