Popcorn Games of the Decade

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 31 December 2019

The Rules

I went through my game libraries on Steam and other digital services and looked at games that came out this decade (on those services, some may have come out earlier on consoles).  To be on this list they had to spark a specific feeling: "That was a cool game, and I wouldn't mind another go."

At some level, this list may be a celebration of my poor memory. :)

The Games

Alan Wake (2010)

Control is a fine game, but the supporting cast of Alan Wake feel so much more real and present.  And the pacific northwest is so much more scenic than concrete box architecture.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)

Plunder the seas.  Sing all the shanties.

Aliens vs. Predator (2010)

The game has issues for sure, but I still enjoy the campaign.  AvP 2's was probably better mechanically, but this one still looks good and feels good enough.

Cargo! The Quest for Gravity (2011)

Developer Ice-Pick Lodge is better known for the dour Pathologic, but this childish post apocalypse is stupidly charming to me.

Dark Scavenger (2014)

The only turn-based RPG on the list, like Alan Wake and Cargo, it's got a lot of character.  Developer Psydra Games bills itself as a small team, but this game is so quirky it feels like a one person operation.

DmC Devil May Cry (2013)

Developer Ninja Theory slightly simplified the DMC formula, and it worked.

EDF 4.1 (2016)

Big Dumb Fun.  EDF 5 (2019) brought some nice enhancements to the Air Raider class, but overall wasn't as fun largely thanks to an even worse loot system.

Forager (2019)

As the newest entry on this list, it may not hold up.  But it's a fun, actiony take on a clicker / watch the numbers go up type game that got entertainingly bonkers by the end.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2014)

It's one of the few Stylish Action games that can hang with Devil May Cry.

Stalker: Call of Pripyat (2010)

The Metro series is kinda sorta carrying the torch, but Stalker was it's own thing.  Anomalies, monsters, secret military facilities, and humans of various stripes made for a unique world to survive and explore.

Just Missed The Cut

Singularity (2010)

Singularity is a good popcorn game, but felt derivative enough that it didn't quite make it.

Watch Dogs 2 (2016)

Getting upgrades felt a little too laborious and a lot of missions felt like running errands.  Still, having non-lethal options and a protagonist that wasn't another generic white dude was cool.

Vanquish (2017)

It's Gears of War but with rocket boots.  There's a lot of cool elements that that didn't quite gel into greatness for me.

Notably Absent

Bayonetta (2017)

It may just be my age, but some of the enemies had attacks with so little warning that it felt like I took hits that weren't my fault.  Plus a QTE death in a cut scene tanking my level ranking and upgrade currency rewards felt cheap.

Doom (2016)

The collectibles initially felt like a good excuse to play more Doom, but I couldn't figure out where some of them were without going to YouTube and it dulled my eagerness to return.

Saints Row 3 & 4 (2011)

Saints Row 3 lost the plot, and four was fluffy fan service.  And let's be frank, I liked Saints Row 2 enough that nothing was going to escape its shadow.

 

Popcorn Hall Of Fame

These are the games that sparked that feeling still even though they're more than a decade old, or that I've already played so many times that they're locked in.

Broforce (2015)

While sometimes this engine of chaos will kill you with no warning, that chaos is also part of fun when you don't die.  Plus it takes about three hours to finish once you know what you're doing.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013)

Take Far Cry.  Up the player speed and jump height by about 50%.  Cut the entire progression down to roughly six hours.  Make everything a dark 80s neon poster.

Warframe (2013)

It's super grindy. But the moment to moment of flipping all over the place and mowing down hordes of enemies with a great variety of space ninja magic and weapons feels so good I don't mind spending a lot of time with it. I do take long breaks from time to time. But eventually I'll get the urge to turn into a murder fly with Titania or be a chill magic monk with Baruuk and come back.

Dead Space 2 (2011)

Action horror which, thanks to EA screwing up their micro-transactions, gives you a ton of interesting weapons right out of the gate.  The Aliens of video games.

Magicka (2011)

Initially a great game, Magicka was reduced to being just exceptional by PvP balance changes that made the single player / co-op feel less crazy.  I used to be able to turn into a volcano. :(

NightSky (2011)

I normally hate puzzle platforming, but this toy version streamlined it down to pure joy.

Lost Planet 2 (2010)

Funky and clunky, but I still kept running those missions.  Never did try the co-op.

NecroVision (2009)

Bulletstorm before Bulletstorm and combos built on each other in a way that was more satisfying.

Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein: New Order, Wolfenstein: New Colossus (2009)

Shooting megalomaniacal Nazis is always good.

Clive Barker's Jericho (2007)

Horror action schlock with enough character and lore to keep it interesting.

Prototype (2009)

Like Magicka, Prototype puts too much power to control in your hands and lets you figure it out.  The sequel tried to reign in that chaos and suffered in the fun department for it.  I'll always wonder whether Hulk: Ultimate Destruction would have made this list if it had gotten a PC port.

Saints Row 2 (2009)

The classic.  GTA but sillier, but over the top gritty cut scenes that shouldn't have worked, but did for me.

Star Wars: Republic Commando (2005)

I enjoy Scorch.  I appreciate Fixer.  And I'm glad Sev is on my side.  The action's okay, but the bromance is what makes the game special.

F.E.A.R. and expansions (2005)

There's something particular about this mash-up of Akira and The Matrix that no other game even tried to copy (except the sequels, which failed).

Devil May Cry 1, 3, & 4 (2001)

The games that created, and for my tastes comprise most of, their own little genre.  I feel like I should like DMC5 more, but the frequent character switching kept me from really digging in.

Blood (1997)

More schlocky action horror.  I'm sensing a pattern.

System Shock (1994)

A space station full of robots, monsters, audio logs, and a great villain.  Most seem to prefer the sequel, but I find it sterile and ugly and burdened with a class system that adds nothing.  I never liked early, low-poly 3D.

 

Notably Absent

DooM 1 & 2 (1993)

It was a drastic step forward in tech.  It defined a generation.  I preferred its multiplayer to most of what came after.  But my time with it is over.

Update

I forgot one Popcorn Game of the Decade.

Wasted (2016)

The indie 80s post-apocalpse FPS roguelite where you power up using hard liquor. I enjoy the setting and characters, but mostly I enjoy quickly and carefully working my way through the bomb shelters the game dubs Coolers. The mix of combat, stealth, and situational awareness required keeps me on my toes.

