Category: Xbox Series X

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #164 – Psychonauts 2

More Info from Double Fine Productions

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, PS4, Windows, macOS, Linux

It’s not necessarily that this is a new benchmark for 3D platformers, but this is a pretty special game. It’s in the way that the game gets into the minds (literally) of its characters that makes it work so well. It’s great storytelling and great set pieces and great handling of character motivations that all combine into something that takes what the series did well in the past and elevates it in a fantastic way. It’s the type of game that was worth the wait, which isn’t something that happens often.

The gameplay itself is pretty standard platformer fare. You’re basically doing variants of running and jumping, with a little bit of combat. Ya, they mix in psychic power flavor in that glides are levitation or throwing things is telekinesis or your gun replacement is a PSI blast. However, it’s mostly set dressing around standard mechanics. It all works well and it’s easy to fall into because it’s all sort of expected, and that’s a nice thing. It’s a much more positive thing that I probably made it sound, but don’t expect this to be treading new ground from a mechanics standpoint. Where this game is actually special is where it handles the personality and history of each of the people’s minds that you’re diving into.

To skip a bunch of back story, the bulk of the game takes place within the brains of a set of Psychonauts that within the in-game universe are historic and famous. In the picture above, you’re inside the mind of one of those members who to some extent was seen as the glue of the group and is now hurt by the fact that they’ve largely gone their separate ways. The way this manifests within the game is the person envisioning the group as a band, and your path through their story is to find the rest of the members and reunite the group.

Another member comes from the opposite end of this story, and sees themselves as having been abandoned. As you work through their story you end up seeing that it isn’t just the case of the group splitting up causing this sense of abandonment, but other situations in the past that lead to this. In working your way through the story, you’re helping them see that the personal traumas that came from it may be somewhat validated, but that they are only seeing things from one side and that with more information things may not be as they see for themselves.

Dealing with personal traumas is always a subject that is interesting for me to see within games. Games that do it poorly can often feel over the top where the traumas inflicted on characters are so extreme that it feels malicious, where it leads to me just reacting negatively to the story. Games that do it well instead lead to me feeling sympathetic to the characters while also leading me to want to help them through their trauma. Psychonauts 2 luckily falls into the latter.

The characters all have back stories that at least feel relatable. Even if it’s not something that has happened directly to me, the things that have happened all feel grounded in reality. Given the psychic powers twist to this universe, they’re all things that feel like they could happen to a group that is trying to harness powers beyond the imagination of normal people. These are all people that were dealt great power and didn’t necessarily deal with it in a positive manner and are now to some extent left broken by the experience, but they all feel redeemable in that they never felt like they were maliciously trying to harm others, main villain aside. Even in that case it feels like you’re seeing someone who was pushed beyond their limits and lost to their own inner demons, rather than being someone who is just inherently evil.

I think that is all why this game works so well to me as a sequel. The first game and the VR experience proved out the core idea that you could make a platformer that exists within the minds of various people, but those two games didn’t feel as fleshed out to me from the perspective of seeing sympathetic characters and wanting to help them. This game just goes the extra mile to really provide that story backing. The mechanics in place are good enough to not get in the way of the rest of the experience, and it lets the story shine and be what is pulling you through the game in a way that I never wanted to put it down.

Although I am a bit miffed that they wouldn’t let me be immature…