Category: Second Wind

Road Redemption

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

FBT returns to Road Rash with the ‘spiritual successor’ Road Redemption. They don’t make them like they used to.

Road Redemption sprung from a Kickstarter project to remake Road Rash. Over the next few years, via Steam’s Greenlight and early-access, Pixel Dash Studios and EQ-Games attempted to fashion not just a game, but a return to those times. But this isn’t quite how I remember it.

Road Rash was awesome; a titan in the classic era of mayhem on the roads – alongside Carmageddon, Driver, the Madness series and the original GTA, RR was morally wrong and beyond fun, one of those early nineties games that got the Daily Mail in a tizz and we all loved because it got the Daily Mail in a tizz. You know a game is good when the first thing you recall about it was running over grannies. The ‘clunk’ when you hit someone with a bat – the bat you’d just taken off them, then kicked them into a passing car. Taking out the cops and running over de-biked opponents. Getting thrown off your bike and skidding for miles before getting run over yourself. Making your way up the ranks, from Rat Bike to Super Bike. Road Redemption attempts to recapture those days. Ballsy.

This time around, instead of an illegal street race, there’s something of a purpose. Like we need one. But it’s a great, sly nod to those text explanations at the start of Doom, giving you vague justifications and context then letting you lose. Or maybe it’s just daft; a mysterious biker has offed the leader of a local bike gang, who then post a huge bounty on his head. As he races through various biker gangs’ patches, they mount up, hoping to catch the bounty. Naturally, it degenerates into everyone kicking holy hell out of each other to get the bounty first.

Set-up aside, it’s familiar ground. Arcade in style, we get a basic bike and start at the back then race to reach the flag, placing in the top three to gain money and XP which we use to upgrade and stand a better chance of surviving the next leg. As each sequence progresses, we get more weapons, and occasionally different tasks like taking out the leader of a rival gang. Dying means you lose it all and have to start at the beginning of the chase, which is one throwback too far.

Road Redemption isn’t a slick game with retro roots, it’s dated; referencing the past is one thing, releasing a contemporary game that plays like it is risky – the bike handles like shit. You never get a sense of weight, grip or tolerance from it, never gauge how it’ll corner, how it’ll react or how far to push it; it practically just slides from left to right. If you come to a dead-stop after hitting something, you have to reverse to get free and it has the turning circle of a super-tanker not a superbike; or you can pause, go into the main menu and pick ‘put me back on the road’ – both are a faff that take you from 1st to 12th in no time. Breaking is too slow to have any chance of avoiding collisions, which are a crapshoot when it comes to outcomes; the game physics are insanely unpredictable. Hitting something either stops you, bounces you across (if not off) the map or separates you from the bike and kills you. And there’s a lot to pile into; dead ends, drops, hills, cliffs, houses, cars, plus falling off buildings, bridges, the edge of ramps and random things like rocks and other obstacles are everywhere – you can’t put this many accidents-waiting-to-happen in a game where left and right are more of a metaphorical choice. You unlock better bikes as you go, but ‘better’ is largely subjective. They look better. Back in the day, the wonky physics led to such unintentional hilarity it was worth losing pole position, but this game puts so much stock in winning, it’s a frustration when it costs you huge bonuses and forces you to restart.

The controls are messy too. Our biker can be armed with up to four different weapons, ranging from OTT blunt weapons and swords as well as explosives and machine guns, but you have to specify which side to attack on; yet the kick button auto-targets whoever’s nearest so why can’t he auto-swing too and save a button? It would work if he could hilariously dual-wield but it’s just one key too many; you need to use a blunt weapon to knock off armour before switching to something stabby – if you just clout them, they take a lot longer to go down, and our rider can’t sustain the blows he’s taking from all sides – especially when you also have to block as well; you’re swinging left, right, kicking, blocking, switching and trying to keep the grip-less bike on the road while swamped by riders who constantly land perfect hits and control their bikes like pros. Plus, reverse and break are different keys too? It tries to be tactical but loses the recklessness of the original by over-complicating the experience. Games like those should be stripped back, leaving you to just react and get caught up in the mayhem. As you progress the layouts change from desert wilderness to inner-city and there’s secrets and shortcuts, but the environment looks like something from a decade ago; it’s not unpleasant, just bare.

The biggest let down though is the lack of vehicular homicide. There’s no pedestrians. That was the best part and not including it is the final nail; the original was a giggle-some mad dash to the next city, a biker’s Cannonball Run but there was also the bar everyone met in, the silly photoshopped faces; the daftness of Road Rage is missing – and so is its spirit. I’d forgive Road Redemption’s flaws if it was half as naughty, half as nuts as the original.

At least … that’s what most of the other reviews of Road Redemption have been saying. And at first I was much the same.

Thing is, there is a move toward rediscovering old games, celebrating their simplicity and commitment to just providing a good time. For every smug, bloated CoD there’s some once-forgotten game doing gangbusters on GOG.com, a rediscovery courtesy of Night Dive Studios, a nod to the era like Miami Takedown or a reboot by the original devs like Carmageddon Regeneration. You can’t moan about Redemption not being finessed, it came from Kickstarter. There’s games out there that are even more backward than this and they’re from major publishers; and unlike them, the Road Redemption crew interacted with fans, revealed plans and most importantly, took ideas and feedback on board. Name a AAA game that opens not with their smug logo but an open invite to stream their game on Twitch (and warn about musicID)? Or offers you a second game for free as a thank you? They made this the best they could and it’s made by people like me, for people like me so STFU and just enjoy it;

Redemption is hella fun. Sure, most of the complaints are valid, but get your eye in and it becomes a work of messy art, a pure Jackson Pollock to Infinity Ward’s advanced but soulless 3D-Printing. The crashes are sometimes so insanely spectacular it’s like the one good scene in Matrix Reloaded out on the highway. It’s so random, so free-for-all there’s countless opportunities for mayhem, and many just randomly happen – it’s a game than demands you have fun with it; when’s the last time you had a racing game that included power-ups like grappling your bike to a passing helicopter, or outfitting it with a jetpack? What about a race where cars fall from the sky? Come on! This is gold; the silliness is there, you’re supposed to have a laugh and remember the good old days when we didn’t take video games all that seriously. How can you claim it’s not up to AAA standard when all we do is moan about over-marketed, under-produced, for-the-masses guff they churn out? Can’t have it both ways and Redemption is the way I wanna go. It’s a really fun, daft, outrageous game; it’s not Road Rash, it’s Road Redemption – yeah I miss toddling back to my bike and the 90s in general but can’t have everything. If it just let us knock over grannies, it’d be perfect.

2017 | Developer/ Publisher; Pixel Dash Studios & EQ Games

Platforms; Win, PS4, XO

Alien Isolation

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

FBT plucks up the courage to play Alien Isolation. You have my sympathies.

Insanity is repeating the same event and expecting a different outcome. But it’s always tail-gutting, claw-shredding, inner-jaw death. ‘This time, I won’t get killed’. You will. Alien Isolation should be called Alien Insanity; it is death on repeat and, at the risk of being insensitively glib, playing it is denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Fifteen years after the Nostromo disappeared, it’s flight recorder turns up at Sevastopol Space Station. Weyland-Yutani sends a ship to retrieve it, and invites Amanda Ripley to go along and gain some closure on her missing mom – but she and a couple of W-Y suits arrive to find Sevastopol damaged and drifting. During an ill-advised spacewalk, Ripley is separated and enters the ship alone. Only she’s not alone.

Isolation bleeds not only the original’s atheistic but also the era. 20th Century Fox’s logo is a fuzzy, played-too-often VHS image and Sega’s is rendered like the green monitors (humourless AMD keep their logo shiny and HD). The menu background is a huge planet surrounded by the blackness of space, a speck of a ship orbiting while the text is in the original font and the music a rework of Silvestri’s original score. I am in Alien. There’s that nodding bird, the padded walls, the clicky buttons, huge passkeys, CRT monitors. Although Sevastopol is in ruins it’s not the Marie Celeste; occasionally we see people. They never stop to talk though. Or stop running. I wonder why.

Creeping along, we find locked doors and items that require things we don’t have, suggesting this isn’t linear and we’re going to be doing some backtracking. Nope, not doing that, I’m getting my closure and getting out. Ripley doesn’t know about the Starbeast but she’s hesitant, muttering to herself and scared; a twenty-something grease-monkey, Junior is reminiscent of the rebooted Lara but more consistent; she doesn’t switch from blubbering Lambert in cut-scenes to Ripley in-game. She’s shit-scared throughout and so are we . Although we don’t learn a great deal about her as a character, we gather she’s never given up on looking for her mother, and the pain of not knowing her fate drives Jnr. Right now I suspect the pain she’s focused on is backache. I’ve never crouched so much in my life. Thank God the Crouch button toggles otherwise I’d pull a muscle in my finger.

Eventually we meet a tetchy local who explains the horrible truth – which we bought this game for. The ship that found the black box backtracked Nostromo’s route to LV-426, hoping for some prize salvage and … Yup. Arriving at the station, they asked for medical assistance and we can guess the rest but the local insists on taking us on a tutorial tour. He explains that the ‘Working Joes’ -android caretakers- suddenly started preventing people from escaping or sending distress calls (Ohho) and survivors became unstable while trying to protect themselves from a ‘monster’ stalking the station. Can I crouch any lower?

When I do pop up to take in the surroundings, I’m reminded of Bioshock. The Sevastopol has the ‘used future’ feel but also Rapture’s rotting, uncared-for look, with (ironic) health & safety posters and corporate propaganda on the walls; the departure boards all say ‘cancelled’ – it’s got that abandoned, trapped feel like there’s no (Hadley’s) hope of escaping. Then there’s the exploration element, the hacking and crafting plus we contend with Bioshock Splicers in the panicked human survivors, and the Joes are like Big Daddys, harmless unless provoked and doing so risks death. But if they’re the Daddy, what’s the Alien? Please don’t say it’s a Queen.

So, as the local finishes his tutorial and his exposition, we realise we’re trapped, have to contend with hostile androids, insane humans and HOLY SHIT A FRICKING ALIEN. Its first appearance is (thankfully) a cutscene that lets you in on the horror gently. Too late. The cutscene over, we’re right where the Alien was. It’s coming back. F’ing run!

Kane’s Son isn’t just a tough little son of a bitch, it can’t be killed; if the keyboard and mouse would reach, I’d be playing this from behind the sofa. It’ll patrol around, sometimes you’ll just hear it and sometimes you’ll see it. And you’ll always be paralysed, dumb-stuck, in denial that it’s actually there, in front of you. If you do snap out of it in time, you have seconds to find a hiding spot and wait, wondering if it’s really gone or will reappear like it popped back for its keys. You quickly flick on your motion sensor and gingerly step out. Then back in; give it a minute. What’s worse than seeing a shark’s fin while swimming? Seeing it disappear. You know it’s still there, but where, and that unknowing becomes unbearable. You slowly build up the courage to – Oh shit it’s here! Don’t run it can hear you. Where’s the tiptoe button? I don’t wanna crouch I’m moving too slow. Did it follow me in, maybe it didn’t notice me, I can’t hear it, okay I’ll just take a peek to see – waa! The Alien is relentless and the experience exhilarating, terrifying – it is. And isn’t.

The Xeno slithers out of the vents like a snake, then stalks around, checking and searching while you stare, frozen, trying to work out an escape. It provokes the most preternatural fear-response I’ve ever known; I’m almost relived when I get killed, it’s a break from the tension. And this is where I get a bit conflicted. Xeno is the office cold – no matter what you do, who you avoid, you’re gonna get it eventually; I never stop being terrified, but I get used to the sensation – slowly you start accepting it’s gonna get you. It becomes an inevitable thing to deal with while doing other things; extras to unlock, schematics to build, relevant junk to find, secrets to explore, archive logs to find and crewmember ID tags to collect (Collectibles? Who the hell cares?!) And that’s while dealing with the Working Joes and Humans, tracking down the W-Y suits – who are injured; guess who has to reach the med bay? – not to mention the discovery that (surprise) Weyland-Yutani hasn’t been entirely honest about its intentions. Plus, resolving my mummy issues. Oh, and escaping. While being constantly eaten. I feel like an overtaxed parent, trying to get chores done while my toddler keeps demanding attention. A bitey toddler. In the end, you just suck it up and chance a run, hoping you’ll reach safety but accepting a kill if it means you scoped out what’s ahead. And once you get into that mindset, the Alien isn’t that scary anymore – Okay it’s still terrifying but I just give up and guess which death I’m about to suffer. Being pulled out from under a desk by my feet is a fave. What isn’t a favourite though, is reloading.

