'Dishonored 2' Review

Dishonored 2 review (PC version)

By Trevor Whalen

            Dishonored 2 is Arkane Studios’ follow up to their 2012 release Dishonored, and similarly is an immersive, first-person game that allows for a stealth approach, an action approach, or something in between. Like the original, it is a spiritual successor to the classic PC games Thief and Deus Ex, and it’s a success. Dishonored 2 is a really good game with great level design, beautiful visuals, and multifaceted, enjoyable gameplay.

            The game begins in Dunwall, the industrial, whaling-centric city from the first game. Empress Emily Kaldwin (daughter of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, assassinated in the first game) takes to the throne room in Dunwall Tower with her “Royal Protector”, Corvo Attano (the protagonist from the first game). The occasion is the memorial for the day Emily’s mother was killed. An entourage from Serkonos, the island country to the south of Dunwall, marches into the throne room. Royal Protector Corvo had known about this visit, but he had not authorized the surprise gifts it bore: a few “clockwork soldiers” and a Delilah Copperspoon, someone claiming to be Emily’s aunt and the rightful heir to Emily’s throne. In a coupe, Delilah, aided by her magical abilities, takes power. At this hectic point, you choose to play as either Emily or Corvo, and are imprisoned in Dunwall tower. The first mission of the game is escaping the tower and going on the run.

One of the first views from the game looks out over the cloudy Dunwall skyline.

 

After the Dunwall prelude, most of the game takes place in Karnaca, the capital city of Serkonos. (Dunwall is the capital of Gristol, the larger island nation north of Serkonos. The two island nations are part of the game’s fictional “Empire of the Isles”.) Karnaca is warmer than Dunwall, and while Dunwall’s economy centers on whaling, Karnaca’s centers on silver mining. The theme of mining runs throughout Dishonored 2’s story. One mission takes place in Karnaca’s “Dust District”, the area just outside the mines. Karnaca also has problems with “blood flies”, annoying maggots who infest some of the games’ buildings with their large nests. Destroying them with flame (via flammable liquids or incendiary bolts from your crossbow) may reward you with items and valuables tucked away behind where they were nesting.

Karnaca in the day.

Karnaca in the evening.

 

            While playing through the game as either Emily or Corvo, you may exploit the game’s powers and items or adopt a minimalist approach. I played the game as a stealth game, a method by which I think one can experience more of the game’s details, but an action approach is an option, as is an action and stealth hybrid approach.

I played as Emily Kaldwin, who has slightly different powers from Corvo. Her “Far Reach” ability is similar to Corvo’s “Blink” as it transports players quickly from one area to another within a reasonably close distance. Emily’s power has her pull herself very quickly, whereas Corvo’s power instantly transports him. Far Reach is the main power I used as I traversed the rooftops and ledges of each area or shot out of sight into cover just as a guard spied me. I ignored the other powers except for late-game uses of “Dark Vision” (an ability that allows you to see AI and security systems through walls) and “Shadow Walk” (an ability that allows you to sink into the ground as a shadow for a time and better sneak around). Early in the game, you can even choose to play with no powers available to you.

            If you choose to play with powers, you can unlock and upgrade them by using Rune Stones. Emily’s Far Reach ability may be upgraded to pull items and people toward you. Passive abilities, that may allow you to jump higher or to gain more health from eating food, can be activated by using Bone Charms. Both Rune Stones and Bone Charms lie throughout each level for you to find. They are in addition to other collectibles like blue prints for upgrades to your items, weapons, and self, and all the basic loot (coins, valuable trinkets, etc.). If you like exploring every nook and cranny and picking up collectibles, Dishonored 2 has a lot in store for you. The more you put into the game, the more you will get out of it. I explored and collected, and was satisfied by how much the game had to offer.

The collectibles each mission has. I didn't do too bad.

