Category: Video Games

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is in contention for the second best Assassin’s Creed game ever. Black Flag is the first best and isn’t going to have its throne toppled by the minor improvements Syndicate made to the usual formula, but those minor improvements make Syndicate stand out compared to other games like the Ezio trilogy, III, and especially Unity.

Syndicate’s story is still more gonzo yet less character-driven than the original Assassin’s Creed, and the more gonzo you go, the more you want to rely on characters to keep the story grounded (alternatively, go full gonzo and make Kung Fury). Still, Syndicate is coming out ahead of most Assassin’s Creed games for its story. The tale of two siblings who become estranged from one another but then reconcile is delivered poorly, but most Assassin’s Creed stories are delivered poorly and this one is at least an interesting concept. Anyway, the first Assassin’s Creed game was the only one with an even passable story, the rest are divided between bland filler (the Ezio trilogy, Black Flag) and a cavalcade of opportunities missed out of corporate terror at the idea of having something to say (III, Unity).

Syndicate touches up the mechanics in a couple of important areas. The parkour is still not as good as it was in the Ezio trilogy (I’m still baffled as to why they didn’t just keep that parkour engine), but it’s a much more functional version of what they used in Unity. The left shoulder button will actually pull you into a window, as opposed to Unity, which promised that pressing left trigger would pull you in a window, but was lying. For the first time ever the combat system has been noticeably improved with the addition of a guard-break, so now you don’t just attack and counter but also break. One additional button to press does not drastically deepen the game’s combat, but it’s something. I talked about the Dreadful Crimes DLC in another post, which takes the mysteries from Unity (already a good idea) and gives them some quality of life improvements that remove a lot of minor annoyances from the experience.

New gameplay mechanics are minor, but mostly fun and easy to ignore when they’re not. The grapple hook is mostly a gimmick. Zipline assassinations are fun, but other than that it just lets you skip a bit of parkour, but, like, parkour is the gameplay. That’s part of what makes Assassin’s Creed fun. I don’t want to skip it. The new carriage riding mechanics are pretty fun. You can ram Templar carriages off the road, or climb on top to jump to an adjacent carriage and kill the guy driving it to steal his carriage if you like it better. The trains circling about London are put to good use, with open world activities to rob them, thus giving you an excuse to climb all over them while having a shootout/brawl with bad guys.

Speaking of shooting, the existence of revolvers brings a welcome expansion to the game’s ranged combat. Now that you can go as many as eight shots before reloading (assuming you’re using the best pistol in the game), ranged combat can be used not just to take out one guy before a melee, but to actually win an entire fight. Syndicate is heavy on melee, but having six cylinders to chew through means ranged combat is a real option unto itself in a way it never really was in earlier games.

I’m a little bit sad they stopped advancing towards present day with Assassin’s Creed games, because I think they had all the elements they needed to make that work in Syndicate. The carriage mechanics are close enough to car mechanics, and the revolver provides a foundation for effective ranged weapons despite the melee-focused mechanics of the series, which could’ve been expanded to cover modern automatic weapons. I think WW2 is the most overdone historical period in all of video games and while you could say some very interesting things about how the Assassins and Templars supported or opposed fascism, communism, and liberalism in the 20th century, Ubisoft would never actually say those things, so better to just leave that whole time period alone. WW1 has also gotten kinda played out lately, but there’s theaters of that conflict that could make for a great Assassin’s Creed game, like the Middle-East. You can have your trench warfare in Gallipolli while getting up to classic Assassin shenanigans in the Great Arab Revolt, meeting with historical figures like Lawrence of Arabia and stabbing Templars.

