Some of my friends have asked me why I even bought Rage 2, since I didn’t exactly enjoy the original and the sequel wasn’t looking like anything special from the previews. My answer to them was that I just wanted to blast things with a shotgun for a few hours, as that’s a genre that’s been somewhat underserved this year (so far), but the real reason is that I really, really wanted to open the review with a “You can’t spell average without Rage” joke.

Unfortunately this makes Rage 2 doubly disappointing, as it’s turned out to have fallen some considerable way short of even that rather dubious target.

When I think back on my time with the original Rage I can’t remember all that much. I remember that the driving was dull, and that there were no sidequests to speak of, and that using John Carmack’s last major contribution to id Software’s engine — megatextures — in a game with such uninspired visual design largely resulted in it having some very pretty rocks and not much else. The high point of the game was some distinctly above-average weapon variety that went very much against the prevailing trends of the time, and which livened up the otherwise subpar combat considerably — however, given that both Wolfenstein and Doom 2016 took that high point and leveraged it into a pair of excellent reboots it has to be said that Rage, on the whole, was not a concept or a franchise that was particularly crying out for a sequel.

Yet one now exists. And now, having played it all the way through, I have to wonder why on earth Bethesda bothered to resurrect the IP: it is exactly the game you would picture when considering what a sequel to Rage would look like. Rage 2 is set in a bland, samey open world that has all the depth of a puddle. It features a car that you can drive around said open world, but the vehicular combat is pointless and the driving physics are just out-and-out terrible. Its plot is virtually non-existent, it barely has any scripted missions, and most of the content is just your standard open-world fare of clearing enemies out of the little question mark symbols that pop up on the map every three-hundred metres or so. It does have a moderately satisfying combat loop, with most of the ingenuity the original Rage displayed around weapons being transferred to a set of magic powers that make individual fights against stock mooks flow quite nicely, and this is probably one of only two reasons I made it to the end of the game. The other is that if you cut out the driving and the question mark locations from the equation, Rage 2 is about two hours long.

Nearly all of this was true of the first Rage. Despite an eight-year gap and the primary development responsibilities being handed over to Just Cause developers Avalanche, Rage 2 has ended up being almost exactly the same goddamn game, replete with almost exactly the same mistakes. True, it’s been built from the ground-up to be open world this time instead of the weird halfway house of the first game, but that just means it’s lost the vast majority of its scripted missions. In their place are the set of standard open world “activities” that, in Rage 2, mostly consist of getting out of your car and shooting things. Most of the time it’s a small clump of buildings that must be cleared of bandits, which come in Basic and Armoured flavours but which otherwise lack any variety in how the player deals with them. Sure, there’s a bandit with a bat that whacks grenades at you, but he dies if you shoot him with a shotgun. There’s a bandit with a rocket launcher, but she also dies if you shoot her with a shotgun. The only reason I distinguish between Basic and Armoured bandits is that the Armoured ones take two shotgun blasts to kill. Occasionally a bigger enemy will show up that would actually take some time to kill with just the shotgun, which is why you’re also carrying around a rocket launcher. And that’s most of Rage 2’s encounters in a nutshell: you shoot everything with the shotgun until there’s nothing left to shoot. There’s the occasional robot sentry turret sitting out on its own that’s actually the most dangerous enemy in the game by several orders of magnitude, but all you really need to defeat one is a handy piece of cover and some decent reflexes; for everything else, the shotgun is king.

Well, I suppose that reductive description is actually doing Rage 2’s combat encounters a little bit of a disservice. Taken as an isolated, atomic game element they’re not too bad as you have several abilities to play with as you shotgun your way through yet another bandit horde. There’s a Rush ability you can use to close the distance quickly; a double-jump that can be upgraded to clear any barrier less than two storeys high; a charge-up ground-pound that will suck in and then bowl over anyone in the radius of effect. I was using all of these regularly during combat, as well as abusing the health drops that spew out of every enemy on their demise — one of the few things Rage 2 does that I found genuinely quite interesting was to treat the player’s health pool as an alarmingly ephemeral thing, since enemy fire is actually quite damaging and if you’re trading shots at range you’re likely to quickly have your health whittled down unless you chug some of your limited supply of health potions. If you charge into the midst of an enemy group your health vanishes even more quickly, but when you’re up close you also have the chance to pick up these enemy health drops, which are a bunch of little blue vials that behave much like Doom’s Glory Kill health orbs. As long as you’re killing and getting the health drops, you can ensure that the rate at which you gain health exceeds the rate at which you lose it as a side-effect of being in the middle of a bunch of angry, tooled-up wasteland raiders — but the moment you stop, even if it’s to take cover or reload, your health starts dropping at a precipitous rate.

So Rage 2’s combat is built along the opposite lines to Bethesda stablemate Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Unlike TNC, Rage 2 very definitely wants you to be in the thick of things, blasting away with your guns and using your powers with wild abandon. It’s structured its entire combat design around enabling that gameplay style, and it is the sole part of Rage 2’s design that actually lands properly. Rage 2’s up-close gunfights are about as good as anything on offer from Doom or Wolfenstein — at least to start with, before overfamiliarity has bred a healthy amount of contempt. Once you’ve invested in a few upgrades for your weapons and powers you can get into a zen-like combat flow: shoot, shoot, shoot, ground-slam to knock anyone nearby over, reload, shoot again. The shotgun is an excellent example of videogame shotguns, with a generously wide aiming reticule and a visceral sense of meaty force; because it’s a one-hit kill on most enemies if you can fill more than 50% of the reticule with their body (and because you can’t die if you keep on killing) the fights are very much like being in a shooting gallery, servicing targets one after another as quickly as possible. And despite the lack of real threat from the enemies, Rage 2 somehow avoids this experience becoming fully stale for, oh, a good five or six hours. It’s just that fun to shoot people.

