The following is a transcript of a Youtube review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/62UVeiLrMIc?si=jNluQ-ZqpGalOlvG

I’ve been thinking about video game progression a lot lately. Way of the Samurai’s odd structure has been a big part of that but the Archipelago multiworld system has also really captured my attention. Both of these gaming experiences require the player to be far more active in seeking relevant progression, be it determining which clue they should follow-up on in Rokkotsu Pass or assessing what their current loadout allows them to achieve within the multiworld. When presented with a choice in either setting, familiarity goes a long way to selecting the best path to follow. I know which locations open up to me whenever I get a hold of the Monarch Wings, but I have no idea if finishing Dona’s haiku with the omelette line actually makes a difference. As far as I can tell it just makes Dona assume Japanese people suck at poetry. Unlike Archipelago, Way of the Samurai isn’t randomised upon game-start - it isn’t a roguelike or anything - instead Acquire have designed a game that revolves around the player making a big decision once an hour, then following that thread to its conclusion. And for some, a branching narrative adventure where small differences in action have a butterfly-effect impact that lead to different outcomes for the story overall is the Platonic ideal of a video game story. For others, Way of the Samurai looks like a cynical attempt at getting the most amount of game for the lowest number of assets. Whichever the case, the game’s structure is totally unique and absolutely makes it worth revisiting today.

Released in 2002 exclusively for the Playstation 2, Way of the Samurai is a 3D action-adventure game that follows a travelling ronin as they stumble into the end of an era. The Rokkotsu Pass is undergoing a rapid change of governance - whether the people present know it or not - and the player is allowed to navigate the upheaval in a broad number of ways. Whenever the player transitions between scenes the day advances slightly and, depending on the time of day, the player can catch and participate in a variety of events that inform how their adventure will end. Will they fight this crew of troublemakers, ignore them, or maybe attempt to get involved in whatever they’re up to? If things don’t quite go to plan, the player might end up helplessly tied to the train tracks or even recruited as cannon fodder in an upcoming battle. The game features three major factions in the Rokkotsu Pass that are all willing to accept the player as a member on a whim. There’s the Kurou Family, the current top of the hierarchy; a de facto dictatorship who shake down the villagers in the valley for protection money and resources, then there’s the Akadama Clan who have recently moved into Rokkotsu Pass with the intent to dethrone the Korou Family and take control of the region for themselves, and finally the villagers who live in the valley; most of whom have been chased away by the two gangs but a handful are still present and trying to scrape out a life amidst the chaos. The player is free to join and oppose any and all of these groups, leading them through a variety of circumstances with compounding effects. Way of the Samurai also boasts a complex sword-fighting system with 40 different weapons and over 200 attacks, which seems ridiculous and kind of difficult to understand, but most aren’t necessary and some might even be exclusive to the PVP fighting mode. Or maybe they are useful on higher difficulties, I don’t know, I just wanted to see the different stories.

At this point I would normally provide some kind of biography for the developers to help set the scene. Something to introduce the real main character to this narrative, because games don’t just emerge from the ether and install themselves onto 2001-gaming compatible hardware - someone had to make them. But I’ve run into a bit of a problem: Acquire’s strange online presence. The company was founded in the late 90’s and quickly made its way onto the Japanese stock exchange, where it was then acquired by a larger company, and then later sold to another media conglomerate while forming partnerships with other game developers along the way. Not only is the history of Acquire obscured behind language barriers and corporate acquisitions, but at some point a bunch of false information made its way into their online profiles throughout various databases, including things like western names being credited for work that was most likely done by a Japanese person, as the credits in the game would suggest. In a similar vein, I would’ve thought it appropriate to write a bio for the Archipelago developers who have done some tremendous technical wizardry to have created such a robust, generation-spanning machine. But much of the project’s early history is mired in sour politics and the egos of people working on a similar but separate computing marvel. Not only that, but the vast majority of game compatibility work within the Archipelago project was done by community members. Talented and determined individuals who just had to bring randomised Landstalker to the masses in a way that also adds cooperative multiplayer. I don’t think I’d be able to do justice briefly covering so many incredible people who have delivered to me my favourite multiplayer gaming experience of all time, but I am going to gush about it all for a bit.

You can only really play your favourite game so many times before you start to forget what made it so special in the first place. The deeper one’s familiarity with a world the more likely exploring becomes routine, most enemies turn into annoyances, and the story eventually grinds to dust. I love Hollow Knight and I’ve played it a lot, but I haven’t really touched the vanilla game in a couple years. I know where to go and where to avoid until later which means Hallownest’s wonder and mystery are gone. Until Silksong comes out. Randomisers help to restore some of that mystery while also requiring creative routing through a part of the world that probably hadn’t been designed for the player’s current mobility tools. Combine all of that with Doom’s items, randomised Minecraft recipes, and a Super Metroid playthrough and suddenly it’s all new again. The Dung Defender’s stinky charm doesn’t drop from the ceiling of the room after he gets Team Rocket blasted into the distance, this time it’s a BFG, or the bucket recipe, or the 80th pack of missiles. The system even saves the multiworld progress so one player can load up a playthrough of all 56 currently supported games and even throw in 15 extra playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts 2 because you just love Donald Duck so god damn much you fuckin’ lunatic Disney-adult maniac- and Archipelago will let you log in and out whenever you want. But it’s also possible to play simultaneous multiplayer too! Colloquially known as “sync games,” a group of players hop into a voice channel and communicate which items they need and when so the other members of the group can go collect them. And with the right settings most groups can get a full multiworld done in around 2 hours, which is crazy! It genuinely breathes new life into some of my most played out games and I seriously cannot recommend it enough. The website has a list of every compatible title and I’ll also put a link to the Discord server in the description in case you want to try it out and craft your own stories. But now, back to drudgery.

Aside from the ronin’s death and the ronin just leaving on their own, there are six endings to find within Way of the Samurai, which itself is a bit of an illusion. I’d argue that there are only two significantly different endings that don’t just change when each major character is killed. Every storyline is only an hour long and none of them are that special or interesting individually, so I’m not spoiling anything of any consequence. The first ending I found and I think the most natural path to follow would be siding with the villagers in the Station. When the player enters the game world the very first event they’ll come across is the attempted kidnapping on the bridge. Stopping to rescue Suzu momentarily swerves the Kurou Family related paths, since Tsubohachi won’t let the player enter their territory after this confrontation. Winning the battle isn’t necessary since Dona will save Suzu if the player fails to, and surrender only detours the player slightly provided they manage to convince the passersby to untie them. After some relatively unimportant posturing between the various clans in the area, the player convinces Suzu, her grandfather, Dojima the blacksmith, and Dona to follow them out of the Station and then the credits play. This is probably the ‘best’ ending where all the sympathetic characters get to live, but it’s massively underwhelming. It takes an hour to convince four people that maybe they should leave the Rokkotsu Pass, and then they do. The other paths all end with the ronin and a buddy from the Kurou Family or the Akadama Clan or both dying honourably at the hands of the Meiji army who have come to annex the pass into the government’s territory. I skimmed over all of that because, despite there being a really easy and obvious way to add depth to the characters the player will meet over and over while seeking out different endings, every single person in this game is paper thin. Dona wants to be a samurai and marry Suzu. Suzu is a damsel in distress and acts only as a prize to be won. Dojima is just some dude who watches stuff happen and that’s basically it. He used to be in the army so he knows there’s a government spy among the Akadama people, which if he didn’t know would mean this entire character lives to be the blacksmith and nothing else. The Akadama Clan wants to take over the valley from the Kurou Family because one of their leaders is the child of Tesshin, the Kurou leader. Like, that’s it. The Akadama have no more motivation or pivotal conflict besides that. Tesshin wants to sell land to the government but the government agent flakes on the deal and decides to take it violently instead. The game holds this stuff back like these are valuable pieces of information that alter how the player is thinking about these people. Like the player is going to become more sympathetic to the Kurou after learning that they want to sell their old steel mill to the government. The Akadama Clan could just want territory with residents to extort, using the word “revenge” hasn’t made that motivation more meaningful. And since the conceit of this whole game is following storylines to their conclusion and then picking up a new one on the next run, I think it’s a huge problem that none of the characters are written all that well and that the stories themselves are bland and forgettable. If this were a roguelike then the weakness of the narrative wouldn’t be such an issue - Way of the Samurai’s combat could be the star of the show instead.

The combat system in Way of the Samurai functions in a similar way to the first Tekken game, of all things. With a drawn sword and an enemy in the ronin’s sights, the player’s movements are restricted almost to a 2D line with the option to sidestep. Different attacks are triggered by specific inputs which not only depend on the type of weapon the player has equipped, but also requires the ronin to “learn” them by trying to do them in battle. They never get more complex than two or three inputs, but that’s still in line with the original Tekken movesets. All these attacks don’t really change how the combat flows which is why I said they weren’t overly necessary earlier. Different attacks don’t combine together so any attack that lands does its damage, then the combat resets to neutral. The more impactful combat mechanic is pushing and pulling the opponent to cause them to stumble. I didn’t notice any visual indicator for the player to tell whether the enemy was susceptible to a push or a pull, but with enough trial and error I was able to figure out which enemies were push and which were pull. Picking the correct option causes the enemy to enter a brief period of vulnerability - allowing the player to get an extra hit in. The defender can also push and pull their opponent, keeping this layer of interaction even throughout the more passive moments in combat. The advantage gained from pushes and pulls can be decisive and it naturally goes both ways, but a problem arises when the player loses too many of these interactions and is killed. The ronin’s death is considered an independent ending, regardless of the tasks the player completed beforehand. And because the game recognises an ending has been reached, any save data from the previous run is deleted to allow the player to start over again. So if the player pursues a thread all the way to the final showdown and gets unlucky or makes a mistake or can’t find enough vegetables to eat to heal up, that entire hour of progress is lost with no way of getting it back. I didn’t die too often, but if I was going to die it’d almost always be right near the ending I was chasing which completely killed my motivation to play and then I’d turn Way of the Samurai off. Eventually I did see all the endings and all of the models in the game, which are okay. It’s a PS2 game but the palette is very bland.

This game was released in 2002, the year of Vice City, Metroid Prime, and Morrowind, and while it lacks the scale of these games, Way of the Samurai’s visuals are at least on par with the top of the pile. Prime does have phenomenal style and direction over Acquire’s game, and I think having Tommy Talerico on board definitely contributed to Prime’s tremendous overall presentation, but I think we should probably stay on topic. Way of the Samurai’s character models are solid and the combat animations are great all around - a genuine achievement. Animation outside of combat is often a bit wooden and sadly never gets as action-figurey as stuff like Rune, so it’s just kind of boring to watch. And most of the environments are plain and boring too. The PS2 can handle much broader palettes and there are even examples of Japanese forests with a greater range of colourful plants and even some totally necessary god-rays. The rest of the Rokkotsu Pass is in decline and generally abandoned so the muted colours are appropriate, but why the Korou Family live in a big pit in a drab little house is very strange considering they’re supposed to be shaking the villagers down for all of their riches. Is the palette being used in a metaphorical way to signify the end of this era of Japanese history, the colours literally holding onto a time that ceases in this very moment? Or did Acquire just go for drab colours because that’s how you make things look more realistic? It makes sense for the Akadama clan to be based in a rickety old barn or something, and their mansion is sort of run down, but it’s hard to even say if that was a deliberate design choice or if the game just looks like that. And don’t get me started on Kitcho’s design. It’s a badass ‘fit but it cannot be historically appropriate. Kitcho standing there in his black jeans, string vest, and killer jacket while the ronin runs around in his kimono is a weird collision of fashion that I’m kind of into. But Kitcho might just be the real time traveller here.

Way of the Samurai was Acquire’s first game on Playstation 2. It was also the third game the company ever released and it was their first not to be specifically focussed on stealth. The video game industry was doing very well during the early 2000s, with Sony’s new console becoming one of the most ubiquitous electronics in homes worldwide. There was plenty of money to be made developing video games, and Acquire had shareholders to satisfy. My cynical brain wants me to say that Way of the Samurai was made to stretch a relatively small budget into a video game with enough content to sate consumers and make out with the highest yield for the company’s shareholders. I think many of the combat animations were either made during Acquire’s time as a motion-capture company or for their Tenchu games. That would explain how the combat can look as smooth and natural as it does, while the conversation scenes have characters’ heads swivel around like they’re owls. All of the environments are small, lacking in detail, and are reused often. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with reusing assets to make a game - I’d encourage it, actually - just something about the way Acquire has done it gets my cynicism going.

Ultimately, I think Way of the Samurai tried something really interesting and unique, but this first attempt doesn’t quite live up to the strength of the idea. RPGs that divide narratively based on whatever choices the player makes are already compelling enough for players to regularly replay games just to see what else they could do - designing an entire game around that should be a recipe for success, but Way of the Samurai lacks compelling events. I don’t need to see the two sides of a dude pushing a pram through the wilderness, neither eventuality is that exciting. And the short runtime makes discerning between events that lead to particular endings difficult. The Meiji government soldiers are always going to show up at the end no matter how effective a negotiator the ronin is. Overall, I don’t think Acquire are happy with how this first game ended up and I’ve seen that the rest of the series expands a lot on this first attempt, which is good. But it’s also a shame, for me I mean, because when do I ever play sequels?

This next game is some wild tactics thing.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/-qajdeYdJdA

Wanted: Dead is an anomaly within the modern video game market. The game wasn’t created to dazzle people with a phenomenal presentation, it isn’t some avant-garde break from typical action gameplay, and the narrative doesn’t go anywhere a video game hasn’t dared to go before. Instead, what makes Wanted: Dead stand out is Soleil’s unique game development philosophy. Similar to games like Axiom Verge, Dusk, and Disco Elysium, Soleil made a game in a style that is no longer catching the attention of the money-men who control the big studios. Wanted: Dead adheres closely to Soleil’s signature style: it is an over-the-top action game with elements that would be right at home on the Playstation 2. I can imagine that description alone can be enough to convince some players to go out and give the game a shot, but I can also understand the concerns this could raise in others. “Looks like a PS2 game” is a frequently used pejorative term nowadays so it’d take something really special to convince those people not to immediately write Wanted: Dead off. Soleil has used many modern game development techniques to deliver an experience that wouldn’t have been possible on that old hardware, while still holding true to a lot of the conventions from the time - which I think is a good way to summarise this game. The player uses swords and guns and grenades and chainsaws, they roll around and parry enemy attacks - which makes it a soulslike - there are boss fights, long, linear levels, tons of stylish kill animations, 80s music, minigames, weird character designs, and a lot of funny cutscenes. It might share many of these features with other games, but the combination is distinctly Soleil’s own. Wanted: Dead is basically an Extermination redux which is exactly what the world needs right now. But, since this game wouldn’t be filled with purchasable cosmetics or offer the publisher some means of selling the players’ personal information, Wanted: Dead’s budget was remarkably small, and that lack of funding is very apparent throughout the game. There are a slew of technical issues that are detrimental to the experience, then there are a few gameplay segments that would probably have been left out had the studio been playtesting more thoroughly, and then the game’s difficulty balancing could have benefitted from some extra time for refinement. With all that said, however, I don’t think this is a bad game, and the air of negativity surrounding it is completely unearned.

A while back I played Devil’s Third, the infamous WiiU game that was brutalised by professional reviewers at the time. I liked it quite a lot - the cutscenes made me laugh, the gameplay is solid, and Ivan is a character who deserved the trilogy that the developers had been dreaming of, but it was far from flawless. The developers’ inability to secure a publisher and target hardware put a big dent in Devil’s Third that I’m happy to overlook. I definitely attributed far more of Devil’s Third to Valhalla Game Studios than to Soleil which has ultimately proven to be incorrect. Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead are very similar games but Valhalla had no hand in the latter. And now I’m questioning what Itagaki and co even did. Both games feature similar third person hack-n-slash elements, cover-shooting, party mechanics, a war criminal main character, and ambiguous world-ending stakes that are kind of trans-humany. In one game there’s synthetic humanoids, in the other there’s Joe Rogan clones. I think the mechanical differences favour Wanted: Dead overall, but I laughed a lot less. Whether this was due to having played Devil’s Third first and thus I was ready for the kind of wacky nonsense Wanted: Dead contained, or if the humour just doesn’t quite land as well is something I can’t really pin down. But at least the parry-counter system is cool.

As the player makes their way through Wanted: Dead’s linear levels they’ll frequently be presented with a new batch of enemies to fight. Pretty much all of these enemies are some form of humanoid, but the variety of guns and armour values they have force the player to interact with different enemy types in different ways. When entering the first level the player is shown the two guns Stone has been issued; not so subtly prompting them to try both out during the upcoming battle, which demonstrates to the player how the rifle and the handgun will be used. The rifle facilitates a cover-shooter gameplay style where the player can post up behind chest-high walls and play whack-a-mole with the enemies that are also hiding in cover. It’s the same cover-shooting we’ve all seen before but I was more than content to click on dudes throughout both playthroughs. If you wanna get spicy there is a range of other guns to grab from defeated enemies that include things like grenade launchers, shotguns, and LMGs. The selection isn’t gigantic, but I think every forageable weapon fulfilled a unique role, which is great. The handgun is more a component of the hack-n-slash gameplay. It’s mostly used as a parry: whenever an enemy’s attack shines a red danger indicator, pressing the handgun button interrupts the attack and stuns the enemy for a short period. There’s also a super the player can use to stun a bunch of enemies simultaneously and then watch as Stone dashes around to each stunned enemy, performing a brutal kill animation each time. The super is charged by landing melee swings with the sword, which was the primary weapon I used throughout the game. Stone only ever learned 2 combos when she was taught how to swing that sword, resulting in a melee combat system that is extremely simple. The sword has its own parry too, though, activating the parry can be done by simply mashing the block button until the parry triggers; no additional complexity or skill requirement is added. I don’t think the melee combat being simple is necessarily bad, but it means relying a lot on the enemies to offer interesting and exciting gameplay moments. Enemies that also need to be engaging to shoot at from across the room. It’s a fine line to be walking and I think Soleil just about pulls through in the end, but not without some severe compromises.

The enemies in Wanted: Dead belong to one of three factions, though the synthetics are exclusive to a single level, and the gangsters show up once more after their level concludes. The vast majority of the enemies belong to a mysterious private army or police force (?), they’re equipped with a wide range of guns, and generally have enough armour to take a few hits. The standard gunner enemies are surprisingly active: they move from cover to cover while attempting to flank, and if the player is close by they might charge in and have a kick. They’re solid at the very least, which also applies to the ninja enemies. These come in three colours and all of them have a lot of health. And the white ones have way too much health. Stone is also horrendously ill equipped to face off against another sword wielder and gets absolutely destroyed by a single mistake. Their inflated health pools also caused every battle that mixed gunners and ninjas to inevitably end with a handful of ninjas refusing to go down, which did get tiresome through the last few levels. There’s one section in a series of alleyways with like four white ninjas back to back that ends with a miniboss encounter against two black ninjas with no breaks or checkpoints at all. The runback to these final ninjas can take up to 10 full minutes because Stone refuses to open the door to their arena if any other enemy in the previous alleyway is still alive. The number of enemies in this alley doesn’t even change if the player chooses normal or “Japanese hard” difficulty, and “Japanese hard” difficulty isn’t even selectable until after the player finishes the game at least once. Putting aside the strange name, I couldn’t really figure out what about the game was altered by selecting this difficulty level. There’s still a black ninja in one of the earliest rooms in the first level, enemies with grenade launchers can still kill the player in a single hit, even the bosses seem to be around the same level of challenge. I hit a few troublesome areas on my first normal mode playthrough that I didn’t struggle with at all on the harder difficulty. Clearly I had learned how to play the game and understood how it wanted me to approach these challenges, but I went from spending minutes bashing my head against what seemed like a brick wall to breezing through effortlessly the second time around. The only real stopping point during my Japanese Hard playthrough was that ridiculous alleyway I mentioned before, and a couple of the boss fights.

There are five boss enemies in Wanted: Dead, with the spider tank making a repeat appearance toward the end of the game. The tank is the only boss that isn’t a melee only encounter so its reuse isn’t egregious or anything, and the rematch has a whole second tank skittering around. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest of a fairly disappointing showing of bosses overall. All the player really needs to do is kill the human enemies, take their explosives, and shoot them at the tank until it dies. They roam around the arena and shoot at the player almost lazily. The main cannon deals enough damage to kill Stone in one hit, and if the player happens to be standing in the tank’s path when it charges they can expect to die instantly too. So the fight is extremely easy but sometimes you get vaporised or flattened and have to start over. I like the tank’s visual design, though, and the battles against it are a cathartic flurry of audiovisual effects that manage to make the boss seem exciting in the moment. The rest of the fights are all against humanoids with a unique capability, almost exactly like Devil’s Third bosses. The first of these is the rebellious synthetic leader August, whose three phase encounter is gruelling when compared to the spider tanks. This fight takes place in an empty public swimming pool, which I think is a cool concept for a boss arena, and August’s first method of attack is to stand on a ledge above the pool and shoot a grenade launcher at the player while some regular synth enemies try to tie the player down. Killing most of the regular enemies or shooting August enough will cause the fight to transition into the second phase. I like that the fight is adaptable in this way since the player gets to decide whether they want to clear the synths out of the pool before August hops in himself. The second phase sees August switch to an assault rifle while patrolling the arena, which isn’t quite as interesting as the first phase, and his pinpoint accuracy is probably a bit much considering how long this fight can go on for. Eventually he puts the gun away and resorts to hand-to-hand attacks which would be trivial to overcome if the player had any bullets left. Things get weaker when it’s time to fight Kolchak. I’m a massive fan of invisible enemies that the player tracks via some environmental detail, so fighting this cloaking sniper on a rainy rooftop should’ve been awesome. Sadly, the fight is easily won by just waiting for Kolchak’s red warning trigger to appear and stunning her with the handgun. And she spends a lot of time cloaked looking for an opening to attack, but it’s possible to track her and land hits while she won’t fight back, pushing the fight to the second phase where the cloak starts to malfunction. Kolchak tries some new moves after this point but they aren’t any more effective than before. Then there’s the Mr. Holiday encounter. This guy has appeared a couple of times during the ending movies of some of the previous levels but I don’t really know him or get much of a sense of what he wants. He seems to be Richter’s second in command but what that means is difficult to discern. So it's a huge surprise that when the boss encounter begins there are two Mr. Holidays in the room. During the first phase both Holidays share a single health bar, and they play off of each other very well. One takes the melee role and the other hangs back and shoots. It’s a shockingly well-balanced encounter, but I have no idea what Holiday achieves by killing Stone. I do not understand what he’s talking about or why he “feels nothing”. The second phase is also a solid duel against an opponent with similar moves to the player. Holiday isn’t as flashy as the other bosses, but all in all I think this fight is pretty good. The final boss is Richter, who I guess is the main brain trying to take down Stone and her squad. He has a weird lightsaber and the power to summon a rainstorm, and he can heal too, but Richter isn’t an especially active boss. I found plenty of opportunities to slash at him a lot and he’d just sit there and take the hits. I also discovered that spamming the sword parry whenever he started his standard combo would give me a lot of successful parries which would drain Richter’s invisible posture bar. It isn’t an easy encounter and there wasn’t anything offensive going on or whatever, but the moment Richter fell into the darkness was hugely anticlimactic.

So that might have seemed like a spoiler but it definitely isn’t - the truly interesting part of Wanted: Dead’s narrative is trying to decipher what’s actually happening - which is why I’m going to talk about the game’s presentation first before we get stuck into the real meat here. Wanted: Dead looks counterintuitively cheap and expensive. The character models and textures are impressively detailed but the animation work doesn’t maintain the level of quality. The combat animations are great, and sometimes the movie animations are just as good, but other times the arm movements are strangely jerky and the faces seem overly wooden. I also think the lack of particles and screen effects cause a lot of the movies to look empty, like the characters are in some kind of vacuum. Fee Marie Zimmerman’s performance as Stone is mostly solid, but a lot of lines could’ve used another read. It’s tough to have so many different accents converge in a language that isn’t the writers’ first so some of the things Zimmerman has to say aren’t exactly friendly to her Swiss accent. The sound overall is genuinely really well done - there’s just these occasional hiccups in direction and implementation that stick out. Like, why are the gangster’s voice lines so strangely mixed? Why does the karaoke singing go on for the entirety of 99 Red Balloons? And the tonal whiplash I got from the karaoke segment had me in the ER. But then Herzog tells an awful joke in the elevator and the performance is perfect.

The game opens with blonde Hannah Stone in a tiny cell being recruited to the team by a mysterious red light. Things flash forward to the crew eating at a diner where the nearby TV reports on Dauer Synthetics’ stock price decline, as well as a report on Dauer’s violent response to protests in Baghdad. The footage on the TV during the protest report looks just like the Dauer building the crew are sent to at the end of the scene, so I initially thought the team were being sent to Baghdad, but they actually never leave Hong Kong. The whole opening scene is really strangely written. Lots of awkward lines back to back. The Dauer building the first level takes place in is being attacked by a mysterious force who are there to steal American bills. Why would they want this currency when they’re already equipped with unmarked guns and high end armour? And according to Doc, the soldiers sent in to steal the cash are untraceable. Who are these guys? What are they doing? It’s an intriguing premise - despite being kind of difficult to follow - but these questions are never answered. Instead, the crew are sent down to a park to deal with some troublesome Synthetics who are refusing to comply. This is where August is introduced, and instead of capturing or killing him, he manages to escape on a helicopter - with a little help from another Synthetic named October. The team takes October to be interrogated and learn a few things from her, and Doc makes his own discovery as well. October says her memories begin when she woke up in a bodybag, and the implants she has covering her body are primarily used as a means to punish insubordination. Stone had heard this “woke up in a bodybag” phrase before, and I think it’s probably the most pivotal part of the narrative overall. Dauer Synthetics’ business has been either reanimating corpses to be used as their “synthetic” workers, or they’ve been kidnapping and memory-wiping people instead. Stone seems to also be affected by whichever thing Dauer is doing which is shown in the 2D animated movies. These scenes don’t add much to the game for me; the artstyle shift is completely inconsequential and the stuff about Stone’s lost family doesn’t expand her motivation meaningfully - people don’t just do war crimes for no reason. If Dauer is reanimating dead people and selling them as “synthetic workers” secretly, then it would make sense to me that Richter and Mr. Holiday have been employed to stop Stone from figuring out what Dauer is doing, by force. The company is clearly powerful enough to do this - they run the police force that Stone and her crew of war criminal officers work for - but then how can the company’s stock price be in decline? If they are law enforcement, with a private army and private police forces and literal zombie slaves, wouldn’t they just subsume all other governments into the company and be the de facto authority? Why are they playing by the rules? And why would it matter if their police force discover the origins of Dauer’s synthetic workforce? This is like everybody’s dystopia. Nobody wins, not the company, not the public, not even the children.

When I decided what the thesis of this video was going to be, I did what I always do: I started writing and cutting and rewriting and recutting and hoping that eventually through persistence I’d be able to come to a satisfying conclusion. But this time I never had the epiphany that I was expecting to have. I created this document back in November, after first playing through the game in October. It’s now almost January as I finish writing this script and I have only just come to the realisation that I’ve been searching for. I had just finished editing out the stammering and poor line reads from the voiceover when I realised I had never read the About page on Soleil’s official website. Part way through the segment titled “Message”, below a picture of who I presume is Takayuki Kikuchi, there’s a smoking gun that answers all. “We… develop action games especially focused on the "good feeling when you press buttons" and the touch and feel sensation that is the primal appeal of computer games.” Wanted: Dead was designed to have good buttons. The player is primarily supposed to enjoy making their character do stuff, and the rest of the game is made to reinforce that philosophy. It’s so simple, and it’s so extremely obvious now. All the screen effects during combat that are totally absent during the movies, all the weird lines back to back, the narrative’s lack of coherence or a clear point, even the way some of the bosses are designed, it’s all secondary to ensuring that the player gets to enjoy doing cool stuff. And I’m here for it.

It’s nice to finally have an answer for why this game is the way it is, and while I enjoy the game for it’s quirkiness and fun gameplay, Wanted: Dead still has problems. The rhythm game sections are much longer than I think anyone would care for, that one alleyway is way more demanding than the rest of the game, and the narrative makes next to no sense at all. But it’s honest. And I’m happy to see that the Steam reviews have recognised the honesty. Soleil just likes PS2 games, and so do I. I like them so much, I’m going to be playing a real one for the next video.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/RdnLNoOkP3E

One of the worst crimes that can be committed in a tabletop gaming environment is murder - naturally - but powergaming is up there. Even the idea of disregarding flavour, immersion, and any other role-playing activity in order to exploit the game’s rules as efficiently as possible, often to the detriment of the others playing the game, can get people quite upset. I used to hear this stuff all the time back when I was attending 40K tournaments - despite those clearly being a competitive environment, and an unlikely place to find flavourful games where the Dark Angels player doesn’t have 37 Fenrisian Wolves on the table. But in more casual contexts - and especially in regards to tabletop RPGs - I can completely understand why aggressively optimising the rules of a game earns as much ire as it does. The primary objective of one of these games is to facilitate a collaborative story-telling adventure where the destination is tertiary to the journey at hand. Games like Dungeons & Dragons have rules to guide the players toward an objective, but they also require a Dungeon Master to participate who is at liberty to ignore those rules whenever they choose, since the point of the game isn’t to spend hours decoding some masterful puzzle or flicking through rule books with a dictionary on hand just in case, the point is to have fun with your friends. Unfortunately, people’s schedules don’t always allow everyone to play together on a whim but since these games have rules and were popular enough media properties on their own, adapting them into video games for the solo player was an instinctive substitution. Except this presented a bit of a dilemma: should the video game adapt the rules verbatim or should it instead try to adapt the spirit of the game? Whichever their choice, the subsequent video game would regularly divide fans. Bending the rules to favour a friendlier adventure for players would go over well with casual fans and beginners, whereas adhering strictly to the source material pleased the long-time players and the harcore audience. At the turn of the millennium, both groups had plenty of games to be excited about. As the 2000’s crept on, however, the closures of Black Isle Studios and Troika Games gave developer’s pause. Clearly these games weren’t selling well enough, and many big players in the RPG market switched their focus toward the larger customer base of casual and beginner players. Upon noticing the void this move left behind, German video game developer Radon Labs saw an opportunity to give the spreadsheet enthusiasts the game they wanted, and in 2008 Drakensang: The Dark Eye was released.

Drakensang is a relatively standard PC role-playing game, reminiscent of titles like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. The player picks a class, they can find additional members to join the crew, all of these characters have a wide range of stats and equipment to upgrade, even the combat is similar - using a real-time with pause system, though Drakensang’s version is a bit unusual. There are quests, dungeons, boss fights, light puzzles, and even a coherent plot full of ancient prophecies and rebirthing gods. Narratively, Drakensang is doing nothing new, and many of the characters and environments adhere to the western fantasy standard. But these aren’t the reasons to play Drakensang. Unlike those games I mentioned earlier, Radon Labs did not create another game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and they had a particular audience in mind when designing much of their game. As a German company, the tabletop role-playing system the developers would’ve been most familiar with was The Dark Eye. It is an aesthetically similar game to Dungeons & Dragons, but there are a number of mechanical and philosophical differences that separate the two. While both have combat and conversation mechanics, Dungeons & Dragons is more focused on providing a robust combat experience, while The Dark Eye contains more tools to resolve disputes verbally. Talking with enemies is also incentivised by the game’s punishing combat system. Characters in The Dark Eye will never be strong enough to defeat an enemy in a single attack and being outnumbered is almost always a death sentence. These characteristics have been replicated well within Drakensang. Combat encounters can very suddenly spiral into defeat and many big fights can be avoided through stat checks and investigation. Conversation isn’t quite king - by no means is this Disco Elysium - but among the fantasy RPGs that Drakensang positioned itself, the player can achieve a lot more by investing in those conversational traits. That being said, Drakensang is not a one-to-one adaptation of The Dark Eye’s tabletop rules, and I’m unsure if that is necessarily a bad thing.

First published in 1984, The Dark Eye is a fantasy role-playing game originally created by Ulrich Kiesow. Kiesow had been working as a translator within his company Fantasy Productions, and was contracted to translate both Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls in 1983 before Kiesow embarked upon his own original project. The Dark Eye’s first edition sold very well throughout German and French speaking countries, as well as the Netherlands, and Italy and a second edition of Das Schwarze Auge would see release in 1988, followed by a third in 1993. The fourth edition of The Dark Eye was the first to be translated into English and it was that 2001 edition which formed the basis of the system present in Drakensang. Like many other tabletop RPGs, The Dark Eye makes use of dice, a character sheet filled with a variety of stats and other useful information, and a dungeon master - who is referred to as the “Highlord” which is fun. The Highlord guides the collaborative story the group is creating together, requesting players make Attribute tests whenever they attempt any actions, playing the role of most minor characters in the story, as well as occasionally fudging the rules here and there to ensure the players are enjoying themselves. There are 16 different Physical Talents, 8 Social Talents, 7 Nature Talents, 18 Lore Talents, a handful of Language Talents, and multiple pages of Artisan Talents that players may mix and match at their preference. Demonstrably, Kiesow wanted players to position their characters as experts in specific fields and to allow the Highlord opportunities to integrate that expertise into their campaigns. There are still plenty of Combat Talents, weapon proficiencies, magic capabilities and the like, but the idea that knowledge of popular board games, heraldry, or tattooing could be the key to progressing a situation is uniquely compelling, I think.

Maintaining this gameplay experience was always going to be difficult when adapting The Dark Eye to a video game form, and Radon Labs had to rearrange, remove, and refocus the game in order to make it work. Previous adaptations of tabletop RPGs were often centred heavily around the system’s combat and Drakensang follows that pattern. The Dark Eye’s combat system isn’t its main focus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the combat is underdeveloped or bad or anything. Most of the weapons and spells from the 4th edition rulebook are present in Drakensang, as well as a range of other magic spells and physical actions that aren’t part of the tabletop game’s base rules. I have to assume that all of the hit chance, parry chance, damage rolls, resist chance, and all of the other combat stages are handled the same since it looks like they are, but there aren’t any rolling dice to be seen. Since Drakensang puts such an emphasis on combat, the example professions from the rule book that wouldn’t grant the character any combat abilities aren’t present, but the number of classes the player can choose from at the beginning of the game is more than enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sure any Explorer or Messenger players will be able to find something to enjoy amongst this list of professions anyway. Another significant change to The Dark Eye experience is how Drakensang confines the player’s actions. Tabletop RPGs are relatively cheap to produce and the grandiosity of a continent spanning campaign is extremely easy to implement; it’s just putting words on a page and letting the players’ minds fill in the gaps. Radon Labs couldn’t possibly account for this level of scope so their game limits the player’s ability to resolve all of its narrative conflicts. To me, this is acceptable, it would be immensely unreasonable to expect the scale to match, and the way things are implemented in Drakensang at least give the impression that the campaign’s Highlord just isn’t presenting many opportunities to use all of a player’s skills. A character might have a decent cooking skill but the Highlord never gives the players an opportunity to cook anything so the skill goes unused. Basically every tabletop adaptation is going to be this way, so Drakensang isn’t an outlier.

Up to this point, it doesn’t seem as though Radon Labs have made any big deviations from the norm during the development of Drakensang, and it’d be easy to see why their game doesn’t have the legacy of the games they were clearly inspired by. Other than the game’s rules being based in The Dark Eye, Drakensang’s most identifiable feature is its balance and difficulty. There’s a single difficulty level which has been meticulously constructed for the player to contend with throughout their adventure. There are a finite quantity of enemies in each of the different zones, and even within a single zone the player will find challenges they won’t immediately be able to overcome and they’d be better off trying something else first. A little ways in, a guy asked me to help clear some rats out of his basement, and I had been fighting some rats earlier, so, sure, it should be fine. What I didn’t know was the big rat at the bottom of the basement was designed to perfectly counter my team. I didn’t spend 24 hours fighting this boss, but there is 24 hours of footage between my first encounter with Mother Ratzinsky and her death. This kind of thing is pervasive throughout the whole game and I don’t recall any other game where the player has to drop out of a side quest part way through and return to finish it half a game later. Even encounters against normal enemies can force the player to follow a different thread for a while so they can power up a bit before pressing on. In a more narratively focused game I could imagine this constant interruption to be rather frustrating, so it’s fortunate that Drakensang’s story isn’t particularly special.

