The Spec Ops franchise has been going on for a number of years; I remember playing one of the games on the PS1, though it wasn’t something that particularly interested me. Po-faced military games full of hoorah US soldiers wasn’t really my cup of tea. Still, somehow this game found its way onto my radar and I was lured in by the promise of a good story and not your typical American war game.
Welcome to Dubai.
Well, first and foremost, Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person cover shooter, not unlike many I’ve played before, be they over-the-top sci-fi shooters like Gears of War or plucky adventures like Uncharted. This is not as good as those on a mechanical level; it’s less polished, the shooting and cover system is a little on the clumsy side, and the main difficulty is just in seeing where you’re being shot from since the enemies are usually hard to distinguish from the sand-strewn brown and grey backgrounds. That said, it’s not bad. A serviceable, generally decent play experience.
In the single-player mode, you are accompanied by two computer-controlled characters, who you can direct to help you with basic commands.
What makes it different is that it attempts to tell a more interesting story that focuses on the characters, the effects of war and the consequences of your choices. There are a few points in the game where you can make a decision that changes the outcome, there are some pretty good twists and even multiple endings. Set in Dubai during a catastrophic sandstorm, a special forces unit is sent in for a rescue and reconnaissance mission that goes wrong. Gradually the characters start to question their mission and the player starts to question reality. I did struggle to follow the plot at certain points (as I often do when too many character names being shouted at me while I’m trying to focus on shooting things), but on the whole, the story keeps things interesting, and the performances (including Uncharted‘s own Nolan North as the lead character) are pretty good. It’s not a bad looker for 2012 either.
A pretty run-of-the-mill shooter, full of violence and death, but with something a little more interesting to say than you might first think. I’ve played better, but I’ve certainly played worse too.
Back in 2013, I played a little indie adventure game called To The Moon, by designer and writer Kan Gao. It was made using an archaic engine called the RPG Maker XP, which was designed to create ’16-bit’ style role-playing games for PC (like your classic Final Fantasies, etc.). However, To The Moon wasn’t an RPG, nor did it even have that much gameplay of any kind. It was an interactive drama/fiction that told a surprisingly emotional story about life, love and loss, through a science-fiction prisim.
Two doctors travels into the mind of a dying man to give him new memories and fulfill his final wish.
But that was nearly nine years ago and I’ve actually forgotten a lot of it. I had also forgotten just what a good storyteller and writer Kan Gao is. Once again, this sequel deals with some pretty weighty issues of regret, of love and loss, and memories, wrapped in a sci-fi concept that’s not unlike Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and runs non-sequentially like Memento. Clearly, cinema is a big influence, and it’s almost a shame that these stories are contained within creaky old game engines and cutesy little character sprites, and unlikely to find wider audiences. There’s beautiful music, nicely-written dialogue, some surprisingly good imagery (within the confines of a 16-bit style game world), and even the odd bit of genre-busting fun-poking at itself. You wouldn’t think to look at it, but if you get drawn into the story and the characters, it’s quite an emotional five hours or so.
You revisit key memories of the patient, Colin, piecing together the story of his life but not necessarily in the right order.
Although Finding Paradise is a self-contained story, it carries over some plot strands and characters from the previous game, and leaves some breadcrumbs for the next, so I would recommend giving To The Moon a play first (which, as far as I can recall, was a slightly better story). It’s also worth mentioning that it’s a pain to get these games running correctly on PC. I had to drop my monitor resolution and force it into 4:3 mode just to get the correct non-stretched aspect ratio. There’s also no controller support so you have to play with the keyboard, or you can use the mouse to interact like a traditional point-and-click adventure. Either way, it’s a bit of a faff, but these games are out (or soon to be released) for the Nintendo Switch, which is probably a better way to play them. I recommend them both!
Grow Home was released in 2015, and is a delightfully different platform adventure from Ubisoft Reflections. You play as a little Robot called B.U.D., who is sent down to a planet to make a ‘Star Plant’ grow up into the atmosphere. All the while, you can collect energy crystals to power yourself up, and gather flora and fauna samples for scanning into the teleport chambers as you make your way higher into the floating islands of the planet.
Attach buds to the green rocks to make the Star Plant grow.
The unique way this game plays is in how you control your little robot’s hands individually, using the analogue triggers on the controller to grip onto things, climb up surfaces and direct the growing buds of the plant. This is one of those games that relies heavily on its physics engine, a game that treads a fine line between control and chaos, between interactivity and frustation, much like another game where you control a creature’s limbs, Octodad. But here, chaos is not the point and B.U.D. is not supposed to be drunk or malfunctioning, so his inability to walk in a straight line and not fall off of cliffs is a bit incongruous (if not sometimes quite funny).
