Transistor Review

People will undoubtedly remember the Xbox 360 as the machine that got online gaming right. Gamers of tomorrow will talk about Gears of War rodeo runs, late night sessions of Firefight in Halo, and the time their console red ring of death’d just as they were about to get through Modern Warfare on Veteran. It is the console that brought the first person shooter to the consoling masses, stole Sony’s killers apps and for better or worse, achievement points.

For me however, the Xbox 360 will always be the console on which I played Bastion.

Released in 2011 by Supergiant Games, Bastion was an Action Role-Playing Game that featured a solid combat system, unique narration point and a stunning world that formed around the player’s very eyes. Bastion took the best of both Western and Japanese RPGs, put them in a blender and out came a dynamic combat system, an isometric perspective and enough charm to see it win and receive nominations for many coveted awards.

Almost 3 years later, on May 20th 2014 Supergiant Games released their Sophomore effort, Transistor on Sony’s Playstation 4 and Steam. Would this be the arrival of a soon to be revered RPG?

Transistor sees the player take the role of Red, a famous musician from the city of Cloudbank, who has been robbed of her voice by a mysterious organisation known as The Camerata. Armed with the eponymous Transistor, Red must fight her way through the city of Cloudbank, defeating The Camerata’s robotic forces known as The Process, in order to find answers and seek justice.

The game’s narrative is however, somewhat of a fragmented mess. While a large chunk of the game’s story is narrated to the player by The Transistor, this will only reveal the surface of the game’s plot. To understand the game’s story to the fullest it allows you will require scouring the city of Cloudbank for Terminals, viewpoints and using the game’s combat mechanics to their fullest.

While it can be argued that this really encourages exploration of both the game’s world and it’s possibilities of play, it may leave a player in search of more casual experience at a bit of a loss as to what is going on. Though what may frustrated the more dedicated player, is that even after putting in the extra time to discover these scraps of narrative, there are still some questions left unanswered or open to personal interpretation.

This is not to say that the game does not have a story to tell however, and while Red herself is a slant on a stereotypical silent protagonist, the game is certainly heartfelt. The juxtaposition of a silence singer with a talking sword also offers an interesting dynamic, similar to the narrator in Bastion over it’s lead character, The Kid, meaning the game never slows down it’s pace for stories sake.

As you would expect after Bastion, Transistor is a visual delight. The city of Cloudbank feels lived in because of the attention to detail in it’s visual design. Cloudbank is a Cyber-Punk utopia that at times seems to draw inspiration from Blade Runner’s futuristic Los Angeles and even Final Fantasy 7’s Midgar. Though this feeling of beauty comes with a cost. Despite it’s wonderful rendering, the level design feels slightly linear in it’s approach. While the game called out to be explored, there are not many reasons or options available to do so. Most of the more hidden terminals require simply trekking past an exit or just a little further around a corner, which while it scratches the itch for explorations that RPG players crave, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

However, despite these shortcomings, Transistor’s combat system is a thing of beauty. Using ‘Functions’ the player is able to customise their fight style how they see fit. There are multiple melees, ranged and burst attacks, as well as Functions such as ‘Help()’ which allows you to call upon a dog to aid you in combat. While this may seem straightforward enough and one function be equipped to each of the shape buttons on the controller, the real depth begins to surface when the player unlocks the ability to upgrade other functions with functions, but also to have ‘passive’ functions active, which effect all of your arsenal. Suffice to say, that by the time new game plus roles around, Red is somewhat of God with the correct functions in place, which feels rather rewarding.

Just like with the Narrative, there isn’t much explanation on the combat system, and Supergiant treat the gamer like an adult, letting them figure out these things for themselves, which adds a level of personal satisfaction in figuring out how to stack functions to the best effect. You are only limited by Red’s ‘Memory’, which act as her skill points for functions. These functions can be swapped in and out from the game’s numerous save points, meaning experimentation is encouraged as painlessly as possible.

