I was originally going to start this review with a short, punchy opener like “Halo Infinite is the best Halo since Halo 3!” After a little thought, though, I’ve chosen to take a rather more measured approach, not least because saying that would make me sound like I write for IGN or something. Saying “Halo Infinite is the best Halo since Halo 3” is not inaccurate, but it’s also a somewhat nonsensical statement for two reasons. One is that it makes the same mistake as 343 and Bungie did of assuming that everyone’s actually played the other Halo games — and their spin-offs, and read their tie-in novels, and their comics, and probably watched the upcoming live-action TV show to boot. If you don’t have the context, then that could mean almost anything. And the other reason is that even if you do have the context — if you have played every single Halo game, as I rather unfortunately have — you’ll know that this is potentially an extremely powerful curse as every Halo game after 3 has been varying shades of crap¹.

This perhaps makes me not the best person to review Halo Infinite — not because I’m particularly enamoured of developer 343 Industries or the Halo series (certainly not the latter half of it, anyway), but for precisely the opposite reason: I think those games are so bad that Halo Infinite has an extremely low bar to clear in order for me to consider it a success. Clear it it just about does, though, which is still a tad surprising to me given Infinite’s well-publicised development problems. After five years spent trying to figure out how to winch the story back up from the pit they drove it into at the end of Halo 5, 343 showed off a gameplay demo of Infinite back in 2020 that was widely derided and led to two things. One of those things was unambiguously good: they got a full additional year to work on the game and polish up some of the more obviously shonky gameplay elements, and I think it’s thanks to that extra year in the oven that Halo Infinite works at all. But the other I’m less sure about, because the bad demo indirectly led to a new Creative Lead being brought on board², and I’m fairly sure this change in direction is part of the reason why Halo Infinite feels like two completely separate games that have been bolted together into a single misshapen product.

Now, one of those games is actually quite good, and, defying my increasingly allergic reaction to the concept as time goes on, it’s turned out to be the one set in the open world. Infinite making Halo properly open world is supposed to be the big “innovation” it brings to the series, but I’m not as opposed to the idea of Halo going open world than I might be with other long-standing franchises; ever since that first trailer all the way back in 1999 it’s been obvious that that was the original vision for Halo, but the technology just wasn’t there to support it yet. I’m less wild about suiting up as Master Chief yet again just to run around an open world map hoovering up all of the map markers, but fortunately Infinite’s open world isn’t about that. Or at least, it’s not solely about that.

Halo Infinite’s plot is awful, and I’ll give it a kicking at the end of the review when I tackle the actual campaign. The gist of it, though, is that Master Chief has ended up on the surface of yet another giant ringworld called Zeta Halo. Unlike the other rings, this one has had a vast hole blasted out of it by some cataclysmic event and the ring is in the process of repairing itself, with huge chunks of the circumference still gaping voids open to space. This damaged portion of the ring also happens to be where Halo Infinite’s open world is set, since it lets 343 gate player progress by splitting the world into discrete regions separated by vast chasms that are impassable until either you get lifted over them by some plot occurrence, or you unlock the Wasp VTOL towards the end of the game. Zeta Halo is currently under the control of a bunch of Covenant knockoffs called the Banished, whose major gimmick is that they have red theming instead of purple theming and much less interesting architecture, and are otherwise identical in every way. Your job as Master Chief is to hike around the ring “liberating” UNSC bases and rallying human survivors to fight the Banished, and you do this by…

…running around the map hoovering up all of the map markers. What can I say, Halo Infinite is an open world game in 2021 and there’s apparently only one way we can do these, for all that Breath of the Wild demonstrated people could cope with a much more freeform alternative. The map markers are all of the same things that you can find in any open world game on the market — seven forts to attack, fifteen high value targets to assassinate, fifty skill point caches to find etc. etc. — but the interesting thing about Halo Infinite is how it approaches the map markers that aren’t collectibles. Or perhaps it wasn’t Infinite’s intention, but it was definitely how I ended up approaching its map markers: as an excuse for a series of interesting fights.

The fights against the Covenant have always been the most interesting part of Halo to me. Twenty years later and I’m still in awe of how good the combat in the original Halo feels; the different enemy types and the relatively sophisticated AI meant that Bungie could get away with just inserting enemy squads via dropship and letting the combat encounters play out from there in a natural, emergent way. This reached a proper art form in Halo 3, with the enemy roster at its most vibrant and some excellent weapons and vehicles that weren’t the Warthog; I replayed all of the Halo games last year via the Master Chief Collection and it struck me how ambitious Halo 3 was with this, and how subsequent games all rowed back from it substantially by becoming far more straitjacketed, proscriptive and CoD-like in their level and encounter design. And the reason I’m willing to forgive Halo Infinite quite a lot — and trust me, there’s a lot to forgive — is because the open world finally starts things moving back in the direction of these emergent fights again.

Each map marker sets up a combat encounter, or a series of combat encounters, with slightly different scenarios and enemy mixes and starting positions, but aside from dropship spawns none of the action is scripted at all. The Covenant and any supporting UNSC marines that happen to be present will fight it out autonomously; you can watch these battles from afar without intervening if you want, although the marines will get absolutely leathered unless they have special weapons. It’s far more interesting to get stuck in yourself, though, and the approach you can take to each one is truly freeform. You can hang back and snipe from afar, you can get up close and personal with a shotgun and the new grappling hook, you can bring in a Wasp and just slaughter everything from the sky, or even (and this is very much my favourite) spawn a Razorback at a FOB, load it up with five marines and then drive your little clown car straight into the action where the marines will add to the sheer chaos unfolding in front of your eyes. Because the Banished are a copy of the Covenant they have all of the tried-and-tested enemy types from other Halo games — Grunts, Elites, Jackals, Brutes, all with different weapons and loadouts, and all of whom can leap into nearby empty vehicles or turrets to try and take you out. The marine and enemy AI was one of the things that was polished up during the extra year of development, and it’s really paid off by ensuring every single map marker provides a fight that’s at least as good as the ones from the second level of Halo: Combat Evolved.

This is why I’m a bit more positive about Halo Infinite than I might otherwise be given the giant-sized “But…” that just visible on the horizon of this review: “interesting fights” are all I ever wanted from the series, and it’s nuts that I’ve had to wait over a decade for a Halo game to give me something I recognise as Halo combat, but Infinite gives me a full open world’s worth. The actual rewards you get from clearing the map markers are minor — in the case of the assassination missions they’re practically worthless — but I did them all anyway because I knew each one would be a 1-3 minute snippet of what Halo does best. If the open world has a flaw, it’s that it doesn’t have enough of these fights; Infinite’s map is considerably smaller than your typical Ubisoft open world game, and while I definitely don’t want another game on the scale of Valhalla I would like one that took me a bit more than nine hours to fully strip clean³.

I’m also a big fan of the approach Infinite has taken towards its actual combat mechanics. You may have noticed the dreaded words “grappling hook” just now, which is the other major “innovation” Infinite adds to the Halo formula; it seems to me that making your game open world and giving the main character a grappling hook fit more into the “chasing market trends” category than they do innovation, but just as Infinite manages to make the open world not suck, it has also put a surprising amount of thought into the grappling hook. First off, and to Infinite’s considerable credit, it does not fuck about with it in any way; having decided to make the grappling hook a core part of Master Chief’s equipment and a game-defining piece of mobility tech, it has the good sense to start you off with the thing attached to your armour from the very first moment of the game. Chief’s grappling hook feels almost exactly like the one I saw six months ago in Necromunda; it only has a single charge, and the range is slightly shorter, and the base recharge time is slightly longer, but it’s otherwise identical, and that’s a good thing because Necromunda’s grappling hook was the first time I’ve seen an FPS do a grappling hook right. Infinite is the second, and just like Necromunda it lets you upgrade the grappling hook to the point where it is ludicrously broken — and ludicrously fun. The base grappling hook lets you grapple to enemies so that you can punch them, but you can add an electric charge to it so that it’ll stun anything it touches, and then a shockwave attack that lets Master Chief hit the target point with the force of a small nuclear weapon. You can also fix that recharge time to be short enough that Master Chief can chain grapples to properly Spiderman his way up cliffs, firing it off again long before he’s lost his height and momentum from the first grapple, and when combined with the now genre-standard mantling behaviour the grappling movement around Halo Infinite’s open world feels very smooth.

One of the interesting things about Infinite, though, is that it doesn’t enforce the use of this shiny new button it’s given you. There’s a few bits in the first level of the campaign where you need to use it, but precious few others, and nothing that’s on the critical path in the open world requires you to use the grappling hook. Getting around the ring is going to be unnecessarily difficult if you don’t, but you can just play Halo Infinite with guns and grenades if you want. The reason I find this approach interesting is that it stands in stark contrast to what I’ve come to consider a design antipattern in FPSes: Doom Eternal, which introduced a bunch of new buttons and abilities and then forced you to use them by crippling the basic combat gameplay⁴ to the point that it was pretty much unplayable if you didn’t. Halo Infinite’s approach is much more player-positive; it too adds a lot of new buttons — the grappling hook, a threat sensor ability that will highlight all enemies inside an extremely large radius, a deployable shield wall that blocks incoming fire and will happily soak up multiple Hunter barrages before being destroyed, a dash move that can be upgraded to give you a cloaking ability — but instead of punishing the player for not using them, it instead makes them so powerful and accessible and fun that you want to use them. I certainly did, multiple times, in every single fight. This, again, is a similar design ethos to Necromunda, and in my Necromunda review I wondered what Streum On could have achieved if they had access to AAA development resources. I now have an answer to that, as Halo Infinite’s combat plays out like a much more polished version of Necromunda, one with actual enemy AI and enemy variety and attack animations.

So that’s why Halo Infinite’s open world works for me. It is in all other respects an unashamedly shallow take on the concept, with only a single biome (you’ll get bored of clambering up a series of identical rocky mountains quite quickly in spite of the grappling hook) and nothing to do that isn’t “fight some enemies at this map marker”, but those fights are the best fights I’ve seen in an FPS in at least the last couple of years. Given that, it’s slightly strange that the other game that’s crammed into Halo Infinite fell so flat with me: it’s a series of the same linear, scripted campaign levels that you can find in any other Halo game released in the last decade, and because 343 definitely haven’t changed their design ethos here — or their writing quality — it is utterly crap. That much was expected, but regardless of the level design or the writing, surely the campaign has all of the same building blocks for fun that the open world does? The weapons, the enemies, the combat abilities and so on? Well, sort of, but the lengths Halo Infinite goes to to sabotage the good bits is truly remarkable. Or perhaps I should say the lengths it doesn’t go to, because one of the truly astonishing things about Halo Infinite is how little effort it makes to mesh its campaign missions together with the open world sandbox.

