DarkStar One: Broken Alliance - Xbox 360

So it's come to this. I always wondered what would happen if I came to a game that was just so bad, so frustrating that I couldn't finish it. So far in the twenty-three games that I've played it hasn't happened. Sure, I've come across a couple that were bad, but nothing that I just gave up on. Until now.

I was excited about DarkStar One: Broken Alliance, I really was. I remember I was mining in Mass Effect 2 and thought about an old Sega Genesis game called StarFlight. It was a space mining somewhat RPGish game that I used to love. It involved mining, space fights, traveling between galaxies, it was just a fun time. I really wanted a game like that for the Xbox360 or PS3. Oddly like three days later I read about a game called DarkStar One: Broken Alliance in OXM... and it sounded like exactly what I wanted. Space battles, upgrading your ship, it sounded like a great time... unfortunately, the game wasn't out yet. It stayed in the back of my mind though, so when it was released I knew I was going to Gamefly it.

A couple months passed and I got busy with other games, DarkStar One was on my Gamefly queue but generally other things got shipped before it. I kept it on there because I really wanted to play it.

Last week it finally shipped, so the day I got it is the day I started playing it. Let the disappointment begin.

Parts of DarkStar One were good... but those parts were quickly ruined by the other bad parts.

The space battles were fun. At least they were at the start... then I realized they're pretty much all the same. The battles all feel exactly the same, there seems to be no variations in them. You kill six space pirates who all look exactly the same and then go to the next system and kill another six space pirates who look exactly like the last ones. Occasionally there would be a cruiser, or a slightly more difficult space pirate but overall the battles felt incredibly cookie cutter. They also all take place and space, and despite the fact that there are planets, stars, and asteroids that all move around you, you feel almost stationary in your battles. You don't feel like your speeding through space fighting battles, you just feel like your on a stationary axis shooting at moving ships. So while the space battles were fun at first, after a while they just became tedious.

Let's talk about space travel. You start off with an engine that will allow you to travel three light years. So you can travel to different planets within a galaxy, but to travel to the next galaxy over you need an engine that will allow you to travel four light years. So you do missions until you can afford to buy that engine so you can travel to the next galaxy over... and to get you to the next galaxy after that you need an engine that will travel five light years, and you keep doing that over and over. That was annoying, it really was, but it gets worse. So Let's say you have to travel to a planet a couple galaxies over... you essentially have to travel to the farthest star your engine can reach and keep doing that until you reach the galaxy you want. So you jump to a planet that 1.9 light years away, then you wait for your engine to cool down so you can hyperjump to another planet 3 light years away, then you do the process all over again until you reach your destination. I read something wrong and thought I had to travel to a planet several galaxies over... it took me about a half hour to get there and back. Let me tell you how bad that sucks.

Remember how I told you about exploring galaxies? You do... but they're all practically the same. They each have a space station, they each have different spaceships flying around, some of have asteroids, some have pirates... but they're all pretty much the same. There's really no exploring though. All of the space stations look the same, you fly into them and it cuts you a static screen that just has a menu of what you can do. You want to buy ship parts? You go to dock yard in the menu which opens up another sub-menu. You never actually see or get to walk inside a space station. As far as I can tell the only time you can actually explore is when you're in your ship... and really there's no reason to. You're radar tells you everything that's in that planets orbit. So you don't explore, you just a open a menu and see if there's anything interesting, and as far as I could tell for the most part there wasn't. You could travel around a bit, but for the most part I felt no reason to. Everything just seemed the same.

DarkStar One wouldn't have been too horrible if this game had been eight to ten hours long. Sure it would have been kind of boring, but I'm sure between the story and a little exploring and some space fights it would have been an okay game. Problem being is that I spent at least fifteen hours if not more playing the game and wasn't even halfway through it. By that time not only was I incredibly bored I was getting very frustrated. I felt like I was making no headway in the game, honestly I felt like I was just going from planet to planet, occasionally shooting pirates, and very much grinding missions so I could get enough money to buy a new engine so I could get to the next galaxy in hopes that I could finally beat the game.

