I must admit, it’s something of a minor miracle that I enjoyed Deathloop as much as I did given the amount of complaining I’m about to do.

Arkane’s work since the exceptional Prey in 2017 has struck me as being somewhat… experimental. They released the Mooncrash expansion for Prey, which had a set of characters going on pseudo-randomised runs through a wrecked moonbase; the gimmick here was that since the runs were sequential in in-game time the things you did with the first character would alter the run for the second character — weapons and ammo that you swiped would be gone, switches would remain switched, and new routes could open up based on your prior actions. It was an interesting idea, but since it was a DLC it was never going to explore it in the depth that it really deserved and so I didn’t get on all that well with Mooncrash. They also helped out on 2019’s Wolfenstein expandalone Youngblood, which tried to turn limited development assets into a strength by having you revisit the same areas over and over again on different missions that would shake up the layout and enemy distributions on each run. And despite enjoying it as a dumb co-op shooter I had a fairly low opinion of how Youngbood executed on that idea too.

And now comes Deathloop, which is smushing together these ideas first prototyped in Mooncrash and Youngblood into a fully-featured game. Based on my reaction to those games I was really not expecting to get on all that well with Deathloop either, but it has three things on its side that Mooncrash and Youngblood didn’t. First is that thanks to an exclusivity deal with Sony it’s got far more development resources behind it — this is a game that’s supposed to sell PlayStations¹, and it shows. Second is that Deathloop has the very good sense to mix in a little bit of Hitman into its game mechanics, and I really like Hitman.  And third is Deathloop’s sense of style; it oozes, drips it from every pore, being part pulp `60s spy movie, part surreal thriller (I expect every review of Deathloop will mention The Prisoner somewhere despite nobody actually having the patience to sit down and watch the bloody thing) and part reality-bending Inception-esque sci-fi jaunt.

It’s this third element that I think has been key to my enjoyment of Deathloop. It’s definitely not without a lot of problems, many of which I will complain about in this review because I think there’s a fundamental mismatch between the current critical consensus on it (it’s being heavily trailed as a classic and a GOTY candidate, which it most definitely is not) and the sad reality of what Deathloop actually is. Deathloop’s in good company there, since I also did a lot of complaining about Youngblood and I would have done the same for Mooncrash if I’d ever reviewed it; there is far, far less separating these games in terms of mechanical quality than there really should be given the disparity in budget and resourcing. In Deathloop’s case, though, the omnipresent style helps smooth over those rough edges, from the thorny exchanges between protagonist Colt and his nemesis Julianna to the stunning, ever-changing island environments to the the omnipresent ticking-clock musical theme that segues into energetic jazz when you get into a fight. Arkane’s games have always targeted a distinctive audiovisual identity, but I don’t think I’ve played a game where that style was doing quite so much heavy lifting since Bioshock.

If you’ve been exposed to any of the five thousand trailers the marketing machine’s been cranking out for the last year and a half, you’ll know that Deathloop is about two rival assassins, Colt and Julianna, who are caught in a time loop on an island called Blackreef. Blackreef has been taken over by a nihilistic cult called the Eternalists who started the loop so that they could have a never-ending party with no consequences (the Bioshock comparisons go beyond the style as these guys are basically the splicers without the runup), but something has clearly gone wrong since they live out each day of the loop as though it was their first and Colt and Julianna are the only two people who keep their memories from loop to loop. But they’ve come to very different takes on the situation: Colt wants to break out of the time loop by killing the seven leaders of the cult (called Visionaries), while Julianna wants to protect it by repeatedly killing Colt.

Each day of the time loop is split into four time periods: Morning, Noon, Afternoon and Evening. Colt can pick one of four areas to explore during each time period, and each area contains one or two Visionaries for him to kill. They are not particularly hard to kill; because this is an Arkane game each Visionary has a Dishonored-style power like teleportation or invisibility which you can take for yourself once you’ve killed them, but once you’ve got the power figured out they’re only slightly tougher than the regular mook enemies scattered around Blackreef’s streets and will go down in two or three shots from your handcannon. Most of them are surrounded by significant quantities of henchmen, who are a more significant threat as Colt’s health bar is not large and he’ll die quite quickly if two or three enemies are shooting at him, but if you play it smart you can manage these firefights to the point where Colt is gunning down thirty or forty people in the course of getting to his target and coming out without a scratch. After you see how easily the first Visionary goes down, it seems like knocking off the other six is going to take no time at all.

The catch, though, is that no two Visionaries will be in the same place at the same time. Since you can only visit four locations during a single loop through the four time periods, this means that you can kill, at most, four Visionaries. In order to get the other three you have to manipulate the loop by sabotaging equipment, cracking through locked doors and sending false messages to maneuver your targets into the same part of the space-time continuum so that you can take them all out at once. This is a quite long and involved process; a single run through Deathloop’s eternally repeating day will take around forty-five minutes, but gathering all of the information required to complete a full set of kills took me just under sixteen hours of playtime. Each strand of investigation requires multiple runs through the loop in order to follow up — for example, one Visionary will appear in the Complex area during the Evening to run an experiment, but if you go to the Complex earlier in the day and shut his equipment down he won’t have the data he needs and will go elsewhere. In order to get the required codes to do this, though, you need to kill him in the Evening and loot his lab, and then loop around and use the information Colt now knows to perform the equipment sabotage at Noon so that you can kill him again in his new location in the next Evening period, hopefully along with another target.

This brings me on to Deathloop’s take on the standard time loop problem: at the start of the game the only thing that Colt can take with him from the end of one loop to the start of the next one are his memories. At the end of Deathloop’s far-too-long tutorial he gets the ability to “infuse” weapons and powers that he picks up so that he can keep them between loops — or in other words he buys them with a currency called Residuum that he slurps up from random objects around each map. This only applies to equipment, though, not to plot-critical items, which makes it extremely convenient that every single door, safe and mechanism on Blackreef is locked with a handily-memorisable code of some kind. Sometimes the codes are pretty elaborate and require visiting multiple locations in different time periods to decipher, but once Colt knows one he can automatically bypass the thing it was protecting on any subsequent loop. Much of Deathloop’s playtime is, essentially, an elaborate hunt for codes as you need at least five of them to finish the loop properly, some of which need to be painstakingly assembled across multiple locations and time periods.

Now, I usually save the hammer for the end of a review, but since I’m talking about a game with a time loop, and since I’m talking about time loop mechanics, I cannot avoid dropping it here instead: the current state-of-the-art for time loop games is the superb Outer Wilds, which has a similar emphasis on following up investigation leads to find new information that allows you to progress further in subsequent loops. Outer Wilds records all of this information in a handy computer log, but it never gives the player any overt direction; it simply marks the leads that have yet to be completed and lets the player pick and choose their own path through the game. Importantly, it also lets them figure nearly everything out on their own through direct experience of the loop; one of the reasons I think it’s such a good game is that it actually trusts the player to understand its core concept without too much hand-holding.

Deathloop… does not do this.

Deathloop was always going to have to work extra hard to sell its time loop mechanics to me because, unlike Outer Wilds, time does not progress when you’re inside a level. The only point at which time moves forward is in the loading screen between the end of one level and the start of the next; the levels themselves are totally static aside from a couple of scripted bits and pieces that are player-triggered, not time-triggered. This means that what Deathloop actually is, deep down, is a standard FPS where you have level select unlocked from the start. The only real difference is that you have to figure out which sequence of levels is the correct one and what actions to take inside each one to finally end the loop. If it were another developer making this game I’d already be screaming “cop-out!” but Arkane are the one studio that I’d be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to. Their level design has always been heavily focused around multiple routes, side areas and optional objectives that reward exploration, and I think that (relatively) undirected exploration through Deathloop’s levels to try and figure out the loop could have been really fun.

I am guessing, though, that at some point during Deathloop’s development somebody at Arkane or Bethesda got cold feet and became convinced that players would not understand the time loop idea and what they were being asked to do. This is why two things have happened that have killed any chance Deathloop had of being a genuinely interesting game:

• Whether it’s because content was cut to make the game less confusing or because Arkane ran out of time and had to ship what they had I do not know, but there is a grand total of one “correct” route through Deathloop. It is incredibly prescriptive; you must do action X followed by action Y followed by action Z, with very little room for improvisation or variation.
• Just in case that wasn’t straightforward enough, that one route (along with the codes required for unlocking it) is explicitly signposted to the player through a set of mission chains called “Visionary Leads” that have the standard FPS objective markers. This ensures that you never actually need to think while playing Deathloop; you just follow the same damn waypoints that you can find in any open world game until you run out, at which point congratulations! You’ve finished Deathloop.

