Like a vagrant uncle, Xaviant is back with another grift.
Continue reading “Cull Your Enthusiasm: The Culling Couldn’t Get Worse”
Category: Reviews
Early Access Impressions: Population Zero, What Is the Point?
I’m trying really hard to not get annoyed at this game.
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Review: Shop Titans
Early Access Impressions: Royal Crown Is Cute, Needs Work
Impressions: Shop Titans Is On The Big Screen
Diaries From Eternal Magic: Why Does This Game Exist?
I feel like I’ve gone back in time to 2005.
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Not Massive: Final Fantasy VII’s Demo Is So Easy, My Cat Could Beat It
Review: Avabel On Steam Is Lowest Of Low Effort
What can I say about Avabel Online?
Its interface is hideous.
The translation is as low effort as it gets.
The game doesn’t work half the time.
And it literally suggests starting out with auto-quest on before you’ve even taken your first step. Yes, Avabel makes no pretence on being fun to play, just throw that auto-play on and maybe toss developer Asobimo a few hundred bucks for the privilege of having a dull, uninspired ripoff of a mobile game play itself.
Now that Bluestacks is bridging the gap between low effort mobile games and low effort PC games, any fly by night developer can pay $100 to have their mobile title developed on the budget of a White Castle slider foisted onto the Steam Store where it will get buried under a sea of other low effort cash grabs with the only hopes of coverage in the form of ridicule from some loser living in his own basement.
Final Score: 0/10 – I’m sure at least one desperate fanboy will tell me that this game is better than anything that came out on PC.
It Came From Origin Premiere: Let’s Talk Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Boy what a ride.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the most video game-ass video game to come from the AAA sector in recent memory. It makes me a bit sad to recognize the fact that this is the first Star Wars game in over a decade that feels like it was made foremost to be a fun game and not to be a vehicle for disgustingly greedy microtransactions. In fact, the game doesn’t have microtransactions period. I know, right? From a subsidiary of Electronic Arts and in 2019 no less.
There are a lot of things that Fallen Order does not have. It doesn’t have a tacked-on half-baked multiplayer mode that would be dead within a month. It does not have shoddily-implemented RPG mechanics to artificially extend the game’s lifetime by forcing the player to grind for gear with incrementally higher numbers. There are no daily missions, no loot boxes, no weekly checklists or login rewards. No season passes or ridiculous cosmetics to give Vade pink armor. It’s like the developers at Respawn fell out of 1998 and said “let’s make a modern Star Wars game.”
Fallen Order is set shortly after the events of Revenge of the Sith. The Jedi are mostly wiped out, Yoda and Obi Wan are headed to their respective hidey holes for the next couple of decades, and the newly formed Empire is on the prowl wiping out the good guys wherever they may be hiding. Luke and Leia are probably just reaching the age of saying their first words, so don’t count on them for help. You are Cal Kestis, a name you’ll probably forget about two minutes after hearing it. Cal is living his life as a normal scrap miner (who would have thought) when his life is flipped turned upside down; the Empire knows he’s a Jedi. With the help of the mysterious Cere Junda (played by Debra Wilson) and space pilot from Space Bronx Greez Dritus (Daniel Roebuck), your goal is to rebuild the Jedi Order.
1. Exploration Is Encouraged, Not Forced
Exploration in Fallen Order tastes like Respawn made a gumbo using a 50/50 blend of Metroid and Uncharted. You’ll visit several planets over your trip that amount to a variety of open world locations with twisted, winding paths and a variety of local wildlife. Each zone basically amounts to taking the long way to your goal while simultaneously opening up shortcuts for when you come back. And you’ll come back, they always come back. After all, you’ll need to return to the planets you’ve visited (of which there are roughly half a dozen) to unlock new areas.
As you journey through the world, you’ll obtain new force powers, upgrade your BD-1 unit to access more areas of the map, and find more unlockables. The unlockables are wholly optional and amount to new cosmetics, bits of lore, and doodads that incrementally increase your max health/force. The map is also very handy for showing you areas that you can access and those that you can’t, so you’ll never be scouring an area for a frustratingly long amount of time wondering where to go next.
