Category Archives: Videogaming

Thoughts and Reflections: Lords of the Fallen (PS4) – and other “Souls” Games

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First up, an admission – I’ve never really played any of these “Souls” type games. I bought the SE of Dark Souls on PS3 years ago but couldn’t handle what I felt was the “loose” controls and put it down forever after less than an hour of play. Turned out later that the “loose” controls were simply the crappy DualShock3 sticks when compared to the superior 360 controller that I was so used to (I played most of my last-gen stuff on 360, due to it being the better console of the two – just as this-gen I’ve moved over to the PS4 – and yes, I own all four and no, I have no fealty to either faceless multinational company.)

So Dark Souls 1 on PS3 went back into the backlog pile, and has been there ever since.

Still, in the intervening years, I’ve read an endless stream of people praising these games to the high heavens and always kept one eye open towards having a go again at some stage. I tend to play games on easier levels these days – and that’s basically because I have a lot of video games, can afford to buy lots of video games, but between work, painting models and my other interests, I simply don’t have huge blocks of time to play video games any more like I did when I was younger and in school. I also have eclectic tastes, and like a lot of different stuff (as you can see with the model collection) and tend to like to buy too many games, so I like the idea of playing through a game to see and experience it, then moving on to the next one. I generally don’t have the time or inclination to spend 50 or 100 hours on one game when there are so many others around to play, so from that perspective, easier (or at least not brutally difficult) tends to be better.

The guy who killed the game for me.

So with this as the background, I picked up Lords of the Fallen late last year. It looked very pretty in all of the pictures and previews. It was on sale for a good chunk less than it’s release price, and happened to be the Limited Edition pack with a few extras, and it turns out that it had sold well (!) enough that months later I even got the pre-order bonus code for another extra. Reviews of the game tended to talk about how it was a kinda-“Souls-lite” and “a bit too easy” – and while that tended to be a criticism, it was usually written by people who clearly played a shit-ton of Dark/Demon’s Souls and were well-versed in these games. I figured that this might be a good entry point for myself to this style of game, so I picked it up and onto the pile it went.

Now I have some time off work, and so I decided to install it and give it a run.

Well. I lasted less than an hour. When I turned off the PS4 I was tempted to eject the disc and snap it in half. Instead I put it in the case and threw that across the room, where it bounced off the couch and landed next to me, unharmed.

Basically, I loaded it up, fought the first tutorial-guy. Started to figure out how to play by killing a half-dozen blind “trainer” mobs, killed one “warrior” mob, then was thrown into battle with a Boss: The First Warden. My character, who controls ponderously got the living shit kicked out of him, over and over. I had already wanted to save the game to get back to before I’d even gotten to him (I often play games in small 20-min chunks, going back and forth between a game and my paint desk), so when I found that I was essentially in a death loop, I became more and more frustrated and eventually cracked up and turned the game off.

Another view of the guy who ended the game.

So what’s my point?

Basically, it seems that unless you’re already one of the converted, or love being brutalised by games and have an awful lot of free time to spend getting good at this genre, there’s no real entry point to these games for the rest of us. The usual internet feedback by the moron classes would tell me that I’m just butthurt because I’m bad at games. I’d partially agree. There are lots of games I’m not good at. I’m no RTS wizard, and never got into Starcraft properly. I don’t have the skills to rank up high in AoEII. I never learned to fly particularly well in any of the Battlefield games, and I’m no twitch-headshot master in CoD.

But other games and aspects I got bloody good at. Sometimes easily, but usually after a non-frustrating chance to develop my skills. In Lords of the Souls, I’m not good. And I am butthurt. I’m further annoyed by the addition of two sets of paid DLC: The Foundation Boost and The Arcane Boost – at three bucks apiece, their description states: The DLC package contains 2 special resource cards which can be redeemed for a small boost to help Harkyn get started. The resource cards are of course consumed on use, so if you decide to go for a second (or third) playthrough, you’d theoretically need to buy them again. I just feel that it’s quite dirty, expecting new and inexperienced players (ie the ones who will most likely need these boosts) to pony up an additional three/six bucks to get started.

Especially in light of that DLC, I’m rather pissed off that as a new player, there’s no opportunity to learn the game a bit more by fighting “normal” enemies, and that it’s going to take me an hour or more of ponderous, un-fun gameplay to get past the first boss, and I’m probably not going to bother investing that much time into something that’s not actually fun, so ultimately it’s been a waste of my cash.

And if this is the “easier” cousin to Dark/Demon’s Souls… well, I’m simply not ever going to bother with trying this genre again. And that’s the shame.

