Not as good as Deus Ex.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Tag Archives: thoughts
Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed 2.
I was originally going to be very, very positive about Assassin’s Creed 2. I skipped the first game after hearing horror stories about how unrefined it was, but AC 2 is the real deal; a free-running game set in fifteenth century Italy with a heavy emphasis on open world gameplay and lots and lots of stabbing1. To begin with I was wowed by the sumptuous environments (more on that later) and the seeming ease of movement allowed by the free-running system. But AC 2 is one of those rare beasts; it’s a game that’s actually far too long for what it is. It’s not like they’ve stooped to the depths of Far Cry 2 in terms of recycling content – there’s four very meaty maps to explore plus a personal hideout town – yet if you stare at even the finest artwork for long enough you’ll start to notice the cracks in the paint. So it is with Assassin’s Creed 2.
- Although it was a very long time until I got to the stabbing part. The AC games have this weird overplot where you’re not actually playing assassins in various time periods, you’re playing a guy from the present reliving genetic memories of his assassin ancestors using magic pseudo-tech. I didn’t mind it too much since while the whole thing is preposterous conspiracy bollocks it’s entertaining preposterous conspiracy bollocks, but it was a little bit obnoxious at the start when I had to escape from a facility (no stabbing), meet some present-day assassins who would be acting as my support team (no stabbing), get plumbed into another “Animus” so that I could go play as Ezio (no stabbing), and then endure the world’s longest tutorial where Ezio does a million fetch quests for his family (some punching, no stabbing). It must have been a good hour into the game before I got to stab anyone. ↩
Thoughts: Dungeon Siege 3.
Now this is a surprise. I don’t think anybody was expecting Dungeon Siege III to be anything other than a by-the-numbers cash-in, a hack n’ slash action game churned out with little thought or care purely because Square Enix had the licence going spare and Obsidian needed some money. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to turn out to be one of the better games I’ve ended up playing this year.
Thoughts: Far Cry 2.
Far Cry 2 manages the remarkable feat of being a game that I knew practically nothing about before booting it up and yet which still managed to disappoint me. It shows a substantial amount of promise in the first thirty minutes of the game that it completely fails to make good on. It tries to depart from standard FPS memes but is ultimately too scared to make itself truly unique. And so it occupies this extremely weak middle ground, where it has no scripted events that can grab a player’s attention and also ties the hands of those who get their kicks out of exploration, resulting in a crippled hybrid failure of a game.
Thoughts: Hunted.
My first draft of this piece involved simply making a list of everything that was wrong – everything that I hated – about Hunted. After playing two out of the six chapters making up the main adventure, this list clocked in at 1,552 words. It was obvious I was never going to get through the entire game this way without writing a small book. So when I say that the flaws in Hunted are far too numerous to list, that’s not just a figure of speech: I actually tried.
Thoughts: RUSE.
I was a little puzzled by Ruse (or R.U.S.E, as most people never call it) to begin with. Specifically, I was puzzled by its UI. Whoever designed the visual elements deserves a medal; the menus all use bright, vibrant primary colours and abstract geometric symbols to produce a wonderfully warm, stylish interface. It’s the style Civilization V wishes it had, basically. On the other hand there was something slightly off about data presentation and unit selection. The game is controlled almost entirely via left-clicking, box-selecting units is a little over-generous and ends up selecting units which are just outside the box, and the text is bloody enormous. Which seemed like somewhat baffling design decisions until I realised that Ruse was developed for consoles. The text is designed to be read on a TV screen from across the room and the game is supposed to be played with an imprecise controller, hence the overcompensation from the UI.
Thoughts: Splinter Cell Conviction.
Conviction is a title in the stealth-based Splinter Cell franchise that’s been a long time coming. It’s the one where Splinter Cell jettisons the “stealth-based” part of its descriptor in favour of firing hot lead into people’s faces. And when you take the stealth out of Splinter Cell, what you end up with is a tediously mediocre cover-based shooter.