Review: Gears of War: Judgment (Xbox 360)

Though a little on the lean side in terms of content, Gears of War: Judgment is pretty good... provided you like third-person Halo games.

Shooters are the video-game equivalent of jazz music. To some people they seem like so much chaos and noise, and many have trouble discerning the subtleties that distinguish one work from another. Through practiced appreciation, though, the connoisseur learns to identify tightly woven patterns of structure and balance, a framework that allows seemingly minor creative changes to have a massive impact on the mood and feel of the piece. This dichotomy of chaos and order is why two games like Halo and Call of Duty can seem like interchangeable murder simulators to the layperson, whilst the expert experiences them as differently as one would a Thai massage and a colonoscopy.

The narrow chasms that differentiate shooters are especially relevant when we consider franchises and sequels. For example, the Gears of War series sets itself apart with combat that is far more deliberate and strategic than that of "twitchier" shooters like Call of Duty, while still achieving the kind of high-octane arcade flair not present in tactical shooters like Rainbow Six. However, when designing a new entry for an established franchise, developers face a dilemma: how can the game evolve, without changing so much that it becomes an entirely different kind of shooter?

What I've Been Playing

As I've mentioned in the past (and as known by anyone who has had the misfortune of meeting me personally), I love criticizing things. Unfortunately, the writing of game reviews brings with it a host of other problems, and since I started blogging I've noticed that my gaming habits have changed significantly. These days I almost exclusively play new releases, rushing through each game as quickly as possible in the hopes that I can pen some sort of semi-informed review while anyone still cares. (In fact, in the 10 days it took me to finish Mass Effect 3, everyone had already become sick of debating its "controversial ending".)

So, for a change of pace I decided for the month of April to play whatever I felt like playing whenever I felt like playing it. (At least, as long as "whenever" happened after the kids went to bed.) Rather than write exhaustive reviews for each game, I figured I would instead attempt to condense my standard several pages of witty commentary and dick jokes into just a paragraph or two about each game.

Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

After spending an uninspiring winter term studying at the University of Final Fantasy XIII-2 (The "Safety School" of J-RPGs), I was anxious for a role-playing game that would really spike my cocoa. Enter Xenoblade Chronicles, (nominally) spiritual successor to the other "Xeno games" (i.e. Xenogears on the PS1 and Xenosaga on the PS2). Xenoblade Chronicles was originally released in 2010 for the Wii, and like most Wii games, it wasn't released in North America. However, unlike most Wii games, it was supposedly quite good... in fact, it was apparently so good that a fan campaign led to it being released here nearly two years later.

You'll enjoy exploring Xenoblade Chronicles' lush and expansive world, especially since there won't be any pesky high-definition graphics getting in your way.

Right now I'm about 20 hours in, and so far the game's primary effect has been to remind me that the Wii's graphics are on par with a PS2 that's been left out in the rain, and that its controls handle like an old Atari joystick made out of a live weasel. That said, it's impressive that such an underpowered system can support a game of this scope. The stereotypically inane J-RPG dialogue--while still present--is softened by the choice to make everyone have a British accent, and the initially simple battle system continues to become increasingly more layered. So, I suppose for now I'll forge ahead with the hope that all that hype was founded in some sort of reality I have yet to experience.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (Xbox 360)

Seeing the extended-gameplay trailer for Assassin's Creed III at PAX East rekindled my interest in this series, or at least nudged it enough that I was willing to drop $21.99 on Amazon and about 20 hours of my life on Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (which I passed on when it came out back in 2010). I have to admit, I'd forgotten how much I love these games. Although largely unchanged from the formula of Assassin's Creed II, there are a few subtle changes that go a long way towards enhancing the AC gameplay experience.

I had heard that the real contribution of ACB was its innovative multiplayer, but unfortunately I didn't explore this aspect very much... in part because I didn't want to tarry before moving on to Assassin's Creed: Revelations, but mostly because I didn't feel like getting the ol' hidden-blade-to-the-brain-stem treatment by the few die-hard assassinos still lurking on the servers after 18 months.

Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)

For about half a year now, Gears of War 3 has reigned as the official game of TNGN (Thursday Night Game Night), my weekly multiplayer gaming session with my friends from high school (or as my wife calls it, my "standing Thursday play-date"). As much fun as it is to frag complete strangers, there's a lot to be said for engaging in multiplayer with folks who respect a request of "don't kill me for a few minutes; I need to go change a diaper".

"RAAM's Shadow" introduces the new character Michael Barrick. He can be easily distinguished from other characters in the Gears canon by his gravelly voice, terse demeanor, and impossibly large musculature.

Actually, I think there must have been quite a few diapers that needed changing during the month of April, because more than once our TNGN crew seemed a little thin. In fact, one week I was a party of one, but instead of sobbing into my Manhattan and cursing children everywhere, I instead took the opportunity to wrap up the GoW3 RAAM's Shadow DLC. It turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable and well-executed addition to the campaign, especially the parts where you get to play as General RAAM (the final boss from the first Gears of War).

Dragon Quest IX (Nintendo DS)

They say the birth of a child is a happy event. I'm inclined to agree, because the birth of my daughter in January resulted in my three-year-old son getting an Xbox Kinect and myself getting a Nintendo 3DS. After playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for about an hour, I opted instead to go back and dive into some of the old Nintendo DS games I missed, such as Dragon Quest IX.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies is an RPG in the classic Dragon Quest (a.k.a. Dragon Warrior) style, meaning that you can't blow your nose in the game without it being accompanied by several pages of text narration. While this results in a gameplay experience that is doubtlessly padded, it also has a certain laid-back charm that is well suited to a portable gaming experience. In the past few months, somehow I've managed to sink 50 hours into this game (mostly in 15-minute chunks), and I still haven't beaten it.

Fez (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Last month's indie darling Fez looks on the surface to be simply a perspective-based puzzle-platformer, reminiscent of Crush or Echochrome. Though its pixel-art graphics and chiptune soundtrack are not without their charm, most folks are unlikely to be blown away during the three hours it takes to collect "32 Cubes" and beat the game.

What does it mean??

However, once you beat the game and unlock New Game +... that's when things begin to get weird. As you start over on your quest for the "32 Anti-Cubes", you begin to realize that the pixel-art world of Fez is rife with cube-based iconography, and that the environments you've been carelessly hopping through are littered with snippets of language, numbers, history, astrology, and religion, much of which is integral to solving the puzzles in this second half of the game. The culture of this strange little universe is so deep and interwoven that at one point (around 2:00 AM) I started to believe an entire race of 2-D people actually lived inside my Xbox. It's been a long time since a puzzle game forced me to write actual notes on actual pieces of paper.

Well, that's about it for the April Game Roundup. In other news, we're closing on our new house tomorrow. Perhaps in another month I'll be writing about my new favorite games, which are likely to include such titles as Wallpaper Removal Challenge 2012, DIY Home Wiring: First Aid for Minor Electrical Burns Edition, and Moving All Our Crap to a New House.

Review: Gears of War 3

As a critic, I’ve found the most challenging reviews to write involve games to which I have a particular emotional attachment, and this is certainly the case for the Gears of War franchise. As long as I’ve had an Xbox 360, Gears of War has been a constant and dependable companion. Sure, every once in a while I’d run off and have a fling when a sexy new Call of Duty game came along... but once the thrill wore off, I’d realize all those new frags were meaningless, and soon I’d be stomping Locusts again like I never left.

Now Gears of War 3 is out, the final entry in Epic Games’ blockbuster trilogy. As excited as I’ve been about this moment, I’ve resolved to do my best to be objective. Given all that we’ve been through together, I’m sure my girl will be furious about being treated like any other release. All I have to say is that I’m sorry, babe... but this is business.

