On hold!

Due to various things that will be keeping me busy over the coming months, I've put writing this blog on hold until further notice.

Civilization 5, Brave New World: Review

Big expansions come with equally large expectations, and Brave New World is Civ 5’s second major piece of DLC. Now expansions and strategy games are old bed fellows, you can find one for just about any strategy game you care to name and the majority of them followed a familiar trend. Lots of new toys to play with no attention paid to balance issues.

You spend hours investigation all the new options, but once you’d finished that exploration, the cracks would be laid bare and you interest would be gone again. And this is what makes Brave New World so interesting. It bucks the trend completely, instead being a carefully crafted expansion to fix the problems Civ 5 already has.

And Civ 5’s biggest problem by far was a lack of mid to late game action. It was all too easy to build empires that would be entirely introverted; completely focused on their path to victory which involved no one else. You’d just be clicking next turn to see if you could complete your science victory before someone else filled the culture bar. Only a warring nation could throw a spanner in the works, provided they had the technology to do it.

So what does Brave New World do to get players round a table and interact? Well it introduces a very important table in the form of the World Congress and makes you pull up a seat. Once an early game technology is completed and the simple matter of meeting everyone is achieved, the World Congress begins. Every thirty turns, new proposals are put forward for approval by all nations. These range from putting trade embargos on your enemies to trying to decide the world religion and ultimately, voting for the world leader as a diplomatic victory.

It elevates the importance of diplomatic relations and makes them relevant again. You can use spies you gain to instead act as diplomats, allowing you to haggle over back room deals with the other leaders. A large sum of gold and a few resources may well secure you those crucial votes to enact the policies you need. Each vote can be quite a tense moment as you never know exactly who will be in favour and who might see your proposals as being one step closer to war.

Other changes see a revamped cultural policy tree as well as the introduction of ideologies. Each of the three ideologies is an extra tech tree of cultural policies with some powerful late game bonuses. These also have a great impact on international relations by affecting your empire’s happiness. If your populations think it looks more fun over the border, your happiness can take a serious hit. Riots can spring up, and you may be forced into towing the line and switching to the more popular ideology.

Cultural victory has had a complete re-work which it definitely needed. Before it was simply a case of building culture producing buildings and filling up a progress bar to win, hardly engaging.  Now a cultural victory sees you doing battle with tourism as your offence and your own cultural progress as a defence. You utilise great writers, artists and musicians to produce works that you can put on display giving you tourism points. This will slowly build up through the game and if you focus on it, your tourism begins to eclipse the culture of your opponents. If your tourism score is greater than every other’s nation’s culture, the game is yours as the world marvels at your artistic output.

The UI does a good job of tracking and displaying you tourism progress, with clear indicators to show if you’re making progress or if you’re falling behind. You can also swap great works with other nations to achieve theming bonuses that can give you a little extra boost. It also adds another late game element with archaeological digs. These appear as a bonus tile improvement with the right technology and with a little effort, will let you find artefacts to display in museums (where they belong), further boosting your tourism output.

All these new elements are also nicely accommodated by the previous expansion, Gods and Kings. There’s clearly been a lot of effort put in to make these expansions feel like a cohesive whole, as all the new elements can interact with the religious choices you make. If you get other leaders to agree that your religion is the world religion, you gain further votes in the world congress. Other choices can give your tourism a boost, so there’s a nice link to the new mechanics.

Crucially the AI is capable of playing a competent game with all the new additions. It’s able to sensibly assess the proposals made at the World Congress and knows where its votes will benefit it the most, as well as how much it should demand if you want to buy its votes. War is also a lot more predictable, if leaders start denouncing each other, you know war is only a few turns away unless you make efforts to smooth things over. Not that a war focused AI will care much for your offerings, but I felt that war didn’t suddenly arrive on my doorstep as a surprise like it used too.

So the real question is, do the additions give you enough to consider in the late game, or are you still doomed to click next turn? Playing a standard pace game against the AI, there were moments where that did happen, yet it was never long before something required my attention. A quick paced game or one with friends will likely give you plenty to do for most of your turns. So on this point Brave New World is a real success. It may need a few balance tweaks, but considering the complexity of Civ 5 with all its DLC, it’s likely that any imbalance is perceived rather than it being a real underlying problem.

It does however fall down at my second question. Is it worth the money? Not really. If you buy it full price, it’s nearly as expensive as the original game and it’s only an expansion. This probably won’t be a problem for long though as Civ 5 and its DLC is regularly on sale. So as soon as that happens, Brave New World jumps triumphantly into the must buy category for anyone who already owns Civ 5.

Antichamber: Review

Ever wondered what it would be like to explore one of those impossible pictures? The type where the staircase always goes up, where doors are on every surface? Well Antichamber answers those questions whilst delivering a truly unique puzzle experience.

