Review: Dead Space 2

This review is written for the installed Xbox 360 version of Dead Space 2.

Dead Space 2 is my favorite game of all time. No, that’s not hyberbole, and no, contrary to the name of this blog it is not just some quick, gut reaction. I’ve played dozens of games since, including some of my previous favorites, and DS2 still holds its position in my mind as the best of the best. I know that the immediate response to saying any new game is the best ever is immediately met with a million and one screams of anger, but let me clarify. I’m not saying the gameplay is necessarily the best (although it’s great), nor am I saying it is the best looking (but it looks incredible). I’m not saying that it is the most revolutionary game of all time, or that the face of media will be forever changed by its existence. Despite all that, one thing sticks out in my mind: Dead Space 2 is without a doubt the most fun, atmospheric and mind-blowingly awesome thing that I have ever played.

The shooting is not only intact, but improved

I don’t want to spend too much time on the gameplay, just because if you played Dead Space 1 you know what to expect here. The third-person shooting still retains that Resident Evil 4 core that has been omnipresent in the genre since 2004, but it is so refined that it’s impossible to level any complaints of it feeling derivative. Raising and lowering your weapon, melee attacking, stomping, running and any other essential activity are all mapped intuitively and they all occur quickly, to the point where I never once felt like I was fumbling against the controls or waiting for an animation to play out. The “strategic dismemberment” of DS1 is at play here as well, with the primary way of slaying Necromorphs still being to sever two or three of their limbs and take them out of the action. The weapons all facilitate this, with the originals Plasma Cutter, Line Gun and others showing up alongside newbies like a sniper-type weapon and the immensely satisfying Javelin Gun. On top of this the Stasis and Kinesis modules return but are much improved, with the Kinesis being used to impale Necros with environmental objects (or their own amputated claws) and the Stasis automatically regenerating, making it actually viable in regular combat. Finally, the shop and workbench system from the first game returns, where you collect credits to buy new guns and armor along with power nodes that are used to upgrade them. Even this is improved over the original due to the special bonuses that certain armor permutations grant and unique upgrades for certain weapons, such as incendiary bullets or the ability to electrify fired javelins to eliminate groups of enemies.

This looks ten times better in motion

Vacuum and zero-G sequences also return in Dead Space 2, the latter of which is drastically improved. Your suit(s) now have small thrusters on board, which make a huge difference for how these portions of the game play out. You are given full 360-degree movement around the weightless segments, and the controls are simple enough to let you navigate the huge outdoor environments with ease. The thrusters come into play in a few of the jaw-dropping scripted sequences as well. The game throws these chunks of gameplay out at a pretty regular pace, such as when you need to take out a monster’s weak point while being violently dragged across the floor, or when you are flung into space while grappling with another enemy and need to detonate some nearby barrels before you are ripped in half. The most memorable of these are portions where you need to move very, very rapidly from place to another, and need to pilot your suit to avoid flying rubble and the like. Most games would relegate this to a series of button presses, and while DS2 has its share of button mashing, the fact that most of these sequences are directly controlled by the player is awesome. One in particular involves Isaac being literally catapulted from one district of Titan Station to another, and the combination of the fantastic large-scale graphics and story-motivation to get there fast make this sequence incredible to play.

This is literally the first event of the game

Wait a minute. What are all these proper nouns doing here? Well, as it turns out, Dead Space 2’s stories holds up the crazy bombast and polish that the gameplay supplies. You play as Isaac Clarke, clinically insane zombie-killing machine that barely survived the events of the first game. You show up on a mining colony embedded into one of Saturn’s moons with little to no idea of how you got here from three years before. However, whereas most games would give a nice, long period of learning exactly what the circumstances are, the game instead has one of the strongest openings I’ve ever seen, with Isaac immediately thrust into a second Necromorph outbreak. Is the Marker involved? Probably. Is Isaac’s evil, hallucinated girlfriend back? You betcha. But the willingness of Dead Space 2 to let you pick up these facts across the game and make the connections yourself without explicitly spelling everything out from the word “Go” is refreshing and makes you actually care about the struggle Isaac is going through on his quest to literally stomp as many deformed creatures into little tiny pieces as possible. I also want to call out the ending that is, without spoilers, one of the greatest emotional rollercoasters of all time. The game wears you down with a good hour of insanely difficult combat where running is often the best option, then throws you into one a completely mind-bending boss battle, and then manages to hit both the depressing and triumphant notes. It is masterfully done, and it left me sitting there after the fact, completely brain dead in the best possible way.

