Deus Ex: Human Revolutions (PC)...

The original Deus Ex (2000) is one of those classic PC games considered sacrosanct by the community. Many 'Top 100 Games of All Times' lists put it at #1 and a lot of PC gamers evangelize it at every opportunity. I admire Deus Ex for what it accomplished - It was arguably the first game to successfully pull off a blend first-person shooter and deep RPG mechanics - but I wasn't ga ga over it myself. Deus Ex tought me that when it comes to action games, quite a bit more care has to be put into how the RPG elements are handled than in turn-based games. Action games have to be fun to play before skill points and level-ups are awarded; and yet so many begin as a chore to play.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DEHR; 2011; Eidos Montreal) is a prequel, set in a near-future where cybernetic technology is becoming available to the general public. While the medical benefits of replacement limbs and organs are clear, many people fear a future in which wealthy people will gain even more of a competitive edge over plebes by implanting 'neural-stimulator chips' or synthetic muscles, etc. You take the role of the chief of security for one of the major manufacturers of cybernetic technologies when, on the eve of a major government hearing on cybernetic regulation, your company is attacked by terrorists. What follows is a quest to get to the bottom of who the terrorists were, and what they thought that they would accomplish (hint: it's a Deus Ex game, which means that it's going to be filled with conspiracy theories).

A digression. Unlike review sites, I tend to pay only the most lip service to video game stories. As I've said before, this is because most of them don't hold up to comparisons with any other type of media. Let me reiterate this: With only a few exceptions, the best that the vast majority of game stories can claim is that they're comparable to the pulpiest of pulp fantasy/sci fi novels or cheaply produced television shows. Some people get really offended when I say this, but I'd challenge them to go out there and read some books, watch some great classic movies, and then come back and tell me about how 'original' this or that game's story really was. Here's a paragraph from PC Gamer's review of DEHR:

The full story is vast and complex, crammed into every corner of Human Revolution’s world. Every apartment you break into, every secret room you find, every rooftop you clamber across has little scraps of personality and history to read and interpret. It’s a story-junky’s blissful overdose.

While I agree that there's a lot of fluff to read in the game (too much), we have very different definitions of 'vast and complex'. If you were legitimately surprised by the 'twists' in this game, I'm sorry for you. The foreshadowing is so clumsily heavy-handed that some characters may as well enter the stage for the first time wearing devil-horns1.

The game's dialog system is quite good, with one caveat: There's an absolute must-buy ability (it should be your first upgrade) that allows you to sense the NPC's mood, determine whether you're pursuing the right conversation choices, and ultimately influence their behavior. Given how important influencing others is to this game (it gives you massive xp rewards and perks), it's a bit ridiculous that you can actually accidentally ignore this upgrade.

With that out of the way, I was genuinely impressed by how much DEHR stuck to the formula and feel of the original. The layout of the worlds feels very similar in style, and the way that you can approach challenges from various angles (sneaking, shooting, hacking, etc.) cleaves very close to the best intentions of the first title. I say 'intentions' because I think that many reviewers forget that there's a huge difference between intention and execution, and it's in the latter that the game stumbles.

DEHR is perhaps the worst-balanced game that I've ever played - at least when it comes to titles published by professional studios. What a mess. Where to begin?

Take the upgrade system - it's terrible. For starters, at least in the early game, upgrades are very expensive (all upgrades have the same point 'cost'), and you're given a surfeit of uninterpretable choices: This upgrade protects me from poisonous gas... Is there a lot of gas in the game? (no). To make matters worse, there are entire upgrade trees that are completely useless. Seriously, go and read upgrade guides to see how they spell out why this or that 'feature' provides no benefit in the context of how the game actually works. When points are scarce, accidentally wasting them on useless upgrades is a massive drag.

Another problematic feature is the combat balancing: the main character is very, very weak, whereas some of the enemies are quite strong. Looking broadly at the skill trees, it's pretty clear that the game really wants you to lean towards stealth (annoyingly, you also get more experience for non-lethal takedowns so there goes that whole 'play any character you want to' thing). Inexplicably, however, the game forces ~4-5 'boss' encounters where you absolutely have to fight. Every review agrees that these fights are handled terribly, and even more so if you've invested all of your points in stealthy abilities. The developpers seem to have realized this as well, so they included a very cheap upgrade that gives you a limited-use instant-kill attack called the 'Typhoon'. Realistically, you may only find about 40 cartriges for this thing in the game, but it kills anything in 1-2 hits, including major bosses. I only used the ability about 8 times in the whole game, but 4 of those times were to instantly skip the awful boss fights.

I'm not a big graphics person, but given how terribly this game runs - with frequent frame-rate drops - I'd expect it to be a lot better looking than this. The character models are particularly stiff and bland, with flat textures. For comparison's sake, I can run Skyrim, a contemporary title, with all options maxed and no frame-rate issues at all. I've seen a lot of complaints about this on the forums, so I know it's not 'just me'. 

