The month of October saw a wealth of interesting new games being released. As always I’ve tried to get some play time in with as many of these games as possible, which has resulted in some delays in getting this edition of Games Worth Playing finished. However, that also means this article consist of an accurate and comprehensive overview of the games released in October that are truly worth playing.
Two games released in October are of particular note. The post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout: New Vegas manages to surpass its predecessor in every respect, even if it does suffer a bit from Obsidian’s tendency towards buggy releases. And the excellent first person platformer The Ball may well be in the running for Indie Game of the Year.
In the monthly Games Worth Playing feature I take a look at noteworthy games released during the previous month. I’ll focus on games that were truly worth playing, regardless of the advertising budget. However, a special section is reserved for those long-awaited games that may or may not have lived up to the hype. I endeavor to play as many of these games as possible, but any games I haven’t played are evaluated based on critic and user reviews and have a ‘no hands-on experience’ notice attached to them.
Game of the Month
Fallout: New Vegas
A free-roaming role-playing game set in the post-apocalyptic Fallout universe. New Vegas offers the exact same basic gameplay as its predecessor by Bethesda, which means more first person exploration that sees combat and activities handled with statistics over player skill. The skills these characters can specialize in are widely varied, but Obsidian has taken care to make some of the more obscure choices more viable in this newer edition, with dialogue in particular being greatly affected by skill choices.
The overall feeling of Fallout: New Vegas is simply that it’s Fallout 3 done better. New gameplay features like NPC factions, weapon modifications and direct control over companions through a companion wheel are great additions. A hardcore mode has also been added to provide a more realistic nuclear fallout experience. But most importantly the storyline and dialogue are much better, which is a result of having cRPG veterans Obsidian Entertainment on the job. This also means some of the crew behind Fallout 1 & 2 got to work on New Vegas, which has resulted in more than a few nods back to those gaming classics.
New Vegas does suffer from severely outdated graphics. This is still the same engine that was used in Oblivion more than 4 years ago and it doesn’t seem to have been updated much. Fortunately a lot of Fallout 3 user modifications have already been converted so there are numerous mods that improve the lighting, textures and even the NPCs to make the game look like it was published sometime this century.
This is a solid step forward from Fallout 3 and an absolute must-have for fans of that game. It may not introduce any revolutionary changes, but there’s no doubt about the fact that New Vegas offers a much improved gameplay experience that makes its predecessors completely obsolete. Unfortunately it hasn’t changed enough to attract anyone who didn’t like Fallout 3, but for those who enjoy a good (light) free-roaming RPG it’s certainly one of the best games released this year.
Fallout: New Vegas barely looks any better than its predecessor, even if the gameplay is much improved
Worthwhile Games
AI War: Children of Neinzul – no hands-on experience
AI War is a real-time 4X space strategy game with a large variety of races and factions to choose from. This expansion pack adds another new race, three new factions, new music tracks, new map styles, 36 new ships and 6 new AI types. That all comes at just 3,- euro with all proceeds going to the Child’s Play charity. It’s not quite a must have for fans of the original, but certainly offers quite a bit of value and it’s hard to argue with the price.
Those who haven’t played AI War previously should check out the demo over here. It’s not the prettiest of games, but the gameplay is rock solid.
Bloody Good Time – no hands-on experience
A first person shooter that doesn’t revolve around shooting, but killing your opponents in the most creative ways possible. Bloody Good Time puts you in the shoes of an aspiring movie star and tasks you with killing off your competition. This can be done with straight up shotguns, but also exotic weaponry like explosive remote-controlled rats. More inventive traps grant more points and the competitor with the highest score wins.
This can be played against bots or in multiplayer, with the latter certainly offering the better experience. Players can choose from a wide variety of B-movie characters like a bikini babe or a creepy clown and then get to chase their targets across four different movie sets. It’s all presented in a cartoon style reminiscent of Team Fortress 2, which is to be expected with the Source Engine powering this game.
It’s worth a look for gamers looking for something a little different or fans of The Ship, but is certainly best played with friends. It’s a bargain at just 5 euro, but I can’t help but think that it’ll be overshadowed by Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood’s similar multiplayer mode when that comes out on PC in a few months time.
DeathSpank
DeathSpank is a hero who is out to save the world, in his own dimwitted way. It’s also the name of this humorous action RPG that incorporates Ron Gilbert’s (Monkey Island) legendary humor with the basic building blocks of a solid action RPG: fancy and varied items, lots of monsters and tons of quests. This is all presented with a curious art style that’s reminiscent of those popular papercraft figures. Each object looks like it’s been cut out of paper and meshes together with the rest to form a colorful cell-shaded fantasy world.
I haven’t played this for much more than an hour, but from what I’ve seen it’s got a great loot system with widely varied random item drops. The basic gameplay is much like your ordinary action RPG, although not quite as refined as the likes of a Titan Quest or Torchlight. This also extends to the controls which can feel a little unresponsive at times and supposedly the game does tend to get overly repetitive as you progress.
