Fallout 4

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, and PC

Played it on: PS4

RATING: 6/10

To be completely honest, it has been incredibly difficult to write this review. I've gone back and forth considerably on this game. Is it good? Is it bad? Do the new design decisions work, as a fan of Fallout? Does it live up to expectation? I can't answer those questions in a straightforward manner because...

Well, the game is painfully average.

I remember the hype surrounding it. Years of rumors, culminating in an E3 presentation that destroyed all competition. Bethesda rolled out trailers for every major upcoming title in its publishing arsenal, including a sequel to Dishonored, which I loved despite the criticism. A reboot of DOOM that actually looked like DOOM, unlike the divisive DOOM 3. And of course at the end, the hour dedicated to unveiling Fallout 4. It all seemed so fresh back then, so amazing to be back in this world of post-apocalyptic 1950's aesthetic. I was so hyped that I pre-ordered the Pip-Boy edition with help from my significant other at the time. It looked like a return to everything I loved about Fallout 3 and a turn from everything I hated about Fallout: New Vegas. Finally! A return to form!

And then I played it.

It was good for a while. At first, I loved it just as much as I thought I would. The story was great, I thought it was fantastic to play from the perspective of a parent trying to find their child. It was way more compelling than the story of New Vegas, that much was certain to me. Boston was a unique location to explore, and the companions were neat. All of them had different likes and dislikes, and finding one that jived with your character was enjoyable. I even liked the crafting for a while. But after I kept playing, the paint started to chip away. That Fallout 3 nostalgia wore off. And I was forced to see what was lying underneath.

The game just doesn't function like its supposed to. It tries to get you to care about certain factions over others, but fails to present any of them in a meaningful way. It does the exact same shitty thing that Skyrim did by allowing the main character to immediately advance in the four major factions without hardly any setbacks or challenges. The vast majority of the characters are weak and forgettable. I only remember about half the companions because I spent the majority of the game with either Nick Valentine as my noir cop sidekick or Piper because she was my love interest. There was no reason to have anybody else, because they were the only two characters who meant anything to my Sole Survivor.

The locations? Largely forgettable as time went on. It becomes extremely difficult to remember what each part of the map is like because it's too same-y for the entire game. There are differences, yes, and they're distinct enough while playing, but it's extremely easy to get lost or turned around in many sections because it feels like a world too populated and overdesigned with things. And because every quest feels nearly identical, there's no reason to learn the world more intimately. New Vegas suffered from a similar issue, sporting a map that was too open in many areas and lacking in substantive explorative content, but not nearly to this extent. It feels like the Commonwealth is a direct response to criticism of the Mojave, and goes so far in the other direction that it ends up still suffering. Every location blends together, every encounter is identical to the previous one, no main quest is even remotely as compelling or memorable as something like Tranquility Lane or anything leading up to the Battle for Hoover Dam.

And what of that big, climactic battle that epitomizes every modern Fallout? The battle for the fate of the Commonwealth... sucks. Most factions struggle to make you care or feel conflicted, so you're ultimately stuck with something functionally no better than the Mass Effect 3 endings. You can either nuke the Institute or not, and then take down the big Brotherhood of Steel blimp or not. That's it. There's not even a reason to care about which outcome is best because none of them are. Functionally, mechanically, they are all the same. This speaks volumes through its silence. The world of Fallout was always meant to be complex and nuanced, but this feels like an amateur attempt to recreate something Fallout-like rather than a meaningful continuation of the universe. The RPG elements are so token, so shunted aside in this one, that it would be a genuinely better experience if they didn't exist at all.

And what about that good ol' boogyman, the Institute? Well, it's probably one of the biggest tragedies in the entire game. So much detail has been put into it, so much love, so many hours crafting a place that's meant to symbolize a new hope for humanity and the only beacon of progress in a dead world. It is by far one of the most gorgeous locations ever crafted in a Bethesda engine. And you know what? It sucks. It's supposed to be a heavily complex question of your character's morality, and there were moments where that came through. The scene with you and Shaun alone on the roof of the CIT, that was powerful. But ultimately, the entire personality of the Institute boils down to, "Screw the outside world, it's too imperfect and we should just live in our utopia with sentient slave robots." None of the characters in the Institute are nuanced or interesting, they're all cookie-cutter cardboard skeletons that repeat roughly the same thing to you over and over again. Granted, there are moments when the nuance of the Institute shines through like a beautiful beacon of much-needed storytelling, where the characters within feel deeply human. But those moments aren't what sticks, and they're a major faction that's introduced far after the main character is likely deeply entrenched with at least one of the other three, which means that there's just not enough time to care about them, not to mention the fact that siding with them is painted blatantly as an evil decision. It's the one major memorable location that left an impression on me, and it can't even act correctly as the crux of the story. What if, in visiting the Institute, you were tasked with assisting a lesson with a group of kids, talking about what the world above is actually like? No, of course it can't do that, because then you'd have too much of a moral quandary with your decision about nuking the Institute because these kids are ultimately innocent and it would actually force players to question what is right. But if the Institute is full of mostly faceless adults who are painted as condoning slavery, then there is absolutely no reason to care even remotely about them unless you force yourself to think about some of the more abstract consequences like a loss of progress.

