Crysis 2

Stop genocidal aliens from overrunning New York City.

PC Release: March 22, 2011

By Ian Coppock

Pumping aliens full of lead is not a new trend in video games, but the Crysis series’ impact on that premise is sorely underappreciated. The original Crysis is one of the best shooters ever made, with a lively mix of open-ended levels and tactical gunplay that few, if any, modern titles have replicated. Crysis 2 was kicked onto shelves four years after its predecessor stormed the boards with high-end visuals and exotic alien weaponry, and while it has both of those things in spades, Crysis 2 marked the series’ descent into the relative obscurity it “enjoys” today, despite being a good game.

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Crysis 2 was developed by Crytek, the one and same German studio that produced the first Crysis and the original Far Cry. The game is built on the CryEngine, so named because its high-end visuals and steep processing demands have been known to make computers shed tears. Crysis 2 continues its predecessor’s proud tradition of eye-popping visuals and smooth performance, but don’t try to run it on a potato. Its in-depth options menu can only do so much to throttle the game’s visuals, which were several years ahead of its 2011 release date.

Crysis 2 is set in 2023, three years after a group of special ops soldiers accidentally unearthed prehistoric aliens in the first game. Those aliens, the Ceph, have since begun attacking humanity worldwide, unleashing a lethal virus in New York City. The game begins as a Marine code-named Alcatraz is sent to NYC to extract Dr. Nathan Gould, a scientist who claims to have info on stopping the disease. Alcatraz’s infiltration goes south when the Ceph sink his submarine, and when he wakes up, he finds he’s been strapped into a Nanosuit.

Fancy duds.

Alcatraz finds out that the suit’s owner was on his way to save humanity from the virus, but got infected before he could finish the mission, leaving Alcatraz to carry on instead. The suit left to Alcatraz is the one and same piece of equipment used in the original Crysis: a suit that allows its wearer to jump higher, run faster, and even turn invisible. Even with those abilities, Alcatraz has his work cut out navigating a city full of alien warriors and hostile human mercs. He sets off for Dr. Gould’s lab in the hope that humanity can be saved after all.

Players can use their Nanosuit’s powers to play Crysis 2 their way. Alcatraz can barge in with armor mode on, or play it cool in stealth mode. Crysis 2 introduces a few improvements on the suit over Crysis, like combining speed and strength modes into a single physical fitness module, and allowing players to use multiple modes at the same time. Players can use these abilities in short bursts before waiting for the battery to recharge, but Alcatraz’s proficiency with firearms leaves him anything but helpless.

Players can leverage Alcatraz’s suit however they want.

As in Crysis, the enemies in Crysis 2 are more intelligent than your standard-issue bad guys. They use tactics, they fan out, and they notice strange activity. Alcatraz has to fight his way through groups of alien soldiers and the soldiers of the corrupt CELL corporation, and they each use different weapons and strategies for taking the hero on in battle. This gives Crysis 2 a pleasant jolt of variety, as players never know if the next corner’ll have straight-faced human grunts or octopuses clad in armor. Both are smart, and both make for fun target practice.

It’s disappointing that Crysis 2 nerfed its alien enemies, though. In Crysis, the Ceph attacked with giant flying creatures, which were tactically distinct from the game’s other foes and felt scary to fight. In Crysis 2, the Ceph have reconfigured themselves into human-shaped soldiers. The story’s tagline is that this form is better suited to urban combat, but making the Ceph humanoid takes away from the novelty of the first game’s flying death squids. It makes the aliens feel less, well, alien.

The enemies act different, but they go down the same way.

The Ceph are given the spotlight they deserve in Crysis 2‘s narrative, which is more nuanced and fleshed out than the first game’s story. As Alcatraz fights his way through New York City, he becomes bound up in a series of conspiracies that do what most military shooters don’t: take straight-faced dudes in flak jackets and make them multifaceted. Several factions in the city have different goals for the aliens, and navigating those goals becomes as dangerous as Alcatraz’s street-to-street firefights.

Along his journey Alcatraz meets up with a gallery of fascinating and well-written characters. Dr. Nathan Gould is Jurassic Park‘s Ian Malcolm on steroids, spouting off funnily written anecdotes about science alongside his life-or-death monologues about beating the Ceph. The CELL Corporation’s Lieutenant Strickland seems dedicated to her company’s shady behavior on the surface, but the events she drives on and off of Crysis 2‘s screen point to something more. Crysis 2 has crisp, multilayered writing that concisely tells the story and provides a great deal of exposition.

Bazooka drone murder. Another possible name for the band.

Crysis 2‘s rendition of New York City makes for a thrilling sci-fi setting, and is to Crysis‘s tropical island what night is to day. The thick jungle groves of the first game have been traded out for blocks of skyscrapers and narrow alleyways, making Crysis 2 one of gaming’s purest exercises in urban warfare. Visually, the game is stunning, with sharp textures blanketing every surface. Volumetric lighting and shadow affects that were years ahead of their time make Crysis 2 look more like a 2014 title than a 2011 one. The game’s use of strong color, fluid character animations, and impressive facial capture technology all do a great job of bringing this game to life. The visuals certainly add to the fun of visiting post-apocalyptic Wall Street, Times Square, and other NYC locales.

Unfortunately, Crysis 2‘s level design is what stops the game from being as novel as its predecessor. Even more than the Nanosuit, the core characteristic of Crysis was being able to play across large areas. Players could traverse entire square miles of terrain on their way to a goal, free to sneak or shoot their way through and explore for hidden avenues. Crysis 2 sadly abandons this design philosophy in favor of narrow linearity, which gives the game a much more pedestrian feel. Crysis 2 might’ve appealed to a larger audience by going the way of Call of Duty and Halo‘s level design, but sacrificed much of the series’ novelty in the process.

Only one path forward.

In making Crysis 2 so linear, Crytek also missed an opportunity to apply their open-ended formula to an urban environment. New York City is a metropolis teeming with vertical space, whether it’s underground in a subway tunnel or atop the city’s many skyscrapers. Imagine if players had the freedom to traverse these environments as they saw fit. Alcatraz spends plenty of time in subway tunnels and on skyscrapers, but it’s all predetermined. That player agency that made Crysis such an open-ended tactical masterpiece has been abruptly amputated in Crysis 2.

The level design’s drastic change doesn’t make Crysis 2 a bad game. In fact, Crysis 2 remains one of the better sci-fi shooters made this decade; but the game has a much harder time standing out from the other titles in its genre because of its linearity. Fans of the first game will be sorely disappointed to be shunted down avenues instead of free to sit in a river all day watching enemy troops play Parcheesi.

Look at all of those invisible walls.

Crysis 2 is still worth any shooter fan’s time thanks to its fierce firefights and outstanding visuals. The game also benefits from neatly written storytelling that gives players exposition and character development at a smooth pace. It’s just a shame that Crytek decided to forsake the open-ended design that helped put their first titles on the map. It’s not a given that this format change made the Crysis series harder to distinguish from other first-person shooters, but considering that Crysis 2 still does everything else better than most games in that genre, it’s a strong possibility. Enjoy saving New York City from aliens, but don’t expect Crysis 2 to allow for any dillydallying.

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You can buy Crysis 2 – Maximum Edition here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

Stop the Sith from wiping out the last Jedi.

PC Release: December 6, 2004

By Ian Coppock

For anything that can be said about the Star Wars prequels, that sequence in Revenge of the Sith in which countless Jedi are getting murdered is a real gut-punch. It’s arguably the most pivotal scene of the entire prequel trilogy, where the Star Wars universe violently changes hands from Jedi to Sith. Tragic as that scene is, though, it’s not the first time that the Jedi were driven to the brink of extinction. If the old Star Wars canon is to be believed, there was an even darker, grittier period for the Jedi that began with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

Take a seat, young Skywalker. This game makes for quite a tale.

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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (let’s just call it Sith Lords, that title’s one hell of a mouthful) is a third-person RPG set in the Star Wars universe, and the direct sequel to BioWare’s wildly popular Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Unlike the first KOTOR, Sith Lords was actually developed by Obsidian, a studio that makes bank developing sequels and spinoffs on behalf of other devs. Like KOTOR, Sith Lords comprises a mix of quick turn-based combat and open-world exploration across a variety of planets. The game allows players to create their own character, pick a class, and recruit squadmates to fight alongside them.

Sith Lords takes place five years after the events of KOTOR, which is itself set an eye-popping 4,000 years before the Star Wars films. Neither game is considered canon anymore, but that doesn’t stop them from being good Star Wars stories. KOTOR detailed a galaxy-wide war between the ancient Republic and an entire empire of Sith warriors led by a cyborg with a chip on his shoulder (or is it his jaw?). Anyway, even though the Republic eventually won out over the Sith, the galaxy was left a pile of smoldering wreckage. Most of the Jedi were wiped out in the conflict, leaving only a small handful still standing when the dust settled.

The Jedi victory over the Sith came at an awful price.

To make matters worse, the remaining Sith simply fled underground and spent the next few years ambushing and assassinating the remaining Jedi from the shadows. A new generation of Sith Lords is now but a few steps away from galactic domination, and only one more Jedi stands in their way: the player character. Sith Lords begins as the titular baddies ambush the protagonist, and the unlucky Jedi wakes up dazed and confused in a derelict mining colony.

Like KOTOR, Sith Lords allows players to create their own male or female character, and choose from a couple of different cosmetic options. Unlike in KOTOR, Sith Lords’ character starts out as a Jedi, so players nix picking a soldier class and can start leveling up Force abilities from the get-go. Canonically, the character is actually a female Jedi named Meetra Surik, a name that Star Wars: The Old Republic players might recognize. To the game and most NPCs, though, the character is known simply as “the Exile.”

The Exile! (jazz hands)

After wandering out of the colony’s medical bay, the Exile encounters a strange old woman named Kreia, who claims that the two share a bond through the Force. The Exile finds a few more characters strewn throughout the colony, but the group is forced to make a quick escape when the Sith show up to finish their dirty work. Kreia believes that the Exile is the galaxy’s best chance for stopping the Sith, though stops short of endorsing such a mission herself. Indeed, the old woman’s motivations remain delightfully vague for most of the game.

As the Exile travels around space running missions and picking up more oddball squadmates, he/she notices a few particular Force abilities. For a start, the Exile can form bonds with squadmates through the Force, strengthening their trust in him/her and even influencing their sense of morality. The Exile also learns that these abilities may or may not be tied up in why they were, well, exiled from the Jedi Order so many years ago. The Exile decides to try to seek out the Jedi Masters who oversaw his/her banishing — not just to learn why it happened, but to enlist their aid in stopping the Sith.

Yay, they brought back this sarcastic clunker!

The Exile’s journey around the galaxy plays out a lot like the main character’s quest in KOTOR. Players have a ship (the same ship from KOTOR, in fact) that they can use to putz around the galaxy and visit a few planets. Those planets are chock full of story missions, side quests, and lots of money and items. Combat is third-person and turn-based, but as with KOTOR‘s combat, the turns move quickly enough to keep the fight interesting. Attacks do only have a chance to hit, though, so be sure to level up that accuracy and critical hit damage as much as possible.

Each squadmate in the Exile’s party has his, her, or its own combat specialty and unique abilities. Some squadmates have latent Force powers and can eventually become Jedi apprentices (though lightsabers are rarer than gold dust in this game). Others are trigger-happy shootists that would rather put a blaster bolt between someone’s eyes than give them the time of day. Still others are more specialized in their abilities, adept at hacking into places they shouldn’t. Regardless of their specialties, the Exile’s team has that Mass Effect 2 ultimate badasses vibe to it. Who knows? Maybe a Sith ends up joining the team! That’d be crazy, right?