Which is, incidentally, the last time you’ll hear me using the word “fun” to describe Rage 2. The rest of it is full of messy design that’s either incomplete or not joined up in the slightest, pasted over an open world that’s criminally underdetailed in both the narrative and literal sense of the word. I know that Ubisoft, for example, have roughly one trillion outsourced artists working on each of their games because that’s what it takes to get them looking as stunning pretty as they are, and Rage 2 is a great example of what happens when you don’t invest that effort: muddy textures, featureless locations and a lot of skyscrapers that are just big grey boxes that look like they’ve been slapped together in the level editor for the original Quake. It’s already struggling uphill because every game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ends up including a disproportionate amount of grey and brown, but after this and Mad Max it’s looking like Avalanche don’t have any more of an idea of how to make a wasteland look interesting than Bethesda themselves did with Fallout. Every set of buildings use the same corrugated iron shacks; every mutant hideout uses the same set dressing that looks like it’s been scooped directly out of a toilet. This lack of fine detail is a major contributory factor to none of these places feeling like places — they’re just geometry that’s been slapped together by an encounter designer for you to clamber over during a fight, and once the fight is over their value to the world’s sense of place is effectively zero. It takes a lot of work to stop an open world getting bland and samey, but Rage 2 feels like it’s barely even trying.

Then there’s that design problem. Rage 2 has a dizzying array of currencies and upgrade points and reputation meters and none of them have had more than the most cursory amount of effort put into them to make them engaging to deal with. Take car upgrades, for example. The moment you get out of the tutorial you’re given a car which is pretty much a carbon copy of the one from Rage, complete with dual auto-tracking miniguns as the default weapon. You can upgrade it with some cursory additional bits: a bigger set of cannon, some missiles, a couple of health upgrades — nothing too flashy, but effective enough as an incentive to try and get the corresponding currency, which is Car Parts. You can buy Car Parts in shops and occasionally get them out of chests, but your main way of getting Car Parts is by doing the Convoy events that crop up on the map every so often, which involve you chasing down and destroying a heavily-armed collection of bandit vehicles. Convoy events always reward you with Car Parts, so you duly go off and do a Convoy or three and buy a few upgrades — and then quickly realise that you’ve bought every worthwhile upgrade the starting car has to offer. There are other vehicles in the game, but you cannot upgrade them; the only use for Car Parts is to upgrade the starting car and you’ve already maxed it out. Since Convoys don’t offer any other reward, and since they’ll just ignore you if you don’t shoot at them, you can in turn just ignore them from that point on. The problem with that, though, is that chasing the Convoys is the only time you will engage in vehicular combat in Rage 2. It isn’t tied into any other kind of event or any of the plot missions. So you’ve just wasted time upgrading your car to do an event type that you have no further use for once you’ve upgraded your car. And believe me, the vehicle combat is nowhere near fun enough to justify engaging in for its own sake. It’s completely segregated from the rest of the game, and an excellent example of why I think Rage 2’s design, on the whole, outright sucks.

It’s not an isolated example either, with the same bum note being hit again and again no matter where you turn in the game. Even the combat isn’t immune; a lot of time has been spent getting that close-range combat flow to feel right, but one thing I almost never did in Rage 2 was something I found myself doing all the time in the original Rage: switching weapons. Frequent weapon switching in an FPS is a fairly reliable indicator of good enemy design. Your weapons should be seen as tools to solve the problems posed by different types of enemies, and if you have a good variety of enemies you’ll be changing things up as you encounter each new type. It’s a satisfying thing for the player do; you’re thinking on the fly, picking the right tool for the right job when different enemy combinations mean the answer isn’t always obvious, and lending a more cerebral aspect to an experience that’s otherwise just entirely a matter of reflexes and hand-eye coordination.. As good as Rage 2’s shotgun is, my being able to get by with the shotgun and just the shotgun in every non-boss encounter belies some deep issues with its weapon and enemy design. Part of this problem is that the shotgun is arguably too good: it’s sickeningly powerful out to midrange and it has more than enough ammo to kill everyone in the average bandit camp several times over. But the major issue, as I see it, is that Rage 2 hands you a bunch of innate powers that you have to get right up into an enemy’s face to use and a health system that will sustain you when you’re nose-to-nose with some slavering wasteland mutants — and then gives you precisely one weapon that actually supports that playstyle. Oh, I suppose the assault rifle is also a decent weapon for running and gunning if you ever somehow ran out of shotgun shells, but everything else I used was either absurdly situational (the flame revolver) or else was designed to be used at range and thus rendered utterly redundant by the rest of Rage 2’s combat design (the rail gun).

I used these weapons a couple of times and almost died — and more importantly, had to spend a distressing amount of time standing in one place doing precision targeting for less damage than I would have inflicted with one shotgun blast — and then never used them again. Based on that experience I also stopped looking for new weapons to pick up in the wasteland; they’re scattered around in Arks that you have to hunt down, but since I didn’t see a literal chainsaw on the menu I didn’t see the point in wasting time acquiring guns that would ultimately just be worse than the one I already had. Again, it’s a lack of joined-up design, and one that’s arguably harder to understand than the car combat and upgrades being totally pointless: it feels like the weapon designers and the combat designers didn’t talk to each other at any point during Rage 2’s development and so it ended up having a set of weapons that only briefly overlaps with its combat encounters — but the weapon designers and the combat designers should have been the same people. It’s impossible to design one without designing the other, and there’s no excuse for the two of them feeling quite as disjointed as they do in Rage 2.

I haven’t spent any time yet talking about Rage 2’s plot, and for good reason: if I spent much more than a couple of lines laying into it I’d have expended more effort on Rage 2’s plot than Rage 2’s writers did. I’ll just say that after you get out of the tutorial there are a grand total of seven plot missions in the game, none of which take more than fifteen minutes to finish once you subtract the excessive amount of driving from one place to another that Rage 2 makes you do as part of any activity. The driving itself is curiously joyless for an Avalanche game; the car handles like a brick and nearly every single thing in Rage 2’s world — from rocks to fences to tiny plants that your heavily-armoured gunwagon should crush into the dirt — is a collision object that’ll stop you dead in your tracks. Any time you try to go offroad you’ll run into dozens of these collision objects and it makes taking a shortcut an absolutely miserable experience, and one that’s somehow slower than following Rage 2’s ridiculously windy roads. Since there’s no actual vehicle combat in the game (unless you’ve suffered a blow to the head and suddenly find yourself in the mood for taking on a Convoy) this means you spend a distressing amount of your time in Rage 2 slavishly following the stupid purple navigation chevrons the game helpfully overlays onto the road whenever you mark an objective on the map. It’s somewhat staggering, but Rage 2 is an open world game with fuck all to do in terms of actual exploration — the driving is too painful to do anything other than follow the road to your next destination, and the world is so bland that there’s nothing interesting to find in the wasteland even if you did.

