Steam Halloween Sale: Damage Report

I claimed a free copy of Frostpunk on the Epic Store not too long ago, and I enjoyed the game quite a lot – you can read my review here. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that when I saw a GOTY edition with all of the DLC go on sale, I figured I’d pick it up and jump back in.

I liked the Tales of Arise demo quite a bit too, so I decided to pick up the full game, despite my reservations about the ridiculous amount of Day 1 DLC. I’ve actually already completed it at the time of writing this post, so expect a full review very soon.

Given that I’ve played all the other Walking Dead games featuring Clementine, I couldn’t not pick up and play the The Final Season to see how her story ends. It better not be sad.

Scarlet Nexus was another title I enjoyed the demo of so I decided to pick it up and give the full game a spin.

And finally we have The Room VR: Dark Matter, a VR puzzle game with a lot of great reviews. I’m not expecting a substantial experience, but I’m hoping I’ll get a good few quality hours of engaging and immersive, head-scratching puzzle fun.

Now Playing: World War Z: Aftermath

World War Z: Aftermath AKA Left 4 Dead 3 is a third (or first) person zombie co-op shooter. You and up to three friends can fight your way through 7 campaign based episodes comprised of 23 levels, or try your luck in the limited – but fun – horde mode. There’s also a challenge mode providing unique modifiers to various levels, and a competitive multiplayer.

World War Z is, more or less, a Left 4 Dead game in all but name. You have 4 characters to choose between, a pistol and a primary weapon with heavier ‘special’ weapons that can be found randomly placed throughout levels. Each episode has between 3 to 4 levels and mostly involve moving from A to B, broken up with a few horde defence sections. Zombies come in the regular or special varieties, such as the hunter – sorry, lurker – or the charger – sorry, bull. If you’ve ever played L4D, you’ll know how it works.

But that’s not to say that War Z doesn’t have any of its own ideas. Rather than follow the same 4 characters across every episode, War Z takes a global approach to the zombie outbreak, with each episode set in a different part of the world with a new team – New York, Jerusalem, Moscow, Tokyo, Rome and Marseille.

War Z also has a class system, complete with a level system and perks you can unlock as you progress. There’s a Gunslinger class that focuses on being the best at shooty shooty bang bang, or the Hellraiser that focuses on things that go boom. In total there’s 8 classes to pick from, and you use virtual currency earned from completing missions to purchase their various perks.

There’s 5 difficulty settings in War Z and the harder you go the greater the rewards. Every weapon also levels up as you use it, although you do need to purchase each individual upgrade level before you can keep progressing which is kind of annoying.

Zombies are also far more numerous in War Z than in L4D. The hordes in War Z come charging at you like a relentless tide of dead flesh and bone. It’s really quite impressive to see as they pile up and form zombie pyramids and it never gets old tossing a grenade into the base of the swarm and watching the pieces go flying.

When you’re fighting hordes you’ll typically have access to a few defence items such as stationary or automated turrets, barbed wire or electrical grids that can help you slow down and thin out the herd. And it’s those moments when you’re fighting a horde that are the real star of War Z. It’s like the final escape section at the end of a L4D campaign, only in War Z you get it several times throughout each episode.

War Z is undoubtedly fun. The levels are fairly short, but not too short. For all the zombies on screen at once the performance is always smooth. Visually, it’s a good looking game. It’s a little repetitive at times – the missions don’t really vary much from that A to B formula. But I enjoyed working my way through the missions both in solo with AI – which is surprisingly decent – and again with a friend in co-op.

I think my main criticism of War Z is that it lacks personality. Compared to L4D, none of these characters really stand out. It’s all a little too serious and po-faced. There’s not really any humour to be found and you won’t come to have a favourite character to play as because they’re all pretty bland regardless of who you pick.

And that’s all I really have to say about World War Z. It’s a solid, enjoyable game that does enough of its own thing to stand apart from L4D and offer a fun alternative. The characters are so bland that I’m not sure I’d even call them characters. The missions are all pretty much the same despite the variety of locations. The horde mode could do with more than one map.

But despite its shortcomings, War Z is worth picking up if you’re growing tired of L4D and want a new game where you can shoot lots of zombies with friends. There’s plenty of content here to keep you busy, plenty of missions to replay on different difficulties, classes and guns to level up and perks to unlock. It’s a game I’m sure I’ll keep returning to every so often for some mindless, simple zombie shooting action.

