God, I’m disappointed with Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Not because it is particularly bad (it isn’t), or because it’s an almost exact carbon copy of Rise Of The Tomb Raider (it is, even down to the plot), but because I really think this incarnation of Lara Croft would be a much happier woman if she gave up the sham cover story of stealing ancient artifacts from their rightful owners and just accepted the fact that she really, really likes killing people.

I hammered on this point again and again in my Rise review, but Shadow really does push it to the point where it’s no longer a joke and is actively frustrating. Maybe it wouldn’t have gotten to me as much if there hadn’t been pre-release publicity about how Lara was finally going to “become the Tomb Raider” (as if the two hundred people she killed in the first game somehow weren’t enough to instantly qualify her). Maybe it wouldn’t have been such an issue if the Steam page didn’t have an embedded video of a mud-covered Lara stalking some generic mercenaries through the jungle like she was the fucking Predator. That made Shadow look interesting! It’s always bugged me how none of these games acknowledge just how lethal their protagonists are; I played through all of the Uncharted games last year and it was pretty ridiculous how the dichotomy between “Nathan Drake, devoted family man” and “Nathan Drake, Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse” was never explored or even mentioned. I was up for playing a game that stopped tiptoeing around the issue, finally embraced the reality that Lara Croft is the deadliest woman alive, and treated her with the respect she deserves.

Instead I got yet another installment of the reboot’s tiresome, wishy-washy, uncertain Lara Croft who has received almost no character development over the course of five years and three games. This Lara Croft — the one who shows up for the cutscenes — is severely at odds with the Lara Croft that I’m actually playing, the one who indiscriminately slaughters her enemies in a variety of horrible ways in pursuit of ancient artifacts. The playable Lara isn’t a very nice person, but she’s at least competent. She’s at least sure of herself. And it says a lot about the quality of Shadow’s writing that I would much rather have this deranged serial killer as my main character instead of a woman who contracts severe cases of Plot Stupid whenever the writers have backed themselves into a corner and need some way to continue to the next set piece. I’m just so tired of games where I spend forty-five minutes doing a bunch of platforming and puzzle solving to retrieve some artifact, only for the game to switch to a cutscene in which the protagonist suddenly regresses to a helpless infant while the villain swoops in to steal the MacGuffin. If there were any consistency with the character I spend the majority of my time with in the game she’d have shanked all of them before he’d gotten ten seconds into his tiresome monologuing and would have strung him up from the nearest tree, and to have to sit there while the developers tell me the last hour of gameplay was effectively a waste of my time makes me hate Lara, it makes me hate the story, and it doesn’t exactly get me thinking too kindly of Eidos Montreal, either.

I really wasn’t kidding when I said Shadow is a copy of Rise Of The Tomb Raider. It follows the same plot points almost beat-for-beat: Lara is in pursuit of a magical artifact (again) but gets interrupted by a Generic Secret Society called Trinity (again). In her pursuit of Trinity she gets stranded in a remote wilderness (again) and finds a hidden city whose inhabitants mysteriously speak perfect English (again). She makes friends with the city’s leaders and goes spelunking around various tombs to try and find yet another artifact (again), and encounters a group of Generic Monsters who live underground and who are tasked with protecting the artifact (again).  Finally, after finding the artifact (and promptly getting it stolen in a cutscene) she faces off against the leader of Trinity in a terrible bossfight (again), and then there is a spectacularly idiotic ending cutscene¹ in which she demonstrates she’s learned absolutely nothing from her tomb raiding experiences. Now, obviously this is lazy writing – it would be foolish to expect anything else from a Tomb Raider game — but I wasn’t prepared for Shadow to plumb quite such depths as it ends up doing; it is, in fact, the worst writing I have seen in a videogame since Splinter Cell: Blacklist, complete with a villain who might as well be called Dr Not Appearing In This Game for all the presence he he has during its 20-odd hour length, since he only ever shows up when the writers need him to take something of Lara’s, or for the end bossfight. Probably the worst indictment of Shadow’s writing is this: it makes Rise’s plot look competently written, and the original Tomb Raider reboot looks like fucking Proust when you sit it next to Shadow.

