Author: fbt

Far Cry

Blast from the Past

FBT goes back to where the Cry began. And gets reduced to tears

The Past

I remember raving and raging about the original FC. I bought it thinking it was a regular FPS, and faced with this open, up-to-me approach after so many Doom-a-like corridors I was … terrified. It was like the first day of school, and very quickly I wanted my mummy.

It was beyond anything I’d played; there’d not been a shooter world like this before, but it wasn’t just the astonishing graphics and brilliantly realised world that felt like a shooter-heavy GTA VC – the hero even had a Hawaiian shirt on – this time it felt like it really was me being the hero rather than playing one; I was deciding how to get things done … and it turned out I was crap at being a hero.

Nowadays, extreme open-world shooters are no big thing. I laugh in the face of Borderlands. Was FC really that tough or was I just unprepared for the non-linear shooter world? Will it have mellowed? Have I toughed up?

With the FC series reskinning since FC3, I’m looking forward to playing the game that started all this open-world shooter mayhem.

Still a Blast?

We’re Carver, the classic hero; ex-military now a hard-drinking loner. Running a boat charter in a remote part of paradise, Carver’s hired by journalist Val to take her to a nearby atoll to investigate something; Carver gets to see the something up-close when he and his boat are blown sky-high by an RPG. Washed ashore, Carver is contacted by someone called Doyle who explains the island is a secret facility guarded by mercs, and Val has been taken prisoner. Tooling up, Carver needs to rescue Val and get himself a new boat.

I’d say maybe a third of this game is staring at the load screen. Not just because it takes a good minute to get the game reloaded, but because of how often I get killed. I just keep dying. The AI of the mercs is good, they wander aimlessly and have little auto-actions like chatting or milling about, but if you get spotted it’s go-time. They’ll run for cover, work around you, keep you pinned down while others flank, and they’re are brutally accurate. Carver can only take three or four shots before he’s down, and he always gets hit three or four times. And there’s no quick-save. Paradise this isn’t.

But it is paradise to look at. I can’t believe this is over 15 years old. While FC is showing its age, it’s still astoundingly beautiful. It may not have the minute detail but the design, the look and feel, it’s real. Palm tree-lined beaches with clear water filled with fish and turtles, rainforests with encampments and old ruins to navigate, huge open valleys and rivers, it’s great. Until someone spots you and ruins the moment. Most of the time we’re just given a marker and make our way there; even when the game’s being cheekily linear about the approach such as bottle-necking you in a crevasse or just killing you when you stray too far, like I needed more ways to die, it still feels very open. And you need that open space. To run screaming.

I can try to sneak around the mercs, swim between islands, stay hidden in bushes or thickets (whatever one of those are) but if you get spotted you’re pretty much dead. You can stay hidden but it takes a lot of work and they don’t give up once they’re onto you – they’ll investigate and keep investigating, making logical assumptions about where you might have moved to. In short, the AI is smarter than I am. At least change out of the bright red Hawaiian shirt Carver! I must stick out a mile.

Carver is part of the problem though. He’s supposed to be ex-special forces but this only seems to extend to knowing how to reload. The only edge we have is previous FPS experience which is no good here. Carver doesn’t have any special abilities, traits or tricks besides tag n’ track binoculars, which later get upgraded to heat-sensors letting you go Predator on the Mercs. But not a very good Predator. The odds are already heavily stacked against him; even something as cool as using a hand-glider to silently zip over their heads tends to attract a helicopter with a mini-gun, and it just becomes frustrating

Even when you’re facing an already large group they’ll still call in reinforcements – which include the Choppers with mini-guns, VTOLs filled with more troops, rocket-armed dinghies. Eventually though, I start to figure things out. This is a realistic shooter; I can’t just go Doomguy on the mercs, I need to work around them, pick them off, watch their routines, or just go full-coward and walk for miles to get around camps. Whatever they’re guarding must be valuable. Or dangerous.

It’s dangerous. Of course. Turns out the island is a testing ground for mutants. I’d forgotten about this, and how terrible they are. Naturally those things, the ‘Trigens’ break lose and are running rampant. By now I had my eye in, but the Trigens have none of the merc’s AI or wit. They just spot you from a mile off and come running. Mostly it’s gorilla-type slashers, but later we’re contending with borgified mercs with guns and rockets sewn into them and all the subtlety I’d started to get into goes out the window turning it into a murky barroom brawl.

It’s disappointing too that we start to leave the island for the confines of the labs; it just becomes a typical FPS with corridors and caves, and although a standout is a zoo-like holding pen with Trigens and Mercs fighting it out below us as we navigate tension bridges, leaving behind the beaches and mercs for monsters and corridors just makes it samey.

That seems to be a constant with CryTek; ‘spiritual sequel’ Crysis is essentially FC with a weaponised wetsuit until the squiddies rock up and ruin it, and both FC3 and 4 continued the concept with the second, tougher location you reached. I guess the Trigen third was added because it was felt FC needed to change up, but blasting the hell out of Paradise was a great deal more fun, and still felt fairly unique. Shame. I was actually enjoying it; well, surviving.

Far Cry is an odd game to play now. It’s been far surpassed and replaying it seems redundant – there’s nothing here that’s not been done better since but it’s got a nice simplicity to it; I’m not farting about hunting skins or helping islanders, it’s a pure shooter that requires you to really get dug in and find a way to survive on your own wits. Carver is a solid reluctant hero type and his observations on the situation work really well; it’s a shame he was never seen again, and Val’s ‘project far cry’ could have seen the two of them going off on other adventures. Instead, Ubisoft just kept remaking this one.

FC is absolutely worth a replay, if you like loading screens, and if you kick it in the head after the zoo level it’s still a cracking free-range FPS that deserves recognition for turning linear shooters into a free-for-all. If we hadn’t had this we’d not have had Borderlands and for that, I think, I thank it. Still, if I was Carver, I woulda just shacked up on one of the little islands with a Wilson Volleyball and left the Trigens to run rampant like the ending to Jurassic Park.

2004 | Developer; Crytek | Publisher; Ubisoft

Platforms; Win, PS3, X360

Call of Duty Playthrough Pt8 – WWII

A second wind special review – Call of Duty

Part eight, WWII

This is it, the final part of FBT’s epic run n’ gun through CoD.

So, full circle. We began in the trenches and that’s where we’ve returned. It’s been an odd playthrough. I always described CoD as a by-the-numbers series, a story-less slog of samey retreads. But I was wrong. Mostly. There are compelling narratives in the series; it’s what drove the MW trilogy just as much as the light-speed firefights, while Black Ops was a master-class in twisting, compelling stories.

Still, later entries like Ghosts and Black Ops II were exactly what I complained about; if you missed the opening titles you’d struggle to say which game you were playing. With the outstanding exception of Advanced Warfare, recent CoD has been exactly what I thought it was – repetitive retreads that only served as multiplayer tutorials. Story matters.

Really though, I originally disliked the modern era because it’s not what we signed up for. I loved the original WW-set CoDs and I’ve been looking forward to WWII all along. WWII must be perfect – modern graphics, classic setting and a more up-to-date handling of the events. This is the game that got me through those reskins – just a few more CoDs and it’s WWII-time I’d tell myself. Here we go! Except … this playthrough is ending on a Rage Quit. Goddamnit Activision.

Private “Red” Daniels signs up for the war to live up to his big brother. Embodying America, Red talks with a farmboy accent and through letters he writes to a sweetheart, we get to hear choice lines like “I hope I make it home for Christmas” and other heavy-hearted and heavy-handed lines about life on the frontlines.

Life on the frontlines is staggeringly uninspired. Every level ends with either ‘we gotta defend this x’ or ‘watch my back while I do y’ and of course, we have to keep back two or three waves before they retreat or someone saves us or they get the engine running or some other prime 2000-era event happens. That’s when you finally reach the end of the levels. They’re not just unfair, they’re not fun. The first, a re-enactment of the opening of Private Ryan (rather than an actual D-Day level) is a misstep – rather than being dumbstruck by the ‘spectacle of war’ we just get killed over and over, the game is gleeful about how impossible it is to survive. For sure, this is what actually happened but since we don’t actually die, just just pop back to our last autosave you end up doing repetitive learning like you did playing games 30 years ago – move here, cross there, die. Okay, move here, cross there, duck here. Yep I’m okay, now … dead. Okay, move here, cross there, duck here … It tries very hard to show the event in intense detail, but you’re not looking at all the work that’s gone into it, you’re just looking for the next auto-save. We’ve already did this 20 years ago, in earlier CoD games, it immediately makes the game feel familiar instead of fresh.

And that sets the tone for the entire game. WWII rehashes the levels, setting, objectives, the entire gameplay from the original. Yet it’s not a reboot it’s a reskin; we’re still doing crappy dated stuff like jumping into a tank and … I’m the driver as well as the gunner? Why am I the only one winning this war?! Okay, but wait, why can’t I turn the turret independently of the tank? That’s basic controls, I’m playing cat and mouse with two Panzer tanks by driving into walls while trying to aim and just getting stuck and killed. This pissed me off 20 years ago, why am I doing it now?

It’s just so old-school; when we face off against Germans with dogs, the woofers only target me, running past my fellow soldiers, and why am I the only one with the explosives to stick on a passing tank, the only one who can collect explosives to take out a pill-box, the only one to use a sniper rifle, the only one who can take out gun emplacements? I get that I’m the player/hero but a little help here chaps? There’s hundreds of G.I.s knocking about, if this is supposed to be about the men of war, the pals at your side as the game demands I consider, why am I winning WWII alone? This is so dated, so tired. The only help comes from fellow soldiers reminding me every two seconds what the mission objective is. I know to shoot the fricking ammo dump, STFU! At least the original CoD has a sense of adventure, of heroism; war really is hell in WWII.

On top of that, health packs return. Very retro and also very annoying because you have to chose to use it, which causes a short QTE of Red self-administering which breaks the action – and he can die while doing it. If you’re going for realism I’m either wounded or critical; if I’m wounded I’d ignore it, if critical I’d just fall down. The replenishing health concept does not suggest our hero is Wolverine, it just takes it as read he’s patching himself up when he can. And since two or three shots puts Red down, you can’t use the old trick of tactically taking hits then recover; you become scared to stick your head out; again, realistic, but boring to play and Red loves a QTE; a nasty Nazi will get the drop on you and you’re furiously mashing a key, then lining up the mouse then hitting a random button to pull out a knife then another to kill him. What the hell? Why? That’s not realistic. No one consciously makes considered decisions in life-or-death situations, it’s automatic or dead. Why am I looking for the Q key?! It completely undermines the supposed realism.

There’s more real-ruining elements; Red’s buddies carry supplies. Health, Ammo, Grenades, etc., which is a nice bros-in-arms thing, but since you need to activate them up close, they have big markers over their heads to spot them and stay in your POV, completely ruining the look. It’s like your squad is running around with balloons. It’s a genuinely beautiful game; there’s not a pixel out of place in the battlefield, it’s unnervingly realistic and the cut-scenes are just extraordinary looking – but what happens in them is very ordinary.

