Pokémon Go to your DOOM!
Where's the gameplay at?
So when I left off last time, I had mentioned that I would talk about Pokémon go for a little while. I have certainly dabbled in it a little bit, and while I have enjoyed little bits of it, I don't have the same pull that a lot of other people seem to be enjoying. For the four people left on earth who might not know, Pokémon Go is a game for your mobile phone where you are basically placed on a google-maps type environment, with varying levels of activity, depending on where you are in real life. As you move around in real-life, your avatar moves around on-screen and you are able to interact with Pokémon as they appear. This interaction is a simple minigame where the player is able to continually swipe up on their phone to throw the ubiquitous "Pokéball" at the creature while it performs a series of canned animations.
Once your prey is caught in its little red and white prison, you have added it to your roster. And that's pretty much it for gameplay, in the early stages at least. There are some RPG mechanics that sadly seem to involve mincing lower level Pokémon to create "candies" that help similar species of Pokémon to evolve into stronger versions of themselves, and there is the option to "battle" at gyms, where the game does a good job of reinforcing the same conditioning that many people get on games like Call of Duty or Halo; namely being put in your place by a 14 year old with a drugs reference in their title. In full disclosure, I only ever fought one guy in a gym, and it was at Livingston train station and the game didn't like it when my train started moving off, leaving me unable to fight further. I won, but I don't think I should have.
I would forgive you for assuming that this is a negative review of Pokémon Go, but I want to state at this point that I am curious to see what's going to happen with the game. I am almost certain that this is basically an open beta, as the distinct lack of fun gameplay that seems to have pushed the main series of Pokémon games into what must be its eighth or ninth generation is conspicuously absent, leaving behind the "gotta catch 'em all" element that seems to have entranced everyone, including my wife. I don't take any issue with the game, and for the most part, stories about it have been regarding how "Pokémon Go helped my autistic child make friends" or "I am a PTSD sufferer who finds it calming to take my children out to go Pokémon hunting" etc. This is all good, and hopefully getting a generation of nerds to go outside and interact socially will be something that prompts more games to encourage players to leave their home. My issues really come down to two things.
- I live in a little town in West Lothian, with little in the way of Pokéstops or gyms nearby, and I cycle a bike to get to the train station, so I can't have Pokémon go out while I'm travelling.
- Even with a range of respectable Pokémon in my roster, I don't feel like I can do much with them. There's just no gameplay there.
So with all of these factors considered, I decided to overcome 20 years of snobbery about Pokémon and I picked up "Pokémon Soul Silver" for my 3DS. I am only a couple of hours or so into it at the moment, and I still feel like the game has to "open up". I am at Violet City and just got my first gym badge, but I am worried that I've not balanced my training as my initial choice Pokémon is at least ten levels above the nearest other one. I may have to do some grinding to get my team up to speed. I promise to get back to you guys when I figure out if I was right to write-off one of the world's favourite and most famous gaming franchises of all time, or not.
Ok, so I'm not this far yet, but give me time.
Speaking of old franchises, I had mentioned last time that I had been thoroughly enjoying my time with this year's reboot of the grandaddy of first-person shooters: id Software's "DOOM". I tell ya what, this game was everything I'd been hoping for, in terms of gameplay, story (what little was there) and tone. Bethesda are presently 2-for-2 in terms of recent shooters, with Machine Games' 2014 "Wolfenstein: The New Order" having a solid single-player campaign that mixes a lot of FPS tropes with modern gameplay mechanics and leaves you satisfied that you've played a real videogame, and not just walked through a shooting gallery. For those who have followed games for a while, you'll know that Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM share a similar origin, both coming from the extremely influential id studio in the early nineties. Oddly enough, both games contain nods to their origins, with specific areas where players are able to step into original environments from their predecessors. The visual juxtaposition of the beautifully rendered modern weapons (which I'll get onto later) and the jagged sprites of the original environments certainly made me smile.
DOOM features these secret areas throughout the game.
Not content to rest on its laurels, DOOM goes above and beyond any expectations I had when I first saw it being demoed at E3 last year. I think this is largely because this is a game that relies on how it feels to really make itself stand out. I touched on the speed and aggression that the game requires of you to succeed, with the player really needing to push forward when they're in trouble, instead of hiding. Enemies are smart and most of them are capable of chasing you anywhere you go, so it's best to turn around, pull out the chainsaw and run right at them, before enjoying the gory animation as you chop demons in half. This is especially enjoyable as the brief respite for the animation stops the player from being injured further.
