Kry Reviews: Dead Space

Dead Space, developed by EA, was released October 2008. It’s a horror-survival, third person shooter game set aboard a spaceship filled with creepy aliens. It was a pretty hyped release, and generally had favorable reviews from the critics. Besides my aforementioned hesitation to play scary games, I had assumed Dead Space to simply be a clone of RE4. I was pleasantly proved wrong, and I was unpleasantly horrified playing through the game.

So, as I said before, Dead Space is set… in space. And, honestly, I really have to laud EA for the artistic design of the game. Not only are the aliens quite grotesque and scary, but also the spaceship interior remains fresh and interesting throughout the game. In addition, there are a couple key design elements I want to note. I loved the design of being in the vacuum of space, and also, the game’s HUD is designed excellently, notably by not existing at all! All of your relevant information is actually displayed on your character, which definitely increased the immersion factor for me. The music is also quite rich and definitely kept me on edge.

Some gripes before touching on gameplay... First off, the story’s quite weak. There is something about your dude looking for his girlfriend aboard the ship, which is hard to figure out immediately when he doesn’t speak. Also, I feel that the game relies too much on Bioshock’s paradigm for storytelling as an example of progressing the plot, not only does the general atmosphere always remind me of it slightly, but Dead Space also utilizes the same ideas of audio tapes/text logs strewn about and multiple parties chatting on the radio with you as a means to perpetuate the storyline. Another seriously annoying gripe I have is with the physics engine, which functions satisfactorily most of the time, except when it comes to enemy corpses. It is a serious immersion breaking factor when I walk over a corpse and boot it into the air. It was the cause of cheap scares several times throughout the game as I saw a corpse pop up and flip behind me as I walked over it and freaked out.

The gameplay is definitely enjoyable through the entire game. It differentiates itself from the Resident Evil series nicely in the unique way you kill enemies, via dismemberment. There are some very, very intense fights throughout the game. Combat in zero gravity and the vacuum were certainly cool instances as well. There is a decent selection of weaponry, and inventory management doesn’t feel like a chore. I felt that the means of upgrading your weapons and armor were unique, and had a decent amount of depth, although I pretty much wound up soaking everything into additional health.

Some serious frustrations included the piss-poor melee combat abilities of Isaac. Attempting to use any sort of melee in this game is just a way to get yourself killed. It is a jarring disconnect from the fluidity of Resident Evil’s solid combination of gunfire and physical attacks. Also there are two very annoying minigames midway through Dead Space that were a cause for rage. You’re basically stuck controlling a cannon and shooting asteroids/debris careening towards the ship. Sounds cool in theory, but turns out they’re hard as hell to hit; using the slow-moving reticule to track them was a serious pain in the ass.

Is Dead Space worth your money? I’d say it’s a solid buy now, with the price cuts. If you’re looking for a good horror game, or are a Resident Evil 4/5 fan, it’s definitely worth your time. Looking towards the horizon, it seems EA is interested in continuing the use of this IP, with a Wii on-rails shooter announced; it is entitled Dead Space: Extraction, likely due for release at the end of ‘09.

Kry Retro-Reviews: Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 4 was ported to the Wii in June, 2007, which is the version I played through. It took me a while to try it out because of my distaste for the scariness of the original games. I finally got around to it, and was rewarded with a truly great gaming experience.

RE4 sets a great atmosphere; from the beginning, I was engrossed into the storyline and mystery of the Plagas virus. Despite this, towards the end the characters start to get a little silly, and the dialogue does occasionally get rather... unfortunate at times. The game was still pretty scary, but it is mainly an adrenaline based fear, though there were some genuinely scary parts. The graphics are certainly antiquated for an '07 release on Wii, but it doesn't detract much. It is still totally awesome when you blow a zombie's head off, especially after you start witnessing the insectoid appendages that sometimes sprout out after you do later in the game.

Speaking of decapitation, let's talk about the gameplay, which has much of that. The game has you killing zombies left and right from the get go, combat is completely engaging and fun (especially working in kicks and suplexes on stunned enemies), and the difficulty curve ramps up at a pretty fair rate. RE4 also made an excellent use out of the wiimote as a targeting reticule, the controls never felt clunky. I did enjoy the ability to customize your arsenal through the merchants, but disliked the tedium of inventory management that accompanied it. It's also a break in the action when you're pretty much pausing the game while zombies are in your face to peruse your inventory.

