Category: Xbox Series X

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Game Ramblings #213 – Star Wars Outlaws

More Info from Ubisoft

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

Non-Jedi Star Wars games need what I would consider a mix of few things to succeed. They need to have you going up against weird aliens and imperials. They need you to be visiting strange alien planets and the cantinas in their towns. They need space flight of some sort, preferably with combat. To some extent they need callbacks to the movies to at least ground them within the universe. Those are important to the games being Star Wars, but it then has to prove itself as a good game and this one delivered.

This fills the void that the lack of a recent Tomb Raider left me with. For me, the most recent trilogy in that series is a stealth and ranged game. Where a lot of games in the realm of Assassin’s Creed are stealth and melee, TR leaned on the bow for ranged. There is very little else that worked effectively in those two modes for me like TR, but this one does and it does it with a perfect Star Wars universe wrapping.

It might seem strange to consider this and Tomb Raider in the same general vicinity since ranged here is almost entirely blaster weapons, but my use of them was pretty similar. For any sort of large scenario I would go in intending to do it completely in stealth. The blasters bring a bunch of options to do ranged stuns that worked in a similar way to TR bow kills in that they are silent and effective. This would be paired with me sneaking around doing melee takedowns to get rid of as much of the enemy presence as possible. The stealth portion was a lot of fun and had elements to it that were relatively IP specific.

For example, there’s situations where you’ll be sneaking into an Imperial base, full of enemies, cameras, and turrets. You could approach this by taking everyone out and getting away through relatively brute force. You could also approach it by finding a computer to hack the turrets and turn them on the Imperials. You could also approach it by shutting down the cameras and finding safe paths through the base. You could also approach it by finding vents that can be unlocked and coming into your objective via a back route. While some of the story stuff is a little more singularly focused than that, there’s almost always multiple ways to approach a scenario, and that variety and ability to change tactics on the fly really gave a lot of life to the stealth gameplay in particular as it was always a little bit different based on the location you’re at.

When I then inevitably screwed something up I could then lean on the blasters to do actual damage. Where this differs from the TR bow is that the blaster is much more of a third person shooter style weapon where kills are fast and effective. The toolbox here is a lot of chaotic fun when this does happen. Equipping shock damage to disable droids is obvious in-universe and a lot of fun. Shooting the wide array of explosive barrels conveniently placed in combat areas and watching bodies fly is the type of stupid physics thing that adds secondary fun to games like this.

However, it’s also got a really nice power curve and more granular customization than that. An example of the type of thing they have is three upgrade paths for the core plasma blaster. You can go into light firing, heavy firing, or rapid firing. This gives you three types of gameplay that fit different preference styles. Light is a semi auto that can be rapidly fired, but with lower damage. Rapid fire is a pray and spray auto fire that gives you more speed but less accuracy. Heavy firing gives you big damage but lower rate of fire and frequency of reloading. Giving the player the ability to bend combat to their preferences is a powerful way to get a lot of mileage out of small changes that don’t really require a lot of new work. It’s some basic tech and configuration to completely change the gameplay experience in a way that empowers the player to play their way.

You may notice that this is all talking about moment to moment gameplay in what are essentially small places, but this is an open world game with space combat. Frankly, that’s because that stuff simply exists. The meta loop of this game is that it’s an Ubisoft game and it plays like an Ubisoft game. It’s a big ol open world with stuff scattered around that you can do, stuff scattered around that you can collect, and random event stuff that pops up. This extends to space combat where the same stuff happens, but now in a space ship with space combat. Like a lot of their games it’s not that it’s bad but it simply exists and works well, but it’s been done before. The meta loop is no different than Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, or Immortals. Like a lot of AAA game meta loops, it’s all well put together and exists without getting in the way, but it was distinctly not the draw of the experience for me by the end of the game.

I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t some portion of me that likes this game because of the nostalgia of being able to work for Jabba or shoot Imperials or go visit Mos Eisley. That absolutely is a portion of the experience that enhances this game over the same loop without the license. However, this game absolutely stands out as a fun experience enhanced by the IP and how they could work that into gameplay mechanics. This takes bits and pieces that work within a stealth experience like Jabba and bounty hunting and blaster pistols and mashes it together into an experience that really surprised me.

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Game Ramblings #206 – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

More Info from Bethesda

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

If I were to really explain what this game is I’d probably describe it as a very good stealth game, but an extraordinary Indiana Jones game. Detached from the license this would still be a fun game in its own right. However, its attachment to the Indiana Jones IP seems to have steered it in such a perfect B-movie direction that it elevates it more than I would have expected.

