Hotline Miami is a top-down twin-stick shooter that creates a fast and furious blend of stealth and combat, designed up front for quick, satisfying showdowns with a large number of intensely lethal enemies while simultaneously requiring the player to very carefully manage their path through the level, lines of sight, and noise level to avoid being overwhelmed.
Hotline Miami views the player from a top-down perspective much in the style of older games like Grand Theft Auto or Die Hard. The player has independent control of both the character’s movement and aiming direction as twin-stick shooter implies. The goal of almost every Hotline Miami level is to kill every enemy on the current floor before moving to the next one. A variety of weapons can be collected in levels either as drops from enemies or just found lying around, these range between different melee weapons to various firearms. The game is extremely lethal, one strike from a melee weapon or bullet will kill most enemies and the player as well. Most floors are designed to be relatively short and should the player die they have an instant reset with no penalty except time. Continue reading →
I already commented on another of their videos, quoted below. I think the movement system and combat systems don’t compliment each other at all.
I feel like the game has a really poor sense of momentum. You got a few people complaining about the speed, and you say you played Sonic a lot as a kid, so you’re not changing it. Eh. The thing about Prototype and Sonic is, both have the character accelerate in order to move quickly, and both have the character slide to a stop. The exception is if you use a trick of some sort or an environmental feature to gain speed or to stop quickly.
The attacks you have here all start abruptly, allow no movement input during them and travel in completely static patterns. Compare to DMC, Mirror’s Edge, Smash Bros, King of Fighters, Guilty Gear, Prototype. The animations and movements in this game lack oomph. You’re animating like ninja theory (I hope you remember the article where Capcom had to seriously tell them about timing and spacing in animations to give attacks a sense of impact). None of the animations flow into each other, they’re all abrupt, most of them lock you in place, they start and end suddenly.
End result is a game that’s super fast and super janky. I know you’re not going for this. You’re going for something fluid like prototype, but with combat that is worth a damn and I don’t think your current approach will get you there. Your animator and your programmer should be working together to try to blend the animations and the movement of the whole character together into a cohesive whole. All the animations seem to play mostly in place or on a completely static motion track. Consider how the acceleration builds and declines through the animation. Consider how the moves change based on directional input and facing direction, consider how they change based on the momentum of the character at the time. Consider arcs, gravity, emphasis. The teleport and rising kick animations are especially weird because of how abruptly they move in a totally different direction than you were previously headed.
That and the jump is seriously fucked up. The dude just pops up with no anticipation, so it feels like a really weird jump. There’s force but it comes from nowhere. The jumping animations themselves are really weak too and don’t reflect the massive change in acceleration.
I’m a bit biased, but I think an important inspiration here would be smash bros. Smash bros, unlike other fighting games, and very much like your game, is all about momentum. Especially aerial momentum. Players can control it all the time while they’re in the air, and on the ground they’re also dealing with momentum. They transfer momentum from the ground to the air, they need to employ various tactics to keep their options open on the ground, in the air they can use attacks that move them forward and back, while also finely controlling where they’re going at the same time. Attacks are based on doing damage, but also on pushing the enemy around. This style seems very similar to what you seem to be going for. Your combat system is currently very much about timed inputs in close quarters to locked on targets. It just doesn’t fit with the larger system. You’re exploring the wrong design space there. Try thinking up different attacks that sweep through space differently, and are affected in different ways by your momentum, or which can be leveraged in different ways by your momentum. A better angle to go than the current system might be to focus on the player avoiding attacks by weaving between them, instead of just getting away from the enemies, and to in turn try to use attacks whose paths intersect with the enemies without exposing the player in the process. Coming back to smash bros, here’s some inspiration, jigglypuff has short ranged attacks, but awesome aerial mobility, so jiggs constantly dances right outside the enemy attack range, gets them to commit to something, then slides in, pokes the guy, and slides out. It’s a constant back and forth dance in the air. Marth meanwhile is all about attacking with the very tip of his blade the instant an enemy is in range, so he tends towards finely adjusting himself to always be at that perfect distance. Other characters of course have other tactics, but everyone has different attacks that make use of space differently and have different applications from one another. Most of the ground attacks here, except those with more explicit functions, like gap closing, seem really samey. Get the game designer on board and work out attacks that use space and momentum more effectively, that’s what meshes with the movement system you’re trying to build, don’t waste it.