2. The Darkest of Souls
I am legally obligated to point out that Fallen Order is the Dark Souls of Star Wars games, and the analogy actually works this time. Let me summarize: Fallen Order is a game where your capabilities in combat are tuned around timing your strikes, parries, and rolling dodges. You come up against enemies, many of whom can strike you down within a handful of well-placed hits. Defeating enemies grants you experience that translates into skill points that must be spent at meditation points. If you die in battle, you lose your accumulated unspent points and must go back and strike the NPC that hit you to get them back. Meditating, dying, and leaving resets all enemies on the map. For healing you have limited stims (estus flasks).
For Soulsborne fans, I recommend playing on higher difficulties. Respawn’s difficulty system is rather ingenious in that it doesn’t change much. Lower difficulties make enemies hit for less damage and moderately increase the parry window. Regardless, this game will beat the crap out of you on pretty much any mode except for Story Mode. You are expected to die, and die a lot.
3. Artificial Unintelligence
That being said, Fallen Order can be cheesed by playing the game in ways that it was clearly not meant to be played.
Fallen Order’s artificial intelligence is fantastic in a very closed environment. Respawn manages to keep a tense atmosphere from start to finish by pitting you in a world where even the lowliest stormtrooper can knock you silly if you aren’t careful enough. Enemies parry your attacks, anticipate your movements, and generally fight like intelligent creatures with real experience.
Pull it out of that environment, and Respawn’s AI falls apart. I was able to get through several areas that should have been difficult simply by force pulling mini-bosses into adjacent rooms. The mini-bosses didn’t understand the layout and ignored me bashing at them with my lightsaber while slowly waltzing back to their zone. Mobs will often just stop pursuing you at the boundary point between rooms at which point they just sort of shut off and won’t acknowledge your presence until you walk back into their zone. Even worse than the dead-brain mode when getting pulled into other rooms, I found that some mobs will just hit a kill switch and die if they wind up on unfamiliar terrain. It kills the atmosphere when you pull a mini-boss on to solid ground and he just keels over for no reason.
When it works, it works. The few lightsaber battles you’ll get into with Fallen Order’s bosses are some of the best since the old Star Wars Jedi Knight titles. You’ll go from getting your ass completely kicked by a boss to doing better, then even getting an advantage, and finally you’ll be finishing the fight without taking more than a couple of hits. And you’ll know that you accomplished that on your own, not because you min-maxed or overleveled the game but because you paid attention and learned the cues.
4. I F*#@ING LOVE STAR WARS
My interest in Star Wars in general has been rekindled thanks to the impressive launch of The Mandalorian, and Fallen Order couldn’t come at a better time for the franchise. This game has a lot of what you’d want out of a Star Wars Jedi game. Customizing your lightsaber? You can do it, even though it’s a thing you don’t exactly see the details of when it is slicing through a stormtrooper. Your lightsaber works like a lightsaber should, cutting things in half with ease. The game does make tougher enemies take more hits which can pull out of the experience, but you have to make some compromises otherwise you’d be the One Punch Man of a galaxy far far away.
Fighting AT-ST’s? Check. Scaling the side of an AT-AT Walker? Double check. One of my favorite bits showcasing the attention to detail is in the stormtrooper dialogue. You can sneak up on stormtroopers and hear them chattering amongst themselves (“it’s your turn to fill out casualty reports!”) and it’s just jump up on a group of soldiers to hear them amping themselves up for the battle only to see that enthusiasm drop away as their comrades fall one by one.
The gameplay and story are compelling enough to make you almost forget that Cal is on a path of failure. Yea, Fallen Order takes place within the canonical universe of Star Wars. In case you hadn’t noticed by the end of Return of the Jedi, the Jedi Order is still not a thing. The ending isn’t clear until well after the three quarter mark, when you kind of get an idea as to how everything is going to summarize itself. It is a powerful ending and one that makes sense in the greater universe. After all, the future does not know who Cal Kestis is.
If I had to nitpick, I’d also point out that the game does absolutely nothing to explain or acknowledge the fact that Cal respawns at meditation points when he dies, or the fact that zones respawn when you meditate. In Dark Souls the mechanic makes sense, here it’s thrown in with no real connection to the world or lore.
