For Honor

 

I've seen For Honor around here and there but for the longest time I wasnt even aware that it had a campaign, let alone a co-op one. It seemed like yet another Ubisoft flavor of the month multiplayer deathmatch fest. Well, when I realized it had a co-op campaign I just had to get it, luckily for dirt cheap. I knew absolutely nothing about the game besides that it had a story campaign.

Main reason I got the game was to play co-op campaign so thats what I ended up doing. The game has a difficulty selection, and it recommends to play Normal unless you're already a "veteran and familliar with the mechanics" or something like that. So we just picked Normal.

The game starts with this overly verbose lengthy tutorial that tries to explain how all the mechanics work but its really a confusing mess. Once you actually start playing the game however, its clear how everything plays. Nothing is exactly uniquely done or innovative here. It has a lock-on combat system and then you point the analog stick in a direction you want to attack or block. The enemy will swing in certain directions and it will highlight in white or red where thats going to happen letting you know where to block from. At first I tried playing with Keyboard & Mouse but it became obvious very fast that it was probably a bad idea in a game like this so I quickly switched over to controller and it was a lot more intuitive.

After the tutorial you get asked what faction you want to start as. Knights, Samurai, or Vikings. Seems like it doesnt matter whichever one you pick, you'll have to play them all anyway. Essentially the game has 3 episodes, each with about a handful of missions. The game has an abundance of cutscenes, which are probably some of the highlights of the whole experience. Frequently you'll see cutscenes involving lots of sword battles and especially lots of gore like decapitations and maiming. The general storylines are loose, but broadly its something to do with following each faction throughout history as they struggle to gain influence. In typical Ubisoft fasion, the game has a lot of historical inaccuracy and stretching of truth. Like how many female Knights, Samurai, and Vikings there are. Frequently the most fearful and powerful warriors just happen to be female. Of course theres nothing wrong with women being in games, but I cant help but shake the feeling Ubisoft is just trying to push some kind of weird agenda like "Hey guys, didn't you know women are Warriors too!?" When In reality, historically they were like 0.00001%.

As for the actual missions, well theres really not much to write about. The game has a handful of objectives you do. Usually its just run to a certain area and destroy some object, defend the area, or kill specific enemies. At any given time there tends to be dozens of enemies on screen, but a few hours into the game I realized that you dont even really have to fight them. Its like an illusion of combat or threat. You can simply run past 90% of encounters and just sprint straight for the main objective. Theres no reason to really fight most of the enemies. I mean yeah you can fight them for fun, but I'm just saying the game is kind of badly designed. It shouldn't really be an option to just ignore most enemies, thats just bad design in a game like this. It should reward you for engaging in challenging combat, not rewarding you for just skipping all of it. It even despawns all the enemies when you complete objectives, further making most of the combat feel meaningless and a waste of time to engage in.

As you play through the missions of each faction you are frequently changing from all sorts of different characters. You briefly get to select what appearance you want to have (although most of them look the same). But I don't really understand that, because every other mission you'll suddenly be playing some new character with a different weapon. One moment youll be using a sword and shield, the next a two hand axe, the next a big sword. Theres hardly any player agency in what you get to use. It comes across as kind of jarring and random.

The game tries to excite you with this 'Feats' system. Where you can run around and pickup items to unlock various perks to equip before each mission. There are two types: Passive and Active. The passive perks are mundane stuff like 25% more health, 10% more damage, just small insignificant stuff. Then you have active skills that can be used with the Dpad. The active skills are stuff like: Instant heal, Do more damage for x amount of time, and our favorite: Unblockable, where for a short period of time the enemy cant block your attacks. For pretty much the entire game I just used the Health skill and then Unbreakable. The feasts try to be this big interesting deal, but really after playing the game for just a short while I no longer gave a fuck about any of it and it just felt like another tacked on pointless system to try to give the game any sense of depth. The game also has this like fighting game button combo system where you can chain together inputs to perform certain attacks, like Mortal Kombat or some shit, but I just could not give a fuck less about it. It kept popping up on the screen suggesting combos to do, the few times I tried it felt so clunky and pointless I rapidly lost interest, since spamming attack works so well anyway and most of the enemies are pointless filler you can just run past or gang up on with your coop partner. You dont even have to lock on a lot of the time, it almost seems like locking on actively makes the enemy block more often. Its totally strange. Sometimes just running in circles like a jackass and spamming attack makes you hit more often than locking on and actually trying to engage with the mechanics.

Apparently the game also has some kind of experience/level up system but thats completely pointless. I have no idea what getting experience, or leveling up does. Even after beating the game I don't know. You kill enemies and it will say +10, +20 etc. No clue what it does. I think its just a facade. At one point I looked up and it said I was level 16, ok? What does leveling up do? Who knows. Probably some multiplayer shit I don't care about.