Right from the start, Antichamber throws out the traditional rules of level design. As you explore down each corridor, you’re never quite sure what you’ll find next. You could end looping back on yourself, finding a secret path or witness the level changing before your eyes. The game pushes the boundaries of what is possible with geometry; completely breaking traditional linear level design. An early example you encounter is a room full of cubes. Looking into the cube from each side shows you something different, which should be impossible, but isn’t in this world: and with a bit of searching you find one side of a cube turns out to be a path into an entirely different part of the game.

It may sound mind bending and it certainly looks it, yet its complex design is delivered in a simple way we all understand. You learn the game through play. Exploring areas teaches you the game mechanics, you learn how to overcome each obstacle and then use that knowledge to progress further when faced with more complex challenges.

The controls are kept simple. You can run, walk and interact with pictures found on the walls. The pictures often compliment the puzzles you just solved, showing how they can be a metaphor for an aspect of life. These moments can be quite thought provoking and left me wondering why the designer didn’t keep the original working title, “Hazard: The Journey of Life”.

Some complexity is added to the game as you progress; giving you more tools to approach problems that previously seemed unsolvable. As you travel, you come across some gun like objects. These allow you to manipulate coloured blocks if different ways and each adds new controls on top of the previous one. And with one simple instruction on the wall, the game has given you everything you need to get past the puzzle in front of you and carry on.

For me, playing Antichamber swung between a few emotions. I’d start off intrigued, discovering the crazy areas ahead of me, understanding where and how far I could progress. Then I’d switch to frustration as I’d fail to solve anything and get stuck. Finally, a few minutes later I’d have a moment of inspiration and break through the barriers in front of me with a real sense of triumph, and start the cycle all over again. In many ways, that’s a familiar description of any puzzle game. But I’d say Antichamber can often linger too long in frustration as it’s not an easy game and it doesn’t offer much in the way of hints.

Due to the game’s non-linear design; you will have to remember how the various paths you can travel connect to each other in weird ways. There is a map in the hub area that highlights where you currently are and the path you just travelled. Both useful pieces of information, but it doesn’t clearly show which bit connects to what, which means you’ll end up mousing over a lot of it to display the more detailed information. It does helpfully show branches off areas you’ve been through, so a glance at the map will show if you haven’t fully investigated an area or remind you that you may need to come back later.

Occasionally you will see some arrows appear in the game to give you a hint in what direction you’re meant to be travelling. You will need good peripheral vision to spot them though as they’re quite subtle. These helped me out on a couple occasions as I got lost on more than once, often finding bonus rooms that revealed how some of the game design worked, which was a nice touch, yet a little disappointing when I thought I was making real progress. A possible improvement would have been an easy mode that gave a more prominent guiding hand to steer you in the right direction.

Of course as a puzzle game, the difficulty is subjective. If your logic is in synch with the game, you could find it to be an easy game. I did end up having to consult a guide towards the end as I had decided the path I was meant to be following was a dead end. In fact it was the same puzzle twice in a row, I just had to repeat the solution as I didn’t realise the location I was in changed.

The clear positive of Antichamber is its design. There are all sorts of nice touches that make it such an interesting title. You can quick travel between any areas you’ve accessed simply by hitting the escape key. This takes you back to the hub room and you simply click on the chamber you want to go to. The hub room also contains all the game’s options on the wall. It seems a bit trivial; yet interacting with an options menu in a first-person view is a little novel.

The aesthetic choice is stimulating throwing a lot of vibrant and varied colour at you to break up the clinical white corridors. It’s used to highlight various puzzle elements adding consistency into the world. This is complimented by an ambient music soundtrack that includes various intriguing sound effects to emphasise certain puzzle elements.

This is definitely a game that was difficult to make a decision on. A big part of its appeal is the experience playing it, exploring and understanding the curiosities around you. But if you get stuck, then that’s taken away from you, leaving you looking for a solution. For myself, I got a lot of enjoyment from Antichamber and if you’re looking for a puzzle game, this should top your list after Portal and Portal 2. It’s incredible to think that this title was developed by one person, Alexander Bruce. He’s created what can be honestly described as a truly unique experience.

The Walking Dead, Episodes One to Five: Review

Fed up with the oversaturation of zombies in popular media? Then this is the game for you! Honest! I was bored of all the TV shows, films and games that were all cashing in the zombie phenomenon. I had even watched some of the TV series adaptation of The Walking Dead graphic novel. Yet this title stands out head and shoulders above the crowd. So how did a game based on the same graphic novel covered in zombies capture my interest?

