Since I don't feel I can adequately sum up the epic fail of the storytelling in the game through text, I figured I'd do a Let's Play now that my FRAPs is working correctly.
It will be up on Youtube soon :)
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Wednesday, 10 August 2011
When Storytelling Fails: "Kane and Lynch: Dead Men"
*Contains spoilers*
So I was at PC World today and saw Kane and Lynch priced at a very tasty £2.98. I happily snapped it up, figuring even if it was total turd such a low price tag would make it at least a good few hours of entertainment.
I've played about 2 hours (which, seeing the ridiculous speed with which the missions are flying by, seems to be about half the game) and it's such a frustrating experience.
Good things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters.
- A gritty feel to the plot.
- Continuous action.
- Reasonably solid gameplay.
- Some gorgeous level design on occasion.
Bad things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters
- The plot is so dark at times that it feels like it could really do with some lightening up. It's almost oppressively depressing.
- Some shitty level design. The gorgeous levels are about balanced out with ones that seem pretty bland and uninteresting.
- Swearing. Gritty or not, an F-bomb gets dropped several times a sentence sometimes. It frequently feels over the top, rather than appropriate.
- The story is ridiculously under explained at times (see below).
- The game seems very, very short so far.
An example of the annoyances: The Tokyo Nightclub level blew me away. Fantastic use of lighting and music to create an awesome feeling level - it was like the "Club Scene" in Collateral.
However, the level lasted about 5 minutes. Rather than really exploit the cool feeling you get when taking down a guard quietly near the dancefloor and have a proper stealthy infiltration section that goes on for a while, the developers inexplicably decide to let the player walk through the level for a very short time before it essentially turns into your typical shooting gallery.
Not to mention the music stops and the dancers all run off. It was real fun just walking through a set of empty rooms shooting people (The sarcasm here is so heavy it's almost dripping off of my fangs!)
-------------------------------------------
SO! THE STORY!
The story takes the biscuit for the most irritating part of the game thus far.
Kane and Lynch has a really interesting setup. Kane is a middle aged, haggard-looking prison inmate on Death Row for apparently doing Some Really Bad Stuff™. He is wracked with guilt over his criminality, and writes a regretful letter to his daughter at the beginning of the game.
Lynch is a fellow prisoner. He's a wild-haired, scowling man with a rather scary beard. It's gradually revealed that underneath the beard is positively terrifying - he suffers from severe psychosis. Every now and then he morphs into an absolute raving maniac, kept in check only by popping some rather ineffective pills. Half the time he runs out of his medication, or forgets to take it.
Lynch bails Kane out of his appointment with death, and goes on to form an uneasy partnership with him. Kane must apparently get some stuff he "stole" for his old "friends" - though they have his family hostage as leverage and plan to kill him for his past transgression.
Lynch hides his illness from Kane and all seems to be well - until, in the middle of a heist, he suddenly snaps and executes nearly all the civilians in the bank, to Kane's astonished horror. Lynch himself wails with despair when Kane later informs him of his mass-slaughter, which apparently he had no control over.
This very interesting concept is totally squandered with a meandering, stupid plot that makes less and less sense as the game goes on.
The game seems to act like it's the middle movie of a trilogy, rather than a debut videogame. Most characters get about 2 seconds of introduction, then seem to disappear just as fast and the setting changes as if the producers were on crack.
Take the main villains: Ketamoto (at least, I think that was his name o_0) and "The7", which are apparently Kane's old group. I say apparently, because I have no clue whether I'm right there or not - the game gives an appallingly crap amount of background info. It would seem that Ketamoto is a crime boss in Japan - and Kane used to know him. However, that's all we learn. Absolutely jack is explained other than that. We don't even know who The7 are or what they do.
There's a difference between creating an air of mystery and an air of "What the shit is happening?". K&L usually gets the latter vibe.
I've played the whole game without skipping cutscenes thus far, and I have literally no idea what the hell is going on. One minute you're robbing a bank for an item which is not actually identified (lolwut?), then you're in Tokyo randomly attacking a nightclub because "That old fucker is there" (No joke, that's literally the only reason you fly to Tokyo and start shooting - because some old guy who Kane doesn't even mention previously is there. Or something. Maybe he just shoots up Tokyo for a laugh?)