Also, the way the character turns is completely silly. There should be a turning animation there, but it shouldn’t change the character’s position as they turn. This makes walking around in any slightly precise way really irritating.
The combat system feels haphazardly put together, like they just chose random components for it rather than something that resembles combat. No thought about the neutral game, just punishes, and sure you can get some fast flying air combos, but the properties of the moves are so similar that linking them together doesn’t really feel that special, especially given that you have a universal cancel in the form of the auto slash, much like Vergil’s DMC4 SE air trick. Also heavy reliance on combo strings is lame.
I don’t think they really thought about how to create a system of interrelated interactions and a multitude of viable strategies, I think they were just tossing in some random combat mechanics that they thought would look cool and would function in a sort of unique way. Good on them for making a working prototype, but I don’t think the final product will have much longevity.
Anyway, I’ve been playing The Witness, because I felt like playing a puzzle game and this intrigued me more than Braid did. It’s alright. The biggest issue I’ve had with it so far is that the rules for overlapping shape symbols are not adequately explained in the swamp area, first that the overlapping shapes can be connected to each other, next that as long as the symbol is contained, the shape represented by that symbol can be anywhere within the contained area. Not to mention that a lot of puzzles in that area which have multiple solutions will reject a large number of valid solutions. The blue square subtraction puzzles are a similar issue, with the hardest puzzles of that type having solutions that honestly don’t make any sense compared to the puzzles that came before them, or after them, seemingly violating their own rules. Oh, and I wish you could sprint faster and the acceleration weren’t so slow.
The Witness is honestly kind of a curiosity to me. It’s literally a game about drawing lines, yet so much effort was put into making a fancy island with a unique visual style, really striking environmental design in terms of landscaping and color design throughout. You find audio logs that are far as I can tell, all just quotes from famous people, particularly scientists. Then there’s the $40 price tag. Does he think this game is really the same as other $40 games on the digital market? The 10/10 is also striking from IGN, because while I think it’s an interesting game, I don’t think it’s worthy of a 10/10, there’s not enough there. I’d give it a 7/10 personally.
This actually really pissed me off. I haven’t finished the game yet, I’m on the final area, and I’ve taken far less time than he has. I did all the work in my head with no accompanying notes and almost no hints. throughout the video he attempts solutions that I can tell are wrong, probably selected on purpose to convey his dissatisfaction with the game.
The thing I disliked about Braid was that the puzzles were too easy, and when they were tricky to figure out, it was because they relied on an interaction of the mechanics that was difficult to extrapolate from the earlier puzzles. I have a similar issue with Portal’s puzzles where the thing is playtested so hard that all the corners are carefully sanded down to prevent people from getting stuck.
The Witness was a big step up from Braid in my mind as a puzzle game because it introduces base concepts, then expects you to solve for them in a larger problem set, where the possibility space is big enough to make brute force prohibitively expensive.
Then it combines concepts, like two per area, areas needing to be a certain shape and excluding colors, plus connecting circuits and correcting 1 mistake, and because you know all the simpler rules you can figure out the trick to making this one whole puzzle work. Then there’s a bunch of observational puzzles and it’s like, yeah I can look at the environment or make this thing line up in perspective, give me a real one.
Part of what pisses me off is the way he criticizes it for not having more mechanics relating to the manipulation of simulated space. I thought it was an oddity frankly that jon blow decided to make an island at all, but frankly it’s neat to have nonlinear connections between areas and puzzles. I just wish sprint was faster and you could fall off more cliffs and the like.
Blow is trying to do something really elementary here with game design, with using basic abstract symbols for game rules. He managed to create a ruleset with these simple things that has a massive combinational complexity, then he leveraged it to make a massive fucking number of pretty good and difficult puzzles that almost always have good simple demonstrations of the base mechanics.
SBH whining that he’s not making use of the medium is ignorant, especially given portal 2 removed all the realtime execution components, and could probably be formatted to be solved like a crossword puzzle too. There’s no other game on paper, or otherwise, with rules like this, to my knowledge, and it being digital allows the system to check your answer against the correct one without revealing it to you in the process. Not to mention it allows multiple correct answers when applicable.
