Batman Arkham Knight

A Rage Quit review

Batman Arkham City was one of FBT’s favourite games. Will the Knight ruin it for him?

Rocksteady’s Arkham Asylum finally allowed us to say ‘I’m Batman’ and mean it. Bats was largely grounded and faced appalling boss battles but AA was brilliant – gaming’s Batman Begins. And then Rocksteady gave us The Dark Knight as a follow up; Arkham City. Freed of the boxed-in Asylum, it was Escape from New York and you were Snake in a Cape. With the exception of yet more infuriating watch-and-learn-with-Bats boss battles, AC was one of the best games of all time, a towering achievement of gaming and story-telling worthy of any graphic novel. And now, Arkham Knight – Dark Knight Rises or Batman and Robin? I’ll give you a clue; Robin’s in it. Oh yeah. I’ll give you another clue – this review is filed under Rage Quit.

After the ending of AC, Gotham is bracing itself after the power-vacuum left by Bats and Joker’s epic battle. This time it’s Scarecrow, who was roundly beaten by Bats in the previous games – well, beaten, inhaled his own fear toxin and chewed on by Killer-Croc – Understandably pissed off, Scares unleashes a toxin causing Gothamites to go murderously insane. Everyone except the law-breakers scarper. And Bats.

The city is extraordinary to look at, like it was designed by a fan of The Crow having a fever-dream after reading a book about Art Deco while watching Metropolis and listening to the Bladerunner soundtrack. Its twisting labyrinth streets, uneven rooftops, modern-on-gothic look makes for a rainy, gritty, dirty maze of crime and grime. It’s perfect. It’s perhaps the most beautiful and detailed game world I’ve ever seen, decay and misery included. Never mind you had to own a Sunway to run it (Ok Google, what’s the world’s most powerful supercomputer?) – this is worth upgrading for. Gothman is sheer rotting beauty.

From a lithe and leafy Poison Ivy, Bats learns that Scares’ toxin is only the start; he clubbed the Rogues Gallery together to support him in destroying Gotham. Before Bats can even grimace at the idea of Gotham dying, a militia force rolls in, tanks and tech’ed to the teeth and starts pulling the town apart looking for him, commanded by the mysterious Arkham Knight, who has the kind of hatred for Bats that borders on the fanatical, becoming fantastical, eventually farcical. Time and time again he has the chance to kill Bats but doesn’t take it, conveniently says it’s not time for him to die, or leaves him alone to escape; “I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death” – Arkham Knight is Dr Evil. But for now, we’re only concerned about the tanks rolling in. Of course, this Bat doesn’t take things lying upside down.

Bats in AC was fear gliding over the city. In AK he’s a bus driver with a grudge, the one that waits till you nearly reach it then shuts the doors. Once you get control of the beast-like Batmobile, it’s the only way to travel. It’s a monster and better than the Tumbler – It is. It’s a terrifying joy just to look at, Bats’ mood rendered in cold dead steel. It looks like the kind of thing Death would drive – talking of Death, there’s no way Bats’ no-kill policy extends to the Batmobile, without doubt that thing kills people. Aside from that, the sheer destruction you cause just turning a corner is doing Scarecrow’s work for him. It has two settings, pursuit and battle mode. Battle mode works yet doesn’t. The BM basically becomes a crab, able to sidle side to side, spin around, but why turn into a merry-go-round when under attack? Bats has always been about Arrive, Express how much he hates crime, Leave. Why is stationary is the best defence? Is it because the tanks stay still once they see the BM? That’s lucky. The pursuit mode lets you fire disabling rockets at vehicles but it handles like a caravan and goes like a rocket so it’s all so fraught and crashy until you activate battle-mode and it turns into a ballerina. It’s just not the assured, dominant pose you expect from Bats; the thugs are more scared of Bats behind the wheel than the wheel itself.

