Dark Souls

(21/10/2011)  By now, you will know that Dark Souls is hard.  ‘Prepare to die!’ screams the launch trailer, and die you shall, but though the game takes every opportunity to kill you, death is not really the point.  Like Demon’s Souls before it, the core of the Dark Souls experience lies in the meticulous balance between risk and reward.  The odds you must overcome, which will at times feel almost unfairly stacked against you, make overcoming them something of a euphoric experience for those with the stomach to persevere. 

This will kill you.

Dark Souls is the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, one of my favourite games of this console generation and, indeed, ever.  Everything that made Demon’s Souls great is reprised in its pseudo-sequel.  I stand by everything I said in my review of Demon’s Souls, and everything there applies equally to Dark Souls, so for a comprehensive run-through of why these games are so good, I suggest you read that.

Instead, I shall focus on how Dark Souls differs from its predecessor, and even surpasses it, for there is little question that the this is the superior game.  Dark Souls is more than a spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls; at times, it feels more like a re-imagining.  Concepts and characters from the original reappear here almost untouched; the fire-breathing gargoyle boss that spawns a friend just as you think you’ve gained the upper hand, the sorcerer that clones himself to surround you, the oppressive toxic swamp level and that one bastard who promises you treasure and then kicks you into a hole.  There’s much here that will be familiar to veterans of the original, and will surely raise a smile.  

The real difference here is that these elements are now tied together into one great sprawling world.  This massive world is truly Dark Souls’ greatest achievement, invoking a level of immersion unattained by its predecessors’ mostly linear stages.  The level design in Demon’s Souls was impeccable, but here it is a taken to a new level.  The surprisingly varied environments are woven together with a masterful hand, with shortcuts opening out into areas previously visited and far-off caverns promising access to unexplored lands.  The greatest praise I can offer to the game’s design is that, vast and sprawling as it is, I never felt the need for a map; the twisting tunnels of Lordran are firmly etched into my memory as if it were a place I had personally explored, rather than a particular ingenious work of level design.

This too.

Dark Souls is, contrary to the title, a much brighter game than Demon’s Souls, which entertained itself almost exclusively with dark passages and oppressive abysses.  These are more than present here, don’t get me wrong; Dark Souls is more than happy so send you treading through the tombs of giants in utter darkness, or venturing into a boiling netherworld.  But it is also unafraid to send you through shimmering crystal caves or across the balustrades of a sun-drenched palace; these moments of beauty belie the grim fiction of the forsaken world you are swept up into.

It is also a much larger game than Demon’s Souls.  I remember finishing that game in something like forty hours; this one took me more than sixty, and there are still areas I have yet to explore and bosses I have yet to fight.  Every time you think you are pushing the boundaries of the game’s world, it opens up further, sending you deeper down into its hellish interiors.

It is enough to say that Dark Souls is a bigger, more open and more beautiful version of Demon’s Souls.  It feels as though this is the game that From Software wanted to make in the first place; only with the budget afforded from the success of the original were they able to realise their often nightmarish but unquestionably brilliant vision.

And this.

What faults there are are largely technical.  Sections of the game suffer from some seriously debilitating lag, occasionally causing me to wonder how this passed through testing.  Lag such as this would be an issue in any game, but here, where the difference between life and death can rest on a split-second reaction, death through technical fault is unacceptable.

The game’s peculiar yet inspired online system suffers too from technical issues, though how much of this is down to my own broadband connection I cannot say.  Several times, a player would attempt to invade me and fail, and the game would leave me locked behind fog walls while it tried to reconcile connection issues with XboxLIVE.  This happened rarely, but when it did my only solution was to quit the game and reload.  I lost nothing but a few seconds of playtime, but even so, this is an area that lacks the laudable polish of the rest of the experience.

There are times too, especially towards the end of the game, where it threatens to tip the fine balance of its difficulty towards frustration.  Forcing you to retread trying gauntlets to re-engage with a seemingly impossible boss is Dark Souls’ bread and butter, but the triumph of this design lies in artful balancing of risk and reward, and certain late game sections begin to feel vindictive in what they ask of the player.  The same could be said of parts of Demon’s Souls, but in a game so much bigger and so much broader, the thrill of the challenge occasionally – and only occasionally – threatens to become muddied by frustration.

This will also kill you.

None of this truly detracts from the triumph of design that Dark Souls represents.  This is a videogame wholly unique from its contemporaries, a starkly pure vision of what a game can be.  It will certainly not be to everyone’s tastes, and isn’t as immediately playable as the myriad blockbusters released this fall, but to those who can appreciate this sort of games, Dark Souls is one of the finest videogames you will likely play in a long while.

