E-Book Release: The Secret Of The Spires

The once mighty empire of the Legion has descended into chaos, consumed by civil war. The nomadic rebels of the Great Wastes seize this opportunity to strike, liberating those oppressed by Legion rule.

 

In the volcanic ashlands of the east, a dark dragon is seen in the skies, an omen of destruction. Across the land, dormant ruins begin to reawaken, unleashing the fearsome creations of the Forgotten Age upon the world.

 

Six ancient Spires hold the truth. With old friends and new allies, Zorah, a young hunter of the desert Frontier, sets out on a journey to save her world and those she loves from the terrors of the past.

 

A journey that will change Zorah, and her world, forever.

Now Playing: Jedi: Fallen Order

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order tells the story of Cal Kestis, a young Jedi Padawan who escaped the Great Jedi Purge. Cal has been hiding on the planet Bracca, scraping together a meagre living salvaging ships from the Clone Wars but, as you can probably guess, his true identity is soon revealed and he’s forced to go on the run, hunted by the Sith Inquisitors of the Empire.

Cal is a likeable, if not particularly complex, protagonist. He’s a little too nice, too forgiving and it’s a shame we never really see him lose control, be challenged by any morally murky choices, or – even if it might be a little trite – forced to confront the seductive power of the Dark Side. That’s not to say that Cal isn’t faced with any internal conflict, but that conflict largely relates to his past, not his present or future.

Cal sets out upon a mission to restore the Jedi Order, accompanied by Cere – an ex-Jedi Knight – and Greez – a four armed alien with a love of cooking and gambling. Cal also has the trusty BD-1 at his side, an adorable and loyal droid who assists him throughout his travels. At the heart of the story is a Jedi Holocron, hidden within an ancient vault. Hunted by the Second Sister – a Sith Inquisitor – Cal and his crew need to locate and retrieve the Holocron before the Empire do.

Like Cal, it’s a shame the supporting cast (both good and bad) aren’t explored to any great degree. Cere has a pretty decent backstory and arc, as does BD-1, but Greez doesn’t get much. There’s a cool little section that feels like it was originally part of a much larger arc for Greez involving bounty hunters and gladiator cage fights, but it’s cut pretty short in the game and doesn’t really factor into the plot moving forward.

 

The Second Sister is a cool villain but sadly, she doesn’t really get enough time in the game. Like Cere, she has a pretty good backstory and arc, but I really wanted to see more of her throughout the game and have more interactions between her and Cal. She is, without spoiling too much, what Cal could have been if he hadn’t escaped the Purge, so it would have been nice to see them confront one another – and the path they each could have taken – presented more substantially within the game. A section where they’re forced to team up and work together, for example, would have been pretty fun.

Another cool villain – the Ninth Sister – gets a pretty fun boss battle but then just disappears from the game entirely. And another character who joins your crew towards the end of the game doesn’t really have much to do at all. It feels like, similar to Greez, that there should have been at least one mission revolving around this character and their story once they join you.

As much as I enjoyed the story and character aspects of Fallen Order, I can’t help but feel frustrated by them. I wanted to interact more with my crew and with the villains opposing us. I wanted to see more conflict within Cal as he struggles with the weight of the responsibility that has been thrust upon him.

 

On a few odd and seemingly random occasions you’ll get a dialogue choice when speaking with someone. It feels like the remnant of a more ambitious RPG style choice system that the developers just didn’t have the time or money to properly develop. And that feeling of cut corners and pared down features is one that persists throughout the game as a whole.

In terms of gameplay, there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before. Fallen Order is unashamedly derivative. It takes the platform aspect of the new Tomb Raider games, the map progression of Metroid and the combat of Dark Souls. I think it’s fair to say that Fallen Order is a jack of all trades but a master of none.

On your journey you’ll travel to several different worlds. Each world will vary in size and map complexity and your progression through each map will be determined by the abilities you’ve unlocked. You can only explore so far on your initial visit, with many pathways inaccessible until you’ve unlocked the necessary skill.

 

This encourages you to return to previous maps to open up and explore new areas. This will sometimes be part of the natural story progression, but also purely for your own exploration as you seek out hidden chests and secrets. The chests, it has to be said, are pretty pointless because they only contain cosmetic customisation pieces. This would be good if they gave you a varied range of new outfits for Cal, but they only include new colour options for your default (and only) outfit.

