Late Reviews

Reviews for games that are real old but could be good now... mostly.

[lateviews]

Lateviews: Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds deserves every award it's ever won. This game is a masterpiece of game design. From the music, to the gameplay, to the story, the characters, the music, the locations, the premise. All of it. The flaws that exist pale in comparison to the achievements that are made here. If video games were used as educational materials like “To Kill A Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice”, then this would be a game played by generations in schools across the world. It's an astounding experience that deserves your attention. I'll stop gushing now and try to remain professional. This is an exploration puzzle game set in a fictional solar system. You are the latest member of the “Hearthian” tribe ready to explore the solar system, as your elders have done before you. The entire first village is delicately fabricated to perfectly educate you about the world and your place in it, the game and it's controls, your motives and your goals and it does so in one of the most natural tutorial sequences you've ever seen. You won't even realise you're being taught. Soon you'll have explored the village and you're given the code to allow you access to your spaceship but before you go the game asks you what you're about to do, immediately setting the tone for this adventure. You're going out there because you want to explore. There's so much that's unknown about the solar system and so many places to go that it's a question you may not have an answer for immediately. But before you get there you'll get a hint for one of the core game mechanics. Time travel. Well it's a little more complicated than that but the gist of it is that anytime your character dies you are transported back in time to before you set off to recover the code to your spaceship. This is an interesting twist on games as a whole. Outer Wilds isn't about achieving anything. For a reason I won't spoil, you can only explore the world for a maximum of 22 minutes before you'll find yourself waking up again at the start and any physical progress you made will be reset. But that's okay because you're not trying to **do** anything, you're trying to learn. Your spaceship will also retain knowledge you pickup around the solar system so thankfully this isn't an exercise in memory. The game is immediate in showing you why this is okay. Since you already know the code for your spaceship, there's no need to go all the way to the top of the village to the guy who will tell it to you. Every planet in the system will hold a different story of the mysterious Nomai civilization and their efforts in the solar system that your race now inhabits. Very quickly you will start finding singular (metaphorical) puzzle pieces that begin more questions than they answer with just enough clues for you to find the next, and the previous breadcrumbs. In fitting with the cyclical mechanics of the game, opening doors is not as important as discovering **how** to open doors.

I am not usually one for 'interactive story' type of games. Games such as “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter” or “Gone Home”. For those who feel similar, fret not; Outer Wilds has gameplay beyond reading and investigating. Navigating the environment with your jetpack is enjoyable, especially where the game makes creative use of gravity. While the game does challenge you to discover the full story of the universe, it will also challenge to accomplish more tangible tasks. Tasks like navigating a maze of water spouts, or through icy caves full of a deadly gas. The game does feature a heavy amount of reading, but this is not a glorified book.

I've always felt that the best games are the ones to elicit emotional reactions and this game will play your heart like a fiddle. You **will** feel that burgeoning sense of exploration as the game starts. You **will** feel in awe of the island-lifting tornadoes of Giant's Deep. You **will** feel afraid at the corruptive powers of the Dark Bramble. You **will** feel the trepidation as chunks of Brittle Hollow fall into it's black hole core. As you play Outer Wilds you will visit all of these astronomical wonders and if you care to let the game tell you a story, it will pull at your heart in many many ways.

I cannot sing the praises of this game high enough. I put off writing this review for so long just because I was afraid of not doing the game justice. I don't feel it's hyperbolic to call this game a masterpiece. And I will definitely stand by my association of the game to any of the great works of art that you may have been forced to study in school. Not everyone likes reading Shakespeare but you'd still appreciate it for what it meant. Outer Wilds is one of the best video games to ever be made.

[lateviews]

Lateview: Absolver

If you've heard the expression, “Biting off more than you can chew”, then you'll understand how I feel about Absolver. Fans of third-person fighter games like “Dark Souls”, “Devil May Cry” and “God of War” know that these types of games require high levels of love and polish to do well. Despite the starved market, there’s a lot of room for mediocrity. Surprisingly, Absolver doesn't pull any punches and goes toe to toe with the best... until it runs out of steam.

Absolver is a third-person fighter game trying to set itself apart from the crowd using two unique mechanics: stances and the combo builder. The “build your own combo” system has been done before, most notably in “Remember Me” and “God Hand” but the way they combine it with the stances really sets it apart. Each move has a speed and damage rating as well as some of the moves having unique properties like breaking guard and interrupting attacks. There are 4 combat stances, visually corresponding to the direction your torso is facing. Changing stances will result in you turning your torso to face to the left or the right of your opponent while others will leave you with your back facing towards the enemy! Each stance can be assigned an escalating number of light attacks and a heavier “alternate attack”. Most attacks transition you from one stance to another; then, since you’re in another stance, you can immediately use that stances attacks. If you build your combos correctly, you can create loops where one attack will lead into one stance before an attack in that stance returns you to the same stance you started in. The end-result is a custom-built train of attacks that you've personally engineered to confuse opponents as you flow from stance to stance. Since you’re changes stances so often, your alternate attack changes over time. Predicting what move your opponent is currently planning on doing is daunting since there is so much they can do. Oh, and did I tell you that you can pull out a sword or gloves and doing so swaps you over to a brand new page of attacks that you need to customise and memorize?

The game has RPG elements to it as well. Gear will drop from mobs as you down them and you'll also find stashes of gear hidden within piles of rocks. Most interestingly though is how you acquire new attacks. You start the game with a reasonable number of attacks but soon you’ll run into people using 'new' attacks against you and if you block that attack, you'll start learning the move. Use your right thumb-stick ability against it and you'll learn it even faster. Story wise, this is a cool concept. Get punched in a particular way a certain number of times and you should be able to know how your opponent punches like that. Unfortunately, in practice, this just results in you actively not killing your opponents. You end up standing around as they are wailing on you while try to block/dodge/parry all their moves; grinding out all the moves before you move along. There is a risk/reward system at play here wherein all the learning you've done during a fight won't be saved until you kill the opponent and exit combat, but there is a lot of moves to learn from random grunts in the world and these don’t really pose a threat once you’ve got a handle on the game. This system gets even worse when you're trying to discover sword specific moves because swords are rare, and by the time you find someone wielding one, they are normally a very strong opponent and you can't afford to grind out these moves because you won’t survive unless you actively damage them.

That's pretty much the entire game. Fight, learn moves, earn gear, equip said moves and gear, repeat. Thankfully that's not as bad as it sounds because hey, it's a fighting game. You came here to fight. So why am I so disappointed in it? Well before I get to the big one, let me just rattle off a few smaller impressions the game left on me: ●       Falling off ledges is far too easy. Admittedly this is a designed mechanic; forcing someone up to a ledge and just pushing them off with attacks is a legitimate way to win a fight but it still felt like it was far too easy to just slip off. Even with nobody attacking you as you’re navigating the environment, one foot off the path might mean falling and most of the time falling is death, because when it's not instant, the insane fall damage will ensure you lose the fight that you just dropped into.

●       The environment is not easy to find your way around. The “map” you're given is essentially 3 circles, and you don't know where you are unless you sit at a bonfire an energy shard thingy or kill a boss as these are the only 2 markers on the map. Many times, vital paths that you NEED to go down are not highlighted or made evident in any way and are sometimes, out-rightly obscured. As a result of this, I completely missed an entire area of the game for a long period of time simply because I couldn’t find the path AND I thought I had already entered that area of the map… There's a time and a place to do-away with the hand holding evident in modern game design but this is too far the other way.

●       Maybe why the environment is so convoluted is to try to hammer in this sense of mystery that the game is so stubbornly trying to instil. The game makes a point of telling you NOTHING about where you are, who you are, what you're doing or why. Thankfully it does tell you what to do (fight people and open a door). It just comes across as entitled. There IS an interesting world here but by the end of the game, nothing is explained at all. Who am I? Why did I teleport when I put on this mask? Why do I need to kill these people? Did I travel through time? Who is this chick with a sword? Who were the people who were here before? The game makes a point in referring to the tesseract-looking particle effect that happens as you kill others, get killed yourself or even unsheathing your sword as “folding” which seems really cool! To sum up my feelings on the aesthetics and lore of the game, I have two words. Obnoxiously Mysterious

Finally, the big one. The game ends. It just ends. No big finish, no special reveal, no closure. Nothing. If you remember before, I mentioned the map being 3 circles? That's it. That's the whole game. I have FOUR HOURS in Absolver, and it's finished. The entire story-mode. That's a third of the I spent in DMC and less than a 10th of the time I spent in Sekiro. Now sure, those are AAA titles with massive budgets behind them, but I cannot help but feel starved of content, especially since the story does not wrap itself up. The game starts with you and a bunch of other initiates standing in an arctic wind before you are chosen, you don a mask and teleport to another world. You then traverse through 12 named areas (3 of which contain nothing) fighting 11 different bosses. There are probably below 50 enemies to fight in the entire game. And then you're done. After fighting the somehow important Risryn, you're teleported back to the place you started with, you graduate from being a “prospect” to become an “Absolver”, you get a neat cape and you get told, “Idk, wait around and grind a bit I guess?” before it teleports you back to the “hub”. To put this in perspective, if the game had 3 times as much content as it currently does, I would still probably call the game short. I have no idea why (besides development problems) the game ended when it felt like Act 2 should have begun.