Catching Up

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 20 April 2014

I continue to play games. I just haven't felt the urge to write about them in a good while.

Diablo 3 (3 of 5)

Game not pictured because it doesn't really look like much.

Since they fixed the loot system and reduced the cost, I figured it was finally time to try the premiere action RPG.

It's okay.

I can only imagine what a disappointment it would have been with the auction house where instead of finding great loot you just find stuff to sell then have to spend every trip back to town scrolling through auction listings. Bleh.

As it is the game still isn't really grabbing me. As a melee class the biggest threat was groups of elite enemies with lava or toxic abilities that made it hurt to get close to them. Difficulty spikes determined by a random number generator leave me pretty cold.

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EDF 2025 (4 of 5)

Game not pictured because I don't have an HDMI capture setup.

EDF 2017 was a budget game. EDF 2025 doesn't actually add or change a huge amount and was priced at $50.

For me, it was worth every penny.

In case I haven't properly introduced it before, Earth Defense Force is a campy game about defending the earth from hordes of enemies. Dead Rising, with it's oceans of zombies is the only game I can think of that puts as many enemies on screen as EDF. But the enemies of EDF are giant ants and spiders and robots and space ships, giving it a bit of the feel of a 50s monster movie. The hammy histrionics of the voice acting confirm that none of this is to be taken too seriously.

Beneath the silly trappings is a simple loot chase. Shoot bugs. Grab armor crates to increase health and weapon crates to get random weapons. More difficult levels give better weapons. The weapons themselves can be pretty wacky. Grenades that don't travel far enough for you to get out of the blast radius, close range weapons with reload times guaranteed to get you killed if you don't take out all of your opposition in one magazine, weapons that fire in two directions, neither of which is straight; etc. Working around these limitations (throwing the grenade from higher ground so it travels farther, carrying a more practical backup weapon to switch to after unloading the first one, and maneuvering opponents into the fire pattern of a multi-directional gun) makes the player feel very clever.

I could go on, but I'd rather just go play some more.

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Goat Simulator (3 of 5)

Here I am licking a bucket.


Here I am getting hit by a car, still with my bucket.


Here I am, struggling internally with whether to trash this party, still with my bucket.


Goat Simulator is basically a silly physics toy where you can knock stuff about and jump around and then push a button to make a goat noise. There's a bit more to it than that, but just a bit.

One More Business Says It's Leaving The PC Ghetto

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 22 September, 2010

I read a story about Capcom not releasing Super Street Fighter IV on PC. It was disappointing. I bought SF4 for the PC during the Steam winter sale last year, fully knowing I wouldn't actually play it. I just wanted to throw Capcom a little money for being a good citizen, supporting the PC without consumer harming DRM. So this is a slap in the face.

The game's producer (Yoshinori Ono) said that the PC version of SF4 had strong sales but was "number one in piracy". Doy. The PC's an open system (compared to the consoles at least). You might as well cancel the PC version because the sky is blue.

Maybe he just said it wrong. Maybe something got lost in translation. Maybe the piracy numbers on SF4 were truly horrendous.

But the article 1up got the story from also says that despite the PC port being easy to do, there would not be a Steam release because it would be unfair to people who can't buy from Steam. So it's not about piracy because Steam would solve that. It's about fairness. But excluding the PC gamers entirely is already unfair.

Again, maybe it's a translation problem, but this story doesn't seem to make sense. And narratives like this aren't unique to Capcom. A lot of the business people sound like this when they talk about the PC. Piracy is a tough problem, and most companies don't sell enough on PC to make it worth their time to figure it out. But once in a while they see a game like Spore or Starcraft 2 move millions of units and they can't stay away.

It's not a new problem. And it's not going away. But it annoyed me particularly this time, so I wanted to say something. Capcom's good citizen credentials are hereby revoked. Please resume your normally scheduled web surfing.

Quick Takes

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 22 September, 2010

Amnesia: The Dark Descent (3 of 5) is by Frictional Games. You might remember me mentioning the Penumbra games a while back. I appreciate that they're an independent studio with limited resources, but when I played Amnesia, I couldn't help but feel it's the same game they've made twice already. If you haven't played any of them, the first time's pretty exciting. They combine simple puzzles with insanity effects and monsters you can't possibly beat. It's tense. But I've seen it before, and the monster encounters became far too predictable.

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Recettear (3 of 5) is a simple dungeon delve combined with running a shop. It's a nice idea. Balance hack and slash with buy low / sell high. Neither side of the game has much depth to it. And the two sides also don't relate in any interesting ways. But it's a cute grind that I can use to keep my hands busy while I listen to a podcast. It's digital knitting.

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Star Wars Battlefront II (3 of 5) was on sale for $5 on Steam. That's probably about the right price. It's not up to Battlefield 1942 standards. But the scope of the campaign was pretty impressive. From Geonosis to Hoth you fight with the 501st clone division. The campaign gets way too hard. The feel, feedback, and sound is third rate. But I paid $5 and shot some battle droids, so it was good enough.

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I still should finish Cryostasis, but I know it's going to be another 3 of 5, so I'm not too motivated.

Reviews: BioShock 2, NecroVision

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 30 June, 2010

BioShock 2

Developer: 2K Marin
Platform: PC
US Release: February 2010
Genre: First Person Shooter
Price Paid: $15
My Score: 3 of 5

It's more BioShock. I would say it dilutes the wonder of the first game, but the first game already did that by overstaying it's welcome and having a pretty weak ending. It's still a decent progression of getting and using new weapons and powers. But that's its own problem.

BioShock 2 suffers from an abundance of inventory. A lot of games streamline inventory by limiting what the character can carry, but BioShock still lets you carry eight weapons (with three different ammo types each) and eight special powers at once. Also the powers reorder themselves when you upgrade them or get new ones. In the later stages I felt like I spent more time managing my arsenal than playing the game. And having a tough fight because you forgot you left a certain gun loaded with the wrong ammo is no fun.

And the interface to organize and buy things wasn't the best. I tried using the scroll wheel on a menu and it scrolled the menu out of view. This is definitely a rough around the edges port.

The collectivist take on the first game's theme did nothing for me. I think that's largely because I never felt included. For someone who thinks the common good and larger family is all, the idea that the villain never tries to offer you a place in the organization feels weird. I think they missed an opportunity there.

