The short version of this review is as follows: If you enjoyed the gritty post-apocalyptic Russian setting of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you enjoyed the mutated creatures constantly trying to kill you in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you enjoyed the humans who ironically also constantly try to kill you in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and you liked the plotline wherein you play a silent hero who is heroically(?) chasing a MacGuffin composed of 99% pure handwavium, but you did not like the open world or RPG elements of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., then this game is for you!
Speaking for myself, I really enjoy the look-and-feel of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so Metro's strong resemblance to its predecessor in that regard does not bother me a bit. The game engine used in Metro is significantly better than that used in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and even with the game's default graphics setting of "very high," it ran on my computer with very little slowdown and looked like a million bucks. There are some nits I can pick about the graphics, but most of them are about the uncanny-valley-lookin' dudes you're always hanging around in the game. The world looks good, the monsters look good, light looks great, it all hangs together quite nicely.
I can't be quite so positive about the story and the storytelling, however. You play a silent hero (with the exception of one f-bomb, but given the circumstances it takes place in, anyone would break their vow of silence) who apparently communicates telepathically whenever anyone asks him a question. His silence is played for laughs a few times in the game but it mostly just served to make me not give a crap about the hero, Artyom.
At the start, the story has potential: about 20 years prior to the game's setting, nuclear war broke out and Moscow was obliterated. About 40,000 people survived by taking refuge in the subway system, which was improved over time into a series of fortified underground villages connected by the subway tunnels, and people get along in a fair approximation of business as usual if you discount the mutants roaming the tunnels and the several factions of humans who are engaged in open war in the tunnels.
Then, at Artyom's home station, a new threat surfaces: the Dark Ones, mutants who kill by telepathically shattering the minds of everyone they come into contact with. Danger! Panic! Then, the Dark Ones enter Artyom's mind, and speak to him in a way which can be interpreted as non-threatening. And so, we have the standard moral dilemma on the table: are the bad guys really bad? Like for reals? Spoiler: no. And yet Artyom, in a stunning display of non-genre-savviness, does not see the obvious telegraphing of the "misunderstood monster" punch in the very first cutscene, and he neglects to inform anyone else of the numerous times he is in contact with peace-seeking Dark Ones. Because the character of Artyom is not developed and every one of the major scenes in the story (excepting the contacts by the Dark Ones, of course) take place off screen, it never felt like I was part of the story. There was never a scene where Artyom sits down with someone and talks out the question of peaceful Dark Ones, there's never a scene where Artyom explains why he feels compelled to continue on his quest to see the Dark Ones destroyed in spite of their communications... the story is the part of this game that feels the most "on rails," just careening towards the ending without explanation or detour, and that's a shame because it had so much potential.
Not to mention the many, many times the player is subjected to the "omg guyz something haz blocked teh path and I iz separated from teh NPC homies so I iz gonna pew pew sum monsters until I findz themz againz lolololorafl" device. I realize writing friendly AI is hard so you want the player away from his buddies as much as possible to make things harder on the player and easier on the programmers, but surely the writers could have thought of some other plot device to separate me from my escorts, just to change things up once in a while.
The combat is both good and bad. Good when you're fighting humans and in a few mutant-fighting set pieces, and entirely mediocre when you're fighting mutants. When you are fighting humans, stealth has a role: with silent weapons, you can strike from the shadows and often manage to avoid notice so that you can do it again. When you are fighting mutants, stealth never matters, because they detect you anyway. Every mutant fight is a stand-up slugfest where you burn through huge amounts of ammunition (a precious commodity until near the end of the game) to waste the pile of mutants that the designers throw at you, then once you've killed the magic number of mutants, the fight ends.
You fight a single kind of mutant, called a nosalis, throughout the entire game except a bare handful of set pieces. Which is not bad, because most of the set pieces where you are dealing with other mutants are among the low points in the game. I'm looking at you, Library levels, with your invincible Mutant Du Jour and your loading screen tips to "move when they can't see you" and your enemy placement that ensures that it is impossible to avoid being seen by nearly all of them. This section pissed me off real quick, because having to figure out where to run in a dark room when my only guide is a compass arrow which I can't stop to check because I need to keep running at a sprint to stay ahead of the invincible monster chasing me is not fun. I wound up playing this section by running a bit further than I ran last time, then being clawed to death while checking my compass so I could figure out where I need to go on the next try. That is one definition of "the opposite of fun."