Let's take a moment to talk about that story, too, and the RPG elements as a whole. Fallout has always been, since its start, a series of RPG games. You make a character, and you have options to play that character the way that you want them to be expressed in the world. Throughout the series, the games have accomplished this to varying degrees, with Fallout having some stumbling blocks but ultimately being a good rollplay foundation, Fallout 2 being by far the best at conveying story and an ability to play whatever character you want, Fallout 3 being at least interesting with its limited options, and New Vegas expanding on 3's design to provide an incredibly deep experience. But with 4, there was no impetus to get invested in a meaningful way. The dialogue system was nice, I definitely enjoyed the experience of playing a voiced protagonist, but so many of the options are completely meaningless, and many of them are functionally identical to the others. The lead writer, (and it honestly angers me to have to bestow that title on this man) Emil Pagliarulo, is an imbecile who does not have any clue what good storytelling is. He has essentially stated that because players will miss certain story elements in an open world game, that there's no point in story effort at all.

Sorry, Emil, but there's a massive crowd of RPG's outside your door, some of which come from this very franchise, that are carrying pitchforks and screaming that they disagree with your nonsense.

Let's take a second to imagine the four factions as something that has huge consequence for the player and the world. Imagine an Institute that was an entire world unto itself, like the Vaults, but better. An entire functional society underground, with bases all over the Commonwealth that you could visit and gain new technology from, that were researching different aspects of post-nuclear life. Spouses, kids, aunts, uncles, entire families that were raised in this environment with an entirely different worldview than the protagonist's. Now, siding with them means understanding their beliefs with the potential of guiding them in a new direction thanks to your connections in the outside world, but also knowing that this society couldn't function without the use of sentient, synthetic slaves. Imagine the Brotherhood of Steel as an organization with forward thinking, if flawed, morality that believes in law and order, but is too entrenched in preserving the past and being unable to change their ideals. Now, siding with them means sacrifice for the greater good with the knowledge that while you're only a cog in the machine, you're contributing to a better society. Imagine the Minutemen as something greater, as a collection of people who want what's best for the Commonwealth and are willing to fight to protect one another from the evils of the wasteland, who concretely believe in freedom and the common good without the strict militarism of the Brotherhood. A people focused on each other and the future, without being hindered by dogmatism and tradition like the power-armored princes. Now siding with them may mean losing the concrete order and technology that the Brotherhood would provide, but ultimately gaining a better society as a result. Imagine the Railroad as an organization growing too zealous within its own mission, coming to believe that synths are inherently better than the humans around them despite how much help you've give them, with slanted comments about how much better you would be as a synth. Given how zealous they're becoming, what if they're the only ones who want this final solution of nuking the Institute because they can't see any other way. What if siding with them meant a slowly creeping indoctrination that ultimately resulted in you switching your consciousness into a synth body, and what the ramifications of that would be both mechanically and story-wise as you choose who to share your secret with. Now every faction matters. Now the choice of who you side with in the end is truly difficult and really does boil down to how your character rationalizes the decision and what they value and prioritize. Now it's an RPG.

It's this fundamental misunderstanding of what they think players care about that forms so much of the foundation of why Fallout 4 ultimately fails to deliver as the kind of game we were promised. Remember when Todd Howard said in the E3 presentation that Codsworth had a list of hundreds of the most popular names that he would use directly to address the player? That's what we expected. We expected Codsworth to matter for more than eight seconds, for one. But we expected this to carry over as a design philosophy. Not just that it was neat that our servant robot knew our name, but that we would matter, and be deeply entrenched in the entire composition of this world. But that's not how it feels. The RPG elements are so light, so non-existent for the vast majority of game time, that this bombshell drop of cool design back at the E3 presentation is meaningless after the first two hours of the game. That is bad design at its finest.

And while I'm here, why, oh why, DO I GET POWER ARMOR SO EARLY?!?!?! I actually have no problem with how power armor operates in 4, I especially enjoy all of the customizations and variations I can have with the different collectible sets. It felt very Tony Stark to have this big room in my house dedicated to all my different suits of power armor. And it was even nice to finally feel the weight of putting on gear like that, something that wasn't present in previous titles. But being handed a suit of power armor at level 3 in the very first town? That is not how you pace a game. You don't trivialize a fight with the game's first deathclaw and hand the player the power of god immediately upon starting. It's not even a piece of equipment one has to really use sparingly, there's dozens of power cores throughout the game that are extremely easy to find. The power scaling only grows more poorly handled as the game progresses because of this, and the end of the game can be spent almost exclusively in power armor. It's incredibly bad design, because it feels less like a reward and more like a crutch or yet another token inclusion because of the way the player is introduced to it. It's very heavy-handed, which explains a lot about how the rest of the game feels as well. Forced.

