third person shooter

All posts tagged third person shooter

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne – 17 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/20/2020

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox. Tagged: max payne 2, remedy entertainment, rockstar games, the fall of max payne, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Release Date: 10/14/2003 (PC), 11/25/2003 (Xbox), 12/02/2003 (PS2)

Also Available On

Max Payne 2 was released a little over a year from the original and a surprising amount of fat was cut from the original. It’s the same game, but more refined and updated and feels more tightly woven than its predecessor. A lot of problems were fixed, but new ones arose as well. The narrative continues right after the first game with Max still trying to avenge the death of his wife and child, still trying to get to the bottom of The Inner Circle, and a new love blooms: Mona Sax.

The game starts off similarly to the first game, we get some weird trippy dream sequences, but they aren’t nearly as awful with zero platforming this time. Once you are in control of Max you can instantly feel the difference. He has more weight, his animations are smoother, and gunplay overall just feels punchier and sharper. More weapons were introduced with many old ones coming back. The new M4 and Kolishnokov weapons are a great addition, but unnecessary. One assault rifle is good enough as well as the addition of the HP5, but the Ingrams do just fine for a sub-machine gun. While the older weapons pack more of a punch the new weapons just feel like they were added just to add to the weapon count, less would have been fine. A new dedicated projectile button has been added so you can throw grenades and molotovs without equipping them.

Bullet Time has been refined and fixed as well. Max can now spin around in a 360-degree motion while dodging and the bullets impact harder and there’s less of a delay when you shoot. There is also better feedback on enemies when hit as they stumble more and drop their weapons so you know they’re dead in bullet time. Max can also stay lying down while continuing to empty a clip so the delay in getting up doesn’t make you completely vulnerable as the first game did. The difficulty has been dialed way back and I died a lot less than in the first game. All these great fixes and additions make Max Payne 2 the better of the two games already.

When it comes to level design, Max Payne 2 has more interesting levels like a creepy funhouse, a sprawling mansion, a construction site, and some apartment slums, but there’s a lot of backtracking and I feel the overall scope of the game feels claustrophobic. The variety is better, but you explore those few areas longer and I just feel I wanted to see more of New York inside this noire world Max lives in. Also, gone are the boss fights so the game feels better paced and I felt a tempo of gameplay going that the first didn’t have. However, the game is much shorter clocking in at 4-5 hours. There aren’t any collectibles or anything like that so once you fly through the game it’s over and there’s no reason to ever go back honestly.

Max Payne 2 is a memorable ride. The story is still told in those awesome comic strips, and I feel at the end of the game we get to know Max and Mona well enough to understand their characters and want them on screen more. Their love story is a great centerpiece for this Mafia revenge tale and it makes Max and Mona feel more human. There’s still a cliffhanger at the end of the story, and a third Max Payne game didn’t come until a decade later, but what we get is one of the best single-player shooters of the PS2/Xbox era. It’s tightly compacted and solid and while it’s short, sometimes that means quality and that is rare even to this day.

Publisher: Gathering of Developers

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Release Date: 07/23/2001 (PC), 12/06/2001 (PS2), 12/12/2001 (Xbox), 07/16/2002 (Mac), 12/16/2003 (GBA), 04/12/2012 (iOS), 06/14/2012 (AND)

Also Available On

Bullet time. While The Matrix made it popular amid pop culture, Max Payne started it all in the video game realm. You play as a cop, Max Payne, who is framed for the murder of another NYPD cop. Your wife and newborn child are also murdered and you are trying to get revenge on the people who did it. The story isn’t anything amazing, but Max Payne’s voice actor, and the well-done writing, keep you hooked long enough to find out what happened behind the scenes. The game is told in a comic noir graphic-novel style and it suits the game well. The cut scenes are imaginative and different and don’t look cheap or like the developers were trying to take shortcuts.

Outside of the story, the gameplay is all about shooting because that’s literally it. Max runs around with various weapons such as Barrettas, Ingrams, shotguns, grenade launchers, Molotov cocktails, grenades, and assault rifles to mow down the Mafia and corrupt cops. Bullet time is the main gameplay element here and when activated Max does a jump dodge in the direction you move and you can see him dodging bullets in real-time. This is actually a mechanic you must master as most situations require you to use it to stay alive. You can’t stand in one spot or you will be dead in a few hits and there’s no cover system. I had to quicksave every 2-3 minutes as well because the game is so difficult. It’s cool to jump dodge around a corner, but once Max lands there’s a delay in him getting up and you are completely vulnerable to gunfire. I had to make sure I jump dodged behind cover or across a hallway so I wouldn’t die the second the bullet time finished. You can also activate bullet time and just run your meter down so you can run and gun with it too.

