The Day of the Dead (or Dia de los Muertos) is a traditional Latin American holiday on which, every November 1st, the lives of deceased loved ones are celebrated with food, drink, parties, and a great deal of masquerade involving the calacas and calaveras (skeletons and skulls). For me, this seems like the perfect excuse to look back on the long-running and ever-changing zombie genre that was largely popularised by director George A. Romero, which I devoted a great deal of my PhD thesis towards and which has often been used as a parallel to various aspects of society and culture.
Released: 27 April 2022 Originally Released: 13 September 1996 Developer: MegaPixel Studio S.A. Original Developer: SEGA AM1 Also Available For: Google Stadia, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series S, Xbox One (Remake); Arcade, PC, and SEGA Saturn (Original Release)
The Background: The influence of renowned horror writer and director George A. Romero cannot be understated; not only did he forever change the concept of zombies from their origins as voodoo slaves to the shambling undead we know and love today, but his zombie movies had a profound influence on videogames. The Resident Evil franchise (Various, 1996 to present) was directly inspired by (and constantly paid homage to) Romero’s films, and his influence can be equally felt in the popular light-gun title The House of the Dead. Originally built using the same game engine as Virtua Cop (SEGA AM2, 1994), The House of the Dead was put together over the course of a year and three months by a team that couldn’t speak a word of English. Initially, the developers wanted to include more complex branching paths, but these ideas had to be dropped due to time constraints; to save time, the enemy designs skipped the rough sketch phase and went straight from the initial idea to the design drawing stage, though the developers were able to anticipate the game’s violence would need to be toned down overseas and so included the option to change the blood colour. The initial arcade version of the game was a critical and commercial hit and the SEGA Saturn port was generally well regarded in turn, thus kick-starting a pretty successful series of follow-ups despite two widely derided live-action adaptations. In April 2021, a remake of the original game was announced for the current generation of consoles that included updated visuals and controls, a new “Horde Mode” that increases the number of onscreen enemies, and other additional features. While the Nintendo Switch version received mixed reviews, critical feedback for the Xbox One/Series version of the game was largely positive, with reviews praising the horror presentation and nostalgia offered by the title despite the lack of a physical light-gun accessory.
The Plot: After renowned biochemist and geneticist Doctor Curien becomes obsessed with discovering the nature of life and death, his experiments at the Curien Mansion take a gruesome turn. After government agent Thomas Rogan receives a distress call from his fiancée, Sophie Richards, from the Curien Mansion, he and his partner, “G”, fly out to investigate only to find the mansion overrun with Curien’s undead creatures!
Gameplay: The House of the Dead: Remake is a first-person rail shooter in which players step into the role of two government agents, Thomas Rogan and “G”, and blast their way through hoards of zombies and other demonic creatures across four chapters. While you never have to worry about moving your character, as you traverse a set path at all times with few deviations, you can direct an aiming reticule using the left stick and automatically centre it with the X button. Otherwise, though, your controls are nice and simple: The Right Trigger and A button lets you fire, the Left Trigger and B button lets you reload, Y activates a torch (or “flashlight” for your Americans), and that’s basically it. You can go into the options and set up an auto reload function (though I find manually reloading is far more intuitive) as well as set a variety of other gameplay and aesthetic effects (such as changing the colour of your reticule and the level of aiming assistance you receive). You can also switch between your different weapons using left and right on the directional pad, though you’ll have to go to some effort to actually unlock additional weapons to use; they’re found in weapon crates scattered throughout each chapter, but these are only accessible by saving scientists from zombies and other life-threatening situations, which can be easier said that done when you have a trigger finger as itchy as mine gets in games such as this.
Mow down hoards of the undead but be careful not to kill any innocent scientists!
The game comes with two playable modes: “Original” and “Hoard”, with each one sporting four difficulty levels, the option to switch to a “Classic” and “Modern” scoring system, and allowing solo, co-operative play, or competitive play. The main different between original and Hoard is that there are loads more enemies in Hoard mode, making for a much more frenetic and action-packed experience. While the different difficulty levels make enemies tougher and more resilient, the “Arcade” option imposes health and credit limits; in this mode, you still get three health bars (represented as these glowing jugs) but each hit fully depletes one of them rather than dealing half damage as on the easier difficulties and, when you lose a life, you have a limited number of credits available to continue playing. You can use your points to buy more credits, but these cost about 5000 points a piece so you can easily run out in a playthrough, but the “modern” scoring system earns you extra points for successive kills without missing or being hit. Some enemies can block your shots with their arms or weapons, meaning you either need to time your shot to hit their weak spot or blast away their weapon or limbs to take them out but, while you can shoot their heads off, some will continue to attack regardless. All of them lumber towards you until you put them down but will slash and bite at you up close, and they even throw projectiles, barrels, and bladed weapons from a distance and have a tendency to pop out of nowhere so you need to be quick on the trigger, but not so quick that you shoot the scientists and cost yourself some health and points. At times, levels will split into multiple paths, but it’s not always clear how you take these routes; sometimes you need to shoot a button or blast away a door, debris, or trap door, but other times you need to shoot specific enemies, save certain scientists, or even let yourself get hit to drop down to a new area, which encourages experimentation and multiple playthroughs.
Graphics and Sound: Rail shooters don’t tend to be the most graphically intense games, in my experience; generally, the action is far too fast and frenetic to worry about the presentation as you’re constantly on the move and being swung about the place by the auto movement, but The House of the Dead: Remake looks and sounds really, really good. There’s a fantastic B-movie-level menace to everything, from the mansion’s grounds to the gothic interior, the rancid sewers, and Dr. Curien’s high-tech laboratory. The exteriors are bathed in a red glow or the darkness of night, while the interior as full of little touches, from suits or armour to wrecked paintings, and decorations that you can destroy at will. As you explore, you can blast crates and barrels to find the odd health pick-up or score bonus, but you’ll also activate new paths in the same manner, calling elevators, dropping through trap doors, and wading through water depending on your actions, which will then lead you to disgusting sewers, narrow corridors, billiard rooms, and stone hallways not unlike a medieval castle.
Blast your way through a gothic mansion and high-tech lab all while the fantastically cheesy plot unfolds.
Eventually, you’ll reach Dr. Curien’s laboratory, where blast doors block your path and require key cards to open, high-tech computers and monitors are everywhere, and tougher enemies are stored in glass tanks or scrambling about on the ceiling. Enemies can also come crashing through doors and windows, pop out from electrical barriers, and will blast into chunks when you shoot them, losing limbs and heads and having their skeleton and guts exposed as they take damage. The music is all very suitable for the action and the aesthetic, being an adrenaline-pumping mixture of rock and synth, and the satisfaction gained from hearing zombies groan in pain as you put them down or hearing your bullets clang against metal or tear apart a false door or chandelier is pretty fulfilling. The voice acting is hilariously bad, of course, but that’s all part of the charm of the game’s B-movie presentation; both Rogan and “G” have different dialogue and grunts as you play, which is a nice touch, and the line delivery is suitably over the top to immerse you in the atmosphere (there’s even some typos in the subtitles which, intentional or not, I found amusing).
Enemies and Bosses: Dr. Curien’s mansion has primarily been overrun by zombies; these shambling, bloody ghouls will stumble towards you, throw knives or axes from a distance, or pop up right in your face to scratch and bite at you, but they can be blasted apart and put down into a rapidly bubbling pool of viscera pretty quickly. Bats, weird winged dogs, vicious worms, spiders, and even mutated monkeys are all commonplace enemies too, but it’s the various zombie variants who’ll give you the most trouble. Larger, more rotund zombies will throw barrels at you or charge at you with a chainsaw in hand, slimy decomposing corpses pop out of the sewers or drop from above, suited zombies scamper about with knives, and hulking brutes wield massive sledgehammers or balls on chains that you need to shoot out of the air. Similarly, the Borg-like cybernetic zombies fire claw projectiles at your face, a pale variant attacks with a laser knife, and you’ll even encounter bigger zombies covered in iron armour that can resist your bullets.
Dr. Curien’s most monstrous creations await you at the end of each chapter.
Each chapter ends in a battle against one of Dr. Curien’s more powerful creations, with two of these returning as sub-bosses in the final chapter. The first you’ll battle is Type-27 (or “Chariot”), a large, rotting humanoid garbed in heavy armour and swinging a bardiche. Chariot relentlessly shuffles towards you, looking to maim you with his weapon, but can be forced back by shooting at the weak spot on his breastplate. After enough hits, he’ll burst free of his armour and you can start blasting his decomposing flesh to put him down for good but he can also defend against your shots by covering up with his armour and limbs. Type-041 (or “The Hanged Man”) is much trickier to defeat; this bat-like creature hovers above the rooftops sending bats to attack you, which you must shoot out of the sky and then desperately try and get a good shot at the weak point on his chest as he darts about the night sky and closes in on you for a close range attack. This fight goes on a bit as, when weakened, the Hanged Man will fly away and then force you to a different section of the rooftop, where he repeatedly dives at you to attack, which also leaves him wide open for your shots. Type 6803 (“Hermit”) is a far easier fight; this giant spider-like creature climbs towards you up a cobwebbed tunnel and you must shoot it in the face to force it back. When you follow it, it backs up and fires projectiles from its egg sack and then protects its head as it scurries towards you, but it’s pretty simple to blast it in the face once its exposed. Finally, after dispatching Chariot and the Hanged Man once more, you’ll face Dr. Curien’s greatest creation: Type-0, AKA “Magician”. This synthetic humanoid floats around the arena, quickly darting all over the place and making itself a difficult target, while tossing flaming projectiles at you that can be difficult to shoot down. Covered in an armoured hide, its only weak spots are the exposed flesh dotted around its body, mainly on the legs, and it can summon a rain of projectiles that you need to shoot down and also zoom up close to land a swiping attack, making it easily the toughest boss in the game simply because just landing a hit can be difficult due to its speed and small weak point.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: As you play through the game’s four chapters, you’ll find scientists being chased, threatened, or otherwise endangered by Dr. Curien’s creatures. Saving them nets you a score bonus and eventually leads to you unlocking new weapons, but they will also often gift you some health, which can either replenish or increase your health, so it’s worth taking the time to save them. Shooting crates and barrels may also reveal health power-ups and other objects, like coins and golden frogs, which add to your score tally. Sadly, the only way to actually access new weapons is to save as many scientists as you can, which will unlock the weapon crates found in each chapter and gift you far better weapons, such as the assault rifle and grenade launcher, as well as a crossbow and the pitter.
Additional Features: There are forty-one Achievements to earn here, with five being earned simply by beating the game on any difficulty setting. There are three endings to earn as well, with four Achievements tied to them, and these are gained by finishing the game with a certain number of points rather than on different difficulty settings. There is an Achievement for beating the game’s “Arcade” mode, but not the “Hoard” mode, and others for playing with a friend, killing a certain number of enemies, rescuing and killing scientists, and unlocking every weapon. In addition to “busy work” Achievements (like finding every alternative path or picking up every item you see in one playthrough), there are some more obscure and inventive ones, such as blasting enemies over a wall or juggling a zombie with your assault rifle. As you play through the game and encounter enemies, they’ll be added to the creature gallery, which allows you to view their character models, bio, and weak spots. After beating the game for the first time, you can replay any chapter at will (meaning you can just jump to chapter four to beat “Arcade” mode for an easy Achievement), and you can also play alongside a friend, register your high score on the leaderboard, and even input cheat codes on the main menu to unlock infinite ammo, all weapons, one-hit kills, a free-play option and, eventually, invincibility but, while you’ll still be able to get Achievements with these cheats activated, they’ll only take effect once you’ve earned a certain number of Achievements.
The Summary: The House of the Dead: Remake is a fun, frantic, blood-soaked shoot-‘em-up that’s packed full of gore, action, and fun gameplay. I really enjoyed the presentation, the call-backs to B-movies and zombie classics, and the fast-paced shooting that had me mowing down zombies without a second’s thought and desperately trying not to hit any innocent scientists. Sadly, though, the game is very short; “Hoard” mode really doesn’t add all that much except a whole bunch of additional enemies to fill full of holes and, while it’s fun discovering new paths and burning through the game in repeated playthroughs trying to save everyone you find, it’s not always clear which route you need to take or when these are even available to you. The content is also lacking a bit; it would’ve been nice to have Achievements specifically tied to “Hoard” mode or to have the option to play the original arcade release, or to have included the other arcade titles in with the package as it’s not exactly a lengthy or deeply complex game. Overall, it’s a great way to spend a few hours of your time but the novelty soon wears off; I used to have The House of the Dead: Overkill – Extended Cut (Headstrong Games, 2011) on the PlayStation 3 and I think I remember that having a lot more going for it in terms of length, variety, and unlockable content but if you’re itching for a bit of simple, arcade, zombie-blasting action then The House of the Dead: Remake has you more than covered.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Pretty Good
Did you enjoy The House of the Dead: Remake? How do you think it compares to the original game, or other titles in the franchise? Did you ever discover al the different paths and save all those scientists? What did you think to the variety and gameplay options, and did you think there was anything lacking in the game? Which of the bosses was your favourite and what did you think to the B-movie presentation of the game? What is your favourite House of the Dead game, or other zombie videogame? How are you celebrating the Day of the Dead today? Whatever your thoughts on The House of the Dead: Remake, and zombies in general, feel free to either sign up and leave a comment below or leave your thoughts on my social media.
Released: 19 August 2021 Originally Released: 22 June 1996 Developer: Nightdive Studios Original Developer: id Software Also Available For: Amiga, Linux, MS-DOS, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, SEGA Saturn, Xbox One, Xbox Series S
The Background: Following the unprecedented success of Doom(id Software, 1993), first-person, PC-based shooters were suddenly all the rage and the pioneers of the genre, unquestionably, were developers id Software. Having capitalised on Doom’s success, and the wave of knock-offs, with a sequel, expansions, and ports, id Software drafted in Doom creator John Romero to create a successor series based on the original Doom engine. After his pitch for a third-person melee title was turned down, tensions were raised between Romero and id Software that ultimately led to his departure. Originally intended to feature a Thor-likecharacter, Aztec elements, and even role-playing mechanics, Quake eventually took the form of a more action-orientated follow-up to the Doom games and was bolstered by a sinister soundtrack from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. For my part, I played a decent amount of Quake on PC as a kid and, based on my enjoyment of Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms, 1996), I picked up the Nintendo 64 port back in the day, something which earned me a great deal of flack from my friends. Regardless, Quake is very highly regarded, especially on the PC, kick-started a popular sub-series of first-person shooters (FPS), and surprisingly received a remasterfor modern consoles in August of 2021 that I decided to snap up since I was signed up to Game Pass Ultimate at the time.
The Plot: When the military’s experiments with teleportation technology result in the creation of an inter-dimensional portal known as the “Slipgate”, humanity find itself threatened by the demonic beings code-naked “Quake”. After “Operation Counterstrike” is slaughtered, a sole surviving Marine is left to gather the four magic runes that are the key to stopping the enemy and ending their invasion of Earth.
Gameplay: Quake is a first-person shooter (FPS) in which players are placed into the role of a hardened, nameless Marine and traverse a number of dark, demon environments battling all kinds of monsters and ghouls. If you’ve ever played Doom or any of its classic sequels, you’ll be immediately familiar with Quake’s gameplay and presentation but there are a few things that make Quake stand out from its predecessor. First of all, the player is able to actually aim their crosshair, allowing for full 3600 field of view and making it easier than ever to blast enemies no matter where they’re hiding. The rest of the game’s controls are standard fair but are also fully customisable from the main options menu; when I played the game, I mapped jump to A, shoot to the Right Trigger, and the ability to quickly switch between weapons to X and B. This remaster of Quake adds a weapon wheel to the game, which I mapped to the Right Bumper but never actually used, and you can also assign buttons to have you dive and rise when swimming or use the Anti-Grav Belt to fly. You can also customise various display options while you’re at it, which allows you to change the size of the crosshair and the presentation of the heads-up display (HUD), but I left most of these alone. When in the pause menu, you can also use the Left Bumper and Right Bumper to quick load and quick save the game, which is super useful.
Explore dark, terrifying environments in search of keys to find the exit.
Like in Doom, your primary objective when playing Quake is to fight your way to the Slipgate exit. This sees you traversing a number of dark, ominous environments and taking out a whole mess of demons and monsters while collecting gold and silver keys (known as Keycards, Keys, and Runekeys depending on the theme of the level) to open doors and progress throughout the area. You’ll also be pressing in buttons and switches by walking into them to lower drawbridges, creating bridges, or otherwise opening up tunnels or doors so you can progress a little further. One thing you’ll probably notice right away is that Quake lacks any kind of map system but, for the most part, it doesn’t really need it; while many levels are somewhat maze-like and a handful are specifically constructed to be more labyrinthine than others, overall the environments are much smaller and easier to find your way around than in its sister-series and you’ll often find arrows, Slipgates, and gates to help you get to where you need to go. Exploration is often rewarded with secret areas containing armour, health, and other power-ups and the game’s difficulty is entirely up to you as you can select different difficulty settings from the main menu (ranging from “Easy” to “Nightmare”); in this remaster, you can also select whichever level you want to start from right from the start but this won’t count towards you unlocking the game’s many completion Achievements. Selecting higher difficulty settings will naturally increase the amount of enemies, their aggression, and how much damage they dish out, which can mean the difference between dispatching a boss with one move or with three.
Press switches, swim through water, and watch out for death traps as you explore.
When you start a new game, you are dropped into a small hub world from which you can also choose from different difficulty paths and jump into the next mission and you’ll need to make liberal use of the manual save system because, when you die, you’ll have to restart the last mission right from the start without any of the weapons you picked up before and during your last run. It doesn’t take long before you’ve experienced basically everything that Quake has to offer; dark military bases, bloodstained castles, and Hellish dimensions are the order of the day and you’ll find yourself taking a dip in water to reach new sections in each area, dodging balls of molten rock, and being surprised when the floor suddenly collapses beneath you and drops you into either a pit of lava for an instant death or a body of slime that slowly saps your health. Gameplay gets mixed up a little bit the further you progress, though, allowing you to hop between stationary and moving platforms or rising and falling columns of rock, riding in boats, elevators, and lifts, and blasting you around the place in air tubes. Occasionally, you’ll be faced with slightly more ambiguous puzzles that have you pushing barely-visible buttons, shooting or pressing and number of Quake pads to complete a sequence and open a new area, and dodging a variety of environmental hazards. Levels will contain crushing weights, electrical traps, rapid-firing nail guns, spears, and other death traps that you’ll often have to either run through as fast as you can, jumping madly to try and keep damage to a minimum, or carefully make your way through the trap to avoid being crushed into a bloody paste.
Graphics and Sound: Unlike Doom or the vast majority of Duke Nukem 3D, Quake’s enemies are entirely rendered as 3D character models. This gives them a much more solid and weighty appearance and means that enemies now lumber about as jerkily-animated 3D models rather than clumsily stumbling about the place as jerkily-animated 2D sprites. Still, they do explode into bloody, meaty chunks when defeated and their bodies drop to the floor and stay there, which is super useful for retracing your steps. The main character is primarily represented as one of many floating guns and a grimacing face on the HUD that reacts when you’re attacked and becomes more bloodied and dishevelled as your health drops, but you will get to see the Marine in full during the handful of brief third-person cutscenes that punctuate the end of each of the game’s episodes.
Dark, ominous hallways, medieval ruins, and pixelated Hellish surroundings are the order of the day.
Environments are dark, foreboding, and full of Lovecraftian and Satanic imagery. You’ll navigate through futuristic military bases of rusted metal, grey stone castles full of spikes and drawbridges, and volcanic levels full of demonic ruins. While the game retains that old-school, pixelated graphical sheen that was the order of the day for videogames at the time, the textures and game stability are undoubtedly the best they’ve ever been and, while you’ll see a lot of the game’s architecture and layouts repeated, they’re often mixed up enough to make each level distinct from others. You’ll see blinking control panels, pools of blood, dank sewers filled with zombies, blast through graveyards and catacombs, and explore high-tech military installations overrun with all manner of beasts. When you finish each episode or defeat one of the game’s handful of bosses, you’ll be met with a bit of text to help give some context to the game but much of Quake’s horror and tension comes from the fantastic soundtrack, which manages to be both fittingly ominous and rocking at the same time. Levels are also made all the more terrifying by the screams and roars of enemies and the sounds of more monsters teleporting in, all of which helps to keep the adrenaline constantly pumping as you bolt through pitch-black tunnels and explore caverns barely lit by flickering candles.
Enemies and Bosses: Contrary to other FPS videogames, Quake doesn’t actually feature that many boss battles; instead, you’ll generally have to collect keys to open exits and battle through hordes of enemies in order to finish most episodes. Enemies are visually very interesting and range from zombies (who throw chunks of bloody meat at you and can only be put down for good with your heavier ordinance), gun-toting Marines possessed by Quake’s evil, and sword-swinging knights. One of the most recurring (and annoying) enemies in the game is the Ogre, a chainsaw-wielding monstrosity that has a tendency to shoot grenades right in your face! You’ll also come across Death Knights, who fire flaming bolts at you in addition to wildly swinging at you with their swords, the floating, leech-like Scrags, piranha-like fish and eels in some bodies of water, Rottweilers, and vicious Fiends (who leap at you and swipe at you with their claws).
You’ll need to employ speed and strategy to take down Cthon and avoid Vore’s seeking explosives.
That’s not to say that boss battles don’t exist in Quake, however; at the end of the first episode, you’ll have to battle the mighty Cthon, a gigantic beast made entirely of lava and resembling Satan Himself. Cthon is entirely immune to all of your weapons and can only be defeated by running up to the upper path and pressing two buttons to lower two columns either side of him. You then race back to the start of the enclosed arena and press a third button to activate a bolt of electricity that either blows Cthon into chunks or sends him back to his lava pit for you to repeat the sequence on higher difficulty levels. At the end of the second mission, you’ll encounter the disgusting Vore enemy for the first time; this spider-like monstrosity scuttles around trying to slice you with its limbs and shoots heat-seeking spiked balls that explode on contact, meaning you have to constantly stay on the move and dodge behind walls and cover to avoid taking damage. After clearing this mission, Vores will appear sporadically as regular enemies but this can actually be to your benefit; when large groups of enemies gather, you can race/strafe around in a circle and cause them to attack and damage each other, which is super helpful.
The recurring Shamblers are far more dangerous than their eldritch creator.
Another boss-like enemy that becomes a recurring foe is the horrific Shambler, a massive beast that stomps around the environment blasting a bolt of lightning at you and trying to pummel you with its huge claws. After taking out the first with your best weapons, these bastards will teleport in or appear at the most inappropriate moments and often guard the keys you need to collect to progress and can even appear in groups of two or alongside Vores and other enemies. Both Shamblers and Vores populate the final mission of the main game, which sees you confronting the leader of these enemies, code-named “Quake” but in actuality the “Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” herself, Shub-Niggurath. You’ll have to settle for battling those enemies, though, as Shub-Niggurath is little more than a screaming, pulsating mound of flesh in the middle of a lava pit and, while she’s immune to your weapons, defeating Shub-Niggurath is ridiculously easy; simply wait for the spiked ball that’s circling the arena to enter the demonic Old One and then jump into the Slipgate. This will see your character teleport inside Shub-Niggurath, who simply explodes in a burst of chunky pieces.