SPOILER SECTION (highlight to read)
The bits near the end where you get to fight alongside your daughter are cool, not so much for the fact that the AI is good but because it feels like my decision to be nice to the little sisters and judge some opponents as redeemable and some not shaped her personality. I will never play the game again because that's probably a really easy illusion to tear down, and I like it in place.

Also the good ending involves you dying and living on, literally, inside your daughter, seeing through her eyes. It was probably supposed to be heart warming, but the thought occurred to me that she's entering sexual maturity. That's messed up.
END SPOILER SECTION

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NecroVision

Developer: The Farm 51
Platform: PC
US Release: February 2009
Genre: First Person Shooter
Price Paid: $4
My Score: 4 of 5

The demo of NecroVision was pretty bad. The combination of mediocre performance, punishing load times, and punishing gameplay was not promising. But the combo based, melee heavy combat system intrigued me, so I was willing to risk the four dollar purchase. Initially I was very pleased. The performance was great (especially when I turned the resolution down a bit). The load times were still a bit long, but bearable. And the gameplay was so much easier I wondered if the developers hadn't released a baby version for Americans. I still wonder about that.

So the bad stuff was gone and the good stuff was still in. I could still charge across a room, stab a guy with my bayonet and kick him away, knock another guy down with my rifle then shoot him, then switch to my knife to kill a guy with an end over end circus throw, all while getting powered up with combo energy for doing it. When it's going well, NecroVision is the game Bulletstorm wants to be when it grows up.

If it wasn't for some pacing problems, save game bugs that lost me hours of progress, map bugs that forced me to reload a few times, some tedious flying sequences, and a final area with lousy visibility and enemies that aren't fun to fight, I would have given it a five and told you to go buy it already. As it is, I'll probably play the fun levels a few more times and jump into the sequel.

Review: Mass Effect 2

written by Blain Newport on Friday, March 19, 2010

Developer: BioWare
Platform: PC
US Release: January 2010
Genre: Third Person Action
Price Paid: $30
My Score: 4 of 5

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The Short Version

Mass Effect 2 is much more consistent, streamlined experience than its predecessor. Interesting stuff happens all the way through it. Whereas the first game was mediocre with an ending I loved, Mass Effect 2 is good throughout.

Obligatory Pretties

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The Long Version

Theatrics

I came to Mass Effect 2 with some preconceptions based on marketing and podcast discussions of the game. It was supposed to be like The Empire Strikes Back, the dark middle chapter to the series. You were going to go on a crazy suicide mission where anyone could die. These turned out to be exaggerations, but they improved my experience.

The stakes were always higher for me in Mass Effect 2. This was partly because I knew my team could die, and I didn't know how that would work. I also knew that as a Paragon, I was going to make sure my team made it back. As if that wasn't enough, I knew my decisions would matter in Mass Effect 3. I wasn't just going on a suicide mission determined to not lose a single person. I was secretly preparing the entire galaxy for war.

The characterization is mostly well acted and directed and the dialog is often witty and memorable, but technical decisions blunt the effect. The overall structure of the game is stilted. Plot point. Recruit quests. Plot point. Loyalty quests. Plot point. Game over. It turns life changing events into items on a checklist. Additionally, the choice between Renegade or Paragon isn't much of a choice at all. Going back and forth never seems like the right thing to do. And the inclusion of a neutral choice is usually pointless. It often felt like they could have just had you pick a path in the opening menu and been done with it.

Mechanics

Mass Effect 2 is largely simplified. Instead of sorting through a huge list of duplicate guns, you buy upgrades for your existing guns. You scan planets from orbit instead of driving around on them. Scanning is less interesting than driving, but negotiating rough terrain was a pain and I think scanning takes less time. Then again, I was playing as an engineer who could buy research for less minerals, so I didn't have to gather as much as someone playing another class. The interface is also more streamlined, but there are still weird quirks (inconsistent menu navigation, being told not to rebind keys because upcoming DLC won't be able to handle it, teammates switching to new guns even if they're less effective, and having to manually import save games because the game won't bother looking in the default Mass Effect 1 save directory) that make it feel like sub-par design / PC porting.

Combat is somewhat improved. Your AI buddies will still occasionally stand in the open until the enemy kills them. But they won't shoot you in the back as much while they do it. And finally, there's locational damage when you shoot people. It didn't mean much for my engineer, but I think my soldier will get some use out of it. I'm still not huge on the pace of combat in these games. I'm more of an action guy and the encouragement to pause and general pace of the game rarely pushes my buttons. But when the galaxy is at stake, I'll tolerate it. :)


Addendum

I would like to nominate Mass Effect 2 for "Worst Use of Tricia Helfer in an Entertainment Product". The character she plays has virtually no emotional range. Her voice is processed to the point of being unrecognizable. Why cast a capable actress for such a generic role?

Review: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Developer: CD Projekt RED
Platform: PC
US Release: October 2007
Genre: Third Person Action (and Role-Playing Game)
Price Paid: $14
My Score: 5 of 5

My experience with The Witcher was magical. And as we all know, magic is about making the mark believe something impossible is happening. :)

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The First Illusion is Self

The Witcher is the main character from the fantasy novels of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. As such, he has a well defined character with a wealth of back-story. But the game uses the hoariest conceit known to fiction (amnesia) combined with another old chestnut (resurrection) to let the player decide who Geralt of Rivia will become in the game.

The crazy thing is that the game owns these clichés by completely surrendering to them. This isn't convenient amnesia that goes away once the tutorial is over. And for that it feels genuine. The same goes for the resurrection. It feels like a legitimate mystery.

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The Second Illusion is the World

The game draws on a rich fiction: persons, places, plots, principles of magic, and prophecies. It's a huge amount to take in. There is a journal that automatically records much of what you learn, but even still, there are many details (sometimes even ones that impact major decisions) that I had to remember myself.

In a game like Mass Effect or World of Warcraft, I felt the lore was an extra for über-nerds. In The Witcher, because enough of it mattered, I cared.

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The Third Illusion is Other People

I got the impression that many of the main characters in The Witcher had lives of their own. They had their causes, their desires, and their failings. I wouldn't say any of them are ever fully developed, which is appropriate in a game about a loner and outsider. But many of them have enough quirks and foibles and went through enough changes to make them interesting.

DISCLAIMER: I played the game in Polish with English subtitles. This makes a tremendous difference in how I experienced other characters. Hearing the better (and better directed) voice acting, having fun learning tiny bits of Polish, chalking strange bits up to cultural differences, and knowing that people weren't saying exactly what I was reading made the NPCs infinitely more believable. If you played The Witcher in English, you have no idea what my experience was like. Occasionally I would forget and start the game in English. It was physically painful to hear.