 

Edit – I’ve gone back to the game and given it some more time… and… well, I still stand by everything I wrote earlier. I killed and killed and re-killed one of the few guys that were upfront before the boss over and over before going back in to fight him after each death, and he dropped a fancy Bardiche (I think the game calls it an axe of some kind). With the additional reach, and the additional of cowardice and running away I eventually defeated the first, cheap boss. Not until after watching a YouTube video where the YouTuber went on about how easy it should be for everyone playing the game for the first time to defeat this first boss without being hit at all. /sigh

Shortly afterwards, I figured out how the exp system works in the game and spent some time going back and forth between the game and my goblin fanatics – essentially treating the game almost like a Roguelike. Kill some mobs, get some exp, buy a skill or stat point. Kill the same mobs, get some exp, buy a skill or stat point. Die a bunch, but essentially killing resetting and farming the mobs in the initial area (and the hidden cellar) like the bad old days when we used to claim multiple camps in EverQuest for an old-fashioned exp grind. Only instead of auto-attack doing the work, it’s a chop, chop, dodge instead. With a bunch of slow healing throws in for good measure. Just like caster soloing in EverQuest and meditating, come to think of it.

I’ve just gotten past the second boss, and did it in the super special sekret way (no blocking) to get the special reward of a better version of his shield. Not sure how much “skill” is involved in auto-lock and circle-strafing the boss to get a few whacks in when his guard opens up and quaffing the odd potion. While Marouda wouldn’t be able to do this, I’m not sure it’s an especially good marker of being “good at games” or “bad at games” – not that those titles are an especially useful marker of anything.

So at this point, my opinion has changed slightly. The game is awful to start with. I’m also not convinced that a throwback to EQ-style mob grinding to level up is an ideal mechanic, though. For those unfamiliar with EverQuest and mob grinding. Check out the South Park World of Warcraft video instead. It’s the same thing.

Review: Dark Sector – Digital Extremes, Inc. – PS3

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Dark Sector. or darkSectOr, as it wants to be called. Back when it was released there was a bit of a hulabaloo about its violence content, going to far as to being Banz0red in Australia in 2008. This naturally meant i needed to rush out and pick up a copy, a year after it’s release in late 2009 so I did. My next  move was to carefully store it in the backlog. Apparently it got a release in Australia later on, in censored form. Hopefully that’s not what the patch it just installed was about, but I guess I’ll see.

Playing through it I certainly didn’t see anything that struck me as even the slightest of ban-worthy. I’m wondering if the game update/patch I downloaded was a censorship patch. It’s also quite possible – and in fact likely that the bar has very much changed in the past 7 years as well, though.

This screenshot is Strangely Brown.

This game got some pretty reasonable reviews back in the day, with a few that were less enthusiastic. Let’s see how it holds up today. It could be argued that it’s unfair to judge these games I’ve been looking at by today’s standards. While that’s a reasonable point in some ways the fact is that these games are still available to buy and play today – especially on Steam, XBL, PSN, etc – so they’re still very much available for purchase and play. Given that, I feel it’s worthwhile enough to look at them with modern eyes and not through rose-coloured lenses to see what still holds up today and what might have been a good idea back in the day but is past it’s use-by date. I’m making a conscious effort not to be harsh when it comes to graphics, (with the exception of pointing out when a game is a brown-grey smear) but as blunt as I like when it comes to gameplay.

The first thing I noticed was that it’s 3rd person with pretty bad motion bob – not a good start, though I did get used to it after awhile. Graphics are pretty bland and muddy. It kinda-sorta depicts a westerner’s mental image of a delapidated and decaying post-Soviet, post-bio-zombi-pocalypse-infected bit of Russia/ex-Soviet states, but it’s just unrelentingly dark, dim, grainy and shitty looking. I’ve seen enough photographs of Pripyat, ghost towns and similar abandoned areas (and been to a few) to know that the sun does shine there, and the use of light as well as darkness can create an atmosphere of eerie and abandoned stillness. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out only 5 months before and managed to capture this so much more effectively, and that’s a bloody Call of Duty game. (Though to be fair, this was before CoD was the MP-focused-bro-shooter-focused thing that it’s now become).

