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Dark Souls Review #10
About the Game
Dark Souls is an RPG developed by FromSoftware and released in 2011 and spiritual successor to a game called Demon's Souls. While Demon’s Souls was successful, it wasn’t until Dark Souls came out that the series really came into its own.
The Story
The story is very dense and extremely convoluted. Not only that, but as the player, you really need to work to uncover the lore of every character you find to actually understand the plot in the way that the developers do. In a way, this is one of the best parts of this game, in that every player can experience the story differently by coming up with their own conclusions as to what the game is about on a personal level. The game takes place in this massive open world that’s seemingly empty and appears to be dying. Enormous decaying structures built for giants stretch towards the sky, while vast caverns fall deep below the game world to extremely dark depths. It’s up to the player to navigate the different areas at their own pace.
Gameplay
The Dark Souls series is known for its difficulty. Death is essentially a pivotal gameplay mechanic. Boss battles are frequent and extremely tough. These bosses are often Massive beasts, such as dragons, giants, or other terrifying creatures that dwell in their own unique environments. The entire game revolves around collecting souls. These souls are used to upgrade your character’s stats. If you die, you have to make it back to that point from the last checkpoint without dying again in order to recover your souls.
Multiplayer
While Dark Souls is mainly a single player game, there is a multiplayer aspect in the form of summoning and invading. As per the lore, a player can take two forms, either human or hollow. If the player is human, they can summon other random players to their game world and play in a coop mode. However, while the player is human, that also leaves the vulnerable to invasions, where other players invade the game world in search of a fight.
Conclusion
Dark Souls was extremely successful upon released and was followed up with two sequels, as well as a spiritual successor in the form of Bloodborne. For me, Dark Souls is extremely nostalgic. My friends and I have spent countless hours helping each other through the maze-like environments and discovering the rich lore of the game world.
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Half-Life 2 Review #9
About the Game
Following the release of Half-Life, Valve was under pressure to release a highly anticipated sequel. However, Valve has a habit of taking their time with projects and it shows. When Half-Life 2 was final released in 2004, it was hailed as perhaps the best possible sequel that could have followed up a game as inspirational as the first. Valve’s new Source engine had some of the most realistic physics seen in a video game at the time.
The Story
The game takes place some time after the events of the first game and follows Gordon Freeman through a post alien invasion world were the Earth has been taken over and the human race has been enslaved by and alien presence known as the combine. Gordon teams up with other characters to form a resistance to fight their oppressors. Some familiar faces can be recognized from the first game as well, because valve essentially took the faces of generic scientists and security guards from Half-Life and turned them into real developed characters.
Gameplay
Half-Life 2 largely builds off the same gameplay foundation of the first game, but much more refined. Valve also took full advantage of their new physics engine with the addition of the Gravity Gun. The player can use the Gravity Gun to pick up, move, and launch objects that would normally be too heavy to pick up. Valve also implemented large sections of the game that could only be traversed by vehicles such as a fan boat, and a dune buggy.
Conclusion
Half-Life is one of the most beloved franchises in the gaming industry. Following the success of Half-Life 2 Valve would come out with two expansions in the form of Half-Life2 Episode 1 and Half-Life2 Episode 2, both of which meet critical acclaim. For fifteen years now, fans have yearned for another sequel, one that would tie up all the loose ends and bring a proper conclusion to the franchise. At one-point Half-Life 3 was one of the most searched terms on Google. Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell has been repeatedly asked about a third installment to the series and has refused to comment every time. The unfortunate reality is that fans may never get the sequel they’ve longed for. At this point, Valve is more focused on their online digital distribution platform, Steam, as well as the fact that the amount of hype generated by Half-Life 3 would simply be too immense for even the best game to satisfy the expectations of even the most patient fans. Even so, maybe one day…
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Max Payne Review #8
About the Game
Max Payne is a third person shooter developed by Remedy software and released in 2001. Up to that point there had not been many successful third person shooter games, but with the wide spread popularity video game industry and the growing availability of development software and programs, smaller teams of talented graphic design teams found themselves in a position to take advantage of this opportunity. Remedy entertainment based out of Finland was one such team.
