Category: Reviews

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.

Review: Secret World Legends


Secret World Legends is a reboot in the sense that the second verse to a song is a reboot to the first. Functionally it follows the same ebb and flow, but it feels like somewhere along the way the lead singer/manager died, only to be replaced by the studio label’s brand manager who doesn’t so much care about playing sick tunes at the next small gig as he does monetizing the band to death. The end result reminds me a lot of City of Steam, a fun game that didn’t do so well in revenue and as such was resurrected as a shambling money zombie to the detriment of the community and ultimately the game’s viability as people left for greener pastures.

After heavily considering whether I want to review a game that is now several months old and rebooted from a five year old title, I guess you can already tell my answer.

1. Let’s Talk Praise, Before I Tear It Apart

I’ll be the first to admit that my memories of The Secret World are as biased as they can get, owing to the 2012 launch and accompanying alternate reality games that were ridiculously cool. I can still remember sitting at my computer with a few thousand people watching CCTV camera footage of a park in Montreal where one of the chat members met up with secret agents (actors) and was given the next piece of the puzzle as we all tried to crowdsource this intricate puzzle.

Since the meat of Secret World Legends is pretty much on par with The Secret World, I think it’s safe to start with its two big draws; questing and the world. The secret world of the Secret World is one of myths, legends, and conspiracies. Imagine that everything you read on the internet is true, from living mummies in Egypt to vampires in Transylvania, swamp zombies in New England and filth in Tokyo. The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars are very powerful entities unlike in the real world where contractual obligations require me to state that the Illuminati is certainly not controlling your everyday life via radio waves. You once again don the uniform of and join one of the three factions in their bid to stop the end of the world, mostly to forward their own purposes.

Missions vary greatly in length and complexity, from the simple “kill x creatures” jobs to 29 tier journeys that can take more than an hour to complete. Because a lot of the puzzles involve knowledge of Morse code, bible scripture, and 18th century musicians, the game has helpfully built in a web browser to assist you in looking up the answers. As well as aiding in learning about the world in which you inhabit, missions also go far into establishing the plot and actors that you’ll be encountering along the way. I’m not lying about that knowledge of bible scripture by the by, a fair amount of puzzles early on will require you to source from the Good Book.

One of my favorite parts of the story is in the scorched desert which features a series of quests that are basically stripped right out of an Indiana Jones movie. You even get to have a prolonged series of fights on a moving train. Many of the quests start and end with fully voiced cutscenes, and while the voice acting and animations aren’t always so great, it’s a nice change from the walls of quest text that still permeate most games in the medium.

Combat is, and I know this is something of an unpopular opinion, better than the average traditional MMO, and I can give me sound reasoning. While combat does devolve into the usual MMO repetition of the same five buttons in specific orders, each fight tends to last just long enough that you don’t feel like you’re grinding out, and short enough that each trash mob doesn’t feel like busywork. The game encourages you to keep moving by giving most enemies some form of powerful area-effecting attack, so Secret World Legends basically drip feeds you enough adrenaline to keep it from getting World of Warcraft quest-grind level boring.

But now that I’ve talked about my two favorite parts of Secret World Legends, let’s get the rest of this over with.

2. The Sheer Incompetence Of It

If you want to understand the criminal incompetence of handling in regards to The Secret World, all you have to do is look at the fact that people from Funcom went to actual, physical prison over fraud and corruption related to this game. Criminal incompetence is a term that I’ve used for a long time in regards to The Secret World, and it is still applicable to Secret World Legends, but worse. If The Secret World was held together with duct tape and chewing gum, Secret World Legends feels like the dry gum was hastily covered in a sign that says “nothing broken here.”

To further explain my point, I hit a spot while leveling where the story mode had become completely impossible to progress. I leveled up my character and managed to reach the Scorched Desert, the first desert area. At one point, the main story tells you to complete a quest called “A Time to Every Purpose” for your contact Said before he will let you continue. Funny story, though: This mission is bugged and has been so since long before the relaunch in July. At one point in the mission, you have to craft two items in succession in order to progress, and sometimes the second just won’t craft. At all, for no reason. It also doesn’t help that this quest highlights some of the user interface chunks that are no longer functioning but remain in the game anyway.

