Évaluations récentes de Quitch

I've been playing The Walking Dead since 2012, the longest running game series I've ever played. By this point you're likely incredibly invested, emotionally, in the series and its central character: Clementine.

This is a bittersweet season. It sees both the end of this series and the studio that made it. So it makes me happy that they went out with probably their strongest offering to date. The engine looks better than ever, they've mixed up the gaming mechanics a little more to the point where you may actually die, and they've perfected the balance of dialogue, gameplay, alone time and the group. Where season 2 struggled to find its footing for some time, season 4 is firing on all cylinders from episode one.

It's a shorter season, and the last episode is in many ways an epilogue. But that's what it needed, because when you've seven years of history behind you, you shouldn't rush the emotional release. The game brings things to a close perfectly, and brought me to tears at least once.

It has been a pleasure to play this series, and one day when I have enough distance, I'll play it again. Until then, it has been a joy to watch my Clementine grow up and guide her on her journey.

Good, but not as good as you've heard. It tries to do a lot, and is very reminiscent of Deus Ex, yet it doesn't do any one thing particularly well.

For an RPG I was left feeling that the experience was ultimately hollow. I didn’t really get to know anyone or grow attached to them. None of the factions ever become more than skin-deep. None of the choices you make about them carry any real weight because you don’t care about anyone in any of them.

You are given a raft of social and stealth skills, yet thrown into mandatory combat on multiple occasions. This mandates a combat build to some degree, meaning that replayability is highly limited because most clans will feel very similar in playstyle. There is some flexibility here, with the Malkavians having lots of great dialogue, and the Nosferatu mandating a unique approach to world navigation (though one that may simply be irritating more than fun). Social skills are mainly wasted though, with both seduction and intimidation being mostly useless, and persuasion predictably powerful.

What ended up killing replay for me though is the endings are weak. It’s as well that none of the factions or characters are particularly developed, because there is no emotional payoff at the end. A brief cutscene and we’re done. It’s an ending that leaves you empty.

There’s a reasonable flexibility to approaching missions. It’s not at the level of its four-year younger cousin, Deus Ex, but it’s there.

So why do I still recommend it? Because the pool of this type of game is very small. There just aren’t many FPS RPGs, and it does have some fun ideas, even if the implementation isn’t great. The last chapter of the game has all the classic signs of rushed development, and the poor ending made me feel I’d ultimately wasted my time pushing through that last chapter, but I can’t deny that I had fun in the run-up to it.

Would I play it again? Probably not, I felt like my build was broad enough that I saw everything the game had to offer outside some unique clan elements. Yet it’s worth at least one romp.

I only played 999 as I didn't enjoy it enough to play VLR.

999 has a concept similar to great sci-fi films like Cube. You take a bunch of people, lock them in a place and see what happens. With Cube you get an amazing character piece. I was hoping 999 would deliver the same, but with the puzzle solving and choice & consequence that a game can deliver.

The problem with 999 is it's a visual novel with bad writing. Like, really bad. The characters are flat and uninteresting. You don't learn much of significance about any of them until very late on, which means there's little to fuel any drama, tension, or suspicion. Characters will just dump exposition on you out of nowhere. It makes a mockery of the tension the time limit is supposed to bring when not one character in the game seems to be in a hurry.

But it's not just the characters, it's the general narrative. The game loves to make everything take twice as long as necessary, and the text was in desperate need of an editor. It will constantly reexplain the digital root concept, showing you the workings of tough equations like 2+3+5 to ensure that no one is left behind. Characters will regularly repeat what someone said back at them as a question. More than once someone explained something, then explained the same thing again in the next line in a slightly different way.

You have a number of different endings, which you need to work through to unlock the true ending. But they feel arbitrary and pointless. They don't develop your understanding of anything or anyone, and you have no real opportunity to even see them coming. A quick Google reveals that a lot of people were as confused as me about what even happens in one of them.

But you push through all this because the puzzles are OK and you want to try and figure out who Zero is. Unfortunately you're doomed because the game will suddenly dump a huge narrative turd on you and change the rules of the game out of nowhere. I was looking forward to seeing how it all fit together, and then it decides to redefine even its already pretty out there ruleset to make its own narrative work.

I can't really recommend this as it's not a strong puzzle game, and the great scenario is ruined by terrible writing and underdeveloped characters. It's also burdened with some of the fanservice elements to be expected from this style of Japanese narrative game. The true ending isn't worth the slog and is really a giant mess.

I enjoy the aspect of the game where everyone is paranoid and you're trying to solve murders. Then my character made friends with someone, which apparently gives me her knickers, and then she's murdered, so we're wandering around with a collection of knickers from dead girls.

I mean, I just can't even...

It also has the same tedious present grind that was in the first game because the development team apparently don't understand how odds work. Solve a case? Get 100 coins. Then put them in a machine one-by-one (because that's how you maximise your return), with a full animation every time, to get the items you'll need to increase your relationship status with people. Solving a case was great, followed by 30 minutes of mindless tedium.