Halo Infinite opens with two standard FPS missions that aren’t set on the ring, where Master Chief first fights his way through a Banished battleship and then a series of Forerunner corridors. He then gets into the first open world area, but to unlock the next one he needs to storm a big fortress called, imaginatively, The Tower — this is extremely unusual because I think it’s the only campaign mission that actually exists wholly in the open world. Once that’s done with, nearly every single mission after this has him going to some point on the surface of the ring, unlocking a Forerunner door and then sitting through a loading screen so that he can go through an entirely linear, self-contained and incredibly boring series of Forerunner corridors. I was tired of Forerunner corridors approximately twenty minutes into Assault On The Control Room in the original Halo, and the subsequent two decades of Forerunner corridors appearing in every numbered Halo game from that point on has not improved my attitude towards them much. They’re just not interesting spaces to fight in; Halo is at its best when the levels are wide open and you have complete freedom of movement, and it’s at its worst when they’re so cramped that you can’t really vary your approach beyond moving around cover while shooting an endless succession of Brutes in the head, because that’s what I do in literally every other first-person shooter out there. But by setting the vast majority of its campaign underground, Halo Infinite not only divorces its campaign from the open world to the point where they feel like two completely separate games, but it puts the emphasis on precisely the kind of combat that Halo isn’t very good at — or at least at which it is no better at than the competition.

The thing that really baffles me here, though, is this: if you’re going to almost totally segregate your campaign missions from the open world like this, why not take advantage of this temporary freedom from any open world restrictions and put in some cool Halo set-piece missions? Having marines riding around on Mongoose ATVs blasting rockets at enormous Scarab walkers is something the series already managed to do back in 2007 on the Xbox 360; are you really telling me that fourteen years later all we can do are Forerunner corridors?  Halo Infinite only really attempts this twice, and one of those attempts is the “take out the three anti-aircraft cannons” mission from the 2020 gameplay demo, which feels like it’s been spliced in from a completely different game — it looks like it’s in the open world, but your fast travel is locked off while you’re in that region and none of the map markers spawn until after the mission is finished. It also happens to take up probably around 10% of the map, which possibly explains why so much of Infinite is locked away underground; 343 couldn’t figure out how to fit more missions than this onto the surface of Zeta Halo. The other set-piece is a fairly standard mission where you drive a Scorpion tank down a canyon while blowing up Banished until you get to the end, and that’s it for your not-Forerunner-corridor levels. That’s two missions out of fifteen-odd where you even get to touch a vehicle. There’s only one mission where you get help from AI marines (it’s the Scorpion tank one, where two of them spawn so that you can have somebody on the machine gun). For a Halo game, releasing in 2021, that is insane; these are core mechanics that make Halo Halo, and in Infinite they’ve been rudely shoved into the open world so that the campaign can be made into a boring corridor shooter.

(If you wanted any more evidence that 343 really couldn’t figure out how to make Halo work in an open world setting — which feels like a ridiculous thing to say, but it appears to be true — you need only look at the features that were cut in order to get it out of the door before the end of 2021 rolled around and Phil Spencer had everyone fired for missing another deadline. Infinite is the first Halo game to ever release without campaign co-op; what has previously been a core feature of the series has been delayed to the second half of 2022, and frankly I’ll be amazed if they release it at all given the difficulties they seem to have had with the open world so far. It also doesn’t have any mission replay functionality, apparently because the few missions which are actually integrated into the open world make this awkward. You’d think I wouldn’t be that upset about this given that the missions are so bad, but 343 have decided to put collectibles like the skulls inside of these non-repeatable missions, and if you miss them on your playthrough then the only way to get another shot at finding them is to replay the entire game until you get to that mission again.)

And if the incredibly unimaginative campaign missions weren’t bad enough, they’re twinned with 343-grade writing and storytelling. I’m going to try and avoid going on a rant here because I feel like only a few people are brain-poisoned enough to actually care about the Halo story and world in 2021, but even by 343’s standards Halo Infinite’s plot and storytelling is utterly dire. It’s an attempt to try and get the train back onto the rails after they already fucked everything up in Halo 5 (short version: Cortana goes insane, incites an AI rebellion and takes over the universe) but they don’t actually make any attempt to address what happened in Halo 5, they just do a time skip at the start of Halo Infinite during which everything gets resolved offscreen. The intro cutscene to Halo Infinite features the UNSC supership Infinity being boarded and Master Chief getting beaten up and tossed into space by the baddie from Halo Wars 2. The game then cuts to six months later after Master Chief wakes up from his coma, during which the following has happened:

• Cortana has died, somehow. Exactly how you kill an omniscient AI who controls dozens of ancient planet-destroying superweapons is, alas, never explained.
• The baddie from Halo Wars 2 has also died, somehow. Which is a whole lot of who-cares, except why show him beating up the Master Chief if you’re just going to kill him offscreen two seconds later?
• The Infinity has been blown up and all of the characters on it thrown into the garbage.
• The UNSC and Banished have gotten into a war that the UNSC have somehow lost, despite the UNSC being an interstellar nation state and the Banished being the Covenant equivalent of a terrorist group.

The later Halo games have always been terrible for expecting you to read the tie-in fiction in order to understand what is going on, but Halo Infinite is the worst offender yet; I have played every single Halo game, including the RTSes and the two twinstick shooters, and I have absolutely no idea why anything in its plot is happening or how things got to where they are. Playing Halo Infinite is like playing the direct sequel to a game that doesn’t exist, and the game not bothering to explain key plot developments means it can never be anything other than a confused mess. Not that it particularly tries to be more than that, since it chooses to devote 90% of its story time to setting up the baddies for the next Halo game (already trademarked!) in between having the new leader of the Banished repeatedly call you up on the holophone to issue empty threats and assure you that he’s always one step ahead, which is a sure sign you have absolutely no idea how to write a villain.

Between the execrable plot and the dull level design, Halo Infinite’s campaign missions are probably the worst Halo has ever been — yes, even worse than 5, which at least managed to squeeze in a couple of interesting missions between the repeated bossfights with that warden guy. I strongly suspect that this is because of the last-minute change in creative direction; when a game spends more time setting up its sequel than it does actually telling the player what is going on in the thing that they are playing right now, I can only assume it’s because 343 now have some Big Ideas that they didn’t have time to crowbar into Infinite and had to settle for rebuilding the game into a series of boring corridor levels so that they could at least foreshadow it. When the original vision of Halo Infinite as an open world game is allowed to breathe, Infinite shines; when the combat clicks, which it does more often than not in the open world, it’s absolutely brilliant. The longer I spent with it, though, the more the sheen was taken off by the abominably bad campaign, and when I ran out of things to do in the open world and had to devote my full attention to finishing the story my opinion of the game nosedived straight into the toilet. Halo Infinite somehow wraps up the best and worst of Halo in a single package; the combat design is genuinely inspired and it’s well-integrated into the open world, but the rest of the game is an overindulgent, incoherent and ultimately self-defeating mess that I couldn’t wait to be done with.

The post Thoughts: Halo Infinite appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

“The next generation of real-time strategy gaming!” proclaims the marketing blurb for Age of Empires 4. This is technically true, since aside from assorted mediocrities like Grey Goo and Company of Heroes 2 I don’t think anyone has taken a proper big (or at least medium-sized) budget stab at the classic RTS since Blizzard released Starcraft 2 back in 2010. Unlike those failures, Age of Empires 4 has the support of a big franchise name, a big publisher — they don’t get any bigger than Microsoft — and it’s being developed by Relic Entertainment, who are in theory a seasoned RTS studio thanks to their experience with Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. But if Age of Empires 4 is indeed the next generation of real-time strategy gaming, then I have to say it looks a hell of a lot like the twenty year-old Age of Empires 2.

To be completely fair to Relic, Age of Empires 4 is a better game than I was expecting them to make based on their recent (or semi-recent) track record. I think there’s finally been a general realisation that game development studios are a lot like the ship of Theseus; they’re constantly undergoing a churn in personnel as older developers leave to do their own thing or are “promoted” to management positions and new blood is brought on board. In recent years we’ve seen several studios who previously were known for releasing nothing but classics — Blizzard and Bioware are the ones who most immediately spring to mind — abruptly send their reputation straight into the toilet with a string of duds¹. Afterwards the question is always asked: how could this company release such a bad game when they clearly know how to make a good one? And my answer is always that these companies have been around for multiple decades at this point and the people who developed Warcraft and Mass Effect are long, long gone; all that’s left is the name attached to a mostly-new group of developers who, for whatever reason, can’t recapture that same magic.

Relic are another great example of this. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes were both incredible games. They were also released in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and while the company still had it as late as 2010’s Chaos Rising the writing was on the wall with Company of Heroes 2 in 2013: Relic no longer knew what they were doing when it came to the RTS, which was subsequently confirmed with the disastrous Dawn of War 3 in 2017. When Age of Empires 4 was announced with Relic at the helm a couple of years ago I groaned inwardly since it seemed like this would just be another beloved franchise for them to drive straight into a brick wall. Nothing I saw from the prerelease marketing gave me cause to doubt this assessment, and so I gritted my teeth and clicked the “Download” button on Game Pass more out of a sense of misguided obligation to see just how bad it was than because I actually wanted to play it.

I’d like to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how Age of Empires 4 turned out, but this is patently untrue. I was surprised, at least, because my expectations were rock-bottom low. Age of Empires 4 has not done itself any favours whatsoever by being based heavily on Age of Empires 2 — same time period, same buildings, (sort of) the same units, same technologies, same gameplay. This gives it a pair of extremely weighty problems right off the bat: one is that Age of Empires 2 is an RTS classic and it’s extremely unwise for Relic to invite such direct comparisons in this way. You’re going to be seeing a lot of comparisons to AoE 2 in this review, which I would usually try to hold back on after a twenty year gap between the two games but which are literally unavoidable in this case because Age of Empires 4 is in many respects a straight remake of AoE 2. And that runs slap bang into the second problem with this idea: there was already a very good remake released at the end of 2019 in the form of Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, so it’s not like Age of Empires 4 can get away with updating the UI and graphics and adding some modern quality of life features and a modern multiplayer backend and calling it a day., because that’s already been done

Possibly the most surprising thing about Age of Empires 4, to me, is that it doesn’t do this. It might use AoE 2 as a baseline but it does try to carve out its own identity, which leads to some massive regressions from what you can find in AoE 2: Definitive Edition and all of those unfavourable comparisons that I’ll get into dissecting in just a bit, but also a couple of additions that I do think justify Age of Empires 4’s existence as a separate thing. By that very low metric Relic have managed to achieve a measure of success here; Age of Empires 4 might be constantly standing in the shadow of Age of Empires 2, but it at least manages to avoid being crushed underfoot.

