It's Halloween, which means it's time for the obligatory horror game review. Tonight's game is Five Nights at Freddy's, the latest indie sensation to wet the pants of YouTube "let's players" proclaiming it to be the scariest game they've ever played. Hold it there, chief, you're telling me a game about friendly animatronic animals at a children's pizzeria/playground/arcade is supposed to be scary? What's that? They come to life and roam the building's halls at night attempting to murder anyone they find so they can stuff the human remains into an empty animatronic suit? Well, that's a start, I guess.
In Five Nights at Freddy's, you play a security guard tasked with spending the night at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza to keep an eye on the robotic band members, who're set to "free roam mode" every night because they (supposedly) need the exercise to keep their servos from locking up. Except, really, they're trying to murder you. You have to survive six hours each night (roughly eight minutes in real time) by flipping through camera feeds to keep track of where each animatronic character is so that you can close the doors to your office when they get close. What's stopping you from keeping the doors closed all night, I hear you ask -- a limited power supply. Using the cameras, turning the lights on, and locking the doors all consume power.
Therein lies the game -- a simple matter of clicking through camera feeds, watching the screen, and closing a door at the right moment without using too much power -- but can such a simple game succeed at eliciting genuine horror, or are the masses simply overreacting? The answer is a little bit of both, but more of one than the other. How much you'll be scared by Five Nights at Freddy's depends heavily on how much of a wuss you are, and on how much you can suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself in the security office's confines.
I'll cut right to the chase on this one: I don't like Five Nights very much, and I think the amount of "buzz" surrounding this game is way out of proportion. This game's success and popularity seems to be the direct result of it being primed for social media, because it's short and has a bunch of jump scares. Jump scares always get the easiest and most animated reactions out of people, which makes for good entertainment value watching someone else get scared, and the game's eight minute survival scenario is the perfect length for getting quick satisfaction before moving on to the next video. To put it simply, the scares in Five Nights are cheap and easy, which makes for cheap and easy YouTube videos, which makes for cheap and easy exposure, which makes for cheap and easy success.
The security office, checking the light at the left door.
I don't mean to completely demerit Five Nights, though, because it is, in fact, an interesting game that does some things well. For such a simple game that consists almost entirely of still images, it creates a pretty immersive atmosphere that can really bring your imagination into the experience. With few exceptions, you never actually see the animatronic characters move, which makes them seem like lifeless, inanimate objects, and yet they quite obviously move from location to location, always when you aren't watching. You basically have to watch each one in order to keep it from moving, but you can't keep an eye on all of them at once so you always have the dread of not knowing where one or two of them are at any given moment.
The robots can do some pretty creepy, unexpected stuff as well, which helps to set up the jump scares by putting you just a little on edge. You might, for instance, be looking at the three band members on stage, look away, and check on them later to find them all staring directly at the camera. You might flip to a random hallway and see one of the robots' heads spazzing out like it's been possessed by a demon. You might notice that a poster of Freddy on the wall changed to show him ripping his head off. The robots themselves look uncanny as hell, too; some of their idle expressions are weird enough to make you feel a little uncomfortable. In fact, the whole atmosphere with the dark lighting that casts subtle, ominous silhouettes of the animatronics, combined with the static-filled camera feeds and the ambient sound effects is just a little bit creepy, too.
Then you've got the "phone guy," a security guard who worked there before you, who left daily recorded messages to guide you through the job. He serves as kind of a tutorial for how the game works while also filling in some of the game's backstory, like explaining that the animatronics used to be allowed to roam freely during the day until "the bite of '87," which apparently resulted in the victim losing his or her entire frontal lobe. His nonchalant tone of voice juxtaposes the implicit horror you're supposed to feel, adding to the game's uncanny atmosphere as you try to picture what horrible things are happening on the other end of the phone while his own situation quickly escalates from bad to worse, while he barely breaks his nonchalant, professional tone and behavior.
Foxy's peeking out of Pirate's Cove, getting ready to pounce.
Having the game set in a children's party restaurant is a pretty clever idea, since many of us have memories of visiting ShowBiz Pizza or Chuck E Cheese's as a kid. This game plays on your childhood memories by bringing out the genuine creepiness that actually existed (whether you felt it or not as a kid) and/or by twisting your recollection of fun times into something sinister and terrifying. Furthermore, these restaurants are places we all have some experience with in real life, which makes the setting feel that much more plausible. It's equally impressive how much lore there actually is in this game, too. At first glance, the game seems like a simple, straightforward facilitator of jump scares, but you can piece together an actual backstory to explain what's (possibly) going on in Freddy Fazbear's by listening to the phone guy and reading newspaper headlines that randomly appear on the walls.
The central gameplay mechanism -- managing a limited power supply -- is not something unique to Five Nights, since most horror games worth their salt implement some kind of resource management, but it does the job well enough here that I welcome and appreciate its presence. You already have the problem of not being able to keep an eye on each animatronic at all times, but the limited power supply is the type of thing that forces you to lower your guard because you just can't afford to keep your defenses up constantly. Sometimes, you just have to take risks and hope for the best, which can be some of the most tense, gripping moments of gameplay in any video game. This is a game that leaves you feeling vulnerable, as survival-horror games should, yet still leaves you with enough agency to stem the tide so that you feel like you're in control of whether you live or die.
So, there's enough reason to like Five Nights at Freddy's and I respect it for being a clever, simple game that is, surprisingly, quite effective for what it is. The biggest problem -- and this is a big one for a horror game -- is I just did not find it scary. At all. The animatronic characters aren't inherently frightening or menancing; they're just a little weird and creepy, and nothing in the game actually depicts anything greusome or violent. You could just as easily pretend that these robots are harmless pranksters attempting to give you a wedgie or even a friendly hug.
Chica hanging out in the dining area. Let's eat.
The jump scares -- the source of anything remotely scary in this game -- are as basic as you can possibly get. It's always a loud, high-pitched screeching noise accompanied by something jumping directly at the screen from out of nowhere during a moment of quiet downtime. It's a one-trick pony, one that admittedly masks itself well with some unexpected twists on its one scare tactic, but a one-trick pony nonetheless. I felt a little startled once, and then never felt like I was actually in danger of anything, because the jump scare just signifies a "game over." You only have two player-states, alive or dead, so there's really nothing the robots can do to harm you except to make you replay such a trivially short scenario over again.
Should you intend to finish the game, and not just play one or two nights and call it quits, you're going to run into two problems: the game is going to start feeling really repetitive, and the gameplay is going to become incredibly dry and mechanical. Each night involves the same gameplay and the same eight-minute scenario -- it just becomes harder each night, with power draining faster and more animatronics coming to life. By night five, there are certain things you simply have to do in order to survive, which involve following a pre-determined script because each of the four robots has its own set behavior pattern with a set counter-measure. Beating the game basically requires you to dissect it to learn how it works; once you've done that, suspension of disbelief goes out the window and all immersion is lost.