After reading through numerous conflicting theories on how to fix said glitch via Reddit and the official forums, I eventually found a method that worked for me. You craft the first item and then leave the area, log out, and come back which resets the quest but doesn’t remove the first item from your inventory. Get to the point where you craft the items and just craft the second item. Voila! Using a glitch to fix another glitch.

Like the pyramids that dot the Egyptian landscape, many of these bugs are old and decrepit. The fact that many of these bugs have been in the game for months and still haven’t been fixed is depressing, the idea that some have been around on and off since the original launch is downright pathetic. It’s indicative of a company that is either grossly incompetent or pitifully understaffed, but considering that Funcom’s history of MMOs seems to be one unmitigated disaster of a launch after another (Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, followed by The Secret World and Lego Minifigures), I’m inclined to believe that the answer lies in both theories.

The game just finished its Halloween event which is effectively just a reboot of an event from several years ago. The event had major, progression blocking bugs including one where a portal you had to step through to continue the quest just wouldn’t appear, for no reason.

3. R-E-C-Y-C-L-E Recycle! Make Gear Grinding Boring Again.

Let’s talk about loot and gear progression in Secret World Legends, more specifically how underwhelming both aspects of the game are. It’s important that we talk about both in the same section as they specifically go hand in hand.

Secret World Legends doesn’t much care about its loot, it knows that 9.9 times out of 10 you’re going to stick with what you have equipped and as such has no problem feeding you tons of junk with every completed mission. At the beginning of the game, you’ll pick your first primary and secondary weapons, a task that the game forces you to do before you even know what each weapon really does, and then locks the rest away behind some pretty aggressive currency grind. Rather than feed you a steady drip of increasingly fancy looking gear, Secret World Legends has you to level up your equipment by feeding it similar equipment, which are obtained via random bags given as rewards for completing missions. A mission might give you a weapon bag, a glyph bag, and a talisman bag, or some combination of the three.

While I like the idea of being able to upgrade your gear, the manner in which Secret World Legends seems to rely almost entirely on feeding garbage into your weapons in order to slowly level them seems to cut entire swaths of content out of the game. It isn’t like, well every single other MMO where part of the reason to play is the hopes that you’ll get some cool piece of gear. It makes completing quests feel less rewarding, not to mention raids/dungeons, as your best bet at sweet loot is some junk that you’ll recycle to incrementally boost your existing gear. Get used to staring at the same weapon for most of your time playing, because especially after the first few levels there isn’t much of a reason to start leveling up a new weapon.

So here you have an MMO with unsatisfying loot and virtually nonexistent gear progression. The more you level up and upgrade your gear to higher ranks, the longer it takes to get the pieces necessary to perform those upgrades. But hey, the cash shop is always there to speed that progression up, a sad reminder that certain elements of the game were functionally crippled in order for Funcom to try and make some extra moolah off of the free to play transition, at the expense of fun and, if it mimics The Secret World, long term financial stability and player loyalty.

4. Funcom’s Generosity With Loot boxes

One thing you may have noticed is that I’ve been talking about loot gained through mission rewards, and I haven’t said much about loot gained through monster drops. This is simple, monsters don’t drop loot. There are named boss creatures that roam around the map that will drop loot, usually just a random item bag, but monsters in Secret World Legends only drop one thing: Loot boxes. They drop a ton of loot boxes, and nothing else. According to the game, my character has 50 hours invested into it right now. In that time, I have managed to accumulate around 150 loot boxes.

Now that translates to one box on average every 20 minutes, which doesn’t sound so bad and also doesn’t take into account the amount of time spent not killing anything. In reality when you’re killing mobs, these things drop every few minutes. This still wouldn’t be a problem, after all I play Neverwinter and that game drops loot boxes like candy, but that’s coupled with the fact that mobs drop nothing else. Literally the only loot that drops from standard level mobs needs to be unlocked with real money.

It also doesn’t help that the loot box drops are nearly completely worthless. Barring the very rare cosmetic item, of which I have yet to obtain a single one from my daily patron keys, the loot boxes drop distillates and pretty much nothing else. Distillates are items that are used to further increase the experience on your gear, so one of the perks of a patron subscription is you get to boost your gear up every day by a certain amount.

This generosity also expands to the game’s varied dungeons, where your limited daily keys can be used in dungeon lootboxes to obtain even more distillates and junk gear to feed your inventory.

