The biggest mistake Mecurysteam made with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was allowing Konami to brand their half-finished project as a Castlevania game. Without the expectations packaged with such a legendary series, the game could have easily survived on its own and potentially achieved higher regard with the reviewers that continue to shamelessly yearn for another Symphony of the Night¹. Instead, it is viewed as an attempt to reinvigorate an aging series by capitalizing on recent trends in third person action games². Indeed, Lords of Shadow borrowed liberally from its immediate peers only to be received as another Dante’s Inferno: a pretender to God of War‘s gratuitous throne. Yet the meaningless spectacle of the recent God of War III only confirmed the series as caricature of the third-person action game.

So Lords of Shadow has something to prove, as Mercurysteam isn’t in the same fortunate position of coasting on the success of past efforts. Lords of Shadow borrows the right parts of the action games that inspired it, and assembles a remarkable genre blend that can be appreciated on its own merits. The game provides an engaging variation on third-person melee combat requiring the development of player skill over the course of the game. Even the positive reviews that laud the reimagining of such an iconic series do a poor job of conveying what makes this video game such an accomplishment. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow will appear as an attractive also-ran, but it is a game that demands examination to fully appreciate its competency within the genre. And those who are willing to submit to its initial allure will play one of the best releases of 2010.

The “reboot” is a common phrase in the modern media franchise. Inspired by comic books that wiped the slate clean of a decades-old convoluted storyline, it allows creators to start anew and re-establish their bankable characters without having to worry about continuity. Why Castlevania even required a reboot is anyone’s guess; it has been happily chugging along for years re-framing the eternal struggle between the Belmonts and Dracula. While past critics of the series may complain about the overuse of the castle setting, the more astute observer would understand that the castle wasn’t changing – the way the player character interacts with the castle was changing. Contrary to popular opinion, the series is far from stagnant; there has been enough variety in this series over the course of four generations of consoles to show that it was always in a state of flux. The series moved uncomfortably into three dimensions with the N64 version of Castlevania³ and then began a parallel lineage on Nintendo’s portable platforms that continued the design legacy of Sympony of the Night. This included the addition of weapons beyond Vampire Killer, new ways of outfitting the player character, and new combat and magic systems that complemented the Metroid-style upgrade-to-proceed formula.

So when Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was announced and associated with Kojima Productions, the responses ranged from “This game will have beautiful movies” to “will you even be able to play this game?” Once the videos of the game in action started to appear, the predictable refrain of “God of War rip-off” grew to a low rumble right up until the release of the demo, where these condemnations were all but proven in the court of public opinion⁴. At the same time, the early positive reviews claimed Lords of Shadow was a “bold new direction” for the conservative Castlevania, a series that had been retracing its steps in recent years. Yet these assessments did not elaborate on what made it such an achievement for the series. Evidence to support either claim was not present in the demo, and in the end was a poor choice for introducing players to Mecurysteam’s updated vision for the franchise.

The fiction of the Castlevania universe was never especially complex, so to overwrite it is not the catastrophe it would seem. The internal mythology that is constructed is sure to pay homage to the games in the series that came before it, but is founded in a more conservative interpretation of horror fantasy. Not all tall spires and evil forests, it takes a more tempered approach to the medieval Eastern Europe that provides the setting for Lords of Shadow. The mythical creatures presented abandon the caricatures of games past, grounded in an alternate reality inspired by Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This balanced approach doesn’t convey that Mercurysteam had a strong sense for themes from the previous installments of Castlevania, but this is their world now.

The game takes place in the year 1047. The Earth has been cut off from the Heavens, and the Lords of Shadow reign in the absence of God. It is up to Gabriel Belmont, figurehead for the “Order of Light”, to restore balance to the world. In the process, Gabriel Belmont must also search for an artifact called the God Mask to resurrect his recently deceased wife. Lords of Shadow tries to weave this insufferably ponderous story around the action to justify the player’s need to move forward, but it comes across as too desperate to be taken seriously. Furthermore, the “surprise” ending is overflowing with the same desperation to tie things together that it damages the delicate relationship between player and Mercurysteam’s new vision for the series. This is a video game about stabbing vampires in the chest and wrapping a chain around the necks of werewolves. No one should expect depth of any significance in a story from a video game in this genre, as long as the “video game” part provides motivation enough to continue.

To lend further weight to this tenuous story arc Mercurysteam used celebrities to provide voices for the main characters. When Patrick Stewart and Robert Carlyle were attached to the project, the presumption was that Lords of Shadow was going to be A Big Deal. Nobody mentioned that Jason Isaacs – better known as Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter film adaptations – would be playing the part of Satan. Maybe that would give away the unconventional ending, because everyone knows that in Castlevania you fight Dracula at the end. Always⁵. All three actors mean nothing in the context of the game; they simply offer a recognizable voice. Stewart gets bored of his script after the second chapter, having been forced to read the unnecessarily lengthy introductions to each sub-chapter. Carlyle’s voice is too hard for the soft-faced Gabriel Belmont⁶. There is no expression in his plight; only the reading of lines. These inclusions were intended to cultivate credibility with video game culture, but are wasted efforts. I didn’t care that Jason Isaacs was trying to seduce Gabriel Belmont in the Underworld. What I cared about was being able to give Satan the beating I wish I could have at the end of Dante’s Inferno⁷

Lords of Shadow begins at the gates to some rustic village under attack by werewolves. It’s an unremarkable encounter aside from a small flourish at the end where Gabriel must stab a giant warg in the heart with a sharpened log. Gabriel is then forced to ride on a horse with glowing tattoos through a pack of more werewolves, and there is an unsettling feeling that maybe Mercurysteam is operating out of their depth. Or perhaps Kojima, who had never worked with Castlevania before, gave some unnecessary creative direction. The scope of the game’s ambitions could not possibly be gleaned from this tiny skirmish. And yet this sequence was included in the game’s official demo.

And so after this very brief encounter – the quality of which would not be repeated for the rest of the game – the player is properly immersed in a gorgeously crafted world. And it is not all brown and grey; moving from the washed-out tones of a foggy swampland to the bright jungle of Pan’s Temple to the derelict walls of an abbey in the middle of a winter wasteland, the exceptional art direction of Lords of Shadow ensures that it does not fall within the territory of a dismissible reproduction. Mecurysteam has wrought their own dark and mysterious landscape, with a progression of themes accented by Óscar Araujo’s equally majestic score that suitably conveys the journey of the player through this new world.

Nevertheless, there is no Castlevania flair to any of these meticulously crafted landscapes. In the past, the Castlevania series drags out old standbys: the walls of stained glass, the disused cathedral, the clock tower, the evil laboratory. And while elements of these settings are certainly used in Lords of Shadow‘s series of locations, they are assembled in such a way that it could be any dark fantasy setting. The artists at Mercurysteam have put together a world that is internally consistent, and distances itself from the visual references that have become creative crutches for the series. Lords of Shadow is the new Castlevania, despite the belief that this new vision would effuse more influence from its progenitors.

An unfortunate trend among games that have such elaborately designed environments is that they are merely decorative. Very little of the game world is accessible by the player: prescribed pathways are opened by puzzles or brief platforming sections, with open spaces and hallways reserved for combat. The fixed camera is at odds with the game; these manufactured angles iterate the importance of the scenery, and not play. As a result, the platforming in Lords of Shadow is no more than a compulsory distraction in order to return to combat. Taking cues from a combination of the Uncharted and God of War series, particular parts of the environment must be sought out to be jumped on, shimmied along and swung from. And instead of scratch marks or other environmental cues to navigate the terrain, the path forward is paved with glowing ledges and grapple points. Death by falling only provides a modest penalty – like Link in the Legend of Zelda series, a portion of Gabriel’s health bar is taken and he returns to the ledge or grapple point he fell from.

Lords of Shadow awkwardly takes renewed interest in platforming once the Seraph Shoulders are obtained. At this juncture over two thirds of the game has been played through, and the player has resigned themselves to mediocre-to-poor platforming breaks between the more satisfying combat. And these new platforming sections are good: from simple jump/double-jump/swing sequences to “Aperture Magic.” Lords of Shadow may be the latest game to take inspiration from Valve’s Portal, but there is no clumsily integrated tool to be manipulated in such a disparate setting. Rather, these portals are already in the world, and Gabriel must navigate them using the Seraph Shoulders to double-jump and float through a moderately challenging sequence. Apart from calling these spatial anomalies “Aperture Magic”, it is no different than the typical “magic mirror” mazes that were in video games long before Portal.

To call Mercurysteam’s ideas for breaking up the action “puzzles” would be generous, though that is by no means disparaging their contribution to Lords of Shadow. Instead, these are simply further manifestations of what has afflicted the third person action game, where the genre has developed a parallel definition of “puzzle” that has polluted the video game forever. These “puzzles” are useless distractions thrown into the game to extend it, and perhaps alleviate some of the monotony that combat has caused. However, in most cases the designers lack pacing in the flow of their game, and so insert these activities to slow down the action while still maintaining the player’s attention.

“Puzzle” is such a loose term in the case of Lords of Shadow, as what are set up as tests of logic have one obvious solution, or a solution that can be brute forced without much thought. There is an equal amount of lever turning and switch activating, sometimes while under assault. There are switch panels that will do damage if they are selected in the wrong order. There is a game of battle chess⁸. Lords of Shadow is already a game of substantial length, so these activities do more to sidetrack the player than searching for a glowing ledge to leap over a wall. Well, all except one.

The Music Box is a brilliant segment of Lords of Shadow where Gabriel is miniaturized inside a music box and must traverse a series of trap rooms to escape. While the segment was completely ridiculous in the context of the game, it was the setting for one of its most enjoyable environmental challenges. Gabriel must wander around the music box finding sections of sheet music for it to play, each section modifying the behavior of the traps inside the box depending on what order they are played in. The music that plays is a variation on the “Vampire Killer” theme, and the appearance of the box is reminiscent of the clock tower and church organ rooms from the Castlevania maps of old. Fan service, perhaps, but the best kind.

Lords of Shadow is oddly distracting in the way it deliberately holds back in its first few hours, intently focused on showing off its environments through sub-chapters that sometimes amount to little more than walking through a forest. Had the platforming been more elaborate at the start, the coyness surrounding the combat system would have likely gone unnoticed.

Then perhaps two mistakes were made by Mercurysteam. The second is withholding a fully functional combat system until the player has spent four hours with the game. For some players, this will seem like the natural order of things. They start off with a limited selection of abilities, and gain rewards such as magic items or new weapon upgrades. This is a familiar design for the Castlevania series, and others of its exploring and item-hoarding ilk. However, this method of delivery is more appropriate for items auxiliary to the whip-based combat system, which is the centerpiece of Lords of Shadow. Instead, the full complement of abilities for the Combat Cross is frustratingly delivered in pieces over the course of the first nine levels.

The Combat Cross is a redesign of the legendary Vampire Killer: a large metal crucifix where the top extends into a chain whip. Although reference is made to the weapon’s more recognizable name, it is more in-game folklore than new canon. Its construction is still associated with Rinaldo Gandolfi, the creator of the original Vampire Killer established by Lament of Innocence. Initial impressions might classify the Combat Cross as an uninspired recreation of the Blades of Chaos. However, even in the setting of a video game a knife on a chain teaches nothing of swordplay – only that melee attacks are transformed into distance attacks and danger is less immediate for the player. In truth, the Combat Cross is the Blades of Chaos reduced to first principles: a chain whip that behaves as one would expect. The Combat Cross feels agile, yet substantial in issuing light and heavy attacks. It writhes and snaps like the head of an iron snake. It facilitates aerial combat as much as ground combat with a grappling move that resembles Nero from Devil May Cry 4 more than Kratos. It is a satisfying weapon to yield.

The Focus Meter is the first addition to the combat system beyond the basic whip attacks, though it isn’t immediately useful until the Magic system is handed over. The Focus Meter is similar to the combo systems in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, in that the player is judged on how well they can avoid attacks. Completing successive combos and executing a “perfect block” – blocking at the exact moment of an incoming attack – increases the Focus meter more quickly. Once it is full, each successive hit of an enemy will produce a neutral magic orb, which are in turn used to fuel the Magic system.

The whip is eventually used in conjunction with Light and Shadow Magic to enhance attacks, but these are not offensive spells. Rather, they are more like the whip upgrade systems in Harmony of Dissonance and Lament of Innocence. Equipping Light Magic attacks will sap health from enemies with each hit, while Shadow Magic will increase damage output. All whip combinations can be enhanced with magic, or new combinations specific to each branch of magic can be purchased. The player can switch between Light and Shadow magic on-the-fly using the shoulder buttons of the controller to maintain the flow of combat. Coupled with the Focus meter, the skilled player will theoretically have a steady supply of magic in most fights.

All magic orbs released by enemies are neutral, and can be used to fill the Light or Shadow magic meters by converting them to the desired type. In this manner, the player controls their supply of magic to suit their style of play. The act of collecting the orbs breaks up the action, and is similar to the balance of offense with orb acquisition in Ninja Gaiden.

Unlike Dante’s Inferno, in which the act of “Absolving” or “Punishing” souls determines the type of orb released, orbs in Lords of Shadow are released for consumption no matter the choice of attacks. The player can assign it accordingly without having to endure a clumsy animation or mini-game that stops the flow of combat just because they want to follow a particular upgrade path.

Combat isn’t entirely free from flow-breaking distractions, however. Lords of Shadow is also sure to carry over one-button finishing moves from its contemporaries. Do enough damage to an enemy and they will be weakened, where they can be finished off in a more dramatic fashion. The difference in Lords of Shadow‘s approach to quick time events is that any button can be pressed after waiting for a glowing circle to focus on-screen. To this end, the button pattern is replaced wholesale with the act of waiting, which is at odds with Lords of Shadow‘s well-paced combat.

There are only three available armor upgrades, but instead of simply providing accessories for traversing the game’s environments they are well-integrated into the combat system. They are also spread out in the game, as each item is awarded after a major battle. The player remains in command of their fighting style, as there isn’t suddenly a batch of new monsters that can only be defeated using Gabriel’s latest acquisition. And the Combat Cross remains as the centerpiece.