 Gears of War 3

(03/10/2011)  For me, the first Gears of War was the game that justified my purchase of a spangly new high-definition games console.  It was the first game that didn’t seem like a polished-up PS2 title, that felt like a genuine generation leap forward.  All that much-lauded ‘next generation’ tech was finally being used for something.  And it was great.

Five years later, we have Gears of War 3.  The end of the trilogy, arriving in the impending twilight years of the Xbox 360.  The technology that once seemed so promising and powerful now feels everyday, even a little dated.  People are looking towards the future, towards the next Xbox.  And Gears of War is still great.

New baddies keep things fresh.

There’s little to say about Gears 3 that you won’t already know, other than that it’s Gears of War at its finest.  The formula that made the first game seem such a revelation was so close to perfect in its first iteration that only the tiniest of tweaks have been made over the course of its two sequels.  Gears 3 will not change any minds; if you loved the first two, you’ll love this equally.  If you’ve never liked Gears, there’s nothing here that’s going to change your mind in the slightest.

Some areas are surprisingly pretty.

This is probably the best Gears campaign yet, and that’s largely down to the pacing.  After working on three games, Epic have got the formula down to a fine art.  They know where to place choke points, where to allow downtime and when to break it, when to throw in a turret section; it’s something Gears has always done better than many of its contemporaries, but this is the tightest iteration yet.

It’s also bigger, bolder and brighter than its predecessors.  Fittingly, this final chapter contains more grand set-pieces and large-scale battles than ever before.  The maturation of Unreal Engine 3 shows in the number and variation of the locations you visit; a far cry from the almost monochrome palette of the original.  Gears 3 is, throughout, a surprisingly varied and colourful journey.

Plus, there are girls in it now.

There’s also a stronger story focus this time around, with the plot established over the last two games finally reaching its long-awaited conclusion.  It may finish rather abruptly, and doesn’t answer as many of the series’ long-standing questions as I would have liked, but in truth, I don’t really care.  Gears of War is not about accomplished science-fiction; it’s about shredding grubs with a chainsaw bayonet, diving into cover amidst a storm of bullets and tearing through the horde with a sawn-off shotgun, and it does all of these things impeccably.

It’s enough to simply say the Gears of War 3 is Gears of War 3.  It’s exactly what you’d expect from the conclusion to one of the most well-respected series of recent years.  Perhaps now Epic are looking to the future, working on a game that will come to define the next generation of console in the way that Gears did this one.  Whatever the case, they’ve crafted a fitting end to the Gears saga; grand, violent and bombastic, Gears 3 stands confidently amongst the finest of modern shooters.  As if anyone expected it would be otherwise.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

(16/09/2011)  Some games are RPGs.  Some are shooters.  And some shoot for the stars – spanning genres far and wide and combining elements from across the gamescape, aiming to become some sort of mega-game, an experience that defies genre with expansive grandeur. 

The original Deus Ex is amongst the first of these grand hybrids; it’s most recent successor, Human Revolution, matches itself against the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock and Fallout.  And even with such stiff competition, it stands out as a unique and gripping experience, and presents a world well worth investing time in.

2027 is breathtakingly imagined.

The issue that occurs whenever a game promises to explode genre staple is that there’s always compromise.  It’s impossible for a modern game to be a great shooter, and a great RPG, and a great open world game, and a great story game.  Parts of the gameplay invariably suffer in the bid to balance these often conflicting elements.

And balance is something that Human Revolution excels at, possibly more so than its peers.  While no individual element can match a dedicated genre game – as a shooter, it’s stiff yet functional, as a stealth game, it’s somewhat shallow – it displays a masterful hand at combining these elements into a cohesive and engaging whole.

In short, there were very few points where I found myself wishing it was better, something that can rarely be said of similar cross-genre experiments.

Player choice is the fulcrum of the Deus Ex experience, and it’s this sensation of freedom that is Human Revolution’s strongest individual feature.  It’s not a massively open game in the way something like Fallout 3 is; instead, it presents you with many fixed situations, each with countless different ways to tackle them.  Sneak in, hack the security system, and climb out through a vent, or talk the guard on the door into simply letting you stroll through?  Almost every mission feels charged with countless possibilities.  This focus on player choice and experimentation is refreshing in a gaming environment that seems bent more and more on restricting the player’s impact on their own gaming experience.

Much is owed to Blade Runner.

I get the impression that a lot of this choice is not in fact as sweeping as it seems while playing, and certainly as the game moves on the artificial nature of its apparent openness becomes more obvious.  Vents are conspicuously placed, boxes of just the right jump height are noticeably snug to troublesome walls, and once you’ve fully upgraded your hacking abilities the whole thing becomes a trial of patience rather than skill, and you move slowly through the game hacking everyone and everything with ease.

