A Way Out

 

 

 

 

A Way Out is a unique co-op only experience where the boastful developer claimed "Its impossible to not like this game" while introducing it at E3. Does his claim hold up?

The premise of A Way Out is a good one, and one we always kind of want. At the foundation is that you and your partner are sent to prisoner for alleged crimes Theft/murder and you've both been set up by a guy named Harvey. shortly after arriving at prison you meetup with eachother and become accomplishes.

The game is unique in a few ways, first of all its always Split-screen so you can always see what your partner is doing, second of all because only one person has to buy the game and can invite anyone to download and play the whole game with them without having to buy it first.

The split screen is one of the most entertaining things about the game as its always useful and fun to able to see what your partner is doing, from talking to people to what hes looking at in the enviorment.


While the premise and unique mechanics are interesting, unfortunately the game has some pacing issues which makes a lot of it pretty underwhelming.

For example, in the beginning has you escaping prison, but the whole prison escape is quite underwhelming and almost easy to miss. You go around trying to collect tools to unscrew the toilet in your cell to climb out into the matience tunnels, but in between doing that you have to do all these menial prison jobs and mini-games. Like showing up to work, mopping the floor,talking to inmates/guards and you do this stuff for quite a long time and its not all that exciting.

Theres plenty of cutscenes and dialogue and the game has some pretty funny writing and joke cracking, but for the most part its kind of barren of engaging mechanics, you're mostly just walking around and talking to people or puzzle solving things in the enviorment. And during the prison escape theres not really a sense of urgency or thrill because of it. Theres a lot of these 'spam X' parts of 'Press X at the same time as your partner' parts and those make up the bulk of the 'engaging' mechanics.

Like in the middle of escaping prison you crawl through some tunnels, only to show up at a prison job where you have to smuggle a wrench into your cell but spend a lot of time doing insignificant tasks and dumb mini games.

After you escape prison its a nice change of pace where you're running around through the forests and trees where you really start to get to know eachothers characters. Theres some decent character building going on here where you eventually go visit Leo's family and the hardships they endure, how both of you guys were framed by the evil Harvey villian, how Vincents wife is having a baby so you have to go to the prison to meet her...but all of these things can start to be a bit boring when theres no real oppression or mechanics to deal with, its still all the same walking around and puzzle solving things in the enviorment.

Theres a few choices you can make that either go like 'Violent path' or 'Stealthy path'  like one place where you are trying to find new clothes/a vehicle so you find a couple on a remote farm where you can tie them up or sneak past them. We tied them up and then had to search around for a bit to try to repair the truck in the barn which was more of just mindlessly searching the enviroment for the object to hit X on and other sorts of minigames.

Then you have multiple vehicle sections which control hilariously and arent that hard, but its not anything all that thrilling. Just standard chase scenes with narrow paths, theres a rowboat part which was a good change of pace and something different, but still more of the same trivial tap X stuff.

Theres another part where you play basketball with your son and thats what I mean, all the major 'gameplay' elements are just these trivial little interaction events where you do mini games to progress. Theres no real engaging main gameplay element. Its not much of an action game its like a slow, sleepy, story puzzle solver.


Things like this go on for half the game, car chases, walking around talking to people, spam X moments, quicktime events, cutscenes, dialogues, its all OK and the story is decent enough just when you've been playing for hours it can get pretty sleepy.

Like how theres yet another part where you go to a construction site and just walk around talking to workers, but atleast you track down one of the main badguys henchmen, and go on some big rooftop hunt but its not anything besides a handholding platformer. It was exciting  chasing this guy across rooftops and theres a funny interrogation scene with him ontop as well.

Then you get attacked by a hitman, which was pretty cool, but you dont do any shooting back you just engage with linear scripted press X events to eventually get rid of him. Then you go to a hospital which is a lot of more just walking around talking to people.

Also a lot of the dialogue is just strange or doesnt make sense, like you're at a hospital rushing to find your wife whos having a child, but you can talk to random pedestrians about small talk about trivial BS, or play connect four. Its funny, yeah, its just a little awkward and often theres a lot of parts which doesnt make sense if you want them to.

In between some of this the game finally asks you to choose some guns, you try them out for a minute, but then you never get to use the guns until the last hour or so of the 10+ hour campaign.

The last part of the game is the best and most engaging, you go on a plane to Mexico to track down the bad guy and you can parachute onto his island, then one of your parachutes break and the other guy has to save you.
Then when you land, it turns into a third person shooter and the shooting mechanics are actually pretty good. The guns have a good recoil mechanic and crosshair, hitmarkrs, and the game starts to be pretty fun now. Finally some action to break up the mundane walking and talking and puzzle solving.
Unfortunately, you only get to shoot a couple handfuls of bad guys for less than an hour, find the bad guy an take him out, then return back to USA for whatever reason even though you're a wanted fugitive.