Gameplay-wise Shadow is, again, almost exactly the the same as Rise. It’s traded the snowy climes of Rise for the Peruvian jungle, and there’s a new mechanic where Lara can cover herself in mud to conceal herself from enemies with thermal goggles. This is a perfectly decent addition and having Lara burst out of a mud-covered wall to stick a knife in somebody’s ear is very entertaining for the, oh, call it two times that it’s actually used in the game. There have been some other additions to her repertoire of war crimes, such as:

• Going full-blown chemical weapons by manufacturing poison gas grenades.
• Booby-trapping corpses with IEDs.
• Firing a rope arrow through somebody’s chest and stringing them up to a tree as a warning to the others.
• Splitting out some of the skill tree abilities from Rise (such as bullet time when aiming a weapon) to a set of craftable hallucinogens that she can ingest using the D-pad to jack herself up during combat.

All of which are things that totally normal human woman Lara Croft would do, and not a drugged-up mass-murderer whose insatiable bloodlust is driving her to methods that would get her put on trial in the Hague if the civilized world were to ever learn about what she gets up to on her little field trips.

Still, Shadow is fine in terms of gameplay, I think. It cannot help but be fine, seeing how little has been changed from Rise, which was itself a perfectly fine game; Eidos Montreal even do something a little bit smart by taking just two hours to bring Shadow Lara’s moveset up to almost full parity with what Rise Lara had at the end of the game (rope arrows, grapple axe etc.), which does a lot to minimise the classic Metroid problem of having the main character lose all of her armour and equipment at the start of each new game. It also attempts to put a little less emphasis on Lara’s murder habit by having fewer encounters with human enemies compared to Rise — but this ends up backfiring, because it doesn’t particularly tone down the amount of combat at all. It just means that most of it is now Lara versus those Generic Monsters², who are far less interesting to fight because they just run at you and try to slash you with their claws. There’s no opportunity for stealth in these monster-battling segments, meaning that most of the new stuff that’s been added — such as the mud and the tree kills — ends up being underused.

And because the new features aren’t given much of a chance to shine, Shadow ends up coming across as rather more derivative than it would be otherwise. It doesn’t just feel like a copy, it feels like a copy of a copy, like more has been lost in the translation from Rise than there really should have been. The platforming is back, but there’s no new spin on it; Lara climbs the same collection of pitted rock faces and shit-covered³ ledges as she does in the previous two games, and it’s strictly a way of getting from A to B. The challenge tombs are back and they follow the same formula as Rise — a platformy bit to get into the tomb, followed by a puzzle of some sort — but they follow it a little too closely, to the point where every tomb feels exactly the same. There’s no Byzantine galley encased in ice here, no yawning chasm pulled straight from the ending of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Just a set of recycled assets and puzzle elements that barely tickle your critical thinking bits; there was only one tomb that took me more than two minutes to figure out, and that was because it was so overwhelmingly brown my visual cortex hadn’t managed to parse a water wheel as actually being a water wheel. It’s all a fairly adequate experience when you actually play it, but it feels like “adequate” was all Eidos Montreal was ever aiming for. Because it appears to have no ambition to be anything more than a rehash of Rise, Shadow Of The Tomb Raider comes across as an exercise in calculated mediocrity.

That’s probably a little unfair on Eidos Montreal. Shadow Of The Tomb Raider has an extremely odd narrative structure that has all the hallmarks of something that’s been the victim of an overambitious deadline and which has been hastily assembled out of whatever gameplay segments happened to be deemed completable by the time that deadline rolled around. Its two best bits feel horribly out of place both because they’re atomic segments that have been spliced in mid-story that have almost no effect on the narrative, and because they display significantly more imagination than the entire rest of the game put together. The first is a flashback to a young Lara solving puzzles in Croft Manor, which is lent some charm by her ongoing narration of what she’s doing as an adventure with herself in the starring role, but I found the second more intriguing because I suspect it’s more along the lines of what the whole of Shadow would have been if Eidos Montreal had had their way. It involves Lara getting ambushed by Trinity and temporarily losing most of her equipment, and what was interesting about this was that she finally lost her self-restraint as well. What follows is a fantastic half hour sequence where Lara kills her way through the entire Trinity search-and-destroy party, butchering dozens of goons without a single iota of pity or remorse and generally acting the way I’ve been wanting her to act for at least one and a half games now.  Towards the end of it Trinity throws armoured cars and helicopter gunships at her and it barely slows her down, and it’s at this point that their morale shatters and they start outright panicking, which is the first and only time in the entire series that anyone has ever had an appropriate reaction to fighting Lara Croft. Scripted as it is, combat-heavy though it might be, it feels like a sequence from a much better game, and one that I would have been far more interested in playing.