Red is caught between two commanding officers – Lieutenant Turner who believes the men come first, and Sergeant Pierson who thinks only the mission matters. Except, Red’s not really caught between them; this isn’t channelling Platoon, and Red doesn’t get to chose which CO he follows, have his own war experience; he just mumbles something to his sweetheart. We have zero impact and so as a story we just observe it and it’s incredibly derivative of Spielberg’s war era – if it’s not riffing on Private Ryan, it’s wholesale lifting from Band of Brothers. The key element to those men-in-war stories was that those men all had a voice, an opinion, a personal experience; a choice. Red is just an NPC in the cut-scenes – he, and by extension us, isn’t experiencing war, he’s not making decisions he’ll have to live with – he’s just watching it.

Further reducing the emotional impact of Red’s journey is us jumping out of his boots and into others; or in one case, High Heels. As French Resistance soldier Rousseau, we wander a German garrison. It might be grand that we’re playing as a female for a change, but she doesn’t do anything other than sneak and the level is little more than filler – most insultingly, it transpires Rousseau watched her family slaughtered by a Nazi who happens to run this garrison and she gets to kill him in revenge. It would have been far more interesting to see her realise he’s here and you chose to jeopardise the mission to exact her revenge – or not. But, WWII is just by the numbers.

Another missed moment comes when we find German civilians hiding in a hotel we’re supposed to defend. The COs get into an argument about what to do with them and does Red have an opinion? Nope. The decision is made without our input and all Red does is write to his sweetie that tension between the COs is rising. If I was her, my reply would be ‘Dear John … I’m rage quitting you’.

And that Rage Quit eventually arrives. I really wanted to see this through but when I’m bounced into a pilot I just lose it. Everything in WWII has been a frustration up to this point; the tired missions, the lack of interaction or influence, Red’s lack of character, the whole cliche of it all, but this …

It looks fantastic and really tries to bring home to intensity of a dogfight. Except, whereas other CoD games kept flying simple and effective, this is infuriatingly haphazard and fraught. This should be exciting not aggravating. Even if I master the plane, which has the aerodynamics of a 5-year old’s paper plane, I have to avoid hitting our planes, of which there are dozens. And none of them are doing anything to help. Protect the bomber the mission guy yells. Everyone else just pisses off or gets in the way. After hours of struggling I get through it, only to discover yet another squadron approaching. On top of which, this is to provide support to Red’s squad, essentially a reheat of the tank mission. I just hate this game. Rage Quit.

WWII is just a flashy, hollow, lazy game filled with completely outdated levels and basic gameplay; to play it is to be totally at odds with the mini-series cutscenes. I didn’t think it was possible to get WWII so wrong. But the biggest let-down with raging quitting at this stage is I know what follows; a sequence where one of my buddies is captured and taken to a concentration camp. I don’t know if that would wind up coming across as a No Russian moment, but I do know games have matured enough to tackle such troubling subjects. I also know WWII isn’t the game to do it. It’s far too generic to really do such an experience justice; if Red had been involved, if we’d actually had our own war to fight, I might have applauded such a moment. I’ll never know, because I have no intention of playing this again. If CoD wants to step foot in a concentration camp, it needs to put every foot right leading to that moment, and WWII just followed in CoD1’s footsteps.

And so ends my CoD playthrough. It’s been eye-opening, rage-quitting mayhem. I was wrong about much of the modern era; MW as a trilogy is absolutely fantastic; the first Black Ops is one of my new all-time greats, and Advanced Warfare is an absolute blinder. But what marked them out was the story, the reasons for shooting. Whenever CoD slipped into the generic, it was when the story wasn’t compelling enough to drive you forward. With Black Ops IIII multiplayer only, it does seem if as Activision has finally dropped any pretence of the storymode meaning anything to them. I always thought story didn’t matter in CoD either, but this playthrough has proved it’s not a war without a reason.

We’ve answered the call enough times now though. Activision’s duty should be to let Treyarch, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer loose to create their own franchises; in those later games you get the sense that they want to be doing something else; IW was a prime example. I’d love to see what those devs can do when their tour of duty is up.

After all this, the original still reins in my eyes. It’s one of the exceptions that proves the rule; CoD 1 has no story to speak of, but it’s just a great shooter filled with exciting missions, clear objectives and lets you be a war hero. I know games can’t come close but they can channel the most heroic, selfless elements of war and despite its age, CoD1 came closest to that.

Why We Game – 2018 re-review

why we game

a year in review. sort of.

Previous Weapon doing a year review is a bit redundant. We’re all about games of yesteryear and in sales. Technically our game of the year was Dusk, the awesome Quake-era throwback, because it was the only game we reviewed that was actually released in 2018. And it wasn’t even finished when we reviewed it, so no 2018 GOTY awards from PW. We’ll need to do a GITS award; Game in the Sales …

Previous Weapon is all about rediscovery and replay, and we did a lot of both in 2018, hitting our 100th review in December. We also continued our spoiler-ridden playthroughs with 2018’s first review, Fallout 4, FBT’s emotional Mass Effect trip, and TheMorty took us through an epic season in Championship Manager 01/02. And then there was the Call of Duty playthrough in search of a story. PW had a busy year gaming when we should have been doing something more constructive. Let’s let TheMorty and FBT look back on a year of playing the previous year’s games …

FBT – Let me get my failures out the way first. I have 47 games I’ve half-started or half-finished. Damn Steam Sales. In my defence I haven’t finished those because I had others to play, I wasn’t distracted by real life or anything.

It’s interesting that my fave games of this year have been from small developers making games for gamers – SOMA, Ion Maiden, Dusk; they ran rings around the Triple-A games. And the most fun I had was replaying old games; not for the memory but for the simple fact that they were better – maybe not as realistic, or as complex, but just … better. I fell in love with gaming when devs like id and 3DR were doing it for themselves, for fun and it seems as if that’s happening again. Long live the indies.

TheMorty – Well, I lost nearly a year of my life re-playing a childhood classic. Championship Manager 2001/2002 gained cult status with football aficionados – and it had aged like a fine wine. My play-through took months, I truly lived it. At times, the game had me in fits of rage, tears of joy and regularly biting my fingernails. Guiding, quite literally, the team of my childhood to a pair of cups was a refreshing break from the disappointment of being a Newcastle Fan IRL and it offered a simplistic gaming experience in contrast to the prolonged, overcomplicated sports management games of today – it had me nostalgically longing for more. The epic 8-part review also marked a rare foray into non-Xbox gaming. It was a welcome retro break to swap to 4.3 from my usual 50-inch cinematic experience.

FBT – Other than CM, the one game that TheMorty wouldn’t shut up about was Witcher III. Another I still haven’t played. And why? To annoy TheMorty? Yes, but also Keys. Different key sets for the horse? What, am I riding and walking at the same time? Multiple one-use keys instead of a multiple-use key, what is this, 2005? I don’t care how good WIII is, I rage quit at the key menu. Key assignments piss me off. It’s what stopped me playing Watchdogs, made Assassin’s Creed Odyssey harder than it needed to be; Witcher II had its key assignments outside the game – I have to quit to reassign?! Deadpool and Sleeping Dogs won’t even allow key reassignment; Lazy ports piss me off. I am not a console.

TheMorty – FBT can use keys to excuse his Witcher failings all he likes. You’ve got opposable thumbs, use them. Get a controller. For me, looking back on 2018 I’m reminded that my Mafia III Rage Quit review is still the highest read article on the site, hanging around the top spot 18 months since I ejected the disk in disgust. But the review’s success made me think – was I too harsh…? Maybe I Whacked the game before it had chance to become Made. I Rage Quit in 2017, but I’m both a year older and wiser. Surely I’m a more patient man. Instead of reminiscing like FBT, maybe I’ll give it another go…

FBT – While TheMorty tortures himself yet again, I’m reminded that the one that surprised me the most this year was Aliens Colonial Marines. How is a game this badly-reviewed actually this good? To be honest, it’s not that good. But it is great fun. It’s a b-movie game, filled with scrappy fun; we’ve got Aliens leaping about, pulse rifles, Queens, a Bishop, Weyland-Yutani, LV-426, the Sulaco; what’s not to like? It’s good but is it a GITS?

TheMorty – while FBT is arguing for a bad game to be awarded a GITS, I’m just playing a git of a game. After I got through that rage-quitting mission, I ran through a few tedious side missions – nothing too exciting, but enough to get back into the swing of being Clay, who now works for not-at-all cliched drunken Irish mobster Burke, who wants me to steal cars.

Not just any cars, but three limited-edition orange coloured Samson Richmond-Luxes. Rare, but fortunately three are marked on the map for me – albeit, quite some distance away …

FBT – Since MIII doesn’t allow fast-travel in main missions, let’s leave TheMorty to negotiate the mean streets of Mafia III and instead take a moment to appreciate the mad streets of Just Cause 3; I think I did JC3 a disservice when I reviewed it early in 2018. I talked at length about Rico’s double-denim outfit, but I didn’t really get into it. Yet I kept going back to JC3, just for the laughs. I did rave about the madness of it, but not the sheer unbridled joy of being the one to cause all the madness. JC3 is a looney tunes cartoon, it’s pre-schoolers at lunch break after too much lemonade, it’s my state of mind when a Steam sale comes up. The JC series seems to be leaning towards Saints Row with its ‘just go muck about’ mentality. It’s because of JC and SR that I can’t get on with GTAV and for that I thank them.

TheMorty – still driving.

FBT – Perhaps the most emotional playthrough of 2018 was my Mass Effect DGAF. Playing Shepard as only out for themselves, avoiding all friendship and relationships, dealing only with what needed to be done was tough, and also amazing; it was like playing a new game. I still hate myself for what happened to Tali. I am so sorry. The ME series is one of the best of all time – and I’m including ME3 in that assessment.

TheMorty – if I wasn’t busy I’d remind FBT of the time I owned him for claiming Mass Effect 1 is better than Mass Effect 2 in an Agree to Disagree. And now he forgives ME3 as well? Idiot. Anyway, I’ve aced the first car and after a little cop-trouble, nabbed the second. This isn’t so bad. As I leave the scrap yard, imagine my delight when I see one of these rare orange coloured Samson Richmond-Luxes drive right past me; I don’t have to do the annoying drive halfway across the map – the car is right here. Perfect. Perhaps this is the game’s way of trying to make it up to me, serving up the perfect apology.

FBT – While TheMorty’s busy thinking MIII will even let him get away with that, I’ll refute his ME comment by pointing out I put him in his place with our Borderlands agree to disagree review. Who admits to being scared of a Skag? He should stick to footie. Let’s see how he’s getting on with the Mafia III car heist. As well as he does in Borderlands I’m betting.

