AlexaLily
1998
Fallout 2 improves upon the foundation of Fallout 1 in many ways and when people are reminiscing about "the good old Fallouts", the things they're thinking about are almost entirely from Fallout 2.
The combat is a smoother experience and while it has some issues (that I'll get into later), it is a generally better game to play. The writing is, on average, better than FO1 (with the caveat that the humor tends to be much more abrasive - either opening mocking the game or its characters, or winking and nodding at how silly videogames are. I'm not a fan of either of those things but your mileage may vary). The crowning bit of this game, though is the ending. It's a pretty great ending that actually sets up one of the biggest facts of the setting that the Bethesda games later leaned into quite heavily.
But before I get too much further or get into too much detail, I need to get into some of the bad stuff. First off, the game is deeply racist. There's the very obvious stuff like Hakunin and Sulik both being bizarre mish-mashes of actual cultural traditions which result in deeply offensive caricatures. But there's also an idea that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic fiction that humanity would somehow "regress" back to more "basic" types of cultural, specifically that tribal or indigenous cultures are somehow "lesser" than more "advanced" cultures. This idea is straight-up racist and deeply offensive to indigenous peoples because it assumes that they are somehow inherently less intelligent and less capable because they live in tents and not in bombed-out buildings. Fallout 2 then takes it a step further and leans into this idea by having people (especially in the early game) refer to your character as "a tribal" and will talk down to you because of it. The game never seems to do this knowingly, either, because it never really remarks on how that's bad or anything - it just considers it a truth of the setting. On top of that, there's the classic Fallout racism that is in each and every game with ghouls. If you have the ghoul companion then you're going to have to tell him to wait outside whenever you enter a building because people 'don't like his kind around here.' The game at least seems aware of what it's doing with this but still isn't doing much to make note that people are being racist and that's a bad thing. It's once again just considered a factual part of the fiction. At least when Fallout 1 was racist it had the good graces to be ashamed and try to hide it a bit.
My other main issue with the game is that the combat, while an improvement FO1, is a slog. At the start it's okay because it's just the beginning and, hey, whatever, it's fine. But by the end of the game, nothing about the combat has changed in any meaningful way except now instead of fighting geckos and rad scorpions, you're fighting groups of Enclave soldiers in power armor. So you either have to do even more of this not-great combat to level up to even up the playing field so you can maybe survive all these random encounters or dump a bunch of your points into the Outdoorsman skill so you can avoid the random encounters completely. It's a poorly thought out system that seems to punish you for avoiding combat (because you get less experience) but also punish you for engaging in combat (by draining resources like health and ammo). It's not fun at all and is only worse because the game never adds any sort of interesting combat mechanics for you to implement. There are no skills, no special weapons, nothing that would make you approach combat in a different or more interesting way. The entire game you're either shooting things with a gun or hitting them in melee.
The issues with the combat connect into the later parts of the game where for the final third or so, the game sends you on a series of very long fetch quests. "Oh you just got here, we need you to go somewhere else to get one item or talk to a person." Over and over and over again. So you end up having tons of these high-level encounters while you're running all across the map to try and find every macguffin to move the plot along. It's an awful grind that exists only to drag out the length of the game. The actual end area of the Enclave Base is good but I'm not sure if it's even fully worth how much of an awful slog all these fetch quests are.
And that brings us to the ending which, outside of one specific part, I think it's pretty good! The most interesting parts of the story are here with some big reveals about the Enclave and the truth about the world as a whole. It should be said though, that none of those interesting reveals are ever hinted at when they really should have been just to let you know that something bigger was going on and not just evil people being cartoon villains (okay, it still is somewhat that but not entirely).
That one issue I mentioned about the ending is, once again, combat. After everything is said and done, you have to fight through a final boss. Despite Fallout 2 being touted as the game you can talk your way through, you still have to fight the biggest damage sponge in the game (and on a time limit, no less!) For a game that encourages so many different types of play and wants you to play around with how you interact with the world, it's absolutely bizarre that the ending is a fight with a big slab of beef with a minigun.
So overall the game is an improvement over Fallout 1 and I'd say a pretty alright game. Just don't be afraid to open up a character editor and give yourself some stats so you don't have to deal with atrocious end-game combat. It's a game you play for the story, there's no good reason to suffer through unrelated parts just to get to the good bits.
Oh and one final thought: I just want to give a shoutout to the talking scorpion. It's the funniest gag in the entire game and maybe the whole franchise. It plays within the game's setting (instead of most of the humor which can get pretty meta both about Fallout and about videogames as a whole) but it also has interactions with the game's mechanics and the player's stats. It's very clever and silly and fun and good.
The combat is a smoother experience and while it has some issues (that I'll get into later), it is a generally better game to play. The writing is, on average, better than FO1 (with the caveat that the humor tends to be much more abrasive - either opening mocking the game or its characters, or winking and nodding at how silly videogames are. I'm not a fan of either of those things but your mileage may vary). The crowning bit of this game, though is the ending. It's a pretty great ending that actually sets up one of the biggest facts of the setting that the Bethesda games later leaned into quite heavily.
But before I get too much further or get into too much detail, I need to get into some of the bad stuff. First off, the game is deeply racist. There's the very obvious stuff like Hakunin and Sulik both being bizarre mish-mashes of actual cultural traditions which result in deeply offensive caricatures. But there's also an idea that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic fiction that humanity would somehow "regress" back to more "basic" types of cultural, specifically that tribal or indigenous cultures are somehow "lesser" than more "advanced" cultures. This idea is straight-up racist and deeply offensive to indigenous peoples because it assumes that they are somehow inherently less intelligent and less capable because they live in tents and not in bombed-out buildings. Fallout 2 then takes it a step further and leans into this idea by having people (especially in the early game) refer to your character as "a tribal" and will talk down to you because of it. The game never seems to do this knowingly, either, because it never really remarks on how that's bad or anything - it just considers it a truth of the setting. On top of that, there's the classic Fallout racism that is in each and every game with ghouls. If you have the ghoul companion then you're going to have to tell him to wait outside whenever you enter a building because people 'don't like his kind around here.' The game at least seems aware of what it's doing with this but still isn't doing much to make note that people are being racist and that's a bad thing. It's once again just considered a factual part of the fiction. At least when Fallout 1 was racist it had the good graces to be ashamed and try to hide it a bit.