And then, when Lara is standing atop the wreckage of an oil refinery surrounded by dozens of corpses and the shattered hulks of the war machines that tried to stop her, her companion and serial enabler Jonah arrives like he’s just stepped out of a taxi and isn’t happening upon a scene of indescribable slaughter, which is cutscene Lara’s cue to show up again and have a thirty second emotional breakdown before carrying on like the whole episode never happened. From this point onwards Shadow’s colours are firmly nailed to the mast of Just Being Average. It largely succeeds in this. Like I said in the opening, it’s not a bad game. I’ve played enough bad games to know that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is not one of them; even in its weirdly disjointed final form it has enough intrinsic competency to be moderately engaging throughout most of its 20-hour length, if you’re into the kind of thing that it’s doing. The problem is, if you are into that kind of thing then I don’t understand why you’re not playing Uncharted instead; unlike much of the gaming media I don’t worship the ground Nathan Drake walks on and I think the series is incredibly flawed⁴ for something that’s held up as one of Sony’s flagship franchises, but there’s no getting around the fact that Uncharted 4 does everything Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is doing but better, and it did it first⁵. Not to mention the fact that Rise Of The Tomb Raider did everything Shadow did better, and first. If you must play a third-person platforming-puzzling adventure game with extreme quantities of increasingly bloody killing, I’d play (or replay) one of those instead.

The post Thoughts: Shadow Of The Tomb Raider appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It’s a really good thing for Mankind Divided that Invisible War exists. Otherwise its claim to the title of “Worst Deus Ex game”¹  would be completely undisputed, and I think that’d be kind of a shame given how much it tries to improve on Human Revolution.

It would be fair to say I enjoyed Human Revolution very much at the time it was released. Despite a fairly protracted development period it felt like a game that did a decent job of blending the incredible freeform style of the original Deus Ex with the dominant console FPS gameplay of the period. It would be equally fair to say that Human Revolution is a game that has not aged well at all; both attempts I’ve made to replay it since its original release have ground to a halt just a few hours in, and this is despite my love of HR’s world, visual design and general atmosphere. It had that in common with the first game, in that it adequately captured something of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time it was released (“It is a time of great innovation…” indeed). Unfortunately the gaming landscape almost immediately started to shift under Human Revolution’s feet with titles like Dishonored demonstrating a far better mechanical grasp of how to execute on the concept of freeform first-person gameplay. It got worse when the new console generation enabled a rapid evolution of what it was possible to achieve on console tech, and when you put it up against modern heavy hitters such as The Witcher, MGS V, and even slightly more unusual fare such as Alien Isolation it feels like a game that’s a good five years older than it actually is. HR’s world remained vibrant and interesting to me, but many of the mechanics and the underlying technology comes across as extremely decrepit.

This creates both problems and opportunities for Mankind Divided, since it’s built using technology that, if not a direct descendent of HR’s, then at least is driven by much the same philosophy. This approach provides many, many opportunities to iteratively improve on the worst mechanics from Human Revolution. To its credit Mankind Divided takes advantage of nearly all of them; there’s a huge number of snarls that have been either eliminated completely or streamlined away into something much better. A lot of this consists of basic things that had a disproportionate impact on how Human Revolution played, such as nu-Deus Ex protagonist Adam Jensen (a man with a beard so pointy that were this game set in another age he’d be a shoe-in for Grand Vizier) getting from point A to point B by sprinting and jumping. In HR he could sprint for a whole 2.5 seconds (upgradable to a generous 7.5 seconds if you invested valuable upgrade points) and reached about knee-height with his jumps, making you feel less like a mechanically-augmented post-human superman than an asthmatic OAP crossing the road. By contrast in Mankind Divided he can sprint indefinitely with no upgrades required, and while his regular jumping height isn’t much improved he can at least mount ledges and fall more than half a storey without shattering every bone in his body.

The bog-standard, unaugmented version of Adam Jensen is a lot more fun to play with this time around, and this goes double when you start tossing augmentations into the mix. Since Jensen already maxed out his upgrades in Human Revolution you do start with a fair chunk of them already activated in the tutorial so the game can show them off; however this does mean that Mankind Divided predictably has to put him through a Samus Aran-esque mishap just afterwards where they all fall off and he has to start over again from close to zero. While cliched, this turn of events is at least unusually well-handled with one of the lengthier side missions having you chase down the reason why all your augs went on the fritz, and why you now have access to some completely new experimental ones. The existing augs are hardly unchanged from Human Revolution, however; most of them have been pushed in a direction that makes them more powerful and hence more satisfying to use. Smart vision is probably the standout here since it ties into gameplay in a number of very subtle ways when upgraded and combined with other augs — it’ll let you spot enemies through walls, examine their equipment and any augs they have, mark them on the HUD with a Battlefield-style arrow so that you know their position, and target their weak points with armour-piercing rounds. Other returning augs include Punch Through Walls, Lift Heavy Things, Breathe Poison Gas and Cloaking, and they’re all more or less the same – however, I found myself using them far more than I did in Human Revolution thanks to the overhauled energy mechanic.

