1. I am always skeptical when game companies farm their handheld titles to other developers. In the case of Uncharted: Golden Abyss is was Naughty Dog handing their cinematic game franchise to a first party Sony studio. I figured this was a bit more akin to Capcom developing Zelda for Game Boy than Ubisoft throwing their IPs to whatever garbage studio handles their pocketable translations so I thought I'd give it a go.
2. The goal with Golden Abyss seems to be pretty clearly to show off the capabilities of the Vita by bringing a huge AAA franchise to it in style. For what it's worth, they sure did wind up w/ an Uncharted game on the Vita but it's a "good enough" type effort if I've ever seen one.
3. This was a launch title by a first party studio so the developers were compelled to throw every possible new control method at the player, mostly in the form of touchscreen mini games. This is fine enough, I guess, but if I really wanted to rub every possible inch of my Vita screen, I'd grab a cloth and clean it for once.
4. Otherwise, it controls pretty much like any third person shooter. You run around, aim, shoot, climb ropes. All the things. You can use the touchscreen to draw a path to follow when scaling walls but this is mostly useless. Additionally, common combat controls are mapped to the touchscreen and accidentally throwing a grenade at your own feet when you are trying to engage in melee combat adds an exciting wrinkle to action sequences.
5. The setup here is you are Indiana Jones recast as a huge dumbass. You play as treasure hunter, Nathan Drake, a man tough enough to navigate caves overrun w/ people trying to kill him, smart enough to know everything about archeology and yet still enough of a dupe he can get tricked by people a child wouldn't trust.
6. In case you were wondering, no, Golden Abyss is not a clever name for the empty void that divides the hearts of those who seek fortune above all else. It is a literally an abyss w/ a lot of gold in it. Nobody seems to have put more thought about it than that.
7. Gameplay has three components: shooting, climbing and doing absolutely nothing. All of these are equally engaging. I am willing to admit though that the pacing between these is really good if a bit overly scripted for my tastes. Just when you get sick of endless waves of enemies, you get a relaxing section where you follow the exactly one path to your next destination where you then spend five minutes watching a cut scene before you repeat this process.
8. Though you have no real choice in how you go about achieving the game's objectives, there is a good deal of side content to explore along the way. Mostly, if you run into a place where you must pick between going the obvious right or obvious wrong way, you need to go the wrong way first to pick up some collectable. The reward for this is often a touchscreen mini-game so once you pass one or two collectables you can't double back and get, you realize you will never 100% the game on the first playthrough and get to avoid that tiresome nonsense for the remainder of your playtime.
9. Holy smokes are the enemies in this ever bullet sponges. I dunno... I feel like a couple shots to the chest should take down a guy who is obviously not wearing body armor. I mean not you. You are special. You can get shot like a hundred times and duck behind a short wall for thirty seconds to return to full health. That's fine. I just don't want to stand there and have to unload a full magazine into every bro that comes at me. Putting so many holes into human beings just gets dull after a while.
10. And, yeah, the headcount in this game is something close to incredible. It's like watching every Rambo movie but the first one in order three times in a row.You are in a supposedly unexplored ancient ruin and yet somehow you run into mobs packed thick at every corner. Thankfully, they spent a couple hours before you got there littering the place w/ guns and ammo. I am pretty sure Golden Abyss does not take itself totally seriously but this is a bit much.
11. Combat never gets harder. It just gets more annoying from time to time. There is a super overpowered sniper rifle that's really fun to use though so it all balances out.
12. There is a point where you feel like you're about to start wrapping everything up and you are like, "Well, short but sweet but at least it never got super repetitive and boring." This point is approximately one third of the way through the game.
