Presenting the upcoming Xbox 360 RPG Fable 3 at Microsoft's X10 event in San Francisco, Peter Molyneux has revealed that the game will not have any health bar or XP system.
Instead, player progression is reflected automatically by the changing appearance of weapons, while character damage merely darkens the screen - a technique already used by some shooters. The nearest thing Fable 3 has to experience points is the new followers system, which sees famous characters accruing a larger group of fans.
"It's an RPG without a health bar or experience," Molyneux said in a demonstration, via Eurogamer. "Because we put the levelling up into the world, with followers, you don't need experience."
The reason for the change is apparently that players didn't understand the old XP system and that Molyneux thought the idea of experience points was outdated.
"The absolute main reason is that most people didn't really understand it," Molyneux explained. "[i]When you asked people how to get red experience, they'd say, 'I don't know, sometimes it's green, sometimes it's red, sometimes it's blue'."
"Experience seemed 1990s, it seemed old school."
These are apparently the changes that Molyneux alluded to earlier this week, when he said that fans would be "pissed off"by some of the changes he was going to unveil at X10. To us, it certainly seems like the Fable series is getting progressively more casual - which is saying something considering that we had Joe's little sister review Fable 2 because of how strong the casual feel was.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Deadrising 2
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: Capcom
To approach Dead Rising 2 in the usual game review way, summing up the story and explaining the key features, feels like the wrong foot to get off on because for most of the time you’re playing it Dead Rising 2 doesn’t feel like a computer game. It feels more like a playground game, like Cowboys and Indians – or Humans and Undead, in this case. You don’t need to know why the two sides are fighting, you just need to understand that the game is fun for the participants.
The playground in this case is mostly set around the Vegas-inspired Fortune City, where ex-Motocross rider Chuck Greene has come with his daughter to take part in the zombie-killing gameshow, Terror is Reality. Humanity has pushed back the zombie scourge to the stage that the undead are now used as entertainment, but it’s not a whole lot of fun for Chuck, who needs the prize money to buy medicine for his daughter. Bitten by zombies in the initial outbreaks, Katey needs an injection of Zombrex every 24 hours to prevent her from turning into a fiend.
Zombies. Serious business.
Unfortunately, when the zombies get loose and Fortune City is quarantined, Katey’s line of supply is cut off. Taking shelter in an underground bunker, Chuck is forced to the surface to locate supplies. He needs to be back with Katey every day at 7 o’clock with a new Zombrex injection, or she’ll be beyond saving.
Nor is Katey Chuck’s only problem. Framed for causing the outbreak in the first place, Chuck is forced to find proof of his innocence through a series of story missions that have to be completed before the trail goes cold. At the same time as doing all this, Chuck needs to rescue survivors and lead them back to the keep the authorities on his side until the army arrive in three days.
So, there. That’s the story. Supposedly that’s the thing which should keep you playing, but in reality the plot is fairly predictable and often faltering. While the black humour is generally successful, there are times when Dead Rising 2 can feel a bit crass – though at least there’s no photography mini-games anymore. Still, watching Chuck ogle the ladies in such a lecherous fashion doesn’t do a lot to endear him to players.
Fortunately, that doesn’t matter because the story isn’t ultimately important and most of the in-game cutscenes can be skipped or ignored without damaging the overall experience too much. It’s the tools left at your disposal that keep you playing. There’s always one more locked door to open, one more weapon to try out and one more special move you haven’t unlocked yet. Dead Rising 2 boasts an incredible amount of content and the arsenal alone is almost as expansive as the setting is gaudy.
Childrens bicycles. Also serious business.
There are recipes too; combinations of items that can be joined together to create new, more powerful fusions. Not every item can be enjoined, but the vast majority can and it’s easy to create more effective weapons or items because Dead Rising 2 knows better than to take itself seriously, allowing you to create some truly ludicrous concoctions. Combine a power drill with a steel bucket, for example, and you’ll get a helmet that will mince a zombies brain with ease, while toy helicopters can have their rotors replaced with machetes for automated killing. My personal favourite? A lizard mask combined with a box of fireworks, creating a dragon helmet that lures zombies away from you.
