Tag Archives: DLC

Princes of Platforming

Last week I dusted off my pile of shame and played through 2008’s Prince of Persia on Xbox 360. Having played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the original Xbox and absolutely adoring it I was pretty interested on all of the changes this reboot was making to the series. Yes, it is a reboot of sorts: you’re no longer the titular prince, at least not in this game – I could easily see the roguish, unnamed character eventually developing into the prince in subsequent games, assuming there ever are any, but for now you’re just some tomb raiding (his words, not mine!) smart ass with a knack for acrobatics.

Anyway, I’ve got to start off talking about the incredible graphics here as they’re surely the most distinctive thing about the entire game. The beautiful, vibrant watercolor meets cell shading art style is quite brilliant – totally jaw dropping at times. There’s also some great vistas in certain areas, probably amongst the best I’ve seen this generation. The animations are also quite good. In particular some of the interaction between your character and Eleka while platforming, such as when you swap places or when you catch her during a jump, are unique and very impressive. They absolutely nailed it!

Doing my best Altair/Ezio.
“Doing my best Altair/Ezio.”

The sound was one of the first things that caught me off guard – the characters, especially your character, sound totally out of place in the setting. When combined with your character’s fun, flirtatious relationship with Eleka it almost reminds me of the type of thing you’d find in a Disney animated movie and, when you think of it that way, it kind of makes sense. In other words it was probably intentional. The music, on the other hand, fit well enough and some of the tunes stood out as really enhancing the experience at times.

That music and those graphics, combined with the back story that is unraveled as you explore each new area and converse with Eleka, also goes a long way in fleshing out the setting. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that by the end of the game the temple, palace, and surrounding city felt like a major character in the game itself. Speaking of characters, although their relationship didn’t quite develop like you might think it would, especially if you’re now thinking of it like a Disney movie, the characters, particularly Eleka, are pretty endearing. That relationship is actually a lot more interesting than it seems at first glance, especially considering how the game ends, and is probably another of its more interesting qualities. More on that later!

My stomach turns just seeing a screenshot of these horrible boss battles.
“My stomach turns just seeing a screenshot of these horrible boss battles.”

The core of the game, the platforming, was pretty enjoyable once I got into it. The addition of the gauntlet and Eleka’s double jumps are nice touches, adding some plausibility to some of your otherwise highly unrealistic moves. Yes, the platforming is relatively easy with most of the precision being stripped out for automatic locking on to the appropriate places for jumping, grabbing, and whatnot but it feels very fluid and is interactive enough not to be a total cakewalk. Think Prince of Persia: Sands of Time meets Assassin’s Creed. That said the hand-holding can be a bit excessive – there are worn down spots on the walls where you’re supposed to wall run for instance, and if all else fails Eleka can summon a Fable II like breadcrumb trail show you where to go. I used this breadcrumb trail constantly when moving from area to area or trying to make my way to the area boss – I rarely needed it to figure out how to navigate the obstacles but it was great for pointing me in the right direction. It was just too convenient! Despite all of this “babying” I never really felt like the game was any worse off for it.

While figuring out how to navigate an area or room is certainly a major component of the gameplay in this type of platformer I didn’t really miss having those mysteries 90% solved most of the time considering how long the game felt. Clocking in at somewhere between 10 and 15 hours it felt just a bit excessive to me. Yeah, I know that isn’t that long for a game but, man, it’s a long time to do the same formulaic area progression over and over again. Here’s how it works: the world is divided into a hub and areas branch out from there. You need to go to each area, navigate to the boss, beat the boss, then backtrack to collect “light seeds” (orbs) then move on to the next area. The orbs let you unlock additional areas. There are a lot of areas with not too much in the way of variety and no real character progression like new skills or abilities along the way. I would have definitely preferred a more linear progression as in older Prince of Persia games – I don’t really see any advantage to doing it with this hub system, in fact all giving me a choice did was make me all too aware of all of the work I was going to have to do to get to the end. Blech.

Eleka. Two thumbs up!
“Eleka. Two thumbs up!”