My other main issue with the game is that the combat, while an improvement FO1, is a slog. At the start it's okay because it's just the beginning and, hey, whatever, it's fine. But by the end of the game, nothing about the combat has changed in any meaningful way except now instead of fighting geckos and rad scorpions, you're fighting groups of Enclave soldiers in power armor. So you either have to do even more of this not-great combat to level up to even up the playing field so you can maybe survive all these random encounters or dump a bunch of your points into the Outdoorsman skill so you can avoid the random encounters completely. It's a poorly thought out system that seems to punish you for avoiding combat (because you get less experience) but also punish you for engaging in combat (by draining resources like health and ammo). It's not fun at all and is only worse because the game never adds any sort of interesting combat mechanics for you to implement. There are no skills, no special weapons, nothing that would make you approach combat in a different or more interesting way. The entire game you're either shooting things with a gun or hitting them in melee.
The issues with the combat connect into the later parts of the game where for the final third or so, the game sends you on a series of very long fetch quests. "Oh you just got here, we need you to go somewhere else to get one item or talk to a person." Over and over and over again. So you end up having tons of these high-level encounters while you're running all across the map to try and find every macguffin to move the plot along. It's an awful grind that exists only to drag out the length of the game. The actual end area of the Enclave Base is good but I'm not sure if it's even fully worth how much of an awful slog all these fetch quests are.
And that brings us to the ending which, outside of one specific part, I think it's pretty good! The most interesting parts of the story are here with some big reveals about the Enclave and the truth about the world as a whole. It should be said though, that none of those interesting reveals are ever hinted at when they really should have been just to let you know that something bigger was going on and not just evil people being cartoon villains (okay, it still is somewhat that but not entirely).
That one issue I mentioned about the ending is, once again, combat. After everything is said and done, you have to fight through a final boss. Despite Fallout 2 being touted as the game you can talk your way through, you still have to fight the biggest damage sponge in the game (and on a time limit, no less!) For a game that encourages so many different types of play and wants you to play around with how you interact with the world, it's absolutely bizarre that the ending is a fight with a big slab of beef with a minigun.
So overall the game is an improvement over Fallout 1 and I'd say a pretty alright game. Just don't be afraid to open up a character editor and give yourself some stats so you don't have to deal with atrocious end-game combat. It's a game you play for the story, there's no good reason to suffer through unrelated parts just to get to the good bits.
Oh and one final thought: I just want to give a shoutout to the talking scorpion. It's the funniest gag in the entire game and maybe the whole franchise. It plays within the game's setting (instead of most of the humor which can get pretty meta both about Fallout and about videogames as a whole) but it also has interactions with the game's mechanics and the player's stats. It's very clever and silly and fun and good.
A few months ago, when I was playing the rest of Fallout 4, I got to Nuka-World, found out that the premise of it is helping some raider gangs to build a bigger/better slave empire and I just kind of checked out of it. The game offers a quest to kill all the raiders instead of helping them, I did it, and my reward was the previously-enslaved NPCs glitching out and taking all their clothes off and then nothing else meaningful happened. I moved on with life. But now I felt a draw to go back. Maybe I missed out on something. Maybe within the rancid outer layer is a core that has something special. Maybe there is something here to point to that makes this awful DLC 'worth it.'
Dear reader, I am sad to say there is no such thing.
The Nuka-World DLC was made in response to fans at launch saying that they wanted more content with raiders and so Bethesda planned this out as a way to spend time with them and to add more depth to raider factions than what there was in the base game. And, see, that is a pitch I can get behind. Because in every Fallout game, from the isometric beginnings to the first-person present, the raiders are pretty much just murder junkies (and occasionally cannibals). They exist to fill a gap in the enemy progression and nothing more. Bethesda needed an enemy tougher than the random mutated bugs and critters but not as strong as the Super Mutants. And the raiders fill that gap. Fleshy bags of XP and loot that are pure evil that come from nowhere for you to freely murder the shit out of them without as much as a second thought as to who they are or why you're murdering them. The raiders are humans of pure function. So, the idea that you might actually get to sit down and talk to them and find out what's up with the raiders and why they are the way they are... yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone take a crack at that because no one really has so far.
Unfortunately, this DLC is a full product and not just a pitch. In practice, Nuka-World is a big map for you to go to with plenty of locations to explore and some very bare bones narrative to send you from one point of interest to the next. You arrive, are appointed leader of all the raiders and then you are almost immediately sent out to clear out the rest of the theme park of the various non-raider monsters and robots that have somehow completely confounded three rather large gangs. Each gang has a leader that you get one meaningful conversation with but even these are pretty disappointing. Instead of making raiders with depth, they just made different flavors of raider with fun coats of paint. Instead of generic murder junkies, you now have the Disciples (Original Flavor™ Murder Junkies), The Operators (Money-hungry Murder Junkies), and The Pack (Furry Murder Junkies). But that's kinda it. It's not like you get much background about who any of them are or where they come from or why they decided to be murder junkies. And after those initial conversations? They have nothing meaningful to say and will only send you on some classic Bethesda Radiant Quests to go murder people or enslave them. Cool.