It’s great to drive once you get used to it, assuming you have enough fingers to operate all the options, but within the game it’s a gimmick. Rather than a complement to his crime-fighting ways there’s convoluted reasons to use it, and everything is solved by either gliding or driving – not both, you don’t get to choose how to approach a problem. You’re also confined to close-quarter chases when it should be GTA Gotham; you never really open it up, let lose. You can remote control it too, but that’s irritatingly underused or forced in as a problem-solver.

So, apart from Knight and his boo-hissing, Scarecrow’s open-season means we also tangle with Azrael, who’s interesting appearances in AC are completely undermined, mockney Penguin doing something or other, Two-Face for padding, and then there’s helium-voiced Harley Quinn; she should be a loose-cannon threat given Mr J’s fate but she’s got nothing to do and only there because we’d complain if she wasn’t. There’s a ton of filler-villains too; zeroes like Man-Bat, Professor Pyg and Firefly are crammed in (Can’t we find something better to do than chase a fly? You don’t even get to smoosh him on the BM’s grill). But the real rager is Riddler. Taking convenient advantage of the Batmobile, he sets a route of time-based chases around Gotham’s sewer system for Bats to conquer. There’s a city filling with poison, do you really have time to play Mario Kart, Bats? Yes, because Riddler has kidnapped Catwoman. She’s not key to the poison plot or anything, but we’re all a sucker for Rocksteady’s Catwoman. The issue is though, Bats always out-thinks his opponents – sure he’s got the gadgets, the cash and the bod, but his mind was his super-power. Yet in AK he just goes along with Riddler’s demands, jumps through his hoops to save Catwoman. He doesn’t outwit him, figure ways around the problems, he just solves them. Boring. And reducing Catwoman to a damsel in distress is a huge disservice to one of the more interesting female characters in Batman. In AC she was hot and formidable, Bats’ equal. Riddler may be helping Scarecrow to distract Bats, but he would have known that – plus Catwoman is imprisoned, not in danger so from our perspective it’s filler and annoying for it. I get so bored with Rids’ games I leave Catwoman chained up.

While the thugs are largely the same, the Knight’s men are anti-Bat trained; electrified fields, the ability to revive fallen comrades, armed with mini-guns, tasers, blades, they can also counter Bats’ moves and scan to spot where he is. The best thing about AC brawling was Bats had the tactical and technical superiority; they just had numbers. Now they have both and the fights turn into button-mashing scraps. It was fun to fight in AC, test Bats’ mettle; now it’s an annoyance. I once played AC for so long the entire city was silenced. I’d offed every thug in Arkham. There’s so much locked down arena fighting in AK it’s more Tekken than Taken; Bats should be brutal and efficient, not hopping around in the background like Pumaman. Bats can be accompanied by Catwoman, Robin or Nightwing and reaching a certain streak-count allows you to body swap; sounds cool but it’s a bit gimmicky and who cares, I’m Batman; just make fighting more satisfying.

We’re also supported by Gordon and his daughter Oracle as well as the occasional dry comment from Alfred. We even get to use the police precinct to doss about in, pick up crimes in progress and drop off the side-villains we take down. AK has some RPG DNA in it, and you wish Knight and Scarecrow would naff off and let us tidy up the city in the Batmobile instead of all this ominous stuff. There is one ominous element that almost saves AK though.

Bats has another side-kick … The Joker. This is a brilliant dynamic. Bats and Joker have always had a complicated relationship, so to have Joker in his mind, reminding him of his failures and his guilt is proper stuff. It’s the best thing in the game as Joker corrodes Bats’ mind and looks set to take over completely, intertwining with the main plot (until Knight’s histrionics make everything daft again) and its really good when Bats conveniently needs to get a little crazy (It’s a shame it’s scripted though, would have been great to get Joker-time as an option like bullet-time). They have some great moments together.

The plot of AK is huge, epic and a fitting end to the trilogy; everything that is happening is Bats’ fault – Scarecrow’s revenge has been a thread throughout the series and more and more people get pulled into – or pay for – Scarecrow’s obsession and Bat’s actions. The game asks if Bats is really doing the right thing, or just making things worse. And it’s played out in the most beautiful environment, by a Bats at his most grizzled and agitated, with all the usual suspects, and the Batmobile – and we’ve even got the Joker doing a Tyler Durden. AK is pure class, and I’m still giving up on this gem? Hell yes.