TheMorty – Whatever. After a bit of trouble I steal the car and there’s flashing lights everywhere but I’m so close to the mission marker, if I can just get inside the scrap yard the mission will end. I drive up, expecting the car to be crushed but nothing. What’s going on? I’m reversing back, driving forward trying to find that sweet spot but nothing’s happening. No cut-scene, no mission complete. You’re joking?! Please don’t let FBT be right.

FBT – Let’s give TheMorty a moment. For me, of everything I discovered and replayed in 2018, the one that stuck with me was SOMA. That game ruined me. It’s in my top five now, and I’m not even sure I’ll ever play it again. Just play it with the lights off and no one home. You’ll never look at an electrical appliance the same way again. My GITS for 2018, SOMA.

TheMorty – Hang on, pausing MIII for a minute here. SOMA for GITS of the year? Previous Weapon’s inaugural award goes to SOMA? I struggled to get past the tutorial level – yes, the Xbox version is a clunky, glitch-filled port but what I did play was … well it’s not a rage quit, but as soon as I finish MIII I am agreeing to disagree on that one. So anyway, there I am …

I’m surrounded by cops and I’m getting shot to bits. I leave the coveted motor to take them all out. I’m losing health rapidly and haemorrhaging bullets. The firefight eventually gets too much as wave after wave of cops descend on my personal Alamo and it’s fast becoming a futile last stand. As the car takes too much damage and bursts into flames, I die, respawning at the safe house.

So after all that, I must start the whole mission from scratch, losing a chunk of money and all my ammo? I knew there was a reason I hated this game! It turns out that Burke’s crusher is picky and will only accept the exact cars pinpointed on the map. Doesn’t matter if you can find closer cars in better nick, the mission marker won’t recognise them. What a stupid, stupid game. That’s it, this time it’s over. Mafia III is staying in 2018 never to be installed again (or will it…?).

FBT – this is a Previous Weapon first; a double rage quit. Didn’t see that coming … I posted a lot of rage quits, but begrudgingly, thanks to my CoD replay I have to remove ‘Call of Duty Modern Era’ from my most hated games list because the MW trilogy was awesome when played as one epic run-n-gun; and Advanced Warfare was bloody brilliant. Question now is, what replaces Modern CoD as a new most hated? CoD WWII? Mass Effect Andromeda has earned a place – at the very least, it was most disappointing game of the sales.

TheMorty – I took a lot of inspiration this year from reading FBTs reviews and got an itch to replay some of his much-loved games for the fun of it. His Far Cry review inspired me to re-view Trails of the Blood Dragon, which was an uncharacteristic delve into the Trail-bike gaming. His Fallout 3 write-up made me keen to get back into the wasteland, so I replayed its sequel ‘Fallout: New Vegas’. His disappointment at Volition’s SR spin-off, Agent of Mayhem, made me long for some vintage Johnny Gat – so I pulled out my original copy of ‘Saints Row’ – both reviews are coming early 2019.

FBT – for me, it’s great to hear some of my rambles inspired TheMorty to ignore real life in favour of the digital one. That’s the point of Previous Weapon, honest chats about games and why they’re great – or not. Next year I’ll be posting a mix of reviews; I even found an excuse to replay Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim again. If they do those in VR I’ll never go outdoors again.

So, that was our not-2018 review. GITS is off to a flying start … Only Previous Weapon could create an award then its contributors refuse to award it. Here’s to 2019 and all the 2018 games we’ll play. So long as they keep making games, there’ll always be games we missed the first time around, and that’s what PW is for.

We’d also like to thank you for reading. We’ve had thousands of reads, likes and shares from almost every country in the world, so thank you. If there’s a game out there you’d like us to blast, let us know. Any excuse to game. See you in the sales.

Call of Duty Playthrough Pt7 – Infinite Warfare

A second wind special review – Call of Duty

Part seven, infinite warfare

FBT is in space, in the future and infuriated. In space no one can hear you rage quit

So far we’ve beaten Germans, Russians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, South and Latin America, Africa and the Middle East plus an AI, technophobes, traitors and miscellaneous; now we’re at war with people who are just unsociable. Getting desperate aren’t we.

In some future or other, humans have colonised the solar system. But the outer planets secede, forming the Settlement Defence Front and become isolationists before declaring war on Earth. I can’t wait for the Battle of Uranus. So who’s going to stop the SDF? Captain Nick Reyes of the United Nations Space Alliance. Unfortunately.

At a 4th July-style celebration, the UNSA decides to put ALL their navy on display. The SDF launches a surprise attack – surprising to everyone but us – and Reyes is forced to assume command of the last Battlestar or something. Dutifully followed about by the far more interesting Lt. Nora Salter, Reyes is a Poundland Shepard; he worries about choices, about losing men, about Earth yet isn’t decisive or a leader; he refuses to accept sacrifice, which surely is the basic understanding of any soldier, even though he’s reminded of it constantly; Nora claims he’s changed since he became captain but literally nothing about him changes. There’s no moral choices that would help Reyes understand and the game removes any responsibility anyway, so anyone who gets killed is someone else’s fault.

If there was ever a CoD crying out for character shifting it’s this one – and not just because of how boring Reyes is; it would make sense for once. We should command as Reyes to get intel and pick missions then play who he sends, letting you decide the tone of the mission and have to accept the risk of sending them. That’s the burden of command. Instead, he insists on leading missions so men don’t die for him – except all the NPCs that is – which makes no sense. Come on, you’re already ripping off Mass Effect 2, just build on it, make it logical. Nora is an Ash knock-off anyway, and we have a Legion.

Ethan, an AI Robot with a mischievous streak; conning Nora into thinking he has a human brain (a simple farmer’s brain at that), convincing Marines he’ll overthrow humanity one day, he’s beyond the call of duty brilliant and the one bright spot in this otherwise dour, dull game; a scene where he and Reyes are ‘spaced’ and there’s no hope for survival is affecting – that I’m sad to see the robot go and not Reyes says everything. I’m gonna be Nora now? Nope, they’re saved! Wait, how?! Anyway, there’s a great recovery in a comment that Ethan had to be prised off Reyes’ body, having protected his captain until he shut down – but Ethan’s only awesome in the cut-scenes and in-game dialogue. He’s criminally underused within the gameplay, just another NPC – at one point he gets described as a ‘stiff metal motherfucker’ but we never see him motherfucking. Half the time I don’t even notice him. How do you rip off every other awesome metal motherfucker in gaming then not utilise them? D0g took down a strider in Episode Two, what does Ethan do in-game? Nothing. I’m joining the geth.

Actually, that’s an insult to the Geth. At least they were sentient. Here, more often than not we’re fighting bland robots programmed by a CoD Zombie. Boring. But then, look who they have for a boss. The SFD is led by a general who is so panto evil he makes Lord Dark Helmet look like a credible threat. Spewing lines like “it’s not enough we break free, we must break them!” it’s hard to imagine the outer planets take him seriously let alone us; he’s played by Kit Harrington so on top of his tantrums, he constantly looks like he’s about to burst into tears. If the SDF are extremists then that needs to be explored, why must they break us? All we get is a laughable, boo-hiss kids tv villain?

So, not wanting to upset anyone, Reyes instigates lots of small, forgettable campaigns; I’m sure they’re effective but I’m bored. Although there’s multiple approaches within the levels, SDF always have all the exits covered so you never feel like you’ve outsmarted them. You’re just going through the motions. Where’s the hail-mary passes, the desperate chances? I thought this was a losing war, most of the time it feels like business as usual. There’s no pressure, no momentum and we have side-missions to further dilute the desperation plus loads of zero-g and flying missions which somehow the game makes mundane. I only do one side mission and that’s because it was set on Uranus. Most of this game feels like padding, and the rest is just watching.

We endlessly watch Reyes open and close doors, get in and out of space ships, travel up and down in elevators; anything to avoid a decision. There’s hours of cut-scenes. The biggest irony here is I wanted a story, and this time I’ve got too much story. The writing, especially around Ethan and Reyes is good but there’s no connection; it falls into the same trap as ME Andromeda, which it’s clearly trying to ape; interesting set-up but no follow-through, missions that don’t mean anything, personal drama you can’t connect to. It does feel like a pilot episode, leaving a lot unsaid so new games can pick up the threads, but there’s nothing to do here, in the now.

There’s huge action moments but they’re all background noise or so derivative you’re taken out of it, shocked at how shameless it is … there is a sequence on an robot-controlled asteroid that’s headed for the sun which is dizzily spinning above our heads. Cool, but … you can only move in the shadows or the sun will burn you … I’m here for Tali, right?

When it’s not ripping off better games it’s stealing from stable-mates. It lifts so much from earlier CoD entries I keep expecting to see Riley float by. This is not how you start a franchise, by cannibalising your own games and stealing from others, and it feels budget and technologically old; NCPs salute the door when I’m already 20 feet into the room, they talk to nothing, get trapped in doorways or ignore enemies in front of them. Reyes often gets stuck or blocked and it crashed regularly, which just made playing it more laborious.

Finally, Reyes puts in motion a plan that fails spectacularly and gets loads more people killed; still, wasn’t his fault and it all worked out so mission accomplished. What a hero. Reyes then watches Rogue One and gets an idea for a one-way mission; problem is we’re not invested in any of the characters – save Ethan – so when Reyes does a sub-Shepard speech about how they have no way out but must succeed for Earth, we’re relieved instead of worried; that means it’s ending soon. As the crew dwindles (mostly via less than subtle examples of sacrifice; will you just learn it already?!) I realise I got all the way through without rage quitting. But I get my moment when it ends on a survivor staring at a memorial wall with all our lost crew names on it. Skip scene, rage quit.

This should be called Derivative Warfare. But the real issue is we’re a spaceman not a soldier and by focusing on command, CoD lost its niche – it’s brilliance wasn’t in the epic setting that a space drama requires or the burden of command, it was the regular grunt in the shit, doing his bit. CoD is a genre unto itself, and this isn’t a CoD game.

It’s almost sad that IW completely failed; this much-vaunted new era of CoD was quietly dropped and the series returned to its roots with WWII. It’s sad because no one else was doing modern warfare anywhere near as well – even games I despised like Black Ops III were still cracking shooters ultimately. Infinite Warfare ruined Modern CoD for everyone.

So the only way forward now is back. With all those advancements, a return to a WWII setting could be the best CoD game since CoD. They can’t mess up WWII can they?

Read FBT’s final CoD review as he plays WWII and ends this mega playthrough.

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza

A Blast from the Past Review

Is FBT just another cowboy?

The Past

Die Hard is my all-time fave action movie so I originally approached DHNP like walking across glass barefoot. How could it possibly be any good, even if the movie’s plot is basically a FPS? But in my memory, DHNP trod a fine line; referencing the movie yet sneaking in levels like protecting Argyle and filling out the bit between ‘shoot the glass’ and John in the bathroom. There are two things I remember most clearly about DHNP; it tried very hard to respect the first film and it was as hard to finish as the fifth film.

