For reasons best known to Sony, the best thing at E3 was the longer version of its E3 Uncharted 4 demo that it didn't show at the con...
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Friday, September 11, 2015
The best part of Uncharted 4's demo
For reasons best known to Sony, the best thing at E3 was the longer version of its E3 Uncharted 4 demo that it didn't show at the conference. Behind closed doors, an extended version of the truck chase continued the sequence and raised the bar so high it might well break all other games.
What happens is impossible to describe without falling into hyperbole because holy Christ I nearly lost my shit, with gameplay that almost seemed to be mocking your ability to deal with it - piling sequence onto sequence, and building the pace and action up to to a level that's almost impossible to comprehend without seeing it. Nothing else out there can compete with what I saw: there's honestly a world before that demo and world after.
In the original Sony press conference demo, Nate and Sully shot their way through a market, escaping bad guys and a gun-carrying APC truck in a smashy downhill drive. In the short version, Drake lassos an overhanging crane arm and swings alongside a bridge as it smashes him into obstacles. Fade to black, crowd goes wild.
The extended demo continues this sequence, only with the swinging changing to dragging as Nate's pulled up onto a muddy road. There's what I can only describe as the best mud physics I've ever seen here, as Nate slops and slides along the ground behind the truck. Nathan's forced to take chaotic pot shots at gunmen in pursuing jeeps while he desperately tries to climb the rope and claim the truck.
From there, via a shootout on the back of the truck, Drake manages to jump to another jeep as he tries to catch up with his brother Sam's motorbike - the reason for the chase in the first place. Throughout all this, the speed and scale is huge. There's no sense of being on a single straight road with prop trees whizzing past; this is all taking place in a huge open environment. Vehicles careen and rattle between routes and obstacles, or go pinwheeling through the air in sheets of flame once the tires have been shot out. It's fast, loud and cinematically overwhelming.
And it's not even the best part. After fighting some goons who're trying Nate's jeep-hopping tricks to get from their ride to his, Drake catches up with his brother and jumps on the bike. From here, it just goes crazy. The camera switches to a front view as the pursuing APCs give chase, smashing through obstacles and skidding back and forth on their heels.
What's impossible to understand until you see it is just how kinetic and animated it all is. It's not a static rolling road creating a background for a shooting gallery. It's a twisting, turning, full-on car chase. Sam throws the bike around, leaning into skids or throwing a leg out for sharp turns. The view swings around the action and the bouncing bike as Nate peppers the pursuing vehicle's grill with bullets. Beautiful depth-of-field effects and camera angles create an incredible sense of velocity as the carnage unfolds.
It ends with the pair sliding the bike under a container as the APC explodes behind them. It's ridiculous and joyously over-the-top in a way that even the game seems to acknowledge, with Drake and Sam bursting into grins at the end like school kids that have just had the best fun ever.
It's definitely a return to Uncharted 2's sense of scale and action, recreating the thrill of that game's helicopter chase. But on a level so far above that, and what other games have achieved, that it's a literal game changer (I said there'd be hyperbole). The scale, speed, and sheer ambition of the sequence genuinely has the potential to redefine what's possible, drawing a line in this generation's games and not so much raising the bar as firing it into orbit.
MAD MAX REVIEW
Poor old Max. Seems like he can’t start the day without having the sense kicked out of his skull and being left for dead in the desert. It’s like an alarm clock for him. Only with no snooze and more boots. Warner’s tie-in, while oddly divorced from the recent movie, upholds that tradition, with Max waking up in the dust minus a car and setting out on a quest to build a new one, mainly via the medium of blowing shit up and frowning.
The game’s opening introduces you to an Igor-esque mechanic called Chumbucket who builds you the bare bones of the Magnum Opus, a replacement for the movie's iconic Interceptor. It forms the backbone of the whole story as Max tries to trick it out to a level high enough for him to reach the mythical ‘Plains of Silence’, an arbitrary plot MacGuffin driving the whole thing forward.
