Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is this year’s Shadow Of The Tomb Raider.

Fallen Order has been compared to a lot of things. It’s been compared to Uncharted, and the start of the game is a heavily-scripted linear romp through a disintegrating scrapyard full of Star Destroyers that definitely feels very Uncharted. It’s been compared to Sekiro, and while I’ve not yet gotten around to playing Sekiro the human-on-human combat in Fallen Order is a similarly slower and more methodical affair of timing your blows to break through your opponent’s guard while dodging their ripostes. And it’s also been compared, inevitably, to Metroid and/or Castlevania, because it relies heavily on the same maze-like worlds with various areas and shortcuts gated off by mobility abilities such as double jump that must be obtained via progressing the story. As you progress through the game you revisit the same areas and worlds several times, with more and more of each map being available to you as you grow more powerful as a character.

More than all of those, though, Fallen Order feels most like a modern Tomb Raider title to play. The balance of exploration, puzzle-solving and combat is more or less the same, and uses the same broad structural sweep. That’s one reason why I’ve chosen Shadow Of The Tomb Raider as my point of comparison. The other reason, and the reason I’ve chosen Shadow specifically, is that, just like Shadow, Fallen Order is a narrative mess that’s been stitched together out of several mismatched bits of game that all have wildly different levels of tone and polish. It’s actually a little uncanny how similar the two are; Fallen Order is at least not burdened with being the third entry in a series that had proven remarkably reluctant to do anything new since it rebooted itself, but otherwise playing Fallen Order was an eerily familiar experience. It’s got the same nonsense story, the same abrupt lurches from scripted set-pieces to tepid open-world exploration, and the same weird fascination with fighting enemies that make use of only a fraction of the combat system’s potential. It’s just that this time the main character is clutching a lightsaber, and that’s something that counts for far less with me than it might do with other people.

Fallen Order casts you as Cal Kestis, an ex-Jedi apprentice who went into hiding in a galactic breaker’s yard after Order 66 went into effect and the Jedi Order got merked by the clones. Unfortunately he’s not very good at it, as he openly uses his force powers to save a co-worker from a grisly fate while there’s an Imperial probe droid not ten feet away. Imperial Inquisitors (Vader-lites invented by the animated shows to give their protagonists somebody to fight lightsaber duels with) swiftly arrive and start chasing him through the ship graveyard where he works, and because he’s a shit Jedi who never finished his training he’s only saved by the intervention of two NPCs who swoop in on their spaceship to pluck him out of harm’s way. This kickstarts what little plot Fallen Order has; the NPCs have come to find Cal specifically because they need a Jedi to follow a trail of clues across the galaxy towards a magic box containing the location of force-sensitive kids that can be used to rebuild the Jedi Order.

Immediately there are a number of problems with this setup. For starters everyone has seen Star Wars the film, and since there’s no rebuilt Jedi Order in that it’s going to be a very fair bet to say that Cal does not succeed and his hunt for the magic box is going to be effectively meaningless except in terms of his own character development. Even if you hadn’t seen Star Wars, though, Fallen Order is staggeringly bad at explaining why any of what you’re doing in the game actually matters, how one thing connects to the next, and even who the people accompanying Cal on his little quest are. The NPCs who save him from the Inquisition are supposed to be major characters who appear in most of the game’s cutscenes; one is a Jedi master who has lost her powers, and the other is a sarcastic four-armed pilot, but I have absolutely no idea what their names are because they don’t actually do anything¹. They’re almost entirely absent from the game proper, preferring to just sit back on the ship while Cal does all of the hard work and only popping up to vomit exposition when you’re travelling to the next planet. You’re supposed to be following in the footsteps of a dead Jedi who speaks to you from beyond the grave via a convenient set of holographic recordings, but in literally every single one he just spouts sixty seconds of meaningless mumbo jumbo about a dead civilization before almost absent-mindedly adding “and now I’m going to the next planet”” on the end. Like the ship NPCs he has no active role in the story; a little more understandable in his case since he’s dead, but his search appeared to be more of a galactic tourism trip than it did an attempt to unravel a mystery.