Oh, and back to the subject of the game’s difficulty real quick: Yes, Eleka will save you every… single… time… you die. Yeah, it’s kind of cool, yeah, it does seem a bit silly when you die 10 times in a row trying to make a particular jump, and yeah, it does make you nigh immortal, but really this is just a clever way of masking what is basically just a normal checkpoint system with a beyond generous amount of checkpoints and a nearly seamless reload. Did I prefer Sands of Time’s humorously narrated backpedaling? Absolutely, but this is not a problem.

Now to some stuff that is a problem! The platforming sometimes involves using various “power plates” that are spread around the areas. These plates do different things, such as teleport you or send you flying across the map. While these seemed quite cool at first glance, two of them, the one that lets you scurry around on walls, and the flying one, have this absolutely silly element of having to steer (slightly, it’s on rails) in order to avoid obstacles. Well, the controls on the wall running part are shit and the camera on the flying one often fought me, and guess what happens if you hit an obstacle? Instant death! Yes, Eleka saves you as usual… but you have to start what is usually one of the longer sequences of platforming in the game all over again. Pffft. Frustrating!

Yes, he drags his gauntlet everywhere. Ladies dig the sparks.
“Yes, he drags his gauntlet everywhere. Ladies dig the sparks.”

The other thing? Combat. I HATED the combat in this game. Absolutely hated it. At first I was trying my usual button mashing approach that has served me so well in other, similar 3rd person games but even after figuring out the simple, almost QTE like, rhythm to executing combos I still hated it. It just wasn’t fun and unless you lock in some huge combos combat can potentially take way, waaaayyy too long. Eleka will save you here too, by the way, but your opponent will get back a massive chunk of its health every time. Pfffft! Speaking of QTEs, yes they’re here too. How fun! Occasionally a prompt would go away before I had time to react, other times I clearly appeared to hit it in time but still didn’t register. Ughhhhhh… kill me now! So yeah, fuck that! The only saving grace here is that combat is relatively rare and somewhat easy to avoid – really, the boss fights were the only times I needed to worry about it once I got into the swing of things.

Finally, the ending. Wow… what? I don’t want to spoil anything but the game ends somewhat predictably… at first… and then leaves you with your only course of action to do something that, frankly, I didn’t want to do. I suppose that if the game did a better job at building up the relationship between your character and Eleka, or even just fleshed out Eleka a bit better in general, I might not have thought twice about whether it was worth undoing all of the work we just spent the last 15 hours painstakingly fighting through but as it was it felt extremely forced. This led me to question whether your character’s relationship with Eleka was meant to be as atypical as it felt, or if something in the script was just totally lost somewhere in production. Hmph.

Eleka doesn't just save your ass constantly, you also put her to work.
“Eleka doesn’t just save your ass constantly, you also put her to work.”

Anyway, I decided to keep the ending, which is somewhat open ended and mysterious, intact by not buying and playing through the $10 “Epilogue” DLC which goes on to flesh out the ending a little by showing you what happened next. From the various reviews I read the addendum to the story was unnecessarily with many people preferring the original ending. It also seems that they attempt to ratchet up the difficulty slightly, apparently prioritizing a lot of the things that I didn’t like about the core game. So yeah, easy decision for me!

So, over all, interesting game. Good if not a bit more accessible than usual platforming and a beautiful world brought to life by a unique art style and high production values all around are the highlights here. I’d really have no trouble recommending it to anyone if it were a much shorter or at least slightly less tedious playthrough but otherwise I’d probably only really recommend it to Prince of Persia fans or fans of this style of 3D platforming in general. That said, I picked up my copy for dirt cheap so perhaps you’ll find it in a bargain bin and won’t be able to pass it up.

Screenshots borrowed (and possibly not from the Xbox 360 version.)

Back to the Trenches!

I decided to hit up an XBLA game for a change – there are plenty of Arcade games that I want to play but it’s already challenging enough to manage my backlog of physical titles which often leads to me forgetting all about these excellent downloadable games. Still, every now and then I choose to hop into one. This time it is Toy Soldiers by Signal Studios.

