Looking at: Cities: Skylines

Simulation of a City, 2015

The city appears barren until citizens move in.

Cities: Skylines isn't SimCity.

This is both it's biggest strength and greatest weakness.

Anyone that's been watching the industry has heard about the death of one of simulation gaming's most beloved names, Maxis, and it's no secret that the studio's closure was related to the underwhelming performance of it's last two games. Chief among these was SimCity [2013], a game that almost single-handily proved the folly of improper always-online implementation. Sure, Diablo 3 had a rocky start too, but the difference is that once the connection issues of Diablo 3 were solved the underlying game was still fun, and that simply wasn't the case with SimCity13. The cities were to small, the options were to limited, and the game wasn't all that fun to play.

City building simulations are a niche game, but among the niche titles they usually come out as one of the more popular, with titles like the Anno series, Banished, or the impossibly difficult Dwarf Fortress serving as popular outlets for any budding civil planner. The undisputed king of these games, however, was the SimCity franchise, proving to be almost as popular as it's life-sim cousin. However, when the king is dead, someone has to wear the crown. That's where 19 people from Finland and Paradox interactive came in with their recent release of Cities: Skylines.

Civil Planner

Cities' tilt-shift filter makes for some great picture-esque scenes.

Let's just get this out of the way: for all intents and purposes, Cities really is just SimCity 2015. There's no denying the obvious similarities between the two games, with Cities borrowing everything from the various color codes used in SimCity, down to the tilt-shifted toy-like look of the former game's 2013 outing. The two games are so similar that former SimCity developers have even started creating content for Cities, and the developers themselves admitted that the game was green-lit because of SimCity's failure.

The truth is, there's only so much you can do with a game about civil planning before it draws comparison to SimCity. Any game that has you drawing roads and placing buildings is just SimCity, the only difference is most games don't look this similar. The idea of Cities is to be what SimCity wasn't, to be the better game, and in this regard it succeeds masterfully.

Additional Pylons

Fire seems to be the worse issue you'll have to deal with, and doesn't spread in the native game.

Enough talking about a game that didn't work, let's look at why this one does. The idea of Cities is simple, draw roads, place buildings, balance the budget, and make your city profitable while increase the population. That's really all there is, since Cities doesn't include a scenario mode like some games do. The drive here is to constantly make your city bigger and better, slowly but surely unlocking Milestones that grant access to different buildings and services.

This brings me to one of my biggest complaints about Cities, in that there's really no end-game. Like I said, outside of unlocking these Milestones there's no objective for Cities, aside from what you assign yourself. That's fine, but there's also no challenge past a certain point. If you rig it correctly your city will start generating so much money that any issue becomes trivial. Worse, unlike it's inspiration, there's no randomized events like natural disasters or wide-spread fire that will require your attention. If your city makes it past the three hour mark, it's almost a guarantee that, barring any accidental flooding, your city will make it to the 30 hour mark. There's no sense of urgency to your building, and while this means you can just relax and enjoy the game at your own pace, it also means I wasn't as engaged as say Banished or SimCity 3000 because there wasn't any reason for me to be engaged.

That's not to say there's no gameplay. The early game stages of Cities are a flurry of activity as you plan out your city. You'll need to decide where to place all of your different zoning types, keeping just enough space between them to prevent traffic issues while also keeping them close enough to benefit from one another. You'll need to place down city services and carefully balance between your spending and your revenue. Unlocking the ability to draw districts will allow you to control industrial specialization and what ordinances are enacted where, and you'll be expanding outward as fast as your income lets you. This is where Cities shines as you rapidly create bigger and better cities, rigging up intricate traffic systems and making sure utilities go to where they're needed most.

Land Survey

Sewage will need to be pumped out, keeping your city clean but ruining the water.

Despite it's arguably boring subject matter, Cities is a bright and vibrant game, not shying away from color in either it's in-game graphics or the UI. Borrowing heavily from you-know-where everything is nicely color-coded and easy to use, with tool-tips aplenty to help you get a sense of what's going on. There's a nice variety of color throughout, with plenty of visual feedback for things like natural resources, pollution, and traffic flow. Cities even features a camera mode to remove the UI and just let you watch your city grow, and the tile-shifted camera makes everything seem childlike and inviting.

It's unfortunate that nothing within the game really changes however. There's no weather system, or even a day-night cycle in the base game. That's a minor complaint, especially given size of the team working on Cities, but it is a noticeable issue. Even more glaring of an oversight is the inability to affect the geography of the map while your playing on it. Buildings and road systems tend to do this automatically, but it's unfortunate that you can't create dynamic rivers or mountains by yourself. Less a God-sim, more of a county planner-sim.

Thankfully Colossal Order didn't make a colossal mistake, and not only does Cities work with mods, it seems like the entire game was built to be modded. Mere hours after release the Steam Workshop page was overflowing with mods, adding everything from day/night cycles and spreading fire, to pictures of Gabe Newell's face as a map or a giant dong building that would randomly sprout up. (heh)

Cities: Skylines isn't SimCity, but nor is it it's own creation. This is a game built for the love of a genre that's not afraid to admit it's own influences. It's the perfect time sink, a way to kill an afternoon watching something grown, and an homage to a series now dead. Cities Skylines isn't SimCity, merely it's tombstone and eulogy.

Looking at: The Witcher 2

Kingslayer

As Geralt, you'll often face insurmountable odds. 

I hate the word "epic". Like most things it gets it's hands on, the internet has all but ruined this word, turning into a shambling, stupid, meme-spitting buzzword. I hate "epic"

But there's no other word to properly describe The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

Witcher 2 is a huge, sweeping, mature epic fantasy that demands that you take it seriously as it strings you along. Is this a journey worth taking or just idle talk by the firelight?

From Poland with Love

The Witcher 2 can be beautiful when it wants to be.

The entire franchise of The Witcher comes to use courtesy of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. The series centers around Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, and a Witcher. Witchers are mutated monster hunters that roam the land killing for money, and Geralt is considered the best among them. The books provide an entire back story, but the games are they're own self-contained tale, and you don't really need any fore-knowledge on the character or world to get what's going on. All you need to know is that shit is almost constantly in a state of fucked up, and Geralt really doesn't care at all.

