Hi. Remember me? Yeah? well, the Digimon Tamers and F.E.A.R 2 review aren?t coming anytime soon since a little while ago my laptop finally croaked. This on top of my dog has made it a really fucking rotten summer, and it?s also on top of the cooks at my favorite restaurant singing ?Happy Birthday? to America when I went out to eat on July 4th. Fuck your disingenuous patriotism; I?m trying to kill myself with beer and sausage! Anyway this time though I can pin the death of my laptop on those evil bastards at Amazon. I was already royally pissed at them for trying to charge $80 for Phoenix Wright: Justice for All never warning me it sucked and I already played the good Ace Attorney games, but when my laptop?s AC adaptor began shorting out and I tried to put a rush order on a new one, not only did Amazon steal close to $80 from my account the item they sent me WASN?T compatible with my laptop despite website claims that it was, so my laptop ultimately died after I found out the manufacturer no longer acknowledged the existence of my specific model and I couldn?t find the right part. While I?m going through a few other electronic retailers to try and revive her so I can back up my old files to my new laptop, for now all my footage has been lost and we?re starting these reviews from scratch.
?which also means I lost my research and have been pushed back on another writing project. Fucking Amazon!
So anyway making a review for no other reason than to prove I?m alive, i can deliver some news that my new laptop has some HD capabilities and a processor introduced six months ago, so she?s powerful enough to run low-end PC games, so with that in mind here?s a review of two demos I downloaded from Steam: Bastion and Sniper Elite V2.
Bastion is a game Zero Punctuation fans and Steam users will be intimately familiar with most likely because it was one of the best games released last year according to some. For those who don?t know Bastion is a top-down action game about a post-apocalyptic world where you control some kid who has to fix the world using a device called the Bastion. The world had apparently been blown to bits and the Bastion somehow allows the kid to put the world back together. Most of the game takes place on floating platforms that form beneath your feet as you travel and a lot of the enemies are monsters that were once trapped underground but are now free since, you know, world is in pieces and all. The game gives you two weapons and a shield for counterattacks and for the most part it?s a basic yet inventive hack-and-slash game, but that?s not where it sticks out.
Though this isn?t overly apparent in the free demo one of the more interesting aspects of Bastion is how it?s narrated. Now I alluded to this in my BioShock review, but video games are essentially interactive storytelling and how the story is told can make or break a game. Bastion has an adaptive narrative where the story adjusts to the players behavior, and it?s all told with an absurdly sexy voice. I don?t know who the hell is providing voices but if you have a computer strong enough for gaming Bastion is worth checking out for narration alone. Plus, while not completely world changing the gameplay is generally fun and what glimpse I saw of the story have me planning on downloading the full version once my pay comes in next month, so I guess that makes Bastion an effective demo since it makes me want to see the rest of the tale. Plus there?s a colorful yet melancholic feel to it all that made me very happy in my pants.
Next up is Sniper Elite V2, a World War 2 era tactical shooter made by Rebellion, a company that is either inventive or fucking dreadful. I?ll say right now that it fails in what it sets out to do since it tries to be a realistic dramatic stealth based shooter where you use tactics and traps to survive being woefully outnumbered and outgunned since bolt action sniper rifles within fifty-meter combat are hard to use, though it lacks the precision aiming capabilities of Metal Gear Solid games so using pistols for quiet kills is damn near impossible since your character is such an awful shot with anything not scoped. Basically if you?re not spamming the bullet time mechanic and your sniper rifle, you?re fucked.
Anyway the demo plays through most of what I think might be the second level of the game. From what I know Sniper Elite V2 takes place during the ending days of the European front of World War 2 and concerns the construction of the V2 rocket, your objective is to kill rocket scientists who would be left out in the open after the Nazi?s collapse before Russia can get it?s hands on them. Yahtzee commented on Russia and the U.S not being at war at the time, but I actually don?t find this too hard to swallow since the U.S and Russia were never fond of each other and the nuclear arms race was already underway before we dropped the bombs, in fact I?ve heard it theorized a few times that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just as much to intimidate Russia since by that point Japan didn?t have much of a foot to stand on and were going to surrender anyway. But that?s a bit of a loaded topic since some people would like to shove their heads up their asses and pretend the U.S never committed an atrocity while I like to remind people that the U.S is a country consisting of people, and people suck.
But that?s not what we?re here for. Sniper Elite V2 is an over the shoulder shooter with mechanics that can sort of be described as Metal Gear Solid meets Call of Duty, enemies react to sound and tend to track your last known location instead of psychically knowing where you are at all times unless they?re enemy snipers who seem to spawn in after you pass a checkpoint since they?ve popped up in areas I?ve scanned prior and never aided fellow soldiers in shootouts since they almost always start shooting at me while I?m crawling over the corpses of Nazis with ventilated skulls.