There’s no headline feature like the ship combat in Black Flag, but Syndicate has a lot of minor improvements on the Assassin’s Creed formula that makes it one of the best of the series, and it makes me sad that it got overlooked because it came out in the aftermath of Unity, which had such an infamously terrible release that everyone wrote off Assassin’s Creed until Ubisoft promised to spend a year in timeout thinking about what they’d done.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate takes place in Victorian London. Unfortunately, it gives itself a very specific year, that being 1868. Most Assassin’s Creed games give themselves a few years, sometimes more than a full decade, in order to give themselves some wiggle room as to what kind of historical figures can be involved, but Syndicate is glued to the specific year of 1868. So when it wants to have crime-solving stories, it is unfortunately saddled with the reality that Arthur Conan Doyle was a maximum of 8 years old. If they’d run themselves, say, from 1868 to 1873, they could’ve at least gotten as far as 13. Alas.

So the Dreadful Crimes DLC gives our main contact as Henry Raymond, a fictitious author of penny dreadfuls. Little Artie is his biggest fan, and it’s honestly kind of annoying having this eight year-old drag you by the nose through the first mystery. You cannot solve the first one by yourself, your only option is to falsely accuse Artie’s child laborer friend of having stuck his foreman, when in truth it was one of the adult workers. After you make the false accusation, Artie steps in and is all “what if instead of going with the most blindingly obvious culprit after looking at two clues, we did some actual detective work?” and only then do the additional investigation sites open up such that you can find enough clues to solve the mystery for real.

Bad enough that we’re stuck with babby Sherlock because of the timeline, but they go out of their way to make him come across as less “plucky sidekick” and more “snot-nosed brat” in his first appearance. If it were some other adult that Artie was showing up, I wouldn’t mind, nor would I be bothered (except with myself) if Artie just showed up to explain why the person you’re accusing can’t have been the culprit every time you organically got it wrong. That’s not even something he actually does, if you falsely accuse someone they just profess their innocence and you have to guess again. That’s a perfectly good mechanic, but here was the perfect opportunity for Artie to demonstrate his sleuthing skills without being an irritating little shit about it, and they walked right past it. I imagine some players would get annoyed with Artie anyway, but that’s on them. If you didn’t want the eight-year old out-detecting you, you shouldn’t have fucked up your detective work!

Despite the rocky start, the Dreadful Crimes is fantastic overall. It takes the crime-solving from Unity, already that game’s best idea, and makes a ton of improvements to quality of life and storytelling. Syndicate’s main story is plagued by stilted dialogue where the idea is good but it’s marred by execution so lacking that I sometimes can’t tell what they were trying to set up until it’s being paid off, not in a “shocking twist” kind of way, but in a “oh, I guess Jacob and Evie’s conflict was supposed to be reaching the point of estrangement from one another and not just siblings joshing each other” kind of way. Not the Dreadful Crimes, though. Perhaps because the dialogue is much more functional, focused around interrogating witnesses, so there’s less pressure to try and communicate an emotional arc through casual conversation and instead it comes out in clues and contradictions.

Continue reading “AC: Syndicate’s Dreadful Crimes DLC Is Better At Being BBC’s Sherlock Than BBC’s Sherlock” →

Mind Scanners is to Papers, Please as Katana Zero is to Hotline, Miami: A game with noticeably different style and mechanics whose underlying theme and pace nevertheless make it feel like it’s a clone. In Mind Scanners, you are in a dystopian cyberpunk city and your daughter has the mutant power to blow up electronics, which makes her both a threat and potential asset to the government. They take her to a special institute for research. At the same time, there’s a new Mind Scanners initiative for using cyberpunk tech to scan and alter people’s psychology for mental health purposes, and level 3 mind scanners are allowed into the institute where your daughter is being held.

As you work your way up the mind scanner ranks, you come across disruptors – other mutants with the same powers your daughter has – and can turn them in or experiment on them to try and find a way to exploit or eliminate their powers. Rebels and the government alike will sometimes ask you to use mind scanning tech to erase the personality of certain patients completely, something you can also do by accident (or on purpose – there’s no penalty for erasing a personality besides being an evil bastard, and it’s faster and easier to cure people if you ignore the personality meter completely).