Demanding there at least be some sort of narrative thing to justify it is like the ultimate insult here. If you don’t like the game for what the game is, you don’t need this additional narrative thing to try to justify its existence to you, give up! Go back to puzzle games made specifically to coax you through any point you might get stuck or need to think.
But you know it’s gonna be a ton of adventure game + collectathon bullshit. That was one of the things I hated about psychonauts, the very deliberate telos of everything. You have all these figments you can collect in people’s minds to level up, cool. You have all these arrowheads you can collect to buy items, cool. Then they place barriers in your way that absolutely require these things. You NEED the cobweb duster, because certain cobwebs are completely impassable. You NEED the arrowhead finder, because the cobweb duster is so damn expensive (okay, this one is a bit less of a need). You NEED invisibility to get to Gloria’s dressing room, which means you NEED to collect all these fucking psi cores and figments to level up. It’s like no elements of the game are allowed to overlap in any way, everything that can be done has one strict way of doing it, a key that opens the lock. This means that rather than the collectathon bullshit being something additional, like hey, you unlocked the ability to launch enemies from afar, now you can juggle them with ranged attacks, now you have this crowd control ability, now you can zip forward, things that are nice to have and don’t totally overshadow the existing mechanics, but aren’t strictly necessary, you instead have these abilities that will do this one lock-and-key thing for you that you gotta have or this section is impassable. Screw that shit.
This is old writing I dug up from a long time ago, posted only to twitlonger. I mentioned in my other Shadow of the Colossus post on here how I had sworn I wrote something but couldn’t find it. Here it is:
Ico was completely lame and Shadow of the Colossus had a way better more interactive formula. Ico was lame because it was static. Ico’s gameplay challenge was primarily based on solving puzzles, fighting shadows, and escorting Yorda. Shadow of the Colossus’s primary challenge came from the scaling of the colossi, and exploring the world to find the colossi.
In Ico, Yorda is used as a key to open doors, so all puzzles require that she must make it to the next door. The primary hurdle with the puzzles is getting an AI companion to pass by various barriers when they have less movement capabilities than you do, only being able to climb up short ledges. So you must work to create paths the AI can traverse to get them to the next door. The solving of puzzles, rather than requiring actual logistics is more frequently a process of having Ico climb to the next point of interest along a relatively linear path and activating the thing that moves the game along, then dragging Yorda through to the next area. In a very zelda-like fashion, progression is defined largely through activating things rather than actually having to solve interactive systems, like portal, braid, or trine. Predictably every single puzzle consists of leaving yorda, navigating the environment, and activating something to let Yorda progress past a road block.
The other point of conflict is fighting shadows. Shadows are constantly attacking Yorda and Ico, and attempt to kidnap Yorda, dragging her into a portal. If this is successful, the game is lost. In most sections of the game, the shadows can be ignored by running past them. In others you are actually forced to fight the shadows, which is a complete slog. You only really have one attack, done by pressing square. when a shadow hits you, you get knocked down and have to sit through a lengthly getting up animation. In general, fighting shadows is not fun, it’s completely tedious. You thwack at them with your one attack, and they have tons and tons of health, having to be knocked down multiple times to actually defeat them. This isn’t dangerous nearly so much as it is dull and grindy. The enemies don’t have a lot of health to force you to attack right and efficiently to take them down, they have a lot of health to draw out the process of fighting them. The worst part is that in some sections you are forced to fight them and are not allowed to progress until they are all defeated, in which case they are made annoying by skittering off into corners and avoiding you as frequently as they attack. This is especially irritating in the late part of the game where you obtain a sword that can destroy shadows in one hit and they avoid you.