So Fallen Order has a similar scale of open world exploration to Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and just like Shadow it provides precisely zero impetus for you to actually engage with that exploration beyond sticking an objective marker on the map and telling you that’s where you should go next. It’s even doing a lot of the little structural stuff worse than Shadow did; for example, it’s absolutely terrible at contextualising most of your ability upgrades. Cal is accompanied at all times by a tiny droid called BD-1 that clings to his back while he’s running around and fighting things, but which will leap off and scuttle over to anything nearby that happens to be interactable. This is a nice solution to the old UI problem of highlighting nearby points of interest to the player², and BD-1 also gets access to a selection of abilities that enable new ways of traversing the environment, such as slicing through doorlocks and travelling up ziplines. That’s all fine, but the problem is that these abilities are gained in the most nonsensical way possible; what’ll happen is that you’ll find a random droid upgrade bench out in the middle of nowhere, Cal will bend over it for five seconds with a screwdriver, and suddenly BD-1 has the ability to overcharge the electrical grid. There’s no work involved in unlocking these abilities, no sense of cause and effect — you don’t pry the new droid parts out of a droid boss you’ve defeated, or even pick them out of a droid scrapyard, and instead the level designers just plop down an upgrade node somewhere at the point in the story where you need that ability to progress.

It all feels incredibly, nakedly artificial, and all the more so because it’s not actually possible to do anything out of order in Fallen Order. While there are optional side areas that you can explore if you want to, you cannot run across the droid upgrade benches or the lightsaber upgrades or the force powers before the story says you can, and when you reach that point you will get the upgrade whether you want it or not. What, then, is the point of doing side exploration in Fallen Order? There’s certainly plenty of side areas in the game, including a fairly lengthy platforming section through a crashed Star Destroyer, but all that’s in them are codex entries, audio logs, and chests containing the following:

• Cosmetics for your lightsaber. You can customise the colour, the sleeve, the hilt — hell, both hilts when you get the double-bladed upgrade! Unfortunately Respawn don’t appear to have considered that if you’re not staring at the closeup in the lightsaber customisation menu, the actual in-game presence the lightsaber has is a tiny stick attached to Cal’s waist. It’s kind of hard to appreciate the cosmetics on an item that is, most of the time, about fifty pixels long.
• Cosmetics for your poncho. The poncho is possibly the single ugliest garment I’ve seen in a AAA game to date, and none of the available cosmetic options improve this state of affairs.
• Cosmetics for your ship. The ship only appears in cutscenes, and on the landing pad where you enter/exit each world.

This is possibly the least enticing set of exploration rewards that anyone could have devised for a Metroidvania title. Castlevania squirrels all sorts of weird shit away in its castle, and Metroid loves to hide optional weapon upgrades and tons of energy tanks off the beaten path. Fallen Order does have health and Force (i.e. mana) upgrades, but they’re handled via the tremendously cack-handed approach of having you need to collect three of them in order to get an upgrade. Zelda does the same thing with its Pieces Of Heart, but they’re comparatively much more common, as well as far more satisfying to collect; here it’s tremendously shit to do five minutes of platforming to get a glowy force ball and then be told you need two more in order to get anything out of it. It’s not even like Fallen Order quantifies the health upgrade your recieve; in Zelda you get a heart and in Metroid you get an energy tank, but in Fallen Order your reward for finding three health balls is that your health bar increases by such an infinitesimally small amount it’s difficult to tell that it’s increased at all.

In fact the only exploration reward that actually feels worthwhile are the infrequent golden chests that dole out estus fla- I mean, healing stims. Which I suppose is a good point to segue into talking about the combat, which has been ripped wholesale from a From Software game. Apparently Fallen Order is heavily influenced by Sekiro; I’ve only played the Souls titles but even I can see that Fallen Order has tripped over the line separating “inspired by” from “ripped off from”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I quite liked the combat in Dark Souls and it does adapt pretty well to a Star Wars game. Cal managed to retain his lightsaber when he fled the Jedi purge, and as the game unfolds he unlocks three Force powers which are used in combat as well as to solve puzzles: Force Push, Force Pull and Force Slow. Arrayed against him are a selection of classic Star Wars baddies: Stormtroopers, Scout Troopers, Heavy Troopers and Rocket Troopers, along with the odd AT-ST. Most of them engage you at range, but Cal automatically deflects blaster bolts if you hold down the block button and can even reflect them back to their source if you time the block right, while rockets and other heavy projectiles can be deflected/slowed with force powers. Scout Troopers choose to get in close to try and hit you with shock batons (which puts me in mind of this classic PA comic), which is where you get into the meat of Fallen Order’s combat: cutting people the fuck up with your lightsaber.