There are very few scenarios in which you do more than press buttons. One scene has Max driving a crate crane around an area, but it’s nothing special, and there are some interactive objects that trigger comic cut scenes, but 95% of the game is just shooting. The weapons themselves feel good and I felt I had to switch up weapons depending on the situation to make my life easier. The locales are varied, but they are a bit too stale and boring for my taste. They don’t quite capture the noir feeling of the comic cut scenes, but there is one level early on called Ragna Rock which was a gothic cult house that reminded me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, so that’s a good thing. The game really does feel like a first-generation PS2/Xbox game, but it’s very polished. The game flows nicely, but the difficulty is all over the place, you will die dozens and dozens of times in this game.

The visuals are clean and look nice even 20 years later. I installed a texture upgrade patch and some other things to make the game upscale to 4K nicely and play on modern hardware, and it looks pretty good. Even in the original, the facial textures are nice and very realistic, and the aesthetic of the game stands out over most shooters of its time. The voice acting is great, and I finished the game in about 7 hours. After you finish it there’s literally nothing else to do as the multiplayer mode was scrapped. It’s a fantastic single-player game that holds up well even today despite its insane difficulty and unbalanced gameplay. The story isn’t anything special, but Max is a great character to dive into and it makes for a fun evening.

L.A. Noire – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/16/2020

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: l.a. noire, la noire, open world, rockstar games, shooter, team bondi, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games

Release Date: 11/14/2017 (XONE/PS4/Switch) 05/17/2011 (X360/PS3) 11/08/2011 (PC)

Also Available On

America loves to romanticize the police. Despite the political environment, we are in, the only way we can really satisfy our lust for crime and murder mysteries is to put ourselves in the shoes of the police. L.A. Noire is set in an almost historically accurate 1940s Los Angeles right after WWII ended. You play as war veteran/detective Cole Phelps in solving a drug mystery and many murder mysteries within.

The game starts out like any typical open-world game by slowly introducing gameplay elements to you before opening the world up. You are Cole as a beat cop who is called to a murder scene. You chase down a suspect, investigate some clues in an alley, and you’re so good at what you do that you magically get promoted to a traffic detective. L.A. Noire has a few core elements and it mostly sticks to these throughout the game ad nauseum. The first element is crime-solving. This is done by picking up various objects in an area, examining them, and moving on. This sounds interesting in theory but 90% of all objects in this game are completely useless and really don’t need to be picked up and examined. There are maybe one or two objects that are puzzle boxes and a couple of documents that require you to tap on certain information. It’s cool the first time you do all of this, but after that, it’s boring and feels pointless. Make the objects I’m holding more interesting or allow Cole to do more than twirl them around.

The next core element is interrogations and this implements Team Bondi’s groundbreaking motion capture technology that actually makes facial animations life-like but in a creepy uncanny valley type of way. Sure, you see neck muscles move, eyebrows twitch, and it all looks nice, but on hardware that couldn’t run the engine very well, these realistic life-like faces look odd on low textured and poly counted characters. The whole point of an investigation is to use these facial expressions to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth and it never works as intended. There is no set to tell that the game gives you to look for, and it always becomes a guessing game or a crapshoot. Most of the time the logic never makes sense based on what the game wants or its hyper-specific. A certain question may seem like selecting Good Cop would be a good idea because that’s what your guts tell you, but instead, you were to accuse the suspect and pick a piece of evidence that you never would have guessed. The interrogations are an awful guessing game and I never felt engaged like the developers wanted.

The next part of L.A. Noire is exploring and gunplay. Firefights are mundane and feel pretty lifeless. There are a cover system and the weapons shoot, but they all feel the same and there’s no feedback or satisfaction from firing these WWII-era weapons. Each firefight is a whack-a-mole style shooting gallery of enemies popping their heads above cover. When you’re not shooting you’re chasing people or driving around. Driving is one of the worst parts of the game as compared to Rockstar’s other offerings, it feels stiff, slow, and lifeless, and I had no fun driving around the city. Sure, Los Angeles looks pretty good with some great landmarks, but having a piece of a fence bring my car to a complete stop is nonsense. I can ram through a fire hydrant, but a wooden fence will stop my car dead in its tracks. The driving is inconsistent and even car chases are no fun.

There are 40 side missions called “Streets of LA” but these are just various car chases, shooting galleries, or on-foot chases and repeat and become stale and annoying. Thankfully there’s a fast travel system that allows your partner to drive to the next destination to skip all the boring driving. I understand this is a realistic game, but Mafia did it much better. There are 95 different cars in the game, but they honestly all drive the same and it just becomes no fun after the first hour of the game is over. There are other side objectives like finding hidden badges, all the landmarks, and trophies but why bother? Anything outside of the story cases is just completely boring and stiff, there’s a layer of polish that’s seriously missing.