DeathSpank may not be the next great action RPG and its dry sense of humor won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s a decent game if you’ve burned out on Torchlight or are just looking for something fun to play for a couple of hours. It’s also easily the better choice out of the two RPGs released in October, with Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes belonging nowhere except in the recycle bin.
The exaggerated art style fits perfectly with DeathSpank's wacky narrative and weaponry
Lionheart: King’s Crusade – no hands-on experience
A new real-time strategy game that emulates the Total War formula of massive real-time battles interspersed with turn-based overmap gameplay. Lionheart takes place during the era of the Third Crusade and offers rather impressive 3D graphics that are only slightly inferior to recent Total War games. It’s unfortunate that the same production standards weren’t kept for the voice acting, because that can feel forced at times, although the excellent musical soundtrack does somewhat make up for this.
In terms of gameplay the best way to describe this is as lacking scope. The tactical battles are relatively simplistic and don’t require nearly as much planning or active direction as in a Napoleon: Total War. And overmap gameplay is limited to mere unit management, with political maneuvering not entering the picture at all. NeoCoreGames have tried to spice things up a bit, with the introduction of RPG elements. Regiments of units gain experience, special perks and can be outfitted with unique armor and weaponry. It adds a nice touch to the familiar formula, but isn’t quite enough to push it to the level of its predecessor King’s Arthur, let alone the giants of the Total War franchise.
Lionheart also suffers from a few lingering issues that as of yet haven’t quite been resolved. Numerous players are reporting critical bugs that cause crashes or even corrupted save games, forcing players to restart the campaign. A large update was presented shortly after release, so hopefully NeoCoreGames will soon resolve these last few bugs. Otherwise it’s a decent strategy game that could be worth picking up during a sale for fans of the Total War games, but is hardly a must-have title.
The Ball
A brilliant indie game that combines the first person perspective with a unique form of physics based platformer gameplay. In The Ball you’re an inquisitive archeologist who fell down a hole during excavations and uncovers an captivating yet eerie underground world. Soon you stumble across a strange artifact that can be used to push and pull a giant ball, which not only proves key in the countless physics based puzzles that make up the bulk of the game but also forms your only means of defense against the not-so-friendly natives.
This curious indie game was built using Unreal Engine 3 so the production values are top notch. The environments are stunning and huge, with some interesting artifacts and intricate contraptions spread throughout the underground world. Add in atmospheric background music and decent voice acting and you’ve got yourself an absolute winner. The Ball is a game that will be particularly alluring to those who enjoyed Portal and is good for several hours of fun. It’s worth the 17,99 asking price on Steam, but will be absolutely impossible to pass up on if the price drops in the future.
The Ball is a great game that mixes the wondrous puzzling and exploration of Portal with the creepy atmosphere and crazy enemies of Painkiller. Be sure to give the demo a roll here.
A game that revolves around pushing and pulling a ball about really shouldn't be this fun
Highly Anticipated Games
ArcaniA: Gothic 4 – no hands-on experience beyond the demo
Gothic 3 fell flat on its face due to a boatload of bugs, but ArcaniA does not. It presents a beautiful fantasy world supported by all the basic role-playing game elements: a story, character progression, quests and items. It’s all good up until this point, but then NPCs open their mouths and everything starts going wrong.
This fourth Gothic game really doesn’t live up to its legacy. The world on offer is limited and populated with NPCs who stubbornly ignore everything that’s going on around them. The story is forgettable tripe that begins with you attempting to win the hand of the village’s ugliest and most hateful wench. The translation is a mess with atrocious voice acting and lipsyncing that doesn’t sync up. The specialization trees for the main character are extremely limited, to the point where magic comes down to just three different spells. The loot that drops is generic and rarely useful, while crafted items are even more useless despite requiring tons of grinding to gather the necessary components.
ArcaniA doesn’t match up to the narrative quality of a Dragon Age or The Witcher, the lively world seen in Fallout: New Vegas or Risen, or the great loot system found in DeathSpank or Torchlight. So you’re much better off just playing those games instead.
Front Mission Evolved
Front Mission Evolved is a third person action game involving giant mechs and a far future global conflict. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally got another mech game on the PC and it’s actually halfway decent. The premise is one of humanity united into two super nations which co-exist in a tenuous state of peace. That peace is shattered when the U.C.S.’s orbital elevator in New York comes under attack from a group of terrorists while young Dylan Ramsey is out doing field tests for a new experimental wanzer – which is short for walking panzer apparently – and he joins up with the U.C.S. military. It’s not outstanding science-fiction fare, but it gets the job done and forms a decent excuse for some mechanized warfare.
The gameplay comes down to very straightforward third person shooter action, with four individual weapon slots and a sliding mechanic to grant a temporary speed boost. There’s even a bullet time mode in there for good measure, although it’s rarely required to shoot your way through battles even at higher difficulties. Item drops regenerate your armor and ammunition, while standing still and not engaging in combat also regenerates some armor. It’s all very straightforward and even gets a bit repetitive as the enemies rarely prove challenging and it always comes down to either long-range combat with missiles and machine guns or close range combat with shotguns, swift movement and melee attacks. The wanzers aren’t particularly maneuverable and behave much like walking tanks with hover packs providing the occasional speed boost.