Which brings me back to the question I got halfway to asking in my opening paragraph: why on earth does Rage 2 exist? It’s a sequel that falls far short of the standard set by its decidedly mediocre predecessor, let alone the (relatively) polished modern open world experiences from other AAA developers that it’s supposed to be competing against; it’s a sequel that, rather than learning from the original’s mistakes, instead repeats every single one of them while doubling down on the mediocrity as hard as it can. Nearly everything about the game outside of its combat feels like it was phoned in, like Avalanche got handed the IP by Bethesda and told to make a game out of it, but their hearts weren’t really in it. I don’t pretend to understand the inner workings of Avalanche, and I don’t want to accuse them of not having any investment in the game they were making because I have no doubt there were more than a few late nights involved in getting Rage 2 out of the door, but that is what it feels like. My personal suspicion is that somebody at Bethesda noticed that Gearbox had spent several years chasing their own tails instead of continuing the massively-yet-inexplicably popular Borderlands series, and so decided to dust off the closest thing to it that they had lying around — the Rage IP — and gave it to somebody who might be able to do a decent job with it, but for whatever reason the drive wasn’t there from either the developer or the publisher to actually make it happen. And while I would have laughed in your face if you’d told me this would happen immediately after I wrote my Rage review back in 2013, it would at least explain why I’m reviewing — and largely hating — Rage 2 in 2019. That and my proclivity for bad jokes involving worse puns.

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

I’m writing this review of Doom on a sunny Sunday probably less than 24 hours before the gaming sites get their own reviews up. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to say, but I predict they’re going to be fairly surprised at Doom’s proof that id Software do still know how to make a cracking FPS. I know I certainly was.

Honestly, if anything is to blame for that surprise it’s a combination of Rage being extremely tepid and Bethesda’s marketing department targeting all of the pre-release coverage of Doom at the CoD-devouring masses. It didn’t look great. The multiplayer beta made it look even worse – it moved clunkily, sounded awful, and just generally felt wrong, like they’d tried to turn Doom into an off-brand version of Halo. Fortunately for Doom the multiplayer was handled by a completely separate developer and can probably be consigned to the dustbin of history; the single-player has been developed solely by id Software — and despite their dwindling pedigree, there were a few lonely islands of promise in Rage’s ocean of mediocrity that indicated their talent wasn’t entirely dead. From the way Doom is structured I also think they’ve taken a long hard look at what fellow Bethesda stable-mates Machine Games did with Wolfenstein: The New Order, as the general approach Doom takes is almost identical; it fuses modern metagaming elements and quality-of-life features with core gameplay that feels retro, but which is so responsive and polished that it can only have come out of years of experimenting with how to update that gameplay for the modern era.

As with all Dooms before it, Doom is set on a Martian base that’s currently suffering the predations of a demonic invasion launched from Hell. And as with all Dooms before it, Doom’s plot is largely disposable gumpf, albeit somewhat self-aware gumpf that has a subtle sense of humour about it. For the most part it manages to avoid intruding on the actual gameplay; this does make the 3-4 “cutscenes” where you’re forced to put your gun away and listen to one of the two non-Doomguy characters in the game monologue at you all the more jarring and I’d rather they weren’t in the game at all, but the reason they’re so noticeable is because they’re so at odds with the rest of the game, which is the most arcade-y shooter I’ve played since Bulletstorm. It feels like a good update of classic Doom, mixing up frantic battles where a horde of demons chases you around the room while you try desperately not to die with quieter episodes where you explore in the name of finding secrets and easter eggs. The fights actually put me in mind of the excellent Devil Daggers for how fast and action-packed they are, which is appropriate since Devil Daggers was itself inspired by Doom.

A typical Doom level is laid out thusly: you proceed in a more-or-less linear fashion through the map, disposing of a basic background level of monsters on the way, until you reach a big room that’s laid out like a classic deathmatch area, with lots of raised platforms and nooks and crannies full of ammo and supplies, as well as a powerup or two. Sometimes there’ll be an extremely prominent button for you to push or an item for your to pick up, but just as often you’ll have no warning before the doors slam shut and demonic beasties start warping in. Doom’s enemies are almost entirely comprised of returning favourites from the originals — Imps, Hell Knights, Pinkies, Revenants, Mancubus…es — and while many of them do have projectile attacks that you have to dodge (they don’t get any hitscan weapons, so you always have a chance of dodging) they all love to get up close and personal. You also love to get up close and personal with the new Glory Kills mechanic, but only when you’ve staggered an enemy by reducing them to near-death; otherwise it’s backpedal o’clock while you fire a selection of extremely meaty guns at the encroaching enemy horde.

I was a little bit worried about Doom’s guns after enduring the multiplayer beta, but each of its nine weapons is really fun to use and gets a thorough workout throughout the entire game. There’s no magazines to reload and only two weapons have scopes you can sight down (these are rarely used because staying still in Doom is death), so the R key and right mouse button are instead reserved for switching between and using each weapon’s alternate fire modes. Each gun has two, and they’re unlocked by finding powerup drones hidden in particularly inaccessible places on the map; these alternate fire modes are a mechanic that’s been stolen wholesale from Rage, but that’s fine because it was the one part of Rage that worked, and it worked really well. It is if anything even better in Doom, with each fire mode ensuring a gun retains usability and versatility throughout the game. For example, there are two shotguns in the game: a bog standard combat shotgun you pick up in the tutorial, and the classic double-barrelled Super Shotgun you can get 4-5 levels in. The Super Shotgun would ordinarily make the combat shotgun irrelevant, but it’s saved by one of its alternate fire modes turning it into a grenade launcher. The Plasma Rifle gives you a choice of firing a stun pulse or a wave of superheated plasma in a wide arc. The Rocket Launcher can either lock on to an enemy and fire a volley of three rockets, or else have its rockets detonated mid-flight for a far more powerful explosion; this is particularly good for hitting enemies floating in mid-air such as the Cacodemon.  The Gauss Rifle has a Siege Mode, which is heavy on the ammo and takes a little while to charge, but which fires a single hugely powerful blast that’ll penetrate through multiple enemies and which will kill a Baron of Hell in two shots.

