INTERIOR: A well-lit tavern. The sound of quaffing and carousing fills the air, along with the twangs of some unmentionable stringed instrument. The camera focuses in on one table to reveal three men deep in discussion. Observing the noble cut of their clothes, the fine pleating of their beards and the ostentatious jangle of their chains and jewellery, one would suppose these gentlemen to be talking of matters of great import, of the rise of kingdoms or the fall of grain prices. We zoom in further, to reveal they’re…talking about Torchlight 2.

Hentzau: So we’re all sitting here, trying to figure out how to kickstart this review/discussion.

Jim: Okay, easy one to start. Why the hell did you buy Torchlight 2. Sinny?

Sinny: I bought it because ARPGs feel like games that should be cheap, simple and quick to play. Torchlight was all of those things, and Torchlight 2 promised to patch up what was missing. I know Jim was somewhat ambivalent towards the original, why did you get Torchlight 2, Hent?

Hentzau: I have been trying to figure that out for the last five minutes. Trying to peer back through the thick fog of boredom and loathing to see what my thought process was before I bought the game. Largely it was a matter of inertia; Torchlight 2 was going to come out before Diablo 3, it was going to provide an ARPG fix while Blizzard put the finishing touches on their Ecce Homo mural, it wouldn’t matter so much that it was good just so long as it existed. Then it was delayed. Then it was delayed some more. Then Diablo 3 was released, and almost immediately afterwards the Torchlight 2 preorder came up, and at this point I’d been waiting so long I blindly jumped aboard the nearest 4-pack without really paying attention to what Diablo 3 might have meant for the genre in general.

Jim: I think ambivalent is nowhere near strong enough to describe my love-hate relationship with the original. I’ve always shied away from these obsessive-compulsive clicky clicky RPGS, but I played Torchlight until the tendons in my wrist ached and that is pretty rare because you could crack nuts with them or use them for bridge suspension they are just that strong. I got obsessed with it for a week, rushed through it and ended up despising not only the game, but myself. I found my old review of it a few weeks ago, it was very succinct. “The worst game ever made, made perfectly.”

Sinny: So we’ve got me, a guy who picked it up specifically as an antidote to Diablo 3, Hent, who bought it to hold him over until Diablo 3, and then Jim in the middle, who can’t work out whether to punch it in the crotch or marry it. This should be a relatively even-handed review, I should think! I’ll start with the sweeping statements then: Torchlight 2 isn’t worth any awards this year, but it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made.

Jim: Justify yourself!

Sinny: There’s nothing here that moves the industry forward or emerges from a flock of doves to the strains of a string quartet. Nor is there anything that feels so polished, cinematic, or packed with human flourishes that it deserves a place in history as a shining example of videogame development. What Torchlight 2 does is take a genre, find out every idea that is key and core to it, and then removes everything else. And it does it in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost that, yes, Diablo 3 tries to.

Hentzau: Oh, that’s certainly what Torchlight 2 does. The problem is that the genre is the ARPG, and the key ideas — the core concepts that are at the very heart of any ARPG worthy of the name — are hitting things, and loot. Torchlight 2 has plenty of both, but that’s all it has. There’s a lot of colourful invective thrown around about ARPGs about how they are basically games about watching numbers get bigger. The numbers on your items. The numbers on your character. The numbers floating out of the baddies’ heads when you smash them in the face with your giant wrench. This is certainly a part of their appeal; however, it is only a part, like butter in a sandwich. Eating butter on its own is probably not something I’d choose to indulge in all that frequently; it needs something more added to the mix in order to make it interesting and give it that addictive APRG tang. What Torchlight 2 is missing, and what it appears to have consciously removed, is the bacon.

Jim: There’s something that really bugs me about the streamlining process and it’s that complexity is necessary for a game to be a dynamic and interesting experience. Torchlight does pursue this gradual chipping away of everything that could be a hassle or a bore with a particular ruthlessness that I think drains a lot of the potential fun out of the game. You start with this overly complex, kind of sharp statue, fine, you sand it a bit. You don’t remove all the arms and legs to make it easier to deal with.

Sinny: I think there’s something to be said for knocking the arms and legs off to achieve a particular effect. I worry that this review might end up at a rather depressing conclusion, because the thing I appreciate most about Torchlight 2 is that it has that satisfying ebb and flow that Bejewelled has. It’s this “blissful productivity” that game designer Jane McGonigal talks about – this feeling of getting things done, even if the final goal is sort of nebulous or maybe entirely non-existent. It’s why you arrange things in neat piles when you’re bored, or why it’s sometimes strangely satisfying to tidy a room. And it’s also why playing Torchlight 2 is simultaneously frenetic, and almost meditative. I suppose the question is – is this an acceptable goal for an ARPG?

Jim: I can see where you’re coming from but I think that clashes with how they’ve packaged the game. Bejewelled looks like it’s meant to go on forever, you play until you’re too bored to carry on, but T2 is a campaign. It’s got throwaway mechanics poured into this epic RPG mould (save the world, kill the bad guy). I’d argue that in the map design stakes, they’ve taken a step backwards from the original. In the first, your goals were “clear this floor of the dungeon, get to the next level”. It was simple, measurable progress that was clearly compulsive. Now, it’s bigger and prettier but there’s no flow. Main areas are gigantic without focal points, and the various event caves dotted around are more or less identical. I think my problem isn’t with the general idea of mindless questing, it’s how it’s implemented.

Sinny: I agree that level design takes a step back here, though perhaps for different reasons: I have a sneaking suspicion that all random map generation has been removed in the sequel, which is a shame. That said, I like the open-plan hub areas. To me, a lot of the areas conveyed a sense of adventure: the swirling snowscapes punctuated with fiery-red caves to quest into; the gaping chasms cutting through the desert. It’s more organic than the original’s cramped, single-minded design. And the art style supports that too, with big brush strokes and the obligatory abundance of particle effects throwing fireflies at you one second and sandstorms the next.

The art is just one of the ways that Torchlight 2 distinguishes itself from a depressing trend throughout Western RPGs to always include dark medieval nonsense, self-important extended metaphors wrapped up in exposition, and the colour grey. Torchlight 2 is vibrant, colourful, and juicy – that great game terminology for a game that moves and shakes and spurts with every player interaction. It’s a lovely-looking game, I think.

Hentzau: The art style goes for a relatively simple and spartan look, probably to make the most of the limited resources the developer had to begin with. NPCs and baddies are picked out in pastel, painterly shades that are a long way from the grimdark look so beloved of other entrants in the ARPG genre. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and I actually think it works well for rendering the game’s world. Unfortunately the environment I run around in is background only; it generates atmosphere but it is secondary to the creatures populating it and the items you prise from their cold dead fingers, and here I think the game misses two crucial points. The first is that dress-up is a large part of ARPGs. Make the items you pick up and equip look good on the character; when I find an orange pair of trousers I want them to look just as awesome as the stats imply. I don’t want them to look like a pair of skintight lycra pants. It’s not true of all equipment, but most of it is visually bland and unexciting, making the finding of loot that much less interesting.

Jim: In theory the game looks fine, it’s consistent and colourful and full of little elemental fireworks. It’s just that they went for the archetypes of the RPG world. Forests! Snowy forests! Deserts! Fucking swamps! There was no point where I was impressed or cheered or creeped out by the art, but it is competently made.

Sinny: Sure, but Torchlight 2 is Archetype: The Game…

Hentzau: There’s actually a reason the game is set up like that, Jim, but that’s something we shall discuss later. AS I WAS SAYING, my second point is that killing baddies is also a large part of ARPGs. Make the baddies you kill distinctive and recognisable. Make their attacks easily-identifiable. Remember that the player is going to spend pretty much the entire game in this zoomed out isometric view, and that looking at them from fifty metres up at a 45 degree angle is going to make them look very different from what they look like close-up. I’m not sure if this counts as visual design or animation or whatever, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the name of a single baddie I killed in this game, they were that unmemorable to me. They were just things; swarms of things that ran towards my character to be dispatched without thought or mercy. It’s almost like the game has taken its slavish streamlining of the ARPG to its logical conclusion and rendered the concept of enemies down to its most abstract form possible. They simply exist, and Torchlight 2 deems this sufficient.

