Microreview [video game]: Tom Clancy's The Division 2 by Massive Entertainment (developer)

Trouble in the Capitol

After the wreck that was Anthem, I was ready for a better shlooter. After playing the open and closed beta, I knew that The Division 2 was that game. But having spent ~30 hours in the game, I’ve come to learn it improves a lot of issues (compared to Anthem, but also The Division) but it still isn’t perfect.

The Division 2 is a third-person cover shooter with loot collection. It picks some time after The Division, but in Washington, DC rather than New York City. Like NYC in the previous, DC was ravaged by the Green Poison (a manufactured smallpox variant) and is in a state of rebuilding rather than the simple survival focus of The Division. But there isn’t a whole lot of plot here either because it also retreads a lot of “reestablishment of society” beats from The Division.

The Division 2, if anything, has a lot to do and collect. Every area of the map is simply littered with missions and landmarks, and these tasks give you plentiful amounts of loot. The world of The Division 2 has knee pads, backpacks, body armor, sanitary masks, and other protective gear everywhere. And guns! It’s like a prepper hive lives in every basement, and most of them exploded up to the surface in the ensuing disaster. All this gear has a handful of levels of rarity and numbers go up in a satisfying fashion if you’re compelled by seeing numbers go up.

The Division 2 improves on the first game’s skill selection (which are things that you can do in combat on a timer, like drop a turret or pull up a shield) and enemy tactics. In the first game, a solo player like myself could do very well simply by dropping an automated turret and then flanking the enemies as they take cover from the turret. That doesn’t work so well in The Division 2, because enemies outnumber and flank you, and tougher ones will simply rush your turret and kick it to death. To compensate, you’ve got a much bigger selection of tools to adapt to enemy tactics. Where The Division had four, The Division 2 has eight, and each of those has three variants. You can only pick two configurations out of the possible 24, and it’s a hard choice. That turret that draws enemy attention is still useful, but sometimes I’d rather have the grenade launcher that drains enemy armor, or the drone that heals me.

This variety in gear and tactical options doesn’t change the basic gameplay loop though, and it wears on after a while. With some exceptions, weapons are just bullet hoses, and the enemies are just more goons with a guns shooting at you. A lot of the missions take place in museums and DC landmarks, which is cool because they’re beautiful environments with neat set pieces, but what you do in the missions rarely changes. You enter a room full of enemies, take cover, and then shoot at them until they die. That sounds like an oversimplification, but it really isn’t. The action feels good but I’ve mowed down hundreds of enemies. This isn’t a big change from the last Division, where I also cleared rooms and mowed down hundreds of enemies with automatic weapons.

The huge amount of stuff in the game but limited variety in core gameplay has worn out my interest in playing it more. I’ve honestly not completed the main mission branch, and I’m going to need to take a break and come back to it later before I start to resent this game. It’s a fun game for the first 20 something hours and numbers go up, but numbers going up isn’t cutting it for me anymore. It is more fun to play with others, and matchmaking exists for every activity, but even playing with others doesn’t change the core gameplay loop. The good(?) news is that this is a “live service” type game that will be getting more stuff over time, and Ubisoft has demonstrated their dedication to supporting their games with The Division (which markedly improved over time), and other titles like For Honor and Rainbow Six: Siege. I’m fairly confident I’ll come back to The Division 2 in a couple months, wrap up the main missions, and play more of the new stuff they add to it. The Division 2 is fun but wears out its welcome before you finish all of what it offers.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 lots of loot, +1 lots of stuff to do

Penalties: -2 repetitive core gameplay loop

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Massive Entertainment (developer). Tom Clancy's The Division 2 (Ubisoft, 2019)

Micro(?)review [video game]: Assassin's Creed Odyssey by Ubisoft (developer)

Blood on the Sand

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (ACO) is a role-playing game. I know I said it was moving in this direction with last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, but this entry in the series is as much of a RPG as The Witcher 3. But where Origins last year pushed Assassin’s Creed further into RPG territory and further away from the focus of assassinations, ACO takes this series even further from its roots. In fact, this entry may as well be an entirely different franchise.

In ACO, you can select from the start whether you want to play as Kassandra (woman) or Alexios (man). Either way, you are a Spartan in exile, a descendant of Leonidas himself, during the Peloponnesian War. In the broad game world, Sparta and Athens are at each other’s throats. In the story’s winding path, you learn more about your destiny and how the Cult of Kosmos is attempting to leverage your bloodline to control the world.

This game is enormous, and I could spend hundreds of words describing just the game. Instead, I’ll sum it by saying this is a third person character RPG in a historical setting. Even though killing people isn’t your only course of action, most missions are resolved with murder and there are four different power structures to be murdered: the Cult of Kosmos, a seemingly endless string of mercenaries, an arena full of champions, and the national leadership of the Greek states. This may sound like a lot and it is; each of those is a different tweak on the game.

