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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Showing posts with label playstation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label playstation. Show all posts
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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