It’s probably worth tackling Age of Empires 4’s skirmish and multiplayer first, whose foundation is largely unchanged from the formula that was established in the original Age of Empires a full quarter-century ago. The idea is that you start each game in the Dark Age with a town center and a few villagers. You set the villagers to gathering food and wood and your town center to building more villagers. You herd sheep back to your town center for a quick food boost, build houses and mills and lumber camps to support your constant production of villagers (and thus the total rate at which you can gather resources), get a barracks up to produce a few military units to fend off wild animals and raiding parties, and then focus on teching up to the Feudal Age. This unlocks more buildings and technologies and units, so you build all of them while creating additional outposts for resource collection. Perhaps at this point you’ll get involved in a short war with a neighbour but things are still very much in the raiding and harassment phase and it’s difficult to deliver the coup de grace even if you’ve crippled your opponent; at the very least it’ll take so much time that you’ll tech up to the Castle Age while it’s happening, which is where the real war game starts because you can build Keeps to quickly entrench yourself in a particular bit of territory. Whether the game progresses from there onwards to the final Imperial Age is a function of how many opponents you have and how much of a fight they’re putting up; once they’re all dead, you win.

Age of Empires has always been incredibly war-focused, and Age of Empires 4 is no exception. Just like its predecessors there are nominal Wonder and control point victories (here called Sacred Sites) but it’s far easier to just build a lot of trebuchets and systematically dismantle the enemy cities one town center at a time. It’s here that we also run into the first major point of divergence from AoE 2, though: unit variety. Under the hood the two games have much the same setup — the Barracks builds cheap melee infantry that use food and wood and expensive melee infantry that use food and gold, the Archery Range builds cheap archers that use food and wood and expensive crossbowmen that use food and gold, the Stables build cheap cavalry that use food and w- oh look, you get the idea. AoE 2 had some nice set dressing around this, though, where the line of expensive melee infantry progressed through the various Ages from Macemen, to Men-at-Arms with sword and shield, to the Two-Handed Swordsman, and then finally to Champions. I can remember that progression even now, and not just because I spent a fair chunk of my time in 2020 playing the Definitive Edition. It’s distinctive. It has flavour. It works.

Contrast this with the Age of Empires 4 approach. In the Dark Age, you can build Vanguard Men-at-Arms. Then in the Feudal Age, you tech up to Early Men-at-Arms. The Castle Age gets you just regular Men-at-Arms, and the Imperial Age Elite Men-at-Arms. While their visual look does update with every age advance, their equipment does not; they’re always armed with sword and shield, every time. It’s not quite the historical Total War problem of every unit being a variant of spearman in different-coloured trousers, but it’s close. And because the name doesn’t change, and the weapons don’t change, and the rest of the look doesn’t really update enough for you to notice from your lofty, godlike perch above the battlefield, this feels like you’re using the same unit for the entire length of the game. And since meaningfully different warfighting tech is the primary way the game reflects the progression through its various Ages back to you, advancing an Age feels far less impactful in gameplay terms than it does in AoE 2. The same story is repeated for the Spearman — available in regular, Hardened, Veteran and Elite flavours — the Horseman, the Archer and the Crossbowman; you can build a Horseman in the Dark Age and upgrade it all the way to Elite Horseman in the Imperial Age, but it’ll always be a dude on a horse with a spear.

Now, I do understand why Relic have done this. It’s been a long time since the last Age of Empires game and they’re trying to appeal to a whole new audience here, not the dwindling population of RTS grognards. If you’re completely new to RTS, the AoE 2 approach of having to keep track of four Age-specific units with different names and different looks that are actually all part of the same unit line and behave the same way could be seen as unnecessary overhead. Age of Empires 4 reduces the form to fit the function; a Spearman is always a Spearman and a Horseman is always a Horseman and they have the same weapon and same recognisable silhouette throughout the game. That’s much less information for a new player to have to absorb before they understand what is going on, and in theory makes the game much more accessible and readable.

However, I have two counterarguments to this approach. First is that in AoE 4’s case it massively oversimplifies things, reducing the basic unit pool down to just six: two infantry, two archer, two cavalry. There’s also siege engines, which sort of exist off to the side as specialised tools thanks to the way AoE 4 redesigns siege warfare, and civilization unique units — but how many of those you get is very dependent on which civ you pick. Otherwise you’re just playing around with the same six units for the hour plus that a skirmish match takes to play out. Related to this is my second counterargument, which is that Dota 2 and League of Legends have millions and millions of players who have managed to learn the intricacies of 100+ heroes per game; your average video game player is capable of grasping more than six things at once, if they take the time to learn, and the RTS space is one of the few where I’d expect a game to not cater to the lowest common denominator, since if you do you just end up with a product that feels too basic and dumbed-down. Just like Age of Empires 4 ultimately does.

The UI really doesn’t help here, either. In fact Age of Empires 4’s UI is one of the worst strategy game UIs I’ve seen since Rome 2. Distinctive unit and technology icons? Pffft, what if we just make them all stylised unit and technology iconography picked out in gold over a background that’s either brown (for units) or green (for technology), turning your building panes into a mass of unreadable crap. Group-selecting a bunch of units and want to select a certain type of unit within that selection? Good luck finding the one you want in the sea of identical brown icons. Researching multiple technologies at once? Hope you enjoy clicking back to your technology buildings periodically to see how things are going, because Age of Empires 4 doesn’t surface research globally the way Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition does. It just doesn’t feel good to interact with; Age of Empires has always had a problem where it’ll have techs like Iron Casting and Bodkin Arrow available for research, but the in-game impact of these things is +1 to a unit’s attack stat. It needs to work as hard as it can in order to convince me that I’m not just adding parsimoniously small numbers together — that this is actually a flourishing medieval culture that I am in charge of — but the Age of Empires 4 UI is so uninspired, and so simplified, that it actually enhances this sterile, mechanistic feeling rather than minimising it.

And that’s a real shame, because if you look beyond the broad sweep of the gameplay mechanics and start to drill down in the specifics of the eight cultures/civilizations that Age of Empires 4 launches with, you can start to see it pulling its weight. I think that the single most impressive thing AoE 4 does, period — in fact this is the primary reason I accept Age of Empires 4 existing at all –  is give every single civilization unique building and unit art for every single age. AoE 2 had a couple of sets of culture-specific building art (shared by multiple civilizations) that the Definitive Edition expanded upon, but Age of Empires 4 goes far further and the amount of work required to do so really cannot be understated; we are talking about 32 separate models for a Town Center, 32 separate models for a Barracks, 32 separate models for a Spearman — and repeat for half of the units and buildings in the game. (The other half require a little less work thanks to being available only to certain civs, or only in certain Ages.) I suspect it’s only because of the dumbing down of the unit rosters that this is possible at all, as if AoE 4 had any actually significant unit variety the number of potential unit/age/civilization combinations would become unviable.  As it is the civilization theming is extremely welcome, since it’s the only thing stopping Age of Empires 4 from sliding into the abyss; even the English and the French are immediately different, with the English buildings and units having very functional, baseline medieval styling compared to the French, who are all polished stone turrets and flamboyant helmet plumes.

Because there are a much smaller range of civilizations to play with (Age of Empires 2 launched with 13), Age of Empires 4 can also afford to extend this variety to more than building styles and unit barks. Age of Empires 2 kept the gameplay differences between the various civs relatively small — depending on which civ you picked certain units and technologies would be available (or not), you’d get a different unique unit built from the Castle, and also some subtle economy tweaks and bonuses that, while substantial enough to be felt while you were trying to boom your way to the Castle Age, I always thought weren’t really enough to make the differences between the Goths and the Franks or the Teutons and the Vikings properly meaningful. The Age of Empires 4 approach is far more daring; there might only be eight civilizations in the game this time around, but every single one of them has some Starcraft-style gimmick. The Chinese get multiple unique units and buildings and also Tax Collectors, who patrol between the various resource collection buildings hoovering up bonus gold income. The Rus have much stronger wooden fortifications and a special form of tower called the Wooden Fortress, as well as Hunting Lodges which increase the food gained from hunted animals and give you a gold payout every time one is killed. The Holy Roman Empire get a version of the Monk called a Prelate, who is available from the start of the game and can inspire Villagers to gather resources more quickly; they also have more special military technologies than any other faction I’ve played with so far — it turns out one of the reasons that Macemen and Two-handed Swordsmen were removed from the mainline melee unit progression is because the Holy Roman Empire stole them as technology upgrades for its own Man-at-Arms that (sigh) boost its attack stat. The Delhi Sultanate’s technologies have a high base research time but no resource cost, and garrisoning Scholars inside special buildings can speed up research considerably. And then there’s the Mongols, who flat out ignore several gameplay mechanics by starting at the max population cap (so they don’t have to build Houses) and who can move what few buildings they do have around the map at will. This means they don’t have much of a use for Stone, so they build Ovoos on top of Stone deposits and then any unit-producing building in the radius of the Ovoo can invest Stone to build duplicates of whatever is currently being trained.

This is all good stuff and arguably an improvement over the way Age of Empires 2 did it, and it’s thanks to the civilization design that I’ve actually had fun with Age of Empires 4. True, it’s a very limited sort of fun, where I fire up a succession of skirmish games to see what the next gimmick is before moving on to another one, but that I had fun with it at all is more than I was expecting from Relic, and so I think that this is the one true success that Age of Empires 4 can lay claim to. However, if that’s the case then it’s a somewhat qualified one since I’m not sure the more impactful civilization-specific traits were worth oversimplifying the shared ones for; nearly all of them are economy- or technology-focused, so they don’t really serve to counterbalance the now extremely-limited unit roster. In fact some of these civilizations don’t even have all six of the basic units available for the entire length of the game – six of the eight can’t build the Man-at-Arms line until the Castle Age, for crying out loud, as being able to build them earlier than this is now seen as a civilization-specific trait that’s limited to the English (who can build them in all ages) and the Holy Roman Empire (who can build them from the Feudal Age onwards). Most civilizations are limited to Spearmen only in the Dark Age, and it’s really really noticeable how little there is to do in the early stages of the game now beyond pumping out villagers and beelining for the Ages that will let you build more interesting things.

Speaking of, Age of Empires 4 also switches up how you advance Ages: you no longer do it via an expensive technology that provides no other bonuses, but instead invest the same amount of resources into constructing a unique building called a Landmark. Landmarks have wonder-style effects like periodically spawning free units or providing big boosts to nearby economy buildings; each civilization gets a choice of two per Age, with the one they don’t pick being permanently locked off (unless you’re the Chinese, who can build both as one of their civ traits). Landmarks take time and a lot of villagers to finish, but once they’re done you get the landmark bonus and advance to the next Age. I’m lukewarm on the concept of Landmarks as buildings, as I’ve only seen a couple so far that weren’t more than situationally useful, but I do like them because of how they change the warlike victory condition for skirmishes; instead of having to kill all of an opponent’s unit-producing buildings or all of their Town Centers — which is super annoying if they have a lot of far-flung outposts in corners of the map –  you instead just have to destroy all of their Landmarks, which is far more manageable and keeps games from spiralling into multi-hour hellwars.