There is some narrative promise within this game, but I don’t think the story ever really amounts to anything worthwhile. It isn’t a bad story - things aren’t so bad that it detracts from the experience - but Drakensang’s narrative definitely leaves a lot to be desired. The game opens with the player receiving a letter from their friend Ardo. Ardo seems to have stumbled upon a shady conspiracy and, fearful for his life, asks for some muscle to come to Ferdock and back him up. So the player travels to Avestrue, a small village on the road to Ferdok. Avestrue acts as a sort of tutorial staging area, which is good because the Ferdok guards are refusing to allow anyone else to enter the town. There’s a serial killer currently at large and the guards are wary of travellers who may be in league with the killer. In Avestrue the player can meet Rhulana, Amazon warrior and potential party member, as well as Queen Salina and Arch Mage Rakorium, sponsors whose word would allow the player entry to Ferdok. Both Salina and Rakoirum are significant characters later on and I think the game does a respectable job introducing them. Salina’s task for the player involves ascending a nearby mountain to look for her boyfriend, Dranor, who seems to be making a deal with the scaly, green devil. This guy is weird. I got the impression that he was going to be the main villain, or at least a high ranking member of the evil faction’s army or something, and he kind of is, but also not really. He matters until he doesn’t. Once the player manages to gain entry to Ferdok, they discover that the letter arrived too late. Ardo has been murdered, and nobody has any idea who the murderer is. After following some information up, however, the player is able to determine who the murderer will be targeting next and the hunt begins. The killer makes their move and the player chases them throughout Ferdok’s sewers and alleyways before eventually cornering them in the city’s library. It turns out, the culprit is a noble, and he is using his wealth to fund a private militia whose purpose is to assassinate prospective chosen-ones, preventing them from being chosen, buying time for the other members of his cult to resurrect a dead dragon. At this point I was absolutely on-board with this narrative. There’s so much intrigue and potential, and even though there is a chosen-one story at play here, the way it had been handled up to this point was great. The last person the dragon cultists wanted to kill was this apprentice librarian; is she going to be the chosen-one? Would it be the player’s task to accompany the librarian to all of the different locations she needs to get to so she can prevent the return of the zombie dragons? Maybe she’s a fifth party member who can’t leave the team like the player character.
These possibilities are put on the backburner for a short while as the player is directed to the temple of Hesinde, the goddess of wisdom, since deonts of Hesinde are devout historians. They would likely have some information about what the chosen people were actually tasked to do. After helping clear the amoebas out of the temple’s library, the deonts are able to reassemble a magical, golden statue of the Dragon Oracle. The statue rises into the air and recounts the last time it was awoken. 78 years have passed since it was last assembled, and this is the tenth time the statue has been activated in total. The Oracle then names the player character as the next chosen-one and tells them to go out and collect a bunch of magical items without a clear purpose. This was… heartbreaking. All of the game’s potential just melted away so that my petty burglar character could save the world from evil wizards and immortal dragons. Her combat capabilities were nowhere near up to the task. Her whole skillset revolved around sneaking into a place, stealing something, and then sneaking out again. How could this character possibly defeat a dragon? The rest of the game tasks the player with completing a scavenger hunt before the evil dragon cultists can, and I can only be happy that the side quests are as good as they are. Choosing whether to side with a group of witches or a marauding band of inquisition forces, helping the townspeople of Tallon resist the goblin incursion that ends in a full-scale assault on the goblin camp with the town guards, or deciphering Aurelia’s alchemy recipe which went a direction I was not expecting it to go. This is a big game and I’ve only really scratched the surface with these examples. It’s certainly a shame that the main quest became so cliched and uninteresting, but there are a few hints toward the end of the game that suggest Radon Labs may have been running out of time.

In terms of presentation, Drakensang compares favourably to many of the blockbuster titles that were released alongside it in 2008. The character models are distinctive, the environments are lively, and the music is solid from front to back. Conversations with NPCs can be a little dry since Radon Labs didn’t bother with a complex facial animation rig and settled with mouth flapping and expressive body movements instead, which I think is a better choice for the time. This is bound to age better than those robotic automated conversations, in any case, but it is a bit impersonal. I also think the game’s palette is quite unique. The world is vivid, sunny, and warm, and there are colourful flowers everywhere. In the caves there’s always some moss or algae slathered over the rocky walls, or there’s a bunch of glowing mushrooms giving off a greenish light. I really like the way the fog layers are used too. Not only are they used to make the caves gloomier, with the air thick with steam and spores, but the fog is also tinted orange and used as haze to bathe rooms in sunlight, or a white fog washes out the terrain in the distance. It adds so much richness to the game’s environments, which are already impressively detailed. I think I should reiterate: Drakensang came out in 2008, these textures should not be this high res. Fallout 3 came out a month after Drakensang, and Bethesda spent almost half of Drakensang’s total budget on the Fallout licence alone. Radon Labs pulled off something truly incredible with the visual presentation. But then the game’s soundtrack kicks in. Yes, there’s a lot of strings and horns and it’s all very typical fantasy stuff, but it sometimes gets weird. I like it. It’s a shame that a lot of the voicework doesn’t quite hit the same highs as everything else. Some of these line deliveries don’t seem directed at all, which is odd considering just how few spoken lines there are. Characters will say the first text box aloud, and then nothing from then on. This works for and against the game. Some of the performances are really good so it’s a shame they talk so little, but then other performances are horrible, so at least the player doesn’t spend too long listening to the weaker performers. Similarly, the combat audio varies in quality. Sometimes the enemies sound great, the music swells and the fight is accentuated. And then there’s the fight against the wounded dragon. I spent a while trying to decide what this sounds like and I couldn’t come up with anything. Whatever this is supposed to be, it doesn’t invoke “dragon” in me. Which is strange because the dragon cry in the final movie is pretty good.

The player’s party can consist of no more than four characters: the player character, and up to three others who the player can meet as they progress through the world. Each character has a level and they earn experience points throughout their journey as is expected in any RPG. They also have a wide range of stats that influence their Base Values, Weapon Skills, Talents, Abilities, and Spells, but they do so in a way I was unfamiliar with. Instead of simply reaching the next level and being handed a bunch of skill points to assign, the player directly spends their Experience points on their stats, with the character’s level controlling the caps those stats can reach. So, for example, at character level 15 Gwendala the Elven Spellweaver can have a maximum of 19 spell levels in her Balm of Healing spell. What does that mean? This is about to get a bit hard to follow, and I can only apologise. A character must already be attuned to magic in order to learn to cast spells at all - there’s no way to force a character to learn magic if they didn’t start with magical capability. In order to learn Balm of Healing, the character must meet or surpass the requisite Cleverness, Intuition, and Charisma stats. They will also need a minimum of 10 Astral Energy to cast the spell. Okay. Balm of Healing restores 2D6 Vitality points (health) plus the spell modifier multiplied by five to the target. It may also remove up to the modifier number in Wounds from the same target, which is a mechanic we’ll get into later. The modifier is a number shown below the spell’s icon which the player can change at any time, though increasing the modifier also increases the cost to cast the spell. The maximum modifier is determined by the spell’s level. So with Balm of Healing using a modifier of 4, Gwendala must spend 14 Astral Energy to cast the spell, then 2 six sided dice are rolled, which returns an average result of 7, then the modifier of 4 is multiplied by 5 for 20, and the final effect is the target is healed 27 health on average. Fortunately, there aren’t modifiers on every spell and combat abilities don’t have them either, but those are a whole other mess of stat modifications and dice rolling. The big takeaway from all this is Drakensang is willing to tell the player everything. The player will know exactly what level they need to reach to pass a threshold, and they’ll know exactly what each spell will do and why. At the same time, there are so many other places to put points that the player will be swamped with options whenever they decide to level up. I don’t know how thorough Radon Labs were with adding Etiquette and Streetwise checks, but I did find Constitution checks and Alchemy checks in conversation which was cool. And the back half of the game was a breeze with high Perception, Dwarfnose, and Lock Picking talents, though they didn’t do much to alleviate the difficulty of the combat encounters.

Combat in Drakensang can be very interesting and exciting, but it can also be a frustrating slog. The game uses a real-time with pause combat system while simultaneously using a lot of turn-based features and mechanics hidden beneath the real-time stuff. The player is able to issue tasks to their party in real time; sending one character to battle a specific enemy, telling others to cast spells, use items, among other things, but those tasks aren’t just carried out instantly nor do they take a small period of real time to complete, they take combat rounds. Balm of Healing doesn’t take 3 seconds to cast, it takes 3 combat rounds. To me, this seemed really strange at first, but the deeper I got into the combat the more I understood why Radon Labs chose to handle combat in this way. Combat in The Dark Eye is a call-and-response type system; the attacker makes a to-hit roll, the defender chooses to make a dodge or a parry roll, then there’s a damage calculation roll, followed by any armour effects. If the units in combat weren’t synchronised to a global combat clock, these call-and-response dice rolls would be next to impossible to understand. Fights would all be moshpits where an orc could parry an attack from the flinching dwarf he just clobbered, and the player wouldn’t be able to react accordingly because the animations couldn’t possibly sync with the actions. It’d be like an autobattler with ridiculously complex rules, totally incomprehensible to a casual observer. Another consequence imposed on Drakensang’s combat by this is that the system can’t process area-of-effect spells. There needs to be time to display the call-and-response effects so a big explosion spell hitting multiple targets at once wouldn’t work. They did try to add one AOE spell, which is funny but functionally useless. If the enemies aren’t standing in exactly the right locations when this attack goes off then Forgrimm takes a few swings at nothing. Despite this, there are still many locations where enemies will swarm the player and there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Combine the large enemy populations with the lack of a taunting ability and you get some extremely irritating encounters. Enemies just love to rush the squishy backline wizard, though that was probably my fault for giving her a bow. There were a lot of cases where the number of enemies was just too high so I had no choice but to cheese my way through. Sometimes my method would involve hiding the wizard way in the back and bringing her into the battle after all of the enemies chose targets I liked, other times I’d take direct control and run the entire length of the countryside, hoping my teammates running behind me could hit the enemy whenever it turned. There aren’t too many encounters like this, but the worst one came right before that wounded dragon fight I mentioned before. While ascending the mountain toward the dragon’s lair, groups of harpies would spawn up ahead and path back down the hill toward the party. Harpies aren’t especially strong or healthy in Drakensang, but they have a special ability very few other enemies possess. Whenever a party member’s health reaches zero, they gain a Mortal Wound which prevents them from fighting. Mortal Wounds can be healed but only if the party is out of combat. Characters can also gain a Mortal Wound if they have 5 regular Wounds, even if they’re at full health. The player can use this mechanic to kill enemies with lots of health really quickly provided they have some means of dishing out Wounds. Harpies also apply Wounds in combat and man did I get unlucky a lot. On paper, I think this is a solid mechanic that makes sense if the enemy has a low chance to apply the Wound or the enemies that can apply Wounds are few in number, but a group of 8 to 10 harpies Wounding as often as they do is sadistic! But it comes so late in the playthrough that I expect most people who make it here are the ones who were always going to push on to the end.

Radon Labs was a German company and Drakensang basically runs in a proprietary engine from 2008, so technically things are on the decline. The game is very stubborn on startup - it often refuses to show the player the intro movie at all and constantly minimises whenever the player tries to click on the window. My method for resolving this was pretty simple, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for everybody or if I did some sort of miracle. Upon launching the game I’d click on the program window, hit alt and enter once to set the program to windowed mode, click the program window again, and then hit alt and enter again to go back to fullscreen. I had to do this every single time I launched the game, but it wasn’t a big deal. As far as other technical problems go, I think there were a few times where I saw the German text appear in a text-box, and I couldn’t resolve the farmhand hostage situation peacefully because one of the pigs the goblins wanted refused to move like the others. And there were the occasional instances where characters would just endlessly run into walls. And the skeleton cyclops fight is total bullshit but that’s not really relevant to this section. My biggest complaint about Drakensang is the strange distribution situation the game is in. Drakensang and the sequel are both for sale on Steam and GOG but not in Australia. All of the game’s original publishers are defunct and BigPoint only made and maintains the spin-off MMO, so it’s hard to say who’s even selling the game at this point. The only way I was able to get my copy was by buying a key from a third-party site, and as far as I can tell nobody who was even tangentially involved in the production of Drakensang is getting paid for it now.

I liked Drakensang for the most part. It’s an interesting system to play with, the presentation is tremendous, and there is so much to do. The game stumbles a bit toward the end, but the vast majority of the game is a solid experience. I think it’s worth playing if you’ve already exhausted those classic turn-of-the-millenium RPGs, though Baldur's Gate 3 is probably a better use of your money. That being said, this is probably one of the more guiltless pirates of your life.

Drakensang forced me to pay attention to it. I had to be alert to the next potential combat encounter and ready to act at all times. There are thousands of tiny decisions to make constantly, within and without the game’s combat scenarios, and I could easily imagine a perfect team exists on some long-forgotten spreadsheet somewhere. If the purpose of an art piece is to make the viewer think about it then Drakensang’s combat system alone is a work of art. The rest of the game is good, but the time I’ve spent thinking about particular arrangements of enemies far outweighs how long I thought about Avestrue’s golden wheat fields or how willing I was to transform some stranger into a toad because a witch told me to. The game penalises your Charisma stat if you smell bad so you need to keep soap on you in case you need to wash, but I’m too busy trying to concoct a way to kill this really big rat. I feel like I’ve just overcome one of the most granular video gaming experiences I’ve ever played and I did it all because a magic statue is actually a direct telephone line to a cyclops blacksmith who wants to retire from blacksmithing. I’m exhausted. I’m gonna go play something mindless to recharge.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/2KYZPvAfRaE

In roleplaying games, the central narrative that guides the player’s journey is often colloquially referred to as the “main quest”, while all other branching threads are the “side quests”. Most roleplaying games rely on that main quest to direct the player toward the game’s various objectives, as well as provide the primary thrust to the game’s narrative. Without the main quest, most RPGs don’t even start. It’s the reason Harry is in Revechol, the genesis of the Devourer’s relationship with Krenze, and Enzo’s quest for power would’ve been unnecessary without the Bojaa invasion. But if this central narrative didn’t exist, would these games be considerably worse off? Sure, it’d take some re-writing, but would Shadows: Awakening really be much different if the Devourer simply came to be one day and began working to gain power on its own? Video game players like adventure, they’re curious and ready to delve into any old catacomb if the possibility of loot or a reveal is present. That quest for power is often more than sufficient, and Turkish developer TaleWorlds Entertainment have demonstrated just that. Mount & Blade has no main quest - no primary objective at all. The player is dropped into the fictional region of Calradia and left to their own devices. What they will spend their time doing, who they work for, who they oppose, where they will call their home, and how they will handle conflict are all down to the player. With all of these choices to make and things to do, does Mount & Blade ever feel like it’s missing something?

Mount & Blade takes place in the fictional - yet suspiciously familiar land of Calradia. There are five empires present within what is essentially a single river-valley, and each is trying to defeat the others to become the sole rulers. The player is dropped into this maelstrom and let loose to do whatever they like. They could build a diverse army by recruiting troops from all the different cultures, strictly align with one of the empires and wipe everyone else off the map, focus entirely on becoming famous at the tournaments, or become the world’s most powerful caravan baron - the player can even oppose everyone and go full bandit if that’s how they want to play. The game takes place primarily in this large map screen where the player can travel around, visit the various cities and villages, talk with the generals patrolling their territories, and get into fights. Battles are fought in procedurally generated battlefields determined by where the armies meet on the overworld map, which is reminiscent of something from a Total War game. It’s even possible to auto-resolve battles as if it were actually a Total War game; if the battle seems too easy or if you’d rather play as a backline commander instead of getting your hands dirty, or the situation is hopeless and a few seconds of menus is preferable to watching your character get hacked to pieces, you can just let the game calculate an outcome and move on. Of course, there are definitely reasons to participate in the battles, most impactful of all being the increased experience points gained from landing a killing blow on an enemy. Those experience points are spent on the player character’s massive variety of stats which influence everything from the player’s health and weapon skills to the quantity of soldiers they’re able to command and their ability to haggle over an item’s value. The battles are a strange semi-RTS thing mixed with some action combat that employs its own first-person directional based sword-fighting system. Well, it’s either first-person or you can piggy-back your character during battle. Why anyone would want to use this perspective eludes me, but it’s there as an option. I think it's probably a quirk of the engine since other games that used the engine also have this camera perspective available.

Mount & Blade looks pretty good for a game that came out in 2001. It didn’t; this game’s original release was in 2008, the same year Metal Gear Solid 4 and Dead Space came out. Things looked rough at release, but as time has gone on Mount & Blade’s visual presentation has retroactively become much more palatable, at least to me. It’s an older game, older games look like this, it’s fine. The Calradia overworld map is handcrafted and does a reasonable job of reflecting how a river valley like this would form in real life, but it has some unfortunate restrictions imposed upon it that definitely bring it down visually. The rolling hills and same grass texture desperately need more stuff to break them up. The occasional rocky hilltop and handful of trees just isn’t enough. But there can’t be too many forests since they cause armies passing through them to move slowly and if the player triggers a battle in a wooded area the battle map will be filled with trees that make cavalry and archers much less effective, resulting in really long, drawn out battles. Taleworld definitely noticed how dull Calradia looked and made an attempt to add some more variety to the landscape; the Khergit Steppe uses a slightly different shade of green for the ground and the eastern region of the Vaegir territory has a permanent blanket of snow burying everything. I don’t think the different green is a successful substitute for more interesting terrain, and the white snow makes reading the white text updates about world events and level-ups from training impossible. But all that said, I like Calradia, it’s a big space that adheres to all of our real-world natural conditions when it didn’t really need to. The same goes for the sheer quantity of different weapon and armour models. There are many different styles of clothing that take inspiration from the various Middle Ages European and Central Asian cultures present at the time, and even a set of samurai equipment that makes me think of Morrowind for some reason. The character models are a bit wooden, but it’s much less noticeable from horseback or through the sights of a crossbow.

There are clearly two major sections where gameplay happens in Mount & Blade: the Calradia overworld map, and the boots-on-the-ground battles. Neither of these two modes of play would be great on their own, but in combination I think they both compliment each other very well. As a 4X game only, Mount & Blade would be much too simple, especially before the big changes that came in Warband. The player commands a single army, and even if they manage to earn a Marshall position within one of the empires, they’ll never be properly able to issue commands to those other armies. They just kind of tag along and stand nearby like dad asked them to help with the car. There’s a similar shallowness to the battles; the addition of directional attacks and timed parrying is okay, but horseback combat kind of makes the whole system irrelevant. But as something to do between planning world conquest and chatting with the boys, it’s good enough.

I played two characters during the 60 hours I spent with Mount & Blade. Raez Steppecast was the daughter of a travelling merchant who got lost in a snowstorm after her caravan was attacked by bandits, and Yuzu Ganbataar, a frog-mouthed Khergit man held prisoner in a Nord city for years longer than his sentence. This mistreatment at their hands fostered a deep hatred of the Nord aristocracy who refused to acknowledge their mistake, and Ganbataar vowed to wipe their unjust nation off the continent. Raez managed to use her negotiating skills to earn an audience with the Vaegir king who would hopefully have some means of escorting her back home, but ultimately the Vaegir leadership weren’t very helpful. Raez would have to take things into her own hands, and soon enough she had recruited a small warband that rivalled her family’s caravan for strength and number. Upon finally being released from Nord captivity, Ganbataar immediately travelled home to the Khergit lands to try and raise an army, and while it took a little longer than anticipated, the Nord empire was repelled from mainland Calradia. Now, the game mostly gave me blanks to fill in regards to character motivations and objectives and when to call the campaign complete, which I’m in two minds over. Firstly, I like that the game allowed me to do this. Raez and Ganbataar both engaged with Mount & Blade’s mechanical systems in roughly the same way, but who they talked to and how much was required of each character was significantly different. Raez spent a lot more time speaking to the village elders as a means to earn some money, as well as use her newfound military power for the benefit of the less fortunate. I spent a lot more time herding cattle and training peasants in that first campaign than I did in the second. This was definitely the better path to follow first, though, as Ganbataar wasn’t able to just head to the Khergit lands and have the Khan’s forces at his disposal. He had to earn that, which meant grinding to gain reputation, which is done via lots of boring, menial tasks. Whenever I asked a lord if he needed help with anything, they would often send me across the map to deliver a letter, and then the recipient would say “hey thanks” and that was that. Now I’m multiple days away from the guy I wanted to rep grind, and there’s a good chance he isn’t where I left him anymore and now I need to ask directions. Once Ganbataar had done the legwork, though, the Khan eventually saw it fit to grant him a fief, which greatly increased his earning and ballooned the potential army he was able to field. Before long, Ganbataar was knocking Nord castles over and claiming them in the name of the Khan, which also accelerated reputation gain. Turns out, everyone likes you when you’re the one supplying the empire with new territory. Ganbataar managed to become so popular among the Khan’s lords that he was elected the Marshall twice in a row before eventually being captured, and likely executed by the Rhodoks. The reason I concocted this rivalry between the Nords and the Khergit was completely arbitrary. There are no real differences in management tactics across the various empires, they just have different visual themes. I did find it easier to target the Nords over everyone else - none of their troops ever figure out how to ride horses, which makes fighting them from horseback extremely easy.

The battles in Mount & Blade are fairly straightforward, but there are a lot of quirks that make them interesting to think about. TaleWorlds figured the engine wouldn’t survive them, so the battles have character limits that the player can also reduce if they need to. At a maximum, each side starts with 50 soldiers, even if the armies themselves have more. There’s a “Battle advantage” stat that shifts this balance toward something like 55-45, but that isn’t really going to impact the battles until Battle Advantage +10 or so. The fight begins and most of the time both forces will rush toward each other and fight somewhere near the centre of the map. When one army has lost a majority of their initial troops, a new batch of reinforcements will spawn in to continue the battle, which almost always happens when the player is looking at the place they’re going to spawn. The player typically starts the game with a horse and a crossbow so they can at least try out a few of the different combat styles and pick one they prefer. On-foot melee fights are fast as each participant tries to avoid hitting their opponent’s shield by attacking from different angles. Successful attacks deal significant damage, so a lot of the individual fights revolve around effective shield use. Or you can just swarm the enemy since they can’t block every attack. It is still possible to engage with this combat system on horseback, but doing this forfeits the horse’s real strength in battle. Horses are heavy animals, and in Mount & Blade they can carry some decent momentum on the charge; knocking down opponents and maybe even trampling them a little too. This momentum is also carried into the rider’s attacks. There are hefty multipliers when hitting an enemy while moving at high speed, enough to kill them in a single stroke if the sword finds their head. This is a good way of encouraging the true-to-life hit-and-run strategies cavalry have been employing on battlefields for centuries - smashing into a formation, taking a few swipes on the way through, and then circling around for another charge. Unfortunately the CPU didn’t get the memo. The player can command their cavalry units to follow them closely around the battlefield, but only the player will be making hit-and-run attacks, the cavalry units prefer to wade into the enemy blob and wait for their horses to be killed. The tools the player uses to command their army on the battlefield are very limited, and the interface used to issue those commands isn’t exactly elegant. There are options for things like which weapons the units should be using or how tightly units should group up, but there isn’t much more to it. Units are set to charge by default and they may as well stay in that default state. I only used the hold command to position my ranged units on advantageous hilltops or to have my army wait a little and let my allies take the brunt of the initial damage. Also, I preferred to take battles on the flattest terrain I could find to avoid the mountainous battle maps. These maps are by far the worst thing in the game and I don’t think it's close. Mountainous terrain does not look like this anywhere in this universe. Worms-tier land generations. I actually enjoyed the siege battles far more than these maps, but I can imagine those could be like pulling teeth to some. All siege battles work the same way; the attackers leave behind their horses and climb their ramp to hop into the mosh pit they’re greeted with at the top of the wall. The real test is whether the player can snipe enough enemy archers to ensure the Denny’s grand slam goes off without interference. No unit has infinite ammunition, including the player, so eventually the player has to decide whether to disrespect their surroundings or scrounge around for any bolts or arrows someone else dropped. Fighting through a city garrison regularly takes so much time that TaleWorlds put intermissions into these battles. Whether these breaks were put here to give the player time to refresh or lift some strain off the engine, I’m unsure, but at least the player gets a free restock of arrows when it happens.

I’ve mentioned the engine a few times because Mount & Blade uses a proprietary engine, which was not the done thing by this period in game development’s history, outside of maniacs like Jeff Vogel. The big studios had their own in-house engines, but most smaller developers were using tools like Source and Unreal Engine to reduce the amount of work they had to do in order to create a viable product. Creating a proprietary engine was a common occurrence during the 90s but the practice largely disappeared at the turn of the millennium. Doing this allowed TaleWorlds to tailor their engine to do the specific things they wanted to do with it, but it put a massive amount of pressure on the developers to get it working well, and required a tremendous deal of foresight to include all of the functionality they might want later on. So while Mount & Blade is most certainly a sandbox, the things the players are able to do aren’t nearly as broad as similar products. When the player gains control of a city, castle, or village they can build a small selection of buildings there for some minor buffs or to increase the village’s vision range. Oh wow, more prisoner space, great. The player isn’t allowed to attack any settlements if they aren’t affiliated with one of the empires. But once the player has that affiliation they can just attack anyone else as they like, even factions they’re supposed to be friends with. They can find and meet characters to add to their army which have the same levelling and equipment screen as the player so the player’s army can have access to more skill tree buffs, but there are two distinct groups of companions who complain when they’re mixed with members of the opposite group. They’ll offer small dilemmas which eventually result in the character informing the player they intend to leave the group, but you can just tell them no and they won’t leave. Because if they did leave the player would lose all the gear the companion has equipped. And even if they do leave they’re only a couple tavern visits away from asking to come back.

These limitations were apparent to TaleWorlds and ever since they’ve been expanding on the Mount & Blade base. Two years after the original game, Mount & Blade: Warband was released. Warband rearranged Calradia’s geography, added the Sarranid Sultanate faction, new NPC tasks, expanded diplomacy and empire management options, the ability to establish one’s own faction, and even a multiplayer component. These additions and changes are so expansive that - obviously - I’m inclined to treat Warband as a separate game, and I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this video. Warband is basically a resolution to all of the gripes I had with the original game, at least from what I’ve seen. Two DLCs were released for Warband too, which is kind of like an expansion of an expansion as far as I’m concerned. Both seem interesting though, so I’ll probably be back in future to explore this entirely new package. I’m unsure whether I feel the same about With Fire & Sword. Released back in 2011, With Fire & Sword is another standalone expansion of the original Mount & Blade which makes some improvements over that base, but goes in a different direction from Warband. Instead of retreading the fictional land of Calradia again, With Fire & Sword is based on the Henryk Sienkiewicz (Shen-kyay-vitch) novel of the same name. The Cossack-Polish War is raging and within the tumult the player character emerges to forge their own path. Since the game is based in the mid-17th century, the player has access to a range of firearms and explosives which aren’t quite effective enough to eliminate the use of swords and shields. It’s certainly a fascinating setting for a game, but I think I’d prefer a focussed narrative within the setting as opposed to the Mount & Blade sandbox style. With Fire & Sword also doesn’t feature many of the improvements Warband contains, so I expect bumping up against the game’s limitations to be the same as within base Mount & Blade. And, of course, an official sequel to Mount & Blade was released into early access in 2020, with a subsequent full release in 2022. Bannerlord is bigger, prettier, offers more freedom, and is much more complex than even Warband, and it has been received incredibly well. I’m very intrigued by the sequel and I’m similarly excited to see what TaleWorlds gets up to next.

For now, though, I do think Mount & Blade is worth a shot if the extreme freedoms of Bannerlord or even Warband seem too overwhelming to you. It runs right out the digital box on basically any hardware so the barrier to entry is very low. I think it makes more financial sense to just buy Warband since they’re basically the same price, but I had to know the differences and I didn’t have a bad time.

I think, judging by my ability to blabber on about it for this long, that Mount & Blade’s lack of a main quest isn’t detrimental to the overall experience. Without a list of mandatory objectives the player is entirely responsible for finding the fun, and there is certainly fun to be found. But there are weaknesses that come as part of this design style. The player needs to meet the game on its terms - they need to approach the game with a plan or at least a target, because the game isn’t going to give them one. At the same time, the developers still needed to think about all of the things they wanted the player to be able to do and then implement them, which is definitely a process where having a bunch of people involved would have been helpful, hence the Warband changes. But even still, those changes never involved the implementation of a primary objective or an interruption of the unbroken freedom the original Mount & Blade provides. These games are compelling all on their own, which some games can’t manage even with a scripted plot and specific objectives. Naturally, this kind of sandbox RPG isn’t going to be to everyone’s preference, but I think Mount & Blade embodies the role-playing aspects of the genre so well that it is genuinely a quintessential role-playing experience.

With all this pontificating about what a role-playing game really needs to fulfil that tag, I think it’d be best to play something a bit more traditional.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/MgpW1h_XUqg

What makes a video game ugly? Is it the aesthetic qualities? If a game’s palette features too many clashing colours or is primarily grey and uninteresting, or the technical graphics are amateurish and the animation is awkward, maybe the music isn’t produced well or doesn’t keep to a single key, does that make a video game ugly? Perhaps a game’s technical implementation makes it ugly, or its mechanical components. Does it run just poorly enough to be noticeable without being too intrusive, or are the tools the player has to achieve their objectives unsatisfying to use? Could a game’s narrative be the source of ugliness? Are the things happening in the game distasteful or just cruel and evil? There are clearly a lot of variables at play, but I think we’d all be in agreement if there was a game that featured all of these possibilities. That game would rightfully be regarded as truly awful. Well, here it is. After the relative flop that was Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, Zombie Studios partnered with Bethesda Softworks who - after noticing Ubisoft’s successes with their Tom Clancy franchise - decided they wanted a piece of the military fiction money. Bethesda brought author Richard Marcinko on board, and in 2005 development of Rogue Warrior began. Over the next four years, the project would go through a variety of iterations, be stripped from Zombie Studios, and then sent to Rebellion Entertainment who would completely transform the final game. In December of 2009, Rogue Warrior was finally released, to critical savagery. The reception at the time was so bad that Rogue Warrior is often in the conversation as one of the worst games ever made, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that it absolutely belongs in that conversation. The game is short, it’s barely functional, the palette is bland, the enemies are vacuous, the dialogue tasteless, and this story of Marcinko’s murder spree throughout North Korea and North-East Russia is downright villainous. Rogue Warrior is terrible, and it is the ugliest game I’ve ever played.

If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, you’ll know that I like to play a stinky shooter every now and again. Sometimes they’re brilliant, but mostly they’re just fun lay-ups so I can use all the words I know that describe how bad something is. Rogue Warrior is special among these, though, and that’s down to its association with its main character: Richard “Dick” Marcinko. Marcinko was a member of the US Navy SEALs, an elite fighting force that focuses on coastal and riverine combat, similar to the Marine corps but usually more covert. In 1980, Marcinko was given the go ahead to establish his own SEAL Team, Six, who would go on to be known as the most effective fighting force throughout the USA’s armed forces. Despite all that he was afforded, however, Marcinko was jailed for defrauding $113,000 from the United States’ government in 1990, and was subsequently kicked out of the Navy. While in jail, Marcinko drafted his autobiography which was then rewritten by ghostwriter John Weisman and published by Pocket Books in 1992. The book sold well, and Marcinko and Weisman would go on to produce a series of self-help books and fictional sequels to the autobiography until Marcinko’s retirement in 2014. This summary of his life makes Marcinko sound like an intelligent, articulate man, but after reading the autobiography and playing the game, I can say that he was most certainly neither. Marcinko loves cursing, he even makes up his own new curses just so he has more to say. The expression “swears like a sailor” does not do his vocabulary justice. He sounds like a teenager once their parents are out of earshot, and it gets tiresome both in the game and in the book. Additionally, Marcinko’s motivations for the things he does are generally horrific and often unreasonable. Throughout the book, Marcinko makes it very clear that he just wants to kill people. He did three tours of Vietnam and relished the opportunity to kill as many Viet Cong as he was able to, though he wished he could have killed more. Marcinko regularly bemoans the administrative structure of the Navy; they didn’t see his murderous rampages through rural Vietnam as necessary which ultimately hurt Marcinko’s naval career in the long run. Those administrative types would still control where Marcinko would be working and who he’d be working for, afterall. He was moved away from SEAL Team Six in disgrace, hidden away in the Pentagon for a while, but he managed to start another organisation whose purpose was to deliberately annoy Navy base commanders before finally being indicted for fraud. Marcinko would then go on to have his authorial career while also hosting a politically conservative talk radio show - which seems counter-intuitive to me, like, the systems were the problem so advocating for them doesn’t follow, unless he just really hated gay people for some reason. After his final novel was published in 2014, Marcinko spent seven years in retirement before passing away in December of 2021, a period where many old conservatives seemed to all coincidentally die at the same time - wow, amazing. Marcinko led a full life, people threw themselves into frozen ocean water for him, opportunity for success came wherever he looked and he took those opportunities. When the concept of a video game based on his novels was pitched to him, there was likely no hesitation from Marcinko, and thus, we are here today.

Despite the shared title, Rogue Warrior the autobiography and Rogue Warrior the video game contain vastly different material. The events of the autobiography are probably true events, while the video game’s narrative is totally fictitious. The game is set in November of 1986, Marcinko and two nameless accomplices have been deployed to Unggi in North Korea where they are to meet with a CIA informant to receive information about a missile factory. The trio are dropped from a helicopter somewhere outside of town, before making the trek through the forest. They come across a patrol of North Korean soldiers, and while they were able to kill all of them, both of Marcinko’s buddies are killed in a grenade explosion. From here onward, Marcinko is alone, and despite orders to retreat, Marcinko chooses to press on. The rest of the game follows Marcinko’s murderous fantasies of killing as many North Korean and Russian soldiers as he desires, slightly justified by the thread of trailing the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles throughout North East Russia. Each step of this story features Marcinko disobeying his commander’s orders, saying the dumbest one-liners ever written, enacting his own moronic plans that all magically succeed, and providing as many opportunities to kill as many non-combatants as possible. That might sound strange since these are clearly soldiers the player is fighting, but there was no formal declaration of war between the US and North Korea or the Soviet Union during the 80s. While there was political tension between all of these states, East Asia was the only region that didn’t earn any attention from Reagan’s military meddling. And without a formal declaration of war you can’t just roll up to a foreign military base and start gunning people down on a whim, that just makes you a murderer. The missile hunt eventually leads Marcinko to a large Russian dam and submarine base, which he promptly blows up as the game’s finale. The player does this by shooting people, placing explosive charges Marcinko pulls from his magic hat, and watching short movies along the way. Of course, this stuff never happened, but there is a book that features the same title and the same main character that is a record of true events.