Lastly, we come to the story and characters. Nearly every character is completely unlikeable in the sense that they are just plain boring. Cole Phelps is a goodie-two-shoes who can do no wrong and has zero character flaws which make him very unlikable. His partners on the four desks you work on are also just as poorly written. I hated them, but not because they were written so well that I wanted to hate them. They were just so average and too Mary Sue. One partner was just a lazy asshole cop and never budged from that stereotype, another was just corrupt, and the issue is that there was no development. No back story to any of these characters and Phelps’ flashbacks to WWII did nothing to make you care for him as he acted just as stubborn and perfect as he did as a cop. For the game being a noire there is zero character build-up or any reason to care. The overarching story doesn’t actually pick up speed until the last few cases, as each and every case drones on and on and is exactly the same as the last just in different orders. I never once felt interested or attached to any one case. Give me fewer cases and build up the victims within so I can feel like the boring twists are worthwhile.

And that’s where I conclude with L.A. Noire. It’s just “okay”. Each of the many cases feels rudimentary in the end and mundane and I felt like I was just checking off boxes (literally) and had no reason to care for the first or last murder case. The driving is painfully stiff and slow and despite 1940s Los Angeles looking nice it’s stale and boring with nothing going on inside. You can’t even shop for clothes or go buy weapons. It’s just a giant hub world to get from point A to B. Streets of L.A. side missions are just randomized gameplay loops of chasing, shooting, and driving with neither of the three is particularly interesting in their own right. So, is L.A. Noire worth playing? Sure, it’s a fun game and some of the cases are decent and I did want to see what happened to Phelps in the end, but just barely. After getting so far in the game I felt like I had to finish it hoping it would pick up in the next case. The game plays and looks great on Switch, but has performance issues and bugs that required game restarts. The framerate can dip into single digits in certain spots, but it’s still very playable.

Syphon Filter 3 – 19 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/22/2020

Posted in: PlayStation (PS1), Sony Consoles. Tagged: 989 studios, action, eidetic, exclusive, gabriel logan, playstation, ps1, psone, Sony, syphon filter 3, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Sony Bend

Release Date: 11/06/2001

Available Exclusively On

Gabe and Lian are now federally wanted fugitives and are marked as terrorists after trying to foil The Agencies’ plans to acquire the Syphon Filter biological weapon. The game picks up right after the end of Syphon Filter 2. Both agents are testifying to Vince Hadden, the main villain of the previous game, and the entire game is made up of flashback missions filling in gaps for the entire series.

While this is a fine idea, Syphon Filter 3 suffers from a huge flaw and that’s level design, as the clever level design from the last 2 games is out the window here and seriously brings this entire game down. While I liked knowing what happened before the first game during the beginning cut scene with Rhomer and Mara in the jungle, and I like seeing how Gabe, Lian, Mujari, and Teresa all met, the levels don’t do it justice. The issue here is both lazy level design and over-ambitious design mixed with hardware limitations. This game came out too late and should have been made for the PS2. Levels in this game are large and open and suffer from the black distance and low draw distance from the PS1’s hardware limitations. The level design is incredibly confusing and hard to navigate. One mission as Lian in the Ancient Ruins is just a labyrinth of hallways and instead of the smooth push through each level there’s tons of backtracking and running around blindly.

Another issue the game suffers from is too much action. There aren’t really any required stealth missions anymore and too many enemies are thrown at you at once as well as a mix of low ammo resources. I frequently ran out of ammo and had to exploit the game by resorting to headshots when I didn’t have to. The increased enemy count just doesn’t work with the game’s auto lock-on system. Many times I died because I couldn’t switch between enemies fast enough. Another mission as Gabe has him running around a boat to plant explosives which is incredibly boring and one level is so short it only has four enemies in it. I feel like 18 months wasn’t enough time to develop this game and create the fun clever levels and enemy placements that made the series so popular.

There are no new gameplay elements added this time around, just new weapons. The MARS, Spyder, AUG3000 (that can see through walls), and that’s about it. Even these weapons are hard to come by and you’re left with the same weapons used in the previous two games. I also didn’t care for the multiplayer this time around and the added mini-games which are just trial runs aren’t that fun either. The only really enjoyable part of the game was the final mission as it felt like a classic Syphon Filter level and the satisfying conclusion to the story for this chapter.

There are no visual improvements outside of better-pre-rendered cut-scenes and virtually no new gameplay additions or enhancements. Overall, I feel Syphon Filter 3 was a product of rushed development and trying to get it out the door for the PS1 players who hadn’t adopted the PS2 just yet. Is it worth playing? Yes, if you’re a hardcore fan, but just take the game with a grain of salt and be prepared for aimless wandering around levels and many frustrated restarts due to poor enemy placement and lack of ammo.