Like Papers, Please, you’re playing a little minigame on a timer to try and stay ahead of your rent. Unlike Papers, Please, it comes with difficulty levels, and the easy difficulty level mostly lives up to its name. I played the tertiary gameplay loop of the game – picking which patients to treat and when to set aside time to invent new mind scanning/altering devices and so forth – pretty sloppy on my first time through, because I found it very hard to resist scanning as many patients as possible even when there were more important plot things to be doing. On easy mode, though, treating patients went quickly enough that I was able to stay on top of things anyway.

I got a “the rebels are also authoritarians” vibe from the game, so I mostly snubbed them, but also ignored anytime the government asked me to mindwipe someone for being robosexual and declared a bunch of dissidents sane despite their weird tics (one claimed to see the future in a way that wasn’t clear whether she was speaking metaphorically or not but I suspected the main reason the government wanted her examined is because she was cryptically implying the government would cause catastrophe, one was an anti-government artist really obsessed with water which is weird, but we do need that stuff to live so I don’t really see how it’s a problem). There was a mad science project I botched purely out of incompetence, but that turned out to be for the best because (the internet tells me) its ultimate effect is to erase everyone’s personalities to create a world of perfectly homogenous bliss.

Two things I really appreciate about Mind Scanners is that 1) easy difficulty hits that sweet spot where I still have to learn the mechanics of the game and can’t just completely faceroll, but it’s also easy rather than demanding a ton of effort from a game I really want to get out of the way in one playthrough, and 2) generally trying to be a good person gets you a generally good ending on your first time through, rather than having the default ending be your puppy getting ground up into viscera and force-fed to other puppies and the only way to avoid that is to either play multiple times and experiment with what changes the ending or else use a walkthrough. Mind Scanners is a fun game, but not so fun that I want to replay it, and it seems like the endings get this. There is a perfect ending you can strive for if you want, but getting a generally positive outcome just requires that you not be overly gullible or murder your own daughter for the glory of the Supreme Leader.

For a bit, I tried to do reviews of the monthly Humble Bundle, largely in an effort to write off video game expenditures as a business expense. Ultimately, I gave up on the plan, because it turns out I really dislike playing a half-dozen new video games for an hour or two each in order to squeeze out a sloppy first impression of them. These days I’m doing exactly the opposite: Assembling a list of video games that I want to play all the way through (or in some cases, get 100% completion on). Once something goes on the Incomplete list, it has only two possible destinations: The Complete list once finished, or the Regrets list once I determine that actually this game is bad and I never want to finish it.

But this means I am now once again analyzing the Humble Choice (successor to the Humble Bundle) more closely, just for different reasons. So what are the games in August’s haul, and after a quick glance at them, are they going on the Incomplete list? I mostly haven’t played any of these, I’m going purely on advertising and reviews.

The Ascent is a solo or co-op action-shooter RPG about fighting through a cyberpunk arcology somehow. The details are a bit scarce, but it’s definitely a cyberpunk top-down shooter/RPG of some description, which sounds cool. This is going on the Incomplete list.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is a racing game for people who are nostalgic for Hot Wheels, I guess. Pass.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is one of those artsy story-focused indie games. This one in particular seems like it’s trying and failing to be a Sad Game like This War Of Mine and Frostpunk. I like Sad Games, but that doesn’t mean I’m interested in watching A Plague Tale go “look, a puppy! Now the puppy is starving! Please clap.”

Gas Station Simulator is one of those work simulation games that seem like they shouldn’t exist and yet here we are. I sometimes like to zone out to podcasts to these, so this is going on Incomplete, but once I get around to actually playing the damn thing there’s decent odds it’ll get kicked to Regrets if it doesn’t manage to hit that zen groove for me.

In Sound Mind is some kind of puzzle-y adventure game-y type thing. Cool concepts are involved, but I hate everything about that gameplay.

