Bulletstorm Review - Crackin' Jokes, Kickin' Ass

Bulletstorm Review 
Crackin' Jokes, Kickin' Ass

A very underrated game. This game was supposed to get a sequel, but EA canned the project because the original failed to meet sales target. This story is no masterpiece and the music is not mindblowing. If any, they are painfully average. However, what this game does best is with the shooting and oh boy, wasn't it fun.

Story
Bulletstorm follows the story of Grayson Hunt, a spec ops that went rogue after discovering that he is being used by his superior. One fine day, he saw the Ulysses, a battleship that belongs to General Sarrano, his superior. Blinded by revenge, and alcohol, he proceeded to shoot down Ulysses at the cost of his jet fighter. Both of them went down on this planet inhabited by mutants and savages. So our story begin with Grayson and his comrade-turned-cyborg Ishi trying to find a way to escape the planet's surface.

The setting is certainly a refreshing change from the yearly release of Battlefield and CoD. It has a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic feel to it. Something like Fallout, but much MUCH less serious.

The plot itself is a big cliche. A rogue soldier trying to get back on his evil superior. The twists are expected and it even gets a tad draggy at times. If you are looking for an excellent story, you won't get it here. However, the writing however is extremely well done. The chemistry between Bulletstorm's three main characters is very well fleshed out. Firstly, we have Ishi Sato, a makeshift cyborg with personality issues who is a serious and straight-faced guy. Then we have Trishka, a young military commander who is a vengeful tomboy. And lastly, we have Grayson who acts as the comic relief with his brainless, smash-em-all mentality.  Thought you've had enough? Towards the end of the game, another cast member joined the group, the antagonist General Sarrano who is a general that I swear uttered about half of the dirty words present in the entire game.

Yes, there are the cliched one-liners and it gets old after a while. However, the conversations are genuinely funny. I had a number of good 'wtf' moments and that usually is a good sign of a well-written game.

The campaign itself is quite short. Steam clocked me at 5 hours, but I personally think it was closer to about 7-8 hours. Also, the game did get a little draggy towards the end when the enemy gets EXTREMELY bullet spongy. So, if you are expecting a 40+ hour long campaign, the campaign will disappoint you.

Gameplay
This game is a first person shooting game and a fine one at that. The shooting was extremely satisfying with a wide variety of weapons, each with an alternate firing mode. On top of an excellent shooting mechanic, there is also the Energy Leash.

Pulling off multiple skillshots is extremely satisfying

The Energy Leash is a leash (duh.) that allows you to pull enemies from a distance towards you. It can pass through objects and hook to enemies that are within range even if they are not within you line of sight. To compliment the leash, you have your Boots that you can use to kick people away from you. Using this two tools, you can then perform Skillshots, which are basically fancy ways of killing enemies. There are various Skillshots, varying from the basic ones like headshots, to kicking enemies to spikes, cactus, ponds, live wires, grinders, power generators, you name it. If it looks dangerous, chances are you can kick enemies there to kill them. These Skillshots then grant you points and you use these points to purchase supplies and upgrade your guns (read: more ammo).

There are a few weaknesses to the game unfortunately. For starters, this game has no weapon customization system, so you cannot upgrade your gun. This becomes a problem towards the end, the assault rifle becomes extremely weak and is only usable because of the large magazine size. This is compounded by the fact that you cannot swap out your assault rifle with another weapon. And did I mention, this game only allows for THREE weapons? It's a shame considering the weapons are all interesting. In the end, I opted for the standard Sniper, Assault Rifle, and Shotgun for most of the game.

Also, although there are plenty of quick time events in this game and there is a turret segment in the game. Although I personally feel that they are well done segments and does not impede in the way of gameplay, I still feel it needs to be at least mentioned.

Fortunately, there are an overwhelming amount of positives to the gameplay.

Firstly, the Skillshots never gets old. There are only so many environmental skillshots opportunities (cactus, steel poles, and live wires), but they are so very well placed that every battle turns from just a mindless spray and pray, to a somewhat thinking game. Positioning and timing is key in surviving battles, especially towards the end where the enemy gets so bullet spongy that your assault rifle feels like it's just tickling them. Dashing, kicking and leashing quickly replaces aiming and shooting and it actually feels good. It's hectic and when you perform the big combo kills by using the explosive barrels, it's extremely satisfying.