The co-op gameplay is the best part of the game, its standard fare here. You can heal your partner when they go down, and if they go down for good then they respawn after 20 or so seconds. If you both die, you respawn at a checkpoint which you frequently get. The game is very easy, too. We played on the recommended difficulty, and at first I was sort of intimidated by the combat system and all the direction based tactics, but really the game is shallow as fuck. For the most part, All I did was spam Upward attacks or just roll around in between attacks, wait for my skills to come back, and either sprint past enemies to the main objective or team up with the co  op partner to stunlock the mandatory enemies. The game is just shallow and average or even medicore in all regards.

Luckily each episode is very short, we breezed through the Knight campaign in the blink of an eye, then we moved onto the Viking campaign and they made vikings look like clowns, the writing here was just annoying and cringe. Constantly laughing bumbling idiots or screaming at random shit constantly, it was just stupid. Then we moved onto the Samurai campaign, which was maybe the most memorable but still nothing really stands out. Sometimes you'll get these boss fights where you Duel some guy, but its still not really anything exciting cause you can just stunlock the boss in co-op. Its almost like they barely tested it for co-op gameplay how much you can stun the enemies. Also, at a certain point I started realizing the gameplay just felt like a weird shitty mod of Assassins Creed, being a Ubisoft game and all, it just has that weightless, shallow vibe to it. Especially with the lock-on system and frequent use of worthless waves of 1 hit enemies.

The graphics really arent anything special. Its a 2017 game but I've seen Xbox 360 games from 2007 look way more impressive. Everything is kind of flat and dull and without that impressive 'shine' or dynamics a modern game has. Also, the artstyle is very hit and miss. Like the armors and models are pretty cool looking and detailed, especially the Knights. But then they go and ruin it by plastering these overly vibrant saturated like crayon colors all over them. Like bright baby blue cloths and yellow. Ubisoft games do this a lot, where they expect the player will be so clueless and stupid and wont be able to understand whats going on unless you paint everything this really obvious childish color. It just sucks, they always find some way to fuck up an otherwise good artstyle.

 We beat the whole campaign in about 5 hours and 2 sessions. Its a short game, but a very mediocre one. At least it was co-op ,and the cutscenes were mildly entertaining. Its a mindless Ubislop action game, I wasnt expecting much.

Oh yeah and its clear the campaign realy isnt supposed to be the focus of this game. Its "real draw" is this yet another bullshit multiplayer 'Hero' based pvp crap where you pick your "favorite heros" and battle against other players to reclaim territories or something. Yeah, sorry. Not interested, at all. I would have never picked this game up if it didnt have a campaign. And as soon as I noticed the multiplayer was just more of this 'Hero' class based generic shit I lost all interest, I really hate that stuff. So this review says nothing about the multiplayer, maybe, just maybe, if the core mechancis and gameplay were unique and interesting enough I might care just a bit - but its not, so I'm not even gonna comment on the multiplayer stuff.

5/10

Torchlight 2

 

I didnt really like Torchlight 1 so I wasnt really that excited to eventually play this one. Its been in my 'shit games' category on steam for over 10 years now. Finally I decided to play it, mostly because of the co-op.

To play online with friends the game has an account system. So after logging in you then get a server browser. This part can be fucky and either crashes sometimes or you have to fumble around trying to join eachothers game before some random does. It works fine enough I guess. Then you pick one of four classes: Berserker, Outlander, Engineer and Embermage. We both picked Berserker because we just wanted to do a standard barbarian warrior type guy and that seemed most suitable.

Torchlight 2 starts where the first game ends off. In Torchlight 1, you just have a central hub down and you crawl deeper into a dungeon. Now, in Torchlight 2, at the beginning of the game you get some text about how the town is destroyed and this and that, and now the game is sort of open world and features many different towns and locations. Thats a big central design change compared to the first game. So you just go through these grassy green fields slaying your first groups of enemies until you come across the first town. Now, right out of the gate its hard to ignore the elephant in the room (for me). The artstyle is just atrocious in this game. I didn't like Torchlight 1's artstyle and atmosphere much, but its much, much worse here. Everything looks like a lame sunday morning childs cartoon. The game just feels immature. Like it almost makes me self conscious to play such childish looking games. Who is this intended for? 7 year olds? It sucks. The cutscenes are quite possibly some of the worst I have ever seen in gaming. Extremely lame and low budget looking college safe art project slideshows almost like superhero cartoon vibes. That has the effect of making me give zero shits about the story and plot. So the game is almost an absolute chore to look at, and now I dont give a shit about the story. Not off to a good start. I mean, the UI is alright, the inventory is acceptable and (this is a weird acknowledgement) but I like how the boxes of text float around as you move your mouse cursor, theres something oddly satisfying about that feature. But for the most part the graphics are bad, and the artstyle is just not for me. Maybe I can even acknowledge that they might have did a "good job" at achieving their certain artstyle, but its like saying good job to a toddlers drawing or something.

