Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

Posted by Sishu / at 2:48 AM / / 0 comments

Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

• Xseed Games
• K2 , Kurogane
• Role-Playing
• Release: Sep 30, 2009
• ESRB: Teen

Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga

As Valhalla Knights moves to the Wii, any potential for fun is buried under tons of repetitive busywork and technical gaffs.

The Good

• Lots of jobs and skills to choose from.

The Bad

• So ugly it's hard to see the gameplay
• Mind-numbing repetition
• Interface ignores years of design evolution
• All the grind of an MMO game but none of the camaraderie
• Crippled multiplayer.

The previous entries in the Valhalla Knights series were monotonous, unrewarding PSP games that poorly aped the Monster Hunter series. Monster Hunter will be making the leap to the Wii in North America next year, and while Valhalla Knights has beaten it to the punch on this occasion, it hasn't so much leapt onto the console as it has limply flopped onto it. Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is ugly, repetitive, and boring, and it's one of the worst action role-playing games since Valhalla Knights 2.

Eldar Saga hangs its storytelling hat on having two related gameplay sections, joined by a family bloodline. The first chapter casts you as an uninteresting young man. He goes where non-player characters tell him to go and he shrugs during cutscenes, but that's about the full measure of his emotional depth. You spend much of your time early on reuniting the four races of the world: elves, dwarves, halflings, and humans. Monsters are scattered across the land, and an evil spirit is returning to unite them. The backdrop is meaningless and has no impact on the game other than providing a convenient excuse to kill things and level up. Drama certainly takes a backseat when your enemies include such fiends as moths and immobile fungi. Demons and monsters do appear, but the first chapter's real purpose is to set you up with a swooning woman from one of the four races. Conveniently, each of the four races has a woman so dunderheaded as to be attracted to your character. Your child is the character you'll play in the second chapter.

You'll spend a lot of time in this forest.

Set 16 years later, the second chapter covers the war between the alliance of the four races and the monster armies. Your race options for the second chapter will be human or half-human/half-girlfriend's race. Want to play as a half-elf but decided on the halfling girl in the first chapter? Too bad. You're just as out of luck if you want to play a whole-blooded anything-but-human. Your choice of race affects your stats, but there's no way to find that out during the first chapter, when you make your irrevocable decision. You could easily find yourself locked into playing the greater part of the game as a race that doesn't suit your character's build or that you just don't like. In the first chapter you take on one of the basic jobs--thief, mage, priest, bard, and soldier. The second chapter opens up advanced jobs, such as knight, ninja, samurai, and anchor. Each job comes with its own set of active and passive skills you can advance, and each job demands a focus on a different set of stats and equipment bonuses. So, while you can switch jobs in-game, Eldar Saga rewards single-minded focus with the bonuses and powers you'll need to survive.

You could pick your battles if you could actually spot enemies, but low-resolution visuals make it hard to spot them. One smudgy blur in a field of smudgy blurs isn't an easy target. You're better off hiring a computer-controlled mercenary and letting him engage the enemy for you--and in fact, Eldar Saga even recommends hiring mercenaries for their "sharp eyes." Once the aggressive computer-controlled enemies spot and attack you, combat begins, and you have a chance to test out a variety of attack types and special skills. Unfortunately, the poor graphics and a number of equally troublesome camera modes make it hard to see where your enemies are in relation to you. As a result, you need to rely on camera lock-on, which heavily restricts your mobility. It's unfortunate that in order to use one key mechanic, you are forced to give up another.

You spend most of combat sticking close to your mercenary, locking on to any enemies that come near, and pounding the attack buttons mindlessly. Any thoughts of careful maneuvers or plans will wilt under the reality of always-aggressive opponents, the necessity of locking on, and the superior results that boneheaded button-mashing defensive fighting will deliver. You can still expect to be on the receiving end of plenty of cheap deaths, though. Sharp spikes in enemy difficulty arise without warning. To access any items or skills requires going into your item menu in real time. That's a difficult task with an action game's limited inventory, let alone with this RPG's massive collection of gear. You'll frequently find yourself forced to choose between dying from an inflicted condition and dying as you try to get the cure from your backpack while enemies tear you apart. You can set a few items for quick access, but it's simply not enough.

You have to wait for enemy bodies to vanish before you can collect loot.

Bizarrely, in order to heal without using precious items or magic, you have to stand stock-still and not take any action. Since standing still costs nothing and heals you, a core gameplay technique is to stand still, doing nothing. There's no justification for encouraging you to disengage like this, other than to arbitrarily run up the gameplay clock. Death is punished by the removal of half of your money and the theft of most of your items. You can store spare items and extra money in your house. Well, it's called a house, but it's really just a menu where you can drop stuff off and change your character's haircut. Also, it's accessible only in the main city. You'll find yourself making frequent trips back to the city to stash money and items, followed by frequent trips to pick up money and items when you need them.

Repetitive trips are one of the most defining features of the game. Storyline quests will send you from a hub city to a dungeon, either to kill something or to find a spot where a cutscene happens. Then you'll return to the hub city, only to be sent right back to the same dungeon. The second time you dive into an identical set of monsters and challenges in the Castle of Ruins level, it will feel old. The third, fourth, and fifth trips will feel downright antediluvian. Clever reveals of secrets and rewards could alleviate this, but each trip just feels more tired than the last.