*Sigh.* But you know what the troubling thing is? I can't fully write this game off as bad and call it a day. The side quests, despite taking place in an awful map, are actually interesting for the most part. Some of them were far better than the main quest. I did deeply care about taking care of jobs for the Railroad, for one. Letting me choose my own code name was a fantastic touch, I loved that they called to me specifically as "Fixer," and relied on me to live up to that name as a sort of clean-up crew. All of the synths in the Railroad were great characters as well, they felt like this ragtag group that was Fighting the Good Fight™ despite their clear differences in approaching their overall goals. Desdemona was an imperfect leader, but always felt as though she was trying to do the right thing overall. It was something that the Minutemen desperately needed, especially as a group that was billed from the start of the game as the main faction in the Commonwealth that you're supposed to care about as the protagonist. It's no wonder I sided with the Railroad in the end, they were easily the faction I cared about the most thanks to this characterization. The whole game needed more of that, and it shows a glimpse of what could have been.

A few other locations were also highly standout. The slightly on-edge, grunge feel of Goodneighbor stuck with me for the whole game. I thought the Castle was actually pretty neat, and was easily the most memorable thing for the Minutemen (though that is admittedly a very low bar), and the Glowing Sea, now THAT was some proper game feel. They do manage to stick out in this overall dismal world design, and again show what could have been.

The gunplay is also fairly decent, I have to admit. It takes the FPS elements and pushes them even more than New Vegas, and the care in this part of the game shows. I was never unable to have fun or be challenged during combat. To segue into another element I can't conclude without mentioning, crafting parts for my weapons did take up a large part of my time, and I did enjoy it. Many of the weapons do feel great to use in battle, and all of them feel different enough to justify their existence. The upgrades are the same way, they greatly change the feel and utility of each weapon in a noticeable way.

The crafting overall, however, is the most middlingly mediocre part of the game. In some areas, there's too much of it. There's way too many settlements to even remotely begin to care about. The interface is clunky and organized weird. The electrical system is, in general, silly. But for those two settlements I did built out, it was usually fun to make houses and furnish buildings for my settlers, and to build up enough defenses to keep them safe. Until building houses stopped functioning because pieces were unable to click together and it just wasted my time trying to find parts that worked. The same can be said of the guns, there gets to be a point where there are too many guns to care about so you stop making them better, and there's not enough part variety to make it fun in the long run, but it is nice to have the ability to tinker with weaponry to make better or different versions of what you started with. Eventually it boiled down to a long stock, long barrel, glow sights, a muzzle break, and the best regular receiver for pretty much every weapon I had, but I liked that the other options were there for modification, and that they genuinely did make the weapons handle differently.

Ultimately, Fallout 4 does feel like a game whose heart is in the right place. But it feels as though it's fallen victim to a cavalcade of inherent design flaws that have come to define certain aspects of the series, and instead of improving and innovating, they just left it because the lineage is good enough and there's too much of a precedent at this point. A lot of the problems ultimately boil down to pacing and an inability to convey itself properly. This is compounded by the existence of Emil Pagliarulo, who needs to leave Bethesda immediately, and what feels like a focus not on design quality, but instead on feature quantity. At the end of the day, I wouldn't hate myself for playing more of it, especially because the two major DLC's are pretty fun. But it falls far short of expectations, and it's obvious that there is a rift between what players actually want and what Bethesda thinks they want. Fallout 4 can't be a good game, because it fails to come together as the cohesive experience it should be. And unfortunately, the saddest category of games in existence is the bin in which it now finds itself - the depressing, forgettable world of just being ok.

A Discussion About Good Games

What makes a good video game? Wow. What a colossal question to answer. I've been a game reviewer for a long time, and no, I don't post nearly as regularly as I should, I admit that. But I've also spent the last 4 years studying game design in order to break into this field, and that's the one question that has plagued me for my entire higher education. What the fuck makes a game good?

What has become clear to me in recent years is that most AAA companies with big publishers have no. fucking. idea. what makes a game actually good. The cynicism is so blatantly obvious and present. The fact that 343 Industries and The Coalition exist in the first place is proof positive of that. The fact that Bungie made one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, knew when it was supposed to end, ended it, and then 343 dug up its corpse for a quick buck. The fact that The Coalition just couldn't leave Epic's magnum opus alone. At least Gears 4 was good, unlike Halo 4.

Lawbreakers released into an extremely over-saturated market, and instead of trying to actually distinguish itself, decided to pander to the market as much as possible in order to put itself in direct competition with the juggernaut titan that is Overwatch. That is not how you make a game. Thanks to a recent video by Crowbcat, I really started to think about why it is that Lawbreakers failed like it did. I will link the video at the bottom of this post, just in case you would like to watch it, too.

In it, Crowbcat does not speak. Just as he always does in his videos, he simply lets Cliffy B. and the team speak for themselves. And while it starts as something fun and interesting, the cynicism creeps in after a little while, and it becomes painfully clear that Cliffy B., great designer though he may be, has become an extremely arrogant ass since his retirement from Epic at the conclusion of Gears of War 3. In another one of his videos, Crowbcat compares Bungie in their Halo days to 343 now. The differences speak for themselves.

This is the core problem with AAA. There is a very real reason that good indie games have a rock solid following. There is a reason Undertale is as popular as it is, and deservedly so. It's because Undertale is fun. It's because Toby Fox took a risk, and made something with love. It's because he was a perfectionist with an idea. There is no substitute for passion, and he nailed everything about Undertale. Bungie wanted to make something fun with Halo: Combat Evolved and its successors. It is still entirely possible to create a game that good in the modern era, Doom (2016) is proof of that. It's even possible to do it with a new big AAA IP, as Horizon: Zero Dawn proves. But these games are, depressingly, not the norm. No AAA company would risk making Undertale. None of them would risk making OneShot. None would venture into the territory of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, or Wasteland 2, or Owlboy. These are thought of as the scraps, left only for partially competent indie devs, experiences that are too risky for publishers to get behind. Yet these games, offered for half or less the price of a "premium" experience, are often the greatest games created in the modern games market. Because they remember what passion is.

That's the core component that the vast majority of current AAA games lack. Passion. Drive. Mixed with a healthy dab of perfectionism. Not cameos, and the "cinematic" (gag) experience, fan service, or the "premium" game. They have forgotten that for a game to be good, first it must be fun. That before a level is pretty, it must feel good. Before a gun is implemented, it must first be unique. Before a core mechanic is finalized, it must first enrich the experience. Dead Space 3's gun building was detrimental to the game and ruinous to the feel because it was not properly supported in the game. The cinematic bullshit that was added to Halo 4 and 5, replacing the player-first mentality of Bungie's work, destroyed the player's relationship to the game. And for god's sake, can we please stop this trend towards making absolutely everything an open world experience? It's not good for every game! It's just not! Dragon Age did not need to become open world, and it massively damaged the pacing of Inquisition in comparison to Origins and II. You know what the best parts of Inquisition were? The directed, limited-area DLC's that returned to the design principles of the first games.

Do you want to know what fun is? Fun is exploring Yharnam in Bloodborne, because the game is incredibly tight and exactly as directed as it needs to be. Fun is delving deeply into the world of Torment: Tides of Numenera and rollplaying in a setting that actually has replay value. Fun is what The Elder Scrolls and Fallout had before Skyrim and 4 respectively, before they forgot how to make a world that's good to explore rather than a cash-in with a trash story that does nothing to further what's enjoyable for the player. Fun is what The Legend of Zelda had before Ocarina of Time ruined it with formulaic tripe that cheapened and worsened an experience that should be about exploration and becoming a hero. Ocarina is how we got the travesty that was Skyward Sword. All of Skyward Sword's problems started with Ocarina. Never forget that, I don't care how much you like the game.

Great games are objectively great, but in an intangible way, and that is what is so hard to understand about them. They are not great because of any one feature present in all of them. They're not great because of perfection in a certain realm of design, like soundtrack or level design. But they do share an intangible means of wrapping the player seamlessly into the flow state, that indescribable feeling where the interface melts away and the player is within the game itself. Because the core of the game is so damn good that nothing else matters. That is how you make a game good.

I know that no AAA producer is going to read this post, and that's fine. They don't give a shit about player feedback anyway. If they did, DICE's disgusting, failed attempt at Battlefront would not be the flea-ridden travesty that it is. Mirror's Edge: Catalyst would not be the haphazard open-world mess that we got. Dragon Age: Inquisition, for as much as I love the game, would not have been bogged down with useless mechanics like shard collection and astrarium puzzles that set fire to the pace of the game and took time away from what really mattered.

You don't make a good game by adding bullshit. You make a good game by removing what isn't fun and refining what you have until it is fun. You don't rest on your laurels and just expect players to enjoy what you shit out because you think it's cool, you rip the game apart every time it's not fun and you ask yourself, "Why?" And then you rebuild it and repeat until you find the fun. Only then are you allowed to move on.

THAT is the difference between Undertale and Dead Space 3.

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The Lawbreakers video by the great Crowbcat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4v2LgVlEA

Dark Souls II

Available on: PC, PS3, and Xbox 360
Played it on: Xbox 360
Played it for: 60 hours

RATING: 7.5/10

Dark Souls II is the first direct sequel in the Souls-borne series... and it's fantastic. It builds upon what the original Dark Souls crafted, and makes certain purposeful decisions that, while controversial, ultimately help the game to shine where it needs to.

Now, I will give you lovely readers a disclaimer about my experience with this game. When I first booted it up... I hated it. I came to Dark Souls II very shortly after beating the original Dark Souls, and a lot changed between the two games. In order to explain some of the reasons behind that, I'd like to talk for a moment about the troubled development cycle of this sequel. 

