(The following review is from an unprofessional blogger. All expressed opinions, viewpoints and criticisms are all the blogger's personal perspective.
Please ask me for permission before reposting, retweeting, reblogging or otherwise sharing this post.
Please do not doxx, harass or otherwise bother Brianna Wu or the developer Giant SpaceKat especially by linking this review to them.
Also, this review will contain spoilers for Revolution 60, Mass Effect, The Walking Dead: Season 1 and Life is Strange.).
Assassin Holiday is part of an elite special forces operation. Holiday, as well as Minuete and Valentina make up the crew of Chessboard. Their mission: to infiltrate a space station called N313, currently orbiting above China before an international incident takes place.
"Revolution 60" advertised itself as being a combination of "Heavy Rain" and "Mass Effect" (and it shows with Holiday walking around in her Miranda Lawson catsuit). Throughout the game, Holiday will be prompted by various choices and decisions that the game warns us will have dire consequences.
As such, I personally feel it is appropriate to judge it by other 'cinematic games' where choice is the main focus. Mainly, I choose to compare Revolution 60 to games from developers of Bioware, Quantic Dream, Telltale Games and Dontnot Entertainment.
The thing is, I'm not one of types who chastises games for choosing to have be more like interactive movies. I like Mass Effect. I like Telltale games. I like Life is Strange. I even, on occasion, like Indigo Prophecy and other David Cage titles. And I love the convenience of being able to play those games on my iPhone.
And I want more diversity in gaming. Women, social minorities, LGBT and other characters would be great for critical analysis.
So, when I heard about this game, it seemed right up my alley. I was fully prepared to enjoy this game.
...And was ultimately disappointed by the end results. In some ways, I feel like a bully. Putting an indie studio's first game through the ringer seems somewhat cruel. But then, I always recall that even the independent gaming scene is filled with the likes of Lucas Pope's Papers Please or the excellent Stanley Parable or the great Bastion. And where those games seem like a polished finished product allowing alternatives to the AAA gaming scene, Revolution 60 felt like it needed a bit more last minute work to be fully acceptable.
Before we continue, let me address the question many critics are wondering.
Yes, there is strong female representation here. But, so what? So what if the game passes the Bechdel Test? Representation's simply one element. There are bad games that can pass the Bechdel test just as there are immensely superb games that fail it, as well as many variations in-between. We've also established that the Bechdel test doesn't necessarily mean it's a good measure of femininity.
It's as if Brianna Wu and her creative team were so focused on creating a female character, they forgot to create an actual or good character that just happened to be female.
And even within the realm of games with a female protagonist, it comes up short against character-focused stories such as Life is Strange. I knew more about Max Caulfield and Chloe Price in one 2-hour episode than I did anyone of Revolution 60's characters the entire time I played Revolution 60. (Then again, Max and Chloe have the benefit of appearing in a slower paced game.)
Gameplay: Gameplay is broken up into different sections: combat when Holiday is facing potential enemies, proficiency tests where the player must swipe the touch pad during a limited time, exploration and dialogue trees, similar to the games mentioned above.
Combat is best described as Megaman Battle Network: Lite. It's mainly grid based where the player taps areas where Holiday is and moves based on those areas and fires her gun. Meanwhile the enemy combatant can move and fire his/her weapon as well. If Holiday builds up her meter enough, she can perform combos in which she must past more proficiency tests to do higher damage.
This would be very interesting if the enemy variety wasn't severely lacking. At best you'll fight maybe 6 different enemies, 3 of which are just straight up copies of one another, only with different weapons. Worse yet, when the combat does get interesting and does start to add variety, the game is practically over.
There's a light RPG portion in which Holiday levels up and can unlock skills or passives (such as improving health or unlocking a 'charge' ability) to improve combat. But since there's so little variety and combat only occurs when dictated by the game design, it's fairly limited.
During the game, Holiday will be met with several proficiency challenges, requiring the player to swipe or tap the screen in succession where Holiday will earn proficiency points. If a challenge is failed, the prompt will reset and Holiday will earn less proficiency points. If Holiday lacks enough proficiency, the game warns "the results will be disastrous" and will affect the ending you receive. (Though, in my opinion, it does tend to create a Narm moment. If Holiday doesn't move these crates fast enough, she'll face dire consequences!)