Because you can only save at static locations (you can even be killed while saving), getting killed eventually triggers something other than terror – anger. Now I gotta go through all that crap again and because the Alien is entirely unscripted, you can’t anticipate it – which is cool but it means a fresh hell as you retrace your steps. Or don’t even get to take a step – there’s one death where Ripley looks down and sees its tail sticking through her stomach; you didn’t even know it was there. And to make it worse, while you start all over again, the Alien gets to improve. It gets level-ups?!

Each time you win a round of hide and seek, the Alien learns from it. Use distractions too often and it’ll ignore them, hide in the same spots and it’ll realise. Even the tracker starts to attract it. Every edge Ripley gains eventually kills her. Yet she doesn’t have the same learning curve. If it had behaviours, if you could spot quirks (such as Xeno gets enamoured by flashing lights) or routines I could exploit, like it always disappears after feeding then you’d start to feel a bit more confident and use those against it. Imagine being able to lead the Alien to a human so it feasts and leaves you alone for a while. Imagine if you could gain trust then set them up, create bait traps; Jesus, don’t trust me in extreme stress situations. It sounds like I’m trying to bargain for an advantage but it’s not that; hide and seek just isn’t very compelling as a character trait – you survive not by Ripley’s wit or inventiveness but because it didn’t see me. I thought this was Alien not Predator? Who’s got some mud?

Why can’t I hack a Working Joe? The Alien ignores them. Ripley is an engineer, we can kill them, why not reprogramme them? Instead of playing Tag, why isn’t she improving her odds, out-thinking it? She gets better at surviving, but not in the same way the Alien grows more dangerous. It’s just repetitive upgrading her noise makers when you know it’ll become redundant eventually. There’s a couple of story-dependant out-wits but naturally they fail and there’s no reason why the game couldn’t have included free-form attempts at containing it. I keep thinking of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park; that is Alien Isolation but without the kids’ ingenuity – or a door to escape through, at least until it figures out how to open doors. Instead of building distractions and lobbing flares, why can’t I repair a bulkhead, let it chase me into a trap, sealing it in for a time? It’d be exciting to see if I could make it, if the trap worked or the Alien just escaped, more pissed at me than before. It’s just not tactical enough to keep your interest – even Pacman got to chase the ghosts once in a while.

Ripley just doesn’t rise to the challenge and it becomes depressing dying all the time. She does get a flamethrower but it learns to stay out of range and wait until you turn away. Now what? Why I can’t use the flamethrower to back it into a room and use those deadbolts she finds? Ripley’s so inept at mastering her situation she’d walk past a power loader.

Essentially, Alien Isolation is a one gag game – we’re here to be chased by an Alien and it does that brilliantly, but you’re so insanely focused on Xeno (regardless of if it’s there or not), you never really appreciate the subtleties, the station itself or even the story – which like the Alien, doesn’t know when to quit.

After a good ten hours of gameplay pass, we’re approaching a great ending. Except we’re not. You know how Shawshank ends like 3 times and each ending is better than the last? This isn’t it. I honestly thought I’d finished and triggered the DLCs. After a terrifying, beat-perfect battle it shifts into a completely different, annoying problem-based faff, followed by betrayals, twists, reveals and returns – none of which were necessary even as fan-service – and turns our Lara Croft-a-like into Sandra Bullock in Gravity. It just overstays it’s welcome by a good five hours; that’s too much crouching. More than a few reviews pointed out how much they wanted an alien-free roaming version of the game, just to take in the sheer beauty of the art design and that’s all that’s missing really. If the Alien would get shot just long enough to appreciate the world it’s based in, give you a breather, it would be the perfect game.

But it’s not over yet. The game had a ton of DLC, including two set within the movie, even featuring voices and digitised versions of the cast; ‘Crew Expendable’ reworks the scene where Dallas attempts to drive the creature out of the vents and into the airlock (we can play as Dallas, Ripley or Parker) while the second, ‘Last Survivor’ follows Ripley’s run for the lifeboat. Post-ending DLCs included ‘Corporate Lockdown’ where a Sevastopol-based W-Y employee regrets their career choices; ‘Trauma’ which follows a doctor who realises her research on the Alien could fall into the wrong hands (Like Eric Red’s hands – you read his Alien 3 script?) and must destroy her research before it destroys her, while ‘Safe Haven’ follows a survivor trying to reach their safe room with supplies. The final two DLCs were ‘Lost Contact’ where the local we met at the start tries to survive as the station falls apart while ‘Trigger’ sees you trying to corral the Alien; those two lead up to Ripley’s arrival. While seeing the station pre-riots is interesting, it’s just more crouching and more death. Ripley, signing off.

Putting the Alien encounters aside, there are other issues – too many distractions and padding, and the character animation is so bad I expected Ripley to turn out to be an android. The Joes are annoyances while the humans are there just to provide more obstacles. You can risk luring the Alien to them or use them to distract it – see, told you it was a good idea. But given their desperation to escape, and the fact they can all see Ripley’s ship orbiting outside, you’d think they’d end hostilities; ‘You have a ship? Okay, I’ll stop clubbing you, let’s work together’ – it’s too much Ripley vs everything. Even a bunch of convicts worked together to capture Alien 3 and really, just an Alien is enough to contend with; I would have rather played as the two of us, not getting embroiled in W-T shenanigans and story twists. The DLCs do explore that to be fair though. See, this game has everything. Even free heart-attacks.

Still, in the end, Alien Isolation is a terrific game. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. It is repetitive but it’s only my fear that causes me to get aggravated with it, get impatient with Ripley. The care, the attention to detail (the Working Joes do Ash’s little warm up jog when idle); it’s extraordinary – you are on the Nostromo in 1979/2137. And the way the Alien just … that thing is real. But, it’s not Ripley Vs Alien, it’s Alien from the POV of its lunch. While I was for killing that goddamn thing right now, the concept of only ever escaping it works brilliantly, and terrifyingly – it’s just not for me; I’m no Ripley, I’m Lambert.

You’d think after their Colonial Marines mishap, Sega would run away from Alien faster than I do, but they let Creative Assembly craft something clever, original and challenging – it’s an hour before you even see the Alien, and it’s not an easy sell; here’s an alien, and you won’t beat it. That’s not the kind of risk you’d expect from a AAA publisher and for that alone Alien Isolation should be played. From the safety of a locker. I am safe in a locker, right?

2014 | Developer Creative Assembly | Publisher SEGA

Platforms; Win, PS3/4, X360/XO

Genres; horror, survival, sci-fi

Max Payne 3

An Agree to Disagree review

FBT and TheMorty need a bullet-time-out arguing over Max Payne 3.

FBT – Needs more painkillers

Max Payne is one of my fave games. Max Payne 2 is one of my fave games. Max Payne 3 is one of my most hated games. Rockstar games usually get it right but this monstrosity is worse than the movie adaption. Least that had Mila Kunis. MP3 doesn’t even have Mona, just me moaning. My main gripe with Max Payne 3 is it’s not a Max Payne game. TheMorty may come up with various nods to the original, argue it’s Max in spirit, that the main plot – Max trying to save a girl – is the Max Payne DNA, that’s it’s a Noir in spirit but no. There’s nothing salvageable here; MP3 is a Call of Duty reskin.

The original was a subtle retelling of the Ragnarök legend in a classic noir setting that played out like a graphic novelization of the actioners we grew up on. The sequel was a more generic shooter but it was all about Max’s survivor’s guilt, and that killing was all he was ever good at. This time Max is a bodyguard working for a shady businessman in Brazil; not exactly a noir setting, I think one of the CoD Modern Warfare series was set there. Okay, that’s a tenuous link but Brazil’s locations, the shanty towns, offices, airports etc. are the bread and butter of CoD, unlike the original’s fleapit hotels and decrepit tenement blocks; the originals seethed with decay and disappointment, reflected Max’s state of mind.

Unlike the originals where Max was a lone man against the world, most of the time in MP3 Max is taking orders from NCPs in flack jackets who look just like Spec Ops guys. He’s not the driver anymore, it’s not a lone wolf, personal mission – a kidnapped Paris Hilton might stir Max, his weakness was always women but in MP3 it doesn’t have to be Max. In the original, Max was an epic anti-hero, depressed and on a death-wish. No one else could do it. This Max is an shooter-cliché, as formulaic and interchangeable as any of CoD’s characters. Name a standout in the CoD series, one who is significantly different to all the others – you can’t, and this Max is just as characterless. If it wasn’t in third person I’d not know I was Max. The original Max was Bruce Willis in his Last Boy Scout days. This Max is Bruce Willis now.

The first was set during a brutal snowstorm, and like the second, took place over one night. MP3 not only takes it’s time, draining that relentless feeling of the originals, but is set during the day. Noir and night, those were key to the Max games, they reflected him; I’m surprised Max isn’t in a Hawaiian shirt. And where the hell are the graphic novel pages? Why instead do we have this horrible double-exposure effect and dialogue flashing on the screen? If the original was Bladerunner, this is the worst of Tony Scott, keeping your attention with epileptic editing and film-stock changes; it doesn’t mean anything. Max is an action hero now; at one stage he hangs off the bottom of a helicopter and shoots down RPGs…

It’s not just me complaining; Max is a moaning old man too – gone are the fatalistic, Bogart one-liners, now he just nonsensically rambles like Homer Simpson’s dad. And when he’s not grumbling, he’s flaying about like he’s on roller-skates. MP3 has a cover system? That’s not Max, that’s CoD; Max goes straight into the bullets – he wants to die, it’s just that no one can stop him. We had shot-dodge and bullettime and that was enough; now we have both of those plus cover, vault, crouch, prone, roll, sprint, 180 turns – I thought he was a creaking burn-out from the NYPD not on tour with Cirque du Soleil. And we have more moment-spoiling with the Last Man Standing, a poor man’s Second Wind plus shot-dodge has been ruined because Max can get hit while jumping. Shot-dodge was pure Joel Silver, now it’s Michael Bay. MP3 is an over-engineered tactical shooter. I rest my CoD case. And I’ve not even played it yet.

It’s not even fun to play. When Max isn’t pirouetting about he’s fussing over which weapon to pick up, which attachments to use and looking for irrelevant clues. It’s just a series of small, linear moments followed by Max downing a whisky and babbling about how bad everything is – yes, it is, because you’re a completely inefficient bodyguard – By the time I reach a scene where a character he’s supposed to be protecting gets Necklaced I’ve had enough. Call of Duty can pull off torture if it wants, but Max was always about him torturing himself. This game’s tortured me enough.

Sam Houser said this incarnation is “Max as we’ve never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever.” Did you even play the original? He’s right about one thing, this is Max as we’ve never seen him; this is Call of Duty, the worst kind of populist trend-following nonsense, a cash-in that sullies Max’s good name.

TheMorty – dual wielding

The way I see it there’s two types of people, those who spend their lives trying to build a future and those who spend their lives trying to rebuild the past. – Max Payne (May Payne 3; 2012)

How better to sum up this review? FBT was desperate for Rockstar to rebuild the past, thinking fondly and nostalgically of re-playing one of the greatest action classics of all time. Whereas I am delighted that the genre-defining franchise has moved forward. Don’t get me wrong, on this I agree with him; The original Max Payne is by far the superior game. It’s impossible to refute and saying anything contrary would be short-sighted and brainless. Max Payne had iconic panache that spawned a whole generation of multimedia and gave foundation for games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. However, where we disagree fundamentally is on the future of the franchise.

I love that Max has evolved and moved away from that dark, 90’s gangster setting and leaped forward to a modern environment with a fresh storytelling dynamic. It’s the only way to keep one of gaming’s greatest heroes alive in a market flooded with poor, slo-mo knockoffs, like WET, Wanted and Stranglehold – all of which dying a death after an unwillingness to evolve.

It’s clear Rockstar wanted to take the game in a new direction but we should be grateful that it doesn’t leave behind Max’s core values. We still have the Bullet Time system and the film noire, snow-laden flashbacks set in a familiar New Jersey to help fans of the original transition into the modern setting and while he might be weary and tired, Max still has that incredible wit and off-camera, one-liners steeped in Hyperbole – “This town had more smoke and mirrors than a strip-club dressing room”. Sure, the story might not have the same darkness and grit of its predecessors but I’m delighted it doesn’t try to force the square peg of the storyboard narrative into a round hole. Instead it boasts an incredible 3½ hours of cutscenes, which suits the new style and makes the game almost like an interactive action movie. It’s a fresh and wholly different take which might not be for the purists, but makes for a fantastically cinematic gaming experience.