Then the game reveals its plot twist, that Vincent was just a cop in disguise, only helping you in order to get his revenge on the bad guy for killing his brother.

This is the games ending and where the narrative gets a bit awkward and messy, now instead of it being a co-op game, its this weird split screen thing where its both partners against eachother. Its awkward because its like, why do we care about whos more skillful at 'defeating' the other guy? we want to do the thing that has the coolest outcome.
So theres one part where the cop player has to shoot at the prisoner player whos driving a boat, but its like, "wait man, it would be more interesting if the prisoner escaped, dont shoot at me" so the cop just sits there awkwardly doing nothing. Its strange.
Then theres a gun fight part between both players, the cop betrayer VS the escaped inmate, and again, we thought it would be more interesting if the prisoner actually escaped, so its like "Ok just let me kill you" it was just a weird way to handle the ending because its so awkward as a 2 player game.

They made it out to be as if its just some deathmatch, but we just cared about what would have the more interesting ending, so the 'deathmatching' didnt matter.

So then the game wraps up, one of you dies, the survivng one puts a letter on the widows door, end credits.

Overall the game tends to be a little underwhelming and boring due to lack of mechanics, the narrative and premise is good, but its like if the game is just a movie, it has to be a really good movie, and it was just a typical prison escape espionage revenge on the bad guy movie type thing. So then the mechanics had to be really good as well, but they kinda werent even there for the most part. If even half of the game had more shooting that would of really helped a lot. Its a unique game, and will be memorable, but even while we were playing it we said a lot "this is kinda boring" so that gives an idea of the pacing issues.. Its got decent graphics as well, but nothing jaw dropping or super state of the art graphics, maybe if the graphics were breathtakingly amazing it would of helped a bit too, but they were just kinda 2018 standard with some weirdly cartoonish characters visuals.

6/10

Battlefield 1

 

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Battlefield was never really known for its single player but still they're fun high budget triple A campaigns with state of the art modern graphics and polish and the main competition for Call of duty so worth checking out.

This time in Battlefield 1 the campaign is separated off into six short different mini-stories where each one you play a different character. These little episodes only last about 30 minutes to an hour each, and while the characters are decent and suit the role of drawing you in, you never stick around long enough to really get any real development of them as any sort of plot device or narrative. The story (or lack thereof) is just some typical situations six different soldiers would encounter.

Three or four of these campaign episodes take place mostly inside vehicles, be it airplanes or tanks. This alone is kind of a negative for me as its not my preferred gameplay I just want boots on ground action shooting. So right off the bat basically half the game is already dissatisfying for me personally. While these vehicle sections are fine, and done as good as they can be, its just not as engaging as first person ground combat. At least during the tank mission its premised in such a way where you get to feel like you really are crammed up in a tank with some guys and they must become your best friends you get that sense of actually living out of this tank the way the cut scenes and narrative weaves its self.

Something thats odd is the pacing of the campaign. It starts you on an overview map of all the 6 different episodes, in numeral order. So if you play it starting from Mission 1 up to 6, oddly enough the first few missions are inside vehicles. So right out of the gate 2 or 3 hours in you've already spent most of the time driving or flying around which I found an awkward way to start the game off.

The moments and missions where its primarily gun combat are pretty good. The movement in particular feels fantastic and its great to jump and sprint and duck and pop out of cover all over the place the movement mechanics and controls in general feel very good and polished. Theres lots of different guns to find as well with all sorts of crates everywhere to always discover new weapons or attachments. Since it takes place in WW1 its a breath of fresh air to use these old archaic weapons its a lot of things like bolt action rifles and semi auto carbines, funny enough I thought ww1 didnt have that many machine guns but theres quite a few to choose from and all the weapons are quite satisfying to use with good impact hit markers with a chunky sound when you connect and the marker turns red when its a kill which makes the gameplay feel satisfying and full of weight. A lot of the guns have really punchy sound effects too. You have the mechanic of spamming the Q button to tag enemies which gives them an outline and you can see them through walls, which is a little cheap and classic symptom of modern gaming.