The final big change AoE 4 makes to the basic Age of Empires 2 formula is in how it deals with siege warfare. Previously Age of Empires made it very difficult for regular units such as Spearmen and Horsemen to damage buildings, especially once a couple of Ages had gone by and you had some building HP and armour technologies researched; you could do it if you had time and an overwhelming advantage in manpower, but if you were fighting any organised opposition you needed siege engines such as battering rams and trebuchets to quickly destroy target buildings while your main army kept the enemy from smashing them to bits. Age of Empires 4 flips this around slightly, with all melee units getting a special “burn building” attack that they automatically use when told to attack one, and this can torch normal buildings very very quickly. However, if the player you’re attacking has built stone buildings — or god forbid, stone walls — then you’re going to have to call in the siege engines for two reasons. One is that stone fortifications have a much wider range of defensive mechanics available, from being able to install additional ballistae and cannon on Keeps and Towers to having a special Boiling Oil attack you can research (with an actual visible boiling oil effect when it fires) that makes getting into melee range of a Keep or Tower extremely dicey. And then even if you did, the other reason you need siege engines to tackle them is that stone fortifications do not burn, period; basic infantry literally can’t hurt them.

So, unlike AoE 2 where you could potentially get by without them (although it would be an extremely bad idea to try), Age of Empires 4 makes siege weapons compulsory. Fortunately it’s also smart enough to make the basics much more palatable, as Battering Rams are no longer built by the Siege Workshop but are instead constructed on the front lines by your soldiers. A Battering Ram is resistant to arrow fire and it acts like a transport, allowing you to stick up to sixteen infantry inside for protection while it smashes down the front door. All siege weapons have the same vulnerabilities to infantry/cavalry fire attacks that normal buildings do, though, so you need to be careful that sallying infantry doesn’t chop your Battering Ram into pieces. If you don’t fancy that risk then an alternative option is the new Siege Tower, which can trundle up to a stone wall — all stone walls now have battlements  that you can station archers and other troops on — and disgorge eight of your best fighters onto it, from which point they will hopefully murder any defenders and then descend into the settlement proper.

These basic tools of siege warfare always being available makes the siege weapons that you do build at the siege workshop more specialised. Springalds (a renamed Scorpion) are for smashing up other siege weapons before they can fire and do next to no damage to buildings, Mangonels retain their huge shotgun-like hail of shot and excel at wiping out clusters of troops, while the Trebuchet remains the choice for dismantling a set of fortifications from well beyond the range of any Tower or Keep armament. The Springald and the Mangonel are very definitely not things that you build for taking down a settlement; they have a niche on the battlefield, but only the Trebuchet (and also the Bombard, which has a slightly shorter range but does more damage) is designed for demolishing buildings. All siege weapons now need to set up before firing, too, making shoot-and-scoot Mangonels a bit less of a pain; carting them around feels a bit more like a proper medieval siege train than it does Tanks: Middle Ages Edition, and the ones intended for combat need to be properly micromanaged in order for them to survive an encounter.

I think that these changes to siege warfare are, in principle, a good idea. When siege warfare works in Age of Empires 4, it really works, with flaming arrows raining down from castle walls onto Battering Rams and Siege Towers that are slowly creeping forwards to do their damage, while a party of infantry gets ready to sally out to try and burn them before they can do too much damage. However, the underlying systems and polish aren’t quite there to properly support AoE 4’s particular vision of siege warfare yet; it’s been a remarkably bug-free experience so far, which is something that I value increasingly highly these days, but what bugs and glitches I have seen have mostly been focused around unit pathfinding on and around walls — things like siege weapons getting stuck in gates because I placed a tower slightly too close to the entrance², units getting lost on their way up/down from a wall, or simply stuck inside a gatehouse because there’s another unit blocking the door. Micromanaging siege weapons is also painful, especially because Age of Empires 4 really, really wants you to use Attack-Move — its compulsory and over-long tutorial explicitly makes you do this three times but doesn’t teach you how to do regular Attack orders at all — but the list of target priorities that the AI has is really, really stupid. If you have a group of Bombards in the middle of a city that are busy reducing the important targets to rubble, and a horde of angry infantry appear who are rather intent on making you stop, you cannot tell your own infantry to engage them with Attack-Move. If you do, then what will happen is that your troops will ignore the archers pelting them with arrows and the horsemen throwing burning torches onto your Bombards and instead start trying to blow up the nearest House, just because it’s tagged as an enemy and happened to be two feet closer to them. The Stand Ground order that should make them ignore nearby buildings is inconsistent at best, so I have completely given up trying to use Attack-Move inside of a city and instead have to keep the infantry back behind my siege line so that I can give them real Attack orders without them getting distracted.

Looking back on all of this, I have to say I don’t think the skirmish/multiplayer side of Age of Empires 4 is all that much of a misstep. The UI is awful and that will never change, and the troop AI really needs a lot of work to avoid so much micromanagement, and it could really do with more unit variety, and it has far fewer civilizations available to play than Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition — that last point is somewhat unsurprising, though, since Age of Empires 2 has been continuously expanded on for two decades now. If you asked me which of the two games I’d rather play, right now, then I would immediately answer “Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition”. That’s still a no-brainer, as it’s the far superior game and Age of Empires 4 still has far too much overlap with it. But if you instead asked me which I’d rather play in five years’ time, then that’s a much more interesting question because while Age of Empires 4 might be barebones in a lot of places and I don’t think it’s a particularly good game right now, it does at least provide a surprisingly solid foundation to build upon for the future. The core of what is here is reasonably sound even if the execution is lacking, and so if Microsoft don’t forget it exists and pay Relic to keep adding in new factions, and maybe at least bring the UI up to parity with AoE 2 (I still can’t believe AoE 4 is missing UI features that the Definitive Edition has, the blueprint for doing it right  is right there), it could eventually be a worthwhile alternative.

However, I also couldn’t shake the feeling throughout my time with AoE 4 that the skirmish and the multiplayer wasn’t where Relic’s primary focus was throughout the development process; Age of Empires 4 also ships with four single-player campaigns (as the Normans, French, Rus and Mongols), which is definitely a bold move considering that both Relic³ and the Age of Empires series do not have a particularly good track record where these are concerned. Age of Empires 4 continues this trend, riding that campaign rollercoaster down the hill and then straight off the cliff; there’s some decent design in some of the missions, albeit nothing I wouldn’t have seen in Warcraft 3 19 years ago, but whatever good might is present is hugely outweighed by stupid decision after stupid decision that make this the worst set of RTS singleplayer campaigns that I’ve played since… well, since Relic’s own Company of Heroes 2 back in 2013.

First, theming. Age of Empires 4 themes every single one of its campaigns, and in fact a large portion of the wider game, as a historical documentary. There are no characters to follow and nothing to get invested in, because everything that happens in every campaign is being narrated by the same tired documentary voiceover actor who is just reading whatever is put in front of her. Even in missions there are no characters with speaking lines; instead we get the narrator saying “Willikins the archer roused the English villages against the French” as you give your hero unit some movement waypoints. The entire game being related to me second-hand by a disinterested observer who is a thousand years removed from the events in question is an absolutely tremendous way to get me to not give a shit about anything I’m doing, and the kicker is that even by historical documentary standards Age of Empires 4 is absolutely terrible. There is an almost complete lack of detail, with only the broadest possible strokes of history outlined by the narration — inane statements like “Wallingford was the key to victory” are uttered with no further explanation or clarification as to why it was the key to victory. The Mongol army advances across Asia and “finds its way blocked by an army of forty thousand Rus”. Okay, who are these Rus and how did they get there? I still don’t know because the game didn’t tell me; as far as the game is concerned they just popped into existence one day as convenient targets for the first mission in the Mongol campaign. Age of Empires 4 is awful as an educational tool because it will teach you almost nothing about history; there are a few videos of crossbow and trebuchet demonstrations and so on, but the bulk of the content here is modern-day drone shots of famous historical monuments⁴ and battle sites with some crappy Animus graphics of soldiers superimposed on top. It is largely thanks to these videos — and there are a lot of them — that the Age of Empires 4 install size clocks in at a whopping 90 gigabytes of hard disk space, and all for content with far less educational or narrative value than the average episode of Time Commanders⁵.

Second, tone. Age of Empires 4’s campaigns do not follow a single person or army or military campaign, but instead consist of a series of isolated events spanning a hundred years or more. The Norman campaign, for example, follows the dynasty established by William the Conqueror as various challengers to the throne appeared from 1066 through to 1216. This is a weak through-line to follow at the best of times as you’re getting a chopped up, overly condensed version of history that’s made even worse by the awful, dispassionate documentary styling; however, there are points where it gets truly ridiculous in order to justify even the tenuous campaign theme that it does have, as you always have to be fighting on the side of the dynasty in question even if the members of that dynasty who were involved in this mission were demonstrably idiots. Here, this is a roughly paraphrased example of one of the mission briefings for the Norman campaign:

“This is King John. He was an idiot. Spent all of his money on expensive wars. Taxed the population heavily to pay for them. Pissed off the barons. Had to sign the Magna Carta to keep them happy. And then went back on it when it no longer suited him. The country is in open rebellion because he’s such a crappy failson of a ruler.”

“So anyway, in this mission you’re defending Dover castle to try and hold the crown for King John…”

Third, content. I have played the entire Norman campaign and the first two missions of each of the French, Rus and Mongol campaigns. I have come across exactly two missions so far that were not subtitled “The Battle of…” or “The Siege of…” Perhaps it’s wrong to be annoyed that Age of Empires 4’s campaigns are so war-focused when Age of Empires as a series has always been like this; however I really feel that nearly every single mission feeling like a throwback from the ‘90s where you group select a huge mass of units and steamroll the enemy is possibly not ambitious enough for an RTS made in 2021. For some of the missions you don’t even have to build the units yourself! The game just hands you an army and tells you to mash it into the opponent. For the rest it’ll start you with a fully built settlement and a sizable starting force that you just build up to unit cap and then go around razing all of the CPU settlements — you can even do this in the missions where you’re supposedly under siege by overwhelming enemy forces.  You almost never get to build an economy or advance through the Ages, which is a rather curious omission for a game called Age of Empires. It’s absolutely baffling to me that the campaigns would intentionally cut out the most interesting part of the game and instead just offer you battle after battle, which merely serves to accentuate the fact that the basic combat mechanics haven’t changed since 1996 and exposes some of AoE 4’s more egregious issues, like the unit AI and pathfinding.

