Watch Dogs 2

 

I had finished Watch Dogs 1 a few years ago, and most of all I liked the concept of a Grand Theft Auto style game with a twist: being a covert hacker using gadgets and smartphones in the modern age messing with people. The first game is a fairly standard open world GTA clone, you played as this sort of edgy guy that wears baseball caps and trenchcoats, using your phone to hack almost anything electronic. I didn't think it was like an amazing game, but it was tolerable enough and had fun moments and a good premise. I had no idea what to expect with Watch Dogs 2, I just had my eye on it for a few years, and waited until the price was right to pick it up for cheap.

Watch Dogs 2 has you playing the part of Marcus a young, hipstery college type black man who soon meets up with the rest of the jolly band of hacktivists in the game. Before long you'll be watching these corny, forced wholesome cutscenes of this band of friends drinking beers on the beach and hanging out, talking about their plans to take down the big bad government tech overlords. And frankly none of the characters are appealing or resepctable, the whole tone of the game has this air of overbearing friendliness and almost like toxic niceness. The narrative also feels like its trying hard to push some political agenda, trying its damndest to send this message about how great diversity is, which sure can be fine, but its so forced here it feels like the only purpose the characters and dialogue serves is to further this agenda.
Though, I must admit, the cutscenes and dialogue is sort of entertaining to watch, in a like bad B-movie kind of way, it is almost 'comfy' to keep going back to your hacker base and seeing all your friends standing around hanging out and watching the cutscenes of whats new that day, its a predicable yet entertaining setup. The games progressive politics are just cringe inducing at many turns, though. Frequently you'll have these narratives how the black guys need to band together because "blacks are brothers" , and even at one point saying "Cracker" as a racial slur, I thought that was odd, like why are racial slurs suddenly acceptable when its against a specific race? The game plasters pride flags all over the place, the game has the narrative of government evil, capitalism evil, etc. I wouldn't care about any of this if it was weaved well into a unique story, but instead it feels like everything in the game is first and foremost to serve Ubisofts political agenda, rather than making a game with its own in-universe politics. I'm not really a big politics person, or do I care, but its clear to see when a games developers forcefully inserts their own values into the entire narrative, and its embarrasing that thats most of what the plot is here.

The narrative cutscenes and visual style of the game also has its own distinct hacker artstyle, with all these graffiti, internet memes, and programmer symbols all over the place, which helps to give the game more identity. Cutscenes and narrative feels like its trying to be the 4Chan "We are anonymous. We do not forget. We do not forgive" kind of thing. With these psuedo threatening messages and hacker propaganda cutscenes that play. Its fun to watch, but it is really lame, but its fun in a more way of wondering what kinds of things the developers will steal from current day social media to put into their game.

The game, like the first one, is a standard open world GTA clone, the twist is that you also use your cellphone and hacker abilities to interfere with anything electronic. You hold a button to ready for phone, and theres an icon on anything interatable which lets you then popup a phone menu to pick an option to mess with the object in various ways. Usually this is stuff like open door, hack to obtain a password or key, disable alarm, steal money from someones phone, or more entertaining stuff like place a fake police bounty on someone,  blow up water pumps around town, stop traffic lights, take control of cameras and remote vehicles, read peoples text messages, and so on. Though, frankly, I never found many of these hacker abilties useful or even fun. More than anything I was annoyed by the menu for them and how it only shows a tiny icon , but no text saying what it does. So it took awhile to even figure out what all the icons corresponded to, and additionally the controls for it is just clunky as hell and not fun to interact with. Its sad how the whole game is centered around the hacker abilities but I just didnt really use them that much, outside of mandatory mission moments. Even the multiple skill trees I found completely unappealing and boring. None of the skills looked fun or interesting to me. Theres like 8 skill trees and its just stuff like ,Vehicle hacking, Remote control RC toys, Botnet power (basically energy), Weapon skilltree, Social control abilities, and a few others. Even the weapon tree seems like it would be useful, but theres barely anything in it, just a few upgrades for reloading assault rifles faster, stungun abilities, and not much else. Even then half of your skilltrees are locked behind optional pickups that you have to pickup around the world, so I just didnt even bother that much. I did upgrade all the stuff I could, but at a certain point all of it was so boring to me I just blinded upgrade whatever to spend my points and didnt even care to look at what I was getting.

The basic mission structure of the game is actually kinda confusing at first. You have this phone menu, where it pulls up a little miniture phone screen on the bottom right of your screen, and you have to navigate around this shitty little phone interface of a bunch of different apps to find what might help you progress. Theres an app which I guess is dedicated to main story progress called DedSec app, but I never used it much. Instead, theres an additional menu for the map screen. So you look at the map screen, and just find "Main Operation" and try to do all those. On the map theres all sorts of other icons, Side Activities, Online Activities, random little coffee shops and clothing stores, but I didn't care for any of the optional stuff, as (spoiler) I wasn't really enjoying the main game that much, why would I do the optional stuff? I did go into a few clothing stores to buy some clothes to make my character look as stupid as possible, to aptly suit the stupid narrative of the game, I couldnt seriously immerse myself as this main character, so instead I made him look as dumb as possible. Once I selected "Main operation" from the map screen, you cant fast travel to the mission directly. You can however, fast travel to shops and locations nearby, for whatever reason, even without ever going there first. So I just select a Main operation, then find the closest fast travel point, then start the mission. This usually is a fast process thankfully, so going mission to mission is quite seamless unlike other open world games that force you to drive around for minutes at a time until you get to then next mission.