Jim: I don’t think that’s just a product of the visual design, though, it’s the mechanics underlying them that render everything a little bit of a soupy mess. Ultimately, you barely actually look at your character and what they’re doing. Your two friends, the things that you keep your eyes fixed upon, are the health globule and the map. The bucket o’ blood because the only thing that is happening in these fights is that health is going down and you need to stop it going TOO far down, and the map because it’s impossible to have a general idea of the space you’re in without it. It’s a fine health sphere, sure, there’s little bubbles in it and everything, but it’s not what I want to spend my weeknights glaring at.

Hentzau:  Ah, but the importance of the health globe is actually rather down to the game’s poor visual design/feedback in communicating damage spikes to the player. You’ll be fighting a bunch of things just like the last ten bunches of things you thought, and everything will go well at first, and then suddenly your health will start dropping dramatically with nothing appearing on screen to indicate you’re experiencing a particularly damaging attack except the rapidly-emptying health globe. So combat largely consists of watching this thing and pressing “1” to gulp down a health potion whenever your health gets too low rather than, you know, fighting the bad guys.

Sinny: I think a lot of this might come down to the game’s insistence on throwing colours and shapes at you from the get-go, so as it tries to ramp up the difficulty it’s hard to make things bigger or badder than they were before. But I’m not sure I agree entirely about the visual signposting or the health dependence. Some classes have their issues, but I had quite fun combat experiences with others. Which classes have you both played as?

Jim: Engineer! I cleverly named her “Enjimeer”. There’s bits and pieces I really liked, the variety of robots you can have sauntering after you is a highlight, but as I played more the game did seem to boil down to the health thing. See, I was trying to play elegantly at first, I had a healing robot and I was determined not to use potions because I hate using potions, so I was running away to my portable dispenser all the time. It was tense! It was sometimes exciting! I died a lot! Then I realised that the game spits more potions at you than you can physically carry and there wasn’t really much point in continuing to cripple myself, so I stashed them all in one of those American ball game hats with the two straws going directly into my face.

Hentzau:  Engineer, with an additional hour spent as a Berserker to see if it was just the class that was the problem. Spoiler: it wasn’t.

Sinny: The classes take a few hours to open up, which is a big problem with the way they’re designed, but the Berserker has a lot of interesting skill combinations that encourage you to dash both towards and away from danger. I found that I was focusing on healing a lot less, and more about acrobatic skill usage when playing as him.

Hentzau: TRAP SPRUNG. This is the point where I start railing against Torchlight 2’s skill system and how much I hate it. Specifically, the almost total lack of respec capability. Torchlight 2 lets you pay to refund the last three skill points you spent, which at least allows you to try new skills, but skills on their own do not make a character. You see, in most modern ARPGs skills combine into what we call builds: multiple skills which work together to form something more effective than the individual skills on their own. Torchlight 2’s limited respec system makes the testing of builds impossible. If you’ve invested in the hit-things-really-hard ability and then ten levels down the line realise it doesn’t synergise particularly well with the robomancer your character has become, there’s no way to get those skill points back. It’s intentionally letting you fall into the trap of crippling yourself if you don’t already know what all of the skills do, which I regard as unforgiveable in a modern game. It discourages experimentation, is what it does; there’s loads of skills but you’ll only ever use a small subset of them because bringing in an additional skill is risky when it might not work with the ones you already have.

Sinny: I feel like we’re butting against the same point more than once here, which is that Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 embrace very different design philosophies, and Hentzau and I seem to come on opposite sides. With Diablo 3’s abandonment of skill points, the player is protected from cornering themselves with a build, but with that loses the feeling of genuine uniqueness and specialisation that permanence confers. Equally, Torchlight 2 – while it tries to let you see how a skill feels with the limited respec points – ultimately is willing to punish the player for changing tactics halfway through a game.

The problem with allowing arbitrary re-customisation of a character is that you’re left with choices feeling meaningless and entirely temporary. While it might be kinder to players (both the expert experimenters and the novice alike) to allow hacks and changes galore, for me it dilutes part of playing an RPG – which is that I chose this path, not this one, and that seeing a pistol drop is a flash of excitement because pistols are my thing.

Whichever side of the debate you fall on, though – Torchlight 2 has already been cracked open, and infinite respeccing is modded in. That’s the beauty of the way this game has been designed. Friendliness extends beyond design decisions, and right through to the openness of the game itself. No Internet connection required.

Hentzau: They’re not meaningless, though! If a player tries a skill and a build and doesn’t like it they have gained valuable information: that build is not for them. Why do they have to be penalised for finding this out? If I try a build and it doesn’t work, I don’t want to have to start a whole new character to try another one. There’s enough skills that a player can spend literally hours fine-tuning their build and homing in on one that works best for them. This is something Diablo 3 got very, very right; I went through like five or six iterations on my Wizard before I finally settled on something that felt right to me, and the game didn’t make me roll five or six Wizards to do this.

Jim: I think conceptually I agree with Sinny, to be honest. Hard choices should be made and you should be punished for making them wrong. All the information is there, dammit, and if you want to go around making wrong decisions then I’m not helping you. There’s also a lot of give built into the system if you are sub-optimal, because you die and you respawn and that’s it, there’s no cash lost if you don’t want to, there’s no experience penalty. I mean if you’re playing Ironman yes, but I suppose by that point you have to accept that you should know what you’re doing. That’s not to say I think that Torchlight’s skill system is particularly great, because the skills are, with a few exceptions, phenomenally boring, all plus percents and plus damage a bit and okay yes the occasional helpful robot. Also, nothing really seems to stack together.

Hentzau: Arguably any flexibility that exists in the system does so because the combat is based in large part around constantly guzzling health potions. As long as you don’t run out of health potions you will win.

Sinny: I don’t know how the Engineer works later in the game, but I know that a lot of its abilities are geared towards firing-and-forgetting, particularly the robot pet stuff. Other classes definitely have synergistic skills, though, but not as many as an ARPG should have, certainly. One thing I do feel, both from writing this review and reading others, is that spending six hours with each of Torchlight 2’s classes gives a better picture of the game than spending twenty-four hours with one of them.

Jim: Playing it through with one class doesn’t give you a picture? It’s going to take me thirty hours to finish my first playthrough and I don’t think I could take much more.

Sinny: I said it gives you a better picture. Even at thirty hours, if you were truly drained at that point, you paid a third of what Diablo 3 is currently going for on Amazon.

Hentzau: And so we come to the elephant in the room: the Diablo franchise and Torchlight’s love-hate relationship with its older, pricier sibling. Torchlight was a modern update of Diablo, in that you descended through a dungeon underneath a town to slay the boss at the bottom. Torchlight 2 is unarguably a modern update of Diablo 2; the action transitions to an overworld and you travel from town to town chasing the bad guy. The levels are even the same, since you start off in your green foresty level (although it swiftly transitions to snow), and then act two is the desert level, and then act three is the swamp level. If you really love Diablo 2 I guess this isn’t so much of a problem, except…

…well, here’s something it took me a while to realise about Torchlight 2 and why I hated it so much: it missed its window. Diablo 3 was taking such a gosh-darned long time — and there had been so few other ARPG titles in the interregnum — that a modern update of Diablo 2 wouldn’t have seemed anachronistic at all. But then Torchlight 2 was delayed to the point where it released after Diablo 3, and the moment Blizzard’s effort came out Torchlight 2 instantly aged twelve years and started to resemble a misguided Spanish lady’s attempt to restore life to a dated work of art. Diablo 3 isn’t perfect by any means and there is much about it that I didn’t like, but it’s taken Torchlight 2’s deliberately retro approach to make me realise that many of the changes it made to the formula were changes for the better.

