003 – Titanfall 2

Completed 4/1/2018. No idea how long the campaign took.

The Titanfall series deserves better than what EA gave it. I’ve no idea why they threw so much money at a game they sent out to die between two of 2016s biggest releases. I mean, one of those releases was their own bloody IP so it’s not like they got caught off guard.

They did release some flannel about how they thought there was a market for Titanfall AND Battlefield, but that just goes to show how narrow a field of view they have. People just don’t have the time or inclination for more than one FPS in their lives.

So Titanfall 2 fell by the wayside somewhat, although it has had a steady pick up of players over the last year or so due to the incredibly generous post release DLC schedule which positively takes a massive, steamy dump all over everyone else’s due to the simple fact it’s all been free. There’s paid cosmetic DLC in the form of banners, titan skins, paint jobs and Prime Titans (which I bought in the sale, because Respawn deserve my money but obviously not at full whack. Because I’m a bell-end) but they wanted to maintain parity between all players and didn’t want to segregate the base, so everyone has the same content. Given how small that base was thanks to EA’s fuckwittery it was the best decision.

I won’t brook any argument that the relative failure of Titanfall 2 to set the world of online gaming on fire is anything other than EAs due to the simple fact Titanfall 2 is fucking brilliant. Like the first game, it takes the FPS and turns it to a Spinal Tap-esque 11. All the gimmicks that Call of Duty has now abandoned like wall running, double jumping, sliding etc has been crafted with a fluidity that makes even the most cack handed chimp like yours truly feel like some futuristic parkour master with the reflexes of Spider-man.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the game has massive stompy robots in it. God I love this game.

Anyway, the multiplayer is fantastic and I’ve known that since I bought the bloody game.

The single player is also very good, but comes up short of consistent greatness due to constantly breaking the flow of some incredible set pieces with frequent instadeath situations. To put it another way, the game suffers from Repetitive Death Syndrome (or RDS). It’s difficult to be continually impressed by something when you’ve seen it for the umpteenth time.

However, it has some of the most inventive and ingenius levels, set pieces and events I’ve seen in an FPS. Good example; the Effect and Cause mission where you effectively jump instantaneously between different points in time. It works fantastically.

Or the level where a massive factory constructs buildings and live fire test arenas around you while you attempt to navigate it and not be squished.

Or the frequent need for BT 7274, the mech who commandeered your neural link after Captain Lastimosa (your commanding officer and his Pilot) is killed, to throw you through the air to reach locations.

Or leaping from aircraft to aircraft and fighting a flying mech while shit gets blown up all around you!

It’s pure spectacle on many levels, and usually not necessarily in that superficially forgettable way video games tend to manage. It’s just a shame about all the constant threat of RDS.

Another let down with the game is that the villains aren’t used to better effect. The named people with their custom titans are quite well realised (if a little stereotypical, and I’m 99% sure they named Richter a) to use the Total Recall pun for the achievement/trophy and b) told the voice actor to do their best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression) but on the normal difficulty you can dispatch them with ease, and it makes it feel anticlimactic.

Overall it’s a solid blast. BT is one of the best secondary characters in any video game. Being a robot he often doesn’t understand some of the phrases Cooper uses and his flat, deadpan delivery is often a source of levity and amusement. I loves BT, I do.

If the multiplayer wasn’t an obvious enough draw, you can get Titanfall 2 for a tenner these days (which is fucking criminal, I might add) and it’s well worth it for a decent single player campaign.

8/10

Protection From Who, Tommy? Ze Germanz? – Wolfenstein: The New Order

2014 was, overall, pretty great for games. Gaming… eeeeeeeeh, not so much, but that’s not for me to go into. That would take me to that nasty, awful place and we don’t like to go there, do we? This blog is called “Video Games Are Fucking Great” so let’s stick to what’s great about games. This right here what you is absorbing with your eyeballs is the first in a series of me going “HERE’S SOME GAMES THAT WERE RELEASED DURING 2014 THAT WERE FUCKING AWESOOOOOOOOOOOME!”. For your and my pleasure. Well, mainly mine.

