All Along the Sanctum 2 Review

I don’t remember when I heard it first, but someone at some point years ago made the astute observation that as the video game industry matures, we’ll see more and more genre-bending games come out. It was a salient point that became more pertinent as time went on. Nowadays you see RPG elements like experience points and level-restricted gear in your first-person shooters and you see extensive combat systems in your platformers. Puzzles, even, persist through less traditional enigmatic environments, and as a result, it becomes harder and harder to describe games without writing a full treatise on their intended design: third-person point ‘n click action adventure game, real-time strategy Sudoku-inspired MOBA, etc.

Sanctum 2, however, makes it simple. Take one part tower defense and one part first-person shooter and cram them together with a nice sci-fi bow on top (there are aliens that want to destroy your oxygen supplies and you have to stop them. For humanity!). It sounds simple, but the result is much more complex and altogether better for it. It is a marked improvement over the original and manages to create a fast-paced, aggressive game that succeeds in so many more ways than it fails.

You pick from four distinct characters, each with their own expertise and specialized utility (and totally badass 90s anime-style character portrait, a milieu that persists through fantastic-looking but intrigue-lacking comic bookish cutscenes). Haigen Hawkins, for example, carries a shotgun and has above average health, so he’s perfect for getting in close and punishing mobs. SiMo, on the other hand, is a sniper rifle-wielding robot who gets bonus damage for hitting weakspots. These varying attributes combine in four-player online play to create this synergistic dependency that, should people play their parts, is rather fun.

That is should play their parts because it’s not necessary; the character differences are nearly drastic enough to require class-based play. Most of my mob control strategy resulted in getting in as close as possible and dumping ammo like it was British tea in the Boston harbor. No matter how hard I tried to keep in line with what my character was best at (sniping, bashing, fire-based crowd control), it always ended up the same.

That may just be a consequence of some rather smart game design decisions, though. The framework of the game is designed to funnel you into acting fast and shooting faster. For instance, you can only set down a limited number of towers, a fact that produces two design artifacts: 1) you find yourself more inclined to restructuring and refinancing your existing towers to optimize for the next encounter, and 2) you are forced to get down and dirty a lot more often. Enemies can also be lured away from their relentless trek by getting close, which opens up new avenues for crowd control tactics. Then combine that with how your weapons recharge and reload on their own when you switch between firearms. This means that you spend way less time running between cover and open engagements and instead just have to decide on your order of operations of death.

This does take away the old drama of reloading while aliens get uncomfortably close to the core you’re protecting, but it replaces it with the anxiety of wondering if you’re maximized output can fell a foe before it reaches your ward. Enemies like the Soaker (who, predictably, take a lot of damage to kill) seem specifically geared towards poking at this insecurity and this switch-focused design choice as each hit increases the damage take on subsequent shots. This does, however, sometimes result in your having cleared out the smaller, faster fodder enemies and are left with unloading on some slow, trundling creature. That gets kind of boring after 30 seconds of nonstop firing and zero seconds of strategic contemplation.

You can fill that time, though, with thinking about tower management, which can get quite deep. Instead of discrete upgrades, you can slowly build up towards more powerful towers one coin at a time. And then you can buy the lump-sum upgrades to drastically alter how your tower functions, like turning it into a rapid fire death node. This is especially exciting in the beginning when you are also constructing the maze that the hordes will walk through so you have to decide what is important first and where it would be not only most effective later but where it can mitigate your lack of walls now.

In between levels, you pop out to where you can view your unlocked perks and weapons and build your loadout. It’s fun to see some tangible rewards for earnest progress, but everything you choose actually has a very impact on your next encounter. You choose what weapons and towers to bring with you (yes, towers, so pick wisely because those airborne enemies can get troublesome) but also combine perks to further specialize your class. You can increase your weakspot damage or boost your movement speed. These are choices that actively change the way you experience any given level. The most trivial choice you make is perhaps your weapon loadout and even that is critical.

Which actually causes some trouble down the line. With such a dependence on pre-gaming the game, you find yourself locked in trial-and-error loops more often than you’d like and thus more frustrated than you’d want. And playing online can be fun, but a commensurate amount of effort has to be directed towards effective communication since resources are a free-for-all and one idiot can ruin the entire operation for everyone.

And while it’s understandable that the towers are rather standard tower defense fare, it’s rather disappointing that the player armaments are relegated to the standard shotgun, assault, and rifle classes. The enemies, too, find themselves disappointingly uniform, like when the larger baddies are simply, well, larger versions of the regular infantry.

Sanctum 2 has a generally rough feeling around the fringes, but the core is substantial and surprisingly refined. There are niggling problems of difficulty, occasionally game-ending glitches, and frumpy aesthetics, but the actual act of playing the game is so manic and strategic and wholly a fantastic combination of things you rarely experience together that it’s easy to look past all the small stuff. Sanctum 2 takes two simple concepts and turns them into a product greater than the sum of its parts. It just forgot to sand down the edges.

+ Creating loadouts of weapons, perks, and towers have real, tangible impact on your effectiveness
+ Combat flow is refined to allow for a much more manic pace yet strategic feel
+ Crafting the mazes that affect horde movement by hand requires thought and careful consideration of the future and the present
- You occasionally find yourself stuck testing and revising strategies that result in you pointlessly replaying levels
- For all its genre-mashing innovation, a lot of the forward-facing portions feel very generic

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Game Review: Sanctum 2
Release: May 15, 2013
Genre: First-person tower defense shooter
Developer: Coffee Stain Studios
Available Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Players: 1-4
MSRP: $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points)
ESRB Rating: T
Website: http://www.coffeestainstudios.com/games/sanctum-2

Shine a Light on Low Light Combat

Wolfire Games is more than an indie darling. It’s probably more accurate to just call them an oddity. Consider that Lugaru: The Rabbit’s Foot, their first commercial game, is about a giant anthropomorphic rabbit named Turner with rather advanced combat training under his belt. It’s ridiculous and strange and funny and, actually, quite good, especially considering it was made almost entirely by Wolfire’s founder David Rosen.

Perhaps what is most endearing about Wolfire is that they’re so open. Now four-person studio, they regularly put up videos on their YouTube channel detailing design decisions, art assets, development progress, and even songs from game soundtracks. And with most of these uploads, narration accompanies the visuals and offers fascinating insight. For example, one video discussing combat changes to Overgrowth shows how the AI predicts your movement and how that influences player combat.

What’s Overgrowth? Well, it’s a “spiritual successor” to Lugaru, though it seems to be directly following the events prior with Turner’s lingering anarchistic maneuvers, but whatever. It looks pretty neat and somehow improves on a game no one thought they wanted until they played it, but what’s more interesting is a game attached to it called Low Light Combat.

To be perfectly clear, LLC isn’t a part of Overgrowth, but it is free with a preorder, though you could also buy it for five dollars. It was created as part of the Mojam 2 charity drive, so 100% of the money they make off of it will go to either Camphill California, a residential care facility for adults with developmental disabilities, or Blender, an open-source piece of 3D modeling software.

LLC is back in the first-person perspective, a reminder of their last game Receiver. But whereas Receiver was about delving as deep as possible into the mechanics of operating an actual firearm and using it within a traditional (if minimalistic) video game environment, LLC is about exploring the relationship between power and vulnerability.

