A Few Comments on Vanquish

March 25th, 2013

It only took about half an hour of play for me to realise that Platinum Games is one of the world’s best game developers. Vanquish is a supremely well-designed action game that deserves more time than I’m about to give it. Consider these dot points as preliminary commentary for when I get back to Australia and can explore the game more thoroughly on its harder difficulties.

The slide boost and slowmo functions are tied to a visible cool down meter, which forces the player to carefully consider when to use these mechanics and for how long.
When the player’s health is low, the slowmo function is automatically activated. This makes it easier for them to dodge attacks and quickly retreat into cover, where their health can regenerate.
The player can only manually activate the slowmo function after rolling, slide boosting, jumping out from cover, or slide kicking an enemy. This limitation forces the player to strategically consider their plan of attack so that they can use the mechanics in tandem to turn the tides of a fight. More specifically:

Rolling – Access to the slowmo ability encourages the player to identify the enemy’s weak point (observation, knowledge), determine when they can roll around the enemy to get a clear shot at its weak point (space, knowledge), and then execute (dexterity, reflex).

Sliding Boosting– Because Sam Gideon slides so ridiculously fast, the slowmo is activated any time the player shoots in this state, allowing them to cleanly target enemies. If it weren’t, shooting when slide boosting would clutter the game design. By joining the two mechanics, the player’s presented with a meaningful strategic choice: use the boosters to get behind enemy lines and then keep going forward or flank the enemy with a few melee moves or shotgun blasts (less cool down juice) or slowmo as you slide in, picking apart the enemy line (more cool down juice). With the former, the player risks being caught off guard by a pack of enemies. With the latter, the player risks being caught with their suit overloaded and nowhere to hide. Depending on the composition and layout of grunts and larger foes, you’ll want to vary your strategy accordingly.

Jumping Out From Cover – Access to the slowmo ability encourages the player to identify their targets (observation, knowledge), wait until they’re open (timing), and then leave the cover, line up the crosshair, and shoot (dexterity, reflex).

After Slide Kicking – The slowmo ability allows the player to follow up the slide kick with some close-range shooting. This can destroy decimate grunts and take large chunks of health off larger foes, but comes at the expense of a lot of cool down juice.

When in slowmo, the bullets move slow enough for the player to manually dodge them. This makes the chaotic bullet-hell sequences manageable. It’s quite the spectacle.
When slide boosting, the camera pulls back to give the player an optimal view for targeting enemies.
Walking/running in a shooter is often a low engagement action, especially once the conflict has died down. By sliding boosting instead, the player can keep the game moving at a rapid pace.
The red/blue colour palette of the enemies distinguishes them from the detailed environments.
Unlike Resident Evil 4, which often allows the player to play for long stretches without being interrupted by a cutscene, Vanquish’s various battles are strung together through cutscenes which, perhaps unnecessarily, set up the next confrontation. This is a pity as these sequences lack the gameplay’s finesse, never mind the “McCheeseMo” script. Over time the expository melodrama becomes tiresome.
Despite the innovative slowmo and slide boosting mechanics, and all the enemy and level design that works in with it, Vanquish lacks legs. The inventive gameplay scenarios keep the game going for a while, but there’s simply not enough enemy, weapon, or level design variety in the game’s second half to maintain the initial momentum. Blue-coloured grunts which cut Gideon down with their shotguns, a morphing particle boss, and sequences where the ARG suit is disabled are noteworthy exceptions.
Vanquish shares many similarities with shmps, both in terms of aesthetics and gameplay. All of the player’s actions contribute to a high score tally, the enemies spawn in waves, some enemies let loose with a bullet-hell-esque hail storm of gun fire, and most bosses are introduced with a “warning, enemy ships approaching” alert notice, as in most shmps.

Hopefully, there will be more for me to say in the future.

Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals Design Issues

March 22nd, 2013

When my brother and I were kids, we finished SNES RPG, Lufia II, about six or seven times between us. Every time you beat the game, in the subsequent New Game+ file, your party’s EXP is multiplied by the number of your current playthrough. So beat the game once and start a New Game+ file and your party will receive double EXP each battle. Needless to say, we adored this game. When Square-Enix announced that Neverland, the original developers, were going to re-envision the game for the DS, it seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, this gorgeous-looking dungeon crawler is full of bad design. I got a bit further than half way through the game (the Mountain of No Return, ironically) and gave up. Here’s why:

Unlike the Zelda games, where the combat and puzzle portions are organised so that one doesn’t intrude on the other, Lufia frequently dogs the player with enemies in the middle of them pushing blocks or targeting a grapple point. Worse still, enemies respawn endlessly without any cool down period between defeating one and attacking its replacement.
There’s little strategy to the combat. You just combo enemies until they perish and then attack their dead carcass to earn bonus gems and coins (odd, I know).
Comboing attacks adds a lot of negative space (button mashing, in this case) to the combat design.
There’s a ton of weird stuff going on with the combat. Hit boxes are off. Enemies sometimes flicker from one spot to another. Geemer-esque enemies in the first dungeon can take off 999 HP in one go!
The levelling system means nothing when you can prop your party up five levels every time you game over. I jumped ten levels in the second fight against Gades and it didn’t make a huge difference. Since levelling is useless, there’s no “incentive” to participate in the tiresome battles.
The rooms in the dungeons are too large, so the camera is zoomed in in order to prevent slowdown. This, however, conceals a lot of important information from the player, making it easier for them to overlook certain details and get stuck.
The logic behind the puzzles can super unintuitive at times. I got roadblocked about once every hour of play.
The characters’ unique abilities are underutilised in the puzzles.
Oftentimes, the game makes it easy to accidentally mess up a puzzle, such as the block puzzles in Gruberik Bridge W. Yet, when the player resets the puzzle through the reset function, they have to start the whole room again. This can be frustrating when you continually mess up the fifth puzzle because of an issue with the game’s design, and so you have to repeat puzzles one through four several times over.
Some areas, like Gordovan Drawbridge, are too open-ended and the layout, architecture, and visual design often lead the player away from where they need to go.
Maxim and Selan’s wedding is far too sudden compared to the original game.
I don’t remember Guy being a big, dumb oaf. Curse of the Sinistrals also turns the once-cool Dekar into a bit of a bonehead too. Because of this character rearrangement, Dekar and Guy are too alike, and ultimately it makes Dekar, who joins the party later in the game, feel superfluous.
Maxim pronounces Gades as gädis, not gādēs (the latter having the same pronunciation as “Hades”).
Like most RPGs, the equipment side of things is pointless and should be cut.

Here’s what I did like:

The localisation is surprisingly aware of the trite plot and character archetypes, and often makes good use of these traits for comedic effect.
The level of detail in the environments is amazing, and the scale of some of the bosses is nothing short of remarkable.
The grid system—where players are rewarded with Tetris pieces for solving puzzles and said pieces can be placed on a grid to unlock new abilities, tributes, and bonuses—is a neat way of tying together the game’s two halves.

Ah, now that I’ve written this article, I don’t feel so guilty over ditching this game early.

A Few Comments on Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor

March 18th, 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2MaK-shoqU

The colon in Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is significant. The purpose of a colon is to separate “two clauses of which the second expands or illustrates the first”*. In this case, “Spider” is the gameplay, being a spider catching insects in your web and “The Secret of Bryce Manor” is the narrative, the spider’s exploration of the manor, which occurs through the gameplay. The colon then can be considered as a representation of the harmony between the two elements.

As said, you play the role of a spider who creates webs to catch insects. This is done by touching the spider to plant silk onto a surface and swiping to send the spider leaping to another surface, where the thread connects, making a line. When several lines make an enclosed space, a cobweb is formed. Cobwebs catch any insects that pass by. By touching the screen, the spider will walk to the touched location, either along the cobweb or along the edge of the environment. The spider eats any of the insects caught in its web when it touches them. The player progresses to the next part of the manor after they’ve cleared all the insects in a level.

The core game loop involves:

1 – Exploring the area and identifying the movement patterns of the insects (observation, knowledge).

2 – Determining where the paths of the insects intersect (deductive reasoning, knowledge) so that the player can catch as many insects as possible in the one web.

3 – Determining how to make the web (spatial reasoning, knowledge). Doing it well requires the player consider how they can cover the most area with as few strands as possible.

4 – Making the web (finger sensitivity and direction, dexterity).

Observations

Catching several insects in the one web increases the score multiplier. Hidden areas contain caches of insects and nuggets of narrative insight. The player gets a higher score by using less silk. These three aspects give the player the opportunity to scale the difficulty in a variety of ways.
The insect counter shown after completing a level informs the player of whether or not they accessed the secret area(s). This acts as a sly prompt for the player to scale the difficulty.
Each level has a silk limit which encourages considered play.
The wasps, dragonflies, and butterflies really mixup the standard gameplay loop by forcing the player to line up jumps and consider light sources.
Variation is achieved by: adding new insects and mixing up the combinations (some of which make for highly engaging spatial reasoning), adding and combining different types of surfaces, decreasing the number of available surfaces, mixing up the arrangement of surfaces (modifying the available space), and spreading the surfaces further apart so that the player has to consider the length of the silk (nuance). If the silk is too long, the spider can’t form a strand.
The flicking motion that makes the spider jump feels fantastic. The faster the flick, the faster the jump.
If the player knocks a bee hive and fails to catch one of the bees that fly out, they’ll have to reset the level if they want to get a 100% completion rate. The hard punishment of the player losing progress adds a tension to the game.

–

Repair

I don’t have many complaints for this game, it’s a pretty smooth experience, but one thing that really bugs me is the positioning of wasps in some of the levels with no ceiling. In one of the levels set on a clothes line, the spider must jump up to attack a wasp which is off-screen. This, however, is tremendously tricky as the only available surfaces are to the sides of the level and they aren’t very high. Furthermore, when the spider jumps up underneath a wasp, it will float upwards. This can all amount to frustration as you slowly drive the wasp out of your reach and must restart the level.

*According to the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Additional Reading

Tiger Style Interview – Touch Arcade

Posted in Game Discussion | Comments (2)
Tags: spider, tiger style

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