shooter

The Emperor Protects!

by

Hey Folks! I was not really feeling it on Friday so I did not make a blog post. This weekend I spent most of my time playing single-player games, and I think that was a good call. In theory, I am prepping myself for the release of Dragon Age at the end of the month and wanted to try and knock out a few games that I had been holding onto for awhile but had not started. While this blog is old enough to have existed in 2011 when the previous game came out… that was during my dry period when I was struggling with blogging. I loved the original Space Marine game, it was a blast and pretty much everything that I had ever wanted in a Warhammer 40k game. When the original Space Hulk game from EA came out in the 90s… I mostly just wanted Warhammer 40k Doom. It was a great third-person shooter with some interesting systems and enough story to keep the game from falling apart.

What I wanted from Space Marine 2 was more of the same, and I wanted to see more of the Warhammer 40,000 world displayed on the screen. It delivered both admirably and I geeked out every time I passed a new imperial armor mode that I had not seen yet up to this point. I am not as up on my 40k minis as I used to be, but I am pretty sure this is a company of Chimera tanks rendered lovingly in video game form. I am pretty sure during the course of the gameplay I also saw at least one Predator, a Leman Russ, and a Manticore. 40k is a miserable world of constant warfare, but the thing that I dig the most is that this game respected the dignity of the Imperial Guard, who are wildly outgunned in almost every battle but keep pushing forward regardless. The Cadians were an excellent choice here, and I believe they also were the army of choice in the first game.

Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is these loading screens that show the objectives for the mission as dietetic or “in-universe” screens appearing to the NPCs as a holo in the Thunderhawk drop ships. Everything about this game just drips Warhammer 40k lore from the fact that you interface with an Adeptus Mechanicus Magos any time you need to change out your Wargear aka your weapon loadout. I pretty much standardized on the Oculus Bolter, Heavy Bolt Pistol, and the Power Sword throughout as much of the game as would allow me to use them. There are folks out there who like constantly swapping weapons, but I tend to prefer sticking to a loadout that works well for pretty much all situations. Though that said… I did spend a heck of a lot of time doing melee combat because it is just fun to rip through tyranids with a chain sword or power sword.

There were also so many great setpieces in the game that put you in wild situations where complete nonsense was going on in the background. Probably the highlight of these was an orbital drop through the wreckage of Imperial Gunships as you attempt to get into the atmosphere of the planet where it is just too “hot” to get a proper landing. The first game was all about the Orks and this game is a love letter to Tyranids… with of course the “Archenemy” of Chaos always in the background. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of the Ultramarines, but I also understand why they are the poster children for Adeptus Astartes. It sort of hit me this weekend… that they are effectively the “Union Jack” Marines which is probably why they are fairly beloved in the origin country of the game. If I ever got back into the tabletop game I would probably just give up trying to do custom chapters and standardize on the Space Wolves because they have most of the elements that I love going on.

The campaign is pretty short as a whole, but it was one hell of a ride. There are so many excellent moments that are pure fanservice for Warhammer 40k folks. Once the campaign is over however there are a number of strike missions that you can venture forth on as well as a whole Online Multiplayer PVP mode in the game. Honestly, the setup of Space Marine 2 reminds me of how the OG Halo games felt. It has a solid campaign and from what I can tell a very solid and fun multiplayer experience, both doing their own things. This is pretty much everything I could have asked for in a shooter. I’ve only played the single-player content, but I have friends who have almost exclusively played co-op and said it was pretty great as well.

If you are looking for a game that throws back to an era before everything was a live service experience… then maybe check out Space Marine 2. It is just a big dumb shooter with lots of really cool vistas in the background as you rip through enemies with awesome weapons. If you also happen to be a fan of the 40k universe, then it is just the icing on top of this delightful cake. I spent most of the game hating one of the two characters that you are grouped up within the story, expecting an imminent betrayal. However, it turns out that it was just another Carth Onasi situation, and was that archetypal character that distrusts you forever until they turn into a loyal friend. I honestly hate that shit every time I encounter it. That however is the single blemish on an otherwise amazing experience.