Then, there's exploration. Instead of holding or swiping the side of the touch screen to move Holiday, you hold and move the camera from a third-person perspective and tap green circles to move to the next mission objective or a yellow circle to move back to previous locations or optional places. Along the way, Holiday will come across med kits that can revive her if she loses all her HP in combat or encrypted disks, containing high value intelligence, that can help gain more favor with either Amelia or Minuete. The encrypted disks would be interesting if they didn't give so little affection (only 2 points). Even then, the game constantly wants you to commit to a side (They even do it in the loading screen. Pick a side or you'll get caught in a crossfire) so trying to trick the system to gain points with Minuete and Amelia is a wasted effort.
The game features a choice based system. Throughout the game, Holiday will be prompted with dialogue wheels. Sometimes it will be a moral choice between the green morally upright "Professional" and the darker, harsher "Rebel" (I think the nod to Mass Effect's own Paragon/Renegade system is obvious). As the game progresses, dialogue options will become available to Holiday the more points she has in each category (the same way a Charm or Intimidate option will become available in Mass Effect with enough Paragon/Renegade points). One such example, Holiday can choose to either deactivate her opponents or shoot them out the airlock into space.
To me, this is the portion of the product that feels the most dated, at least compared to other choice based games. I don't know how long this game was in production, it certainly feels like a long time and since then, the world has changed. The binary black vs. white/good vs. evil has been done to death already and the nebulous grey areas of morality are being explored. In 2004, Kotor 2 was already subverting morality systems by questioning if the good choice was the actual good choice by doing an NPC's work for them. But in 2014, when Revolution 60 was released? In a Post-Infamous, Post-SWTOR, Post-Mass Effect 3 ending, Post-Walking Dead age? It feels ancient. Never mind that the choice based games that have come out after 2014 have managed to raise expectations.
This sort of binary thinking has given way to choices in which the player questions morality. Here's a quote from Robert McKee's story for reference.
Here's another. Lee Everett is scavenging for food. He sees a woman going to be eaten by walkers (zombies) and screaming loudly. Lee must decide whether to let the woman die, buying him a few more crucial seconds to find more supplies or kill her out of mercy, stopping her pain but leaving a gunshot so loud it attracts walkers towards him. What if he misses? Wouldn't he want to be put out the same way if he were in that situation? What if he takes the shots and because of that, he misses crucial supplies?
And one more: in Life is Strange Max Caulfield is hiding in Chloe Price's room. The scene can play out in a variety of ways but if Max is hiding in the closet, she'll see Chloe's stepfather yell at her and accuse her of smoking marijuana. If Max decides to stay in the closet, Chloe will be slapped and emotionally hurt that Max did not intervene. If Max intervenes and says it was her marijuana joint, she'll risk her scholarship program and may not be able to attend Blackwell, the school she's dreamed of attending. Does she risk her academic career for a friend she hasn't seen for some odd years?
That's an actual dilemma.
Another part of the point scoring is that Holiday must either earn favor with either Minuete or Amelia to get a good ending. I like this much better than the binary morality system, but the game does such a rushed job on explaining who these characters are, it's hard to side with either of them. Instead, it keeps giving up peripheral details such as Amelia's military history or Minuete's father being a senator instead of giving up the good material: Amelia's technological prowess matched with her sarcasm and Minuete's strict adherence to the rules. It's established but never explored to the extent I wanted it to.
Another criticism the game has faced is the use of skinny female models in impractical dresses. Again, I don't mind this part. Whatever the dresses might look like or the models appear, what's important is that they get the characters down.
Voice Acting: There's a variety of voice actresses playing the parts. Jill Melancon plays Holiday, Marieve Herington voices Amelia and Heidi Drennan voices Minuete.
Crimson 09, however, deserves special recognition. That's Amanda Winn Lee, who you may recognize from such works as Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rally Vincent from Gunsmith Cats or maybe most famously, Yukiko Amagi from Persona 4.
Sadly, most of these characters are your basic archetypes: As mentioned before, Minuete is the bossy one, Amelia is the sarcastic one, Holiday is the latest iteration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not only that, there simply isn't enough time in the game to explore the full range or at least a broad spectrum of their emotional and moral spectrum. (To be fair, a lot of games do rely on character archetypes to tell their stories. Bioware has been guilty of this as well. However, at least in Bioware games, there's enough downtime, pacing and character banter to flesh out the various archetypes. In the short span I've seen these characters, they still appear as broad and basic to me).
Oddly enough, it's Crimson 09 that ends up having the most personality of the bunch. She's your basic rogue AI gone wild mixed in with a little Handsome Jack (what with taunting you over your tac cam), but Amanda Winn Lee does such an amazing job voicing her, I can't help but think the villain being made interesting is entirely her own doing.