The game took no prisoners – shooter experience was not part of the equation this time, you realised that. God knows how Hans got all those terrorists in one van – they were everywhere. One wrong move and you’re down before you had a chance to say Ho-Ho-Ho. Still, I recall it as a cracking shooter that let you live out an against-the-odds action movie.

But considering its lacklustre reviews and that it’s not even reappeared on Steam or GOG makes me wonder if my DH love overshadowed the game itself. Was it Yippie Ki-yay or just Motherfucker? I remember a great, if unforgiving game and it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5. Even if it doesn’t run it can’t be worse than Die Hard 5.

Still a Blast?

I’m alone, tired and seeing diddly squat from Windows10. I just couldn’t get past the welcome screen, like John looking for Holly McClane. I lost myself in patches and dead links trying to find a way to make it work, but nothing. I had to find out if DHNP really was a lost classic and not a Die Hard In A Building rip-off. McClane wouldn’t give up; neither will I.

A week later I was staring at that Windows XP wallpaper courtesy of a battered Dell computer off eBay. I get deafened by the start-up tone and begin installing DHNP. It’s good to be back. And it’s even better when DHNP loads up like a boss.

Although it looks pretty dated now, DHNP is really trying. The opening sequence, while truncated is faithful and there’s detail only a Die Hard geek would spot – when you walk to the elevator the second security guard is idly picking at his nails. A major difference is how everyone looks; Holly has the same perm (no one’s gonna trademark that) but Ellis now looks like an 80s porn star. Karl doesn’t look anywhere near as menacing and has his hair in a little ponytail, but the biggest change is John McClane. Because he’s not in it.

Die Hard’s strength as a high-concept movie wasn’t the shooting, it was who’s doing the shooting. John McClane was, as the trailers said, an easy guy to like. You wanted to see him succeed; he wasn’t Arnie shrugging off bullets, he was a regular Joe caught in a situation he had to face. But in DHNP we never see JM’s face, only hear him, even in cut-scenes which is distracting given how much of this is about him; and JM doesn’t always act like JM – at one point, while stalking through Nakatomi’s R&D department, he has the option to gas several terrorists just to clear a fairly easy path. What raised Die Hard above other actioners was that JM was fundamentally decent; he never kills anyone who doesn’t shoot first, yet here, you can kill Tony with the buzzsaw. DHNP’s John is more Doomguy than nice-guy.

As it progresses, DHNP seems to be unsure if it’s for fans of the film or a standalone shooter; I couldn’t proceed until I looked at Tony’s shoes which would make no sense to those who hadn’t seen the movie (since we can’t see JM’s feet) yet Hans is hidden for half the game. I couldn’t work out why until I met Bill Clay – ahh I thought, if I get taken in by that fuckin’ TV accent I’m going to get shot, but Hans doesn’t get the drop on JM this time either, so keeping him hidden makes no sense to a gamer who never saw the movie.

One minute it’s relying on you knowing what’s happening then it’s acting like we’ve never been here before; John finds C4 on a seat next to an elevator shaft which seems fairly obvious, but still needs Al to prompt him before you can use it. By picking and choosing what to reference, DHNP creates huge plot holes; Thornberg is completely absent so how did Hans know to kidnap Holly?

But the biggest ‘huh?’ is Karl, who has his Tony-tantrum then all but disappears, so when he rocks up and says “we’re both professional, this personal” it doesn’t have the same resonance – we don’t even get the “that man is pissed” moment. Plus, he runs off and gets reinforcements! The hell? It also messes with the structure of the film; SWAT enters the building despite the RPG attack occurring and Al mentions they’re sending in Paramedics; it undermines JM’s isolation if folks are coming and going freely – he visits every floor, even going for a swim in the sewers for no good reason, yet never opens an outside door to get help.

So, if it’s not the Die Hard experience I remember, how does it hold up as a shooter? Frantic and frustrating. The AI of the terrorists (who all sound like Arnie) is basic, and there’s hundreds of them. There’s a nice touch in the way they switch to sidearms if you get too close and do lots of duck and rolls, but it’s insanely difficult due to their numbers and accuracy. Even in the finale Hans needs seven or eight shots to the head just to send him out the window. While Holly is doing everything she can to get shot herself.

There is a lot of care here though; the ‘don’t hesitate’ guy pops up – then down onto Al’s car, the receptionist that looks like Huey Lewis is there and others from the movie too, and it’s got the look and feel of the Plaza down perfectly, meanwhile some extensions work really well, such as trying to outfox the terrorists tracking your blood-soaked footprints, reworking the giant fan scene or saving Argyle. Sometimes it does go left-field, most notably in a sequence where John discovers C4 counting down (doesn’t that go against Hans’ plan?) and has to disarm it in a time-sensitive rush.

So did DHNP live up to the memories? I can see why DHNP faded away. It’s just an Okay Shooter, given a pass by its inspiration. It tries, but relies on your awareness of the movie to fill gaps in its logic, then asks you to ignore the logic where it suits. Can’t have it both ways, and instead of enjoying it I just wish Hans would open the front door for me.

Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza might not have been what I remembered, but the saddest part is what I had to go through to relive it. I now have an obsolete PC lying around. It’s a shame that older games are left to die-hard as the tech marches on; we’re even seeing it in mobile platforms now which were once the last chance saloon for older games – Monkey Island no longer works in iOS 64-bit, which sucks. It’s frustrating when you can’t enjoy something anymore just because the industry decided not to carry the past into the future, worried it would look dated. So maybe that XP rig isn’t obsolete after all; I have a ton of old discs W10 turns its nose up at. XP, come up to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.

2002 | Developer; Piranha Games | Publisher; Sierra Entertainment

Platforms; Win XP

Call of Duty Playthrough Pt6 – Advanced Warfare

A second wind special review – Call of Duty

Part six, advanced warfare

In this part of Previous Weapon’s CoD playthrough, FBT finally has some fun.

Ignoring all the work to create a US on the backfoot, a cliff-hanger and a dog sidekick, Ghosts was dumped for a new narrative; because Activision think we’ll play anything with CoD stamped on it. If you played Black Ops III then they’re right.

I feel sorry for AW. After WaW, Black Ops II, Ghosts and Black Ops III I’m so sick of CoD I hate it already and I’ve not even installed it yet. Adding ‘warfare’ into the title seems a cynical marketing ploy at best. I have no idea what AW is, but I suspect I’ve already played it.

Holy crap AW is good. Easily the best CoD since MW2 and Black Ops I; in fact, it’s the bastard child of those two. In other words, awesome. It’s not insanely original, but where AW aces it is the story; it feels ripped from near-future front pages. It might be set 30 years on but the way tech and politics are going, this could be 3 days from now; throw in a three-dimensional villain and some insane shooter set-pieces and you’ve got a cracking game. This is the modern CoD I always wanted. Where did this come from?

It’s the 2050s and we’re Mitchell, a Marine busy repelling an attack by North Korea. His best bud sacrifices himself to save us, although we also lose an arm in the process. At the funeral, stubby Mitchell meets his bud’s dad, Irons, who is a private military contractor; since the best the US Marines can offer is a disability claim, Irons gives him a hand – attached to a robotic arm – and a role in his private army for hire. Mitchell also gets various ‘exo suits’ designed for each kind of mission which centre around private contracts and fighting an anti-tech terror group; which governments pay Irons’ company, Atlas to protect them from.

This is genuinely a great game. Like Black Ops, that’s largely down to the story, but like MW, it’s also a real roller-coaster of a shooter and the combination of dizzying fights and deep story keep you glued to it – we assume it’s the Koreans we’re fighting but no; we then think we’re actually up against a techno-terrorist but no, the real enemy is closer to home, and while it’s fairly obvious, the way Atlas grows to become a dominant force is subtle and somehow enticing. Like a Blackwater-style contractor free to act outside government control, Irons ignores the Geneva convention to stop an attack, and when the terrorists are successful it’s Atlas that rolls out aid and support; they become indispensable and eventually a ‘private superpower’, playing a PR battle as much as battling with bullets; they’re friendly, persuasive and have great marketing – you can see why the world loves them more than their own governments, who happily contract them to protect their countries.

Although at times AW feels like it should have come from Ubisoft – we have a grappling hook, stealth around and use a scanner to track people – and it falls into mainstream tropes like skill trees and upgrades, but the missions are never less than insanely good – the pressure is set at MW3-level throughout and at times, the sheer spectacle is exhilarating. We have a running firefight on a freeway – on top of cars like we’re in The Matrix Reloaded; a chase in a submersible speedboat charging through the canals of ‘New Baghdad’ (rebuilt by Atlas…), while even the standard on-foot, close quarter firefights feel fresh and urgent, usually because of the goals; a standout is trying to reach a sniper who has us pinned down. Nothing new there, but it’s done in such an incredibly thrilling way. And part of that is because the future elements are nicely built-in rather than show off; Mitchell’s exo-suits have great backup tech like using a ‘wasp’ drone to cover your pals or Overdrive which gives you a kind of bullet-time edge. I feel like a tech’ed up soldier, the most dangerous dude on the battlefield, not some idiot leaping about like in BOIII.

Of course, Irons is nowhere near as altruistic as he made out and once we suspect, we get fired – and fired at. Hooking up with ‘Sentinels’, a US task force investigating Atlas as their expansion began to worry world leaders, Mitchell and absolute kick-ass side-kick llona look to expose Iron’s end-game, whatever it might be. Controlling the world is not enough?

Irons is arguably the best villain in the entire series. He goes through distinct stages all of which are way better and more refined than all of CoD’s previous gallery of rogues; a grief-driven father angry at government politics and policy; a megalomaniac who positioned himself as a world dictator; and eventually an insane man who has his own idea of how the world should be and who lives in it – he’s a Bond villain, a man with a classically twisted world view who thinks he’s doing the right thing. The scene where he is elected to be on the UN Council and promptly tells them he’s in charge – and asks what they plan on doing about it – is electrifying. How do you stop someone you hired to stop people like him?

It’s good that while Irons has something horrible planned for us, he lets people keep their dignity

The final third, as what’s left of the united nations declares war on Atlas – which is futile since most of the armies are now Atlas armies, is good and just keeps getting better; a fight across the Golden Gate Bridge – as it explodes; fights across sinking battleships, an assault on New Baghdad as Irons demonstrates his final plan – they’re each bigger and better than most CoD endings, but then it switches to a tense corridor-shooter as Mitchell loses his Roboarm and can’t reload, forcing you to pick targets and chance which weapons to pick up – it’s fantastic, the first shooter in ages to actually leave me breathless as each stage up-stages the next. It also ends on a Die Hard nod; can’t get better than that.