You can save yourself from freefall with a giant flower and, later, a leaf glider.
However, it is definitely fun in short amounts, and it’s got some of the best climbing mechanics I’ve used in a game – creating genuine fear from hanging half a mile in the air on a floating asteroid. Another clever feature is how the plant growth is player-controlled, so huge parts of the level are essentially designed by the player as you get higher and grow more of the shoots. When you reach orbit and look down at everything you’ve created, it’s quite a sight – really impressive stuff. This is a short game and it won’t take long to reach orbit and complete the mission, although there’s more to collect and discover beyond the key objective, so long as your hands aren’t tired from gripping those triggers.
Climbing underneath things can be treacherous but exciting.
Even if it’s a bit on the frustating/chaotic side, I’ve certainly never played anything else quite like it, and that’s worth a recommendation from me.
Super Mario Odyssey has a lot to live up to. It follows a lineage that began with Mario 64 and continued with Mario Sunshine and Mario Galaxy (all of which were re-released for the Switch recently). This is Nintendo’s mainline 3D Mario title, its flagship production to shift consoles and keep its mascot in the top spot. Let’s just say it has some big shoes to fill… or in this case, some big hats.
New Donk City was featured heavily in the promotional material but is just one of eighteen Kingdoms in the game.
Odyssey was released in 2017, so I’m a little late to the party, but good things come to those who wait and thankfully it’s pretty bloody great! Every Mario title has some interesting or inventive new mechanic and in Odyssey it’s ‘Cappy’, a hat that Mario can throw at enemies and some objects to ‘inhabit’ them and take on their abilities. From Goombas to dinosaurs, cutlery and statues, everything Mario can inhabit has some unique ability that plays into the design of the levels. This allows the levels to be quite open and large, while still offering specific challenges around them.
These checkpoint flags provide shortcuts around each Kingdom.
Mario is nimble and fun to control, the levels are beautifully designed, it’s full of imagination and variety, the environments are gorgeous and it’s the kind of game you can just sit and play and not realise the hours have flown by. You can leave each Kingdom once you’ve found enough Power Moons for your airship, or you can stick around and collect some more. And there are a lot to collect, that’s for sure.
Mario and Cappy’s airship, the Odyssey.
Some design modernisations have slipped in, such as the removal of the ‘lives’ system. Some will probably welcome this as it’s long been seen as an archaic throwback to Mario’s older games. Instead, when you die, you lose a few coins – which is a fair penalty because coins are now needed to buy things like hints, costumes and even Power Moons themselves.
There are 8-bit retro sections built directly into the levels.
This leads to my main criticism of the game: the amount of Power Moons seems ludicrous. There are (apparently) a grand total of 999, though you need significantly less than that to see the ending of the game. However, if you’re somewhat obsessive and want to get them all, this will mean doing the same or similar challenges multiple times in each Kingdom, repeating boss fights, or just finding the damn things lying around, buried in the ground or sold in shops. In previous games, there was something special about finding a Star, Shine or whatever. The Moons in Odyssey are just too numerous to feel special and it feels kind of cynical and cheap. A focus on quality over quantity would have done the game a world of good. My other criticism would be about the suitability of motion controls when playing in handheld mode, but they’re usually optional and therefore pretty minor.
The bosses are really good fun and well-animated.
Overall, then? Odyssey is better than Sunshine but not as good as Galaxy. A fine entry in the series nevertheless but I’m still waiting for a ‘Universe’ to knock my socks off. My final tally (at the point of giving up) was 533 moons and I got through the (final?) Darker Side level by the skin of my teeth. Fun times!
Sometimes it’s nice to play a short, uncomplicated game (especially if it’s one the Epic Games Store is giving away for free!), and having enjoyed the last ‘walking simulator‘ I played, this seemed like another hit.
The beaten track. Go off it.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a first-person detective, mystery/horror, walking-simulator, puzzle game… thing. It’s set in a reasonably open-world environment, a small American mining village and surrounding areas. As such, you need to go off the beaten track to find things, but the game doesn’t hold your hand and pretty much expects you to just look everywhere. It doesn’t do a particularly good job of directing you towards things you might be missing, and in fact I spent a lot of time looking for objects of interest. At one point, even after reading a walkthrough telling me exactly where to find something, I still couldn’t find it for ages! You can solve the mysteries in any order, so it’s often possible to jump ahead and miss stuff. That said, I think I completed all of the mysteries and got the full ending. Don’t expect any definitive answers from the game, though – it’s an ambiguous conclusion.
There’s an important item inside the church and another outside it. Could I find the latter? Could I hell!