Well how are the main operations then?  sadly, not very fun. Almost every mission in the game is basically a stealth mission. I mean the intended, main route is to sneak around, use your hacker abilities to usually hack cameras and float around in these camera views for 5 minutes hacking things to get passwords and open doors, which is extremely boring and just visually annoying to deal with. Then once you get the passwords or open doors from the camera views, you need to sneak around past all the enemies, usually going inside some facility or base , find the main target, usually some computer or device, and plant a hack on it or pick something up, then leave. Thats the basic structure for most of the missions in the game. If you get detected or caught, the mission is usually fucked, because the enemies have this abiltiy where they can infinitely call in reinforcements and spawn waves at you, plus the cops show up which is more infinite respawning enemies. Ontop of this, the game loves to use this shitty puzzle mechanic where you have a grid of these lines and you have to turn these pipes to match the lines up. Its like a bad iPhone minigame you would play on the toilet or something , but no, in Watch Dogs 2 its one of the main mechanics. This is the best kind of hacker mini-game they could come up with? This thing is so boring, so tedious, so annoying, every single time they made me do it, I let out a sigh or groaned in annoyance. Sometimes they even make it a timer to add to the boredom and frustration. This minigame just sucked, most of the gameplay honestly just sucks. And you know what? I was so bored most of the time doing the almost mandatory stealth route that I just said fuck it, and frequently I would just go in guns blazing shooting everything. This did work most of the time, for multiple reasons: One, you have an ability where you click a button and your screen turns into this See-through walls hackerview. Its ugly as sin, it makes the game an eyesore, but you get to see enemies through walls easily. So for most of the damn gameplay I would be in this shitty view, making the game look awful. The combat uses a generic cover based system, where you press a button to snap to cover. Sadly the control are terrible and more often than not I would snap to some random object nearby rathr than the piece of cover I was intending to go behind. You also cant blindfire, so its a very limited cover system. You die in like 3 bullets, and sometimes checkpoints arent very forgiving making you replay the whole mission from the start. To further add to annoyance, later on in the game you start coming across enemies that wear hulking suits of body armor that are just massive bullet sponges that are near impossible to kill, further emphesizing that they do not want you to play non-stealth routes. Still, the majority of the time I carried on doing non-stealth, just because Its a style of gameplay I prefer, and the stealth in this game is stupid and boring. For one thing, even if you try to be quiet and do the melee takedowns to put down the enemies, you usually get punished for it because AI almost instantly hears you or spots you, or spots the dead body. Secondly, if you use the stun gun, same thing. So you dont even have any option to really stealth takedown the enemies, its futile, you'll get spotted. You need to just painstakingly sneak past everyone and after 10 mins of sneaking around you get caught, and you might as well just let them kill you and start over. So yeah I usally said fuck the stealth and just tried to kill them as soon as possible before they call reinforcements, using that stupid see through walls hackervision ability.

The shooting is standard fare. Theres all sorts of different guns you can obtain, even at the main hacker base headquarters theres a 3d Gun printer where you can get specific DedSec guns, but they're all super expensive so I never bothered to get one. I just used the basic 'Goblin' Assault rifle the entire game. No joke. I tried using other guns, Shotguns, snipers, random guns off the ground. They were all terrible. This assault rifle did the job and took down all the enemies easily wherever I was, why bother with anything else. So it made the combat even more boring and trivial. Basically my whole strategy for every mission is to just hide behind some piece of cover where they cant get behind me, and bait them all to me one by one, then once they're all dead progess to the objective. The missions arent that varied in scope and location, at least half of them are just what I described. Infiltrate some building, plant a hack or pickup some object, then leave, usually on the way out alarms are going off and reinforcements are called in. Some notable locations include infiltrating the Nudle headquarters, a clear Google joke, infiltrating the Invite headquarters, a clear Facebook joke, infiltrating some government buildings, infiltrating the FBI, and I can't really remember more off the top of my head.

The controls in this game are basically just awful. Nothing feels good or fluid. The movement is janky and weird, you can hold a button do to this sort of psuedo parkour movement where you instantly jump over anything almost like Assassin's Creed style, but this thing is shitty too. Sometimes he'll be doing backflips over boxes when you want to just climb up on it. The phone controls suck and are clunky to use, frequently I'll accidentally use my phone on some random thing in the enviornment instead of what I wanted to use it on. The combat control are terrible, you have to hold Dpad UP to open the weapon wheel, and if you dare press Dpad left or right you're totally fucked, you throw some RC toy instead of switching guns like you would probably expect. This screwed me over multiple times. The driving even sucks, some of the weirdest driving I've seen in an open world game. The cars all have this floaty, slippery feeling to them that feels worse than silly arcade racing it just feels broken sometimes. Like driving offroad your car bounces around like its in a bouncy castle, its just awful. The physics are crap. The cars radio stations arent much to talk about either, no really standout songs or stations, maybe one song here and there is mildly familliar or entertaining but it has no heavy hitters like other open world game radio's have. Even basic controls like picking up some object off a table is clunky as hell, he takes ages to pick it up, like that time when you have to retrieve the mask, I guess because the devs dont want you to just run in and grab the object instantly and leave, but it feels artificial and terrible the way they've done it. Just frustrating gameplay and controls all around.

The whole game feels like a bad stealth puzzle game. Trial and error bullshit, like having to fail the first few times to see what the intended stealth route is supposed to be. Theres hardly any racing missions, and the few that are here are basically just escape from the cops, which also has its annoyances. Overuse of helicoptors making it a tedious chore to get away from the cops, it uses the modern GTA 4 police system where you have to get outside the cops bubble on the radar and hide for long enough to "Vanish". The over reliance on these shitty little puzzle 'hacking' minigames, the bad controls, the cringy characters, dialogue, forced identity politics narrative, doesn't make for a very appealing package. Towards the end of the game I was honestly pretty pained trying to reach the end. Lots of times I would be failing checkpoints over and over because of the shitty stealth or dying almost instantly because you have such low health engaging in headon combat is almost not-viable, but still it was more fun than slogging through another dull 20 minute stealth section going through all these awful remote control camera segments. Towards the end of the game you go on these missions to take down this big bad evil corporate guy in a manbun, you break into his main headquarters and blow up his mainframes or something, another terrible, big stealth section, tons of guards with bulletsponge body armor, then end cutscene he gets arrested and everyone rejoices and drinks beer together (again) and everyone is happy hacker wholesome frienderinos. I was really expecting someone on your team to betray you or be working for the enemy, but nope, no plot twist. Just pretty much dull the whole way.

I remember liking the first game a fair bit, I don't think it has many of the problems that this game has, though its been awhile so its not super clear to me. But I really didn't enjoy my time with Wactch Dogs 2, and was just relieved when the end credits rolled

4/10

Deathloop

 

I picked up Deathloop only knowing barely much about it, basically just the front cover. It wasnt until a few hours into the game that I even realized its by the same devs as Dishonoured. So, I really didn't have any expectations going into the game at all.

The game starts up quickly, without any difficulty selection, or much of a lengthy intro. You do get presented with two game modes: Break the Loop (the main story) , and Protect the Loop , which is locked until after you finish the story. Turns out this is basically just an online PVP mode. Upon getting into the campaign, within the first 60 seconds you're already playing, which is great, no waiting around for big expositions. You wake up on the beach, having total amnesia not even knowing your name or where you are. This is the core component of the games narrative. The game isn't really cutscene driven, moreso its just heavy, constant dialogue chatting through your ear via radio. Juliana, the mysterious person taunting you through the radio, is your adversary that apparently keeps killing you over and over. The games name, "Deathloop"  is constantly reminded to the player, and is taken literally.

Deathloop is a First person shooter, but also with the typical modern day RPG-lite mechanics and 'loot'. You have loadouts, perks, attachments, and theres even different tiers of weapons and powers which indicate their effectiveness, this is whats told to you during the introductions of the game. The game progresses slowly at first, having a lengthy sort of tutorial section before it lets you off on your own. You get taken on a few short missions around the games different locations, introducing you to the enemies, which look like these humanoid things wearing masks or unemotional faces, having weird colors, and generally looking a bit like delusions or something, in a way the enemies are kind of cool looking, but also feeds back into that comic book style that almost reminds me of Fortnight vibe. Here the game also introduces you to the stealth mechanics. Since the game is by this Dishonoured devs, its obvious that they want to encourage stealth, there are messages warning you not to be loud, "maybe not here", to go different routes, etc. Well, I don't really like stealth games. So I didn't play this game like a stealth game. I played it like an FPS.  There are messages constantly written all over the walls or floating in the environment, almost like a schizophrenic hallucination, giving you clues and more details. You get a machete melee weapon, that is quite effective in taking down enemies in just 2 slashes, the second slash does an animation which kills them. You get introduced to the basic combat, a standard modern FPS gameplay with ironsights, hit markers, enemy markers for how spotted you are, alarms can go off, machine gun turrets which can spot you, and sensors around town which also set off alarms and lock doors. You get this hacking device that you can hold in your left hand to disable turrets, alarms, open doors, etc. You can also dual wield in your left hand, but I never used it as I felt it was too clunky because the controls are not that great in this game, there are too many actions and it can be cumbersome and awkward to fumble around with everything on the spot. This became much of an issue throughout the whole game, fighting with the controls and doing actions I didn't mean to do (I played with a controller, maybe you can blame me for that, but I would imagine thats how most people experienced this game.) After a short prologue where you run through a tunnel and find a password to unlock a door, the game opens up with all these menu's that you navigate through after each "day". At first this was a lot to take in, and felt needlessly bloated, but I reserved judgement and just tried to slowly wrap my head around it.


And it doesnt take long to see what kind of tone and narrative this game is going for. It's a sort of whimsical, cartoonish, campy, in your face obnoxious narrative that just seems like its trying to push an agenda. Like this Juliana characters whole motivation for existing in the game is like the developers pushing some political idea like "See guys? Women can be badass and individuals too, they're strong and individualistic, they don't take no shit from men! Look how much shes dominating Cole, look how shes totally in control! Women are strong and awesome!"  I have absolutely nothing against strong female characters, or anything like that. But here it just felt forced, and token. Like its not like this because its an actual great narrative, but because it serves some moral or political agenda. And besides that, just the whole tone of the presentation is not one that I really vibe with. At times the whole thing gave me Fortnight or Borderlands vibes... It's that same sort of overly stylized, almost childish, comic book quirky thing going on, and the writing is , dare I say "Peak redditor" ..take that how you will.


Basically after each outing, you come back to these mission lobby screen where you can select your loadout, and select which of the 4 games locations to visit next. You have "Visionary leads" page, which it turns out is the main missions page. Then you have "Arsenal leads" page which is side-content to unlock new weapons and gear, which I never really paid attention to because you end up doing a bunch of these accidentally anyway. Now, the thing is some of the 'objectives' are only available at certain times in the day, Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Evening. This is controlled with a little button on the left side of the screen, if you want. So if a mission says it starts at Noon, you better set the dial to Noon or else if you enter the location you wont be able to progress the mission and you'll just be wasting your time.
Unfortunately the game does a poor job staying coherent with many of these small details, much in part of the general interface and mission tracking system being an incoherent mess, as well as many of its mechanics. Quite often I would find myself trying to track a mission, enter a location, and there being multiple 'main objectives' in the list, but really only the top one progresses the campaign, and the others are like temporary things you can do to farm equipment and even if you successfully do it and, for example, kill the person you are tracking, the mission will just reset anyway and you wont gain any progress. This is because, in true to the games name, everytime a 'day' ends (so after one loop of Morning, Noon, Afternoon, evening)  you get taken back to the Morning, and lose all your equipment. Progress is saved, in the mandatory main plotline, but the optional things just get reset for the most part. This was very confusing to figure out for maybe the first half of the game I was very frustrated and feeling like I was most of the time running around making no progress or having no damn clue what to do. I would be losing all my equipment after every so often, running around being surrounded by enemies without much of a chance to do anything, and kinda clueless how to progress.

Eventually I wrapped my head around the games "Infusion" mechanic, which believe it or not is like, once again, a Dark Souls inspired thing. It's basically souls, and at the end of every day you lose all your souls. And if you die you lose your 'souls' and drop a 'bloodstain' and you can go pick it back up to get your souls back. (I Actually forget what the name for it in this game was, but its blatantly just ripping off Souls mechanics.) This is further proven by the insipidly stupid Invasion system. Not only does the game try to cash in , and appeal to the Souls trend at the time with the bloodstains and Souls system, it also has real PVP invasions that can randomly happen. Enemy players can play as Juliana, and randomly invade other players worlds to hunt them down and ruin their fun. Now, you get an option to just disable this feature. And at first I thought "You know what, I'm not gonna disable it, lets just see what they were going for here." Yeah, didn't take long for me to change my mind. I would be trying to go about the missions, complete my objectives, and I'd get 75% through a mission, then all of a sudden some pro PVP guy with crazy gear would show up in my world, lock the escape, and randomly pop around a corner and shit all over me , ruining 30 mins of progress. After this happened a few times, I just disabled the whole invasion mechanic. Like, why wouldn't I? It works in Souls games, it doesn't work here. Whats the point? For the thrill? I don't care, I just want to progress the game. It's a stupid system and only seems like they put it in to again, cash in on some trend. "Hey guys, you know that famous game thats doing really well? Guess what, we have those mechanics too! You'll love it!"


Eventually the game opens up a bit, and reveals that there are 8 'visionaries' that must be killed in order to finish the game. The dedicated screen for this, Visionaries Tracking, is like a bunch of detective files where you can choose which of the 8 main files to track at any time. Now, it doesn't really seem like theres any sort of intended progression route or structure. You just pick one of them at any time, like the game is almost absent of any pacing, I didn't really like it and found it confusing and annoying. At first I think you only have access to 5 of the Visionary case files, but as it progresses you unlck the last 3. The game started off to look like it was maybe promising, the FPS mechanics are there, OK it has all sorts of loot systems and attachments, perks, stuff to collect, it has this quirky Loop mechanic with the days and time shifting, it has this almost open-world sandbox mission structure...but the illusion of a possibly fun game was quickly shattered the more I played. The missions just suck, and most of the time spent feels like you're doing next to nothing, the feeling of progress is just terrible in this game. Many missions consist of just spawning into some location, running past the generic open world enemies to some building, going inside a building and looking for a piece of paper, or a computer, or some radio which gives you a line of dialogue and then thats it, Mission complete. Go to the exit to progress the next quest. After you exit each location, it gives you a summary screen of what you've accomplished. And the confusing part is most of the time it will just say shit like "Just wasting time"  , even though you've progressed a main plot point. It makes it seem like you're not doing anything productive, even though you are. The game is so confusing with shitty presentation like this, its frustrating cause I wasn't sure if I was doing anything right, but eventually I understood what was required of me, its just stupid the whole presentation and UI of the game is such an incoherent mess.

So back to the missions, I pick one Visionary (main quest) to focus on, and go to the places it tells me, pass the time until the right objective opens up, and go in. The game gives you this double jump ability at the start, which is extremely broken and OP. You just double jump past the entire map, past all the enemies, it almost trivializes combat. I realized this a few hours into the game, but before that it was pretty fucking annoying trying to navigate past the random trash open world sandbox mobs to get to the objective. Once I realized I can just double jump past most of them, I was making more steady progress. So most of the time you just go in, double jump past everyone, go to some house and grab a piece of paper which progresses the main quest because you unlock some password, code, you find some plot point or whatever, have to exit,  then have to go back in for the next mission. It doesnt help that the game has tons of loading screens in between, the pacing of this game is just annoying. Way too many loading screens and bloated interfaces.

The way death works here is that you essentially get 3 lives. When you die, you leave a 'bloodstain' on the groudn to go back to collect your souls, and you spawn nearby. If you die 3 times, the entire day resets, you wake back up on the beach, lose all your guns that havn't been locked in with Imbuing, and you can also frequently lose lots of progress including entire missions you've already completed. Thats right, there are some missions in the game that you can complete, and if you die 3 times, well the time in the world goes back to such a state to where the mission hasn't been completed. This was really, really fucking annoying at times. It's not so much that I hate the death penalty, its that theres so many loading screens and downtime in between, and having to re-do things I've already completed is just the straw that broke the camels back here.

So, the aim of the game is to kill each of the 8 visionaries, but many of them I completled without barely noticing how. Like for instance, one guy you just go into some field and place down a radio, and suddenly the visionary is complete? Like it gives you these shitty, cheap looking comic book slideshow cutscenes of you completing the mission. I barely noticed I was at the end of some of them. Another one, Frank, you do some shit with his fireworks by interacting with some computer, and then you get another one of these cheap little comic book cutscenes. Ok? For main bosses, many of them are disappointing and barely noticeable. For others, you do get to break into their bases, fight through hordes of enemies, and actually face to face battle with them. These can be exciting, you get into these boss battles and once you kill them, they explode into all sorts of loot, special high tier colored weapons, perks, trinkets, abilities, etc.