Probably the best thing about this game which makes it superior to many call of duty campaigns is the fact that during missions theres rarely if ever any NPC which you have to slowly follow around and do exactly what he says. Theres no waiting around for NPCS to do their scripts every 20 seconds, walking around in extremely linear movements waiting for your NPC commander like on COD etc. Most of the objectives have you in a huge enviorment where the game just tells you to "Do X" and you run around to approach and do it however you please. Usually you just go into an area and on the minimap theres a big circle and you just have to search the area to find the objective. Its mostly a good thing, but its also sort of negative in that compared to COD there isn't as many crazy scripted things that happen and most objectives feel repetitive and the same even though the game is so short.

Theres 3 difficulties and on the 2nd one it feels just right. You can die really quick if youre not being careful but its also not super easy

Really the worst problem is that half of the campaign is in vehicles or that one mission where you're a guy in a giant suit of armor where you walk around like a human tank carrying a machine gun mowing down waves of enemies, that was kind of odd. All I wanted was more typical soldier missions, but they're too limited here. Out of the 5 hours spent playing the campaign maybe only 2 of them were really truly doing the typical WW1 soldier combat. Just when the game starts to feel really good and the campaign picks up, giving you more diverse locations such as the desert and even a taste of an 'open world' where it gives you 3 locations to capture at will, and then just like that its over. Theres no coherent narrative or story to wrap it up, it just kind of says some tidbits about WW1 and the soldiers involved and thats it.
The campaign feels like a tutorial for the multiplayer mode more than anything, just trying to introduce as many mechanics as it can as fast as possible to prepare you for MP.

The game could of been twice as long and in the extended parts just had way more in the trenches boots on ground combat, but it doesn't. Its a 5 hour long game and its sad to say its too short because the mechanics and controls, graphics and atmosphere are all an amazing framework but it ultimately just feels like a missed opportunity because of how short it is and how half of it is spent in vehicles

 

6/10

Call of Duty: Ghosts

 

 

Ghosts has you playing as some supersoldier of some sort, in the sense that youre a part of this highly special ops task force capible of extreme feats. Not many people can become a 'ghost' and it has you undergoing typical military escapades, betrayals, and the like

The first thing I notice is that the weapons look pretty cool and all have good and satisfying animations. All the models are nice and you have a good variety of weapons you can pick off the ground. Some of them sound pretty chunky and have a good weight and feel to them.

Quickly throughout the campaign a reoccuring trend happens over and over. Its what I call these sort of gimmick levels and mechanics. Like for example early on in the campaign you're forced to play as a dog and do these odd stealth sections for awhile, then other parts in the campaign youre flying a very boring lazily done helicoptor, then other segments in the campaign you're controlling a drone lazily clicking on big red squares to blow them up...this sort of gimmicky mechanic/feature crops up on almost every single level and it just takes away from the experience. I come to the cod games for viseral boots on ground shooting action, thats it. I dont need any of this other lazy half-assed attempts at doing something new, they all just feel like a shitty mobile game or something.

Entire levels can be based around these awkward gimmicks, like in the middle of the campaign you have an entire underwater swimming level where you engage in underwater combat with a single water gun and it doesnt really add to the experience it just takes away. Theres another level towards the end of the game in a similar fasion, except this time youre floating around in space. Another level where you're driving around in a tank and it feels so uninspired and shoe-horned in like I said it feels like a generic mobile game or something, whats the point? At least half of the campaign has these dull gimmick levels/features its not all that impressive. When the campaign does have you doing the standard boots on ground shooting combat, its decent, but honestly the lack of hitmarkers does make the combat a bit less satisfying and it never really feels like youre actually doing all that much, instead youre just following around NPC's waiting for them to trigger the next script. A level towards the end of the game you're on a train where the 'gimmick' is that the train is shaking so furiously that you can barely aim down your sights without flying all over the place. Sometimes I just want an entire campaign where I'm left by myself to do what I want to progress the objectives, to actually feel like I'm doing something, without constantly having to engage in all these worthless one-time event things. The pacing is pretty dull overall because of this. Its like they just ran out of ideas for interesting standard gameplay so they threw a bunch of 'innovative' things at the wall and see what sticks. I never liked much of that kind of stuff.

Another glaring flaw for me is the fact that the entire campaign it basically just feels on-rails. Theres not a single moment where you're left to your own devices to wander around by yourself and figure out what to do. In the first quarter of the game I was wondering "is there ever going to be a point where I'm not being bossed around to follow some NPC's script?" Unfortunately, that point never came. The entire campaign is hand-holding you following around an NPC. Being told what to do, what to shoot, where to move, the entire time! it barely feels like I'm even playing a video game, I'm just re-enacting a script. This has always been a crucial flaw for cod games but this one in particular is just egreiously hand-holding.

Besides that stuff what else is there to say? the story is not at all engaging, its generic military jargon campaign #9987, the characters and 'ghosts' stuff , the villian, as cookie cutter as it gets. Its not horrible or anything, its just not much to write about. Imagine any typical military plot and its this. I appreciate the fact that the game tried to do a bunch of different things, its not the first time cod does stuff like this, but in this campaign in particular so much of it is just following NPC's around, or doing these shitty gimmicky parts. The game is OK enough just for the shooting mechanics, short length, and tripple A budget action, but it's hard to call this one of the better cod games.
 

5/10

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

 

 

 

Black Ops 3 has a co op campaign so that alone makes it unique and stand out. Only two COD games have that, World at war and this one.
So right off the bat we jump in and things are odd, the premise is about a far future technologically advanced world where computers take over peoples brains and transhumanism and Deus Ex type stuff, its interesting enough at first but also gives some fears for bad things to come. I dont really come to call of duty games for super high tech fantasy things,but we'll see...

Since its co-op, we played on Veteran difficulty. It has the standard co op system of picking your friend up everytime they go down so its not super challenging or anything.
The first little bit has you going around watching a lot of cutscenes and scripted things, having the story told to you, via an NPC partner that always follows you around yelling and talking to you, then you get a first taste of the combat. Everything appears to be in order so far, its standard call of duty fighting waves of heavily armed soldiers. Right off the bat though, you'll notice that you can no longer carry two of any weapon you want. You can only carry a primary weapon, and a pistol or rocket launcher, which is not an exciting design as no longer can you constantly try out  new weapons while keeping your 'main' one, it feels limiting and makes the gunplay boring as you use the same gun for most of the game.

After a lengthy introduction you arrive at the hub world where you learn this game has all sorts of crazy mechanics. First, you have a weapons bench where you can create your classic COD class system. Theres really not a great variety of weapons in the game, a couple standard categories like shotguns, SMG, assault rifle, sniper, and you'll notice right away that the guns don't look like any real counter part. It's all very blocky high tech fantasy weapons and honestly none of them look that cool or fun to use. After picking one, you can put attachments on it of course, but you have no attachments at first and the more you use the weapon, the more it levels up which unlocks more attachments. These attachments (and later on unlocking stronger weapons) really matter, because the game has a sort of RPG feel to it where in the beginning of the game you do very shit damage because your weapons/attachments suck, but towards the middle/end of the game you start to get great gear which makes you do way more damage and you no longer struggle as much against some of the enemies.
The create a class also has some perks, but nothing like multiplayer cod. The perks are very uninteresting and limited, things like "take less damage from grenades"  "use another attachment on weapon"   "carry another grenade"  - There is one perk that stands out, and its the ability to wall run/use a jetpack, which can be kind of fun but like, what game am I playing again? you'll be asking yourself that a lot.  Its also curious how you need to pick a perk just to be able to pickup enemy guns on the ground.

Also in the hub world is this 'Create  your own weapon' mechanic where you can start from scratch to build a weapon, I tried to do it but It seemed like I could not really create anything different? it was just the standard guns and attachments? I was probably doing something wrong, but I didnt care enough to really try more.

And then in the hub world you have the Unlocks system. Now this is where the game takes a real "what the fuck" turn. You have three of these skill tree abilities with all sorts of jargon and skills. You press a button in game which opens up this big 'skill wheel'  where you pick different abilites on the fly like a fking MOBA game or world of warcraft or something,  and then you press another button to use your ability which has a cooldown. You can unlock dozens of these things from the skill tree, but truth be told I never found any of these appealing or even worth engaging with. No one has the time to be in the middle of a battle, hold a button, stare at this big skill wheel and read a ton of descriptions on what they do. Because the things they do are so asinine and pointless it doesnt matter. Its all stuff like "corrupt enemy robot gun temporarily"  or like "Run super fast for a short time"  "make enemies fight against eachother"  I dont know, none of them were very useful except one: Theres a cloak which makes you go invisible, which as you can imagine makes it much easier to pickup your  friend everytime he goes down. I eventually unlocked all of the skills on all the different skill trees, but the cloak is the only one I actually cared to use.

So thats the main mechanics in the hub world, from there you hit 'Deploy' and it takes you to the next mission. Its kind of nice that after every mission it takes you to this hub world where you can take a break/get a coffee/prepare yourself for the next mission.

So, on Veteran difficulty the challenge is just right. Playing co-op makes it so you do not fail when only one of you goes down, so being able to revive eachother makes Veteran an actual fun challenge. You dont go down in one bullet, but like 5 or 6.
Now, the thing that sets this apart from other call of duty games, which makes you ask what game you're playing, is the enemies.
You have all sorts of enemies, you have standard soldiers, you have super heavily half-robot, half-human soldiers, you have giant mechs, you have flying drones, you have even bigger mech tanks, you have robots...