Tower defense games are oddly hit and miss for me – when they’re done just right they totally click with me in a very satisfying, addictive way and when they’re not I usually can’t even be bothered to try feigning interest in them enough for a second try. Toy Soldiers is definitely in the former category. It takes the classic, simple tower defense gameplay, gives it an awesome World War I come toys theme, and adds in the ability to control towers and other units (tanks and planes) by hand to up their effectiveness and/or your score. It’s a very simple concept but executed almost perfectly with an awesome presentation and a healthy layer of polish.

Surveying the (toy) carnage.
“Surveying the (toy) carnage.”

The World War I theme doesn’t get visited in video games (or much else) very often and, if you think about it, the static trench warfare that is typically associated with it is right at home with the tower defense genre. You have troops attacking in waves, trying to reach objectives, and you can place certain defenses such as barbed wire, machine gun nests, mortars, and artillery in their way to hopefully wipe them out before they get there. Right on! As usual, the more enemies you kill the more money you make and the more money you have the more you can upgrade your defenses which you’ll need to do as enemy waves get more and more difficult. That’s it in a nutshell.

The fact that you’re actually supposed to be playing with toys takes little away from the game – units are animated and are fairly realistic. In fact I often found myself forgetting that the sun was actually a gigantic desk lamp and that my tank had a huge winding key sticking out of the back of it and finding myself immersed in the gritty battlefield. Still, having the units break into pieces and vanishing instead of turning the toy-box into a horrid gore-fest is actually a pretty smart way to get around any ratings concerns. Using toys also gives the developers license to more or less do whatever they want. How about we fight a massive uber-tank this time? What if flying saucers show up instead of tri-planes? Again, pure genius.

About to fuck up some toy horses... and probably my own guys.
“About to fuck up some toy horses… and probably my own guys.”

The maps are pretty varied and are often quite challenging, sometimes involving a bit of trial and error though if you play conservatively enough with your cash flow you can often adapt to surprises in the enemy waves. In some of the trickier scenarios finding just the right balance between managing your turrets and controlling a turrets or units is key to a successful defense. There aren’t many types of turrets and units available at first glance but each turret can be upgraded and not all upgrades are of the simple “+1 damage” variety. For instance, I sometimes preferred a level 2 anti-infantry gun for tracking and killing off cavalry quickly versus a level 3 which is basically a small canon, and thus fires and tracks a little less quickly despite doing a lot more damage over a wider area.

I ended up playing through the campaign on normal difficulty as well as playing through the campaign+ mode (which thankfully mixed up the maps from the normal campaign a lot more than I was anticipating) and both DLC campaigns including “Invasion!” which added all kinds of flipped out new enemy units and culminated in you fighting a giant robot. AWESOME! Sadly I didn’t get around to try multiplayer but I can easily imagine it being a ton of fun. I can’t wait to get my hands on Toy Soldiers: Cold War now though I’ll likely wait a while before leaping into that one.

Digging waaaay back into the physical backlog I also played through The Darkness by Starbreeze Studios. Being a fan of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on the original Xbox and thinking the concept looked cool I’d been wanting to play this one for quite awhile. Unfortunately I came out on the other side mostly disappointed.

Viva la aim assist!
“Viva la aim assist!”

First, the game in case you’ve never heard of it or more likely have forgotten about it by now: It’s a first person shooter where you play a mobster who gets possessed by The Darkness, some kind of wacky demonic presence that wants nothing more than to kill mofos and eat their hearts. Doesn’t everybody? The Darkness grants you some powers and abilities in additional to the normal FPS running and gunning you’re used to which should help aid you in hunting down the mob boss who is trying to rub you out. Additionally, it thrives in the darkness (go figure!) so sneaking around in the shadows and shooting out lights becomes a major factor in the gameplay as well. The other big gameplay twist is that you’re mostly running around in a small but semi-open world city (complete with side missions!) rather than the usual level based structure we see in FPS games. You’ll also make a few trips to a twisted, dark re-imagining of World War 1. Yes, another World War 1 game… err, sort of!