The game tries to justify this by placing a big emphasis on PVP. There is a system to look up other players and have a tussle and the game is always online so you might find people in the world and decide to start smacking one another but if the game is dead (like it was when I got to it) then all the PVP is non-existent. That's not even mentioning the players who don't WANT to fight other people. As far as I can tell the “latest” addition to the game included the “downfall” mode. This mode (only available after you have graduated to be an absolver) is randomly generated rooms of goons to fight endlessly. The lore explanation for this area only adds questions to the already tall pile of unanswered ones. The game allows you to fight bosses again at a harder difficulty, but this is locked behind PVP progress…meaning that if you weren’t able to find a game like myself, then you just can’t

I hate having to be so negative. Other indie games cater themselves to a casual market and can have all the depth of a puddle and still receive high ratings but because the devs took on such a loved genre, all the depth they have added only makes people want more. I mean really, if my biggest complaint about the game is that I wanted more, there's got to be something good about it. In shooting for the stars, the devs came up short, but the time, skill and effort they put into trying to get there far exceeds a lot of other developers. I can say that the game was bug free and (until it ended) felt close to a AAA title and the sad thing is that it starts to get judged by those harsh standards. For a AAA title, this would be an insult; But for a fighting game? This is a worthwhile experiment; for an indie game? This is one heck of an accomplishment and for your time? This is worth it.

Overall, I'd look to pay $15 to $25 for Absolver, despite its $42 default price tag. It depends on how much you love the third person fighter genre; how much you enjoy PVP (and if you're lucky enough to be in a locale with players online) and how much you want to support the studio. If you can make a trio of yourselves, maybe you can get some mileage out of the co-op enabled Downfall mode, but I wouldn't want to pay much more for that.

[lateviews]

Lateviews: Sir, You are Being Hunted

SirYaBH could pretty accurately be described as a survival horror game. The premise of the game is that you are a boffin who, after tinkering a bit too much in the lab, has gone and gotten themselves teleported to another world. What a pickle! In order to return you'll have to gather pieces of the machine and return them to your entry point into the world. So the game is a giant fetch quest? Yes, but don't let that hurt your expectations. That is just the vehicle to get you moving. The macguffins are scattered around the archipelago you find yourself in and are guarded by killer aristocratic robots. Defeat and evading those robots makes up the majority of the gameplay.

But before you can take them on you're going to need some gear. You get can get gear by looting the abandoned buildings that dot the landscape. Looting begets of the games core mechanics, inventory management. Each item you pickup will take up space and your backpack has a limited amount of that. It might be healthy to carry around 10 bandages but that is going to limit the amount of space you have for other items. You can store items in containers around the world but you run the risk of that stash being guarded the next time you return. Ultimately you're here to find the machine pieces and some of those can take up a whopping 16 spaces. If you don't have enough space to grab it then you're in for a bad time because you'll only discover that you're out of space AFTER you've sprinted in to wrench the piece out of the ground, which is roughly the same time you should be booking it to escape the guards. Balancing the amount of ammo, food, tools and free space you're currently carrying is an exciting and dynamic puzzle.

Aside from items you find, your second biggest tool at your disposal is your ability to not be seen. At all times, in your lower left corner you'll have a visibility meter that will let you know how easily the robots can see you. Moving faster makes you easier to see. Crouching makes you less visible. Pretty standard stuff. The brilliant factor is how the game factors in your environment. Crouch down in an empty field or the middle of the road and you'll still be pretty visible, but do the same in a patch of dense grass and you won't be seen unless you're stood on. This means the environment is not just a backdrop. You're constantly afraid of open spaces and find yourself hugging walls and sprinting to dense foliage. The stealth is so natural and organic that you don't even notice you're playing a game anymore. When you're spotted, the robots will emit a sharp bleep noise to alert you to their alertness. In a genius move, you're given a split second to return to stealth before they realise it's you and start firing. It's thrilling to dance right around this edge of notice-ability and this system let's you stay right on that line. Additionally, because of this leeway, the game can afford to take away liberties elsewhere while still making the game feel fair. That bleep is the only warning you'll get before buckshot starts flying by your head. If you get found, you do have the choice of fight or flight but the former is only available once you've found yourself a piece of weaponry and the ammo to use it. A rare and limited commodity. Overall the game strikes a perfect balance of difficulty in both stealth and combat.

My final paragraph today will be about the environment. The feel of the game and the atmosphere. It cannot be overstated how much this game draws you in. A constant drone hangs in the air and it shifts and mutates as you move through the world. One moment a forest may be singing for your attention and the next a nearby town howls. Stand too close to the water and you'll be treated to a showing of the lovecraftian horror that haunts the shallows surrounding the islands. Innocent bright blue wisps break up the drab colour palette of the environment as they meander towards your goals, almost like they are leading you. There's giant balloon floating to the south. It whips it's searchlight this way and that, ready to attract the entire island's guardians to your location. Rabbits and grouse will shuffle out of your way as you approach. Troupes of robots patrol the landscape as they attempt to “FIND THE TRESSPASSER”. One of them says, “I'M SO WEALTHY IT'S OUTRAGEOUS”. As the game progresses, stronger enemies will come out to play, like the landowner. He stomps around with his cane, calling out for you. He is impossible to kill but will kill you in a single blow, if only he could catch you. This game dunks you into the flow zone in seconds and never let's you out. Don't mind the voice acting though... it's a little... amateur, I'll admit.

Yes, yes you should play Sir, You are Being Hunted. The game is cheap as chips on sale ($7.50 AUD as of writing). As of writing I have 22 hours in the game which I feel is an overestimation of the time you could expect out of this game. In that sense it is short but that doesn't matter, you won't be watching a clock while you're playing this game. If you enjoy stealth games or survival horror games, this is a must-play for you. I still recommend anyone else to grab the game as well as it's just that good!

[lateviews]

Lateviews: Furi

I remember first seeing Furi when a youtuber played it. He only ever got past the first boss and I guess he or the audience didn't like it enough because there was never a second video. I however, did like the look of it, and could not remember the name and searched for the game for a long time. Finally, in this most recent of steam sales, I found it again.

Furi is a fusion of 3rd person fighter and a twin-stick shooter. It's also a boss rush game in a very literal sense. When you're not fighting a boss you're just walking. It's very slow and pretty boring. You get some exposition from this rabbit-headed-spirit-guide character but it's so monotonous that developers put in an “Auto-walk” button so you don't need to pay any attention. This turns the walking segments into glorified cutscenes and whilst I'm quite confident saying they're the worst part of the game, there's only two parts in the whole game. Fighting and walking.

The game does a good job of providing unique experiences for each fight. Although the enemies all have the same basic attacks, the way they combine them means that they all feel very different. For instance there is one character who has a sword and shield. The shield is very apt at reflecting projectiles which leads you to use more sword attacks. Then another boss has wings and flies around, making it very difficult to land any sword attacks at all. The game does a bang-up job at teaching at times and a horrible job at others. The first boss has a few extra health bars with which it teaches you the basic controls and it flashes the button prompt to alert you to how to play. Other controls it simply won't tell you about, like how you can use the right thumbstick to charge up your suit when you're in close quarters mode, or that you can charge up your dash/dodge.

Probably it's biggest achievement is how it eases you into each boss. Let me take a step back here and describe how the health system works. Both you and the boss have multiple health bars. You beat up the boss enough to deplete their health bar and it'll prompt you to run up to the boss and lock them into close quarters, this will then allow you to fully destroy their health bar so that it can't regenerate. And regenerate it will if you let your health bar deplete. Think of it like a 1 on 1 fighting game and how they have rounds. Each time you or your opponent depletes a health bar, both parties are healed and you go again. This cultivates a system that is very forgiving in the best of ways. You can lose 90% of your health bar but as long as you kill them before you lose that 10%, then you'll heal it all back. So when each boss has all their health bars and they will dish out their attacks slowly and then amp it up as you defeat each health bar. For instance one character might charge up and shoot a laser directly at you, where another boss might come in for 2 melee attacks. Then once you have defeated their health bar, they'll kick it into 2nd gear, and now when they charge up a laser, it will actually shoot 3 in a cone, and when they melee, they'll do a 3 attack combo instead. Until the very last health bar where they shift into their final form and hit you with a limit break, they still attack like themselves. For example, the shielded enemy will still alternate between melee attacks and wave attacks, and as the battle goes on, the melee attacks will remain melee attacks, and the wave attacks will get bigger and harder to dodge, but they'll still be wave attacks. He doesn't suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting to catch you by surprise, he surprises you by preying on the fact that you think you can predict his every move.

Overall the story is pretty weak. Something about you being in prison but then there's another prison and who is this bunny-masked man? The game acts cooler than it is but the good thing is that you won't care when you're in the thick of it. Voice acting is hit or miss. Some characters are voiced well and others are just... slightly off. The bunny-man is one of the off characters and unfortunately, you're having to listen to him constantly.