Between storyline quests, you can take on guild quests. These are smaller missions that send you to kill a certain number of a certain type of monster, escort an NPC to a particular location, or go talk to an NPC and come back. They are no relief from the storyline's drudgery, sending you right back to storyline areas you've finished. And there's no way to knock out a few guild quests all at once, since you can take on only one at a time.

If you save up enough money, you can go shopping for weapons, armor, and items. While you shop, there's no way to compare what you're buying to what you've got. If you haven't memorized your character's gear and all of the two-dozen-plus stat changes each piece has, you'll have to exit out from the shop and take some notes. Extensive notes, since there's no rhyme or reason to the gear modifications. You can easily buy a weapon that costs 10 times your current weapon's price and find yourself with lowered stats. Don't save only before you go into a big fight; save before you go shopping.

If you don't want to memorize the stats for every piece of gear you see here, you better buy a notepad.

You can also hire and equip mercenaries in town, and sadly, there's no way to change out your sole mercenary companion in the field without a return trip. Buying gear for your mercenaries is integral to their success, but there's no way to compare their current gear to what you're shopping for. You'll have to take notes on their current gear, leave the mercenary hiring shop, go to the item store, buy what you want, bring it back over to the mercenary hiring shop, and then distribute what you've bought. They can also take items you don't need, as long as you're willing to compare each piece on each mercenary, one item and one mercenary at a time.

Visual effects are limited to blasts and healing energy, without any spectacular summons or flashy magic. But you can still expect the frame rate to stagger when you've got more than a handful of enemies on the field. The field itself is often so dark and the graphics so muddy that you won't be able to see where you're going without watching the minimap and crossing your fingers. Audio problems start with your character's first step, which you'll mistake initially for the pealing of massive bells or the fall of a blacksmith's hammer. Your character's awful-sounding footfalls set the mood for dull music and inoffensive sound effects. There's no reason to play Eldar Saga, but if you're determined to, there's no reason to leave the sound on. Put on an album you enjoy and set the TV's volume to zero.

You can choose to play co-op with another player using the Wii's Wi-Fi. There's no local co-op, although with the frame rate issues in single-player, that's no surprise. Once you're connected, your co-op buddy takes the place of your mercenary companion. Predictably, there's also no voice chat available--there are only preprogrammed emotes.

Constantly repeating the same dungeon, crisscrossing the same areas over and over again, standing still and doing nothing to survive: Eldar Saga's gameplay more closely resembles that of a lackluster massively multiplayer online game than of a compelling console RPG. In an MMO you'd at least be able to play with friends. You do not want to make a friend play Eldar Saga.

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

Posted by Sishu / at 11:25 AM / / 0 comments

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

• Dreamcatcher
• Cyanide
• Action Role-Playing
• Release: Oct 2, 2007 »
• ESRB: Mature

Loki: Heroes of Mythology

Loki may be awfully late for the party, but this Diablo derivation is a solid rip-off with great game mechanics and atmosphere.

The Good

• Outstanding atmosphere in four different campaigns
• Impressive straightforward clone of Diablo game mechanics
• Great monster variety.

The Bad

• Never strays from familiar territory
• Extremely tough on the easiest difficulty setting.

Somebody needs to tell Cyanide that it's a little late in the day to be ripping off Diablo II. That seven-year-old action RPG provides the template for Loki: Heroes of Mythology, a derivative hack-and-slash that brings nothing new to the genre. Still, being late for the party is the only major strike against this game. Even though the Diablo formula may seem awfully ho-hum these days--especially in this case, since Titan Quest covered the mythological-heroes shtick over a year ago--good mechanics and great atmosphere make up for the lack of innovation.

Despite the title, Loki has an equal-opportunity philosophy when it comes to ancient mythology. You choose from male or female warrior and mage characters from the Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and Aztec traditions and engage in four different lengthy campaigns that can be played solo or with up to six friends in cooperative mode (although there is no matching server, so it can be tough to hook up with fellow players). Things start off with you playing errand boy for the three principal gods in your pantheon (a lineup that includes heavy hitters such as Athena, Isis, Tyr, Quetzalcoatl, and the like), but then move on to you defending a collection of multicultural divinities that looks like an old United Colors of Benetton ad. The end goal is to defeat the machinations of the evil Egyptian god, Seth, who has defied divine rules and crossed into other mythologies in the standard megalomaniacal bad-guy quest to take over the universe.

Hacking through yet another pack of those pesky half-naked Amazons.

As this hook-snouted deity is also apparently a big fan of all things multicultural, you face a hodge-podge of monsters from across the entire mythological spectrum. But each of the four campaigns is based on the character battling beasts from his or her own milieu. So the Greek warrior begins by cutting down hundreds of Amazons, centaurs, and harpies, for instance, while the Norse fighter slaughters beasts of the North like bears and wolves, the Egyptian sorcerer battles desert creatures such as giant scorpions, mummies, and scarab beetles, and the Aztec shaman fights jaguars and giant tarantulas.