In LLC, you play as a ninja, and in keeping with the game jam theme of endless nuclear war, you are powered by nuclear energy. You have 60 seconds of power available to you, but you can earn more time and power by killing other ninjas (the point being that you are fighting to determine what the Illuminati will do next). The problem is that to kill other ninjas, you have to either fire off your laser shotgun thing or use your sword, the former costing you 15 seconds of time and the latter only being able to be used while running which drains your energy four times as quickly.

The biggest issue, though, beyond the constantly ticking timer on your screen of your imminent death is that you can’t see much of anything. True to its name, LLC takes place in some rather low light and ninjas, apparently, are constructed almost entirely out of shadows. So the only time you can really catch a glimpse of your enemies is when they attack or turn on their flashlight.

Make no mistake; LLC is about stealth, but it is fast and reckless stealth. The games move as quick as a Counter-Strike game but with a lot more breathless stalking and swords swinging. The brilliance of this whole setup is the timer. Competitive stealth (or even non-competitive or single-player stealth experiences) is often about lingering. You wait and you wait and you wait until your moment arrives. The Assassin’s Creed multiplayer is a fine example of this. You spend most of your time biding it, trying to see if an opportunity presents itself before you expose yourself. There is less a literal timer and more a race between the mining of opportunities.

A discrete timing mechanism, though, tickles a very fundamental portion of our human brains. In Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, it ticks up, and you immediately want to stop it from doing so. The only way to do that, however, is to finish the level, so your stealth is an active measure of avoidance rather than hiding, usually in the form of running and screaming like a child. In LLC, the timer goes the other way and ticks down, counting your remaining steps until inescapable death. Now, the slightly advanced mental actuation of considering the reduction of time turns into the extremely simplistic notion of beating the time. It is one abstracted layer less and one more notch towards a primal instinct of competition.

And on such a low level of operation within your mind, the impulse is native and trumps the superficial desire to hide in the shadows. The immediacy of the risk-reward analysis is simple and lives as a little nugget deep at the core of your brain: choosing to fire or run or simply wait in the dark is as simple as breathing. This allows higher level functions to determine how to go about it rather than if.

Of course, on some level, that still persists across all mental calculations, regardless of complexity or residency in the brain. But rather than being filtered through additional gates of considered causality and risk aversion, the idea that a timer has to be beat and maintained shutters every hurdle and hits the NOS.

It’s not necessarily an increased impetus or a push against reason. It’s more like a direct line access to being “in the zone.” And that’s how you can determine the good players among the sea of bad and average fodder. When your instincts are finely honed enough to match your slower, more deliberate and thoughtful actions, you are a notch above. It’s like the difference between someone who can intuit if they’ve fired off every round from their revolver or someone who just kind of thinks they might be out. It’s a learned but deeply ingrained type of knowledge that separates the professionals from the hobbyists, the chefs from the Food Network fans.

It’s when you know you have to make a move rather than taking the time to calculate run and gun utility costs and estimate your chances of success. It’s more just thinking that this is an opportunity and more knowing it is going to be yours. It’s an impressive feat to construct a design so human and fundamental over the course of a 78-hour game jam, to so easily tap into what many other games attempt and desire to do. Or maybe it’s less impressive and more odd. This is, after all, Wolfire Games we’re talking about, and this is Low Light Combat.

Mind the Kerbals

I’ve never been to space, but I’ve died there a lot. Actually, I’ve died a lot between the ground and space, too. Most of those deaths, in fact, take place somewhere between zero and 100 meters off the ground. If you stacked all of my virtual corpses up on top of each other, it wouldn’t be hard to see how I finally achieved orbit. It’s a bit like an adorably green pyramid of terror, creating a thick base of stupidly failed launches, a mezzanine of admirable attempts, and a cherry or two of inexplicable success.

I’m talking about, of course, playing Kerbal Space Program, or KSP as the kids like to call it. Playable since mid-2011, KSP is still technically an “incomplete” game (it’s at version 0.19.1 and being constantly updated) but my god is it fascinating. Breathing deep, it’s an intoxicating aromatic blend of flight simulator, space exploration, and feeling simultaneously like a genius and the world’s luckiest idiot.

The goal of the game is to build various shuttles and pods and launch them into space with a few Kerbals—the inhabiting sentient species of the pseudo Earth you launch from—stowed away in the command capsule. Your homeworld is where you build everything as you take up more and more space inside your hangar with your increasingly ambitious and dangerously untested machinations, but there’s a whole galaxy beyond that. You can orbit the planet, land on the Mün (bonus points for the umlaut), or float off into the deep unknown.

The driving force behind it all is a significant and reliable physics engine. It still tends to suffer from the usual problems, which is to say that closely aligned parts will often wobble and shake to the point where you think you’ve better start to lay off the peyote, but it is amazingly robust. Everything from the mass of the fuel in your tanks affecting your efficiency to the gravitational interplay of adjacent celestial bodies to weight displacement impacting your alignment momentum is all simulated here, so when something fails, you never feel cheated. You just feel like a certifiable dumdum who just got a free lesson in physics.

What really makes this work, though, is the persistence of the entire world. The game’s name is severely and tragically appropriate because you are effectively building up the Kerbal Space Program. All of your mistakes and successes linger about in the world and remind you of things to do, things to avoid, and to not let your fingers absentmindedly hover over the keyboard lest you accidentally engage your stage two rockets 10 meters off the launch pad. If you crash land and some of your Kerbals survive, you will see them puttering about the planet, trying to find their way back to the base. If you leave some sort of rocket or strut in orbit, it will be waiting for you to crash into it on your next launch.

Of course, this also means pods and utilities you purposefully leave up in space will still be there as well. If you plan on building a Mün base, you can definitely do that. You just need to plan your landing trajectories accordingly so that you don’t have some sprawling mess on that cheesy surface or so you don’t crash into your one other successful landing. Or if you want to recreate the International Space Station, you can do that, too.

In fact, if you want to reenact the recent emergency spacewalk that took place a few days ago (and was streamed live to the Internet), you can do that, too. Your Kerbals are able to pop out at any time and rocket boost around with their limited fuel supply, latch onto ladders, and switch to other space vehicles. But once you lose one Kerbal to an impossibly strong gravitational well or to a fuel tank that wasn’t as full as you thought, it becomes a nerve-racking ordeal. You can see your lonely astronaut floating off into nothingness with no hope to be rescued or to achieve any elegant death (Kerbals don’t need food and seem perpetually terrified, excited, and confused). Floating off for more than a couple dozen meters is an anxiety ridden affair and only makes you want to hove close to the outer ladder so you can grab on. It is at point, however, necessary. Necessary and scary.

Most of what you do, actually, is terrifying simply because of the aforementioned persistence. With constant reminders of how easy it is to fail floating all around you, it’s impossible not to be scared of even attempting something beyond your grasp of knowledge and capabilities. The phrase is your reach exceeding your grasp, but in KSP‘s case, both are beyond your Kerbal’s tiny, lime green hands.

