Category: PS5

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Game Ramblings #227 – 007 First Light

More Info from IO Interactive

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows, Switch 2

I’ve always been a general fan of the Hitman series and have jumped into the recent trilogy a number of times. The way that you could take things on in a number of different ways and carefully plan the missions has always been really engaging. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of how they handled failure. It’s always felt too cut and dry to me. When things go incredibly wrong you basically fail and restart rather than adapt. In making the game focused on the Bond IP, First Light solved a lot of that problem for me.

There are certain expectations around the Bond IP that come from decades of films and videogames. Sure, he’s going to be the ladykiller spy with cool gadgets and an ability to adapt to his environment. However, the important thing for this game is that when things go wrong in a Bond movie – and they always do at some point – he will action star his way out of trouble. That is the biggest thing about this as a difference against Hitman. I can carefully plan my infiltration to areas and make sure to stealth or fake or distract my way through areas, but when things go wrong I don’t reset. I punch and I shoot and I laser gadget and I explosive my way through. Sure, I can reset the scenario and try a different approach but it doesn’t feel like as much of a punishment as it did for me in Hitman because the action escape is simply another part of the experience and another tool in my bag.

This obviously wouldn’t work if the action parts weren’t fun. Luckily, the experience here is sharp. Melee is your typical experience at this point. The AI will generally line up attacks one at a time to avoid overwhelming the player. There are color coded tells for parry and dodge-focused defense. You can punch and grab and throw things to get in offense. It’s fine and it works. What surprised me is how good the gunplay was.

This plays a lot closer to something like a Tomb Raider than a Goldeneye 64 when gunplay is active, and that’s a huge benefit to the game. There’s a pretty narrow variety of weapons, but they cover a few specific wider types. There’s a couple pistols, a couple SMGs, a few rifles, and a couple shotguns. They’ve got enough coverage to be useful in generally different ranges but you also don’t really sit on them for too long. The game plays a pretty tight line where ammo is not overly abundant so you are frequently changing out weapons to kind of whatever is nearby. This also leads to the thing that I really liked in that careful targeting is very important, but the game is also generous with its aim assists. As an example, headshots are incredibly important in reducing ammo use as they are a guaranteed kill. However, there are a lot of enemies that wear helmets. These are a guaranteed two shot kill done well – the first shot pops the helmet off in a satisfying way and the second shot is your kill shot. All of this encourages the player to efficiently dispatch enemies and preserve ammo as it can become a hazard to get out of cover to find more weapons.

This would all be incredibly more annoying if the game wasn’t fairly generous with its aim assists. It doesn’t necessarily aim correct much but it definitely leans into camera magnetism in a way that lets the player pan and scan and get close enough to an enemy’s weak point before getting pulled in to the target. This obviously helps with general clumsiness of gamepad inputs, but it also helps more importantly in preserving the speed of gameplay. The skill is in identifying targets and getting over there, and the game provides that last push once you’ve gotten to the right spot, rather than fumbling around to hit the perfect final tap of the stick. It feels like the team approached the reality of gamepad-focused gameplay with a lot more realistic of a mindset of what benefits the game as a whole, rather than being focused on whether or not there should be a skill wall involved, and I think the game ends up being better on the other side of it as a result.

Where I kind of think this falls apart a bit is in boss fights. They all kind of felt too scripted and too heavy handed. You generally can’t just melee your way through these fights or shoot your way through these fights. They generally require you to use things like gadget moves to distract the enemy and get a hit in, then run away to find a new unique distraction to do. They generally require some specific melee combo of a parry of a very telegraphed attack into a single hit, then some waiting around for it to happen again. What they are is generally slow and not really presenting the player with actual choices they can make to impact the experience. In a game so heavily leaning into letting the player approach situations in any way that they felt like, the change to heavy scripting felt jarring in a negative way.