The only disappointment is the semi-cliff-hanger ending, that the world is now at war with Atlas – since there’s no AWII it’s a let-down, but more of an ending than Ghosts. The next CoD release was the despicably bad BOIII which just reskins this without the story or effort. It’s horrific yet could have worked as AWII – if that game’s daft AI had been an Irons AI built into Atlas’ systems and it was them we were fighting it could have been a killer sequel. Adding insult to missed opportunities, up next was the embarrassing IW. Yet again, CoD snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Idiots. Still, AW is a brilliant, brilliant game. For sure, it recycles some elements from what’s gone before, but it’s all so cleverly done. AW proves you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just find a new way to spin it.

Instead of following up the most original and daring CoD in the last 5 years, Activision decided the space missions in Ghost were the future and claimed, this time, Infinite Warfare would be the start of a new CoD franchise. Third time lucky for a new franchise? Let’s find out.

Check out FBT’s next Call of Duty playthrough as he gets lost in space.

90s FPS vs Reboots – A Blast from the Past Special

On Doom’s 25th Birthday, FBT compares the Doom-era to its reboots in yet another of his excuses to replay old shooters and bitch about new ones.

Happy Birthday Doom! Thanks to you, FPS is one of the most successful genres in gaming. As I’m fond of saying, Doom was gaming’s Jaws moment, the moon landing; it was bigger than inventing the wheel, discovering fire, evolving opposable thumbs. It was the Big Bang of gaming, and I cannot understate this – the Doom era was the Rat Pack to modern FPS’s One Direction.

What became known as the Doom era lasted until Half-Life. Five or so glorious years of carefree shooting. While both Doom and Wolf managed sequels after Half-Life, the era was over – until 2011 when Duke Nukem Forever finally (crash) landed. What followed was a sudden resurgence; between 2013 and 2016 Wolf, Doom, Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad were rebooted; I avoided them all as cynical cash-ins on marketable names after the horrible DNF; it ruined it for everyone. But now they’ve transcended their origins to become new franchises. They must be doing something right. Am I being a Doom-era snob?

For me, the only way a reboot is going to work is by recapturing the spirit of the original; it has to take me back to the first time I heard an Imp growl and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. That’s a tall order for the modern reboots; I have a hairy back now. But, why do the new games have such big reboots to fill? What is it about that era that I hold so dear? Can the original Rat Pack still pack the Vegas Sands or have they been reduced to Cannonball Run II? We all know Doom is the Chairman of the Board, but who is Dean Martin and who’s Peter Lawford? And who from the remakes is Harry Styles and … the other guys?

Dosbox is at the ready and I’m all out of gum.

The Past – Wolfenstein 3D

Like everyone, I was astounded by Wolf wayyy back in 1992 as I mowed down ‘Mutti!’ crying Nazis. But even then it looked a little basic. It was the work of mad genius, but I never felt like I was there. I was exhilarated but I was never in it, never connected to it. It’s the one I went back to the least, quickly overtaken by Doom; I can’t imagine this has aged well at all.

Yeah, this has aged; I want to bang on about the good old days, but this isn’t the good I was hoping for. I’m smiling, I’m enjoying it, but that’s mostly my memories talking, remembering that time – literally, I just remembered I played this on a Time Computers PC.

The missing floors and ceilings, a compromise to keep BJ moving make the game samey and impossible to disappear into; it’s just corridor, room, Nazis, repeat. It’s bright and cartoony, and while levels change, W3D really is a proof-of-concept. FPS had never been done properly before and it feels wrong to moan but Wolf is a tutorial. It’s also over 25 years old and still deserves respect, but that adulation is for what it did for gaming, not what you do in the game.

More than any other Doom-era game though, Wolf kept going. Aside from the sequel, there was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where BJ goes Call of Duty, followed by Wolfenstein, which no one talks about. Then, the Castle laid dormant until Machine Games moved in.

The Blast – Wolfenstein The New Order

This is what Hollywood calls a Soft Reboot, continuing story elements but resetting the world. Whatever it is, it’s a shame it’s called Wolfenstein. Had it just been The New Order, I might have liked it more. After an opening that sees BJ leaping between crashing planes, getting chased by huge mecha-dogs and taking down Nazis in intense trench fights, our hero takes shrapnel to the head and gets stuck in a locked-in state just long enough for the Nazis to take over. Waking up, BJ regains his considerable strength, links up with the hottie nurse that’s been sponge-bathing him and joins a rebellion in this new world order. I mean, Wolfenstein New Order.

The one thing I can’t get past with W:TNO is BJ’s internal monologue. It’s like listening to Max Payne’s Podcast. BJ never shuts up with his introspective mumbling and now he’s all emotional and awkward? Soft reboot is right. When he gets shot I expect him to shout “I’m a vegan”. BJ should be Austin Powers or Demolition Man, a man out of time but with a unique approach that this new world needs; having BJ on ice for a decade meant W:TNO had an opportunity to explore the differences between the original bad boys of FPS and the modern sensitive heroes. It could have been a great commentary on how shooters have evolved, but instead, BJ is just an arm in a theoretical world run by Nazis. And it’s horrible.

Scenes like infiltrating a concentration camp just feel … off for a game that originally ended with us fighting Hitler in a mecha suit. People in fly-infested bunks, emaciated and crying for food isn’t Wolf – a scene in a cattle-train with screaming people bound for the camp while catching a glimpse of an uber-bitch Nazi holding a baby by its ankles and brandishing a whip is a grave moment – but nevermind ‘cos BJ’s dual-wielding machine guns, piloting mechas and popping into space; is this a Tarantino-style revenge shooter or Schindler’s List The Video Game? Early on our hero takes a chainsaw to a tight-lipped Nazi and that’s fine, but when BJ falls asleep and dreams an original level I’m reminded of why I’m supposed to be here – fun. There’s not much of that in this new world.

W:TNO is, actually, an incredible game. Its compelling stuff and there’s some great characterisation; BJ and the nurse have an awkward romance (and some hefty sex-scenes) and the resistance are all believable. But it’s not Wolf – even though I was unimpressed with W3D and this is immeasurably a better game, it’s Wolf in-name-only.

The Past – Doom

To explain the effect Doom had on me; Doom was the game that got me back into gaming after I discovered girls instead. Doom is better than girls, that’s how influential it was.

Still, eventually I got bored with it. I started to find the levels wearying, the designs too stark once the initial shock wore off – it was the Clones’ fault. Blood, with its storyline and style, Duke and SW with their humour and self-awareness, Doom started to feel samey. But after all the clones I replayed it and … whoa. This is FPS. I gave up on girls all over again.

I can bitch about the blocky creatures, the repetitive art design, the never-changing slog to find keys but the thing is … the levels are timed to the pixel like some satanic ballet; every single creature is a classic, the art design is perfect, and it’s never dull finding keys – seeing that end-board with the location replaced with a red splash; I did that. Every now and then a level reminds me of some 1990s song, tv show or hangover, but Doom is so well judged I forget I’m playing something 25 years old. Rather than become cute like Wolf, it’s still an intimidating, dangerous game. This is how you do it.

That ‘Doom feeling’ isn’t in its dark corridors; it’s something you get while playing. id knew they were on to something and it’s that enthusiasm you feel, it’s still palatable now. It’s somehow got charisma. See, Chairman of the Board.

I should follow with Doom 3, as it was a ‘soft reboot’ but I don’t want to. DOOM 2016 was the real reboot, it promised to recapture that Doom feeling. Let’s see if it’s better than Girls.

The Blast – DOOM

The reboot is 68Gb; the original was 28mb – I have mp3’s bigger than that. Surely, with that much weight to it, with this legacy to emulate, it’s a better game experience? Nope.

It does look so real it makes you feel uneasy – but weird uncanny-valley realism doesn’t make a scary game; it’s urgent and shouty, the creatures so busy posturing that it becomes a grind. Doom was a moshpit – DOOM is commuting in rush-hour. It’s a punishing game but missing the recklessness, the way the original would hype you up enough to consider punching a Hell Knight. By missing the sense of excitement, fun, the sheer bravado of the original it’s just a by the numbers shooter, closer to CoD Zombie than Doom. You just spend all the time surviving arena battles and that wasn’t where the original’s intensity came from.

Further missing the point of the original, in firefights we have ‘glory kills’ where a dazed imp or whatever can be brutally killed up close during a QTE. Meh. Half the time you’re so swamped you can’t reach the downed guy anyway and an incessant glowing and flashing is just annoying. Doomguy didn’t have time for this kind of crap and it gets worse – the original has secrets but this time Doomguy is also hunting for fricking collectables as well as suit upgrades, and weapons can be improved by completing challenges; Doomguy didn’t need those, he already was the best. He was John Maclane, John Spartan, John Matrix, John Rambo, John Wick. Not John from accounting who needs all the help he can get. How do you misjudge a character who didn’t even have any characterisation?

Doom was the daddy of shooters; DOOM is doing a dad dance. There’s nothing new here; this is not the good-old-days and it’s not giving the modern era a kick in the ass the way Doom did. This isn’t a reboot of the original, it’s a reboot of the original’s reputation. It’s just marketing. It’s infuriating – so much so, my original playthrough ended in a rage quit and so did this replay. The biggest mistake though is unlocking a classic-era level. That’s just triggering me to go back to the original again. I should have played Doom 3.

The Past – Rise of the Triad

I was not a fan of RotT when it came out. The cheap-looking digitised effects, the blocky movement of the enemies, and the basic level design – plus, we’re assaulting an enemy base, why has it got coins floating everywhere – and platforming?! This is a First Person Shooter not First Person Mario. RotT felt like a thrown together cash-in clone.

It’s not got any better. There are some advancements like character selection and enemies faking their deaths or begging for their lives while bleeding out, but the world looks cheap and digitised like an arcade rail shooter. There’s an interesting deviation when it comes to weapons though – you get infinite bullets and dual-wielding and alternative explosive/magic weapons instead of an arsenal, but it feels easy – endless bullets or rockets; more than a match for what I’m facing. Traps, trampolines and floating coins mostly.

About the only fun I have in this game is watching the enemies fall into their own traps. Why is this castle so insanely dangerous? The trampolines let you propel yourself forward or back but rather than a new shooter mechanic it’s only there to collect more of those bloody coins. There’s power-ups but in Doom they’d give you health bumps, invincibility or let you punch like a rocket, here we can turn into a dog. It’s bordering on a kid’s shooter.

I had it mind RotT was a subtle parody but it’s not, it’s just childish and not in a juvenile way like Lo-Wang’s antics. It’s just horrible. It’s not a clone – because it’s nothing like Doom. For the first time I’m actually hoping the reboot strays from its source material.

The Blast – Rise of the Triad

Well, this follows the original pretty closely. Great. The one time I wanted it to deviate … And then … this is a contender for best reboot of the bunch. RotT is the only one to actually remind me of the era; it captures that wild attitude, the unexpected mayhem.

There’s so much carnage to be had, but rather than DOOM’s scraps or Wolf’s atrocities, this is just mad fun. The weaponry works better this time and even the traps, as nonsensical as ever, are fun to navigate and trick baddies into. It’s no longer a kid’s game, it’s a big kid’s game. This is what I remembered. I’m having the same fun I had 20yrs ago.