A host of new maps, enemies, weapons, and challenging bosses await in the additional missions.
Thankfully, this remaster of Quake comes with four additional mission packs that include not only all-new maps but also additional enemies, such as Gremlins (essentially a reskin of the Fiends), nail-shooting, cybernetic scorpions known as Centroids, sentient swords, Grim Reaper-like Wraths, and a number of additional bosses. The first is the cybernetic Armagon, who fires lasers, rockets, and shockwaves at you in a claustrophobic arena. Luckily, you can take cover behind the many columns and take advantage of the weapons and power-ups strewn around, and he actually goes down pretty easily on the easiest difficulty as a result. Far more troublesome is the multi-armed, Grim Reaper-esque Overlord; this robed mage teleports around an arena full of Wraths and nail traps, hacking at you with its axes and firing a homing ball at you much like the Vores. Other additional bosses include Hephaestus, (a smaller, weaker version of Cthon), a Mummy (which is functionally the same as a zombie but does (and takes) greater damage), and three Guardians (Aztec and Egyptian warriors and blast at you with their staffs and spawn in more minions the more damage you inflict). After battling through longer, far more dangerous levels filled with a variety of the game’s enemies that will test your mettle to the limit, you’ll eventually face off against a monstrous dragon in an arena filled with lava and narrow rock pathways. The dragon flies overheard in a circular motion and spits fireballs and energy blasts at you, but you’re completely safe as long as you stay out of its sight, follow it from behind, and don’t slip into the lava. The arena is full of some of the game’s most powerful weapons but, even so, the dragon can absorb a great deal of punishment and can be tricky to hit while safely circling the arena. After you do bring it down, you’ll have to unload the remainder of your weapons on the Quake Temporal Energy Convertor (while, again, being careful not to slip into the lava beneath it) to finally put a stop to the demons’ invasion of Earth.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Being an FPS title, your most recurring power-up will be the large amount of weapons and ammo made available to you as you play through Quake’s missions. Unlike other FPS protagonists, the Marine has no unarmed combat mode and, instead, swings a pretty useless bloodied axe at enemies when no other weapons are available; you’ll also be happy to learn that there are no pistols or small firearms here and that your default weakest weapon is a good, old-fashioned shotgun. You can also grab heavier ordinance, such as grenade and rocket launchers, but the signature weapon of the game is undoubtedly the rapid-fire Nailgun. Furthermore, you can also pick up upgrades to these weapons, such as a double-barrelled shotgun (my preferred weapon of choice) and the Super Nailgun, and the game’s super weapon, the Thunderbolt, a futuristic-looking firearm that blasts enemies with a bolt of lightning.
In addition to a slew of devastating weapons, you can also grab temporary power-ups.
You’ll find more weapons in the additional mission packs, such as the lightning-spewing Mjölnir of Norse legend, a multi-grenade and rocket launcher, a proximity mine launcher, a laser cannon (that shoots high-intensity laser blasts that ricochet all over the environment and can damage even you), a grapple gun and throwing star, and further upgrades to the Nailgun and Thunderbolt that spit out lava nails and a burst of energy, respectively. In addition to health packs and armour, you can also find a number of temporary power-ups: the aforementioned Anti-Grav Belt allows you to moon jump to higher areas, the wetsuit and biosuit allow you to traverse water and slime without fear of drowning or taking damage, respectively, and you can grab Quad Damage to deal four times as much damage for a limited time. You can also pick up the Pentagram of Protection and Ring of Shadows to become temporarily invulnerable and invisible, respectively (although enemies will still attack you if you fire on them while invisible), and there are even more opportunities to increase your defence and attack in the additional mission packs. You can even grab the Horn of Conjuring to summon a random monster to fight by your side, and there are also other power-ups that are exclusive to the multiplayer deathmatch modes, such as the Rune and Vengeance Sphere.
Additional Features: Quake comes loaded with thirty-five Achievements for you to earn, with the vast majority of these being tied to completing the game’s single player campaign and finding secret exits. In fact, there is only one Achievement reserved for multiplayer, which is good news for me, though you will have to take on the game’s more challenging difficulty modes in order to get 100% completion. Additionally, you can’t just load up the final levels of the game and beat them to pop the Achievements; you actually need to play through the entire game to earn them, and you’ll find that there are a couple of quirky ones that have you killing a Shambler with only an axe or before it can fire its lightning attack, and causing enemies to kill each other. As mentioned, the game comes with a multiplayer component that allows you to play on- and offline against a friend or other players in standard deathmatches, such as free-for-all and team play, and you can even play alone against computer-controlled ‘bots that you can set to different difficulty levels. As I also detailed, the game comes with four additional mission packs to play through that seriously up the game’s difficulty; new enemies, weapons, power-ups and bosses have been added and maps and textures have been redesigned to create entirely new levels so you can keep fragging demon scum to your heart’s content. Finally, you can also download the Nintendo 64 port, though unlike the other mission packs there are no Achievements tied to this version of the game (which is basically just a stripped down version of the base game).
The Summary: For over twenty years, my friends have ragged on me because I once owned the Nintendo 64 version of Quake. I didn’t have it for long but, for whatever reason, it was enough to become a recurring joke between us and I have shunned the series ever since in favour of Duke Nukem 3D and a cursory relationship with the Doom franchise. When I heard that there was a remaster of Quake, I was both surprised and sceptical but, against my better judgement, I took advantage of it being free on Game Pass and downloaded it mainly to snag the game’s Achievements and up my Gamer Score. However, I found myself really enjoying the game, far more than I remember in the past. Thanks to a dark, foreboding atmosphere, a fittingly ominous soundtrack, and some disturbing visuals and enemies, Quake is a tense and action-packed experience. The controls are tight and intuitive; blasting demons has arguably never felt more gratifying and, despite a few annoying instances where the floor suddenly collapsed into lava or I was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a horde of enemies, I found the game to be an enjoyable and intense ride. Although the game has a serious lack of boss battles, the ones it does have generally require more from you than just mindlessly blasting away, and though the environments can be dark and confusing at times, they’re not brain-bending mazes and it’s pretty simple to plough your way through to the exit in short bursts. Overall, I’d actually say I rate this higher than the original Doom since Quake definitely improves upon the game engine of its predecessor and delivers one of the most horrific and bloodthirsty shooters in the process.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Great Stuff
Are you a fan of the original Quake? How do you think it compares to other FPS titles of that time? What did you think to the game’s enemies, aesthetic, and soundtrack? Were you a fan of the focus on medieval and Lovecraftian horrors and what did you think to the battle against Shub-Niggurath? Which of the game’s weapons and expansion packs was your favourite and what did you think to Quake’s multiplayer options? Which game in the Quake franchise is your favourite and would you like to see a new game on modern hardware? Have you ever had your friends take the piss out of you for owning a game before? What horror-theme videogames are you playing this October in anticipation of Halloween? Whatever your thoughts on Quake, sign up and drop a comment below or comment on my social media.
Released: 21 February 2014 Developer: Teyon Also Available For: Arcade, PC, and PlayStation 3
The Background: In 1972, David Morrell’s First Blood was published; a harrowing tale of the horrors of the Vietnam War, the book was well-received upon release eventually led to a live-action adaptation directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Sylvester Stallone. A commercial success, First Blood(Kotcheff, 1982) is widely regarded as one of the most enduring and influential movies of its genre and was followed by a series of successful and popular action films that helped make Stallone a household name. John Rambo had featured in a number of videogames, most of which were based on the more action-orientated sequels rather than the more introspective First Blood, before Reef Entertainment acquired the rights to the franchise in 2011. Hoping to capitalise on the recent success of Rambo (Stallone, 2008) and the upcoming The Expendables 2 (West, 2012), Reef opted to use voice clips and dialogue ripped straight from the movies for their rail-shooter rather than record new dialogue with existing actors or soundalikes. This was one of many criticisms levelled against the game upon release; critics were equally unimpressed with the game’s over-reliance upon quick-time events (QTEs), the lacklustre enemy intelligence, and the game’s short length and Rambo: The Video Game was generally regarded as being a disappointing and mediocre use of the license. However, since today marks the anniversary of First Blood’s release, this seems like the perfect time to take a look at this poorly-received shooter and see if it truly deserves its overwhelmingly negative reputation.
The Plot: Rambo: The Video Game sees players take control of John J. Rambo (and one of his allies, if you have a friend to play alongside) and reenact key events from the first three movies. This sees Rambo enduring horrendous torture in Vietnam, battling bigotry in Hope, Washington, infiltrate the Vietnam jungle to rescue a number of captured soldiers, and finally stand against a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Gameplay: Rambo: The Video Game is a first-person rail shooter that places you into the role of Rambo (or the likes of Colonel Sam Trautman and Co Bao) and has you playing through a number of missions that are either based on key moments from the first three films or directly recreate some of the most iconic moments of Rambo’s film career. Since it’s a rail shooter, your control and movements options are a little limited; Rambo moves as the story dictates and you’re left controlling the aiming reticule with the right stick and holding the left stick to take cover from fire. The Right Trigger will see you fire one of your two main weapons, which can be switched with either Y or the directional pad (D-pad), and you can occasionally use an alternate fire mode with the Left Bumper.
Shoot down your enemies to enter a Wrath state and unleash the full force of Rambo’s rage.
Rambo can reload his weapon with either X or the Right Bumper; this will bring up a small reloading wheel and you’ll need to press the button again to reload faster to grant yourself additional ammo (though your overall supply is unlimited). Press it too soon or too late and your gun will jam, giving you less ammo and slowing down your reload time, thus leaving you vulnerable. LB and the B button also allow you to throw one of your limited supply of grenades, while the Left Trigger provides you with an aiming lock to target specific enemies, and you can also use the D-pad to cycle through different types of arrowheads once they’ve been unlocked. As Rambo kills enemies, scoring headshots or disarming them or blowing them to pieces by shooting explosive barrels, he’ll not only earn points but also fill up his “Wrath” bar. When a segment of this is filled, players can press X to enter “Wrath” mode, which slows down time, highlights enemies using their body heat, and refills Rambo’s health for every kill he performs during this limited burst of rage. Rambo: The Video Game allows you to play missions in three different difficulty settings: Private, Sergeant, and Green Beret; each one tweaks the aggressiveness and competence of the enemies, provides a different number of checkpoints, and makes quick-time events (QTEs) either easier or harder. If you’re playing on the easiest setting, you’ll be blessed with an unlimited number of checkpoints but won’t earn as many points for your playthrough; Sergeant or higher will limited your checkpoints to five and three, respectively, and end your game if you run out, though you can lower the difficulty setting from the death screen if you’re having a hard time. As you gun down enemies, you’ll rack up a score multiplier, which is key to increasing your final ranking at the end of each mission; you’ll also gain extra points for your accuracy, headshots, the difficulty setting, and how many deaths you suffered during the mission, promoting more efficient and calculated playthroughs on higher difficulty levels in order to level Rambo up, gain Skill Points, and upgrade his stats and unlock Perks and increase his combat proficiency.
QTEs, stealth sections, and explosive vehicle gameplay help add some much needed variety.
However, it’s not just about going in all guns blazing; Rambo will also need to take up his bow and arrow or his iconic knife and sneak through the woods, jungle, or under cover of darkness to take out enemies undetected. This means completing a number of QTEs, which award additional points for pressing the onscreen prompt at the last minute or tapping the button as fast as possible; while QTE time is severely reduced on higher difficulties, the onscreen prompts are always the same so you can simply memorise their order and concentrate on your timing. Sometimes these will crop up mid-mission to have you avoid incoming bullets or mortars, and one particular mission offers you the choice between a stealthy route or a more action-orientated path. You’ll also come across “Cautious Enemies”, indicated by a ! prompt, who will one-shot you if they spot you; enemies can also lean over or shoot through your cover and be bolstered by “Commanders”. Gameplay is given a little variety by the few times you take control of a mounted gun or a helicopter to wreak havoc on the immediate area. These sections are timed and involve blasting at the Hope police station, assaulting a Vietnam base from above, destroying mines and boats while sailing down a river, or blasting away at Soviet forces and their vehicles. These moments of intense action are where the game really excels, though the controls are a little slippery and it can be difficult to aim at your targets with the crosshair slipping all over the screen. This crops up again as Rambo is tasked with disarming and wounding Hope’s police officers for extra points; you can kill them as normal, but you get more points for disarming the cops, which is difficult to do without taking a lot of damage so it’s probably best to turn off the aiming assist option for this mission to make things easier. While sneaking through the Soviet base in Afghanistan, you’ll also have to follow onscreen prompts to arm explosives and can shoot at glowing sections of the cavernous environment to crush your enemies under boulders. If you’re playing alone, you can share your ammo with Co Bao in Vietnam by pressing Y at the right time and she’ll help you out with cover fire, and you’ll even have to take out snipers from afar in Afghanistan. Although the game starts of pretty simply, with you blasting at Viet Cong and diving to cover to reload and catch your breath, things quickly ramp up and get very frustrating and unfair as combinations of the game’s most formidable and annoying enemies ambush you, leaving you on the back foot if you’re out of grenades; things are made all the more maddening by some wonky hit detection than can see your point-blank shots miss or enemies hitting you through normally impenetrable cover.
Graphics and Sound: I’ve played Rambo: The Video Game in the arcades before; there, on a big screen with a real (albeit plastic) gun in your hand, the game looks and plays pretty well for a standard light gun shooter. However, on home consoles, the game is pretty much an embarrassment from top to bottom; while the missions do a decent enough job of bringing to life the dark, dank jungles of Vietnam and recreating the town of Hope and the Soviet cave from the films, there’s a lot of graphical pop up and corners cut here as it’s simply a rail shooter and you’re not really meant to be stopping and taking in the details around you. Similarly, enemy models are decent enough, but ragdoll all over the place at times and you’ll see the same enemy types again and again with very little variation.
While locations are okay, the character models, music, and audio dialogue are all absolutely dreadful.
The actual character models are pretty laughable; Rambo himself looks more like an off-model action figure than the surly Stallone thanks to his ridiculous mane of a haircut. Trautman doesn’t look too bad, but hardly any of the corrupt cops from Hope resemble their onscreen actors. The game’s story is framed as a series of flashbacks at Rambo’s “funeral” as some nameless, unknown military man gives those in attendance a rundown on Rambo’s career and reputation in order to afford him some anonymity for his excursion into Afghanistan. This allows the game to recreate the most memorable moments of the films with the absolute bare minimum of effort; the music is dreadful, repeating in embarrassing loops mid-mission, but it’s the voice acting where the game really falls flat. Stallone and Richard McKenna’s audio are ripped right from the films, making their words distorted and wildly inconsistent and hilariously out of context at times, and only emphasising the cheapness of the title.
Enemies and Bosses: Rambo will gun down a whole host of nameless, faceless, interchangeable groups of enemies themed after each of the game’s missions: Viet Cong, Hope’s police department, and Soviet forces all try to fill Rambo with holes, popping up from the background, the sides of the screen, and rolling in to take shots at you. Enemies make use of cover to avoid your shots, can have their hats shot off, and some can even be disarmed to render them harmless to you but, for the most part, they are easily offed with just a few shots. Soon enough, you’ll encounter more formidable and annoying enemies, such as grenadiers (who take cover and toss grenades you can shoot out of the air), “Heavy” enemies covered in armour and vulnerable only in their face masks, and “Flamers” who wield flamethrowers and force you to shoot at their flame tank. Commanders will bolster the morale and efficiency of all onscreen enemies, so you should prioritise taking them out, though you must duck behind cover when turrets are rolled out into the field as they’ll shred you pretty quickly. Snipers, armoured enemies, and groups of these foes can whittle your health down in no time at all so it’s best to make use over cover, shoot any nearby explosives, and try to get off some one-shot headshots to off your enemies as quickly as possible.
Some familiar faces and final encounters close out each of Rambo’s explosive adventures.
Each of the game’s missions includes a timed sequence where Rambo must destroy parts of the environment, usually by making use of a large cannon or a helicopter but, in Afghanistan, you’ll also be hounded by helicopters and tanks that you cannot destroy and must either avoid by taking cover or run past by eliminating all onscreen enemies (and objective the game makes frustratingly vague) and completing some QTEs. Each mission culminates in something that can be generously described as a boss battle; after laying waste to the Hope police station, you’ll need to avoid Sheriff Teasle’s gunfire by pressing the onscreen prompts when it’s safe to move around, then desperately shoot at him when he peeks out at you from his elevated position. After laying waste to his base with your explosive arrows, you’ll find Lieutenant Tay far less of a challenge as you simply have to fire an arrow at him to blow him up, but you’ll need to take the controls of a helicopter and frantically fire your bullets and rockets at an enemy chopper to finish Rambo’s redemption in Vietnam. Finally, after a harrowing rescue mission in Afghanistan that sees you struggling past formidable and frustrating groups of various enemies, you’ll take the controls of a tank and get into a ground-to-air firefight with Colonel Alexei Zaysen. Jeeps and soldiers run around distracting you, but your primary concerns are Zaysen’s missiles and the tanks, which can severely reduce your vehicle’s health and destroy it in one shot, respectively. You’re thus forced to frantically fire your main gun and your cannon like a madman, desperately hoping to shoot down the missiles and destroy your targets before they can do too much damage, before finally ending Zaysen’s threat in this surprisingly aggravating final showdown.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Aside from your Wrath state, there aren’t any in-game power-ups to make use of beyond being tossed a grenade or making use of explosive barrels or other environmental hazards. You don’t need to worry about picking up ammo and health is restored in Wrath mode, so your primary focus should be on staying alive, killing as many enemies as possible, and keeping your multiplier chain and accuracy high. This will net you the Skill Points you need to level-up and improve your efficiency; these can be spent upgrading your resistance to damage, your grenade inventory, the power of both light and heavy weapons, and extending the duration of your Wrath bar. When you level-up high enough, and complete certain requirements (known as “Trautman Challenges”), you’ll unlock additional weapons to take with you into each mission, which can definitely turn the tide in your favour in the game’s tougher stages. You’ll also unlock up to three Perk points and a variety of Perks that allow you to perform perfect QTEs or gain increased health and ammo while reloading or killing enemies in Wrath, for example.
Additional Features: There are twenty-seven Achievements on offer in Rambo: The Video Game; the vast majority of these are tied to you getting at least a two-star rank on every mission, which will require you to beat the game in at least Sergeant mode, while others include maintaining a high chain multiplier, using every weapon in the game, completing it on Green Beret mode, and killing a total of 3000 enemies. Sadly, none of this is easily accomplished and meeting these criteria quickly becomes a very laborious and needlessly frustrating process as achieving even a two-star rank can be more trouble than it’s worth at times. The game can also be played in two-player co-op, which is very much appreciated and probably makes some of the tougher sections a bit easier, but there’s no head-to-head multiplayer mode and Trautman’s “challenges” amount to fulfilling certain objectives (which you can’t review in-mission) to unlock new weapons. If you simply must have more Rambo, there was some downloadable content released for the game that included some additional missions and Achievements, but I can safely say that I won’t be checking this out any time soon given how infuriating this game can be at times.
The Summary: I’d heard nothing but bad things about Rambo: The Video Game; however, even after my last few attempts to play the arcade version resulted in my coins being eaten by the machine, I maintained that it would be an inoffensive enough rail gun shooter to blast through and rack up some easy Achievements. Instead, what I got was an absolute slog of a gaming experience; bland environments which, while somewhat faithful to the movies, are way too dark, unimpressive and frustrating enemies, and a lack of variety really bring down the otherwise enjoyable enough gameplay. The stealth and QTE sections are okay, if painfully simple, and the parts where you’re in control of heavy ordinance and vehicles can be a lot of fun, but the presentation is just so cheap and rushed. The muted dialogue ripped right from the movies is the most glaring offense, of course, but the lack of gameplay options, the stringent criteria for unlocking stuff, and the odd little glitches and annoyances peppered through the game definitely don’t make it worth investing your time and money in when there are far better first-person shooters out there. It’s a shame as there’s definitely a lot of potential here, but the execution screams “cheap cash grab” and you really won’t be missing out on all that much if you skip this title, which I’d argue even die-hard Rambo fans would struggle to find enjoyable.
My Rating:
⭐
Rating: 1 out of 5.
Terrible
Have you ever played Rambo: The Video Game? If so, did you enjoy it or were you as disappointed by it as I and many others were? What did you think to the Wrath system and the recreation of the film’s moments? Were you also disturbed by the poor quality character models and audio clips? Which Rambo videogame, or videogame appearance, is your favourite? Which of the Rambo films is your favourite? Whatever your thoughts on Rambo, drop them below or leave a comment on my social media.
Released: 13 October 2008 Developer: EA Redwood Shores Also Available For: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X (Backwards Compatible)
The Background: Dead Space was the creation of Glen Schofield, who was inspired by the likes of Silent Hill (Konami/Various, 1999 to 2012) and Resident Evil (Capcom/Various, 1996 to present) and attracted the attention of a small, but committed, team of developers and Electronic Art’s (EA) Redwood Studios. The team worked tirelessly to put together a proof of concept and push the game within the company, and constantly tweaked the different gameplay mechanics to keep things action-packed and tense. Crucially, Dead Space opted to forgo a traditional heads-up display (HUD) and render cutscenes and story sequences using the in-game engine to avoid breaking the player’s immersion, and combat became more about dismembering enemies rather than mindlessly blasting away. Dead Space is an extremely well-regarded title; reviewers praised the innovative mechanics and horrifying atmosphere, though the story faced some criticism. Still, the game sold over one million copies and kicked off a successful new survival-horror franchise that came to be comprised of animated tie-ins, twosequels, and even a next generation remake.
The Plot: When a massive deep-space mining ship goes dark after unearthing a strange artifact on a distant planet, troubled engineer Isaac Clarke joins the repair mission. There, he finds a nightmarish bloodbath as the ship’s crew have been horribly slaughtered and infected by alien scourge known as Necromorphs.
Gameplay: Dead Space is a third-person, survival/horror action shooter with an emphasis on atmospheric horror, light puzzle solving, and exploration. Players are placed into the mute boots of engineer Isaac, who spends pretty much the entire game garbed in a steampunk-like work suit and hiding behind a glowing helmet. Isaac comes armed with a Plasma Cutter by default, but has a few options available to him when it comes to combat: players can hold down the Left Trigger to enter aiming mode (and, crucially, can move while aiming and shooting) and press the Right Trigger to fire their weapon. Outside of aiming mode, you can press RT to throw a slow, clunky, and awkward melee attack to fend off Necromorphs, hold the Left Bumper to jog along a bit faster, to press the Right Bumper to deliver a big stomp to downed Necromorphs or break open crates. There’s no jump or dodge function, but you can press A to interact with consoles or shake off Necromorphs when they grab or claw at you; providing you have some Med Packs on hand, you can heal yourself by pressing X, the directional pad (D-pad) functions as a shortcut to your weapons and allows you to quickly switch between up to four guns on the fly, and you can reload by pressing LT and A or switch to an alternative fire mode by pressing LT and RB.
Dismember enemies, move objects with Kinesis, or freeze them in place with Stasis.