I rate this game Five Dakkas and a Chainsword Rip.

Witchfire Steam Early Access

by

Witchfire is a PVE guns and spells extraction shooter that I remember being somewhat interested in during Summer Games Fest 2022. It apparently has been in early access and available on the Epic Game store since last year, but being perfectly honest… a game might as well not exist for all the good launching on EGS does for me. I am not saying that Epic is a bad storefront, it is just a giant gap in my knowledge because I never go there unless I have some external reason… like someone broadcasting that some big game was being given away for free there. Witchfire released Monday before last on Steam and now it has visualization to the majority of the world. However, It still had not tripped my radar until my friend Ace shared this quote from a review.

Imagine the gunplay of Destiny. But none of the intense shame of playing Destiny.

I have so much love for the gameplay of Destiny, but I have zero love anymore for the way in which that game is released and the grind associated with the light level. I am also still super fucking bitter about losing content that I paid for because it was vaulted. So if a game can bring me the feels of Destiny, with a sweet Hexen with guns vibe I am probably on board with that. So I picked up the early access client on Steam for roughly $36 and gave it a go. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my early impressions.

In the game, you can set up multiple profiles, aka characters that have persistent progress between expeditions into the world. The first step in that process is choosing which “Preyer” you are going to be playing, which acts as your default loadout of weapons, spells, and stats. I am playing Butcher currently which is big life totals and running around with a fully automatic rifle… but nothing much else. Once you progress through gameplay you can I believe essentially unlock everything on a single character, but the Preyer sets your starting point and to some extent dictates how your early gameplay is going to progress.

From there you are dropped onto a foreboding-looking island in search of resources on an expedition, which is what the game calls its general mission map structure. Much of your progression path is focused on the acquisition of gold and a glowing red material known as Witchfire. You can get this by killing monsters or by harvesting it directly from nodes you can find in the world. The maps are all custom-built, but the spawns and objectives vary each time you set foot on it. This means you pretty quickly get a lay of the land and understand how to traverse the area effectively, but won’t actually know what dangers lay along your path.

One of the first things that you want to do upon landing on the Island of the Damned, is pop open your map. This will have various objectives marked as well as the most important items the portals that will return you to the base where you started. Witchfire is an extraction shooter, which means you want to collect as many resources as you feel like you can before making your way to a portal and exiting the level locking in your progress. If you die on the island, you lose ALL of the Witchfire that you have not spent on upgrades, not just the Witchfire that you earned in a single play session. This makes you carefully choose your engagements because it seems like the longer you stay on the map, the more likely monsters are to guard your portal out of the map.

I’ve seen this game compared to a soulslike a few times, but I feel like the depth of this comparison ends with the fact that monsters hit really freaking hard, you have very limited health pool and ability to heal yourself, and that the mobs themselves have deeply predictable attack patterns. If you are taking on a single monster it is pretty easy to avoid all of the attacks. However, if you get swarmed… it becomes MUCH harder to read all of the attacks and move out of the way of various things that can kill you. The bane of my existence is the snipers which will give you a muzzle flash/glint in your radar letting you know that they are about to fire upon you. This is pretty easy to deal with in singletons, but when you get four of them attacking you at once it is very hard to accurately dodge all of them.

Every so often upon killing a monster you will be given access to an Arcana power-up which will last for the course of the current expedition giving the game a bit of a Hades vibe. You can also fine White Raven Feathers scattered through the map in treasure chests which will allow you to unlock additional options during each unlock. I’ve seen a lot of very interesting options, like the ability to gain a random elemental damage type when you reload your weapon. I’ve also seen some boring options like just giving you more health or more stamina. These combined with the random nature of the spawns and objectives give each map a lot of replayability.

Again though your goal is to get a bunch of loot, and then duck out before the heat gets too much for you to handle. While this does not really factor in for the early maps, there is a GTA-style heat meter that shows up as “The Witch” starts to notice your presence. When this bar maxes out, it will summon some cataclysm event that seeks to kill you. I’ve not seen this, but I have heard of it and it sounds like bad news given how hard everything already hits for random goons. In the above exit screen, I killed 24 monsters and looted 10k Witchfire… which admittedly is only that high because I retrieved a pile of Witchfire off my corpse after I failed the run before. When you fail completely, you end up creating a pile on the map that represents some of what you dropped on death.

