edmondhonda304

The truth is good FPS games were not exactly plentiful on PS2, something that certainly helped this great game stand out even more. The first mission, D-Day landing à la Save Private Ryan, is totally misleading because 15 out of a total of 19 missions are you alone against the German army, always conveniently justified by a briefing that suggests an “undercover assignment”. Briefing which I heeded and stupidly believed, so there was I, always trying a first stealth approach on every mission which failed miserably with the first enemy I shot. The game simply isn’t designed to be played that way, it is a shooter. It’s as absurd thinking you can beat N64’s Goldeneye never being spotted by the enemy. Level design is great but (and?) totally linear. Lots of door that “won’t open” here. I have no problem with it, it’s 2020 and I’m already tired of huge open world experiences that are 70% padding (delivery boy, crafting, collectibles, hunting, fishing, hiking). Shooting the weapons is great, you really feel the “weight” thanks to the quality of the sound effects and the enemy animations when hit. Plus the soundtrack by Michael Giacchino is simply outstanding. On PC shooters we were used to save our game anytime. Not here, this is hardcore. If you die on a mission, you start from the beginning of it. And some of them take more than half an hour to complete. Imagine my face when I died at the hands of the last pack of Germans. Worth mentioning here I did this recent second playthrough on Hard and obtaining all the gold medals, you can progress faster otherwise. The game is tough from 7th mission on, but completable. I remembered it harder though. When I played it for the first time back in 2003, I recall resorting to lowering difficulty to “Normal” at “The Golden Lion” and got sick of the game when I got stuck at “Arnhem Knights”. If you like old school first person shooters (level-structured, medkits as the only way of healing), you can't skip this one.

I'm reviewing here Icewind Dale (IWD), it's expansion Heart of Winter (HoW), and the expansion of the expansion, Trials of Luremaster (ToLM) in one blow. The original one, not Beamdog's Enhanced Edition. Icewind Dale shares the same Black Isle's Infinity Engine that powers other great DnD RPGs such as Planescape Torment (PST) or Baldur's Gate (BG) saga. The combat system is just like Baldur's Gate. It involves six-second rounds concealed behind an appearance of real time combat with the option to pause combat whenever you need (and you'll need it) and jargon terms like THACO, AC, save roll and so on. Sadly, the game in lacks where it counts. In spite of visual and combat similarities, this beast is much different to BG than I first thought. Gone are the interesting companions with backstories and desires that join your party along the way. Here you start your adventure with six silent and functional playable characters that answer swiftly to your clicks and whose attributes and skills you can customize from the ground up. The story is relatively simple and not told in an interesting way. NPCs are mostly the classic saint-or-evil stereotypes you find on hundred of video games. The first two big dungeons do a disservice to the game, they are 100% barren and essentially act as padding between you and the corresponding boss. Fortunately, after that you start to find some engaging locations, NPCs and quests. The game gets a bit of traction and you finally start to care about this universe and the people that live in it. Whereas BG was a semi-open world game where you could explore and discover its different areas in any order (with the usual story related restrictions), Icewind Dale takes a totally linear approach. You can't travel to a location if it isn't on your map, and it won't be on your map until you are assigned the primary quest that takes place there, which won't happen until you solve the primary quest you are currently involved in. You'll find and solve all the side quests as you follow this straight line that is IWD, though there are a couple whose resolution require some on purpose backtracking. Icewind Dale focuses on dungeon crawling and combat but it does not excel in it. For example, on the first floor of certain dungeon you'll be fighting reptile people, on the next one trolls, once you go downstairs again, undead. I would probably equally complain if enemies were always of the same type, but that's because the key here is that certain dungeons are just too long for the sake of it. Nothing really interesting happens as you descend from one floor to the next, just a succession of forgettable mob slaughters until you reach the final boss which offers some decent opposition, whereas I still recall lots of memorable encounters from BG Saga. On the other hand the expansions are brief but better focused. The backstories and NPCs you find there are engaging and the raw dungeon crawling is less jarring. Unfortunately Heart of Winter has one of the most underwhelming final bosses I have ever met in a video game, rivalling with the last one you fight in Blade: Edge of Darkness. Trials of Luremaster, accessible from the first area of Heart of Winter, consists of a dungeon were you have to kill monsters and solve some riddles à la BG1's Durlag's Tower. Not bad at all, and it has some captivating lore to reveal reading tomes, scrolls and having conversations with NPCs. I now realise I have mentioned "Baldur's Gate" in six of the seven paragraphs that make this review up. There is no better indicator to what I would rather have been doing while playing this game.