To say this was disappointing would be a tremendous understatement. I’m not sure if Deathloop is the worst Arkane game that I have played, but it is certainly the dumbest, asking very little of the player except for the ability to follow waypoints while shooting people in the face. The tragic thing is that you can see the outline of a much more interesting game in here, one which still casts a faint shadow of what Deathloop could have been. For example, in the Fristad Rock map you infiltrate the base of a Visionary called Frank so that you can kill him, but Frank’s base is festooned with security systems and you also can’t get into the front door without a “ClassPass”, which disables all of your Dishonored powers. But it turns out that Frank’s security system, including the ClassPass, was created by another Visionary called Charlie, and Charlie has locked the master code for it behind a door in his compound in Updaam. The catch? You need a ClassPass to get in, and you can only get those from Fristad Rock.

So the idea here is that you go to Fristad Rock in the morning, get the ClassPass, probably kill Frank on that loop the hard way, and then go to Updaam with the ClassPass so that you you can get through the locked door and acquire the master code; this will make subsequent runs through Frank’s base much easier. On the face of it this is pretty cool! You can choose to endure a bit of short-term pain on this iteration of the loop in exchange for opening up a shortcut for killing Frank later on — sure, it’s basically just your standard Dishonored level design except spread out over multiple areas, but that’s kind of what I was expecting from Deathloop. But the big problem here, though, is that Deathloop has that One Correct Route through the game, and Frank’s base is most decidedly not on that itinerary since he’s one of the Visionaries that you manipulate into being killed elsewhere. You do have to visit it once to get a piece of information from a tape recorder — just like Arkane’s other games, Deathloop loves its audio logs — but once that’s done you never, ever have to go back. So what exactly is the point of me going through all of this effort to get unrestricted access to a place that I’m never going to go to again?

Deathloop is full of “alternate” routes like this that end up being rendered totally useless by its dogmatic insistence that there’s only one way to complete the game. Charlie’s base is supposed to be a big LARPing ripoff of Among Us with a real rocket engine rigged up in the middle of it, and if you futz around gathering batteries and plug them all into the rocket you can turn it on to kill everyone in the compound. Great! Except Charlie is another one of the Visionaries who isn’t supposed to be killed where you first find him, and if you do you can’t successfully complete the loop. The Visionary Egor has an invisibility power and a sniper rifle which makes him annoying to fight in an open area, and since Egor is also a raging paranoiac if you go to the Complex in the Evening you’ll find that he’s set up a bunch of turrets and cameras and tripmines; if you trigger any of them, or make any noise at all, it’ll tip him off that you’re coming and you’ll have a proper fight on your hands. But if you take the trouble to sneak by or otherwise bypass his security systems he’ll have no idea you’re there and you can just shoot him in the head from cover². Once again, though, since you’re not supposed to kill Egor there it feels like taking the trouble to do this is nothing more than a waste of time; you just need the stuff from his lab and then you can leave and never come back.

This is the problem with the critical path being so constrained, then: where Arkane’s other games would offer you four or five different routes to a goal, all of which were equally valid, Deathloop has just one, with any other routes or kill methods that might exist being rendered meaningless because they’re off the critical path and taking advantage of them will render that loop uncompletable — if you kill Charlie in his base with the rocket engine, then he and Fia won’t go to their secret rendezvous together, and that’s the only way to kill both Charlie and Fia on the same loop. The only place where you get even a hint of real choice is in the final level, where you’ve manipulated three of the Visionaries into attending the same party and have to figure out how to kill them without being swarmed by the rest of the party guests. The party is the one location in the game where spending a bit of time on previous loops to learn the layout and scout out how exactly you were going to kill your targets felt worthwhile, and where you can try some of the special kill methods to see if they’ll make your life a bit easier  It’s still not even remotely close to Arkane’s previous work, though, and it’s frankly a little astonishing that the sum total of Arkane’s ambitions for Deathloop amounts to a single bad Hitman level³.

(I should also talk about the weird level design in general somewhere, so I’ll stick it here. Deathloop has an odd problem for an Arkane game: it only has four levels, but even so two of them are mostly “empty”, irrelevant space. Most of Karl’s Bay is taken up by a colourful theme park complete with minigames, but your actual target for that level is in a boring aircraft hangar in a corner of the map; the theme park isn’t used for anything except as a place to put a safe to hide yet another code. The Complex has an entire armoury annex that’s only available in the Morning time period and which is full of booby-traps; I spent a tense 15 minutes picking my way around all of the landmines and tripwires to get a code for a door at the start of the armoury that turned out to contain… absolutely nothing. Why are these areas here when they don’t do anything? Why could Arkane not figure out anything worthwhile to put inside of them? I don’t know the exact reason, but I think it’s a pretty good sign the last twelve months of Deathloop’s development were not happy ones.)

Speaking of Hitman, Deathloop doesn’t have a good answer to the question that Hitman answered quite satisfactorily: even where a special kill method is available and worthwhile, what is the incentive for me to take it over and above just shooting my target in the head? In Hitman there’s various scoring criteria and in-game challenges to incentivise smarter play, but the root of the answer is usually because there’s about a hundred guards on the map and they’ll all come for you if you go loud; the ensuing firefight is apocalyptic and highly unlikely to end in your favour, and even if it does you’ve effectively broken the level from that point onwards. In Deathloop, on the other hand, the enemy AI is really strangely pitched. Alarms are genuinely dangerous, as are the golden enemies that summon reinforcements, but after you’ve played the game for an hour or two you’ll notice a couple of weird oddities. First is that the sound of your gunshots doesn’t carry all that far, and aside from a few high-density locations (such as the party) enemy groups are dispersed far enough apart that shooting one guard will only alert the nearest 3-4 others. In Dishonored this would be a serious problem that would require expending gadgets to fix, and so would be something to be avoided if at all possible, but in Deathloop it just means pulling the trigger four more times. The second weird thing is that while your gunshots might not carry all that far, enemy gunshots don’t appear to carry at all; if you charge a pair of guards with a machete and one of them gets a few shots off, the five other guards in the room next door won’t hear a thing.

Now, I get that Deathloop is not Hitman. I get that it’s a more action-y game and that you’re supposed to get into gunfights, which Deathloop actually does extraordinarily well. The enemy AI being extremely forgiving in terms of alert status and not swarming you to death is a deliberate design choice, since it would be a shame if the player were dissuaded from seeing that side of the game. But that comes at a cost, since in terms of effectiveness even the Dishonored powers pale into insignificance compared to just casting the “Gun” spell over and over again. The quickest, simplest and easiest solution to any problem in Deathloop is to shoot it in the face, and this is not what I was expecting when I bought it. I was expecting far more to be made out of the potential for cause and effect, doing things in earlier loops to affect later ones, but it turns out there’s maybe five of these things in the game in total and they’re all on the critical path — meaning they’re heavily scripted and signposted. It’s a timeloop game where time almost isn’t a factor because, unlike Outer Wilds, Deathloop places zero faith in the person playing it. And given Arkane’s previous design ethos, that is incredibly disappointing.

Since the bulk of the complaining is now out of the way, it’s time to mention a few ameliorating factors. I said up top that Deathloop is tremendously stylish, and this remains probably the primary factor in my getting to the end of the game, but I should also spare a few words for the weapon design. Deathloop might be a far dumber game than it first appears, one which asks nothing more of the player than the ability to mow down everything they see in a hail of lead, but it at least hands you an appropriate set of tools to do it. The standout weapons are the Fourpounder hand cannon and the Rapier single-shot rifle, which have an absolutely tremendous report and an extremely visible impact effect to match. You can get higher quality versions of each weapon that have special traits; there’s a version of the Fourpounder that fires more slowly but which will one-hit kill everything in the game (although you’ll have to get a headshot if you’re pointing it at a Visionary), and I cannot think of an FPS weapon that I’ve had more fun using in the last five years. One thing Deathloop does retain from Dishonored is the exceptional player mobility, too; the various special powers might be underwhelming in general but the teleport power has made it across completely intact, and it is tremendously satisfying to flit around Deathloop’s levels while gunning down hordes of mooks. There’s even a cool sense of mastery that starts to emerge once you’ve done enough runs through the loop, where you know the layouts and the location of all of the enemy packs and can zip to your objective and back in record time. It’s just a shame that Deathloop does absolutely nothing with this, since mastery is largely useless when there’s no scope for improvisation — after all, it doesn’t really help that I know the entire level like the back of my hand when the only part of it that matters is the room containing my target.