To achieve this you're set loose in a vast, hugely populated map, pulling off missions for various minor warlords and trying to lessen the grip of the dominating Scrotus gang by destroying its bases, minefields, totem-like scarecrows and other displays of power. In terms of scale this is right up there with The Witcher 3 for having the kind of map that makes you want to switch the game off as soon as you see it - the thing’s huge, with the sort of obscuring smatter of markers that’ll have you wiping the screen just to make sure you’re actually seeing it right.
It’s this scale that’s both Mad Max’s greatest strength and, to a lesser degree, its weakness. There’s a good game here eventually, but one that takes some time to find itself. Early on it’s all a bit directionless with such an arbitrary overall objective: you’re trying to make your car better by completing missions to… um, make your car better. With such a woolly heading, the first 4-5 hours become a formless muddle among the wealth of things to do, making it easy to get lost or find yourself in trouble above your level.
Once you get past those muddy first hours however, the world opens up and Mad Max becomes a seriously enjoyable realisation of the character. The plot, already more a distraction than a directive, becomes secondary to the pure dusty joy of driving around looking for trouble. Forget that main mission, the wasteland is the game. Whether that’s ramming convoys off the road or fighting your way through camps - this is all about the journey, a perfect setup for the original Road Warrior.
The counter-based combat swaps out the feel of a trained fighter for a kerb-stomping brawler, dishing out ugly fist-swinging thumps that crunch enemies underhand like someone dropping rocks on a meringue. Early fights are tough because you lack the abilities to deal with knife-waving thugs, or Warcriers who buff surrounding enemies. It’s a slog just to make it through a small gang. Unlock a few counters though, to use enemies’ weapons against them or pull off insta-kill moves on stunned foes, and suddenly you start to dominate. If you like satisfying progression then building out Max to take apart a crowd of War Boys in a handful of devastatingly considered blows is just the best.
It’s the same with the car. Early road tussles can feel a little like you've cycled out into the fast lane of the motorway with nothing but a pokey stick and a lot of ambition. But, by the time you've kitted out the Magnum Opus with better armour, spikes, engines and more, you’re smashing opposition off the road, blowing up fuel tanks with drive-by shotgun blasts and pulling drivers from their seats with the game’s signature harpoon
It’s expanding and developing your tools that make this game sing. Even friendly bases have their own upgrade tree that provide another layer of options to play with. Things might start with you as the victim in a threatening world, but it's not long before you craft Max to become the danger instead. One minute you're fighting to make it from A to B, the next you’re flattening all in your path, rolling with the blows and improvising on the fly. Do you snipe an enemy base’s defence from afar, drive past, hell-for-leather, pulling down sentry towers using the harpoon without stopping, or sneak through a gap in the wall a local told you about?
There are a few things that don't get better over time. There’s a bizarre, apparently random use of the DualShock speaker for sound effects that can distractingly break immersion, for example. A sprinkling of Australian accents add an otherworldly magic whenever used, but only really serve to highlight the blandness of the cookie cutter American voices filling the majority of the game. The camera also struggles in tight spaces, causing problems if a fight tumbles into a corridor or shipping crate.
Perhaps the biggest failing here, though, is Warner’s apparent lack of faith in what it has (hello minimal advertising, last minute review code and that suicidal MGS5-matching release date). This may not be breaking any new ground but it’s a satisfying experience with plenty to do. By the time I'd finished the main story I'd clocked 38 hours and apparently completed 39% (!). The main story, despite its mundane crux, does ultimately deliver a worthy climax (it'd be spoilers to say more) before returning you to a still daunting map full of bases, side quests, diversions and everything else to mop up. The plot might barely exist for the majority of the game, while direction and focus takes its time to come together, but none of that matters. Just being in the world is enough. You are Mad Max, a violent stranger roaring across the wasteland in a cloud of dust and violence.
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FORZA MOTORSPORT 6 REVIEW
You can either look at Forza 6 as a 'driving game' or a 'racing game'. And, despite phenomenal quality (and I do mean phenomenal) throughout most of its production, it doesn't offer anywhere near the best driving experience available on console. As a racing game? I simply wouldn't call it that. I've been playing it all week and I've had one great race. One. Obviously, that is a problem.