Review is a little short this time around mainly because there’s so little for me to criticize. My only complaints have been minor ones. The standard game is long, and it’s engrossing the entire way through. When that is finished, there are additional minigames that also hold one’s attention for a decently long time as well. RE4 is simply a great game, and I’m very much looking forward to playing RE5 next month to compare/contrast the two (and in the meantime, I’ve picked up Dead Space to keep me sated).

Kry Reviews: Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead was released 11/18/08 to critical acclaim. It continues Valve’s benchmark for top notch quality FPS games, but it does have a few problems that need addressing.

Let me start with addressing all that is good with Left 4 Dead, which is a lot. I absolutely loved the art style within Left 4 Dead; the grainy horror movie look really works well for the game. I’ve heard some complaints that the story in L4D’s too simple. I disagree, the simple story is sufficient for the atmosphere they are trying to set.

The co-op play is a blast, especially with 3 buddies (although the friendly AI isn’t bad). It’s great fun mowing down hordes of zombies, and your group really has to keep their wits about them. Your group gets separated and it isn’t long before you get gibbed. Also, the expert difficulty is seriously hard, and a tough goal to work towards for more dedicated zombie hunters.

Versus Mode is also great fun, and probably is the reason most people continue playing L4D once they beat the campaigns. Playing as a zombie is neat, however if the survivors are organized playing infected really requires supreme coordination. It has a few problems though. Only 2 of 4 maps are available for it, so the locales get stale very quickly. Also, Versus Mode also had a serious luck factor with the timing on tank spawning, which I believe was normalized with the recent patch. Although I saw nothing in the notes about having your tank randomly die (It’s happened to me a lot). Very frustrating, but I haven’t been online to test it for an even more annoying reason.

The server selecting system is Left 4 Dead’s biggest flaw, and a serious turn off. When you start a game you have the option of selecting a third-party dedicated server or hosting it yourself. I don’t want to run it off my machine so I choose a dedicated server to host my games. Night after night I’ll get stuck with laggy, high-ping servers (once even in Germany, serious WTF there), bugged servers, or I’ll just get dropped by them midgame. This makes me irate and has on more than one night ended my gaming early. Valve needs to implement a way to select servers or get better hosts because these server problems are killing the game for me. I doubt I will play L4D much more until I see some news about this.

Left 4 Dead is a good game overall. The first few nights playing it for me were just awesome. The server problems are very noticeable, almost immediately depending on your luck. Bottom line about L4D is this: If you have the patience to keep remaking games when you land on bad servers, you’ll have fun if/when you get into a good game.

Kry Reviews: WoW: Wrath of the Lich King

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is World of Warcraft’s second expansion, released 11/13/08, nearly four years after the original release of WoW. I’ve played WoW pretty extensively throughout it’s lifespan, and especially the last month; enough hours that I am certainly equipped to write a real review of the expansion.

The first thing that really jumped out at WotLK’s release is, once more, Blizzard’s stunning eye for detail and polish that’s seen as you adventure through the frozen continent of Northrend. It is equatable to a work of art, whether it be the graphical design of the zones or the monsters inhabiting them, an actual, culminating storyline, or the musical score. The one blight on the music design, however, is the vrykul theme that plays in almost every zone and creates a disharmony with the rest of the score in that area.

3.0 saw the most brilliant addition to World of Warcraft, the achievement system. In a game where you choose to set your own goals and the challenges are what you make them to be, this system truly shines. There are myriad achievements for every kind of gamer, and to some players, they are pretty much like crack.

What was probably the most anticipated addition to WoW in Wrath was the new Death Knight class. This is the class I wanted to make when I first started playing WoW, so personally I was thrilled to play one. And the death knight experience is truly groundbreaking, starting with the epic starting zone, which incorporates an ingenious new mechanic , phasing, that allows for each individual player to see their actions truly make an impact on the world (and this is all over Northrend, as well). The class itself has truly been a blast to play, although they are quite overpowered and are seeing many balance fixes in the 3.0.8 patch. I feel that after this patch, they should really fit the “epic but equal” moniker that Blizzard gave them.