FBT argues this Max is an aged Bruce Willis and sure, he has a very valid point. Particularly around the plot similarity of a slap-headed, alcoholic ex-cop jetting abroad to take down a foreign criminal empire. But so what if Max Payne 3 is the Die Hard 5 of sequels, who cares if the McTiernan and Remedy classics are no more and we’re in a modern world of John Moore adaptations. Nothing will ever take away from the originals, they’re still on the shelf and can be watched or played any time you like, but I’d much rather have this Max than no Max at all and the way Rockstar have re-invented the character is so much more palatable than re-making him – particularly considering so many have tried the latter and failed; see Doom 4, Duke Nukem Forever, Mass Effect Andromeda, Resident Evil 6… all frantic attempts to re-create iconic originals and each spectacularly falling flat on their arse in the process.

Rockstar clearly wanted Max to have his Liam Neeson renaissance. Re-booting him into an unexplored role as opposed to having him age ungracefully like Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood who, rather embarrassingly, look like mid-life crisis divorcee grandads in their futile attempts to reprise roles from their 20s. Roles where some of the romance scenes should be ringing alarm bells at Operation Yewtree HQ. There is definitely a market for those nostalgically seeking that type of hero, one that Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme have cornered with their 10-a-penny, bargain bucket straight to DVD movie releases but that was never the route for Max and Rockstar certainly didn’t want to see him go down that road. Max himself is pretty open about his transformation and alludes to the changes Rockstar have implemented since taking over; “I guess I’d become what they wanted me to be, a killer, some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes in other bad guys. Well, that’s what they had paid for, so in the end, that’s what they got”

It’s a difficult torch to carry, but if there’s one company fit for purpose it’s Rockstar. Taking over a successful franchise and making their own mark on it, all while keeping the integrity of the original. For years Rockstar have always been one step ahead. Using filler games such as LA Noire, Red Dead Revolver or The Italian Job as a risk-free way to try something new and get the right feedback before building them into the gameplay of AAA titles. With Max Payne 3 there’s a lot of similarities to the gameplay of GTAV. The cover aspect, the character movement and, of course, Bullet Time were all features tried in Max 3 before taking the plunge in GTA. There’s also a lot of similarities in between the two protagonists as well, gameplay aside, Max and Michael are almost one and the same. Their humour, the focus trait and even their attire are eerily similar. So maybe our remodelled Max deserves a bit of further praise as a trendsetter and perhaps without Max we might not have had such a stellar, near-perfect game in GTAV just over a year later.

Released in a year full of top rated sequels like Halo 4, FarCry 3, Assassins Creed III and Mass Effect 2, it’s very easy to overlook Max as a game of the year contender but I think it’s re-play value will stand the test of time. It has the feel of a classic 3PS action game with enough nods and throwbacks to the originals to really keep the fans content.

Don’t like it, well, to quote the big man himself “you buy yourself a product then you get what you pay for, and these chumps had paid for some angry gringo…”

2012 | Developer Rockstar Studios | Publisher Rockstar Games

genres; shooter, 3rd person, crime

platforms; Win, PS3, X360

Fallout 4 – Pt1

a second wind special review

In this special edition playthrough, FBT relives Fallout 3 *spoilers (FBT hates it)*

I loved Fallout 3. There was nothing like it. Okay, there were loads like it; Stalker, Metro and … others but this was from the makers of Oblivion. It was Oblivion after the bombs dropped. That’s got to be good. And it was. I lived in FO3 for an age, explored every irradiated pixel. The world was horrible but the experience was unforgettable. When FO New Vegas came out I explored the wasteland again, loving being back in the world from a different perspective. Sure, it was a little juvenile, a bit repetitive with huge areas of nothing but a radscorpion for company and its story was daft (Romans? Yeah, they’re a good role model) but it had some really good stuff in it especially with the factions, reputation and robot sex. And then it was five long years in the vault until I could strap on my Pipboy again.

Fallout 4 opening with a pre-war scene was interesting, clearly that was supposed to make me feel emotionally connected to the wasteland later but it hadn’t ever occurred to me during FO3 to picture the world pre-war. I didn’t really care then and I don’t care now cos the game is making me go through annoying mundane tasks to build suspense, as if what’s about to happen will come as a surprise during this perfect suburban domesticity.

Cracking wise with my clearly ill-fated other half, rocking a cradle with my sprog in it, watching TV, all I can think about is the scene in Saints Row 4 where The Boss is trapped in a 50s sitcom and you’re forced to ‘play’ eating breakfast and get the morning paper, itself a parody of games like Heavy Rain. How meta. Eventually I’ve interacted enough and we’re running for the vault. I don’t get much time to look around but I do pause briefly to see the bomb land which is amazing, but I’m quickly hurried inside before I can really take it in. Safely vaulted, getting a real sense of the panic and drama, I’m looking forward to starting a life in a vault. I wonder if this will be the first Fallout game to explore the Commonwealth before it started, adventure in a world where the bombs are still smouldering, but no; we’re tricked into being turned into an ice-vault-icle and the years pass. I helplessly watch as my other half is indeed ill-fated and the kiddiewink snatched. Another unknown period passes and eventually I melt and claw my way outside to catch my first glimpse of the world I’ve seen before.

One of FO3’s greatest moments is when you escape the vault and are awed by the world for the first time. FO4’s attempt at awe is seeing my perfect neighbourhood reduced to ruins. But this isn’t as affecting as Bethesda may have intended; I never made a connection to the neighbourhood, I saw it pass by as I was running for my life so seeing it now has zero impact on me. I’ve seen this before – It’s just another Fallout ruin. I go inside my house and because I assume the game wants me to and stare at the empty cot. Sads. I have no emotional connection to the place or what happened or even the kid, because it all happened too fast. To really have given this impact, the game could have done with a few more hours in the pre-nuclear environment the way you spend time in the Vault in FO3. You think you know the world, then step outside and gasp. It could have worked quite well with the right quests. It’s like FO4 forgot about FO3 and thinks I’ll be shocked by what happened to my home.

A short chat with my still operating Mr Handy then occurs and I uncover something startling; The voice is Jack in Mass Effect! This game had better allow tattoos. I adore Jack; Courtenay Taylor did a stellar job grinding out Jack-the-killing-machine’s dialogue with barely contained rage then slowly softening to reveal a fragile and hurting human underneath but in FO4 my voice stays largely the same; indifferent. I’m playing a mother who just saw her hubby shot, her baby taken and the world destroyed and I’m talking and acting like it’s no biggie. The Handy gives Jack a waypoint to begin the search and so, filled with despair, determined to find my son and planning on playing ME2 next, I head Jack off in the opposite direction.

Before I’ve even met my first bloatfly, I’m already a little worried about where this game will take me. It’s forced onto me a very strong reason to drive forward and I don’t want one, I want to wander and discover. FO3 wasn’t about saving the world it was about taking the first steps towards a better one and until I did it, everyone just got on with life. In NV it was revenge and the key to that is preparation. Alongside it you got embroiled in a larger power-struggle, but one that didn’t need a resolution quick-sharp. In FO4 I am looking for my helpless baby lost somewhere in this nightmare world. How can that not overwhelm every other consideration? Why would I explore, roam, build some granny an armchair when my kid could be on a slab somewhere? It’s impossible to wander the wasteland and care about the main storyline at the same time. This is a Schrodinger’s cat of a main mission; the kid is alive and dead until I action it. So I’ll make a player decision not a character one, and ignore a kidnapped baby. Other open-world games have reconciled a dramatic main plot with freedom in far better ways. Far Cry 3 got the recovery of his friends out of the way quickly and focused on sacrificing your humanity in favour of revenge. Perfect for side-questing. Mass Effect 3 had arguably the biggest story driver of all time – a trifling mission to save the earth and then the galaxy – but it encouraged side-missioning because most if not all your actions added to your readiness; You were side-questing to prepare for the main quest. Another open-worlder that stumbled its main mission was Tomb Raider – why am I looking for Dream Catchers when my friends are being held hostage? In FO4 it’s worse; maternal instinct or material instinct?

Ignoring the baby and taking on what FO4 is, it’s interesting and brave that I’m a vault dweller with no knowledge of the war’s repercussions. I have no training, no survival instinct, no idea what’s out there. I’m a fifties housewife. Amazing. Everything my character sees should cause her to breakdown, every item should be a mystery, every challenge an impossible feat and every creature a lethal encounter – but we just merrily crack on, knowing how to read a Pipboy, pick locks, fire guns. I should have screamed the place down the first time I saw a ghoul. But no, I’ve gone full Rambo in one cut-scene and it’s a huge mistake because playing someone completely unprepared and incapable would have been more realistic, more frightening. Why create a character so woefully unprepared and conflicted, then have them handle everything like they’ve been doing this for years? It would have been compelling to find trainers, get experience, learn, barely survive. But no, we hit the ground running and gunning.

After a few hours of barrelling about lost in the world I so loved in FO3, I stop and look around. It does look amazing. It’s exactly how I remembered the post-apocalyptic world looking. Just how FO3 looked. Just how NV looked, when it wasn’t crashing. Exactly the same. Same landscape. Same items. Same everything… Everything the same… Maybe a little more pixel-sharp, but yeah … there it is then, the wasteland. Eight years I’ve been waiting for this. Just how I left it eight years ago. And within the next few hours, the worst thing that can happen in an open world game happens. I get bored. The problem is I’ve seen it all before. The thrill of discovery, of getting into and out of trouble, of finding deserted houses with skeletal bodies, venturing into buildings, we went through that in FO3; it’s just more of the same and the impact is lost. I’m deathly, depressingly nonplussed in a huge apocalyptic world.

Oh look, a factory. I wonder if it’s a nuka cola factory? Yes, it is. I wonder if it’ll be full of raiders. Yes, it is. Water, bring on the Mirelurks. A bog? I can’t even be bothered with the bloatflies. I’ll go around. It’s the same disarray, the same crap on the floor, the same super mutants. Even the Megaton replacement Diamond City just reminds you of Megaton. Bigger but not better, not different enough to get the wanderer juices flowing. Each Elder Scroll fundamentally changed the environment, the experiences, why did Bethesda keep going back to the irradiated well? Surely there could have been other ways to explore nuclear Armageddon; New Vegas was set in a location spared direct hits so NV explored how humanity would survive in an isolated world, not an obliterated one. FO4 could have gone somewhere else entirely but instead it feels like more of FO3. When you compare it to rival Sandbox games it comes across as lazy; Far Cry distinguished itself by never repeating itself, every Assassin’s Creed is unique while each Mass Effect subtly updated, changed and refreshed without becoming too distant from its predecessor; all the GTA’s stay safely within a city, but with new ways to explore it and Saints Row 4 rebuilt Steelport but gave you new ways to abuse it. In those you know which game you’re looking at; I couldn’t pick a FO4 screenshot out of a FO3 line-up.

The only part of FO4 that’s remotely fascinating is the Glowing Sea, a deadly ground-zero for the bomb we saw at the beginning. It’s a horrible place and ironically, given its deadly nature the only place FO4 comes alive. A sick and blighted place, full of seeping decay and absolute death, The Glowing Sea is thrilling, not just in the experience but because it’s new. Had FO4 been set here entirely, it could have been something incredible. We’re constantly injecting radaway and the like, surely we’ve built up a resistance by now? Come on; in FO3 we purified water, no one’s built on that since? Setting FO4 in the Glowing Sea would have been stunning; it could have played like Bioshock – folks safe but rotting away inside great buildings with their own society and laws, surrounded by a lethal environment that only the brave (i.e Jack) will brave and bring the different houses together to fight some larger force or maybe eradicate radiation so everyone can leave. Having the Lone Hero find a city trapped by air would have set a new bar. Anything but just visit the place before returning to the rinse and repeat of FO3.

Worse, if not unforgivable, there’s so much reskinning and recycling going on I’m surprised CoD’s legal team didn’t sue. Who reskins a game nearly a decade old?! If you played FO3, NV or Skyrim then you’ve played in the world of FO4. This is more than just lazy art design on Bethesda’s part. This is wilfully cheating gamers who plonked down a TON of Nuka caps on a new fallout world and got something built in Skyrim’s Construction Set. In years to come, people will discuss FO3 and 4 interchangeably – that’s not good enough. And it’s not just evident in the art design. We’re still lock-picking the same way (and let’s not forget that was reskinned in Skyrim too); Sure, the locks wouldn’t have changed but the mini-game? Come on. Who in the fallout world is still manufacturing bobbypins?! I’m not talking about realism (I have a mini nuke, that should get a drawer open), just give us something new; anything but this again, I’ve been breaking locks the same way for at least four Bethesda games. Each Mass Effect had a different approach to hacking, why am I still playing Boggle in FO4 too? It’s all the same like a place-holder, a mega DLC.

