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Realm of Rikonia
Rikonian Revuze
(Video Games)
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Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 7/4/2010 9:56:27 PM)
Overall Rating: 3.00 orphans
Quality:
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Review: Alpha Protocol is fun. It has pretty good graphics, it has a nice selection of gadgets and weapons, it lets me shoot people, and it has that moral choice system that lets me express my primal psychotic douchebag nature in a safe manner. The character log even keeps track of how many orphans you made. Not just kills, orphans. If you kill a dude, the game looks up his data, goes "Oh, this guy had 3 kids, so 3 more orphans." Seems like there's a lot for a demented gamer to like.
Yet you're probably noticing that all of the subcategory ratings are higher than the overall game rating, and wondering what the hell is up. Well, I'll explain that first.
There is something I dislike about this game, and it is the reason why its aggregate score is lower than all the subcategory scores: Saving is a pain in the ass. In most games today, you can save at any time (or at least any time you're not actively fighting). Alpha Protocol lets you save during a checkpoints only. Checkpoints are worse than save points, by the way, because save points can at least be used again. Seriously, if you make a game that requires checkpoint saving, then you deserve rabid weasels to eat your eyeballs. And your balls too.
But that is not all. Conversations and cutscenes are unskippable. And there's a couple places where a checkpoint is followed by a string of unskippable cutscenes and dialogs. Today, I had about 15 minutes of cutscene after cutscene after cutscene. This is an annoyance, and a pretty unforgivable one.
Here's a tip for any game programmers out there: if a player cannot, at any non-final-boss-battle point in the game, get to a save menu and an exit menu within fine minutes or less, then you have failed. Not only as programmers, but also as human beings. In fact you have failed as mammals. I recommend cutting some lines into your necks and jumping into the ocean because maybe you'll do better as fish.
Aside from that horrible aspect, I like this game, though it is not my favorite, and I doubt that it wil have much replay value for me. However, other people tend to hate it, and for the wrong reason. The complaints that I hear most often (that the stealth and shooting controls suck) are unjustified.
Alpha Protocol is an espionage RPG. What that means is that your abilities are stat based and the controls will suck until you get the stats raised. It's the same way in Mass Effect and the Elder Scrolls series. If you want to headshot people, you have to put some points in to your gun skill, otherwise your shot may go wild.
My character is pretty proficient with stealth and pistols, and the controls for those are fairly good now (because my stats are raised). I've gotten through several missions already and controls and gunplay difficulty seem fairly well balanced. Occasionally, the NPCs act kind of incredibly stupid, like when I'm fistfighting an islamic terrorist and his friends are not shooting. If these guys are willing to blow themselves up, I figure they probably wouldn't care that much about friendly fire. But then, that may just be because I'm playing on the easy setting.
For the most part, I like the way guns are handled. However I have a fairly major complaint: no sniper rifle in inventory? What the fuck?! Oh you can get a sniper rifle, in certain missions, if a you pay a guy a few hundred bucks. But you can't move the sniper rifle, it's basically treated as a turret. Not since the baldheaded genetic ubermench who cannot jump over a foot tall obstacle has a character limitation felt so arbitraily forced. Come to think of it, old shinyhead had a sniper rifle. It's called a briefcase, Obsidian! New elite technology for hiding sniper rifles in. Put it in the sequel (Beta Protocol: Revenge of the Orphans!), damnit!
Of course, no espionage RPG would be complete without dialog and quicktime events. I'll handle dialog first.
The dialog as written is very clever and funny, but the implementation sucks! Similar to Bioware games you have a conversation with a few options. However, these options are in real time, with a timer ticking down to make your decision. This system would be clever, except it means that dialog cannot be skipped or hastened. And that makes the dialog a stygian slog through a hell of Obsidian's own making, where you want to escape, but cannot, because you haven't gotten to the fucking checkpoint yet.
The minigames are pretty well designed. For the first time, lockpicking actually feels like lockpicking. Kudos for actually giving a reason for the XBox controller triggers to be analog! Circuit bypassing and hacking are also fairly well done, though hacking is annoyingly tricky at times.
Playing Advice: Despite the flaws (the many many many flaws), this is a fun game. However, I recommend waiting. It's not really super earth-shattering, and with the flaws, the game really isn't worth the full price. So get it used or wait for the retail to drop a bit.
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Ron Howard is the Opie of the masses
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Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 11/8/2009 3:56:44 PM)
Overall Rating: 2.00 nagging undead dreams
Quality:
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Review: note: this review was written for the XBox 360 version
Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, aside from being the unholy union of two potential Steven Segal sword and sorcery movie titles, is also a haunting, yet disappointing union of old school and contemporary RPG video game design.
The Kingdom Under Fire series was originally an RTS series, but Circle of Doom is marketed as an RPG. Technically this is true. It has a few NPCs who you buy stuff from and get quests from, and it has levelling. But this is the VRPG distilled to its most basic form. A cliff's notes RPG. There were a few NPCs: 3 magic idols that randomly appear in preset locations that you trade with, and whatever one or two people are in your dream world (more on that later). When you're not in the idol/sleep safe zones, everything is a monster. There's not even one single moron who can only repeat the phrase "there are monsters tot he north!" whenever you get near.