But that is also what makes your successes so god damn exhilarating. The mechanics are so simple and the data surfaced to you make it seem so straightforward (click, add maneuver, wait), but when everything requires precision and you are single-handedly operating what takes Captain Picard an entire bridge of people to do, it’s rare you feel anything approaching confidence. So when you finally achieve planetary orbit, you feel like cheering as if you just landed NASA’s Mars Rover on that dusty red planet. When you manage to land—land, not crash—on the Mün, it feels like you pulled off Armageddon’s asteroid landing 20 times in a row with a blindfold on from within a barrel going over Niagara Falls.

What I’m saying is that KSP succeeds at making the impossible possible but not by holding your hand. It simplifies the radically overwhelming realities of designing, launching, and controlling spacecrafts, but not to the point where it is a point-and-go system. It never lets your forget how many times you’ve tried, how many times you should have given up, and how many times you actually did walk away with a handful of Kerbals’ lives on the line.

And when it reminds you of all that (as well as how futile it is to even try with your horribly misaligned college degree and hazy memories of Bill Nye music videos), it very much makes you feel like you’re winning just be trying. You are Frodo in the middle of Mordor where everything is casually oppressive and wholly distressing and yet you still climb. You are Rudy, standing a foot shorter than everyone around you, a constant physical reminder of your diminutive worth, and yet you still play. It’s every underdog story you’ve ever heard and seen and subsequently loved. The only difference now is that you’re in control, and you’re the underdog. And you’re cheering yourself on.

Grilling up the Small Stakes

There’s a point of escalation to where it doesn’t even feel like you’re going up anymore. Once the space elevator gets built, I’m sure it will prove this notion; somewhere around the 200^th mile or so and the thrill of traveling up a ribbon of carbon nanotubes up into the thermosphere becomes the same droll of any other elevator. But until then, think of it like a roller coaster. On that main ascent, what are the most exciting parts of it?

The two answers easily offered up are the beginning and the end. What of the middle? Well, what about it? The middle is a homogenized slog of indifference. It is a necessary step for a top or turning point to exist and nothing more. When you first start out and the cars shake and rattle as the chain catches the underside, you are filled with pure excitement, pure elation. All you can think about how fun this is going to be, your bones rattling in that very particular way old timey roller coasters rattle bones.

As you begin to crest the first and largest of the hills, the genesis of the rest of the ride, anxiety builds. It’s a certain nervousness of fear and rationalization that there’s nothing to fear. These things are, after all, pretty safe.

And then there’s the drop and the loops and the dragons and whatever: the payoff for the wait and that hot little turnip of nerves all that contemplating of your own mortality has turned you into. But what about the parts of the ascent that don’t involve turning towards the heavens or down towards an earthly tomb? That part, to an extent, doesn’t matter. Past a sufficient height, it all becomes a single note in an operatic trill held too long. Worse than that, you lose the relative scope of it all and that buildup of anticipation fades away and turns into boredom.

This, if you’ll take it, is a metaphor for stories in video games. This is a parable for the direction that many narratives in our digital entertainment have gone. But it is also merely a symptom for a root cause that many have identified but few have fixed.

If I could boil it all down to a single statement, it would be that our virtual storytellers are confusing meaning with scope, that bigger stakes are better stakes. They want to build the world’s tallest roller coaster but not the best roller coaster. Even though the best may also be the tallest in the world, they don’t forget the small stakes: a vertical corkscrew ascent that results in a mirrored descent, a sharp 90-degree twist after a four-second, 0-to-120mph drop, and an 85-degree plunge back down to Earth.

But those crafting the stories we revel in through our tablets and our controllers seem content at keeping you up at those stratospheric heights, failing to utilize all of that potential energy we just spent nearly half of the ride gaining. Though not purely an indictment of blockbuster hits, many triple-A games seem emblematic of this problem, that we turn the knob up to 11 and leave it there.

This was actually a lingering critique of many (all?) post-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare entries into the storied first-person franchise. Where do you go after you threaten the world with nukes? What about after you actually blow one up? Two nukes? Twenty nukes? It’s a rising escalation that has lost its footing, to where you lose the relative scale of the implications of these actions.

That bar keeps getting raised, but now there seems to be less space at the top. Mass Effect was a trilogy built on the premise of saving the entire known universe. Halo went from saving our little rinky-dink planet Earth to also saving the whole universe. Assassin’s Creed went from Desmond Miles trying to learn about his family to, once again, preventing the mass eradication of everything everywhere. You can only save the world so many times from certain annihilation at the hands of Locusts or Necromorphs or Helghast or Chimera before you just become numb to the whole “being a hero” thing.

Of course, being a hero doesn’t necessarily have to mean preventing humanity’s extinction, nor is this a put-down or categorical admonition of the entire triple-A gaming sector, but it does make you consider where that switch flips from quantity to quality, so to speak. There is no minimum size for these stakes.

There is a game that a lot of people have been talking about lately called Papers Please. Described as a “dystopian document thriller,” it’s a game made by Lucas Pope that requires you to play the role of an immigration inspector at a border town in the middle of a raging war. You, however, take no part in this war between Arstotzka and Kolechia and instead just stamp passports. You’ll check names, look up rules, interrogate people, and try to earn money so your family doesn’t die. It reminds me an awful lot of Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life except with a lot more of that hot stamping action.

And just like the recent IGF winner in Cart Life, Papers Please specializes in those small scale dramas. My actions, for the most part, have no direct impact on the war, let alone the rest of the world. I am not a single superpowered soldier that will solely determine the outcome of the galaxy; I am just a man trying to make a living. And when my son gets sick, I worry. When I have to reject a mother trying to see her son for having late papers, my heart breaks. Every little thing is so small and means so little to everyone else, but they are the only things that exist in my world.

It’s this economy of scale that is important, not the actual size of your measuring stick. Not only can I relate to trying to do a good job and failing, but it is all this character has and he is failing at it. In Cart Life, getting custody of my daughter may not mean anything to anyone else, but showing up late to pick her up from school is more devastating that if a hundred nukes go off in the next Call of Duty.

Pope actually seems to specialize in these sorts of games, these singular experiences where he maximizes his component utilities. 6 Degrees of Sabotage is about determining the network of ne’er-do-wells surrounding a bomb that went off an hour ago. The bomb has already detonated, the damage has been done, and you are simply figuring out a mystery. If Modern Warfare covers the action-packed attempt to prevent the bomb from going off, 6 Degrees of Sabotage is about the aftermath where you review security tapes, and it is gripping.

Pope’s The Republia Times has you as an editor-in-chief trying to steer public opinions of your nation with your editorial oversight, and it, too, is gripping (if a bit rudimentary). There are plenty of these smaller games that are diminutive in both production and narrative scope. You aren’t preventing the destruction of any planets or ensuring the longevity of the human race, but you are doing things that matter wholly and completely to the character at hand, and that is what is important.

Getting the right amount of homogenization is important. Riding that space elevator will be a technological achievement and insanely useful, but it won’t be much fun on your fourth day of your trip up. There’s a new roller coaster opening up this month at Alton Towers in the United Kingdom called The Smiler. It features not one or two but fourteen loops. It is nothing but after a paltry 98-foot drop reaching 52 MPH. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth loop, I’m guessing you won’t but much into loops anymore. And after the fourth or fifth time you save the world, you get kind of numb to the idea of being humanity’s last chance.

So who’s up for some grilling?

