Terraria – PC

By Clint DrewsKolb

Developed by Re-Logic

Terraria is a Minecraft style sandbox game. There’s crafting, blocks, exploration and the freedom to build the absurd. It stands apart by concentrating more on exploration and fighting. This leads to a more directed experience in which you’ll be spending more time delving the depths than building fantastical structures. The addition of boss battles, a stronger emphasis on RPG elements and retro graphics leads to an interesting game.

Like a lot of sandbox games, it starts by being plopped into the middle of a randomnly generated world. An NPC is there to assist you starting out the game though he’s largerly useless and I’d reccomend looking up the Terraria Wiki before playing to avoid being hopelessly lost. The Guide may point you in a vague direction, but a quick wiki check will save a lot of time. It’s still possible to operate without the wiki since crafting looks at what’s in your inventory and presents a plethora of items you can make. There’s pumps that can be made to move lava or water. Traps can be set up to make your locale into a treacherous fortress. A garden can be built to grow useful plants and trees. Although such things are enjoyable in Minecraft, it feels like a waste of time in Terraria. Obtaining what is needed in Terraria is considerably easier, or perhaps it just doesn’t feel as magical to build in a 2D environment. The essential fun of creative building feels largely absent; however, Terraria is enjoyable for entirely different reasons.

Whereas Minecraft is about creative expression and surviving the world, Terraria is about loot accumulation and conquering the world. The world is covered with foes to be vanquished and chests to open. Who has time to build a recreation of Hoover Dam when there’s loot to be had? There’s tools and ingredients to loot for further access of the world.

At first, the player’s mobility is limited, but certain tools will allow players to reach over chasms or walk on burning surfaces. It’s Meteroid style where you need the right tool to continue unhampered. Terraria doesn’t lock the player out, but it is difficult to proceed. Through enough determination and ingenuity it is possible to continue, but progress will be costly. Each biome will have differentiating strength of monsters which will require stronger armor and arms to comfortably explore.

The armor and arms come in a variety beyond sword and hammer. There’s flails, spears, lightsabers, repeaters, handguns, bombs and boomerangs. Progression will bring a greater diversity and power, coupled with random attributes makes a near endless supply of weaponery. Although most foes can be easily vanquished, boss battles will require more than an upfront confrontation.

The true test of acquired goods are boss battles. In retro style, they fill a rather large portion of the screen and fill the rest with their attacks. They require high mobility, proper weapon usage and intelligent potion utilization. A first encounter with a boss will probably end badly since they can easily be stumbled upon and foreknowledge of attacks is crucial to survival. My battles with bosses often left the battleground permanently ravaged due to my madman tactics of using high explosives. The boss battles won’t last longer than a span of minutes, but they’re frantic affairs pushing a player’s ability. They make for excellent checkpoints to measure a growth of power and skill.

After successfully defeating a boss, achieving the next tier will require traveling to the next biome. There’s various Underground ground levels like a basic dirt area, to a more stony area and ending with Hell. There’s floating islands, areas filled with unicorns and pixies, meteor crash sites, biomes corrupted by evil and swarming with demonic agents, jungle areas, deserts, snow covered lands and a dungeon filled with traps, loot and skeleton hordes. Although there isn’t much time to appreciate the aesthetics due to being under constant attack, stumbling across new biomes with new monsters and dangers is a thrill.

Although a more directed experience than expected, Terraria draws on the strengths of a 2D retro style combined with modern technology to create something similar, but all together well crafted and original. Minecraft is like Legos whereas Terraria is a loot rampage. It is not a side scrolling Minecraft, but takes Minecraft elements and brings its own flavor. It’s more similar to classic dungeon delvers where the purpose and source of fun is in taking on greater challenges and receiving greater rewards. I’m glad my initial preconceptions of Terraria were off base, and if you have the time I’d recommend a purchase. It is only ten dollars and will consume many times that amount of hours.

Fallout: New Vegas

By Clint DrewsKolb

Developed by Obsidian Entertainment

Who needs those fancy pants new games to review? When the bombs fall and the world is bathed in nuclear fire there will be no new games. Here at Cybernetic Future we’re already in Survival mode and Hardcore mode (as we’ve been since the Bieber Fever epidemic). We’ve delved into our vault and uncovered Fallout: New Vegas and with DLC still coming out it justifies a review.

New Vegas feels less like a new Fallout game, but more like an expansion. It’s not a negative critique since instead of spending time tweaking or developing game mechanics they spent time on fleshing out the world. Fallout 3 felt a little flat much of the time and didn’t do enough to differentiate itself enough from Bethesda’s previous projects like Oblivion. This lead to the slugs of the interent saying over and over, “It’s like Oblivion but with guns!” I assume the statement was followed by “The LAWLS” and perhaps some laughing while tossing about on the ground. The comment was an oversimplification, but it had enough merit to stick in the internet consciousnesses. New Vegas may copy the mechanics without much of a change, but proves itself to be a true player in the Fallout series.

Obsidian Entertainment contains many of the original people who worked on Fallout 1+2 which explains New Vegas’ authenticity. Bethesda has Elder Scrolls down, they’re great with fantasy worlds. A good vs evil dichotomy is problematic when presenting a post-apocalyptic world. The destruction of world does more than destroy structures and governments, it destroys the moral foundations the world stood on. Bethesda tends to present the choice of “Do you want to save this basket of kittens or burn them alive for profit!” whereas Obsidian presents a plethora of choices where surviving and still being good are not exclusive.

For example, the main plot sets up the New California Republic (NCR), The Legion and Mr. House as rival factions fighting over New Vegas and the Hoover Dam. NCR is corrupt and questionably competent, The Legion is barbaric and Mr. House is tyrannical. I approached the situation in a Machiavellian manner and feigned loyalty to all the factions and awaited an opportunity to grab power myself. It was a dangerous game based on lies and cover ups, but at the proper moment I betrayed all of them. Not to spoil much, but it involved a B-29, an army of robots and a 9 iron to Mr House’s skull. The game rewarded me for betraying everyone I worked for and didn’t chastise me as a villain. It was an intricate weave of dialogue choices and ultimitly I felt in control of how I wanted my character to tackle the situation.

How situations are completed are further diverse by traits, skills or stats chosen. I played through the game as a hyper intelligent, computer hacker. While less intelligent players may have to wade through foes, I’d subvert turrets or activate a robots override code to shut it down. The advantages went further than these superficial gameplay elements. Before fetch quests to get X item to fix Y item, my high intelligence and high skill with jury rigging would prompt the dialogue choice of using more common place items thus skipping over delving into ruins. Or my Math Wrath perk led me into going on rant about how the number zero was the most powerful number in the universe to intimidate a scientist into manning up. These incidents makes every character unique with not only what little tid bits of new dialogue that opens up, but also what kind of challenges are presented.