And they still haven't solved how to make getting around the location anything other than a chore.

Yet despite all this the core of the game is fantastic. The murders are smarter than the first game, the cast is still excellent, and the nonstop debates remain one of the best mechanics ever seen in a murder mystery game. You just have to ignore all the garbage surrounding it to get there because the game is filled to the eyeballs with timewasting filler.

Unfortunately there isn't much to say about this season. If you've played a Telltale game before you know what you're getting into.

Batman The Telltale Series is one of their more mediocre works. It's placed in the batman universe, but never really finds a way to establish its own identity. You'll witness the origin story of Harvey Dent, and it feels like it's just really by-the-numbers stuff, with your decisions feeling meaningless because you've seen this dance before and know where it's going.

Where someone is new, or perhaps one of the lesser known characters, you struggle to get invested because the characters feel so shallow. Villains are evil in a melodramatic sense, and while some vague attempts are made to establish tragic backstories, there's no weight to any of it.

Likewise, where you do recognise the names, the game never really escapes the idea that it can't do anything of consequence to anyone, so what does it matter?

There's also too much fat. I can see what Telltale were going for with the detective scenes, but it's so simple and unengaging that it just becomes a tedious time sink. These games are at their best when they focus on the dialogue. I felt the QTE stuff worked well enough that I'll give it a pass.

Telltale did follow up this season with a bloody excellent second season though, one which corrects almost every problem the first season had. If you're planning to play the second, then it might be worth slogging through the first just so you've established all the relevant relationships in time for the sequel.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS REGARDING WHICH CHARACTERS ARE IN THE SERIES AND THE NATURE OF THE DIVERGENT PLOT STRUCTURE

After the disappointingly bland Batman: The Telltale Series, this second season is a much stronger entry and probably the best thing they've done since Tale of the Borderlands. About my only complaint would be that to get the most out of this season you'll need to slog through the previous season first.

The first episode isn't much to write home about, but from episode 2 onwards it goes from strength to strength. You've got a refreshing reimagining of the relationship between Harley Quinn and Joker, done in a way which makes sense while being more compelling for being something new. If you were invested in Catwoman she also has a significant amount of screen time, and given the character driven nature of Telltale games it's always a winner to have carryover character relationships as it helps give them more depth.

The focus of the series is on your relationship with John Doe. If you haven't seen the marketing, then you are basically helping him define who he is. Does he idolise you and become your best friend, or does he go on to become the villainous Joker? Telltale have outdone themselves here, with one episode actually have two completely different paths, with completely different content, depending on this answer.

John Doe is indeed the standout here, and the relationship between him and you is developed perfectly. It's the thing that ties the season together, and how much you care about it will determine how much you enjoy the season. This is probably the best representation of the Joker that I've ever seen. While everything is amped up to 11, there's a level of underlying trauma and sadness that you can totally buy into. Special mention must go to Anthony Ingruber as well for an amazing vocal performance.

If you've played a Telltale game you know what to expect, but this is certainly at the end of the scale where their best works are found and I highly recommend that anyone into this type of game try it. It's the only time I've bothered with a second playthrough, as there really was enough divergence to feel it warranted two.

Alpha Protocol is a terrible game in so many ways, and yet I love it enough to have finished it four times. For the fourth I picked it up on Steam.

You may have heard that Alpha Protocol is a buggy game. This is no lie, and while patches and hardware improvements have dealt with much of this, you'll still find corners where the camera suddenly changes speed, rooms where enemies fail to spawn, non-blocking scripted events that don't fire properly. This is not the tightest product ever made.

The minigames are also infamous, yet here I disagree with the majority opinion. The greatest sin a minigame can commit is to waste my time, but all the minigames here are completely failable. The controls on the hacking minigame are not the best on M&K, but they're manageable. It was just so refreshing to be challenged by things that are normally just a time sink. About my only complaint would be that it's pretty much mandatory to pick up the first hacking upgrade if you want any meaningful chance at completing these things. Or you can buy EMPs and bypass them.

Story is serviceable. You've seen it all before. The plot is actually a little odd in that it seems to be driven by something that comes out of nowhere. Evil corporation is trying to create a cold war, but is accidentally going to trigger World War III. It's unclear where that latter part comes from, two characters just announce it like you uncovered something, but it all happens in dialogue in the most bizarre way. It also leads to a slightly disconnected mission structure where you're following a number of different leads, but it's easy to lose track as to how any of what you're doing relates to the wider plot. If I had a complaint about the story it would be that the ending doesn't provide enough emotional closure.

Shooting is poor and the skill balance is terrible, which in a way is nice because if you really don't want to do the shooting you can pick some easily abusable skills to get through it.

So why do I recommend this game? Because there's nothing else like it, except perhaps for Tyranny, and even then that's only a shadow of what Alpha Protocol manages.

See, Alpha Protocol is about choice & consequence on a scale never done before or since. It's not just choices like kill this guy or let them live, it's everything. Stealth vs action? Consequence. Shooting vs. stunning? Consequence? The order you do missions in? Consequence. The order you speak to people? Consequence. Whether people love you or hate you? Consequence.