Let's look at the driving first, since that’s what you spend your time doing. In the very fastest cars, it's exhilarating like few other games. The sensation of being at 200mph in an F1 car is properly scary. It's almost violent when you accelerate out of a corner, there's so much power under your finger. I've seen videos of people trying real F1 cars on track days, and this is just like that. Far more power than most people could possibly handle.
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But the game isn't about that kind of driving for 90% of the time. Sporadic showcase events may let you try some more exotic cars early on but, for the most part, career mode is slow and boring. There are 5 main 'volumes' of race types, ranging from pootling road cars and nostalgia-laden classics to snarling beasts and V8 Supercars. You spend most of your time in sedate, joyless races, going through the motions of driving and hitting rewind when you fail. Forza 6 is actually much more engaging when you disable rewind - where's the fun in do-or-die manoeuvres if it's really just 'do or mulligan'?
Many cars feel like they have beach balls for tyres and driving lap after lap at a proverbial snail's pace is incredibly dull. The idea of racing SUVs around Spa in the dead of night with only the cars' headlights to illuminate the track is fundamentally exciting. I would love to do that for real. In the game? It's mind-numbingly boring. Slow, floaty and sedate, it's simply not fun.
Naturally, the first thing I did was play on Sim settings, like I normally do. However, the 'raw' cars behave very strangely – actually a lot like the motorbikes of MotoGP 15. Yes, that is weird. There is definitely more grip in Forza 6 compared to Forza 5, but that creates some very strange accidents. I somehow managed to roll my car on a straight because it waggled under acceleration, which grew more violent before turning into a spin, which tipped over and barrelled for some 50m. Needless to say, that would never happen in real life. So after a few hours, I grudgingly switched on stability management and things were more manageable.
And so we get to the racing. The problem is simple: The Drivatar system simply doesn't work. Never mind the fact some cars inexplicably tap the brakes on a straight. It doesn't matter which Avatar Difficulty you choose: on some tracks you'll win easily, while on others one or sometimes two cars will simply drive away from everyone else. You'll sometimes catch a glimpse of a dot on the track map, or a speck on the horizon, but you'll never catch them. The hardest difficulty is meant to humble you and it does. But everything below that is alarmingly inconsistent
As a result, actually getting into a closely-fought, cut-and-thrust race (which is what a racing game needs to be exciting), is incredibly rare. It doesn't help that only special, themed events fill the grid with the same model of car. Most races are uneven in terms of horsepower and grip and it really shows. Fortunately, you only need to get 3rd or higher to progress, but you really should be able to win if you're good enough.
Forza 6 makes Forza 5 look like a demo in terms of event types and track diversity and the first two hours of the game are beautifully-paced, as you're introduced to the controls in a warm-up race, then gradually given full control over assists and difficulty, before the new 'Mods' feature is unveiled.
I really like the Mods. They are given to you as cards in packs of varying price and rarity, and are split into three types. Some cards can be used as many times as you like and give you stat boots like +12% grip or -5% weight, plus extra boosts on certain tracks. Dare cards offer credit rewards for completing race objectives under set circumstances, such as forced cockpit cam, or no assists. Other cards are single-use, like a two grid position starting boost for one race. They're fun to use and I hope the series expands on them in the future.
There is a problem, however. While I absolutely welcome the video game elements and special states these challenges introduce (one card turns off collisions for the entire first lap, letting you drive through the packed field at turn 1), they are somewhat negated by the new spinner system. Every time you level up - which happens every couple of races - you get to spin a randomised spinner with nine possible prizes. None of the rewards totally suck, but there are some huge wins to be had. About an hour into the game, I hit level three and won a Lotus F1 car worth 2,000,000 credits. I also won 1,000,000 credits soon after. So when you're gambling rare cards on the prospect of maybe a 10,000 credit bonus, it feels a bit meaningless. A shame, since the spinner and the Mod cards are both truly great elements. They just don't work together.