The cult is hunted through finding clues, usually by killing other cultists, sometimes through sidequests. Hunting the cult is some of the most fun this game has and it ties deepest into the main plot. While most cultists are just a name, some are given personality and character, and there are some genuinely surprising reveals.

The mercenaries hunt you when you’ve committed crimes, usually murder, sometimes theft or destruction of property. They’re an endless stream of difficult enemies with unique qualities (“takes less assassination damage”, “has a wolf companion”) in a way that sort of makes it like the Nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, except this is far less fleshed out. It’s one of the game’s biggest missed opportunities. With any amount of personality ascribed to these mercenaries, it might have added something significant to the mindless murder, but instead it’s just another long chain of bodies.

The arena, by comparison to the rest, is fairly simple; fight waves of enemies in an arena and then kill their champion boss. The fights aren’t particularly different from what you do in the game world, but they do take place in an arena full of obstacles to avoid and exploit. There’s a story to this arena that’s worth seeing to the end, but that’s about it.

The least fun of these are the nation takeovers. You have to first lower national threat levels by infiltrating forts and destroying supplies, stealing their war chest, and killing their leadership. Then you can take to the battlefield in a mass combat scenario that’s a lot less fun than it sounds. It’s just a lot of the same combat except with more enemies on screen, and most of them are occupied in fighting other nameless soldiers that are on your side, until one of the two nations wins. Your influence is in killing enemy captains and heroes, which are just the same enemies except with more hitpoints. If you were on the winning side, you get a big reward of gear. If you were on the losing side, you still get some gear. It ultimately does not matter whether Athens or Sparta controls a region, so it’s really just another lost opportunity but maybe it’s commentary on the game world.

I highlight these power structures because they’re the vast majority of the game, and where it loses the most Assassin’s Creed flavor. The focus of these power structures is mostly built on killing the people at the top, which is what you’d expect an assassin to do, but you’re not playing an assassin. The word “assassin” might not ever be used in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Where Origins reduced the functionality of the “single-button murder” that was a staple of the series, it’s almost entirely removed in ACO. No longer does catching somebody by surprise and pressing the murder button kill them outright. For most non-fodder enemies, it only takes a large chunk off of their health. The satisfaction I derived from this game was looking out over an enemy infested fort, sneaking around to kill all of the fodder stealthily, and then getting the drop on the cultist, national leader, general I was there to kill and fighting them without backup because I killed all their backup. This is a formula Ubisoft has been building on since Far Cry 2. It’s still fun, but Assassin’s Creed used to make sneaking in and just killing that one target without engaging in mass murder feasible.

Another major change is the addition of dialog options. Sometimes, you can talk your way out of bad situations. None of these are influenced by your character’s stats, which are solely focused on how easily you can kill someone, so the choice of dialog often feels like a guessing game. ACO doesn’t pretend that these choices are particularly meaningful, except that at six points in the main plot they can influence which of the nine conclusions the story reaches. Even then, the results are largely the same but who comes to the end with you changes.

This is emblematic of ACO. It presents the illusion of choice, but there’s really not much choice at all. Your choices don’t have far reaching consequences for being a story largely centered around your character’s special bloodline. The game world is wide open but it’s a static thing. Killing one nation’s leader just results in another filling in their place. Killing one mercenary moves you up the ladder, but another mercenary fills in behind you. Random name, random traits, no personality. The only murders that count are those against the Cult of Kosmos, but even half of those are just faceless people. I found two of the last ones just sitting alone in the woods. It seems that as Assassin’s Creed has opened up the world over the course of the series, it has reduced the player’s impact on it. Prior games were more linear affairs that could do things like jump 20 years in the future, or kill major characters and show the impacts of those deaths. In ACO, no one’s death means anything. By the end of the game, my character’s actions have had no meaningful impact on the game’s world. Maybe it’s a direct contradiction of the game’s “chosen one” story, or maybe it’s commentary on the meta narrative of the series, which is that all of this is largely meaningless because this world has been simulated to completion. Ancient aliens solved all of this long ago and humanity is just going through the motions. The ones who thought they could change things were wrong.

In this Assassin’s Creed game, you are not an assassin, you’re not part of a group of assassins, and you hardly assassinate anyone. In most aspects, this game and Origins before it are unlike any others in the series, and they benefit from it in some ways, but calling them “Assassin’s Creed” is a misnomer. The game is still historical tourism, with appearances by famous Greeks such as Socrates, Leonidas, Herodotus, and Pericles, among others, but it’s otherwise an entirely different animal from the series that came before Origins. I look back on the 70ish hours I’ve spent in the game, and I enjoyed my time playing it, but it’s a sort of hollow enjoyment. This is a popcorn game, tasty but void of nutrition or substance.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 it's a huge, beautiful, open world full of things to do

Penalties: -2 you spend the whole game being told how important you are, but your actions don't make any meaningful impact on the game world

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 (still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Ubisoft (developer). Assassin's Creed Odyssey [Ubisoft, 2018]

Microreview [video game]: Assassin's Creed Origins by Ubisoft Montreal (developer)

A Bright Shining Sun

I tell people I have a love/hate relationship with the Assassin's Creed series, but I'm going to be totally honest here: it's mostly a love/annoyed relationship. I find them to be brainless timesinks, and that's not really a bad thing. They're a reliable, often enjoyable 20 something hours of game. I haven't played all of them, and the ones I have played are often regarded as the bad ones, but I almost always get one when I want to kill time. Assassin's Creed Origins, however, is better than a time killer. It's a great game.