The Story
On the surface, Max Payne has an extremely basic premise. Max is an undercover New York cop, his family is killed, and he’s out for revenge. Along the way he discovers an elaborate underground conspiracy that involves everything from mob bosses to corrupt government officials to power hungry corporations while dealing with heavy subject matters like drug abuse and the religious occult. The real magic to Max Payne’s story is in the details. Small nuances in the game’s levels don’t reveal themselves until the second or even third play through.
Gameplay
Max Payne shares a common ground with Halo in that it was really the first of its genre to implement gameplay elements that we take for granted today and are even seen as cliché. Inspired by the John Woo movies of the 90’s, Remedy implemented a slow-motion element to the game that could be activated by the player in limited amounts. In this mode called “bullet-time”, player and NPC movement speed were slowed down while the player could move the aiming reticle at normal speed. This not only provided a more cinematic presentation, but also allowed the player to escape otherwise nonsurvivable situations.
Style
Aside from a massive snow storm that has engulfed the city that you explore, Max Payne is essentially an amalgamation of 90’s film influences. Modern film noirs like Seven combined with the John Woo choreographed action of The Matrix inspired the overall aesthetic of the game. The developers opted for graphic novel cutscenes as opposed to live action or 3D rendered cutscenes. This added to the overall atmosphere of the game and saved money on the project’s already sparse budget. Due to these financial restraints, the studio also looked to alternatives to real actors, so they used themselves, friends and relatives as stand-ins for actors to be used in photos that would become the graphic novel style art panels. While in some ways, this resulted in sometimes cheesy interactions, overall, I think it adds to the game’s character and is more than made up for with the great voice acting.
Conclusion
Where I live, in the southeast, our winters are fairly mild. However, every once in a while, we’ll get a pretty heavy winter storm and we’ll occasionally get several inches of snow. Being that we’re not equipped to handle such weather conditions, many schools call off classes and stores close for a day or two until the roads are safe to drive on again. It’s times like this that a couple of friends and I will inevitably get the urge to play Max Payne.
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Halo 3 Review #7
About the Game
2007 is a pretty crowded year when it comes to video games and is often cited as one of the best, with titles like The Orange Box, Bioshock, and Call of Duty 4, it’s not hard to see why. With that said, I don’t think 2007 would have been quite as memorable without the third and arguably most beloved Halo instalment of the series. This time, Bungie had both the time and budget to make the game they wanted to make from the start, and the team at Bungie started right away. Unlike Halo 2, Bungie knew they were going to make a sequel, and although some of the team continued to support Halo 2 updates, the rest of the team moved on to working on Halo 3 fairly rapidly.
The Story
The Campaign picks up shortly after the evets of Halo 2. The Master Chief has returned to Earth to continue to repel the Covenant invasion and prevent the remaining Covenant Prophet from activating a Forerunner artifact found in a remote location on Earth. However, the Prophet is able to activate the artifact which opens a slipspace portal. The Master Chief and his allies move through the portal in pursuit of the Prophet.
They are transported to large Forerunner structure called “the Ark” where the Prophet could activate all the Halo rings remotely. As the Profit begins the activation process, the Chief and the Arbiter show up in time to stop him.
Afterwards, The Chief and his allies realize that the Ark is were Halo rings are created as they witness another Halo emerge from the center of the structure to replace the one that Master Chief destroyed in the first game. The Chief decided to retrieve Cortana and from then they realize that a premature activation of the ring before it’s completion would cause the destruction of the Halo ring and the Ark.
As the Chief moves to the control room of the Halo ring to activate it, 343 Guilty Spark realizes the Human’s plan and turns on them, but the Chief is able to activate the ring regardless as he and the Arbiter escape towards their ship. As the Chief and the Arbiter launch the ship towards the slipspace portal they came through, the blast causes the portal to close with the ship only half way through. The front half containing the Arbiter returns to Earth, but the back half containing the Chief and Cortana floats adrift far out in space.
Multiplayer
Halo 3 introduced many new multiplayer features including forge mode and theater mode. Forge mode allowed players to customize and change the base maps to create unique experiences. Theater mode allowed players to record online matches with the ability to see the match from different angles and viewpoints.
Graphics
While the art style of Halo 3 remained more or less the same between Halos 2 and 3, Halo 3 saw the transition to the Xbox 360, which meant the graphics and textured needed to be much more detailed for the new HD console.
Conclusion
The Launch of Halo 3 in September of 2007 was immense, it made $170 million in the first day, and sold 8 million copies worldwide by 2008. The original Halo series holds a special place in the hearts of most gamers. It’s a series that’s defined a genre of games that most others have only ever been able to imitate and even 12 years after the release of Halo 3, it’s hard to name a game that does it better. Halo made first-person shooters what they are today.
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Perfect Dark Review #6
About the Game
After Rare ware released the critically acclaimed Goldeneye in 1997, it would be some years before the studio would release another first-person shooting game. This break ended with the release of Perfect Dark by Rare in 2000 and largely built off Goldeneye as a sort of spiritual successor.
The Story
The game takes place in 2023, a time of war between two alien races, the Maians, and the Skedar. You play as the game’s protagonist Joanna Dark, an agent who works for a secret organization called the Carrington Institute. The Carrington Institute covertly operates along side the Maians, where a rival faction known as DataDyne secretly works with the Skedar.
Gameplay
Perfect Dark is notable in that it’s one of the first shooters to cast the player in to the shoes of a female protagonist. The core gameplay isn’t much different from Goldeneye, aside from the fact that it’s much more polished and refined. That being said, they didn’t do much to improve the AI.
Soundtrack
The score was composed by Grant Kirkhope and Graeme Norgate, who also composed the score for Goldeneye. However, this time they were not limited to making the soundtrack fit a James Bond theme and is therefore, much more varied and interesting in my opinion. The music also sounds much less like it’s from a video game. There is also an alternate version of most of the songs that have faster tempos and have fuller sound to create suspense when the action ramps up during the climax of each level.
Graphics
Compared to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark is much better looking with better lighting and textures. It also has a very interesting Cyberpunk aesthetic that harkens back to classic sci fi films like Bladerunner and Robocop. Unfortunately, due to the higher resolution, the game suffers from frequent framerate drops. However, in 2010, Perfect Dark was remastered and released on the Xbox 360 marketplace with even better lighting and textures as well as a consistent framerate.
Conclusion
Perfect Dark is something of a cult classic. It never had quite the success that Goldeneye had, but to those who stuck with the n64 long enough to see this one through and remember it fondly. After Rare was purchased by Microsoft, a sequel was produced titled Perfect Dark Zero although it was met with lackluster response by fans and doesn’t hold up to the original. The aforementioned remaster was released and again in 2015 as part of the Rare Replay bundle available for the Xbox one.
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Halo 2 Review #5
About the Game
Halo 2 is the beloved sequel to the already hugely successful Halo: Combat Evolved. Again, developed by Bungie studios, Halo 2 set off as a bold project that would attempt and succeed in surpassing its predecessor in many ways. Bungie had not originally planned to turn Halo into a series, but the massive success of the first games prompted a sequel. Halo 2 was largely based off ideas that were initially intended for the first game but were cut due to being simply too ambitious. With a higher budget, Bungie began by creating a new game engine from scratch, but by the time the game was demoed at E3 2003 the studio realized that in order to make the game they wanted to make on the engine they had created, it wouldn’t be able to fit onto the Xbox console. After discovering this, Bungie decided to scrap the entire game engine and start fresh with only a little over a year to create the game.
The Story
As a result of Bungie’s ambition, Halo 2’s campaign became much more cinematic and emotional. Halo 2’s story originally encompassed that of Halos 2 & 3, but it simply wouldn’t fit onto one game’s disc. This led to a now infamous cliffhanger ending.
As the campaign begins, the game immediately differs from its predecessor in that it starts from the prospective of the Covenant, the main antagonists from the first game. The cutscene fades in to a view of the still smoldering remains of the Halo ring that Master Chief destroyed in the first game floating in space. As the camera pans, the Covenant mobile city of High Charity comes into view, overlooking the destruction. The Covenant Elite responsible for the safety and protection of the ring stands trial in front of the Covenant’s three religious prophets and leaders. The Elite is stripped of his rank and armor and branded as a heretic.
