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03/01 - The Last Campfire
05/01 - Splatoon 3
17/01 - Wolfenstein (2009)
22/01 - Fragments of Euclid
02/02 - Postmouse
08/02 - Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (Kung Lao)
26/02 - F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch
06/03 - Omensight: The Definitive Edition
09/03 -
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
As I’ve had my eye out for lesser known action games lately, this one popped up on my radar again. It’s also another one of these movie licensed games that are supposed to be much better than they have any right to be. Turns out that it is indeed pretty enjoyable, but it’s dumb as rocks. There’s also some eyebrow-raising elements that probably wouldn’t fly if this game was made today.
The core combat is quite fun and decently polished, but it doesn’t exactly have a whole lot of depth. It feels good on a base level, with tight controls and well-animated, expressive moves that have a nice impact to them. There are also some special moves on a cooldown that are especially satisfying to pull off, and also a basic parry system. It effectively delivers on the visceral experience of tearing through enemies with sheer chaotic violence. But it doesn’t really have anything beyond that. You can’t do much to apply any higher level technique to be more effective or creative. What it looks like is basically all it is. And that’s still fun, and it’s a pretty well made version of that. But it’s not really hiding anything more interesting like Ghost Rider was, despite having a higher level of spectacle and seemingly a higher budget. And even though most of the controls feel good and responsive, the dodge is a bit clumsy. At least enemies are animated well so that you have a generous signal of when to move or parry. There is also a move that lets you leap towards enemies from a very long distance away, which helps alleviate an issue that other similar games have. Many hack-and-slash games set in a modern time period tend to have a lot of enemies with guns, and that can introduce the problem of fights being little more than chasing down these boring enemies that just chip down your health from afar. In this game you can just close the gap near instantly.
The game’s story feels like an afterthought that exists only as a hasty explanation for the visual style of the environment you’re in. I don’t know how closely this follows the movie since I haven’t seen it, but I have heard it takes a lot of liberties. One thing it does do is that it has two parallel story threads going on, as it alternates between current day and a flashback to previous events. The modern day stuff being tracking down and taking revenge on characters from the flashback, in which you learn why you’re going after them in the first place. Said flashbacks take place in a military expedition in the nebulously described “Africa”, and the way it frames all that feels kind of insensitive. It treats the setting almost like it’s a dangerous fantasy world. While obviously you’re working for the bad guys in those sequences, and it’s clearly going for something like a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now feel, it doesn’t do anything to actually examine the morality of what’s going on beyond the barely existent relationships between the main cast. These parts are actually the better half of the game in some respects though, as they have much more visually interesting locations, and enemies are more varied and more frequently melee focused. But at the same time, that also feels a bit suspicious, as said locations are framed as these ominous, mysterious places, with the enemies mixing modern militia members with completely unexplained magical beings that use tribal warrior weapons and dress. As if the local landscape and culture is analogous to some dark fantasy realm where there’s little difference between human inhabitants and monsters. And doing all this while you play as a white character ripping through exclusively black characters as a central part of its power fantasy is… not a good look. The game feels like it hasn’t considered the implications of any of this at all though, so I can’t honestly put it down to malice, but that’s definitely not a reason to not call it out. It's careless.
Something related to this game, which has been on my mind for a little while now, is the whole subject of these “God of War clones”. I’ve played a few of them somewhat recently, seeking out ones I haven’t played before. And I realised I don’t think there’s actually that many of them, despite how much you used to hear people talking about how oversaturated they were. Not only that, but they weren’t really around for very long and died out very suddenly. It stands out in contrast to games inspired by DMC, which never really died out thanks to Platinum, and have been experiencing something of a revival in the indie space in the years following the release of DMC5. But as for GoW-like games, they seem to be almost completely confined to the 7th generation era, with a few stragglers on either side. Obviously the original God of War being a later PS2 game, it took developers a few years to pick up on that. But that whole scene seemed to decline pretty quickly towards the end of the 360/PS3 era. The latest game I can think of in that mould is Lords of Shadow 2, which came out at the start of 2014, but still on those old consoles. And even then I would say that’s doing more than just being a straightforward
clone. But it makes me wonder what a new game in this style would look like.
