Sunday, August 21, 2016

Zombie Carnage in: Dead Pixels

The Basics: Retro Art zombie survival with RPG elements

Previous Time Spent: 10 minutes
Expectation of learning Curve: low
Why I bought this: 2011 zombie craze?

First Impressions: This game is in love with a sort of grindhouse aesthetic, and opens with a film-grainy, retro looking production company logo, before settling into a sort of top down, zombie shooting/beating action rpg. This was clearly released at the height of the low-res/retro indie craze of the early 2010s, so all of the zombies and the main character have a blocky vibe remniscent of something from the NES. And my first 10 minutes gave me a sense of comforting, gory and fairly stupid fun.  

My 3 hours: I played through the intro campaign for my 3 hour test-run with the game, consisting of 20 levels in a forgotten and zombie plagued US city in the 80s or 90s. It opens with a standard-issue b-movie explanation for the zombie apocalypse and gives the main character a clear goal, reaching an encampment of survivors who are 20 streets away. In the parlance of the game, a street is a level, which appears to take up some 5 or 6 city blocks , and includes a slowly escalating zombie threat, houses to loot, and a trader who sells weapons, ammo and medical supplies. Additionally, the trader seems to be the only place you can save, so reaching the trader in each level feels like a bit of a milestone.

The main challenge in the game comes from resource management and crisis aversion. Much of the time, you'll be encountering small groups of zombies, but as levels go on, they form larger and more dangerous mobs. Knowing when to slowly take them out with melee attacks, and when to use firearms to take out larger groups more quickly seems to be the key to success here, and it provides a pretty satisfying sense of continuity to the longer campaign. I found myself constantly tempted to use melee, and by the end of the game had a crazy stockpile of ammunition (but had taken a pretty large number of hits). I think there are probably other legitimate strategies to be used. 

Character advancement adds an additional layer here, and allows you to figure out styles that work fairly well for you over time. Based on my playthrough, a player earns enough points to upgrade several, but not all skills up to their maximum. The upgrades that I took early on significantly changed the way I played the game, allowing me to be quicker, and better at melee takedowns. When I reached the waves of zombies in the final level, I felt like I had earned the ability to blast my way through hordes of zombies and reach my eventual goal. 


High
My Highlight: The game really came together for me when I had a huge stockpile of ammo, the ability to move quickly, and a shotgun with a high rate of fire. Being able to decide to shred my way through hordes of the undead and then mop up with melee felt pretty satisfying.  

My Verdict: This is pretty satisfying for mostly shutting down the brain and getting out some violent urges in a cutesy retro world, so I'd recommend it for a steam sale purchase.

Next post will be on September 4th, covering Divinity: Original Sin  



Sunday, August 7, 2016

NYC Disaster Porn: Crysis 2

The Basics: Very pretty disaster porny first person shooter with a cyborg suit

Previous Time Spent: 27 minutes
Expectation of learning Curve: low
Why I bought this: Extremely cheap steam sale (long enough ago that I don't remember it)

First Impressions: This is a good looking game, but my first impressions were marred by expecting it to be fairly boring/boilerplate. I found myself frustrated by the long, live-action CNN/Fox News intro, and the standard tutorial which slowly unlocks controls. I did find the submarine escape in the beginning kind of thrilling, but I ultimately found it to be more annoying due to loss of control than anything else. For a game that seems to be really about a cool cyborg killing small squads of soldiers, it spends a lot of time pretending that the audience is interested in it's story.  

My 3 hours: I spent the entire 3 hour playthrough in the singleplayer campaign, figuring that a game this old would probably end up not well-supported on the multiplayer front. The game takes place in 2023 in NYC, with the main character as a marine who takes on the mantle of a crazy cyborg (nanosuit) suit of power armor. This power armor confers a bunch of special abilities to the player, including cloaking, resistance to damage, and seemingly extreme strength. In a lot of ways, it plays like a more violent, sprawling version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 

Much of the gameplay is focused on advancing from checkpoint to checkpoint while dealing with environmental hazards and squads of soldiers. These challenges escalated in a pretty satisfying way during my 3 hours with the game, and did a fairly good job of introducing the player to new tactics/ideas in order to surpass them. The bread and butter of it is often finding cool places to hide/shoot soldiers from, while taking cover when appropriate, and sometimes turning invisible to feel like the Predator. The main character feels extremely powerful in the suit, bringing me back to old-school shooter games and the feeling of being a one man army. 

The story that's told in the game is one of an alien virus and a harsh crackdown, and much of it feels pretty standard issue, but some of the environmental storytelling great. The scene that immediately follows the opening, allows the player to slowly acclimate themselves to a New York city that appears to be under martial law, between audio records on laptops, and the horrible remains of living people. It then allows the player to slowly make their way from Battery Park and head north. The game is at it's best when it's providing interesting combat challenges, or allowing one to feel like a tourist in a believable near future New York.   
High
My Highlight: For me, the greatest joy I had with the game came fairly early, and is pictured above, a mix of combat and infiltration set in Castle Clinton, bringing me back to one of the early missions of my beloved Deus Ex. As you can see above, the historical marker is even legible, and the attention to detail shown in the environment conveys a clear sense of place. The game introduces the stealth mechanic there, which is pretty fun, and allowed me to feel like The Predator.  

My Verdict:I generally kinda liked this game, but much of the joy I got out of it, I think I got because it reminded me of things I liked better. It made me think of Deus Ex and Half Life 2 the most, between the sprawling levels, the near-superpowers given by nanites, and the environmental storytelling. I can't strongly recommend it, but I think it's a game that is good at what it intends to do .