Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

I just finished this game last week, and it was a blast.

As an overall summary, if you liked or hated the first game, you will like or hate the sequel about as much. The graphics are a little prettier and more detailed, the UI has some nice tweaks added, but basically it's the same game with a new storyline.

If you haven't played the first one yet, by all means track down a copy and play it before playing the sequel. Although the high points of the backstory are filled in by the intro movie, it's much more fun (and engaging) to play through them - especially because the sequel must inherently include some spoilers for the plot twists in the original.

My biggest complaint about the game was that it was over a little too fast - only about 20 hours of playtime, taking my time but not including time taken to find and download some new character meshes for custom characters and build their power sets. On the good side, the original game was slightly longer but achieved that by adding some relatively boring fill-in battles just before the big confrontation. This one kept the excitement curve going all the way.

As with the original, you are playing through several related, sequential story arcs of a virtual comic book. The actual time-travelling fights against the Nazis are only about a third of the overall content. To say anything more would be a spoiler.

So, what's new this time around? Probably the most important thing is a refinement on the automatic repeating attacks. In the original, any melee attack would be auto-repeated until the character ran out of endurance. This was bad because it forced you to micromanage ranged-centric characters and those with nice but energy-hungry melee attacks. In the sequel, any attack with no endurance cost will be repeated automatically. Also, the standard characters were tweaked so they all had at least one no-endurance attack to use. This is much nicer, and I found I was much more able to direct combat instead of micromanaging it.

Of less importance is a minor improvement in your characters' AI. They will no longer stand stupidly when being attacked - they will counterattack. The choice of counterattack is less than optimal, though - they pretty much use the first attack on their list, which for all the stock characters is their cheap melee attack. This is better than nothing, but you will still want to pause the game and give orders to any character who you hear saying they are under attack.

There are a few new powers, a couple of which are quite cool. There are a few new characters. In particular, the WWII-era heroes are well-realized, with voice acting and characterization as good (in the same exquisite, cheesey-but-not-quite-too-cheesey way) as the original set. One of the first new additions to Freedom Force proper is particularly handy, a support character with powers to help friends and hinder foes rather than direct attacks.

One nice touch is that the power and character data for all the first game's characters (heroes and villains) is included. This means that you can use old favorite powers even if no character you will encounter has them, and that the presence of a power doesn't spoil whether or not that villain will make a comeback.

Another nice addition which I don't remember being in the first game is a random battle generator for single-player, as well as a fully-implemented multiplayer mode. This was a fine way to playtest custom character designs, and gives the game at least a little life after the storyline is done. (Only a little life, as random battles don't give experience points for future character development.)

All in all, I am very happy I bought this game. It was worth the money and the time to play, and lived up to my expectations and most of my hopes for a FF sequel.

For Freedom!

Guest Review: Oddworld - Stranger's Wrath

While I found watching the original Oddworld game entertaining, it was too arcade-y for me to play so I haven't been watching the series. My good friend Slothman, who is a bit less reflex-challenged than I, just played the most recent game in that series and has some comments on it.

You can read his review at

http://www.livejournal.com/users/slothman/76318.html

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

(This is the reincarnation of the lost review that spawned this blog. It has been a week since I played the game, so some details may be fuzzier than they used to be.)

I guess the most important thing to say about Bloodlines is that it's one of those good games where the worst frustration is seeing how it could have been a great game.

Before I start ragging on its weaknesses, I must stress that this was a fine game. The story is interesting and progresses pretty well, as your PC starts out as a sireless neonate, used as a pawn by various political factions, and grows to become both personally potent and the controlling element in a political crisis.

The general feeling of the White Wolf world, emphasizing shadows and gray morality with a hint of Randian brutal individualism, is brought to life in large and small ways. Most of the game story takes place in four distinct neighborhoods around Los Angeles, with side trips to various one-shot locations. The first two of these areas feel extremely "alive", with lots of interesting side characters and optional quests; the third area and all the subparts of the main story are generally also polished and interesting. There are some fun and creative details all over - when you finally figure out what's going on with the sisters who own the club in Santa Monica it's a nifty twist, for example. My overall impression is that a great deal of loving effort was put into the game, but that they ran out of ideas before they came up with enough to fill in the last area. It is certainly refreshing that the game does not feel "rushed"; the weakness really seems more like running out of energy than of time.

Similarly, there is lots of loving detail in the conversations and voice scripts, though the final areas seem weaker than the earlier ones. Subtle differences occur in conversations depending on your clan, gender, and past actions - and some not so subtle: they actually wrote alternate text for the PC options in every conversation for Malkavians!

