Category: Adventure

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Game Ramblings #80 – Shadow of the Tomb Raider

More Info from Square-Enix

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

TL;DR

  • Consistently good combat, exploration, and puzzle solving
  • Entertaining story involving the legend of the city of Paititi and a mix of Inca and Maya lore
  • On console, nice option to prefer framerate over visual quality. 60 FPS feels really good during the heavy movement segments of the game.

If you’ve played the prior two games in this trilogy, you know what to expect – solid semi-open world exploration, good puzzle dungeons, excellent stealth mechanics, and fun combat when pressed into action. Although this is definitely starting to trend towards being formulaic, there’s a few things here that made this feel like the best iteration on the gameplay that’s come out of the trilogy.

The game is only really a semi-open world experience, but the handful of larger towns are still fun to explore.

One of the reasons that I’ve really enjoyed this trilogy is that it’s only really openish. It’s got some open world trappings in terms of a relatively seamless world and a ton of things to collect in it, but in general this is still a fairly linear experience. The handful of times you get an open-style area, it’s really to allow you to breath between strictly linear story segments and give you a place to return to when a story spot is complete. These larger areas also give you the push to explore to find tombs – after all this IS Tomb Raider – that act as a significant side item to do.

The tombs are the best part of the game, giving you a mix of puzzle areas to engage in.

The prior titles in the reboot series had their share of tombs to go into, but it never really felt like a focus. While the content here is still entirely optional, the quality and count of tombs available in this game feels more significant than before. Its these tombs and crypts that are the best part of the game for me, and pushed me to seem them out whenever I could.

Each open area typically has somewhere between 3-6 hidden areas to explore with a single focus in each one. Some tombs are focused on manipulation of light to open doors to proceed further. Some focus on weight-based puzzles to open up paths to move on. A couple of them really end up being purely about climbing from point A to B without dying. These are entirely optional experience, but they’re worth seeking out simply because they are so much fun to complete. On their own, you could make a game out of a series of these and it would be worth playing, but as a part of the greater experience they still stand out. It also helps that they tend to have skill rewards at the end to really push the need to complete them.

I’m a sucker for stealth games and bow + arrow games, and this gives me both in great supply.

Combat remains largely the same as previous iterations, but is still a ton of fun. That said, the fact that there is less of it throughout the game oddly makes it feel even better. The previous titles had similar problems to Uncharted where almost any story area had obvious segments of a room of bad guys, then a room of jumping, then a room of bad guys, etc. Shadow significantly reduces this, and the game really only ends up having a handful of significant combat events in the entire game. Of this, most of them can also be completed entirely through strong stealth mechanics. When you do end up firing weapons, it’s usually for a strong story-reason, and luckily the handful of weapons (pistol, shotgun, auto rifle, and in particular the bow) all feel solid to fire.

Overall, Shadow felt like an appropriate ending to the reboot trilogy, and probably a good ending for the series on the current generation of hardware. There’s some obvious fluff to the experience that could be trimmed away, particularly with side quests that generally involve running around towns doing nothing in particular, but the overall game feels like it has reached a solid peak. Combat is fun, the puzzle solving is the best it’s been, and the origin story for Lara wrapped up in a relatively satisfying way. I’m hoping the next generation of hardware allows the series to stretch into new directions in a way similar to God of War, but for now I’m happy in where this one has ended up and can’t wait to see where Lara’s adventures take us next.

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Game Ramblings #79 – Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

More Info from Ninja Theory

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

TL;DR

  • Fantastic storytelling backed by a phenomenally good audio design
  • Combat is the obvious weakpoint for the game – it’s serviceable, but nothing special. Also not a reason to avoid the game.

Hellblade is a curious game to recommend. It’s technically an action game, but its action is not a reason to play it. It’s purposefully AAA in quality, but not in scope so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s also the rare game that I would highly recommend wearing ONLY headphones for, even if you’ve got a high end audio system purely based on the merits of its audio design. It’s proof that a high focus on a specific element can result in an extremely high quality title without the need to add unnecessary fluff to pad the experience.

The game is entirely based around Senua’s psychosis, and everything from the audio to world design focuses in on that.

I’m really regretting not pulling some video footage of the game’s audio design while I was playing, because that’s where I want to start here. Up in the TL;DR I mentioned that this game is worth playing with headphones, and it’s entirely because of the focus on Senua’s psychosis. Throughout the game, the player hears voices in Senua’s head that act as something of a narration. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to the narration that takes place in the game Bastion, but in this case is often telling the player the opposite of what they want to do. These voices are entirely spatialized, so you spend a lot of the game with voices floating around inside your hearing. It’s a simple audio trick, but it’s fantastically impressive in practice, and one of the few true good uses of stereo panning of audio that I’ve heard in a game in recent years.

The fact that you can’t see anything in this screenshot is very much on purpose – it’s the mechanic of an entire level.

The heavy emphasis on audio even becomes game mechanics on its own. One of the puzzle segments of the game from the screenshot above involves effectively removing the player’s vision. The entire level takes place in near blackness, with only things directly next to the player even being visible as a fog. Throughout this entire section of the game, the player depends on their sense of hearing, and to some extent sense of touch through controller vibration to get through the game. Within the context of the game’s story at this point, it’s a fantastic way to force the player into an uncomfortable position where they can’t depend on what they see to give them clues of where to go. Everything comes down to your ability to listen to what’s going on, and move towards the sounds that can lead you to the exit.

