Review: As Dusk Falls

To say that FMV (Full Motion Video) games have been around for some time is a bit of understatement, with the genre appearing first nearly forty years ago in arcades. Of all the gaming genres out there, though, it has always been the one to never really return to the public consciousness, instead relegated to peoples nostalgia for old, half forgotten consoles. 

In the last few years though, games like Her Story have rode that nostalgia wave while also creating compelling narratives to push the games along, embracing the limits and opportunities of the genre in equal measure. There have also been games best described as FMV-Like, and this is where As Dusk Falls comes in. 

The first game from Interior/Night, a studio made of former Quantic Dream and Sony veterans, As Dusk Falls is best described as a thriller - think of those old movies where the bad guys end up in a standoff with the cops and you kinda know how it's gonna go, cause that's the way it always goes. 

Thing is, you don't know this time. As Dusk Falls’ choose your own adventure style means your decisions in certain situations matter, with the story adapting to those decisions and crafting your own version of the story. I like games like this, where your run is your run, and might not be the same as the next person. Of course, you can go back and see everything, but that is self-defeating in my book and games like this are best played once and you take the unwritten rule that the story you get is your version of it. 

If you do this, there will be a lot of content you missed. The end of each chapter shows you a timeline of events, but only fills in the path you took, so you can see the other branches if you had taken the other option, but no specifics, just lines leading to blank boxes. It’s amazing to see just how much you have actually missed out, but also brilliant because it reinforces that feeling of ‘this is my version of this story’. 

There isn’t really a singular main character, as the game spreads out over a cast that each feel fleshed out and real. You might have seen the archetypes in a hundred movies over the years, but that still means they are better written than many in other games. There is the devoted dad, the violence loving member of the gang of ‘bad guys’, the mother who cares for her sons no matter what they do and more. This cast is the game's main strength, and chances are you will resonate with at least one or two. For me it was the Dad, Vince, for obvious reasons, but also a young man named Jay who is caught in his older brother's wake. 

As the story progresses there are some genuinely emotional moments, and you can get really invested in it, feeling for some characters while hating others and it is really cool to see, marking the game as a definite highlight of this genre and a future cult classic. I have definitely been thinking about it long after completing it, always having to force myself to remember that I had my run and that’s ok. It’s so good though, the temptation is high to go back and choose the other paths. 

I said at the start of this review that it is a ‘FMV-Like’ game, and what I mean by that is that the art style has actual, real life actors, but isn't full motion. It's more like moving through comic book frames but without the frame while being rendered to look like paintings. It’s striking, evocative and genuinely different to the point where I couldn’t tell you another game that looks quite like this. The downside is that it's a style that could instantly put some people off, and honestly, if you told me this makes you feel motion sick I can see that being a thing too, so be warned that your mileage might vary here. 

At around six hours long, assuming you only do one run, the game is the perfect length, feeling more like one of those limited run prestige TV shows you get through streaming services and it works perfectly for what the developers are going for. If you go back and see everything you can easily double that length, probably get even more out of it. You shouldn’t, but that's on you. 

As Dusk falls will leave you wanting to see every aspect of its story due to the strength of its characters and writing while also thinking about it for some time after you have stepped away from its events. Resist. Take the version of events at the Dessert Dream Motel as cannon and enjoy your time with it.

Review: Twelve Minutes

2021 is definitely the year of the time loop. Lots of games, a few films and TV shows all showcase the mechanic this year and one of the ones that I was personally looking forward to was Twelve Minutes, the new game from developer Luis Antonio and publisher AnnaPurna Interactive. I then, unfortunately, played the game. 

Twelve Minutes is a game with a striking look, with a top down perspective set in the smallest apartment known to man and features just three characters, the Protagonist, his wife and a mysterious cop. What starts out as the, quote “best night ever” quickly deteriorates as the cop bursts in, accuses the wife of murder and eventually kills you. 

The loop resets, and its time to figure out why he shows up, why he accuses your wife of murder and exactly what he is wanting. In terms of mechanics, it is a fairly standard point and click style game with objects that can be interacted with and combined with various others and the three characters to create differing results and hopefully get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that there are enough things to interact with and logic to follow that the possibility space becomes way, way larger than what the game actually wants you to do. 