This never gets old

The weapon variety also goes a long way to alleviate the monotony and weakness of the default assault rifle. Each weapon handles and feels differently. The Sniper has a remote controlled bullet, the Flailgun shoots remotely detonated grenade, the Penetrator shoots rocket powered drills, etc. They are ridiculously fun weapon to use and each have their own usage. Unfortunate as it may be that you can only equip 2 plus the assault rifle, they are still fun to use and there are plenty of Droppods where you can change your loadout.

Graphics
This game was released in 2011 and I think the visuals are gorgeous. The backdrops and the environments are as good as modern titles. There are plenty of open vistas and they are jaw droppingly good (it helps that they give you points for looking at them).

It is only a skybox, but it is a very good skybox.

Texture quality too was good for a game that was also released on consoles. Environment looks sharp and detailed. The developers of Bulletstorm is capable of creating a world that people could have once called paradise, even if most of them are just sets and props that are just pretty to look at, but are not actually accessible

Performance-wise, being quite an old game, it works very well on my i5-4670 and GTX760. Constant 60+ fps and no noticeable bugs.

Sound
Not much comment here. Probably the weakest aspect of the game and that is a huge compliment to the game. Voice acting is also not too bad. Overall, a decent sounding game leaving little to be desired.

Conclusion
Overall, I enjoyed my time with BulletStorm. They almost overstayed their welcome, especially with the later enemies becoming extremely bullet sponges. However, I cannot help but feel that they are specifically designed so that you have to rely on the Skillshots in order to win, which is a good thing in my opinion. 

This is an extremely underrated game and more credit should be given to it. It has been on sale several times already, and if you do see it on sale, buy it. 

On Ubisoft's recent update on AC:U
and some small updates

It has been quite a busy week at school, so sorry for the lack of articles. I'm still waiting for the Assassin's Creed patches to roll out before resuming my game so, don't hold out for it. Anyway, if you liked AssCreed, you've probably bought it. If not, then you might want to look at AC4:Black Flag first, or AC2. Both of those games are not much worse, if not better, than Assassin's Creed: Unity.

As for reviews, I'm trying to play Far Cry 4 as fast as possible. I've liberated about half the Radio Towers, so I think I'll soon make a review of it. So far, the gameplay is solid. It was solid in Far Cry 3, and it's just as solid in Far Cry 4. However, my problem is with the story. I'll go in detail later in the full article, so look forward to it.

Today, I just want to talk a little bit about Ubisoft, especially the letter from their CEO that was released this week, link below. Paraphrasing, the CEO basically apologized for the blunder that they made in AC:Unity and is giving it their all to fix the game. They are offering the DLC Dead Kings for free to everyone who owns AC:Unity and a free Ubisoft game for Season Pass holders. 

Some people said that this is merely a move made as damage control and are pretty dismissive about it. The comments section on that letter is evident enough in my opinion. However, I am willing to give them a second chance given how much value the choice of games hold. Far Cry 4, Rayman Legends, and AC:Black Flag are solid titles, not to mention that The Crew is also there (although the lack of review copies for The Crew is not a very good sign) and they are basically giving them away for free to people who bought the Season Pass.

So, I think we should give them another shot next year. I don't have high hopes for The Crew due to recent circumstances surrounding the game, but knowing that they cannot possibly make drastic changes in two weeks following the outcry caused by the AC:Unity, I cannot really blame them either. It should all come down to their next big title releases and really hope, for Ubisoft's sake, that they are well designed and polished to a mirror-shine.

Just my two cents~

Link: http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-gb/news/news_detail.aspx?c=tcm:154-186654-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32 

Assassin's Creed: Unity - First Impression

Assassin's Creed: Unity
A whole lot of lost potential - First Impressions

I played around 4 hours of Assassin's Creed: Unity, and I really wanted to love it. My last Assassin's Creed was Assassin's Creed 3; and compared to ACIII, Unity is far far better. However, and this is a big one, the port is bad. 