Different play styles can be adopted by customizing the wanzer with different weapon loadouts. There are quite a few different weapons to attach to the four available slots and there are some basic wanzer kits to improve things like agility as well. In keeping with modern racing games it’s also possible to completely customize the look of your wanzer with decals and different paintjobs, which is a nice touch for multiplayer but a bit excessive for the short singleplayer campaign. That multiplayer component is packed with genre standard game types and actually quite enjoyable for an arcade mech game, but it’s not particularly popular.
The graphics are nothing to write home about, with low polygon models and low resolution textures ensuring that the game looks every bit like it was released five years ago. The fancy explosions and collapsing buildings do little to remedy the excessive lack of detail. FME is further hampered by unpredictable voice acting that ranges between acceptable (Dylan Ramsey, Adela Seawell), atrocious (Russel Hamilton) and obnoxious (Amy). The story is quite predictable and the overall atmosphere is that of an sub-par mecha anime that steals a lot of elements from its betters but doesn’t add much of its own.
That last paragraph may have sounded rather negative, but I actually enjoy playing Front Mission Evolved. It could have used a lot more work and doesn’t really offer anything beyond a generic third person shooter experience backed by a mildly engaging story, but that’s enough if you’re a mech fan and haven’t really seen anything new since MechWarrior 4. Those not as fond of mechs should avoid this game.
Front Mission Evolved looks dated and has mediocre gameplay, but at least the mech designs are nice
LEGO Universe – no hands-on experience (post-beta)
An MMORPG set in the expansive LEGO universe sounds like a great idea, but only if it’s properly executed. LEGO Universe doesn’t quite hit the mark. It offers a mixture of the platforming gameplay found in singleplayer LEGO games with the item collection, group-based encounters and reputation grinding of MMORPGs. This stays fun for a while, particularly due to the great variety in environments and implementation of achievements, but soon becomes repetitive as the limited content runs out and grinding becomes necessary to access new areas or gain better equipment.
It doesn’t help that the game suffers from a multitude of bugs, such as entire zones turning pink, as well as severe lag for European players. The possibility to create your own LEGO constructions in a separate instance is nice, but extremely limited and requires a lot of grinding for the desired LEGO blocks. New content is being added quite rapidly, but even when factoring in the three newly added zones it’s still possible to see everything there is to see within a few weeks, let alone the free month included with the initial purchase. And with few players adopting the game or sticking around for very long, there seems to be little reason to put down a monthly fee for it. In its current state LEGO Universe can’t even compete with the popular singleplayer LEGO games.
Lost Planet 2 - no hands-0n experience
Lost Planet 2 oddly builds its setting around its predecessor, but marries this with wildly different gameplay. Oh, it’s still a game about shooting things in third person, preferably in giant mechs, but this is all presented in a different, cooperative, format. Running from hot spot to hot spot in a frozen wasteland isn’t part of the routine either, because the planet has heated up quite a bit resulting in much more varied and impressive scenery.
Played cooperatively Lost Planet 2 features a wealth of encounters in varied environments that generally culminate in an epic boss fight. The cooperative nature of the game has resulted in relatively short (10 minute or so) levels, which is again an odd contrast to the occasionally rather lengthy missions featured in the original. It also results in a game that’s not much fun to play solo and in fact isn’t even balanced to be playable by yourself. This makes it an interesting shooter if you’ve got a few friends willing to pick it up along with you, but otherwise Lost Planet 2 offers an absolutely abysmal shooter experience.
Medal of Honor
Medal of Honor is yet another action packed first person shooter in a modern day setting, in this case the ongoing conflict against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It distinguishes itself from that other game by offering slower paced, more methodical gameplay and featuring a group of soldiers as opposed to a lone killing machine. This gives it a slightly more realistic edge, but underneath that shiny surface still lurks a heavily scripted and linear shooter. A shooter that chains together countless hectic and explosive moments without so much as a breather in between, while letting the player regenerate health behind cover and soak up bullets as if he were a walking tank.
It’s all beautifully portrayed with lush backgrounds and highly detailed character models putting it a step or two above the popular Call of Duty series. It’s a shame then to see frequent washed out textures on nearby elements in the environment. Also unfortunate is how much this game holds the player’s hand, which effectively makes it play like a corridor shooter even though the open environments give the illusion that it’s not. It squarely fits in the familiar Call of Duty mold and doesn’t offer anything special beyond that, which makes the singleplayer campaign a hard sell.
A multiplayer component is also included, which attempts to mix Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s semi-realistic warfare with the intense action found in the Call of Duty games. The resulting monstrosity doesn’t feature the awesome destructible environments of Bad Company 2, nor does it come packed with quite the same intensity as Black Ops multiplayer. It’s no surprise then to see that few people have bothered sticking around, which means you’re better off looking to Bad Company 2 or Black Ops for your multiplayer fix.
The jagged edges are because this "AMD powered" game doesn't support AMD anti-aliasing
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