The combat itself can be customised further and either played like it’s predecessor in real time, or strategically with it’s ‘turn’ system, which allows you to plot the course of a turn like a strategy RPG, you can move around the battlefield, deal massive damage and avoid enemies, but as ‘turn’ suggests, you are left powerless until the turn bar refills. The ability to change this on the fly really helps to make Transistor an enjoyable experience, allowing you to change from aggressive to strategic at the press of the ‘R2’ button, without any hassle from menus or settings.

Another winning aspect of Transistor’s combat is that when Red dies, the player is not presented with a game over screen, but simply loses on of the player’s functions for a limited amount of time, meaning the tables can still be turned, but with a less powerful arsenal, resulting in teaching the player caution and patience are the keys to succeeding.

While enemies come in all shapes and sizes, all with unique functions and attack patterns of their own, there is a substantial degree of pallet swapping going on. While it’s perhaps not noticeable first time through, this means the enjoyment of the New Game + can be slightly hindered by a lack of variety in enemies, meaning the end game enemies spawn by the dozen rather than sparingly as they did on the first shot. It is also by mixing and matching these functions in various forms that more of the story is revelled to the player in a similar way to reading Dark Soul’s item descriptions, enriching the experience.

There is also the option at any time to add a ‘limiter’ to the game, which acts similarly to Idols in Bastion. Equipping these limiters can do anything from limiting Red’s memory to making enemies hit twice as hard. Playing with all 10 activated might test your ability to play the game, but rest assured it will mean a lot of retries.

Similar to Bastion’s Proving Grounds, there are also many tests the player can try to unlock music from the game’s excellent score. Away from the game’s main area, player’s can explore the practice test to hone your Functions as well as several to challenge you. The speed test to kill enemies within a time limit, Performance test’s your combat abilities with limited Functions, while Agency sees you face off against something else all together.

Another of the game’s highlights is it’s score. Darren Korb and vocalist Ashley Barrett really make the game. Each number creates an ambience that sets the emotional tone for Transistor beat for beat, With such a rich variety of instrumental and vocal tracks, such as the launch trailer’s ‘All become One’, it will be fantastic to see what Korb achieves next time around. Barrett’s humming to this score creates not only creates a haunting atmosphere, but gives Red an emotional side that a voiceless protagonist would otherwise be lacking. Without speaking a line, Barrett allows Red to say more than words ever could.

Transistor is solid game that asides from a few short comings, supersedes Bastion and many of the game’s spiritual predecessors. It’s innovative battles, beautiful visuals and simply breathtaking score are something any fan of Action RPGs should be clambering to experience.  While more casual players may be put off by it’s seemingly sporadic storytelling, it’s important to know that it doesn’t detract from the fun of the game. While more experienced players may want to know going in, there are a lot of blanks to fill in themselves or on message boards. Overall, clocking in at around 5 hours for a single play-though, Transistor will leave you begging for more and perhaps a little emotionally engaged, which when considering the genre’s past, is perhaps more than we could have hoped for. But it’s a little sad knowing that with a pinch more narrative and a little more exploration to bring the game unto the bar raised by it’s combat, this game would be flawless. It will however leave you excited for the studio’s next title, and until then, I’ll see you in The Country.

Titanfall Xbox 360 Review

When anyone utters the words ‘makers of Call of Duty’ and ‘giant robots’ in the same sentence, it’s only understandable that people get a little bit excited. Say what you will about Activision’s first person shooter franchise, but with a total of over 120 million units sold, Call of Duty’s reach and influence in the sphere of gaming is hard to deny. So large an influence perhaps, that Respawn Entertainment, the EA funded studio founded by Jason West & Vince Zampella, previously of Infinity Ward, must have felt the pressure of the colossal franchise they helped create, weighing down on them from the get go. The hypothetical question must have one day arisen – How do you take on a colossus? The answer seemed to be to simply bring a Titan. If anyone could do it, then who better than Respawn?

It was under the weight of this expectation that Titanfall, Respawn’s new futuristic FPS title hit the markets. The game’s packaging boasts of the title’s 60+ awards at E3, merely a feather in the cap of a game riding high on the shoulders of an aggressive marketing campaign and promised a next generation experience like no other. But after Titanfall’s March 11^th release for the Xbox One & PC, reviews were mixed to say the least. Critics expected the second coming of the modern first person shooter, but instead received a competent game that could never live up to, the carefully orchestrated symphony of hysteria-inducing hype that told of it’s coming.