The series as a whole is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, but unlike Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, he didn't have direct oversight on Dark Souls II. Instead, that control was shifted to the people who are now lovingly referred to as, "The B-Team." Originally, the directors for the project were Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura. Now, the game was at first going to focus a lot more on the light and dark themes that were inherent to the world, and play a lot with heavy shadow and the tension of limited torchlight. A lot of this was even showcased as gameplay prior to the sequel's release, but was surprisingly absent from the release game, which featured toned-down graphics and an almost entirely bright world. FromSoftware has remained surprisingly quiet about the whole thing, but it would seem as though Shibuya was taking the game in a completely wrong direction, and was eventually taken off the project entirely. He hasn't been seen since. Tanimura took complete control of the B-Team and tried to fix all the issues before release, even asking Bandai Namco to push back the release date. But they refused, and thus Dark Souls II was released unpolished and unfinished.
After my first several hours, I had to put it down because I was so frustrated. And it sat on my shelf for a good several months. However, what the unpolished exterior was hiding underneath made this game very interesting. When I came back to it, I made a concerted effort to understand it, to not make snap judgments about the game based upon its predecessor. And I'm so glad I did.

The stats vastly changed between the two Souls games. The functionality of Endurance is split between Endurance and Vitality, the former governing raw stamina and the latter controlling the weight of items that can be carried. The addition of Adaptability also shakes up how players are forced to level, as higher Adaptability grants more invincibility frames during rolls and allow a faster swig of healing estus.Using estus and the healing rate itself are also considerably slower. Even if one gets a heal in, it takes a decent amount of time to take full effect. At least in comparison to Dark Souls. And, most notably, Soul Level itself no longer matters. Matchmaking, both in summoning and invasions, is now based upon Soul Memory. Any souls collected are recorded and boost your SM, which prevents players from constantly invading at low level and scumming out rewards because any kills bump up Soul Memory and will eventually push players out of the low range.

These mechanics are coupled with a heavy focus on netcode. Granted, this also comes with a simplification of modeling and texturing, but the real functionality of a Souls game is within the mechanics. And boy, are the mechanics smooth. The game is built around steady frame rates, both in PvP and general world exploration. The disgusting frame dips in Blighttown and Lost Izalith are a thing of the past. Even in the most expansive areas, it's extremely rare to see any impact on the engine. And despite the simplification, the game is by no means ugly. Merely different.
The game is also the longest Souls game to date, and since Hidetaka Miyazaki has stated that he doesn't want to make a new one after Dark Souls III, it will likely remain so. There are both benefits and drawbacks to that, admittedly. The length is wonderful, and the game contains a massive amount of areas and enemies to contend with. But the world construction does suffer, as some areas are stuck together without much care for continuity. Thankfully, this problem fixes itself after reaching Drangleic Castle about halfway through.

The game isn't without its problems, and these stem from the incomplete nature of the game. There are ganks, enemies who deal too much damage, and nonsensical enemy placements that make certain areas clunky, and this continues throughout the whole experience. Some locales are something of a chore to deal with, though that's not exactly new for a Souls game.

At least the rewards for defeating bosses are highly varied and useful for all kinds of characters. This is especially and uniquely true in Dark Souls II, which allows almost any weapon in the game to be infused with elemental enhancements. While this was the case for the regular weapons in Dark Souls, even the vast majority of boss weapons can be modified in this sequel. Just pick a weapon and have fun!

Is it perfect? No. But that doesn't mean that it's bad. It's different, but those differences are crucially important to allowing this game to distinguish itself from the other games in the series. It's smooth, it feels good to play, and it's just fun. However, one caveat I have is that you shouldn't buy it. Because the next review will cover the far superior re-release, Scholar of the First Sin. And that game, every Souls fan should play.

Dark Souls

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: Xbox 360 and PC
Played it for: 150 hours

RATING: 8/10 on console, 6/10 on PC

Ah, Dark Souls. The famously obscure, infamously hard, not-to-be-trifled-with lovechild of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kentaro Miura. The series has gained plenty of attention over the years, but let's go back to where it all began. Well, not counting Demon's Souls, of course. Or King's Field, for that matter...

Dark Souls isn't a direct sequel to Demon's Souls. Atlus published the latter, and there's been plenty of discussion since about IP ownership, so FromSoftware instead made a game with the same mechanics that's set in a different universe, this time published by Bandai Namco. The universal currency of the game is "souls" that are collected from fallen enemies, which can be used as both experience points and as gold. Business as usual, then. But the premise of Dark Souls is much more fleshed out than the previous game. In Demon's Souls, the protagonist, the "Slayer of Demons," was a pioneer adventurer who wanted to kill some demons. That was that. But Dark Souls paints a deep story for the protagonist. Cursed with the fate of the undead and branded with the feared Darksign, the protagonist is locked in a remote asylum to await the end of days. But unlike other undead, the protagonist still retains their human will, and sets forth on a date with destiny to become the Chosen Undead that would alter the course of history forever. Sweet!