Graphics: Much criticism has been laid on Revolution 60's artstyle and the fact it raised $400,000 on Kickstarter and the final product looks unfinished. I'm willing to entertain that it's entirely possible that the budget did go towards this game. It may suggest a misallocation of resources or using them incorrectly, but I don't think Brianna Wu stole the money. Unless I have definitive proof through an income statement or a balance sheet where those funds went, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
When I say the graphics are lacking, I don't mean that in a Framerate per Second or lack of details way. Lots of great games can get by without having Call of Duty's graphics. I've often praised Telltale for choosing to create a cartoonish/comic book inspired graphics that, while lacking in technical detail, aid in creating a specific aesthetic that works. (See also: Lucas Pope's excellent Papers Please).
Sadly, Revolution 60 chooses to constantly bring these graphics in the spotlight. They constantly repeat Holiday's martial arts to highlight (which is a mistake in my opinion). When the characters are in motion, you can just tell when something doesn't mesh right. Worse, when the game goes into full cutscene mode, the drop in detail becomes noticeable. It felt like I was watching an advertisement for those computer animation colleges and this was a work-in-progress. I did think the space ships and some of the designs looked nice.
You know how in other games there's a chapter select or an allowance for multiple saves where you can go back to a specific point and re-do the scene to see how it plays out differently? Revolution 60 doesn't have that. Instead, the game auto-saves as you progress. If you want to see how differently things turn out, you'll have to restart the game all over again. I wouldn't mind this if the game notified me when the game had saved (like a little cursor mark Telltale has). Instead, I have to pause the game, go to saved games and see if the game saved properly or not.
And with only 3 save spots, I felt my gameplay experience was very limited.
Story: But, if all the flaws were purely technical, I could've looked past that. Like I said, even stories with buggy content can be looked past if there's a narrative so emotionally engaging that you're invested in it. After all, two of my favorite games were the unfinished Kotor II and the buggy Fallout: New Vegas. Unlike graphics, soundtracks, gameplay or voice acting, you don't need large resources or capital to tell a good story. What you do need is commitment and talking points to beat it out.
Sadly, Revolution 60 lacks that as well. Mind you, I'm not referring to various plot holes or gaps in story logic. Lots of famous stories, including Steven Spielberg ones, can survive the occasional unexplained plot hole. (Remember Jurassic Parks infamous "Spared no Expense except for this one guy who happens to code the entire park's security" plothole?) The key is to hold emotional engagement.
I think Giant Spacekat, the studio behind Revolution 60 made the mistake of world-building first and foremost rather than making engaging characters to make us care about the setting. As Holiday progresses through N313, she shares dialogue with her various teammates. So much of this dialogue is spent establishing how everything works and otherwise laying out the specific details in the world that I think Giant Spacekat forgot that you couldn"t possibly care about the world unless the characters they're filled with are interesting (or at least enough personality to compensate for being so broad and archetypal). (Or another possibility would be to bring those problems into the conflict instead of simply referencing them. For example, in Dragon Age, the Warden had to experience the plight of both the Dalish and City elves to get a perspective and complete the game. It's world-building through the narrative. Then again, that could also be a strain on resources and I'm not sure if Giant SpaceKat could afford it.)
It'd be one thing if Revolution 60 was attempting to be vague or obscure on purpose, like the Scythian from Swords and Sworcerey, but after being advertised and marketed as Heavy Rain meets Mass Effect, it's clear that we're supposed to think of Amelia, Minuete and Valentina as fondly as we did Garrus, Tali, Wrex, Miranda Lawson, James Vega or any other Bioware companion.
I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears mentioning again. The biggest problem, to me at least, comes near the end. So consider whatever beyond this point a spoiler.
Ah, and yes, there is the whole we have more variations than Mass Effect 3 thing. Yes, dear readers, the ending of Mass Effect 3 was stupid, nonsensical and lame. But, up until that particular point, the game held my interest. If Mass Effect hadn't done a good enough job in creating character bonds, backstory, emotional investment and had a bad ending, I wouldn't care regardless. The fact that Bioware did such a good job on creating a universe made me care.
And you don't need ending variations to create a good game. Yes, it's fine if a game can give those to you (like Fallout: New Vegas or the excellent Witcher franchise), but a good story doesn't need that if it tells a story effectively enough. For example, Telltale's original The Walking Dead game has only 2 ending variations: Leave Lee or Kill Lee. It's few, but effective.
Honestly, there's very little variety in the endings themselves as well as emotional catharsis. I'm sure the choices be interesting to witness when the sequel (yes, there is a sequel planned) comes out but for now, I'm left feeling a bit cold.