Mind Scanners is one of those “the future as envisioned by the 80s” retro-futuristic dealies, this one about a psychiatrist in a dystopia. Basically what if Papers, Please had arcade mini-games that let you erase someone’s traumatic memories instead of stamping passports. This might be one of those indie games that never really developed their ideas past the point necessary to make them sound good for Kickstarter, but since it’s in the Humble Choice either way, I’ll toss it on the Incomplete list and see for myself.

I’ve talked about Emily Is Away ❤ already. I tried the first installment in the series, which is free, and found it both failed to hit my nostalgia and wasn’t very fun to play, and Emily ❤ is unlikely to fix either problem. It’s closer to my nostalgia window, but also my teenage years were kind of weird and Emily ❤ will probably be bad at reminding me of them, plus I don’t think they fixed the thing where you have to bang randomly on your keyboard for a few seconds to “type” the message you’ve already selected.

Omno basically just looks like Journey but worse. It’s a puzzle platformer-y type thing, but there’s no multiplayer and the world looks slightly less interesting to explore than Journey’s.

So that’s three new games for the Incomplete list, although two of them are only getting in on the grace of “eh, I may as well double check to see for sure whether they suck.”

One of the games from the August Humble Choice is Emily Is Away <3, the third game in the Emily Is Away series of nostalgic chat-based visual novels. The first Emily Is Away focuses on the internet of 2002-2006 and takes place through AIM Messenger. You play as a high school and subsequently college student with a crush on Emily, who is never away, because the gameplay is about talking to her through AIM. The first game is free, so I decided to give it a whirl before picking Emily Is Away <3, so that I can maybe give Emily ❤ away if someone else wants it.

As a nostalgia vehicle, Emily Is Away fails for me in particular for two reasons. First, I was ten in 2002 and fourteen in 2006, so the game’s initial hook of talking about Coldplay in AIM chat just doesn’t land for me. I used AIM as a teenager, but it was on the way out, and I never knew anyone who cared about Coldplay. Emily ❤ takes place on off-brand Facebook in 2008, when I was 16, and would line up much better.

Second, the game (at least in its first few interactions) relies heavily on a romantic entanglement between the protagonist and Emily, and I am an aromantic with a mind of metal and wheels who never cared who a girl I was interested in might be dating. There was more than one attractive girl in my circles, I was aware teenage relationships were fragile and temporary so a girl dating someone else didn’t really present a long term obstacle anyway, and my interests in relationships was pretty limited to begin with, especially for the amount of effort a relationship with a high school relationship usually requires.

Plus, the girl the protagonist is interested in is one they know in real life, and regularly see in person. The only reason they’re using AIM chat to stay in touch is because using the phone requires slightly more effort. Emily is exclusively the character you interact with early on (maybe for the whole game?), and it’s jarring to me that a 00s-era AIM conversation would end with a promise to meet up in real physical space at a party later that evening. When I was a teenager, the internet was another world with almost totally distinct inhabitants, and the friends I had online and used things like AIM chat to talk to were completely different people from who I saw at school.

None of this is a fatal flaw, though, because they’re obviously pretty specific to me. No, Emily Is Away’s fatal flaw is that after you pick a dialogue option, you have to hit keys on your keyboard to type it out. It doesn’t matter what keys you press, it’ll always match (more or less) the dialogue option you selected, so this is just a bit of friction between making a choice and seeing results. There is occasionally some characterization of the protagonist as they start to write one thing, then delete it and use a different phrasing (usually going from something very strong to something more restrained), but it’s really not worth the bit of friction introduced into every single player input. I keep thinking to myself “maybe it’ll be more relatable if I muscle through the opening conversations with Emily and find some side characters to talk to” or “maybe Emily ❤ will work better for me since it takes place in 2008 when I was 16,” but ultimately, I don’t want to struggle through fake-typing out all my responses when I still have over 170 games in my backlog.

In Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Evie Frye is an Assassin chasing after the Shroud of Eden to prevent the Templar Lucy Thorne from using it to take over the world somehow. At the point in the story we’re talking about today, Sequence 5, Evie doesn’t know the Templars’ exact plan, just that they need a new piece of Eden after they accidentally blew up the Apple of Eden (I say “the” but at this point in the continuity there’s at least a couple floating around – this one can’t be the same one the Assassins and Templars were fighting over in the Ezio trilogy, because that was still around in 2012).

Evie solves some puzzles and tracks down some puzzle key thing in a hidden room in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that’s when Lucy Thorne pops out of nowhere. You have a quick mini-boss fight, and then in a cut scene Lucy takes the puzzle key from around Evie’s neck where Evie had been wearing it like a necklace (for all of five minutes) and runs away. After reducing the bosses’ health to zero, you win, but actually, you lose. It’s at least framed as Lucy grabbing it on the way to being tossed out a window and then using her parkour skillz to escape, but if they needed Lucy to win at this point, why not cut the (fairly dull) boss fight and just have Lucy be there ahead of Evie?

What makes it particularly aggravating is the premise of the Assassin’s Creed series: The frame story is that you’re a modern day Assassin reliving the genetic memories of an ancient Assassin master, usually to learn where some Precursor artifact wound up 200 years ago in the hopes that it’s still there to be recovered today (this hope turns out to be accurate a shockingly high percentage of the time, particularly since the modern-day frame plot is often vestigial to the point where you can go ahead and give it an anti-climactic “yeah, the vault’s empty” ending and it would be fine, because the storyline we care about is the one with the pirates/French revolutionaries/Industrial Age gang wars/whatever). The memories are fuzzy, which is why you can run around locations freely instead of repeating exactly the dead Assassin’s movements step for step, and you can do side quests in any order, and so on. This is necessary enough for gameplay that it would have to be handwaved even if it didn’t make sense, but it does: Memory is imperfect, and the genetic memories you’re accessing haven’t properly stored what order events occurred in, so the Animus has to be able to handle the ambiguity. I mean, genetic memories don’t work that way at all, but once you’ve accepted that a DNA sample can remember specific events, the rest is pretty plausible both in comparison and generally.

What makes this aggravating is that there are bonus objectives for full synchronization: Things your ancestor specifically remembers doing and which will help synchronize you (giving you new abilities) with the memories if you do them as well. For example, in the fight with Lucy Thorne, apparently Evie Frye specifically remembers countering every one of Lucy Thorne’s attacks. Which is the only way Lucy can do any damage. So the canonical outcome of this fight is not that it was a desperate struggle between evenly matched foes that could’ve suddenly tilted towards either side at any second, and Lucy seized an opportunity to grab the key and escape. It’s that Evie was completely dominating and then Lucy got phenomenally lucky.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is a 2015 game, but Valhalla was a 2020 release and is still nailed to that dead platform. Anyway, UPlay was dead on arrival, even in 2015 it should’ve been obvious that this was never going to be a Steam competitor. And Uplay doesn’t even have the courtesy to be merely useless, it’s actively harmful to the gaming experience. I’m on a cruise to Alaska celebrating my father’s retirement (two years late because Covid), which has generally been quite lovely and most of the games I downloaded onto an old laptop for the trip have worked fine and ultimately I’m not spending that much time on video games while on a cruise ship, but I don’t want the buffer to run too thin while I’m out here and certainly the thing that’s most stood out in terms of video games is that the only video game that has given me any trouble despite patchy ship wifi and so forth has been the Ubisoft game I brought.

You see, I have two Ubisoft accounts, the main one, and the backup I use to submit support tickets for when I can’t get into the main one, because Uplay is finnicky. For example, two-factor authentication stopped functioning for no reason at one point, leaving me unable to log in. I wasn’t even at sea, that was during the drive up when wifi still worked fine. In any case, I accidentally logged into the backup account, opened up Syndicate, and was presented with a new game. So then I log off, wrestle with Uplay’s login for a while longer, and get into the main account, only to find that the backup account’s new game data has now overwritten the one, single save file you get across all devices and, apparently, any number of Uplay accounts. Luckily, I’m not super invested in the story or anything, I don’t ultimately care that much so long as I get to run around London stabbing people, and it’s not like I’m on a deadline to beat this game, but it does mean I have to replay the stupid tutorial introduction missions again.