Then you're back in the US, then you're in Tokyo again, then someone's dead so you have to bust into a prison (?!), then you're somewhere else. Lynch spends half the time asking WTF is going on, and rather than Kane dickishly telling him to shut up, we wish he'd fucking tell us as well.
Remember how I mentioned the moral ambiguity as both a negative and a positive? There's a reason for that - the characters are total arseholes at times. Both of them.
They almost did too good a job of making them tortured souls. Kane neglects his family completely, and ends up getting them killed. He leaves his heist buddies to die because he apparently can't be fucked to help them out of a burning van. He kidnaps Ketamoto's daughter for the vaguest of reasons (the guy apparently has something he needs, goodness knows what) and then stupidly leaves her with Lynch, despite his condition. She ends up dead, naturally.
What a hero!
Lynch on the other hand is rumoured to have murdered his own wife in one of his psycho black outs. This is hinted very strongly in a certain loading screen, where he apparently breaks down after "discovering" what he may or may not have done. In the present, he spends most of his time screwing up the plan by shooting innocents and butchering people they're meant to be protecting.
The areas in which they really could have deepened the bond between the characters were really missed, which I think is where the narrative drops the ball the most.
So far, the saddest scene in the game has been when Kane's wife was murdered by The7 for his failure to complete the task they gave him. They said they would at least let him talk to her before their collective deaths, but the thug in charge of the deed didn't even give him that opportunity. This causes Kane to go berserk and beat his would-be killer to death with a shovel.
Even the bloodthirsty Lynch is shocked by these events, and he leaps to Kane's aid without any of his normal bitching. Wow, I thought - perhaps the macho "Shut up", "No, you shut up" shit is finally over, and the devs will now add a stronger bond between the characters?
Err, no. Instead we get Kane grieving over the newly dug grave of his wife, Lynch starting to sympathise and then Kane being a total wanker and viciously brushing him off. Nice going with the character development!
I think if I were a wanted man, my wife had just died, my daughter was in terrible danger and I had no one I could count on, I'd be a little more thankful for the one guy who also lost his wife and got backstabbed by the same people. In this game, apparently such human traits are not present in the characters.
I shall play on tomorrow, but damn. The game really could have been neat, if there had actually been some thought put into the progression of things.
So I was at PC World today and saw Kane and Lynch priced at a very tasty £2.98. I happily snapped it up, figuring even if it was total turd such a low price tag would make it at least a good few hours of entertainment.
I've played about 2 hours (which, seeing the ridiculous speed with which the missions are flying by, seems to be about half the game) and it's such a frustrating experience.
Good things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters.
- A gritty feel to the plot.
- Continuous action.
- Reasonably solid gameplay.
- Some gorgeous level design on occasion.
Bad things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters
- The plot is so dark at times that it feels like it could really do with some lightening up. It's almost oppressively depressing.
- Some shitty level design. The gorgeous levels are about balanced out with ones that seem pretty bland and uninteresting.
- Swearing. Gritty or not, an F-bomb gets dropped several times a sentence sometimes. It frequently feels over the top, rather than appropriate.
- The story is ridiculously under explained at times (see below).
- The game seems very, very short so far.
An example of the annoyances: The Tokyo Nightclub level blew me away. Fantastic use of lighting and music to create an awesome feeling level - it was like the "Club Scene" in Collateral.
However, the level lasted about 5 minutes. Rather than really exploit the cool feeling you get when taking down a guard quietly near the dancefloor and have a proper stealthy infiltration section that goes on for a while, the developers inexplicably decide to let the player walk through the level for a very short time before it essentially turns into your typical shooting gallery.
Not to mention the music stops and the dancers all run off. It was real fun just walking through a set of empty rooms shooting people (The sarcasm here is so heavy it's almost dripping off of my fangs!)
-------------------------------------------
SO! THE STORY!
The story takes the biscuit for the most irritating part of the game thus far.
Kane and Lynch has a really interesting setup. Kane is a middle aged, haggard-looking prison inmate on Death Row for apparently doing Some Really Bad Stuff™. He is wracked with guilt over his criminality, and writes a regretful letter to his daughter at the beginning of the game.