Afterwards we are reunited with the Master Chief at a ceremony aboard a UNSC space station orbiting Earth in which he is being awarded for his actions in the first game. The event is cut short when it is interrupted by an invasion by a Covenant fleet. The Master Chief and the rest of the defensive forces repel most of the attack apart from one ship that makes it to the Earth’s surface. This particular ship holds one of the Covenant’s religious prophets known as the Prophet of Regret, who led the attack. Realizing situation is becoming dyer, the prophet orders his ship to make a slipspace jump.
At this point the game returns the player to the point of view of the Elite commander who has been declared a heretic. The other two prophets seen previously, order a meeting with our Elite. During this meeting, the prophets recognize that it is indeed the Elites fault for the destruction of Halo, however they also recognize that he is no heretic, and offer him the dubiously honored title of Arbiter.
The game takes a turn when it transitions the player from controlling the Master Chief, to controlling the Arbiter, who is assigned with killing a heretic leader. Upon completing his task, the Arbiter discovers 343 Guilty Spark and returns him to High Charity.
From this point the game switches back and forth between playing as the Master Chief and the Arbiter and the story becomes quite complicated. Master Chief discovers that the Covenant have found another Halo ring and the Arbiter learns the true nature of the Halo rings. The Arbiter turns on the Prophets and High Charity becomes the battleground for a civil war within the Covenant.
The Cliffhanger ending comes when Master Chief returns to Earth aboard a Covenant ship in pursuit of another religious Prophet. The Chief contacts the UNSC requesting that they not fire upon the ship that he’s in. When asked why he’s on board the ship, the Chief replies “Sir, finishing this fight”.
Gameplay
Building upon the ground work of the first game, Bungie also made some significant changes. The aiming reticle has been dropped down from the center of the screen slightly, the separate health and armor system was replaced with one that only includes armor, and things like vehicle hijacking, vehicle destruction, and dual wielding were also added.
Multiplayer
While I usually leave a section for graphics, the graphics are only a slight improvement over the first game and while they were still impressive at the time of the games release, Halo 2 really made a huge impact on the world of online multiplayer.
Halo 2 expanded on Halo’s multiplayer modes immensely. Players could now customize their player models and game modes to a degree that had never been seen before in a console shooter. Halo 2 also took advantage of Microsoft’s then new Xbox Live subscription service. The way Halo 2’s online multiplayer matchmaking paved the way for how almost all online future first person shooter games would be set up. Halo 2 would also be one of the first shooter games to be involved in e sports with the MLG Pro circuit.
Conclusion
Halo 2 released on November 9th, 2004, and within 24 hours the game had sold 2.4 million copies. At the time of it’s release, Halo 2 was the then highest grossing entertainment media product ever. The game set a bar that would only be surpassed by future titles in the franchise and is one of the most celebrated titles in the series.
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Conker’s Bad Fur Day Review #4
About the Game
Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a platforming game developed by Rare Ware and released in 2001. Rare was a giant at the time of Bad Fur Day’s release. People knew Rare from games like Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong, and the video game adaptation of 007: Goldeneye. Conker’s was originally supposed to be another platforming game geared towards a younger audience, However, Rare didn’t want to compete with their own games like Banjo-Kazooie. Also, with the acceptation of Goldeneye, Rare had not released a game geared towards a mature adult audience. So, they decided to make a platforming game geared towards adults that explored mature themes and comedy.
The Story
The Plot of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a fairly simple one. You play as Conker the Squirrel, who, after a night of drinking heavily and lost his way, has awoken in an unfamiliar pasture. The point of the game from here on is simply to find your way home.
Meanwhile, the Great Panther King has a broken end table that needs to be fixed. An evil professor tells the Panther King that he needs Conker to place underneath the table where there is a missing leg. ‘Why?’ you might ask? Because video games, and this one is particularly goofy.
Conker must travel through many different environments and meet a variety of characters and perform different tasks for each of them to eventually find his way home. Most of these environments are intended to play off popular culture with references to films like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Saving Private Ryan, and Jaws.
Gameplay
Conker’s is essentially a simpler version of Banjo-Kazooie. The player controls Conker from a third-person perspective around seven different worlds. The player’s health is indicated by a chocolate bar in the top right corner and is regenerated by finding large fragments of so-called “Anti-gravity” chocolate.