New recipes can be unlocked through experimentation, but Dead Rising 2 is underpinned by an RPG system too and you’ll get told new options when you level up, as well as a stat boost. Killing zombies with home-made weapons yields an XP boost too, encouraging you to focus on murdering the hordes in the most elaborate, gory way possible.
It’s sick, it’s twisted and it provides endless fun as you rack your brain for new combinations. Even without creating your own weapons there’s tons of fun to be had, as we loved throwing gumball machines into crowds of enemies – the initial damage followed up by the hilarity of zombies tottering over the gumball covered floor
Publisher: Capcom
To approach Dead Rising 2 in the usual game review way, summing up the story and explaining the key features, feels like the wrong foot to get off on because for most of the time you’re playing it Dead Rising 2 doesn’t feel like a computer game. It feels more like a playground game, like Cowboys and Indians – or Humans and Undead, in this case. You don’t need to know why the two sides are fighting, you just need to understand that the game is fun for the participants.
The playground in this case is mostly set around the Vegas-inspired Fortune City, where ex-Motocross rider Chuck Greene has come with his daughter to take part in the zombie-killing gameshow, Terror is Reality. Humanity has pushed back the zombie scourge to the stage that the undead are now used as entertainment, but it’s not a whole lot of fun for Chuck, who needs the prize money to buy medicine for his daughter. Bitten by zombies in the initial outbreaks, Katey needs an injection of Zombrex every 24 hours to prevent her from turning into a fiend.
Zombies. Serious business.
Unfortunately, when the zombies get loose and Fortune City is quarantined, Katey’s line of supply is cut off. Taking shelter in an underground bunker, Chuck is forced to the surface to locate supplies. He needs to be back with Katey every day at 7 o’clock with a new Zombrex injection, or she’ll be beyond saving.
Nor is Katey Chuck’s only problem. Framed for causing the outbreak in the first place, Chuck is forced to find proof of his innocence through a series of story missions that have to be completed before the trail goes cold. At the same time as doing all this, Chuck needs to rescue survivors and lead them back to the keep the authorities on his side until the army arrive in three days.
So, there. That’s the story. Supposedly that’s the thing which should keep you playing, but in reality the plot is fairly predictable and often faltering. While the black humour is generally successful, there are times when Dead Rising 2 can feel a bit crass – though at least there’s no photography mini-games anymore. Still, watching Chuck ogle the ladies in such a lecherous fashion doesn’t do a lot to endear him to players.
Fortunately, that doesn’t matter because the story isn’t ultimately important and most of the in-game cutscenes can be skipped or ignored without damaging the overall experience too much. It’s the tools left at your disposal that keep you playing. There’s always one more locked door to open, one more weapon to try out and one more special move you haven’t unlocked yet. Dead Rising 2 boasts an incredible amount of content and the arsenal alone is almost as expansive as the setting is gaudy.
Childrens bicycles. Also serious business.
There are recipes too; combinations of items that can be joined together to create new, more powerful fusions. Not every item can be enjoined, but the vast majority can and it’s easy to create more effective weapons or items because Dead Rising 2 knows better than to take itself seriously, allowing you to create some truly ludicrous concoctions. Combine a power drill with a steel bucket, for example, and you’ll get a helmet that will mince a zombies brain with ease, while toy helicopters can have their rotors replaced with machetes for automated killing. My personal favourite? A lizard mask combined with a box of fireworks, creating a dragon helmet that lures zombies away from you.
New recipes can be unlocked through experimentation, but Dead Rising 2 is underpinned by an RPG system too and you’ll get told new options when you level up, as well as a stat boost. Killing zombies with home-made weapons yields an XP boost too, encouraging you to focus on murdering the hordes in the most elaborate, gory way possible.
It’s sick, it’s twisted and it provides endless fun as you rack your brain for new combinations. Even without creating your own weapons there’s tons of fun to be had, as we loved throwing gumball machines into crowds of enemies – the initial damage followed up by the hilarity of zombies tottering over the gumball covered floor
kayne and lynch 2 dog days review:
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men was one of the most notorious games of this generation. Famously bad, the game made headlines after a GameSpot reviewer gave it a low score and ended up fired because, allegedly, it had upset Eidos and the site's marketing department.