Sinny: I think I understand everything you’re saying about missing its window, and Diablo 3 shifting the goalposts somewhat, yet for me I was happy to see the Diablo series sail off in search of new waters. Just as Team Fortress 2 retained the fun and vibrancy of first-person shooting, in the face of gritty, noisy, moody militaryfests like CoD, Torchlight 2 offered a respite from the course Blizzard was charting for the ARPG genre, and allowed me to enjoy the genre in the way I wanted to.

Perhaps this is the sad tale of Torchlight 2 – that it turned up for a big fight with Diablo 3 behind the bike sheds only to find it had graduated and gone off to big school. These two fanbases, these two opposing schools of thought on the genre, they’re really not talking about the same types of game any more? I think that’s okay though. I think it means that the old ways get to continue to live and look beautiful and have Internet co-op, while the huge development machine that is Blizzard pushes the core of the genre in the direction it believes it needs to go in?

Jim: Beautiful as that is, I would point out that I am someone who eschews other ARPGS, who has never played a second of Diablo, and those flaws still stuck out like the massive thumbs of a novelty foam hand. I’m sure that Diablo 3 has hammered a few more nails into its general reception but T2 brought that on itself by being such a predictable and derivative game. We haven’t even mentioned the plot or the cutscenes or any of the attempts to stitch their reasonably-fun monster-smashing into a big ol’ game, but they are so, so awful. I think the problem is that it overreached. Torchlight was successful and deserved to be successful, it was a cheap and cheerful game that tried doing things in a completely new and streamlined way and novelty counts for a lot. Torchlight 2 is, well, bloated beyond fun.

Sinny: To me, it’s the realised full game that Torchlight was the proof of concept for.

Hentzau: And to me it’s obsolete. Redundant. Supernumerary. I appreciate that not everyone has the moolah to splash out on the premium rates Blizzard charges for their games, but Torchlight 2 isn’t really an alternative to Diablo 3. It’s something different, and to my mind inferior Its low price point is certainly a point in its favour, but that’s not going to help if it’s not what you were looking for in the first place.

Sinny: I’m sticking with my composite ship-sailing, schoolyard-sparring metaphor. 2012 has pinned the Diablo and the Torchlight series to the opposite ends of the ARPG genre. I’m genuinely excited to see where both of them go next, and the fact that Torchlight 2 could do this without changing its core philosophy is really wonderful.

Jim: I’m middle class, I look up to him and down to him.

The post Diablog: Torchlight 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yeah, I’m basically reviewing Orcs Must Die 2 just so that I can do that pun. I have dragooned my regular co-op partner Kenti into helping me out with this one. Say hello, Kenti.

Kenti: Hello there. I play games with other humans.

Hentzau: But only humans. Because you hate computers. You’re a computer…cist.

Kenti: It’s true. Sometimes when my voice synthesizer doesn’t work I refuse to talk to the humans. They must intimate my intent purely from the actions of my on-screen characters. This occasionally makes Hentzau swear and complain about being lonely. (So the plan is working perfectly).

Hentzau: Yes, for my part I don’t hate computers. I just hate you. However, I also hate orcs. Oh, how I hate them.

Kenti: They must die. It is the only way.

Hentzau: Indeed they must. In quite prodigious — one might even say extravagant — quantities. The original Orcs Must Die provided for this particular vice quite admirably, but it nevertheless fell short in several ancillary areas, consisting as it did of a simple linear campaign with no challenge levels or multiplayer or anything. Once you were done with the campaign then bam, that was it. No real reason to go back. It was functional, it was enjoyable, but it definitely felt like it could do with a bit of fattening up to provide a more comprehensive orc-slaying experience.

Kenti: I think it is fair to say that after playing the first iteration, both of us agreed emphatically on the fact that the cherry on top of this murder cake had to be some form of multiplayer. It did clearly feel like an iteration, the development team’s first shot across the bow to stretch their game development muscles.

Hentzau: For me it wasn’t so much the lack of multiplayer as the complete absence of any sort of survival/high score mode. That both are present in the sequel is a sure sign that Robot Entertainment were aware that the first iteration of OMD was very much the Lite version of the game. The sequel feels like the full release.

Kenti:*protracted silence*

Hentzau: Let’s talk about the co-op first, shall we?

Kenti: Yes. Because for me that was definitely the most attractive and exciting of the new features. I was satisfied enough by the first OMD’s proof of concept, but this, I was sure, would make the fun pop out in glorious 3D. I think it did – there is always a certain amount of extra fun that co-operative play always adds, but unlike some of the games we have played together, it didn’t actively work to subtract that fun. Although I have enjoyed playing the other modes alone, I think co-op stands as the more complete experience. Not to say that there wasn’t something missing in the tactics department. When alone, you get a large number of slots to equip gadgets in, when playing co-operatively, you get just over half the slots each.

Hentzau: In theory this should promote intelligent trap selection with each player taking traps, trinkets and weapons that’ll complement the other player’s traps and abilities. However, I at least found it didn’t quite work out that way thanks to both an incredibly irritating UI decision that I’ll go into more depth on later (you have no idea how I am going to go into depth on this) and the difficulty of coordinating some good synergies when your voice communication is only going one way. EH KENTI.

Kenti: Your turmoil pleases my circuits greatly. I think on the first two thirds of the levels we maybe communicated on trap choices once. The last few levels did require us to think a little more about how we were individually and collectively going to tackle the challenge – I wanted to feel that from map 3 or 4. Perhaps that is necessary for the hardest difficulty level (Nightmare), but one would expect it to feature more in the co-op play of the standard difficulty level.

Hentzau: Most of my objections to OMD 2 arise not from the gameplay itself, but from the way the metagame elements are set up. Here, you have the problem that — with the sole exception of two levels near the end — all the campaign levels are pathetically easy for two players to complete. Having an extra pair of hands available to help stem the green tide flooding towards your rift makes a huge difference. The thing here is that while Nightmare mode is genuinely harder, with far more enemies and enemy types, it doesn’t unlock until you’ve completed the game on normal. This is puzzling to me; rather than give you the option to get murdered on a higher difficulty level from the outset if you really want to, OMD 2 instead forces you to splash around in the kiddie pool for six hours no matter how good you actually are at the game.

Kenti: Orcs Must Die, but at a measured and manageable pace. There must be some sort of Orc Murder Control Agency.

Hentzau: In order to qualify for your grown-up orc-killing licence you first have to pass the game’s version of a cycling proficiency test. Quite frankly if you hadn’t been around to poke me through co-op I think I might just have stayed in Endless mode. Except of course I couldn’t, because a lot of the trap unlocks are also linked to progression in the campaign. You basically have to play it in order to get the most out of the other modes. It’s more than a little bit obnoxious.

Kenti: That’s not to say that co-op wasn’t fun, at least in my case. I found it an incredibly enjoyable process and it certainly rates high in the Championship of Co-operative Games.

Hentzau: For the host, anyway.

Kenti: It is not my fault that my pristine broadband tubes are far superior to those a fleshling can install in themselves. Put some optics in your toes: then you can host.

Hentzau: My connection woes had sod-all to do with my internet, which runs literally every other co-op experience under the sun with a minimum of fuss. I am therefore forced to point the finger of blame for the game’s second-plus lag times, teleporting ogres, ice-skating orcs and regular disconnects squarely at OMD 2’s netcode. Maybe it was just me and everyone else is having a wonderful time with it, but as the non-host half of this partnership it put a significant damper on my co-op experience since it pretty much ensured I couldn’t rely on weapons. Like, at all. Couldn’t hit a thing with them; the crossbow headshot system is amazingly crap anyway but this basically reduced things to “fire randomly at horde at roughly head height, hope for the best”. There were even a couple of times where I had to query you as to whether or not my traps were working because I simply couldn’t tell.  It wasn’t impressive.