All of them look great (although, oddly enough, the same can't be said for the four heroes, who are thin mannequins who move in a slightly herky-jerky fashion), and are accentuated with creepy sound cues. Many of these sound effects, such as the hissing of vipers, are so effective that they give the game a menacing vibe that usually isn't present in speedy, action-oriented RPGs. Some monster types are relatively generic and can be found across different levels, although these creatures are often given differing characteristics based upon their location. Birds of prey, for example, look like eagles in the forested Greek missions, while in the Egyptian desert levels they appear as scruffy vultures. The monster variety in Loki is quite good--even though you still wind up killing so many birds, beasts, and living fauna over the course of the game that the proceedings can get rather monotonous in spots (Amazon lancers? Again?!).

Additional atmosphere comes from music and level design that really plays up the four mythologies. The original score is fantastic, immersing you in each of the four cultures through tunes that perfectly evoke the setting and time. All are decidedly spooky, too, specifically the Greek and Egyptian scores. They wouldn't be out of place in big-budget horror movies about Medusae and mummies. Visuals tie into the music for the most part. The Egyptian campaign is particularly effective, as it takes you into desert wastes and forbidding tombs, although the snowy wastes of the Norse missions and the jungles of the Aztec escapades are almost equally evocative of ancient myths (the Greek settings go a little too heavy on generic fantasy forests). Cyanide apparently uses a random level generator to mix things up, though, which makes your travels look a little mundane after a while. You encounter a lot of the same terrain, and outdoor maps often seem to be laid out on a template. You generally get a single road leading from point A to point B along with a lot of scrub brush to both sides that is packed with enemies.

Quests themselves are more varied, however, as they're drawn from specific myths. You check out what rival gods are plotting for Athena, explore the tomb of Seth, rescue Odin from the clutches of Fenrir, and so forth. Storylines aren't really developed, though. Generally, you just walk over to the deity of the moment, who's typically loitering around the hub of each campaign as if waiting for a bus, and take your marching orders. These orders always involve straightforward objectives like looking into some sort of mystery, such as seeing if Seth's body remains in its sarcophagus, investigating the deadly machine that Minos seems to be constructing, or going out to murder some deadly threat like the Medusa.

Regardless of your goal in Loki, you always get there the same way--by bloodily slaughtering an endless horde of monsters. This Diablo-styled theme was old when the world was young, but Loki still manages to mostly pull it off by sticking to the template. The only serious annoyance is extreme difficulty even on the easiest "mortal" game setting. Enemies are so numerous in spots that you need to wage a war of attrition to make it through many maps. You start off by killing as many monsters as you can before succumbing to their crazy numbers, then respawn at the start of the level and repeat. Over and over again. Many levels require seven or eight instances of this frustrating wash, rinse, and repeat cycle. Even worse, there are moments when the game engine can't keep up with the number of monsters onscreen. In some of the Greek forest missions, for example, the combination of dozens of flying foes and the heavily treed landscape turns the game into an instant, unplayable slideshow. Thankfully, these slowdowns are rare.

Mummies haunt the tomb of Seth in the Egyptian part of the campaign.

Despite the overall difficulty, everything moves along pretty quickly. Even though you have to repeat yourself a little too often, you still easily get into a killing groove balanced just about perfectly between addiction and monotony. The only thing that slows you down is the regular 20-second or so wait after battles to regenerate health and mana. As with every other good action RPG ever made, you know that you're just clicking mouse buttons over and over again, but the pace of combat and the collection of magical weapons and other goodies (the usual assortment of swords, armor, and potions, with some cultural characteristics tossed in mainly to differentiate one style of clothing from another) is so speedy that you can barely bring yourself to stop playing.

Character development is an equal mix of the simple and compelling. Leveling up is a quick process of assigning points to attributes like strength and vitality. Added special battle abilities are gained with points earned every time you max out your faith bar. Basically, this lets you suck up to your three principal gods and take on combat buffs like Thor's Bull's Charge and spells like Ra's Fireball. The whole faith system is actually laid out in a very similar fashion to the skill masteries in Titan Quest, although the number of options here are even more varied. You're generally stuck on a linear path when picking abilities, however, so this doesn't afford a great deal of character customization.

All told, Loki is one of those rare, totally derivative pleasures. A game that will inspire a lot of déjà vu but very little boredom.

King's Bounty: The Legend

Posted by Sishu / at 10:36 AM / / 0 comments

King's Bounty: The Legend

• Atari
• Katauri
• Fantasy Turn-Based...
• Release: Sep 23, 2008 »
• ESRB: Teen

King's Bounty: The Legend

King's Bounty is a great modern rendition of an old-fashioned formula.

The Good

• Solid gameplay based on a traditional tactical RPG formula
• Good turn-based tactical depth
• Strong RPG flavor and storyline
• Colorful graphics evocative of old-time role-playing.

The Bad

• Not much in the way of innovation
• No multiplayer.

One thing you can say for King's Bounty: The Legend is that it fares a lot better than most resurrections of old games. While these digitalized archaeological digs generally reveal that you wouldn't want to go home again even if you could (Defender of the Crown, anyone?), the revival of New World Computing's fondly remembered role-playing/strategy hybrid is a vast improvement upon its 1990 predecessor. While King’s Bounty may not be the most revolutionary game of 2008, its refined gameplay makes it a treasure worth hoarding.