Right.

The changes that Sith Lords makes to KOTOR‘s gameplay are relatively few. Players can now craft their own components for their armor and weapons, rather than having to find them out in the field. The Exile can also make a few basic guns and battle drugs, given the proper materials. Sith Lords‘ range of hand-to-hand combat moves is expanded for some reason, and the conversation system is a bit more dynamic, giving players more freedom to persuade the weak-minded through the Force or just be a really good debater. Players can also access a palette of new and interesting Force powers. Force Scream, for example, is logistically similar to Force lighting but lets players flatten people like that little kid in Linkin Park’s music video for From the Inside.

Anything else? Not really. Money is a lot easier to come by, that’s for damn sure. KOTOR had an approximate game-wide limit on its money, and players had to be really choosy about where to drop that coin. Sith Lords makes it far easier to pick up some extra cash, and it’s not like there aren’t tons of weapons and armor to buy anyway, right? That’s pretty much all there is to be said about the changes Sith Lords makes to the KOTOR formula. That is to say… not many.

Punch him in the lightsaber! That’ll show him!

The changes that Sith Lords makes to the KOTOR aesthetic are also few in number. This game was only released a year after KOTOR, so there wasn’t time for Obsidian to get to work developing new assets or visuals. There are plenty of new character models, which is neat, but the game retains KOTOR‘s awkward character animations and not-so-well-aged object details. Textures remain blurry, colors are still a bit blotchy… fights have a few new animations, but they’re mostly restricted to the fisticuffs. Still not sure what the purpose of that skill tree is when the player can use a lightsaber.

Sith Lords has a few original creations, though, that outshine everything the game borrowed from KOTOR and even give its beloved predecessor a run for its money. The first is the game’s sound design. Guns, lightsabers and spaceships return in rip-roaring audio glory, and they still come through cleanly despite being over a decade old. Far better even than that, though, is Sith Lords‘ soundtrack, which is one of the greatest Star Wars soundtracks of all time. Alternating between quietly haunting melodies and dramatic, triumphant strings, Sith Lords‘ score is an audio masterpiece. The music is so good that LucasArts was using it for videos and promotional material up to the very last second before the Disney acquisition. Seriously, it’s damn good music.

I find your lack of musical taste disturbing…

The final and grandest piece of Sith Lords is the game’s narrative. With the game’s war-torn set pieces and the bleak notion of being the very last Jedi, Sith Lords is the closest that Star Wars has ever been to having a post-apocalyptic setting. Some aspects of the game, like invisible Sith assassins that crawl around like animals, even give off a horror vibe. Sith Lords‘ atmosphere is impressively dark, and that bleakness is carefully arranged in every war-torn city, every battle-weary NPC. The Exile cannot trust anyone; even the Force is arrayed against them. Players are as hunted by these grim signs as they are by in-game Sith assassins and bounty hunters.

More than just the apocalyptic vibe, Sith Lords benefits from having some of the best writing of any Star Wars game, far superior even to that of KOTOR. The writing results in some truly memorable characters with believable development arcs and heart-wrenching motivations. Kreia, the aforementioned old woman, is one of the most interesting video game characters ever written, Star Wars or otherwise. Her reserved character and constant criticism of the player no matter what they do smack of a depth rarely seen in RPGs anymore. Similar things can be said about the bounty hunter who’s secretly afraid, and the Mandalorian getting too old for this s***. It all makes for a batch of believable characters… characters that become very dear to the player very quickly.

That Kreia is a mysterious one…

It’s impressive that Sith Lords manages to tell a great story despite not being a finished game. It’s true; an entire planet and a few other side quests were left out of production so that Obsidian could meet a deadline. While it’s unfortunate that some content was left out of the game, the studio did a good job at covering those loose ends up (not sure if that’s commendable or unfortunate) and the rest of the game doesn’t feel short, clocking in at a few hours longer than KOTOR. A few mods are floating around that add bits and pieces of that content to the base game, but finding and downloading them is another story.

Sith Lords also deserves some leniency for the creative risks it took in penning its narrative. Rather than merely giving staple Star Wars concepts a new face, it twists those staple concepts around in interesting and terrifying ways. The idea of the Force undergoing a metamorphosis is an exotic concept, and the game’s portrayal of the Sith as hungry animals rather than cunning tacticians makes for a refreshing change. The point is that Sith Lords isn’t afraid to bend some of Star Wars‘ rules or tinker around with concepts enshrined as untouchable, and that’s what makes it such a great game. Perhaps even better than KOTOR.

Just another day in space-pocalypse.

Sith Lords isn’t the most well-known Star Wars game ever made, but it is one of the best. Its dark, rich story introduces bold new ideas to the Star Wars universe, rounded out with terrific music and some of the best writing of any Star Wars media. Don’t let Sith Lords‘ aged aesthetic or its relegation to non-canon status by Disney stop a playthrough. Pick up a copy (the Steam version’s nice and updated) and delve into some of the darkest, grittiest Star Wars storytelling ever penned.

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You can buy Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

Stop a fallen Jedi from becoming more powerful than can be possibly imagined.

PC Release: September 30, 1997

By Ian Coppock

Writing nothing but Star Wars reviews these past few weeks has been fun, and the tourney of said fun continues with a look at Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Awkward arrangement of the title’s segments notwithstanding, Jedi Knight was well-received when it launched in ’97 and remains notable for being one of the first Star Wars games to let players wield a lightsaber. How well that and other mechanics have aged has been a subject of debate, and it’s one of the subjects of tonight’s review. That and, well, being able to slash people with lightsabers. Don’t worry, those people usually shoot first. Usually.

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As can be inferred from the Dark Forces II subtitle, Jedi Knight is a direct sequel to Dark Forces featuring the return of Rebel mercenary Kyle Katarn. Jedi Knight is set one year after the events of Return of the Jedi, as the Rebel Alliance transforms into the New Republic and the Empire’s various leftovers squabble for Emperor Palpatine’s vacated throne. Sadly, this game’s story was classified as non-canon when Disney bought the rights to Star Wars, but that certainly doesn’t stop the game from setting out with its own vision of how things shook out after the destruction of the second Death Star.

Anyway, the story of Jedi Knight begins as Kyle receives new information on the death of his father Morgan, whose murder by the Empire was what convinced him to join the rebellion in the first place. Kyle learns that his father was killed by Jerec, a fallen Jedi who served Palpatine as an Inquisitor and struck out on his own after the emperor’s death at Endor. Unafraid of Jerec’s ruthless reputation or the dark Jedi’s skill with a lightsaber, Kyle strikes out to find his newest nemesis.

Dark Forces II: The Return Of The 90’s

As Kyle begins searching for Jerec, he receives a vision telling him that the dark warrior is searching for the Valley of the Jedi, a nexus of Force power that will make him invincible if he taps it. Kyle also finds an old lightsaber left behind by a friend of his father’s and activates it, discovering that he has a connection to the Force. Kyle’s mission against Jerec becomes both a quest for personal vengeance and to stop Jerec before he becomes all-powerful and conquers the galaxy. With Jan by his side, he sets out to stop Jerec and his dark apprentices, all while learning what it means to be a Jedi.

Jedi Knight‘s audacious start helped get the game off the ground as much as its upgrade to fully 3D graphics and more dynamic gunplay than that of Dark Forces. Indeed, all three of these elements helped propel the game to dizzying heights when it first hit shelves in 1997. Audiences were smitten by everything from the 3D character models to the live-action cutscenes interspersed between levels (strange to think that such mundane things were once the toast of the gaming world). For every gritty investigative vibe that Dark Forces gave off, Jedi Knight has a much more character-driven narrative.

Ah yes, these must be the infamous Triangle-Faced Troopers. A truly deadly variant.

Jedi Knight is a shooter/slasher that can be played from either a first-or-third-person perspective, though generally it’s best to use the former for guns and the latter for the lightsaber. Kyle starts out with his blaster pistol, but he can quickly upgrade his arsenal with more advanced guns and grenades. Some of these weapons return from Dark Forces. The lightsaber is found relatively early in the game, and Kyle gets progressively better with it as the game goes on. Before long, the mercenary Jedi becomes pretty adept at deflecting blaster bolts and slashing enemies out of his way. Every so often the player can sever an enemy’s arm, which was considered ghastly and shocking in the 90’s.

Jedi Knight‘s other gameplay component is simple puzzles. After Kyle’s done shooting and stabbing his way through an enemy regiment, players have to solve a few simple physics conundrums in order to progress in the game. These include opening doors, balancing fuel tanks… nothing too mentally taxing but just varied enough to keep things interesting. Some levels are thinly disguised key hunts, but Jedi Knight puts enough variety into its level design to keep those from becoming too rote. Through puzzles and gunfights, Kyle has to find health and shield pickups to stay alive. Ammo is also ludicrously plentiful, even for top-tier weapons.

Put ’em up, you insidious marshmallow man!

Jedi Knight provides a solid, unpredictable mix of shooting and puzzling, but that doesn’t stop a few glaring design flaws from, well, glaring out of the woodwork. The lightsaber is a bit OP, especially later in the game when Kyle can just deflect all the blaster bolts and cut down every stormtrooper between him and the next level. This can make the game a bit easy; even the Empire’s hardest-hitting troops go down in one lightsaber strike. This, coupled with a few basic Force powers, can make short work of even the hardiest Kyle-hating combatant.  The initial fun that comes with cutting enemies to shreds with a lightsaber starts to feel old alarmingly quickly.

Jedi Knight also comes with a few platforming sections that could’ve done with more development and less reliance on micro-precise jumping. This is especially true of some of the game’s early levels, like Kyle’s father’s farm, where the player has to jump between precariously tiny ledges over an endless abyss. Similar jumping obstacles pepper many of the game’s levels, some of them with fans, anti-gravity, or something else to make hitting a square foot-wide target even more challenging. Even if Jedi Knight‘s level design sheds some of the convoluted corridors that plagued Dark Forces, its abundance of invisible walls and twisting paths can still leave players’ heads spinning.

What, jumping on a brick that juts out from the wall isn’t fun all the sudden?

Just as it would be a lie to say that the original Dark Forces‘ graphics have aged gracefully, so too would it be false to say the same of Jedi Knight. Make no mistake, the latter title’s 3D graphics are a tremendous improvement over those of Dark Forces, but some of the in-game objects are still pretty hideous. Blurry textures and awkward character animations are nothing in the face of blotchy in-game illustrations and some of the worst character model details ever devised by man or machine. Each character’s face, for example, looks like an orgy of colorful pixels with perhaps a semblance of normal facial features.

Jedi Knight manages to fare quite a bit better in the sound department, with a wide palette of crisp, impacting sound effects. Some of them reek a bit too much of static, but the sounds of blaster fire and the swoosh of the lightsaber have some satisfying weight to them. The same goes for walking on various surfaces and the rip-roaring sound of an exploding fuel barrel. The game’s score comprises the music of the classic Star Wars films, which, while a bit of a cop-out, also means that Jedi Knight isn’t hurting for great songs.

What the hell is that?! A seahorse in a tunic?!

The narrative at the heart of Jedi Knight is by far the game’s most admirable quality. It swaps out the investigative vibe of Dark Forces for a story that lets players get to know the real Kyle Katarn — not the quiet secret agent from the first game, but a stoic and rapidly evolving warrior finding his true place in the universe. Kyle’s mission to avenge his father’s death carries much more personal weight than his fight against the Dark Troopers in Dark Forces; this allows for a believable character development arc that takes him from detached mercenary to courageous champion.