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The Fourth Illusion is Choice

As I mentioned previously, I looked forward to the consequences of my actions in this game. This was because the game had already established that bad decisions could have very dire consequences and might not even effect who you thought they would. GTAIV felt like a story told to me. At it's best, The Witcher felt like a story I made happen but was never in control of, a true adventure.

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Mundane Stuff
The game looked fine. It had some interface / camera issues. The combat was simple but serviceable. The gathering and crafting and skill choices gave me plenty to keep me busy and experimenting. The game has a lot of implied sex in it, but it had little bearing on the plot or what other characters thought of Geralt. Growing up I read a number of Conan stories, so the frequent and unmotivated boot knocking came off as a genre convention to me.

Review: Red Faction: Guerrilla

written by Blain Newport on Monday, January 11, 2010

Developer: Volition Inc.; Reactor Zero (PC port)
Platform: PC
US Release: September 2009
Genre: Third Person Action
Price Paid: $10
My Score: 3 of 5


Red Faction: Guerrilla PC started strong. I loved wrecking stuff with the hammer and blowing it up with demo charges. But the game never really picked up from there.

Compared to the immediacy of demolishing a building with your hands, everything else was a chore: killing enemies, dealing with vehicles; performing various challenges.

Even the challenges that were about blowing something up usually weren't much fun because of strict time limits that made a lucky break the only way to complete them. I've already talked about the horrors of the driving challenges.

The rub is that I don't know how much of this is the PC port's fault. Is it the fact that the game runs at hyperspeed that wrecks the feel and pacing? Most people complained that the game went on too long, but after futzing to get it stable, doing almost every side mission, and spending a fair amount of time just screwing around to entertain one of Matthew's kids, Steam says I've played it less than 14 hours.

I haven't played the DLC which is included with the PC version, but it's never occurred to me that it would be worth my time to do so. It would be fleshing out a story I didn't care about in the first place.

My first impressions of RFG were gleeful, and I will always remember them. But the rest of the game never lived up to the promise of the tutorial.

Review: Grand Theft Auto 4

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Developer: Rockstar North; Rockstar Toronto (PC porting)
Platform: PC
US Release: December 2008
Genre: Third Person Action
Price Paid: $8
My Score: 3 of 5

The situations and characters of GTA 4 are far less wacky than previous GTA games. Decisions tend to have consequences. Many characters have done, are doing, or will likely soon be doing serious jail time. Many characters die. Characters have family ties and relationships that play out against the backdrop of a lot of hardship. But while that stuff is interesting to talk about, it doesn't make the game fun.

The main activities in GTA 4 are driving, shooting, and hanging out with friends.

Driving is sloppy as all get out. GTA driving has always been pretty loose, but by the time you get any sense of speed in GTA 4, you're completely unable to corner. It's important to let off the gas around turns because you'll lose traction otherwise. Drifting used to be a valuable cornering trick, but the best way to drive in GTA 4 is always slow and steady. It's not fun. I took cabs everywhere to avoid it, which means I also spent very little time listening to the radio, which is a large part of the charm of GTA games. And don't get me started on trying to shoot while driving.

Shooting is better than old GTA games, but still not great. They tried to add cover mechanics, but since your aim moves slightly as you lean out to fire, it's better to just walk around holding down the aim button and take cover manually. They added procedural animation, so if you shoot a guy in the arm he may stagger, or if you shoot a guy running, he'll probably fall. Aesthetically, it's nice, but the end result is that they get back up, so getting people to stay down can be a pain. Also, like many games, if you round a corner and meet an AI with a shotgun, you die. It's realistic, but it's terrible design.

Hanging out with friends is a new addition to GTA. You call or get called by people you meet throughout the game to hang out. You can go eat, go drinking, play a mini-game, or go to a show / strip club. At first hanging out is pretty cool. You pick them up, they tell you a bit of their life story. You play a mini-game. You drop them off. But they quickly become a pain as people start calling you when you're trying to do something else or call you from so far away you can't possibly drive to them in time. If I hadn't discovered the magic of teleporting taxis, I probably would have quit the game entirely.

I don't regret finishing it. Seeing it through to the end means I can talk about the game intelligently. It may be an important reference point in gaming history. But as I look back over the familiar scenarios, frustrating chases, and samey gunfights, there's not much to remember fondly.

Review: Crysis

written by Blain Newport on Monday, January 4, 2010

Developer: Crytek Frankfurt
Platform: PC
US Release: November 2007
Genre: First Person Shooter
Price Paid: $14
My Score: 3 of 5

I wanted to like Crysis more. I really did. It's a true PC game, and I'm tired of playing cheesy ports. Saint's Row 2 stutters so badly while driving that some missions are borderline unplayable. GTA4 has a terrible frame rate. Red Faction: Guerrilla runs too fast. Borderlands has performance and networking problems. And Mass Effect has an inventory interface designed by monkeys on drugs.

But the basic experience of them is good, so I overlook the technical issues. Crysis is the opposite. Technically, it's very good. The lack of an option to bind separate keys to suit modes was my only technical complaint. But the experience of playing the game just doesn't do it for me.

The guns are weaksauce, often requiring multiple shotgun blasts to down an unarmored foe. It felt like playing STALKER again, always going for the head shot because it was the only way to do damage.

The powers are okay. Once I figured out the suit shortcuts, double tapping was pretty cool. It meant I could switch powers at will. But none of them felt that super. The distance I can cover with super speed / while cloaked felt paltry. Three jumps with super strength completely depleted my energy. And armor mode only made it so later enemies took two attacks instead of one to kill me. And this was on easy difficulty.

It turns out there's very little difference in the difficulty levels. Health regen rate and some interface tweaks are about it. I'm playing Crysis Warhead on the hardest difficulty, and it's practically the same game. Why put in four difficulty settings if they don't make an appreciable difference in gameplay?

There are a lot of design decisions that don't make sense. Having all sorts of options on all the guns was silly. Who puts a sniper scope on a shotgun or a laser sight on a minigun? Why give the player all this useless garbage to futz with? Why are there keys for leaning left and right? This isn't Rainbow Six. This is monsters and gauss rifles and nano armor.