7/10

Battlefield 2042 (BETA)

Battlefield 2042 was one of my most highly anticipated games this year. I know a lot of people didn’t like BFV but I thoroughly enjoyed it and the thought of DICE building upon that foundation, with a not-too-distant future setting, larger maps and a 128 player count . . . it’s quite an exciting prospect, isn’t it?

Oh no. After playing this beta, I’m not sure I want to buy the game at all. A lot has been said about this beta being an ‘older’ build which might excuse the bugs and performance issues, but my problems with the game aren’t technical in nature – they’re problems with core aspects of the game design. Those aren’t things that can be ‘fixed’ or patched because they’re intended to be that way.

And hey, maybe a lot of people will like the way 2042 plays. But I can’t say I enjoyed it very much at all, at least compared to BFV.

So yes, it’s a beta and it’s a bit buggy and the performance isn’t great. I was able to get a fairly solid 60 FPS on medium settings, but it’s hard to be sure how stable it was because my in-game overlay didn’t want to work most of the time. Visually speaking, 2042 still looks pretty good on lower settings but, to me, it still seems like a step down from BFV.

Maybe it’s just the map. Maybe it’s the horrid UI with all those horrible icons I couldn’t seem to turn off unless I turned everything off which isn’t particularly helpful. Maybe it’s that f**king intrusive banner that continually appears at the top of the screen. I don’t know. I’m sure if you scrutinise the textures or whatever, 2042 is pretty impressive . . . but as a whole?

Your screen feels like a nightmare of garish colours and icons and information all in the wrong place. The amount of times I was trying to focus on the map ahead only to be distracted by a dozen colourful icons all in my field of view – objective markers, squad mates, equipment – there’s way too much shit on the screen and no way to remove it.

Everything about 2042 feels messy. To be fair, Conquest, as a mode, could be messy in BFV too, which is why I always preferred Breakthrough – with more clearly defined objectives and battle flow. Conquest always was a bit of a free-for-all. Of course, it’s even more messy in this beta because the map is disabled.

Great. You have no idea of which points need reinforcing or which point your team are pushing onto next because there’s no map to pull up in-game. So for a mode that’s already fairly messy, with no map to help co-ordinate the teams, it’s even more of a random, chaotic mess.

And the map? It’s not that good, to be frank. Maybe it works better in other modes but in Conquest, it’s just too big and too open. It’s weird to think that this is one of the smaller maps in 2042 given how spread out everyone is. You really don’t feel like you’re playing with 128 players. In fact, battles feel smaller than in BFV because of the distances involved.

The vehicle limit for such a big map and so many players feels incredibly small – only 2 tanks per side? It’s not exactly all-out-war. And this results in matches in which most of the time you’re desperately sprinting from one point to another hoping desperately that you don’t get shot on the way because you’ll face another 2 minute sprint to get back there again.

Speaking of vehicles, what’s the point of a repair tool if vehicles can just regenerate health? The amount of times I nearly destroyed a tank or helicopter only for it to retreat out of the fight for a minute or so and then return . . . at full health. Oh, and with unlimited ammo, too. This is, of course, different to BFV where vehicles had to be manually repaired and resupplied.

Medics! In BFV, medics were vital. But in 2042, when your health can regenerate to full without a health kit, why bother taking one? And 2042 doesn’t even really have a medic – not exactly. In fact, it doesn’t have ‘classes’ at all but ‘specialists’. Oh god, I’ll talk about those later.

Unlike BFV where team work wasn’t just encouraged but necessary and everyone could feel like they were contributing to the win – medics dishing out health kits, engineers dropping ammo and building fortifications, assault leading the charge and recon providing spotting and sniper cover – none of that team play exists in 2042, at least not in this beta.

In BFV each class had its role to play but 2042 completely abandons this idea and instead switches to a system in which team play is nice, I guess, but certainly not required. Even ‘squad’ play feels pointless given the size of the map. Most of the time you’re totally separated from your squad. Maybe if the squads were bigger – say 10, or 15 players – actual squad play / support might make more sense.

Reviving is bound to the same button as ‘pick up weapon’ which as you can imagine leads to some incredibly frustrating situations. The map destruction also feels weak compared to BFV. In that game, the entire map would have been transformed by the end of the match but in 2042, nothing really changes. You get a few holes in the ground, I guess, but the buildings all remain standing.