Assassin's Creed Origins takes the history-skipping game way back to ancient Egypt, in the times when Cleopatra's brother occupies her throne, and he's propped up by a Greek army. You play as Bayek, a Medjay, and you're hunting down the people who killed your son. This mission will take Bayek all across Egypt and lead to uncovering a greater conspiracy.

Origins bins a lot of hallmarks of the Assassin's Creed series. In doing so, it becomes a much more enjoyable game, and probably a more accessible game, but it loses some of what makes Assassin's Creed unique. Origins presents a huge, sprawling Egypt that you're free to explore and engage with on your terms.

Origins took a lot of, let's call it, inspiration from The Witcher 3. It's very much about having a lot of stuff to do, and letting you do it in whatever priority you want. Often, you can even run off in the middle of a quest to do something else and then come back and pick it right up. While the quests aren't quite as well written as The Witcher 3, and they rarely do that thing where it acknowledges when you've already solved a step in the quest ahead of time, they are competent. They don't feel like a waste of time. Bayek himself, along with the rest of the cast, is also well written. Compared to some of the rest of the Assassin's Creed series, this is the best it's been.

What is loses is the strict focus on stealth. Bayek can get into a lot of fights and leave most of them alive, where most Assassin's Creed protagonists would wilt like a flower. Additionally, if you do find yourself in over your head, you can simply run away and it'll almost always work. This is in stark contrast with other games in the series, where enemies are almost omniscient and ever-preset to the point that being spotted means reloading a checkpoint. Add in that you no longer have the ability, or much need, to blend in with crowds, nor much need to run along rooftops to avoid being seen, means this Assassin's Creed feels least like a game in this series. If it weren't in a historical setting, with a single "assassinate" button, and good climbing mechanics, it'd be a different game entirely.

Some people aren't going to like this shift; I'm not one of those people. I loved it. Like The Witcher 3, it hooked me early on and I spent a lot of long stretches of time playing it. Unplayed games notwithstanding, this is the best game in the series. The extra time Ubisoft put into its development clearly paid off; they made an Assassin's Creed that I just loved.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 absorbed a lot of the good open-world qualities of The Witcher 3

Penalties: -1 lost some of the unique qualities that Assassin's Creed is known for

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin's Creed Origins [Ubisoft, 2017]

Summer Reading List 2017: brian

Harry Potter 1 - 7 by J.K. Rowling

This is the Summer of Harry Potter for me. I never read the books when they were new (I felt like I was a bit old for them at the time), and now I'm going back to see what I've missed. I'm reading each book consecutively, with the movies inserted as I finish each book. Definitely reading each of the canonical seven books, maybe adding on other Potterverse novels or media when I'm done. I'm excited about the Summer of Harry Potter because that world has been a big blank spot for me, and these novels mean a lot to people I know.

Well, that's it for my summer reading. Seven plus novels, that's about all I can handle if I even finish them before the end of the season. But it doesn't really fill out this post, so let's shift gears.

Summer Video Gaming List 2017

Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment (developer)

This one is something I've kept an eye on for a while, but was recently encouraged to play sooner rather than later by a recommendation from our very own The G. I've played an awful lot of enormous CRPGs, and I don't think I've finished a single one, but Tyranny interests me for its developer, Obsidian, and its premise. It's a game world where the bad guys won. It's reportedly shorter than most CRPGs, which appeals to me because many of those other CRPGs I've never finished are because I lost interest before reaching the conclusion.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands by Ubisoft (developer)

I liked Tom Clancy's The Division, and Wildlands is kind of like The Division combined with Just Cause. It makes for a sort of uneven tone, because it's about the serious topic of taking down a drug cartel, but so far the cutscenes have been very Hollywood action movie. My initial assessment of the structure makes the game look enormous, so here's hoping it has enough variety in action to keep me playing.

Tacoma by Fullbright (developer)

As a long time Idle Thumbs fan, I simply cannot pass up a game that's a product of that group of people. I loved Gone Home and Firewatch, and I don't care what Tacoma ends up being. I'm going to play it. And I'm in luck because Tacoma combines a few things that I like a lot; strong narrative, environmental storytelling, and space!

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014