Conclusion: It's hard to recommend Revolution 60, even at its low price. I'm not entirely sure how long it took the game to be produced, but it definitely feels like a product of its time. Gaming, especially mobile gaming, has changed dramatically since the past few years. Brianna Wu's inspirations have made it to the iPhone and Android platforms. If I wanted to play Bioware's binary morality simulator, I could just play Kotor again. If I wanted to see choice and interactive storytelling done right, I could just play a Telltale game again. And yes, if I wanted to play a David Cage title, I could just play Indigo Prophecy again.
I want to close out saying that while I appreciate Mrs. Brianna Wu and her studios efforts to put more female characters in the spotlight, I do think they've got a long way to go before they make a quality title. But, this stumble could be an effective stepping stone. After all, Telltale's Jurassic Park was regarded as a bad game before Telltale used the best elements from that to make their award winning and critically acclaimed The Walking Dead game.
Keep on producing, and maybe you'll get somewhere. Revolution 60 is a disappointment but at least I can see the effort being made to get there. That's something I can commend. This is not meant to discourage or shame Brianna Wu and her team from creating more works. Instead, I encourage her to learn from these missteps and make something great.
Games all have the potential to create new worlds, new experiences, memorable characters, perilous situations, compelling stories, moral dilemmas and memories we can all cherish.
Sad to say, the only compliment I could pay to Revolution 60 while being honest is that it doesn't live up to that potential.
Better luck next time, Brianna Wu and Giant SpaceKat.
Please ask me for permission before reposting, retweeting, reblogging or otherwise sharing this post.
Please do not doxx, harass or otherwise bother Brianna Wu or the developer Giant SpaceKat especially by linking this review to them.
Also, this review will contain spoilers for Revolution 60, Mass Effect, The Walking Dead: Season 1 and Life is Strange.).
Revolution 60, a review
Assassin Holiday is part of an elite special forces operation. Holiday, as well as Minuete and Valentina make up the crew of Chessboard. Their mission: to infiltrate a space station called N313, currently orbiting above China before an international incident takes place.
"Revolution 60" advertised itself as being a combination of "Heavy Rain" and "Mass Effect" (and it shows with Holiday walking around in her Miranda Lawson catsuit). Throughout the game, Holiday will be prompted by various choices and decisions that the game warns us will have dire consequences.
As such, I personally feel it is appropriate to judge it by other 'cinematic games' where choice is the main focus. Mainly, I choose to compare Revolution 60 to games from developers of Bioware, Quantic Dream, Telltale Games and Dontnot Entertainment.
The thing is, I'm not one of types who chastises games for choosing to have be more like interactive movies. I like Mass Effect. I like Telltale games. I like Life is Strange. I even, on occasion, like Indigo Prophecy and other David Cage titles. And I love the convenience of being able to play those games on my iPhone.
And I want more diversity in gaming. Women, social minorities, LGBT and other characters would be great for critical analysis.
So, when I heard about this game, it seemed right up my alley. I was fully prepared to enjoy this game.
...And was ultimately disappointed by the end results. In some ways, I feel like a bully. Putting an indie studio's first game through the ringer seems somewhat cruel. But then, I always recall that even the independent gaming scene is filled with the likes of Lucas Pope's Papers Please or the excellent Stanley Parable or the great Bastion. And where those games seem like a polished finished product allowing alternatives to the AAA gaming scene, Revolution 60 felt like it needed a bit more last minute work to be fully acceptable.
Before we continue, let me address the question many critics are wondering.
Yes, there is strong female representation here. But, so what? So what if the game passes the Bechdel Test? Representation's simply one element. There are bad games that can pass the Bechdel test just as there are immensely superb games that fail it, as well as many variations in-between. We've also established that the Bechdel test doesn't necessarily mean it's a good measure of femininity.
It's as if Brianna Wu and her creative team were so focused on creating a female character, they forgot to create an actual or good character that just happened to be female.
And even within the realm of games with a female protagonist, it comes up short against character-focused stories such as Life is Strange. I knew more about Max Caulfield and Chloe Price in one 2-hour episode than I did anyone of Revolution 60's characters the entire time I played Revolution 60. (Then again, Max and Chloe have the benefit of appearing in a slower paced game.)
Gameplay: Gameplay is broken up into different sections: combat when Holiday is facing potential enemies, proficiency tests where the player must swipe the touch pad during a limited time, exploration and dialogue trees, similar to the games mentioned above.