Pending you exit the level successfully you can spend your stockpile of Witchfire on upgrading your core stats at the Ascension shrine, craft additional healing potions, or unlock perks on the weapons you currently have. I did not have a screenshot of this because apparently, you cannot access the weapon upgrade UI unless you have a pending upgrade. However the game has something akin to the Masterwork weapon system from Destiny, which is probably why it draws that comparison. Weapons each have three tiers of “masterworking, ” each giving the weapon some sort of intrinsic perk. You unlock the next one by defeating a certain number of baddies or performing other actions while on the expeditions.

Starting at level seven, you get access to the research system which will unlock new gear for you to equip on your character. Instead of being tied to Witchfire, this one is tied to gold which largely comes from looting treasure chests or very rarely dropping from tougher enemies. I was hoping this would allow me to research specifically named weapons, but apparently, it gives you a random unlock from a broad family of equipment. To start out I am researching a Close Ranged Weapon and a Medium Ranged Weapon, and I believe this progresses as you complete a number of expeditions because it does not appear to be tied to real-world time.

All in all the game is pretty fun. I dig the hunt for treasure and kill the baddies aspect while slowly powering up your character over time. I am starting to get better about looking for plants to harvest and witchfire clusters to gather while in the map, while also keeping an eye out for individual treasure chests. I’ve not made it very far into the game and I am assuming there are other maps that will unlock as I progress my character. If you are interested in Destiny-style movement and gunplay combined with magic powers, interesting gun design, and Hades-style rogue-lite powerups it might be worth a gander. I will warn you… the game can be punishingly hard at times which seems to reward a careful gameplay style rather than running into a nest of monsters guns blazing. There is a lot of cover that you can use to bait enemies out into the open for you to kill them more safely.

Anyways! Thought I would talk about it this morning in case anyone else out there would be interested. They released a few more updated trailers when the game went into Steam early access. The game world is gorgeous so I can see myself playing this on the side when I am in the mood for its blend if tropes.

Alan Wake 2 Thoughts

by

Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. This weekend I decided to take a break from my Path of Exile and Audiobook norms and play through Alan Wake II. Currently, the game is available on consoles or for PC on the Epic Game Store… given that EGS helped publish the game I am questioning if it is ever going to make its way to Steam. I guess some background… while I enjoyed the story of Alan Wake, I did not suffer through playing it all the way to completion until the Control DLC hooked me enough to want to see it for myself. I had issues with some of the fiddly gameplay more specifically the flashlight gunplay. At this point I have played Alan Wake Remastered, Quantum Break, Control… and because I was super hooked on the Remedyverse Alan Wake II was probably the game I was looking forward to the most this year.

Does it stick the landing? Yes very much so, but I will warn you the beginning of the game is a bit of a slog as you are going to be back in Bright Falls fumbling through the twilit darkness with a pistol and a flashlight. This time around you are alternating viewpoints between Saga Anderson an FBI agent and partner to Alex Casey (aka Max Payne but Rockstar owns that character), and Alan Wake while trapped in the dreamlike malleable reality of the Dark Place. You can in theory play ALL of the Saga segments aka “Initiation” or all of the Alan Wake segments aka “Return”, but I chose to shift back and forth between the two of them… essentially doing one Saga and then the next Alan Wake until I reached a point where the game warns you that you are reaching the end segment.

One of the things that Remedy has been playing with in all of their games, is the seamless integration of full-motion video with rendered action sequences. Alan Wake II is the game that finally nails this formula as you are constantly subtly blending video and game sequences constantly. Sure there are still world televisions and projectors showing short-form video, but the game goes so far beyond this. Unfortunately, I can’t really give you the most concrete example of this because it would likely spoil the experience. There is one Alan Wake level that might be the best thing I have ever played through in any video game. The Ashtray Maze from Control was a thing of beauty and a real masterclass in level design… but the “We Sing” mission takes this to a whole new level. It will be an absolute shame if this game does not take home several awards at the “Keighlies”.