Though, many of the visionary missions are just shitty. Like there is this one mission that you stick your arm into some device which disables your 3 lives. Now you only have one life. You have to do this whole mission and facility with 1 life. Now, this wasnt even obvious at the time, and I would die once, and then wonder why the fuck I was waking back up on the beach with the day over cutscene. Game did a terrible job explaining its self what was happening here. This place is some big casino type complex full of turrets that gun you down in a moments notice. As I said before, the controls can be cumbersome and shitty. You have to use this hacking device in your left hand to disable the turrets, but its weird how it works. You have to kind of "lock on" to the turret, then you can keep hacking behind cover. Frequently I would try to hack the turret but the controls would screw me up and it would start gunning me down, me thinking I had successfully hacked it. Or I would be far away on the other side of the map, and the turret would start shooting me anyway. More shitty missions include forced stealth sections. Now these were just downright awful. Many, many failed attempts, loading screen after loading screen, moving the clock forwards each time. Takes like 5 minutes to even get back to the stealth section, and then if you crawl in one wrong spot, move to one of the 99 out of 100 wrong places its just instant failure. Terrible. Massive time waste. Don't give me forced stealth missions ,or if you do, make them not so fucking annoying and tedious. These included this terrible mission about some mansion party where you have to somehow know to crawl into the basement and turn off some beer supply, then assassinate the guy, or you have to do this insanely stupid shit upstairs with a music box machine. I couldn't figure any of it out. I had to Google it after wasting too much time failing over and over. Just shite. Theres another terrible forced stealth mission later on in the game at some nuclear facility place. If you get spotted, you get like 60 seconds before the entire island blowns up with a nuke and it resets the entire day, just one life here as well. Any progress or missions youve done when this happens on that day get reset as well. This was extremely frustrating. Like punching couch in anger stuff. Eventually I realized you can just speedrun to the nuke and disable it by cutting the wires properly ,but yeah I had to Google it as well. Not wasting any more time on this shitty game.

Like the missions are just not good. Like I keep saying, most of the time all youre doing is entering some open sandbox map, double jumping past all the openworld trash mobs, running into some building to find a fucking piece of paper just to be told to exit and start again for the next objective. Its so tedious. One of these missions didn't even give me an objective marker. It was just like "Go to Fristad and explore the shore"  What? I just walked around this god damn map for like 1 hour finding nothing. Theres a tiny little photograph in the menu showing two people standing by the shore, I couldn't understand what the hell it wanted me to do. Well I had to Googl this too, the game is just a massive time waste of annoying, shitty objectives. Well it turns out in the tiny photograph, you can just barely see an airplane in the water. In the photo, it just looks like a rock, because its so tiny. So it tries to give you a hint to find some airplane in the water by a shore. Well I didn't , or couldn't notice, and I looked it up. You just have to find some bunker by the shore to go pickup some note to progress the mission. Just more time wasting bullshit. One of the missions is in this like toxic plant where the bottom floor has this green gas that you cant touch. I would sometimes fall into this pit accidentally, fumbling with the controls, trying to get to the boss.


Theres this other main Visionary mission called "Space Invader" where you go invade some like big arcade base and get to the top only to find a super computer that talks to you. He wants some talking head doll thing, so I just double jump through the open world, collect it nearby, run back and give it to him. Visionary complete. Ok then? this one wasnt anything amazing, kind of just a typical FPS mission. It was OK.

The games audio is mostly obnoxiously bad. There is almost nonstop, annoying chatter going on in your ear from all sorts of radios, often times multiple at once. It gives me Borderlands vibes frequently , which is not good. Sometimes you'll be listening to the Juliana talking in your ear, then some optional voice memo, and then also some other person, and then also all the NPC's on the street yelling. Its a clusterfuck. The music is also nonstop blaring this shitty 1960s like Austin Powers whimsical spy music, its just dreadful, and is nonstop. Its a cacophony of obnoxious bullshit.

The guns in the game, the combat? The guns are mostly not that fun. You have this single shot rifle that basically one hits any enemy in the game, I used that the whole time. You also have SMG machine gun, shotguns, multiple different pistols, this big clunky machine gun, and this other smaller machine gun. Well, the entire game I basically just used this single shot rifle, and for the beginning of the game I used these pistols but the recoil was shit and they were not very good. Once I got a blue tier single shot rifle, and also killed a Visionary which had this crazy good purple SMG that "Replenishes life when shooting enemies" thats all I used for the rest of the game. The guns are very mediocre looking and feeling. The attachments system isnt that thrilling either. Just stuff like less recoil, more zoom, more accuracy.. I barely cared. Just faster reload on the single shot was all I needed. Frequently I would use the machete instead of guns, because of the instant takedown ability. The problem is, you are left vulnerable when getting into the takedown animation, so this became frustrating after awhile and I stopped bothering. But in the beginning of the game it was quite effective. The combat wasnt the hard part of the game, as I said, you can just double jump past everything that isn't mandatory anyway, the hard part was trying to figure out what the hell the game requires of you most of the time.