Kenti: So what has OMD2 added to the actual gameplay itself? Apparently more environmental traps, including the largely autonomous minecarts whizzing around the earlier levels and the player-activated spike-rollers, mine-carts full or hot coals and so forth. These are placed strategically across levels to give you just that little bit of an advantage against the relentless tide. Great! But they aren’t really useful for your typical destructive needs – they are not as reliable and conveniently located as traps you can place yourself, nor are they as precise as your personal attention to orc death – you can’t be sure it will take care of the problem. I ended up relying on traps I could place and spells I could shoot, the environmental traps were a curiosity and little more.

Hentzau: I think part of the problem here is that the pressure the orc hordes were exerting on us never got to the point where we needed the extra edge the environmental traps provided. They’re simply not necessary, and so while the automated minecarts are a nice little bonus the rest of the environment features went unused

Kenti: Even when the situation does get high pressured — such as on Endless — either I had the autonomous carts help thin out the hordes, or I had no time to set up the shots at the right time for a questionable amount of orc damage.

Hentzau: I’ve made good use of certain well-placed boulder traps and rolling logs on Endless, but on the whole I agree with you. Even the minecarts hinder more than they help, with the tracks taking up valuable floorspace and the carts themselves exploding your painstakingly-positioned boom barrels if they so much as graze them.

Kenti: They have also given us more placeable traps and weapons. There are some new traps that only the new character, the Sorceress, can use such as the Acid Trap or Ice Vent. I certainly found these more interesting than some of the more basic traps of the original (the War Mage still gets the original Arrow Trap and Tar Pit) and they formed the core of my arsenal against the orcs. The new Scepter of Domination was also great fun as it allowed me to briefly convert an orc to my control and cause them to explode in a deadly manner if killed. Entertaining AND a lifesaver. There were also general new traps such as the Haymaker (placed on the ceiling and invited to thrash orcs about in a circular manner) and…

Hentzau: Does this mean I can talk about SKULL REFUND ARMAGEDDON now?

Kenti: Er… go ahead. I’ll go grab a drink of oil. Is that what they put inside machines?

Hentzau: Okay, so, the Weavers from the first game have been defenestrated and replaced with the skull currency system. For the sequel you give your traps passive upgrades by spending skulls you earn through the simple process of playing the game. Skulls are earned through killing x number of orcs, surviving y number of waves, and finishing the level in z amount of time with Ω rift points remaining. In order to be fully effective as a War Mage/Sorceress you need enough skulls to fully upgrade ten traps/weapons/trinkets, which I think works out to about 250 in total. This takes a while, and makes the initial stages of OMD 2 a somewhat grindy system, but I don’t think it’s a bad change. It’s a change that I actually endorse, on the whole, since it means that even a failed Endless attempt will give you some skulls for your trouble.

Kenti: The upgrade system does add a little bit of extra faff that is usually a good break from the action. It’s the same reason that people like equipping things in RPGs or getting new guns or whatever else. You get to make your traps a little more effective, get slightly different effects from your weapons and generally do things a bit differently.

Hentzau: Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. If that’s how it had actually turned out, I would have zero problem with the system whatsoever. Unfortunately the entire thing is undone by one of the biggest own goals I can remember seeing in a recent game. The skull system is supposed to promote experimentation and a lot of testing traps together to find out what fits and which trap/weapon combos will lead to high scores and big bucks. The developers have made some provision for a player who tries out a new trap, decides he doesn’t like it, and wants some way to get back the skulls he invested in upgrading it. At any time, and as many times as you like, you can refund the skulls you spent putting new bells and whistles on your orc grinding machine.

Except, in a truly baffling example of a developer making things difficult for the player for no other reason than because they can, you can’t refund the skulls spent on just one trap. Oh no. That would be too simple. If you want those skulls back then you have to block refund everything. All the skulls you ever spent on every single trap you spent them on; if you hit that refund button your entire setup ends up totally erased. If you decide to try out the new Void Wall trap only to find it wanting and now want to put those skulls back into the Boom Barrel Dispenser, you have to wipe your entire finely-tuned trap spec out of existence and then spend five minutes trying to remember exactly where you spent those 250-odd skulls all over again. It’s such a pain to do this every single time you want to try out a new trap that it actively discourages experimentation and tinkering with different trap combos. I can’t think of a good reason why Robot would decide to do this, except maybe that they secretly hate everyone who buys their games and did it out of sheer spite.

Kenti: Now, either someone up the design chain didn’t think this through, or (knowing how development works) there was some sort of technical issue that prevented it being done the sane and sensible way. Not excusable though, because the end product simply discourages you from experimenting too much and thus tentatively keeps you away from a higher orc-murder count. The Orc Murder Control Agency strikes again?

Hentzau: I mean the actual gameplay part of OMD 2 is outstanding, it’s just that whenever you’re outside that the game is hell-bent on making things as difficult for you as possible. As I said, it’s utterly baffling to me why they would do this.

Kenti: Monsters! It’s not just orcs. We’ve been lying to you this whole dieorcblog. As in the first OMD, you get to kill things that are not orcs and they are not as optional as the name might suggest. There are the old ogres, kobolds, gnolls and the like as well as the new Earth Elementals, Trolls, Gnoll Grenadiers and Shamans. All of which are really really annoying in a positive way, pushing you to work that extra bit harder to destroy all things that are not you. Earth Elementals shatter into progressively smaller versions of themselves, trolls have predictable but really really annoying regeneration and Shamans… what do shamans do? I remember killing them but they never once upset the acid cart.

Hentzau: Shamans periodically resurrect any recently killed baddie that you haven’t gibbed to full health. This includes super-baddies like Armoured Ogres and Mountain Trolls, so they can potentially be a massive pain if left to their own devices.

Kenti: Ah. I think most of my eradication methods involve the utter disintegration of the subject in question. Robot efficiency you see.

Hentzau: I like most of the new monster additions. They keep you on your toes; elemental mitosis has to be dealt with in a controlled fashion, trolls must be burned or frozen to halt their regenerative abilities and the shamans… well, you just shoot those first.

Kenti: The flyers are still pointless though. They were just a nuisance that you either had to take care of personally or appoint lots of archer guardians to deal with in OMD and in OMD2… that’s pretty much the same. They don’t really add a good challenge, they have wings and you just make sure to kill them off and that’s that.

Hentzau: Eh, I found that while flyers were present they weren’t particularly overused, and all but the ice bats could be one-shotted by a blast of the ice amulet. Where monsters are concerned I reserve my ire for the cyclops mage, who I think must have been coded by the same guy responsible for skull refunds and the difficulty progression. Cyclops mages are very tough, fire homing missiles that will always hit you unless you get out of range (and they have a very long range), count as large monsters so they can’t be flipped or pushed into acid, and have tiny tiny heads making the freeze/headshot combo used to down most large enemies entirely useless. They are utterly unfun to fight and the only enemy I’d be entirely happy to never encounter again.

Kenti: Tell you what though – the story is absolutely roaring. There are trial, tribulations, problems that our brave protagonist and anti-hero must overc-

Hentzau: Oh be quiet. OMD 2 wisely doesn’t waste any time on a plot beyond “The Sorceress somehow survived and the War Mage is still a boorish dick, and together they kill orcs,” and the game is better for it.

Kenti: It is present but discreet. What little script they have written aims for levity and that’s just fine.