Finally, I want to point out that this is yet another example of a game where you have to upgrade your character a number of times before it's actually fun to play. The basic character can only run for 2.5 seconds (some super-soldier, hunh?), dies from a single shotgun blast, and sneaks like he's trailing a dozen empty tin-cans behind him on a string. You're constantly presented with alternative routes that you'll need this or that upgrade to take, so the game world feels like an endless series of limitations rather than 'opportunities'. I wish that more devs would make the basic game fun to play and use upgrades as 'perks' rather than necessities.  

I kept playing DEHR because many people were very positive about the game and I wanted to be able to criticize it from a knowledgeable perspective. Yes, the black-and-gold cyberpunk aesthetic is cool and the Blade Runner vibe is somewhat refreshing in the sea of overused military/space marine settings (I'd argue that the original Mass Effect did an excellent job with this same vibe). But none of this elminates my feeling that the game just isn't any fun to play. Compared to other sneaking games (e.g. Metal Gear or Splinter Cell) it leaves much to be desired, and as a third-person shooter it's too clumsy2.

When a game's fundamentals fail on so many levels, I don't understand why so many people feel compelled to stick around for the setting or story. There's so much better stuff out there to waste your time on. 

1Simply understanding 'The Law of the Economy of Characters' makes it very difficult for overly simplistic 'twists' to have any impact.

2The enemy AI is absolutely abysmal. For instance, foes can spot you through glass windows, andwhile this will trigger the alarm, they'll just stand there and shout at you. No enemy will actually bother firing at you until you shatter the window yourself, allowing you to line up a great free headshot, grenade toss, or rocket strike before you're even threatened.

Alan Wake (PC)...

It feels like I've been hearing about Alan Wake (2010 Xbox 360/2012 PC; Remedy) since the days of old DOS games. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but they were discussing it on podcasts as far back as 2006. Everyone was excited about a Stephen King-esque, horror themed open-world game set in the Pacific Northwest. As we all realized when the long development cycle finally ended, that is not what we got.

The game opens with the titular character, a famous horror novelist, arriving in a small town with his wife Alice. Alan's been having writer's block since his last best-selling novel and has taken a vacation on Alice's advice. Unfortunately, soon after arriving Alan witnesses his wife's drowning at the hands of an unknown assailant, after which he passes out. Inexplicably, he comes to one week later with no memory of the intervening time. As Alan struggles to find out what happened to his wife, he comes across pages of a mysterious manuscript that describe events before they actually happen to him in the real world. Many of these events are supernatural in nature, and the Alan soon realizes that the manuscript was written by him, though he has no memory of its creation. Shortly thereafter, a supernatural darkness takes over the town, and it becomes clear that this isn't all simply happening in his head.

In terms of everything but the terrible lip sync-ing, the game is quite gorgeous. It probably helps that the designers had so little diversity in their locales (see below).

It's an interesting and quite untested premise for a game. In addition, unlike many a review that I read, I also felt that it was satisfactorily 'wrapped up' as far as horror themes go - in the end, you do find out what is happening. But while the story and voice acting - particularly Alan's narration throughout the entire adventure - are by far the game's strongest features, this style of tale is also it's Achilles heel: How do you actually wrap a game around it?

I'm 100% certain that in the past, Alan Wake would've been an adventure game. I can think of classic titles like Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria from that genre that were in the horror mold. Point-and-click adventures catered well to aggressively linear cutscene-driven narratives of the style presented by Wake.

But this the present, and the dev team chose another route: Alan Wake is an action game. In between all of the story elements, Alan wades through endless forests fighting off people who have been 'consumed' by the supernatural darkness. Combat involves a somewhat clever concept whereby Alan must first burn-off the shadows shielding his foes by using a flashlight before he can exterminate them with firearms. I've read many praises about this system but I have to admit, I absolutely hated every second of combat in the game.

The battles just feel wrong and poorly balanced to me. From the very beginning of the game, fights are quite difficult. There are only a few different enemy types and even the basic ones require a lot of light, opening you up to attacks from their allies, followed by several bullets. Each and every battle begins in the exact same way: Enemies teleport in and surround you after which you have to scramble to some place where you can begin picking them off one by one. Your foes appear at specific 'spawn' locations that can sometimes, mercifully, be avoided, discouraging any type of exploration. It also doesn't help that your foes move faster than you do, making crowd control a huge chore. They're also able to hit you with ranged attacks from off screen, which is always fun1. It reminds me a lot of the combat in Grand Theft Auto in that it's functional, but at least in GTA's case, it was never meant to be the focus of the game. 

Yay, more trees! Honestly, the designers probably spent so much time designing trees that they should sell extras to other devs. Oh wait, nevermind. 

Sadly, the majority of Alan Wake's gameplay is this awful combat. Each of the six 'episodes' somehow contrives some way to get you back into the woods, where you fight the same three or four shadowy psychos over and over and over. There's no level design to speak of either: you just walk along mostly linear paths, struggling though waves of enemies and occasionally finding one of the game's excessive number of collectible doo-dads (yay replay value!). But aside from the occasional open-world style driving segment, every level pretty much feels exactly the same2. I just feel that if you're going to have hours and hours of combat in your game, it would do you well to add more variety to the mechanics or even enemy types.