Lynch is a fellow prisoner. He's a wild-haired, scowling man with a rather scary beard. It's gradually revealed that underneath the beard is positively terrifying - he suffers from severe psychosis. Every now and then he morphs into an absolute raving maniac, kept in check only by popping some rather ineffective pills. Half the time he runs out of his medication, or forgets to take it.
Lynch bails Kane out of his appointment with death, and goes on to form an uneasy partnership with him. Kane must apparently get some stuff he "stole" for his old "friends" - though they have his family hostage as leverage and plan to kill him for his past transgression.
Lynch hides his illness from Kane and all seems to be well - until, in the middle of a heist, he suddenly snaps and executes nearly all the civilians in the bank, to Kane's astonished horror. Lynch himself wails with despair when Kane later informs him of his mass-slaughter, which apparently he had no control over.
This very interesting concept is totally squandered with a meandering, stupid plot that makes less and less sense as the game goes on.
The game seems to act like it's the middle movie of a trilogy, rather than a debut videogame. Most characters get about 2 seconds of introduction, then seem to disappear just as fast and the setting changes as if the producers were on crack.
Take the main villains: Ketamoto (at least, I think that was his name o_0) and "The7", which are apparently Kane's old group. I say apparently, because I have no clue whether I'm right there or not - the game gives an appallingly crap amount of background info. It would seem that Ketamoto is a crime boss in Japan - and Kane used to know him. However, that's all we learn. Absolutely jack is explained other than that. We don't even know who The7 are or what they do.
There's a difference between creating an air of mystery and an air of "What the shit is happening?". K&L usually gets the latter vibe.
I've played the whole game without skipping cutscenes thus far, and I have literally no idea what the hell is going on. One minute you're robbing a bank for an item which is not actually identified (lolwut?), then you're in Tokyo randomly attacking a nightclub because "That old fucker is there" (No joke, that's literally the only reason you fly to Tokyo and start shooting - because some old guy who Kane doesn't even mention previously is there. Or something. Maybe he just shoots up Tokyo for a laugh?)
Then you're back in the US, then you're in Tokyo again, then someone's dead so you have to bust into a prison (?!), then you're somewhere else. Lynch spends half the time asking WTF is going on, and rather than Kane dickishly telling him to shut up, we wish he'd fucking tell us as well.
Remember how I mentioned the moral ambiguity as both a negative and a positive? There's a reason for that - the characters are total arseholes at times. Both of them.
They almost did too good a job of making them tortured souls. Kane neglects his family completely, and ends up getting them killed. He leaves his heist buddies to die because he apparently can't be fucked to help them out of a burning van. He kidnaps Ketamoto's daughter for the vaguest of reasons (the guy apparently has something he needs, goodness knows what) and then stupidly leaves her with Lynch, despite his condition. She ends up dead, naturally.
What a hero!
Lynch on the other hand is rumoured to have murdered his own wife in one of his psycho black outs. This is hinted very strongly in a certain loading screen, where he apparently breaks down after "discovering" what he may or may not have done. In the present, he spends most of his time screwing up the plan by shooting innocents and butchering people they're meant to be protecting.
The areas in which they really could have deepened the bond between the characters were really missed, which I think is where the narrative drops the ball the most.
So far, the saddest scene in the game has been when Kane's wife was murdered by The7 for his failure to complete the task they gave him. They said they would at least let him talk to her before their collective deaths, but the thug in charge of the deed didn't even give him that opportunity. This causes Kane to go berserk and beat his would-be killer to death with a shovel.
Even the bloodthirsty Lynch is shocked by these events, and he leaps to Kane's aid without any of his normal bitching. Wow, I thought - perhaps the macho "Shut up", "No, you shut up" shit is finally over, and the devs will now add a stronger bond between the characters?
Err, no. Instead we get Kane grieving over the newly dug grave of his wife, Lynch starting to sympathise and then Kane being a total wanker and viciously brushing him off. Nice going with the character development!
I think if I were a wanted man, my wife had just died, my daughter was in terrible danger and I had no one I could count on, I'd be a little more thankful for the one guy who also lost his wife and got backstabbed by the same people. In this game, apparently such human traits are not present in the characters.
I shall play on tomorrow, but damn. The game really could have been neat, if there had actually been some thought put into the progression of things.