After a backlash from critics and a name forever tarnished with corrupt business practices and dreadful quality, it's surprising that Kane & Lynch ever managed to get a sequel, but here we are. Two of gaming's sleaziest, most grotesque, sociopathic old bastards are back, and this time IO Interactive has a chance to get its honor back.
Was that chance taken, or is Kane & Lynch a series forever doomed to be consigned to bargain basements and trash cans? Read on for the full review of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (Xbox 360 [reviewed], PS3, PC)
Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Release date: OUT NOW
Kane & Lynch 2 takes us to Shanghai, China, where former schizophrenic murderer James Seth Lynch is trying to straighten up his act. He's still running illegal errands, killing people, and generally being a scumbag, but he's got a girlfriend now and seems to have gotten his mental problems in check. He and Adam "Kane" Marcus revive an old alliance for one last score -- setting up an arms deal so that the two men will be set for life. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and soon the duo find themselves on the run from one of Shanghai's most powerful -- and violent -- men.
Dead Men had its fair share of flaws, but one thing that stood out was the amazing characterization, interesting story, and variety of unique and innovative scenarios. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has none of this. The story is far less inspired this time, and with a single-player campaign that stretches to five hours at a generous estimate, there is no time for exploring character depth or even changing the scenery. Dog Days has nothing of the first game's ambition and vision, and from its sterile beginning to the rushed and alienating ending, there is absolutely nothing in Dog Days to compel the player onward.
Insultingly, however, while IO Interactive took all the good bits out of Dog Days, it left all the bad things in. Everything that was terrible about Dead Men has, for some inane reason, been preserved in Dog Days. It's a broken, messy, sloppy, completely unbalanced joke of a game, with a cover system that doesn't work, checkpoints that sometimes land you in the middle of deathtraps, and slow, frustrating, boring gunfights against enemies that absorb more bullets than Scarface.
Kane & Lynch 2 almost parodies the cover-based shooter genre with gunfights that see players trading shots against massively overwhelming opposition that takes forever to die. What this means is that most of the game is spent pinned down behind cover, with the player's health dropping to near-zero whenever he so much as pops his head above cover. One is expected to fight this way, slowly attempting to whittle away an enemy's health before hiding again, regaining health, popping up and attempting it again. Now and then, a player can throw an explosive barrel or fire extinguisher, but it doesn't do much.
What's worse is that the cover system barely works. Most of the time, enemies can shoot you to ribbons through the cover, and many of them will just ignore the system altogether, run up to your spot, and blast you pieces. The game has a "down but not dead" feature which basically means that Lynch will fall over if he gets shot enough times. It's unnecessary and -- you guessed it -- incredibly irritating. The game's full of cheap shots, clustering enemies around corners or in hiding places to constantly ambush the player. Most of the deaths in the game is not due to player error, but the game's tendency towards ambushes or breaking the rules of its own game in order to look "challenging."
It's not fun. At all. It meanders between extremely dull and intensely annoying, and not once does it ever become enjoyable, satisfying or rewarding.
In Dead Men, you truly felt like you were on an underworld adventure, and the game was full of surprises. A prison break, a bank robbery, a fight against a digger truck, a skyscraper assault and more gave the game a truly vast and varied feel that went some way toward making up for its sub-par gameplay. Kane & Lynch 2 takes place entirely in a dark and dreary Shanghai and is a pure corridor shooter throughout with nothing to break the monotony.
The relationship between Kane and Lynch, arguably the biggest draw of the entire IP, feels like it barely exists. Their interactions are limited and neither one of the duo are explored in any depth. The campaign was poorly scripted, with a story that barely even feels like it's there and characters that lack the sleazy charm of the original game. Lynch himself is a far less interesting character, with his hallucinations no longer part of the game and no real reference to his former madness outside of the occasional forgettable quip.
And then we get to Kane & Lynch 2's big gimmick -- the Youtube-style graphic effects. Dog Days is presented like an online video, with a camera that shakes and jitters as if it were being held by hand and graphics that are full of visual distortion and artifacts. As a concept, it's incredibly clever. Stretched out over several hours, however, and it will hurt your eyes. The camera swaying can be switched off, but the distortions and effects cannot, and they're the things that really do the damage. After I beat the mercifully short single-player mode, I was in actual physical pain from eye strain. The effect would have been cool for a level or two, but over the course of an entire game, it's more painful and distracting than I imagined it would have been.
