Category: Action

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Game Ramblings #108 – Control

More Info from Remedy Entertainment

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

So, this is a really fun game. Admittedly, I was a big fan of Max Payne and Alan Wake, so it’s not overly surprising that I also enjoy this entry from the team. Admittedly I’m also forgiving some warts in the experience, particularly in the gun play that is generally not that good. However, it’s got such a great setting, such great use of telekinesis, and such fun puzzle solving that I really didn’t care about the smaller problems at play.

Ultimately, this is a game of powers. There’s a bunch that you gain throughout the game, but there’s really two that I want to focus on – launch and seize. These two were the core of how I really built out my personal combat focus in the game.

Seize is simply the ability to take control of an enemy, and have them fight for you. You drop them down to low health and take over, and suddenly you’ve got some helper NPCs at play. This was the first part of my combat plans – distraction. Taking a few weak enemies, having them turn on their allies, and even get in some damage here and there was a good way to take the heat off of me. It provided opportunities for me to move and flank, and find better locations to take out the rest of the group. If I wanted to be aggressive, it provided ways for me to remove some damage and really go in for the kill.

Launch on the other hand does exactly what it sounds like, it launches shit at targets. You can basically pull chunks out of every floor, ceiling, and wall, and use them as built-in ammunition. Later on you can also start launching enemy missiles back at them. Because of this, there’s an endless amount of ammunition in the world, as long as you have energy remaining to use your powers.

Together, these two powers were the core of my encounter focus. I would start an encounter by finding a weak enemy or two, and take them out with either my gun or the Launch power. Once they were able to be Seized, I would do so. With that distraction in place, I could then reposition myself or move in for quick kills with subsequent launches. This all felt extremely good. Launch in particular has really wide aim assists, but also pretty inaccurate throwing, so in general it just causes hilarious chaos with pretty fair average damage.

The powers working well was great, because ultimately I didn’t find the gunplay all that good. It basically felt functional to me, but not overwhelming in quality. The guns had enough variety – you have your pistol, shotgun, rifle, etc. However, they don’t really feel that impactful in either their damage output or in their visual feedback. From a controller standpoint, their aim assists don’t really feel up to the modern expectations of something like Halo or Destiny. They kind of exist, and I made use of them, but I far preferred using powers as my main damage source, unless absolutely necessary.

End of the day, it was the setting that really kept me going. This is very much a story in the vein of Alan Wake, and some of the lore ties into it. The tl;dr is that you’re playing the head of what is basically a paranormal FBI, and are tasked with clearing out an extradimensional invasion that has warped the entire department. Some of the key points are presented in cutscenes, but a lot of it is presented in really well done passive content.

Some of that is things like audio recordings or projected videos that you can’t help seeing. However, a lot of it is stuff that as a player you have to actually search for, and that kind of thing is always a huge plus for me. I can really dig into games that have hidden lore, and this has literally hundreds of files to find. You’ll find folders and crates and tape decks all over the game filled with lore entries. Some of it is essential to expanding your knowledge of the game setting. Some of it is department bickering via memos. Some of it is history books telling of past paranormal events throughout the world, including the one from Alan Wake itself. It’s this kind of scattering of information that really drives me to explore, and it was all written in an extremely high quality fashion to really get me wanting more.

That pace change between combat sections and exploring is so typical of the genre, but it feels so much better crafted here. The entire setting being in a warped building caused by a paranormal event allows so much flexibility in building environments that are simply built to be fun to play in. Where turning corners in Uncharted leads to obvious combat rooms, this feels extremely organic, partly because weird shaped rooms are the norm but also because the rooms can warp back to a normal shape once combat is complete. Where Gears of War hides their dog tags around in corners just to give a reason to explore, this game has lore entries scattered around on desks and cabinets because this is an office building and of course they would be there. Where Halo has to keep inventing bigger baddies to elevate the sense of danger, this can simply throw a refrigerator at you with some demonic presence and not care that it’s ludicrous. It’s not that they’re doing anything particularly new here, but their setting being slightly off kilter allows so much flexibility for them to take the genre norms and get rid of that little bit that makes them feel so unnatural in other games, but completely expected here.

This game was a real surprise to me, and I guess in hindsight I’m surprised that it was a surprise. I’ve always liked Remedy’s work, and while I tend to gravitate towards RPGs, I’ve always been a huge fan of this kind of 3rd person adventure. I think more than anything, it was kind of a game that just fell off my radar. I’d heard a few friends and a few coworkers continue to recommend it to me, so I kind of just bit the bullet and picked it up, and I couldn’t be happier. This is the type of game that I ended playing wanting more, and after a few bigger releases get cleared off my plate, I suspect the DLC for Control is now not too far off in my future plans.

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Shelved It #8 – Ori and the Will of the Wisps

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox One
  • Also Available On: Windows

I really liked Ori and the Blind Forest. It’s still as good of an example of a modern Metroidvania as I’ve played in the last ten years. The gameplay of Will of the Wisps is just as good, and when it’s smooth this is an absolutely wonderful game. However, it just isn’t smooth very consistently, and it has periods where it outright freezes for 5-10 seconds at a time, including in the middle of boss fights. Simply put – this game should not have shipped.

This is 100% a game that I expected to love, and for the most part it did what I expected. It’s still a really mechanically tight Metroidvania with a ton of great traversal. Wall jumps, air dashes, slingshots, water dashes – it’s all there and it all feels really good. Combat is similarly tight, with a nice set of melee attacks and ranged helpers to give you great capabilities to fight a wide range of enemies.