Human Revolution’s ridiculous chocolate-fuelled energy bar was probably my most-hated thing about the game; the fact that only a sliver of the energy bar recharged for free once drained basically encouraged the player to hoard chocolate bars and never make full use of their augs except on very special occasions. Not only did it strike me as terribly-designed at the time, but it was really shown up a year later by Dishonored’s far more generous system where using a power would grey out a chunk of your energy bar which would then start recharging after a short delay; using another power before it had fully recharged would deplete any un-recharged energy for good and necessitate Corvo glugging down a mana potion to refill it. This struck a really nice balance between making prolonged use of your powers have a cost while ensuring that you still felt free to use them to overcome isolated obstacles without wasting anything, and so it’s no surprise that Mankind Divided has pretty much stolen it wholesale. It’s a little bit more punitive in that all aug use has an upfront cost in energy which is drained permanently, and then any energy which is drained while the aug is switched on will eventually be recharged. However the permanent energy cost for most augs is so small that you don’t feel like you have to be restrained; the notable exceptions here are the takedowns, which still cost a fair chunk of non-refundable energy², but I kind of understand why that’s the case since the game really wants to encourage you to make use of the hundred other options you have for neutralising or bypassing bad guys. Anyway, the game vomits so many biocells at you (yes, the chocolate bars and jars of Nutella have met an unfortunate demise) that you’ll still never run short unless you’re really abusing your superpowers.

Thanks to this nearly-new energy system the simple act of using augs in Mankind Divided feels way better than it ever did in Human Revolution. There’s so many ways to get around obstacles now, from the fairly humdrum hacking minigame (largely unchanged from HR, and whose major flaw is that it is invoked approximately 200 times in the course of the game and so gets really old really fast) to the series staple of the vent shafts hidden behind some boxes, to the Klipspringer jumping aug that allows you to leap moderately tall objects in a single bound, to the Remote Hacking aug which is (thankfully) a different minigame to the main hacking one and which opens up so many additional paths that it should be purchased ASAP. It moves Mankind Divided back towards the series ideal: the main choice you’re faced with is which route you’re going to take, standing in stark contrast to the more miserly decision space of whether or not you can afford to. The augs themselves aren’t locked behind any sort of progression tree and you can buy them in any order you want — individual augs have mini-trees where you upgrade their functionality and power efficiency, but actually unlocking the thing can be done at any time as long as you have the skill points. There’s lots of tools for stealth, lots of tools for non-lethal and lots of tools for murdering the entire population of Prague in as loud and conspicuous a fashion as possible and using any or all of them is entirely up to you. This makes the player feel doubly powerful, not only because the improved augs finally transform you into the mechanical marvel you should have been in Human Revolution, but also because the freedom to choose is an inherently powerful thing.

This degree of choice is usually more than supported by the level design. I will admit to being extremely down on Mankind Divided’s level design on my first stealthy runthrough; the hub area of Prague had a fair amount of hidden areas in it but it all seemed to be small, inconsequential standalone stuff whose presence didn’t really bolster the game at all. As you progress through the plot you explore most of the map (but by no means all of it) and you see the various set-piece areas it has to offer, most notable of which are a theatre and a bank. I thought that these areas didn’t fully unlock until you triggered the relevant piece of plot that required you to go there, but before suplexing Mankind Divided through a table I thought it’d be a good idea to do a second anything-goes run where I deliberately tested the game’s limits – and I was very pleasantly surprised, because it turns out you can go pretty much everywhere in Prague from the moment you get out of the tutorial as long as you have the right augs. You can also kill a lot of plot-relevant people and the game will adapt: on my first runthrough I got a hint as to the next location for the plot by eavesdropping on a conversation between a mob boss and his lieutenant. This was towards the end of the story, so one of the first things I did on playthrough two was to shoot my way into the mob boss’s compound and shove a nanoblade through his chest. I was impressed that the game let me do this at all — I thought he’d be some sort of special NPC that’d only spawn when I had the relevant mission active — and when I had to go there for plot later he remained dead and I instead got the information out of his computer. It’s a comparatively small adjustment, true, but I like the fact that it’s so organic; I’m so used to games making it very explicit what I can and cannot do that even this relatively minor side-character existing in the game long before the story required him to without the protection of the bulletproof glass so beloved of most AAA titles was still a very refreshing experience.

