Tag Archives: Cooperative

Halo Fest 2020 – Spartan Ops

The Story So Far: Adrift for over 4 years, the crippled UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn is pulled towards a mysterious object. Cortana wakes the Master Chief from cryosleep and the pair discover that they’re being attacked by a splinter fleet of Covenant loyalists led by the Sangeili Jul’Mdama. Without warning the object opens and violently pulls all nearby ships into it. Crashing onto the interior surface of what they learn is the Forerunner Shield World Requiem, Cortana picks up a faint signal from another UNSC ship, the supercarrier Infinity. Attempting to warn the Infinity of Requiem’s gravity well, the pair unwittingly release an ancient Forerunner warrior leader, the Didact, from stasis. The Didact resumes control of his army of defensive constructs, the Prometheans, with Jul’Mdama’s faction also falling into his ranks. Barely escaping, Master Chief and Cortana reach Infinity’s crash site where Master Chief rallies the UNSC defense, forcing the Didact into retreat. Aboard the Infinity Captain Del Rio dispatches a force to disable Requiem’s gravity generators so that the Infinity can escape. In the process the Master Chief is lured to a Forerunner facility where he’s contacted by the AI imprint of an ancient Forerunner called the Librarian. Explaining that the Didact intends to use a device called the Composer which had been used to digitally conscript living beings, including humans, into Prometheans to fight against the Flood, she insists that he must be stopped. Upon returning to the Infinity, Captain Del Rio observes Cortana’s instability and orders Master Chief to surrender her, ordering his arrest when he refuses. Instead, the Infinity’s executive officer, Commander Lasky, aids the Chief by procuring Pelican gunship for him. The Didact departs Requiem aboard his flagship, the Mantle’s Approach, though the Chief and Cortana make it just in time to stowaway on an accompanying Covenant dropship. Later hijacking the ship, the pair head to Ivanoff Station, a research facility where the Composer has been relocated. They find the station already under assault and attempt to sabotage the Composer before the Didact can reclaim it. Failing, they witness the Didact unleash the Composer on the station to devastating effect. Master Chief and Cortana then arm a Broadsword fighter with a HAVOK nuclear missile and pursue the Mantle’s Approach as it heads for Earth. Crashing into the ship’s interior, Master Chief takes the warhead and continues to fight his way to the Didact on foot. Confronting him, Cortana distracts the Didact for long enough for the Chief to manually arm the warhead. Cortana is able to teleport the Chief safely off of the ship but sacrifices herself in the process. Master Chief is later found and brought back aboard the Infinity where he quietly mourns the loss of Cortana.

“Oh goody, more Knights…”

Replacing the popular Firefight wave survival mode first introduced with Halo 3: ODST and iterated on with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 included a separate episodic co-op oriented campaign called “Spartan Ops”. 343 Industries might have opted to do this as part of an effort to canonize Halo 4’s multiplayer (AKA “Halo: Infinity”) with competitive modes being presented as war games conducted aboard the UNSC Infinity. Similarly, and the reason I wanted to cover Spartan Ops despite not talking too much about multiplayer during my Halo Fest posts is that, unlike Firefight, the Spartan Ops campaign actually includes a full story, taking place just after the events of Halo 4.

Back in the day I had started to work my way through Spartan Ops by myself on “Heroic” difficulty but quickly discovered that it was definitely tuned for 4 person cooperative play. Between this and that it still retained much of Firefight’s wave survival gameplay (and you were fighting damned Prometheans a lot of the time to boot) it was quite the slog. I think I made it as far as episode 2 before burning out, and I believe this is a huge reason for that negative impression of Halo 4 I’d been carrying around for almost a decade now. Going back to the campaign in 2021, I decided that cranking my difficulty down to “Easy” would probably be a solid first step in meeting my goal of making it all the way through this time.

“What can I say? The Warthog never gets old!”

While still not a total cakewalk, there were a few things unique to Spartan Ops that made it a bit more tolerable. For one, weapon racks and ammo crates are generously placed throughout each map. Sure, you may still need to grab a Covenant or Promethean weapon from time to time, but you’ll have the option of using UNSC weapons without worrying about running out of ammo much more often than in Halo 4 proper. There are also special ordnance drops that are given to you during many missions, usually when there’s a particular reason you might need a special weapon; rocket launchers being dropped for you just before a pair (or multiple pairs) of Hunters show up is a common example. You also get to use your multiplayer loadouts which means access to your choice of basic weapons and grenades, equipment, and special “tactical packages” and “support upgrades”. Finally, being multiplayer oriented, you simply respawn if you die rather than having to jump back to your last checkpoint. Nice!

Gameplay wise, your fireteam is dropped into an area and issued a linear string of objectives, coming one at a time to appear more dynamic. For instance, you might be sent to a waypoint, then told to activate a McGuffin, then told to defend the area against a few waves of enemies, then told to reach the extraction point and… oh no, reinforcements! Better defeat a few more waves so you can extract! You get the point. In the first 5 episodes this gets very formulaic and very repetitive very quickly. Even more so when you consider that the same 8 maps are featured multiple times in those 25 levels, and many of them are based on sections from the main Halo 4 campaign or are straight up taken from multiplayer in the first place.

Episodes 6 through 10 greatly improve things by introducing a new batch of maps which feel purposely crafted to be used this way. They also do a better job of varying the gameplay, though the tradeoff is that some chapters end up feeling more like single player campaign missions than Firefight-like scenarios. That said, all 10 episodes have some cool moments, including some awesome vehicle-centric sections. It should also be noted that Spartan Ops doesn’t suffer from the issue of having confined, linear levels that I mentioned in my Halo 4 post. Even some of the small maps feel very open which is refreshing when coming straight from the main campaign.

“Palmer and Majestic capture another Forerunner artifact.”

Presentation is another story. Individual chapters start and end with short in-game cutscenes and there are numerous radio communications from your mission handlers about your objectives throughout. Most notably, the biggest story beats are told via lengthy, beautiful rendered cutscenes created by Axis Animation that kick off every new episode and focus on a core cast of characters, many of whom you’ve already met in Halo 4. Honestly, say what you will about Halo 4, but these cutscenes are peak Halo awesomeness in my opinion and I’d love an entire series done this way.

The story itself is quite good too. Untangled from the legacy of Master Chief’s story and the perceived lore complexities of introducing the Didact and the Librarian, I’d suggest perhaps better than Halo 4’s. I definitely got pretty into it in any case. For one, I know he didn’t originate with Halo 4, but I thought Jul’Mdama was a great, more grounded antagonist. I also like getting some insight into the SPARTAN-IVs and the idea of Dr. Halsey feeling somewhat left behind as more advancements are made without her (which I feel is a more realistic narrative than making her cartoonish traitor.) Hell, I even started to like Sarah Palmer by the end of the campaign thanks in large part to the way her relationship with Lasky is depicted. The 10 episode story arc has a satisfying enough conclusion while also leaving some major developments wide open and begging for a sequel. I don’t know if one was actually planned or not, but sadly, a second season of Spartan Ops would never arrive, leaving the story to need to be fully resolved elsewhere.

“Fun times in the corridors of the Infinity.”

All in all, Spartan Ops is a pretty damn cool batch of bonus content that I doubt a lot of Halo fans have experienced. While I’m not sure I can heartily recommend it to solo players, there were numerous chapters that stuck out to me as likely being incredibly fun when played cooperatively while I was playing through. That said, in the exceedingly likely event that you’re unable to convince even a single buddy to play through this huge 50 mission campaign with you, watching a compilation of its awesome cutscenes is still an absolutely worthy investment of your time and that, at least, gets that my recommendation.

Next up, something completely different…

Out of the Fire

I’ve been intrigued by Firewatch since it was first announced. Not only have I been a longtime fan of many of the the Idle Thumbs podcasts, of which three members are key Campo Santo employees, but I loved The Walking Dead, and two of those three employees were its project leads and writers. I’ve also enjoyed my few forays into the “walking simulator” genre thus far, and the previews of the game made the basic themes look appealing as well. Despite buying it on PC the first time it ever went on sale on Steam, I only finally got around to playing it last month, buying the Xbox One version so I could more easily share the experience with my girlfriend from the comfort of our living room couch.

“Home sweet home.”

Right off the bat Firewatch hits you with a bizarre “choose your own adventure” like interactive story about your character Henry’s backstory. A bit jarring, it feels a little low budget and isn’t anything like the experience I was gearing myself up for. Still, it has an interesting function – you immediately start the game with a good idea of who your character is, what he’s gone through, and having customized his backstory a little in the process, even a bit of a connection to him.

Once in the game proper, you find Henry in the beautiful Wyoming wilderness where he’ll be manning a fire tower for the season. We have fire lookout towers not too dissimilar to the ones featured in Firewatch out here in and around the southern Appalachian Mountains and, having had the opportunity to climb several of them over the years, I’ve always been fascinated by what manning one of them must have been like back when they were in full-use. The Campo Santo team did a fabulous job bringing those towers and the surrounding wilderness to life. The stylized art and the engine’s lighting system steal the show, but it all comes together just perfectly, producing beautiful vistas filled with swaying trees and grass among rolling hills and rocky peaks. Combined with the forced first-person perspective and minimalist, mostly in-game-world UI, I quickly found myself totally immersed in the setting.

“The lighting really brings the whole presentation together.”

Firewatch’s world is fairly open, and while there is some gating and the occasional invisible wall, I never found them to take me too far out of the experience. This is likely because I was always too busy either checking out the amazing views, looking for the next interesting detail, or looking at my map and compass to try to figure out where in the hell I was. On top of that, I often felt a sense of urgency to try to complete my objectives before the sun went down and I’d be forced to wander my way back to my tower in near pitch-black darkness. Those objectives felt important to me most of the time too, so going off and exploring far beyond where I needed to be never made a lot of sense to me.

A lot of the user reviews I glanced at while writing this seemed to mention bugs and performance issues but for me the fact that the game ran so smoothly with such a degree of polish was absolutely a part of why I was able to really get into the experience. Maybe the Xbox One port is better than some of the others or perhaps I’m benefiting from being a late adopter here, but in any case, I think it bears mentioning that I didn’t have any such issues.

“I hope you like looking at maps!”

Anyway, so far, I’ve just described a game about a guy wandering around in the woods. Obviously, I’m leaving out a massive part of the game here: Delilah. Your character has a nearly-constant companion over the radio, something along the lines of Atlas helping you out in Bioshock, though a little less manipulative. The conversations between Henry and Delilah, both in terms of writing and voice acting, are what really push Firewatch into excellence. These chats are unusually funny, heartwarming, realistically written, and full of character. The dialog system has both the urgency of a Telltale adventure game, in which you might have a limited time to respond and your lack of a response is, in and of itself, interpreted as a response, and unlike most modern games with dialog systems, isn’t tied to story decisions or moral choices but mostly just serves to further develop your own personalization of the characterization of Henry. I can only guess that how well this all came together must have surprised even the developers themselves.

“I was more than a little disappointed about not having the option to order prints of my pictures in the Xbox One version.”

Through the friendship that grows between Henry and Delilah, the mysteries they unravel and personal baggage they unpack together, we eventually reach a conclusion that is, as with the dialog, rather realistic. I won’t spoil it or go into any in-depth analysis of the ending, despite how desperate I was to discuss it when first finishing the game, but I will say that like so many others I was a bit disappointed in the ending. At the same time, I felt like I understood, at some very deep emotional level, what Campo Santo was aiming to achieve, and I got it. I got it. I didn’t like it, maybe because it was a bit too real, but in some way, it made me respect the entire experience all the more for it. What a fantastic game.

“One player distracts the guard, the other unclogs the toilet.”

At some point while playing Firewatch we stumbled upon A Way Out in the Microsoft Store. From watching trailers and listening to some podcast banter about it, all I really knew was that it was a game about two convicts working together to escape a prison, and that the whole game was based around being a two-person co-op experience. I could also see that the game looked fantastic, with a simplified but realistic art style, and a lot of interesting, very cinematic camera work. Overall the art and presentation is somewhat reminiscent of the last couple of Grand Theft Auto titles, which is a good thing.

Starting the game, we found ourselves quickly engaged, as we had to decide which of the two distinct characters we’d want to play and then, after a brief cutscene, were set off on two different paths. The fact the game starts off with your two characters not even knowing each other was unexpected, and despite the beginning being a little slow, made for some interesting development as the two characters met and the story progressed.

“Wandering the yard.”

Having each player working on separate goals via split-screen, interspersed by the occasional use of clever timing to trigger cutscenes and events involving both characters together is the game’s central novelty, in fact. Sometimes these events are little mini-games meant to allow the players to interact and the characters to bond a bit, and other times they’re simple cooperative puzzles, like needing both players’ input to lift a heavy object or to climb up an otherwise unreachable ledge. Occasionally the players must decide between two different approaches to solving a situation, which was kind of cool. I do wish there was a little more depth to these mechanics, as your interactions with NPCs are short and mostly only serve as fluff, the exploration is very limited, and the cooperative puzzles are almost all exceedingly basic. I suppose the simplicity is in service of being an approachable co-op experience, so I can largely overlook that. Besides, early on, it was mainly the story and the characters that had me hooked.

“You can choose to handle a lot of situation Leo’s way, or Vincent’s way. You’ll figure out what that means quite quickly.”

Unfortunately, the story is really nothing too special. The fact that almost every aspect of it was swiped from genre tropes is a common complaint but I personally didn’t really find that to be distracting or problematic. Instead, my main problem is that while the game does a good job at giving you a sense of who both characters are, in fact watching them interact as the story unfolded really seemed like it was going to be something very special, it ends up squandering the opportunity for some real character development and an impactful story. This is especially true when the plot takes a sharp turn from being about our characters escaping prison and reuniting with their families to being about them seeking revenge on the person who put them there. It just goes a bit off the rails.

Revenge certainly could have been an interesting angle, of course, but when the game suddenly devolved from what felt more like a narrative heavy adventure game, not completely dissimilar to the aforementioned Firewatch, into a mediocre third person shooter, it kind of lost me. By this point in the story we had learned that neither one of our two characters were what you’d call “violent criminals” yet they suddenly engage in the wanton slaughter that makes up this next to last scene of the game without batting an eye. Talk about ludonarrative dissonance! That, and the twist at the end, while mechanically kind of cool, just wasn’t at all where I felt like the story was taking me early on.

“There’s always time for Connect 4!”

Despite the disappointing finale, I liked A Way Out overall. The presentation, the characters, and the co-op centric gameplay really impressed, even if my great early impressions didn’t quite last throughout the game. There aren’t a lot of games out there that rely on cooperative gameplay, especially split-screen cooperative gameplay, and A Way Out even lets a second person play online without owning the game, which is awesome! If the negatives in this little review here don’t sound like they’d outweigh the positives for you then it is probably easily worth your money. At the very least, Hazelight Studios’ next project will have my full attention. I hope it’s not something entirely different as I really do see a lot of potential in A Way Out’s style of gameplay.

As usual, I’ve stolen my Xbox One screenshots from aimlessly scouring the Internet for decent ones. Apologies for not having individual credits for each of them!

Covered Up

I’m down two more Xbox 360 games from my oh so intimidating backlog of games.

First, I finally got around to playing through Gears of War 2. I did so cooperatively and I have to say it was a pretty polished and fun experience. The game still has excellent graphics despite its age and whether or not it does anything for you personally, a unique visual style. As a sequel it felt like “more of the same” of the first game in pretty much every way. Of course, I haven’t played the first game for quite a long time so that impression might be slightly skewed. My only real complaint other than the typical observations about the meathead characters and hole filled plot was that as a cooperative game I’m not sure I appreciate the designers’ decision to constantly try to separate the players by making them take separate paths. I’m pretty sure they were attempting to force you to work together by completing different but related goals to help foster some kind of greater feeling of cooperation but more often than not it just garnered a disappointed “aww, they’re making us split up AGAIN?” response from us. It felt like the game was attempting to keep us apart half the time and exactly what kind of co-op experience is that?!

“Football sure has changed in the future…”

I also dusted off my copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Vegas 2. Damn, that’s a long title.

Immediately Vegas 2 came off as very dated compared to most newer FPSes. It took me a while to get familiar with the controls which work fine for the most part but are definitely different enough from the Halos and Call of Duties of late to screw you up for a bit – I chucked plenty of grenades at my own feet early on. Once I got over that curve I started to appreciate the brutal, tactical nature of the combat over any lack of modern polish. I haven’t talked about it a lot here since I haven’t played much of it lately but I am a big fan of the more realistic, Tactical FPS genre of games so I suppose it started scratching an itch that I haven’t had scratched in a while. Having overcome that I struggled to remember how the hell the story of the first game ended. I knew it ended with a “To be continued…” sort of thing but Vegas 2 definitely doesn’t pick up feeling like a direct continuation. Then again this is a Tom Clancy brand game and I’ve played enough of those by now to not have to worry too much about the story.