The game's biggest new feature is probably wet weather driving – and it's gorgeous. I scoffed at all the hype around the game's puddles, but I take it all back. These are some seriously sexy puddles. They're not dynamic (so they're always in the same place and don't get bigger or dry up), but they behave exactly like real puddles, making your car hydroplane, or dragging it off-line and onto the wet grass, where you're heading straight to the scene of the accident.
Project CARS' weather is better (it's a fully dynamic weather system with rolling clouds and everything) and Driveclub's wet conditions look better, but Forza 6 at least maintains a rock solid 60fps. I haven't seen it drop or tear a single frame anywhere, even when all those hyper-detailed cars are leaving the startline. It's gorgeous.
And oh boy, the cars are really special. They look absolutely stunning, and it's impossible to take a bad photo of them in the returning photo mode. They pick up dents and scrapes and occasionally a spoiler will fall off, but otherwise the damage is visually modest. Impacts do significantly affect handling, however. First you'll find braking is unstable when suspension is bent, but crash hard enough and your vehicle will be seriously crippled. What a shame impacts with other cars lack any kind of violence. In some races, it's often like bars of dry soap rubbing together.
I love everything else about the game. Having real-life Indycar drivers and Hammond / May from – sorry, formerly from – Top Gear introducing classes is wonderful. Warm, engaging and often funny, they add much-needed personality to the action and the result is clearly a AAA package. The car customisation options are predictably amazing (and you should see my pure gold-painted Ferrari F40, which looks so classy it hurts), the circuit selection features hit after hit of real world classics and the sensation of simply travelling forwards is wonderful. On the rare occasions you hit 200mph, it's magnificent.
The speedier, grippier classes like the Grand Touring series really show what the game could have been. But when Formula E became available and the first race was an 8-lap slog around Indianapolis, I wondered where gaming went wrong. I found myself sitting there, stony-faced, maintaining 138mph, in the lead, with no need to brake, and no chance of being passed. The frantic orchestral music and pounding drums reached crescendo after crescendo as I spent ten minutes of my life gently nudging left. Racing games are better than this and we must never forget that.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
THE ORDER: 1886
The Order: 1886 is nothing more than a computer program. That may seem an arbitrary statement, but it’s simply not applicable to most video games. Not good ones, and certainly not full, AAA narrative experiences. ‘Experiences’ is the important word there. The best modern games are about involvement, empathy, and the player’s sheer sense of presence and agency in a living, breathing, creatively sculpted world. For all of the logical, digital mechanisms at their cores, they’re about creating a sense of life, a sense of place, and allowing the player to explore and express amongst all of that.
The Order: 1886 delivers none of those things. The Order: 1886 is a cold, uninvolving, desperately automated, experiential production line, churning out its prefabricated, prepackaged nuggets of brutally prescribed interaction as it wants, when it wants, and with a seemingly gross lack of insight into either the state of gaming in 2015 or the importance of player investment. For all of its arresting visual quality, it is no more a modern, AAA, narrative video game experience than a recently dead pig is a bacon sandwich.
The Order’s intent – if I interpret it correctly, and I really hope I do – is a worthy one. Progressive even, in its desire to tell an action-led war story that doesn’t focus primarily on the meting out of violence. But alas, The Order’s total misunderstanding of the relationship between player interaction, personal investment, and narrative resonance furnishes its execution with little merit. It falls far, far short of the powerful, storytelling epic it so clearly wants to be.
In concrete terms, what we have here is a roughly seven-hour game, about a quarter of which is comprised of brief, sporadically placed cover-shooting segments. The rest is filled with a lot of very pretty nothing. The shooting is adequate at best, limited chiefly by a minimum of enemy AI types. There are two. One hunkers down behind its chosen cover seemingly indefinitely. The other rushes down the player with close-range weapons, sometimes wearing heavy armour, and often annoying for all the wrong reasons due to the game’s inexplicable lack of evasive manoeuvres. Underwhelming opposition established, the scope for meaningful, satisfyingly strategic play is then further crumpled by The Order’s cripplingly narrow view of environmental design.