And the action/FPS elements are not too stressful even for a diehard turn-based player like me. I could hold my own in most of the fights until the ludicrously-hard final ones (more on that in a moment). For the worst cases there is a built-in cheat console, including an innovative feature I hope to see more often in these sorts of games: "Buddha mode". There is a regular "god mode", where your character is just invulnerable. But in Buddha mode, the game mechanics are entirely normal except you cannot die. If you are reduced to zero hit points, your HP meter flashes red but you can keep going, and eventually heal back up. This is perfect! You get all the feedback on how you are doing, motivation to do as well as you can, and a good chunk of the tension you would get if playing normally, but you aren't punished by endless boring reload-and-retry cycles when the designers failed to tailor the game to your personal skill level.

Having mentioned Buddha mode, I should point out the other big reason to use it. The patch for the game seems to have fixed most of the major bugs, but one pretty annoying one is left. If you die, and take the game's offer to load your last save, you will end up stuck in combat mode, unable to leave it. The only way out is to quit and restart the program. So if you want to play "straight", turn on Buddha mode and then manually reload from save when you would have died as a workaround for the bug.

World of Dimness purists may complain about the game running roughshod over the White Wolf mechanics while keeping the basic character statistics, but this was a very good decision. When you've already made your combat very actiony, adding a to-hit roll on top of aim and world physics would be icky. And the wild variance of the WW system combined with the limits on social/skill interactions in a computer game make the replacement with straight feat vs threshold mechanics much more workable.

Undoubtedly the worst thing about this game is the map/level designs. With significantly better maps this game could have been worthy of mention in the same breath as the original Deus Ex. The overall story is as good (if not quite as elaborate), the basic ability to choose character direction is present, and even the overall theme of the pawn who grows to become a player is there. But, sadly, it fails. Many of the maps are visually and tactically interesting; a couple are so well-realized and immersive that they gave me shivers. But every single one is totally linear, with almost no room for exploration, let alone rewards for it. Some maps require stealth, some require raw firepower, none let you meaningfully choose between them. None give you interesting options like sniping and the only ones where clever use of the environment can save you grief, practically force you to see that "clever" choice. One particularly annoying map gives you a blatantly-obvious stealth approach around a bunch of heavily-armed guards, and even rewards you with extra experience for successfully stealing a target object without being detected - but doesn't provide a stealthy exit path so you end up fighting all those enemies at once in order to get back out.

The single-track maps are particularly disappointing because the character generation and development system is fairly wide open. Like the Fallouts or Arcanum, you can make a character with your own mix of stealth, brute force, and social ability. The difference is, that choice doesn't extend into gameplay. Social characters get the opportunities for some extra experience by finding superior solutions to thorny political problems, can con NPCs out of money, etc. Stealth characters can get some extra goodies by picking locks and hacking computers. But then they have to fight through an entire apartment building full of zombies, room by room with no shortcuts, exactly like the combat monsters. And the combat monsters still have to sneak past alert guards patrolling narrow spaces in covert missions.

To give them some credit, I think the idea was that various characters would not take various missions. The extra experience rewards from social solutions are generally equal to those from the high-stealth or combat-heavy ones. But first of all, there is generally no way to tell what a given side mission requires until you've accepted it - or sometimes until you get well into it. Secondly, separate missions for separate characters is just not satisfying. The Deus Ex approach, where all characters get the same goals but each goal can be met multiple ways, makes a much better game.

As the swan song for Troika, I suppose it's only fitting that Bloodlines suffers the flaw that has marked every one of their games - a letdown of an ending. There are five different endings for the game, branching at a choice point where you must decide which faction you will back (or perhaps that you will back none at all, getting yourself out of the situation and then walking away). But the first problem is that you make this decision at the beginning of the endgame, and then face a series of extremely ugly fights that is basically identical for every ending in order to actually accomplish your choice. Depending on the choice you make, you might skip one of these fights, but if you really want to see the possible endings you will be repeating the most tedious and un-fun part of the game five times over.

The final cutscenes are also just too anticlimactic. The "best" ending, for example, has a great homage to Raiders of the Lost Ark in it. But sadly, the voiceover is delivered with a total lack of conviction and the visuals are a little weak, and it just doesn't feel right. It needed to be done with more passion, and about twice as long.

That's not the worst of it. The plot of the game centers on a specific McGuffin and political differences over who should control it and what should be done with it. An attentive player will notice the clues that all of the feuding factions are mistaken about the McGuffin, and even if they back a faction that prefers to "push the button" may not want to be in the near vicinity when said option is taken. But despite all that, the endgame removes that choice. Choosing a faction that wants to do the thing forces you to be there when they do it. So of the five endings, two result in Something Bad happening to your character after you win - despite the fact that in-character you would have gotten out of there. And actually, one of the other three isn't really all that happy either. Really, the designers had an idea that there was only one "right" choice, and they punish you for doing anything different. That fundamental disrespect for the choice they themselves gave you really detracts from the endings more than the lame implementation does.


In summary, I'm glad I bought and played this game, but I'm also glad I didn't pay a premium price for it or race out to get it in breathless anticipation. It's a good game, it's fun and (at least with god mode turned on for the final fights) worth the playtime, but the weak endings and the overall feeling that with better map/level/sidequest design it could have been a true landmark game leaves me more ambivalent than I like to be after finishing a game.

