On the Subject of The Hunter

Some Random Model

I had never heard of The Hunter until it popped up on a forum recently. It was being compared with Crysis, at least graphically, and I have to admit that initially I scoffed at what seemed to be some crappy redneck hunting game. Look at those shitty avatars! Crysis?? Yeah, right.

But first things first. Subsequent online discussions about the game have tended to disintegrate into impassioned, if pointless, arguments about the nature of hunting in general. Mindless bloodlust or sensible population control? A means to provide food or a means to provide wall trophies? I have no interest in hunting in real life. It's difficult to be impressed by someone dropping a deer at 200m using a rifle. I'd be impressed if the hunters took them down bare-handed. Or if the deer could shoot back. Don't confuse that with me giving a fuck about poor, innocent animals, though, because I don't. Hunting simply doesn't appeal, in the same way that I have no interest in opera or knitting.

Still, the trailer looked pretty, and the idea of a more leisurely-paced game was attractive, and best of all the basic game is free.

It doesn't look as advanced as Crysis, let's settle that one right away. The graphics reminded me more of Stalker, which isn't a criticism, just an observation. On the other hand the island reserve is nice and big (and seamless) and the forest nice and dense. Well, it's nice from an aesthetic point of view, not so much when you're trying to spot a bastard deer. There's a dynamic day/night, or rather dawn/dusk cycle, and just like in Far Cry 2 the game can look stunning in the morning and evening. In full daylight it can be a bit harsh, a bit electric green, but even then there are cloud shadows rolling across the hills and grass. Some of the meadows especially are gorgeous. And it runs pretty well too, although I've had a couple of crashes. Overall, far more impressive than I was expecting.

Then there's the game play. It should be understood that this is no run-and-gun FPS. In fact there's not much gunning at all, and you're not going to get very far if you run (in either sense; the run speed isn't exactly a sprint, and any deer will hear you coming a mile off). It's barely a walk-and-gun, more like a crouch-and-then-prone-and-then-spot-and-maybe-gun-if-you're-lucky. It's a much more measured, thoughtful experience which will immediately alienate all the "hardcore" online FPS fans and for that alone it deserves respect. It turns out that for me at least, and naturally my opinion is the correct one, The Hunter is enormously immersive. It's amazing how much time you can spend in it, simply tracking and exploring and perhaps spotting the odd animal along the way. You can sit in a watchtower (or whatever they're called in hunting circles), camp your favourite meadow or beach or forest clearing. Well, ok, there aren't that many options for things to do, but that makes it all the more impressive that it's such a compelling game. There's the carrot-and-stick element of "if I just follow this next track...", or "if I just wait here a little longer...".

It's not perfect, but then no game is. There's a slightly bizarre, and incredibly annoying 4 hour / 10km limit before it kicks you back to the hunting lodge. That might seem like plenty of time/distance, but when it kicks in while you're trying to track a wounded deer like it has done for me twice this week, it couldn't be more frustrating. According to some posts on the forums it is done to prevent server overloading or some such rubbish. No one seems to know why they can't let you "rest" in the same position rather than forcing you to retrace several kilometres of slow jogging, by which time the tracks are long gone.

Not being a real hunter I can't comment on the realism of the animal AI. The deer cetainly seem to be verrrrry sensitive, and I've often approached at what I thought was a very restrained pace only to see the deer bouncing off over the horizon. It wasn't until I figured out how important wind direction is, and located the smoke bottle in the inventory, that I started making progress. It makes a close encounter quite nerve-wracking, and it requires a lot of patience to get that perfect shot. Or luck.

Anyway, in terms of value for money it's unrivalled, and that aside it's the best game I'm played so far this year. Of course it's early days, but The Hunter will certainly keep me occupied while I wait for Burnout Paradise to download on Steam (finally!).

On the Subject of HAWX

Holly Madison

How the fuck could anyone mistake Tom Clancy's HAWX for a proper, realistic flight sim? The fact that it's a multi-format release should be enough to tell you it's an arcade game, and if there's any doubt beyond that then a quick look at any of the teasers and trailers should firmly put the matter to rest.

And yet since the release of the PC demo, I'm seeing endless forum posts from people whining that the flight model is unrealistic, or the unlimited ammo and fuel is unrealistic, or it's not as realistic as Falcon 4 or Lock-On - Modern Air Combat or whatever other chin-stroking flight sim they can think of.

It's like complaining that Mario Kart isn't realistic. It's an arcade game. It's about action, pretty pictures and blowing stuff up. It's like some people saw a picture of an aeroplane and immediately started dusting off their joystick/thrust/pedal combos.

Anyway, some people's idiotic presumptions aside, I was quite enjoying the PC demo. For a while. But like virtually everyone else who's tried it, the out-of-cockpit "assistance off" mode started to wear thin quite quickly. I was saddened to see a developer response to the issue,

Our "Assistance OFF" mode comes with a completely different gameplay style than the one we have been used to until now in other flight combat games. The dogfight camera is the only camera that can support that type of gameplay. Here are just a few of the features we wanted to implement in the "Assistance OFF" mode, which could only be obtained through the "Dogfight camera":

• See both your target and your own aircraft at the same time, to anticipate and quickly react to your opponent's moves.
• See incoming missiles as they approach your aircraft, so you can assess impact time and calculate exactly when you need to react.
• See every move that your plane makes, this being the only way to execute extreme maneuvers, never seen before in other flight combat games.

