Well I'm having no luck with motivating myself to write anything for uni, so I'm gonna write a couple of reviews instead. They're a little late - both games I'm talking about here came out late 2014, so why not ring in the new year with them? I wanna talk about two of my favourite games: Shadow of Mordor, and Far Cry 4.
Now, Ubisoft have come under a lot of fire the past year; among other things, the let-down that was Watch Dogs (which I had a lot of fun with, although it suffers from a lack of replayability) and Assassin's Creed: Unity and the review embargo/glitchful gaming shame which left them red-faced and trying to explain themselves, have taken the wind from their sails following Black Flag. And it's a shame, because Black Flag itself was pretty good (although it very quickly got same-y and dull). Despite the usual AC problems of cluttered landscapes which render Edward Kenway unable to run in a straight line without being attracted to the nearest ladder, the islands I visited were fun and the ship portions were fantastic, there's nothing which makes you feel more powerful than taking down a Hunter.
But, Far Cry 4. I have Far Cry 3 on my computer, but being as it runs too slowly for me to even complete the hunting tutorial - I only have a laptop here, people - it's nice to have something I can play on the Xbox where it'll actually work. The usual mechanics are there and I can't say there's anything new added (except perhaps fortresses? I dunno) but it's an expansive environment and the outposts are a fun challenge for the most part (although the addition of elephants sometimes makes it seem too easy). I have to say, I'm impressed with Ubisoft for doing pretty darn well with this. The branching paths you can take as you go through the quests are good, choosing between Amita and Sabal as they argue their case for each mission, and it feels like you're actually making a difference in each one. The wingsuit is amusing, if difficult to control, and there's a sense of accomplishment when you successfully scale a bell tower or liberate an outpost.
Having put a few hours into the game, I have my reservations. For a start, the map is too cluttered; I found it difficult to figure out where my quests were, at one point having to go into the filter and turn off everything except quests (which took a while - can't I just turn everything off?). And it progresses too quickly - if you're persistent, or actually good at this game (which I, as usual, am not) you can upgrade most of your equipment in a couple of hours and liberate all the outposts in Southern Kyrat in less than eight hours of play. I have a clear map at the moment, no enemy outposts left except for the fortresses, and it hasn't taken too long. The money is too easy to get, too; it didn't take me long at all to unlock the grenade launcher, which is kind of a game-changer when it comes to vehicle combat, and it only took me another hour to get a good sniper rifle and decent attachments for it. And there's that usual Ubisoft problem of replayability - yes, there is a lot to do, but none of it sounds very interesting. Like I said, I've liberated all the outposts. All I want to do now is finish the missions and unlock the second half of the map.
My biggest issue right now is with glitches and gaming satisfaction. I've been killed three times by jumping while walking and I can't figure out how, except that is must be a bug because I jumped maybe three feet down and Ajay just died. I've had one or two other game-breaking bugs; in one notable instance I got stuck between a small cliff and my truck, unable to move because I was fused with the truck's door. But the glitches are nothing compared to the anger I feel towards the animals in Kyrat. Again, I get it: they're random, they're portrayed more realistically. But I don't want to spend my time running from animals when I'm trying to get to my next mission or take another outpost. And dying thanks to animals just doesn't feel satisfying, it makes me want to physically stop playing the game. This isn't because they're a distraction from the main game - lord knows hunting is one my the best things in Far Cry - it's because they feel overpowered. I'm a guy who can shrug off bullet wounds, who can walk through burning grass with barely a scratch. I've been mortared and lived, but a bear hits me twice and I'm dead? Often it's out of nowhere too - the animals have a habit of inadvertently hiding behind crates and over hilltops where they can't be seen but can be heard, creeping up the paranoia. And the inability of practically any gun to stop a predator before it can get its two hits in is just infuriating. Of course, it's a good mechanism to force the players to use a gun slot to carry a shotgun in case bears/honey badgers, but I should be able to at least kill the animals attacking me. Except rhinos. You get a free pass on rhinos, though - they're vicious, even when you're in a car, and that viciousness is fun.
Far Cry 4 is a decent game by Ubisoft, but it's marred by their usual cramming in of extra features, side missions etc. which are often dull and clutter the map; and it suffers from a few bugs which leave you trapped or dead, repeatedly. Oh yeah, and tone down the animals.
I talked about Assassin's Creed earlier, and it seems like a good game to bring back in comparison to Shadow of Mordor. Both are similar in terms of game mechanics - AC's Eagle Points are replaced by Forge Towers, and the parkour and jumping is relegated to one button rather than two - but Monolith seem to have gone the Titanfall route and stripped it out, simplifying it. There are a whole lot fewer obstacles for Talion to get confused by when he's running and leaping about the place, and the 'a' button on my controller is used mainly for outrunning orcs when I'm overwhelmed, or for scaling cliff faces while stealthing around an orc camp. You still have a sort of Eagle Vision, too, but you aren't limited to finding your goal by line-of-sight - often you're searching for an orc captain, and it handily lets you zoom in on their position when you're in their area.