The DLC for New Vegas brings new challenges. Old World Blues (OWB) distills the humor of the Fallout series in a fun little rump through an ancient research facility. Every mad scientist archetype is brought together with insane AIs and experiments gone wrong. The real meat of this DLC is in the conversations with the mad scientists in their brain jars or the appliances that we’re given personality for reasons of clear madness. The writers ran from seriousness and decided everything should be tied up at fun to fun. OWB has better voice acting than the main game perhaps because the actors were allowed to go over the top and have fun. Although combat and the quests in OWB don’t differentiate much from the rest of New Vegas the story and humorous run ins with a vibrant cast makes up for it. The DLC ends with a message about friendship and pursuing what one really loves AND it didn’t feel like a cop out.

The latest piece of DLC, Lonesome Road (LR), doesn’t feel as lovingly put together. This adventure brings you into The Divide which use to be a supply line until a catastrophic explosion. You’re led by a man speaking through a robot following you. This man was apparently a courier who’s been stalking you all your life and even passed on the job that kicks off the events of the main plot line. The game had been leading up to this DLC for a long time, perhaps they had the idea of it at the conception of New Vegas. But sadly, they are not able to bring an epic conclusion to these events. The problem doesn’t lie with having heaps of exposition about The Divide thrown at you by a man who refuses to be specific beyond saying how vague he is. The problem isn’t Lonesome Road tying you down with a companion on the LONEsome road. Or how said companion sacrifices himself, explodes into shrapnel and somehow returns perfectly repaired. Or LR’s trying to wow you with devastation when you’ve spent the ENTIRE game existing in a destroyed world (seriously, what’s shocking about ruins getting destroyed. It’s like getting insulted when the dog eats rotten steak from the garbage).

The main issue which left me disconnected from the events of LR is the plot relies on events the player’s character did before the player started being him. What the player does before New Vegas is never explained, and apparently before New Vegas he founded a trade route and a community sprung up along this route. Further the player is suppose to deduce that he’s responsible for it’s destruction because he accidently exploded a cache of nuclear warheads. And the antagonist’s revenge motivation springs from this which is to blow up NCR? Apparently the character comes from NCR, but even this revenge motivation seems weak. It felt like they needed a way to artificially up the stakes.They wanted a revenge plot, but it’s hard to be afraid of a man who only speaks in vague exposition and his biggest threat is to nuke people you don’t care about. Lonesome road is a low point for the Fallout series and this DLC could be avoided without missing valued content.

Lonesome Road aside, Fallout: New Vegas is a fun adventure through the post-apocalyptic Mojave desert. If you’ve burned through the content of Skyrim and are looking for more adventure and loot, I highly recommend this game. It’ll hold your attention and lose you another relationship be it with a girl, guy, work or god. There’s hours and hours of content I didn’t cover or didn’t discover. It won’t blow anyone off their feet, but it’s a solid piece of entertainment. It’ll keep you entertained until the bombs fall.

Bastion – PC

By Clint DrewsKolb

Developer : Supergiant Games

Bastion has already received a high amount of critical praise from highly trusted sources, but a lot games get good reviews and praise. Not all games deserve the degree of praise they receive. Review inflation is not unheard of. Skyrim was a great game, but it did not deserve a perfect score. I had fun with Battlefield 3 but it did not deserve 8/10 or whatever high score it got. We at Cybernetic Future don’t use a rating system to not be bite size and easily digestible for this very reason. The constant barrage of inflated praise leaves a small margin for differentiating excellent from shoddy. All these high scores has made me from time to time jaded, calloused and downright skeptical of a game receiving high praise when the premise seems worn thin and from an unknown developer. Bastion seemed to be another action RPG with a colorful art style to distract from a lazily done combat system. Assumptions can lead to all sorts of wrong conclusions.

Bastion is an action RPG all games aspires to be. Any player’s fighting style will be embraced while challenging the player to change things up. A wide assortment of ranged and melee weapons with distinctive benefits ensures a lack of confusion in combat. Learning to fight is easy to pick up, but mastery requires practice.

The simplicity of controls conceals a complex combat system. The choice of weapon upgrades can radically change their function, but on the first playthrough an intricate knowledge isn’t necessary to succeed. It’s not until the achievement hunting and new game plus begins that any planning beyond picking randomly is necessary. The difficulty can easily be shifted so if things get too hard you can restore to base difficulty and enjoy some cathartic slaughter before having another go at a hard part. Combat is expertly fashioned, but it is only one facet of this gem.

The art design allows recognition what game it is at a glance. It’s not revolutionary by any means, games like Odin Sphere have already come and gone. It borrows from already established aesthetics and brings its own twists to the mixture. I’m not a student of art beyond taking an Art History class six years ago, and frankly I don’t have an eye for art beyond gut reaction. From a more technical aspect the presentation impresses because it presents fantastical art while simultaneously not cluttering the screen with unnecessary information. A lot of artsy games have fallen victim to presentation over quick deciphering of relevant information. The screen will often be busy but never overwhelming.

Enemy types are quickly distuinquishable along with method of attack and how to counter it. Negative and positive effects to the player are obvious while not clashing against the scenery. Combined with a simplified HUD while using highly recgonizble visual clues ensures a cohesive experience without feeling cheated or drained. But quality design isn’t what sets Bastion above its contemporaries.

I’ve drummed on about this before, but its importance can never be stated enough. Plot, narration and immersion are all crucial to a gaming experience. We play games to step into something beyond our reality, to do things we can’t do. Often in this industry the game is made first then story elements are thrown in near the end of the development cycle. Budgets are tight and deadlines are tighter near the end and story elements are quickly tacked on by qualified people, but even a master engineer needs time to craft a serviceable machine. Consider what game felt more real? Portal or Battlefield 3? What game grabbed you into the world and changed your perceptions of this reality for you have lived another life besides your own?

Bastion took loving care with their story. A central pillar of the entire game is the fact it is in past tense and being narrated. It’s less a video game and more an interactive novel. After some experimentation and several playthroughs, I’ve discovered the narrator follows your actions, but also has several different phrases according to how you tackle a situation. The narrator is like a personal announcer which greatly underscores how effectively it is implemented. Paths of narration are small, but subtle and numerous. If you remain unharmed through a certain segment there will be a different narration than if you’ve got some chunks missing.

The narrator voiced by Logan Cunningham deserves recognition for fleshing out the game. He delivers an authentic voice most actors cannot invoke while recording away from an audience. He tells the story Bastion like he was sitting across the campfire from the audience. The writing is good, but Cunningham elevates it away from words on the page and makes it undeniably human just like the the only two points in the game where different paths are an A or B scenario.