            Like in the first game, each mission has a target person for you to dispose of. In Dishonored 2, the goal is to eliminate Delilah’s inner circle of powerful friends in Karnaca. You may either kill each person or get rid of them in a “non-lethal” way. Discovering the non-lethal method of disposing a target requires a little more work, but the alternative is easily progressing straight to the target and killing them. Only one mission, an early one, offers real conflict, even for stealthy players, in choosing whether or not to kill the target or take the person out non-lethally. In most missions, the non-lethal path is usually accessible and interesting enough that choosing it is preferable to choosing a simple assassination. Going the non-lethal route leads to less overall “Chaos”, as does opting not to kill AIs. Less “Chaos” leads to a better ending, and the game tells you such early on. I’d prefer that this remain secret, but Dishonored 2 lets you know up front that if you kill more, you will earn a worse ending.

Taking down Clockwork Soldiers (like the one pictured above) won't add to your Chaos level.

 

            You can save the lives of average NPCs as well. Dishonored 2 has a few scripted scenes where members of the guard or of other in-game factions are threatening a civilian’s life. Initially I began only watching these moments, as if they were typical scripted sequences that I shouldn’t mess with. To my surprise, and after thinking, “Why not?” I once fired a sleep dart at one of the NPCs threatening another’s life. Doing so saved the potential victim. I noticed that the game has achievements for such life-saving acts. This ability to meddle in what might otherwise seem set-in-stone scripted sequences is another part of Dishonored 2’s fluidity.

The results for how hostile or stealthy you were. I came up a bit short.

 

            The level design in Dishonored 2 is excellent. The missions each provide you multiple pathways to any destination, several areas to explore, and room for trial and error. The latter depends on your method of play. The more perfectionist and experimental you are, the more you may fail and have to re-attempt any given feat. You will encounter multiple pathways because each area has ways to progress that are below or above street level. I usually took the higher road of rooftops, balconies and street lamps, as on ground level, even creeping about, you can be detected by NPCs frequently.

            The level design inspires through the whole game not just because the levels themselves are well built, but also because there is variety in the gameplay, structure, and purpose of the missions. Though each mission does ultimately center on a large structure you must infiltrate, these structures vary in ways that affect your progression in unexpected ways. One mission, the “Clockwork Mansion”, centers on a house with walls and floors that change via buttons on panels you find. Another mission, late in the game, has a fun and clever component that gives you a break from the standard gameplay. This interesting component could be the core of an entire game. Variety in missions pairs with fantastic level design as Dishonored 2’s greatest strengths.

 

            Intricate design is complemented by beautiful visuals. The art styles and the architectural designs are well realized and at times breathtaking. The designers wanted the Void Engine to enable graphics that look like a painting in motion, and it shows. I played on PC with the settings a mixture of Medium, High and Very High (the range goes up to Ultra), and it looked beautiful.

There are beautiful views at just about every corner.

 

The game is not void of technical issues, however. I played after early patches had been applied, with an Intel i7 6700 at 3.4 GHz, an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 with 6GB of onboard memory, and 16 GIGs of RAM. Though these are the recommended system requirements, and I was not playing with every setting on ‘Very High’ or ‘Ultra’, I experienced severe frame rate drops throughout. This was not so frequent as to be game breaking, but it is clear Dishonored 2 was optimized for consoles, not for PC. Recent patches have fixed most of the problems that plagued the early release, and the many graphics settings, including a much-loved-by-me field of view slider, make Dishonored 2 better than most. Still, it isn’t ideal conditions if anyone with a standard high-end PC can experience such graphical hiccups.

            The audio design, like the visual design, is solid work hampered by some technical faults. The voice acting is excellent throughout. The cast includes Stephen Russell (Corvo Attano) and Terri Brosius (some NPC lines), both Thief alums. Like in the first Dishonored and the Thief games, guards and other AI will mutter lines to themselves as they patrol. These add humor and charm to the game as you sneak by, and can make you feel guilty about choosing to kill, or even render unconscious, AI. How could you murder or strangle a guard who has just conversed with his stomach about dinner coming soon?