While most of this is standard third-person fare, Isaac also acquires a couple of “modules” that allow him to perform a few unique tricks: You can activate the Kinesis Module by holing LT and pressing B, which will allow you to move certain obstacles out of the way, activate certain consoles, and move platforms and doors to progress further and solve problem. While you can use this as much as you like, the Stasis Module is limited by a meter than can only be replenished at refill stations scattered around the game’s locations or with a pickup. Stasis can be used to freeze enemies in place for a limited time, slow fans or other hazards, and is crucial to keeping you safe from attacks or the game’s many instant-kill traps. Unlike many other videogames, Isaac’s health, ammo, and Stasis meter are all displayed either on his suit or on his weapon, a system that easily allows you to see how well you’re doing or when you need to reload or replenish your meters. You can access your inventory, map, and current objectives by pressing the ‘Back’ button (though this won’t pause the game) and are given the option of dropping items if your inventory is full, or dropping them in a safe at Store stations found around the game’s environments. While the map isn’t too clear, you can press in the right analogue stick at any time to drop a light that will briefly point you in the right direction, which is super helpful; slightly less helpful is the abundance of text and holographic imagery that appears onscreen to advance the story and mask the game’s loading screens, though this does flesh out the story and point you towards your next objective. Although you have to manually save the game at save stations, the game does actually contain checkpoints; so, if you die halfway between save points, you’ll respawn pretty close to where you were split in two by a Necromorph.
Puzzles involve activating or repairing consoles, avoiding hazards, and eliminating Necromorphs.
Dead Space’s story is split into twelve chapters, with each one separated by a tram-like system around the ship, and can initially be played on Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulty settings, with additional difficulties being unlocked after you complete the story. You cannot replay previous chapters at will, so if you miss any of the pick-ups or collectibles, you’re either going to have to start over or make multiple save files. For the most part, it’s pretty simple to figure out where to go and what you need to do but the camera is placed very close to Isaac at times; when aiming, I found that his character model took up quite a bit of the screen, which made it difficult to get off a good shot (something that’s pretty important considering you need to dismember the Necromorphs to kill them rather than shooting at their bodies). Isaac’s objectives don’t tend to get more complicated than exploring a foreboding area of the ship, fending off Necromorphs, and recovering key items such as a key card, a piece of machinery, or other object and bringing it (or them) back to another area or non-playable character (NPC) to repair a console, machine, or other part of the ship or progress further. Sometimes, areas will get locked down as a quarantine is put into effect and you’ll need to hold out against waves of Necromorphs; other times, the ship decompresses or starts exploding around you; but, mostly, you’ll need to use Stasis or Kinesis to slow down hazards, move platforms, or activate switches to get closer to your objective. While you’re often tasked with moving big batteries around with Kinesis to power up lifts, you’ll also need to kill special Necromorphs that are poisoning the air in the botanical gardens, watch out for air vents, whipping power lines, and laser cutters that threaten to splatter or skewer you or your enemies, clear an area of radioactive material in order to restore gravity and power, and dash through (or shield yourself) from bursts of flame while shooting electrical panels to open doors.
Watch your air supply in a vacuum, jump around in zero gravity, and blast asteroids with gun turrets.
Indeed, a prominent aspect of Dead Space is the presence of zero gravity areas; here, you need to hold down LT and press Y to leap across the environment, often while fending off Necromorphs, moving items with Kinesis or activating consoles. You can’t jump to every part of the environment, and the game will notify you when you’re trying to jump to the wrong part of the floor (or ceiling), and it can be a bit disorientating trying to direct yourself in these areas, though they do help to break up the gameplay a bit. There are also many sections that take place either in a vacuum or out in the depths of space; here, sounds are suitably muted, your flamethrower won’t work, and you are in a race against time to cross through the vacuum to the next air lock before your oxygen supply runs out. You can replenish your oxygen supply at refill stations or with items, though, and increase your capacity using Power Nodes; sometimes, you’ll have to deal with zero gravity and a vacuum at the same time. A little more variety is added to the game in a couple of sections where Isaac takes the controls of a massive gun turret to fire at incoming asteroids or a gigantic Necromorph using LT and RT (both separately and at the same time) to keep the ship from being destroyed, but don’t get too trigger happy or you’ll have to wait for the turret to cool down from overheating.
Graphics and Sound: If I had to use one word to describe Dead Space, “atmospheric” would spring instantly to mind. Players spend the majority of the game exploring a deep space mining vessel, the Ishimura, which has been absolutely wrecked by the outbreak of the Necromorph virus. Dead bodies, blood stains, claw marks, and even dismembered NPCs are all over the place; sometimes they’re still alive and shoot themselves in a frenzy, other times they’re torn apart by Necromorphs, and there’s one harrowing moment where it looks as though a mass suicide has taken place. Ominous words written in blood can be seen everywhere and you can never be too careful when turning a corner as Necromorphs have a nasty tendency to burst out from air vents, glass capsules, or from every nook and cranny to attack you. Sometimes, a massive tentacle will grab at you and drag you around by the ankle, forcing you to blast at its tumour-like weak spot, and visibility it often low thanks to a foreboding darkness, intermittent lighting and power failures, and bursts of flames and electrical sparks in the flickering darkness.
The environment is suitably bleak, blood-soaked, and teeming with atmospheric horror.
The best way to describe this game is by calling it Resident Evil meets Event Horizon(Anderson, 1997). The technology and environments all have the same “lived in” feel of that gloriously entertaining space horror and the sense of dread that constantly hangs in the air is just as palpable. Nowhere is this comparison more apt than in one particularly annoying mission where you have to plant markers on a giant asteroid being mined by lasers; the asteroid is protected by huge concentric rings that will slice you in two and is heavily reminiscent of Event Horizon’s Gravity Drive. Other notable areas of the ship include a cargo bay medical facility, the aforementioned botanical gardens, and the main bridge, all of which are crawling with hazards or Necromorphs waiting to pounce on you. You’ll find workstations in disarray, ammo, credits, and collectibles in lockers and crates, and areas frozen from exposure to the void of space. At one point, another ship crashes into the Ishimura and you have to help guide and load up a shuttle with the dangerous “Red Marker” that is the cause of all this chaos, a mission that also forces Isaac to face up to some unsettling truths on the hellish planet of Aegis VII for the finale.
Isaac may not say anything, but he gets lots of video messages and is a surprisingly complex character.
You don’t really interact with too many NPCs outside of holographic messages, video calls, or seeing them shielding behind glass or trapped in other rooms. There are some exceptions, however, such as Isaac’s frequent encounters with his wife, Nicole, who he thought was dead and whose voice and memories haunt him throughout the story. Although Isaac himself doesn’t actually talk (always a weird decision for a third-person shooter, I find), you can review his thoughts in his mission log and objectives, and he cuts a formidable and interesting figure. His suit and helmet are instantly iconic and, though they hide his face throughout the game, they make him seem almost as horrific as the creatures he encounters and his grunts of pain and panting wheezes when in a vacuum or running low on health really add to his otherwise blank personality. Transferring the HUD to Isaac’s suit and weapons is a great way to keep the screen from getting too cluttered, and the use of ambient sounds (particularly a haunting rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) really add to the game’s horrifying, ominous sense of dread and claustrophobia. Even brightly lit or familiar areas aren’t always a safe haven as the ship can be thrust into a lockdown or dead bodies can suddenly burst to life as Necromorphs, often even while you’re trying to save the game.
Enemies and Bosses: Isaac is hounded throughout his treacherous and nightmarish mission by demonic Necromorphs, which come in all shapes and sizes and are the result of a horrific alien virus that reanimates corpses and transforms them into shrieking, taloned beasts hungry for human flesh. The most common variant is the Slasher, a blood-soaked, malformed corpse that sports blade-like appendages and shambles towards you either alone or in groups. As with the vast majority of the Necromorphs, these are best dispatched by targeting their limbs rather than their central mass; dismember their insectile arms to keep them from skewering you, and cut off their legs to slow their movement, but be sure to make sure they’re really dead as these bastards have a tendency to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’! Other common enemies includes the Lurker (a sort of disembodied head that sports three tentacles, hops all over the walls and ceilings, and fire projectiles at you), the Leaper (which, as its name suggests, leaps at you (appearing to float in zero gravity areas) and scuttles across surfaces whipping its scorpion-like tail at you), and the bulbous Pregnant (which lumbers about and bursts forth a swarm of tiny Necromorphs that can quickly whittle down your health bar). Rather than facing off against a boss at the end of each chapter, Isaac will generally encounter newer and deadlier variants of the Necromorphs in each area: The Exploders shuffle about and try to blow you up with their huge, explosive arm (which you can shoot to blow them up, and any nearby Necromorphs), bat-like Infectors will try to attach themselves to you and cause any nearby corpses to burst to life as dangerous Necromorphs, and the corpse-like Dividers are gangly, gory corpses that split into smaller, equally dangerous Necromorphs after being downed.
Some massive monstrosities await you in Dead Space, but most have nice, obvious weak spots to shoot.
Large Brutes often act as sub-bosses and must be slowed with Stasis so you can target their various weak spots across their armour-like hide, and you’ll encounter Guardians merged with the walls and have to fend off the Pods they spit out, watch for their instant-kill attack, and severe the tentacles tying them to the Corruption that covers the environment. That’s not to say that there aren’t encounters that could be called boss battles in the game; the intimidating Hunter regenerates lost limbs and tissue so fast that, at first, all you can do is hit it with Stasis or temporarily immobilise it while running to safety. To properly destroy these creatures, you’ll need to lure them into a cryogenic chamber or behind the thrusters of a space shuttle and hold them in place with Stasis and get them into their regeneration animation to put them down once and for all. You’ll also battle the gigantic Leviathan in the food storage area of the ship; this battle takes place in zero gravity and sees you dodging tentacles and firing at the tumorous lumps on its appendages to kill it off. A similar creature, the Slug, attaches itself to the outer hull of the Ishimura and begins ripping it apart, forcing you to man the controls of a gun turret and blast at its tentacles and the debris it throws your way. After being tricked into activating the Red Marker, Isaac must face down the Hive Mind on Aegis VII; this eldritch abomination is a mess of flesh, tentacles, and teeth but sports yellow/green tumorous growths in its gaping maw that you can shoot to damage it. As long as you avoid its massive tentacles and target these areas when its rib cage opens up, you can put this beast down pretty quickly and bring the Necromorph threat to an end.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Isaac has a decent variety of weapons at his disposal; the Plasma Cutter he begins the game with is pretty much capable of taking care of every enemy you come across, but you can also pick up a Pulse Rifle for rapid fire, a Line Launcher to shoot out explosives, a flamethrower, and the Ripper, which shoots out buzzsaw-like blades that you can direct to chop up incoming Necromorphs. Each weapon has an alternative fire mode and some are more useful against different enemies; you can charge up the Contact Beam to blow apart bigger enemies, for example, but it’s probably best to use the flamethrower when swarmed by little Necromorphs or to subdue large groups. It pays to explore your environment from top to bottom, and to ransack the corpses of the Necromorphs you kill, to find ammo, health and restorative items, credits, and other items. These are often found in smashable boxes, crates and lockers or strewn around the environment, but be wary as you only have a limited inventory. You can, however, expand your inventory, health bar, Stasis meter, and the power, capacity, and reload speed of your weapons at Workbenches. Here, you can spend Power Nodes you’ve either found or bought on the skill tree of each weapon, your modules, and your suit, though you’ll need a hell of a lot of them to upgrade all of Isaac’s weapons and equipment. You can also find blueprints to allow you to buy new weapons, better restorative items, and even better suits that increase your maximum health, meter, and air supply, so be sure to search all around and focus your efforts on upgrading what works best for you.
Additional Features: There are forty-eight Achievements on offer in Dead Space, with one popping after you complete each chapter. You’ll get Achievements for dismembering a certain number of limbs, killing a certain number of enemies with each weapon, acquiring every weapon in the game, and completing the story, and for upgrading every weapon and piece of equipment available to you. There are also audio logs to be found to flesh out the story and earn you some G, secret areas to find, and mini games to play that will pop an Achievement. These include a shooting gallery and a zero gravity ball game, and you’ll also get Achievements for keeping the ship’s hull integrity above a certain percentage when shooting down incoming asteroids. After finishing the game on Easy mode, I unlocked a new suit for Isaac, additional logs, 50000 credits, ten Power Nodes, and “Impossible Mode” (which, I assume, is a one-life-only type of mode). While you don’t get to replay specific chapters, you can replay the game from the beginning with all of the weapons, upgrades, and gear you’ve collected, but the lack of a chapter select means that tracking down the last of those Achievements can be a bit of a slog.
The Summary: Being a big fan of the Resident Evil franchise, and having largely exhausted the games available to me in that series, I was eager to get my teeth into Dead Space and found that it more than scratched my itch for an atmospheric, claustrophobic survival/horror experience. Infusing a desolate sci-fi aesthetic into the genre was an ingenious idea and had me constantly thinking back to films like Event Horizon and games like Doom(id Software, 1993) thanks to the merger of horror, sci-fi, and demonic imagery. While I could have done with the camera being pulled back just a tad and Isaac could be a little clunky to control at times (a quick-turn function really would have helped), and it was pretty much impossible to upgrade all of his gear in one playthrough, I found myself really enjoying the ominous aesthetic of the game, the tight dark corridors, and the thrill of each encounter and managing my resources. I was worried that the limb-targeting system would be difficult to get the hang of but I picked it up pretty easily and was soon dismembering Necromorphs left and right, but even on the easiest setting the game offers a decent challenge as enemies can take a fair bit of damage before finally going down and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or blunder into traps and instant-death hazards. Still, the game had a fantastic atmosphere, tight controls, and intriguing premise, and a suitably morbid and gory presentation and I found myself thoroughly entertaining as I ploughed through each chapter, splattering Necromorph (or Isaac’s) guts all over the walls and clear just one more chapter and I’m excited to tackle the second game in the near future.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Great Stuff
Have you ever played the original Dead Space? How do you think it compares to other survival/horror titles and do you think it still holds up today? What did you think to the game’s enemies, aesthetic, and mechanics? Did you like the mixing of sci-fi with survival/horror or did you find the game a bit derivative? Which of the game’s weapons and was your favourite and what did you think to Isaac as a protagonist? Which game in the Dead Space franchise is your favourite and are you looking forward to the remake? What horror-theme videogames are you playing this October in anticipation of Halloween? Whatever your thoughts on Dead Space, drop them below or comment on my social media.
Released: 31 October 2019 Developer: Next Level Games
The Background: In 1996, following their success in the “Console Wars” of the nineties, Nintendo entered the third dimension with Nintendo 64, a console that stood out against its competitors by continuing to use cartridges, coming readymade for multi-player player, and featuring a unique controller design. Having lost out to Sony’s new-fangled PlayStation, Nintendo sought to recoup their once-vaulted position as the premier entertainment option with the Nintendo GameCube, which finally saw the company switch to discs (albeit with a suitably “Nintendo” flair) and was also notable for Mario’s younger brother, Luigi, finally receiving his time in the spotlight with Luigi’s Mansion (Nintendo EAD, 2001), a game that focused more on exploration and puzzle solving as Luigi channelled his inner Ghostbuster to suck up ghosts infesting a hotel and rescue his brother. Although the game sold extremely well and was a critical success, it took twelve years for the game to get a sequel. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (Next Level Hames, 2013) released for the Nintendo 3DS and was also a best-selling title for the system and met with largely unanimous praise. After development of a third game for the Wii U was delayed, Next Level Games finally returned to the franchise six years after the release of the second game; developed for the Nintendo Switch, Luigi’s Mansion 3 saw the setting expand from a mansion to a high-rise hotel and also increased the game’s accessibility by including on- and offline multiplayer modes. Considering the success of its predecessors, it’s perhaps no surprise that Luigi’s Mansion 3 became one of the Switch’s best-selling titles and was regarded as Luigi’s best adventure yet.
The Plot: Luigi, his pet ghost dog Polterpup, Mario, Princess Peach, and three Toads are invited to the luxurious Last Resort hotel for a vacation. Soon after arriving, Luigi awakens to find the hotel transformed into a haunted building and the others imprisoned in pictures by the hotel’s ghostly owner, Hellen Gravely, as part of a trap set by the nefarious King Boo. Arming himself with Professor E. Gadd’s newest Poltergust vacuum, Luigi hesitantly sets out to rescue his friends and suck up the hotel’s ghost infestation.
Gameplay: Like its predecessors, Luigi’s Mansion 3 as an action/adventure game with a strong emphasis on exploration and puzzle solving. Players are played into the shoes of Mario’s younger, often unfairly overlooked brother, Luigi, who is robbed of his usual athletic abilities and must rely on a vacuum-cleaner like device, the Poltergust G-00, rather than his jumping prowess to dispose of the many ghosts that have infested the hotel. As you explore the many dark hallways and various themed floors of the hotel, you’ll need to use Luigi’s torch (or “flashlight” for any Americans out there) to stun nearby ghosts; you can do this by tapping or holding A, which will freeze most ghosts on the spot for a few seconds so you can suck them up by holding down ZR and filling up an onscreen circle by holding back on the left analogue stick. Once this is full, you can press A to perform a slam move that will deal greater damage to the ghost and speed up the process, but just sucking them up is enough to whittle down their health.
Stun ghosts and suck them up with your trusty Poltergust G-00.
You can also use ZL to send out a gust of air to push enemies back or fire certain items at ghosts as projectiles, or press ZR and ZL together to perform a quick burst akin to a jump that won’t let you reach higher platforms but will knock back enemies. All of these Poltergust functions are also useful for interacting with your environment; you can suck up curtains and sheets, blast furniture and chandeliers, and affect almost everything in every room either with the vacuum or by pressing X. This will reward you with loot, such as Golden Coins, gold bars, bills of money, and pieces of heart to refill your health, but can also uncover hidden ghosts. Some of these, such as shiny gold and blue-coloured variants, will reward you with additional loot and collectibles, so it’s well worth exploring every room you enter to see what you can uncover. You can use the left-hand circle pad (or directional pad, depending on which Switch you have) to call for Mario with left, right, and down, or enlarge the onscreen map by pressing up. The map can also eventually be accessed from the + menu, which allows you to view the floor you’re on, review your current objectives, and chat with E. Gadd for hints, though it’s generally pretty clear where you need to go and not only will Polterpup occasionally pop up to show you where you need to go but E. Gadd will communicate hints to you through the “Virtual Boo” if you struggle to solve puzzles.
Luigi can use his plunger or his gooey doppelgänger to solve puzzles.
As the story progresses, E. Gadd will furnish you with these additional upgrades, and others; eventually, you’ll gain the ability to fire plungers with Y, which you can suck up to destroy chests and other parts of the environment, activate switches and such, and remove protective items from certain ghosts. You’ll also acquire the “Dark-Light Device”, another torch-like appendage that lets you uncover hidden chests, doors, and other secrets, track Polterpup and the mischievous Polterkitty, and even defeat certain enemies by holding X to shine the dark-light around the environment. Your most useful ability, and the game’s big new gameplay mechanic, is “Gooigi”, a protoplasmic double of Luigi that E. Gadd eventually supplies you with and which you can send out of the Poltergust but pressing in the right stick. Doing so switches your control to the gooey double, who can slip through bars, vents, and grates and allow you to clear rooms and puzzles by activating switches or opening doors as one character and progressing as the other. Gooigi is quite fragile, having only twenty-five hearts to his name, and immediately dissolves upon touching water, and many of the game’s puzzles and bosses that involve him are geared specifically towards having a second player on hand. If you don’t have one, you’re forced to switch between the two on the fly using the right analogue stick, which can be tricky and frustrating at times and leaves Luigi vulnerable to attack while playing as Gooigi. Still, it’s an interesting mechanic and make you think a little harder about approaching each room, as your exploration may uncover a hidden vent that leads to a key or other loot.
You’ll need to make innovative use of Gooigi and the Poltergust to find the keys needed to progress.
Your primary objective in Luigi’s Mansion 3 is to rescue the three Toads, Mario, and Princess Peach from the magical paintings they’ve been trapped in. To do this, you’ll need to defeat a number of bosses to acquire the missing buttons for the hotel’s elevator; each boss you defeat awards a button, giving you access to another floor of the hotel, and many of the floors contain a specific theme that help them to stand out. Most of the time, you need to navigate through rooms clearing out all of the ghosts you encounter and exploring any hidden areas; other times, you’ll need to find a key to open doors, or find another way around if doors are blocked or barred, or use the two Luigis to activate switches and fans with their weight or Poltergusts. The game’s puzzles eventually become a bit more complex, and it’s not always immediately clear what you need to do: in one area, you need to roll and unroll carpets according to how they appear in a mirror; in another, you need to use the jump burst to uncover dangerous and painful laser traps; and other times, you need to blast Toad at breakable walls or use your plunger to pull down weights to activate lifts. Quite a few puzzles require you to shut off water streams so that Gooigi can reach a switch, or have you creating shortcuts using ladders, or blowing on windmills to rotate rooms and access hidden switches or keys. Probably the most complex puzzle is found on the eighth floor, which is a television studio; here, you need to warp between four different film sets using television sets and activate a film camera as one character while the other fends off ghosts to acquire an item, which must be then taken to another set and so on until you’re able to get the key item you require.
Graphics and Sound: Luigi’s Mansion 3 retains both the charming, cartoony aesthetic of its iconic characters and also the gloomy, ominous surroundings of its predecessors. Luigi’s character model is fantastically expressive; his body shivers and his teeth chatter as he cautiously wanders the hotel’s hallways, and he jumps with fright at any sudden movements or sounds. I find it endlessly amusing that the developers continue to implement a specific button to have him call out for Mario in a terrified voice, and it’s a continual source of amusement to see how he comically reacts to scares, rooms, and even damage. Of all the other Mario characters seen in the game, the one you’ll interact with the most on a gameplay level is Toad; you have to rescue three of these little blighters, and they’ll follow you around, squealing with fear at every opportunity, and you can give them a little high-five or even shoot them as a projectile to progress further. You’ll also spend a great deal of time interacting with Professor E. Gadd, who sets up a laboratory in the hotel basement that you can quick travel to for upgrades, hints, and to view bonus materials, and all of these familiar characters are brought to life wonderfully using the power of the Nintendo Switch.
The Last Resort is full of rooms both bizarre and expected, and carries a comical horror throughout.
The Last Resort is quite a large and versatile environment; although it’s a hotel, it contains many areas and rooms that you might not expect. At first, you’ll explore such traditional areas as the basement, laundry room, and various bedrooms and dining rooms you would expect to find in a hotel. Each of these are infested with ghosts, of course, and filled with interactable objects, but things start to get incredibly bizarre as you explore the upper floors of the hotel. Here, you’ll enter the aforementioned television studio, a floor littered with magician’s tricks and apparel (including mirrors and upside-down rooms), a gymnasium, and an Egyptian-themed floor full of hieroglyphics, sand, and even a pyramid. You’ll also find a pirate-themed cavern, a beach, and explore rat-infested sewers and a boiler room, and scale a crumbling, wrecked staircase in the overgrown gardens. There are fifteen floors to visit and two basement levels to explore, with secrets and enemies increasing the further you progress; areas start to become more and more overrun with ghosts and different combinations of enemies, which constantly keeps you on your toes, and it’s continuously amusing to see what new surprises await you on the next floor as the hotel is crammed full of both surreal areas like the Unnatural History Museum and the comparatively normal master suite at the top floor.
The game’s presentation shines through, but especially in the pantomime-like cutscenes.