Then there’s Deathloop’s adversarial multiplayer mode. I mentioned at the start of the review that there’s another assassin called Julianna who is trying to stop Colt from breaking the loop, and she’ll do this by occasionally teleporting into the level, locking the level exits and hunting him down. By default Julianna is controlled by a not-very-good AI that’s easy to kill, but if your game is set to Online mode you’ll instead get other human players invading your game as Julianna and have to engage in some tense cat-and-mouse gameplay to fend them off. I was expecting to hate this gameplay feature, just as I hated it in Dark Souls, but I was surprised to find Deathloop’s implementation growing on me. It helps that the odds are very much stacked in the hosting player’s favour since they get three lives on every map while the Julianna player only gets one; they have to work pretty hard to properly kill you and none of the five Juliannas I’ve fought have managed it. It’s a good idea that is, sadly, totally let down by its higher-level implementation into the broader structure of the game; I have tried to play the other side of this as Julianna and spent about half an hour in matchmaking queues which led to one actual game (which I did not win). For the others I either got disconnected from the game during the matchmaking process, or the player I was invading quit the moment they saw me arrive. Because you can only connect to other players in a very brief window after they’ve started a level, and because they need to have Online mode switched on, this leads to hefty matchmaking queues even with the glut of release players and I strongly suspect that this will be a dead game mode in two months’ time.

So Deathloop really isn’t all that. I enjoyed playing it, but the level of that enjoyment was inversely proportional to the amount of time I’d spent with it, since unusually for an Arkane game it’s all flash and practically zero substance. It does the shooting side of things well but they’ve backpedalled away from the time loop concept as fast as they possibly can and the mediocre level design can’t really prop up what is now a more-or-less linear shooter. Neither can the backstory and audio logs, since what passes for Deathloop’s main story goes nowhere and ultimately has a worse ending than Prey did. It’s the first game Arkane have made that I’m utterly disinterested in replaying, and while its sense of style does, unusually, count for quite a lot, it’s not really matched by its sense of spectacle. I install Bioshock every now and again to play through its opening⁴, which is still one of the all-time greats, but I can’t imagine ever doing the same thing for any of Deathloop.

The post Thoughts: Deathloop appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider is an expandalone for Dishonored 2 that came out towards the end of 2017. Given that Dishonored 2 and its sci-fi stablemate Prey are two of my favourite games of the last few years it’s possibly a little surprising that it’s taken me two years to get around to playing it; however they also came out within six months of each other and Death Of The Outsider looked like more of the same, so I decided to let it breathe for a few months and come back to it when I was ready. As it is now 2020 I appear to have gotten a little bit distracted between now and then, but that’s actually done Death Of The Outsider a considerable favour: it is, arguably, just more Dishonored, and if I’d played it so soon after Prey and Dishonored 2 I’d likely be much more critical of it. However, since both games underperformed it’s highly unlikely we’ll see more of either from Arkane in the near future. Death Of The Outsider is the last Dishonored thing we’ll be getting for some time, and if you view it through that lens it being more of the same is no bad thing at all.

As is now tradition for Dishonored DLC, Death Of The Outsider puts you in the shoes of a supporting character from the main game. This time around you’re playing ex-assassin Billie Lurk, who has gotten tired of spending most of Dishonored 2 masquerading as Emily/Corvo’s chauffeur and has gone off to find her mentor, the master assassin and previous series antagonist Daud. Both of them have the same gameplay-enabling eldritch powers as Emily and Corvo, and both got them from the same place: a magical brat called the Outsider, who is the closest thing the Dishonored setting has to a god. Daud and Billie are far more jaded about both the powers and the Outsider, though, to the point where Daud now sees the Outsider as responsible for everything bad that happened over the past two Dishonored games and has hatched a plan to kill him. Unfortunately he’s basically an OAP at this point, and so the bulk of the actual god-murdering legwork falls to you as Billie.

Death Of The Outsider is much smaller in scope than Dishonored 2: it’s just five levels (which translates to between 6 and 9 hours of playtime depending on how sneaky you’re being), and one of those is a short and mostly-linear tutorial where you rescue Daud from the gang that’s captured him. Arkane have also taken a hammer to your Outsider-derived superpowers; the hilarious Time Stop, Domino and Doppelganger abilities have all vanished¹, and in their place are three powers that represent the bare minimum required for Death to feel like a Dishonored game:

• Displace, which is a medium range teleport power much like Corvo’s Blink. It differs in that your first click plops down a teleport marker at your location of choice, and your second click then teleports you to it. This gives you much more fine control over the timing of your teleport, as well as letting you telefrag unfortunate guards who happen to be walking through the marker at the same time as you teleport to it.
• Foresight, a pretty standard scouting and enemy-tagging power. Billie sends her spirit shooting out of her body, and it has the ability to both see through walls and pass through closed doors. Guards and objects of interest are highlighted, and up to four guards can be tagged so that they remain visible when you turn Foresight off.
• Semblance, which lets you disguise yourself as any NPC you’ve knocked out. Potentially useful for getting by areas with a high guard population, but also very costly in terms of mana and dogs aren’t fooled by the projection.

And that’s it. Given that two of these are just the same enemy tagging and disguise mechanics you can find in literally any game released in the last five years you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe Arkane cut things down a little too far and that Death is in danger of feeling alarmingly lightweight. Instead, though, I found it proved that all Dishonored really needs is that mobility power; having absurd vertical and horizontal mobility is what enables the interesting level design and exploration that powers Dishonored, and Displace might just be the best version of it that Arkane have come up with, especially once you attach a few special effects via bonecharms that give it a bit more flexibility when you’re under pressure.

And because your magical toolkit is so limited you end up falling back on both the powers that you do have (both Foresight and Semblance got solid workouts where I might not have bothered with them otherwise) as well as your physical gadgets. Ever since the series started Dishonored has been constantly struggling with its gadgets, since most of them have lethal effects despite the game implicitly placing a higher value on a non-lethal approach by having this lead to an unambiguously better ending. If you want the “good” ending you can’t use springrazors, grenades, most of the crossbow bolts or even your sword, and have historically been relegated to choking guards out again and again. Thankfully Death Of The Outsider moves things much closer to where the series should always have been: while it does still track lethal/non-lethal takedowns these don’t appear to have any impact on which ending you get this time around, making a non-lethal run a genuine player choice just like it was back in the days of Thief and Deus Ex. It also adds a few more non-lethal gadgets, and while these are basically just remixed versions of the lethal ones (there’s now a stun grenade that knocks people out instead of killing them, while the new Hook Mines have explicit Lethal and Non-Lethal settings) it’s enough to make me feel like playing non-lethally isn’t restricting me from having fun. Of course because I knew I wasn’t being scored on this stuff outside of the end-of-mission summary screen I felt free to toss around a few springrazors and actual grenades and made a wonderful mess; Dishonored is at its best when you have the freedom to use your entire moveset, not just the half of it that aligns with your current ending goal.

Still, having an actually varied moveset that enables multiple approaches to a problem doesn’t mean a thing if your level design doesn’t do the same thing, and it’s here — and somewhat unusually for Arkane — that Death Of The Outsider falls down somewhat. As I stated up top, there’s only five of them, but to compensate for that the four non-tutorial levels are bloody massive, easily matching the size of the largest levels from Dishonored 2. However, since one of them is one of the largest levels from Dishonored 2 — a remixed version of the Royal Conservatory — that’s hardly surprising, and this recycling of content is something I honestly found a little disappointing given how imaginative the base game was. It’s not a bad level as such, it was just hard to get away from the feeling that I was replaying something I’d done before instead of experiencing something new. The final level of the expansion pack was a very long one and threw in a few interesting dimension-shifting effects, but it also struck me as unnecessarily constrained, like it was Arkane’s take on Call Of Duty-style linear level design that funnels the player through a series of chokepoints. Again, it wasn’t something I’d necessarily call bad, but once I was finished with it I had precisely zero desire to replay it because I felt I’d already seen everything it had to offer, which is something I’d never say about any of the levels from Dishonored 2.

Let us focus instead on the two levels that Death Of The Outsider actually does right. After springing Daud from the tutorial level Billie ventures into town to investigate an Outsider-worshipping cult, and this level is both sprawling and pleasingly open, with a ton of secrets ferreted away in the various nooks and crannies of the map. The highlight is a raid on the high-security mansion of a cultist opera singer, which is split off into its own little sub-area with at least three different methods of entry and its own isolated security systems to defeat. Once you’re in there you discover that the cult is hiding a crucial Outsider-related macguffin inside the fortress-like bank that you’ve walked past many times as you crisscross the level, and so the next level is something which inevitably ends up being the best part of any Thief, Dishonored or Deus Ex game: a good old-fashioned bank heist.

In my opinion the bank heist level, on its own, is sufficient reason to buy Death Of The Outsider, because it is absolutely outstanding. For starters it’s so big it’s split into three different segments. First there’s the approach from outside, which offers a variety of different points of access along with a couple of things you can do to make your life easier once you’re inside, like dumping a load of sleeping gas into the ventilation system. Then there’s the bank interior – the lobby, counters, offices and so on — which present a series of barriers that need to be bypassed in order to access the vault area. This is the final part of the bank, and it’s protected by patrolling guards and clockwork soldiers, voice access systems and electrified floors — and once you get past all of those, you still need to deal with the fact that the vault itself is suspended fifty feet off the floor and needs to be lowered to ground level in order to access it. Even if you’ve gassed everyone this still presents a rather tricky challenge, since the bank staff and guards are genuinely asleep instead of knocked out and they’ll wake up if they hear any significant noise. Of course you could just murder your way inside, but there’s more than enough guards to ensure that you’d have significant difficulty winning the ensuing fight, even with a full set of grenades, mines and bullets.