Remedy learned a lot of lessons while creating Quantum Break and Control and you can see these out on display here. Sure the gameplay isn’t necessarily as tight as a dedicated shooter, but it works so much better than the fumbling attempts made in 2010 with the first Alan Wake. The set design, however… is phenomenal. The Alan Wake segments center around him attempting to rewrite a book in order to find his way out of the Dark Place. As a result, he can go to his “Writers Room” and change set pieces and motivations, which then trigger transformations of the scenes that you are playing through. While extremely surreal, this leads to some truly interesting puzzle-solving behaviors as you are trying to figure out which version of the world you need to be in to progress past obstacles.

Saga has something similar in the form of her “Mind Place” a spot you can return to at any time and sort through details she has collected. You place these on the wall in the stereotypical thumbtacks and red string manner, but correctly placing elements end up unlocking dialog elements and changes your current in-game objectives. This is either going to be something you find really cool or something that frustrates you endlessly, because without placing certain items on the investigation board… you won’t have specific interactable objects appear in the world. There are dialog prompts that will not appear unless you have done the work in your Mind Place in order to reach the logical leap that triggers Saga to ask it. I do somewhat wish there was an “autoplace” option, because if you have somehow fumbled your way to a solution without using the investigation board… the game will do this for you to close out a case.

The best thing for me personally about the game is that it continues to expand out the shared Remedyverse. For example, there is a lot of involvement in the plotline by the Federal Bureau of Control, which gives hints towards the current state of that game universe as I am sure we are heading to Control 2. There are plenty of name-drops from the history of the past games… and I am pretty certain that Sherrif Tim Breaker is supposed to be Jack Joyce from Quantum Break, and similarly Warlin Door is a reference to Martin Hatch from that game as well. The awkward thing about the Remedyverse is that some of the ties will always be a bit tentative because Remedy does not own the rights to a handful of games. Max Payne for example is owned by Rockstar and Quantum Break by Microsoft… and while everyone is pretty certain that Alex Casey is Max Payne that revelation will never quite be as concrete as we might want.

The highlight of the game for me however is the return of Ahti the Janitor. In Control, we ended that game pretty sure that Ahti was some sort of god or at least a multi-dimensional being. Alan Wake II does nothing to dissuade us of this line of thinking as Ahti appears both in The Dark Place and Bright Falls interacting with Saga and Alan. Ahti is a hero from the epic poem The Kalevala (also name-checked in the game) and Ahto is the Finnish god of the sea… so I feel like the Ahti we interact with is somewhere between these. In Control Ahti talks about wanting to go on a much-needed vacation, and I am wondering if the events of Alan Wake II are in fact that “vacation” because he knew he was needed here to see both sides of this tale to its conclusion.

So the question I have been asked already is whether or not I feel like you can enjoy Alan Wake 2 without having played through the rest of the Remedyverse. On a surface level yes, I think you could enjoy yourself or at least enjoy it from the aspect of a very well-designed game. However, it won’t mean as much to you as it has to me, given that you will be missing a bounty of subtle references to the greater Remedyverse and the events of the past. I don’t think this game requires the understanding of these to make your way through the story. It explains enough detail as needed because a lot of your perspective comes from Saga an outsider to Bright Falls and Alan Wake who has had his memory damaged and is very much an unreliable narrator. What you are left with is a very well-crafted and honestly scary game, but if you have bounced off other remedy games… then Alan Wake II might not be for you.

While I am taking this break from Audiobooks, I plan on playing through a handful of other narrative games but for the moment… this is absolutely my game of the year. I mean as I said before I am already sold on the Remedy style of storytelling and feel like this is probably their best game to date. While I enjoyed the action combat of Control more, the storytelling here is phenomenal. They really have nailed blending live-action sequences with game sequences and making the combination greater than the parts. The game as a whole is very much an experience that needs to be played to be truly appreciated.

Boltgun Initial Thoughts

by

Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.

About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.

You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.

While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.

What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.

The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot.