[Game Review] Metroplexity

If you go to Metroplexity's website, you'll find a game that's in early beta, but is still very playable. It's a neat idea - an entirely web-based game that's a mix of text, simplistic artwork, and a combat system that's simple and yet extensive. It's incomplete - there's a point at which you can finish most or all of the game's content and there's nothing more to do even though the story remains incomplete. Still, you can easily play for several weeks before you reach that point.

The game doesn't put a lot of effort into helping players along. This is good because it challenges you to figure out what's going on, but it's also annoying if you don't really understand what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Still, it reminded me of the old 80s text-based adventures, where you were told almost nothing about how to play the game, and had to stumble along trying to figure out what to do. Those games really put hair on your chest, so to speak, and today's gamers are spoiled by comparison.

One thing that took me quite a while to figure out was the combat system. It's evidently based on card games like Magic: The Gathering or somesuch, where you build "decks" of combat techniques and then have to play them in sequence to build combinations. Moreover, certain techniques or combinations will work better in some situations or others, so you need to account for that. Finally, there are three types of attacks - melee, ranged and the sort-of magical "etheric," and you really ought to choose your attacks based on the sort of weapon you're using. I eventually figured out that I could build separate decks, and I split my cards into "melee" and "ranged" decks so that I could match them up to my chosen weapons.

The ability to move your character around in the game and take action is based on energy points. You get a certain number of points each day, and you can recover some of them by using food or drugs. Once you've exhausted all of your energy, your hunger and your "body" (which is consumed by using the special drugs and drug-like substances, like coffee), you're done for the day. This definitely limits how much time you can put into the game. Again, this is good if you're inclined to get sucked in and spend too much time playing the game, but managing your energy can be a bit of a nuisance and sometimes seemed like it got in the way of playing the game.

But gameplay aside, the game is fun to play, presents an interesting storyline, and challenges the player to figure out what's going on and then solve it. That's what's really important after all. Granted, Metroplexity is still in "early beta," so it's not perfect and it's not done. But it's also completely free - which it might or might not be when it's finished (I haven't seen anything one way or the other). As free games go, its unique and entertaining enough to be a great way to spend some time. I liked it enough to give it a B, and when it's finished it could easily rise higher than that.

[Game Review] Assassin's Creed 2

I played the first Assassin's Creed a year ago, and I enjoyed it very much. (Click the link to read my review of the first game). It had some flaws, but overall it was a solid game, especially since I paid almost nothing for it. In many things - games, books, and movies especially - we hope that sequels will manage to capture what we liked about the original and then improve upon it. All too often, they fail to achieve either or both of those goals. Assassin's Creed 2 is the happy exception.

Assassin's Creed 2 managed to maintain much of the feel of the original game, from the historic settings to the combat moves and the relatively open nature of the gameplay. It downplayed the need to perform a wide variety of side missions in each city, concentrating instead on the main storyline. But it made up for that by making the main storyline extremely compelling.

Sadly, some of the original's flaws carried over as well. For instance, it's often incredibly frustrating to get your character to move precisely where and how you want, even when you use the controls precisely as designed. The ONLY time I found myself cursing this game was when I would follow a pickpocket all over town, finally catch up to him, and then somehow swing my fist at empty air instead of clouting him soundly like I should have. Or when the game would cause my character to jump off in some random direction that had nothing to do with the keystrokes I entered, for no apparent reason, and usually get me killed. Man I hated that. It was especially frustrating because, much of the time, the game is really, really smooth about figuring out where you wanted your guy to go, so he could effortlessly swing and jump from one precarious perch to the next. So when that capability failed - when the game not only didn't figure out what you were trying to do, but actually did something fatally contrary to what you were explicitly telling it to do - it was doubly frustrating.

This game actually involves the same "character," in the sense that you're playing a modern-era man who is descended from the "assassins" in the game. He is able to use these high-tech machines to enter a virtual world with his mind, where adventures from his ancestors are recreated. This allows him to explore where they lived, learn what they knew, and investigate people, places, and hidden clues that offer up information he and his cohorts can use in present day. The first time, he lived life in the body of an assassin in the Middle East during the time of the crusades. In the sequel, he takes on the identity of a Florentine nobleman who must avenge his family and continue to fight against the evil Templars, who continue to plot world domination right up through the present day.

