Reviews

Free downloadable games rarely look so good.

So, today marks the release of the first in the Doctor Who: The Adventure Games series, named City of the Daleks.  Funded by BBC license fees, available for free download (in the UK), executive produced by Steven Moffat and Charles Cecil, developed by Sumo Digital… everything sounds brilliant on paper.  Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite what one would hope.

I should probably mention before I go any further that I have only experienced the game running under Wine 1.2 on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.  A few of the negative points that follow, particularly those regarding bugs and glitches, may not be valid when running the game “properly”, but it’s difficult for me to say.

The Good

• The storyline is typical of Moffat’s new Doctor, exploring some of the more interesting possibilities of time travel.
• It’s a point-n’-click adventure, which is a sensible choice for a Doctor Who game.
• Rotoscoping Smith and Gillan has resulted in characters that move semi-realistically.
• There are a number of real-world and Doctor Who facts strewn through the game as collectables.
• It’s free, and the storyline is presumably canon.

The Bad

• The textures are a little ropey in places.
• The lip sync is just awful.
• The vocals are pretty poor.  Though Smith and Gillan have done an alright job, the voices and characters just seem… disjointed.
• The controls are mostly mouse-based which makes the camera very difficult to, well, control.
• The gameplay isn’t really anything special.

I understand that the game is supposed to be accessible to gamers of all ages.  I also appreciate that the game’s target audience are all considerably younger than me.  But I don’t think that’s any excuse for repetitive gameplay, “puzzles” that don’t require any real thought or out-of-place minigames.  The vast majority of the game consists of pointing the Sonic Screwdriver at things and stealthily avoiding Dalek’s vision cones; the rest sees the Doctor dragging small circles through a laser maze or hacking into computers by symbol matching.

That being said, hardcore Doctor Who fans will no doubt see the series through to completion regardless.  Sure, the game isn’t fantastic… but it does present an opportunity to spend a few more hours with Amy and the Doctor.  If we’re lucky, this first game is simply supposed to serve as an introduction — I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the next three will grow progressively harder.

(At the time of writing, the game is only available for Windows machines, but the game runs perfectly well under Wine. it wouldn’t surprise me if Mac users unwilling to wait for the official port were able to do the same under Darwine. UK readers can grab themselves a copy at the BBC website — the rest of you will just have to wait.)

Believe it or not, this logo actually makes sense.

Well, it’s taken me the best part of two months, but I finally fancy writing my review for Final Fantasy XIII.  The only reason that it’s taken this long is that I don’t usually like to cast judgement on a game I’m not finished with — but I think that after spending 60 hours with FFXIII I’ve probably learned everything I’m going to need.  And yes, I am still playing it… which makes a welcome change from the last two eight-hour games I got for the same price.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past twenty years, FFXIII is the thirteenth instalment in the popular J-RPG franchise from Square-Enix.  As with most J-RPGs, the storyline is pretty cliche; the story sees a seemingly workaday group of people get swept up in an evil plot, granted magical powers and eventually fight to save their planet from destruction.  The details are different, sure, but there’s nothing ground-breaking in story-telling terms.  In fact, I’d probably even go so far as to say that the plot and its characters are not as memorable as those from previous Final Fantasy games.  The lone possible exception to this rule is the game’s protagonist — Lightning — who is pretty striking (if you’ll excuse the pun).

A quick run-down of those things that make FFXIII different, then:

• Restriction
  One of the best things (in my opinion) about J-RPGs is the freedom; at some point in the game, usually about half way through, you find yourself an airship and gain the ability to revisit all of the towns and locales you’ve passed through before.  This freedom is unfortunately missing from most of FFXIII. Of the game’s six characters, only three of them can take part in battles at any given time.  Of those three, you can only control one — who you are stuck with until the battle is finished.  Each “Chapter” of the game comes with a level cap, presumably to discourage you from grinding, and it’s impossible to max out your characters until you’ve defeated the final boss.  There are no towns or villages to speak of, no real NPC interaction, your hand is held tightly as the game drags you down a set path… I could go on.

• Battle System
  First FFXII, now FFXIII — it seems that Square-Enix is more than happy to kill the original turn-based battle systems that worked so well in previous games.  That isn’t to say that FFXIII‘s battle system is bad, necessarily, but it does take some time getting used to.  At the beginning of the game, your characters are confined to three “paradigm roles” each, which limits your selection of battle strategies considerably.  Thankfully, this restriction is limited after about 30 hours.  Unfortunately, up until this point, the best tactic seems too often to be: hammer away on the “Auto-Battle” command until whatever you’re fighting falls over.

• Weapon / Accessories Upgrades
  FFXIII has one of the most in-depth upgrade systems I’ve ever seen.  Almost every item that you find on your travels has an amount of EXP associated with it, which can be used to upgrade accessories and/or weapons; a ring providing +15% Earth Resistance may, eventually, evolve into a completely different ring providing +40% Earth Resistance, for example.  This system is the only way to gain stronger weapons (including each character’s Ultimate Weapon), so its use is essential.

The tone of this review has been surprisingly negative so far — surprising because I’m still playing the game.  A large chunk of it lacks in freedom, as I’ve said, but everything changes rather suddenly in Chapter 11 (of 13).  You find yourself thrown from the planet where the rest of the storyline took place to a world called Pulse (which serves as FFXIII‘s World Map) and just told to get on with it.  The change was too sudden for me; having been left to my own devices, I promptly got lost and died.  Several times.  But eventually I figured out where I was going, how to work the teleporters and how to accept missions; the difficulty had been ramped up considerably and things were starting to get interesting.