It didn't feel like there was much of an actual challenge involved in the gameplay, and the scares had no effect on me. I felt essentially no emotion whatsoever while playing this game. Not to mention, the game is short, simplistic, and repetitive. I therefore can't recommend Five Nights at Freddy's in good conscience. There are worse ways you could spend $5, but to me, this is a game that's only worth watching someone else play -- preferably someone who's a complete wuss who'll emit operatic shrieks whenever something scary happens. That's where the game's real entertainment value stems from. For that, I direct you to YouTube and its approximately 1.4 million videos, which you can watch for free. As an actual game, Five Nights is really kind of boring -- you basically just sit there watching camera feeds and waiting for jump scares. I don't see what the fuss is all about.
The Super Smash Bros series has been a longtime staple in my party gaming lineup, ever since the original was released for the Nintendo 64 back in 1999. Super Smash Bros: Melee was the one reason I absolutely had to buy a Nintendo GameCube; my friends and I enjoyed that game so much that we played it nearly every weekend over the span of three years. When Super Smash Bros: Brawl came out in 2008, I found myself underwhelmed by its slow movement and clunky physics, yet friends and I have continued to play it on occasion to this very day.
By now, my enthusiasm for new Super Smash Bros games has waned to near non-existence, since each new game has been the same as the last but with more characters, new stages, and new tacked-on game modes. After 15 years of playing essentially the same game, it feels like I've been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt, but I simply could not resist the allure of the appropriately-yet-unimaginatively-named Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3DS. After all, it's a timeless formula that I can now play when I'm away from home, on a platform I already own. What's not to enjoy about that combination of features?
I've had my copy of Smash 3DS for a couple weeks now, having unlocked all of the characters and stages and having tried each and every game mode, and I feel pretty confident in saying I like Smash 3DS a lot more than Brawl, and perhaps almost as much as Melee. It feels faster and more responsive than Brawl, and the controls feel right at home on the 3DS. The new characters are all really fun to play, and the plethora of unlockable content is enough to ensure a long lifetime of playability. And yet, after about nine hours of playtime, I've basically lost interest.
That's exactly what happened with me and Brawl -- I started playing the game and got super excited about all the new bells and whistles, feverishly racing to unlock content and to develop some semblance of mastery over my favorite characters, and then felt completely bored with it once I'd unlocked all of the important things and realized all I had left was to repeat the same instanced matches over and over again. At least Brawl had some kind of appeal in addition to the staple party-gaming multiplayer modes and mini-game challenges with its Subspace Emissary mode, a loosely story-based adventure campaign that admittedly wasn't all that good but still showed a lot of potential; Smash 3DS, by contrast, comes purely in bite-sized chunks of exclusively party-gaming scenarios.
Mario, Luigi, and Wii Fit Trainer battling on the Paper Mario stage.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you -- each game in the series has been, by definition, a party game, and the "bite-sized" gameplay format matches the sporadic nature of mobile gaming. Smash 3DS accomplishes what it set out to do and is, in fact, a pretty solid game in its own right, even compared to its (arguably) beefier predecessors, but what Smash 3DS set out to do really wasn't all that ambitious. Smash 3DS feels more like an iterative update to the Smash series than a full-fledged sequel, one that simply adds more characters and stages while refining its various mechanisms and game modes. The game's "killer feature" is simply the fact that you can play it on the go; otherwise it's basically just more of the same with a requisite new layer of polish on top.
One way that Smash 3DS differentiates itself from its predecessors is the new Smash Run game mode, put in essentially to replace the missing Subspace Emissary from Brawl. Smash Run challenges you to a five-minute race to upgrade your character's stats (such as your run speed, your defense, the strength of your special attacks, etc) by exploring a metroidvania-esque map in search of treasure chests, challenge doors, and tough boss enemies. Once the five minutes are up, your stat bonuses are applied to a final challenge against either three AI-controlled opponents or up to three of your friends in local multiplayer, with the final challenges ranging from various types of smash battles (300% smash, team smash, multi-man smash, etc) to non-combat challenges like "race to the finish" or "tower climb."
Smash Run takes the fun PVE-style gameplay of Brawl's Subspace Emissary, where you get to use the core combat mechanisms of Super Smash Bros to run around 2D levels beating up common and stronger enemies, and condenses it into an intense rush to explore and to rack up as many stat boosts as efficiently as possible. It's really engaging, because every second matters, and the randomized nature of what enemies will spawn where, where you'll find treasure, and what random events you'll encounter ensure that you'll never know exactly what to expect. It's almost like playing a roguelike, except the map itself doesn't change from game to game, and it has the same addicting feel of playing a roguelike just to see if you can do better next time with another roll of the metaphorical dice.
Bowser in Smash Run mode with his stats and power-ups.
What's even better about Smash Run is that you get to custom-tailor each and every character to your liking before every single run. Each character now has two alternate special attacks for each directional combo (ie, three types of triple jumps, three "down B" moves, etc) that you can unlock by playing the various game modes. You can also swap out stat-altering equipment like boots and gloves to focus your character more on speed, attack, or defense, and you can equip different types of special abilities and power-ups that you activate from the touch screen menu, like dropping a power bomb from Metroid, or toggling brief invincibility, or summoning blades that spin around you and damage opponents. The more you play, the more and better customization options you unlock, so you're always improving and there's always some kind of interesting reward.
Besides modifying existing characters, you can even create your own custom Mii fighters by choosing from three archetypal templates (gunner, brawler, or swordsman), picking their special attacks (three options for each directional combo), and even customizing their appearance with outfits and hats. Otherwise, they use the exact same Mii avatar you created for yourself, so it looks just like you. Most of the Mii fighters' special attacks are variations of existing moves for existing characters, which basically lets you pick your favorite moves from all your favorite characters -- you might, for instance, choose Samus's charge shot, Zelda's stealth burst, and Fox's reflector. This, to me, is Smash 3DS's best feature because it allows for such a wide range of possibilities and makes you feel a more personal attachment to your own custom character.
Unfortunately, none of these cool customizations work during online play, which limits online multiplayer to the default, "vanilla" Smash we've been playing for the last 15 years. While playing online you can either choose to play "For Fun," a casual party game mode that turns on all the items and stage hazards, or "For Glory," a more competitive game mode that turns off items and plays exclusively on "Final Destination" level variants while recording your wins, losses, and various stats. Both are timed matches, and you can't change any of the options in either game mode. It's a little disappointing, because I don't care much for the chaotic fustercluck of "For Fun" (I especially don't like playing with Smash Balls), and I don't care much for the bland "Final Destination" levels of "For Glory" either; it's just two opposite ends of a spectrum with no satisfying middle-ground.
Mario defeating enemies and earning power-ups in Smash Run.