This game is a choice & consequence masterpiece. I've completed it four times and I still haven't seen all the ways the ending can play out. And don't think that this stuff is all about modifying the final mission. The game consequently recognises your choices, from conversations, to available intelligence, to dialogue, to routes and allies available to you. Your introduction to entire factions can be affected simply by the order you do things in and the game handles it seamlessly.

Let me also mention the perks you gain. So much of what you do also results in a perk giving you things like bonus damage, extra ability points, discounts on stuff, etc. And you don't know when it's coming, the game just goes "oh, I see you did X, here, have a perk". It helps add more weight to your play because that play helps inform your development in a fun way. You even get per-mission perks depending on who your mission handler is, and the perk they provide will also change depending on the relationship you have with them.

You have relationship scores, but unlike most games here you can have people love you or hate you and you're going to be rewarded either way. Not in identical ways, but in ways that don't punish you for not sucking up to everyone. The bonuses you receive will change, conversations will adapt, cutscenes will change.

Obsidian said they kept the game short to encourage replayability and it works! It's a brisk 20 hours, and even though I've just completed it for the fourth time I'm already thinking about what I might do for my fifth.

If you like what Obsidian did with New Vegas and Tyranny, and are willing to put up with some jank, then you simply must play this game.

Ubisoft have an open world formula, they want the player to have lots of options, lots of things to do. But the problem is there's no depth to any of it.

The world of Far Cry 3 is reduced to navigating to markers on a mini-map, and often quick travelling. The world is gorgeous, yet completely forgettable because not only do you not need to look up outside of shooting, you never have a reason to walk across it. You mark a target, sprint in a straight line, shoot it in the face, mark the next one. There's nothing to explore or discover; no hidden secrets await.

The strength of the game comes from Vaas, someone who I think will be remembered as one of the great antagonists of gaming. He oozes personality, and what's more, he's present throughout the story which has you all the more invested in your fight against him. There are a number of strong characters during the first half of the game too, such as Buck, Dennis and Agent Willis.

The problem here is that the game is twice the size it needs to be, and gaming was going through this two antagonist phase (see Bioshock for another example) where somewhere around the mid-point the awesome antagonist is switched out for someone much blander. Most of the cast also disappears at this point too, leading to a story which now struggles to hide its "go to X, blow up Y" nature. And of course the second half of the map opens up, identical in every way to the first. It feels like a real grind.

For some this toy box style approach of open world is a delight. For me it was a slog which takes much longer than its depth of content and story can justify.

There's just not much to recommend. It's a game about atmosphere and exploration, but without enough of an atmosphere, and exploration which is boring and without much purpose beyond head to the dot the telescope put on your map. As most of the game is based around climbing and the animations this entails, there's this sense of delay as you wait for each little animation to finish, rather than a fluid sense of motion.

I didn't make it more than a couple of hours and it already felt like it had overstayed its welcome.

So due to the very lukewarm initial reviews of season 3 I've only just bought and played it. I wish I'd done it earlier, because unlike many I think this is the best season of Walking Dead yet. I can see people tiring of the formula, and it's not really bringing anything hugely new to the table, but it has both a stronger cast and consistency of quality that both previous seasons lacked.

When I heard that Clementine wasn't the main character and they were bringing in someone new I was onboard with the doubters, but in fact I think it works out brilliantly. By making Clem an NPC they allow the writers to develop her in ways they never could if she was played controlled. She's become a sole survivor, someone shaped in the mould of Jane. She's cold and focused on survival. But more than that, you can disagree with what she thinks.

In terms of choice the season seemed strong. And I don't mean just the big choices, but just in terms of general dialogue. In season one you almost certainly did what was best for Clem. In season two you picked a side early and stuck to it. Here you're trying to hold a family together, but the family itself has different views and goals, which makes your choices so much more interesting. And on top of that you have to define how Clem fits into all this.

The cast is better too. Season one was strong, but because of the central relationship with Clem; they actually change the cast about half-way through for shock value which led to weakened stakes. Season two took too long to establish the group, and I wasn't really bought in until episode four. Season three quickly establishes its cast and makes the entire season about them, meaning they're all relatively well developed and the stakes have some real meaning. The things you fight against are also better defined as understandable evils, rather than the cartoonish monologuing villainy seen in episode two.

There's even more content variation than normal. You get flashbacks to what happened to Clem, something I disliked the idea of but ended up really looking forward to. Mine were based entirely around what happened to her and Jane at Howe's, but that suggests there's a bunch for Kenny and maybe even the ending where Clem walks into the snow alone with AJ. Things like that help keep it as your story.

The final screens at the end of episode five to me spoke about how the writers better understood what works in this kind of structure. Major characters get their own screen, and you don't just see your choices around them, but also how that defines the relationship you had with them.

I don't know how season three did, but it left me hoping for a season four. While I'm sure we'd like to see them be a bit more daring with the formula, I was happy enough with the improvements made to the core structure that I want more.