The first game opened with Geralt running through the forest, waking up with amnesia, and slowly but surely piecing together everything that's happened to him. Throughout the first game he killed monsters, killed some great evil known as the Grand Master, and saved King Foltest of Temeria from assassination. There is more to it then that, but that's all you'll need to know about The Witcher in order to player Witcher 2.

The Witcher's Path

The upgrade, simplified thanks to the amazing Combat rebalance mod.

Witcher 2 opens with Geralt in prison. He's been accused of killing Foltest and is set to hang. Throughout the tutorial it's slowly revealed that another Witcher killed Foltest and that Geralt is just taking the blame. In exchange for his freedom, Geralt promises to track down the real kingslayer and bring him to justice. This serves as the central plot point throughout the game, as you track down the killer and deal with the fallout of Foltest's death.

The plot plays out like a medieval noir story, with secrets being revealed and motivations changing as more and more details come to life. It's a great story too, taking time to develop like a constant slow burn, and giving you time to digest what's going on. There's plenty of back story to wade through, with character descriptions, a full bestiary, and plenty of lore hidden throughout. The Witcher 2's world is easily one of the most well realized and complete worlds I've ever seen.

There are also side missions throughout every level, ranging from simple Witcher's work -that is killing monsters for money- to more involved quests like locating a lost laboratory, saving researchers from a haunted mansion, and more. The more involved sidequests will create entire stories independent of the main plot, with the majority of these being worth the time, if only for the great story.

Like I mentioned, choice means everything in Witcher 2. You'll often have to make decisions, whether minor or not, and live with the consequences. Practically this usually means things like avoiding a fight, or changing your opponents, but certain choices can vary the game's progression wildly, with the entire second act hinging on a few moments. These choices feel natural, and the game's reaction reciprocates this well so the entire process seems dynamic, rather then the "choose a color" scheme some other games choose to go with.

Whirling Dervish

Monsters are often as terrifying as they are massive.

Gameplay in Witcher 2 can best be described as "tactical swordplay". Geralt, despite his abundance of badassdom, can't really take a hit that well, even with late game armor. Instead his style of fighting relies on being faster then his opponents, be they man or beast, and making sure he doesn't get hit. In this regard I often found the most useful tool in the Witcher's arsenal his ability to dodge around like a madman, rolling or pirouetting out of harm's way in a second. More importantly, dodge was one of the few animations that would trigger correctly when I try to use them.

That brings me to the heart of the issue with Witcher 2's combat, is that it's all heavily animation based. That's fine, since all games are, but there's no real physics to the animations, and they play out regardless of what's going on. It's hard to explain, but play a comparable game like Dark Souls or even Skyrim and you'll understand. There's an odd lack of weight to your hits, like they're not really connected to anything, and this makes combat feel floaty and awkward.

This is an issue for two reasons: One, when combat does work, and you kill your enemies in a flurry of blows and feel like a master swordsman, it feels great. The second issue is that combat makes up the large majority of the game between just normal monster hunting and encounters with human foes.

Combat is a mixture between using one of Geralt's swords (silver for monsters, steel for humans, despite what the novels may say), using one of the limited, but insanely useful, magical signs, and making liberal use of alchemy. This last one is particularly of interest as it reinforces Witcher 2's theme of preparation. Geralt isn't the Dragon Born, and he can't heal in the middle of a fight by eating a sandwich. Instead, you'll need to brew and quaff potions when you have a spare second, meaning that trips outside of town are limited to about as long as your potions last. It's an interesting idea in theory, and certainly makes the game more challenging, but quickly becomes annoying and tedious, not to mention aggravating when the game constantly forces you into situations where you're not given time to prepare.

Troll maiden

A moment of quiet before a battle.

There's an almost constant sense of awkwardness to Witcher 2, like it's a game that wasn't meant to be as good as it it. Dialogue interactions are strangely stitched together, and rarely flow well. Scenes don't as much bleed into one another like they should, but feel patched together, like they were constructed independently of one another and assembled after the fact. There are so many strange and unintentionally hilarious animations I lost count halfway through the second act. I've seen games that punch above their weight class and impress me by doing things I didn't expect them to do, but Witcher 2 seems like the exact opposite, making mistakes that a game of its caliber shouldn't be making.

The one area where Witcher 2 is consistently great is it's graphics. While the character models have aged a bit in the years since it's release, there's no denying that it's a great looking game. The lighting work especially sells the scenes, but overall the world looks and feels great, even when the things inhabiting it don't. 

On that note, a special notice goes out to monsters. Despite the promise of monster hunting, there are only a handful of monsters to hunt throughout the game, but they all look great. Each monster looks terrifying, and really fits the dark, ugly tone of the game. Everything from the undead zombie nekkers, to the towering Kyran octopus creature looks great and fighting them is all the better for it.

On the audio side Witcher 2 once again fails to deliver. Voice acting on the main characters is great, particularly Doug Cockle as the voice of Geralt and Jaimi Barbakoff as Triss Merigold, the lead female. Voice acting on the other characters though ranges from mediocre to terrible, and the sound mixing doesn't really help. VO actors either seem to close or to far away from the mic at times, and conversations seem to happen regardless of your proximity to them in the world. I was across town from a pair of dwarves talking and yet I still heard every word of their conversation. Worse is that each location only has a small finite amount of ambient conversations that play over and over infinitely. I can completely recite one conversation from the second act because it's the only thing I ever heard whenever I was in town. Using the incredibly useful Cat potion, which grants the ability to see in the dark and sense living creatures, was always a hard choice because for ten straight minutes it would play a beating hear sound that drove me nuts.

Monster Slayer

As a Whitcher you'll often be called to deal with magical creatures like the undead.