Even if there were a more satisfactory middle-ground, I probably wouldn't play online very much because of how laggy online play tends to be. Online matches in Smash 3DS use a peer-to-peer connection, which basically means the speed and stability of your connection will only be as good as that of the person with the worst internet connection. If you're playing someone halfway around the world, or with someone whose ISP is powered by a hamster wheel, then you're likely to encounter freezes and stuttering lag that disrupt the timing of your inputs. I've played about 12-15 games online and about half of them had some kind of noticeable lag; though it's never been strong enough to make the matches unplayable, it's been enough to curb my desire to play online more often.
Smash 3DS fixes some of the more notable problems from Brawl, yet perplexingly retains some of Brawl's other notable problems. Movement is faster, attacks feel weightier, and the controls feel more precise in Smash 3DS. There are still minor limitations with the accuracy of the 3DS's circle pad as compared to a full joystick, but at least the software isn't designed to be deliberately imprecise like the infamous tripping of Brawl. So on the whole, Smash 3DS feels better than Brawl, but it still uses the same obnoxious scoring system that arbitrarily awards KOs to players after someone suffers an obvious self-destruct, just because someone happened to touch that player 30 seconds ago, and typical matches still have too many freakishly random things between pokeballs, smash balls, stage hazards, assist trophies, and so on all being active simultaneously.
After playing Sony's PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale, I've also come to realize how little I care for the Smash Bros series' damage and KO system. In SSB, the damage you deal to another player doesn't matter at all if someone else swoops in and delivers the killing blow, which makes matches more about opportunism than anything else. In PSA:BR, you have to earn each of your kills by charging your own "AP meter" to execute killing maneuvers, which requires you to be an active participant in combat -- you can't simply avoid combat and kill-steal. The system in PSA:BR promotes more offensive engagement and doesn't penalize players as harshly for minor errors and fluke accidents. Chalk this one up to personal preference if you will, but I prefer the system in PSA:BR and would have loved for Nintendo to include a similar type of game mode in Super Smash Bros, especially since any hope for an actual PlayStation All-Stars series is basically dead.
My two favorite characters: Samus and Zero Suit Samus.
Like each of the previous games, there's a lot of excitement to experience in Smash 3DS right up front, but after a few days of unlocking things, the thrill wears off and you're left with the same basic game we've been playing for the past 15 years. Customizing your characters for use in Smash Run is a fun way to pass the time if you're waiting at a bus stop or something, but I don't see there being as much lasting appeal in Smash 3DS as a true party game as compared to its console brethren, since it requires all of your friends to own a 3DS and their own copy of the game. Odds are, you're going to be playing Smash 3DS by yourself, or possibly online against laggy, random strangers, which I just don't care for much, personally.
Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3DS is a pretty solid entry in the series that does the requisite things necessary for a sequel of this nature, but doesn't do anything all that mind-blowing to make it an absolutely essential purchase. Perhaps my tastes have changed over the years, but I just don't see myself spending much more time with Smash 3DS now that I've unlocked all the important features, because it feels like I'm just repeating the same games and grinding through challenges over and over again. That said, I still got nine hours of enjoyment out of it, so if you're an avid fan of the series I'm sure you'll get your time and money's worth. If you have a Wii U, though, you might be better off just waiting for that version to come out for the convenience of easier/cheaper local multiplayer and its greater production values.
It's been over a decade since Piranha Bytes released a game worthy of praise and recognition. Gothic 3 was a bloated, broken mess that required extensive community patching to make it remotely tolerable; Risen showed some promise but was essentially only half of a game; and Risen 2 was so thoroughly mediocre that I couldn't even write a proper review of it. Gothic and Gothic 2, on the other hand, were such phenomenally outstanding, perception-altering experiences that I'll continue to play every Piranha Bytes game until the day I die, just on the chance that they'll make another masterpiece as good as the original Gothic games.
I'm pleased to say that Risen 3: Titan Lords is the most fun I've had playing a Piranha Bytes game since Gothic 2. That's not to say Risen 3 is as good as Gothic 2, but it comes close. Indeed, there are times when Risen 3 feels a lot like Gothic 2, and it captures the spirit of the original Gothic games better than any other game since. Risen 3 even goes so far as to (finally) fix nearly all of the major issues that afflicted both Risen and Risen 2, making it the most polished and thought-out PB game of the "modern era." At no point did I ever encounter any glaring oversights or questionable design decisions like the things that pissed me off in the other games.
Unfortunately, Risen 3 is not without its problems. The combat is too easy, the progression lacks focus, and the story never really gets going, but compared to previous PB efforts, these problems are minimal and don't actively take away from the game's enjoyment. Rather, it feels as though Risen 3 simply missed some of its potential. It's disappointing to realize how much better the game could have been with some simple tweaks and a little more time in development, but the game itself, as it exists now, is a respectable effort by the small German team that deserves some success. If you like action-adventure-RPGs with immersive worlds that are genuinely fun to explore, then Risen 3 is definitely worth your consideration.
After Risen 2 veered off into some rather murky waters with its heavy (and yet not fully realized) pirate theme, Piranha Bytes wisely chose to distance itself from Risen 2 with Risen 3, proclaiming in a lengthy trailer that they were going "back to their roots." Though technically a direct sequel that shares the same general setting and characters of Risen 2, Risen 3 is basically a fresh start for the series with a new protagonist and a new story that forgets about the threat of the titular Titan Lords almost entirely. It's odd that they would choose to abandon everything they'd been building towards in the previous two games, but the story has always played second fiddle to the gameplay in these games, so it didn't really bother me.
The story this time centers around a new Nameless Hero trying to reclaim his humanity after his soul is taken from him by a lord of the underworld. That's the entire extent of the story -- you join a faction, prepare a ritual spell, gather three powerful mages, reclaim your soul, and fight the bad guy. It's a bit anticlimactic, really, because the "reclaim your soul" objective always feels like a preliminary objective to some greater goal, but the game just kind of ends without much buildup or resolution. The fact that Nekroloth, the undead sorcerer, happens to be a titan lord is nothing more than a convenient plot contrivance to tie Risen 3 in with the established premise of Risen 1 & 2; he doesn't feel like a titan lord, and the threat of the undead armies being unleashed on the world never escalates.
In the beginning you're warned of a fleet of ghost ships prowling the seas, which triggers a main quest (which spans most of the game) to gather enough allied ships to face the ghost fleet. Once you've finally done this, the fight just kind of happens, it plays identically to the dream sequence you already played in the opening tutorial, and you don't even use the other ships you spent all that time recruiting. Meanwhile, you're supposed to close a bunch of portals to prevent the undead armies from overrunning the land -- the supposed main threat of the game -- but nothing really comes of this, either. Rather than building towards the climax, the tension in Risen 3 starts at its highest and progressively dwindles down to nothing by the end of the game as you knock off shadow lords for no practical effect.