But a month after the games initial release, when the dust has settled and Titanfall finds itself on Microsoft’s Xbox 360, what then? When those expecting the next generation of gaming, have seen the emperor naked of new clothes, can Titanfall be judged solely on its merits as a console first person shooter?

For starters, let us look at Titanfall’s campaign. After promising a single player-like experience in a multiplayer setting, Respawn hit their first hurdle. By making the game online only, Titanfall polarized potential players from the very beginning. While only 18% of players completed Call of Duty Black Ops’ campaign, it is still a very daunting thought not to have a campaign in a full retail title.

To some, the idea of paying full price for a multiplayer game, in a constantly shifting multiplayer environment and especially with a new IP, is a scary thought. What if months down the line, nobody is playing Titanfall online? Then the game has a sell by date, a prospect that alarms most gamers who primarily vote with their wallets.

These grievances aside, what Titanfall offers in terms of a campaign is an ambitious idea, but on the whole will leave gamers wanting. For all its promises of user’s creating their own story, Titanfall’s campaign is simply Halo 4’s Spartan Ops. Small episodic chunks of story, which consist of nothing more than an in-engine cut scene and audio logs played over combat.

As for length, while the campaign is split into two opposing factions, the surprisingly well armed Frontier Militia, and the seeming evil Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, both of which offer the perspective of each army and their struggles, not a lot changes. Win or lose, the story plods along to its slow and unsatisfactory conclusion. Though the story the game tells isn’t the most fascinating, its absence in the game’s regular multiplayer modes in noticeable, and even though the writing isn't the best, the contextualization of why these armies is fighting, feels strangely gratifying.

While only two of the game’s six multiplayer modes are playable here (Attrition, the game’s Team Deathmatch & Hardpoint, i.e. three point King of the Hill), experiencing them as part of the campaign is arguably more fun than without it.

In the campaign, the player takes the roll of a pilot, the game’s customisable soldier. Here a player experiences the game’s custom load outs and perks, as you would expect from any modern day shooter. However what Titanfall gets right is that like Halo, the weapon’s the player starts with are perfectly capable tools to play the game. The player is not penalized for their newness like in Call of Duty, or their lack of Premium Membership like in Battlefield 4. Even when fighting the game’s titular Titans, players start off with the right gun’s to make scrap metal of the metal mechs with ease, if they have enough skill to use them.

Where Titanfall’s game play differs from most modern FPS games is that in campaign and multiplayer, the player meets not only enemy players but AI with varying levels of skill, all of which gives XP. These AI make the seemingly limited 6 vs 6 experience feel on par with Battlefield 4’s 64 player Multiplayer. But more than simply filling up the numbers, these bots speed up the generation of the game’s selling point but also its biggest missed opportunity: The Titans.

Titans are mobile suits that offer the player further levels of customization of play, more powerful weapons and a personal robot killing machine to boot. Player’s can either pilot these Titans, or simply allow them to roam around the map, AI controlled killing enemy players for you. While Titan’s can be used strategically, using them guard a base in Hardpoint, or roam around covering your back in Attrition, I often found myself letting my Titan simply roam around scoring kills for me, as in an otherwise fast paced, no-nonsense FPS, Titan’s really slow things down. It’s both a blessing and a curse – the Titan’s speed restrictions stop them from being Battlefield’s Tanks and Choppers and dominating infantry, however it also derails what should be the selling point of the game, Titan vs. Titan action. Why would you ride a slow moving, large target into battle, when you can dispatch a Titan more efficiently with basic Anti-Titan weaponry? Especially when wall-running and the traversing of the environment is encouraged as a pilot?

The game’s Multiplayer options outside of campaign are also a mixed bag. While the game touts six modes, as well as Attrition & Hardpoint, there’s Last Titan Standing (a Titan vs. Titan mode which suffers from the pre-mentioned problems), Capture the Flag & Pilot Hunter (Team Deathmatch without AI kills counting).