There are 64 optional bounty-hunter style missions to undertake on Pulse, which is the reason I’m still grinding away.  These sorts of missions might not be to everybody’s tastes, but I found them a pleasant distraction.  Attempting them in order seems the most sensible idea, and gives you a handy method of levelling up; in addition to counting towards an achievement/trophy, each mission offers useful rewards and experience that help prepare you for the next.

So, what am I trying to say?  Probably that Final Fantasy XIII disappoints in a few places, but that it’s still brilliant.  The characters may not be that memorable, the dialogue may be filled with nonsense and the game may feel very cramped and restricted for the first 30 hours, but the hours that follow; the exploration of Pulse; the high-definition FMVs; and the musical score easily make up for all of the game’s faults.

It’s made me even hungrier for a high-definition remake of Final Fantasy VII, to boot.  What?  A man can dream…

The long-awaited spiritual sequel to Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, has finally arrived.  Whether or not it was worth the wait seems to be a matter of opinion, but I am sitting quite comfortably on the “Of course, are you out of your mind?” side of the fence.  For anybody hearing about Quantic Dream’s masterpiece for the first time, a quick recap…

Heavy Rain is being marketed less as a game and more as an “interactive drama”.  The story follows four characters, each chasing a serial killer known as ‘The Origami Killer’ for his or her own reasons; Ethan Mars, a father whose son has been kidnapped; Scott Shelby, a private investigator who has been hired by the families of the killer’s victims; Norman Jayden, an FBI agent working alongside the police to crack the case; and Madison Paige, a photographer-cum-journalist doing some investigative reporting.  The gameplay consists almost entirely of quick-time events, ranging from mundane tasks like pouring juice and cooking eggs to edge-of-your-seat fight scenes.

Sound fun?  Well, it isn’t — but that’s not a criticism.  It’s not much fun to watch when you’re not playing it, either — but that’s not a criticism.  Like its predeccessor, Heavy Rain is completely unlike most other games; rather than playing it for the satisfaction of seeing somebody’s head explode or handing somebody’s ass to them online, you play it because you are engaged in the storyline.  You play it because the mundane tasks you perform make you feel like the character is real — because you feel empathy for them.  I admit, it’s tempting to see Heavy Rain as a work of art, and most of what I’ve said is already plastered all over every review site and gaming magazine known to man.

But fear not, skeptics — I’ll be the first to admit that Heavy Rain does have some faults:

• Inconsistent Voice Acting
  Owing almost entirely to the fact that you are in direct control of what your character says, what they think and how they react to certain situations, some of the voice acting comes across as entirely wrong and broken.  Early in the game, when your son goes missing, you can press “X” to call his name.  Being caught up in the game as I was, I pressed the button regularly and was disappointed to hear Ethan’s cries cycle through the same three variations of “Jason!”.  Entirely my fault, granted, but giving the player the ability to ruin the mood of the scene was a bad move.

• Pretty Short
  I can’t give an accurate time (since the game doesn’t provide one), but the game has taken me less than two days of play to complete.  This may not be too big a deal, if it proves to be as replayable as I hope, but otherwise I feel a little cheated.  I wasn’t expecting a 40-hour epic, but I could have sworn Fahrenheit was longer… And that cost me less than £10.

• Major Technical Bugs
  In my short time with Heavy Rain, I have experienced the following faults (in no particular order): temporary loss of all sound, speech delays that wouldn’t look out of place in a badly-dubbed kung-fu film, video freezes, children walking directly through my character and seemingly random interruptions to internal monologues.  At one point, Jayden’s ARI glasses flew off his face, folded themselves in mid-air and placed themselves neatly in his coat pocket — pretty hard to ignore.

That said, ignoring most of the above is exactly what I’m going to decide to do. Why?  Because the storyline is brilliant, full of twists and its conclusion depends entirely on how you play the game; because it deals with some very mature themes and proves conclusively that games are not “just for kids”; because it’s going to be a game that everybody talks about for years to come; and because the installation process includes an origami how-to for the bird on the box.  Heavy Rain is a work of sheer genius, and should not be missed.

Anybody that saw my earlier post about how much I loved my Assassin’s Creed II collector’s edition shouldn’t be surprised to learn that all of my spare time of late has been poured into my Xbox 360.  And I must say — it was time well spent.

Just in case anyone has been living underneath a rock for the last year or so, Assassin’s Creed II is the much-awaited sequel to Assassin’s Creed (duh), and a game that promised to do away with the repetition that made the original so boring. Playing as Ezio Auditore da Firenze, another of Desmond Miles’ ancestors, the storyline this time takes us to renaissance Italy — a location considerably more colourful and interesting than the Middle East.

I won’t waste too much time re-hashing what has already been said in many other good reviews, but there are a few things that are worth saying…

Graphically, the game is very impressive.  Unfortunately, and this may just be the fault of my Xbox, there are several graphical glitches.  Textures going funny at the edges of the screen, mainly.

There are literally hundreds of things to collect, and lots of optional sidequests.  The best set, by far, is the “Assassination Contracts”.  Unlike the first game, there is an emphasis on being stealthy, and with two hidden blades, a pistol, poison and ways of distracting guards at your disposal, there are a number of different ways to approach everything.

For the achievement whores among you, it’s also very important to note that there are only 100 feathers to collect (in place of a million flags), and most of the achievements are storyline-related.  Indeed, I’ve gotten 1000 gamerscore within two weeks.

In short, I recommend it. Muchly.