5. Yet I Keep Coming Back

I have very little reason to believe that my time in Secret World Legends will extend beyond completing the story, frankly I have neither the intent nor the willpower to continue the endless grind via repeating missions to continue leveling various weapons and equipment pieces. My character just hit level 50, and is about the venture into the relatively unknown lands of Transylvania. Even then, I’m feeling my interest waning in continuing on with the story after making the arduous journey essentially back to where I left off from the abandoned The Secret World.

Verdict: 2.5/5 – Secret World Legends feels bad all around, from the enhanced combat system that doesn’t actually change much to forcing the existing community to either forgo their characters and in some instances purchases to start over or be left behind on the abandoned-yet-still-operating-until-Funcom-arbitrarily-kills-it-for-lack-of-players The Secret World, while ignoring issues that have been present in the game for years. It strips content from the original game, some for the better, while crippling other parts for the sake of the cash shop and loot boxes. While the missions are still engaging, gear progression is a mind-numbing snore and another function crippled for the sake of selling you lootboxes.

Review: Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire


(Disclosure: MMO Fallout received a copy of Path of Fire for the purposes of review. As always, this does not change my opinion)

I’ve always regarded Guild Wars 2 as the Cadillac of MMORPGs, it’s a title that while not being the apocalyptic horseman for subscription games that some fans prophesied, has cut itself a fine section of the market thanks to its polish and the way that Arenanet went about building the world. Here you have a game with strong non-player characters, an engaging story, and a world that feels more living and breathing than your Eorzeas or Gielinors. It presents maps chock full of stuff to do, and your character at the forefront of ever increasingly dangerous foes.

Path of Fire is the second expansion to Guild Wars 2, continuing the story as it left of in season 3 of the living story. Balthazar, human god of war, has returned to Tyria and plans to kill the elder dragons in order to absorb their power and get revenge on his fellow gods for their betrayal of him. At the end of the season, Balthazar turns his sights toward the Crystal Desert and sets off to kill the elder dragon Kralkatorrik. This is where the story picks up.

The lands of the Crystal Desert aren’t just long stretches of brown and tan, either. The world presented forth is massive, much more open than previous zones (especially Heart of Thorns) and well varied between open deserts littered with the skeletons of massive dead beasts, and a lush oasis of trees and waterfalls.

#1: Mounting With Purpose

I’d like to use this opportunity to gush about the mount system in Guild Wars 2, in part because it was the main focal point of my previous commentary and mostly because it is a huge part of the expansion and a lot of mechanics revolve around the use and leveling of said mounts. You’ll gain several story related mounts, all of which are required to progress through the main story missions and to thoroughly complete each map. These mounts allow you to leap further, jump higher, ride the waves, and the griffon is halfway towards flying.

Now depending on who you ask, the mounts fall into one of two categories: Great handling or cumbersome and horrible. While not entirely like driving a tank, there is no doubt that the mounts in Guild Wars 2 have been built with some idea of realism in mind. Your mounts won’t turn on a dime, you can’t position the camera in front of your mount and perform a crazy backwards leap, it just won’t work. In the wide open maps of Guild Wars 2, these mounts feel great. They sway and roll into each maneuver, you can tell that Arenanet put a lot of love into making something more than just your avatar but with boosted speed/jump. Try to use them to maneuver through small spaces, and they respond exactly like you’d expect walking a giant dinosaur through a China shop would.

The mount system itself introduces a whole new form of progression into Guild Wars 2, with each mount becoming even better at their specialty as you use them and gain experience. Completing tasks, finding nodes, and going through the story missions unlocks mastery points which are needed to upgrade your mounts to be all they can be. The mounts also have a use in old Tyria as while the old zones have a lot more waypoints, you won’t have to spend the money to warp between areas.

#2: The Trivializing of Isaac

The good news is that if you have vast swaths of the game world unexplored, as my newly minted level 80 boosted ranger does, you’re going to have a much easier time doing so. The raptor and hopper mounts perform their jobs excellently, jumping long distances and leaping to extreme heights with ease. On the other hand, those of you who meticulously took the time to complete all those difficult jumping puzzles might not be happy to find out that they’ve all been made trivial and mostly useless thanks to a mount that can leap 50 feet in the air or a raptor that can just bypass a jumping puzzle.

Granted, these abilities already exists in one fashion or another, but Path of Fire basically takes all of that and wraps it up into four mounts and hands them to everyone, regardless of your ownership of Heart of Thorns.