Xenosaga II (first thoughts)

The US version of this game finally arrived at my door this week, with perfect timing as I come down from a massive crunch at work and consequent feelings of reluctance to sit in front of my PC, even for a game.

If you haven't played the first game in this series, go find a copy (it's been rereleased in "classics" format). The combat system is satisfying, and there are significant strategic choices to make in character development which made the game very satisfying overall. It also has an extremely well-developed story, though in the first installment you will find yourself with many many unanswered questions even after you finish the game.

On the downside, much of the story depth comes from long dramatic cutscenes. A couple are over ten minutes long. This is only an extreme case of the traditional console RPG concept, where you play fights between story segments and have no real control over the overall story, but it's not for every player. The game art is also a bit more anime-styled than purely realistic, which turns some folks off.

In any event, even if you don't like it, the original is a seminal game and worthy of a place on a collector's or historian's shelf.


So, what about the new installment?

First, they have clearly paid attention to players' comments about the game. The ratio of cutscenes to playtime is still a bit high, but not as dramatically as before. So far, the longest cutscene was only a couple of minutes, and the historical narratives (of which there are necessarily quite a few in a story this complex) have been done as voiceovers on action footage instead of talking heads in the present.

The combat system has been made more complex, with a couple more variables to juggle, even as they drastically simplified the character development system. Instead of tracking money/equipment, experience, "tech points", "ether points", and "skill points" outside of combat you have only the skill points plus regular experience. The downside is that characters are much less customizable (MOMO will always be low on hitpoints, Ziggy will never be able to get much use from spell...I mean "ethers", etc.), but the upside is that you spend a lot less playtime on logistics (buying and selling equipment, upgrading mechs, "farming" specific enemies for the type of development points you need, etc.).

The visuals have been completely redone in a much more realistic mode. This is gorgeous by PS2 standards, really pushing the limits of the platform. Along the way they made many of the characters more distinctive - KOS-MOS is more human-looking, Chaos more boyish, Jr. easier to mistake for a child at first glance, and especially Shion is now a believable-if-pretty young woman instead of a half-girl half-stereotypical-professor mismatch.

And Monolith clearly realized that they left a few too many unanswered questions in the first game. This time around we seem to be getting a bit more context on things (especially in flashbacks) so we the players are not scratching our heads about things that the characters in the world take for granted. Many of the mysteries of that annoying type from the first game are clarified in the first few hours of this one, leaving you much more room to appreciate the mysteries that are central to the story.


So far, I do have one concern about the new combat system. Despite the slightly richer mechanics and options, it appears that there is a "best" approach to combat that works better than any other options. The way the "guard break" mechanics work, if a fight is any sort of challenge you pretty much have to spend the first few turns stocking up "stock" (read action points) for all your characters so they can deliver maximally effective guard-breaking attacks. Lather, rinse, repeat once per foe in the combat and things get pretty boring pretty fast. I'm hoping that as I advance further and open up more of the character skills there will be equally effective approaches to choose from. Maybe have MOMO or Shion blast with ethers matched to the enemy elemental weaknesses while the other characters support them, or something.

I also really miss the "tech attacks" from the first game. The replacement, special combo attacks available when specific pairs of characters are in the fight, looks like it will eventually be as cool and powerful. But because each attack must be opened individually, you don't start with any to use. And more annoying, these attacks require both characters to have "stock" saved up, so you will still have to open each fight the same old way.

The other combat annoyance is that they've added just enough of a realtime element to get on my nerves. When FFX-2 backtracked on true TB combat it was a dirty shame, and the biggest reason I never bought the game. This isn't that much of a killer, but it's damn annoying. Both optimal use of the "break" mechanics and any use at all of the duo-combo attacks require you to carefully synchronize two PC's combat turns via use of Boost. But here's the annoyance: If you stop to think longer than about 2 seconds during your turn, one of the enemies will automatically Boost. As in the first game, enemy Boost overrides yours, so the very act of trying to plan something makes it impossible. I haven't gotten pissed enough at this to quit playing, but it is certainly contributing to an overall feeling that they've managed to dumb down the combat despite adding extra mechanics to it.

Introduction

Welcome to my reviews blog. I welcome interesting, useful comments on my reviews, but I ask you to refrain from ones too short to have value. As much as "U ROXXOR DUDE" may be complimentary, it won't help other readers decide whether a game is worth their time; and as much as "That game SUCKS" may make you feel better, if you can't explain what you didn't like you won't be helping anybody either.

This posting is something of a placeholder. I started this blog because I spent an hour yesterday on a review of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and it got eaten when the blog service I use for my personal blog had problems.

I hope to rewrite that review and post it sometime in the next few days. I also want to write about KOTOR2. And my copy of Xenosaga II just arrived and I hope to play it some in the next few weeks, despite a crunch at work which is stealing much of my gaming time.