Graphics
While the visuals probably aren’t appealing to modern tastes, the simple textures and bright colors add to the aesthetic that the game is going for. Like Rare’s prior platforming titles, Conker’s mainly consists of cartoon animal characters that live in vivid picturesque environments.
Soundtrack
The game’s soundtrack, composed by Robin Beanland, consists of mostly of music to accompany cutscenes as well as a general theme to match each world and chapter. That being said, the music is still well done and quite memorable.
Conclusion
Conker’s Bad Fur Day was an instant cult-classic and still is to this day. When the game was released it was very well received, earning frequent reviews that praised it for it’s originality in a genre that was somewhat saturated. For me personally, I still go back and play it on fairly frequent basis. It’s sense of humor is sometimes cringy, but always enduring. It’s a game I can always pick up and immediately feel as if I’m seeing an old friend and it never fails to put a smile on my face.
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Halo: Combat Evolved Review #3
About the Game
Halo: Combat Evolved is a genre defining first-person shooter developed by Bungie Inc. and released in 2001. Before Halo, Bungie was a subsidiary of Apple and had made a handful of games that met mild success. In 1999, Steve Jobs actually debuted the first trailer for Halo at the Mac World Expo. However, it was around this time that Microsoft was looking for studios to make games for their upcoming Xbox console. So Ironically enough, Microsoft bought Bungie from Apple so that Bungie could make Halo exclusively for the Xbox.
The Story
Over the years, Halo has expanded into multiple mediums including Books and TV mini-series with tons of lore, but for the purposes of this review, I’ve decided to focus on only what the first Halo game covers.
The game begins with a strange ring-shaped world emerging from darkness as a large space ship comes into view. The captain of the ship and the ship-board A.I. unit can be heard discussing their current situation, which is a grim one. This human military ship has been trying to escape an enemy fleet of ships crewed by an alien race, known as the Covenant, that has been waging war with humanity. The captain and the ships A.I. named Cortana, decide its time to awaken a super-soldier called the Master Chief who is the protagonist, and the sole playable character in the game.
As the Master Chief, you awaken from a cryogenic state as the Covenant begin boarding the ship. When you make it to the bridge, the captain put’s Cortana on a small computer drive and tells you to get her off the ship. At this point, the captain, Cortana, and the Master Chief decide that there’s no choice but to give the order to abandon ship and seek refuge on the ring world they’ve stumbled upon. The captain opts to try and land the ship on the object to use as a rally point.
Only after landing on the ring world, are the humans able to put together a resistance and learn more about the ring. They discover that the ring-world is called Halo. The Covenant believe that Halo has significant religious meaning, but upon further inspection Cortana learns that the structure was actually built by an ancient race of aliens known as the Forerunner as a weapon against a parasitic organism called the Flood. Activating the Halo ring would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy.
After encountering the Flood and realizing that the Covenant want to activate Halo for religious reasons, Master Chief and Cortana decide that the only way to stop both of them is to initiate a sort of self-destruct function on the ship they came in on to destroy the ring and escape on a smaller ship.
Gameplay
Where Halo really shines is in the gameplay. Halo is a fairly straight forward shooting game and it wasn’t the first game to use dual analog sticks to control your character, but it seems to be one of the first to do it in a way that seemed natural and intuitive. Essentially, the way Halo’s controls are laid out set the foundation for almost all console shooters since.
Most of Halo’s combat is in open spaces as opposed to most shooters at the time that confined the players to indoor hallways or corridors. This meant that Bungie also had to develop enemy AI that would be able to work in such environments making every encounter unique.
Another gameplay element that started with Halo is what’s known as regeneration. In Halo you have two indicators of how much damage your character has taken. Health, that can only be regenerated with health packs, and shields, that regenerate after a certain amount of time without taking damage.
Graphics
Halo’s graphics where revolutionary at the time it was released and really showed off the potential of Microsoft’s new console and they still hold up pretty well today. A large amount of the environments where influenced by Bungie’s move to Washington State after they were bought by Microsoft. Halo offers a wide variety of environments and unique visuals make the game stand out from the rest
Soundtrack
Martin O’Donnell, who composed the soundtrack is quoted as wanting something that sounded epic mysterious ancient and futuristic all at the same time. The result some of the most iconic and recognizable video game soundtracks of all time. From ancient sounding operatic chants, to percussion reminiscent of Native American drums, to huge symphonic melody’s, Halo’s soundtrack is in a league of it’s own.