Que many hours of frustration as you constantly bump up against what you think you can do, and what you can actually do. Your brain will say that, logically, doing this with that will result in this, but what actually happens is you just receive the same bit of dialog again over and over until you finally fumble into the right interaction and move the story forward. This game is supposed to be about six hours long, but because of this problem with possibility, it took me ten. 

Some of this is down the UI, that can make it difficult to realise you need to do something else with an object or click a dialog option more times to get different results. I finally beat the game once I realised I had to click on an object I just picked up to trigger some dialog that will grant me a different path of conversation when talking to the wife and it says a lot that at that point I was looking up guides that said just pick up the object, not pick it up and click on it, almost like even they didn’t realise you had to do that. 

Twelve Minutes suffers from something that just about all time loop games suffer from: repeat dialog. Now, it might seem harsh to criticize a game with such a system for having to get the same dialog to the player over and over but with the other issues it out stays its welcome long before you can complete the game. 

It’s not all bad however. The all star cast does a stellar job with a script that isn’t exactly stunning and I honestly, without being told it was, couldn’t tell that the protagonist is played by James McAvoy and his wife by Daisy Ridley. I can tell the cop is Willam Dafoe, cause it's Willam Defoe, hiding that iconic voice is almost impossible! 

The script just doesn’t make sense at times, with reactions and dialog which can instantly throw you out of the game because frankly, people just don’t interact like that. It’s partially the nature of getting dialog recorded in different sessions, sometimes thousands of miles apart, to work together properly, but also the script just does a bad job of those interactions. It does go some places in terms of the plot though, and some are pretty wild, eliciting an out loud “WTF?” from me personally, but it definitely has its problems. 

Twelve Minutes unfortunately isn’t as good a game as its premise might suggest. The issues with the possibility space and a script that could have been so much better bring down what was an arresting idea, one that could have stuck with people for more than just the bad areas. As it stands, if you do remember this game, it will be mainly because of the extreme levels of frustration it provided. Fans of the genre will get the most of it, the rest of us beware. 

Review: Backbone

It’s very easy for games to fall foul of ‘style over substance’. The medium inherently sets developers up for this trap, as so many components make up any given game that leaning too much on one or two aspects sacrifices the substance to enhance the style, and it is a balancing act that all too often fails and leaves the game worse than it could be. 

Backbone, the new game from developers Eggnutt is, unfortunately, a Style over Substance game. It looks great with a cool jazz tinged noir theme that runs throughout, but gives way to a hard pivot into a twist that comes out of the blue with little setup and makes no sense given the world that has been created up to that point. 

You play as Howard Lotor, a private detective in a Dystopian version of Vancouver. He is also a raccoon, as this version of Vancouver is populated by anthropomorphic animals, ruled over by the apes, who are the higher class. The story sets up an interesting world of class and social issues, gangsters, drugs and all the same rubbish stuff that we humans have to deal with - just with talking animals. 

It starts off with Howard getting a fairly normal P.I case, as such post-noir stories do, with a wife wanting to know if her husband is cheating. From there, it becomes a fairly standard point and click adventure, with a heavy emphasis on talking. The dialog is the game's main thrust, and at first it seems that paying attention to what is happening really does help. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn’t last long, and you soon begin to question if you are actually affecting any conversations as while you might be able to be an arse or be nice and understanding, if at first it does seem like you have messed up it will always loop around and get the result you need. 

This is disappointing, because it makes the conversations you have feel kinda pointless, and you can just button mash through without paying attention as the game will always feed you the right thing. Once you find out there are no multiple endings, it makes it all the worse, as that would allow multiple playthroughs and make the conversations feel meaningful. As it stands, when you complete you game you feel like your time was wasted a little. 

That feeling is compounded by the fact that there is very minimal sound in the game. I appreciate that Eggnutt is a small developer, and that voice acting is expensive and beyond many studios, but Backbone is a game that could have really done with it. The minimalist sound design makes the game more than a little boring, and voice acting could have really helped with it. This is a nit pick that isn’t really the developers fault, but the other issues with the dialog just adds to the idea the game wasn’t respecting your time. 

