Shootember: War for Cuber DARK ENERGON

no timer on nonsteam games

I avoided this game for a long time because I'm a Transformers "fan" of varying amounts on any given day and I assumed it was a boilerplate shooter that other Transformers fans were telling me was amazing because having Soundwave talk with a little synth action is enough to make their pants thunder as bits within break the sound barrier. I'm not kidding, it really doesn't take much to get them popping their cogs.

oh fuck it was dead space all along

So I finally fired it up and I was actually pretty floored with it. The thing that struck and strikes very quickly is how beautifully detailed the environments are, and not just the skyboxes!. The character models and animations are really slick too, with the whole Transforming element a joy to watch, but the levels are just lavished with detail. This is pretty weird, see, since shooters have a bad habit of being a bunch of boxes with other boxes in a skybox. War for Cybertron I was almost certain would be the boxiest robot box in the history of crates but somehow it isn't. It isn't better looking than Crysis 2 but it is really lovingly crafted.

The game is ostensibly a shooter but at times I'm not entirely certain it truly wants to be that. Characters can transform into a variety of vehicles, so there's drivingish bits and flyingesque bits that feel sort of like the shooter parts are still clinging pretty hard. There's also some jumping puzzles and some vague other sort of puzzles. It feels like they took a couple game ideas then hosed them down with shooter elements before dropping them into the prettiest damn boxes.

If that sounds sort of negative, maybe it is, but the game is a pretty decent shooter in terms of just gunning down dudes. Has a real blood pumping bam bam feel to it that puts a grin on your face. The other elements keep the action broken up, which I like, and some of the vehicles are nice to drive. I do find some of the jumping puzzles with their instant death time to reload dorkiness a bit annoying, but the game's check point system is better than some - not flawless, but fine. Also the game is not afraid to throw huge boss fights at you, or tease you with massive destruction being thrown around. Admittedly, if you're one like me who played too many mmorpgs and is long since sick of staged fights, you may find a little nausea in this game.

I really dig the animations on the characters themselves - It sinks in more and more as you play different bots that they all have beautifully detailed idle cycle, transformations, so forth. Although if looked at too long it becomes evident they are blocks that don't really "work" in terms of having joints or functional range of motion, they are still a delight to watch in action. They also sound really good on the most part - I find Cullen's Optimus a little out of place sometimes, but worse voice actors producing better lines feels about the same. Megatron's voice actor is not quite what I'd hope for, he's more of a Turmoil sounding character, which is a reference no one will ever get.

of course it rains in prison

Megatron's character and the overarching plot of the game beyond individual scenes of robotic mayhem, which the game does extremely well and with impressive grasp of scale, is pretty much repulsively awful. Megatron has no real character, he is as one dimensional as they come and his plot device which he screams repeatedly is unexplained goofy nonsense. I don't know if I want to say Dark Energon is children's cartoon level, since honestly it basically get hamfisted into everything and feels like something even little kids would start rolling their eyes at. It does everything! It defeats bosses for you, empowers his armies, is part of bombs and opens doors. You know you're really reaching with your plot device when in addition to everything else it is a skeleton key.

The story is on the most part simply awful. The characters are good, the dialogue is good, but the person who wrote the story should simply feel bad about what he's doing with his life. I mean really, really should think about how he's writing at a grade school level. When almost all of your plot centers on a blow by blow level on "plot device!" you're doing something wrong. It's honestly worse than watching an 80s cartoon. It's sort of a pity watching good voice actors perform good dialogue that, when you stop and parse, is absolutely dreadful in scope. Also the story does little to articulate why anyone is fighting this war at all. They hate each other and ... And yeah, that's all of it.

And don't give me the "There's a story???" tripe. If you don't want to pay attention to a story, that's totally fine. But you could have taken the same scenes with much the same dialogue and laid out something at least run of the mill instead of outright insulting.

Other things that aren't fun, and never were fun, and never will be fun. Waiting during a fight for some "instant death" attack to finish. The game gets worse and worse in this regard, with some of the last few battles having extremely long sessions of "drive around waiting for missile barrage to finish". This is MMORPG level design and it's beyond irritating to see it migrate into other games. I get that you want to make people dodge or avoid attacks, that's fine, but making me drive from something I can not see for more than even two seconds is boring and hovers right above being a chore. Past that and you're into tedious monotony.

really

It's not binary, of course, but a spectrum of tense moments that rapidly dissolve away. Tension turns into stress, and stress is the biggest enemy of fun. I think people have a ton of difficulty discerning or articulating the difference, which can make game design slippery. You desperately seek tension, but you utterly do not want stress. Worse, while I really like the NPCs that make up your squad, the fact you can run into them while you're trying to avoid something is atrocious.

Still - regardless of the bad story and a couple snafus in fight design - the game overall is a polished, surprisingly deep shooter with a great variety of play. As I said the game feels less like a shooter, more like a shooter operating through multiple minigames. Transforming can be pretty tertiary, or really important, depending on what stage of the game you're in. Also the game is surprising in terms of environmental variety; Cybertron really does feel like a "different world" and not just a metal Earth.

Shootember: Let's be negativestein

I can't take screenshots of Wolfenstein for reasons I am uncertain of. It does not allow steam overlay because bananas, and capture attempts do not seem to work. How nice! It's not really the best looking FPS. This is going to be pretty dry without pictures, ugh.