This game is a textbook example of a diamond in the rough. Because, there is a ton of rough surrounding some brilliant diamonds here. It's not a game for everyone because the beauty of the diamond is in the eye of the beholder and while I am a sucker for 3rd person fighters, someone less invested may not have the perseverance to see the game through to the end. The steam sale at the moment of writing has the game for $9ish AUD which is more than a fair price. At full price I'd want to be paying $15-$20

[lateviews]

ARK: Survival Evolved

I feel this review is more pertinent than ever due to the new DLC coming out a few days ago. I worry that I lot of people will see the DLC drop and decide to buy into the franchise because they want to ride cool mech suits. Let me give you a spoiler, that's not happening, at least not for a while. I've actually been sitting on this review for a long time but I've always put it off because ARK: Survival Evolved is one heck of a big game. Anyway, here goes. For the purposes of most of this review I'm going to ignore all the DLC but I will mention it in it's own section.

My time in ARK was mostly spent solo or with a singular friend I have. This is important to note because ARK is actually an MMORPG. Yeah, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, this is a game designed around having a large open world with other players in it that remains constantly alive so that things are happening even when you're not around. I do recommend you play with a small tribe though because I personally find the online servers to be a waste of time. This game has been out for so long now that every server is covered in forts and settlements that cover vast swaths of the map. If you're looking to start out by yourself, at best, large walls prohibit your movement and block access to areas while simultaneously tanking your frames due to the HUNDREDS of dinosaurs stored within. At worst, these forts kill you on site with unmanned laser turrets from a distance equal to 20 times the range of your wooden spear. If you want to play online, start in your internet browser. Find a tribe's website, ask to join and if you convince them you can successfully skip playing the game. You'll now probably find yourself with end game gear, dinosaurs and weapons and you can now stop playing because you win the game. I'm getting ahead of myself, let's pretend you're not using the online maps. What is ARK? Well it markets itself as a survival game and at least in the beginning it is. You start by picking up rocks and punching trees to make tools to help you pick up rocks and bash trees more effectively. Each time you level up you get a skill point to put into one of your stats and some points to put into “buying” engrams (crafting schematics). Now that you've unlocked an engram, you'll probably want to craft it. As you work on crafting that, you'll probably level up again. This opens up more engrams. More engrams means more things for you to craft. This is a very effective feedback loop and will keep you busy for hours. One of the big reasons it'll keep you busy is that one of the items you'll end up crafting is a saddle. Saddles can be used to ride dinosaurs. Now, not all dinosaurs can be ridden but all dinosaurs can be tamed so each time you unlock the ability to make a saddle, you'll now have two jobs to do: Craft the saddle, tame the dino it goes on. This gives the game an almost pokemon feel as you knock out Dodo's and convince them to be your friend by feeding them berries. Dodo's are as useless as you might think but other animals are actually exceptionally helpful and will expedite your progression. An early example of this is the Parasaur. Parasaur's are herbivorous animals that will harmlessly roam around the starting areas of the island and once you've learned how to craft a club and a bolas, you can stun and club one until it's unconscious (the majority of dinosaurs are tamed by knocking them out and feeding them). With the parasaurs saddle, you can now ride it. It provides you with portable storage and although it's run speed is slower than yours, it can run for much, much longer. It also can harvest berries for you. En masse! It can also harvest thatch and wood from trees although it's not very efficient at doing so but it does all this without using up any tool durability or consuming your stamina. The usefulness only goes up from there with some dinosaurs being able to uproot entire forests in seconds and others able to crush rocks in a single swing, spewing out many more resources than you would have been able to mine by hand. It's safe to say that taming is a huge part of ARK and it's one of the more enjoyable parts.

The “crafting, taming, levelling up” loop will last you quite some time but survival games need more than just surviving to be good. Eventually you'll be asking what's next. Now, you will notice foreboding alien pillars rising high into the clouds all across the island and you might think that this is where you need to go and indeed going there is a challenge but arriving is not as rewarding as you want it to be. Here is where the game falls down in terms of conveyance. So far the game hasn't needed to spell things out to you. There is no tutorial message telling you to punch dodo's or to make a house. You just did those things because they made sense. Same as you went to investigate the pillars because it made sense to go see them. When you arrive though you'll receive no instructions. The console in the middle of the obelisk will cryptically mention something about a broodmother and a dragon and offer no explanation. You'll return to your house lost and in a daze. What is your purpose? Well, you need to go to the wikipedia for the game. Turns out you've just started the dungeon grind and nobody told you. This isn't bad in and of itself but I would have enjoyed some booming alien voice telling me to seek the dungeons out. Anyway yes, the game has dungeons (remember, it's an MMO) and you will need to be prepared for them. The majority of caves (caves = dungeons) on the island will result in your death the first time you go in them. Some of them are especially unfair like the poison cave which will, well, poison you. But it doesn't say this it just makes your health go down and again, it won't tell you why so you google it and find out you need a gas mask. An item I still haven't unlocked after 360 hours of play. With heavy dose of googling, the dungeons are a fine challenge. They provide you with the drive to escape your manufactured comfort zone that all survival games need. Still though, what's after that? When does the game end? Well after doing a few dungeons and some more googling you'll find that completion of the island involves defeating every dungeon multiple times in order to farm the artifacts needed to summon boss fights who's items are needed to open the dungeon of the final boss atop a volcano at the centre of the map. Again, none of this is spelled out or explained in-game.

So let's move right along into the first of the negatives about the game. The fact that it's designed to be an MMO. In an MMO, when you go to bed for the day or while you're at work, people in your tribe across the world are waking up and logging on for a session. It doesn't even matter what they do, the point is that they'll be progressing your tribe in some way. The game is balanced around the fact that multiple people, 24/7, will be working on these goals. It's just such a bizarre and disheartening change because up until this point you have felt like you're progressing at a normal rate. Imagine any other RPG you know, and then imagine that at what should be the halfway point of your progression, the game suddenly multiplies the amount of time it'll take for you to achieve your next goals. You will go from needing 50 metal to make an axe to 200 metal to make a gun and 1000 metal to make a more advanced gun. Once you complete a few dungeons and start eyeing a boss, the progression hits a ramp that's so steep it feels like a wall. You might log on and play for an hour and only make a dent in the task that's in front of you.

The other big problem with this game is how buggy it is. On the low end is predators being able to climb walls and cliffs that should be completely impassable. Also on the low end is how predators aren't smart enough to go around walls and cliffs that are completely impassable. On the high end, dying inside a cave will cause you to lose all your items permanently unless you know a very specific method for breaking the game. Skip this paragraph if you don't care for the example: I believe it has to do with the fact that the game will unload the cave once you die (because nobody is inside it) and since there is no more cave, your dead body will fall into the void below the kill plane. Even if you turn on the hax and noclip down to the void, the kill plane will respawn you above ground. You need to combine console commands to turn off the kill plane just to get your stuff, and now you'll fall forever if you don't teleport yourself above ground. Oh, but the ground doesn't exist for you anymore and you need to log out of the game and log back in just for physics to resume working again. All of this was because you died in one of the hardest parts of the game.

Alright, here's my bit about the DLC. The three paid maps are Scorched Earth, Aberration and Extinction. These are all fine additions. I haven't played extinction yet but both Scorched Earth and Aberration add many new engrams and entirely new worlds to explore. Aberration in particular has a whole new set of rules that you need to follow and I feel safe in saying, do not attempt to play these before putting a lot of hours into the island. Aberration will chew you up and spit you back out, again and again. It was kind enough to include a “starter” area but there's no water source in that area so... whoops? Scorched Earth would feel mostly normal if it weren't for the fact that you'll be dying of dehydration in seconds. Let me put it this way, I played Aberration with a new character and it was really hard and not entirely enjoyable for a long time. Do you remember everything that I mentioned above about dodo's, taming and a general sense of progression brought about naturally by the levelling system? Yeah that doesn't really apply in Aberration. The game asks you to have items you don't have yet constantly and if you do manage to get yourself set up you feel trapped because your safe space only goes so far and the area outside of that is so hostile that you feel you'll never be able to go out there. For Scorched Earth me and my friend tried something different. We ported our characters over from the island (this is a mechanic of the game. You can port dinosaurs over too) and thus while we still had no items we at least had enough stats to survive and the engrams to make the tools to survive. Even when I ported my character back across I could then start a new character to inherit all the equipment and the shelter my high level character had made and it made the game so much more enjoyable. In short, the DLC should be treated like an expansion pack. Something to do AFTER the island. This is why I mentioned that you shouldn't expect to play Extinction right away. Ideally, you'd want to have completely finished the island, Scorched Earth and Aberration before attempting Extinction but if you're impatient you'll still want to spend a few hours on the island to get some experience. One quick thing to mention, even if you don't buy the DLC, the game will install it for you in case another player does (remember, MMO). At least on my PC the game is now a whopping 150gb. Just something to keep in mind.

So why do people play ARK? I've been very negative in this review thus far and with 360 hours there must be some reason why I'm still going. I spoke about hitting that wall when you attempt to fight a boss but, up until that point the game is engrossing to no end. Everyone I've talked to who has played it has either given up very quickly or not wanted to stop playing for many hours. When you're not frustrated at a glitch the game is a joy to play. The sheer amount of different activities you'll be doing ensures that you'll never be bored. At any point in time, you could go mining, wood-chopping, hunting. What about fishing instead? How about heading off on an expedition to the next dungeon? What about trying to tame a particular dinosaur you once saw? Or maybe you want to set up an outpost in a strategic area so you'll have a safe place to go? Why not just go out exploring, try to find some encyclopedia pages left behind by survivors who were here long ago? Or you can head out to the ocean because you heard that there's a rare material that spawns there. So many possibilities await you. The world is a playground and you have your best mate and your pet dinosaur to take along with you. ARK has a retail price of $60 for just the base game which I think is a lot to ask for a game, even one with this much content. That said it's on sale right now (until 5th of Novement 2018) for $20 ($30 with DLC) so go buy it, that's an amazing price.