More impressive is how the game adapts to your style of play – at one point fairly late in the game, having tired of sneaking everywhere, I decided to simply waste everyone in sight.  Once the somewhat dumb AI adjusted to the shock, the game adapted easily from a tight stealth game into a surprisingly solid cover shooter.  The robust formula encourages players to experiment, and while the game displays a definite favouritism toward the stealthy player, it does reward any style of play, something I don’t think another game has done so well since, perhaps, the original Deus Ex.

Gunfights are rarely the only option.

It’s something of a shame that the character upgrade system doesn’t reward specialisation in the same way.  At first, choosing where to place each upgrade point feels vital, often the difference between winning or losing a mission.  But by the end, if you’ve even been half-attentive to the side-missions, you can’t avoid becoming a cyborg powerhouse.  All the carefully placed obstacles become irrelevant when you can either blow everything up with a shotgun or simply turn invisible and wander through entire facilities.

You will get used to office infiltration.

Then there’s story, which builds a compelling and believable 2027 only to spiral down through countless sci-fi clichés and nonsensical plot-twists to end in a convoluted mess.  This is compounded by the fact that major plot points are often skimmed over in painfully brief pre-rendered cutscenes, leaving me checking my mission log to find out what was actually going on.

And of course it doesn’t end well.  Following in the footsteps of Bioshock and Fallout 3, Human Revolution falls apart in its final hours.  Freedom, choice, basically everything that makes the game great are stripped away, ending in a bizarre and misjudged boss fight followed by little more than a slideshow and some exposition.  It’s certainly more whimper than bang.

All of this dampens the overall experience, but doesn’t stop Human Revolution from being a great game.  Despite some poor story beats, questionable boss fights and a limp ending, for the vast majority of its playtime Human Revolution is grand, confident and enthralling.  It’s a rare game that offers real freedom for experimentation while suffering little of the crippling compromise that often plagues games of such scope.

 Shadows Of The Damned

“Taste my Big Boner!”  Garcia Hotspur grips his Boner firmly with two hands, thrusting forward with his hips as he fires salvo after salvo from its throbbing shaft.  Around him, demons with televisions where their faces should be crash to the ground amidst neon spires, overcome by his weapon’s penetration.

(26/08/2011)  Shadows Of The Damned is a silly game.  With a relentless sense of humour that regularly crosses the border from innuendo into plain absurdity, it’s never as funny as it thinks it is.  Still, it’s a rare game that entirely eschews sanity in favour of balls-out (sometimes literally) zaniness, and while it caters for a very specific taste, it should be applauded for the effort.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Shadows Of The Damned should be better than it is.  A joint effort from two of Japan’s most influential developers, Goichi Suda (Killer 7, No More Heroes) and Shinji Mikami (God Hand, Resident Evil 4), it should have been extraordinary.  Instead, for all the silliness and attempts at humour, it’s disappointingly ordinary.

Bosses are a highlight.

That isn’t to say it’s a bad game.  It’s a solid, simple, and satisfyingly old-school third person shooter.  It says something for the prevalence of modern gaming tropes when a lack of chest-high cover and regenerating health can feel refreshing.  Big chunky power-ups, bosses with a plethora of glowing red weak spots and weapons that develop wacky secondary-fire options over the course of the game give more than a nod to a now-lost era of shooters.

This ain't you father's underworld.

It’s clear the developers had fun designing the game; the number of ludicrous set-pieces they’ve dreamt up play out like the fantasies of an adolescent drunk on Red Bull.  Their vision of the underworld is a colourful departure from the standard bleeding-red-walls portrayal so often depicted in games.  Garcia will run across the giant undulating body of his captive girlfriend to find himself in the middle of a demonic Las Vegas strip, surrounded by towering demons.  You rarely have the chance to look at one thing long enough to get bored.

In fact, the game seems so terrified of the player getting bored that it becomes a bit schizophrenic at times.  Some of its attempts to distract from standard shooting work – a rotating-room puzzle late in the game is surprisingly well thought out, and underused – while some do not – multiple run-from-the-instant-death-girlfriend sections are purely frustrating, and a shoddy but ‘hilarious’ side-scrolling section overstays its welcome.  An interesting light-and-dark mechanic adds welcome variation, while ‘find the key to put in the door’ puzzles derail into tiresome plodding about.

You will learn to dread this.

Shadows Of The Damned is a decent game; it’s as serviceable as any other almost-AAA shooter out this year, and a lot more visually interesting than most.  Its grindhouse-inspired vibe goes a long way to raising it above the competition, but it’s hard not to wish for more, given its developer pedigree.  Good as it is, is doesn’t come close to either Suda’s or Mikami’s finest work.  Through no fault of its own, the game feels like a missed opportunity.