#3: Telling A Story With A Punch

Five years later, I still can’t tell whether I like or hate story boss fights in Guild Wars 2. They remind me of the opening sequence of Game of Thrones, in that if I’m in the right mood, they are epic and just the right length. Other times they can seem cumbersome and overly dragged out.

One of the bosses you’ll fight against during the Path of Fire story is the Herald of Balthazar in Act 1. Personally I hated this character, not because of the character itself but for its game mechanics. There is no thought to most of the Herald’s fights, you just pummel her uselessly with attacks while she goes around murdering the people you’re trying to save. I get it, and although clumsy the presence of no-win situations is a nice addition. Who wants the protagonist to come out on top at all chapters of the story?

Otherwise the story boss fights are pretty grand, more than a simple “do more damage than the other guy until one of you is dead.” Fights against Balthazar become desperate, as he continues to make the field more dangerous. One boss I fought against had a mechanic where he would summon allies, and if you didn’t beat them fast enough he would siphon their energy and replenish some of his health. One thing Guild Wars 2 does great with its story boss fights is making that 10 minute fight seem like a real struggle, making you hate the giant bastard after you finally think you’re making progress only for Balthazar to show up and start wrecking your stuff while taunting you the whole time. After a while you realize that it’s not so much frustration at game mechanics that you’re feeling but actual immersion in the world and its inhabitants.

I eagerly await Season 4 and how the story will continue going forward.

#4: Closing Thoughts

In summary, Path of Fire is exactly what you would want out of an expansion. It adds a bunch of new content, reasons to log back in and keep playing, while keeping your existing toys more or less intact. The Crystal Desert is a beautiful place to roam around in with tons to do. There is more content coming with Path of Fire that simply hasn’t been unlocked yet, but we’ll be doing an updated look when it does.

Verdict: 4.5/5 – I loved the story of Path of Fire, and the mounts are a positive addition to the game. Arenanet avoided a major pitfall by not diluting the world with flying mounts. It’s impressive to see how far the story has come, via a series of flashbacks in Path of Fire’s main story.

The Destiny 2 Review: Burning Down the House


Destiny 1 was a pretty earth shattering game, not in the sense that it broke new ground but in how many people it managed to snare in its repetitive yet addictive gameplay. While the title was a bust in many minds thanks to broken promises and features that seemed obviously slashed for time, Destiny carried a certain I don’t know what that kept people engaged for a long time after launch. Where other titles sell seven figures and watch their communities quickly die off, Destiny’s users were still logging in crazy hours two years after launch, hunting down all of the game’s exotic gear.

Destiny 2 feels like someone took an MMO and sheared off the leveling experience, leaving only the end-game gear grind and some bits and pieces left over. Those of you who played through Destiny will be familiar with most of the mechanics from this sequel, and as many will already know or quickly realize, the “true game” as some would call it doesn’t really start until you’re level 20 and beat the campaign.

Neither of which take a particularly long time to complete, but the story and world seem far more fleshed out an interesting than they did in the previous title, in which a great portion of the game’s lore was locked away off-game on the Bungie website. All you really need to know going into this game is that you are a Guardian, a special person who literally can’t die as you are gifted powers by the Traveler, a construct that came to Earth and then died, bequeathing humans with its powers of light. As a Guardian of the light, your job is to protect the light, all of those people who can die, and fight off the coming darkness.

Destiny 2 starts off with an invasion of the tower by the Red Legion, led by the big baddie of the campaign Dominus Ghaul. Seeking to claim the Traveler’s gift for himself, Ghaul destroys the last remaining human city, captures the Traveler, and nearly kills you (the player). The ensuing campaign is all about taking back what was once yours, and reclaiming the Tower and driving off Ghaul and his forces.

Thankfully, unlike its predecessor, Destiny 2 treats its characters as though they are real people and not simply cardboard cutouts to vendor weapons to players. I honestly couldn’t tell you if any of the characters from Destiny 2 were in Destiny 1, and for all intent and purpose they might as well be completely new people. But with Zavala, Cayde-6, and other side characters like Failsafe help build a world that is interesting to learn more about.