The game presents you with difficulty choices when you start it, which is something kind of odd for an ARPG. Usually ARPGS like Diablo, for example, only scale the difficulty when youve already played through the campaign, as a very hand crafted carefully curated difficulty curve experience. But being able to choose hard difficulties at the start of the game makes me question the balancing. Like how is it working? The enemies get more health but I still do the same amount of damage? so essentially all thats changed here is the requirement to full clear every zone and do every side quest in order to be 'up to par' in comparison to the Normal difficulty. So thats what we felt compelled to do. We chose Veteran difficulty, because that was the reccomended setting "for people who have played Arpgs before" , and we basically full cleared every single zone, uncovered all the map fog, and tried to do every side quest just to be able to scrape by and have enough experience to be properly levelled. Usually in other arpgs, fully clearing every zone and doing every side quest rewards you by being significantly overpowered and higher level than the mobs, but for some reason in Torchlight 2, we were still always just barely at the proper level for the zone we were at, making it all feel not so optional.


The game has four acts, act 1 is a standard grassy fields overworld with a village and some dungeons. Act 2 is the desert act, surprise surprise, big Diablo 2 influence here. Act 3 is this poison swamp area. Act 4 is a single short quest that takes place in some metallic robot dungeon. Really nothing inspirational or memorable here. Apparently I played halfway through the game over 10 years ago (looking at my unlcked achievements), but I dont have a single memory of any of it, that goes to show how unmemorable the whole thing is. It's all bog standard and uncreative. Even most of the enemy designs are boring, tedious, or annoying. For instance in Act 2 its like most of what you'll be fighting is hordes of insects and pests. The enemy design at times can be exciting, mostly in those optional netherworld dungeon places, they have more hellish looking monsters, but for the most part even the monster designs are cartoonish bullshit thats neither threatening,exciting, or interesting. Like to me, a lot of what makes ARPGs exciting is having threatening monsters that keeps you on your toes and makes you make interesting character decisions, but here you barely even notice them. Don't get me wrong, the game is decently challenging and we did die frequently, but it wasnt really due to the monsters being intimidating but rather either being half asleep , playing lazily, or some resistance being fucked up and having to change around gear.

There are a few things the game does relatively good, though.
The gear systems and stats are actually interesting and you do have to make calculated decisions. It has lots of different stats you have to account for, basic resistances, attack speeds, health, damage bonuses when certain criteria is filled, armor, Minus armor per hit etc. Items can roll with a decent variety of stats that mostly keeps gearing exciting. For weapons, there is a "DPS" number so at a glance you can quickly get an idea of how much damage certain weapons do, but its not the end all be all because the actual individual stats rolled on items can be more important. While the gear doesnt look very visually appealing on your character, atleast the actual mechanics are engaging enough. For the most part I tried to be a two hand sword warrior type guy, and the game mostly made that possible and rewarded me a bit for that commitment. Getting unique drops were exciting, and theres a good amount of them too. Its odd that green colored items are the lowest tier, and blue colored items are higher tier. That tripepd me up a lot because usually its the opposite.

The stats are standard ARPG fare, Strength, Dex, Vitality, Magic... I pretty much dumped 99% of my points into strength for more damage, though if I wanted to focus on Critical strikes I could have put a bunch into Dex, or if I  was dual wielding weapons it also apparently gives you a dual wield bonus if you put points into Focus, so theres a variety of choices here too.

Unfortunately a big flaw with the game, atleast for me, was the skill trees just were not interesting at all. Every single skill was not something that was appealing to me and that I actively didnt want to use. At least for the Berseker class I chose, cant speak about the other ones. The Berserker class appeared to be the most basic warrior/barbarian type character, though the entire skill tree and its 3 tabs didnt give me basically any options to just be a sword swinging warrior. It was all Druid type shit like "Turn into wolves, summon wolves," and then one of the trees was based on elemental damage for some stupid reason? Like "Summon ice storms, Imbue your attacks with lightning" . And then the main melee tree was stuff like Eviserate, which is you do this AOE attack but briefly turn into a wolf and attack with these claws. None of it was about the actual playstyle that I wanted to be. Either the game is just really unclear with its classes, or the skills just suck. Like, is Engineer the warrior guy? Who would look at Engineer and think "Yeah thats the two hand warrior class". No one. The Berserker sounds like the melee class, but all the skills dont encourage the typical warrior stuff. So for the whole game I was disappointingly using these stupid wolf claws attack, and dumping most of my points into the permanent passive buffs, because atleast those apply to everything. Theres just not that much choice for skills. Eventually I unlocked a few buffs like throwing a banner down in a circle which grants buffs to yourself and allies and debuffs enemies, and I used Howl which further debuffs enemies. But that was basically all the variety I had in skills and what appealed to me. Towards the latter half of the game I unlocked Ravage, which is basically almost the exact same as the former Eviserate but more effective. So...finally unlocked the epitome skill, and its the same damn wolf claw animation. Disappointing. I just want to swing with , you know, my actual weapon. Whatever, they fucked it all up.