I will say that the graphics look fantastic, with great animation for the characters when moving around and background art that really invokes the dystopian city feel. It is enough to propel you through the story, though again, those other issues do make the game's completion feel wasted.

The story itself, without getting to spoiler heavy, is weird. As I say it starts off with a standard ‘cheating husband’ case, and spirals out into a deep, conspiracy heavy and potentially world changing mission from there. The problem is that the game invoked in my head one story which would have been really cool to see play out, but that twists into a story that makes absolutely no sense, has no real resolution and the motives in the final act for some of the characters seem completely at odds with the overarching narrative on display. The game would have been so much better had it leaned into it’s early politically motivated ideas and had real, grounded characters that made sense in the world, but that twist just sends it off on an completely unneeded tangent that spoils the rest of the game. 

Had this happened, some of the genre splicing the story does would still work, it would just make a hell of a lot more sense and give a much more satisfying conclusion. It's a shame that it doesn’t because it would have made for a very cool detective story, an in-over-his-head tale in the best traditions of the thriller genre, just with a talking racoon as a protagonist. 

If you plan to pick up Backbone, do so on Xbox Game pass. It makes the sting of how it all ends and lack of multiple endings less painful. It will provide a game that looks great, but is ultimately disappointing and makes little sense. Be warned.

Review: The Medium

Marianne is a Medium. Not the kind that reads Tarot cards and scams tourists, a legit one that can see dead people and help them cross to the other side. She must use her powers to uncover the truth about not just the case she is investigating, but herself as well. This is the setup for Bloober Teams The Medium, and despite technical issues that prevent it from becoming a classic, it's one of the best horror thriller games of the last few years. 

The game’s world is dark, the main character working at her adoptive fathers funeral home and her first act is to get him ready for burial. It’s an effective tutorial of how the game works, which is to say as a modern adventure game, so it's a case of running around rooms and environments to find interactive elements and find what is required to solve a given puzzle. In terms of gameplay, the majority is fairly standard stuff that fans of the genre will have seen a hundred times before. 

It does have some twists however, and various points in the game Marianne shifts so she inhibits the real world and ‘the other side’ at the same time. This literally splits the screen in two, either top and bottom or side by side depending on how that sequence is set to play out. This gives way to the games' take on puzzle solving, as Mariannes medium powers, for the most part, can only be used on the other side. This allows her a defensive ability, an offensive ability and to have an out of body experience which shifts her onto the otherside to move independently of the real world, though this only lasts a finite amount of time. 

This is how you get past the various obstacles that lie in your path to solve puzzles and move forward, though to be honest the game does a bad job of reminding you this abilities are at your disposal, and I got stuck on a least a couple of levels because I forgot about the out of body experience ability and the game does not make it obvious that is what you need to do to continue. I am not complaining about a hint system here, this is a case of there being an in world hint to what to do, but it’s so vague that it is easy to overlook. 

It’s frustrating, though once you get used to what to look for it's better than it was, you just shouldn’t have so much trial and error to get there. The puzzles themselves are not especially difficult to figure out, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t satisfying to complete. One in particular stands out, and has you switching between the real world and the other side in order to figure out the solution. It's very clever, and is one of the game's strongest sequences. 

The split mechanic when it kicks in I have to admit is very clever and really cool. If you think of the remasters of Halo CE and Halo 2, where you can hit a button to switch to the old graphics from the new ones, it's kind of like that but both are happening at the same time. When this is a cutscene, it's quite freaky because the real world section plays out exactly the same as the otherside, but without the other character Marianne is talking to. She literally talks to, and interacts with, herself. 

Speaking of freaky, the developers' rendition of the other side is one of the freakiest things I have seen in some time. It’s all rotten and decaying versions of the spaces you occupy in the real world, with things like a collapsed wall replaced with burnt corpse’ looking down at the ground or revealing the fate of long dead characters. Walls look like they are made out of bone underneath and doors of stretched skin block your path. It's a great environmental look, but it's the characters you meant that send it all home. These will have relatively normal things like missing arms, and when I say normal here I mean in terms of what your brain understands, but also the outskin on other limbs will be twisted with holes missing to reveal nothing in the middle. Ribcages will be exposed but look grey and brittle, while this strange, almost fungal display spreads out from various parts of the body. 