Combat is best described as Megaman Battle Network: Lite. It's mainly grid based where the player taps areas where Holiday is and moves based on those areas and fires her gun. Meanwhile the enemy combatant can move and fire his/her weapon as well. If Holiday builds up her meter enough, she can perform combos in which she must past more proficiency tests to do higher damage.
This would be very interesting if the enemy variety wasn't severely lacking. At best you'll fight maybe 6 different enemies, 3 of which are just straight up copies of one another, only with different weapons. Worse yet, when the combat does get interesting and does start to add variety, the game is practically over.
There's a light RPG portion in which Holiday levels up and can unlock skills or passives (such as improving health or unlocking a 'charge' ability) to improve combat. But since there's so little variety and combat only occurs when dictated by the game design, it's fairly limited.
During the game, Holiday will be met with several proficiency challenges, requiring the player to swipe or tap the screen in succession where Holiday will earn proficiency points. If a challenge is failed, the prompt will reset and Holiday will earn less proficiency points. If Holiday lacks enough proficiency, the game warns "the results will be disastrous" and will affect the ending you receive. (Though, in my opinion, it does tend to create a Narm moment. If Holiday doesn't move these crates fast enough, she'll face dire consequences!)
Then, there's exploration. Instead of holding or swiping the side of the touch screen to move Holiday, you hold and move the camera from a third-person perspective and tap green circles to move to the next mission objective or a yellow circle to move back to previous locations or optional places. Along the way, Holiday will come across med kits that can revive her if she loses all her HP in combat or encrypted disks, containing high value intelligence, that can help gain more favor with either Amelia or Minuete. The encrypted disks would be interesting if they didn't give so little affection (only 2 points). Even then, the game constantly wants you to commit to a side (They even do it in the loading screen. Pick a side or you'll get caught in a crossfire) so trying to trick the system to gain points with Minuete and Amelia is a wasted effort.
The game features a choice based system. Throughout the game, Holiday will be prompted with dialogue wheels. Sometimes it will be a moral choice between the green morally upright "Professional" and the darker, harsher "Rebel" (I think the nod to Mass Effect's own Paragon/Renegade system is obvious). As the game progresses, dialogue options will become available to Holiday the more points she has in each category (the same way a Charm or Intimidate option will become available in Mass Effect with enough Paragon/Renegade points). One such example, Holiday can choose to either deactivate her opponents or shoot them out the airlock into space.
To me, this is the portion of the product that feels the most dated, at least compared to other choice based games. I don't know how long this game was in production, it certainly feels like a long time and since then, the world has changed. The binary black vs. white/good vs. evil has been done to death already and the nebulous grey areas of morality are being explored. In 2004, Kotor 2 was already subverting morality systems by questioning if the good choice was the actual good choice by doing an NPC's work for them. But in 2014, when Revolution 60 was released? In a Post-Infamous, Post-SWTOR, Post-Mass Effect 3 ending, Post-Walking Dead age? It feels ancient. Never mind that the choice based games that have come out after 2014 have managed to raise expectations.
This sort of binary thinking has given way to choices in which the player questions morality. Here's a quote from Robert McKee's story for reference.
Here's an example of a great dilemma and choice. In Fahrenheit. (before David Cage made the story jump the shark), Lucas predicts seeing a child fall through the ice. If he does nothing, the child will die. However, he notices the cop from the diner in which he stabbed a man. If he rescues the child, the cop will see him. Does he risk going to jail to save a child? Does he let the child die to keep his secret? That's a real choice.
Here's another. Lee Everett is scavenging for food. He sees a woman going to be eaten by walkers (zombies) and screaming loudly. Lee must decide whether to let the woman die, buying him a few more crucial seconds to find more supplies or kill her out of mercy, stopping her pain but leaving a gunshot so loud it attracts walkers towards him. What if he misses? Wouldn't he want to be put out the same way if he were in that situation? What if he takes the shots and because of that, he misses crucial supplies?
And one more: in Life is Strange Max Caulfield is hiding in Chloe Price's room. The scene can play out in a variety of ways but if Max is hiding in the closet, she'll see Chloe's stepfather yell at her and accuse her of smoking marijuana. If Max decides to stay in the closet, Chloe will be slapped and emotionally hurt that Max did not intervene. If Max intervenes and says it was her marijuana joint, she'll risk her scholarship program and may not be able to attend Blackwell, the school she's dreamed of attending. Does she risk her academic career for a friend she hasn't seen for some odd years?
That's an actual dilemma.