At least for the Berseker class the game has a Frenzy system in which, you have this meter that fills up according to how much damage you do, then when it reaches the top every attack you do is a crit and you pump out tons of damage for a brief period of time. You can increase this amount of time through items/skill tree. So probably the most satisfying part of combat was actually trying to fill this meter up and then getting a blast of frenzy and spriting around the level trying to kill as many mobs with it as possible. The actual gameplay and combat is just okay, it was definitely more fun with the frenzy stuff. I like that the monsters explode into gore sometimes, and the game does a decent job with its pacing with monster density. The first half of the game you can almost get away with just single target attacks, not too many mobs on screen. But then the second half you get swarmed with tons of mosnters requiring AOE attacks and lots of  stuff going around on the screen, so it gives you a taste of both styles. Still, some of the controls can be a bit frustrating. Like, it felt like I'd have this problem where I would be attacking a monster and using skills, but then I would be taking damage and need to run away ASAP, but my character was comitted to some action and he would just refuse to move until the animation was over, resulting in my death.


The game has a Fame system, which rewards and encourages you to kill these purple miniboss enemies. So its a good use of your time to go around and explore every nook and cranny to kill these guys. When you get a certain amount of fame, you get a skill point. Its cool the game makes it worth your time to explore, but at the same time it almost feels mandatory to do so because you'd be left without so many skill points otherwise, so its a weird conflicting feeling I have about the system. The balance of the game overall is just questionable.

None of the quests really stand out or are interesting. Theres barely any different in the Side quests and Main quests. They dont really seem that different or distinguishable. Most of the time its just fetch quests to go inside some dungeon and grab an item or kill some boss in a big arena. The game does have a fair amount of these dedicated arena boss fights, which were probably a highlight of the whole thing. But still, none of them really stand out in my mind after the whole things over with. Cant really remember any. After every act you get these god awful cutscenes I was talking about, makes the game seem like such a joke.

Death isnt that punishing, you can choose to respawn in town and lose nothing or respawn in the same area but lose gold and XP. Ive never once respawned in the same area, just go back to town then instantly warp to your co-op partner using the portal. The game is really forgiving with teleporting around, you can instnatly warp to your friend or his last portal or your own infinitely. So death is really just a minor annoyance.

Torchlight 1 had a pet system, where you can send your pet to town to pickup health potions for you and make him sell some junk gear. Its not really that much more developed here. Your pet has 3 modes, Offensive, Defensive, and neither. But it doesnt really seem to matter. When your pet dies, he respawns like 15 seconds later anyway. You pet can wear 3 items, like a collar and tags, but its not a big deal. Theres this fishing mechanic where you can feed fish to your pet to transform him briefly but it just seemed like a gimmick or waste of time. The pet could of had a skill tree or something, but no, it feels bare bones.

The game kinda just slogs along. Half of the time I was falling asleep playing it. Just a lot of roaming around killing generic uninspired mobs in open fields and the occasional generic dungeon. Towards the end of the game you get to this swamp act where theres all sorts of purple poison shit everywhere that kills you fast, or these tentacles coming out the ground that hurt, but thats about the most notable thing. The best things Torchlight 2 does is the item statistics, some of the arena based boss fights, and the general combat is sort of satisfying - at least it doesnt have level scaling like some other shit ARPGs do. But really the game is just a medicore chore most of the time. The awful artstyle is just insult to injury. The last act of the game is pretty lame too, you start fighting all these robots and mechs and the last boss is pretty anticlimactic, its like this weird lizard dragon guy that we killed without much hassle.

Theres a bunch of end game stuff you can do, like this mapping system (Is this where Path of Exile got its mapping system from!?)  and you can also go to New game +. But yeah...I'm not interested in any of that if the base game is really medicore to me. A lot of people seem to praise Torchlight 2, I guess i can sort of see why, its just not for me. I heard that Fate is like the predecessor of Torchlight, and yeah I do have some nostalgia for that game, and yeah it does have a similar sort of kiddy immature artstyle, but I dont know - something tells me I can get more into Fate than I can these Torchlight games. Maybe one day I'll give that a shot. And oh yeah, Torchlight 3 and beyond looks even way worse than this shit so I can only imagine how atrocious that will be. Maybe one day I'll have to find out,  as well. As long as these games are playable co-op then they're at least tolerable 

4/10

The Darkness (Xbox 360)

 

 

I had played and finished this games sequel, The Darkness 2 because that game is on Steam whereas The Darkness 1 is exclusive to Xbox 360/Ps3. I had heard how the sequel was made by a different developer entirely, and how its tone and style was changed to be more cartoony than the first game. I had a decent time with the sequel, but finally after a long time I got a opportunity to get the original The Darkness on Xbox 360.