Rogue Warrior 1992 is Richard Marcinko’s life story, his memoirs told from his perspective which detail his Navy recruitment in 1958, to his expulsion over thirty years later. It’s a fairly short book at around 370 pages, the language is simplistic when not referring to everything through Navy acronyms, and a hefty chunk of the content is useless descriptions of people who never speak or do anything as well as unnecessarily detailed explanations of whatever mundane activity Marcinko happened to be engaging in at the relevant point in time. The story opens in media res, as SEAL Team Six has been summoned to a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Apparently a Puerto Rican separatist group called the Macheteros had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon and the SEALs were sent in to retrieve it. On approach, however, Marcinko discovers that the rounds loaded into their magazines are lighter than usual, and sure enough, they’re blanks. The Macheteros don’t have a nuclear weapon, they don’t even have a presence on the island. It’s a training exercise, much to Marcinko’s disappointment. Things then flash all the way back to Marcinko’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, what he did for fun as a kid, his first job, how many of the girls in town he slept with, vital formative details. Marcinko becomes aware of the Lebanese Crisis in 1958 and sees it as an opportunity to go and kill some people. His application to join the Marines was rejected, but the Navy accepted and it all kicked off from there. I actually had a scheme for marking points of interest in the book. Each of the different coloured tabs denotes a different thing. Pink is for things that are just propaganda, some of which Marcinko believes as fact and others he seems to just be saying. On page 49, for example, the Amphibious Force Commander John S. McCain delivers a speech to the trainees going through Hell Week. “We took his words to heart. (He must have been inspirational at home, too. His son, John, (is) now a US senator for Arizona…)” That’s Republican politician John McCain, there, likely Marcinko’s favourite politician and probably explains how he ended up on conservative talk-radio. Green tabs were for strange sentences. Originally I intended for these to be sentences that featured strange grammar or things that you can say in conversation but don’t really work in written form. “A boxer, light heavy-weight division, he’d been to EOD school so he could play with explosives. And he understood CT: he’d taken over Paul’s old job commanding MOB-6. He was big, ugly, and aggressive. Yeah.” (p.254). In the end, though, most green tabs were put beside things that I had to make sure I read correctly because of how ridiculous they seemed. Weird, racist sentences, talking about the Vietnamese people as “a useless class of nuc mam-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit” (p. 166), having his Cambodian houseboy say “You go fuckee-fuckee tonight, Mr Dick?” (p. 188), and creeper stuff like “... he’d married a young beauty named Denise, the girl he’d been dating since she was fifteen and he was eighteen or nineteen.” (p. 255-256). Green tabs were the ones I used the most and it made that line in the game about the Great-leader’s penis much more tasteless than it already was, though at least it was something Marcinko would’ve said. The orange tabs indicate murderousness. Marcinko wanted to kill people and his aggression isn’t limited to the US government’s victims of the day, though they are the only ones who saw the realisation of Marcinko’s fantasies. After returning from that training exercise in Puerto Rico, Marcinko notes “...it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters.” (p. 289). Frustrated by their lack of deployments to Japan or Iran, Marcinko ponders attacking the Joint Special Operations Command headquarters to give himself and Six someone to kill. I think the orange tabs are the most numerous in the book since Marcinko really wanted to end a lot of people’s lives and enjoyed killing the people he was able to. Blue and yellow tabs are by far the rarest, mostly because there isn’t a lot else to the book outside of what I’ve already mentioned. Blue tabs are for unexpectedly good takes and I used three in total. One was for recognising Operation Just Cause was an invasion, another was a Lebanese taxi driver explaining that the Israelis brutalise Palestinian refugee camps - which isn’t even Marcinko’s opinion, and the last one is Marcinko realising how horrific a car bomb actually is. Of course, this realisation doesn’t cause Marcinko to reconsider his own actions in Vietnam but I probably shouldn’t have expected it to. Yellow tabs were my Other tabs and point at things like Marcinko’s baffling Godfather impression - which is nonsensical in written form - as well as his embarrassing interactions with the people who worked at the Pentagon and some pathetic whining about how Six didn’t have enough time to make him a plaque when he got booted. Despite all of its clear failings, Rogue Warrior was the New York Times bestseller during its first week on shelves, though that was probably pretty disappointing to many working at the publication at the time. Writing for The New York Times Book Review, David Murray said “While his story is fascinating, the method of telling it in "Rogue Warrior," written with John Weisman, a freelance writer who specializes in espionage and military nonfiction, is not. Mr. Marcinko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.” (The New York Times Book Review, 1992). Naturally, this quote was chopped up and plastered on the front cover as though it were praise. Too bad Bethesda weren’t able to do the same for the video game.

Rogue Warrior was built within Rebellion’s in-house Asura engine, the same engine used to develop their Sniper Elite franchise, so it should be more than appropriate for Rogue Warrior. Mysteriously, though, Rogue Warrior refuses to run for more than an hour on my PC. Once an hour passes, the program shuts down. The game is only 2 hours long so it isn’t a huge problem, but there are other things I had to resolve. Rogue Warrior doesn’t natively lock the mouse to the window and it has horrible screen tearing throughout most of the levels. Also, the default controls put grenade on the right mouse button and aim on the space bar like some kind of maniac. And the menus aren’t mouse navigable, you have to use the arrow keys and enter which is mostly an annoyance. There isn’t a means to fix the menus, but everything else can be resolved if for some reason you also want to put yourself through this. Firstly, the game seems to have fewer issues when running in Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) compatibility mode. I do not understand why, but doing this prevented some of the hitching I was encountering early on and seemed to prevent a majority of the crashes. Next, there’s a file floating around in the Steam community section that’s part of an unwrapper called WineD3D. Putting both the D3D9 and WINED3D files in the game directory stopped my mouse from leaving the game window and resolved the last few crashing instances compatibility mode didn’t catch. I don’t fully understand all of this, and those older Sniper Elite games work just fine, so maybe Rebellion don’t care about making Rogue Warrior functional today. And honestly, fair call, they probably shouldn’t care for their own sake. With that done, though, we can finally play the game.

Rogue Warrior is listed as a tactical shooter online, which is to say that it moves at a snail’s pace and there might be some kind of stealth section now and again. The stealth doesn’t actually work; so long as you don’t sprint or shoot and you’re outside of the enemy’s field of vision the game considers you to be in stealth. I think there are two or three total sections of a level where the player might get a whiff of stealth gameplay, but this game does not compare to the likes of Splinter Cell at all. The player can just walk right up behind an enemy and press the kill move button at their leisure. If I can compare what the gameplay is actually like, in most aspects Rogue Warrior is eerily similar to Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. The gunplay is basic, with next to no recoil, bullet-spread, or screen effects other than the tearing. A headshot kills an enemy in one hit, and hip-firing is pinpoint accurate so even the highest difficulty level is a breeze. And the enemy scripting does nothing to make shooting them interesting. It seems like every enemy encounter is a mini set-piece event, where the enemies are spawned by the player crossing a trigger point, then they run to their specified cover point, and then they stand there and shoot at the player while occasionally dipping behind cover. It’s like one step removed from a Kim Jung Il whack-a-mole machine. There are a bunch of different guns to try out, though, so there’s a little replayability built in through that. And replayability was absolutely on Rebellion’s mind when they shipped Rogue Warrior. The Steam achievements are all things that can’t be done on a single playthrough as a desperate attempt to drag out the run time somehow. In order to complete the single player achievement list, the player needs to kill 180 enemies in different ways and there are nowhere near 180 enemies in the game. Something that also blew me away after my first playthrough was the lack of a turret section! These games always have a turret section. They were really hoping walking and shooting were all people wanted. Or maybe they were hoping people would just be so astonished by the game’s middling presentation that they wouldn’t notice how bare the gameplay is.

This game is very grey, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that. There could have easily been more green in the palette since these places aren’t as far north as they might seem. Rason, formerly known as Unggi, is as close to the equator as San Francisco, so it isn’t some frozen wasteland. Most of the game takes place in these semi-industrial areas which means a lot of sheet metal walls, workshops, chain link fences, and big pipes. There isn’t an awful lot of variety throughout the environments, and even the Russian palace level quickly transforms into more pipe-lined concrete corridors. The character models are fine for 2009, Marcinko’s mouth looks a little off and the animations are jerky and robotic. I think putting Rogue Warrior next to Uncharted 2, which was also released in 2009, shows what I’m talking about. The Rogue Warrior animations almost feel like stock animations, they’re so lifeless and flat. Even the kill move special animations have no punch. The soundwork isn’t even good. It sounds like nothing, and then Mickey Rourke says a Marcinkoism. Mickey Rourke might actually be the best part of Rogue Warrior - just his voice. The things he has to say are very stupid, and there are some line reads that don’t seem correct, but his gravelly rumble is fun to listen to at least. The only notable piece of music in this project is basically just a drum beat with the Rourke lines arranged over it, which is funny, but it's competing with that “wrap ‘em around your mouth” line.

Rogue Warrior definitely goes all-in on the stupidity but whether it was a conscious decision or not is hard to say for sure. The plot isn’t just poorly conceived, it’s idiotic and kind of despicable. After his voiceless buddies are killed in the intro, Marcinko makes his way through Unggi to try and meet with the CIA informant alone. He’s too slow to save the informant from being killed by a North Korean officer, but manages to piece together the location of the missile factory from notes left in the apartment. His commander again orders him to retreat, an order Marcinko ignores, choosing to head to the factory alone. Upon making it there and after fighting through waves of North Korean soldiers, Marcinko learns that the missiles have almost all been completed, and that they’re being transported to Russia on a train. Marcinko then travels to the loading facility, where he fights through scores more soldiers before diving onto the train. His commander then tells him to keep a low profile, as if that is at all possible after the massacres left in his wake. The train changes hands as it crosses the Russian border bridge. The bridge is rubble shortly thereafter as Marcinko steals a Russian military vehicle and heads to an old palace where the missile silos are being kept. Beneath the palace is a large control room with a display that coincidentally shows a representation of the Soviet Missile Defence system which is basically a targeting computer that allows the Russians to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. Marcinko decides that the only solution to this is to destroy the palace by retargeting the missiles to hit the building he is standing inside. Not only is he somehow capable of operating a Soviet computer, but the computer is also able to target inter-continental missiles accurately enough to destroy a single building. Marcinko’s plan for surviving the missile strike is to wait in the bunker below the palace. His CO rightfully calls this plan insane. And it is. Nothing about this should work, especially since the missiles are supposed to be a defence system, and the control facility is on the eastern coast but all the diagrams are firing across the Atlantic. Moscow and St Petersburg are over 9000 kilometres away from where Marcinko is standing, so why would that be the operation centre of the Soviet Missile Defence system? Naturally, this totally nonsense plan works without a hitch and Marcinko is off to the next place. I do think it bears repeating, the Cold War wasn’t an actual war. The Americans and the Russians weren’t happy with each other, sure, but they weren’t formally in conflict. Marcinko is just killing people and blowing up buildings and bridges on a whim and against direct orders from his commanding officer. Rogue Warrior concludes at a hydro-electric dam that has been fitted to also be a dry-dock for submarines. The Russians are in the process of fitting an anti-ballistic missile system to the submarine docked there and that apparently warrants destroying the dry-dock and the dam. The sub base is by far the worst level in the game for variety, but once the player manages to slog through it they are finally released from this horrendous experience.

I think it’s very easy to point the blame of Rogue Warrior’s badness at Richard Marcinko - and while his contribution informs the specifics of the game - Bethesda were the reason the game exists at all. Rogue Warrior wasn’t being developed by a team who actually wanted to make a Dick Marcinko adaptation; Bethesda contracted Zombie Studios to make the game, decided they didn’t like what Zombie had made, and moved the project over to Rebellion Developments who squeezed the final release out in under a year. Rogue Warrior’s inception likely happened in a boardroom as a bunch of Bethesda executives pawed over some Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell numbers. Nobody actually wanted a Rogue Warrior video game, a bunch of company higher-ups decided it should exist so the company could win some more capitalism tokens - which is no way to make art. Since nobody actually wanted to make the game, is it any wonder that it ended up as one of the most critically panned video game products ever made? Did the Bethesda exec who scrapped the Zombie Studios project really think Rebellion’s game was going to print money? It might seem cynical to suggest this, but I genuinely cannot think of any other reason for Rogue Warrior’s existence.

From the minds of Bethesda’s opportunistic producers, the team at Rebellion who likely wanted nothing to do with the project, and the world’s most insecure, bloodthirsty radio host, Rogue Warrior is a pallid, pitiful, chauvinistic, cretinous, inane display, desperate to be perceived as cool and aspirational, a desperation so visible that everyone instinctively knows it is okay to bully the people responsible for it. How anyone could have looked at the Tom Clancy franchise enviably was already confusing to me, but for Bethesda to attempt to capture that audience by willingly associating with Richard Marcinko? Did they really expect more? Marcinko was a deeply stupid man, a murderous monster who could only fail upward for his entire life. He was sort of involved in the writing of a bunch of books about how much of a badass he was. I don’t think there is a more potent way to signal how extremely insecure you are. This man was pathetic. This game is a joke. I’m so happy I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Is it “fief” or “fife”?

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/q6LZOTV2ebk

Whenever I think critically about video games I tend to focus on the aspects that would be considered artistic, and not so much on the elements that make them products. I’ve spent hours upon hours thinking, writing, and talking about games from that perspective. How the misery of There Is No Light is too nihilistic for a discernible moral to shine through, how Pagan: Autogeny explores the experiences of a real person’s life, metaphorically and literally, or how Ace Team uses hurried traversal of their game world to elicit a powerful emotional response from the player. These parts of games are the things that I focus most of my attention on because the artistic side of the medium is the side I find most interesting. There are those who might be more concerned with a game’s qualities as an item for sale: how it was priced, whether it was effectively marketed, the opportunity to earn money from playing the game, that sort of thing. I have never found myself interested in that side of games. I’ve never looked at a Metacritic score prior to wishlisting a game on Steam. In most cases, if I think the game has any potential to be cool at all, I won’t look at reviews until I’ve finished my own playthrough. I’ve never been upset about a dollar per hour ratio, and, since I’m privileged enough to be able to, I often avoid buying games when they’re on sale in order to ensure the developer gets the proper financial compensation for their work. But sometimes, particularly when considering multiplayer games, the art fades away. Some games are just products to me, and if I spend any time thinking about the game, I often focus on the psychology behind the different mechanics present, or trying to solidify an understanding of the nuances within the game’s balance. Is this game merely a cynical Skinner box designed to capture people so the publisher can continue to sell those people things as captive consumers? Or has a technical savant created something so widely fascinating that people are genuinely inspired to try to become the number one ranked player? I don’t think these are bad questions, and I’m sure those more value-minded people out there really appreciate a game when it adheres to their idea of good design. Now, I’m not a psychologist, but I feel like I’m honest with myself about what my motivations are and I can at least provide my perspective on a game that I view only as a product. I don’t think the way I think about games is the same as the average person, so the things that I find compelling or not are likely to be different from the things you are compelled by. What I can say, though, is that many of the games that people commonly spend years of their lives playing have dug their claws into me at one point or another. I’ve played a fair amount of Runescape, a ridiculous amount of Minecraft, likely a couple hundred hours of League of Legends, and don’t ask how much time I spent playing World of Warcraft. I know what it's like to be drawn into a game long term, and it happened to me again recently.

In this video, I want to talk about Rust. I want to figure out how I spent over 300 hours in the game without noticing. I want to know why people who aren’t particularly good at the game keep coming back. I want to know why being killed in Rust makes people so angry. And I want to find a way to stop myself from logging back in. This is going to involve a fair amount of explaining before the examination and review begins due to Rust’s surprising breadth and depth of content. There are a lot of different systems at play here so I think it’d be best to lay it all out first before picking anything apart.

Rust is a first-person survival multiplayer game in which players are washed ashore on a strange island populated with Soviet-era Russian structures, hurriedly abandoned a long time ago. With no guidance besides their hunger, thirst, and health bar, players are left to their own devices on the island. Will they work with others to achieve peace and comfort, or ruthlessly murder everyone they come across for fear of losing what little they have? Upon opening the game the player is shown a list of servers to choose from, each with its own rules and game settings controlled either by Rust’s developers, Facepunch Studios, or an unaffiliated server operator. The most common variations in game settings are island size, frequency of server “wipes”, and item gather rate. (I’m going to pretend the two hand-made maps don’t exist for the purposes of this video, I know they do, but I’ve never played on either of them so they may as well not.) The procedural island is generated upon server start - similar to a Minecraft world - though the biggest islands will not fill a map larger than 20 square kilometres. That grid will then be split into three climates, before the “monuments” are scattered across the island. Particular monuments may only appear in certain climates, so for example, the Abandoned Military Base will always be placed in the desert region, while the Arctic Research Base will always be in the tundra region. “Monument” is the name given to the game’s prefab structures in which players can find loot, as well as various amenities, shops, and even NPC enemies which differ depending on the structure. Most servers operate on a weekly “wipe cycle”, where once a week the server is totally reset, all player items and structures are removed and a new island is generated. There are servers which wait longer between wipes, but Facepunch do recommend a monthly cycle at most in order to implement whatever new content has been added to the game. In most cases, a server wipe triggers a massive rush of population, as many vie for control of particular monuments or look to become the most feared player by the end of the night. Some players treat this phase like a battle royale gamemode, gathering as much high tier gear as possible so that they might get as many player kills as they can before they lose it all and move on to the next server. Others look to establish a base location quickly so as to protect whatever they can gather from monuments and the wilds. In either case, there is no end goal built into the game. Players set their own objectives and decide whether they achieved them or not when the server next resets. Rust’s lack of a proper objective isn’t uncommon among survival games, and the developers are quite open about the game beginning life as a DayZ copycat - a game which also lacks a meaningful endpoint. This lack of focus does sometimes make Rust seem like a collection of mechanics instead of a structured experience. While it is possible to enter a server without a formalised plan and have an enjoyable play session, without setting a target to hit I’ve found it very easy to simply spin my wheels for hours and never actually achieve anything. It’s as if Facepunch launched a tool and hoped the players would figure out how best to use it, which is exactly what the studio’s first released game was too.

Facepunch Studios might be a company that many of you are already familiar with. The company was founded in England in 2004 by a man named Garry Newman. Newman’s initial motivation for starting Facepunch was to formalise development on a game called Facewound. Facewound was a 2D platformer game in which the player, armed with a variety of firearms, battled swarms of monsters as they made their way through the game’s levels. Facewound was made available to users of Facepunch’s official forum and user suggestions were to be implemented into the game as development continued. Instead, however, Facewound was quickly put on the backburner as Newman’s side project took over the studio’s focus. The first iteration of Garry’s Mod was released in December of 2004, and throughout the next year, the Half-Life 2 mod would become exceedingly popular. The mod was basically a Half-Life sandbox at release, allowing players to create their own levels or game modes using Valve’s assets, and then sharing them easily. After talks with Valve throughout 2006, Facepunch would work to make Garry’s Mod a standalone title that could be sold among Steam’s first products. Garry’s Mod quickly became one of Steam’s most popular games, and even now, almost 20 years after the original mod’s release, Garry’s Mod still sits comfortably within Steam’s 50 most active games. Facepunch maintained Garry’s Mod solely between 2006 and 2011 before deciding to split their attention. Facepunch staff were dissatisfied with certain aspects of DayZ, a popular zombie apocalypse survival mod for military simulator Arma 2, and figured they could make some vital improvements. In 2013, the first publicly available iteration of Rust was released into early access, followed by just less than 5 years of further development before officially releasing in February of 2018. Rust has been a tremendous success, selling over 12 million units by January 2021, and it too continues to hold a comfortable position among Steam’s most popular games. Facepunch’s prosperity has been no accident, and I think their continued operation considering their origin is extremely commendable, but, y’know… Their two biggest projects are a sandbox mod of another game, and a standalone clone of another mod… that differs by including elements from Minecraft… the most popular game of all time. These guys aren’t exactly a fount of artistic vision, but they are masters of betting on the right horse. Rust still receives monthly content updates now, including new monuments, items, skins, toys, mechanical changes, and even an entire electrical wiring and piping system at no additional cost. This kind of content model is very generous considering the game’s lack of gratification systems that any other studio would be cramming in if they could, and I respect Facepunch a lot for it. But, Rust doesn’t exist as a reflection of the other games around it, it’s much too deep for that to be a reasonable assessment of the game, particularly in regards to the complexity within its mechanics.

Rust has three main modes of play, with a variety of tierings and different game phases for players to progress through while they play. There’s the initial establishment phase, followed by the refining phase, which then leads into the end-game phase. These phases aren’t concrete, and play will often bleed from one to the other depending on the circumstance. Upon first entering a server, players will need to find some food, water, clothing, and weaponry in order to stay alive for any length of time. Wild animals, scientists, and other players are a present danger which will quickly send the player back to the beach if they aren’t prepared. If the initial migration inland goes well, a typical player will look to establish a base of operations in a location convenient to their preferences. For me, this usually involves being near the Sewer Branch monument, but others might prefer proximity to a safe zone, a higher tier monument, or attempting to find as isolated a location as possible. In any case, once a base is established and fortified with stone, most players transition into the refining phase. At this stage, players will want to progress through technologies as quickly as possible in an attempt to get an edge on each other, as well as earn access to the higher tier monuments and even take on Rust’s boss battles. To move through the tech trees, players must spend a resource called Scrap at a workbench. Scrap is found in barrels, crates, and toolboxes which are present in junk piles on the side of the road, as well as the various monuments throughout the island. Many of the items found in those containers can also be recycled for additional Scrap. This causes roads and monuments to become natural hotspots for player activity, and wherever players are, fighting is bound to ensue. It’s at this point most people notice that other players are usually reliable sources of weapons and Scrap, and that it's a good idea to keep track of players who seem to be relatively wealthy. Once the player has their preferred weapons and armour ready, it's time to shift into the end-game phase. The goal of end-game Rust is hoarding, really. Defeating the attack helicopter boss rewards weapons and armour the player likely already had access to from clearing high tier monuments, essentially making most PVE content redundant. Instead, the target shifts to other players’ bases. Of course, there are options for raiding bases in the earlier modes of play, but it isn’t until the end-game when it truly becomes the most potent. Rockets, timed explosives, and explosive ammunition can quickly tear through a base, but there are options for fortification to counteract their effectiveness. This is usually where most wipes end. The island is essentially conquered and most players are ready for the reset, hungry to be the one who does the conquering next time. I find the establishment phase and the refining phase to be the most interesting, but the end-game is very disappointing. That first handful of runs inland from the beach can be thrilling, escaping the chaos of a literal battlefield as naked people throw wooden spears and discarded kayak paddles at each other. Then, the process of gathering materials to build into a base is just as tense, and the adrenaline doesn’t properly die down until there’s a sheet metal door between me and the outside world. From then, things transition into a stealth game, as scouring the shelves in an abandoned fuel station turns to creeping around in the dark tunnels below the dilapidated power plant, hoping the guy with the semi-automatic rifle above didn’t hear those footsteps below him. Those first few hours of a new map are unlike anything else, and I can totally understand the urge to keep chasing that rush. But once things turn to raiding other players, the momentum almost vanishes completely. I’ll talk more about the meta and playstyles later on, but for now know that most bases worth raiding have been built specifically to be expensive to open and often feature a shooting floor that gives defenders such a pronounced advantage that even passers-by are at risk of taking a bullet to the head. Most times the effort it takes to get inside of another player’s base isn’t worth the expense, and all of that gunpowder would’ve been better used on an oil rig or something else.

In order to qualify itself as a survival game, Rust features a wide array of different survival mechanics that the player must manage while exploring the world. Not only do players need to eat and drink, they also need to consider their body temperature, how much noise they’re making, how far from safety they are, and who could be nearby. Some of these aspects can be neglected here and there depending on player skill and overall server population, but things like starvation, dehydration, and hypothermia are present no matter how many other players are in the vicinity. There are aspects of these health related mechanics that I like, and some design choices I find confusing. Firstly, food and water are both methods of regaining lost health in small quantities. Swallowing an entire raw pumpkin not only pushes the hunger timer back a fair way, but the player also receives a decent quantity of hydration from it, and it will heal a little over time too. Rust features a lot of options for food that may be too easy to collect. Wild animals can be hunted and harvested for food, most monuments contain or are surrounded by food crates, riverbanks periodically generate a bunch of ripe pumpkin and corn plants to harvest, and there are plenty of berries and mushrooms to gather from the forest floor. You can even fish or eat cactus if you want. Starvation is almost never a concern, and while that does sound like the mechanic is wasted, I don’t think making food more important would amount to more interesting gameplay. It’d be extremely irritating to get hungry mid-battle and start starving to death so I can understand why the mechanic has been minimised, but if it's being minimised to the point of barely mattering it may as well not be in the game at all. Dehydration is handled even worse and its continued inclusion is just as worthless. Players can find old bottled water in the same food crates around monuments, they can also drink river and lake water directly, without boiling it first, and there are a range of rain catchers and water purifiers the player can use to collect water to drink as well. Hydration depletes much slower than hunger, and many foods also replenish some quantity of hydration too, making it so the player almost never has to drink water at all. Eating raw meat or rolling the dice on a jar of pickles can cause the player to vomit, drastically reducing their hydration levels, but a quick trip to a nearby river or monument will basically remedy this concern entirely. And, not only does this mechanic barely impact the player normally, even if the player is starving or dehydrated, they can still regain missing health by wrapping a bandage around their arm, negating the damage being dealt by one of these bars being too low.

In contrast to these non-systems, I think the way body temperature is implemented is fantastic. The island is split into three climates that each have different day time and night time temperatures, and each climate reacts differently when the weather changes. The temperate climate is the least extreme, with comfortable day temperatures and night temperatures that aren’t life-threatening to a clothless person. The desert climate gradually increases in temperature throughout the day, eventually becoming hot enough to be hazardous if the player doesn’t take cover from the sun. Then as night falls, the temperature plummets to dangerous lows which could potentially cause hypothermia if the player is unprepared. The tundra region is cold all day, but it becomes extremely perilous in the night, which definitely caught me off-guard the first time I got stuck outside in a frozen monument. And on top of that, the cold can be worsened by wetness. Getting rained on, stomping through a river, or taking a swim in the ocean will cause the player and their clothes to become wet, which makes the cold much more lethal. There aren’t ways to towel off, instead players need to find or make a source of warmth or change clothes for a bit and wait to dry out, so getting wet can be troublesome if it happens at an inopportune time. Fortunately, rain doesn’t fall in the desert and the snowfall in the tundra doesn’t wet the player as thoroughly as the rain does, but the temperature gets even lower during a snowstorm. This stuff is excellent, and it does a lot to make the island as much a threat as anything living on it. Plus the pronounced climates keep figuring out a good location to set up home fresh with each new map. The rain can also be used to mask the sounds of footsteps, which is as much a pro as it is a con. An average sized island takes a considerable amount of time to run across, usually around 20 minutes without any diversions or distractions, with many hills and forests to block line of sight as the player runs. Because of those hills and forests, players are much more likely to hear each other at a distance compared to the likelihood of being seen. Gunshots and explosions carry a long way, and it isn’t uncommon for the sounds of war to drift over to you while crafting items in base. It’s incredible how well the spatial sound systems work, it even makes the darkest spaces navigable without a light. And sometimes, sitting silent in a pitch black cave is the best move.

Alongside those three modes of play I talked about earlier, there are other ways progression in Rust can be separated into different levels. Technological stages, monument stages, and structural stages are all progressed through independently, which is quite overwhelming to newcomers. The first technological stage is often referred to as the “primitive stage”, where players are equipped with spears and bows, as well as whatever they can scavenge from toolboxes on the roadside. This is also the only technological stage where melee weapons are remotely viable, since bows are generally very slow to fire, inaccurate, and they aren’t likely to kill a player in fewer than three hits. Primitive equipment doesn’t stick around for too long but players sometimes deliberately bully others in order to keep them at the primitive stage - colloquially called a “primlock”. As the quality of armour increases, each arrow’s potential damage reduces dramatically, which makes overcoming a primlock revolve more around surprising the enemy with the infamous eoka pistol or scurrying away unnoticed to try and regain some momentum elsewhere. While rare, low tier guns can be found in junkpiles, though they aren’t useful for very long. Considering how inaccurate it is, the revolver’s pitiful damage output only slightly out-performs a crossbow. I spoke with players who would rather the crossbow over the revolver, and considering the expense of crafting bullets at this stage of the game, I think I agree with them. Of course, you’d take the revolver over nothing, but the real prize of the primitive stage are the shotguns. There’s no greater trump card than pulling out a double-barrel and blasting someone away. I’d argue that this is where the primitive stage ends and tier 1 begins, though that line is blurry. Tier 1 is primarily defined by clothing and trying to quickly grind up enough Scrap to craft the next workbench. Monuments come in four tiers themselves, where the required keycards to clear every room denotes which tier it sits within. I think the number of different tier zero monuments is great, and there being multiple of each on the map helps mitigate the relatively slow repopulation time of the loot within, most important of which is the green keycard. NPC scientists can also drop green keycards, but progression then gets into a bit of a bottleneck. Tier one monuments require a green keycard in order to clear every room. There are three tier one monuments, and only the harbour can appear more than once on each island. At least, it could. The Ferry Terminal was added while I was writing this video, and I think it takes over a spot from the Harbour, but I’m unsure. Checking the official servers was inconclusive since the maps are usually gigantic. That being said, the Ferry Terminal doesn’t have a green card room so smaller maps are even more bottlenecked than they were before. Moreover, the rooms accessed via the green keycard at both the Harbour and the Satellite Dish monuments are laughable. Two brown crates at most. This is why I live by the Sewer Branch, green cards are easy to get and the loot is leagues better. The player may also expect to find a blue keycard in these loot rooms, granting access to tier two monuments.

Tier 2 gear is not required to clear tier two monuments, but, due to the higher distribution of green military crates, it is more likely to find tier 2 gear within a tier two monument. Strangely, there are five total monuments within this tier, though the Trainyard only generates if the island is able to generate a rail network. Despite this, there are still four other monuments that are each bursting with loot that are consistently present on every map. This is also where we run into another of Rust’s odd colloquial language curios: the liberal application of the word ‘puzzle’. Tier two monuments will usually require at least one electrical fuse to activate the blue keycard swipe panel. For some reason, this is commonly referred to as a puzzle or a keycard puzzle. I don’t know why. In the Power Plant specifically, players must first activate a switch on one side of the monument, before heading to the other side to activate two more switches, thus allowing them to swipe their green keycard and enter the central building. Is this a puzzle? At the Water Treatment Plant, players may either turn a wheel to manually open a large door, or swipe a green keycard to enter the central building to access the fuse box, replace the fuse, and then travel over to a separate building where the blue keycard is swiped to enter the final room. Is this a puzzle? Similarly, within the Water Treatment Plant monument, crates will occasionally spawn atop a tall metal water tank. The original ladder leading to the top of the tank is broken, so players must climb the pipes sticking out of the sides of the tank to reach the top. This is casually referred to as a jumping puzzle and I have to ask, is that even a thing? They’re just platforming segments, right? Or are platformers “jumping puzzlers” and I’ve been misled this entire time? And the Arctic Research Base is also strange! Putting aside the word “Arctic” in the name, the ‘puzzle’ here involves nothing more than swiping a blue keycard to get into the room that has all of the loot inside. I don’t get it. Tier 2 is where most players really start fighting each other. The Semi-Automatic Rifle and the Thompson are Rust’s workhorse weapons, though they come strangely late into the tech tree if the player has to research their way through. There is an easily accessible way to skip straight to these guns, provided the player can get their hands on one, but if they can’t then it’ll cost a fair chunk of Scrap. Better hope those monuments turn up something quickly.

After tier two, there are tier three monuments, and tier four monuments or the event monuments. In order to completely clear a tier three monument, the player will need a red keycard and some formidable equipment. The Launch Site, Missile Silo, Underwater Lab, and Military Tunnels are crawling with scientist enemies and feature some of the highest levels of radiation in the game. Launch Site’s rocket factory is so heavily irradiated that even the hazmat suit with its 50% radiation protection is not enough to protect you, and it makes me wonder how the scientists are able to hang out there all day. Unfortunately, the rewards for braving these monuments are often not substantial enough to justify the risk. They each contain at least one elite level crate which has an unreasonably wide variance in quality. Elite crates can contain end game, tier 3 weapons and armour, as well as tier zero nail guns, crossbows, and revolvers. You could fight your way through all 28 scientists patrolling the Missile Silo, many of whom are armed with shotguns in an enclosed space, and your only rewards are a longsword, some electrical components, a hazmat suit, and a tier 2 pistol. When people go to these monuments, they tend to go for the amenities or to kill scientists for medical syringes and ammo. I can’t think of a good reason why the elite crates have this level of variance, and it kind of kills these cool, dungeon-like experiences which are totally unique within Rust. This is especially irritating in regards to the Launch Site. The structure is gigantic, it dominates smaller islands, and it radiates… er, radiation, forcing under-equipped players to walk the long way whenever they pass by. If it's loot you’re after, the best bet is to head to one of the tier four event monuments instead. These are often highly contested due to the quality of items available, and they all have a built-in timer to facilitate counter attempts, plus everyone on the server will be notified whenever they reactivate. The two oil rigs present a pretty devious conundrum. Since they’re isolated offshore, players need a strategy to get onto the rig, deal with the patrolling scientists and any players already there, and then protect the rig from other players trying to get on themselves. There’s also the climate to consider, whether the cargo ship is approaching, what’s the plan for fighting the heavily armoured scientists. And the crate isn’t secured when the timer hits zero, you still have to make it home to bank the goods. On the oil rigs and cargo ship, this gameplay style of protecting the objective works very well and I found it to result in a lot of exciting gameplay. When the chinook drops a crate onto the airfield or a supply drop shows up, the experience is less positive. Timed crates on the water are almost like a separate game, timed crates on land are just a stupid lottery. People start crawling out of the woodwork to kill you over an airdrop. Hell, one time I paddled my kayak to an airdrop that people were fighting over, and I killed the winner of the fight by smacking him with my paddle. It’s ridiculous.

The gunplay in Rust is super solid. I really like the recoil and screen effects when firing, and the sound design is generally tremendous, notably the sounds of the semi-auto rifle. I enjoy clicking on people, and the headshot sound is supremely satisfying. Even the bullet spread is cool. The more cobbled together a gun is, the less accurate the player should expect it to be which does a lot to sell the fantasy. The guns are made from rusted old road signs and discarded water piping, they should be kind of shitty. These things aside, most combat encounters in Rust are going to be extremely short and ultimately, kind of mediocre. The time-to-kill is extremely fast in this game, even with the highest quality armour equipped, and due to the abundance of walls, hills, trees, and rock faces, one player will almost always get the drop on their opponent and kill them before they can properly fight back. The vast majority of my deaths were dealt to me by somebody I never saw, and I’m sure a large proportion of the players I’ve killed didn’t see me either. Sometimes it feels like players have an innate ability to only notice you when you make a break across a large open space, or manage to whip around a corner when you’re otherwise preoccupied. Very, very suddenly all of the gear you had on you and all of the items in your inventory are now in the possession of someone else who may as well have materialised just out of sight. If you’re far away from your base, you might never see them again, and your stuff is gone for good. The speed at which a fight can end combined with the time it takes to rearm tends to lead new players into one of two diametrically opposed mentalities, both of which must be overcome in order for players to improve at the game at all. The first is often referred to as “gear-fear”; the player becomes so risk-averse that they avoid other players entirely, never clear monuments, and, in more extreme cases, never venture too far from their base for fear of dying. This style of play is not only ineffective, but it also brings into question whether Rust is a game this person should be playing at all. Sure, it sucks to lose all your stuff to someone who won’t even type “GG” into the chat after they kill you in cold blood, but tier zero equipment and a wooden door aren’t going to keep you safe for long. The other mentality is equally unproductive: becoming so detached from gear that you don’t even care about losing it. Players like this are completely relentless in totally fruitless ways. Everything gained is something lost moments later when an obviously doomed attack doesn’t work out. Every death is a trip back to the beach. Before long, the more patient players will be armed well enough to be able to swat you away, and the victories will cease entirely. From the outside, the failings of each of these play styles seems fairly blatant, and yet players will return wipe after wipe to do exactly the same thing they did before. The ideal is to sit somewhere between these extremes, taking calculated risks and learning to walk away from a challenge that comes at a bad time. Once a player has overcome these ineffective strategies they can move on to investing more time into learning the gunplay, and then the macro-game decision making will also develop alongside it. That is, if you don’t get sick of the other people playing the game first.