It's not a bad game. I'm not sorry I played it. It's just confused about what it wants to be, so it ends up not being anything of note. I'm playing Warhead because it seems likely to have a more interesting story. Plus seeing my own character through another's eyes could be interesting. But Crysis itself is just okay.

Addendum (added 8AM, Jan. 5, 2010)

After talking about music so much recently, I neglected to mention it, and that's a shame because Crysis has very nice music. It sets an epic, heroic tone, and I enjoyed it.

Review: Mirror's Edge

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Developer: DICE
Platform: PC
US Release: January 2009
Genre: First Person Running
Price Paid: $5
My Score: 4 of 5


Not enough pictures lately? You'll like this update. Are you using a 56k modem? You'll like it less. :)

Mirror's Edge is the other big EA "new IP" from 2008. Dead Space didn't do it for me. This game does, to the extent my cynical old man heart can still be reached. I think I felt it beat once, faintly. It was more of a wheeze than a beat.



This is how far you have to go to get my heart to beat at this point.

I'm leaping towards a building in first person. I might not make it. I'm reaching out for it. There's speed lines everywhere. There's scary wind noise. It's a really long way down.

The problem is that if I fail, I just want to start running again. The game is about momentum, both in gameplay and pacing, and you if you fall you fall all the way down. I frequently got bored and impatient before I hit the ground. I know I failed already. Let's go.


The first person perspective can also be confusing sometimes. This is me landing in a roll from a long fall. That's a helicopter shooting at me. Disorienting, eh?

Strangely, I found breaking through doors / windows was the most discombobulating bit.


Awwww. First person hugs! Also, click on this one. The gal's face is a good example of how the game looks like an illustration. The city looks pretty spiffy too.


Enough warmth. Where's my violence? You can pass the game without shooting anybody, but it's generally safer and easier to do so. The shooting feels bad. It takes three shots just to make the deputy sit down. You also run slower and can't do cool stuff, so it's obvious the player isn't supposed to use guns much, which is fine.

It kind of made me feel like I was getting away with something I shouldn't when I picked up a SAW and killed lots of dudes.

This is another good picture to look at full size as an example of the style of the game. I never quite came to terms with the white foliage. I suppose it might be the future. But I can't shake the feeling that at the point where science has found enough free time to go back and solve the "make chlorophyll white" problem, there should be flying cars, space ships, and laser guns.


This is what it looks like when the game fails to load a section in front of you and you fall into a void outside of the level. There were a lot of issues with the port. For one thing, all of the prompts still show Xbox controller buttons. Plus the frame rate drops to unplayable if your PhysX drivers aren't up to date. Plus it crashes even if they are, so you have to turn off PhysX, which was the one advantage the PC version had. Oh well. For $5, I can live with it. Plus it's a DICE game. Being able to turn off the thing that makes the game crash is a huge step up for them.

Also, I've heard the Steam version doesn't have access to the DLC (which are special running courses that extend the life of the game beyond the five hours or so the story takes). Honestly, I haven't looked into it yet as I expect it would be normal PC platform neglect and make me sad.


The flash animation cut scenes were less great. The real game looked so nice that these were powerfully bland. When they were doing fast action, they were okay, even good. But for slow walking animations and talky scenes, they looked creepy and bad.

---

Story
Sorry Rhianna Pratchett. I do not care about your story. The first person hug was good, and the voice acting was okay, but the dialog was generic and throwaway. "Because you're my sister" was a terrible payoff line that highlighted how flat the characters felt. And in a game that sparse, the amount of time you spent establishing a certain relationship made it obvious it was just there to set up a later betrayal. When it finally happened it didn't upset me in the slightest. It was more of a relief that the pretense was lifted.

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Mechanics
(Some people hate the word gameplay. So I'm calling it mechanics. I'll probably use them interchangeably, just to maximize the people I annoy.)

Physics defying free running is the main activity in the game. The sounds and camera wiggle and tunnel vision and all that stuff are well done. But the activity itself never feels that great. Maybe that's just because I'm bad at it, but it felt like I never had the feedback to feel good about it. Did I time that slide right? Am I going the right way? (The inclusion of an "instantly look where we meant you to go" button is something of an admission that they didn't get the visual cues right.)

But I was never thinking hard enough to make the puzzly bits interesting. And It never felt like I was building enough momentum to make the action exciting. If I have to know the level already to find the entertaining running lines, your game isn't fun. I'm not going back to make it fun for you.

Well, I might go back. It is a pretty game. But I still won't spend my time looking for the perfect line. That's dull (and nonsensical when dodging gunfire).

A lot of the game architecture feels like it's just sort of around: a slide here, a vault there. It's boring. I never feel like I'm chaining crazy moves together and cutting a sweet line.

Basically, I don't get the rush the camera and sounds indicate the game was going for. Here's hoping the sequel does it better.

Review: Mass Effect

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, November 22, 2009

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Developer: BioWare
US Release: November 2007
Genre: Third Person Action
Price Paid: $10
My Score: 4 of 5


WARNING: THIS REVIEW IS INCREDIBLY LONG WITH NO PICTURES AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD BE READ BY ANYONE.


Mass Effect is a confused game. It straddles the line between action and role-playing uncomfortably. It wastes the player's time a lot. And the only reason it got a 4 out of 5 is because it saves the best for last, leaving me feeling better about the game overall than maybe I should.

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Confused

I classified Mass Effect as a third person action game, since that's how I approached it. Others might say it's more of an RPG because it lets you pause the action at any time to give orders and has a lot of leveling and inventory and other fiddly bits.

But why pause and give orders when your squad doesn't follow their orders very well? They move with no regard for who's shooting them and from where. They get stuck. You can't switch their weapons sometimes for no apparent reason. And they frequently shoot at targets behind walls. At first I wondered why only the bad guys got rocket launchers, then I realized how many friendly fire incidents they would cause and was almost grateful they weren't allowed. As it is, your squad will frequently shoot you in the back, to the point that if their shots actually did damage to you, they would be more dangerous than the enemy.

Tactically, there's not much there. You can only send your squad where you can see, which makes flanking problematic. The AIs mostly just charge or hide. I never felt like they had a plan of any kind. I mainly used the squad commands to keep my idiotic squad mates from standing in the open under enemy fire, which they did frequently.

Leveling isn't very interesting. There are few choices to make and most levels you'll be doing small incremental improvements that mean nothing to how you play.

The inventory system is just a mess. It discourages pack ratting with inventory limits. But then it doesn't give you the same add-ons at every level so sometimes you need to keep older stuff around.