Hentzau: In the main, though, OMD 2 really is just a collection of well-designed orc killing boxes, something that’s particularly emphasised in Endless mode. Endless mode is, for me, the meat of any tower defence game, in which you set up the best system of traps you possibly can and have it gradually tested to destruction by ever-increasing hordes of baddies. It’s here that most of the trap experimentation really becomes necessary (although it’s still a massive pain) as each level requires a different set of traps to maximise your killing potential. My most recent discovery is that arrow traps will set off boom barrels from boom barrel dispensers, allowing you to instantly carpet bomb an area using the trap reset trinket power. Prior to that I was trying to perfect a spring trap/wall void combo to basically automatically toss the orcs into a black hole as they walked past it. This playing with different layouts and setups is, to me, the reason tower defence games exist, and the addition of Endless mode means it’s something that OMD finally caters for.

Kenti: Endless feels like a good challenge/puzzle and I can see myself working away at perfecting the orc-killing grids for some time. If that’s not quite enough to satisfy your orcs-be-gone needs, you can also play though the Classic levels from OMD if you also own OMD. I’ve been enjoying tackling them as the Sorceress as they present a slightly different challenge in this than they did in OMD – they are genuinely worth replaying.

Kenti: In the field of tower-defense hybrids it is certainly now the king sitting atop a mountainous throne of orc corpses. Sanctum was an excellent proof of the concept but it was dry and lifeless, sticking too rigidly to the conventions of the classic tower defense genre. Dungeon Defenders, although it went for the ‘cheery’ approach to its graphics and tone was all too obsessed with the loot rather than the levels and creative solutions to the orc problem. OMD’s aesthetic treatment is far more preferable too, being easier on the eye and softer on the ear, the only thing that OMD 2 doesn’t have that was great in Dungeon Defenders is bosses. Even there I am in two minds over just how much fun that actually added to the latter.

Hentzau: For my part II find OMD 2 to be a far more comprehensive experience compared to the first game. It still has some room for improvement/additional content via DLC or expansion packs (although if they don’t make patching out the absurd all-or-nothing skull refund system their first order of business those are very definitely going to remain unbought) but otherwise it feels pretty much done this time around.

Kenti: Would I disappoint and hurt you by saying that they have released the first patch already and they haven’t improved the skull refund issue?

Hentzau: That was a hotfixy patch. I expect it to be in the first proper patch they release, or there’s going to be trouble.

Kenti: I am sad this causes you no pain.

Hentzau: The skull refund system causes me pain, Kenti, and when I say “there’s going to be trouble” there what I actually mean is that I’m going to delete the game and then retire to my room to weep over a Diet Coke as I consider the intrinsic cruelty of the world and everything in it.

Kenti: Good enough for me.

The post Dieorcblog: Orcs Must Die 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Something that separates games from most other media is the effort put into adverts – game trailers are almost universally unmemorable, and so when Dead Island came out with this catchy, speed-switching… thing, the world sat up and noticed. The trailer was either incredibly cynical or just incredible depending on who you talked to, but it seemed to promise a different take on the zombie genre; one that was less arcade slaughter of undead hordes and which instead focused on it as a bleak and brutal battle for simple survival. It hinted at an emphasis on close and personal combat, improvised weaponry, and terror-induced flight, and looked like it might – might – be the first zombie FPS to do it as a true survival horror rather than treating its undead menagerie as just another set of monsters to be shot in the face.

Then Dead Island was actually released, and… uh, yeah. It really didn’t.

Hentzau: How much did you know about Dead Island before buying it, Jim?

Jim: I knew about that trailer, and I knew it was co-op, and that was the entirety of my thought process. You, me, two disposable minions, battling the undead? Score. You already owned it, obviously, owning all games ever, how had you found it the first time around?

Hentzau: Fun for five minutes, but a game which quickly outstayed its welcome and became dull and repetitive. I was playing through it with a co-op partner who still hasn’t forgiven me for giving up about halfway through until more people actually bought the damn thing and we could play with a full set of four. I thought that would make it far more interesting. Turned out I was right, but I had to wait nearly a year for the Steam summer sale to make a sufficient number of my friends lose all control of their critical faculties and pick it up on the cheap.

Jim: I think you do need a squad of four to get the most out of it

Hentzau: With two there’s far less scope for the unintentionally hilarious moments to emerge blinking into the daylight. I mean there were a couple, sure, but I don’t recall us wedging quite so many cars the first time through.

Jim: There is even the option to play the whole thing in singleplayer but, well, I’m not sure I could endure than. Having said so much about what it promised to be, we should start by saying what it is: Dead Island is a four-player open world zombie smashing simulator. One thing they got damn right in that video was how much you’d rely on improvised melee weaponry. My first weapon was an oar which was just lying around when I stumbled out onto the beach for the first time. Whacking zombies upside the head with a piece of wood never really got old for me, I think the default melee system, though simple, was really enjoyable.

Hentzau: There’s actually a secret, more complicated melee system that you can turn on in the options. The default one is fine, though; point crosshairs at body part, wait for it to lock on, and then do your very best to smash or remove it with whatever you’re currently holding, whether it be a razor-sharp machete or a hatstand you picked up on your way through the hotel.

Jim: And I liked the little additions they made, the jumpkick that would knock any zombie down to make their evisceration that much easier and the glory of the tackle: sprint into a line of zombies, knocking them flying. As such a huge portion of this game was the indiscriminate slapping of the undead, it was important that it worked.

Hentzau: Don’t forget the kicking. And the stamping. Four survivors clustered around a prone zombie furiously putting the boot in while it’s defenceless until someone finally purées its head by stamping on it. Wonderful.

Jim: Those zombies were mannequins for our displeasure. You could hack off limbs, stave in skulls, burn off their skin, electrocute ‘em (though shouldn’t that actually help the undead?), and, uh, make them sick. And then after you’ve gleefully crushed a small horde, the trusty stick with which you did it disintegrates.

Hentzau: I actually didn’t like that the weapons were so fragile. If they’d gone for the proper survival horror approach everyone thought they would then it would have been fine, but since Dead Island turned out to be about 1001 Ways To Kill Your Zombie it ended up just being an annoyance that got in the way of the zombie dismemberment.

Jim: We’re going to be using the word zombie more than it’s ever been used before here, aren’t we. Can we agree on a code word or something?

Hentzau: Well there aren’t too many synonyms for zombie. After you’ve run through “undead” a few times you’ve got nowhere to go. Vitally-challenged? Otherwise-alive?

Jim: But yes, I hated that I was constantly looking for workbenches to repair my stick – obviously it’s a bit of an immersion breaker that your finely-crafted machete, designed for hacking through undergrowth for years, can chop through roughly a dozen of the breath-impaired before you have to fix it up, but more than that, it meant I was almost hesitant to use my most amusing, most destructive weapons in case I needed them later for a bigger boss.

Hentzau: Okay, this zombie thing is definitely going to get silly. Shall we just call them potatoes? Or other assorted farm produce?

Jim: Deal. Of course you could also use the workbenches to create new weaponry to assist in your ruthless strawberry harvest, what did you make of that?

Hentzau: It struck me as a rather pointless addition to the game. I mean I get that they wanted to have you scavenging raw materials from the environment to make bigger and better potato peelers, but in order to make this worth it — in order to make it matter — there needed to be some proper differentiation between the different weapon types. As it is you’ve got your electrocuting weapons and your poison weapons (what) and your fire weapons, but the way each of these things is implemented in game is exactly the same: a small amount of bonus elemental damage, and then occasionally your upgraded weapon will produce a stun effect where the watermelon you’ve just whacked in the face gets stunned by an electric shock or bends double retching its guts out. Animations aside, though, these stun effects are functionally identical, meaning there’s no actual difference between an electric hammer and a poison mace. Your only real considerations are dictated by the base weapon type: blunt or sharp, and one-handed or two-handed.

Jim: I disliked this disconnect between what a weapon looked like and what it did. You were constantly levelling up, your enemies were constantly levelling up, and so that amazing-looking sledgehammer you’d picked up in chapter two was now about as much use as a chocolate sledgehammer, nowhere near as good as that wrench you found a few chapters later. What this did was add in this Diabloesque system where you were constantly looking at sticks on the ground to see if they were better than the stick you currently had. I hate that, I’d grown accustomed to my mace.