When the Wolfenstein reboot/retelling/sequel/whatever the hell it is was announced I only had minor interest in it. I enjoyed the noisy, silly supernatural hokum of the 2009 version but not enough to make me want to spunk £40 on the new one, even with the promise of giant robots and an alternate 1960’s where the Nazi’s rule (spoiler lol). I mean, yeah, that’s generally enough but this time… I dunno, it just didn’t tick anything.

Then I got a new PS4, which I didn’t really have any games for and bought it anyway. Classic me. Prick.

Anyway, it turns out that Wolfenstein: The New Order is absolutely cracking. It’s just a perfect storm of everything that should make a game fantastic.

Aside from only a couple of bizarre difficulty spikes, Wolfenstein: NWO plays pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to play. Across all the Wolfenstein games the combat has always been solid and satisfying, so you’d have to be a spanner of a developer to take that base and to get it wrong, but there’s a couple of interesting tweaks. Quite a lot of the time you have the option to stealth your way through sections, and the stealth actually seems to work. Like, properly works. Forgiving enough that the enemies aren’t psychic, but harsh enough that you can’t get away with walking across their eye line crouching while putting a finger to your lips going “Ssssssssh! You can’t see me!”.

You can dual wield any gun in the game, including the Sniper Rifles. How fucking cool is that? Why can you do that? Because!

“No, Steve,” some boring fucker pipes up “That’s ridiculous and pointless.” Oh, more ridiculous than  a 1960’s where the Nazis control the world with giant fucking robots? Shut your hole and get on board.

Another great addition is the skill tree. Instead of being tied to a points system you unlock perks in the tree by fulfilling certain criteria. Quick Reload, for example, is done by achieving x kills with y weapons. It basically rewards you for your play style and more games should pillage it wholesale.

There are a tonne of collectables and nick-nacks to find, like Nazi Gold, records, letters, and a choice near the beginning of the games mean at least 2 different lots of dialogue from certain characters. I do need to pick it up again so I can play through it a second time.

On the superficial side of things Wolfenstein looks and sounds great. Machine Games are made up from ex-Starbreeze chaps, who worked on The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and The Darkness. Both very solid and enjoyable first person action games, so the pedigree was there. Using Id Tech 5 (the same engine that ran Rage which, for all it’s faults, also looked amazing) they’ve crafted a wonderful dys/utopian future (depending which side of the Nazi fence you fall. Though it should be the ‘dys’ side, you facist.) that could have easily been grey and dull, but is vibrant and filled with fantastic chunkily vivid art design.

Similarly for the sound. The guns sound meaty, the voice acting is of a very high quality (and, in turn, the dialogue is very good also), the music well scored as well as brilliant alternate-future songs (and parody of songs) by artists of the time in German.

The plot isn’t really the usual nonsense we expect of FPSs either. It’s not Citizen Kane, but it has a bizarre warmth to it through the monologues of the improbably named B.J. Blazkowicz and his interactions with the Kreisau Circle resistance members.

One of the absolute best things about this game, though, is the use of language. Seeing as you are an American solider fighting firstly in Nazi Germany, then a Nazi occupied world it’s great to see that Machine Games have taken the time to do all the voice acting for the German characters in German. Aside from when they’re supposed to be speaking in English, they speak German. The propaganda is in German. The letters and newspapers are in German.

One of my biggest bugbears in games is laziness when it comes to the audio. I mean, yeah, there’s cost and time involved, but if you’re going to set your game in, say, Soviet Russia, then have the fucking newsreels and characters speak fucking Russian. ARE YOU LISTENING, SINGULARITY?! Turning the fucking ‘R’s backwards on posters does not make it Russian. It just makes it look like you couldn’t be fucking arsed to do it properly!

Time and budget. I know.

The complete lack of multiplayer mode has to be noted, simply because it blatantly means Machine Games concentrated on delivering a brilliant single player game. And deliver they did. Wolfenstein: The New Order is not only the best FPS of 2014, but the best one I’ve played in years. It puts the single player campaigns of Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (well, what I’ve seen of it) to shame.

I’m not sure if there’s going to be a sequel. I don’t think there needs to be. If there is one it’ll probably be another reboot. Should that happen I’ll be following it with great interest.