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Review: Neon the Right Track

I can’t really remember the last time Michael Biehn was such a hot topic, but then again, I wasn’t alive for his Terminator and Aliens runs as Kyle Reese and Dwayne Hicks respectively, nor was I conscious enough of the outside world to keep up with the industry surrounding movies when he was unrelenting in his 90s movie production.

It turns out, though, that he’s never gone away; his movie credits only grow more and more impressive as time goes on. But he seems to have taken a step towards the realm of video games as of late. Earlier this year, he reprised his role of Corporal Hicks in Aliens: Colonial Marines and now he’s Sergeant Rex Power Colt in Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a standalone expansion to last year’s Far Cry 3. It’s a surprising, hyper 80s twist to the rather superb original release, and Biehn, quite frankly, excels as a cyber supersoldier. His commitment is stellar. The problem is that Blood Dragon itself seems to falter.

At its most fundamental level, Blood Dragon is pretty much Far Cry 3 proper in that you play from a first-person perspective, clear outposts, and occasionally hunt things. The framework is still there in that you sneak around bases and can distract guards and hold a button to heal yourself, but now it’s drenched in the neon glow of the 1980s. Think back to when you would go to Blockbuster and browse the action section, looking for the most ostentatious cover you could find. The more gaudy, the better! Skip over The Running Man and Cyber Tracker, though, because you’ll just keep picking Blood Dragon from now until the end of time.

The year is 2007, the unknown future, and the aforementioned cyber supersoldier Rex Power Colt (an absurd and amazing name) must head to an island to stop his former commander from doing, um, something. It’s nefarious and involves blood dragons and missiles and is about as relevant to the game as the actual story of The Delta Force is to The Delta Force. It’s simply a means to an end, and while the means can be pretty fun, the end is what really matters here.

And to that point, it succeeds, if not completely. If Blood Dragon‘s goal was simply to finish the race, then congratulations, but it does stumble quite a bit along the way. The aesthetic, for example, is oozing with style. It has convinced me wholeheartedly that more games need to be made in this exact milieu, complete with ambient rainbow glows and scratchy scanlines. The entire game, though, comes across as too dark, to the point where you feel like you’re struggling to see things further than 10 feet away from you.

The tutorial could have been the strongest part of the game, but it lacks the commitment that makes B-movies ironically great. Some of the stuff is genuinely funny such as when it describes what jumping and crouching do, but when it calls you a nerd for throwing a d20 (a twenty-sided die usually used for tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons), it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You just spent so much time committing to this one gag on an overly controlling and self-serious tutorial. Why ruin it by basically breaking down the fourth wall and asking the player, “Hey, this is pretty funny, right? Throwing dice? Eh? EEHH?!”

Perhaps more emblematic is that fact that you throw a d20 at all. What was wrong with just throwing a rock? Just call it a cyber rock and you have a more fitting and funnier joke. Actually, it would have been better even if the entire game was d20-type of goofs because then it would have been at least consistent, which is perhaps the most important thing when it comes to B-movie pleasure. The fact that the game doesn’t harp on your ninja star stealth kill chain move is what makes it work, but having loading screens full of snark really becomes self-defeating. It also doesn’t help that the very first thing you do is engage in a turret sequence, though the song kind of makes it worth it.

The whole cloth infusing that takes place in Blood Dragon is, however, mostly good. Everything you remember outside of the core mechanics have been affected by the cyber bug of the expansion. Outposts no longer serve you up animals in cages that do the work for you. Now, instead, you’ll have to lower the shields surrounding them and lure in the giant, ornery blood dragons with cyber hearts that you collect from corpses. And while you’ll still collect experience points and unlock skills, there is no longer a skill tree; you simply unlock a predetermined set of skills—most of which are taken straight from the main Far Cry 3—with each level you gain.

Now, in addition to hunting side quests, you can also go on hostage rescues. There will be a scientist you’ll have to liberate from a patrolled area, and if you alert anyone, enemies in the vicinity will immediately head back to your charge and start lighting him up like a god damn Christmas tree. And in completing these side quests, you’ll unlock weapon attachments like silencers and explosive rounds.

And, of course, there’s the soundtrack, which is utterly sublime. If I could just stare at the main splash screen and listen to the soundtrack on loop, I would be content for at least three to four hours. Wait, did I say hours? I meant days. No, make that weeks. Whatever, just get out of my room and let me listen to this retro-future cyber punk rock electro house surf metal.

Blood Dragon is, undoubtedly, a good game. It doesn’t hurt that it’s built on top of an already fantastic game in its own right in Far Cry 3, but Blood Dragon definitely comes in and adds its own spin to the proceedings. It’s audio and visual flair are what bring the heat and turn a patently absurd and risky maneuver into a resounding success.

Now if only they could figure out what to do with it. The humor comes from two disparate places, as if there were two different writers unknowingly contributing to the same game. As they say, shit or get off the pot, and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is trying to do both. Instead of creating a cohesive, fantastically retro while amazingly modern throwback package (that could make a compelling argument for more standalone expansions on its own), you have a visually stunning, mechanically sound game steeped in the cyber-fascination of the 80s that doesn’t know what it wants to do with itself. If Biehn can commit, why can’t you?

+ The entire audio and visual treatment is mind-blowingly awesome
+ Built on the strong fundamentals of Far Cry 3, Blood Dragon succeeds at just feeling like a good game to play
+ Dialogue and jokes, when they hit, work disgustingly well at being simultaneously stupid and appropriate
+ The non-syringe healing animations are pretty great, as is the entire ending
- At times, the game seems too self-aware and fights against itself and how its genre (80s action) works

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Anno Online Preview: Play With Anno-thers

Up until last year, I’d never played an Anno game. I definitely knew of the franchise but that was about it. More than that, I only knew it as “that SimCity-like game,” which I realize is totally unfair to the entire Anno series, but here we are. And it was only through that unfortunate stigma that I finally got around to playing Anno 2070 after the entire SimCity always-online debacle when Ubisoft discounted it and every website and their mother (a newspaper? How does that work?) suggested other city-building alternatives.

And I really enjoyed it! It’s a fun game and has its own quirks, highlights and lowlights, but I definitely liked it enough to go back and play a few other franchise entries. It made me realize, though, that I really only had room in my life for roughly one city-builder video game a year, maybe less. It’s a rather isolating experience to play such games, both physically and mentally. Amongst the fleshy bodies of the world, you often seclude yourself to engage in digital entertainment, but the mental isolation was so much more taxing. You would sit and ponder this nonexistent, practically hypothetical world that only you could rummage about in, dreaming up and concocting situations to get yourself into and out of.

SimCity addressed that by putting your cities right up against other cities in a region, shoulder-to-shoulder sharing resources and traffic. It was an interesting idea, if a tad poorly executed since it eventually limited you to what type of city you could build in addition to the size. Luckily, though, Ubisoft and Blue Byte, publisher and developer of Anno Online respectively, have decided to rectify this injustice, so I took a key to their closed beta lock and took a look around.

Anno Online is an MMO still in the style of the traditional series, which is to say you’ll be building structures, managing populations, and optimizing economies from an isometric perspective. The kicker is that you’ll be doing it online with a bunch of other players. Actually, there are several kickers, so get your shin guards on.