The musical style does not diverge from the original’s and, while there’s nothing particularly memorable, it complements the atmosphere, and there are several ambient noise effects that took me back to moments playing the Thief games. I did experience some technical flaws with the audio in the last few levels, though. A few scenes of people dancing and singing would seem mute until I passed a specific threshold close by, at which the noise would sound clear. Once I stepped back across this metaphorical threshold, the scene went back to being mute. Sometimes just turning towards and away from such a scene produced the same effect. I also experienced this same phenomenon with NPCs walking and chatting in the last couple of missions. At one point I received a mission note informing me I had overheard a conversation detailing where a certain key was—when I had heard no such conversation at all. These minor hiccups don’t make the game unplayable, and were the exception to the rule of solid sound design, but I did encounter them.

Part of a ruined home you will explore at one point.

 

             These occasional glitches with visual and sound design don’t ruin the otherwise very enjoyable and satisfying experience of playing Dishonored 2. The game is a successful effort from Arkane. Its level design and gameplay options make it a great game for anyone, and played as a stealth game it is a very special gift for old-time Thief fans. If you want to be immersed in an atmospheric game that rewards ingenuity and exploration, purchase and play Dishonored 2.

~My score: 4/5

+Excellent level design.

+Good visuals.

+Fun, multifaceted gameplay that allows for experimentation.

-Some technical issues with framerate and audio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the The Witcher III's Blood and Wine DLC

            The Witcher III is my favorite game of 2015, and Blood and Wine is my favorite gaming experience of 2016 so far. Blood and Wine gave me a new, beautiful land to explore, a solid main quest line, a good crop of side quests, fun characters, a wonderful soundtrack, and more great Geralt dialogue. There are each a good thing that all people need.

 

 

            Blood and Wine’s location, the country of Toussaint, is breathtaking. So much that I hesitate before fast traveling back to the other lands of Witcher III, though I am, as far as I can tell, finished in Toussaint. Though no more quests await, I can’t help but frolic through the fields, taking screenshots and delighting in the music. The rolling hills and valleys of Toussaint are some of the most beautiful game visuals one can see in 2016.

            Toussaint is based on France. It’s not too difficult to discern this, given the many vineyards, the accents of its people, and the look of its buildings. Toussaint offers a refreshing change of scenery and environment from the rest of Witcher III’s Temeria, much like France does, I’m sure, to northern Europe. I can’t say for sure as I’ve never been to France. (But I have been to Toussaint!)

 

 

            The soundtrack lives up to the quality of the base game’s, if not even surpasses it. The music that plays as you explore the world complements the beautiful, rolling visuals. The battle and dungeons tracks are great, and I loved the theme it plays when you are investigating a scene. Each track has a French sound to it. I’m not a music expert, so I can’t elucidate here on all the nuances of French music—but you’ll know what I mean.  

            The main quest involves a beast plaguing Beauclair, the capitol city of Toussaint. It has been killing prominent citizens in extremely violent fashion. Duchess Anna Henrietta, ruler of the region, summons Geralt and offers him a contract to slay the beast. Geralt finds out, soon after he has undertaken the task, that slaying this beast is going to be more difficult than it is for most contracts. This main quest line is enjoyable, if victim to some cliché plot devices that, honestly, most narratives fall to. There’s even a ‘secret background character that suddenly comes into the picture in a “did I mention” sort of way, at just the opportune moment to make you think “surely not…but of course!”…’. But the use of these ploys does not detract from the main quests’ overall quality. Like the major quest lines of The Witcher III, there’s excellent dialogue, a couple key choices to make, tough boss battles, and good set pieces. It’s more of what you loved from the base game.

 

            Ditto for the side quests. You’ll fight plenty of monsters plaguing vineyards, encounter a few anguished spirits, help a few folks with curses (like an unfortunate werebird), and meet colorful characters throughout. A new feature in this DLC is furnishing a home—one of the side quests has Geralt restoring a house given him by Toussaint’s duchess. All the quests amount to a hefty amount of content for a twenty-dollar DLC package. Even still, if you’re as Witcher III-crazed as I can be…you’ll be wanting more.

            This DLC comes along with an update to the base game that improves the user interface and makes other minor changes. One of these that I appreciated is that the game now pauses the action when you bring up the menu to change signs, rather than only having the game enter slow motion when you do so.