While the graphics and environments are impressive and full of a decent amount of variety, the music isn’t really all that interesting. The iconic Luigi’s Mansion theme plays sporadically throughout the game, and areas are mostly accompanied by bursts of lightning, skittering rats, chattering ghosts, and the sounds of Luigi’s terrified footsteps and whimpers. Ambient sounds and subdued musical cues help add to the game’s comical terror, and Polterpup’s inexhaustible enthusiasm is a welcome addition and, as is the standard for Mario games, characters speak using text boxes, gibberish, and a few choice voice clips, so you won’t have to worry about sitting through any overblown cutscenes here and can simply enjoy the characters employing amusing pantomime-like motions and spouting nonsense when they interact.
Enemies and Bosses: As you might expect, given the franchise, your primary enemies in Luigi’s Mansion 3 are a series of ghosts who have taken residence in the hotel. These range from the standard blue-coloured Goobs (who are easily mopped up but sometimes shield themselves with shades and wield melee weapons like baseball bats), the yellow-coloured Oozers (who pop up from hiding spots to throw projectiles at you), and miniature versions of these enemies. You’ll also have to fend off rats, bats, and spiders (though these little critters can be easily dispatched with a burst of your flashlight), and possessed chests and bins that need to be blasted with projectiles or subjected to your dark-light. Soon enough, you’ll come across more formidable ghosts, however: the Hammers will try to crush you with their cube-like bodies and must be sucked up from behind, Slinkers will scare you and leave you vulnerable and also try to kidnap Toads, and Trappers require both Luigi and Gooigi to suck on their tongues to dispatch them. When in the Tomb Suites, you’ll have to knock over mummified ghosts with your jump burst and unravel their bandages to expose their ectoplasmic bodies, and larger and more diverse groups of enemies will eventually populate the hotel’s higher floors, causing you to mix and match your attack strategies.
The first few bosses slowly introduce mechanics that prove extremely useful for later battles.
Seventeen bosses must be fought in the game’s story, with fifteen of them being required to beat in order to access every floor in the mansion; while their attacks differ from each other and you’ll generally have to employ different strategies in each battle, they all mostly boil down to finding a way to stun the boss and then suck them up with the Poltergust. The first boss you’ll encounter is a ghostly steward, who shields himself from your flashlight with suitcases and then tosses them at you in the hotel’s basement. On the fifth floor, you’ll counter a particularly malevolent maid who disappears through the bedrooms of the RIP Suites and will cause Luigi to sneeze with her feather duster, and can only be sucked up after using your plunger to slam the briefcase stuck in her stomach. In the hotel’s mall, you’ll need to find a number of different keys to confront Kruller, a bulbous security guard who dissolves Gooigi with a water pistol and must have his shades sucked off so that he can be stunned, but also strikes with a rolling attack. While in the second floor kitchen, you’ll battle the first formidable boss of the game, Chef Soulfflé, who shields himself with a frying pan and unleashes a spinning attack with his knives. To defeat him, you’ll need to avoid the fishes he throws at you and stun him by firing melons at him to leave him vulnerable to your torch and Poltergust.
Soon, you’ll need to use your Poltergust in innovative ways to outwit and defeat the bosses.
Things start getting a little more complicated when you battle Amadeus Wolfgeist, a pianist who remains safely out of reach on the stage and causes chairs to fly at you, distracts you with ballerina ghosts, and then possesses his piano. In this form, he is invulnerable and hops around the theatre, but can be stunned when Amadeus pops out of the piano; you then need to try and shoot bombs into the piano lid to collapse it and drag Amadeus out with your plunger, which gives you the chance to properly damage him but you’ll also have to watch out for his flaming attacks and the piano keys he tosses at you. Another troublesome boss is King MacFrights, who’s fought in a medieval coliseum and can only be stunned when he charges at you for a lance attack while archers shoot arrows at you. After slamming him a few times, his armour will break and you’ll have to dodge his spinning attack and strike while he’s left dizzy and vulnerable. Just reaching Doctor Potter can be a chore as you have to weave through the wild gardens to get to him and, when you do, he sends his Venus flytrap at chomp away at you; avoid this, however, and it’ll get stuck on the environment, allowing you to cut it using a convenient buzzsaw, which leaves him vulnerable to your Poltergust. After helping Morty the ghostly director find his megaphone, he’ll force you to star in his latest production and battle a Goob inside a Godzilla-like costume; you must use the Poltergust, in conjunction with Gooigi, to force the monster’s fireballs back into its face in order to damage it. Once you destroy the suit, the Goob is easily sucked up, and you can also choose to suck up Morty as well by going into his office in you fancy it.
Later bosses make use of their environment to defend themselves and attack you!
In the Unnatural History Museum, you’ll be attacked by another monstrous enemy as the caveman-like Ug possesses a giant Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, which can only be damaged by firing eggs first into its mouth and then into the glowing red orb in its rib cage. Once the T. rex is destroyed, Ug himself will come out to fight; while he’s a bit of a bruiser, as long as you stay away from his club and burst-jump over his shockwaves, you can stun and suck him when his club gets stuck in the floor. Clem awaits you in the boiler for a battle in a reservoir of water lined with spikes; he’ll attack you with a fan and send out landmines, which you must direct towards him to blast him out of the water and leave him vulnerable, meaning it’s best to leave Luigi floating in the water and have Gooigi on the outside ready to attack. After conquering the Tomb Suits’ puzzles and traps, you’ll battle Serpci, a pharaoh-like entity that protects herself with a mound of sand and strikes at you with cobras. Sucking at her sand and snakes will cause her to become exposed, then you must dodge the projectiles she fires to stun her, though her speed and unpredictability make her a particularly aggravating boss. A trio of magician ghosts, Nikki, Lindsey, and Ginny, await you in the Twisted Suites; this is actually good preparation for the final boss as the three fire playing cards at you from their magician’s hats and must be stunned with a jump-burst when they try and grind you up at close range and you must attack each ghost in turn, with decoy ghosts taking the place of each of the triplets as they’re captures.
After chasing down Polterkitty, you’ll need to make use of Gooigi to defeat the game’s later bosses.
One of the most recurring enemies you’ll face is Poltergkitty, a mini boss who steals a couple of the elevator keys and forces you to chase after it across the floors of the hotel. When you finally confront it, you need to face away from it and wait for it to creep up behind you; right as it’s rearing to strike, at the very last minute, you must turn around and stun it so you can suck it up and remove one of its tails until it’s defeated. Captain Fishook awaits you in the Spectral Catch; at first, you need to avoid his charge and the swing of his hook, stunning and sucking him up when he gets stuck in the deck of the ship, but things get much more harrowing when the shark possesses the ship itself, turning the wooden decking into a gnashing mouth that you must fire bombs into and avoid being tipped into it by the ship’s wild dipping. Johnny Deepend absolutely requires the use of both Luigi and Gooigi and is best fought with another player; Luigi must take cover and distract the boss so that Gooigi can slip around behind it and drain the water from the pool. After that, simply avoid his fists, remove his shades, and stun him with a water polo ball to suck him up, and you’ll then have to contend with DJ Phantasmagloria. First, you have to deal with the dancing Goobs, stunning the one who has the elevator button you need with a jump-burst, before the boss officially joins the battle. DJ Phantasmagloria teleports around the dance floor tossing vinyl records at you and you need to use the burst-jump to knock off her afro and leave her vulnerable to your flashlight so you can suck her up.
Fittingly, thanks get extremely challenging and chaotic for the final showdown with Hellen and King Boo.
When you finally reach the fifteenth floor of the hotel, you’ll have to face off against the hotel owner, Hellen Gravely, in another boss battle that is absolutely built to be conquered by two players. While Luigi must avoid the spinning lasers and coloured laser walls, Gooigi must head down into the lower levels to deactivate the aforementioned laser walls by pulling four switches. Removing all four walls makes trying to suck her up much easier but realistically you can probably do just as good a job of avoiding her attacks and going after her with one or two of the walls deactivated. As the battle progresses, you’ll have to avoid more lasers by either frantically running around the arena or jump-bursting over them, and water will flood the lower level, restricting which switches you can pull, though you can flash the green lights on the walls and the insects to replenish your health if necessary. Afterwards, you must head to the roof to do battle with King Boo, who tries to squash and rattle you by dropping down from above and causing shockwaves, spits a bunch of fireballs at you, tries to slam and swipe at you with his tongue, electrifies the roof tiles, and tosses bombs into the arena. You must quickly suck one of these up and fire them into his mouth, which is easier said than done given how tricky the aiming mechanics can be, and this only makes the battle harder as King Boo spawns first one and then two duplicates and vastly increases the aggression and number of its attacks. You’ll only gain victory by firing bombs into the right King Boo, but it’s actually easier to just blast as many bombs as possible at all the targets and hope for the best as things get very chaotic very quickly thanks to the time limit in the final phase.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: At the start of the game, your options are limited to your flashlight but it doesn’t take long before you acquire the Poltergust G-00. However, once you have this, you’ve basically got everything you’ll need for the remainder of the game; sure, you get the dark-light, the plungers, and the Virtual Boo but there’s only really one prominent upgrade to the Poltergust, the Super Suction, and it’s only used once in the game, which is a little disappointing. You can earn additional upgrades for the device by meeting certain requirements, such as collecting all of the game’s gems or defeating all of the optional Boos, but none of the money you earn is used to upgrade your repertoire or even your health. When Professor E. Gadd sets up his shop, however, you can buy some helpful items, such as Gold Bones to have Polterpuppy resurrect you when your health is drained and sensors to alert you to nearby Gems and Boos, but that’s about it in terms of items and power-ups beyond the temporary use of a buzzsaw in the gardens.
Additional Features: As alluded to, there are some rewards you can earn for meeting specific requirements, referred to as “Achievements”; these are directly tied to repetitive actions, such as riding the elevator, defeating specific numbers of ghosts, and interacting with certain objects in each environment. They’re also tied the game’s few collectibles; every floor has six hidden gems to find, with many requiring quite a bit of exploration and ingenuity to track down, and you’ll also be given the optional task of hunting down sixteen hidden Boos, who require a little more strategy than just stunning and sucking up as they like to play hide-and-seek, must be stunned with the dark-light, and can be difficult to pin down. When you complete the story, you’ll receive a letter grade and get to see a rebuilt version of the hotel that reflects how much money you have but, unlike in the first game, you don’t get to play through a mirrored version of the game on a new save file.
Hunt down hidden gems and Boos, and battle against friends in the game’s multiplayer modes.
You can view the ghosts you’ve defeated and the gems you’ve collected at Professor E. Gadd’s lab, but the majority of your additional playtime will probably be taken up with the game’s extra modes, which can be played either solo or alongside fellow players. The ScreamPark challenges you to collect Coins, defeat ghosts, or shoot at targets to score points for your team; the ScareScraper sees you defeating ghosts, rescuing Toads, and fulfilling other objects either alone or in teams while avoiding traps. At the end of those mode, you’ll battle the Boolossus, an even more formidable version of King Boo that adds a phasing attack to its arsenal and splits into a number of regular Boos after eating a bomb. If you fancy putting your hand in your pocket, you can also purchase some additional content (such as costumes, games, and ghosts) for these modes, though I have to say that I remain unimpressed with the lack of post-game content.
The Summary: I remember enjoying the original Luigi’s Mansion back when I borrowed it for the GameCube when it came out, but being disappointed by the post-game content; there wasn’t too much on offer beyond the main game, despite there being a lot to see and do as you explore, and I can’t say that I was too interested in revisiting the franchise after that experience but I was won over by the game’s visual style and charm. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is basically more of the same; the gameplay and mechanics haven’t really changed all that much as far as I can tell, and the developers haven’t really complicated the premise with too many different mechanics. The addition of Gooigi is an interesting one that is tailor-made for two players (specifically an older and younger player) but perfectly acceptable to play solo as long as you can properly manage your characters thanks to the puzzles and areas being quite restricted to closed off areas. As visually impressive as the game is, and as expansive and diverse as the hotel is, however, there’s really not too much to occupy your time in the main game outside of bustin’ ghosts and ransacking the hotel for loot. There’s still no option to play as any other character, which I find endlessly disappointing, and while you suck up a lot of currency, there’s very few opportunities to really spend your money on anything beyond a few minor additions to your arsenal, and beyond the hidden gems and Boos there’s not really much incentive to explore or search around the hotel’s rooms. I imagine that the additional modes offer a lot of replay value, and that the game is more enjoyable in co-op mode, but I put all of my time into the single player story and, while I had a good time, I was hoping for a little more from it. A mirrored mode, purchasable upgrades and skins, and maybe the option to utilise Polterpup and/or Toad would have been nice but there’s definitely enough content and gameplay on offer to keep players (especially younger players) invested and challenged, I just think there could have been a little more spice added to the mix.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Pretty Good
Have you played Luigi’s Mansion3? What did you think of it compared to the previous two games, and which was your introduction to the franchise? Are you a fan of the series and how different it is from the traditional Mario formula? Do you agree that there could have been a little more in-game content or were you satisfied with what was on offer? Which of the floors and bosses was your most, or least, favourite and did you ever play the game in co-op? What games are you playing this Halloween season? Whatever you think about Luigi’s Mansion, sign up to leave your thoughts or let me know on my social media.
Released: 26 July 2019 Originally Released: 10 December 1993 Developer: Bethesda Softworks Original Developer: id Software Also Available For: 3DO, Amiga, Android/iOS, Atari Jaguar, Game Boy Advance, Linux, MS-DOS, Nintendo Switch, PC/Mac, PlayStation, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, RISC, SEGA Saturn, SEGA-32X/Mega-32X, Solaris, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series S
The Background: First-person shooter (FPS) videogames existed before Doom but, thanks to having been ported to every console and format available, the genre was pretty much defined by Doom, whichinspired a wave of FPS titles on the PC and home consoles, as well as popularising online “Deathmatches” against other human players. Doom owes its existence to its forefather, Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992), and id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack. Inspired by classic science-fiction and horror films and board games, Carmack joined forces with designer John Romero and lead artist Adrian Carmack to create Doom, though the process wasn’t all plain sailing. The small, five-person team disagreed about the importance of story to the game and certain gameplay features, such as a score tally and the expansive nature Carmack envisioned, and the limitations of the hardware available to them. Carmack wanted the game to be faster and more brutal than its predecessor, and to have more abstract level designs to separate it from Wolfenstein 3D, which upset designer Tom Hall and saw him replaced late into the game’s development.
Doom has been run on nearly every device, including in Doom itself!
Largely programmed in ANSI C, Doom was released as “shareware”; the first episode was distributed for free and gamers were encouraged to play it, share it around, and purchase the full game if they liked it. Although it was a late addition to the game, Doom’s deathmatches were so popular that the game caused servers to crash, and the game was such a success that it was said to have been installed on more computers than Windows 95! Accordingly, id Software were making $100,000 a day (!) from sales of the game as Doom topped 3.5 million physical copies sold and was banned from workplaces after employees kept clogging the networks with deathmatches! Doom was met with widespread critical acclaim; despite some criticisms regarding the presentation and difficulty, critics lauded the game’s addictive gameplay, and it has cemented its legacy by being regarded as one of the greatest games of all time. Naturally, Doom was the subject of much controversy due its graphic violence and Satanic imagery, but its success led to a slew of expansions, sequels, ports, ancillary media, and even movie adaptations, which more than speaks to the popularity and longevity of the franchise.
The Plot: In the future, an unnamed marine (popularly known as the “Doomguy”) is posted to a Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) outpost on Mars, where a secret teleportation experiment opens a portal to Hell!
Gameplay: Surprising absolutely nobody, Doom is the quintessential classic FPS gameplay experience that eschews the modern gameplay mechanics we’ve become so accustomed to and is as basic as you can get. There’s no options here for strafing, no quick-turn, and you can’t aim the crosshair anywhere but left and right but, on the plus side, your shots will generally always hit your target no matter where they are as long as you’re shooting in their general vicinity. The Right Trigger fires your current weapon at a steady rate, with no worries about reload times or the amount of weapons you can carry at any one time; you can use the Right and Left bumpers and the directional pad to quickly switch between your available arsenal, though its important to remember that you’ll lose everything but the basic pistol and your trusty fists when progressing between the game’s four chapters.
Blast through the demonic hordes to find coloured keys and make your way to the exit.
You can either hold down the Left Trigger to sprint or turn auto-run on from the options (I recommend the latter) and, while there’s no awkward first-person jumping or platforming to worry about, you can interact with switches, levels, and doors by pressing A. Y will bring up a useful wire-frame map of the current level, but this can be a bit disorientating as it takes up the entire screen and I always found it difficult to figure out which direction I was heading. Your ammo, health, and armour, are all helpfully displayed in the heads-up display (HUD), and this is where you’ll keep track of the coloured key cards and skulls you’ve collected in each level. These are necessary to open the appropriately-coloured doors or activate coloured barriers, and function as the primary puzzle/objective of each area: wade in, dispose of demons, grab keys, and get to the exit, snagging new weapons, ammo, and power-ups along the way. While you don’t need to worry about submerging or swimming through water or hopping from columns, you will have to keep an eye out for poison, lava, and crushing traps and getting all turned around from teleporters. On the plus side, you can lure enemies into attacking and killing each other, which is a nice touch, and destroy explosive barrels to take out larger groups of enemies.
While levels quickly become bizarre hellscapes, it’s easy to get lost in the samey environments.
And make no mistake, the hordes of Hell are out for your blood. The game has five different difficulty levels, with the enemies increasing in number and aggression depending on how difficult you set the game, and enemies will skulk around in the dark, fly at you from the shadows, and teleport in to take shots at you. You can also take advantage of these teleporters to be instantly transported around the level, and the further you progress into the game’s story, the more prominent such puzzles will be. Equally, things start off quite linear and it’s not too difficult to make your way from the start to the exit and find secret areas and rooms hidden behind seemingly innocuous walls. However, it isn’t long before the levels get a bit bigger, a bit more open, and start to take on a maze-like quality; walls, rooms, and textures start to look the same and it’s easy to find yourself running around in circles, desperately trying to figure out how to get to the next key and open up the next door. Sometimes, this requires you to pull a series of levels to active a bridge, open a door, or open up an area and it’s not always entirely clear what you’ve done or changed in a level, making exploration that much more confusing at times.
Graphics and Sound: I mean it’s classic Doom so you know exactly what to expect. I have to say that Doom has probably never looked better than in this high-definition version for the Xbox Series X; environments are as dark and foreboding and gothic as ever, and there’s some impressive and ominous use of flickering lights and darkness to help add to the claustrophobia and horror. While enemies are comprised of 2D sprites, giving the game something of a 2.5D look that’s often like blasting through a diorama at times, I’m not going to dump on the visuals because they speak to the nostalgia in my veins and add to the game’s charm. The game’s iconic soundtrack only bolsters the experience; while areas might be strewn with bloodied corpses, flickering candles, crucified souls, and Satanic imagery, a number of memorable beats help to keep the adrenaline up.
While the graphics are nothing special now, the nostalgia is strong, the gore is brilliant, and the soundtrack is fantastic.
Demons and other enemies growl and snort at you from the dark, exacerbating the constant feeling of dread at work in the game, but all the sound work in the world can’t change the fact that many of the game’s areas look the same and only add to Doom’s confusing, maze-like nature. You’ll explore space facilities and outposts, cargo holds full of UAC crates, and journey to gothic castles and medieval structures sitting amidst the burning lava of Hell, but it can be difficult to distinguish one area from the next after a while. Some odd colour effects also make some mountains look like they’re glitching out, though neat touches like pentagrams, drawbridges, blood fountains, and lava waterfalls help to make some areas more memorable. One of the most entertaining aspects of Doom is the HUD, which features a pixelated representation of the Doomguy reacting in pain when hurt or grin sadistically when acquiring new weapons, and there’s some really fun, gory death animations included to make blasting demons (and your friends) endlessly enjoyable. After completing each chapter, you’ll be presented with some small, very difficult to read text that gives you the low-down on the story, but I didn’t really pay much attention to this, and a cool little map screen shows where you are in each chapter between levels, which helps to make up for the limitations of the game’s graphics.
Enemies and Bosses: As you make your way through UAC’s Mars outposts and into the fiery depths of Hell, you’ll come up against a handful of macabre enemies that are all out for your blood. There’s not much in the way of enemy variety, and you’ll encounter the same enemies in ever chapter, but they can take a few good shots to put down and often attack you from the shadows, from afar, or randomly spawn in to swarm over you. The weakest enemies in the game are the zombified marines, who shuffle about firing at you with either a pistol or a shotgun, and these are often found alongside or near to fireball-throwing Imps, the most common demon you’ll encounter. Things progressively get more harrowing when you’re attacked by the gorilla-like Pinky, which can also be invisible for added annoyance, and the bulbous, disgusting Cacodemon, but by far the most annoying enemies are the Lost Souls, flaming skulls that float about and fly at you in a suicide run!
Some huge, monstrous demons await you at the end of each chapter and double as sub-bosses!
Each of the game’s four chapters ends with a boss battle to wrap up the action. The first of these is the Baron of Hell, a huge demonic Satyr that plods around throwing balls of green, flaming energy at you and swiping at you when you get in close. You’ll actually battle two of these at once at the conclusion of “Knee-Deep in the Dead” and they tend to crop up at the worst time in the game’s later chapters as sub-bosses, of sorts, usually guarding keys, doors, or the level’s exit. The Barons are succeeded by the Cyberdemon, a gigantic devil-like monster that lumbers around a wide open arena firing rockets at you. Luckily, there’s loads of rocket launcher ammo nearby and columns to run behind for cover, meaning you can easily hit and run and stay on the move, but when the Cyberdemon randomly appears in later chapters as a sub-boss, your options for weapons and cover are severely limited! The game’s final boss is the Spiderdemon, a massive brain-like ghoul trapped in a mechanized, spider-like body that jerks around the place rapidly firing its chaingun at you and accompanied by Cacodemons. The first time you fight it, you can take cover behind loads of columns and structures, but then it randomly reappears in the last level of the fourth and final chapter, “Thy Flesh Consumed”, it’s proceeded by Barons of Hell, Cyberdemons, accompanied by far more enemies, and lurking out in the open. However, focus your fire on the cybernetic arachnid and you’ll be awarded with the final victory over Hell’s minions.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Doomguy starts out with nothing more than a pistol and his bare fists, but it’s not long before you get your hands on my go-to weapon of choice, the shotgun. There’s no Super Shotgun available here, but get up close to most of the game’s enemies with this bad boy and you’ll put the majority of them down in one hit. When surrounded by enemies, it’s best to bust out the chaingun or plasma cannon for some rapid fire action, or whip out the chainsaw to chew up demon meat into bloody chunks, but I would save the rocket launcher for the game’s bigger enemies and bosses. Of course, if you look hard enough, you’ll get your hands on Doom’s signature weapon, the BFG-9000, which will unleash a powerful green energy blast that obliterates any onscreen enemies and makes short work of the game’s bosses.
Grab some ordinance, protect yourself with armour, and power-up to make short work of demon scum!
As you explore your environments, you’ll find stimpacks and medikits to restore your health and pick up various armours to increase your resistance to attack. While your maximum health and armour is defaulted to 100%, you can increase it further with health and armour bonuses, and shrug off the damage dealt by lava or poison with radiation shielding suits. Poorly lit or darkened areas are a worry of the past with the light amplification visor, and you can unlock the entirety of the map, including seeing all the secret areas, with the computer area map. You can also pick up temporary powerups like the Berserk, Invulnerability, Invisibility, and Supercharge to help you dish out additional damage against enemies, full heal yourself, and shrug off any dangers you might encounter for a short time.