Hentzau: The real-world environment makes it logically inconsistent, too. In Diablo you might pick up a dagger that does more damage than your two-handed sword, and you think: so what? It might be a really super-duper awesome magic dagger. In Dead Island you can pick up a stick that inexplicably does more damage than your painstakingly constructed chainsaw-cum-baseball bat. I mean, what, is the stick made of neutronium or something?

Jim: But overall I was happy with the fighting, the enemies were just varied enough and the attacks I could do were just varied enough too. The skills you can unlock as you level up are a bit of a mixed bag, some of them are fun (tackle! fury! headstomping!) and some of them are just “Numbers get bigger”. I think there was scope for far less mindless increase of numbers and far more slow expansion of abilities but oh well. And then, suddenly: guns.

Hentzau: I’m not going to diss the appearance of guns because they gave my otherwise-useless throwing-things character something to do. They’re not as game-breaking as you might expect, either; ammo is scarce, and unless you’re using a shotgun aimed squarely at the head the shambling hordes of leeks roaming the island have a tendency to simply shrug off gunfire. Melee weapons are still your best option for taking those out. The reason guns exist is so that you can battle the inevitable human enemies on even terms. Two or three headshots will take out an armed goon with ease; however, the gunplay in this game is somewhat tedious, and takes on a faint air of absurdity given how strictly the game adheres to its arbitrary rules. Guns are for PEOPLE, and melee weapons are for VEGETABLES, and if you throw a fire axe at an unfriendly bandit’s head it’ll take off about a tenth of his health and he’ll happily run around with it lodged in his skull while continuing to shoot at you.

Jim: My basic theory on Dead Island, right, is that it’s only good when there are no other humans in-shot. When you weren’t fighting them (it was just about possible to tackle and then headstomp them but I took a lot of damage in the process), they were giving you the most tedious sidequests of all time. When they weren’t giving you those sidequests, they were leaping through plotholes the size of the Yucatan peninsula. Enough of this praise of the mechanics, they’re basically fine, let’s talk plot.

Hentzau: This may end up being a rather brief conversation, because even after reading the plot summary on Wikipedia I still have no idea what was going on. You spend most of the game being ordered around on a series of pointless, nonsensical tasks that have no connection to one another. The four “heroes” of the game have no end goal of their own, they’re just there to take orders from NPCs in the hope that they might fork over a slightly better weapon at the end of the quest chain.

Jim: I mean you missed a few bits so maybe I should summarise: We’re at this lighthouse, and there’s a load of onions, so we head into the town to find the mayor but then there’s a load of turnips. Our only ticket off this rock is a mysterious voice who tells us to meet him at the prison, so we find the guy who knows where the prison is. At first, he’s all “I don’t know what a prison is” and instead takes us on a pointless journey into the jungle (fighting off vicious native pumpkins) where we rescue a girl of some description, and then he remembers where the prison is. So we go there, cabbages galore, and we meet the guy and escape. Anyway this takes twenty hours.

Hentzau: Twenty hours! God, I actually can’t believe they padded it out for so long. For reference, that’s about as long as a single playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas took me. Except in that game I was exploring a rich, detailed, well-written world. Here I was switching on an endless series of loudspeakers, or sending emails to a guy’s parents, just because someone told me to.

Jim: Again, there’s this disconnect between what you *see* and what you *do*. Dead Island couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be serious or silly and ended up sort of lodged between the two (just like most of our cars). The mechanics of what you were doing were simple brainless fun, driving cars through a horde of rutabagas, stomping on skulls like it was a new dancestep. But then you have this plot contrasting to that, where they’re trying to spin a heartrending ballad of a tale, and it just doesn’t work. There’s a girl you pick up in the first act who has to go through that standard asparagus movie routine of killing her dad after he turned. But in game, she was used as an excuse to get us to do thousands of miles of detours, stealing our armoured truck. So rather than being subtly moved by the plight of this poor young thing, we as a group hated her. It was all very bizarre, I felt like I was playing one game to the cutscenes of another.

Hentzau: The cutscenes are so disjointed with what’s happening in the game that they do occasionally become comic masterpieces. Like the guy with the boat who doesn’t know a route through the floating minefield surrounding the island prison, but then suddenly he does. This fiendishly complex route that only he understands the full intricacies of is shown, via cutscene, to consist of nothing more than a long stick which he uses to push mines out of the way before the boat hits them.

Jim: I think the fact that it is co-op means we’re going to be harsher with the plot, I feel like I might have swallowed some of this in singleplayer. But because there’s four of you, all spotting these massive flaws and plotholes, keeping spirits up by abusing the characters who are stopping our progression, well, I dunno. It becomes part of the entertainment.

Hentzau: Certainly my attitude towards Jin switched from resigned tolerance the first time through to a visceral, deep-seated loathing of her character after it was repeatedly pointed out just what a millstone she was round our necks. In-game she acts as the party mule. They could have replaced her with an actual, literal donkey and it would have elicited more compassion and empathy from us as players.

Jim: I think, though, that this sort of unpolished finish does have its benefits. Aside from the fact we were able to have a great time ripping up the plot, there were all these moments of unscripted hilarity that emerged, because of the scope of what had been attempted and the sandbox mentality they’d attempted it with.

Hentzau: Oh god yes. The game is so, so rough, and it’s got more than its fair share of glitches, but this just increased the entertainment factor even more. Like the camera zooming in on a certain NPC as they gave you an impassioned plea for help, only for the effect to be somewhat spoiled by the sight of your three co-op partners doing Irish dancing in the background. Or any time we had to interact with something. In first person view, it’s all very well-animated. To another person it looks like you’re holding out your hand palm down and concentrating really really hard before opening the door or activating the switch through sheer force of will, like Luke raising the X-wing from the swamp on Dagobah.

Jim: Or the fact that they gave some objects infinite mass, so you could kill your partner by kicking a beachball at them or hurling a plastic garden chair.

Hentzau: There was one occasion where we loaded gas into the back of a truck for a quest and set off on our merry way back to the dropoff point. Except in a tragic lapse of judgement, my co-op partners had decided to let me drive. “Don’t wedge the car,” they said just before we left. I didn’t make it past the first corner before somehow managing to jam the car between a wall and a lamppost, with my attempts to extricate it merely sending the game physics into overdrive and causing it to creep slowly up the side of the lamppost. We had to quickly unload the gas before the car became inaccessible and carry it the whole way back.

Jim: Daring the NPC to ask what we’d done with the car, yeah. So, overall, I really enjoyed playing the game despite its many, many flaws, and I think that the way they tried to give you this huge environment to wander around doing sidequests was a big part of that. I reckon if they’d gone for a more constricted, linear slog then it would certainly have been more polished, there’d be a much smoother ride, but it just wouldn’t be as fun.

Hentzau: The game definitely had a dishevelled and unkempt sort of charm to it. I wasn’t enjoying it anywhere near as much towards the end, but that’s mainly down to the fact that it’s about twice the length it probably should be, and that most of that length is obvious padding like the sewer levels.

Jim: Would you recommend it to other people? What would your caveats be?

Hentzau: It’s not so much that the price of the game is an issue when it turns up fairly regularly for 75% off on Steam. The main barrier to entry is that you need to find at least three other people also willing to buy the game and invest twenty hours in finishing it.

Jim: Sure, it’s going to be dependent on finding that committed cadre. I reckon you want to get it done quickly, too, a big gap would kill the momentum. I’d comfortably put this in my top co-op list but that’s more down to a dearth of good co-op games.

Hentzau: I think my main caveat would be that it does have to be played in this very specific sort of way in order to get the most out of it, and if you can’t it’s probably not worth doing. If you can, though, knock yourself out. Or maybe let the courgettes do it for you.

