FAR: Lone Sails (2018) and Changing Tides (2022)

Amid the perpetual disillusionment from AAA titles, the ever increasing complexity of even AA titles, the focus shifting more and more to either ridiculous levels of hand-holding to completely abandoning the gamer, and the rest of it including what can only be hoped is a transient plague of bad PC ports, it is nice to come across a game that, in the simplest of terms, just works.

That, however, is not the only good thing about these games.

There is an elegance in simplicity that is not always readily found. There are many games that create the illusion of complexity but sort out their components and the simplicity can possibly come as a shock.

FEAR and Halo Combat Evolved are just two such examples.

But we are not talking about FPS games. Rather it is about the individual parts which when assembled manage to get the player entangled in the machinery and when the end comes around leave you wishing it would not have come so soon.

Again, where more and more AAA titles are going for higher and higher graphical fidelity while paying less and less attention to art direction, when an independent team comes along with something as focused as this, well then that is an excellent reason to chop down a tree and get the hope fire blazing again.

Lone Sails is a side scrolling mix of adventure and puzzles that do not try to burn out your logic circuits just to show you how clever the game developers are.

The camera zooming out telling you not to do whatever you are doing is probably the only help the game gives you. Other than that, you are on your own. There is no intro or anything. Just start. The games starts much the same way Spirit of the North starts. Get busy.

There is no nonsense with timed events as puzzle games often use to falsely pressure gamers. The entire experience is very relaxed.

And you are allowed to make mistakes. There is one sequence where you have the option to take shelter and I just went past the shelter because I was a bit too relaxed in my approach. The game just kept sailing. Most games would have gone into a fail state and thrown me back to a checkpoint but not here.

The narrative, no matter how incoherent in may be, is important to me in a game. Not sure how or why buuuut it seemed irrelevant here. Might have been a self-defense reaction to all those big executives forcing out AAA story lines so twisted they would give you a headache without any physical cause. Be that as it may, there is a sense of enjoyment here that makes you go "hang everything, keep going and see what happens next."

I suppose that is the advantage of making a small game. You don't have to stuff everything into it. You take only the good bits and make them all count.

Another thing about the games is that you can only talk about them vaguely. The only way to get specific is to give the whole thing away. Not going to do that.

If you are one of those smart people (I am not, I am more like Mater, average intelligence) you can finish the game under 3-4 hours depending on how many breaks you take.

If you or anyone you know has been advised not to play games due to low frustration tolerance, you may want to try Lone Sails.

Changing Tides on the other hand suffers from an excess of complexity, just by adding another axis. The underlying concept is the same but since you now have two axes of freedom and movement in each direction along either. Combined with a lack of any indication of where to go, it is easy to get lost and confused. Some parts of the game also require specific actions. You could be staring at something head on and not know what to do because the game gives you more freedom of choice but no signal if a choice is required.

Changing Tides is good sequel but the puzzles are more intricate and there are times where the game demands trial and error more than clear thinking. This is a personal thing and might not apply to everyone but trial and error is not a logical way of solving puzzles. Some people might find the first game too simplistic but at least it was without "try this then try that, rinse and repeat till something works."

Besides that one small issue in Changing Tides this is a good pair of enjoyable games.

Highly recommended.

Spirit of the North (2019)

Ooo, foxes.

This game literally tells you nothing. No background, no tutorials, no direction markers.

Just start walking around and figure it out along the way.

Good thing too.

The learning becomes part of the journey and since the game complexity increases very gradually, there is never any over-burdening of information as can sometimes happens.

While the path to take is linear, the path is not always evident. It is possible to get confused in this game but it doesn't last long. Just a touch of exploration and off you go again.

The story never becomes clear. You still need to look outside the game to satiate your curiosity about the why and how, but again, it's a good thing.

Some mechanics border on failure, especially those requiring precision, but those are not too frequent.

This is basically a half-puzzle half-exploration game that finds a good balance between the two.

Once or twice the game might frustrate you but then it's not a perfect game by any means. And that too is a good thing. Perfection would ruin it.

Most importantly, you are never required to hurry.