 

Bastion

Words can’t express what happened, but they’re all I got.

(04/08/11)  There are certain games that make me wish I could buy their developers a drink.  Bastion is such a game.  On the surface, it’s a simple dungeon-crawling RPG with some lovely graphics and a neat method of narrative delivery, but it’s underpinned by some fantastic design decisions that set it amongst XBLA’s finest offerings.

Bastion comes across like a playable fairytale.  The narrator’s gravely tones guide you through the game world, giving life and history to what would otherwise be merely pretty window dressing through which to hack-and-slash.  It immediately made me wonder why more games haven’t used this method of storytelling, as it effortlessly solves one of the biggest problems regarding storytelling in a videogame; the need for the player to stop playing to absorb the story.

Bastion never pulls you up to read a page of lore, never subjects you to a lengthy cutscene, yet manages to reveal a colourful post-apocalyptic world with depth, nuance, and history.  The narrator describes the habits and habitats of the creatures you encounter even as you slice them to pieces.  The lore of the desolate vistas is told even as the world itself is built around you, pieces falling into place as you move.  Bastion’s universe, though simple, is fleshed out and detailed without relying on the heavy text-feed that has become something of a crutch for the genre.

The narrator is always a joy to listen to, dry, sharp, and witty, and the story he delivers builds up to an ending with genuine impact.  With so many games these days implementing an arbitrary morality system that often has little relevance to the narrative, the choices you are required to make in Bastion’s closing moments are given real weight, built up gently over the entire course of the game. 

Mechanically Bastion is simple yet sturdy, with a robust dual-weapon hit-and-dodge control scheme that is easy to learn, and with just enough nuances to be satisfying to master.  It’s the mechanics that underpin the controls that are more impressive; weapon- and character-upgrade systems give you a good deal of control over how the game plays, but it’s the game’s variable difficulty system that truly shines behind the scenes.

The Shrine, which lets you invoke gods to empower your enemies for greater rewards, allows you to effectively choose how punishing the game is; choose to battle through a gruelling gauntlet and you’ll be rewarded with more EXP and money to spend.  If you’d rather just experience the story at a gentle pace, then simply disable all the gods, and there’s little of real challenge standing between you and victory.

It’s a neat alternative to the standard ‘easy’ ‘normal’ and ‘hard’ difficulty tiers still used in many games.  By giving the player direct control over the game’s difficulty, Bastion ensures that hardcore players are rewarded for mastering the game without evoking feelings of frustration or inadequacy in those who’d rather take things gently.

There’s much to be said for a game that does not waste a player’s time.  Bastion is finely tuned, trimmed of all the flab that so often surrounds games of this genre, and as a result it feels fresh and vital.  It’s not overlong and it’s never boring, yet its simplicity belies a subtle depth which encourages repeat play-throughs and prioritises player choice.

As such, Bastion is a game that appeals to new players as much as it does fans of the genre.  It’s a title I would recommend over many full-priced retail titles at any time of year, but as an antidote to summer’s current gaming drought, it comes as something of a godsend.  Effortlessly charming and surprisingly gripping, it's an easy game to recommend.

Child of Eden

(30/06/2011)

I travel through a tunnel of digital light, distended pixels dilating in time to the thundering beat.  My movements synchronise with the beat, firing with each pulse of bass, and the tunnel warps, becoming a spiral of shapes in electron orange.  Beyond the reaches of this trans-spectral entity, I catch a glimpse of her...

I’m something of a sucker for the work of auteur.  Show me something devised by the mind of a single individual, something wild and new and unexpected, and I’m often willing to overlook sometimes glaring faults in my appreciation of it.  Child of Eden is the spiritual successor to Rez, the oft-revered 2001 music/game project by producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi.  In fact, Eden is so similar to Rez in both structure and gameplay that it wouldn’t be a remote stretch to call it a true sequel.

I glide through primordial soup, the organisms around me spasm and change in time with the ripple of the tranquil waters.  With my hand I bring life to life, call forth a shoal of electric-blue fishes from the midnight depths.  The shimmering back of a whale rises beneath me, and my rhythmic energy caresses its shining skin.  Together, we burst through the waves towards the stars above...

Child of Eden is as close to a straight work of art as a videogame is likely to get.  I don’t mean this in the sense that videogames usually aspire to be art; Eden is an audiovisual experience first and a game second.  Its beautiful visuals and pulsing soundtrack share equal importance; it’s mechanics lie in a distant second place.  This is game to seen, heard, and felt first, and played second.  Like Rez, the effect is often transporting, demanding a level of attention and absorption that most games can’t sustain.  Unlike Rez, Eden is truly beautiful; no longer restricted by technology, Mizuguchi has painted a spectacular high-definition vision that is at times close to breathtaking.