Additional Features: There are nineteen Achievements to earn in Doom, with four of these popping after successfully completing every level of the game’s four chapters, others popping for killing a certain number of enemies in certain ways, and others awarded for beating every level of the game’s highest difficulty setting. There are a number of secret areas to find, and you’ll get an Achievement for finding one and then all of them, and you can also earn a few by finishing every level in co-op mode or getting first twenty-five and then a hundred kills in the game’s deathmatch mode. Although the game is severely cropped in this mode and your options are limited to setting how many kills equate to victory and the time limit of each match, it remains a fun and frantic little extra that can make or break friendships, and it’s nice to see a co-op feature included as I don’t think I’ve seen that in Doom before. You can also input a number of push-button codes to activate cheats, though being able to select every level right from the off and having a quick-save function makes this a little bit of overkill, and sign up to Bethesda.net to download some additional add-ons to add a little more to your Doom experience.
The Summary: Unlike so many other gamers, I didn’t grow up playing Doom; I was playing Duke Nukem 3D (3D Realms, 1996) instead and the closest I got to playing Doom was my tumultuous relationship with the Nintendo 64 version of Quake(id Software, 1998). Still, I have played Doom before, specifically the port included in Doom3’s (ibid, 2004) BFG Edition on the PlayStation 3, but I jumped at the chance to pick up the Doom: Slayers Collection (ibid, 2019) for Xbox One when I saw it going cheap so I could experience the game once more. I have to say, even some thirty years after it first released, Doom remains an almost timeless gaming experience. Sure, your control options are limited, the game quickly becomes quite repetitive as there’s little to do but collect keys and mow through enemies, and the game isn’t the prettiest thing you’ll ever play, but nostalgia is a powerful thing and there’s something very powerful about the simplicity of Doom. It’s such a fun game to play in short bursts or one quick-fire playthrough, and the feeling of blowing demon scum into bloody chunks never gets old. The game is tight as a drum and controls very well even all these years later; while the maze-like construction of some areas is annoying and really not my thing, I enjoyed having some bad-ass beats to nod along to, discovering secrets or bloody Easter Eggs, and the rush of adrenaline from a Baron of Hell suddenly emerging from behind a door! Obviously, Doom’s sequels and successors would tweak and improve upon the presentation, mechanics, and options but, in terms of the FPS genre, it all began here and it remains a rollicking good time even after all this time and a must-play for fans of horror, shooters, and videogames in general.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Great Stuff
Are you a fan of the original Doom? When did you first play it? Do you have fond memories of playing deathmatches with your friends? Which of the game’s chapters and weapons was your favourite? Which boss was the toughest for you? How highly do you rate this version of the game? Whatever your thoughts on Doom, or FPS games in general, sign up to drop a comment below or let me know on my social media.
In the decades since his first dramatic appearance in the pages of Detective Comics, Bruce Wayne/Batman has become a mainstream, worldwide, pop culture icon. The brainchild of writer Bob Kane, Batman was brought to life by artist Bill Finger and has been a popular staple of DC Comics and countless movies, videogames, and cartoons over the years. Accordingly, September celebrates “Batman Day” and is just another perfect excuse to celebrate comic’s grim and broody vigilante and, this year, I’ve been dedicating every Wednesday to Gotham’s Dark Knight Detective.
Released: 23 June 2015 Developer: Rocksteady Studios Also Available For: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S
The Background: After a rocky relationship with videogame adaptations, Eidos Interactive and Rocksteady Studios turned the Dark Knight’s fortunes around with the critically and commercially successful Batman: Arkham Asylum (ibid, 2009) and the bigger and better sequel, Batman: Arkham City (ibid, 2011). Eager to capitalise on this success, and to allow Rocksteady Studios the time to craft a suitable third entry, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment turned to WB Games Montréal to develop a prequel set during Batman’s early days that, while criticised as somewhat derivative, still sold incredibly well and helped keep the franchise alive while Rocksteady worked on their next game. Development of Batman: Arkham Knight began shortly after the completion of Arkham City and took four years to complete; utilising the greater graphical and processing power of then-current consoles, this new game would allow of five times the number of enemies to be present onscreen at any time, cutscenes to be rendered in real time, and have items like cloth react realistically to movement and wind. The game’s story was designed to be the concluding chapter in Rocksteady’s Arkham saga and the developers chose to expand upon the game world by implementing Batman’s famous Batmobile and redesigned the city to incorporate the car’s unique gameplay mechanics. Arkham Knight was met with generally favourable reviews; reviews praised the game’s puzzles and expansion of Batman’s gameplay and repertoire but also criticised the game’s big narrative twist and the over-reliance on Batmobile sections. Still, Arkham Knight was the fastest-selling game of 2015 and, as with its predecessors, was expanded upon through the release of downloadable content (DLC) that served as both pre- and post-game content that was met with mixed to negative reviews.
The Plot: On Halloween, Doctor Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow forces everyone but the very worst of Gotham City’s inhabitants to leave the city when he threatens to swamp the streets with his fear toxin. With the city under lockdown and some of his worst rogues at large, Batman is faced with his greatest challenge yet when he encounters the mysterious “Arkham Knight”, who not only commands a well-armed militia but also has a personal vendetta against the Dark Knight.
Gameplay: For Batman: Arkham Knight, the game developers once again returned to the formula that worked so well in Arkham City and, by expanding upon them exponentially and even infusing a few mechanics inspired by Arkham Origins, sought to create the biggest and most definitive Batman videogame to date. Consequently, the stakes are much higher, the city is larger than ever, and Batman’s repertoire has been refined, improved, and expanded upon but, most crucially, the game’s central control scheme remains as fluid and familiar as ever. The basic control mechanics remain largely unchanged from the previous games: you hold A to run and glide when running from a ledge or tap it to perform a dodge, press B to perform a stun with a swoosh of Batman’s iconic cape, and tap X to attack and counter incoming attacks (indicated by a helpful Bat symbol over their heads) with Y and string these moves together to build up a combo attack that increases your multiplier, speed, and damage output. Pressing the Right Trigger allows you to crouch to soften your steps and sneak up on enemies, and you can select a gadget by pressing down on the directional pad (D-Pad), aim it with the Left Trigger, and fire off Batman’s patented grapple with the Right Bumper.
Batman’s stealth options are bolstered by the new Fear Takedown mechanic.
Rocksteady’s trademark “freeflow combat” system remains as fluid and intuitive as ever; you can make use of any of Batman’s gadgets by holding LT and pressing buttons like X and Y to add to his combo multiplayer and must stun, evade, and utilise split-second timing to avoid, counter, and counterattack the game’s various distinct, yet familiar, enemies. You can, as before, also utilise Batman’s gliding mechanics to take out enemies by performing a dive bomb or even by firing off certain gadgets mid-flight and, as is also the standard by this point, stealth is just as important as Batman’s combat prowess. Consequently, you’ll still be grappling up to higher levels to scope out large groups of armed and unarmed enemies in order to pick them off undetected. Vents, smoke pellets, and various parts of the environment can also be used to disorientate or take out enemies and to allow you to get the drop on unsuspecting thugs, which allows you to silently choke them out or perform an instant “Knockout Smash” but at the cost of alerting other enemies. Arkham Knight introduces a new “Fear Takedown” mechanic that allows Batman to subdue up to five enemies in one move as long as he remains undetected, with time slowling down to allow you to easily focus on your next target.
Batman’s Detective Vision allows him to recreate crime scenes and navigation is as intuitive as ever.
Batman’s ever-useful “Detective Vision” is now mapped to the D-Pad; pressing up bathes the world in an x-ray-like filter that highlights nearby enemies, secrets, and points of interest. Similar to how this was a crucial part of progressing the story in Arkham Origins, Batman’s Detective Vision can be utilised to reconstruct crime scenes and review evidence from various angles by use of his Evidence Scanner. This allows you to hold X to scan in any evidence and then cycle through a holographic reconstruction of the incident to find clues, progress the story, and solve crimes. You’ll also once again find yourself using your Detective Vision to isolate Edward Nashton/Edward Nygma/The Riddler’s informants in order to get clues to track down the Riddler’s trophies and challenges; these tugs are highlighted in green and should be left until last so you can press Y to squeeze information out of them. The game map is noticeably larger than ever before, with many new and familiar areas of the city to explore, but thankfully Rocksteady’s ever-useful map and compass system remain intact to help you to navigate; you can place waymarkers on the main map to guide you to your destination and a Batsignal will shine into the sky to direct you towards your next objective, whether mandatory or otherwise.
Though a bit clunky, the Batmobile allows for fast, explosive travel and hard-hitting combat.
Unfortunately, there is no fast travel system like in Arkham Origins and still no way to fast exit interiors; Batman still has his gadgets (particularly his cape and grapnel gun) to help him traverse the city but, if you really want to get somewhere fast, you’re heavily encouraged to press the Left Bumper to summon the Batmobile! This armoured vehicle is very similar to the Tumbler and allows you to rocket through the grimy city streets, through destructible parts of the environments, and across rooftops by holding down RT. You can boost with Y, brake and reverse with X, dodge and slide with A and the control stick, and will conveniently and non-fatally automatically repel any nearby enemies with the car’s electrified defences. The Batmobile can even be remote piloted but, while its “Pursuit Mode” is extremely responsive (unless you’re attempting sharp turns or driving up tunnels without enough speed) and helpful arrows guide you towards your intended destination, the controls get a bit clunky when you hold down LT and enter “Battle Mode”. This transforms the Batmobile it into a mini tank and allows you to fire a missile barrage, send out a sonar signal to detect nearby enemies, and blast at the Arkham Knight’s automated tanks using a high-impact cannon or a rapid-fire gun. The Batmobile is absolutely essential to clearing the game’s main story and side missions, with many puzzles specifically tailored to have you flying over ramps, utilising a winch, or blasting at weakened walls in order to progress and complete side quests. The most notable of these sees you forced to take on the Riddler’s many hazard-filled race tracks hidden all over the city, which will test your skill as much as your patience, and the numerous instances where you must either pursue a foe at high speed or engage with wave upon wave of conveniently unmanned tanks.
You’ll get to tag in, or briefly play as, other supporting characters throughout the main campaign.
Gameplay in Arkham City is further mixed up through the return of similar puzzles from previous games that see you hacking or locating radio signals, activating machinery or crossing gaps with your various Bat-gadgets, making extensive use of the Batmobile’s versatile winch, and utilising the new (if brief) team-based mechanics. While you won’t get to switch to Selina Kyle/Catwoman this time around, you can control her during various Riddler challenges and there are instances where you’ll get to either tag in or briefly play as either Tim Drake/Robin, Dick Grayson/Nightwing, and even Commissioner Jim Gordon in a short flashback. Unfortunately, just like in Arkham City, there is no option to play as either of these characters on the main story outside of these instances, which I continue to find both confusing and disappointing. Similarly, there’s a section right at the end of the main story where you’ll take control of the Joker, who not only gets to wield a shotgun in a first-person sequence that sees him desperately trying to take control of Batman’s mind but also has his own “Jokermobile”. Despite being unequivocally dead, the Joker continues to play a pivotal role in the story; thanks to being infected with the Joker’s blood, Batman is continually haunted and tormented by visions of the Joker throughout the main campaign, which include a recreation of his crippling of Barbara Gordon and Joker’s torture of Jason Todd, and eventually leads to Robin questioning Batman’s sanity and stability.
You’ll need all of Batman’s upgrades to lock his villains up in the G.C.P.D. cells.
Although you can no longer travel to the Batcave, Batman has set up a makeshift laboratory in the city and you can enter the Gotham City Police Department to converse with non-playable characters (NPCs) and the cells will fill up with his various rogues as you defeat and capture them in the main story. As always, defeating enemies, scanning objects of interest, finding Riddler Trophies, and completing missions earns you experience points (XP) that allow you to not only level-up to upgrade Batman’s suit and gadgets but also augment the Batmobile’s capabilities. As the game gets progressively harder as you complete story objectives, with more and more varied enemies appearing all over the city and in larger numbers than ever before, you’ll definitely need to make the most of these upgrades if you want to increase your chances at succeeding. The game has different difficulty settings that can be changed at any time if you’re struggling but you’ll be forced to utilise all of Batman’s skills and gadgets as the story progresses; this means chaining combos using the Batmobile, taking on small encampments of enemies, and (as is also the standard) tackling the game’s “New Game +” mode that starts you off with all of your upgrades and XP but removes counter indicators and increases enemy aggressiveness.
Graphics and Sound: You probably won’t be surprised to hear that Arkham Knight is the most graphically impressive of all the Batman: Arkham videogames; bathed in the perpetual blanket of a dark and ominous night, Gotham City has never looked better and is awash with filthy streets, high-rise industrial areas, and abandoned docks and dingy alleyways. Rain will occasionally wash over the city, giving everything a sleek and suitably menacing look, and it’s genuinely impressive how the game utilises these effects, lighting, and shadows to craft one of the most gorgeous looking titles I’ve ever played. Batman, in particular, looks spectacular; now sporting a far more futuristic suitthat emphasis the “Knight” of the game’s title, he again accumulates battle damage as the game progresses and remains a fearsome and impressive character model. Unfortunately, while I have many positives to say about Rocksteady’s interpretation of Robin, I can’t say I care too much for Nightwing’s new suit, which includes an odd and uncomfortable looking headpiece.
Gotham is huge and full of large, detailed locations both old and new.
Gotham City is nothing short of spectacular; as I mentioned before, it’s super fun to see Batman’s enemies end up populating the cells at the G.C.P.D. and you can also revisit notable areas from the previous games and even Barbara Gordon/Oracle’s church tower. While it’s disappointing to find the city is once again abandoned and largely devoid of life except for criminal scum, Gotham City is almost too big this time around and it does baffle me a little bit that the developers didn’t include the Batwing fast travel system but there’s a great deal of fun to be had gliding or grappling through the air or blasting through the streets in the Batmobile. One of the game’s most prominent missions sees you infiltrating the blimp-like airship of industrialist Simon Stagg, which introduces a bit of an aggravating tilting mechanic to the game that can be a bit tricky to get past. Another mission that is a personal favourite of mine sees Batman willing to give his life when the ACE Chemicals reactor goes critical. This has you very carefully placing big tubes into slots to contain the reaction, which can be a bit finnicky but the section is made all the more poignant thanks to the dialogue between Batman and his butler and father-figure, Alfred Pennyworth, and the touching orchestral score.
Not only is the city bigger than ever, but the locations are large, detailed, and more dangerous and garish.
It’s actually pretty amazing how the developers tweaked the city to be both believable in its construction and also conveniently tailored to suit the new features offered by the Batmobile. All too often, this means forcing you to use the Batmobile to solve a puzzle to open up a new area or speed through a tunnel or race track but, while these can be aggravating moments, there’s an exhilaration to be had in using the Batmobile and there’s nothing stopping you not using it outside of mandatory sections. Gotham City is comprised of three large islands (Miagami, Founders’, and Bleake), each with their own distinctive areas that include Wayne Tower, a dilapidated sewer system, and large bridges connecting them to each other. The Riddler’s challenges are more elaborate than ever; bathed in a garish neon glow, you’ll race through massively impractical sewer tunnels avoiding his many hazards or use Batman and Catwoman’s various skills to solve the Riddler’s death traps. Many of the interiors you visit are pretty much the same fair from previous games an are comprised of industrial facilities, rundown buildings, and an abandoned movie theatre repurposed for the villain’s purposes but all of them are perfectly in keeping with this world and they’re so much bigger, more detailed, and more impressively realised than before; you rally feel it when buildings explode or you bomb around the city in the Batmobile.
There’s a lot to see in the city, including jump scares from Man-Bat and a flood of fear gas!
As in the other Batman: Arkham games, a number of Batman’s other rogues are at large in the city and must be taken down in side missions. One of the most prominent is Doctor Kurt Langstrom/Man-Bat, who will randomly pop up to give you the fright of your life when you’re casually traversing around the city. Thanks to the Scarecrow’s fear toxin, you can expect things to get a bit twisted here and there as well; indeed, the game begins with you controlling a Gotham cop using a first-person perspective and forced to watch as the city descends into chaos. Thanks to the Joker’s influence, Batman will see various hallucinations of his foe across the city, a PlayStation-exclusive piece of DLC sees you racing through a nightmarish version of Gotham City transformed by the Scarecrow’s fear gas, and the city is shrouded in this same gas thanks to the release of Cloudburst. This bathes the game world in a thick, copper-tinted fog, drives enemies intro a manic frenzy, and you’ll even find the city being torn to shreds when Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy helps you out in this section.
Arkham Knight features some powerful, poignant performances from series staples Hamill and Conroy.
Even now, Batman: Arkham Knight is one of the most impressive videogames I’ve ever played; the game runs so smoothly, with quick loading times and a consistent frame rate. Textures, assets, and parts of the environment are just there onscreen, with no pop-up or distortion, and the sheer amount and variety of enemies onscreen at any one time really helps to add to the stakes and pressure Batman feels in this final outing. While it is a bit disappointing that the developers felt the need to include the Joker again, even after he has been killed, I’ll never complain about hearing Mark Hamill in his iconic role and matching wits with the immortal Kevin Conroy one last time. As always, Gotham’s thugs are extremely chatty and full of amusing sound bites and exclamations; Batman stays in constant contact with Oracle, Alfred, Lucius Fox, and Gordon throughout the story (with Alfred basically telling you “Go do some side missions” when the main story takes an awkward break) and, as if the Scarecrow’s constant taunting threats aren’t bad enough, Batman also finds his communications hacked by the Arkham Knight.
Enemies and Bosses: If you’ve played any of the previous Batman: Arkham games, you’ll know what to except from Arkham Knight’s goons; a slew of vagrants and scumbags can be found all over the city in various groups and they’ll rush at you with knives, baseball bats, and even grab car doors to use as rudimentary shields or wield stun batons. Gun-toting enemies remain an obvious threat since Batman won’t last long against sustained gunfire or sniper shots so you should either disable, disarm or take down these enemies first or as quickly as possible. Thanks to the Arkham Knight’s technology and knowledge of Batman’s methods, thugs will also place booby traps, destroy vantage points, and even jam Batman’s Detective Vision to make things more difficult. As you might expect, there are a number of different enemies on offer in Arkham Knight: Combat Experts resemble Arkham City’s ninjas and can teleport away from your attacks and attack with swords, medics revive their fallen comrades, and Brutes must be stunned and subjected to a beatdown or lured to environmental takedown points to dispatch (or, in the case of the minigun variants, snuck up on and taken down with a quick-time event ). You’ll also have to contend with the Arkham Knight’s more heavily armed and capable forces; in “Predator” sections, this means picking armed thugs off one at a time but, out in the city, you’ll battle against unmanned Drone Tanks that can either be quickly destroyed in one hit or with a well-timed shot to their turret. When battling the Drone Tanks, you must be careful not to leave the designated area and make use of the Batmobile’s turning circle and dodge mechanic to avoid damage, which can be a bit clunky thanks to the way the controls are implemented.
Though dead, the Joker continues to haunt Batman and must be fought in his mind and by proxy.
Although the Joker is not an actual, tangible threat in this game, he does have a consistent presence; notably, when Batman is exposed to the Scarecrow’s fear gas, he sees enemies as the Joker and even becomes briefly possessed by him, skewing his perception of reality at certain key points in the story. The Joker also infected five Gotham citizens with his blood (with one of them being Batman) and, as part of the story, you’ll have to try and find and rescue these victims in a bid to save them. Two of them, however, serve as boss battles; the first of these, Albert King, you’ll battle alongside Robin. It’s best to stay out of King’s reach, take out the goons that accompany him, and utilise team attacks and beatdowns to defeat the Jokerised boxer. When you track down Johnny Charisma, Batman hallucinates him as the Joker, who sings a mocking song while strapped to a bomb. Rather than fighting Charisma, you must take control of Robin and sneak around to disarm the bombs as Batman stares down his adversary on a rotating stage. Other Joker infected are also encountered, though they’re generally hidden behind standard combat and stealth sections; you’ll also encounter Doctor Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn during these sections of the game, but defeating her simply amounts to performing a Team Takedown with Batman and Robin and then fending off her goons.
The Batmobile is instrumental in dispatching the Arkham Knight’s militia.
The Arkham Knight’s forces extend to a number of Armoured Personnel Carrier (A.P.C.) vehicles that pose a significant threat; when these appear on the map, you’ll need to chase them down in the Batmobile, side-swiping their support vehicles as you desperately try to hack them with Batman’s tech. The Arkham Knight will battle you four times during the course of the story, with the first seeing him take the controls of an attack helicopter. The Arkham Knight will bombard you with missiles while his forces try to distract you, so be sure to take out his Drone Tanks first before blasting at it his helicopter with the Batmobile’s cannon. In the second encounter, the Arkham Knight roams the fear gas-covered city in the heavily-armed Cloudburst Tank while being flanked by a number of Cobra Tanks. Rather than tackling these tank-like vehicles head-on, you’ll need to utilise stealth (while in the Batmobile) to sneak around behind the tanks to damage their weak spot on the back until only the Cloudburst remains. You must then scan it to identity its weak spots and then creep up on the Cloudburst Tank to land a hit on one of its four cooling systems before blasting away as fast as possible to avoid being blasted to smithereens by the tank’s high-powered weaponry. Once its central core is exposed, position yourself into a wide open space so that you can avoid his missiles and finally put an end to this absolute bitch of a boss fight that dragged on way too long and was far too finnicky to be enjoyable.
While Deathstroke is reduced to a tank battle, Pyg and Firefly prove formidable, if repetitive, villains.
However, don’t think it’s over yet as, after clearing the main story, Slade Wilson/Deathstroke takes control of the remnants of the Arkham Knight’s militia and you basically get to do a variation of this tedious battle all over again! As many have mentioned, it’s a shame that Deathstroke is reduced to such an insignificant and tiresome boss fight; the battle against him in Arkham Origins was brutally tough, yes, but it was a far better representation of the mercenary’s skills and actually put your combat prowess to the test. Another notable boss encounter in the game is a side mission that sees you investigating mutilated corpses that culminates in a battle against the ruthless butcher Lazlo Valentin/Professor Pyg. This sees Pyg’s zombie-like patients attack you relentlessly and these can only be put down for good with a ground takedown. Pyg himself spends most of his time tossing meat cleavers at you, which you can send back at him with a well-timed press of Y; once his minions are finally disposed of, stun him by smacking a cleaver at him and perform a takedown to end his threat but be warned as I found it oddly difficult to get the game to trigger the takedown in this fight. Other notable Batman enemies also crop up in side missions; as mentioned, Man-Bat will randomly appear flying through the city skies. When you spot him, you must try and get to high ground in order to land on his back and retrieve a blood sample in order to synthesise a cure at Langstrom’s lab using a simple mini game. Afterwards, you’ll need to wait for Man-Bat to appear a couple more times in order to administer this cure. Similarly, you’ll often get notified of fire stations that have been set ablaze; when you reach one of these, you’ll need to use the Batmobile to extinguish the flames and then chase the man responsible, Garfield Lynns/Firefly, across the city until the fuel in his jetpack runs out, allowing you to blast out of the Batmobile and bring him down. Like many of the side missions in the game, these occur randomly and the main campaign often grinds to a halt as you’re left trying to seek one of them out in order to reach 100% completion.
