Nylige anmeldelser av MarcusTerritory

Dark Souls, but make it Star Wars. Combat is really solid, the exploration and metroidvania style gameplay is nice (go to Dathomir first and stop once you get the big upgrade; it'll help down the road), and the story is surprisingly competent. BD-1 is also just an adorable character and stole my heart. Also, if you're filming a reaction video, you're gonna wanna keep it running after the final boss fight. Trust me.

It's good. Worth the price. No other game beats it in the Western genre and if your idea is to go for a cowboy gunslinging fantasy game, you will find nothing better, guaranteed. The story is above-average (i.e. fantastic for modern video games), the gunplay works, the world and immersion is without peer, all that good stuff.

The major complaint that I have is that even after over 100 hours of playing, I still can't get over the fact that this game borders on being disrespectful of the player's time. Yes, it's "immersive" to literally craft every explosive round one after another; yes it's "realistic" to watch your character go through the 30 second bear-skinning animation; and yes I suppose it is a nice detail that to buy anything in a shop you have to go through an old-style book that takes half a minute to flip through because of all the animations. But ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, does it grate quickly. I'm here to shoot outlaws and be the mythical Old West Rogue Gunslinger, and yet sometimes it feels like the game is just fighting with me in the name of showing off how gorgeous it is.

It's a minor thing, but it adds up. It's worth it, but for God's sake, prepare yourself to start rolling your eyes every time you need to skin an animal.

If there’s one game this year that I absolutely must give my faithfulness award to, it’s probably Alien: Isolation. I’m honestly having trouble thinking of a team of developers who clearly love the source material of their game and want to pay it an honest respect *more* than the developers behind Isolation at Creative Assembly. So much so that absolutely nothing is misplaced, although a few things are mishandled. Everything in Isolation is almost perfectly sculpted and placed to the point where you never have your immersion broken or get taken out of the story, and it’s crystal clear that Creative Assembly wanted to paint Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger’s original vision in a way that did it honor. And they have.

The largest parts of that immersion can be boiled down to three features: graphic design, audio, and mechanics. Graphically, the game is absolutely stunning. Isolation aims to recreate Scott’s original style in the first Alien of “low fi sci fi”, and does it with perfection. Analog computers and cameras and voice recorders and huge, bulky spacesuits with 80’s GUIs. Believe me when I say that this is by far and away the most accurate and stellar portrayal of Alien in any other medium ever made. Second, the sound design: also, absolutely fantastic. Isolation uses the original score from the movie combined with eerie, high-tone background music that’s contrasted against it, and creates a mix of something that both astounds and terribly unnerves you at the same time. And finally, the mechanics, which, while they are a bit simplistic, lend themselves to the scenery that much more. There’s a lot of button pushing and primordial hacking and lever pulling in Isolation, which does wear thin after a while considering the standard formula is “get to location X” while avoiding everything in your way, but fortunately, this is circumvented by Isolation’s greatest strength: it’s fear factor.

It’s been said that the best horror games have you just as terrified when something isn’t happening as when something is happening. Silent Hill 2 understood this. Amnesia: TDD understood this. And I’m glad to say Isolation does as well. The sound of the Alien crawling in the vents above you is constant, as well as the subliminal noises and creaks and bangs that keep your skin crawling, making you never aware when the Alien will drop down. And when it is on the screen, it’s fantastic. Creative Assembly have designed Giger’s Alien (there’s only one in this game) with virtually no scripting and mostly organic AI, creating the effective illusion that this is a real, breathing predator that searches rooms and doubles back and reacts to sound. It’s genuinely terrifying when you’re hiding in a locker, barely a metre away from the beast, knowing that if it turns right, it might hear you breathing or your motion tracker beeping, rip off the locker door and end you.