Dog Days boasts a multiplayer component, which consists of three game modes -- Fragile Alliance, Undercover Cop and Cops & Robbers. As in Dead Men, the multiplayer is full of inventive concepts and cool ideas, with Fragile Alliance being the star of the show. If you never played the first game, it's an online co-op mode in which players pull off a heist and try to escape with as much cash as they can. However, the players can screw each other over for more loot, or abandon their friends if they reach the escape vehicle first. Cops & Robbers is exactly how it sounds, with one side being the cops who are trying to stop a heist undertaken by a team of criminals. I could, unfortunately, not get into a round of Undercover Cop, but it's just like the other modes with one player who is secretly a cop and needs to stop the robbery covertly.
If you want some variety, there is also Arcade Mode. I lied about the variety, because it's just Fragile Alliance for people without friends.
The ideas are great, but they are unfortunately married to the same broken gameplay as the story campaign,with its ambushing AI and broken cover system. Essentially, you're just playing the single-player mode with a bunch of other people who have to suffer it with you. Misery loves company, but company does not make this game any less miserable.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a game that plays how it looks -- it's distorted, confusing and thoroughly ugly. The fact that IO Interactive had a second chance and squandered it seems to suggest that the excuses made for Dead Men simply weren't true. The "mistakes" have happened all over again, and worse, anything that made Dead Men enjoyable has been sucked out to leave a shriveled, decaying husk.
This game was Kane and Lynch's chance to get a title that such interestingly dark characters deserve, and it's a chance that has been wasted on incompetent design and half-hearted writing. I actually cannot think of a single positive thing to say about the game, and the fact that I have been rooting for this IP from the moment the first game was announced just makes it all the more infuriating. I wished nothing but the best for Kane & Lynch as a series, but the appalling nature of Dog Days confirms to me that this franchise will never be what it deserves to be.
There is only one thing that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days succeeds at. It makes Kane & Lynch: Dead Men look really, really good.
Score: 1.0 -- Epic Fail (1s are the lowest of the low. There is no potential, no skill, no depth and no talent. These games have nothing to offer the world, and will die lonely and forgotten.)
After a backlash from critics and a name forever tarnished with corrupt business practices and dreadful quality, it's surprising that Kane & Lynch ever managed to get a sequel, but here we are. Two of gaming's sleaziest, most grotesque, sociopathic old bastards are back, and this time IO Interactive has a chance to get its honor back.
Was that chance taken, or is Kane & Lynch a series forever doomed to be consigned to bargain basements and trash cans? Read on for the full review of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (Xbox 360 [reviewed], PS3, PC)
Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Release date: OUT NOW
Kane & Lynch 2 takes us to Shanghai, China, where former schizophrenic murderer James Seth Lynch is trying to straighten up his act. He's still running illegal errands, killing people, and generally being a scumbag, but he's got a girlfriend now and seems to have gotten his mental problems in check. He and Adam "Kane" Marcus revive an old alliance for one last score -- setting up an arms deal so that the two men will be set for life. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and soon the duo find themselves on the run from one of Shanghai's most powerful -- and violent -- men.
Dead Men had its fair share of flaws, but one thing that stood out was the amazing characterization, interesting story, and variety of unique and innovative scenarios. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has none of this. The story is far less inspired this time, and with a single-player campaign that stretches to five hours at a generous estimate, there is no time for exploring character depth or even changing the scenery. Dog Days has nothing of the first game's ambition and vision, and from its sterile beginning to the rushed and alienating ending, there is absolutely nothing in Dog Days to compel the player onward.
Insultingly, however, while IO Interactive took all the good bits out of Dog Days, it left all the bad things in. Everything that was terrible about Dead Men has, for some inane reason, been preserved in Dog Days. It's a broken, messy, sloppy, completely unbalanced joke of a game, with a cover system that doesn't work, checkpoints that sometimes land you in the middle of deathtraps, and slow, frustrating, boring gunfights against enemies that absorb more bullets than Scarface.