And the "quests" are for the most part just "kill # _________s" laundry lists. Even your quest to find a plant seed for an idol to make a magic seed conists of killing 10 plants (the first 9 don't have a seed, tenth does, no matter where that tenth plant is).
Combat is simplistic. You can have 2 weapons equipped, A and X buttons are mapped to those weapons. Melee combat is a standard "first couple hits are normal, third is a flourish" system. You can also assign 2 special abilities (to the B button and R trigger), but that just brings me to another complaint: Learning skills is another of the "hey kill a bunch of these things" quests, and you can have only 2 of these quests active at a time.
To make matters worse, this is one of those games where the maps are predefined paths. Think of the most restrictive parts of KOTOR, and realize the whole damn game is like that! And a lot of the time, the path you're supposed to tread upon is visually subtle so you miss where you're supposed to turn. This is particularly a problem in places where the paths move up and down and you must walk above or below other paths,thus making the overlay map far less useful.
But the game isn't all bad. The visuals are stunning. Truly beautiful graphic design. And the dream world angle is interesting, though far too limited in scope (a game concept that will hopefully be refined for future games).
You choose one of 5 characters (there's a 6th unlockable one), each is weak or strong in speed and HP. I picked Leinhart the half-vampire prince because he's a high-speed character and I do well with those. His dreamworld is kind of funny, it consists of a graveyard with his dead dad (who was a real dick. "Oh my stupid son, how you've always embarassed me, blah blah blah") and some hot half-naked vampire elf chick.
Though to be fair to undead douchedad, Leinhart is kind of an idiot. When trying to get the Idol of Death to help him, he opens with "hey you old bag of bones!" and he calls the Buddha statue idol of greed fat. Though he is apparently capable of learning, because I was half expecting him to tell the Idol of Love to take her top off or something, but he didn't.
Playing Advice: Don't rent this, as it may take you a while to beat it. If you really want it, you can find it for cheap. I bought mine at a Blockbuster going out of business sale for 5 bucks.
If you get it, then be prepared for lots of repitition. You will be swarmed with mobs of monsters, then advance forward to face more mobs. Remember to have a strong melee weapon and a ranged weapon to hold the hordes at bay. Using left-trigger to enter targetting mode and left thumbstick to strafe side to side is highly effective against shambling hordes, while Magic Shot ability is very useful against enemies that lurk on the walls or the ceilings.
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Ron Howard is the Opie of the masses
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Reviewed By: Lord High Rikonian ( 11/12/2009 7:07:18 PM)
Overall Rating: 2.00 severed limbs
Quality:
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Review: Viking: Battle For Asgard has a some good stuff going for it. It has pretty good graphics, and the characters' movements are fairly realistically rendered. But Skarin, the Viking you play as, is a bit of a butisface, who looks like Beuwulf got beat with the unsettlingly-weird-looking-stick in the Uncanny Valley. But the rest of the graphics are pretty good.
However, the controls are very weak. There's a strong attack button that works fairly well, but the fast attack is somewhat buggy, sometimes leaving you briefly incapacitated. This pretty much defeats the purpose of a speed attack button.
Combat is very repetitive. Maybe a couple quick attacks, then a hard or two. However, there is some fun to combat. You can slice limbs off during the fight, and then hit X one more time for a brutal flourish attack that either runs the foe through, chops off the remaining limbs and the head, or runs the enemy through and then chops off the remaining limbs and the head. Doing this gets you orbs that restore your magic power and sometimes your HP. However the game seems to like denying you the green HP-boosting orbs when you really need them. It also likes putting you up against several foes at once, with no backup.
Like Circle of Doom, this game makes some half-hearted (probably because some viking cut it in half with his sword) attempts at including RPG elements, but they just serve to annoy. There is no levelling system. You just buy all your advancements at shops.
You can learn special moves at an arena (by purchasing them from some dead Viking who bitches about not getting to hang out in Valhalla because some loser mortal wants to learn a jumping sword attack). The special moves do add some variety to combat, but they are not very useful in mob fights, because the good ones all move you forward (further into the mob) so now you're out of special move tokens and surrounded by foes all wailing on you. If Skarin were a bit more agile this would be fun.
But he is a sluggish and clumsy avatar compared to other faster video game characters, such as Leinhart, the chick from Jade Empire, Darth Revan, the Neravarine, Mario, the guy from GTA 4, the guy from GTA 3 and 2, and the guy from Grand Theft Personal Mobility Scooter.
Playing Advice: I can't really recommend this game. Sometimes a game like this is a quality sleeper that went under everyone's radar. This game, however, was deservedly unnoticed. It's highly repetitive, and I got bored with it after just a couple days.
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Ron Howard is the Opie of the masses
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