The Last of Us, from the makers of the Uncharted series (Naughty Dog), came out to almost universal acclaim. It has a solid 95 metacritic score, with 10/10s running rampant across both critic and user reviews. People praise the graphics, the gameplay, and most of all, the story. We all know the situation here. Whenever a game gets such amazing praise like this, I'm basically sure to follow suit. Here's the thing:
I hated it.
That's right. Hated. So let me tell you what went wrong for me, and why I simply cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this tedious, poorly executed, poorly written game.
First up, let's summarize what this game is about. The Last of Us takes place 20 years after an outbreak of a mutated cordyceps fungi turns people into, essentially, zombies. The story mostly follows Joel, a grizzled survivor who lost his daughter in the initial outbreak, not to zombies, but to a soldier who was ordered to shoot them in case they were infected. After an initial mission that reveals Joel has gotten into some shady dealings in the past 20 years (and introduces you to the essential gameplay mechanics) you are introduced to Ellie, a young girl who you are asked to escort to a rebel group calling themselves Fireflies. It's quickly revealed that this girl is immune to the fungus, and must make it to the Fireflies so that a vaccine can hopefully be made and thusly the world saved. The rest of the game is their journey through various dilapadated cities and sewers, fending off bandits and infected all along the way.
So let's look at that zombie survival horror checklist shall we?
-Grizzled male anti-hero (check)
-Damsel in distress (check) that is also the...
-Golden child that could save the world (check)
-Humanity often worse than zombies (check)
-Abandoned and/or infected cities (check)
Along with many other familiar tropes that unfortunately reveal too much for those looking to avoid spoilers. But you get my drift. Original it isn't.
This could be made up for if the characters had any degree of a unique personality to them, but they don't. Joel is a take-no-prisoners, survive-at-all-costs stock character. I was frankly astonished he wasn't also a drunkard (especially with the aiming system...I'll get to that later). Ellie is your stock headstrong, foul-mouthed, scared-but-doesn't-want-to-show-it girl who starts off hating our chisel-jawed protagonist but then grows to love him. There are a couple refreshing characters who show up, but they're only refreshing in the sense that they break up the monotony of Joel and Ellie's utterly predictable banter and relationship. Even these side characters are stock characters. The woman who could never replace his wife, the crazy guy who has his own town, a friendly black guy and his kid. They're all just so horribly generic. I will give them that at the very least they're well-acted and voiced, and believable for what they were. But the script here truly let them down.
And since I've said one nice thing, let me say the only other nice thing I have to say. Everybody is praising the graphics, and they're right to. It's a very pretty game, and the environments, while never truly unique, also never feel repetitive despite practically every other scene being in a sewer.
So, the setting and characters are overused, uninteresting cliches, but at least it's pretty to look at!
My true gripes with The Last of Us come in its gameplay. Even with it's cliches, the story does manage to pull out some truly gripping moments. But when each redeeming point of the story leads back into this truly awful gameplay, there's no saving it. Here's the problem, and if this entire review is to be summed up in one quote, this is it:
The Last of Us tries to do too many things at once, and fails not only because of that, but also because each of those things has already been done better in other games.
This game can never decide whether it's a stealth game, an action game, a survival horror game, a puzzle game, an open-ended choose-your-own-path game or a straightforward narrative-driven game. It tries to put them all together and it doesn't...work. It tries to do what Deus Ex did with each encounter, where you can stealth or fight your way through. But it fails because it also tries to do what Uncharted and the new Tomb Raider did in terms of cover-based shooting, where stealth is only a means to get rid of one or two enemies before the rest converge. But it fails again because it also tries to do survival horror in terms of limited ammo and a drunken aiming system that only gets steadier with upgrades. But it fails again because the purposefully survival horror sections are more like stealth puzzle games in that the infected all follow circular routes and you must take them out or avoid them in a certain order to advance, and if you make one wrong move, you die and restart at a convenient checkpoint, meaning the stakes for each encounter are ridiculously low (also meaning the ammo restrictions and wavy aiming become more annoyances than anything). And, you guessed it, it fails again as a puzzle game because unlike I Am Alive or Splinter Cell which have very specific solutions to each enounter, they try to keep each situation open to either stealth or combat like in Deus Ex and oh look here we are back at the beginning of the fail cycle.
There were so many times I wanted to scream at the screen because it would literally force me into combat despite my having stealthed through an entire section. I got to a door at the end and it wouldn't let me open it until I had killed every enemy on screen. When you penalize combat so much by making each and every weapon slow-firing and slow to reload with a wavy aiming system on top of it, combat no longer becomes enjoyable unless you like severe handicaps. It becomes a game of chance of whether you happen to get off a lucky headshot, or run out of ammo and resort to punching everything and hoping you have enough supplies to make more medpacks.