DOOM actually reminded me quite a lot of Bioshock Infinite, which is technically a great FPS, but it lacked the immediacy and punch that I feel I wanted from it. The original Bioshock was creepy to the point where it could justifiably be called a "horror" game, but in the case of Infinite, its admittedly fantastic story was so reliant on the environment being open and engaging that it never felt creepy, and the shooting became somewhat monotonous. Of course, this isn't what made me think of Bioshock Infinite, as DOOM has none of these traits, but both games share a similarity with regards to resource gathering. Ammo and health must be scavenged if you're going to survive either game, but where Bioshock Infinite has you literally raking in bins for old apples to restore health, DOOM makes a game of running around the environment mid-gunfight to pick up that vital bit of health or armour as you flee (let's say fighting retreat) from a "Baron Of Hell".
A "Baron Of Hell". These guys take some putting down.
This "micro-gamification" permeates everything that makes DOOM great. At no part of the game are you bored, feeling like you're missing something or ought to break up your exploration. There's always something to do, from the unobtrusive and rewarding puzzles that scatter the environment, to checking off the map-specific challenges: "Perform 5 screw-top glory kills on possessed." The combat related challenges often force you to re-think your approach, trying to get certain enemy types to move with you in a certain direction while you desperately hunt for the right weapon to complete the challenge, or declining to use your area-of-effect weapons for risk of killing an enemy too early to complete the challenge. Combine this constant need to switch-up your strategy with top-notch level design, weapon mechanics and baddie balancing to craft a masterpiece of exciting and gory gunplay, and after all that, what else could you want?
The aesthetic design twists wildly from creepy and demonic (above) to sci-fi futuristic.
If you want a story, it's...ok. It's certainly functional, and to be honest maybe DOOM wouldn't hold up as well if you made the DOOM Marine any more than a mindless gun-toting maniac. The UAC reprises its role as an openly evil corporate entity, with little datapads telling its employees that "unlike the rest of your life, the stuff you do here is important" and openly channeling "argent energy" directly from hell, all while they send research teams to their deaths and perform augmentations on demons to make them...well...it makes for better level bosses, let's leave it at that, shall we? Like I said, looking into the motives of a character in a DOOM game probably won't go very well. DOOM does its best storytelling through its environments, and there's no doubt that the art team must have trawled through some especially disturbing artwork to get the ideas for the settings. From futuristic planet-sized computer cores that are infested with demons, to biblical looking hellscapes and back to scientific martian colonies with clumps of demonic goop and human body parts, you know things aren't going well for the locals. Hiding in a locker isn't going to help you here ("Alien: Isolation" may have conditioned me to always look for a hiding place in a dystopian sci-fi environment) so you best just keep running forward, chainsaw raised and trusty shotgun loaded. You'll have a blast.
Lastly, I want to talk about Batman vs Superman:Dawn of Justice.
I know, I know. It's "not great", but it's not all that bad either. It pulled back quite a bit from Man Of Steel's reliance on grand-scale sweeping combat to make its points, although there's certainly plenty of OTT fight scenes that will dazzle with special effects. The opening scene features an overlapping story with MoS, with Affleck's Bruce Wayne driving through Metropolis while Superman and Zod fight overhead, bringing down skyscrapers and rubble. It does a good job of juxtaposing the "small man" of Batman, on the ground and trying to help people while the "big guys" fight up in the sky.
Affleck's Bruce Wayne is pretty good, and it has to be; as he carries the movie.
With so much of the movie spoiled for me in trailers (I won't go any further into details), I already knew the major story beats for this film before I watched it. The combination of "knowing what's coming", along with reading the pretty poor reviews made this a "wait until it's on TV" movie for me, and while it might have been nice to see the big action scenes on a cinema screen, I feel like I enjoyed the film more with my expectations tempered slightly. The performances are all pretty good, with Affleck stealing the show for me. Henry Cavill's Clark Kent/Superman (Spoilers, sorry!) is everything I dislike about Superman as he gets outsmarted by everyone that meets him. Jesse Eisenberg is a great villain, for sure. He's just the right amount of slimy, creepy and psychopathic to make Lex Luthor work, and while she's mostly a mystery, Gal Gadot's WonderWoman looks great on screen. I guess we'll see how her Diana Prince turns out in her stand-alone movie which looks frickin' awesome, based on the new trailer from SDCC.
That's all for this week. If you made it down this far, thank you for reading and hopefully you'll join me next time when I discuss some of the books I've been enjoying lately, due to my recent decision to join Audible, and I might have made some progress with Pokémon Soul Silver. I'm still not sure what will fill the hole left by DOOM, but I am considering giving the multiplayer a shot.
Until then, goodbye and thanks for stopping by!