I might be able to retrieve my old save file from my old computer and get Uplay to recognize that, and maybe by the time I get home I’ll feel like wrestling with Uplay to make that happen, but I don’t know if I’m going to bother, just play the new save file to completion instead. Certainly this has cemented my decision to use Syndicate as the breakpoint where I stop bothering with Assassin’s Creed games. I was starting to think “y’know, people really seemed to enjoy Origins and Valhalla, and those settings might be played out in a way the French Revolution and Renaissance Italy are not, but the Caribbean is pretty played out and it was still fun to play the Caribbean but also you are a parkour ninja.” But this experience has hammered a nail into that coffin. No thank you, no more Ubisoft games, I’ve probably got too many already, really. I’ve still got a bunch of Far Crys in my backlog that I’ll still play, because I already bought them and these games are fun to zone out to podcasts with, when Uplay isn’t getting in the way.

I guess I could review the cruise itself, but it’s not like I go on three of these a year. I don’t think I really have the depth of experience to say anything about it besides “cruises are fun” and also surprisingly affordable, so if you can take a week off and can manage to save $1,000-$2,000, maybe consider taking one. The ship’s crawling with boomers, but they’re much more polite than you’d expect, I think partly because I’m not staff and partly because they’re grateful someone under 50 is around to make the place look less like an unusually ritzy waiting room for the morgue.

Eastern European video games are so famous for producing brilliant but unpolished gems that the term “Eurojank” was invented to refer to them. Pathologic is a Eurojank survival horror game, STALKER is a Eurojank shooter, Gothic is a Eurojank RPG, and so on. The Witcher series was never Eurojank, but it’s got a lot of the hallmarks of one, and especially its third entry did the impossible – delivered on Eurojank ambition without the actual jank. Clearly this was some kind of Faustian bargain, because Cyberpunk 2077 failed to deliver the ambition but had all of the jank.

As that first paragraph hints, the core of Eurojank is manic ambition married to janky execution. Eurojank games are carving out a whole new sub-genre for themselves, one which usually never gets any entries outside of that one game or series, and they have the bugs and lack of polish that you’d expect from a mid-size company trying to invent an entire genre with one video game. Each Eurojank game is an experience that no other video game will give you, something new and visionary, but also they have a bunch of jank you have to get used to.

The “Euro” in Eurojank stereotypically refers to eastern Europe specifically, although that stereotype doesn’t quite hold even with the three Ur-Eurojank examples I gave in the first paragraph: Gothic was developed in central European Germany (not even on the east side of the old border). Necromunda: Hired Gun continues that trend of being technically in Europe, albeit far to the west of the stereotypical Eurojank game.

Necromunda is a loving recreation of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium’s most infamous underhive. The maps are half-functional steel plants built with the pointless enormity of the Imperium of Man, deep trenches carved into Wall-E style mountains of trash cubes that lead upwards to bunkers to storm, and mineshafts dug miles deep for raw materials. There are side missions to retrieve human corpses because that’s a valuable food supply, to destroy the ventillation fans in an enemy gang’s hideout so they’ll asphyxiate on the industrial fumes that permeate the hive, and to both rescue, kidnap, and execute unregistered psykers. It’s a game that understands what a 40k video game is supposed to be: A playable death metal album that takes place in a galaxy ruled by an evil empire that’s just past the height of its power and entered into decline, crushing its hapless subjects between its merciless, failing machinery, but still too powerful to be meaningfully opposed from within (logically speaking, there must be certain frontier sectors where Imperial power has receded to the point where local powers could successfully break away and create democracy or whatever, but if you want democratic rebels breaking away from a fascistic empire, why are you not playing a Star Wars game?).