Another part of the point scoring is that Holiday must either earn favor with either Minuete or Amelia to get a good ending. I like this much better than the binary morality system, but the game does such a rushed job on explaining who these characters are, it's hard to side with either of them. Instead, it keeps giving up peripheral details such as Amelia's military history or Minuete's father being a senator instead of giving up the good material: Amelia's technological prowess matched with her sarcasm and Minuete's strict adherence to the rules. It's established but never explored to the extent I wanted it to.
Another criticism the game has faced is the use of skinny female models in impractical dresses. Again, I don't mind this part. Whatever the dresses might look like or the models appear, what's important is that they get the characters down.
Voice Acting: There's a variety of voice actresses playing the parts. Jill Melancon plays Holiday, Marieve Herington voices Amelia and Heidi Drennan voices Minuete.
Crimson 09, however, deserves special recognition. That's Amanda Winn Lee, who you may recognize from such works as Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rally Vincent from Gunsmith Cats or maybe most famously, Yukiko Amagi from Persona 4.
Sadly, most of these characters are your basic archetypes: As mentioned before, Minuete is the bossy one, Amelia is the sarcastic one, Holiday is the latest iteration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not only that, there simply isn't enough time in the game to explore the full range or at least a broad spectrum of their emotional and moral spectrum. (To be fair, a lot of games do rely on character archetypes to tell their stories. Bioware has been guilty of this as well. However, at least in Bioware games, there's enough downtime, pacing and character banter to flesh out the various archetypes. In the short span I've seen these characters, they still appear as broad and basic to me).
Oddly enough, it's Crimson 09 that ends up having the most personality of the bunch. She's your basic rogue AI gone wild mixed in with a little Handsome Jack (what with taunting you over your tac cam), but Amanda Winn Lee does such an amazing job voicing her, I can't help but think the villain being made interesting is entirely her own doing.
Graphics: Much criticism has been laid on Revolution 60's artstyle and the fact it raised $400,000 on Kickstarter and the final product looks unfinished. I'm willing to entertain that it's entirely possible that the budget did go towards this game. It may suggest a misallocation of resources or using them incorrectly, but I don't think Brianna Wu stole the money. Unless I have definitive proof through an income statement or a balance sheet where those funds went, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
When I say the graphics are lacking, I don't mean that in a Framerate per Second or lack of details way. Lots of great games can get by without having Call of Duty's graphics. I've often praised Telltale for choosing to create a cartoonish/comic book inspired graphics that, while lacking in technical detail, aid in creating a specific aesthetic that works. (See also: Lucas Pope's excellent Papers Please).
Sadly, Revolution 60 chooses to constantly bring these graphics in the spotlight. They constantly repeat Holiday's martial arts to highlight (which is a mistake in my opinion). When the characters are in motion, you can just tell when something doesn't mesh right. Worse, when the game goes into full cutscene mode, the drop in detail becomes noticeable. It felt like I was watching an advertisement for those computer animation colleges and this was a work-in-progress. I did think the space ships and some of the designs looked nice.
You know how in other games there's a chapter select or an allowance for multiple saves where you can go back to a specific point and re-do the scene to see how it plays out differently? Revolution 60 doesn't have that. Instead, the game auto-saves as you progress. If you want to see how differently things turn out, you'll have to restart the game all over again. I wouldn't mind this if the game notified me when the game had saved (like a little cursor mark Telltale has). Instead, I have to pause the game, go to saved games and see if the game saved properly or not.
And with only 3 save spots, I felt my gameplay experience was very limited.
Story: But, if all the flaws were purely technical, I could've looked past that. Like I said, even stories with buggy content can be looked past if there's a narrative so emotionally engaging that you're invested in it. After all, two of my favorite games were the unfinished Kotor II and the buggy Fallout: New Vegas. Unlike graphics, soundtracks, gameplay or voice acting, you don't need large resources or capital to tell a good story. What you do need is commitment and talking points to beat it out.
Sadly, Revolution 60 lacks that as well. Mind you, I'm not referring to various plot holes or gaps in story logic. Lots of famous stories, including Steven Spielberg ones, can survive the occasional unexplained plot hole. (Remember Jurassic Parks infamous "Spared no Expense except for this one guy who happens to code the entire park's security" plothole?) The key is to hold emotional engagement.