The biggest trouble with Ico is that the game has absolutely no flexibility. There is one way to solve every puzzle, there is one path to the next area, there is one attack that you spam. The game has a much larger focus on the environment and the idea of characters holding hands than any of its actual gameplay. I dare say that the concept of design for the game is outright unsalvagable, because no combination of the game’s existing mechanics or new mechanics could really serve to make the game interesting short of changing it into an action game. The game is gratuitous with its scenic vistas to the detriment of the game itself. It loves unskippable filler content. The AI that controls Yorda is unresponsive and has to be yelled at to get it to move anywhere by itself in any reasonable amount of time. The entire game gets no better than this. The level design doesn’t improve, the puzzles don’t get harder, the enemies don’t vary,
Speedruns are rarely an indicator of the quality of a game, because different pressures and dynamics generally apply, but they can frequently be a good tell. This is the Ico speedrun:
This speedrun is pretty notable among speedruns just because of how closely it follows the game’s original route. Minor tricks like jumping instead of running are employed in many areas, but largely, every single player to ever play this game will repeat the exact same actions as this speedrunner, only with more fumbling around trying to figure out the topography of their environment. This speedrun is a complete testament to the inflexibility of the game and the dullness of trying to play it. Ico isn’t a game based on interaction with your environment, it is a game based on participation with the route they want you to take.
And here’s the turnaround, Shadow of the Colossus is the opposite, a legend stepping out of the shadow of failure. In Shadow of the Colossus the primary gameplay segments are exploring the world on horseback, and scaling colossi to stab their weakpoints, killing them. You start every colossus hunt at a temple in the center of the world, use Agro, your horse to ride to the next Colossus, and do battle with it before starting over.
The biggest point against Shadow of the Colossus is the process of locating each one. In the sunlight you can hold up your sword to direct you to the next colossus, and Agro is helpful in getting you from place to place. Getting to each colossus frequently means riding to a location, and climbing a little to get to the actual arena. To help make exploration of the overworld more interesting, there are rewards for players who explore outside of just going straight to every colossus in the form of fruit and lizards. Fruit found will increase Wander’s health, and Lizards shot will increase Wander’s strength. Shooting lizards is tricky because they run away quickly and are small, making them hard to aim at. They can also be slashed or trampled by Agro, but this is more difficult. Between these, the open world is less filler and more worthwhile to the game, also offering greater freedom to explore freeform than Ico’s castle.
The real meat of Shadow of the Colossus however are the Colossi themselves. The game doesn’t waste time with smaller enemies, the Colossi are the embodiment of the game’s strongest system, climbing. The colossi moving underneath Wander’s grip and the addition of the grip gauge are what create the greatest tension in the game, requiring the player both to figure out a way forward, and pace themselves carefully so as not to fall off. Successfully defeating a colossus involves a careful game of evaluating when the colossus will shake or move, where to climb to next, if jumps are necessary, where the next weak point is, and how long to risk charging each stab for maximum damage. Along the way you must find footholds and places to rest to restore your stamina. Every facet of the colossi design is about putting your climbing skills to the test. Each colossi has a different physical structure that can be climbed, many have arenas that need to be climbed, multiple and changing weak points exist to make you climb all over the boss and to keep you engaged in climbing rather than staying in one place. They shake to make it so climbing wrong is punished and you have to carefully manage your stamina meter. Each boss has different movement behaviors that open up new avenues to climb or new ways to climb. Defeating each boss is much more than just following a static route to a static destination.
The big thing about Shadow of the Colossus is also its flexibility in killing the colossi. It’s possible to whistle to attract colossi attention, it’s possible to jump around on top of the colossi, it’s possible to see opportunities and run over for them and risk getting thrown off. It’s possible to do all these things because Shadow of the Colossus has such a robust simulation of bodies in motion. The bonus unlock items help highlight this in of how each of them can create unique interactions with the colossi. The colossi have senses of sight and sound and an AI to themselves and manipulating that AI can be useful in defeating each colossus.
In contrast to Ico’s speedrun, here is Shadow of the Colossus’s. Throughout every colossus there are tons of tricks used to win each fight, special jumps from flinging yourself off the colossus, moving around during cutscenes to break sequence. Most of these tricks are well and beyond a normal playthrough, not really something that you can totally judge the game on, but the fact that they exist is in part a testament to the robustness of Shadow of the Colossus’s system. There are many different ways to tackle each boss, and every player will have their own experience finding how to fell each Colossus because it is such a wide system of possible interactions. Also important is that it is a system that directly challenges the player to work out strategies for beating it. It is not just do what I tell you to, it is figure out ways to beat this. The Colossus quakes underneath you and between the tools you have, you must make it do what you want. The system isn’t participatory, it is based directly on interaction. Not on repeat back to me, but on you playing notes and the game playing back, on being able to change how you play rather than just do the same thing with less mistakes. It’s not about having fancy tricks, it’s about the game being designed in such an open way that people can solve things for themselves or make their own tricks, make their own way forward.