At the start of the game things are pretty damn hard. Your health barely regenerates, maybe like 20% and slowly. Though, not long into the game, maybe 30% or 40% through, I realized the Imbue system and how the items work, and I got perks to massively increase my health regen, maximum health ,decrease my damage taken, that sort of stuff. Once I got this stuff I could actually float around through combat and make my way through the missions without as much trouble, but at the start yeah if you don't look out for upgrades like this its a real pain in the ass. Theres no skill tree or level ups or anything, so all your power comes from these character perks, weapon upgrades, and these things called "Slabs" which give you special unique magical abilities, like the ability to teleport (Very similar to Blink from Dishonoured)  Sadly,  I unlocked this teleport ability early into the game, before understanding how Imbue works, and I died and lost it for basically the rest of the entire playthrough. I'm sure I could of done some optional mission to get it again, but I didn't care enough. And the few other times I had access to these slabs and picked them up, I didnt have enough Souls (what the fuck were they called in this game?)  to Imbue it and keep it, slabs cost 15k to imbue and I just never had enough and lost most of them. But they werent interesting anyway. Stuff like picking up and throwing enemies, or buffing yourself to be "tougher" . I hardly used them at all.

Towards the end of the game theres this mission to go to this power plant and redirect power to different locations around the game. You have to go down in some basement kill a bunch of enemies and put batteries in this generator to power the redirection process. The game does such a shitty job representing the objectives to you that I had to re-do this entire process 3 different times. There are 4 power switches, and after you turn on two generators you have enough power to turn one on. Then the objective marker updates to "Exit" , telling you you're done and can move on. Well, technically, you shouldnt move on. Because if you do now, youre just going to have to come back later once you complete the next objective and need to come back to change the power again. Really you should turn on all the generators now, and turn on all the switches to save yourself the headache of re-doing the entire process multiple times. Well, the game doesnt make this clear. And I annoyingly, painstakingly had to do this stupid generator section 3 or 4 different times. Just tedious, annoying bullshit. Oh yeah, and the battery used to power the generatorcan be randomly exploded too, which was super annoying , forcing you to waste more time going around finding different batteries for it.

The end of the game is super anti-climactic, too. You get in some rocket ship, fly to Juliana, and just walk up and have a chat with her and can choose one of two (?) endings. No epic final boss fight, no big enemy section, no battle at all. The entire game shes shit talking in your ear and is built up to be this formidable foe, yet you dont even get any sort of epic finale. What the fuck? They thought the shitty PVP invasion system was enough to suffice? So lackluster. I guess the big finale was the last mission "Ending it" where you have to kill 7 visionaries in one day, in 3 separate mission loading screen instances. Well thankfully this wasnt hard, but I did fail multiple times because of again, vague stupid objectives. One of the visionaries, Frank again, you have to interact with his computer and select the right option to sabotage his fireworks. I incorrectly picked the wrong option two times (because I fucking forgot which one, or didn't even realize you had to choose the right one) The first time, the computer exploded, so I thought an enemy did it, so I reloaded. The second time, I picked the wrong option. Well both times I picked the wrong option. Finally after I got it right the third time , the rest of the last 7 visionaries mission was easy enough. Just stupid, tedious stuff like this makes the game a chore. The last 'checkpoint'  a bunch of visionaries show up in that aforementioned Mansion, thankfully its not stealth this time. This mansion section is built up to be this big epic invasion assassinate thing. But really all you have to do is stand outside and bait every single NPC outdoors, they just run outside after you. And you can safely camp in a corner, set up multiple turrets, and mow them all down without much threat in like 2 minutes. So thats what I did, took out the few remiaining visionaries, got acess to this Unique yellow colored laser gun thing that  I didn't even get a chance to use because the game ended shortly after. Just very, very disappointing missions all around.

The narrative of the whole game is incoherent gibberish. Time travel interdimensionality schizophrenic nonsense. I lost interest in caring about the plot not long into the game, to be honest. It just all seemed like drivel.

I thought Deathloop would be better than it is. I thought it would just be an enjoyable generic FPS game, but sadly this game tries its hardest to not be generic and thats probably what makes it so shit for me. If this had just a standard formula of progressing mission to mission , without any psuedo-open world gimmicks, without any of this pace-less Visionary shit, I might of liked it more. The pacing of the game is just terrible, the whole thing feels tedious, the UI's and downtime is super annoying, the death mechanics making you sometimes lose progress is infuriating, the "loot" is largely uninteresting and feels shoehorned rather than a genuinely interesting gameplay decision, the tone of the game is just lame, the graphics are not too amazing, its a typical modern game using a modern engine, I mean the lighting, shaders, shadows and stuff are decent enough, but the artstyles and visuals, environments, towns, are not much to look at. Sadly its not even an average game, I flatout just did not like this game and the entire time I was either frowning, annoyed, mad, or disappointed. The only really enjoyment I had out of this was laughing at the stupid dialogue, cringy characters, and maybe some of the combat was momentarily here and there somewhat enjoyable, sniping guys across the map with that one shot rifle, double jumping around, but yeah its few and far between moments of enjoyment from me with this game.

4/10

Control

 

Control is a game developed by Remedy, the famous developers of Max Payne known for their high octane third person shooter action. I had also previously played their other modern game, Quantum Break, and had mixed feelings about that one. But I had heard lots of hype around Control and of course I'll almost always be interested to play anything by this dev so I eventually got it for a cheap price without knowing anything about the game other than it has a female protagonist that uses super powerful abilities like throwing objects with your mind, or something, thats what I gathered from the odd trailer here and there.