After taking out his drill machine, Batman goes head-to-head with his former protégé.
Later in the story, you’ll encounter the Arkham Knight one last time in the city tunnels; this time, he’s in a massive drilling machine that cannot be damaged by any of the Batmobile’s arsenal. Instead, you must flee from it to avoid being chewed up into scrap, boosting through a tunnel to avoid various unbreakable obstacles and luring the drill to a series of explosives in order to damage it. Afterwards, you’ll confront the Arkham Knight (who, by this point, has obviously been revealed to be Jason Todd) using Batman’s more familiar skills; you must avoid being spotted by the Arkham Knight’s red targeting sight, stay out of sight of his drone while taking out his goons, and escape from a room filled with poison gas within thirty seconds in repeated phases in order to grapple up to his vantage point and damage, and ultimately defeat, him. Rather than actually get to fight against the Scarecrow, the finale of the game sees Batman overcoming the Joker’s influence and finally putting the Clown Prince of Crime to rest and, thanks to surprising assistance from Jason, defeating the Scarecrow once and for all (but at the cost of his true identity being revealed to the world).
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Just like the previous games, you’ll be able to use XP to upgrade Batman’s armour to improve his resistance to melee attacks and gunfire, add additional takedowns to his arsenal, and upgrade his many gadgets to improve their range and efficiency. If you’ve played the previous games then you’ll be immediately familiar with the vast majority of Batman’s gadgets: he’s got his patented Batarangs his Batclaws, explosive gel, smoke pellets, a tightrope-creating Line Launcher, a Remote Hacking Device to hack control panels, the Disruptor to render weapons inert, and the Remote Electrical Charge to activate certain electronic puzzles.
In addition to his many returning gadgets, Batman has some new toys and, of course, his tank car!
One of the most useful new gadgets is the Voice Synthesizer, which allows Batman to mimic the voices of his enemies and other NPCs to gain access to new areas and lure goons into a takedown. The Freeze Blast also makes a return, though it can be easily missed as it’s not necessary to finish the main campaign, but the most useful gadget in Batman’s arsenal is easily his Batmobile, whose weaponry can also be upgraded to increase your accuracy, reload speed, and weapon energy and efficiency as well as giving you the ability to hack the Drone Tanks to turn them against each other.
Additional Features: Batman: Arkham Knight has sixty-nine Achievements for you to earn, many of which pop simply for playing through the main campaign and taking down Batman’s rogues. You’ll also get Achievements for using a hundred Quick Gadgets in combat, gliding four-hundred meters while less than twenty meters from the ground, landing fifty critical shots on Drone Tanks, for performing twenty Fear Takedowns. Some are a little more tricky, requiring you to glide under three bridges, completing a series of jumps in the Batmobile, and avoiding damage against Drone Tanks, all for a measly 5G each.
Riddler, Two-Face, Azrael, and other Batman villains offer various side quests of varying quality.
As is to be expected, there are a number of side missions to occupy your time away from the main campaign and net you additional Achievements; these include completing Augmented Reality trials, destroying militia watchtowers, disarming a series of mines using the Batmobile, and (of course) collecting Riddler Trophies. This time around, the Riddler forces Batman and Catwoman to work together to both save a number of hostages from his death traps and overcome his deadly racetracks and puzzles. This culminates in a battle that pits the two against the Riddler, who first sends a swarm of robots after you (which are colour-coded so that only Batman can destroy the blue ones and Catwoman the red) before attacking you in a massive, steampunk-like mech! Batman will also have to team up with Nightwing to locate and destroy Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin’s weapon caches, which culminates in Batman having to rescue Nightwing from the Penguin’s goons and subdue the mobster with a Team Takedown. Batman will also have to foil a series of robberies perpetrated by Harvey Dent/Two-Face, rescue firemen held hostage all over the city, and finally close the book on the case of Doctor Thomas Elliot/Hush and Michael Lane/Azrael. Both of these are quite anti-climatic considering that Arkham City seemed to be indicating that they would play a pivotal role in this game, though the Azrael side mission does result in some fun combat situations rather than simply culminating in a glorified quick-time event like the disappointing Hush side mission.
The DLC, while short, at least offers multiple different characters to play as.
Fans of the Arkham Challenge Mode will be glad to hear that it returns once more, again pitting you against a series of combat, stealth, and mini campaigns (many of which you can customise with different buffs and debuffs) to earn Medals, Achievements, and actually have an opportunity to play as other characters besides Batman. Arkham Knight was expanded upon with a decent amount of DLC, which added additional skins for Batman, his allies, and even his vehicles and brought the total Achievement count up to 113. While a lot of the DLC was comprised of yet more race tracks (with some based on the 1960s show and Tim Burton’s film), there were a few additional mini campaigns on offer. These included additional villains to encounter in the main campaign, a prelude in which you get to play as Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl, and post-game stories where you play as Nightwing, Catwoman, Harley Quinn and Jason Todd (now in the guise of the Red Hood). While none of these were as long as some of the additional DLC missions seen in Arkham City or Arkham Origins, they featured additional Achievements, new areas and villains, and it was nice to actually get to play as someone other than Batman if only for a short period of time and in an isolated narrative bubble.
The Summary: I can totally understand why people would have been left a bit disappointed by Batman: Arkham Knight: the big twist regarding the titular character was incredibly predictable (especially for long-time Batman fans), the villains utilised in the story were a bit bland and uninspired (the game’s really missing those nightmarish Scarecrow sections from the first game), there was a certain amount of dismay inherent to the game since it was the last in the series, and the forced emphasis on the Batmobile definitely bogged down the usual combat and stealth-based mechanics of the previous games. Being as it was the third (well, fourth, technically) game in the series, a certain amount of predictability was to be expected; by this point, the series had done so much and included so many stories and side stories that it’s arguable that Rocksteady would have struggled to please everyone no matter how they told their finale. For me, the primary glaring flaw in the game is how the main campaign literally stops dead in its tracks on multiple occasions and you’re told to do some side quests, which can be difficult to accomplish as many of them are only playable when the game randomly loads them in. This noticeably interrupted the flow and the lack of checkpoints in some of the harder Batmobile sections (particularly against the Cloudburst Tank) and the sheer abundance of annoying Riddler racetracks and death traps, relying too much on Batmobile combat for certain scenarios (especially battling Deathstroke), offering lacklustre conclusions to Arkham City’s loose threads, and a disappointing assortment of DLC do weigh heavily on the overall experience. Yet, despite all of this, it cannot be denied that Batman: Arkham Knight is an abolsutely phenomenal experience. While Batman: Arkham City may be my favourite in the series, with Arkham Origins close behind, I have to make room in the ranking for Arkham Knight for its sheer scale alone. This is a Batman at the absolute top of his game and, accordingly, Arkham Knight may very well be the quintessential Batman experience. With a host of new combat mechanics, detective skills, and gadgets at you disposal, never has a game encapsulated what it means to be Batman better than Arkham Knight; there’s still loads to see and do, the story is intense and engaging and feels very raw, personal, and like a true finale for this version of the character.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Fantastic
Were you a fan of Batman: Arkham Knight? How do you feel it holds up compared to the previous games in the series? What did you think to the larger, more open and varied game world? Were you a fan of the tag team mechanics and, like me, would you have liked to see these other characters actually playable in the open world this time around? Did you ever find all of the Riddler’s Trophies and what did you think to his racetracks? Were you a fan of the Batmobile? What did you think to the game’s DLC? How did you celebrate Batman Day this year and what is your favourite Batman videogame? Whatever you think about Batman: Arkham Knight, or Batman in general, drop a comment below!
Released: 26 November 2008 Developer: Backbone Entertainment Also Available For: PlayStation 3
The Background: In 1987, Capcom released Street Fighter onto the arcade scene; this oft-forgotten one-on-one brawler may have been criticised for its repetitive gameplay and dodgy controls but it certainly laid the groundwork for probably one of the most recognised fighting games ever created. Thanks to game’s special moves, pulled off using directional inputs in conjunction with button commands, and the introduction of a six-button cabinet, Street Fighter gained a modicum of intrigue on the growing arcade scene that exploded with the release of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (Capcom, 1991). Expanding the playable roster to eight, Street Fighter II changed the genre forever through the accidental introduction of combo moves and gave Nintendo a much-needed edge in the “Console Wars“ of the nineties with its blockbuster release on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Street Fighter II was so universally popular that it revitalised the arcade scene and was bolstered by a number of revisions and expansions that increased the number of playable characters, special moves, and vastly sped up the gameplay. By 2008, there had been at least five of these revisions as Capcom desperately milked their popular title for all its worth, but the idea of giving the title a whole new gloss of HD paint came at the suggestion of Backbone producer David Sirlin, who spearheaded the game’s development, although sacrifices had to be made to keep the digital release small. In addition to a slick graphical aesthetic courtesy of artists at UDON Entertainment, the game also included an overhauled soundtrack by music tribute website OverClocked ReMix and even saw a limited physical release on the Xbox 360. In keeping with the success and popularity of Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix was met with largely unanimous praise; reviews lauded the new graphical style and arcade-perfect controls, though the lack of additional options was noted as a downside. While it wouldn’t go down in history as the definitive version of Street Fighter II, this HD re-release ensured that Capcom’s influential fighter lived on through another console generation.
The Plot: The malevolent M. Bison, ruler of the criminal organisation Shadaloo, is sponsoring a martial arts tournament for the world’s best fighters. Twelve such fighters join the fight, battling each other for the right to face M. Bison’s four Grand Masters, with each of them having their own motivations for personal vendetta against the dictator.
Gameplay: I should preface this review by pointing out a couple of things; the first is that I first played Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix on the PlayStation 3 after buying it on a whim (I think, or at least hope, it was on sale at the time), most likely because I realised that I didn’t currently only a version of Street Fighter II. The second thing to note is that there’s a very good reason for that and it’s simply that I’m not a fan of the series; I’m much more of a Mortal Kombat(Various, 1992 to present) kinda guy as I prefer the simplicity and brutal nature of that franchise to Street Fighter’s more intricate mechanics. I owned a cracked version of Street Fighter II for the Amiga as a kid, which fooled me into thinking I was somewhat competent at the game (infinite health will do that to you), but this didn’t translate when I played versions on the Mega Drive and PlayStation 2. Hell, I struggled with the later games in the series despite desperately wanting to get into it since they all look so appealing and everyone always raves about them, but for the life of me I just cannot seem to click with the franchise and always end up feeling frustrated and defeated as a result. I only say this because my enjoyment and opinion of this game, and the entire series, is thus inherently soured; I can’t be anything but biased against it despite my best efforts, but I went into this new playthrough of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix hoping that maybe things would be different as I do have a lot of fondness for the franchise.
Be sure to press your attack with the game’s combo system and to be on your guard at all times.
As any gamer will be able to tell you, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is a 2D, one-on-one tournament fighter in which players pick from a roster of sixteen playable fighters and either take on either the computer in a series of battles in a bid to get to M. Bison and his four Grand Masters or go head-to-head with another player, either on or offline. The game’s controls are exactly as you might expect from a Street Fighter II title; you have three types of punch and kick, ranging from a weak, strong, and fierce attack, with each assigned to different buttons. X throws a jab, Y a strong punch, and the Left Bumper a fierce punch while A throws a shot kick, B a roundhouse kick, and the Right Button launches a fierce kick, though all of these controls can be fully customised to your liking. Combining these button inputs, and directional controls, will allow you to pull off various move combinations to dish out greater damage or pull off your character’s special moves, which are helpfully listed in the game’s pause menu. In Street Fighter II, you hold back to block incoming attacks and use up to jump; you can also throw and grab your opponents, sometimes in mid-air, to deal a ridiculous amount of damage. While you can hit buttons to recover from throws, getting stuck in an enemy’s grasp is basically a death sentence and will see your health whittled down in the blink of an eye; you can also be stunned if you take too much successful damage, which can be catastrophic. Fights are decided in rounds, with the default set to best two out of three, though you can change this to as little as one and as many as five (and rights may go to a sudden death final round in the rare instances of a double knock-out). You’re also battling a timer, though you can again disable this option, and can increase the game’s speed on a scale of one to five (with five being the fastest, which also seems to equate to attacks dealing more damage). Finally, you can set player handicaps for player-on-player fighters and choose from four difficult settings to challenge the game’s two arcade modes.
Stagger your foe with special moves or finish them off with a grandiose SuperFinish.
For me, these difficulty settings are a joke; I played with the game speed set to five and on the ‘Easy’ difficulty and still struggled to get past even the first few fighters even with the timer disabled. The computer is an absolute unrelenting machine, making use of combos, frame damage, and cancels to land strings of attacks you have little hope of blocking or counterattacking. The computer is somehow able to hit through your moves at times, grab you in the middle of attacks, and even hit you out of mid-air with low attacks and projectiles, making for an uphill battle right off the bat. As mentioned, you can pull off special moves with each character, though I find these difficult to figure out even with the helpful move list as the require complicated half-turns, charging, and diagonal inputs on the control stick. I find even some of the easiest moves, like Ryu and Ken’s Hadoken, inconsistent to pull off, though projectiles such as this will cancel each other out, which is extremely useful when fighting against spam-artists like Sagat and his constant barrage of TIGER! TIGER! TIGER! shots. As you fight, you’ll build up a little Super meter and, when it’s full, you can try and pull off your character’s Super move, but these are even more complicated to execute and the computer is an expert at blocking and negating all incoming damage. I couldn’t tell you the difference between the ‘HD Remix’ and ‘Classic’ arcade modes as I was barely able to scrape through the ‘HD Remix’ arcade on the lowest difficulty; ‘Classic’ thus seems harder but that might also be because I changed the rounds to win to one, which seems to put the computer in a hyper-aggressive “pinch” mode. Consequently, I can’t say if the classic bonus stages are present in this mode; they weren’t in the ‘HD Remix’ arcade mode I played so, from my perspective, the entirety of the game was geared around tournament fighting, fighting with friends, or desperately trying to get to grips with your character in the game’s training mode.
Graphics and Sound: Graphically, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Street Fighter II looking better than it does here; the slick UDON aesthetic really makes all of the fighters and their stages pop out and makes the most of HD overhaul the game has received. Every character has their own eccentricities, loudly announcing their special moves and pulling off a couple of victory poses when the fight goes their way in addition to being followed by a shadowy double whenever they execute a Super move. Little touches such as every character’s unique fighting pose, being able to hit off Vega’s iconic claw, M. Bison tossing aside his cape, and characters like Chun-Li being able to spring off the sides of the screen help to make the game more immersive, and this carries over to the stages as well. Some stages have destructible elements such as crates and barrels to smash your opponent into, and all of them include some kind of animation in the background, from cheering crowds to roaring elephants to fighting cages being lowers and boats rising and falling. The remixed soundtrack is a joy to listen to; memorable tuns such as Ken and Guile’s themes sound great, though the fight announcer remains merely serviceable. Although the game lacks a memorable introductory sequence, each character has their own ending, which you’ll get to see even on the easiest difficulty; rendered using text and static artwork in the style of the UDON comic series, the only thing letting these down is that you can’t unlock them to view anywhere else in the game.
The UDON aesthetic is far more visually engaging than the distorted classic sprites.
If you’re a purist and prefer the classic look of the original games, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix has you covered; you can enable not just a classic option for the in-game sprites but the music as well. Unfortunately, the sprites really don’t benefit from this; they appear large, garbled messes against an otherwise pristine background and hearing the classic arcade-style move announcements and music doesn’t make this any better to look at. It would’ve been better if the game had the option to switch everything to an optimised pixel-art aesthetic but, as is, it’s a garish reskin that’s probably not going to appeal to fans of the original releases. One area where the game does get some credit, though, is in the inclusion of palette swaps for each character; each button corresponds to a different palette for each character on the character selection screen, which adds a touch of variety to the game as your opponent’s randomly pick different palettes for each bout, though you can’t switch between different styles of fighting like in other Street Fighter games. The game does run as smooth as butter, though; I noticed no input lag or slowdown, even on the highest speed setting, and I’m sure an accomplished Street Fighter II player would appreciate such a smooth presentation to the game’s action. Every bout also ends with with the victory taunting the loser, who’s left a battered mess, and I’ve always found these jabs entertaining; a helpful countdown gives you ten seconds to continue fighting, which will reinvigorate your fighter and return you to the character selection screen to challenge your opponent again.
Enemies and Bosses: Being a one-on-one fighter with sixteen characters to pick from, every fighter in Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix will inevitably be your enemy at some point and each offers a slightly different, if also similar, level of challenge. It’s not uncommon to have to switch to a different fighter depending on your opponent as it’s some fighters are better geared towards dealing with certain opponents, though I find it better to stick to one fighter (Ken) and power through with an attack that favours fast-paced button mashing and aggression over any kind of actual strategy. Some fighters, like Zangief, E. Honda, and Balrog are slower, much heavier characters who rely more on grapples, powerful punches, and slams; you can sue faster characters, like Chun-Li and Cammy, to negate their power but this isn’t always a guarantee as they’re still able to close the distance despite lacking projectiles thanks to diving headbutts and screen-covering uppercuts, for example. Dhalsim is a pretty unique fighter in that he has super stretchy limbs to attack from afar, can teleport about the screen, and will set you ablaze with his Yoga Fire and Yoga Flame attacks, making him quite the slippery opponent. Similarly, Chun-Li is extremely quick on her feet, able to flip around behind you and send fireballs your way at a higher speed than Ken or Ryu, who are equally formidable thanks to their Shoryuken and throws. Other fighters, like T. Hawk and Fei Long, present their own challenges thanks to their bulk and lightning-fast speed so it’s recommended that you spend a bit of time playing as each fighter and seeing what they can do before you head into a fighter.
Surviving Sagat’s spam and M. Bison is one thing but challenging Akuma is a true test.
Some characters, like my favourite (but not to play as), Blanka, fall back on the unpredictable; not only can Blanka barrel across the screen in a cannonball roll but he can also fry you and chow down on your head if you get up close. Others, like Guile, require more patience to execute their special moves; you’ll need to hold back to charge up before pressing the attack button, for example, but they can catch you unawares because of it as they lure you in for the kill. None exemplify this more than M. Bison and his four Grand Masters, who act as the game’s bosses. Things start off pretty simple against Balrog; while he can deal tremendous damage with his charged-up punches, he’s slow and not too difficult to get around. Vega, on the other hand, is the exact opposite; he flips and whoops about the place, dancing around you and slashing with his claw and easily catching you in a German Suplex or a horrendous rolling throw. Vega can also scale the cage in the background to dive down at you and has a great aerial game, which can make him a tough opponent, but I’ve hit a brick wall with DeeJay just as often as Vega thanks to the former’s aggravating Capoeira style. Things really get serious when you face off against the walking mountain of muscle that is Sagat, the former Street Fighter champion; this absolute spam-artist of a bastard will relentlessly throw projectiles high and low, lure you in to knock you flying wit his TIGER!UPPER-CUT!! and flies across the screen with his TIGER!KNEEEE! attack, all of which make him easily the most formidable of the four Grand Masters on Easy. M. Bison represents the game’s final challenge but is nowhere near as spam-happy as his chief lieutenant, though he’s no less dangerous as a result. M. Bison likes to bounce off your head, land multiple hits with his bicycle kick, and send you careening through the stage statues with his Psycho Crusher attack. On higher difficulties, his challenge only increases with a heightened aggression, but you’ll need to get to M. Bison within twenty minutes if you want the honour of being absolutely obliterated by the game’s secret boss, Akuma, a psychotic variant of Ryu who fills the screen with fireballs and leaves you lying with his destructive Shun Goku Satsu Super move.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: As it’s a one-on-one fighter, there’s nothing to help you out here except for the Super meter; land hits, blocks, and reversals and you’ll build it up and then it’s just a question of mastering the button inputs and landing the move through your opponent’s block to hopefully score an impressive finish to your fight.
Additional Features: Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix has twelve Achievements on offer, though I’m not holding out hope in earning any more than the paltry one I got for limping my way through the game’s arcade mode. You’ll snag an Achievement for earning five perfect rounds in a row (achieved by not taking a single hit, so well outside my skill), landing a Super Finish (possible, but most times when I tried it the computer obliterated me as I was trying to input the combo), winning a round in fifteen seconds (I was thoroughly slaughtered on every attempt), and landing ten throws in a single match (also not outside the realm of possibility, though I have trouble executing throws). In addition to a bunch of Achievements being dished out for online play, there’s also Achievements for beating Akuma in arcade mode and for landing Ryu’s Super Finish on Sagat, all of which is probably very doable and appealing for more accomplished Street Fighter II players. Other than that, there’s not much on offer here beyond some run of the mill online modes (including ranked matches and the like) and player-on-player play, though you can input a button code to play as Akuma if you fancy it.
The Summary: Look, okay, I’m sorry I’m not a more accomplished Street Fighter II player. I’m sorry I haven’t master frame-perfect combos and move cancels and all that nonsense. I’m sorry that it was a constant fight against not only the computer but my desire to rage-quit the game and just relegate this to a Bite-Size review, but I’ve just never got on with Street Fighter II. Having said that, I don’t think I’m wrong to say that the difficulty curve here is pretty unforgiving; you can’t just pick up and play Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and expect to be good at it; button mashing works, to be sure, but only on occasion and some rounds will fly by in the blink of an eye without you even landing a single hit if you’re not using a bit of skill. Consequently, as always, I struggled with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix; I was able to make it through the ‘HD Remix’ arcade with Ken after numerous losses, but I couldn’t make a dent in the ‘Classic’ mode and the experience is so draining that I’m not sure when or even if I’ll go back to try and get at least one more Achievement. The fact of the matter is that no game should every require you to go into it as a master, or even a high-intermediate, player; that’s what difficulty settings are supposed to be there for, to incentivise replay and the building of confidence and skill. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix opts instead to whack you over the head with its unforgiving arcade-style difficulty and force you to earn every win, no matter how cheap. On the plus side, the game looks, sounds, and plays great; I might suck with the combos and special moves, but everything runs super smooth here, it’s just a pity that it’s such a barebones release. It can’t be denied that there are better versions of Street Fighter II out there, and compilations that allow you to sample the length of the series, but this is still a pretty decent conversion and representation of one of gaming’s most successful and influential fighters…I’m just hopelessly bad at it and that apparently will never change.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Pretty Good
Have you ever played Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix? If so, what did you think to it and how do you think it holds up against other versions of Street Fighter II? Which version of the game is your favourite, or which one did you play the most back in the day? What did you think to the game’s graphical overhaul and lack of additional features? Which fighter was your favourite, or least favourite? Have you ever beaten this game on the hardest difficulty? Are you an accomplished Street Fighter II player and, if so, how much of a noob do you think I am? Which fighting game franchise is your favourite? Whatever your thoughts on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, your memories of Street Fighter II, and your opinions on the franchise in general, feel free to share them below or on my social media.