Some creatures though do move in new and frightening ways – the same creatures but you can’t have everything. Deathclaws leaping over fencing and through buildings is pants-wettingly good/bad as is trying to sneak around them, and the ghouls are faster too. And then there’s the Legendary enemies. Random encounters with extra-tough opponents that weld unique and powerful weapons. They’re actually more of a frustration and a distraction than anything exciting. Sure there’s going to be ornery old coots out there that know how to take a hit, and they’re likely to be carrying good loot but they’re barely even an event moment, just ammo-sucking annoyances mixed in with regular bullet-catchers carrying rarely exciting but always heavy goods. Borderlands often battered the crap out of you then dropped something even bigger and nastier on you, but you knew BL was as trustworthy as it was insane. That creature will drop something sexy. You may spend a hundred mill on a reclone, but goddamn that loot will be worth it. So you suck it up and Jack Burton it; Gimme your best shot, pal. I can take it. In FO4 it’s not worth all the Buffout and ammo and they appear at frustrating times when you’re just trying to get some place.

And at first, it seems the place you want to get is home. Largely an improved version of Skyrim’s Hearthfire extension, you can stake a claim on multiple locations, rebuild and attract settlers. Sounds fantastic, and judging by some of the settlements gamers have created, the possibilities are endless. They’re also mind-numbingly boring. Setting up power actually requires you to do the wiring. Well, I’m kinda searching for my son but yeah okay, lemme just rewire a plug. And when I do get settlers in, do they get involved? Yes, if I force them to but only in support roles while I’m out trying to find more logs for their fricking roof. Had the building work been played through a mini-game where you could properly plan, like a Sim City or the way Black & White allowed you to train a foreman to direct the rest of the followers, it could have been amazing. Set plans in motion then return to see how everyone was doing, how your little fiefdom was coming along. It could encourage you to talk to NCPs, finding scavengers to find materials, track down a builder, a planner to design it, artists to decorate it, build a militia, become raiders and attract criminals or a peaceful settlement for families. It could have been incredible. Go from a ruin to a functioning town, become a force in the wasteland! No. And thanks to a build system that’s more infuriating and confusing than picking something up in Trespasser, just trying to put a rug on the floor becomes rage-inducing; my house looks like an art student’s Cubism project. I have to do this for the entire settlement?! I eventually lost it and walked off never to return. And I have to do this for every place I’ve secured?! I’m a slumlord and I’m okay with that. The Fallout society can rebuild itself for all I care. The tenants constantly ask for things to be built; how did they all survive this long without me?! I just woke up, how come I’m a DIY God as well as a survivalist expert? I just give up and let the settlers live in squalor. Get out of my bed.

We’ll leave FBT to his impression of Reg Prescott. Maybe he’ll cheer up when he discovers the romance sub-plot, so check out pt2 to see if FBT forgets his other-half who died a day ago and finds love in the wasteland. Oh yeah, and finds his kid. Keep forgetting about that.

Fallout 4 – Pt2

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

Part two of FBT’s special edition Wasteland wander through Fallout 3. I mean 4.

*Spoilers. Not that it matters, it’s fricking obvious*

So, having been thawed out of a Vault, my suburban housewife character has not even remotely bothered to look for her son, the main plot of Fallout 4. Instead the domestic goddess blazed through the wasteland like a grizzled survivalist. Likely because she’d played Fallout 3.

While most of Fallout 4 is Fallout 3 Redux, one new addition is the ability to create a settlement; amazingly this isn’t a Bethesda money-grubbing DLC element like Skyrim’s Hearthfire, it’s part of the main game and a key element, the idea of carving out a place to call your own, of rebuilding the home you glimpsed pre-war, or building somewhere new, away from the memories of our recently lost other-half – it’s great; well, a great idea but impossibly frustrating and boring. Speaking of our beloved, the tragic parent of our child, the man I shared domesticity with only moments ago, I should look for someone new to share it with. Well, that was a long mourning period, sixty years as an ice-cube; a girl’s got needs. Companions are back and largely the same as FO3 in that they can carry stuff for you and get killed easily. I don’t need to find my kid when I’m spending so much time saving, finding, reviving and shouting at my companion. There’s a relationship angle added that’s somewhere between Mass Effect’s romance process and CJ’s girl in every city. Each companion has a selection of actions they find Hot or Not. Take Piper the spunky journalist; she’ll have the hots for you quick-sharp as she gets turned on every time you pull out a bobby pin.

It seems like a good idea and a way for you to find your true love – a companion who matches your character’s personality. In reality, it’s a real pain because many actions are necessary within the game – for example Cait hates it if you’re generous and likes you being selfish (She loves you walking around naked too, that girl’s got issues) so it becomes a question of do you alter your style to please them because you like them, or will your actions tear the two of you apart? I might be giving Bethesda too much credit for this concept, I’m not convinced that’s their intention but it’s an interesting dynamic. And oddly I had to sleep with a woman at one point to get info out of her, and my fully-confirmed partner was with me. I’m not sure what happened that night but we’re still together, yet she gets well pissy if I flirt off-script with someone. Plus, the whole idea is undermined by the perk system; each companion provides a bump in some form or other, so you just keep around whoever has a perk most useful at the time and put up with their grumbles when you do something they don’t like. The majority of the companions are quite interesting with different takes on the wasteland, and the perfect partner angle (if that’s what Bethesda were actually going for) is interesting – but the perk system removes who they are and turns them into a power-up.

Of course, the wasteland isn’t completely empty. Aside from the faction missions and the main storyline, there’s tons of mini-missions, events and radiant quests to keep you schlepping back and forth. Most are standard clear this out, find that, uncover what that is, kill that, rescue this. It can’t really go any other way, but after games like Mass Effect 3, which for all it’s faults made sure every mini-mission counted, you kinda want to see more impact. It would tie in nicely with the opening scenes of blissful suburbia if every side mission or encounter added to your settlement, either by more refugees helping or providing services; it would have been nice to return on a whim and see how it’s flourishing, and encourage you to go out and adventure more so by the end, you’ve provided and created a community, a nod to the past. But, missions are all standard and you do it for the xp. Eventually I get badass enough that a Deathclaw doesn’t terrify me, and give up questing, bored. Plus the settlement looks like a dump and everyone in it moans. Washed out of the wasteland, I might as well get this done. Why am I here again? Oh yeah, the kid.

So I follow fairly typical plotlines that lead me eventually to the dreaded Institute. Throughout, I heard stories of those guys, that they were creating androids to replace people in preparation for invading and forcing everyone out of the area. ‘Cos it’s just prime real-estate n’all. I kept thinking, why would they waste such resource and effort? I don’t know. And that’s not my infamous lack of patience, that’s the game’s muddled and unfocused plotting. The Institute itself is spotless and futuristic, why’d they want to move above-ground at all? The institute, for all their brilliance – not to mention the fact that they invented a transporter – doesn’t seem to have a clear mission statement and they have more than a passing similarity to FO4’s Steel Brotherhood; there’s a slightly distasteful fascism to both factions yet they hate each other. Still, turns out the wasteland tales are true. They are building ‘synths’ which are roaming about insinuating themselves into the colonies and townships of the wasteland. Still don’t really know why. But anyway, turns out my bundle of joy was taken for his DNA to help build human-androids for … reasons. And here he is!

My boy is all growed up and become the Father of the Institute (‘Father’ – Wow. Mom meet Son called Father. That’s deep, right? I shall call him Fatson) I feel nothing when we meet; this should be a huge moment finally finding him only to discover my boy is old, indifferent to me and has a very different world view to the one I’ve formed while out in the wilderness, but it doesn’t gel because I’ve not shared any of my pain or feelings during my trip. The game doesn’t seem to know what to do with us once we’re together. After some wooden dialogue that doesn’t explore anything, the game shuffles me off on quests with a neat little ‘We’ll talk later’. And we never do, not really, not in a way that’s rewarding given this has been Jack’s focus. All conversations are carefully manipulated to avoid any plot-spoiling or emotion; he’s in his sixties and not had a parent so his feelings towards me should be curious at best whereas I should be staggered but their scenes together are little more than standard dialogue found elsewhere in the game. My chat with the Mr Handy was more emotive than this. When a machine is happier to see me than my own son you’ve got problems.

Reuniting with Fatson is a complete let down but not an unexpected one; I don’t feel cheated because it could only ever have gone this way; I never thought the game would have the guts to kill the kid; he could have died, that would be interesting – a mid-game emotional wallop that leaves me wondering my place in this world without the focus; we could have found our descendants, imagine grandma Jack and the kids rebuilding a settlement or me eventually sacrificing myself, too far removed from this world to settle but providing something to ensure Jack Junior’s kids had a chance – Nope, standard plotting only please. Hell, it didn’t even go wide of the mark and say he’s gone but everyone in the institute is a clone of him intended to repopulate the earth and I was a clonemother. What would I do then, kill potentially hundreds of cloned grandkids I could spoil at Christmas? It just doesn’t do anything brave with what it has and I think that inevitability played a part in my reluctance to go looking for him. I didn’t want to be disappointed by a FO game. But it did it anyway, then compounded it; just before meeting Fatson, FO4 grins like it pulled a Keyser Soze-sized rug by revealing my son is the antagonist. Of course he is. You’re expecting this to create an emotional struggle, a difficult choice? Nope. Worse, that reveal is the second rug-pull in a row. In a scene ripped from a Spanish telenovela, I’d been led to believe my kid was a child still and sure enough, in the Institute, I find the child! *Cries in Spanish* But as we talk something weird happens; he … shuts down. It was a robot! *Cries in frustration* Cue Fatson briefly pretending not to be the boy before we ‘realise’. Piss off. I wasn’t shocked I was disappointed and filled with suspicion this wouldn’t be the last I’d see of the robokid. Don’t you do it FO4 …

Anyway, having been sent packing by Fatson, I wander the institute. Every scientist I meet is a bit of a prick and they’re misinformed about the surface – if only the Institute had someone available with an intimate knowledge of life in the wasteland. But they don’t just dismiss me, they don’t even have the option to ask (It’s like Bethesda realised ‘oh crap, if she tells them it’s not that bad out there, our main storyline is shot / Just don’t have the dialogue option? / Great save! Lunch?’). Their attitude towards Jack also rankles me. I’m a badass wilderness survivor, they should at least be a little nervous having someone this dangerous leaving dirt everywhere. I have a nuclear weapon strapped to my back and they’re rude? Fine that they have an ingrained dislike of surface-dwellers but I can’t change their mind and I’m really not convinced those are the guys to side with. But I go off doing the side missions to see where this takes me. And I’m surprised; it takes me right into Fatson’s chair!

More ridiculous than the whole Fatson reveal episode, within 3 or 4 missions I’m offered the big chair; that’s just unbelievable. Plus, I’ve not learnt anything new, been swayed towards their world-view or even offered a view. An entire institution of scientists capable of building robots – including robot gorillas I noticed, why? – and a transporter beam and various other brilliant technologies and the person best suited to taking over Apple is the mud-covered luddite who’s been here a day? Okay so two scientists rebel against the notion, and do so by brilliantly locking themselves in the room with the gorillas. But everyone else just comes around to the idea, especially after that whole gorilla incident. Okay so if I’m in charge now I get to change their views toward the surface – Oh, no I can’t. More ‘don’t break the storyline’ control. I can’t influence the Institute at all. FO4 has jumped the gorilla. Even if I accepted that, and I can’t, this whole event should have come early on, to give me time to warm to their ideas and ideals, but now I’ve done most of the other factions’ missions and get where they’re coming from, I don’t care about the Institute.

It also turns out my little man is the one who let me out of the vault. Why? I dunno really, he mumbles some plot-papering about knowing I’d find my way to him. How, why, what? You’ve expressed nothing but contempt for the wasteland and had the power to let me out decades ago, but you think the best idea is let your Mother wander with no direction or inkling about your status and just figured I’d rock up? And then when I do, I’d automatically side with you and – oh forget it I’m disowning you, I’ve had enough, I’m gonna go hang out with those fifties throwbacks with the shark decals on their power armour.