Or at least that’s what it’d be all about if Fallen Order had the balls to set g_saberrealisticcombat to 1; as it is you can chop up droids and monsters but humans just get some scorch marks and then fall over. Nicking the Dark Souls/Sekiro model does a lot for it; you’re not one the super-mobile backflipping Jedis seen in the prequel films, but are instead much more Luke circa Empire Strikes Back. Combat feels slow and deliberate, with no button-mashing (unless you want to die). Fighting human enemies in melee combat is a genuine pleasure, as you either drain their block bar with repeated attacks or well-timed parries, or else knock them off balance with force powers before hitting them a few times with your lightsaber. Most of the regular trooper enemy types are appropriately weak and die in one or two hits once you’ve gotten into melee range and past their defences, but it’s the fights against the special Purge Trooper enemies that are the real highlight here; these are enemies armed with a larger healthpool, magic electric weapons — staff, axe, pair of swords — and a much wider range of attacks and counters. Fighting Purge Troopers comes across as a proper duel, as you need to keep your guard up while looking for openings and mixing your own behaviour up a bit. I learned pretty quickly that the dual-sword troopers were difficult to parry as they attack too fast, so it was best to go on the offensive and hit them with some really big heavy attacks that smash through their block. That’s a high risk option if used on the staff trooper, though, as they’re strong enough to absorb the hits and then counterattack while you’re recovering. There’s no animation-cancelling in Fallen Order; once you’ve pushed the attack button you’re committed to that lightsaber swing, which can be precisely the wrong thing to do if you’ve timed it wrong and find yourself staring at an incoming axe with no way to defend yourself.

The parts of Fallen Order with human enemies were the parts where I found it easiest to overlook Fallen Order’s flaws. Sure, the exploration may be a bit shit, and it’s also a little exasperating that it’s also nicked Dark Souls’ bonfire/enemy respawn system, but as long as my journey through an otherwise surprisingly linear game is filled with fun combat I’m not going to complain too much. The difficulty levels are nicely pitched and adjustable at any time; I had it stuck on Normal to begin with but also didn’t pick up any extra estus flasks for the first half of the game, so things got increasingly tricky, and pleasingly so. Once I had eight of the things the Purge Trooper duels started to become pushovers (literally, they spent the entire time flat on their asses because of Force Push) so I bumped it up to Hard which restored some of the challenge. If human enemies were all the game had then I think the combat would be in an extremely strong place — strong enough to carry the game — and I’d be much more positive about Fallen Order than I am.

Unfortunately another point where Fallen Order strongly resembles Shadow Of The Tomb Raider specifically is that, for most of the game, you’re not fighting the recognisable Star Wars enemies from the Empire. You’re instead fighting an incredibly uninspired collection of monsters, and these are actively unfun because of how they subvert the concept of “cool lightsaber duels” that the combat has seemingly been built around. Even with the basic Scout Troopers you can tell when they’re winding up for a swing, and you can bring your lightsaber up to parry. Time it right and there’s a huge clash of sparks as the two weapons meet; it’s an interaction that’s got a sense of weight and force behind it. Your enemy stumbles backwards, and you lunge forward with a jab through their midsection that they don’t recover from.

Now let’s consider the same fight, but with one of Fallen Order’s favourite monster enemies: a giant rat. Literally, that is what it is. The giant rat jumps from side to side for a bit, and then stops. Great! It’s open for an attack, so you duly lunge forward an… oh wait no, it stopping and standing in one place was apparently the cue I was supposed to read for its own attack, and now it’s stunlocking me with an attack chain. The attack tells on almost every single monster are incredibly fuzzy and difficult to read; even after playing the game for twelve hours I was still getting taken off guard because the attacks kept coming out of nothing. Eventually you do get into the habit of not bothering with any fancy parrying and just approaching the rat with the block button held down, which causes its attack to harmlessly slide off and lets you counter. You hit the rat with your lightsaber; job done, right? Ha ha, of course not; all of the monster enemies are an order of magnitude tougher than the human ones, and this giant rat takes three — three! — lightsaber swings to kill. That’s something that makes me feel less like a badass Jedi, and more like I’m an exterminator who’s been called in to flail ineffectually at vermin with a foam baton. Talk about subverting your own fiction.

(“Giant space rat” is also indicative of the amount of thought that’s been put into the monster design. You will also encounter giant spiders — two types of giant spider, in fact — giant slugs, giant flies and giant yaks. Is it just that Daikatana is old enough now that game designers haven’t played it and thus don’t know that it’s an insanely bad idea to feature giant insects as the primary enemy type in a game?)