Other changes include a wide array of different weapons, a home base that you can enter pretty much whenever you like, and money that's used to procure your new weapons and armor, as well as to make improvements to your home town. The weapons give you steadily increasing combat effectiveness throughout the game. The introduction of money, however, was somewhat clumsy. By midway through the game, I had such a ridiculous amount of money that it ceased to have any meaning for me. Only in the very earliest stages of the game did I ever make any real decisions based on what I could afford.

Lastly, the sequel introduced a series of puzzle-style mini-games, where you had to unravel the pieces of a mystery by finding and then decoding them one at a time. I found these mini-games extremely tedious, and most of them I only managed to solve by randomly clicking stuff until something positive happened.

Overall, though, Assassin's Creed 2 was a worthy successor to the original, and just as much fun to play. Better still, it didn't shoehorn you into a single fighting style at the very end, which really affected my ability to fully enjoy the first game. The game didn't feel quite as open as the first one - I was encouraged more to follow a prescribed series of quests in order - and I'm not sure there was quite as much strategy involved as in the first game. Still, it kept me cheerfully occupied for a couple of weeks, and that's really what I ask my games to do for me. I look forward to the forthcoming Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood to be released for the PC, and then a year later I can buy it when it's suitably discounted.

I rate Assassin's Creed 2 an A- and recommend it highly!

2010 Holiday Steam Sale

Long-time readers will recall that last year I purchased quite a few games during the Steam holiday year-end sale. Those games literally lasted me all year - in conjunction with re-playing some old favorites (like Civilization IV and its expansion packs) and buying only a couple of new games at deeply-discounted prices (including Deus Ex: Invisible War, which turned out to be way better than I'd been told to expect). In fact, I just finally started to play Bioshock this month and I'm not done with it yet, and it bought it almost exactly a year ago.

So as 2010 wound to a close, I made sure to check and see what Steam had to offer in this year's holiday sale. Once again, I think I was able to pick up enough to keep me busy for a while.

Assassin's Creed II - the original game was part of the pack I bought last Christmas, and it's one of the most-enjoyable games I've ever played. So when I saw the sequel on sale, it was a no-brainer to pick it up. In fact, the only annoyance for me is that the newest game in the series, Assassins' Creed: Brotherhood, appears to be a console-only title, with no PC version available. Which truly sucks. Cost: $14.00

Prince of Persia - I got the whole collection of games, sequels and expansion packs for a pittance. The road to this game is actually kind of amusing. As I mentioned above, I really, really liked Assassin's Creed. My wife though the Prince of Persia movie looked pretty good, so we got that from Netflix and watched it. And the combat scenes were apparently true to the game, as they made me sit up and say, "Hey, this movie looks a LOT like Assassin's Creed." Sure enough, Assassin's Creed was built on the Prince of Persia game engine, and they do behave similarly from what I could tell in my research. So the game plus the movie lead to me buying this other game. Fascinating! Total cost: $19.95

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - I know next to nothing about this game, but it was five bucks so what the hell. From the description, it sounds a bit like an Elder Scrolls-type of RPG adventure game, and I've been enjoying those for almost thirty years, I figure I'll get some kicks out of this one, too. Cost: $4.99

Grand total: $38.94

That doesn't look like much of a list. And, to be sure, I was very tempted to pick up some other games at greatly discounted prices. But they weren't low, low enough for me. Nope - I'll wait until next year, when I can expect those same games, some of which are still pretty new, to be available for a song. Besides, what that list doesn't show is that there are something like five different games included in the Prince of Persia pack I bought, which bulks up the amount of gaming I've got to look forward to by quite a lot. I can't find my receipts from last year so I'm not sure how much I ended up spending in 2009, but I think I'm in the ballpark. And none of those were duds, even if Judge Dredd was a little bit craptastic. I still enjoyed playing it.