I weave through the roots and branches of trees, tumbling through green portals in time with the petals falling around me.  I can hear her, snatches of her song through the staccato drip of deadly droplets.  I blast them away, and plunge deeper...

Child of Eden is an on-rails shooter.  The mechanical descendant of games like Panzer Dragoon, it also borrows from the lighting-reflex world of the bullet-hell shooter.  In later stages, it hurls great sweeping waves of projectiles at you, forcing you to react quickly to survive.  Fail, and it has no problem dumping you right back at the start of a ten-minute level.  This frustratingly old-school approach seems at times to be at odds with its transient, dreamy aesthetic, occasionally evoking fits of teeth-gnashing rage as a particular boss casually dismisses you, forcing you to repeat the entire section from scratch.

I soar through mechanical vistas high above the clouds, great white towers tuned to the turning of monumental gears.  Engines fire and rockets launch in time to the wave of my hand.  Above, a thousand satellites blossom amidst stars where twin suns collide...

 Repetition is the key to Child of Eden.  The game only has five proper stages, but in order to progress you will need to play each one many times over.  There are various rewards to spur you on, but this is a rare game in that the stages draw you back in for the joy of playing them.  And as you repeat stages, the game’s idiosyncrasies start to make sense.  What may have initially seemed frustrating becomes an exciting challenge.  The anticipated monotony of score-attack runs become a joyful experience, as the game rewards skilful play with visual flourish and a sense of achievement that goes beyond the star ranking it doles out at the end of a stage.

The cosmos contracts and expands around me, its heart beating to a celestial rhythm.  I dive into wormholes, through transcendent tunnels, towards the heart of everything.  Existence expands around me.  I reach her prison, the core around which reality turns; I raise my hand and take aim...

I am very glad that a game like Child of Eden exists.  It’s the antithesis to everything expected of a modern production.  Rarely is a game genuinely beautiful the way Eden is.  It’s a true audiovisual, multisensory experience, and it’s also a videogame, rigid in structure and unforgiving.  One thing for certain; it’s not like anything else out there, game or otherwise, apart from its spiritual predecessor, Rez.  Eden is Rez expanded, given greater depth and impact and beauty.  It certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but it’s definitely something I believe that anyone, gamer or otherwise, should at least experience.

L.A. Noire

L.A. Noire is a game both shrouded in, and primarily about, mystery.  Very little of the game was shown prior to its release, the usual hyperbole that precedes a new blockbuster was absent, and in its place a certain insecurity on the part of Rockstar, an unwillingness to reveal any concrete information about the title before launch.

This same insecurity pervades the experience of L.A. Noire, and stops it from being quite as great as it perhaps ought to have been.  Its premise is wonderfully realised; you play the part of Cole Phelps, a detective in 1940’s L.A., and the central mechanics let you inhabit the part convincingly.

You’ll scour crime scenes for clues, collecting evidence and a list of potential leads, then you’ll follow up on said leads, interrogating suspects using what is possibly the finest dialogue system seen in games so far.  Team Bondi’s incredible face-capture technology goes a long way to making your interviews with the citizens of L.A. tense and affecting.  L.A. Noire takes concepts from games like Mass Effect and Phoenix Wright and takes them further to create a level of character immersion that surpasses most anything in the medium.  You’re not playing a detective, you are a detective.

The meticulously re-created open world of 40’s L.A. is not the sandbox players may expect from a Rockstar title.  It’s a stage on which the game’s drama takes place.  Excluding optional street crimes and collectible automobiles, neither of which adds much to the experience, the city exists for the purpose of closing your case.  It’s the canvas upon which Cole Phelps paints his rise through the ranks of detectives, and as such it’s the perfect backdrop, offering that authentic atmosphere that Rockstar are so good at delivering without detracting from the narrative of the case at hand.

But then the game shows its insecurities.  As a game primarily about methodical investigation and impactful interrogation, it seems perpetually worried that players will get bored, and doggedly sticks to tired videogame tropes in a bid to please an audience unused to such a measure pace.

The number of car chases that occur throughout Cole Phelps’ career becomes almost comical.  As do the number and scale of its gunfights.  Did detectives ever take down entire armed gangs single-handedly?  They certainly do in L.A. Noire, many times over.  Even more absurd are the various set-pieces Phelps must suffer through; a rickety film set collapsing around him, a timed jump from a falling chandelier, and a bizarre jaunt across a tar pit.