This meant that the bank was the first time Dishonored’s level design has properly risen to the challenge presented by its toolset. Dishonored 2 had some fantastically imaginative levels but they weren’t all that great at forcing you out of your comfort zone, and you could quite happily get through them by using the same three or four moves or powers over and over again. By contrast the bank scatters so many obstacles on your path to the vault that I needed to use everything in order to get there in one piece; it took me two hours to clear this one level, and from a mechanical viewpoint it’s the most fun I’ve had with a Dishonored game yet because I was constantly experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t. It doesn’t quite compare to Clockwork Mansion or A Crack In The Slab because at the end of the day it is just a bank, but it comes damn close for something so comparatively mundane. And it does also sum up Death Of The Outsider’s general mindset pretty well, I think; by removing most of the powers it’s stripped down the amount of stuff you can do in a level, but it has substantially raised its expectations of the amount of stuff you must do in order to complete it.

Oddly enough I think it’s the removal of the Chaos system — where the game tracks exactly how many people you’re killing and alters certain things based on this, including giving you the Good Ending/Bad Ending depending on whether you finish the game in a Low or High Chaos state — that has enabled this change in philosophy, and which justifies Death Of The Outsider existing as a separate entity at all. It’s ironic because a lot of people would point to the Chaos system as one of the things that defines Dishonored, and I will admit that the game does lose a little something as I missed the cool environmental tells in the levels that accompanied high Chaos/low Chaos runs. It also doesn’t make the ending situation any better, as instead of going Lethal for the Bad Ending and Non-Lethal for the Good Ending you’re instead just presented with a binary choice at the end of the game as to which ending you want. I think the tradeoff is well worth it, though, as Dishonored is a much stronger game when you have the freedom to do everything in a level which actively demands experimentation on the part of the player. Death Of The Outsider ultimately doesn’t avoid being “just more Dishonored” since the level design doesn’t really live up to that ideal and is rather too uneven to sustain it all the way through, but for a few brief hours it does end up in a markedly different place from the mainline Dishonored games. That, for me, made Death Of The Outsider a worthwhile experience.

The post Thoughts: Dishonored – Death Of The Outsider appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a collaboration between Wolfenstein developers Machine Games and Dishonored and Prey developers Arkane. The idea is that Machine Games supply the excellent (most of the time) Wolfenstein shooting gameplay, and Arkane supply the excellent (most of the time) Dishonored level design. What’s not to like?

Well, quite a lot, as it turns out.

I should say up front that I don’t actively dislike Wolfenstein: Youngblood the way a lot of the internet seems to right now. It’s sitting on a  47% “Mixed” rating on Steam as of the time of writing, which I feel is very unfair for a game that is a lot of fun to play. (Most of the time.) Unfortunately Youngblood has chosen to actually experiment a bit with the Wolfenstein formula, and that experiment doesn’t really work, and the botched nature of these new systems appears to be pissing a lot of people off. I get that. It pissed me off at a couple of points during my trip through Youngblood. The thing is, though, I can also recognise that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Youngblood — leaping around in a suit of magic power armour shooting Nazis with a selection of around nine improbably-sized weapons — is as fun as it has ever been, and is certainly a damn sight better than the comparatively tepid stuff to be found in New Colossus. It’s just a bit baffling that this excellent shooter gameplay is now sharing a bed with… permanent co-op and RPG-style levelling mechanics?

Hmmm.

I’m guessing this sudden desire to innovate and experiment has been driven in part by the 2016 Doom reboot. Like the original Doom and the original Wolfenstein, the 2016 Doom did everything that the 2014 Wolfenstein did in terms of tearing around at light speed slaughtering enemies, and it did it better. 2017’s New Colossus hadn’t really had time to react to the existence of Doom, which is why it was so underwhelming. Youngblood has, though, and it’s notable that the basic movement and shooting in Youngblood is now almost a direct replica of the stuff in Doom. Just like Doom, you start the game in a suit of power armour giving you super speed and double jump and mantling abilities from the get-go. On the flipside the signature Wolfenstein mechanic of being able to dual-wield most weapons is much less noticeable, as you can only do it with pistols and submachine guns. The shooting in Youngblood is mostly a case of you holding one very large gun which you use to blast Nazis into tiny chunks — again, just like Doom. The weapons are a bit unimaginative (shotgun, assault rifle, grenade launcher etc.) but most of them have their niche and you’re switching constantly during combat, which is usually a sign that a game is doing something right.

The problem here is that Wolfenstein can’t just copy Doom because publishers Bethesda already have a franchise that does the Doom mechanics. It’s called Doom. Wolfenstein therefore has to find some other way to justify its existence in a post-Doom world; with Old Blood it also set a precedent of following up a big mainline Wolfenstein title with a smaller expandalone one that reused many of the assets and was consequently cheaper to develop, and so Youngblood is arguably an ideal opportunity for them to try something new. I’m never going to begrudge a game developer trying something new when it’s driven by a genuine desire for change instead of chasing market trends, which is probably why I’m a little more sanguine about it than all those people leaving angry Steam reviews. But Youngblood does, unfortunately, feel rather experimental, like I’m dealing with a jury-rigged prototype instead of a revolutionary new design. The best of its ideas are hampered by the technical restrictions of the Wolfenstein engine and the reduced budget available for this smaller interim release, while the worst of them are exacerbated a hundredfold by those same limitations.

So. Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the tale of BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters Jess and Soph, who have been trained from birth in the fine arts of Nazi-killing by both BJ and his wife Anya and are fairly proficient at it despite their teenage years. BJ goes missing at the start of the game and the twins find evidence pointing towards Nazi-occupied Paris as his likely location, so they get together with their tech-guru friend Abby – who rather conveniently has a pair of power suits for them to use — and fly over to Paris to help out the Resistance there as a means to finding their father. This is very quickly boiled down to “break into these three heavily guarded locations and hack into the computers there”, but with a catch: all of the Nazis guarding the computer compounds are much higher level than you are at the start of the game, making them practically impossible to kill. Before making your assault on the computers you first have to spend a bit of time wandering around the various Paris environments killing Nazis and doing side quests; this will let you upgrade your weapons and suit abilities to the point where you can take the plot missions on.

This is where Arkane’s influence is most heavily felt in Youngblood: it’s gone from a traditionally linear first-person shooter to a more free-roaming experience with most of Paris accessible from the start of the game. Or it would be free-roaming, at least, if a) the game wasn’t still restricted by the necessity of packaging things up into discrete levels (you’ll see a lot of loading screens in Youngblood), b) there were more than four of those levels, and c) there was literally anything at all in those levels that was memorable. Seriously, I’ve spent three or four hours wandering around the Paris streets shooting Nazis and I couldn’t describe a single distinguishing feature about them, they’re so generically Paris. The thing is there are very few actual locations in these levels; they’re about the size of a typical Dishonored level and are further compartmentalised by the necessity of each of them having to support multiple unconnected mission objectives and side quests, so the best you get is the hospital which is three corridors and a couple of rooms, or the interrogation “complex” which is two corridors and a big open gantry, because to have them be larger than that would eat up too much of the level.

Mostly the Paris streets are just that: streets, designed to get from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss (well, aside from all of the Nazi barricades and robots), and with almost none of the architectural flair displayed in Dishonored and Prey. Oh, the game does try, with minor secrets and collectibles scattered throughout the game, but it’s always on the order of a locked door leading to a room with some stuff in it rather than the far more elaborate mechanisms concealing Dishonored 2’s secrets. The running battles with the Nazis are always fun, but they’re fun because of the Doom-style combat and (later in the game) the obscene overpoweredness of your characters, not because the levels are in any way a decent backdrop for them. You’re mostly stuck in the middle of a street, after all, so all they can really add in terms of combat geometry are the standard collection of waist-high barricades and the occasional raised platform. It’s not really possible to play stealthily the way it is in Dishonored — you have a cloak ability and can run around shanking Nazis for a little bit, but once the alarm is raised all enemies will be able to spot you regardless of whether you’ve got the cloak on or not — so while it was occasionally entertaining to deal with big boss enemies by simply running past them and into the next area transition, that was the sum total of additional combat tactics afforded by the level design.

(Youngblood makes matters even worse by relegating many of its side missions into generic sewer levels that are put together out of obviously prefab chunks and which must have been fairly cheap to create. My hatred of sewer levels is well-documented, and Youngblood is a good poster child for why I hate them; no game developer is ever going to intentionally add a sewer level if they have the time and resources to do something, anything else, and so having to resort to adding one anyway is a sign that all is not well with the development of your game.)