Like happens in the real world, this family reunion has been a disaster. Fatson and the Institute should have been introduced from the outset, especially after the revelation he let me out – It would have been a wicked game-changer to find a grown man at the house, explaining he released me and he’s about to unleash synth Armageddon on the commonwealth and wanted to rescue me first, revealing his identity. But something prevents us from returning so instead we go exploring for a way back to the Institute and along the way we both learn something; based on my actions, he sees hope or despair in the wastes, compassion or brutality – my actions are his reactions; it informs his plan once back at the Institute. Maybe he becomes compassionate and I become hardened and it’s up to him to change me. Anything but this. So much potential squandered, the generic nothingness of it makes me so angry I launch a mini-nuke and murder-suicide the two of us. This game drove me to infanticide. Or patricide I’m not sure. Had the two of us wandered together I would really have the fate of the wasteland in my hands, side missions would benefit the main quest by swaying his opinion and I’d be able to shape it as I see fit. But no, I’m caught between the usual factions and go with whichever ones I personally prefer/finished the missions for. Just like FO3, just like NV, just like most of Bethesda’s games nowadays; they’re not just reskinning the world, they’re copy/pasting the plots and missions.

This time around factions include the Steel Brotherhood, who somehow – despite the presumed world-wide shortage of everything – manage to maintain a huge airship dreadnaught (admittedly that thing arriving in the sky was a high point as was blowing it up later), or the Railway who are dedicated to freeing sentient synths (The Railway? Seriously? Let’s leave alone the grade-school level commentary on slavery). Oh and those Minutemen. I forgot about them. Literally forgot them; someone in the Steel Bros mentioned the Minutemen and I was like ‘oh yeah!’ And then there’s the Institute with their plan to do make everyone upgrade their iPhone or something. They all hate each other. I can’t unite them. Why not?! We don’t even explore the hatred which in some cases, particularly the Steel Bros vs Minutemen, doesn’t make sense.

On top of it all, Jack is the worst kind of hero – a passive one. She’s happiest wiring plugs. I play her as an absolute badass and the game makes the character a complete meh.

Another option could have been to build your own faction. FO4 would have had the capability to do that. Your settlements could have become a force in the wasteland, a new power rising with your actions dictating how it’s perceived, become the major power battling the others; Nation of Jack. That would make me more inclined to build more than a rickety shed for my settlers. Anything! Damnit!

So I go through the motions and the missions, none of which stand out and eventually I destroy the institute. It’s telling that I forget to go see my son after all that. Had I followed his storyline, more would be revealed about the Institute and it’s intent and that’s annoying; to be cheated out of a resolution because I don’t follow his ideals despite being made the Father is a further insult and eventually I forgot him as if he was a Minuteman. I guess I assumed he’d appear at the last second begging me not to do whatever I’d done, but instead, little robo-son rocks up. Now believing Jack is its Mother, robo-kid asks to be taken with. I agree, although I’d rather take a Gorilla. It would be cool if robo-kid actually turned out to be a homicidal mini-me terminator but no, it’s just that kid from A.I and a hackneyed way to give Jack her son after everything.

Once we’d escaped the explosion of the institute – which took out most of the buildings folks were living in – I wonder was there really no way to take it over and move in? That’s the only way to resolve this? In the middle of an irradiated wasteland, atomically blowing up the only safe haven for miles? And what about the poor robo-gorillas?! The Institute has exploded (helpful), the Commonwealth’s scientists are dead (helpful) and all their technology is gone (helpful), and my replacement son was nowhere to be found (helpful). I think he might have fallen off the roof we watched the explosion from. Finally, a Bethesda bug I can get behind. I’m certainly not going to look for him, one missing kid was enough and I was already aggravated the game would try to tie everything up so simply by giving me an iBoy. A happy ending? That’s not what the wasteland is, and it was never what Fallout was about. The best you could hope for was a better wasteland.

For some, the familiarity of FO4’s retread is more than enough. If you loved FO3, FO4 is just more of it and the settlement element allows you to bring some civility to the wasteland. It is beautifully detailed, involving and does what it says on the tin. For me though, FO4 was tame, safe and bland – I wanted to make more of a mark than a blast radius. As I prepare to fast-travel to the exit menu, I take a look at the landscape one last time. It’s an incredibly compelling world Bethesda created and it’s a testament to their dedication that we eventually call the wasteland home and want to better it. From up here that is. Down there in the ruins, we’ve seen it all before.

War. War never changes. Neither does Fallout it seems.

2015 | Developer Bethesda Game Studios | Publisher Bethesda Softworks

platforms; Win | PS4 | X0

Quake 4

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

This is a review of Quake 4 and FBT still spends most of it moaning about Quake.

If Doom was the Star Wars of gaming, Quake is the prequels; Everything is there, it looks great, but they’re shit rip-offs when you get down to it. Only the multiplayer saved it; and the sequel wasn’t even a sequel – it was a new IP, they just couldn’t think of a better name, which tells you everything you need to know about id by this point. Quake represents where id went wrong and I hate Quake more than the Star Wars prequels. It was a polished turd.

Nothing more than a tech company by 2004, id busied themselves sullying Doom’s legacy with Doom 3, aka ‘buy our new engine’; they off-loaded the Quake franchise to old pals Raven. I have a huge soft spot for them; besides making one of my fave Doom Clones, Heretic, they also hit both Star Trek and Star Wars out of the park with Voyager Elite Force and Jedi Knight Outcast/Academy. But I still avoided Quake 4 because it was a Doom 3 clone. More dark corridors and jump-scares? Naa. But now, a decade on and one Steam sale later, can Raven do what id couldn’t – Make a good game out of the Quake universe(s)?

With id out of the equation and good old fashioned war movies as inspiration, Q4 actually gets the job done right. A military FPS, Q4 picks up directly after Enemy Territory and Quake II – finally, some Quake Continuity. Plus, it’s single-mission driven; the first Quake game which is more than just lip-service for the multiplayer. The Strogg, an cybernetic invading force seen in Q2 has been beaten (well done Doomguy of Q2) and our hero, Kane, is deployed on their homeworld to mop up. But of course, the Strogg aren’t quite as down and out as the military thought, and soon enough we’re in a battle for our lives. It’s got a D-Day meets Starship Troopers vibe, and while it’s standard ‘get this door open’, ‘go find a medic’ orders, the missions often turn FUBAR as the Strogg push back – in Q4 it feels realistic in the way the army has misjudged Strogg forces and you get the sense we’re just being played with.

Rather than be a straight FPS with us wading through infinite Strogg, Q4 goes for the realistic approach; its a CoD-classic era tactical shooter and we’re often accompanied by other commandos, either from our squad or other regiments (Including Raven squad, complete with their logo as their patch) and they’re expendable – losing them is occasionally scripted but not always, and ending up alone can get under your skin; you suddenly feel outnumbered. Still, it’s not all on you; safe-areas where you hang with other troopers reveal missions they’re on, sorties that got their teams cut to ribbons and you pick up snippets of transmissions detailing other events; you get the sense that you’re part of a bigger mission, Q4 really tries to explore the grunt experience and seeing jets scream past in dogfights or troop carriers land or get bombed as they evac makes you think we’re all in it together. We listen to other troops discussing events from the earlier games, worry about ‘the folks back home’. It reminds me a lot of Raven’s Elite Force – no Seven of Nine though, but you can’t have everything.

The game itself has some nice epic moments to give it that war movie vibe; there’s a great moment where you help secure a landing zone for a carrier, then watch it circle and land, then climb aboard, all in one shot. While we wander the ship, it circles to the next LZ and we deploy into another battle zone. You always feel as if you’re pushing toward a goal, doing your bit to stop the Strogg.

The Strogg are basically what the Borg would be like if they assimilated the WWE. Huge cyborg mentalists, sporting the kind of dismemberment and horror that’s usually reserved for Clive Barker; even Pinhead would be like ‘that’s a bit much’ and they provide some great firefights; it’s not a case of who can pump the most bullets into the other first (although it seems to be them generally). They’re formidable. Most of the Strogg’s military is converted humans from past battles, adding a macabre element and there’s the standard gunners but also big rigs like the Harvester, a giant spider-like creature that reminds you of the striders from Half-Life – a scripted moment when one barrels towards you, legs stomping while you and your team are stuck in a corridor is awesome-scary. There’s freaks like the surgeon guys who haunt the medical bays; cut-off at the waist and hovering, they take great delight in swooping down, swinging surgical instruments, while returning from QII, the Iron Maiden has had an upgrade including the ability to teleport, going from nuisance to rocket-propelling threat. Meanwhile heavy-unit The Gladiator has to drop its shield to fire so it’s a quick-draw or run-quick. Q4’s enemies aren’t hugely original but they have some tricks up what’s left of their sleeves and while most of Q4 is close-quarter corridors, they’re nicely laid out with various ways to advance or get the upper hand if you spot them in time; the game balances slow, uneasy exploratory levels with throw-down shootouts keeping it interesting. Progressing often requires a bit of thought and backtracking, rather plodding ever-onward and there’s quite a few outdoor levels, including some vehicular action; hover tanks, exoskeletons and jumping aboard troop carriers to keep the Strogg off our tail. It is industrial in look and without doubt falls into a Doom 3 feel at times, being built on idTech 4 but it’s got some sci-fi to take the dreary edge off and Q4 quickly develops its own personality. Kane himself though is just a Doomguy; it has Doom 3’s weird ‘zoom out of his head’ cut-scenes and he’s the strong silent type, a grunt committed only to the mission – which the marines have started to lose the initiative on. Then, you lose more than that.

Roughly mid-way through, it’s all on you as you reach the final button that’ll stop the Strogg. Yeah, that room isn’t clearly set up for a boss battle is it. But it’s worse than that. What follows is a grotesque trip as Kane is ripped and rendered for Stroggification. At the last second, we’re saved by our squad but a glance in the mirror suggests we’d need more than an analgesic cream to clear that up. Ever stoic, Kane seems largely untraumatized after being buzzsawed to pieces and his head cracked open. While conscious. Without anaesthetic. Man, even Doomguy looked perturbed when he lost most of his health in one shot, but Kane doesn’t even blink when he loses most of his limbs. He doesn’t even check if little Kane is still there.

Once Kane escapes, he’s Robocop with a missile launcher. Faster, meaner, a better shot and you can hear the Strogg talking and interact with their equipment now. It feels like the game just changed, but not enough. Everyone bangs on about Kane now being the army’s most important asset but we’re back to getting doors open and babysitting. It should drastically alter the game but it falls into standard shooter tropes – even his squaddies are largely unfazed by their old pal looking like the enemy. It could have gone in all sorts of ways; Kane cast out to go it alone, or hunted by his own squad, or even have him completely assimilated and turn on his pals – Kane could have been biblical reference (sort of) so to have him start killing his bros would have been sick. At least have him turn into an infiltration soldier, walking the Strogg areas without threat as you try to bring down defences, see how far you can get before that itchy trigger-finger gets too much. It could have gone anywhere but it just keeps going until it becomes standard shooter fare. It just doesn’t alter the gameplay drastically enough considering what we just watched him go through. He’s just Doomguy on Steroids and doesn’t quite feel as key to the mission as everyone bangs on about; it’s all down to Super-Kane in the end, and it’s a good ending with a nice question-mark final shot, and it works, but it feels a little bit of a missed opportunity.

Stroggification disappointment aside, Q4 is a cracking shooter. It’s a real good’un. You feel like John Wayne in some 1940s war movie or western; Q4 holds up as a shooter from a period where all gamers banged on about was Half Life 2 – like Prey (the 2006 version) which this often reminds you of, Q4 has some great moments and it deserves to be played; it’s more than another Quake sequel built on Doom. It’s the Rogue One of the Star Wars movies.

Raven software; always the bridesmaid never the bride, most of their successes have come from playing in someone else’s sandbox; their early games were built with id (ShadowCaster ran on an id engine, Romero exec-produced the Heretic series), while their best games, Elite Force and Jedi Knight were fan-fave franchise licences; besides Quake they also rebooted Wolfenstein and then produced a shooter based on the magazine for gun-lovers, Soldier of Fortune, which is as odd as it was ultra-violent. Then they contracted with Marvel for a series of X-Men games. Everything Raven touches is a solid, likeable game – and in the case of Jedi Outcast, an absolute classic – yet they never had an in-house property; their most recent attempt, Singularity failed and now they just churn out Call of Duty DLC. They deserve better, and it’s a shame Raven got bought by Activision; if only id bought them instead – as each id engine evolved, their games devolved. Raven’s developer genius built on id’s technical genius could have staved both off from being bought out by the kind of soulless companies they once rallied against. Just think what Doom 3 could have been; The Doom Awakens.