Usually when I encounter a set of singleplayer campaigns this bad my usual reaction is to wonder why they bothered; a hell of a lot of time and effort has gone into making something that I literally cannot bring myself to play any more when the actually decently-fun Skirmish mode is sitting right over there and I still haven’t gone through all of the civilizations yet. Age of Empires isn’t like Battlefield, though; it’s an RTS and singleplayer campaigns are supposed to be part of its DNA, and also there are glimmers of good design in here that make me think it didn’t have to be this bad, if Relic could somehow look at every single high-level decision that went into making Age of Empires 4’s campaigns the way they are and then go back in time and do the exact opposite. The best that I can say about them is that they’re not offensively bad, just incredibly bland and boring and uninspired, like the RTS equivalent of Ryvita. It’s hard to get angry about Ryvita, although if you forced me to eat more than one I’d probably change my opinion in a hurry.

Fortunately that’s not a problem I have with Age of Empires 4. I might boot it up a couple more times to finish trying out all of the civilizations and then I’ll delete those 90 gigabytes of high-definition videos so that I can install something else. It’s definitely not a good game, but at least where the skirmish mode is concerned it’s not a bad one either. It’s not a worthy successor to Age of Empires 2, but neither is it the complete disaster I was expecting from Relic. Would I be happy if I’d paid the RRP of £50 for it instead of trying it on Game Pass? Absolutely not — but I will at least check in on it again in a year or two to see what’s been added, which is definitely not something I saw myself doing prior to release. Age of Empires 4 does a hell of a lot wrong, but did not piss me off sufficiently to put me off the idea of ever playing it again. This is not a quote I see Relic putting on the Steam store page any time soon, but by their recent standards it counts as a roaring success.

The post Thoughts: Age of Empires 4 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

First, an apology to Hidden Path. Back in 2013 I slated the first remaster of AoE 2, Age Of Empires 2 HD, as being little more than a widescreen upgrade for the game. Granted it did have Steamworks integration for multiplayer, but on launch the game was plagued with bugs and desyncs and so at the time I didn’t see the long-term value of an AoE 2 with a modern multiplayer backend. Hidden Path kept at it, however, fixing those bugs and shoring up the game and providing a base for another studio, Forgotten Empires, to release their own campaigns and civilization packs. A couple of years back I discovered that Age Of Empires 2 now has a thriving esports community with some of the highest viewer counts on Twitch during major tournaments; I have enjoyed watching many of those matches myself, and that’s something that probably wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of Hidden Path and Forgotten Empires¹. However, while Age Of Empires 2 has certainly aged more gracefully than several of its contemporaries, there was no getting around the fact that the HD Edition was just that – it upped the resolution while doing nothing to update the underlying look of game, and that’s been a bit of a problem as the modern obsession with 4K displays and 144Hz refresh rates intensifies. Given that Microsoft is going through one of its more consumer-friendly phases at the moment, and given that there’s a proven audience for Age Of Empires out there, it’s not that surprising that they’ve taken a stab at a full remaster with Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition.

What is a little surprising, though, is just how outstandingly good this remaster is.

Strategy game remasters are, in general, a bit of a minefield: the more you tinker with the game, the more likely you are to do something that pisses off the people who loved it in the first place and who you are relying on to come and buy your new version. On the other hand if you just increase the screen resolution and chuck in a few modern quality of life features and otherwise leave the base game untouched certain people are going to question why they should bother buying your remaster in the first place when the original version has been working just fine for them for a couple of decades, thanks. The latter approach is usually the safer (and cheaper) option, but not always — I enjoyed Rise Of Nations Extended Edition very much because it was always a good-looking game and the original graphics took very well to higher resolutions, but I couldn’t play more than a couple of hours of Age Of Mythology Extended Edition because the early 2000s-era 3D art looked terrible. As for the former, Blizzard have one excellent example of a full rebuild working well in Starcraft Remastered, where the updated graphics and animations looked exactly like my rose-tinted memories of the game (outside of the mission briefings, anyway), and one well-publicised example of it exploding in their faces with Warcraft 3 Reforged, which I believe still has the lowest Metacritic user score ever. Doing it right is very possible, but god help you if you get it wrong.

Fortunately the Definitive Edition of Age Of Empires 2 has a couple of things going for it from the outset. First is that Forgotten Empires are the ones making it, and they’re a group of developers who cut their teeth on AoE 2 modding before turning professional and making the new campaigns and civilizations for the HD Edition. They really, really love Age Of Empires 2, and if anyone understands what made the original game tick it’s them. Second is that they got to do a dry run for AoE 2 by first making a Definitive Edition for the original Age Of Empires. I’ve played a few hours of this, and it’s rather more ambitious with updating the underlying look and feel of the game than its sequel is; all of the new unit art is technically accomplished but thematically sterile (plus I’m not sure if the developers have ever actually seen a real live horse before based on the cavalry animations) while the redone terrain looked nice in isolation but really screwed with the game’s visual language, with fights devolving into an indistinct mess taking place on a blurry green backdrop. The original 1996 graphics were included as a pregame setting, and while they were devastatingly primitive they were also clear and distinct; at no point did I struggle to pick out my own units while they were standing on top of one of my farms.

Forgotten Empires seem to be aware that the AoE 1 approach didn’t quite work out, which is why their treatment of Age Of Empires 2 is much more faithful (or conservative, depending on your point of view): while everything is being rebuilt from the ground up as before, it’s being done in such a way that it matches the look and feel of the original almost exactly. If you put a villager from AoE 2 DE and a villager from the original 1999 release of AoE 2 next to each other and told them to walk from left to right across the screen… well, you would be able to tell the difference because the Definitive Edition one has three times the animation frames and a much higher level of detail, but in all other respects they’d be identical – unit outline, animations and colour palettes are all exactly the same. It’s a similar story with the buildings, which have acquired extremely detailed destruction animations in place of instantly collapsing in a pile of dust, but which are otherwise unchanged, and the terrain, which looks smoother than the original while remaining just as readable. Where AoE 1 strayed too far from the original look, AoE 2 has been upscaled in such a way that it looks functionally identical while filling in all of the little details that you had to use your imagination for twenty years ago without provoking an Uncanny Valley response. Compensating for two decades of nostalgia is a fiendishly difficult thing to do, but Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition manages it flawlessly; the game looks absolutely gorgeous, and it might just be the best-looking 2D strategy game on the market today.

Feature-wise there don’t appear to be too many in-game alterations, which is probably wise considering the esports background AoE 2 now has; there’s a mousewheel zoom available that I barely touched, and otherwise it’s the same game it always was. Outside of the RTS gameplay, though, there’s an absurdly chunky amount of new features and content. The core of Age Of Empires 2, and the focus of this new edition, is firmly on the adversarial multiplayer modes, whether against AI or human opposition. The Definitive Edition includes every single map type and civilization that was available in the base game, the HD Edition, and all of the expansion packs for both. It also includes all of their respective skirmish AIs  — original CD AI, HD Edition AI, and a new AI for the Definitive Edition — and I am pleased to say that the newest one is actually a bloody difficult opponent for a casual player. It has different behaviour for each map type, raids aggressively and with purpose and is insanely good at building up its economy – definitely better than I was when I started playing it again after a seven year break. It has some odd tics on certain maps, like it’ll just walk villagers into the gold veins in the centre of the map on Gold Rush without sending any protection along with them, making it trivially easy to bleed it dry with a couple of towers, but it says a lot that after a dozen hours of practice I can only just beat the Moderate version of the Definitive Edition skirmish AI and am still some way off being able to give the Hard one a run for its money.

Part of that practice period has involved a rapid reassessment of how Age Of Empires should be played. Up until now it had struck me as quite a slow game, with the focus being more on using your villagers to build up your economy and slowly teching up — sure, you’d be sending out raiding parties and could even attempt an early rush if you wanted, but the military side of the game always seemed somewhat secondary. And that’s true, up to a certain point; I’ve seen pro matches of Age Of Empires 2 where the players are just setting rally points inside the enemy base and churning out unit after unit into a bloody meatgrinder because their economies are so strong that the resources used to build a military unit are negligible by comparison. The main reason I thought this, though, was because the original version of the Age Of Empires 2 skirmish AI wasn’t very good (by modern standards) and doesn’t pressure the player at all. The reason I thought Age Of Empires 2 was a slower economy and tech-heavy game was because those are the things I like to focus on in a strategy game, and the AI was passive enough that it let me do so. The Definitive Edition AI has introduced me to the other side of the game, though, where you need to get a military up and running early or else you’ll find yourself swamped in spearmen and battering rams at around the twenty minute mark. It’s not particularly sophisticated in its attacks and can be baited if you’re smart with tower and wall placement, but it’s good enough that in order to deal with it properly you need to get extremely good at the opening 10-15 minutes of the game.

What “good” means, in this instance, is efficiency. Your town center needs to be constantly producing villagers with zero downtime. Given that you start the game two villagers away from hitting your population cap that means you need to immediately delegate one villager to building a couple of houses so that you don’t get delayed by hitting the cap (referred to in AoE 2 parlance as being “housed”), and the rest need to go on collecting food from your starting sheep. Those starting sheep need to be brought next to your town centre before being killed so that you have zero travel time carrying the food back and forth, and you need to find additional sheep quickly so that you can keep this boosted food gathering rate going for as long as possible. Once you have seven or eight villagers on food you can supplement the sheep by luring in a boar, which is a process that needs to be micromanaged properly if you don’t want to either lose a villager to the boar or else kill it too far away from your town centre to be useful.  After the sheep are gone you’ll need to transition to gathering berries or hunting any deer that might be nearby; this will require construction of Mills, so you’ll have to have sent a few villagers off to gather wood long before you reach this point. The idea is that by squeezing out all of these efficiencies in your starting food production you can delay the switch to Farms until you’ve got the wood income to properly support it and, ideally, until you’ve teched up to the Feudal Age and can research Horse Collar, which drastically increases food yield per Farm.

This is a process that will sound rather familiar if you’ve played an online Starcraft match before, as Age Of Empires 2 has the same focus on hyper-efficient build orders and optimised building placement in the early stages of the game. There is a difference between the two games, though, which is that Starcraft’s economy is comparatively less complex with only two resources to keep track of; Age Of Empires 2 has four (food, wood, gold, stone) along with a much wider breadth of strategy for acquiring them. You need to expend a lot of mental effort getting your food pipeline up and running, yes, but at the same time you’ve also got to be paying attention to wood and planning your eventual transition to gathering gold and stone, as well as the standard RTS stuff of scouting, walling, and making sure you don’t get housed. Balancing all of these things at once is very, very difficult; even pro players mess it up and miss things from time to time, and for somebody who is just starting (or who is picking the game back up after several years) it’s a bit of a jolt to discover that just beating the Moderate AI requires you to be quick on your feet and display at least some basic mastery of the starting build orders, as well as a wider gameplan – knowledge of which techs are important, when you should be teching up, when your chosen civilization is likely to be at its most powerful, and which units will counter whatever the AI is building.