The two A or B scenario choices are both complex and heart retching. Thanks to a great narrative set up and both residing when the narration shifts from past to present tense the repercussions are spelled out, but both choices have pros and cons. The first one is a choice between safety or selflessness while being about forgiveness or justice. And these are on the forefront of the first choice, the backdrop is a vast collage far too intricate to bring up out of context. It’s a long road filled with tribulations which ends not with a choice between good or evil, but something intricately human. Many will suffer from the choices made and the guilt of these decisions rest on you. The 2nd choice is doubly complex and there is no right answer. I won’t ruin the choice by explaining it any further.

But words and choices are only an aspect of storytelling, the music of Bastion seals its position as an excellent contribution. Taken out of context the music isn’t anything special, but its timing within the game and how it appropriately fades in and out with the scenario gives the final kick into total immersion. In the darkest hour, the score fits perfectly with the themes of resilient determination against certain death. It matches the Western Desperado inspired style. Here’s a sample

Bastion is one of those games I’ll be replaying annually along with Half-Life 2 and a few select other titles. It’s a stellar narration backed by top tier quality gameplay. If there’s any complaint it is the length of the game. It can easily be played through in one sitting. But that only speaks of its high quality and who wants a good thing to end?

Orcs Must Die! – PC

By Clint DrewsKolb

Developed by Robot Entertainment

Orcs Must Die! is a venture into cathartic mass slaughter. This finely crafted tower defense (TD) game manages to distill what makes TD fun and adds novel twists to keep the player coming back for more. The usual drudgery point a lot of TD games suffer from never occurs in Orcs Must Die! The game makes a mindless horde charging into a good olde rumpus. For only fifteen dollars, it’s a short and cleanly made game. Cheaper than bringing your girlfriend out for dinner and more entertaining to boot!

There’s too much importance put on how every new game coming out needs to be original. It’s certainly original to wear a shoe as a hat and hats as shoes, but no one is going to think you’re good at fashion. Unless of course you made shoes that look like hats which would be pretty cool. Personally I’d opt for bowler hat bowler shoes. But to get back to the point, a lot people like to superficially reject an idea because it copies from something or another. For instance the current Battlefield 3 versus Modern Warfare 3 debates raging across the internet with both parties accusing the other of being a “shallow, unoriginal and generic shooter” which is of course a shallow, unoriginal and generic assessment of the situation.

Both games are indeed continuing the trend of following a near future military conflict and both will feature FPS elements. Both games are not pushing the envelope on genre or gaming philosophy, but they are well crafted. They’re well made and that’s why people like them. They take what has worked and borrow innovative elements that have worked in other games. People don’t pass up a ham sandwich with a better bread and meat just because they had a ham sandwich yesterday. Tangent aside, Orcs Must Die! does this with its TD counterparts.

A problem a lot of TD games have is a sense of urgency or agency. It’s frustrating to see the enemy slowly march past your defenses because of forgetting to upgrade a tower or making a proper combo. A lot of games take the cheap out with a fast forward button to speed up the process of playing the game. Orcs Must Die! solves this issue by including the innovation of bringing the player into the action. Instead of being some floating entity above the action, now you’re an active participant in the battle.

You play as a Warmage which having the expected ability to sling fireballs and swing a sword also includes the ability to set traps. The various traps will not be enough to stop the mindless horde. This game requires the player to fight the horde personally. It is very common for the number of kills between the player and traps to be around equal. The innovation of personally getting involved in a TD unsurprisingly freshens up the genre. Now a player needs to worry about their own HP bar while protecting the objective. Action will often get frantic as you have to place yourself between an innumerable number of orcs and the rift you have to protect. It mixes strategy, battle skill and the joys of TD mass slaughter.

To assist in mass slaughter, traps are provided. It is a massive arsenal of spike traps, arrow traps, bombs, launchers, automated ballistas, pits of everything awful and even the ability to summon in henchmen. The orcs will be hurled into pits of lava/acid, impaled by arrows, smashed by swinging maces and burned alive. Each trap has a specific function and specific circumstance in which it will be effective. Each map has been carefully designed to allow a variety of trap combo styles while forcing the player to adopt new strategies from map to map. Often difficulty will come not in beating the level, but in perfecting the level.

At the end of each level, performance is assessed by time and how many orcs that were allowed to pass-by. A skull rating is given with five skulls being the best rating. Achieving a perfect rating requires constant diligence and sound strategy. The skulls acquired through ratings can be spent on adding power and functionality to traps thus adding incentive to becoming a completionist. Though I don’t know why the developers needed to add incentive to get a player to finish the game, spending more time with the main character is time enough.

Simply known as the Apprentice or Warmage, the main character is one of my favorite archetypes. He’s a hero who does not seem to possess the intelligence to be afraid. He’s obnoxious, shows a careless disregard for life and cockier than a bazooka wielding grizzly bear. Everyone else in the world obviously sees this and discriminates against him. He’s outcasted and considered the absolute worst of the warmages which gives him the lovable aspect of the underdog. It’s frequently suggested through the story that the reason he keeps surviving isn’t because of skill or bravery, but a sort of bumbling stupidity. When the main villain tells him to surrender, he only has idiotic comebacks that are accidentally genius. He’s a Han Solo like character which matches the game’s tone of mass slaughter for fun.

Orcs Must Die! forces me to put forth a strong recommendation. It’s easy to learn, fun gameplay and mass slaughter reminds me why I love gaming. I can see for years booting the game up from time to time and killing some orcs to turn around a bad day. If everything I loved died, this is the game I would play to forget. I can’t think of anything wrong about this game besides there not being enough of it. Maybe it’s a bias towards seeing orcs hilariously die or a deep love of traps, but at the end of the day I have to say, “This game is only fifteen bucks and will probably entertain you more than most sixty dollar games.” Go out, buy this game. If you regret the purchase, you’re dead to me.

Iron Grip: Marauders

By Clint DrewsKolb

Developed by ISOTX.com

The land of Kathos is in upheaval and on the brink of war. It’s a time for stalwart heroes and nefarious villains. Which makes it a perfect time for piracy! Who wouldn’t take the opportunity to loot and pillage? Squares, that’s who.

Iron Grip: Marauders puts you in charge of a band of airborne pirates hellbent on smuggling and raiding. From your mighty airship you’ll command your legions to victory or defeat. This Free-to-Play game will let you explore your piracy urges.

Most of the game s played through browser menus. It’s a standard fare of unit recruitment, quest selection, marketplace options and researching. Here you allocate resources into strengthening and upgrading your force. Gathering resources can take time and building/researching takes more time. As in actual time, researching can take three hours to bring a unit from level 2 to 3. It gets annoying to pop in for five minutes then wait another three hours before playing again. Of course for a fee, waiting can go away.