Once you finish the campaign, the game opens up and everything becomes available. You have four planets, each of which has its own set of public events, missions, patrols, faction currency, and more. You’ll be able to embark on missions that offer varying challenges in return for powerful, game changing exotic equipment. I managed to get my hands rather early on a Sunshot, a hand cannon that carries explosive rounds and causes everything I shoot to explode and damage those around them.

Strikes are Destiny’s answer to MMO dungeons, these are three player instances that have you completing various objectives in return for glimmer and gear. While the standard strikes are open for matchmaking, the more difficult version does require communication and thus you’ll need to form your own fireteam. Same goes for Raids, high tier dungeons with gear requirements that require you to know who is doing what and when, and thus is not available for public matchmaking. Crucible is once again the place to go for player vs player matches.

But you’ll find plenty to do in Destiny 2 on your own as well. Public events dot the landscape on each planet, and each event has a secret trigger that unlocks its heroic version, increasing the difficulty while also increasing the rewards. You might be annoyed to find yourself in a zone where nobody else is farming events, but that can be pretty quickly fixed and more often than not you’ll find yourself surrounded by players who seem to know exactly what they’re doing.

Thankfully Destiny 2 continues its series staple of having some of the tightest gunplay in the genre. Just about every weapon has a satisfying kick as you blow off a Fallen’s head, shatter a Vex’s shield, or take down some big bad guy who is just asking for a shotgun blast to the face.

Destiny 2_20170913002506

In a lot of ways, Destiny 2 feels like Destiny 1 and Destiny 1 more like Destiny .5. While the maps are wholly new, the enemies you’ll face in them are virtually identical to those from the previous game. Rather than building on to the currencies of Destiny 1, Destiny 2 streamlines or outright removes them. And while customizing your character is much more in-depth thanks to shaders being per-body part, it’s hard not to see through the cynical cash grab that was making them single use and placing them as part of the cash shop. You can get a ton of shaders through gameplay, but they come in packs of three, for your four pieces of armor.

I don’t have many gripes with Destiny 2, but considering how the original improved greatly during its first two years, it only seems logical that Destiny 2 will continue to be improved upon post-launch.

Exclusive: Middle Earth Shadow of War Preview


Middle Earth: Shadow of War is the long awaited sequel to Shadow of Mordor, a highly rated open world fighter that takes place in everyone’s favorite land of Mordor. Players once again control of Talion as he forges a new ring of power and attempts to keep control of it for use in the war against Sauron and his forces of darkness. The game doesn’t officially launch until October 10, but it just so happens that I was in the store and they miraculously had a copy on the shelf already. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity for an exclusive review, so I took it.

The more I play this, the more I’m pretty sure that this is an unreleased prototype spinoff, possibly taking place in between the first two games. My local store had a copy called the Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition, and frankly within ten minutes I could tell that this would revolutionize gaming as a medium. To start, the special edition was clearly mislabeled and thus rang up for about $4 at the counter. The cashier didn’t seem to care that I was getting this product more than a month early.

And I know what you nerds are going to say: Why focus on Pepperoni as a character when she was such a minuscule factor in the books and never made it into the movies? Look, I love Lord of the Rings just as much as any of you do, likely a lot more. I’ve read the books literally three thousand times each, and I’ve been waiting what feels like decades for the Tolkein Estate to finally release the rights to Pepperoni for her own game. In fact, just the idea that pervasive sexists are fighting so hard against her appearance as a lead character should be all the evidence the Warner Bros needs to put her front and center.

The most surprising thing of Shadow of War’s Pepperoni spinoff is that it not only isn’t compatible with any of the current gen systems. Instead, Pepperoni Edition is compatible with most microwaves and convection ovens. It does contain a code for 100 coins in the main game, however. The cashier told me that this game doesn’t play as well on the microwave, so for the ultimate experience I went with my trusty convection oven. After a quick 10 minute installation process at 400 degrees, I was ready to go.

Let’s get into Pepperoni as a character in Shadow of War. It’s nice to see Warner Bros. finally giving us a gritty female character, one with a tough, crispy outer shell that actually hides a rather saucy personality underneath. We see a character that is both sweet and a bit tart, always ready to help when called. The dialogue can get a little cheesy in parts and it lacked a really meaty ending, but overall the presentation is one that you can really sink your teeth into.