The game still plays in a similar way to Demon's Souls, but overall it has a lot more polish than its older sibling. The first Dark Souls is the slowest of the Souls-borne games, but this goes miles in terms of building a tension that is inherent to the world of Lordran. Every weapon swing feels purposeful, like a commitment. This makes combat much more challenging, as poorly-timed swings could quite easily end up being fatal. Smaller weapons swing much faster, but don't deal the poise damage required to stagger most enemies like the massive zweihander would. But both are viable, as are all the other weapon classes.

Casting, too, has been revamped to allow viability from the start, instead of asking the player to invest 60 intelligence or 60 faith and just hope for a payoff that would still often require a melee fallback when one runs out of MP. MP has been removed in Dark Souls, and spells are instead limited to a certain number of uses that cost stamina to cast. You'll still see the most damage out of a spell when you max out its appropriate stat, but it's perfectly viable to be a split physical and mental character this time around, pushing 40 Strength and 50 faith to get the most damage out of your lightning spears while still hitting like a truck with your blessed longsword. The possibility is massive in this game.

The rolling system has been re-tuned to a tiered metric. Increasing your endurance increases your equip load, which affects how your roll. Demon's Souls simply revolved around the 50% equip load mark, but Dark Souls adds a "mid roll" between 30% and 70% load. The addition of the mid roll is huge, as it's not too good and not too bad. It's significantly more difficult to get your character to the ridiculous hyper-speed Brushwood Set meta from Demon's Souls, although it is still possible with the right commitment. It is instead much more plausible to simply mid roll in the heavier sets, and this still requires a focus in Edurance. This means players need a much more careful balance of damage stats, Vitality, and Endurance, and is much better for gameplay overall.

Now, onto the story and such. The focus of Dark Souls was on an interconnected world design instead of the "hub-and-spoke" design of Demon's Souls. The game drops the Chosen Undead into Lordran with the basic objective of ringing the two Bells of Awakening in order to progress to the mysterious Kingdom of Anor Londo. Accomplishing that goal is left to the player, and while there is a standard order of bosses, there are many ways to unlock doors and potentially cut corners. As the player works through their quest, they'll meet quite a few NPC's that are all attempting to complete their own quests, most of whom the player can help as the game progresses.

The game slowly unveils the story as the player moves forward, and builds a genuinely complex history through environmental clues and item descriptions. It's a fascinating passtime to really piece everything together and come to the ultimately sad conclusions about the world of Lordran. And it feels absolutely fantastic to triumph where so many others failed. It builds a wonderful and coherent world that feels satisfying to play. It's a solid experience.

The game, of course isn't without flaws. The PvP experience is... less than stellar, with faulty netcode that often means completely off-model hitboxes. Backstab scamming is an important tactic, even in high-level PvP, and the weapon and armor balances were meant almost exclusively for PvE. They become far too easy to exploit in the PvP scene. Parrying is incredibly easy as well, and again becomes an important and easily exploitable mechanic when fighting other players. So while PvP is an ingrained and important part of the universe, it's a pretty terrible experience overall.

The PC port is also... well, it's atrocious. The mouse and keyboard controls are horrendous, the mouse isn't even hidden on-screen, the netcode works even less reliably than it does on console, the framerate is grossly underwhelming, and if you click to summon somebody whose name is too long, the game outright crashes. It takes no less than three heavy mods to get the game working right, and even then it doesn't fix the mouse or control issues, and it's far better to just plug in a controller. The game itself is good, but the disgusting port seriously docks points.

Overall, it's a great experience. Even on PC, if you can get all the mods to work right. It makes seriously beneficial improvements from Demon's Souls, builds a fantastic, breathing world, and feels great to play. Starting with this game is a must if you're a Souls-borne fan, or even if you're just interested in trying it out. Demon's Souls is optional. But not this one.

Prototype

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 20 hours

RATING: 3.5/10

Want a game that's just an amalgam of all the action game cliches from 2005, mushed into a badly designed, horribly executed mess of a game? Then Prototype is for you!

Yes, that's a very strongly opinionated opening, but this game is a 3.5/10 for a reason. In all my gaming career, I've rarely come across a triple A cesspool of this magnitude. Sure, it happens. Brink and RAGE do exist, and despite by best interests, I continue to play some games with very minimal research into their actual function, so sometimes I end up with garbage like this. So, to begin in earnest.

I picked up Prototype because it was one of those games that I would see in stores, but would always pass up. Back when it first released in 2009, I wasn't old enough to purchase M rated games by myself, and I wasn't interested enough to try convincing my parents to come to GameStop with me to get it. And I hadn't heard too much about it, either, since YouTubers didn't really do a whole ton of Let's Plays back then, and those who did simply passed the game up as well. So I was left with a very well-designed box art and an intriguing premise, and that was about it. Alex Mercer is infected with a virus that gives him the power to mutate his body into weapons, and the whole city is becoming infected with the same thing. And Alex can somehow control his version, when the rest of the citizens become mindless zombies. Dark and gritty, but interesting nonetheless. Boy, was I let down.

