Overtly, for me anyway, 2011 is the year of the Fighting Game. With Mortal Kombat, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, it's definitely the best year for the genre in a long time. But if you sift through the fisticuffs, there's also an abundance of a genre fast becoming one of my favourites: The Western RPG. Coming to a crescendo with the mighty (we all know it's going to be amazing, why even speculate?) Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim later in the year, we've got lesser beasts such as Two Worlds II, Arcania: Gothic IV and Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga to tide us over. But, while they might be met by the eyes of the masses as mediocre shadows of the upcoming social-life-destroyer, one game still stands strong.
That game, for those still paying attention, is the sequel to Bioware's epic, official 24HG Game of the Year 2009, Dragon Age: Origins; Dragon Age... er... II.
Set almost immediately after the first game, DAII sees you in the shoes of a Blight refugee known as Hawke (who can be male or female and have any first name you choose, but must be human. The Dragon Age Commander Shepard if you will), trying to rebuild his/her life in a foreign city after his/her former home was destroyed by the pesky Darkspawn, bumping into lusty Pirates, surly warrior-giants and the most pleasant blood-mage (an art in the DA canon where a mage bonds with a demon to boost their own powers, basically the classic view of satanism) you'll ever meet along the way.
But the thing is, that's it. The story never really goes anywhere, you just waltz into a city, pick up the compulsory rag-tag band of misfits and generally doss around doing stuff for people, and then shit suddenly hits the fan and it's over. And while we're focusing on the negative points, DAII is one of the laziest games I've played in a while. There's only one (admittedly expansive) city and a small handful of wilderness areas, as opposed to the wide variety of settings in the original. The city is littered with warehouses to explore, and each is identical to the last, the same goes for the wilderness and caves, and it makes for some incredibly repetitive gameplay. They've also not bothered with the finishing moves in combat this time, just opting to have your enemies fall apart when you kill them, and while this looked alright in Fallout 3 where the limbs would sever in the middle of a thigh or below the shoulder, leaving a jagged rip in the flesh, DAII's enemies fall into smooth segments, like when you shoot somebody with the grenade launcher in Tomb Raider II. And that looked shit 14 years ago.
But aside from that, the game really excels. The visuals have improved no end over the washed out, low res textures of Origins, to the point that they could even be considered impressive. The combat system has been refined, sped up and simplified in the right areas, and crucially been made real-time in the console releases, and your party members, much like in Mass Effect 2, have been given much more individuality in their appearance (be it Pirate lady of ill repute Isabella's swashbuckling gear or emo elf Fenris' lyrium tattoos). They also have a lot more unique abilities, in Origins your two mages, Wynn and Morrigan, could end up playing exactly the same, or even have their roles reversed should you choose to do so. In DAII, Anders is a designated healer, Merril is a damage dealer and Bethany is an all-rounder.
Mentioning Anders and Merril brings me to my next point, there's a lot here for the nostalgic. Anders himself is now possessed by the spirit Justice, both of which were party members in Dragon Age: Awakening (they were actually my two favourite characters in the game, but now they are one person they, or rather he, seems to have become a self righteous prick), and Merril was a temporary party member in Origins if the player followed the Dalish Elf storyline. Anyone who played the demo will have come face to face with the Dragon-morphing witch of the wilds Flemeth too, sporting a sassy new look, and a bunch of other familiar faces also show up, but I won't ruin things for you there.
I don't like ending things on a low point (once again, as with last week's Dead Space 2 review, I seem to have unwillingly slated the game), DAII does have the 'can't put down' factor and is the closest thing to a Game of the Year for me so far in 2011, but it throws a big middle finger skywards when it comes to consistency in it's continuity. A lot of the races have altered, take the elves for example. In the last game they were just people with pointy ears, and spoke unanimously with an American accent. They are now much smaller and are painfully thin, and their facial structures have changed to resemble the blue guys from Avatar, and while the city elves still retain the Yankee lilt, the wild dalish elves have adopted an Irish tongue (apart from Merril, who is voiced by the unquestionably Welsh Eve Myles, star of BBC's Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood). The Qunari have also metamorphosed beyond recognition, from basically being black guys with white hair in Origins to their new look, resembling Kain from Soul Reaver. It's natural progression as a higher budget is available, I fully understand that (look at the Klingon in Star Trek after all), but for someone like me with borderline OCD over details like this, it kinda twists my melon.
