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The plot's not that bad, what there is of it, although there's some humor value in EA making a game about the inherent dangers in corporate overreach. It's a particular kind of exposition that I actually appreciate in prose, where they rely upon you to figure out what they're talking about on the fly, rather than pausing to dump information on you. I do appreciate how Faith's relationship with Noah seems strained in a believable way; she's got a death wish she hasn't confronted, he's old enough to see it's what she's doing but doesn't have a firm moral basis for objection.Mordja posted:How does the freeruning compare to Dying Light's? I thought that game did it very well, though the focus was more on, you know, zombie killing. Inexplicably, it's much worse. Dying Light was smart enough to keep it relatively simple. It's mostly climbing, running, and jumping there, with solid, responsive controls. Mirror's Edge's control scheme is hosed, there's no way to remap the buttons (at least not on Xbox One), and the first-person perspective does not cope well with things like wall-running. There is nothing about navigating Catalyst that would not look, feel, and play better in a third-person perspective.
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Jun 6, 2016 20:59
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I think they were shooting for Icarus having daddy issues with Noah, but went too far so now he's acting like a spurned lover.
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Jun 6, 2016 21:49
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There are a lot of really badly designed mandatory combat encounters in the game, especially in the latter half of the story missions, but I really do enjoy dropping on a dude from two stories up and mule-kicking him into next week.
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Jun 7, 2016 22:28
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Regarde Aduck posted:It's going through the exact same review process as the first game. Games journalists gonna gam jurnalist! Nah, the game's genuinely not great. It's probably fine if all you want to do is bomb around the city, but the story missions get increasingly stupid as they go, and something like 90% of my deaths are down to too many kinds of traversal being bound to the same button. It's certainly a novel game, but it's not well made. I do run into a problem where muscle memory from other games affects my ability to play this one, though. I kept wanting to hit A to jump, for example.
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Jun 8, 2016 13:49
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:We must be on different planets then, 'cause this game delivers entirely on the unfulfilled promises of the first game without losing nearly anything that made it unique. Nah, son. The combat's shallow, the controls are poorly considered, the best parts of the city look like an airport lounge at 3 AM, and doing safety rolls in first person gave me a headache after the first day. It certainly is unique, and no one can take that away from it, but I put maybe 20 hours into it over the weekend and it's difficult to regard it as anything other than an interesting failure. There's no bandwagon here; you're just one of the handful of people who somehow managed to enjoy the first game, and thus, you're exactly who the second game was made for.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:38
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Against a single opponent, circling around them to kick them in the back of the head will work every time. Face to face, against anything short of the guys with shock gauntlets, you can beat them all with straight heavy kicks as long as you don't mash the button. The light attack might as well not be there at all, as there's never a reason to use it. The final combat encounter of the game, its last "boss" fight, can be beaten very easily by kicking one elite soldier into the other, over and over again, timing your second attack to land just when they recover from slamming into each other. The only real fun to be had with combat in this game is in the rare occasion where you're not trying to fight at all, so you bounce off dudes like they're Koopa Troopas and just keep going. By coding the game so every traversal move is keyed to the same button, it virtually guarantees a series of obnoxious deaths where you go for one traversal move and due to some fluke, get another. If anything, the controls are too simple. Many other parkour-influenced games will deal with this issue by assigning jumping to a separate button from wall-running. If you could rebind the wall-run to the right trigger, for example, as it was done in Sands of Time, that would address most of my problems with it. BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Yeah, sounds like it's not for you. Motion sickness turned a lot of people off the first game, too. Yeah. 99% of the first-person games I've ever played don't bother me, including the first game, but this one did after a while. It's particularly bad when you're fighting the elites who can knock you over, so the screen goes fuzzy for a second and Faith gets up with a backward somersault.
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Jun 8, 2016 20:13
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The combat works pretty well for that in the open world, but really suffers when it just drops you into an arena, especially if you have to restart and go in without any Focus Shield. There are a couple of rooms in the middle to late story that work directly against the combat's strengths. I'll also admit I get a bit salty about how the dudes with guns can peg you from two buildings away, which can be obnoxious if you're trying to get somewhere and accidentally lose Focus. BeanpolePeckerwood posted:I dunno, this is how it was in the first game and it's far more reliable here. In my opinion if my character fails on a specific occasion to enter a wall run because I misjudge the distance it's in my interest that there is at least some possibility for a vault to take place without me having to press another button. Having to keep in mind more buttons for similar actions in a tight would be frustrating as hell, especially when you get to complex traversals that require repeated pivots, I mean, at that point it becomes a struggle for your brain to keep up with muscle memory. In a slightly different system, the button presses aren't that different. A similar sequence in Prince of Persia on PSOne would be something like LS + R1 -> X -> X, and it'd automate the soft roll if one was required. The execution comes from timing, rather than the mechanical complexity of the execution, and that's the sort of system I grew up in. I do think you've touched on something here, in that it's bizarre that the mid-air tuck is a Movement upgrade in Catalyst, rather than something you just know how to do.