…Or does it? Depending on certain actions the player takes during the course of the game, Kyle may very well be driven to the dark side in his quest for justice against Jerec. If Jedi Knight is to be believed, the path to darkness comprises killing every innocent bystander that Kyle happens upon during his journey. Unfortunately for dark side enthusiasts, though, the game doesn’t do jack to tell players that slaughtering random NPCs alters the course of the story. That’s a pretty crappy way to alter the story anyway, though; just cutting down NPCs who are otherwise unmentioned and have no bearing on the plot is a weird idea of changing the narrative’s trajectory.

It’s okay if the NPCs try to kill Kyle, though.

Even though Jedi Knight is by all accounts a direct sequel to Dark Forces, the games’ stories are two very different animals. Dark Forces is a tale of investigation and subterfuge that has little to do with the player personally, while the other is simultaneously a revenge story and a coming-of-age narrative. Jedi Knight ultimately wins out in narrative weight because of the aforementioned character development in Kyle as well as his allies and enemies. His relationship with Jan continues to evolve, as does his adversity against the brutal, greedy Jerec.

It’s difficult to say that Jedi Knight‘s narrative is strong enough to make players ignore the game’s ghoulish visuals and bad level design choices, though. Worse still, most players won’t ever get the chance to find out, because Jedi Knight is difficult to run even on Windows 7. The Steam version of the game is dead in the water due to an embarrassing bug that makes the game request putting in a disc, which… wow. The GOG version is a bit more up-to-date but still rife with  problems. Some players have gotten Jedi Knight to run after spending hours in the forums, but Jedi Knight might not be worth all those hours.

Bugs are even worse than fallen Jedi.

Unfortunately, these problems are also endemic to Mysteries of the Sith, an expansion pack that was released for Jedi Knight in 1998. The expansion is set five years after the events of Jedi Knight and follows both Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade, an Imperial agent-turned-Jedi apprentice and one of the expanded universe’s most popular characters. Despite the implementation of in-game cutscenes and a few performance updates, Mysteries of the Sith suffers the same performance and running snafus as its larger counterpart. The Steam version of this game also asks for a disc.

It’s a shame that one of Star Wars’ most iconic expanded universe characters (and the future wife of Luke Skywalker, according to the old canon) didn’t get the video game debut that she deserved. The story of Mysteries of the Sith relegates Mara Jade to a few disjointed and ultimately forgettable mercenary missions that have little to do with each other. The expansion’s ending helps set the stage for Kyle Katarn’s next game, but that’s about it. Still, even if the expansion is underwhelming, it’s too bad that getting it to run so that players can decide for themselves is next to impossible.

Sorry, Mara.

Even if players manage to get Jedi Knight to function, the story at the center of the game isn’t quite enough to save it from a plethora of badly designed visuals and weird level-building choices. The lightsaber also neuters much of the game’s challenge, even in boss fights, and that only increases as Kyle gains powerful if clunky Force abilities. Mysteries of the Sith is similarly morose in its offerings. Ultimately, both games are better off avoided, at least until they’re patched to be able to run on modern systems. Until then, Kyle’s first sortee against lightsaber-wielding bad guys is probably better off floating in space.

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You can buy Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Stop the forces of Oblivion from destroying the mortal plane.

PC Release: March 20, 2006

By Ian Coppock

Whether it’s spending time outdoors or getting into a big video game, summer is usually a time for grand adventure. It’s no coincidence that fantasy RPGs like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are usually released during the summer months, and with that time of year right around the corner, this is a great opportunity to take a look back at the high fantasy epics of yore. The best adventure stories are still enjoyable years after they’ve been told, and though The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion‘s status as the best of those games is up for debate, its legacy is still felt over a decade after its release.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the fourth title in Bethesda’s venerable Elder Scrolls series and, like the other games in that lineup, is a high fantasy RPG with all the hallmarks of a magical adventure: a big world with lots of items and helpless non-player characters for whom you can run fetch quests. A few editions of Oblivion have been released over the years, but the best one to buy these days is the Game of the Year Deluxe edition available on Steam, which includes the base title and a ton of DLC all to the tune of $20.00 (or about $.01 per hour of entertainment).

Like the other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion takes place in the magical world of Tamriel, a continent rife with magic, elves, orcs, all that good fantasy stuff. The game’s story is set 200 years before the events of Skyrim, and in classic Elder Scrolls fashion, begins with the player character having been imprisoned for an unspecified crime. Players can fashion their character from 10 playable races and a wide variety of cosmetic options. Each race also has its own perks and abilities: elves are great with magic, orcs are great with smashing skulls, etc. Players can also pick a class to suit their playstyle, making Oblivion a much more rigid RPG than most fantasy adventures released today.

Wizards are great for burning things alive and for entertaining guests at parties.

The player character catches a big break from jail time when, of all people, emperor Uriel Septim shows up at their cell. Uriel’s being chased by assassins, and his secret escape route leads through the player’s cell. The emperor’s bodyguards allow the player to accompany their party into the tunnels below the prison, though their efforts are in vain, as Uriel gets killed by a cabal of red-robed assassins. Before dying, the emperor tells the player to find his secret son, and prevent the demonic forces of Oblivion (hey, name drop!) from overrunning Tamriel.

Even though the player’s been entrusted with saving the world, they can do whatever they want after this prologue ends. Like other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion starts players out with the main story objective but gives them the freedom to go wherever they want. Players can join a faction, go find legendary items… hell, just sit there and relax by the lake, Oblivion doesn’t care. The Elder Scrolls has always been a big believer in player agency, and no less so than with Oblivion.

This is an Elder Scrolls game, so expect plenty of caves.

In grand RPG tradition, players gain experience by using their class’s core skills, and can level up attributes like athletics and magic affinity. Unlike Skyrim and other modern RPGs that are more open-ended, Oblivion only lets players level up if they use their class’s pre-assigned skills. A player who picks a magic class, for example, won’t level up if they use something outside that skillset, like swords. This design philosophy is dated by contemporary standards but Oblivion has over a dozen classes that combine lots of different skills. The biggest danger is that players only have the prologue to see what skills they like before being forced to choose something, so pick carefully.

Oblivion can be played from a first- or third-person perspective and gives players a high degree of freedom in choosing how to navigate the world. Players can charge into battle sword in hand or sneak around assassinating foes from afar with a bow. Magic makes for the most audacious combat approach, while lockpicking lets players get a bit more creative in “borrowing” enemies’ possessions. Players can also become adept at schmoozing up to NPCs and haggling at stores. Whatever the skillset, Oblivion‘s core gameplay is classic Elder Scrolls: talk to NPCs, get quests, descend into dungeons, and fulfill a goal. It’s an inveterate quest design structure that gets saved from weary repetition by the hours of adventuring fun players have along the way to an objective.

There are lots of baddies and treasures to find in Oblivion.

Oblivion‘s combat system is not difficult to understand: just use a sword, a spell or a bow to kill a foe before they can kill the player. Enemies will usually charge right at the player, but with a bit of practice, dodging the opponent’s attacks and going in for the kill become all but second-nature. As players level up, the world will start providing more advanced weapons and treasures. Of course, enemies will also level up, and more powerful monsters will start creeping along the realm’s roads. This combat system would eventually undergo little change in Skyrim, but weapons can degrade, so it pays to keep equipment nice and shiny.

Players can set out to complete Oblivion‘s main story, complete standalone side quests, or join a faction. Like Morrowind and Skyrim, Oblivion features entire quest arcs that are not only narratives in their own right, but also give players an opportunity to build their character and gain access to valuable resources. These factions’ quests can get pretty involved and almost always end with the player becoming the head of that organization. It turns out that when the world is ruled by swords and bloodshed, the promotion ladder becomes surprisingly flexible.

The first meeting of the Creepy Cave Guild will now come to order…

Most of Oblivion is set in a verdant province called Cyrodiil, which, with its castles and rolling green hills, is the quintessential medieval fantasy setting. Of course, this also makes the game world difficult to distinguish from the dozens of other medieval fantasy games that thought it would be innovative to have a world of castles and rolling green hills (because that‘s never been done before). There’s a bit of jungle to the south and some mountains in the map’s western corner, but the rest of the world features samey medieval countryside that, while pretty, is extremely conventional for a fantasy RPG.

Players can also head to one of the region’s many cities to find quests or just get a drink at the inn. For all the visual sameness afforded by Oblivion‘s wilderness, the game does a good job of giving each of its cities a different visual theme. Each city features its own palette of building and landmark textures, though they all offer the same mix of inns, guild stops, and NPCs bursting with random exposition. Some of Oblivion‘s visual design, especially its environments, have aged well over the years, but its NPCs and wildlife look mannequin-esque by contemporary standards.

The next person who talks about mudcrabs is getting a mace in the balls.

As it happens, Oblivion‘s NPCs are where most of the game’s weirdest design choices really shamble to life. For starters, the guards’ AI is omniscient, to the point where they can sometimes detect players burglarizing a house on the other side of town. The game’s friendship system is also one of the most bizarre minigames ever devised by man. Players who need to gain an NPC’s trust have to play a pie chart game that makes them alternate between telling jokes, making threats, and complimenting them on… what, exactly? No one knows; but it does allow players to forge lifelong friendships in the span of several minutes. It’s a wonky system that only gets funnier as years go by.

Even more hilarious than the instant buddy minigame is how Oblivion allots its voice actors. Rather than mix a bunch of voice actors together across the game’s numerous races, Bethesda decided it would be a good idea to give each race a single pair of male and female voice actors. In other words, a conversation between three male humans just sounds like one guy talking to his other two personalities. Because each NPC has its own canned dialogue, repeatedly pressing anyone from a suave nobleman to a dirty beggar for news will result in the same scuttlebutt, delivered in the exact same tone. Oblivion‘s voice acting is one of gaming’s most lovably bad design choices. Fortunately, the game does a lot better in other areas of sound design, especially its gorgeous soundtrack.

Subtitles are the only way to tell who in a group of the same race is saying something.

Oblivion‘s voice acting kerfuffle becomes less entertaining when confronted with the game’s writing. Most NPCs spend an inordinate amount of time drowning the player in exposition, which isn’t that out of character for an Elder Scrolls game but is particularly common in Oblivion. The shopkeeper who wants help investigating a shady merchant will take four or five paragraphs to explain exactly why she wants the job done. Drowning the player in mission details does not substitute for storytelling, but it does make it harder to remember why the quest was taken in the first place.

The bulk of Oblivion‘s storytelling and voice acting efforts were put into the main questline, which features performances from such big names as Terrence Stamp, Sean Bean, and the immortal Sir Patrick Stewart. These actors’ thoughtful performances and much more concise writing save Oblivion‘s story from becoming as plodding as the farmer who spends thirty minutes explaining why her dirtbag husband ran off. The story also touches on themes that pop up in other games, like how the whole Dragonborn thing works. Oblivion‘s main story is arguably the most involved of the series, and the idea of the entire world being destroyed by demons gives Skyrim‘s dragons a run for their money.

Oblivion’s main narrative is darkly beautiful.

The Elder Scrolls games are not known for deep character development, preferring to let their massive worlds be the meat of the game. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but Oblivion features a modicum of character development that makes it stand out from its peers. The emperor’s bastard son, Martin Septim, is given a thoughtful demeanor and gradual character development arc by Sean Bean, who managed to channel his inner Ned Stark before ever having signed to HBO’s Game of Thrones. Mankar Camaron, the mortal bad guy voiced by Terrence Stamp, similarly provides some fascinating insights even if they are all squashed into the very end of the game.