I realize that a game isn't fun when the only reason I'm playing it is because I want to beat it. Sure, you always want to beat the game you're playing but you also want to have fun doing it, you want it to be a good experience. With DarkStar One, all I wanted to do is beat it. I wasn't having a good time, in fact I was having a bad time. I just wanted to beat it. Video games shouldn't be like that. Video games should be enjoyable. You wouldn't watch a TV show that you absolutely hated, why should I play a video game that I don't think is fun?

I have pushed through some bad games, games that were bad but at least had some good qualities. DarkStar One had very, very few good qualities, and certainly not enough for me to keep playing. If there had been at least a few redeeming qualities I probably would have pushed through and beat the game, but at the end of the day there weren't enough to keep me playing.

I know, I'm reviewing a game I haven't beat. For all I know at the halfway point the game became much different and much better... but the first half wasn't good enough for me to make it to that point. Something tells me though if the first half was this bad, the second half wasn't magically going to get much better. You can take this review with a grain of salt. I didn't actually finish this game. Remember though, the reason I didn't finish it is because the first half was so bad that I didn't want to waste my time with the second half.

In the entire time I've had my Xbox360 there's only been two other games that I couldn't finish, out of probably forty plus games that I've beat. It's a bad sign for DarkStar One that it's now the third game on that list.

Squid.

Folklore - Review

Folklore. Ugh. If you followed my updates on Twitter about Folklore it must have been an interesting roller coaster ride. Straight up to only go straight down farther and farther.

Every single list of must play Playstation 3 exclusive games includes Folklore. I don't know how many people I had tell me that I should play Folklore because it's an amazing game. And on the surface it does sound amazing, I had it described to me as a mix between Silent Hill, Pokemon and an RPG. Sounds like it could pretty damn awesome. So finally I put it on my Gamefly queue and eagerly awaited it.

My first three to four hours of Folklore were awesome. There's two main characters, Ellen and Keats. Ellen is lured to the Irish village of Doolin through a letter sent by her supposedly dead mother telling her to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. Keats is a writer for an occult magazine, he receives a telephone call from a mysterious woman who sounds like she's in trouble, she tells him to meet her at the Cliff of Sidhe. So both of our characters show up at the Cliff of Sidhe at the same time, only to find that the woman isn't Ellen's mom and that she's been murdered. So it's up to you solve the murder as well as three other murders that happened 17 years ago and the mystery surrounding them. You do this by entering the Netherworld, which is the realm of the dead.

It started it so well.

Once you're in the Netherworld you fight creatures, and take their souls (I don't remember what it was called in the game so we'll just go with souls). What this allows you to do is have this creature fight for you. You assign it to one of the buttons on the controller and hitting that button will call out this creature who will do it's attack move. There's tons of different creatures and all of them have different skills. You might need a fire creature to beat an ice creature, or you might need water creature to break a crystal that will get you to the screen. Each realm has different creatures, and each creature has a special attack which may help you against another creature or boss in one of the other realms.

I was still interested.

The game is broken up into chapters. There's seven chapters each for both Ellen and Keats. So after my first chapter with Ellen it asked me if I wanted to do Chapter 2 with Ellen or if I wanted to play Chapter 1 with Keats. I figured I'd play one chapter as Ellen and than one chapter as Keats and just keep switching back and forth. So I chose to do Chapter 1 as Keats.

That's kind of where it started to go downhill.

So it turns out that Chapter 1 as Keats is almost as exactly like Chapter 1 as Ellen. Sure, there's little difference. The creatures are the same except their skills are bit different. So if one creature was a water type with Ellen it might be an ice type with Keats. The story was a tad bit different, you might learn a something a bit different as Keats that you might not learn as Ellen, but not anything especially earth shattering. So I just kind of assumed that you were supposed to choose one or the other, Keats or Ellen. I assumed that it was meant to be a "Hey! You beat the game as Ellen, now try it as Keats so you get a bit different story." Which would have been interesting because down the line it adds a little bit of replay to the game.

