Tag Archives: reviews

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Left 4 Borderlands: Far Cry Edition (AKA Dead Island)

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So as you may recall I’ve written about Dead Island before, but now that it’s out and I’ve had the chance to spend some time with it, I thought I’d give some of my opinions on it.

The very abbreviated version is: Dead Island is one of the best bad games I’ve ever played.

Let me elaborate. It’s a shoddy piece of programming. It slows down at times for no discernible reason; sometimes you’ve got a bunch of zombies and it goes smoothly, sometimes there’s two and it stutters horrifically. There’s noticeable pop up. Textures can vary wildly in quality. The controls were very obviously designed for the console, to a degree that kind of makes me long for Oblivion, because this is far worse and it gets very tedious very quickly.

There are some poor design choices as well. Everything respawns being the main one. Everything – zombies, vehicles, weapons, items, little stacks of cash tucked away inside people’s backpacks and stuff (More on money later). It doesn’t make sense. You end up just learning the game, and once you’ve been through someplace once there are no more surprises. Hardly making the best use of an open world. It also harms the immersion, both in the obvious ways (“Didn’t I kill this guy the last four times I went this way?”) and the slightly less so (People desperate for food/water/booze in a world where everything respawns within minutes).

Remember the previous DI post, where I talked about losing quest hubs and stuff? Yeah, well, there are safe zones in this game. Some infected (Running zombies, just like L4D) managed to get in because there’s a very conveniently placed rock for you to use, and apparently they can do. For a moment I thought “Oh shit here we go!” but they just charged directly at me, got their heads smashed, and elicited no response from the surrounding NPC survivors.

Pretty much my face when that occurred.

In fact, so far at least, it seems that there is no interaction between the living and dead aside from yourself and some scripted encounters. There are other survivors around the island, but unless you get an escort quest or something, they’re not going to be getting themselves bitten or cracking any heads. Worse, if someone isn’t an escortee or the like, you can’t give them a slap/hug/whatever and say “Yeah I know you had to do some bad shit, but we gotta get to safety, come with me.” They just sit there lamenting whatever they had to do to survive over and over.

You also have to pay cash money for stuff. I mean, I can sort of understand why you’d still care about money to some extent – it suggests there will be a normal world tomorrow to spend it in. But yeah, really having a hard time buying that people would hold back on helping you out when their lives are so acutely on the line. Nevermind the workbenches – you pay to repair and upgrade items, but there’s nobody there to pay! Apparently some ethereal miser demands payment in exchange for sticking your weapons back together.

Oh but cracking heads. Forget everything I’ve just said about the game, because really, what it’s about is cracking heads. And this, at least, it does well. Smacking a zombie feels great, visceral. Knocking one aside with a metal pipe is satisfying as hell. Cracking or entirely removing limbs? Yep, you can do that, and they’ll flail the jelly-like appendage at you without much effect. And this is before you start playing silly buggers and modifying the game files.

The game is pretty atmospheric, it does a great job of juxtaposing a tropical paradise with living hell. When you’re walking around and you hear a zombie breathing or roaring or whatever, it’s unsettling, even if you’ve killed a hundred of them already and one more won’t be able sort of problem. The evidence of what’s going on is grim and pretty omnipresent; one minute it’s a picturesque tropical scene, the next you come across someone whose skin appears to have all been eaten.

There are also a nice wide variety of weapons, and what is more, the weapons degrade and break at a pretty believable speed for once! The human skull is one of the toughest structures nature has devised, so you’re not going to be able to break thousands of them before you need to exchange your paddle for something better. Similarly, this is one of the best implementations of stamina I’ve seen in a game. You’ve got a lot of it and it recharges fairly fast so you can sprint a long way, but if you go around swinging madly you’ll run out faster than you expect, and then you’ll be in trouble. It works excellently in doing what it is meant to do: Making you fight with an eye on your tactics.