It’s these points, at which L.A. Noire is stubbornly determined to be a videogame, that it’s at its weakest.  Certainly a change of pace from investigating and interviewing is welcome, but these action-based diversions feel sloppily tacked on, a desperate appeal to the type of gamer that L.A. Noire simply isn’t aimed at, and they detract a little from its masterful sense of place.  The fact that these action sections are skippable smacks further of insecurity, as if the developers knew these sections were weak, but still felt that their inclusion was necessary.  The resulting trade-off caters to no one in particular, leaving the player waiting for the game to pick up its stride again.

But when the game finds its stride, and it does more often than not, it is captivating in a way games very rarely are.  Owing far more to the classic adventure games of the LucasArts era than to Grand Theft Auto or any of the free-roaming blockbusters that imitate it, L.A. Noire both a triumph of visual technology and narrative scene-setting.  It sucks you into the role of a detective and asks the player to make decisions that, thanks to some great performances from the cast, feel real and meaningful.  Only a strange narrative turn in the game’s final few hours dampens the drive of the story, and while this does somewhat undermine the player’s actions and choices, it’s not enough to de-rail an otherwise excellent detective story.

This is L.A. Noire’s greatest triumph.  It’s at once a great thriller, and a demonstration that prioritising investigative thought and conversation absolutely can work in a modern videogame.  As a proof-of-concept, it’s superb, and I truly hope that other developers take note and attempt to imitate and expand on this design.  It is a game that is only let down by its insecurities, its stubborn reliance on traditional videogame elements that it truly could have been better without.

Superbrothers: Sword And Sworcery

(28/05/2011) The creators of s:s&s ep (abbreviating the title makes it no less hard to type, it seems) cite the work of Eric Chahi, Shigeru Miyomoto and Fumito Ueda as inspiration for their iOS audiovisual experiment.  Grand inspirations, and the game wears its inspirations on its sleeve.  The visual style recalls the opening moments of Another World.  The story riffs off the mythology of Zelda.  It’s sparse beauty recalls the plains of Shadow of the Colossus.  Yet far from being derivative of these titles, Sworcery creates its own identity and stands out as a completely unique experience.

Sound is the game’s greatest caveat.  Sound design is usually considered adept when it fits a game’s visual tone.  Sworcery’s sound sets the tone of the whole experience.  The soundtrack is not so much an accompaniment to the game as the game seems to flow organically from its soundtrack.  This is not a ‘music game’ in the traditional sense, but its music is its central component.  If you’re not playing it with headphones on, you’re playing it wrong.

The sound and the visuals play off each other in many wonderful ways, creating an atmosphere that feels impossibly dense for such a small-scale game.  Other quirks enhance the game’s distinctive voice.  The real-world lunar cycle is used and manipulated in surprising ways.  The game constantly comments on itself with a clever meta-narrative, rife with pop-culture slang and social networking references.  The result is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously; it avoids the pitfall of extensive naval-gazing that often plagues similar ‘art games’, and establishes a unique vibe quite unlike anything else I’ve experienced.

Mechanically, the game is flawed in places.  The imagination that can be so captivating falls flat in few of the puzzles; while some make inspired use of touch-sensitivity, others involve so little logic that the only way to progress is to poke at the screen until the right number of things light up.

The game also makes you re-tread many of its environments (slowly) multiple times, and repeat-performances of certain battle in its second half can wear on the patience, especially for those at a loss for what to do next.  There are rare times, when you are walking down a mountain for the fourth time or watching the same enemy respawn for the sixth, that the game’s charm runs the risk of wearing thin.

But to find such niggles truly frustrating is to miss the point of the experience.  The creators describe the game as 'a brave experiment in Input Output Cinema'.  Grandiose, perhaps, but after playing, you can see where they are coming from.  As a videogame in the purely mechanical sense, Sworcery is simple, shallow and sometimes derivative.  But the lasting impression is one that leaves a much greater impact than many full-price AAA games.

Sworcery is a finely crafted experience that is acutely aware of the technology it is designed for.  It is a definitive statement that the size of a game has no necessary correlation with its capacity to enthral.  Many iOS developers struggle to overcome the technical limitations of the platform.  Those who understand it better make Angry Birds or Tiny Wings.  With Sworcery, Capybara Games have shown that a casual game does not have to be a throwaway one.  Sworcery is built around the technology of the iPhone and iPad to such an extent that it simply wouldn’t work on other platforms.

It is a shame that the game is not available on other mobile platforms like Android or Windows Phone 7, as it deserves to be experienced by as many people as possible, but it’s easy to see why Apple wanted to keep it exclusive to their platform.  It’s a coming of age for smart-phone gaming, a game with real impact that takes elements of those great games that are its inspiration and injects a sense of identity and personality to create a wonderfully unique, surprising and engaging experience.