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Games That Should Have Been Great: "Republic: The Revolution"
So, for what feels like about the 20th time, I reinstalled the old strategy game "Republic: The Revolution" again.
The game is...unique. Set in a fictional ex-Soviet Union splinter state named Novistrana, it allows you to lead a political revolution against a corrupt, dictatorial government.
There are 3 central Ideologies: Influence, Wealth and Force. Depending on the route your party follows, you will acquire new members with different views and form a different type of government over time.
For example - a typical Influence party will primarily use traditional rallies and canvassing to gain support, while a Force based party will perhaps use crime or intimidation to further it's agenda. A Wealthy party will seek to sway minds with flashy ad campaigns and use financial ruin to attack other parties.
It's all very odd and interesting. Unfortunately, that's where Republic starts to fall flat.
It's crammed to the brim with interesting ideas and mechanics, but the gameplay is nothing short of infuriating at times.
Take the way your party progresses: You will take out a "support increasing" action, such as a poster campaign, to increase your support in a city district. However, you can only win support from neutral Proletarians who don't support any party.
This means you have to damage opposition support before you can harvest it for yourself.
This leads to seemingly infinite "Damage Support" actions followed by "Increase Support" actions. Of course, opposing parties are doing this all the time too.
You end up winning one district, then immediately losing the one you held before. As a result, it sometimes feels bloody impossible to actually sway anyone for more than 5 seconds.
Another highly annoying design failure is that you cannot see what your party members can eventually unlock as they level. This means that you'll spend hours meticulously levelling up a guy to find that he is rubbish.
I have a "Political Activist" as one of my party members. At about Level 10, he only has 3 very mundane Influence actions. He can't even damage hostile party support. This essentially means that I have spent several hours in-game using him to unlock useful abilities he doesn't have. To get a useful party member, I have to fire him and hire someone else, meaning all my effort was totally wasted. Very, very annoying.
By contrast, you sometimes get an "uber member" who seems to be able to do everything. This is also useless. Since you need to order your political members to be working together every day (one weakens support, for example, then the other gains you support right after), having one guy able to inexplicably do loads of different stuff is actually counter-intuitive.
The objectives are also frequently ridiculous. My current goal is to "Attain 60% support in 4 areas around the Church District."
I have three methods of gaining support at present - Canvassing, Poster Campaigns and Graffiti. Both Graffiti and Canvassing create Sleaze, which basically means other parties can print it in the paper (they almost inevitably discover your actions), then you get all your support utterly destroyed in that region.
So even my "gain support" actions lose their support about 1 day later. Excellent! Now, I have majority support in all those regions, but that counts for jack. I need exactly 60%.
The local Socialist Union party (AKA the Commies) are a bunch of criminal arsehats, and will vandalise the utter shit out of my territory the minute I convince some of their proles to support me. In return, I must consolidate my support by launching graffii campaigns in their territory and reporting their acts to the papers.
This results in an endless back and forth in the papers of "OMG, COMMIES USING VIOLENCE" followed by "OMG, OTHER GUYS USING GRAFFITI".
As a result, the objective is mind-numbingly annoying to achieve. In addition to all the above, there is some kind of retarded player handicap in effect, or so it seems. Whenever you really start to take some territory, you'll suddenly find all the other parties gang up over one evening to totally rape your support base with a sudden all-out attack of graffiti, vandalism, crime waves and leaflet campaigns.
It sure is fun to work for about 2 hours and then lose it all instantly!
Now, supposedly you can counter this. A dickhead working for the local hoods keeps organising attacks on your supporters? Use your Business contact to drop a massive debt on his head, then laugh as he deserts his party and lives a poor life of ruin.
Supposedly. In actuality, the Weaken Character attacks are piss weak, and you have to perform them about 5 times to get a guy to leave his party. Then they just hire someone else >_> <_<
Of course, while you're ruining his day your guy is also unable to be supporting you with poster campaigns and the like too, meaning other parties will quite happily destroy your own support anyway. Everything requires way too much micromanagement - why should the player be punished merely for knocking on the doors of some proles? It's simply not feasible to constantly keep your actions secret, especially when only one of your 3 guys has that action available.
The end result feels like a game that could have been fantastic (interesting concept, a story that feels fresh and intriguing, an environment that is large and very ambitious) but is really let down by some stupid design choices.