Actually, about the only fair negative comment you could make about King's Bounty is that there isn't really anything new here. Just about everything feels like a rip-off of Heroes of Might and Magic. As with that long-lived Ubisoft franchise, the core of this game is all about taking on the role of a hero in a solo campaign (there is no multiplayer option) and guiding parties of mercenaries across a real-time map to fight turn-based battles on hex grids. A strong RPG flavor is granted through character creation, which allows you to choose from warrior, paladin, and mage classes and then trick out your avatar with skills, artifacts, weapons, armor, spells, and assorted other Gygaxian accoutrements. You then explore the huge medieval fantasy world of Darion in the service of King Mark the Wise, plying the trade of a treasure hunter. A story slowly develops regarding the king's older brother and the standard evil threat to the continued existence of, well, everything, although you don't have to pay much attention to it. Essentially, you just wander around doing good deeds, guiding an icon of your hero through the usual D&D-inspired landscape to slay monsters, loot treasure, scoop up skill runes, mana crystals, and leadership banners, and solve quests handed out by your king and various passersby.

Throwing the book--er, spellbook--is just one way to get rid of a pesky undead enemy.

Despite that description, this isn't a hack-and-slasher. Instead of whaling on monsters with a small party of adventurers as in the typical RPG, you wage tactical battles with veritable armies of troops on turn-based battlefields. Mages, priests, knights, archers, monsters, and the like are hired at special buildings such as the king's castle for use as shock troops in your hero's party. You start off with a paltry handful of these goons, but soon wind up at the head of a tremendous force of killer Renaissance fair refugees. Stuff enough gold into your pantaloons and increase your hero's leadership skill as you increase in level and you'll be able to afford the services of loads of hirelings. The scale of battles always remains manageable, however, as each unit type is depicted by just a single character model on the battlefield no matter how many of those units you actually command. This keeps the focus on pure tactics and allows you to whip through battles lickety-split, while still letting you make use of each unit's special abilities. As just about every unit comes with some sort of skill involving spells or bonus attacks, cutting to the chase without dealing with hordes of units is vital to keeping the game straightforward and simple.

This should sound familiar if you have any experience playing a tactical RPG. The only real difference between King's Bounty and Heroes of Might and Magic or Disciples is a greater emphasis on role-playing. Story is brought to the fore here in a much more overt way, thanks to a sarcastic sense of humor and a ton of quests to be solved. True, most of these quests have been scooped out of the big bag of RPG cliches (find stolen property, remove a curse, kill the big bad whatever that's plaguing our village, and so on). But many come with multiple parts that force you to venture all over the map to solve them, along with a great deal of personality conveyed through idiosyncratic characters and a lot of text. You can't just skip around like you're filling in blanks; do so and you're liable to get caught not paying attention, as with the quest where you're given the words to a spell solving a peasant's zombie problem and then have to pick the actual phrase out in a multiple choice menu when casting the spell a little later. So even though these various tasks might not break any new ground, completing them is more involving than the map-clearing busywork that dominates the usual tactical RPG.

Difficulty is also scaled well. Starting off on easy knocks down monster hit points to something quite manageable, and cranks up the amount of gold awarded so that you never seem to run out of the coin needed to hire reinforcements. It's gratifying to see newbies getting let in on the action like this; too many games of this ilk seem to want to punish players, or at least present such a grueling level of difficulty that only veterans of the genre need apply. With that said, moving to normal difficulty is one heck of a leap. Enemy hit points take a huge jump and your gold gets slashed to practically nothing, turning what was a pretty fast-moving game into what can be a grueling slog through battles of attrition.

King's Bounty isn't the most modern-looking game out there, although you can't quibble with its creepy, bombastic spell effects.

Visual design is impressive, if not cutting-edge. The game is a couple of years out of date, although the use of bright color and loads of details on maps means that everything still looks great in a Disney kind of way. Areas are intricately drawn and laid out in such a way as to increase the fantasy atmosphere. Every nook and cranny is filled with something D&D-ish, from urns and skulls in catacomb corners to webs and giant mushrooms in forest clearings. Spell effects are spooky and imaginative, too. Magic is generally underlined with special effects like clouds of brimstone, puffs of green gas, and even leering skull faces. All of these added details sometimes gets in the way of your simply playing the game, though. Pathways through maps are very twisty-turny and often obscured with foliage or other terrain obstacles. It can be tough to locate a way forward without rotating the map or zooming in. Failing to at least pan the camera around before galloping into an S-curve can also see you trot right into a killer encounter with powerhouse monsters hidden just out of sight. Audio, on the other hand, is similarly secreted away. The score is a generic triumphal blast that repeats so often during tactical engagements you will almost immediately tune it out, while battle sounds are tinny and there is virtually no voice acting in the game.

Forget about looking at King's Bounty: The Legend as a sequel to an oldie-but-goodie and take it on its own merits. Anyone with the nostalgia gene who played the original might get a special thrill out of this sequel coming along almost 20 years later, but you don't need a connection to this classic to enjoy this impressive take on the traditional tactical RPG.

Guild Wars

Posted by Sishu / at 11:34 AM / / 0 comments

Guild Wars

• NCsoft
• ArenaNet
• Role-Playing
• Release: Apr 26, 2005 »
• ESRB: Teen

While it's tempting to compare Guild Wars to any number of other fantasy-themed role-playing games, there's really never been anything quite like it before. It innovatively and successfully combines many of the best, most addictive properties of action RPGs, online RPGs, and competitive multiplayer games in one beautifully produced package, which offers a tremendous lasting value yet none of the monthly fees typically associated with online-only games. The first title from developer ArenaNet, Guild Wars threatens the entire online RPG establishment with its bold design. More importantly, it's a very impressive game that's rewarding on many different levels and can be tremendously appealing for any number of reasons.