First off, it’s free-to-play. That usually has some poor connotations on its own, but nothing egregious purchase-wise has jumped out at me yet (yet). Second, it’s browser-based. Or more accurately, it’s Adobe Flash-based and you play it through a browser. So if you want to write up some diatribe about more always-on video games, go ahead, but the trade-off here is that you can play it on pretty much any computer with Flash installed on it.

This puts it in direct competition with several other browser-based, free-to-play city-building games out there like Immortal Cities: Nile Online, Evony, and even Blue Byte’s own The Settlers Online. It’s already a crowded market, so despite setting itself apart from the rest of the Anno games, you have to wonder how they plan on making it to the front of the pack with the rest of the Flash F2P runners.

Well I can’t be sure if their plan will work in the long term, but I can tell you what they’ve done so far. First and foremost, Anno Online probably has the best presentation of the bunch, which is not surprising given the rest of the series. The interface is most like Anno 2070 but the visual milieu reminds me most of Dawn of Discovery, and if you’ve played The Settlers Online, it is perhaps most reminiscent of that but with a more deeply saturated color palette and textured veneer. But the buildings and ships and everything are indeed charming. They are nothing more than sprites laid over one another, but it comes together in a cohesive, quaint visual package that I really appreciate.

And it’s good there’s a lot to just stare at from the get-go—though you won’t immediately see all of its 120+ building types from the start—because it’s a slow burn. The introduction is lengthy and a bit on the dragging side of things (and highlights the oddly cumbersome road-building tool), but it also is probably necessary given that this is an attempt to bring in players unfamiliar with the Anno series and the builder genre in general. And even as someone somewhat steeped in the conventions being laid out to me, I found it useful and hid the Anno-style complexities rather well. I didn’t realize how far spread my influence had grown until I stopped and looked around all my network of old timey machinations.

Your network, though, will soon interact with other networks, and necessarily so. Some of the more impressive structures like huge Gothic cathedrals and whatnot require cooperation to build. Trading is actually a large part of the game as you can ship off resources to those less fortunate (or less skilled) than you and you can watch ships from other player islands come in stocked to the brim with goods (ships can be customized so others may begin to recognize certain boats coming and going).

While interacting with all the social hooks of Anno Online can help speed up your fungibility, none of it is required, though it is great at encouraging you to try it out. You can just as easily muck about in your own island slots. As you grow your starting island of fixed layout but somewhat random contents, you will be able to set sail to colonize your other parcels of land, each with their own minable resources. However, you can circumvent that with trading, or supplement it to build faster. The desire to get the game going faster is key to urging the inter-player economy, and it works because holy crap does the solo drive feel slow.

But if you do want to go it alone, you can engage in some microtransactions to boost your progress acceleration as well as unlock additional islands for you to expand to. This doesn’t feel especially dirty, but given how easy it is to take the already snail-like pace down to dead snail speed, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. And once PVP gets involved, competition-based microtransactions always feel a bit unsavory.

Which is a shame because so far, I kind of like Anno Online. There are some great multiplayer hooks with global leaderboards and a nice chat system, game design that encourages social interactions for bumps in trading and economy, and a leisurely approach to the gameplay. It may be painfully slow to some players, but Anno Online seems specifically designed for 30-minute bursts of fine-grained micromanagement. There is an underlying complexity here and that is very much in the style of past Anno games, and that’s definitely a good thing.

I’ll have some closed beta keys to give out a bit later, but definitely keep this one on your radar if you’re into building cities and maximizing economies. Anno Online is a free-to-play, browser-based city-builder that just might be worth keeping tabs on. An open beta is coming with no official release date set.

Concept Art Roundup: Beyond: Two Souls, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Rainbow 6: Patriots, And More

All right, so maybe this Concept Art Roundup thing isn’t going to be as regular as I’d hoped, but after the Weekend Play thing petered out, what did you expect? Well, maybe I should bring that back, too. What if I just did a Daily Grace-style thing where every day is a set theme? Would anyone prefer that to me just rambling almost every single day on something nobody really wants to read about? Talk to me!

Anyways, back to the matter at hand. This collection of concept art is particularly exciting because there are some unreleased games in here. I had a whole slew of Gears of War 3 and Guild Wars 2 pieces all picked out for today, but then I stumbled across these little gems. There’s not much there—just a couple of concepts and promo things—but it’s still pretty neat considering this may fuel whatever imagination engine you have running your head about these games.

There are some old games in there, too, because the art was just too good to ignore. Also, I had to flesh this one out a bit, but it really is because these concept artists are so damn talented. If I could, I would dump everything at once and just let your eyes glaze over like little Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

In fact, let’s start with a previously released game in Halo 4. This comes from a fellow named Nicolas Bouvier, though he seems to much rather go by his Internet pseudonym Sparth. He currently works at 343 Industries and was actually the lead concept artist for the game. He previously worked on Rage by Id Software, Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, and Alone in the Dark 4, all of which I consider fantastic games with fantastic art. I wonder if Bouvier has anything to do with it…

This next bit is going to be a tad more low profile. All right, a lot more low profile. How many of you have heard of Asura Online? I see like one hand up, and that’s okay. I only know it by name and almost nothing else, but an MMO fiend friend of mine gave me the highlights: it’s an action RPG MMO set in a craggly-looking fantasy world viewed from an isometric perspective. It’s apparently pretty good, but also it’s also entirely in Chinese, so just know that if you decide to set out looking to play it.

But that’s not the point. The point is that the art is pretty effing rad. All I know is that this guy is named Yang Qi and lives in Shenzhen. He’s also fairly active on Weibo, a Chinese chimera beast of Twitter and Facebook and all the rage over there. Based on Chrome’s built-in translation feature, he seems to love sharing art (natch). But check out this art!

Next up is Geoffroy Thoorens. He currently works at Applibot, creators of Legend of the Cryptids and employer of an odd number of concept artists I’ve come across today, but he has also worked on Sonic Unleashed, R.U.S.E., and, most notably, Beyond: Two Souls, the upcoming Quantic Dream game/experiment/Twitter discussion fodder generator starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. Really, there are just two pieces of the game that I could find, but they are pretty great. The other two are from Galaxy Saga, the newest battle card game from the aforementioned Applibot.

Huddled up all the way over at Ubisoft Singapore is Jan Urschel, a concept designer and jazz lover (or so he says). Despite that, he’s got two pieces of EA’s Command & Conquer floating around out there. I guess he does contract work through West Studio who was signed on to work on the game or something. I don’t know. What I do know is that looking at this here tank makes me want to play the upcoming RTS like crazy hard. The other two pieces are just some great things he drew that I kind of love.

Lastly, we have Xavier Thomas, better known as Seed Seven and one dot of Two Dots. With Two Dots, he’s worked on with Riot Games, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and many other studios. As Seed Seven, he’s worked on Assassin’s Creed III (he did the Game Informer cover and a lot of the iconic marketing imagery), the insanely stylistic Prince of Persia reboot, and now two upcoming Tom Clancy Ubisoft games: Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Rainbow 6: Patriots. Blacklist at least so far looks like a decent game and Patriots has gone radio silent since its first announcement (though it might now be a next-gen game), but with Thomas working on the art, we know they’ll both at least look good.