Plot - spoilers ahead, probably you want to skip. I'll put a TL;DR
The story of AC:U revolves around Arno, a child born into a family of Assassins. Early in the game, his father was killed by a mysterious person and suddenly, Arno was orphaned. He was taken in by his father's acquaintance, a Templar, and raised as their own son. Years went by, until one fateful night, Arno's stepfather was murdered. Arno was wrongly accused of murdering his stepfather and imprisoned. In the prison, Arno met another one of his father's friend, an Assassin, who taught him the ways of the Brotherhood. And... that was as far as I have played. 

As a character, Arno is likeable. Unlike, Connor, Arno is not overly-zealous with his cause. He has his own goals, in that he wants to bring his step-father's killer to justice and live happily with his Templar -to put it crudely- girlfriend, Elise. If any, Arno is much more Ezio than Connor in terms of personality. Witty, brash, and is yet kind and compassionate to those in need. 

TL;DR The plot is good. In my opinion, it is at least on par with ACII.

Performance and graphics
This is where the game breaks down. I am running the game on a i5-4670 and a GTX760. To put things into perspective, my rig can run Tomb Raider with maxed settings (except Tress-FX) at almost constant 60 fps. It's no GTX980, bit it's no slouch for sure. With AC:U, I cannot even get constant 30 fps, at high settings. 

It would be fine if the game looks out of this world, but it's not. I must admit that the character models, especially the named characters looks fantastic. The detail in the clothings, skin, eyes, and expression looks amazing. Animation quality is also top notch, especially in cutscenes. However, for the rest of the non-named NPCs, they look horrible. Environment textures too look horrible, even at Ultra setting. Doors and pillars look horrible in this game, and is especially emphasized when the high-res character models interact with the objects. This mismatch in texture quality really detracts from the experience as they are really jarring.

One thing that I should commend about the game is that the lighting looks absolutely fantastic. Most of the reviews that I read online don't really touch on lighting, but I think it's so awesome that it deserves its own paragraph. If you are using an NVidia card, please do yourself a favour and turn on the HBAO+ lighting effect. Although it does tank the fps quite a bit, the really good lighting masks much of the murky environmental texture and improves the overall look of the game. 

In game screenshot that I think really emphasizes the beauty of the lighting in the game. Just look at that light pillar.

Gameplay

The biggest change in gameplay compared to the previous AC games is the addition of downward parkour. You will not know how much does downward parkour helps until you've tried it. It really is a godsend, especially when you want to descend from a ledge without jumping off and alerting every guard within a 20 meter radius. One drawback that I have with it is that every time you parkour downwards, the camera turns to face the ground for some reason. It wouldn't matter if the camera can quickly swivel back towards the horizontal, but it doesn't. So every time you parkour downwards, you need to readjust your camera to know where you are going.

Combat

Another big change in gameplay is the combat. In previous AC games, I have 2 main problems with the game: disarm and chain killing. Disarming allows you to kill anything in the game, including those that you cannot counter with the hidden blade; and Chain Kill is simply over-powered. The removal both of these aspects in AC:U makes me glad they. AC:U feels less like the power fantasy that recent AC games started to be and places more focus on stealth, rather than combat. 

Another big omission to me was the inability to equip the hidden blade in combat. What this entails is the you can no longer counter-kill enemies in AC:U. In AC1, you cannot block when equipping the hidden blade, making the hidden blade a high-risk, high-return weapon as a successful counter on-shots almost any enemy, whereas failing would mean taking damage. In AC2, they allow you to block with the hidden blade, removing the risk, but is still very difficult to counter with, providing incentive to master the timing. In AC:U, you cannot equip the hidden blade in combat at all and I find that as a rather odd design decision. I hope that Ubisoft brings hidden blades back into combat in subsequent AC games, but return it to how it works in AC1. 

All-in-all, the changes in AC:U combat has really made it better in my opinion. It is now much more difficult to kill a group of guards, and, combined with the improved parkour mechanics, this makes running when outnumbered a more viable and enjoyable option. Unfortunately, smoke bombs are still as over-powered as ever, allowing you to kill 5-6 guards without difficulty and are ridiculously cheap. Ubisoft, nerf them will you...?

Conclusion

So far, Assassin's Creed: Unity has captured me with its story. I will be playing more of it, only to see the story unfold as it is, in all honesty, quite interesting. However, I can only barely stomach the performance issues that the game has. If you can wait, do wait for a patch that fixes the game before purchasing. I will bring a full review once I have completed the game, or stopped playing due to frustration. Ubisoft, get it together, please. Patch it.