Syphon Filter 2 – 20 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/15/2020

Posted in: Editor's Choice, PlayStation (PS1), Sony Consoles. Tagged: 989 studios, eidetic, exclusive, gabriel logan, playstation, ps1, psone, shooter, Sony, syphon filter 2, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Eidetic

Release Date: 03/14/2000

Available Exclusively On

Syphon Filter is one of my favorite gaming franchises of all time and the top five PS1 series. It was the very first serious “adult” game I ever played and got into. Just the concept of how shooters work was totally alien to me before Syphon Filter. It was a game that I also spent a lot of time with my late father and we aced each game learning every enemy spawn point, hidden cache, and level design. We rented this game frequently and spent dozens of hours mastering each game. We probably spent more time on Syphon Filter 2 than any other game in the series and for good measure as it’s the best game out of the three.

Syphon Filter 2 isn’t just an expansion, despite playing and looking exactly like the first game, as there is a greater and more expanded story, more weapons, new levels, and it’s also a couple of hours longer than the first game coming on two discs. You play as both Gabriel Logan and Lian Xing as you are fugitives of the US government and are still fighting The Agency so get back the data discs that store the Syphon Filter data. The game picks up right where the last game left off when Gabe crash landing in the Colorado Rockies. In the first level, the game introduces new weapons and gameplay elements such as being able to leap gaps. New weapons include the unsilenced 9mm, H-11 sub-machine gun, silenced HK-5, UA12 auto-shotgun, hand taser, flashlight, teargas launcher, and more. These weapons are just as memorable and awesome as the first games. There are so many new weapons here it nearly doubles the arsenal.

On top of this, there are other gameplay elements added such as enemies being able to get a headshot on you. The HUD will flash red and a headshot text will appear on the screen. You have mere seconds to get out of the way or you instantly die. New enemies are introduced such as full armored ones that only die with explosions in one level towards the end of the game. There is also a better balance of action and stealth with Lian’s levels in the air force base are perfect examples. Agents can be killed but military MPs can not. You must sneak around and tase the MPs with your hand taser, but the agents are fair game with silenced weapons. Another level has you sneaking around vents and night vision automatically kicks in when the area is too dark which is awesome.

The level design is on point just like the first game. Each level is memorable and fun and takes you around the globe. From the Colorado Rockies that the first disc mostly takes place in the Moscow nightclubs, Agency bio-labs, and New York sewers. The levels are incredibly designed with the perfect balance of stealth and action. The train ride is a fun linear shooting gallery while the bridge level requires quick thinking and stealth and mastering enemy movement patterns. You can tell Eidetic mastered this genre with the second game and even the voice acting greatly improved. This is a AAA PS1 game at its finest and you will be hard-pressed to find better on the system.

The visuals didn’t really improve any, but they already pushed the system to its limits and still have plenty of detail and the game looks great. There is some issue with slowdown here and there, but what PS1 game didn’t have that? There’s also a shoehorned multiplayer mode that I didn’t even care for. 1v1 on maps from both Syphon Filter games just isn’t very fun. If the game allowed 2v2 via a multi-tap that would have been awesome, but what we have here is something just not very fun, and not to mention half the maps need to be unlocked by finding secrets in the game.

Overall, Syphon Filter 2 shows what the PS1 era of games would do and helped push the third-person shooter genre into what it is today. While it came out very late at the end of the systems life cycle — a mere week before the launch of the PS2, it still sold incredibly well and showed that the PS1 had staying power even after its successor launched. The story, voice acting, visuals, and overall feeling of the game are fantastic and there’s nothing else like it on the system. It’s a must-own for any PlayStation fan.

Control

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/10/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox One. Tagged: action, control, dlss, remedy entertainment, shooter, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: 505 Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Release Date: 08/27/2019

Also Available On

I love Remedy’s games and always have. From the first Max Payne all the way to Quantum Break there have been ups and downs, but Alan Wake still remains my favorite game from them. Control takes place in the same universe as Alan Wake and even explains what kind of happened down there, as you play as Director Jesse who has a crazy gun that can transform and you fight off weird enemies called The Hiss and your goal…well…I can’t tell you what the end goal is as this is Remedy’s most incohesive story yet with many plot holes and even after the credits rolled I still couldn’t make sense of the story at all.

Let’s start with the exploration. Control takes place solely inside the Federal Bureau of Control and is a generic boring and ugly building that is basically a labyrinthine maze that requires a ton of backtracking and is a pain to navigate. There are several floors in this building and spread throughout are Control Points which you use to level up Jesse and fast travel. Even though fast travel is nice trying to find new areas from those points is a serious pain. Throughout the game, you can find files to read and solve simple puzzles that use your telekinetic powers. Jesse can throw objects as weapons and break off pieces of the buildings as well and hurl them. This is a key combat mechanic as you will swap between this and your weapon when either is recharging.