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Jun 9, 2016 03:51
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I've been talking about it a lot lately, kicking around my reaction vs. that of a couple of people I know who liked it more than I did. ME as a series sort of revels in its relative inaccessibility. There are very few skills you can transfer to it from other games, for example, because most of what you can name that's even vaguely comparable, like Assassin's Creed, are third-person games. They also generally have parkour as a feature, rather than the entire point thereof. (It's weird that, as far as I know, there's never been some kind of parkour equivalent to the Tony Hawk series, where you just dick around in a playground jumping off stuff and scoring points all day. I have to imagine there's an audience.) That inaccessibility's a big part of why its reviews have been what they are, I think, because ME:C has such a different learning curve, especially for anyone who didn't sit down and master ME. If you like other platformers, it feels backwards; if you like other first-person games, it requires an entirely different approach. It feels like it's fighting you for every step you take. On top of that, it's just kind of a dick a lot of the time, like in the last level with the damaged glass panels that give you about a second's warning before breaking. I don't think the story's that bad, though. I've seen a lot worse, and a lot less consistent.
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Jun 14, 2016 10:04
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Add to all that the main character being a woman/racial minority who doesn't shootmans. I do think that somebody must have, at some point, wanted to deliberately appeal to the social justice crowd. A relatively non-violent, proactive heroine, heavily influenced by her genius mother, who's also a woman of color, and whose primary ally in the latter two-thirds of the game is an autistic black woman? If Faith and Plastic made out at some point it'd hit the Tumblr triple word score. BeanpolePeckerwood posted:Also, and this is probably going to sound dumb, but there are some interesting subversive ideological elements buried in the mess of the story (insurgent socialist collectivism vs corporate suppression of thought, even some anticapitalist stuff about the fallacy of endless growth made it in there), stuff like that usually doesn't play well on an advertising level next to hoorah nationalism and spectacle. I was actually sort of surprised to hear stuff like that in a videogame at all, even just as voice acting, especially presented in a not-entirely negative frame of reference. That being said, I'd agree that even if the story isn't that good it also isn't that bad. It's boilerplate and somewhat naive, but the voice acting is all pretty fresh and convincing and nuanced, even if most of the characters aren't particularly deep. And the general presentation is quite fancy. It is truly loving weird to see EA publish a game about a distant-future corporate-run dystopia, I'll say that much, even if it did resort to the old dodge where the protagonist doesn't truly pick a side. They did do some homework, though. There's a lot floating around in Rebecca's rants and some of the documents that's taken right from the recent wave of near-future climate apocalypse science fiction, and the Shard looks like it was designed to mimic some of the next-generation wind turbines that are currently in the concept stage. As a side note, there's a comic from Image called Lazarus that's been running for a while, and ME:C feels very much like it's set in the same world. Lazarus is mostly involved with high-end skirmishes between the corporations, but if you were to arbitrarily decide Cat Kruger were to her corporate family what Forever Carlyle is to hers in Lazarus, it'd be a nearly one-to-one match.
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Jun 14, 2016 19:30
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Also, that scientist lady mentions in the last level that fresh water is becoming increasingly hard to come by in Glass, and there's a document that discusses how one of the lesser corporations is responsible for desalination, but their process is dirty and energy-intensive. I was sort of assuming the whole way through that "Cascadia" is in what used to be the Pacific Northwest, since the word's been used for various secessionist movements in that region since the late 19th century or so.
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Jun 14, 2016 20:11
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That reminds me of something I was wondering about the final mission. Was there ever an explanation for the explosion at the Shard? I assumed it was Black November, but if it was ever actually explained, I sure didn't see it.
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Jun 14, 2016 23:08
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That's what I ended up doing once I knew they were going to break, yeah, but there are a couple of ledges that are there as a gently caress-you. There isn't really enough time to react, especially if you don't happen to be close to the wall.
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Jun 16, 2016 20:47
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I do kinda want to see the pseudoscientific design document for the grappling hook, since the last story mission has you firing the goddamn thing about five stories straight up. It must be loaded with Spider-Man's webbing or something.
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Jun 18, 2016 00:30
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UnfortunateSexFart posted:Do they ever explain why Faith's last name is Connors? She doesn't look half white. Sometimes half-Asian women don't, and in the original game, her dad was white. I don't think you ever get a good look at him in the new one, though.
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Jun 23, 2016 01:00
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