[lateviews]

Lateviews: Euro Truck Simulator 2

Don't be so quick to dismiss this game. If you're like me you baulk at the idea of most “simulator” games as a specialised product for a niche market and for most simulators, this is true. Euro Truck Sim 2 definitely seems like it was initially designed with this purpose in mind but it's been handled with enough care that the game is appealing to people who've never been interested in trucks, Europe or simulators.

You probably don't need me to spell out what the game is on the surface. You drive a truck. The game begins with your character finally achieving their “dream” of owning a trucking company. Although really this “company” is just you owning a run down shed in a bad neighbourhood and your only valuable asset is your truck driving licence. You don't even own a truck so you're going to have to approach freight companies offering your services. These jobs ease you into your new career by comping fuel, repair and toll expenses into your contract and you just teleport to and from the start and end locations. Over time you explore more towns and discover truck dealerships in them. It is not quick but you will earn enough money to finally purchase your first truck (you'll probably take a bank loan. Don't feel ashamed). Once you get your own truck the game suddenly feels like an open world RPG. No really, you no longer teleport at the ends of jobs. You actually need to drive to the place to get the job and if you're late, that job has gone to somebody else. You become painfully aware of all these awesome upgrades you could apply to your business or your truck... if only you had enough money. And now that you're now the one paying for tolls, fuel and repairs so you had best be on your best behaviour if you want to buy them.

Now, so far this might not seem like an enjoyable experience. I mean it's a job right? Who would want to go to work in their spare time? Well, it's the job that sucks, the work is enjoyable. Performing a task is inherently satisfying. In a job, this is typically overshadowed by the physical, emotion and mental toll on us. In ETS2, this doesn't apply. If you're sick of it, you can quit. If you mess up, reload a save. What ETS2 gives you is the satisfaction of doing a job with much of the struggle taken out of it. The game front-loads the best bits of this truck driving career fantasy and gives you the best bits of life with the ugly bits cut out. The game never tells you to go out and work, you go out and work because you want the rewards. On the shallow end, you get paid. Money can be spent on truck upgrades, custom built trailers, new buildings to use as headquarters for your business. You can even hire other drivers to work for your company. On the deep end though, the game gives you a “Sense of Pride and Accomplishment”^TM. When you roll into the depot with your trailer at 100% integrity and you park your trailer in no time at all, the game tells you “Excellent!”. Green numbers flash over your screen, and then other numbers get bigger! You drive away from the depot looking back and knowing that yeah, you did that. You got the freight from Point A to Point B. Alright time for the negative section, but first a little disclaimer. I played this using an Xbox controller on my PC, so I have access to the keyboard as well. Make no mistake, this is NOT the optimal way to play the game. This game, more than anything else makes me want to buy a wheel and pedal setup and a VR headset to go with it. That said my setup is miles better than simply keyboard and mouse and I find it quite satisfactory. I've even invited a friend to play and while I handle the keyboard controls like some sort of co-pilot. Don't feel like you can't play this game without a wheel. This game has a ton of options and if you go through them you'll find a system you like. I found the default controller sensitivity to be far too low and it made parking a nightmare until I changed it. My only real negative comment is that progress is rather slow. The slow burn could be appealing to some people and it doesn't feel lengthy for lengths sake so I've forgiven the game. Even once you're high enough level to start doing jobs for >€ 30/km it'll still take 10+ perfect jobs to start thinking about upgrading your headquarters (and these jobs are not quick).

I like this game. Although I find it more useful as a tool of sorts. If I want to have fun, there are games out there that are more action packed and they have the endorphins pumping the entire time but this is a quiet game. An hour or so before bedtime, take a moment to boot this up. Turn the in-game volume down and have some ASMR, rain sounds, podcast, etc play in the background as you drive around Europe. Why not find yourself a friend and you can chat while they pretend to sit in the passenger seat. You have a job to do in-game but the constraints and limitations are so faint that you can't help but relax. It's like real life except all your responsibilities are way away on the horizon and they never get any closer. I'm pretty sure I picked the game up on sale for ~$5~ when I think it retails for closer to $30 and that's a pretty accurate way to see the game. For some people, $5 will seem like a ripoff but then some like me will play it so much to get their $30 worth. I don't think it has a demo but with steam refunds you can always get it refunded if it doesn't click for you.

[lateviews]

Lateview: Payday 2

Some may call Payday 2 a heist simulator but it's more like a heist fantasy simulator. As in this is the illustrious life you might for a half-second believe that criminals live while you work a dead-end job. The game takes a loose approach to it's grounding in reality and for that they're rewarded with loads of creative freedom. And the devs have taken it and run with it. In fact they're still running with it. I believe DLC is still being made for the game as I write this. If you've ever dreamed about robbing a bank while also being a superhero, this is the game for you.

Most of your time in the game will be spent shooting. At it's core this is a wave-based first person shooter but the brilliance is in the bells and whistles that come along with it. If it were just shooting police then this would become pretty stale but thankfully, outside of some very avoidable missions, you're never just shooting cops. Every mission has objectives to accomplish. Take a simple bank job for instance. You start in casing mode. No masks on so you are harder to detect but you can't do anything illegal or suspicious. You and your crew take note of cameras, guards, civilians. When you do finally mask up, you have a plan. You march in, one guy takes out the camera's, another two take down the guards. You're on civilian duty. You get everyone down on the floor. You tie them up so they can't run for the panic button. Someone goes to fetch the drill for the vault. Now so far everything has gone according to plan but what if someone messes up. A camera you didn't see, a civilian who walks past on the street, phones the cops. A guard who comes back from his break. Now the alarm is blaring and cop cars are pulling up outside. You start trying to get the hostages further inside so the cops can't free them. Someone else has found a safe in the managers office and is setting up a drill for it. The other guys are shooting the cops as they come but they have to fall back inside because the cops set up sniper teams. Now the vault is open. Cops are streaming in through every opening the building has but somebody has to go inside to bag up the cash. You're inside bagging cash while someone is sawing open safe deposit boxes. Two guys are outside taking down cops but suddenly, one of them goes down, you stop bagging to go help him but the other guy outside has it handled. Now you're outside the vault and you're getting shot at, you shoot back. It's this hectic amalgam of objectives that fuels the enjoyment of Payday 2. There's always something to do and never enough time to do it. After every single heist you finish in Payday 2, you'll release a breath you didn't realise you were holding in and smile to yourself at what a cracking good job you did. It's satisfying through and through.

If I had to have criticisms with the game, it's that the base game feels like a shell of the “Ultimate Edition”. Buy the base game and you'll constantly come across walls of DLC. It's everywhere; from collectibles to new missions, new guns, masks, characters. Admittedly, this game has one of the best DLC policies of modern games. You can play DLC missions if someone with the DLC hosts it. Most weapons are comparable anyway so it's not any stronger to buy them. New masks and characters are cosmetic only and you can still have them on your team if the AI randomly chooses them or if someone playing as that character joins. It just goes to show that DLC sucks even when it's done well. You won't be penalised for buying the normal edition as the upgrade to the ultimate edition is discounted   once you have the normal edition.

The other kinda lame part is that money doesn't matter. I mean maybe a bit at the beginning of the game when you don't own anything except an undying need to buy everything in sight but eventually you have a handful of masks you like and one or two guns you use and then money just doesn't matter. If money doesn't matter, why bother trying to get more loot from missions? Why do missions at all? The answer is because it's fun and once you wrap your head around that it becomes clear but I do wish that there was some money-sink in the game so I really felt rewarded for earning that dosh.

But on the whole, it's a pretty great game. Mission variety is sweet (sweeter with the DLC), characters are fleshed out and fun. Upgrading your weapons will make your guns actually feel upgraded. There isn't huge variety in “special” police but the ones that exist are different and enjoyable to shoot. One of the best things I found about the game is that it really feels like a cooperative game. You can set up your AI buddies to give you a passive stat boost but nothing works like 4 real humans. If you read my killing floor 2 review, one of the things I mentioned is that it often didn't feel like co-op because all you did was shoot zombies. The only difference more players made was that you personally had to shoot less zombies. Here that is not the case. If you get hit with a taser, it's useful to ask your friend to free you. If you are carrying a bag, you can throw it across a gap, off a roof, over a fence to your friend on the other side. If you mess up and 2 guards spot you at the same time, you'll need to call for help so they can answer the other guards pager while you answer the first. If you shop around you can get the base game for $10-$15 which is fair and the ultimate edition will be about as much again.

[lateviews]

Lateview: Doom (2016)

Doom is a victim of modern game design. From collectible overload to signposted level design, the game is torn between what it wants to be and what it expects players will want. Despite this the game is fun and has perfect length to avoid becoming stale.