In the decades since his first dramatic appearance in the pages of Detective Comics, Bruce Wayne/Batman has become a mainstream, worldwide, pop culture icon. The brainchild of writer Bob Kane, Batman was brought to life by artist Bill Finger and has been a popular staple of DC Comics and countless movies, videogames, and cartoons over the years. Accordingly, September celebrates “Batman Day” and is just another perfect excuse to celebrate comic’s grim and broody vigilante and, this year, I’m dedicating every Wednesday to Gotham’s Dark Knight Detective.
Released: 25 October 2013 Developer: WB Games Montréal Also Available For: PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 (via PlayStation Now) Wii U, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S (Backwards Compatible)
The Background: Batman’s, shall we say “difficult” relationship with videogames was forever turned around when Eidos Interactive, Rocksteady Studios, and celebrated Batman scribe Paul Dini collaborated on the critically and commercially successful Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios, 2009). They followed this success with the bigger and better sequel, Batman: Arkham City (ibid, 2011), that was even more well-received than its predecessor, ranking as one of the best videogames ever released. Arkham City’s monumental success meant that the bar was raised and expectations were even higher for another sequel after the developers left so many loose threads dangling in the game’s side missions. However, Rocksteady Studios required a lot of time to craft the sequel they had in mind and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment were in no mood to wait that long. So, they turned to WB Games Montréal to develop a prequel set during Batman’s early days and placed more emphasis on vertical movement and Batman’s detective skills. The result was a game that was met with mixed reviews; although the plot and certain mechanics drew praise, the game was seen as largely derivative rather than properly expanding upon, Arkham City’s mechanics. Still, Arkham Origins was expanded upon with a fair amount of downloadable content (DLC) and I remember it being more of a good thing when I first played it on PlayStation 3 and particularly enjoying the new Christmas aesthetic and the game’s more challenging boss battles.
The Plot: Two years into Bruce Wayne’s crimefighting career, Roman Sionis/Black Mask puts a $50 million bounty on the Batman! However, the eight assassins are nothing compared to the appearance of a new, sadistic villain known as “The Joker”.
Gameplay: Just like the last two games, Batman: Arkham Origins is a third-person, action/adventure game. This time around, rather than change the formula too much, the new developers simply took the gameplay mechanics and game world of Arkham City and tweaked them, expanding on a few areas here and there and basically coating the previous game with a slightly different coat of paint. The result is a game that is immediately (and, perhaps for some, disconcertingly) similar to the last Arkham title in numerous ways but still different enough, in my opinion, to stand alongside its predecessors and, as I always say, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.
Batman’s abilities and skills are almost unchanged from Arkham City.
In terms of controls, they remain exactly the same as before (which is interesting as I could have sworn that they were a little different when I first played it on PlayStation 3…). You still select one of Batman’s many gadgets and weapons (the majority of which return from Arkham City in some way, shape, or form even when they don’t make narrative sense) using the directional pad, ready a gadget or quick-fire with the Left Trigger and press the Right Trigger to use the gadget or crouch, and you can still use Batman’s cape to stun enemies, glide around the city, and dive bomb onto enemies or to gain extra height and distance. Similarly, the “freeflow combat” remains virtually identical to that seen in Arkham City; you strike with X, counter incoming attacks with Y, and build up combos by directing Batman towards different enemies, mixing up your attacks, and performing takedowns to disarm and/or knock out foes one at a time as gangs of thugs swarm over you. Stealth remains an important aspect of the game and, just like in the last game, Batman can crouch around undetected, grapple to vantage points (usually stone gargoyles) to observe groups of enemies, and perform double or even triple takedowns in certain situations. Batman can venture through vents to avoid detection and take down enemies, interact with his environment using his gadgets to take enemies down or disorientate them, smash enemies into walls and floors and other parts of the environment when he’s near them, interrogate certain enemies for information and to uncover secrets, and deliver a “Knockout Smash” when choking thugs out (though this will attract nearby enemies).
Batman’s detective skills get much more focus this time and allow him to reconstruct crime scenes.
As always, these tactics are best utilised during the “Predator” sections of the game and using Batman’s patented “Detective Vision”; tapping the Left Bumper allows Batman to see an x-ray-like layout of the game world and highlight nearby enemies, secrets, and points of interest, all of which are invaluable when going up against armed thugs. Detective Vision is greatly expanded upon in Arkham Origins, though, and the game goes to great lengths to emphasise the “detective” aspects of Batman’s character at numerous points and during side missions. When discovering a dead body or the scene of a crime, Batman can set up a crime scene with LB and you must hold the A button to scan in various pieces of evidence. As you do, Batman will piece together the crime not only through his monologue but also through the use of a holographic recreation, which you must advance and rewind to solve the crime or locate objects in order to progress. At the same time, though, the Detective Vision often feels a little neutered in some situations; like, I found myself stuck in rooms and locations with no real idea of where I was supposed to be going, which was very confusing. Although the map and onscreen compass return just as in Arkham City and it’s great for directing you to where you need to go in the overworld, it falters a bit inside buildings and locations at times, which can get annoying.
The game world is bigger than ever but, luckily, Batman can fast travel by using the Batwing.
As for the game world, while it contains the same locations and areas seen in Arkham City, it’s actually far bigger thanks to the addition of a (super long) bridge connecting the recognisable parts of the city to a new area down South. You’ll notice that the recognisable areas are in much better shape than in Arkham City since the area hasn’t been condemned or turned into a prison and some buildings that were only background elements or Easter Eggs in the last game can now be entered to complete story or side missions. The game world is so much bigger that the developers saw fit to include a fast travel mechanic; after hacking into various control towers across the city and liberating them from the control of Edward Nashton/Enigma, Batman can freely fast travel to every prominent area of the map via the Batwing. While this does result in more loading times than in the previous two games, and you cannot control the Batwing or fast exit areas, it is really handy for quickly getting from one end of the city to the other. Also included for the first time is the ability to visit the Batcave; from here, you can converse with Batman’s loyal butler and father-figure, Alfred Pennyworth, progress the story, acquire new gadgets and upgrades, switch to a different costume, or engage in some training by taking on various combat and stealth challenges. It’s not an especially big or well-implemented area, to be fair, and you’re only really forced to go there a handful of times in the main story but it’s a nice addition, at least.
Arkham Origins has some odd difficulty spikes that aren’t present in the previous two games.
There are, however, far less destructible elements dotted around the city this time around but you can still earn experience points (XP) and level-up to upgrade Batman’s suit and gadgets and stuff by taking out thugs, scanning points of interest with your Detective Vision, or finding Engima’s informants and Data Packs (which replace the usual Riddler Trophies). Batman: Arkham Origins is probably the hardest of the Arkham games so far; perhaps because of the developers assuming players would be familiar with the franchise and the gameplay, you quickly encounter armoured thugs, goons with knives, batons, and shields, and bigger, more formidable enemies during the opening part of the game. The city is, again, awash with thugs from different gangs (mostly Black Mask’s but also Oswald Cobblepott/The Penguin’s) and you’ll even have to fight against the Gotham City police, specifically their S.W.A.T. division, given that Batman is seen as a disruptive vigilante in this game. The game’s difficulty can, again, be set by the player to increase the challenge offered to you but the two hardest modes, “New Game Plus” and “I Am The Night”, will remove the counter indicators, increase enemy aggressiveness and mix up their placement, and give you only one try to finish the game in the latter mode. This can be extremely challenging when facing off with the game’s bosses, the majority of which will tear through you like paper or have you ripping your hair out trying to figure out how to beat them and counter their attacks as the counter indicators are basically useless.
While the menus can be difficult to navigate, the increased puzzles adds a new dimension to the game.
Although Arkham Origins is bigger than its predecessor and instantly familiar, there are some things that let it down in terms of its presentation. For one thing, the menus (particularly the upgrade trees) are much more cluttered and far less intuitive to navigate. It seems like the developers were running out of ideas for things for you to unlock and view from these menus, though you’ll get all the usuals (biographies, side stories, story synopses and the like) and be able to chart the progress of your side missions, set waypoints to travel to, and see secrets or points of interest on the comprehensive map but, again, I found it stupidly easy to get trapped in a room and unable to figure out where I was supposed to go. There are also far more quick-time event-like moments in this game where you must counter an attack during a cutscene or mash A to open a door or break free of an enemy’s grip or avoid an attack, which can actually be more laborious than fun. Finally, you’ll find that there is a far greater emphasis on vertical traversal and puzzle solving this time around; you’ll have to activate a lot more consoles to break through walls or open doors, for example, and when navigating through the Joker’s funhouse in the Gotham Royal Hotel you need to use Batman’s Batarangs and gadgets to free hostages from timed traps and scale up the outside of the buildings using his grapnel gun. Entering an area or hacking a device is also generally made much more annoying thanks to the inclusion of jamming devices that you’ll need to disable with the new Disruptor gadget, meaning that a lot of your traversal is hindered by “busy work” at times.
Graphics and Sound: Fittingly, given that its basically just slapping some additions onto Arkham City, Arkham Origins continues to be an impressive feat in terms of rendering the gothic, crime-ridden, anachronistic streets of Gotham City. Yes, many of the areas will be familiar to you but they’re far less rundown and have been recontextualised thanks to the Christmas time setting. Snow falls constantly, covering the ground, and Christmas decorations, trees, lights, and presents are in abundance; some enemies even wear Father Christmas hats and even the score is punctuated by Christmassy bells and all of the dialogue you overhear makes constant reference to the Yuletide season. It’s just enough of an aesthetic reskin to make the game world look and feel new and different and it’s great seeing ice in the water, the Penguin’s ship, the Final Offer, moored up at the docks, and buildings like the police station and steel mill in full, working order rather than abandoned like in the last game.
Gotham is expanded to include new areas and territories alongside familiar regions.
All of the regions from Arkham City return but you’ll enter different buildings and explore different areas this time, such as the haberdashery in the Bowery and the courthouse, but you’ll also be traversing (or fast travelling) the Gotham Pioneers Bridge down to the new areas in the South of the game map. Here, you’ll explore a high-end apartment building to solve Black Mask’s apparent murder, battle and scale up the aforementioned Gotham Royal Hotel, and fight and sneak your way through the hallways of the Gotham City Police Department. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Arkham game without a load of dank sewers and catacombs to explore and it seems you venture down into these depths a bit more often this time around but they’re a little easier to navigate through. You’ll also fly over to Blackgate Prison to quell a riot there, where the game’s visual presentation closely emulates that of the penitentiary on Arkham Island thanks to its large, automated doors and prison aesthetic.
Nightmarish renditions of Wonderland and Batman’s worst fears twist the game world.
As is a tradition with the Arkham games, things also take a turn to the bizarre when you hunt down Jervis Tetch/The Mad Hatter, who drugs Batman and forces him to navigate through a twisted version of wonderland in sections very closely modelled after the nightmarish sequences that pitted him against Doctor Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow in the first game. Here, you’ll need to dodge electrified floors while using Batman’s gadgets to progress through sidescrolling sections, battle thugs in his mind-controlling rabbit masks who pour through a mirrored doorway, and scale up a twisted clock tower. It’s only one section, unlike the Scarecrow’s three, but it lasts quite a while and can get a bit annoying, especially the part where your vision is reduced to seeing through a keyhole and you must guide Batman through the correct doors to progress. Another standout moment comes late into the game and sees you taking control of the Joker as he recounts a version of his origin story to Doctor Harleen Quinzel; similar to how he played in the DLC for the first game, the Joker is a wild and crazed character who attacks in manic bursts, tosses razor sharp playing cards, and electrocutes enemies with his joy buzzer and you also get to guide him in his Red Hood persona past bursts of flames in a nightmarish funhouse of sorts. There’s also another opportunity to revisit the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents and suffer a bunch of unnerving hallucinations after Batman is poisoned by Copperhead, which distorts the screen and your controls at various points throughout the fight, and a pretty cool (if all-too-brief) moment where you must fight some thugs on a rooftop from the perspective of Vicki Vale’s helicopter.
Some shifts in perspective help to keep things interesting and add some variety.
The in-game graphics are just as impressive as the last two games; the game engine is tighter than ever, allowing for the biggest game world yet that is full of thugs and Easter Eggs and things to see and do, and character models still look really good. Batman’s suit, especially, is much better in this game, resembling military/riot armour and, in many ways, actually looks more durable and plausible than his suits from the previous games (which take place after this one). He still accumulates battle damage as the game progresses, which is always a nice touch and even though Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill aren’t present, their replacements (Roger Craig Smith and Troy Baker) do an excellent job of filling in (even if they do seem emulating their predecessors a little too closely, which I guess is natural but keeps them from doing their own take on the characters). However, the game kind of drops the ball a little with its pre-rendered cutscenes, which look…a little more out of place compared to the in-game graphics and the previous Arkham games. Everything in these cinematics seems a little too plasticy and hyper-realised; it’s not a game-breaker, though, just something I happened to notice.
Enemies and Bosses: All of the standard thugs and enemies you encountered in Arkham City are back this time around, but with a new coat of paint in many cases. Gangs of thugs roam the streets or patrol rooftops, often with sniper rifles; enemies will grab broken bottles or slash at you with knives, swing metal bars and baseball bats at your head, and even lay mines and booby-trap vantage points to reduce your manoeuvrability in Predator sections. The sword-wielding assassin enemies return from the last game, as do the bigger, more armoured enemies who require you to cape stun them and beat them down by mashing X, but there are a bunch of brand new enemies in this game, too. One of the most prominent are the martial artists you’ll encounter, who will test your countering ability with their quick kicks and shoves; another are the muscle-bound thugs juiced up on Venom who you must beat down and use takedowns to pull out the tubes feeding them the substance. Larger, more powerful enemies will rush at you and grab you or hold you in place so other enemies can beat on you and you’ll have to battle variations of these as the game progresses, which forces you to adapt your combat strategies on the fly.
While Killer Croc is similar to battles you’ve fought before, the Electrocutioner is a complete joke.
Of course, the main thrust of the story is that the Joker (under the guise of Black Mask) has hired eight assassins to take out Batman on Christmas Eve so, of course, that means you’ll encounter these assassins throughout the course of the game. The first of these is Waylon Jones/Killer Croc, which is a fight you should be well familiar with at this point as it’s the standard fare of stunning him three times with your cape and putting a beatdown on him. Things do get spiced up a little but when he grabs a gas canister to throw at you; at this point, you have to quick-fire a Batarang to explode it and whittle his health down. in a recurring theme, you’ll need to mash A to fend him off when he tries to bite you and also have to battle waves of thugs who jump into support him and distract you but, as first boss battles go, it’s pretty simple and basically the same as fighting the TITAN enemies and even Bane from the previous games. The next assassin you’ll battle is Lester Buchinsky/The Electrocutioner but this is played more for laughs as you take him out in one hit and then have to battle a gauntlet of the Penguin’s goons before he’s unceremoniously killed off by the Joker later on.
Deathstroke will truly test your mettle in one of the more frustrating boss battles.
The battle against Slade Wilson/Deathstroke, however, more than makes up for this. This is a complex and multi-stage fight that really comes out of left field and suddenly spikes the game’s difficulty in frustrating ways. Deathstroke has a counter for all of your attacks, many of which are nigh-impossible to defend or counterattack as the counter indicator window is next to useless in this fight. Without it, it’s damn near impossible but, by staying on the move, dodging over him, and utilising the quick-fire Batclaw, you can slowly (and I mean slowly) whittle his health down enough to trigger the next phase. Deathstroke tosses a smoke grenade to sneak attack you with his bo staff, forcing you to mash Y to counter his attacks and then mash X to beat him down, similar to the fight against Rā’s al Ghūl in Arkham City, but he also fires his Remote Claw at your chest to send an explosive barrel flying at you. You need to quickly counter this and throw it at him to keep him from shooting you and, eventually, you’ll snap his bo staff and the fight continues with Deathstroke now attacking with a sword! This doesn’t make things any easier as it’s hard to build up your combos and strikes or get a rhythm going since he counters you so quickly and hits so hard that you can only afford to make a couple of mistakes throughout the fight (which has no checkpoints). This fight is easily the most challenging in the series so far and it would be fun if the counter window wasn’t so damn small but, as it is, it can be one of the most aggravating boss battles in any of the Arkham games because of how brutally unfair it gets.
Lady Shiva and Copperhead recall previous battles against Rā’s al Ghūland his assassins.
One of the other assassins is Lady Shiva, who is relegated more to a side mission and who challenges you to rescue an innocent man from a death trap. In doing so, you have to battle her sword-wielding ninjas and, similar to when you tracked the assassin’s blood in Arkham City, track her down by following a blood trail to the bottom of Wonder Tower using your Detective Vision. This leads to a fight against her, her ninjas, some martial artists, and a bigger martial artist variant in what is, essentially, a scaled down version of the sword fight with Rā’s al Ghūl (or, alternatively, a more troublesome version of the fights against the assassins in Arkham City). Basically, your standard striking, counter, and combat skills are more than enough to win the day here but watch out for Shiva’s random attacks in the city as you’ll need to be quick to counter these. The fight against Copperhead also recalls the Rā’s al Ghūl fight; she poisons Batman and causes him to hallucinate being attacked by multiple versions of herself, dashing at him from the darkness much like Rā’s al Ghūl but attacking with agility and claws similar to Selina Kyle/Catwoman. She also leaps onto you, requiring you to mash A to throw her off, and it can be quite a headache dealing with the distorted camera and trying to land a decisive hit on the real Copperhead (though, once Batman is cured, she goes down in one hit).
Bane is your most recurring foe and requires both agility, brute force, and stealth to defeat.
One of the more recurring antagonists in the game is Bane, who you’ll battle multiple times throughout the story. In the first instance, he charges at you very much like a TITAN enemy and will deal massive damage if he hits you or grabs a hold of you. Simply cape stun him three times and beat him down and then perform a takedown, however, and he’s not too difficult to overcome. However, he then overdoses on Venom and takes the fight out onto the rooftop; when full of Venom, he charges at you like a rhino and is very hard to dodge out of the way of, and he also leaps at you, causes shockwaves to ripple across the ground, and can easily spam-charge you to death if you’re not careful. You also have to be wary of the never-ending supply of goons who join the fight to distract you but, again, your cape stun and beatdown will do the trick, as will the Shock Gloves, but it can get very aggravating trying to avoid his charges. Later, in the finale, you have to go through it all again but this time, Bane also powers himself up with TN-01 and becomes a hulking, mindless brute who rips you out of floor grates and stomps around a small enclosed area looking for you. Similar to the fight against Doctor Victor Fries/Mister Freeze in Arkham City, you must sneak around behind Bane and use the vents to your advantage to surprise him from behind and then ram him into electrified walls before finally subduing him in a QTE with your Remote Claw.
While Firefly requires your projectile-based gadgets, the Joker fight is basically a QTE.
Another of the game’s more troublesome and complex boss battles is the encounter with Garfield Lynns/Firefly, who is raining destruction down on the bridge. Before you can even reach him, you need to take out his goons and disarm three bombs while forging a practical relationship with Gordon and then battle Firefly amidst the wreckage on the bridge. Firefly hovers out of reach of your strikes, blasting at you with his flamethrower, so you need to dive out of harm’s way and toss Batarangs, Concussion Detonators, and Glue Grenades at him until he’s stunned. Then you can quick-fire your Batclaw, mash A to haul him down, and put a beating on him and damage one of his wings. In the second phase, after chasing you around the twisted underside of the bridge, you have even less opportunities for cover and Firefly now tosses grenades at you but the tactic remains the same. It can be tricky to dodge and quick-fire your gadgets at him but by far the hardest part is firing your Batclaw and countering his final attack when he flies off with you attached to him via your line so be sure to keep your wits about you. The final moments of the game finally see you track down and get your hands on the Joker, the mysterious anarchist who has been causing death and destruction across the city and who causes a full-blown riot at Blackgate Prison that more than recalls the tense, claustrophobic moments of the first game where the Joker would taunt you constantly. This fight is little more than a QTE, really, requiring you to hit Y to counter the Joker’s attacks and then pummel him into submission with presses of X. It’s a satisfying conclusion given all the chaos the Joker has wrought and how quickly the animosity between him and Batman escalates and, fittingly, is in no way a physical challenge for Batman (there’s enough of that with the likes of Deathstroke and Bane).
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Like its predecessors, Arkham Origins features a level-up progression system; every time you defeat enemies, pick up Data Packs, scan parts of the environment, and such, you’ll gain XP and, eventually, level-up. This allows you to upgrade Batman’s armour (again, into two blocks to improve damage from melee attacks and gunfire, respectively), add more elaborate takedowns to his repertoire (all of which return from Arkham City), and upgrade his various gadgets to improve their range and efficiency. Upgrading can be tricky this time around, though, as the menus aren’t as easy to navigate; you can still view tutorials and such and you’ll actually receive a grade and additional XP depending on how dangerous a combat or Predator scenario was and how versatile you were in beating it, which will net you more XP if you happen to meet certain criteria in movement, combat, or Predator scenarios and you can get more by talking to Alfred in the Batcave and hearing his wisdom. All of Batman’s gadgets from Arkham City make a return, with many looking and acting a little differently or being expanded upon in new ways. The main exception to this is the Line Launcher, which is entirely absent and replaced with the Remote Claw; this fires a line between two specific points that you can grapple up to, crouch-walk across, or speed along on a zip wire to effectively fulfil the same function but in a way that ties into the game’s more vertical layout.
Batman has a few new gadgets, most of them repurposed variants of those from Arkham City.
There are some other new gadgets here, too. The Disruptor is now a gun-like device that disables enemy weapons, speakers, and jamming devices from a distance (which is super useful when facing armed goons), and the Freeze Blast is eventually evoked in Batman’s Glue Grenades, which can trap enemies in glue and allow him to form rafts. The Remote Electrical Charge gun is gone but Batman acquires the Electrocutioner’s Shock Gloves, which charge up as he deals damage and can dish out extra hurt to enemies (even punching through shields and negating the need to cape stun) once activated by pressing in the analogue sticks (they also come in handy for charging electrical panels and opening doors and for resuscitating characters). The Concussion Detonator is a bit like the R.E.C. blast in that it goes of and disorientates and confuses enemies after a short time and, if you purchase the ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ DLC, you’ll gain access to a new Batsuit and thermal gloves to dethaw Mr. Freeze’s victims and heat up your Batarangs.
Additional Features: Batman: Arkham Origins has fifty Achievements to earn, the vast majority of which will pop as you play through the story, taking down the assassins, and completing side missions. There are specific Achievements for taking out thugs in certain ways (such as not being seen), stopping twenty random assaults in the city as they pop up on your radar, gliding a certain distance, and fast travelling to every point on the map but you’ll also get them for collecting all of Enigma’s Data Packs and finishing the game on New Game Plus. Doing this unlocks the one-life, “I Am The Night” mode that sounds gruelling, at best, though all of your XP and upgrades do carry over to each of these save files.
Batman encounters some of his most infamous rouges for the first time in side missions.
