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

Now Playing: Days Gone

I think the best way I can sum up my thoughts on Days Gone is that it’s a potentially great 30 hour game trapped in the body of a mediocre 60 hour one. If you’ve read my First Impressions post you’ll know that despite feeling the opening of the game was rather slow, I concluded by saying that ‘I don’t mind a slow burn as long as the game pays it off in the long run.’ Unfortunately, Days Gone doesn’t quite manage to do that.

Whereas some games really suck you in and make you want to keep playing every minute until you reach the end, Days Gone is the kind of game you might need to take regular breaks from playing, not because you don’t want to see it through, but because you need to take a rest from the relentless monotony.

The map is split into six separate regions, and although each region offers a varied locale to explore in terms of terrain, they do fall into the Ubisoft style ‘regional content’ system, whereby every region has the same pattern of side content and collectibles – marauder / ambush camps, Nero outposts / checkpoints, hordes and nests.

I’m sure you can argue that you can ignore the majority of this additional content and only focus on the main story missions. And if you do, maybe you can get through the game in 30 hours or less. But if you don’t explore the side content in Days Gone you’re going to miss out on a lot of pretty useful upgrades and crafting items – not to mention the importance of increasing your ‘trust’ level in each region to unlock new supplies and bike upgrades.

You’ll also miss out on what is by far the best aspect of Days Gone and one which, sadly, the game doesn’t really focus upon enough – fighting the hordes. There are only three main missions in which you’re forced to fight a horde and these come towards the very end of the game. The zombie stuff in Days Gone is the real highlight – the way the hordes move, coming at you like a relentless tide, forcing you to plan and prepare, using traps or the local environment to your advantage.

Taking on a horde and winning when things go to plan – and especially when they don’t – is exhilarating and exhausting. Fighting the hordes in Days Gone is brilliant. Unfortunately, aside from those three main missions, hordes are just considered another ‘side’ activity in the open world. This, to me, was a massive mistake. Instead, the game focuses on what is probably the weakest and worst aspect – fighting humans.

Days Gone really does focus on the wrong thing. It begins with Deacon searching for his wife and in contact with a group called Nero. Things move slowly as you work through a series of repetitive missions in which you stalk a Nero researcher and listen to their conversations. You do this about seven times before even Deacon gets sick of it and demands the plot continue.

But then Nero and Deacon’s wife kind of stop being the focus and instead the game shifts attention to a group of crazy cultists called the ‘Rippers’. Once you’re finished with them, it seems like the game might actually be turning its attention to dealing with the hordes and that maybe that will connect to what Nero are up to?

But . . . no. The focus then shifts onto another human group – the Militia – who Deacon initially works for, but ends up fighting against leading to an absolutely terrible final mission. For a game that really takes its time with its story, it ends in a way that’s incredibly abrupt and disjointed and leaves a lot unresolved. Nero just disappear out of the story entirely. The hordes you were talking about trying to stop just get forgotten.

Instead, the game decides that fighting humans is the most fun thing to do *insert Picard facepalm*. The bulk of the side content is fighting humans in marauder or ambush camps, and most of the main content is also fighting humans in the form of the Rippers or the Militia. There’s nothing clever or fun about fighting humans in Days Gone. There’s nothing terrible about it, either – Days Gone is a competent third person shooter. But it’s not really what the game should have been about.

If it wasn’t already clear, I’m really frustrated with Days Gone. I really like the world. I like crazy, shouty Deacon. I like the direction the game was going with Nero and the increasingly mutated freakers. I loved fighting the hordes and I’m going to keep playing Days Gone until I’ve destroyed them all. I liked upgrading and customising my ride. I liked exploring each of the regions to see what I could find.

But I really got sick of fighting humans. I got sick of the game dragging its heels and meandering along with a plot that ultimately, doesn’t really go anywhere. I got sick of the game forcing me through a series of repetitive missions just to advance the story. A perfect example is towards the end when you’re preparing to fight the Militia and then, for no real reason, you have to destroy three Militia camps in a row to advance.

It’s just the same mission, over and over again, no different to the other thirty human camps you’ve cleared – marauder, ripper, drifters, bandits – whatever, they’re all the same. It’s so . . . well, lazy, to be frank. And the game didn’t need it. It didn’t need those quests. They just bloat the game and drag out the experience.

Just like those irritating Nero quests where you roll from one bush to another so you can listen to a conversation. And if you get spotted, you’ve got to do it all over again from the top. It’s such a dull and repetitive way to advance the plot.

Here’s what Days Gone should have been about – fighting zombies. Working with Nero and the other human settlements to destroy the hordes. You can still have Deacon searching for his wife, giving him that personal stake within the story. Cut all the boring marauder / ambush camp nonsense. Cut the pointless and forgettable ‘bounty’ missions. Days Gone is at its best when it’s focused on survival – humans versus freakers.

Despite all my complaints, I do still like Days Gone, because the good stuff is good enough to outweigh the bad and the boring. And if you’re looking for a decent game to sink time into, Days Gone certainly has plenty of content to keep you busy.

But Days Gone is also one hell of a grind to get through and it ends in a way that just makes you sit back and say ‘seriously, is that it?’ It’s a real mixed experience and it’s frustrating to think about how much better the game could have been if it had focused upon the right things – if it hadn’t bloated itself with so much repetitive and boring content.

6/10

Steam Summer Sale: Damage Report

I picked up Skyrim VR in a previous sale but decided to refund it when I realised how terrible it was. Skyrim, obviously, was never designed for VR, but that doesn’t excuse this exceptionally poor and lazy conversion. The fact they had the audacity to charge 40 quid for this garbage at release is practically criminal. Even if they gave it away for free I’d still not recommend it.

So why did I buy it again? Mods, of course. Mods are the same reason I sunk 600 hours into the regular Skyrim and mods, once again, come to the rescue of this VR version. At the time of writing I have 60 active mods running and I’d say that’s roughly the bare minimum you’d want if you want to transform the base game into something playable and enjoyable in VR – in addition to numerous configuration tweaks.

I’m sure I’ll go into more detail when I review the game but for now I’ll just say that if you’re not willing to spend several hours modifying and tweaking Skyrim VR then just don’t bother. It’s not worth it at any price. If you are willing to put in the time and effort and you’re already a fan of the game, then you should be able to knock it into shape but it’s never going to be perfect.

Despite having a fairly small reduction in price (35%) I decided to pick up Yakuza: Like a Dragon. I loved Yakuza 0 and enjoyed Kiwami 1 & 2 a lot. But I wasn’t too interested in moving on to 3, 4, 5 or 6 because I was kind of happy with how the story wrapped up in 2. But I did want more Yakuza, and this new game with a new cast and a new style of combat looked like a fresh twist for the series and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.