You also get new colour skins for BD-1 and your ship, and various new lightsaber parts. The lightsaber parts do at least change the visual appearance of your weapon, but it’s not like you really see it up close very often anyway. The collectible stuff in Fallen Order feels like another cut corner, like they wanted to do far more with cosmetic custom options but just didn’t have the time. That said, the ‘secrets’ on each map are worth tracking down because they’ll provide boosts to your health, force power and healing stims.

Traversing the map is a lot like the new Tomb Raider – you can run, climb walls and swing from ropes to get about, with a few slip and slide roller-coaster set piece moments to keep you on your toes. Combat, on the other hand, is a lot like Dark Souls. You can dodge and parry and utilise a – sadly limited – range of combo moves. You have ‘mediation points’ (bonfires) where you can rest, restoring your health and stims (flasks) but also re-spawning all enemies on a level. If you die in combat you’ll lose all of your accumulated experience, but you can retrieve it by striking the enemy that killed you.

 

The combat, overall, is pretty fun, despite the lack of humanoid enemy dismemberment. It can get a little messy, particularly towards the end of the game when, once again, it feels like time and budget was a factor and the game just devolves into a linear corridor that throws dozens of enemies at you at once. I also would have liked more elaborate combo moves and abilities. The difficulty options are pretty good – I’d recommend Jedi Master for a fair, but robust challenge.

Visually, Fallen Order looks great. The character models – most of them, at least – look fantastic. The wookiees though look pretty terrible. I don’t know what happened there. The environments are varied and make for some very pretty screenshots. The sound and music, as you’d typically expect in a Star Wars game with such a rich and iconic base to work from, is also really good.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy playing Fallen Order but I also feel like the game doesn’t quite live up to its own potential. It’s the kind of game you’ll play but also be frustrated by because it just falls short in too many key areas. The signs of a tight production schedule and budget are obvious – take the chests you open underwater, but still play the same animation (and audio) as they do on land.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a really good game that I really want to see a sequel to. A sequel that the developers have the time and resources they need to deliver on the experience they clearly wanted but weren’t quite able to here.

7/10

Horizon Zero Dawn: First Impressions

I was wary of picking up Horizon Zero Dawn when I’d heard so many bad things about this PC version. But I figured I’d give it a shot and if it really was as bad as people said, I could always get a refund. I’ve now played Horizon for about 16 hours and I’m happy to say I’ve not experienced any crashes, stuttering or performance issues. I don’t know if it’s just luck and maybe at some point that luck will run out, but at the time of writing, Horizon runs perfectly fine for me.

Horizon is the story of Aloy, a young outcast of the Nora tribe living amongst the ruins of a technologically advanced civilisation. The setting is something I’m particularly fond of and I’m pleased that my exploration of the map is nearly always rewarded with the discovery of ancient artefacts to sell, or audio / text logs that serve to flesh out the world and reveal more of the past.

This is a world inhabited by dangerous machines, many of which have grown more hostile to any humans they come into contact with – one of the many mysteries that you’ll explore as you progress through Horizon’s story.

Visually, Horizon looks great, although how good it looks does somewhat depend upon the environment and lighting – some areas look much better than others, but none of it looks bad. The only real negative I have with the visuals is the facial animation which seems almost non-existent. It’s like everyone has been pumped full of botox. Their lips barely move and their blank expression barely changes regardless of the situation. It does a pretty great disservice to what is, overall, some pretty good VA work, even for minor side characters.

Horizon is a very collecting / crafting heavy kind of open world game, but the game streamlines these systems in such a way that it hasn’t yet grown annoying. Combat is pretty fun and I like the tactical aspect as you have to plan your attack when dealing with a group of machines, setting traps, luring them into ambush and switching weapon types depending upon a specific weakness or when targeting specific pieces of your enemy. 

Stealth, however, is kind of broken, at least from what I’ve played so far. It’s far too easy to simply whistle one enemy into a bush at a time and insta-kill them silently. I cleared one bandit camp almost entirely by sitting in a single bush and luring the bandits to it one at a time until there was a dozen bodies surrounding it. At no point did any of my foes consider this suspicious.

Another criticism I have right now is quest progression – the game is very side quest heavy, even relatively early on, and this does see you lose focus a little on the core story. The side quests, for the most part, are all pretty decent, but there are quite a few of the ‘gather 4 boar skins’ type of fetch quests that don’t really feel necessary. I also don’t like how the weapon tutorial quests don’t track if you don’t actively select them.

