All posts in category Shooter

Deus Ex: The Fall

A bit more of a conventional review today, folks…insofar as that term can be applied to several pages of discourse on a glorified expansion pack for a cult video game, prepared eleven months after anyone anywhere cared.

That said, let’s talk about that cult video game. Deus Ex, a 2000 RPG game, is the Gone With The Wind of video games. For ages it’s been frequently cited as one of the capital-letter Best Ever, and it features broad entertainment in perennial genres mixed with some seriously deep ruminations and excellent character development. For all that, though, it isn’t popular with modern audiences at all because of how mired it is in the bygone age when it was made.

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by Year Late Reviews on July 11, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in RPG, Sequel, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on July 11, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/deus-ex-the-fall/

Metro: Last Light

Metro: Last Light is the sequel to the stellar indie game Metro 2033. 2k33 was a very intelligent game, with an excellent premise for an action-horror FPS: The game took place twenty years or so after a nuclear holocaust, where the survivors had managed to seal themselves inside the vast and labyrinthine Moscow Metro system. For a while, things were okay – subway stations turned into villages, tunnels into trade routes, and so on – but then hideous mutant creatures started appearing (I guess no post-nuclear game can escape the influence of the Fallout series, which is sorta sad because I always enjoy harder sci-fi in games). You control Artyom (You’ll be safe with “ar-CHOM”) an unassuming, fresh-faced kid who leaves his station for the first time, and goes on an expedition through both the Metro and the blasted, sterile landscape above as he finds a way to deal with the supernatural mutants once and for all.

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by Year Late Reviews on May 14, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in RPG, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on May 14, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/metro-last-light/

BioShock Infinite

DISCLAIMER: It’s no secret that this blog doesn’t get very high viewership, or that writing down my rambling and snarky thoughts on these works of art is more for my benefit than anyone else’s. As a consequence, please note that this will go on for much longer than normal.

And once more with feeling – your playing experience will be very much spoiled by this review. If you just came here for a yea or nay, you should play the game, by all means – you’ll probably enjoy at least some parts of it.

References within references within references…this was fun to make.

It’s impossible to talk about BioShock Infinite without talking about its lineage. The game is the sequel to 2007’s BioShock, one of the best known and most influential games in history. BioShock is a true work of art, and unlike some other games which share that distinction it’s also a really fun game in its own right.

 

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by Year Late Reviews on March 26, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in RPG, Sequel, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on March 26, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/bioshock-infinite/

Dead Space 3

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2008’s Dead Space was a self-proclaimed love letter to the sci-fi horror genre, and was one of the last specimens of a dying breed: The AAA-developed horror title.

Jim Sterling of the Escapist has gone over this in more depth than I care to, but I’ll sum it up: Because horror games have a niche market, big distributors and developers are less willing to take a chance on them over products with a wider appeal. Thus, horror games are usually the province of smaller developers. This has led to some big successes for startup companies, like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Slender: Source and Outlast. The drawback to this is we’ve lost the grand, theatrical style of horror games that we got until the beginning of the previous console generation; F.E.A.R., Resident Evil, Metro 2033…the list goes on.

Yes, major developers, we’ve all seen Aliens – we know that the logical progression for a horror franchise is to make it more action and character focused. The problem is that when you do that, it stops being a horror game and just becomes an action game with the lights turned off. All the franchises I mentioned above have neglected their horror roots in favor of becoming more generic shooters…except for Dead Space. The third and latest game in that franchise makes a decent attempt to stay a horror game, but commits a few unforgivable sins in the process.

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by Year Late Reviews on February 5, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Incomplete review, RPG, Sequel, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on February 5, 2014

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/dead-space-3/

Far Cry 3

For those of you just tuning in, my Assassin’s Creed 3 review had me notice several similarities in that game to FarCry 3 – similarities which I attributed to the two games being developed by the same studio, and released within a month pf each other. I haven’t been the first to see this, and I also won’t be the first to say that the latter game, and today’s subject, fares much better for its stint in the Ubisoft mixing bowl than ACIII did.

I haven’t played the previous installments in the FarCry franchise – in fact, my only previous experience with it has been a riff session with some friends of the Uwe Boll movie – so I went into it dry, not knowing what to expect outside of the accounts from reviewers, which praised the game for the joy that it brought to exploration, but didn’t like the near-complete lack of any story or structure to the game’s world.

This problem has been mitigated, but it still remains. There’s a whole lot of things to do in the game, and they‘re all satisfying and make for a coherent flow of gameplay, but quite a few of them don’t have any real incentive. The reason FarCry 3 is such a great game, though, is because of how effortlessly it manages to combine this varied gameplay with a tight, deconstructive and well-scripted story.

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by Year Late Reviews on December 4, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in RPG, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on December 4, 2013

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/far-cry-3/

Black Mesa

It’s not Half-Life’s birthday – Blocky Scientist doesn’t get a candle.

It says a lot about video games as both an art form and a medium in general that Black Mesa, fan remake of landmark first-person shooter Half-Life, was even thought of, much less made. In Hollywood, remakes have never really been popular, even in the drought of intellectual property that has afflicted the film industry in the past decade – the logic usually being “How much could you change the original while still repeating it?” from an artistic standpoint, and “Why would people pay to see this when they could just get the original?” from the marketing side.

In video game territory, though, remakes are a near-necessity at this point. The trend of shunning backwards compatibility will continue into the next decade (I’m exclusively a PC gamer, in case you didn’t know), so remaking old video games for newer formats is the only way anyone without an obsolete system can play them – and since games more often than not sell themselves on looks, updating the game’s visuals is practically a necessity. I will try to focus solely on the changes to Black Mesa, rather than rehashing the original.

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by Year Late Reviews on September 14, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Reboot, Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on September 14, 2013

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/85/

Spec Ops: The Line

No pictures in this one, folks - replaying the game was enough of a chore, taking screenshots was just too much.

No pictures in this one, folks – replaying the game was enough of a chore, taking screenshots was just too much.

Some of my favorite works, in any medium, are those that deconstruct, examine, and lampshade their chosen forms of art: People like Jasper Fforde, Terry Pratchett, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino have based their entire careers on works like this, and deserve every bit of acclaim they get for it.

Spec Ops: The Line, Yager Games’ landmark opus, may seem like one of those on the surface, but it’s another animal entirely. There are dozens of differences between it and the creations of the other artists I mentioned, but there’s one that overshadows the rest, and it leads to most of the game’s successes and failures:

Pratchett, Tarantino, and so on – they love books and movies, and the ones they make themselves are playfully satirical, but still affectionate. Spec Ops, though, hates video games. It hates video games with a passion, one that is comparable to the likes of a vengeful computer hates the hapless human scientists it invariably turns against. And since, by necessity, you’re a player of video games if you’re playing Spec Ops, the game hates you.

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by Year Late Reviews on June 26, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Shooter, Video Game
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Posted by Year Late Reviews on June 26, 2013

https://yearlatereviews.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/spec-ops-the-line/