The available Secondary Weapons are more like the traditional alternate attacks in a Castlevania game, such as daggers or holy water. They are further enhanced by using them with Light and Shadow magic. At first, the secondary weapons only seem useful when a distance attack is required. Though once the Holy Water is obtained, it becomes an essential component for any crowd control strategy to keep groups of enemies at bay so that individuals can be engaged with the whip. When enemy toughness increases in the second half of the game, the secondary weapons become a bridge between whip attacks to ensure that whip combos are not broken and the focus meter is sustained.

Dark Crystals are introduced at the end of the second act as items that serve two purposes: they can power some of the old technology that is encountered (usually part of a puzzle), or they can be broken to summon a demon that will exact a substantial amount of area damage. It is the closest thing to a spell in Lords of Shadow, and a strange addition to Gabriel’s arsenal given its structure around the whip. This spell does not merge with the regular flow of combat, as each use starts a brief cutscene showing the demon’s summoning. The designers likely included this attack to allow an escape hatch for unskilled or struggling players, though four shards must be fused together to make one, and Gabriel can only carry one full crystal at a time. In fact, the limited inventory supply of secondary weapons overall deters player dependency on these items during combat, bringing focus back to the whip.

The currency of Lords of Shadow is experience points gained with each kill, which can be used to purchase new combinations for base whip attacks, or Light and Shadow magic-enhanced ones. The amount of choice here in comparison to Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta and even God of War is limited, but it makes Gabriel’s overall repertoire more manageable for those that want to learn and make the most of the combat system. Some combinations can be upgraded more than once, and the experience hoarding approach doesn’t work well with this system. When the game indicates “More skills Available” it doesn’t mean they are immediately visible. It just means the upgrade pathway to that skill is unlocked, requiring some mandatory investment of experience points to see what is available. However, due to the limited set of skills, the risk is low for players that worry about optimization of their character build. The Chapters in the game are structured in such a way that they can be revisited upon completion to gather more experience, so it is perfectly reasonable to expect that every skill can be purchased by the end of the game.

When the Magic system is introduced, the player is given a meager supply to work with. Light and Shadow must be used in bursts integrated with regular whip attacks. There is no one skill that bypasses everything without penalty. The player must still block and dodge in equal measure with attacks or they will take damage. Hitting buttons quickly will not work, and arming magic buffs at random will only drain the supply of magic faster. The player is therefore forced to learn the application of each whip attack to maximize the benefit to the Focus meter. This encourages depth in combat strategies so that by the time the magic supply increases in capacity there is no dependency on it, which ultimately creates a more balanced system.

For most players, dodging will be a reflex instead of blocking. This will allow a comfort level to be developed for offensive attacks prior to learning to block properly as the Focus meter becomes more important. Unfortunately, in Lords of Shadow the dodge action was mapped to a button chord – the Left Stick and the Left Trigger.

Maybe there were three mistakes, after all. Mapping the dodge/roll function to a button chord is difficult to perform while under heavy assault, and occasionally mutates into an offensive combination by mistake. This leaves the player open and interrupts the flow of their attacks. While acting like a natural extension of the block (the Left Trigger), it is still awkward compared with the convention established by God of War. Even stranger is the lack of function mapped to the right stick in the game. The dodge button mapping wouldn’t be as noticeable if it wasn’t so essential to any combat strategy.

To accommodate the acquisition of player skill, combat is more forgiving in allowing time to execute combinations, and through natural pauses from the game’s use of the “press any button” quick-time events. This is not a punishing technique-based beat ‘em up like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, though the influences of these games are more recognizable in Lords of Shadow than in God of War and its imitators. Dante’s Inferno did not allow for player reaction time. While there are plenty of offensive attacks to choose from in Dante’s Inferno, it was not necessary to learn them to succeed – the player could always fall back to the infinite supply of overpowered Beatrice Cross projectiles. Similarly, the generous magic system in God of War does not explicitly encourage exploration of melee combat, though it is not as obtrusive.

The combat in Lords of Shadow is the centerpiece of the game. It has been balanced between blocks and counters, dodging and offensive strikes. At first, enemies will appear scarce in number to the quick learner. The tempered difficulty curve obliges with stronger enemies in similarly sized groups with greater variation between unblockable and blockable attacks to explore the full depth of available combat strategies, allowing the player to fully grasp the system and appreciate its dynamics.

Of course, players are free to attempt button mashing in Lords of Shadow. It might even work for the first few hours of play, but certainly not for the duration of the game. This approach is a mistake, and a waste of the player’s time – a hard lesson that the game provides early enough so this strategy can be corrected. The player is directed into building combinations, blocks and counters, and to predict enemy movements and “tells”. Successfully landing combinations of attacks will also assist in filling the Focus meter to replenish magic during a fight. Combat in Lords of Shadow encourages active thought, not passive muscle memory, and provides immediate reward for this behavior.

Once the main features of the combat system are earned by the player in Lords of Shadow, the system asserts itself. Over the course of the first four chapters of the game, the player has grown accustomed to relying on the Focus meter and balancing Light and Shadow magic with whip attacks. Techniques and combinations have been built up around these abilities.

And then the Chupacabras comes.

Far more devastating than the wandering blobs that would steal Link’s shield, the Chupacabras takes all of Gabriel’s abilities and he must be captured to get this equipment back. The Chupacabras appears three times in the game, but one instance in particular stands out.

At the beginning of the fifth Chapter, Gabriel chases the Chupacabras into a Goblin encampment, complete with a rampaging giant warthog. These enemies have been encountered many times already. Except this time, Light magic is not available to restore health, and Shadow magic cannot be used to deal more damage faster. The player must adapt quickly.

Though “adapting” really means returning to the character’s state at beginning of the game. It feels incredibly unwieldy – unfair even. Except this is the game’s way of reminding players of the importance of the combat system that has been built up to that point. If the player has developed enough of the whip’s advanced non-magic attacks, there is no reason why this sequence should be a problem. Once the relics are regained, there is a renewed appreciation for what Mercurysteam has created in Lords of Shadow‘s combat system.

The design of the boss encounters is one of the best features of Lords of Shadow. The exceptions are the massive Titans: clearly inspired by Shadow of the Colossus they are outliers, and a very awkward addition to the game. Even when taking the story at face value, their existence in the world that has been established is of little importance. Furthermore, after fighting two Titans in the first third of Lords of Shadow they aren’t seen until again until the end of the game when Gabriel visits a Titan graveyard and fights a final battle with what could easily pass as a giant dragon skeleton. These encounters attribute some half-hearted legendary status to the Titans, but instead they manifest as a series of very clumsy homages to Team Ico.

In stark contrast with these indulgent departures, every single fight with a boss character in Lords of Shadow is logical, fair, and reinforces the combat system with Gabriel’s growing repertoire of combinations and special attacks. The fights are all structured so that combat can be approached as it was in regular encounters. That is, hinging on the player’s skill at reading the tells for unblockable attacks, and interpreting the responses to Light and Shadow magic⁹. The boss characters are neither damage sponges like the obnoxious setpieces of Dante’s Inferno, nor are they “puzzles” to be solved by using a specific attack or prescribed button sequence like in Darksiders and the God of War series. Some of the fights are multi-stage, but still allow the full breadth of skill use for any play style to overcome each new form of the boss. The increase in difficulty for each encounter comes from stronger, faster or more complex attack patterns – such as unblockable or magic attacks – but they can all be avoided, blocked or countered with the same complement of abilities as regular encounters.

It is essential that the Focus meter is used in these fights to maximize the use of the Magic system. Landed strikes increase the Focus meter as in normal encounters, but to accelerate this process it is better to do a perfect block at every opportunity. Maxing out the Focus meter in these fights provides a dependable reserve of Magic, allowing more flexibility in attack and health recovery strategies.

Despite the freedom encouraged by the structure of these encounters, all of the fights have checkpoints. This significantly diminishes any sort of tension built up in the fight, and is an indicator of the lack of confidence in player skill by the designers. It shows that they did not feel their encounter was balanced enough to allow the player to survive it without dying, even though the tools have been handed over to survive these encounters indefinitely. There is no special attack that must be performed to win. The “any button” quick time events are used at the end of the fight, but this is more to display an involved cinematic showing the defeat of the boss. The contest has already been won.

It is during the fights with the boss characters that the combat system galvanizes itself. After surmounting the normal encounters leading up to these battles, forming a successful attack and defensive strategy should be second-nature; gauging the enemy’s reaction to each whip strike should provide adequate information to develop a suitable combination to counter them and emerge victorious. The rewards for capitalizing on the combat system are sensed immediately. It is a devastating disappointment to learn that the fight with Satan isn’t so much about combat, as it is navigating a bunch of Light and Shadow magic concentric circles. While immensely satisfying to bombard him with the whip while weakened, it wasn’t a very challenging fight for the climax of the game.

Lords of Shadow is the new Castlevania for as long as Konami resists returning to the old canon. As was the case of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia, a reimagining is only successful if sales are able to support the loss of the old character and themes. The release of The Forgotten Sands earlier this year shows how quickly these ventures into new territory can double back¹⁰.

Lords of Shadow distinguishes itself not through the rewriting of Castlevania‘s history, but its restoration of melee combat as a central theme. Besides the obvious influence from their contemporaries, Mercurysteam went back to a Castlevania before the character leveling, item hoarding and exploration styled after Metroid. Recent Castlevania games may have drifted away from the whip and the original focus on action, but Lords of Shadow defiantly asserts itself in the lineage of video games to bear the Castlevania name.

With the fervent praise surrounding God of War III, Sony Santa Monica are so confident with their position in the third-person action genre they assume that spectacle alone is an acceptable improvement to a series that has remained mostly unchanged since its first installment. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow shows that when a developer’s fate as an imitator has been decided, they have nothing to lose except the unfounded criticisms from those that have fashioned God of War into an unassailable representative of the genre.

Rather than relying on empty posturing, Mercurysteam has created a video game that brandishes its combat with purpose. Despite their attempts to deepen the experience with familiar voice actors, well-tread plot points and trivial interactions with the game’s environments, the combat in Lords of Shadow emerges as its most remarkable element. Lords of Shadow exploits the use of the whip, creating a combat system that allows players to develop their own approach to each encounter. Most importantly, the combat system does not suddenly disappear when confronted with the boss challenges at the end of each chapter. Combat in Lords of Shadow is substantial and engaging enough to carry the burden of the rebirth of a well-known series, undeterred by the distractions that have been built up around it.

Lords of Shadow delivers a combat system that provides depth for the skilled, and enough easy flourishes to keep novice players entertained without feeling like they are hammering buttons reflexively. The challenge of Lords of Shadow is in the constant struggle against muscle memory; realizing there is a combat system that does not conflate accessibility with a lack of challenge. And so when Satan falls and the closing movie reveals Mercurysteam’s uncomfortable plans for the newly established Castlevania timeline they may not have the mindshare of the faithful, but they have certainly earned the right to lay proper claim to the bloody throne of Kratos.

Further to my review of Shank over at Rules of the Game, I wanted to examine the fight with Cesar, the man responsible for the murder of Shank’s girlfriend and the last encounter of the game. It stuck in my mind as something particularly interesting about Shank, in the way this fight feigns openness for the player’s attack strategy to make it seem different from the rest of the game. It is set up to be the “true” culmination of the skills learned in Shank, as if the previous boss encounters were merely warmups. Even though this encounter is the only thing I found interesting about Shank, it’s not something that would have been very useful in the middle of a review.

I said in my review that the traditional boss fight is challenging in the way it represents the culmination of each set of encounters at the end of a given “chapter” or “level” of a game. The tactics for each boss fight should be no surprise, as they should collect the skills developed during the course of the game. However, the challenge of a boss fight is removed when “tactics” become prescriptive of player action: whether it is requiring a particular attack to be used, or a weapon or ability that was obtained during the course of the preceding level. In the interest of player accessibility, the prescriptive boss fight is the easiest to grasp without a full understanding of the combat system. This was the approach that Klei Entertainment took with most of their boss characters in Shank.

In Shank’s fight with Cesar, there are two main differences from other boss encounters that should be evident to the observant player. Firstly, it is a fair fight. While he is a little bit taller, the size and appearance of Cesar is consistent with Shank and the goon characters that have already been faced. He is equipped with a sword, two pistols, and a knife. Secondly, it is not immediately apparent that a special activity must be performed as in the other boss encounters. That is, in the fight with Cesar the player is never explicity told to perform a one-button act to deal damage once the boss character is stunned by regular hits.

The fight is set up very similar to the one with Cassandra in the second level; however, she is much easier to defeat with persistence and repetitive attacks within a shorter period, when compared with Cesar’s overall toughness.

The use of weapons and melee attacks do not behave as they do in the regular encounters of Shank; against Cesar they are not nearly as effective. However, this can be accepted in the context of Cesar being the final boss and less susceptible to basic attacks. In the way most games increase difficulty by making enemies tougher, Cesar is simply given characteristics to absorb more damage.

Instead of an instruction, Shank gives some non-specific advice for the fight with Cesar: “Wait for an opening, and then counter-attack.” This strategy is always available to the player, though it is rare that it must actually be applied during the course of the game. Instead of reinforcing the combat philosophy – which should be typical for any self-respecting beat ‘em up – the amount of player skill is largely the result of finding ways to bypass it completely. As a result, this sudden encouragement to use the combat system may come as a surprise for some players that have had no reason to explore it until this point.

The player is then forced to come up with a strategy that may have worked in the typical encounter, but now this strategy is met with much deadlier resistance. This will result in the player becoming frustrated with the lack of feedback that had previously been so liberally granted. Since the player was able to get away with the typical buttonmashing strategy, those unfamiliar with the other aspects of combat (blocking, dodging and grappling) may not necessarily have the skills to figure out this fight for themselves.

This will result in two approaches, assuming the player doesn’t give up:

1. Chip away at him: the slow and steady approach where damage is done by the weapons, just not at the rate that the player may want.
2. Find an exploit.

Chipping away is the safest option, as it is controllable and the most predictable. There are three phases to the battle with Cesar, based on amount of damage inflicted. At the start of each phase, the player is presented with two health potions. As long as the player can survive through each phase, they are guaranteed a power-up and should (theoretically) emerge victorious without their health reaching zero.