There are some monster enemies that do work; not coincidentally they’re the ones with two arms and two legs that are at least somewhat intuitive to read, and all of the boss monsters are also pretty well pitched thanks to having a much more strictly designed set of attack patterns. One common issue that the combat faces across all types of enemies, though, is that while Fallen Order does one-on-one duelling very well it’s far less assured when you’re facing huge crowds of baddies. As previously mentioned, Cal is not mobile. He can’t run very fast, so he can’t outmaneuver a crowd, and his block bar vanishes in no time when facing multiple enemies. So you end up doing what you do in every single third-person melee combat game to date: dodge rolling everywhere, stopping for a couple of seconds to land exactly one hit, and then dodge rolling everywhere again. This works, especially if you supplement it with some force powers to keep a few of your attackers disabled, but it’s hardly fluid or fun when you’re fighting four monsters all of whom have giant sacks of health and who will take actual, literal minutes to wear down.

And the weird thing about Fallen Order is that its combat is pitched to emphasise precisely the sort of encounter that it doesn’t do well. The Empire vanishes for significant portions of the game’s length and there was a full sixty minute segment where I didn’t see a single Stormtrooper. Instead you’re just fighting spiders and slugs, with the occasional giant ogre-thing thrown in. Enemy numbers increase as the game goes on, and the combat starts to feel less like the measured and thoughtful affair Respawn were presumably going for and more like clumsy flailing because you simply don’t have the tools to deal with it properly; attempting to engage a single target to get the best out of the combat simply results in you getting dogpiled by the rest. It is notably less of a problem when Fallen Order decides to go all out and throw piles of Stormtroopers and Scout Troopers at you, since those poor bastards die in one hit and you can actually manage their numbers properly, not to mention getting to feel like the rampaging Jedi you should be. That’s a vanishingly small portion of the game, though, and I would say that the Empire enemies — the fun enemies — are present for maybe 30% of its length. Spending the rest of it fighting generic monster enemies that could have been lifted straight out of any other fantasy game is not what I expected when I bought³ something with the words Star Wars written on the tin; when people fantastise about Star Wars they’re not imagining themselves slicing up a bunch of alien rats, after all.

I probably shouldn’t be so surprised that the combat is so confused about what it wants to be, though, since it simply matches the entire rest of the game in that regard. Just like Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Fallen Order has been rushed to hit a deadline and has been pasted together out of several mismatched parts that don’t really mesh at all. The Uncharted-style opening is surprisingly excellent, and made me a bit wistful that Star Wars 1313 got cancelled because on the strength of this it’s clearly not a bad idea. Then you’re into the more Souls-y/Metroid-y part of the game, which feels like it was designed for a different set of gameplay systems which would have given it a far wider range of rewards to stick inside of its loot chests. Occasionally you take a little detour into another game entirely, like the part where you drive an AT-AT — this segment is pretty much exactly as it was during Fallen Order’s gameplay presentation debut, but the level of polish it’s received in comparison to the rest of the game makes it stick out like a sore thumb. At one point you’re whisked away from the game for literally no reason to do an arena fight against a bunch of monsters; this part really smacked of Respawn having twenty minutes of gameplay from a previous design iteration that they slapped in because they needed to pad the game’s running time.

It’s really, really telling that Fallen Order’s best bits by far are the ones which ditch the open world exploration and revert to a linear romp through classic Star Wars environments populated by classic Star Wars enemies, though. The opening is like this, as stated, as well as the AT-AT segment, and the optional bit where you explore a crashed Star Destroyer is also great. Cal flashes back to what happened during the events of Order 66 and you get to guide Kid Cal as he tries to escape from the clones, and this too is surprisingly good value considering my historic hatred of gameplay segments where you have to play as the younger version of a character. And the finale of Fallen Order is a fully-upgraded Cal making an assault on a heavily guarded Imperial facility, and it’s a lot of fun, zipping through an environment that oozes Star Wars ambience with waves of Stormtroopers coming at you and not a single giant spider in sight. It feels like Fallen Order needed somebody to make an executive decision to cut the Metroidvania concept (along with its insanely obnoxious backtracking) and just focus on making a great Star Wars action adventure game, instead of producing this weird halfway house where Fallen Order does neither thing particularly well.