It is one of the games best looking aspects and marks the talent of the art team at Bloober, though as someone who has had nightmares of freaky skin stuff since watching an old sci-fi movie as a kid, this distracted me a few times as it made my skin crawl. Which I guess is exactly the effect they were going for, and the game is all the better for it. 

At the start the game is slow, not least because someone somewhere confused ‘running’ with ‘fast walk’ which even at the end of the game feels like a brazen attempt to extend the life of the game and it is no less frustrating then than it is at the start. Literally no one on earth would move that slowly. This isn’t helped by the game's biggest design decision, one that is at this point very much out of date: Fixed camera angles. I get that the team was going for an old school adventure game feel, but those games have moved on, and the problems that come with this decision, such as directions being changed because the angle moved are all present and correct, and just as frustrating as ever. 

That said, once the story started to pick up, I was engaged more than I was initially expecting and it helped to set up a universe that I really hope the developers explore more in a sequel, as the lore starts to be developed in some very cool ways. I won’t say more than that to avoid spoilers, but the game does stick its landing excellently, its ending excellently acted and written and leaving you wanting more. 

The last thing to mention are the technical issues. I played on PC, and it recommends a gamepad to play with, and I cannot stress that enough if you intend to play. The keyboard and mouse controls are poor beyond belief, to the point using an item to cut through a skin door on the other side actually hurt my arm it took so long with the mouse. Then there are the frame rate issues. It just dropped to single digit frames for no reason I can tell several times during my play through and I have no idea why. 

I had one issue with my gamepad that wasn’t the game's fault, but when I got it fixed for some reason the look controls became inverted for no reason at all, I certainly hadn’t done it. These little things, and the frustrations around the movement speed and fixed camera angles keep The Medium from becoming a classic, but I do recommend it for fans of both horror thriller games and excellent art direction. 

It is one of the best horror thriller games I have ever played, it just takes a few hours to get there, but I cannot deny the art direction is top notch and makes the game well worth a look on its own. The fact the story gets as good as it does is just the icing on the cake, and I really hope a sequel comes soon. 

Review: Carrion

 As gamers we spend so much time going on a power fantasy where we save the helpless, mow down hundreds of lesser enemies and ultimately defeat the big bad at the end to save the world/planet/galaxy/universe that it can become somewhat rote. It’s rare that a game lets you be that big bad and rarer still where there isn’t some reconciliation at the end. Enter Carrion, where the developers decided to let you play as that big bad. 

Carrion puts you in control of a blood drenched tentacle monster with a taste for human flesh, and sets you lose in a facility full of said walking food. It is a joy to play up to a point and doesn’t out stay its welcome with a relatively short run time, but I have never encountered a game that screams for one of the most used video game mechanics in history and never gets it. 

Simply moving the monster around the map is an absolute joy, it just feels amazing to get around and the only times you can’t get to a particular spot is because you haven’t found the required upgrade yet. Yes, this is a metroidvania style game so upgrades come at a decent pace and allow you to get around easier or survive combat encounters better. 

Speaking of, the combat is slightly weird. The majority of the NPC’s are fodder, literally, and are used to replenish biomass which serves as your health. There is a morbid satisfaction to entering a room full of unarmed scientists and ripping them all apart, sometimes rolling over the scene and covering it in blood. It harks of those horror movie scenes where the monster annihilates an supposedly ‘elite’ squad of soldiers and provides some of the games coolest moments. 

As you progress, however, those NPC’s get guns. This starts with some obviously overly ambitious security guards and office workers grabbing weapons and thinking they are brave and they don’t pose too much of a threat, but eventually you get the actual soldiers and without considered use of the environment and a deft hand on the controller can prove a problem due to the forward shields they carry. These guys upgrade to flame throwing wielding annoyances and the ultimate enemy, the mech. Again though, through ability use, knowledge of the room/level and agile thumbs they don’t pose a huge problem. 