I don't know what to make of Witcher 2. I didn't know what to make of it when it was released in 2011, I didn't know what to make of it after the enhanced upgrade release in 2012, and I still don't know what to make of it weeks before Witcher 3's release in 2015.  Witcher 2 is a game that's great, even amazing, despite how terrible it is. This isn't a case of The Room where it's a bad property that's accidentally great because how bad it is, rather it's a case of a property that is so great despite it's many shortcomings.

In the end, there's nothing else quite like Witcher 2. It's a game of political intrigue, endless conversations, and brutal violence. It's a world of grey, where black and white morality simply don't exist. It's a unique experience to be sure, but I don't know if it's for everyone. Trying to recommend Witcher 2 is difficult because looking at it's individual pieces it's not that great of a game. Only when looked at as a whole does the game work, and from a distance it's a masterpiece. If your looking for an RPG that will challenge you, both in terms of gameplay and morally, then The Witcher 2 is for you, otherwise this might be a tale left unheard.

image sources:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Witcher-2.jpg

Looking at: Age of Ice

Cold Front

Literally the only picture I could find of this movie, seriously.

I've been drinking. I recently got a tooth pulled and the experience has left me in a lot of pain. Alcohol is a disinfectant, and my dentist didn't prescribe me any antibiotics or painkillers, so I've been using a little Jack Daniels and Alexander Keiths to help me out.

That's neither here nor there, but it did make my experience watching Age of Ice, from "director" Emile Edwin Smith somewhat more tolerable then I think it's supposed to be.

In the Madhouse

Not even remotely close, but a way better movie.

See, Age of Ice is another movie shat out by The Asylum. Anyone who's into bad movies, like yours truly, is quite familiar with The Asylum. They fill a hole once occupied by Troma Entertainment, namely that of low budget straight to DVD movies that confuse people into buying them.

It's been said that The Asylum spends a million dollars on a movie on the hopes that it sells a million dollars worth. If an Asylum movie breaks even they consider it a win. They have had a few minor successes, and the Sharknado franchise has turned out to be a big hit for them, but they're main bread and butter is crappy knock-offs of popular movies (such as a version of Marvel's Thor where the Asgardian wields an Uzi), shitty softcore porn (often about cheerleaders), or terrible disaster films.

It's this later that The Asylum seems to find a particular niche, in that most of their catalog consists of damn-near unwatchable disaster films, often with bizarre or oddly specific disasters. There's the aforementioned Sharknado franchise, a mashup of Shark movies and... well just Twister really. Then there's there seemingly endless supply of 2012 based movies, with at least five different scenarios ranging from meteors to the sun exploding. There's a series of Toho-esque monster films with titles like Mega Shark VS Giant Octopus, Mega Piranha, Mega Python VS Gatoroid.

They make bad movies is the point I'm trying to get across. Anyway, it was this bizarre combination of heavy drinking and unfiltered access to Netflix that lead me to watch Age of Ice, The Asylum's answer to the question: "What if it snowed in Egypt and a bunch of dumbass Americans, and also the prince of Jordan or something had to escape why not?"

Snow Capped Pyramids

Never read it, probably better then this movie.

Our film opens with fighter pilots failing to land, strangely reminiscent of this clip. Then someone mentions seismic activity, then the whole aircraft-carrier sinks. Strong opening.

Then we're in Egypt, where a family are checking out the pyrimads, or at least as close to the pyramids as a bunch of Mexican laborers can assemble from plastic bricks, which are clearly visible. We're introduced to the Father (Barton Bund, no seriously) his dumb-as-fuck son Dylan (Joe Cipriano, fucking idiot) and his daughter Amber (Bailey Spry) who instantly falls for some random Muslim dude (Owais Ahmed?). They head back to Cairo, shit starts getting weird, they meet the Mother (Jules Hartley) and all of a sudden life sucks. A wall breaks and they decide they need to get home.

Then it starts snowing, and Egypt starts looking an awful lot like northern Connecticut, complete with wide open fields with deciduous forests. The gang mysteriously acquires a bunch of towels and blankets, then sets forth across the frozen Egyptian wasteland in search of a mysterious evac point. Along the way they meet some people, form bonds, and perform endless acts of unbelievable stupidity.

There was the time Dylan fell of a train for no good reason, or the time the same stupid little fucker fell down a pyramid for no good reason, or the time the SAME STUPID LITTLE FUCKER fell down a cave for no good reason. It's not just Dylan fucking up though. At one point they use a heavy duty truck's winch to lower people down, which sounds reasonable. Except that somehow this two-ton truck got pulled over the side of a cliff by a ~110lb woman. At one point the group steals camels, rides them for a few moments, then abandons them and suggests (and I quote)

"[cutting] them up for warmth like in The Empire Strikes Back"

Oh the antics of those wacky, fucking stupid Americans and they're brown guide. An oil refinery gets blown up by hail, but at that point you're so far gone that it barely registers.

Brain Freeze

This is from a Newsweek article on Ice Ages, read it here!

"The special effects in this movie were taken from the Sega Mega Drive on-board graphics circuitry."

That's a direct quote from the IMDB page concerning this movie. For reference, the Sega Mega Drive  (also known as the Genesis) was released in 1989 and officially discontinued in 1999. Age of Ice was released in 2014. I didn't grow up with a Genisis, but my research indicates that the best looking game on the system, at least graphically speaking was this:

That's the level of graphical fidelity you can expect from this film. That's the level of graphical fidelity you deserve from this film. 

It's unfortunate, given that The Asylum can, at times, generate... passable graphics. Thanks to Sharknado and some other work they've done for SyFy they've stepped up they game considerably, but not here. No, Age of Ice was spit out, waging a visual war on it's audience, daring you to keep watching. 

Sound design barely fares better. There are enough sound effects, and most of the characters are discernible. There's one person I couldn't understand, but that was due to his heavy accent. The music is The Asylum's standard of royalty free stock music they bought en-masse ten years ago. Nothing special, but it doesn't hurt your ears either. 

The camera work is shoddy at best, but it is stable. I suspect that's because spending money on something like a dolly rig, or even a slider, is decidedly outside The Asylum's budget. It's all bearable, save for one shot where you can clearly see a second camera team in the distance. 