However, chipping away at a boss can be tedious. This is despite the fact that the solution will eventually work given enough time and endurance with a rudimentary attack combination such as dodge, shank, jump away, dodge, shank, jump away, etc. None of the weapons prove to be more effective than the others with this approach, however. A katana/shank combination that was devastating in the game only provides a moderate increase in damage to the standard shank combo, and therefore isn’t worth the trade-off in losing speed from a heavy attack. The grapple move cannot be performed arbitrarily, which is consistent in the game for all enemies bigger than Shank. The disembowel move with the katana, which proved to be extremely useful against large enemies in the rest of the game, will only cause Shank to be locked into one of Cesar’s counter-moves after dealing only a moderate amount of damage. The chainsaw takes too long to recover from, and all of the guns may as well be doing nothing. The quick fire rate of the dual pistols allows the player to keep a safe distance, but they take the risk of Cesar returning fire, and his pistols do more damage. Attempting this first strategy reminded me of my time with Lucifer at the end of Dante’s Inferno¹. It wasn’t pleasant, and I did not learn anything except patience, perseverance, and the true strength of my thumb muscles (something I’ve learned many times before, but in much more palatable video game experiences).

“Wait for an opening, and then counter-attack.”

The player is thus forced to find a weakness, and exploit it.

In Shank, a “counter” move is available when Shank is in close quarters with an enemy, and the left trigger icon appears on screen. If Shank is in close quarters with Cesar, this same icon will pop up. And as long as the player hits LT in time, they can counter him and do a little more damage than with a normal attack.

However, this counter-attack isn’t enough to deal substantial damage. The player must then fall back to chipping away at Cesar until receiving the opportunity to counter again. The timing must be perfect, and by moving in close the player runs the risk of some of Cesar’s highly damaging combo moves that they have no way of blocking. The player is stuck in a loop that may require several attempts to be able to beat Cesar.

The player then starts to optimize: If I am going to get close, how do I maximize my return on applied damage?

If the player experiments – or visits online forums, if they are impatient – they will learn that the best way to beat Cesar is to grapple him. But this isn’t possible! The player complains. You can’t grapple characters larger than Shank! And this would be true, if the developers were following the rules they have set. But as evidenced by the previous boss encounters, the rules of the game in the levels leading up to these encounters don’t necessarily apply.

The grapple can only be performed without the katana armed, because the right trigger is used for the special heavy attack for the katana. All other heavy weapons can be equipped, but the chains are particularly effective. The way to perform this move is actually very similar to the “double-team” throwing move in the co-operative campaign. Once the player is able to move in for the counter-attack, they must quickly hit “RT” to grapple after the counter. Shank will pick up Cesar and perform a pile driver, taking almost a quarter of his health bar. After the player performs a few of these attacks the battle is won.

Once the counter-grapple is learned, it is incredibly easy to perform. The only skill required is the ability to time the counter and grapple button presses, not use Shank’s arsenal of weapons in attack combinations. The weapons are available for this, of course – they just aren’t as effective. And all things considered, next to useless.

Cesar doesn’t change up his fighting style except for a “gutting move” with his sword, which is similar to what Shank does with the katana. This new move appears during the second phase of the fight. The attack can be easily avoided, as there is a red blinking “tell” like every other boss and large character encountered in the preceding game.

The lack of dynamics for this fight based on Shank‘s combat system makes it predictable, and as long as the player can minimize damage taken to set up this counter-grapple move, they will win. And there are plenty of health potions to correct any missteps, when the return on risking close-quarters damage is suddenly increased.

The battle with Cesar is not as open as the initial setup impresses on the player. The counter-grapple is the skeleton key for this fight, and Cesar can be bested quite quickly using this method. This is compared to a more substantial investment of time spent optimizing a “chip away” strategy. Keeping this technique hidden from the player may give the illusion of openness, but as anyone experienced with video games knows the player will use any means necessary to maximize their success in the least amount of time used for trial and error. Ultimately the battle with Cesar is no different than the other boss fights in the way it uses one move to deal the most damage, and although a disappointing finale it fits in well with the rest of Shank.

Shank is overconfidence in a borrowed design that is only partially understood. It is a one-button brawler that adds depth in the most unnecessary of areas for a video game of this genre: story. In all favorable reviews, comparisons list off the beat ‘em ups that came before it – whether it’s the gun and swordplay of Devil May Cry or the rudimentary street fighting of Streets of Rage – as if Shank belongs in their company. And perhaps it was inspired by these titles, but inspiration is very different from execution.

Read the rest over at Rules of the Game.

Around this time last year, I complained that the trial version of Batman: Arkham Asylum was a poorly constructed demonstration of the final game, and lamented the days when demos were complete pieces of a larger game that allowed the player to make an educated decision on a purchase. Last week, Capcom released Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, a stand-alone introduction to Dead Rising 2. It is a mission – or “Case” as they were called in the original game – that takes place in the backwater town of Still Creek. Dead Rising 2 will be a multiplatform launch, so the exclusivity of Dead Rising 2: Case Zero on the Xbox 360 appears to be a token sign of loyalty to those that made the original so successful. The Prestige Points statistics levelling system returns, so that any character built in Case Zero can be carried across to the new game, as long as it is purchased for the Xbox 360. Case Zero costs 400 MS points, or around $5 US. Essentially, it is a pay-to-play demo.

On its surface, the intent of Case Zero is to explain how main character Chuck Greene gets to Fortune City, the setting for Dead Rising 2. Establishing Chuck’s character and his background, we are introduced to his situation and what got him there. However, the story in Case Zero isn’t set up as a “prequel”, proper. That is, the ending of the mission in Case Zero is Chuck Greene and his daughter driving to Fortune City. Anything could have happened before that; what happens in Case Zero isn’t essential to the story. Instead, Chuck’s detour in Still Creek is more apt as an introduction to developer Blue Castle Games’ rendition of the Dead Rising universe and the game’s mechanics. In this regard, Case Zero is one of the best video game demonstrations I have ever played.

Since Case Zero must be purchased, there is the theoretical incentive for the developers to create a finished product that is characteristic of the framework of the main game. In many modern demos, there are disclaimers on the menu screens that it doesn’t represent the final game, or that the developers make no claims the demo is a finished product. By contrast, Case Zero is intended to be a stand-alone product; a full game.

The difference between Case Zero and its successor is one of scale. Case Zero can be completed in under two hours by the experienced Dead Rising player. The town of Still Creek is small: as a result there are fewer missions, and the time limits for each task are shorter. There isn’t much time to get comfortable, so the player must hit the ground running.

In the first ten minutes of the game (including the introductory movie), Case Zero establishes the following:

1. Zombrex is an experimental drug that staves off “zombification” for 12 hours with each dose. It is the most important resource in the game, as it will help keep Chuck’s daughter Katey alive. It is also the most scarce.
2. There are time constraints. Chuck must be able to give Katey her dose of Zombrex every 12 hours.
3. With Chuck’s truck stolen during the opening movie, they must find a new source of Zombrex, and a way to get out of town.
4. There is a safe house, including a save point (restroom), where the player starts.
5. There are objects everywhere to be used as weapons. Items can be combined to make new improvised weapons. The first combination is right next to where the player starts.

The player is then free to go and do whatever they please, understanding that there are hard constraints to this wandering. However, unlike the original Dead Rising, the constraints are not merely appointments to be kept so that the “big story” can be broken, which was perfectly fine in the context of Frank West’s occupation. For Case Zero this appointment is a life-or-death situation. Late on the dosage, and Katey becomes a zombie.

The importance of this task contributes to a darker atmosphere in this version of the game, as the stakes are suddenly higher. Things feel more serious, and there is a palpable sense of urgency. There is no government agency on hand to assist in investigating the outbreak. There is no helpful janitor watching everything through a mall security system. Although Dead Rising tried its best to be frightening, the camp underneath was consistently exposed through its often ridiculous exposition regarding the zombie outbreak. In Case Zero, the outbreak has spread throughout the continental United States. The Military are trying to contain the situation using lethal force. Chuck and his daughter are alone in a town without transportation, and must find a way to live for another day.

I enjoyed my time with Dead Rising; I often point to it as a reason I own an Xbox 360. Frustrated with the direction the genre took with Resident Evil 4, I saw it as the answer to my zombie outbreak survival simulator needs. Sure, the game was more than a little hackneyed at times: a cast of ridiculous caricatures to rescue, B-movie plot devices added as subtext to the adventure, and fear as the product of being without a weapon in the middle of a large crowd of slow-moving zombies.

As in the original Dead Rising, there are plenty of distractions that get in the way of the main objective. Whether this is bludgeoning your way through packs of zombies just to move around, rescuing the twelve different survivors scattered around town, or trying to find objects that will combine into new weapons, there is no shortage of activities.

Immediately noticable is the difference in controls. Dead Rising controlled like an old game; Frank’s movements were clumsy and exaggerated. Chuck Greene’s movements appear smoother and more natural than the original game, though the scope of movements are still limited to running, jumping and climbing over low ledges. A roll or dodge action would have been beneficial, though like the original game, it is possible that this action is an ability that is unlocked upon reaching a higher character level.

After stumbling across an old motorcycle chassis, Chuck decides this is his only hope for getting out of town. It is also learned that the Military are on their way to Still Creek, and since Katey is infected they will quarantine her. Instead of entrenching himself with Katey and waiting to be saved, Chuck has even more incentive to leave town before the Military arrives. This inversion of player expectations is a fantastic twist similar to the recent film The Crazies, where “quarantine” was just another word for mass killings to prevent further outbreak.

With these objectives in mind, Case Zero reinforces the time management aspect of the original Dead Rising. In a very short time – approximately 12 hours – Chuck must find the remaining parts of this motorcycle, and get out of Still Creek before the Military arrives. And remember to give Katey her dose of Zombrex.

Finding the missing motorcycle parts to reassemble it involves helping out some townspeople that have survived and searching through the abandoned buildings of the town. Picking up each part takes up an inventory slot, but unlike the item-fetching quests in Left 4 Dead 2, they can be used as weapons. For example: upon finding the motorcycle chassis, Chuck loads it into a large bin with wheels on it. Heart sinking, I thought about making my way back to the safe house through the crowd that had already closed up behind me with this unwieldy gear. However, there’s an action button for this bin. Moving forward and pressing this button allows the bin to be used as a plow, creating some hilarious visuals. As long as I didn’t stop running I was invincible, zombies launching into the air in my wake.

It is so easy to get distracted with activities like this. Once the Hunting Store is accessed, there are plenty of new weapons to play around with, including a broadsword reminiscent of the True Eye Cult leader’s weapon from the original game. It cuts a vicious arc through any crowd, with the swing appropriately weighty and leaves Chuck open for attack.

Indeed, Case Zero gets melee modeled right, so that heavier weapons like the sledgehammer will have a longer swing arc and recovery, while lighter weapons like the baseball bat will allow for quicker attacks and less damage per swing. This is a significant improvement over the original game. There are also two types of attacks: normal and strong (which includes a suitably gory animation). Unfortunately, weapon durabilities appear to be unchanged and do not reflect the materials.¹

In Dead Rising 2‘s first official trailer the “Paddlesaw” was revealed: two chainsaws taped onto each blade of a kayak paddle. This weapon alone seemed to sell the concept for Dead Rising 2. To avoid disappointing the fans that have anxiously waited to use this weapon, the Paddlesaw can be built in Case Zero after finding the kayak paddle and making a trip to the hardware store. Other combinations include molotovs (whiskey and newspaper), and a spiked baseball bat (baseball bat and box of nails). You need a workbench to complete these weapon upgrades, which are scattered throughout town. I can see this system being interesting to experiment with, but the set combinations seem limited, and quantities don’t matter. For example, the “Drill Bucket” only needs one drill and a bucket, yet the finished product actually contains three drills. The Paddlesaw only requires one chainsaw and the kayak paddle. Why couldn’t I attach two circular saw blades to the ends of my kayak paddle instead? Why couldn’t I fashion new ammunition for my shotgun with a box of nails?² Including this weapon combination system is a huge improvement on its own, but the scope of possibilities already feels limited on this small scale.

The most noticeable improvement to combat is in the use of firearms. In Dead Rising, guns could be shot from the hip but didn’t provide much accuracy at a distance. And aiming produced a view straight from Resident Evil 4, without the ability to strafe and shoot at the same time. In Case Zero, shooting from the hip is more predictable (though still not accurate), and aiming and shooting has been taken from the typical third-person shooter, complete with full use of the left and right trigger buttons for aiming and firing. Firearms are still underpowered compared to melee weapons, but in the close-combat situations typical of the Dead Rising series, if you are struggling to aim a gun you’re already dead. Once again, ammunition is not available separately from weapons. This was especially puzzling when I stumbled upon a military quarantine camp that had supply boxes that could only be used as weapons.

In the game’s only boss fight firearms become essential, however. This is another extension of the design from the previous game where victory is assured by running away, dodging return fire and shooting the boss character in the face. There is no encouragement of tactics or use of the game’s environment. While I could stun the boss character with the IED (propane tank and box of nails), I was only able to do serious damage with the Assault Rifle. I have a feeling this will be the same in the retail game, as I can’t see how any significant improvements have been made through use of the environment to defeat the zombie horde, let alone individual adversaries.

Like the original Dead Rising, there are a number of endings available to the player in Case Zero depending on whether they succeed in their main quest to escape Still Creek before the military arrives. The most troubling of all the failure conditions was forgetting to give Katey her dose of Zombrex. This occurred at nightfall, when the zombies become more powerful, and I was stuck behind a crowd trying to get back to the safehouse. Surrounded, I was furiously swinging a feeble two-by-four to make my way through the unyielding ravenous horde. The urgency was unbearable. Suddenly the game stopped, and I was given a scene where Chuck says “I’m too late.” You don’t see anything else except Chuck standing hopeless in the middle of the street. The fate of Katey is left to the imagination of the player.

While the characterization of Chuck and Katey can hardly be called deep, there is something in their relationship that echoes many horror and post-apocalyptic films that involve family. Survival is important, yes, but should it come at the cost of your loved ones? This theme was made prominent by the recent film adaptation of The Road. I don’t expect the emotional weight of McCarthy’s work to be carried by this game, but it lends the air of something greater than the typical survival horror tropes when the father of a doomed child is willing to risk everything for them regardless of the situation’s apparent futility.