AK has a lot of annoyances – the fights aren’t fun, the Batmobile has a puncture, Riddler is an idiot and Knight is Widow Twanky with a painfully obvious secret identity. But the real rage-quit is AK’s habit of rug-pulling. The plotting is like one of those old 30’s serials where each episode ends with certain death then the next tells us Rocketman or Flash actually escaped in time. There’s some real mouth-hits-the-floor, eyes-wide, ‘holy shit’ moments where you really think Bats can’t come back from this. Game-changing, narrative-impacting, how-you-play and how you feel moments. And … then it undoes the moment. This happens at least three times – as far as I got anyway, who knows if there’s more.

At the risk of a spoiler, a perfect example is the fate of the Batmobile. After a huge (and daft) fight with Knight in the sewers the Batmobile is destroyed. DESTROYED?! No! OMB. Now what? I feel naked, worried about how I’ll get about town, the toxin everywhere, the tanks, this is real hell-no, game-changing stuff. I’m terrified and excited, and we’re stuck trying to rescue someone, surrounded by tanks and … wait, Bats isn’t worried … oh yeah, just call Alfred and get Batmobile Mk2 delivered. Which is actually a meatier and better version. What?! Fine that Bats has a spare, but games always put you in extreme situations and you go along with it because that’s the world you’ve been told exists – it was Bats, trapped in the city, alone. If Bats can just call in backup, if Alfred can pilot a replacement then the world changes; roll everything out – get the Batwing to take out the militia, have Nightwing rescue Catwoman, Robin can chase Firefly; let me and Joker go get a beer. It sounds like a whinge but it changes the reality we trusted the game to maintain. The other twists are even more of a betrayal because they undercut emotional reactions. They’re soap-opera twists. In AK it turns out J.R shot himself.

Another example of the game’s treachery; when the militia’s commander-in-chief is run off, what happens? Another Merc rocks up and takes over. Where did he come from, why didn’t he get involved earlier? What, he was just sitting in the super-villain waiting room?! You kept a spare henchman, Scarecrow? It’s exactly the same, just different voice goading you. The game can’t let things change too much because there’s so much non-linear stuff going on it would impact – Bats needs the BM outside the main mission, so it has to reappear and that’s a cheat, like Skyrim had Dragons that don’t damage anything and a civil war you never see, AK gives you show-stoppers then restarts the show rather than having the guts to let it stay changed. Each time you think this is the boldest, bleakest, bravest Bats ever and then it double-crosses you. I can’t believe AK became a let-down, especially after how AC played out. That game stuck to its shocks. I’ve had enough. To the Bat-Exit.

Arkham Knight opens with the line ‘this is how the Batman died’. This game pranked me so many times I suspect Bats doesn’t die either. AK gets so much right; it can make you gasp in shock, at it’s beauty, the story, but eventually you’re gasping in annoyance.

2015 | Developer Rocksteady Studios | Publisher WB Interactive

platforms; Win | PS4 | XO

Total Overdose

A Blast from the Past review

FBT remembers when he was a Mexican not a mexican’t.

My memories of TO are good. I spout on about insane gameplay, a DGAF attitude and feeling like I was in a Mexican GTA. I also remember I picked it up solely because it’s tagline was ‘Chili Con Carnage’; You knew what you were in for. I recalled TO as the granddad of Bulletstorm and Saints Row III, games that let you play insane.

But when I try to remember specifics, I struggle. I take this to mean it wasn’t important, I was too busy living a Rodriquez movie; I can’t really remember what GTA 3 was about either, beyond the fact Claude never spoke (Or maybe he did and I don’t remember), so not recalling any detail doesn’t make a game unmemorable … it’s the experience you took from it and I would describe TO as great, but have no demonstrable specifics to back that up. It was great though, honest.