2005 | Developer Raven Software | Publisher Activision

platforms; win | X360

Train Simulator

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

FBT got Train Simulator from Secret Santa. All you had to do was follow the damn train, FBT.

Secret Santa. The frustration of trying to work out who in the hell Barbra is. Getting the guy who no one knows what they’re into. Or getting the boss. Then opening the tat you were given, realising no one at work knows you – or worse, something so on-the-nose they know you too well. This year I got Train Simulator: London to Brighton – my daily commute. I guess all I talk about in the office is gaming and Southern Fail. Well played Barbra.

I’ve always avoided those games like a plague sim. I don’t understand why anyone would want to play something real. I get realism, but I game to be better than I am in the real world (and avoid it); why would I spend my free time doing someone else’s job? I can’t imagine a worse game to play. But … I have suffered at the hands of Southern Rail for a decade now; I know the announcements, the excuses, the world-weary sigh in the conductor’s – sorry, On-Board Supervisor’s voice as they announce the train is no longer in service. I am a Southern Fail ninja, leaping from platform to platform, hopping trains as the service crashes to its knees at the sight of a falling leaf. I’ve been cancelled, delayed, abandoned at places I’ve never heard of. I’ve missed connecting trains, parties, birthdays, films, gigs, restaurant bookings. I can’t plan anything when Southern are involved; my homepage is their delay-repay. I have a “I survived the Southern strikes” t-shirt. Southern is so bad they have to be some sort of Government sociological test like MK Ultra or the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. To actually spend free time playing as Southern is an insult, like the FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS A YEAR I PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF TRAVELLING ON – And yet … what I have here is a chance to prove Southern can’t run a rail network; that it is as easy as it looks. I was once delayed for a total of 48 hours over a single month; enough to claim I was a missing person.

I am instantly in the mindset of Southern; I have no idea what I’m doing. There’s a HUD and the actual controls, but once past the tutorial (okay, I may have skipped most of the tutorial) and realising I can’t re-bind the keys, Driver FBT is just pressing everything to see what happens. Ohh train whistle! Toot Toot! I got this. I find the button to change view and lean out the window. The platform is basic, and there’s nowhere near the number of passengers usually at Victoria; aggravated commuters mixed with flight-missing tourists who have no idea what “cancelled due to train displacement” means. It’s a fairly accurate representation of Victoria though, even down to the lack of platform staff or helpful info. My train is announced and my passengers saunter up to the doors; boarding a Southern train is usually like a scene from World War Z but here they hang around passively. Oh yeah, the doors. Which key is it? One Google later and I have it. It’s the T key. Not D for doors. This being Southern I expected it to be C for ‘Cattle’ or some other C word. I check in on the passengers. There’s seats to spare! This isn’t realistic of Southern at all. Normally you’re so crushed together someone’s pregnant by Three Bridges. After lots of knob twiddling and pressing things, we rumble out the station. We’re off!

Southern commuters have a Bingo game; will it be congestion, ‘overrunning engineering works’, an ‘earlier incident’, ‘operator error’, a vague ‘disruption’ or the dog-ate-my-homework classic, ‘signal failure’? Yesterday it was the two-year-old announcement of Temporary Staff Shortages. Not on this train buster, this train will not be delayed. Even if it briefly starts going backwards and I get an emergency break alert. All right, we all make mistakes. Or ‘Operator Error’ as it’s called. So that’s what that means. Scary stuff. This game is giving me Siderodromophobia. AKA Southernphobia.

The game does reconstruct the journey incredibly well; the view from the windows is spot on, although it’s very 2002 graphically – fitting, that’s the last time Southern had a train on time. I’m kidding; they never had a train on time. I wonder if my real fellow passengers are confused by my laptop screen showing their commute – nope, they have the same listless, thousand-yard stare of my digital passengers; this is your life, and it’s ending one Southern delay at a time. Developers Dovetail Games got the Southern experience spot on.

My real train is delayed because we’re behind a ‘stopping service’. I on the other hand am blasting through the route. I’m ahead of myself. Wait, was I supposed to stop at Clapham? I hunt for a skip mission or speed up button, but this is real life. Real time. Real boring. There’s nothing to do. Oh East Croydon! As I slow down I realise it’s not going to happen. We screech past and I’m warned I’ve missed a station. Minutes later, while searching for the button to turn on the lights I run a red signal; Another Operator Fail – I’m fired. The union takes up my case, the whole network goes on strike. I’m reinstated. Bless the Union.

After several more operator errors, including trying to back the train up after I miss East Croydon again (it creeps up on you), I’m still determined to get to Brighton. I realise this is the first gaming experience where I have to behave and that’s hard to do, but after a while I start to get into it; there are challenges, there’s a lot to being a driver. Actually, there isn’t, the biggest challenge is not mucking about. Really, it’s stop in time and stay within the speed limit – which is interesting; on Southern’s Brighton route you get bounced about so much it’s like being on the Vomit Comet; I have gone Zero-G around Hayward’s Heath, but they insist it’s within speed limits; I was told not to sit ‘over the wheels’ if I wanted a comfier ride. What the hell kind of advice is that?! But here, whenever I get above 80 the train lurches and I get a speed warning. Suspect. I trust a computer game more than Southern.

“‘Do not lean out of the window’. I wonder why?”

It’s fair to say that some of my befuddlement and red-light running is caused by the confusing controls; at times it’s maddening. I spent most of the time with my head stuck out the window like a dog. V is for Window Wipers; what was wrong with W? But, ignoring the messy control system and basic design, Train Sim is surprisingly realistic – except the toilets, where I find a fully clothed man sat on the loo; weird – like any of the toilets work on Southern. But it’s strangely compelling, after a while I find myself totally into it; it becomes a point of pride to hit the stations bang on time, keep on schedule. Once I’m out of the city and barrelling along I enjoy myself. It’s not fun in the traditional gaming sense and I’m not a sim convert – I still try to crash it and misbehave, closing the doors before the passengers can board, but that’s me gaining a Southern attitude, not the GTA in me – when I reach Brighton I honestly feel like I accomplished something. I’m weirdly proud to watch my passengers disembark, headed for the heavily guarded ‘Meet The Manager’ stall. Some of that enjoyment might be down to the familiarity of the route, and the fact that unlike Southern, I actually want to get me home.

Dovetail could have made a Sim based purely on Southern’s management; choosing when to blame Network Rail or Thameslink, timing cancelling a service just after the next one leaves, or once it’s full, claiming it was wrong kind of rain on the track, or the wrong kind of track, last minute alterations, diverting trains, not assigning a driver, sending people to the wrong platform; as a Southern Sim it would be more realistic to stop passengers reaching their destination, but Train Sim isn’t a Passenger sim, it’s genuinely trying to give you the train driver experience. It may be a budget game, but there’s a lot of options, including events that cause changes to the route, weather, seasons, journey options and trains other than Southern’s Cattlecarts, as well as challenges and an editor.

I appreciate what Sims do now; the same as any other game – let people experience something they admire or may never get to do in the real world. For some, that’s driving a train not beating a Boss. I did get a train from London to Brighton and it wasn’t delayed. It really isn’t that hard Southern. I actually learnt a thing or two about trains, tracks and train management too; I’ll be using those in my next Delay Repay claim. Thanks Barbra.

2015 | Developer, Dovetail Games | Publisher Dovetail Games

Platforms; Win

Agents of Mayhem

A SECOND WIND REVIEW

A Saints Row game that isn’t a Saints Row game that wants to be a Saints Row game that FBT wishes was a Saints Row game too. Saints Row.

Agents of Mayhem is a spin-off, side-quel, alternate universe, continuation, whateva of Volition’s mighty Saint Row series. Following the ‘good’ ending to Gat out of Hell, the earth has been rebuilt only to be attacked again; it’s not the Saints behind the mayhem though, it’s super-villains L.E.G.I.O.N who destroyed every major city and government in preparation for something even more nefarious. M.A.Y.H.E.M, a group dedicated to disrupting LEGION’s plans arrive in Seoul to … disrupt their plans.

In the eighties, someone in marketing realised just because kids couldn’t see R-rated movies that doesn’t mean they couldn’t sell to them; Rambo had an animated tv show and toy-line, as did Robocop, The Toxic Avenger, even Police Academy; Alien had a toy as well (Complete with spring-action jaws) and was followed by a (Flying) Alien Queen, now with Spitting Action; Aliens even had a kids show but it never made it to air. I bet it included a baby Alien that made friends with the kid character, just like Uni in D&D and Godzooky. Man, the 80s were amorally great. Nowadays it’s different, they target the toys at adults. Sorry, collectable figurines. And that, in a beautiful tangent, is AoM; a Saturday morning cartoon version of Saints Row. Not in look – it’s clearly is intended to emulate that Filmation meets Toei style we all grew up with – but in style. It’s the bounciest, most bloodless, shiniest, inoffensive game to ever let you murder people. Apart from the occasional ‘motherfucker’ there’s no reason why an AoM playthrough couldn’t air on a Saturday morning straight after Mr.T’s tv series where he pitied the fool who took drugs.

A little like The Avengers, MAYHEM is the brainchild of Persephone. Originally one of the LEGION Supervillains, she defected and took the ‘Ark’ with her, a floating fortress where she assembled a group of mercs to end LEGION’s plans. As an Agent of Mayhem, you’re actually twelve to fifteen agents of Mayhem, including Saints Row stalwarts Pierce and Oleg and Saints Row superstars Johnny Gat and Kinzie (sold separately). The agents operate in groups of three but once in the world there’s only one active and it becomes basically the same as scrolling through weapon choices. If you’re in close-quarters swap to the tank with the shotgun; long distance enemies? Scroll to the one with the sniper-like weaponry and so on. Later groups specialise but often it’s not until you’re deep into a mission that you realise what you need now is a Roller-Derby chick with a mini-gun. Shame you brought the spunky hacker with a peashooter.

They’re all cool and have distinct personalities and one-liners, but they’re completely redundant as characters in-game, it’s purely about their weapons and powerups; once you settle on your preferred loadout, the rest never see the light of day and it’s frustrating if you take a liking to one but can’t stand their compatriots or their loadout isn’t to your playing style. If they can each ‘beam-in’ on a whim, why can’t an entire team? Why is the safety of the world hinging on three heroes out of fifteen? Not actually having one to call your own also removes you from the struggle, further making AoM feel like something you watch not play and you realise how well Mass Effect’s dirty dozen balanced it; squad-mates were cool but they were the support act; you were the hero. In AoM, everyone’s the sidekick, including you.

The agents can alter and upgrade to improve their chances via xp unlocking level-ups, or in-game objects that unlock further improvements and each has a special ability which itself can be honed, and chaining events unlocks another show-stopper ability. Problem is, with this much choice across this many characters it gets messy and confusing. We also get our very own car, which can be called whenever it suits. While you can nick cars pootling around Seoul, they’re horrible and slow compared to our own K.I.T.T car and it’s one of the best things in the game. Not just for the always positive AI who doesn’t seem to mind you constantly wrecking it, or that it’s the only cool thing on the roads, but because it’s one of the few times in AoM where you get to really cut lose and not feel like you’re playing Saints Row The Fisher Price edition.

As you scally about in Seoul, there’s standard mini missions; drive out LEGIONs troops, retake bases, claim areas. Mostly those entail Saints Row 4 reskin events – LEGION troops warp in, you smack them silly for xp, money and health drops and the more mayhem you cause the more dangerous the opponents until you reach the big mini-boss and reset your wanted level. It just feels so pleasantly familiar, a daytime version of a late-night show where you keep noticing they cut out the good bits – but fatally, when you’re not distracted by fond memories of SR, you realise there’s not a lot to Seoul. Instead of carrying on the cartoon look of the cut-scenes, the future looks like an Apple Store, all shiny and neat with no real depth or involvement and you never get stuck in, which is key to an open world game –you never get tempted to ignore the missions and have a muck about, and since there’s another twelve agents to unlock, most of the first third is finding them so you lose momentum; LEGION’s looking to rule the world, if the Agents are that cool can’t they find their own way to the Ark? Just look up, it’s big enough.