This makes the Definitive Edition AI that rarest of things in a strategy game: it’s an adequate replacement for a human player. Not a good human player, mind, but it’s good enough that it won’t make you lazy the way a lot of strategy game AIs do, and the way the previous AoE 2 AI did. It’s the perfect gateway drug for AoE 2’s current multiplayer scene, which is appropriate since the Definitive Edition would really, really like you to participate in its multiplayer scene. There’s an excellent set of multiplayer-focused tutorials called the Art Of War that go some considerable way beyond the typical “here’s how to scroll the camera, here’s how to move your units, now take on this thousand-game multiplayer veteran” tutorials that RTSes often fob you off with; they’re very aware that people have been playing AoE 2 for twenty years and that the game has evolved all sorts of idiosyncrasies over that time, and so they’re focused more on AoE 2-specific concepts like “how to boom your economy”, “how to do fast Castle Age” and “how to defend yourself against a rush by frantically micromanaging villagers to repair walls and garrison towers”. Each one begins with a short introduction video that shows you the thing you’re supposed to be learning and then leaves you to execute on it yourself, and I found this to be a much more effective teaching method than the usual step-by-step hand-holding that strategy game tutorials resort to.

The tutorials and the skirmish AI between them gave me a much better appreciation of the sort of game Age Of Empires 2 really is, and while I still got brutalised in the couple of multiplayer matches I attempted I was at least able to understand why, instead of having a thousand enemies charging out of the fog of war at the ten minute mark with absolutely zero conception of where they’d come from. Just balancing the economy properly is a far more intense experience than I was expecting, with minor lapses in concentration snowballing into having ten thousand wood and seventeen food — but that ruthless focus on optimisation actually taps into some of the same mental circuitry that makes me enjoy games like Factorio, so I can’t deny that it’s addictive. The Definitive Edition features all of the mod cons you’d expect from a 2019 multiplayer RTS, with the ability to ban a limited number of map types that you don’t like and a ranked matchmaking system that’ll set you up with a 1v1 match in a matter of seconds because this is one of the most popular games on Steam right now².  Given that there’s 35 civilizations currently available to play that means there’s also a significant amount of variation from game to game, both in terms of strategy and in terms of how the thing looks; one thing AoE 2 does that I really like to see in strategy games is having four or five culturally distinct sets of building artwork, as well as a single unique unit and building per civ. It unfortunately doesn’t change the look of the regular units at all from civ to civ, which is a bit of a shame, but since it’s heavily multiplayer-focused I at least understand why that is since screwing with unit silhouettes would be a cardinal sin.

As far as the skirmish and multiplayer side of things goes I really couldn’t be more effusive with my praise for the Definitive Edition; it’s about as perfect an update as you could hope for, a game which really cares about onboarding new players and which gives the burgeoning Age Of Empires 2 multiplayer scene a truly modern client that’ll hopefully take it from strength to strength.  I’m going to be a bit more reserved when talking about the singleplayer campaigns, though, since the best thing I can really say about them is “they’re there”. For once that’s not quite the damning-with-faint-praise it usually would be, though, since they’re all there; every single campaign that has ever been released for Age Of Empires 2, either in the base game or in the new or old expansion packs, is present in the Definitive Edition. If you happen to be a fan of the way Age Of Empires 2 does singleplayer campaigns then you definitely won’t be short on content, and their inclusion makes the Definitive Edition one of the most astoundingly generous remasters I’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately I have to qualify that by saying that I don’t think the Age Of Empires 2 campaign style has aged particularly well. Each mission takes upwards of an hour and always ends up feeling like a bit of a grind, especially since you’re usually pitted against two or more AI opponents in superior starting positions. This was fine for a contemporary game like Command & Conquer where the AI didn’t really understand how to attack a base and so it was a slow, almost tower defence-like experience where you’d sit behind your walls and towers and smash attack after attack until you’d built up enough of an army to flatten the enemy base in one go; there was something remarkably zen about it³. By contrast the Age Of Empires 2 AI does understand how to attack a base, and so its campaign missions are far less sedate; it’s hard enough just to keep the AI from overrunning you, let alone getting enough breathing space to take the fight to them. There’s a fun series of videos where Viper — who is arguably the best Age Of Empires 2 player in the world — tries out the singleplayer campaigns, and by the time he gets to the last mission of the starting French campaign he’s getting so severely pressured by the AI that he actually loses his first attempt at it. I myself have attempted this mission three times and have lost every single time. Later games that had missions with this kind of power asymmetry spun it in interesting ways (like the zombie mission in Starcraft 2), but I find Age Of Empires 2’s take on it exceedingly dull and it’s just not a fun problem for me to solve. I’ve tried a couple of the newer expansion campaigns to see if they mix things up at all, but as far as I can see it’s much the same story there too.

Still, this is a long way from saying the AoE 2 campaigns are bad. They’re just not a thing that I particularly enjoy; I can definitely see someone who likes being constantly assailed by hordes of enemies enjoying them immensely, although given that they still take a long time to finish I also don’t see how you couldn’t be a little bit intimidated by the fact that there are something like twenty campaigns in the game now. It’s not particularly fair to complain that a game has too much content either, though, especially when it’s being sold for a downright reasonable £15 on Steam. Even if you ignore the campaigns completely that’s still an excellent price for a pitch-perfect update of one of the best RTS games around, whose skirmish mode alone will keep you occupied for dozens of hours — I doubt it’ll ever leave my hard drive because it’s so fun to boot up for an hour or so every now and again — and whose multiplayer population has been booming for a while now. And on a technical basis alone the Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition is now my gold standard for RTS remasters, since it proves that you can rebuild a game from the ground up to a modern standard while retaining everything that made it special in the first place.

The post Thoughts: Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is not the first time I’ve played Halo: Reach. The first time I played it was back in 2013 during my misguided attempt to catch up on the Halo series post-Halo 3, when I played through ODST, Reach and Halo 4 in quick succession. I didn’t like ODST much, though I will admit it is infinitely better than the staggeringly awful Halo 4¹. I did quite like Reach, however; it wasn’t up to the standards of the original Halo trilogy, but it at least didn’t go out of its way to break the fiction-gameplay relationship like ODST did, and it didn’t replace the Covenant with an incredibly uninspired race of Generic FPS Baddies called Prometheans like Halo 4 did. Instead it focused solely on what the series has done best: punchy FPS combat against waves of well-designed enemies whose AI meant that you had to get somewhat tactical in order to survive. Reach at least qualified as an actual Halo game in my eyes even if there were other things missing that meant I’d put it at the bottom of the pile, and in theory it’s not a bad game to kick off the series’ long-overdue return to the PC platform.

The recent release of Reach on PC is, of course, is the reason I’m writing this review now². Back in 2015 current Halo custodians 343 Industries decided to rerelease the bulk of the Halo series onto the Xbox One as part of a package called the Master Chief Collection. I own an Xbox One, and I own the MCC, and it’s a decent collection; I’m nowhere near sold on the graphical updates that were included for Halo and Halo 2, but you can play with the original visuals if you want so it’s not so much of a problem. Initially the MCC contained Halos 1 through 4, with ODST being added later, but Reach was conspicuous by its absence. (I am going to take a wild guess and say that this is because it was a particularly tricky game to port to modern console architecture, for reasons that will become clear later in this review.) This is why everyone was so excited for Reach: up until last Tuesday the Xbox One version of the MCC didn’t have it either, and the only way to play Reach prior to that was on an original 360 that hadn’t red-ringed itself into oblivion. PC players were particularly excited, however, because the MCC coming to Steam and Microsoft Game Pass marks the first time you’ll have been able to play Halo on a PC since the baffling Vista-only port of Halo 2 back in 2007³. Sure, you can only play Reach right now, but the intention is to release the rest of the games in the MCC onto PC over the coming months, and hopefully by this time next year you’ll be able to play all of the actually good Halo games on Steam.

Halo: Reach itself functions as a prequel to the main Halo trilogy. The human forces of the UNSC have been locked in a war with the vastly superior alien Covenant for several years by this point, and they are losing badly. The original Halo kicks off with the Master Chief’s ship fleeing from a massive Covenant attack that destroyed the UNSC military headquarters on Reach, and so Halo: Reach is a ground-level portrayal of that assault on Reach as the Covenant funnel more and more forces to the planet and eventually turn it into a smoking cinder. This is a slightly more interesting premise than your typical first-person shooter, simply because you know the conclusion if you’ve played any of the other Halo games: you lose the battle, and Reach gets blown up. It’s even more interesting because you’re not playing the Master Chief in this game either; instead you’re playing a generic Spartan super-soldier called Noble Six who is part of a small squad of Spartans attempting to hold back the invasion. Since the OG Spartans are kind of a big deal in the Halo fiction, and since Noble Team isn’t mentioned at all in any of the following Halo games, it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to guess what happens to them by the end of Reach.

This makes Reach a much bleaker game than the rest of the series. It is not particularly good at communicating this bleakness — certainly it doesn’t tell you any of the stuff I just did in the previous paragraph, and very much relies on your having played Halo in order to make much sense of what’s going on. This is a continuing failing of the series and something that drove me absolutely mad in Halo 4 and 5, which not only expected you to have played the previous games but also to have read all of the shitty tie-in novels in order to make any sense of the plot, but in Reach I think it’s just the right side of acceptable and the problems are more to do with hamhanded story pacing and some extremely abrupt cutscenes that do nothing to adequately portray the scope of the Covenant threat and the overall hopelessness of your fight. For example, at one point a character sacrifices themselves to blow up a Covenant super-battleship, complete with heroic soliloquy and swelling, emotional musical cues — but the capabilities of the Covenant super-battleship are never shown and the super-battleship itself has about seven seconds of screen time, so it’s not obvious why destroying it was so important or why this character needed to kill themselves doing it.

Most of Reach’s story beats fall flat in a similar manner, undone by storytelling that’s far more interested in having the Noble Team leader have a lengthy conversation with a static .jpg of his commanding officer than it is actually communicating the stakes and the cost of this Covenant invasion. Your Spartan teammates gradually die off one at a time, but for at least half of them their deaths have zero buildup and seem to come about simply because they turn to the next page of the script and discover that they’re due to expire during the current cutscene. None of it has any impact — at least, not until the very end of the game when Noble Six decides that they have to be the one to fire the big gun at the Covenant instead of one of the many highly expendable marines in the general vicinity, and so ends up in an unwinnable fight against impossible odds where they’re just trying to kill as many Covenant as they can before they get dragged down through sheer weight of numbers. Unusually for Reach you actually get to play this sequence instead of watching it or hearing about it over the radio, and it’s one of the few moments where Reach’s gameplay experience matches the bleakness of its premise.