The game starts off in a car chase where your working with the Mafia. Some deal goes bad and you lose the money you were supposed to get to your Uncle Pauley. Then, basically the whole game is this series of events surrounding this guy being pissed off at you and wanting you dead. The premise may seem simple, a run of the mill mafia story - but no. The character you play as, Jackie, isnt just some typical Italian mobster. He's this brooding, edgy, long haired gothic metalhead cynical type. So it's this bizarre contrast of being surrounded by like Goodfella's type characters and dialogue, but then the main character is so out of place, but also somehow a part of their family and operation. It's like, imagine a punk rocker Mohawk guy hanging out with The Sopranos. It's two different worlds. But here, it only serves to make the plot and game that much more interesting and strange.

Very soon into the game I was just really impressed with the graphics. Its a 2007 game for fuck sakes. It looks better than modern games like Starfield. Graphics really have not improved much past 2007, it seems. Diminishing returns. The models for the character faces, the lighting, the physics system, the attention to details like your hair and coat having physics, seeing yourself in the mirror, being able to look down at your legs and feet, the way your guns clash up against the wall automatically when you get too close and how the arm animations change depending on what angles youre looking at - the game overall  has this really professional polish to it that really makes it feel ahead of its time. The animations and the weight of the bullet impacts are great too, shooting enemies they react dramatically flailing around to the ground almost reminds me of the physics in Gta IV.

The gameplay here is a psuedo open-world single player shooter campaign, but it has a lot of oddities in its design. For the first couple hours it takes awhile to wrap your head around what the game expects from you navigation wise. There are no objective markers or much in the way of helpful navigation. You press the select button to pull up your inventory, and it will give you some hints of what it expects you to do in the form of a few lines of text, but it isnt always clear where the location it wants you to go is. This got me quite frustrated in the beginning, as I began walking around in circles over and over having no idea what to do feeling annoyed, which is made worse by the extremely slow movement speed. Eventually, however, I realized the games Subway system is the main 'hub' of the game, and even more - there are these helpful navigation stations inside the subway that will give you directions of places you want to go, like real life memorizing the street names and stuff, but I feel like the game could of done a better job pointing these out to the player, maybe make one of the missions to go to one of these things as a tutorial or something, because its really easy to miss them and spend a lot of time scratching your head left clueless. Frequently the game will be vague about what it wants you to do or where youre supposed to talk to someone when really all you have to do is find a phone and call the guy. I do appreciate how immersive the game tries to be and how 'grounded' everything is, like having to navigate yourself using maps and directions and using phones. The game at times feels like it takes inspiration from RPG games like Oblivion which was famous at the time, because of how many npc's you talk to and how you can choose what dialogue you want to say to them, also the music in these subway stations starts playing some calm mystical theme that sounds like something out of Oblivion which I thought was funny.  

At first the combat is simple, you have two pistols each can shoot with right and left triggers and you go through relatively linear street city type levels killing mobsters, though the difficulty is still fairly challenging. It has easy/medium/hard. I picked medium. Even on medium you can die very quickly if you dont know what youre doing. And once again I feel like the game could have explaiend its mechanics better, because it took me a few hours in to realize that there is an entire mechanic where if you stand in lighter areas, you have less health. Eventually I realized that in the main menu there is a Darkness tab where you can read all your different mechanics and it explains as such. So then a lot of the game is about shooting out lights and lamps and trying to stay inside the darkness as it increases your shield. The controls can be weird to learn too, because sometimes if youre standing in too much light and you press the Darkness button, the monsters will just refuse to come out and make a sort of sizzle noise, something I couldn't understand what was happening until many hours into the game when I realized what was going on. Still, the visual indicators for these things are a bit vague and its hard to know exactly how much health you have, or how much the darkness adds to your shield. But when standing in very well lit areas, its not uncommon to die in 2 shots, however standing in darker areas you can take a lot more bullets. I learned that the hard way and died quite a few times before realizing. The game could definitely explain its mechanics better or slowly teach them to you with objectives, but sadly it doesnt. Eventually you start getting a large arsenal of weapons, shotguns, assault rifles, uzis, tons of different dual wield pistols. Much of the game does center around dual wielding, but when you get shotguns and assault rifles you use both your hands. Another point in favor of the impressive graphics and attention to detail is, when you slightly hold down the Trigger, you can see your finger slightly moving to pull on the trigger and it only shoots when you push far enough. Cant say i've ever seen a game do that, its a very nice touch.