The second half of Risen 1 may have been disappointing with its endlessly copy-pasted lizardmen, but at least there was something happening to show that the stakes were actually rising towards the end. Gothic 2 did this same thing even better by introducing a new threat after accomplishing your main goal of defeating the dragons; the lizardmen invade the main areas of Khorinis (which were previously safe), thus creating a brand new dynamic for familiar locations with opportunities for new quests, before sending you off to a brand new location for the final stretch. Risen 3, in contrast, gives you a lot of content upfront but doesn't replace completed content with new content, which left me with a somewhat unsatisfying "that's it?" kind of feeling as I worked my way through the game.
That's not to say Risen 3 doesn't have some pleasant surprises in store; there just aren't enough of them. I got really excited when I was working my way through what I thought was an ordinary temple, fell into a giant underground spider nest, and had to explore its labyrinthine tunnels and defeat a pretty nifty boss to escape. It's really cool that you now get to engage in sea battles when traveling between islands, steering your ship to shoot serpentine monsters with broadside cannons or boarding an enemy vessel to defeat its captain -- the kind of stuff that was sorely missing from Risen 2. On one of the islands you encounter a fortress with rotating platforms that you have to arrange a certain way to progress, which is kind of a neat little puzzle that I haven't seen in a PB game before.
Exploration -- one of the most important and most satisfying elements of PB games -- is at the top of its game in Risen 3. The first Risen was pretty good in this department but suffered from taking place entirely on one relatively small island; Risen 2 increased the explorable landmass dramatically, yet felt incredibly simplistic and straightforward. Risen 3 features a comparable landmass to Risen 2 (supposedly slightly larger), yet it feels almost twice as deep thanks to the removal of those damnable invisible walls and the reinstated swimming and climbing. That adds tremendous freedom for you to explore every nook and cranny of the finely detailed maps, and even to explore off the confines of the map. True to the precedent set by Gothic 2, you're free to figure out for yourself whether you're venturing out of the intended playing space or not, and you'll find yourself surprised more often than not by the places that you'll find cool loot and hidden rewards.
Even with all that praise, however, the exploration still isn't as good as in Gothic 2. I miss the old days when the maps were hand-drawn approximations of the terrain, as if it was something drawn by a cartographer walking around and observing the landscape. The maps in the new games are so detailed that they show every little thing before you even have a chance to discover it for yourself with your own eyes, which makes exploration more like going down a checklist. I also miss having to find a merchant to buy the maps before you could even consult them; here, you automatically have maps for every single island before you've even visited them, and you even get a constantly active mini-map by which to guide. I tried turning the mini-map off and was kind of annoyed when it was replaced with a useless over-sized compass that still occupied the same amount of screen space.
It could be said that Risen 3 offers the largest world to explore of all three Risen games, but that would be a bit misleading because a certain percentage of its landmass is reused from Risen 2. The reused landmass is not a carbon copy, however; everything that returns from Risen 2 has been given a total facelift, which inspires nostalgic memories of time spent exploring those locales in Risen 2 while also allowing you to enjoy a fresh twist on a familiar location. A greater portion of landmass is entirely new, and the areas that are new to Risen 3 are more complex than the old stuff from Risen 2, so it's an all-around win-win situation. The size of the world isn't large enough to compete with likes of The Elder Scrolls or Gothic 3, but that's actually a blessing because the world in Risen 3 is a more manageable size that's actually worth exploring in fine detail.
The world suffers from being a bit too large and open at the very beginning, however, which is compounded the overly vague, directionless main quest line. While it's great to have the freedom to go wherever you want, it really hurts the pacing of the game to essentially meander across five or six islands with no clue what you're actually striving to accomplish or how things on each island are supposed to relate to the main quest. Plus, if you're like me and always do everything possible before advancing the main quest line, then you'll find that you've basically completed the game before you even start the main quest. It would have helped, I feel, to have restricted the beginning areas a little more to give the story more momentum up front and to allow the world to expand as you play.
Gothic 2 gave you a pretty large open world to explore from the very beginning, but you had to be careful where you went because you were likely to be killed by any number of extremely tough, high-level enemies. This technique effectively blocked off certain areas of the map, thus making the world seem smaller and more manageable while also making the world feel genuinely dangerous. A lot of the fun in Gothic 2 stemmed from leveling up and watching the world seemingly expand as your options grew, while also being able to challenge yourself to tackle stronger enemies for greater rewards. Risen 3 features none of these good qualities because its combat is so easy that you can go anywhere at any time and defeat any enemy without fear or even that much difficulty.
Risen 3 uses the same combat system from Risen 2 but with a few key improvements: you can now block and riposte monster attacks, and you can roll-dodge to avoid damage (this was later patched into Risen 2). Melee combat isn't very deep or complicated, with you having the same three-hit combo (plus a charged power attack) for most of the game, but it employs a satisfying timing element for every single action. You have to click at the right time in the sequence while attacking in order to chain attacks together more quickly, and you have to watch enemies for subtle cues to know when they're about to attack so you can dodge or block in time, which is satisfying and engaging in and of itself.
Combat is much more fluid and functional now than it was in Risen 2, but the physics behind it don't feel quite as elegant or punchy as I would like. The game uses a lock-on system that has you focus your attacks on one enemy at a time, and it feels as if you're always attached to your target via a rubber band that automatically pulls you in to your target and vice versa. Directional blocking is practically non-existent because both you and your enemies will automatically turn to block all attacks from whatever enemy you or they are targeting. It makes positioning feel kind of pointless, because all you really have to do is left-click and right-click at the right times as if you're reacting to a series of QTE prompts.
The roll dodge, meanwhile, is so overpowered that it practically breaks the game. You are totally invincible while roll dodging and you can spam the dodge continuously, so you're practically never in danger of dying. Even if a strong enemy backs you into a corner where you're completely unable to move, you can just roll in place and avoid all the damage until they back off or until your companion gets their attention. Likewise, you'll miss attacks against enemies that dodge directly into the path of your sword, completely defying the laws of physics and making the combat feel extremely one-dimensional. Ideally, there would be no "rubber banding" in the targeting system and the roll dodge would be useful only to move yourself out of range of an attack with a brief moment of exposed vulnerability. This, I feel, would make the combat more challenging and more organic.
I set the combat difficulty to "hard" before I even knew what the combat was like and never felt challenged; I was able to kill nearly any enemy I faced at level one, and was tackling obvious end-game objectives in the very first chapter. Leveling up therefore felt somewhat trivial to me, because you don't actually need to level up to face stronger threats or to gain access to new content -- leveling up just makes the things you're already doing faster and easier. Melee combat doesn't change all that much as you level up, save for adding an extra hit to the basic three-hit combo, attacking faster, and adding the riposte ability; most of what you're paying for is to increase your damage by small increments. Consequently, it takes a while before it feels like you've actually improved by any significant amount, because less total progress is spread out over a long(er) game.