It means the game is, for the most part, a breeze to play through. As I said at the beginning it is a joy to control and it’s at its best when it goes all in on the overpowered monster loose in an underground facility trope that is the games main selling point. Unfortunately, it isn’t without its problems which is a shame because with just a bit of tweaking Carrion could be one of the year's best games. 

I said it’s great to control which is true, however, as the creature gets bigger it can get in its own way and make it difficult to move vertically. I am not exactly sure how this can be rectified, and it is a relatively small issue but it can be frustrating. Same goes for moving around in water as it can be hard to track which bit is the ‘front’ so you can end up moving in circles to get through a section. 

This size issue can cause problems with a certain type of defense system the facility has as well. This is a mine, i guess, that sticks to the biomass and is an instant kill when it goes off after a couple of seconds. They appear at set locations and while there is an upgrade that stops them killing you, it is possible to accidentally drift into their reaction zone and get killed when you don’t have the energy needed to stop it. Again, like all but one issue in Carrion, it's an annoyance more than anything. 

The main issue, and one that I don’t think any long time gamer would be able to understand why it isn’t included, is that this game needs a map. Desperately. It is ridiculous that it isn’t included given the lack of any other on screen direction other than your ability and health indicators, and given that the game is a metroidvania style game which inherently means a lot of backtracking and returning to old areas for upgrades, it is a glaring omission.

It is insane that one of the most used, and some would argue, basic video game mechanics is completely not in the game. Moreover, this was a deliberate design decision by the developers and speaks to an age old problem of “Well I can finish it without one so so can they.” I mean, to be fair you can, but not without an immense amount of moving through areas multiple times for no reason whatsoever. 

The lack of a map is Carrion’s most frustrating and disappointing aspects and I hope the developers learn from this mistake and have more respect for their audience's time in the future as the despite that one massive issue and a few niggles, it is a great playing and fun game that genuinely offers something different to the usual power fantasy. I do recommend Carrion, just be aware that it will hugely frustrate you by the end.

Review: The Outer Worlds

It is easy to tell a Japanese RPG from a Western one. JRPG’s focus on cool visuals, heavily inspired from anime and manga with at times cheesy dialog and story lines and combat that features summoning monsters and comically over sized swords. Western RPG’s, generally speaking, focus on the dialog and story, presenting worlds that seem to brim with possibilities. Obsidian Entertainments The Outer Worlds is very much the second of these, and in some ways is an excellent example, but not so much in others. 

You play as the sole revived occupant of ‘The Hope’, a colony ship left on the edge of  the Halcyon colony, light years from earth. The man that revived you says he can save the thousands of other colonists on the ship if you help him, and of course you do, setting you forth on an adventure across space stations and worlds to encounter a cast of crazy characters, strange planets and vicious monsters. So far, so RPG. 

To solidify this, there are stats, upgradable weapons, companions and quests. Everything you would want from an RPG, except for one important thing: Stakes. The stakes here never feel world ending, there isn’t some ‘big bad’ coming to destroy you, it is a smaller tale than that, which is a deliberate design choice but one that makes everything feel a little bit muted and understated. 

There is a sense of humor to The Outer Worlds that a lot of RPG’s lack, and this comes through in the excellent writing and story lines. The tale of corporations running everything and the rivalry between each one that leads employees to not even take medicine if it isn’t made by the one they work for is something genuinely different and fun, with people you encounter saying the company marketing line at the end of every sentence. It can get a little tedious, but that is kind of the point, corporate policy infringing on everything in your life is just that. 

You start out a loner, but soon come upon your first companion, Pravati, an engineer naive in the way of the colony. This is where the game really comes into its own, showcasing the excellent, nuanced writing that is truly the hallmark of The Outer Worlds. Each companion is a very unique character you help shape over the course of the story, and the both satisfying and disappointing ending wrap up scenes serve as a nice conclusion to each arc, though that does depend on how much of each character's quest line you complete. 