Looking purely at gameplay, this is a winner on its own. I’ve said it before, but I am an absolute sucker for games that let me stealth the entire time, and this is absolutely one of them. The game didn’t even let me have a gun until at least 5 or 6 hours in, at which point I promptly got killed by the next guard with a gun and decided that was not the way I wanted to approach the game. That’s not to say I didn’t ever use guns, but more often than not my play was to turn them around and use them as a stealth melee weapon anyway.

The game just gives you so many good tools to allow melee/stealth to be the way to play. Visibility itself is incredibly fair, with an indicator over enemies when they see you that gives you a chance to get into hiding. It eliminates one of the core problems I have with some stealth games where things off screen or slightly in less obvious lines of sight break stealth. Areas that require stealth generally have a ton of spots to break line of sight, whether it’s direct line of sight breaking, small alcoves to hide in, or boxes to hide behind. Noise isn’t a huge factor, so you can focus on positioning. Basically, as long as you don’t sprint or use the whip you’re probably good on sound. Stealth kills are fast and efficient, and you can hide bodies (or frankly, just leave them and use them as a distraction for other guards).

This is then helped by the disguise system where each world hub has its own outfit that you can find themed to the area. In Italy, it’s a fascist uniform. In Giza, it’s themed to the occupying Nazi’s desert uniforms. In Asia it’s themed to the more jungle-friendly uniform of the occupying forces. What these inherently do is lower the danger of the entire hub and let you easily get through areas that required a ton of effort before, but not for free. You have to go into dangerous areas first to find them and are given the reward of free reign. It’s a perfect way to encourage exploration beyond the golden path.

That said, when I did screw up stealth melee combat was also simple but satisfying. Melee combat is your basic setup of weak attack, strong attack, block, and dodge. What it does have is a fairly good rhythm. You don’t generally get overloaded with enemies, so melee encounters are generally 1v1 or 2v1 at most. Enemy tells are fairly well telegraphed, giving you time to do a defensive maneuver before laying in for a few attacks. Weapons themselves are also easy to find and pickup in the environment, leading to what is usually a pretty entertaining cat and mouse game of getting in a couple attacks, seeing if I can find something stronger than my fists, blocking attacks, then reaching out and bonking someone over the head with a melee weapon. Sometimes it’s a hammer, sometimes it’s a guitar, sometimes it’s a toilet brush. Luckily even in the comedy moments, the melee weapons are still leaning towards unrealistically effective to prevent negative outcomes.

That little thing there – no negative outcomes – is hugely important to how the overall balance of the game played out. Generally speaking, stealth is totally safe and won’t pull other guards. Melee is fairly safe and only pulls guards nearby. Gun fire will pull guards from everywhere. It basically lets you play the game how you want and at what level of danger you want. Stealth is slow, but if you like that type of game it totally works well here. Melee is a bit quicker overall but adds some danger but is totally safe if you’re good at dodging. Gunfire is by far the quickest option but adds a lot of inherent danger to the experience. Generally I would expect that a game wouldn’t be able to do a great job of balancing such disparate gameplay styles but my experience was that they all worked fairly well as needed.

The game does like to remind you that it’s an Indiana Jones game though, and it does it very often. Obviously you have Indy’s whip, and it’s effective here. It can be used as a hookshot for swinging over things. It can be used as a rope to climb up walls when you’re diving through a tomb. It can be used as a weapon to stun enemies. It’s all the things that you would expect in terms of gameplay mechanics to come from such an icon of the series.

However, it’s also the comedy and sci-fi bits that you see scattered around. It’s the twang of a guitar as you whack it over someone’s head or picking up a toilet brush because it’s the only stealth weapon available. It’s enemies setting off traps to their own detriment, leaving Indy safe and healthy. It’s the absolute over the top acting of the Nazi side of the story straight out of Raiders. It’s the fact that the story has teleportation across the world as a core story beat that reminds you that this isn’t grounded in reality. It’s the fact that there’s a pre-Christian race of giants that somehow has its hands in every ancient civilization known to man.

It’s the sum of all these things that truly makes this a great Indy game. It’s not just going full circle and doing a first-person Tomb Raider. It’s Indiana Jones through and through.

The sum of all this is that a great game is already there that is then elevated by it taking the Indiana Jones IP seriously and using it to its advantage. Put this under any IP and it scratches my stealth itch but the way they integrated the things you expect out of Indy brings it to an easy recommendation for me.