Like a lot of F2P games, Marauders has a currency you can buy with real money. “Gems” as they are called, can make progress bars insta complete, or buy cosmetic items for your avatar or buy expensive, hard to obtain units. Gems can also be acquired by leveling up to give the player a taste of what they could have. I never felt like I needed the gems to fully access the game. There’s no level caps, restricted areas or pay only modes. The Gems are there to assist the player. The game is easier for paying customers which I have no problem with. However I do hold some issues with combat.

Combat situations arise during quests, raids, boss battles and ambushed smuggling runs. A new window will appear and you’ll deploy you’re pre-selected forces. From here it’s a bare bones turn based strategy game. Armies take turns bombarding each other until one side or the other is eliminated. There’s very little advantage to utilizing terrain and the rock paper scissors dynamic is hazy at best. A unit’s description will say it’s good against infantry, but it barely does any damage and gets shredded by infantry. All units are somewhat effective against all other unit types. So instead of strategy, who shoots first wins since they’ll get more hits in. Combat comes down to coaxing the AI out of the fog of war and getting the first hit in which is way harder than it should be.

The AI has an annoying ability of knowing exactly where you are while leaving you clueless to their position. Scout units with a supposed long sight range are routinely hit by the AI from beyond their sight range. It may have been added to counter balance the AI’s single tactic of streaming until it is dead, but the sight advantage is major and frequently annoys. When victory is determined by who shoots first, it is a major disadvantage and you’re guranteed to lose units no matter how careful you are. Control of the battlefield feels removed from the player’s hands. It feels more like numbers bashing into each other than an interactive game. The addition of buttons is just an illusion.

A frequent problem is enemy difficulty. The quests you select have star levels for how hard it’s suppose to be, but that’s an utter lie. You’re just as likely to come across a handful of yokels with sticks painted like guns as you are to meet the Mongolian horde reborn as cybernetic tanks. A supposedly easy mission can become a bloody massacre which will deplete your stocks of expensive, time consuming units. These set backs can take literal hours of waiting to replenish your forces. A defeat can mean waiting six hours until you’re fully functional again. You never know the configuration of the enemy force, so you fling together a force and hope it works.

The random difficulty becomes more frustrating by the inability to retreat. Let me reiterate, a game where you play as a pirate commander who has dedicated himself to plundering from legitimate government intuitions does not retreat. When you know you’ve been defeated, there’s no fighting withdrawal, no tales of a narrow escape; just death. Call me old fashioned, but I always thought a pirate ran when the going got tough. They’re not a type known for brave last stands or even to fight an unprofitable battle.

The classic Quest menu

On the more technical side, the game has a lot of bugs. Menu navigation often gets frozen up repeatedly during the same operations so menu navigation becomes more puzzling than combat. Menus freeze up, refuse to update or get a delayed feedback. Even for a F2P, this isn’t acceptable. These errors don’t occur during complex sequences or are rare. They’re frequent and during straight forward operations. This indicates to me either the team was lazy or they didn’t have a large enough team to tackle the project. If you expect people to put forth money and time, I expect some decent debugging. I may not be paying, but I am spending time.

In final summation, there’s plenty of time sink games like Marauders out there. If you want to go out there and play some cheap game for like ten minutes a day and feel like you’re progressing I would suggest Mafia Wars or Castle Age or any other Facebook F2P game. If you’re looking for a turn based game to sate the need, look elsewhere or pick up Advanced Wars again. Iron Grip: Marauders isn’t awful. Everything is mediocre about it, it lowers the bar for F2P and turn based games This game isn’t worth your time investment. Though it still isn’t as Call of Juarez: The Cartel so that’s ending on a positive note.

Resistance 3 PS3

Developed by Insomniac Games
By Clint DrewsKolb

The third installment of the Resistance series brings us into the boots of Joe Capelli, best known for killing the former protagonist of Resistance. It’s been four years since America was overrun by the Chimeria and mankind has been run underground. In this bleak alternate history, Joe Capelli fights to save his family from an unfathomable army in an experience that is surprisingly refreshing. Resistance 3 takes a step back in current FPS trends by getting rid of regenerating health, allowing an absurd number of guns on your body and containing RPG elements to an enjoyable extent. What comes out is an old school shooter with modern innovations in pacing and storytelling.

The absence of regenerating health makes every encounter tense. Instead of finding a dark corner until the screen clears of red, you have to charge the enemy with victory in doubt. A lack of regeneration makes striving out into the open dangerous, but all the more rewarding. I didn’t realize how much I miss scrambling from health pack to health pack as Hell rained down. Staying behind cover to exchange potshots will slowly whittle away your health. The player needs to jump from cover to cover, dishing out efficient death before succumbing to accumulated damage. Courage, not cowardice, is rewarded in Resistance 3 since health packs are pried from the cold, dead hands of the enemy.

The guns of Resistance 3 bring to mind of an old school collection of guns. There are more conventional rifles, machine guns and SMGs, but there’s the Auger, a gun that shoots through walls, or the Mutator that infects foes with a powerful strain of the Chimerian virus causing them to sprout explosives pustules. All the guns upgrade as they are used which adds power and utility. There’s no explanation for why, but I figure it falls under The Rule of Cool. The upgrading system rewards a player for using his full arsenal of guns. It keeps combat from stagnating and makes a starter weapon useful in the end game.

Enemies manage to keep changing the game plan. There isn’t anything too surprising in enemy types, but they keep mixing it up enough to force the player into operating outside their comfort zone. A few enemies like the Brawler are an exhilaration to fight as it bashes through the environment and chucks the player like a rag doll. Tactics need to change on the fly while the enemy sits in a middle zone between being difficult, but not frustrating. I rarely died, but I worked hard to live.

The pacing is excellent. I haven’t seen pacing like this since Half Life 2. Alright, I’ve wanted to hold back from the comparisons between Resistance 3 and HL2, but now it’s unavoidable. R3 borrows heavily from HL2. This isn’t a negative critique; games borrow from each other all the time. Correction: everything borrows from each other all the time. The HL2 formula for pacing is evident in R3. A really intense scene is followed by a sharp drop off and slowly climbs for the next 30 minutes until the next intense scene with little spikes in-between. It works, the core of HL2’s greatness is its pacing and I hope more triple-A games borrow the idea.

R3 seems to acknowledge it borrowed from HL2. There are some very obvious nods, and by nods, I mean they grab your head like Henrik Ibsen born again and slam your head into the material while screaming “GET IT! THEY’RE ALIKE! IT’S CALLED A DOLL HOUSE AND SHE’S LIKE A DOLL IN A HOUSE! THE LAMP! THE LAMP!” Sorry, memories from High School. But in all seriousness, there’s a creepy village overrun by zombies/grims and overseeing this village is a preacher who has seen as a vision of god to protect it. There’s an obelisk opening a wormhole to the aliens controlling the whole operation from another planet and is ultimately destroyed in a catastrophic explosion caused by destroying a power core. The Chimeria are having a harder time dealing with their feral creations than the resisting humans. It gets a little heavy handed.