Freedom Wars

First Impressions - So far, So good

So, I picked up Freedom Wars on a wimp. The gameplay videos looks good and I am itching for a monster hunting game. After a few hours of playing, I can say that it is really worth hyping for.

Plot

Let's start with the plot. It is fortunate for me to report that there is a story in Freedom Wars, and it's not bad. The writing is cliche and does not really break new grounds. It is really typical anime plot whereby you are there to save the world with the power of friendship, bla bla bla. But, it is the setting where Freedom Wars really kills it. It goes something like:

The earth is basically ruined due to shortage of resources. Humanity now live in Panopticons, a "city" where some people live as a prisoner with a million year sentence from the moment they were born. In the game, you fight as one of the Sinners, who committed a sin by simply living, and must reduce your one million years sentence by going on suicide missions against other Panopticons. 

The 1 Million Year Sentence at birth

You really have to hand it to the Japanese to be able to come up with such brilliant and unique setting. It's really sufficient to provide a decent backdrop to the whole game.

When you start the game, you need to choose your Panopticon among the 50 randomly chosen cities around the world. The choice does not really matter as you can play with anyone from any Panopticons, but there is a leaderboard of some sort to rank which are the top Panopticons, but I am not sure how the leaderboard system works since I have not touched multiplayer yet.

Gameplay

Typical of many hunting games, gameplay consists of mainly combat and crafting. There are some conversation choices, but so far, choices does not affect the story at all. 

Combat

Combat is amazing. Although the weapons feel a bit samey, the thorns more than made up for the lack of weapon variety. Equipping different thorns makes up for the lack of distinction between the different weapon classes that are generally present with other hunting games. Jumping on Abductors and hacking away parts of their body still feels great after a few hours. I have heard that there aren't that many variety of Abductors in the game, but so far I cannot say that it's not fun. Battle do get a bit clusterf*ck-y, especially if the arena is small. At low health, the Abductors hit some sort of enrage threshold and start spamming attack. If your team is stuck in a small space, you will die pretty quickly. 

The main enemy in the game, the Abductors. Yes, you can jump on top of it and hack away parts of the enemy.

Another interesting addition that Freedom Wars adds into the combat are accessories. They are sort of the felines that you encounter in Monster Hunter games. They act as a companion the battle, acting as a distraction and support character. Outside battles, they act as your personal assistant and jailer, recording your progress, relaying messages and giving additional years to your sentence when appropriate. This causes me to, embarrassingly, develop sort of a bitter sweet feeling towards them as they will be the character that you interact the most during your playtime. 

Crafting

Crafting is handled differently in Freedom Wars. They are on a timer, like much mobile games. They will continue to tick down as long as you don't terminate the application. This gives me mixed feelings about the game. On one hand, I like it because this give some sort of resource management aspect to the game, in that you need to time your upgrades so that you will not be stuck using inferior equipments because your best weapons are being upgraded. On the other hand, it seems to be unnecessary clutter as you will just assign the upgrading to your different facilities as you end your play session anyway so that when you come back, they are all done. Also, some people seems to be bothered by the RnG aspect of crafting in this game. The fact is that the final stats of the weapon that you craft is randomly assigned and so far, I have not encountered any way to make the odds of obtaining a superior version increase. Take it as you may, but I am not really bothered by it. 

Graphics

An in game screen-shot as seen on the Vita TV.

The graphics in this game is easily one of the best on the Vita. Despite the sub-HD resolution that the Vita has, the graphics looks amazing. I did notice some jaggies, especially during character close-up shots in cutscenes, but they are hardly noticeable unless you are looking for it. Also, I think Sony does balance particle effects and graphical flare during combat as battles look bombastic, but not too cluttered.

In game on the PSVita.

Sound

Music is amazing, if not lacking in variety. There are a few tracks for the few locations in the game, but each of them sounds great. Weapon sound assets too sound really great. The sound, combined with the excellent visuals, makes the attack feel really powerful, especially when you can pull of a large hit with the great sword on the enemy Abductors. 

Bottom-Line

If it's not obvious by now, I really enjoy Freedom Wars. I will continue to play it and will write a full review once I am done with it. However, so far, I feel that it is really really good.