Thinking about it though, if I consider TO so great why’d I only play through once? It came out in 2005 and the budget edition a year later (big seller then) and within that time there were a few other distractions; Star Wars’ Republic Commando and Battlefront 2, FEAR, Quake 4, Gun, King Kong, Just Cause and TES Oblivion to mention a few, many of which are still being mentioned ten years on yet TO is long forgotten; was it Bulletstorm, one of those underground games only a few knew about or was it best forgotten? Deadline Games, the devs weren’t high-end but it was shepherded by Square Enix who’d overseen Tomb Raider and Thief so it had pedigree. Plus, my copy had avoided the great eBay purge of 2007 (when Steam started releasing major non-Valve games and I figured everything would be on there soon – Still waiting, NOLF) so something about TO stopped me from parting with it. Time to work out what’s going down in Mexico.

Shoulda stayed there?

So after two production credits that feature Day of the Dead characters dancing in skeleton outfits (one in a sombrero) I already wish I’d played this hundreds of times. I can tell this is going to be awesome. Mexican rap plays over the menu and I feel like I’m in Desperado. Then I’m into the story. I’m a DEA agent whose cover has been blown, attempting to escape some airfield and being shot at by drug runners. I begin by sliding down a zip-rope uzi’ing the smugglers and then take out everyone between me and my plane; which once aboard, I’m promptly thrown out of by my double-crossing extraction team, bought out by the drug kingpin I’ve sworn to bring down. Given how heroic I’ve just been, I expected to have expected this, but I didn’t and I’m actually dead. The action then switches to later and I’m now playing my son, also a DEA agent who is also in deep cover in the same kingpin’s crew to prove dad didn’t die of an ‘overdose’ – what kind of drug gets you so high you die from the fall? Let’s not worry about it, the game is either joking around or doesn’t care, and that’s part of its appeal – As the son, I’m instructed to drive a car towards a gas truck and use a ‘stunt exit’ option. I slo-mo out of the car as it crashes causing an explosion, then I wipe out everyone around me. Finally, down to me and one last guy who taunts me with a grenade, in cut-scene I shoot him between the eyes then stand about looking cool, before realising the grenade landed by a petrol pump. It goes up and so do I. Does every mission end with the death of my character?! No, I survive although with a broken leg. I’m then transported into the son’s wayward twin brother who has been released from prison on the understanding he’ll pretend to be who his brother was pretending to be and continue his (their father’s) work to bring down mr kingpin. Got it so far? In return, my sentence will be reduced (so, I’m in prison and the DEA sends me to a country with no extradition order and expects me to infiltrate a drug business filled with criminals in return for reducing my sentence? Again, don’t sweat the small stuff). Cue opening credits. What a start!

Once in the Mexican city, I do various small criminal jobs to attract the interest of the Kingpin then work my way to his side by doing missions alongside various side quests to build up health and xp. So far, so typically free-roam but the initial fun has worn off and I start to see how old this plays (despite being built on Renderware, the same engine that underpinned GTA SA the year before); the cars drive worse than Driver which was 6 years old and the on-foot sections are less refined than GTA 3, 4 years earlier. I try to remind myself it’s a decade old but it plays like a decade before that. It’s not from some deep-pocketed dev so you can forgive some creakiness, some unrefined gameplay but you’d expect more than this. By 2005 driving, running and general mayhem were, if not a fine art, past blocky characters and wobbly car behaviours. It’s just not fun to play and worse, not nice to look at.

Deadline Games seem to be on their first major free-roam game here, but whereas Stainless Games managed to pull off Carmageddon, DG seems to have made a vanilla GTA; but it’s actually softer than that; this is Midtown Madness meets Blake Stone; not mad or bad enough to actually be anything but a Clone and a largely inoffensive one at that. Worse, the world is tiny with very little to interact with or get lost in. There’s nothing to see and all too soon I give up wandering. You never feel like you’re in a Mexican town let alone one controlled by a drug cartel, it’s a bland featureless concrete area with no interaction, where running is preferable to driving and the side missions are all races or brawls, which get dull quick.