How many times in a game do you come to a fork in the road, your objective marker clearly says to go left but you just HAVE to go right because you got to find all those secrets? Even if it's just ammo, there will be something down that other corridor right? Every game today has these nooks and crannies to search through and here it's especially jarring. You're supposed to be a demon slayer, not a puzzle solving, map checking treasure hunter. Unless you purposely go out of your way to ignore the secrets, you will constantly be interrupting yourself to open the map and scour your surroundings to check if there is some collectable nearby. Considering that this is a game about shooting demons, this is a big flow killer. It's like having to do homework in the middle of your video game. I hate to blame the game for what is essentially a sidequest but the game doesn't leave you much choice. Every game made today has an RPG mechanic slapped onto it and by god have they slapped it onto Doom. Finding the secrets awards you with praetor tokens for your suit, weapon tokens to upgrade your guns, weapon mods to change how your guns work and Argent Energy to give you a stat-boost. Choosing to ignore the secrets and focus on the (enjoyable) gun-totting gameplay will end up neutering your effectiveness in combat. You'll never end up stuck if you're too weak for a fight because you can always replay old levels but that doesn't fix the real issue.

Some of the level design suffers from the modern game design ideology too. Anytime the game lays out a platforming section for you, they'll make sure to light your way with blinking green lights. One of the things that players respond to in play-testing WITHOUT FAIL, is that they love lights. You ever want your player to know where to go? Make it brighter than everywhere else. Shine a spotlight on something and they will go investigate. It's so obvious in this game that it insults the player's intelligence. Admittedly there is an argument to be made about how necessary it is because you will end up turned around in combat and may lose your sense of direction but it could have been done better.

The story feels confused in what it's trying to do. Right in the first mission, your character, the Doom Marine, punches the display monitor while Samuel is trying to talk to you. The Doom Marine doesn't care for Samuel, he's just here to kill some demons. There's even a moment where Samuel disables your access to the network because he's struggling to gain the Doom Marine's attention! However, you meet up with the sentient AI of the Mars Base and Samuel gives you a piece of Argent Energy and suddenly you're buddy buddies? I thought the Doom Marine didn't care for Samuel? The Doom Marine is initially portrayed as this force of nature, uncaring of the whims of other characters in the story, so why then does he end up partnering up with Samuel? At least that's what I am assuming the Doom Marine does. Silent protagonist syndrome is particularly painful here because you never know what the Doom Marine is thinking. He's clearly a character who uses logic and makes decisions but none of that is explained so the player is left guessing as to what their motivation is! Making matters worse is if you go the whole game without picking up the text logs scattered around, you won't grasp the full scale of the events happening around you. This minimal storytelling idea would work okay if they doubled down on the idea that the Doom Marine giving 0% care to the story but since they don't it just leaves the game feeling very light.

So, negatives aside, the game is a ton of fun, if you like fast paced shooting. You are given 9 weapons throughout the game and 4 ammo types between them (not counting the chainsaw and the BFG). This is good because the game doesn't shoehorn you into having to use a gun simple because you have ammo for it. If you don't like the plasma rifle, you can still use the gauss cannon to consume your energy ammo. Each gun handles differently and you'll probably end up flipping between every gun at least once to see what your favourite and as long as you become proficient at balancing your ammo then you won't have to use a particular gun you don't like. I say this because you will run out of ammo in every fight and it is far smarter to swap to a gun than to try to hunt down a bundle of ammo. On top of this, each gun has 2 mods you can equip to it. For instance the assault rifle can be equipped with a scope or a side-loader of mini-missiles. All of the mods offer advantages and disadvantages and finding your favourite gun/mod combo is enjoyable. The combat constantly has you making decisions and reacting to new information. One moment you will run out of ammo and need to change guns, the next second a new enemy will spawn in front of you and you will need to find another route to take so that you're not standing next to them. Then while you're shooting an enemy they may become staggered. If you turn around and run back to them, you can instantly kill them with a health replenishing, ammo saving glory-kill. Factor in the rune quests and gun challenges that task you to change up your playstyle and the game never let's you perform the same action twice in succession. Simply put, anytime you're shooting enemies, you're having fun.

And that's the defining factor of this game. There is enough combat and enough variation therein that you won't mind making concessions on story and although you might find the collecting to be a bore, the combat will keep making you reopen the game and give it another go. It's not all positives but it's positive enough that if you catch this game on sale you'll probably get your money's worth. I'd probably pay $30-40, depending on your affinity to fast paced shooters like Quake or Titanfall.

[lateviews]

Lateviews: The Forest

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/92vspi/lateviews_the_forest/

The Forest is a confused game. It doesn't play to it's own strengths and this can lead to frustrations and apathy. Still, the co-op aspect of it makes it enjoyable you will have some fun playing it. Get it on sale and it probably won't be the worst money you've ever spent.

Let's start with the combat because it's the most pushed of the game mechanics. By pushed I mean that the game pushes the fighting on you, a lot. Anytime from the second day onwards, the natives of the island will make themselves known to you. Initially they are hesitant to attack and may even run away from you but eventually every encounter with the natives turns into a fight. The AI in The Forest is abysmal. The enemies don't feel real. They don't react in believable ways and they are completely unpredictable. They are so erratic that it's impossible to judge what their next move will be. There are no clever decisions to make in combat. Either you get the first blow and the hitstun from it will allow you to continue attacking until they die or the natives random AI patterns devise that they are going to launch enough lightning fast attacks that you die lest you remembered to hold up your block. Succeeding in combat isn't making decisions, it's exploiting the enemy's AI. And you need to exploit the game or you die. Nothing changes later on when you end up encountering mutated enemies. You get stuck with the same ultimatum. Take advantage of the poor pathfinding and get them stuck on a ledge, or hop on the ledge yourself and pelt them with projectiles. Even when you fail in combat, there's no danger. You respawn at the plane and you just need to walk to where your body is and pick up your stuff. It's just tedious to die. Combat is just a chore that constantly gets in the way of you trying to have fun.

Speaking of chores, the survival mechanics have the same design philosophy. Take advantage of the system or die. I get the sense that the game wants you to forage for berries and kill wildlife to survive but it's just designed so poorly. Rabbits, Deer, Lizards and Squirrels are all not worth hunting unless you need their respective pelts. The AI once again, feels broken. Most of the time if you step within a few metres of the animal it'll zoom off in the opposite direction and if the opposite direction happens to be a cliff or a body of water, they will just run around in circles, whizzing past you with so much speed they are impossible to hit with an axe. Although sometimes, you'll find a lizard just chilling by your feet, not yet aware of the fact that you're standing above it. So why bother hunting them when you can just kill turtles and birds? Turtles spawn along the beach every day and produce enough food that you'll never go hungry. They don't fight back or run away. The same mostly applies for birds who's landing animation is so slow that it takes no effort to catch them. Managing health and water is insultingly trivialised. There are 2 water sources in the game. One hurts to drink from and the other doesn't. It doesn't take long to construct the rain catcher and then you'll never be thirsty ever again. Health can be restored by eating food and sleeping but the amount restored seems to vary on factors outside your control. It is much simpler just to consume the medication that you find in abundance from discarded plane luggage around the world.

So what's the appeal of The Forest? The first is the construction. Opening your survival book for the first time is often a shock. There are pages and pages of structures you can build. Tree houses, house boats, drying racks, zip-lines. You can even build custom houses as big and as intricate as you want. There is so much to build... and all of it is pointless unless you're already abusing the game. Most structures you build on the mainland of the game will be destroyed by the natives. There is no feasible way to protect your house from the natives without devoting 100% of your attention to it. You'll find yourself endlessly repairing walls in an attempt to hold them off. And you'll never get to move onto the gameplay that is actually enjoyable. That is of course unless you build on one of the tiny islands just off the coast. Then the natives will never reach your house but at that stage you're just exploiting the system again!

The other truly enjoyable part of The Forest is the spelunking. There are a number of different cave systems and each of them contains secrets and collectibles all over the place. It's dark, it's spooky and exciting. You need to balance using your map and using your torch to find your way around and you're rewarded with better gear (such as a modern axe, a radio to replenish stamina or a sword). This aspect of the game is also ruined by the enemies. It's so dark that you require a light source to see. You know what isn't a light source? Your weapons. In co-op it's manageable because one person runs around in circles with a torch while the other engages in combat but once again, these enemies are getting in the way of you having fun.

I felt really bad about starting a peaceful run of this game once my house had been destroyed in my first game but honestly, it's the best way to play the game. You can build a magnificent house wherever you want and nobody will disrupt you. You can ignore the turtles and spend days hunting rabbits and deer because with no enemies, you will have enough success that you will be able to feed yourself. You can explore the caves fully, finding all the collectibles and treasures and there's no need to engage in the clumsy, poorly designed, frustrating and honestly dumb combat. If you can pick this game up cheap and convince a friend to join you, give it a go but do not feel bad about starting again on peaceful if you get frustrated with the enemies.

[lateviews]

Lateviews: Overcooked

https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/87lspk/lateviews_overcooked/ Overcooked is a game where you and your friends attempt to cook various dishes using simple methods in increasingly cumbersome environments. The biggest selling point of Overcooked is it’s “couch co-op” nature. Thusly named because, even on PC, multiple people can sit on the couch together and play using the one screen, the alternative being that each player needs their own system running the game. This game is one of the best couch co-op games to have come out in recent years. It’s so simple that it can be enjoyed by all ages, yet it’s complex enough that you’ll end up spending hours happily grinding away, trying to achieve max stars on all levels.