In the world of Guild Wars, the men are men, and the women are runway models. Oh, and it's awesome.

In Guild Wars, you play as a hero from Ascalon, your typical fantasy province that's fallen on hard times, thanks to relentless assaults from fearsome creatures called the charr. Ascalon seems huge and wondrous as you begin to explore it and its outskirts. But it turns out to be literally just a tiny portion of the richly detailed and shockingly gigantic world of Tyria, which you'll explore during the course of an adventure that's truly epic. Meanwhile, the other half of the game consists of competitive battles between teams of players, set in various types of arena events. It's action packed, it's tactical, and it's sporting. It's definitely more involved than a pick-up-and-play first-person shooter, but it's relatively easy to learn and certainly difficult to master. Unlike many other online RPGs, which often take a lot of flak from their audiences for lacking a definitive endgame, Guild Wars gives the impression that it was built with the endgame competition as a primary concern. However, one of its big surprises is just how much noncompetitive content there is. Even if you have no interest in player-versus-player battling whatsoever, Guild Wars will still provide you with more than 100 hours of quality gameplay, which you can tackle either alone or together with other players pretty much every step of the way.

The core gameplay in Guild Wars is reminiscent of action RPGs like the Diablo series. It lets you navigate countless big, winding maps filled with enemies and treasure, and combat is frequent and fast. You can't climb or fall from ledges, so at times, the design of the maps feels pretty contrived. However, the generally linear layout mostly just helps to keep you focused. The game's interface is clean and intuitive, and offers a few neat perks like a minimap that you can scribble on to help you communicate with your team. You have free reign over the camera perspective, so you may choose to play from a first-person viewpoint all the way on out to a bird's-eye view. Although, a third-person behind-the-back angle seems to deliver the best of both worlds, because you'll get a close look at the game's gorgeous graphics and plenty of room to see on your character's periphery. When you see an enemy (whether it's a computer-controlled creature or an opposing player), you may target it with a hotkey or a mouse click, and then attack it with your ranged or melee weapons. Most of your combat will be focused on using your different skills, though.

You can have exactly eight skills readied at a time, which correspond to the number keys on your keyboard. Which eight skills you bring to battle and which skills you discover during your adventure is really at the heart of what makes Guild Wars such a compelling experience. It's what levels the playing field in PvP and keeps the action manageable even when things get really intense. Each of the game's six character classes has 150 unique skills, and each one has its own little icon graphic, description, and purpose. For the most part, skills are not inherently better or worse than other skills--they're just different. Depending on how you've developed your character or your role in a player team, the skills will be better or worse for your circumstances. Many skills have obvious uses, while many are much more specific to certain types of situations. Some will serve you better when exploring the role-playing portion of the game, while others will be better suited to PvP battling against real opponents. It's definitely an interesting selection process. It shares a lot in common with collectible card games, and similarly offers a very satisfying reward whenever you discover that great, new skill that makes you feel much stronger while also causing you to make significant changes to your overall strategy. Guild Wars' skill system is a resounding success.

Creating a character is a quick, straightforward process of choosing a gender, appearance, and character class. You'll quickly notice the game's striking character design right from this point. Even prior to that, though, you're asked to make an important choice: whether to build a standard role-playing character or a player-versus-player-specific character. If you choose the former, you start out as a first-level neophyte on a foreboding day in Ascalon's history. And if you choose the PvP option, you skip all the way through the 100-odd hours of questing and storyline and begin with a high-level character decked out with powerful equipment. He or she can then jump right into some competitive matches, but cannot participate in any cooperative gameplay.

An absolutely huge story-driven role-playing adventure awaits you, though you can cut straight to the player-versus-player skirmishing if you prefer.

The idea behind these two options is pretty obvious. Players who'd rather not muck around with leveling up and pretentious fantasy storytelling needn't even bother with it, and they can instead jump straight into the competitive game. Or, players who want to get their feet wet before diving into PvP combat, or who want to ignore PvP entirely, may do so during the course of the adventure. It's not quite this cut and dried, though, because Guild Wars wants you to experience both aspects of the game, regardless of whether you think you do or not. Specifically, if you cut straight to the PvP, you'll find that the vast majority of the different character classes' skills are locked away, waiting to be discovered during the course of the role-playing portion. Custom weapon parts can also be found in the campaign, which can later be used in PvP.

So, it's possible that players expecting Guild Wars to be a light and breezy experience will be disappointed, because this is a deep, enthralling, and potentially very time-consuming game. While combat in Guild Wars rewards skillful planning and coordination between players, many of the best Guild Wars players will surely be the ones who invest the largest number of hours into the game--not only honing their talents, but also seeking out the best skills and equipment in the role-playing portion. Fortunately, the role-playing portion is on equal footing with the PvP, so chances are you'll enjoy the opportunity to experience both, and appreciate the game all the more for it.