Boy was I wrong.

So I continued the story as Ellen, but over time I started noticing more and more flaws in the game. Some were big and some were small, by about Chapter 5 my enthusiasm for the game had taken a drastic turn. There were just so many things that I didn't really care for.

1) The cut scenes
2) The save points
3) The respawning creatures
4) The map
5) The story

The cut scenes: For the most part there's very little voice acting, which is good... because when there was it was generally pretty bad. No, instead your treated to comic book like cut scenes (you can see what I mean here), which at first I thought were kind of interesting, but towards the end of the game I disliked them and thought that they felt out of place.

The save points: I dislike save points in games. I understand why we had them back in the day, but I don't understand why we still have them. The only real arguments I've heard for save points is that they're for nostalgia sakes and that they make the game more difficult. You know what else makes me nostalgic? 8-bit graphics, but games still don't have those. And as for adding difficulty I've never understood that, it just means if you die you have to replay something you've already played. That's not difficulty, that's annoying. By the same logic rubberband AI makes games more difficult, let's bring that back. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here... for the most part the save points in Folklore weren't too horrible, but there were times that I would go 30-45 minutes where I wasn't able to save. If I die I don't want to have to replay 45 minutes of game. Some of the save point placements in this game were just unforgivable.

The respawning creatures: Ugh. Okay, I understand that there were certain creatures that if you accidentally killed them without taking their soul you would be screwed because you need that particular creature for a boss fight. But EVERY creature respawns every time you leave that screen, including the mini-bosses. So you fight 15 creatures on one screen and then leave and come back? Those 15 creatures are back. For the most part you can just run past them instead of fighting, but it's still very annoying.

The map: The map in this game is fairly useless. Every time you enter a screen that part of the map is now shown. So you have to visit every screen to have a complete map. Okay, it was kind of annoying but that's not a deal breaker. Later on in the game I wasn't sure which door I needed to go through so I pulled up my map so I could see which door I was standing in front of... that's when I noticed it. There's no marker on your map telling you where you are in that room. It's not a huge problem but occasionally it was annoying. It's like if you were at a mall looking at a map and instead of arrow saying "You are here" the map just said "You're in a mall". Not too helpful.

The story: The farther I got into the story the more I realized that it wasn't very good. Every plot twist they had in the game I easily guessed. A lot of the characters weren't fleshed out very well either. Overall it just felt kind of lacking. It wasn't an awful story, but it also wasn't very good. Especially for a game that had RPG elements.

And then the thing that I hated the most. Remember how I was just playing as Ellen? Well at Chapter 6 the game informed me that I needed Keats to help me. Now I assumed I would just be able to control Keats for this chapter. Nope. Keats ALSO needed to be at Chapter 6 before I could continue. Apparently the developers thought that I needed to play both of these characters to understand the story. I got to Chapter 6 just playing Ellen and not once did I not udnerstand the story because I also wasn't playing Keats, the story just isn't that good and certainly isn't that intricate. So those five chapters I had just beat as Ellen, well now I had to replay those as Keats. This was like playing Super Mario Brothers and getting to the fifth level and the game making you play those last four levels again but as Luigi. The story lines between Ellen and Keats just weren't different enough that I thought you should have to play as both of them. And if you're going to make me play as Keats at least give me different levels, mix it up a bit, have Keats go to different realms... but no, instead I have to play the same levels again but with very slight differences. Awesome.

I went from really enjoying this game to disliking it very quickly, and the worst part is that if they had made some minor changes I would be singing a completely different tune. I'm not sure why everyone but me seemed to enjoy this game, but I didn't. When you add up all the minor annoyances and the couple major annoyances... what's good in this game just isn't enough to overtake them.

That being said there are a ton of people out there that really enjoyed this game. I didn't. Give it a shot you may be one of the people that like it, but I would highly suggest renting it instead if buying it.