Case Zero is not a predecessor or prequel to the retail version of Dead Rising 2. Rather, it is an excellent demonstration that successfully encapsulates the systems and mechanics that have been revised since the release of Dead Rising. For players that enjoy what Case Zero has to offer, it serves as a suitable appetizer for what is to come in the retail release of Dead Rising 2. It also acts as a refresher for experienced players of Dead Rising. For everyone else, its containment as a separate game provides enough closure that it can be left behind without wondering if it was representative of the final game, which most retail game demos fail to do. And if zombie outbreak survival on a small scale is enough for some players, Case Zero can be replayed without ever owning the full version of Dead Rising 2. In the town of Still Creek there are additional weapon combinations to experiment with, survivors to rescue, and unlimited zombies to kill – all under a prescribed time limit that is embedded in the game’s mechanics. Case Zero confidently stands on its own, but its most important contribution to the Dead Rising series is its ability to fully demonstrate the systems and mechanics in the world of Dead Rising 2 in an easily accessible package.

My first review went online today, of the independently developed Flotilla. From the review:

Flotilla is a game about capital ship battles in space, with the lighthearted mood and pacing of Shrapnel Games’ Weird Worlds series. Pirate chickens, space pigs, and other oddities spring up in your journey across the galaxy in search of things to fight and spaceship parts to salvage. Developed by the creators of Gravity Bone, Flotilla is a more traditional game in that it imitates the recognizable three-dimensional space combat of Homeworld. While exhibiting some appreciation for the details in maneuvers that would be performed in capital ship battles, the combat’s lack of depth and limited options for ship customization detract from what could be a significant addition to the strategy genre. Instead, Flotilla leaves one wondering when a developer brave enough to combine and tune every exciting, disparate concept in strategy game development will create a work to revitalize the genre.

Read the rest at Rules of the Game.

Dante: “Where are the others? Why aren’t the other damned down here with me?”
Lucifer: “This isn’t their Hell, Dante. It’s yours.”
- from Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Inferno is a half-hearted action game that gets caught up in its own spectacle. The offensive content of this video game is enough to repulse the casual observer, but those that actually play it will find its sins go far deeper: it is a video game that makes its own existence unnecessary with a combat system wrought by designers who have learned nothing about action games in the last five years. The result is an artifact that only serves as another reason why video game enthusiasts continue to bleat loudly and thump their chest while struggling to justify the cultural legitimacy of video games. Dante’s Inferno is a game that sought and received a lot of attention, but for all the wrong reasons. Electronic Arts’ campaign to promote the game was an embarrassing display, but fascinating in how it adapted to the response of the video game community. And yet the worst criticism levelled at the actual game upon its release was that it was a poor imitation of God of War, while glossing over the general offensiveness of the content – both visual and ludic – in what can only be labelled as acts of sloth. Dante’s Inferno is a mark upon the rich history of video games that reveals more failures than successes, but still manages to recognize the most noble of attempts. However, Dante’s Inferno has no hope of being a work as accessible or impactful as the ones that are the subject of so many retrospectives. Dante’s Inferno will be remembered, but not for the reasons Visceral Entertainment had hoped.

The biggest mistake that EA made with Dante’s Inferno was their marketing campaign¹. The callous way they manipulated video game culture did more to damage the public image of video games and the video game media than actually advertise the game itself. While the campaign may have received a lot of attention, the majority of it was negative and was mostly related to three things: the marketing push for “Lust”, the marketing push for “Greed”, and the fact that a lowly video game – surely the basest form of modern entertainment – was attempting to adapt an untouchable piece of classic literature. The most startling fact amongst all this degenerate drum-beating was how little was mentioned about the actual video game, as if this campaign was intended to distract from it.

In fact, when Dante’s Inferno was first rumored to be in development in late 2008, many people thought it was a joke. How could anyone hope to adapt a 700 year old poem and use it as the setting for a video game? The wells of creativity had truly run dry, and game developers were turning to other sources in the same manner that Hollywood has recently taken to trawling the shelves of comic book shops. This made Dante’s Inferno an easy target for critics: what better way to prove a video game’s worthlessness than pointing out how it represents everything that is wrong with the industry? The game became a pariah, and subject to the scorn of what seemed like the entire internet.

In the face of such adversity, the team responsible for Dante’s Inferno had to create a product that would surmount the horde of critics that were simply waiting for it to fail. One could argue the old adage that any publicity is good publicity, but the events leading up to this game’s release were setting it up for Daikatana-like disappointment. Buckling under the hype is not an option if Dante’s Inferno was to succeed in the eyes of the press and the game-buying public that accept their recommendations. It would simply be another nail in the coffin of video games’ cultural legitimacy.

The demo for Dante’s Inferno was released in December 2009 and showcased the setup for Dante’s journey into Hell. It was engaging in the sense that God of War was engaging: the game begins with the spectacle of fighting an omnipotent adversary, and moves forward in the name of cutting things to pieces while defying gravity with double-jumps and following button prompts as each new enemy is killed in dramatic fashion. This sampler proved to be enough to illustrate the game’s direction and its aspirations. Many of the game’s detractors labelled Dante’s Inferno a shameless clone, and this claim is not without substance. However, for those that would never get to try such a game otherwise, Dante’s Inferno initially appeared as a suitable alternative that would not require investing in more hardware. This assumption would prove to be wishful thinking.

After a few hours of play, Dante’s Inferno exposes itself as an unambitious entry into the third-person action genre, but a surprisingly structured adaptation of the poem. It is a rock concert of a video game: full of puerile imagery and middle fingers given to Christianity’s dark history. However, setting out to compare the poem and video game in a review would be folly; any player of video games who claims to have read it was probably just skimming the Wikipedia summary, anyway². Dante’s Inferno is not meant to be an adaptation in the purest sense; rather, it is a video game that wishes to turn Aligheri’s Hell into a battleground of depravity, parading horrid displays in front of the player as they are corraled through its wretched depths.

The designers at Visceral clearly did some research – every aspect of the Inferno itself as described by Aligheri is represented in some way, as if they made a list and checked everything off. While the imagery of Aligheri’s Inferno was left to the reader’s imagination, Visceral have tried their hardest to make the player’s skin crawl – it certainly took a twisted imagination to come up with what has been presented. And there really isn’t any other way this could have been done. This is Hell for a modern age: nothing’s shocking anymore, and so to get the player’s attention, the team of artists at Visceral had to overcompensate resulting in some questionable and outright offensive content. The atmosphere that is developed relies entirely on this principle, with the expectation that the egregious failings of the game will be forgiven. This would prove to be an arrogant assumption by the designers.

Dante Aligheri’s The Divine Comedy is no religious text; it is one man’s interpretation of the afterlife seen through the lens of the prevailing opinions of fourteenth century Christianity. Setting himself up as the protagonist allows the reader to see it through his eyes. To create a video game based on what is essentially a Tourist Guide wouldn’t be very exciting, though. There must be action. There must be jumping puzzles. There must be blood.

So Visceral came up with the idea of making Dante’s character a Knight of the Crusades, who is painted as a troubled and evil man. He sews pieces of tapestry to his chest in what appear to be fits of self-punishment, having been responsible for some unspeakable acts in the name of cleansing the Holy Land of non-Christians. There is certainly some underlying criticism of these events by the game’s creators, through a series of haunting montages done in stylized animation reminiscent of Gerald Scarfe’s work on Pink Floyd The Wall (1982).

The reason for Dante’s descent into Hell is because he wants to save the soul of his betrothed, Beatrice. As a result of Dante’s indiscretions in the Holy Land, she was killed in his absence and her soul is being held captive by Lucifer. She represents the symbol of purity and Dante’s broken promise, so naturally saving Beatrice is the only way Dante can redeem himself.

After Dante is stabbed in the back, Death arrives to claim his soul for Hell, beginning Dante’s quest to save the soul of Beatrice. Making Dante’s first major encounter a fight with Death says something about the game’s ambitions. This is Dante’s boot in the door, but he doesn’t leave without taking Death’s Scythe with him in an act that sets the stage for the exaggerated action that is sure to follow. Dante’s Inferno is typical video game pastiche, yet establishes itself as an epic, bloody adventure.

The game is clearly presented as Dante the character’s Inferno, so taking these liberties with the source material is expected. It is a man’s personal quest to atone for his sins, driven by the guilt of his actions while away from his betrothed. The shouting and virulent rage expressed by Dante while performing the more powerful of his attacks is pronounced. It is not just pure anger; it is a plaintive cry. He wants release from his suffering and inner anguish. For an instant one might even sympathize with the character. Then the game happens.

Dante’s Inferno isn’t coy about its influences. The combat’s fluidity and system of combinations make it an action game that at least meets the basic requirements of the genre, but it is far from being genre-defining. To create a God of War clone without improving on this inspiration draw obvious criticisms about its lack of ambition. What’s worse is that these criticims were used to elevate the God of War series to paragon of third-person action games. It is here that reviewers lose sight of the real issue: neither game is mechanically original, and if anything do more to further constrain the third-person action genre with prescriptive combat. One only needs to look at the negative reviews of God of War III to see that reviewers are finally recognizing a regressive design philosophy.

Shortly after obtaining Death’s Scythe, Dante gets the “Beatrice Cross” for his secondary attack. The Beatrice Cross is a multi-part projectile that resembles something out of the Castlevania series. With these two weapons, Dante has two paths for weapon and skill upgrades: Unholy (Scythe) and Holy (Beatrice Cross). To perform these upgrades, Dante must collect and spend souls. Unlike God of War and Darksiders, these souls are not random and available with every kill. To upgrade Unholy or Holy skills, you must either “Punish” or “Absolve” each enemy you are faced with. Punishing will grant unholy souls, while absolving will result in holy souls.

This is actually a good system in theory, even if it makes no logical sense that an undeniably evil man is able to absolve sinful souls. Apart from the standard mobs, Dante will encounter various historical figures or “Shades” as they appeared in the original poem and will be given the choice to punish or absolve them of their sins. Doing either will result in more souls than the typical monster, so these encounters are usually the ones that allow the player to upgrade the skills in each path, so it definitely becomes a conscious choice. Initially, experimenting with the first two tiers of abilities in each path gives a sense of depth to the game. The rudimentary combinations seem tight and serviceable.

However, after traversing the first circle of Hell, the combat system’s weaknesses start to reveal themselves. The Scythe feels thin and reedy in comparison to the chunky Chaoseater of Darksiders³ or the switchblade precision of the Dragon Sword from Ninja Gaiden II⁴. The Scythe was taken from Death himself, but presents itself as so much junk to be upgraded. There is a compulsion to hit the attack buttons harder, as if it makes a difference. There is a hit counter like any self-respecting third-person melee game, but aside from a couple of Achievements there is no reason to pursue drawn-out combinations. There are no style points like in Devil May Cry or the recent Bayonetta that grade the player on their performance.

As the game increases in difficulty, it becomes easier to punish souls because it is faster. Most lower-level enemies are actually killed in one hit by punishing them. The player is untouchable when absolving a soul (which involves mashing the “B” button repeatedly), but this does serious damage to the flow of action. As a result, the player doesn’t want to punish everything in sight because they are evil; they simply want to keep moving. This is more pronounced when absolving the Shades, which starts a ridiculous mini-game that determines how many Holy souls the player will get.

With even a few points spent upgrading the Beatrice Cross, the player doesn’t have to get close in order to engage any adversaries. Maximizing the Beatrice Cross powers through the Holy path of skills ensures the player is all but invincible for a good portion of the game. It can be used with no penalty (that is, no mana draw), and can be hammered until all feeling in the thumb is lost. Using the Beatrice Cross quickly becomes tiresome as the challenge is drained from the proceedings.

Combat is the primary focus of Dante’s Inferno, and it is exposed as weak and unsatisfying under analysis. It devolves into a utilitarian system that is tedious to participate in. The combat has been constructed to simply illustrate a point: the player is fighting things. The spells and special attacks that are supposed to add variety become worthless when under assault because there is no reason to use them, despite feeling compelled to do so. The game’s combat system is simply unwilling to comply. The player surmounts every encounter through brute force: the combat is an exercise in hammering on the same buttons over and over, just to survive and make it to the next area.

If this fault in the combat system is not detected early in the game, it will most certainly be exposed in the game’s latter half. The difficulty⁵ increases unforgivingly to compensate for a repetitive and unchallenging combat system, clumsily concealing what should have been an increase in the combat system’s complexity. There are enemies that are suddenly able to block all of Dante’s attacks, have unblockable attacks, and the player is forced into situations where the magic abilities that were previously untouched must be relied upon, while hammering away on the Beatrice Cross for crowd control. To have combat become monotonous after only a third of what the game is offering means the designers have made a mistake. It leaves the player no choice but to hate the game for the painfully limiting constraints of what should be its strongest attribute.

Yet in spite of the uncontrollable wells of anger that spring up due to the game’s inability to control its own difficulty curve, there is still the need to continue. There is a nagging curiosity to see what else Visceral has created for their interpretation of Aligheri’s Hell.

And nothing says “Decent into Hell” like rappelling with human entrails down the faces of cliffs made up of undulating corpses. These brief interludes allow the game’s scenery to be taken in; to hear the moaning of restless souls begging for mercy that never seem to fade into the background. And there are a number of foreboding areas that successfully convey Dante’s role as intruder: the bubbling pools of human filth in Gluttony; the river of boiling blood in Violence; the Forest of Suicides where Dante finds his mother and continues his downward spiral into self-loathing.

Yet these are modest interpretations of Hell when compared with the inhabitants of each circle. The Temptress and her outward-reaching crotch-tendril⁶. The shapeless Gluttons that cover Dante in all manner of excrement. The hook-armed babies that erupt from the exposed nipples of a 40-foot zombie Cleopatra. These were the wretched of humankind as imagined by Visceral to make the player squirm. And it works, until the veneer of repulsion is scratched away by the frustrating limitations of the combat system and replaced with simple hatred of the obstacles.

And if it wasn’t enough just to observe the environment, the designers felt the need to make its presence known through pointless interactions with it, like mashing buttons to open doors, chests, and fountains. There are the puzzles solved with barely a thought, serving only as interruptions to the flow of play. It becomes hard to justify the forgiveness of a game that relies on a distressing aesthetic to obscure its failings.