Guild Wars is one of those games that you can easily play for long stretches while losing track of the hours--suddenly it's dark out, or light out, as the case may be. However, in contrast to many other RPGs, there's very little about Guild Wars that inherently demands a lot of your time all at once. It was clearly designed from the ground up to allow you to play in brief spurts, for minutes or maybe for an hour at a time. The PvP battles are action-packed affairs along the lines of what you'd expect from a competitive shooter. The role-playing quests and cooperative missions are typically less than an hour long. Also, you never need to worry about saving your progress or logging out in a safe area, because you can quit whenever you want to, and you'll always restart in the nearest town with all your skills and experience intact. There are no severe or permanent penalties from getting killed--just a temporary hit to your maximum health and energy levels that goes away when you get back to town.

Guild Wars offers single-player, cooperative, and competitive experiences each in turn.

From a technical standpoint, the game is a marvel. It boots up and quits out instantly, downloads software updates quickly and automatically, and runs wonderfully in a window if you prefer (you do need to be connected to the Internet whenever you're playing, though). Unlike in other online RPGs, logging in and quitting out is painless, and your character is also capable of instantly teleporting between all the cities and towns you've ever visited, at any time. These locations effectively serve as lobbies, and they're packed with players looking for other players to be their teammates. Or, if you can't find a good player team (or don't want to), the cities and towns let you fill out your team with computer-controlled henchmen.

For better or worse, these henchmen aren't as good as the real thing. Later on in the adventure, they'll be ill equipped to help you through some of Tyria's most dangerous environments. We also had them bug out on us on several occasions, either by getting stuck in the environment or flying off to who knows where. But the game generally makes it really easy to start and restart quests and missions, and finding willing players to work with is also fairly simple, which makes the occasional problems with the henchmen easy to dismiss. There's another issue that has to do with the game's cities and towns, which is that they can be overwhelming because they can be filled with so many players. There's no simple, obvious way to get into a group, short of clicking on the different people you see and then clicking a little plus icon that invites them to join you, so chat channels tend to be filled with requests from players looking for teammates. Also, there's no easy way to compare your pending quests with your teammates' pending quests short of just chatting about it, so it can be especially difficult to find a willing group to go questing out in the wilderness, versus taking on the cooperative missions that start out in town. And there's some slight but noticeable lag when you type chat messages. For a game with player community at its heart, Guild Wars seems somewhat devoid of amenities for enabling players to meet one another.

Furthermore, since Guild Wars makes it so easy to jump around the world, as well as to start up and exit out of the game in the first place, the player community doesn't exactly seem warm and friendly, on the whole. For example, if a quest or mission doesn't go well, random teammates are liable to quit without any warning, which can be frustrating to those left behind. As with just about any online game, the solution to this sort of issue is to play with friends instead of with strangers. To this end, Guild Wars actually has another leg up on most online RPGs, in that it lets you freely communicate with any other player in the gameworld, while most online RPGs limit you to communicating only with players on the same server, which contains its own instance of the gameworld.

Many of the cities in Guild Wars are absolutely packed with other players.

Guild Wars uses a different sort of technology. Towns and cities that have too many players in them are automatically split up into "districts," akin to separate chat lobbies, while missions and wilderness areas are always uniquely generated for the player team, so you'll never encounter random players or seas of already-killed monsters when you're out exploring the world. For the most part, that's great. But to an extent, it's actually a double-edged sword, since the fairly abstract manner in which the gameworld is set up diminishes some of the sense of immersion. It's difficult to fully appreciate the scale and the dangers of the world when you can freely and instantly teleport between the areas marked on your map. In other words, Tyria doesn't feel quite as cohesive as it could have, with the extremely brief but frequent loading screens between maps, and the fact that the towns and cities are all inundated with out-of-character banter. Additionally, the key story sequences are presented in full speech, which is nice, but most of the questing is conveyed through small text-based pop-up windows, which aren't very engrossing, especially not in the context of the game's otherwise-outstanding presentation. For that matter, the rewards for the game's dozens of different side quests often aren't even pertinent to your character. So the questing system can sometimes seem unfocused. It's mostly just there to give you more of a reason to explore the gameworld at your own pace--which, luckily, is enjoyable enough on its own.

There's definitely a learning curve involved in getting proficient at Guild Wars, at least as far as the PvP gameplay goes. For one thing, because the game features a nonstandard character class system, which encourages you to choose both a primary and a secondary profession from six different options (for a total of 30 different combinations), the result is having to learn lots of obscure abbreviations like "R/N" and "Mo/Me" (referring to ranger/necromancers and monk/mesmers, respectively, just in case you were wondering). Fortunately, the role-playing portion of the game mostly does a great job of introducing you to the different layers of gameplay at a steady pace. You'll start out being able to casually adventure on your own (an optional early quest invites you to group with just one other player). Later, you'll be able to form groups of four, then six, and then more. Each time, it feels like a significant upgrade, requiring you to rethink your place in the team as well as your overall strategy. Eventually, teaming up with other players starts to feel like a necessity rather than a simple choice. Some of Guild Wars' final quests are both very open-ended and challenging. And they also serve as a primer for the sorts of PvP battles you could later proceed to engage in.

It's a lot of fun to experiment with the different character classes and skills in the game.