The crafting system I didn't actually have a problem with. Basically you collect various types of ingredients throughout the game, and each type of ingredient is usually required for 2 or more recipes. Do you want to make a medpack, or a molotov? A shiv which allows you to stealth kill Clickers (one-hit-kills-you infected), or a bomb that can take out multiple enemies but makes a lot of noise? You're limited to only three of each item, but I almost always had enough ingredients that I never found it that difficult to decide what I needed to craft.
This leads us into exploration. When you're not
dealing with an enemy encounter, you're free to wander whatever area
you're in looking for supplies. That said, these areas are often
extremely linear, and even when there is a little nook or cranny that in
practically any other game like this you would find something...all you
find is more rubble. Supplies tend to just be in side rooms, or down a
side path, which makes the people like me who want to explore every
little corner feel like it's a constant waste of time to do so.
I should also mention the upgrade system here, since it relates to gathering ingredients. Often you'll find these pill bottles alongside ingredients, which you can then use to upgrade things like the drunken aiming, your listening mode distance (which let's you see through walls when enemies make noise), your health, and the time it takes to craft. As far as I could tell there's nowhere near enough to max out everything, so you do have to choose carefully what you upgrade, but I personally found it to be an easy choice: health, and aiming. The rest are barely useful. You can also upgrade each weapon, and here is where you're faced with harder choices. Each and every weapon has roughly 3-5 different categories of things you can upgrade (reload speed, clip size, etc.), but each and every upgrade costs anywhere from 20-70 spare parts and for me, at least, whenever I found a workbench to upgrade at I never had more than, say, 130. This means you really need to choose carefully about which weapons you upgrade. Unfortunately, the system once again gets frustrating here, because you often have NO IDEA which weapons will be available in the next section. There was one weapon that literally showed up for a single section and then never showed up again. Still had it in my inventory, but never got more ammo.
Speaking of ammo, the ammo drop rate from enemies is wildly inconsistent. There was one section where I was forced to kill off something like 8 bandits, practically all of whom had a gun. Does that mean I got to take their ammo after they died? Nope. I think I got 6 bullets for one gun from that encounter. Yet in another section, practically every other enemy was dropping something for me. When ammo is a forcibly limited commodity, it's going to break immersion when you see a gun lying right in front of you and can't do anything to it.
Oh immersion. Probably the worst victim of this game. This is where I truly cannot understand why so many people fell in love with this game. Practically every single thing in this game breaks immersion. Lurking through an area full of infected where one wrong move or audible sound means your death? Here's Ellie running directly into a zombie with no reaction. The partner AI is just plain stupid. I get that you need to make them invisible to enemies, but when their first instinct is to literally run ahead of you or into you or into other enemies, there's a problem. Especially after the exceptional partner AI in Bioshock Infinite. How about with that ammo situation? Turns out if you run low/out, the game pops in more where none existed before. Found that out during an enclosed-quarters boss battle where I was truly starting to get pissed because they had already sent three waves of infected at me and I was out of ammo, and then more was there. So I used it. And then there was more that spawned in. I rolled my eyes and finished the battle, all urgency having been wiped clean. Speaking of spawns, there was one section in particular that was teeeerrible about random enemy spawns (the sniper). You're being shot at by a sniper and have several options for cover: the ruined buildings on one side, random cars down the middle, and intact houses that might have supplies on the right. But here's the thing. If you go into the houses, you have this handy listening mode that lets you see enemies through walls. You can scout and scout and see no one's there, until you pass a certain point and then WHAM enemies are on you.
Truly the biggest breaker of immersion though is from its puzzle-game tendency to have very generous checkpoints with almost no loading time after you die. All agency, all stakes, are removed from practically every situation because there's no real consequence for getting things wrong. Run into those random spawns and get killed? No worries, let's put you back to right before you entered the house so you can deal with them now that you know they're going to be there. Did you try to go Rambo on all these enemies but kept missing thanks to crappy aiming until you had no ammo and then you died? No worries, here's a handy checkpoint with all your ammo back and you can try that again and maybe get luckier with the aiming.
So, let's summarize. Stock characters in a familiar post-apocalyptic zombie world. Crappy gameplay that tries too much and fails. Linear environments masquerading as open. And immersion-breaking elements around every corner.
But you know, none of this, NONE, got me as riled up as the ending.
****THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD. YE BE WARNED.****
The final section sees Joel and Ellie finally making it to the Fireflies. But it turns out that in order to make the vaccine, they have to kill Ellie because the fungus grows on the brain. Joel then has to shoot his way through an entire hospital of soldiers to get to Ellie and save her. But then...there's this pivotal moment. Joel grabs her from the doctors, he's about to escape through the parking garage, and he runs into the leader of the Fireflies, the same woman who sent him on this mad quest in the first place. And she gives him the choice. Leave Ellie, save the world. Or be selfish, take her, and doom it. The scene then shifts to Joel driving away, no sign of Ellie. He has this haggard, depressed look on his face, and I was just like OH THANK GOD, IT ENDS ON A LEGITIMATE QUESTION. Did he give her up, even after all they've been through? Or is she in the back seat, and they're on their way back to his brother and the relatively safe town that had been set up on a hydroelectric dam? What a beautiful way to end it, I thought. What a wonderful question to ask. Sure, if you've paid any attention thus far you know she's probably in the back, but the question is still a powerful one...