This is why the dogfight camera is and will remain the only camera available when playing in "Assistance OFF" mode. This camera is at the core of the game design, and an essential part to create the game experience.

What a load of absolute wank. What they actually mean is the game would be too easy if you had a proper cockpit (or even chase) view in assistance off mode, so they've added artificial difficulty by forcing you to use a needlessly disorientating camera. The first two "reasons" they give are essentially the same, but the third doesn't even make sense. The 3rd-person view is "the only way to execute extreme maneuvers"? Hitting brake+up elevators at the same time, which seems to be the full extent of the game's "extreme maneuvers", has nothing to do with the camera. The fact is that if you were in a first-person view, you'd be able to judge when to complete the move much more easily than you can with the current camera.

Of course a first-person view wouldn't show off their fancy graphics as well.

And the game seems to be quite pretty, at least from high-altitude. At ground level the simple box buildings look a bit... boxy. The clouds are sweet, though. Another side effect of the "not a proper sim"-ness is that there are limits to the active flight zone. Admittedly it takes a little while to reach them, but when you do you'll find a very sci-fi force field blocking any further exploration.

I thought it felt a bit like Strike Commander, a classic action-oriented, non-sim flight sim. It was probably that nostalgia that led me to preorder on Steam. However, having spent a little more time with the demo, and after discovering that the assistance off camera is apparently here to stay, I'm wondering if I should have bothered.

On the Subject of FEAR 2

Monica Bellucci

I've been looking forward to this one. The original FEAR was the Crysis of its day, pretty much impossible to run at max detail on anything available at the time. It might have been a stunningly blatant Ring rip-off, but it had its fair share of shocks, and an oppressively creepy atmosphere punctuated by frantic firefights with impressive AI opponents.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of that game was the ending. Rather than winding up with some tedious boss character, the sort where you think "why didn't that thing just go out and kill everything itself rather than wasting time with all this tech company conspiracy bollocks?", F1's finale was surprisingly melancholy. Well, until the nuclear explosion.

It was slightly tricky to keep track of F1's storyline, scattered as it was between discarded Armacham laptops and voicemails. But at least there was a story, unlike Valve's piss-poor attempts to obfuscate Half-Life 2. Of course if you were following the story it was just Ring without the video tapes. And a high-tech underground vault instead of a well.

But fast-forward past all the non-Monolith-developed expansions and "Project Origin" name wrangling, and now there's a proper, official sequel.

Let's get the bad things out of the way, although they will probably be more numerous than the positives. Which isn't to say they outweigh them, however.

• What idiot thought it would be a good idea to letterbox the PC version to 16x9, when most monitors are 16x10? The same idiot that thought it would be more "cinematic" if they added, or rather forced you to put up with...
• ...film grain. And no option to turn it off. Maybe in the rumoured patch. Note to developers: film grain doesn't make you feel like you're in the game, it makes you feeling like you're watching someone else play it. On shitty 8mm film.
• Autosave. Fair enough, but there's no way to manually save the game. You have to rely on the predefined chapters if you want to replay a section of the game.
  
• Achievements. Not really a "bad thing" in themselves, rather just another symptom of the overall consolitis.

With that of the way, it's time to consider the things F2 does right. It looks very nice, in the same clean, industrial style of the first game. It also runs very well, and I suppose that's largely due to it being console-friendly.

One point which I feel deserves special mention, is that the game has not crashed once, so far. It's sad that that should be the exception rather than the rule, but it has been absolutely bug-free in the time I've spent playing. Top marks.

The story is... hmmm... well, Monolith have attempted to distance themselves from the 3rd-party FEAR expansions, but I don't feel they achieved anything remarkably different with this game. I only played Extraction Point and not the widely-panned Perseus Mandate, but I did find F2 to be a little less subtle, and a little more in-your-face than the first game. There are many points in F1 where not a lot happens, except for the tension being cranked up. F2 tends to throw as much as it can at you, all the time. Firefight followed by Alma vision followed by firefight followed by specters followed by firefight in a mech followed by etc etc.

One interesting comparison is provided courtesy of the stealthy assassin bad guys. In the first game they appear (in narrative terms) without warning. You're in yet another office environment when suddenly there are Predator-style refractive things jumping around at amazing speed. When they appear in F2, it's after seeing one from a safe distance, shortly followed by a special appearance in a cutscene. So it's not like you're not ready for them. That, and they're a lot easier to spot, even if they feature more sophisticated, pretty rendering. The end result is that they really become just another foe rather than the "oh shit, it's an assassin" moments of the first game (at least until you figured out that slide-kicks would one-shot them).

In general the gameplay felt very much like Half-Life 2 in the sense that you're constantly moving forward, never sticking around in any one location for any time. I suppose the first game was like that too, and maybe I've just been spoilt by Far Cry 2. It's not really a complaint, just an observation. It also feels like a waste, because there are some very nice environments in F2, not to mention 11GB of game data, which seems like a lot for what turned out to be a roughly 8 hour game for me. So yes, it was too short. By roughly a factor of 2.