Design: 5/5

In any well-established franchise—especially those with a strong multiplayer component—each sequel is a delicate balance between innovation and tradition. Gears of War 3 finds this balance well, leaving the majority of the essential play-control elements unchanged, while making a few subtle yet important tweaks. Pick up a controller, and initially you may feel like you’re still playing Gears of War 2; however, you’ll quickly notice that things feel more refined and responsive. For example, the button mechanics for actions such as picking up weapons and reviving allies have been slightly adjusted, so now the next time one of your comrades takes an unhealthy number of bullets to the head, you’re much more likely to help him up as opposed to accidentally rummaging through the ammo crate upon which he happened to lie bleeding.

Hey, you can cook him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna eat him.

Of course, there’s the requisite bevy of new ordnance, including the Digger Launcher (which fires small, highly-explosive Locusts that burrow under cover), the One-Shot (a heavy instant-kill sniper rifle), and the Vulcan Cannon (a two-person chain gun setup, where one person shoots while the other feeds ammo using some sort of bizarre hand-crank device that looks like it also doubles as an ice cream maker).  These new additions are fun, and so far appear to be limited enough in power and availability as to not alter the core gameplay too substantially.

One of the biggest changes involves “Horde mode”, a staple of the Gears of War 2 experience. While you and four friends still get to fend off waves of attacking Locusts, you now have the opportunity to establish a dedicated base, complete with fortifications such as razor wire and turrets. Instead of points (and gore and self-satisfaction), killing Locusts yields rewards of cold hard cash (also, gore and self-satisfaction). After each wave, you can use your newly earned wad to repair and upgrade your sweet fort. Oh, one more thing—every 10th wave is now a “boss wave”, which in my experience usually meant that before his gruesome demise, my character spent his last few terrible seconds of life as a pair of Brumak slippers.

Artistic: 5/5

It’s hard to know where to stand with the visuals in Gears of War 3. From a technical standpoint, everything looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I consider this to be more of an engineering accomplishment than an artistic one. However, in terms of pure aesthetics, I didn’t find most of the locations in the campaign to be all that compelling. One issue is that at this point, the world of Sera has been wrecked more times than I was during my freshman year of undergrad, and thus most areas have devolved into the same uniform collection of gray rubble. Although there are some occasional breaks from this monotony (such as the setting for the last act), for the most part I wasn’t particularly impressed by too many of the new locales. 

It took some hard work, but designers of Gears of War 3 were able to make Marcus look about 20-30% more haggard.

The enemies, however, are a different story. There are a ridiculous number of new foes, and most of them look pretty bad-ass. Particularly impressive are the many new Locusts of the Lambent variety, which are so packed full of Imulsion that upon dying they explode in a spectacular display of glowing ooze, like some sort of toxic piñata.

Narrative: 3/5

In trying to trying to describe the plot and dialogue of Gears of War 3, I felt it necessary to strive for the same delicate blend of dramatic sensibility and elegant wordsmithing that surely went into the game itself. Here’s what I came up with: “It’s okay.” If you happen to care at all about the fate of Sera, then the campaign does offer a few answers and a bit of closure, but don’t expect to see any Marcus Fenix soliloquys showing up in the drama curriculum anytime soon.

In a lot of ways, Gears of War 3 feels like it’s just running down the checklist of action game clichés. Noble battlefield sacrifices? Check. Comic relief through gallows humor? Check. Newly-introduced NPCs dying quick and horrible deaths? Check. On the other hand, perhaps I should cut the writing a little slack. If you consider the characters, perhaps it’s actually spot-on. I mean, these guys are soldiers—and not the macabre “war is a terrible tragedy, but I’ll fight because I must” kind of soldier, but the kind who gleefully crush skulls under their boots while cracking jokes. I have to assume that they’re not too particularly thoughtful or self-reflective, because otherwise I’d start to worry that they were total sociopaths.

Gameplay: 5/5

As I’ve already mentioned, Gears of War 3 sees adjustments to both the multiplayer and Horde modes, and the result is a noticeably improved gameplay experience. Add to this full four-player co-op in the campaign and a new albeit brief “Beast mode” (basically the reverse of Horde, wherein you play as the Locust), and you’ve got a total package that should keep anyone entertained for quite some time. In fact, while playing the game I got a very real sense that the developers tried to make a game that one could continue to enjoy for years, and so far it seems to me like they achieved that goal.

Once you’ve crushed a Locust’s head with a Silverback mech, you won’t want to crush one with anything else.

Summary

When it comes down to it, when evaluating any video game there’s really only one question that matters: “Is it fun?” After all, you can’t spell “video game” without “game”. (Or, I suppose, without “demo”, “evade”, or “amigo”, although none of those words are at all relevant to my current point.)

If you enjoyed playing any of the previous Gears of War games, then you can rest assured that this one improves upon them in nearly every way, including being more “fun”. Alternatively, if you haven’t played Gears before, but the prospect of exploding one of your friends into a pile of bloody chunks with a short-range shotgun blast (and then having a good laugh about it) appeals to you, then now is as good a time as any to jump on the bandwagon.

Merry Gearsmas!

I could barely sleep last night. Laying in my bed, I thought about (of all things) my Google Calendar, and how for months now, the date of September 20th had been emblazoned with the title “GEARS OF WAR 3 RELEASE”. I remembered how I had even typed it all CAPITAL LETTERS, signifying a level of typographic excitation I almost never achieve, not even for special occasions like Christmas or National Fellatio Week. 

Fuck you, Fred Savage. Fuck. You.

I don’t remember ever being this excited about an upcoming video game as a kid. This could be because I have an absolutely terrible emotional memory; perhaps I actually was this excited about every new release, but don’t remember because the 1990’s happened more than a week ago. One of the only cases I could recall was Super Mario Bros. 3. I remember relentlessly begging my mother for a copy, a tireless saga whose finale doubtlessly involved her slugging it out with other guilt-crazed parents in a K-Mart somewhere. I even dragged her to a showing of The Wizard just for a glimpse of the game. In the end, I finally got my copy of SMB3, and learned an important life lesson in the process: watching an autistic kid play video games for 90-minutes does not make for compelling cinema. 

To be honest, I’m not even sure how (or even if) my friends and I found out about upcoming games back then. This was in the Dark Ages before the Internet, so unless we saw a television commercial or read about it in Nintendo Power magazine, we usually didn’t know about games until after they were already on the shelves. Our usual approach to gaming was to goad our parents into heading to Video World, our local “video rental store”. (For you youngsters out there who don’t know what I’m talking about, imagine Netflix were an actual physical store, except with VHS tapes and Nintendo games instead of DVDs and disgruntled customers complaining about price hikes.) Once there, we would descend into intense deliberations over which game we should get, based on esoteric criteria such as coolness of cover art, whether it came with a photocopied instruction manual, and whether they even had a copy available to rent. Then we would go to one of our houses, start playing the game, realize that it was Back to the Future and one of the worst NES games ever made, and go to bed disappointed. Good times. 

Looking back, I realize that the difference between this approach and the current pre-order paradigm is like the difference between awkward teenage sex and that crazy tantric stuff that Sting is into. For months I’ve read the press releases, watched the gameplay trailers, and played the beta, and when I finally get home from work and open that lovely little package from Amazon, it’s going to be amazing. Don’t get me wrong… like any high-school sweetheart, I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for Video World. However, I think both Sting and I prefer the status quo. 

Merry Gearsmas everyone!

PS - I just remembered, Netflix doesn't have DVDs anymore either.  I guess now it's just disgruntled customers.

