Impressions of Red Orchestra 2

Steam recently held a free weekend event for Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, a multiplayer FPS set in the eastern front of WW2. I'm not normally one to enjoy competitive shooters, but considering my fond appreciation for the work that developer Tripwire Interactive puts into its other online shooter, Killing Floor, I thought I'd give RO2 a shot. And then I was promptly shot to death. Many, many times.

The core concept behind the Red Orchestra series is to create more realistic military shooters that rely more on teamwork, tact, and strategy than the run-n-gun bravado of more popular franchises like Call of Duty or Battlefield. The pacing is much slower with a greater emphasis on using cover and moving strategically across the map to occupy zones and choke points. For new players, there's an "Action Mode" with all of the full gameplay features, tweaked to make it more action-oriented, and there's also "Realism" and "Classic" modes for more unforgiving, tactical gameplay. 

Even understanding the basic tactics (run from to cover to cover, don't leave yourself exposed, survey the terrain before moving), I still spent most of the free weekend being killed instantly by hidden players. Consequently, a lot of my time in RO2 amounted to pure frustration as I carefully planned my every action, only to die without any chance of survival or retaliation. On the other hand, I found it incredibly satisfying whenever the tables turned and I was the one gunning down hopeless players from a clever vantage point. 

As inexperienced as I was, I could tell there was a lot of room for personal improvement, and I really liked the map design and the general feel of combat. Playing with a lot of fellow newbs in Action Mode, I didn't get the best sampling of the strategic gameplay, but I could tell how much of an impact it has on the game. So even though I was really, really frustrated with the game at times, I decided to take the plunge and buy the full experience. More of my impressions after the jump.

Metacritic: A Blight on the Industry

The recent release of Risen 2: Dark Waters was met with mixed reviews from fans and critics alike. I never expected Risen 2 to do well among mainstream gamers (whose definition of a good RPG consists of Skyrim and Mass Effect), so it's no surprise to me that its metascore is currently sitting at a mediocre 69. Honestly, I would've given it a similar score myself when I first played it. Seemingly broken combat, graphical glitches galore, watered-down gameplay elements, and other issues with design and presentation left me feeling very conflicted about a sequel that should have only improved on the success of the first game.

Less than two weeks after its release, however, Piranha Bytes released a patch which addressed nearly every major complaint I (or anyone else) had with the game. They added roll-dodging and the ability to block monster attacks, which greatly improved the feeling of combat, they adjusted some really distracting graphical issues like low draw distance and growing/shrinking foliage, they fixed a few quest bugs and other glitches, they improved enemy and companion AI a little bit. It's still not a perfect game, but it became instantly more enjoyable with just a single patch.

And yet virtually every single review was published before the patch was even released. Surely these review scores would have been more favorable, maybe averaging in the 75-80 range, had they reviewed it with the patch. To be fair, the game should never have launched without these basic components, and PB / Deep Silver deserve to take the flack for its launch status. At the same time, however, shouldn't they be cut a little slack for addressing all of the major issues in a timely manner? Either way, as far as Metacritic is concerned (and any casual consumer consulting it), Risen 2 is just another mediocre game not worth your time or money. 

So I have a few bones to pick with Metacritic. In the full article, expect a fair bit of ranting about what's wrong with Metacritic and how it's destroying the industry, with other examples besides just Risen 2.

Demon's Souls is Not That Hard

When Demon's Souls was first released in October 2009, everyone was quick to propogate the hype that it was a brutally hard, soul-crushingly challenging game. After all, it had once been advertised by the publisher, Atlus, as "a game that enjoys the taste of your tears." There are numerous bosses and enemies that can kill you in one hit, and you're expected to be slaughtered to death before even finishing the opening tutorial sequence. When you die, you lose all of the souls you collected (your currency and experience points), you get sent back to the beginning of the level, all of the enemies respawn, and you suffer a penalty to your maximum health.

For a new player unfamiliar with the ropes, this means repeatedly finding yourself back at the start of the level with all of your progress undone, and with no souls to spend buying extra healing items, ammunition, upgrading your stats, or repairing your armor until you can get back to your bloodstain to reacquire your lost souls. Dying once is bad enough, but fighting your way through the level can be even harder the second time around, especially if you used all of your healing items trying to survive in the first place. And if you die enough times in body form, your game's world tendency will shift to black, populating the level with even tougher enemies.

Whereas most games help you get back on your feet after death, Demon's Souls punishes you hard for dying. And yet it's not an unfair game, and actually becomes incredibly easy once you know what you're doing. While virtually every press release has touted the game's challenging difficulty, and many gamers have accused it of being exceedingly cheap, tedious, and frustrating, the simple fact of the matter is that Demon's Souls is not that hard, as long as you approach it intelligently.

