Trine: Did you really just kill the thief again?

As it turns out, PC gaming can bring something new to the table after all these years, local multiplayer.  It made sense on paper, consoles have local multiplayer, PC hardware tends to better than consoles, PCs should be able to handle local multiplayer.  Well there was a bit of a hurdle since plugging in two keyboards does... odd things.  And mice just fight each other, I wouldn't recommend it.  But with the advent of more and more gamers having controllers, devs are putting in local multiplayer and I love that they are.

Trine is a physics platformer, puzzle adventure game, as indie games tend to be, I guess it's a safer bet than trying to debug a Skyrim clone with two testers.  But, spoiler, it turned out to be pretty good, if a bit broken.

First things first, it's really beautiful.  The levels are gorgeous.  There's generous doses of color and varied objects, traps and enemies.

The levels are completely linear but that's okay, it's a platformer and it keeps things simple, especially if you're playing with more than one person.  The mechanics revolve around three heros that have their fates intertwined by a magical artifact called the "Trine", the important bit is that they are able to trade places with each other at will which, to the player, means you need to use the correct character with their specific and unique move set to move past traps, puzzles and enemies. 

So seeing as this is a multiplayer focus game, I enlisted the help of my girlfriend who apparently wasn't completely scared off from our time playing co-op Portal 2, turned out to be an okay idea.

I wouldn't recommend playing it with three people though, the game doesn't seem properly balenced for not being able to switch between characters.  There may be a mechanic for switching when you have three people, but since I don't have a second controller/any friends, we didn't try out the three player mode.

The main problem here is the water bits.  The wizard and the thief, who I could not stop calling the "rogue" to save my fucking life, can both swim.  The knight sinks like a rock to the bottom of whatever water he falls into and 90% of the time drowns before anyone else can swim down low enough to actually see him on screen.  There is an item that allows you to breathe underwater, but I'm assuming it's a random drop from the chests so it can not be counted on.

What my girlfriend and I also figured out is that aside from beating the shit out of enemies, the knight is completely useless.  Both the thief and the wizard have some ability to solve puzzles and bridge gaps, the knight has no such abilities.  And even more than that, the thief is essentially able to handle everything in the game.  The wizard's main use was supporting the thief, then once the thief got across, switch characters so the other player can use the thief to get over the same gap.

But honestly, we had a blast playing it.  Not the most balanced, not the most challenging but certainly fun as a multiplayer game, even if we did fight a bit over how many times she killed of the thief and then we needed her 20 feet down the road and the final level that we had to retry no less than 30 times, but she is now bugging me to download the sequel so we can play it some more and she doesn't like many of my games.

Please don't kill the thief...

Minecarts look like so much fun

Sniper Elite V2: Human Echolocation

Have I mentioned before that steam's screenshots are really difficult to navigate to from anywhere outside of Steam?  Well, they are, it's something like 10 clicks through directories just named with numbers so you can go find another directory with a random number and then you find the actual screenshots.  I only mention this because for once I don't really have anything to say about game design or some over-arching exposition that matches up nicely with the review that I give of the game.  I've been sitting here for 2 hours trying to think of something to say and it just isn't coming.  So here is Sniper Elite V2.

Sniper Elite is kind of a weird game.  I briefly played the first one and I thought it was okay.  It lacked quite a lot of necessary explanation and ended up being absurdly difficult until you managed to figure out how the AI worked and how the physics engine ran.  V2 does not do much to fix this.  At least it tells you that bullet drop is a thing as opposed to figuring it out on your own in the first and it has a few different physics settings so you don't have to play with bullet physics at all.  It's better, but not great.

The controls are fine, I guess.  Some of the key bindings don't make a ton of sense but they're okay.  For example, I didn't know that no-scope aiming was possible, that particular function is bound to left control, something I would have found on my own from trying to crouch, but they tell you in the first bit that "c" is actually crouch so I never bothered to touch left control.  Overall, it's fine, the decisions are odd but not unintuitive and I'm very glad they made crouch a toggle, good job on that.

Thanks asshole, now I'm fucking deaf

The loading screen, which is unskippable, is the loudest fucking thing I've heard since the THX intros from older movies, it's seriously fucking deafening, RIP headphone users.