I feel like I should point out that I beat the game in one sitting, but that is in no way a slight against the length of the game. It took me roughly eight hours to finish, and that’s coming from the perspective of someone who was extremely familiar with the first game going into it. It’s more a testament to just how compelling the gameplay, atmosphere and narrative all are that I neglected food, sleep and schoolwork to pound out chapter after chapter of the DS2’s campaign. I don’t want to disparage the shooting, which is great, but the real drive comes from the things in between, be it one of the high-action scripted sequences or a particular chapter that is completely combat-free. This one portion, while technically a back-tracking sequence, is so dark, eerie and fascinating that I recall it as one of the best things in the game. On top of the incredible focus that Dead Space 2 granted me (a focus that led to the consumption of more than two liters of water despite being completely sedentary), there is an immense amount of replay value here, between carrying over upgrades to higher difficulties, to completing the insane save-limiting hardcore mode to getting every achievement, a task that is actually reasonable due to the lack of multiplayer-centric ones. My grand total as of today is a good eight and a half playthroughs, and while I am indeed a crazy person, there is more than enough game here to keep you busy for a long, long time.

So there you have it. Dead Space 2 is an amazing game, regardless of whether or not you agree with my assessment as the best game. Yes, the gameplay is derivative, and the story may have a few inconsistencies. But the caveats are so miniscule and the praise I can lay on it so great that you really need to own this game.

Images courtesy of Google.com

Retro Review: C&C Renegade

This review is written for Renegade running on a high-powered Windows 7 PC.

           

            To say that games have had a profound influence on me would be a gross understatement. My experiences with interactive media have informed the vast majority of my tastes in the non-gaming world, and no one game has had a greater impact on me than Command and Conquer Renegade. Don’t take that to mean that Renegade is somehow an incredible, life-altering game; in reality it is a relatively middle-of-the-road shooter. However, in one way or another Renegade has influenced my stance on online gaming, my knowledge of computers, my opinion of writing as a hobby, my early teenage taste in music and much more. For the most part its effect was due to the period in my life that I played it, but regardless of any nostalgia I feel, the things that Renegade does are still impressive to this day.

            As I’ve already said, the core gameplay in Renegade is fairly rudimentary. It can be played as either a first- or third-person shooter and offers a huge assortment of weapons and vehicles to choose from. The on-foot shooting, while satisfying enough on the easier difficulties of the single player, is nothing to write home about, and enemies often tend to simply be bullet sponges for you to dump lead into in your quest from one objective to another. The vehicles, on the other hand, are much more fun, and there is enough variety between them that commandeering a new one is always a fun proposition. The split between the two forms of gameplay is roughly fifty-fifty, so whenever one style starts to get stale, it’s usually not long before the game with switch it up on you.

The conversion from 2D to 3D is done extremely well

            The story of the game is practically non-existent. You play as Nick “Havoc” Parker, a GDI commando who is tasked with taking down a Nod special forces unit in order to rescue a group of captured scientists. The plot has a couple of “twists”, but it’s all so thin that it can largely be written off. That said, the cutscenes can be pretty funny simply in that Havoc is such a gung-ho, macho dude that he feels like a mature Duke Nukem, and it makes the attitude of the game relatively lighthearted. 

The interesting thing about the single player is the fact that this is, in fact, a Command and Conquer game. The games plot, units and structures are all based on the original 1995 game, and while I personally entered the series with Tiberian Sun, the reverence to the source material is still pretty cool. The transition of the tiny thumbnail-sizes sprites from the RTS are fully realized in Renegade, and if you have any fondness for the C&C franchise it is extremely fun to see everything in gigantic 3D models. This is particularity true for the structures, as one of the most interesting aspects of the game is to explore the bowels of the monoliths to uncover hidden items and weak points in them. While it may be easy to write off Renegade as a cash-grab towards those with C&C nostalgia, the game is treated with enough reverence that those involved in its development clearly knew the source material.