Blood and Wine has great quests, great visuals, a great soundtrack, and brings improvements to the base game. I loved it. It got me back into The Witcher III, after all, and got me psyched for a new-games-plus! (The option of a new-game-plus is one of the more recent updates around the time of this DLC.)

 

Thoughts on DOOM

Thoughts on DOOM (4) (called Doom in the review)

            No game is perfect, but id’s 2016 Doom reboot perfectly melds the Doom experience with present-day shooter design.

            My initial thoughts on Doom veered towards “This isn’t the kind of Doom I want.” My ideal Doom recreation would be built of labyrinths, with monsters placed throughout. Instead, Doom gives linear set pieces with demons spawning in combat-zone style a la Painkiller. “Once again, a shooter reboot fails to capture the real classic shooter design,” I thought. But I was quickly won over. Doom is a great game, and perfectly reboots Doom.

The core of the game is shooting and otherwise tearing apart demons. There is some simple strategy to be had, though. After shooting each demon for a while, and just before the next shots would fell them, each demon glows a blue or yellow color. This means you can perform a “glory kill” on them—a melee attack that has you finish off a demon in always bloody, sometimes creative ways.

One glory kill on the Mancubus has you tear out his stomach—or some other, apparently explosive, organ—and shove it in his mouth. You can then watch as he explodes and organs spill out. Delicious—but, not all are as detailed as this. Some just have you break a demons’ arm and knock it in the head with it. Others boringly have you just punch a demon forward. (Not everything can be a hit.)

These glory kills have the demons drop more health. Chainsaw kills have the demons drop more ammo. These gloriously gruesome attacks are one-hit kills, even for the bigger demons, but each chainsaw kill requires fuel. The bigger the demon, the more fuel you need. You could use bits of fuel each on a group of lesser enemies, or all of it on a big one. The big one will net you more ammo.

So as you go about killing demons, you’ll perform glory kills and chainsaw kills depending on how much health or ammo you need. You’ll probably be performing these regardless, as they are ceaselessly satisfying.

As I noted above, most combat in Doom takes places in “battle arena” like scenarios. Each of these have health and ammo pickups littered throughout, and a lot of them have jump-pads and teleporters. When demons start coming, battle music, metal in style, starts playing. Think of how Bioshock Infinite’s battle music worked, if you need a point of reference. Really, Bioshock Infinite’s battle scenarios are a good point of reference for Doom’s, as are Painkiller’s. But Doom is better than both of those for what it does.

All the shooting and killing takes place across surreal landscapes in the UAC Facility on Mars and the demons’ abodes in hell. The visuals are what really drive home Doom’s throwback nature. It was while firing rockets at a giant horned and hoofed demon, with a surreal hell landscape in the background, and while blasting my double-barreled shotgun at a Pinky demon as he charged towards me in a surreal research-facility hallway, that I thought to myself how much this game harkens back to the shooters of yore. There is great nostalgia here if you grew up with the original Doom and its contemporaries.

Extra touches keep the game from being a totally straight shooter. You can upgrade your suit, say to be more resistant to weapon splashback, and you can unlock and upgrade weapon mods. These are basically alternative fires. Think of an old FPS game with secondary fire, and then imagine being able to switch between multiple secondary fires and being able to upgrade them. Yeah, it’s cool.

There is some story here too. A few characters speak to you, the player, and there’s some backstory on all this UAC / hell / Doomguy stuff. The way id worked story elements in just enough, to keep them from hampering the run-and-gun Doom experience, is as near perfect as it can be. I was impressed by how lightly and neatly story bits were segmented in. What was there worked, and it didn’t dominate the experience. For that matter, there’s also a codex that you can gain entries to for each demon, weapon, character, and location. It’s interesting stuff, if you care.

Did I mention there are secret areas? And Quad Damage (among other powerups)? And a couple cool, classic-FPS-style boss fights? And red, blue, and yellow key doors? Well, there are all these things, and a whole lot more goodness, that I didn’t touch on. And I didn’t do Multiplayer or Snapmap. But, of course, I loved the singleplayer. Based on that alone, id’s 2016 Doom reboot is a fantastic game, that perfectly brings classic Doom to a present-day shooter design. I love it.

And now, id can focus all their time on Quake V.