Kane & Lynch 2 almost parodies the cover-based shooter genre with gunfights that see players trading shots against massively overwhelming opposition that takes forever to die. What this means is that most of the game is spent pinned down behind cover, with the player's health dropping to near-zero whenever he so much as pops his head above cover. One is expected to fight this way, slowly attempting to whittle away an enemy's health before hiding again, regaining health, popping up and attempting it again. Now and then, a player can throw an explosive barrel or fire extinguisher, but it doesn't do much.
What's worse is that the cover system barely works. Most of the time, enemies can shoot you to ribbons through the cover, and many of them will just ignore the system altogether, run up to your spot, and blast you pieces. The game has a "down but not dead" feature which basically means that Lynch will fall over if he gets shot enough times. It's unnecessary and -- you guessed it -- incredibly irritating. The game's full of cheap shots, clustering enemies around corners or in hiding places to constantly ambush the player. Most of the deaths in the game is not due to player error, but the game's tendency towards ambushes or breaking the rules of its own game in order to look "challenging."
It's not fun. At all. It meanders between extremely dull and intensely annoying, and not once does it ever become enjoyable, satisfying or rewarding.
In Dead Men, you truly felt like you were on an underworld adventure, and the game was full of surprises. A prison break, a bank robbery, a fight against a digger truck, a skyscraper assault and more gave the game a truly vast and varied feel that went some way toward making up for its sub-par gameplay. Kane & Lynch 2 takes place entirely in a dark and dreary Shanghai and is a pure corridor shooter throughout with nothing to break the monotony.
The relationship between Kane and Lynch, arguably the biggest draw of the entire IP, feels like it barely exists. Their interactions are limited and neither one of the duo are explored in any depth. The campaign was poorly scripted, with a story that barely even feels like it's there and characters that lack the sleazy charm of the original game. Lynch himself is a far less interesting character, with his hallucinations no longer part of the game and no real reference to his former madness outside of the occasional forgettable quip.
And then we get to Kane & Lynch 2's big gimmick -- the Youtube-style graphic effects. Dog Days is presented like an online video, with a camera that shakes and jitters as if it were being held by hand and graphics that are full of visual distortion and artifacts. As a concept, it's incredibly clever. Stretched out over several hours, however, and it will hurt your eyes. The camera swaying can be switched off, but the distortions and effects cannot, and they're the things that really do the damage. After I beat the mercifully short single-player mode, I was in actual physical pain from eye strain. The effect would have been cool for a level or two, but over the course of an entire game, it's more painful and distracting than I imagined it would have been.
Dog Days boasts a multiplayer component, which consists of three game modes -- Fragile Alliance, Undercover Cop and Cops & Robbers. As in Dead Men, the multiplayer is full of inventive concepts and cool ideas, with Fragile Alliance being the star of the show. If you never played the first game, it's an online co-op mode in which players pull off a heist and try to escape with as much cash as they can. However, the players can screw each other over for more loot, or abandon their friends if they reach the escape vehicle first. Cops & Robbers is exactly how it sounds, with one side being the cops who are trying to stop a heist undertaken by a team of criminals. I could, unfortunately, not get into a round of Undercover Cop, but it's just like the other modes with one player who is secretly a cop and needs to stop the robbery covertly.
If you want some variety, there is also Arcade Mode. I lied about the variety, because it's just Fragile Alliance for people without friends.
The ideas are great, but they are unfortunately married to the same broken gameplay as the story campaign,with its ambushing AI and broken cover system. Essentially, you're just playing the single-player mode with a bunch of other people who have to suffer it with you. Misery loves company, but company does not make this game any less miserable.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is a game that plays how it looks -- it's distorted, confusing and thoroughly ugly. The fact that IO Interactive had a second chance and squandered it seems to suggest that the excuses made for Dead Men simply weren't true. The "mistakes" have happened all over again, and worse, anything that made Dead Men enjoyable has been sucked out to leave a shriveled, decaying husk.
This game was Kane and Lynch's chance to get a title that such interestingly dark characters deserve, and it's a chance that has been wasted on incompetent design and half-hearted writing. I actually cannot think of a single positive thing to say about the game, and the fact that I have been rooting for this IP from the moment the first game was announced just makes it all the more infuriating. I wished nothing but the best for Kane & Lynch as a series, but the appalling nature of Dog Days confirms to me that this franchise will never be what it deserves to be.