Given how much Fallen Order resembles Shadow Of The Tomb Raider it’s hardly surprising that my overall opinion of the game is much the same as Shadow. It’s weird, misshapen and has a plot that makes absolutely zero sense but if we set an extremely low bar of “it’s a triple-A video game” then by those standards it’s fine. The combat is entertaining when the game chooses to make proper use of it and the mechanical action of clambering around Fallen Order’s various worlds is fun enough even if there’s nothing worthwhile waiting at the end of it. However, I would seriously question why you wanted to play Fallen Order instead of one of the many other games I’ve namedropped in this review that do these things far better. Is it because of the Star Wars wrapping? Because I have some bad news there: Fallen Order doesn’t leverage that license anywhere near as well as it should do and for much of the game’s length it’s difficult to tell you’re playing a Star Wars game at all. I will give it some credit for trying to adapt Sekiro’s combat for lightsaber battles but ultimately all it’s really done is made me slightly more interested in trying Sekiro itself, which presumably implements the concept in a far neater fashion. Otherwise while my litany of complaints in this review isn’t quite enough to damn Fallen Order outright, it still presents no actively compelling reason as to why you’d play it over any of the alternatives.

The post Thoughts: Star Wars Jedi – Fallen Order appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Rear Admiraless Josh asks

In The Empire Strikes Back, there’s a bit where the Falcon goes into an asteroid field pursued by a bunch of TIE fighters, and they have to avoid a load of rocks flying around very fast in close proximity. It’s what a lot of people think of asteroid fields as being like, but logically that’s can’t be right, as the rocks would just bash each other into sand over the course of a couple of centuries. So what is the inside of an asteroid field really like? What is the largest thing you can swing around while reasonably expecting not to hit anything?

Ooooh, “rocks just bash each other into sand over the course of a couple of centuries” is so close, and yet so far.

I actually have mentioned collisional evolution before on here but it was rather in passing so you can be forgiven for missing it; in short, the long-term evolution of any belt-type collection of objects is going to be primarily driven by two things:

1)     The average velocity (and hence kinetic energy) of an impacting body in the belt.

2)     The critical energy density required to blow a body in the belt to smithereens without it eventually reforming under its own gravity.

So basically you have to be going fast enough to cause some real damage, and the thing you’re hitting has to be weak enough that that damage will be lasting. As ever, the hardest part about blowing massive objects up in space is that in addition to actually physically destroying the target you have to give most of the resulting fragments enough energy so that they’re accelerated up above the object’s escape velocity. I mostly dealt with the larger type of object in my Ph.D research – dwarf planets and the like – so gravity was Kind Of A Big Deal for them, but… *rummages through paper archive*

This is the result of some computer modelling done in a paper by Durda et al. (1999, Icarus, 135, 431-440.) which attempts to figure out how the strength of asteroids increases with their size. There’s actually a whole bunch of models there but they all follow the same basic behaviour of an initial decrease in the material strength of an asteroid as its size increases (this is because it is easier for cracks to propagate through big bodies than it is through small ones) and then a sudden upswing at around the 1km diameter mark. This is the point at which the object is large enough that its gravitational strength becomes the primary factor working against its destruction, and material strength becomes more or less irrelevant. In other words it doesn’t matter if you’re hitting an object made out of rock or taffeta; if it’s 10km on a side it’s the gravity of the object you’re going to have to overcome, not its material strength.

So how big are the asteroids in the asteroid belt? Obviously their sizes vary, and the overall size distribution looks something like this.

(Taken from this great American novel via a second-hand source because obviously I don’t have sixty-five quid what are you crazy.)

This is the expected power law distribution of any large collection of objects driven by collisional evolution, with the only aberrations being those two small bumps. The interesting thing about the asteroid belt, though, is that this size distribution has remained static over time. That is, if you were to go back in time a couple of million years (this being the timescale over which collisional evolution operates) and take a similar survey of the asteroid belt, the size distribution graph would look much the same, implying that whatever is going on in the asteroid belt has produced a population of bodies which is stable over solar-system timescales.

It was not always thus, of course. The asteroid belt originally had far more mass in it (about one Earth) than it does today (about 0.01 Earth masses), so the population we see in the asteroid belt right now are the stable one percent survivors of whatever happened to eject the other ninety-nine percent. “Whatever happened” is overwhelmingly likely to be the chaotic gravitational interactions, peturbations and resonances of the solar system’s early years. For example, there’s lots of very large, very conspicuous gaps in the asteroid belt at certain orbital radii which are down to resonances with Jupiter amplifying the planet’s gravity and shooting anything unfortunate enough to be found in those gaps out of the solar system. So it’s not just asteroids colliding with each other that can “destroy” them, it’s outside influences as well.