Combat in Control is pretty boring and frustrating. In fact, I would have rather had no combat in this game and it would have been more enjoyable. Shooting enemies that float in the air, have shields, larger health bars, and some bosses are all fun, but not in Control. The game throws an insane amount of enemies at you at every turn and there are no cover systems so you must run around like a bafoon trying to avoid explosive enemies, bullets, and projectiles. You don’t get to levitate until the last fourth of the game and I never even got the dodge move or shield as completing side missions is an absolute chore and I didn’t care enough to see the level-up system all the way through.

Many times I died because you can’t heal unless an enemy has dropped health and if you picked it all up you’re screwed. This is essentially a broken mechanic and I hated every minute of it. Not once did I enjoy the combat because instead of fun and unique bosses you get tossed into arenas and gauntlets and waves of enemies to chew through and it seriously hinders progression. Not to mention they respawn in certain areas when you’re trying to cut through somewhere. The gun itself isn’t fun to shoot as it requires recharging and there’s no ammo or reloading. There are various forms such as a sniper pistol, machine pistol, grenade launcher, shotgun pistol, etc. but I only stuck with a couple of forms throughout the whole game. You can add perks to Jesse and each weapon that can increase health, decrease recharging, energy costs, etc. and these are vital to surviving.

As you explore the game you will notice Remedy’s signature trippiness as levels twist and turn and transform and there’s a supernatural aspect to the game of course, but it’s all for naught. Nothing in the game is ever explained like why can I pull a string three times and get warped to the Oceanview Motel and have to solve the same stupid puzzles inside. Ring the front desk bell, go into a room remember the placement of objects, ring the bell again, and move the objects to the next room. It’s stupid and makes no sense. Why is Jesse communicating with this Hadron entity and who is her brother anyways? What purpose does the Director have in all of this and why does a slide projector harness so much power? Yeah, makes about as much sense as it sounds and nothing is ever explained. It’s hard to push through the boring and frustrating combat only to get another confusing cut scene that seems like a random piece from a storyline.

Control-Screenshot-2019.08.25-08.09.26.90.low_

Control looks pretty good, but Nvidia’s DLSS anti-aliasing is awful here and the game is a blurry mess even with MSAA enabled. The engine is decently optimized as I got a steady 60FPS through most of the game with RTX on and it rarely dropped below 45FPS. However, the art style is dull and stale with concrete hallways and corridors. It doesn’t have a unique identity and that’s sad as Remedy is good at this.

Overall, Control is a disappointing follow-up to Remedy’s legacy. With Quantum Break being as disappointing as it was, was Alan Wake their last great game? Control isn’t the game we all wanted, and I honestly won’t remember this game a week from now, and that’s sad as there’s lost potential here with Remedy’s signature touches that just don’t quite connect. The combat is boring and frustrating and very repetitive, lots of backtracking, and a confusing mess of a building to explore just doesn’t strike me as fun. If the story was at least solid it would be worth it, but it makes no sense, and when the credits roll you just shrug and wonder why you wasted your time.

Gears 5

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/04/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Unsupported, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One. Tagged: gears 5, gears of war, marcus fenix, Microsoft, online multiplayer, pc, the coalition, third person shooter, tps, unreal engine, windows, xbox, xbox one. Leave a comment

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Developer: The Coalition

Release Date: 09/06/2019

Also Available On

Gears of War has always held a special place in my heart as it was the first game to introduce me to “next-generation” graphics. You know, shaders, real-time lighting, high-resolution textures, ambient occlusion, all that jazz. It was the first Xbox 360 game I ever played and I will never forget the first time playing through that game. It’s still one of the best shooters ever made and nothing will change that. After Gears of War 4, my hopes for the series died a bit as it had a mediocre campaign and average multiplayer. Gears 5, however, takes the series a step further by adding open-world elements and a rock-solid campaign.

I didn’t mind the new additions to Gears 4 they were just not implemented well enough. The new weapons were lackluster, the older weapons didn’t pack the punch they used to before, and the level design was bland and stale. I got tired of playing in the same areas throughout the whole game and the entire base building or defense gameplay was just boring to me. Gears 5 strips the base defense gameplay and tunes everything up several notches and makes what was introduced in Gears 4 really good now. The weapons pack a serious punch, the game is more challenging, the waves of enemies are more balanced and the entire ebb and flow of the game is like the older ones. I was glued to the game through the entire campaign and didn’t want to stop. Gone are the boring Deebee robots (they’re back as Swarm now but only sparsely), and a larger variety of Locust Swarm.

