Just a Few Reviews

Hey there! So, I’ve been absurdly busy this two weeks; a new school, gamedev work pick­ing up in pace, and crises arriv­ing and lin­ger­ing. It’s now come down to Sunday, though, and to be hon­est, I don’t have the capac­ity right now to really do jus­tice to the con­cept I wanted to talk about.

However, I did just get a little bundle, and so I fig­ured that I would review the games that I get in from a nar­ra­tive per­spec­tive. So essen­tially, I’ll be eval­u­at­ing whether they tell a qual­ity story, whether that story has good pac­ing, whether their char­ac­ters are believ­able or inter­est­ing, and so on and so forth. I imag­ine that I’ll make a habit of this, and will prob­a­bly do this in addi­tion to my typ­i­cal posts. Or, like this week, when I just don’t have the focus to write some­thing aston­ish­ing, it might fill in.

So, the first two games that I received were Transformers: War for Cybertron and Dead Space 2…

Transformers: Battles in Robotland

My first impres­sion of T:WFC wasn’t all that pos­i­tive. For one thing, I found the set­tings to be so clut­tered and over-designed that it was dif­fi­cult to tell what on the screen was me, or an Autobot foe, or an explo­sive ele­va­tor. To com­pli­cate the mat­ter, the cam­paign starts on the Decepticon side, so the first few sce­nes all fea­ture Megatron’s cease­less mono­logu­ing, which is a taste I find impos­si­ble to acquire. However, as my eyes slowly grew used to the game (a cog­ni­tive feat I can’t quite explain), my opin­ion soft­ened. While most of the Decepticon mis­sion were set to the boast­ful dron­ing voice of Megatron, the sup­port­ing Decepticon cast of syco­phants (and Soundwave) were actu­ally sim­per­ing qual­ity writ­ing. There is not much sub­tlety to the game’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, but the trans­form­ers, and espe­cially the Autobots, tend to grow on you. The Autobot mis­sions were much the supe­rior because the game por­trays the rise of Optimus Prime after the death of Zeta Prime, which is in all cases bet­ter than the Decepticon story, which has you access­ing the core of Cybertron, which is only opened by a key… which is a mas­sive killer robot. Getting to play Optimus Prime through that rise is an absolute plea­sure. Despite the moments of that rise, the plot felt a lit­tle scat­tered, but I’m pretty sure there’s a Confucian adage that says some­thing about look­ing for qual­ity plot in a Transformers game. Transformers may also have you won­der­ing how ecol­ogy works on a world that is both a robot and that has a bunch of robots liv­ing on it, and then han­ker­ing for some Autobot phi­los­o­phy to see how the hell they jus­tify that messed up world.

Space Just Got Dead

Dead Space 2 is fan­tas­tic. Nothing I say below this state­ment should at all sully the fact that Dead Space 2 is a bril­liant game, and that you should play it soon.

Just like in Dead Space, from the start of the game to its explo­sive fin­ish, there is not a sin­gle moment when Isaac is not on your screen. For 99.95% of the game, you have full con­trol of Isaac. It’s incred­i­bly immer­sive, and I can finally say that giv­ing a voice to Isaac was a jus­ti­fied move. He still speaks spo­rad­i­cally, as would be expected; if he’s not actively talk­ing to an NPC or a hal­lu­ci­na­tion, then he won’t be say­ing much. The necro­morphs aren’t inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion­al­ists (though if you stomp on the ground repeat­edly, he will start to shout, “Mother F***er!” in time to the stomps, which is a jus­ti­fied thing to say if you’re grind­ing a hor­ri­ble, vicious mon­ster into a pulp with your boot heel). But those hal­lu­ci­na­tions allow the game to dis­play Isaac’s inter­nal mono­logue in a nat­u­ral way, and Isaac is an inter­est­ing, tor­mented, and believ­able fel­low. He is also obvi­ously fed up with this necro­morph busi­ness, and it def­i­nitely shows in his dia­logue. It’s worth not­ing that Isaac is well voice-acted, and his dia­logue is qual­ity.

Isaac’s strug­gle is the focus of the game, but at the detri­ment of the plot fuel­ing the events of the game. Now, the con­cepts at work here, the story that could have been told, has a lot of merit. It’s unfor­tu­nate, then, that the plot receives lit­tle time to breathe and come into its own. The most inter­est­ing qual­i­ties of the events of the game, and the plot’s antag­o­nist (other than the necro­morphs), are only cemented in the last hour and a half of the game, and pre­sented to the player through text files alone. This is unfor­tu­nate. The story-telling of Dead Space worked so well because there wasn’t a lot of intrigue to the plot that had reduced the Ishimura to a necro­morph hunt­ing ground; the only sto­ries to tell were the sto­ries of peo­ple who had strug­gled to sur­vive on the ship, to no avail. They were meant not to con­struct a large nar­ra­tive, but to add atmos­phere and a human ele­ment to the ship. Dead Space 2 isn’t like that. These necro­morphs are appear­ing because of the med­dling of Isaac’s human foes. There’s inter­est­ing intrigue going on behind the sce­nes, but it only goes on behind the sce­nes. Squandered poten­tial, to be sure.

However, the other peo­ple that Isaac encoun­ters on the sta­tion are inter­est­ing folk. Ellie is a stand-out char­ac­ter. She’s tough but believ­able, evok­ing sym­pa­thy and dis­play­ing pain with­out ever seem­ing like a dis­tressed damsel. Better yet, Isaac’s rela­tion­ship with her is dis­tinctly non-romantic, and you actu­ally empathize with Isaac’s reac­tions to her predica­ments and behav­ior. Seeing Isaac and Ellie inter­act is very plea­sur­able. Nolan Stross is also an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. He’s a dan­ger­ously dis­turbed indi­vid­ual who, like Isaac, has been aversely affected by the alien Marker. He, unlike Isaac, killed his wife and child in the wake of his insan­ity. Better yet, Stross remem­bers more than Isaac does, and so Isaac is forced to keep the man around; it gen­er­ates an inter­est­ing rela­tional ten­sion that didn’t exist in the first Dead Space. The sup­port­ing cast is totally supe­rior to Dead Space’s cast. Neither Kendra nor Zach elicited near as much emo­tional response. For that mat­ter, the first chap­ter of Dead Space 2 is prob­a­bly the best; you watch the infec­tion spread wildly across a heav­ily pop­u­lated sec­tor of the space sta­tion, and see plenty of inno­cent peo­ple con­sumed by it. It’s cool to see it unfold, and adds more grav­ity to the rest of the game’s events.

I’ll end by not­ing that the end­ing is much bet­ter than Dead Space’s con­fus­ing cliff-hanger. It will leave you sat­is­fied… and say­ing, “I see what you did there.”