Teamwork is both present and essential to winning online

This is normally where I would tell you whether or not the game was worth buying, but the simple fact is that the single player is the weakness of Renegade. I don’t typically like emphasizing the multiplayer in most games, but here it is the bread and butter of the game. The only mode in the game is C&C mode, in which both teams (GDI and Nod) are given an assigned base to defend while trying to eliminate the opponents. The layout changes from map to map, but you typically get structures like the Refinery that earns your team credits, the Barracks that grants purchase of over a dozen different character classes, and the War Factory where vehicles can be purchased. The genius of Renegade is just how many different options there are for how to play online. You could be a basic soldier skirmishing with those on your opponents team. There are engineers that can repair buildings and vehicles that earn the player credits. Snipers and anti-vehicle troopers are in play as well. Even the vehicles range from long range artillery to heavy tanks, troop carriers and even the occasional aircraft. On top of all this, while GDI and Nod have many overlapping or similar units, both sides have many unique troops, such as Nod’s stealth units versus GDI’s aptly named Mammoth tank. While many games offer both asynchronous and class-based gameplay, the way Renegade meshes it all together while also throwing a few completely exclusive features into the mix. 

The Red Alert TC is at least as fun as the core game

You may be wondering why I’m harping on the multiplayer of a nine-year-old game, but that’s because it is still incredibly well supported. While only a few hundred people are ever online at a time, there are always that many people, which is more than enough to max out the top servers that run 24/7. And while there may not be a huge, widespread appeal to Renegade, those who like it really, really like it. The main login servers for the game, which allow the multiplayer to even exist, are run by the community. In addition, two fan-made “core patches” have been released that address remaining balance issues as well as adding new animations and features to the multiplayer. Also, an updated scripts file has been released that improves the graphics along with adding features that the engine previously could not support, and as of the time of writing and new set of scripts is actively in development. On top of that, EA put out official modding tools for the game, which were taking to the extreme. I’ve heard enough to know that Unreal has always been the gold standard for the open game engine with crazy community-made content, but having never been in that scene, Renegade has be covered. Not only have hundreds upon hundreds of excellent maps been made, but a number of total conversion mods have been created. These include a largely complete and playable Red Alert mod, and partially complete Tiberian Sun mod and an early in development Red Alert 2 mod, and that’s only within the C&C framework. As with most community-heavy games, the vast majority of these TC mods never really come to fruition, but a number of truly high quality entries are playable and many, many more are still being slowly plugged away at after nearly a decade.

I unabashedly consider Command and Conquer Renegade to be one of the greatest games of all time, even considering the reasonably major fact that the gameplay isn’t really all that great. The fact is that Renegade shows not only what online gaming is, but it explores just how incredible a devoted fanbase can be and it makes a compelling case for why PC games still have a reason to exist in a console-run world. The game itself is practically free at under $5, or you could get it as part of the excellent First Decade bundle for less than $20. Plus, it’s old enough that even with the graphical enhancements it will run perfectly on just about any system. Even if you don’t find the shooting especially compelling or you don’t play a lot of multiplayer games, you owe it to yourself to give Renegade a shot, if only to see what kind of unique, inventive and outright fun games can be completely overlooked by the general public.

  
Images captured by author

Series Review: Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

This review is written for the Rogue Squadron franchise played on both an N64 with the expansion pack and the Wii.

            Let’s get one thing out of the way: If you don’t like Star Wars, you aren’t going to like the Rogue Squadron series. That’s not to say that they aren’t incredibly well made and entertaining in and of themselves, because the simplified flight-sim style of the games still pans out to a hell of a good time. However, this these games are made by Star Wars fans, for Star Wars fans. The Star Wars-iness is so baked in to every facet of the ship designs, environments, objectives and storylines that if you aren’t familiar with what Bacta is or what an A-Wing looks like, your enjoyment will be seriously hampered.

