Screenshot Library

New to the blog this week is the screenshot library, which you can find on the right hand side column. Simply click on the game you’re interested in to visit a page with all my screenshots for the title. To view larger versions, just click on an image. 

Dead Space 3: Boom, Bang, Splat, Meh

*Warning, minor plot spoilers below

There are few games I stop playing before I complete them and now, Dead Space 3 has joined that small group in my games library. Not because it’s functionally broken in some way or terrible in quality, but due to a lack of atmosphere and genuine scares.

Dead Space is one of the very few AAA franchises that considers itself to be horror.  And yet with each new title, it moves further away from the shocks and scares of the original and towards being an action orientated title. And there’s no reason or need for the change of direction as the original had a good balance between action and horror that made it unique.

A lack of atmosphere and pacing are the main culprits for the missing terror. Instead of trying to build any tension, it relies almost solely on jump-scares to the point where you can predict the appearance of every enemy. To compound the problem, the Necromorphs have had a significant speed upgrade which gives you about a second to kill fresh enemies before they jump on you and take a chunk out of your health.

That may seem unfair and often I did feel cheated when entering a room; being immediately jumped on with little time to react. But to give you a hand with your quick draw, the audio goes absolutely ballistic with loud, sharp noises to announce the appearance of every enemy. The sound design completely robs the moment of any shock value and instead becomes a cue you rely on to progress. There’s no moment where the audio tries to build tension, it’s just flicked on and off like a child playing with a light switch.

Dead Space 3 also fails to make the best use of space. In fact only about a third of the game is set in space with the rest of the game taking place on the snow planet of Tau Volantis. And the developers missed a great opportunity to use the most terrifying scenario of the series. The moments when Isaac has to step into a decompressed room, or walk out onto the hull of a ship. These were brilliant examples of when the sound design perfectly complemented the atmosphere of the game.

All you can hear in these moments are dull thumps of your footsteps and thuds of your weapon discharging. You have to depend on your other senses as the Necromorphs can sneak up to you unheard. It was these moments that put me on edge, sweeping the room to find enemies before they found me. I didn’t even want to step into these areas.

And there wasn’t a single moment like this in Dead Space 3. There are some interesting points where you can jet around freely in space between the wreckage of an old fleet to scavenge parts. However the fact that you can simply fly through space means that enemies can barely attack you. I often didn’t even notice that Necromorphs were firing at me because they couldn’t hit. Otherwise the homing space mines were the biggest concern, and they fail to be any real threat as they kindly announce their approach with loud warning beeps; like angry trucks trying to reverse into you.

The new upgrade system is the largest change in Dead Space 3. Notoriously done to cram in EA’s micro-transactions so you can upgrade faster. EA did claim that micro-transactions wouldn’t be necessary and in fairness to them, it’s absolutely true! Once again you quickly acquire your trusty Plasma Cutter and it’s still a perfectly viable weapon for the entire game. All the other parts you pick up along the way allow you to craft other weapons to add a little more flavour to your arsenal. The big flaw is that the crafting system is very confusing. It took me a while to work out all the possibilities and how valuable certain resources were. Compounding the problem is the lack of detailed tooltips which led me to creating a few poor weapons and adding useless upgrades.

I might return to Dead Space 3 when there’s a lull in the release schedule just for the sake of completing it. I feel that Visceral Games has taken a wrong turn and need to rethink their approach to horror if they want really scare players. Otherwise the franchise will become just another third person action game; a very competent third person action game, but lacking the elements that used to define it.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty Campaign

RTS used to be a prominent genre within gaming, but recent years have seen the amount of releases dwindle. A large problem has been a lack of innovation in the single player campaigns. Each new title followed the old model of merging story with an extended tutorial, and if that story was lacklustre; there was little purpose to its existence. A prime example of this is Supreme Commander 2. A poor story married with very limiting missions.

So it surprised me when Blizzard took a real step forward in design with the first Starcraft 2 campaign: Wings of Liberty. And it needed to be a step forward as well considering Blizzard announced form the start that Starcraft 2 was to be released a full price trilogy rather than a traditional main game with expansions or DLC.

