Ok no funny intro this time. You'll read it anyway, right? Cocks shotgun
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Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron (DS)
Nay don't get your hopes up: It's not a full-fledged Battlefront game on the DS. This is, for the most part, a top-down shooter, but it does take a lot from the Battlefront formula and bigger SW games overall. And it does have some first person and third person sections, so I'm including it just to round things up. Also, did you know there's a Battlefront game on the DS? I didn't.
Earlier this year I played Rogue Squadron for the N64. It's highly praised for the Star Wars feel - the music, sounds, assets, all that. And sure, that stuff works, especially if you like SW.
But I'm also not sure if a game should be praised for taking everything from other sources? It should stand on its own regardless of material, and frankly I don't think Rogue Squadron is that good outside of its licence. You don't even get space battles for crying out loud.
I'm mentioning this because Elite Squadron hits you with everything like a Star Wars game as well: The music, the look, the story as it begins at the beginning of Episode III. Yep definitely a SW game. But what is it aside of that?
Most of the playtime is spent in birds eye view, however everything is rendered in 3D, so there's no cheaping out there. It's not all there is though. Soon you'll also be riding a speeder in racing view with a back camera, and maybe most effectively, also fighting space battles. Like, in space. A war among the stars, who would've thought? And a few short turret sections here and there for good measure.
Shooting is very simple, the game auto-locks on a nearby enemy so you don't need to do much more than move and hold the button. As a battlefront game, you have 4 classes which you can switch at stations scattered everywhere. There's little reason to choose anything but a heavy and his chaingun, unless the game tells you to hack something.
Space battles are where it's at in my opinion. They're greatly simplified, in particular you can only move in a 2D plane left/right, but come on, even so flying a TIE or an X-Wing is pretty cool.
What's really interesting is how often the game switches between different mechanics. You'll never spend more then 10 minutes doing something before it switches to something else. It smells as being made for kids with a short attention span, but I still I welcome it, as it keeps things fresh. Again, it really is a simple game, so at least it doesn't get too boring.
I do appreciate how varied the environments are too - now yes it's all taken from the movies, but still, you get to to fight your fights on Geonosis, Kashyyk, Hoth, Endor, Mustafar, a few Star Destroyers... They look pretty nice too, all things considered. Simplistic, but recognisable and in 3D.
The story that holds everything together spans episodes III, IV, V, VI and a little beyond. You're a special clone - meaning you're the most generic dude with a brown beard game protagonist instead of the clone proper the Clone Wars are named after.
Anyway your twin brother stays with the empire, and you join the rebels, so you take part in all the major events and battles across the 4 movies, and meet most major characters. Eventually you even become a Jedi... Not what I expected, this kinda stands out like a sore thumb. But I guess it's a way to round things up and have truly everything in one game.
The story is quite cheesy in my opinion, but isn't too insulting and it does help move things along, especially combined with the fast pace of the game.
It's also a suuuuper easy game, enemies drop like flies. Well at least until the final boss, who's a cheating bastard (you'll never guess who is the adversary here, will you?), so I found it fair to cheat in return. Otherwise it would take like 20% of the entire playtime, sheesh.
So the game doesn't really have much of its own thing. It's almost all repurposed Star Wars stuff, if not from the movies, then from the Battlefront games proper. And what it adds, isn't much to write home about.
Still, it is close to an ultimate Star Wars DS game - you get to relive all the important bits from the movies, it keeps good pace and switches mechanics often so it doesn't get stale, and at total playtime of at most 4 hours, it's not too annoying.
Also, you can do skirmish fights with bots - including space battles, and various modes on the ground like point control, capture the droid or hero battles using the Jedi from the films. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong and just like with the big Battlefront games, multiplayer is really where it's at with this one.
Rating: 6/10 - optionally add a point or two for the bots, as that looks pretty fun.
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Dementium: The Ward Remaster (3DS)
Okaaaay I'll play it, geez...
So, I agree with the notion that if you can't make a decent story or setting, don't bother at all rather than make some generic trash. Which is why I don't mind that Bionicle Heroes doesn't have any story whatsoever, while the likes of Moon, C.O.R.E and Ironfall just go with the "fuck it, alien research going wrong and alien invasion it is, lol" first draft.
Anyway, the people behind Moon also made this horror game set in an abandoned hospital populated with zombies with teeth for ribs and children ghosts, because they come from Genericland ruled by King Standard the Universal.
I don't vibe with horror games well. I can do the Doom 3/F.E.A.R. kind of horror where I can move like a human with working legs and have enough firepower to level the continent 6 times over. Or alternatively when I can switch on wuss mode like in SOMA and go on to explore the apocalyptic carnage and be annoyed by stupid broken physics puzzles instead of the mutated critters constantly poking me with their bloody claws.
What I can't do much, is the survival kind of horror with tropes like limited saving, barely having ability to fight, and a character with shat pants that trips over their own feet.