The idea of a prodecurally generated universe with millions of planets to explore is tempting, but the game is not accompanied by an alluring gameplay. Before I left the first planet I was already bored of the repetitive mechanics. Seen a planet, seen the rest, because other than color or orography, in all of them you will find the same plain and static intelligent alien species that tell you something irrelevant and give you some blueprints to build an enhancement for your equipment, you will learn alien languages from cylindrical monoliths, scan animals, harvest resources to make the aforementioned enhancements or to feed your suit and ship energy needs. No motivation via an engaging story or interesting side quests, nothing, just follow the mysterious signal, go to the center of the galaxy.

We are facing another point-and-click graphic adventure which follows the Monkey Island trail here. Its difficulty is based on puzzles that consist on a stuffed inventory, item combination and traversing the dialog tree till exhaustion. The good old formula that ruled the genre before it was replaced by narrative driven press-A-precisely-when-i-tell-you mechanics Tell Tale has exploited to the point the company has fallen flat directly inside its grave. At any rate, that doesn't mean Pendulo Studios has resisted the temptation to slide one combinatorial (in appearance) puzzle midway into the game. One I somehow managed to solve by trial and error, and my character kindly explained me the logic I apparently had just applied. Another puzzle I recall as extremely unfair involved a surreal item combination I once again solved by entering the use-anything-on-anything mode. This last one takes place within a character's dream, which makes getting stuck on it simply priceless. Be that as it may, with the exception of these two examples, puzzle design is top-notch. Regretfully, the writing in this game leaves a lot to be desired. The game never takes itself seriously, which isn't a bad thing per se because it grants designers more freedom in the puzzle department. Unfortunately, this light hearted stance permeates the plot conferring it the complexity of a SpongeBob SquarePants chapter. You never feel any kind of relevancy to your actions: never does the game achieve to convey what is so evil about the force you are fighting. In addition, characters are quite one-dimensional, "functional" is the nicest adjective I can say about them. The humor in this game is the childish one expects from a Monkey Island applicant, based on wacky situations. Plus, in this game, with the constant recall to the player of certain traits of our two protagonists: he is a womanizer, sports-loving freak that loves to smash things with his bat, she is simply crazy. While you play this game, laughing is totally ruled out, you mouth will adopt the kind of crooked grin you get while watching one of those Nordic/Central European straight-to-tv romantic comedies. On the other hand, the game is a technically nice, Pendulo Studios is well-known for the quality of its 2D artists and it doesn't disappoint as usual, plus the spanish dubbing is great (I played the Spanish version, which is called Hollywood Monsters 2 BTW). Unfortunately, if we want to play a classic point-and-click adventure, since they don't get released anymore we are virtually dependent on a finite backlog. If you already played the big ones (Gabriel Knight saga, LucasArts ones, Discworld Noir, Grim Fandango...), you can't get too discriminating. The Next Big Thing has a great gameplay but weak writing. If you are here for the puzzles, you will enjoy the ride.

A worthy sequel, prequel to be precise, to the great Deus Ex. Sadly, much more guided than the original, more "consoley" so to speak: with the inclusion of press O for a spectacular takedown, with the developers almost forcing you to play using stealth and hacking, losing a chance to win large amounts of XP if you don't, and with the inclusion of a conspicuous mini-map always telling you the direction you should be heading. At any rate, this is a great resurrection of the saga, an honest game from other era. A game that gives you the freedom to choose your play style but at the same time has a focused and coherent gameplay that doesn't rely on incoherent ad hoc gimmicks.

Puzzles in this game are rather logic/easy. Limited scenarios (a train, a ship) plus scarce interaction elements (characters, scene items/inventory items) lead to straightforward solutions to any puzzle the game throws at you. To make matters worse, The Raven uses a QoL system quite exceptional in the graphic adventure genre that consist of removing from interaction any "useless" or "padding" item in the scene you already examined. At first it seems a great improvement, but it ends up hindering playability because it greatly reduces the set of possible actions, rendering the classic try-anything-on-anything strategy a viable one. Character quality is a mix bag. Some of them are well written, others, whose role end up gaining weight as the story progresses, are dull and uninteresting. This game tells a classic whodunit story with a surprising but unsatisfying ending. I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, I will just say that the mystery is solved in a hurry, the final events feel improbable and the final situation of certain characters raises so many unanswered questions, the most obvious being: How on earth did they escape the crime scene? One does not have the spare time to replay the whole game, but I am pretty sure that if I did I would find some big fat plot holes in the script.