Squid.

Myst - Review

I mentioned that I think the reason that I had never finished Myst is because I played it when I was too young. Having now beat Myst I can say that I was 100% correct in thinking that.

I'm split on how I should feel about Myst. On one hand I thought it was a fun game that made me think and was also very interesting. On the other hand I had a hard time with the pacing and I felt that the game was extremely counter intuitive.

Myst is different than any game you've probably ever played before. There are no bad guys, there are not time limits, there really are no rules, no one tells you where to go, no one tells you what to do, and there's a total of three characters in the entire game. You're pretty much just plopped down into a world and you decide what you do next. Which I greatly enjoyed, I like non-linear games. Though with Myst I really wish it had given me at least a little direction. For the first 30 minutes I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I basically wandered around the island wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing, which can get frustrating at times.

It took a while to finally figure out what I needed to do, but than I ran into a problem when I tried to do it. Myst is full of puzzles. Throughout the game you're going to be solving all sorts of puzzles. Which is okay, puzzles in games that should have puzzles are great. Except with Myst I felt like I was missing about 20% of the information I needed to solve most the puzzles. Don't get me wrong not every puzzle had me stumped, but there were quite a few that I had to give up on and go check a walkthrough to see how to finish them... and even once I knew that answer a lot of the time I still wasn't sure how they arrived at it. It's things like that which got on my nerves. Myst puzzles occasionally feel like a connect the dots only half the dots are missing and you're just not sure how to complete it.

Let me give an example: In one puzzle you're supposed to put exactly 59 volts of power into a rocket, you do this by clicking on ten different buttons. Each button will add X amount of volts to power the rocket. There's two screens, one that shows the amount of volts currently and one that shows the amount of volts going to the rocket, well if you go over 59 volts all of the sudden the screen telling you the amount of volts going to rocket goes blank. I had no idea how to fix it, finally I checked a walkthrough and apparently I tripped a circuit breaker and I had to go fix it. Not only did I not know that, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know that.

Despite the fact that occasionally I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do and was often somewhat confused by the puzzles I still enjoyed playing Myst. It does a good job immersing you in it's story and the visuals and sound/music are all very interesting (even though the visuals are dated). I had a good time playing it, and can understand why it's as popular as it is. It was interesting to play a video game that I don't think I could actually compare to any other video game I have ever played. If you haven't played it before I would suggest giving it a shot some time even if it's just with a walkthrough in hand.

Squid.

Mass Effect 2 - Review

Mass Effect 2. There's only two words I need to describe it: absolutely phenomenal.

I'm a huge, huge fan of the first Mass Effect. When I eventually get around to playing and writing a review for that I assume it's going to be one gushing love letter to the game. So when I say that I enjoyed Mass Effect 2 more than the original it's a big statement.

Everything that you may not have liked about the first Mass Effect? Gone or greatly changed. No more Mako, no more bloated item/selling screens, no more clunky gun and armor customization, no more long elevator rides. Remember those little QTEs that you had to do to open certain containers? They're now replaced with "mini-games" that feel a lot more natural in the game. Basically everything that you may have griped about in the first one will probably be completely different and almost always better in Mass Effect 2.

Sure, there were a few misses with the hits but they're few in far between. The new mineral scan mini-game can feel tedious at times, but overall I didn't have a huge problem with it. Occasionally the models (especially on Shepard and Miranda) can go a little wonky. Also the cover system would occasionally frustrate me, but for the most part I loved how natural it felt. Like any other BioWare game the characters dialogue trees occasionally wouldn't get anything new for quite some time, but even this is much better than it was in Mass Effect or even Dragon Age. Overall though the few gripes I have about this game are quite small and insignificant, especially when I compare those to the things that have been changed to make this game better.

Listen, I could go on for hours about how amazing this game is... but I'm guessing there's thousands of reviews out there that would be saying the exact same thing as mine: this game is amazing. I spent 64 hours beating it and loved every minute of it. It managed to keep the same feel that Mass Effect had, but at the same time changing so much and in the end making it even better.