Anyway, that was something of a tangent. The thing to take away from this is that while collisional evolution was a big factor in the initial makeup of the belt, the current population is — more or less — stable and unchanging. With that in mind, what would flying through it in a spacecraft be like? Immensely boring, I suspect; the average distance separating asteroids in the belt is about one million kilometres, although that is a number based on the volume of the belt and the number of asteroids rather than any hard and fast measurements of actual distance separations. Certainly it’s sparsely populated enough that every single interplanetary probe we have sent to explore the outer solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – has made it through without even the faintest glimmering of an incident. A million kilometre gap is quite a large target to aim for, after all, especially when it has more million kilometre gaps on either side. You’d be lucky to see an asteroid at all, let alone the swarms of them seen in Empire Strikes Back.

(Speaking of, I’m fairly confident saying that an asteroid field of the type seen in Empire could never actually happen. The only way you could get so much debris so densely packed is by destroying a planet – which isn’t completely out of the question given the Empire’s Death Star – but if the fragments were produced by that kind of process then they’d all be flying away from a central point at some ridiculous velocity, not just sitting there chilling and occasionally bumping up against their buddies.)

The post Never Tell Me The Odds. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Gnomishlich asks

Could I ask your thoughts on Petroglyph Studios, specifically Universe at War: Earth Assault? I’ve always thought of it as ahead of its time, but bogged down by implementation issues. your thoughts?

Oh. Petroglyph. Those guys.

For those not in the know, Petroglyph was formed by the last group of Westwood refugees back in 2003 when EA turned off the life support that was keeping the zombified husk of the studio alive and merged what was left with EA Pacific. Westwood were responsible for a couple of minor PC hits you may have heard of, such as Command & Conquer, Red Alert and all that jazz. In theory Petroglyph were well placed to carry on where Westwood had left off, immediately beginning work on two RTSes that eventually came to market in 2006 and 2007. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.

I own both of Petroglyph’s initial games. The first — Star Wars: Empire at War – actually scares me a little bit because I have no recollection of buying it. Like, at all. The first I knew of it was when I was trying to sort out my Steam games and stumbled across it when browsing through my library, accompanied by a muttered “What the fu-?” I own just shy of 400 full games and expansion packs on Steam, and with the sole exception of Empire at War I can remember buying every single one — even the ones that were part of massive pack deals that led to me owning such gaming luminaries as CivCity Rome and Midnight Club Street Racing. I could probably even put a rough date on when I bought most of them.

So when I found Empire at War in my games list I was somewhat taken aback, to put it mildly. If Steam can make buying games so easy that I don’t even remember the rationale that led to me forking over money for something I didn’t really want then we’re all in serious trouble. Fortunately it seems to have been something of an isolated incident rather than the start of a trend, possibly exacerbated by Star Wars: Empire at War being one of the most forgettable games in existence.

This is odd considering it does make an effort to break from the RTS formula of base building and tank rushing¹. Empire at War does the Total War split between a empire map where you build units and move armies and fleets that switches to a conventional RTS with tiny mans shooting at each other whenever two armies come to battle. It really shouldn’t be as boring as it is, and yet the moment John William’s score starts playing over the empire map I feel this weird narcotic effect starting to seep into my bloodstream. It’s not particularly the game’s fault, but Star Wars is, for my money, one of the most dull and ill-defined sci-fi universes in existence. The space combat is the only thing that really translates across into games since it’s based on World War 2 carrier vs carrier battles, and so everything that isn’t part of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series (okay, maybe I’ll give Rogue Squadron some points here too) has actually suffered from being set in the Star Wars universe. Yes, even the Jedi Knight games.

I’ll probably end up expanding on such a contentious statement next month sometime, but for now it’s a phenomenon that manifests itself as “grey and pointy syndrome”. To wit: the Star Destroyer design is fairly iconic what with the opening of the original Star Wars film and all, but when you’re designing an RTS in which unit differentiation is going to be key making every single ship an identical grey and pointy shape does not do wonders for the game’s visual variety. It’s intimidating to see a fleet of Star Destroyers on screen in the films; it’s frustrating to see them flying around on your computer monitor because you can’t tell the difference between them. Even the sodding TIEs changed wing shape and silhouette from model to model. A complete lack of any sense of destruction from the trademark Star Wars blat-blat lasers merely reinforced the sense that I was watching a collection of grey pointy things engage in a not-particularly-interesting light show, not a space battle.