The thing is, it doesn’t seem sporting to knock AoM. It’s only here for shit and giggles, and there are a lot of giggles. It’s a solid world and everything you expect is present, Gat is an absolute highlight and clearly shows that’s where Volition’s heart is, especially in his personal mission where he takes out a squad of AI Bots all imbued with his personality, not to mention his John Woo-tacular special skill, while early Agent ‘Hollywood’ is SR3’s Josh Birk turned up to 11; he’s a lot of fun before he gets side-lined by better agents – his special move is firing grenades from his groin, how can that not be fun – and all of them are up there in terms of cool. The problem is, SR had that level of fun from the get-go and then kept layering it with jokes, set-pieces and increasingly insane behaviour from a narcissistic, anarchistic, psychopathic hero – AoM starts as a light muckabout with interchangeable playables, and never progresses. When you’re putting yourself in harms’ way by constantly playing as Kinzie and Gat instead of better suited teams, your core game is clearly not bringing it, but the biggest miss-step of AoM is there’s no Co-Op, let alone followers. How can you have fifteen agents and force you to play them one by one, not even as an on-screen team? AoM’s high-point is its characters and there’s not a dud amongst them but they’re criminally underused so to ignore a co-op/follower situation where they all get an airing is a huge misstep. I get that they’re tools to be used when necessary, but we’re MAYHEM not ORDERLY QUEUE.

In the end, you never shake the feeling this is another nutso Volition Saints Row DLC – it would have worked awesomely alongside Gat Out of Hell or Enter the Dominatrix with the Saints crew trapped in a Saturday morning cartoon. It feels like a holding game while Volition and latest step-parents Deep Silver get a grip on what to do next. What happened next is Agents of Mayhem tanked and DS laid off a ton of staff. That’s a shame, cos Volition were the only ones capable of knocking the smug smile off GTA’s face; hopefully they’ll return to 3rd Street and bring it like only the Saints know how. I miss Mayor Burt -edit- Reynolds.

2017 | Developer, Volition | Publisher, Deep Silver
Platforms; Win | PS4 | XO

Mass Effect 1 vs 2

An Agree To Disagree review

FBT & TheMorty fall out over who has the best Mass Effect

Mass Effect – FBT

This seems like a tough one, but it isn’t. Mass Effect is better than Mass Effect 2. ME3 we’ll leave alone for now, it’s suffered enough but ME2 is a Michael Bay remake of David Fincher’s Mass Effect; it’s all shouty and sexy, missing the subtlety and sinister tone of ME1. In ME2, when we’re not fighting robots (never, ever exciting) it’s oversized midges. When we’re not ignoring the fact that Shep’s thrown in with terrorists, we’re helping our squad get over their daddy issues. ME1 is a slow burn spin through a galaxy that just gets bigger, grander, a true role-playing experience. ME2 is a bombastic, set-piece-driven shooter with too much filler, it’s Independence Day to ME1’s Close Encounters; instead of delving deeper it’s just louder, bigger, shoutier … and it opens with your hero dying but then getting better…

And who are we fighting in ME2? Saren was a complex character aptly supported by the Matriarch, and then there’s the Geth; self-aware machines searching for their God? Brilliant. There was the Thorian and the Rachni, Sci-Fi characters at their purest. ME2 has roaches. We even had a much cooler Reaper; Sovereign. Epic and arrogant whereas ME2’s Harbinger is all off-screen ‘puny humans’ speeches; Sovereign makes good on his threat and rocks up to kick ass, unlike Harbinger, hiding behind a gnat.

And Shep’s taking orders from a bloke called TIM (The Illusive Man’s initials are Tim? Tim?!). We all know Tim’s a villain but what does Shep do about it? Just contemptuously folds his arms at him. Did they forget to clone his balls? This is why I play as Femshep. Cerberus were ultra-evil in ME1, now they’re just misunderstood? Did he forget what they did to General thingie, the experiments? ME1 Shep woulda nicked the new Normandy and hightailed it back to Anderson. And what’s with the Alliance anyway? Shep; ‘yeah, I was dead, I’m not now. I am working with a supremacist group who tortured my own squad’ / Alliance; ‘Oh okay, here’s some side missions’. Shep basically signed up with Britain First ‘cos they gave him a new ship. And Joker too, the voice of sarcastic reason throws in with Cerberus cos he was grounded while Doc Chakwas joined a terrorist group cos she missed serving on a spaceship? There’s a few others knocking about in the Alliance. And Liara sells Shep’s body to them. It’s because I chose Ash isn’t it.

There’s no Ash in ME2! She has one scene before grumping off – it’s great that she refuses to join Cerberus because of the Commander’s influence; She had pro-human leanings, perfect for Cerberus but the cap inspires her to see beyond it and yet here he is; without Ash – Miranda is no substitute for being called Skipper. I can’t even be swayed by her catsuits. I can’t. Totally not swayed at all. Oh, hey Miranda, just stopping by again … so are we flirting yet, cos if not Jack’s looking kinda hot. As is Tali, Kelly, Samara… ME1 is intimate, personal; with six companions, you spend time with them whereas ME2’s frat-party means most get completely sidelined – they’re all great and that makes it worse. You end up going ‘Oh I’d better take Grunt, he’s not been out for a while’. The closeness of ME1’s crew lends itself to the story, this small band taking on the universe – and the relationships that develop feel more natural. In ME2 everyone’s getting jiggy; that place is like Porky’s.

And how does Shep chose to fill his spare time in ME2 when he’s not skulking around Miranda’s office? Scanning planets. He has a ship full of people and an AI onboard, can’t anyone else fire the probes?! Even EDI sounds fed up with it. And what the hell is Joker doing? Why am I piloting the ship about?! ME1 made it all about your command decisions; surprised Shep’s not on latrine duty in ME2. And there’s Mako-time. Granted, most of the time you’re just rolling back down the mountain again and the planets are sparse, but it’s a change of scene and an occasional Thresher. Admittedly, Shep needing to do a hack on a lump of gold you found makes no sense though.

ME2, flying ants aside, is a great thrill-ride but it’s a game trying to be a movie whereas ME1 is a great game, period. Some serious shit goes down in ME1 – you earnt that determined hero-walks-offscreen final shot. ME2 is just padding until a final boss reveal. Okay, I’m not even convincing myself; I’m arguing my Ferrari is better than TheMorty’s Lambo. ME2 is pretty darn close to perfect. But ME1 does get a little closer.

Mass Effect 2 – TheMorty
ME2…or as I like to call it, The Magnificent Seven in Space. Good ol’ Commander Shepard strolls into Dodge to take on the seemingly impossible task of preventing a vicious band of outlaws from enslaving the townsfolk. Of course, he can’t do it alone and immediately sets out to recruit his own band of expendable misfits. His McQueen, Coburn and Bronson are Turian, Asari and Krogan but pack an equally weighted, heavyweight punch in an incredible final mission where one wrong move and it’s more like you’re playing Massacre Effect.

How anyone could dispute that ME2 is by far and away not only the best of the trilogy but also one of the all-time greatest games ever is baffling. Firstly, your squad is over double the size, meaning you can tailor your arsenal to suit the mission – unlike ME1 where you’re pretty much just going into every fight with Wrex and *insert love interest here*. Having the same conversation no matter who you choose and going into cut scenes knowing that they’ll repeat the same Renegade/Paragon drivel like the classic angel and devil on your shoulder. Give me ME2 any day where you have to think carefully about who you take so that Jack doesn’t kick off in the Cerberus base or that two girls you want to sleep with aren’t going to get wise to your polygamous plan.

When you’re not doing very linear missions that are pretty much just a copy and paste job of the last mission you did, you’re travelling in the Mako – the most pointless and boring vehicle in gaming history. I mean, it’s the year 2183, we’ve discovered faster than light travel, have fully aware synthetic AI and can scan an entire planet using a fancy holographic wrist watch. So why in this age are we riding around in a 6-wheeled, saloon version of the 60s moon-landing buggy? It’s so dull but not as dull as the planets you’re driving round at snail pace. I preferred wasting 20 minutes of valuable gaming time trying to take a shortcut over a mountain because it was infinitely more interesting than the unattractive, soulless journey around it – even if that trip would have taken half the time. Never have I played a game where driving felt more slow and painful than the M25 at rush hour. ME2 though, blew that boring piece of scrap out of the water when it gave us the Hammerhead. A hovering jet that was faster, quicker and more agile and manoeuvred with a distinct panache.

Don’t even get me started on the antagonists. A firefight with Saren on Virmire has him running for the hills like Bowser at the end of every Mario level ever – hardly putting the fear of God into the gamer. The Matriarch battle has the most pointless of endings where she dies no matter what choice you make and as for the Rachnii… it just reminded me of fighting radroaches in Fallout. In ME2 you take down a half-human half-reaper. yep REAPER. I mean, beats a bloke possessed. When you take down Sovereign, it’s pretty much just a mind-controlled husk…hardly comparable.

Thank God there’s no Ash in ME2. How on Earth are you supposed to save the universe with a nagging wife over your shoulder… imagine every time you pick Miranda or Jack having her moan “oh, you’re going out with HER again are you?” and making you feel guilty just because you need someone with the Shockwave biotic skill. No thanks. That’s all she did in ME1, whine. About how she got Kaiden killed, about how her father always wanted a boy about how she’s not good enough for you. Have some self-respect woman. I’m the first human spectre, lack of confidence isn’t exactly a turn-on. In ME2 though, you have to work for it as everyone plays hard to get. Much better than fishing in a very small pond where you pretty much have the choice – white or blue…?

Having this argument is like saying Alien is better than Aliens or Judgement Day is better than Terminator. In reality you couldn’t have the action-packed sequel without the taut, suspenseful original that sets the mood. Maybe ME2 is better but even if it is, and it’s a BIG if, it’s only because it had an almost perfect game to pick apart and try it’s best to improve on. At least there’s one thing FBT and I agree on – both are a million times better than ME3.

Mass Effect 1, 2007 | Mass Effect 2, 2010

Developer BioWare | Publisher Electronic Arts

platforms; win, PS3, XBox360

Bioshock Infinite Pt2

In part two of FBT’s scathing Bioshock Infinite review, he basically rants for pages about how infuriating the game is. TLDR; FBT hates Infinite.

* Spoiler Alert – Plot-points and character fates are mentioned throughout *

Thus far Infinite has us shooting through a quantum physics-based plot murdering racist religious fanatics -and those who oppose them- while hop-scotching around multiverses to escape a floating city with a Disney Princess who can alter reality and pass through dimensions with her mind but not conjure an exit. While being chased by a giant mechanical crow.

Having reached Comstock’s airship, there’s nothing stopping us escaping so Songbird swoops down and swipes Liz. Then we’re in the future. 1984 to be clichéd exact. Without Booker to protect her, the years of conditioning turned Liz into the superweapon Comstock prophesied; Columbia is the Ark and Elizabeth the flood. We finally see what her potential really was … directing the Columbia airships to launch missiles. What? Comstock said she was God’s instrument, we’ve seen elements of her power and this is it? I wanted to see her tears pouring death from above, real fire and brimstone stuff, Sleeping Beauty become Maleficent. Nope. No Tear in sight. Just ‘drop a bomb there’. Not even Songbird!

Turns out Old Liz pulled us into this time to stop it happening. Okay, (deep breath) I thought she was on Comstock’s side now? She can’t be brain-washed and aware it’s wrong; Why not have a mini-boss battle with her? Save her, break the conditioning. Imagine that. And, she can time-tear? Oh and, because Old Liz sent us back with a clue to stop Comstock, that means not only can we affect the timeline but that this future won’t happen so we won’t get the clue which means … oh phew, here comes Levine waving his Quantum Theory for Dummies book, now with an all-new Grandfather Paradox Explained chapter!

Back to reality. We arrive just in time to see Young Liz’s super-charged powers open a tear to a tornado which wipes out everyone experimenting on her. THAT’S what I’m talking about! Go Liz! Then she NEVER does it again. So, with zero help from Tornado Liz, we storm Comstock’s airship. Comstock’s got to be impressive, charismatic, commanding, convincing to have pulled all this off; with the scene of Ryan playing golf while Rapture crumbles in mind, we wonder if we’ll meet the Devil or a con-man.