As a whole, this is a really impressive experience. On its own it proves to be a really fun mix of Hitman stealth/planning with more typical action-oriented gameplay possibilities when things go wrong. It feels a lot more weighted toward real time adaptation over resetting than Hitman and that’s a huge win. Add in the fact that this is a Bond game that feels like how I imagine Bond would be and that adds up to an incredible experience. Goldeneye was fun, but it was distinctly an action FPS and had nothing else to really feel like Bond. The games that came after it never really stepped out of its FPS shadow. First Light feels like the franchise finally merging the movies with videogames in a way that feels correct to the IP and all it took was bending the rules of Hitman a bit to make it more shooty.

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Shelved It #23 – Saros

More Info from Housemarque

  • Genre: Third-Person Shooter
  • Platform: PS5

This is a somewhat unusual shelved it in that this is a really well made game and I really have enjoyed my time in it. The…problem as it were? I just don’t enjoy roguelite loops. I can deal with it to a certain extent if the loops are quick but I usually hit a point where the growth of the experience has either stopped because it’s out of new mechanics or because it’s at a wall and I grew bored. I’m more at the first for this one at the 6th boss. However, for me it’s a bit of a miracle that I’ve played a roguelite for 11 hours and counting to begin with, and I can see this one slotting into the type of game that I occasionally return to and eventually just get through via time.

The thing I will absolutely call out here is how good the combat is and I think it comes down to one specific thing – despite being a “shooter” I’m not often doing a lot of aiming. Saros recognizes that it’s first and foremost a game about dodging projectiles, and not so much about creating projectiles. The entire experience is then built around that. You have a rapid dodge that allows you to go through some projectiles. You have a shield that allows you to absorb other projectiles to return as attacks. You have a parry that allows you to block other projectiles. Choosing the correct defensive maneuver is by far the most important part of combat with offense then being a secondary consideration.

This only works because the attacks that are coming at you are very clear and give you enough time to react. Blue can be absorbed, yellow can be dodged through, red should be parried (and additionally, red shields should be hit with a melee attack with the same button). You constantly move to stay at a range where you can still attack but have time to react and never stop being in some form of fast action. It’s fast and relentless but always feels fair. In the classic roguelite pattern it also feels like I’m constantly learning and using that to reinforce the upgrades I’m getting to move further every time.

The lack of aim is completely built into the weapon system. Most weapons have auto-hit with large aim correction built-in, with some specific weapons being instead built and balanced around auto-hit being off. Despite not really aiming though, the weapons still had important variety in letting me build the way that I felt comfortable. There’s things like shotguns and chakram discs that I totally disliked using because their damage felt so inconsistent around how much I was playing a run and gun style. On the other hand there were rifles and pistols that were reliable damage dealers if I needed an upgrade. When I got particularly lucky I was getting one of the crossbow types which were universally a ton of fun for my preferred style, putting out slower shots but much larger damage at a time.

This is then backed by the stat upgrades typical of the genre that have interesting modifications when in the eclipse state. This morphs upgrades from simple stat increases to things with drawbacks. Sure you might get some resilience, but now you take fall damage. You might get increased weapon power, but now you can’t stay still. You may bet better shields and absorption, but now you may have decreased damage at low health. It adds the type of fun decision making typical of the genre in a way built very well around the core gameplay of Saros. I knew I could always comfortably take the penalties standing still or the fall damage penalties because avoiding those things was crucial to my more run and gun play style and tailoring my build to that always felt incredibly effective.

However, the roguelite part of the game caught up to me at around the 10 hour mark near the 6th boss. Each biome introduced new mechanics but over time they were becoming less important because they were starting to become minor modifications to combat instead of large changes. I started seeing fewer new enemy types, and those that were new started to be some clear combinations of existing enemy types. It’s typical of the roguelite meta loop, but for me it doesn’t really work unless the loop is fast, and here it isn’t.

The death loops here are typically 25-30 minutes and that is just far too long for me. It works fine when I feel like I’m making progress, but I just zone out when I get some bad RNG and make no progress in a loop of that length. But that’s the genre expectation and it just doesn’t typically work for me. Getting the 11+ hours I got out of this one is highly unusual. Getting that far was only because the core combat in the game really was simply that good.