The game looks and sounds great, I particularly love the use of the first person view, though overall it feels very last gen at times – maybe this is because of it being very early in this generation or maybe it’s a Starbreeze thing. I don’t really know. The sound is pretty excellent overall – good voice acting, for instance. I was concerned about Mike Patton being the voice of The Darkness since I’m a big fan and was worried that such a bizarre role would somehow come across poorly but I should have had more faith in him as he hits a home run with his performance here. Really, the only thing I found difficult to live with was its controls: maybe I’ve been spoiled by some of the newer shooters out there but they’re a bit on the clunky side in The Darkness which is definitely not what you want in a console FPS. Still, thanks to a heavy dose of auto-aim they’re serviceable enough.

That leads me to The Darkness powers themselves. I was actually pretty surprised by how little your possession by The Darkness actually gives you. Looking at them all on paper it seems like a nice selection of abilities to augment your character but their execution was a bit rough around the edges, both in terms of using the powers and of how some of the special mechanics they introduced were used in the game. In other words, so close but yet so far…

The Darkness knows how to party!
“The Darkness knows how to party!”

The “Darkness Vision” which was supposed to be kind of a nightvision+ kind of sucked. The “darklings” you can summon to help fight with you were barely useful and died or otherwise vanished way too quickly. The “Creeping Dark” power seemed awesome but was needed perhaps too little and could sometimes be a little disorientating to use. The “Demon Arm” power also seemed to be required a little too infrequently and mostly served me as a way to quickly (err, usually) take out lights without wasting all of my ammo. The guns seemed nice but also seemed to deplete your darkness too quickly to be useful. Finally, the last power you get, the vortex, was almost an “I win” button but even that was perhaps a little too iffy to target and, on top of that, a bit too sensitive to range. I found myself occasionally landing it just a bit too far and having it sitting there seemingly close to my enemies as they stood their attacking me, unaffected.

Keeping track of your darkness power levels was kind of head scratching to me at first. The game frequently referred to having to stay out of the light and in the darkness to fuel your Darkness powers, and referenced how certain abilities drain your Darkness at different rates, but this Darkness power is never represented anywhere in game that I ever noticed. Having a meter on screen or SOMETHING would have gone a long way into making my darkness powers feel more useful as well making the whole “staying out of the light” and “hunting for hearts to eat” thing a bit more urgent and fun. I’m guessing this was done in the name of having a minimal UI (your health also goes unrepresented and guns and ammo display can be a little sketchy as well) but to me, in this case, it largely detracted from the experience.

The open world structure is kind of pointless. It worked well in the Riddick but in this game it didn’t really serve to help immerse me in the environment at all. Instead, it just felt tedious having to travel around everywhere, back and forth to the same bite sized hunks of map, loading screens in between. Perhaps a real, seamless open world and/or better navigational aids could have helped this a bit but ultimately I just didn’t think it fit well with the story.

You'd think with this much firepower a single schlub with a gun wouldn't be owning me.
“You’d think with this much firepower a single schlub with a gun wouldn’t be owning me.”

Finally, the story. I understand that The Darkness was based on a comic book series and perhaps I’d have some better appreciation for it if I had ever read any of it, but as it was, it didn’t do much for me. There seemed like so many missed opportunities to take it into more interesting places. For instance, your character, Jackie, hardly has any sort of reaction to being possessed. Really? You’d think suddenly having an evil demonic entity sprouting out of your body and speaking directly into your brain might elicit SOME kind of reaction. Nah, not so much. I mean, you could tell an entire series of stories based JUST on him dealing with this shit! Instead Jackie hardly has any sort of reaction to anything! There have definitely been times when the silent protagonist thing has worked just fine in video games but The Darkness is pretty ham-fisted with the whole thing. One minute he’s blabbing about meatballs or making some vapid comment about riding on the subway in a loading scene and the next he seems entirely unfazed by having his entire life, and even his entire concept of reality, turned upside down. Come on, guys…

The death cut scenes and the loading scenes were interesting touches and add a little more flavor though the loading scenes in particular often felt bizarrely out of place and were where the worst of the horrible Italian-American cliches came in. Honestly, Jackie didn’t really need any help feeling like a one-dimensional moron, but whatever. Despite my issues with some of these scenes, and I don’t say this a lot, I think the whole presentation, both in terms of the story and of the flawed open world structure I mentioned earlier, would have worked so much better if the game were more linear with more cut-scenes or at least more focused on the narrative. As it is it just doesn’t feel well executed to me.

