Tag: Single-Player

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.

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.

Pokemon Sun & Moon

Pokemon Sun & Moon

Introduction

When I was younger I played a lot of Pokémon. I bought Pokémon Red when it first came out and later bought Pokémon Yellow. I managed to get all 151 Pokémon (including Mew). I then continued on with Pokémon Silver, but stopped playing before the next entry into the series. Now I felt like it was time to jump back into the series and see if it was everything I remember it to be.

The First 15

I start up the game and am asked to pick my character. I’m a little disappointed by how few choices you have when it comes to making your character.

The opening cutscene shows a young girl trying to escape from a lab. She nearly gets caught before whatever pokémon she has in her bag teleports them out of the lab.

Now we’ve moved on to my character who it seems has just moved to the Alola area. I’m starting to notice that people all smile a lot.

I find it a little weird that even the professor calls my mom ‘mom’.

After a lot of cutscenes I finally get to chose my starter pokémon. I chose Litten the fire cat as my starter. My reason is that it looks the coolest of the three.

Now equipped with my starter I’m ready to go!

Story

There is a decided lack of tension between characters in the game. Everyone remembers the constant tension between Red and Blue (Ash and Gary) from the first game. But in this game it seems like everyone is always friendly. I feel like the lack of a rival does the game a disservice. It by no means ruins the story, but I think the story could be better if there was a character that acted as a true rival for the player.

In Alola, Team Rocket is replaced by a gang called Team Skull. Unfortunately, whereas Team Rocket managed to actually feel like a real threat and defeating them became a priority, the members of Team Skull are mostly characters who are very clearly trying to compensate for being weak by acting tough. This makes defeating them feel less like something you need to do, and more like something that you might as well do since you’re already here. Even their leader is hard to take seriously. I remember Giovani being someone you could respect (granted I was a lot younger at the time). Unfortunately this new group does not elicit the same response.

Interface and Controls

Players gain access to the Ride Pass which allows players to mount up on different pokémon. I like how this replaces the old HM system, but it feels a little odd to be able to just call up a pokémon anywhere I want without having first captured that pokémon. I think you should have to capture the pokémon you use on the Ride Pass. I’m also not of fan of how Sharpedo completely replaces Lapras. Technically you can’t fish while using Sharpedo whereas you can with Lapras, but this just feels like the developers last minute realized Lapras was useless and so they removed something from Sharpedo to make Lapras feel ‘different.’ I’d like to see them give Sharpedo the ability to be fished from and then simply remove Lapras as a mount.

I wish the game had a quest log or a notebook of some kind for tracking quests you get from NPCs. Often times I’ll meet an NPC who wants me to do something for them or trade a pokémon with them. The problem is that if I don’t do it right away, I usually forget about the quest until I revisit the area later on.

One of the biggest missteps the game takes is with the Battle Royale. Players are introduced to the Battle Royale through the story at about level 20. Players participate in one which is a lot of fun. Naturally players are going to want to do a few more before they continue on with the story. Unfortunately, pokémon who participate in the event are all level 50. Pokémon over that level are set at level 50, but pokémon under that level are not leveled up to 50. This basically means that the player, having just been introduced to this new system, has to immediately leave and come back much later in the game to participate. I really wish there were Battle Royales available at level 20 so the player could participate immediately upon being introduced to the system. I would have liked to see the developers add in a series of one-time level 20 battles that reward the player with an item and unlock the normal level 50 battles upon completion.

One of the things that made the game much harder than it should have been is after defeating a pokémon that belongs to a trainer, the game tells you what pokémon they will be playing next. Unfortunately, all it tells you is the name of that pokémon. As someone who hasn’t memorized all 700+ pokémon I usually had no idea which pokémon was about to be summoned next. I would like to see the new pokémon displayed in the bottom screen along with its type(s).

I appreciate that when I’m selecting a move the game will indicated if an attack is super-effective, normal, not very effective, or will have no effect on the opposing pokémon. This is extremely helpful since it means I don’t have to try and memorize a giant strength/weakness chart.

I actually didn’t even realize that I had access to Pokémon Pelago until a random NPC I spoke with told me about it. There needs to be some sort of tutorial added that takes players there once they unlock access.

Gameplay

Early on enemies have a habit of overusing debuff moves which ultimately means they never do any damage. I think it’s intentional in order to make at least the start of the game really easy for new players. This is a great way of giving players enemies with pokémon that are the same level but are still very easy since the player could have chosen any of the three starters.