It’s Doom’s treatment of series classic weapons the BFG and the Chainsaw that’s probably the most interesting change here, though. These aren’t accessed via the number keys like normal weapons, but instead have their own dedicated keys for activation. This is because they function more like one-shot powers in a shoot ‘em up; the BFG is basically a smart bomb that’ll clear out all baddies standing in front of you, while the chainsaw will instantly kill any single enemy and cause them to drop a ton of ammo. Both of them function as get-out-of-jail-free cards for using in a jam; the chainsaw is designed to be used when you’re running low on ammo so that you can refill and get back in the fight, and the BFG is a panic button to be used when you’re facing overwhelming odds.  Each of them has a very limited number of uses and a very limited number of refills during a level, so you have to choose the moment to use them with care.

A typical battle in Doom has you switching between 3-5 weapons very very quickly according to the situation. Aside from the rocket launcher there’s no weapon that really functions as a one-size-fits-all; they’re all useful in different situations and so you find yourself switching from the Heavy Assault Rifle for sniping Imps to the Gauss Rifle for eliminating a tough target like a Mancubus to the Super Shotgun for the point-blank disposal of a Pinky. You use every aspect of the room to its fullest; Doom’s protagonist now has added mobility thanks to a double jump and the ability to mantle platforms, and you have to use all of it as you keep moving, moving, moving around the room, sprinting down corridors and leaping off ledges while taking out any monsters that cross your path. More stuff will spawn in as you finish off the first wave, and most of these arena encounters slowly scale up their monsters as the fight progresses, starting off with Imps and Possessed Soldiers mixed in with the odd tough enemy like a Mancubus, moving on to multiple Revenant and Hell Knight spawns and then finishing with something appropriately huge like a Baron of Hell. The big monsters function as an appropriate crescendo for a fight that’s been going on for a good 3-4 mayhem-packed minutes, and once they’re down it’s time to take stock of what’s left of the room, pick up any ammo/health that you missed and move on to the next arena.

Or you could hunt for secrets. This was a big element of classic Doom, and it’s one that’s been fully embraced for this update. I said earlier that the levels were more-or-less linear, and there are; there’s usually only one way forward and the trick is in figuring out what it is. If they’re linear, though, they are at least interestingly linear, making good use of the third dimension and sometimes backtracking over themselves several times. This three-dimensionality is supported by an updated automap system that is honestly the absolute best implementation they could have come up with, as it both shows you where to go and shows off how intricate the geometry of the level is. Often there’ll be an area shown on the automap that you didn’t visit in the course of travelling through the level; you’ve got fairly decent odds on there being a secret of some sort located here. At other times Doom pulls the classic Doom trick of showing you the secret through a window or a gap in the wall or up on a high ledge somewhere, and leaving you to figure out how to get to it. They’re usually cunningly well-hidden despite these hints, and so secret hunting both carries the inherent satisfaction of solving a puzzle and the more tangible reward of whatever the secret contained. A lot of the time this is armour, or a powerup – useful, to be sure, but nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary — but sometimes it’s a gun that wouldn’t normally unlock until a level or two down the road — once again, hiding powerful weapons in the early levels was something that original Doom loved to do, and new Doom is no different. There’s also a selection of classic levels to be unlocked, and these are by far the hardest secrets to locate as they’re activated by levers that blend into the background geometry of the level and which don’t have the normal helper glow that other interactive objects have, but my favourite secrets by far were the little Doom action figures that play a chiptune-y snippet of E1M1’s music when you pick one up. The figures don’t unlock anything good themselves, but each of them is themed after a piece of id or Bethesda history — Quakeguy, Keenguy, Vaultguy etc. — and are honestly so adorable that I would unhesitatingly buy one if they existed in real life.

This is Doom’s biggest strength, I think; it’s not even trying to hide its origins. The gameplay is a fusion of the best of both retro and modern FPS styles, yes, and this provides a very strong frame on which to hang the game, but it’s helped along the way immeasurably by being stuffed chock-full of callbacks to the original games. It’s easy to jam in easter eggs, of course — this being a Bethesda game, there is of course the now-tiresome skeletal corpse with an arrow in the knee hidden in a cave in Hell somewhere — but the nice thing about Doom’s is that they are for the most part entirely natural. They feel like they’re done out of love for the original material rather than because they’re cynically trying to trigger players’ nostalgia glands. Importantly, Doom doesn’t really waste too much time trying to justify them, either; there’s a soupçon of effort made to tie the classic blue/yellow keycards into the world a little more naturally, but the transition to skulls in Hell is just presented to you as a fait accompli, and while there is some cursory blurb in the game’s Codex to try and explain the powerups they’re just plonked into levels rather unapologetically, because this is a Doom game and a Doom game should have the Berserk powerup. It’s Doom because it has Doom-ness infused into its very DNA, from the frequent musical references to classic tracks to the game providing something cool if you shoot the Icon of Sin in the head, again.

Flaws? Well, I’m not 100% sold on the Glory Kill system. Glory Kills were much-hyped prior to launch, and mechanically they do make sense and fit into the game flow; if you reduce an enemy to low health they glow orange and start staggering around, and this is your cue to Press F To Perform Glory Kill. A Glory Kill is a melee finisher that will cause an enemy to drop a small amount of health – unless you’re on low health, in which case they’ll drop enough health to refill your health bar to about halfway. Glory Kills therefore function as a good way to keep up the frenetic pace of Doom’s battles; if you get reduced to low health you don’t have to piss about playing cautiously or search around for a convenient medikit, you just punch out the nearest demon and watch health orbs fountain out of their corpse. The problem is that despite there being a large variety of Glory Kills in the game — you’ll trigger different ones depending on which body part you’re targeting — firing one that isn’t “Punch the demon in the face” is really, really difficult, even when you’re specifically trying to set one up for one of Doom’s many mission challenges. Because you’re only ever seeing one or two Glory Kills, and because you do them so much, they get boring really, really quickly. They don’t feel powerful in the same way that the Berserk melee kills do, where Doomguy literally rips Imps in half with his bare hands. And in a game like Doom anything that doesn’t feel powerful ends up being not all that much fun, really.