There is no difficulty selection, the game just has one difficulty. I found that intriguing at the start.
You play as a female protagonist, known as, actually I don't even know her name. It's played from a standard modern Third Person perspective with controls you would expect. Standard running and jumping, moving around, presing X to interact with the environments, and so on. The game has you starting off going through these sequences of government agency office buildings of a sort, with a really strange and obscure weaving narrative about some leader guy (called the Director) killing himself, and somehow now you're the new leader/director person of this..government agency thing. Then you encounter some monsters known as "The Hiss" , usually they are just standard government soldier looking guys with red eyes and a bit of weird hazy fog around them that attack you on sight, but as the game progresses you encounter more and more monster types with varying levels of unique abilities. For the first bit of the game, you're taking Missions to go throughout this big Government agency complex, of various floors and Sectors. A problem that I was having the whole game is that theres a general lack of direction, and it frequently turns into a "Where the fuck do I go?" kind of game. Unlike other similar games in the genre, theres no hud marker of where to go next. There is however, a map you can pull up, but this map is atrocious and borderline useless.  It covers up almost the whole screen while its up, so you can barely look at it while navigating, it also is very vague on if you should go Up or Down to get to the marked icon, its just a mess and I never got comfortable navigating my way around the game. Instead of reyling on this map, you'll have to look around at the in game world for signs and try to navigate this place using signposts, but the game will often bar off areas with this Red wall until you kill enemies, sometimes. Its inconsistent, sometimes the red wall will have nothing to do with killing enemies, but breaking some objects or something. Its frustrating and I find myself walking in circles far too often doing nothing. Its funny because its not really the kind of game that rewards vigorous exploration, yes - there are slight RPG mechanics, almost feels like a case of "well, we HAVE to have RPG mechanics because every other game does!" This is trivial, simple stuff, like as you kill enemies and progress through the game you unlock points to put into basic things like multiple tiers of increased health, energy, and increasing your powers damage and stats. There are also "Mods" you can unlock, like putting attachments on your guns or 'Personal mods' to give yourself little buffs like more health, or better health pickups, or less energy used when Dashing or sprinting etc. But its very minor, almost unimportant stats and RPG things where I barely gave a shit about any of it for the whole game and only played around with it a handful of times and was relatively fine. So to reiterate: Its not like the game massively rewards exploration, so the argument of trying to say it would take away from the game to just have a basic arrow or indicator on the screen pointing where to go would "ruin immersion or exploiration" doesn't work. It just hampers the gameplay experience and adds unnessesary frustration , time wasting, and annoyance to navigate through this game. It doesn't help that almost everything in the game looks the same. It's all just various degrees of warehouses, office buildings, factory looking machinery. Thats it. There are a few dreamlike sequences where it goes into these fourth wall breaking 'Meta' floating cube areas, to be quirky and different or something, but these moments kinda just fall flat and feel lazy, like they didn't wanna bother making another level or scene, and gave you this barebones development blocks to pass as some dream sequence.

How about the core combat then?
You start off with just a basic pistol, you have infinite ammo but once the ammo counts down, it has a cooldown and slowly refills. At first its a very barebones basic shooter, enemies come out in waves, you spam them with your pistol, and thats about it. Theres no health regen, which is a questionable decision. Enemies drop health orbs that you can run over to refill, but by default you dont get much health from it, you need to use Mods to get more. Eventually (takes far too long) you start to unlock the other 'guns'. I say 'guns' because it kinda just shapeshifts from the pistol form into another slightly altered pistol form. Its pretty disappointing and not that fun, it feels like the game basically has one gun. The other guns I tried were not exciting or satisfying to use. This "Spin" gun that acts like a machine gun, but is inaccurate with bad damage and takes too long to reload. The Shotgun, which I used for a total of 2 minutes before realizing its shit because you cant get close to enemies in this game since there isn't regenerating health, and finally this Charge laser shooting gun where you hold down fire to charge it up and then release to do massive damage. I ended up using the Pistol and Charge gun the entire game, swapping to charge to deal with the higher armored and bullet sponge enemies. The guns were not satisfying or exciting, and the lack of variety or even 'real' guns was a detriment. Well as the game progresses you also unlock these like Superhero powers. Like the ability to grab random objects and throw them across the map at enemies. It seems like these powers are the games biggest selling point, and the main attraction. And yeah, the particle effects and physics on display here are satisfying, it does have a nice 'oomph' to it when you slam an enemy in the face with a massive block from a wall. I mostly used this ability in between the gun reloading, which is how its seems to be used. You can throw objects while the gun reloads, so its this rhythm of shooting guys and tossing objects that can get kinda fun and amusing to do. But for awhile thats all the game has going for it, lackluster gunplay, with this throw ability, and visually generic or unappealing office room after room and very annoying navigation with a shitty map system. Later on you unlock another ability, this float ability, that makes the game look really goofy. You just levitate across the whole map floating around like Superman or something and you have to use it to jump to various high places that aren't always marked in an obvious way, wasting more time. But thats really all the game has to offer in terms of its combat mechanics. I was actually expecting more from the powers, but the ones are offer are pretty unimaginative, but like I said, at least the physics system is entertaining enough.

The game has 10 main story missions, which get accepted automatically and progresses you through them automatically. You do, however, get tons of side missions, and can track them manually. I didn't bother to do a single one of these, as I wasn't really particularly having a blast with the main missions, so what are the chances wasting my time with side-content is gonna boost my enjoyment? Little chance. There are tons of them, though, like 40 something. And like I said, the game doesn't massively reward you for 'grinding' for XP or find new guns or unlocks, its just these unappealing Mods and basic bonuses skill unlocks that you get an abundance anyway, so the side content felt pointless.