The game doesn’t waste much time on the plot. You are a cooking team tasked by an onion? king? guy? To defeat an evil meatball monster from out of space. You confront it, but your cooking skills are not good enough, so you travel back in time, to allow you to hone your skills in preparation. It’s mostly an excuse to keep shoving you into new kitchens so that the game can throw a new mechanic at you. The base game has 6 different “worlds” for you to journey across. Each world has a different gimmick and new recipes for you to cook. Such as the pirate world where the work-tables slide around as the ship rocks back and forth, forcing your team to change jobs on the fly. Or the lava world which… has lava. The cooking in this game has been simplified down to its core elements. In fact, the entire game is controlled using 3 buttons (and a thumbstick) meaning that there’s an option to let 2 people use the one controller. It’s very simple, but multiple orders stack up quickly and it’s not enough to work through each step on your own. Eventually you’ll have each person doing one or two jobs and figuring out who gets what job and when to start it is the fun of the game. One player might bite off more than they can chew on their own and suddenly they’re holding up the whole kitchen. Now somebody else must stop what they’re doing to come help them. Then there’s another job not being done, and in the chaos, you’ll be bordering on screaming at your teammates to stop cutting tomatoes and take the finished soup and serve it! Overcooked ticks all the boxes. The whole game is made with care and attention. There will be moments of frustration mixed in with your chaotic joy, but you’ll forgive the game because it’s just that good. I can’t recommend Overcooked enough as a party game you can play with anybody who can use a controller.

[lateviews]

LateView: Arkham Knight

I’m in 2 minds about Arkham Knight. On one hand it’s a brilliant game. Refined mechanics, gorgeous visuals, entertaining gameplay, serviceable story. On the other hand, Arkham City is just better.

Fret not readers, all the comments you may have seen about the launch issues are not relevant anymore, at least in my experience. I actually pre-ordered this game and thus recieved it during it’s infamous lockout period on steam and I downloaded it onto my machine that was using an AMD card, the very type of card that was supposed to be the cause of most issues and the game ran fine. I did reinstall the game for this review and I’ve not suffered any problems moving through about half the game (I 100% the game on my initial playthrough). For those that haven’t played an Arkham game before, about 30% of your time in AK will be spent in hand-to-hand combat in control of the caped crusader. The combat is from a third person and there’s no combos like God of War or Devil May Cry. Instead the game has you focus on your positioning and timing. The game popularised a counter attack system that countless games have copied from (Assassin’s Creed, One of the Spiderman games, the Shadow of Mordor series) and here, the creators of the system have done well by it. Different enemy types and enemy weapons shake up the fight and force you to adapt. For instance there are new medic enemies that attempt to stay away from you will resuscitate unconscious enemies and charge them with electricity, rendering them immune to your attacks until you remove it with your batclaw. The game continues to add new elements to try to overwhelm you with possibilities. New weapons, enemies and enemy attack patterns require new tactics each time and will quickly defeat you unless you’re prepared. Thankfully, being prepared is exactly what Batman is great at.

Around 20% of the time you’ll be entering sections that the game refers to as “predator puzzles”. This is where you have a number of vantage points above a room of heavily armed enemies and have to determine a way to takedown all the opposition without being shot (Batman is human and does not like being shot)(citation needed). This is where the plethora of batman’s gadgets get their usage. You can disable weapons, set traps, stealthfully eliminate isolated enemies. You really do feel like a predator during these sections. You have a constant stream of enemy chatter being fed through your cowl throughout the game but here it’s a reward in and of itself to hear enemies react to your brutal takedowns with fear and surprise. Once again, just as you feel confident they’ll start throwing spanners in the mix. How about drones that can see a wide area of the map? Or sentry turrets covering a walkway? Or what about one guy who blocks your detective vision (which is what let’s you see interactive objects and enemies through walls) and this other guy’s gear pinpoints your location if you spend too long looking through your detective mode? What about when Two Face robs a bank and the alarm is so loud that bad guys can’t hear you? And also the bad guys are shipping money/toxins/unobtainium from one end of the room to the other and you’re on a time limit?

Another quarter of the game is dedicated to puzzles. Most of these are because of the enigmatic Riddler but the game throws some at you through other villains as well. These puzzles range from simple visual problem solving to recreating the scene of a car crash in order to determine what happened. A lot of these also incorporate gadgets. Some of these frustratingly so. The game has a system that allows you to scan a riddler trophy’s location into your map so you can come back but it never feels good to leave an area knowing you’ll have to come back for the trophy. It feels even worse to know that you couldn’t have done it any better because you need a gadget that you haven’t unlocked yet. Through the main game and most of the sidequests, the puzzles serve as a nice break from the combat. Forcing you to think slowly and not quickly like the rest of the game does. The game does fall down a bit when it comes to the Riddler.

His plot in this game is that he has kidnapped catwoman and won’t free her until you use your batmobile in these 9 challenges. And these 9 challenges don’t become available until you have recovered a percentage of the riddler trophies smattered across Gotham City. During my second playthrough I tried to focus mostly on the main story and while I did encounter and solve a lot of Riddler puzzles, there’s still a lot left. I remember during my 100% playthrough that I had long since finished every other quest and still had miles to go before the Riddler was done. They’ve got this.. halfway solved thing you can do, wherein once you have enough trophies to finish the last Car challenge, Catwoman is free and the Riddler rides a mech to fight you but in the middle of the fight, with no warning, the Riddler goes, umm nup, not going to fight you anymore and peaces out through the floor, telling you that you need 100% of the trophies to finish the fight with him... talk about a buzzkill.

Thankfully, the rest of the game makes up for it. At least 10% of Arkham Knight’s gameplay, I am going to say comes down to exploration and story absorbtion. There’s a lot of moving between locations in AK and the game handles it well. The most advertised feature of Arkham Knight is the Batmobile. Yes, you can drive it around and mostly, the car is handled ok. I’ll go more into the Batmobile next as it deserves it’s own section. Here I’m talking about how it is to move around. Gliding and grappling is amazing, as always and they’ve amped up Batman’s (upgrade locked) abilities so that you feel stronger/faster than you did in Arkham City. As I said at the beginning, the story I believe is serviceable. Don’t get me wrong, there are awesome moments (like, the moment before you first gain control of Batman) but then there’s a lot of monotony as well. The titular Arkham Knight is just not an interesting character. He just seems like a bad guy. Someone who is really mean to Batman and his only motivation seems to be his hate for Batman. Let’s look at a couple of other Batman villains. * Penguin? Wants money and power. * Two-Face? Want’s poetic justice on Gotham, not just Batman. * Joker? “Some men just want to watch the world burn”. * Arkham Knight? “I hate you”. It just makes the Knight seem immature and short sighted. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been mad at people before but anger is quick to fade, especially when they don’t continue to wrong you and even after the big reveal of who the Knight is, I just don’t get his motivation. How could he not just get over it? What makes things worse is that the other big bad of the game is Scarecrow. Another guy with muddled motives. What does he want? To scare Gotham? I understand that he craves to instill fear but since we, the player, are Batman, we have no reason to fear him, yet the game plays him off like it wants us to fear him like you would fear the antagonist of a horror game. Hearing Scarecrow rant about fear quickly becomes eye-rolling as we start shouting at the screen, “You’re not scary! Just lie down and stop. Please!”

But, for all this, the story keeps ensuring that you HAVE to do some side-quests and I quite enjoyed this. It’s almost like the game sat down and said, “Hey, I know you’ve been ignoring these side-quests because of our big bads but here, have a break. Your next main story objective, is to do some side story objectives ok? Have fun sweety!” And the game is all the better for it because all the side characters are more interesting than the big bads. With this system, the game keeps you going. Sometimes you’ll have this awful feeling wherein you need a gadget to do a side-quest, and the only reason you then return to the main quest is to get the gadget. If that’s a reason to play the story then it’s not a great story.

So. Batmobile. Initially you view the car as this massive, beastly machine. Any fight hand-to-hand fight becomes elementary with the car. Enemies just don’t pose a threat and this feels great. The game then very quickly implements a Batmobile sized threat for you to deal with in the form of Drones. Batman of course can’t hurt people so the only way he’d get any use out of his TANK CANNON is if SOMEBODY decided to drive into town with a bunch of robot cars that need blowing up. How convienient. So, now that the game has a Batmobile and Batmobile sized threats, the game now needs sections of the game for you to fight them. If you blatantly ignore all the side-quests, there will only be a few of these. Namely when Batman launches the car into a new area and it’s populated by tanks. You blow them up. The Arkham Knight sends in more tanks. You blow them up later on. You’ve now got third-person shooter segments in your fighting game and despite the multitude of enemies and weapons for hand-to-hand combat, there are only 4 drone types. After that they simply just throw more tanks at you to up the stakes. There is a 5th type of tank but it’s reserved for tank stealth sections. Yes, you just read that. You have to sneak up on these Cobra tanks and shoot them from behind (after waiting for the obnoxious lockon time). Without a doubt, the dedicated car-battle sections are the worst part of this game. They just didn’t get it enjoyable enough to endure how hard these sections can be. Couple that with the fact that the Riddler requires you to use the car in some of his puzzles and the fact that the boss fights of the game come down to you fighting another bigger tank and there’s plenty of reasons to see why people hate the car. In the beginning, I mentioned that Arkham city was better and, yeah I have to agree. Some things were improved, like the complexity of hand-to-hand combat but all that was improved didn’t really matter. It’s only a slight improvement compared to the degrade in the story, the warping of the environment to allow for the Batmobile, the fact that you had fights you had to use the batmobile for. Arkham City is an amazing game. Then Arkham Knight sought to try to make it perfect, but they were trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Imagine you were a painter, trying to paint a picture. You finish your painting of a fruit bowl and you notice the Banana is a little wonky. You try again, except that you can’t just paint the same fruit bowl. You rearrange your scene and try again. This time, your banana is impeccable but you realise that you accidentally fudged the background and the orange seems to be melding with the apple. It’s like in programming when you iron out one bug and 2 more appear. That’s what happened here. They wanted to fix some minor details of the game and they just couldn’t replicate the rest of the game. There’s no point fixing 50% of your game if the other 50% is going to suffer for it.