The game gives you access to the Exp Share item very early. Personally I feel like this is one of the best decisions the game makes. By having the Exp Share all of the pokémon in the player’s party are constantly leveling. This makes it so you don’t have to spend time farming experience or constantly swapping pokémon at the start of every battle if some of your pokémon start falling behind. The early access to Exp Share means you can always use the pokémon you want to use, but the others in your party will be strong enough when the time comes for them to shine.

In the old days (Pokémon Silver) pokémon would full heal when they leveled up. They don’t do that anymore, which is probably for the best.

The game strikes a nice balance between random encounters and avoidable encounters. Walking in tall grass or inside of caves causes the player to encounter pokémon at random, while others can be seen spotted beforehand. I like the mix of encounter types and how they made each area feel unique.

Replacing dungeons are the Island Challenges. These challenges require you to navigate through an area, usually a cave, while completing some kind of quest which then ends with a fight against a totem pokémon (basically a supped up version of a normal pokémon). While fun, the challenges tended to be quite easy and the fights with the totem pokémon were also quite easy if I burst down the totem pokémon right away. I like that they’re trying to change things up, but their one-hit KO methodology prevents things from being as interesting as they could be (more on that below).

My largest complaint about the game is that most of the fights come down to one-hit knock outs. Because of how much damage pokémon deal at a time, hitting an enemy pokémon with a super-effective attack will usually KO that pokémon (or vice versa) without giving the target a chance to do anything. There were a number of times when I would put out a pokémon of my own only to have it get knocked out without being able to attack even once. Because of this I found the majority of the game to be rather easy since I could stick my Butterfree out first which usually had at least one attack that was super-effective against anything the game threw at me. And if it doesn’t, then I could just switch to one of my other pokémon who did have a super-effective attack. I would have liked to see fights be a little more of an actual fight. That means that even a high damage super-effective attack wouldn’t do more than one-third to one-half of a pokémon’s health. I just feel as if the constant one-shotting makes the main part of the game too easy and a couple select fights much harder than they needed to be.

The first time I was defeated it was to a trainer who played a Meowth that used Bite. Bite is a move that has a chance to make the opposing pokémon flinch, thus skipping their turn if the opponent goes second. Unfortunately for me, the enemy was faster and proceeded to make my pokémon flinch every turn until eventually they all fainted without being able to attack even once. Losing purely to RNG like this felt so completely awful. A feeling that just got worse when I went in again and defeated her without any trouble the second time. I feel like the designers need to be a little more careful not to give enemies moves like Bite which can potentially cause the player to lose without being given a chance to do anything due to bad RNG.

Z-Power is a new mechanic which allows players (and very rarely enemies) to supercharge a single attack once per fight. I actually found Z-moves to be a bit underwhelming from a gameplay perspective since they’re mostly just a more powerful version of an existing ability. It’s a good attempt to try and follow up on Mega Evolutions, but it just doesn’t have the same effect. Z-moves also tended to make wild encounters even easier than they already were since a Z-move is almost always going to one-shot the target even if it isn’t super-effective. The upside to Z-moves are the animations that play when players use one. Some pokémon have unique Z-moves which generally have some of the best animations.

Mega Evolving is a system from the more recent games. In Pokémon Sun/Moon players aren’t given access to it until after the main storyline is already completed. I feel like this is done to further highlight the new Z-Power mechanic.

Something I want to highlight about Pokémon Sun/Moon is that players can spend an almost unlimited number of hours playing this game. Even once you beat the main storyline there are several other storylines that follow it. Besides story content there is the collection aspect. Players can catch pokémon to fill up their pokédex. And once that’s completed then players can try to collect the rare shiny variation of each pokémon. Between that, breeding and hatching eggs, online battles, and a number of other gameplay features players can easily pour hundreds (maybe even thousands) of hours into this game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy collecting a seemingly limitless number of creatures, training them, and taking them into battle against enemy trainers or players.

You will not like this game if you don’t know many of the pokémon by name or you dislike games that have an over the top cheerful atmosphere.

Pokémon is (as it always has been) the ultimate collector’s game. With over 700 pokémon (over 300 catchable between the two games in the current expansion) players have plenty of things to chase after. But even for those who aren’t into filling up their pokédex, the game is still a lot of fun with an engaging story. There are a few missteps such as Team Skull lacking a sense of danger and the constant one-hit KO attacks, but all in all I enjoyed my time playing this game.

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.