Jim’s making good progress on his epic journey through his Steam backlog, as you can see here. Also many thanks go to Bodge, Rolly and Kinsman for their sterling work as hired goons. You can staff my secret volcano lair any time.

The post Diablog: Dead Island. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After the last diablog was so rapturously received (by which I mean three people said they liked it) Jim and I decided to team up to review another game we’d both been playing recently: Bioshock 2.

Jim: Sometimes you’re watching TV, around about the hour when you’re starting to give up on being a productive citizen, and you’ll catch a glimpse of a half-remembered childhood hero, trying to make it big in America as a singer, or filling in the rubbish cooking quotient of Celebrity Masterchef. “Gosh”, you think, “are they still going?” Similar thoughts crossed my mind when Bioshock 2 flashed up in the Steam sales. I mean, Bioshock had been big when it was released. Big Daddies were an iconic design of 2007, the incredibly meaningful choices were more heavily trumpeted than the walls of Jericho. Then everyone played it, realised a lot of that was blustery bluff that masked a reasonably pleasant, novel-looking shooter, and moved on with their lives. 2K weren’t done, however, and brought out Bioshock 2 a few years later, to a chorus of world-weary shrugs. What the hell, it was £3.75, I reasoned. Let’s see what it’s like.

Hentzau: The road to hell is paved with cheap Steam purchases. I enjoyed Bioshock for what it was; an inoffensive enough shooter that didn’t do anything to justify stealing the “shock” nomenclature from System Shock, and which ended up being an average game attached to a spectacular opening as a result. The sequel, though. The sequel’s hook is that you’re playing as a Big Daddy, one of the lumbering armoured juggernauts of destruction that features so prominently on the publicity material for both games and which is the Bioshock franchise’s signature monster. How could they possibly screw that up?

Jim: You still had these memories, didn’t you, of battling those diving monstrosities in the first game. I loved that I had to work up to those kinds of fights, setting elaborate plans and traps and just generally thinking before I shot.

Hentzau: Oh yes. Dodging red-hot rivets, losing half my health to the drill attack — part of the morbid attraction of that kind of power asymmetry is that after dying for the umpteenth time the player mutters under their breath about what they’d be able to do if they had those weapons and that obscene health pool. Bioshock 2 was supposed to fulfil this wish; the concept as stated is pretty much the dream of anyone who played the original Bioshock.

Jim: And so you wake up as said mini-godzilla, espy a splicer bearing down on you and begin to laugh at his puny gun and his puny armour and…oh, you’re dead. Bioshock 2 did not trust you with that level of power, so it made a compromise – you can keep some of the attributes of the Big Daddies, but not all. So out go the obscene levels of armour and health, the powerful attacks and the inbuilt rocket launcher, but you can keep the incredibly slow movement. And the drill.

Hentzau: Except the drill now does sod-all damage to begin with. And has an ammo supply. Which, when depleted, forces you to clumsily flail at nearby enemies with all the brute strength of an enraged flamingo. A power fantasy this is not.

Jim: Basically, they decided that you should play a human who just happens to be wearing a fancy suit. You were forced to mainly use guns, to go for headshots, to be precise and stealthy and everything one of those massive fuckers definitely is not.

Hentzau: The in-game excuse for this is that the player is supposed to be an earlier model of Big Daddy, one which is, and I quote, “a more streamlined and agile type of Big Daddy, meaning they are not as heavily armored, but are faster and more maneuverable”. They got the not as heavily armoured part right, but strangely they forgot the part where the player was supposed to be faster and more maneuverable. In Bioshock 2 — at least to begin with — you move at the speed of a wounded sloth. Just getting from point A to point B is a chore, and you can forget actually trying to strafe or dodge in any way, which is kind of a pain when every single enemy in the game will take off at least a third of your health bar in one hit. There were times when I wished the game was third-person because it would have been quite comical to see this hulking behemoth being beaten to death by two thugs wielding iron pipes.

Jim: And so the game’s response to that difficulty is to literally slap a band-aid on it. There’s a lot of medpacks around and you guzzle them like there’s no tomorrow. It was rare I could make it through an area without needing one or two, and I know I was playing it on hard difficulty (because this year isn’t onerous enough), but it’s weird that you had that problem even on medium and being the world’s greatest manshooter.

Hentzau: Well I probably wouldn’t go that far, although it’s worth mentioning the aiming reticule is a massive empty circle which actively dissuades precision targeting. But yes, even on medium I was chugging at least one health pack after every fight. At the beginning of the game, before I had a full stock of gene tonics and health upgrades and my Big Daddy was at his most fragile, I even dipped into the difficulty settings to check that I hadn’t accidentally managed to misclick Hard when I’d started it. But no, this was medium. I really didn’t feel like I should be coming out of a fight with a couple of basic enemies nearly half-dead. This absurd level of vulnerability is completely incongruous with what you are supposed to be, and did an awful lot to turn me against Bioshock 2 from the outset.

Jim: Given your size and noise made it impossible to get the drop on them until you get that one tonic that makes you invisible, yeah. The other way they tried to balance it was via the vita-chambers, presumably. If the difficulty was too high, if you ended up dying a lot, well, didn’t matter, you could just jump out of that magical tube, sparkling new. I loathe the very idea of those things, though, it takes away all tension in a fight if you know you can never actually die..

Hentzau: Admittedly it’s just an active gameplay substitute for your average FPS player’s standard operating procedure, which is to quicksave every sixty seconds. However, I feel the vita chambers are more insidious than that because they basically remove the penalty of failure that underpins all FPS games. Die in Bioshock and — oh no! — you have a thirty second walk back to where you were, with everything else being exactly as you left it. Actually it’s often less because the damn things are so ubiquitous.

Jim: I did disable them and quicksave like the spawny git I am, but I still curled my mouth into a dismissive sneer every time I walked past one. And that’s just the fundamentals of fighting, there’s an awful lot that Bioshock staples on in order to try to keep these things exciting. Plasmids, for example, were one of the big selling points of the original game, a sort of organic magic that, once again, Big Daddies didn’t have but you do for no reason this time because you’re special.

Hentzau: Did you ever use any plasmid that wasn’t the electro-stunning attack?

Jim: Occasionally I had to melt ice to get some ammo, and I quite liked the one that summoned security bots, but honestly it was a chore switching between those things in combat. If an enemy chucked a bin at you, I estimate he’d have to do it from around thirty miles away to give you enough time to switch to the telekinesis one to fling it back.

Hentzau: This is especially annoying when a lot of the mini-boss fights are built on using specific plasmids within a split-second window. Electrocute the Big Sister to stop her crawling over the walls! Catch her firebombs and throw them back at her with telekinesis! There were all these special attacks that I was supposed to block with plasmids, but which I had to soak up because I had no chance of switching to the correct plasmid and firing it off correctly in the heat of the moment.

Jim: Most of the fights in the end do devolve into a sort of frantic slow-motion backwards jog, firing off rivets in the general vicinity of the opponents heads and hoping they connected. Occasionally you’d spam out some electricity and see what happened. The key thing missing, I suppose, is control. You never felt master of the fight (until right near the end), you were this breakable, endangered diver boy who was constantly hiding in alcoves.

Hentzau: The thing that gets me about this is that there are a couple of gene tonics — Drill Lurker and Natural Camouflage — that are actively supposed to promote stealthy gameplay. Stealth. Gameplay. In a game about a one-ton armoured bastard carrying around guns roughly the size of a filing cabinet. The approach to the whole thing is just so conventional and completely backwards to what it should be.

Jim: You’re also an investigative Big Daddy, don’t forget. Early on in the game you stumble across a camera and the most ludicrous concept of all is introduced: research.

