written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 19 May, 2011
I'm going through some transitions, so the blog is lower priority right now.
Brink
Brink is not a great game. It's mostly Enemy Territory: Wolfenstein since without the vehicles or artillery, it's got less variety than ET: Quake. The parkour and objective systems are functional, but don't really add much. The perk system rewards prolonged play and specialization in a class, while the game itself requires flexibility. The difficulty of taking objectives seems to vary a lot, meaning some missions are pushovers and some are brick walls, depending on which team you're on.
Games with more than four player co-op aren't easy to find, so there may be some appeal there. But outside of that, I don't see much reason for Brink to exist. And that's not a big market.
Killing Floor
Oh look. A six player co-op game. :) Killing Floor has been my go to lately. That's partly because the Penny Arcade forum folks have backed off of Bad Company 2 to deconstruct Brink. They'll spend weeks testing every map, gun, and perk to find optimal combinations.
But it's also because Killing Floor is simple co-op fun. If I'm on a good team, we hold down a defensible location, a bulwark against the monsters. If I'm on a bad team, sometimes it's even better as I get to step up and be a big fat hero. Some teams are too terrible to save, or just jerks, which will make even a good team no fun. But it's way better than Bad Company 2 for finding fun games, if only because it's cooperative and the voice chat actually works.
The Witcher 2
I'm torn with The Witcher 2. The combat has serious problems including a steep learning curve and controls that simply refuse to work at times. I have been in fights where I didn't care about winning. I just wanted the block button to work. Even at low settings, the game is fairly choppy on my old system, so I suspect the input system is simply getting ignored when there's too much other stuff going on.
I may turn the combat down to easy to see if I can't salvage something from it. But at the moment, I'm thinking I'd rather just sit back and wait for a major overhaul like the first game got.
Singularity
For me personally, Raven Software makes good games standing in the shadows of great ones. Heretic and Hexen were fantasy versions of Doom. They did Quake 4 and the latest Wolfenstein remake. Those games are good, but never great. Singularity mostly fits that bill. The tape recorders you listen to, frequent use of water effects, and upgrade system feel like a lightweight BioShock. The time device you carry feel like a souped up gravity gun from Half-Life 2.
But while many aspects are derivative, it still worked. The the Soviet trappings, time travel elements, and additional powers of the time device were enough that it didn't feel like a retread.
It's worth mentioning that the game is totally streamlined. You always know where the path is, and if you're deviating it's always a quick diversion to figure out how to get some extra loot. I liked it. It was on rails, but the ride was fun.
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