Technically it is fine, and even conceptually it’s quite solid, I just feel like they designers missed a lot of opportunities to capitalize on what could have been a much more exciting game with more unique and cool mechanics and a much more engrossing story. It came close to being something really special and I’m quite curious to see if the developers of The Darkness 2 will be able to succeed where Starbreeze couldn’t. Not a bad game overall but probably not really worth revisiting if you missed it originally. All of that said, the very last cut-scene was surprisingly touching and having the credits roll on to a Tomahawk song was awesome!

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots mercilessly looted from teh interwebz. Yarr!

More Like L.A.me Noire!

Am I rite???

All jokes aside, I’ll apologize in advance for the extra-ranty tone of this log as I’m pretty disappointed in Team Bondi/Rockstar’s L.A. Noire. Not for the usual reasons though – I wasn’t expecting the next Grand Theft Auto here. No, I was so hyped for this game because some previews heralded it as the next evolution of the traditional adventure game, and even those that didn’t certainly made it seem that way. The detective angle also fit perfectly into my hopes for the game, conjuring up thoughts of Deja Vu, Police Quest, and Tex Murphy. Even all of those expectations aside, adventure game elements + Grand Theft Auto 4 sounded right up my alley. I even broke my new game embargo and bought this sucker close to release, bumping my back log to play it. So, where do I start?

In L.A. Noire you play a police detective in 1947 Los Angeles. I kind of wish the game had exploited the setting and the whole period noir vibe just a little more: more rainy nights, more sassy dames, more cartoon gangsters, hell I would have even settled for a crap-ton of cheesy, film noir style first person narration, but the game keeps it all fairly straightlaced. Anyway, you have to investigate and solve various cases which eventually start mingling together to form a cohesive plot relating to a larger conspiracy. You do this investigation by visiting crime scenes, looking for clues and interviewing witnesses, chasing those clues and accounts to more witnesses and suspects, looking for clues at their locations and interviewing them, sometimes with some action scenes thrown in, and eventually either interviewing the suspects one last time or having the case culminate in some sort of action that ends up wrapping things up. Cutscenes provide some extra story during and especially in between cases. That’s the most basic description I can give it – yes, it really is that formulaic and yes, thanks to the lack of variety in the cases it can indeed start feeling repetitious.

Adding to that explanation the whole thing feels almost exactly like Grand Theft Auto 4 – I realize it is the same engine, but no, down to a more granular level, the whole game feels very close to GTA4. Driving feels exactly like a slightly tighter controlling GTA4. Walking around locations in third person feels exactly like GTA4. Combat feels pretty much the same as well. You do all of these things quite a bit too. The focus of the game isn’t really on any of these things, however, it’s on the investigation and interrogation stuff and fittingly those two areas are where the game feels like the biggest departure from GTA and its ilk.

Actor hunting in Hollywood.
“Actor hunting in Hollywood.”