Hentzau:  This is yet another of many, many things which have been recycled wholesale from Bioshock. It worked in the first game when you were a stranger to Rapture; you’d never seen any of these mutated monstrosities before and the existence of a magical doohickey that let you find out their strengths and weaknesses made thematic — if not exactly logical — sense. Here, though, you are a mutated monstrosity, and instead of laying waste to your foes you’re wandering around taking holiday snaps of them so that you can gather research points to get a small bonus to damage or whatever.

Jim: It was another layer of ballache onto the already horrible mini-boss fights that you were constantly having, too, a couple of times I’d sweat my way through some big daddy fight only to find that I’d forgotten to get the research done at the start, which I knew I was going to need. And let’s not forget that amazing research bonus for the thuggish splicer.

Hentzau: Ah yes, that fantastically complex technology that you had to perfect through hours of painstaking observation and analysis of your opponents’ behaviour in combat: a bigger wallet.

Jim: I was already crying with laughter when I realised there was a wallet cap, and that you could expand it just sent me over the edge. Back to those bossfights, though. Bioshock’s marketing was all about the confrontations with the Big Daddies, as we’ve already mentioned. Bioshock 2, unsurprisingly, is exactly the same. How many times would you say you’d slogged through that exact same fight?

Hentzau: Fifteen, I think. Or at least, that’s roughly the number of Little Sisters you can rescue/murder, which means that’s the number of Big Daddies you have to kill.

Jim: And then every time you kill them you go through two more identical “stand here and get rushed by waves of baddies” fights as your adopted Little Sister gathers Adam from appropriately glowy corpses for you.

Hentzau: That’s if you made the decision to save them, mind. Killing them presumably circumvented the whole tedious process, as did just stuffing them into a vent straight away (the game doesn’t tell you this is an option, though). However, in order to get over the difficulty hump and become less fragile you need gene tonics, which means you need Adam, which means you need to stand over the Little Sister and protect her from hordes of splicers while she gathers Adam. Skipping straight to vent-stuffing is only a viable option after you’ve unlocked most or all of the plasmids/tonics and you don’t need the Adam any more. It’s a remarkably unpleasant, repetitive gameplay mechanic which, yet again, is lifted wholesale from Bioshock 1. Except that game at least had the good sense not to make you do a pair of tower defence missions every time you wanted to save one.

Jim: Splendidly, about halfway through the game they run out of ideas and remove even the pretence of that gathering being optional, when that newspaper man tells you that he’ll only lift the barriers if you rescue three little sisters. Because they…..have….a genetic memory or….just do it alright. Your objective is to do the optional metagame objective.

Hentzau: Here’s what I don’t get, right; Rapture is apparently a functioning society because you’ve got all these characters who have survived there for years with no problems, and this guy sends you after the Little Sisters because he’s concerned with his standing in this society and doesn’t want certain plot-sensitive information to become common knowledge. Yet the Rapture I walked through was a leaky dystopian hellhole full of monsters. I doubt they’d have cared much about his dirty laundry.

Jim: My only theory on that is that the only people alive now are people who managed to lock themselves in a booth. Almost every character you interact with has placed themselves behind the unbreakable plexiglass so presumably they can’t be got at. It’s maybe even more worrying that the only time you’re allowed into a room with a person who isn’t a raving monster, is when the game is leaning on you very heavily to kill them.

Hentzau:  It was like the game was telling me I couldn’t be trusted to be left alone with these people, that I had to be supervised and separated from them at all times lest I do something stupid. Your interactions with the NPCs in this game are basically a series of prison visits, conducted through a glass screen and a two-way intercom system. And that’s why, every time the game wanted me to kill someone, I didn’t. Not out of any moral concerns or because I was trying to get a certain ending, but because it was my way of giving two fingers to the developers and their ridiculously constrictive, on-rails level design.

Jim: The whole game was “follow this compass arrow”. Not because it was interesting to explore, not because the world invited a sense of wonder, not even because you wanted to get to the bottom of this awful plot (and it was so tremendously awful), but just because it was there. I was paying as much attention as I could and, honestly, I still don’t know what the plot was about. I understood the words they were using, yeah, but it followed so little logical sense. Despite the hundred little recorded diaries, the constant intercom announcements, all I picked up was a constant squabbling static.

Hentzau: There’s one part towards the end of the game that’s particularly absurd; you find a message from a man who knows he’s going insane and wants you to kill him. To this end, he has left you detailed instructions on exactly how to do that. Except they’re not all in one place, because that would be far too simple and — dare I say it — logical. Instead he’s decided to scatter them across a pair of levels in easily-digestable bite-size chunks that automatically play whenever you finish the next step of his ridiculously elaborate plan. It’s an approach which certainly avoids taxing the attention span of the player, but which is absolutely nonsensical when placed in the context of the game world. How do the messages know to play only for you? Do they play for every random splicer who walks by? And why did he split the plan up anyway?

Jim: That’s it, though, the game world makes no sense, it has no structure. Bioshock was a game that was actually fun to explore, you had the pleasure palace, the run-down slums, the farms, the orphanage and so on. I remember more standout interesting moments from the original game, and I last played that about four years ago. The only things they’ve changed, they’ve made worse. Hacking, for example…

Hentzau:  In the UK we have something called a driving theory test which you have to pass before they let you behind the wheel of a car for real. Part of this test is hazard perception, where you watch a video of somebody driving and click the mouse button whenever you see a potential hazard. Clicking the mouse button too late will result in failure but — hilariously — so will being particularly observant and clicking the mouse button early as soon as you spot the danger. Instead you have to click the mouse button when the person who made the test thinks you should spot the danger. And this is the best analogy I have for Bioshock 2’s hacking minigame, which sets you the pulse-pounding challenge of clicking the mouse button inside a series of steadily decreasing time-windows three or four times per hack. I know Bioshock’s Pipemania minigame got a lot of stick, but even that was nowhere near as braindead as this is. And of course the worst thing about this is that everything in the game can be hacked. Everything. They even introduce a remote hacking tool so that you can hack places that would normally be inaccessible to hacking!

Jim: Hacking on the go for today’s busy professionals who are trying to juggle their home and work commitments.

Hentzau: It’s utter garbage, it really is, and failure either giving you a damaging shock or summoning security bots to kill you is just the shit icing on a cake made of shit.

Jim: Okay that’s a great big list of complaints there, and they all boil down to the utter lack of innovation or care about this gameworld, relative to the original. What Bioshock 2 mainly is, is a poor-quality copy. So many of these things we’re complaining about have just been transferred straight across, apparently without thought on how they’d fit into this alternate viewpoint. Bioshock was if nothing else, glorious to look at and explore. Bioshock 2 is a mess.

Hentzau: Is there anything you liked about the game, Jim?

Jim: I liked the seaweed. The seaweed was ridiculously pretty, there were these shoals of fish swimming about that looked like real shoals. You?

Hentzau: There was a bit where you’re walking around an animatronic display about the building of Rapture and this rickety dummy scientist raises his arms in celebration after making a discovery, only for a pair of giant hands to descend from the ceiling and take it from him. That was good.

Jim: Yeah there were a couple of really nice moments. You get a brief glimpse of Rapture at its peak, right at the end, a swathe of mahogany, velvet and dinner parties, and after tramping through this rusty tin can for many, many hours, it was a lovely sight. I would also add that, once you threw enough upgrade juice at it, the combat finally became a little bit fun, you finally felt like this halfway-invincible ironclad.

Hentzau: If the difficulty curve had started there I’d have had far fewer complaints about the game. As it is it’s ass-backwards; starts out diamond-hard and steadily becomes easier as you unlock more passive bonuses and expand the amount of ammo you can carry. It wasn’t until the end of the game that I felt I had enough bullets to really go hog wild on the basic splicers instead of saving all the good stuff for the inevitable miniboss fights.

Jim: Ah well, there’s always Bioshock Infinite eh?

Hentzau: I’LL KILL YOU.

Has Jim crossposted this to his own blog this time? Who knows. You should probably go there and find out.

The post Diablog: Bioshock 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.