As in Arkham City, there are numerous side missions to fill up your time with: Enigma’s data collectors need to be interrogated and his Data Packs found to bring him to justice, Black Mask’s drug stashes need to be destroyed (similar to the Bane side mission in Arkham City), and Barbara Gordon tasks you with destroying the Penguin’s weapons caches across the city. You’ll also have to find and deactivate three bombs placed around the city by Lonnie Machin/Anarky (and you’ll find his tags spray painted all over, too) before confronting him at the courthouse (where you’ll have to fight a wave of goons and Anarky himself, who is armed with stun batons). One of Bane’s henchmen, Bird, is also at large and inspiring gang fights all over the city, as is Floyd Lawton/Deadshot, and the chaos doesn’t end after the main story is cleared as Gordon tasks you with hunting down a number of escapees from Blackgate. Challenge Mode appears once again, now accessible from the main menu and from the Batcave in the main game world. Just like in Arkham City, you can take on self-contained combat and stealth challenges based on encounters in the game that see you battling waves of increasingly difficult enemies and racking up points by sustaining and varying your combos, or picking off goons from the shadows while handicapped by a number of modifiers (such as enemies having access to gun racks and weapons or Batman’s gadgets or combos being disabled).
Replayability is bolstered by a variety of DLC and a team-based multiplayer mode.
There is also a series of “Campaign” maps that mix up the two challenges to present a sort of adjacent side story to the main game and you can compare your high scores against friends and other using the online leaderboards. As before, all of this can be further expanded by purchasing a range of DLC. This includes a whole bunch of new skins for Batman (including Jean-Paul Valley’s “AzBats” armour), additional challenge packs that see you playing as Bruce Wayne during his training years, and even the ability to play as Deathstroke in the Challenge Mode, which is pretty cool. The “Cold, Cold Heart” story pack adds a whole extra story-based mission that takes place after the main campaign and features an encounter with Mr. Freeze; it even includes additional Achievements, gadgets, and things to scan and find (though they are limited only to this story mode). The biggest additional mode to Arkham Origin, though, was the inclusion of an online multiplayer that sees players battling as a member of the Joker’s gang, Bane’s gang, or Batman and Dick Grayson/Robin. Unfortunately, though, I never experienced this mode even when I played on the PlayStation 3 so I can’t really comment too much on it but it sounds like a standard, team-based deathmatch kind of mode; my only real grip is that the developers didn’t incorporate Robin into the main game or even as a playable character in the Challenge Mode this time around, and that the DLC can no longer be purchased.
The Summary: Even now, Batman: Arkham City remains one of my favourite videogames and a standout in the Arkham series; it expanded upon all of the mechanics and features of the first game and truly defined the standard for Batman videogames. For me, then, Batman: Arkham Origins is a lot of fun; it’s (literally) everything Arkham City was but more; it’s not like they just slapped on a reskin or opened up the map a little bit either like some glorified DLC, there is a lot of story and additional features at work here that expand the game world considerably. The Christmas setting is inspired and seeing Batman nearer to the beginning of his career and encountering some of his famous villains for the first time is a blast, as is the intricate development of Batman’s character from a wanted vigilante to a trusted ally of the city and, especially, Jim Gordon. The Batwing, additional gadgets, bigger emphasis on Batman’s detective skills, and the unique, challenging boss battles are all really solid additions and help to make the game very unique. What lets Arkham Origins down a bit, especially compared to its predecessor, is undoubtedly how derivative it can be and how needlessly frustrating many of these boss fights can be. The lack of inspiration in the game’s Enigma puzzles, simple reuse of many of Batman’s gadgets (when this would have been a great opportunity to strip him of many of them to really evoke the gritty feel of the first game), and reskinning of areas we’d explored to death in the last game do take it down a notch but I still maintain that there’s plenty to like about Arkham Origins. I’m not sure if it was worth developing the multiplayer component and it would have been nice to see some of these elements incorporated into the single player story but, overall, I feel if you enjoyed Arkham City then you kind of have to enjoy Arkham Origins as it’s the same game but with a new coat of paint.
My Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Great Stuff
What did you think to Batman: Arkham Origins? How do you feel it compares to the other Arkham games, particularly Arkham City? Did you think the game was too derivative or did you enjoy the additions it made to the gameplay mechanics and revisiting the world in a new, expanded way? Which of the game’s assassins was your your favourite, and how did you fare against the likes of Deathstroke and Bane? Did you ever play the online multiplayer mode and, if so, what did you think to it? Did you enjoy the game’s DLC and the side missions? How are you celebrating Batman Day and what is your favourite Batman videogame? Whatever you think about Batman: Arkham Origins, or Batman in general, please leave a comment below and check back in next Wednesday for one more Arkham review!
With the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3(SEGA Technical Institute, 1994), gamers were introduced to Knuckles the Echidna. This mischievous, dreadlocked antagonist was created by Takashi Yuda and his debut was made all the more impressive by virtue of the fact that Sonic 3 was too big to fit on one cartridge, which meant that Knuckles was the first of Sonic’s supporting characters to co-star in a main series videogame when Sonic & Knuckles (ibid) was released on this very day in 1994.
Released: April 1995 Developer: SEGA
The Background: Following the release of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, SEGA looked to be unstoppable with their Sonic franchise; the latter title was a huge game for SEGA, backed by an impressive marketing campaign, and the franchise had sold over $1 billion in total revenue by 1994. With the Mega Drive nearing the end of its life cycle, and the videogame industry on the cusp of entering a new generation of 3D gaming, SEGA attempted to prolong the Mega Drive’s lifespan and appeal with a series of expensive add-ons like the Mega-CD and the Mega Drive 32X. Like the Mega-CD, however, the 32X was doomed to failure primarily because SEGA were planning on releasing an entirely new console, the SEGA Saturn, just a few months later and gamers just couldn’t afford the clunky peripheral. With the benefit of hindsight, I truly believe that SEGA would have fared much better had they simply continued with the Mega-CD, producing a combination Mega Drive/CD console and releasing all 32X and Saturn games on this platform rather than wasting time, effort, and money on expensive add-ons. Regardless, one title that sticks out to me from the 32X library is Knuckles’ Chaotix; initially designed as Sonic Crackers, the game’s big mechanic was that players controlled two characters simultaneously and were joined by a special, elastic “Combi Ring”. The game, which was Knuckles’ one and only solo title, also saw the return and redesign of obscure Sonic character Mighty the Armadillo and Vector the Crocodile into fully playable characters. However, thanks primarily to the failure of the 32X, the title has largely been doomed to obscurity and SEGA’s continued refusal to port or re-release the game to modern consoles means that the only way to play the game is by using emulators or spending extortionate prices.
The Plot: Doctor Eggman discovers the seven Chaos Rings on Carnival Island and attacks alongside Metal Sonic. When Knuckles investigates, he rescues Espio the Chameleon from Dr. Eggman’s Combi Confiner and joins forces with Espio’s cohorts (Mighty, Vector, and Charmy Bee – the titular Chaotix) to put a stop to Dr. Eggman’s schemes using the power of the Combi Ring.
Gameplay: As is to be expected of a classic Sonic the Hedgehog title, Knuckles’ Chaotix is a 2D, sidescrolling action/platformer that is heavily geared towards speed but, in a change of pace, actually has far more emphasis on vertical platforming and progression that any of its predecessors. The game takes place in Newtronic High Zone and is comprised of six stages referred to as “Attractions”; each Attraction is made up of five levels (called “Acts”) rather than the usual two or three, and each of these pushes you to run up loops and walls or jump to higher areas in order to reach the end goal. In another change of pace, the game immediately begins with a practice area, in which you play as Knuckles. After scaring away Dr. Eggman, Knuckles rescues Espio from the mad scientist and players can choose to play through a quick tutorial to familiarise themselves with Knuckles’ Chaotix’s new mechanics.
Knuckles and his new friends are inexplicably tethered together for some clunky gameplay.
All of the basic controls of a classic Sonic remain intact and as you’d expect; players can run, jump, and perform a Spin Dash to speed ahead with all but three of the available characters, and you’ll find that each playable character has their own unique qualities. Knuckles, for example, can glide and climb walls as in his previous appearances; Espio spins like a top instead of Spin Dashing and can cling to walls but cannot climb them; Vector is the biggest character and so has a greater chance of hitting Badniks or taking damage but he can also perform a double jump or mid-air dash; Mighty is basically a thinly veiled stand-in for Sonic and can perform a wall jump; and Charmy is the smallest and fastest character and constantly flies about but at the cost of severely reduced visibility. Players can also be impeded by Heavy and Bomb, two Badniks who cannot Spin Dash or climb walls, explode on contact or severely weigh you down, and you’ll have to leave it up to a mixture of fate and luck as to which character you get as your partner as the main Scenario Quest forces you to pick one at random using the “Combi-Catcher”, a mechanical claw game like you see at seaside amusements. Of course, the unique selling point of Knuckles’ Chaotix is the frankly bizarre decision to tether two characters together using the Combi-Ring. This means that there are always two characters on screen at once, and you can choose to play either with a computer-controlled partner or with a human friend. Players can call their partner to them at any time with the A button or hold down B to “hold” their partner in place to activate switches; when they stand in place, you can also build up a head of steam to blast ahead, which is honestly more beneficial than the Spin Dash in this game. This also allows you to grab your partner and fling them at switches, Badniks, bosses, or up to higher areas; however, it can be extremely clunky trying to slingshot your way up to where your partner is, and more often than not you end up hanging in place or ricocheting about like a pinball just trying to progress upwards. Furthermore, calling your partner back costs you Golden Rings, the lifeforce of the series, and you can even drop the Ring counter into negative numbers as a result of this.
You’ll must master (or bungle) the Combi-Ring and make use of gimmicks to progress ever upwards.
While each character is very visually interesting in their own right and the idea of working together to progress is an interesting one, tethering the characters together is extremely restrictive in practise; the majority of the time, your biggest struggle won’t be with the game’s Badniks or the tedious nature of the gameplay, it’ll be with trying to navigate the environment using this clunky, awkward mechanic and getting frustrated when you finally get where you need to be only to drop down a second later. Indeed, the level of difficulty in Knuckles’ Chaotix is extremely low compared to the games that came before it; the life system and checkpoints are now gone, there are no bottomless pits or bodies of water to worry about falling or drowning in, and you don’t even need to worry too much about being hit without any Rings as you’ll either lose your partner for a short time or be booted out to the main hub world to try again. Like Sonic 3, the game comes with a save system that allows you to have three saved games, though the only way you can replay the game’s Attractions is to play through the Training Mode. This mode also allows you to set your playable character and partner, which is more freedom than the main Scenario Quest offers, but the most tedious aspects of Knuckles’ Chaotix come from how unnecessarily long and annoying some of its gameplay elements are. While the Attractions are a visual eye fest there’s not much to distinguish each Act from the other within a set stage (I swear some of them have exactly the same layouts bar some very minor changes), there’s next to no hazards or Badniks to worry about, and you don’t even really need to worry all that much about the time limit.
Most stages are painfully barren and linear, but there are some instances of variety.
Instead, the game is built around randomness; it’s pot luck that you’ll pick a decent partner (I recommend a Knuckles/Espio team, personally) and as to which Attraction you’ll play. Between each stage, you’re returned to the hub world and must hit a bumper to randomly select your next area, meaning that you’re literally bouncing all over the place and will most likely play the game’s Attractions out of order. This may go a long way to explaining the uniformity and ease of the game’s stages, however, as it wouldn’t be fair to be randomly dropped into a tough stage before you’re ready, but it does make playing through the Scenario Quest quite a long old slog. While the basics of the gameplay are very much familiar to anyone who’s played a Sonic game before, Knuckles’ Chaotix feels very slow and sluggish at times and you won’t really find much here you haven’t seen both. Sure, there’s a few more switches and a bit of variety in the likes of Marina Madness and Amazing Arena (you can hop on a rising/falling ship in the background in the former and must light up each Act to get a successful clear in the latter) but, for the most part, you’re just running up walls, hopping over spiked balls, bouncing off springs and bumpers, and scaling upwards (always upwards) on platforms and elevators. The Acts do eventually appear to become more dangerous as you progress, but by then it’s too little too late and I can’t help but feel that things would have been much better if there had just been three Acts per Attraction and then a final area to play through before battling the final boss.
Graphics and Sound: If there’s one area where Knuckles’ Chaotix excels, it’s the presentation; the game is undeniably gorgeous to look at, and easily the most vibrant and colourful Sonic title of its era. Each of the playable characters (with the exception of Heavy and Bomb) has an idle animation unique to them (Knuckles twirls his Combi-Ring in boredom, Espio cycles through different colours, Vector jams to his music, Mighty impatiently taps his foot like Sonic, and Charmy looks at you incredulously) and are some of the finest sprite work in the series. It’s such a shame, then, that Charmy is so goddamn small; obviously, he’s a bee and is supposed to be tiny but half the time you can barely see him, which is almost as disappointing as Mighty being a simple sprite swap of Sonic. Still, Espio and Vector look fantastic; each has unique and quirky running and jumping animations, and Knuckles’ sprites have been completely overhauled to make him more detailed and expressive than ever.
Sprites and environments are extremely colourful and detailed, sometimes to a fault.
Sadly, the game is let down by how bland and uninteresting its level design is. Knuckles’ Chaotix is very similar to Sonic the Hedgehog CD(SEGA, 1993) in a lot of ways but primarily in how confusing and clumsy its stages are laid out; when Badniks do appear, it seems completely at random, and the few hazards you come across are so oddly placed that it’s easy to run head-first into them. Stages are also extremely cluttered at times; there’s often too much colour, too much sensory overload, and it makes everything blend together or difficult to look at, which really doesn’t help when you’re trying to figure out where the hell you’re supposed to be going. The game’s Attractions play things extremely safe with the likes of Botanic Base being a lush forest, Speed Slider being an amusement park, and Techno Tower being Dr. Eggman’s industrial blemish on the natural environment, much like the classic Green Hill, Star Light, and Scrap Brain Zones. The aforementioned Marina Madness and Amazing Arena thus stand out even more thanks to the their unique gameplay mechanics and presentation, and the game does get extra points for featuring different colour palettes for each Act to indicate a different time of day (morning, noon, evening, and night), though this really doesn’t help to stave off the recycled nature of each Act.
Sprite manipulation, isometric graphics, and some funky effects hint to the 32X’s potential.
Also like Sonic CD, Knuckles’ Chaotix makes an impact with one of the best of the classic Sonic’s soundtracks; there are so many jaunty, catchy tunes peppered throughout this game that it really helps to take your mind off how empty the stages are and how monotonous the gameplay can be. Since it’s running on 32-bit hardware, the game also features a great deal of isometric 3D graphics; Dr. Eggman shields himself being a polygonal diamond, some lifts and bosses are built out of the same graphics, and you’ll find the bonus and Special Stages also contain a fair bit of this technique (and suffer from jerkiness, slowdown, and perspective issues as a result). There’s also a big emphasis on sprite manipulation; characters can grow or shrink with monitors, and bosses, Badniks, and sprites will fill up or fly into the screen. Unlike Sonic CD, however, the game doesn’t feature any anime cutscenes; in fact, even sprite-based cutscenes are few and far between here, relegated to the opening and before the final boss, and although the bosses are proceeded by a short cutscene, the game prefers to just show a partially animated image of the main cast for the title screen and credits. This is a bit of a shame, really; I wasn’t expecting full blown animated sequences but both Sonic 3 and Sonic CD featured more sprite-based cutscenes than Knuckles’ Chaotix, so the game ends up feel quite rushed and a bit of a step back.
Enemies and Bosses: Dr. Eggman hasn’t really tried to reinvent the wheel in Knuckles’ Chaotix and is still using his tried-and-tested robotic creations, the Badniks, to hinder your progress. Unlike in the majority of other 2D Sonic titles, destroying Badniks doesn’t free a cute little woodland critter; instead, an uncollectible Dark Ring will drop out and disappear soon after, meaning that the few times Badniks do appear you’re robbed of any sense of satisfaction from destroying them. These Badniks are some of the oddest in the classic series, resembling a mish-mash of insects, tanks, and other creatures and mostly just floating around here and there. The only real standouts for me were Burboom and Blitz; Burboom can catch your partner and hold them captive and Blitz target you with homing missiles that fly across the immediate area to hurt you. While in Amazing Arena, you’ll also have battle a sub-boss, which is a massive mechanical version of Dr. Eggman that stretches its fists at you. The only way to damage it is to toss your partner into the head, which routinely floats back and forth at the top of the screen; although you can simply wait it out and the boss will deactivate, you won’t get the benefit of the Ring Monitors defeating it bestows upon you.
Bosses can be either stupidly simply or needlessly frustrating thanks to the Combi-Ring mechanic.
Since you’ll play the game’s Attractions at random, the main five bosses can be fought in any order, and you’ll probably tackle them at different times each time you play through the game. It’s also worth noting that you must play each Attraction’s entire fifth Act to reach the boss, and if you fail you’ll be kicked back to the hub world and have to play through the whole Act all over again, which can make these battles very tedious. I fought the Botanic Base boss first; in this fight, Dr. Eggman holds your partner in a mechanical claw and shields his craft with electrical currents, meaning you’re left frantically trying to figure out how to bounce around using the bumper and ram into the craft. After that, I took on the Amazing Arena boss, which sees Dr. Eggman spawn in Badniks using a projector screen and protecting himself with a sphere. Simply fend off the Badniks, avoid his mace-like arms, and toss your partner up into him to take him out. I then fought the Marina Madness boss, which sees Dr. Eggman hide behind a polygonal shield and then protect his craft with slivers of it, not unlike the Metropolis Zone boss, forcing you to time your attacks to avoid damage. The Speed Slider boss is one of the trickiest in the game as Dr. Eggman essentially commands a huge, dangerous carousel; the floor constantly moves you towards the spiked cups that rotate around the main machine, so you have to fight against the inertia, avoid the spikes, and ram the blue spherical weak spot of his machine. Contrasting this is the Techno Tower boss, which is easily the game’s simplest boss by far; despite the lasers and the swinging arms of Dr. Eggman’s rotund mech, I was able to batter the red sphere that is its weak spot in no time at all thanks to simply taking advantage of invincibility frames.
Metal Sonic transforms into a massive mechanical monstrosity for the finale.
Once you have defeated all five of the main bosses, you’re returned to the hub world, where Metal Sonic takes over the stage select machine. Just as you need to hit a bumper to select a stage, so to do you have to hit the bumper to try and deal damage to Metal Sonic; if the indicator lands on the X, one of the other numbered panels will be destroyed and the hub world will become more and more damaged. However, if you land on one of the numbered panels, you’ll have to dodge one of four different attacks as Metal Sonic tries to force you into spiked walls, rains missiles down on you, sends buzzsaws across the floor, and tries to hit you with bouncing tentacles. You’ll need to avoid these as you can only take two hits in this boss battle due to the lack of Rings; the first hit will cost you your partner, and you’ll need to wait for him to respawn or you’ll be kicked back to the hub world and have to start over. With Metal Sonic heavily damaged, Dr. Eggman repairs and powers it up with a huge Dark Ring, transforming it into the massive, monstrous “Metal Sonic Kai”. This is a three-stage boss battle in an enclosed, cyberspace-like arena, where you’re afforded ten Rings and must avoid its huge claw arm to strike its chest, then Spin Dash into its remaining arm while it hovers in the background, and then avoid its massive near-screen-filling chest beam to finish it off in a pretty simple, but surprisingly impressive, final battle.
Power-Ups and Bonuses: Pretty much all of the classic Sonic power-ups are available to you in Knuckles Chaotix; while there are no Elemental Shields or extra life monitors, you can grab ten Rings, a speed up, a one-hit shield, and an invincibility from the different monitors you can find in each Act. There are some new power-ups here as well, though: you can briefly switch your playable character (or switch your partner to a different one depending on whose face is on the monitor when you smash it) and either grow to plough through the few enemies onscreen or shrink to find your jump and abilities painfully stunted for a short time. Perhaps the most useful item is the Combi-Ring Monitor, which stays with you until you’re hit; then, when you are hit, one large Ring is thrown from you rather than all of them scattering around and collecting that one Ring restores all of your Rings. Another interesting twist is that your partner can also collect and be affected by the monitors, meaning they could be invincible, big, small, or protected by a shield while you are not.
Additional Features: As you might expect, finishing any Act except the ones containing a boss while holding fifty Rings or more spawns a Big Ring. Entering it takes you (or your partner, if they enter or are thrown into it) to an isometric Special Stage where you continuously lap the environment until you have collected enough Blue Spheres to proceed. Collecting Rings will afford you more time to do this, and you must dodge buzzsaws and spiked balls and the myriad of gaps in the floor in order to reach your goal. While these aren’t necessarily the worst Special Stages I’ve ever played, they can be extremely difficult; it’s very hard to see what’s coming ahead of you or to anticipate which “lane” you need to be in to find a Blue Sphere, and all too easy to slip to failure. On the plus side, there are only six Special Stages; you’ll be awarded one of the six coloured Chaos Rings upon completion and will be treated to a slightly different end credits screen that adds Sonic and Miles “Tails” Prower to the cast and avoids Metal Sonic Kai wrecking havoc.
Snag the six Chaos Rings for the good ending, or mess about with the game’s debug mode.
Unfortunately, there are no Super transformations or additional bonuses; however, if you enter a Special Stage after collecting all the Chaos Rings, you’ll simply challenge them again in an even more headache-inducing wireframe mode. If you’re holding twenty Rings or more, you may encounter Big Rings hidden within the Acts; these transport you to a bonus stage that sees you constantly falling and trying to hit blocks for points and Rings. However, your Rings are constantly being drained in this stage, making it more of a hinderance than a benefit. Outside of the regular game, you’ll find a sound select and “colour test” in the main menu; messing around with this allows you to activate a debug mode, have Amy Rose appear in the sound test, activate a stage and character select, and even play as a glitched version of Knuckles. Since the only way you can play Knuckles’ Chaotix is to emulate it, you can obviously also make liberal use of the save state features included in most emulators to make the game a bit less annoying to play through.
The Summary: Knuckles’ Chaotix is such an oddity to me. The entire game feels like a barely finished proof of concept, with empty environments and clunky mechanics that all needed to be addressed before the game was completed, and yet it’s such a lush and stunningly well-presented package that I find it all the more disappointing how lacklustre the actual gameplay and content are. Rather than trying to emulate the size, scope, and variety of Sonic 3, Knuckles’ Chaotix takes a step backwards for a far more linear and mundane experience and hedges all its bets on the unique Combi-Ring mechanic and the random, amusement park-like structure of the main campaign. Sadly, neither are all that much fun to play; five Acts per stage would be a lot to get through even in a traditionally paced Sonic title but the lack of enemies and variety are a real issue, despite how pretty the game looks. It’s a shame as the character designs are really unique and it could have been a really good continuation of the classic Sonic series, but it’s just lacking in a lot of ways that make it inferior to Sonic 3. The bosses aren’t too bad, especially the final battle, but the Special Stages are extremely disorientating and I can’t imagine the game is very enjoyable in two-player. At the same time, though, I’d love to see this get a remaster or a port to modern consoles with a few quality-of-life fixes, and it boggles my mind that we haven’t seen it re-released in all this time, but I can decisively say that you’re really not missing out on much by skipping over this one.
My Rating:
⭐⭐
Rating: 2 out of 5.
Could Be Better
Have you ever played Knuckles’ Chaotix? If so, did you play it on the original hardware or, like me, did you discover it through emulation? What did you think to the Combi-Ring mechanic, and which combination of characters was your favourite? Were you a fan of the random aspects of the game and the five-Act structure? Did you ever collect all the Chaos Rings and what did you think to the Special Stages? How are you celebrating Knuckles’ big day today? Sign up to leave your thoughts on Knuckles’ Chaotix down below or drop a comment on my social media, and check back in for more Sonic content a little later in the year.
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