No fortifications system. Seriously, fortifications in BFV were a fantastic idea, adding another way for maps to change dynamically during a match. Completely gone, in 2042. As is the BFV movement system which was pretty much perfect. Gone. Replaced by a far less fluid, awkward and clunky one.

The random weather changes can be cool but they’re not really more than another visual distraction and I hate the UI glitches they cause – it’s bad enough as it is. The general gun play isn’t too bad, I guess? It’s hard to say because this beta has also been a bit laggy and the hit detection feels off a lot of the time. I like the on the fly weapon modification. That’s neat.

So what about those ‘specialists’, eh? They pretty much turn 2042 into the Clone Wars. Now, I know there’s going to be about 10 specialists at release compared to 4 in this beta, but I don’t see the situation really improving all that much. So you don’t choose a ‘class’ in 2042, you choose a ‘specialist’ that has access to a single piece of unique equipment – grappling hook, automated sentry gun, medical syringe or drone. The rest of your load out you can customise as you like.

I guess on paper it doesn’t sound like the worst kind of system but it totally destroys the notion of clearly defined class roles and as a result, everyone just kind of runs around and does their own thing. It’s . . . a mess. It’s also incredibly sad when you’re playing as the specialist Boris and you shoot and kill Boris, only for another Boris to shoot you, but then a friendly Boris shoots the bad Boris and friendly Boris revives you as . . . Boris.

It’s f**king crazy. There’s absolutely nothing to make each team distinct in 2042. You get the same specialists on each side and there’s no cosmetic customisation so everyone looks the f**king same. And this kind of kills what, for me, was great about BFV – you were just another grunt in the army playing your part, doing what you could. That, for me, was what Battlefield was all about, even way back when I played the original 1942.

But now? In 2042? It’s now a Hero shooter, more or less, and it sucks balls.

Christ, there’s so much more I could ramble on about but I think you get the point. 2042 wasn’t terrible to play. I had a few fun moments with it. But it feels like a big step back from BFV in pretty much every department. Maybe there are better maps, maybe it plays better in other modes. Maybe a lot of my issues with the UI will be fixed by release.

But right now, I can’t say I’ll be picking up 2042. A game I had the Gold Edition pre-ordered, now refunded. I’m not going to write it off completely. I’ll keep my eye on it and see if it can change my mind. To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement.

Tales of Arise, Scarlet Nexus & Code Vein

It was too hot to keep playing Skyrim VR recently, so I decided to take a little break and try out a few demos. First up was the newly released Tales of Arise. I don’t believe I’ve played a Tales game before, although part of me recalls owning Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube so I’m really not sure. The first thing that struck me about Arise is how damn pretty the game looks. It has this ‘watercolour’ style to it that’s really quite lovely to look at.

The demo is a little weird in the sense that it doesn’t begin at the start of the game with a single character, limited abilities and a basic tutorial, but with a party of six(!) characters to control at around level 25 and more skills than you know what to do with. It really does throw you in at the deep end.

Combat, initially, felt incredibly messy. Flashy and exciting with cool, totally over the top animations? Sure. But I didn’t have a f**king clue what was going on. I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know how. You have a basic attack combined with 3 special abilities plus ‘boost’ attacks (at least, I think that’s what they’re called) provided by your party members, each of which has a very different optimal use.

There’s also a combined party attack that can be triggered, weak spots on certain enemies, elemental resistances, different attack types for when you’re on or off the ground. It’s a lot to take in, not to mention the strategy system in which you can customise how your party members fight when you’re not directly controlling them.

I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I bumped up the difficulty from standard to max. This meant that enemies now had a lot more health so fights took longer to beat, giving me more time to figure the combat out – and once I did, I really started to enjoy it. But now that I do have a much better grasp of how the combat works in Arise, do I still think it’s a little messy?

Yeah, I do. A lot of the time the game can get a little too flashy for its own good. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fantastic, but when so many animations and effects are popping off all over your screen, it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

The creatures you fight are pretty neat and I like the look of the world – at least from what I saw in the demo. From a story and character point of view, it’s hard to say because the demo doesn’t give a lot away and I tend to skip story stuff when I’m playing a demo anyway so I can just focus on the gameplay.

Overall, I enjoyed the demo a lot and was actually thinking about picking it up straight away, but then I saw the three different editions and the 100 or so quid of DLC including XP boosters, costumes with unlockable skills and various gold and item packs. It might be that none of this stuff is really needed or important, but when a game offers to let you buy levels for your characters, you do have to wonder if the game has been deliberately designed to encourage such purchases. I mean, why else would people buy them if they didn’t feel they had to?