I won't know whether these games are all they're cracked up to be for several months at least, but that's always a challenge when you're buying a game. Usually for forty bucks (or easily more), you get one game and one chance to find some satisfying entertainment. With the Steam sale, I get a half-dozen chances or more to find a decent game. And in my experience, I end up with a half-dozen or more decent games, which is huge.

I Like It My Way

It's definitely clear to me that when it comes to computer games, I like to do things my own way. The more freedom the developers give me, the happier I'll be. This surely speaks to why certain games are my favorites.

Deus Ex, for example, is a fairly free-form game. Sure, each "map" in the game has certain goals that need to be accomplished before you move on, but it's extremely flexible about how you meet those goals. To facilitate this, the developers did several things right. They provided multiple "paths" in most cases - lots of ways to get to where you need to be. There'd be a "sneaky" path where you had to stick to the shadows, a "technie" path that only worked if you were able to bypass security equipment, and a "brute force" path that required you to defeat numerous enemies. They also provided multiple "upgrade" trees for your character - as the game proceeded, you'd find nanite canisters that allowed you to upgrade your systems, but each time you had to make a choice - strength or stealth? Weapons or computer? The better you got at one, the fewer chances you'd ever have to upgrade the other. Lastly, they provided a wealth of weaponry, several for each playing style. Personally, I tended to like a combination of stealth and direct assault, wherein I would sneak into a good position, then use a sniper rifle to pick off enemies from a safe distance, then move up.

Another game that I really, really enjoyed was Assassin's Creed. Assassin's creed places you in various middle-eastern cities around the time of the Crusades and lets you have at it. There are various people you're supposed to help and/or kill, but how you achieve those goals is largely up to you. You had the skills to launch all-out assaults, or to slide in behind a victim and slip a knife in between their ribs. I hated the ending, mostly because it denied you the sort of freedom the rest of the game provided, instead funneling you through a series of near-impossible toe-to-toe battles that ignored most of what you'd learned while playing the game. The other 90% of the first Assassin's Creed was excellent, though, and I look forward to the sequel(s) coming down in price to where I can afford them.

I've never written about it, however System Shock 2 was another masterpiece that combined free-form play, selectable upgrades, and a dark, mysterious storyline to produce an epic playing experience. SS2 is still one of the scariest, most dramatically tense games I ever played. Like Deus Ex, it let you choose whether to be a tech, a brawler or a telepath, and which one you chose affected how you played.

The Elder Scrolls games - Morrowind and Oblivion being the two I've actually played - expanded on the level of freedom dramatically by letting you explore whole continents, choose multiple races and classes, and even join certain factions (which then denied you access to what the other factions offered).

But there was one game that trumped all of those. A game so epic in nature that you literally had entire worlds to explore, whole cultures to play, a wide multitude of races and classes, and thousands of NPCs and players to interact with. That game, of course, is World of Warcraft.

WoW is in the process of experiencing its third expansion, and I admit I have a slight itch to play the game again, in spite of the monetary cost and the huge time investment involved. And that addictiveness that would threaten to pull me in even when I know the game isn't really a good hobby got me thinking about why. Why would I even consider playing a game that sucks up every free minute of my day? And I realized, it's the freedom that really attracts me, and the freedom that makes the game almost too good - too much of a time-sink. There's ALWAYS something you can do, whether it's questing or grinding for experience or exploring someplace you've never really been or hunting for "rare" monsters (who only appear in certain locations at random times) or gathering ingredients to craft items or selling stuff in the auction house or... well, there's always something to do. Most of it, quite honestly, isn't that much fun, but somehow the ease of it, the monotony of it, the limited risk of it and the "hoarding" aspects of it all speak to me in such a way that once I'm in the game, I find it awfully hard to leave. It's always "just one more quick thing."

So I am not going to play WoW again, even just to see the changes. If anything, the fact that they're changing stuff that was really familiar to me, comfortable for me, is a bit of a dis-incentive, so that's good. But if I were in there, I'm sure I'd have just as much trouble leaving. Because if there was ever a game that let me pretty much do what I wanted however I wanted to do it, it would be World of Warcraft.