You can spawn these 4 little demon goblin guys at various fixed points around the maps to help you do things. Usually some stuff like needing them to unlock gates or doors but also they help you in combat like being a chaingun wielding machine gunner,a melee guy, a suicide bomber guy, and one that kills lights. They didnt seem like totally fleshed out but it was a neat little additional mechanic to play with.

The game really shines with its narrative, atmosphere, and story. Everytime you enter a loading screen or change areas you get a scripted cutscene of the protagonist standing in a black area just talking to himself or commenting on whats going on. Sometimes its picked from a random pool of things, but other times its guaranteed to get a certain context specific cutscene.  The writing is very entaining, at times its really almsot juvenile as if its what a bunch of edgy 13 year old highschoolers would sound cool. Like constantly saying the word Darkness, calling everything Dark Dark Dark. Its Dark, its So dark, its darker than dark. The darkest around. The darkness inside me, Pitch black darkness, super duper dark. Like yeah, it gets pretty silly sometimes. But it has that endearing campy vibe to it that makes me appreciate it more, its just entertaining. Especially the whole Mafia plot and everyone around you talking in that Mobster accent while your guy is responding to them in a completely different tone. You meet all sorts of interesting characters, and theres even lots of NPC's roaming around the subway that will talk to you if you stand in front of them. Sometimes they even give you side quests to complete, and I did a fair good amount of them. Though, it wasnt obvious what completing the side quests unlock besides maybe some "extra content" like concept artworks, it was still fun to see what all the different characters had to offer. Like that one mini-quest where the old lady throws some coins on the railroad tracks and asks to see if you can get them back before getting killed.

Of course the game centers around 'The Darkness' which is like this evil entity that resides within you, almost enslaving you to do its bidding. It makes the game feel like this schizophrenic nightmare where the voices in your head are lying to you or misleading you, but your character is also sane enough to recognize it, so the game is constantly fucking with you saying "Wrong way, jackie!" or "Dont do that..." but its what you're supposed to do, making it this interesting dilemma like: Do I trust the voices in my head? Or are they messing with me!

The Darkness gives you special powers, though once again the mechanics for them arent made very clear. You press a button to bring out these snake demons from your sides, and they help to illuminate the enviornment and highlight different objects and enemies, also they have special abilities that you slowly unlock, but sadly I never found most of them all that useful. Usually they are mandatory for progression but other than that they dont really add to the gameplay. At first you have this crawling snake ability used to crawl through some specific vents to unclock doors, then you get this tentacle arm whip/grabbing move you need to move objects sometimes to progress, then you unlock Darkness Guns which are these guns with infinite ammo, but only when youre sufficiently standing in the darkness (?) something that , once again, I didnt realize for a long time. Lastly you get this black hole ability that I guess seemed cool at first, But I never ended up using it much. Additionally, each enemy you kill you can walk up to and press A to 'Devour heart' - Now, it's not clear exactly what this does either. When you consume every so many, it says "Darkness Powers Upgraded" ...but again, I never really knew what that does either! A lot of the mechanics are sort of nebulous and left myself wondering what the hell anything does, even halfway into the game. Still, it was satisfying as the animations and the general level of polish on everything is fun to engage with.

The game has a wide variety of scenarios and events it puts you through, it is an eventful game, never feels that boring except the times when I was running in circles wondering what to do. One moment youre inside your girlfriend Jenny's apartment, hanging out with her on the couch, then the next youre having these nightmarish delusions(?) of World War 1 surrounded by guys with sewn up faces fighting in the trenches, the game has a lot of mature themes and dark grit to it like theres multiple instances of Suicide, from both the main character and even in the trenches theres a "Suicide corner" where you see a soldier blow his own head off. Theres parts where you have wounded soldiers laying in beds with all their limbs blown off begging for nurses, the game is grim. Then the next moment youre back in 'reality' shooting your way through slaughterhouses, or going through a drug den to steal some briefcase off a mob boss, another time you're breaking into some ship to murder everyone and the captain. There's never really a dull moment, the pacing is pretty great, and I even do appreciate the moments of down time in between the subway stations looking for directions, checking maps, using the Payphone to listen to the silly optional collectable dialogues.

The narrative is engaging enough where it keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time, at first you were just trying to avoid getting killed by this mob boss Paulie, but then you watch him murder your girlfriend right in front of eyes, then youre on this hell-bent rampage to get back at him. When you finally do, the game ends. Wraps it up nicely.

The atmosphere is immersive the whole time, the whole thing has this aura of metalhead schoolkid about it. There are tv's around the world you can turn on and watch random stations,some of them blasting death metal. The soundtrack is a mix of metal and ambient stuff.