What isn't forgivable is the editing. Shots jump around for no good reason, and the whole film has a sort of mashed-together feel that make some projects I've worked on look magnificent. I'm no editor, and I've never claimed to be, but I think I understand enough about the art to know how bad this movie fucked it up. 

It should be pretty obvious I didn't enjoy Age of Ice. It was an extremely bad movie, even by The Asylum's standards. I know it's not really indicitive of their normal stock, and that they can actually produce movies worth watching every once and a while, but Age of Ice isn't even worth it for the paltry entertainment value it accidentally provides. Leave this one in the back and let it get freezer burn. 

Image Sources:

http://maxcdn.dardarkom.com/files/uploads/14222180481.jpg
http://akmmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Age-of-Ice-2014-screen-1.jpg
http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/22600000/Ice-Age-Cd-ice-age-22617740-1502-1127.png
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1369085840l/16130312.jpg
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/why-were-definitely-not-headed-another-ice-age-264633.html

Looking at: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

Old Legend

This being a Western tale, you'll spend most of your time in the countryside. 

The Old West, despite being an absolute kickass backdrop for any story, hasn't really gotten the love it deserves in video games. Sure, there's Red Dead Redemption, one of my favorite games of all time, as well as a handful of other games, but they're few and far between.

Hot off the heels of it's disastrous, and racist predecessor CoJ: The Cartel, Gunslinger is looking to return the series to it's gun totting, tobacco spitting, Wild West roots. Is this a tale worth listening to?

Long Winded

Duels require concentration, and a quick trigger finger.

The framing device for Gunslinger is that of a long, long story being told by legendary bounty hunter Silas Greaves, who stopped into an innocuous bar for a drink and ran into some fans. Silas has an odd penchant for mistaken identity, with his actions often getting attributed to other more infamous names. The story device works well enough, and is actually woven into the game with the sets changing as Silas remembers, or mis-remembers minor details. Ladders fall into place magically, and caves appear from nowhere. At one point there's a break in the action because Silas gets up to pee. It's an entertaining yarn that feels right at home in an old pulp-fiction book.

You'll run into a laundry list of Wild West heroes and villians, and almost every chapter is capped off with an interesting boss fight. You'll face down Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and many more in your journey. There are collectible "nuggets" of truth you can find throughout the game that offer actual stories of what happened to all these people. It's a wide roster and it's exciting to see so many infamous stars of a wild time. At the very least Gunslinger is a well researched game.

Six Shooter

Special characters get an animated intro, including one mean-ass shotgun.

It helps that Gunslinger is also an incredibly satisfying shooter. Shooting is smooth and precise, allowing you to line up shots with ease. There are only a handful of guns, unfortunately, and this being the wild west most guns only hold a handful of shots. That means your shots need to be precise, a facet further emphasized by Gunslinger's scoring system.

For whatever ludicrous reason Gunslinger is meant to be played like an arcade shooter, assigning you points based on your actions. Nail a headshot, that's 100 points. Nail that headshot from a good range? 200 points. Do it in slow motion while you're enemy is running? 500 points. Scoring consecutive kills will increase your multiplier too, meaning that at the end of a good firefight you'll be earning points like it was going out of style. Aside from an arbitrary measure of you're skill, these points also contribute to leveling you up.

There are three paths to choose from in Gunslinger: the pistol wielding Gunslinger, the ranged rifle specialist Ranger, and the shotgun and dynamite blasting Trapper. As you upgrade these paths you'll unlock perks to outfit your character with, as well as a number of special weapon variants that can really change how you play. It's all very light and linear, but it fits well with the game and makes scoring points mean something.

Returning from Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the idea of duels. Like any classic Western tale these are short, violent, and tense as all hell. You'll need to focus on the enemy while also moving your hand into position and listening for the countdown. Gunslinger mixes up the formula a bit by making each fight unique from the others. Some enemies will dodge after pulling iron, some won't move at all to unnerve you, and at one point you'll even have a three-way Mexican Standoff a-la The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In each of these you'll have the option to wait until your opponent pulls their gun and killing them honorably, or getting the jump like a low-down dirty bandit. It's a minor choice, but can affect your score.

Home on the Range

Combo-ing trick shots results in a better score, and a more satisfying kill.

Being inspired by dime books and pulp fiction, Gunslinger opted to go for a cell-shaded comic book style. It's not Borderlands, but plays more closely to the likes of actual Western comic books that were popular in the '40's and '50's. Characters are cast as larger then life, often towering and armor clad. There's plenty of detail, everything from random clutter lying around the towns, to rock formations and wilderness. It's all rendered well enough thanks to an updated Chrome Engine 5.

Better then the visuals is the sound design of Gunslinger. A special honor goes to veteran voice actor John Cygan who provides the voice work for Silas Greaves. Cygan nails the aging hero feel of Greaves perfectly and carries the lions share of the story by himself. Not to say the voice acting is bad anywhere else, and all the main characters turn in great performances.

The sound design is equally great. The guns sound bombastic, grating, and metallic like real old West guns should. These were tools meant to be used and they all sound as good as they feel, making the shooting that much more satisfying. Gunshots cling and clang off various surfaces, and even when there's no shooting going on the soundscape really helps to immerse you in this old Western tale.

Fistful of Dollars

Right before death you'll have the chance to dodge one last bullet. Do so successfully and you live that much longer.

All that said, Gunslinger regularly reveals it's obvious budget title nature. List price for Gunslinger is ~ $15, and it's constantly obvious that it was never meant to be as good as it turned out. There's only a handful of characters to cut down on voice actors, with most character's narration being delivered by Greaves as part of his story. Even then, none of the characters have animated lip-synch, and they shift around to cover this. Levels are short, and the entire game can be cleared in about 3-4 hours. There's new game plus, and an arcade score-attack mode, but there's just not that much game here.

Gunslinger is a game indicative of it's own subject matter. Gunfights in the old West were short and brutal, but made for great stories. In that vein, Gunslinger is a very, very short but enjoyable experience that weaves a good yarn. It is a budget title and other better games exist, but this is definitely a tale worth listening to.