Conclusion
Halo is a definitive first-person shooter that’s inspired nearly every shooter to come after it in some way or another. It marks a point in gaming where consoles were becoming the norm in gaming and becoming more and more accessible to a larger audience. Halo changed the way we play video games and it changed the way developers designed video games.
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Half-Life Review#2
About the Game
Half-Life is a landmark first-person shooter developed by Valve Software and released 1998. It was Valve’s first project after it’s founder Gabe Newell left Microsoft to create the studio. Prior to the release of Half-Life, the market for first-person shooters was saturated with so-called “Doom clones”, These games more or less copied the template of the massively popular Doom released back in 1993 and were met with varying degrees of success. Gabe Newell and his team at Valve set off to make something different.
The Story
Unlike in Doom or Quake, where the hero is usually a buffed-up, special forces, space marine, or military juggernaut, the protagonist in Half-Life is a seemingly normal, subdued, unassuming, and late for work. Gordon Freeman is hardly seen outside of the game’s cover box art, this is because the game creates immersion by thrusting you, the player, into his shoes. So, who is Gordon Freeman? He’s you, a 27-year-old MIT graduate who works at a high-tech, secret science facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert called Black Mesa.
The day starts off like any other, you begin with a tram ride into the facility, which allows the game to accomplish incredible world-building, while an automated voice recording reads off safety procedures and daily announcements engulfed with foreshadowing. The 5-minute ride lets the player catch a glimpse at how extensive the complex is, stretched over acres of desert landscape, mostly underneath the surface.
As you arrive at the station platform, you’re greeted by a security officer as you make your way to the test chamber that lies within the laboratory. After briefly going over the procedures with your colleagues once more, you begin the experiment, when something goes terribly wrong. The experiment tears a hole through space and time, creating a rift to other-worldly dimensions. Strange creatures and Alien lifeforms begin appearing throughout the entire compound and horror ensues.
The rest of the game consists of surviving as you try to escape the vast facility on foot while not knowing what lurks around every corner. The situation becomes even more dire as a secret military unit is tasked with containing the incident and silencing any witnesses.
Gameplay
The game was unique in many ways when it came to gameplay aspects. Before Half-Life, most first-person shooters followed a linear progression that went from level to level. While it remained linear, Half-Life did away with this level design, opting instead for a seamless uninterrupted experience, from start to finish. Aside from the first-person shooting nature, the game also implements aspects of platforming and puzzle solving. The player must use their resources sparingly and strategize in order to overcome many obstacles in the game. The AI in the game was also quite advanced for the time. Your opponents will try to counter your actions at every opportunity, and you’ll have to adapt your tactics to account for this. Valve also created a new physics engine for Half-Life, which allowed the player to interact with objects in the game like small boxes and creates.
Graphics
At the time when Half-Life came out, it’s graphics were revolutionary. No other games had such large-scale environments or such detailed and believable landscapes. A later expansion to the game titled Half-Life: Blue Shift would include an HD model expansion that improved some NPC models, as well as first-person weapon models. Although dated by this point, there is something about the color pallet and textures used that still manage to spark my nostalgia today.
Soundtrack
Half-Life’s soundtrack, composed by Kelly Bailey, is sparse, but it’s not without character. It’s eerie and atmospheric tracks immerse the player in the world. Typically, the music kicks in before a scripted sequence the results in combat with NPC’s, or it fades in as you enter a large or particularly cinematic area. The music has a way of mixing seamlessly with the ambient sounds in the environment which gives it a particularly immersive quality.
Conclusion
Upon its release, Half-Life was met with immense critical acclaim and Huge impact on the gaming industry. The modding community for Half-Life exploded with fans and amateur developers using the games engine to create games of their own. Some of these mods would generate their own fan bases to the extent that Valve would take notice and hire the teams to create more refined versions of these mods into fully developed retail games. This resulted in games like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Team Fortress. Due to the success of Half-Life, Valve contracted Gearbox Software to create two expansion packs Half-Life: Opposing Force, and the previously mentioned Half-Life: Blue Shift. Both expansions would be highly praised and would quench peoples thirst for a time before Half-Life 2 could be developed. It would take Some years before Valve could put out a deserving sequel, but that’s a topic for another day.