Okay so it's a total whiff on the narrative end. But a theme park! Surely this is some cool locations with fun aesthetics! It's not just bombed out buildings or military bases or what! It's rollercoasters and fun houses and a zoo for some reason! And this all just... largely didn't do anything for me. The little bit of interest I had in it the aesthetic wore off fast, though, because this DLC has a lot of stuff in it and it makes you go to almost all of it. I recommend turning the volume slider for dialogue all the way down because the constantly looping theme park PA system messages about buying overpriced maps or how such-and-such a ride is out of order get old the third time they loop and get very old the eighteenth time they loop.
The one nice thing I can say about this is that they brought the Hubologists back and I think that's fun. I don't know how the religion from the West Coast games ended up in the Commonwealth but I'm not asking questions. They dose you with radiation and will give you way more lore than all three raider gangs combined before their heads all explode in a the best quest of the entire DLC.
Total ass DLC that is a huge missed opportunity because they just wanted to give you more. More locations to look at, more garbage to loot, more functional mechanical horseshit to wade through. As if the base game somehow didn't have enough. What the hell.
Dear reader, I am sad to say there is no such thing.
The Nuka-World DLC was made in response to fans at launch saying that they wanted more content with raiders and so Bethesda planned this out as a way to spend time with them and to add more depth to raider factions than what there was in the base game. And, see, that is a pitch I can get behind. Because in every Fallout game, from the isometric beginnings to the first-person present, the raiders are pretty much just murder junkies (and occasionally cannibals). They exist to fill a gap in the enemy progression and nothing more. Bethesda needed an enemy tougher than the random mutated bugs and critters but not as strong as the Super Mutants. And the raiders fill that gap. Fleshy bags of XP and loot that are pure evil that come from nowhere for you to freely murder the shit out of them without as much as a second thought as to who they are or why you're murdering them. The raiders are humans of pure function. So, the idea that you might actually get to sit down and talk to them and find out what's up with the raiders and why they are the way they are... yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone take a crack at that because no one really has so far.
Unfortunately, this DLC is a full product and not just a pitch. In practice, Nuka-World is a big map for you to go to with plenty of locations to explore and some very bare bones narrative to send you from one point of interest to the next. You arrive, are appointed leader of all the raiders and then you are almost immediately sent out to clear out the rest of the theme park of the various non-raider monsters and robots that have somehow completely confounded three rather large gangs. Each gang has a leader that you get one meaningful conversation with but even these are pretty disappointing. Instead of making raiders with depth, they just made different flavors of raider with fun coats of paint. Instead of generic murder junkies, you now have the Disciples (Original Flavor™ Murder Junkies), The Operators (Money-hungry Murder Junkies), and The Pack (Furry Murder Junkies). But that's kinda it. It's not like you get much background about who any of them are or where they come from or why they decided to be murder junkies. And after those initial conversations? They have nothing meaningful to say and will only send you on some classic Bethesda Radiant Quests to go murder people or enslave them. Cool.
Okay so it's a total whiff on the narrative end. But a theme park! Surely this is some cool locations with fun aesthetics! It's not just bombed out buildings or military bases or what! It's rollercoasters and fun houses and a zoo for some reason! And this all just... largely didn't do anything for me. The little bit of interest I had in it the aesthetic wore off fast, though, because this DLC has a lot of stuff in it and it makes you go to almost all of it. I recommend turning the volume slider for dialogue all the way down because the constantly looping theme park PA system messages about buying overpriced maps or how such-and-such a ride is out of order get old the third time they loop and get very old the eighteenth time they loop.
The one nice thing I can say about this is that they brought the Hubologists back and I think that's fun. I don't know how the religion from the West Coast games ended up in the Commonwealth but I'm not asking questions. They dose you with radiation and will give you way more lore than all three raider gangs combined before their heads all explode in a the best quest of the entire DLC.
Total ass DLC that is a huge missed opportunity because they just wanted to give you more. More locations to look at, more garbage to loot, more functional mechanical horseshit to wade through. As if the base game somehow didn't have enough. What the hell.
It's pretty common for your first time playing a game to be full of mistakes. Sometimes you don't fully grasp the system so you play sub-optimally. Or maybe you don't know what skills are going to be more valuable for the sort of playthrough you're going for and you spec in the wrong direction. But Wasteland 2 is the first time I made the mistake of using pre-generated characters instead of making my own characters (apparently by following a specific guide and not actually choosing things on my own, according to more veteran players). If you use the four preset characters, you'll not only be lacking on a lot of valuable skills you'll also have overlap on some only mildly useful ones! Hope you don't like opening doors, openings safes, hacking, disarming traps, or shutting off alarms because you'll run into all those things immediately and never get to interact with any of them! But don't worry, you've got multiple people with the same dialogue option skills (called "Hard Ass", "Smart Ass", and "Kiss Ass" which I guess is supposed to be funny/clever but only got a groan out of me). Oh, but those skills aren't high enough level to actually use, just high enough to see that there are things you could say if you leveled up more.
So it already felt the game was funneling me into a sort-of triage mode where I needed to spend my levels getting into the skills that I lacked to be able to interact with the world in the way that I wanted to. Unfortunately, everyone is so miserably poor at shooting things that speccing into combat felt like the much more vital thing. Every character seemed to have about a 70% chance to hit on every shot but in practice it seemed to be closer to 30-40% because, good god, these people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
On top of all that, the game feels very clumsy. This is an area that, within the CRPG genre, I'm willing to cut an awful lot of slack because a lot of these games are unwieldy to try and control. But this one is kind of incredible in just how bad it can get. As an example, I had my medic character go down in combat. Not the end of the world - or so I though. I'll use the second medic character that I picked up to heal them. But the first medic has all the healing supplies because they're the better healer so it'd be an inefficient waste to have the second person carrying a bunch as well. This becomes a problem because when someone is downed, you lose access to their inventory. So I had a group of five people standing around, watching their friend bleed to death, and no one would reach into her pockets to pull out the thing to save her life. So she died there, on the floor because, I dunno, I guess it'd be rude to rifle through her backpack. It didn't have to be like that. Just let me take an item from them, what the fuck.