I’m going to start this segment with a bit of a proviso. I live in Australia and I played on Australian servers. The community I experienced might be vastly different from whatever the game is like to play in other regions, but I think the psychology is going to be roughly the same. I was also planning to use Rust’s handy “streamer mode” feature to protect the identities of people typing in the chat, but I don’t think they deserve that luxury, really. I haven’t seen this level of vile shit in a chat box in years and if you are sensitive to racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, or just generally disgusting language then I’d encourage you to stay far, far away from this game. Rust has an unusual method of assigning a character model to the player instead of allowing them to select whichever they like. The character parameters are derived from the user’s Steam profile, likely to bring some diversity to the game so it isn’t all just white dudes running around. My character is a bald, dark skinned woman with a sharp nose and soft cheekbones, her name is Shantae. When playing as Shantae, some people will use a specific slur when referring to me in game, which is frankly revolting. Putting proximity based voice chat into a game like this was genius until these guys showed up, and Facepunch are well aware of this problem, though they prefer to lampshade it instead of doing anything about it. Moreover, most messages sent in text chat are just people angrily hammering at their keyboard after losing their rock to someone with a pump action shotgun. People get irrationally angry when killed while naked, typing up a storm until half of the server is telling them to log off. There are plenty of good reasons to kill a naked player, and the killed player has likely died in the best way possible - they lost nothing. But that doesn’t stop them. This does leave less ruthless players in the lurch: kill a naked player and potentially have them badger you for an indeterminate amount of time, or take the risk and let them live, hoping they aren’t secretly carrying a weapon and making some kind of deceitful play. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And people play underhandedly all the time. They’ll beg for items they don’t need in order to ambush their victims, they’ll lure players away from safe zones when making trades so they can just steal the items, they’ll run around outside of a base and then silently walk back to the door to try and trick people into thinking they’ve left. One time, a player with a helicopter offered to perform a backflip with me on board, but instead they just crushed my character against a catwalk, killing me and leaving my body fully inaccessible, all the while dispensing some sage-like wisdom about how you shouldn’t trust people in Rust. Okay? I expected we’d do something fun in this multiplayer video game together and instead you voided all of my items for no reason. And it isn’t like there’s some kind of asshole mandate in place. At least with things like door-camping there’s a clear benefit. Likely the second most reviled activity a player can engage in, door-camping is the simple act of standing outside of someone’s door in hopes of ambushing them. It’s considered bad manners, and while I agree, I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it seem. Door-camping only really works if the base is vulnerable to it, which is a failure of base design more than anything else. Putting a window by your external doors, making a second exit, building a tower so you can see all possible hiding places from which you might be ambushed upon leaving - all methods of keeping door-campers at bay. Although, you should be careful with that last one. By far the quickest way to earn a negative reputation on a server is by “roof-camping”. In some cases, even the presence of a high shooting floor atop your base will earn ire from the neighbours. Roof-camping utilises a couple of Rust’s quirks as a means to terrorise as many people as possible. Firstly, the high weapon damage leaves victims unaware of who’s shooting at them until it’s already too late. Then, a competently designed base gives the camping player their vantage to shoot from and protects them from counter-attacks with plentiful cover. Next, if the unlikely does happen and the camper is killed, they’ll respawn within the same base and quickly reclaim their items, denying anyone who beats them in a firefight their trophies. And finally, indiscriminate targeting. Nobody knows who's carrying the bag, so everyone has to die. Compared to standard ground combat, the risk-reward of roof-camping is absurd. The strategy is regularly bemoaned as destroying the spirit of the game by poisoning the player versus player direct confrontation combat. But I don’t think it is. There are a lot of shady, dishonourable things going on in Rust all the time, and if there was some form of etiquette based fighting going on then it is long dead now. It’s almost like one of the game’s most fundamental components encourages people to build castles.

The tools for construction in Rust are simple and intuitive, and designing bases is an enjoyable process. There are some nuances that probably should be explained in a tutorial or something, but for the most part I think the system is a huge success. The player first needs to craft a building plan in order to place twig structures, and then the player needs the hammer tool to upgrade the twig into a more durable material. There are more than enough different shapes available to make a wide variety of buildings, though most people will aim for compactness. To prevent buildings from decaying and to stop other players from griefing the structure, the builder needs to put a Tool Cupboard inside and stock it with appropriate resources. This is a much better solution than the things I’ve seen on Minecraft servers, which is to be expected really. The resources required to prevent decay scale with the size of the building, discouraging solo players from building unnecessarily large fortresses unless they’re willing to spend a lot of time farming resources. Base desig ns do kind of homogenise within these restrictions, but there are plenty of opportunities for freestyling depending on the topography of the base’s location. Since the Tool Cupboard prevents outsiders from easily interfering with a base, it becomes the primary target when raiding and base designs should prioritise protecting it as effectively as possible. One of the most standard methods for doing this is to build additional foundations and walls on the exterior of the structure to increase the cost of raiding the base - charmingly referred to as ‘honeycomb’. Wood and stone are relatively easy to collect in large quantities so adding an entire layer of honeycomb protection takes very little investment. It is so cheap to do this that people will be adding honeycomb to their base before anyone has any explosives, which is why so many raid attempts end in disappointment. The vast majority of players are protecting nothing of value within their 16-rocket-raid base. Nine times out of ten a raid will yield a few metal tools, a single broken gun, and there might be a tier 2 workbench in there if you’ve been good this year. When you see those videos with captions like “Most PROFITABLE Raid EVER?” or “You won’t BELIEVE what this base was hiding” they’re talking about an edge case that’s exciting because the raid wasn’t a waste of time. I’m not really sure how to resolve this; a functional base layout that is also an amusing puzzle for raiders can exist, but how anyone would incentivise that I have no idea. My personal base design stems from the idea of a bunker-style base. A standard bunker base will have a core room that contains the tool cupboard alongside the residents’ most prized items, but there won’t be a door to get inside. Instead, players will respawn on the sleeping bag inside if they ever need to access the bunker, and then suicide to respawn back outside when they’re finished. Doors are typically the most vulnerable part of a base - it only takes 4 beancan satchels to destroy a sheet metal door while the stone wall beside it takes 10 - so removing that vulnerability makes sense. My design features a central core that holds the tool cupboard, the core is then surrounded by a large open space to act as a buffer as well as the base proper. It’s modular for easy expansion too, which is handy. I even built a garage on the roof once to secure my horses inside. I’m not sure how effective this design is at deterring raiders since I’ve never been raided, so its utility in that scenario is unknown, but I think it's neat.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve built this base, it was relatively late into my play time when I decided to design my own and Rust doesn’t keep track of how many different maps a player has joined. I don’t know how many total wipes I’ve played either, but I think I’ve seen more than enough to get a decent understanding of how the game functions. At over 300 hours there are going to be plenty of veterans who disagree with that assessment, but I think that’s more of a coping mechanism than it is derision from authority. Even on servers that advertise themselves as friendly to new players, there will be a handful of people with thousands of hours insisting that it isn’t possible to truly understand the game without a 4 digit play time, which isn’t true. The game isn’t that complex or nuanced, and there are hundreds of tutorial resources online that explain how everything that has complexity can be understood. This would be gatekeeping if it wasn’t so glaringly insecure. These people know they should probably stop playing Rust, but they won’t - or can’t. Rust’s most cunning piece of design is the wipe cycle. With each new map, players get another chance to be the one to come out on top or to prove that last time wasn’t just luck. Maybe the monuments are in a more favourable position this time, maybe your first spawn location gives you everything you could ever want, what if you are the one to pull the Thompson from a crate by the beach? It taps into the same mentality as gambling. Rust also includes roulette, blackjack, slot machines, and poker in game which isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s just a funny coincidence. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil about Rust taking advantage of people’s proclivity to gamble, especially considering it doesn’t cost money to play each wipe. But it does imprison its community which is why it can feel like 2013 in here. People with Towelie the Towel profile pictures, calling things they dislike “gay”, a server plugin that mutes players if they type racist or homophobic slurs in the chat, but does nothing about ableist or anti semitic language. It’s just so antiquated and it’s kind of embarrassing. These guys are the juvenile “peaked in high school” type which I guess explains why they want to return to those intolerant times. That being said, this community is surprisingly tolerant of things that I don’t think they should be.

A while ago, I mentioned that Rust’s official release was in February of 2018, which had been preceded by a five year long early access period. Rust has been available to the public for almost a decade now, considered feature-complete for more than half of that time, and yet the game still isn’t finished. I don’t mean that in the sense that Facepunch keeps adding new content and making changes to old stuff to keep the game fresh, I mean that there are things in this game that most developers would be trying to patch out and fix up as quickly as they can. Player buildings not being rendered at a distance, minor pop-in when moving around at normal speeds that gets much worse at high speeds, basically everything else about horses too, junk piles and scattered resources spawning on top of each other, road and cliff generation creating holes in the terrain so players can crawl under the map, ore nodes clipping through the ground, projectiles disappearing when the player that fired them dies, most of the hitboxes, the roulette wheel, fighter jet pathing, scientist damage scaling, the inside of your own arms blocking your vision, and while I could keep listing things I think I’ll stop there. These guys have Valve on board, this game has had an average player count of around 80,000 players for the past two years straight, they’re selling new skins every month, but their patches fix things like in-game painting resolution and making sure harvested player skulls have the correct name attached to them. I can’t help but feel like the priorities are not set correctly. Many of the things being added in these patches are tiny changes to the presentation that feel like they belong in early access patch notes. Adding ammo box models for that fraction of a second where ammo is thrown onto the ground, meanwhile the guards in bandit camp have been floating a foot in the air for months. It’s a shame, really, because without the clipping and pop-in I think the game looks excellent. The topography mostly generates as rolling hills, with cliff faces being placed over the steeper slopes for extra depth. The ground texture is frequently broken by different types of grass and rocks poking out, as well as the many different bushes, shrubs, ferns, cacti, and wildflowers scattered around. I like the diversity of tree species as well as the variety within each species that makes forests feel surprisingly authentic. Similar to how all of the monuments and pylons fit into the landscape. It was rare to find a monument that looked as though the geography had to change significantly to accommodate it. I even found the different materials the player can build with to be successful. They’re very adaptable, and they usually look great in every climate, though the Adobe skins don’t suit the tundra particularly. It isn’t an especially stylish game, but visual clarity was important and I think Facepunch nailed that.

I obviously have mixed opinions on Rust. There’s a lot about the game that I respect: it’s overflowing with all sorts of things to do, there are challenges to overcome, mechanics to master, and you might even meet someone cool and have some funny moments together. Rust has potential to be a fun experience, but it almost never is. Progression can be painfully slow without a good deal of luck, and that luck can turn in an instant. Getting back on the ball takes a while too, so there’s always a lot of down-time. There are plenty of dead servers for new players to get to grips with the gunplay and plan out their progression, but eventually you have to transfer to a populated server which exposes you to the other people playing this game. Plans will be foiled, shots will be missed, gear will be lost, and you might get addicted to the pain. You can turn off the voice and text chat, but then why are you even playing a multiplayer game at that point? And the thing is riddled with technical problems that the developers don’t really seem interested in fixing. I don’t like this game, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Before I wrap this thing up, I have a few other things I wanted to mention but I couldn’t really figure out where they should go. Alongside the horses, kayaks, motorboats, and helicopters I’ve mentioned previously, there are a bunch of other modes of transportation available in Rust. Players will often find functional car chassis, hot air balloons, miniature submarines, and soon a much larger boat that apparently has a room that can be used as a mobile base. I think it’s fun to have a lot of these in the game, but some of them are so niche that I’ve never used them. I also can’t imagine anyone was really asking for them either. The cars seem the most applicable to normal play, but they require so much maintenance. There are a few different chassis styles as well as a load of different vehicle parts so Facepunch clearly sank a significant amount of resources into them, but the cars just aren’t that useful. They’re subject to the terrain, they eat up a lot of fuel, they’re noisy, and they often break from normal use. It’s a similar story with the hot air balloons. Wind and air currents are not present in any meaningful way at any other point within Rust gameplay, they exist solely to facilitate hot air balloon use. I don’t think Facepunch spent years and years perfecting their air current mechanic, but they did spend time on a feature that isn’t at all useful and would’ve been better left in the concept stage. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the absurdity that is the presence of a slow moving mode of transport that’s highly vulnerable to projectiles in a game about shooting each other with guns so we’ll move on. The aquatic vehicles make a lot more sense to me. Being able to live in a boat and drive around the island sounds like it could be fun, provided the boat is indestructible or something though. There’s quite a lot to do on the water already so more boats seem like a natural addition. And with more players on the water, the usefulness of a submarine naturally increases so I think their inclusion is a good idea. I also really like the DIY look of the submarines, even if they’d probably be lethal to operate. Trains are also present on the island, above and below ground. They control intuitively, and you can leave the throttle on without having to stay within the cab. The underground rail network is the home of the tunnel dwellers who guard loot in their underground stations in similar quantities to most monuments. I was frequently the only person in the tunnels, and I managed to use them to gather a substantial haul of items fairly safely on multiple occasions. I don’t really have much critique to give on the subway tunnels, I mostly just wanted to let people who play the game know they exist.

To mention something I wish people used less, there are delivery drones in Rust which are launched from a hub building in both the Outpost and the Bandit Camp. Players can craft vending machines to safely sell each other items, and if the vending machine is positioned correctly, an automated drone can collect the items and deliver them to the buyer waiting in a safe zone. Initially this seemed really cool. You could trade items with players while you were offline or preoccupied with something else in the game, and both parties would be sure that at the end of the transaction, a trade will have safely taken place. Thing is, I think the drones make it too easy, too safe, too impersonal. Nobody needs to talk to each other in order to strike up a deal. If there’s an item you want for sale, you can just silently buy it. One of the few avenues to create positive player interaction has been removed for the sake of convenience which is definitely a shame, the game could really do with more of those.

The last thing I want to mention is Rust’s lack of any narrative or lore. There’s an island. It has post-Soviet Russian architecture on it but the signs are all in English. There’s a company called Cobalt. There are the bandits and the scientists who may or may not be related. Some scientists are hostile while others aren’t. Players wake on the beach like they’re being washed up there after falling into the sea. It’s called the Arctic Research Base. But there’s no explanation for anything, these things just are the way they are. I’m not saying it all has to link into some grand narrative or that it isn’t possible to enjoy a game without the setting being explained. But there is kind of a theme here and Facepunch hasn’t done anything with it.

After all that, I think I’ve figured it out. Rust took advantage of some of my psychological urges to get me to engage with it for hundreds of hours. I was fed just enough victory to counteract the defeats and keep me coming back. The people playing the game believe there are things to learn that take hundreds of hours to understand, and I took their word for it. When I learn about things like FIFA Ultimate Team or CS:GO skin trading it seems obvious, these are clearly predatory and these people are missing out on all of the other excellent games they could be playing instead. Why are they subjecting themselves to this? Is it not obvious to them? From now on, I’ll think back to the things I had to put up with and ignore so I could play more Rust. The slow build, the sudden deaths, the playerbase, the half-baked mechanics, the absence of polish. This game launched in early access in 2013 and it never left. Functionally and psychologically. Facepunch Studios will never finish the game, because it’s far more profitable not to. Because Rust isn’t an artistic expression. It’s a product. It wasn’t made to elicit emotion in the player, it wasn’t made to capture a life or a world, it wasn’t even made to be original. It was made to be a cancer, and like a cancer, it should be cut out.

I bought a book for this next video.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/ArhWJKf9rKA

As video game genres age, developers tend to reuse aspects of previous works as a medium to plant their new ideas within, allowing them to focus on creating new assets instead of reinventing agriculture every single time. In the past, there wasn’t a default first-person shooter player controller so many developers experimented with different styles to see what best resonated with their audiences. Nowadays, character controller styles have homogenised after developers discovered what players liked most. This has caused many games to function fairly similarly, but it also leaves re-examination of older attempts in an interesting place. We can expect the roughest examples to originate from a new gaming technology’s introduction, I mean, have you seen movement systems in VR games? Some genres lend themselves to being played with simple controls on a limited controller, but others often struggle to keep things simple. Fighting games, for example, are notorious for requiring complex inputs and precise timing, putting a lot of pressure on the game’s controls. These games are immensely popular, and are often one of the few video game genres that allow those involved in their development to earn continuous revenue from purchases of the next instalments, re-releases, downloadable content, and official partnerships for competitive events. Excessive input delay or awkwardness in execution could spell disaster for any game hoping to establish a competitive scene, risking potentially millions of dollars over a single mistake. In 1995, with the introduction of Sony’s Playstation, 3D rendering video game hardware was entering homes worldwide, signalling the beginning of the race to be the first to publish a fighting game for the new system that took advantage of the hardware capabilities. Shortly thereafter, Namco’s Tekken would solidify itself as the most popular among those first 3D fighters, with its immaculate performance, stylish characters, flexible playstyles, and a surprisingly intuitive control scheme that assigned each of a character’s limbs to its own dedicated button on the controller. 28 years later, Bandai Namco are about to add an eighth instalment onto their Tekken franchise, an entry fans are very excited for after the success of Tekken 7. Inspired by this, as well as my randomiser’s unflinching recommendation, I figured now would be the perfect time to see what all this Tekken stuff is about, and where better to begin than the first game.

Likely to be the biggest hurdle for most is the game’s presentation. Early 3D has undoubtedly aged pretty poorly, and anyone seeking to replicate the visual style of the original Playstation tends to draw inspiration from the system’s later games, as well as taking some technical liberties. Modelling for games was obviously a totally new thing: rendering would have to happen in real time, forcing the models and animations to adhere to stricter optimisation practises than necessary for 3D animation for film. Since the speed of fighting games during the early 90s was picking up drastically, Namco knew that Tekken would have to run well in order to seriously compete. Tekken’s director, Seiichi Iishi’s 1993 project Virtua Fighter was illustrative of this issue. On the Saturn, Virtua Fighter cannot maintain a steady framerate, a flaw that Iishi wouldn’t permit within Tekken. As a result, all of the game’s stages are flat, infinite arenas with a scrolling background to represent the stage’s location. Some of these, like the Fiji stage and the King George Island stage, seem to be hand drawn artworks, while others like Acropolis and Venezia could just be photographs. Neither style is particularly exciting or interesting, and the lack of a stage select option in Versus mode signals to me that nobody at Namco felt strongly about any of the stages either. The stages have been made this way to allow more processing capacity for the game’s character models. The majority of these models are genuinely really charming and characterful, even if I can count the polygons by eye. Of the eight main roster characters, Law’s permanently agape mouth is my only big complaint. Kazuya’s design is iconic and his outfits are great. I like Paul’s sleeveless red gi and square hair, but I don’t care much for the leather. Jack looks surprisingly good considering his exaggerated proportions, and King’s leopard head fits naturally on his model. Nina and Michelle look really good too, though Michelle’s casual outfit is a little bland in terms of palette. She’s also called Michelle Chang despite the Native American themes in her primary outfit and ending animation which is a bit strange. Yoshimitsu completes the eight primary characters, and while his armour looks okay I feel like how he holds his tiny sword seems very awkward. He only ever uses it when a specific command is input, so he could’ve just had it sheathed the whole time otherwise. There are 10 other characters in the game, whose visual designs are a mixed bag; Ganryu is a solid looking low poly sumo wrestler, while Kuma’s model is rough. Poor bear doesn’t even look good in the renders. I can definitely see how people thought this was a guy in a suit and not an actual bear. And there’s also Heihachi’s Grindr profile picture. I understand that P Jack is an incomplete version of Jack, but he looks much more like an action figure than any fictional military robot I’ve ever seen. Wang is this game’s plain old man, Lee is trying to get into one of those K-Pop boy bands with 20 members, and Anna is unfortunately just as bland as Michelle’s palette. The menus in this game are awful. They aren’t particularly pretty, they’re arranged in strange ways, and if the Arcade mode is selected, the player can’t back out to the main menu. The only way back is to reset the game entirely, or pick a character and lose the first fight. Though, I suppose the menus aren’t the main draw of the game.

Fighting games live and die by their controls, and while it has its problems, Tekken’s controls on PS1 are surprisingly solid. Triangle and square control a character’s arms while circle and cross control their legs. Movement and blocking are all performed on the d-pad, the Playstation’s Achilles Heel. The d-pad buttons are brutal. I hate them so much. How many other controllers give you calluses? Movements are mostly done through tapping forward or backward instead of holding the direction down, with subsequent taps triggering different movement speeds. There isn’t any real side-stepping yet, aside from Heihachi changing his angle of attack which doesn’t really do anything except show off that this is indeed a 3D game. As for the controls for the fighting, players hold back to block and can either block high or low. Blocking high leaves the player vulnerable to lows, while blocking low leaves them vulnerable to overheads. Which attacks are lows is pretty obvious, but determining which attacks are overheads is less clear, though fortunately most overheads won’t lead into a combo or a knock down. There are methods to beat blocking outright, but generally the neutral game involves a lot of blocking and repositioning, as both characters try to move into a range to hit their opponent with a move that passes their block, while also avoiding being hit themself. There are a handful of attacks that are truly unblockable, as well as grabs that beat blocking and some other moves that briefly stun a blocking opponent. Fully unblockables are very slow and easily punishable so they aren’t really worth worrying about, but grabs are pretty good when they actually hit. To input a grab, the player needs to know which series of button presses result in the move they want, it isn’t as simple as pressing the grab button. These inputs are often different depending on the character, and the player either needs to memorise all possible inputs or at least have a list of moves open somewhere. The manual lists a handful of special input attacks that each character might have, but it doesn’t include all of them, so I referred to a list I found online. A standard grab input typically uses triangle and square pressed simultaneously which I found easier to press with my index and ring fingers instead of trying to press both with just my thumb. I’m unsure if this is a failure on the game’s part - not using the L or R buttons at all - or the controller’s design but either way I definitely felt the game would play way better on a stick. Inputting the directional components of the special attacks would also be way easier on a stick. Pressing forward, down, and down-forward in sequence is Kazuya’s entire gameplan, and hitting that with a thumb took some time to get used to. The rest of the cast vary in terms of technical requirements that leave a fair amount of space for skill expression, as well as a pathway from simpler to more complex playstyles.

Tekken launched with an initial roster of eight playable characters, but when it was ported to the Playstation players were able to access an additional ten unlockable characters. Those extra characters are all derivatives of the main cast, and are usually unlocked by clearing the arcade mode, though there are two that differ somewhat. Most discussions of fighting game characters often use colloquial language to describe particular character archetypes, though Tekken kind of shirks the normal labels by the nature of the game’s mechanics. There isn’t a Ryu-style “Shoto” character since there isn’t a single projectile in the game. Instead, Kazuya functions more as a 50:50 style character, given that his strongest combo starting tools both require the same input to initiate and only differ when choosing either punch or kick. Opponents have to guess which height is the correct one to block, else they’ll be eating Kazuya’s full damage. Paul, in contrast, hopes to bully his opponent into blocking low with the threat of his incredibly painful two hit combo. Unfortunately, what Paul actually gets from forcing his opponent to block is barely worth worrying about. He can grab, or commit to an extremely risky jump kick to try to get comparable damage to the sweep-punch combo, or he can swing with single attacks. Michelle and Law unfortunately feel very similar to each other, both characters have long one button sequences that deal a hefty chunk on hit, and cause a knockdown. They also both lack a means to stun a blocking opponent, and Law even has trouble hitting most characters after knocking them down. I don’t really understand Nina’s gameplan, but I did finish her arcade mode on the default difficulty relatively quickly. The CPU likes to grab a lot as Nina, but I wouldn’t call her a grappler by any stretch. Even King, who is arguably the closest thing to a grappler in the game, isn’t really a grappler. He has more grab attacks than anyone else, but I found his more standard moves to be just as effective as any other fighter’s. King’s elbow attack also stuns on block so getting in to deal damage is fairly easy, unlike a typical grappler. Yoshimitsu functions similarly to Kazuya in that his main game plan revolves around forcing the opponent to guess between one of two options, except in Yoshi’s case the guessing revolves around whether the second kick is going to come out or not. The fact he has sword swings that are unblockable is entirely irrelevant to anybody picking Yoshimitsu, even the CPU doesn’t try it. They’re just unreasonably slow to start, and Yoshi doesn’t have any moves that’d realistically lead into hitting a sword swing. Jack functions as a keep-away character on account of his massive stature and long arms. The guy just swings normals and most characters have to respect him doing it. Well, most characters that aren’t Jack, which sounds strange but there are the additional characters to mention, a bunch of whom are Jack. P Jack is obviously Jack, Kuma is also Jack, even Ganryu is Jack. Kuma and Ganryu aren’t exact copies, but they use almost all of Jack’s moves. Ganryu’s arms are shorter than Jack’s, but he has a few Sumo-themed moves to set him apart. Kuma, on the other paw, has the longest arms in the game. So long, in fact, that it’s possible to tech-lock a knocked down opponent to death, including hitting them if they don’t tech. It’s super cheap, but I was able to beat the arcade mode extremely fast this way, though doing it as Kuma doesn’t actually reward anything. The only way to unlock Heihachi as a playable character is to beat the arcade mode in under five minutes as one of the original eight characters. On the default difficulty, and using the standard 2 round matches, I couldn’t finish all ten matches in the time limit without taking advantage of Kuma’s tech-trapping, so in order to unlock Heihachi, I had to drop rounds to one per match and learn to actually play as Kazuya. I had been playing as Armour King a lot prior to discovering Kuma since I liked using King’s elbow attack to stun blocking opponents, and then following that up with Kazuya’s powerful uppercut. Both of these moves are present on Armour King so it felt natural. That being said, Armour King most definitely isn’t the best of these unlockable sub-bosses. Lee is Kazuya’s penultimate fight in arcade mode, though he derives most of his attacks from Law. Unlike Law, however, Lee’s kicking string doesn’t have to end. The guy just keeps going. And it can’t be ducked like whenever Law gets swinging. Finally, there was one character that I saw but never managed to unlock. In order to play as the final character, the player needs to perfect the shoot-em-up minigame they can play while the game boots. It's fairly long and, honestly, it isn’t that fun, and any mistake forces a restart. But if you manage it, you can unlock and play as the final character in the game: Devil Kazuya. Who is just Kazuya but purple. What a prize.

Fighting game single player content is always a little thin, and Tekken is predictably rather limited. There’s no VS mode against the CPU, there isn’t a story mode, there isn’t even an easy way to access the shooter game mode without resetting the console. The only option is Arcade mode, which is slightly different depending on the chosen character. Arcade mode involves fighting each of the eight main cast characters consecutively in a random order, with the CPU strength getting slightly higher with each new character. Then, the ninth match is against the chosen character’s specific sub-boss, followed by the tenth match against Heihachi, victory in which earns the player an ending animation, provided they’re playing one of the main cast. Arcade mode as a sub-boss will make their penultimate fight their main cast counterpart. So, Armour King’s ninth fight is against King, Kuma fights Paul, Lee fights Kazuya etc. Heihachi’s Arcade mode is different by randomly ordering the sub-bosses instead of the main cast, before Kazuya transforms into his Devil form for the finale. This is the only way to fight against a CPU sub-boss while playing as a character that isn’t assigned to their main cast counterpart. So if a player wanted to play Ganryu versus Anna, they need to find a friend to play with. Gross. I did find the Arcade mode to be enjoyable, at least, but without a greater goal like a tournament or something, once I made it through a few times as the characters I liked, the game’s content basically ran out of stuff. I couldn’t even do the same Iron Man challenge I did when I played Dawn of War to get more out of my play time. And as funny as some of the ending animations might be, I didn’t laugh every time Kazuya smiled at me.

As a starting point for fighting games, there are plenty of worse options besides Tekken. It lacks a tutorial and it isn’t likely you’ll be able to get many opportunities to play against other people, but the game is simple to understand while also having some hidden depth to explore with the right time commitment. For someone who has put any time into a standard fighting game, there’s nothing really here aside from the historic perspective. All the things in Tekken are things any intermediate player would already be well aware of, even if they’ve only ever played 2D fighters. Aside from some mild juggling techniques, the top end of the first Tekken game isn’t particularly complex. It's impressive, but I think the third game is the landmark of the series for a reason.

At almost 30 years old, Tekken still controls remarkably well, runs immaculately, and laid the foundations for one of the genre’s most beloved franchises. It isn’t as visually revolutionary as it used to be, nor is it the pinnacle of gameplay expression, but for something that was among the first of its kind Tekken is remarkably flawless. In a modern context, Tekken serves as more of a niche tutorial than a competitive platform, but it wasn’t ever that competitive anyway. The character designs are simple, but still mostly great, and the animated endings are still relevant even now. The game is most certainly antiquated and the series will move further away from this basis with each new entry, but if you’ve ever been curious about the origins of an iconic series, Tekken is totally tolerable and definitely has value in retrospect.

Next up, the first multiplayer game I’ve featured on the channel.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be found here: https://youtu.be/BCH3jbQyIiM

“Anarchism” is an unfortunate word. While it was initially used to describe a political movement seeking to abolish a hierarchical government and encourage a more cooperative arrangement for society as a whole, the word “anarchy” was derailed into becoming synonymous with words like “mayhem”, “lawlessness”, and “chaos”. Because of this, it’s difficult to imagine a world where an anarchist arrangement of society is anything but a dystopia, and yet Ace Team have been doing their best to truly explore the idea within the video game medium. Since their first released game back in 2009, Ace Team have been examining the concept of a fully anarchist society, how it would work, who would live in it, and how other hierarchical societies would interact with it. In this effort, Ace Team have created three games set within their fictional anarchist world. The first Zeno Clash game details a member of Zenozoik society struggling with a moral challenge. With no concept of crime and legal processes, Ghat has to make judgments based on his personal morality and desires, a decision resulting in his family disowning him and chasing him out of their home. In the sequel, a foreign power has come to Zenozoik to forcefully establish laws, encouraging the people to become admissible in the lands beyond Zenozoik at the cost of their unbroken freedom. Ghat understands these laws as little more than a means to ensnare him and his family, so he fights them all the way beyond the end of the world. The Zenozoik shown in the first two Zeno Clash games is a violent place. The people are all members of gangs, they’re technologically stunted, and they’re easily manipulated, but despite all of that, nobody starves - unless they choose to. This setting is tremendously rich and Ace Team could make games set in Zenozoik for as long as they have stories to tell. Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, the next game in the series, takes the player to an older Zenozoik, before Golem’s intervention, before Haldestom, back to the days when the old hegemonies ruled via their one law.

Unlike its predecessors, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is a third person action game that follows the adventure of Pseudo, a hermit who has the inexplicable power to awaken as a skeleton in the night in order to revive his dead, fleshy body. Pseudo finds himself called to a nearby altercation when he hears a song in the wind. An elderly man and his grandson are being harassed by another person who insists the elder must fight him. The player then gets the opportunity to play the one law’s dice game before completing the fight part of the ritual as the elder. No matter how hard you beat this guy’s ass, I don’t think Grandpa’s attacks actually do any damage. Despite his efforts, the elder is unable to defeat Bhlag, and ultimately ends up being killed during the fight. Typically, murder isn’t accepted by the people of Zenozoik, and since Pseudo witnesses the fight, Bhlag quickly challenges him to try and cover up what he had done. Without dice, Pseudo loses the ritual game by default and must accept the penalty without retaliation. What follows is the player’s first proper experience with the game’s combat. The camera is positioned just above Pseudo’s right shoulder, giving the player a good view of the enemy in front of him, but not obscuring their peripheral vision with a first person perspective. Not all of Pseudo’s attacks will cause enemies to flinch, so the player will be punished for mindlessly mashing attacks, demonstrating to the player the thing they are told in the tutorial, that Pseudo is not the strongest and will have to take advantage of his superior speed. The player does this by dodging around their opponents and keeping mobile during a fight. At the conclusion of this fight, Pseudo and the Boy try to establish a plan going forward. Who will care for the Boy, and how will he get to wherever the carers are? Pseudo suggests waiting at a nearby fortress in hopes of catching a messenger going toward the Boy’s old home. The Boy then loots the dice and ritual belt from his dead grandfather before the two begin their journey to the fortress. When they make it to Gemini's palace, they’re invited inside to meet her. As it happens, the Boy also has magical powers; he’s able to transfer lifeforce from one living thing to another, though strangely he views this as a curse. Gemini plans to use this power to expand her rule throughout Zenozoik, but the reasons for why she would want to do this are fairly vague. It isn’t like she’s collecting taxes or anything. Sensing that the Boy isn’t safe in Gemini’s possession, and prepared to face the coming bounty-hunters, Pseudo commits to taking the Boy to his old home himself and the two set out across Zenozoik.

I’ve seen this game described as “soulslike” a few times now, and there’s definitely some merit to that claim, though you might have to squint a bit to see it. There’s a single combat difficulty that can be quite the challenge before the player properly gets to grips with the combat system. That combat system includes a dodge mechanic, there are campfires at which the player saves and heals, and may also brew a health drink to consume in combat. That health drink doesn’t activate until the animation associated with it completes, meaning that the player has to find opportune times to heal. The world is explored in loops, paths leading away from save points tend to loop back and give the player the chance to open shortcuts to previous hub areas. The combat is quite fast-paced and has a very effective quantity of audio and visual feedback. Pseudo’s attacks are snappy and cancelling between standard attacks, special moves, and dodge attacks feels like inputting combos in a fighting game. In the lower left of the screen is a bar that fills whenever Pseudo lands a hit on an enemy. When the bar is full, the player can engage a brief first-person mode which ends in an extremely powerful attack that is unfortunately a bit buggy. There are a lot of different fighting styles and options within the combat when in motion which is highly impressive and I enjoyed it a lot, but there are aspects that I think are undercooked and things that people who’ve played the game all the way through probably aren’t familiar with. Firstly, this game has a blocking mechanic. Blocking occurs passively, though, which is just baffling to me. In order to block an attack the player needs Pseudo to stand perfectly still and tank an enemy’s attack to the face. Who would ever do this? They can’t be moving, or dodging, or attacking, which is totally antithetical to what a normal player would do when presented with danger. And Pseudo still takes damage whenever he successfully blocks an attack. The parry system acts in much the same way, although there’s at least a timing challenge involved in parrying. Secondly, there’s a stamina mechanic in this game, though it doesn’t slow Pseudo down or stop him from relentlessly attacking which is appreciated. What it does is increase the damage Pseudo takes and reduces the amount of invulnerability frames on dodges, which isn’t conveyed well at all. For a while I thought enemy attacks were able to deal a random range of damage, when one moment I was surviving one attack, and then the next that same attack would kill me outright. But no, Pseudo just gets tired and takes more damage. I think all this pushes the gameplay toward a style that keeps the player out of danger at all times, which I didn’t find to be the most fun strategy, just the most effective. I often found myself using the dash attack, then cancelling that into a special move, then a dodge attack, and finally disengaging so that I might start the sequence over again. All of these attacks cause the enemies to flinch, so I was never in danger from the enemy I was hitting directly.

Actually, that’s a good way of transitioning into talking about the game’s level of challenge. I’m by no means an elite ultra mega gamer, but I can hang, and for the first half of the game or so it took me at least two attempts to beat a fight. I was trying to engage with the game on its terms which took me a few hours to unlearn. Again, taking increased damage from having low stamina was not well communicated, so I found I’d be relentlessly attacking enemies until they’d suddenly kill me. Eventually, though, once I learned the combat system, the game ran out of challenges. Once I was familiar with Wrehgg’s attacks, I beat him every time. The Outcast and his giant friend weren’t an issue either. The same crew of regular citizenry and members of the Director’s cult hunt the player all throughout Zenozoik, and while each new enemy has their own fighting style, their repeated appearances make them less interesting. This is additionally true when that citizenry is also reused as spectres in the night. At about 14 hours in length, the game is definitely spreading its content a bit thin, but I don’t fully subscribe to this idea. Naturally, games like this are going to have a lot of encounters against enemies the player has already overcome. The player gets to express their skill against an enemy that might have been troublesome before, and Ace Team gets some more use out of the complex enemies they’ve designed. But man, Bhlag just won’t stay down. The handful of boss fights are really cool though, mainly due to how fascinating all of the designs of the enemies are, but sometimes the fight’s mechanics are visually spectacular.

I think it goes without saying, but this game is gorgeous. The art direction and technical artistry are phenomenal, and I almost can’t believe a team as small as Ace Team managed to produce something this beautiful. The shapes, the colours, the shading, even the little scratchy marks, it all oozes style and artistic vision. The world is stuffed with life and character, even the wild areas where it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a normal forest. And the people living in Zenozoik are wonderful. I love Pseudo’s design, his permanently furrowed brow perfectly encapsulates his grouchy attitude, and the checkerboard designs tattooed onto him show that while he is a hermit who dislikes interacting with other people, he is still very much subject to their one law. The Tchaks tend to have this red and white colouration on their tops in order to denote effectiveness, which is shared with some of Pseudo’s tattoos as well as the Boy’s clothes. The ritual dice game is quite plain in comparison to the rest of the game, though. The dice are thrown onto a skin placed over the grass, and while the skin looks great, I’d much rather be looking up instead. Just look at the sunset. And the stars in the night. Magical. The plant-life is similarly magical, when it isn’t trying to kill you, and the presence of non-Rath bird animals is very welcome. Mostly. This cat guy thing is a tremendous design but I absolutely hate it. Great job. The combat animations have great weight to them, and the variety is astonishing too, not just on Pseudo’s end. The way this enemy pirouettes whenever she throws her boomerang attack, or how this guy can’t actually see so he’s fumbling around searching for the player with his hand. I’m sure I could gush about this game’s presentation all day, but I think just looking at it does more than I can express.