Oblivion‘s staple of endearing characters continues in The Shivering Isles, an expansion pack that sends the player off to an island chain full of crazy people. The expansion is meant to be played after the main questline, but allows players to interact with kooky characters and gives the medieval fantasy trope a colorful twist of insanity. It’s one of those rare expansions that is both chock full of content and the clear product of lots of love; it remains one of the most memorable fantasy RPG expansions of all time. The Shivering Isles is rolled into the aforementioned Game of the Year Deluxe edition, along with the less memorable Knights of the Nine DLC and a variety of spell, house, and armor add-ons.

Gasp! My own tomb!

So why should modern RPG enthusiasts consider giving Oblivion a try, what with its dated visuals and oftentimes tedious dialogue? Because like other Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion succeeds in handing players a robust world and telling them to go wild. It contains that same spirit of wild abandon and exploration that was captured by Morrowind, and later Skyrim. It’s a fantasy game that allows for open-world grand adventure, but has a central story that’s deeper and more involved than that of any other Elder Scrolls games, giving it an element of enjoyment not quite found in Skyrim. Medieval fantasy enthusiasts pining for the next great adventure may well find it in Oblivion. Even 11 years later, it’s one of gaming’s surest staples of satisfying adventure.

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You can buy The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition Deluxe here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Save the galaxy from being conquered by the Sith.

PC Release: November 19, 2003

By Ian Coppock

Holy guacamole, has it really been 14 years since Knights of the Old Republic released?! Doesn’t feel that long ago that so many Star Wars fans got swept up in this epic tale, which pits a group of Republic heroes against a Sith Lord with a colander for a mouth, but that’s life. Grand adventures happen, years go by, and hopefully that adventure gets a fond remembrance down the road. Knights of the Old Republic‘s legacy has gotten continuously more curious over the years, but the impact it had on the Star Wars universe is comparable to that of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn novels or even the release of The Force Awakens. Why? Great question, let’s find out!

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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a role-playing game developed by BioWare, the studio best known these days for creating the Mass Effect series. Knights of the Old Republic was the very first Star Wars game BioWare ever made and was created with the involvement of such inveterate developers as Casey Hudson, who would go on to direct Mass Effect, and Drew Karpyshyn, who also wrote the excellent Darth Bane novels. In addition to being the first Star Wars game developed by BioWare, Knights of the Old Republic is also arguably the first Star Wars role-playing video game to have been made.

Knights of the Old Republic is set a whopping 4,000 years before the events of the Star Wars films, marking one of the first times that the old republic era of the Star Wars expanded universe was explored in video games. Knights of the Old Republic is set in an age when the Galactic Republic and its Jedi defenders fought fiercely against the Sith, who hadn’t yet adopted the Rule of Two and were as numerous as their light side counterparts. Both powers struggle in a galaxy-wide war for supremacy, though as Knights of the Old Republic opens, the Sith are winning.

The Jedi and Sith have been at this for a long time. A long time.

Knights of the Old Republic (or KOTOR, as it’s commonly abbreviated) lets players create their own character from a mix of physical features and classes (much like Mass Effect later would). The story begins as the player character barely escapes a crashing Republic warship with their fellow soldier Carth Onasi, and the pair lands on a Sith-occupied world called Taris. It turns out that the Sith are looking for Bastila, a powerful young Jedi who can use the Force to demoralize her foes and empower her allies with confidence. Certain that Bastila is the key to the Republic winning the war, Carth and the player set out to find her.

It also turns out that Bastila isn’t the only Force-sensitive member of the group, as the player also demonstrates an affinity for the Force and becoming a Jedi. What started out as a simple quest to find a lost Jedi quickly turns into a galaxy-wide race against the Sith and their insidious cyborg master, Darth Malak. Along the way, players can explore a small but vibrant palette of worlds and recruit a team of squadmates to aid them in their struggle against the Sith. Finding a way to stop Malak may be the galaxy’s last hope for survival.

LIGHTSABER TO THE FACE!

Knights of the Old Republic‘s epic quest across the galaxy takes the form of a third-person RPG. Players can choose one of three soldier classes at the beginning of the game, as well as one of three Jedi classes later on. Each class features different emphases on combat, diplomacy or circumventing dangerous obstacles. Combat in the game is turn-based, but never fear; turns fly by so fast that the game almost seems ashamed of them, and the various fighting moves make for some awesomely animated combat sequences. Players can use a variety of melee weapons like quarterstaves and lightsabers, as well as more conventional blasters and grenades.

Like any decent RPG, the player can also call upon some special abilities to help turn the tide against the opponent. As the player levels up, they can learn powerful abilities like Force lighting and even a stasis shield that freezes enemy combatants. Players can also level up and execute their party members’ abilities as well as directly control them, putting them on point instead of the main character if so desired. Players can swiftly accumulate a squad comprising fellow Jedi, seasoned gunslingers, and even droids.

A Jedi, a war hero, and an assassin droid. This session of the Friendship Committee has been very productive.

As with Mass Effect, it’s up to players to manage their own actions as well as relationships with squadmates. Generally good or generous actions will sync the player to the light side, while being a galaxy-sized dick to everybody will turn them toward the dark side. Squadmates take notice of these actions and their relationships with the player are affected accordingly. Jedi party members and the aforementioned Republic sidekick will be taken aback by dark deeds, but dark deeds’ll probably impress the Mandalorian gun nut and the sarcastic assassin droid. Each character has their own light-dark alignment, but it’s just a reference point. Players can only alter their own alignment.

The conversations with squadmates form much of KOTOR‘s narrative backbone. Between missions, players can speak with their buddies to get their take on the last mission or just to get to know them. Some characters hand out little freebies depending on their combat specialty; the Mandalorian gives out battle drugs and the Wookie (yes, players can recruit a Wookie) hides what seems to be an entire grenade armory under his shaggy exterior. Each character has his or her place on the player’s ship, but the interaction they have with each other is minimal.

The sarcastic assassin droid is a lively one.

The wider narrative of finding a way to stop the Sith takes this team of all-stars all over the galaxy, to worlds that brim as much with secrets as they do enemies. Some of these worlds, like Tatooine, are instantly familiar to Star Wars fans. Others, like Taris and the water world of Manaan, are planets that were created expressly for KOTOR. Each planet has its own assortment of story missions and side quests that take players to exotic locales and pit them against all kinds of unsavory foes. Not “just” the Sith Lords and their legions of troopers, but also criminals, unfriendly local governments, and hungry wildlife.

Because this game is an RPG, all of these planets have lots of treasure and items for the discerning explorer. Between crates full of credits and soon-to-be-corpses adorned in weapons and armor, KOTOR has a lot for players to find. This resourcefulness is second only to leveling up in terms of success in KOTOR. The amount of items out there isn’t quite on the order of Mass Effect, but it’s a lot—certainly enough to kit out the player’s squadmates in enough weaponry to make the state of Texas collectively blush.

I have a lightsaber, a Jedi certification, AND A MASTER’S DEGREE IN RAISING HELL!

The planets the player can visit in KOTOR don’t hurt for spectacle. From the deep blue oceans of Manaan to the verdant green fields of Dantooine, each planet in KOTOR is painstakingly detailed with beautiful visuals and sound effects. These worlds also don’t lack in level design variety, from tight city streets to vast deserts. This amount of variety is not only important for the game’s artistic value; it also means that there’s an ever-expanding palette of exotic environments to explore. Indeed, KOTOR‘s planets arguably have more variety than the main worlds visited in the first Mass Effect. The game also boasts a beautiful, dramatic score that gives even John Williams a run for his money.

Having said all that, though, the finer details of KOTOR‘s visual design have not aged well. For the admitted variety provided by the game’s options menu, KOTOR‘s in-game objects and characters are stiff and have blotchy coloring. The anti-aliasing is basically nonexistent, giving every object and detail in the game that annoying serrated look, like everything has bristles on it. Some of the character animations are pretty painful to watch, especially when NPCs attempt to laugh. These problems don’t sink KOTOR‘s entire motif, but they do shoot the game’s much more ambitious sense of scale in the foot… as palm trees that look like dead spiders often do.

Bastila used Awkward Battle Snarl. She hurt herself in her confusion!

KOTOR avoids any truly catastrophic problems, like game-breaking bugs, but the title still has lots of little back-end quirks that can form a cumulative headache. The game’s menus are pretty clunky, especially the inventory, which makes little effort to categorize all of the player’s possessions. The storage system is also laughably unwieldy, forcing players to only be able to store one item at a time. Empty containers are also not marked as such, even once the player’s looted them, so combing rooms for items becomes needlessly cumbersome.

And although KOTOR‘s turn-based combat is so fast that it almost doesn’t register as turn-based combat, fighting as many enemies as the game throws at the player with this system can quickly become a grind. A base full of Sith troopers will only go down in a battle with each individual soldier, so even if the turns are fast, a bunch of turns together aren’t necessarily also fast. Still, this system’s a damn sight quicker than something as awful as, say, the gameplay of Final Fantasy XIII. Just one more heads-up about the combat: each weapon does have a chance to miss, so don’t get too angry if the player’s 90% chance to kill misses. KOTOR was pulling XCOM: Enemy Unknown misses on 90% kill chances before XCOM: Enemy Unknown knew it was cool.

How the f*** did he dodge a shot to the face at point-blank range?!

KOTOR‘s main narrative has aged considerably better than its menus or combat, and it warrants giving the game a try. Although the game does feel like Star Wars, it’s so long ago and far away from the films that it feels like a universe in its own right. There are echoes of other Star Wars themes in this game, but KOTOR establishes a ton of its own lore in the process, even minimizing references to other Star Wars media to boldly further its own identity. Indeed, KOTOR‘s impact led to the development of a direct sequel, the The Old Republic MMO, and a slew of other media set in its ancient pre-New Hope setting. It’s one of the most important pieces of Star Wars media ever made.

All of this was only accomplished because of the game’s strong story. Characters develop believably over the course of the game, and as players get to know more about them. The mystery of the Sith’s resurgence builds up to a revelation just as if not more impacting than Mass Effect‘s plot twist. The game alternates between light and dark tones as only Star Wars media can before sticking the landing with a satisfying, climactic ending that is genuinely affected by whether the player chooses the light or dark side of the Force. Drew Karpyshyn’s simple but elegant prose gives life to these characters and has continued to do so over the 14 years since this game hit store shelves. Funny how a well-written, galaxy-wide search for the truth inspires such grandiose feelings.

TO GLORY!

In the end, KOTOR‘s narrative may very well be enough to supersede the rest of the game’s problems. The game does have issues, but KOTOR‘s remarkable saga causes most of them to fall by the wayside, forgotten in the face of a beautiful Star Wars odyssey that the player is at the heart of. The story is not rendered less enjoyable because of the occasional miss on a 90% chance to kill, nor even Disney’s declaration that the entire KOTOR era is no longer canon. If KOTOR remains influential enough to be referenced in Rogue One (the Hammerhead-class cruiser originally appeared in this game) perhaps the rest of the title is worth a visit from fans new and old.

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You can buy Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Star Wars: Dark Forces

Stop the Galactic Empire from building a doomsday army.

PC Release: February 15, 1995

By Ian Coppock

A lot of the Star Wars expanded universe’s lore is convoluted or flat-out bad, but its removal from canon by Disney was still a somber day for Star Wars fans. It wasn’t surprising; how was Disney going to produce new movies within a 30-year-old framework of established content? Although the Disney-owned Lucasfilm has done a pretty good job of making new stories, from last winter’s Rogue One to Marvel’s excellent Darth Vader comics, quite a few exciting and memorable expanded universe narratives were swept under the rug, and remain so to this day. It’s time for some of those stories, like Star Wars: Dark Forces, to get just one more spotlight.