Rather than divide the game up into obvious stages, Visceral stuck with the structure of Inferno and placed the “Boss” characters where they appear in the poem. For example, King Minos – the sorter of sinful souls – must be fought before entering Hell proper (after Limbo), and Cerberus guards the gates into Gluttonous realm. Some areas don’t have bosses, and others bring forth characters from Dante’s life who must be slain and absolved. There is resistance everywhere, and it’s made frighteningly clear that the player shouldn’t be there.

However, the Boss encounters are just more examples of how the game’s combat system fails to emerge from self-sabotage. The Boss creatures are disturbingly impressive to behold – that is, until you have to fight them. There are no “hot spots” in the purest sense; rather, there are prescribed routines that must be followed in order to proceed to the next damage state. And this would be almost bearable were it not for the stilted and imprecise controls that are aggravated in these isolated scenarios, and weapons that feel powerless against them in what feels like intentionally drawn-out fights just to show off the design of these creatures. There are tight windows of opportunity that must be taken in each of these fights, and punishment for missing them is always a significant portion of Dante’s health bar. This is not balanced difficulty: this is the designers resorting to unfair tactics. The response, naturally, is hammering on attacks when these opportunities arise, and using defenses like Divine Armor to recuperate while still being able to take damage. This teaches the player nothing of the game’s combat system – only how to survive it. When the boss creatures are defeated, it is not the glorious thrill of victory that is felt. It is exasperated relief that these battles will never have to be fought again.

In what seems like inches from completing the game, The Malebolge is introduced. The description of each area is taken from the poem, but the theme is not. The ten pits are set up as a series of discrete challenge arenas and bear a resemblance to the hidden challenges in Devil May Cry 4 – something only skilled players should attempt – but they are optional in that game. Instead of carrying themes like the rest of the game, the Malebolge throws an assortment of monsters at the player that have been fought countless times before, and issues a directive that must be completed prior to gaining access to the following pits, such as get a 100-hit combo or stay aloft for eight seconds. This is the sign of a developer who has run out of ideas or time (or both), but through some slavish sense of duty wants to remain faithful to their source material. There was no buildup of difficulty in these challenges, just a bunch of random encounters with some arbitrary way of measuring success. The dramatic change of pace for the Malebolge effectively kills any momentum that was maintained to that point, making the subsequent fight with Lucifer feel like an obligation.

It’s only fitting that the final battle with Lucifer is longer than the others – this is the end of Dante’s journey through Hell. However, the challenge of Lucifer is not one that was fostered and developed for the duration of the game, like the Archfiend in Ninja Gaiden II. The player is suddenly expected to apply skills learned during the gauntlet of the Malebolge (if they were paying attention and not just trying to survive it), and make it through Lucifer’s two forms.

Realistically, the first form of Lucifer provides no course of action for the player except to continue hammering the same attacks as they have been for the whole game while hoping they will make it to the next area. The quick time events allowing the use of the Scythe during this sequence further illustrate its frustrating ineptitude as a weapon. If the player manages to make it through this encounter, they get to face Lucifer on foot.

In this form, Lucifer does not inspire fear – only more exasperation. He is identical to all the other humanoid bosses that were encountered in the game. Aside from some very powerful distance attacks, his movements and melee patterns are predictable. The player watches as Lucifer’s manhood swings between his legs during the battle, as if possessed. The only distraction is wondering how many animators it took to create this feature.

After Lucifer’s patterns are learned it becomes a war of attrition with distance attacks because it is the only way to mitigate damage. Lucifer will also begin to block the Beatrice Cross at some points, forcing the use of the Scythe and further highlighting its decrepitude. The fight lasts what seems like an eternity, as a steady rhythm of Beatrice Cross attacks and rolling dodges is engraved into the mind of the player while they slowly chip away at Lucifer’s health bar. The fight with Lucifer is not so much giving the player a final exam as it is pulling the rug out from underneath their feet.

After defeating Lucifer, Dante is shown naked and reborn, looking at the shores of Purgatory. The heart sinks at what EA and Visceral have planned for this series. What is Dante going to do next? Take on Purgatory? Purgatory is full of people who are allowed to atone for their sins and make their way to the top of a tower into Eden, and eventually Paradise. It’s hard to wrap the mind around what someone would even fight in Paradise. While one can allow Visceral a little flexibility for making the killing happen where it actually makes sense, basing a game on anything other than self-flagellation while ascending a tower is a challenge destined for levels of criticism only hinted at during the buildup to Dante’s Inferno. And since Dante’s Inferno was not universally reviled⁷, someone is thinking about a sequel. Probably two of them.

The Hell of Dante’s Inferno is disturbing, but it is effective. It represents Aligheri’s visions of the worst of humankind, often degenerating into parody to make its point – but it is made nonetheless. Visceral obviously took the time to create a Hell that would both revolt and captivate, to ensure the player is engaged in their surroundings. However, this is no walking tour of Hell. This is a video game, and the easy disassembly of the combat system proves there is little to retain the player when it is easily grasped and mastered through its circumvention. Dante’s Inferno manages to work as the structure for a video game, but it is the execution of the game that is enough to make anyone familiar with them want to throw their controller through a window in disgust. A game that could have risen above mere imitator with the support of its source material becomes frustrating and unnecessary. It is the Hell of Mashing 10,000 Buttons. From the incredulous first announcement to the repugnant advertising campaign, Dante’s Inferno will not be forgotten. Indeed, Dante’s Inferno will receive its place in video game history for many reasons, but not one of them is because it was a good video game.

Darksiders is a wave of nostalgia. It is playing A Link to the Past (1991) on a Super Nintendo console borrowed from a friend away for summer vacation. It is the limited edition comic book with holofoil cover that never existed; in the game are the characters that do battle on these imaginary pages. Darksiders is what happens when a comic book artist has something to say about a video game’s design. The art direction of Darksiders provides a solid foundation for this original setting, where a generous layer of grunge and oversized pauldrons was applied to a formula so revered by video game culture it has become all but untouchable. This aesthetic becomes one of the strongest points of Darksiders, as it is so convincing that the flagrant plagiarism happening underneath can be overlooked. This is not mere homage; the team at Vigil Games has created a video game. The intent of the game’s design is clear from the beginning, and like the adventure it contains, does not deviate from this prescribed pathway. Darksiders has scope and it has goals, but it does not over-reach. The mechanics are inviting and do not ask for anything but the player’s attention. Darksiders demands to be played.

Darksiders has been criticized mainly for its lack of originality; it seems pointing out an obvious trait of video games in general is cause enough for dismissal. The negative commentary claims everything Darksiders has to offer has been done previously – and better – elsewhere. The most popular example being the one-button finishing moves and gratuitous vivisections of the God of War series. However, when playing Darksiders there should really be only one series of video games that comes to mind: The Legend of Zelda. And this should come as no surprise, as it was always the intent of Darksiders Creative Director and comic book artist Joe Madureira¹. Typical for the reception of such an endeavor, Darksiders was the victim of offhanded associations from people who didn’t play the game, or worse – they weren’t paying attention while they played it².

The individuals that purport to dictate taste through these indolent opinions are propagating a disease within video game culture, one that results in some offensive double-speak regarding the advancement and future of the industry. They want innovation, but they don’t want anything too different. They complain about formulas and sequels, yet express deep reverence for a character or game design as old as video games. No one can do platforming like Mario, or solve puzzles like Link in The Legend of Zelda. These memories are untouchable, and the games that inspired them incorruptible³. By adopting this philosophy, the people who play these games with veneration overflowing in their hearts are limiting themselves to the regurgitations of the same formula, made by the same people, to the hollow ringing of cash registers. And in spite of it all, there is never a shortage of criticism when the big studios keep producing these duplicates. This feedback loop is the unfortunate ecosystem of the video game industry.

For the first half of Darksiders, the plagiarism is so obvious that it becomes a running gag as to see which tool will be received in each dungeon. One dungeon had hard to reach switches, which were obvious call signs for a boomerang. Only in Darksiders it’s called a “Crossblade.” The hook shot? It’s been suitably grittied up as the “Abyssal Chain.” Despite this overt imitation, these items were still fashioned to reflect the world of Darksiders. It also calls into question the Zelda series itself: aren’t the recent installments of the series essentially a facsimile of every Zelda game ever made? What Darksiders has going for it is that it isn’t a Zelda game. The genre bullshit can be cast aside because there is no genre – Darksiders is copying a game that has been in a genre of its own since its creation. Darksiders works because it is similarly consistent in its approach. It applies a formula that is obvious from the start and sticks with it for the entirety of the game. As a result there are no surprises, and the disappointments are only from attempting to assign attributes to the game it was never meant to have.

Darksiders begins in some generic North American city in the midst of what is clearly the Apocalypse. The player receives control of War, who arrives with all the bombast expected from one of the mythical Four Horsemen: by emerging from a meteor that had just destroyed a building. Like many recent video games it uses the familiar method of getting a player interested by providing an overpowered character at the start and then thrusting them into the chaos. None of the immediate threats pose any challenge. The player is expected to learn the controls, and to see the endpoint for their avatar in action. Kill, destroy, and ravage as War is attacked by the forces of Heaven and Hell alike. However, the other three Horsemen are missing. Something is wrong. At the end of the starting area there is a fight with the archdemon Straga that there is no hope of winning. War is cast down into some kind of molten limbo, where judgement is passed by the Charred Council. They deem that War’s solo trip to Earth is the cause behind the destruction of Humanity.

From the beginning of Darksiders, the player is encroaching on someone else’s plan. After wrongful accusations about being the catalyst for Armageddon, War must make things right. And nobody wants him to do that, either. They’d rather this wayward Horseman just languish in Hell for eternity with the demons that are allegedly his allies (thus, Darksiders). This is a mission to regain War’s honor and restore balance to the Universe. There are no allies in Darksiders; every one of the allegiances that is formed has its price. Even after the Charred Council permits War to walk the Earth again, they send The Watcher along for the trip to keep War under control. The Watcher is never slow to criticize the player’s actions, yet still manages to act like Link’s fairy companion in Ocarina of Time (1998).

Darksiders is assuredly a revenge story. It will feel familiar to anyone who plays video games. Contrary to the populist sentiments directed towards Darksiders, revenge stories are not new or unique to any particular video game series. In fact, they make the best kind of motivation for the action in video games. It is easy for anyone to grasp. The player doesn’t have to think about anything other than satisfying this basic need, which often involves killing indiscriminately. Darksiders ensures there is ample opportunity for the player to do exactly that.

In stark contrast to the game’s chaotic introduction, the adventure begins at a leisurely pace as War returns to a vastly different Earth. The burnt out and blackened cityscapes are realized like a comic book that isn’t shy about using color to illustrate the desolation. I’d compare the philosophy behind the use of color to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), where a sinister atmosphere can still be conveyed without sacrificing detail or a varied palette for the sake of general dirtiness and a main character drowning in angst. The jagged structures and exaggerated monster design show a consistency of vision employed in each of the game’s environments, and their appeal endures for the course of the game. Even the cutscenes are framed like comic book panels that are only missing the speech bubbles. It captures the spirit of comics that were more interested in showing their readers something that was “cool” to look at – whether it was gratuitous violence or neverending capes – instead of a story worth following. Anyone who read Image Comics in the 1990s will recognize that the world of Darksiders fits comfortably within that period⁴.

To name War’s sword “Chaoseater” was a dangerous gamble. It would either seem unoriginal and juvenile, or it would tap into the collective subconscious of players who grew up on comic books with similarly ridiculous heroes, evoking a singular reaction: “fucking awesome.” Not only does the name awaken the awkward pre-teen that used to beg for money from their parents to spend at the comic shop, it is pretty much the final word on confrontation in this game. It is a sword that eats chaos, the most uncontrollable thing in the Universe. Its thirst for destruction is insatiable. Chaoseater is an artifact bred from the comic book mentality: physically impossible yet invigorating to possess. There is an inertia behind this sword, and you cannot help but succumb to its pull. When you decapitate some beastly demon, you feel it. It is an unstoppable force. Like War.

Combat is straightforward and unassuming. There is usually only one button to press. Press it a few times, lock on with the Left Trigger, and suddenly War is juggling demons like Dante in Devil May Cry. There are hit counters as well, but this is just a number on the screen. Nobody’s watching.

For the most part, War’s multitude of weapon upgrades and special moves are for the player’s entertainment alone. With the exception of the end of dungeon bosses, the player could hammer the main “Attack” button for the entire game and still succeed as in Fable II (2008). Though Darksiders loses a good portion of its appeal with this approach, because Fable II had all that other stuff like property buying and getting married and avatars growing horns out of their head.

The accessible combat system creates a smoothness that resembles Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009). While swinging Chaoseater, War can be directed to his next target to build up a chain of hits. At the end of the skirmish, a group of stunned monsters are left begging to be put down. Pressing “B” will execute a finishing move that differs for each type of enemy, dialing up the theatrics but providing no other benefit. It doesn’t make it any less satisfying, though.

The flourishes of combat in Darksiders are meant to fill in the gaps of the overarching adventure. The Zelda series has always been about adventure through exploration, and combat was an obstruction on the path towards the ultimate goal. Darksiders has a more developed combat system in comparison: it allows the player to relish the details. It is satisfying without being punishing, and there are enough combinations and special attacks that keep it consistently engaging. It allows experimentation because it allows preparation. It is not about reflexes.

As a result, combat is slow relative to other third-person action games, and easy to get a grip on without ever feeling overwhelmed by the adversaries that are presented. Darksiders revels in the little things: the basic, but satisfying finishing moves, watching War’s horse Ruin erupt in flame out of the ground beneath his feet, running through a desert on horseback while being chased by a giant worm – these displays are all unmistakably inspired by those two-page spreads of a favorite comic book hero performing some inhuman feat.

Too weak to take on Heaven and Hell’s armies, War must develop his powers. This is achieved primarily through wandering around and killing things. With each kill, an assortment of souls are dropped: regular souls (for currency), Life, and Wrath (mana). War will gain passive and active powers by completing quests and dungeons or by purchasing them from Vulgrim, the demonic vendor that always seems to be in the right place at the right time. This should all sound very, very familiar.