Corridors, streets, warehouse rooms and town square shoot-outs alike are as boxed in and restrictive as each other, often dropping a swathe of empty space between the player and the enemy’s resolutely dug-in position – sometimes even physically isolating you from the action entirely - creating the sense of firing into a self-contained diorama model from the outside. It’s as close to a fairground shooting gallery as modern games have ever come.
With weapons largely interchangeable - aside from a couple of more interesting, but barely used, area-specific ones - and enemies often respawning for long enough to make you feel that the game has broken, combat goes nowhere fast. Basic, yet bloated, it appears so infrequently over the course of the game that there’s no time for it to evolve. By The Order’s climactic stages, you’re experiencing nothing that isn’t present in the early chapters of this game, or any other shooter.
What do you do for the rest of the time? Not a lot. As unremarkable as The Order’s combat is, it’s when the game tries to expand the scope of its story’s delivery that it utterly fails. This is where its naïveté regarding the player experience becomes blisteringly apparent. Simply, it trots along with telling its story, but gives the player no meaningful presence within it. You know all the little filler actions you carry out between the main sequences of an Uncharted or a Gears of War? All of that corridor-walking, and radio-chatting, and door-opening, and diary-reading, and obstacle-pushing, and simple climbing and jumping? The rest of The Order: 1886 is made of that and little more. And by ‘little more’, I mean ‘an incredulous volume of cutscenes’.
The combat-light focus need not, of course, be a problem. Consider The Walking Dead. Ostensibly made of cutscenes, dialogue trees, and QTEs, Telltale’s game insightfully evolves those ‘filler’ mechanics – through depth, finesse, quality of writing, and weighty, branching consequences – into something engrossing. It’s far beyond the sum of its parts. Consider Sony’s own The Last of Us. Consider how Naughty Dog’s thoughtful use of downtime, of ambient exploration, light problem solving, and non-standard action serves to build narrative depth and texture, character empathy, and the relationships between those characters.
The Order seemingly didn’t consider any of the above, and instead simply presents the same eight-year old, stock filler ideas you’ve seen a thousand times before, at surface value, for hours on end. By padding out the majority of its running time with such a glut of limited offerings, unelevated beyond the basic form in which they appear in more complete games, the result is just a game made of other games’ filler. And to boot, one in which any movement or action runs the risk of being replaced with a needless and jarring cinematic at any given moment. The ultimate impression is one of having had a story related second-hand by a friend rather than ever having been part of it.
When The Order tries its hand at set-pieces, its cluelessness is compounded, the maddening, illogical, pathological need to turn everything into a QTE killing any excitement or sense of control. Its trademark werewolves come off particularly badly, appearing outside cinematics only as part of two hopelessly prescribed and distinctly un-fun set-piece types. One aspires to tense, cat-and-mouse action, but its unnecessary reliance on scripted button prompts in order to trigger an otherwise non-existent evasive roll – alongside the Lycans’ simplistic hit-and-run AI – makes for a reductive, mechanical experience, dull and irritating rather than fevered and exciting.
The other encounter type is a boss fight, specifically a knife fight, which marries pseudo-realtime control - as both adversaries circle each other pointlessly, and purely cosmetically - with ultimately meaningless slashing, which inevitably gives way to the barrage of button prompts that really push the scene forward. Thus, the creatures that should be The Order’s most unique asset are weakened, reduced to puppets and automata, with no tangible, threatening presence. A late-game stealth sequence is particularly galling for similar reasons, its non-linear environment buried beneath basic AI and yet more timed QTE demands for takedowns. Infuriated by its unswerving nature and instant restart punishment for failure, I rapidly decided to skip the whole experience in favour of a sprint-and-shoot crossbow frenzy. But even that approach is flawed, given the implementation of unavoidable, instant-death cutscenes, vetoing any chance to fight back when discovered.