These kinds of use of strong technology also abound in how puzzles are solved. The little video above is one example in how they manipulate the environment through the use of portals to open up progress to the player. There’s a few variations of this type of mechanic around, and it plays a really nice balance between making the player pay close attention to what they are looking at without being a vague guessing game.

Combat was clearly not an emphasis, but the bosses themselves are still a lot of fun to face.

If there’s anything where the game could have used more time, it’s probably in combat. The combat that is there is effective, but it’s pretty simple and has its own share of problems that grow as the game nears its end. This game has the problem that I’ve seen in a lot of melee games where the combat is fun against one or two tough enemies, but not fun with a bunch of weak enemies. The sections with weak enemies near the end of the game end up being an effective dodge spam to avoid a bunch of attacks, then poke damage to kill the enemies. There’s never much danger from the enemies themselves but I ended up dying a few times simply from getting stuck in chains or other environment pieces that seemed like they weren’t really meant to be hazards.

That said, the simple nature of the combat does shine in boss fights. The handful of bosses have a pretty wide range in sizes and mechanics, so they end up being the satisfying nearly Souls-style fights, where you slowly face off against the boss to learn its mechanics, minimize damage, then really go on the attack as you learn the patterns. Because many of the boss attacks are one or two shot deaths, finishing off the bosses is always really satisfying due to the recognition that the difference between you winning and you dying was really down to skill.

Ultimately this is a game that is really easy to recommend. Just on its gameplay and story alone, it’s probably worth the look for a lot of people. It’s a relatively short game that takes place as a single continuous camera shot (about 6-8 hours in general) and will come in at an affordable price at this point. However, the audio design is above and beyond what almost any developer is doing at any level these days, so on that alone I give it a nod. Now that Ninja Theory is under the Microsoft umbrella, I’m hoping we see more experiences like this where a strong focus wins out over marketing bullet points.

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Game Ramblings #36.1 – Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds

More Info from Guerrilla Games

Original Ramblings

  • Genre: Open World Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds does do a lot to generally continue what was great about the first one.  The setting is still fanastic and drop dead gorgeous.  The moment to moment combat is still a lot of fun with a lot of variety in ranged weapons.  Exploration is still always worth it, with things to find all over the place.  Basically, they didn’t screw up what was good.  Luckily, they also fixed my two biggest gripes with the base game, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.

This time around you’re running around Yellowstone and the surrounding areas. It’s definitely seen better days.

The end of HZD really annoyed the hell out of me, and it was because of two reasons.  The first was the lack of progression with the main melee weapon leaving the end hours of the game focused on much stronger ranged attacks, and the second was the design of many of the boss fights being an effective circular arena fight where you could generally stay safely at range the entire time.  While neither of these problems really ended up being a killer in the game’s overall result, they were definitely annoying problems that left me scratching my head a bit.

The melee weapon itself is definitely helped this time around by having an end game upgrade path.  One of the first side quests you come upon when entering the new area of the game ends with you upgrading your spear to support the modification system that the ranged weapons all had.  While I could definitely gripe about this being hidden behind a side quest, and I could gripe about the spear still not having inherent stat upgrades, this change alone is huge in changing how late game melee combat worked for me against higher level enemies.  Now I could build the staff to my play style, whether that’s a pure damage build, one focused on debuffs, or one focused on getting some ticking damage out on enemies.  While this was simply using a system that already existed for the ranged weaponry, gaining this system for melee was a huge change for the better.

While boss fights are still in relatively obvious arenas, they are much more varied landscapes, and the bosses themselves are significantly more aggressive against the player.

The handful of bosses in the expansion are also much improved over the base game.  While they still take place in relatively obvious arenas, there’s a much better variety in how the arenas are laid out.  In the example above, the player is sort of ducking in and around little outcroppings, giving a lot of line of sight breaking when fighting the boss.  In general, that is pretty common, allowing the player to fight in a much more stealth-based way.  This is really important based on a change in overall design of the boss AI.

The original game suffered from bosses that could generally be kept at range, letting the player just kind of tick away at them with the bow with very little danger.  The bosses here feel a lot more like large versions of the world machines instead.  They move around a lot to keep the player from being grounded.  They do a lot more melee and charge attacks, keeping the player’s dodging finger ready.  Even when the bosses are doing ranged projectile attacks, the danger of being hit and knocked down is a lot higher due to the ability of the bosses to close the gap and melee the player while they are down.  Overall the fights just feel a lot more dynamic, rather than the circle strafe grinds that the original game suffered from.

Since this is Yellowstone, lava is the name of the game. It looks even better in motion than it does in screenshots.

Overall this was really just a solid expansion.  It took what was great about the original and gave you more, and fixed a few of the larger problems while it was at it.  The new content was a lot of fun, the new weapons felt impactful and slid naturally into my arsenal (super bonus mention to the energy projectile cannon you get about half way through the expansion), and the handful of new enemies fit into the existing roster really well while giving some new mechanics to watch out for.  In general, this one leaves me wanting more of the series than the original game even did, and that leaves me excited for the future of the series going forward.