Its storytelling is quite interesting, particularly in how it mixes the real with the imagined. There’s lots to reflect on and think about. Sometimes it’s a bit scary, but there’s no danger or enemies in the game (weeeeelllllll…. except for one section) so you just walk around solving puzzles by finding items and interacting with supernatural things… often in very strange ways. It looks absolutely beautiful, too. The landscapes are stunning, and the lighting, textures and foliage look superb. Apparently, some sort of photogrammetry was used to make it look so good, and for this ‘Redux’ edition, they re-built the game in Unreal Engine 4, which makes the lighting look nice and glowy. Thankfully, my PC could still run it reasonably well.
As a special detective, you have the ability to piece together memories or ghosts or something.
If you’ve got 4+ hours to spare and don’t mind a bit of semi-aimless wandering accompanied by a moody noir-ish horror vibe and some schlocky dialogue that makes you think, this game could tick the right boxes. I kind of enjoyed it overall, but I felt like I was forcing my way through it a few times. You can watch my entire playthrough below.
A few days ago, we held a private screening for the fifth episode of my ‘Fallen Star’ sci-fi show, and it went rather well – lots of laughs and good feedback.
Well, now it’s on YouTube so you can watch it at home! I will also be releasing bloopers and a VFX reel at some point and talking about the latter on here. For now, enjoy the episode…
Indie developer Playdead’s successor to LIMBO follows in a very similar vein to that monochrome puzzle/platformer. You play as a young boy in a strange place, but instead of this being the afterlife, it’s a rather more bleak reality, in which grown-ups and dogs are chasing you, people are being herded into trucks and then… well, I don’t want to spoil it. I had no idea what the game was about going into it and that’s the best way to experience it. It’s 3 – 4 hours of absolute magnificence, going from rural forests, through farms to factories and beyond. It’s haunting, evocative, moody, the soundtrack/soundscape is incredible. It’s genuinely the most strikingly beautiful game I think I’ve ever seen. Forget Unreal Engine, this is absolute art.
There are some stealth sections but they’re basic and just a matter of timing.
As in most puzzle-platformers, you generally walk from left to right on a 2D plane, but INSIDE uses 3D graphics to build its world and uses that extra depth to great effect, often using the background as the source of a pursuer or showing some important information or storytelling. Like LIMBO before it, the controls are very simple but very intuitive and tactile. You learn through play and experimentation, with no dialogue, cutscenes, tutorials, on-screen prompts or anything else to take you out of its world. The game doesn’t linger on any particular puzzle mechanic for long, it doesn’t drag an idea out to breaking point. It teaches you what you can do and then gradually changes things up. There is a little trial-and-error, learning through dying and repeating sections in the style of games like Another World, but these usually give you some warning and there’s no real punishment for getting killed.
So much of the story is told through the environment. These outskirts remind me of Half-Life 2. Bleak, unsettling and mysterious.
To say the game gets kinda weird at the end would be an understatement… but it’s so, so good. You really just have to play it without any preconception, preferably with the lights off and headphones on. Playdead have a style and formula that has me hooked, and I will definitely be checking out whatever they come up with next. INSIDE may just be the best game I have played this year.
Released in 2016, Firewatch is an independent first-person mystery/adventure game in which you play a part-time ranger in a fire lookout tower somewhere in the Wyoming wilderness. It’s an ‘open-world’ game and a ‘walking simulator’; your only company is a voice on the radio, and it’s through exploration and dialogue choices that the story plays out.
The Two Forks look-out tower – your home away from home.
The two lead characters, Henry and Delilah, only interact through the radio, and other than a few close encounters, there aren’t any other characters in the game. The voice performances are excellent and the characters are believable and likeable – flawed but human, and trying to do the right thing. How much information Henry discloses about his past life is up to you, and the responses from Delilah will change depending on what dialogue choices you make. Some actions (and even inaction) will also influence the story in small ways. It ultimately ends up in the same place but it’s nice to feel like you can change things a little.
You have to use a map and a compass to find your way around, at least until you get to know the landscape.
You can’t die or get hurt in Firewatch – that’s not the point of the game. However, you can explore, and find new items that open previously inaccessable routes through the wilderness – ropes to climb down steep slopes, a torch to explore a cave, an axe to make a bridge out of an old tree, and so forth. You spend a lot of time just walking and talking, while taking in the views, but the pacing has been expertly structured in a way to keep things interesting. Occasionally, it can even get a little tense or scary – but I don’t want to spoil any surprises.
There are some picturesque vistas.