First we have crime scene investigations. You walk around in third person looking for items on the ground and other clues. Some of these items can be tricky to spot, bringing back the old point and click adventure gamepixel hunt” to some extent, though to its credit L.A. Noire does employ a couple of tricks to make this phase a little less frustrating: a vibration effect to alert you when you’re nearby new points of interest and a sound that plays when you come across clues you’ve already investigated. Another thing that helps is that music will play the entire time you’re in the investigation area (the game is still very much an open world so you can wander away from where you’re supposed to be quite easily) and will cease once you’ve found all of the relevant clues in the area. I say relevant because there are plenty of annoying red herrings lying around – maybe “red herrings” is too generous of a term to use, rather it is trash and other miscellaneous junk that you can, for some reason, interact with. I suppose the designers put this extraneous stuff in to make crime scenes a little less cut and dry. The real problem with these items is that occasionally they are actually relevant. I can think of at least two cases where a matchbook is an important clue instead of just the meaningless trash it represents another dozen times throughout the game, meaning you’ll probably want to examine every one you come across just in case. Doh. It wouldn’t be so annoying if there weren’t so many extra button presses involved. You don’t just pick up an item and instantly add it to your inventory, as it were, rather you often have to rotate it around and/or press the interact button a second time to further investigate the item. I’m guessing this was done to simply avoid the game feeling like a Heavy Rain style QTE fest. I suppose it succeeds… but it feels worse for it.

As I mentioned before there are also action sequences. Frequently at that. These range from typical GTA4 style car chases, fist fights, and fire fights, to item manipulation puzzles, foot chases, and even the odd platforming puzzle. These types of occasional action scenes help break up the monotony of the investigation stuff but GTA4 stuff (which I like – who doesn’t like spraying gangsters with a tommy gun?) aside, they often felt a little unsatisfying, and sometimes even frustrating. The stealth-like missions where you have to shadow someone at a distance were 100% pure, distilled anti-fun. Surprisingly many of the action sequences can even result in instant case failure and/or death which is pretty damn jarring when you compare it to the no-fail way interrogations work. In another nod to old adventure games though, the game seems to almost acknowledge that the action isn’t necessarily what you’re there for and if you fail a scene enough times you can simply skip it with no consequences. You can also easily skip the vast majority of driving around from location to location if you’d like. Alrighty then.

What a mess - at least we can cross vampires off the suspect list!
“What a mess – at least we can cross vampires off the suspect list!”

Finally, onto interrogations. These can take place either at an investigation scene or in an interrogation room at the station, and can range from simple information gathering to full on desperate attempts to get a confession from a suspect… but they all work the same way. There’s some (spoken) dialog between your character and the NPC which eventually leads into a clip that you’ll need to react to based on the person’s statement, tone, and notably facial expression. You react by choosing “Truth” which denotes that you believe the NPC was telling the truth, “Doubt” which denotes that you believe the NPC was lying or otherwise hiding something in their answer, or “Lie” which denotes that you believe the NPC is lying AND you have the proof to back it up. Your answers here can cause the interrogation to branch off (a little) sometimes granting you additional people or places to investigate, or straight up clues.

The whole interrogation system, which along with the new facial scanning technology was touted as the most unique thing in the game, actually holds my biggest complaints about it as well. First of all, there apparently is no way to fail an interrogation. If you choose poorly, the game goes on, which can sometimes cause you to miss vital clues and/or ultimately charge the wrong suspect. I personally thought this was a pretty nice touch and decided that no matter how bad I did on my first playthrough I’d accept all of the consequences and just go with the flow as in Heavy Rain. This became immensely unsatisfying, however, as even though you can’t necessarily fail an interrogation or a case as a whole the game is still extremely keen on letting you know when you’ve screwed up: when you react incorrectly in an interrogation a tone immediately lets you know, at the end of an interrogation it tells you how many you got right, and at the end of the case you’re given a 1-5 star rating based on how well you handled the investigation overall. If I’m supposed to just play through the case should it really be constantly slapping me down when I screw up? Worse yet, if I do choose to correct my actions I can’t – the only way to back out of a decision is to either restart the game before it saves again, doing the whole scene over again, or replay through the entire case. Wow. Make up your minds, Team Bondi! Do you want me to just keep going or do you want me to play to perfection?