These encounters sum up The Order’s problems rather perfectly. Whenever potential presents itself, the game can’t help but reductively shoot itself in the foot by removing the interaction that would have made a sequence shine, in favour of yet more relentlessly superficial delivery. Even its resplendent Victorian streets suffer, rendered in some of the finest visuals ever to grace a console game, but feeling resolutely lifeless. They’re filled with sterile emptiness, and punctuated only by NPCs so stiff, mechanical, and non-reactive that you can almost see the hinges at their joints and the tracks at their feet. The supposedly narrative-furthering collectibles - newpapers, notes, documents, and the like - frequently, bizarrely, hold no information at all, existing only to exist, as non-functional props. It all feels more akin to an unguided tour of an empty film set, or the exploration of a closed theme park.
It might sound an odd comparison, but when playing through The Order, I found it impossible not to think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1988 comedy classic, Twins. In the film, Arnie’s character, Julius, is a genetically engineered super man, a refined, improved version of humanity intended as a shining blueprint for the future. But he is born alongside an unexpected twin brother, Vincent, played by Danny DeVito, who exhibits none of Julius’ carefully chosen qualities. If The Last of Us – with its intelligent, progressive, resonating, modern interactive narrative design – is Julius, then The Order, with its dated, automated, uninvolving delivery of similarly epic aspiration is – as a scientist bluntly describes DeVito at one point in the film – ‘all the crap that was left over’.
Friday, February 13, 2015
FORZA HORIZON 2 REVIEW
Forza Horizon 2 is an open-world racing video game developed for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles. It is the sequel to 2012's Forza Horizon and part of the Forza Motorsport series.
The Horizon Festival is a massive, summer-long music and automobile festival, and it's back again--this time it's hitting the French and Italian coasts before spilling into the sun-baked countryside. Thousands of hipsters with fancy cars and far too much disposable income have gathered here for a summer of concerts and racing competition; think Coachella meets Le Mans, and you're halfway there. It's a completely ludicrous set up that makes no sense under any form of scrutiny. Seriously, who would give these people free reign to terrorize not one, but two European countries with high-powered sports cars? I can't tell you how many private vineyards I must have demolished on my race to be Horizon champion, and it kills me a little inside every single time. Still, it at least gives you some context as to why you're driving around the Mediterranean coast like a bat out of hell.
As contrived as the whole premise is, Forza Horizon 2's, well, horizons are gorgeous. Whether you're racing down the winding streets of Nice or zipping through the bounding hills of Montellino, each location in Forza Horizon is both distinct and breathtaking. While there aren't as many cars here as there are in a typical Forza game, each one is painstakingly detailed, right down to the individual gauges and windshield wipers. The dynamic weather system ensures those wipers get fair use, too. One minute it's nice and sunny; the next, it's raining like the end of days, and how you tackle each course changes dramatically. It also looks fantastic, too, as rain bubbles and pools on the surfaces of roads and cars. Other than a few frame hiccups and some minor bouts of shadow pop-in, Forza Horizon 2's vistas are a joy to drive through, whether you're doing it in a classic Ferrari GTO or a not-so-classic 1981 Volkswagen Scirocco.
You won't need to know a lot about about cars (other than that they look cool and go fast) to enjoy Forza Horizon 2, as it trades realism for pure, high-speed thrills. Cars may dent and windshields may shatter, but they ride just as well as if they were just driven off the lot, and each one is miraculously restored after each race. Driving on dirt or grassy fields will cause your vehicle to slide around more than it would on the road, but honestly, that just makes things even more fun, as you drift wide through someone's delicately pruned shrubberies. Heck, when the festival gives you your first ride, it doesn't show you each car's individual stats--rather, it's as if the game simply asks: "Which one looks the most badass to you?" Even the series' signature Rewind feature feels more at home here than it ever did in Motorsport, as it keeps you from having to repeat races due to a single botched turn. Forza Horizon 2 wants you in a car and doing awesome stuff as quickly and as often as possible, without having to worry about differentials and gear ratios.