 Portal 2

(14/05/2011) Portal was close to perfect.  Technically precise, clever, witty and tightly designed, it’s probably one of the best examples of a modern videogame.  What gave it such impact on arrival was the fact that it was reasonably unknown; it was the ‘third bit’ of the Orange Box, receiving little of the hype that was reserved almost exclusively for its more established siblings, Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2.

Yet it can be argued that Portal was ultimately the best game in that collection, which against those two contenders says something about its quality.  As does the reaction of the internet public; the game pretty much became a meme overnight.  That’s a tough act to follow.

But Portal 2 pulls it off.  Through impeccable design, smart twists and heavy doses of ingenuity, Portal 2 manages to exceed its predecessor in almost every way.  It’s bigger, bolder, funnier and more intelligent.  The one thing it can’t do is recapture that spark of wonder players felt when first witnessing the original.

Portal 2 is the vision of the original, re-imagined as a large-scale blockbuster.  If the original Portal was a technical demo, a proof-of-concept, then Portal 2 is the finished product.  Everything from the first game returns, but this time into a vastly larger, more established environment, rendered massive and impressive by its AAA budget.

The quality of the script was one the greatest surprises of the original Portal – it did what few games ever manage, and was genuinely funny.  Virtually every line of it was re-posted thousands of times over the internet.  It would have been very easy for the writers to play up to this in the sequel – give the fans more cake and companion-cube references, more GlaDOS quotes – and still end up with a satisfying product.

What’s pleasantly surprising is how little the writers relied on these now-established tropes – cakes and companion cubes are mentioned once each, respectively – and instead crafted a script that takes mute protagonist Chell deeper into the world of Aperture Science, whilst delivering a constantly high-standard of humour delivered by a relentlessly perfect voice cast.  Only the ending of the game itself, which comes across a little like a sudden grasp for the heavily meme-able lure of the original, feels a little out of touch with the otherwise stellar writing.

The mechanics of the game have been subtly tightened, removing any minor frustrations of the original – the often-erratic bouncing laser balls have been replaced by solid laser beams, and portals are now automatically aligned to stop you from flying out upside-down or facing backwards – and new mechanics are added constantly throughout, stopping the gameplay from ever becoming dull.

One thing that is not as tight as the original is the structure of the game itself.  This is something of a necessity, being as the original game is a couple of hours long at most, and the sequel almost three times that – six hours of test chambers, however expertly designed, would have become stale long before the end.  The necessary periods of downtime, in which you get to explore behind the scenes of Aperture, are enjoyable in their own right, but lack some of the engagement and challenge of the actual test chambers.  These sections can start to feel like padding at times, and are the weaker part of the game’s whole.

The test chambers themselves, however, are impeccably designed throughout.  They display possibly the best understanding of 3D space in a videogame yet.  The puzzles are great in their own right, but what sets this above similar puzzle games is that the solution to a puzzle is almost always a joy to carry out, even when you’ve cracked the puzzle itself.  The balance between puzzle solving and the physicality of executing the solution is spot-on.

This master class in level-design carries over to the newly-minted cooperative mode.  The co-op features a series of test chambers continuing from the end of the single-player, and is where the game’s hardest challenges lie.  With each player firing two portals, things quickly get complex, but the experience is never overwhelming, and the pleasure of sitting down with a friend and combining brain power to complete a particularly nasty set of challenges makes this mode a welcome addition.

One of the only negatives to the whole experience is that the whole game, both the single player and the co-op, is very much a once-through affair.  It’s a fantastic ride, but one you can blast through in a weekend, and beyond a few hidden easter-eggs or simply the desire to experience the fist-class script again, there’s little reason to return to it.

Also, while each of the game’s new additions - including dynamic reactive goo that and portal-sensitive bridges of light – are executed with the same level of ingenuity as the rest of the game, they feel a bit under-used.  Each element appears for a specific set of chambers, after which it disappears again, only to be combined into a meaningful whole for the game’s final few levels.  What this does mean, however, is that there’s plenty of opportunity to play around with these elements in both future DLC and user-generated mods, both of which will extend the enjoyment of the game months into the future.

Portal 2 is almost perfect, in that it’s likely as close to how the designers intended the original vision as it could possibly be.  Technically, it’s a far more accomplished game than its predecessor.  However, it will likely be the original that lingers longer in the memory, simply because of that scrappy indie flare that it embodied.  That’s something that a sequel, however expertly crafted, will never be able to recapture.

This doesn’t diminish from the fact that Portal 2 is one of the finest examples of a videogame in a long time.  Clever, witty and perfectly executed, it is a game that will stand up against the greatest of this generation, and will be fondly remembered in years to come.