While her motivations aren’t as in your face as, say, Talion wanting to survive and destroy Sauron in the main game, it’s pretty clear from the get go that Pepperoni is all about sustaining the survivors still hiding within Mordor. She wants to enrich life back into the lands via copious amounts of iron and protein. The game really goes far to show the gritty, greasy reality of life in Mordor and while I wouldn’t exactly call this game “profane,” it is dirty enough that you will literally need some napkins in order to walk out with your hands clean. Perhaps some wet naps.

The delivery method of Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is going to irk some customers. The idea of games slowly becoming more of a service than a product has become more popular over time, but this is the first game made entirely out of consumables. The box came with 40 consumables that must be individually installed, of which I used a baker’s dozen for this review. Now I can see why this cost $4 at the store, most will beat it in less than a week while hardcore games can probably get through it in a day. I did severely burn my mouth on the first three consumables, but that’s the cost of games journalism.

There is little doubt in my mind that this review is going to get slammed on social media because “oh it’s not a real game,” and “oh Connor you don’t know what a real game is, you’re not a real games journalist.” Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition doesn’t cater to the ‘hardcore gamer,’ the unemployed basement dweller who has all the time in the world to memorize button combinations. You don’t need quick reflexes to play this game well, nor do you need to memorize insane codes or find secret areas. Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition can be played both solo or co-op/competitive, but there is no online option.

MMO Fallout Verdict: 4.5/5 – Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is a welcome spinoff of presumably a great game. It’s simple to install, engaging to play, and features a filled out protagonist with clear cut motivations. Will it win the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers? No, but the general public will find something to love in Pepperoni’s cheesiness. 

NM Impressions: Crash Force


(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.

The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.

Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.

While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.

And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.

I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.

As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.

It Came From the Xbox Game Pass: Layers of Fear


 

Layers of Fear was part of the Games with Gold service back in March, so if you’ve been a Live subscriber and kept up on activating your monthly titles, you already have this in your library. I activated my copy in March and haven’t given it a try because, I will admit, there is nothing that I loathe more than the horror game genre outside of maybe the mobile gaming sphere and the degenerative effect it is having on the industry overall (a conversation for another day).

My problem with horror games is that they so easily fall into the same hole as many horror films, where ‘psychological horror’ has slowly changed to mean ‘gradually increasing music followed by the OOGA BOOGA BOOGA’ jump scare, as we delve into the past of another protagonist with his insanity/dead family/amnesia/drug problem. I will also admit that I’ve been spoiled on great horror. Resident Evil 7 is terrifying on Playstation 4’s VR, Amnesia/SOMA are fantastic games, and we’ve had years of titles like the old Resident Evil games that still spook if less so in the modern era. But Layers of Fear is worse, it is a horror walking simulator.

Let me explain: Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a great (if sometimes frustrating) game because encounters were sparse and you couldn’t fight back, in fact you couldn’t even look at the monsters too long without going insane. Resident Evil 7 starts you out running and hiding and over time you gain the ability to fight back, although it is still a very haunting game. A big part of horror games is the fear of danger, of death, of failure. It’s not enough to just be in a spooky place, you have to believe that there is something that poses a threat. Take that building block away and the game starts to fall apart. Obviously I’m talking in the context of my in-game character with the level of immersion you’d expect to have with any piece of media.

Layers of Fear does attempt to introduce more immersion by having you grip down with the right trigger and pull open doors and drawers with the right joystick. It would have been a nice touch, were it implemented ten years ago, but here it is janky and more often than not you’ll find yourself fiddling with the controls because, despite the button prompt being up, the game doesn’t register that you’re grabbing hold.

And that’s why Layers of Fear lost me within the first five minutes, after I realized that this was a carnival fun house where no matter how spooky things got, nothing could harm me. The premise of the game is simple, you play an artist returning to his home to finish his painting. As you move around through the house, collecting mementos and reliving memories, you slowly piece together what happened in his life to bring him to this state, as he appears to break down into insanity and the world warps around him. In short: It’s very close to every other ‘psychological horror’ walking simulator to come out in the last five years.

Which is terrible, because Layers of Fear clearly has some talented people at the helm. Much of the credit has to be given to the level designers putting together a house that will give you whiplash as you try to find your way around. The level seamlessly warps, entering a room only for the door to disappear when you turn around to go back, for another door to appear where you had just encountered a dead end. The absolute worst thing you could have happen is for the player to witness these changes, but the game perfectly ensures (without taking control of the camera, mind you) that you don’t.