With the arrangement and distribution of War’s catalogue of abilities, Darksiders also makes a point of ensuring that increases in power are granted to the player in controlled bursts. There is also an excellent tedious-repetition-to-reward ratio. With this constantly in the mind of the player, there is never a time where total mastery over the game’s challenge structure is felt. The player must still work for their rewards.

Chaos Form, which is an ability introduced about half way through the game, allows War to change into a fiery demon, providing a brief period of invincibility and higher damage output. The only way to recharge this power is to build up Rage through attacking more enemies. The game provides no ability to increase the size of the Rage meter, and the slower recharge rate ensures that the ability is used sparingly. There are also areas where heavy weapons are available on a per-encounter basis: a high-powered plasma rifle dropped by heavily armoured Angels, or an exploding spear gun dropped by Demons. These weapons are meant to deal with large crowds quickly with their fast rate of fire and damage output. However, both weapons severely limit mobility, and are further examples of power being suppressed in this game. This cautious release of offensive weapons and abilities provides a great contrast with Prototype (2009), which gives away too much, too fast to the player so that the system of challenges beings to break down almost immediately⁵.

The Mask of Shadows is an item given to War during the buildup to the final battle with The Destroyer. Its function is to show objects in the Shadow world that would otherwise be invisible in the Real world. Its sole purpose is to find pieces of the Armageddon Blade, the only weapon that can be used against the Destroyer.The Mask of Shadows could have been the equivalent of the Magic Mirror in A Link to the Past. Had this item been given to War earlier, it could have effectively doubled the size of the game world in Darksiders: opportunities for more puzzles, more treasure hunting, more mobs to fight. However, this becomes a question of balance with the main story. How would this expanded world have been worked into War’s quest? Instead of a game world that could unravel into repetitive quests and unnecessary backtracking, the exploration is kept restrained and manageable. The final goal always remains visible so that the player remains focused.

As enjoyable as the weapons available in the game are, there are two key weak points in War’s arsenal: the Tremor Gauntlet and Ruin, War’s horse. The Tremor Gauntlet is actually an upgrade of War’s existing gauntlet, which already allows War to run along ledges as in Prince of Persia (2008)⁶. The gauntlet alone was fine, as eventually no jumping puzzle in Darksiders felt complete without a few sections of cliff or ledges to scale. The mistake lies in making the Tremor Gauntlet a weapon – it was one weapon too many. Chaoseater is undeniably the best weapon in the game, and perfectly suited for the primary attack. The Scythe can be purchased as an alternate attack, though its use is mainly for crowd control and fast distance attacks. The Tremor Gauntlet is completely ineffective in combat; the other two weapons completely outclass it for every combat situation. The Tremor Gauntlet is granted because it is the only item that can break passages blocked by ice, and in that regard is no more useful than the Crossblade or Abyssal Chain in combat. Instead of making the Tremor Gauntlet a levelable weapon alongside Chaoseater and the Scythe, why not spend the effort developing more attacks for Chaoseater? A resourceful player is able to max out the Chaoseater’s abilities fairly easily. In this case, it would have been more beneficial to add more powers to War’s two main weapons, instead of trying to come up with completely new ones for the Tremor Gauntlet that will go unused.

Not surprisingly, the biggest mistake made was relegating Ruin to a “power” that is obtained about half way through the game. The numerous Zelda comparisons in the video game press weren’t without their references to Epona, but the relationship between War and Ruin is one established purely on functionality. And it’s a frustrating one, because Ruin is on the fucking box. Starting Darksiders you’d almost expect to be reunited with such a beast early on in the game – it’s preposterous that a Horseman of the Apocalypse has to earn his horse. This is explained through the story, however, as Ruin was captured and broken by the Demon hordes in your hundred-year absence. When the reunion finally does happen, it is glorious: On horseback, War’s attacks are much more devastating as large, gory swaths are through demon mobs. For a brief moment you feel like the Apocalypse ride again. But these moments are painfully fleeting. Instead, there are just a few select areas where Ruin can be used as transportation, or as a solution to an invisible bridge puzzle.

While most of War’s weapons and powers have obvious analogues in the Zelda series, they nevertheless feel like they belong in the world of Darksiders. Yes, there are puzzle contrivances, but what kind of Zelda imitator would this be without them? Following through with this line of thinking will result in some very disturbing questions: just what is a Horseman of the Apocalypse doing all this stuff for, anyway? Jumping around and pushing blocks? Hunting for Keys? Swimming? Reasoning with angels and demons? There is but one task for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: to act as harbingers of the Final Judgement. Except that this is a video game. Asking serious questions about such a manufactured fantasy setting makes about as much sense as trying to reconstruct Todd McFarlane’s backstory for Spawn. There comes a time where you have to let go and allow this outlandish video game to run its course. And in Darksiders this is during the encounter with the Jailer, a sub-boss of the first dungeon. A bulbous, throbbing monster with glowing pustules that would make fine targets for the recently obtained Crossblade. It is exactly here that the player sees the limits of this video game’s ambitions. With a game this honest and forthcoming about its intentions, it is hard to fault Darksiders for reinforcing the limits that have been set for it. The best part of familiarity is how it can be so inviting.

To call the world of Darksiders “open” would be grossly inaccurate, but still an unfortunate byproduct of modern video game marketing. Any game released in recent years must proclaim its openness and freedom for serious consideration by the masses, because that’s what video games should aspire to be. In truth, Darksiders is open like the Zelda games are open. That is, there is a hub world with fixed limits that contains a mix of open areas and dungeons interspersed in the Apocalyptic wastage, and with the acquisition of equipment or powers access is gained to previously blocked and hidden areas. Darksiders encourages exploration once War starts to gain back his equipment and abilities, but this exploration is far from being formless. The player was placed on a path at the beginning of the game and they must follow it in that order if they hope to accomplish anything.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a modern video game without some form of fast travel, despite the world being set within obvious limits. Instead of providing Ruin from the start, the game introduces Serpent Holes to travel between areas. These aren’t simply waypoints, though, as control of War is still maintained as he travels through an ethereal realm to get to the opposite end, representing the destination in the physical world.

The problem with the Serpent Holes is that they are necessary. In Diablo II, where waypoints are almost like progress save points, they are there as a safety net should the player die and want to retrieve their corpse in a reasonable amount of time. If the player chose to, they could fight their way from the base camp out to the corpse and collect experience points on the way – it was entirely up to the player. In Darksiders, because the monsters and wandering enemies are sparse it’s simply not that rewarding to run between the game’s main areas like that. Yes, the monsters all respawn randomly – and there are certainly some areas that provide excellent “grinding” locations to harvest souls – but because these are relatively isolated, just wandering around to try and have fun with the combat system tends to be harder than it should.

Indeed, Darksiders genuinely creates a feeling of wanderlust. In that sense, Darksiders is more like the recent portable Castlevania titles in the way its effortless blend of combat and exploration always yields some trivial reward: experience to upgrade weapon damage, money (souls), Life shards or Wrath shards to upgrade the associated gauges. Exploration will also reveal artifacts that can be traded to Vulgrim for souls. There just isn’t enough of this meandering. In Metroid or Castlevania, once a new ability is gained there is an immediate desire to try it out and to see what is newly accessible. The game’s designers have done their best to establish that careful balance between the linear progression of the main quest, and modest exploration. As much as the Darksiders world demands to be expanded, the limits only serve to maintain perspective for the ultimate objective. Any openness perceived inside the game world is never overwhelming; this is an adventure where the end was always intended to be in sight.

The game’s difficulty begins to increase when you are first presented with “challenge rooms”, which are areas that are blocked off until you defeat everything in them. This should be familiar to players of the Zelda series, Devil May Cry, God of War and the recent Bayonetta. These challenges start on the approach to the Twilight Cathedral, the first dungeon. The previously lazy and loose combat suddenly becomes important to think about, though the only skill required is an attention span. The monster patterns are recognizable. Attacks are blockable. There is War’s growing repertoire of powers that only get stronger. These are areas that have been constructed to provide legitimate challenge and encourage active participation in combat. It is Zelda if Shigeru Miyamoto was a mean-spirited bastard. The difficulty is not punishing, but it is nonetheless present in the tasks it lays in front of the player. It is a warning that this will be no light-hearted affair.

Nevertheless, criticism has been directed at the unassuming level of difficulty in Darksiders, but these assertions are hastily made. Part of the reason the difficulty of Darksiders is dismissed is that it can be inconsistent. The Twilight Cathedral⁷ is the most enjoyable dungeon in the game for its carefully distributed challenges, monster encounters, and final fight with Tiamat, the end boss. It is also the hardest, as the final encounter with Tiamat sets the bar so high the remaining bosses – even the Destroyer himself – are pushovers by comparison because of the special abilities and weapons that have been collected to that point. Even though the guiding hand of the designers is present through the game’s proceedings, constantly establishing limits, the balance of difficulty is not transparent. These easily perceptible missteps cast doubt on the entire affair for any player that’s looking for a reason to dislike the game.

Entering the first dungeon clearly illustrates the intentions for the rest of the game, even though it doesn’t always follow through on this promise. The Twilight Cathedral is where most of my deaths in the entire game occurred. The use of the Crossblade in the first part of the fight with Tiamat assures many frustrating false starts before the pattern is learned and controls are mastered. The second part of the fight requires use of dodge and timing War’s stronger attacks with Chaoseater while he is weakened. And since it is early on in the game, War’s health bar is no buffer against the onslaught. Victory in this battle is one of those rare feelings you get with a video game; it doesn’t make you want to put down the controller, even with the ridiculous punishment that was just experienced. It makes you want to take on the rest of this post-Apocalyptic wasteland, and the armies of Heaven and Hell that struggle for control of it. Even though the remaining dungeons don’t match up to this first encounter, they still feel substantial and satisfying. They are exactly as long as they need to be, and are a fair balance between puzzles and combat.

Every boss fight seems to end with a video showing some exaggerated killing blow from War, like ripping the wings off of a dragon or gutting a sandworm like a fish. These theatrics should be familiar to players of Devil May Cry and God of War. While satisfying to watch (typical complaints about lack of interactivity at these points aside, of course), this disconnect is even more pronounced in Darksiders, because the combat is already streamlined in comparison to these two games. Despite their dramatic nature, the actions shown in these cutscenes always had nothing to do with the activities War had to perform moments earlier to weaken the boss. To require a player to execute some relatively menial task when an especially extravagant move lies in wait just to be shown in a closing video is a little insulting. Darksiders should have a little more faith in the Player. A game like Devil May Cry 4 gets away with this because the attack patterns are not prescribed based on the weapons that happen to be featured in a particular dungeon. The rest of Devil May Cry 4 is mostly a movie anyway – placed back-to-back, the cutscenes would make one of the greatest action films of all time. Darksiders allows uninterrupted control during its boss fights, and then suddenly rips it away at the end, leaving a massive void between the player and their investment in the game’s action during these pivotal moments. After Tiamat, bosses are mere puzzles to be solved – just like Zelda.

Any goodwill generated for the game up until the last dungeon is almost completely lost, however, as the player is subjected to the self-awareness of the designers. The Black Throne is what happens when a development team thinks their game is too short. It is a dungeon divided into three parts, representing three bonds that imprison Azrael, an Angel that has decided to help War find the true cause of the Apocalypse. This dungeon is a crippling change of pace, as it includes an overabundance of puzzles involving the Voidwalker. The Voidwalker is a portal gun obtained in this dungeon that can only be used on designated portal tiles. The locations of these tiles are found throughout the dungeon, but the accompanying puzzles are nowhere near the complexity of the game that obviously influenced this mechanic. And while the puzzles are not hard to solve, limitations on camera movement and viewing angle make these sequences unnecessarily challenging. These puzzles are broken up by fighting the same boss three times, and a particularly tough challenge room where the player is suddenly faced with managing health versus ridiculous escalations in enemy toughness. It is painful design trope used to stall out the end of the game, and disrupts the balance in encounters that had been carefully maintained until then.

After conquering the Black Throne and obtaining the Mask of Shadows, War must search out the hidden shards of the Armageddon Blade. Like Zelda and Metroid, the player is required to backtrack through the entire game world looking for things that were always there, just inaccessible. And while this sequence could easily have bordered on tedious backtracking⁸ and brought more attention to a world that has been carefully constructed to limit excessive exploration, instead it gets right to the point. The locations of these shards are obvious, and if the player has paid attention during the brief bouts of exploration prior to this mission, they should already know where they are. This part of the game is also an opportunity to collect the remainder of the Abyssal Armour set with War’s full compliment of abilities. It is the montage before the final battle; these were preparations for the climactic confrontation with the Destroyer. And the fight is on horseback, as it should be.

Upon victory, Darksiders is fully primed for a sequel in an expected, but nonetheless exciting reveal. It does not feel cheap or gratuitous. Instead, it instills a feeling of hopefulness. Darksiders is not a perfect game – as it has been mentioned here the shortcomings are obvious to anyone who is looking for them. Nevertheless, Darksiders succeeds in adapting a venerated formula to introduce a new world to anyone who is willing to take the time to play inside of it. It ensures the Player is invested in its lore, as adolescent as it may be, so that they are committed to playing a sequel. The ending is Joe Madureira and Vigil Games saying: “See you next month.”

Examining Darksiders strictly from a mechanical perspective would reveal a design that is copying a familiar formula while referencing recent successes in the third-person action genre to make itself relevant for modern audiences. It is uncanny in its implementation of The Legend of Zelda formula, and yet it is incredibly satisfying to be able to play what amounts to a missing Zelda game without the actual Zelda aesthetic, characters, and well-worn concepts. Darksiders does not pander to an aging audience like Ghostbusters: The Video Game⁹. Darksiders is preserving old designs, not copying them. Novels and film borrow liberally from each other all the time. If done right, no one argues the lack of inventiveness in these media or its modernization of archetypal themes and stories to reach new audiences. So why must video games be held to an impossible standard of originality, just because they are relatively new to these forms of creative expression? And with video game enthusiasts clumsily trying to compare video games to these cultural mainstays for indications of their worth, one would think that Darksiders is easily forgiven its brazen plagiarism. Equating quality with originality is a dangerous assertion to make about video games.