The storyline borrows heavily from the classical hero’s journey. It won’t be winning any awards for storytelling, but attention was given to the narrative. It was enjoyable to see any complexity in a character in an FPS. Joe Cappelli is torn between wanting to protecting his family and having to leave them behind to save them. Or Charlie Tent who leads a resistance group called Remnants and is desperately trying to keep hope alive by putting airs of being a cocky, military leader, but feels the pain of every loss. Exposition is kept to bearable levels and twists in the plot are believable and organic. In the end, I found myself caring for the plight of Joe Cappelli and cast.

In the end, the story is a simple one, but it allows the world of R3 to shine. The developers put some thought into the horrors of a post-invaded 1950′s america. It goes beyond simple details like people scrawling declarations on walls, or propaganda posters to keep the populace calm. While playing I came across a room with a Christmas tree with presents underneath and letter written by a child. The child had already lost her parents to the chimeria, and she was excited about Christmas. Little unexpected touches like people trying to bring normalcy to a world falling apart instead of the usual, “OMG! The worlds be falling apart!” grabs the player into the world. It always did bother me the suggestion in video games that the first thing people do when they panic is pick up a recorder, scream at it for awhile then place it neatly on a shelf. If someone is going to record something or write it down, they already have a vague idea of what they’re going to say and are already off the initial shock of what happened; in fact, they’re probably recording their thoughts to soothe themselves, not to send themselves further into shock. Or as Monty Python would put it

Resistance 3 has exceeded my expectations from the previous two games. It provides a thrilling experience, yet it doesn’t quite rise to becoming a classic. Combat is solid, pacing is solid, the storyline is good for a FPS and immersion does its job. But it never quite comes all together to become an unforgettable experience. More polish and Valve like perfection could have made it truly great. It’s slightly frustrating to see the structure of greatness, and not see it realized. But it is fun, and in my book, that is still a success.

Dead Island PS3

Developed by Techland
By Clint DrewsKolb

It’s an island covered with zombies, it is Dead Island. The newest contribution towards a media takeover by the undead promises hordes of undead, machetes to hack them to bits and fetch quests? The hooks besides zombies and 4 player co-op, is an RPG style reminiscent of Borderlands. It’s a solid concept, but in execution it leaves only tantalizing promises at what could be like a Cuban made with expired pork.

The core problem is fighting zombies isn’t enjoyable. When fighting I don’t feel fear or a bloodlust while wading through foes, there’s only frustration. When there’s a horde of zombies there isn’t a thrill or panic, only a dull feeling similar to clocking in for work…on a weekend.

At first I thought the problem was first person perspective. It’s hard to judge a weapon’s reach from first person which can make a major difference in frantic combat, but plenty of other games like the Elder Scrolls series and countless others have handled melee situations effectively. It only takes a few battles in Oblivion to get a good gauge on any weapon’s reach. Though the wide variety of weapons with wildly different ranges may be a factor, but it isn’t the main problem.

The culprit is a disconnect between the avatar and the player. I never felt in control, or I could count my avatar to do as I intended which made me feel like bystander to my own fate. My swings felt delayed, sluggish and drunken. When aiming a melee attack, the aimer locks onto the chest and you flail madly, hoping your blows land somewhere important. Want to remove your foe’s arms, and laugh as they try to nibble your face off? That’s going to require luck, not skill.
If the avatar is hit by multiple foes you can still move, but your arms are stun locked. Your avatar uselessly backpedals while you jam the hit button in hopes the game will give back control. It was an attempt to create frantic battles, but it only leaves the player chucking his controller at the ground. It’s a cheap way to inflate difficulty, and only worsens the experience. Randomly a zombie will grab you and activate a quick time event that quickly gets repetitive. And why in the hell can’t I climb over chest high walls or anything?

Speaking of scaling, a great joy of RPG’s is to go back to the beginner zone and laugh as once deadly enemies become wreathed in flames by your mere gaze. In Dead Island, the zombies scale with your level so as you get stronger, they get stronger. It’s supposed to give a constant zombie threat, so every fight is a risk and you can’t grind past the difficulty. It’s also lazy and problematic.

I’ve played a lot of RPG’s with scaling before, and there’s always a singular problem with this idea. There’s a strong chance that a player’s equipment may not scale with his new levels. As the enemy gets more powerful, the available equipment needs to get stronger. If a player doesn’t get better equipment, but the foe gets stronger then the player is relatively weaker. Increasing in levels weakens the player instead of strengthening; therefore, punishing the player for acquiring experience.

Furthermore, if a player messes up selecting skills or passes up good equipment by accident or they don’t have time to compare stats on the go; things can get overwhelming hard and without an easier zone to retreat to. The player can get bogged down or stuck because of RPG elements that are supposed to assist the player delve into a character role instead of denying him from playing the game.

Immersion is problematic across the game. The beginning tries a half-hearted, “omg, zombies.” The island has already gone to hell when you start the game. From there the immersion constantly tries to say, “Look it’s a resort, isn’t it beautiful? Oh look over there, that pool is full of blood. Sppooookkkkyyyy! And if you reach into this bowl, it’s full of eyeballs!” The visuals are well crafted, but they don’t reinforce any message. It’s all shock, they took an idyllic location set up some fires and some gore. The problem is in an attempt to reinforce a theme of disorder, but they made everywhere disorderly which makes everything homogeneous. There’s no contrast between a safehouse and a deeply zombie infested area. It doesn’t make the game believable.

In many ways, I’m not convinced the zombies are actually dangerous. The safehouses are laughably fortified. Most are guarded by a chain link fence, a broken wooden door or in one case, a curb guard. The zombies don’t assault the safehouse except in story events which are infrequent and easily thwarted. Zombies will only give chase for a short while or stop at a closed door as if they’ve had their fill of brains for the day. There’s no sense of urgency besides NPC’s shouting at you to get off your lazy ass as they click the recliner back a notch.

NPC’s have an odd tendency to never use the term “Undead” or “Zombie” like they’re worried about infringing on a copyright. They use terms like “Half-dead, half-alive”, “those things!”, “guy with a case of rabies”. Back in classic zombie films, people not knowing what to call zombies was logical since zombies was a new horror monster. But nowadays, anyone who doesn’t qualify for Social Security has grown up seeing zombie films. I know it is tradition for the survivors to not know what to call them, but they use so many terms close to zombies that it’s like dealing with a waiter who is coy about saying the words “food” or “menu”. Would you like some nutritional matter? I will get you your tablets of information about our service options and prices.