While many story missions are great in their layout (a level in an abattoir is a standout) and there’s some nice cinematic cut-scenes, they’re hamstrung not just by the featureless look but the shootouts themselves aren’t especially exciting. Baddies stand and shoot or run at you, they’re hidden in areas they couldn’t possibly have chosen to stand in unless they knew you’d walk past and every single door will have someone behind it; it’s so simple it’s like playing a shooter from the Doom era. To spice it up you have bullet-time and insane power-ups including reversing time, onscreen graphics congratulating good kills and comments from our hero (‘spicy move!’, his favourite phrase is uttered over and over) but it all comes across as set-dressing, gimmicky after a while and irritating soon after. This is one of those games where the engine and development just couldn’t compete with the concept and spirit and that’s best illustrated by the launch trailer that still makes TO look like the game you always wanted someone to make.

Maybe much of this banality could be overlooked if it was great shakes with storyline and characters – a gaming element not curtailed by budget or graphical constraints – but while in the game’s head you’re Antonio saving a feisty Salma-alike, the reality is a cliché story and strained, obvious dialogue.

When TO came out in 2005, Free-roam (Sandboxing, nonlinear, open-world, whatever) was in its most exciting period. We’d had three GTAs, Morrowind and Far Cry building up to Boiling Point, Oblivion, Gun and Just Cause and barely a year after that Assassin’s Creed, Crysis and STALKER. TO was dead in the centre but there’s none of the reckless enthusiasm that pervaded those games; if TO’s limitations were down to a budget constraint, then they should have constrained themselves to a clean linear game and dropped the free-roam. Released around TO was Call of Duty 2, FEAR and Doom 3 – not suggesting TO should have reached for those lofty heights but how much more immersive could TO have been as a straight shooter with all the free-roam work funnelled into a real Drug Cartel experience saving a Mexican town.

In the end, Total Overdose isn’t just dated, it was five years too late to the (open) world. Despite my disappointment at finding my memory lied to me, it had its moments; our hero yells lines other than Spicy on rare occasion that get a snigger, flies descend on your kills, if you shoot a guy wearing a hat, it’ll fly into the air. Position yourself under it and your hero will be wearing it until it gets shot off. It has flashes of brilliance that makes TO feel like an unfinished game, like it’s still in beta phase. It’s frustrating because it could have been so much more; it’s got a lot to give – but there’s no world to be given it in.

2005 | Developer Deadline Games / Square Enix | Publisher SCi / Eidos Interactive

Platforms; Win | PS2 | XBox

Mafia III

A Rage Quit review

TheMorty had been so looking forward to playing a mafioso.

There must be some kind of way outta here, said the Joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief…

Well, they can’t say they didn’t warn us. The writing was well and truly plastered all over the wall from the very beginning of the game as Hendrix’ iconic cover of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ boomed over the title screen. Call me nostalgic, but I hadn’t been this excited for a game since Saints Row 4. Nearly 7 years since the last Mafia game and we’re thrust straight into an unexplored era of America. Sure, we’d had the 40s and 50s with Mafia II, the 80s with Vice City, the birth of hip hop with 1990s San Andreas but I always felt there was a big gaping hole where sandbox games had just failed to explore the period in-between. Think of the soundtrack alone, The Beatles and Stones, the height of New Orleans R&B and the astronomic rise of disco and Motown. The announcement trailer alone filled me with anticipation as there was a previously unexplored opportunity to relive a golden period in history and have a break from the comparable norm of what’s been a very generic offering of third person shooters in the recent marketplace.

Perhaps the biggest draw of all was the idea of playing a mixed-race protagonist that carried all the stereotypical attributes of the badass from the Bayou during a period rife with racism. Surely there’s nothing more character defining than overcoming the extremely racist Italian-American mob on their own turf? Hell, the game even carried a warning that it was going to be extremely non-pc and felt it necessary to condone dropping the N-bomb as often as possible to stay true to the abhorrent problems that the character would undoubtedly have faced at that time. I mean wow, that obliterates the feeble cop-out of a warning from the Assassins Creed anthology – “we’ve got Christians, Muslims and Atheists working on this game, honest… ask me mum”. Surely all the above considered we’re going to be in for one hell of a journey… right?