The bank is another example of how freeform Mankind Divided can get, and probably the best one. All the time you’re wandering around Prague you’re picking up information about the bank and codes for various safes in the vault, and so you’re naturally wondering when the plot is going to ask you to pay it a visit; the interesting thing here, though, is that you can complete the game without ever breaking into it at all. This is surprising considering it’s possibly the signature location in Prague, with multiple floors, multiple vaults, plenty of security to crack and plenty of secret routes to find. The other interesting thing about it is that if you do decide to break into it the amount you get out of it will directly correlate to how much time you’ve spent exploring wider Prague. There’s two main vault areas in the bank: the executive safes, which are simple containers that can be broken into easily if you have a fully-upgraded hacking skill (although getting into the vault that houses them without alerting security is pretty tricky), and the corporate vaults. As you’d expect in a dystopian future where corporations wield increasing amounts of power, the corporate vaults are where the real goodies are to be found – but they can’t be broken into. Instead you need to find the keycard for each individual vault somewhere in Prague, and since three out of the four vaults are not (to my knowledge) part of any plot or side mission you’re going to have to get your exploring on if you want to walk away from it with a full haul.

Prague itself I have mixed feelings about. It’s a very depressing hub area in which to set a game compared to the glowing streets of Detroit, and it doesn’t do itself any favours by apparently ripping off Half Life 2’s City 17 in terms of both look and feel. I get that this is intentional: the golden age of Human Revolution is over and Prague is the game’s main method of communicating that, with constant evidence of discrimination against the augmented and an ever-increasing police presence. In a way it captures the prevailing cultural zeitgeist just as well as HR or the original Deus Ex did, it’s just that the current zeitgeist is “Everything’s a bit shit, really” and that’s hardly a compelling atmospheric hook on which to hang your environment design. There’s certain bits and pieces — like the bank and everything surrounding it — that really stand out, but they only do so when you take a step back and consider how it all fits together, and that’s something that very much went over my head the during my first playthrough as I had the tunnel vision common to all players exploring an environment for the first time. Most games use this to their advantage to make their environments seem larger and more detailed than they really are, but Mankind Divided has the opposite problem: if you don’t have the post facto perspective granted by hours of exploration then Prague initially comes across as a collection of recycled apartments, recycled tiny shops with tiny basements, and recycled storage containers with secret entrances. They’re not particularly fun to visit on their own, and it’s only when you understand how they tie into the wider environment that their point becomes clear.

Probably the worst sin committed by Prague, though, is the division of the city into two halves: the aug ghetto and the somewhat nicer commercial district. Getting from one to the other requires you to sit through a fairly lengthy loading screen. I accept that loading screens are a fact of life and am usually prepared to put up with them; however Mankind Divided takes the piss slightly by having its missions constantly ask you to travel from one environment to the other and then back again for no real reason. There’s one particularly good one towards the end where Jensen infiltrates the red light district to get an update on the main story and asks his confidante to meet him back at his apartment; cue one lengthy loading screen for the payoff of a minute-long conversation. To get to the piece of the story immediately after this Jensen then has to meet his pilot at the helipad – which is right next to the sodding red light district he just came from. Basically there’s a method of structuring your missions/quests so that you can minimise a player’s exposure to loading screens, and you could use Mankind Divided as a case study for how not to go about doing this.

That’s the good and the ugly out of the way, which means that it is now rather unfortunately time for the bad news: mechanically speaking this Deus Ex is a triumph and probably the best the series has ever been, but narratively it is an absolute clusterfuck. For starters it does the one thing AAA RPGs should never, ever do, which is to assume that the person playing it will have played all of the other games in the series (including the shitty phone ones) and/or read all of the terrible tie-in fiction and that it’s perfectly fine to introduce characters and groups from these games with little to no explanation of who they are. Mankind Divided doesn’t quite reach the nadir that Mass Effect 3 did (I still shudder whenever I think of that Mary-Sue space ninja) but it’s this attitude that it doesn’t have to waste time filling the player in on missing backstory that contributes to much of the main plotline’s general feel of incoherence. It’s a problem exacerbated by the generally mismatched nature of the game; outside of Prague (and in more than a few locations within it) Mankind Divided strikes me as a game that suffered some development troubles. The missions are bolted together in a jumbled, ad-hoc way that’s usually a classic symptom of the developers being forced to a deadline and having to assemble the story out of whatever they had lying around at the time. It doesn’t flow at all. For all its flaws Human Revolution at least managed a story with a distinct beginning, middle and somewhat wonky  end, whereas in Mankind Divided the story is just a thing that happens until it doesn’t.