Youngblood’s free-roaming doesn’t really land, then. The level design does get better once you start storming the three computer compounds, as these are put together much more like a traditional Wolfenstein level with a smattering of Arkane-flavoured alternate routing through vents and on top of light fittings, but the streets and sewers in which you spend the majority of your time are as generic as they come despite the alternate ‘80s Nazi chic. It does rather feel like they’re only there to support the levelling mechanics: killing Nazis and completing missions levels you up and gives you ability points, which can then be spent on a variety of hilarious Nazi-murdering skills. Scattered throughout the various environments are chests full of — sigh — silver coins, which are somehow a currency in this game that is used to upgrade your weapons to fire faster and do more damage. In order to level both your abilities and your weapons up enough to finish the game you’ll have to criss-cross Youngblood’s levels many times — although, contrary to some reviews you might have read, dedicated grinding is not necessary in order to beat the higher level enemies, since I didn’t have to do any. All that was required was to do most of the side missions and — and this is really important — not tackle any of the computer locations until we had completely cleaned out every other activity available.

Now, if you don’t do this, you’re in for a world of pain thanks to the way Youngblood handles those levels and abilities and  weapon upgrades, which are partially level-locked anyway. The increase in power that they offer relative to the baddies isn’t linear but rather geometric; you go from chipping away at giant Nazi death robots with an assault rifle to one-shotting them with an upgraded Laserkraftwerk while laughing as they fail to make any impression on your vast pool of health and armour that you can fully regenerate every 20 seconds. Most enemies in Youngblood appear to be calibrated towards the shallow end of this power curve; they will be challenging to handle with basic weapons and abilities, but not impossible unless they outlevel you by five or more. However, the various boss enemies are a completely different story, as the weakest of them are targeted at midgame characters who have bought all of the first tier of upgrades for all of their guns and who have invested in the first half of the health and armour skill trees. If you have not done this you simply won’t be able to put out enough damage to kill them before dying yourself. I wouldn’t have too much of an objection to this if they didn’t represent such an obvious difficulty spike; you’ll be happily slaughtering your way through one of those three computer compound missions and there’ll be nothing about the standard mook enemies to indicate that you might be in over your head. Then you get to the end of the level — this takes around 30 minutes — and you run into a brick wall of a boss who, it turns out, you are simply not equipped to handle.

And when the boss inevitably kills you, the icing on the cake is that when you respawn, you’ll discover there is no checkpointing and that you’ve been dumped back at the start of the level, presumably because this was too difficult to implement for a co-op game on a budget. All of the enemies have respawned, and you have to do the entire thing all over again. At the end of the game, when you have actual, literal superpowers to help you on your way, this can be done very quickly and trivially. But if you try to do those missions before you’ve got enough upgrades and abilities unlocked you’re going to end up very frustrated and annoyed — and as it turns out, the amount of upgrades and ability points that you need are almost exactly the same as the amount granted by doing all of the available side missions. Youngblood is one of those “open world” games where it’s nowhere near as open as it would like to appear; you have to do all of the content at some point, and all you as a player really get to decide is what order you do it in. And since it turns out that all of the side missions are actually compulsory, you end up going back and forth across Paris through the same areas fighting the same enemy groups over and over again.  There’s only so many times you can kill them before the experience inevitably starts to pall.

Honestly, Youngblood does come dangerously close to being another Rage 2: it’s got a good core combat loop and the powers are fun once you’ve unlocked them, but the surrounding game fabric is stretched dangerously thin through banal repetition and does an incredibly poor job of providing any meaning or context for why you’re shotgunning your thousandth Nazi in the face. What little story there is is there to support the standard uninspired RPG structure of doing three levels and then doing the Big Level and then fighting the end boss to complete the game, and there’s basically zero effort expended to hide that nakedly artificial setup. However, Youngblood has three things on its side that Rage 2 didn’t.

First is that, as with most things, shooting Nazis is much more fun when you do it with a friend, and Youngblood is a co-op game first and foremost with many mechanics and concepts that are based around there being two players present in the game. If you don’t have a Player Two to bring along then you’ll end up being accompanied by an annoying and not particularly effective AI player, but even with an autonomous chum I don’t think it’s a viable game to play solo. With an actual human friend playing along with you, though, it’s worth playing Youngblood just for the sheer hell of it, especially if you pick different ability builds. I went for super throwing knives and a fully upgraded pistol while my regular co-op partner Kenti went for the ability to pick up and retain heavy weapons along with the Nazi equivalent of Uzis, and these builds complemented each other quite well; I’d run around knifing people to death while Kenti repeatedly fell over because it turns out heavy weapons aren’t that great, but he made a wonderful target that drew a lot of fire while I got the job done.

Second is that that the two protagonists of Youngblood, Jess and Soph, are fantastically well-realised and basically what Rage 2’s artificially edgy player character was trying way too hard to be. They’re teenagers, and they act like it: constantly goofing around and treating the wholesale slaughter of Nazis like a big game. They’re utterly convinced of their own immortality in the way that teenagers often are — they’re certainly far too naive to know what they’re getting into when they jet off to Paris — and their youthful energy makes for a welcome and refreshing contrast to BJ’s increasingly morose and increasingly wearing internal monologues in New Colossus. It also made some of the more weirdly unnecessary game elements like the armour and weapon cosmetics a lot more natural, because of course a teenager is going to daub war paint all over their power armour. They’ve even got a boost ability called a Pep Signal that essentially amounts to throwing up gang signs or doing dance moves to give both players a temporary buff, and I kind of loved that I could restore myself and Kenti to full armour by stopping for a couple of seconds in the middle of a furious firefight to do the robot. Jess and Soph don’t have a huge amount of depth to them as characters, but I liked them nevertheless and enjoyed spending the eight hours it took to finish Youngblood in their company.

And third is, well, it’s £25. That’s a bit pricier than my typical budget purchase, but also substantially cheaper than what I spent on New Colossus or Rage 2 and so I’m commensurately a little more forgiving of Youngblood’s shortcomings and limitations than I might be otherwise. The relatively short length and the experimental nature of the game are effectively factored in to the RRP, and the good thing about these shorter Wolfenstein games is that while they do tend to get as much wrong as they do right, they don’t stick around long enough to get on your nerves. That being said, I think it’s something of a failed experiment, as I’m not sure there’s much in Youngblood that could be taken forward into a mainline Wolfenstein game — not unless Machine Games are going to make it an inherently co-op series from this point onwards and are willing to do some significant technical work to shore up the engine so that it can actually properly accommodate co-op gameplay. The power armour abilities work quite well, the weapon upgrades less so because very few of them change the actual functioning of the gun and most of them seem focused on making damage numbers bigger; however, neither the abilities nor the upgrades require the absurdly gamey levelling structure to be in the game, and so I don’t think any of that stuff is going to make it through to Wolfenstein 3. And so while Youngblood is more or less adequate as a short once-through and done co-op shooter, it’s not anywhere close to being an answer to the question of what Wolfenstein should be in a post-Doom world, and is itself doomed to remain nothing more than an interesting curio.

The post Thoughts: Wolfenstein – Youngblood appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I have done a terrible job of a) posting and b) responding to comments recently, for which I can only apologise. I was having some severe motivational issues and needed to take a break. 

Here’s a fun game you can play when reading a review of Prey on a mainstream gaming outlet. Do Ctrl-F, and count how many times the reviewer mentions Bioshock. Then do the same thing for System Shock. Then correlate those mentions with a score, or the overall tone of the review. I guarantee you the better reviews will have name-dropped System Shock at least once; these are the ones that really understand where Prey is coming from, because it’s System Shock 3 in all but name.

The distinction is important. I enjoyed the first Bioshock game, but it was very much a product of its time: released a couple of years after the start of the 360 era, it was designed to bring across something of System Shock’s open world and pseudo-RPG nature into the (at the time) modern console age. It succeeded thanks to certain compromises it made on mechanics and game structure, but those very compromises are what has caused the series to age very ungracefully between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock Infinite’s full stop; Infinite presented an extremely pretty world to the player filled with interesting things, but the only way you could interact with them was by shooting them in the face. If Prey was simply an updated Bioshock I’d probably be slating it along with half of the gaming press, as there’s very little mileage left in that concept.

That’s the last thing Prey is, fortunately, and that Bioshock is the closest analogue most mainstream games journalists can reach for is a pretty damning indictment of the paucity of their experience and knowledge. No, Prey is something very special indeed. The concept is very similar to the first System Shock: as protagonist Morgan Yu (who, excellently, can be either male or female with small details changing depending on which one you pick) you wake up on a gigantic space station infested with strange alien beasties and killer robots, and you have to figure out what’s going on, contain the outbreak and escape. This took me about 17 hours on my first run, so it’s not a trivial task. There’s the usual shenanigans you’d expect from what is now referred to as the “immersive sim” genre¹: you can pick up injectors called Neuromods that function as skill points for buying powers and passive abilities, there’s computers stuffed full of emails to read, and audio logs left scattered around the station that provide a lot of backstory as to what happened before you woke up. That certainly sounds a lot like a Bioshock game so far.