Easy, the game is all about the characters; the human interaction in the desperate situation of a zombie apocalypse and how it pushes everyone to their limits. You play the role of Lee, an African American who starts his story in the back of a police patrol car. You’re on your way to jail, but slightly bizarrely, the game initially hides the reason behind it.

It makes you first few interactions with other survivors slightly dicey, as you have to decide whether you reveal or hide where you were heading at the start of the outbreak. And they’re not easy decisions to make. The game makes it clear that your decisions will affect the outcome of the story. But you never know who will become a long-time companion that you have to rely on, or someone you just meet in passing. Lying to a friend could have severe consequences further down the line and impact the choices you have to make. Thankfully, you’re not left in the dark for too long. Lee’s past is revealed part way into the first episode and becomes a really interesting issue to handle.

The gameplay is predominately point and click adventure with a dash of quick time events (QTEs). Now QTEs have definitely received their fair share of flak for being annoying and unexpected, requiring you to memorise button presses just to progress. So The Walking Dead sensibly side steps a lot of the problems with some simple design choices. All QTEs in the game rely on the same button presses and are used consistently for action sequences. They’re also short lasting only a few seconds at a time, so if you fail and get reset to the start of the event, you don’t feel unfairly punished.

That shortness also adds to the tension, whether it’s fending off Walkers in a frantic attempt to escape, or having to deal with some of the hostile survivors. It’s by far the best implementation of QTEs I’ve seen, although there were still a couple that didn’t immediately make sense. In one instance, I had to fail the first QTE, to then save Lee in a second. But that wasn’t explained at all. So I spent a minute madly mashing the button before I gave up out of boredom because I thought it might be a bug.

The action sequences are sensibly dotted throughout the story, yet they are definitely not the focus of the game. It’s all about the choices you make in conversations, how you steer the group and what you think is the best option for survival. It’s also about who you care for, which characters you like and those you hate. The first survivor you meet is Clementine, a little girl who’s lost her parents. Lee realises that he’s going to have to take care of her, and so you become her guardian.

I’ve never cared so much for another character in a game. Even though Lee isn’t her dad, I felt that I had to take care of her, no matter what. And that’s a testament to the quality of the writing. She’s not some annoying tag along escort quest character. She actually acts like eight year old, with her own personality and capabilities. There’s often moments where you’ll rely on her to get through a tough spot, rather that constantly having to protect her. It forms a natural team between her and Lee.

Then there are your enemies. Your other group members have their own clear opinions on the best way to survive, and you’ll be caught in the middle of it. You won’t be able to keep everyone happy, so you’ll have to choose your conversation options carefully. Some of the best story moments are when you’re presented with the tough choices. You will be in situations where you have to choose who lives and who dies; and if someone has been working against you, can you take the high road and save them?

You don’t always get a lengthy amount of time to weigh up your options. Sometimes you’ll be forced to react to events in conversation, adding to the pressure of the situation; fearful of what happens if you take no action, which is often a valid option. Silence can speak louder than words on many occasions. The only problem is it can be a bit harsh on slow readers.

There are two options for the point and click element of the game. You can play with all the intractable elements highlighted or revealed by mousing over them. There’s never a large amount of objects to interact with at any one time, but I would recommend playing with highlights on. The points you can click on are often fairly small and there’s no point in handicapping yourself. The point and click portions are fairly linear and only use a few objects at any one time, so there’s never a complicated puzzle to solve, though this lack of complexity may be a bit of a disappointment to point and click fans. I only had one moment where I had to walk around and click on everything to progress, which was satisfying for me as I hate getting stuck when the design logic isn’t clear.

Currently, a complete story is told over the five available episodes. Telltale Games are becoming masters of episodic content, as each episode provides a complete chapter of the story that concludes, but also leaving a cliff hanger teasing upcoming events. There’s a new DLC episode ‘400 Days’ in development which will allow you to play other characters and see their perspectives of the apocalypse. The events of the first five episodes will then continue in season two, with a current release date scheduled for later this year. As an excellent story driven game, it’s good to hear that more content is on the way, but it does raise the issue of when will the story conclude?

All in all, I can definitely recommend season one, even with a further problem discussed within the spoiler alert below. It will provide an excellent story driven experience that runs for around ten hours total for the first season. It’s left me looking forward to both the upcoming DLC and season two.

So the final problem of the story that can only be discussed with spoilers:

Spoiler Alert!

You would expect The Walking Dead to have multiple diverging paths with plenty of endings, given the amount of serious decisions you have to make; but that’s not the case. Really there’s only one ending at the end of the first season of five episodes. How you get there can be quite different and the journey is definitely the heart of the game. Yet it robs the game of replay-ability and it’s exactly the same issue suffered by the Mass Effect trilogy. Telltale Games have stated that your decisions will carry over into season two, so it may only be a catch for now.