That last part isn’t just a figure of speech. The most infuriating thing about Mankind Divided is that towards the end of the game it does slowly seem to be drawing towards some sort of point. The first two-thirds are really rocky, but it’s finally managed to establish its characters, their motivations and who the bad guys are and what they intend, and it looks like it’s going to set up a fairly decent final act where all of these hanging plot points are going to be resolved. It is just at this point where the story is getting its shit together, and you feel like the general incoherence is starting to give way to genuine mystery, that the game ends. The story doesn’t, I should hasten to add; Mankind Divided just throws an end boss at you and calls it a day about five to ten hours before the story wraps up. They might as well have just replaced Adam’s growly introspectiveness in the end cutscene with a splash screen saying “Buy the DLC! Coming soon!” since that’s clearly where all of these hanging plot threads are actually going to be tied off³.

It’s not all bad, I suppose. There’s still some surprisingly good and subtle storytelling in here if you know roughly where to look and are prepared to do some digging (like Task Force Director Miller’s backstory and motivations) but almost none of it relates to the actual main plotline. Meanwhile the rest of the narrative reeks of a rush job – there are “major” characters who show up once in the tutorial and then vanish again until the very final mission, locations which are very heavily lampshaded but which you never get to visit, and locations which aren’t lampshaded at all and where you do nothing plot-related outside of the opening cutscene, and which seem to have been thrown in to extend the game’s running time more than anything else. I’m going to give Eidos Montreal the benefit of the doubt and assume that this mismatched structure wasn’t intentional, and that they simply didn’t have enough time or resources to finish the game properly; either way the effect is the same, though, and that’s to ensure that the story concludes in just as unsatisfying a manner as it begins.

It ends so badly, in fact, that my original verdict on Mankind Divided was that for all the mechanical improvements it made over Human Revolution it was almost worse than Invisible War; having a crap story is the absolute kiss of death for an RPG no matter how well the rest of it is designed. It was only once I tested the game’s limits on the second playthrough that my opinion of it mellowed somewhat; there is much to recommend it if you’re willing to take your time and fully explore the Prague environment, but on the other hand I really wouldn’t blame anyone for not putting in the effort since it’s not immediately obvious there’s going to be any sort of payoff. It doesn’t have the immediate story hooks to drag you in that Human Revolution did — or story hooks of any kind, really — and to get the most out of Mankind Divided you have to be interested in doing things for their own sake rather than because they’ll have any significant payoff plot-wise. Fortunately for Mankind Divided you’re probably already that kind of person if you’re playing Deus Ex in the first place, and so my third place ranking of it is more a function of my high opinion of the original DE and HR than it is Mankind Divided’s own numerous flaws. While it might not be a great or even a good Deus Ex game, it is at least still recognisably Deus Ex. Just don’t play it for the story.

The post Thoughts: Deus Ex – Mankind Divided appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This was never going to end well. You can’t resurrect a franchise that’s near-legendary in its ability to make those who played it at the time wax nostalgic about Hammerites and Taffers and expect to please both those people and the new audience of console gamers that this new Thief is designed to attract. Last time that happened we got Thief: Deadly Shadows, and despite being a decent game in its own right it’s something that gets looked down on a lot for not being as good as the originals. When you look at it that way, Thief wins the smallest of victories: it isn’t quite as bad as I was expecting, and I don’t completely hate it. Thief is an okay stealth game, and if its development had gone smoothly I dare say we might even have gotten something on the level of Deadly Shadows out of it. Unfortunately its development didn’t go smoothly (you don’t take five years to make a game like this without fucking up badly at several points along the way) and so Thief ends up being something more like The Bureau: it’s a hodgepodge of ideas and mechanics thrown together into something whose shortcomings and general lack of polish ensure that it’s far less than the sum of its parts.

