Gallery: Days Gone

 

Return to Boneworks (VR)

I reviewed Boneworks in March 2020. You can read that review here. I concluded that review by saying: ‘I don’t plan on ever playing it again.’ Boneworks wasn’t a game I enjoyed. In fact, I thought pretty much everything about it was kind of bad – the campaign, the story, the level design, the combat . . . ‘I can’t recall the last time I told a game to f**k off as much as I did Boneworks.’

So why did I decide to give the game another shot? I guess it’s because, looking back, I was wondering if I’d been too harsh on the game. I mean, Boneworks remains one of the most highly rated VR games on Steam with (at the time of writing) a 91% positive All Reviews score, and a 93% positive Recent Reviews score.

People really like Boneworks, it seems, both old players and new. But not me. I could barely stand it. Was I just in a bad mood when I played it? Was it the VIVE wands I was using that gave me a bad experience?

So, armed with my new Index controllers – that the game was clearly designed for – and with several new updates and patches, I figured I’d jump back in and see if my opinion on Boneworks had changed.

…

F**k no.

I know not everyone will love or hate every game in the same way I do, but when my opinion on a game may not necessarily reflect the majority view I can usually understand why. But Boneworks really has me scratching my head.

How can anyone like this?

I didn’t finish the campaign this time around. I just couldn’t be bothered. The only good thing I can say about it is that I didn’t have so many issues with the wonky physics totally f**king up the puzzles. But all the other problems I spoke about in my original review remain. The level and puzzle design is poor and the story aspects are a complete joke.

Also, as I suspected in my original review – ‘When I try to move a box and my virtual body glitches me inside of it so I become a half-man, half-box hybrid, barely able to move or free myself so I’m forced to restart, I don’t really see how using the Index controllers would have saved me.’

I was right, the Index controllers didn’t help. I still glitched inside objects and got stuck. My hands, when climbing, would glitch out causing me to drop. My virtual arms would often get caught on scenery, sometimes wrapped around an object, trapping me in place until I was able to wiggle them free. I gave up a few levels in when I realised everything was just as bad as I recalled. But what about the combat? I decided to give some of the Sandbox modes a spin and see.

Oh no.

The combat is bloody terrible. The melee combat in particular is just awful. It’s even more noticeable when I was just playing some Blade & Sorcery the other day. There’s no sense of weight to weapons. Sharp or blunt, weapons just awkwardly bounce off a target with no sense of impact.

Half the time when you grab a weapon via telekinesis it won’t automatically switch to facing the correct direction, so you end up with an axe head pointed back at you and not the enemy you’re trying to fight.

And gun combat? Gun combat, whilst not as bad as melee, is still pretty bad. The reloading system is awkward as f**k and none of the guns I used seemed to aim properly no matter how carefully I lined up my shots. Once again, there’s no sense of weight or impact to your guns or to your shots.

I returned to Boneworks hoping that, even if I still didn’t like it, I might at least come to understand why the game has such a positive following. Instead, I leave the game even more confused. I can’t honestly think of a single thing the game does well.

The story sucks. The campaign sucks. The combat sucks. The sandbox modes suck. The visuals are . . . fine, I guess? The music sucks – oh god, I forgot how f**king irritating the music is. The whole game is janky as f**k.

How can anyone like this?

I’m really sorry if you like Boneworks but I’ll never understand you and we can never be friends.

Now Playing: Frostpunk

I’d seen Frostpunk go on sale numerous times on Steam but I was always wary of picking it up. When it comes to city building / management type games, my enjoyment of them tends to be very hit or miss. I either really get stuck into it, or I get bored very quickly. But then I noticed Frostpunk was being given away for free on the Epic store and you can’t exactly go wrong at that price.

I can’t say I really use my Epic account for more than claiming free games that I never actually play, but Frostpunk proved to be different. I really got stuck into it, clocking more than twenty hours over just a few days.

Frostpunk is a city building sim with a focus on survival. There are four scenarios included in the base edition (obviously, the free version doesn’t include the DLC) each with their own unique objectives, but the ultimate goal for each is largely the same – to build your city and keep your inhabitants alive as the winter storms grow progressively worse and the temperature plummets.

The setting – an historically alternate, steampunk Victorian style era – fits perfectly with the mood. It reminds me, thematically, a lot of Homeworld – the sense of desperation, of being the last survivors on a journey to a new home. Each scenario has one or more narrative event chains in addition to various gameplay related events depending upon your actions or your choice of ‘Laws’.

 

There are three branches of Law in the game – a base set and the choice between an ‘Order’ or a ‘Faith’ set. You can pass new Laws periodically and each, regardless of set, will offer various choices as to how you want to manage and build your society, unlocking new options or building types.