Dead Island is a promising game launched too soon. Bugs and launch issues aside, more time should have been taken to polish game mechanics and immersion within the world. If combat was streamlined, the game would be massively improved. The utter failure at immersion could have been overlooked if zombie smashing was fun. But as the game stands, I cannot recommend the game. Play a game like Left 4 Dead or Borderlands instead since Dead Island borrows heavily from both.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The original Deus Ex is a shining example of the “cult classic.” It never reached the level of popularity that a game of its calibur really deserves, but those who have played it tend to agree that it is one of the all-around best FPS games, and perhaps even simply one of the best games, ever made. However, it did have its flaws: namely an unnecessarily complex user interface and perhaps a bit too much by way of character customization. In its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, an attempt was made to streamline some of these complexities and left the hardcore fans of the original with a sour taste in their mouth. Many fans believe that Invisible War is less streamlined than it is dumbed down, and in this dumbing down was lost the nuance of the original game. When the series’ third installment, Human Revolution, was announced the hardcore fanbase of the original waited with cautious optimism: would Human Revolution live up to the name of Deus Ex, or would it dumb the formula down even further?

I personally have not played much Deus Ex, but from my (admittedly limited) perspective Human Revolution more than holds its own against the original, mixing the choice and exploration of the original Deux Ex with a user interface and control scheme that brings the series into the modern age. Human Revolution is a beautiful, polished, entertaining game and if the fans of the original find some reason to hate it, I certainly do not know what it will be.

Human Revolution spares little time letting the player know exactly what kind of game it is going to be: a complex one. Its opening cinema is rife with mystery and flashy technology: A shadowy figure talks to people using voice disguisers on a window-turned-computer monitor about the various schemes they are putting in place. Cut to a news report where a woman with a foot tall collar talks about a major corporation’s discovery of a way to allow mankind to control its own evolution. The camera zooms out and you see the main character Adam Jensen and his scientist ex-girlfriend Megan Reed in a heated discussion about the necessary defense protocols for a trip to Washington. These strands all come together sooner or later to create the web of intrigue that constitutes Human Revolution’s complex but still easily understandable plotline. You are plopped down into the shoes (or more accurately, the head) of Adam via an oldschool zoom into the back of his head, a-la Goldeneye, and can immediately start reading books laying about or Megan’s email. After a short jaunt through the Sarif Industries labs, a terrorist group attacks and you must fend them off long enough to find Megan, a shortlived reunion that ends with her death and Adam being disfigured and nearly dead. Things do not get started slowly in this game, and rarely do they slow down.

The plot is a unique one for a video game, centering mainly on corporate espionage – who’s hacking who, which company is tyring to lower which company’s stock prices, etc. – which wouldn’t be all that interesting if it weren’t for the fact that in the world of Deus Ex a hostile takeover of a rival company more than likely involves sending in cybernetically-enhanced highly-armed mercenaries. Jensen’s job is to protect the interests of Sarif Industries, a leader in augmentation technology, and he most often does so by sneaking, hacking, or shooting his way through the defenses of whichever group has most recently given him reason to do so. Later in the story there are some undertones of conspiracy, secret societies, black ops government groups, and other staples of the Deus Ex franchise, but these are discussed much less often than they are in the original. The story does shift from this corporate espionage focus after about the halfway point, when things start to become extremely complicated and the lines of who’s side you should be on become very heavily blurred, but unfortunately you never really get very much character development from any of the game’s main characters. You do get some, its characters aren’t lifeless wooden archetypes, but I would have enjoyed a bit more exploration of their backstories and motivations than you get. The backstory is especially barebones when it comes to the relationship between Adam and Megan, which is less explored than some of the interoffice squabbles you read about in all those emails you go through.

The story is very intense, but thankfully the game gives the player some breathing room in the form of free roaming “city hubs” you can choose to explore between main story missions. Apart from a few really interesting set piece segments in the main plot, these sidequests are easily my favorite part of the game. None of them take the form of “Go bring me X” or “Go kill X,” the objectives are more varied and broad, leading you to uncover dirty cops, defuse terrorist plots, or stop an imminent gang war. These missions prvide a good boost to your XP and therefore your augmentations (more on that later) but more importantly they provide an outlet to learn even more about the world. Most of these side missions have only a small connection to the main story arc, so you do not miss out on very much (if any) of the story if you completely skip over them, but you do learn quite a bit about the organizations you get involved with, the technology that’s floating around, and other such details that flesh out the world.

The XP and augmentations I mentioned in the previous paragraph are where the real meat of the game’s character customization is found. This system is actually given an explanation: when Jensen was augmented originally, his body was in such bad shape that many augments which were put in place were not actually fully activated because their full activation all at once would cause a shock to his system likely resulting in death. “Praxis” is the vaguely defined means of turning these inactive augments on, slowly increasig the power to them until they are functioning as they were originally intended to. You can also purchase small amounts of Praxis for large sums of money from various shops, but the main means of gaining it is via XP.

5000 XP nets you a single point of Praxis – which is enough to purchase most upgrades, though some require 2 – and you receive XP for things you would expect (incapacitating an enemy, completing a mission objective) and some more difficult tasks such as completing an area without being seen or without tripping an alarm. My issue with this is that though the game flaunts the fact that you could run and gun or sneak your way through any area, there are no bonus XP to be found from killing everyone so you miss out on a massive chunk of XP if you choose not to sneak. These XP bonuses range from 500 to well over 1000 XP, a major percentage of the 5000 necessary, and since even one alert is enough to completely negate the bonus I found myself not dealing with the consequences of being seen and just reloading my game whenever an enemy managed to set eyes on me. Had I not, I likely would have finished the game with at least 7 or 8 less upgrades, which seems very limiting just for having chosen not to sneak.

To aid you in that sneaking you likely chose to do, Human Revolution includes many extremely useful and downright cool augmentation powers. Before you gain a few Praxis points you have to rely on the very solid stealth system which combines the cover system of Gears of War with the cones of vision and alert system of Metal Gear Solid. Simply pull the left trigger and you stick to the nearest wall, where you can peek over the top or move to the edge to slide around the corner or dive-roll to another piece of cover. This system is intuitive and allows for many tense situations where you have to make dive rolls or quick runs to cover while barely outside an enemy’s view range.

Gather some experience, though, and soon enough you’ll be looking through walls, marking targets so you can see them wherever they may go, or turning completely invisible to sneak past (or up to) your enemies. Get yourself seen and you can put the game’s extensive (and highly customizable) arsenal of weapons to good use taking out enemies that use cover, flank, and run for backup. You won’t want to be seen too often, though, as these enemies can kill you almost as quickly as you can kill them -unless you upgrade your Dermal Armor. Find yourself getting into that situation a lot? Don’t worry, you can upgrade your arms so they dampen recoil, make yourself run faster and longer, even unlock an explosive device that turns you into a walking claymore mine.