Alas, I was conned. Sucked into the abyss by the siren of Jimi’s wailing Gibson SG Custom. Instead of the thought provoking, immersive story the preamble had promised to deliver – what followed was a hastily-released, buggy and boring mess without a resemblance of substance or stamina. A game that would not only leave me feeling disappointed, but one that made me fear for the future of a fantastic company that has delivered two of this sites all-time top ten games in Borderlands and Bioshock.

The game starts as it means to go on and opens in a tedious method of non-linear storytelling – a Black Mass-style interview with key players some years after the narrative ends. “I knew Lincoln as a boy” queue flash back to Lincoln being a boy… you get the drill. After an overly prolonged backstory about how I was a Vietnam vet (who would clearly suffer from PTSD before the game was out) the tutorial level began. As with all lecture levels, they’re dull – like teaching your granny how to suck eggs or Duke Nukem how to bed strippers. I’m on a job, dressed as a security guard and I get given my first “Choice”, kill a man or wound him. I pondered it. What would a future gangster do; kill him and keep him quiet or show humility. Turns out that what I do here makes absolutely no difference to the outcome (Commander Shepherd, Lincoln is not!) so of course, you pop the guy. Heading outside, we climb into an armoured security van. Grabbing the steering wheel for the first time, I take out a fence, crash through a gate and collide into a tree. Bloody hell, what am I driving? An oil tanker with a caravan hitched onto the back??!! Fair enough it’s the late 60s and power steering was more of a luxury than a standard – but this is ridiculous. On reflection, maybe it was my fault. While waiting for the game’s 30gb download I took a trip to Los Santos and spent three hours messing around in GTA V. Maybe the smooth cornering, quick breaking and responsive handling of my souped up Zentorno was the equivalent of filling up on bread at a nice restaurant and being unable to eat the main meal. Still, it doesn’t excuse how bad the driving mechanics are here. Like GTA IV, there’s two driving modes in Mafia – normal and simulated. Now, one is supposed to be the generic VG style driving mode – except trying a cool handbrake slide at half speed sends you flying into the Lagoon – the other, which per the game menu is a “fully realistic driving experience”, allows you to corner at 100kph without the need to brake. Who wrote that part of the game – the Stig? It’s frustrating given that driving is pretty much the cornerstone of any city-based sandbox game and to get it so fundamentally wrong was always going to make that inevitable time-trial mission even more impossible.

Not wanting to spoil, the tutorial missions end in the all too familiar gangster style. The double cross. Leaving Lincoln angry, bereaved and frustrated as hell. He’s on the warpath and won’t stop until he gets his revenge. Sounds promising, perhaps I can look past the poor driving mechanics…

Once the cut scenes are out of the way and the tutorial mission has been finished, I can finally free-roam. I head to my safe house and notice my wardrobe contains a nice little pre-order bonus pack of outfits. Thanks 2K, very kind of you. Oh, wait, you’ve given me one that makes me look exactly like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson – I’m wearing it. Sod the 70s. This will be fun for the next 20 minutes at least. The generic costume is typical war-vet attire. Dog tags, big boots, green jacket – I’m looking very Travis Bickle (lazy Scorsese reference #2,458).

Sod that, dressed in my pre-order attire I leave the house, jump in my car and head over to the first mission point. As I walk through the door, something feels off, is it a trap? Am I about to get whacked? Nope. I’m dressed like Travis Bickle again for the cut scene. Are you serious? it’s 2017 and you’re still using QuickTime cut scenes? Character customisation is pretty basic these days; I mean most iOS and arcade games can cope with integrating your unique character look into cut scenes – why have bother even having a customised character if you can’t include them into the most powerful and memorable aspects of your story. Two seconds ago, I had a bic’d bonce now I’ve got a full head of hair. You’re beginning to irritate me Mafia and with a full shelf of games on my to-play list, you’re on real thin ice!