That being said, with a lack of scripting comes some annoying and downright frustrating moments.The Alien can sometimes spend three or four minutes searching the room you’re hiding in and leaving you no chance to get away before it leaves, and other times it may just drop out of a vent right in front of you and leave you no chance to escape. And given that Isolation’s style of hacking and even saving requires you to leave yourself vulnerable for a few seconds (which, to be fair, does add to the horror factor), the game can be very unfair with how quickly and without warning you can be killed. This is both the greatest strength and weakness of the game: *NOTHING* you do is not potentially dangerous in some way. Sprinting down a hallway, using a save point, hacking a door, building an item... everything opens you up to a horrible death, and while that is incredibly atmospheric and nerve-wracking, at least a few times during your playthrough, you'll probably face a very unfair end. And the horror factor does tend to drain in the second half, when you're given a reliable method of defense against the Alien that keeps it at bay, and there's always someone talking in your ear, in contrast to the first half, where you're almost entirely alone and you have only molotovs to slow the Alien down, which are hard to craft, minimal and difficult to aim. So I feel the game could have benefitted by giving us fewer methods to defend ourselves.

All that said, Isolation’s core is a solid, terrifying experience of a tride and true survival horror. It flies its colours well, and executes its design almost perfectly. There are some issues with the story what with it being very, very long, and the fact that you seem to have won multiple times before the game yanks the rug out from underneath you and tells you there’s a few more hours to go could be seen as annoying by some (though for me, I felt the game is paced and spread out enough that it was negligible). However, I felt that even getting to a save point in this game was a minor victory, and it makes the terrifying moments shine as bright as a star. Isolation’s concept is fantastic, its execution solid and its atmosphere astounding.

For any Alien fan, for any survival horror connoisseur, and for any curious gamer that has enough money to reupholster their computer chair, this is a must-buy.

My Rating: 9/10

Arkham Origins is, unfortunately, sort of the black sheep of the Arkham Games. What with it not being made by Rocksteady while they worked on Arkham Knight, Origins was put out by Splash Damage Studios instead. And it is, to some degree, underrated. While Arkham Asylum was excellent and Arkham City was good, Origins falls further behind and winds up in the realm of "Better than average", but it is still decent. Everything you liked about Arkham Asylum or Arkham City is still here, mostly. The problem is that Origins somewhat coasts off the success of the Asylum and City, and suffers from a lack of any new cards to throw down.

On the gameplay front, combat has been improved once again, but it's gotten around to where it has inevitably become repetitive. And the entire map does feel somewhat lazily designed, as no less than half of it is copied over from Arkham City, right down to the Steel Mill section. Side missions are also making their return, although not quite as much of a spectacle. What is new is the crime scene missions, which are a welcome addition using Batman's crime reconstruction technology, although the number of them makes them go on a bit too long and a bit too short each to be truly entertaining. Boss fights haven't been copied, but as a result they're worse than City or Asylum and fail to do anything as impressive as the Mr. Freeze fight from City. Hunting down Deadshot and Riddler are also almost exactly the same from the previous games. Really, on the gameplay side, there isn't much to talk up. It's basically an expansion for Arkham City.

The story is where Arkham Origins finds a good place. Asylum played much more like a comic book and did quite well in its niche, but City tried to take a darker turn without changing Asylum's formula of "Villain X is doing Y. Go to location Z and beat them up", and therefore suffered for anyone who tried to take it seriously. While Origins doesn't do much to shake that up that formula, it actually explores the relationships of both Batman and one of his biggest enemies, which both its predecessors failed to do. The character arcs affect the plot much more than they did in the previous games, and so with that, Origins takes that successful dark step up that City tried to take but misstepped somewhat. The main plot thread does hop back and forth between side stories a bit too much, but it's not that noticable, and its enjoyable while it lasts. The voice actors also do a very good job filling the shoes of their predecessors, and one villain's VA who I won't mention did such a fantastic job that I didn't realize until halfway through the game that the character's actor had changed.

If you liked the previous Arkham games, you'll find pretty much everything you liked here, and maybe something you haven't seen before as well. That being said, while Origins doesn't do anything that made me want to punch the developers in the face, it didn't make me want to sing their praises either. There's nothing really new it can bring to the table, although it does make better developments in the story department by making characters more three-dimensional and making them more important to the plot. I'd pick it up on a sale if you aren't 100% convinced, but Origins isn't not worth your time, and it does no dishonor to the name of the Arkham franchise.