And then it kept going. It didn't go black. And I literally sat there saying "No...don't...don't you dare...."
And then the camera shifted to Ellie lying down in the back.
The rage...I felt...was incomparable. They had the perfect opportunity to save what little they could of this game with a powerful question of an ending...and they ruined it. They just straight up ruined it. What followed was a brief and utterly inconsequential scene where Joel and Ellie approach the town. Joel lies to Ellie in the car, saying dozens of immune people like her had been found to no consequence, and they had given up finding a cure. Ellie talks about her first friend to fall from the infection, Joel tells her it's important to find something to fight for to survive, she questions him about his assertions about the Fireflies, he promises he's telling the truth, she says "Okay." And that's the end. They end on the questions of "Why did Joel save Ellie, and why did he lie to her?" instead of "Did he try to save the world, or has he doomed it?" See the difference? One question deals with internal character motivations from a one-dimensional character and is easily answered. The other quesiton deals with character motivation AND larger ethical issues and ramifications for the world and doesn't have a clear answer.
They could've redeemed themselves with the ending...and in one more thing, they failed.
****END OF SPOILERS BE HERE****
The Last of Us is a tragedy on almost every front. The story, the gameplay, the characters, damn near everything is a shadow of other better games. I am honestly baffled how so many people played this and thought, "This is the greatest game ever!" It's not. It just mimicks the greatest games by smashing them all together and praying it works out.
It doesn't.
The Last of Us gets a 4/10.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Beyond: Two Souls
I return to the blogging medium after many many months because my thoughts and feelings on Beyond: Two Souls cannot be contained in a mere facebook post. So here we go.
Beyond: Two Souls is the spiritual successor to Heavy Rain, which since it's release has become a prime example of cinematic storytelling in video games. It had its issues, from sometimes unintuitive controls to story relics that were once significant but were then thrown to the wayside, but overall I found it to be a superb game where your choices truly did matter to the story because if you mess up, you have to just keep going.
The same applies to B:TS. Make your choice, good or bad, and live with the consequences until the very end.
For those unfamiliar, B:TS tells the story of Jodie, who ever since she was a child has been linked to a ghostly entity named Aiden who, for the most part, seems to be there to protect her. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, starting at the end and jumping around different times in Jodie's life. From her time as a child being kept in a lab and studied, to a young woman being recruited by the CIA, to escaping their clutches and living homeless and on the run, to her final role...which I won't spoil. Throughout the story you play as both her and Aiden, who can assist her in all manner of paranormal ways that I'll detail in a bit. Their unique relationship, and the larger implications of Aiden's existence, are the main thrust of the narrative, and boy what a fascinating narrative it is.
First, though, let's talk gameplay. Just as in Heavy Rain, almost all the action is controlled by this unique variation on quick-time events. Push buttons in a certain order, flick the right stick in a certain direction, mash a button enough before time runs out, etc. However, it felt simpler here. The button commands were not nearly as strenuous as some of the ones found in Heavy Rain. In one sense, that's good, it means things flow more smoothly. In another sense, I found it took away a layer of difficulty that I thought added to the experience. Even with something as simple as cooking a meal. In Heavy Rain if you wanted to cook something, it took some careful moves. In B:TS, however, despite not being a cook Jodie manages to fix up Asian Beef with a couple simple swipes of the right stick. The most difficult part of that sequence was actually deciding whether I wanted to add ginger since it wasn't in the recipe. I know it sounds ridiculously nitpicky, but immersion is the key in a game like this, and Heavy Rain's slightly more complicated controls actually made me feel more invested in the outcome of each action.
What's new here, gameplay-wise, is Aiden. With a push of the triangle button, you pop into Aiden's floating, tethered perspective. As a ghost, you can do basically everything you would think a ghost could do. Wander through walls (though your tether only stretches so far), move objects, possess people, as well as the non-obvious powers of healing wounds, creating a telekinetic shield that reflects bullets, and allowing Jodie to commune with certain objects and/or corpses to see how they ended up where they are. As you might imagine, this lends a kind of puzzle element to certain sections where you use Aiden's various powers to assist Jodie through. And once again, it feels a bit simpler than I'd have liked, but still adds some nice variation.
So the controls may be a bit dumbed down from Heavy Rain, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it means the whole narrative experience can flow more smoothly. And what about that story? Does it help for things to be smoother?