I don’t want to get too stuck into Horizon in this post because it’s still pretty early in the game and I’ve got a lot left to explore. But I am really enjoying it at the time of writing and, thankfully, I’m not experiencing any of the reported technical problems. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through the entire game without issue because what I’ve played so far is shaping up to be one of my favourite games of the year.

Now Playing: Metro: Exodus

I enjoyed – but didn’t love – the previous Metro games (2033 & Last Light), so I didn’t go into Exodus with particularly high expectations, but I still came away disappointed. I think it’s the weakest entry in the Metro series and a game I’d be very reluctant to recommend.

Whereas the previous Metro games had, at the very least, a strong sense of identity, Exodus doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It’s a confusing mixture of very linear, scripted missions and semi-open world maps loosely strung together by a muddled story.

Exodus has an opening ‘prologue’ section set in the Metro before you and a small team embark upon the titular Exodus. This section plays more like the missions of the previous games, with tightly designed levels and a mixture of combat and stealth. I’d say it’s one of the better parts of the game . . . if it wasn’t for the story aspect.

Without getting into spoilers, the reason for the Exodus feels like an unnecessary and contrived retcon of everything the previous games established. I wasn’t particularly invested in the story of the previous games, but even I felt cheated by the way Exodus sets up its plot.

 

It certainly doesn’t help that so many key dialogue scenes seem to have several characters all talking at once (a problem that persists throughout the game) making it hard to follow exactly what’s being said. The story, sadly, doesn’t really improve once the Exodus begins. The ‘twists’ are easy to see coming, as each new section tries (and fails) to tell its own story within the larger plot.

Once you complete the prologue and embark upon the Exodus you’ll enter your first open-world-but-not-quite map. It’s one of only two in the game as all the other missions are completely linear in nature. And I just don’t see the point of these larger maps – outside of the core mission locations, there’s practically nothing to see or do.

The best things about the previous Metro games was their atmosphere, attention to detail and the tight design of their environments and level progression. Exodus, attempting to transfer these strengths onto much larger maps, fails spectacularly.

The first map is mostly empty, with a lot of wasteland to traverse making it a tedious slog just getting from one place to another. The map is broken up by various waterways which require the use of a boat to cross, restricting your movement and essentially transforming this ‘open’ map into a series of smaller, linear lanes.

 

The map, beyond the core mission areas, has a few old ruins with some angry (and stupid) zombies to shoot, and a handful of generic ‘bandit’ camps. But there’s nothing in these optional locations to really make it worth the time or trouble to explore. If you’re playing on higher difficulties, you can end up expending more valuable resources clearing these locations than you’ll receive in return, meaning its best to just avoid them.

Once you finish your core missions on this first map you’ll travel onto the next location which, for me, was probably the best part of the game because it was, like the prologue, more similar to the linear, focused design of the previous Metro games. Unfortunately, this improvement doesn’t last as you then move onto the next ‘open’ map which is, more or less, the Mad Max map.

The open desert is a welcome change of environmental variety compared to the snow and dank tunnels of the last, but the same design problems persist – the map isn’t really ‘open’ but a series of linear lanes with just a few ruins and camps full of bandits to kill. You get a vehicle to drive on this map which, to a degree, makes traversing the map less of a tedious slog but ultimately, it still gets pretty annoying having to travel from one end of the map and back again just to progress the story.

The previous Metro games, for all their flaws, always had the player moving forward, never back. These ‘open’ maps in Exodus totally lack that clarity of level progression and feel like unnecessary and pointless filler content to drag out the experience. There really is nothing worth seeing or exploring upon them – and believe me, I tried. I explored everywhere. I found all of the collectible letters, postcards and upgrades. What a waste of time.

 

From here, it’s almost as if the developers themselves realised that this semi-open world approach just wasn’t working, so the game becomes far more linear in terms of progression. You enter a forest map which, although large, really only has a single path to follow.

The last mission is probably the worst. Although it feels more like the previous games in terms of design, it’s a weak mission with little combat and far too many scripted animation sequences breaking up the flow. I was pretty sick of the game at this point, becoming more and more agitated every time my progression was delayed by yet another unnecessary scripted sequence. I just wanted to get to the end and get it over with.

Visually, Exodus is, overall, a good looking game, but it’s also a pretty inconsistent experience – some environments look fantastic, but others look pretty drab. The combat is . . . fine, I guess? But how much you’ll enjoy it does vary depending upon the location and situation. The enemy AI is also pretty bad – it doesn’t feel like it was properly designed for the larger, more expansive maps.

