Recent reviews by Darvin11

original post Jan 24 2015

I hated playing The Evil Within. I quit after two or three passes with the first encounter and its unfriendly checkpoints. It felt tired and forced, and held back vital mechanics from the player in favor of cheap scares. It annoyed me and did not value my time.

I reminded myself of this the 10th time I tried to make it through the medical section in Alien:Isolation.

Directed and linear to fault, Isolation has enormous issues, especially in the last third of the game which are offset magnificently by the first third of the game. Playing as Amanda Ripley, the grown daughter of the still vacu-frozen Ellen Ripley from Alien, the story takes place on a near derelict space station that is being decommissioned. With art and sound direction that feels like the original Alien was rubbed up and down over the developer’s bodies, mood and tone are established quickly and retained for the most part.

The Sevastopol station leans heavily on the design of the refinery towed by the Nostromo in Alien, with towering spires and spikes sticking out of everything. On in the inside, inexplicably large open holes dot the ceilings and the walls are lined with circular vents that iris open. Wall-grids are backlit creating the illusion of light against massive negative spaces of shadow. In short it looks great. It looks right.

The station thrums and pulses with the film’s atonal sounds that create tension on their own, delivering inescapable claustrophobia, like an empty active auto factory. Machinery is alive everywhere but little else is. Sparse human survivors run or attack when they see Amanda, desperate to hold on long enough for a rescue that is never coming.

In survival horror tradition, resources are thin though there are crafting materials everywhere if you take time to look. Amanda picks up blueprints throughout the game, expanding the repertoire of jury rigged defenses that as much distraction as weapon. Early on, a locked door hints at a specific kind of torch i.e. the one she didn’t just get, that is needed to cut through the lock. Backtracking through environments is a thing.

Man is it a thing.

The opening hours are tense and exciting, as Amanda works her way deeper into the station, trying to reconnect to the ship orbiting outside that brought her here. All of the enemies on the station are revealed, average loud dumb gun toting humans, ultra creepy near invulnerable androids and finally the titular alien.

Revealed in a cut scene and soon followed in gameplay in the dreaded medical section I was immediately terrified by the Alien’s presence. Booming footfalls or rumbling vents announced it and drips of drool would hint at why lie ahead. I was riveted.

I was riveted until I died or backtracked through medical enough times to memorize it and really watched the Alien’s behavior. It thumped past me and I drank in the detail and I died enough that I stopped caring. I stopped being afraid of the plodding Alien and hid and crouched and kept quiet, so much so that by the time I had completed what I thought was the ending I was barely annoyed.
I realized then I wasn't even halfway into the game. There would be pointless side missions that could be replaced with a cut scene and lose nothing.

More and more I backtracked and had a sudden realization that it seemed like sequences were created from a cool visual concept and reverse engineered to create that moment, and thus were impervious to subversion by the player.

Isolation betrays its own conceit late in the game, having abandoned the Alien as enemy, placing hordes of androids instead, only to reintroduce the Alien. But by then it’s too late. Amanda has enough weapons and tools to keep her out of harm’s way. The Alien has been effectively neutered as a threat as have the androids.

When it ends, when it finally ends, it betrays the conceit of the film so spectacularly one wonders why the slavish devotion in all other areas. It falls to the same pitfalls Alien: Colonial Marines fell to in trying too hard to retro-fit canon when it isn’t completely ignoring canon. (ie. Why name her Amanda if Aliens is outside the source material, but then why ignore Aliens if her name is Amanda?)

Isolation is ambitious and visually stunning, often incoherent and in love with its set pieces, and too long by half.

Original Post Oct 26 2012 gameish.ragingcanuck.com

I didn’t know if I liked Dishonored until the last third of the game. Leveraging the Unreal Engine, and set to the default brightness settings as directed in the initial startup, Dishonored is a washed-out low resolution mess. Individual pixels can be discerned within groups of shaded art making up a wall in a mess of greys and browns. I dropped the brightness down a few notches to create deep black shadows, hiding the transitional colors.