I do have one half-compliment though. I think the idea that you have to radio back to Ranger HQ to get your "promotion" is a neat idea that could be used in an interesting way but in practice just adds a few extra clicks because there's absolutely no restriction on where you can radio from. I was in a cavern underneath a research facility and apparently my radio got absolutely perfect reception down there. If I had to choose between pushing forward in a dungeon or backing out so I could level up then that could be an interesting choice to make but instead it's just tedium. Wasted potential there.
Even with all that frustration and utter lack of interest or fun with the combat, I'd be able to put up with it if the writing in the game were strong. But it isn't. It's extremely rote post-apocalyse fiction. Have you seen or read any post-apocalyptic fiction about a guy in a cowboy hat and a duster surviving in the wasteland? Congrats, you've pretty much seen the level of writing this game is at. In the handful of hours I got through, there was absolutely nothing that made me think sticking with this game was going to be worth it. No intriguing plot lines, no likable characters, no interesting lore to the world. Maybe I didn't get far enough in. But in the opening hours, this game is impressively dull.
Overall, I don't think I had any real fun with this game at all. There are some cool ideas that I'd like to see reworked into anything that isn't as miserable as this but there is nothing in this game that really makes me want to engage with it any more than I already have.
So it already felt the game was funneling me into a sort-of triage mode where I needed to spend my levels getting into the skills that I lacked to be able to interact with the world in the way that I wanted to. Unfortunately, everyone is so miserably poor at shooting things that speccing into combat felt like the much more vital thing. Every character seemed to have about a 70% chance to hit on every shot but in practice it seemed to be closer to 30-40% because, good god, these people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
On top of all that, the game feels very clumsy. This is an area that, within the CRPG genre, I'm willing to cut an awful lot of slack because a lot of these games are unwieldy to try and control. But this one is kind of incredible in just how bad it can get. As an example, I had my medic character go down in combat. Not the end of the world - or so I though. I'll use the second medic character that I picked up to heal them. But the first medic has all the healing supplies because they're the better healer so it'd be an inefficient waste to have the second person carrying a bunch as well. This becomes a problem because when someone is downed, you lose access to their inventory. So I had a group of five people standing around, watching their friend bleed to death, and no one would reach into her pockets to pull out the thing to save her life. So she died there, on the floor because, I dunno, I guess it'd be rude to rifle through her backpack. It didn't have to be like that. Just let me take an item from them, what the fuck.
I do have one half-compliment though. I think the idea that you have to radio back to Ranger HQ to get your "promotion" is a neat idea that could be used in an interesting way but in practice just adds a few extra clicks because there's absolutely no restriction on where you can radio from. I was in a cavern underneath a research facility and apparently my radio got absolutely perfect reception down there. If I had to choose between pushing forward in a dungeon or backing out so I could level up then that could be an interesting choice to make but instead it's just tedium. Wasted potential there.
Even with all that frustration and utter lack of interest or fun with the combat, I'd be able to put up with it if the writing in the game were strong. But it isn't. It's extremely rote post-apocalyse fiction. Have you seen or read any post-apocalyptic fiction about a guy in a cowboy hat and a duster surviving in the wasteland? Congrats, you've pretty much seen the level of writing this game is at. In the handful of hours I got through, there was absolutely nothing that made me think sticking with this game was going to be worth it. No intriguing plot lines, no likable characters, no interesting lore to the world. Maybe I didn't get far enough in. But in the opening hours, this game is impressively dull.
Overall, I don't think I had any real fun with this game at all. There are some cool ideas that I'd like to see reworked into anything that isn't as miserable as this but there is nothing in this game that really makes me want to engage with it any more than I already have.
This is partially a review of the game itself but also a bit of a PSA about the fan translation of the game that was released a few months ago.
The game itself is better than I was expecting it to be. The combat is a pretty different system that attempts to make it much more like an actual MMA game with different fighting styles and making each one play a bit different. The story (as far as I got, I quit after about 10 hours due to technical frustrations- more on that later) is largely unremarkable. You play as Tatsuya (who I did not find to be particularly likable) and you fight people until you learn to become a better person while also discovering a secret plot within the Tojo Clan. The vast majority of side content is untranslated which is unfortunate because I think that is where the Yakuza games hold quite a bit of charm and where some of the most interesting world building is done.
Now, about the fan translation. Enough of the game has been translated where you can play through the entirety of the main story but most things outside of that have been left untranslated (and because of how the translation was done, the original Japanese text has been replaced with asterisks, meaning you can't even get a rough machine translation without a Japanese version of the game). That on its own wasn't enough to dissuade me from trying the game out but the translated version also has a lot of technical issues. Several segments of the game crash, opening certain menus can cause crashes, starting certain substories can cause crashes. Most of it can be worked around but it because so tedious and frustrating to deal with that I eventually tapped out and decided to wait/hope for a better and more complete fan translation to appear in the future.
So, overall, I would only recommend playing the game through this fan translation to the most diehard of Yakuza/RGG fans. Are you absolutely desperate to return to Kamurocho one more time and are willing to put up with all kinds of technical issues? Well then this game is there for you.
Maybe the most unfortunate thing is that I highly doubt this game will ever get a re-release or a remake. In interviews, it's never been brought up whereas RGG Studio have talked about wanting to do something for Kenzan and Ishin. So it seems this game and its sequel may be lost to time.