13. I'm not going to lie, though this isn't really my style of game and it seems like I'm going pretty hard on it, I did actually enjoy playing it for the most part. It is not exactly good by my excruciating standards of high drama and gameplay excellence but it fills time well enough and every time I picked it up, I'd find myself playing it for much longer than I expected. The story is pretty obvious but good enough to string you along. There's a bit of mystery, a bit of romance, some witty banter. Uncharted: Golden Abyss pretty much puts you in the same fugue state as binge watching a pretty decent show. Your mind isn't really turned on but you're not bored and you can drink beer and eat popcorn if you want. It all works out.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
13 Points on Killzone: Liberation - Guerrilla Games - 2006 [Sony PSP]
1. Let's just get this out of the way: I am a rather dedicated handheld person when it comes to consoles. I have never played the home console Killzone games and almost certainly never will. If you want to know how Killzone: Liberation compares to its big siblings on home consoles, I dunno, just imagine what I would say about it, write that down and then read that.
2. This game encapsulates both handheld games done right and handheld games done wrong. It is a paradox. On one hand, rather than trying to cram a full fledged first person shooter onto limited hardware, they redid the game as a isometric shooter. This is smart. Instead of getting a crappy version of the home console game, we get a unique game designed for the strengths of the PSP.
3. On the other hand, it really lacks the polish of a full AAA console release making Killzone: Liberation feel like "only" a handheld game. It has great potential but it is never achieved.
4. The setup here is you are some kind of super soldier. Your mortal enemies are some storm trooper types and you've got to run around killing them and occasionally pressing green buttons. Doing this successfully causes your side to win the war. Woo!
5. The voice acting, script and plotting are all pretty underwhelming. This, to me, is a fine compromise for a game destined to sell at a half the price as a home console release. Sure, I'd personally prefer no cut scenes to disposable ones but, whatever, some people expect them for some reason. But, if the story isn't going to holdup, the gameplay has to. Unfortunately, while Killzone: Liberation has some good ideas, it falls short in almost all cases--and most often due to control limitations of the hardware not be adequately addressed.
6. In spite of its isometric perspective, this plays mostly like a third-person cover based shooter. Most situations are tackled by finding a good spot to hunker down then picking off enough enemies to clear your way to the next spot. This all works out well and little is lost in translation to the new perspective. In fact, it makes for different strategic opportunities because you can see more of the battlefield.
7. To make this all work w/o a second stick to aim, the developers relied on an auto-lock-on mechanic. This would be great--maybe even better than a second stick, really--but it is forever locking on to the wrong enemy or nobody at all. Or, it will lock on the right enemy but forget about it because you moved an inch in one direction . Or, the lock-on will switch mid firefight because the enemy you were shooting fell over so instead of actually finishing off the first guy and letting you focus on the second, it will leave you w/ two enemies at half health. This would normally be rectified by allowing you to use the L and R buttons to switch who you are locked on to but the R button is dedicated to crouching and the L button allows you to strafe while staying locked on to an enemy (as long as that enemy doesn't fall over or the lock on doesn't switch to another enemy for some other reason).
8. Lack of buttons cause some other issues as well. At one point--and this is just an example--you get a jet pack which is activated by the same button as you use to disarm landmines. The game gets around this problem by just having you float in the air while disarming the mine that would be at knee level if you were standing on the ground. What the hell?
9. On top of everything else, the check-pointing system can be a little weird. You are typically allowed to backtrack and pick up previously passed over health pickups and such but you never re-trigger the checkpoint. If you come upon section you struggle w/, you need to backtrack and pickup everything you need over and over again. There's also the issue where some checkpoints are immediately before a dialog cut scene and having to rewatch those gets to be a chore too.
10. All of these previous issues seem like they could have been smoothed out just by refining them a little bit. They are compromises, sure, but you only notice them because they are compromises that don't work like they're supposed to.
11. Even w/ all these complaints, I think the combat could have worked if they had just made it a bit slower paced and focused on picking the right approach. There are times when you can do clever little tricks like shooting a walking mine which homes in on the nearest person be it friend or foe and using that to thin out enemy ranks before a firefight. You don't really need the tightest controls if you are going for a more puzzle-oriented approach and I think that would have been a better fit here. The problem is Killzone: Liberation only really plays at this idea while its bread and butter is more action based.
12. I also don't want to forget to mention that the enemies that shoot homing missiles that can one shot kill you are one of the most annoying enemies I have encountered in any game.