But dear god, the jank. The game has an atrocious reverse-difficulty curve. By the time you’ve finished the second level (maybe even the first, I was still getting to grips with the game and wasn’t great at distinguishing enemy types yet), it’s already throwing ogryns and enemy lieutenants with powerful refractor fields at you. Psykers and ambots get introduced in the third level, but while they have different powers than other enemies, they’re actually much easier to fight than the lieutenants with the refractor fields. Genestealers show up in level 7, but they’re some of the easiest enemies in the game, melee-only foes who you can just kite while unloading a heavy bolter at them. If there’s been any new enemies in levels 4-6, I didn’t notice them. There’s only 13 levels in this game, and while I definitely expect there to be some new mini-bosses, boss fights, and maybe a new elite enemy type like the psyker and genestealer, it’s pretty clear at this point that the basic mooks you clear through are the same at the end as they were in the beginning. The Escher, Orlocks, and Goliaths are all visually distinct and fantastically well-represented, but none of them are meaningfully harder than the others.

This would be a flat difficulty curve, but you also have upgrades. Buying new bionics and a better arsenal of weapons makes the game noticeably easier as you progress. Bionics give you new powers like slowing down time or a pulse that both stuns enemies and deactivates refractor fields within a certain radius (when fully upgraded, a very wide radius), and while I find that the autogun you get in the first five minutes remains a pretty reliable all-rounder weapon even after I’ve unlocked the entire arsenal, the heavy bolter’s insane damage reduces even the tankiest of (non-boss) enemies to red mist in just a few shots, often chewing through a refractor field before I even notice the golden glow intercepting my shots, and while the bolter’s recoil is too intense to be used at anything but very close range, the plasma gun is great for sniping because of its even higher damage-per-shot. It’s not extremely accurate by default, but the right upgrades can give it fantastic range in exchange for a terrible reload speed, which is perfect for sniping.

Between the enemies having variety but not escalation and the bionics and weapons becoming steadily more versatile and in some ways even directly more powerful, the game gets easier as you go. I was seriously considering tossing this game on the Regrets pile early on because its difficulty was so intense even when taking B-ranked side missions (supposed to be the easiest type) on the lowest difficulty option and it was still really difficult, but once I managed to scrape some credits together and buy some upgrades, easy difficulty started living up to its name and I switched back to normal. Now only S-ranked side missions give me trouble, and even then, it depends on the exact objective (objectives that require killing mini-bosses or capturing territory are much harder than objectives that require destroying stockpiles of ammo or drugs or stealing food – the latter feature infinitely spawning enemies, so ignoring them to hit the objectives is not just viable, but to some degree required). I’m sure this is partly because I got better at the game as I played, but also I have way better gear.

Some basic quality of life features are absent as well. This is a looter shooter, except the advantage of a +2 bolter over the standard are tiny enough that you can ignore them, and the process of getting loot is clunky enough that you probably will. You can’t open your inventory screen in regular gameplay, instead exclusively opening it when at the weapon upgrade shop or when choosing your mission loadout, so you never do the looter shooter thing where you swap out new weapons mid-mission because you found something better, and once you’ve found your first heavy bolter, you’ll probably never find one that’s better by enough to be worth the trouble of customizing it to max out whatever features you’re using heavy bolters for (probably close range damage, but maybe there’s other uses for that gun that just aren’t obvious to me).

There’s no mini-map and the objective markers aren’t nearly sufficient to tell you where to go. Since you’re in an underhive, knowing which direction your target is in doesn’t always help because the door leading to the other side of the wall between you and the target might be far to the side or maybe even in the opposite direction. There are occasional wide, open spaces when you’re out on the ash wastes or in a particularly cavernous storage chamber or whatever, but these are the exception, which means a lot of missions, especially side missions, are spent screaming “where the fuck do I go next?!”