The art style is distinctive and inspired, but initial off-pointing. Thick angular extremities taper towards the body, with odd features over-emphasized as they jut from a character’s head. Turn of the century architecture of brick and glass reaches for the gloomy sky as steampunk technology inspired by a world run on whale oil provides energy weapons and barriers. A terrible plague burdens the city/state of Dunwall, leaving the poor to be dumped into quarantine zones as they transform into walking shuddering wretches that vomit black clouds on the unwary.

Playing as Corvo, the titular bodyguard framed for the death of the body he was guarding, Dishonored initially guides the player through a linear path of escape. Only as Corvo mutely joins a merry band of insurgents within a hub level of sorts does the game open up. Environments are reused to good effect though the scale of the game seems small until the final map, a sprawling island fortress. Until that point, four or five of the base levels are visited at least twice, allowing Corvo to stretch any newly acquired abilities gather along the way.

Blink is a fundamental necessity in Dishonored and as a mechanism fixes the single largest issue facing first-person platforming, traversal. Functioning as a nearly instantaneous teleport, Blink allows Corvo to zoom from perch to perch, ascending or descending the environment at will. Only the highest heights are unreachable, though the indicator of what is scalable can often be confusing. Other abilities include stopping time and possessing animals and people, and all of them can be leveled by gather charms and runes within the environments. More a scavenger hunt than the chore many games make of collectibles, it offers opportunity for multiple play-throughs, as does upgradable equipment. Upgrade paths taken can determine possible strategies, but this concept is not communicated well by the game. Only by finishing it does one fully realize the depth of the paths not taken.

What is unfortunate about Dishonored is the empty shell of a narrative that is offered. Borrowing from Bioshock 2, a surrogate daughter learns from how Corvo conducts himself in the world. Play as a violent murderer, killing everything in sight and the girl becomes ruthless in her world view. Practice mercy and stealth, she become benevolent. An excellent mechanic is robbed entirely of meaning as there is no emotional connection to the girl or to any character in the game. Drowning in bad writing delivered in a vacuum by bored or confused celebrity voices, Dishonored is done a disservice, rendering the game an exercise in strategy rather than an experience to become immersed in.

Heady with upgraded powers I raced through the final moments of the game, skipping an environment entirely and accidentally triggering a scripted event. I chased the event and when presented with an ultimatum I simply executed a multi-power combo that resulted in the enemy killing himself literally in a blink. By this point the game I was so highly leveled the final encounter was a trifle, and that is a shame.

Dishonored is a fine successor to Thief and Deus Ex, offering player agency, and open environmental puzzles but is ultimately hollow.

Original post May 30 2012 gameaday-ish.blogspot.com

Max leapt and spun like a leaping and spinning thing, puking bullets in every direction, but unable to hit anything he aimed at. He grumbled to himself, dry and overly serious, deeply committed to the newfound film noir tone the original game had parodied. Max drank and took some painkillers, because that’s what haunted men do. They also shoot people.

A lot of people.

The simple joy of the original Max Payne lay in its mechanics rather than its all too self-aware neo-noir pastiche. While it did feature some truly haunting moments, the general tone of the game was a celebration of the inherent cheesiness of noir.

The fun lay in the ability to leap into a environment littered with enemies, pistols akimbo, and engage bullet-time, slowing the action to a crawl. Everything except Max would creep like molasses’s giving the keyboard and mouse wielding player razor sharp control.

Max Payne 2 updated the look but not the feel, replacing the blocky models with more polygons but retaining the bullet ballet aesthetic of the first game. With a slightly more complicated and less bizarre plot, Max Payne 2 is an underrated gem, though it does have it's own points of frustration. Like the horrific level in the first game of following a trail of blood towards an infant's screams in a nightmare, the second game has a brutal escort mission featuring a costumed character that waddles on flippers.

Max Payne 3 retains the bare bones of the mechanical joy of shooting, but, at least on console, lacks the precision necessary to make bullet time work. Combined with a corridor-based level design of cramped quarters and waist high walls, a cover mechanic is forced into the game, rendering the initial hook, bullet time, nearly useless. Only during what is essentially QTE sequences rendered in forced bullet time does the original mechanic sing.