The other problem Doom has is that despite its admirable focus on frenetic, relentless action, it does unfortunately feel the need to shoehorn in some plot and some scripted events to placate the modern gamer. At first it seems like it’s parodying the need for every game to have an over-elaborate story, since as soon as Doomguy puts his armour on fifteen seconds into the game somebody calls him up on a terminal to spout Plot at him — and his response is to punch the terminal into oblivion before they’ve even got through a full sentence. Sadly this story-lite approach does soon give way to cutscenes where you’re staring at a screen while somebody monologues at you, and not only do these slow the game down unnecessarily, but they also actively interfere with the good parts of the game by occasionally locking the door behind you so that you can’t go back to earlier parts of the level. This is completely at odds with the secret-hunting half of Doom; you can replay any completed level with all your weapons and upgrades so it’s not an unforgivable sin, but it does strike me as an unnecessary one.  The story itself does have some amusing beats like the evil UAC being portrayed as Scientology But With Demons, but it’s absolutely not worth the drag effect it has on you actually getting shit done. The visuals are technically very accomplished – very crisp and detailed, and the engine is about a thousand times better optimised than whatever piece of crap is powering the CoD series these days¹ — however thanks to the game being set in just two locations it’s also rather bland. There’s a couple of moderately interesting environments towards the end, but mostly the palette is that of the reddish-browns of Mars or the brownish-browns of Hell; Wolfenstein very much has the edge here as it had some outstanding visual design to back up its gunplay. Doom does better gunplay, but its visuals are never really anything more than “okay”.

Still, these low points don’t come anywhere close to dragging Doom down. It’s far too fast and far too fun to be held back by the occasional missed beat. It’s a fantastic return to form for id Software that’s driven by a love of the series’ roots and a deft understanding of how to make those roots blossom into a sturdy, demonic Hell-oak of a game — a modern update of a retro concept that, by and large, manages to combine the best of both. Up until now I was happy to call Wolfenstein: TNO the best FPS of the last half-decade, but now that Doom exists and is good I’m not sure which is better. I might even be inclined to say that Doom edges it on the strength of its purity of design, flabby cutscenes aside; it’s too close to really call it, though, and making a game that is as good as Wolfenstein is still one hell of an achievement. Pun very definitely intended.

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

Yes, we’ve made it to the fourth main outing of the inexplicably-populist post-apocalyptic open world RPG. Ever since Oblivion it seems that Bethesda have been incapable of doing anything wrong; each game they release experiences a couple of million more copies sold than the last one, and Fallout 4 doesn’t look like it’s in any danger of being an exception to that rule. That they salvaged the Fallout IP from the Interplay debacle and turned it into one of the most successful franchises in gaming is laudable; that their approach to Fallout 3 was to simply paste that IP over the top of Oblivion is less so. Don’t get me wrong, Fallout 3 achieved great success in splicing some of the core Fallout concepts together with the stock Bethesda open-world gameplay (guns, VATS), but this came at the cost of it being a noticeably shallower game than its predecessors in terms of actual RPG-ness. Even at the time I remember thinking that it was fine for a first outing, but that any follow-up should make better use of the setting and include such radical features as “an actual plot” instead of stunt-casting Liam Neeson and hoping nobody would notice it wasn’t there.

This is why I’m a little dismayed at Fallout 4. I’m dismayed despite some of the good iterative improvements it makes to the mechanics, and despite Bethesda making the visuals a little less grey this time around, because in all other respects it is exactly the goddamn same as Fallout 3. Fallout 3 was Oblivion With Guns. Fallout 4 is Skyrim With Guns. If you have played literally any other Bethesda game from the last 15 years then you’ll know what to expect from Fallout 4. There’s a huge world map covered in a shitload of markers for you to discover. Roughly half of the markers are settlements and other points of interest, while the other half denote the location of mini-dungeons that you can blast through in 5-10 minutes. You get quests from the former to kill things in the latter.  The quests and plot are about as deep as the virtual paper they’re written on. There’s a certain amount of joy to be found in the exploration, in seeing what’s over the next hill or around the next corner, but the switch from Skyrim’s snowy vistas to Fallout’s muddy, dirty wasteland means it’s operating at something of a disadvantage here. It is, in other words, a Bethesda Open World Game, with everything good and bad that that statement implies.

“But Hentzau,” you might ask, “what on earth were you expecting from a Bethesda game?” The answer is: exactly this. I can’t fault Bethesda for not delivering on my expectations because they’ve done precisely what I thought they would do. They’ve stuck to what they know. In fact they’ve arguably exceeded my expectations since there’s one or two areas of the game where they (gasp!) successfully innovate, which at least avoids Fallout 4 being a straight rehash of F3/Skyrim; it does have some unique selling points that lend it some of its own identity. So while I’m a bit disappointed that F4 doesn’t deviate (much) from the standard Bethesda Open World Game formula, I can’t in all good conscience use that as a stick to beat the game with since for some – if not most – of its prospective audience that’ll be nothing but good news. So when writing the rest of this review, I’m going to try and leave that by the wayside, especially since the next thing I’m going to say might surprise you:

I quite enjoyed Fallout 4.

Yep, despite large portions of the Bethesda formula running very much counter to my particular tastes, I found there was actually a lot to like about Fallout 4. It’s by no means a comprehensive package of plus points, and the enjoyment that you derive will depend largely on your ability to use the character progression and crafting system to set your own goals, but as long as you’re willing to play the game on your terms rather than slavishly engaging with every mechanic it offers you for the sake of it then it is, in terms of mechanics, probably the best game Bethesda have released yet¹. The biggest speedbump it encounters is right at the start of the game, in the pre-nuclear fire prologue that sets up your character; I found this tremendously dreary and not a good way to set the atmosphere or make me care about my supposed motivations for venturing out into the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the setting of every Fallout game. Once the game has set you loose, though, and once you start to fully comprehend some of the possibilities the new mechanics make possible, then the chances are you’ll be hooked in for a good long while.

But what are these new mechanics I keep mentioning? Well, there’s three worth talking about, two of which are good, and one of which I thought was a bit of a failure. They are, in order:

• A completely redone character levelling/perks system.
• A new crafting system for customising guns, armour and equipment.
• The ability to build settlements in the wasteland that slowly grow as they attract new settlers.