The only place where the game is a bit rough around the edges is I would say some of the direction and objectives, there are some places where the way to progress is really cryptic and obscure like this one part where you get locked in a room with exploding bombs all around you and it turns out you have to shoot this lock on a gate in some pitch black corner, that part really pissed me off and took awhile to figure out. The path forward isnt always obvious and it can make for some tedious or frustrating moments. Also like I said previously, the mechanics could of been explained better either through some short tutorials or these missions that introduce them to you, but the game kinda just throws them at you with no introduction really.

I have faint memories of Darkness 2 but I can see why people say it got a lot of things wrong. The tone was just way off, this first game is much more grim and mature but also has a great entertaining cheesy/campy vibe to it.  I mostly had a blast playing through it, and especially have lots of praise for the presentation and overall graphics, physics, and fun impactful combat and even the enemy AI was pretty impressive. I also really liked how the whole game you're just fighting humans, believe it or not. Usually when games put in these dark fantasy elements you start fighting goblins or monsters and shit, but its a nice change of pace for once for you to be the weird demon possessed guy while still fighting ordinary people.

8/10

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

 

Lately i've been interested in playing just about any ARPG I can come across. Looking for another one to play I remembered I had this Van Helsing game tucked away in my Steam library for many years that I forgot about. I never really knew anything about the game other than its a Diablolike in some Van Helsing universe. I might have given it a chance 10 years ago and played for 2 hours and then uninstalled, so I guess at the time I wasnt that into it  - but the great thing about games like this is they almost always feature full campaign co-op modes, so its a great genre to play through with a friend. That's the main reason I was interested and returned to it.

The game has 3 classes/characers to choose from, I cant remember what theyre called but I just picked the basic sword guy. Then, you have to go to the server browser and find your friends game to join them and you can start playing co-op from the beginning of the game. The first impression is pretty mild, the graphics arent great at first glance especially the aliasing and jaggies , so the overall presentation leaves much to be desired. Although the UI, hud, inventory looks good and is a faithful recreation of the Diablo formula. The inventory uses the same grid based items having different sizes depending on type, which is nice, because some shitty ARPGs just make all the loot the same size square which makes it feel like a bad MMO or something.

As you go through the first bit of the game it introduces some unique mechanics to you. For starters they tried to make the combat here I guess more involved than other ARPGs because on the skill tree you have your primary attack skills, but then above those you can choose to get these smaller nodes that make your attack do special things if you press certain buttons. You can press A, S, D or a combination of them to do different minor 'combo' abilities for each main attack. The added buffs were things like life steal, bleed, or just 50% damage. I didn't really enjoy the concept of having to juggle pressing A,S,D, plus Q for health and 1 for health too, so the whole game I just made a conscious choice to use the D 50% more damage exclusively to keep things simple, although I do find it neat how there is the ability to do involved combos if you so desire.

The RPG mechanics and skills here are fairly in depth but it allows to keep it simple if you want.For starters, its different in that it has firearms. You can use hunting rifles, pistols, shotguns, the kind of 18th century victorian weaponry. In the skill tree menu you have multiple tabs you can flip through which lets you specialize into different things. It was like, one tree for melee, one tree for ranged, one for Passive buffs (Auras) and one for special abilities called Tricks. For the most part, I like to keep arpgs simple and be the generic Warrior sword guy, so I just stuck to the Melee tree and tried to get as much AOE as possible because it was obvious most of the game youre going to be fighting swarms of enemies instead of one by one. So I went with this Cleave skill. Eventually I was having annoying mana problems so I had to max out this passive ability that gives me mana on hit which helped quite a bit, plus its nice you can get a Mana on hit stat as well.

The itemization is fairly decent, theres all sorts of different unique affixes and stats that can roll on gear, making sorting through pickups an interesting process. However, the game does simplfiy things a lot if you want to. It shows you red minus and green pluses on every piece of gear instantly letting you know whats a downgrade or upgrade, while this doesnt indicate everything about the item as being nesseasrily more useful or not, its a great rule of thumb. You can even quickly go to the character sheet to see your overall DPS simplified and simply equip any gear that increases this number, although you have to be concerned about your defenses still. I thought the itemization was fairly well done for a casual jump in and play with your buddy type experience, as for any End game stuff I don't know if it would work out to be a satisfying experience there, the loot may feel trivial once you get to the upper eschelon of gameplay, but who is doing that for Van Helsing? probably no one.

The loot follows the typical standard of White (normal), blue(magic), yellow(rare), then unique, which is great. You can simply jump in and play this and be familliar with how everything works if youve played another ARPG before, it doesnt try to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you just want more of a good thing. I dont really like when ARPGs try to reinvent the wheel, unless its really good and innovative. Not just different for the sake of being different.