With Darksiders, Vigil Games has taken something familiar from the collective consciousness of video games and created more than an homage: they have made a video game that is entirely captivating on its own to play. It is easy to submit to the unique aesthetic and cohesive presentation of the game world, its vibrant characters, the satisfying swordplay, and modest exploration. It ensures the player remains inside the game, while keeping the occasionally awkward storytelling out of the way. Darksiders is not always easy, but the game is never antagonistic. The guiding hand of the designers is always present, ensuring the player is rewarded suitably for the adversities they encounter. It is an adventure that has been carefully manufactured, its restraint in scope allowing players to fully experience the setting with mechanics that are already comfortable. Darksiders is a video game that understands its place, and does not attempt to rise above its station as genuine imitator. Darksiders lays out its aspirations in full view at the beginning of the game, so that disappointment only comes from assigning attributes the game was never meant to have. Darksiders is a celebration of its uniquely realized setting, and it is up to the player to put aside any pretenses saved for obvious exploitations of video game history. And when they do, they will not play an homage. They will play a video game.

Including the New York Public Library as a playable mission in the demo¹ should have been a dead giveaway. As one of the signature setpieces in the film Ghostbusters, allowing players to take part in a second trip to this locale with familiar faces in tow, is essentially what Ghostbusters: The Video Game entails. It collects a series of touchstones for players to reminisce about, while attempting to tell a new story. Except the story reclaims entire sections of the film and its sequel, patching together plot points, locations and famous adversaries in what amounts to playing inside a world of Ghostbusters: Greatest Hits. You are constantly harangued by Walter Peck and the new Paranormal Contract Oversight Committee. You have to fight the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man (again). You get to destroy the Sedgewick Hotel (again). About the only thing interesting is the encounter with Ivo Shandor, the Architect of Dana Barrett’s apartment building from the first film, who remained a legend that was never really explored. In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, you discover how obsessed with the Gozerian cult he really was, as the Ghosbusters slowly uncover a plot designed by Shandor years ago, to bring about the coming of The Destroyer.

This brief incursion into Ghostbusters lore comes too late in the game, and it’s frustratingly obvious that the previous missions were filler to relive everyone’s favorite moments from the films. But as you play the game, its intentions are clear: this is not meant to be a video game as much as it is intended to be those Greatest Hits, as it was not designed for an audience who plays video games. Rather, it was created to placate fans of the movies that also happen to play video games.

As a result, both Terminal Reality and Atari are banking on this brand recognition to give the game a passing grade. Any critic or reviewer that has been paying attention over the last eight years would see this game for what it is: old, outdated, unnecessary. So why the relatively high scores², respectable sales performance³ and praise as wistful recollections? The answer is simple: Nostalgia is a dangerous weapon used to great effect in the video game industry. It will beat people senseless – especially in a hobby that helped many people through their childhoods.

If Terminal Reality were feeling ambitious when they started the project, they could have made Ghostbusters into a game that stood beside other “open-world” ⁴ titles like Red Faction: Guerrilla, inFamous, and Prototype that seemed to be in fashion in the first half of 2009. The entire concept behind Ghostbusters is ripe for exploitation with this formula, where side-missions can be completed while following the main plot to key story-driven missions in the streets of New York City. Even the films themselves establish such a framework: the Ghostbusters are either starting out (Ghostbusters) or making a comeback (Ghostbusters II), completing small tasks on the way to fighting a greater evil. The entire film worked towards a final confrontation. This should be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a video game.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is not just another example of the lack of ambition on the part of game designers to develop a captivating product, but of the industry at large: stuck in the past assuming that the weight of intellectual property and the familiar will bear heavily on the opinions of those that play their game. Ghostbusters: The Video Game is not just old because it reuses scenes, jokes and events from the films, but also because of its unwavering approach to the game’s objectives. Its linear design is based on the most rudimentary of movie-tie ins. While the actual “ghostbusting” remains fun until the end, it’s hard not to view Ghostbusters: The Video Game as anything more than a third-person shooting gallery with proton packs. In this regard, the game fails on two fronts: it cannot provide an engaging framework for a game, and it cannot provide an engaging enough story to excuse the simple mechanics.

I was hoping for something like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, where the creators clearly took the source material to heart, and created a brand new adventure that may have borrowed from the original films, but didn’t overtly copy them. Instead, the game carried the spirit of the original source so that it wouldn’t seem out of place next to the films that inspired it. Ghostbusters: The Video Game had the potential to do this as well, and would have made the limitations of the game a little easier to tolerate. The story and script were handled by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis – the writers responsible for the original films – and the best they could come up with falls hopelessly short of these expectations.

Ackroyd often said in the interviews promoting the game and his involvement with it that Ghostbusters: The Video Game is “essentially Ghostbusters III“⁵, or the sequel that everyone wanted but never received. And to revisit the same locations so predictably says a lot about their opinions and assumptions of the fan base. The fans want wish fulfillment, they want cheap thrills. They want the security blanket of their youth. And they got it.

The dialogue will make you laugh, and the sarcastic delivery of most lines will certainly bring you back to watching the movies as an impressionable youth. The fluidity of the dialogue is also impressive. Either the actors are drawing from experience, or more time than usual was spent in the studio. In either case, it suits the game and presents a playful atmosphere reminiscent of the films. Any scenarios intended to invoke fear are always undermined by a one-liner or wisecrack from one of the team, which is something the films did so well. However, the cutscenes between levels felt long, as if the development team were trying to assemble a movie. Except it doesn’t actually work when the game is already stripped to the bare essentials.

Apart from the infiltration of Ivo Shandor’s hidden island laboratory, players have seen everything else before. There is precious little information offered to substantiate the lore presented in the previous films. Reusing old plot points with different characters is common practice. To take Ghostbusters: The Video Game as the third film would therefore be a mistake, as I doubt any studio would support such a horrible script. And this is yet more evidence of the divergence between video games and their clumsy and pleading comparisons to the film industry: a bad plot in film is a pretty good plot for a video game, even as we “turn our brains off” as the reviewers love to justify. No one should play video games because they want to watch a movie. They would be wasting their time, and that of everyone else when they start complaining about the lack of interactivity afterward.

The depth to the system in Ghostbusters: The Video Game is through upgrades that can be purchased with money earned on each mission: better traps, four types of particle beams, modifications to the PKE meter. In other words, the most callous and unimaginative reason to ask someone to keep playing your game.

I’m willing to give Egon the benefit of the doubt for some of the weapons that were invented specifically for this game – the character was clearly a wizard with technology. They also keep with genre conventions to some degree: Boson darts are the shotgun, the freeze beam slows enemies, etc. However, simply pausing the game will allow the purchase of these upgrades. In fact, there is one mission where a new technology is suddenly activated on your proton pack in the middle of a mission, meaning you had been carrying it all along. I can understand the need for a certain technology to be available for a particular mission, but the mission progression should be designed so these upgrades could be purchased or handed out at the beginning of each. Allowing this kind of freedom to access new technology at any time removes the need for a planning phase. Even in such a linear game as this, the addition of something so simple would at least give the illusion of challenge.

Trapping ghosts is still satisfying right until the end. The game really makes you work for it. You feel the bend and pull of the makeshift equipment in your hands. With the “Slam Dunk” modification to the trap, ghosts can be captured in one shot if you Slam a ghost near a trap. In either case there is an exaggerated feeling of relief when the ghost is finally caught. You have to take a few seconds to regroup, even though there are five other ghosts floating around above you. The moment has to be savored. There are so precious few of them in this game.

A dynamic of the game that only reveals itself later on is teamwork. This isn’t as necessary at the beginning, where fallen teammates were an inconvenience during a boss battle. In the later missions, there are multiple ghosts requiring attention from your particle thrower, and even then they will require more than one person to knock it into submission. During these encounters, you need your teammates to survive. Even though a ghost may be seconds away from being trapped, you have to drop everything and revive your teammates or you will die attempting to do everything yourself. An example of this is in the Museum mission, where you must manage the ghostly possession of civilians as well as your own teammates, all the while attempting to capture the ghosts that are responsible. It’s a harsh lesson, but one that was clearly presented by the films. The war against the supernatural in New York City is not a solo effort.

In fact, starting with the fight against the Librarian partway through the third chapter, the game starts to show promise. Aside from the constant direction and commentary from your teammates, the encounters with large ghosts and mission bosses are challenging as you manage damage and try to recover teammates. It can be a frustrating system as you attempt to compensate for the middling squad AI, but at the end of each battle there is a sense of accomplishment. It’s like repeating the last 10 minutes of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II each time. These encounters are the reason you keep playing.

And yet the game really starts to break down in the last act when travelling towards the final encounter with Shandor. It becomes difficult in the way you have to manage projectile enemies, swarming enemies, ghosts that must be trapped, and larger monsters. This is a sharp spike that throws off the previously established rhythm of the game. It is no longer about “hunting” ghosts, but fending them off with random blasts of particle beams just to get some space to do your job.

The final showdown with the mayor of New York City – possessed by the ghost of Ivo Shandor, no less – provides a two-stage battle that evokes something startlingly similar to the conclusion of Ghostbusters II. Though Terminal Reality must be given accolades for this encounter, as it is an extremely satisfying, drawn-out fight in the spirit realm, instead of the lucky shots at the end of each film that were favored in the name of pacing. The game’s plot had genuine closure, and all was right with the world (again).

So it’s quite puzzling as to why Terminal Reality assumed that multiplayer would be a big draw for people after the main game was completed, when all it really amounts to is a collection of random task-based missions that can be played co-operatively. It was wasted effort, considering that it had no hope of competing with more attractive options for online play at the time. And Terminal Reality wasn’t even responsible for this component of the game; it was contracted out to Threewave Software. Assuming that this freed up more time to be spent on the single-player campaign, the overall package doesn’t show it.

Nevertheless, there are the collective opinions of the press that must be resolved. If anyone took the time to consider what was being offered by the game, it would be very hard to justify the 78% average that the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 versions have received. Reading any number of reviews⁶ will yield the same sentiment: if you like Ghostbusters, this game is for you. But what if I like video games? No one dared look at this game critically, or in depth beyond pointing out obvious faults – it was perfectly acceptable to give the game an average score an move on, business as usual. There is no need to desecrate happy childhood memories. But sometimes there is.

Make no mistake: Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a tie-in to the films. The producers of the video game said as much: the release of the game was intended to coincide with the anniversary of the theatrical release of the first film, and the remastering of the films on Blu Ray. And yet any other movie tie-in is automatically approached with contempt by the video game press, as if these other video games were the reason the industry overall was being cheapened. Except that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. It’s just that no one wants to see it.

A recognizable piece of intellectual property can be made into a good video game – there are already a number of examples from recent years – but they, too, suffer the same fate of being intellectual property first, and a video game second. The most recent case of this is Batman: Arkham Asylum, where the general sentiment was “a Batman game that isn’t terrible.” How special developers Rocksteady must feel!

If players are happy to “play Ghostbuster”, Ghostbusters: The Video Game certainly succeeds on that crude level. But why should it get a passing grade just for fan service? It’s the same reason why video games should not be given the right of way because it supplies “a good story”⁷. These are games, and should be judged as such from the beginning. Giving these types of games an acceptable grade assures that we we will see more of this half-hearted approach, proving once again that we are destined to recycle the same material with better graphical fidelity. Being satisfied with “good enough”, assures a future of being fed leftovers from the trough of nostalgia.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game isn’t long, and so despite the numerous faults that have been pointed out here it doesn’t take long to finish. The thrill of wrangling ghosts and capturing lasted until the end, even with the spike in difficulty. The production is also well done: Atari spared no expense in obtaining the music and original actors (they even dug up William Atherton to play Walter Peck). All the earmarks of a work inspired by these movies is there. But this is looking through the Ghostbusters Yearbook, and we’re all grown up now, and the Ghostbusters are old friends that aren’t as interesting as your remember them. Ghostbusters: The Video Game could have put a familiar face on the proven, comfortable sandbox/”open world” formula. Bust ghosts with your pals Venkman, Stanz, Spengler and Zedmore. But do it inside the structure of a game that is well-equipped for such a theme. Invent your own story. Save the city of New York again, on your terms.

So the question for the player becomes: Am I interested enough in a recycled story to continue?

Even though Ghostbusters: The Video Game takes place in 1991, the game is still stuck in its own past as a hopeless artifact of the 1980s. A retread referencing old jokes, old plot points and forever doomed to be a nostalgic curiosity. If Terminal Reality had worked on making a video game instead of a finely polished homage, there might have been something in Ghostbusters: The Video Game worth praising. As it stands, nostalgia is the selling feature and weighs heavily on the game’s proceedings. For some, that is obviously enough. However, complaining about a lack of advancement in video games, while cuddling with one that is mired in our collective childhood means there is really only one person to blame. And there will be no sympathy.

In the wait for Diablo III, Torchlight has been cause for celebration among those that wish for an effortless and predictable excursion into well-worn territory. But like Darkstone was to the deadspace between Diablo and Diablo II, Torchlight is being overvalued because of timing. I’ll certainly give Runic Games credit for creating a slick action role playing game that pays adequate homage to Blizzard’s seminal genre template, but Torchlight is in a genre holding pattern that is waiting for something else to take its place.

Indeed, Diablo is a name is guaranteed to be referenced when talking about any gear collecting, gold hoarding, point-click-kill marathon. And perhaps some developers think that this is something to aspire to, hoping to capture the players that don’t want to pay for an MMORPG by capitalizing on the success of a proven formula. But does the already diluted genre of role playing games need another Diablo clone?¹ What is this really offering the platform of PC gaming, in a time when the industry is rightfully criticized for creating sequels and clones and sequels of clones?

That’s a pretty heavy topic for such an innocent genre retread to lead to – after all, Torchlight is instant and fleeting gratification at its most elemental. One would also be remiss in failing to point out that Torchlight is a front to fund Runic’s upcoming Free-to-Play/micropayment MMORPG². There’s not much more you can say about Torchlight‘s intentions, even if like Neverwinter Nights the game and its toolset are being released to provide a product for the community with virtually endless replayability. Yet I was still compelled to spend many hours with Torchlight, because it closed the loop on something that was started almost five years ago.