The first two features are largely unambiguous successes. Talking about the new perk system first: the old Fallout system of percentage-based skills governing your chance of success at doing things in the game (pickpocketing someone, shooting a gun etc.) and perks that give you specific, passive bonuses has been condensed into a single sprawling system of perks. At the start of the game you get 30-odd points to invest in your character attributes (Strength, Perception and so on) which isn’t so different from the previous Fallout games, except that, interestingly, the “base” level of competence in a given area has been lowered from 5 to 1. This means that you start with one point in each attribute, and that you can’t really have a character with lower-than-average Intelligence (a favourite character archetype of Fallout) because it’s not possible to lower your attributes from their starting level. All you can do is boost them with those starting points; this is a weird way to start the game, and I must say it went against every natural fiber of my being to start a character with only one point in Luck and Charisma since my instincts were screaming at me that this was just crippling my character. It’s very unlike the previous games – or most RPG attribute systems in general – and the most confusing thing about it was that Fallout 4 asked me to make these decisions blind, without any real clue as to how these stats would affect my progression. It doesn’t show you the perk tree until you’re actually in the game and have run through the tutorial, at which point it’s a little too late to make changes without doing it all again.

Once you see that perk tree everything becomes clear, however. It’s got one track for each of of your attributes, and each track is split out into ten tiers. Each tier of the track contains a single perk which will either confer some new ability or provide some kind of passive bonus. As you’d expect, the higher-tier perks (or lower-tier, since they’re set up starting from the top and progressing downwards) are broadly better than the ones at the start of the track, and this is where the attributes come in; they each have a passive effect on your chance to hit, melee damage, hit points etc., but they also determine which perks you can and can’t take. For example, you won’t be able to take a sixth-level Perception perk unless you have at least six points invested in Perception. Every time you level up you get a single point to invest in this perk tree, which you can either spend on a perk or on increasing one of your basic attributes to make new perks available.

As a basic setup that works pretty well, especially so since a given attribute’s perks will at the very least enhance one another – and some of them go from so-so to truly and utterly broken once you unlock certain high-tier perks – meaning it pays to specialise. The thing I really like about this new perk system, though, is that nearly all of the perks in it are interesting and/or powerful. They have a significant effect on how the game plays. Every point spent in the tree feels worthwhile, and most perks can be levelled up multiple times to increase the bonus they give you. For example, even a basic “Increase rifle damage” perk increases it by a whopping 20% per point spent, and you can invest five points for a total of +100%, neatly doubling your damage output. That’s a powerful perk to take and a great decision to have to make, and the fact that most of the time it is a genuine decision between two or more potentially awesome choices should tell you a lot about how good this perk tree is. You can spend *hours* in here plotting your route through it depending on the character you’re trying to build – and for me personally, the nice thing about the perks is that they aren’t even remotely balanced. There’s about a zillion ways you can combine perks to make a ridiculously overpowered character, and that points to a surprising degree of awareness on the part of whoever designed this: they’ve realised that balance doesn’t matter in a single-player game just so long as the player is having fun making interesting decisions, and figuring out which of those zillion ways is the *best* way to break the game is fun.

Then we come to the second success on the list: crafting.  Crafting mechanics are all the rage these days so it’s no surprise they’ve made an appearance in Fallout, but what I did find pretty surprising was how seamlessly it was integrated into the game. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the crafting, though, I should talk about the new equipment system: previously in Fallout you’d have a bolt-action rifle, a semi-auto rifle and an assault rifle, and these would all be separate weapons. In Fallout 4, however, they are all the same weapon: you take the base of “rifle” and apply different modifications to it to make the weapon that best suits your playstyle. If you want an automatic weapon for fighting at short range you add a short stock (for hipfire accuracy), a set of reflex sights and an automatic receiver. If you want a long-range sniper rifle then you instead add a marksman stock, a long-range scope,  a powerful receiver for boosting the damage of the round, and a long barrel for boosting the range of the round. By mixing and matching these modifications you can make pretty much whatever you want; the only real limitation is that each base type of gun will fire one specific type of ammo, and while some guns can be rechambered for a different calibre you’re always stuck looking for that ammo type if you become overreliant on one weapon in particular.

This equipment system is very flexible. It does have a significant flaw in that the DPS of every weapon you make will be roughly the same (since automatic weapons do less damage per round), and since ammo is a finite resource that you have to scavenge you end up gravitating towards building weapons that maximise the damage inflicted per round. Nevertheless it’s another set of interesting decisions for the player to make, with one significant caveat: unless you can scavenge an existing weapon with the modification you want, you need to turn to the crafting interface to make modifications for your guns from scratch. This requires two things; first, you need points in the relevant perks (Gun Nut for guns, Armorer for armour, as well as Science for certain high-level power armour and energy weapon mods), and then you need raw materials to actually build the thing.

The way you get said raw materials is actually really, really smart. You remember all those junk items from Fallout 3? The pre-war money, Abraxo cleaner and the like, which had no in-game purpose other than to clog up your inventory? (Sidenote: the inventory interface in Fallout 4 is still utterly dire, as with every other Bethesda game.) That’s all changed now. Junk items can now be broken down into raw materials for crafting, which catapults them from “pointless time-waster” to “most important items in the game”. Much of the latter half of my game was characterised by a never-ending search for items containing Adhesive and Aluminium, which are used in vast quantities for high-level gun and power armour mods. This search meant I had to go into unexplored areas with the sole purpose of finding untapped sources of these materials to scavenge. Not because I was exploring, or because I’d got a quest to go there, mind; literally the only reason was because I was 5 adhesive off of being able to complete the Calibrated Shocks for my power armour legs (or whatever). This not only gives those junk items a point, it’s also an incredibly natural thing to be doing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. You quickly learn to identify what is and isn’t important, and if you’re having difficulty there’s an incredibly useful perk that highlights items containing raw materials you’ve tagged in your HUD.

It helps a lot here that – again – the higher level weapon and power armour mods are really, really useful. Silencers and sniper mods are as overpowered as you’d expect, and are mostly locked behind level 4 of the Gun Nut perk; meanwhile a high Armourer skill lets you install a targeting system in your power armour helmet that highlights all “living” entities (this includes robots for some reason) in red, which is insanely good for night-fighting. Investing time in getting these mods onto your equipment feels like a good thing to be doing with a satisfying outcome.