One of the new features in Mafia III allows you to have underbosses to your empire of crime (oh yeah, we’re 10 minutes in and have already forgot about revenge – we’re already thinking ahead before we’ve even had chance to spill some blood!). The first of which is Cassandra, a woman with the Haitian Mob who owns a voodoo shop in Delray Hollow. We “rescue” this girl in one of the earlier tutorial missions, not realising she’s the brains of the operation. I’m starting to like where the games going with this. A strong, black female in a world filled with powerful, white males – surely this promises to be tasty.

The first mission for Cassandra fully immerses you in the games fighting system. It’s quite good, but annoyingly you can’t use it unless you’re in stealth mode. I learned this the hard way, walking up to a group of gang members outside a bar thinking I’m going to go full Batman in Arkham City, when one of them shouts “hey, it’s him” causing his crew to whip out their shotguns and with one blast put Lincoln down – costing me a cool 50% of my wallet, Borderlands style. So not only are shotguns pretty much the BFG of Mafia III, but prepare to lose a lot of cash if you don’t make regular trips to your safe house to store the cash in your safe. Oh, that’s right. You must physically bank your cash. Again, something that should have been left behind in the stone age of gaming.

I’m trying to persevere with this so I head to the next mission and with it, a little more of the map is unlocked. I can now do missions to reclaim my turf – like CJ and Big Smoke’s missions to take over the hood for the Grove Street Families. Yes! Let’s make this map a little greener… I dive into the nearest enemy warehouse and enter stealth mode – taking out the lookouts on the door before making my way through the floor and up the stairs to where the piles of drugs are held. I attach some C4 and move on – looting a pile of cash in the head honcho’s office as I choke him out from behind. I wring the place dry, taking out every enemy and watching my XP slowly rise in the process before triggering the C4 and blowing the drugs. I’m a few quid better off and can move on to the next red hotspot on the minimap – this time it looks like it’s in a bar. I sneak around back armed with my signature Colt (avec silencer) and eliminate the guy on the payphone. Once he’s out of the way, I edge into the back room and take out the two guys in the office – helping myself to a chunk of cash and picking up the collectible playboy mag to appeal to the 14-year-old boys playing the game. Moving into the bar, I get spotted. Quick on the draw, I shoot the mobster sipping his scotch before he can even raise his pistol and then take out the other guy just in time before he leaves the building to sound the alarm for reinforcements. Smooth Clay, two hideouts hit, without a single triggered alarm. Maybe there’s some hope for this title after all…

At this point, I’ve been away from the story for a while, so I figure – best head over to Cassandra’s place to start the next story mission. When I get there, I enter the house dressed as Bickle again (FFS!) and Cassandra proceeds to tell me of some pesky drug smugglers holed up in a warehouse nearby (hmm, this sounds familiar…) and how she’d be ever so grateful if I could get rid of them for her. The cut scene ends, I leave the house and I’m dressed as The Rock. I follow the nav-point and as I’d feared – I’m back at the warehouse I’ve just cleaned out 20 minutes previous, only problem being the whole safe house has respawned. Same number of people, same positions, same AI movement. The only difference… no more cash to steal! How dreadfully dull and pointless. So again, I stealth around the room taking much less care than I ever did the first time, expending more ammo and using far too much health than I need as my brain desperately tries to avoid boredom during the repetition of the task. After 5 or so minutes, the coast is clear. I’ve taken everyone out and head back to Cassandra. “Thanks Lincoln”, no bother Cassy – what you got for me now – A high-speed chase… high profile assassination… what’s next on the agenda? “There’s a group of guys in a bar I need taking care of…” You’ve got to be shitting me. The bar I’ve just been in? Now I must re-do that again too? Honestly lads, why even try to be a sandbox game and offer the illusion of choice if all you intend to do is force me to play this as a linear third person shooter – and why am I dressed like Bickle AGAIN!! So not only does the game not reward you financially for doing twice the work, but it makes an open world free-roaming game extremely linear. There’s absolutely no point in exploring any of the map until after you’ve completed the story missions in that part of town – so why bother.