There is only one thing that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days succeeds at. It makes Kane & Lynch: Dead Men look really, really good.
Score: 1.0 -- Epic Fail (1s are the lowest of the low. There is no potential, no skill, no depth and no talent. These games have nothing to offer the world, and will die lonely and forgotten.)
Saturday, October 2, 2010
halo reach review
Bungie has managed to do something that eluded George Lucas years ago: create a prequel to a beloved sci-fi series that not only simply works, but is at times better than the installments it precedes. After spending ten hours with the campaign, and another eight or so with the multiplayer, it's already clear that for their exit from the Halo franchise, the developers at Bungie have crafted a fine sendoff in Halo: Reach.
One of Reach's immediate improvements is its storytelling. The Halo trilogy's story has been impeded by both inconsistency (a curious mix of either over-explaining or obfuscating dialogue), and by becoming a fan-only affair overflowing with series technobabble a la Star Trek. Reach rectifies this "inside baseball" feel by telling a broader, more accessible story that doesn't require knowing tons of Halo terminology beforehand
Don't assume that because you know there exists a Halo novel called The Fall of Reach -- which details Master Chief's origin and his experience during the Covenant glassing of the United Nations Space Command fortress planet Reach -- that you know how Reach the game ends. The campaign focuses on Noble Team -- a UNSC special operations team composed of Spartans (think Delta Force by way of Iron Man) -- and the missions it undertakes. You control the team's newest member, Noble Six (you actually replace the previous Noble Six, whose fate is detailed in the most recent commercial), as Noble Team is tasked with investigating what happened at a downed communication outpost.
Without spoiling anything further, the campaign ultimately unfolds into a grand re-telling of the Battle of Thermopylae, but portrayed from a gritty, ground-level perspective across multiple missions like Band of Brothers, and all done with typical Halo flourish. It's about elite warriors (interestingly, Spartans in both stories) and the sacrifices they make during their last stand against insurmountable odds, and the lasting impact their actions impress upon the rest of the series
As noted earlier, with a more straightforward story and less reliance on Halo jargon, the storytelling is generally improved from previous Halo games. Only minor quibbles interfere with Bungie's tale-telling. Similar to Mass Effect 2, having a main cast of six characters within Noble Team, plus numerous others encountered within the campaign, doesn't leave much time for character development or interaction. In fact, you end up learning (and empathizing) most with Noble Two (Kat) and Noble Five (Jorge), by virtue of spending the most time with them (you tend to be paired with one or the other during the campaign). By comparison, I almost forgot that Noble Four (Emile) even existed for a big chunk of the campaign, as I rarely saw him. The large cast ends up not being about a group, but more about a couple of characters and a lot of generic archetypes.
Also, Reach is a bit conservative when it comes to exposition and context; even though you often change times, locations, and objectives based on mission, you're not given quite enough info for where or why you might be where you are. Sometimes, vital information such as why you can pilot an experimental spacecraft simply gets dumped into terse expository dialogue without warning. Still, even with these minor stumbles, Reach is a significant improvement from Bungie's previous narratives
But how does it actually play? It's in the flow and design of combat that Reach demonstrates what Bungie has learned in crafting the Halo trilogy plus Halo 3: ODST. Instead of adding radically new features, Bungie opts to take the better elements of Halo combat, and tweak it. The Battle Rifle's rate of fire gets toned down to become the Designated Marksman Rifle. The Magnum gets its scope back. Single-use Equipment from Halo 3 turns into reusable and swappable Armor Abilities for Reach. Noble Six's survivability lies between the extreme supersoldier that is Master Chief from the main Halo trilogy, and the glass cannon that is The Rookie from ODST.
It's this sort of cherry picking and then tweaking the best parts of previous games, that enhances Reach's "combat sandbox" the most. At any one moment, you're given a set of tools (weapons, abilities, vehicles, even friendly A.I. soldiers), straightforward objectives, and free reign on tactical approach. Guard the teammate hacking the door open. Make your way to the extraction point. Push the button inside the well-guarded room. So to achieve those, do you then use Active Camouflage plus long-range weapons to sneak about and pick off your foes? Do you distract with the Hologram, and then sneak up from behind to pull off an Assassination (a special melee takedown complete with badass animation)? Or do you close the distance and rely on grenades and assault rifle fire to soften foes before delivering a smackdown via melee? Combat in Reach stops being linear and allows for some player creativity in tactics. One time, after unsuccessfully attempting to scale a fortified structure on either foot or Warthog jeep, I simply decide to try using a Jetpack to reach my objective -- and by golly, that worked.