Structurally Reach is a bit of an odd beast. As a series Halo became famous for its impossible alien megastructures containing large open spaces that you traversed via vehicles to fight interesting Covenant enemies in a series of unscripted battles. Since Reach is set on a regular human planet there’s no Halos or Arks to catch the eye and provide a cool backdrop for your shootouts, and the levels are much more conventional FPS fare: almost entirely linear, and with most of the significant vehicle use quarantined off into dedicated vehicle levels in much the same way Call Of Duty would do it. Reach does still retain those unscripted set-piece battles, though, where the game delivers waves of Covenant baddies to your location via dropship and then leaves their AI to create interesting, emergent gunfights that never play out the same way twice — and they’re probably the best in the series to date. This is largely thanks to two things: one is that the previous four games in the series gradually added new enemy types to the Covenant ranks and Reach is playing with the full set, giving the combat the widest tactical breadth it’s ever had. The other is that Reach is one of only two Halo games that doesn’t get distracted with Flood, or Prometheans, or other types of gleep-glop that aren’t anywhere near as fun to fight as the Covenant are. This ensures Reach feels a bit more like a precursor to Doom 2016 than it does a Call Of Duty game set in space, in that it’s a series of combat arenas where your movement and actions are driven by the enemy behaviour rather than by any scripted objective. It does just this one thing well, but it does it very well.

So Halo: Reach is probably the least quintessentially Halo of the first five Bungie-developed games in the series, but ironically this has given it a level of focus in combat design that the other games lack. Every fight in Reach is fun. There’s very few moments of outright frustration. Just like the enemy variety, the weapons are as good as they have ever been in a Halo game, with the rocket launcher especially retaining its trademark chunkiness and sense of explosive impact. The grenade button continues to be one of the best additions anyone has ever made to the FPS genre. And despite my criticism of how Reach makes use of its premise, there are a couple of levels that do manage to be more than linear romps through generic military installations; the one where you’re helping evacuate a city under assault by the Covenant is the sole moment outside of the epilogue where the reality of the Covenant invasion is made clear, and the level based around using a Hornet to visit a series of mile-high skyscrapers is interesting in concept if not in execution. There is good stuff in here, if you’re prepared to put up with the two-dimensional writing and unusually drab environments for a Halo game.

As a game Reach mostly holds up, then; I wasn’t blown away by it at any point during my replay but then I didn’t think it was particularly great the first time around either. It misuses its premise but is otherwise solid and dependable and scratches a very specific Halo itch, without really standing out in any notable way. Normally I would say the PC release is just about worth the £7 it’ll set you back on Steam, and if you have friends who also own the game it’s actually great value for money because the entire campaign is playable via online co-op⁴ and there’s also a fun little horde mode included. However, this is where we come back to that little thing I mentioned earlier in the review: I suspect there’s a very good reason it’s taken 343 this long to add Reach to the Master Chief Collection at all, let alone release it on PC, because there are some very serious things wrong with the port. For PC users specifically it feels like the kind of port we’d have gotten a decade ago when PC ports were little more than an afterthought, with next to no graphics or audio customisation options and a control system that’s still 100% designed for console. Movement feels a bit slow. Aiming feels a bit floaty. It feels like my mouse movement is acting as a poor substitute for a controller analogue stick instead of something natural and precise, and while I did find myself getting better at it the more I played the game it takes some getting used to; there’s definitely more than the usual amount of awkward flailing whenever I venture into a multiplayer game, both from me and from other players.

These PC-specific issues are comparatively minor compared to the real problem with Halo: Reach, however, and it’s a problem that affects both the Xbox One and PC versions of the game: the audio is a fucking disaster. It’s the worst audio I’ve ever heard in an FPS, and would have totally ruined the experience for me if I hadn’t been playing the campaign in co-op and was concentrating more on ripping the piss out of the game on Discord than I was listening to the in-game sound effects. I know 343 were aware of the audio problems prior to release, because they mentioned them in a development blogpost. Here’s how they described it:

To update Halo: Reach for Xbox One and PC required entirely changing the encoding for the game’s audio which has resulted in it sounding different from the original release.

This is technically correct. I could hear my gunshots in the original release of Reach. Explosions didn’t sound like a mouse farting inside of a tin can in the original release of Reach. The original release of Reach could play more than two sounds at once and didn’t completely cut out the sound of combat whenever the music had to be one of them. Even in a perfectly controlled environment, with absolutely nothing else going on, the sound effects are flat and indistinct compared to the original release of Reach, with no sense of heft or weight to any of your weapons. The moment you add in more than one person firing a gun it becomes exponentially more so; I was driving one of my co-op buddies around in a Warthog and I couldn’t hear him firing the extremely large chaingun just behind my head in the back of the truck. By contrast, this Reach port thinks it’s very, very important that you be able to hear the panting and wheezing sounds both you and other people make whenever you’re using the Sprint ability (I had no idea the Spartans were so out of shape), even if they happen to be standing fifty metres away at the time. Reach already has a big problem with its cutscenes not making a huge amount of sense, and it turns out this is something that’s greatly exacerbated when you can only hear one word out of every three thanks to the port’s bizarre sound mixing.

(And to add insult to injury the subtitles are broken, so I guess Reach’s plot will forever remain a mystery to anyone who hasn’t already played it.)

These audio issues are so bad that the otherwise-solid Reach campaign is reduced to being borderline unplayable unless you happen to be using your phone speaker as your PC’s sound system, in which case you probably won’t notice the difference because that’s what it sounds like anyway. I’d love to try and fix it via the in-game audio options, but unfortunately they don’t exist. Reach should not have been released with the audio in this state, but I imagine there was some arm-twisting happening to get the game out of the door before Christmas — that or 343 figured that most people would be playing the multiplayer, where it’s a little less noticeable thanks to the lack of music and radio chatter. Whatever the reason, though, it means that what should have been a triumphant return to the PC platform for Halo has ended up leaving a very sour taste in my mouth, and given 343’s track record here (the original Xbox release of the Master Chief Collection was notoriously broken) I’m not exactly filled with confidence that the rest of the series will be any different once it finally arrives on PC. My expectations weren’t high; all Halo: Reach really had to do was be the same game I played on my 360 six years ago, but it couldn’t even manage that. It’s a real disappointment.

The post Thoughts: Halo Reach appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Sea Of Thieves is possibly the most interesting AAA game of this generation.

Note that interesting isn’t necessarily the same thing as good — although, for what it is worth, I think that after a year of steady content patches, and especially the most recent Tall Tales update that adds around twenty hours of meaty quests to the game, Sea Of Thieves is finally an acceptably good game. It didn’t release that way. I played it for a few hours when it first came out back in March 2018, and while it was certainly pleasant to sail around on its incredibly calming blue ocean and the built-in PvP nature of the game threw up some excellent/panicked encounters with other players, there was ultimately nothing to do aside from sail around, dig up chests, and level up a bunch of reputation bars for the game’s paper-thin factions. The launch edition Sea Of Thieves had a very distinctive framework of cooperative gameplay systems that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in an AAA game (indie games, of course, have been operating in this space for years), but that framework wasn’t actually supporting anything, and if I hadn’t been trying the game on a free two-week Game Pass trial I might have been quite upset at how barebones it was.

As it was I didn’t have any skin in the game, and so I was quite happy to shelve Sea Of Thieves until such time as I heard it might be worth playing again. Rare have dutifully spent the last year adding new features that individually are nothing to write home about, but when taken together do at least add a little more meat to the game’s bones — things like haunted mermaid statues you have to find and smash for valuable gems, and megalodons that you can hunt and kill for money, and skeleton pirate ships that you can duel for treasure chests, and the Kraken which… actually the Kraken is one of my major beefs with Sea Of Thieves, so I’ll talk about that some more later. Still, these additions always struck me as never actually addressing the core problem with Sea Of Thieves: it had all of these great mechanics based around crewing and sailing a pirate ship, but unless you were particularly invested in watching a collection of reputation bars go up — and most of the additions mentioned above do, ultimately, result in a reputation bar going up — there wasn’t really much of a reason to actually go and engage with those mechanics for more than a couple of hours. Sailing is fun, and the new content has injected a bit more variety into it, but Sea Of Thieves always lacked a good long-term goal to sustain it after the novelty had worn off.

The Tall Tales update changes that. The Tall Tales are a collection of nine two-hour adventures which heavily leverage the existing SoT mechanics as well as introducing specific gimmicks for each adventure that give each of them their own flavour. All of them start much as a regular Sea Of Thieves “quest” would start: by talking to an NPC in port. However, where usually the NPC would give you a scrap of paper as guidance for an equally-thin quest — go to an island, go to the X mark on the map, dig up a chest, bring it back — embarking on a Tale chucks an entire book into your inventory. The book contains instructions on where you should go and what you should do when you get there, encoded in the form of riddles or diary entries or, in one memorable case, a child’s story. They are not trivial to figure out by any means, especially if you’ve been made lazy by years of games helpfully plonking objective markers on top of your next destination; Sea Of Thieves offers no help whatsoever beyond a single map in the hold of your ship that you can’t even write notes on, so you’ll have to go with the old adventure game standby of keeping pencil and paper handy to try and decipher just where in Sea Of Thieves 50-island archipelago you have to go next.

Then you have to sail there. Sailing is what you spend the vast majority of your time doing in Sea Of Thieves, as it takes a good minute or two just to sail over to the next island, and the semi-randomised nature of the Tales (each Tale has at least one stage that can be set in one of half a dozen possible locations to provide some replayability as well as confounding walkthroughs) you’re equally as likely to be sailing halfway across the map as you are visiting the island next door. Sailing is mechanically quite simple — you can furl/unfurl the sails for more or less maneuverability at the expense of speed, and you can angle them to catch the wind, and that’s about it aside from having somebody on the wheel to actually steer the ship — but what’s interesting here is how it’s deliberately been designed to require a multi-person crew to do properly. You can’t adjust the sails without letting go of the wheel; you can’t see where you are to adjust your course without visiting the map belowdecks; and if you’re on the wheel you can’t even see where you’re going most of the time because there’s a bloody great sail in the way. One person can just about sail the smallest class of ship — badly — if they’re willing to do a lot of running back and forth between sails, wheel, map and bowsprit, but you need a minimum of two people to do everything properly.