The original's draw distance is its only graphical blemish

            The core gameplay in Rogue Squadron really only needs to be explained once, as it remains largely unchanged throughout the trilogy. At the beginning of a mission, you select a vehicle, usually predefined the first time a mission is played. These range from your typical X-, Y-, A- and B-Wings to unlockables like the Millennium Falcon, Slave 1 or Darth Vader’s TIE that can be selected on subsequent playthroughs. The missions themselves range from simple dogfights to bombing runs, reconnaissance and the occasional slightly-less-than-awful escort mission. While the core objectives usually remain the same, the varied environments and spacecraft make the gameplay feel fresh throughout. At the end of a mission, you receive a medal based on the targets destroyed, mission time, accuracy and so on, and these contribute to unlocking new vehicles and missions. While getting the gold on each mission can be infuriating at times, the medals are fair in that if you know what you’re doing you can usually attain your goal. 

            Rogue Squadron on the N64 takes place almost entirely between Episodes IV and V in the original trilogy. The events of the game follow Luke through an assortment of largely unconnected missions to throw a wrench in the Empire’s plans. The story takes a back seat to the gameplay here, despite a few events that are important to the films. On top of this, the plot appears to delve largely into Expanded Universe territory by featuring bizarre Empire super weapons and planets unmentioned by the movies, but it’s easy enough to follow for someone who only really cares about the films. However, it’s the very tactile and visceral feel of flying these familiar ships that matters, and in that regard the first entry in the series is an excellent start.

The sequel upped the ante in every way

            Rogue Leader takes the above and completely blows it out of the water. The game feels insanely fast by comparison, both because of the clearly increased speed of shooting as well as the incredible graphics and environments that still hold up to this day. Whereas the entirety of the N64 game took place on the surface of planets, the sequel has space missions as well that have you zipping between huge frigates, star destroyers and the like. On top of the improved look and feel of the game is a much better story, mostly because it focuses on the plot of the original trilogy. You start with the assault on the Death Star, then travel to Hoth, Bespin and finally the space over Endor for what is undeniably the best mission in the series. There are also plenty of other missions in between, of course, including the escort of a convoy moving from Yavin to Hoth, and the infiltration of a downed Star Destroyer that stands out because of its use of multiple different Rebel ships to get to the objective. 

The AT-STs are one of the few improvements in Rebel Strike

            Finally, we come to Rebel Strike, the low point of the trilogy. The primary difference in this game is that it is split between two campaigns. One of these follows Wedge and is the traditional Rogue Squadron gameplay, although again using what I assume is Expanded Universe fiction for its plot. This half of the game is solid, and introduces the Jedi Starfighter, which despite the bad connotations of being from Episode II is probably the most fun ship in the series. The other half of the game, however, is flat out bad. Someone at Factor 5 thought that the thing that was missing in this franchise was on-foot action, and man oh man were they wrong. This campaign follows Luke, again through the original trilogy, on missions such as the evacuation of Yavin, the ground battle on Hoth and the escape from Jabba in Episode VI. The simple fact is that the on-foot action consists of running towards the objective while hammering the fire button to win. The camera is bad, the aiming is an unnecessary challenge and the entire addition is utterly pointless. With that said, the AT-ST sequences are a blast, and the Endor speeder bike chase has a sense of speed not even seen in most racing games. On top of that, Rebel Strike includes the entirety of Rogue Leader’s campaign for cooperative play and has a boatload of minor but nonetheless interesting extra features to mess around with.

So many AT-ATs, so little tow cable

            If you’re looking to get in on this awesome trilogy, you absolutely should start with Rogue Leader. It is without a doubt the highpoint of the series, and has such a tight focus that every aspect is forced to be as well-constructed as it possibly could be. After that, the proposition is dicier. The original game is probably the better of the two remaining entries, but if you can only get one of them it makes more sense to get Rebel Strike. Getting both Gamecube entries gives you the same controls and the same system, and the fact that they follow largely the same story makes them excellent companion pieces (not to mention that Rebel Strike contains co-op for its predecessor).

            So there you have it. As far as I’m concerned, the Rogue Squadron series is one of those modern classics that will likely get forgotten due to the explosion of other, more successful genres that occurred in the same time frame. I cannot stress enough that while they are not all created equal, any entry in the series is worthwhile in my book. You absolutely should play these games.

Images courtesy of Gianbomb.com and Google.com