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Game Ramblings #198 – Hogwarts Legacy

More Info from WB Games

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Xbox Series
  • Also Available On: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, PC, Switch

This IP is obviously complicated by the fact that the original author has turned out to be a piece of shit and that wasn’t something I wanted to support, so I waited. I waited until it was so cheap that I would effectively not be putting money into the IP. I waited until I had a practical need to play it as a developer. However, it was time for me to get around to playing it and I’m glad I did. The team at Avalanche put something together that is pretty obvious on paper – make an open world RPG third person shooter – and unsurprisingly it works well. The level of polish behind this game puts it right up there with the best of AAA experiences I’ve played over the last several years.

There’s a really interesting push and pull here between childhood nostalgia of what Hogwarts is from the books and movies against what is expected of a playable videogame experience, and this one does a surprisingly good job of playing that balance. There’s sections that are heavy on puzzles that really lean into the lore. You’ll be solving puzzles created by Merlin or finding important objects to the universe or capturing magical creatures. There’s sections that are then heavy on combat where you’re fighting dark wizards and trolls and goblins. The game does a good job of balancing that back and forth to where you’re never doing one for a particularly long time back to back so you get into natural sort of peaks and valleys of action that allow rest between.

Underlying all of this is how it ties together the overall story with simply being a student. Yes, you’re doing something larger than Hogwarts as the meta experience, but within that are chunks of distinct classroom experiences. You’ll be given tasks by the professors that need to be completed. For example – use a specific potion and defeat enemies, capture some specific magical creature, defeat enemies with particular spell combos, etc. Those lessons then result in you learning new spells to use further in the game. It’s got a very Nintendo quality to it in that it’s naturally tutorializing parts of the game without being overtly in your face about it, then rewarding you with a new toy to play with.

None of this would work if the action that followed was bad, but that works extremely well. Ultimately, the closest thing I could compare it to would be something like Mass Effect. At the end of the day this is a third person shooter full of projectiles flying everywhere, but each attack is based in magic. Where Mass Effect would have a magnetic shield, this has Protego. Where Mass Effect would throw grenades at range, this has Bombarda. Where Mass Effect has cryo weaponry, this has Glacius spells. Where Mass Effect has poison dots, this has curses from Crucio.

From an experience standpoint it all just feels natural as a result. This may be an 1800s magic game, but it feels like something that almost any core gamer has played before. The control scheme is similar, the results of actions are similar, and the moment to moment gameplay is similar. That may sound a lot like “well it’s been done before”, and I suppose there is some truth to that. The thing that’s impressive is that it doesn’t feel like a retread, but instead feels like a perfectly natural blend of known gameplay and a completely unrelated IP.

However, they also really do hit that nostalgia hard in this. The thing about Hogwarts that was always pressed into my brain was how much it was a maze and this absolutely feels like a maze. There’s spiral staircases and unnecessary hallways and hidden hallways and all sorts of chaos, and at first it’s overwhelming. However, the game does a great job of leading the player via a “spell” that shows them the path to where they’re trying to go. Then over time as you explore you start to recognize spots and it continues to be a maze, but it’s a maze you know and in that sense you then start to appreciate how well put together the entire school sandbox is to feel so much like my expectations and yet still allow me to easily get around.

Places like Hogsmeade are the same. IT feels like an overwhelming place to walk into. All of the buildings are a little rickety and feel like they may fall over at any time. Places like Honeydukes look like an explosion of treats. Ollivander’s is floor to ceiling stacks of wands. The Three Broomsticks looks like the perfect pub to hop into on a cold day. Basically, it all works to hit that nostalgia of the series, but it also works incredibly well as the core upgrade hub of the game. Where Hogwarts is the place where you learn new stuff, Hogsmeade is where you improve things. You’re there to sell unused gear and get money to grab new potion recipes or conjuring spells or broom upgrades or combat items. What it ends up being is that you kind of end up hopping back and forth between the two in natural waves where Hogwarts kind of becomes a hub to learn for a while, then you’re off in the world and hopping back to Hogsmeade to bring your power curve up. In that sense, it’s gamifying nostalgia in a way that just works.

In continuing to play to both the game and nostalgia aspects, this ends up being one of the most impressive licensed titles that I’ve likely ever played. Licensed games are often hard to get right because the IP ends up having to be important enough to sell the game. In this case, I think the game benefited a lot from not having to tie itself to Harry Potter. It could simply be a game in the overall lore of the IP and live on its own in an impressive way. It took pieces that were important in the setting and the very loose lore of witches and wizards existing and crafted a game that naturally worked around that. The game is not appreciably different than it would be if it was not Hogwarts, but in doing so it allowed itself to be attached to something that was going to simply sell more with the same game, and in doing so it opened a path forward for the studio that had seemingly been left to die after the end of Disney Infinity.