In conclusion, go buy Arkham City. If you’ve already bought AC and loved it, you can give Arkham Knight a go. It’s mostly the same.

[lateviews]

LateView: We Were Here

First thing to note, this game is available for free here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/582500/We_Were_Here/ We Were Here is a co-op game similar in vein to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. One player is the Librarian and has access to a wealth of information on how to solve puzzles, and the other player is the explorer, who has all the information about said puzzles. It’s in the translation of what each player is seeing VS what they tell the other that actually creates the real gameplay. I’m tempted to say that, WwH is actually designed for you to NOT play with a friend. There’s in built voice chat in the game and when you don’t play with a friend then there’s an added layer of confusion in the communication between the two of you. The reason I mention this is that WwH is really a game you can only ever play once. The puzzles change slightly each time you approach the game but it’s too similar to have any replayability. A large part of each puzzle is figuring out how to solve the puzzle, the actual solving is pretty trivial. Each puzzle plays out roughly the same way. 1. Upon enterting the chamber the Explorer needs to explain what they are seeing. 2. The Librarian needs to find what item in the library contains the information needed for the puzzle. 3. Once the Librarian has the correct item they need to decipher what they are reading, as the clues can be rather cryptic. 4. The Librarian requests specific information about the puzzle 5. The Explorer returns the information. 6. Return to steps 2 or 4 if the Explorer or the Librarian do not understand each other. 7. The Librarian concocts a plan for the Explorer to implement. 8. If it’s not successful, you return to step 3 The biggest problem the game has is that once you have played the game once, steps 1, 2, 3, 6 and 8 don’t exist. You just go 4, 5, 7. In quick succession because everyone already knows what the puzzle is, they just need to know whether to solve it with Plan A or Plan B depending on random elements in the puzzle. Still, the first time playing is a very memorable experience. I only have a few minor hangups about the game. Firstly, the explorer lacks a sprint button. This is mainly a problem for one puzzle that involves a lot of running. Secondly, some of the item interactions can be a bit clunky and cause frustration. Thirdly, I was not a fan of the timed puzzles. Some puzzles have a timed element to them where one of the players is being accosted by some threat and will cause the puzzle to fail if it is not solved fast enough. They just feel cheap as the threat doesn’t present itself until after the timer has already started. In reference to the steps above, this would mean the timer starts before the players have time to complete step 1. The Explorer feels helpless because they can’t do anything and the Librarian feels frustrated because navigating the library is not an easy task and doing so under pressure is even worse. It’s hard to be negative about a game that you don’t have to pay money for but the designer in me just feels disappointed about the wasted potential. The developers have created a sequel (which is not free) so perhaps they improved upon these problems. Overall, the game is definitely worth your time. It’ll only take a couple of hours and despite these problems, it’ll be a fantastic couple of hours.

[lateviews]

LateView: Killing Floor 2

Killing Floor began as a mod for Unreal Tournament and since the beginning the developers knew what they wanted to make. It’s a co-op zombie shooting game and it’s not shamed into trying to be anything else.

Killing Floor 2 is no exception. They’ve taken the winning formula (Zombies + Bullets = Fun) and applied it here with a slick coat of paint and a generous helping of tweaks, balancing and some new ways to shoot bullets to spice things up. If you’re not up for shooting zombies then there’s literally nothing else here for you, so for those of you still reading, you’re in luck because KF2 is very good at doing what it’s designed to do.

Before you start the game you have to pick one of the 10 classes in the game. Each of the classes specializes in a particular type of weapon (SMG, Melee, Dual Pistols, etc), except for the survivalist, who’s speciality is not having a speciality (it’s as awkward as it sounds). Each game consists of waves of enemies with a respite period in between for you to hunt down the trading pod and purchase new weapons using the “dosh” you get from shooting the zombies. This gives the combat some nice pacing. Each wave you start confidently with your new shiny weapon, only to realise that each wave gets progressively harder and you find yourself still struggling. Then you can take a breather, buy a new shiny toy and restart the process until the boss comes. And shiny toys, this game has! Each class has a handful of weapons that scale with how much dosh they cost and deciding which one to buy constantly provides an interesting choice. Do you save up for the bigger gun and not have as much firepower during the next wave or do you buy the slightly smaller gun so you can kill zombies better? Killing Floor 2 has also taken the modern game design choice of shoving loot boxes in everything but they’ve had the sensibility to restrict it to cosmetic items. Reskins for weapons and outfit pieces for your character. You can buy keys to open crates if you want but if you don’t then everything (including crates you don’t want) can be broken down into... powder...stuff, and then reconstituted into another cosmetic item. Additionally the game gives you daily acheivements to earn dosh (not the same as the in-game dosh) and with that dosh earn already opened “vault” crates. With a combination of the untradable vault crate items and the random drops you get from playing and crafting, you should probably have a decent enough skin for all the guns you like to use. And if you don’t, a lot of the skins are available for pennies on the Steam Marketplace. To keep players returning, there is a progression system in the game. While you play as any particular class, you’ll earn XP killing zombies and bonus XP for killing them in a class specific fashion. The progression system here has been lovingly tweaked since the first game and I think it’s in a really good place right now. Each level will provide you with a stat boost relevant to your class and every 5 levels you can pick a perk. You’ll start with each of your classes at level 1 and you’ll have to join games on the normal difficulty because you won’t have the firepower to do anything else. I remember attempting a game on Hard before I had hit level 5 and I was very overwhelmed. The brilliant thing is that as you level up, the exact moment you start finding normal mode easy is the moment you’ll find Hard mode achievable and I’m currently finding the same thing for the transition from Hard to Suicidal difficulty (although it’s drawn out considerably). The game is also smart enough to make each difficulty feel unique by changing more than just the zombies stats. Harder difficulties will send more powerful zombie types at you on lower waves and even harder difficulties will give zombies new attack animations to throw you off guard.  As far as aesthetics go, the game is mostly on point. Most environments are colourful and interesting with a few duds thrown in. It’s hard to applaud a map set in a cave when you could be exploring a mansion, shooting up an abandoned Paris, getting nuked or travelling through literal hell (actually the nuked map is a little too brown for my tastes but it’s still better than a cave). There are a whole bunch of characters you can play as but pretty much all of them are insufferable. It’s especially apparent when you play as the character as they are spouting off lines about stuff that nobody cares about constantly and there’s nowhere near enough variety to stop them repeating the same line everytime you walk through a cave. Now, this game is totted as a co-op game and it’s true, you can invite a friend through steam and play on the same map but it’s not co-op like Portal 2 is co-op. You never really work together. Sometimes it just feels the exact same as single player except that you sometimes get your kills stolen but someone standing behind you and you don’t get hit in the back as much. When all’s said and done Killing Floor 2 is a solid, well-rounded game. Although the game doesn’t offer a variety of things to do with your time, it offers you a smorgasbord of ways to do the killing with and rewards you for doing so in whatever method you wish. KF2 retails at $30 USD but often ends up on sales. As long as killing zombies remains entertaining, killing floor will easily entertain you.

[lateviews]

LateView: The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (with Afterbirth +)

As of the time of writing, I have 369 hours of playtime logged on this game. That’s not counting the 147 hours I have logged in the previous version of this game (same game, different engine). I could let those numbers speak for themselves but then I wouldn’t be a very interesting writer.

When it boils down it it, BoI is a twin stick shooter roguelike. The reason why this game is so great is that it’s probably the best roguelike ever created. Let me explain. First off, the roguelike side. For those uninformed, the term roguelike refers to a old game called Rogue. Rogue was the first of it’s kind in using, well, roguelike features. Every time you die your progress is reset. There are no save files and there is no loading. Roguelike’s typically place a challenge in front of you that would seem trivial but because each failure means restarting, the task can take some time to complete. Now, in a normal game, this would be a quick recipe for a boring game. Repeating the same actions is anything but exciting. The trick that roguelike’s employ is they use random events to create new experiences each time you attempt the challenge. In BoI, each level of the dungeon is created from smaller rooms, each of which is randomly picked from a roster of pre-made rooms. For instance one room could contain an assortment of rocks in a grid pattern, while the next room may have a gaping hole in the middle of it. Then if you die and restart, you may never see these room configurations again throughout the entire dungeon. Each iteration and DLC of the Binding of Isaac has increased the size of this room pool such that even when you do see the same room layout twice, the other random elements of the game ensure it won’t be the same experience. Each and every single room gives you a sense of anticipation as you only have seconds to react to the existence of enemies in the room before they animate and begin attacking you.