While I had a lot of fun ordering my squad mates around, clearing rooms with well-timed flash-bangs and flawless shots through thermal goggles, sniping from afar in the pitch dark, and otherwise being on the enjoyable end of a lot of face pwning, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. I actually became quite frustrated with the game more than a few times during the run. Silly stuff, like unevenly placed checkpoints, including a major pet peeve of mine: checkpoints right before scripted events or cut scenes. Probably the most of annoying of these was right before the final major firefight of the game. I must have had to watch that damn thing play out 20 times before finally surviving the fight long enough to make it to the end scene of the game. Most of the checkpoints were placed decently early on but it definitely seemed to go downhill the later into the game I got.

“Rainbow 6 prefers to conduct most of its firefights in crowded city streets.”

Of bugs, the generally fairly well received cover system of Vegas seemed a bit less reliable in Vegas 2 than I recall it being in the first game. I found myself flipping out of cover, leaning out of cover on my own, and generally not behaving as expected a bit more than I was comfortable with. This seldom resulted in any fatalities though so I guess I can’t bash on it too much. I also ran into one part of the game which I had to replay about 5 times due to the cut scene at the end the level not triggering after completing my object of clearing an area despite wasting tons of time trying every trick in the book to avoid having to reload. Arghhhh!

Your squad mates are still hilariously stupid at times. They often fail to do a good job checking corners when entering rooms or taking up good defensive positions when ordered to move to certain places which contrasts sharply to how well they do these things at other times. Probably my favorite example of their stupidity is that when one squad member is injured (which itself is frequently the result of something pretty shockingly dumb occurring) the other will usually make their way their location as if to secure them BUT won’t actually try to save their life without being manually ordered to. This can create some pretty tense situations if you decide to split yourself up from your two squad mates to employee some more creative flanking tactics, as the game encourages you to do from time to time. Dashing around to try to get a clear shot of my downed team mate to issue the “heal” command in time resulted in at least a few deaths of my own during the campaign… oh, and despite how easy it is to heal your squad mates they’re apparently completely incapable of healing you. Why?! Oh, I guess because you’re not alive to explicitly tell them to. Pfft…

“My squadmate decides to investigate an explosion face-first while I intelligently take cover behind a barrel of highly flammable liquid.”

My other biggest complaint about Vegas 2 is probably the difficulty. Yeah, yeah, I know I just praised it for its brutal combat two paragraphs ago, but honestly, damage and ballistic models aside, most of the more difficult sections of the game felt only difficult because of the sheer number of enemies they pack into some of these areas, and most often, the absolutely painful choke-points and scripted scenarios they expose you to along the way. In other words, it oftentimes only felt difficult because the designers’ went out of their way to make it overly difficult in those particular spots. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a good Tactical FPS doesn’t need a ton of enemies to be fun! If the damage and weapons models are “realistic” enough, 2 enemies in a room is a challenge… and that challenge usually feels much fairer than, say, the scripted hordes of unlimited NPCs games like Call of Duty 4 throw at you. Combining that, however, with having to have your 3 man squad off 50 terrorists in one level encourages you to run through quickly rather than carefully entering and clearing rooms, only adding to potential frustration while minimizing the tactical gameplay the series is supposedly built around.

Despite all of those negatives playing through Vegas 2 did in fact feel fairly satisfying and refreshingly different alongside other FPSes I’ve played through recently. I highly doubt I’d volunteer to play through it again anytime soon but it might indeed inspire me to play through some of my favorite oldies such as SWAT 4.

Ahh, one last thing… when I played the original Vegas I didn’t have an Xbox Live Vision cam so I couldn’t test out the awesome ability to map your own face to your in-game character. Thank god for that! After my several attempts to get it working at all I was greeted by some horrible looking, wax golem-like facsimile of myself. Yes, even more hideous than the real thing. Yikes!

As usual for console games, not my screenshots.