I think Giant Spacekat, the studio behind Revolution 60 made the mistake of world-building first and foremost rather than making engaging characters to make us care about the setting. As Holiday progresses through N313, she shares dialogue with her various teammates. So much of this dialogue is spent establishing how everything works and otherwise laying out the specific details in the world that I think Giant Spacekat forgot that you couldn"t possibly care about the world unless the characters they're filled with are interesting (or at least enough personality to compensate for being so broad and archetypal). (Or another possibility would be to bring those problems into the conflict instead of simply referencing them. For example, in Dragon Age, the Warden had to experience the plight of both the Dalish and City elves to get a perspective and complete the game. It's world-building through the narrative. Then again, that could also be a strain on resources and I'm not sure if Giant SpaceKat could afford it.)
It'd be one thing if Revolution 60 was attempting to be vague or obscure on purpose, like the Scythian from Swords and Sworcerey, but after being advertised and marketed as Heavy Rain meets Mass Effect, it's clear that we're supposed to think of Amelia, Minuete and Valentina as fondly as we did Garrus, Tali, Wrex, Miranda Lawson, James Vega or any other Bioware companion.
I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears mentioning again. The biggest problem, to me at least, comes near the end. So consider whatever beyond this point a spoiler.
As Holiday makes her way up the space station, she has a final confrontation with her best friend, Valentina, acting under the rogue AI's Crimson 09's orders. Holiday stops Valentina but Valentina fears if Holiday doesn't kill her, she will come and kill again.
So, Holiday is left with a choice: Spare Valentina for the sake of their friendship or dispose of her so the mission can move forward with fewer complications.
Now, this has the potential to be a great choice, something that really makes the player question which route to take. However, it is undercut because we know so little of Valentina that by the time we reach this point, there's no drama to be felt.
http://badassdigest.com/2013/07/03/film-crit-hulk-man-of-steel/
When I say who is Valentina I don't mean incidental details such as "What's this character's history?" or "How did they grow up?" or "What do they look like?". I mean true character development such as dramatization and what this character does in a frantic situation where they're forced to make a choice. And No, a peripheral tie-in book/comic/novel is (such as the Chessboard Logistica sold seperately on iBooks) not the answer. While those details are nice for story logic, they're not needed (nor should they) for dramatic arcs. I mean, to take a page out of Mrs. Wu's inspirations, Bioware manages to do this all the time. I can tell you what Loghain Mac Tir's true character is; he's the guy who left his king to die in Ostagar. I didn't need to read The Stolen Throne or The Calling beforehand to find out who he is; I know who he is. The fact that Loghain also happens to be a war hero and brilliant strategist adds layers of complexity to the character, to the point where like him or hate him, you are invested in said character.
And said reason is why the whole Valentina/Holiday conflict falls completely apart. The game continues to insist that these two are best buds from way back, but since we never see the relationship or history from them, aside from a few (very few) throwaway lines, we cannot become engaged at all. It'd be one thing if this was just a random stranger and the conflict relied on "How can I pass judgement on a person I barely know?", but the game insists that this is your best friend. By the time we do see some actual character development out of Valentina, she's pretty much written out of the story. I'd really wish we'd gotten to see this Valentina before hand before the emotional rug was pull out from underneath us.
To be fair, animating resources and backstory can be a strain on both time and money. Not every game has the capital to animate a backstory a la Dragon Age: Origins. But, a game can compensate that by giving meaningful character interaction. For example, showing Tales from the Borderlands' Rhys very beginning career-wise would have been impossible. But Telltale realized you only need to see Rhys become demoted to janitor and how condescending Vasquez was to gain empathy (not necessarily sympathy) for Rhys.
The reason why I can't connect to Holiday's dilemma to kill or not kill Valentina is the same reason I shrugged at wiping Valentina's memory. Because when I should have been saying "Oh, how sad. I hate to see this character I know so well being forced through this.", I instead said to myself "Who is she again?" Compare this scene to how gut-wrenching it was to have Wrex pull a gun on Shepard, Shepard threatening to kill Mordin or Clementine deciding whether or not to shoot Lee.
You cannot be emotionally invested in something you are told about in comparison in something you have experienced.
So, Holiday is left with a choice: Spare Valentina for the sake of their friendship or dispose of her so the mission can move forward with fewer complications.
Now, this has the potential to be a great choice, something that really makes the player question which route to take. However, it is undercut because we know so little of Valentina that by the time we reach this point, there's no drama to be felt.
http://badassdigest.com/2013/07/03/film-crit-hulk-man-of-steel/
This entire sequence relies on Holiday's and Valentina's/Unknown's relationship and the reason this whole sequence feels like a waste of time is because I can't tell who Valentina is beyond Holiday's friend.