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Created over 20 years ago by the folks at the then-open LucasArts (another Disney casualty), Star Wars: Dark Forces is a first-person shooter that borrows heavily from DOOM and other mid-90’s titans. The bulk of the game is set immediately after the events of A New Hope (with the exception of a prequel level that was, at the time, how the Death Star plans were really stolen). Dark Forces casts players as Kyle Katarn, a grizzled Imperial officer-turned-Rebel saboteur who takes mercenary jobs from the Alliance.

Kyle’s latest assignment comes on the heels of the Death Star’s destruction. Rom Mohc, a dastardly Imperial general who thought that the Death Star was a glorified disco ball, proposes using deadly next-generation battle droids called Dark Troopers to deal with the growing Rebel threat. After pitching the idea to Darth Vader (the term “pitching” meaning “use the droids to burn down a city and kill everyone in it” in this context) Vader greenlights the droids’ mass production. The rebels, ever the eavesdroppers, catch wind of the Dark Trooper project and hire Kyle to shut it down ASAP.

Holy nineteen ninety five-eroli.

Kyle sets out with his resourceful sidekick Jan Ors to take down the Dark Trooper project, starting with an investigation of the city that the Empire s***housed a few days earlier. Though Dark Forces very much bears the aesthetic of a straightforward shooter like DOOM, Kyle’s investigation is anything but. Finding and destroying the Dark Trooper project requires going up not only against stormtroopers, but also against various criminal and underworld factions that General Mohc’s got lined up. It’ll take all of Kyle’s guns, his skill with those guns, and the occasional wisecrack involving said guns to stop the Dark Trooper project dead in its tracks.

As can be gleaned from that screenshot where Kyle is pointing one pixel at another pixel, Dark Forces is as mid-90’s FPS as it gets. It’s almost shameful how derivative Dark Forces is of DOOM, down to the user interface and the guns being down the middle of the screen. None of this stops Dark Forces from being a good or perhaps even great game, but holy cow, LucasArts… no one needs three guesses to see which game the Dark Forces team loved to tears. Then again, everyone was copying DOOM back then, so perhaps it’s unfair to pin the copycat throttling solely on LucasArts. But, for anyone thinking about getting into this game… DOOM is a stellar litmus test.

Is this a heat grate, or am I standing on the galaxy’s biggest hot dog grill?

And while on the subject of Dark Forces‘ visuals, it would be a lie to say that they’ve aged well. They have not. The player can usually tell which character that vaguely amorphous cutout of pixels is supposed to be, but that’s about it. Sometimes, that pile of grey pixels on the floor is actually a sophisticated piece of ordnance, but the only way to know that is to approach the damn thing and think to pick it up. Dark Forces has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay and narrative, but don’t go into the game expecting a visual feast. It might’ve been sophisticated in 1995, but, well… 1995 has long since passed.

What’s that, though? Dark Forces has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay and narrative? The gunplay in Dark Forces is classic DOOM; the player can carry nearly a dozen guns and pieces of ordnance and wield them all with lethal precision. Some guns are Star Wars mainstays, like the stormtroopers’ iconic E-11 blaster rifle, while the plasma cannon was created specifically for the game. Kyle picks these weapons up as the game intensifies and carries them with him into every mission. Point, click, and shoot. Most weapons are at least slightly guided to compensate for the game’s camera being locked.

Taste the justice of flaming soup cans!

Combat in Dark Forces is not hard to understand. Just try to shoot the bad guy before he shoots Kyle. The enemies in this game are about as tactically intelligent as bags of hammers, but Dark Forces compensates for this by giving them all impressive aim and even more impressive damage. It pays to fire from behind cover (something that Kyle’s foes don’t also think to do) and replenish with health and shield pickups wherever possible. Dark Forces‘ enemies are pretty dumb, but there’s an impressive variety of them, from endless squads of stormtroopers to alien mercenaries armed with axes. That’s to say nothing of the insidious Dark Trooper droids that come after Kyle with swords and cannons.

When Kyle’s not busy shooting his way through an enemy base, he’s looking around for clues. Dark Forces challenges players to explore intricate environments for keys, buttons, maps—anything that can point him toward the Dark Troopers’ base of operations. The way that these goals are all set up is decidedly less diverse than the goals themselves (go up to the thing, press the thing, end mission) but that style of investigative gameplay adds to the secretive, gritty nature of Dark Forces‘ central narrative.

Apparently Imperial personnel get stripped of their peripheral vision.

The story at the core of Dark Forces is more nuanced and sophisticated than its simplistic premise might imply. The Empire remains the chief antagonistic faction of the story, make no mistake, but the narrative does a great job of weaving other galactic factions into its mix. As previously mentioned, Kyle spends the bulk of his time fighting stormtroopers and mowing through Imperial installations, but his journey also pits him against smugglers, pirates, mercenaries and maybe even Jabba the Hutt. This means that Kyle spends almost as much time scouring the galaxy’s seedy underbelly of bars and hideouts as he does the pristine hallways of Imperial bases. It makes for an interesting investigation and allows for more level variety.

The characters in Dark Forces are a mix of big-name stars from the films and entirely new peeps made for the game. The former, like Darth Vader and Mon Mothma, make plenty of cameos, but Kyle and General Mohc have the most screen time. They don’t really develop all that much, but they still cut compelling profiles in this dark mystery. Dark Forces deals out clues about the Dark Troopers at a pretty even clip, giving enough pieces of the puzzle at a quick enough pace to retain attention spans without spilling too many beans. Even decades later, it remains one of the most compelling mystery narratives in the Star Wars universe… even if it’s no longer considered canon.

It’s like talking to a bullfrog made out of congealed rubber cement…

Dark Forces‘ gameplay is 90’s shooter through-and-through and its story is interesting, but the game emulates a less welcome theme endemic to that period of game development: convoluted level design. Though Dark Forces‘ levels are expansive, the constant inclusion of twisting corridors makes it easy to get turned around or flat-out lost while out on a mission. Most of these areas are intricately interconnected, too, which can make it at once easier or more difficult to return to a previous area.

This level design issue is a problem despite the environmental variety that Dark Forces has going for it. Being able to switch between a ruined city, an Imperial base, and Jabba’s personal starship makes for great variety, but they all seem to pack some loopy level design here and there. Players can game the system by making careful mental note of where they’ve been, but don’t get surprised if Kyle ends up back at the entrance he just broke through. Bodies don’t disappear in Dark Forces though, so if all else fails, just follow Kyle’s trail of carnage. Think of the corpses as jelly beans. Bloody, rapidly stiffening jelly beans.

I already shot up this glacial cirque!

The other interesting thing about Dark Forces is how it briefly re-entered the national media conscience when the first details about Rogue One got out. Until that movie’s release, the canonical theft of the Death Star plans was actually carried out by Kyle in Dark Forces‘ prequel mission. That story detail obviously didn’t make it into Rogue One (and neither did Kyle Katarn) but it’s worth pointing out the many similarities that Dark Forces and Rogue One share.

For a start, Director Krennic’s Death Troopers look an awful lot like the Dark Troopers Kyle fights throughout the game; they wear black armor, have lethal aim, and their speech is weirdly garbled. Cassian Andor greatly resembles later renditions of Kyle Katarn. Perhaps most significantly, Jyn Erso’s name sounds a heck of a lot like that of Jan Ors, Kyle’s mission partner. This is without mentioning more nuanced details like the comparable personalities of Krennic and Mohc. These may all or mostly be coincidences, but Lucasfilm has done an unexpectedly decent job of referencing stories from the old canon in their new narratives.

Rogue One wasn’t the first time Mon Mothma put together a Death Star mission…

Dark Forces remains a fun and pivotal piece of Star Wars history. Not everything about it has aged well, but it makes for a gritty adventure whose gameplay is still accessible to fans new and old (not in the least bit thanks to updated emulation software). Dark Forces somehow forewent the grinding difficulty endemic to many shooters of its day (though the game is by no means a cakewalk) and it would later serve as the launching point for one of the best sagas in Star Wars gaming: the Jedi Knight series. Dark Forces is worth picking up for its murder-mystery atmosphere and easy-to-understand gunplay. Even if it’s not considered canon anymore, it’s still comparable to what the “new” Lucasfilm is putting out these days.

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You can buy Star Wars: Dark Forces here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Outlast 2

Rescue your wife from a town full of insane cultists.

PC Release: April 25, 2017

By Ian Coppock

Grab a pitchfork and propose to a cousin, because Red Barrels’ long-awaited hillbilly horror game has arrived at last. After Outlast stormed the boards in the fall of 2013 with its eerie green-tinged environments and flat-out terrifying enemies, Outlast 2 was a foregone conclusion for many fans. Sure enough, Outlast 2 was announced a few years later, and much like a Mount Massive Insane Asylum patient barging through a door, could not be restrained by delays and obstacles. Now it’s time to delve once more into what could very well be the scariest universe in contemporary gaming.

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Like its predecessor, Outlast 2 is a first-person survival-horror game that emphasizes careful exploration and avoiding crazed monsters. The game is set some time after the events of Outlast, but features a new cast of characters and a setting far away from the original’s Colorado crazy-house. Players assume the role of Blake Langermann, a cameraman who along with his wife Lynn has been investigating the murder of a pregnant woman in Arizona. The couple’s sleuthing leads them to the state’s remotest desert region, and to what could be a big break for Lynn.

As Blake and Lynn prepare to touch down in the desert, a strange blast of light forces their helicopter to crash. Blake regains consciousness and finds his trusty video camera, but cannot locate his wife in the wreckage. He follows a spine-tingling trail of screams to what looks like a town… only, there’s not supposed to be a town so far out here. The word “town” is also quite generous. “Dilapidated village from Hell” is a more apt descriptor of this place.

Oh boy.

It doesn’t take long for Blake to discover that the town is inhabited… by a vicious cult that believes the end times are upon the world. Barely managing to stay one step ahead of the zealous cultists, Blake also realizes that the townsfolk have captured Lynn, and are preparing to cart her off to a fate worse than death. Armed only with his camera, it’s up to Blake to rescue his wife and find a way out of this hellish little corner of the desert.

That camera is players’ only hope for survival in Outlast 2, as Blake is unable to fight back against the cultists (despite the entire town being full of farming implements). Blake’s camera is far more sophisticated than the one Miles Upshur used in Outlast, with improved zoom, night vision, and even microphones that can pick up distant footsteps. Blake can run, jump, and slide his way out of trouble provided his reflexes are quick enough, but the town’s inhabitants are armed to the teeth and none too shy about attempting a murderous 50-meter dash.

I suddenly have a lot more respect for adult diapers.

Although the basic run-and-record gameplay of Outlast 2 is nothing that fans of Outlast won’t be familiar with, the sequel does make a few crucial tweaks that refine the first title’s gameplay. For instance, the player can now look behind themselves at any time instead of just when sprinting. Additionally, the retinue of hiding spots has increased dramatically, and the player now has a wide selection of barrels, troughs and ponds to hop into when Cousin Cletus comes knocking. The whole camera setup feels a bit too derivative of the first game, but it remains a fluid setup indeed.

Outlast 2 also makes some rather malicious modifications to the game’s survival systems, doing away with the health regeneration of Outlast in favor of limited health and bandages. This mechanic is a great way to up the tension. Players can still expect to find batteries lying around, but Outlast 2 demands far more usage of the night vision mode than the first game did, so players have to be resourceful when whipping the camera out. Outlast 2 also does a much better job than the first game did of hinting to players when an event is worthy of recording, and allows players to review footage they’ve taken for clues and Blake’s insights.

There’s no “Killbilly” Instagram filter.

