Two more games bite the dust:
I liked the first Dead Space game… Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting anything special, but it kind of worked for me… The plight of Engineer Isaac was the kind of thing that works in survival horror, and trying to figure out what went wrong on the Ishimura was interesting enough to keep the game going forward…
So, my expectations for Dead Space II were a bit higher… and boy, was I disappointed! 🙂 They tried to flesh out the main character some more (which kind of make me unlike him, it didn’t seem genuine anymore), they were trying too hard to push the “horror” (which kind of loses its edge after the n-th time an enemy jumps out from somewhere, even with the limited supply of ammunition the game has), and towards the end, the game even got lazy by adding indestructible monsters and the “you’ll take damage no matter how well you play” factor…
I can’t say exactly where the game lost me, but finishing it was a chore (specially that idiotic final fight, where you had to work with whatever you had with infinitely spawning enemies)…
The main problem, as I see it, is the fact that the game doesn’t evolve the story, characters and game world… you’re just playing the same game again, but instead of being in the Ishimura (and you’ll be in there, by the way), you’re in a colony/space yard, in the midst of a xenomorph outbreak that “noone could predict”… for how long will we have these uni-dimensional bad guys that always think they can control uncontrollable forces?!
All in all, objectively, it’s not a bad game, it just feels that way due to some lazy design and associating “survival horror” to “you don’t have enough ammo to kill them all”… 6/10
LA Noire is an amazing game at the same time it fails spectacularly… Let me start by saying I love the Noire setting, but I didn’t feel it in LA Noire… For me, “Noire” involves a broken PI (preferably alcoholic) that gets conned by a mysterious woman to take some case in which she’s involved to her eyeballs, while feigning innocence… Maybe I’m reducing a whole genre to its more basic expression, but that was what I wanted to play in LA Noire, not some “straight arrow” cop that was too good at his job and had to be taken down…
Ignoring that pet peeve, this is probably the first game I’ve ever played in the last 10 years that really gives you the feeling of being involved in an investigation, analyzing clues and talking to suspects, trying to call their lies into question, or doubting them until they gave us worthwhile information…
The problem with the game is the cuddling it gives to the players… the game treats the players like morons, and takes away the real use of their investigative brains… This is noticeable when you always want to accuse everyone of lying and then back up from the accusation… the way the suspects react to the accusation gives us a clear clue on if they’re lying or not, and if you decide they’re lying, you just have to choose the correct piece of evidence… if their reaction is off someone telling the truth, you just back out of the accusation and choose another investigation path… The much-talked about facial animation system (which is amazing, by the way – first time I saw throat/larynx movement in facial animation in a game) makes it too easy to tell if the a character is telling the truth or lying… The fact you don’t have many dead end clues doesn’t help to the atmosphere aswell.
Of course, this has been a discussion for a long time: how easy/accessible we want the games to be to our customers, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer… I’d venture that it’s better to fail towards the easy side than towards the hard side, from a commercial perspective…
The action sequences are also terrible, feeling constrained, out of place and simplistic in their approach… no challenges there and it just seems a way to waste time on the way to the next piece of storytelling…
The storyline is very interesting (although not “Noire” enough for me, as I stated above), and most of the graphics are very good (bar the odd pixelated/blurry textures here and there). I say most because the female characters are probably the worse I’ve seen in ages… they all look 100 years old, which is kind of annoying when you’re interviewing a 20-year old wanna-be starlet and it seems like your grandmother… kind of ruins the immersion… Male characters are quite good, on the other hand.
LA Noire could be (and in some level it is) one of the most revolutionary games in the last decade (much more than Heavy Rain, to be honest, which the game has some similarities to), but trying to reach for a wider audience kind of spoiled it for me… But, nowadays, a 20-hour game (with a 65% completion rate) at standard price, it’s a good buy! 🙂 8/10
Next on my game list: Pixel Junk Shooter 2…