Image Sources:
http://www.vgblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/20/Call_of_Juarez_Gunslinger.jpg

Looking at: Hotline Miami 2

Ring Ring

Brief moments of calm break up the non-stop action.

It once took SBnation writer and destroyer of EA Sports games Jon Bois 344 tries to pull off the impossible. Occasionally playing through Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number felt similar to that, struggling to pull off the impossible, always just an inch away from victory. You don't throw footballs in Hotline Miami 2, however, unless they're directed at some poor bastard's head.

As a followup to the 2012 indie darling, HM2 certainly has some big shoes to fill. It fleshes out the story, changes up the gameplay, and adds some new touches, but is this a phone call worth answering?

Prerecorded Message

The blood and gore have been increased from the original to incredible proportions. 

Gameplay is unchanged, as it should be. HM2 controls from a top down perspective and your goal is to kill everyone that isn't you in a given level. You'll have access to a variety of weapons and ways to do this ranging from guns, to knives, bats, and chains. Sometimes. More on that in a bit.

Action is brutal and breakneck, with most levels only lasting a few seconds. The trick is that you die in one hit, be it rifle fire or a lead pipe, so completing a level requires a perfect run. You're also scored on your performance, creating a purposely uncomfortable mixture of rush tactics and the desire to stay put and plan out strategies. That's where dying comes into play.

Not unlike Dark Souls before it, death is used as a mechanic in HM2, albeit sans the story explanation. Restarting a chapter is instantaneous, and clearing a section can take dozens and dozens of attempts as you learn and plan your way around.

One New Voicemail

HM2 never shies away from controversy. 

The gimmick in HM2 is that, unlike the first game you play as a cast of characters, rather then one psychopath wearing different masks. Each character has different abilities that change how they play, although there are a number of milquetoast "normal" characters. There's Corey the Zebra that can roll dodge and use windows, Tony the Tiger that eschews weapons in favor of his fists, Mark the Bear wields a pair of SMGs that he can fire in two directions, and most interestingly are Alex and Ash two characters that control as one using guns and a chainsaw. There's also a writer that goes for non-lethal takedowns, a mysterious cop, a soldier and a repentant mobster. Each character handles slightly differently and figuring out which one to use is important.

Or it would be if HM2 was designed a little better, ie. more like the first game. Hotline Miami 2 has a bigger focus on it's story this time around, a welcome change from the first game, but what this actually means is that your freedom is limited more often then it should be. There are a handful of levels that let you run wild at your leisure, but most of the time you'll be told exactly which character to use, and trying to deviate will all but render the level impossible. That's only the first of my issues with this sequel.

Wrong Number

HM2 flips back and forth between fact and fiction, and you're never quiet sure which is which.

The level design of the first HM was damn near perfect, offering constant mixtures of long hallways, short openings, and huge wide-open areas that forced you to constantly react and rethink on the fly. What it usually did best was allow you to figure out how to proceed, letting you pick your path of destruction. HM2 doesn't do this so much, with most of the levels being scarily linear, and with hallways that are way to long so that you get shot from an enemy you couldn't see. When the levels do work they work gangbusters, but this doesn't happen nearly enough.

That sightline issue I mentioned is a real problem, and bleeds into another issue I have with HM2: it's reliance on guns and it's unwillingness to let you use them. Some character can't use guns whatsoever, and Tony the Tiger can't even pick up weapons to throw. That might be fine except that the levels are all bigger and more often then not strangely designed for guns. I didn't like using guns in the first game, since I found they cheapened the experience, but here it was either go in double barrels or use plan B over and over again. Plan B was to expose myself for a second, wait until the idiotic AI rushed me, then take them down in melee. Effective, but it really fucked up my level score.

You can still shift-look in HM2, that is holding down the Shift key to extend your range, but I often found myself over-using this and got annoyed when the level didn't let me extend further. The default field of view quickly became to small and constrained and I struggled to see and mark targets effectively from a distance.

The AI was always inept in Hotline Miami, but now they seem especially off-base. Enemies would either run straight at me in a murderous rage, or spin around in a circle for no reason. I've lost count of how many dogs I've seen spinning like tops. Worse is that the designers seem to think that more enemies means a higher difficulty setting, and you'll always find yourself completely overwhelmed. This does, of course, encourage more tactical gameplay as you separate enemies and take them down in manageable numbers, but you'll likely lament at the amount of times you've killed one guy with a crowbar only to instantly be taken down by his buddy beside him.

The biggest issue I had with HM2 was it's constant inconsistency. Enemy weapons are randomized, as well as their movement paths, which made proper planning very difficult. What happened the last four tries didn't happen on try #5, and only half happened on #6, meaning that I was never really able to plan my advance leading to more unnecessary deaths then I can count. This isn't a stealth game, I realize, but I do approach HM2 like a puzzle game, and that's difficult to do when it doesn't remain constant from attempt to attempt.

Click

The insidious phone calls from the first game are back, although less frequently.

It might sound like I didn't like HM2, and at some points while playing the game I think I didn't either. The truth is, though, I do like HM2, but only in short bursts. I found if I played only a level or two at a time I could sort of put up with the game's bullshit, and the feeling of accomplishment for actually pulling off a perfect run is unbeatable. You feel like a god for that briefest of moments and it's a dangerous rush because you'll want it again and again.

I haven't yet mentioned the soundtrack, which is probably the only part of the game improved on since the first one. That's saying something, since HM had one of the sickest, most enjoyable soundtracks ever put into a videogame. There's a lot of what made the first game great, with heart pounding tracks layered in with smooth calming beats. HM2 also starts moving towards the rock end of the spectrum, fitting as the game itself moves into the early 90's, and you hear more variety in the music then the first game.

Hotline Miami 2 isn't a bad game, and in many ways it's not even a bad sequel. Everything that made the first game great is here, but it's often buried under the desire to make HM2 something it isn't. There's to much filler pushed in beside the goodness of the core game, and it brings the experience as a whole down because of it. I enjoyed my time with HM2, but I don't know if I'd actually recommend it, at least not until a few patches and the promised level-designer feature release. Perhaps, for now, this is a message best left unanswered.