The enemies that Outlast 2 throws at Blake are even more terrifying that the mutated inmates at the first game’s insane asylum. Something malicious has clearly driven these townsfolk over the edge, and as an outsider, Blake is the unlucky recipient of the village’s collective ire. The villagers are smarter and more thorough than the monsters in Outlast, using more intricate search patterns and working together in teams to hound the player. It’s an impressive AI upgrade over what Outlast provided, though the villagers are little less oblivious to when the player is walking right behind them.

Outlast 2 also succeeds in providing a greater variety of foes than the first game. For all their admitted scariness, the inmates in Outlast constituted a single enemy type. As Blake progresses through the village, he has to put up not only with angry villagers, but sickened outcasts that crawl around and stalk the player from a distance. The heretics, a splinter faction opposing the town, are little friendlier to Blake than the villagers but are brutal ambush predators. None of this is to say anything of the game’s unique and particularly gruesome villains, like the 8-foot-tall pickax lady.

Nothing to see here ma’am, just a metal drum minding its own business… (whistling).

Outlast 2‘s most dramatic change over the original Outlast is in the level design department. The game abandons the constricting linear environments of the insane asylum in favor of open hamlets and corn fields. This shift in level design is a refreshing change, but it certainly doesn’t stop the monsters from being thorough with their patrols. The corn fields represent the zenith of this transition, as players have to adjust from creeping down asylum corridors to blindly pushing through corn stalks while who knows what waits in the next patch over.

Unfortunately, this transformation to a starkly open environment makes it difficult for players to know where to go next. A few areas here and there are marked with telltale lights or a pushed-over cart pointing toward a door, but too often finding the path forward becomes an obnoxious spate of trial-and-error. Players have to run around an environment hoping that they blunder into the exit, but might very well blunder into Billy Jean’s ax and have to start all over again. For the visceral new sense of terror afforded by Outlast 2‘s much more open design, the game loses a lot of structure in the process.

An actual haunted corn maze is pretty terrifying.

The real heart of the problem with Outlast 2‘s format change has less to do with the change itself and more to do with how enemies act in it. This game is rife, absolutely rife, with scripted chase sequences, which the player is still expected to navigate even while in an open area. It becomes dull and frustrating to endure a chase scene over and over again because the player can’t find the direction the game wants them to run in. There’s something inherently dysfunctional about applying a linear chase sequence to an open environment. It happens a lot in Outlast 2, and it’s less scary than irritating.

Despite the drawbacks of Outlast 2‘s world, it remains one of the scariest game settings developed in years. This spooky Arizona backwater is intricately detailed with decaying buildings and ghoulish religious iconography, all of which gives it a dreadful atmosphere. The game certainly doesn’t let up on showering the town with (literal) buckets of blood, bodies, and gore, all of which is carefully arranged to show, not tell, additional little stories. These details, plus a heap of sophisticated lighting and weather effects and outstanding PC performance, make the town even scarier than the setting of the first game. Outlast 2‘s comprehensive options menu doesn’t hurt the game either.

Mount Massive’s been given a run for its money.

The other thing that makes Outlast 2‘s setting so scary? The horror. The pure, visceral, unleashed, unrestrained horror. The horror of watching the pickax lady murder someone for not muttering Biblical phrases properly. The horror of being licked by an all-too-amorous cultist who really wants to feel the spirit. The horror of watching townsfolk get stretched on the rack, flayed alive, and then burned at the stake. The horror of being vomited on by a plague-ridden cultist before watching him retreat to a cabin half-sunk in his own feces.

Yeah, Outlast 2 does not hold back in its portrayals of graphic violence. Indeed, it might be one of the most violent games ever made, and for this medium that’s saying something. Red Barrels’ decision to go full-throttle on portraying the very worst excesses of the human mind means that most players will experience the game while under the duress of a perpetual heart attack. Even iron-hearted horror aficionados may find themselves flinching at some of the torture and assault portrayed in this game. For better and for worse, Outlast 2 digs its adrenaline-tipped barbs into players’ hearts and doesn’t release itself for most of its 8-9 hour playtime.

I do not want to watch how this shakes out.

This constant cringe also creeps into the main narrative, thanks to some talented writing and horrifyingly brilliant voice acting. Unlike Miles Upshur, Blake can talk, and usually gives very realistic reactions to the awful things he witnesses. As Blake makes his way through the village, he also begins having flashbacks of unpleasant events at his Catholic elementary school. These scenes are wound together with the main game into a foreboding miasma, one with implications of unspeakable acts whose portrayal in media is usually taboo.

Forsaking nuance in favor of ramming through as much brutality as possible is not as foregone a horror game strategy as many gamers might think. It’s easy to look at games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent or the Doorways saga and automatically assume that they pack all sorts of unspeakably atrocious things into its production. While it’s true that both games have plenty of content that’s terrifying more for its implication than what it is, horror games usually still have at least some restraint when it comes to portraying things like sexual assault and child abuse. Outlast 2 doesn’t. And that bestial lack of restraint is all that the game seems interested in.

This game has some truly gnarly stuff in it.

For better and for worse, Outlast 2 seems interested purely in being scary. In cramming as much gruesome stuff and shocking subject matter into its audience’s eyeballs as possible. In so doing, Outlast 2 forsakes the narrative that’s supposed to hold this all together; the reason that all of this horror is being experienced to begin with. Even more than the level design, the game’s focus on overwhelming terror in place of a terrifying story is where the whole production really starts to fall apart. Outlast 2 is uninterested in answering the questions that its own narrative raises, which is a major problem.

It’s difficult to say much more without getting into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Outlast 2 starts the player off with a lot of questions and ends without having answered virtually any of them. Everything from why the rednecks have kidnapped Lynn to why Blake is having these flashbacks goes unanswered by Outlast 2. At one point Blake actually spots the source of a major plot point, but doesn’t investigate or otherwise comment on it, content to just leave it hanging. Outlast 2 prefers to focus on pure scares instead of why the scares are happening. This game’s plot holes outweigh its plot.

Why is any of this happening?

It may seem paradoxical to take a horror game to task for focusing exclusively on being scary, but that approach transforms Outlast 2 from a great horror game (like Outlast) into a tacky scare-house. The game’s idea of throwing constant scares at the player without rhyme or reason smacks more of desperation than competency. Outlast 2 isn’t interested in why the cultists hate Blake, or why it might suddenly start raining blood… it only expects the player to be awed by the spectacle. It’s only interested in getting a reaction from the spectacle.  Anyone can make a game full of spectacle, but few can make a game full of substance. Outlast 2‘s lack of substance makes it a bitter disappointment, and patently unworthy of the asylum adventure from whence it spawned.

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You can buy Outlast 2 here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Star Wars: Empire at War – Gold Pack

Liberate, conquer, or corrupt the Star Wars galaxy in a strategic war for dominance.

PC Release: September 4, 2007

By Ian Coppock

Tonight’s review of Star Wars: Empire at War marks the end of strategy month, and this game’s Star Wars motif in no way hints at what next month’s review theme will be… nope, not at all. It’s an interesting time for Star Wars fans to be alive; some people (probably not Expanded Universe fans) might go so far as to call it a Star Wars renaissance, on the order of the early 90’s when Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy was released. Though there are lots of upcoming Star Wars games to look forward to, tonight’s review looks back at Empire at War, a strategy game set in that most beloved galaxy far, far away.

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Star Wars: Empire at War is a real-time strategy game developed by Petroglyph, a Las Vegas-based studio best known these days for their 8-bit series. Empire at War was the first Star Wars RTS developed since Galactic Battlegrounds in the early 2000’s, and remains the most recent such game set in the Star Wars universe (Battle Orders for iOS doesn’t count).

Like Age of Empires II and other real-time strategy games, Star Wars: Empire at War emphasizes building bases, training units, and relying as much on tactics as force to win a match against an enemy army. Players can assume control of either the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire, each with its own retinue of units, buildings, and technologies. The Forces of Corruption expansion pack adds a third faction, the Zann Consortium crime syndicate, whose troops sport exotic black market weaponry. All of this content is rolled together in the Gold Pack edition of the game being reviewed here tonight.

Time to conquer the universe.

Each faction in Empire at War also has its own playstyle reflective of its cinematic counterpart. The Galactic Empire is a military powerhouse whose tactics focus on taking and holding territory. Each of their units, from a platoon of stormtroopers to the mighty AT-AT walker, is useful for players who like to win through sheer force. The Alliance, by contrast, fields lighter units that are better for hit-and-run attacks. Beset by AT-ATs? Use some snowspeeders. The rebels are great when it comes to fast raids and cheap, innovative solutions against waves of imperial troops.

The Zann Consortium, a faction unique to Empire at War and an entity almost certainly rendered non-canon with Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars, utilizes units with weird and creative weaponry, like metal bullets that can pass through shields and second-generation Separatist battle droids. These weapons make for some cool gear, though the idea of a crime syndicate waging conventional warfare is comically ridiculous.

Oh we’d better get going, the Mafia’s armada will be here soon (snort).

Battles in Star Wars: Empire at War are waged on a galaxy map comprising upwards of 50 planets, ranging from movie staples like Tatooine to lesser-known locales from other Star Wars video games, like Knights of the Old Republic‘s Taris. In most modes, whoever can capture all of the planets wins the game. Each planet offers its own perks for the player occupying it; shipbuilding worlds like Kuat are useful for building big warships, while wealthy worlds like Bespin and Coruscant give the player extra resources. Some planets have natives that will side with one faction or the other other—aliens on Outer Rim worlds tend to fight for the rebels, while the well-do-to human suburbanites in the Core side with the Empire and its housing associations.

Capturing a planet in Empire at War is a two-stage process: players have to first engage in a space battle and destroy the enemy space station. Players can use space stations to build fleets of ships, from squadrons of TIE fighters on up to mighty Star Destroyers. Players can only field so many vessels at once, but if the battle starts to turn south, they can call in more ships for backup. Similarly to ground units, space units in Empire at War utilize a variety of weapons to take down different classes of enemy ships. Bombers are great against capital ships, corvettes can decimate fighter squadrons, so on and so forth.

This is a great example of how NOT to wage space warfare.

Once the space around a planet has been secured, it’s time to head to the surface and eliminate the enemy’s ground game. Players can fly their troops and vehicles into battle using landing zones. The more landing zones a player owns, the more units they can shuttle in for battle. The match ends when the invading player manages to kill all the enemy units and any structures they might’ve built, or when the defending player manages to kick their would-be-conqueror back into space. Each battlefield is sprinkled with build pads that players can use to erect turrets and repair stations. Players can build training academies and other facilities on their worlds to produce units between battles.

Empire at War‘s idea of resource gathering is quite a bit faster than that of Age of Empires or other RTS games. Rather than having players task gatherers on a resource, Empire at War direct deposits credits into each player’s account at the end of an in-game day (every few minutes). Players can make more money by capturing wealthy worlds or building mining stations on their planets, which automatically generate money for their owner. As a result of this resource model, combat in Empire at War tends to happen quickly and with ferocity. It may sound intimidating, but Empire at War‘s thorough tutorials and wide range of difficulty options make the game accessible to space commanders of all skill levels.

Back, you frosted freaks! Back, I say!

Players have a few other options to consider if money’s running short or their fleet took a beating in the last battle. Empire at War allows players of all factions to hire smugglers to steal credits from enemy planets, and the Zann Consortium can co-opt an enemy player’s cash flow by bribing opponents’ planets. The rebels can bypass space battles and land a small army on enemy planets; with the right tactics, it’s possible to take a planet from right under the opponent’s nose. Each faction also has a gallery of powerful heroes whose abilities can turn the tide of battle, including Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Legends favorites like Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade. The Zann Consortium borrows a few infamous bounty hunters, like Bossk and IG-88, to serve as its heroes.