Papers, Please is one of those very pleasant, tiny surprises that comes along every now and again. And I do mean tiny: 30 megs tiny. That's four times the price of an iTunes HD episode for less than one-fifteenth the size, but believe me when I say that you'll spend more time on this game than you ever would watching any episode of any TV show.

The power of the game lies in its simple and complex art style and moral elements, respectively. Your position sees very little of any colour other than greys and blacks, probably reflecting that the morality that the game pushes you towards. Almost your money goes to rent, food and heat for your family at the end of each workday, and you get paid by how many people you process correctly. This would normally just serve to give the players incentive to pay attention and not ♥♥♥♥ up, but the game has the simple trick of any citizen just claiming what any citizen would. Maybe they want to get into the country to see their family or reunite with their significant other, and turning them away means breaking that. Of course, letting them through means you might not be able to afford heat this evening.

The game has problems, sure. If you're not the type for it, the morality system falls completely flat and you just don't care, because there's no real penalty for simply doing your job aside from citizens calling you an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in 16-bit text before disappearing forever. The booth upgrades aren't very helpful, and I can't say that this is the most thrilling game to play if you're playing on a stationary rig that can run many more exciting, if not as compelling, games. That being said, it is still surprisingly engaging for its size; I found myself able to play it (before I bought the Steam version) in class for sometimes hours at a time, just processing and processing over and over. And its size and almost non-existant graphical tax means that no matter your specs, you could run it.

In conclusion, it's more than worth recommending. The phrase "Simple, yet elegant" is thrown around a lot but it really does find a place here, amongst the endless passports and tickets that will inevitably clutter your desk. If you're the type for it, pick it up anyway, but if you're on the move a lot and switching computers, frequently finding yourself with nothing to do, I couldn't recommend Papers, Please higher. It takes some real talent to make a job that should be boring fun and captivating, and that's just what Mr. Pope has done.

Final Score: 8.5/10

With everyone trashing this game, I feel like I should take a stand for it.

Assassin's Creed III does get most things right. The main story set in colonial America is a good one: it's arguably the best Assassin's Creed story to date. The character development and central plot are all intriguing, and it's the first game in this series to operate without a stark hero-villain contrast. The Templars don't seem so evil and the Assassin's don't seem so good. I like that. The developers took a bit more risks with the story, and that's a good thing. And despite his negative press, Connor is an excellent character, and without a doubt the best assassin to date. What people seem to forget is that a character does not need to be likeable to be a strong character, and that's what he is: a vehicle for all the emotions he carries and the pain of his people. Him and the main villain Haytham alike are both very well-written.

The gameplay is solid as well. Simplified free-running makes things easier on beginners, although the new design of combat admittedly does make things far too easy, especially for veterans. The homestead missions are a nice change of pace and contain more of Connor's development, as well as the liberation missions and forts, which are a ton of fun. The naval missions are excellent, easily the strongest part of the side content, so much so that Assassin's Creed IV was practically built on them. The Frontier is also a great place for fun, as is hunting and ambushing soldiers as they walk through the forest.

That said, there are more than a few weak points. Several elements, like the underground, the courier missions and the assassination missions (the part of the game that should be quite in-depth) are either a drag or just half-assed. They're not even good time sinks, unfortunately. The amount of bugs in this game is also extremely annoying: from poorly moving lips to collision issues to weapons randomly unequipping... the list goes on. It gets annoying, and if you play long enough, it becomes nigh unbearable.

Ultimately, the complaints of Assassin's Creed III can be boiled down to this game being a case study for a title that lacks polish. Little details that could have been easily fixed or tweaked to be either repaired or significantly better have been glossed over, and the game suffers for it. However, it is still a good (not great) game, and with its current price of 20 dollars, I recommend it for any fan of the series.

My rating is 7.5/10.