While you can participate in random PvP battles, the odds are good that you'll meet up with (or will go in already knowing) some like-minded individuals with whom you'll want to form a guild. Forming a guild mostly just enables you to readily communicate with other members of your guild, though you can also customize a unique insignia that all your guildmates may proudly wear on their flowing cloaks. Being a member of a guild also allows you to get the most out of the game's PvP elements. International PvP competitions between guilds are already taking place, as players from all around the world battle it out in multi-team skirmishes, pitting their best combinations of skills and tactics against each other. When spells and counterspells are flying, as melee fighters close the distance with ranged assailants and supporting forces, the action can get hectic and very exciting. And since you can have literally hundreds of different skills to choose from across your two professions, you ought to have your hands full for a good, long time. So if the solo and cooperative portions of Guild Wars start to take on a certain monotonous feel after a while, leave it to PvP for a complete change of pace.

It sure doesn't hurt that Guild Wars is so easy on the eyes. This is an excellent-looking game, both from a technical and from an artistic standpoint. Character designs are fresh takes on fantasy conventions. Each character gender/class combination has a unique and memorable look, plus many options for customization (as well as some unique and amusing social animations), so you won't be seeing many clones of yourself while running around in Tyria. The various creatures you'll encounter are also imaginative and interesting, varying wildly in shape and size. Though, sadly, none of them bleed. The environments of Guild Wars may be the biggest attraction from a graphical standpoint. This is one beautifully detailed world, offering up larger-than-life versions of pretty much every type of environment you could think of, all rendered in a vivid, soft-focused look that gives the game a dreamlike quality that totally works. In spite of all this, Guild Wars runs great even on relatively modest systems, and even when tons of people are running around or duking it out. The game's few graphical rough edges, such as how characters seem to pop in piece by piece when you enter a new area, wouldn't even be worth mentioning if the superlative graphics didn't make them stick out a little.

If you only buy one computer game this year, it might as well be Guild Wars. It's got what it takes to keep you happily entertained for a very long time.

The game doesn't sound quite as impressive as it looks, but that's kind of an unfair way of putting it, since Guild Wars sounds great. A symphonic musical score by renowned composer Jeremy Soule helps imbue each of Tyria's distinct regions with its own personality, and while the music is of uniformly high quality, it can start to grow a bit repetitive as you explore within a given type of environment. The sounds of combat pack a good, solid punch, and different types of weapons and skills in turn make distinctive noises, which all tend to fit the action well. Guild Wars also has some nicely done ambient sound effects, but given the nature of the gameplay, you'll end up hearing a lot of the same effects over and over. Interestingly, you can actually hear your otherwise-silent character speaking during some of the cutscenes, which will probably make you wish you could hear his or her voice more often, such as in tandem with the different social animations.

It seems like a common observation among longtime game players that games have gotten shorter and smaller over the years. The rigors of game design are such that it's generally just not reasonable to expect games that are both of very high quality and that are also very long, but at the same time, there's something to be said for a tightly paced gaming experience. Still, you can never have too much of a good thing. But Guild Wars comes awfully close. It pulls out all the stops to win you over.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Posted by Sishu / at 5:55 AM / / 0 comments

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

• Activision
• Troika Games
• Role-Playing
• Release: Nov 16, 2004 »
• ESRB: Mature

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Despite the clunky combat and other shortcomings, there's a rich world to explore in Bloodlines, an RPG that allows you to indulge your inner vampire.

Jason Ocampo tries his share of blood sucking in his review of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

The Good

• Great graphics present gritty Los Angeles
• Interesting and atmospherik quests
• Open-ended character development.

The Bad

• Clumsy combat system favors melee over firearms
• Some graphical glitches
• A few stability issues.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines comes during a surprisingly dry year for PC role-playing games, which only amplifies the attention on the game. There's also a lot of focus on Bloodlines due to the fact that it's based on White Wolf's popular pen-and-paper role-playing game, and partly since it uses Valve's Source engine, the same engine behind Half-Life 2. And, for the most part, Bloodlines is an atmospheric role-playing game with a rich setting--though it's one beset with a clumsy combat system and some noticeable bugs. That's unfortunate, since the game clearly could have been better had its rough edges been ironed out.

In Bloodlines you can become a vampire in the Los Angeles underworld.

You start Bloodlines by creating a vampire, which you'll do by conforming to the seven major vampire types found in the pen-and-paper game. The idea is that you can create a vampire suited to your style of play. The options range from sophisticated vampires that can talk their way past most situations, to burly vampires who like to intimidate people and pick fights, to demonic vampires who prefer to skulk in the shadows. And while you can select a gender for your vampire (which affects the kinds of characters you can seduce), you won't actually be able to customize your vampire's appearance, aside from the kind of clothes he or she wears.

Bloodlines takes place in modern-day Los Angeles, in four major sections of the city. You'll start the game in Santa Monica, carrying out all sorts of low-level missions for your vampire lord. But before too long, you'll be drawn into the game's overarching story, which deals with the vampiric end times. The story itself is filled with all sorts of intrigue, and you'll be caught between the major vampire factions as they battle for supremacy. Part of the fun is figuring out which of the factions you want to ultimately align yourself with. The game also has a cool twist of four different endings, so you can decide how the story will eventually conclude. This makes for added incentive to go back and replay the game to check out different story paths. In turn, this gives the game quite a bit of replay value, as it will probably you take at least 20 to 30 hours to get through Bloodlines the first time.