In a vacuum, this would have been an easy recommendation, but the performance of the game just could not hold up.

From a general game performance standpoint, things aren’t typically all that great. I get it – I’m playing on a base Xbox One and that’s not going to be the optimal experience. However, I’ve also shipped games on the base Xbox One, so I’m at least familiar with the machine’s capabilities, and Wisps is not doing a good job of keeping up. There’s a lot of sections of the game that run at a stable framerate, but I’d wager that probably 20% of what I played isn’t hitting 30 FPS. If it was close, that wouldn’t be a problem, but it was noticeably not 30 fps. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if some of the sections were more around 15-20 fps. In normal traversal this was just annoying, but it was especially bad happening during the game’s signature escape sequences. In those you absolutely need performance, and having to redo sections because a framerate drop caused me to miss a jump were infuriating.

However, the worse problem was the flat out freezing that happened every few minutes. I’m not talking about hitches – I’m talking straight up 5-10 second freezes. Looking around at the Steam forums, it looks like this is similarly bad on PC if you aren’t installed on an SSD. Given that, and given the laptop drives in all models of the Xbox, I’m assuming they’re getting slammed trying to load content. It’s bad enough when it happens in just running through a level or playing a cutscene, where it’s simply annoying. However, I had it happen multiple times during a boss, where it can often guarantee a death and reset.

This was capped by a handful of crashes that were periodically setting me back, which just kinda burned any patience I had left with the game in its current state.

Being quite frank, I’m surprised the game shipped in the state it did. It would be one thing to have some spots where a patch could smooth out some lower framerate spots. It’s even more unfortunate, because the gameplay is great when it works. However, having obvious long period freezes that happen every few minutes is unforgivable. Stuff like that is what certification is supposed to suss out and prevent games from shipping with. This being a first-party Microsoft title, I’m tempted to put some of the blame on them for it. However, the developers have as much responsibility as anyone to make sure they’ve got their shit locked up. And ya, I’ve been there – sometimes you just need to get something to cert and start working on a day 0 – but things like this should also be in your day 0.

More often than not, I shelf games because I simply am not finding something in the gameplay worth moving forward on. This one is the complete opposite. The gameplay is fantastic, but the performance and stability absolutely killed my patience with this game. If they sort it out in a patch, maybe I’ll come back to this, but for now it’s just kind of a disappointment.

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Game Ramblings #102 – Iconoclasts

More Info from Konjak/Bifrost

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita, Windows, macOS, Linux, Switch

It’s no surprise that I like Metroidvanias, so hopping at another indie take on the genre is never something I’m going to argue. A lot of the time it can feel like they’re trying to out difficulty each other instead of just having compelling gameplay. Luckily, Iconoclasts definitely falls into the latter category. It combines some solid gunplay with interesting puzzle mechanics to really be a standout entry in the genre.

The big thing to notice was really how variety was pulled into this game, in a way that isn’t necessarily typical of the genre. It has a few things that are your typical “door opener” type of upgrade, but the more often than not, upgrades were used to solve full room puzzles that ended with the room being permanently traversable in a fast way, rather than being something that has to be run through every time. It was a nice difference to the norm where retraversal for new upgrades or new paths was generally going to be done as quick as possible to minimize wasted time.

A lot of this is built into the player’s weapon set – a giant wrench for melee, and a set of a pistol, grenade launcher, and beam pistol for ranged. Some examples of upgrades include an electric charge that is used to raise and lower platforms, the wrench’s built in ability to turn bolts to open doors, or a spin maneuver used to quickly crank gears. The electric charge is also built into the grenade weapon – any launched grenades while charged gain an electric charge – and some blocks that can hold a charge. This wide range of abilities are all built into the puzzle sets, where some puzzles require multiple combinations of the skill range to complete.

In practice, it works extremely well. Puzzle rooms are pretty well segregated from combat, allowing the player the time to think and plan for how to complete the room. The puzzles are also more often than not focused around a new power, giving the player a good chance to reenforce the use of any new skill.

These abilities also extend into combat. Each of the ranged weapons have a secondary charge mode – for example, the pistol charges into a shotgun blast, the grenade into a missile – that are used as ways to take out enemies in unique ways. This is particularly important in boss fights, where they will generally be specifically weak to either a specific mode of a weapon, or a specific area in the combat arena. Because of this setup, the bosses are more often than not a puzzle in itself, alongside needing to it out.

This is probably the point where the game really earned its fun for me. The game is challenging but fair, instead of being difficult for the sake of difficulty. I definitely died a few times, but it was either because I was being careless, or because I was learning new mechanics. Bosses will hit you if you aren’t careful, but you’re not going to die in a couple hits. You’ll die to trash if you’re not avoiding damage, but you’ll be fine if you’re paying attention. More often than not, the bosses also have adds that spawn health. It feels like the developers want you to win, and give you ways to do so, as long as you’re generally moving forward and learning as you go. That difference there has often been a rare thing to find in the independent scene in the past few years.

Add this one to the list of Metroidvanias that I’ve been playing over the last few years, and more importantly, put this one up at the top. It was able to combine really solid combat, really solid puzzles, and gorgeous visuals into a package that punches above its weight. This one avoided the indie trap of being exceedingly difficult, and instead crafted a great experience that was challenging but fair. This game took a long time to come out, but the effort definitely shows, and I’m hopeful that whatever comes next out of the team’s brains can be similarly positive in whatever genre they pick.