If you are in the mood for an opposite-to-the-edge-of-seat gameplay experience with mild brain stimulation, go for it.

I am just glad that there are people out there still making games like this.

Go people out there.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021)

An optional but relevant read can be found here.

Proceeding towards an oldish age, I have become a cautionary gamer. So basically I let the world play a game, watch gameplay clips, read (not watch) a review or few, and then decide on buying a game or not.

After the Avengers fiasco (that one I decided to skip after watching the first trailer) I had low hopes for a good Marvel game.

Then word started circulating that this is actually a good and fun game. In fact, so unlike Avengers and without its premature-birth problems and shameless cash baiting that that alone earned Marvel a second chance.

So, I gave it the good old go.

Not going to repeat myself so just go and read the link above. If you like that sort of thing, you will like this game. If, like me, you don't, then don't bother with this one. The combat is torture. Might be an odd thing to say that it is also extremely fatiguing given that torture is not supposed to be a relaxation device but there it is.

The game's environments though are some of the most versatile you will see in a single player campaign and they are beautifully crafted and lit. Except the climactic sequence where it is a case of too much happening to notice anything.

Finally, this has to be the most talkative game I have played in more than three decades of gaming. They never stop talking. The situation does not matter. Incessant chatter flows and flows. Someone should make a documentary just on how do you write so many lines for a game, get the voice actors to deliver those lines, and lastly, how do you program for those lines to be delivered the way they are. I mean, when the main characters talk so much that your brain relegates it all to background noise, well, I would not say something went wrong but it did not go right and neither did it stay in the middle.

Maybe it took a holiday to get away from itself.

Gears 5 (2019)

Before I start the rant ... oops. Spoiler. I don't like this one.

First, you may want to do a quick read on this.

So, if you have read my Gears 4 review you might have read the bit about how some games have a death wish of wanting to be "that game."

Well, that's Gears 5 for you.

I was still reeling under the exhilaration of having played Gears 4 just a little over a month ago and had loaded up Gears 5 with barely contained excitement.

An excitement that evaporated when within a couple of minutes of starting I got stuck. Stuck. In a Gears game. Unbelievable. If you haven't played it then without going into details let me tell you it involves looking through a crack in a wall.

But being a good little gamer, I gathered the tattered remains of my gaming faith and plodded on. Later, much later, in the red sand location, the same thing happened. This time I got stuck and looked and looked and scanned and looked around 360 degrees, thanked the powers that be that 23 years ago I decided to shave my head or right now I would be pulling the stuff out in huge clumps, gave up, and, oh the disgrace of it, had to look it up on YouTube. Most people make a big deal about the weakness of the Death Star. I don't care about that. What gets me is the bloody ventilation ducts. Never liked ventilation ducts. Ducts are the ultimate architectural insult. Necessary but a better alternative is needed. Bloody ducts.

But like the Snatcher in Gears 4, these were two isolated and minor annoyances. Even though there was no more getting stuck in the game, it just did not feel like a Gears game anymore.

Here is a brief list of subjective peeves:

• The common law sin of all open world games: You have to frequently refer to the map. A map. A gosh darned map in a Gears game. A wannabe, completely unnecessary, pseudo-open world in a Gears game.
• Upgrades through Collectibles in a Gears game that have no impact on gameplay but keep popping up everywhere.
• A skill tree in a Gears game. Not for you, for the darned robot. The collectibles upgrade the robot which you can completely ignore because the game is 100% playable without its assistance.
• Side missions, argh, in a Gears game.
• Choice in a Gears game. This one is the Idiot Leader of the game. How Gears 6 will continue after this unless it has access to your last save game from Gears 5, I don't know.

Why? One solitary inquiring mind wants to know why? Why after four games did they decide to ape "that game" that is not a Gears game?

There are downright bad games that you suffer through because, fundamentally, you are an idiot. There are games with bad controls. There are games with bizarre camera angles. There are games that send a clear message of "F you, I am what I am, take me or leave me, see if I care."

Gears 5 is one those games that does everything except hiss back at you. It seems safe but at the same time you feel it would be best not to provoke it.

I wanted to like Gears 5. I did like it. But just when I was happy that the aggravating bit was over, minutes after the current objective the game threw me back into the mess.