Winning the long game in Empire at War requires a strong economy, but its emphasis on planetary footholds means that players also have to know how to stretch and concentrate their forces. Does the player fortify core systems and leave outlying planets vulnerable? Or try to stretch their forces equally across what might be dozens of worlds? That choice, as always, depends on how well the wider match is going. That tension of wondering which world will be hit next can make Empire at War a thrilling strategy experience. The tactics each faction uses are faithful to their cinematic counterparts, lending that Star Wars adventure vibe to each game. A rebel raid against impossible odds feels very much like a plot point in a Star Wars film.

All wings report in!

And speaking of plot points, Empire at War comes with a few story campaigns to flesh out its single-player content. The Empire and Rebel stories deal with both sides of the conflicts leading up to the Battle of Yavin, while the Zann Consortium’s narrative is a grand space heist set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. None of these stories are particularly well-written or feature stellar voice acting (and they’re certainly no longer canon), but they contain exciting levels with unconventional design. Whether it’s detonating a giant space bomb over the Empire’s fleet, or breaking into Emperor Palpatine’s vault on Coruscant, the missions in Empire at War‘s story campaigns don’t hurt for interesting variety. It’s just a shame that the narratives don’t pack the same punch.

No matter the story and no matter the mode, Empire at War‘s gameplay has aged surprisingly well over the last decade. It’s an easy real-time strategy game to pick up and learn, given how fluid its unit production, combat, and resource gathering mechanics are. Though Empire at War still plays well, it’s easy for its battles to become repetitive, as the rinse-and-repeat of fighting in space, landing, and taking planets gives the aforementioned unpredictability element a black eye. The game also suffers from a few embarrassing bugs, including a real gem of a glitch that causes the game to crash if an Empire player uses the Death Star on a planet that Han Solo and Chewbacca occupy. It and bugs like it happen with relative rarity, but they still happen, so be on the lookout.

STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP

Additionally, Empire at War‘s visuals have not aged so well over the years. This is one of those games where zooming in too close on a unit’s face reveals little more than squiggly lines and maybe the hawk’s beak of a “nose”, while character model colors look pretty smudged. The game’s environments are brightly colored but similarly morose when it comes to textural sharpness and use of detail. Soldiers look more like mannequins than real people.

The game’s sound design is also hit-and-miss; the audio in space battles is absolutely glorious, what with the thunder of Star Destroyer cannons (technically space battles shouldn’t have audio, but Star Wars has never adhered to that law of physics). Even though both space and ground battles implement lots of sound effects from the Star Wars films, they often sound distant or too soft. The sound design does manage to save itself with its soundtrack, but to be fair, it’s all from the films’ scores rather than any original content.

Oosh, that’s rough…

Star Wars: Empire at War does not provide a strategy experience as in-depth as that of Age of Empires or Command & Conquer, but its gameplay is more fast-paced than that of either title. For anything that can be said about the game’s visuals or bugs, Petroglyph did an admirable job adapting the Star Wars source material to the real-time strategy formula. It’s fun to wage a war for the Star Wars galaxy, building up planets and engaging in huge last-ditch battles for supremacy. The game also has a thriving modding community; someone went and made a full-length Clone Wars-era mod called Republic at War, which can be downloaded from Mod DB.

Empire at War hedges its bets not on providing a deep, highly customized real-time strategy experience, but on being able to leverage that format to produce adventures on par with those of the Star Wars films. It’s not a perfect game, but it still largely succeeds in producing that potential for epic space battles and memorable campaigns. Star Wars fans should buy it, and strategy gamers on the fence about its shallower tactical focus might very well be won over by the chance to fire the Death Star.

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You can buy Star Wars: Empire at War – Gold Pack here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Yooka-Laylee

Adventure through colorful worlds like it’s 1997.

PC Release: April 11, 2017

By Ian Coppock

Even for a medium as fluid as video games, the demise of the open-world platformer was breathtakingly fast. The 90’s were replete with titles like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, in which players were free to explore huge worlds littered with hidden treasure. Despite massive popularity, the genre largely died out at the turn of the century, and has remained quiet for the better part of two decades. With games like 2014’s The Last Tinker and last fall’s Unbox, though, it’s starting to creep back into the gaming scene. Yooka-Laylee, the subject of tonight’s review, is the strongest sign yet of the open-world platforming genre’s push into contemporary gaming.

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The title Yooka-Laylee is immediately reminiscent of 1998’s Banjo-Kazooie, and that’s no coincidence. Not only is this new game a spiritual successor to that legendary platformer… it’s made by the same team of former Rare developers, who reunited after nearly 20 years under the banner of Playtonic Games. The team’s stated goal with Yooka-Laylee is to bring back the open-world platforming genre that gaming has been sorely missing, and to create a title that they hoped would match the vibrancy and variety of one of the Rare era’s best platformers. Just like Banjo-Kazooie, Yooka-Laylee sees a duo of cartoonish animals square off against an equally cartoonish evil, with plenty of platforming to boot.

Yooka-Laylee kicks off with the game’s titular characters, a chameleon named Yooka and a bat named Laylee, relaxing perilously close to the premises of the nefarious Hivory Towers. The adventure starts when the One Book, a golden-paged tome that Laylee found, gets stolen by the evil Capital B and his sidekick, Dr. Quack. The pair hope to use the tome to rewrite the universe, but not before stealing all the world’s books and turning them into money! That latter plot detail kinda falls to the wayside, but it doesn’t stop the heroic duo from breaking into Hivory Towers to stop Capital B and save the universe.

Capital B and Dr. Quack’s scheme to rule the universe is as 90’s as such schemes get.

Yooka and Laylee manage to break into Hivory Towers (the door was open) but the One Book’s magical pages get scattered all over the place. Collecting “Pagies” is the main goal of the game; they are to Yooka and Laylee what Jiggies were to Banjo and Kazooie, and golden stars were to Mario. To find all the Pagies, Yooka and Laylee have to dive into huge worlds brimming with treasure. Collecting Pagies is not only the only way to confront Capital B, but also to open up new worlds for exploration. Yooka-Laylee contains five big worlds with themes similar to those of Banjo-Kazooie, while Hivory Towers serves as a hub world that binds it all together.

Like Banjo-Kazooie, Yooka-Laylee is a third-person platformer that emphasizes scouring the aforementioned big worlds for hidden treasures. In addition to Pagies, players can also find a riot of other collectibles. Quills, for example, allow players to learn new moves useful for accessing new areas. There are also more conventional pickups, like health and power upgrades. Pagies are still the most important item for players to find; some are awarded to Yooka and Laylee for completing challenges, while others are hiding out there just waiting to be discovered.

Everything is colorful and/or has eyeballs. We’re definitely back in the 90’s.

Yooka-Laylee‘s gameplay is pure Rare platformer. While out exploring the world, players can use different abilities to speed across terrain, jump to new heights, and break through physical barriers. Like Banjo and Kazooie, Yooka and Laylee execute these moves by working together as a team, with coordination that can only be described as symbiotic. Players start out running and jumping, but can learn how to blast through barriers, fly, and even absorb new abilities from the world around them. Provided they’ve found a certain squid-woman scientist, players can even transform into new creatures for taking on previously inaccessible challenges. Most monsters go down in one hit, but boss battles are a little more complicated.

Using these abilities is essential for collecting Pagies and advancing to new worlds, as well as finding the other useful pickups hidden around each level. Most challenges revolve around using these powers to destroy an obstacle or complete a task, sometimes with a time limit, and getting a Pagie as a reward. These tasks are usually performed at the behest of an NPC, who can’t be bothered to just hand the damn Pagie over even though the universe is in danger of being destroyed. No, no, there are rules, ways that these things have to be done. A quest to save the universe is moot, but jump through these hoops (literally) and somehow that’s way more impressive.

The hoops have eyes…

Even though five worlds may not sound like a lot, each of Yooka-Laylee‘s treasure-filled realms is a sight to behold. The game’s textures could stand some sharpening, but its worlds are colorful and gorgeously detailed. Like Banjo-Kazooie, Yooka-Laylee‘s worlds are expansive and each revolve around a singular theme, like a ruins-filled jungle, a winter wonderland, or a spooky swamp. The intergalactic pirate cove world is particularly beautiful. Each world varies visually but their basic layouts are all similar: a large ground area studded with obstacles and opportunities to jump high or swim low.

Though running around these worlds looking for treasure is fun and quite reminiscent of the best 90’s Rare games, there is quite a bit of pointless space packed into each one. Between each challenge and cluster of quills is a ton of open space that, while useful for establishing the world’s sense of scale, leaves players spending an inordinate amount of time running from place to place. Scale can be achieved without putting an empty space the size of a football field between Pagies, but Yooka-Laylee nixes compacting its levels a bit in favor of leaving them too big. As a result, each world has a lot of ground to cover but also ends up feeling empty.

There’s a difference between levels feeling big and being big.

Although Yooka-Laylee runs well and suffers almost no bugs or in-game problems, some of its gameplay does feel rather dated. Embarrassingly, the game contains a few gameplay issues that were endemic to 90’s games but successfully omitted in other, more recent releases, including imprecise controls and occasionally tedious platforming. The fact that Playtonic has reintroduced these long-corrected issues with a 2017 title is embarrassing. It suggests that the team entered some sort of hibernation after developing Banjo-Kazooie and emerged from their slumber blissfully unaware of the advances that have been made in game design these last 20 years.

To be fair, though, some of the issues plaguing Yooka-Laylee have been greatly exaggerated. Critics at the bigger networks have taken this game to task for its camera controls, which, to hear them tell it, are the worst thing to befall mankind since the Bubonic Plague. The camera does struggle to provide decent angles on occasion, including during the first world’s boss fight and in a few puzzles, but it’s not anything that players will be fighting constantly. Usually it does a pretty fluid job of following the player, without necessitating constant push-back.

Reports of a camera control apocalypse are premature.

The main concern to be had with Yooka-Laylee is how in lockstep it is with Banjo-Kazooie. It feels less like a spiritual successor and more like a reskinned Banjo-Kazooie that was ported to modern systems. Though Yooka-Laylee is visually superior to that venerated title, there’s almost nothing in the game that wasn’t also present in its predecessor. The characters do that Banjo-Kazooie thing where they repeat a few odd noises every time they talk, and virtually all of the collectibles are stand-ins for the items found in Banjo-Kazooie. Even Yooka-Laylee‘s fonts are nigh identical to those of Banjo-Kazooie.

None of these things are necessarily bad, but they do represent a missed opportunity to innovate the open-world collectathon. Playtonic did streamline a few things here and there, like how the player absorbs and uses different types of projectile weapons, but the otherwise rigid adherence to what Banjo-Kazooie already pioneered makes Yooka-Laylee feel cheap. The fun and nostalgia that its open-world gameplay brings back to the scene is compounded by a weary sense of repetition. It’s at once demonstrative of the genre’s resilience over time, but also leaves players wondering that they’ve already seen this exact game before.

Don’t mind me, just burying the chance to do something different.

Yooka-Laylee is somewhat aware of how dated some of its design has become, as demonstrated by the game’s writing. The dialogue is rife with funny little fourth-wall breaks, as well as jabs at how the gaming industry has changed since the 90’s. Capital B in particular cracks a lot of jokes about microtransactions and DLC, which is cathartic for players who remember a time before such cancerous practices. Surprisingly, the dialogue contains a lot of innuendo, which makes it harder to characterize the game’s intended audience. Is it the adults who grew up with Banjo-Kazooie, or today’s crop of youngins?