In Heavy Rain the story suffered for various reasons, from relics of discarded storylines (the whole blacking out/waking up elsewhere plot) to the often disjointed nature of tracking 4 different protagonists in a branching choose-your-own-adventure style game. In B:TS, unfortunately, some of the same problems persist. Despite only having one protagonist now, the story is told in a non-linear fashion, meaning there's still some fragmenting issues, especially concerning the possible romance with your CIA partner Ryan Clayton (which is a whole nother can of worms about feminism I will likely need a separate post for). The entire section where you're homeless also feels strangely out of place, **SLIGHT SPOILERS** with some unwarranted moments of contemplating suicide as well as a completely random baby birth and escape from a burning building. **END SPOILERS**
I feel I should also mention that B:TS has a recurring problem in that Jodie+Aiden = practically invincible. In Heavy Rain, if you messed up, you could lose a main protagonist. In B:TS, you're (eventually) a trained CIA agent tied to a supernatural being that can protect her from all harm, or heal any harm done. Basically the stakes are a bit lowered. So while the game does do a good job convincing you in the moment that you could die at any moment, when you get the chance to take a step back you're reminded that, once again, things seem easier than they should.
That being said, despite it's troublesome moments, Beyond has one of the most compelling, fascinating, and emotionally-investing narratives ever assembled for a game. I laughed, I cried, I got so scared I wanted to crawl out of my skin and run away, and a couple times I'm fairly sure I forgot how to breathe the action was so intense. It has sci-fi, action, suspense, horror, drama, everything you could ask for. It takes you from science labs to a crumbling middle-eartern city, a suburban home to a desert ranch, even from a horror-filled hospital to an underwater sci-fi base. And somehow, through it all, it never loses its humanity or its emotional core.
What truly helps this is the ASTOUNDING leap in graphics made here. If this is a glimpse of the next gen, sign me up. Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe deserve Oscars for their portrayals here, because each truly do deliver a movie-worthy performance. Every minutiae in their facial expressions can be seen. Every line is delivered with emotional weight behind it. They are the reason this story is as effective as it is. Unfortunately this also means that weaker acting also shows through, like from Kadeem Hardison as Willem Dafoe's assistant Cole, who is supposed to essentially be a father figure (along with Dafoe) for Jodie but simply didn't deliver a strong enough performance for me to have cared about him.
What brave new world is this, where we're not just talking about how a voice actor does syncing their voice to a game, but the actual full performance of an actor? Crazy stuff.
To sum up, Beyond: Two Souls is not perfect, but when you're in the midst of it boy does it play like it is. Yes, it's missing some of the complexity in its controls and has lower stakes for messing up than in Heavy Rain which reduces immersion somewhat. But it also delivers, in my opinion, a better narrative experience that makes up for what it lost. I cannot wait to delve back into the world and see how different choices will effect the story.
Beyond: Two Souls gets a 10/10.
Beyond: Two Souls is the spiritual successor to Heavy Rain, which since it's release has become a prime example of cinematic storytelling in video games. It had its issues, from sometimes unintuitive controls to story relics that were once significant but were then thrown to the wayside, but overall I found it to be a superb game where your choices truly did matter to the story because if you mess up, you have to just keep going.
The same applies to B:TS. Make your choice, good or bad, and live with the consequences until the very end.
For those unfamiliar, B:TS tells the story of Jodie, who ever since she was a child has been linked to a ghostly entity named Aiden who, for the most part, seems to be there to protect her. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, starting at the end and jumping around different times in Jodie's life. From her time as a child being kept in a lab and studied, to a young woman being recruited by the CIA, to escaping their clutches and living homeless and on the run, to her final role...which I won't spoil. Throughout the story you play as both her and Aiden, who can assist her in all manner of paranormal ways that I'll detail in a bit. Their unique relationship, and the larger implications of Aiden's existence, are the main thrust of the narrative, and boy what a fascinating narrative it is.
First, though, let's talk gameplay. Just as in Heavy Rain, almost all the action is controlled by this unique variation on quick-time events. Push buttons in a certain order, flick the right stick in a certain direction, mash a button enough before time runs out, etc. However, it felt simpler here. The button commands were not nearly as strenuous as some of the ones found in Heavy Rain. In one sense, that's good, it means things flow more smoothly. In another sense, I found it took away a layer of difficulty that I thought added to the experience. Even with something as simple as cooking a meal. In Heavy Rain if you wanted to cook something, it took some careful moves. In B:TS, however, despite not being a cook Jodie manages to fix up Asian Beef with a couple simple swipes of the right stick. The most difficult part of that sequence was actually deciding whether I wanted to add ginger since it wasn't in the recipe. I know it sounds ridiculously nitpicky, but immersion is the key in a game like this, and Heavy Rain's slightly more complicated controls actually made me feel more invested in the outcome of each action.