Let’s start with the City. Contrary to what you might have heard, the level design of the story missions in Thief isn’t actually all that bad. Some of them are distressingly linear, but most are chock full of secret areas and alternate routes that attempt to reward a player who doesn’t just slavishly follow that objective marker.  There’s nothing anywhere near as sprawling as Shipping and Receiving from Thief 2, but that was never going to happen anyway; what’s on offer in this remake is just about as good as I’d expect from the modern console age. The catch is that in order to get to the story missions you have to spend 5-10 minutes slogging through the City, the game’s sprawling hub area that’s so large it has to be cut up into four or five different segements. That in itself is something of an issue in that the transitions between City areas are not always clearly marked; some of them are highlighted by glowing gates, but some are just window entrances that are identical to window entrances you might use to gain access to a shop or a house, and it’s really irritating to have your exploration suddenly interrupted by a loading screen (or two, if you want to get back where you came from). Then you have just how insanely dull the City is. It’s very large, yes, but also largely pointless. It’s visually uninteresting, shrouded in a permanent twilight with no colours used that aren’t drab brown or gloomy grey. There’s lots of nooks, crannies and hidey-holes in it, but there’s nothing in them; it’s extremely disheartening to remove a concealed vent cover, drop down into a hidden area, get the “Secret Area Found!” sound effect, disarm a trap, pick the lock on a chest and open it to find… a cup and an ashtray worth 12 gold pieces.  It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding as to the player’s motivation behind exploring a level; it’s not enough to just splurge out a confusing mess of buildings and assume a player will obsessively comb through the lot just because it’s there. There has to be some incentive, some cool loot or secret or easter egg to reward exploration.

The City doesn’t have any of these things, and as a result I gave up on exploring it several hours in. Even after I minimised the amount of contact I had with it, though, navigating it was still by far the most boring and frustrating element of the game; because of how segmented it is getting to a destination usually involves at least two level transitions, and I had to dodge the magically respawning guards at the same time. This was exacerbated by Garrett’s movement, which is sufficiently awful that it made me realise just how badly I’ve been spoiled by games that do it right. He moves like he’s wearing a pair of concrete overshoes, is incapable of leaping more that a foot in the air and resolutely refuses to do any sort of context-sensitive action unless he’s standing up, leading to absurd deaths where he steps off a ledge and plummets to the ground rather than grabbing hold of the rope that was two feet in front of his face. I spent far, far too much time battling the awkward movement controls and deeply wished they’d taken a few pointers from Assassin’s Creed; it was okay for Garrett to move like a tank in 1998 because we didn’t know any different, but things have moved on slightly in the intervening decade and a half. Thief should have moved with the times instead of plastering itself to a wall when I what I actually wanted was to pick a guard’s pocket.

At least Garrett’s other interactions with the game world are done right. Where most other games would have loot disappearing into some nether dimension when picked up, Thief has his hands shoot out from the sides of the screen and physically swipe it. Where he stashes it afterwards I do not know — which is a little weird considering he must pick up half a metric ton of stuff during any given mission – but I appreciated the way the game constantly tries to create a connection to the game world, with Garrett rifling through desks a drawer at a time, swiping his hand through candles to snuff them our and reaching out to push buttons and switches. This tactile interaction is also used to great effect during the puzzles as Garrett runs his hands across a bookshelf or around the edges of a painting looking for a secret switch. I know it’s just a pretty dressing for what is ultimately a very simple minigame, but it does a great deal to make up for the clunky movement and general failure on Thief’s part to promote any sense of immersion or place.

Thief’s world design is bloody awful, there’s no getting around that. Where the original Thief’s budget, stylised cutscenes did so much to enhance that game’s sense of atmosphere – a critical accomplishment given how primitive the graphics were, even for the time – the reboot uses bland in-engine cutscenes that look just as dull as the rest of the world. Given how effective Garrett’s first-person interactions with the environment are it’s jarring to be yanked out of his body and shown something unutterably tedious happening in a cutscene, usually involving his persistent “nemesis”, the Thief-Taker General, who has some of the most atrociously bad voice acting I’ve heard in a triple-A game in a long time. Not only is his accent horrific, but he mumbles and slurs so many of his lines that I started to suspect the voice actor might have been hitting the drink in order to blunt the pain of having to utter such hackneyed, claptrap dialogue. Sometimes when Garrett is talking to somebody during a cutscene their conversation will suddenly drop in volume while the ambient soundbites of the people around them continue unabated and drowns them out. And those soundbites, holy shit. You thought the guard lines from the original Thief were bad? At least they had a B-movie sort of charm, which is more than I can say for the ambient conversation in the remake. Garrett overhears the usual selection of conversations telling him where to find valuable items as he traverses the City, except these voices appear to come from thin air; I think they’re supposed to originate from poorly soundproofed rooms or something but they sound like the people speaking are right next to Garrett, making it seem more like he’s starting to hear voices in his head. The denizens of the City you can actually see also never shut up, saying at least one line every ten seconds like clockwork. Considering their limited repertoire (they’ve done the weird Elder Scrolls thing of having different voice actors record the same selection of five stock lines) they repeat themselves frequently and often to the point of absurdity; witness the guard patrolling the ancient underground ruins where no-one has set foot for centuries who said, and I quote: “Wish there was a sloop-seller nearby!” If it’s not sloop it’s coffee, or sleep, or a tooth coming loose, and it never, ever stops.