Looking at: Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

For King and Country

Large weapons like Battle Axes hit hard, but are slow and unwieldy.

There, in the center of the battle, we met. Two armor-clad titans, with sword and axe in hand. The battle around us raged, but there we stood, for but a moment, before our own storm erupted. Blow after blow was struck, some getting through, but most being parried. A tale for the ages, even if it only lasted a moment. All good things must come to an end, and after a while my opponent made a fatal mistake. I swung with all the might I could muster and off came his head like so many before. I was victorious, if only for a second.

First-Person melee combat has always been something of a gamble. games rarely decide to go that route, and the number of games that do it well, or even acceptable, can be counted on one hand. What a gamble it must've been then to pitch the idea of Chivalry, a multiplayer focused arena-style old-school first-person slash-em up completely and utterly focused on melee clashes. Did the gamble pay off, or is this just another lost fable?

Clash of Titans

The maps are huge with many varied paths to the objectives.

Chivalry started life as a Half-Life 2 mod similarly named "Age of Chivalry". The idea is similar to that of most arena games like Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament in that 32-50 players are locked in a room and told to just wreck shit. Of course, in normal games it comes down to good shooting and use of cover. In Chivalry it comes down to proper foot-work and well timed swings.

It's an interesting idea in theory, but like I mentioned, first person melee is incredibly easy to fail at. Even the Elder Scrolls series has a number of problems with it and no game has ever really nailed the formula. At least, not until now. Chivalry is probably the best implementation of a first person melee system I've ever seen, and it all comes down to two things.

The first is the hitboxes. Hitboxes refer to the rendered area of a character in-game that needs to be hit by a weapon for the game to register it. Below is an example from Team Fortress 2:

1

Note the highlighted boxes around the character models indicating where they can be hit. Hitboxes are notoriously hard to program, since character models are almost constantly moving and shifting, and this is often why first person melee combat doesn't work quite right. Except in Chivalry, where the hitboxes seem almost perfect. I can't even fathom how much time this must have taken to perfect, but in the several hours I've spent in Chivalry I've not once missed an action that I thought for sure would hit. 

The second reason Chivalry works so well is because it's designed from the ground up to be completely about the melee. There's nothing else at work, save for the small handful of ranged weapons (more on that in a bit). Each weapon handles a bit differently based on it's weight, lenght, and type, but more importantly then that are the controls. Rather then just the standard LMB attack, RMB defend, Chivalry makes complete use of the mouse. LMB is your standard swing, RMB is a short parry, up on the mouse wheel is a stabbing attack, and down on the mouse wheel is a heavy over-hand attack. If your mouse has side buttons then these two are taken into effect for alternative swings and stabs. All of this works to really immerse you into the melee combat, and successfully landing a blow in satisfying every time. 

Once More Into the Breach

Shields provide better cover from arrows, but make you slower.

There are four classes in Chivalry, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. First is the Archer, specializing in long range attacks with bows or crossbows. They're fast, but incredibly weak and the ranged combat is iffy at best. The Man-at-arms is fast and has access to shields, but his weapons are relatively weak and you'll need to rely on hit-an-run tactics against armored opponents. The Vanguard combines speed and armor, but is limited to two-handed weapons and needs to rely on a charge attack to be effective. The Knight is heavy and slow, but has access to a huge amount of weapons and tools to effectively deal death. 

Each of the classes plays just different enough to be interesting, and a proper balance of all of them is paramount to success on the battlefield. Of course, you won't be going it alone, since Chivalry is largely multiplayer based. The official servers are usually full, but there are more then enough private severs, some with higher player caps, that finding a game is easy to do. Obviously playing with real people is decidedly different then AI, so your experiences will likely vary from match to match. 

Chivalry probably could work as just a free-for-all hack and slash, but to keep it from growing stale each map has it's own objective or set of objective to complete, often with one team rushing to complete the objective while the other team attempts to hold them back. There are traditional objective maps too, like team deathmatch, last man standing, and a no-team free for all to score the most kills. All of this is well controlled and maps are fairly well balanced. 

No Honor in Battle

Chivalry is not a bug free game...

Chivalry is an incredibly niche game that could really only exist on PC. It's controls are clunky, yet innovative. It's design is old, yet well suited. It's graphics are your standard Unreal engine 3 fare, but it conveys what it needs to quite nicely. It's a simple game to learn, and yet can take hours to master. 

There's nothing really wrong with Chivalry, but then there's very little that makes it truly stand out. The melee combat is new and interesting, sure, but strip that away and it's just a reskin of every other multiplayer shooter. It's in Chivalry's best interest then that the melee combat is so well done and so precise. If you are looking for a multiplayer experience that's far and away from the same old shooting madness then Chivalry is definitely worth checking out. 

Image Sources:
http://www.yialife.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/chivalry-medieval-warfare-15987-1920x1080.jpg

Looking at: Enemy Front

Gold Old Days

You'll need to use precision shots and high explosives to dislodge the Nazi threat

It used to be you couldn't swing a grandpa around in the air like a club without hitting a WW2 game. They were everywhere, in every genre, completely saturating the market like Zombie games and MOBA's do today. By far the most popular was the venerable first person shooter, a trend that transcended subject matter. WW2 shooters gave birth to franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor, to name a few.

Over time fads fade away however, and by the mid 2000's shooters had switched over to more modern conflicts, like the Gulf War of early 90's or the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East of today. The last truly note-worthy WW2 shooter was likely COD: World at War, an incredibly underrated entry into the series that remains one of my favorite COD games of all time.

It's a bit strange then that someone would try to revive this once guaranteed money-maker, but in June of 2014 CI games tried just that with Enemy Front, calling it the "first modern WW2 FPS game". It's modern alright, and it certainly takes place in World War 2, but does it live up to the legacy of the greats, or does it land like a dud?

