Just like with Virtua Tennis 4, I bought this from greenmangaming.com when it was on sale a few weeks ago. I knew it got somewhat mixed reviews, but for €6 or something I figured it was worth trying out myself.
Well, I finished the game yesterday, with a total of 10 hours of play time. Most of it was fun, some of it was stupid, some of it was frustrating, but in the end I would say it was worth my money - and time.
The game is very much the Japanese take on games like Gears of War and Mass Effect, in the sense that it's a squad-based third person shooter in a sci-fi setting. The gimmick here (because every game needs a gimmick right?) is the consequence system (basically a team mate trust system), and also the voice commands. Both, unfortunately, are flawed.
The trust system is a good idea in theory, but its implementation is rather crappy. One reoccurring problem I had was accidentally shooting a teammate in the back and thus losing trust as you might expect. Why did I shoot them in the back? Because the AI was so incredibly stupid to run into my line of fire - while I was shooting.
It's not just that though, sometimes, mostly after an action scene, a teammate will start talking to you and you have to respond to what they say. While you have some options, most of the time just saying "yes" or "okay" will increase trust. So you start wondering what the point of these scenes is exactly.
Which brings me to the voice commands - I can honestly say I turned off that option after half an hour or so. It works, kind of, but since I was using my laptop mic it worked too much, and picked up sounds that weren't made by me, and made it's own interpretation of it. Which annoyed my teammates. So yeah, I chose the simpler option where you just choose commands and dialogue options with the press of a button.
Might as well complain a bit more - it has the typical Japanese stereotyping, so one of your squadmates is a big, smack-talking black guy. And the tendency to give stupid, "unique" names to things is also there. "Hollow children", really? They're just androids, you know.
The main character - what was his name again? - is just as replaceable as any other main character in most action games. The game's difficulty is also a bit off, it has some frustrating boss fights, especially in the middle of the game, but towards the end it becomes a cakewalk. Personally, I hated chapter 4, the structure was awful and I had the most frustrating moments in it (but then I absolutely loved chapter 5, so that balances it out I guess).
Lastly, sometimes the cutscenes are longer than the gameplay sections - I can get very annoyed at this as I want to play a game and not watch it.
As for the good things: shooting up robots feels great, taking them apart piece by piece is visually very satisfying. Where you shoot them has an impact as well: shoot their legs off and they'll come crawling to you, while still firing. Shoot their gun arm off, and they'll pick up the gun and start shooting with the other arm. Shoot their head off, and they'll malfunction and shoot the other robots. It's a fun system really.
The boss battles are a bit of a mixed bag, and most of them basically come down to "shoot the glowing bits!", but some of them are quite satisfying.
The story then, only really starts getting interesting in the last two chapters. For the most part it's not exactly subtle, and sci-fi fans have surely come across this kind of story before (see: Star Trek The Next Generation: is Data a person or a thing?) They don't handle it too badly though, and I thought the ending was fairly satisfying. There are multiple endings based on the consequence system, and mine was a happy ending for most characters, but one guy died. How are they going to explain that death in the sequel, hmm? :)
Well, there probably won't be any sequel since the game didn't sell enough and got only average reviews, but I would be interested in one. As long as it has more robot shooting, less cutscenes, and better team AI.
Anyway, while I listed plenty of reasons why it's not a great game in my opinion, I had fun with it. I won't recommend the game to everyone, but if the concept of shooting hundreds of robots to little pieces appeals to you, and you can overlook some of the flaws I mentioned, you'll enjoy this. If I used a score system to review games, this would be a 7.5/10. But I don't, so ignore that.
To conclude, a few pics I took:
Commander Shepard?
It's the Cole Train, baby!!!
Very slick shop front.
Big robot.
Even bigger robot.
No comments:
Post a Comment