Now, a beautifully presented world does little for a game if the thing is a nightmare to traverse and lacks interesting things to do. Fortunately, these visuals aren’t going to waste. Zenozoik’s geography has yet to be ground down to the rolling hills common in Zeno Clash 2’s rendition, instead the world is craggy and rocky, with a lot of vertical layers stacked on top of each other. Exploration often involves a lot of climbing and hopping over gaps in the path, circling around prominent terrain features, and then knocking down the same suspiciously placed stone block to create a path back to the campsite. The mountain region has a greater focus on higher climbs, while the coastal swamp features smaller ledges followed quickly by returning back down to the base level. There are small settlements all over the place, though they’re mostly empty aside from the two vendors who set up shops within. I don’t know whether the abandonment of all of the villages is because everyone is hunting Pseudo and the Boy, but maybe. It’s quite astounding just how many homes have been modelled and placed in the world, filled with trinkets and references for long-time fans to get, places where the residents might farm their food, and then nobody’s there. There’s also only a handful of Corwids in the whole game! They still live in the woods, but there’s much more structure out here than there used to be (or will be), and Haldestom seems to be actively trying to keep the Corwids away which is something I had expected to be present before. Also, the living statues return, due to popular demand, I suppose. I quite like the ancient fortress, though. The way it all tightly weaves around itself, with enemies suddenly appearing from their hiding places was a welcome change from the normal way lesser enemies are handled. Not that they’re bad, just that all the buff aardvarks in the game are pretty easy to beat and they’re surprisingly common. And since there are so many potion ingredients to collect, I did find myself fighting every single aardvark and pterodactyl I came across. Some of the routes that circle back to previous areas do seem a bit contrived, and while the design of the structure is impressive, I don’t think Corwids would really bother with building a one to one scale replica of Blight Town. Especially when Pseudo’s just living in a tent.

The player is first introduced to Pseudo in his skeletal form. Somewhat reminiscent of the opening of the first Zeno Clash game, Artifacts of Chaos begins in a dream realm while a mysterious person with a gruff voice delivers the combat tutorial. The voice then instructs Pseudo to wake up, though the world he awakens into is likely not what the player expected. Pseudo is still a skeleton, wandering in the night. There are other skeletons en route to where Pseudo’s flesh lies. He had been crushed by a log and his body lies face down on the ground amidst his current campsite. But with the skeleton’s help, the log is removed and Pseudo can truly wake up. Pseudo sees a former body point south-east, though what we are to glean from this I’m unsure. And this is how the player meets their protagonist, crushed and alone, fortunate that his ability to reanimate as a skeleton kept him from staying dead. As the player explores this first area, they’re likely to walk into a trigger which causes Pseudo to stop and wonder where music is coming from. As the player approaches the source, they’re shown the battle between Bhlag and the Boy’s Grandpa, and then Pseudo intervenes. Intent on returning to his life of solitude, Pseudo wants to leave the Boy in someone else’s care as soon as he can. When shown his original plan to offload the Boy onto a messenger wouldn’t work, Pseudo quickly decides that he will make the journey himself. There’s very little conflict in Pseudo’s thoughts: that option won’t work, he will have to find another way. When Pseudo and the Boy finally make it to the Boy’s brother, and Pseudo again learns that he cannot offload the Boy here, his immediate reaction is to find the next place. Though his original motivation may have been to get back to normality as soon as he could, Pseudo’s sense of responsibility is the strongest characterisation he has. It makes him very likeable, despite his grouchy outer appearance. And when everyone starts hunting him, and with no idea who should care for the Boy, Pseudo heads north to speak to someone he wants very little to do with. His former master might know what to do. But when that attempt also fails, I think players are supposed to get the sense that Pseudo makes the decision to care for the Boy himself. Instead of running around Zenozoik looking for a suitable guardian, the plan changes to collecting shield artefacts in order to defeat Gemini and call off the hunt. There’s even a distressing scene where a machine Pseudo comes across starts emitting sounds that cause all birds throughout Zenozoik to lose their balance. The Boy, being kind of a bird, is affected by this, and Pseudo must make the run north to hopefully destroy the machine to save the Boy from the pain. This kind of emotional run across Zenozoik isn’t unique to this one instance, though, but that second occurrence is something we’ll get into once those sensitive to spoilers are gone.

Which is why I’ll put the marker here. If you intend to play the game and don’t want it spoiled, you’d better skip to the timestamp.

We’ve pretty much covered the bulk of the narrative excluding the big finale and the details of the shield artefact hunt, so I won’t go over it all again in this section. Instead, I want to discuss some metaphorical readings of the story as well as address some comments on my previous Zeno Clash videos. In a past life, I went to university to study writing. While I was attending classes, I was enrolled in a subject called “Creative Reading”. It sounds really stupid, but the professor knew exactly what he was doing, and it was probably the best class I’ve ever taken. One of the biggest takeaways I got was the idea that nothing a writer ever includes is truly random. The blue curtains might “just be blue” to the writer, but they’re not telling the truth, they specified that information for a particular, maybe even unconscious reason. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking that Artifacts of Chaos is about impending fatherhood, and the journey an expectant father would be going through before finally accepting their new role in life. This interpretation makes the ending hurt even more, as Pseudo is finally ready to accept his new life with the Boy before he is ripped away, hopefully taken to serve some greater purpose. Of course, this is just my interpretation, and unfortunately it ignores the game’s exploration of anarchism and the presence of “the one law” which I don’t think plays much of a role in Artifacts of Chaos anyway. Compared to previous titles in this series, Zenozoik’s anarchic society isn’t given very much attention. Ghat expends a lot of energy fleeing from Haldestom after attacking Father-Mother in Zeno Clash, and he’s just as active in his attempts to find a way to free the city from the oppressive regime that has taken over in the sequel. Pseudo plays by the one law all throughout Artifacts of Chaos, until the very end when he declares the law unjust. I don’t dislike this direction for the series, to put more focus on the other people who live within Zenozoik, rather than just Ghat’s conflicts with the morality of law, but I am left feeling underwhelmed by Artifacts of Chaos’ narrative as a result. At least not to the same degree as Zeno Clash 2, though. Artifacts of Chaos feels kind of narrow in that way, at least that’s my interpretation of it. Which is also something that was commented on in my previous video on this series. I didn’t see the parallels between the prison Father-Mother was thrown into and Zenozoik itself being deliberately isolated. How Golem had basically created a miniature version of his own duty and handed it over to his Enforcers. A user named Munsonroe left a really excellent comment on their understanding of the first two games, and while I think their own life experience has coloured their reading a bit, it’s very well reasoned and I think a great example of why I’m still in the YouTube game. Tell me your ideas, help me to broaden my perspective, it’s not always bad to allow others to influence your reading of something.

As the game approaches the climax, with the player embarking on their quest to collect all of the great shield artefacts, they come across a guy who had once been Gemini’s right hand. Circumstances changed, however, and they were forced to exile themself, though they didn’t go far. The Outcast had taken up residence in a cave on the coast, beyond the swamp where the people of Zenozoik rarely venture. After the player defeats the Outcast, they explain that they cannot hand over the shield artefact. In a fit of rage, the Outcast had tossed the trinket into the mouth of a nearby sleeping whale. So, Pseudo and the Boy go to meet the whale and see if they can get the shield artefact from them. Word is an ancient being, so old that a tree seems to have sprouted from their face and someone has carved one of the rocks that they have stacked atop their head. Word remembers everything, they are empowered that way, much like the Boy’s life force exchanging power. And, as many ancient beings do in fiction, Word has been using their immense memory to think about the state of things and how the future might shape up. Word explains that Zenozoik has been a prison for a very long time, and I have to mention that whoever was directing the voice actors should’ve been super picky about pronunciation. “Zeno-zoh-ik”. But anyway, Word critiques the law, and the artefacts. The one law binds Zenozoik while the outside world drowns in their many laws. The artefacts are components of the magic circle the Zenos abide by, they aren’t truly useful outside of the one law. Nobody can hunt or grow food with an artefact, much like nobody could hunt with a wallet full of cash. It’s definitely profound in some ways, but Word’s presence in the story is only to deliver this monologue, which is little more than the writer directly inserting their notes into the story. As much as I might find the ideas agreeable, the way they’ve been given to this character to just dump comes across as a poorly wrapped bandage. As if they were doing play tests and realised people didn’t get that anarchism was supposed to be a strong theme in the game, so they literally just copied and pasted the first few sentences of the Wikipedia article into the script and then created an entirely new character to read it out. Word also “predicts” that the future will involve pain in the name of change, that the people of Zenozoik are going to have to struggle in order to make their world better. And yeah, they do. There are two whole other games that detail aspects of that struggle. Some clairvoyance this whale has. Real gifted individual. And the way Pseudo leans to the Boy to say “do you understand what this guy’s talking about?” is the same 4th wall unbreaking that Pathologic was pulling back in 2005. It’s not so exciting 18 years later.

While it is part of the greater Zeno Clash universe, it isn’t necessary to have played the previous two games in order to understand this one. There are characters you might lack context for and little easter eggs that you likely won’t understand if you only play Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, but overall, I would definitely recommend playing this. It’s just as unique as the first Zeno Clash, while allowing for the customization available in Zeno Clash 2, and I think its graphics are far more appealing. There is one caveat to this recommendation, though, and that is a hardware issue. This game is very resource intensive, and I actually couldn’t run the game at low settings and record it via OBS with my previous GPU. I had some rinky-dink AMD card that was a couple of years old by that point, but I’m now running a 4070 which allowed me to record the game at its prettiest. That being said, if you don’t intend to record your playthrough then it probably won’t be a concern.

I think Clash: Artifacts of Chaos achieved exactly what Ace Team intended for it to achieve. There’s a new, modern feeling combat system, the visual presentation is on another level in terms of quality over their previous titles, the world shadows the Dark Souls style interconnected map with looping level design, and there’s a charming character dynamic to enjoy throughout the game’s generous run time. The game ticks all of these boxes and it’s a lot of fun, Ace Team should be commended for making such an excellent game. But I think they felt Artifacts of Chaos had to adhere to the themes they were exploring in previous Zeno Clash games and resorted to jamming those themes in with little consideration with how it’d work. Zenozoik has a law and a hierarchical leader, not anarchy, and that law and leader are the reason for the conflict in the game, not some condition of the setting that the narrative has to work around. The othering of Zenozoik’s population and their isolation within their borders is not a factor any of the characters ever think about, save for one instance where it is mentioned and quickly forgotten. Don’t misunderstand me, I like this game a lot, I just wish it could’ve lived without feeling like it had to tie itself to something else. The setting and character designs were more than enough, and that would’ve been far, far easier to manage than trying to shoe-horn in this strange pseudo-anarchy.

More fighting with some wacky characters to come!

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be found here:
https://youtu.be/wxowZ6Sb28E

I like dark stories, and I think the success of From Software this past decade or so indicates that I’m not alone. Everyone loves an underdog, and there’s no greater challenge than overcoming the impossible. When the world crumbles to dust, that little seedling pushing its way through the rubble at least gives up hope that the next iteration of life won’t make the same mistakes that we did. The writers of these stories do have to practise a bit of restraint in order to create an effectively tragic setting, otherwise their world is just hopeless and even a huge victory seems utterly worthless. Where that line can be drawn is hard to say, and I think different people are going to have different tolerances for misery. I also think Zelart’s There Is No Light has crossed the line. Somewhere between Lovecraft and Glukhovsky, There Is No Light is set below the ruins of a once populous city, now uninhabitable due to some nebulous disaster. The people have been living in the subway tunnels for generations, guided by some self-appointed religious figures who interpret and accommodate an other-worldly being known as “The Great Hand”. The religious fanaticism isn’t confined to the followers of the Hand, and its repeated presence across the whole game definitely added to the notion that humanity is deep into an unrecoverable entropy. It makes me wonder why the player is fighting at all, and I think, unfortunately, that Zelart probably doesn't really know either.

The game opens with a short scene in which the unnamed player character is enjoying a few seconds with his pregnant wife in their home. The sound of a fight can be heard just outside the door, and upon going to investigate, the player character is suckerpunched by a man with strange shoulderpads. His wife is then abducted and carried outside into the carnage. The surrounding tent community is ablaze, the residents murdered by the armoured invaders, and the player character left alone to track down his wife. His dying mother tells the player that his wife has been taken to the Central Station and that they will give his wife and baby to the Hand. As the player makes their way toward the Central Station, they come across more of this mysterious army, as well as a much larger humanoid with a lot more health. Once they’ve defeated this enemy, they hallucinate a strange dark room in which another large man in a blue coat beats the enemy against a wall. The man in blue laughs, and the player is placed back where they were. Further along the path, the player is shown the dilapidated train network that used to run through the tunnels, some other civilian populations living their lives in the ruins, and more armoured people milling around. Upon entering the Central Station, the player sees the throng of people gathered awaiting the tribute ceremony. The gate to somewhere called the Sanctuary opens, and the player is allowed to enter. Inside, a priestly dressed man offers a baby to a hole in the wall, and a tentacle-like hand wriggles free to claim the child. The player character attempts to interfere, at which point he is beaten by the guards and tossed into the corpse pile tunnel. The man in blue appears from the shadows, revives the player, and offers them a sword, a pact signed in blood. A year passes. It’s time for the tribute ceremony again, and Samedi wants this to be the year the Great Hand finally meets their demise. The player returns to the Sanctuary within the Central Station, sneaks behind the curtain, and kills the monstrous deity. In its death throes, the Great Hand sucks 4 coloured lights out of the player character and uses them to seal a nearby door. From here on, the player’s role is to explore the quadrants of the underground, defeat a powerful enemy in each, and reclaim the pieces of their soul. It’s an effective opening that does a lot with very little text. The player is shown their final objective, given a method to achieve it, and introduced to their primary ally moving forward. The fact an entire year passes so suddenly is a bit surprising, but I suppose there needed to be some context given to Samedi’s casual tone throughout the game, as well as the rapidly improved skill set the player character gains as they progress throughout the world. It does lessen the drama of the kidnapping, though. Knowing that a full year has passed without the player character doing anything to fight back, rescue or avenge their wife, or reclaim their soul or whatever seems a bit strange. Perhaps the Great Hand really is that powerful.

The coloured blobs that flew out of the player character were scattered across the underworld, forming parasitic relationships with the most powerful beings they could find and kind of just sitting and waiting to be killed. These enemies wait at the end of long pathways leading from the Central Station, although they branch off of the station in a peculiar way. There’s a northern and southern path, a western path that immediately turns east, and the eastern path that’s more like a downward path. I followed the northern path first, and learned that each of these branches is shockingly formulaic. There’s a bit of a narrative throughline specific to each pathway that doesn’t interact with the others at all, and often these narratives circle back to the same ideas and themes. That being said, while the game is set within subway tunnels beneath a city, the variety among the environments is quite impressive. The Depot in the north is little mor e than a collection of subway tunnels, maintenance access walkways, and a bunch of spiderwebs holding it all together. But as the player continues further along the paths the tunnels disappear and things get more surreal. The New Dawn area is almost an ancient ruin with a writhing red lifeform smeared all over the place. That gives way to a stone temple, and then a series of decadent golden hallways that’d be at home on some kind of bougie science fiction cruiseliner. The abstract environments continue throughout most of the rest of the game too, which is visually great, but makes piecing it all together basically impossible. Also, for a game with such an apocalyptic setting, there are so many people all over the place. There are loads of pilgrims trying to get a grab of their Messiah, there are always a large number of people hanging out at the Central Station, even Nimbus has a big population, enough to mourn for family killed in a war. And I can’t imagine a desperate, starving civilisation somehow churning out this quantity of sculptures and monuments, and then just leaving them around. It makes me wonder how dire the situation really is.

The sculptures are beautiful too. This game is full of wonderful visuals scattered all throughout. Detailed and fascinating monstrous corpses float in the void, little more than the most grotesque plants continue to live in the dark underground, and stunningly opulent architecture spreads like a fungus throughout the entire game. Some of these places aren’t literal, at least I hope not, and eventually repeated exposure to all of the bizarre environments quashed my initial pedantry. It doesn’t matter how these things got here, they’re cool. I think the sound design is very good too. The footstep sounds change depending on the floor material. There’s low humming wherever large machines are spinning away doing whatever. It’s very immersive and done really well. The music is also great, it’s generally very moody and slow, but whenever a fight kicks off someone wheels out the distorted guitar and goes wild for a bit. I do have some gripes, mainly that there are too many songs that feature mostly a single, lonely piano. While that is good, it gives off too much of a Hollow Knight feel. A couple of songs are a little uncanny in that way and I could swear I heard Resting Grounds in there at one stage. Hollow Knight doesn’t own melancholic piano but it was definitely suspicious. The combat sounds are pretty good too. The fights can become quite chaotic, but the excellent sound design makes even the most hectic battlefield readable at the very least. The enemy sprites are also mostly good, though it’s probably the weakest aspect of the presentation overall. There are a lot of different enemies in this game, and they’re all visually very impressive, but too often things won’t layer over each other particularly well. There Is No Light doesn’t often swarm the player with enemies, but there are instances where the screen can become very noisy and the player character gets buried beneath a pile of attack particles and enemies bunching up. Some enemies also look quite similar to each other, making determining which should be the first the player targets difficult.

The combat takes up the largest portion of total play time, and while it is okay, it has a lot of problems. The player starts the game with one sword which has a two-hit combo and an instant activation special attack. Eventually, they’ll gain access to additional weapons, which can all be upgraded a fair bit too. There’s quite a lot going on within most fights so I’ll just run through it so we’re all up to speed. Whenever an enemy attacks a small halo appears above them, colour-coded to indicate the property of the attack. If the halo is red, the following attack can be nullified by dealing damage to the enemy. If the halo is yellow the attack can only be interrupted by a special attack, and if the halo is white the attack cannot be stopped at all. Most attacks in the game are yellow, red attacks are so rare that it’s almost a non-mechanic. In order to use a special move, the player’s Rage bar must have adequate charge. Rage is built by connecting normal attacks with an enemy but it dissipates over time. In the early game, enemies die so fast that it’s unlikely to ever have enough Rage to use special attacks which can get the player thinking that the entire halo system is totally useless, that they might as well just dodge everything instead. In the later stages the ability to cancel enemy attacks is handy, but it does take a few seconds of slashing at an enemy in order to gain Rage in the first place. There’s also another layer to special attacks that doesn’t really matter as the impact is so small, but I’ll mention it anyway. For each special attack landed, this counter in the upper left corner increases. Once it maxes out, the next special attack will cause a healing orb to spawn that heals one health if the player manages to hit it with their sword. This basically never matters, but it’s there. Most attacks deal 2 damage per hit so healing 1 health once every two or three battles is negligible. There’s also another colour-coded system involved in the game’s combat. Hopefully this isn’t getting too confusing. Each pip on an enemy’s health bar can either be red or white. Red health is standard video game health, while white health regenerates. To prevent white health from returning, all of the white health in a line must be removed within the same combo. The game uses this to gate off certain quest stages and locations behind damage challenges that require optimised attacking strategies. I think this is a good way to encourage the player to use all of the tools they have, but the number of enemies that just have 2 or 3 pips of white health is really high, so it’s rare to ever see this mechanic actually mean anything. It’s easy enough to just mash through. For the most part, the player needs to figure out an enemy’s attack rhythm and get hits whenever they can. In time, I learned to attack quickly before an enemy’s attack came out, dodge into a position where I could attack again, and then move away from the enemy to see what its next action would be. This seems like an effective strategy, but there’s an unfortunate input buffer that often causes some of those attack and dodge inputs to combine into dodge attacks that lands the player in danger. In most cases, slamming face first into an enemy is pretty bad, they mostly deal a minimum of 2 damage per attack, and healing resources are surprisingly limited.

Aside from the healing orb the player earns via hitting special attacks, there are other ways to regain health. The game has a similar checkpoint system to the Souls bonfires, although instead it's a big worm that the player heals and levels up at. The player can teleport between any of these that they’ve already come across, although they aren’t the only places the player respawns upon death. They also don’t refill any healing resource, just the player’s health. In order to gain healing charges, the player needs to find them in the world. They typically grow from small plants which the player can harvest once and then never again. The only way to gain a replenishing source of healing charges is to purchase a shrine that appears whenever the player dies in an area enough times. This costs a tiny bit of Karma, which is easy to gain and only ever used for unlocking an ending and the occasional shortcut door. The shrine also only spawns one healing charge per death, so while it is possible to carry the maximum of three charges, the player has to teleport around to all of the other shrines they’ve unlocked to get more. Most of the bosses seem to be balanced around the player bringing zero healing charges to the battle, which definitely makes sense since they fully heal the player and the player can quickly skip any animation associated with activating them. I don’t think I used many healing charges while exploring the world, but the bosses certainly ate them up. As far as balance for the bosses, I feel like the vast majority of them are good challenges, even if I might not care for whatever mechanic has been introduced for the player to try and overcome. The fights can be a little grindy at times, but I don’t mind getting punished for making mistakes. In games like this, it usually takes me a handful of attempts to really understand what the fight is asking me to do, and then I form a plan of attack and overcome the challenge. There Is No Light has that level of challenge and puzzle-solving, but whenever the player dies a certain number of times to a boss this giant text box appears at the top of the screen to tell the player there’s an easy mode. I don’t want to play the easy mode, the difficulty selection strictly said that this was the intended level of challenge. If this could’ve been disabled somewhere then this wouldn’t be an issue, but it cannot be turned off. One of the last things anyone wants to see as they’re struggling with a difficult encounter is someone telling them to turn the difficulty down. Get that away from me, please. The majority of traversal through levels isn’t even challenging, the game is fairly easy until the bosses show up, at which point there might be a bit of resistance, and then suddenly the game wants to patronise you.

Of the three paths open to the player at the start, I went north first, to the old train depot. The spiders have taken over the tunnels here, capturing would-be citizens to take back to their village and rip off their faces so they may live in peace. It’s a bit of a strangely violent facet to an apparently peaceful community. This inconsistent characterisation of the spiders also extends to them constantly attacking the player as they make their way through the tunnels. If they’re friendly, why are they attacking? Beyond the spiders’ lair, is the New Dawn area with its tribe of blood-crazed humans and their leader Corelia, and then the Great Archive further along the path. The people who were living in the Archive soon after the apocalypse were experimenting with demonic summoning, and accidentally summoned a number of beasts they weren’t able to control. Some knew that the demons would eventually break away and likely kill everyone in the Archive, but these detractors were ostracised and even killed by the more fanatical people around them. It’s a relatively strong route that stands out as the only one without the religious zealotry theme, but it is much more disjointed than the other routes.

I went south next, through the village of Nimbus, toward the old warzone in the tunnels beyond. The people don’t have many options for food underground, but a substance known as Wax had been discovered and it had just enough nutritional value to serve as a food source. The Wax is flavourless and viscous, and nobody really knew where it came from. Some started to believe that the Wax had some kind of depressing qualities, that they would eventually become mindless drones doing exactly as ordered by the Church of the Great Hand who seemed to have an unlimited supply of the Wax. After some time, a group splintered from the Church and travelled into the south tunnels in order to establish a new, Wax-less colony, with their own army called the Lunar Order. The Church was not pleased to see its followers abandon their faith and decided to wage war against the Lunar Order. The player travels through the old fortifications on their way to a facility referred to as The Sarcophagus. It’s essentially a giant, impenetrable prison that the Lunar Order tried to seal themselves inside, and while they were mostly successful, the desperation that led their leader to make this choice drove him mad. His insanity is physically manifested just outside the walls of the Sarcophagus, and the player gets to see the steps he took in order to get to this stage. It’s a cool series of levels, though the interior of the Sarcophagus is a little underwhelming by comparison. It’s mostly a return to the dilapidated environments the rest of the game is composed of, which isn’t bad, it just looks a little plain next to the madness just outside.

The third path I followed was the west road. Along this road are a number of camps from which a group of pilgrims are making their way toward their Messiah and his house of safety. The pilgrims are having a bit of an internal crisis, however. Someone seems to be messing with their signs and causing some people to get lost in the tunnels. One of whom is a woman and her baby, who she hopes the Messiah has some method of helping. There are a few events along the path to the Messiah where the player helps to protect this mother and her child from a bunch of enemies that show up to attack her. I don’t know what happens if she’s killed here, I won this event every time it showed up. One of the biggest challenges the pilgrims must face while travelling is the awfully inconvenient village full of cannibals that has been set up along the road. The cannibals clearly spent a long time decorating their village; there are potted plants, painted murals, wall hangings, and colourful streamers all throughout, as well as the cages filled with people that the player can’t release at all. This might be kind of racist. Beyond the village is the final push before reaching the outskirts of the Messiah’s palace. There’s a cave on the path in which the player must fight a copy of themself to demonstrate their willingness to overcome their faults or whatever, and then the player gets to see the hell that awaits most of the people trying to make their way to this place. For a reason that is never explained, the Messiah’s army captures and tortures a large number of the pilgrims. They’ve constructed a massive elevator that descends down into the torturous pit to move large groups of unwitting people all at once. I really don’t know why they’d do this. Eventually, the player comes across the main structure, fights a really unusual boss, and then gains access to the Messiah’s home. Just inside the main door, a gigantic machine lowers and emits an extremely powerful light, blinding everyone. The player’s vision is saved by Samedi, but all of the other people who had come to worship the Messiah are blinded. These people lay strewn about within the halls of the Messiah’s palace, still devout and desperate to find their idol, but now with their eyes burning in their heads. No prizes for guessing who the main boss of this area is. The Messiah does seem to have access to the surface, and it is bleak up there. Again, I don’t know what the Messiah gains from treating his worshippers this way. What good is a huge cohort of blind people in this terribly violent world? The fallout of killing the Messiah is never shown either, which I guess is fair.

Finally, the east path which only opens after the first three have been cleared, leads to another settlement filled with corpses. The city was once the most prosperous settlement in the underground, but things suddenly collapsed one day after the leadership abdicated all of their duties to an AI. The leadership had always planned to put the AI in charge, and while things were going well in the beginning, the AI inevitably succumbed to the tropes we all saw coming. Its primary objective was to protect human life, so it inevitably resorted to putting all of its subjects into stasis spheres so they couldn’t harm themselves or each other. It’s really obvious that this is what happened, but the game gently hints at it at most. All the holograms, and the humanoid shapes inside the spheres floating around and stuff. It couldn’t be more obvious. The boss here is also rather underwhelming. But with this area cleared, the player can finally return to the Sanctuary, enter the gate to the surface and see what the church had been keeping from the people all along.

There are a lot of boss encounters in this game, 28 in total, and they are mostly tough challenges. I criticised Eastern Exorcist a while back because I thought it had way too many bosses. It took me almost 10 hours to beat both narratives within Eastern Exorcist, and in that time I fought 31 different bosses. With the reused bosses added in, that game had an average of 3.5 bosses per hour, which makes There Is No Light’s 1.4 bosses per hour look far more reasonable. And there aren't any rematches. The quality of the bosses is also generally much higher. Most bosses have chunks of red health separated by white health pips. Some of these sort of act like phase changes, or damage checks before the real fight starts. I think the fight against Shedim is the most emblematic of the majority of encounters in the game so I’ll be covering it in detail, though there are a bunch of bosses that don’t fulfil the same boss fight style, and none use the same mechanics that Shedim does. Shedim is a demonic gryphon which mostly attacks by charging at the player and slashing with its giant claws. The arena is mainly clear of obstacles, and the crystal clusters that are present break whenever they take damage or the player dashes into them. Shedim cycles through its attacks, generally favouring the multi-part dash attack, but it won’t hesitate to slash at a nearby player, or teleport charge at a distant player. The fight is super fast paced as Shedim is very aggressive, and it’s unlikely for the player to ever get more than one hit on the boss between its attacks. The gryphon also has a fairly decent chunk of red health, but the last 2 hits have to be done in sequence in order to win. Most other bosses in the game are just as aggressive as Shedim, and they can kill the player super quickly if the player makes a mistake. I enjoy bosses designed this way, but the input buffer combining an attack and a dash together sometimes makes some of the hits the player takes feel a little unfair. Fortunately, there’s a respawn point right outside of the door so new attempts were quick to start. Also, the fight isn’t especially long. When I succeeded in defeating Shedim, the fight only took around 40 seconds to finish. At this point the boss stands up on its hind legs, sprouts a couple of extra arms, and a long golden tongue extends from its mouth. Avarice has about twice the health Shedim had, as well as a series of white pips to work through. It is also just as aggressive as Shedim and has a full-screen attack that requires a well-timed dodge to avoid damage. Fortunately, Avarice is much easier to hit than Shedim so it’s possible to beat this second form down in only thirty seconds or so. But, yeah. Most bosses in this game are similar to this. They’ll have something that makes them stand out among the other bosses, but they’re basically never boring and can be defeated in a matter of seconds. One might be in a room full of poison gas that the player has to manage by venting throughout the fight, one might remove the floor from beneath the player’s feet as the fight goes on so they have to keep mobile, one might change its name a bunch while you’re fighting it. The secret final fight is pretty middle of the road, so don’t be too discouraged if you can’t figure out how to access it.

I’ve touched on it a few times, but I think this game has gone too far in exemplifying how bad its world is. An apocalypse on the surface forced the population into the subway, where they’ve been living for generations. The most prosperous community is lorded over by a dictatorial theocracy whose deity demands yearly child sacrifices. The Church of the Great Hand strips the humanity from its warriors through some kind of ritualistic torture, and it enforces a rigid power hierarchy within an arbitrarily defined upper and lower class. I don’t really understand why wealth matters in this world where might-makes-right, if all the upper class people were members of the ecclesiarchy or something then it’d make sense, but there’s just like, rich guys here. Nearby is a slum for the sick and disabled outcasts of the Central Station who just have to live in squalor because The Great Hand said so, I guess. The Church waged war against a splinter of itself, the Lunar Order, who believed that the Wax the Church was feeding to people was causing them to lose their free will. That Lunar Order then developed a strain of the Wax that could cure any ailment a person may be suffering from or it could violently transform them into a lumbering purple zombie. Failure to administer this Black Wax to his mother caused the leader of the Lunar Order to grieve so hard his sadness physically manifested in the tunnels he used to rule. There’s all these desperate people dying as they try to reach someone they’ve been led to believe can save them from the horrors of living under the Church, and then that Messiah tortures and blinds those people just because. There’s another tribe of humans who’ve eaten the writhing fleshy mass on the walls of the New Dawn region who’re now mutated and have excessive, violent urges they never had before. There was a library full of people casting torturous demon magic on each other out of suspicious spite until they all killed each other. A lionised AI decided to pacify and cocoon all of its charges in amniotic bubbles, then kill everyone that it felt it couldn’t control. The one place in the game that claims to be looking out for the people’s best interests captures its future residents against their will, and then tears their faces off so nobody can judge each other or something. And don’t expect this place of relative peace to stick around. The Church launches a raid on Spiritina to try and scare the spiders away from their territory. Even the endings are bleak. The player character travelled this whole world, slayed giant demons and wicked false prophets, and, in the end, it was all for nothing. The citizens of the Central Station mount a revolution against the Church, but whether they succeed or not doesn’t really matter. The player can help to defend the spider village from attack, but either way the result will be the same, the spiders have to leave to find somewhere safer to live, or they die. The only person who seems to win at all is Samedi, but he was just fine watching the humans destroy each other anyway. Maybe he wanted to be worshipped too, but he could’ve just deified himself anyway. There are clearly people desperate enough to follow evil tyrants already, Samedi could just become the new Messiah.

I spent about 19 hours with There Is No Light, though I didn’t stick to the main quest the entire time. There are a few side quests to do, as well as a lot of little nooks to explore for lore or experience points. The side quests are all fetch quests, though some of them have multiple steps or involve fighting secret bosses that couldn’t have been encountered before. They’re entertaining enough, and it’s easy to find the quest items when exploring through an area anyway. I do think this game is about one quarter too long. When I unlocked the east path that leads down to the AI controlled city, I expected that to be the end of the game. I was kind of done with the game at this stage, I didn’t think it could include any more interesting enemies or challenges and if it had stopped at 14 hours I’d have been more than satisfied with the length. The final city environment is cool, and the visual designs of the enemies are really well done. They have a new mechanic where the player has to defeat the nucleus after destroying the primary enemy to stop them from regenerating. But this isn’t much different to any other enemy in the game. You still just slash at them and dodge their attacks like everyone else. The rampant AI bundling up the humans it's been designed to protect is a good cliche, I think there’s still some novelty in it at this point, but it is still a cliche. In my eyes, Zelart could’ve chopped this area off and the game would be better for it. They could even sell it as DLC later on if they really wanted to include it in the game.

I’d still say that There Is No Light is worth playing if this type of game appeals to you. It’s tough and nihilistic, but it’s mechanically very solid. If you aren’t already into this style of game, I don’t think There Is No Light will do anything to sway you. It’s solid, but it isn’t breaking any new ground.

Not every story has a happy ending, and I don’t think There Is No Light necessarily needed one, but I don’t think every part of its world needed to be crawling in agony. The player character almost immediately gets revenge for the deaths of his wife and child, and for the rest of the story he’s just killing big monsters and returning trinkets to regain his soul and memories. That’s just something that sort of happens to him and acts as a motivation because he was already done before. While on this journey of self-repair, the player gets to see how hopeless the world is. How the most powerful among us, who claim they’re working in our best interests, are actually monsters, choking what little life is left out for their own gain. How attempts to place our trust in some messianic being, be they person or machine, will inevitably lead to our own destruction. We can convince ourselves to be grateful when we’ve been blinded to the truth. We can sign all responsibility and freedoms over for our own good, and be imprisoned by the consequences. We can mourn for the old days, before everything went wrong. But we can’t fix it, even if we really want to… Except, in reality, we can. It’s scary and dangerous, but if enough people band together, we can change that oppressive regime. We can revolt. Or secede. Collective action is much more powerful than those lording over us would ever admit. It’s why big companies hate unions so much. If we stopped doing what our bosses tell us to, what can they do? If we don’t enforce the rules that we agree are terrible, what will they do? As citizens, we can unite. As humans, we can unite. The world can be brighter. There Is No Light is too dark.

Speaking of a brighter world.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/WgS7hmxQv9s

Originality is an unfortunately toxic means of measuring a piece of media. When something deeply unique shows up, it tends to be praised for doing something nobody else has ever done before, and then the creators are financially rewarded for coming up with such a cool new idea. That’s great if it’s the only thing the creators will ever have to make, but in our current economic system, most creators can’t just make one thing and live off of it for the rest of their lives. So a sequel is bound to release, and since that sequel will enter a world in which the original exists, the sequel’s uniqueness is already lost. What was once a single, novel idea is now duplicated, weakening the draw of both pieces simultaneously, but also still hoping to recapture the audience that enjoyed the original piece for its innovation. Zeno Clash 2 is everything the first Zeno Clash was and more. The game is longer, there are more interesting places to explore, there are new characters to interact with, and there are a bunch of new enemies to battle while utilising the game’s new combat system. As someone who greatly enjoyed that first game, I can confidently say that the sequel renders it redundant in every way, but it also poisons it. There’s now another game that lets the player fist-fight with wildmen in the woods. Another game where the intricacies of an alien society aren’t too deeply revealed, but that society’s rules are easily intuitive, even to an outside observer. These aspects of the first game are still good in the second, and the sequel greatly benefits from their inclusion, but I can’t shake the feeling that this return to Zenozoik is all about saying things that were better left unsaid.