Overall though, it's a great game, more suited to a console gamer than it's elder. But, under the mocking eye of the behemoth that is the upcoming Skyrim, Bioware really shouldn't have cut quite so many corners.
Monday 11 April 2011
Monday 4 April 2011
Am I following all of the right leads, or am I about to get lost in space?
I've decided on a self-imposed gaming hiatus, in a bid to free up some time to get this site up to date, so I'll hopefully be posting quite a bit in the coming week or so. There's so much shit I want to write about, and it seems that every time I fire up a console something is added to the list, so there comes a time when one just has to sit back, catch a breath and put pen to paper, so to speak.
I'll start with Dead Space 2 I guess, it was the first game I played during the 2011 annual laptop disaster so it's only fair. I was extremely late to the party with the first Dead Space, not only picking it up late but developing an irrational hatred of it about a third of the way in (I think I was intimidated by the apparent difficulty of the game at first, it seemed like ammo was very short in supply and the enemies just keep on coming, but things loosened off a bit later on) and shelving it. I corrected myself a few months ago and discovered what an absolute joy the game was to play.
Dead Space 2 then, is more of the same in terms of gameplay. I opted for the PS3 version for the perks of Dragon Age II DLC, Free Dead Space Extraction and not having to swap the disks, and I kinda regret this choice. Firstly, the controls are far better suited to the 360 pad, the chunkiness seems to fit with the way Isaac moves on screen. Playing the game in daylight (I only have a 360 in the boudoir) subtracted from the horror of the experience, Extraction is virtually unplayable without a Move controller, and to top it all off the DAII DLC is non-console specific, linking to your EA account and not through the PSN store or XBL Marketplace.
I suppose the biggest difference to the prequel is that Isaac, the main series' alien-zombie stomping protagonist, now has a voice, and consequentially refuses to shut the hell up. And suddenly this silent sentinel, this extension of your own psyche stuck in a deep-space hell filled with terrifying (albeit overly brittle) perversions of nature, suddenly has his own personality. And boy oh boy, is he a cock. He's informal, macho and at times bratty, totally the opposite of the Gordon Freeman archetype silent scientist, and what that conjures in the imagination.
But it's still a great game though, these aspects only lightly tarnish the refined Resident Evil 4 style engine, and the incomplex but engaging narrative. Being set in a colonial space-station set out like a city, as opposed to the Space Hulk/Nostromo/Discovery One/Red Dwarf hybrid of the first, the Bioshock similarities of the first (the uninterrupted gameplay and Isaac's aesthetic reminded me of 2K's opus the first time around) seem all the more apparent: echoes of Rapture are everywhere. There's also a bit of Silent Hill thrown in with cliched trips through a hospital and school, the latter throwing some relatively unmutated child-like monsters that could have been ripped right from the foggy ghost town itself if I didn't know better.
So original Dead Space 2 isn't. Visceral aren't really known for their originality though, Dante's Inferno anyone? There are a few new enemies and a couple of new mechanics, such as hacking minigames and being able to blow out a window to suck enemies into space, before closing it again before the vacuum consumes you (A bit like on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed actually), but it's mostly just a refined version of the original, gameplay wise anyway. I read somewhere that the game reminds the writer of Resident Evil 2, in that it's just like the original but bigger and better in every way, and I think that just about sums it up. Although as far as I'm concerned, Dead Space is still superior to it's sequel. Same goes for Resident Evil actually.
Mortal Kombat then. I've absolutely caned the demo since it became available to the masses the other week and to say I'm excited is like saying Hitler was a bit of an arsehole. The thing that is immediately apparent, once you've taken in the unrivalled violence and brutality anyway, is just how unique the game is; since the 2D fighting game revival we've seen Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue as the most dominant in the genre, and as far as first impressions count, all three of those are very similar experiences. Mortal Kombat still retains the feel of the series since Deadly Alliance, matching speed and fluidity with character-specific combos and signiature moves. The new X-Ray moves are wince-inducing too (Johnny Cage's actually made me want to go and have a little cry), and although easy to pull off, they require some expert timing; performing such a move consumes (sorry, konsumes) a full special bar, and they are very easy to evade it seems.
Finally, we've got the fatalities. It's been 5 years since we've had a real, true Mortal Kombat game (Mortal Kombat: Armageddon), and even that didn't have true fatality moves. 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was toned down to achieve a teen rating at the request of Warner Interactive, so said moves were far less grotesque, and as a result we've been starved of the privilege of a satisfying way to murder our aggressors since Mortal Kombat: Deception in 2004, seven whole years ago. The sheer brutality of the finishers on offer here makes it worth the wait. If the whole game maintains this level of intense violence and joyous gameplay, then the Mortal Kombat series is back where it belongs, as the second-best fighting game franchise on the market. Flawless Victory.