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The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Review #1
About the Game
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt is a 2015 action adventure RPG developed by CD Projekt Red out of Poland. As the name implies, the game is the third installment in the Witcher game franchise, that is in turn, a successor to the Witcher book series by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. The Witcher series is what CD Projekt Red is most well-known for since the release of the first game in the franchise back in 2007. The Witcher 3 has been met with critical acclaim and praise, becoming one of the most awarded games of all time.
The Story
The story follows one Geralt of Rivia through a thirteenth century inspired fantasy world. Geralt is a monster hunter for hire, also known as a Witcher. Witchers like Geralt are trained from a young age to fight monsters of all types, their bodies are mutated through magic to enhance their physical attributes like strength, stamina, and resistance to poisons or toxins.
The Witcher 3 begins shortly after the end of The Witcher 2 with Geralt on a quest to find a young woman named Ciri who is being chased by a band of mythical riders known as the Wild Hunt. Although Ciri’s real father is the King of an empire called Nilfgaard, Geralt and Ciri have become close enough through their trials for Ciri to consider Geralt more of a father figure than the emperor. The reason for the pursuit, both by the Wild Hunt and by the Emperor is that Ciri is a descendant of what is known as the Elder Blood, and it is prophesied to possess a great magical power.
From this point the story can play out in several ways depending on the decisions the player (you) makes throughout the game. The player controls what choices Geralt will make through his journey. Weather Geralt is honest or dishonest, kind or spiteful, just or unjust, the player decides how Geralt reacts to the situations that are presented to him, and these decisions will determine how the story plays out.
The game also features a huge number of random encounters and side quests with strange and interesting characters throughout the game world. Side quest in most role-playing games are typically shallower and sometimes tacked on, however the side quests in the Witcher 3 are nearly as engrossing as the main storyline. Almost every character you meet has their own problems, personalities, conundrums, and dilemmas that they will need your help with.
Gameplay
The gameplay mainly consists of third-person action. The player controls all of Geralt’s movements from an ‘over the shoulder’ perspective weather he’s running, jumping, swimming, climbing, or riding a horse. I played the game on a PC, but I found it much easier to use a controller as opposed to a mouse and keyboard. Combat mechanics are smooth, fluid, and much more precise with a controller in this game. Geralt can carry with him an immense variety of weapons and armor. Typically, he is armed with two swords that have become synonymous with Witchers. One silver sword for monsters and mythical adversaries, and one steel for human adversaries. Geralt also carries a crossbow, as well as a slew of potions oils and magic bombs, all of which have differing effects on different enemy types.
The player will need to be resourceful in their travels across a massive map that is roughly equivalent to 52 square miles in size and full of multiple environments ranging from swamps, to rolling hills and farmlands, to snowcapped mountains.
Graphics
Speaking of the environments, CD Projekt Red has made one of the most believable worlds ever designed in a video game. The graphics are simply gorgeous. Every environment incredibly detailed with ultra-realistic lighting and textures that adapt to different times of the integrated day and night cycle. Every other hill, mountain top or clearing looks like a post card from southern France. The urban areas are equally as detailed with high resolution textures on nearly every surface. Even on my laptop that’s a few years older than the game itself, I could still play the game on medium-high graphics settings with a consistent frame rate at around 50 frames per second.
Soundtrack
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the only thing more beautiful than the graphics, which is the score composed by Marcin Przybyłowicz, and is easily one of my favorite soundtracks put to a game. The way Przybyłowicz uses atmospheric melodies to build suspense, convey emotion, and enhance action builds upon the world and makes the gaming experience incredibly immersive and enjoyable.
Conclusion
The Witcher 3 is easily one of the best games I’ve played in years. All the components work seamlessly together to create an immensely entertaining experience that is able to be played and replayed in countless ways for a different outcome every time. Since the success of The Witcher 3, Netflix has gained the rights to the franchise and has an original series set to come out some time in 2019. I look forward, to seeing how well Netflix can adapt the franchise to a television format and add to the story of the world I and many others have come to love.
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