Perhaps this wouldn’t burn me quite as badly if interrogations actually worked a little better. There’s nothing like doing badly and feeling like it isn’t your fault. While the new facial expression tech is indeed awesome I was surprised to find myself having an extremely difficult time spotting tells at times. Sometimes it is obvious, over the top even, but other times I was sure I was right and still got the reaction wrong. After I started doing so poorly I became more and more careful about choosing my reaction and still frequently got my guess wrong. Arrrrgh. Apparently it’s not just the mannerisms when answering you need to look out for as I had at least two NPCs answer very straight faced only to act shifty in their idle animations after the fact and turn out to be lying. Fair enough, but adding that into my bag of tricks still didn’t help matters much. I sometimes wondered if you weren’t just supposed to be trying to do what Phelps would do in the situation rather than base your decisions on what you, as the player, believed. It perhaps wouldn’t be as difficult if the difference between “Doubt” and “Lie” wasn’t so nebulous, never mind that those three choices don’t even clearly fit as appropriate reactions to every statement you’ll run across while interviewing, and that you’re not even presented with the option to ask a lot the questions that you, as a player, have probably already formed by the evidence you’ve gathered.

Truth, I mean... lie! Wait, no, doubt!
“Truth, I mean… lie! Wait, no, doubt!”

Delving further, the “Doubt” option freaked me out occasionally – doubt, to me at least, imparts a causal feeling, but a few times when I used it during interrogations my character went from mild mannered, friendly even, to TOTALLY FLIPPING OUT and screaming at the suspect. It totally took me out of the game the first time it happened and seemed a little out of character for Phelps. The “Lie” option is an even more interesting case study. Like I said, the line between “Doubt” and “Lie” wasn’t always so clear – fair enough, I take a look at my clues and maybe I don’t have the evidence to prove that the suspect is telling me a lie, or maybe I just don’t make that connection. In reality though, some of the logic between the NPC’s previous statement and the clues you have is a little on the fuzzy side and it can be hard to pick the right clue. Some of the “correct” clues you’re suppose to present as evidence are things that the NPC wouldn’t know so bringing it before them, saying what little your character says, wouldn’t actually convince them to start talking, for example. More problematic is that I often found the subject of the interview changing IN BETWEEN me picking the “Lie” option and having to present the evidence. WHAT THE FUCK? How was I supposed to KNOW I had the evidence if I didn’t know what I needed to provide evidence for until AFTER picking “Lie”? REALLY GUYS?

Here’s an example from The Naked City DLC case. I’ll try to be vague and not spoil it too badly:

I’m interrogating a guy, the husband of a friend of the victim. I had been told before by the victim’s house keeper that the victim was dating a man from San Francisco. I ask this guy if he knows of this fellow. He claims ignorance. Following me? At this point to branch to a new topic I have to call him a liar yet none of my evidence clearly says or even mildly suggests that they would know each other. The first time I played the case I think I chose “Doubt” instead of “Lie”. Regardless I got it wrong. The second time, after I do choose “Lie” he then admits that maybe he does in fact know him, but doesn’t know where he is from, stating that it might be New York. Evidence time! The correct answer is to present the victim’s house keeper’s statement that she knew of the guy and that she thought he might be from San Francisco. Wait a minute? I’m presenting evidence about where this boyfriend fellow is from? The original statement I called a lie was the NPC’s claim that he didn’t know of him, nothing to do with where he was from! Regardless, what did I just prove? That, in fact, he doesn’t know where the guy is from just like he stated he didn’t, because the house keeper says he’s from San Francisco? WTF? How does any of this make any sense? Let’s recap: I called him a liar, which means I have to present evidence to prove he is lying, yet I have none. Then it ends up being that the evidence I have to present isn’t even directly in response to the original statement I called a lie. Then I present a piece of evidence that essentially proves nothing – the guy claimed to be fuzzy on where this boyfriend fellow was from, and all we did was tell him that WE know where he was from. Take that! How is this helpful? Gah.

Look familiar? Well it also feels familiar...
“Look familiar? Well it also feels familiar…”

It’s almost as if half of the time the “Lie” response isn’t so much to call out that person’s statement as a lie, as it is presented, as much as it is to scream “HEY YOU’RE A LIAR!” and to watch them squirm to see what they rattle on about. The evidence will have to be related to whatever they say AFTER you call them out. This is reinforced by the fact that, unlike with the other responses, you can back out of your “Lie” response. How bizarre! Are you supposed to just test this out on every question you ask? Really? Here’s another, more brief example from the same case: I’m told by an NPC I’m interviewing that a man I’m trying to track down doesn’t exist. If I choose “Lie” the topic suddenly turns to this NPC’s alleged role in a burglary which causes him to get defensive and challenge me on providing a list of stolen items. For evidence I can provided a list of stolen items recovered which all tie back to him. Fair enough on the challenge and evidence but the evidence is in no clear way related to the original accusation that I responded to! Ugh!