The game itself is better than I was expecting it to be. The combat is a pretty different system that attempts to make it much more like an actual MMA game with different fighting styles and making each one play a bit different. The story (as far as I got, I quit after about 10 hours due to technical frustrations- more on that later) is largely unremarkable. You play as Tatsuya (who I did not find to be particularly likable) and you fight people until you learn to become a better person while also discovering a secret plot within the Tojo Clan. The vast majority of side content is untranslated which is unfortunate because I think that is where the Yakuza games hold quite a bit of charm and where some of the most interesting world building is done.
Now, about the fan translation. Enough of the game has been translated where you can play through the entirety of the main story but most things outside of that have been left untranslated (and because of how the translation was done, the original Japanese text has been replaced with asterisks, meaning you can't even get a rough machine translation without a Japanese version of the game). That on its own wasn't enough to dissuade me from trying the game out but the translated version also has a lot of technical issues. Several segments of the game crash, opening certain menus can cause crashes, starting certain substories can cause crashes. Most of it can be worked around but it because so tedious and frustrating to deal with that I eventually tapped out and decided to wait/hope for a better and more complete fan translation to appear in the future.
So, overall, I would only recommend playing the game through this fan translation to the most diehard of Yakuza/RGG fans. Are you absolutely desperate to return to Kamurocho one more time and are willing to put up with all kinds of technical issues? Well then this game is there for you.
Maybe the most unfortunate thing is that I highly doubt this game will ever get a re-release or a remake. In interviews, it's never been brought up whereas RGG Studio have talked about wanting to do something for Kenzan and Ishin. So it seems this game and its sequel may be lost to time.
I finished this like a month ago and forgot to log it here so I'm gonna do my best to jot down some notes about it but I have almost certainly forgotten things so this "review" is going to be even more of a jumbled mess of my thoughts than my usual ""reviews"" are.
First off, this story bangs. It sucks, it fucks, it whips ass, it's incredible. Jack and his polycule do it their way. I love how it makes Jack & co. strangers to this world but you are also a stranger to it! Love that good title with double meaning bullshit. I do feel like I missed out a bit because I haven't palyed FF1, so not all the connections hit with their full force but the game does more than enough work to give context so all the big reveals land. It ends up being a really powerful ending!
I do wish we had more moments that we had gotten to know the party members as individual characters. They very occasionally get some lines of dialogue but it's really not much to give them the depth that I like to get from RPGs. Also, Sophia and Neon should have gotten together. Known woman-kisser Alexa Lily thinks the women should kiss, more news at 11.
It's a little mechanically odd, especially when you get into the loot and all the systems around it. I never kept an individual piece equipped for more than a mission or two because I got so much stuff so fast that I was always finding gear that was straight-up better all the time. So it meant dismantling stuff for materials only matters as a way to de-clutter the inventory screens and the blacksmith was almost entirely useless. If I had gotten into the post-game mission grind then it's obvious that I would've engaged with these systems more but as someone that was just hear for the story it was all so wildly unnecessary. It's just this weird situation where I can see all these systems in place—for the loot, the Job Affinity, even some of the more advanced combat mechanics—but I really have little to no need to mess with them at all because I just played through the story on normal difficulty and then stopped when the credits rolled. I can still look at them and appreciate the work that went into designing it and I can get a pretty good idea of how it all fits together but it does leave this weird feeling where I spent hours and hours in this game and all of it largely ignoring big parts of it.
Speaking of the items, this game commits the cardinal sin of loot games where they change my appearance but I can't put something in a cosmetic slot. Let me where a cool hat regardless of what the stats are! I desperately need to look cool while I punch goblins but your game doesn't allow for that!! Fucked up thing to do in to us in 2022.
I will never think of fistbumps the same way ever again.
Astos is one of the boys of all time. I need to soak him in water and wring him dry like a dirty washcloth. I need to squeeze him like a stressball. I need to neatly fold him up and keep him in my pocket. He is a lovely little gremlin and I would die for him.
the video game is good and the haters are wrong
First off, this story bangs. It sucks, it fucks, it whips ass, it's incredible. Jack and his polycule do it their way. I love how it makes Jack & co. strangers to this world but you are also a stranger to it! Love that good title with double meaning bullshit. I do feel like I missed out a bit because I haven't palyed FF1, so not all the connections hit with their full force but the game does more than enough work to give context so all the big reveals land. It ends up being a really powerful ending!
I do wish we had more moments that we had gotten to know the party members as individual characters. They very occasionally get some lines of dialogue but it's really not much to give them the depth that I like to get from RPGs. Also, Sophia and Neon should have gotten together. Known woman-kisser Alexa Lily thinks the women should kiss, more news at 11.
It's a little mechanically odd, especially when you get into the loot and all the systems around it. I never kept an individual piece equipped for more than a mission or two because I got so much stuff so fast that I was always finding gear that was straight-up better all the time. So it meant dismantling stuff for materials only matters as a way to de-clutter the inventory screens and the blacksmith was almost entirely useless. If I had gotten into the post-game mission grind then it's obvious that I would've engaged with these systems more but as someone that was just hear for the story it was all so wildly unnecessary. It's just this weird situation where I can see all these systems in place—for the loot, the Job Affinity, even some of the more advanced combat mechanics—but I really have little to no need to mess with them at all because I just played through the story on normal difficulty and then stopped when the credits rolled. I can still look at them and appreciate the work that went into designing it and I can get a pretty good idea of how it all fits together but it does leave this weird feeling where I spent hours and hours in this game and all of it largely ignoring big parts of it.
Speaking of the items, this game commits the cardinal sin of loot games where they change my appearance but I can't put something in a cosmetic slot. Let me where a cool hat regardless of what the stats are! I desperately need to look cool while I punch goblins but your game doesn't allow for that!! Fucked up thing to do in to us in 2022.
I will never think of fistbumps the same way ever again.