It gets so bad, in fact, that I resorted to brutally beating¹ every single guard I saw in a futile attempt to get them to shut the hell up (I was not allowed to do the same thing to civilians because of the difficulty setting I’d picked). I actually enjoyed having to sneak through a catacomb filled with mutant monstrosities later on in the game because they at least didn’t go on and on and on about sloop every five sodding seconds. Of all the insufferable things Thief inflicts on the player the voice acting is probably the worst, followed closely by the economy of thieving and the lip-service paid to side-jobs. I’ll spend about as much effort describing the latter as the developers did putting them into the game: there’s about twenty of them but every single one consists of going somewhere in the City and pressing E, after which you get a generous payment of about 50 gold. Not only is he a miser with his job fees but Garrett’s fence must be making a fortune because he apparently charges a ruinous commission on every item Garrett steals; golden cups and brooches are worth about 6 gold each, while even the supposedly valuable big loot (like a solid gold bust of the City’s ruler) clocks in at around 60 gold. For reference one rope arrow costs 75 gold, while the permanent upgrades required to access alternate routes through a level are 500-1000 gold.  Because the things you steal are next to worthless it strips a lot of the joy out of the act of thievery, which is understandably something of a problem for a game called Thief; time and again you’ll crack open a safe only to find that the loot inside is worth less than the equipment you used to get to the safe in the first place. Where’s the fun in stealing things if they’re not valuable? That I’m even having to ask this rhetorical question of Thief is a solid indicator of just how badly it’s veered off the rails when it comes to the game’s core mechanic.

I’ve spent all this time talking about the world and the act of stealing and almost none whatsoever talking about the stealth gameplay. That’s because it’s solid, but almost completely unremarkable. The light gem is present and correct. Shadows are an almost impenetrable barrier to a guard’s eyesight, and they’ll only spot you if they’re right up close. They’ll hear you coming a lot further away, especially if you’re stamping over broken glass or something, which is why you do spend most of the game shuffling along in a crouch. Caged crows act as noise sensitive alarms, and caged dogs act as proximity alarms. You sneak up behind guards and press Q to do a silent takedown. You drag the bodies away and dump them where nobody will see. In short you do the rote actions you do in literally every other stealth game under the sun, and Thief’s problem here is that its approach to stealth is unimaginative and doesn’t make enough use of its curiously combat-oriented set of gadgets. I can think of at least two games I’ve played in the last couple of years that have done stealth far better than this Thief remake: Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and – despite its many flaws – Dishonored. Given that, I don’t feel like being particularly generous towards Thief just because it didn’t completely fuck up it it’s raison d’etre.

Still, if I don’t feel like being generous I don’t particularly hate Thief either. Once I gave up on the City and started tearing through the missions – with their actually quite good puzzles and level design that made the most of Garrett’s environment interactions — it became mildly diverting, and I dare say I would have made it to the end if not for a persistent save glitch that eventually stopped me in my tracks. The quick version of this: Thief will occasionally fail to save your game state properly, meaning that on loading the save you’ll find that sleeping citizens have been awoken and lights will have been turned off. In my case it failed to reset the swarm of angry guards that was about to stab me to death and I’d foolishly failed to make a separate save, meaning it was something of a game-ender. This is actually a huge bug and I’d be far more annoyed about it if I really cared about finishing Thief, rather than being kind of relieved I didn’t have to play it any more and could make a start on other, more interesting games. I think that reaction – or lack of one – says rather a lot about Thief; it’s a stealth game that is merely average when compared to its competitors and which is stunningly unimaginative throughout, and it does mean that we’ll likely never see a proper continuation of the Thief series after this reboot has turned out to be so awkward. I’d argue, though, that the Thief series in particular has never needed one; it said what it needed to say in the original trilogy and there is something to be said for knowing when to stop. They were groundbreaking games that had a huge impact on gaming, and Thief was never going to repeat that kind of success with a modern reboot. I don’t begrudge it the attempt, but perhaps now that that attempt has been made — and has turned out to be decidedly lacklustre — they’ll finally let Garrett rest in peace.

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