I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the storyline in Bodycount, which is all about the gunplay like a shooter should be. However, throughout the game, an obligatory female voice is talking you through the missions. She’s your handler or narrator or Cortana or whatever. This is how you’re supposed to figure out the story, but I was only half listening. Near the end of the game, she gets attacked and you have to mumblemumble data cores mumblemuble nexus mumblemumble cyber program mumblemumble to save her. And that’s when I realized the voice actress is a dead ringer for the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross. Who I’d much rather rescue than Neal Conan or Robert Siegel.
I’ll have a full review of Bodycount posted later this week. Until then, suffice to say Bodycount doesn’t close nearly as strong as it opens.
Everyone knows that strategic games with tactical battle engines are better than strategic games without them. Any game which tries to abstract out combat in the name of tighter, more thematic game design is eventually going to get crushed by complaints from gamers who want to fight out the battles turn by turn, or for truly advanced players, in real time. You know it, I know it, and the American people know it. So why do developers keep missing the boat? It’s so cute that you think I am about to give you the answer. I would never be that straightforward. Maybe I just don’t know.
After the jump, there are known unknowns, where we know what we don’t know Continue reading →
So far the most powerful weapon I’ve discovered in Dead Island is Xian’s high-heeled shoe. Once I’ve knocked a zombie to the ground, I can aim at its head and tap the E key to apply my shoe (pictured). It is the equivalent of going nuclear. Let’s look at the numbers.
The early trash weapons do about 30 or 40 points of damage. More durable weapons do two or three times that amount. As you upgrade weapons and specialize with your skills, you can get that into the 300 or 400 range. At level 20, with most of her points in combat skills, my Xian has a rare bolo machete given to her by a nun. After investing considerable lucre, the machete does 700 points of damage. A molotov cocktail will apply about 150 points of burning damage every second or so, pretty much until a zombie is dead. The first homemade bomb you discover will do 5000 points of damage.
Xian’s stomp routinely does over 20,000 points of damage.
As much as I’d love to consider Dead Island a subversive commentary on women’s footwear, it’s not just the high-heeled shoe. All four characters have a stomp attack once they get about half way into the combat branch of their skill trees. Stomps are actually — get this — a part of the game’s economy. Every point of damage you do without spending some of your weapon’s durability rating is money you’ll save on repairs. Timothy Geithner has nothing on me.
Shark Night, which features a scene in which a one-armed man wades out into waist-deep water and wins a hand-to-hand fight against a shark, introduces its cast with a pair of Tulane students playing Halo 3 in their dorm room. Microsoft’s shooter gets quite a bit of screen time, some map-specific discussion, and a generic Xbox shout-out. The word “pwned” is used unironically. And considering that the cast of this forgettable tripe is so uniformly unlikable — I was even rooting for the dog to die — I’m not the least bit surprised they’re the sort of people who play Halo online.
I was digging on Crimson Alliance, a simple and spirited action RPG that pulls back from the usual finicky loot chase in favor of a scoring model. You try to avoid taking damage to rack up a multiplier. At the end of the level, you earn points based on your combat effectiveness, the secret areas you’ve found, and the time you took to reach the end. If you finesse the multiplier, you can hit the score thresholds for silver and gold medals. That’s the overall metagame around the lively hacking-and-slashing.
But then I get to the business model for this Xbox Live Arcade game. I don’t really mind the overall pricing model. The three heroes are sold separately for $10 each, or for $15 for all three. That’s an interesting enough alternative to the usual price.
But then I get to the stores between each level, where you spend the gold you’ve accumulated to buy gear. Gear is a bit more meaningful than the usual action RPG, because there’s no leveling. Each character always has three attacks, but the attacks get more powerful based on which items you equip in each of a character’s three slots. Some equipment even gives you extra health, or a bonus tweak. This wizard’s orb might improve your direct flame attack and add a few points of health, but that wizard’s orb will boost your electricity crowd control attack as well as add a slight chance of critical hits. Simple meaningful choices without too much fuss. Now let’s go eff up some more goblins!
But what rubs me the wrong way is that each store includes a nag for you to buy 40,000 gold from the Xbox Live store. In the overall calculus of the game, 40,000 gold is an unbalancing metric butt-ton of money. It will basically unlock all the best items for each of your three slots. I’m guessing it will let you effortlessly plow through the levels, pretty much guaranteeing silver medals all the way.
Is Crimson Alliance supposed to work this way? Shouldn’t the developers tune their game* so the amount of gold you earn is commensurate with either the amount of time you’ve played, or how well you’ve played? When is gameplay just a grind that you should be able to buy your way past? Should indie developers shirk their duty like Electronic Arts routinely does, giving players the option to subvert whatever challenge level their game should provide? And should an indie developer include a nag for this every time I’m counting out my hard-earned gold for whatever minor item I can afford?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know that I lost interest in Crimson Alliance after being repeatedly nagged to pay extra money as an alternative to actually playing the game.
2 stars
* otherwise known as “doing their jobs”
Hey, look, it’s a found footage movie that goes, pow, straight to the moon! If you don’t want Apollo 18 spoiled, then fast forward to this week’s 3×3 at the 57-minute mark, where we discuss our favorite battles of the sexes.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