Astos is one of the boys of all time. I need to soak him in water and wring him dry like a dirty washcloth. I need to squeeze him like a stressball. I need to neatly fold him up and keep him in my pocket. He is a lovely little gremlin and I would die for him.
the video game is good and the haters are wrong
2008
Some very cool characters that game treated pretty poorly. A great battle system that is a little bit clunky. The politics of the main plotline are pretty bad. It's a game I'm very mixed on despite enjoying quite of bit of my time with it.
After watching Rings of Power with my girlfriend, I decided I should check out the source material so of course I did the sensible thing and tried out Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. (The actual reason is it was free on Amazon/Twitch Prime like a month or two ago and I figured why not)
First off, a neat thing I truly didn’t expect is that you can kinda-sorta play the game as a woman? It lets you select a skin for Talion and most of them just put him in different types of armor (normal guy armor, evil guy armor, elf guy armor, etc) but then one of them is just a woman named Lithariel? It’s purely cosmetic (no audio/dialogue changes) and only in the gameplay segments (cutscenes switch back to generic Talion), but it’s kinda neat that it’s available at all. Being able to be a cool lady with a sword instead of generic gruff white dude #75 was a big plus for me.
But, uh, other than that I didn’t have a great time? The movement feels mushy (on keyboard and mouse, maybe controller would feel better?) and I felt like I was constantly fighting the camera for control. I also didn’t care much for the combat. I’ve never really been a big fan of the Batman Arkham game style combat and this is pretty directly that with some bits added on. But then this one it feels like I don’t get to decide who I’m actually targeting so I just kind of flailed between targets. I pretty frequently caught myself thinking that I wish this felt more like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey because I love how that game feels for runnin’ around, climbin’ stuff, and stabbin’ dudes. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison since AC:O was several years later but it constantly came to mind for me.
I’m largely ambivalent on Lord of the Rings in general so this game is kind of not targeted towards me but the narrative (as far as I saw in my 3-ish hours of playtime) didn’t really do anything for me. Talion is a kinda boring sad dad, Celebrimbor trying to regain his memories doesn’t do much for me either (maybe because I already know some of his deal and the game seems to assume I wouldn’t know anything), and having missions where I had to go hang out with Gollum felt like fan service aimed at completely different people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (well, maybe the Talion stuff is, that’s dreadfully dull) but it left me without much to really latch onto here. If the story had been intriguing enough maybe I’d feel compelled to stick through the mushy controls for a while longer to see what’s up with the rest of it.
First off, a neat thing I truly didn’t expect is that you can kinda-sorta play the game as a woman? It lets you select a skin for Talion and most of them just put him in different types of armor (normal guy armor, evil guy armor, elf guy armor, etc) but then one of them is just a woman named Lithariel? It’s purely cosmetic (no audio/dialogue changes) and only in the gameplay segments (cutscenes switch back to generic Talion), but it’s kinda neat that it’s available at all. Being able to be a cool lady with a sword instead of generic gruff white dude #75 was a big plus for me.
But, uh, other than that I didn’t have a great time? The movement feels mushy (on keyboard and mouse, maybe controller would feel better?) and I felt like I was constantly fighting the camera for control. I also didn’t care much for the combat. I’ve never really been a big fan of the Batman Arkham game style combat and this is pretty directly that with some bits added on. But then this one it feels like I don’t get to decide who I’m actually targeting so I just kind of flailed between targets. I pretty frequently caught myself thinking that I wish this felt more like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey because I love how that game feels for runnin’ around, climbin’ stuff, and stabbin’ dudes. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison since AC:O was several years later but it constantly came to mind for me.
I’m largely ambivalent on Lord of the Rings in general so this game is kind of not targeted towards me but the narrative (as far as I saw in my 3-ish hours of playtime) didn’t really do anything for me. Talion is a kinda boring sad dad, Celebrimbor trying to regain his memories doesn’t do much for me either (maybe because I already know some of his deal and the game seems to assume I wouldn’t know anything), and having missions where I had to go hang out with Gollum felt like fan service aimed at completely different people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (well, maybe the Talion stuff is, that’s dreadfully dull) but it left me without much to really latch onto here. If the story had been intriguing enough maybe I’d feel compelled to stick through the mushy controls for a while longer to see what’s up with the rest of it.
2021
An absolutely gorgeous game in every possibly way. The visuals, the music, the sounds, the writing, the message, the experience. It's all incredible. A masterpiece of a game.
Early on, B.J. says "Don't worry Wesley. I've got a plan. Break into the Keep. Kill every goddamn Nazi in there." and I think that's some of the most beautiful and eloquent writing in any video game ever made.
2017
I'm glad I finally went back to give this game another shot because it's really great! It gets slightly experimental with the immersive sim genre and that can be a little bit hit-or-miss at times and I think the final section of the game drags a bit but overall it's a well-thought out and well executed game.
I ran into some problems at first because I went in with my usual approach to immersive sims where I tried to sneak past everything and avoid combat whenever I could but it felt like Prey simply isn't built for that. Stealth feels like a way to kick off combat and not a way to circumvent it. Crouch and sneak up behind an enemy for bonus damage on an attack but after that combat pops off the same as it would as if you ran in guns blazing. You can try to sneak by things but you don't have many tools in your toolset to do much actual stealth which is then exasperated when, later in the game, you run back and forth through the areas several times over which would make stealth time-intensive and tedious. It's not necessarily an issue with the game itself because the game it absolutely designed with this in mind, but it meant that I had trouble getting a handle on things. But once I got past that and figured out how the game wanted me to approach it, I had a great time. Exploring and clearing an area of enemies and loot and information is still a very fun experience. Finding all the little nooks and crannies in an area never stopped being enjoyable and all the short stories I uncovered in emails and notes and whatnot were fun to piece together.