Like any real RPG, better stats are rewarded in combat, but Risen 3 also values player skill, since well-timed attacks, blocks, and dodges, spatial awareness of the battlefield, and knowledge of your opponents' attack patterns give you a tremendous advantage. As fun as it was to be rewarded for my own skill, the satisfaction petered out because there wasn't enough statistical challenge. In addition, it was way too easy for me to accumulate wealth, experience, and resources. In Risen 2, these were all in short supply, so it felt like you never had enough of what you needed and you therefore had to spend your resources wisely; in Risen 3, I was rolling in money, experience, and crafting materials without feeling like I'd even lifted a finger, and was able to max out virtually all of my stats and skills by the end of the game, which really should not be happening in an RPG.
The combat system opens up tremendously once you join a faction, however. As with the original Gothic games, you must choose to join one of three factions -- the Guardians, the Demon Hunters, or the Voodoo Pirates, all of which come with their own unique form of magic and special abilities. The guardians of the exiled mages cast traditional fireballs and ice bolts, the demon hunters summon allies and buff their physical skills, and the voodoo pirates cast necromancy and mind control spells. New features like melee magic and free-aiming over-the-shoulder ranged magic attacks are a lot of fun, and with the magic system now running off a cooldown system, instead of mana, you don't have to deal with chugging potions after every fight or constantly running back and forth to the nearest bed.
Whichever faction you choose will permanently alter your character's appearance while determining your armor, weapons, and general playstyle. Each faction has its own quests that you must complete in order to become a member, which helps familiarize yourself with their roles and backstory, and each faction has a couple of exclusive quests once you've joined. This allows for some decent replay value, since you can play the game three times with each faction having its own unique gameplay "flavor" and quests.
Risen 3's quests aren't terribly sophisticated, but they give you enough narrative reasons to care about what you're doing. Even when you don't care about the specific objective, the quests are integrated with the world and its characters to such a degree that you often solve quests just as a result of exploring the world, so it never feels like you're doing errand-boy busy work. Many of the quests allow for alternate paths to the solution (if you find a shortcut, if you have a certain skill, or if you've already done some favor for person B) while also allowing you to decide the outcome (do you give the item to person A or to person B, do you turn the wanted man into the authorities or do you release him for a different reward). Though the game is spread out across multiple islands, quests frequently overlap between islands, which makes the world feel much more alive and complex, especially since new quests spawn in familiar areas after completing certain chains.
"They aren't ducks. They are servants of death, my friend."
The content of these quests is usually pretty interesting, too. In one quest, you meet two hunters who're paranoid that a group of ducks is going to murder them in their sleep, so you agree to help put their minds at ease; while investigating the ducks, you find one that looks a little bit like a turkey, which then turns into a demonic soul eater. In another quest, you discover that one of the demon hunters accidentally turned himself into a soulless minion, and so you have to help reunite his soul with his body by completing an alchemical recipe. In another quest, you help a lonesome pirate search for his buried treasure before being confronted by a ghost with a series of riddles. In another quest, you get to use voodoo magic to posses a native tribesman in order to convince the tribe's leader not to go to war.
Like Risen 2, you can also enlist the services of several crewmen who will help out on your ship and follow you as you adventure across each island. These companions come with their own quests that unfold over time, and they each have something important to say about the places you visit and at various times in the main story, so they feel like genuine characters that each add some unique flavor to your adventures, instead of tacked-on features like they were in Risen 2. Unfortunately, this is another gameplay element that feels at odds with the core design, since a companion makes combat laughably easy and kills any feeling of vulnerable tension you might have of being by yourself in a dangerous area, like how you felt all the time in Gothic 1 & 2.
It might be obvious to you by now, my dear reader, that I have mixed opinions on Risen 3. It's a good game, certainly, but it doesn't aspire to be anything more than serviceable. Still, "good" and "serviceable" are much better than the adjectives I would use to describe Gothic 3, Risen, and Risen 2, and I genuinely enjoyed my time with Risen 3. It's easily the best Piranha Bytes game of the past decade, though it pains me that PB are finally taking steps in the right direction and yet remain still so far away from their potential. The combat is merely "ok," but it's just one or two small tweaks away from being solid; the story has some intriguing elements but doesn't comes together until the very end, and by that point it feels rushed; and the game is just way too easy, even in hard mode.
Risen 3 fixes all of the major problems of the last few games but does very little to expand and improve upon them. Fixing problems is absolutely necessary, but it feels as if PB set a very low bar for themselves and ran out of time to do something more interesting and substantial with their materials. Risen 3 feels more like what Risen 2should have been, rather than what Risen 3could have been, and that's what's most disappointing of all. I should mention as a bit of a disclaimer that most of the criticisms I mention here did not impact my enjoyment of the game while I was actually playing it; the world, atmosphere, exploration, and quests were so fun and captivating that I didn't notice or care about many of the game's shortcomings until I sat down to review it in retrospect.
As a bottom line, is Risen 3 worth your time and money? For fans of the original Gothic games, the answer is a resounding yes -- this is the closest Piranha Bytes have ever come to replicating the success of Gothic 2, and you will not regret it. If you didn't like Risen 2 (you're not alone), then you should know that Risen 3 is basically more of the same but in a definitively better package. For everyone else, the answer is a more tentative "maybe" -- I think Risen 3 is worth your time, but maybe not at full price. Keep it on your radar and give it some consideration once it's had a few price drops; hopefully by then there will be a patch to at least balance the combat a little like they did post-release with Risen 2.
Given my history with theUnchartedseries, I wasn't expecting great things from Bend Studios' Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the PlayStation Vita. I'd grown weary of the series after playing all three of the main installments back-to-back-to-back, but thought Golden RainbowGolden Abyss might be a decent game to play on a mobile platform where my expectations might be a little more restrained, especially since it didn't cost me anything as a PlayStation Plus subscriber. It turns out even my modest "I'll enjoy it for what it is" attitude wasn't enough to prepare me for how utterly boring and disappointing Golden Abyss would turn out to be.
Thanks to the powerful graphical processing of the PlayStation Vita and its dual control sticks, Golden Abyss looks and feels very close to what you'd expect from the console games, but once you actually start playing it you begin to realize how streamlined and simplified the gameplay actually is. Like its elder brethren, gameplay in UC:GA basically consists of walking forward through linear paths, climbing and jumping across platforms, fighting tons of dudes, and watching cutscenes, but the gameplay is so pointless and unengaging that the only time it ever feels like you have any real control over the game is during combat.
Platforming, for instance, is totally without consequence -- there's virtually zero possibility of failure and Drake does virtually everything automatically. Often times you don't even need any sort of directional input to make a successful jump -- you simply press X and Drake jumps to the next platform automatically. Climbable ledges were always pretty obvious in the other games, but now they're made doubly obvious by the fact that they shimmer, an indication that you can use touch screen controls to make Drake climb an entire series of ledges by tracing the path of the ledges with your finger, in case you're too lazy to move the control stick and occasionally press the X button.