It should be noted I’ve not played a terrific amount of the game yet, and I’ve also not played multiplayer. I’m confident that messing around with some friends would make the game much better. It’s not a ‘good’ game, so I can’t in good conscience say to everyone “go out and buy it now”, but it is a fun game and once the price comes down a bit, if you see it when there’s a bit of a slow spell of other releases, or if you just want to crack a whole lot of heads and collecting way too many weapons that you then have to sell ONE AT A TIME with a confirmation message for EACH AND EVERY ONE, then yeah, Dead Island is a sound purchasing decision.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

The trouble with reviews

Right then, now that we’ve warmed up let’s launch straight into the pretentious overestimation of my own abilities and talk about videogame reviews and analyses, shall we?

There’s plenty to say about the business of reviews, but something I’ve been thinking about lately is how shallow they are. I don’t mean this in the most critical sense per se, but rather that they are oriented towards only the typical gameplay issues, graphics, that sort of thing. Rarely do they delve into the more complex things such as tracing a lineage of a genre and understanding the influences of things, or really picking apart what a game is saying, except in the examples where it cannot be avoided.

This is not difficult to understand. At the cynical end, it’s because reviews are about getting sales for the reviewing body (Or in this day and age, online advertising revenue) and keeping publishers happy. I think this is a factor but it does seem rather overstated. At the more generous end of the scale, it’s because reviewers are simply talking about whether a game is worth your money and time, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and pursuing this concept means that criticism isn’t fair because different kinds of analyses are not within the reviewer’s mandate.

Are these things contradictory, though? Can you provide a review of a game as fun and at the same time consider its place within gaming, and impartially assess what the game is doing in a more abstract sense? After all, if we are thinking about games as a form of creative expression beyond simple entertainment, or at least with the potential to be, surely we need to investigate the bad and the mediocre with as much depth and critical thought as the greats? For my own part I don’t think these are contradictory goals. I do however think they diverge somewhat, and to expect a review to take both angles is to ask a reviewer to cover a very broad subject. In terms of games themselves, not everything has to try to be Casablanca. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a dumb shooter which exists solely for ridiculous fun; despite this, there are plenty of efforts at making the things more emotionally engaging, more narrative-oriented, &c. And some games are starting to make use of their unique possibilities to make points that cannot be made in other mediums (BioShock springs to mind here).

Games also present a relatively unique problem for this kind of thought. Unlike other mediums, which see very occasional shifts in their presentation and, with the exception of sound for movies, don’t generally endure particularly revolutionary advancements, gaming (like computing as a whole) is part of a very rapidly advancing field in purely technical terms. We’ve all seen it on consoles; games towards the end of the console’s life are much more impressive than those at the beginning. But then the next generation comes along and we’re so worked up (understandably so) over what the new tech can do that we don’t play such close attention to other factors. The new tech opens up new possibilities, of course. You simply couldn’t do Dead Rising on a pre-current tech and have it do the concept justice. I do suspect that it serves as a distraction both on the part of designers and on the part of those who think about games.

So there seems to be a dearth of the more analytical review, or perhaps essay, outside of a few select places. What I’m thinking of is really more an analysis of what a given game or series or genre is, how it has evolved, where it got its ideas from, that sort of thing. On there narrative side of things there are obvious parallels to other mediums; you can find more than a few things discussing what The Road means and symbolizes and so on. And games have plenty of scope for things like that; consider how much mileage you’d get out of thinking about the messages of the Metal Gear Solid series. But what is there about the clever use of things like game mechanics, outside of simply noting that there is a clever use of game mechanics?

I should say, I know there are people out there talking about that stuff, and I don’t want to diminish what they are saying by acting like it doesn’t exist. It absolutely does and is very much worth finding and reading. Nonetheless it seems to be quite plain that there is a lack of a coherent body of thought on game criticism, in comparison to the thoughts on film or literature. And I think that ultimately, this harms the whole medium. As entertainment, games have things figured out pretty well. As vessels for communication, they’re still falling rather short. Games are expensive to make, especially compared to a lone alcoholic takking out The Old Man and the Sea on a typewriter. It is understandable and forgivable that many are made with profit uppermost in mind. Nonetheless many of us in the gaming sphere are all too ready to dismiss things as “just games” – which they might be in some contexts, but it makes it hard for them to develop into anything more if we don’t credit them as something more and start thinking about how to evolve them.

Hopefully as time passes this will change. The best way to ensure change is, of course, to bring it about.