5. In Conclusion
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is not an open world RPG but instead a mostly linear storytelling experience with some optional exploration sprinkled in. It tells a great story though, one that gives me hope for the future of Star Wars as a video game franchise (one which ironically was also killed by the same publisher). Fallen Order has great characters, a fantastic story, and combat mechanics that keep the game exciting from the moment you pick it up to the moment you put it down and the credits roll.
Finishing the main story without doing much in the way of exploring the optional mechanics took me roughly fifteen hours and some change. Your mileage may vary. That said, there is little in the way of replayability outside of going back and roughing through the game at a higher difficulty.
If playing on PC, I highly recommend just footing the month of Origin Premiere and playing through Fallen Order over the weekend for $15 and then spend the rest of the month doing whatever with the remaining library of games. For Xbox or PS4? Rent it from your local Redbox. It’s a fantastic game by all means, but I feel like most people will be done with it once the first playthrough is over with.
[Review] Fallout 76 Is A Roaring Dumpster Fire
For all intent and purpose, Fallout 76 could have billed itself as Fallout 4 With Multiplayer, and people would be knocking down the walls to get in. Set in Appalachia, West Virginia, Fallout 76 is a Frankenstein’s Monster of various systems coming together in the hopes of providing an interesting, engaging experience. In reality, Bethesda pushed out a title that highlights the worst of its franchise while mostly ignoring what Fallout has always done best.
Fallout 76 is an open world multiplayer sandbox. As has become a series staple, you the player are a vault dweller who at the start of the game finds themselves pushed into the post-apocalyptic wasteland to do mostly whatever you want. The meat and potatoes of the game sits with the various quests that players will take on from letters, holotapes, and robots that dot the land.
Bethesda’s decision to remove all of the NPCs and replace them with holotapes and robots has been called ambitious and it absolutely is in the same sense that being too cheap and lazy to shrinkwrap my windows is an ambitious take on the Buffalo cold winters. It feels like a natural conclusion to assume that Bethesda’s lack of human NPCs has less to do with immersive storytelling and more to do with not wanting to spend the time and resources on drawing, building, and animating those characters, preferring instead to recycle Mr. Handy models and stationary computers.
Todd Howard stated that Fallout 76 is Bethesda’s most ambitious project, and I can’t for the life of me find out where all that extra work went. Visually, the game looks worse than Fallout 4, there are clearly less resources put into animating characters and scenes that might be found in a Fallout game. The assets are 99% recycled from previous Fallout games, evidence has come to light that enemies like the Scorchbeast had their AI code copied and pasted from Skyrim’s dragons, and the only thing new to the game seems to be the occasionally functioning online play.
By all counts, Fallout 76 would be an impressive undertaking by a more competent group of programmers. Unfortunately, Bethesda is not that group. Perhaps analogous to the ultimate demise of Telltale Games, a company that refused to fix its aging, janky engine and ultimately paid the price for it, Fallout 76 appears to be floundering in a market where Bethesda previously seemed impervious to releasing a title that didn’t easily bring in more revenue than the GDP of a small country. It’s telling how seriously Bethesda is taking Fallout 76’s apparently disappointing performance, because they’ve actually started/committed to fixing bugs that have been present in the engine for several titles now.
Fallout 76 is a landscape of wonderfully, shall we say, unique bugs. My character occasionally gives off a grunt like they’re being hit when nobody is around, like they’ve stubbed their toe but without taking any damage. I was forced to quit the game on several occasions because the depth of field bugged out causing the game to look nauseatingly blurry when walking around. I’ve hit points where my character will holster and then refuse to pull out whatever weapon I have equipped, where weapons/grenades get randomly unequipped, and where my character will simply not attack. Then of course there’s the building pop-in, where entire buildings will just not render and take minutes to show up. This would be unacceptable in an alpha release, but Fallout 76 wants sixty bucks for this amateur showing.
Todd Howard stated that you would never see a server for Fallout 76, and you won’t…unless of course you happen to have the bad luck of being placed on an unstable server and find yourself hopelessly hacking, whacking, and smacking against enemies that refuse to acknowledge your hits or find yourself smashing that play button only for the game to repeatedly tell you that there are no worlds available. They, on the other hand, have absolutely no trouble landing hits on your character in spite of any server lag. You may also acknowledge the server when, for instance, you fail a timed mission because the node you were required to hit simply didn’t feel like responding in time.