As for the ending, well, it was ok I suppose. There is what really amounts to a boss encounter unfortunately, although it's a boss encounter crossed with the stupid bit at the end of Far Cry 2 where you end up fighting your "buddies". So that was less than ideal. The conclusion to the story itself could have been better, too. The idea of your character ending up trapped with Alma in her private hell is good, but they had to spoil it with the ridiculous psychic rape and talking foetus. Yeah, it's pretty much as bad as it sounds. No subtle melancholy for F2, that's for sure.

Still, the firefights were good enough, if no different to the first game. The frights were a little less effective, maybe thanks to (over-)familiarity with most of the tricks in Monolith's big book of scares. There were some good bits, although not much beyond what was in the demo.

One thing that I found disappointing was the Wade Elementary section. There's lots of intel lying around to tell you about the testing that's been performed on the little kiddie-winks, how they were split into different groups and ultimately how there's a huge underground testing facility beneath the school. That's all great, but I kept waiting for the "scary freaky kids" to show up and provide a landmark gaming moment. Unfortunately they never did, and it all just turned out to be backstory for how Armacham were trying to find potential candidates for project Harbinger, which is essentially how your own character fits into the situation.
Definitely a missed opportunity there, Monolith. You know where to find me if you need some tips for FEAR 3.

Thought for the Day: Veronika Zemanova Megapost

I really didn't intend for this one to be a megapost. "12 will do", I thought to myself. But you know how it goes when it comes to pictures of attractive women with big tits, there's no such thing as "enough".

On the Subject of Mass Effect

Bar Rafaeli

Mass Effect is an odd game in hindsight. I really enjoyed playing it, but now that I'm looking back on it I find it hard to pinpoint what exactly made it compelling. The combat is awkward, with it's over-the-shoulder 3rd person view, team orders that I rarely used and which were pretty frustrating when I did and character skills which I hardly ever bothered with. Graphically the game veers between impressive and fairly lame. The characters are done well, some of the environments are good, but then you get dumped onto a planet in the little tank thing and suddenly it's like playing something out of the 90s.

Really, it comes down to the storytelling. The story itself may be fairly standard sci-fi wank involving ever-popular robotic species and ancient civilisations, but it's told in a very engaging, and very polished style. The voice acting in particular is first-rate, probably the best I've encountered (which isn't really saying much). If you don't stray from the primary missions then it has a great deal of page-turning appeal.

It's not perfect, and some of the supporting characters veer from bland to annoying. Eventually I was longing for a dialogue option that would let me shoot the human woman who you pick up at the start of the game in the head. Also you know, deep down, that the game isn't going to allow you to do the "wrong" thing, so while it can be fun to act like a bastard and crank up your "renegade" status, it doesn't really change anything. I'm not even sure what the point of the paragon and renegade tracks was, I think I've read you get some special ability that's activated by them or something, but I ended the game at about 50% on both, with no obvious impact on my character.

Another aspect of the game which could use some serious work is the side missions. They're useful for bumping up your level and for kitting out yourself and your team-mates, but there are only about 3 models of "dungeon" in the whole game; a "mine" dungeon, a "research" dungeon and a "warehouse" dungeon. Oh and I suppose there's a "spaceship" dungeon for the relatively rare boarding missions. But in each case the layout is identical each time that location appears. And they're very small, taking all of 5 minutes to clear.
Fortunately there's more variety in the locations visited in the primary missions.

The character design interface could do with some work, too. Assuming you bother to customise your character, it has an irritating habit of producing faces which look fine in the close-up view within the design interface, but which go on to look fucking awful in the actual game. Mostly it's the camera's short focal length, which gives the image a slightly fish-eye effect which isn't present in cutscenes. So you end up having to put the eyes artificially far apart to make them look right in the game. Also I found it virtually impossible to make a decent-looking female character. Someone needs to put some R&D into proper hair systems for games, because the sculpted plastic look that's so common in RPGs is overdue for a next-gen update.

The fact that there's a lot (and I mean a lot) of dialogue to plough through might seem like a bad thing, but I found myself exploring all of the branches wherever possible. The downside is that it hurts the game's replay potential. There may be a fair variety of classes to choose from, but the thought of having to sit through all the interminable chat again really puts me off. It was fun the first time, but now I know what everyone's got to say, what's in it for me?

Perhaps that's why I find the game slightly difficult to classify now. I was keen to get back into it at every possible opportunity to find out what happens next, but now that I know what happens next, I really have little motivation to do it again. Maybe I'll wait a while, and then choose a class that's significantly different from the tank I played this time. I ended up fairly overpowered really and my team-mates contributed very little to the success of the missions, which is perhaps why I didn't need to bother with the team controls. There were occasions where both my team-mates were dead (never permanently) and I'd go on to clear the area single-handed before returning to resurrect them. I might as well have not had team-mates, except that they're often necessary for cutscenes.

So overall, a polished, fun game. Might be one to pick up cheap given it's limited replay value but still definitely worth a first run.