I'll start with Dead Space 2 I guess, it was the first game I played during the 2011 annual laptop disaster so it's only fair. I was extremely late to the party with the first Dead Space, not only picking it up late but developing an irrational hatred of it about a third of the way in (I think I was intimidated by the apparent difficulty of the game at first, it seemed like ammo was very short in supply and the enemies just keep on coming, but things loosened off a bit later on) and shelving it. I corrected myself a few months ago and discovered what an absolute joy the game was to play.
Dead Space 2 then, is more of the same in terms of gameplay. I opted for the PS3 version for the perks of Dragon Age II DLC, Free Dead Space Extraction and not having to swap the disks, and I kinda regret this choice. Firstly, the controls are far better suited to the 360 pad, the chunkiness seems to fit with the way Isaac moves on screen. Playing the game in daylight (I only have a 360 in the boudoir) subtracted from the horror of the experience, Extraction is virtually unplayable without a Move controller, and to top it all off the DAII DLC is non-console specific, linking to your EA account and not through the PSN store or XBL Marketplace.
I suppose the biggest difference to the prequel is that Isaac, the main series' alien-zombie stomping protagonist, now has a voice, and consequentially refuses to shut the hell up. And suddenly this silent sentinel, this extension of your own psyche stuck in a deep-space hell filled with terrifying (albeit overly brittle) perversions of nature, suddenly has his own personality. And boy oh boy, is he a cock. He's informal, macho and at times bratty, totally the opposite of the Gordon Freeman archetype silent scientist, and what that conjures in the imagination.
But it's still a great game though, these aspects only lightly tarnish the refined Resident Evil 4 style engine, and the incomplex but engaging narrative. Being set in a colonial space-station set out like a city, as opposed to the Space Hulk/Nostromo/Discovery One/Red Dwarf hybrid of the first, the Bioshock similarities of the first (the uninterrupted gameplay and Isaac's aesthetic reminded me of 2K's opus the first time around) seem all the more apparent: echoes of Rapture are everywhere. There's also a bit of Silent Hill thrown in with cliched trips through a hospital and school, the latter throwing some relatively unmutated child-like monsters that could have been ripped right from the foggy ghost town itself if I didn't know better.
So original Dead Space 2 isn't. Visceral aren't really known for their originality though, Dante's Inferno anyone? There are a few new enemies and a couple of new mechanics, such as hacking minigames and being able to blow out a window to suck enemies into space, before closing it again before the vacuum consumes you (A bit like on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed actually), but it's mostly just a refined version of the original, gameplay wise anyway. I read somewhere that the game reminds the writer of Resident Evil 2, in that it's just like the original but bigger and better in every way, and I think that just about sums it up. Although as far as I'm concerned, Dead Space is still superior to it's sequel. Same goes for Resident Evil actually.
Mortal Kombat then. I've absolutely caned the demo since it became available to the masses the other week and to say I'm excited is like saying Hitler was a bit of an arsehole. The thing that is immediately apparent, once you've taken in the unrivalled violence and brutality anyway, is just how unique the game is; since the 2D fighting game revival we've seen Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and BlazBlue as the most dominant in the genre, and as far as first impressions count, all three of those are very similar experiences. Mortal Kombat still retains the feel of the series since Deadly Alliance, matching speed and fluidity with character-specific combos and signiature moves. The new X-Ray moves are wince-inducing too (Johnny Cage's actually made me want to go and have a little cry), and although easy to pull off, they require some expert timing; performing such a move consumes (sorry, konsumes) a full special bar, and they are very easy to evade it seems.
Finally, we've got the fatalities. It's been 5 years since we've had a real, true Mortal Kombat game (Mortal Kombat: Armageddon), and even that didn't have true fatality moves. 2008's Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was toned down to achieve a teen rating at the request of Warner Interactive, so said moves were far less grotesque, and as a result we've been starved of the privilege of a satisfying way to murder our aggressors since Mortal Kombat: Deception in 2004, seven whole years ago. The sheer brutality of the finishers on offer here makes it worth the wait. If the whole game maintains this level of intense violence and joyous gameplay, then the Mortal Kombat series is back where it belongs, as the second-best fighting game franchise on the market. Flawless Victory.
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