Happy Birthday to Me

Tomorrow I’ll be celebrating the completion of my 32nd trip around the Sun. (Though by the time I finally post this, it might be today.) In regards to this momentous event, my wife posed a question that I expect is pretty commonly asked around such anniversaries. Namely, she asked me, “What would you like for your birthday?”

I responded in the same way I have every year since reaching adulthood: “Nothing”.

“What, there’s nothing that you want?”

Hearing the absurdity of this accusation, I thought that perhaps my original one-word response could do with some unpacking. I explained:

“Of course there are things that I want, but they all fall into one of three categories: (1) things I can afford, like video games, (2) things I can’t afford, like a helicopter or a Japanese sexbot, and (3) things that don’t exist, like hover shoes or an AeroBed that actually stays inflated. Things from the first category I’ve already bought myself, and things from the second you shouldn’t be buying me. Good luck with the third.”

You see, this is the problem with birthdays. When you’re a kid, a gift is like free income, which is why you feel so completely ripped off when someone gets you something lame like clothes or a pencil case. (As my birthday coincides with the back-to-school season, you can believe this happened to me all the time.) When you’re an adult, it’s completely different. A gift from your parents merely serves to decrease your future inheritance by one ugly sweater’s worth, while a gift from your spouse is basically something you bought yourself.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I much prefer it this way, where I get to buy whatever I hell I want, whenever the hell I want it. At this point, I’ve got pre-orders stacked up through the holidays, including Gears of War 3, Saints Row: The Third, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Modern Warfare 3. In other words, I’ve ensured that Amazon will be delivering me a steady stream of gifts non-stop until Christmas.

Happy birthday to me.

PS – I’ve decided that instead of posting blog entries on Tuesdays and reviews on Thursdays, I’m going to post them on Tuesdays and Fridays.  However, I’m going to start posting them first thing in the morning (or the night before), so that you can actually read them on those days :)

The Best Hangover Cure

As should be obvious from the date of my last post, my blog has been on a bit of a break while I finish up my Ph.D. degree. However, I hit a major milestone this past weekend when I turned in a nearly final draft of my thesis to my committee. After doing a bit too much celebrating on Sunday night, I nursed a brutal hangover on Monday using an old family remedy: fluids, aspirin, and the Gears of War 3 beta.

My initial reactions are pretty positive. As one might expect, not much of the game is fundamentally different from its predecessors. I was able to jump in and play as though I’d never left, like these months of pretending to love Black Ops were just a bad dream. It seems like they refined the button overloading a little bit; for example, you now have to hold buttons down to do certain things, which reduces the chances of your character absently rifling through an ammo crate when you want him to be assisting a dying teammate instead.

Also, there appear to be two new default weapons. The first was a “Retro Lancer” which has a bayonet instead of a chainsaw. I think the balance here is a faster instant-kill melee, at the cost of a lower shooting accuracy. Instead of your standard Gnasher, there is now the alternative of a sawed-off shotgun, which can instantly turn anything into a pile of bloody chum, but can only do so one shell at a time.

You must get a tax break if you include a mall as one of your multiplayer maps, because it seems to be all the rage these days.

A few other new weapons I found scattered about were an incendiary grenade and a “Digger Launcher”. The latter adds a nice twist to the cover-based combat, as it can burrow under walls to explode an enemy hiding on the other side.  If you have a terrible sense of direction like me, then you’ll be pleased to see that the loading screen includes a map of the current multiplayer level, complete with locations of where to find these precious toys. Just don’t expect to be the only one making a beeline for the nearest Mulcher.

Although not much has changed on the surface, that doesn’t mean that a lot of new work hasn’t gone into the game. I get the impression that designing a good multiplayer experience is kind of a thankless job, as people only notice when something is unbalanced, such as when a map is poorly designed or a particular weapon is too powerful. Though things look good right now, it will take some time to see whether Gears of War 3 gets it just right.  Of course, that’s why they have these beta tests… and if it means I don’t have to wait until the fall to get my Gears on, then I’m certainly happy to help.