Managing the inventory is tedious at best, and I often felt I didn't have enough information to make good decisions quickly. Is this new assault rifle good for Garrus? I don't know since I can only check his inventory when he's in the squad.

What mods do I have equipped? I have to memorize mod icons to know, and even after I memorize them, I might be using an older, less effective version, so I still have to click on it to check. Are mouseovers really so hard to code?

Plus why does everyone have to carry one of each weapon type when most classes can't use more than two types proficiently? If my engineer had been able to carry multiple pistols, I could have used mods to make them useful for different situations. Maybe I'd have an accurate sniping pistol with an ice mod to reduce enemy accuracy, a powerful but inaccurate pistol with an anti-organic attachment for charging Krogans, anything that actually gave me some choices would have been good.

BioWare is known as an RPG developer, but the RPG aspects of Mass Effect mostly suck.

---

Time Wasting

I took 22.4 hours (according to Steam) to finish Mass Effect. Steam records the time when I have the game open but am not actively playing, so let's round that down to 20. That probably makes the game too long by half. And that's with me skipping large quantities of side quests and vehicle exploration. I don't even want to think about how long the game would be if you tried to be a completist. *shudder*

This is especially true since the time consuming activities in Mass Effect suck. The most time consuming activities in the game are busy work. Trotting around Citadel station, driving the Mako buggy around on various planets, waiting through load times in elevators, and managing your inventory all suck. Well, driving the Mako isn't terrible. But it's never really exciting and driving over rough terrain makes the going arduously slow.

Of course none of them is as bad as flat out losing hours of game time because Mass Effect's autosave system is garbage. It only saves between transitions on the galactic map and a few points in the main storyline. You can explore an entire planet in the Mako, get one shotted by a giant worm, and have to do the whole thing over again.

"Back to film school ***hole!" - Maeby Fünke

---

So Why Did You Like It?

I liked it because once I got to the endgame and the plot actually moved, it was pretty great. My squad was rocking the bad guys with a wide assortment of super powers and guns. We were learning the secrets of the ancients. The world was coming apart. My investment in the paragon path gave a major enemy a tiny bit of redemption. And the music, which had been halfheartedly languishing in the background, finally kicked in. By the time I hit the end credits, I was really excited.

And supposedly my choices will have an impact on how the sequel plays out, so I'm looking forward to that.

I just hope they streamline the heck out of it because way too many of the time consuming activities in this game are just filler.

Review: Borderlands

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, November 1, 2009

Developer: Gearbox
US Release: October, 2009
Price Paid: $50
My Score: 4 of 5

Price Paid is a new thing. I used to try and call out when I felt that the price paid was important to my experience, but it's simpler to just include it in the heading and let you make up your own mind. I do not include tax, but I do include shipping.


Sooo tired.

Borderlands is absolutely a "just one more" kind of game. Just one more mission. Just one more side quest. Just one more fight. The game is built for addiction. And when playing with others, it's amplified because I don't want to let the group down, and I don't want to fall behind. Last night I was up until after 6AM. (Perhaps it was after 7AM. There was a time change.) So maybe this isn't the best time to write a review... But as the title song says, "there ain't no rest for the wicked."

---

Before anything else, I'm going to say that the PC networking for the game has definite problems.

I was forced to use an old GameSpy profile (instead of the one I used for Unreal Tournament 3 and Saints Row 2) for no apparent reason. Despite being perfectly capable of configuring my router, I was unable to host a game. I later learned that you sometimes have to invite people from in game. But sometimes that doesn't work and you have to invite them to a lobby first. It's just random. And since the best part of the game is multiplayer, that sucks.

There were problems with the in game voice chat that can't be turned off, but the Penny Arcade forum community posted a workaround (editing a configuration file to disable it) before I managed to get multiplayer working.

There were also other bugs. In multiplayer the game may permanently erase skill points, hamstringing your character. Also, it overwrites your configuration files on the first game start after a time change, so I had to change all my controls today. Why on earth would you write code to do something like that? How does that make any sense at all? A patch is being worked on, but this is how the game launched on PC (nearly a week after the console release and more buggy).

---

Industry standard PC woes aside, the game is certainly fun. The guns and their effects are satisfying. Learning which weapons to use with which elemental types on which enemies keeps things interesting. And the random loot means that the next guy you kill or next chest you open may give you the super weapon you've been waiting for.

And in co-op it can be even better because there are four characters you can play, and running with a balanced group means almost every great piece of loot is usable by someone. And when you use your special abilities to help each other out, you can kick major butt.



In case you can't see, that's a lot of large bugs, many of which are already dead.

The game has rough edges. Some special abilities (both skills and on weapons) don't work. Damage and health don't scale properly on the second playthrough. The randomness of the items you find sometimes mean finding what you want is nigh impossible. I could go on, but overall, I've had a lot of fun with game and expect to continue having fun with it for a long time.

Review: Batman Arkham Asylum

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, September 26, 2009

NO SPOILERS.

Well, there will be some minor gameplay spoilers, but I won't discuss plot details beyond the game's premise, which is that Joker has taken over the asylum and Batman has to stop him.

Arkham Asylum is a well made game with many minor issues that keep it from being great.

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It looks good. The setting is well rendered. The characters, while overly beefy / tarted up in many cases, are well animated and detailed. There are distracting clipping issues where Batman's cape will pass through things or where his final slow motion finishing punch will appear to pass through or completely miss the target.

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It sounds good. The music set the mood well. Honestly, I would have enjoyed an easily identifiable main theme for the game, but oh well. The voices, many of which were from the animated series, were good. But in keeping with the beefiness of the design, Batman's machismo was dialed up too much in the early stages.

---

It plays well.

Overall progression through the game is in the style of Zelda or Metroid where Batman gradually gets new abilities which allow him to enter new areas and unlock secrets in old areas. This feels a little artificial but basically works. The detective mode stuff is there. It exists. But it's usually just finding a chemical, then setting your visor to track it.

Hand to hand combat is very streamlined. It can mostly be reduced to three buttons: attack, counter, and evade. The main problem is that the game gives out upgrade points based on continuous combos, so when off screen attacks are the most common cause of broken combos, that's frustrating. Also, the game wasn't designed with keyboard play in mind, so Batman would occasionally attack the wrong enemy. I played on hard and died a fair amount in the game, but I often felt my deaths were not my fault.