The open world(ish) design of this is an interesting choice when most any other immersive sim (as far as I've played, at least) goes with discreet levels. It does help to make the world feel like a singular place and I think it achieves that age old thing of "the location is a character unto itself" which isn't necessarily something games are good at. I feel like that aspect of the design did get in the way a bit when I was completing all the optional objectives and was just sprinting through areas that I already knew to be clear of enemies and items.
Overall, this game solidified my opinion that Arkane is one of the best and most interesting developers going. Every one of their games that I've been able to play has been a great time.
I ran into some problems at first because I went in with my usual approach to immersive sims where I tried to sneak past everything and avoid combat whenever I could but it felt like Prey simply isn't built for that. Stealth feels like a way to kick off combat and not a way to circumvent it. Crouch and sneak up behind an enemy for bonus damage on an attack but after that combat pops off the same as it would as if you ran in guns blazing. You can try to sneak by things but you don't have many tools in your toolset to do much actual stealth which is then exasperated when, later in the game, you run back and forth through the areas several times over which would make stealth time-intensive and tedious. It's not necessarily an issue with the game itself because the game it absolutely designed with this in mind, but it meant that I had trouble getting a handle on things. But once I got past that and figured out how the game wanted me to approach it, I had a great time. Exploring and clearing an area of enemies and loot and information is still a very fun experience. Finding all the little nooks and crannies in an area never stopped being enjoyable and all the short stories I uncovered in emails and notes and whatnot were fun to piece together.
The open world(ish) design of this is an interesting choice when most any other immersive sim (as far as I've played, at least) goes with discreet levels. It does help to make the world feel like a singular place and I think it achieves that age old thing of "the location is a character unto itself" which isn't necessarily something games are good at. I feel like that aspect of the design did get in the way a bit when I was completing all the optional objectives and was just sprinting through areas that I already knew to be clear of enemies and items.
Overall, this game solidified my opinion that Arkane is one of the best and most interesting developers going. Every one of their games that I've been able to play has been a great time.
2021
this game is like when you feel really depressed but also really horny at the same time. also it's very gay. and very good.
Ok, well, the drive AC Valhalla was installed on died and I Can Not be bothered to re-download 150 gigs for this fuckin' game so I guess it's time to try and sum up my thoughts on this one, huh. Spoiler alert: I think it's bad!
I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!
This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.
Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!
And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.
(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)
The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!
And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!
(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!
But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.
The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!
And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.
I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!
I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!
TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!
I like to indulge in some big dumb open world game from time to time and have put many many hours into both AC Origins and Odyssey, so I was actually looking forward to Valhalla! Another one of these big dumb games for me to use to stave off depression but this time it's got a vikings and Norse mythology coat of paint? Sure! Sign me up! But! Alas! It sucks!
This game is so chock full of design choices that I think are potentially very interesting or compelling but then they only ever commit halfway to them which results in this largely frictionless and uninteresting game. A big example of this is how they've structured the main plot of the game. They give you a choice in which region's questline you'll do next. At first I thought this meant that you would pick one region to ally yourself with and that would result in another region becoming an enemy and then there'd be some conflict later but, no, it's just literally the order you do them in because you will end up doing all of them eventually! And also! The individual regions don't really matter because there is zero interaction between any of them. People of one region really have no thoughts or feelings about the guy who just took over the region next door? Really? Nothing at all? Yeah, okay, sure Valhalla, whatever you say.
Speaking of those individual regions: they make the main plot of the game mostly feel like this collection of short stories. Which, again, I think is potentially interesting! Getting to learn about the core cast of characters by putting them in a variety of Situations is very compelling! But all the short stories suck ass and have zero interesting things going on and Eivor doesn't really do or say anything particularly notable. It's all just the most boring version of this idea!
And Eivor... I need to talk about Eivor. If you know me then you'd probably expect me to feel Very Normal about Eivor. I adored Kassandra and Eivor at first seemed like she might be another run at that character type. Strong powerful woman in kind of a mainstream generic hero way... like, sure it's kind of basic but also I can be kind of a basic bitch. But Eivor is so boring! She's supposed to be the quiet, stoic badass but it means she just sort of ends up standing around in every cutscene and occasionally grunting. If that's how your protagonist is going to be then you need to have some good characters around her to bounce off of. And unfortunately! The main plot does not have that! The absolute best of Eivor is in the dlc(?) add-on when Eivor heads to some island and meets up with Kassandra because Kassandra keeps trying to be her charismatic, jokey self but Eivor is always no-selling her attempts at humor and the dynamic works really well! But after four or five hours, that island is done and Kassandra leaves forever and it's back to Eivor and her boring viking pals all being dull and wooden together and it makes every cutscene a fucking slog.
(That bit when Kassandra comes back is fun. Sure, it's partially because I love her but also I think it's fun to have a functionally immortal character that could pop up anywhere in your big dumb franchise! What a goofy thing to add in a series chock full of goofy shit.)
The world is SO big and SO empty!! The majority of things are densely packed into the handful of cities and so most of the landmass is just empty fields and forest. I use the horse auto-pilot mechanic waaay more in this game than in AC:O or AC:O. I had frequent stretches of just riding across hillsides for, like, two minutes where nothing happens. No interesting terrain or landmarks, no combat, no collectable to grab. No nothing! It's so big and empty and boring!
And the thing is, this kind of feels like it's the developers trying to respond to the criticism/memes about "Ubisoft open world game map icon vomit". Like, they want the map to not be so cluttered with icons and so if there's big stretches of empty land, that technically addresses the issue but not in a good or satisfying way! There's still tons of shit to do it's just all concentrated in a handful of smaller areas. Why bother with such a big world!!