If I had to pick one thing that differentiates Prey from Bioshock, though, it is the level design. Prey has been developed by Arkane Studios, who also did the Dishonored series, and Dishonored 2 was extremely my shit thanks to the way it approached the level design. Arkane are now arguably the best developer in the world at structuring levels, and this is because they think about how their environments would work as real places as well as levels in a game. They’ve extended this philosophy to the huge, kilometre-long Talos 1 space station in Prey, except where in Dishonored 2 each level was an isolated entity, the various areas of Talos 1 (and there are about a dozen) have been designed in such a way that they connect together seamlessly. You could take the layout of each individual part of Talos I that you visit and fit them together into a blueprint of the whole thing that actually makes sense — and in fact it turns out this is basically what Arkane did.

The fact that the interior environment of the entire station exists in the game has some extremely beneficial knock-on effects for the rest of it. For starters, it’s incredibly open. Your movement at the start of the game is restricted by one locked door. Once you’ve hit the appropriate point in the main plot to unlock that door (which could be done in minutes if you were speedrunning, but which took me an hour or two) you can go pretty much anywhere in the station without having to wait for more plot to occur, just so long as you can find your way there without dying to the various high-level monsters you’ll find in later game areas. Past that opening tutorial segment, Arkane do not have to worry about restricting the player’s movement down a single critical path — everything outside the station is a microgravity vacuum that presents its own hard limits on exploration, so why introduce artificial ones when you’ve gone to the trouble of making everything inside the station a real, explorable environment? Similarly, Arkane do not have to worry about masking areas of the station that do not exist with the hoary old videogame tropes of barricades, wreckage and unopenable doors blocking your path. Any time you come across a locked door in Prey there’ll be some method of opening it to get to what’s the other side, and often more than one. Even the emergency hull breach containment doors you occasionally run across aren’t abused at all, as later on you get the ability to venture outside to the station exterior through airlocks scattered along the length of Talos I, and whatever part of the station you’ve run across that’s open to space will always be accessible from here. Except for the nearby Moon which Talos I orbits, the general rule of Prey is that if you can see a place you can get to it, or through it, somehow. The trick is in figuring out how.

This is tremendously refreshing. I have a very specific approach to playing first- and third-person games these days: as soon as the tutorial finishes and the game blesses me with free action, I immediately go looking for the limits of the simulation. Back in the early ‘00s Old Man Murray rated games by their Time To Crate, so I guess you could call this measure Time To Invisible Wall. Most games usually don’t last more than a couple of minutes by this metric before I run into something rather uncomfortably gamey that keeps me on the straight and narrow. – open world games have a higher TTIW thanks to their scope, but eventually you’ll run into some decidedly unnatural geography designed to hem you in. By contrast, Prey arguably doesn’t have a Time To Invisible Wall. Technically you could rate it at around two hours, as this is the earliest point in the game where you can get outside the station and start jetting away from it indefinitely using your suit thrusters, at which point Prey has no choice but to kill you because modelling local Earth orbit is somewhat beyond the scope of what it’s doing — even here, though, they’ve put some thought into it and presented some fairly convincing in-game reasoning as to why this happens. Other than that first locked door after the tutorial I managed to explore pretty much the entire station without ever advancing the main plotline, and the game accommodated me quite happily even though I was breaking the sequencing on some of the sidequests pretty damn hard — one of them I managed to complete before I even picked it up by hacking into a container in the cargo bay, but in general Prey is good at providing some sort of acknowledgement of the fact that you’re doing things out of sequence, even if it’s a throwaway voice line.  Prey is the first game that I have played, ever, that completely rebuffed my attempts to break it. And of all the games that have had the “immersive sim” label retroactively plastered on top of them, Prey is, perhaps, the first to truly earn it.

I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I was with Prey once the almost total lack of bounds became fully apparent. It’s something best experienced blind, but if you haven’t bought it yet you probably need some convincing and for my money the Talos I station is by far the biggest and best selling point it has to offer. Of course because this is Arkane the station environment is complete, connected, and detailed, with a flashy art deco facade for the station staff and visitors giving way to more practical and utilitarian maintenance spaces behind the walls that run pretty much exactly where you’d expect maintenance spaces to go. One of the gimmicks of Prey’s alternate history world is the Looking Glass technology scattered throughout the station; this is a viewscreen that’s more than a viewscreen, as it presents a flawless 3D image of whatever you’re looking at that’s like peering through a window or onto a stage. The primary gameplay purpose of the Looking Glass is so that you can plausibly view cutscenes as a helpless observer (it’s a damn sight better than unbreakable glass windows, anyway), but Arkane then ask themselves: how else might this technology be used? Especially on a space station where space and resources are at a premium. This is why there’s more than one waterfall in Prey that isn’t actually a waterfall at all, but is instead a Looking Glass screen presenting a facsimile of a waterfall that’s indistinguishable from the real thing – and that you can smash and get behind the workings of if you manage to figure out that it’s a fake. Talos I is stuffed full of secrets like this and ferreting all of them out is immensely pleasurable, like deconstructing an incredibly intricate puzzle box. It’s also important to note that at no point does Prey break character in anything it does; where it has to make concessions to the fact that it is a game it’ll always come up with a believable in-game reason for why a thing is the way that it is, and that’s a principle that extends to both the level design and the more general gameplay mechanics.

Now, as to how Prey plays out in terms of the moment-to-moment activities of sneaking, fighting and listening to the ubiquitous audio logs, about the worst criticism I can make of it is that its weakest areas are no more than genre standard. The sneaking is perfectly functional, and the three working firearms in the game do exactly what they say on the tin; they are perhaps a little unspectacular, but then Prey is neither Dishonored or Doom. It simply makes some provision for you to play it like Dishonored or Doom if that’s what you want to do. More interesting are the non-firearm weapons and the powers you can pick up by scanning alien lifeforms and researching their abilities. Something that struck me a couple of hours into the game was that there really are only three weapons in the game that are primarily intended to be weapons — a pistol, a shotgun and a short-range stungun. Everything else is a jury-rigged experiment or an actual tool that you might believably find on a space station of the future, such as the Gloo Gun – this fires gobs of quick-expanding sealant that harden instantly and which are intended to be used for sealing atmospheric breaches (and there’s some sidequests where you use it to do literally this), but it’s also handy for immobilising enemies or for spraying onto walls to create impromptu staircases. Ditto the Q-Beam, which is a sort of high-powered welding laser, and the Huntress Boltcaster, which is actually a toy crossbow that fires foam bolts; it’s absolutely useless in a fight, but for pushing buttons from across the room and creating distractions for enemies that track movement or noise there’s nothing better.

Because you have very few actual weapons, and very little ammunition for those weapons, you’re forced to get creative when taking down your alien foes. Immobilising them with the Gloo Gun or the stungun before whacking them with your wrench — yes, Prey continues the fine Shock tradition of having a wrench be your primary melee weapon — is much preferable to taking them head on with an unupgraded shotgun, as even one kinetic blast from a Phantom will take off nearly half your health. For bigger enemies you need to disable their more damaging abilities via EMP or psi-nullifying powers before taking them out. Prey’s weapon selection mostly being a set of tools is mirrored in you using them like tools: each one has a specific application, and you switch between two or three when fighting a given enemy.

Prey follows a slightly different design path when it comes to the alien powers. You unlock these by scanning the various alien enemies you encounter with your Psychoscope doohickey; once you’ve scanned four or five of a given enemy type you’ll unlock the appropriate parts of the alien skill tree that corresponds to the abilities that enemy has, at which point you can purchase those abilities yourself using Neuromods and use them against their erstwhile owners. Here Prey does something that I very much like to see games doing: it applies the same rules to both you and the aliens. They look weird and scary and until you get the Psychoscope they’ll show up in your HUD as a series of ??? marks rather than a named organism, and the start of Prey is correspondingly incredibly tense as you creep around the station trying to avoid bizarre monsters with unknown capabilities. That lasts up until you scan and research them, at which point the tables are turned: nearly every single alien ability that exists in the game is something that can be scanned, bought and turned against them. Eventually you learn that a Thermal Phantom is just something that can lay fire traps and has innate fire resistance, both of which become available to you after doing the requisite research. Etheric Phantoms are immensely confusing to fight until you realise they only have one active ability: Phantom Shift, which teleports them a short distance while leaving a clone of themselves to distract the enemy. Again, that’s something that you can research and use yourself. It’s not quite universal, and they can do some things that you can’t, but you eventually get access to all of their best toys.