I found the enthusiast press reaction to Torchlight a little disturbing. The critical reception seems to agree that there’s nothing to it; beyond the item hoarding and watching numbers go up, Torchlight offers no more than you would expect from an acolyte of Diablo, complete with a soundtrack that is essentially Matt Uelmen riffing on the themes from Diablo II. And for simply meeting these expectations, it has managed to receive generally positive reviews³, and has been included on many best of 2009 lists. Does Torchlight represent the triumph of the “indie” or “underdog” spirit? Are fans of the genre so desperate for a true successor to its figurehead that they are satisfied with design by association? This is another symptom indicative of the game industry’s ability to succeed by creating graphical updates of very old, overused game concepts. I don’t even buy refinement as an excuse, because it adds only a few minor flourishes to the design of Fate⁴, a game by WildTangent released in 2005. Travis Baldree, was the lead designer for Fate. He is also the lead designer for Torchlight.

The praise for Torchlight becomes highly suspect when there are no heavy references to Fate, because the similarities are obvious throughout the game’s proceedings. Runic’s development roster consists of a mixture of WildTangent, Blizzard North and Flagship Studios expatriates. Aside from some offhanded references to the pedigree of Torchlight‘s team in some reviews, it’s apparent no one bothered to make the connection. In 2005, Fate was named on many year-end lists, too⁵. It wasn’t a good year for role playing games.

The result is that Torchlight is presented by the enthusiast press as a minor revelation, and one can only conclude that these are the opinions of people who never played Fate. Indeed, the pet that brought unwanted gear back to town for gold was a fantastic idea, and seems to be one that many advocates of the game latch on to. The same goes for the shared Item Stash that can be accessed by all of the characters saved on the same computer. However, like many other concepts in Torchlight, these features were directly transplanted from Fate. And it’s a good thing; in many ways, Torchlight is the game I wished Fate had been. It unquestionably exhibits a more cohesive presentation, so I didn’t feel like my character was some paper doll wandering around in randomly drawn levels fighting randomly spawned creatures dropping randomly generated items. Torchlight has a common thread, and as tenuous as it may be, there is at least some goal to achieve in this game beyond nursing a sore index finger.

What arises from this scenario is a question of the acceptable level of ignorance for reviewing a game of a particular genre. The same could be said of a publication that gives a fighting game to someone who dislikes them, and expects a fair review to be produced. But if a reviewer knew or cared to point out it was simply a visual upgrade to something that had been done previously – by some of the same people, no less – would it have elicited the same response? I can’t help but get the sense that Torchlight is receiving the treatment of the typical independent or low-key release that does something noteworthy, so that critics can give it the requisite pat on the head and move on to the next high-profile release. Like my feelings towards Borderlands, I refuse to accept that Torchlight‘s greatness is supported by its ability to be a faithful recreation of the mechanics of Diablo.

The three character classes offered by Torchlight are a welcome change to Fate‘s non-template, where there were no classes and the system was so open you could create whatever you wanted⁶. But what initially appeared as flexible is actually a poorly implemented system that makes you wonder what is in front of you after experimenting with all the skill point options and delving through fifty levels of random dungeon. Torchlight only allows the increase of the same basic attributes of any action RPG: Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Defense, and they all start off at the more or less the same value and provide the same benefits to each class (More strength means better armour and melee damage, more Magic means more Magic Damage, etc.). Playing an Alchemist felt very close to a fighter-mage, provided I was equipped with suitable armor and a staff with large damage output. In fact, there are very little trade-offs for system optimizers that want to create melee hybrid classes, making the starting class choice meaningless except for the Skills that accompany them.

The Skill selection for each class is uninteresting, but serviceable. The skills are entirely dependent on character level; there is no “tree” of prerequisites. Thus, there is no commitment from the player to a particular branch of special abilities; most can simply be ignored until more powerful ones become available and cherry-picked out of the set. In fact, the mid-level skills (such as Ember Lance and Ember Lighting, the case of the Alchemist) feel so overpowered that there isn’t much use in spending points on anything else. Saving up Skill points becomes a common strategy. It is also odd that spell scrolls were included as an alternate source of magic. This is more of a carryover from Diablo, where a Warrior class could actually learn a Fireball spell if the scroll was picked up as an item drop. There are only four slots to store these spells, and un-learning them destroys the scroll. This isn’t as much of a sacrifice as it seems – the amount of spell scrolls that are dropped by monsters or purchased through vendors provides an ample supply to draw from. This seems like an element of design that was kept in by mistake; once again, the line for a character’s class is blurred when a Destroyer is able to wield a Level III fireball spell if they are willing to spend the Magic attribute points or have equipment that grants them. A more complicated skill tree with dependencies to make character builds more of an investment for the player would have synchronized Torchlight with its contemporaries.

In Fate, everything was randomly generated. Quests, items, the floors of the endless dungeon – even the “boss” monster to be faced at the end of the game was generated when a new character was started. By having a thread of quests based on an over-arching storyline, Torchlight avoids the same pitfalls of being inconsequential by providing a reason to keep going down into the dungeons. It’s the typical fledgling hero versus evil mage story, and the main characters in it don’t change every time you play the game. There is consistency in that, at least.

The dungeon levels in Torchlight are still randomly generated, but their layouts appear deliberate. And every seven levels, the surroundings change. It’s strange to see such a variation in environments going down through one set of catacombs, but Diablo did this too. There are new monsters to fight and they all seem to fit together with each level’s theme. It’s a welcome change from the obvious tileset and monster randomization of Fate. But once again Torchlight did not adopt what has become a genre convention: a surface world with more than one town, instead of stacking the differently themed levels.

Nevertheless, the structure and appearance of each dungeon level map are well-crafted and evoke an individual personality for Torchlight. There is a feeling of depth to each dungeon level, whether it’s through the layering of stairs or putting some inaccessible areas as background filler. This is one of the things I liked about the Barbarian Highlands in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and was further illustrated by the outdoor regions in Titan Quest. It gives the impression of scale and that there is some substance to these areas.

Indeed, Torchlight‘s strongest attribute is its appearance. It looks light-hearted and fun, which is yet another element borrowed from Fate. But in Fate, the game suffered from overly cute character and monster design; there was nothing threatening about its adoption of a casual game’s aesthetic. Torchlight corrects this, so that the game bears enough of a resemblance to what’s expected of a fantasy setting in action role-playing games without drifting into the bland side of the spectrum like Darkstone or Dungeon Siege II. Clearly someone at Runic was paying attention to Blizzard’s philosophy behind the art direction of World of Warcraft.

Because Torchlight‘s scope is limited to one town, it is considerably scaled down from its contemporaries. There are only four people in the town that give out quests, and they all have a type of quest repeated for the whole game with the exception of quests related to the main story thread. The monsters that must be slain are random, the items that must be retrieved are random, and the rewards are random and usually junk when they should have been level and class-based. You will always find better equipment through item drops or even at the vendors, as the game does a terrific job of randomizing their supply. The various non-player characters offer up these quests as if you want to do them, but it hardly seems worth it aside from the experience grind. Runic obviously spent more time on the game’s appearance. Because like Fate, if you play Torchlight for more than five hours you come to realize there is no end to the randomization of the entire affair. There is no incentive to do any of the quests other than there is nothing else to do.

What becomes immediately obvious to veterans of this genre is the lack of difficulty. The most lively parts of the game are the boss or special monster encounters, which often result in drawn out battles of health potion attrition. While the experience and looting grind may be enough incentive to spend hours in the catacombs below the town, even on Hard Torchlight quickly becomes an exercise in tedium when it poses minimal resistance. Money is easy to obtain through selling most of the items that get dropped. There is no money sink through something like equipment degradation, so there is nothing preventing players from stocking up on potions to guarantee survival though most of the tougher mob and level boss encounters. When you die, you “choose your Fate”: respawn at the exact point of death for a loss of experience and renown, at the beginning of the level for a loss of money, or in town for no penalty. And since town portals are persistent between sessions, getting sent back to town is always the best option.

There are also waypoints located at each of the transition areas between the main sections of dungeon, but using these just results in a longer walk. There are no monster respawns on the cleared dungeon levels – even between sessions – so there is no way to earn experience simply by travelling through previously cleared areas, or added risk in retrieving your corpse. If the levelling treadmill provides no opposition, is the purpose of this game to just get to the end? You can’t even show off your character’s gear to anyone. Is it the infinite randomness? Last time I checked, you could go down 2,000,000-plus levels in Fate. While I’m reluctant to label Torchlight as more genre pollution⁷, Torchlight commits a similar mistake to Borderlands in assuming that providing a new skin for the same well-worn formula is enough. Though at least Torchlight isn’t coy about it.

Everyone likes to compliment Runic on their work in creating Torchlight‘s OGRE engine, and how the game had such a quick development cycle. I have no problems acknowledging this feat when presented with such a polished product. It’s evident that Runic wanted to create something familiar for fans of the genre, and for some people this is good enough. But I see Torchlight as a necessary step to something better. I think Runic did too.

Torchlight doesn’t have any multiplayer. That seems to be the biggest complaint I’ve seen in reviews of this game. And it’s a valid one, when multiplayer is typical among this game’s peers in the year 2009. I took the same exception to Fate, and now that the dungeon design resembles something with purpose, Torchlight would be the perfect pick-up game for a few friends. Given the pedigree of the design team, one would think that multiplayer would be a foregone conclusion. But I suspect it was omitted on purpose.

Torchlight was released mainly to test the OGRE engine and to gauge player response to the game and its setting. In general, the critical reception seems satisfied without multiplayer, so there’s no need to include it even as an add-on. Runic has already confirmed as much on the official forums. Instead, Runic continues to work towards their MMORPG based in the Torchlight universe. Torchlight was an experiment, and the players of the game are all willing test subjects. I’m willing to concede that Runic has my money because they are creating something bigger and better. And they might actually do it this time.

Torchlight is praised as a noteworthy re-imagining of Diablo‘s well-worn formula. And in the wait for Diablo III, I suppose anything will do for obsessive fans of the genre. One only needs to remember the reaction to Darkstone – a painfully mediocre action RPG released during the wait for Diablo II that even I fell victim to. But this adoration is untempered by greater expectations. Torchlight is a competent entry into the action RPG genre, but fails to compete with the games that have already succeeded its greatest influence. Instead, Torchlight limits itself to improving Fate‘s groundwork to make a game based on randomly generated content feel like a game, instead of the transient experience it actually is. Torchlight is not a revelation, but a game that provides enough genre touchstones under a slick appearance to disguise its reservation. Torchlight is the game Fate should have been: an endearing impersonator, but an impersonator nonetheless.

In Canabalt, you jump or you die. It’s that simple. When you think about it.

But Canabalt doesn’t give you much time to think. You have no control over your avatar’s movements in the game besides jumping. He is already running. Your responsibility as the player is to make sure he jumps. There is one button in this game. It can be picked up by anyone. The only difficulty curve is learning to overcome your own lack of patience to wait until that perfect second to execute the jump. There are no pretenses of depth that only end up disappointing.

The game starts in what appears to be an office building. Your avatar is wearing a suit. He starts to run. The window you jump through accents the beginning of what will most certainly be a daring escape.

The entire time you are playing Canabalt, you are gripped with fear of the unknown. Will you make the next jump? Will you escape destruction? And where is it you are escaping to? But there isn’t enough time to contemplate the incongruities of this game. You have to run. You have to jump. Freedom awaits. Or more buildings.

I could say I had visions of Out of this World (Another World) and Flashback while playing this game. The simple, yet effective artwork and smooth animations bear enough of a resemblance. But in truth I couldn’t stop thinking about F-Zero GX ¹, and the billboards throughout the game that tell you to “GO FAST”. The obnoxious guitar-laced techno always thumping in the background, constantly pressing you forward.

Canabalt is the same. Like some other iPhone/iPod Touch games, it allows you to listen to your own music while playing. But to do that would be a mistake. Before the game starts, Semi-Secret advises players that headphones supply the best experience for their game. They’re right about that.

There is only one piece of music in this game² . It starts off quiet, then develops into the same abrasive techno from F-Zero GX. You can’t help but feel prodded by the music, letting it affect your decisions. A high, long jump when it gets loud seems only fitting. Then it gets quiet again. But you don’t want to slow down; you can’t slow down.

The more you run, the more momentum builds up. The soundtrack complements everything that happens on screen. It is essential to the experience. Every single footstep can be heard. Stone, metal, and then glass breaking as you leap through a window across another gap between buildings.

Semi-Secret Software didn’t really have to do that, you know. There is no purpose to breaking through windows or the delectable tinkling sound of falling glass that results. It is the only thing in Canabalt that feels gratuitous; It’s embellishment for the urgency of your escape. Clearly you will stop at nothing – not even a full-story pane of glass – to get away.

Then there are other obtacles. Sometimes you have to hit them to slow down for a short jump before a long one. Sometimes undetonated bombs fall from the sky. You have to jump over them, or they explode when you hit them. Despite the urgency to keep moving at all costs, Canabalt makes you think ahead. You dread what’s coming. You don’t want to ruin a good run.

The buildings are random. Sometimes the gaps seem like they are getting bigger. You learn that holding on to a jump even for a split second more extends the airtime.

The whole time you are running, there is a war going on in the distance. More likely it’s an invasion. You never find out. It brings to mind the tripods from War of the Worlds and Half Life 2. These silhouettes are purposefully placed out of focus, so you can never pay full attention to what is happening. There is a more important task at hand: survival.

The most revealing feature of this game is the lack of a pause button³. You are running for your life, away from some unknown force that will surely kill you if your death-defying stunts don’t. The only thing left is your life. This is an all-or-nothing gamble. There are no breaks. There is no stopping. You either make the next jump, or you die.

I’ve seen Canabalt labelled as one of 2009′s “indie darlings.” The criticism that naturally follows such attention has focused on its lack of producing an experience of any significance; it’s too short. Aside from the initial novelty, there is no reason a person needs to pick this game up more than once. They would be wrong. There is a reason.

Canabalt is a game of the simplest philosophy, hearkening back to the days where “High Score” actually meant something⁴. Success is easily quantified. There is no secret there: to go farther, you must get better at the game. Anyone can grasp this concept. The failure condition is equally simple: you die. But even here the game has something to say, because you don’t just fall into a chasm. You hit the brick wall of your skill level. Canabalt wants you to do better.

With enough patience, Canabalt can last forever. And you want it to last forever. As long as that character is running across the screen, you are alive. You go on because you must.

Or you die.