When I say who is Valentina I don't mean incidental details such as "What's this character's history?" or "How did they grow up?" or "What do they look like?". I mean true character development such as dramatization and what this character does in a frantic situation where they're forced to make a choice. And No, a peripheral tie-in book/comic/novel is (such as the Chessboard Logistica sold seperately on iBooks) not the answer. While those details are nice for story logic, they're not needed (nor should they) for dramatic arcs. I mean, to take a page out of Mrs. Wu's inspirations, Bioware manages to do this all the time. I can tell you what Loghain Mac Tir's true character is; he's the guy who left his king to die in Ostagar. I didn't need to read The Stolen Throne or The Calling beforehand to find out who he is; I know who he is. The fact that Loghain also happens to be a war hero and brilliant strategist adds layers of complexity to the character, to the point where like him or hate him, you are invested in said character.
And said reason is why the whole Valentina/Holiday conflict falls completely apart. The game continues to insist that these two are best buds from way back, but since we never see the relationship or history from them, aside from a few (very few) throwaway lines, we cannot become engaged at all. It'd be one thing if this was just a random stranger and the conflict relied on "How can I pass judgement on a person I barely know?", but the game insists that this is your best friend. By the time we do see some actual character development out of Valentina, she's pretty much written out of the story. I'd really wish we'd gotten to see this Valentina before hand before the emotional rug was pull out from underneath us.
To be fair, animating resources and backstory can be a strain on both time and money. Not every game has the capital to animate a backstory a la Dragon Age: Origins. But, a game can compensate that by giving meaningful character interaction. For example, showing Tales from the Borderlands' Rhys very beginning career-wise would have been impossible. But Telltale realized you only need to see Rhys become demoted to janitor and how condescending Vasquez was to gain empathy (not necessarily sympathy) for Rhys.
The reason why I can't connect to Holiday's dilemma to kill or not kill Valentina is the same reason I shrugged at wiping Valentina's memory. Because when I should have been saying "Oh, how sad. I hate to see this character I know so well being forced through this.", I instead said to myself "Who is she again?" Compare this scene to how gut-wrenching it was to have Wrex pull a gun on Shepard, Shepard threatening to kill Mordin or Clementine deciding whether or not to shoot Lee.
You cannot be emotionally invested in something you are told about in comparison in something you have experienced.
Ah, and yes, there is the whole we have more variations than Mass Effect 3 thing. Yes, dear readers, the ending of Mass Effect 3 was stupid, nonsensical and lame. But, up until that particular point, the game held my interest. If Mass Effect hadn't done a good enough job in creating character bonds, backstory, emotional investment and had a bad ending, I wouldn't care regardless. The fact that Bioware did such a good job on creating a universe made me care.
And you don't need ending variations to create a good game. Yes, it's fine if a game can give those to you (like Fallout: New Vegas or the excellent Witcher franchise), but a good story doesn't need that if it tells a story effectively enough. For example, Telltale's original The Walking Dead game has only 2 ending variations: Leave Lee or Kill Lee. It's few, but effective.
Honestly, there's very little variety in the endings themselves as well as emotional catharsis. I'm sure the choices be interesting to witness when the sequel (yes, there is a sequel planned) comes out but for now, I'm left feeling a bit cold.
Conclusion: It's hard to recommend Revolution 60, even at its low price. I'm not entirely sure how long it took the game to be produced, but it definitely feels like a product of its time. Gaming, especially mobile gaming, has changed dramatically since the past few years. Brianna Wu's inspirations have made it to the iPhone and Android platforms. If I wanted to play Bioware's binary morality simulator, I could just play Kotor again. If I wanted to see choice and interactive storytelling done right, I could just play a Telltale game again. And yes, if I wanted to play a David Cage title, I could just play Indigo Prophecy again.
I want to close out saying that while I appreciate Mrs. Brianna Wu and her studios efforts to put more female characters in the spotlight, I do think they've got a long way to go before they make a quality title. But, this stumble could be an effective stepping stone. After all, Telltale's Jurassic Park was regarded as a bad game before Telltale used the best elements from that to make their award winning and critically acclaimed The Walking Dead game.
Keep on producing, and maybe you'll get somewhere. Revolution 60 is a disappointment but at least I can see the effort being made to get there. That's something I can commend. This is not meant to discourage or shame Brianna Wu and her team from creating more works. Instead, I encourage her to learn from these missteps and make something great.
Games all have the potential to create new worlds, new experiences, memorable characters, perilous situations, compelling stories, moral dilemmas and memories we can all cherish.
Sad to say, the only compliment I could pay to Revolution 60 while being honest is that it doesn't live up to that potential.
Better luck next time, Brianna Wu and Giant SpaceKat.