Dementium is somewhere in between. There are weapons to deal with the threats (at least on the lowest "normal" difficulty), so that's something. But it also does the cheap horror gotchas like zombies jumping at you just as the new room loads, shitty little slimy flying embryos that can kill you very quickly if you don't pixel-perfect snipe them immediately, and infrequent save points, a very small area of vision without a flashlight, the walking pace of a salted snail, and the omnipresent annoying heartbeat, but... But... Hm...
Yea, no buts. It's a totally standard horror shooter, complete with cryptic messages written in blood, shuffling footsteps, locked doors and all that. Now, props for existing before the explosion of bazillions other 1st person low-poly horror games that are out today and do the exact same thing; and obviously it's on the DS/3DS, so that's extra points. But we had seen all of this so many times even before.
The game does exactly what it wants to do I guess, so if you're looking for horror on the go, then this should work well enough. DS is the right system for it indeed, as even the 3DS version already makes it a bit too smooth, while the native DS roughness fits it well. It's definitely creepy and unnerving enough. Mostly.
I quit about an hour in, when a Silent Hill-style skinless boss killed me in a locked room, because the controls are just fiddly enough and the walking pace is just slow enough for "real" combat to be quite annoying. And of course the last savepoint was several critters- and darkness-filled rooms back.
These and other classic survival horror tropes aren't even scary, it's just annoying bullshit and a great way to make me close and uninstall the game. I looked up a playthrough and I don't feel like I missed out on anything but more of the same blood-filled hospital hallways and repeating annoying enemies over and over anyway.
I sorta respect that the devs succeeded in what they wanted to do; for a DS game (originally) this is quite cool. However, even more so than Ironfall, it's not easy to look past how extremely derivative and uninspired it is. I think I'm rather gonna try Luigi's Mansion for some scary fix.
If you do want to try it, I suggest the DS version, as the PS1 low-poly styling and narrower field of view gives it more charisma.
Rating: 5-6/10 - functionally it's fine, but the clichés are annoying, and damn is it generic as hell. The extra point is just for there not being a lot of DS/3DS games like it.
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: Defiance (DS)
Send help. Why am I doing this to myself? COD4:MW really was a trojan horse of the N-Space developer, as it was quite alright, but the sequel and one later 007 spinoff were utter trash. I have no interest in World of War as it's clear that Brothers in Arms blows it out of the water, and I briefly tried Black Ops to find that it's also basically unplayable. But one remains... Egh fuck it, it can't be worse than what I've already seen.
But well, the game doesn't start too bad. It's a stealth mission, which is quite the first for COD and not as shit as GE007, the snow looks decent and hey, music is a more constant presence. Even the framerate doesn't tank too much until you start running into multiple enemies, and the AI is scaled back to the level of the first MW. Alright, maybe this won't be such a disaster.
And so I was playing - basically just going through the motions, and I certainly felt the same was the case for the developers. Just going through the motions, no passion anymore. MWM at least had a bit of that. In that one you had a remote controlled robot you needed to deploy and pick up; here, if there's a RC section, it just switches you to the robot's view and then back.
There is a handful of new mechanics, but they're all scraping the bottom of the barrel. To breach a door, you place a charge with a button, it blows, and then the scene goes into slow-mo like in the "big" COD games, except when I first got it, I didn't know if it's actually slow-mo or just the framerate tanking.
Even the TV news clips are mostly gone and there are just text briefings now. Everything in this game feels so, so tired. Maybe that's where the 'improved' gameplay comes from... There just were no more attempts to make something cool.
Of course, it doesn't help that while the previous two games had you chase after nuclear terrorists all around the world, here you get the most mundane objectives - secure a warehouse, secure a pipeline, secure a weapons shipment... Since MWD follows the main MW3 game and its ridiculous idea of Russia invading with wave attacks of middle-aged men and malnourished teenagers armed with weapons from the 50's... Er, okay, I guess this was quite prophetic after all. But in the whole game you only have random missions in the US, and it ends on a complete whimper.
I don't mind that in theory - I still think the simpler COD4 worked better than the overconfident, but almost unplayable MWM; and there's nothing wrong with small-scale, personal stories in games. But it feels truly lifeless, as if it was the last game out of five DS shooters in two years, in addition to all the other games n-Space has made during that time, and they ran out of steam.
Bugs are back too - AI glitching, objectives not registering, sounds not playing. More evidence of the same.
But in terms of playability, or rather playability to bullshit ratio, it's still the best of the trilogy. It went away with double-tap aiming and stupid minigames of COD4, it doesn't have the dogshit framerate and rabid AI of MWM... It just really doesn't have much of anything.
Not exactly an epic ending to the MW trilogy, the COD on DS saga, or the whole N-Space shooter lineup. Well, they died as they lived: Meh.
Rating: 5/10 - listed in dictionary under the definition of "average".
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Older reviews:
I. Moon, COD4, C.O.R.E., Ironfall: 3DS community - Patient gamers
II. Chibi Robo, MechAssault, Bionicle: 3DS community - Patient gamers
III. Brothers in Arms, GoldenEye Rogue Agent, COD:MWM: 3DS community - Patient gamers
IV. Metroid Prime Hunters, Dead'n'Furious, GoldenEye 007: 3DS community - Patient gamers