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Game Ramblings #225 – Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

More Info from TT Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, PC, Switch 2

If Lego Skywalker Saga felt like a big leap forward for the series, I would now consider it a trial run. Lego Batman has completely removed a lot of the old grind of the Lego games and now feels like something that can stand on its own separate from the cute visuals. Given the abandonment of the Arkham series, this is probably the best continuation of that type of game I could have otherwise hoped for.

There are things where this feels like a clever blend of Lego and Arkham, but because of that this definitely feels less like a Lego game than in the past. The first spot that really hits is in characters. Past Lego games have had lineups of literally hundreds of characters that share specializations, allowing you to kind of mix and match. That is now gone. You have a core set of characters that you unlock from the hero side of Batman IP and that’s it. The gameplay that you get out of them is still core Lego. For example, Batman has his batarangs, Batgirl can hack things, Robin/Nightwing can connect things together to pull obstacles or build bridges, but it’s purposeful and not just collecting.

The combat is also much improved here. It’s not that it’s necessarily full action game, but it’s deep enough to be sufficient and fun. For the most part combat is core punching, but you have counters and dodging timed by visual cues to give it a little more flair. You have your traversal skills and items that can also be used in combat. An example would be Catwoman’s whip being used to spin screws out of doors to open the way, but in combat can be used to spin enemies in circles causing them to be stunned or pinball off other enemies.

The fact that the game takes place in a single open world area instead of tailored levels is also fairly new within the Lego gameplay, but it works well. Skywalker started leaning in that direction, with sort of core hub levels. However, it was still distinct areas for each movie that weren’t that far off of what existed in past Lego games. Batman is just Gotham, and it’s the same Gotham for the entire game even though it’s a blend of various bits of a bunch of the films all packed together. Story segments go into specific tailored levels but they feel appropriate and still living within the open world that you’re presented with.

This is all tied together with the open world having very Arkham-style activities to do. There’s your general crime fighting with random events popping up where you can take out bad guys. There’s generally collectable things to get in true Lego game fashion. However, the real meat of the activities are tied into things like story content for Killer Croc or an entire set of puzzle activities tied to Riddler or street racing and combat AR trials created by Lucius Fox. It makes it feel much more grounded in traditional open world territory than in pure Lego game territory.

However, this being a Lego game does mean that it knows to not take itself more seriously. The writing of the game is way more in line with 1960s Batman than Christian Bale Batman, and that is a really fun setup against the backdrop of the movie plot points. Mr. Freeze may be threatening to freeze the entire city, but when Batman gets disabled in the fight it’s because he gets turned into a Lego brick made of ice. Enemies don’t die but get blasted into the brick parts of their minifigs. Large enemies aren’t just buff, but instead are comically larger than Batman and are defeated by things like clapping cymbals on their head or trapping their head in a net. Catwoman doesn’t just cut a circle out of glass when she’s robbing places, she’s cutting a perfect 8×8 circle plate Lego out. There’s just a constant barrage of these little details all over the place that the TT Games team have built up as expected behavior in Lego games that work so well because it’s simultaneously the opposite of the more serious side of Batman while also just working perfectly against the slapstick nature of its past.

But it ultimately comes back to the love of the IP. All of the expected baddies are here so it isn’t surprising, but it is fun and it makes it clear that this is a game for Batman fans by Batman fans. I probably wouldn’t go so far as to call this game a game of the year candidate, but it certainly is making a good push at it. It is distinctly enough of a Lego game where most systems are not fully fleshes out in a way typical of a AAA game, but there’s nothing there that stands out to me as bad. What it ended up being the entire time was just fun, and it’s fun in the same way that the Lego games always have been but turned way more seriously. It’s clear that TT Games’ pace of output was pulled way back for Skywalker Saga and that certainly was a risk for them, but that game and Lego Batman have both shown that they can grow the fun and silliness of Lego in ways that push it into more traditional games without losing what brought me to play them in the first place.