The game also sometimes tries to be a puzzle game, and this stuff just sucked. It would jerk you around ,waste your time, to solve the must mundane uninteresting boring puzzles. Like basically "put round object in round hole" type stupidity. These flash card puzzles of interacting machines to line up the right flash cards, these stupid little door sequences where you have to match the square to open the door, these absolutely downright annoying and nonsensical Hotel sections where you go through the same hotel over and over and over throughout the game doing stupid, mundane little shit like adjusting a painting, ringing a bell, turning over a clock, backtracking and resetting the hotel 3 times and then magically a key spawns. Just why? What a fucking waste of time. I get its supposed to be this narrative plot point, but it just makes for annoying time wasting 'gameplay'. Other parts where you have to find the power boxes and slam them into the walls, a puzzle where you have to lock this creature into a room to progress, I mean its not always awful , its just very mundane.

And the narrative is really, really, nonsensical garbage. Let me touch on that...The game's story is produced by Sam Lake, the guy that did the Max Payne face. He was in charge to come up with this clusterfuck of a plot. I'm not gonna still here and like Movie review the script, thats not what I'm here for, but the plot is so pants-on-head-retarded that its laughable to try to follow. And its not just me. Someone was watching me play virtually the entire game, and they couldn't wrap their head around what the fuck was happening either. It all just seemed like a joke, almost like someone purposefully making fun of storywriting as a medium. None of it makes sense. Time travel, alternative dimensions, you killing yourself over and over, FBI government Spy sub plot, constantly breaking the fourth wall, this Projector thing transporting you to alternate dream worlds? The close-up zoom in on the main characters Sparkle in her eyes and the inner monologue, the extremely bland, lame, forgettable characters that all play it way too safe, the main characters motivation about finding her brother Dylan as if to say family is the most important thing in the world, wow how original (eyeroll) no depth, no nuance in personality...It all comes across as this tryhard, pretentious, joke of a plot, that I quickly found myself not giving a fuck about and mostly just laughing at it.

Oh yeah, the respawn system tries to take a note from Souls games or some shit, they give you these respawn points that basically act like Bonfires letting you warp around and upgrade skills. And if you die far away from these "control points" you lose minutes of progress spawning back at the last one. Theres no checkpoints or autosaves, you just go all the way back, again, pointlessly, uselessly wasting your time. I get that there should be a penalty for dying, but this is just tedious and timewasting, not punishing or challenging.

For much of the game I was sitting there muttering to myself "ugh, this is so fucking shit"  almost like groaning in pain at how annoying a lot of these sections were to get through. Mostly because of the respawn system, but also because the combat is genuinely fucking bullshit a lot of the times. Theres a very frequent thing where you will be fighting enemies , doing fine, then out of nowhere you'll just explode and instantly go down to 1% health. I still have no idea what exactly does this. And its a big problem cause its so threatening and hard to get health, you cant just cower in the corner and wait for it to come back. Once this happens youre basically fucked and can kiss your progress goodbye, going far back to the last spawn point. This happened a lot. Other times, the games graphics will change into everything having this bright shade of red, almost entirely obscuring the field of combat and any visual queues. There was one boss fight in particular with a guy called like Salvador or something, and the entire arena was red, and he would instantly explode you, but it was near impossible to see ANYTHING cause of this obnoxious red filter. The arena was also swarmed with dozens of enemies. This was a terrible, headache inducing, frustrating fight that took a dozen or so attempts. And it just felt like fake difficulty, mostly because I can't see shit. Finally beat him sitting back in a corner sniping him with the Charge gun...wow how rewarding. Theres one or two other boss fights in the game but they are barely worth mentioning, I can't even remember them. One guy near the beginning of the game is this floating guy that also, guess what, randomly explodes you, and is more tedious to kill more than exciting or challenging. I think these enemies also became regular occurrences afterwards, but with much less health it seemed like.

Not sure what else to say, the game uses real actors in some of the cutscenes which was kinda jarring I guess, but amusing. But like I said I just couldn't get into the pretentious, silly plot, it was hard to get invested or care. Even by the end of the game I just zoned out and couldn't tell what the fuck was happening anymore. Theres not really that many cool parts in the entire game, a few times you go into these alternate dimension chamber places of like giant bridges and cube worlds which I guess can be trippy in a drug fueled trip kinda way? Theres this one place with a Maze of Ashtray where it allowed me to progress there before I was supposed to, making me walk in circles for 30 minutes for no reason because the right wall wouldn't open up until I came back later, yeah thanks for that one.. Its like the in game map sometimes actually lies to you and tells you to go to the wrong place or just confuses the fuck out of you. So annoying. Later on I went there when I was supposed to and it was kind of an entertaining segment? This rock music played and the walls were opening up and going trippy, it was visually stimulating and almost fun, afterwards the character said to herself "That...was...awesome" Which kinda ruined it, though. Please dont tell me when the game is awesome, Game, its like a comedian saying "You should laugh now".

I had higher hopes that I would enjoy this game, being the developer that it is , with its history, but I don't know. I just could not get into this game very much. The graphics can be striking and visually impressive, with the RTX Raytracing feature and cranked settings, but its not this like mindblowing "greatest graphics ever" game that I've seen some people say, really the only impressive graphics is the physics and particle systems, and some of the reflections. The actual environments are pretty dull looking and the levels themselves are generic and bland. Even the last 'mission' just wasted my time. It turned me into some ordinary office worker where I go around delivering mail, packages, picking up coffee mugs. What the fuck? Again, I get its for some narrative reason. But the narrative sucks. When the game was over, it made me keep playing a bit in this new uniform, like "Hey, you can freeroam and do all the side content!" Yeah, not happening. But it did give me new main missions, which I thought was odd. I played for 20 mins or so, then I realized it automatically launched the DLC expansion. Yeah, also not happening. Maybe one day if I'm desperate to play something, but not anytime soon.

4/10