This design ethos of providing you with a universal toolkit rather than a weapon or powerset mostly succeeds in keeping Prey’s combat from becoming stale, but if Prey has one single weakness it’s that it doesn’t pace itself quite right in terms of encounter design. It’s not so much that the enemies you face are badly designed in and of themselves, it’s that Prey runs out of new ones to throw at you about halfway in and they don’t increase in threat while you continue to jam Neuromods into your head, powering yourself up to the point where even large groups of enemies are nothing more than an inconvenient speedbump. This is probably unavoidable when Prey has to cater to so many different styles of play — there’s a big thing around the morality of injecting yourself with alien abilities, so potentially a player only has access to the passive Human powersets (hacking, repair, more damage for weapons etc.) or even none at all, and the game still has to be completable for those players. It just means that for somebody like me, who found the Neuromod fabrication plans about thirty minutes into the game (I love that it let me run across them that early) and spent the next sixteen hours obsessively picking up every scrap of exotic matter they could find to make more Neuromods, the last half of the game was rather lacking in challenge.

A brief word about crafting: as a system it’s pretty basic and functional, but the in-game process for it is tremendous. You can pick up many different junk items in the game and, when your inventory gets too full, feed them into a Recycler that breaks them down into their constituent components: Organic, Synthetic, Mineral and Exotic. You then take those raw materials across to a Fabricator, call up the desired plans and plug in the required number and type of components to build the thing you want, which is 3D-printed in the air in front of you. Very simple, but I mention it for two reasons. One is that it means exploration is always worthwhile, as exploring a new area will always yield new items that, no matter how seemingly useless they are, can still be fed into the Recycler for more materials that can be used to create items you do want– it also means picking up duplicate guns has a point as these always have a very good yield when put into the Recycler. The other is that recycled materials are physically deposited into a hopper next to the machine for you to pick up, and the sound of them clattering into the slot is one of the most satisfying things ever.

The last thing I should mention is that Arkane have done some serious work on one of the areas I’ve historically regarded them as being a little weak on: their world-building. Between this and Dishonored 2 they’re the undisputed champions of making fantastic environments that still have an entirely plausible layout, but Prey also couples it with some surprisingly good writing, dialogue, and incidental details. Take the Nerf crossbow I mentioned above: in one of Prey’s many incredibly neat touches of characterisation the plans for the crossbow can be found in a dozen places on Talos I because the people who work there are huge nerds and really into their office Nerf wars, which is also something that comes across in their audio logs – despite the fantastic environment the staff of Talos I are for the most part extremely relatable people, which makes it an extra-hard punch in the gut when you’ve been getting to know them via their voice recordings for five or six hours and then come across their helplessly eviscerated corpse. I’ve always looked down on audio logs as being a second-rate method of storytelling that are relied on far too heavily as a crutch, but games like Prey and Horizon Zero Dawn are making me revise that opinion; it looks like developers are finally figuring out how to use them effectively. If you buy Prey, don’t do what I did and dismissively ignore the logs for the first two hours of the game since you’ll be missing out on a lot of detail.

Prey is one of the most complete games I’ve ever seen. I was going to say I couldn’t recall the last time I played something that so successfully delivered on nearly everything it attempted, but then I realised that was a lie: the last time I played a game that left me feeling quite as satisfied and appreciative of the state of modern game development was Witcher 3. Prey isn’t as ambitious a game, but modelling an entire space station in minute detail should be plenty ambitious enough for anybody. Importantly it confirms Arkane as the custodians of the old Looking Glass² spirit; Prey is a game that takes those old System Shock concepts and updates them almost flawlessly, blending in a little of Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, and more besides. It’s certainly a far better heir to the title than than the comparatively anaemic Bioshock games. I don’t namedrop all this stuff lightly but Prey definitely deserves it; it’s one of those rare games that redefines what I consider to be the standard for the genre, and serves as a timely reminder that this isn’t such a bad hobby after all.

The post Thoughts: Prey appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m a big enough man to admit that my review of the original Dishonored was a little on the harsh side. Indeed, it was deliberately so, since I felt at the time that the universal praise it was receiving from all practically all quarters of the internet was a little bit over the top and wanted to provide some balance. And so I went to town on Dishonored’s structural problems and gave it a thorough kicking, and in the process glossed over far too much of what it did that actually worked, and worked well. Much of that has only really become apparent to me in hindsight as I’ve played other games that have tried similar things only to stuff them up quite badly, but that’s just made me quite excited for the Dishonored 2: the first one was a good game with some serious flaws, but what are sequels for if not fixing what you couldn’t get quite right the first time around?

It’s true that where Dishonored 1 was a good game, Dishonored 2 is a great game. Like, genuine classic levels of great. It’s certainly the best Thief-alike I’ve ever played, and is in many respects far better than the original Thief games themselves; that’s not really a fair comparison to Thief as it is nearly two decades old and had to do the hard work of establishing that sub-genre in the first place, but Dishonored 2 being the first game in eighteen years to come along and almost effortlessly swipe that crown says a lot about the quality of both games. It’s how Dishonored 2 manages to make that leap from good to great that has surprised me, though, as instead of making any big changes to address the problems with the original it’s instead doubled down on everything — both the things it did well and the things I felt were a handicap for it — with only minor tweaks to existing mechanics to try and smooth them out a little bit.

For most other games this would simply mean more of the same, and for almost any other game I’d be even more critical a second time around thanks to a perceived failure to innovate. Even the plots are largely identical: Dishonored 2 takes place fifteen years after series protagonist Corvo’s coup-induced murder/sleepy-time rampage in the first game, and it kicks off with… another coup. Corvo is now both Royal Protector and Royal Spymaster, and he once again fails utterly at both roles when he first fails to notice half of the royal guard force being subverted by the evil witch Delilah¹ and her stooge of a Duke, and then fails to stop them just walking into the palace and killing everyone who might potentially disagree with Delilah taking the throne. Fortunately this time around the Empress Emily Kaldwin is far from being a helpless child; she’s a fully-trained assassin in her own right and so this time around you get to choose to play through the game as either Emily or Corvo — the one you don’t pick is conveniently turned to stone by Delilah so they don’t have to be in the story any more, but on the plus side the one you do pick is fully-voiced throughout the game which removes the “idiot protagonist” complaint I had about the first Dishonored – after which they flee the palace and get on a boat to the southern city of Karnaca to start unravelling the conspiracy behind the coup and eliminating the conspirators.

In mechanical terms the choice between Emily and Corvo is an interesting one. Most games would make one of them the stealth character and the other the combat character and lock them into fairly static playstyles based off that one choice at the very start of the game, but while Dishonored is certainly about heavily incentivising a certain style of play thanks to its heavy-handed Chaos system it balks at actively dictating your options in any way. So Emily’s set of Outsider-granted eldritch powers very slightly leans towards being stealthy, but there’s nothing particularly non-lethal about her and she can mix it up in a fight just as well as Corvo can. Conversely Corvo does get some perfectly good stealth options of his own, they just happen to be a little more situational than Emily’s. There is a significant difference in what they can do since each of them has a very different powerset, but how those powers are used is left entirely up to the player. The focus has been on making the powers interesting in and of themselves rather than trying to force the player down a particular path.

As to the specifics of what those powers do: Emily arguably has the better selection, with Domino (linking together up to four enemies so that killing one of them kills all of them) and Doppelganger (summon up to two shades of Emily to fight alongside her) allowing for all sorts of chicanery such as Domino-ing your own Doppelganger with some guards and then killing it, or summoning a Doppelganger mid-fall to break it via a Drop Assassination. Corvo’s powers are a sort of greatest-hits selection from the original Dishonored with Blink, Rat Swarm, Possession and Bend Time all making a second appearance; Emily is no slouch in the mobility stakes herself, however, as she gets Far Reach (throw out a tether to either pull yourself to the target point or pull your target towards you) and Shadow Walk (morph into a stealthier shadow form that moves quickly and can fit into those tiny rat gratings). The difference between Blink and Far Reach is what really sums up the difference between Emily and Corvo, I think; they’re both fairly similar in function, being primarily used to zip around Dishonored 2’s vast levels, but where Blink is almost 100% focused on ethereal movement — and is way better than Far Reach in that regard — Far Reach opens up far more opportunities for fucking with enemies and the environment in general.

(Mind you, I’m not calling Corvo’s powerset boring in any way. No powerset that lets me literally stop time, fire off six crossbow bolts, back off a little to watch them just hanging in mid-air, and then restart time to watch them all score simultaneous perfect headshots could possibly be called boring. I just think Emily’s carries off the fine Arkane tradition of asshole physics a little bit better, is all.)