I played the first Zeno Clash game a while ago and then made the video the weekend following, but I hadn’t played it since then so I went back and played the whole game again in order to cement my thoughts. The campaign is only 3 hours long which isn’t a big ask, unlike other things I’ve done for recent videos. I found the game to be just as compelling as it was when I first played it, and I definitely encourage anyone to play it if they haven’t, and especially so if they ever intend to play the second game. Everything about the first game is iterated on or directly continued in the second, so in order to discuss Zeno Clash 2 at all I’m going to have to talk about the first game. Zeno Clash is a first-person beat-em-up style game, sort of like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage. The player moves from level to level, getting into fist-fights with all manner of wacky creatures and quirky humanoid opponents. Single punches are thrown with the left mouse button, repeated clicks cause Ghat to swing out a combination of punches, and holding down left mouse engages a charging mechanic that results in slower, but more forceful attacks. Pressing space allows the player to block incoming attacks, and pressing A or D while blocking will cause Ghat to dodge to the side for a counter opportunity. There are a few projectile weapons like guns, crossbows, and a grenade too, which keeps the whole experience varied. As for the narrative, the game opens with a mystery. Ghat has just killed his own Father-Mother and nobody seems to know why. He refuses to tell Deadra, his partner, and the two resolve to run as far away from Haldestom as possible in order to escape from any retaliation Ghat might expect from his siblings. Their adventure leads the pair north, beyond the Rath-Bird fields, the Corwid Woods, and even beyond the desert from which nobody has ever returned. What lies in the north is a massive stone fortress, guarded by animated statues, and surrounded by a poisonous gas. Ghat manages to break into the fortress and awaken the Golem, a being who seems to know everything while also having incredible physical power. Golem convinces Ghat to reveal the reason he attacked Father-Mother to Deadra, and the trio make their way back to Haldestom to try and have Ghat atone for his crime. I managed to avoid spilling the big secret event of the story in Zeno Clash 1 in my video about that game, but I cannot avoid it now. In order to continue I have to reveal the secret. Seriously, I’m going to say the secret right now. The reason Ghat had to attack Father-Mother was that Father-Mother is not the biological parent of any of their children. Ghat and all of his siblings had been kidnapped by Father-Mother in order to form their family. Ghat never intended to reveal this secret, and even after returning to Haldestorm to accept whatever punishment his family decided he deserved, he still refused to reveal it. It turns out that Father-Mother wasn’t killed by the bomb, much to everyone’s relief, but Father-Mother still chooses to beat Ghat for his actions, at which point Golem reveals the truth. This is where the story of the first game ends, with Golem demanding the people of Haldestom attempt to adhere to some laws and create their own system of dispensing justice. I quite like this twist. It demonstrates that Ghat values his family more than anything else, and he would travel to the literal end of the world to protect it, but it also feeds into the unpredictable nature of the setting. Maybe Father-Mother really was their parent, everybody believes they are, and even the player has no way of knowing for sure. Maybe there really is a phenomenon where people’s children can transform into animals, this dude has feathers and a beak, and that guy has a pig nose and ears. The game isn’t perfect, the camera can be a bit strange at times, there are some technical problems that show up at the end, and I’m not a huge fan of the animated statue enemies, but the narrative is utterly bizarre and the combat is generally executed really well. I love the Corwids, and it’s a shame they weren’t explored further in the second game. Instead, we’re hanging out with the Tiamte which is okay.

Zeno Clash 2 picks up a short while after the ending of the first game. Ghat has spent the last few days avoiding his family as much as possible but the other people in Haldestom aren’t so gracious as to let him wallow in peace. While at his favourite bar, Ghat is harassed by a rival intending to get a rise out of him. Ghat obliges and the player gets hands on with the new combat system. Now, each of Ghat’s arms are controlled independently, left mouse for his left arm, and right mouse for right. Space still blocks, and holding the mouse buttons down still engages a more powerful attack, but this new arrangement allows for more active and varied punching combos. Ghat meets with his sister Rimat upon exiting the bar, and the pair create a plan to try and break Father-Mother out of jail, which is a concept that the pair are clearly disgusted by. In the time between the games, Father-Mother’s children had been asking Golem who and where their real parents were, and most left to go and be with them. Deadra also chose to leave, hoping to establish a new settlement away from Golem’s watch. This left Ghat and Rimat alone. After exiting the bar, the player can complete a side quest for an NPC nearby. In return for completing their task, the NPC awards Ghat a chain to be used as a weapon, which is the first of three new dedicated tools the player will have access to throughout the game. While there were a few group fights in Zeno Clash, as well as the challenge tower that consisted of little else, Zeno Clash 2 has a much heavier focus on groups. Enemies show up in greater numbers than ever, so the game provides the player with some tools for dealing with the increased danger. The chain has a wide arc of effect, and a much longer range than Ghat’s arms, enabling the player to hit multiple targets with a single swing as well as enemies that would typically be out of reach. In addition, before most fights the player is given an option to summon a follower to aid them. There can be up to 2 additional members in the party, although Rimat will always occupy one space. In order to add other members to the crew, Ghat’s Leadership stat needs to match or exceed the ally’s requirement. Oh yeah, there’s a levelling system now, allowing the player to increase their Health, Stamina, and Strength in addition to their Leadership. The player gains skill points from finding totems hidden throughout the world, which is now no longer linear. There are more than 10 zones to travel through, with enemies and upgrades and secrets scattered all throughout. Some zones contain obstacles that can only be passed with upgrades from later areas, encouraging the player to go back through previous locations to see what they might have missed. There are coloured moths and golden cubes hidden alongside the totems throughout the world, and while the mystery of the cubes is fairly interesting, the rewards for collecting the moths is much more desirable. This might make the game seem fairly long, and while it is more substantial than the first game, Zeno Clash 2 took just over 8 hours for me to finish. I am missing 3 Steam achievements, though two of those are for very rare combat occurrences, and the third is for maxing out Ghat’s stats which seems kind of pointless. It isn’t really necessary to care too much about these stats since the game’s controls allow the player to express much more skill than they were previously able to.

The first game’s combat system wasn’t so simple that the player could just mash left click, but Ace Team were very cautious with the challenges they included in the game. Spamming the dodge attack was often all the player had to do to succeed in most encounters, so it was refreshing to see all the changes the team made to combat to encourage a more creative style and incentivise using all of the moves available to the player. Assigning punches to each mouse button makes a lot of sense, and Ace Team also made the excellent decision to allow each punch to be charged separately for big damage, or together to form this double-arm slam that does even more. There are specific combo inputs to find too, often ending in this kick flourish that ragdolls enemies and makes them vulnerable to more damage while on the ground. With the camera fixed up too, the fighting system is all around greatly improved over the first game. The annoying stuff crops up when traversing the world. The only movement ability Ghat has is sprinting, which uses stamina that the player has to wait for while it recharges. There’s no jumping, so if there’s a knee-high ledge the player needs to climb up, they have to run all the way around to where it slopes down to the level Ghat’s on and then run all the way back. Adding a jump isn’t as simple as just enabling the ability, though, so I can understand why it isn’t here.

The things that are here are generally great, but that doesn’t mean I have nothing related to the game’s balance to complain about. I started out on Normal difficulty but switched to Hard after a few fights to see what the difference was. In the end, I don’t really think there was any difference. Enemies might be more hesitant to drop their block, or appear in larger numbers, or the loading screen tip about health and damage might be true, but I never noticed anything different. It’s very easy to plough through most areas without much thought, which is a big shame. These enemies have a lot of complex behaviours and elaborate attack animations that the player might miss because once they get a jab to connect with the enemy’s face the fight could end then and there. Not only are the enemies not challenging to fight one on one, but when the groups do show up the player is given the option to invite one or both of their party members to help out, who will then draw enemy aggro and generally make the fights even easier. This even works on the bosses. As the player progresses through the narrative, they’ll be given additional weapons to deal with the groups of enemies, starting with the chain, but then going on to include this really cool celestial bombardment gun-thing, and this entity-linking knuckle armour piece. The chain is handy, though Ghat can only swing it 4 times before he needs a break. There were guns and crossbows in the first game, and while they do occasionally make their appearances in the sequel, they actually have limited ammunition this time around. Because of this, it’s likely the chain will be the player’s best option for getting rid of flying enemies. They aren’t as gracious as they are in The End of Dyeus, flying down in order for the player to get a hit in, they just float up there and spit. The player gains access to the celestial bombardment weapon next, which I am a huge fan of, despite its niche application. In order to fire the weapon, the player must aim the sights at either the sun or the moon, at which point a small line of explosions will trail between the player and their target. It isn’t a particularly useful attack, but just the concept alone sold me on its inclusion. The final weapon the player gains access to is the entity-linker, when 2 enemies are linked, damage dealt to one enemy is also dealt to the other. It’s a neat idea that’s much more applicable than the other weapon, and it has its puzzle applications too. It also makes group fights easier. The reason I’m so hung up on the lack of difficulty is just how dissonant the whole thing is. There’s a huge gulf between the things characters say, and the tasks the player is given, the vast range of upgrades and weapons the player has access to, and how generally non-hostile this colourful world appears.

Zenozoik wasn’t a drab place in the first game, and colours were on Ace Team’s list of things to include more of in the sequel. Some areas in this game would horrify a conservative, and that’s before mentioning the prominent nonbinary character included in a video game from 2013. Shoutout to the Chilean people, you’ve really figured out this whole societal progress thing. Haldestom is now a bustling city. There are oddly shaped buildings all over the place, but they seem to coexist without any issue. Residents of Haldestom mill around in the street while mysterious 2D rendered people watch from a distance. There are also a few shops around, usually manned by an interesting NPC with a task for the player. It’s all very vividly coloured and busy, but it isn’t overwhelming. Out in the wilds, there’s the rocky coastline area with the skeletal remains of the big dead fish from the last game. The breezy Rath-Bird fields are populated by a few bubble-blowing trees, these other large bird creatures, and this mysterious broken egg thing off in the distance. Someone dumped oil in this river, though. Can’t stop frackers, even in an anarchist utopia. Anyway, the desert, as fitting as it would be to leave a desert area flat and brown, has these enormous creatures living in it, the ground is covered in patches of dandelions, and there’s this big stone snail man thing whose head has been opened as he lies above this pit filled with spikes. Who else is doing anything remotely like this? It isn’t totally flawless, though. There’s two options for field of view total, and looking down while using the wider FOV allows the player to see Ghat’s motionless leg sliding along the ground. I don’t much care for the Two-Headed Man’s model either, and I think the lands to the east could’ve done something more with its tremendous scenery. Look at this place. All the player does here is sprint across a bridge. Same with the tunnel under the fog in the north. It’s just a straight path. That being said, every boundary I reached just felt unfair. I wanted to see more, to keep going. What’s farther east than this tower? What’s this pyramid platform thing? Where did it come from? This is really cool, I want to know more. There is a moment where the player gets a glimpse of what’s beyond the bounds of the game, but we’re a little ways away from discussing that.

Ghat and Rimat’s jailbreak attempt goes very well, despite costing Father-Mother a few years of knee use. Golem’s enforcers aren’t too willing to allow Father-Mother their freedom, and apparently they pursue in high enough numbers for Ghat and Rimat to be unable to fight them off. Father-Mother is presumably recaptured, while Ghat and Rimat travel the surrounding regions to try and enlist their former siblings to return to Haldestom and help to keep Father-Mother out of jail permanently. This mission acts as a means to get the player to visit all of the various locations around Zenozoik, as well as increase their pool of potential party members. The first region I visited was the Garbage Canyon, since Rimat knew that Pott was there. Father-Mother manages to make their way to Pott’s cave too, and the 4 try to come up with a plan to end the enforcers’ hunt. In the past, Father-Mother claimed they had sailed from the west coast of Zenozoik in search of another like them. They didn’t find what they were looking for, but did find an island with a facility that kind of matched the Golem’s fortress from the north. Perhaps there was some weapon there Ghat could use to kill Golem and return Zenozoik to its lawless ways. While leaving the Canyon, Ghat and Rimat are caught in a mysterious trap and greeted by a strange voice. The celestial bombardment gun is tossed to Ghat by whoever has trapped them, which can be used to release the trap. The player then travels to the island Father-Mother had mentioned, and discovers that the Golem Ghat met in the north was not the only Golem in Zenozoik. Attempts to communicate with this western Golem fail, as neither Ghat or Rimat can speak to seagulls, and a fight breaks out. Defeating this Golem rewards Ghat with the Golem Hand, and confirms that the northern Golem can be killed. There’s a quick distraction in which Ghat’s former partner, Deadra, as well as one of his siblings had been kidnapped by the Tiamte, which is fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Once that’s taken care of, the player heads north to look for more weapons or other information that could help defeat the Golem. This fortress was built at the northernmost end of the world. There’s nothing but poisonous fog to the north. But, after some investigation of the fortress, the player finds a tunnel.

Now, this is where Ace Team irreversibly smashed my perception of this world. Zenozoik is this wild, anarchic place where humans live in concert with all these other beings. It’s violent, yes, but even people without the will or physical ability to fight are welcome members of society, and clearly someone is taking care of them. In all the chaos of this world, a city has been built and a culture has emerged. It’s fantastical and bizarre, but it feels like its own reality. At the far side of the tunnel beneath the northern end of the world is a gnarled, rocky mass and the machine that pumps the toxic gas into the valley behind the fortress. Continuing north, the player can find some dilapidated, white objects. A piano. A clock. A bookshelf. Interacting with these transports Ghat into an empty, white room, each object occupying a different space as they’re added to the room. Then, the player comes across an archway that leads to a short passage through a cliff face. Beyond the cliff is a large, circular platform suspended by concrete pillars above an inlet of ocean. Across the inlet is a cityscape. An unusual cityscape, but a city with electric lights, skyscrapers, cranes, roads, and stars quickly travel back and forth over the city, which could either be helicopters or some sort of sci-fi flying cars, I can’t really say for sure. But that’s it. The world doesn’t end at Golem’s fortress in the north. Zenozoik does. Golem shows up and tells Ghat and Rimat that they are not allowed to go to the city. The world has decided that Zenozoik is uncivilised and is better left alone. “You Zenos have no notion of history, of how past events have an effect on the present.” I hate this, I really do. Instead of the world being a swirling cloud of absurdity, brutality, and conviction, it’s just a prison where the weirdos are kept. Ghat travelled to the literal end of the world to escape his family’s vengeance in the first game, but he also ran to protect Father-Mother’s secret. At the end of the world, when he had nowhere else to run, he found a conscience, a sense of responsibility that resulted in Ghat returning to his family to try and make amends. I never thought Zeno Clash was totally literal, it’s quite clearly laden in layers of metaphor coated in this eccentric shell that demands more attention. But then the sequel undoes all of that in favour of this goofy Truman Show reveal. Ghat beats Golem in a fight, but since Golem is linked to everyone in Zenozoik, letting Golem die from his wounds would cause the deaths of Ghat and everyone he’s ever known. So Ghat and Rimat go to the east to try and get help from the Eastern Golem. The journey east is cool, I guess. This quest to rescue Golem ends at a place called The Pink Tower, which is visually incredible. Atop the tower sits the East Golem, or what’s left of them anyway. The decision to isolate Zenozoik was made so long ago that not only did this Golem have time to literally resculpt the world around it for fun, he also had a hand in creating a bunch of two-headed Chimeras, then he got bored of that so he sat in his chair for a while and literally disintegrated. The Southern Golem arrives on possibly the coolest flying vehicle I’ve ever seen. This Golem is only here to remind the audience that he exists. He’s the one who gave the player the celestial gun thing from before, but Ghat and Rimat didn’t meet him before now. Since he has a flying machine, the Southern Golem offers to take the pieces of the East Golem to the North Golem in order to prevent everyone from dying. Ghat agrees, and unsure what to do next, the pair return to Haldestom to see what Father-Mother is up to. Turns out, Father-Mother is gone, captured and ensnared in a rock archway along the southern road. The South Golem is here, after delivering the organs to the North Golem, and so are all of the parents of the children Father-Mother had stolen from. The Golem explains that this lynching will end the story of Father-Mother’s crimes. It also acts as the Southern Golem’s opportunity to explain their motivation, which is to see what Ghat and Rimat will do. “I wanna watch you guys do interesting things. Maybe I should give you this gun, just to see what you do. How about I kill your parent? What’ll you do then?” This sucks. This is really really bad. Such a stupid reason to do anything. After rescuing Father-Mother, the Southern Golem asks Ghat and Rimat to meet him atop the highest point in Haldestom for a conversation. North Golem is there, South Golem says his motivation again, and then everyone attacks each other for the final battle in the game. I like the mechanics of this fight a lot, and the sun setting in the background is a great touch. But, once the Southern Golem’s health is reduced to zero, the North Golem hoists him by the throat, says some stuff about the makers sending replacement Golems and deliberately gets both of them crushed by some nearby clockwork.

I’ve been finding it really hard to come to terms with how Ace Team went from the tremendous levels of restraint and meticulous consideration that went into everything in the first game, but a couple of years later they resort to the least interesting twist a story like this could’ve ever had, and then had the narrative circle back to some dude who was barely developed and whose motivation is the dumbest cliche a teenager embarrassingly left in their Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction. Father-Mother wanted a family, so they made one. They had to do some unacceptable things in order to get what they wanted and that’s where the narrative’s conflict comes from. Golem shows up and starts trying to enforce a bunch of rules on a lawless population so they might one day join greater society outside of Zenozoik. As little as I care for the “Zenozoik is a prison for weirdos” plot, Golem’s plans to bring the law to this society is at least a good place to draw conflict. It raises engaging questions. Is it fair for Golem to be imposing rules on a functional society because they don’t conform to whatever’s going on in some other place? Is it right to punish people for crimes they’ve already received some form of punishment for? Why does Golem get to decide that Father-Mother should be imprisoned, and can that imprisonment ever end? What even are crimes? If I were to make some changes, I’d suggest removing any mention of a world outside of Zenozoik and the western island. Golem is this omnipotent robot god already, make it so he needs the world to be in perfect order because that’s the only way he can make sense of it. Ghat still dislikes this, Father-Mother still ends up in jail, but now the responsibility of altering the world is in the hands of someone who actually lives in it and not some amorphous entity that decided what laws were all on its own. Change the South Golem to be the mirror of the North Golem. Instead of his motivation being “I did something extreme just to see what you’ll do” it could be that the world being in chaos is the only way he can understand it. Then the narrative revolves around Ghat’s preferred Zenozoik; should he work with the North Golem to prevent what little logic exists within the world from being destroyed? Or should he work with the South Golem so as not to lose the world he loves? I know it’s kind of Petersonian to talk about law and chaos like this, but it’s at least something.

My thoughts on the narrative are unfortunately very negative, and it’s a shame my video format makes talking about the narrative last clearly the best choice, because I quite like Zeno Clash 2 and I think anyone who enjoys action games should really play it at least once. While it being a sequel does make it less unique, there’s still a lot of things on display that no other game would ever consider trying. First-person melee combat is usually either extremely simple and bland, or barely functional and frustrating, but this indie studio managed to perfect the style back in 2013. The game is similarly progressive in its ideas, and it barely draws attention to those parts. There are hundreds of details all over the place, hidden faces in a net, the huge automatons patrolling in the distance, the muffled yells of the Marauders behind their hoods, or the support arches holding up the tunnel beneath the fog being in the shape of human arms. There was clearly a lot of love and attention poured into Zeno Clash 2’s mechanical systems, presentation, and world and character design. A lot of care to finally realise the world Ace Team had been wanting to build ever since their inception making mods of other games. This sequel was on the precipice of greatness, but it was robbed of that last piece that tied the whole thing together, and the fans were robbed of a sure masterpiece.

Let’s hope James Hetfield doesn’t get wind of this next game.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/J1Z8B4HNRhA

Some genres of video games aren’t as widely appealing as others. As video games become more mainstream, developers seeking to capture the widest audience tend to create games in styles that are shown to be popular. The average game playthrough occurs on a couch with a controller or on a mobile device, which are scenarios that favours some genres over others. This was especially true prior to the dissemination of the home computer, but in the late 90s and early 2000s as computers were infiltrating homes worldwide, developers suddenly found that games within traditionally niche genres were becoming increasingly popular. Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer, Ensemble Studios’ Age of Empires, and Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft and Starcraft series all saw enormous success, but their reach was always hindered by their complexity. Real Time Strategy games often require a lot from the player; it takes some attention to manage the military units, unit production, and resource gathering, while also trying to keep on top of enemy activity on a micro and macro scale, and they have to do it all without any pauses or dedicated thinking time. For most, the ability to manage so many things at once is a learned skill, and while it is possible to slam into a hard challenge repeatedly until success happens, having an entry level is a better way of keeping people around. And so, in 2004, after the relative success of their Homeworld games, Relic Entertainment released a game that’d break down the barrier to entry into the RTS genre with their 4th published title: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Dawn of War adheres to many of the genre's defining attributes, but absent are a large number of complexities to avoid overwhelming their inexperienced players. Diverse economies, continuous production, unit micro, different terrain and elevation, and deep unit types and counters have been excluded from Dawn of War and yet the game has had a lasting popularity that sees many return to it frequently.

Whether the player chooses to play the campaigns or skirmish against CPUs or other players, they will be engaging in similar RTS matches that can last anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. At the beginning of most matches the player will have a headquarters building and a single worker unit to get things moving, as well as a base quantity of the game’s two resources: blue Requisition and green Power. Requisition is necessary for almost every building, unit, and upgrade while Power is used less often and usually in smaller quantities. The headquarters can produce additional workers as well as scout units and some technologies, and in some scenarios destruction of the enemy’s HQ can be a victory condition. The worker unit can construct buildings that produce different unit types, buildings that can be used to research upgrades and other technologies, and buildings that generate Requisition and Power. Power Generators can be built within any area of influence, but Listening Posts that increase the production of Requisition can only be placed atop the control points dotted throughout the map, which must be captured by an infantry unit before the worker can build anything there. From then on, the game is a tug of war as each side attempts to push their enemies back, capture their control points from them, and prevent them from building more units to use to fight. There are infantry units, heavy infantry units, and vehicle units that all take increased damage from certain weapon types, though it never gets quite as specific as the unit matchups in Age of Empires 2. Vehicle units usually have a lot of health and armour, but equipping an infantry with an anti-tank weapon is a good enough solution in most cases. There is a morale mechanic which causes frightened units to be less effective in battle, but it rarely comes up and simply giving the unit a moment to rest totally resolves their morale qualms, though most units with broken morale are probably moments away from death anyway. Dawn of War released with 4 factions in 2004, and throughout the next couple of years an additional 5 factions were added to the game, leaving the final total at 9 unique factions to play. The expansions also added an additional scripted campaign, and two different 4X game modes which brings the total campaign playthrough time to about 50 hours provided the player only does one run through each of the 4X modes. My total play time ended up at around 100 hours after I spent a while learning to beat the highest CPU tier in skirmish mode and attempting a personal challenge I set for myself. I think the game was definitely worth this much time and attention, and encourage anyone who has never played Dawn of War or any RTS game at all to give it a shot. There are a few issues, quite a few actually, but they aren’t nearly enough to dissuade me from recommending the game. The rest of the video will be going into detail about my thoughts on the campaigns, each faction, the game’s balance, and some other technical stuff, so if you’d rather not have the campaigns spoiled as well as make those mechanical discoveries for yourself then this would be where you depart. Everyone else should get an extra can of Monster ready and make sure to remember that the setting is one of humanity’s bad endings.

Dawn of War’s first campaign introduced the world to the Blood Ravens, a Blood Angels successor chapter whose third company has been deployed to Tartarus to help defend the planet from Ork invasion. Thankfully there are no Genestealers this time. Captain Gabriel Angelos takes command from the planet’s Guardsmen forces with Brother Librarian Isador Akios accompanying him. The player is then introduced to the game’s mechanics in an especially friendly way as the Blood Ravens flush the Orks from the city. From then on the campaign meanders through the jungle as the Blood Ravens push the Ork attack back, each mission introducing more dangerous enemy units and the means to tackle them, though often the construction aspects of the game are minimised in favour of a more linear mission structure. And there are even boss fights! Kinda… They’re there. I personally much prefer this to the Age of Empires 2 campaigns, but the general absence of base building is an odd choice to make for the Blood Ravens’ adventure. It eventually becomes clear that some other force is present on Tartarus, and before long the Eldar make themselves known to the Blood Ravens in a surprisingly brutal ambush. Inquisitor Toth makes his way down to the planet, and if you know anything about the Inquisition in this setting you’ll probably have a hunch where this story is going. Toth orders Angelos to end his war against the Orks due to the imminent arrival of a tremendously destructive warp storm, but Angelos insists that something is amiss. The Eldar haven’t fled and the Orks seem more organised than they typically would be so something more sinister must be afoot. Toth reveals the Inquisition suspects there is a Chaos presence on Tartarus, and sure enough, at least one of the Blood Ravens have already been in contact with them. Isador had been communicating with a Chaos Sorcerer, who tempts the Librarian to unleash the demonic being trapped within the planet. I feel like the Sorcerer doesn’t really have to say too much to get what he wants and that Isador is a big dumb passive blob in this story until the moment he needs to go become evil. It’s a narrative that does the bare minimum to contextualise the battles despite the setting’s narrative richness - which is not unique to Dawn of War - but at least the voice acting is great.

The base game was released in 2004 and it still looks and sounds decent. Relic spared no expense on the presentation for the base game and it is still excellent today. Of course, there are other RTS games with more detailed models and textures, but the silhouettes were vitally important for the game and Relic nailed those designs. The soundscape is similarly excellent. RTS soundscapes can become horrific noise without a lot of attention laid onto them and Dawn of War manages to avoid slipping into such a state for the most part. The performances really stand out during the first campaign, though. Paul Dobson’s performance as Angelos is pretty legendary, and the swap to Scott McNeil’s Damian Thule as the default voice for the Space Marine Captain will never not be a tragedy. I am consistently impressed by the Orks’ voices, too. They sound just like real English people, and with the subtitles I could almost believe they were speaking an actual language. The voicework falls apart through the latter expansions, but I’ll mention that when it's relevant. The animation in Dawn of War is really solid at a base level, but the real marvel are the sync-kill animations. Whenever a model in a unit is killed in hand-to-hand combat, instead of the killed model simply falling over dead and the attacking model immediately switching to the next target, the two models play a unique animation that differs depending on who is involved in the fight. There are so many of these and they’re always cool to look out for in a battle. My favourites usually involve the Dreadnoughts and the Killa-kans tossing dudes across the map. While the majority of animations are great I do have to pick on the Sisters’ running animation. Maybe the plan was for them to have a higher movement speed than they do, but that left them with these wildly exaggerated motions for their running animations. Despite the little flaws like this, all these years later, the game is still well presented and definitely doesn’t look its age.

The passage of time hasn’t been particularly kind to Dawn of War’s controls, however, and its contemporaries receiving regular updates or HD and Definitive Edition re-releases has left Dawn of War feeling very uncooperative and awkward. The keybindings can’t be changed, there aren’t keys to quickly move around the map or create groups of units, the keyboard shortcuts mostly make logical sense but they’re not exactly ergonomic, and there’s a giant UI mass that takes up a large portion of the screen which is too easy to click on. Big UI artworks were the style at the time, but inter-faction keyboard shortcuts were at least consistent. Let’s just get into some examples. Here is the Space Marines’ builder unit, our friend the Servitor, and in order to have him build something for us we can either select the build icon with the cursor or we can press B. To create units of Space Marines we’d need a Chapel-Barracks, so we can select the Chapel-Barracks icon or press the C key, which seems simple enough. The Imperial Guard’s Techpriest Enginseer builds with B, followed by an I press which links to the Infantry Command building that can be used to create Guardsman units. Now, here’s the Chaos Space Marines’ builder unit, the lowly Heretic. In order to create a unit of Chaos Marines, we would need to build a Chaos Temple. So that’s a B for build and a C for Chaos Temple, right? Well, no. Actually, for Chaos Temple it’s E. There aren’t rules for which key does which action across factions and it’s up to the player to not only memorise the name of each of the different factions’ functionally identical buildings, but to also learn whether the faction’s buildings have their first letter assigned as their shortcut or some other random key instead. I stuck to clicking with the mouse for everything, which is slow and imprecise, but I think a standard shortcut layout would do a lot for speeding up the player. I really like the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 2’s default keyboard shortcuts, but back in 1999 that game had the same layout issues as Dawn of War. Also, moving between the B and I keys with one hand is quite the stretch, but Dawn of War’s slower pace at least makes mouse only viable. Units have a long wind-up before they start actually attacking when commanded and they deal so little damage to each other that there’s no need to have the APM of a Korean infant, but I would’ve liked the option to pick up the pace somehow.

The faction that most embodies standing still, dealing little damage, and taking less are the Space Marines. Games Workshop’s favoured sons have a healthy supply of dudes in armour and rectangular tanks that most other factions can struggle to shift off of a control point. The basic Marines are well armoured and have a broad selection of weapons to tech into that can provide them decent anti-tank damage, effective anti-infantry damage, or some middling damage against the heavily armoured units. Their Predator tanks are similarly flexible and the standard Dreadnought can grind through most everything it can sink its claws into. But then the rest of the roster is almost purposeless, which isn’t too dissimilar to their tabletop range, actually. There are two different Land Speeders and neither of them do anything. There are two different Terminator units that require multiple buildings and technologies to be researched in order to build, and they’re almost as useless as the Land Speeders. The Marines cost 50 requisition per guy before any additional weapons, which is pretty expensive for a low damage bullet magnet, and while the Dreadnoughts are effective when they get going, if the enemy has a single anti-vehicle weapon the Dreadnoughts start melting. Ultimately, this means that the Space Marines are really good at holding objectives, but they’re quite ineffective at taking the points from enemies, which turns most scenarios into long grinds that drain the entire map of all resources. The player can focus on Scouts which are able to circumvent their lack of armour by being invisible, but most factions have a very cheaply accessed counter to invisible units that makes investing so heavily into Scouts an easy loss. With the Marines, the player can at least be confident they’re getting what they’re paying for.

Most RTS games have two major factors that the players must manage in order to be successful; they need to be able to control their army and build the correct units for the situation, and they need to manage their economy in order to continually produce units as necessary. Some economies are more complex than others. In Stronghold, for example, having a supply of wood isn’t enough to start recruiting archers, the wood needs to be fletched into bows and then the completed bows need to be taken to the armoury for distribution. Old School Runescape type of supply lines. Dawn of War is nearer the other extreme where the economy is almost entirely passive. Once a point is captured it begins generating requisition for the controlling player immediately and doesn’t stop until an enemy unit comes along and neutralises the point or it is fully depleted. The player can increase the rate at which requisition is extracted from a control point by building a listening post on it, and then researching technologies within the listening posts, but that’s all there is to gaining requisition. Starcraft’s minerals and gas require workers to collect and hand in the resources, the same is true in Age of Empires, even Pikmin requires a unit to take stuff back home in order to grow more units. Creating an effective economy is part of the skill set within most other RTS games, but it's also an important balancing system too. If one player’s army is too effectively beaten by their opponent’s, instead of fighting a battle and inevitably losing they can take their army into the enemy economy and start slowing down their income. With fewer resources coming in, the relative strength of each army balances back out again, offering an opportunity to make a comeback. This isn’t possible in Dawn of War. Once one player pushes their opponent back and manages to capture one of their control points, the battle is basically over. Winning a battle rewards more requisition, which can then be used to build a more powerful army, which wins subsequent battles, and the cycle continues until the game ends.

A faction that should probably have access to a third resource but doesn’t are the forces of Chaos. The Chaos army features the classic Chaos Space Marines and their warped machinery, as well as a smattering of Demons to summon in opportune moments. Chaos Marines aren’t nearly as customisable as their loyalist brethren, but they still get a few upgrades to make them more effective at anti-infantry damage if that’s what a player needs. The faction also has access to the Predator tank but they swap out the powerhouse Dreadnoughts for slightly less effective Defilers. They serve the same function, they’re just not quite as good at it which isn’t a problem for Chaos. Gone are the niche Land Speeders and Terminators, replaced by the much more applicable Hell Talon, Pink Horrors, and Obliterators. The Hell Talon’s bomb attacks are fairly effective against infantry units, though the investment rarely pays off, but the demons are significantly more worthwhile. After being recruited in a demon pit, Pink Horrors can be summoned anywhere on the map where the controlling player has vision and they immediately add their high damage attacks to any push already underway. The Horrors are quite fragile but they can sit safely behind a hefty blob of Marines and never have to risk being sucked back into the warp. You don’t have to be so subtle with the Obliterators. These guys teleport in, blast off a bunch of tank weaponry, and then they can easily withstand the minimal retaliation from whatever managed to survive their arrival. They’re very expensive, but Obliterators are a surefire way to win a game. And they’re recruited in the same building as the Demon Prince and the Bloodthirster, which are okay. I didn’t mention this before, but every faction has their own super unit that can be reasonably devastating if they show up at the right time. Chaos has 2, and both can be on the battlefield at the same time, which is a luxury no other faction enjoys. The Space Marine’s Land Raider is basically just a bigger, shootier Predator so it isn’t especially exciting or impactful. But turning a Lord into a Bloodthirster is cataclysmic. The arrival of a giant flying monster should be the punctual crescendo of any battle, and the Bloodthirster lives up to the expectations. They’re fast, they’re powerful, and they’re really hard to kill so they’ll smash through most of an enemy’s base before going down. The only bad things about the Bloodthirster is its odd low framerate arrival animation and that it makes the Demon Prince look weak. The Prince is on par with most other super units; he’s still great, but I’m picking the big red dude every time.

The Eldar also have a big red dude, though it's rare to ever see him. Likely the weakest faction in the game, the Eldar have a lot of different types of infantry that are far too costly for what they do and a selection of super flimsy vehicles to throw more resources away on. While Chaos and the Space Marines have their staple units to form a strong baseline for their armies, the Eldar can choose between squishy Guardians or weak and expensive Howling Banshees as their primary infantry unit. Moreover, in order to recruit most units from the Aspect Portal building, the player has to research a specific technology for each unit at each individual building. Rangers don’t require a technology to be recruited, but they take twice as long to build as the other units, they have a slow rate of fire, they do require a technology to go invisible, and they have a hard limit of 1 unit so you can’t make an army out of them. I don’t really know why since Space Marines can spam invisible sniper Scouts all day and there’s no limit to the number of Stealth Teams the Tau can have either, and their plasma weapons are way better than snipers. I did see some old forum comments saying that Eldar were total garbage without their Fleet of Foot tech researched and while that is true, the difference in effectiveness isn’t huge. Yeah, they can get to places faster, but they’re still wearing their cardboard armour they made from the leftover nerf gun packaging. The faction relies heavily on their Farseer casting their AOE spells to deal with enemy infantry pushes while the rest of the army hyper-focuses on countering vehicles or heavy infantry only. There aren’t enough Banshees in a squad to effectively trade against most infantry units, Dark Reapers are super vulnerable to being jumped on, as are Fire Dragons though they’re at least very effective at knocking out vehicles while Dark Reapers don’t often get a chance to shine. I guess that Relic wanted to keep players from reliving their tabletop experiences with Eldar, which I’m sure many people appreciate.

Something I’m also sure is popular with a lot of people are the Orks in Dawn of War because they’re a really wacky faction with a lot of cool toys for players to enjoy, and they’re actually good. The Orks forgo a typical scout unit in favour of sending big squads of Boyz out to grab objectives and win skirmishes with opposing scouts. Those squads of Slugga Boyz are also great at swarming enemies and forcing them to fight in hand-to-hand, allowing the Orks with the real firepower to blast the priority targets freely. There are redundancies in the roster, as well as a handful of weak units, but finding an effective strategy for the Orks is really easy. I haven’t quite figured out what Wartraks are for but they are the first to the fight, so they’ve got that going for them. Flash Gitz are just visible Tank Busters, the Mad Doc is worse than just pressing this little button, and Nobs are twice as expensive as Slugga Boys but they do the same thing. Killa-Kanz are handy in a pinch, and since most Ork play is heavily infantry based it’s unlikely an opponent is going to have many anti-vehicle weapons before the Killa-Kan shows up. And if your opponent is playing Eldar, that Killa-Kan’s going to be around for a good while before they can do anything about it. The Squiggoth is an incredible beast, and the disarray it brings is the epitome of the Ork way. Just explosions and earthquakes and big laser beams flying everywhere, it’s perfect. Everything recruiting from 2 buildings also helps to keep production on track. No resources are wasted trying to get niche units up and running, but the Ork unique population mechanic prevents them from snowballing too hard. Almost every one of their buildings has guns on it too so not only do they get the original benefits of the buildings, they also get a base that nearly defends itself. Very fun faction, and 3 out of 4 being enjoyable to play is great.

A year after Dawn of War’s original release, the game’s first expansion made its way onto store shelves. Winter Assault removed a fair amount of the customization options that were available to every faction in the base game, but these changes also helped to give each unit a more pronounced identity which is fine. The expansion also included a new campaign with two different adventures, as well as enabling a new faction for players: the Imperial Guard. There is a little taste of the Guard’s unit roster in the base game, but there are a bunch of new units and the campaign is entirely new. Players are given the option to pursue the side of Order or Disorder, Order being the combined Imperial Guard and Eldar campaign, and Disorder being Chaos and Orks. The campaign follows each side’s attempt to locate and gain access to a Titan, a warmachine with devastating power and far more than any of the armies present could ever hope to combat. The Imperial Guard are led by General Sturnn, again voiced by Paul Dobson, although this time with an inexplicable American accent. The Imperial Guard are commissioned to locate the Titan and ensure the safety of a crew who would pilot enough of the Titan to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, the Eldar are searching for the Titan in order to syphon some power from it into their own weapon so they might defeat their unnamed ancient enemy and escape. Naturally, the forces of Chaos and the Orks just want the weapon for the weapon’s sake but have determined that neither army is prepared to defeat the Imperial Guard and the Eldar simultaneously so they begrudgingly work together a little. Most missions involve switching from one separated army to the other in order to complete the current objective, usually at the half-way point, but this idea culminates during the penultimate mission where the player is free to switch back and forth as desired. Only one faction can actually enter the final battle, though, and it is way harder to get through as the Guard. The Eldar just have to get one unit through the gate at the end of the map, Chaos and the Orks have a similar goal, but the Guard have to babysit a CPU controlled Land Raider as it slowly makes its way to the gate. The player can kind of manipulate the route the Land Raider takes, but for the most part the Space Marines will want to drive directly through all of the enemy bases on the map. Also, there are barely any control points to gain requisition, and building a headquarters isn’t allowed. I don’t know why Relic decided this was how the campaign should end, but maybe they really didn’t like Dobson’s delivery during the final mission so they wanted to hide it at all costs. That final mission is an effective climax and a great advertisement for Dark Crusade. Activating the Titan in any way awakens the Necrons and they begin their slow march toward eliminating whatever witless creatures have sprung their trap. They don’t break out their full lineup, but the classic warriors and the formidable monoliths are more than enough to put some strain on whatever army managed to make its way into the final mission. But with the Titan claimed and the Necrons held off, the Winter Assault concludes.