RotT has really pulled out all the stops – not to reinvent the genre but celebrate it. It doesn’t have any of Wolf or DOOM’s big-budget shininess or epic-ness, and maybe that’s why it’s so good. It’s bolted together, low-fi, smoothed over and a bit cheeky – I’m gonna go play it again. This feels weird but, a reboot wins this round?

The Past – Duke Nukem 3D

Doom might have been the biggest and best, but it was unrelatable; a nameless arm that was knee deep in the dead? Doom gave FPS a reputation, but Duke gave it a personality. I loved Duke. To me he was a perfect parody/love-poem to the Arnie and Sly heroes of the 80s meets Roger Moore-era Bond. And his game was equally awesome. Freed of Dungeons, Castles and Hell, Duke shot through recognisable locations filled with interactive stuff while spouting movie quotes and quips, and women swooned. He was my hero.

DN3D has so much going on unlike the minimalist Doom (or the cluttered RotT); I’m having a great time drinking from toilets, using jet-packs and air-vents, and playing with myself in a time when men were men and women were strippers. Oh.

Admittedly, the flashing strippers and porno theatre feel little schoolboy ‘look, boobs’ now but Duke does tip the strippers and doesn’t make lewd comments – if you shoot them Aliens appear to kick your ass, and it’s not like DN3D created strippers or porn theatres. Not the strongest argument and I’m just trying to convince myself but perhaps Duke isn’t all bad. But that unfortunate element aside, it’s fun to inhabit a super-cool ultra-hero, modern games don’t really do this anymore. Come on!

Thing is, DN3D’s distractions hide a fairly generic shooter and that really comes to the fore once we leave earth for a space station. Away from a real world you realise level design is not 3DR’s strength and they covered it with novelties; aside from the interactions, Duke did have the most varied weapons – who can forget shrinking and stomping enemies? And you never get over the first time he finishes that space boss, pulls down his pants and takes out the newspaper … Still smirking like a schoolboy. But as a shooter, it’s not that cool.

DN3D is great fun but it isn’t up there with Doom’s experience. It’s a bit of a Michael Bay game, shouting without saying anything, but it was a real leap forward for FPS, environment-wise and Duke is still my hero. He needs some sensitivity training, but still. And then …

The Blast – Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever will go down in history for many reasons. Okay two reasons; it’s huge development cycle and being irredeemably shit. Those alien bastards.

The only possible defence you could mount for DNF is its satire; if you’re offended by it, you’re the joke. There are elements that bolster that argument; scenes, references, dialogue and bits of silliness clearly send up Duke and his reputation but you can’t just go ‘it’s parody’ and excuse a level where we search a strip club for a vibrator to have sex with a stripper. Or the “Alien Abortion” game. Or the Glory Hole. Or the twins Duke is dating. Or that sequence. I’ll get to it later (and not much further).

As a game it sucks. It’s graphically uneven and for every fun sequence like a shrunken Duke navigating the Duke Burger there’s dated, uninspired levels – and that doesn’t mean DNF is the throwback I’ve been looking for because they’re either confusingly non-linear or rail-shooter straight with crappy scripted sequences. It’s like playing Steam on shuffle.

Duke is the worst victim though. It’s either mocking him or deifying him and when we meet his incestuous, maybe underage twin girlfriends we don’t think ‘rock n roll’ we think Duke’s a groomer. He’s arrogant now rather than cool and whereas his ego was justified in the original and even a little playful, now he’s just a dumb, misogynistic jock dickhead rewarded for deeply unpleasant behaviour. Thanks DNF, you made me dislike Duke.

So, I reach the infamous level. An Alien nest, where Duke gamely kills women before aliens can burst out of them – fine, that’s in the original and makes some sort of sci-fi horror sense. Except in the original they were cocooned and muttering Aliens’ ‘Kill me’; here they’re topless hotties and that’s not all that’s on display. Duke finds random boob growths in the walls and can give them a hearty slap for a reward – while saying “strange silicon lifeform”. It’s not juvenile, it’s not commentary, it’s just … embarrassing. But then Duke finds his girlfriends, similarly cocooned. As they beg forgiveness for being raped and make abortion jokes, Duke quips ‘looks like you’re … fucked’ – No Duke, you are. Fuck this. Rage Quit.

I don’t get how this happened. More so than BJ, Duke would have been an ideal character to parody moral-choice worrying lead characters, and it’s so offensive I want to believe that was the intent. But without some context, some wit, this is up there with Custer’s Revenge.

The Past – Shadow Warrior

Shadow Warrior wasn’t a Doom clone it was a Duke clone. FPS was moving fast and SW was an innovator at the time. But in retrospect, Lo-Wang was a backwards move.

Lo-Wang is not Duke. We could forgive Duke as he was riffing off the macho alpha males of cinema, but Lo-Wang is a misogynistic asshole. Terrible dad-jokes, repetitive lines (“Time to get erased hehehehe”) and some of the creepiest reactions to female NCPs this side of Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase, Lo-Wang is more No-Wang. There’s moments like a showering woman returns his flirt with machine-gun fire but mostly he’s cornering static buxom anime girls and making sexual overtures that would make Austin Powers blush. It’s clear 3DR were trying to be controversial for controversy’s sake after the accusations levelled at Duke and when he’s not being creepy he’s tittering at everything; we’re playing the class clown here. When you want a silent hero it’s not a good sign.

The game itself is a mixed bag. The levels are a lot richer and have greater depth than Duke’s, with recognisable locations and Japanese imagery, but there’s a lot of backtracking and the fights are boring and repetitive. It’s got no direction, no urgency and Lo-Wang’s clowning doesn’t cover the faults the way Duke’s cool did. There’s some major improvements though; 3D creatures, vehicles, multi-depth design, alt fire and puzzles; all of it wasted on an uninspired game and a git of a hero. Modernising a guy who should be on the sex-offenders list is going to be a tall order. Lo-Wang Forever?

The Blast – Shadow Warrior

Setting itself up as a prequel, Young-Lo-Wang is a cocky henchman ordered to get an ancient katana for his boss’ collection, but the deal goes south when a horde of demons storm the place. A spirit called Hoji explains the katana is no ordinary sword – it can slay immortal beings who rule the demons, making the sword’s master their master … Hoji agrees to help YLW claim the sword in return for a favour, and we’re off.

It’s a master-stroke setting this before the original; freeing itself of LW’s past (future) misdeeds, SW succeeds in making YLW palatable; he is full of himself and during the game develops his recognisable persona and look but leaves the perving behind. He’s a really fun, brash character and the dynamic with Hoji, a trickster-like spirit is great. This is damn good. Where it’s less damn good is in the fighting. Guys, you rebooted the wrong game.

YLW walks into an area, then hordes of creatures pour out of everywhere. Once clear, the exit opens. This is Serious Sam. It is all in good fun, and the battles are frenetic, set in intricate and clever levels (not that you get a second’s breath to consider anything tactical), and it looks amazing, but it’s exhausting and not really the style of the Doom era shooters. I know I bitched about the original having dull fights but now you’re just being silly.

Still, kudos to the devs for keeping LW recognisable but respectable – without turning him into BJ’s mumbling softie. But like Wolf, it’s as modern as they come; YLW has skill trees, special moves, magical abilities and uses money to upgrade weapons – but it is reminiscent of the original where it counts, and of all the reboots, this might be the best ‘reimagining’.

A Blast from the Past?

So are the originals still better? Yes … but … maybe the 90s FPS era isn’t quite as bullet-proof as I remembered. Still, did the era need rebooting?

No. They didn’t add anything, let alone took you back to the era and made you realise what’s missing in modern FPS. But the bigger issue is their success encourages the industry to keep looking back not forward. We need new, imaginative FPS experiences not reheats; if they keep punting new titles masquerading as our heroes we won’t see original, forward-thinking games like Mass Effect or Bioshock anymore; how long before their publishers decide to reboot them rather than chance something as untested as they were on release? DOOM has a sequel incoming and Lo-Wang returned; Wolf got a sequel, with a third announced; Wolfenstein Youngblood, which is a spin-off … when will it end?! The industry needs to find new ways to shoot people.

Thankfully, Redneck Rampage, Blood and Heretic were spared reboots, so they can remain perfect in my mind; otherwise my steadfast belief that the Doom era was the best time in gaming would be seriously shaken by some of those replays … but it was the best time and the innovation, the energy, the originality is still there. The Doom era was basic, but it was more than the sum of its (gibbed) parts.

What I loved most about this old vs new playthrough was the reboots that got closest to that era, RotT and SW both came from indie outfits; just like id and 3DR were. They weren’t developers under the watchful and marketable eye of major publishers, they were gamers making games for gamers. SW and RotT reminded me of when we’d excitedly type ‘doom.exe’ into DOS and that’s what I was looking for. Those guys should have rebooted Duke (ironically, RotT’s devs started out remaking DN3D before Gearbox put the kybosh on them); anyone who can make Lo-Wang less reprehensible could reign in Duke without neutering him. Shake it, baby!

Call of Duty Playthrough Pt5 – Ghosts

A second wind special review – Call of Duty

Part Five, Ghosts

FBT is in the Modern Warfare afterlife with Ghosts

Ghosts is an odd one in the CoD super cannon. Earning its name, it’s as if Ghosts doesn’t exist. It’s the forgotten CoD game, the first chink in Activision’s billion-dollar franchise. It’s hard to understand why though, at least at first. We’re in an entrenched, up-close war set on US soil; deserted old towns repurposed as command posts, decimated ghost cities, an eerie no-man’s land – but once this compelling setting and its backstory is established, Ghosts pulls a u-turn and heads for the comfort of the standard CoD fold.

South American countries form the Federation of the Americas. When the new super-power absorbs Mexico, America Prime pushes back but peace talks avert a full-scale war. Years later, the Feds break the ceasefire by boarding a US missile satellite (US astronauts do not fair well in CoD) and turning it on US cities along the Fed-America border, interrupt Dad telling his lads all about the Ghosts, an elite spec ops group who forced the peace talks and helped avoid the war. Bang up job Dad, we’re running from our own missiles here.

More years later, and between Fed-exico and America is now a demilitarised zone. The lads, Hesh and Logan recon the border with the first CoD character I’ve genuinely cared about, Riley. A dog. They run into a couple of Ghosts and a suitably intense mission follows as the rookies learn how to do things Ghost-style. That is, the same as any other CoD game.

Returning to the base, Hesh and Logan take a knee again. He loves a story does Dad. He’s worse than MW’s Price. Playing as young Dad, we learn about the Ghosts’ original leader Rorke. Left for dead, he was tortured and brainwashed by the Feds and is now a Ghost buster. Dad sends us on a mission to bring Rorke down; just like every other COD where we’re an elite group tasked with stopping the invading forces’ figurehead.