One good thing about this scene; I’ll never again be lost for an example of a game let-down. Comstock could have been one of the most complicated villains in gaming history; he seems to believe in his Old Testament sermons, but we also know he faked his Prophet-like status, using the Tears to gain knowledge. He was building an army to wipe clean the earth but because God told him to or a power-mad desire? And what of his segregation/slavery beliefs? We’ll never know because no sooner have we got past the pleasantries when Booker inexplicably kills him. Just like that. There’s only one reason why that happened. There’s a twist coming. Why is this entire game acting like it’s a ‘previously on’? Comstock, the Luteces, they all know but won’t let on – unless withholding the reveal is key to our final success, this game will be an unconscionable cheat. Before we have a chance to realise we got cheated, the game quickly spirals into an aggravating wave battle while Liz realises the clue from her future-self lets her control Songbird – that’s awesome cool! Sod Comstock, I wanna play Songbird! Wait … Why am I playing Serious Sam with the Vox while Songbird is relegated to background attacks in a hurried point and click? Why can’t we just fly Songbird about?! Massive Crow. Check. Remote control for Crow. Check. Tons of revolutionary, down with the racist and religious nut Vox soldiers to uncomfortably slaughter? Check. Instead I’m busy shooting like I’ve done throughout?

So, given Songbird was the thing stopping us leaving and we have control of it, there’s nothing stopping us leaving – Yes, there is. Booker DROPS the remote over the side. That’s a moment of sickeningly bad, lazy storytelling. Songbird comes in for the kill and Liz opens a tear and transports us to … Rapture! The game already (desperately) justified the Vigors by showing they were Plasmids stolen through a tear so it seemed like we might visit. It’s nice, apart from watching Songbird die outside in the crushing water. It’s really quite sad; Songbird was such a tragic, disturbing creature and not just some automaton, it was a mix between Kong and a Big Daddy and it loved Liz, it’s only joy was looking after her. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking, touching scene and completely out of place in the rest of this shitty, cheating story. God I hate this game.

So, Comstock dead, Songbird gone, free of Columbia; we’re all good, right? Roll the credits. Wrong. Liz’s full powers are unleashed and that gives her … the power to become a know-it-all. We float toward the surface catching a glimpse of Rapture as we go, but of course the moment is spoilt; Booker smirks ‘a city under the sea? Ridiculous’. You’ve just been on a floating … oh I’m done with you. Once by the lighthouse, Liz continues to ramble on; just like Comstock and the Luteces, she knows something she’s not telling me.

Remember that scene in the Matrix when the little kid explains reality; ‘There is no spoon’? and we understood; back to the bullet-time. If you ask Liz she’d talk about a bowl from the spoon’s perspective. Infinite has become Levine’s half-term paper on Quantum Theory and he’s just padding it to reach the word-count. There’s an apocryphal Feynman quote, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t really understand it.” And here we are. Infinite isn’t hard to understand until they explain it, then you realise they don’t know either.

The biggest surprise though is why huge plot twists deserved to be left until the end. We sit through moments that are completely drained of impact because we literally just walking behind Liz who explains everything. It’s like a magician explaining their trick, the power, the wonder is drained out of it.

Comstock is Booker in this reality. Whoa! Imagine working up to meeting yourself?! Questioning yourself, what your doppelganger did, wondering if you were capable. That would have been horrible; it’s not now, being told after the fact just makes you go ‘oh’. The moment Jack sees the ‘would you kindly’ quote on Ryan’s wall, that blew your mind. It was in front of you the whole time, a masterful twist, but Infinite never gives you that realisation. Next!

Comstock’s tear use aged him. Why? Oh of course, so the game wouldn’t tip it’s hand and let me recognise him. It also caused him to become infertile. Jeez you weren’t kidding when you said anything’s possible with Quantum Theory. Oh god, that means … Liz is my daughter! I don’t seem to react to that whatsoever. Neither does she. I get reunions are difficult but come on. Again, that could have been an interesting reveal midway through, change Booker’s opinion of her, from a payday to his daughter, revaluate himself while they awkwardly get to know each other. But hang on, this throws up all sorts of ques – Oh god, it’s the Luteces isn’t it.

Comstock made them open a tear to another reality where Booker, a burn-out after acts he committed in the war, sells the Luteces his daughter, Anna; but at the last second he regrets it and the tear closes and she loses a finger. That is an incredibly strong, shocking scene. But the game panics; we’re sitting there going ‘how did I forget all this?’ and it hurriedly explains Booker lost key memories passing through the tear at the beginning due to his mind trying to reconcile being in Comstock’s reality. Quantum Theory is so bloody convenient. I remember my acts in the war but not a daughter I regretted selling to pay off gambling debts? No sense.

Then there’s the finger thing. It’s because of that Liz can tear between realities? Not just those two, all realities? See, if her Pinkie is in our dimension and her body in Comstock’s why multiverses? Why not just the two? That would have been clean and concise; Comstock universe, Booker universe. Missing daughter, found daughter. Exciting game, emotional game. There’s ironically more potential in two universes than in infinite ones.

The first bit of good news is the fate of the Luteces; after being murdered (yay!) by Comstock to cover his plot, they were spread across all known realities and realised what Comstock had in store for the girl. They resolved to find a Booker and send him into the world to rescue the girl, and hundreds of Bookers later it was our turn, explaining all the see, saw, seen guff. If they wanted to break the cycle why did they continue with their non-sequitur ‘if only you knew’ bants?! They had critical info that would have helped, not knowing didn’t change the outcome just made it harder to achieve! The dicks. The Luteces are the only ones who could have tortured the lighthouse keeper to get the access code at the start. So they themselves can alter and affect things, they didn’t even NEED a Booker or at the very least, they had no reason to keep it from him. It was all for this twist. Bad, cheaty storytelling. Dead. Died. Die.

Eventually Liz leads us back to a baptism that our Booker refused while that Booker took and became Comstock, setting him on his floating-city journey. Somehow. The only way to stop the cycle is for Comstock to never exist. As in, kill Booker to ensure Comstock never lives. Thing is, her thinking is flawed – we’re in a game called Infinite, so that means endless Comstocks; that means there’s a Columbia that helped to usher in world peace, a reality where Booker and Anna lived happily and at least one where Comstock wasn’t an extremist – not every believer is a religious terrorist and you want to kill them too? When you think about it, killing Booker only saves the Luteces. Godamnit! Although, that would be an ending; the whole thing was them just saving themselves. And what’s to stop them giving the tear concept to someone else who is equally nefarious? They’re the villains. We just get Liz joined by other-reality Liz’s for no reason except it looks cool and they drown me. Good.

Of course, there’s one final cheat; Mid-credits, Booker awakes to the sound of Anna crying. Did Infinite just imply it was all a dream?! If not, that undermines the entire game. Liz, open a tear to the exit menu.

Infinite is an incredibly offensive game; raising religious extremism and racism then jettisoning them – you do not use such contentious subjects as filler – having the Vox suddenly become the villains because they’re violent, casting Comstock as a religious zealot and imply he’s a fake – not to mention that his conversion to religion caused all of this; it’s just wrong. And then there’s the plot holes; What about Comstock’s vision, why did they fire on China and why did he prepare the citizens for the coming of the False Shepard; he had no reason to assume the Luteces would turn on him, he killed them to make sure Booker couldn’t follow him. And of course the unresolved issue that that the game lets me be racist; in Bioshock we could murder little girls but you made that call and lived with it and the consequences – it’s as if the stoning scene is an in-joke; something so horrible has no consequences after-all; haha, you thought it was a moral choice, tricked you. Well fuck you Infinite, stoning a mixed-race couple is not a punchline.

There’s so many ways it could have gone; Comstock be a deadhead controlled by the Luteces and we’re just rats in their lab, or Liz even; planned it all to gain her full power. If this game wanted to explore any social issue it should have been the cult of personality; Why folks follow someone like Comstock, we see it in the real world every day. That would have justified almost all of it. It’s not even a very good shooter.

DLC

Clash in the Clouds is the worst kind of DLC – an arena battle. You expect something more; liberating the Vox, a tear-based experience, anything but this. I’d half expect it to just be surviving waves of non-sequitur exposition from the Luteces.

The second and third DLC though, Burial at Sea, seemed more like it. Set in Rapture as a prequel, this was going give us what we wanted in the first place, before it all happened.

Pre-War Rapture. Into Private Eye Booker’s office sashays femme-fatale Liz – in Infinite she was a waifish Disney Princess, in Burial she’s an hourglass-figured Kitty Collins. Liz engages Booker to find Sally, one of several little girls who’ve gone missing recently, and as we follow her Rita Hayworth walk to the door … there is Rapture. In it’s prime, right when life couldn’t get any better beneath the waves. It is absolutely beautiful and I spend an age just taking it in. We light Liz’s cigarette with a click of our fingers, a waiter uses his Houdini plasmid to deliver drinks quicker, it’s amazing. I’m not triggering any story-related stuff, I’m just going to live here.

But it’s short-lived. After a cameo from Sander Coen, we’re headed for Fontaine’s Department Store, where Sally was last seen. This place is unfortunately the Rapture we know; decrepit and looted after Ryan sunk it to banish Fontaine’s followers. There’s no splicers but we do have weapons and plasmid-Vigors to batter Fontaine’s men with; Once we find Little Sister Sally (it was obvious) Booker is surprisingly offed by her Big Daddy. For the first third, that was an awesome run through Rapture and felt like pure, honest fan-service. But never fear, the Luteces are here to ruin it all.

In brief, this Booker’s Anna was killed during an attempt to steal her. Taking pity on him, the Letuces wiped his memory and deposited him in Rapture. He tries to apologise to Liz for cutting his her in half but she’s having none of it and it turns out she’s only here to see another Booker bite the dust. This girl’s got Daddy issues.

So we’ve missed an entire sequence where this Liz became some sort of inter-dimensional time-traveling assassin systematically killing surviving Bookers/Comstocks? Because that would have been awesome; an Assassin’s Creed Infinite? Although, if there’s one surviving Booker then the drowning didn’t work? Still, with Booker very dead where’s part two going? Where doesn’t it go!

Part two picks up almost straight away, after a blatant dream sequence – GET ON WITH IT. Once over, a dazed Liz watches as Atlas captures Little Sister Sally. Awesome, we’re Liz?! We’re gonna get to play God and use tears and run rampant! Then Booker reappears and coaches Liz to say what Atlas needs to hear before he kills her. Kills her? Wait …

Because Irrational missed sexism off their list of bungled social issues in the main game, Burial pt2 strips Liz of everything that made her special, different, powerful. Through whiny monologues, Liz explains to her dead dad conscience (shouldn’t he know?) that she felt guilt about using Sally to expose Booker and the Big Daddy subsequently killed her; the Luteces sent dead Liz back through a tear to rescue Sally but due to reasons, she now has no tears and no foresight. Sigh. Aside from the loss of her powers, Pt2 is primarily a stealth game – Liz can’t take down a Big Daddy, doesn’t get anywhere near the destructive level of Plasmid-Vigors that Booker did, nor does she have any heavy weaponry; Liz even has some non-lethal weapons – she drowned her own dad, I don’t think murder is a problem for Liz.

After helping Atlas reach Rapture, he of course betrays us then puts her through some unnecessary torture during which Liz passes out and misses the war. Goddamnit. She’s awakened just as Atlas is on the ropes and saves herself by offering to find the ‘ace in the hole’. Now weapon-less, Liz has become as much a Little Sister as Sally, driven by the will of men and its uncomfortable given Infinite was all about her freedom. She just walks through the ‘previously on Bioshock’ backstory, getting Atlas Jack’s trigger phrase. We couldn’t just have her finding Sally and the two escaping Rapture, have a mini-adventure, a self-contained view of the war? No, because that would have been great. Instead, it’s got to be all so epic and worthy; Liz realised the only way to save Sally is Jack; by ensuring Jack is brought to Rapture, Sally will be saved. At least she didn’t go back and drown Ryan who turned out to be Jack who was also her dad.

As a return to Rapture, Burial is a total con. We already know the story; Liz’s meddling isn’t interesting to play/watch as we never had any questions about Atlas’ rise. We barely spend any time in the period we’re most curious about and unforgivably miss the key defining moment, the 1959 New Year’s Eve War. The stealthing to avoid a Big Daddy does feel more realistic given their reputation but it would have been better during Booker’s part not Liz; she just jumps through hoops instead of tears and its a shame she’s reduced to a victim – turning Liz into a tragic character betrays her and makes a mockery of the main game’s own ending; plus, what if we played Jack as a bad-guy and killed all the Little Sisters? If the ‘good’ ending to Bioshock is the franchise cannon, then you’ve undermined that game as well. Even Bioshock 2 was kind enough to avoid Jack’s actions beyond the show down with Ryan/Fontaine. Not even an argument that Burial is Irrational’s love poem to where it all started holds water because it betrays everything Bioshock stood for. Ryan would call Infinite a parasite.

Developer; Irrational Games | Publisher; 2K games

platforms; Win | PS 3/4 | X360/One