To begin with I was a little worried about jumping into the story having not completed the original game and its expansion. The installer handily provides an overview of all the major events as a slightly confusing barrage of names and places; although it does manage to convey the key pieces of information. Going into the campaign I knew that Arcturus Mengsk was a traitorous leader from the Saturday morning cartoon school of evil. And as the player I would be controlling the forces of Jim Raynor, a former member of Mengsk’s rebel group who is now an outlaw of the Terran Dominion.

And that was all I need to know as new and returning characters were introduced properly. Their links to Jim Raynor were explained, so I never felt that I had missed part of the story. To achieve this, Blizzard has used a mix of cut-scenes, in game dialogue and optional conversations between missions. The core cast of characters is reasonably small, as the game focuses on Jim Raynor’s story and the future of the Terran forces.

It keeps events easy to follow, which is an advantage considering the campaign’s length. There are a total of twenty three missions if you follow all of the optional paths, with each mission averaging twenty to forty minutes of gameplay. The flip side is that the characters are very one dimensional. Everyone can be easily defined by one or two motives, making the events of the game rather predictable.

There are a couple of missions which give you a choice on how you approach them. Either choice provides a different mission, but the actual effect on the story is minimal. That being said, I wasn’t expecting a wide branching story structure similar to Bioware’s titles.

And the lack of story choice is made up for in the upgrade options you can select from between missions. As you progress through the missions, you acquire cash and can discover research artefacts which are invested in persistent unit upgrades. These range from hiring mercenaries who are elite units to activating new battlefield abilities. All the customisation is accessed by wandering around Raynor’s flag ship between missions. It also gives you the opportunity to indulge in extra dialogue with the supporting characters.

Crucially the missions themselves don’t feel like an extended tutorial. The first few of course are very basic, but the game quickly spreads its wings as you get access to the optional missions. The majority also introduce new units to your arsenal which can then be used freely in later missions. Several of these units are unique to campaign, adding another reason for players that usually focus their attention on multiplayer to come and take a look.

Thankfully you don’t need competitive skills of multiplayer to complete the campaign. I was able to breeze through it with basic tactics on normal difficulty, only having to restart the final mission as I started with wrong strategy.

Blizzard has set the bar for single player RTS campaigns with Wings of Liberty. Like all good trilogies, they have been careful to make sure that on the whole, the story provides a complete chapter with its own conclusion. It would be nice to see a few more complex characters, but the story does manage to pull a few convincing twists. With the release of Heart of the Swarm, it may be possible to find Wings of Liberty for a reduced price; making it worth the purchase if you’re not that interested in the competitive multiplayer scene.

SimCity: DLC Before Bug Fixes!

Unsurprisingly EA is already rolling out the first wave of DLC for SimCity, which isn’t a problem in itself. However they seem to have prioritised it over fixing critical bugs. To my dismay, I only discovered them after many hours of play within the same game region, and after writing my own review.

The first bug I encountered was caused by trying to build a regional wonder with the help of a friend. After he paid the hefty price of one million Simolians to begin construction on an Arcology, we both noticed strange occurrences in our cities. Random warning messages from our advisors would pop up, stating buildings weren’t open due to a lack of workers. Incredible traffic jams would form at the freeway junction and buildings were being abandoned at an alarming rate. After some investigation, it turned out that almost my entire population was going to work on the Arcology every day. Something that shouldn’t occur until the required amounts of construction materials had been delivered to the site.

Despite this completely crippling my cities economy and forcing me to abandon my gambling specialisation, I decided to carry on. I was curious to see what would actually be achieved if we finished building the Arcology. At this point you may sensibly be thinking, “why not cancel building it, if it causes so many problems?” Well that was plan A until we realised the game won’t let you.

Several hours of careful city management later, I bumped into a rather typical nuisance of playing SimCity. My game had failed to synch with EA’s servers again. Great, another twenty minutes of play lost I thought as I clicked the ‘roll back’ button again. Then as I tried to re-enter the game, it never got past the loading screen telling me to try again later. After leaving the game for an entire day, I was still running into the same loading error. A quick search turned up a massive thread on EA’s tech support forum, as thousands of players who had encountered the same bug were having to manually ask EA’s tech support to recover their save files. No proof was needed to show that games which only allow cloud saves are a bad idea, but now we have it. Having run into this bug, I know it’s not worth my time playing another minute of SimCity.