This is the difference between a good game and a bad game.
Okay, I played this game like 3 times, having to restart for various reasons. A ton of dialogue is recycled between different dialogue choices, with minor minor differences. This is especially noticeable with Therese and Jeanette.
I really like the backstory to VTM, but the game is crap overall. The fighting is crap. The dialogue choices are crap. The stealth is crap. The fighting is like, it changes what attacks are performed based on which direction is held, and somehow that affects whether enemies block, I think. In general just mash the attack button and directions and you’ll be fine. As the game progresses you need to fight more and more.
You need to run around back and forth a lot for all sorts of boring reasons. It’s built on the source engine, so there’s bunny hopping. I’m not very good at bunnyhopping, you can apparently go twice as fast that way.
It’s a pain to figure out which way to go some times, some areas have some cute set pieces like the ocean house hotel, whatever place does the mannequin trick, and a couple others.
There’s a bunch of useless skills, because whoever made the game wasn’t very careful. There’s also a bunch of bugs because it was probably rushed. The animations are silly as all hell.
I got to almost the end, and got stuck by a bugged door that refused to open because I didn’t install the fan patch. Installing the patch at that point didn’t fix it and I wasn’t seriously replaying the whole thing again.
There isn’t much to comment on, I don’t think there’s much to defend. It doesn’t seem to succeed even at the things people typically laud the game for. The interactive things at least. Though I guess it’s kind of faithful to the universe in terms of writing and content.
It’s repeating the same thing over and over again until you finally win. You don’t really have much choice in how you do it, you just gotta repeat until the inputs themselves are drilled into your head. The short level length exacerbates this, despite making the game easier, because the sections of repetition are really tightly packed together, so it’s extremely obvious that you’re doing the same thing over and over again. I’m not a fan of this style of difficulty.
Hotline Miami is closely comparable, but its application of randomness and subtle shifts in enemy patterns based on minute changes in timing allow for playthroughs of a given floor to play out very differently from one another, where everything in super meat boy is deterministic and very similar across repeated playthroughs. There’s a lot more possible variation in Hotline Miami, a lot more ways to approach any given problem (except the bosses, which they were sensible enough to not include in the sequel), where in super meat boy there are very few.
Levels in Super Meat Boy are very deliberately constructed to limit possibility space, much like Kaizo Mario style levels. This does make them harder, but it also makes them boring. Super Meat Boy is probably my definitive example of why difficulty or challenge alone does not make a good game. It was what spurred one of my early thoughts that it’s really easy to make a hard game, but a lot harder to make an interesting or “challenging” one. Now I would say a lot harder to make a deep one.
Yes, it is about the challenge, but deep games give you a lot of ways to approach a challenge, they have different measures of small successes to allow you to continue to push forward in some small way while getting closer to the big success rather than just ram your head against the wall making no progress on this one thing required to progress. This prevents frustration with the game, and usually provides avenues where more skilled players can find challenges up to their standards. They’re harder to build, but more rewarding to engage with, retaining more attention from players.
Though, I think Super Meat Boy was a financial success, it sold at least 1.5 million copies, so who really knows?
It’s fun. The weapons are really accurate even if you don’t focus them, the combination of the grappling hooks and infinite parachutes feels really excellent, blowing up stuff attracting the military works pretty well, makes any spot on the map potentially a fight zone.
The story missions are generally rather linear and boring in comparison to free roam destruction. The faction missions are a bit better. Both do an alright job of breaking up the repetition of just going around the map and blowing stuff up, which isn’t very organized or focused, but story missions require a certain amount of chaos before you can do them. The trend kind of ends up being that you’re stuck grinding before the next story mission, which itself is more limiting in many cases and less fun than the open world stuff, but I at least feel the need to get to it, because that’s what progression is defined by. It would be nice if they tried a bit harder to give the player more open ended quests as just things that were going on across the world, rather than segregating them into their own mode. Especially because you can visit anywhere on the map, including mission locations, early and fuck them up in advance, making the missions easier. You might as well have the missions be more based around locations than becoming on-rails segments temporarily, it would all fit together better.
A number of the missions are pretty cool, like the one where you take down the missiles as they launch, or the island that’s a ripoff of lost, then you get components that are annoying like driving sections where you have to follow a single path and your vehicle controls like ass and the car is liable to blow up after getting shot too much.
Downsides are the limited number of weapons you can carry at once, really prevent use of the more exotic weapons and sometimes I was constantly running out of ammo.
Also the map is really big and travel to new locations can take a lot of time. You can only fast travel to places you’ve already been, so you need to invest a fair amount of time into going around the map so you can fast travel it later. Also it feels a bit more annoying than I think it should be to grab all the vehicle, weapon, and armor parts. On top of that you have cash stashes and faction collectibles all spread out across this massive massive map. This is completely filler, much like a ton of the smaller things you can blow up to get chaos are filler. If they didn’t have the heat mechanic bringing the military down on you all the time, then it would be completely uninteresting.
Running out of C4 and grenades sucks, because those are the primary things you use to blow up structures, however I think JC3’s decision to just make those unlimited was a poor decision, given that they’re some of your strongest tools. If they aren’t limited in some way, then you have no problem using them all the time on enemies. At that point you might as well scrap the ammo economy completely.
I feel like the C4 and Grenade shortages could be solved as a level design problem, or by having enemy drops, rather than just giving the player infinite.
Like overall I like the game because the movement is great, the shooting is pretty great, and the missions are generally pretty good too even though I harshed on them a bit. I feel like a ton of the game is built up as filler however rather than focusing the key aspects that make it interesting. You’re practically expected to sweep every area destroying every little thing, while picking up all the collectibles too and passing through large sweeps of land where there’s nothing inbetween the discoverable points. Having a completion counter that gives a bonus reward when you hit 100% is even more painful. Keeping the objectives more limited, or having a threshold where you automatically accomplish everything once you’ve done enough in an area would be a lot more tolerable. I think the design goal was really to drive up the play time by all means necessary, rather than consider whether the boring parts overstayed their welcome or not.
Other things that would help would be a bit more enemy variety. The ninjas are nice, but they’re introduced late in a story mission and I think they only show up in story missions (wiki check says yes). Otherwise most enemies are just footsoldiers with hitscan weapons.
Also I was apparently only 2 missions off from completing the main story. Damn. Might need to finish that.
Probably the most enjoyable open world game I’ve played, despite the faults.
What do you like about the game mechanics of skullgirls?
I decided to field this one to my friend from the previous ask, seeing as he’s the best skullgirl in ‘Straya, “my tl;dr of why i like skullgirls mechanics is because it’s a balanced vision of an unbalanced game with good mechanics(mvc2), every character is functional and viable, there is a very high skill ceiling due to the wealth of relevant mechanics that is unfortunately invisible to most competitive players, and there are very little redundant moves on characters”
What I’d personally say is, the buffer, the flexible cancel system, the ability to cancel any move’s startup into any move it validly cancels into, these make the combo system feel extremely smooth, like everything slides into one another, like the actual endpoint of each move has a little leniency.
They have a cast of characters with tons of original abilities per-character, and weird combinations of moves that somehow fit together into a coherent gameplan. Some characters are clearly missing things, like there’s no character with a good zoning game that also has a good invincible uppercut, to force you to fit those characters together on a team. Even the conventional characters try new things, like Filia is supposedly a shoto, but she has a ton of weird normals, a weak zoning game, and instant airdashes, Peacock plays a zoning game with hidden missiles that you can control at different zones, 3 little bombs that lock space down and more conventional projectiles (one is on a normal for some reason too). Eh, I’m not gonna go through describing the whole cast, just trust me that they’re pretty crazy.