And that means you have to communicate, and communicate well. I was playing with some of my regular multiplayer group, who I have been playing games with for over a decade at this point — and we still regularly screwed up telling each other where we were going and what we were doing. In particular I have learned that no two people think about direction and their position in the world quite the same way, and so it is really important to come up with a commonly-agreed system for navigation that doesn’t result in one person saying to turn to port and the other asking if that means left or right.  There’s plenty of rocks and shallows that need steering around, and if you change heading you’ll need to adjust the sails to match the new wind direction, and when you get to where you’re going you need to drop the anchor before you run into it. If you’re in a storm you’ll start taking on water and will need to bail out the hold; if you’re in a particularly bad storm lightning will start hitting the ship and you’ll have to patch up the damage with wood; and if you get charged by a particularly aggressive example of the local sea wildlife it’ll hole the ship belowdecks and you’ll have to bail out water while hammering wood over the holes at the same time. And you need to do all of this while still sailing the ship, which means there’s several different strands of work to do all at once and everyone needs to be working together. I don’t think I’ve ever played a co-op game — and certainly not one in the AAA space — that was quite this committed to the idea of actually being cooperative and which has woven it so deeply into its core mechanics.

(And this is all without considering the presence of other player crews who might try to attack you and steal your stuff. Mostly people keep a wary amount of distance from each other, but you can’t even do that without everyone on the crew being fully aware of any sails on the horizon and which way they’re headed. If you actually want to get into a fight with either a player ship or an NPC ship full of skeletons that’ll require another level of coordination altogether as you load and fire the cannons while patching damage and maneuvering for position. However ship versus ship encounters are actually pretty rare if you don’t go looking for them, which is why I’m not going to spend much time talking about them here.)

It’s good that the sailing is so involved since you spend so much time in Sea Of Thieves doing it, but as I mentioned earlier there’s no point having a fantastic system for getting from point A to point B without there being anything at point B that was worth the journey. And this is where we come back to the Tall Tales; regular SoT quests would have just one generic objective to kill skeletons or dig up a chest and then you’re done, but the Tales have multiple stages and each of them has some special flavour to it, whether it’s exploring a shipwreck to find a logbook that’ll point you to the next part of the quest, or trying to solve a puzzle in a set of ancient ruins that’ll give you a key that unlocks a hidden vault in another part of the map. Many Tales have their own unique gimmicks that stretch across the entire Tale; in one you use a magic lantern to follow in the final footsteps of some doomed souls on a skeleton island, and in another you must navigate from place to place using the constellations, and in yet another you need to use a special telescope to line up certain landmarks on an island in order to find out where to dig. Even when mechanics are reused between Tales the designers put a nasty little spin on them; a common recurring theme to end a Tale is using the cluebook to solve what’s essentially a combination lock to unlock a vault. You’re given all the time in the world to do this in the first couple of Tales — which makes it a very nasty surprise when you activate the lock mechanism in a later Tale and the door slams shut and the room starts filling with water.

Sprinkling the islands with these miniature Indiana Jones-esque adventures gives so much more body to the rest of the game. What’s particularly striking is how combat-heavy they aren’t. Sea Of Thieves’ combat mechanics have deliberately been kept quite shallow in order to emphasise the cooperative parts of the game — this is not a game about hand-eye coordination or fast reactions or the ability to memorise an esoteric lexicon of weapons and abilities, but is instead all about “soft” skills like communication, coordination, puzzle-solving and orienteering. The Tales largely reflect this, with barely half a dozen combat encounters to be found across the twenty hours it takes to play through all of them. Most Tales don’t feature any fighting whatsoever, instead focusing purely on those soft skills, and that a marquee title from a major console publisher is doing something like this honestly something that blows my mind a little bit. Sure, you can argue that marquee status is more down to Microsoft’s lack of other options than it is because they wanted to take a chance on a game that feels largely experimental, but the fact remains I’d struggle to think of anything else from Sony or Microsoft — or hell, even Nintendo — that’s quite like Sea Of Thieves’ collaborative problem-solving at its best.

Or at least that’s the idea behind the design philosophy driving SoT. It’s a testament to the good work Rare have done with it over the past year that it comes as close as it does to fulfilling its design goals, but it’s still a bumpy ride in places. The Tales might not feature much combat, but those half-dozen scripted combat encounters they do have are utterly atrocious, and in particular there are three bossfights against undead pirate lords that are incredibly badly designed, partly because the combat mechanics aren’t complex enough to provide any challenge for a multi-person crew that’s not “Give the boss an absolutely huge sack of hitpoints, and also give them regeneration abilities when their HP gets low.” I think you’re supposed to burn them down with a damage burst when their regeneration kicks in, except a) you can’t see their health and b) you’ve got no way of actually bursting damage unless you get a little bit devious. The first two bossfights went on for nearly fifteen minutes through multiple deaths and respawns — not doing anything interesting, mind you, just chipping away at the boss’s gigantic health pool with swords and guns — and were only resolved when we kited the boss to the beach and opened fire with the ship’s cannons. Even then it took well over fifty shots to kill them, and this wasn’t even an option for the last bossfight capping off the ninth and final Tale since it takes place in an underground chamber well away from any sources of damage that aren’t your sword or your gun.

That last boss took well over twenty-five minutes of running around this stupid room shooting him with blunderbusses, and it’s here that we come to a second major problem with the Tales: you have to complete each of them in a single sitting, since it there’s no checkpointing during a Tale and it only records progress when you hand in the item required to finish the bloody thing. This is a bit of an ask since each of them takes around two hours to finish, requiring you to have a free evening if you’re going to attempt even one, but the last Tale is particularly complicated and took us just over three hours, the last half hour of which was spent in this purgatorial bossfight. We didn’t have the option to take a breather, to go away and come back later when we were a little bit fresher, as we would have had to restart the entire Tale from scratch. As I get older I get increasingly annoyed at games that don’t respect the player’s time since I have increasingly less of it,  and that includes something like Sea Of Thieves which makes it very easy to flush hours of your life down the toilet if something unexpected causes you to have to end a session early for whatever reason.

And for all that the Tales are otherwise quite excellent, they don’t change the fact that every activity outside of them is just as one-dimensional as it was before, for all that there are more of them now. Sea Of Thieves does a very laudable thing by keeping its equipment structure entirely flat; from the moment you first log in you can do everything there is to do in the game because you already have everything you need, with the purchasable upgrades you can buy being cosmetic only. However, there’s no long-term hook to replace the usual ladder of equipment unlocks, unless you’re really really invested in watching those reputation bars go up. There’s a lot of stuff to do in Sea Of Thieves, and some of it is worth doing for its own sake (for a little while, anyway), but none of it leads anywhere.

This is the big misjudgement Sea Of Thieves made a year ago, I think: it released in an even more barebones state than usual for one of these newfangled “games-as-a-service” things, and seemed to be relying on its emergent player-versus-player encounters to carry the game. And since every piece of loot you obtain has to be carted back to a port in order to be cashed in, there’s a definite pang of nervous excitement when you spot a player ship coming towards your heavily-laden vessel. However, in practice Sea Of Thieves’ supposedly pirate-infested oceans have ended up in much the same place as The Division’s Dark Zones: while there’s a minority of players who’ll try to steal your stuff just for fun, the vast majority of players are engaging with the PvE content and see the actual piracy part of the game as too much of a risk. The numbers speak for themselves: in twenty hours of doing the Tales content there were only four occasions when we came close enough to other player ships to actually be able to see the players themselves. One of those occasions was entirely peaceful, and another had us on the receiving end of a daring heist from our anchored ship while we were trying to solve one of puzzles on a Tales island — we emerged from the caves just in time to see them leap back onto their ship and sail away. The remaining two were precisely the sort of bloodthirsty tussles Sea Of Thieves is trying to promote, but one ship-to-ship battle every ten hours isn’t exactly going to support the rest of the game through its dire lack of meaningful content. You could probably increase that frequency if you went looking for fights, sure, but since you can spot ships from halfway across the map and all ships go at roughly the same top speed, you are going to end up spending an awful lot of time just chasing your quarry down until either they get bored of running or you get bored of chasing them.

Finally we have the Kraken, which I said I’d talk about because, while Sea Of Thieves has plenty of stuff in it that’s misjudged or poorly-tuned, the Kraken is the only thing that’s so actively anti-fun it has me wondering why it’s even in the game. The way the Kraken works is that you’ll be happily sailing on to your next destination when some ominous music will start playing, the water around you turns inky black and your ship slows to a crawl. Then a bunch of Kraken tentacles appear and start attacking you. Your goal is to get clear of the inky water before the Kraken sinks your ship, but the ship is barely moving and the Kraken is batting it this way and that, occasionally wrapping tentacles around the entire ship and blocking the wheel position.

There are three things that particularly bug me about the Kraken:

1. Unlike the other NPC threats to be found on the ocean — megalodons and skeleton pirate ships — there is no option to not engage the Kraken. Its appearances are entirely random, and if it appears you have to fight it, and the fight can go on for 10-15 minutes.
2. Unlike the other NPC threats to be found on the ocean, it is not at all clear what you’re supposed to do during the Kraken encounter, other than get out of the danger zone. Shooting the tentacles doesn’t appear to do anything, or at least has inconsistent results; sometimes a couple of shots with a sniper rifle will cause a tentacle to vanish back under the waves, sometimes pounding it with a cannon for a full minute will achieve absolutely nothing.
3. Unlike the other NPC threats to be found on the ocean, you don’t get a reward for escaping the Kraken.

So at best the Kraken is just an irritating time sink that sucks up those 10-15 minutes it takes to get away from it, time that you’d otherwise be spending more productively.  At worst it’ll sink more than that quarter of an hour — it’ll sink your ship, along with any quest-critical items you happen to be carrying aboard. All loot from a sunken ship ends up bobbing on the surface so it is theoretically possible to come back and get it if you can remember where you were sunk, but this is yet more time wasted — and it’s not even guaranteed that you’ll find it, either, as the peaks and troughs of Sea Of Thieves’ excellent wave tech do a very good job of obscuring small items floating on the ocean surface.

So it’s not so much that Sea Of Thieves is now a good game as it is Sea Of Thieves now contains a good game within it, if you’re willing to ignore the sizeable number of things around the periphery that it doesn’t do so well. The Tales content is, for the most part, great, and there is more than enough of it to outweigh the content offered by many contemporary AAA titles. If you have a couple of friends who are interested in the idea of unusual co-op adventures and you can snaffle up one of the Game Pass offers that regularly come up ¹, then Sea Of Thieves is well worth the hassle of dealing with the Microsoft Store to play it on PC.  As for the rest of it, your mileage may vary; my personal opinion is that it’s very well-packaged but still incredibly shallow and doesn’t have any longevity once you’ve finished all of the Tales — Rare have made some respectable efforts to make them replayable by randomising the clues and locations you visit during each adventure, but once you’ve figured them out once it’s the matter of a few moments to figure them out again — but that arguably makes it a perfect game to try for cheap on a subscription service, since you know you’re not going to be playing it for multiple months. And I do think it’s worth trying, just to see something very different being attempted in the AAA space. When taken as a whole Sea Of Thieves might be something of a mixed bag, but I do like its attitude; it’s the first thing I’ve played from Rare in nearly two decades that’s captured some of the wild, experimental joy of their N64 years, and I would very much like to see more games like it.

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