Me and Fallout 4

As Fallout 4 would not run on my PC, I was reduced to playing it on the PS4. At least I’m getting to play the game without it crashing after 10 seconds.

I’ve played a lot of it recently, and it’s great. Top-notch open world exploration: great visuals, sounds, locales, quests, and so on. I’d like to share some of my adventures from it here, and if I were playing it on my PC, with FRAPs, this would be easy. But I need to transfer all the necessary screenshots and videos from my PS4 to my PC in order to do that. That will happen…later.

For now: some more thoughts on Fallout 4.

The best thing from this game, for me, and same for Skyrim and Fallout 3, is exploring and discovering. The little adventures that just come up from me walking around, without necessarily following a quest. Recently, I headed towards the coast, and came across a lighthouse filled with Children of Atom (who are hostile in this game…). I then walked through the ruins of a quiet little coastal town. I even stopped at a church. The silence was broken by a Mirelurk Queen shooting up out of the ground. This scared me a lot, and, as is the case when I run into Deathclaws and Radscorpions, I ran for the nearest shelter. Here, it was the church. I ran up the stairs as I heard the beast stomping around below. Moments like this are some of the most memorable from these games. I feel a real sense of panic as I head for shelter, a colossal monster on my tail. Hearing it outside as I quiver in the shadows feels like something that was scripted, though it isn’t. It’s just something that happened as I wandered around. This is where these open-world games shine. My favorite ‘mode-of-play’ in Elder Scrolls and the recent Fallouts is to wander around and let adventure just happen: coming upon places, people (hostile or friendly), things, and so on.

Maybe I should just do a ‘Thoughts On’?

-Thoughts on Fallout 4-

With Fallout 4, Bethesda has created another fascinating world to explore, filled with adventure, characters, monsters, items, and stories. Like in Skyrim and Fallout 3, the visuals and audio are both excellent, and complement gameplay that gives players freedom to explore and discover as they wish, whether sticking to quests or not.

Unlike in previous open-world titles by Bethesda, Fallout 4’s player character speaks. The main storyline, which involves a missing person, a private eye, synthetic androids, and a shadowy organization, are more interesting than those in Bethesda’s other open-world games.

Even still, the greatest enjoyment of Fallout 4 lies in exploring its world unfettered by a main storyline. Players will get the most out of the game when they wander off with no set destination in mind, but chance upon people, places, and all kinds of adventure “waiting” to happen. You never know what might come next in the wastes of post-nuclear Boston, or “the Commonwealth” as it’s called within the gameworld. One of my most memorable escapades was when I journeyed off to the coast and discovered a lighthouse and a small coastal village, and had what was a quiet reverie on the beach interrupted by a large monster shooting up from the sand. This monster being well above my level, I fled.

Any single building or location you may come upon in the wasteland will have enemies, story, and items enough for an hour or two of gameplay. The stories you come across range from the macabre to the humorous. A ‘Hubris Comics’ building contains back-and-forth between staff on the casting of one of the female characters in a TV series of a comic book; an old shipyard was run by a man who tried to tame crab-like creatures called “mirelurks”, but failed at it (as his corpse indicates); another place known as the “Pickman Gallery” is not a gallery for art, but for dead bodies, and the artist is the resident psychopath. Anyone who has played an open-world Bethesda game knows the kind of ironic, humorous, and horrifying stories one will come upon in the different dungeons scattered across the overworld. Fallout 4’s world is a collection of sci-fi, drama and monster movie fiction, each location being like an episode from a Saturday morning sci-fi serial.

The characters, too, range from humorous to horrible. The Super Mutants speak lines made funny by their stupidly insincere voices. The various raiders and gangs throughout the wastes all curse and speak in sadistic and violent terms, as before in Fallout 3. Both these groups have bodies and body parts hanging up as wards to explorers such as yourself. There are the “Children of Atom”, a religious group who has conceived of atom as a world-creating god. Unlike in Fallout 3, the Children of Atom here are usually hostile towards the player-character. There is also the Brotherhood of Steel, a Fallout series mainstay who are a group of technology zealots, devoted to preserving and understanding the technology buried throughout the wastes. (This time, they have helicopter things and a huge zeppelin.)