Also cool is how there’s so many ways to link things into other things. Just today I went into training mode, and was like, “Maybe I could tiger knee a hairball with filia?” then I did it, realized MK would work better, and airdash canceled that into a j.mp, lowering them to the ground, with an j.HK as a restand. Apparently this is practically good for almost nothing (less good as an approach than instant airdash, because it skips to stage 3 when you enter the ground phase), so whatever, but there’s a lot of stuff like this in the system, you just see a possibility and maybe it works. The Undizzy system and adjusted IPS have forced combos to become a lot more efficient too rather than just the same loops over and over, and optimized combos these days look really cool.
What are your thoughts on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?
Okay, I played the original Deus Ex first, and I think I’ve covered it before. When we saw the original trailers and gameplay for DXHR, I was convinced it was never going to live up to the legacy of the original (which I thought was good at the time, mostly because I was going with the crowd and not really thinking for myself yet). I was convinced it would be a hollow empty gesture towards the original.
Then the leak happened.
I played the leak, and it had basically all of detroit. The first mission was kind of boring and tutorial-like, but once I got into the city hub, it got fairly crazy. There were a ton of sidequests I could do, they were all over the place, there were a ton of ways to do them, my paths were affected by augmentations, I could use objects in the environment to make stuff work. It was pretty crazy. I was sold. I replayed the leak like 3 times, including a cheated 3rd playthrough where I maxed out all the augs to see what they could do. I played it totally differently all 3 times.
And in comparison to the first game, the stealth was a lot better, the shooting was a lot better, the hacking puzzles were a lot better. Sure it had dumb regenerating health, but pound for pound, all the things it did were much more solidly executed than the original. I felt like there were a lot of ways to approach every individual situation, even with the same tools, and it was genuinely challenging to overcome. It was missing some features, like a number of augs, melee weapons, and had more cramped level designs, but it had more complex enemy AI, more consistent weapons, and better designed levels. The tranq finally works the way it should in comparison to the original game where it alerted the guard and slowly dealt nonlethal damage.
Though trouble is also that the game isn’t as deep as other stealth games or action games. You don’t have a terribly large number of stealth tools, all things considered, and the combat is basically generic modern military shooter combat unfortunately. A lot of the stealth challenges end up coming down to timing challenges because the stealth is as simple as it is, though you do have a limited ability to lure enemies using sound or thrown objects, and the invisibility aug lets you get through guard’s vision for limited periods of time. That and stunning guards wasn’t as involved as the original, where you needed to hit guards on their backs or waste ammo. Knocking out commandos was even harder, having to hit a specific spot on their belt, and having the take downs be so specific was a cool thing.
The other trouble is, the game was clearly stripped down. From what I heard, there were 5 city hubs planned, Detroit, Lower Heng-Sha, Upper Heng-Sha, Montreal, and India. We got 2. They also made some errors accounting for playstyle, especially on the bosses, though they left materials in each fight to guarantee you could deal enough damage to take them out.
And the sources of XP ended up encouraging silly things, like taking out every guard unseen non-lethally, or hacking every computer terminal even if you know the password, or crawling in every vent to get the exploration bonus. Also because guards never woke up from unconsciousness, unless woken up by another guard, there was almost no reason to ever use the lethal takedowns. I don’t know why the lethal takedown option is in the game considering it’s loud, costly, and doesn’t have any upside.
I think the missing link DLC was a great addition in terms of level design. They really nailed the boss at the end, making something that fit the concept of Deus Ex a bit more. I also believe it improved the guard AI, but it’s been too long for me to remember in what way, except that it was subtle, more of a tuning change. Level design was generally a lot tighter too.
The cover system worked amazingly well honestly, you could flip into and out of it just by holding a button with no slow transition or anything and the tuning for how it oriented jensen relative to the wall worked pretty damn nicely. Also it was great that it opened up options for hopping across gaps in cover. Very fun to use when stealthing around.
Oh, and it’s really fun to try to go through the game fast on the seat of your pants and limit the save stating if you can.
Despite everything, the game was a solid showing, and I’m looking forward to the next one, especially because they seem to be introducing some cool new augs, making the shooting gameplay less shit, and so on.
Oh, and sorry for being kind of vague with this answer, it’s been a while since I played DXHR, so I did more of an overall summary.
Celia Wagar's CritPoints 