As a quick aside, I’ve played all of the DLC cases and they feel more or less identical in quality to the main cases and, if you’ve got them installed while playing through the campaign, fit fairly closely into the main case flow of the story. The one exception being Nicholson Electroplating which, despite acknowledging the events occurring up till then, fell into an awkward place at the end of the game that made switching back over to a relatively ho-hum arson case feel a little jarring.

Back to bitching. So let’s go over the ways that interviewing can be a major exercise in fail: facial expressions and other tells don’t always indicate the reaction as you’d expect them to > the line is blurry between doubt and lie, if any of the three options even seem suitable in the first place > when you do choose “lie” sometimes the clues don’t make a ton of sense, sometimes even relating to topics brought up AFTER choosing the option. Awesome… a point of failure along every step of the process. Good luck 5 starring every case without a walkthrough!

Indeed, I sucked at this game the first time through. I’d say half of my cases were 4 stars, while the rest were 2 or 3, with even one or two 1 star cases. Admittedly some of these scores might have been marked down a bit for driving like a maniac, but still. I decided to play through the game a second time with a walkthrough 5 starring every case so I could see how differently the game played out when I did everything “right” and I was, quite unexpectedly, sorely disappointed. The cases don’t really branch out as much as you might expect. In fact when you fail at an interview or you feel like you missed a vital clue somewhere you get the impression that if you had done better it would have turned out entirely different. In reality it seldom makes much of a difference. At best, some new events might take place if you do things differently, specifically if you branch conversations better in the interrogation parts or visit locations in a different order… but this seemed relatively rare.

This game has you doing more corpse fondling than your weird uncle Leroy
“This game has you doing more corpse fondling than your weird uncle Leroy.”

I admit that I started to get more into the game as the story started developing. Bondi and Rockstar did a good job at fleshing at the characters a little bit, at least enough for me to develop a fondness for your character, Phelps, and his various partners… even Roy, somehow. When the main plot started really coming together I was pretty much riveted. Even so I do take exception to the sometimes ham-fisted nature of the storytelling. First of all, there’s a twist later in the game that I really didn’t see coming. Normally twists like that are pretty cool but this time I felt like the game had been lying to me about who Phelps was and only offered the tiniest, most miniscule hints about what he might do and why up until that point. The finale of the game, on the other hand, you can see from miles away thanks to the entire story being heavy-handedly foreshadowed, almost spoiled even, through the numerous WWII flashbacks and newspaper scenes that you encounter FREQUENTLY over the entire course of the game. Some mystery…

Overall, despite all of my nitpicking, I actually enjoyed the game. I loved the graphics, the acting work, the music, the journal system, the 1940s setting, and the whole police procedural feel in general. For every triumph though it seems that there was also a misstep. It felt surprisingly GTA4-like for a game that so many people were quick to point out wasn’t that style of game yet, as feedback shows, it doesn’t really hold up as that kind of game either. When those new adventure game elements that I was so anxious to experience showed up I was surprised to see how many of the well-known negative adventure game tropes they brought with them: pixel hunting, out of place actions sequences, instant deaths/failures… and yet the positives weren’t nearly as strongly represented. I tried giving it a fair shake regardless of all of these things but they quickly started to dramatically affect my enjoyment level. I really hoped replaying it would help me appreciate the game’s intricacies more but it actually only served to reinforce my suspicions about many of its issues. With so long in development and two developers working (apparently quite poorly) together on the game it really makes me wonder how much of a potentially amazing game was somehow lost along the way. 🙁

As usual Xbox 360 screen shots stolen. PC version isn’t out yet!