Your city starts small, your citizens huddled around a defunct generator. As you progress and expand you can put your citizens to work gathering resources – coal, wood, iron and food. You’ll slowly build up and out, always aware that the more you expand, the more you need to heat as the temperature continues to drop. You can send scouts into the frozen wastelands to search for supplies or other survivors to join your city.

But more people mean more mouths to feed and homes to build and heat. Which means more coal to keep the generator running. You can research new technology allowing you to improve building insulation, or upgrade existing resource structures to improve their output. You can upgrade the generator, expanding its heat output and its reach. You can find or construct towering automatons which can operate various structures regardless of the cold.

Your citizens are governed by their ‘Hope’ and ‘Discontent’ – and you may need to make hard choices or pass oppressive Laws that they won’t exactly be happy with in order to keep them alive. The goal of the ‘main’ scenario is to survive a super storm which means stockpiling enough supplies to see your people through safely.

 

Which I guess kind of leads me into my first real criticism of Frostpunk. Those early attempts to survive are extremely fun. The game doesn’t have the best tutorial system so there’s a fair amount of trial and error involved as you figure out the best way to approach your objective. The problem is, when you do figure out the best way to build and expand and how to prepare for the coming storm, Frostpunk does become a little too easy to play.

To be fair, there are multiple difficulty settings to test your ability, but even so, the manner in which you build and expand won’t really change, not when you understand which path to take in regard to Laws or technology that are the most efficient and effective ways to go. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the other three scenarios required you to take a different approach and play in a different kind of way.

And they do, to a degree, but Frostpunk was clearly designed around that first, main scenario, and the other three are kind of short and certain aspects of the game – like the Laws – don’t necessarily fit neatly within them. They’re fun, but they’re certainly not as involved or fleshed out as the main scenario, which is a shame.

 
Beyond the scenarios there is also an ‘Endless’ mode in which you can just focus on building up your city without any final objective. Fun, for a time, with a choice of different maps to play on, but as you’d expect, once you hit a point where your city is pretty much entirely safe and secure, there’s not a lot else to do.

Overall, Frostpunk is a really enjoyable city building game with a unique twist. The visuals and the music fit the gloomy mood. There’s a good sense of progression and there is a decent amount of replay value thanks to the Laws, scenarios and difficulty options – which you can customise entirely to your liking.

But Frostpunk is also kind of limited. The game was clearly designed around the main scenario and everything else feels kind of stuck rigidly around that, and not in a way that entirely works. It’s like a small game trying to be bigger and more expansive than the mechanics really allow.

Frostpunk must have been successful enough to support this additional free and paid content, but it does feel like they stretched Frostpunk’s mechanics and gameplay systems as far as they can go. Which is why I’m eager to see what they do next, if they can take what they’ve done with Frostpunk and push it bigger and better.

7/10 (Updated Score - 8/10 - Complete Edition)

Now Watching: Army of the Dead

Zombies. Las Vegas. Casino Heist. Army of the Dead has such a great premise but completely wastes it. It’s not often I get mad at a film because I feel like I’ve totally wasted my time watching it, but that’s how I felt when I finished with this garbage. There’s absolutely nothing – not a single moment – in this film that’s worth enduring the ridiculous two and a half hour run time.

It takes nearly a full hour before our band of merry mercenaries even enter Vegas and yet, despite the time it took to get there, we still barely know a single one of our characters. Army of the Dead can’t quite decide if it wants to be silly or serious. You’ll jump from a terrible and way too long, ‘heartfelt’ scene between father and daughter, to a zombie being splattered by a cartoon booby trap.

The only interesting thing I’d say Army of the Dead does is the notion of a zombie ‘king’ and the idea that the zombies (at least the smarter ones) can be bargained with. But the film doesn’t really explore or do much with this concept and ultimately, they could have just been dumb as rocks, run of the mill undead. And maybe that would have actually been better.

The father / daughter sub-plot was completely unnecessary. Too many scenes drag on for far too long. The serious stuff falls flat, as does the humour. The film never takes advantage of the setting in any clever or creative ways. Even if I tried to cut this movie down by trimming everything not essential to the core plot, you’d still be left with a pretty mediocre film, but at least it would be shorter.

I’ve seen far worse films than Army of the Dead, but not many that are quite so disappointing, not when you look at the premise, the budget or the talent involved. I recall liking Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. That’s why I thought this would be pretty fun. But it’s not. It’s mostly boring, stupid and it’s far too long. Don’t waste your time with this film. Don’t be tempted by that cool sounding premise. It’s not worth it.

4/10