Understandably annoyed, I carry on and complete a few more side-missions before finally getting a unique task; take down Ritchie Doucet. Doucet’s a man aligned to the Dixie Mafia who happens to be holed up at a rundown theme park. Perhaps my favourite mission on the game, I arrive on a boat and sneak into the park. Think Bond if Idris Elba ever gets the gig. Making my way around various obstacles and taking out Douchet’s lieutenants in Deus Ex-style fashion was quite fun, despite the lack of space you can still combining long range shots and short range combat quite effectively without starting World War III. I finally track down the Boss and he takes more than a few bullets to put down but eventually – he’s toast. I’m Lincoln Clay. I’m a man to be feared. I’m again dressed like the love-child of Rambo and Travis Bickle. Sigh.

The game doesn’t progress much past this point, continuing to recruit underbosses while almost always being forced into running errands for them. What happened to the powerful shift in ethnic power? I’ve now got an Irishman and an Italian on the books and no-one gets on with one another. Oh, and why have I become so obsessed with making money that I’ve forgot about my revenge? I thought that was the whole point of playing through the most monotonous of missions in this games?!

The last straw was the hunt for Sal Marcano’s nephew, Michael Grecco (another lazy Scorsese reference). Mission after mission comes and goes as we repeat the same old task reskinned for different locations to hit Grecco in the pocket and force him out of hiding. Finally, he appears and away we go on what should be an epic car chase. As previously mentioned, the car handling is god awful in this game so imagine how bad it is trying to aim, shoot and steer without breaking your thumbs – all while trying to stop Grecco’s escape. 10 minutes later and I’m still nowhere near Grecco as he inconceivably evades Lincoln whenever you get close enough to deliver a meaningful shot across the bow. Despites his motor being the same model as Lincoln’s he somehow manages to hit Mach speeds whenever you’re near. I eventually get close to him, he’s in shooting distance and I’m locked on his driver’s side rear-wheel ready to pull the trigger and blow out his tyres; bringing this dreadful assignment to its conclusion.

Just as my trigger finger is clenched and I’m about to gun him down, out of nowhere and as if by magic, a 20-tonne garbage truck spawns right in front of me. Where on Earth did that come from? I slam right into the back of it and blood covers the screen. Grecco gets away and the mission fails.

Genuinely, I haven’t seen rendering or draw distance this bad since the original Midtown Madness running on my late 90s Pentium 2. The mission restarts from the beginning. I’m furious. I don’t have time for this, I’m out. I quit. It’s just not worth the hassle.

I expect this from the likes of ‘True Crime: Streets of LA’, ‘Sleeping Dogs’ or even from ‘Just Cause’ but to play one of the most anticipated games of the year from a heritage franchise and to be so brutally let down borders on disgrace. The game just doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s taken the best aspects of several different genres and got them all horribly wrong. No wonder it was down to £19.99 only a month after its release and can now be seen floating around the bargain bins of second hand gaming stores. If you can’t compete with GTA then be different. Something Saints Row have prided themselves on across four wildly different games. If you don’t want to compete, then fine – but at least stick to what you do well. FarCry Primal is a great example of where a copy and paste game can go right, you just need to tap into your consumers longing to be back in the world they love, even if it is just a re-skin of what they’ve played before.

The game just feels like it’s 8-10 years behind the times and while the story feels like it might be going somewhere, the pacing is snail at best. It’s not only seen me question the integrity of a reputable gaming brand, but it’s see me never want to watch another Scorsese movie again. Bravo lads and lasses, you took Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed and Taxi Driver and somehow managed to make Shutter Island. You utter, utter buffoons.

2016 | Developer Hangar 13 | Publisher 2K Games / Take-Two Interactive

genres; RPG, Free-roam, Driving

platforms; Win, PS4, XO