razzzor

Are all the critics on a rush of putting anything intellectual and different as game of the year? I just got done playing Journey (late on the PC) and was just as puzzled as to how that was game of the year.This is standard point-and-click adventure gaming, absolutely nothing ground-breaking apart from just good writing. If you like that sort of thing and love reading books of that style, you'll enjoy it I suppose. The only difference is it's much longer than your standard adventure game, more depth in the skills and the dialogue just goes on and on. Half a million lines they say? Do I really want to read all that? Much of it is just pointless dribble. You have all these inside voices that speak, but it's not really that interesting. The most interesting dialogue in the whole game was the humour from the two kids near the start and the ringing the police station. The art/design is all beautiful. But it's still stuck in an overhead isometric camera view. For sure if they had a AAA budget they would do a third-person mouse look, that's far more immersive. Can you imagine watching a movie, or even a 20 hour TV series, where its just this one view above their heads? It would be laughed at. But somehow, 40 years since the start of the isometric point and click, we're still stuck on this low budget camera angle. You never see the characters faces. Even in the small picture frame you get of the characters, which often barely resemble the model on-screen, it's just a static picture. The main character never even has a voice, and your sidekick is deadpan in everything he says. This is lacking in any expression or emotion. When you only have the budget to do a single isometic angle, this simply can't be a 9+/10. You'll also have to fight through sluggish movement, constantly bumping into invisible walls absolutely everywhere trying to work out the small path to walk. I even had a few game ending bugs that I had to reload from. The overall gameplay revolves around slowly walking back and forth for hours clicking things until something happens in the game, because it's often unclear what you're supposed to do so you just have to click everything, exhaust every dialogue tree, until one of the many missions you have resolves something so you can continue. You'll get a dialogue dead-end where you don't have the skills or research necessary to continue, so you do random tasks to unlock it, or reload the game over and over until you pass the check my chance. I also didn't load a lot into the skills because it's so unclear what's really going to help, as well as how many skill points you have. So I just left it until the end game to when I thought I would need them, but I still didn't. I'd probably only used 5 skills points throughout the game. The skill sets and requiring certain skills, items and tasks to be completed to unlock dialogue is still a nice idea overall and I'm not sure how you could tweak it to make it better. But a 9/10, nope. What was good about most of the game was the story, which had me continuing to play it to see how in unravelled. But in the end, without spoilers, the conclusion really had absolutely nothing to do with anything up till that point and just felt like the writer didn't have any idea how to finish it so just threw something in there to wrap things up. A major disappointment. This is a nice simple point and click adventure, but it goes on for far too long. Over 20 hours I spent on it and was ready for it to be over before then. The highlights for me are just seeing a nice new area of the map. It's not the mountains of dialogue, the story that was never properly concluded, or the very basic puzzle solving. But I can see much better looking design in a full 3D game and countless adventure games already look this beautiful. I'd give it a 7/10. I think the critics have just forgotten what normal adventure games are like and got all hung up on intellectual dialogue and skill trees.

As an 8-10 hour TV mini-series on Batman with an adult story, this is really good. Instead of most of the Batman animated series' and movies that are at times just too childish. It's a new take, keeps some mystery behind the antagonist and in the end was a good watch. But as a video game this is nothing more than a 1/10. You can barely call this a video game. Even walking-sims have more interaction. This is 95% watching the story play out, with the odd selection of what you want to say but often ends up not even accurately being what you selected (standard in Telltale games). Then you have the linking of clickable objects while Batman/Bruce rambles on with his clues, and basic as hell QTE's during fight sequences. Often I just let things play out, I couldn't even be bothered, while I scrolled my phone. I didn't intend to sit through an interactive movie, I want to play a game. For this reason I wasn't really saddened when Telltale closed down because all their games are exactly like this. They needed a wakeup call, it's just not good enough putting such little effort into a video game when you're given such awesome franchises. Even the last Arkham game had much better detective mini-games, and that's a third-person hack and slash. This is just a sit back and watch interactive story with the laziest attempt at interaction ever made in a video game. But, they do always tell great stories. I just hope Telltale v2 is able to put some more fun into their future games.

Do Spider listen to the fans on how to improve their games? The exact same problems with Mars are also in The Technomancer. The biggest issue; backtracking. Backtracking over the same rooms with the same exact enemies in the same positions. Sometimes you'll leave the room, a few minutes later return and the enemies are all back! Later in the game you're still going back to the same goddamn hub you basically started the game in, with the same but upgraded enemies, but many navigation points closed off so you spend a substantial amount of time just trying to navigate the effing layout with the minimap constantly on your screen. Yes, there are no way points. The amount of time I spent lost in the poor maze-like design of The Underworld and The Exchange! This was the same problem in Mars, backtracking. It's a poor mans way to extend a game, in this case probably almost 50% of the game is just from backtracking and replaying the same enemies. Looking over the old screenshots of Mars to refresh my memory, I'm seeing the same graphics, same art style, same enemies and special abilities. Is this a bit of a lazy sequel at re-using all the same assets. The combat can be hard at times. I heard the beginning is especially hard, but it never really let up for me even when doing most of the side quests to level up appropriately. The problem with combat is you can get overwhelmed quickly so it's a repetitive process of hit-hit-dodge-hit-hit-dodge, working on one enemy at a time. The powers you get become pretty useless in tougher fights because they're too slow. But later on the combat becomes a frustrating display of slowdown with every second hit on an enemy. You have to constantly come in and out of slow motion, and what for? I assume maybe it's something to do with going for a critical hit. Overall the upgrades don't give much, crafting doesn't give much, the items you get throughout the game barely improve. I guess this is so Spider didn't have to level up enemies too much, so you go back to the start area and they're still not much easier despite 10 hours of levelling and item collecting. In fact I think the game may only get easier as you perfect your own combat skills at dealing with certain enemies (dodging at the right time etc). That being said the pros are Although there aren't a huge amount of areas (probably similar to a 8 hour Call of Duty game) they do like good. Not amazing but good enough. Side quests aren't always just fetch quests, they are more interesting, sometimes you need to make decisions. Albeit no new areas to go though Despite being difficult and repetitive, combat does have it's good points. I like that the dodge is far more responsive than Dark Souls. You can literally be in the middle of slash and can dodge out of it mid-air. Makes it feel smooth and it is always quite action packed. The story is long and interesting enough, and choices during quests do make a difference later on. I see Spiders' next game, GreedFall at least changes the setting to fantasy, but if they can fix the backtracking that would improve their games a lot, even if they're 1/3 shorter, that's fine because I don't need to fight the same enemies in the same room ten times over.