The game has 3 acts, but its not really clear when you've reached the next one, or the differences between them. Thematically the whole game kind of follows a similar feeling. Its a lot of roaming around open field forested grassy knoll places, here and there you can get warped into these optional floating earthy rock places that are cool, and towards the second half of the game you get sent to this Secret Lair type hub base that has a bit of change of theme but the locations arent all that interesting. Though the use of colors does stand out, theres a lot of dynamic vibrant uses of colors like the game has a lot of blues and greens purples in the lighting which makes everything pop on screen.

The music in particular is fairly damn good, surprisingly. Especially the main theme that plays in Secret Lair and overall the whole soundtrack is captivating and sounds magical. The game does have this neo-gothic victorian overtone and theme to it which is really nice to see in an RPG its a great setting, although some of the aesthetics of the armors and characters isnt quite to my taste. I would prefer the characters wear more chainmail or plate armor or something instead of like, tophats and capes but it is what it is. The equipment you put on doesnt really feel that visually impactful and doesnt change how you look that much beyond a slightly different sword appearance and hat.

For some reason the game only has Swords. Theres no axes, spears, pikes, halberds, maces, hammers etc.. Just double swords, and a "2 hand sword" that for some stupid reason you still swing with one hand. That was pretty disappointing. But still, it was fun and exciting finding constant upgrades for my weapons.

The monsters and especially death animations and variety was a highlight, lots of wearwolves and beasts, vampiric enemies, mythical magical type creatures, zombies etc. But especially when you kill them every death feels like an 'event'. Sometimes even chunks of gore fly all around the screen which is especially satisfying.

The general combat is basically just hold mouse1 while your guy auto attacks, then you constantly spam health potions or your healing ability - but the catch is they are on a significant cooldown of like 30 seconds. So it becomes this juggle of trying to heal more damage than youre recieving while dancing around the cooldowns. For the most part it works and is satisfactory, but I cant help but feel its a kind of awkward clunky workaround to the problem in the first place of having too spongy enemies. I dont think we fucked up our characters too much but nearly every group of enemy was a giant sponge that took 30+ seconds to kill which at times really brought the whole combat down to a slog kinda.

Some of the worst downsides is the game is how it seems like it uses Monster level scaling. So its like, all the monsters in the world level up along side you invisibly. You cant ever see the monster level. If you get really high level, and go back to the beginning of the game, the monsters will still be almost as strong as you and be tanky still. That just feels bad in ARPG's. I wish devs would never do this. I want to build a refined strong character that can obliterate earlier mobs, but this system defeats that. It almost makes leveling up feel pointless. Why bother when the enemy is just going to level up and be just as strong anyway? Its like if you just speedran through the game at level 1 it would be just as hard or even easier. I could be wrong about all this, but thats just how the whole system felt to me. I never really felt a significant power increase in my character, as soon as I felt like I was getting stronger, the enemies would equalize a moment later.

The other bad problem is the entire quest system and quest direction. Its almost impossible to tell where a quest is or what quest youre even doing. Theres almost no direction or the direction thats here is either a broken buggy mess or just confusing as shit. The map will tell you where some objectives are, but not all. And even if you deselect quests to track, they still show up on the map. Often times it will tell you to go to a certain place, but not even tell you what place its connected to so you end up just running through almost the whole game again looking for it. Its fine, we pretty much did every side quest anyway because we were enjoying the game so much, but still the whole quest system could of been handled better.

Its a relatively short ARPG too, only 3 acts and act 3 is really short. Act 1 the hub world is some cozy village, act 2 its a secret underground lair. I especially appreciate how easy it is to respec your character, just a couple thousand gold which is in abundance, so it makes experimentation fun and viable, something ARPGs need.

Oh yeah, the game is really buggy, too. Frequent crashes, things not working properly, quests not showing up, achievements not unlocking, so that really started to grate on me. The game does have really satisfying achievements, something I dont usually mention in reviews but every 5 minutes they'll be popping up and its fun to hunt them down.

The ending of the game was pretty lame and disappointing, last boss was just a giant mech with this evil villian guy with wacky voice acting you just go around destroying these machines then kill him. He glitched out and just stood there for 10 mins doing nothing then the game randomly ended with a brief cliffhanger cutscene.

Overall I'm surprised how much I liked it, i thought the game would be trash which is why I ignored it for so many years in my library, but at least for a co-op playthrough its a pretty good time, I think the game being fairly easy to comprehend and understand plays a big part in that, but it also has enough depth to sink your teeth into its various systems if you really want to. It's also quite eventful, in comparison to other ARPGS (cough, Titan Quest) every 15 minutes or so youll be seeing some cutscene or fighting some big boss or seeing some new enemy or interesting point of interest, so we could play this game for hours on end and not get bored unlike playing Titan Quest for 2 hours and feeling real bored. So yeah, the games pretty fun, but not without its flaws.

7/10