Jaded: Panzer Dragoon Orta; Black

Two more games, two more non-reviews. I'm just not into it lately.

Panzer Dragoon Orta was at least a fun change of pace. I had to turn it down to easy difficulty to pass levels on the first try. The game only gives power ups if sections of a stage are perfectly cleared. That's a pain to do on normal, so it's doubly difficult. Plus it largely comes down to memorizing the order enemies attack in so that you can hit them before they attack (otherwise you'll waste all your time dodging). And dodging, as in most rail shooters, consists of making large lazy circles. There is nothing compelling, fresh, or fun about the gameplay. But the setting is bizarre and the graphics are decent, giving a good sense of speed and scale. So overall it was fun to breeze through. But I can't imagine what would compel someone to actually want to play the game as intended.

Certainly not the story or characters. Panzer Dragoon had an RPG incarnation at some point, but there were maybe four characters in the entirety of Orta. And the story was drivel.

Black was not even a fun change of pace. It's from the folks who do the Burnout racing games. The idea was to take their expertise at making big booms with cars and use it to make big booms with guns. But, like most first efforts, the game isn't actually that good. Sure, the fact that bullets kick up lots of dust and break apart certain walls is cool. But the fact that the AI could see perfectly through the smoke sucked, and there wasn't nearly enough destructible stuff to improve the feel of the game. Remember the prison shower shootout from The Rock? There's one of those, and it's probably the best room in the game because it's one of the only rooms with a high enough density of exploding stuff to actually feel like anything but a bog standard shooter.

Additionally, enemies take so much damage that it's mostly about head shots. The controls suck for making head shots. Sure, once in a while you'll accurately judge the distance and hit a laterally moving target in the head with a bullet that took half a second to reach the mark. That's satisfying. But that's fairly rare, and it's more of a victory over the controls than the game. Plus the ending is pointlessly difficult, featuring RPG shooting in enclosed spaces and enemies that spawn from nowhere and kill you from behind. Maybe if I'd had a mouse, the game would have been worth playing. Maybe.

If you want to keep score you could give Panzer Dragoon Orta a three and Black a two. Out of five.