That is, unless you want to worry about that stuff, in which case Forza Horizon 2 has you covered there as well. You can poke around under the hood and change pretty much anything, from tuning different parts of your car to changing individual difficulty settings. That has long been a hallmark of the Motorsport games, but it’s new here in the more arcadey Horizon series. The cosmetic damage I mentioned earlier? You can switch over to realistic damage, meaning your car will stop dead in its tracks if it gets banged up too much--completely changing how you approach driving in the game. By taking advantage of these options, you can transform Horizon 2 from a simple arcade racer to a much more in depth simulation. It never feels truly necessary, though, and a vast majority of my time was spent without even touching any of these settings. Still, it's there if you want it, and it disappears almost completely if you don't care about anything other than going fast. Race against the world In addition to the massive solo mode, Forza Horizon 2 includes an impressive online component. Compete in Road Trips or free roam across the entire map with several friends, picking and choosing races as you go. In addition to the typical races, you can also compete in Playground events, like Infected (ram into other cars as fast as you can to "infect" and turn them to your other side). While I wish the lines between online and off were a bit more blurred than they are here, if you're looking to test your driving mettle against the world's best racers, you won't be disappointed. Actually racing on each of Forza Horizon 2's many courses is a varied and exciting experience. Drivatars--the AI system introduced in Motorsport 5 that takes other players' racing data and puts it in your game--are back, and they seem to fit even better here than they did in the game that created them. Drivatars in Motorsport 5 are overly aggressive, to the point of constantly trying to ram into you, and it feels out of place in that game’s overly sterile environment.
Not so here, as races in Horizon 2 are far more cutthroat and unpredictable, going from pavement, to off-road, and back again, with racers often leaving behind a wake of wooden fences and traffic cones. Earning skill points takes the insanity to a whole new level, as you're rewarded based on how well you drift around corners or how close you get to other drivers without crashing. Racing in Horizon 2 is a contact sport, and it's the most thrilling it's ever been in the series. In between championships, you can explore the massive open world of Southern Europe and take on a plethora of additional side content. It's makes for nice diversions, but much of it feels like just that--a diversion. Sure, you can seek out and destroy all 150 XP boards on the map, but there's really no incentive to do so, other than to say you did. Still, having this huge map to explore lets you be as focused or as distracted as you want to be, while always keeping you engaged in the act of driving
After a while, though, Forza Horizon 2 starts running out of new tricks. Each championship in the game works like this: First, you go on a Road Trip to your destination--a timed jaunt that's less about racing and more about learning the lay of the land. Once there, you partake in four different races tied to your chosen championship. Once you finish those, you go on another road trip and do it all over again. For a while, you're constantly unlocking new features in between races, but once you start focusing in on knocking off wins to make it to the Horizon Finale, it starts to feel a bit repetitive. Still, it takes around 10 hours to get to a point where you're even starting to repeat races, and with 180 different championships, there's a ton to do. And when the core racing is this good, you won't mind a little repetition. Despite minor faults, it's easy to love Forza Horizon 2. With many of the optional features the more serious Motorsport games are known for, along with Horizon's high-octane thrills and massive open landscapes to explore, Forza Horizon 2 is a culmination of the best parts of both games, all in one package.
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DYING LIGHT REVIEW
Dying Light is best when you’re experiencing it at your own
pace: scaling tall things just because they’re there, delivering babies for
random strangers and eating candy from bins.
Perhaps because of this, the story missions are the weakest part. Too many end in explicit failure, such as chasing airdrops for long-gone loot, or routine chores doomed to end in betrayal. It’s intended as a way of keeping you engaged; instead, much like staring at the night sky or counting my Twitter followers, it made me feel inconsequential. One especially wretched objective had me appeasing a disturbed man’s mother in exchange for medicine. This meant searching a DVD shop for a movie - because apparently, even video rental can be raised from the dead - and sourcing a box of chocolates. When I delivered this stuff, he still wouldn’t give me the drugs. Worse still, his mum turned out to be made of buckets and was thusly unable to truly appreciate either the movie or the chocolates. It’s one disappointing example of many, and it contributes to the nagging sense that you’d rather be out hitting the restless dead with pipes.