Different Front

Enemy Front tries to have a cinematic tone, but often falls short

Enemy Front's biggest attempt to try and distance itself from it's progenitors is in it's choice of locales. Rather then replay the tried and true battles like Normandy, the Pacific, or the Eastern Front, EF turns it's sights to the unknown battles of Eastern Europe. You'll flip back and forth between fights in Poland and Norway, with a central focus around the Battle of Warsaw. It's a nice change of pace, but honestly, one 1940's bombed out village looks like every other 1940's bombed out village, regardless of nationality.

The plot sees you in control of Robert Hawkins, an American war correspondent that takes the "war" part of that very seriously, and never heard the phrase "conflict of interests". Rather then just report on the war, Hawkins decides it's more fun gunning down Nazis and blowing up factories, and while I question his journalistic integrity, I understand where he's coming from. It's to bad, then, that his outlet for this destruction happens to be this game.

The plot is... there? It's hard to say really, because there wasn't anything to grab on to. You'll do a level during the Warsaw uprising, then flashback to another story somewhere else, then repeat over and over. There are really only, maybe, five characters, and no villain save for the endless Nazis that stand in your way. It's very similar to the old Medal of Honor games in this way, where the plot only exists to ferry you from battle to battle.

One of the game's many, often hilarious glitches

Pop Guns

There's a lot of detail in the levels, from realistic shattering glass to small items lying around.

Taking place in a different battlefield means using different guns, and EF's armory contains some of the weirdest and rarest weapons from WW2. There are the old classics, like the MP40, Kar. 98, or the Mosin Nagant rifle, but there's also the inclusion of weapons like the incredibly rare De Lisle silenced carbine, or the WZ .28 auto rifle. There's very little noteworthy about these guns, but it's a nice touch and further cements EF's desire to be different.

Unfortunately, while the attention to detail on the guns is nice, how they actually handle is less so. Aiming feels fine mostly, I suspect, thanks to the Cry Engine EF is running off, but the guns don't have any weight to them, and don't feel that fun to shoot. WW2 weapons were forged from wood and steel, made for warfare and loud as hell. Why then do all of my rifles sound and feel like cap guns, and my machine guns feel like a kid's toy? A shooter lives and dies on it's weapons, and the guns on offer in EF just aren't fun to use.

Lost Platoon

Ragdoll physics transcend warfare.

Rather then the old linear levels of FPS's past, EF's levels are wide open and give you the opportunity to sneak around. There are limited stealth tools, and occasionally sneaking can save you from a costly firefight. Or, it might if the stealth wasn't absolutely abysmal. This is not a stealth game, and should never be played as such. Most of the time I immediately abandoned stealth in favor of a proper shoot out because that was more fun and worked better. Enemy AI handle well enough, flanking around and using cover, and stealth felt like a waste of time. There's no leaning option either, something that should be included in a stealth game.

Enemy Front is a confused game, trying so hard to be the WW2 FPS games of yore while also trying so hard to be a completely different game. There are brief moments of nostalgic brilliance hearkening back to Medal of Honor or Call of Duty 2, but these are brief as you slog your way through generic enemies and boring levels. There's no denying the joy of killing Nazi scum by the dozens, but there are better, albeit older, ways of scratching that itch.


Image Sources
http://www.steamunlock.com/uploads/posts/2014-06/1402743094_enemy-front.jpg

Looking at: Maxis Studios

Rest in Peace

Recently the monolithic source of all evil in the gaming world, Electronic Arts, decided to close the doors of one of the longest running and most influential game developers in the industry: Maxis. This comes as little surprise considering how their last few games have been received, and I thought I'd take some time to briefly go through my history with Maxis and why they were once the kings of PC sim games.

Where there's a Will, there's a Wright Way

Humble beginnings.

In 1987 Will Wright and Jeff Braun decided to port their well received Commadore 64 game "SimCity" over to the PC. SimCity was a strange specimen at the time, a game with no Win or Loose condition that just went on forever.

Wright and Braun created Maxis, after Braun's father suggested a "two syllable name with an X for good measure" and settled on the phrase "Six AM" backwards. Despite it's niche appeal SimCity sold very well and Maxis went on to create a slew of spinoffs including SimAnt, SimEarth, SimTower, and SimLife among others.

My experience with these early games is sparse at best, save one. I've played SimAnt and SimEarth before, but found them antiquated and poorly aged. SimTower, though, was an incredibly addictive and enthralling title that still holds up today. It's a great game, and fun as hell, and can be played for just moments, or for hours at a time.

Electronic Arts and the Sims

Unfortunately unavailable anywhere.

In 1997 Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts, during the production of the third SimCity game, SimCity 3000. Their next title, and the first to be produced fully by EA was The Sims, a game that simply had no competition in the market place.

It's been said that the idea of The Sims is somewhat pointless, and the idea of a game simulating daily life doesn't make sense. This might be true, but the numbers don't lie, and The Sims quickly became, and has remained one of the most profitable franchises for a very long time.

Game changer, and genre-creator.

Like I said, there's nothing like The Sims, and looking past the simplistic exterior it's easy to see why the series is so popular. Once you realize the potential hidden within the game you start to loose hours, or even days as you meticulously craft your own stories. It can be something as simple as a loveless looser making his way through life, or the conniving gold-digging sex addict housewife. You can make the genius artist that never leaves the house, or a work farm filled with slaves. The possibilities are endless, limited only to your imagination.

One Golden Year and the Sims 3

Almost perfect and untouched.

The 2003-2004 marks the absolute peak of Maxis' history. Between these two years we saw the release of what are, arguably, their best games SimCity 4 and The Sims 2. Thanks to these two Maxis became kings of the PC and a name that everyone, even many non-gamers, suddenly knew.

SimCity 4 has remained the high bar for city simulation games even 12 years later. The tools offered to the player are impressively expansive and the simulations are simple to learn and difficult to master. It's the best type of sequel, taking all of the best ideas from the older games and applying new ways to streamline them. It doesn't hurt that it pulled the SimCity franchise into 3D, rather then the antiquated isometric view of it's predecessors. It's a fantastically fun game, even today, and remains unsurpassed as one of the best city sims ever.

No more blocky faces and aging!