The older that I've become, the more I've begun to fall into the camp that argues that linear stories don't belong in video games. The excessive number3 of action sequences in this game are completely disconnected from Alan's broader predicament. In fact, the story itself claims that the supernatural force is trying to 'capture' the writer, so why are all of its minions trying to kill him? This is a perfect example of the 'interrupted movie' style of game: You get the same effect from Alan Wake as you would by watching 15 minutes of The Exorcist, then playing 1 hour of Streets of Rage, followed by 15 more mins of the movie, and so on. Not integrating the story and game play together in any real meaningful fashion completely wastes the medium.

But hey, in my experience, many folks just love those boring, disconnected cutscenes, so I don't see them going away anytime soon.

1Wow a guy teleported in behind me and hit me in the back of the head with an axe! I didn't even know he was there!

2The game is so boringly monotonous in design that my girlfriend got tired of watching me play it. For nights on end she'd ask if I was still in the same place, or if the game was just one big forest that you fought through. The latter is more accurate.

3The game is a boring ~14 hours while it should have been a much tighter and more varied eight hours or so.

X-blades (PS3)...

The vast majority of the time, I'll only play games that garner praise and accolades from the press. There are only so many hours in the week, after all; no sense wasting time on sub-par experiences. Every once in a while though, I'll take a 'bargain-bin' mediocre title out for a spin, if it's in a genre that I enjoy, in the hopes of finding a 'diamond in the rough'.

X-blades (2009; Southpeak Games) is just such a mediocre title. Most of its reviews were middling to poor, but a few critics spoke favorably about the game, comparing it to Devil May Cry and other character action titles. While nowhere in the league of the good DMC games, it does have some cool design ideas. Unfortunately, it's also brought down by oh so many rather obvious flaws.

As stated above, XB is a 'character action game', meaning that the action revolves around a versatile character (in this case the ninja/artifact hunter Ayumi) whose moves and abilities can be upgraded as the game progresses (think Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Devil May Cry, etc.). The comparison to DMC comes from Ayumi having swords, guns, and spells at her disposal, each of which can be chained together to dispatch the hordes upon hordes of foes that come her way.

A brief digression about the main character: Ayumi is the most over-sexualized character I've seen in a game in a long time. She literally isn't wearing any pants:

Most games endow their female characters with unrealistically large breasts. In the case of X-blades, the detail with which the developers drew Ayumi's posterior is umm... impressive? To be honest, her head, hips, and bust are somewhat creepily disproportionate. Image cred here.

You (get to) stare at her thong over the course of the entire game (which doesn't feel like pandering to 14 year olds or anything). I actually think that there should be more sex in games for people who want it - both because sex is a normal part of human existence and the inability to discuss the topic in deep character relationship games tends to make intimacy feel very juvenile (see many, many JRPGs). I'm also unopposed to having attractive characters in games - there are certainly enough examples of those in both sexes. What's somewhat off-putting is when a bunch of guys decide to make a heroine who's fighting thousands of monsters in her underwear.

Anyway, the combat system is the game's best feature. It's fast and fluid and features a lot of different abilities and skills that must be used in combinations to defeat a vast number of opponents. Switching in and out abilities among the 4 quick-buttons is a bit of a chore, but worth it given the diversity. Sadly though, the first major problem with the title is that the developers throw so many foes at you at once that what starts off as a very tactical, skill-based combat system eventually turns into either a frantic button masher, or a rote checklist of using the same moves over and over (stun the crowd, take out fliers with your guns, switch to magic to kill the now unfrozen foes, repeat).

It's clear for many reasons that the devs ran out of development time and vastly increased the number and strength of foes in order to draw out what is ultimately a fairly short experience. Level design is extremely simple, featuring around a dozen arenas made up of one type of area (a ruined castle), which you will visit a couple of times each (there's little to do between arenas except find and collect upgrades). The worst aspect of lack of development time is certainly the story, which is completely nonsensical. I couldn't describe what happened other than the main character releasing a curse from which she has to free herself. One of the two other characters that you meet and interact with (in this case only once) suddenly becomes a love(?) interest towards the end of the game with no explanation. Obviously something got cut out in between. (Also incidentally, the English voice acting is so nerve-grating and terrible that I played through the entire title in French).

The development team, Gaijin Games of Russia, is obviously quite talented as the character designs are great (sexual innuendo aside) as are the graphics. The lighting effects in particular are quite impressive, and get shown off a lot in the dark, shadowed environments. Image cred here. 

It's often more disappointing to play a title that's got highs and lows as compared to something that's just plain bad. The combat and upgrade mechanics of X-blades are pretty good and were enough to keep me playing. On the other hand, the lack of environment variety and anythin to do other other than fight in the game are a major drag. 

I need to end by pointing out one other heinous flaw that I've seen a few times in games and have never understood. In order to get the 'proper' ending to XB (the 'bad' ending is only a few seconds long and is awful), you must refrain from putting ANY points into a particular set of abilities from the very beginning of the game. Nothing warns you of this - you just have to somehow 'know' not to touch one part of the skill tree. If you do, getting the good ending will require a complete restart. Who thought that this was a good idea? Why do developers do things like this? I don't feel the urge to play their game again - in fact, the only thing I feel is being cheated out of a complete experience.