Drake commenting on how lame the platforming is in this game.
Much of the gameplay seems developed around the Vita's unique hardware and control mechanisms, as if Sony wanted to use their flagship series to showcase all of the Vita's capabilities as a marketing tool, without ever considering if those controls or gameplay elements added anything worthwhile or wholesome to the experience. In each case, the Vita controls feel horrendously tacked-on and serve little to no purpose besides calling attention to the device you're playing the game on, which only serves to distract you from the game you're actually playing.
Fortunately, most of the game can be played with the traditional control stick and button scheme, but you're often forced to take your hands off the controls and play a dumb finger-swiping mini-game to perform some trivial action like boosting your partner up onto a ledge or chopping down bamboo. The latter is particularly absurd when you consider that Drake has to stand there for several seconds methodically studying how he's going to cut the bamboo, rather than just doing it when you press the button. What's even more absurd is how much time you spend rubbing your finger all over the screen taking charcoal rubbings or wiping dirt off of tools and relics -- some of the most boring "gameplay" I've ever experienced in a video game.
At one point you even have to use the rear camera, holding the Vita up to a light to make hidden text appear on a piece of parchment; that's a novel idea, but it completely disrupted my immersion by redirecting my attention from the game to my environment, and became especially problematic when none of the soft florescent lights at the airport were bright enough to pass the event. Whenever you cross a narrow beam Drake inevitably loses his balance so that you can play a Vita-tilting mini-game to regain his balance, which would be fine if not for the animation before the mini-game showing him catching his balance and standing perfectly still for a few seconds, just so that he can deliberately lose his balance in the mini-game.
Drake's keen perception suggests a "Z" pattern is best for cutting down this particular bunch of bamboo.
The platforming sequences, in general, tend to feel gimmicky and unnecessary. On more than one occasion you're faced with a guy manning a 50 caliber machine gun and have to "find another way around" by climbing and shimmying along columns avoiding bullets, just so that you can flank the gunner and shoot him, when in reality it would be far simpler and easier to just run from cover to cover on the ground and chuck a grenade over the barricade. Making matters even worse is the fact that each action scene has some kind of idiosyncratic script you're supposed to follow, which completely kills the momentum when you try to perform a seemingly logical action and hit a metaphorical brick wall.
Everything is so tightly controlled and the game holds your hand so much that you rarely feel like you're actually in control. Combat is the only exception, since it's the one time in the game where you're free to choose where to go in each "arena," who to shoot, what weapons to use, and you're even free to get yourself killed if you're not good enough. Unfortunately, combat in itself isn't very satisfying because it often feels like a shooting gallery whop-a-mole -- ie, a simplistic, straightforward third-person cover shooter where you camp behind a chest-high wall and pop out periodically to shoot enemies as they stick their heads out from behind cover. Even then, many of the fights are ruined by the idiosyncratic script, which rigidly forces you to do certain sequences a certain way in order to progress.
Level design is totally linear, which is no surprise given the series' track record, but the environments in UC:GA feel particularly cramped because of the relative limitations of the Vita hardware. In order to make the graphics look as good as they do, they had to cut back on the amount of stuff being processed, and thus we don't get any of the big environments or exciting setpieces the main series is known for. Exploration is virtually non-existent because of the tight, linear corridors, and the optional collectibles lie directly along the main path. The puzzles, what few exist in this game, aren't even that satisfying because they practically solve themselves.
At least the combat isn't total garbage like the rest of the gameplay.
As the fourth game in the series, Golden Abyss feels totally predictable because it does absolutely nothing to deviate from the already-wearisome formula repeated almost verbatim in all three of the previous games. Drake goes on a routine, harmless archaeological dig, meets a woman, gets double-crossed by his partner, realizes he's stumbled into something big, has the villain show up to steal the relic just as he finds it, and then has to race to stop the villain from succeeding in his nefarious plans. This formulaic plot progression, along with the shallow gameplay, made me bored out of my skull and anxious for it to be over.
Golden Abyss looks and feels a lot like its predecessors, which means it suffers from the exact same problems that bothered me about UC1-3, except it's even worse than that, since virtually all of the fun elements have been stripped out in favor of streamlining the gameplay into something more befitting of a tablet or cellphone than a dedicated gaming device. Compared to its predecessors, UC:GA is a restrained, pedestrian experience that fails to excite or engage in any kind of meaningful way. If you enjoyed the PS3 games, it's a guarantee you won't enjoy UC:GA as much, but it makes for a decent handheld game simply because there aren't a whole lot of quality games on the Vita. If you're like me, however, and didn't care for the PS3 games, then be advised that UC:GA is a complete waste of time and money.
Survival-horror is one of my favorite genres, and yet I don't like most of the survival-horror games that I play. It's a difficult genre to pull off, considering the entire point is to instill feelings of dread and horror in the player -- if a survival-horror game doesn't do that one, specific thing, then it's failed at its job. I've played enough of these games that basically nothing scares me anymore, and I'm good enough at these types of games that the mechanics don't do much to inspire tension within me, either, so it takes a rare, special type of survival-horror game to satisfy me.
Silent Hill 2 was one such game. I didn't think very highly of it at first, but it grew on me as I played, and even stayed with me long after I'd finished. Looking back, I realized how much of an impact its story had in elevating a borderline decent-good gameplay experience to something truly excellent. Silent Hill 3 had the unfortunate luck of following what has been commonly regarded as a monumental survival-horror game; it's difficult to top a masterpiece, and SH3 therefore never achieved the same level of acclaim as SH2. In some ways, SH3 is actually a better game than SH2, but I wasn't all that impressed with it.
As one of the last mainstream survival-horror games to be released before Resident Evil 4 changed everything, SH3 has that classic feel that I appreciate without feeling like one of those old games that hasn't aged well. The game certainly didn't feel 11 years old when I was playing it; the controls work fine, and the graphics look great. Silent Hill 3 plays identically to Silent Hill 2 and similar "old school" survival-horror games that existed before the genre became more about action than survival. Movement is slow, combat is awkward and imprecise, and the goal of the game is to explore and solve puzzles, rather than to kill everything in sight.
Silent Hill 3 employs the good type of survival-horror where ammo and healing items are scarce, which makes every enemy encounter an important debate of "can I afford to kill this thing," or "can I afford not to kill this thing." You constantly have to think about what's best for your situation; sometimes it's best to preserve ammo, other times it's best to avoid taking damage altogether. It's generally best to avoid enemies whenever possible, but unlike a lot of modern games, there's no gimmicky run-and-hide mechanism that has you seeking scripted safe zones so you can take your hands off the controls while waiting for the enemy to wander off. There's no time to rest when avoiding enemies in SH3 because you're constantly in danger. Even when returning to rooms you'd previously cleared, you often find all-new enemies, meaning you never know when you're truly safe.