Meanwhile, The Sims 2 has often been regarded as the best of that series. There's no denying the leaps and bounds Sims 2 has over the original. A full 3D render, Sims that react to the world around them, contextual actions that change dynamically, a full town to explore complete with business, and so many updates to the AI it's impossible to fit them all here. The Sims 2 remains one of my favorite PC titles and a great, albeit dated, game.

Open world and polished to a sheen.

Eight expansion packs for the Sims 2 were released, and finally in 2009 The Sims 3 came out. It's change were less visual and AI, and more mechanical. Sims 3 completely overhauled the world and how the Sims themselves interacted with it. The biggest change though, was that the map was now seamless and open, meaning your Sim could dynamically walk to the park without ever experiencing a loading screen. This came at the cost of system performance and even now Sims 3 can be taxing on a system. Regardless, for fans of the series The Sims 3 offered a great deal of improvements over the prior titles and over the course of eleven expansion packs still remains a popular game.

Spore and the way down

First stumble, but not the last.

Let's talk about Spore, lord knows someone has to.

Let me pitch you an idea: create a creature from scratch, cobbling together it's DNA and watching as it grows from a single-cell organism to a functioning society, all the way to a space-faring galactic civilization. All the while the game is dynamically creating similar creatures that evolve with you.

That was the pitch for Spore, Will Wright's big game-changing follow-up to The Sims. What we got instead was a series of mini-games and demo's that finally lead up to an unsatisfying and mediocre space-sim game.

Spore might not be a bad game, it's completely playable and the addition of user-created content gave it a healthy fan-base while it was still active, but it suffered from what can best be described as the Peter Molyneux effect. The game is pitched in such a fantastical manner with so many promises that when the final product comes out lacking some of these features the game, regardless of how good it might be, becomes vilified. That's certainly the case with Spore, a poster child for broken promises in a game. This is likely where Maxis' downturn began, but certainly not it's zenith.

Double Whammy

Hole in the ground...

"I just pre-ordered SimCity [2013]"
"You just pre-ordered a game with always on DRM and micro-transactions from EA in 2013?"
"Yeah! I'm really looking forward to it!"

That's the conversation I had with my little brother shortly before SimCity 2013 was released.

"I regret everything I've ever done! I renounce Maxis, and I rebuke EA! I'll never love again!"

That was my little brother's reaction only a short time after SimCity 2013 was released.

SimCity 2013 (because naming a game the same thing as a game that already exists is stupid) was a disaster. There's no other word to describe it, nothing went right. It all started when it was announced that the game would feature always online DRM and wouldn't support mods. The idea was that this was a more "social" game then it's predecessors.

SimCity isn't a social experience. SimCity is a game played by PC gaming enthusiasts late into the night when they should be sleeping, not with a room full of friends at a LAN party or after a night of drinking.

Apparently learning nothing from the launch of Diablo 3, or any myriad of MMO games, the initial release of SimCity was unplayable, with wait times of over an hour to play, even if you were playing by yourself. Worse, the company later admitted that, despite initial reports, a single-player offline mode was very possible, and was even patched into the game later on.

Even worse is that, even when the game started working, players discovered that the internal systems just weren't that good. Maps were much smaller then SimCity 4, and it was often impossible to fit everything you needed to run a city into the city itself. The traffic AI was problematic, often behaving erratically or nonsensically, and the game was graphically unimpressive.

... nail in the coffin.

Following the disappointment that was SimCity 2013, the Sims 4 was almost doomed from the get-go. People didn't trust EA anymore, and voted them the worst company in the US twice in a row, beating out Bank of America and Monsanto. Add to that the exhaustive list of stripped features and the re-introduction of loading screens and it was clear that there was little hope for The Sims 4. Sure enough, upon release reaction was luke-warm at best. updates to the AI and an overhaul of Sim-to-Sim interaction couldn't help it. Maxis was limping, waiting the killing blow.

EA pulls an EA

Even their official images look imposing.

Maxis isn't the first developer to be killed by EA's involvement. Pandemic studios, creators of the Mercenaries series and the StarWars: Battlefront games were axed in 2009. Westwood, the creators of Command and Conquer, haven't released a game since 2003. Bullfrog, the studio founded by Peter Molyneux and creators of Theme Hospital and the Populous games closed in 2001. Origin software, who's name is now plastered on EA's second-rate digital store, created the Ultima series and shut down in 2004. The list is long and terrifying, and many have called EA tyrannically and pure evil because of this.

Maxis is just the latest victims of the modern gaming world. The constant nickel and diming of customers with DLC and expansion packs, along with disastrous business decisions and questionable ethics are telltale signs of a once great AAA company that's lost it's way. Knowing EA they'll likely stick Maxis on the back-burner, pulling them out to dance like a trained monkey in the vain hope that nostalgia still sells.

In the meantime, to you Maxis, I bid a goodnight. Perhaps this is a mercy blow, slitting the throat of the wounded buck and letting it pass into the golden pasture in the sky. I have hope for the former employees of Maxis, and hope that other developers might learn from this experience. Until then, Soodle Soodle!

image sources:
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130514161620/logopedia/images/1/14/Maxis.svg
http://www.bestoldgames.net/img/ss/simcity/simcity-ss1.gif
http://moarpowah.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SimCity-TRAVIS-1.png
http://cdn.hellogiggles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/26/3266-the-sims-1-irgjf_1471495.jpg
http://eaassets-a.akamaihd.net/prod.simcity.com/sites/default/files/SimCity%204%20Box.png
http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2014/07/the_sims2_089_1680.jpg
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/the-sims-3/thumb/6/6f/Sims3cover.jpg/480px-Sims3cover.jpg
https://d1s1q1nq49bywn.cloudfront.net/cached/7f7fa0c9239dcf62f49325dfe7eabf49/skin1/img/products/spore-mac/spore-mac-product.jpg
http://brothersofwar.org/community/uploads/monthly_12_2014/post-7-0-41882800-1418800378.jpg
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jasonevangelho/files/2014/08/The-Sims-4-release-date.jpg