For all the fun that Yooka-Laylee pokes at contemporary gaming, though, some of its writing remains little changed from that of Banjo-Kazooie. As characters, Yooka and Laylee are virtual clone-stamps of Banjo and Kazooie, with the former being a slow-witted but big-hearted warrior and the latter being an acid-tongued little prankster. The supporting cast of NPCs make for a colorful bunch, like the serpentine abilities salesman, but that the two main heroes are so similar to Banjo and Kazooie once again makes the game feel derivative. Like a lot of things about this game, Yooka-Laylee‘s characterization and writing are a mixed bag of amusing, yet dated.

Dude, your nose is bigger than the rest of your body.

Yooka-Laylee has a lot of adventuring fun and amusing dialogue to offer, but it’s nothing that old-school platforming fans haven’t seen before. The game feels less like the triumphant return of open-world collectathons and more like a fun but clone-stamped fan service for people who grew up playing Banjo-Kazooie. Playtonic bet too hard on the game’s nostalgia factor, nixing innovation in the hope that the mere presence of an open-world platformer would be enough to catalyze the genre’s resurrection.

Unfortunately for Playtonic and for Yooka-Laylee, innovation is the only way the open-world collectathon genre will regain the prominence it once enjoyed. It’s not enough to simply derive from what was already done and expect the outcome of the genre to magically change. None of this stops Yooka-Laylee from being a fond love letter to the 90’s and to fans of Banjo-Kazooie, but it does stop the game from being the genre-reviving spark that Playtonic set out to make. Above all else, keep that divide in mind while deciding whether to purchase Yooka-Laylee.

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You can buy Yooka-Laylee here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.

Age of Mythology: Extended Edition

Use the power of the gods to rule a world of mortals and monsters.

PC Release: May 8, 2014

By Ian Coppock

Real-time strategy games can be a lot of fun, but sometimes they can also be a bit dry. Training an army and sending them to destroy a castle is a pretty straightforward process. It can allow for unexpected creativity, especially when using sheep as spies or monks to wololo, but the sight of a battle in an RTS game can be little more exciting than the minutiae that went into planning for it. There’s usually room for strategy games to liven things up a bit, be it through faster gameplay or fantastical elements, or through a compelling story. Age of Mythology: Extended Edition may very well have all of these things in spades.

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Originally released by Ensemble Studios back in 2002, Age of Mythology is a spinoff of the Age of Empires games that sends players to a mythological world — a world where the ancient gods are real, strange creatures roam the earth, and sheep can, well, still be used to spy on enemy players. Age of Mythology received near-universal acclaim when it first released, charming players and critics with its apt blend of real-time strategy gameplay and exotic mythological elements. It layered a bit of magic, a bit of mysticism, onto the fine-tuned strategic gameplay Ensemble had already pioneered with its Age of Empires games.

Age of Mythology allows players to play as the ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Norse civilizations, while a later expansion pack added the Atlanteans. The Extended Edition being reviewed here tonight rolls both games into a single title, as well as adds HD capabilities, integration with the Steam workshop, and a few graphical touch-ups. Forgotten Empires, the studio that makes the new expansions for Age of Empires II, made an expansion for Age of Mythology that adds an ancient Chinese civ to the game.

Yeah, we COULD produce soldiers and siege weapons, but can’t we just put our spears down and make some gyros instead?

Each civilization in Age of Mythology has its own gods to worship, from the Greek Zeus to the Norse Odin. Players can choose one of three major gods to worship within each civ, and this selection has a massive impact on how the player’s culture will grow. Because of this dynamic, Age of Mythology provides much more variety than a total selection of 4-5 playable civs might suggest. Even though Zeus and Poseidon belong to the same Greek culture, two Greek players picking each god will end up with noticeably different bases and armies. The same can be said of Egyptian players who pick Ra or Set, Norse players who pick Thor or Loki, etc etc.

After picking a major god, players are given a town center and a few villagers, which is classic Age of Empires. And, just like in the Age of Empires games, villagers can go out into the wilderness to gather wood, food, and gold. Unlike Age of Empires, Age of Mythology features a fourth resource called favor, a sort of godly currency that allows players to train mythological creatures and research top-tier technologies. Each civ has its own way of gaining favor that reflects its respective gods. Because the Greek gods are vain, Greek players gain favor by assigning villagers to worship at temples. The Norse, by contrast, gain favor by killing enemy units and are therefore way more bada**.

If only prayer was this awesome in real life.

As players gather resources, they can grow their civilization by building out a town and training military units. Similarly to other Ensemble strategy games, the key to success in Age of Mythology is a strong economy. Gathered resources do no good unless they’re being spent, which means that players can expect nonstop unit production and technology research. With a proper balance of resource income and military buildup, players can train enough troops to defend their town or go on the offensive in relatively short order. Research allows for units to be faster and deadlier, and for buildings to be better fortified against attacks.

The mechanic of advancing to a new age returns in Age of Mythology, with a twist. When advancing to the next age, players can pick from one of two minor gods within their civilization. Like the major league gods picked at the start of the game, these gods have perks and rewards that can alter playstyle. Bast, a minor Egyptian goddess, grants agriculture benefits, while Greek party boy Dionysus improves certain unit attacks through the power of… alcohol? Different assortments of minor gods will appear depending on which major god is picked.

Thor shows favor to those who doth freeze their butts off in the middle of nowhere.

Minor gods provides two perks that definitively set Age of Mythology apart from Ensemble’s other strategy games. The first is that each minor god has his or her own mythological unit, which can be trained at the temple. These units are usually pretty expensive and always cost at least a bit of favor, but they excel at destroying human enemies. Frankly, each civilization provides some pretty awesome monsters to train. The Greeks have centaurs, of course, but later in the game they can also build giant colossi that tower over the battlefield. The Egyptians, who are apparently fans of The Mummy franchise, can train up plague-bearing zombies and half-arachnid, half-Dwayne Johnson scorpion men. The Norse have dragons. Because they are the best.

Over the course of the game, players can also acquire something even more pivotal to gameplay in Age of Mythology: god powers. This is where Age of Mythology‘s ability to shake up the dryness of the Age of Empires formula really comes into play, and where players can change the course of a battle in a split second. Whether it’s conjuring a lightning storm that kills every enemy on the field, or an earthquake that swallows an entire town, players can harness the powers of the gods to shatter foes in ways that human armies can’t. This mechanic adds dire unpredictability to an Age of Mythology match, because players never know if that town they’re about to sack is packing a meteor shower. Some powers can be used multiple times; others, only once.

The most fervent players build their bases in hell. Better fire powers down here.

Like the Age of Empires games, the units in Age of Mythology are unknowing participants in a massive game of rock-paper-scissors. Cavalry beats archers, infantry beats cavalry, myth units beat infantry, etc etc. Players have a much greater chance of beating the opponent by building an army composed of several different unit types. It’s tempting for wealthy players to simply field an all-myth unit army, but even the monsters in Age of Mythology have an Achilles’ heel: heroes. Each civilization can train specially gifted human heroes that can put even the mightiest minotaur to shame.

Because of myth units and god powers, matches in Age of Mythology are usually a great deal more chaotic (and fun) than their Age of Empires counterparts. It’s fun to surprise the opponent with a massive column of cyclops, and the sight of monsters can strike more terror in an opponent than the columns of human troops to which RTS games are restricted. God powers can make or break a match, and knowing when to use them adds a novel bluffing element to Age of Mythology. 

It ain’t no San Francisco, but this fisherman’s wharf will have to do.

For players who are new to real-time strategy games or lukewarm on the idea of multiplayer, Age of Mythology features a single-player story campaign. Unlike the campaigns in the Age of Empires games, which are often split between multiple civs or characters, Age of Mythology features a single, massive campaign starring Arkantos, an Atlantean general, as he travels the world in pursuit of the evil cyclops Gargarensis. The campaign is by far the most compelling narrative Ensemble Studios ever crafted; the writing isn’t great, but its 30+ mission length allows for a surprising amount of character development, exciting battles, and references to ancient myths.

The other neat thing about the campaign is that even though Arkantos is Atlantean, his campaign is split into roughly three chapters that cycle through usage of Greek, Egyptian, and Norse units, whom Arkantos rallies to his cause as he journeys around the world. It’s a novel way to introduce each civilization to the player while in the context of a grand adventure. Plus, with each level featuring missions ranging from infiltration to massive battles, players won’t be hurting for level or objective variety. Because the Extended Edition of this game includes the aforementioned Atlantean expansion, players can play another, albeit much shorter, campaign starring Arkantos’s son Kastor. Despite its reduced length, its scenario variety rivals that of the main campaign.

The story of Arkantos is hands down the best story campaign Ensemble ever made.

Whether players are interested in the single-player campaign or a round of multiplayer, everyone’s in for quite a visual treat. Age of Mythology‘s game world is absolutely beautiful, perhaps even more so than the maps in Age of Empires III. From verdant Greek hills to scorching Egyptian deserts, Age of Mythology features a rich variety of maps inspired by locations all over the world. Each map is beautifully detailed with rugged terrain and ancient ruins, as well as populated by dozens of different animals (elephants, gazelles, zebras, polar bears, the list goes on).

The graphical improvements introduced with the Extended Edition include some well-implemented texture and resolution touch-ups, as well as a day/night cycle and better water rendering. These improvements don’t quite put Age of Mythology on graphical par with modern RTS games, but between the title’s bewildering variety of maps and strong use of color, polygonal precision falls by the wayside. Couple this with the game’s memorable, relaxing soundtrack of deep drums and Mediterranean guitar, and the result is a deeply immersive ancient world that’s a lot of fun to explore.

(Don’t make a P.F. Chang’s joke, don’t make a P.F. Chang’s joke…)

Because it’s an older game with simple processing requirements, Age of Mythology runs problem-free on modern machines. The Extended Edition adapts the game to newer software well, and the options menu allows players to make tweaks to almost anything in case problems do occur. Though it’s not as big as Age of Empires II‘s resurgent multiplayer community, Age of Mythology has experienced a revival thanks to the Extended Edition. Players have also taken to the game’s Steam workshop with rigor, producing a few custom units, skins and even campaigns that can be downloaded for free.

Unfortunately, though, Age of Mythology is not without one major flaw, but it has less to do with the game and more to do with the Tale of the Dragon DLC released shortly after the Extended Edition. To put it frankly, it’s one of the buggiest, most poorly designed pieces of DLC on Steam, and that’s not exactly a light statement. The Chinese units the DLC adds suffer from pathing errors, and the entire production is rife with bugs and glitches. The campaign mode features a particularly game-breaking bug that casts an assassination target as an essential NPC. In short, stick with the main Age of Mythology game. It’s great. Tale of the Dragon is a hot piece of garbage.

No no, attack the farm… attack the… attack the FARM, DAMN YOU WATER DRAGON THINGS!

Luckily for Age of Mythology, its big flaws are restricted to a single piece of DLC that can easily be glossed over in pursuit of the main game. The gameplay in Age of Mythology makes for a well-oiled strategy machine that has aged well despite having originally been released in 2002. Its multiplayer community has been resurrected, and the single-player campaign presents an affable world tour of diverse mythological lore. Strategy fans would be remiss to not add this game to their library immediately. It’s not the most popular game Ensemble Studios produced… but it is the best.

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You can buy Age of Mythology: Extended Edition here.

Thank you for reading! My next review will be posted in a few days. You can follow Art as Games on Twitter @IanLayneCoppock, or friend me at username Art as Games on Steam. Feel free to leave a comment or email me at ianlaynecoppock@gmail.com with a game that you’d like to see reviewed, though bear in mind that I only review PC games.