Next up was Scarlet Nexus a third person, sci-fi action RPG. Once again, I skipped all the story stuff, but it’s a game set within some kind of cyberpunk-esque dystopia post-apocalypse (?) . . . or something. I like the look of it. The visuals are a little drab and gloomy but they do a good job of setting the mood.

You play as a new recruit to some kind of special forces team all of whom have special brain powers like telekinesis and you go on missions into the world to fight what look like giant evil plant monsters and other weird shit. You can choose between two characters each of which plays a little differently and – at least based on what I saw in the demo – follow slightly different pathways through the same core campaign.

You have a squad backing you up but you don’t control these other characters directly. Instead, you can call upon their brain power and utilise it in combat. It’s kind of like each party member is a different magic spell you can trigger for a limited time with various effects all of which will be more or less useful depending upon the situation and the enemy type you’re fighting.

The combat is pretty fun, although given that the variation between the two playable characters doesn’t seem that great, I do wonder if the game will become a little bit too repetitive on a second run.

Overall, I liked what I played and will probably pick up on sale.

And finally we have Code Vein which is, more or less, anime Dark Souls. Seriously, that’s what it is. You collect souls from enemies – although they’re not called souls. You rest at bonfires to restore your health and estus flasks – although they’re not called bonfires or estus flasks. You have a stamina bar, light and heavy attacks, dodges and parries . . . yeah, it’s Dark Souls but with anime girls and a booby slider.

And I’m okay with that – but I can’t say the demo did a good job on selling me the game. The actual combat feels a little weak. It’s hard to say based on the demo, but the attack range always felt a little off. Enemies didn’t always seem to react to blows properly and would occasionally get stuck within the environments in ways that could sometimes be beneficial, but other times would be annoying.

Visually, the game was pretty drab, and not in a good way. Maybe it was just the opening section and enemies, but there wasn’t anything particularly exciting from a visual or design point of view. I also didn’t really care for the combat. Unlike Arise and Nexus, I didn’t bother finishing the demo. Not one I’ll be picking up, even on sale.

Gallery: Skyrim (VR)

 

Now Playing: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Like the other Yakuza games I’ve played, Like a Dragon gets off to a very slow start. But I’d say LaD is by far the slowest. It’s painfully slow. It wasn’t until I’d played 10 or so hours that I felt like the game was finally opening up and letting me loose, and it probably took another 10 before the remainder of the side content became available. Be warned: Like a Dragon isn’t a bad game but I’m probably going to spend most of this review complaining about it.

Taking a break from Kazuma Kiryu, LaD focuses on the likeable Ichiban Kasuga. It’s Ichiban and his friends that are the highlight of LaD – their relationships, interactions and little conversations as you traverse the city. The story may be slow paced and predictable but it’s enjoyable enough to see you through to the end.

The big change in LaD is the combat, with a new turn based party system. I’ll talk a lot more about the combat later but for now, let’s focus on the more familiar elements of a Yakuza game. The optional sub-stories are largely lacklustre and forgettable but there are a few good ones sprinkled throughout.

The main mini-game is Dragon Kart racing which could have been pretty fun if it wasn’t so damn easy – I won every race with ease just using the default kart. The only race I lost and that required a kart upgrade was the very last ‘boss’ race. Even then, I cleared it on the second try. Mechanically, it’s not a bad game within a game, but it’s just so easy that it’s also incredibly dull.

 

And that criticism also applies to the business management in LaD. The idea is that you buy and invest in various businesses, assigning staff and increasing your profits to raise your share ranking. The problem is, it’s a very passive system. ‘Opening for business’ just means it’s time to hold down the right trigger to speed through your earnings. You don’t actually interact in any way with your customers or employees.

Every four turns you have to attend a meeting to win the support of your shareholders and push your company higher up the rankings. This is the only real ‘gameplay’ part of the management experience and it’s basically just a colour coded game of rock, paper, scissors. You don’t keep any profits from your business to spend in the world, only the ‘bonus’ you get from each meeting which, even when you’re Rank 1, still only amounts to 3 million yen when your company may have 10 billion in the bank.

In short, business management isn’t hard at all – like Dragon Kart it’s just a tedious grind to the finish line. There’s no real need for strategy, skill or planning. It doesn’t really matter how much money you make or what kind of employees you hire and assign. All you need to do is grind through each sales turn and then ‘win’ the meeting to progress.