While they do borrow a few things from the base game factions, the Imperial Guard are surprisingly unique in their playstyle, for better and for worse. Much like the Orks, the Guard don’t waste any time with scout units, instead they make use of their signature guardsmen. Guardsmen are not a premium unit by any measure, but they are the faction’s only option for massing infantry. Their two other infantry options each have a hard limit of one unit, which is very understandable for the Ogryns, but the Karsikans being so hamstrung makes little sense. Guardsmen and Karsikan units are both equipped with the same lasguns, and while the Karsikans are significantly more accurate, they’re still carrying laser pointers to a bar brawl on Cybertron. Guardsmen fulfil their tabletop role faithfully in Dawn of War; they use their bodies to jam up enemy vehicles while the big guns do the heavy lifting. It does make the faction acutely vulnerable to jump units, and while they can shove enemies off of objectives fairly effectively, actually capturing them is a challenge. Basilisks are excellent at clearing an objective from a safe distance, but eventually some guardsmen are going to have to run over and hope nobody notices. The Imperial Guard also borrow the Eldar’s requirement to research a specific technology in each production building before they can produce certain units, but in the Guard’s case this limitation isn’t too bothersome. Vehicles don’t come out until at least the mid-game, well after the initial skirmishes for objectives that makes Eldar unit research so painful. It only becomes an issue for Guard in the rare butt-clencher end-game situation in which a pair of Leman Russ tanks or a Baneblade are needed to tilt the scales for a win. Having to research these techs wouldn’t be an issue at all if there were a hotkey to immediately select buildings of a certain type, but that’s an improvement for Dawn of War Definitive Edition. My main complaint about Guard is that they play too much like the tabletop. The game already generally lacks the movement and attack speed for fun micro plays, and the Imperial Guard take that limitation to its extreme. It’s really well designed, but it just isn’t a playstyle that I enjoy.

In October 2006, another year after the last Dawn of War release, the Dark Crusade was added to the game. The second expansion brought two new factions as well as an entirely new 4X game mode in place of the scripted campaign, allowing for more flexibility in the outcome of each individual battle instead of requiring the player to win every match. The arrival of the Necrons and Tau bring some new playstyles to the battlefield, and there are new, longer term considerations to be made regarding the 4X campaigns. Every faction has a specified fortress region on the surface of Tartarus from which they launch a single army to battle for control of the other regions on the planet. Factions gain benefits for each region under their control, ranging from an elite unit joining their main army, to buffs affecting build speed and requisition earning, to the ability to teleport around the planet and attack anyone anywhere. Capturing an enemy’s fortress territory doesn’t provide any benefits to the capturing player, but it is the only method of eliminating others from the game. Movements into enemy territories are always considered “attacks” and the battles are resolved on an RTS map determined by which region the battle is occurring within, similar to the Total War games, although the world map isn’t nearly as big as something like Warhammer 2’s Immortal Empires. Dark Crusade campaigns can be over within 10 hours, which is a far cry from the hundreds of hours someone could put into one Immortal Empires playthrough. There is, however, the issue of the map being overcrowded, which compounds into the problem with automatically resolved battles seemingly being decided at random, or at least having a heavy bias toward some factions over others. There are 7 factions battling over 24 total territories, with many strongholds clustered on the eastern side of the continent. If the player starts out west, it’ll be very unlikely they’ll ever encounter the Space Marines or the Imperial Guard before the Necrons wipe them from the planet. And, since the humans built almost all of the infrastructure on Tartarus, that’ll mean the Necrons will quickly have access to some of the stronger 4X power-ups way before anyone can contest them, transforming the inevitable advance of death itself into an inter-continental skeleton gender reveal party for twins. Before long the entire map will be controlled by only a couple of factions and the battles start to become a bit repetitive. I had to fight the Orks off in the same map 11 times in the Tau campaign because they wouldn’t leave my territory alone and just kept attacking. And then there are the stronghold battles. These scenarios are all unique, usually involving an enemy that has multiple armies and a special mechanic that makes the battles a more formidable challenge. These are generally done really well, but it’s where the worst voicework in the game comes from. I don’t know if it’s racist, I just know it’s horrible. They didn’t change the guy for Soulstorm either and I have no idea why they wouldn’t. But then these scenarios and the opportunity to listen to this incredible voicework are limited to the strongholds that are still with their original owners whenever the player finally makes their attack. If another faction has already come along and eliminated Chaos from their stronghold, there’s no way to play that scenario during the current campaign. As a whole, though, the 4X mode offers a little more weight to whatever skirmish games the player might have been playing otherwise, and some interesting new scenarios to engage with, but there are a few too many imbalances that prevent it from being as dramatic as the scripted campaigns. Fortunately, the factions included in the expansion are well worth the price of admission.

The Necrons function quite differently to the rest of the factions in the game, both economically and militarily. Their economy is entirely Power-based, they don’t use Requisition at all. This shifts their priorities away from the control points and encourages a more aggressive opening, which is also facilitated by Necron Warriors having no cost to recruit and their Lord being able to teleport across the map as part of their standard abilities. If the opponent manages to hold out through the early pressure, the Necrons lose a lot of momentum which doesn’t come back until they finish constructing their Summoning Cores and Obelisks, and then the factory can start churning out units again. The Necrons can capture control points, and they have to in order to build Obelisks, but the only unit capable of capturing points are their worker scarabs. This inflexibility combined with all of their units recruiting from the HQ building tests the player’s sequencing skills rather than their ability to manage multiple things happening simultaneously. How many worker scarabs should the player recruit at the start? When do scarabs need to be pulled away from constructing power generators in order to go and capture an objective? Are there any military units nearby to protect those scarabs moving out onto the map and is there time to make some? It’s a significantly more intricate economy than any other in the game, and it was achieved by removing one of the two resources and all of the different buildings units are recruited from. I like this a lot but I really wanted it to extend to the army too and it just doesn’t. Necrons have a single vehicle in Dawn of War, which is true to their tabletop range at the time, but Relic weren’t opposed to including Battlefield Gothic units or units that never received an official model so there’s no reason the Necron croissants didn’t make it in. The flying scarab swarms the Tomb Spider spits out aren’t a particularly interesting substitution, nor is the Tomb Spider’s combat capability in general. There are also the Wraiths; I have no idea what they’re for but the CPU loves them and will consistently throw a bunch of them out to die for no observable benefit. Immortals and Flayed Ones are far too squishy to be regularly useful, though keeping some units busy for a moment by summoning a squad of Flayed Ones on top of them can result in some breathing time here and there. I just wish it wasn’t possible to shoot at them while they’re climbing out of the ground. The Destroyers all come out way too late, and while they are strong, the 2 C’Tan shards only being temporary elevations of the Lord is kind of disappointing. Everyone else gets to keep their big guy around, but the Necrons aren’t allowed. They do have the Monolith, once the thing finally gets going, and that’s pretty cool. It’s very slow, though, so it’s unlikely to be the unit that destroys an enemy base. At the end of the day, most mid and late game play for Necrons revolves around Pariahs, which are very good, but an army of only Pariahs isn’t especially exciting to play with.

Another fan favourite faction, beloved for their highly interactive tabletop gameplay, the Tau were introduced in Dark Crusade and they are remarkably well-balanced. They’re a much more standard faction than the Necrons, although they lack a proper super unit and instead have a collection of other power units that fill the role. I quite like playing as the Tau, mainly for the Stealth teams. Invisible units become irrelevant toward the middle of most matches but in the very early game they’re quite powerful, and Stealth teams can be equipped with plasma guns for punching through vehicles and buildings without having to tech into some other unit, giving them a purpose as the game goes on. Taking advantage of invisibility is one of Tau’s best strengths, but their only method of countering invisibility is to recruit Vespids which are horrible. Aside from the literal dinosaur, all of the non-Tau members of the roster opt out of wearing any armour and strangely default to hand-to-hand combat instead of using their admittedly underwhelming guns. As cheap as the Kroot might be, they still take up population space and do next to nothing with it. Fire Warriors are just as fragile, but their pulse rifles have some ridiculous range allowing them to sit a screen away and shoot from safety. The Drone units occupy a similar role to the Necrons’ Wraiths, but as part of the mix-and-match customisation of the Commander, the Drones at least serve some kind of purpose. It is possible to recruit a tank that just spawns units of Drones, but I only ever recruited that by accident. That tank and the Sky Ray have similar icons and I was definitely trying to recruit a Sky Ray. These things are my favourite vehicle unit in the game, maybe even my favourite unit to play with too. Sky Rays have similar long range attacks to the Fire Warriors, but they also have an upgrade that allows them to fire all of their missiles at once. It’s incredible. The Tau don’t have many elite units locked behind technologies, but they have to build one of the obscure buildings to get them onto the battlefield which makes those units kind of inaccessible. There is also the issue of being locked into 1 of 2 possible unit paths, but both choices are good. One building enables Crisis Suits and Hammerheads, while the other enables Kroot Hounds and Krootoxen, and the choice comes down to whether the player wants bigger guns or some sort of tanky alien critters. The Knarloc is available no matter which, and holding enemies in place is redundant when they’re dead so I favoured the Crisis Suits and Hammerheads despite the limits on total numbers of these units. Overall, while the Tau might be a more standard faction and the Necrons much more experimental, I think the new playable aspects introduced in Dark Crusade are very good, though the common knowledge that “you get Dark Crusade for the campaign” is most certainly not true.

The other half of that aphorism is that “you get Soulstorm for Ultimate Apocalypse '' and while I won’t be playing the mod, I am going to endorse that part of the saying. Released in 2008, 4 years after the base game and less than a year before Dawn of War 2, Soulstorm includes two new factions, a new axis, and a new 4X game mode. The final expansion was not developed by Relic Entertainment, instead the bulk of the expansion was developed by Iron Lore Entertainment, a studio founded by ex-Ensemble Studios staff which was the studio behind the first three Age of Empires games. It seemed like a great partnership for Relic, but Soulstorm is a bit of a mess compared to the previous expansions. There are a few issues with the presentation, like the strange running animations the Sisters of Battle use, but the real meat of the issue is technical. Soulstorm has nowhere near the level of polish that the rest of the game has, and as a result I found it extremely difficult to even get halfway through a Soulstorm campaign, let alone finish one. It is very fortunate that there was such a strong following for the game, because while Relic did try to patch up the game in the months after its release, it was the fan patches that really saved the day. A little ways into a Dark Eldar campaign, I began to be unable to enter the RTS mode. The game consistently crashed upon loading in, even after assuming the save was bugged and starting over. The new setting and inclusion of the two new factions doesn’t really offer much more than what was available in Dark Crusade, and the choice to remove the models on the planet map in favour of these coloured pins makes the 4X mode that bit less exciting. The ratio of territories to factions is still off, and the starting positions are much worse than they were before. Everyone is now spread out across a handful of planets, with the Dark Eldar and the Tau placing their main bases on moons that should be way harder to attack than they are. Travel between planets is much less flexible than I’d like, so what seems to end up happening is that each planet is fought over individually until one faction wipes out the other, and then warding off alien landings becomes the majority of the battles. The Soulstorm campaign is much more like playing skirmish than the Dark Crusade campaign was, and that really isn’t a substitute for a proper, scripted adventure. At least the new factions are fun.

The new Soulstorm factions aren’t anywhere near as experimental as the Necrons were, but they do both have some cool new mechanics on top of the game’s more standard faction style. The Dark Eldar kind of have their Power From Pain mechanic, called Soul Powers, from which they can gain some buffs like the ability to see invisible units, they can also dish out some debuffs to nearby enemies, or use the points on AoE attacks to chunk some unsuspecting victims’ health. Soul Essence drops from units getting got, and the Dark Eldar are no strangers to both sides of that situation. Armour is blasphemy to the Dark Eldar; the only reason one might wear something into battle is if it has a chance of wounding someone, and whether that someone being wounded is a friend or foe is not particularly important. Other than the Talos engine, the entire roster is killed by a stiff breeze, but they complement that fragility by also being equally dangerous. Kabalite Warriors and Scourges are some of the most effective infantry units in the game, especially once the number of Scourges hits a critical mass. Wyches are totally unarmoured, but good use of their Combat Drugs can totally swing any fight in their favour, and if a well-accompanied Archon gets the buff then stuff will start melting. Raiders and Ravagers are decently effective anti-vehicle units, and the Talos is a lot more than just a floating punching bag. Hellions are a little too true to their tabletop renditions, they do basically zero damage and drop dead from a single kick to the shin, and while the Reaver Jetbike models have always looked cool they too are similarly useless. The Dark Eldar also build strangely, though not for any real benefit. Their worker unit doesn’t have to work on a building in order for it to be constructed, once they lay down the foundations the building constructs itself and the worker can leave to do something else. The difference between this and having the worker work on the buildings as normal is that the Dark Eldar can have buildings activate in a large batch rather than turning on one at a time, and it frees up time for the worker to go around collecting Soul Essence points. The buildings all still cost requisition, though, so the main limiting factor isn’t different. You aren’t going to have all of your buildings up sooner because of this mechanic. All this does is move the worker away from where the notification says they’ll be. A building finished, time to task the worker to something else. Where’d he go? The Dark Eldar don’t really have a super unit, I mean, they do but it isn’t noticeably different to a normal Ravager. The Dais of Destruction is too flimsy to send into the fray like a Land Raider or a Bloodthirster, but the Dark Scythe can put a decent dent into almost anything. They’re a solid faction, and I think Iron Lore did quite well to give the Dark Eldar an identity despite being backed into a bit of a corner.

The Adepta Sororitas are the final faction, though the game and I will be referring to them as the Sisters of Battle as that is what they were called before Games Workshop’s lawyers remembered that trademarks were a thing. The Sisters were the last army I played before quitting tabletop, and unfortunately the thing I liked most about the army is missing from Dawn of War, although pre-moving in an RTS would be hard to implement. Similar to the Dark Eldar, the Sisters of Battle have a third resource they can use for buffs and debuffs, although they need a unit to actually cast Faith powers. These powers aren’t especially impactful, and I found I’d often forget to even use them due to how niche some of them are. Instead, the proper identity of the faction is fire and melta weapons. Everyone can have a flamethrower and even the turrets shoot fire instead of bullets. It’s functionally the same, but with an added morale debuff that sometimes comes up. Everyone also gets a meltagun which are premier anti-tank weapons. Every squad sergeant can have a melta-pistol, every member of a Celestian squad can have a meltagun or even a multi-melta, and some of the tanks are zooming around the battlefield equipped with armour piercing laser beams. Honestly, the faction’s roster could stop there and I’d be happy but then Seraphim are also cool, and everyone loves the Exorcist. I don’t really understand the naked people part of the army. Repentia and Penitent Engines are just unusual ways to execute someone, and the Death Cult Assassins come out far too late for their invisibility to be effective. Of course, the big star is the Living Saint. Summoning a resurrecting, 9 foot angel onto the field to slice through most anything and fly around an opponent’s backline is one of those great joys that can only come from a 40k property. She contrasts so well against the hulking monsters the other factions bring to the fight, and her animations are much more meticulously crafted. It’s a shame the rest of the expansion wasn’t as well formed as this one unit.

As a whole, I think every faction is engaging enough and fits into their own niche within the game without too much overlap, though naturally I do have my favourites. But since I didn’t outright despise playing any particular faction, and for my own investigation, I decided to undergo a little challenge. I wanted to complete a fighting game style “Iron man” challenge against the highest tier of CPU. If you’re unfamiliar, a fighting game Iron man challenge requires the player to win a match with every character consecutively without losing. In something like Street Fighter 2, this kind of challenge isn’t too bad, you only need to learn a few things and the full run doesn’t take too long. It gets a bit more strenuous in games like Tekken 7 or Smash Ultimate, where completion probably requires an entire day at the very least. In order to complete this challenge in Dawn of War, I had to prepare a few things. Firstly, I had to become familiar with each faction and their strengths. It wasn’t going to be possible to play infantry only Imperial Guard and expect to win so I spent some time figuring out some builds. I then had to learn what the CPU was capable of and what kind of cheats it had. The Insane CPU gains resources 40% faster than the player, giving it an army out on the map around the time the player has likely finished capturing their natural control points. The CPU rarely aggresses with this advantage, however, and instead it’ll sit in its base and wait to launch a counterattack. Now, colloquially in games we like to refer to a computer controlled player as an “AI”, mostly because a CPU is a computer component and for all we know there could be an element of intelligence involved in the computer player’s actions, but the CPU in Dawn of War is not an AI. It doesn’t make choices and adapt, it’s more like the enemies in Space Invaders. After a while I did begin to learn what the CPU would do and when, and I learned to play with that information in mind. Eventually, I knew to counter the Insane CPU’s strategy with every faction and I did manage to complete the challenge, but I don’t think what I learned to do amounts to good gameplay generally. In a lot of cases, the best course of action is to send scouts to intercept enemy scouts capturing their natural control points to slow down their income. If this interference fails then the game is basically over. Without the ability to out-micro the enemy - because there isn’t really micro in Dawn of War - the player has to win big fights with a 40% resource deficit. It’s just not going to happen. So the game kind of devolves into early pushes that must never lose momentum, and the big fancy units that everyone wants to play with are relegated to destroying the production buildings of an already defeated enemy. The Hard CPU at least gives up after a while and just stops producing units so it’s at least possible to see the Bloodthirster rip a guy apart. Insane CPU really pushes the mechanics to the limit, instead of the player, and I’d imagine it’s at this point where most players move on to a different game.

So it’s a gateway game; once you’ve played it enough the limitations start to hamper any further enjoyment and at that point most people go elsewhere, occasionally returning to reminisce or to see if it was as restricting as they remembered. Back in 2008, Dawn of War players had the sequel to look forward to, Red Alert 3 dropped in October, and the Kingdoms expansion had just released for Medieval 2: Total War. The RTS market would wither away into the 2010’s but things have been looking up recently. Age of Empires 4 released just last year, and the team is also dropping expansions for every other game in the series too which is ridiculous. Warhammer 2 just finished, and Warhammer 3’s Immortal Empires campaign should be on the horizon if it isn’t out already. There are also indie offerings like Warparty and this cute little project called King of the Universe, though the latter likely isn’t going to be hosting a competitive scene any time soon. Dawn of War acting as a tutorial for competitive titles like Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft 2 is also a great reason to play Relic’s game. The learning curve for Starcraft is quite steep, so having that basis in an aesthetically similar game should smooth things out a bit. There are still a few people hanging on to a competitive Dawn of War 2 scene, though again, I think those players are in it for the love of the setting and not so much for the mechanical complexity. In any case, the first Dawn of War is absolutely a worthwhile game to put some time into, and I hope it continues to foster an interest in the RTS genre going forward.

While it might not be the most intricate, or the most flashy, or possess the busiest multiplayer scene, Dawn of War is still a fantastic game and it achieves everything it set out to do. The feel of the tabletop game is quite pronounced and the setting has only ever been captured as well a couple of times since. Naturally, most 40k super fans have already played Dawn of War, but for those of us with a passing interest in the setting or the RTS genre, there’s no better place to start. And there are plenty worse. After all of this, though, I don’t think I can definitively say if Dawn of War is the greatest gateway game because I didn’t play any others. Kind of comes with the territory of trying to determine whether it’s the best or not, but I didn’t and that’s the video. If there’s another game that eases the player into a complex genre better, I haven’t played it yet. See you next time when I return to Zenozoik.

The following is a transcript for a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/XP5bTH6o-MM

There are people out there who like to pretend video games were never political and that political ideas being brought up in games is a new thing and that it should stop. Occasionally, I might humour that line of thinking, but Just Cause is blatantly political so I’m going to be spending some time talking about the game’s politics. Those politics are bad, from basically every perspective, so if you’re worried about listening to me throw shade at conservatism or something then don’t be. Okay, maybe one time. Societal progress will happen, whether it’s officially legislated or not. If you don’t want to adapt then you can go get eaten by bears, since that went so well. Just Cause is a 2006 third-person action adventure game developed by Avalanche Studios that was released on PC, the original Xbox, and Playstation 2, which was the version I played. The player is dropped into a mostly open environment and let loose on the general population. You can steal cars, steal boats, steal planes and helicopters, there’s shooting with generous aiming mechanics, as well as all of the sex and drugs to be expected from a Grand Theft Auto clone. The fictional country of San Esperito has fallen into unrest as a revolutionary force has risen up to overthrow President Salvador Mendoza. Amidst the chaos, an American spy agency deploys Rico Rodriguez to ensure Mendoza’s regime is toppled, and to buy favour from the new administration, continuing an American tradition of shoving their explosive skydiver fingers into everyone else’s governmental pies. When this stuff happens in real life, people are generally not too happy about it, especially the residents of the country that has earned the United States’ attention. Such a setting would imply that Avalanche has some opinions about foreign intervention that they would like to share in an action-packed video game form. Perhaps Just Cause exists to support this kind of political interference, or to condemn it, or ridicule it. Reviews at the time were generally positive about the game, praising the skydiving and grappling hook mechanics, but any mention of Rico’s narrative actions in San Esperito generally involved disinterest or confusion. The 2006 video game playing audience weren’t ready to consider the USA’s geopolitical actions in video game form. But, at the very least, we can hope something like the events of Just Cause couldn’t ever happen in the real world… Anymore.

The game opens with a news anchor reporting on a media release from the People’s Revolutionary Army of San Esperito, in which the Army calls Mendoza mean names. It then cuts to Rico preparing to skydive down to San Esperito while going over his assignment. There are a few shots of a dude in an orange shirt driving around, before he sets off a flare for Rico to aim for. Then the player gets hands on with the skydiving mechanics while Sheldon introduces himself. This section is basically the tutorial and it does a great job of outlining the mechanical systems that will be at play within the rest of the game. The player parachutes a bit, then they shoot some guys with the guns that basically aim themselves, and then they’re driven to the next objective while manning a turret to shoot at the enemies that don’t really fight back. Other than the driving and the grappling hook, this is basically the peak of all of these mechanics too. Sheldon pulls up at a hut in the forest so Rico can meet and be slapped by Kane, before being told that the next part of the mission will be briefed in the nearby RV. What follows is a series of missions in which Sheldon and Kane point at targets for Rico to hit, and then Rico goes out and hits those targets in whatever method he deems necessary, which is okay if a little bland. For now the player can rearm and get familiar with the game’s underwhelming presentation.

By 2006 standards, this game is plain. The entirety of San Esperito has the same grass texture and handful of trees, all the villages look the same, the small urban areas are all the same, and while all of the roadways do have different topography it’s hard to distinguish each one from the last. This is a big archipelago, with a surprisingly large population living on it too, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have more varying geography in different locations. The weak presentation seems like something that could be attributed to hardware limitations. Sony’s second home console wasn’t exactly a piece of powerful tech at release, but Just Cause is like this on Xbox and home computer too. The game compares really poorly to San Andreas in terms of variety and recognisability as well. Anyone who played San Andreas for any amount of time will recognise the iconic cul-de-sac, but after 11 hours I don’t think I’d be able to tell where Rico was from any screenshot of the game. Sonically, the game is serviceable. The gun and vehicle effects are decent, but the mix is pretty great. The way the music triggers whenever a big fight or chase breaks out is good and it manages to not blow out the rest of the audio, but there aren’t too many songs to apply to each scenario. Eventually the coolness of the trumpet parts wears off, and then the music just fades away. The voice work is quality too. The performances might be a little cliched but the script and actors did some excellent work, with a lot of roundness in many of the voices. And while it was rare I did find some NPCs interacting in an interesting way.

Unfortunately, the mediocrity of Just Cause’s presentation is also indicative of the gameplay. As is the case in many other games of this style, the primary gameplay loop involves travelling to a location in a vehicle and then shooting a bunch of people at that location until the mission parameters are reached. There’s nothing inherently bad about missions like these, provided that the actual gameplay is enjoyable, but that’s where Just Cause stumbles. Just Cause’s vehicles control exactly like Grand Theft Auto cars after all of the tires burst. The steering goes between horrific understeering until it hits the threshold where things transition to spinning out of control. Travelling anywhere by car is a tightrope walk through Fast and Furious one liners, and the cinematic camera triggering whenever the vehicle's wheels leave the ground for a fraction of a second only makes the journeys take longer. Aquatic travel is usually preferable since there are fewer obstacles, but the vehicles are similarly irritating to control. The aircraft control just fine, but they’re very rare so that luxury is reserved for only the end of the game. I find the choice to leave aircraft for the end game a little strange given that one of the game’s primary mechanics is the skydiving, and what better way to engage that part of the game than by ejecting from a fighter jet just above ground level. Apparently not. Instead, the player will gain access to a fast travel helicopter from which to skydive and never pilot. The parachute controls are fine on their own, but there was no way the grapple hook parasailing was going to work well. Rico can break inertia and every other physics constant whenever he enters car-surfing mode, but that flexibility isn’t afforded to the parasailing. Unless the target vehicle is moving slowly and directly away from Rico, entering the parasailing state is kind of a crapshoot. Rico gains momentum and lifts off of the ground, but travels in the direction his legs were facing when he was standing. It ultimately amounts to another finicky and frustrating system that thankfully becomes redundant by the introduction of planes. Vehicle combat is also very lacklustre as it is easy to drive enemy vehicles off the road, or destroy them effortlessly on foot. The game seems to be banking on the player feeling like an unstoppable deity of destruction as none of the enemy encounters ever really offer any kind of challenge. Squishy human enemies are all over the place and they go down in a couple of shots, while anything mechanical can almost always be ignored or simply blown up with any explosive. That being said, the combat systems aren’t really built to accommodate a challenge. The guns aim themselves, so driving challenges are the only candidate for increasing difficulty. Which would be horrific. Contextualising the battles could’ve gone a long way toward making them satisfying, though.

Just Cause’s actual narrative is super simple, but the implications of the events are just godawful. President Mendoza’s regime has been poor enough to inspire a revolutionary force to gather and begin fighting back. The President is apparently allowing a drug cartel to run the country while he focuses on staying in power. The Americans believe this means Mendoza has developed weapons of mass destruction, which is enough justification to assist the People’s bloody revolution. First order of business is to break the rebel leader, Caramicas, out of prison in order to establish a relationship with the future head of state. Most of the rest of the game has Sheldon and Kane introduce some member of Mendoza’s cabinet or the cartel for Rico to go and assassinate, but there are a few other tasks like destroying a crop of coca or helping Caramicas gain access to a radio broadcasting facility so he can deliver a speech to the currently uninvolved citizens of San Esperito. After pushing Mendoza’s forces back across the archipelago, Sheldon manages to locate a nuclear power station as well as Mendoza’s nuclear missile silos, confirming their suspicions. Due to the continued pressure, Mendoza does launch one missile at the United States, but Rico is able to intercept it, before chasing the dictator onto his jet while in flight and finally killing the President.

Okay, so, politics time. For those unaware, Operation Just Cause was the codename given to the United States’ military invasion of Panama during December of 1989. The CIA informant turned militarist dictator of Panama General Manuel Noriega had been assisting US intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 60’s and 70’s, but like with most things, the relationship soured when Reagan gained office in 1981. Noriega’s involvement in the scheme to arm the Contras in Nicaragua had earned him some bad press in the US and Reagan asked him to step down. Noriega refused, and throughout Reagan’s presidency the Panamanian leader began looking to the Soviets, Cuba, and Libya for military aid against coup attempts from his own army. After Noriega overturned the results of an election, the US would have trouble accessing the Panama Canal, so the decision was made to invade. Upwards of 1000 people died during the invasion, which was widely considered illegal under international law. It bears repeating, Noriega was on the CIA’s payroll, he had basically been installed by them and was friendly with the United States until the Americans refused to acknowledge his legitimacy. This is where the video game’s title comes from, as well as a great deal of content within the game. There were, and very likely still are drug cartels active in Panama, fueled by the high prices their products are sold for in the US. American forces were frequently deployed in the region by parachuting out of helicopters, and naturally, much of the fighting was focused around airports and power plants. I don’t think Avalanche Studios intended to glorify the events of the invasion, but I think they’re brazen approach to the gameplay and narrative events does belittle an actual military attack. The People’s Army and Caramicas are portrayed as fairly ineffective or incompetent without their American super soldier, but without the Americans’ involvement Mendoza wouldn’t be in power. And after everything’s over, when Mendoza is deposed, and Caramicas takes power, will San Esperito be free to govern itself or will there need to be an American babysitting the country? Well, “need”. And the American characters in the game are always portrayed as treating this whole thing like a vacation, as if people aren’t really being killed just over the next hill. Are these the people who are going to be running the country once Mendoza is out of the picture? Does Avalanche think that’s a good thing? Of course, there are other influences within the game. The Cuban Revolution is one. Cuba has been subject to a lot of foreign interference throughout the past 600 years, but the instance in 1959 is possibly the most blatant example of the United States’ meddling in geopolitical affairs. Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution had been popular in the US, but after a string executions and the repatriation of US owned Cuban farmland, the relationship between the two countries collapsed. Economic sanctions and a few failed invasion attempts led to the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that saw nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba being aimed at the United States. We see this influence in Just Cause’s cover art, as well as a few events toward the end of the game. Appropriating the Che Guevara imagery for the cover is a bit strange in context, using Rico in Guevara’s place when it really should be Caramicas. Guevara was not an American agent, his ideology was very much the antithesis of Rico’s obedience to his imperialist masters. And finally, to end this whole rant, one of Sheldon’s plans to help depose Mendoza is to blow up a nuclear power plant. Not only does this potentially cause a nuclear meltdown on a small island, which would irradiate a large portion of San Esperito’s limited land space, but it also destroys a public utility that the people are still going to need. By that point, Mendoza and his forces had been pushed into a corner, making utility destruction little more than an act of terrorism and doing nothing to improve The People’s Army’s chances of victory. Avalanche doesn’t seem to have demonstrated opinions one way or the other on the conflicts they’ve referred to in Just Cause, the enlightened centrists both-sidesing a literal military invasion. Really poignant stuff.

There was definitely an attitude of ignoring politics throughout the 2000s that makes Avalanche’s decision to set Just Cause in such a tumultuous political environment kind of confusing. If they had something to say, any kind of commentary at all would be better than nothing. But then maybe the poor gameplay and environment design were made that way deliberately to reflect the writing staff’s inability to say anything of quality. Each facet of the game is a metaphor for how the writers refused to take a stance on anything, culminating in an amorphous green blob of a game that wants to ride entirely on its grappling hook gimmick and putting Che Guevara on the cover. It’s brilliant really.

Busting out an RTS classic next time.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/mXBwKXbX7mE

The open world is a form that video game worlds can take in order to add scale and create the perception that the game contains a broad adventure that the player will be able to get lost in for months if they’re willing. The typical series of beginning a level, and then ending it and moving on to the next map is absent from open world games, instead the player is sent around the world to find objectives in order to progress the narrative or develop their character. This type of world design can be used to great effect in many areas players find valuable within video games: an open world allows the art team to craft environments to feature prominent landmarks that can be referred back to repeatedly if necessary, reducing the required scope of the project and gaining more mileage out of the assets the team has created, the travel time also increases the length of each playthrough, stretching a game that players might be able to blitz though had the game used a traditional level structure, it also allows the developers to cleanly integrate side content by simply placing it somewhere in the world, the freeform level design also grants the player a lot of freedom when it comes to completing which objectives when, including sometimes providing alternative solutions to those tasks, and often looking over vast expanses of playable area can be quite a beautiful visual to impress players whenever they gain a vantage. Of course, the lack of structure can lead the open world to become a gigantic slog. Without quality level design, or at least clear signposts, players can end up spending a lot of time running around without achieving anything, but overpopulating an open environment with objective markers and minor tasks can quickly desensitise the player to the world’s scale. If everywhere has a collectible to grab or an event to engage with, they stop being special and start to become busywork. Recently, the majority of big studio open world games have strayed further into busywork, leaving many looking for a more qualitative approach to world design. Curious Planet saw these desires and decided to make that game. They sought to take the experience back to the beginning, back to when open world game design was in its earliest form, and then rebuild the concept from there. The End of Dyeus is the product from such a venture.

Upon starting the game, the player is given a single objective: find Dyeus. There’s a bitrate destroying display of particles before the player awakens amidst a stone circle in the middle of a forest. There are a handful of chests nearby with some primitive equipment, and a few enemies to try that equipment out on before the player enters the wider world beyond the trees. Here, in the grassy plains, the player will learn of the game’s nature. Throughout the world are a variety of notes and excerpts to find to piece together a sense of the setting, the hooded Shadows are engaging in a relentless war with the more advanced Guardian forces, with their battles centred around a mysterious door under the Guardians’ control. Surely, Dyeus is beyond that door. The player must then find and retrieve three keys in order to open the door, all of which are under the guard of the region’s most formidable beasts. It’d be quite the achievement to defeat these foes with a stick and a handful of arrows, so the player must delve into the rest of the world in order to gear up. While these aspects are indeed fairly similar to the original Legend of Zelda, I can’t help but think the game more closely resembles King’s Field. Vague objectives, no specific barriers preventing exploration, a mysterious military force, hit and run combat, and bosses occupying the normal world. This does beg the question, however: if The End of Dyeus is an open world game, is King’s Field? Does an open world require the fields and forests, or can a series of corridors still be considered an open world? I think this definition can change from person to person.

The first sentence on the Wikipedia page on ‘open world’ says “an open world is a virtual world in which the player can approach objectives freely, as opposed to a world with more linear and structured gameplay.” It also has 2 citations for this sentence and neither of them actually say anything like this, but as a start point I think this definition is as good as any. For a definition, in some ways it's very vague and in others it doesn’t seem quite correct. The implication of “approaching objectives” is that the player can complete the objectives however they like, but it really means ‘approaching’ in the geographic sense. The player is free to walk to the objective from any direction. And “linear and structured gameplay” sounds like an open world is indicative of sandbox gameplay, which doesn’t apply to a large quantity of games with open worlds. Some games with open worlds are basically linear, requiring the player to run to wherever the next objective is in order to continue the game. Just Cause is strictly linear; there is side content but for the most part the open world exists to facilitate the narrative missions without the developers having to build a new environment for each mission. King’s Field has linearity, but for the most part objectives are available to complete whenever the player decides to engage with them, even if it doesn’t seem mathematically possible. There are far too many exceptions to really create a single sentence definition, but as long as the majority of the gameplay occurs within a handful of game scenes and that there aren’t too many in-world barriers, I think we’re good.

The End of Dyeus’ world adheres to these very basic tenants, as well as being unique in its own ways. The game almost entirely occurs within a single scene and there are really only 4 or 5 objectives to complete, with the player being free to attempt the first three whenever they like. That’s far easier to say than it is to achieve but it does incentivise exploring the rest of the world to find tools to overcome the challenges. Overall, the game space appears to be a relatively standard earth-like environment, with forests, rolling hills, meadows, wetlands, and the dry desert areas toward the fringes. People have been present within the region for a very long time, and the structures they built have seriously deteriorated, though many are still inhabited. A city had once existed here, now little more than rubble, but there are other parts of this world that also seem constructed. The map has mountainous partitions between the zone of desert in the corner that functionally match the walls enclosing the similarly dried out region on the other side of the map. The mountain at the centre of the battle between the Shadows and Guardians is almost perfectly circular, and stands defiantly alone upon a large, flat area. In some ways the world isn’t trying to feel natural, it feels designed. The Shadows are using the same bows, spears, and shields the player has, but the Guardians have an armoury of energy weapons and robotic sentries. There was clearly an advanced civilization here at one stage, but they are now long gone. What happened to this place and how are ultimately unimportant, but there are plenty of pieces to assemble the puzzle throughout the playthrough. Amongst those puzzle pieces are also the various equipment pieces the player can collect to help them advance through the more challenging locations of the world. Equipment is almost always stored in chests, which makes sense in some locations, but oftentimes a chest will be sitting idly in the forest instead of its contents being laid out on the ground or something. It's as if someone knew the player was coming and scattered all the tools they’d need around the place in easily found boxes that protect the items from the weather. Which is true. I’m sure that Curious Planet did this for a good reason, and the answer can surely be gleaned from Mayto’s conveniently written video game design manifesto.