Side missions take place in the same maps as the main missions, but in small, cordoned off chunks of them, repurposed for the sake of the side mission. That’s a great way to recycle content (like all games, Necromunda would be better if it was a Metroidvania where all maps connected to one another in a massive interconnected hive, but that would require significant time and money and it’s not super insightful to say “this game would’ve been better with an extra six months and $2,000,000 poured into it”), but it means that you’re often going backwards from the direction the main mission took you, which means all the level design that drew your eye and made the way forward intuitive in the main missions is now useless or sometimes counterproductive. An elevator in the third stage, for example, is very obvious at the bottom but gets lost in the clutter a bit on the top. No problem if you’re starting on the bottom, but if you’re in a side mission that starts you on top, it can take a bit to find. If it’s a side mission that’s constantly spawning enemies, that makes things much worse, because you can’t just carefully sweep the area for the way forward (the elevator’s not hard to notice if you walk right past it), but instead bounce around the arena trying to dodge gunfire while looking for a way out while not even sure if what you’re looking for is a door or a ladder or an elevator or what.

This does lead to a cool thing where over time you build up familiarity with the hive and eventually memorize the connectors between different rooms, but that would’ve happened with a map, too, and with a map the progression would’ve been from a tourist checking the map every two minutes to a native who’s got the routes memorized. In the map-less game that we have, the progression is from a frustrating experience where you can’t find where the fuck to go next while being chased by infinitely respawning Orlocks to actually being able to navigate the level and complete missions.

I do recommend Necromunda: Hired Gun to anyone who likes 40k, but I have to give the massive caveat that you should start out on the lowest difficulty even if you’re very experienced with shooters, and that you should grind some side missions to improve your bionics and customize your weapons as soon as that option is available. You’ll usually profit from even a failed side mission because of loot you picked up along the way canceling out consumables spent (there’s a low cap on how many medkits you can buy going into a mission, and they’re cheap), so expect to make money getting shot to pieces at least four or five times before you build up enough wealth to fight on a level playing field. Tweak the difficulty back upwards once you feel your upgrades are surpassing the level of challenge the game can throw at you (or don’t – I could probably manage hard difficulty at this point, but I’m not gonna).

The title is an exaggeration, of course, but “way more video games should be Metroidvanias than are” isn’t as pithy.

Now I’m not saying that most games should have the Metroidvania style action-platforming gameplay. It’s good that lots of different genres exist covering lots of different gameplay. What I am saying is that most genres of video game could stand to have a Metroidvania-style interconnected explorable world (and I’m using a lenient definition here that includes 3D games with interconnected worlds like Dark Souls). The game that’s brought this on is Yoku’s Island Express, a game which asks “what if pinball was a Metroidvania?” and the answer is “it would be way better, obviously.”

Continue reading “Every Video Game Should Be A Metroidvania” →

Banners of Ruin is a deckbuilding RPG in the kind-of-like-Redwall genre of slightly anthropomorphized animals in a medieval society. So, you assemble a deck of cards by choosing one from a random selection of three every time you win a combat, with cards representing different fighting techniques, weapons, shields, and so forth. In my current playthrough, I happen to have been able to recruit several additional bear party members, and I also happen to have run into a lot of heavy armor that I’ve used to further augment their tankiness. The end result is that in a game where enemies who deal 20-25 damage are supposed to be especially lethal, I have a party full of bears who each individually have 50+ armor on top of their 50+ HP. Armor is restored to maximum after each fight (but HP is not), and non-boss enemies have almost no hope of getting through my armor to hit my HP, which means I don’t even really have to worry about healing because of how incredibly resilient I am.

I have dubbed this build “Invincible Bears” and although all of the bears died, a single stray mouse was able to stagger to victory. This was only, like, my third run, but I guess I’m putting this on the Completed list. God knows I’m not going to sink in like 50 hours or whatever to unlock whatever secret ending I’m sure is buried under challenge modes or grinding for ultra-rare encounters or whatever.