I suspect PC will be the best control scheme for Max Payne 3
Where MP3 drops the ball carried by the first two games, it more than compensates in story.

Unlike the pyschodrama comic-book noir of the first two games, Max is a truly tortured soul in the third. Addicted to painkillers and a barely functional alcoholic, bad choices lead to Max working as a bodyguard in South America. Lost, both in spirit and body, Max struggles to make sense of the machinations and violence that surrounds him by shooting everyone he sees.

The final act outlasts its welcome, the emotional impact of the story already complete, leaving only a hollow revenge story to supply closure.

Max Payne 3 misses the mark in terms of replicating the bliss of slow motion shooting that inspires it but tells a gripping noire tale of a man descending into darkness.

Light defines the experience of Rage. Well earned and unflattering comparisons to Fallout 3 and Borderlands aside, light and how we perceive it drives every frame of Rage. The air appears so clear and crisp that one can taste it, like morning in the mountains.

I woke to the desiccated corpses of my compatriots, rendered in gruesome detail under the sterile bright artificial lighting that bounced and reflected off all that metal. I stumbled outside, away from the sparks and smoke of shorting circuits.

Stumbling and squinting I fell into the world, and drew in that clear fresh air. The skies were bluest of blues, the sun hammering the landscape with rays so sharp they almost cut their will into the rock. It was as if the world had never seen clouds or pollution.

Of course, this was all after a day of downloading the 23 GB package that contained this 20 hour game. And the 2 hours of installing, discovering it flat out won’t start on AMD video cards and researching the various tweaks necessary to start the game. Then enjoying 6 FPS until researched further that I had to improve on the install package and explicitly tell the software, made by PC gaming pioneer ID, to cache the textures in a folder and use the entire available RAM. And disable various features while enabling others to ensure a smooth framerate.

Then and only then, did I play.

Then and forever after then, did the textures pop with noticeable but not alarming regularity.

RAGE is the most dichotomous game I have ever experienced. It is replete with moments of stunning beauty to be immediately followed by Quake II era visuals.

Light and it's use is a fundamental part of the Rage experience as in tight ID style corridors it is rendered with startling realism. Outdoor environments are beautiful as well, until the camera moves, and the textures smear and pop.

The unsung hero of Rage is the weapons. Meaty, with weight and power, they look and sound perfect. Shooting is deeply satisfying in a way most shooters fail to achieve. Weapons never feel overpowered, and the progression in pickups is paced well. Unfortunately, Rage also suffers from a half-baked story about and overarching Authority that tries to control the surviving populace through intimidation and abuse. As an Arc survivor, you represent the last best hope to unite against oppression and rise up in rebellion.

Trite and cliche, the game is also completely missing a third act, the only glimpse of which is a cutscene 15-20 hours in. Game time could be expanded enormously if the unnecessary Mario-kart-esque racing sequences are played, but the controls are sloppy and competition is plagued by rubber-banding.

When you can get it working, Rage is a visual feast and a thrilling shooter mechanically, but in comparison to true open world games like Fallout 3 and Borderlands, is a thin meal.

Originally posted Jan 3 2012

In a world where the only light is artificial, “day” and “night” become formalized concepts based around sleep. Children might grow and never once see the sky, living a lifetime in a concrete fortress surrounded by decaying vents, tunnels and hallways. Survival becomes the only task at hand as disease, vermin and external threats are ever present. Hope is the only thing more valuable than fire and ammunition.

This is the world of Metro 2033.

Based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, the story is a non-sensical meandering through a fully realized post apocalyptic world built out of crumbling subway lines. The surface is a poisoned wasteland where the air is deadly but the roaming population of mutated animals is worse. Those mutants crawl throughout the darkness below as well.

In order to fully immerse myself in this truly foreign world, I played the game with Russian voices but English subtitles. The ambient soundscape of every station became a chorus of Russian speech, song, and laughter, as the population huddled around fires.

The only currency in the game is military grade ammunition, a scarce but lootable commodity. Light is provided by hand-pumped generators, and travel through fumes and topside necessitates a gasmask and plenty of filters, neither of which are readily available.