He’s also got some stuff up for an unannounced sci fi thing called T.Project that looks interesting, one of which looks especially like it’s straight out of Prometheus.

The Value of E3

Since 1995, the Electronic Entertainment Expo has been an annual gathering of the gaming industry. Usually in Los Angeles and usually around May or June, developers, designers, writers, journalists, and PR folk would descend upon a hapless city in droves, wreak havoc, and leave the scene of the crime like a night of bumper cars gone awry. At its biggest, it drew 70,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center, an unwieldy amount of bodies confined to a single sweaty downtown location.

The ESA (Entertainment Software Association, the organization that runs E3 and does a rather poor job representing digital rights) then tried to trim the fat and move to an invitation-only scheme in Santa Monica, but the industry revolted. “The spectacle,” they would yell, “the spectacle is it!” To that end, they do have a point: 2005 was the biggest year for E3 attendance and it was the first year to be televised on any network. The ESA stuck with it for a year before calling it on their botched experiment and the droves came back.

But why?

The original purpose of E3 was to get games and hardware into the hands of buyers for stores and chains so that they could decide how much to stock and thus evaluate budgets and sales projections. It was, by all accounts, an industry event. As it ballooned out to ridiculous proportions and as journalists, bloggers, and TV crews crashed the party, all of those formerly upfront industry sales meetings took place in secret, to the point where few attendees were event aware that there was a hidden, back alley E3.

This ushered in a new iteration of the flashy carnival that focused almost entirely on educating the press and thus educating the mainstream consumer. It was easy to do because everyone would show up; this was the show to go to. Writers would mostly get a straightforward info dump with some nice presentation around the edges and PR would rely on those staffed keyboard jockeys and freelancers to filter out and disseminate key pieces to their readers. The Internet existed but in only in such a nascent form. Information was still collated and groomed for fine display to hungry masses.

Whether this was because the technology was not capable or the sources of said information found the process too time-consuming is an unknown (it was a mix of both most likely). However, once the television barrier was broken in 2005, something clicked: direct access was possible. Over the next few years, it eventually became commonplace for all the big pre-E3 (prE3?) press conferences from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, EA, etc. to be streamed in some form online. Sony started to show their stuff in Home and Microsoft would stream through some Dashboard portal.

But this was direct, shared access. Even to this day, all of those press events that are streamed provide access to their feed and drops for websites. This is so they can capture their own footage or stream their own stuff over the actual presentation. It was a concession of the fact that not everyone that wanted to watch the conference had the aforementioned proprietary access points.

Apple, however, showed it was possible to host one-off events and still draw in a crowd. Granted, this is Apple we’re talking about here and they offer some of the most popular products in the history of products, possibly even rivaling the sales of the Bible, but they did make the point: if you had things that people wanted, they would pay attention no matter the location, time, or medium. People would travel to and pack into the Moscone Center in San Francisco or watch illicit shaky cam streams or read multiple liveblogs just to see what they were doing.

Nintendo has been making similar moves with their Nintendo Direct events. Nintendo Directs are online streaming broadcasts that simply sum up and present new games or hardware or goals for the next quarter or so. Sometimes they’ll stack them up multiple times in a week or month. And they are, for the most part, very successful. Just last year was indicative of the movement: their E3 event was egregiously lackluster, but people went bananas over everything they announced in the following Nintendo Direct stream. It was puzzling at the time, but now it makes sense.

It makes sense because just two weeks ago, it was announced that Nintendo would not be doing its usual E3 press conference. It was shocking at first, but then they said that those Nintendo Direct events would take place, as would smaller meetings during the gigantic June gathering. And then news hit that 2K, who had one of the largest booths last year (all right, so it was more like a set of huge meeting rooms on the show floor), would not be present at the convention. Like, at all. Take-Two Interactive will just be taking meetings during the week.

Combine that with the fact that since the rebirth into the grand spectacle that it once was—or as close as the ESA will allow it sans disturbing amounts of booth babes and billion-dollar setups—E3 attendance has only manage to hover around the low to mid 40,000s. Last year, in fact, was a 2% decline from 2011.

The epiphany that direct access is possible is spreading and the question of E3′s value is forming. There are many journalists that I know last year simply watched press events on G4 despite being just a block away in their hotel rooms. Bundled up previews aren’t as important anymore as they are largely distributed via Steam and PSN and XBLA codes or through traveling press tours for the bigger titles. This, of all years, appears to be the first notable movement of the question why bother with E3?

Covering E3 is tiring. It is a week of nonstop work. You wake up at seven in the morning, sit through meetings and presentations, walk back and forth through a seemingly endless convention center for 10 hours, talk to developers, transcribe audio, write up countless preview and news pieces, and then head out into the night to mingle with the industry. You’re lucky to get four hours of sleep. And all of that could be rectified in PR just sent out codes and press releases and the big publishers and manufacturers had accessible online streams. So why bother?

Well, even after my relatively limited experience with actually attending E3, it became very clear to me that there is one absolutely clear advantage to collecting every single person in the industry, dumping them into 867,000 square feet: the atmosphere. To anyone who has been to a concert after listening to the entire discography of the artist they are about to see or a live improv show after seeing dozen of clips on YouTube can attest, it’s different when you see something in person, surrounded by other people, and experiencing the collective call and response.

It is, after all, the entire reason conventions like PAX and Comic-Con exist. People like doing things with other people because the feelings you have aren’t just heightened but they are altered. There is definitely a mob mentality to it all. When fans cheer to watch a trailer five times in a row at EVE Online’s Fanfest or thousands of people fall silent at god awful joke, you respond with an amplified and psychologically restructured voice. And that passion at what is an otherwise grueling endurance run of gauntlet-like interviews, previews, and handshakes is necessary to keep you going, even if the yelling and cheering is unseemly at what is supposed to be a professional event (seriously, people, lock it up. It’s embarrassing when you hoot and holler for an exceedingly violent kill in a trailer and enraging when you act like sexist assholes to the fantastic women of the industry—and yes, that includes the promo girls and booth babes. Also, stop cosplaying if you’re wearing a press badge).

This extends to actually meeting people. Unless you live in San Francisco or New York and know a few people up on the food chain, it’s hard to get any personal interactions with the editors of your inspirational outlets and designers of your favorite games. But at E3, you can just bump into Vinny or Brad from Giant Bomb and chat them up (if they’re not busy rushing off to an appointment) or see Hideo Kojima lounging at an after party. This is how you expand your network, and in the games industry, your network is everything. If you don’t know anyone, you’re pretty much worth nothing. But one solid endorsement from a reputable figurehead and you’ve got a foot in the door. Remember when I said that part of the E3 workday is heading out to parties? That’s work. You are meeting people and establishing connections.

Also, collecting business cards is kind of fun.

And as a smaller outlet run by a smattering of people in locations all over the world (none of which are San Francisco or New York), this may be the only way to get some hands-on time with hardware and software. Destructoid’s Dale North and what I think is the entirety of ScrewAttack are in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, but they are big names. We rarely warrant a personal visit to our nonexistent offices or a flight out to see a few hours of next month’s hottest game. Someday, maybe, but not now. Now we gear up to go to E3 and PAX Prime and QuakeCon and PAX East and…you get it.

