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Bloke
Bloke with Hammer Walking Dead Bloke Lass Guard Bloke Bloke in Cloak A subtle variety of Other Blokes Thief2 added the machines, which I really liked a lot. They had a weak spot you could hit with water arrows that added another layer.
Thief also had undead, right? had undead, other keeper types, hammerites, pagans, weird enemy types like burricks, ghosts, walking machine things, one of the characters was a big fat weird witch thing (called the hag)
That variety wasnt massive but it is even less so in the new games. The game looks ok actually, much better than expected. Plus anyone watching the Total Biscuit video and expecting him to not mess about in the options in the beginning doesn't understand that it's a pc gaming channel which focuses on pc specific options. No-one is going to feck about with options in a console game because who really cares? The pc platform scales, so options are a huge part of the experience. Mini review of Thi4f so far:
+ Good PC port with lots of customization and a FOV slider that goes all the way up to 110�. + Good atmosphere and cool visuals. + Good ambient music and sounds. + Okay-ish lockpicking, the addition of failure is neat. + Cool statistics. - While the PC port is good, the terrible optmiziation is unacceptable and coupled with the crippled gameplay makes this game an absolute chore to play. - Shitty and completely uninspired writing. - Terrible voice acting. - Linear levels. - Cutscenes were filmed by Michael J. Fox. - Shit contextual jump that misbehaves and requires the player to stand exactly on a certain spot to be able to execute the jump. - Swoop is casual babby mode and completely overpowered. - The AI is stupid as fuck, worse than in the originals, and can either be omniscient of oblivious, but there is no middle ground. Is it too much to ask for a better AI 16 years after the first game? - Some usable objects like ropes are always highlighted in blue even if you don't use focus mode. As you'd expect, that looks utterly terrible. - The visibility meter now has 3 states instead of 16. - Sound has little to no impact except on water and broken glass. - Rope arrow hotspots instead of rope arrows working on every wooden and soft surfaces (soil, carpet, foliage). - Overuse of visual leitmotifs that destroy suspension of disbelief. - Loading screens everywere, and they also are very long. Took me 6 freaking minutes to load the very first level. - Abundance of QTEs. Willem: Thief 2 has machines but... that's all. The rest is entirely human with the exception of the Woodsie beasts in Trail of Blood and some undead here and there. This makes mission variety suffer a lot compared to Thief 1 that was all over the place, in a good way. "The AI is stupid as fuck, worse than in the originals, and can either be omniscient of oblivious, but there is no middle ground. Is it too much to ask for a better AI 16 years after the first game?"
Any specifics on this? "stupid as fuck" doesn't tell me much. What do they do that's wrong? That's pretty funny. I was crying with laughter at around 15mins when he gets to the final level and that scene where he dies and has a rampage over it.
I just don't understand why developers are still doing QTE's in games. Are many developers these days not real gamers? I just don't understand why developers are still doing QTE's in games. Are many developers these days not real gamers?
Isn't it a cost thing? Must cheaper to make a cinematic that requires you to hit a few buttons to decide which of the 2 ending clips play rather than coding up some monster attacks and getting it tested. Too desperately try-hard for me. Inflection and expressions nearly cringed me to death.
Are many developers these days not real gamers?
Developers themselves are, but it's rare that the people in charge play games. Time constraints. Nobody really WANTS to use QTEs but the game is behind and we're not going to ship on time and
That's a great review. I found myself agreeing almost 100% with it.
The learning WALL at the start of the game is what put me off the first time I tried the game. I didn't have a clue how the game worked. When I played it on stream I took the time to read the wiki and ov. chat helped a lot too and it turned into a fantastic game and one of my favourite 3rd person action games ever. Pumped for DS2 QTE exists because it lets you script a fantasy of player interaction that you can't possibly do as regular gameplay.
Done well and sparingly, it's not the most terrible thing to happen in games... but it's been overdone to death by now and more often than not it's in lieu of gameplay instead of supplementing it. Concerning AI:
- They seem to be oblivious to everything that's above their heads, even if you're in broad daylight. - They lose your trail very easily. - At one point I replicated something I saw on a stream: I fought a guard in the brothel mission next to a courtesan and a client, and both of them didn't care at all. What's worse is that the guards downstairs didn't hear a thing. In the originals even the tiniest disturbance could make the whole houseguard come after you. Played through Darksiders now (and reviewed it). Pretty cool game, 8/10. Wicked characters, story, epic large design. Just the puzzles ruined it a bit. Shame the studio closed down because they were capable of doing some really great games.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/05/wot-i-think-tower-of-guns
Tower of Guns is very silly and it�s mostly very enjoyable as well, playing out like a blended distillation of old-school FPS systems and the current obsession with procedural everything. The most important piece of advice, as in Quake or UT deathmatch, is to keep moving at all times I am listening. There�s a toybox full of arena designs, varying from walkways hanging over lava or infinite drops, to complex structures dotted with teleporters and boost pads. Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber. I am no longer listening. getting all giddy about how this game is like old school fps games. As someone who plays old school fps games all the time I have to think that maybe a lot of journalists play so many of these shitty new games they have forgotten what an old school fps game feels like to play.
It's sad really. Tower of guns looks ok but it's a procedurally first person bullet hell game. It has more in common with ikaruga than doom. I think after Half-Life came out everyone's memory of what games were like before that kind of warped into this image of "they didn't know any of the rules we have now so everything must have been shit and we just didn't know it." Rather than inhabit a world where it was okay for the level designer to directly use the level to interact with the player, apparently all anyone remembers Doom actually doing is seal you in a giant thoughtless arena, lock the doors, and spawn guys until it was time to open the doors again and let you into the next, bigger arena.
Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once? Quake only did it once IIRC, in that long slow elevator ride to hell (so it didn't even have locked doors, just a natural timer).
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