I’m starting to get to the end of my pre-written reviews – for this series to continue, I’m going to have to get moving on some of the longer games that I’ve been wrapping up. There’s still a couple weeks of pre-made stuff ready to go, though!
Since I plan to give the “52 games, 1 year” another spin in 2021, I’d bet that this series will continue into the new year. Another self-imposed rule that I had for 2020 was that I wanted to have a positive balance, or at least a zero, on games bought vs games beaten. Without counting games that come as part of a service (like PS+ or Nintendo Online), I came close in 2020. If I hadn’t bought a bunch of PS1, 2, and 3 games as a result of the Sony online store closure, I would have come out ahead.
Ah well, that just gives me more to play in 2021. For today’s post, here are quick takes on Deus Ex: System Rift, LOCALHOST, Condor, Time Crisis: Razing Storm, and End of the Skyline.
Deus Ex: System Rift
While there is some creativity here, and while it is certainly Deus Ex, this expansion felt a little too much like more of the same from Mankind Divided. The opening plays out just like most missions in the main story – arrive at a subway stop, explore a small but dense neighborhood block, experience a poorly thought out stand-in for racism, then break into a heavily fortified office building. The character dynamics between current series protagonist Jensen and Pritchard (a returning character from Human Revolution) are fun – it’s better for Jensen when he has a character with which he has a little history, and their spiky infolink back and forths are well-scripted. And at least the last two areas have some new ideas for the series in terms of managing Jensen’s heat signature and some Portal-inspired puzzles. Unfortunately, that’s all saved for the very end. I would have liked more fresh ideas throughout, especially in the flabby middle section in the offices.
LOCALHOST
LOCALHOST offers a lot of opportunities for choice and role-playing in a mostly single-screen package. The player character is a technician on their first day, whose job it is to wipe some hard drives. But they’re locked, and the only way to get them to unlock is to plug them into a busted android body and talk to whatever they contain. Moral dilemmas centered around the Turing Test ensue. Themes about embodiment, consciousness, labor, and exploitation ensue. Not bad for a game that takes only about 20 or 30 minutes for a playthough!
Condor
A stripped down cyberpunk runner. In a lot of ways, its minimalism is the point. Take out combat, take out some of the xenophobic and voyeuristic imagery that is often foundational to cyberpunk genre works, and what have you got? A free run through the night air, above the traffic of flying cars but under the radar of security. There’s enough freedom of movement that it’s possible to plot your own alternate routes from point A to point B most of the time, and that’s all there really is to the gameplay. There could be more to the whole affair, but I feel like that would be missing the point. The core ideas are here, they’re simple, and at an hour or so of runtime it’s worth playing.
Read more of my thoughts on both LOCALHOST and Condor at Gamers With Glasses.
Time Crisis: Razing Storm
The weakest link of the 3-game collection for the PS3 that shares its title, by far, Time Crisis: Razing Storm shows Bamco’s arcade division losing its way. Next to Deadstorm Pirates and Time Crisis 4, Razing Storm comes off as both somehow obnoxious and bland. It’s hard to overstate how dated the whole game feels, from it’s aggressive butt-nu-metal soundtrack to a rah-rah plot in which an American cybersoldier squad invades Brazil to take town a terrorist. That terrorist inexplicably has giant robots and a massive army of brown people to swarm all over the heavily equipped cybersoldiers from the U.S. of A. This would have been racist and off-putting at any time, but reeks of post-911 market-testing and baiting. That the game came out in arcades in 2009 puts it a further 8 years out of date.
Razing Storm also does away with some of the Time Crisis series’ signature mechanics – namely, ducking behind a shield and switching weapons. The shield is still present, but only for reloading. The player is only given other weapons at scripted moments. That’s a backslide even from 90s light gun games like Area 51, in which weapon bonuses were unlocked within levels and at scripted beats. Time Crisis originally innovated on the genre by allowing players to collect different ammo types and switch freely between them, a mechanic present in this collection in Time Crisis 4. I guess I can appreciate Razing Storm for emphasizing how important that mechanic is to the series, because it is incredibly generic without it.
End of the Skyline
Another gamejam game and freebie available on itch.io, End of the Skyline manages to deliver fairly well on its simple premise. The player controls four characters on a grid, each with the ability to move other characters in a distinct way. One just bashes with a shield, one hooks, one hooks enemies or characters over themselves, and one has a hit that can only be used at range. Generic enemies pile on as you try to manipulate the crew to exit pads that enable them to move to the next rooftop/board. There are 5 boards in all, which makes for a pretty quick experience, especially if you play to exit each board without taking out every enemy that will spawn. This is somehow the first “Into-the-Breach-like” that I’ve seen, and it broadly succeeds. Clean, colorful, cartoon punk graphics provide some personality, and it’s easy to figure out how to play even with the total absence of signposting.
My advice to the devs would be to follow the Into the Breach formula even more closely. The game doesn’t require much strategy, possibly because the boards and enemy spawns don’t force the player into tough situations. Well, they don’t as long as players are diligent about removing the spawns each turn, anyway. Relatedly, it would be better if the game only allowed players to escape once every enemy wave was dealt with. The addition of destructible elements to the environment or resources would spice things up, too. But all of those things are extras – this is a fine, focused effort for a jam that executes the essentials.
Read more of my thoughts on End of the Skyline at Gamers With Glasses.
Previously on the blitz: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Optional Objectives is a contributing editor for Gamers with Glasses. He also writes for a bunch of other online publications and zines, including Unwinnable, Heterotopias, First Person Scholar, Clickbliss, and Haywire Magazine. You can find more on twitter, both @opobjectives and @donaever.
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