That's the first thing I'm going to talk about. The first thing on the in-game menu is "Sauron's Army" and it's the most interesting feature of the game. It shows you all the orc captains, who command units of orcs and often have followers around them. Being a human, and thus an enemy of the orcs, you spend most of your free time killing these captains. Each captain is unique, a character in their own right, and they feel real, making remarks when they kill you, or if you come back from the dead to attack them again. And with each character comes a set of strengths and weaknesses which you can - and often must - take advantage of to dispatch them. Some become bodyguards to the even more powerful and daunting warchiefs - your job is to kill them, cutting off the head of Sauron's army!
Well actually, no. Your job is to find out why you've been resurrected as a half-human, half-elf-wraith thing with the power to shoot ghost arrows. If this weren't Lord of the Rings, I doubt it would've been made, the premise sounds so ridiculous. But it works, and the missions tend to be fun and useful. The quests are often there only to serve as tutorial, and the cutscenes tend to actually be interesting - the banter between Talion and his elf-wraith co-pilot is often fun, and it serves to bring interesting conflict to the story which would otherwise be about a guy beating up orcs. Several of the quests unlock new abilities for you (the beast hunter quests are optional, but they give you the best abilities so they're well worth it) and it takes you through the game mechanics in interesting and challenging ways, although you're free to pursue them on your own first.
But I did say "Mind-Controlled Orcs" in the title, so I should probably talk about that. One of your wraith powers, late in the game, is the ability to "brand" orcs, allying them to you. They'll go about their business like normal, totally ignoring you unless you attack orcs nearby or instruct them to fight, at which point they'll turn on their brothers. It gets interesting when you throw a captain into the mix - if you can brand them (and I do, frequently - one thing I love about SoM is that I can actually play it) you'll have a captain under your control. You can then set them on the other captains, get them into a warchief's good books, and then betray them. If you're fast enough, you can grab the warchiefs too and brand them, with the help of branded bodyguards. It's...interesting to hear Talion and elf-wraith (he has an actual name, but it's elven so I can't remember it) talking about it, I'm maybe halfway through the campaign and I think it could go to interesting places if they keep going with their divergent views. But yeah, branding good!
Okay, now for the bad, and it rests more on the Xbox One than on the game. There's a certain lack of responsiveness to some of the controls in the middle of a fight - sometimes you don't dodge or sometimes you don't counter an attack, and it's down to the controller and the console more than the game. There seems to be a delay between the two, which is irritating, but like I say that's a controller thing and it may be down to my wi-fi. And despite the streamlining sometimes the parkour still feels a bit janky. I also want the orcs to be more difficult - their cone of vision is an acute angle, apparently, it's too easy to sneak up on them, and it takes them slightly too long to realise you're a threat. If you can run up to one head-on and still stealth kill them, they're too slow, in my opinion. Oh, and another animal problems - the caragors (sort of worgs but not? Why couldn't they just have worgs?) are vicious and deadly, and dodging them with the controller delay is often impossible. But that aside, it's a well-balanced game in terms of combat and levelling, the characters and story are fun, and it's a game I like to keep playing, purely because the branding is so much fun, as is the elf-shot. It doesn't do the Watch Dogs thing of trading out the stealth as soon as you use it, and it doesn't do the Ubisoft-in-general thing of cramming every single idea they had into the game. It's an exciting game, and half the time I throw myself into groups of orcs simply to have a big fight. You can mix it up, and that makes it fun, and the levelling system means that by the time you're halfway through the game you can curb-stomp the low-level captains while the higher-tier orcs present a decent challenge.
It was a tough call, despite Far Cry 4's glitches and random animal attacks - animal attacks which, until the halfway mark, SoM suffers from just as much - and despite SoM's controller problems (which Far Cry 4 doesn't seem to have an issue with, but then it relies less on precision-timing and more on waiting for the right moment). Both are good games with their own virtues, good game mechanics, and often similar goals; you could compare Far Cry 4's bell towers to the SoM Forge Towers, and killing captains is in many ways reminiscent of liberating outposts.
But in a battle between the two, Shadow of Mordor takes it, for two reasons. In the first place, the character - Talion is interesting, his internal conflict with the wraith who gives him his powers makes me want to play on in the story, and the orcs you've got to kill are quirky and interesting too. In comparison, Ajay Ghale is a bit too much of an everyman, and we have no background to him to make me believe he can do all the things he does, or to motivate him to fight for the Golden Path. And while the conflict between Amita and Sabal is interesting, it's barely present unless they have a mission for you and they're both very dull characters; Sabal is given focus since he saves you in the beginning, and he's just too much of a goody-goody, and Amita feels like she's there only to serve as a foil to Sabal.
In the second place, the actual gameplay. Far Cry 4 is good tactically, liberating outposts is a challenge and you have so many different ways to approach it, but there's very little beside the gun mechanics and Shadow of Mordor does it better with its own bow, on top of a good general-combat system, stealth mechanics and a power-play chess game of orc-against-orc. It gives you more to work with while taking out the clutter, and that makes it a better game. They're two great games, but the one you'll want to keep playing is Shadow of Mordor.
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