The other trick that roguelike’s use is that there actually is saving and you don’t actually lose all your progress when you die. The game has over 500 items to unlock and when you do unlock some new, powerful item, it stays unlocked, even through death. Now, you’re probably thinking that this isn’t surprising. Every game made today has collectibles. The difference is that each of these items is a usable item in game. Each one modifies the bullets you shoot or the health you tank them with. Some of them are activated items. Some of them are trinkets that provide a passive buff. Some of them change the way you approach every fight and some of them will just kill you (if you’re unlucky...). And every time you boot up the game, you will walk through randomly picked rooms, filled with randomly assigned enemies, dropping randomly assigned coins, bombs, keys and more, just so you can you can fight the randomly picked boss monster and get your randomly granted treasure so that your bullets now apply random status effects to your enemies. PHEW. That’s a lot of random! And the game needs it. 300+ hours is no joke and I haven’t even unlocked all the items. Sure, I can memorize how some items work and how some bosses attack but I never know what treasure is going to be sitting on top of the pedastal when I open this door. Follow this up with tight, responsive controls, balanced items, interesting enemies, 300+ hours of replay value and a unique aesthetic style and I can claim that the Binding of Isaac is not only one of the best roguelikes of all time, but it’s also one of the best games in any genre. Ever. Made.

The game is retailed at $15-$35 depending on deals and bundles you get, as well as how much of the DLC you want (which feel more like expansion packs of old rather than the EA version of DLC) but it’s one of those games that routinely ends up on sale or in a humble bundle. Now, if you do some math, you realise that for 300 hours, $35 is a pretty good deal, so you’ll get your moneys worth no matter what you pay for this game.

[lateviews]

LateView: Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

It's hard to write a review of an Assassin's Creed game without referencing other ones so if you don't understand something I mention then feel free to comment or message and I'll try my best to explain what I meant without referencing the game.

**TL;DR:** AC:S is essentially the same game as AC:Unity but with a new skin, new story and slight tweaks. Overall the game ticks all the boxes and if you're looking to kill time or kill templars then this will do the job. You won't feel like you wasted time but you won't want to waste time playing once the story is over.

The story, I feel, is weaker than other games. I mean it essentially starts when Jacob and Evie say to one another, "Hey fuck assassin training, let's go blitz London!" The game does do one very interesting thing with it's dual character dynamic. Throughout each chapter (or whatever animus name they gave them) each character aims for different objectives so Evie is trying to discover the piece of eden while Jacob is trying to kill his way up the templar hierarchy. Normally the games smush these 2 objectives together and after playing this game, previous games feel clunky. Here, Jacob will identify a templar higher up, do a couple of missions finding them or exposing them and then go in the for kill. Evie's mission will then follow in his footsteps and cleanup the mess he made by stabilizing the institutions by replacing the dead templars with fresh, uncorrupted businessmen. And every now and then Evie will get a chance to go track down a lead on the piece of Eden. This does start to become predictable but by the time it does the game starts to ramp into it's final act so it works well. The villains are largely hit and miss, with an emphasize on miss. Some villains you will barely see at the end of one mission and you kill them in the next, and then one templar in particular you see every mission leading to his demise and it is much more gratifying. Starrick, the Master Templar, is so close to being good. I feel we needed to be introduced to him earlier. You're quite a ways in before you see your first cutscene of him. And then the game tries so hard to make him out to be an antagonist (EG: He kills his own guy for interrupting his piano session) that it forgets to make him human. The end result is that I **know** he is human, but then he does evil things for no reason and then does normal things for good reasons, leaving me in this weird situation where he seems like a jerk, who's just trying to run a business...

Gameplay is still tight. Parkouring actually feels weaker than Unity, but this could be attributed to the fact that London is not a nice place to parkour around. Regardless, you gain access to a zipline very early on (in a stunning mission fyi) and parkouring, now optional, becomes a tool for maneuvering, instead of something you NEED to do just to get around. I actually liked this because it means that the classic moments of Assassins-Creed-brand-parkour-frustration are spaced out. Combat is mostly the same as Unity but there's this new emphasize on levels. XP is gained from missions and such and there are 10 level ups you can get in the game. The game frustratingly uses this to gate your access to strong weapons and skills. It's frustrating because the game is happy to hand you a crafting schematic for a weapon you can't even use yet. And if you decided you'll stick with your shitty weapons until you level up then you'll just have a bad time. I remember one time when I went to an area I was underlevelled for and I managed to corner one guy away from his teammates and he spotted me. Engaging him with a fight didn't feel difficult. He had the same attacks as a level 1 goon but with over 10 times the health of one. I was beating his face in for far too long to be satisfying. Thankfully enough the stealth is good enough that combat is a fallback.

Mission variety is fantastic. Each templar is in charge of a different industry and so the missions to take down each are quite different. And this also applies to the side-missions you have. London is divided into boroughs and each borough has segments controlled by one area of concentrated gang activity that you need to dismantle. The game uses the bonus objectives to consistently good use. It's usually quite easy to run in and fight everyone every time and I could see that becoming boring but then you observe the bonus objectives the game becomes challenging and you'll be looking forward to each mission. Just a word of warning, stay away from Charles Dickens missions. They are such a waste of time.

[lateviews]

LateView: Quantum Break

https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/824s40/quantum_break/ One piece of information you should know is that Quantum Break comes from the creators of the Alan Wake games. This is important because it essentially follows the same cadence.

The game is split into 5 acts

Each act begins with a calm, explorative section

Each act consists of areas of bad guys you must shoot and/or platforming sections

Each act ends on a semi-cliffhanger

The ending doesn't explain much of anything

It's a solid strategy, if a bit predictable, and it lends itself to decent pacing within the game. One thing that may upset you when you play the game is that between each act there is a ~30 min TV episode following minor characters to fill in the world as they react to choices you've made in the game. For instance the first act ends with you (as the antagonist of the game) choosing between using force or subtlety to cover up the events of the first act. These events they call "junctions" and have ramifications on the rest of the TV shows and game. Unfortunately these changes don't alter major events of the story so it's mostly restricted to bits of dialogue or alternate TV show scenes (although, this is thematically on point for the determinism message of the game). There are also minor changes you can make called "Quantum Ripples". On the surface these changes are comically minor, such as a picture of a sports mascot being teleported just off the beaten path for the minor characters to spend 2 seconds commenting on before resuming the episode. I personally enjoyed these videos as they show a "real world" view of the crazy events unfolding in the main game but YMMV as it could seem jarring to jump off one cliffhanger into some reality TV (which most end in their own cliffhanger) and then jumping right back into the game.

Quantum Break's story has lofty intentions. Despite the complicated plotlines, the story remains grounded in it's link to Jack Joyce (the protagonist) and you never feel overwhelmed taking it at Jack's pace. However this can feel frustrating as Jack's character is aggravatingly straight laced at times. Despite numerous people telling him it's impossible, all who have years and years of understanding about time manipulation, he still attempts to change the future throughout the whole game. It can seem like you're playing as a dumbass at times and if it had a different actor, I could have believed that. I think the game tries to play Jack off as a Duke-Nukem-esk, "I don't care I'm just doing it. Fuck the science" type but the actor doesn't sell it like that. This isn't to say the acting is bad (in fact, the acting is pretty much all on point) I just think that there was some disconnect between the character direction and what the story needed him to be.

QB's biggest letdown is it's gunplay. You get a dripfeed of "time powers" over the course of the game but these powers are just polish upon a turd. Let me explain it like this. If you were to remove all the time powers, this game would suck. The guns all feel weak, the cover system is dodgy, one half of the enemies are just not interesting and the other half of the enemies (you'll know the ones I'm talking about when you see them) are interesting but their strength doesn't lead to interesting gameplay it just makes them harder to fight. The best approach to every fight is to find a large wall you can stand behind, position your character in such a way that you can't be shot but you can still point the reticule at the enemies. Your bullets are hitscan and will damage them but they can't shoot through the wall at you. I've been railing on the combat pretty hard thus far but the one important takeaway is that it's serviceable. Unless you're a seasoned shooter veteran, you probably won't get bored by the time the game is wrapping up. This would be ok if the game didn't ask you to replay it immediately after finishing to collect all the story notes and to see the results of making the other choice at each junction. I get that I can play the game on easy mode now and since I collected all the intel on my first playthrough, I can skip that now but there's still so much of the game that is exactly the same that I never managed a second playthrough. That's not to mention the TV show. There are alternate scenes that play but there's also a lot of scenes where there are no changes or where the changes are so minor you'd need a side by side comparison to see the difference.

Overall the game is worth a playthrough. I'd probably be content with paying upwards of $30 (AUD) for the game. If you've got a partner or SO who loves watching people play games more than they like playing themselves, look into this game as they can watch you play the game, help you make decisions at junctions and you can watch the nailbiting TV segments together.