The Evil Within Sucks

This game fucking sucks and I'm so goddamn mad about it.  It sucks on almost every goddamn level and it saddens me.  I saw the screenshots and trailers before this thing came out, I saw who was working on it and for the first time in AGES I got a little bit excited for a modern horror game.  Of course, I shouldn't have let me guard down because The Evil Within is a steaming piece of shit with very few redeeming qualities.

Just for the record, I'm not writing this article as someone who gave up on it and came to come rage.  I played this festering pile all the way through just so I'd have more shit to say when I eventually came to my little blog to tear it a new asshole.

So let's start with the Story because it fucking sucks.  You play as a dude called Sebastian, a cop who is called to come and investigate some fucked up shit going down at Beacon Mental Hospital.  You arrive with your two idiot friends, Joseph and Kidman and you all immediately get jumped by some teleporting fuckwit in a white robe called Ruvik.  He stabs you in the face and you wake up upside down in some kind of butcher with a crazy dude ready to hack you up and the game begins in earnest.

My problem with the story is that the whole point of what's going on is that you are basically inside the villains head.  As a result of this you have no idea where you are, how you are or why you are where you are and there is no real sense of progress to beating a stage.  It doesn't matter how far you traversed the evil village of zombie people or how many traps in the industrial looking place you managed to avoid because the next scene will probably have the world spazzing out and changing locale because Ruvik said so.

There is also some other side plot type thing with Sebastian losing his daughter and wife but the whole thing is told through documents and by the end of the game I didn't give enough of a shit to pay attention to it.  Also Kidman is doing some bullshit and isn't actually a cop or something but none of that really matters because the whole game culminates in a boss fight where you blow Ruvik's brains out anyway.

The game spends so much time harping on about all this research that the villain and his shitty doctor friend was doing but none of it was engaging enough for me to care.  You see, as bad as the plot is in games like Resident Evil, its still interesting enough for me to give a shit about the goings on at Umbrella.  With The Evil Within I just don't give any fucks about what kind of dumb ass research was going on or why Ruvik was so upset, it's just dull.

Oh, there was also some shit about a woman in a hospital who went missing but ends up inside Ruviks head as the save point.  No idea what was going on there, don't care.

So the story sucks, but what about the game play?  Well that sucks too.  It's kind of like Resident Evil 4 but really shitty.  Sebastian just feels a bit....floaty and he's kind of hard to control when you need to do precise movements.  Most of the guns you get are bollocks with the Shotgun being the only weapon that feels any kind of useful.  The Agony Crossbow is cool at first but it's too fiddly when you're under a lot of pressure and you'll end up either missing shots or using the wrong bolt type.

That's just my opinion regarding the guns though, what REALLY sucks about the game play is that it tricks you into thinking you're playing a stealth game and then just totally changing after the third chapter.  The first chapter you are trying to escape from a chainsaw man without being seen.  The second chapter you are sneaking round a village then every chapter after that has ambush after ambush after ambush.  Why establish all this sneaking and then just throwing it out of the window?!  There are a few moments where it comes back but it's only short segments of certain chapters, most of it just turns into shooting monsters.

The game also goes fucking crazy with the whole "survival" aspect giving you very little ammo for anything.  However once you get a feel for the game almost every encounter is completely piss easy and you'll have no trouble with anything after the 4th chapter or so.  You still might die to a trap or a 1 hit kill enemy but the checkpoints are so forgiving and save points so frequent that it doesn't really matter.

Worst of all though, this game just isn't scary at all.  It's trying SO VERY HARD to be scary but it's like whoever was in charge didn't really know how to do horror.  They just seem to take a lot of horror imagery and ideas and just throw them all together but it doesn't really work.  By the end of the game it's trying so damn hard that it comes off as just funny with giant eyeballs and walls covered in brain tissue.  The traps that are supposed to be used to keep you on edge are Tom and Jerry levels of comical are some of the death animations are more hilarious that brutal.

I don't care how much you like horror games, just avoid this pile of shit.  Save your money and wait for Silent Hills or something, maybe they'll get it right next time.

Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a game about rewiring things and punching people according to the developer website and it's a game I picked up on steam for basically no money thanks to a combination of steam sales and selling stuff on the marketplace.

Gunpoint is a game about a freelance spy called Richard Conway who uses his techno trousers to infiltrate buildings and do all sorts of other spy stuff.  He gets caught up in a murder mystery as well as a tale of espionage between two rival gun companies as he tries to clear his name for a murder he didn't commit.  They story isn't exactly the deepest thing in the world and it's made up entirely of text conversations between Conway and his clients that are completely skipable and sometimes a little bit stupid, but there is enough there to keep the player entertained between missions.