Ostensibly a shooter, Metro 2033 is also a surprisingly deep RPG, where resources and loadout can literally determine life and death. An unexpectedly long foray above ground left me literally gasping for air as I reached a checkpoint in one of the most unrelentingly grueling but thrilling pieces of gameplay I have ever experienced.

It is also a stunningly beautiful game, where light is used wonderfully, both in its terrifying absence below ground, and as it blasts through ruined buildings above.

Metro 2033 is a bleak and occasionally overwhelming piece of fiction, leading the player through objectives that are never very clear. There is no endgame, no bigger picture.

You are a small piece of the machine with a single purpose: survive.

Originally published Jan 4 2012

After the legendary development hell, and the near legendary last-minute rescue by Gearbox, Duke Nukem Forever had no chance to meet any kind of expectation. Reviews were poor to scathing though the game sold more copies than expected, perhaps at the cost of longtime PR companies' reputation.

As a historical relic, it is a fascinating journey through trends in game design. Almost in chronological order, the game meanders it's way from era to era, adapting the conventions of the Half-Life 2 era, moving on through Doom 3, and eventually settling on Halo-esque recharging health and COD cover based shooting.

It is a startlingly ugly game both in tone and look. The early levels have a post-processed spit-shine, and depth-of-field is abused like a crack ♥♥♥♥♥'s dignity. Later levels become exercises in how unfinished the game can appear and still function.

Following a Duke who made famous by his world-saving exploits, locations include parts of Vegas and the desert. Women are plastic and disposable, thought they are obstensibly the point of the plot as saving them is the driving force for what resembles a plot.

The blantent mysoginy culminates in a unintentionally disturbing trip through a dark underground Hive where women are not only naked, and glued to columns but actively being impregnated by alien spiders. The only recourse is to watch them explode into baby spiders or to explode them by shooting them before they blow up.

As an independant exercise in circle-strafing, DNF can be fun and early on the unapologetic sexism results in some funny moments but the game wears quickly.

DNF is longer than expected or wanted, and after fighting the same three stage boss 10 times, I quit Duke 4 chapters from the end, but not before Duke quit me.

Originally posted Jan 5 2012 gameaday-ish.blogspot.com

Stop me if you have heard this one: mute protagonist known as “Point Man” blessed with psychic/physical abilities to perceive time as a higher rate and plagued by nightmarish visions of a deranged and violent little girl shoots his way to the revelation that the bad guy, Fettlel, is in fact his cannibalistic brother. Both characters are children of the the little girl Alma, who is projecting her younger self from cryo-storage in the basement of a facility. Alma is a powerful psychic driven insane by extended experimentation and apparently, raped to pregnancy.

That, in a nutshell, is the mythology of the original F.E.A.R. Running concurrently to the last half of the first game is F.E.A.R 2 , featuring mute protagonist “Beckett” blessed with psychic/physical abilities to perceive time as a higher rate and plagued by nightmarish visions of a deranged and violent grown woman. He shoots his way to the revelation that Alma wants him to make babies with her, if only in a psychic not physical way.

F.E.A.R. 2: Fear Harder is good looking game marred by an annoying choice to run film-grain effect over the visuals. Rather than emulating Japanese horror films this aesthetic makes the game look muddy, especially when I played it on 360. The controls were sluggish as well but on PC, and with film grain off, it looks and feels like the original F.E.A.R. which is not a bad thing.

Added to the mix is the ability to operate the once feared mechsuits that terrorized players in the first game. Essentially invulnerable until the power runs out, the mech sequences are explorations in destruction as hundreds of enemies are mowed into pulpy gore. Very satisfying and never outstays its welcome, unlike the main campaign.

2 Fear 2 Furious addresses valid complaints about the endless monotony of office corridors that plagued the original by providing larger more open environments that act as funnels into smaller corridors. Industrial design still dominates but there are some massive setpieces that offer real scope, especially in the aftermath of the explosive conclusion of the first game.