To start, the game's color palette is brown. Sometimes there's some red if you look hard enough, but even when you visit the brighter parts of the city, everything seems... washed out. Even Alex's design is boring, he wears a black leather jacket with a grey hood and light blue jeans. And this minimal color is completely overtaken by browns as the city falls more and more to the rapidly spreading infection. I get that its trying to broadcast this forced gritty-ness, but even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had its brighter moments. Heck, even Gears of War had more color than this. And unfortunately, it only gets worse.

I'm going to bring up Modern Warfare 2 once again, but it's because I want something to be very clear to you lovely readers out there. 2009 was the same year that MW2 released. It was also the same year in which we saw the releases of Mirror's Edge, Killzone 2, and, very notably as we move forward, the first inFamous. That's the level of graphical fidelity and animation quality we're talking about. Prototype plays like none of these things. In fact, the animation quality isn't even something that we'd see out of a game released in 2005, and often looks equivalent to or worse than Halo: Combat Evolved, which released nearly a decade earlier. The explosions are barely better than animated 2D gif's, of which you'll be seeing plenty, and the rush to release becomes very apparent when nest buildings fall apart. They just sort of collapse in on themselves while the pieces clearly fade out. And it doesn't help that they're badly textured in obvious 2D.

Now, you may be saying that because Prototype is an open world sandbox game, it needs to load more things at once, and therefore must have less to load in general. I'd be inclined to agree with you, but I already brought up something very important: inFamous. inFamous is eerily similar to Prototype in a number of ways. They're both open-world games, both feature a protagonist with strange powers who can freely move around the environment and climb buildings set in a heavy urban map, and both have a fluid combat system that requires fast thinking and good use of existing powers. But one of these games does things properly, and the other botches them horribly. Can you guess which is which? You're correct! In inFamous, the world has volume. Windows and doors are set into buildings, cars are modeled with decent care, and Cole even stands out decently well with his bright yellow jacket and shining electric powers. In Prototype, everything looks like a dirty png was just slapped on some rectangles. Nice.

Well what about all the stuff you can do within the world? Sadly, its more of the same. Alex is just a person, so I get that big monsters could realistically knock him around, but it becomes insanely aggravating when every single enemy in the game can do it, even when Alex is coated in late-game, heavily dense armor. Soldiers have rocket launcher squads, tanks and helicopters have missiles, and all the mutated infected can knock Alex around like a pinball. This seems to encourage a highly mobile hit-and-run playstyle, except anything thrown or fired can track you, so distance means next to nothing as well. And despite the fact that the game has built-in combos, you'll never get any of them off because they make Alex stand still for too long, and he'll just get the crap kicked out of him. And the only ranged abilities Alex has are to throw large objects, which don't track and rarely hit their mark because the automatic target selector is awful. Instead of aiming where the camera is aiming, Alex shoots or throws at whatever his character model is facing, which means that if you want to actually hit anything, you have to turn Alex around and aim first, breaking what little fluidity the moving combat has.

On top of it all, the story is... well, to be honest, I don't even really remember. The main problem is that while I came to care about Cole McGrath's story in inFamous, I don't care even remotely about Alex Mercer. The story strives to make him so edgy that he becomes lost in a sea of generic tropes and black leather. And unlike Cole, you can't choose Alex's path. Even if Cole only had the good and bad karma options, the fact that they existed at all made a huge difference because they affected his powers, the story, and the whole game in general. Alex is instead forced down a single, boring path that becomes obscured by all the terrible boss fights and vague mission parameters. What remains is a skeletal premise about Alex saving his sister or something, and and then fighting some infected and murdering a bunch of people. Alex himself is the product of a scientific experiment with a bunch of horribly cheesy codenames like Project Blacklight that seem ripped straight from the corniest Resident Evil storylines. And in the end, I just don't care. And that's a shame.

I could keep going about a lot of things here. The AI is horrendous, I had to restart one mission four times because three of those tries ended when my allied helicopter crashed into me and killed me. Not to mention the parts when the military will exclusively target Alex, even when a berserk boss mob is ripping them to shreds and Alex is obviously helping to kill it. The map is badly laid out, the side missions are generic and tiring, and the story missions themselves offer little to no explanation as to how anything is connected or what Alex's motivations even are. The disguise power is absolutely worthless outside of specific missions, and the game actually looks and plays considerably worse on PC than on console, seeing as the resolutions are heavily limited and the controls are pretty terrible. Ultimately, I'd suggest that you avoid this one. I realize that die hard fans of this game exist, and I apologize for my rather visceral reaction to it, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to any sane gamer. Play inFamous, or, even better, just play something newer and with more polish like inFamous: Second Son. This game nearly gave me any aneurysm, and I'm glad it's now off my hard drive.