The sixth mode is called ‘Variety Pack’ and is essentially a mixture of all other game modes. When you consider that Pilot hunter is simply a variant of Attrition, meaning the game only launched with four game types, Titanfall’s cracks start to show.

While there are certainly fun reasons to play Titanfall, and the game’s introduction of mechanics such as burn cards, cards that can be used for one spawn to deal extra damage or gain more XP, are fun, but they aren't essential to the experience. Despite supposedly being in development since 2010, Titanfall almost feels like a Beta game. With limited unlocks, the prospect that game modes that would have otherwise been on disk being included in downloadable content, as well as a seemingly limited lifespan. While there is the possibility of unlocking Generations, the game’s equivalent of prestige, this offers little but bragging rights, and makes Titanfall a great game that feels half cooked.

All promises aside, all hype deflated, Titanfall is the start of what proves to be a great first person shooter franchise. Despite its short comings, it is a strong basis for Respawn to build off of. The mechanics are there, they just need tweaking. The things it’s borrowed from other games, be it Mirrors Edge’s parkour or Left for Dead’s fighting for survival until extraction, are perhaps the right ones. That when combined with solid shooting and balanced weapons, feel new and exciting. While Titanfall doesn't deliver on its promise of a next gen experience like no other, but it’s certainly a fun, highly playable shooter that shows glimmers of greatness.

inFAMOUS Second Son Review

inFAMOUS Second Son is Sony’s first console exclusive game since launch. It is a game that has been raised high on the hulking shoulders of the Playstation 4. It promises a ‘next gen’ experience that will make the naysayers of this new generation of consoles, part with their hard earned pennies and shell out for Team Sony. But is this game truly the second coming of video gaming? Or like a second child, forced to play with the previous generations hand me down mechanics?

inFAMOUS Second Son follows Delsin Rowe, the titular Second Son, a graffiti artist delinquent, who like most super heroes, has greatness thrust upon him after discovering that he is a Conduit. Conduit is the term given to those in the inFAMOUS universe with powers, though the easiest comparison would be ‘mutant’ from the Marvel universe. Much like Marvel’s X-men series, ‘Conduits’ are treated like outsiders by society, who have labelled them ‘Bio-Terroists’ and assembled a department to track down & capture Conduits called the Department of Unified Protection (or D.U.P).

Despite how clichéd this story may sound, it brings about what is perhaps the most impressive thing about Second Son: the game’s interesting dialogue that actually matches the motion capture beat for beat. Even when characters say lines that sound somewhat forced, the facial expressions exhibited by the character anchors meaning to them, making them not only forgivable, but even believable. 

But even these flourishes of next generation narrative aren’t without their thorns. The game’s characters are interesting, but are painted with such broad strokes of cliché, that their flashback stories sometimes undermine the believability that the actors performances strive so hard to achieve. If the game exhibited a little more show than tell on character motives and histories, Second Son’s story could have raised the bar for storytelling in Triple A titles. 

Instead like a weight lifter with one arm weaker than the other, the game’s storytelling displays a muscular imbalance. Where the stronger arm of the game’s storytelling and facial recognition is ready to push things forward, the weaker arm of convention and its need to impart information on the player quickly holds it back. 

The game’s karma system leaves a lot to be desired however. While it was a key selling point of the original games, it falls into the Fable trap of not having so much impact on the game, other than visual aesthetics and slight changes in dialogue. There is no moral grey in the stories key choices; it’s always a polar opposite ultimatum of good or evil. The game even colour codes these choices, for those who couldn’t tell that ‘turning yourself in’ was the ‘good’ thing to do, over ‘sacrificing your tribe’ making you seem a little bit bastardly. Though perhaps if you’re in need of colour coded assurance of what you’re doing is right or wrong, there are bigger issues for you to tackle.

In terms of game play, short of an impressive representation of Seattle that is close to fully formed, inFAMOUS never really feels more like very well made, late  Playstation 3 title, rather than the next gen opus some had hoped for. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing however, as the game is fun to play for the most part. Combat is fluid and balanced. Even as the game progresses, you neither feel overpowered or nor completely outgunned, as the game’s Conduit powers offer a way to turn the tide. While these powers are upgradable, apart from the elements their composed of and some small changes to the amount of damage dealt & animation, each new power is based around the idea of a melee & ranged attack, a dash, a powerful attack and a special that can be triggered by using the game’s karma abilities, offering little varieties or reason to switch between powers. 

However, the game requires you learn each of these new powers in turn, forcing you into sticking with each of the individual powers for an extended period, rather than allowing the player to simply revert to an older power until later in the game. By the third power unlock, the ritualistic regaining of each attack after receiving a new power takes a lot of momentum out of the game. The game’s final boss encounter is even bogged down in the tedium, forcing you to play the game how Sucker Punch would like you to, rather than how you feel you should, shattering the illusion of player free will in service of the narrative’s natural conclusion, souring the games conclusion slightly and making it feel a little rushed.

The game also suffers from other minor irritations. NPCs will cheer at you one moment, and then the use of a power will make them freak out and run away. The game also punishes you for careless mistakes in combats very heavy handily. While trying to clear out the city of D.U.P agents to gain fast travel, the player can encounter large parking areas full of enemies. If you’re unfortunate enough to clear the whole building, a good 10 to 15 minutes of work, but get killed by the last, more powerful enemy, you’re sent back to the last checkpoint, sometimes at the other side of the city. It could be argued that this is the game attempting to balance risk vs. reward, but can leave Second Son prey to biggest cardinal sin of gaming: making the player feel like they’re wasting time.

Exploring the city is also a blessing and a curse. Traversing a large city that is fully at your disposal feels as next gen as console gaming has got. Running up walls and bouncing up walls is thrilling, but when mixed with poor climbing mechanics & the inability to swim, Delsin feels a lot less super than he should. 

But it must be noted - standing on top of a tall building and seeing a city move all around you is really a sight to behold. For a second, you could be forgiven in thinking that Second Son’s Seattle wasn’t the real thing.

It’s not until you get down on the street that this is abolished. There’s not the feeling of life a next gen city should have. While cars drive & NPC’s shout random lines of dialogue based on your character’s moral choices, there are no background noise, no fleeting whispers of conversation, and the distinct hum of traffic isn’t there but an occasional car horn, making the game’s Seattle a city without soul. The city is also for the most part, also indestructible. You can’t bring down buildings or destroy walls, other than DUP structures that are removable from the environment once districts are freed, adding to the feeling the city is no more but a sandbox. 

While there is little replay offered rather than freeing the districts, the gimmicky graffiti mini-game or taking part in the 6 part, weekly mission cum transmedia campaign in inFAMOUS Paper Trail, there’s not a lot to keep you coming back on Delsin’s story is done.

While Paper Trail is a fun experiment into using an external device & your own detective skills, to solve a murder both at the console & away from it, these extra missions won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The post-story city is also more for those aiming for trophies than a rewarding end game experience. You could always replay the game from the opposite karmic stance, but this offers less variety than you would expect.

So is inFAMOUS worth playing at all? Absolutely. While this review is perhaps rather scathing of Sucker Punches’ efforts, Second Son is a glimpse at the future. It’s a solid game by the standards set in the last generation that gives Playstation 4 owners a look at things to come. It’s vast open world, fast and enjoyable combat, combined with a competent story & incredible character performances makes Second Son perhaps the truest experience of this console generation so far. It’s problems lie in the expectations of what it means to be a game on a new console, instead of defining them, it only theories at what an Xbox One or Playstation 4 game should be, rather than what one is. 

inFAMOUS is one of the first games of the generation to hint at what’s to come. If you own a PS4 and are curious about Second Son, by all means pick it up. While the game perhaps shouldn’t be the reason for shifting consoles that it undoubtedly will be, it’s undoubtedly Sony’s best offering. But be warned - like the game’s karma system, you need to take the good with the bad. It’s not a flawless experience, but it’s story, cool powers & artificial sense of freedom make inFAMOUS Second Son a game that, at least in this point of the console generation, a worthy addition to your games library.