Fun and propulsive, F.E.A.R 2 The Fear Police, suffers from hindsight that the tricks of the original that thrilled and amazed have lost their sheen.

originally posted Jan 3 2012

It was late in the last century when I stood over a friend’s shoulder and peered into a world of terror. Pre-fab corridors drifted off into the darkest of shadows, with red emergency lighting pricking at the black. He carried a pulse rifle, with an over/under grenade launcher and some flares. The environment throbbed with ambient noise but his motion tracker was a metronome of peace.

As he picked his way through the empty halls, tossing flares to light the way ahead, the tracker would blip, until, with a not-far-enough-away familiar shriek, movement would explode towards him. They came, black serpentine creatures with razor claws and faces of teeth. The pulse rifle spat at them, the grenades tossed them back but they kept coming, until he had no choice but to run.

The first time I watched Aliens VS Predator (1999) played on a PC I was so immediately riveted and overwhelmed with tension I actually asked him to pause the game.

AVP (2010) recaptured that magic up until the point where I, as a marine, punched an alien.

In what I must assume was a concession to cross-platform developing, melee combat is introduced and robs the game of all tension. Once you punch an Alien in the face, fear is no longer an option.

Less egregious but still annoying is a similar cross-platform concession requiring separate button prompts to transition as an Alien from vertical to horizontal surfaces. Unlike the original, where the Alien moved freely with lightening speed across any surface, AVP (2010) ‘s Alien mission has neither the speed or freedom of movement afforded by the precision of a mouse and keyboard.

Unbreakable animations also prevent the only joy of playing as an Alien, that of a meaty head bite shown in all incarnations from within the mouth of the Alien. The graphic violence of popping a hole in a Marines skull is thrilling the first few times, but after suffering perforated deaths while waiting for the animation to finish, the bloom is off.

The Predator missions suffer the least in the newest version, though the plentiful vision types offered previously are reduced to 3, Normal, Infrared, and Alien. Unfortunately plagued by an overly complex control scheme, furious hack and slash moments are replaced with hop and block and once again, unbreakable animations.

AVP (2010) is a stunning game on PC, where muddy console textures have clarity and DX11 effects create weighty atmosphere. Unfortunately, the gameplay concedes too much in moving to console and retains too little on PC.

originally published September 13th 2011

Fallout:New Vegas is a slow burn but not in an awesome roast-a-pig-in-a-backyard-firepit kind of way, more a boil-a-frog kind of way. So much time is invested that by the time it's over a beaten down Stockholm Syndrome sets in, goading the player to make it to the pay-off to justify the time investment.


As The Courier (when you are actually one of many couriers) you start the game in a grave, a bullet lodged in your skull. Rescued by a overly friendly robot (that conveniently shows up all over the place), The Courier is mended by a small-town doctor and set out into the world with a single quest-find the man that betrayed him/her.

Like Fallout 3 (and on the same engine) F:NV drops the player into an open world from the beginning, but firmly guides through quests and rewards. As an action RPG, leveling deeply affects the ability to travel from environment to environment as various flora and fauna as well as enemies are placed to deter much off-the-beaten-path travel.

This wide-but-still-a-corridor approach pushes the player into a variety of environments suitable to their level and as diverse as an abandoned town,a Vault, an abandoned farm, a ruined town filled with survivors (good/bad/one with the gun) and Vegas. This also serves to level and equip the player enough to surive the end-game with in New Vegas itself and where the meat of the story really is.

What began as a simple revenge tale ramps up in the last 10 hours to a tale of political power and intrigue as the Courier is given leave to aid or destroy various factions in the world. These choices determine the future of New Vegas itself and the surrounding lands. The meandering journey around the city informs these choices but for me, there was only one clear path, as none of the factions are particularily interesting or endearing.

Presented as an attempt to empathize with the plight of various peoples, F:NV is such a slog that the endless dialogue trees and barely animated charaters blur into one another, including the player companions. I encountered all of them, and while I saw the benefit each might bring as one of the two allowed, I found none to be very interesting. I ended up keeping a robot and a dog for most of my travels.