Anyway, Empire at War may or may not be a bad game but I’m never going to find out, it’s just that dull to me. Universe at War at least features colours that are not “black” and “grey”, and furthermore lured me in with the promise that I’d get to play with a mobile oppression palace.  Unfortunately when I finally got around to trying to play it a few months back it bore more than a passing resemblance to an RTS after the C&C 3 model where everything hurtles around the map at 900mph and you don’t have time to differentiate between units to figure out what does what. Which is puzzling, come to think of it, because I remember playing a demo back when Universe at War was released at the start of 2008 and thinking it was a fairly okay game. It definitely hasn’t aged well in terms of interface; when I played it more recently the main thing that jumped out at me wasn’t the gameplay or the units or the graphics, but that the blocky text was ugly as sin. Here, look at this screenshot. Look at the numbers in the top right corner. It looks like they’ve used Arial Bold, for crying out loud.

It might seem like a fairly minor thing to get hung up on, but it’s just symptomatic of the fact that I didn’t think Universe at War was particularly polished, like they just slapped an RTS together out of parts they had round the back and called it a day. Also – and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, here – I get the distinct impression that each race gets its own UI design and style, except the game starts you out as the humans who are a tutorial race who just get this very ugly, bare-bones interface through which to play the game. It was just massively offputting to me, especially since the game should have been handing me the mobile oppression palace from the off and telling me to crush some puny humans as its tutorial, not giving me inferior terrestrial technology to fight off alien invaders. That’s not a tutorial. That’s kicking the player in the nuts as a greeting and expecting them to enjoy the rest of the game.

So I didn’t get that far into Universe at War. It may have been groundbreaking and ahead of its time, but the hour or so I saw of it was crushingly conventional and utterly off-putting. I dislike ragging on games just because they had a bad opening (Planescape: Torment taught me a salutary lesson here when it took me a year to escape from the Mortuary because it was so grim and unappealing) so I’m not going to make any pronouncements as to Universe at War’s overall level of quality. It might well be a good game. I don’t know. Just as with Empire at War, though, I’m probably never going to find out seeing as I have zero desire to give it another try. There’s just something about Petroglyph’s games that rubs me up the wrong way, and this is puzzling given the team’s pedigree. Either they haven’t been able to move forward with their thinking since 1996, or some of the key movers and shakers responsible for the design of C&C didn’t make the jump across to Petroglyph. A shame, really. The video game market does need somebody pumping out the odd dedicated RTS to keep the concept fresh and to iterate on its design. It’s just not these guys.

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1. Yes, I know that hasn’t actually been the formula for a good decade or so now.

The post Petroglyph. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’ve come away from Republic Commando with mixed feelings. It’s getting on for seven years old at this point, and while it was overlooked at release it’s since garnered a reputation as something of an underrated classic. I can certainly see why. Republic Commando isn’t quite unique, but I’m only aware of a single other game that even tries to do the simplified dynamic squad command that RC pulls off so well (Brothers in Arms). At the same time this is practically the only thing Republic Commando has going for it, as otherwise it’s a remarkably by-the-numbers FPS shooter.

Republic Commando sets you as the leader of a team of four clone commandos fighting in the Clone Wars. There’s a rudimentary attempt to give each of your squadmates a distinct personality, but while you’re told they all specialise in a different job – sniping, hacking and blowing things up – they all seem to do equally well at any of them, making them entirely interchangeable. To me, they were just Yellow Guy, Green Guy and Red Guy. Their basic fighting AI is decent enough; however, Republic Commando makes a big attempt to shake things up by giving your AI companions the ability to do more than follow you around like Lassie toting a blaster. As you progress through the various missions Republic Commando gives you you’ll see various icons that indicate something one of your teammates can do. Press F while pointing at a crosshair icon, for example, and the nearest commando will run up to that spot and stick a sniper attachment onto his gun for long range fire support. An explosion icon means they’ll spend anywhere between ten and thirty seconds setting up a demolition charge to blow up a droid dispenser or a barricade or something. Of course, you don’t have to rely on the commandos to do these things; you can do anything they can do, and – very neatly – they can do anything you can do.

This has particular ramifications for player death. When you run out of health in Republic Commando – and this will happen to you often, for it is a very hard game – you don’t “die”, per se. Instead your screen goes red, your commando collapses to the ground and you’re presented with one of several options: wait for your teammates to deal with the threat and then revive you, call them over to come and pick you back up now, which can be very dangerous if you haven’t killed whatever took you down, or just give up and reload the last save. It’s a really, really nice piece of design, especially in a seven year-old game, and especially when contrasted to the approach of other popular FPSes with AI teammates. Usually they’re either invincible or, while it is possible for them to be temporarily knocked out, only you can get them back up. They can’t get you back up, which always struck me as rather incongruous with the game mechanics. What is so special about the player? Republic Commando’s answer is: nothing. You are genuinely just one part of a four-man team (albeit the part that gives orders) and it goes a very long way towards making you rely on your teammates rather than just carting them around as additional firepower.