But on to the actual game.  The game follows the main character, a elite sniper (OH HO HO, I see what you did there) whos name I never really bothered to learn or remember.  He's tasked with killing off the remainder of non-defecting scientists of the Third Reich.  The only odd bit is he's not actually receiving these orders from anyone, he just kind of figures it out on his own.  It's kind of fun to think of him as a crazed sniper who went insane and now goes around killing any German in a uniform with grey hair.  The story is pretty awful.  Nothing changes really, nothing seems to carry much weight it's just something to tie the levels together.  But the reason people play this game is not becuase of the story.

Most gamers experience with snipers is yelling at one in a multiplayer game, it's not an overly touched section of the military despite the amazing skill they all seem to possess.  This game kind of stands alone as the defacto sniper game which allows it to get away with some pretty bad mistakes.

The game does environments very well, very very well, actually.

But what it doesn't do well is sniping environments.  The environments are much better suited to something like call of duty or a WW2 based Spec Ops: The Line, but sniping, not good.  Everything is way too close.  I think the longest shot I made in the whole game was something like 300 meters, that's basically point blank for a sniper.

The actual shooting is nicely done, I turned the bullet cam up to "excessive", my words as that's probably the most fun and satisfying part of the game.  When you make a shot, you watch the bullet leave the gun, travel to the enemy then it shows you a x-ray view of the enemy skeleton and you watch the bullet rip through vital organs and bones shattering, once you get past how fucking disturbing it is, it's actually fun to see.

I also liked the minimalist approach to the HUD.  It basically doesn't exist most of the time which is wonderful since the game is rather pretty on whatever settings I used.  It also made my screenshots rather pretty and professional looking.

On to the crappy parts.  The AI is way too smart, and too dumb, all at the same time.  The game has an interesting mechanic of you being able to mask the sound of your shots if you line them up with loud events in the level.  It's nicely done, they give you just enough of a window that the shot is tough, but not impossible to hit.  But if the sound goes off, but the sound window closes while you're still watching the bullet cam, the enemies hear your shot.  This wouldn't be a huge problem, but the second, and I do mean the fucking second, that an enemy actually hears a shot, every enemy in the area knows EXACTLY where you are, instantly.  It doesn't matter if you're prone and far back from the edge making a long shot, they instantly know where you are.  It really breaks the game.

But, as per usual, I saved the worst for last, the rifles.  The game has really excellent bullet physics.  The bullets drop nicely and the shooting at any range over about 50 meters requires drop compensation.  For those of you who are not gun crazy or don't do a ton of research, the lines you see in rifle scopes are actual drop and wind compensator.  Different rifle scopes have different markings, there's not a lot of consistency, it mostly has to do with how long the shots you're trying to make are.  The game handles this okay, you're given your rifle and you have to figure out the markings.  After a bit, you start to get good.  You're able to judge distances, you know what the marking distances are and you start being able to pull off some really impressive shots and hit on the first go.  I love that your skill is measurable in games and this is an incredibly satisfying skill you pick up.  But they fuck it up, oh boy do they fuck it up.  They have you switch rifles.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but they don't fucking tell you what the markers on the new scope are.  Right when you're starting to get good, they swoop in say, "We can't have you doing well, no more Springfeild, here's a Mosin Nagant, try hitting shit now asshole!"  It would be so god damn easy to fix too.  Just make a note that's readable from the map screen that gives a scope rundown.  It would have saved me so much frustration in the form of, "Well, the Mosin had 150 meter marks, these seem a bit further apart, how about 200 meters?  Nope, that bullet went 9 feet high, guess it's lower"  They could have just told me, "The Mosin marks are at 150 meters, the G38 rifle has markings for 300 meters."  Fucking done!  I could pick up right where I left off in terms of skill instead of taking five retries of a level to figure out the damn scope marks.  It just seems like a lazy way to get around properly balancing the game

Overall, the game is okay.  It gets grindy at bits and the checkpoints don't really make sense, you're going to repeat your footsteps a lot.  But the shooting mechanics are really fantastic once you sort out the fucking scope problem.  If it comes up on a sale for something cheap, I'd say go for it, otherwise, I wouldn't bother unless you really like watching skeleton explode.

You have something on the back of your head there...

Derp