What's new here, gameplay-wise, is Aiden. With a push of the triangle button, you pop into Aiden's floating, tethered perspective. As a ghost, you can do basically everything you would think a ghost could do. Wander through walls (though your tether only stretches so far), move objects, possess people, as well as the non-obvious powers of healing wounds, creating a telekinetic shield that reflects bullets, and allowing Jodie to commune with certain objects and/or corpses to see how they ended up where they are. As you might imagine, this lends a kind of puzzle element to certain sections where you use Aiden's various powers to assist Jodie through. And once again, it feels a bit simpler than I'd have liked, but still adds some nice variation.
So the controls may be a bit dumbed down from Heavy Rain, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, as it means the whole narrative experience can flow more smoothly. And what about that story? Does it help for things to be smoother?
In Heavy Rain the story suffered for various reasons, from relics of discarded storylines (the whole blacking out/waking up elsewhere plot) to the often disjointed nature of tracking 4 different protagonists in a branching choose-your-own-adventure style game. In B:TS, unfortunately, some of the same problems persist. Despite only having one protagonist now, the story is told in a non-linear fashion, meaning there's still some fragmenting issues, especially concerning the possible romance with your CIA partner Ryan Clayton (which is a whole nother can of worms about feminism I will likely need a separate post for). The entire section where you're homeless also feels strangely out of place, **SLIGHT SPOILERS** with some unwarranted moments of contemplating suicide as well as a completely random baby birth and escape from a burning building. **END SPOILERS**
I feel I should also mention that B:TS has a recurring problem in that Jodie+Aiden = practically invincible. In Heavy Rain, if you messed up, you could lose a main protagonist. In B:TS, you're (eventually) a trained CIA agent tied to a supernatural being that can protect her from all harm, or heal any harm done. Basically the stakes are a bit lowered. So while the game does do a good job convincing you in the moment that you could die at any moment, when you get the chance to take a step back you're reminded that, once again, things seem easier than they should.
That being said, despite it's troublesome moments, Beyond has one of the most compelling, fascinating, and emotionally-investing narratives ever assembled for a game. I laughed, I cried, I got so scared I wanted to crawl out of my skin and run away, and a couple times I'm fairly sure I forgot how to breathe the action was so intense. It has sci-fi, action, suspense, horror, drama, everything you could ask for. It takes you from science labs to a crumbling middle-eartern city, a suburban home to a desert ranch, even from a horror-filled hospital to an underwater sci-fi base. And somehow, through it all, it never loses its humanity or its emotional core.
What truly helps this is the ASTOUNDING leap in graphics made here. If this is a glimpse of the next gen, sign me up. Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe deserve Oscars for their portrayals here, because each truly do deliver a movie-worthy performance. Every minutiae in their facial expressions can be seen. Every line is delivered with emotional weight behind it. They are the reason this story is as effective as it is. Unfortunately this also means that weaker acting also shows through, like from Kadeem Hardison as Willem Dafoe's assistant Cole, who is supposed to essentially be a father figure (along with Dafoe) for Jodie but simply didn't deliver a strong enough performance for me to have cared about him.
What brave new world is this, where we're not just talking about how a voice actor does syncing their voice to a game, but the actual full performance of an actor? Crazy stuff.
To sum up, Beyond: Two Souls is not perfect, but when you're in the midst of it boy does it play like it is. Yes, it's missing some of the complexity in its controls and has lower stakes for messing up than in Heavy Rain which reduces immersion somewhat. But it also delivers, in my opinion, a better narrative experience that makes up for what it lost. I cannot wait to delve back into the world and see how different choices will effect the story.
Beyond: Two Souls gets a 10/10.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Far Cry 3
**Another one of them posts I wrote and then never actually posted...enjoy!**
First things first, I have discovered in my time playing video games that straight first person shooters are not really my thing. They get pretty boring to me when all it comes down to is shooting people with various weapons that really all do the same thing just with different firing rates/sights/etc. Point is, most of the time I'm not a fan. Which also means that while I went into Far Cry 3 with open arms, it had that bias running against it. Did the game shine through despite it? Read on.
What really got me hyped for Far Cry 3, having never played the other two, were the story trailers with your main nemesis Vaas. It looked to combine psychadelic, surreal story elements with the versatility of combat and strategy that Far Cry is known for, along with a villain that was creepy in the most sinister kind of way. And on those fronts, it (mostly) delivered. The story is an unfortunately predictable but nevertheless engaging look at Jason Brody, a man who went on an island getaway with his brothers, girlfriend, and other friends only to get captured by Vaas and his pirates to be sold for ransom. After an intense initial tutorial, you escape and find yourself in league with a resistance force of island natives, trying to rescue your friends and family no matter the cost to your own sanity and identity. Unfortunately the overall plot wanders quite often, as it is wont to do in first person shooters, with many missions serving as simple excuses to give you more to do or take you to different parts of the island. However, in its meandering it does also come across some quite emotional and gripping moments, as well as some missions that are just plain fun (aka the flame thrower vs. marijuana fields mission) and these moments tend to make you forget the rather boring things they were just having you do. I guess this is where my bias against first-person shooters shows itself. To FPS fans, all of these missions may be quite engaging, especially when left to your own devices about how to infiltrate a stronghold and eliminate a target without setting off any alarms. To me, though, it all just came down to shoot this, shoot that, go here, do this, then shoot this guy, which means my enjoyment of it rested on the plot, and with the plot being so inconsistent it was hard to fully enjoy the experience.