Only in that last part of the game does the momentum build, including a truly shocking (and entirely optional moment) involving would-be dictator Mr. House. Only then does the game find its legs and move the story forward, barrelling towards a deliciously violent conclusion.

Obstensibly a first-person shooter, I spent most of my gameplay time in 3rd person mode unless I was in combat. Once engaged with enemies, I immediately made use of the VATS targeting system, highlighting specific body parts to damage. Less a shooter than a dice-rolling RPG, F:NV relies entirely on stats to effect damage rather than player skill. Scoring critical hits in VATS never fails to be viscerally fulfilling as an enemy explodes into gore.

This game is very very brown

Visually a brown and yellow color scheme matches the locale of the nevada desert but it also undermines the previously established and far more striking look of Fallout 3. By using muted earth tones, the game just looks like mud, until New Vegas is reached, at which point it looks like neon-colored mud.

It is also replete with glitches, even this late into release and after multiple patches. Usually spawn or clipping issues, I never experienced anything game breaking, but it was hilarious to disarm an enemy, then have him run himself into a corner and up into the sky.

Like Bioshock 2, Fallout:New Vegas takes a long time to get cooking and engage the player. Unlike Bioshock 2, the visuals are not a hook to keep the player involved until the story ramps up. For those that relish exploration and discovery, New Vegas has some delightfully oddball areas that are quirky enough to keep one engaged, but those seeking narrative have a long road ahead.

Originally posted April 18 2011 gameaday-ish,blogspot.com

At the point Central Park is held aloft in huge earthly chunks settled atop writhing masses of metal tentacles, Crysis 2 turns to the player and shrugs in exhaustion: “That’s all I got, kid”.

A multiplatform follow-up to the PC-killing original, Crysis 2 makes significant trades in gameplay and environments in order to excel visually on consoles. However, even when using a walled garden approach where most maps are open expanses designed for multiple avenues of attack, Crysis 2 is a metric crap-ton more fun to play than any COD clone, including COD:BLOPS.

Unlike the original Crysis, where the player was dropped onto an island with a full suite of nano-suit abilities that allowed for increases in strength, speed, armor or cloaking and given leave to play in a giant sandbox, the sequel parcels out abilities over the first half of the game. Speed and strength are no longer selectable and are enabled by default. Using the energy remains of deceased enemy Ceph allows the player to upgrade the suit abilities throughout.

Like the first game, the story is an incomprehensible mess only set in Manhattan rather than a North Korean island. Flora and fauna are replaced by concrete and vehicles, creating impenetrable mazes of steel and glass, rather than flowing expanses of green. Playing as Alcatraz, a voiceless, personality free cipher of a marine, the player wakes from black (the first of a half-dozen overused transitions), embedded in the suit. Immediately mistaken for the suit’s original owner and apparently incapable of independent thought, Alcatraz begins a series of guided journeys, each lead by a different voice transmission.

The alien Ceph of the first game are succeeding in destroying New York City and only the nanosuit has the ability to stop them. Led through a series of switchbacks and double-crosses, Alcatraz blindly follows orders, leaving one to wonder if he had played too much Bioshock when not at work as a marine.

Epic and troubling imagery leverage the lingering memories of 9-11, as the city collapses during the journey beneath above and beyond, leaving the player slack-jawed. Unlike the seemingly endless vistas of the first game, Crysis 2 is also beautiful but limited. Particle effects and motion blur are used liberally to mask the limits placed on the engine and while the framerate does waver, it does so rarely.

Using the suit powers allows and even requires the player to use some strategy when engaging groups of enemies, especially early on as the enemies become more varied and more difficult, but never smarter. Unfortunately, common glitches manifest where a death-and-reload will cause scripted enemies to become frozen in place, robbing the game of challenge. Diligent hoarders of Ceph energy will also soon find themselves able to nearly max out the suit upgrades, leading to late game moments where a cloaked sprint can avoid engaging the enemy altogether.

Crysis 2 lacks the open world of its predecessor or Far Cry 2, causing it to fall into a nebulous middle where it is influenced heavily by Call of Duty but not yet as horribly linear, leaving it a refreshing change from claustrophobic corridor shooting.

Shame about the story.