Within the About section of curious-planet.com is a cute GameBoy filter photograph of Thomas ‘Mayto’ Ducourant as well as a little personal blurb to read. This page also hosts Mayto’s philosophy. Primarily, this philosophy revolves around player agency and freedom. His games spawn from a concept that is almost entirely open ended, where the mechanics are the basis for the overall design. This idea bleeds into the rest of the game, the presentation, the narrative, the objectives, all informed by the mechanical content. This is somewhat reminiscent of something I said about King’s Field; that the game was strenuously constructed around a single piece of the final product. Things differ massively when taking into account which piece was the bedrock for the project as a whole. In King’s Field’s case, going with the level design first revealed some weaknesses within From Software’s optimisation practises, and the rest of the game, particularly the combat, suffers for it. In The End of Dyeus, Mayto decided to have the player controller polished to a brilliant shine before engaging with much else. The world is specifically designed with the movement speed of the player character at the forefront, meaning the player will never have to spend too much time walking from one location to another with nothing to do in between. When a game’s focus is heavily placed on exploration of its world, it is vital for the player to not be too slow as to be discouraged from actually exploring anything, but not too fast to avoid having them miss items of interest. And while there aren’t many especially mind blowing things to find within The End of Dyeus, the widespread, snack-like discoveries keeps the exploration enjoyable. Mayto also mentions that his designs aren’t necessarily innovative and I must agree, but I think that the focus on player agency is unique among game developers.

With the recent resurrection of the immersive sim the discourse surrounding video games has remembered the phrase ‘emergent gameplay’, and while both ideas do have some things in common, emergent gameplay and player agency are distinctly different concepts. During our conversation, Mayto expressed that his understanding of ‘emergent gameplay’ was that it more resembled a linear design with a sandbox toolset, which I find to be agreeable. ‘Player agency’ is almost the opposite configuration: the player has a comparatively limited set of tools, but the game contains an absence of tasks with urgency or specific direction. Where Deus Ex hands the player JC Denton the cybernetic pocket knife and tells them to escape the facility, Sable points at Simoon and ushers the player out the door. Neither one of these ideas is inherently superior to the other, but I think the examples that I was drawn to reveals my preference. It is far easier to drop a bunch of locations in a game world and hope the player finds travelling between them fun than it is to craft a hyper expressive player controller and then build levels that facilitate that expression. There are a million things a player can do in Deus Ex which I think is a much better fit for an interactive medium. That said, this kind of mechanical complexity is heavily reliant on everything working together well, and it doesn’t take much to break the entire experience.

The mechanical aspects of The End of Dyeus are simple, but that simplicity made the gameplay quite cathartic for me, while also allowing Mayto to construct some in depth challenges that push the player to use the full extent of the character’s capability. I mentioned the movement speed before, and that swiftness is also present within the game’s combat. At the outset, the Shadows are simple to defeat, but they’re more than just punching bags. They can block attacks, and are rarely ever alone, so the player had better get their rhythm down soon or else they’ll be taking a lot of damage. But their low health values make them unlikely to be able to kill the player, so being outnumbered isn’t too big of a hurdle. As the game progresses, the Shadows become better equipped and appear in greater numbers for the player to really test their timing. I like the helmet guys a lot because usually their big heads are easy targets, but in order to spam the armoured guys down the player has to play into their rhythm or start stabbing at their feet. There is also the rock-paper-scissors interaction between various weapon types the player can find and the Shadows can be equipped with. Swords are generally good weapons, but they lack range and can be comfortably evaded by spears. Enemies with spears usually cannot block, so the best way to defeat them is to shoot them with the bow before they can get close enough to attack. And of course, blocking arrows completely shuts them down so swords are generally going to pay off. This system is simple, it’s approachable, it’s accessible, but it’s also interesting and offers the player a lot of decisions to make while they’re battling enemies. Healing and resurrection are also handled in simple, but satisfying ways. The player can find food to eat in the world to recover some health, enemies and breakable environment objects can also reward a small amount of health, and there are plenty of healing Vials to find that can be administered to regain larger quantities of health. Much like King’s Field’s potions, these Vials offer health immediately and are not tied to an animation or an activation timer. Saving is done at fountains. Simply tossing a coin into the water sets the player’s spawn there, creating convenient locations to launch face-mashing expeditions throughout the world.

As engaging as the Shadows tend to be, they aren’t the only enemies in The End of Dyeus. Most of the wildlife in the game will also attack the player, and while a good many of them are designed much like the Shadows or offer similar timing challenges, there are those that buck the system to become more frustrating than I feel they should be. The crocodile frogs are clearly vulnerable to ranged weapons, but learning to fight them with a sword is fantastic. I adore the guys with the bombs and fireball weapons because they always kick off some chaotic scramble and manage to kill themselves or their allies a good percentage of the time. The birds, bats, and enemies from The Void are okay, though there’s a lot of down time when fighting them with melee weapons since they all engage in hit and run tactics. And as fun as the plant enemies in the swamp were at first glance, their proximity to each other often renders the player helpless for a long time. I didn’t dislike fighting the Guardians, but at the stage where I was fighting them often I found that I was either massively under equipped and being solidly killed by them, or I had their energy gun and could take them out with ease. That energy gun drastically alters the way the player engages with enemies and I would have hoped it was a bit weaker overall, to keep the other equipment pieces at least a little relevant. Fortunately, a typical playthrough won’t have access to it for too much of the game as it’s acquired from an especially dangerous location so the first couple of boss encounters won’t be the pushovers they could be. The first boss I encountered was Salamdra in the swamp. This enemy mostly charges around and shoots a flurry of projectiles at the player. It functions like many of the other animal enemies in the game, only more dangerous and with a larger health pool. I especially like its position in the world, since other enemies can get involved in the battle if the player triggers the boss before clearing out some space. Armadillium is a large burrowing insect who doesn’t directly attack the player, she walks around the arena while her offspring do the offence. The player needs to attack Armadillium’s face directly in order to deal damage to her, so the battle becomes entirely about positioning and juggling the presence of all of the other enemies as well. It’s a decent fight, but it won’t blow anyone away. The final beast boss is Aves, a giant bird who spends a lot of the battle flying far out of reach. Other bird enemies in the game fight in the same way Aves does, but Aves has an attack that can actually hit the player through their shield. Combined with her relentless aggression, I found this fight to be far out of reach of my favoured pike and had to look elsewhere for an upgrade. Shooting at the phoenix makes the fight slightly easier, but Aves can still torpedo into the player to deal huge damage through their shield, always being able to kill the player if the move selection dictates.

Now, there is another boss enemy, perhaps two if you’re generous. But that part of the game, that revelation is so brilliant, so earth-shattering, that I don’t think listening to me talk about it will do it the justice it deserves. If the game has seemed interesting enough up to this point or you might consider checking it out eventually, please skip ahead to the timestamp. It isn’t an especially long game and the reveal is far and away the best thing The End of Dyeus does.

So once the player has managed to defeat the three bosses, they’ve travelled to the door the Guardians had been, well, guarding, and they’ve inserted the keys into the locks, they may enter the mountain. Within a group of scientists had been working in a secluded laboratory during an apocalyptic event. As far as they knew, the world beyond the wall had ended. They continued with their work anyway, and they were ultimately successful. They had created Dyeus. Within a sealed chamber lies the lifeform, a mass of tissue that had been birthed to try and stave off humanity’s destruction. And while all of its creators had long perished, Dyeus remained alive. The player is given the option to touch the lifeform. Doing so immediately kills them and transports their consciousness far away. As the universe flies by, the stars blurring into lines against the deep darkness, the player approaches an object. It’s a planet, a rotten sphere, plundered and barbarised by its own inhabitants. Earth. Upon starting the game the player isn’t given any objective. There’s a bitrate destroying display of particles before the player awakens in a cave on the edge of a wasteland. They can scrounge around for some primitive equipment, and hope there aren’t too many enemies they’ll have to use that equipment on as they enter the wider world. The dream is over now, it was never about finding Dyeus or figuring out what had happened to the world, it was just a desperate mind trying to find some inspiration to escape. Now, they need to do it for real. The final throes of humanity are ruthless survivalists, ready to go to any length to get their hands on the resources they need and viciously fighting to defend what they have. They’re ill-equipped and the player can eventually get a hold of their scavenged guns and grenades, which they can use to fight back and to keep the blood monsters at bay. A great tower in the distance surely holds the key to freedom, so the player must travel there. Uroboros is the tower’s guardian and the battle is fantastically challenging. This enemy had been subtly foreshadowed throughout most of the game and it really lives up to the tales. I died to Uroboros a lot. In an open environment, the snake’s moveset is faster and more damaging than the player character can handle and they will quickly be defeated by the gunfire and charging attacks. Uroboros isn’t a pushover with some terrain in the way either, but it at least makes avoiding certain attacks a bit more achievable. I also think the name is great, the snake’s purpose is to assure its own destruction, signalling the end of the world when it does finally happen. Just an excellent detail to include. And with the snake’s destruction the player can enter the tower and destroy the core, punctuating the conclusion of this cycle of existence.

The End of Dyeus stands in defiance of many of the video game industry’s standard practices. There’s no list of features, there aren’t any UI prompts or mini map markers, the player is never explicitly told what to do, nor is there anything in the game that exists to explicitly waste the player’s time. The world is open from the jump and a light mystery is the player’s primary motivation to explore. Whether the player examines every corner, collects every item, or fights every enemy is entirely up to them, and if they do decide to engage with the game the player will experience an adventure unlike anything else on the market. Mayto and Curious Planet definitely have a winning philosophy on their hands if adherence yields results like this, and I think anyone aspiring to make video games could apply the same ideas to their own work and see tremendous improvement. Sometimes, bigger just isn’t better.

An example of how to do it very, very wrong next time.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/4CO08bz8qCw

Video game production has been increasingly globalising as the medium ages, allowing micro-industries to pop up across the world and creating jobs for people who would have otherwise struggled to make their way into a rapidly digitising economy. Individuals and small businesses from all over the world have been seeing great success in video games as of late, which will likely ensure an enduring indie development scene’s existence going forward. For many, this ability to enter into game development has been a very recent phenomenon. Cameroonian developer Kiro’o Games released their first narrative video game - Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan - in 2016, Slovakian developer Games Farm released the conclusion to the Heretic Kingdoms series - Shadows: Awakening - in 2018, and a year later, Estonian developer ZAUM’s debut game Disco Elysium blew audiences away worldwide. Nowadays, games and developers like these are pieces of the international “indie game scene”, and most people who play these games understand the developer’s limitations when they make their purchase. There aren’t many resources to help Cameroonian people find training and employment within digital industries, so their video games are likely to be a little clunky, and that’s okay. In the early days, however, the video game playing public were less aware of the details of a game’s development and the amateurish qualities of indie games were viciously scrutinised. At the turn of the millennium, Central and Eastern European countries were modernising quickly, affording the people the ability to engage with new technologies and delve into the art of video game development. These new developers were hugely ambitious and excited to join the rest of the industry at the forefront of video game design. Some came with wholly original ideas, others adapted film and literature, and others still would see another’s project explode in popularity and attempt to capture some of that lightning for themselves. Nevertheless, ambition alone wouldn’t yield a polished, or even successful project, and these games would often feature critical bugs or baffling design choices that didn’t pan out to the developer’s desire. This was the case frequently enough that a term was coined to describe a European developer’s eccentric, yet extremely enthusiastic video game product; these games would be labelled as “eurojank”. In 2002, after the sequel to sleeper-hit Cultures failed to make an impact on the American market, German developer Funatics Software decided to try something wildly different, creating something that won’t be matched until GOD DAMN PALWORLD DROPS! NONE OF YOU ARE READY FOR THIS! RUN THE INTRO!

The prevalence of massively popular games with expansive, yet intricately detailed worlds and spectacular set piece events is undeniably inspiring. The ability to set down a world that has been built for the player to immerse into is one of the medium’s greatest strengths, and to be the one who created that world, to be the benevolent god who has allowed it to come to life is an easy aspiration to strive for. Unfortunately, though, the video game development process is a lot of work. Godhood doesn’t just fall into one’s lap some day, to be able to ascend to that plane of existence, you’re going to have to figure out a way to run the thing, and then painstakingly build the thing, and then learn how to distribute the thing, and then hope that other people buy the thing. There are shortcuts and tools to help the inexperienced get a leg up, but they can only do so much. A developer might envision a first-person shooter set in a single, gigantic map, with survival mechanics and complex NPC schedules, and a dynamic reputation system, and an entirely optional magic power system, and roaming bosses, and maybe a multiplayer function, and more and more, but if the engine they licensed can’t handle that then the plan has to change. No developer wants to ship a game with a half-baked boss encounter in it, but eventually they run out of money and time and have no choice otherwise. Without the quantity of experienced or skilled staff of a Japanese or American studio, the young European studios would have to learn what their limits were, and most learned through trial and error.

While the exact etymology of the word “Eurojank” isn’t well established anywhere online, Google Trends does show that people were searching the term way back in 2004, indicating that it had entered the video game discourse prior to the launch of the Google search engine. Similar to terms like “immersive sim” and “soulslike”, Eurojank isn’t a genre to categorise games within, it’s a term used to describe a game that exhibits characteristics that extend beyond the mechanical or the artistic, they’re circumstantial or philosophical. Eurojank specifically refers to a game that was dangerously close to the developer’s maximum capability, either exceeding it or at least bumping up against it, and these characteristics were fairly common among games that originated from Europe. Famous examples include the Stalker series, Pathologic, and basically everything Piranha Bytes has ever worked on. These games aren’t too mechanically similar, but they all contain systems that operate in ways that were unusual at release. As the phenomenon became more visible over time, discussion of the term online led to some concluding that “Eurojank” can be applied to games that weren’t developed in Europe. Zeno Clash often appears in these conversations, despite being developed in Chile, and I’ve even seen a game called Adventures of Nyangi brought up despite that game being developed in Kenya. So the actual geographic origin of the game doesn’t really matter, so long as the game has the right aura. This means Eurojank is perhaps more of a philosophical assessment than it is a circumstantial one, which is pretty cool. If someone in Tajikistan made an amateurish, hyper-ambitious immersive sim game on a shoe-string budget, and someone online didn’t know where Tajikistan was, then that game can absolutely be classified as eurojank. Why not? Borders are arbitrary anyway. Unfortunately, I don’t have an example of any game developed in Tajikistan, but I do have something equally fantastical.

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal is a German monster-collecting roleplaying game-first person arena shooter hybrid, so it’s a bit Pokemon, and a bit Quake. The player creates a “deck” of up to five fairies to take into battles. Each may bring up to two loadouts of an attacking spell and a passive spell. Fairies and spells have types that interact in this nightmare matchup table, and each fairy species can equip spells depending on their spell level. They don’t learn moves like Pokemon, you gotta buy them from this Tzeentchian duck blackjack dealer who offers a random selection upon request. This fantasy world had once been connected to the real world long ago, but the White Druid and Quinlin the Dwarf Master were forced to close all of the pathways in order to protect Zanzarah. It was then prophesied that a human girl would travel to Zanzarah and allow the two worlds to be connected once again, and Amy, the player character, is that girl. Sensing the coming of the prophesied liberator, an army of Dark Elves sprung from their home in the Shadow Realm to launch an invasion upon Zanzarah. And that’s actually the entirety of the game’s narrative. It gets slightly more complex toward the latter end, when Amy makes her way into the depths of the Shadow Realm, but otherwise it’s very simple. The game isn’t mechanically complex either, but it is unique in its design.

Throughout the world are a range of different environments to explore, and within each there are objects that can be marked as fairy habitats. Whenever the player approaches a habitat object, there’s a chance that it contains a fairy that leaps out to attack. This engages the arena shooter mode, where the player uses their team of fairies to battle. Attacks require a charge up before they can be fired, indicated by the spinning reticle in the centre of the screen. Charging for too long can cause a spell to time-out and it’ll backfire at the player, at full power too, so don’t do that. Spells charged to their maximum will deal more damage than firing off half charges, but it is possible to spam weaker shots if necessary. I did speak with Zanzarah’s project leader and head designer Andreas Nitsche, who said that the shooting mechanics aren’t quite what he had wanted. Every spell is charged and fired the same way, though there are differences in the charging time, any secondary effects the spells may have, and the spell’s type. There are no AOE attacks, or repeating attacks, or anything like that. The secondary effects can do stuff like disabling the enemy’s spell charge, or slowing their movement speed, but mostly the effects are just tampering with the character’s stats instead of anything flashy. The arena shooter segments have a lot of verticality within the arena layouts, and every fairy can spend a resource to use jumps to fly around these environments, so fights will often revolve around trying to gain the high ground. The RPG overworld controls are just fine on the ground, but there are some platforming challenges here and there to add some spice to the gameplay? Amy experiences some pretty intense physics in Zanzarah, but she doesn’t gain any special jumping powers to help with these obstacles. She falls quickly too, and her hitbox extends a bit further below her than her model would suggest, so she can bounce off of edges that sometimes feel unearned.

Of course, every game is a little odd or has a handful of flaws floating about, so there has to be something extraordinary for a game to earn the eurojank label. The Steam version of Zanzarah is perfectly functional and runs on Windows 10 without issue, though I did have to use dgVoodoo to up the resolution. It’s nice enough to show the activation code window briefly before the game starts running, just to awaken some foundational memory within certain people. Closing the game down always plays the credits too, which is something. Copyright 2022? Release Russia? What’s going on here? Well, when THQ died back in 2013, a company called Daedalic Entertainment bought the rights to all of Funatics IPs, which included Zanzarah. They did a little tweaking and managed to get the Cultures games and Zanzarah running on modern hardware and then put them up on Steam in 2015. Unfortunately, the tweaks weren’t enough, and many people struggled to get the Steam version to run. Funatics had been busy trying to break into the MMO market at the time and weren’t really interested in working with Daedalic, but the two companies eventually came together and got Zanzarah to be more reliable. The Russian version was released in 2003, so it was probably a superior version of the game that the German Daedalic just didn’t have. It works great now, but the Steam reviews might never recover. So it’s been a bit of a technical mess for a long time, but recent changes have at least modernised the game to circumvent the largest proportion of jank. The design and implementation weren’t ever really that strange, though there are some things like there only being one place the player can get free healing, and having to travel back to Amy’s sepia coloured home in London to be able to rearrange which fairies are in the deck. Just little bits of awkwardness that really stick out.

I mentioned before that I spoke with the head designer of Zanzarah and that they were dissatisfied with the shooting mechanics, but most of the rest of the game is what Andreas had envisioned. The game draws a lot of inspiration from the Pokemon games, which is very visible within Zanzarah’s world and level design. Zanzarah is made up of a tangle of towns and the routes between them, with a variety of different environments that allow the player to find fairies of each of the different types. There are a handful of boulders, spiky bushes, and updrafts that prevent the player from freely exploring the entire map too quickly, but these obstacles can be removed by putting a relevant fairy into the deck’s first slot. As for the shooter segments, Andreas didn’t cite any particular FPS game, but he did mention Archon. Archon looks a bit like chess, but instead of pieces being taken instantly, they battle on a separate screen to determine which piece takes which. Seems familiar. There are a decent number of arenas in Zanzarah. The pool gradually increases as the game goes on, with the maps becoming more complex as more are added, eventually culminating in these huge levels that host the fights against multiple opponents. I like most of these arenas, but there’s a big range in quality from time to time. This helix level sucks. The enemies always seem to find their way into some lower part of the map that takes forever to get to, and they get their back against a corner so getting them out is annoying. If there was an attack that could track the enemy to a degree that would solve my gripes with this completely. The shooting mechanic is fine, though. I can see ways it could’ve been more engaging, but that applies to everything.

The two major mechanical systems of Zanzarah are certainly reflective of the game’s contemporaries, but appropriating those ideas isn’t in any way criminal, and the game is plenty original in many of its other aspects. The setting of Zanzarah seems like your standard fantasy setting, with elves and dwarves and wizards and goblins, but it’s actually based in Nordic mythology with a twist of Brian Froud on top. There’s a human realm and a magical realm, there’s a doomsday prophecy, there’s these little naked dudes running around that you have to shove into a bag. You know, Viking legends. The worlds were once intertwined and deeply reliant upon each other, but one megalomaniac eventually showed up and ruined everything. I know that he’s in a white robe and he’s racist sometimes, but I asked and Andreas doesn’t see any resemblance to anything so I guess we’ll just ignore it. The White Druid is the main villain of the game, he’s behind the Dark Elf attacks because he doesn’t want to lose the power that he has. Hard to believe there’s no subtext here. There are 12 fairy types, which is actually quite a lot. Pokemon originally launched with 15 different types, but with 151 critters to collect, that number doesn’t seem too high. There are 77 fairies in Zanzarah, which means some of the types are underrepresented. The Dark Elves often have a few Ice types on their teams, so ideally the player has a Psi or Fire type fairy to counter, but it can be an effort to even get a hold of these types and there’s no guarantee their attacks will be worth anything. Tinezard, the fire evolution of Tinefol, comes with a fire attack with a wind up time that takes as long as two or three other attacks. The lower number does make collecting them all more achievable, however. And once the player has defeated the White Druid and his weird magic robot in a chaotic, but surprisingly easy final battle, Zanzarah and our world can finally be reunited.

75% of Funatics Development was acquired by their publisher Phenomedia in 2000, but in May of 2002 Phenomedia filed for insolvency, dragging Funatics down with them. Zanzarah just managed to dodge cancellation as part of the insolvency deal, and THQ picked up the rights from Phenomedia’s asset sales. In September of the same year, Funatics relaunched as Funatics Software and managed to reacquire the Cultures IP, but the planned expansion for Zanzarah would ultimately never be made. Zanzarah’s eventual resurface in 2015 and the following 7 years definitely made the game seem like a bit of a mess, but now it’s just one of those much sought after hidden gems that we can talk about as though we’re some kind of video game archaeologists or something. There’s nothing to qualify: there’s no more jank here than any other game from the early 2000’s, it’s just a good game, made by some pioneers of German video game development. More people like Andreas should get to express their ideas in the video game medium, even if they aren’t as technically competent as some other people. The value in art comes from the creators, not the cost of the paint or the instruments used to make it. We should always be on the lookout to hear from more people who haven’t yet had the lights turned on them. You never know what treasures they might share with you.

Next time, I’ll be touching the lifeform.

The following is a transcript from a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/caAgVyXGOww

Online video game review has a pet collection of games that are universally agreed to be unscalable. Games that even the angriest youtube angry man would hesitate to unleash their trademark angry rants upon, for fear of having their anger licence revoked and having to direct that anger at something equally harmless, like minority groups. For as long as people have been posting their thoughts about games online, some games seem to only ever garner positive opinions. Everyone knows that Super Metroid is a good game, even those who haven’t played it. We’ve been told often enough to believe it. This isn’t a problem; sometimes there are games that really do have a comprehensive appeal, but that list can’t be as long as it seems. People are nostalgic for dial-up internet and command-based operating systems, they’re maniacs. Moreover, many of the most revered games were exclusive to the Nintendo 64, a stumble in Nintendo’s hardware manufacturing record that would host just more than a tenth of the library that the original Playstation had. Third parties were abandoning the platform, making it extremely unlikely for something transcendent to appear. Perhaps it was the smaller library that led many to conclude that Banjo Kazooie is one of the greatest games ever made.

Originally released in 1998, Banjo Kazooie was Rare’s first stab at a platforming game within the then new third dimension, though it wasn’t their first 3D project. Blast Corps, GoldenEye 007, and Diddy Kong Racing were all released in ‘97 which seems absolutely ridiculous. How this one company managed to pump out so many games is astounding, but that they were generally critically acclaimed is incredible too. Reviews of Banjo Kazooie often connected the game to Super Mario 64, comparing each individual aspect and often proclaiming Banjo the victor in the head-to-head. Mario’s overall moveset in 64 is quite robust, but Banjo managed to have most of Mario’s stuff and more. People were very receptive to the exploration gameplay style, which made the game more accessible, while the controls and abilities allowed more capable players to get creative as they played. Banjo Kazooie actually has characters too, allowing Rare’s personality to take centre stage. Gruntilda always has something to say, making her presence known throughout the entire game. The play spaces are small by today’s standards, but every one is crammed full of things to do that very little of the game’s environment is wasted. There are some empty spaces now and again, but it is extremely rare so it is always valuable to run through every corner just to see. And while the presentation has certainly aged, Banjo Kazooie’s colourful worlds and detailed textures are still pleasant today. Everywhere is bright and lively, and reviews and retrospectives are not hesitant to lionise the presentation, especially the soundtrack.

I wouldn’t see Banjo Kazooie until I was able to access the internet. My dad brought an original Playstation home once, with a copy of Crash Bandicoot 3, though I don’t really know why he chose it. I played my Gameboy Colour to death, and occasionally tinkered with a PC game whenever the computer wasn’t in use. The other kids I lived near would also play PC games, and I don’t think I had ever seen a Nintendo 64 in person until I purchased mine. But with access to YouTube and an interest in video games, it wouldn’t take long for me to learn of Banjo Kazooie and its apparent greatness. But every video that mentions the game will typically skip past explaining anything about it and only ever mention its gloriousness in passing. Since I acquired my Nintendo 64, I’ve played a couple of games on it and it’s been rocky. I played Ocarina of Time first and really enjoyed it. Then I was going to play Operation: WinBack but I didn’t have the controller memory card thing so I played Body Harvest instead. I had seen some generally positive stuff about Body Harvest online, but, man… That game is not good. It was also made in the UK, like Banjo Kazooie, so my expectations were all over the place. But that darkness soon lifted once I started the stream.

Banjo Kazooie’s tone kicks the door down and screams about how much fun it’ll be as soon as the console is powered on. The bright, saturated palette is on full display as the game’s joyful intro song cycles through a bunch of instruments. This song kind of comes across as a flex, the composers finally able to show their full power with a much broader range of sounds to make music with compared to previous consoles. It’s infectious too. Most of the songs make use of similar progressions or musical phrases that add a great deal of cohesion to the soundtrack, giving each location an air of belonging despite how different their themes might be. And the number of variations to the songs really helps to establish a scale to the adventure. When the song transitions to its underwater variant and then to an interior variant, and then to a mini-boss variant the idea that the level was progressing through different stages was easy to believe. It was still clearly Gobi’s Valley, but it has become something beyond an introduction. That being said, not every track is a winner. The alarms and whistles in the Rusty Bucket Bay song are obnoxious, and the melody actually makes me a little dizzy. This level also doesn’t do much for me visually. Clanker’s Cavern already executed the grimey place-of-industry aesthetic with a far more creative centrepiece. Rusty Bucket Bay is just a dockyard with a boat in it. I think Banjo Kazooie is one of the most technically impressive games on the system, I really can’t imagine the Nintendo 64 being taken further than this, but some of the level concepts don’t leave a lot of space for imaginative inclusions. Bubblegloop Swamp almost wrings every possibility out of the idea of a swamp level, with its giant crocodile head, logs and lily pads, and the village on stilts being lifted out of the murky water. The idea of entering an animal’s shell as an extra bit of depth is charming, but the player had already entered a big shell in Treasure Trove Cove. Nothing in the game is particularly ugly looking, and I think the visuals are still wonderful, but there are things that just seem to be stretched too thin or have ended up underdeveloped; the inside of the sphinx in Gobi’s Desert is a good example. These things only stick out in my mind because I’m searching for something to say, though, because talking about how much I liked Mad Monster Mansion’s presentation doesn’t bring anything new to the conversation.

My thoughts on the game’s controls also echo the statements made by others before me, but I still feel that a lot of things are worth saying. Not to excessively deride Body Harvest, but Banjo Kazooie’s responsive controls blows DMA Design’s game out of the water. Banjo’s ground speed and acceleration are perfect, absolutely flawless. And he immediately responds to player inputs. Drake’s slow turning speed and pitiful acceleration are truly inexcusable when Rare managed to get controls to be this responsive. Banjo Kazooie’s controls certainly feel tight and that sensation does a lot to make the game a joy to play, though I do think that the player can be ill-equipped to deal with particular obstacles throughout their journey. They’re rare, but there are a few instances where the player has to land on some tiny platforms with the little shadow indicator being extremely difficult to see, or typically off screen somewhere. The player can sometimes use Kazooie’s double jump to slow their falling momentum briefly to make their landings more accurate, but during a backflip the player is locked out of using the double jump. The backflip is sometimes required to climb certain obstacles, so the inability to double jump can be frustrating. And it isn’t as though this limitation prevents the player from accessing places they shouldn’t be able to get to. There are tiles on the ground that allow the player to take to the skies and fly around so it isn’t as though the game couldn’t accommodate a higher jump. The flight and swimming control fantastically, but they both suffer from the camera’s refusal to be useful. It often lazily follows Banjo, sticking about 10 feet behind him which is rarely ever enough to actually see what’s happening. Now, the game only has one instance where the stakes are high during flight, so for the most part this angle isn’t too much of a problem.

On the topic of stakes, there isn’t much to challenge the player within Banjo Kazooie, outside of a few minigames and the final battle. The majority of levels have very few enemies and even fewer hazards so the player is in little danger for a huge chunk of the game. Usually there’s a large space to explore and collect the various items scattered around, perhaps the player has to climb to a higher level to collect more stuff or jump across some water where the consequences are simply having to run back to wherever the player had fallen from. There are a handful of scenarios to stumble upon that function as puzzles; sometimes an NPC has a challenge to complete, sometimes the player has to use a transformation for something, and other times there’s a timed challenge which can vary wildly in difficulty. For accessibility’s sake, these are excellent things. If someone is struggling to complete one task, they can simply move to another that may be more suited to their capability. There are a handful of difficult challenges throughout early levels that I think are far beyond the other content of the levels they’re within. If turning the key to allow Clanker to rise to the water’s surface was tough for me, how would someone less capable than I fare? In most cases, though, the player can choose to do something else and come back when they feel more comfortable, though this isn’t always true. In order to gain access to the final boss the player will have to collect the majority of the jigsaw pieces and notes so while the player can pick and choose to progress, eventually the ride stops.

Within each level there are 100 notes to collect, and usually 10 jigsaw pieces, though sometimes triggers in the level can cause a piece to appear within the hub. Notes collected within a level are instanced to that particular visit, each level has a “note score” that resets upon the player leaving the level for whatever reason. Walking over the entry tile or dying causes the player to leave the level, so it’s fortunate that most of the level designs are relaxed. Mumbo’s Mountain is sort of an extension of the tutorial; most of the tasks involve shooting eggs at things or utilising Kazooie’s Talon Trot ability to climb steep slopes. It’s easy to see that the level is designed around these abilities, which isn’t a trend that carries much deeper into the game. Treasure Trove Cove is the next level and is probably my favourite in the game. It’s a self-contained island with challenges spread around in a way that seems natural. The pirate ship is moored in the bay, there’s a few different beachside activities to engage with, and the lighthouse at the top of the central rock allows the player to get a good view of the entirety of the level. And it is the actual level. It’s possible to fall from the top of the lighthouse to the beach far below, though I wouldn’t recommend doing it. Very impressive, and one of my favourite environments on the console so far. After Treasure Trove Cove is Clanker’s Cavern which is quite the juxtaposition. The jump from the sunny, clear beach to Gruntilda’s waste solution is a big visual shift and I do like it. I also enjoy how the clean sea water is more dangerous to swim in compared to the wastewater that the player will be spending much more time diving into and out of. The level’s focus around interacting with Clanker is also a new concept for the level design that differentiates it from those that came before and keeps the game feeling fresh. There’s a bit of a blunder in the level designs in my eyes when we get to Bubblegloop Swamp. The level looks like a bunch of obstacles were dropped in an environment and then a wall was drawn around it. Then, from this point forward, the levels switch between these styles again. Freezey Peak and Rusty Bucket Bay are both centre-piece levels, although I don’t find them to be nearly as interesting as Clanker’s Cavern. Then Gobi’s Desert is another collection of stuff with a wall. And then Mad Monster Mansion is the only other level in the game that approaches Treasure Trove Cove’s excellence in terms of design, but most of the tasks associated with jigsaw pieces aren’t as masterfully designed as they were previously. And then, the penultimate level, Click Clock Wood is really, really long. The level’s themed around the four seasons, giving the player 4 entrances into an environment that’s mostly a single, big tree, and then changing the aesthetic to represent each season. It’s fine for the first couple, but by the time I got to winter I was eager to move on. Collecting all 100 notes in Click Clock Wood takes forever, and falling out of the tree in autumn or winter can be a gigantic setback. But once the player has finally managed to do what they needed, they can move on to the game’s conclusion.

Generally, the game is fabulously designed and tremendously polished, but I’m not entirely sold on everything, particularly toward the end of the game. Click Clock Wood drags and there has been a lot of emptiness that wasn’t present earlier in the game. The quiz maze is a great concept, and the questions about voices and locations are an ingenious way to implant these details into the player’s memory. The questions about Gruntilda aren’t so great, and I tried to avoid them whenever possible. The answers to these are randomly generated upon the save file’s creation, which means the player will always have to speak with Brentilda whenever they find her and then write down the answers to the questions. Are there people who enjoy these questions? Are these included in the generalised praise? Am I reaching for imperfections to try to justify a degree of cynicism? Let’s move on to the final battle.

Defeating Gruntilda is tough. She’s a witch, and her arsenal of attacks is a lot for one bear to overcome. The fight is also a gruelling 5 phase endurance test, in which Gruntilda shifts between different strategies to send the player back to the start of the fight. The first phase is a simple dodge test, which the game’s controls are well equipped to engage with and the game’s sound design keeps it wacky and light-hearted. Next is a projectile phase in which the player must shoot eggs at Gruntilda to get her to progress through the phase. Landing the eggs quickly is a good challenge, and greatly minimises risk of taking damage since Gruntilda will be locked down for so long. It’s here that the egg aiming mechanics start to come into play. Without the pressure of a boss battle, the egg shooting mechanic is a bit awkward. There isn’t any reduction to Banjo’s rotation speed so it can be a struggle to aim the eggs accurately, but since there aren't any consequences for messing up, it usually isn’t an issue. Here, though, missing the target can cause the player to be stuck in this phase for an extended period, which will inevitably result in them taking a hit or two. Not a problem for now, though, as once Gruntilda is knocked out of the phase the flying segment begins. The player has to use Kazooie’s flying attack to damage Gruntilda in the air, while she moves around, without any aim assistance, or useful camera controls. I died during this phase a lot. Gruntilda can be hard to find while flying around, she also doesn’t fly very high above the ground and colliding with it can cause Banjo to slide into the abyss. I have a deep respect for the kids who could get past this phase. Once that’s over, it’s Jinjo time. The final two phases of the battle both involve shooting eggs into statues, which awakens the Jinjo within to attack Gruntilda. The egg aiming challenges return here, but with a new spicy, lethality to really make sure the player doesn’t get to see the credits. I saw this phase a few times throughout the hour it took for me to finally defeat the witch and each failure was agony. I’m supposed to be good at video games! Why is this so hard? I managed, though. I saw the melons, I beat the game. And it’s great.

Explaining what makes Banjo Kazooie a legendary game is much easier than I was previously led to believe. The game is packed with character, the palette is appealing, the tone is light and silly, but it doesn’t talk down to the player. It also doesn’t patronise the player mechanically, but it is simultaneously accessible to everyone so people of any age and ability can enjoy the game. While there are most certainly things to criticise, Banjo Kazooie was developed in a relatively short period for hardware that offered a significant challenge to developers, not only because the game was created for the first generation of 3D capable video game consoles, but also because cartridges were significantly limited by what could fit inside of the plastic case. Banjo Kazooie is a triumph in design, in every respect that was squeezed into it. It’s a shame that these things hadn’t been articulated to me before, because I would have played this game a long time ago.

Something typically Euro, next time.