If you haven't played Mass Effect do yourself the favor and spend the $20 and play it. If you have played Mass Effect before and some of the small stuff you didn't like is making you second guess whether you want to spend that $60 or not, trust me, it's worth it. It's a phenomenal game and an amazing gaming experience. Go out and buy it, you won't regret it.

Squid.

Iron Tank - Review

Having just finished Iron Tank I can tell you two things:

1) The game is actually called Iron Tank The Invasion of Normandy. I find this interesting only due to the fact that I've owned it for probably two decades and didn't know this.

2) This game is absolutely-infriggen-possibly difficult. Kind of.

I say kind of due to the fact that I actually beat it and because I did it in about an hour. You're probably saying "Wait, how could a game be impossibly difficult and yet you beat it in an hour?" Well I say that just because I'm pretty sure that if I had some sort of God mode this game would only be about 10 minutes long. Once you factor in the fact that you die every three goddamn seconds and have to replay the same three screens over and over the game all the sudden goes from 10 minutes to one pulling out your hair, yelling at the TV hour long.

Iron Tank is the story of a secret mission having to do with the invasion of Normandy... I guess. The intro scene is kind of vague and somewhat poorly translated. You start off landing the Allies only tank (from what I could tell) on the beach of... I guess Normandy. From there you have to fight your way through hundreds of other much better armed and better equipped enemy tanks so that you can blow up a giant tank at the end. This was the Allies big goddamn plan. Not "Hey, let's send one man in on foot where maybe he can sneak in and blow up enemy tanks and railways" or "Hey, we have these planes... they're pretty good at killing giant tanks" but "Hey, what's the least sneaky thing we have in all of our arsenal? A tank? Great, send that bad boy in and let him take out all the other tanks. I'm going to lunch." Apparently whoever thought up this secret mission was an idiot.

Basically what you do in Iron Tank is blow up other enemy tanks. Occasionally the game will throw you a train or a submarine or... okay those are the only other enemies I can think of. So basically what you do in Iron Tank is blow up other enemy tanks, trains and submarines. You keep doing that until you reach bosses that look like they were designed by six year old boys. Ever remember drawing pictures (most likely in crayon) of tanks that had like eight canons and four of them shot fire and then the others shot lasers and then there were canons on top of the canons that shot heat seeking rockets! Yeah, meet the end bosses in Iron Tank. Apparently the Allies didn't have that technology, either that or they sent me out in my one canon tank because they're dicks and thought it was funny.

So here you are in your one canon tank and you move from screen to screen trying not to get raped by every tank in Germany's army that's advanced on your position. Then you have an "Aha!" moment... all of the tanks seem to move in a set path! If you can just watch their paths and learn it, you can kill them. Which sometimes works out. Until a random tank comes out of nowhere, or two tanks randomly spawn behind you, or you realize that their tanks can shoot farther than yours or there's one path that's wide enough to move your tank down but not wide enough to move out of the way of the bullets the other tank is shooting at you... I could go on for quite some time. When it comes down to it, your tank is screwed. Just get used to starting over and over and hopefully making a little bit of headway each time. Oh, also? The controls are absolutely horrid, so enjoy that as well!

Iron Tank isn't all bad and the parts where I wasn't stuck playing the same part over and over again fifty goddamn times were generally good. I enjoyed that it had multiple paths to choose from, so I guess if once you got tired of being raped by tanks in one direction you could choose to get raped by a whole new set of tanks. The fact that regain health by running over enemy soldiers was also kind of funny in the same way an 8 bit Grand Theft Auto where you ran over hookers would also be kind of funny.

Overall the game wasn't bad when you weren't playing the same part over and over again, but those parts took up way to much game time for Iron Tank to be good. Maybe I've just become different as a gamer, at eight I probably didn't mind replaying the same part twenty time, but now that I'm older it's just aggravating. That being said, I still had some fun and I did enjoy parts of the game.

Squid.