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.

Science Fiction in an Interactive Medium

(06/09/2011)  Whilst busy crawling through the many convenient air ducts of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, obsessively hacking everyone's email account and occasionally stopping to give some hapless security guard who no doubt hates his job a few broken limbs and a serious case of concussion, I came to the conclusion that videogames may be the perfect platform for science-fiction stories.

There are two main elements to science fiction, whether on page or screen; the narrative, that is, what the characters are doing, and the idea, the special set of rules that make a specific sci-fi universe unique.  Whether writing for page, screen or stage, the art of writing good science fiction is in the balancing of these two elements.

Focus too much on the narrative at the expense of the idea, and your left with characters navigating a world that seems vague and badly thought out.  Focus too much on the idea, and your left with a detailed and nuanced world populated by boring characters doing nothing much at all.  In my experience with the genre, the balance of narrative and idea is one of the most difficult aspects of writing science fiction.

 Videogames circumvent this issue of balance by allowing the player to control these elements, to govern how much of the world’s lore they want to absorb.  If they’re only interested in the drives of their character and the immediate plot, then they can effectively ignore the world around them and barrel through the main story.  Those of us more inclined to become immersed in a game’s fiction can spent time pawing through every environment, constructing a great mental map of the world the writers’ have built for us.

All the great science fiction games do this, from Deus Ex and Mass Effect through to Half Life and Bioshock.  All of these games build their fictional world by hiding the details away, there to find for those that are willing to search but of no crucial importance to those who would rather just reach the next checkpoint.

By far and away my favourite part of Human Revolution is the way the writers have built their fiction, through liberal dispersion of eBooks, pocket secretaries and emails, strewn throughout the game world waiting to be uncovered by my inquisitive, level-5-lock-hacking fingers.

But I also realise that many people’s favourite part of the game will be a perfectly executed stealth assault, or conquering the next boss, or fully upgrading their pistol.  These people won’t bother seeking out all that hidden information, beyond perhaps promise of an achievement.  What’s great about the interactive format is that it’s entirely possible to cater to any and all audiences.

When writing passive fiction, you’re always going to alienate a section of the possible audience, however finely you strike the balance between narrative and idea.  I can’t write a novel that is at the same time a great action novel and a studied theory of a future society.  I can choose to do one or the other, or strike a compromise and land somewhere in between, an exercise that will still alienate those geared heavily towards one preference or the other.

It is possible for a game to be a great action game and a great story game, however.  A game writer can create content that is both broad and deep, and leave it up the player how they want to experience the story.  It’s a different approach from the games-as-cinema ideal that many modern blockbusters ascribe to, also to the interactive narrative approach hailed by games like Heavy Rain, and, topically, Deus Ex.  The story itself doesn’t have to be interactive, but the way that it is told can be.  The player decides how much of the story they’re willing to absorb, and thus craft their own experience.

RPGs have been doing multi-level storytelling for years, but the trait has now crossed into other genres; even mainstream heavyweights such as Gears Of War and Halo feature optional diaries that fill in the game’s underlying narrative.  Portal’s wall scrawls hint at a deeper plot untouched by GladOS’ narration, there for those who are willing to speculate.  A game doesn’t have to be a ‘story game’ to be a solid work of science fiction, it merely needs those two crucial elements, narrative and idea, and to allow the player the freedom to explore both of these as they see fit.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have facilities to infiltrate, walls to punch through and conspiracies to uncover.  And probably another hundred or so virtual eBooks to read.

 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.

The 3DS Issue

(30/07/2011)  So the 3DS is doing a bit shit in the sales department.  So shit, in fact, that Nintendo have implemented a massive price cut only a few months after the device went on sale.  It would seem that, for the first time since the ill-fated Virtual Boy, (incidentally, the only other gaming device to tout 3D as a selling point) Nintendo have misjudged the handheld market.

Good on trains.

Many voices are citing the runaway success of iOS and Android devices as a reason for the 3DS having such a hard time at retail.  The argument goes that with multi-functional devices now capable of playing games, there is no compelling reason to purchase a stand-alone handheld game device.  I don’t think this is necessarily true; I just think that Nintendo are missing the actual point of handheld gaming.

Handheld gaming is about minutes-long play sessions, something you can blast away on the tube to work and then shove back into your pocket without a second thought.  In the past, this is what Nintendo’s handhelds have offered.  The Gameboy offered Tetris, the seminal timewaster that offers pick-up-put-down value similar to today’s Angry Birds.  Even the bigger games of that generation, like Pokémon, were designed so that they could be played in batches of minutes as well as hours.

As the hardware power of handhelds has increased, with the advent of the DS, the PSP and now 3DS, the design of handheld games has moved more towards a console-lite experience, resulting in games that aren’t nearly as convenient to break out for a ten-minute bus ride.

Also good on trains.

The issue the 3DS is facing is that it’s trying to offer a home-console experience on a handheld; for evidence, look at its most-touted game, a spruced up port of an N64 title.  The limited success of the PSP, often billed as a pocket-sized PS2, seems to indicate that this isn’t the best idea.  Is there anyone out there who really wants to immerse themselves in Zelda whilst on a train journey?  It’s the kind of game designed to devote some serious time to, and if you’re going to devote so much time to a time, wouldn’t you rather do so on a sofa in front of your TV?

The reason games like Angry Birds are so well suited to the handheld experience is that they are just the right sort of thing to play on a reasonable-length journey.  You don’t have to commit more than maybe a couple of minutes at a time, perfect for a busy commute into work.  Zelda, with its checkpoint system that more or less demands you play for at least twenty minutes, is the less appealing option.

Not so good on trains.

The trouble Nintendo have is that they are just doing what they always have done in the past – pushing out the best versions of their key franchises their hardware will allow.  The difference is that in the past, the limitations of the hardware actually played out in their favour, forcing the type of design that leads to a simple, accessible title.  In reality, a full-blooded Mario or Zelda title just isn’t that well suited to what the majority seem to want from a handheld game.

I don’t believe the real issue is iOS and Android devices rendering a new Nintendo handheld irrelevant; I just think the best developers for these devices understand how to make a handheld game better than Nintendo do.