As for the DLC itself, players can now build Nissan Leaf Charging Stations as extra mode of transport. This lets your Sims zip around in non-polluting electric cars. Obviously it’s a little piece of advertising for Nissan, and to make up for that the DLC is free.

“Plopping down the Nissan Leaf Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles. The Charging Station produces no garbage or sewage as well making it pollution free.”

While I’m not entirely opposed to large companies being able to put adverts into games, it would be nice if the added content was actually balanced. Much like the special editions of the game that included the British, French or German theming, it just makes an already easy game even easier. Of course it is optional DLC, but considering the bad PR EA and Maxis have already attracted for the game; you’d expect them to get their priorities sorted.

Thomas Was Alone

When describing Thomas Was Alone, I feel that I should avoid tarring it with the ‘indie puzzle platformer’ brush; as those words alone could easily put someone off one of the best games in the genre. It seems like there’s a new title in this over saturated genre every other week, popping up in places like Steam’s Greenlight section. What makes Thomas Was Alone stand out from the crowd is that its genre merely describes its function, whilst its form offers so much more. Ostensibly, the game focuses on a curious character called Thomas, a red rectangle who’s about to have a very inquisitive adventure.

Dropped into a quadrilateral world, Thomas sets off to discover and observe everything he can. This driving force rather neatly sets up the structure of each level, as Thomas endeavours to reach the white doorway at the end. And of course has to overcome a series of ever more complicated puzzles to reach it.

The game’s story is excellently narrated by Danny Wallace, who won a BAFTA for his performance. The narration really brings to life the character of Thomas and the companions he will meet along the way. The first new face you bump into is Chris, a rather squat little brown square. And as soon as you meet him, his jealousy of Thomas’ fantastic jumping skills is revealed. Accordingly, the layout of the levels takes a twist, as now they have to work together to reach the goal. To begin with, this mostly consists of Thomas giving Chris a hand reaching the next ledge, and Chris having a good sulk about not feeling useful.

It seems a little silly to say, but the characters in Thomas Was Alone are more fleshed out than your average grizzled space marine; despite only being little coloured quadrilaterals on a journey. And it’s not just the excellent narration found in every level providing that definition. There are a number of smaller subtle touches that define Thomas and his friends. Simple elements such as each character having their own jumping sound effect.

As a puzzle plat-form game, it provides a good and varied mix of mechanics throughout. Each level is made up of a number hazards or difficult obstacles which you conquer using Thomas and company. The story does a good job of keeping things fresh, by providing you with different characters at different stages. So the game doesn’t rely on simply adding new tricks in a bid to try and keep the difficulty curve going up.

I never found myself getting particularly stuck on a level, although there are a few awkward time critical puzzles that can be a bit frustrating with the control scheme. It’s not complicated by any means; simply move left, right and jump. Where it falls down is how you select which character you are currently controlling. You can use the number keys to directly select a particular quadrilateral, or scroll through them using ‘q’ and ‘e’. This would be fine, but the characters you have on each level aren’t consistent. So it becomes difficult to remember the key bindings and select who you want, when you want them without constantly glancing at the bottom right of the UI. Crucially there a very few levels where you can actually get stuck, reducing the amount wearisome restarts.

Backing up the excellent story is an equally fantastic soundtrack. It provides in interesting mix of chip tunes and minimalist classical music, which compliments the events and tone of the story as you progress.

What really caught my attention as I was playing where the extracts from developer diaries that appear at the start of each chapter. These tell a second parallel story to the narration, a much more subtle tale about AI that adds an intriguing extra layer of context. However, for all the positive words I have to say about the story, it also provided my biggest disappointment by ending rather abruptly. It left me wondering what happened next to everyone Thomas had met on his three hour adventure. Not a long game by any means, but equally it won’t over stay its welcome. Worth a purchase for the story alone, and if you’re looking for a puzzle platformer as well; Thomas Was Alone will be the perfect title.