(There's also another aspect that feels like them trying to address that criticism and missing the mark: The icons are (partially) gone! They show up as a little colored dot that is kinda hard to see until you get close to it and then it reveals the icon. It's just annoying! Let me know what dumb collectible I'm heading towards before I get there! Why make this more tedious when this isn't going to actually make people happy!
But maybe none of that matters because most of the stuff you pick up is worthless! I ended up with way more of every material type than I could reasonable use (to the point that I started upgrading whatever extra armor or weapons just to unlock their higher level forms as cosmetics). So there came a point where I just started ignoring most of the icons on the map because I didn't need anything from them.
The Ireland DLC was pretty good! I think the added set of mechanics around capturing resource generators and then trading those resources for stuff is neat! It really feels like they're testing things and exploring possible mechanics for other/future AC games and I think that's alright. The rewards you get for trading things aren't particularly useful (some armor but mostly boat cosmetics) but I think because the materials are passively generated while you're off doing video game bullshit, it makes the lack of meaningful reward feel not as bad. The story is at least better than the main game's (a low bar, but still worth noting) mostly because they have some characters that are actually mildly compelling. I am not Irish but I have a feeling that the representation of Ireland and of Irish people that is presented here is probably not great!
And then there's the mythology DLC. I think between Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Odyssey really struck a sweet spot with balancing history and mythology. There's enough of it spread out through that game that it feels ever-present but there's never too much to be oversaturated with it. But with Valhalla they seem to have gone back closer to Origin where there isn't a whole lot of it (until you get to the DLC that is entirely mythology). So for a lot of the game it's just boring old historical(ish) England.
I am a long time Norse mythology enjoyer (not in a weird way, I promise!! I just think mythology is cool!!) but the DLC really didn't land with me. It mostly just feels like More but with a new coat of paint. More maps to run around, more enemies to kill, more resources to gather. More more more. They do add another unique mechanic here: Eivor can now suck off enemies to gain special abilities! It's used for some puzzle solving and can theoretically be used for traversal or combat but I never found myself ever really thinking about it or using it very much. The puzzles are either dead simple and obvious or way too obtuse with very little in between. The combat isn't really something I needed any more tools for because the ability list is already so vast. And the world isn't so much different from any other location that being able to move around it different is very meaningful. It's just way too much of a new coat of paint on a game that there is already Way Too Much of!
I didn't get a chance to check out the France DLC because by the time I was high enough level to do it, I was feeling very burnt out on the game and was trying to focus on the main story but didn't even manage to finish that all the way through!
TOO MUCH VIDEO GAME. I was just over 100 hours in and wasn't even done with the main story! I probably had at least a dozen more hours to go!! What the hell! Maybe someday I'll go back and see the last chunk of story and go "wow this wasn't worth it" and then I'll treat myself to murdering a bunch of French people. But for now I'm done with this game. And, y'know what? I think this might've cured me of my "Ubisoft open world enjoyer" disease. I know there's another AC out at this point and I don't know that I'm really interested in checking it out at all! It'd be nice if it were good but I'm just not sure I have faith that it would be!
2021
oops, now I'm crying
A very sweet little visual novel about getting a frog out of a pot, about loneliness and living a listless life, and about finding meaning in the things you do.
A very sweet little visual novel about getting a frog out of a pot, about loneliness and living a listless life, and about finding meaning in the things you do.
I played Apex at launch for a handful of weeks, throughout "Season 0" and into the beginning of Season 1, and ever since then I had this itch in the back of my mind to go back to it because it's very fun and I really enjoy the cast of characters they've built. Finally, upon adding the goth trans mommy I decided that this character is laser targeted at me, specifically, and I had to jump back in. I played for a few days and had fun despite being terrible at it. And then one day I didn't play but I still felt this itch as I was getting ready for bed that night that maybe I should pop on real quick to check the dailies and that was when I knew I had to uninstall. It's just not how I want to engage with games - even ones that I really enjoy playing! I don't want to be thinking about daily quests and weeklies and what tier of the battle pass I'm at vs. what tier/rewards I want to get to. I've got enough Brain Problems going on, I don't need a video game to take advantage of me and make me feel worse. So, despite how much I do genuinely enjoy the movement and the gunplay and even the whole battle royale mode, I have to quit playing this because I can't stand the way the bits around the edge make me feel. Maybe if I were playing this with friends instead of solo and it had a more social element to it then I'd be willing to go back and play more. But I guess until then, I'm done with this game? Kind of a disappointing and depressing way to quit a game but I gotta do what's best for myself, y'know?
Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.
Catalyst is a 10/10 character tho, love her to death.
2002
I would heartily recommend people play the first level or two. The next two or three levels are still pretty okay. But after that it becomes a very mediocre third person shooter and the ending is a dire slog. But those early bits? Oh, there are some genuinely interesting ideas in there. They aren't always executed on well but it's so interesting to see what they were going for. It's tragic that so much of what makes this game unique falls away the further in you get until eventually the only remnant of the squad mechanics is just that you occasionally need an engineer to open a door for you. There was, at some point, going to be a sequel to this but it got cancelled and I think that's really unfortunate because seeing a more refined and more fully realized version of this game's mechanics would be absolutely fascinating to see.
As an adaptation though, this thing is kind of a travesty? It actively undoes the ending of the movie and has some bits of lore that contradict some ideas about how The Thing functions. I think there's something to the idea of doing an adaptation game where you're visiting the ruins/aftermath of the movie and you, the player, understand what you see but your character doesn't and has to piece things together. But this game only briefly touches that and abandons it pretty quickly.
As an adaptation though, this thing is kind of a travesty? It actively undoes the ending of the movie and has some bits of lore that contradict some ideas about how The Thing functions. I think there's something to the idea of doing an adaptation game where you're visiting the ruins/aftermath of the movie and you, the player, understand what you see but your character doesn't and has to piece things together. But this game only briefly touches that and abandons it pretty quickly.