Consequently the parts of Republic Commando that really, really shine are the ones that push this squad mechanic as far as it can go. In the second mission, which involved the infiltration of a captured republic ship, I had to fight my way through a series of hangars under attack from droid dispensers. In the first hangar I had all the time in the world to set up defenses, and the droids went down quickly. The droids had already landed in the second hangar so there was an added time element to that one where I had to kill the droids present and close the hangar forcefield before more droids landed. And the final hangar was an all-out assault on a heavily entrenched droid force that involved advancing one at a time under heavy enemy fire, ordering one commando into a fixed defense turret, setting up sniper and anti-armour positions at the rear of the hangar, and relying on my squadmates to cover me while I did a thirty second hack of an exposed computer console. It’s a remarkably nail-biting experience, especially when you can see your teammates’ status degrade from green to yellow to dark orange in your HUD and you pray they can stay alive long enough for you to finish the job.

To its credit Republic Commando really does try to make the most of the squad command abilities it gives you. Unfortunately it does little else that’s interesting gameplay-wise, and nowhere is this more apparent than the extended section at the start of that ship mission where you’re inserted into the captured ship alone and have to round up your teammates one-by-one. This turns the game into a by-the-numbers shooter, and while it is not exactly terrible it is entirely unspectacular. The worst thing about it is that you’re as vulnerable as ever but your squad isn’t around to pick you back up when you get hit, meaning you end up staring at a GAME OVER screen far, far too often. This is especially annoying when coupled with one of the most unfun enemies it has ever been my misfortune to fight in an FPS: the scavenger droids. They fly around erratically, they’re really hard to hit, they can come at you from any direction, and when you “kill” then they do an unerringly accurate kamikaze self-destruct run that takes off half your health. I died more to those little bastards than all the other enemies in the game put together – even the heavily armoured super battle droids that soaked up blaster fire like nobody’s business weren’t this much of a pain in the ass.

The second worst thing about that section was that it went on for far too long. This is a complaint I could level at the game as a whole, actually; it’s split up into just three missions each of which will take upwards of two hours to complete. The first mission on Geonosis I can live with, since Geonosis was supposed to be an incredibly vicious and violent battle and the extended mission length kind of brings home how desperate the fighting was. But after Geonosis the timeline leaps forward by a year, and the commandos are now doing something completely different and separate with only the most superficial continuity between the two. The stuff they give you to do is also very definitely grunt work – the Jedi get to fight Count Dooku and Asajj Ventress in exotic locations, the clone commandos are stuck with playing lizard janitor for two hours on a grey, boring Republic ship. A little more variety would have gone a long way.

My last complaint would be that Republic Commando is a hard, hard game. Mostly it is the good kind of hard, and the presence of the other commandos makes it far less irritating than it would have been otherwise. There are certain places, however, where I started to become convinced the level designers were specifically out to irritate the crap out of me. Any level inhabited by scavenger bots, for a start, as well as those automated turrets which seemed to be intentionally put in places where I couldn’t see them but where they could shoot me while I was in cover. There’s also a rather tragic dearth of ammo; I had no idea the Republic was so stingy with the weaponry it handed out to its elite soldiers, but you’ll be lucky to find more than two anti-armour reloads in a single two-hour mission. And if you don’t have that you’re stuck taking down hordes of super battle droids and destroyer droids with a futuristic peashooter. I don’t mind tough enemies, but I do mind that they’re so tough it takes a third of my max sniper/blaster ammo to take one out, and there’s three of them, and I have to deal with hordes of smaller enemies at the same time.

I’d hesitate before calling Republic Commando an underrated classic. It’s certainly worth playing, especially at the knock-down price Steam sells it for these days, but most of the game’s imagination seems to have been expended on the squad command system that is its unique selling point. Everything else has suffered as a result – plot, characterisation, weapons and enemy design. It’s these last two that really hurt the game, as while a decently-made FPS can get away without the first two if it’s done right, lacklustre weapons and repetitive enemies would be the kiss of death for any FPS that wasn’t Republic Commando. The squad system saves it, it really does, but even so it’s still got those deficiencies weighing it down like a pair of concrete overshoes. Thankfully Republic Commando never quite sinks below the surface level of “acceptably fun”, but it definitely falls some way short of the classic status it could have achieved if it had paid a little more attention to classical FPS design elements.

The post Thoughts: Republic Commando. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.