To be fair, the game looks good in some ways, especially as an early-era PS3 title – but the unrelenting palette of dull browns and blur-greys quickly fatigued my eyes, resulting in it all having the effect of washing together as a muddy dark smear in my memory, even minutes after stepping away from the console. Story-wise. Well, I’m guilty of giving crap to people who complain about the stories of videogames. This one though stands out in it’s …bland nothingness. You play as a Sam-Fisher-wannabe CIA-Black-Ops-type. You infiltrate a Russian castle-base. There’s a virus, evil Russian scientists, you get infected – giving you super powers, a mutant metal arm and a magic glaive which you accept as just fine, and then you slaughter your way through endless zombies (infected civilians) and the Russian troops that are trying to contain the virus (which includes you).

So, yes – you’re an American rampaging your way through the Russian troops trying to maintain a quarantine zone of a mutant virus outbreak. Making them the bad guys – because they’re Russian, after all – and you the good guy – because ‘murica, Fuck Yeah!

Also very popular, you can see the exciting dark blue-grey palette in action.

Actually, I decided before too long into the game that the character I was playing was actually the bad guy for the most part. Like in those Grandoise Theft Automobile games that all the kids are playing these days. But with an even more unlikeable protagonist than Trevor. I can’t believe it… horrible sixaxis aftertouch controls again. Right after I played Heavenly Sword. Still, it’s not as overused as it was in HS, and instead the game just falls into a pattern of blandness.

I found that playing it was pretty straightforward. The ranged combat is bland, and just serviceable – but not fun or tight. The melee combat is just bad. Awful, in fact. Movement is awkward as well, due to both the off-centre 3rd person view, the mapping of run to X rather than L3 (which means if you want to run and change direction – which you need to do at various times – you need to have two thumbs. Was putting run onto R3/RS a gameplay movement that came after 2008? I honestly don’t recall. If it wasn’t, then Digital Extremes have (had?) no excuse. I remember playing MoH back on PS1, but it was so long ago now I don’t recall anything about the controls other than using the dual sticks, which were new-ish at the time.

As I played through, I’m just found it to be so very meh. It lacks both the highs and the lows of Heavenly Sword. It started out like eating a disappointingly bland but inoffensive meal that you don’t really enjoy but isn’t bad enough to not bother finishing, especially since you paid for it – but while you’re eating it you’re thinking of somewhere better you might have gone instead where you’d have really enjoyed it. Still, before I’d finished Chapter 4 (of 10) I was wishing the game would just finish already and by the time I’d started Chapter 5 I was really starting to question myself on whether I was making good use of my holidays by playing tedious games “just to finish them” or if I am just wasting my time. While I’m leaning towards the latter, I do wonder where I should draw the line, as I know some games take a little while to “get going”. I think Dark Sector is pretty well beyond that point, though. Boss fights are a pain in the arse, since they change the mechanic of what you’re supposed to do several times (sometimes mid-fight) with no feedback to the player, and short of checking GameFAQs to figure out WTF you’re supposed to be doing, I can’t see how the designers got a pass on this.

Seriously. The whole fucking game looks like this.

At one point the game mixes things up with a … yes! A vehicle level. You pilot a crab-walker robot with guns that the game manages to make feel not like vicious auto-cannon that will tear things apart, but glorified pop-guns. Seriously, if you’ve played many shooters on any platform, you’ll know the feeling of a game that manages to make the guns “feel” right. Weighty and powerful. These are best described as piddly. Another disappointment to notch up.

Multiplayer looks good on paper. I do like asymmetrical “infection mode” type gameplay. Unfortunately I doubt anyone is still playing MP on this thing 6 and a half years later, and it would be using these gameplay controls that I find so very trying. So I didn’t even bother to look or check it out.

I managed to just finish Chapter 5, which is apparently halfway through the game …aaaand you know what? I’m done with it. This game, taken as a whole – is shit. Every aspect of it, from the graphics to the controls to the shooting mechanics to the aftertouch controls range from awful to subpar to average at the very best. The game isn’t “sticky” in any way, the characters and story are wooden, bland and actively unlikeble. The “endless waves of zombies” that the game throws at you every so often aren’t fun to cut down because the controls are so awful, and the too-common visual noise that the game throws at you (water, fire, vibration, etc) just makes the game even more off-putting.

The game does have a few good concepts – the glaive and various abilities attached to it are nice ideas – unfortunately they’re just ineptly executed, and buried under way too many poor game mechanics. I’ve seen reviews listing this thing as 5-6 hours long, but it seemed quite a lot longer than that to me. I didn’t even die a lot, I just found it long, boring, tedious and frankly un-fun experience – and not one I was willing to waste more time on. I’d rather be doing almost anything else, and so my run through this game is finished, if incomplete.

Verdict: There’s nothing at all to redeem this game in 2015. There are far better ways to spend your time. Avoid.