Demon's Souls

Only Available on PS3
Played it for 100+ hours

RATING: 7.5/10

"I want to get off Mr. Allant's Wild Ride!" my character seemed to say as he was fighting the final boss of FromSoftware's famously difficult Demon's Souls. First of all, if readers don't know what Mr. Bones' Wild Ride is, please look it up immediately. Second of all, if you have a PS3, go out and purchase this game. If you're not a Souls fan, it's the first and best welcome. If you are a Souls fan, it's a beautiful history lesson.

The game is just as punishingly hard as you've always heard, that's for sure. The game begins with a tutorial that ends in a boss fight that is impossible to win. Or, at least, if you're lucky enough to kill the Vanguard Demon with the minimal amount of room the game gives you to move around, the second boss will kill you in a cutscene. So it teaches you early on that you will die. Often. The game proceeds to resurrect you in "The Nexus," a central hub that will transport you to one of five worlds that are all around the kingdom of Boletaria. Your simple mandate is to eliminate the demons that now control the world of man. Simple, right?

The first level is fairly straightforward. It's the outside of a castle, and you must find a way to open the portcullis to proceed. Complicated? No. Easy?... No. The game doesn't have an indication of what enemies are more or less difficult, so it's easy to stumble into an area that's impossible to beat at the start, such as the dragon outcropping or the red-eye knight's bridge. Additionally, if you don't explore the whole area, you'll miss the most valuable item in the whole game: the Cling Ring. Normally, death reduces your max health to 50%, and this can't be changed until a boss is killed or a finite item called a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes is used. The Cling Ring, however, boosts your health back up to 75%, which is significantly more manageable. And if you don't fully explore the very first area of the game, you won't have this item for the other four and half worlds.

However, getting past the first boss, the Phalanx Demon, is a treat. As a first boss, it's simple and pretty boring. But it also gives the player access to Stonefang Tunnel, The Tower of Latria, The Shrine of Storms, and The Valley of Defilement, all of which are unique and fascinating areas that, at least in the lore, are all tied together. By reading the item descriptions, you can begin to peace together tiny bits of information until a picture begins to emerge. It's never told to the player exactly what the story of Demon's Souls is, or what the accurate history of Boletaria is. Instead, this is left to the player and their imagination. Who is Yurt, the Silent Chief? Why, when the player digs deeper, is he working for Mephistopheles? What is the Order of the Soul? None of these questions are ever fully answered, and this is part of the charm of the game. When you get down to it, the biggest question throughout the story is simply, "why?"

This is why Demon's Souls is such an interesting game, and why it spawned so many spiritual successors in the Souls-borne games. On the surface, it's a simple RPG about stamina management and strategic upgrading, but the world is incredibly rich and deep if you're willing to do some digging, and it paints a tragic story of a kingdom cyclically inviting the same demon invasion countless times, each time causing so much destruction that it takes a thousand years just to rebuild to medieval technology. Each world that the player visits has its own theme, and each holds its own piece of the overall story. And the player isn't just told this, they discover it themselves while being an adventurer.

Now, mechanically, this game is... lacking. In several areas. For one, a lot of the game feels incredibly floaty a lot of the time. Hits don't have much of any real impact, falling is slow, and the player can only roll in four directions: forward, left, right, and backward. This makes combat significantly more tedious, as rolls often shoot off in unintended directions, and many fights just aren't that engaging. Most of the bosses are great, but end up as gems in the mud as players trudge through the chore-filled areas of the game, which becomes especially true later on in the Tower of Latria and the Valley of Defilement.

Balance-wise, the game is also not stellar. Later Souls games would introduce the concept of a rolling gradient, which allowed players to roll very fast when they were lightly armored, roll decently most of the time, and "fat roll" only when they were heavily encumbered by their gear. Demon's Souls did not have this, it was either rolling fast or rolling badly. This meant that a reasonable investment in endurance would see you rolling all over the place in even the heaviest of armor sets. High mental stats, like intelligence and faith, would see absolutely devastating damage increases on spells, and of course the now famous "Purple Dragon Smasher" meta forced FromSoftware to rethink how weapon buffs would work in later games.

But, despite the problems, it's still a fun game. And, like I said at the start, it offers both the best welcome for newcomers and an interesting history lesson for veterans. It may not be worth playing multiple times, but it's absolutely worth playing.

A Souls Montage

I love the Souls games. Like, a lot. So much so that I'm getting a Souls-themed tattoo on my left shoulder blade at some point within the next couple years, wallet permitting, and yet I've never reviewed them on here. That's gonna change, so prepare yer butt.

The next four consecutive reviews will be of Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and finally Bloodborne. I'd also like to take some time to compare the games, talk about strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately figure out where From Software has been able to shine the most on the Soulsian Pain Train. It's gonna be a long journey, but one that I've spent a hell of a long time researching, so sit back, relax, and enjoy, as I take you on a journey of condescending snark through what I would argue as one of the best and only worthwhile series in modern gaming. From the Vanguard Demon to the Moon Presence... the true Souls begins here.