The game is a bit Mass Effect 2 in that regard, with each character coming with a ‘loyalty mission’ style quest line that gives back story and develops each one into those unique characters. The best part is that they aren’t ‘go to this place, fight a bunch of creatures/bad guys and win’. A couple are, but most are helping these characters find closure on an aspect of their lives or giving advice in times or need. 

Of course, you do have the option to be a massive dick. This being a story and character heavy RPG you get the option to be good, bad or somewhere in between, and characters do change to reflect that. Being the person I am, good was my path through the game and I saw plenty to give me a satisfying conclusion. It’s all this that will make or break the game for you in the end, if you find the dialog grating or cheesy, and hate the voice acting, cause everyone is then this won’t be the game for you. It’s not, but that's just my opinion, the voice acting is pretty great throughout, though most people have a southern american accent that isn’t for everyone. The writing as previously stated is excellent and these feel like real people, it's truly impressive. 

What's not impressive however, is the combat. It’s in there, it works, but it's just all so lackluster. The guns have little weight to them and on most encounters are so very easy they are a bump in the road rather than an obstacle to overcome. To put into perspective about how easy these encounters are, each companion comes with a unique combat ability, as well as things that boost your stats in certain ways but the fights being as easy as they were I didn’t have to use these abilities. In fact I actively forgot about them until about two hours from the end of the game. 

The ability to assign different states to your companions doesn’t help with this either, since setting them to aggressive and giving them decent weapons and armour means they will just wade in and wreck anything they see, though this does normally result in at least one dying. On the plus side, as soon as all the enemies have been dealt with they instantly revive, so it's no big deal. 

All that was required was the guns to feel that little bit more weighty, like actual armaments, and the enemies to be harder to kill, just by a little bit and that would have given a better performance out of the combat. As it stands, if it wasn’t there at all you wouldn’t lose that much when playing, which is a shame because effort has been made here, with a variety of weapons both ranged and melee that give you plenty of options, it just all feels kind of pointless. 

Travelling about the halcyon colony grants you areas that include a space station, cities and small towns on a few different planets. It's a bummer that there isn’t more of this as the stellar map has several planets you can’t seem to go to, though to be fair I didn’t find all the companions during my play through so that could have changed, as well as the fact I played as a good guy so the options could have changed. The environments I traveled to were pretty varied and very nice looking, so monotony didn’t set in until the back travelling kicked in towards the end of the game. 

The Outer Worlds is a great RPG that just needs better combat. The writing, characters, environments and tone provide a unique setting that is entertaining to explore. There are ideas around what characters in a game of this type could be and prove successful and satisfying, and despite the ending scroll being disappointing for its lack of animation it gives you closure to a character set you come to love, especially for your player character.

 If you are itching for a RPG that doesn’t have all the over top weapons and summons of a JRPG then this is the game for you, and it isn’t over a hundred hours to play, so it doesn’t out stay its welcome. As western RPG’s go, this is a great one.

Review: Blair Witch

Games are very different to movies. It’s an obvious statement, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it is this difference that is at the heart of the issues with Blair Witch, the new game from Bloober Team. It is a competently made game, but the deft touch required to transfer the themes of The Blair Witch movies to a video game setting simply isn’t there and it lets the overall game down. 

As I said though, it is a competently made game. You play as Ellis Lynch, former cop and army veteran, as he travels to the Black Hills Forest to search for a missing boy some two years after the events of the very first Blair Witch movie. Ellis brings with him his pet dog Bullet, and off the two go to attempt to find this small boy. What happens next ranges from the genuinely creepy to the downright obvious, but tries to play on the idea of the titular witch in the woods. 

To be fair, the writing isn’t half bad with Ellis feeling like a fully fleshed out character who is desperately trying to get his life back on track. The characters around him and certain events that transpire add to this feeling, with flashbacks to his time in the army showing a man suffering from deep emotional distress. The good news is that this isn’t done in a ham fisted way, as you can never be quite sure if its the evil presence in the woods or Ellis’ issues that cause the incidents. 

This is all helped along by the best thing that the game has: Bullet. The dog follows you around, pointing out dangers or foraging for clues as well as helping direct you into the seemingly directionless forest. Petting Bullet or giving him a treat helps ground Ellis back in reality, again showing the character as something more than just a blank slate FPS protagonist. 