Gears 5 starts out like any other Gears game with story elements, it picks up right where Gears 4 left off, and a linear bombastic level full of scripted events. This is where you get to learn about Jack who is actually a usable partner now with various abilities that you can upgrade. Things like cloaking, shield, armor, he can zap people, and various other abilities. Upgrades are found throughout the game and I only found a few of Jack’s abilities useful, mainly the armor and shield. Cloaking is useless as the game tries to force stealth for the first time and it just does not work at all. Sneaking around knifing Locust is fine and all but their patrol patterns are poorly laid out and it almost seems random. Never do all the patrols perfectly line up for multiple stealth takedowns. This leads to the horrific AI in both the enemies and partners. When you’re down but not out it can take forever to be revived even if someone is right next to you. I died several times because an AI couldn’t figure out how to climb a ladder as well. Enemy AI will also sometimes get stuck behind walls or just freeze up all together causing objectives to not clear and having to hunt down where someone got stuck.

It’s not all bad though as stealth sections only popped up a few times and AI rarely messed up, but when it did it was the most inconvenient time. Thankfully the new open-world idea works well, but it’s not what you think. You drive a wind-powered Skiff sled that pulls you around on two separate “open” maps. These maps are just a huge excuse to get upgrades for Jack. Outside of going back and forth to main objectives you can stop by and locate 1 out of 3 of something for Jack. These are just various enemy arenas and don’t take long to complete. They’re fun as they vary and are challenging, but unnecessary. It’s just an excuse to extend game time. I also don’t understand the complaint about needing to fast travel between areas. Riding the Skiff is actually fun and there are some scripted sequences that take place out here between main missions. The maps are not that big and the two environments are snow and desert. They’re fun, but I wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared in the next game.

That leaves just the campaign itself with well-paced gameplay throughout and there never was a dull moment. Enemies are better spaced out and the addition of armored enemies adds to the challenge as well as Scions and Wardens which are the big baddie additions of Locust similar to the larger enemies from the Swarm we got in Gears 4. There are plenty of scripted events and sadly the story doesn’t really evolve during these open-world scenes as the game is sandwiched between two large traditionally linear chapters and these are more enjoyable than the middle of the game. The story ends on a cliffhanger again and there are just a few more answers that are given in the traditional Gears way.

That finally leaves multiplayer which is bigger and better than ever. With the original modes tweaked and fine-tuned such as Horde and Versus, the new Escape mode sees you escaping from the center of a Swarm nest with two other partners and it’s incredibly hard. You start out with a Snub and must fight through waves as you make your way out. It feels more like a reverse Horde mode. In Horde mode, you also play a base defense game like in Gears 4 but Engineers play larger roles than before. It’s all been tweaked and I liked it for a while, but I’ve never been the biggest fan of Gears multiplayer. That’s part of why I’m not going super in-depth into it. There are more customization features than ever before with skins and characters and of course microtransactions, but it’s all cosmetic. You also get ability cards and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t really care for.

The game looks fantastic and much better than Gears 4 did. The character models are amazing, fantastic animations and voice acting, and everything just looks so great and it runs well…well at least it did after the first patch. I had constant stuttering and audio glitches for about a week, but it seems fine now. The game is well optimized for PCs with tons of graphics options and support for ultrawide screens. The game can run on a vast variety of older hardware which is also a plus.

Overall, Gears 5 is what Gears of War 4 should have been. Fantastically balanced gameplay, well-paced, and an open-world concept that seems to be done just right and doesn’t overstay its welcome. The enemies are fun, the new tweaks and additions are a blast, and multiplayer is larger than ever. I just wish they would concentrate on more core Gears gameplay and level design and story rather than trying bold new ideas. This isn’t the series that really needs that.

Alan Wake – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/17/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox 360. Tagged: alan wake, horror, Microsoft, remedy, scary, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Remedy Entertainment/Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Remedy Entertainment/Nordic Studios

Release Date: 02/16/2012 (PC), 05/18/2010 (X360)

Also Available On

I always come back to Alan Wake every few years because it’s just such a good game. Great combat, storytelling, varied gameplay, well-written characters, and overall solid experience. Almost a decade after the original release I went ahead and played through the PC version again and it’s helped up surprisingly well. Despite its graphical age, it feels like it could have been released yesterday.

You play Alan Wake who is a writer that takes a vacation to the Pacific Northwest in Washington and stays at a cabin in Cauldron Lake. Alan has a scuffle with his wife and wakes up not really himself or anything around him for the matter. Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around darkness and always wondering whether what’s happening to Alan is real or it’s all in his head as you will see major story landings in which this question comes up. Even at the end of the game this is never really answered, and maybe it’s best to leave the player guessing a little.