13. Killzone: Liberation is one of those near misses that just winds up being all the more frustrating because it's almost a good game. You can feel that there was real effort putting into matching the franchise up w/ the PSP but it just falls a little short in painful ways. Combat winds up being a frustrating chore all too often and the story and cut scenes are in no way good enough to make up for this. Still, there are moments were the kernel of goodness at this game's core shines through. I just wish that was more often than not.
2. This game encapsulates both handheld games done right and handheld games done wrong. It is a paradox. On one hand, rather than trying to cram a full fledged first person shooter onto limited hardware, they redid the game as a isometric shooter. This is smart. Instead of getting a crappy version of the home console game, we get a unique game designed for the strengths of the PSP.
3. On the other hand, it really lacks the polish of a full AAA console release making Killzone: Liberation feel like "only" a handheld game. It has great potential but it is never achieved.
4. The setup here is you are some kind of super soldier. Your mortal enemies are some storm trooper types and you've got to run around killing them and occasionally pressing green buttons. Doing this successfully causes your side to win the war. Woo!
5. The voice acting, script and plotting are all pretty underwhelming. This, to me, is a fine compromise for a game destined to sell at a half the price as a home console release. Sure, I'd personally prefer no cut scenes to disposable ones but, whatever, some people expect them for some reason. But, if the story isn't going to holdup, the gameplay has to. Unfortunately, while Killzone: Liberation has some good ideas, it falls short in almost all cases--and most often due to control limitations of the hardware not be adequately addressed.
6. In spite of its isometric perspective, this plays mostly like a third-person cover based shooter. Most situations are tackled by finding a good spot to hunker down then picking off enough enemies to clear your way to the next spot. This all works out well and little is lost in translation to the new perspective. In fact, it makes for different strategic opportunities because you can see more of the battlefield.
7. To make this all work w/o a second stick to aim, the developers relied on an auto-lock-on mechanic. This would be great--maybe even better than a second stick, really--but it is forever locking on to the wrong enemy or nobody at all. Or, it will lock on the right enemy but forget about it because you moved an inch in one direction . Or, the lock-on will switch mid firefight because the enemy you were shooting fell over so instead of actually finishing off the first guy and letting you focus on the second, it will leave you w/ two enemies at half health. This would normally be rectified by allowing you to use the L and R buttons to switch who you are locked on to but the R button is dedicated to crouching and the L button allows you to strafe while staying locked on to an enemy (as long as that enemy doesn't fall over or the lock on doesn't switch to another enemy for some other reason).
8. Lack of buttons cause some other issues as well. At one point--and this is just an example--you get a jet pack which is activated by the same button as you use to disarm landmines. The game gets around this problem by just having you float in the air while disarming the mine that would be at knee level if you were standing on the ground. What the hell?
9. On top of everything else, the check-pointing system can be a little weird. You are typically allowed to backtrack and pick up previously passed over health pickups and such but you never re-trigger the checkpoint. If you come upon section you struggle w/, you need to backtrack and pickup everything you need over and over again. There's also the issue where some checkpoints are immediately before a dialog cut scene and having to rewatch those gets to be a chore too.
10. All of these previous issues seem like they could have been smoothed out just by refining them a little bit. They are compromises, sure, but you only notice them because they are compromises that don't work like they're supposed to.
11. Even w/ all these complaints, I think the combat could have worked if they had just made it a bit slower paced and focused on picking the right approach. There are times when you can do clever little tricks like shooting a walking mine which homes in on the nearest person be it friend or foe and using that to thin out enemy ranks before a firefight. You don't really need the tightest controls if you are going for a more puzzle-oriented approach and I think that would have been a better fit here. The problem is Killzone: Liberation only really plays at this idea while its bread and butter is more action based.
12. I also don't want to forget to mention that the enemies that shoot homing missiles that can one shot kill you are one of the most annoying enemies I have encountered in any game.
13. Killzone: Liberation is one of those near misses that just winds up being all the more frustrating because it's almost a good game. You can feel that there was real effort putting into matching the franchise up w/ the PSP but it just falls a little short in painful ways. Combat winds up being a frustrating chore all too often and the story and cut scenes are in no way good enough to make up for this. Still, there are moments were the kernel of goodness at this game's core shines through. I just wish that was more often than not.
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