Unfortunately I really can’t say the same for the settlement construction mechanic; this kind of ties into the crafting mechanic in that it revolves around using raw materials to construct buildings instead of weapons, and the idea is to provide food, water and beds so that people will come along and settle in your wonderful new town. This is a nice idea, but in execution it’s sorely lacking. My big problem with it is that the settlements don’t do anything. They just sit there, occasionally being attacked by raiders (which obliges you to drop what you’re doing to go defend the place that’s under attack) but otherwise having zero impact on your game or on the wasteland in general. Because this is a Bethesda game the settlements themselves are fairly puny – you won’t get a population of more than 10 without taking certain perks in the Charisma track – and have the same broken-down, ramshackle look as the rest of the world despite you having literally just built the buildings out of raw resources.

As a consequence the settlements are one area of the game that don’t feel satisfying to engage with at all. The truly baffling thing about them is that there’s a fair bit of effort that’s gone into the building mechanic for it; there’s a whole power system with switches and timers and so on that you could build into something fairly elaborate – that is, if you felt like dealing with the terrible building interface for several hours. Now, I do kind of understand why the settlement construction is in the game. There’s a significant portion of the playerbase who buys into Bethesda RPGs as virtual worlds and will really get a kick out of being able to build their own mini-villages even if they’re ultimately pointless in a mechanical sense, so their inclusion makes a broad amount of sense. For me, though, the settlements needed to have some tangible effect beyond spawning half a dozen settlers into existence where there were none before. Maybe you start getting patrols of militia wandering around; maybe shops have a better selection of goods or better prices thanks to the increased security and civilizing effect you’re having on the wasteland; or maybe you could tie it into a questline that’s a little more elaborate than the procedurally generated “Go to location X, kill monster Y, come back” quests that you do to clear the settlement locations in the first place. There’s at least a couple of dozen ways I can think of to make this side of things more appealing to people who burned out on Minecraft several years ago, and it’s really puzzling that none of them are actually in the game.

The rest of it is pretty much stock Bethesda, and if you’ve played Fallout 3 you’ll know what to expect. There’s one last minor plus point in that they actually managed factional endings to the game that branch somewhat in a mutually-exclusive fashion, similar to New Vegas, but this is cancelled out by the total dumbing down of conversation choices in Fallout 4 – apart from basic Charisma checks there are no dialogue-based skill/attribute checks anywhere in the game, and the actual dialogue has been condensed into a very bad implementation of the Mass Effect dialogue wheel where the one-word descriptions you’re given often bear little or no relation to what you character actually says. Oh, and your character actually says stuff this time; the player character is fully voiced, but the male voice actor’s delivery is on par with the notoriously awful hero dialogue from Ultima X.

So, is Fallout 4 a good game? I’d tend towards a pretty solid yes on that count. I tend not to invest 36 hours of my time into bad ones. Will it change your mind on Bethesda games? No, probably not. If you have a fundamental problem with the way they put their RPGs together than Fallout 4 might not be the game for you; if on the other hand you liked – or are merely just ambivalent about — their previous efforts then it’s possible Fallout 4 might be a worthy sink for your time. That is, just so long as you’re capable of that goal-setting I talked about earlier. I played until I’d perfected my character build within the confines of the systems the game provided and then made a beeline to the end. Your criteria may be different, but as long as you can set them, and as long as they’re not plot-related, you’ll probably have a lot of fun with it. Ultimately I think it’s pretty telling that I’ve spent my time here almost exclusively talking about Fallout 4’s mechanics; I don’t think it’s a game to enjoy for its writing or its world, but there is enjoyment to be had here nevertheless.

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Most reviews of Skyrim, if they’re being honest, will start with some sort of disclaimer that states how far the reviewer has gotten into the game and what they have and haven’t done. This is fair enough; while I’d usually prefer that they finish it games journalists are busy people and Skyrim is a huge game. It’s simply not possible for them to see the whole thing if they want to get their review out while it’s still relevant. So most reviews of Skyrim, if they’re being honest, have been written on the basis of a dozen or so hours with the game.

Mine hasn’t.

Even so I should be clear about just how much of the game I’ve seen. There are still unexplored locations on my map. There are still uncompleted quests in my quest log. There are achievements I don’t have and the Miscellaneous section is just full of stuff I didn’t bother with. I have by no means seen everything Skyrim has to offer. However, I am fairly confident that I’ve seen most of it – all the major questlines, all of the major locations and about 80-85% of the dungeons. So with that in mind I think that I’ve experienced enough of Skyrim to make the following statement with a reasonable degree of authority:

Unless Arkham City turns out to be something very, very special, Skyrim is my game of the year.

If you’d asked me two weeks ago what my chances were of saying that I’d literally have laughed in your face. I enjoyed Oblivion at the time but in retrospect I saw it as something of a misfire in every respect – uninspired art direction, boring repetitive level design, a plot that couldn’t have done less to interest the player if it had tried and voice acting that has become legendary in its awfulness. Fallout 3 was a step in the right direction but it suffered from the same general malaise in its inability to build a coherent world. When I ordered Skyrim I wasn’t expecting much – an above average asshole simulator, perhaps, but those don’t usually give a game much in the way of genuine quality or longevity. Which is why I was so surprised to discover that Skyrim delivers in almost every area where Oblivion failed. Bethesda have done something almost unheard of in game development: they’ve learned from (most of) their mistakes.

So what it is that Skyrim does so right?  It’s something of a triple whammy. The trademark Elder Scrolls open world gameplay is present and correct, but what makes it particularly compelling this time around is that that open world is utterly, devastatingly beautiful. Even on my aging rig, even with the graphics turned down to medium, the Nordic environment of Skyrim is never anything short of stunning. It’s one of those games where you can lose fifteen minutes just gawping at the weather effects; I was staggered that the snowstorms that periodically showed up from time to time had snow which consistently blew in the same direction in the game world rather than being a simple filter over my screen which remained nailed to my field of view. There’s plenty of variety in the locations too – fjords, glaciers, frozen cities, dwarven ruins, jagged tundra, misty lowlands, temperate plains and majestic peaks can all be found on Skyrim’s vast, vast world map. Simply walking around in the world of Skyrim is an unalloyed pleasure, and it’s this which is probably the game’s single biggest strength – like Minecraft, if the player is having fun just looking at the environment and wondering what it’ll throw at them next then the developers are already halfway to having them hooked.