The game features the standard set of FPS weapons – assault rifle, pistol, revolver, SMG, shotguns – and a small set of nonlethal weapons including my personal favorite weapons, the P.E.P.S. While most nonlethal weapons are meant to be used before you’ve been seen (either using the tranquilizer rifle to snipe or the stun gun to shock up close) the P.E.P.S. creates quite a ruckus and is mainly meant for once you’ve been found out. It works like the air gun from Minority Report turned up to 11, sending a massive shockwave that can clear hallways full of enemies with a single shot, but leaving them unconscious for the folks who want to go through the game without a murder on their conscience, such as myself. The whole arsenal of weapons can be upgraded with greater damage, reload speed, and other modifications such as laser sights and silencers, which allow you to further customize the way you tackle any given situation.

Tackling those situations in many ways is much the point of Human Revolution: charge in guns blazing? Hack a security bot to do the work for you? Or simply avoid being seen in the first place? The game’s sprawling maps give you these options and more at literally any given point in time, you are almost never forced to do a specific thing to get past any particular obstacle. I snuck my way through my first playthrough and had a blast, but I then started from the beginning with the decision to kill every enemy I see, and am having just as good a time with that as I ever did sticking to the shadows. The design team managed to nail the feeling of choice, making no situation seem like it has a “best way” and even allowing you to straight up fail major objectives and continue, albeit with some repurcussions. You can choose to complete each and every side mission and go into the next story arc with a full arsenal of new weapons and augmentations, or not. You can choose to read everyone’s emails and books left strewn about to learn passwords, lore, and side-stories about the people working in the building you’re in. Or not. At one point you hear that your boss has some information he’s keeping from you, and you can either interrogate him about it or leave it be. Neither lead to failure, both lead to very different outcomes. Human Revolution doesn’t just provide the illusion of choice that most games do, it truly allows you to play how you want. This is – in my opinion- the reason that Deus Ex is so highly regarded amongst its fans, and Human Revolution has it spot on.

These choices come to a grinding halt whenever one of the game’s boss battles starts. As sneaky as you manage to be in the rest of the game, these boss battles require you to have running and shooting skills, and if (like myself) you never upgraded your armor or shooting augmentations the boss battles are highly frustrating. Each of the boss battles was exactly the same for me: I died several times before deciding to just throw an EMP grenade to stun the boss and toss landmines at its feet until it died. This was the only strategy I could even consider viable for a stealth based character, and I found myself questioning why exactly these boss battles weren’t designed with as much choice in mind as the rest of the game was.

The greatest improvement Human Revolution has over its decade-old predecessor is the power of modern technology. Gone are the clunky menus, blocky graphics, and god-awful voice acting. In their place are a user interface streamlined to show you just what you need to know but keep the extraneous bits available but out of the way, absolutely gorgeous graphics, intuitive controls, and (except for those found in Shanghai) a pretty good crew of voice actors. Penthouse apartments and billion dollar corporations are sleek and shiny, the streets of Detroit and Shanghai grungy, dark, and trashridden. The layout of each building is set up so as to be both functional for the player (giving many options of how to advance) and realistic, even down to realistic bathroom placement. The game uses a golden glow to denote objects of interest such as lockers, doors, movable boxes, items laying around, etc. but this can be turned off in the option menu if you prefer not to be shown these things or would rather not have the immersion lessened with such a “video-gamey” feature.

The sound work is great (again I praise the P.E.P.S., the whumph it releases when fired is part of why I enjoy using it so much) but is highly, highly lacking in the music department. I put some 50 hours into this game in the last two weeks but would be hard pressed to hum even a few bars of its soundtrack from memory. A great game needs a great soundtrack, and Deus Ex leaned a bit (read: a lot) too far toward the ambient end of the soundtrack spectrum for my taste, though this did mean the music was never intrusive. This is a tradeoff, one that a video game’s sound team really has to tread lightly with, and I found them to have treaded quite a bit too lightly.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a lot to live up to in the eyes of the diehard Deus Ex fans out there. One cannot make a sequel to such a highly loved title (especially one which already has a mediocre sequel) without making a concentrated effort to live up to that standard. Fans are hard to please, and when those fans have had 11 years to love a game and 8 years to mock its sequel, they are even more difficult to please. Then there are the other gamers to think about, those who have never played Deus Ex or even heard of it. They need to love it, too. Sequels can be a tough rope to jump, but Square Enix does it with aplomb. Human Revolution is not the original Deus Ex with a new coat of paint. It is not the second Deus Ex made even more simple. It may not be the greatest FPS, or the greatest game, ever created. It certainly is not the worst. What it is, though, is a polished, entertaining, and immersive game which manages to have mass-market appeal while remaining a worthy successor to one of the greatest cult classics of all time.

Library Review: Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia

Author’s Note: As the few readers of this blog likely know I have a sister site of sorts, Trevor’s Library, where I am playing through the many games I own but haven’t finished and writing a bit about them. As I don’t actually review the games, but just talk about them and poke fun at them, I decided that when I’m finished with each game I will write a review of it on Cybernetic Future. So, without further ado, the first of many Library Reviews:

Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia

Developed by: Gust and Banpresto.

Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia is a rather standard turn-based JRPG. The world of Ar Tonelico is held up by the titular massive tower Ar Tonelico. A floating continent makes up much of the game world, the rest consists of a mostly inaccessible upper world, cities on or near the tower, and the interior of the tower itself. Lyner, a young man from the upper world, crash lands on the lower continent and becomes embroiled in a battle to save the world. Along the way he meets several Reyvateils – robotic women who can sing magical songs – who become integral to the survival of the world and the destruction of the evil which faces it.

The story of Ar Tonelico is rather slow, and presented in the most boring manner possible. You often do not see events occur, rather you are presented with static drawings of the characters (the sprites of which are standing still on static backgrounds) who explain what is happening via dialogue. This makes even the most action packed scenes sleep-inducing, and the cringe-worthy voice acting does little to help. This seems just lazy on the developer’s part, and makes an engaging story get lost behind a lack of production values. The story is very low-scale, with very little permanent effect on the game world that is not positive. No cities are destroyed, no massive loss of life. The main characters manage to cut the villains off at every turn, which makes the villains seem very non-threatening and rather pathetic. I wondered why the main characters even really worried about the villains, who seemed perfectly fine with sitting in a small room alone awaiting your inevitable arrival.

The battle system is somewhat unique, but also excruciatingly slow-paced and plagued with constant graphical slowdown. Your party consists of four characters: three frontline fighters and one reyvateil. The reyvateil can do nothing but cast spells, and the front line fighters can cast no spells. As your frontliners fight they build up a gauge on the bottom of the screen, which – when combined with timely spell casts – build a second gauge which can upgrade your basic attacks, special attacks, and spell power. A third gauge builds up next to the reyvateil, its exponentially increasing percentage numbers give you some semblance of an idea of how much damage the spell will do when you decide to cast it. Once you learn to make heads or tails of all these gauges and bars and numbers being thrown around (which takes some time, as there are many of them. I was playing and a friend came in and saw the battle screen and asked, mouth agape, “what the hell is going on? What does all of that mean?”) the battle system becomes reasonably tactical. This never really becomes necessary though as your party is so ridiculously overpowered that 99% of all battles consist of bashing the attack button until you win. Even the end boss fights posed little threat. The game could have used with less bars and numbers, more balance of difficulty.