The game is...unique. Set in a fictional ex-Soviet Union splinter state named Novistrana, it allows you to lead a political revolution against a corrupt, dictatorial government.
There are 3 central Ideologies: Influence, Wealth and Force. Depending on the route your party follows, you will acquire new members with different views and form a different type of government over time.
For example - a typical Influence party will primarily use traditional rallies and canvassing to gain support, while a Force based party will perhaps use crime or intimidation to further it's agenda. A Wealthy party will seek to sway minds with flashy ad campaigns and use financial ruin to attack other parties.
It's all very odd and interesting. Unfortunately, that's where Republic starts to fall flat.
It's crammed to the brim with interesting ideas and mechanics, but the gameplay is nothing short of infuriating at times.
Take the way your party progresses: You will take out a "support increasing" action, such as a poster campaign, to increase your support in a city district. However, you can only win support from neutral Proletarians who don't support any party.
This means you have to damage opposition support before you can harvest it for yourself.
This leads to seemingly infinite "Damage Support" actions followed by "Increase Support" actions. Of course, opposing parties are doing this all the time too.
You end up winning one district, then immediately losing the one you held before. As a result, it sometimes feels bloody impossible to actually sway anyone for more than 5 seconds.
Another highly annoying design failure is that you cannot see what your party members can eventually unlock as they level. This means that you'll spend hours meticulously levelling up a guy to find that he is rubbish.
I have a "Political Activist" as one of my party members. At about Level 10, he only has 3 very mundane Influence actions. He can't even damage hostile party support. This essentially means that I have spent several hours in-game using him to unlock useful abilities he doesn't have. To get a useful party member, I have to fire him and hire someone else, meaning all my effort was totally wasted. Very, very annoying.
By contrast, you sometimes get an "uber member" who seems to be able to do everything. This is also useless. Since you need to order your political members to be working together every day (one weakens support, for example, then the other gains you support right after), having one guy able to inexplicably do loads of different stuff is actually counter-intuitive.
The objectives are also frequently ridiculous. My current goal is to "Attain 60% support in 4 areas around the Church District."
I have three methods of gaining support at present - Canvassing, Poster Campaigns and Graffiti. Both Graffiti and Canvassing create Sleaze, which basically means other parties can print it in the paper (they almost inevitably discover your actions), then you get all your support utterly destroyed in that region.
So even my "gain support" actions lose their support about 1 day later. Excellent! Now, I have majority support in all those regions, but that counts for jack. I need exactly 60%.
The local Socialist Union party (AKA the Commies) are a bunch of criminal arsehats, and will vandalise the utter shit out of my territory the minute I convince some of their proles to support me. In return, I must consolidate my support by launching graffii campaigns in their territory and reporting their acts to the papers.
This results in an endless back and forth in the papers of "OMG, COMMIES USING VIOLENCE" followed by "OMG, OTHER GUYS USING GRAFFITI".
As a result, the objective is mind-numbingly annoying to achieve. In addition to all the above, there is some kind of retarded player handicap in effect, or so it seems. Whenever you really start to take some territory, you'll suddenly find all the other parties gang up over one evening to totally rape your support base with a sudden all-out attack of graffiti, vandalism, crime waves and leaflet campaigns.
It sure is fun to work for about 2 hours and then lose it all instantly!
Now, supposedly you can counter this. A dickhead working for the local hoods keeps organising attacks on your supporters? Use your Business contact to drop a massive debt on his head, then laugh as he deserts his party and lives a poor life of ruin.
Supposedly. In actuality, the Weaken Character attacks are piss weak, and you have to perform them about 5 times to get a guy to leave his party. Then they just hire someone else >_> <_<
Of course, while you're ruining his day your guy is also unable to be supporting you with poster campaigns and the like too, meaning other parties will quite happily destroy your own support anyway. Everything requires way too much micromanagement - why should the player be punished merely for knocking on the doors of some proles? It's simply not feasible to constantly keep your actions secret, especially when only one of your 3 guys has that action available.
The end result feels like a game that could have been fantastic (interesting concept, a story that feels fresh and intriguing, an environment that is large and very ambitious) but is really let down by some stupid design choices.
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