The Video Game Revue

Battlefield: Bad Company, Castle Crashers

I've been busy with work lately, so I haven't had much time for gaming lately, but I've still managed to keep up on a few things. I will also be attending PAX this weekend, so that should help keep me somewhat in touch.

Two games I've been playing lately are IL-2: Sturmovik and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I haven't been playing a ton of these games--just the odd hour or two--but I've spent enough time with them that it's worth mentioning, especially since both are such excellent games.

Sturmovik is now available on Steam at the bargain price point of $10 (flight stick not included, of course). There's an active online community that you can find if you download a somewhat obscure tool called Hyperlobby, and that adds a great deal of playability to the game. But the true appeal of Strumovik is in the wide range of realism settings: on "easy" it plays like a fairly arcade-y WW II flight sim, and on "realistic" it's arguably more difficult than flying a WW II era plane in real life. The learning curve is steep, to say the least; in order to get into it, I had to have a buddy present to tutor me. There are some tutorials included with the game, but they're non-interactive and fairly slow paced. Once you get accustomed to the game, it's extremely addictive. Easier flight sims cannot satisfy the cravings that IL-2 Sturmovik leaves one with, which is why people are still playing it roughly seven years after its release.

The onslaught of new Xbox Live Arcade games continues with Castle Crashers, Bionic Commando: Re-armed, and Galaga Legions. All of these games have impressive pedigrees: Castle Crashers is by Behemoth, the developers of Alien Hominid, BC:R is of course a Capcom remake (joining other recent Capcom throwbacks including 1942: Joint Strike and Commandos 3: Wolf of the Battlefield), and Galaga Legions is by the same developers as Pac-Man Championship Ed. I haven't played any of these games in much depth yet, but I've spent some time with each of them (in the case of Galaga Legions, I only played the demo).

Castle Crashers is very hyped, and well worth that hype. It's an excellent multiplayer game with only one catch: the online game needs some serious debugging. I played online with some friends for about an hour and we lost our connection several times--sometimes even losing progress (XP and gold) as a result. Even with this flaw, Castle Crashers is a worthy XBLA game, and one of my current favorites even with the likes of Geometry Wars 2 competing for attention. I do hope that the technical issues get addressed soon.

Bionic Commando: Re-armed is also hyped and also excellent. It has a hardcore appeal--certainly much more than a typical XBLA game--and that gives it a great deal of replay value. Depending on your preferences or familiarity with the original Bionic Commando NES game which BC:R is an adaptation of, you may find the controls frustrating, bordering on unplayable. The thing to understand here is that the difficult gameplay is by design; it is what makes BC:R worth playing in the first place. There's plenty of content here and the game is well made, but make sure you know what you're getting into before committing to it. I would expect some players to find BC:R more tedious than entertaining, but it is still an excellent game.

I had high hopes for Galaga Legions since Pac-Man Championship Ed is one of my favourite games and so is the original Galaga. Unfortunately, I've found that whereas Pac-Man CE is a modern re-imagining of Pac-Man that is still very identifiable as Pac-Man, Galaga Legions is not much like the original Galaga at all. I respect the fact that the design of Galaga Legions is trying to be original and re-invent shoot-em-ups, but its efforts seem misguided, and in this respect it is more like Schitzoid (ugh) than like Ikaruga (woot). I will probably revisit Galaga Legions at some point and try again to get into it (I really want to like it), but on first glance it doesn't even come close to stealing the limelight away from Geometry Wars 2.

And finally, I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company, both single player and online. I'm not a hardcore Battlefield series fan, but I've played most of them, and the only ones that I really liked in the past were Battlefield: 1942 and Battlefield 2. Turning Battlefield into a console game seemed like a bad idea to me, so I was surprised to find that BF:BC is as good as it is. The online game feels like the old Battlefield experience that I know from playing Battlefield 2 online on PC, and the single player experience is decent.

After about the first half-hour of the single player campaign, I started relentlessly skipping as many cut scenes as I could and not bothering to listen to the dialog even for the few short cinematics that I couldn't skip. There's some humor to be had there, from what I understand, and the writing is better than Army of Two, but that's not saying much. Frankly, the plots and characters from every Xbox FPS from Gears of War to Halo 3 are all utter shit to me (the settings, however, are often excellent). They all have a similar tone, and I can't tolerate them any more than I can tolerate the spiky-haired emo protagonists of cliched JRPGs. That having been said, my disgust with the writing in BF:BC (which is roughly above par for the genre), has not detracted much from my enjoyment of the game. I didn't expect for the story to appeal to me, so I wasn't disappointed when it didn't.

I'll throw in here that Rainbow Six: Vegas follows the "shit story, awesome setting" pattern. I was once a pretty big R6 fan, and I really enjoyed the storyline from the original game (I may have enjoyed the story from Rogue Spear as well, but I don't recall how it went). R6: Vegas has an okay storyline--it doesn't really offend me--but I didn't end up caring much about it. The gameplay and levels were so interesting that the bland plot was completely eclipsed.

Anyway, getting back to BF: Bad Company, one thing that concerns me about the game is that it is likely to baffle new-comers to the Battlefield series. The control layout isn't as tight as Halo 3 or Gears of War, because the game tries to preserve as much functionality as it can from the PC games. Figuring out what to do in multiplayer games is much easier if one has played other Battlefield games online before, and I can't confidently say that BF:BC is a great way to be introduced to the series, although playing through the single player game will help a new player to become more familiar with the basics. Whether or not a new player understands that BF:BC is the way it is because it's based on a PC FPS and adapted to the console world is another matter.

BF:BC has been hyped as a technological marvel, and while it does have reasonably impressive graphics and destructible environments, it didn't impress me all that much. The fact that it's fun is more impressive than any technical marvels that it presents.

Relatively speaking, I would not put BF:BC on the same level as Rainbow Six: Vegas, Gears of War, or Halo 3. It doesn't strike me as a classic; it is simply a strong game that's worth a try if you are either a console FPS or a Battlefield fan.

posted by Parappa @ 4:10 PM