In all other aspects Far Cry 3 is a solid game. It cleverly introduces some RPG progression in the form of tattoos which boost various abilities in three skill trees (Heron for long-range and movement, Shark for combat, Spider for stealth), there's a crapton of collectibles (though with sadly very minimal rewards), the hunting system is very well-implemented with significant rewards in the form of more holsters, better wallet size, etc., and travel (eventually) becomes tons of fun once you get a flight suit and parachute and can traverse practically everywhere with ease. The shooting mechanics are spot on, enemy AI is often a challenge (including rogue beasts) but never feels unbeatable. The quicktime event boss fights are a major disappointment, but otherwise practically every aspect of this game is well designed and lots of fun.
I nonetheless walked away from this one feeling rather..."meh" about it. It is perfectly serviceable in a rather empty market of big sandbox first-person shooters, but the problem with making an FPS so big is that no matter how much variation you try to throw in there eventually it becomes rather repetitive. That could be fixed by a solid narrative driving the thing, but that is simply lacking here despite the presence of one of the most crazy yet loveable villains I've ever seen in a game in the form of Vaas. Is it still fun? Absolutely. But for the story-driven, completionist I MUST FILL IN THAT MARK ON THE MAP gamer like me, there's simply not enough there to warrant anything more than a single playthrough.
Far Cry 3 gets a 7.5/10.
First things first, I have discovered in my time playing video games that straight first person shooters are not really my thing. They get pretty boring to me when all it comes down to is shooting people with various weapons that really all do the same thing just with different firing rates/sights/etc. Point is, most of the time I'm not a fan. Which also means that while I went into Far Cry 3 with open arms, it had that bias running against it. Did the game shine through despite it? Read on.
What really got me hyped for Far Cry 3, having never played the other two, were the story trailers with your main nemesis Vaas. It looked to combine psychadelic, surreal story elements with the versatility of combat and strategy that Far Cry is known for, along with a villain that was creepy in the most sinister kind of way. And on those fronts, it (mostly) delivered. The story is an unfortunately predictable but nevertheless engaging look at Jason Brody, a man who went on an island getaway with his brothers, girlfriend, and other friends only to get captured by Vaas and his pirates to be sold for ransom. After an intense initial tutorial, you escape and find yourself in league with a resistance force of island natives, trying to rescue your friends and family no matter the cost to your own sanity and identity. Unfortunately the overall plot wanders quite often, as it is wont to do in first person shooters, with many missions serving as simple excuses to give you more to do or take you to different parts of the island. However, in its meandering it does also come across some quite emotional and gripping moments, as well as some missions that are just plain fun (aka the flame thrower vs. marijuana fields mission) and these moments tend to make you forget the rather boring things they were just having you do. I guess this is where my bias against first-person shooters shows itself. To FPS fans, all of these missions may be quite engaging, especially when left to your own devices about how to infiltrate a stronghold and eliminate a target without setting off any alarms. To me, though, it all just came down to shoot this, shoot that, go here, do this, then shoot this guy, which means my enjoyment of it rested on the plot, and with the plot being so inconsistent it was hard to fully enjoy the experience.
In all other aspects Far Cry 3 is a solid game. It cleverly introduces some RPG progression in the form of tattoos which boost various abilities in three skill trees (Heron for long-range and movement, Shark for combat, Spider for stealth), there's a crapton of collectibles (though with sadly very minimal rewards), the hunting system is very well-implemented with significant rewards in the form of more holsters, better wallet size, etc., and travel (eventually) becomes tons of fun once you get a flight suit and parachute and can traverse practically everywhere with ease. The shooting mechanics are spot on, enemy AI is often a challenge (including rogue beasts) but never feels unbeatable. The quicktime event boss fights are a major disappointment, but otherwise practically every aspect of this game is well designed and lots of fun.
I nonetheless walked away from this one feeling rather..."meh" about it. It is perfectly serviceable in a rather empty market of big sandbox first-person shooters, but the problem with making an FPS so big is that no matter how much variation you try to throw in there eventually it becomes rather repetitive. That could be fixed by a solid narrative driving the thing, but that is simply lacking here despite the presence of one of the most crazy yet loveable villains I've ever seen in a game in the form of Vaas. Is it still fun? Absolutely. But for the story-driven, completionist I MUST FILL IN THAT MARK ON THE MAP gamer like me, there's simply not enough there to warrant anything more than a single playthrough.
Far Cry 3 gets a 7.5/10.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
The Trial preshow
I think I have finally decompressed from seeing this show, and can now form at least somewhat coherent sentences about my opinion of it. But honestly, most of it comes down to the preshow.