Despite all of this, the game is let down by its name and the cinematic history that comes with it. Should you compare a game and the movie it's based on? That particular debate is still open and yes, as I said at the start of this review they are very different mediums, however games can convey the themes and core tenants of their license while still being their own thing. Blair Witch doesn’t do this. 

The movies are all famous for being ‘found footage’, i.e. the movie you see is actually camcorder footage shot by the protagonists and found at a later date. The game doesn’t do this. It does have a camcorder that allows you to watch tapes you found throughout the world. If you find one with a blue sticker it's just footage you can watch, find one with a red sticker though and you can pause it when something changes and that change is reflected back out in the real world. Its neat, but found footage it is not, and it's also about the closest thing, apart from setting and the strange stick figures you come across, to the Blair Witch license you are going to get. 

Therein lies the problem. The Blair Witch Project and it’s sequels are more about what you don’t see rather than what you do. There isn’t any combat to speak of, and it's more about sinister goings on around the protagonists that mess with their perception of reality rather than anything you overtly see. The game puts the viewpoint in first person and shows enemies you have to fight off with the aid of Bullet and a flashlight, others you have to avoid, making it just not creepy enough to work with the license for me. 

I remember going to the cinema to watch the original film when I was younger and coming out with a distinctive ‘meh’ attitude towards it. I then attempted to go to sleep and that was when the films brilliance dawned on me and I had trouble sleeping for a few nights after. You don’t get that with the game, there are some messed up moments and sequences where images and sound coalesce into something that bamboozles the senses but as soon as you come out of it you are back to a standard FPS thriller, one that could have its own unique and original IP and still be just as effective, the developers wouldn’t even need to change that much about the story and in game assets. 

To be fair, I came around on the game by the time I got to the end, with the story and overall writing enough to provide a satisfying conclusion and the atmosphere doing just enough to make it work. I did not believe, and still do not, that it requires the Blair Witch license and honestly I think it would be better without it as it would have room to just be its own thing without the added pressure of living up to the source material. 

Given that the game is on Game pass, there are certainly worse ways to kill a few hours, but put the notion of this being a licensed game out of your mind, it is a unique horror experience that for some reason was given a name unfitting of its nature. 

Review: Crackdown 3

I remember, back in the day, playing the very first Crackdown. It had its problems, but it was so fun to power up to point where you can leap tall buildings in a single bound, blast generic bad guys in the face and have a good time. It was an original IP for the Xbox 360 and a brilliantly fun, turn off your brain time. 

Fast forward twelve years and we have Crackdown 3, released for Xbox and PC earlier this year. Unfortunately, while the same basic formula applies, and this time features loveable tough man Terry Crews, the magic hasn’t translated because games have evolved over the last few years leaving the third game feeling stuck in the past. 

That’s not to say it doesn’t do what it says on the tin: Crackdown 3 is very much a Crackdown game, but that is kind of the problem. Rather than evolving the formula in any significant way, a few half baked ideas from other games have been added, then the same method of progression has been kept in while a lock on mechanic makes the shooting a little too easy and formulaic. This results in a competent game, but one that isn’t overly exciting and can quickly devolve into boredom. 

In it’s defence, Crackdown 3 fails to fall into the trap a lot of open world games do - over filling the map. There is plenty to do, but not so much that it becomes a slog to get through and the overall game becomes nothing more than a checklist. The developers at Sumo Digital managed to get the balance just right, with enough things to do to keep you playing but not so much that its overwhelming. It’s just a shame that this is the best thing the game does. 

Shooting enemies becomes rote quickly, and despite there being the ability to target individual body parts when getting close to bad guys, you rarely need to do it, plus how this is implemented is strange. I played on PC, so to target an enemy is a click of the right mouse button, fire the left, but when I got closer I could do a quick little movement of the mouse to target the head or arms. It was a weird way to do it because it feels counter intuitive to move the mouse in such a way. More than that though, I didn’t need to do it, I could kill the guy only slightly quicker with headshots than I could just targeting them normally. 