It was one of those "complicated" relationships where you desperately want to like the girl, but the girl's only outstanding quality is throwing pointless tantrums.

You can blame her upbringing or her peers or society at large but what remains in the end is that the girl throws tantrums for no reason. And this girl is not amenable to therapy. You can only like her if tantrums are your thing.

Here is hoping that Gears goes back to being Gears and stops trying to be "that game."

Gears of War 4 (2016)

I feel it. Deep. In my bones. 2007 was a long time ago and I was a little baby, barely 37 years old, and Epic and Microsoft released Gears of War. It was the first cover based shooter I had played and it was a ton of fun.

Then Microsoft decided not to release Gears 2 and 3 on PC because of "piracy" resulting in poor sales on Windows. That the PC port was broken and that selling Xbox was a higher priority had nothing to do with it. Same crap they pulled with Halo 2. Digression alert!

So when I had the hardware to run Gears 4 and 5, of course I was going to play it.

And boy oh boy is this game fun. Mostly, er largely - well actually except for one tiny irritant - a complete joyride from start to finish.

A deplorable thing that most shooters fall prey to is wanting to be like "that game" which could be anything outselling "this game" currently.

Okay, so I was playing it seven years after release. So what?

No silly customizations, no skill tree, no collectibles, no side missions, no pausing the game to fiddle with idiotic inputs that add nothing to the game proper, no branching paths, no irrelevant choices. Just a simple, straight out, linear, old fashioned point A to point B, shoot everything in between with a few environmental hurdles. God, I miss my baby days when games were just games and not a convoluted mission statement that left you wondering what the hell did you just do for 10+ hours and what does it all mean, why are you here, what is the point, why are you expected to care.

Point A to point B, shoot everything in between. Sweet.

It is a testament to good mission design that a linear shooter with zero distractions can actually be more fun and engaging than a mishmash of multiple ideas where the game has to pause every few minutes to ask you "and what would you like to do next?"

Real life is full of those imbecilic situations of what I want to do next. Stop doing it in games. Very annoying.

Okay, let's get that tiny irritant out of the way. Snatcher. This enemy uh puts you in its body without eating you. Like evolution had decided, for some reason, to create a predator that specializes in kidnapping its victims instead of killing them. Once you are "inside", sometimes you come out and sometimes you reload last checkpoint. Not sure what gameplay mechanic is at work here. Your AI companions cannot directly help you. They are shooting the thing, so supposedly with enough hits you get ejected from the zip-up pouch but otherwise there is no player agency left. Except hope.

Happened to me only twice, thankfully, but it took me right out of the game flow. Like you are in the pool and humming to yourself "just keep swimming, just keep swimming" and you realize the other presence in the pool in not a friend or a loved one but a darned shark. Nasty jar that, what?

Apart from that one thing, this game should be on the must-have list for anyone who likes shooters.

If you missed out on the first three parts then just watch a quick video to get the backstory and go from there. You are not missing anything. I also recently bought Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and the updated visuals did nothing. If you are going to play the older games then play them first. The gameplay has evolved a lot (imagine that, evolution in a linear shooter) and going back will not be a nice experience.

For anyone who likes third person shooters and/or cover based shooters, play this game. 'Tis wonderful, 'tis wondrous wonderful.

I tell you, man, dialects are tough.

The Mashening

This is a PC gamer's perspective who has never owned a console.

Well, now that that is out of the way.

Maybe it is just age. Maybe gaming has changed. Maybe PlayStation gamers expect their games to be like this. Maybe I am just configured in a way that prohibits acclimation to it. Who can say.

There is a certain type of combat in certain games that just grates. Feels wrong. It should not be like that. Within the rules of a game it seems contrary to those same rules.

It is also the reason why I never played God of War, Spider-Man, any Assassin's Creed after AC2 which had the quick disarm-and-execute option, and oh so many more games. Simply because the gameplay loop was exhausting.

However, me being me, I did watch the playthroughs and the gameplay baffles me. Why? Why is it like this?

About an hour ago I finished watching the playthrough for Spider-Man 2. Watching that video, one thought kept looping: "The only way I am playing this is with a trainer that gives me the one-hit-kill option."