There are also enemies with knives or tazers that you can't block and must stun before attacking. It's a little ridiculous when Batman obviously has the skill to counter them. He just won't, in the interest of gameplay.

There are a lot of bonus combat tools aren't really needed, and the basic batarangs have a huge problem. There's nothing more iconic than using a batarang to disarm a foe with a firearm. It doesn't work consistently work in the game, and trying it will probably you killed. *facepalm*

Stalking armed enemies is generally fun, providing lots of opportunities to feel like you're outsmarting / freaking out the AI. I played on hard, so if I was spotted it was almost instant death, but it's not difficult to remain undetected thanks to Batman having a visor that sees through walls.

Some reviewers never turned off the visor. I did leave it on sometimes when I wished I hadn't, as the game is prettier without it. But outside of stalking scenarios, I tried to leave it off as much as possible.

---

The story is okay.

The Joker has a simple plan which drives the narrative. But at the end of the experience, it feels like a bunch of stuff that just happened. Batman's largely reactive, which is unsatisfying. And the one time he's most notably ahead of the game, it was scripted, which was also unsatisfying.

There are no characters with stories I cared about. Gordon wasn't really Gordon. Oracle had no character outside concern for her father's safety. Cree Summer's character arguably had a story, but every time I heard her voice I heard Max from Batman Beyond.

For the most part it was a video game story. It's an overly long, colorful tale of numerous ass whuppings.

---

I know it sounds like I'm down on the game, but it's just because I'm an obsessive fanboy. It's Batman. It's Kevin Conroy and Paul Dini and Mark Hamill. I want it to be perfect. But I'm not dumb enough to let my fanaticism override my better judgment.

For all its rough edges, the game is well built, and being Batman is fun.

4 of 5

Review: Mercenaries 2

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, August 26, 2009

THIS REVIEW IS STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Ker-BOOM! That's basically the point of the Mercenaries series. They're open world action games set in modern times where you play a mercenary doing jobs for various factions.

Mercs 2, the PC version especially, has a lot of glitches and annoyances.



Here's a boat slowly rotating in the air for no reason. Aiming is sticky because it's designed for a game pad, not a mouse. Sometimes zooming gets stuck, making sniping a little bit of a pain. There are missions where you can lose because of suddenly getting shot by an off screen enemy with almost no warning. Button prompts for certain events are confusing.

I forgive it, though. For one thing, I paid almost nothing for it, which always makes me more willing to overlook glitches that aren't game breaking.

The world the game takes place in is very ridiculous.



There's ordinance and palettes of cash strewn all over. In the picture above, I just found a cluster bomb sitting near an outlying house and called in my chopper pilot to pick it up. He carries it back to base, and now I can have my jet pilot drop it on something. Not only that, but it takes him almost no time to come pick it up. And my jet pilot can drop it on almost no notice.



Speaking of ridiculous, here I am having just used a grappling hook to attach to an enemy helicopter I am in the process of hijacking.

So why put up with all this weirdness?



Because you get to blow lots of stuff up.



And you can have pretty helicopter fights.

And you can call in air strikes. And you can attach an artillery targeting beacon to a jeep and drive it through an enemy base at full speed, staying just ahead of the falling shells. You can plant C4 on a jeep and drive it towards a building. You can use a helicopter winch to pick up a giant gas container and drop it on an enemy base.

It's basically single player Joint-Ops: weapons grade stupidity.

4 of 5

Technically the game has co-op, but it's only through EA's servers, so who knows if it'll be available by the time you read this. I'm hoping to try co-op with Chris and / or my brother.

---

I can't help but compare the game to Just Cause. Just Cause has cool stunts and lush green environments and clouds you can fly through, but the action isn't nearly as good. That's not to say Mercs 2 has great action, but the action is at least forgiving. If you fail to hijack a helicopter, you can survive the resultant thousand foot fall. You can take a shot in the face from a tank. It's like the game is always on casual difficulty. It feels like Far Cry 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Mercenaries, and Just Cause are very much of a kind.

I hope all these series can continue to get sequels and cross pollinate because I never get tired of hijacking a vehicle, rolling into an enemy base, and wreaking havoc. I love that the fun of Mercs 2 is not winning but in exploring different ways to get the job done. On my first playthrough I took out some tankers by hijacking a helicopter and using the guns on it to detonate the fuel tanks on the deck. The second time I snuck up next to the tanker in a tiny inflatable dinghy and put an artillery beacon on the side, driving away giggling like a fool. I'm in a second playthrough and there are still a lot of vehicles and air strike types I've never even seen.

Mmm. Tasty devastation.

Review: Call of Juarez

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, August 20, 2009

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

3 of 5

Call of Juarez is a western FPS. The demo for the prequel came out fairly recently, so I figured it was time to finally finish the game. I started it months ago, but the lousy graphics and punishing gameplay made me put it down.

In case you don't remember the lousy graphics, let me remind you.


If CoJ was of an older vintage, I wouldn't mind. But no game from 2006 should have looked like that. Unreal Tournament 2003 and Doom 3 had both been out for years, so CoJ was a throwback.

And once I'd gotten past the initial bad impression, it was followed up with a bad impression of how the game played. I started playing as Billy, who just runs away from everything. Running while getting shot and trying to figure out how the blasted whip works so I can swing across a chasm made me, as a player, feel just as unwanted as the character I was playing.

The game never really loses that. There are instant deaths by falling, rock slides, lucky enemy gunfire, exploding TNT barrels, river rapids, mine carts, and various other traps. The game has a decent quick save feature, which should be used often. I guess they were trying to get across that the old west is a rough place. But I found it annoying and a waste of time.

But for all the failures, the game tries a lot of different things. Sneak through a bandit camp, using thunder crashes to cover the sound of your whip as you take out sentries. Chase a stagecoach. Climb a mountain to get an eagle feather for a spirit quest. Solve the mystery of the missing gold of Juarez.

So while I don't recommend the game, I was interested enough to see what they would try next that I didn't feel like it was a waste of time. I'll probably play the new prequel when it gets cheap enough.

As an aside, one of the characters you play is voiced by Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). It was strange to have a voice I associate with a villain as one of the protagonists. It took the better part of the game before I could think of him as anything other than Gul Dukat.

Keepalive: Fallout 3, The Club

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, July 9, 2009

Fallout 3 has provided me with a nice respite from the daily blog. I can easily crank out a few posts a day retelling the stories from the game. And that's what I did. In the intervening time, I've played enough that I could have filled up tons of blog entries. But that would get boring (if it hasn't already). I will select only stories I deem worthy for your subsequent enjoyment.