But then you have a list of horror tropes that I can only assume came off of a checklist, and the game suffers for it and in some cases you’ll find yourself laughing at what was probably intended to be a serious moment. For every impressive moment, like a low-tone gramophone that causes the room to melt, you have six that are cheesy and take way too long to finish up. In one scene, the room fills with dolls that vibrate very fast and then disappear, but are poorly place and half-clipped through objects in some cases like the developer just rushed through that scene. As I said, you know a game has missed its target hard when you’re laughing at scenes that were probably intended to be serious.

And then you have this:

So Layers of Fear can be best surmised by this process: Go into room, figure out how to activate jump scare, find memento or item to pick up (if there is one) and then continue. At best, it’s a good resume item for the artists, level designers, and audio engineers because the folks at Bloober Team do some crazy stuff with the Unity engine. The paintings present in the game are beautiful, haunting masterpieces and the soundtrack is just as unnerving to listen to. It’s a pain, therefore, that the story is so sparse and doesn’t really go anywhere.

Your first play through of Layers of Fear will take around 4-5 hours, which begs the question since the game is free: Is it worth your time? If you’re a Youtuber who makes big money off of screaming into a camera, then you’ve probably already missed your chances of cashing in on this title. If you’re looking for something to make your Xbox Game Pass worth the time, then put this down toward the bottom of the list. #90, assuming you can make it through everything else.

Final Score: 5/10
Recommended for: When you have nothing else to play.

Layers of Fear is beautifully designed, but the scares are often so laughably bad that it’s hard to stay immersed in the world or care about the protagonist or his family. Numerous frame rate dips made this difficult to enjoy further as the game became choppy in some areas. There are so many better horror games to be playing right now, with more interesting characters, engaging gameplay, and better presented spooks that Layers of Fear should be reserved for when you have absolutely nothing else to do.

[NM] 100% Completion: Tattletail


Tattletail came out on Steam on December 28 and pretty much flew under the radar until a bunch of Youtubers discovered it and made it somewhat a success (I’m sure it more than paid its development costs and probably put a decent amount of pocket money in the developer’s…pockets). Looking at the Steam stats, it actually still turned out to be a low key title with somewhere between six and twelve thousand owners, which is a disappointment because this game is much more engaging and suspenseful than Five Nights at Freddy’s ever was. Me, personally, I threw my $5 down on launch night.

This is a game with a basic premise: You are a child who opens his Christmas present five days early to find that it is a Tattletail (think creepier Furby) and you have to survive each night until Christmas. Each night progressively introduces you to more mechanics, your Tattletail needs to be brushed, fed, and charged regularly otherwise he will not stop chattering. You have a flashlight which also much be shaken regularly otherwise the room gets dark (obviously), and by sprinting you create noise. The noise mechanic is important because in order to avoid the Mama Tattletail who is out to kill you, you’ll need to keep Tattletail satisfied and your flashlight charged. You actually don’t see any real action until about night 4.

I recommend playing through this game, you’ll get a few hours out of it for a fiver and it isn’t as bad as the screenshots might make you believe. Tattletail has resources that need to be filled, but they go down so slowly that it never becomes obnoxious, and even when he does start screaming about food, the game is basically lenient enough that you can walk from one end of the house to the other and still not have to worry about Mama attacking. The tension in the game comes from the feeling of losing control, as you move around the house, avoiding Mama’s red glowing eyes, while trying to keep your flashlight on and shushing Tattletail. The game punishes you for reflexes, the moment your flashlight goes out your instinct is to hit the mouse button and charge it, causing instant death.

The game isn’t perfect, there are a few instances where you’ll be in Mama’s sights without being able to see her on screen, resulting in an instant death because you thought it was safe to charge your flashlight. There are numerous ways to cheese the game, but you should at least finish the game once before you ruin the experience, spots you can seek out where Mama doesn’t have a spawn point watching over, or when you figure out that your flashlight is only necessary while holding Tattletail (because he’s afraid of the dark) and not charging it doesn’t penalize the player while walking alone in the dark while charging it could potentially kill you.

While I hope that the developer behind this game continues to make games, I hope to never see a Tattletail 2 without at least good reason. What little story is there leaves just enough questions to the player’s imagination, and I’d hate to see sequels for the sake of sequels.

Check it out on Steam.