Demon's Souls

(Originally published 05/01/2010) I don’t usually enjoy difficult games.  A videogame deemed ‘hardcore’ sets my teeth on edge.  The term has come to symbolise arbitrary difficulty curves compensating for poor design, upsetting the risk-reward ratio and ultimately leading to frustration.  I’m happy to admit that I am in no way a ‘hardcore’ gamer.  Yet Demon’s Souls, an unashamedly hardcore experience, has become one of my favourite games of this console generation.

Demon’s Souls, whilst relentlessly punishing throughout, is never unfair.  I can count on one hand the number of times I felt I genuinely died unfairly, and believe me, I must have died hundreds of times in my first playthrough.  Demon’s Souls will not hesitate to kill you if you are careless, if you venture forth unprepared, if you rush forward without thinking.  What sets it apart and above other deliberately ‘difficult’ games is that it always the player who is responsible for their demise, and never cheap game design.

The primary reason this works is Demon’s Souls’ superlative combat.  There’s little flash or visual flare to the combat; you equip weapons, shields, wands or talismans in either hand, and use the shoulder buttons to either attack or defend.  This simple system opens up into a complex dance of dodges, parries and ripostes, desperate last-second slashes and fatal impalements.  It connects you with your character in a way few RPGs have done before.

Your first inclination, born of years of video game logic, will be to run in and slash away. Your first inclination will get you killed.  Even the lowliest opponent in Demon’s Souls poses a genuine threat, and fighting any of them in a group is almost suicidal.  Each enemy is almost like a puzzle, requiring you to study their movements, carefully blocking or dodging, then strike at the right moment.  Mess up, and it’s back to the start of the level, reborn in a weakened soul form and minus any hard-earned souls you collected along the way.  The sense of achievement you get for killing even a single opponent at the start is one that most games reserve only for climactic boss battles.

The boss battles in Demon’s Souls are certainly worthy of a mention.  They are the centrepiece of the game, the capstone to each level, and key to achieving your ultimate goal; the eponymous Demon’s Souls.  Each of the game’s 18-or-so bosses is unique, challenging and superbly designed. There are intense one-on-one duels, David and Goliath battles against lumbering giants, and towering demons which fill entire caverns.  They are constantly surprising, each one requiring a different strategy. The feeling you get upon felling one of these monolithic opponents is almost unparalleled in gaming.

This level of originality and masterful design applies to every aspect of the game.  Every level has its own unique form of tension, and you are never allowed to feel comfortable whilst exploring.  Just when you think you are on top of the game, the next level will throw in a new twist, throwing you off-balance and requiring you to master a new skill to get through. By flying in the face of modern game conventions, Demon’s Souls never gets boring.  There is never a point where you feel you have mastered the game, and I played through the whole 40-hour game on the edge of my seat, eagerly anticipating what the game would throw at me next even as I dreaded it inevitably killing me.

Excellent details in the level design mean that while dying always returns you to the start of the level, you can open shortcuts that let you get back to where you were faster than the first time through.  If you die in a boss battle (and you will), you are never more than a 5-minute run away, even if it initially took over an hour to get there.  The process of improving your character is similarly well-balanced, with both stat increases and the purchase of weapons and armour tied into the game’s soul currency.  Choosing how to evolve your character requires careful consideration, and the game accommodates any choice of character.  Should you choose to be a potent sorcerer, a towering barbarian, or anything in between, you will find situations in which you excel, and parts that will be deliciously challenging.

There are countless little intricacies that makes Demon’s Souls great, such as the weapon forging element, the game’s brilliant use of sound, or the unique World Tendency system.  One feature that bears special mention here is the game’s multiplayer element, which is quite unlike anything seen before.  There are no lobbies, clans or friends lists; the multiplayer element happens organically as you play the game.

The world of Demon’s Souls is inhabited by the souls of other players, those who came, fought and died before you.  You’ll find the bloodstains of other player littering the floor, and examining one will reveal how that player died, often giving you a clue as to what to avoid ahead.  Players can leave messages strewn throughout the world, warning each other of dangers ahead.  Benevolent spirits can be summoned from other game-worlds, transforming the experience seamlessly into a cooperative effort.  On the flipside, malicious players in soul-form can invade your world in an attempt to kill you and regain their lost body.  The whole system works wonderfully, adding another layer of tension and mystery to an already deep game.

Demon’s Souls is not perfect.  A clunky and imprecise lock-on system makes some battles frustrating, especially those fought in tight corridors.  Small bugs, such as the occasional disappearance of key NPCs, occasionally mar the experience.  But these are small flaws in a game that is undeniably fantastic.

Demon’s Souls is relentless, brilliant, and relentlessly brilliant.  If you have even a passing interest in RPGs, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up.  I really cannot recommend it highly enough.