I played through The Club. The premise (of the gameplay) has nothing to do with style, as I originally thought. It's more of a race to keep killing (or shooting special targets) fast enough to keep your score multiplier up. At least that's hot it works on Casual difficulty, where you rarely have to worry about dying. At points I was thinking I'd like to go back and try the harder difficulties.

But the game really isn't worth it. The main problem is that it's almost always a point A to point B affair. Run to the next area, keeping your multiplier alive. Then shoot everyone. Then do it again. The problem is that the navigation signs are easy to miss while trying to shoot guys. And even though I was only playing on Casual, sometimes scoring over a million points when my goals were less than fifty thousand, I still felt like a failure every time my multiplier ran out.

Navigating didn't have to be a problem, either. They deliberately made the cues small and of varying types. Sometimes it's a sign on the wall. Sometimes it's chalk on the ground. Sometimes it's nothing and you just go vaguely forward and hope it's not a mistake. They could have put a solid line on the ground that would have made it unmistakable. But they wanted to force me to play the level multiple times and hone my performance. In some games, that's good because the act of performing is joyful.

But in this game, where I'm always frantically looking for something to shoot, it's just stressful. Worse than that, the AI often takes cover or outright runs away when I need to kill them to get my points. That takes control of my performance out of my hands and puts it up to seemingly random AI choices. Sometimes I just don't see anyone to shoot for a while and can't tell if my multiplier was supposed to take a dive in that section, if I was supposed to have seen a target to shoot and didn't, or if the AI that was supposed to attack me decided to hang back. It doesn't feel like a game I can win without large amounts of luck.

But at least Casual difficulty set the bar so low I didn't have to rely on that luck. With the exception of one round where I died (the first round in the game, no less), I never took less than first place. I meant to bring this up in my discussion of Stranglehold, but didn't, so I'll say it here. If you can't make your gameplay solid, at least make it easy so it doesn't get in the way of the player succeeding. Stranglehold has a lot of movement hang-ups where it's easy to have the character do something I didn't want him to do. But because I played on Casual, it never made the difference between life and death. If I had lost a level of The Club because an AI ran off or I got lost because of poorly placed navigational markers, I would have hated the game. It didn't make a huge positive impression. But it also never gave me cause to hate it and was pretty and let me shoot stuff.

3 of 5

Review: Stranglehold

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, July 2, 2009

Stranglehold (Midway, 2007) is a third person action game with plenty of fireworks. (See what I did there?) I played the demo a long time ago and was unimpressed. But when I saw it for $6 at Big Lots, I figured it would be worth it for some mediocre bang bang. I actually popped and ate popcorn while it was installing because that seemed the only appropriate way to prepare for playing "popcorn" entertainment.

While the game definitely is popcorn entertainment, best played on Casual difficulty, it is, in places, really amazing popcorn entertainment. The key is the destructability. They made a big deal of it when promoting the game, but outside of some watermelons and scripted stuff, it didn't factor in to the demo very much. But when I got to the shanty town, where much more of the environment was destructible, it was like a whole new world opened up.



MediaFire Upload

While no other section of the game lived up to the awesome of that one, it was still fun all the way through. It's worth mentioning that "all the way through" for this game (on Casual) was maybe five to six hours, but I didn't care. It was quality blowing stuff up, almost like Red Faction Junior.

4 of 5

Review: Zeno Clash

written on Monday, June 29, 2009

THIS REVIEW (or rather the picture section after the review) CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Let's get the reviewy stuff out of the way so we can get to the pictures, eh?

Zeno Clash is a decent game. The mechanics aren't so great, but once I turned down the difficulty, they worked well enough.

The nice thing is that when you don't have to listen to the lackluster (sometimes downright terrible) voice acting, the game creates a bizarre fantasy world the likes of which aren't often seen in games. It's borderline surrealist. And that's pretty awesome.

4 of 5

Now let's look at some art. (If you don't click through for the big versions you're depriving yourself.)


Here's the dream world where the guy who taught you some fighting moves takes you through the tutorial. You learn to fight by killing chickens.


Your AI companion isn't very useful, but she can't be killed either, so she makes decent window dressing as you fight off poison spitting dinosaurs with ram horns.


Fall colors or Dr. Seuss homage?


For such a small team, they certainly managed to put in a lot of detail.


I didn't capture the sense of scale. You come up to about the knee on these things. Check the outhouse strapped to the neck of the one furthest left.


Lumpy wants more rooster blood, but the bartender's cutting him(?) off.


In the dark world you fight off the metal mud men with a glowing jewel on a stick. The sky animates a bit too, to give an Aurora Borealis effect.


And finally, here's a landscape right out of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Like I said, the fighting has rough edges. But the ideas and artwork are novel enough that I really enjoyed the game once I turned down the difficulty. Supposedly the developers are working on a longer game set in the same world, but more like an Action RPG where you can explore a bit more. I look forward to it.

Review: Dark Sector

written on Saturday, June 27, 2009

This post was an hour late.

I picked up Dark Sector for $10 on Steam at the same time I picked up Zeno Clash. And while Dark Sector is more of a mindless action game, that's what I was in the mood for. The main gimmick for the game is that you have a spiky whirly thing called a glaive (basically the thing from Krull) that you use to kill guys.

At first it feels like the game has a lot of potential to let you do fun stuff. You can huck your glaive at guys and keep shooting with your gun. You can pick up weapons and items with the glaive. And you can steer the glaive in mid air to do fancy wall bouncing attacks. You can charge the glaive with various elements to solve puzzles and kill guys in a larger variety of ways. But none of it's actually much fun.

A huge amount of it has to do with the controls. You can't cancel out of any animations, so it's easy to get stuck doing something that you didn't want to do. And the context sensitive actions sometimes flicker on and off, making it even easier to get stuck doing the wrong thing. I didn't die from it too much, but it made the game feel clunky.

The cover system also had some rough edges. The main problem was that it didn't work consistently. Some cover just didn't work, and cover that did work against normal firearms often wouldn't block shotguns very well. It didn't make much sense.

All in all Dark Sector was a mediocre action game. I see the promise of its ideas. Who wouldn't love to kill a guy with a giant blade thingy, grab his gun remotely, gun down his friends, then do it all over. But it never quite gave me the tools to make those types of scenarios feasible.

3 of 5