The Trial was put on by the New Century Theater Company who has my favorite actor Darragh Kennan (sorry Todd Jefferson Moore, you're close!) as artistic director. They performed in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service Building, which essentially used to serve as Seattle's Ellis Island. In fact, the room they performed in was the very room where new immigrants were processed.
It was also where we, as an audience, were processed. The following is my best attempt to try and describe my own experience with it.
The Trial truly began in the lobby. We naturally waited as the house remained closed, though we could see brief glimpses of actors going to and fro past the hanging plastic slats. We could also hear some prerecorded messages playing over a loudspeaker, saying mostly inane things like "Josef K. will be played by Darragh Kennan," or "Please turn off your cellphones." Finally the time was at hand, and an actress led a group of us past the slats and to a door. She separated out 5 of us (I was in the first group), knocked on the door, and another actor led us inside to a rather disconcerting scene. It was obviously normally the box office station, a kind of anteroom with a windowed box and closed double doors leading to (at that point, assumingly) the theater. However, instead of a friendly box office person in the windowed box there were two men in suits, one of whom disconcertingly made eye contact and smiled the entire time. Meanwhile the actor who led us in asked us to stand against a wall to record our height, and then assigned us to one of three lines. I was the only one in the middle line. He then named each line, and while the original names escape me because, well, I was disoriented and creeped the fuck out, they were something along the lines of Alpha, Beta, and Zeta. He then knocked on the door three times.
And BOOM. All of a sudden the doors open to reveal three stunningly gorgeous women in lab coats directly in our faces smiling at us. The first took Alpha and went one direction past the doors. The second took Beta and went a separate direction. You cannot imagine the rising...well...terror, as I was left alone. Finally the third told me to follow her, then suddenly turned back around and gave me one simple instruction...
"Please do not touch the red curtain."
As we finally entered the space, I discovered we were in a room with audience sections on 3 sides, and the stage completely blocked off on every side by a red curtain. And here was the trick...it was nearly impossible to walk down the path to each section without touching the curtain. There was maybe 6 inches of space between the railing on the side and that curtain. The woman somehow magically skirted through without touching it, and I tried my damndest not to, sucking in my breath while she stared, smiling, at me. She then gestured towards an aisle, the second row on the right side of my section, and calmly told me, "This is your seat." I moved past her, instinctively smiling at her in that animal way that says "Please don't hurt me," and took my seat.
Because of the curtain I could only see a portion of the other sections, but it was enough to see the other 4 people I had entered with had made it safely, which, in my state, I was glad of. I then watched as the 3 women made their way back to the door just in time for the three knocks to come and for the process to begin again.
The theater was sweltering. Probably 100 degrees. And I sat there, nervous, anxious, uncertain as to what would happen next, nearly sweating in my t-shirt and shorts. I sat there for half an hour while the process continued and the seats slowly began to fill with more and more people. This was perhaps the most fascinating part of the show for me; watching people's reactions to their situation.
Whenever someone touched the red curtain (which was often), the curtain itself made a lot of noise on its rollers, which then prompted whichever woman was around to yank back the curtain and very curtly say "Please do not touch the red curtain." Some laughed it off. One woman in the front row of the section to my right purposefully touched the curtain when the women weren't looking. Some barged through and were straight-up rebellious.
At one point, three college-age men were put into my section and asked if they could have different seats. A chill went down my spine as the woman replied, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed." She seated a couple other people then whipped back around to them and said even more menacingly, angrily, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed. The door is that way." Then whipped back around and left. The three left, and I was honestly relieved just to see them 5 minutes later when they were escorted to the back row of the section on my left.
Some might not have gotten the full experience of that preshow like I did. Honestly I was glad I saw it alone because it simply heightened all the tension and terror, and got me in the perfect place to witness the rest of that play. I think to most of the people there, this was like any other play, just with a weird introduction. But to me...I was there. The setting was oppressive, the heat was oppressive, everything screamed oppression...and I was, frankly, scared.
That carried me into the opening scene, when the curtains were drawn back to reveal Josef K. in his underwear in front of the same two men in suits we had seen in the windowed box, a clothing rack full of suits, and a lamp, which the two men turned on. And from there...it was one long descent into metaphor and symbolism about ignorance, innocence, repression, choice, sex, power, and ambiguity all rolled up into one. It was masterful acting, masterful direction, masterful choreography (there was a bit where the three women, who turn out to be Josef's secretaries at the bank where he works, hand Josef papers to sign and take them away faster and faster and faster in this almost machine-like way until finally they just fling them everywhere), masterful lighting design for such a small space (including scenes where just a lamp, or in one scene these bright lights attached to the landlord's glasses, was the only source of illumination). Just...masterful overall.
I walked out thoughtful, shaken, sweating, and thoroughly entertained. Easily one of the best (if not the best) plays I've seen this year.