The powers are backed up with a range of weapons and gadgets that, again, we’ve mostly seen before in Dishonored. If you’re playing lethally you get to use a sword, a pistol, a crossbow, incendiary bolts for the crossbow, springrazor mines, grenades and sticky grenades. If you’re playing non-lethally you get, uh, stun mines and sleep darts. This would be my number one complaint about Dishonored 2: there has been an absolute shitload of time spent on making lethal gameplay so fluid and fun and giving you all of these little toys and abilities to play with, and then if you’re playing non-lethally you get two gadgets which are in extremely short supply (you can only carry five sleep darts and three stun mines at a time), meaning that most of the time that a lethal player would spend dismembering guards in any one of a hundred gruesome ways is instead spent choking them out again and again and again. It gets more than a little bit repetitive after a while. I don’t necessarily think the relative paucity of interesting non-lethal options is a huge problem in and of itself since a non-lethal playstyle should be a personal choice for the player to make — doing things the non-lethal way has been an interesting gameplay challenge ever since Deus Ex, but while characters in Deus Ex made moral judgements on how you were playing the game itself did not, and so you were perfectly free to play one way or another.

It’s here that the thing I hated so much about Dishonored comes back to bite it in the ass, though: the Chaos system is back, and while it’s a little less blunt in how it is applied it’s still a ridiculously gamey way to splice in a morality system. People do now have individual Chaos scores that are linked to the secrets that the Heart whispers to you whenever you thrust it in their general direction — so killing somebody who drowns cats is going to be worth less Chaos than somebody who saved their rations to feed starving orphans or whatever — but since those attributes are randomly-determined rather than being authored by a designer it still boils down to kill more people = higher Chaos rating. It might have been interesting if the Chaos ratings were distributed in an intelligent way that, if a player figured them out, would allow a perfectly murderous approach to a situation. Unfortunately that’s not the case, and since low Chaos results in the good ending and high Chaos results in the bad ending — and they are very unambiguously so — you’re heavily pushed towards playing non-lethally if you give the tiniest iota of a shit about the outcome of your actions and don’t want the empire to slide into the toilet the moment you’re done clearing up the conspiracy.

So the plot is the same, the gadgets are mostly the same, nothing has been done to fix the those big structural issues I had with Dishonored 1 and the powers, while very good, probably wouldn’t be enough to save Dishonored 2 all on their own. Why, then, did I spend so much time singing Dishonored 2’s praises in the opening paragraphs? Well, it’s because while all of those things are quite important to how a Thief-style game functions, none of them are anywhere near as critical as the level design; Thief itself would have been nothing more than a curiosity if it didn’t have levels like Lord Bafford’s Manor and Shipping And Receiving² to show off its mechanics in the best possible way.   And while the strengths and flaws of the mechanics are much the same as they were in the original Dishonored, the level design has improved to a frankly ridiculous degree. It’s astonishing how good Dishonored 2’s levels are, really; there are “only” nine of them in the game but they’ll each take multiple hours to work your way through all of their nooks and crannies, and of the nine I think there are three that can instantly be regarded as all-time classics. Two more just barely miss that mark and merely qualify as “really fucking good”, and the nastiest thing I can say about Dishonored 2’s worst level (annoyingly it’s the opening one) is that it felt a little average in comparison to the rest of it.³

Let’s talk about the Clockwork Mansion as an example; this is probably the best mission in the game (although it’s a damn close-run thing between this and A Crack In The Slab) and will have a shitload of articles and blogposts written about it in the future trying to dissect why it’s so good, so I don’t feel all that guilty by getting a headstart and spoiling it a little bit. The Clockwork Mansion is the home of a genius inventor on the side of the conspiracy called Jindosh, who is responsible for building the clockwork soldiers that have featured quite heavily in the publicity for Dishonored 2. Emily/Corvo have to infiltrate the mansion to eliminate Jindosh to cut off the supply of soldiers while rescuing an ally in the process. The level opens with you making your way to the mansion through the streets of Karnaca; probably half of the levels in Dishonored 2 start this way, and it’s used as a freeform opportunity to tool up via black market shops and maybe pick up some extra intelligence/side objectives before tackling the meat of the mission itself. Once you enter the mansion, however, the tenor of the level changes completely. This is the home of one of Dishonored’s renaissance men, and he’s constructed his abode to incorporate particular elements of his genius – and his madness. The reason it is called The Clockwork Mansion becomes abundantly clear the moment you walk through the front door and are confronted with an apparent dead end, with only a solitary lever for company. As soon as you pull the lever everything changes, and literally so — you’re suddenly surrounded by the clanking of clockwork as the walls judder backwards, a balcony appears, stairs rise from the floor and the ceiling is hoisted upwards to form an appropriately grand atrium. This clues you into the level’s big gimmick, but it’s a fantastic one: the entire mansion really is constructed of clockwork and you can change its configuration on the fly by pulling these levers to alter the layout of the rooms inside it, and the level designers have exploited this conceit to the hilt when laying out paths through the level.

I’ll use my own experience as an illustration. The first time I went through the mansion I played it completely straight, as I imagine most people will. When you pull that first lever you’re greeted over the mansion’s PA system by Jindosh, as activating the mansion has alerted him to your presence; he’s wired into all of it thanks to it being constructed almost entirely of clockwork mechanisms stuffed full of sensors for testing his clockwork soldiers, and he makes suitably snide comments on your progress as you make your way through the mansion. I blew up the two clockwork soldiers he sent after me (if nothing else I was happy to finally find a use for my grenades here), snuck downstairs into a greeting room, choked out a couple of guards, teleported up to a balcony and through into Jindosh’s bedroom, choked out a couple more guards, took an elevator down into the dedicated testing area for the clockwork soldiers, and then bypassed a Wall of Light to get to yet another elevator that led to the service area for Jindosh’s lab, from where I was able to make a clean kill. That’s a quick explanation of my first run that glosses over a lot of playing with mechanisms to figure out how the mansion was put together, but you can play the entire thing without really deviating from how you’d play a typical Dishonored level.

The second run couldn’t have been more different, though. There’s an achievement for taking out Jindosh without him ever knowing you’re there, so you have to somehow get into the mansion without pulling that first lever to get yourself out of that initial dead end. Obviously this is possible, but the implementation of how you do it really opened my eyes to what a good level it is: the interchangeable clockwork features of the mansion aren’t just videogame jiggery-pokery, but are instead actual mechanisms inside the building that somebody has gone in and designed and put into the level. I know this because the way you get that achievement is by using your noggin to enter the spaces behind the walls — in which you can see the various wall segments, display cases etc. when they’re not in use and have been stored away in a rather mechanistic fashion that aids their clockwork deployment — and using them to proceed through the mansion away from Jindosh’s prying eyes (and most of the guards), which at the same time provides you with a wonderful sense of having peeked behind the curtain to see what the secret is.

Speaking of secrets, this is another thing this level (and Dishonored 2 in general) does incredibly well and you have to keep a particularly attentive eye on the shifting walls as they change from one configuration to another to figure out where everything is hidden. The hunt for loot is a significant driving force behind your exploration — as it should be in any decent Thief-alike — and there’s also very large chunks of backstory hidden a surprisingly long way away from the beaten path, which I found quite refreshingly contrary to prevailing trends in modern game design.⁴ Dishonored 2’s plot really isn’t anything to write home about, but its world is a different matter and its levels are absolutely seeping with incidental flavour thanks to the excellent visual design, the level layouts and these hidden bits and pieces of background info all blending together into something that actually feels halfway natural. It’s let down a little bit by the ending, and if I’d known how perfunctory it was going to be I probably wouldn’t have cared quite so much about keeping things in a Low Chaos state, but it’s also packed with a ton of little reactive bits and pieces that change based on concrete things that you’ve done in the game. I thought this was a far better way of dealing with choice and consequence than the “you killed too many people so you get the bad ending now” Chaos system, and it ensured that I didn’t feel too bad about the game finishing on something of a low note; the fact that the first thing I did after finishing it was to immediately start another playthrough is evidence enough that it didn’t put me off that much.

Dishonored 2 can be best summed up as “Dishonored, but with the best non-linear FPS level design ever.”  Dishonored 2 might not change your opinion on the Dishonored series at all; if you fundamentally disagreed with the first one then playing the second probably isn’t going to result in some Damascene conversion as they’re very similar in their moment-to-moment gameplay. Fortunately the moment-to-moment gameplay of the first Dishonored was fun enough that, when combined with the supercharged levels of Dishonored 2, I think it’s created something truly outstanding. Certainly it’s now more than good enough for me to be able to overlook the crap parts that I wrote that long rant about back in 2012; they’re still present and they’re still annoying, it’s just that the rest of it is so good that they do rather pale into insignificance now. Dishonored 2 is a game that will, if there’s any justice, be talked about for years to come. Time will tell whether those conversations are conducted in the same hushed tones of reverence used to talk about Thief, but for my money it’s even better, and while eighteen years is a long time to wait for a Thief-beater I can’t help but be pleased that one has finally come along at last.

The post Thoughts: Dishonored 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.