This feeling is aggravated by some ropey characterisation. Hero Kyle Crane is little more than a gruff pair of trousers who scampers up things and says ‘fuck’. A few NPCs stand out - most notably cuddly scientist Dr. Zere and siblings Jade and Rahim - but the rest are merely static mission dispensers. I don’t expect a zombie parkour game to have the literary flair of Bioshock - primarily because I just described it using the words ‘zombie’ and ‘parkour’ - but when you’re forced to join Crane on a personal journey, these inadequacies soon grate
This feeling is aggravated by some ropey characterisation. Hero Kyle Crane is little more than a gruff pair of trousers who scampers up things and says ‘fuck’. A few NPCs stand out - most notably cuddly scientist Dr. Zere and siblings Jade and Rahim - but the rest are merely static mission dispensers. I don’t expect a zombie parkour game to have the literary flair of Bioshock - primarily because I just described it using the words ‘zombie’ and ‘parkour’ - but when you’re forced to join Crane on a personal journey, these inadequacies soon grate
So far, that’s a lot of negatives. Perhaps you scrolled back up to the top of the review and checked the score: yes, there are three stars; and yes, I can count. That’s because despite all that stuff, I really like Dying Light. It’s primarily a game about climbing things and killing zombies, and it does both of those things well. Nailed bludgeons aside, your main weapon is agility. During the day, you’re only ever one van roof away from relative safety, because standard Infected can’t climb. That said, it’s not so much parkour as just ‘jumping’. It’s pretty instinctive - I had faith that running in correct direction would usually lead me to safety - but until you’ve levelled up your skills, there’s a distinct feeling that you control more like a weezy uncle than dashing free-runner. Things are different when the sun goes down, because unlike every other game ever, night is actually dark. Stumbling into a closed space is suddenly terrifying: especially when your torch begins to flicker and unspeakable things start lurching out of the gloom. It also adds a delicious urgency to getting stuff done during daylight hours. Combined, these two things make Dying Light feel unique. The city of Harran is the most interesting thing about the game; a place begging to be explored, made more compelling by the constant threat of things trying to eat your soft bits.
Clambering up walls while the undead snap at your heels is a fantastic rush, matched only by the most dramatic games of tag from your childhood; grazed knees swapped out for gnawed Achilles tendons. Because of this, unlockable safe rooms feel like islands of calm in a tumultuous sea of probably-death. There’s something deeply soothing about surviving a chase, then climbing into your sleeping bag and enjoying an imaginary can of peaches. Ahhhhh. Combine this with the gently threatening electro soundtrack, and you get a very real sense of being trapped in a low-budget horror film.
The Infected are easily killed, but it takes perseverance. Large groups of them are dangerous. When you do fight them, it’s brutal and hilarious. They stumble around like drunks, making it easy to boot them over walls or smash in their heads after they’ve crumpled to the floor. Like stepping on a semi-frozen puddle, there’s something irresistibly compelling about bludgeoning them to bits. It’s less fun fighting human opponents, because they can dodge and block.
Worse yet, you’re forced to fight men armed with assault rifles while you’re packing nothing more threatening than a table leg. Again, this is a triumph of the open world stuff over the story. It feels like you should be avoiding combat, but the linear missions force you into conflict. My solution to this? Herd enemies into tight corridors, chuck a few molotovs, watch them horribly burn to death and think about how the breakdown organised society makes monsters of us all. I’m pretty deep. Like watching professional wrestling or wearing a cravat, there’s something about Dying Light I’m compelled to defend. It has obvious problems, but many of them are eclipsed by the simple joy of braining zombies with shovels. It’s unoriginal, crude and frustrating, but it also lets me dropkick monsters onto spikes. Most of all, it’s a pleasing reminder that not every game has to be a $200 million sequel. And, just as Socrates probably said, we need the B-movies to appreciate the blockbusters.
GAME BLAST
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