Well in the first half of the game some of these enemies are a massive pain in the ass to fight, especially the robots. You'll be dumping two clips into these guys and they'll still be walking around. Your weak weapons and bad attachments early on mean these guys are just bullet sponges and it does not feel great. Youll frequently encounter rooms of these guys where you and your partner just dump magazine after magazine into them while they're still standing walking towards you. Other similarly tedious enemies are these giant mech tanks where you have to unload first into them with assault rifles, then stun it to where you can shoot rockets at it. This takes quite awhile to actually put it down, it isnt challenging or anything just a little tedious.
While these guys are really annoying in the first half of the campaign, in the second half you unlock guns like the Man o War, with 4+ attachments, which now you can take these guys out in 10 seconds as opposed to previously 45+ seconds. Its just a strange progression in difficulty. It gets easier the more the game goes on. But still, probably the most engaging part of the game was that the challenge wasn't too hard, and wasnt too easy. It keeps us on our toes, but also never really gets frustrating or annoying as the checkpoint system is very generous and having to pick eachother up enables some fun co-op and strategic plays.

What this turns out as, is that I really only used 3 guns for the entire campaign. In the first half I used some AK type gun. and breifly a sniper which was kind of useful, but then when you unlock some stronger guns we just used the Man o War the whole game which is like a really powerful slow shooting assault rifle. For a call of duty game, this is a bad flaw. Call of duty for me is all about using fun guns, constantly changing it up with new exciting weapons , but I didnt feel much of this in black ops 3. Being limited to only one primary weapon is a bad flaw and I kept wondering when I could carry a second one to be able to experiment, but it never happened. There are stations where you can change your loadout mid mission, but you cant create a class or swap out attachments or new  weapons, so I never used it much.

The game has so many mechanics that it starts to be kind of a mess. For example you can press 1 to go into night vision thermal mode,  you press 2 to open up all your different abilites, you press 3 to enable some visor hud which allows you to endlessly see through walls and enemy health bars and icons, which is pretty shocking, being able to see enemies through walls constantly like its Borderlands or something felt pretty antithetical to the call of duty experience. More "what game am I playing again?" moments. This mechanic alone sort of trivializes the combat, no longer do you have to make really strategic moves to try to pinpoint your enemy location and try to keep track of where they are, now you can just endlessly see their exact location through walls.

Theres really not much to say on the level design or objectives. A lot of levels are just generic city street battles, warehouse buildings, everything looks the same and the  graphics honestly are not that impressive, even earlier cod games had more impressive visuals. Everything has a flat dull yellow/brown tone and filled with all the robots and flying drones and multi-colored futuristic gadgets you really forget its a CoD game.  Some notable level locations is this one area where its like a brain simulation, and you look up into the sky and the whole village is in the sky turned on its side and you cant tell if you're down or the place in the sky is, its really trippy and surreal. Theres other areas where you go through dream states in some frozen mountian area fighting WW2 soldiers (?) this was an odd but welcome variation to mix things up. But yeah other than some things like that theres really nothing memorable or exciting going on with the objectives.  All the objectives are simply go to this next area/press F on this thing/blow this up. Thats it really.

In standard COD fasion there is a ton of scripted events, people talking to you, cutscenes, a lot of handholding and exposition. But unfortunately the story is not that interesting or even makes any sense. The story quickly becomes into this super fantastical high-tech nonsense where people turn into flying fairies and angels, controlling simulations, I don't really know what the story was. Theres this woman that talks to you the whole game and you're not sure if shes on your side or not? that was kind of interesting. I really dont know what to say about the story other than it was a convuluted mess that quickly made no sense and went way too 'beyond fiction' fantasy world stuff.  Though I will say that they really do shock you with tons of gore and vile scenes, people having their face burned off, limbs cut off, being exploded into bits, eyes poked out, they really dont hold back on the random gore in the cutscenes which is really strange because the actual gameplay is not very gorey at all. In combat, the enemies dont have viseral reactions to being shot or having limbs come off or giving big blood sprays, they are pretty tame in reaction.

Since its one of the only cod games with a co-op campaign, at 10 hours long, that really helped it. If it wasn't co-op, it might be one of the worst cod games. But being able to play a cod campaign with a friend made it pretty OK. The combat is decent, but it sucks that you dont use that many weapons, or that none of them are that interesting to use, the levels are totally forgettable and the story is asinine, but the challenge felt just right and kept us engaged.

6/10