I've become somewhat desensitized to horror games so not very much in this game actually scared me, but it has a pretty solid, unsettling atmosphere. The droning ambient sound effects, the distorted visuals of the alternate world, and the camera angles evoke an awful lot of tension. Ominous foreshadowing adds to the tension, like when a seemingly dead monster conspicuously disappears when returning to a familiar location, or when you hear loud pounding noises coming from some area up ahead. Certain types of enemies are genuinely creepy (like the spiky, spinning blade dudes that hang from the ceiling) and are so difficult to kill without taking damage that I nervously panicked whenever they showed up.
Some of the scripted scares missed more than they hit with me. The haunted house at the theme park seemed like it had potential, with me wondering whether it would be a harmless scare ride or a sinister murder vessel, but I was able to brazenly waltz through the whole thing only once feeling concerned about what might happen. The mirror room, though -- dear God -- was one of the most frightening things I've ever encountered in a horror game. That one moment was so good that it completely made up for any other shortcomings on the horror side of things.
The story, on the other hand, leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Silent Hill 2 featured a slow and steady buildup as James Sunderland arrived on the outskirts of Silent Hill, having received a letter from his dead wife urging him to meet her at their "special place" in Silent Hill. Its introduction allowed the player to make a strong connection with James as a relative outsider to Silent Hill, while offering an intriguing mystery as well as giving both the player and the character a worthwhile motivation to press on. In SH3, the player is dropped straight into a "nightmare sequence" to pointlessly fight monsters and die. Heather wakes up from her nightmare, having fallen asleep in the shopping mall, and decides to go home, only to find that the mall has turned into monster-infested hellhole like that from her nightmare.
It takes 3-4 hours (roughly half the game) before Heather gets any kind of unique motivation, and before she even arrives at Silent Hill. For those first few hours, the entire game revolves around Heather trying to get home when her world is suddenly turned upside down for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Getting home and not dying in the process feels like a totally compulsory video game task made even more dreary and uninteresting by the fact that Heather makes little reaction to what's going on. At one point she gets on a subway car intending to go home, and then for some inexplicable reason the game sends you to an industrial maintenance area, then into some sewers, and then a construction site, and Heather makes no comment whatsoever about this strange detour. There's no narrative reason to be in these areas at all; they're basically just gameplay filler.
Throughout the game you can press the action button to examine things in the environment, which brings up a text description of Heather's inner monologue as she observes the item. I like games that include these kinds of text-descriptions of things because it helps connect you with the character, in terms of what they're seeing and thinking, but examining things in SH3 rarely offers any kind of insight to Heather's psyche. Most of the time, she just states the obvious ("There are books lining the shelf,") and then dismisses it as totally irrelevant ("but I don't really need any of them right now"). Why bother programming those hotspots and writing descriptive text for them if they're not going to serve any kind of worthwhile purpose?
Puzzles feel relatively scarce in this game; I can only recall a half-dozen logic puzzles in the entire game, and two or three of them were pretty straightforward. Otherwise, the game falls victim to typical adventure game logic that has you picking up random items at random times because they'll be necessary for some puzzle up ahead. Once I picked up an empty wine bottle wondering what possible use I could have for such an item; a few minutes later I needed to move gasoline from one location to another, and it was painfully obvious that I should use the one and only item I found in the area. In another scenario I discovered a trash dump, and of all the possibly useful items, the only one I could take was an electric hairdryer, because Heather psychically knew she'd need it to defeat a water monster up ahead.
It's also a shame that so much of the game takes place in claustrophobic buildings, many of which feature a fairly linear progression through their various rooms and corridors. Tight spaces are sometimes important for making the player feel trapped with nowhere to run, but it would be nice to have more of a balance between building interiors and spacious exteriors. After all, the most common thing people associate with Silent Hill is running around the town unable to see through the thick fog; there's only one such section in SH3 (when you have to travel from the hotel to the hospital and back), and even that section is awfully limiting on where you can go.
The game's mystery centers around a woman named Claudia, who at first seems to be the cause of the monsters trying to kill Heather, and who later kills Heather's father to get Heather to follow her to Silent Hill. Heather sets out for revenge and soon discovers that she's being used by Claudia to give birth to a cult's deity. I can't elaborate any more than that because I just did not care about this game's story -- it did not engross me in the slightest, and I never felt compelled to explore the mystery. It never felt like anything was at stake and I never understood why Heather should care about anything that's happening, let alone why I should care.
If you like survival-horror games, Silent Hill 3 is definitely worth playing because it gets the basic mechanics right and its atmosphere feels sufficiently dark and tense. It's not a particularly difficult game, but it was so draining and stressful that I could only play for an hour at a time before needing to take a break. I couldn't appreciate SH3 as much as SH2, however, because the story did absolutely nothing for me and other parts of the game felt rather nonsensical. It's a good game, but it lacks the thematic cohesion of SH2 and doesn't have as many distinct, memorable moments.
Once the reigning king and quintessential embodiment of the survival-horror genre, the Resident Evil series has spent the better half of the past decade trying to recapture its former brilliance. Unsuccessfully, it would seem. I used to consider myself a fan of the series, from the slow-paced adventure-style gameplay of the originals to the stronger action focus of the fourth main installment. But ever since Resident Evil 5, which was itself an underwhelming letdown, I've found myself cynically jaded by the barrage of spin-offs to have been churned out by the grand corporate machine.
Resident Evil: Revelations was said to be a return to form for the series, offering a gameplay and atmosphere style that more closely resembled the originals while still retaining the over-the-shoulder third-person-shooting mechanics and control scheme that made Resident Evil 4 so successful. Revelations blends those two game styles (survival-horror adventure and action-shooter) relatively well, but it rarely reaches the full potential that either of those two styles are capable of delivering. The gameplay works surprisingly well on the 3DS, however, which makes Revelations a pretty good game when you can't take your PC or consoles with you.
As a survival-horror game, Revelations certainly values the moody downtime between monster encounters more than, say, Resident Evil 5, but it still feels to me like more of an action game than actual survival-horror. Enemies simply take too many bullets to kill, and you therefore collect too many bullets -- whatever happened to the good old days of having only two bullets to use on three (or more) enemies? It used to be that every enemy encounter was tense because you had to risk running out of ammo if you tried to kill it, or risk taking damage if you tried to conserve ammo; in Revelations, every enemy is designed specifically to be killed, and you're given more than enough ammo and healing items to get the job done.