Class balance, raiding, and PvP are where the expansion is marred. Burst damage is at the highest point it’s ever been in WoW’s history, which it not necessarily a bad thing, however, it creates a skewed environment especially in arenas where classes with extreme survivability are notably successful. You will find very few top teams that do not use a DK, rogue, mage, or paladin (all classes with immunity shields or ways to mitigate large amounts of damage frequently).

Another reason burst is so very high at the moment is due to the ease of the introductory raids in this expansion. Though optional, difficult challenges do exist (made possible through the achievement system) for dedicated guilds to show off, the fact remains that it takes little organization to run the current raid dungeons, as a result, a large amount of people competing in arena and/or battlegrounds are bedecked in the best damage gear currently in the game, whereas there is a paucity of resilience this early in the expansion to counter the burst. Blizzard has stated Ulduar (the next raid dungeon, due in 3.1) will be a more difficult challenge, but still designed around the mantra of optional challenges for greater rewards. This along with more prevalent resilience and balance changes down the pipeline should bring everything closer to perfection.

The expansion also saw the release of a new battleground, Strand of the Ancients, and world pvp locale, Lake Wintergrasp. Strand is a map with horde and alliance alternating sieging and defending a keep, with a heavy focus on vehicular combat. I like this idea, and, it’s implemented very well, except for the glaring imbalance of having alliance always starting on offense. Lake Wintergrasp is pretty much the same thing as Strand, but with a lot more people. Unfortunately, Blizzard severly underesimated how many people, and as a result, it is in it’s current iteration one of the biggest design failures in WoW’s history. If you are on a high population server (like me), expect to never truly be able to pvp here unless you play on offhours. The lag from people duking it out here is so bad that it hampers the rest of the server, and at peak hours, often runs the risk of a server crash.

All in all, Wrath’s a good expansion, and I am really looking forward to see how the rest of it plays out. There are problems with it, as aforementioned, but as a whole, it has really revitalized my interest in WoW.

Kry Reviews: Crysis

The Crysis series is probably one of the more well known and popular FPS series currently on the market. I will be reviewing both Crysis(released 2007) and Crysis: Warhead(2008) in this review.

Crysis is most notorious for its graphics. It has some of the best visuals ever rendered in a video game, but to see them you have to have one of the best computers available. Even with a 512 mb video card I still suffered framerate lag on medium! But the graphics are everything they are said to be. They are so well done that you can easily be completely immersed in the lush environments, especially when the jungle gets frozen over by aliens. That truly dropped my jaw, especially Warhead with the frozen tidal waves. But, I digress; I feel the graphics should have been optimized to better fit a more standard computer, and for me, Warhead for some reason gave me worse graphical returns than Crysis. Not to mention the dumb naming conventions on graphical settings.

So, onto the gameplay... Crysis’s take on the fps genre has been one of the most fun and action packed experiences I’ve had gaming. Most of the battles, be they versus human or alien, are intense. I loved being able to go invisible, sneak around tanks, and dodge individuals. But, using the suit powers drains your defenses. So, you have to use the powers conservatively. I really laud the suit system in Crysis. Also, you are able to customize your weapons to a reasonable degree, and the power levels are really quite balanced between guns, so you’re not using the same one constantly throughout the game.

The AI is mostly good, although it has a couple problems. It could be easily exploited to kill enemies near gun embankments (killing one makes another guy run up to it, boom headshot), and on the other side, when you’re spotted, the enemies have ridiculous laser vision and cut you to pieces while you’re hiding behind a bush a mile away.

Crysis’ presentation is top notch and well polished. The music is utilized excellently to progress the story and highlight dangerous and epic scenes. Both games also employ cutscenes to further the plot. I enjoyed them in Crysis because they weren’t obtrusive; Warhead had a bit too much emphasis on them, I felt jipped when I watched the main villain die in one instead of blasting him to pieces myself.

Concluding, I found Crysis and Warhead both to be excellent games. I’m going to note here however, that I have not played multiplayer on either one, not only because of how graphically intensive it is, but also because I feel the power of the nanosuit would be too frustrating to deal with in multiplayer. Perhaps I’m wrong here, who knows. Either way, the single player on both games is worth it alone.