Ghosts is frustrating because there’s two set-ups here and neither are realised – One; we’re Ghosts. As the old man described, we’re guerrilla warfare; it should be us sneaking about making life hell for the Feds, but that doesn’t happen. Two, Rorke should be hunting us not the other way around; he taught us everything we know and ought to be cutting us to pieces; it would have been great to be on the backfoot for once as Rorke cuts us (not dogs) to pieces. Instead, to win the war we have to capture Rorke, a man with a personal mission and an army at his bidding; this is Jnr’s missions in BOII. It’s MW2’s TF141 missions. We’ve done this already and the Ghosts do nothing to justify their reputation; we fight from one end of the level to the other, skip a cut-scene and crack on. This is classic CoD; a reworked story to justify the levels. Spectacular levels that feel very familiar.

To its credit, Ghosts does feature two new sequences, one under water and one in space – we have a Moonraker-style space fight and have to avoid Tiger sharks – not in the same mission, that would be too cool, but they’re the same zero-g experience and there’s not enough of those to make Ghosts stand out. But … while we’re primarily Logan (there’s a couple of character detours which scream padding) we actually get to character-hop into a dog. It works insanely well as Riley sneaks around the camp, ripping out throats and listening in on conversations. It’s something new and fresh – but we only do it once. While he can be directed in firefights, he gets killed so easily you don’t risk it. We should be able to switch into Cujo-mode at any time, get around entrenched troops and pee on them, but it’s just another missed opportunity; Ghost is filled with them. Good boy. Bad game.

Why are we chasing Rorke anyway? He’s just one disgruntled ex-employee who’s been missing for a decade, how critical to the war effort can he be? And when we do capture him he stages a Dark Knight Rises rip-off and escapes; it’s the same story beats we’ve played several times now. Why isn’t this set in the demilitarised zone with us cut off and picked off one by one as Rorke gets his revenge? An intense potboiler like Predator would have been incredible and just what the series needed. Instead we get a low-energy MW clone.

Ghosts is a fair crack; you blow up an oil refinery then have to escape through choking smoke and fire, fight through a decaying Las Vegas and the early mission set in an old football stadium where we remote-snipe and have a running gun battle to reach a helicopter is a great tone-setter, but that isn’t enough anymore. Ghosts isn’t as insulting as the BO sequels but it’s just … a CoD game and what’s frustrating is how close it gets to being something interesting; the space and underwater levels, controlling Riley, the personal plot, the setting, they’re all interesting but frustratingly unrealised. The ending, chasing Rorke on a speeding train where each carriage moves independently making shooting hard and falling off easy is brilliant and what the entire game should have been – personal and desperate. But it’s too little too late.

But the most unforgivable element is the shocking cliffhanger ending. Clearly Activision wanted a new franchise but Ghosts had to follow not only the MW series, but Black Ops as well, two absolute juggernaut franchises and in trying to replicate their success it cancelled itself out. It’s as if Ghosts keeps getting its leash pulled like it’s Riley; every time it leaps forward it gets pulled back and that just exposes how CoD has done the same thing too many times now. I’d rather a patchy, try-something-new shooter than a polished autopilot; I feel like an NPC, just going through the motions. It’s not enough to be effective, it has to innovate.

Ghosts still did huge numbers but critics pointed out the worn nature of the gameplay and so rather than risk a sequel, Activision stuck what could have been a stellar Ghosts II into the Black Ops universe – Black Ops II. Make it the Feds led by a brain-washed Logan instead of Menendez and you’re there. You could even make Mason Snr Ghost Dad to further explore his and Rorke’s past. It would have been gold. Instead, we got a crappy sequel to Black Ops and killer cliff-hanger in Ghosts that went unresolved.

I really wanted to like Ghosts, and at times I was into it, but with that unresolved ending it’s not really worth the effort. Just like Activision did, it’s better to pretend it didn’t happen and keep going. Let’s see how well that worked out for them.

Read the next part in FBT’s increasingly unforgiving CoD playthrough – Advanced Warfare. But is it advancing to the rear?

Wolfenstein

Second Wind

FBT plays Wolfenstein. No, the other one.

This 2009 Wolf effort has seemingly been scrubbed from existence. Maybe because of rights issues; it was released by Activision who own devs Raven, but the franchise is owned by id who were bought by Bethesda; maybe Bethesda wanted it gone so folks wouldn’t confuse it with the reboot; or maybe it’s just not very good. Either way, it’s been MIA since 2014. But I have a copy I don’t remember playing – time to replay Wolfenstein for the first time. Maybe.

A sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, we’re back in the boots of blonde and blue-eyed BJ, except now he’s a brunette as he’s ‘undercover’. Which lasts roughly 5 seconds before he’s discovered and heroically sinks a Nazi battleship, escaping with a strange medallion. BJ is then sent undercover in a Nazi-controlled mining town where crystals within the medallion are found. Which lasts about 5 seconds before he’s recognised; BJ’s surname is ‘Blast’owitz, he was never going to be a master spy.

Saved by a resistance group, BJ begins doing missions for them while investigating the strange crystals and discovers, via another secret group, that the crystals let the medallion connect to ‘The Black Sun’ alternate universe and focus its energy. BJ must stop the Nazi’s experiments before they weaponise the crystals and use Black Sun to win the war.

The medallion is very handy, granting BJ in-game power-ups; Mire, which slows down time, Shield which reflects attacks and Empower which gives weapons a boost. But the best one, Veil which reveals secrets and lets you pass through walls, is so tightly scripted what seems like a great edge quickly becomes a chore. You can only pass through areas marked with a Sigil and naturally, they’re located only where the game wants you to go. Usually to locked rooms with treasure, or a scripted get-around. Often the only way to proceed is by using Veil so it feels contrived, which makes it less of a cool power-up and more of a lockpick. I wasn’t expecting it to let me leap around the battlefield untethered but – okay, that’s exactly what it should have done.

There’s a strange sense of conflict within Wolf. It looks and feels like a game that has a lot to say but doesn’t, ending up frustratingly unrealised, and it also feels a little old-school. The cut-scenes and plotting jar with the linear, mow-them-all-down tone of the missions, and that’s most evident by the free-roam town we doss about in.

Isenstadt, the town, has two areas each with a resistance base you strike out from. Within those bases you can chat to forgettable characters and pick up missions, several of which can be active at once but the two camps, ‘drive out the Nazis’ and ‘uncover the secrets of the crystals’ don’t converge or conflict so there’s no emotional investment in their plotlines, no final choice for BJ. They don’t even coincide within a location, so Isenstadt ends up like a multiplayer lobby. A really confusing, easy to get lost in lobby with loads of dead-ends, confusing paths and pointless areas. The whole town is one big empty frustration that slows the game to a crawl; I’m too heroic to ask directions, but the marker is no help and neither is the map.

Isenstadt isn’t just a chore to walk through, it’s filled with respawning Nazis. They constantly repopulate, obsessed with finding the world’s worst spy, yet stop shooting if you enter a safe-house then resume when you leave. At the very least we should be either sneaking (like, with a medallion that can let you pass through walls) or killing all witnesses before entering a safe house? At one point we enter a bar and not one Nazi in there reacts – I was literally followed in by Nazis trying to kill me but now they’re all like ‘will ein Pint?’

You can upgrade weapons and the Medallion by using gold and trinkets, but that causes you to waste time searching instead of shooting and Veil just becomes a metal detector. Intel and “Tomes” (from Heretic, why no return to Heretic, Raven?) will unlock some of the upgrades and finding all of them makes upgrades free. I never find them all.

Once you’re finally free of the town, you’re into familiar shooter levels. A hospital, farmlands, mines, a dig, the standard paranormal base filled with freakish experiments, an airfield and a castle (not Wolfenstein), before a zeppelin and a detour into Black Sun which feel very cut-short and reveals nothing about the Medallion. It’s just such an ‘almost’ great game.

Thing is though, it’s a great shooter and loads of fun. The levels, while linear are all epic both to fight through and look at, and once you get your aim in, it settles nicely between modern shooter sensibilities and retro mayhem; there were times when I was just blastowitz’ing everything in sight and loving it. The Nazis are strictly Indiana Jones types and BJ is a bit of an Indy himself, cock-sure and one-liner driven. He can even pick up sledgehammers and axes to throw; that’s never going to get boring. Firefights are given a nice edge by canisters filled with the crystals; shooting them causes Gravity to take a short break which is great, while the medallion’s powers also add levels to the mayhem.

It does show its age occasionally – the Nazis are not as clever as they make out, they’ll yell out my position but not react, shout ‘flank him’ and not move or ‘he’s reloading!’ and not take the opportunity to fire, revealing they’re scripted rather than AI led, including tell-tale signs like sniping one Nazi only for the other to carry on talking like he wasn’t covered in his mate’s brains. But still, I never got bored and they’re varied enough to keep it interesting, going from grunts to SS troops; in one level I sneak into a house at night and get confronted by Nazis in their PJs, which is a different look for the master race.

In later levels we face off against armoured sons-a-bitches, scampering experiments, invisible assassins and a wicked crystal-using Nazi who makes like those twins in the Matrix sequels and is great fun/annoying to fight, especially as they can also pass their powers onto nearby troops. We even have the catsuit-clad female Nazis from Return, which is a welcome sight, as is a Nazi dominatrix complete with whip, while in the Veil there’s odd aphid critters which you can shoot to create electric storms. Pisses them off though, as you’d expect.

All in, it’s a fine shooter, you just get the feeling it was intended to be more; there’s a subplot of not one but two betrayers in Isenstadt and we don’t get involved in that, let alone Black Sun; a big bad from there pops up, makes like the Alien Queen then it’s never mentioned again, and there is a good mini-boss fight where you can only damage them while in the Veil, where it’s revealed they’re actually a monster – but it’s unexplored; is he just an experiment too, or are the Nazi elite actually from another dimension? Wolf just seems headed for something bigger but doesn’t get there, and it’s frustrating because you’re up for it. Maybe it was all being set up for a sequel; if they’d revealed more there might have been one instead of the oh-so-serious second reboot.

Ultimately, Wolf is derivative and half-realised and I can see why it’s forgotten. But I really got into this; Wolf deserved more than just being wiped from alternate history and I won’t forget it this time. I’m brunette BJ all the way. Easily my fave of all the Wolf reboots and it deserves a rediscovery if you can find it. It deserves a Steam sale at least.

2009 | Developer; Raven Software | Publisher; Activision

Platforms; Win, PS3, X360

Call of Duty Playthrough Pt4 – The Black Ops Trilogy

Second Wind Playthrough Special – Call of Duty

Part Four, The Black Ops Trilogy

Yes Russian.

So Modern Warfare as a trilogy was way better than I expected. Somewhere in this seemingly endless playthrough, is the game that turned me against CoD. WaW came close with its by-the-numbers gameplay and lack of story; the only good thing about that game was Reznov, and he’s in Black Ops. If this ruins CoD and Rez I’ll be pissed.