E3, as far as I can tell, is on the path of CES; it simply trails by several years. It got big, blew up, and is on a course to be a smaller, more dedicated showcase of the industry. Big names will pull out their monolithic support but still appear here and there to show support and keep up in the headlines, but the convention will continue to double down on what Internet streams and press releases can’t copy: the people and the atmosphere.

Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine Review: Thievery in the Third Degree

Are you familiar with the saying “it’s not about the destination but the journey”? Of course you are; you’re not an idio—you’re an erudite-lookin’ fellow and it is a rather trite cliché at this point, bordering on a platitude. It is, actually, a bastardization/generalization of a (possible) Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “life is a journey, not a destination.” But if you’ll follow me one step further into the land of reappopriation, I’d like to throw one more up on the wall and see how it sticks.

Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine is not about the destination but the journey.

Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine is the latest out of Pocketwatch Games, Andy Schatz’s development studio. If either of those names sound familiar to you, it’s because either you’ve been keeping up with any amount of video game coverage in the past few years (Monaco has been in development for over three years, winning the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Excellence In Design award at the 2010 Independent Games Festival) or you’ve played one of this other Wildlife Tycoon sim games.

Monaco is a grand departure from both Venture Africa and Venture Arctic, though, as it’s top-down, four-player co-op stealth game about stealing stuff. Well, I guess it’s as much about actually heisting things as Moby-Dick is actually about a whale (hint: it’s not). Instead, Monaco is a grand experiment in multiplayer, cooperative chaos. Through two to four players connected either online or in person, they’ll guide eight characters through various mini escapades as they hide, run, and loot together.

Granted, you don’t need to play with other people; Monaco works fine on it’s on as a single-player game, but it thrives on having people around you to share in your nonsense. By yourself, it’s still an incredibly charming and hectic little game, but the insanity takes exponential leaps similar to how adding just one extra player to New Super Mario Bros. Wii amplified the anarchy to the n^th degree. Nothing is gated off to having a party with you or to particular characters, though you will find some bits much more annoying or tiresome. Just know that you’re missing out on half of what makes Monaco fun if you dive in solo.

That is, to say, teamwork, or rather the attempt and failure at it. Starting out with the four initial characters, their interplay makes sense: the Cleaner can knock out non-alerted enemies, the Locksmith can open locks super-duper fast, the Pickpocket can hide in bushes really quickly and send a monkey named Hector to surreptitiously pick up coins, and the Lookout is incredibly quick and mobile but can see all NPCs when sneaking. Each person on a four-man team can assume a role and get things done without much oversight or coordination. Just know that if you die, that character is done for the remainder of the job.

Once you introduce the other four characters, though, and you’ve got some interesting things going on because then interactions actually happen. The Redhead can, in addition to seducing guards, revive fallen comrades in a snap while the Hacker and the Gentleman can synchronize disguised movements and hacked security systems to crack open a safe. The Mole is an interesting wildcard as his ability to crazy useful (digs through walls) but also causes a lot of noise, so his actions must be carefully considered. All jumbled up, you eventually begin to decipher the special use cases of each character and how they can align, enabling optimal setups for each particular mission.

And make no mistake: Monaco is all about those careful considerations gone awry. I have no doubt that some players will have a knack of creeping through the entire game without alerting a single guard or camera, but most people will leap before they look and end up in a Benny Hill-like chase. And that’s okay! Monaco has a modern take on stealth in that it is very forgiving. Well, allow me to rephrase: it’s forgiving in that it doesn’t punish you for making a mistake, not that guards are totally inept (though they do seem to have extremely poor vision and hearing) or that you can sneak through an entire level without trying. If you get caught, it’s no problem because you can just as easily complete your mission while on the run.

In fact, “on the run” is how you should spend most of the game because 1) it’s more fun that way, and 2) it makes you complete levels faster, which is the only metric the game has for your completion status. Missed coins merely add seconds to your finish time and affect your leaderboard rankings. There is a certain pride and joy to be taken with completing a job as intended, but the serendipity of when things go wrong just can’t be beat.

Perhaps the only two things that can compete with that sensation of OHGODOHGODOHGODKEEPRUNNINNNNGGGGGG are the art style and the soundtrack. Composed by Grammy-nominated Journey songsmith Austin Wintory, the piano-laden, pop-ragtime beats of Monaco really keep the atmosphere going. From when you’re sneaking around to when you are blitzing your way to the getaway with an irresponsible and reckless abandon, the score is pretty much perfect and always keeps your heart rate similarly thumping along.

And if the music keeps the mood going, the visuals are what set it. All you can really see of the world is a darkened, monochrome version of it where you seem to only get a visual, grayscale representation of some blueprints. This, thematically, makes sense as you are professional thieves, but it also opens the game up to its unique line-of-sight lighting system. It’s being borrowed now by many other indie games, but at the time, Monaco was maybe one of two or three others that utilized this mechanic: only things you can make direct eye contact with are illuminated. This means that as you pass by a row of pillars, colors seem to explode out of your character and highlight doors and bushes and guards.

It’s a bit disorienting and confusing at first (and, in some cases, consistently as objects are sometimes difficult to discern from the background), but it’s utterly enchanting and taxes your spatial memory in ways it rarely is otherwise. It can induce sections of trial and error where you poke and prod at the level design (which is, for the most part, fantastic) until it becomes seared into your mind for facilitated navigation and pilfering, an invocation that can get tiring in the later, more challenging levels, but it is a skill so rarely utilized in most other games.

This welcome addition of cognitive load works hand-in-hand with a simplified control structure. All you really have are directional controls, an item button, and a sneak button. To activate doors and computers and whatnot, you simply press against it and fill up a meter. To reload a weapon, you just collect more coins, which is a bit off-putting at first. And for all the zany runarounds you’ll engage in, the game actually moves at a rather slow pace. It simply feels quick. It comes across as the video game equivalent of the tone set by The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven; they’re slick, cool rides down a thievery-infused mountain.

That breezy, smooth slope, however, hits some bumps towards the end when the difficulty makes the game a chore. It becomes tedious as you have to go back through the same stages on the second tier but with the added goal of getting every collectible. It’s simple on the smaller, earlier missions, but as the number of things you have to snag get unwieldy, you’ll feel like throwing your controller against a wall after sneaking around for half an hour only to realize you’ve missed a single coin somewhere along the way.

Of course, that is a minority portion of the whole game. It’s a problem that permeates the entire product to varying degrees, but they are merely bumps on an otherwise sharp, deft ride. It’s a design philosophy that mirrors the game itself; you are given a beginning and an end but everything in between is up to you, and you may cause a lot of bumps yourself. The difference, though, is that those of your own creation are fun and those inextricably tied to the game are not. But after an otherwise fantastically designed journey, it’s hard to find fault with either it or the destination.

+ Looks and sounds great and totally unique with an abundance of charm
+ The characters and their bits of slowly meted out story are fun
+ A streamlined control scheme enhances the cognitive load as more pleasurable than taxing
+ Provides a great argument for couch co-op games
- The latter portions of the game become difficult in an aggravating way and kind of makes you want to yell

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Guacamelee! Review: A Luchadelight

The thesis statement (if previews of video games about supernatural luchadores can have such a thing) of last year’s PAX Prime coverage of Guacamelee! could probably be summed up in the question “why not?” In my short time with Drinkbox Studios’ third release then, it came across as an appropriate response to all the nonsense going on such as morphing into a chicken and a rather spectacular portmanteau’d title, but it had no bearing on the quality of the game. As a side-scrolling indie brawler, your expectations are exactly what you bring to it from past experiences, but at every turn, it seems Drinkbox instead asks why not make a great game?