One of Reach's immediate improvements is its storytelling. The Halo trilogy's story has been impeded by both inconsistency (a curious mix of either over-explaining or obfuscating dialogue), and by becoming a fan-only affair overflowing with series technobabble a la Star Trek. Reach rectifies this "inside baseball" feel by telling a broader, more accessible story that doesn't require knowing tons of Halo terminology beforehand
Don't assume that because you know there exists a Halo novel called The Fall of Reach -- which details Master Chief's origin and his experience during the Covenant glassing of the United Nations Space Command fortress planet Reach -- that you know how Reach the game ends. The campaign focuses on Noble Team -- a UNSC special operations team composed of Spartans (think Delta Force by way of Iron Man) -- and the missions it undertakes. You control the team's newest member, Noble Six (you actually replace the previous Noble Six, whose fate is detailed in the most recent commercial), as Noble Team is tasked with investigating what happened at a downed communication outpost.
Without spoiling anything further, the campaign ultimately unfolds into a grand re-telling of the Battle of Thermopylae, but portrayed from a gritty, ground-level perspective across multiple missions like Band of Brothers, and all done with typical Halo flourish. It's about elite warriors (interestingly, Spartans in both stories) and the sacrifices they make during their last stand against insurmountable odds, and the lasting impact their actions impress upon the rest of the series
As noted earlier, with a more straightforward story and less reliance on Halo jargon, the storytelling is generally improved from previous Halo games. Only minor quibbles interfere with Bungie's tale-telling. Similar to Mass Effect 2, having a main cast of six characters within Noble Team, plus numerous others encountered within the campaign, doesn't leave much time for character development or interaction. In fact, you end up learning (and empathizing) most with Noble Two (Kat) and Noble Five (Jorge), by virtue of spending the most time with them (you tend to be paired with one or the other during the campaign). By comparison, I almost forgot that Noble Four (Emile) even existed for a big chunk of the campaign, as I rarely saw him. The large cast ends up not being about a group, but more about a couple of characters and a lot of generic archetypes.
Also, Reach is a bit conservative when it comes to exposition and context; even though you often change times, locations, and objectives based on mission, you're not given quite enough info for where or why you might be where you are. Sometimes, vital information such as why you can pilot an experimental spacecraft simply gets dumped into terse expository dialogue without warning. Still, even with these minor stumbles, Reach is a significant improvement from Bungie's previous narratives
But how does it actually play? It's in the flow and design of combat that Reach demonstrates what Bungie has learned in crafting the Halo trilogy plus Halo 3: ODST. Instead of adding radically new features, Bungie opts to take the better elements of Halo combat, and tweak it. The Battle Rifle's rate of fire gets toned down to become the Designated Marksman Rifle. The Magnum gets its scope back. Single-use Equipment from Halo 3 turns into reusable and swappable Armor Abilities for Reach. Noble Six's survivability lies between the extreme supersoldier that is Master Chief from the main Halo trilogy, and the glass cannon that is The Rookie from ODST.
It's this sort of cherry picking and then tweaking the best parts of previous games, that enhances Reach's "combat sandbox" the most. At any one moment, you're given a set of tools (weapons, abilities, vehicles, even friendly A.I. soldiers), straightforward objectives, and free reign on tactical approach. Guard the teammate hacking the door open. Make your way to the extraction point. Push the button inside the well-guarded room. So to achieve those, do you then use Active Camouflage plus long-range weapons to sneak about and pick off your foes? Do you distract with the Hologram, and then sneak up from behind to pull off an Assassination (a special melee takedown complete with badass animation)? Or do you close the distance and rely on grenades and assault rifle fire to soften foes before delivering a smackdown via melee? Combat in Reach stops being linear and allows for some player creativity in tactics. One time, after unsuccessfully attempting to scale a fortified structure on either foot or Warthog jeep, I simply decide to try using a Jetpack to reach my objective -- and by golly, that worked.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)