 

Oh, and the game has a similar ‘moral points’ system like the previous games that determines which ending you get, but it feels even more stupid in Exodus as in order to get the ‘good’ ending you pretty much have to avoid killing anyone – even religious fanatics and bandits that are actively hunting and trying to murder you.

Overall, I can’t really say I enjoyed Metro: Exodus. I enjoyed parts of it, here and there, when the focused design, atmosphere and attention to detail of the previous games shone through. But most of the game was a poorly designed slog with a muddled story and shoddy AI. Even if you were a bigger fan of the previous Metro games than me, I’d still think twice before playing Exodus – very little of what you probably liked about those games exists here.

Exodus, if I’m being really harsh, feels like a mistake from start to finish. A mistake in terms of story, mission design and level progression. It feels like the developers realised their mistake at some point but by that time it was too late to turn back, so we end up with a messy game that feels cobbled together with inconsistent quality and a rushed and unsatisfying conclusion.

5/10

Gallery: Three Kingdoms

 

 

 

Now Playing: Eleven: Table Tennis (VR)

Eleven: Table Tennis VR is a very enjoyable simulation of table tennis in – you guessed it – VR. I did have my doubts about the game prior to picking it up in the recent Summer Sale. I’ve written before about the challenges in VR when a mechanic requires you to judge weight, power and distance – which is particularly important in a game like this.

But table tennis, in a way, seems uniquely suited to VR despite this challenge. The balls are light, so you don’t expect to ‘feel’ a heavy connection when you strike the ball with your virtual paddle. And, based on what I’ve played, the power you physically exert in reality for a strike has an exceptionally close correlation to the power you see exerted upon the ball in the game. Distance is a little more tricky, but it’s something you gradually learn to judge based upon your power and angle the more you play.

The most important thing they needed to get right in Eleven was the ball physics and I think they’ve pretty much nailed it. The way the ball moves, bounces and spins all had to look and ‘feel’ accurate. It’s kind of a nebulous aspect to discuss – the ‘feeling’ of how something plays, but I’m not quite sure how else to talk about it.

When I’m playing Eleven in VR, I really do feel like I’m playing table tennis. The way the ball bounces, the sound it makes as it strikes the paddle, the very slight vibration of feedback in the controller as the ball connects – it all adds up to what feels like a near perfect simulation of the real thing to the point that I sometimes reach out and futilely try to grab the virtual ball with my real hand.

Yes, it really is that good. Of course, doing such a great job of simulating table tennis mechanically in a game isn’t the same as making a good table tennis game. So what does the game side of Eleven have to offer? To begin, you have a single player mode against an AI opponent with an adjustable difficulty slider. This slider ranges from ridiculously easy to ridiculously hard.

Easy opponents are more likely to miss or overhit shots, whereas more advanced opponents are not only more accurate and less prone to mistakes, but more likely to hit tougher angles and use ball spin more effectively. I have to say, I’m really impressed by the AI system. I don’t know how it will feel on higher settings (I’m currently playing on the upper-medium level) but it never feels cheap or – even worse – like its cheating by pulling off shots or hitting angles that shouldn’t be possible.

If you don’t want to play a creepy, emotionless AI you can always play a creepy, emotionless human in the game’s multiplayer mode, but because I’m still kind of bad at the game and don’t really like interacting with other people, I’ve not tried it out yet. Beyond single and multiplayer, Eleven also has a few basic and forgettable ‘mini-games’ to check out, but this is one area that the game could use more improvement.

Eleven has the core gameplay down, it’s just everything surrounding that core that needs to be expanded and improved. More interesting / fun mini-games. More virtual environments to choose between. Maybe a custom music option. A selection of AI visual appearance options.

Eleven already has some pretty good customisation options – table / paddle colour and MP avatars – but more certainly wouldn’t hurt. And how about some kind of tournament mode against different (visually) AI with different skills and a ‘personality’ that determines how they play? As enjoyable as Eleven is in its current state, there’s a lot more they can add and do with the game to flesh it out and really make it a VR sporting game classic.

Overall, Eleven is a great table tennis simulation with a slightly above average ‘game’ aspect constructed around it. If you think you’d enjoy playing table tennis in VR then there’s no reason not to pick it up now. It’s not the kind of game I’ll sink hundreds of hours into, but it’s the kind of thing I’ll always keep installed so I can hop in and play a few rounds when I have fifteen minutes to spare.

7/10