These battles occur in the most completely drab dungeons I have ever seen. All dungeons consist of mazelike grid pathways, often floating in nothingness, which you navigate through identical rooms. You never really know if you are advancing in a dungeon or if you are near its end, as they have absolutely zero flow to their design. They exist as a means to give you places to run through and random battles to fight, and it is painfully obvious they were given barely any thought as to their design and layout.

One of the more interesting parts of the game is the Coscmosphere, wherein you enter a reyvateil’s mind and try to unlock her hidden feelings (which are, invariably, undying love and devotion for the completely personality-free Lyner). You discover the frighteningly bleak back story of the reyvateils, learn their deepest fears, get chained to a wall and told how she is going to kill you and herself both so you can be together forever (this happens in both Aurica and Misha’s minds, I guess it is an endearing thing to have happen to you,) and eventually fight her inner demons through either a small sunburst effect on the screen or a 5-second anime sequence to make her love you forever. These endings are gooey, saccharine, and unnecessary to the plot. However, the lead-up levels of the cosmosphere are very interesting and well-written, often making the actual storyline of the game look like tripe by comparison.

My favorite part of the game by far is its item creation system. You combine the various useless junk you find laying around into very powerful weapons, armor, healing items, etc. This unbalances the game in your favor even further, but nonetheless it is a fun diversion and far more interesting than just finding your ultimate weapons in treasure chests.

Ar Tonelico is by no means a terrible game, but it is certainly also not a top ten contender. The anime drawings are high quality, especially the characters; the sound is serviceable -except the weak voice acting, which can thankfully be turned to Japanese to save your ears – and the story is well fleshed out, even if it isn’t at the level of scale I would have liked it to be at. The item creation and cosmospheres add depth to an otherwise shallow game, and are welcome additions to the genre. I wouldn’t mind seeing a cosmosphere-like feature in other games, as it provides great levels of optional back story. With some more action in the actual character sprites rather than the dialogue, and a more balanced battle system, this game could have been one of my favorites. As it stands, it works best as a sleep aid.

Red Baron 3D

By Clint DrewsKolb

Red Baron 3D’s graphics are indefensible in this modern era, but nonetheless makes up with gameplay undiminished with time. The thrill of dog fighting in a biplane over No Man’s Land is still as thrilling as it was back in 1997. It remains a superior WWI simulator which portrays war more realistically than most attempts. The futility of war has yet to be as aptly applied without some screaming marine telling you war is hell before he coldly tears the head off the nearest Vietcong/Terrorist/Nazi. It’s a video game at its finest, simple to get into but difficult to master.

The default difficulty of Red Baron 3D is Authentic. Enemy pilots will evade and hunt you like they actually want to live. If you dive-bomb too fast, your wings will shear right off. Bursts of flak will fill the air with thunderous booms. When dog fighting you’ll have to balance trying to hit your target and struggling to stay in the air with your authentically crappy plane. The game is hard, but fun. A sense of danger is constant. One errant movement caused by cockiness or fear can end your flight career. Every kill is obtained by skill and determination. There’s a grim satisfaction to watching your foe’s plane burst into flames against an unrelenting ground. The difficulty heightens the game intensity instead of frustrating and hampering connectivity with the game (a la Demon’s Souls).

The most effective creation of connectivity caused by difficulty is the campaign mode. After a short character creation of choosing what country you’re fighting for, what squadron, rank, name, enrollment date, and you’re thrown into a simulation of WWI. You get assigned missions every few days. Get kills, get medals and promotions. As the war progresses, new planes will arrive on the battlefield. Newspapers will update about the war. Nothing too special, except for one fact: a death in a mission will mean the death of your save file. Over the pilot’s picture there will be a big stamp reading “DECEASED”. A reminder of failure. There’s no villain in Red Baron 3D. No real plot. No evil threat trying to consume everything you love. There is only war. The game is story of you, a WWI pilot, trying to survive a terrible war.

The storytelling is very passive compared to current games. It’s an empty vessel approach much like an MMORPG, but without someone shouting at you to care. You kill the Allies/Axis because if you don’t they’ll tear you apart with bullets. It’s unclear if even a message was intended for Red Baron 3D. Maybe a bunch of WWI enthusiasts got together and said, “Hey, you know what? WWI dogfights were awesome and you know what’s more awesome? Making things not just difficult, but authentic.” Maybe they all started high fiveing each other and started doing body shots off a moderately priced stripper. Maybe someone called Plots McPlottinignston walked into the room and they shot him in the face for being distracting when there was body shots to be had. But despite any intentions, a rich story is told (unless you lack empathy or imagination) by sending your pilot into mission after mission, always with the chance of dying, reinforced by close calls and seeing allies burn alive in their planes. Medals and promotions will begin piling up and a thirst for glory is sated. But the war continues. Your renown may be great, but because of it you become a greater target, the danger only increases. There’s always more men coming to rob your life. Medals don’t block bullets. Promotions don’t cushion the eventual end of an irrevocable tail spin. The campaign stops becoming about being acknowledged for being the best, it becomes about survival. Comrades come and go, some you get attached to, some will save your life, some will show commendable bravery. But you know: no matter how good you get, no matter how many foes you down, they will eventually die – or even worse, you will. The game forces you to stare death in the face, know that you could die, and if you don’t bravely rage through to the other end you will permadie. And if that doesn’t demonstrate the futility and terror of war, I don’t know how you could get closer.

While playing most of my enjoyment wasn’t derived from gunning down foes, but flying a shot up or broken biplane away from the battle zone as enemies relentlessly chased me. The hunter becomes the prey as the clichéd phrase goes, and as the prey you have to take your inferior plane and either kill those chasing you or escape to friendly territory. It requires tenacity and intelligence. Forget all that shenanigans about Demon’s Souls, learning by dying isn’t challenging. The true challenge is to not die in the first place and between me and you, not dying in the first place is much more challenging than hitting the restart button.

To wrap this beast up, Red Baron 3D holds its own in the modern pantheon of games. It provides a rewarding AND challenging experience. It provides a richer story than the modern game trilogies without trying. Though plots are kind of like women, the less you pay attention to them the more they come around (sexist comment achieved!). If you’re looking for a nail bitter of a flight simulator, Red Baron 3D stands the test of time at a damn good bargain price. Though I would recommend a joystick, this game will destroy you without one.