Kry Retro-Reviews: Bioshock

Bioshock was released August, 2007 to almost universal acclaim, winning several “Game of the Year” awards. I played through the game and enjoyed it then, but I really didn’t feel it was the end-all, be-all. And what with sequels and a movie planned, as well as a recent PS3 release, I feel it’s reasonably relevant enough to mention in a quick retro review.

First off, Bioshock is amazing simply for its story, setting, and atmosphere. Truly one of the most amazing and imaginative settings I have seen ever. It is worth buying just to explore the underwater city of Rapture and to see the story unfold. I loved progressing through the city and gazing out into the murky depths outside. It is truly that immersive.

Bioshock also has an innovative system for upgrading your character (mutating yourself and gaining ‘magic’ spells). Unfortunately that system does not have much depth. Only a few upgrades are actually worth taking and others are downright useless. Along with the lack of depth are the enemies in the game themselves. They are very homogenous and do not change throughout the game besides gaining more health and damage. I was really disappointed here. The whole city goes nuts for Adam and you’re picking up magical mutating spells from vending machines, yet only the last boss has the same arsenal you’ve got. And then there are the Little Sisters. Either killing them or saving them, the game still plays the same way, except you get an ending where you are either evil or good. That is pretty much the only difference gameplay wise.

Though Bioshock was touted by some as the greatest game of 2007 and a benchmark of gaming prowess, I simply think it was a good game with a very engrossing setting. Bioshock was also very good at giving the player the illusion of choice. There are myriad options in this game, but few useful ones; and it is something most people do not realize until they are finished. Either way, I’m certainly interested in seeing the next game of the series (Sea of Dreams, I believe it will be called).

Kry Retro-Reviews: Smash Bros Brawl

Super Smash Brothers Brawl was the long awaited and anticipated successor to Super Smash Brothers Melee. However, it was met with a fairly lukewarm reception once the initial hype died down. This is because, despite its many improvements over Melee, Brawl makes some very egregious mistakes. Brawl is the actualization of the phrase “Two steps forward, one step back”.

I am going to just glaze over the single player additions to Brawl because I play only for the multiplayer, and most of it is extraneous fluff to a player like me. Also, the online play is a joke. Epic fail there.

The best thing Brawl did (for me) was fixing wavedashing and other similar exploits that existed in melee. Wavedashing created an artificial, steep learning curve and the top tier of play was defined by it. A few other similar exploits have been toned down, however as a result the game is defined now by the ability to throw ranged attacks ad nauseam. I would have really liked to see more characters have cooldowns on their projectiles. Otherwise the gameplay is still the same thing I’ve loved since the N64 version.

New life was breathed into the game with many additions to the cast. And, along with those, many of the weaker characters in Brawl were given buffs or new abilities. But only a few scant months, and some characters are borderline broken and others relatively weak in comparison. However, the weakest characters stand on their own much better in casual play than in Melee, so props there.

Brawl really feels to me that it could have used more play testing. I understand that balancing some 35 characters is a nightmare, but there are just combos that shouldn’t exist. For example, King Dedede has a chain grab, which can easily infinite bigger characters, and is generally just a cheap, lame technique. Also, Sheik can forward-tilt juggle to 50-60%. A lot of characters will glitch out when holding ‘A’, repeating an infinite weak attack.

Another thing I didn’t enjoy in the transition was the trivialization of recovery and nullifying of edge guarding. Several things have been changed to ruin this: Many of the new characters have crazy recoveries, as well as older characters getting stronger recoveries, the wonky physics engine almost always sends people up and away, making it almost possible to just float back on to the stage, and finally, most characters will ‘snap’ on to a ledge the second they’re in range, instead of being vulnerable.

Brawl’s worst addition is the prevalence of randomness. I am talking about tripping in particular. What a stupid, terrible idea to have a chance to just trip on your ass while fighting. Also, jumping off people’s heads ends up screwing people over on recovery by accident and luck, not skill. And then there are all the new stages, full of random damage. Not only that but the damage is ramped up and has serious knockback and killing potential on some stages. My group of smashers plays with about 6 or 7 stages on and that’s it.

All in all, I still and will always love the Smash Bros series, and none of these flaws are glaring enough to ruin it for me. Eagerly awaiting Super Smash Brothers Brouhaha in 2012!