Sharing a world with other players is both a godsend and a curse upon Fallout’s gameplay. On one hand, Bethesda shakes up the formula by allowing people to tackle towns of scorched, mutants, or super mutants with friends and strangers. On the other hand they risk trivializing certain elements of the game as while player acts are constant, loot is not.
In my experience, this led to numerous incidences where otherwise high level safes or locked doors were wide open, allowing anyone to loot their delicious innards just because someone at some prior point came through the same building. Bethesda loves adding quests into their games that require players to navigate buildings only to provide an easy way out once they find the macguffin. Because the door then does not shut for an indeterminate amount of time, anyone else taking on the same mission can simply walk in and finish the quest in a snap. This also means entering buildings with the goal of finding a mission item or to kill a specific NPC, only to find your target has already been taken by another player at some unspecified time. With the time it takes them to respawn, you’re honestly better off just going and doing something else.
Then there’s the fact that a high level character can really ruin your experience. Enemies in most areas will automatically scale to the highest level player nearby, which means that if you the level 10 player are rolling around Grafton, you’re going to encounter generally level 10-15 super mutants. If Remy Remington and his clan of level 60+ hunters decides to take a stroll through the city, however, you’re suddenly going to find yourself getting steamrolled by level 60+ super mutants with crazy stats and buffs, making the area completely unplayable until those players leave.
The worst part about playing Fallout 76 is the knowledge that there is something fun hidden under all of the technical issues. I like the world building elements like how every pack of perk cards comes with a joke and a stick of gum, or the various stories involving the war. Bethesda can do a lot with this game as an online living world and they plan to do so with in-game events, opening new vaults in further expansions, etc. If Bethesda can fix the more glaring bugs and create some semblance of an ongoing story that updates every so often, that would be great.
I’d like to see a few of the prior Fallout staples come back into Fallout 76, like the ability to combine identical weapons in order to repair them. Weapons and especially armor break far too damn fast in this game, and you’re constantly on the lookout for items to make adhesive because if you’re like me you’ll be consistently out of it due to how much goes into repairing each piece of gear. I’d like bobble heads to be items that offer permanent bonuses for having them in your inventory, even if that means they have to be scaled down a bit, rather than consumables that offer minor enhancements for just a couple of minutes.
I haven’t engaged in any PvP since launch simply for the fact that the feature is mostly vestigial and few people outside of hackers even use it, and the same goes for VATS. In terms of player vs player combat, Bethesda should just remove their current system and replace it with one for consensual duels and clan wars. Attacking someone in Fallout 76 is pointless since, unless they attack back, you can expend your inventory worth of ammunition and do enough damage to be nullified with a single stimpack. VATS on the other hand is a barely functioning mess that winds up being less accurate than simply aiming and firing your weapon. Odds are you will completely ignore both of these features in your time playing Fallout 76.
And I haven’t talked much about the story because frankly I can’t find much attachment to it. There are no human NPCs in Fallout 76, this much has been made obvious, but Bethesda for some reason decided to tie a number of missions to radio distress calls that you need to respond to. The implication of course is that you’ll rescue someone, but you already know that whatever you come across is going to be dead, transformed into a ghoul, or a robot. That removes a fair amount of the suspense and interest. Otherwise questing rolls down to hearing about the lives of people who have lived before you, and are already dead or moved out of the area. It’s interesting, but only to an extent.
If Fallout 76 is the most ambitious project that Bethesda has ever worked on, well a lot of people need to be fired for sheer incompetence. The state that this game is in is one that wouldn’t be acceptable for an indie developer early access launch, let alone a AAA developer with more money than God selling it for $60. I’m sure there are plenty of people who can find enjoyment out of the game as it is, but I’m not one of those people.
Verdict: 1/5 – Fallout 76 is an exercise in frustration that only gets worse the longer you play. What little redeeming qualities that the game has are overshadowed by crashing servers, crashing clients, lazy coding, persistent bugs, and other technical issues.