The boring and/or crappy mutant-fighting action (which is, unfortunately, the majority of combat in the game) was made up for by the several entertaining people-killing sections. Using a silenced, scoped revolver to shoot a man in the back of the neck between his helmet and his body armor was enjoyable every time I did it, as was clearing a room with a shotgun, as was throwing a lit pipe bomb into a room filled with enemies.
Speaking of the weapons, the weapons are a lot of fun, although poorly designed in the context of the game. For mutant-fighting, there's really only one weapon worth using: the semiautomatic shotgun. Everything else burns through too many bullets per nosalis. When you're fighting people, your options are somewhat broader but still come down to the several silenced weapons, because once the enemies know where you are, they are alert and watchful and are very good shots, so stealth kills are the smartest tactic for much of the game. Metro has a couple of very cool and unique weapons, the two pneumatic weapons. These are air-powered guns, one of which shoots crossbow bolts, and the other one shoots 5mm balls. The game has a nifty pumping mechanic; the damage dealt by the projectiles is directly related to the air pressure in the gun, so you need to keep it topped up. Both the pneumatic guns count as silenced weapons, and both are pretty accurate. The crossbow gun is a guaranteed one-hit kill on a mutant, and the bolts can be retrieved from the bodies. Unfortunately, it is not a guaranteed one-hit kill on a person, because the human enemies wear body armor. Thanks to that, and to the fact that the pneumatic weapons share the same inventory slot as the shotguns, I gave up on using the pneumatic guns despite their coolness.
The world of Metro 2033 didn't feel as developed as it could have. Each time the story dragged me into a station (that is, a town), I was able to explore less of it than the last station, so that the last few stations you're in are one-room affairs where you buy ammo and then get frog-marched towards the next leg of the story. This was disappointing to me, because I was hoping to have some of that "plot development" stuff happening, but no such luck.
Overall, I liked the game, although I feel that it is not worth full price, being a competent but not great single-player FPS with a lackluster story, fairly short playing time and no replayability. Once it is on sale on Steam you should jump on it, because there's more good than bad in this game, and really, who can ever have enough of post-apocalyptic Russia?
LostWinds: A Two-word Game Title Smushed into One
Pros: Exploding with potential
Cons: Nobody was around to clean up the mess
That, my friends, was an ejaculation joke. If I were starting this article in a more serious manner, I may have written:
Pros: gorgeous visuals, innovative take on the puzzle-platformer, genuinely good use of motions as the primary means of control
Cons: only two environments and one of them kinda sucks, music was clearly written by a "special needs" six-year-old, combat is pointless and annoying, shorter than the attention span of the composer, easy enough for the composer to beat
Actually, that just ended up being me making fun of retarded people. But my main points are all there, once you wade through the Sea of Reckless Disparaging.
LostWinds is a game whose title is formed by taking two words (a transitive conjunction and a semiadverb) and putting them together while retaining the original capitalization. This accomplishes absolutely nothing besides raising a whole slew of questions from me.
- What is the part of speech of the new word?
- Why is the W in "winds" still capitalized?
- Is "Lost" pronounced very quickly, like the "Mc" in "McDonald's"?
- Speaking of McDonald's, did you know that there's now a difference between the classic "Double Cheeseburger" and the new "McDouble"?
- It's a piece of cheese.
- If the title were "Lost Winds," I'd assume that this game were about some winds that were lost. Oh, wait, that is what this game is about. What the fuck, then?
Obviously, I was furious at this game before I even played it. I thought that perhaps the game would answer all of these questions — even the one that's a statement about cheese — before I reached the end, but I was wrong. Though the game is persistently about "lost winds," the concept of "LostWinds" is mentioned only once, as the final word in the ending. As far as I can tell, it simply means "lost winds." Lame.
LostWinds, a Frontier Developments game, was one of the May 2008 launch titles for Nintendo's WiiWare, the service that forces developers to insert horribly unusable motion controls into their games in order to get paid. Before I get into the meat of the review, I proffer this surprise: the game is not shovelware.
The player is greeted by a title screen and musical number that basically says, "THIS GAME HAS A JAPANESE SETTING." A panflute over plucked strings sounds a poignant tonic to subdominant (or maybe tonic to a seventh built on the supertonic but look I'm not gonna load up the game just to listen for a fucking F-sharp and they function the same anyway okay?) while an adorable homeless child with a severe case of cranial elephantiasis sleeps under a cherry tree blowing gently in the wind.
It turns out that this diseased homeless child is unwitting protagonist Toku, and the game begins with him being awoken by the wind. Eager to get away from this sudden minor discomfort, Toku hops down a mine shaft or a bridge collapses under him or something and he ends up in a cavern below the Earth's surface, where he soon meets Enril, the game's other protagonist.
It's worth mentioning at this point that you've now seen (more or less) 100% of the environments in LostWinds, and you're about nine seconds into the game. The portions of the game that take place above ground are absolutely idyllic. Like, heart-wrenchingly idyllic. It reminds me of a cartoony version of the farmlands of Shing Jea Island in Guild Wars: Factions, a game location with which everyone is very familiar. Though the game plays completely in two dimensions, the background shows a fair amount of depth: above ground, you'll see everything from running waterfalls to a farm town populated by people that stand around and stare blankly at nothing all day (they're boring). Below ground, you'll see a shitload of dull-colored rocks and fluorescent mushrooms. Every now and then, the underground scenes surprise with something like an oasis, or enormous, abandoned mining equipment, but generally it's just rock, mushrooms, and crippling banality.
Returning to the story: Enril is a chef-and-television-personality-turned-wind-spirit. She explains to Toku that she once trapped fellow (but EVIL) spirit Balasar in some crystal (because his HATRED was flaring up), but Balasar (using the powers of MALICE) trapped Enril in with him. But then Balasar got bored inside the crystal (not enough FURY in there), so he just up and left (HOSTILITY, anyone?) without even saying "goodbye" to Enril (overflowing IMPOLITENESS). The game uses key words like "bored" and "goodbye" to communicate to you just how naughty Balasar is.
Ever-silent Toku agrees to help Enril free herself from the confines of the crystal, where "the confines of the crystal" apparently means "being a cursor," since that's her function. Technically, you control two characters at once in this game: with the Nunchuk, you move Toku left and right and interact with various objects; with the Wii Remote, you control Enril in all of her...gusty...glory.
And so the duo travels, out into one of the most confusing game worlds I've ever seen. As you enter the more populated part of the world, you'll see plenty of townspeople going about their daily business of staring blandly in your general direction. Everything seems to be vomit-inducingly bucolic (in a good way, I swear), but when you are given the opportunity to chat with some of the townspeople, they all seem shaken up despite their "get out of my face, kid" nonchalance. They worry about Balasar corrupting (CORRUPTING) the land, and they complain about tremors and other environmental frights. I say the game world confused me because it appeared that the NPCs were lying to me: there is one tremor (close to the very beginning, no less), no visible corruption of the land, no blood-smeared patches of grass with little organ chunks in them.
As you progress through the game, Balasar's corruption does visibly grow, however, by making the land appear just as heartwarming and friendly as ever. Trust me, you've never seen more menacingly gorgeous cherry blossoms.
The entire game consists of unlocking three new powers for Enril and unlocking four pieces of fellow wind spirit Deo's memory, which he hid in treasure chests in order to make the game longer than thirty seconds. Each of Enril's abilities can help Toku access new areas. The Gust ability allows you to push Toku in any direction by holding A and dragging Enril through Toku in the direction you'd like him to be pushed. You can Gust up to three times in one period of Toku's being airborne, and you'll need to, to reach higher and farther areas. The Slipstream ability allows you to write naughty words on the screen by holding B and moving Enril around. Calling Balasar a "fag" or pretty much any racial slur is the only way to hold back the corruption! Slipstream also has the side effect of making fire, water, and some objects follow along the path you've drawn, so that you can hurt Balasar's feelings in style. Finally, the Vortex power allows you to draw circles around stuff so that you can curse about how unpredictably inaccurate it seems to be. If it ends up working the way you wanted, you can use a Gust to throw the object at a very high speed.
Aside from Vortexes being a bit unpredictable and a late-game item that allows you to move Toku with Slipstreams getting you caught on the environment, the motion controls are superbly implemented. It's important to note that when Enril is "active" — so when you're holding A or B to use a wind ability — time slows to a crawl in order to allow you to make accurate movements. This was weird for me for the first few minutes of play, but I got used to it almost immediately and now can't imagine being able to maximize height and distance without that mechanic.
LostWinds is meant to be a platformer-puzzler hybrid, and it succeeds at that if you take "puzzler" to mean "rock-mover." The puzzles in this game are not challenging whatsoever — if the solution to something isn't immediately obvious to you, you're probably retarded and should toss your Wii in the garbage and start lamenting the fact that you paid money for it and this game. The most challenging part of this game is trying to position rocks onto platforms. I probably spent 85% of my playtime watching my tiny gusts throw a boulder halfway across the screen, then watching my huge gusts make the boulder move in a completely unintended direction, causing my Wii to overheat and catch on fire. Positioning rocks works a little better after you get the Slipstream ability, but you'll still sometimes want to use them to smash Toku's disproportionately large skull to a less "kawaii" (^__________^) size.
Scattered about the world are 24 collectible statues that I guess are supposed to be challenging to locate and obtain. I used them as a means of determining how far along into the game I was. LostWinds is short. Like, really short. I collected 23 of the statues and beat the last boss (oh, yes, there's combat) in just under three hours. I did not rush through the game, but I did not spend a lot of time searching for the statues — the ones that I found were very obvious and required little backtracking. After I finished the game, I went back to search an area that I suspected contained the final statue. I was correct, and had obtained 100% completion in three hours, eighteen minutes. Unfortunately, completing the game with all of the statues does not offer a different ending, rendering them about as useful as every single power Enril possesses when faced with the monumental task of positioning a rock on a platform. This also means that all of your hard work earns you the same HAY-GUISE-PLZ-BUY-TEH-SEEKWEL ending. (It's worth mentioning here that I played the game a second and third time, and was able to finish with all 24 statues in as low as 45 minutes.)
All right, let's talk combat. Combat is the God damn worst part of this game. All of your foes are Dots candies onto which a blue ink pen accidentally burst. They're called "Glorbs" (exasperated sigh) and they're apparently manifestations of Balasar's EVIL, or something. Actually, I can't remember the game's explanation, but mine's probably better anyway. Glorbs (hearty grumble) come in roughly three flavors: annoying, boring, and fuck this. There's a lot of overlapping there. Combat seems to be tacked on in an effort to give you something to do when you're not getting pissed off at moving rocks. There's no real purpose to it, and there's only one boss battle, at the very end of the game. And once you figure out how to defeat the boss, you can do the entire fight in considerably less time than it takes the monster to make his entrance.
You kill Glorbs (fuck) by — you guessed it — strangling them to death. Or throwing them into walls using wind. It brings me no (and by "no" I mean "a positively tremendous amount of") joy to say this, but the death throes of the Glorbs (...) sound a lot like how I imagine strangling a retarded child to death might sound. To increase the amount of unbearable aural bombardment, the background music is harshly interrupted by an annoying kid wailing on some Japanese drums every time you're within forty-one screens of a foe, including the "final" boss, who doesn't even get his own music.
Speaking of background music, this game's enjoyable title theme turned out to be very misleading: once you're actually in the game, the music degrades into this tuneless ambient crap that's a mix between silence and little phrases played on the same gentle Japanese instruments. It's nice while it's there, but it's unmemorable, way too thin, and too quiet (compared to the blaring combat music).
If Toku loses all of his health, which can happen in a surprising number of inconsistencies, you can rouse him by having Enril give him a gustjob. GET IT? IT'S A WIND JOKE WITH SEXUAL CONNOTATIONS. Reviving Toku costs one icon on your spirit meter. You can easily refill these icons by moving Enril over these little blue floaty things that appear out of wind-disturbed plants, dead enemies, and Toku's bodily waste. This allows you to enjoy the game without really having to worry about death at any point, although it makes me question even further the need for combat. Toku can still get his huge head clobbered in a number of other ways. For example, sometimes you'll fall six feet, slowing your descent with wind, and you'll take some damage. Sometimes you'll jump down a huge ravine, not bothering to slow your descent at all, and you'll be fine. Sometimes you'll accidentally throw a rock straight at Toku's head (this will actually happen a lot) and he'll shrug it off; other times he'll turn around and shocked by an unmoving boulder and crumple to the ground in a heap of giant skull and stupid outfit.
I've done a lot of LostWinds-bashing here, but, frankly, there's a lot fundamentally wrong with the game. I'd like to see non-boss combat completely removed; puzzles become more difficult; a few motion controls tightened up; and more content, more environments, and a true musical score added.
As I wrote at the start of the article, LostWinds is exploding with potential. I will say that, flaws aside, I genuinely enjoyed the experience. I played the game in three sittings of about an hour each, and I looked forward to each one. It's relaxing, innovative, and not entirely linear. With a ten-dollar price tag, you can't really regret making the purchase. In October 2009, sequelLostWinds: Winter of the Melodias was released, and I definitely enjoyed the first game enough to make a second purchase.
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