Exploration and Self-Discovery

One of my greatest joys in gaming is the feeling of discovery one gets from exploring a finely-crafted world. When a world is designed properly, it can really suck you into its setting, and when you have the unrestricted freedom to explore its boundaries, you get a strong sense of place in the environment. It's not merely the sightseeing that makes exploration compelling -- it's the rewards you receive for your discoveries, whether they be little treats left by the developers or just the psychological gratification you get for finding a more efficient path.

Some of the real fun, however, comes from discovering tricks that the developers neither intended nor anticipated, like backflipping into an exploding bomb to reach a high ledge in Ocarina of Time, or planting mines on a wall and climbing up them in Deus Ex. These discoveries are more fascinating to me because they're completely unscripted. As rewarding as it can be to bomb a cracked wall in The Legend of Zelda and find a wealth of hidden goodies inside, it's really just a scripted sequence designed to happen in a precise way. There are obvious clues telling you what to do, which make these discoveries a little less personal and a little less dramatic.

Exploration plays a prominent role in non-linear, open-world, free-roaming sandbox games. Much of the appeal stems from the player's freedom to go off and search for adventure in his own way, but some games promote and reward exploration much better than others. Playing Risen 2, I've noticed that the exploration is at times very creative and satisfying, and other times it's rote and boring, which got me thinking about the broader picture on how games can design worlds that beckon for a deeper, more personal level of exploration and discovery.

Great Games You Never Played: Painkiller

"Fine, obscure gems." Part of a periodical series: Great Games You Never Played.

In the world of first-person shooters, Painkiller is a throwback to an earlier time in gaming history (back in the days of Doom and Quake), when shooters were all about fast-paced, cathartic action. Developed by People Can Fly in 2004, Painkiller tells the story of Daniel Garner; after dying in a car crash with his wife, he's sent into purgatory to battle Lucifer's army, in order to prevent a war between Heaven and Hell and to earn his passage to join his wife in Heaven. Alone against the armies of Hell, Daniel must fight the demons through different slices of history recreated in purgatory, before facing Lucifer himself in a final showdown.

In Painkiller, the main point of the game is to walk into a room and turn every moving thing into a shower of blood and dismembered body parts. The action is fast, the shooting intense and cathartic, and there are no other objectives besides "kill everything." As much as I enjoy more sophisticated shooters like STALKER and Deus Ex, I also hold a fond appreciation for shooters that can make mindless action fun and engaging. Thanks to the tight shooting mechanics, the wonderfully diverse and evocative level designs, the unique variety of weapons and enemies, and the colossal boss fights, Painkiller does the action very well with fantastic presentation.

Impressions of Risen 2: Dark Waters

This past Friday, Piranha Bytes released Risen 2: Dark Waters, a pirate-themed action adventure role-playing game and sequel to Risen from 2009. Piranha Bytes are best known for their previous work on the Gothic series, with Gothic 2 considered by many to be one of the greatest RPGs of all time. I've been a longtime fan of Piranha Bytes, loyal through the missteps of Gothic 3 and their recovering process with Risen, and was optimistic for a brighter future with Risen 2. Now that I've played about six hours of it, I almost fear that Risen 2 may be a case of "one step forward, two steps back."

From what I can tell, Risen 2 seems to have all of the core elements I've come to expect from a Piranha Bytes game; primarily, a rich and organic world that's interesting to explore, and decisions with concrete consequences and role-playing options. The dialogue this time around is especially enjoyable, and many of the new features (like "dirty tricks" in combat) are welcome additions. But even ignoring some of the more glaring superficial issues, there are still a number of questionable design elements that really seem to detract from the game's potential, leaving me with mixed opinions. Continue reading for the rest of my quick impressions.

Please Get Off the Life Support

I've been seeing Resident Evil 6 advertisements lately, and knowing very little about it besides what's been mentioned in marketing, I can't help but feel like the series is desperately crying out for attention. After the lackluster fan response to Resident Evil 5, it seems like they're carefully backpedaling into Resident Evil 4 territory, as if to catch people's attention with "Look! It's Leon! The guy from the one you guys really liked! Please buy this game!" Other forced elements, like the inclusion of Albert Wesker as the main villain again (wasn't he killed off at the end of RE5?) make me even more skeptical.

It seems to me like a lot of these established, long-running series are going onto life support, with the developers making surgically precise tweaks (sometimes read as "manipulations") to try to draw audiences back with promises of returning to the series' prior glory. More often than not, these attempts prove to be uninspired, derivative rehashes that neither capture the original magic of the series, nor provide anything new or exciting. This bothers me. I'd really prefer for these companies to push their series into bold new directions, or perhaps even try their hand at some new IPs. More commentary after the jump.