The story is well told and might take a couple of playthroughs to get everything, but it does keep you pushing through the 6-hour story until the end. Characters such as Barry, Alice, Sherriff Wheeler, and even the doctors and radio station host are all just so well written and memorable. Other story tidbits include finding manuscript pages, watching live-action episodes of “Night Springs” clearly inspired by “The Twilight Zone” and radio station bits by finding radios. It’s nice to see the story unfold outside of cutscenes and it really gives you an insight into what’s going out in Bright Falls outside of what Alan is doing. The whole premise of Alan Wake feels special to me as I originally played this living in Southern California and not really caring where it was set. Almost ten years later I now live in the PNW just outside Snoqualiamie, WA where the setting was inspired. It’s awesome to personally experience this setting and then come back to the game, I appreciated it so much more.

The main gameplay element here is your flashlight and guns. Light is a huge role in this game as the story is centered around it and your flashlight is a weapon. You can boost the flashlight beam and a circle will get smaller on enemies and once the circle is gone, and you beamed away from the darkness, they become vulnerable and can be shot with the gun. There are easy and hard enemies, a few fast ones, and inanimate objects become enemies later on in the game such as boss fights with harvesters, cranes, trucks, and barrels. It’s interesting how the combat is designed and you have to be afraid of everything around you, even birds! The use of the flashlight and guns is just so well done with great controls and the guns feel satisfying to shoot. You always have to be on your toes and every gunfight is never the same with limited ammo, no flashlight, and then sometimes tons of ammo to make you feel powerful. There are even lights in the environment you can use to take the Taken down such as spotlights, floodlights, and headlights on cars in the few driving sequences.

The game, however, is extremely linear and you rarely get to stray off the beaten path. These are only seen in the car sequences where you can stop at a house or two to find collectibles and then continue on. Despite this, the heavily scripted events are fun and there’s so much variety and the pacing is spot on. Going from chaotic dark forests to a New York apartment and then the psych ward and even a cafe is a nice touch. It let you breathe.

Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best games of the Xbox 360 generation with fantastic character dialogue, an interesting story, and fun gunplay with variety in level design and great pacing. The PC version adds DirectX 10 lighting and features such as ultra-widescreen support, a FOV slider, slightly better textures, and character models. Overall though, the textures still look really muddy, even during its release, and there are obvious LOD and draw distance issues with pop-in that the PC didn’t need to experience.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/02/2019

Posted in: Linux, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox One. Tagged: cyberpunk, deus ex, eidos, mankind divided, montreal, nixxes software, shooter, square enix, stealth, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Square EnixDeveloper: Nixxes Software/Eidos Montreal

Release Date: 08/23/2016

Also Available On

Deus Ex is an old well-loved franchise and the reboot with Human Revolution was well received despite its many flaws. Mankind Divided is a direct sequel taking place right after the terrorist bombing from the end of the last game, and Adam Jensen is at it again trying to solve murder mysteries, stop more terrorists, and put an end to the hatred against augmented humans. Dealing with racism, discrimination, classism, and many other dystopian issues, Mankind Divided delivers an atmospheric world to explore with great characters.

The gameplay elements from Human Revolution carry over and feel more polished and nuanced, but this game has its own set of issues. Starting with exploration, Mankind Divided has small areas in Prague you can explore and complete side missions, and sadly that’s all. You can’t talk to 90% of the characters, and there are only a dozen side missions in the whole game. Prague just feels very cramped and small in scope and the Deus Ex franchise has enough lore and interesting things going on that it could be an open-world game. Despite the areas being full of NPCs, open buildings, police walking about, etc., it just feels so empty and lonely. The amount of interaction is so little and there’s no real point in exploring anything except to hack computers to read emails and find ebooks, but even these don’t really give a lot of insight into the surrounding world.

Once you get into a mission the combat is actually rather versatile. You can go completely stealth using silenced weapons and takedowns, or augment yourself for combat with powerful melee moves, more health, shields, and more. I went the hacker/stealth route upgrading all my hacking augs and bio cell meter for stealth shields and extra takedowns. Every area has multiple routes to get to the goal by either shooting through all the enemies, hacking your way around turrets, cameras, and security, or just taking everyone down one by one and sneaking through vents. It’s rather satisfying to find your own path and I rarely had issues in which I didn’t know how to get to a particular area. The shooting is rather satisfying as well, but sadly the game is designed to use very little of it. I never used anything outside of my silenced pistol despite holding on to 4 different weapons through the entire game. You can pick up grenades, software to help to hack, and various healing items, but I never really needed most of it.

Outside of shooting, cover mechanics, and various combat abilities, there’s nothing else to the game. The story and characters are interesting enough to keep you going, but it’s mostly forgettable. The overall terrorist plotline is done to death in other games, and I’d rather know more about the surrounding world and how the people live day to day in this dystopian police-state world. That interested me more than anything Adam and his cohorts were working on. I honestly enjoyed the side missions more than the main storyline which is odd for a video game in general. There are some persuasion dialog mini-games where you must sway a character in your favor, but it’s easy and the outcomes don’t really affect the overall story.