Clocking in at around four hours, Firewatch doesn’t take too long to finish, but there’s a developer commentary mode available where you can hear about the process of making the game while you play through it again. I always enjoy these sorts of features and it’s something you only tend to get with smaller games.
I really enjoyed Firewatch and I would like to play more games of this type. If you want to watch a playthrough (without commentary), I recorded my entire run here:
No, I didn’t just skip 61 Doom games. Doom 64 was the first and only Doom game made for the Nintendo 64 console back in 1997. I had always assumed that this was simply an N64 port of Doom (much like the PlayStation, Saturn and other console ports), but it’s actually a brand new game, developed specifically for the console, and can be considered a sequel to Doom II.
Many of the enemies look like they’re made from plasticine.
Firstly, it looks very different. The garish colours and pixel art from the previous games are gone. Doom 64 is dark and moody, its enemies grotesque CGI rendered sprites, its lighting and sound effects dynamic and atmospheric, and the tone of the game is more of a horror or sci-fi horror that actually feels closer to Doom 3 (more on that later). There’s almost no music, either, just loads of eerie soundscapes.
Doom 64 uses coloured lighting to differentiate areas and create mood.
All of the enemies and weapons are brought back but updated, and the guns in particular now sound incredible – the chaingun feels like it’s trying to rip a hole in the universe and everything reverberates based on the type of room you’re in. My only complaint is that the reload animations are so poor they seem like they’re missing.
These big fellas make a lovely noise when you shoot them.
Doom 64 is a little bit easier, at least on the default difficulty setting, and most of my deaths came from boobytraps and pits, often quite unfairly. You can save anywhere and I strongly recommend it. Maybe it’s different on the higher difficulties, but you don’t get overwhelmed or surrounded quite so often, at least not until the final level, which is… just ridiculous.
I like the plasma gun.
Overall, this is another uncomplicated and satisfying shooter. Depsite some technical issues on the Switch, it feels very ‘solid’, has a nice feel to control and shooting hell demons into bloody pulps is strangely satisfying. It doesn’t really push the series forward, this is still not a proper 3D game as it uses 2D maps with elevation but no up or down aiming. Basically, it just feels like Doom in a moody new style. Things wouldn’t move on properly for a few years yet…
Doom 3
Ah, Doom 3. Back in 2004, this was at the absolute cutting edge of computer game graphics. Games hadn’t really made use of realtime lighting, shadows, bump and specular mapping in the way this game did. It needed a decent PC at the time, but it looked incredible.
Early enemies are little more than shuffling zombies.
Essentially a reboot, Doom 3 puts you in the shoes of the mute marine who arrives on a Mars research facility to find that all Hell has broken loose – literally. It’s a very different game from the old style ones, in feel, tone and pacing. There’s more story and build-up. This is a slow-paced survival horror where you rarely fight more than one or two monsters at a time. It’s not especially difficult (at least not on the default setting) however it is tough to play for long periods due to how relentlessly bleak and stressful it is.
Finding dead people’s PDAs can reveal emails and audio logs containing codes to open weapon lockers, as well as providing backstory and a creepy tone.
This is, unfortunately, not a particularly fun game. The thrill of blasting hell demons is diminished by the realities of early 2000s shooter design. Not only do you have to reload your weapon and recharge your torch, but the aiming is very twitchy (at least on the Switch version, which does not have the gyroscopic aim-assistance the previous games have). I lost count of the number of times I accidentally crouched when trying to run away, got stuck against a bit of scenery or couldn’t climb a ladder properly. Things were simpler in the older games. It’s not that I think slow-paced horror games shouldn’t exist, but maybe Doom shouldn’t have been one. Around the same time as this originally came out for PC, other games like Serious Sam and Painkiller were doing Doom-style shooters better. Faster, lots of enemies, shorter levels and no nonsense thrills. Even at the time, I found Doom 3 disappointing.
Enemies will often teleport in front of you… or behind you.
One of the less popular design decisions in the original 2004 release was that you could not use the torch at the same time as using a gun, and given how ridiculously dark everything is, you had to decide whether to see where you’re going or prepare for an attack, but not both. It was an interesting idea to increase tension but annoying as hell. This was changed in the ‘BFG Edition’ (on which the Switch version is based) so now you can use the torch at any time, but it still requires recharging every few seconds.
This guy’s back, and he’s still annoying.
I don’t get on well with scary games at the best of times, so this was always going to be an uphill struggle. At least I actually finished the main campaign this time, having abandoned the PC version years prior. There’s also an expansion included called Resurrection of Evil, but I simply didn’t enjoy Doom 3 enough to want to play it. I may play the two recent-ish sequels and complete the set at some point, but for now I’m done with Doom. Onto nicer things…
A Dan In The Life 