Using the Genesis tool (a type of scanner that lets you search the environment for hidden items), you find tons and tons of bullets that you simply can't carry, all because of arbitrary inventory restrictions. There's no inventory management or customization to speak of; you just pick things up until you reach the limit. You're basically never at risk of running out of ammunition because it's basically everywhere, and because of the arbitrary restrictions on how much you can carry, you're constantly backtracking to restock or finding abundantly more than you need up ahead, anyway. Like regenerating health, it only allows for minor, short-term tension -- the risk of running out of ammo in a prolonged fight and having to scrounge for more -- but offers no long-term tension because you'll be back at max in no time.
The Genesis scanner introduces an interesting twist on survival-horror's typical "risk vs reward" mechanism, however; besides just scanning the environment for items, you can also scan enemies to build up a meter towards manufacturing a healing item. The closer you are to an enemy, the more progress you'll make on the meter, so do you scan from a safe distance for less reward, or risk getting closer for greater reward? If you're low on health and out of healing items, scanning enemies might seem like your best bet for survival, but that also puts you at risk of getting killed since your defenses will be lowered, which makes the tension doubly thick. This doesn't come into play very often, however, since you'll be sitting on a max supply of green herbs for the majority of the game, but it's an interesting idea that I wouldn't mind seeing more of in followup releases.
The whole game was unfortunately too easy for me to feel much actual tension, thus missing the point of survival-horror entirely. I was a bit concerned when I clicked "new game" and saw that "normal" was the hardest difficulty I could select, since "normal" is basically synonymous with "easy" these days. Harder modes are apparently restricted until you've beaten the game once, but I have no desire to replay the game, even in a higher difficulty. I really wish I could have played a harder difficulty from the start, since I only ever experienced two moments in the normal difficulty where I ever felt at risk of actually dying -- once when I was trapped in a room with no weapon, and once when I had to fight a bunch of underwater enemies.
Besides the old-fashioned "tank controls" and the presence of gory monsters, there's not a whole lot about this game that harkens back to the glory days of the original Resident Evil games. It's nice that Revelations is (generally) set in one, central location (a cruise ship), since it allows you to backtrack for items you might otherwise miss by constantly pressing onward towards the objective, and since it allows you to become more familiar with the setting, but repeating certain areas gets to feel stale, especially when you play random scenarios in other locations as other characters where the maps get blatantly recycled for no apparent reason. It doesn't help much, either, that the game starts with the two most boring, straightforward areas in the entire game.
The game begins with Jill Valentine and some guy (Parker Surname) searching a derelict cruise ship for her former partner, Chris Redfield. This sequence is meant to begin the game with some action and intrigue before flashing back to the proper exposition of the story, but it doesn't fulfill its intended purpose very well. There's not enough mystery or drama on the opening cruise ship sequence to care about, since you have absolutely no context for what's going on or what's at stake, and the flashback sequence lasts all of five minutes before you're right back on the ship. It feels like a pointless concession to shallow, impatient gamers, that the game has to start with action because people would be too bored to play a game for five whole minutes without shooting something.
The game shifts rather frequently between different characters in different locations at different chronological times. You play as a combination of Jill and Parker, Chris and his partner Jessica, and two other guys named Keith and Quint, and everyone except for Jill feels like extraneous filler content. Jill is the only one who has a persistent progression through the game; she's the only one who unlocks upgrades and retains her exact status as you switch from episode to episode. Everyone else just gets dropped into random self-contained scenarios (with no persistent progress between them), which often feel like artificially forced action scenes and which rarely offer anything of substance to the story. If anything, they just interrupt the pacing and make me lose interest in whatever was happening before the change in characters.
The cruise ship that Jill explores is seemingly meant to resemble the mansion from the first Resident Evil, both aesthetically (at times) and thematically, but it lacks the gameplay functionality of the mansion's puzzles. The original game featured a lot of logic puzzles that also required specific inventory items to manipulate -- besides just pressing forward and shooting (or avoiding) anything that moves, you also had to think to make any sort of progress. Solving puzzles helped connect you to the environment more, and offered a couple of branching paths based on what puzzles you were able to solve. Revelations has literally one type of puzzle, which occurs four or five times. That is a woeful deficiency of puzzles, since all you do otherwise is follow the GPS markers and collect keys to open locked doors.
Combat feels a little clunky and unsatisfying, which really shouldn't be the case for a game that seems to lean closer to the action shooter genre than the survival-horror genre. Weapon sound effects and recoil animations aren't always that enjoyable, and enemies don't react much to being hit. In the case of the basic enemies, you have to shoot them three or four times (over the course of roughly three seconds) before they recoil, which makes it feel kind of like you're shooting a bag of potatoes most of the time. Then, when they die, they stand around awkwardly for a moment before slumping to the floor -- coupled with their lack of reaction to bullets, it makes it really difficult to tell when an enemy has died, and there's no real satisfaction from getting a definitive "killshot," such as a decapitation.
In typical video game fashion, the final boss fight features a ginormous, fearsome-looking monster that's ultimately kind of simple to kill, and which emphasizes cinematic aesthetics more than compelling gameplay. I was really disappointed when I realized how easy it was, especially once it shifted into a dumb, scripted rail shooting sequence, but was grateful afterward when the game continued with an extra chapter's worth of calm resolution, flashing back to events long before the chronological start of the game, and finally ending with an actually challenging (and interesting) final boss fight. As much as I criticized the back-and-forth character switching and non-chronological storytelling a few paragraphs ago, I really liked the ending sequences, which probably wouldn't have worked if the game hadn't been switching around all along.
The controls feel natural and responsive on the 3DS, although I'm still not fond of the 3DS's inherently thin, blocky feeling in my hands, even with the XL model. Aiming with the thumb pad slider is easy, and I'm a big fan of handheld games now letting you adjust your aim by tilting the device, which feels like a much quicker, easier way to make small adjustments. Unfortunately, the tilt-aiming doesn't work well with the 3D visuals of the device, since tilting it distorts the image and causes you to lose the 3D. It's pretty cool that the game has an option to strengthen the 3D effect further, but a lot of graphics and HUD elements (like pick-up icons, crosshairs, open door icons, subtitles, etc) are displayed via 2D overlays in the foreground of your vision, which appear as double images unless you shift your focus towards the foreground (which then makes everything else appear in double images).
You can kind of tell that Capcom had to cut a few corners to fit a "console-quality" Resident Evil game onto the 3DS (hence why several areas are recycled, I believe), but it never feels like a dumb, simplified handheld game. The episodic chapters and "previous on" cutscenes enable Revelations to be played in shorter stints, while still feeling like a full game experience. It's a shame, therefore, that Revelations never fully captures the tension the series is known for, particularly in its earlier installments. The survival-horror elements are underwhelming and sometimes feel almost non-existent, and the action lacks a certain amount of punch and ferocity to be truly satisfying, so the gameplay feels a little pedestrian.
I'm not sure I'd recommend Revelations on the PC or consoles, but since there are few similar games of this quality on handhelds, it's worth checking out on the 3DS if you like to play your games on the go.