Thankfully, Mankind Divided is for both action fans and stealth fans despite the game being built for stealth gameplay. There are no bosses this time around and the game has a lot of technical issues. At launch, the game was nearly unplayable for most people, and now after many patches, the engine is incredibly unoptimized even two video card generations later, the engine struggles to stay at 60FPS with load times for menus even! MSAA is nearly impossible to enable with frames dipping into single digits, there’s a lot of chugging when turning the camera as well. On anything but the latest GPUs you’re not going to enjoy this game at all and it will murder your system. The game looks really good though with good lighting, high-res textures, and great character models.

deus-ex-mankind-divided-season-pass-pc-cd-key-2

Overall, Mankind Divided expands on its predecessor, but not on the overall series. More interactive areas would have been great, bigger areas to explore and more side missions, and even more insight into the day-to-day lives of the citizens in Prague. With a terribly optimized engine, and the fun factor of combat and stealth varying from satisfying to incredibly frustrating within minutes of each other, Deus Ex just needs a reboot before coming back. The story is enough to keep you moving along, but it’s nothing memorable.

Anthem

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/18/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Tagged: anthem, bioware, ea game, games as service, online multiplayer, shooter, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: EA

Developer: BioWare

Release Date: 02/15/2019

Also Available On

Anthem has been a long time coming debuting 6 years at E3 and exciting BioWare fans with the teaser. It looked amazing and was said to be as rich and detailed as Mass Effect, but as the years went on BioWare was very choosy about what was shown and the final product didn’t look anything like the original teaser. I for one had no idea what Anthem was about or what kind of game it was due to BioWare’s cryptic info up until release. I started to play the game and didn’t understand all the hate as the first 2 hours are pretty fun as the core mechanics are introduced to you, but after those 2 hours, the game turns into a sluggish repetitive mess that feels like a chore to get through.

When you start out you are introduced to pre-rendered 1080p videos that try to explain the story. There’s something called the Anthem which is a religion and you’re a Javelin which was used to stop some sort of storm that wiped everyone out…yeah it really doesn’t make much sense and isn’t explained very well. The story is more of an afterthought than a forefront to keep the player engaged. Once you get through the tutorial mission and into the main city you start understanding how the game plays and just how repetitive everything really gets.

The core mechanics are fine as the shooting is solid, and the movement is quick and zippy by being able to fly through the air on a dime and maneuver quickly around enemies. The game also looks absolutely fantastic with beautiful vistas and amazing lighting effects, but that eye candy and flair kind of dies off quickly around the 3-4 hour mark. When you fly around in your jet-pack you have a heat meter and either diving steeply or flying near water will cool it down. Honestly, it’s just really annoying and there’s almost no point to having this cool down meter since missions have you flying around an entire map. Second, there aren’t many objectives to actually complete during this loot and shoot cycle just defend a point, defeat all the enemies, stick smaller stones into bigger stones, and gather smaller orbs to deactivate a storm. It’s fine at first and the first few missions have an illusion of mission variety, but you witness everything in the first 2 hours.

Let’s take into effect that once you start unlocking all the menus and things you can do upgrading becomes a grind as most upgrades are locked behind a paywall. Secondly, unless you do a mission with at least one other person online your chances of surviving get really slim as most missions are designed for multiple players. There’s also the issue of only exploring one large map that’s cut into smaller pieces. You’re either in an outdoor forest or a cave and that’s about it. I rarely came across guns or anything that was better than what I already had and forget about purchasing stuff as everything is such a grind and is literally locked away.

Outside of the main missions you can free roam, but this is dull and boring and finding X amount of chests or Y amount of items to get this stupid gun you don’t need isn’t my idea of fun. You can also do tomb raids which literally amount to nothing except a memo to read after acquiring all these items for sometimes hours. It’s the most disappointing looter shooter I have ever played. I’m talking about worse than vanilla Destiny. There are also issues where matchmaking is practically broken where you can quickly play to the end of the game missions and either they are halfway through the mission or just finished and you miss that entire mission. There are also long load times that are quite frequent and are ridiculous.

Is there any redeeming quality of Anthem then? Maybe if you play with friends as I would rather play with AI partners that have personality and add to the story. The game looks amazing but requires a high-end rig to get good FPS. If you’re into boring mindless loot grinding then this game probably is for you, but even with boring mindless loot grinders there’s a reward at the end somewhere and this game just feels like it’s tricking you to the end of its rainbow only to have a turd there instead of treasure. I honestly doubt this game will get better over time like Destiny or The Division did. There’s so much wrong with this game outside of the bugs (I actually had a DirectX crash that said my GPU was magically removed mid-game by the way)