?they also all suck and very politely refuse to shoot at me unless I?m moving because Jah forbid they take a shot while I?m swiping ammo from corpses. And on that subject, why are Nazis who are using submachine guns carrying American rifle cartridges?
Whatever. As far as the actual shooting goes since you?re using a bolt action rifle the theory is to carefully time and place your shots so that one hit kills instantly and there was background noise loud enough to mask your rifle?s report and the enemies don?t discover your nest. There is a reactive physics engine as well where you have to adjust your aim for drop-off and wind interference, only all the shots you are making are in such close quarters you wouldn?t think you would need to make such dramatic aim corrections. When you do shoot it?s almost always clear where the shot impacted so you can correct your aim with the next one assuming the Nazis aren?t on you by then and you have to reposition, well okay assuming the Nazis can actually hit you and you need to move since they tend to be even worse shots than the player character and i was able to kill all the enemies in my first encounter just by lying prone and shooting them as soon as they peaked out of cover since bullet time recovers quickly and like I said, shit aim.
Speaking of bullet time aside from the shooting mechanics and an alleged stealth mechanic that shoddy gameplay with no tutorial kept me from using is a Mortal Kombat X-Ray mechanic where successful one-shot kills get a cutaway kill animation, sort of like when you use V.A.T.S in Fallout 3 only it will also sometimes show x-ray damage of what the bullet is doing inside the enemies body. Here?s the weird thing, while the animation clearly shows catastrophic damage the version I played had no dismemberment physics and no persistent wound decals, even when the x--ray attack shows I hit the cervical vertebre and the enemies neck was blown to bits their heads stay attached and if you manage to shoot an enemy grenade it will explode and you will see the x-ray animation of bones being splintered by raw kinetic force from the explosion, but even when we see that the enemies legs should be vaporized and that only meaty chunks should remain, the bodies stay in tact, so I gotta wonder why they even bothered.
Unlike Bastion, I can?t recommend Sniper Elite V2. Without a tutorial I didn?t know what the fuck I was doing until I reached context sensitive areas, and while the sniper rifle mechanics are needlessly finicky since I don?t think bullets as fast as sniper rifle rounds are affected that heavily by the elements at the enclosed area the game generates, using any other weapon is damn near impossible and unless your close enough that the absurdly wide crosshairs completely engulf an enemy?s head stealth kills are almost impossible to make unless you rely on the background noise, so while it does take some nice steps this probably is a game that would have worked better with iron sight aiming or tighter firing since you?re working in close enough ranges that the whole sniper thing isn?t necessary.
Anyway that?s all for now. Next week I should be back to console game reviews and hopefully back to animation reviews, but I can?t promise too much. If nothing else, at least I get relief in knowing Bastion is pretty good.
You wanna know the sad thing? I lost the draft to my F.E.A.R review but the draft to my Sims 3 review survived.
--Pyramid Head
Next Game Review: Metal Gear Solid 3: HD Edition
Next Non-Game Review: Analogue: A Hate Story
?which also means I lost my research and have been pushed back on another writing project. Fucking Amazon!
So anyway making a review for no other reason than to prove I?m alive, i can deliver some news that my new laptop has some HD capabilities and a processor introduced six months ago, so she?s powerful enough to run low-end PC games, so with that in mind here?s a review of two demos I downloaded from Steam: Bastion and Sniper Elite V2.
Bastion is a game Zero Punctuation fans and Steam users will be intimately familiar with most likely because it was one of the best games released last year according to some. For those who don?t know Bastion is a top-down action game about a post-apocalyptic world where you control some kid who has to fix the world using a device called the Bastion. The world had apparently been blown to bits and the Bastion somehow allows the kid to put the world back together. Most of the game takes place on floating platforms that form beneath your feet as you travel and a lot of the enemies are monsters that were once trapped underground but are now free since, you know, world is in pieces and all. The game gives you two weapons and a shield for counterattacks and for the most part it?s a basic yet inventive hack-and-slash game, but that?s not where it sticks out.
Though this isn?t overly apparent in the free demo one of the more interesting aspects of Bastion is how it?s narrated. Now I alluded to this in my BioShock review, but video games are essentially interactive storytelling and how the story is told can make or break a game. Bastion has an adaptive narrative where the story adjusts to the players behavior, and it?s all told with an absurdly sexy voice. I don?t know who the hell is providing voices but if you have a computer strong enough for gaming Bastion is worth checking out for narration alone. Plus, while not completely world changing the gameplay is generally fun and what glimpse I saw of the story have me planning on downloading the full version once my pay comes in next month, so I guess that makes Bastion an effective demo since it makes me want to see the rest of the tale. Plus there?s a colorful yet melancholic feel to it all that made me very happy in my pants.