In additions to these groups, there are the monsters. The post-nuclear monsters are truly horrible: giant scorpions are back (the Radscorpions), the menacing Deathclaw returns, the Mirelurks (crab and lobster-like creatures) are also back, as are Feral Ghouls (zombies) and various mutated insects. Each monster seems more powerful this time (or maybe it’s just me?). It’s no wonder most wastelands residents are crazy or violent. In a world filled with monsters such as these, how could one not be that way? (Of course, this is a game overworld. Game overworlds are known for having human beings and terrible monsters living in close proximity to one another.)

There are the walled cities, which are the only places of safety. These cities are built on the ruins of the pre-war world. One, "Diamondy City", is built on a baseball field (in which there is a merchant who insists that baseball was a game in which the players beat each other to death with bats). Another, “Goodneighbor”, is built around Boston’s old state house (the leader of which, wearing John Hancock’s once-on-display outfit, has dubbed himself “Hancock”). But even these relatively safe places are full of seedy and corrupt characters and places, each city rife with social commentary (like Diamond City’s conflict between a newspaper and the mayor).

Overall, Fallout 4’s post-nuclear Boston is a world that would turn even the most naïve optimist into a pessimist (or realist?). It is a world of monsters, psychopaths, of corruption, violence, ruin, struggle, where the weak live in fear of the powerful and constant decay thwarts attempts at progress. Not like our world at all. But, at least it’s a world one can run around freely in (until killed by the nearest monster or nut-job).

All the exploration in this world is driven by a role-playing game system that is more Fallout 3 than Skyrim. Each time you level up, you can spend one point on one of the six basic “SPECIAL” attributes (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Luck) or on a perk. These perks are gameplay buffs, and may increase inventory weight, improve weapon accuracy, and so on. They require certain of the base SPECIAL attributes to be at a certain level before they can be chosen. It’s a simple system, though I miss Skyrim’s feature whereby using a certain kind of weapon or trait would earn experience points for that one weapon or trait. I wish I could level up energy weapons as I use them, just as I could level up archery in Skyrim by using the bow, but alas—this feature is gone.

Most will be happy to hear that the weapon condition system is gone, so no more need to repair weapons. A crafting system is here, though, so you can craft new types of aid to use in combat, and mod weapons and armor. These systems are there for you to use, but you don’t have to use them. 

VATs is back, though trickier: in Fallout 3, the game paused when in VATs, but in Fallout 4, action proceeds, just in slow motion. Otherwise, it’s the same: select body parts to aim at, hit go, and watch the proceeding action in slow-motion.

Is there anything to be desired in Fallout 4? Well, incidental to its open-world design is the potential for bugs aplenty. These include quests not working, items floating in the air, the game crashing… and so on. Veterans of Bethesda’s open-world titles will be ready—if you are not such, ready yourself.

Bugs aside, I think Fallout 4 is an excellent game. It’s open-world Bethesda, which I love, and it’s done really well here. A fantastic entry in a great series.

*Note that the screenshots used in this post are from Gamespot.com's collection. I didn't include some I made myself because...well, playing Fallout 4 on the PS4, I have a few more hoops to get through to put them onto my PC and then onto this blog.

Thoughts On...

American McGee’s Alice

PC, 2000

EA, Rogue Software

~

 

American McGee’s Alice is an older PC game (if you consider 2000 old) that I did not play back in the day but finally got around to a couple of years ago. Even after ‘getting around to it’, it sat in my backlog for two more years. This isn’t because it is a bad game, but because it sits in a pile of other games that I incrementally play through, all the while keeping up with new releases. (It’s hard to be a gamer…) I recently finished it, and here share my thoughts.

Mr. McGee’s Alice is a straightforward action game. There is platforming in the game, and you could say it’s part platformer, but this misses the main drive of the game: moving forward and killing enemies.

It’s more comparable to Quake and Quake II than it is to any of the platformers of its era. This is no surprise given the game’s pedigree: Rogue Software made an expansion pack for both Quake and Quake II, and American McGee began his career in games working for id on Doom II.