Still, there’s little point in walking (or riding) around in Skyrim if there’s nowhere to go, which is where the second factor comes in: Bethesda appear to have hired some level designers who know what they’re doing. I won’t say that the dungeons didn’t start to get repetitive after a while; for all the scope of the overworld there’s only 3-4 dungeon types and maybe a dozen enemy types to be found in said dungeons. However, this feeling didn’t start to set in until the fortieth dungeon or so, which is thirty-nine dungeons past the same point in Oblivion. The Skyrim dungeon designers did well to keep my interest for that long, and there’s a good balance of traps, puzzles and whacking things to be found in each one. Most of them are very linear with only one way forward and a shortcut back to the start once you’ve finished, but those are the ones designed to be completed in 10-15 minutes. There’s more meaty fare to be found in the various Dwemer ruins which are properly sprawling complexes covering four or five separate dungeon levels. Of course getting into a Dwemer ruin is a challenge in and of itself, which makes exploring them a real event above and beyond the bite-size caves and barrows the game usually serves up. It’s a nice touch, especially when combined with the unusual mechanical decor of the environment and the bizarre automata which populate it.

Finally there’s the amount of world-building that’s going on behind the scenes. Two hundred years have passed in-game since Oblivion, and since I wasn’t really paying attention to that plot the first time around there’s a lot to catch up on. During the tutorial I floundered a bit as the game expected me to know who the Stormcloaks were and what their beef with the Empire was without ever giving me the chance to find out on my own. Once I became a free agent, though, things got much much better. There’s hundreds of books to be read, many NPCs which will give rundowns of the various elements of backstory when questioned and – excellently – a lot of subtle touches which show the player what is going on rather than explicitly telling them (the Briarheart thing is just creepy). The main questline about dragons inexplicably returning from the grave to terrorise Skyrim takes place against the backdrop of a civil war between Empire-aligned legionaries and rebel Stormcloaks, and a considerable amount of thought has gone into painting neither side as overtly good or bad. Sure, the Stormcloaks may despise elves and by extension all non-human races, but they have a reason to since the Empire is basically a puppet government of the elven Aldmeri Dominion that’s banned worship of the Nords’ principle god. It’s all very nuanced and shades-of-grey, taking a leaf out of New Vegas’s book rather than doing Bioware’s thing of making me choose between doing something vaguely good or doing something unspeakably evil and getting a free sandwich toaster along with -2 to my morality score.

That’s not to say that Skyrim doesn’t do unspeakable evil, of course. There’s six showcase questlines in the game; the main quest, of course, along with quests for fighters, mages, thieves and the obligatory Dark Brotherhood killing-people-for-fun-and-profit gig. The Dark Brotherhood is where the comically villainous among us go to hang out and it does veer off into Planescape: Torment levels of psychosis at points; I know there’s a couple of people on Sekrit who didn’t do that particular questline because they had moral objections to it.  The other guild quests are similarly well thought out, while the dragons thing has a denouement that I thought was a bit of an anticlimax but since it starts off very strongly I’m inclined to forgive it. This leaves the Stormcloaks vs. Empire questline, and I have to say that after the game went to so much effort to set the whole civil war situation up I’m very disappointed that the actual civil war quests are by far the weakest part of the game, mostly involving going into a fort and massacring hordes of faceless opposing faction goons until I’d reached my quota and the fort was “taken”. It’s a tragic waste of what was to me potentially the most interesting aspect of the game’s world.

But hey, five decent questlines out of six is a marked improvement on Bethesda’s usual record, and they’re backed up by twenty-odd miscellaneous quests which are all of a similar quality. Bethesda have also improved the mechanical aspects of the game, streamlining the vast panoply of skills so that they make slightly more sense and implementing a skill tree system instead of having the skills give passive bonuses once they pass arbitrary milestones. This mostly works well – I have reservations about lumping all one-handed weapons together into the same skill tree, but nobody can argue that the removal of the Blacksmith skill wasn’t a good idea. I played aswordmace n’ board character and I enjoyed the combat very much after I’d unlocked a few perks in the respective skill trees, especially the shield bash. However, I do have to wonder if this streamlining has come at the cost of making a truly unique character; halfway through the game I’d pretty much maxed out all the useful talents in the shield, mace and armour trees and so I started dumping points into Sneak.  This led to the rather ludicrous scenario of my heavily armoured orc warrior combat rolling up behind people so that he could bop them on the head with a sneak attack.

What else? The UI is very badly designed but this is never more than an inconvenience unless you’re trying to bulk craft items to powerlevel smithing/enchanting. The voice acting is uniformly awful again, and the truly weird thing about it is that Bethesda have intentionally gotten different voice actors to read the same dialogue responses for, e.g., opening up a store dialogue. This means I got to hear the line “Some call it junk, I call it treasure,” far more times than I ever wanted to and it actually makes the problem of voicing the hundreds of characters in Skyrim even worse, since you’re now hearing the same lines over and over again no matter who you talk to. The Radiant AI is as entertainingly psychotic as it ever was, with guards stabbing hapless merchants to death because they’d had the temerity to try to stop me from robbing them blind and had accidentally caught the guard on the backswing. These are relatively minor complaints, though.

I’ll wrap up by trying to explain the overall reason I like Skyrim so much. It’s because it’s a sandbox RPG which exists in a world where game development is increasingly trying to ape movies by delivering tightly-focused, linear, “cinematic” experiences which are very pretty but which have about as much gameplay value as sitting back in a chair and watching said movies at the cinema.  It’s because it’s stayed true to its roots where so many of its contemporaries have compromised and dumbed down as the years have gone on. And it’s because the changes it has made have mostly succeeded in fixing many of the series’ past mistakes. It is, in other words, the epitome of what game developers should strive for: not perfect – never perfect – but full of ambition and vision. It’s ironic that this is something so at odds with mainstream game development today; doubly so that Skyrim is selling ridiculously well in spite of it, with over 280,000 concurrent players on Steam alone just after release. It’s not often you’ll hear me say this, but Bethesda deserve every single one. They finally did good.

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