Once I gave up on trying to do headshots, the combat got better but so easy that the only times I died were down to poor positioning on my part. The variety of weapons, I must admit, were pretty cool, nothing spectacular apart from a couple of the bigger rocket launchers, but I always had the right tool for the job. Getting better over time with them helped a lot too, but again this added to the ‘this is a crackdown ass crackdown game’ feel. 

As for the other main part of the gameplay - running around the city, that again does the job but I wouldn’t call it Mario levels of precision, far from it. The jumping is just a little too floaty for the number of platforming puzzles available to you, and while this is compensated for as you level up your agility skill by grabbing glowing agility orbs dotted around the world, the over reliance on platforming challenges in the form of towers you have to climb to get rid of the bad guys propaganda leads to frustration as its all too easy to jump over the platform. 

What is that propaganda replaced with? Terry Crews. The setup for the story is that the agency (the ‘good guys’) sent a team to the city of New Providence as the source of a global power outage had been traced there. The opening cut-scene sees the transport shot down, and thus the only agent left is you (unless playing co-op). There are several agent models to pick from, but let's be honest, play as Terry Crews, he is the biggest draw here. Unfortunately he is also massively underused. 

Cutscenes don’t feature any lines from him, apart from the opening one, and while jumping around the world and getting into fights gives you little quips it's not enough. The biggest thing is that when you complete a tower, the giant red hologram of the games big bad is replaced with a giant blue hologram of Mr Crews, spouting lines about how the bad guys are bad. Which you don’t really hear unless stood directly underneath a tower. 

It’s a shame because he is a funny guy and has a singular brand of angry, so any previous experience of his work makes his use here disappointing at best and outright terrible at worst. The marketing all surrounded him, but don’t be fooled, you can play as any other character and get just as good results, but still, play as Terry Crews cause you might as well. 

The term ‘It’s a shame’ pretty much sums up the whole experience. Keeping the essence of Crackdown is possible while still evolving the game, but that didn’t happen here. Even the more modern aspects are a let down. There is a very lite version of the Nemesis system from the Shadow of Mordor games here, but it's just not what you want from such a thing. Where in that game if you took out a nemesis they are replaced by an upcoming orc, here you are given basically the same screen but when you take one out, that's it, they are done and you move onto the next. Once they kill them all you get to take on the head of the organisation they work for. 

Speaking of that big bad, while I appreciate that I put the game on easy, that final boss battle was one of the easiest battles I have ever played. I honestly had more trouble with the lower level bosses than I did the last one. In part this was because I was at a much higher level, part because I had probably the best explosive weapon in the game, but mainly it really is just that easy and it left me feeling unsatisfied with the end game. 

I did try the Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode, which was actually kinda cool. Jumping all over the map blowing it up as you hunt down the other team was cool, but there was so little skill involved it became boring quick. The same lock on system is here, so it's not a challenge to take someone down, and the environmental destruction, while cool adds little to the experience. So few people were playing I got into three matches with the same set of people then the last one took longer than five minutes to match make so I gave up. 

Again, it’s a shame, a bit more thought and wrecking zone could have been really ace but at present it feels like a tacked on afterthought that has had half the resources thrown at it that it really needs. This is especially bad considering that when the game was first announced a huge deal was made of this mode and how it used the cloud to power its destructive environments. It might still do that, but the cloud isn’t a substitute for good game design and ultimately this is where the mode falls down. 

Overall,  Crackdown 3 is a game of missed potential, a game who's core essence could have been kept while taking on more modern elements that would have given it a fresh feel. It could have used its celebrity protagonist in so many better ways that it feels like the money spent should have been used on improving the game and had it followed through on its promise of cloud powered multiplayer become one of the best games of the year. 

Unfortunately, my reaction by the end of my time with it was a definitive ‘meh’. It is a half decent way to while away a few hours but nothing that will stick with you and a game that is easily outshined by more modern takes on open world games. It's on Xbox Game Pass, so to be fair if you have that then it is worth a play, but don’t be fooled, even then it is outclassed by other games on the same service. It’s a shame.