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Spare-Flair
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2003
- Messages
- 7,471
I played the demo tonight. It's simply god awful.
I can't begin to explain the things wrong with it but it is basically the epitome of everything that is wrong with modern gaming lumped into one package for me.
Quick time events are one of the worst things ever invented for games and this game is basically just an interactive movie where everything you do is a quicktime event where the buttons you have to press have nothing to do with the actions that you are doing but are there just randomly inserted to make it feel like a game. If you want to pick up something from a table? Good luck, you have to do a hadoken on the analog stick before the timer runs out. Want to ask another character something something? Press square when the icon briefly flashes. Want to climb a hill? Press up for your left foot, hold R1 for your right foot, then press triangle for your left foot, push down the right analog stick for your right foot, press square for your left foot, do a hadoken with the d-pad, etc.
I should have know what was in store for me when the first minutes were spent fumbling with trying to do some quick time button combinations to get my guy to get his inhaler out of his pocket and to put it into his mouth.
Really? Are you serious? Ashtma Inhaler Simulator, the Game?
It's absolute garbage. This kind of game could have been made in 1980 with laserdisc technology.
The worst part that spoiled my immersion and suspension of disbelief however, is that this is supposed to be some sort of film noir game in a dark slummy modern setting...but when you play the FBI officer to do "detective work", he somehow has these CSI magic alien sunglasses from the 29th century. He puts them on suddenly he has nightvision, he sees all these ugly orange circles on everything (done in the CSI style of fake computer GUIs with random text and numbers flying everywhere) and these glasses allow him to "see" DNA, it allows him to "see" individual atoms and molecules and do organic chemstry and lab work all just by looking at crime scenes. Pollen will glow neon yellow, blood will glow radioactive green. Footprints will light up like a Christmas tree. He can look at something and determine it's chemical composition and mass. I can just imagine him looking at a photo and going "enhance, enhance, enhance, to create detail that didn't originally exist. It's totally ridiculous and does not belong in this kind of game at all.
Another bad thing about this game is that it's all trying to be stylistic and cinematic to the point where it's trying too hard. In cinematography there's this thing called average length of shot. That's how long the camera stays on something before it cuts away to another angle or another scene. It's generally considered bad form to have quick cut after quick cut ad infinitum for your entire movie and this game does it all. It changes camera angles on you every couple seconds to try to be all stylistic and dramatic but all it does is induce a headache. You are walking forward and all of a sudden the camera will be to your left and you get disoriented to what direction you were going, then it cuts to another character, then it cuts to behind you at an angle, then it cuts to the ground. It's awful.
What this game really should have been is 1997's Westwood Studio's Blade Runner mixed with one of the 1990s EA Sherlock Holmes games but instead it's just Dragon's Lair with probably 10,000 quick time events making up the entirety of the gameplay. I swear, with most of these hyped up modern console games, these developers just want to make movies instead of good games (see Infinity Ward).
I can't begin to explain the things wrong with it but it is basically the epitome of everything that is wrong with modern gaming lumped into one package for me.
Quick time events are one of the worst things ever invented for games and this game is basically just an interactive movie where everything you do is a quicktime event where the buttons you have to press have nothing to do with the actions that you are doing but are there just randomly inserted to make it feel like a game. If you want to pick up something from a table? Good luck, you have to do a hadoken on the analog stick before the timer runs out. Want to ask another character something something? Press square when the icon briefly flashes. Want to climb a hill? Press up for your left foot, hold R1 for your right foot, then press triangle for your left foot, push down the right analog stick for your right foot, press square for your left foot, do a hadoken with the d-pad, etc.
I should have know what was in store for me when the first minutes were spent fumbling with trying to do some quick time button combinations to get my guy to get his inhaler out of his pocket and to put it into his mouth.
Really? Are you serious? Ashtma Inhaler Simulator, the Game?
It's absolute garbage. This kind of game could have been made in 1980 with laserdisc technology.
The worst part that spoiled my immersion and suspension of disbelief however, is that this is supposed to be some sort of film noir game in a dark slummy modern setting...but when you play the FBI officer to do "detective work", he somehow has these CSI magic alien sunglasses from the 29th century. He puts them on suddenly he has nightvision, he sees all these ugly orange circles on everything (done in the CSI style of fake computer GUIs with random text and numbers flying everywhere) and these glasses allow him to "see" DNA, it allows him to "see" individual atoms and molecules and do organic chemstry and lab work all just by looking at crime scenes. Pollen will glow neon yellow, blood will glow radioactive green. Footprints will light up like a Christmas tree. He can look at something and determine it's chemical composition and mass. I can just imagine him looking at a photo and going "enhance, enhance, enhance, to create detail that didn't originally exist. It's totally ridiculous and does not belong in this kind of game at all.
Another bad thing about this game is that it's all trying to be stylistic and cinematic to the point where it's trying too hard. In cinematography there's this thing called average length of shot. That's how long the camera stays on something before it cuts away to another angle or another scene. It's generally considered bad form to have quick cut after quick cut ad infinitum for your entire movie and this game does it all. It changes camera angles on you every couple seconds to try to be all stylistic and dramatic but all it does is induce a headache. You are walking forward and all of a sudden the camera will be to your left and you get disoriented to what direction you were going, then it cuts to another character, then it cuts to behind you at an angle, then it cuts to the ground. It's awful.
What this game really should have been is 1997's Westwood Studio's Blade Runner mixed with one of the 1990s EA Sherlock Holmes games but instead it's just Dragon's Lair with probably 10,000 quick time events making up the entirety of the gameplay. I swear, with most of these hyped up modern console games, these developers just want to make movies instead of good games (see Infinity Ward).
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