Next up is Sniper Elite V2, a World War 2 era tactical shooter made by Rebellion, a company that is either inventive or fucking dreadful. I?ll say right now that it fails in what it sets out to do since it tries to be a realistic dramatic stealth based shooter where you use tactics and traps to survive being woefully outnumbered and outgunned since bolt action sniper rifles within fifty-meter combat are hard to use, though it lacks the precision aiming capabilities of Metal Gear Solid games so using pistols for quiet kills is damn near impossible since your character is such an awful shot with anything not scoped. Basically if you?re not spamming the bullet time mechanic and your sniper rifle, you?re fucked.
Anyway the demo plays through most of what I think might be the second level of the game. From what I know Sniper Elite V2 takes place during the ending days of the European front of World War 2 and concerns the construction of the V2 rocket, your objective is to kill rocket scientists who would be left out in the open after the Nazi?s collapse before Russia can get it?s hands on them. Yahtzee commented on Russia and the U.S not being at war at the time, but I actually don?t find this too hard to swallow since the U.S and Russia were never fond of each other and the nuclear arms race was already underway before we dropped the bombs, in fact I?ve heard it theorized a few times that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just as much to intimidate Russia since by that point Japan didn?t have much of a foot to stand on and were going to surrender anyway. But that?s a bit of a loaded topic since some people would like to shove their heads up their asses and pretend the U.S never committed an atrocity while I like to remind people that the U.S is a country consisting of people, and people suck.
But that?s not what we?re here for. Sniper Elite V2 is an over the shoulder shooter with mechanics that can sort of be described as Metal Gear Solid meets Call of Duty, enemies react to sound and tend to track your last known location instead of psychically knowing where you are at all times unless they?re enemy snipers who seem to spawn in after you pass a checkpoint since they?ve popped up in areas I?ve scanned prior and never aided fellow soldiers in shootouts since they almost always start shooting at me while I?m crawling over the corpses of Nazis with ventilated skulls.
?they also all suck and very politely refuse to shoot at me unless I?m moving because Jah forbid they take a shot while I?m swiping ammo from corpses. And on that subject, why are Nazis who are using submachine guns carrying American rifle cartridges?
Whatever. As far as the actual shooting goes since you?re using a bolt action rifle the theory is to carefully time and place your shots so that one hit kills instantly and there was background noise loud enough to mask your rifle?s report and the enemies don?t discover your nest. There is a reactive physics engine as well where you have to adjust your aim for drop-off and wind interference, only all the shots you are making are in such close quarters you wouldn?t think you would need to make such dramatic aim corrections. When you do shoot it?s almost always clear where the shot impacted so you can correct your aim with the next one assuming the Nazis aren?t on you by then and you have to reposition, well okay assuming the Nazis can actually hit you and you need to move since they tend to be even worse shots than the player character and i was able to kill all the enemies in my first encounter just by lying prone and shooting them as soon as they peaked out of cover since bullet time recovers quickly and like I said, shit aim.
Speaking of bullet time aside from the shooting mechanics and an alleged stealth mechanic that shoddy gameplay with no tutorial kept me from using is a Mortal Kombat X-Ray mechanic where successful one-shot kills get a cutaway kill animation, sort of like when you use V.A.T.S in Fallout 3 only it will also sometimes show x-ray damage of what the bullet is doing inside the enemies body. Here?s the weird thing, while the animation clearly shows catastrophic damage the version I played had no dismemberment physics and no persistent wound decals, even when the x--ray attack shows I hit the cervical vertebre and the enemies neck was blown to bits their heads stay attached and if you manage to shoot an enemy grenade it will explode and you will see the x-ray animation of bones being splintered by raw kinetic force from the explosion, but even when we see that the enemies legs should be vaporized and that only meaty chunks should remain, the bodies stay in tact, so I gotta wonder why they even bothered.
Unlike Bastion, I can?t recommend Sniper Elite V2. Without a tutorial I didn?t know what the fuck I was doing until I reached context sensitive areas, and while the sniper rifle mechanics are needlessly finicky since I don?t think bullets as fast as sniper rifle rounds are affected that heavily by the elements at the enclosed area the game generates, using any other weapon is damn near impossible and unless your close enough that the absurdly wide crosshairs completely engulf an enemy?s head stealth kills are almost impossible to make unless you rely on the background noise, so while it does take some nice steps this probably is a game that would have worked better with iron sight aiming or tighter firing since you?re working in close enough ranges that the whole sniper thing isn?t necessary.
Anyway that?s all for now. Next week I should be back to console game reviews and hopefully back to animation reviews, but I can?t promise too much. If nothing else, at least I get relief in knowing Bastion is pretty good.
You wanna know the sad thing? I lost the draft to my F.E.A.R review but the draft to my Sims 3 review survived.
--Pyramid Head
Next Game Review: Metal Gear Solid 3: HD Edition
Next Non-Game Review: Analogue: A Hate Story