Game play is a mix of stealth and puzzling where you have to rewire building electronics to get to your target all while trying to avoid being seen and shot in the face by the various guards that patrol the corridors.  Each level is a building presented in 2D and you are free to scope it out as much as you want so that you can plan a route through the level.  Flicking the mouse wheel will activate your PDA thing where you can see the buildings electronic devices and how they are all wired up.  From here you can change them round so that a security camera might open a door or a light switch might send a power surge through a socket to shock a patrolling guard.  It's a cool system of game play and when you combine it with the various upgrades you can get throughout the game there are a few ways which you could tackle a single level.

The only problem for me is that the game is little too easy and a bit short.  I basically blasted through the whole thing in an afternoon and I managed to get most of the side objectives and an A grade or higher on the majority of the stages.  I'm not going to pass myself off as some kind of super genius but I don't think the majority of people would have much problem with this game and it's sort of a shame in a way.  There's such a great amount of potential in this game for some real head scratchers and while it's a shame that there was nothing brain busting in the core content, there is a level editor so you can share and play user designed levels that might really test you.

I suggest that anyone reading this article go and play Gunpoint.  It's pretty cheap anyway but if you don't want to pay £7 for a game that is a little on the short side, just wait for a steam sale again and you'll be able to pick it up for basically nothing.  Fun game worth checking out and a great way to kill an afternoon when there isn't much going on.

Do we really need more Metal Gear?

I love Metal Gear, it's up there with some of my favourite franchises ever.  I started with the Metal Gear Solid demo on my playstation, ended up buying the full thing and being hooked ever since and as much as some people like to rag on it's outlandish, insane plot which could arguably use some editing, I still love that stuff.

So on the horizon we have Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, but do we really need these games at all?  Now I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way, these games do not look bad by any stretch, in fact they look awesome, but they worry me. 

The story for Metal Gear was done, finito, over with MGS4 and while I'm not going to turn my nose up at more Metal Gear goodness, I'm worried that one day, if they keep making these games, that they are going to end up sucking.

We have seen it happen to Silent Hill and Sonic just to name a couple of franchises that aren't anywhere near as good as they used to be and I really don't want to see Metal Gear get the same treatment.

I'm pretty hyped for these games, and they'll probably be good, but please....let it die and be remembered as a great series before you ruin it with spin off crap.

Alpha Protocol First Hour Impressions

So back in 2010, Alpha Protocol was released and at the time I ignored it after hearing some pretty lack luster reviews and just generally having no personal interest in the game.  Then about a year ago I managed to pick it up on steam for some stupidly low price and now finally I'm getting round to actually playing it

So far, it's not an awful game, it's playable at the very least but oh lord are there some problems with it.  First of all, the plot is just dull, not so much because it's cliche but because all the characters involved are just boring and I end up forgetting their names straight after any given cut scene.  I'm trying to pay attention but I've seen this kind of plot so many fucking times that I probably don't even need to pay attention in order to figure what goes on.  But I only played for an hour so it could get better at least.

Who are you again?

The biggest problem with this game is it just has technical bugs crawling out the arse and no it's not just a case of my computer being bad.  I get that 3rd person games nowadays like to have over the shoulder cameras but this goes WAY overboard, where the camera is just constantly riding up the main characters back and it sometimes makes seeing anything quite difficult.

This guy was just running into that wall, probably hoping if he couldn't see me I couldn't see him either...

Speaking of the main character, I don't really like the skill points system in this game for some reason

I took this picture pretty near the start, so I've got a few more points since then, but no matter how much I load down on assault rifle skills, the guy is still a shit shot with it.  It's not me not being able to aim either, if you move or fire the reticule goes WAYYYYY off target, so I'm having to fire only 1 or 2 shots at a time to actually hit anything, and if I was going to shoot a gun like that, I'd just get a pistol for fucks sake.  That said, if I don't aim the gun, hitting shit seems to be a bit easier, so why in the hell does carefully trying to aim my gun make things HARDER TO FUCKING HIT!  Although there is a possibility that this will change over time too.

The last thing I have to touch upon in this first impressions post is the hacking mini-game.  I fucking hate this mini game, why does it have to be so fucking stupid?!

Basically you have to line up the 2 codes at the top with the codes in the big grid.  Everything that isn't the code changes constantly so you basically have to search for the line that isn't moving.  It's not hard, at all, but it's really fucking annoying and moving the right hand code piece with the mouse is a pain in the ass and I've sometimes failed hacks because it doesn't control properly.  But on the other side of the spectrum, you get the most insultingly easy lock pick mini game I've ever seen, so maybe this bullshit is the make up for that.

Despite all the complaints, I'm not sick of it just yet and I'm willing to at least try to get to the end.  What I will say though is that if it costs more than 5 bucks to pick this up, it ain't worth it.