The same thing happened when watching the God of War (2018) playthrough. When you look at the size of Kratos and the way the game plays, an Argh is inevitable. Even the most basic enemies can take four to six hits to take down. Bosses come with health bars that take vast repetitions to deplete.

It's as if you are watching a blooper reel of Terminator and Schwarzenegger is having a problem breaking eggs unless he takes a hammer to them. What exactly is the point of being so powerful if you are, despite all that power, so ridiculously powerless?

There is so much content related to Halo Combat Evolved and yet in all the years since its release I have yet to come across a single video/post/comment (granted it is not possible for a single human to consume all content even on a single topic on the internet) that mentions the glaring difference between Halo CE and most other games.

There is no boss fight in Halo CE.

There is no great enemy variety. The gameplay loop is rudimentary at best. And it still remains the most enjoyable game in the franchise or even generally.

Now, this is approaching cliche qualification at missile speed. In my gaming experience, Arkham City did it first in 2011. The "shield" enemy that cannot be taken out in regular fashion. You slide under, jump over, do something to stun them, or whatever else. Twelve years later games are still aping it. Zero evolution. Sigh.

Returning to Spider-Man 2.

The shield enemy. Now with Peter and Miles given their age and height and most enemies being at least a foot taller than them, the shield people seem to make sense. But, come on, both have super strength. Shield or no shield, a punch or kick thrown at maximum power must have some effect but zero?

Then there are the boss fights. All bosses come with health bars that have to be depleted three times. Just watching the video was tiring. End, damn you, end. Sure, you could have one bar split into three parts but that does not make it any better. Why do bosses need stages? There are no weak spots or specific target foci. Just hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.

But the piece de resistance, the part that really got inside my head and started performing blindfolded brain surgery was when Harry turned into Venom. That beast must be 5 feet taller than everything around him and 3 feet wider. Guess what the shield enemy does? Absorbs the hit with no more effort than is required to blink. What is going on? It's a basic shield for the love of whatever you please, not a force field. Regular people should have all the resistance of soggy paper to Venom but nooooo, even Venom needs to strike at least three times (oh, forgot to mention, regular hits, no special moves or combos). Why?

Even against regular unarmed human beings, Peter or Miles would be suspended in air and hit someone four, five, six times before the opponent goes down permanently. How many superpower punches are required to take down even an ideally fit but regular human being with no extra powers?

Which (finally) brings us to The Mashening. Games that equate endless button mashing with a sense of accomplishment.

A year ago I was playing Dying Light. Some doors require you to mash X to shove them open and it happened frequently that if I mistimed the mashing my player would just quit and the whole process would start again. In the immortal words of Lord Emsworth, "Eh, what?"

On a side note, Dying Light is the only zombie game I ever played. Not repeating that. Zombies are boring.

There are so many games that follow this pattern. It is a good thing that videos exist where you can see this happening and thereby get guidance in what games to avoid.

The whole mash button to open door, push something, or what have you is puzzling. What purpose does it serve?

Tomb Raider needs a mention here. The game gives you a simple choice: Hold the button or mash it over and over. Why don't more games do this? It is a such a simple thing to do. Of course, TR is not a combat heavy game so there is that.

In any case, the whole God of War/Spider-Man style of combat is just dull, pointless, and has no appeal to me whatsoever.

That, however, is my problem not the game developers'. What I would like to know is where does the mass appeal for this gameplay loop come from. This is what you are doing the entire game. Mashing the same two buttons for a campaign that may last anywhere from 8 to 15 hours topped off by those ghastly boss fights where the bar depletes one hair width at a time (I know, I know, it doesn't, but).

Some games couple this gameplay loop with skill trees. Er, what are those trees for if the mashening does not ease up as the player progresses through whatever tree there might be? How much thought, time, and effort both creative and technical goes into growing these trees? And the end result is nothing more than cosmetic. If the tree actually gives the player more power to make combat easier it would be different. It does not. Combat remains relentlessly mash oriented.

I don't get it. Somebody, maybe Holmes, needs to work this out and get back to me.