Guacamelee! is a 2D platformer with a lot of style and sass. It’s about a fellow named Juan Aguacate who does nothing more than work in an agave field and watch as the luchadores go on to be hailed heroes of the Pueblucho community. In this world, lucha libre produce singular warriors that fight to defend the helpless and their honor, and Juan has nothing going for him expect some plebeian and reciprocal crush on El Presidente’s daughter. Then, on Dia de Muertos, Carlos Calaca, an evil charro skeleton who rules the world of the dead, kidnaps her and sets out to make her his queen as he merges the realms of the living and the dead together.

This sounds like a heavy, grave situation, but Guacamelee! takes it in stride; the game is nothing if not lighthearted. It is rife with humor, and not just throwaway jokes that you might simply sit and stare at as you acknowledge its joke-like qualities, but things that you will actually chuckle and snicker at.

And all of the references that the developers manage to tuck away into the corners and backgrounds of Guacamelee are mind-numbing. At every turn, you’ll see something that will make you go “oh, that’s from Final Fantasy!” or “oh my gosh, that makes me want to play Castle Crashers right now!” And more often than not, this is presented in the context of actual, real jokes. This is hard in any medium, but when gags and storytelling usually exist as a necessity and sometimes serve as inconveniences to actually playing the game, the fact that Guacamelee! does it right is rather impressive.

In fact, all of the surrounding accoutrement of Guacamelee! is impressive. The art style is perhaps the first thing you’ll notice as video games are a visual medium, but it won’t be the first thing you forget. It’s simple but striking. Characters are flat chunks of color assembled into ambulatory caricatures but they are set against smooth backgrounds of subtle gradients and superb use of depth-of-field. The hues of the world simply pop, for lack of a better word, and match well with the bumping club/house-style ranchera mixed with some mariachi influences. If you have a decent sound system, be sure to pump up the volume because it is some addictive aural goodness.

Both of those things are even more noteworthy when you consider that for as much as Drinkbox had to create to flesh out a full, living world, they had to double it to also create a dead one, too. Juan, you see, gains a supernaturally powered luchador mask and, as he progresses through the game, gains powers. He does it by busting up some rather familiar looking and sounding statues or by receiving them from other empowered folk, and one of them is the power to switch between the living and the dead at will.

The switching actually plays a lot into the gameplay and doesn’t just have some implications and impetus within the story. As you switch dimensions, things that exist in one world may disappear as they don’t exist in the other or vice versa. The lesson of them being absolutely parallel worlds is driven home in the solution to a few of the side quests as you are heartily made to realize that these are indeed the living and those are indeed the dead. They are actually a few of the more somber moments of the game and they hit rather hard.

But all that world switching also impacts the platforming and fighting. As you jump around, you’ll have to switch between the two realities to prevent yourself from getting impaled on some spikes or to create a ledge to stand on. One of the most grueling and devious platforming sections I’ve ever played (it’s totally optional, though) in any game exists in Guacamelee! and is qualified as such in no small part due to the dimensional interplay. And when the control is taken out of your hands, well, just be ready to have some sweaty hands.

The fighting is, for the most part, sectioned off into arenas where the game will literally stop you dead in your tracks and force you to fight a few rounds of enemies, usually topped off with a piñata full of coins you can bust open. The combat starts out simple to where you have one button to punch, another to jump, and another to dodge. Damage a bad guy enough and you can engage them in a grapple, and if you combine the stick direction with the punch, you can do uppercuts and downward slams. Simple, right?

Well, as you earn powers that also unlock additional areas of the map (this is, after all, a Metroidvania-style game), the circle button becomes dedicated to moves that drain your stamina meter. You have an air dash that can also punch the crap out of dudes, a headbutt that will launch people across the room, an uppercut that reminds me an awful lot of the up+B moves in Super Smash Bros., and a belly flop that stuns a wide area of bad guys. And then you can launch off of walls and up ledges, all of which double as great, room-clearing moves and triple as platforming necessities (hence the sweat-inducing difficulty levels in the optional stuff).

It all seems a bit disjointed until you find a gym with a chicken that will train you in some killer, amazingly intricate combos. They force you to not only input commands in a timely manner but manage you spacing and stamina. Eventually, you’ll have to put in a string of commands that spans the entire width of your television and, having just played Injustice: Gods Among Us, it is on par with most fighting games in terms of demand on the player. It is refreshing, seeing as how Guacamelee! could have just as easily turned out to be nothing more than a button-masher.

A lot of the design seems to be imbued with that sense, that it turned out a lot better than it could have been (or maybe should have been). The level designs are especially noteworthy because they are, more or less, linearly designed but feel a lot more open than they actually are. Some dungeons are entirely vertical while others are sprawling spiderwebs of offshoots and branches. And when you backtrack to finish off all of the collectibles, they still feel fairly fresh as new abilities open up new traversal options or entirely new areas.

Enemy designs are varied and their abilities are, for the most part, nuanced (you do deal with a fair amount of baddies who do nothing more than throw or smash) when combined with attack- or world-specific shields and vulnerabilities. The actual controls are responsive and feel as tight as a fitted tee on an overly confident McDonald’s addict. You have full air control that doesn’t feel neutered by the lack of ground-based traction and button inputs that utilize pre-loading. I never felt like I didn’t have a handle on Juan and thus never felt like I didn’t have a handle on the game.

The problems are few and far between: occasionally artificial-feeling backtracking shortcuts, co-op that produces more problems than fun, and an upgrade system that doesn’t seem to make any especially standout changes to Juan. The side quests can also feel a bit off-base and feel overly superfluous, as can a few of the jokes. A couple even feel dated, if only by a few months. But every instance of bad is spread out so far in this seven-hour experience that at each encounter, you can barely remember the last one. It continues at a quick and unrelenting pace that arouses a similar sense of compulsion as in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and contains no filler.

In many other online spaces, you’ll see people refer to Guacamelee! as retro or old school, but that is a disservice to the game. It merely borrows the concept of an open, two-dimensional world based on power acquisition, jumping, and fighting. It defies the temptation to be mired in tropes that don’t serve its own desires and instead responds with the same old question: why not? Why not make a Metroidvania-style game that doesn’t try to be either Metroid or Castlevania? Why not make an exceptional platformer and intricate brawler? Why not make a great 2D side-scroller full of great art, fantastic music, and mostly impeccable humor? I guess Drinkbox Studios couldn’t think of an answer, so they made Guacamelee!

+ Gorgeous art design that bleeds style that keeps your eyes occupied while your ears dance to the butt-shaking beats
+ Platforming that requires patience, skill, and a deft hand
+ Combat that focuses on mechanical interactions and not on overloading the player with needless options
+ Tight and responsive controls that feel like you’re handling a Ferrari in the form of a hulking, magic-infused luchador
- A lot of the optional stuff like the co-op and the side quests don’t feel as well designed or as organic as the rest of the game

Final Score: 9 out of 10