Black Ops I – CIA Operator Mason is strapped to a chair, an unseen interrogator screaming ‘what do the numbers mean’. Told in flashback, BO1’s 60’s real-world conspiracy theory plot sounds like an Oliver Stone movie. Numbers stations, MK Ultra, the Space Race, Nazi Scientists, the Kennedy Assassination, the CIA, the Bay of Pigs – we’re in a 60’s era Assassin’s Creed. I’m looking forward to this. Don’t fuck it up, CoD.

Mason begins his tale as he and fellow Operators Woods and Bowman infiltrate Cuba to assassinate Castro. Starting off easy then. And starting off well. We’ve got detailed cut-scenes, great art design and interesting characters right off the bat. The shooting is similar to MW and the sixties look and weaponry gives it a nice edge; it’s pressured and dramatic, plus I’m gunning for Castro which gives it a realer feel. I’m liking this. I feel a story coming on.

Mason gets captured by Red Army General Dragovich and we find ourselves in a gulag in the midst of a fist fight with an insane Russian demanding we hit him again. That sounds familiar … Reznov! The best thing in WaW is back in action and as insane as ever. Rez has an escape plan in mind. And in Mason’s mind. The two stage a daring and incredibly thrilling escape – we’re unarmed, vastly outnumbered and against the odds, just how Rez likes it. I am in The Great Escape; we’re even on motorbikes like the Cooler King, except while Mason escapes, Reznov doesn’t. Aww man.

Back in the CIA fold, Mason and his handler Hudson meet none other than JFK who gives us an off-the-books mission to kill Dragovich, who has a nerve agent. Red numbers fill the screen and Mason imagines holding a gun to JFK’s head. What the hell was that? Mason begins his private little war while Hudson is tasked with tracking down the nerve agent. It’s really nicely done, with Mason’s black op interfering with Woods and Bowman’s missions. They’re unaware of the depth of Mason’s hatred for Dragovich, but then even Mason’s unaware how deep that hate goes.

Yay! Rez re-escaped to begin his own revenge mission against Dragovich; playing as Rez, we get to see how he wound up in the gulag. He is a bit of a disappointment, I thought it would be like inhabiting a Russian Deadpool but it’s no different. Mason begins going off-mission to follow Rez but within the interrogation sequences we realise things aren’t quite what Mason thinks they are. We blast our way through a mission only for the interrogator to rip Mason’s recollections to pieces. But we just saw it? What do the numbers mean?!

I all-time-great loved this. This isn’t just the best CoD, it’s one of the best shooters I’ve ever played. The levels are all brilliant and never repeat themselves; and that’s because of their contribution to the story. Yes! A CoD with a strong, detailed plot. I knew it! It just gives the levels a grounding not just FPS intensity – Hudson outrunning Spetsnaz soldiers in Hong Kong slums, a detour through Viet Cong tunnels after getting tangled in the Tet Offensive, a mission to disrupt the Russian space race; they all have a narrative impact and intensify Mason’s interrogation – What happened to Mason? By now, even he’s not sure, and neither are we because we’re not just watching or shooting, we’re in it with him.

BO1 is the proof I was looking for; story in an FPS works. That we spend most of our time as Mason adds to the immersion and brilliantly, Hudson’s levels provide a counter-point to Mason’s, revealing more of the conspiracy; exactly how character-hopping should be. Most CoDs feature interchangeable heroes who are a small cog in a big machine, this time it’s all about Mason’s mystery and it makes all the difference.

BO1’s characterisation even extends to the NPCs; Rez is great as always, but Bowman and Woods (who has a great scene where, as POWs he and Mason are forced to play Russian Roulette and he screams “you can’t kill me!” before pulling the trigger) are believable allies, while Hudson is untrustworthy and likeable at the same time, constantly hidden behind his mirrored Aviators and stoic look.

B1I isn’t CoD with a sixties soundtrack; it’s so removed from their standard structure it’s almost a lie to call it CoD. No other CoD game digs this heavily into a character, gets inside his head – although it’s fairly crowded in there – or gets invested in a storyline. I can’t believe BO is part of the CoD assembly line. How can BOII top this?

Black Ops II shapes up to be an exploration of the Cold War, regime changes and meddling in the Middle East. But, BOII’s secret mission is to see the franchise back in the CoD fold.

So Woods survived BO1. His death, along with Bowman’s was caused by Mason’s obsessive quest for Dragovich; their deaths were on him and their sacrifices meant something. Is Bowman going to pop up complaining of a headache? Turns out Woods withstood the grenades, ended up in the Hanoi Hilton, escaped then got captured again – where he survived for weeks with no food or water. He wasn’t kidding when he said ‘you can’t kill me’.

Meanwhile, Mason had a child. And we have two plot lines; Mason Snr and Mason Jnr – Snr goes Rambo Part II to rescue POW Mason from a jungle, then Rambo III in Afghanistan before turning his attention to Panama. Meanwhile, Jnr is after terrorist Menendez, who in Snr’s timeline was a drug and gun peddler. Snr gamely shot him in the eye and Woods accidently blew up his sister, giving him the myopic focus to turn his criminal empire into an anti-US terrorist group and seeks revenge against the BO boys. It might be a subtle nod to how America creates its enemies, but BOII doesn’t really explore that – let alone BO1.

Apart from a Rez cameo that makes no sense and a red numbers moment, there’s nothing of BO1 here. Snr’s not a man with a mystery anymore or even on a Black Op; we’re in Afghanistan but avoid any of the obvious implications there, and we tangle with General Noriega but he’s just part of Menendez’s plan; it’s frustrating, all the more so because Jnr’s mission has no intrigue or conspiracy. It’s two separate games bound by the now standard sneering CoD villain who wants to trigger a war. Only the accent separates him from Makarov, Shephard or even Dragovich. I can feel CoD slipping into the generic.

As a shooter it’s great though, particularly in Jnr’s section; a fight through a flooded city avoiding drones, a hectic Humvee chase, a showdown in a floating hotel, burning Michael Rooker’s face off – or not; Black Ops now comes with moral choices. Choices that affect outcomes? How does that work with dual timelines? It doesn’t.

The whole concept is squandered – Snr’s timeline doesn’t alter Jnr’s narrative while in the future the choices just impact how well we do in the final battle – but you can’t anticipate or understand those choices so they’re not tactical, it’s coin flipping. Most insultingly, we play as Menendez – he’s been causing as much pain and destruction as possible and now we decide if he has a conscience? And then it makes no real difference anyway.

The main reason your choices don’t really have an impact is the Strike Missions. A sub-section of the future timeline, you can command bots, drones and men in battles against Menendez’s invasions. I ignore all of them because they’re terrible and not what I signed up for, but they have huge impact on how the final battle plays out. It just doesn’t make sense for Jnr to be pissing about playing Command and Conquer.

I really enjoyed BOII as a shooter but the irony here is there’s too much story. Snr has no real impact or narrative other than being messed about by Menendez and is effectively another CoD character-hop to provide filler. This is all about Jnr, and his story is standard CoD chase the bad guy stuff that comes across as a warm-up for the next wave of CoD. Woods, who in Snr’s timeline got shotgunned twice and left to bleed out (but of course survived) tells Jnr about Snr’s missions but we don’t gain any insight or edge on Menendez by listening to Grandpa Simpson-Woods when it should be choices we make as Snr alter the cut-scenes and how Jnr can operate.

In fact, BOII’s future section would have made a great Ghosts II – just change Menendez to a brain-washed Logan and it would have worked insanely well. If BOII had just stuck to Mason’s murky missions in the Middle East or putting Noriega in power it would have worked fine too. Instead, BOII is classic FPS; you’re skipping cut-scenes and enjoying the spectacle. I ended up with the worst possible ending and didn’t really care.

Still, I wanted story and there is one, and for the first time it was one we could influence. That’s something at least. Let’s see how BOIII handles my natural aptitude for bad choices.

Black Ops III – It’s 40 years later not that it matters, and we’re fighting the Common Defense Pact for earth’s resources, which doesn’t matter. My BOII choices didn’t matter either; BOIII ignores everything we did. What was the point of all that? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?! It’s my first CoD rage quit.

Our Hero gets graphically ripped apart by robots from Infinite Warfare while trying to rescue a Prime Minster from the tutorial in Advanced Warfare. Rebuilt with cybernetics, Our Hero learns Cyber Ops from Robo-CO Taylor within a simulation of recent battles; we can use augmentations and are able to run along walls and make huge leaps; but not in originality.

Oh, here’s something new; you get upgrades to your suit that allows you to shoot secondary weapons out of your fingers – like fire and little bugs; or as I like to call them, PLASMIDS. The only game BOIII doesn’t rip off is BO.

Our pal Hendricks also goes along with cyber augmentation and together we become the last kids picked in PE. Hendricks and Hero are like some Cannon Films rip-off, Robotcop and we behave just like regular troops. Why am I in a specialist team if we’re not assigned to anything special? We’re supposedly doing wetwork but all we do is get dropped off and fight through a standard CoD level. Except this time, we can’t pick up other weapons; no more scrounging for a replacement, hazarding a shotgun over a sniper rifle, getting suspicious when you see RPGs just lying around. You get a loadout at mission start and stick with it. The Plasmids don’t change things up enough and half the time I forget I have them.

What’s frustrating is BOIII has a story and it has huge potential; it’s Robocop meets Vanilla Sky and it could have worked brilliantly if better developed – or been a great Advanced Warfare sequel (it’s basically AW reskinned); make the CDP into Atlas and the AI into Irons and drop the crappy end twist and it would have been awesome. A real frustration is we’re battling a Triad group who are pissy with the US after Nova-6, the gas from BO1 was released in China – by the CIA. You set that up then just ignore it? That’s Black Ops! Why aren’t we following that plot? Why isn’t Woods involved? The guy’s like Keith Richards, he’s bound to still be alive. So frustrating. Instead, we’re in every other CoD game we’ve played. It’s like the game refuses to be original even with all this story potential.

I’ve found the game that ruined CoD for me. No wonder I didn’t remember it, it’s every game I’ve already played, it’s the worst of CoD. But what really gets me to rage quit level is it’s unconnected to Black Ops I or II; Activision slapped Black Ops on this for the marquee value and that makes it the most cynical game I’ve ever played; Rage Quit.

How did we get from JFK to this? The series goes from a deep, complex, thrilling adventure to the most the basest level to ensure sales, plundering every ‘in’ thing to maximise the chance idiots like me will buy it and play mindlessly. The trilogy could have been a dark, mature series exploring patriotism; aka power. There are so many real covert and corrupt ops the BO sequels could have plundered; Oliver North appeared as himself in BOII – how do you not build on that?!

I don’t think I’ve ever been through so many gaming emotions – from a new GOAT game to a rage quit. Black Ops 1 should be considered alongside Half-Life, Bioshock, Mass Effect 2; it needs to be played. BOII and BOIII need to be redacted.

Up next, FBT chases Ghosts.