Speaking of grind, let’s talk about the level and class system. Every character has a base level and a separate job (class) level. Their base level determines what character skills they have access to, and their job level determines what class skills they can use. The job system is very flexible – every character can switch between multiple job types whenever you please giving you a massive range of ways to build your party.

The problem is, levelling up jobs takes f**king forever which rather discourages you from switching. You’re better off finding a job you like for each character and sticking with it to the end. Even then, you might not hit their max job level by the end of the game. Even using in-game xp boosters, it’s a real grind to level up your character classes.

But the more you do level up, the more messy your list of skills become. Because LaD doesn’t replace or remove redundant skills, every attack turn you’ll be scrolling through an extensive list of largely useless abilities. Ichiban, for example, will learn an AoE bat swing when playing as the Hero class. And as you level up, you’ll learn more powerful variations of this skill. But the game doesn’t remove the old ones.

I guess you could argue that it’s not a big deal, that you can just ignore them and that actually, there may be times when you want to use the weaker variation with the lower MP cost. But this feeds into the other major problem with LaD – each character has way too many skills.

Actually – scratch that – it’s not really the number of skills that’s the issue, but how obtuse the turn based combat system is in relation to these skills. LaD features a variety of attack types – blunt, sharp, elemental (fire, water, electrical) and status effects such as bleeding, poison, stun, sleep and silence. And many of these skills are categorised by damage – Light, Medium, Heavy and Extreme.

But even after completing LaD I’m still not sure why I should pick one particular skill over another in a fight. Some enemies do have a marked ‘weakness’ to particular damage, but the majority either don’t, or the attacks that they are supposed to be weak to don’t seem to do any more damage to them than those that they aren’t.

In fact, sometimes a ‘Light’ attack does more damage than a ‘Heavy’ but there’s no real logical reason why. And this connects to the issue of each character having too many skills – you have this big list of potential attacks, but you don’t have any real indication as to why you should choose one skill over another. You can never predict what kind of damage you’re going to do so you end up just picking and choosing skills at random until you find the few that are the most regularly successful.

The combat system in LaD isn’t very good. It’s bloated with useless skills and relies heavily on damage sponge boss fights which – like Dragon Kart and the business management – aren’t hard to beat, but are a tedious grind to get through. Seriously, there’s a couple of boss fights in this game where the boss is resistant to pretty much every attack type so you just have to slowly whittle down their health over 20 minutes or so. It’s boring as f**k.

Oh, and then there’s the penultimate boss fight in which your opponent can one shot Ichiban forcing you to restart from scratch. There is a skill that allows Ichiban to survive a ‘one shot’ attack, but it only works once and this boss can queue up 2-3 attacks in a row. If you’re unlucky, he’ll target Ichiban more than once and there’s f**k all you can do about it.

Although battles are turn based, enemies can and do move about as you select your next attack. This means that the timing of various AoE skills is vital to maximise damage. Unfortunately, your characters often get stuck on scenery as they move to attack, causing a small but significant delay which frequently renders your attack completely worthless.

And although the game has a wide range of elemental attacks and character debuffs, the majority of them rarely come into play due to enemy resistances. Bleed and poison are the most useful against certain boss characters – if you can get them them to stick. Charm and stun are the most useful against groups. But lower evasion or accuracy? It seems like a waste of MP. Silence might be great . . . if I could ever get it to work. And with no indication of how long a debuff may last you can’t really be sure how valuable they’ll be or when to line up another attack to reapply.

I don’t think switching to a turn based combat system was a bad move for LaD, but switching to a bad turn based combat system was. Okay, to be fair, the combat in LaD does have its moments. The classes are all fun with lots of themed special attacks. The ‘poundmates’ system is kind of useless but it’s always fun to attack people with a lobster.

It’s kind of frustrating because if the damage and skills system wasn’t so bloody obtuse and if the enemies – and the bosses in particular – were better designed, it would actually be really good. But it’s not. It’s only ‘okay’ at the best of times, mediocre at the most, and just plain bad on more occasions than I’d like. I don’t hate it. It didn’t piss me off. I just think it could have been a lot better.

Okay, I guess I should wrap this up. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is easily the weakest of the Yakuza games I’ve played. As much as I like Ichiban, the story isn’t that great, the side content is fairly lacklustre and the combat is poorly designed. I wouldn’t say any of it is bad as such. Just mediocre, disappointing and forgettable.

5/10