Alice is built on the Quake III engine and feels like a mod you had downloaded for the game. The model of Alice running around acts how you would picture the Quake marine running, if you were ever to zoom the camera out to a third-person perspective in that game. You cycle through a weapon roster much like you would in Quake. There was even a moment when an enemy gave me an unintentionally helpful rocket jump, by shooting a projectile right at my feet, which sent me upwards to a higher platform.

So the gameplay is accessible action. For the most part, the game isn’t difficult, save for a few sections of tricky platforming, large numbers of enemies assaulting you at once, or maybe one of the boss battles. But the game’s save-or-quick save-anywhere feature, so wonderfully present in most PC games contemporary to Alice, blunts these segment’s difficulty.

So what do you play this game for? It can be fun to ride through a simple action game. And Alice has some strategy, as certain weapons work better on certain enemies and in certain situations. But the main draw of the game for me was being able to play as Alice in a grim fantasy setting. I also liked the characters you encountered: the dialogue of the Cheshire cat, whenever he appears, is usually well done. The Mad Hatter and other characters from the Wonderland fiction also appear, each in ‘messed-up’ form. And the soundtrack has a Quake I atmospheric-‘chillingness’ to it, appropriate as it is composed by a Nine Inch Nails member, Chris Vrenna. So the draw of Alice is the characters, the setting, and the atmosphere. And the action gameplay is good enough to hold it up.

American McGee’s Alice is a “good, not great” game that you should check out if you are at all interested in PC games of the 90s and early 2000s, or in the works of id Software alum. Oh, and, of course, if you are interested in Alice in Wonderland fiction.

 

Thoughts On...

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

Standalone add-on and prequel for Wolfenstein: The New Order

PC, XONE, PS4; 2015

Bethesda, Machine Games, id Software

~

 

            The Old Blood is built like The New Order. There are combat scenarios that you can either sneak through or shoot through and a fair amount of character interaction and story development to break up these combat sections. There are also letters and secret areas to find, this time the secret items being gold bars. Old Blood is a solid gameplay package that results in another “first-person shooter with some extra spice” for us to enjoy.

            The characters are solid for a Wolfenstein cast. Like in New Order, player-character B. J. Blazkowicz offers up some cheesy action-movie-esque one-liners. There are some great lines in this one, many of which are only funny in context, but one I can quote here: “Well I’ll be, it’s raining Nazis.” I loved New Order’s cheesy humor, but if you didn’t, Old Blood’s won’t do anything for you. The quasi-humorous Wolfenstein 3D dream sequences also make a return.

B.J. is tracking down a document with the location of Deathshead’s weapon-making compound. B.J. must contend with Rudi Jager and Helga Von Schabbs, two greatly psychotic Nazi adversaries. Rudi has a pack of dogs he’s very fond of, and Helga’s after a long buried secret of King Otto, the Holy Roman Emperor, lost beneath a ruined church in Wulfburg. Long-time fans of the series know this is a throwback to part of Return to Castle Wolfenstein's story. So, yes, there is some occult and undead stuff here.

            Most of The Old Blood pits you against the living, and this is the stronger part of the game. The game is divided into eight chapters, which are split between two parts. The first five chapters are really good, but the last three are weak by comparison. In these latter segments—spoilers?—undead Nazi come in. The combat loses its cover-and-fire core as ‘standard’ battle scenarios are now complemented by segments with undead running at the player. The gameplay flow breaks down because of this (though you do get a sawed-off shotgun in this stage of the game, which makes up for it, I suppose). It leads into a ridiculous ‘keep-pounding-in-the-ammo’ final boss fight that long overstays its welcome.

            Personally, I would have loved more tombs, and more interesting undead enemies. Some King Otto-era zombies with sword and shield like in Return to Castle Wolfenstein would have been an interesting opponent. As it is, all the freshly undead Nazi zombies are like the Flood in Halo.

            The humor also tapers off once you get deep into the undead segment, with a strangely morose ending that sets up for The New Order. So Old Blood’s an uneven package, but mostly good, and I’d recommend it. The non-undead combat, cast of characters and humor make for a great time.