The Trial was put on by the New Century Theater Company who has my favorite actor Darragh Kennan (sorry Todd Jefferson Moore, you're close!) as artistic director. They performed in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service Building, which essentially used to serve as Seattle's Ellis Island. In fact, the room they performed in was the very room where new immigrants were processed.
It was also where we, as an audience, were processed. The following is my best attempt to try and describe my own experience with it.
The Trial truly began in the lobby. We naturally waited as the house remained closed, though we could see brief glimpses of actors going to and fro past the hanging plastic slats. We could also hear some prerecorded messages playing over a loudspeaker, saying mostly inane things like "Josef K. will be played by Darragh Kennan," or "Please turn off your cellphones." Finally the time was at hand, and an actress led a group of us past the slats and to a door. She separated out 5 of us (I was in the first group), knocked on the door, and another actor led us inside to a rather disconcerting scene. It was obviously normally the box office station, a kind of anteroom with a windowed box and closed double doors leading to (at that point, assumingly) the theater. However, instead of a friendly box office person in the windowed box there were two men in suits, one of whom disconcertingly made eye contact and smiled the entire time. Meanwhile the actor who led us in asked us to stand against a wall to record our height, and then assigned us to one of three lines. I was the only one in the middle line. He then named each line, and while the original names escape me because, well, I was disoriented and creeped the fuck out, they were something along the lines of Alpha, Beta, and Zeta. He then knocked on the door three times.
And BOOM. All of a sudden the doors open to reveal three stunningly gorgeous women in lab coats directly in our faces smiling at us. The first took Alpha and went one direction past the doors. The second took Beta and went a separate direction. You cannot imagine the rising...well...terror, as I was left alone. Finally the third told me to follow her, then suddenly turned back around and gave me one simple instruction...
"Please do not touch the red curtain."
As we finally entered the space, I discovered we were in a room with audience sections on 3 sides, and the stage completely blocked off on every side by a red curtain. And here was the trick...it was nearly impossible to walk down the path to each section without touching the curtain. There was maybe 6 inches of space between the railing on the side and that curtain. The woman somehow magically skirted through without touching it, and I tried my damndest not to, sucking in my breath while she stared, smiling, at me. She then gestured towards an aisle, the second row on the right side of my section, and calmly told me, "This is your seat." I moved past her, instinctively smiling at her in that animal way that says "Please don't hurt me," and took my seat.
Because of the curtain I could only see a portion of the other sections, but it was enough to see the other 4 people I had entered with had made it safely, which, in my state, I was glad of. I then watched as the 3 women made their way back to the door just in time for the three knocks to come and for the process to begin again.
The theater was sweltering. Probably 100 degrees. And I sat there, nervous, anxious, uncertain as to what would happen next, nearly sweating in my t-shirt and shorts. I sat there for half an hour while the process continued and the seats slowly began to fill with more and more people. This was perhaps the most fascinating part of the show for me; watching people's reactions to their situation.
Whenever someone touched the red curtain (which was often), the curtain itself made a lot of noise on its rollers, which then prompted whichever woman was around to yank back the curtain and very curtly say "Please do not touch the red curtain." Some laughed it off. One woman in the front row of the section to my right purposefully touched the curtain when the women weren't looking. Some barged through and were straight-up rebellious.
At one point, three college-age men were put into my section and asked if they could have different seats. A chill went down my spine as the woman replied, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed." She seated a couple other people then whipped back around to them and said even more menacingly, angrily, "If you wish to change your seats, you may be reprocessed. The door is that way." Then whipped back around and left. The three left, and I was honestly relieved just to see them 5 minutes later when they were escorted to the back row of the section on my left.
Some might not have gotten the full experience of that preshow like I did. Honestly I was glad I saw it alone because it simply heightened all the tension and terror, and got me in the perfect place to witness the rest of that play. I think to most of the people there, this was like any other play, just with a weird introduction. But to me...I was there. The setting was oppressive, the heat was oppressive, everything screamed oppression...and I was, frankly, scared.
That carried me into the opening scene, when the curtains were drawn back to reveal Josef K. in his underwear in front of the same two men in suits we had seen in the windowed box, a clothing rack full of suits, and a lamp, which the two men turned on. And from there...it was one long descent into metaphor and symbolism about ignorance, innocence, repression, choice, sex, power, and ambiguity all rolled up into one. It was masterful acting, masterful direction, masterful choreography (there was a bit where the three women, who turn out to be Josef's secretaries at the bank where he works, hand Josef papers to sign and take them away faster and faster and faster in this almost machine-like way until finally they just fling them everywhere), masterful lighting design for such a small space (including scenes where just a lamp, or in one scene these bright lights attached to the landlord's glasses, was the only source of illumination). Just...masterful overall.
I walked out thoughtful, shaken, sweating, and thoroughly entertained. Easily one of the best (if not the best) plays I've seen this year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