The game itself is populated by all sorts of interesting characters who come to life thanks to the Source engine's amazing facial expression technology (though the characters in Bloodlines don't look as good as the characters in Half-Life 2). The dialogue itself is sharply written--there are many memorable lines and phrases uttered by the characters. Keep in mind that Bloodlines is a mature-rated game and it contains profanity and sexual themes, although it never feels too gratuitous.

The quests in Bloodlines range in quality, though for the most part there are some excellent missions in the game. On the low end, there are some standard fetch-style quests that populate most role-playing games--the kind where you simply have to find and retrieve an object for someone. But on the high end, there are very interesting missions, such as an investigation of a haunted mansion. The haunted mansion level is eerily atmospheric, filled with all sorts of scripted events that will keep you on your toes, as well as a fair bit of puzzle-solving. Along with the main storyline, there are many little side quests that you can pursue for amusement. These side quests also allow you a chance to gain more experience, though you don't "level up" like you do in traditional role-playing games. Vampire uses a simple point system where you allocate experience points in various stats and abilities. You can create a very balanced character or you can specialize in certain abilities, so you'll probably want to go through the game a few times to experiment with different skills and approaches.

You'll interact with all sorts of interesting and memorable characters.

Perhaps the best quests in the game are the ones that require you to use stealth, as the combat missions are fairly simple to carry out. There's a strong undercurrent of Deus Ex and Splinter Cell in the stealth missions, as you can sneak past guards and security cameras, pick locks, and try to hack into computers along the way. Some vampire types specialize in stealth, but it's not too hard for other vampire types to skulk quietly in the dark. One issue is that, since Vampire takes place at night, most of the game is dismally dark, making it difficult to see anything. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to have a flashlight, so that means on some levels you might just have to bump up the gamma levels in the video settings just so you can see where you're going. Or what's lurking up ahead.

Where Bloodlines stumbles is in its combat system, which simply feels clumsy and unsatisfactory. The combat mechanics are a blend of twitch-based action and role-playing stats, and it's an awkward compromise. You can battle it out from a first-person perspective using firearms, or you can switch to a third-person viewpoint to use melee weapons, such as knives and swords. However, while Bloodlines is built on a first-person shooter engine, the gunplay is nowhere near as smooth and natural as it should be. Your firearm abilities depend heavily on your characters stats; it's not as simple as placing the cursor over a target. Unless you invest heavily in improving your firearm skills, your aim will veer wildly. Meanwhile, melee weapons are simply overpowering, and combat is skewed heavily toward knife and swordplay. To give you some perspective, we attempted a certain boss battle with a character specializing in firearms and lost repeatedly, but we beat it on the first time that we used a knife instead of a gun.

The combat system treats guns as a disadvantage in fights. It's easier to simply use a sword or knife.

The problem is that firearms in Bloodlines are severely underpowered and they only allow you to attack one opponent at a time. By using a melee weapon you can attack multiple enemies at once. More importantly, you can even knock them down, which buys you precious time to concentrate on a single foe. The only time firearms seem more useful than melee weapons is when you want to attack larger monsters from a distance. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself at a disadvantage most of the time when using a gun. At any rate, the enemy artificial intelligence isn't too bright, as most opponents will simply rush you or fire their weapons at a distance. In one battle, we just huddled behind a counter and healed while the enemy gunmen stood nearby waiting for our vampire to pop up again.

Your vampire can also draw on your special powers, all of which are fueled by blood. In combat, vampires can temporarily boost their strength and abilities, making them even more lethal. Certain vampires can even summon spirit allies to attack their foes. Out of combat, you can use your powers and experiment with different approaches to quests. You can try to brainwash someone into giving you what you want, or you can use a cloaking ability to hide so you're not detected. These blood powers are essentially the vampire equivalent of magic. It's also not much of a problem "refueling" your vampire, as you can usually grab an opponent or passerby and drain them of blood.

Bloodlines is a mostly great-looking game, though it's not on the same level of visual quality as that certain other game featuring the same graphics engine. Even though Vampire's graphics do have some rough spots, like flickering textures and clumsily edited cutscenes, they're still impressive for a role-playing game. The virtual Los Angeles in Bloodlines is a very gritty, rundown place, though it feels rather empty. Some pedestrians loiter around on the sidewalks, but there are no cars on the roads. To some, a Los Angeles without cars may seem far less likely than vampires actually existing. Nevertheless, Vampire's visuals help give the game a lot of gothic atmosphere. Meanwhile, the sound effects for the most part are functional, with the voice acting and music standing out. The game's soundtrack is composed of licensed tracks from a variety of rock bands, and they fit in well with the game's setting, particularly the many clubs and bars that you'll peruse.

Of further note, even though Bloodlines runs smoothly most of the time, it does suffer from some stability problems and it will crash to the desktop on occasion. Also, the loading times feel a bit long, though they're better on high-end systems.

Los Angeles is gritty and colorful, though strangely devoid of cars.

In many ways, Bloodlines feels very much influenced by the classic role-playing game Fallout, which is to be expected since developer Troika was founded by members of the Fallout team. Bloodlines presents a very interesting world to explore and memorable characters to interact with, and the open-ended nature of many of the quests allows you to tackle the game in multiple ways. So if you can look past the clunky combat and other shortcomings, you'll find that there's a rich world to explore in Bloodlines, a role-playing game that ultimately allows you to indulge your inner vampire.