Demon’s Souls : PS3
Sometimes you are led to a game because of something you read, and Demon’s Souls was one such game. It came with the general recommendation that it’s pretty much the hardest and least forgiving game of the current generation and I dove into that headfirst with glee.
Demon’s Souls is an RPG. I’ll start with that. It starts off brutally hard, with no instruction and little clue of what you are doing. There are some RPG standards; a fantasy setting, stats you can view, a vague class system, recognisable weapons, etc. but none of this seems to help in the first moments of the game. After a tutorial which does little but teach which button to press for ‘attack’ and which for ‘get out of the bloody way’, you are thrust into the Nexus, told that you have to save the world by killing demons and directed to the first of these worlds where, if you haven’t done this before, you get instantly mashed.
When you kill any of the bad guys, you get a few ‘souls’ which are used both as XP and currency in this game and, upon that first mashing you find yourself back at the beginning of the stage without all the souls you collected. Yup, all gone. As time and your experience increase, you find that your equipment isn’t reset and that it does in fact, remain as it was when you died. You also find that you get one chance upon each death to find the spot where you died and reclaim the souls that were dropped there, but die again and the first spot is gone, replaced by the newer stain of blood. Slowly, through your frustration, you realise that if you can convert your souls into something permanent, that death isn’t quite the set back it initially seems.
Battling through that first world took me hours. More than simply hours, actually, as the first time I gave up and came back a couple of months later. You get to see an impressive amount in that first world; simple zombie-like bad guys to kill and up your soul count, harder armoured men who take some thought and tactics, strong knights you cannot possibly kill at the beginning and enormous flying dragons which breath fire on entire sections of the landscape, killing everything in their path (including, inevitably, you). Despite this being an RPG I found myself equating it to the first Super Mario Bros., with that feeling of playing the level again and again to get through it and dying again and again and ending up at the beginning. The RPG roots started to show through though, as I felt I was getting better both in terms of skill and in game strength.
One of Demon’s Souls features which immediately impresses is its multiplayer messaging system. Rather than playing directly alongside other players in an MMO way, you see the occasional flash of another adventurer as a bluish ghost as they pass by doing their thing, and you can leave messages in the ground to help (or, if you choose, hinder) those who walk pass. It’s this message system which is so much joy in the early hours of the game as little notes like ‘use arrows on the next guy’ and ‘beware an ambush ahead’ stop you from running into situations unprepared and easily massacred. Through these notes and the ability to see the final few seconds of other player’s deaths, you learn your way and improve your tactics to be able to face the dangers ahead.
I still didn’t quite know where Demon’s Souls fit though, it’s repetitive and grinding nature and almost irrelevant storyline pushes it far from other modern RPGs such as Mass Effect, or newer Final Fantasy games, but its solid RPG underpinnings set it apart from third person action games. It was a friend who hasn’t played much (if anything) of recent computer games who nailed it for me when I described it: “It’s a rogue-like game,” he said, and how right he was. Once this revelation had been made in my mind, it actually changed the way I perceived and played the game (for the better), for this is exactly what Demon’s Souls is, and it explained to me my utter love and addiction for it. Years of playing rogue-likes and now here was one with all the trappings of a modern game.
Demon’s Souls is a game about grinding though, and for many modern players, this is too much. There is little chance that any player (no matter how great) can beat every boss the first time they encounter them; one early boss had me refining tactics after multiple deaths and ended up with me grinding souls for hours in order to buy the 250 arrows I anticipated it would take to kill him safely from distance. He died (I had 40 or so arrows left!), and all the hard grinding was worth it as the trophy binged and the world opened up some more. You learn and refine and repeat patterns many tens of times, picking the places that suit your play-type in order for you to maximise your soul gains. Personally, I found myself killing the first six or so skeletons on world 4-1 literally hundreds of times, enjoying the glee as I got better and it went from a hard fight each time, to three hit kills, two hit kills and finally a single swing to claim the all important souls. It addictive and enticing and calls you back for more even when you are sleeping (the nightmares! The nightmares!).
Ultimately though, you move from being a beginner to a journeyman. Your equipment is better, your skills are honed and it stops being frustratingly difficult and becomes something you can just do. Finally, before the endgame, you push your power beyond those of the enemies and it all becomes a little easy to knock back boss after boss. Demon’s Souls, though, is not a game about completion. The story is weak and utterly irrelevant. This is a game which is all about the journey and the pure joy in playing and it delivers in large amounts.
What’s more, this game breaks new ground (or uses well-trodden ground to new effect). The messaging system is great, but for me the apex oh-my-God moment of the game was when, instead of a boss, the game reaches out to the internet and pulls in another player to fight you. By far the hardest fight of the game, this PvP moment in an otherwise solo experience is frightening; you have no way to learn a pattern, no way to gauge the strength of your opponent, you can’t even be sure that the next time you try it you’ll get the same opponent. After being beaten five or so times I felt stuck and stunned and unsure what to do. I even debated standing outside the door (after the player has been summoned) for an hour in the hope that the other player would quit from boredom and leave me a simple AI challenge in his place, but in the end (and due to some egging on) I pushed through and had the finest fight of my game and was able to feel truly proud when the battle was won.
So shall I conclude my thoughts on Demon’s Souls? This is not a game for anyone, in fact I doubt it’s a game for many modern players. This is a game for people who grew up in the dungeons of Nethack, Omega and Rogue itself. This is a game which harks back to a time when dead was dead and perseverance is an art all of its own and I heartily approve. Sadly, due to a mistake on my part, even though I completed the game, I failed to get the final trophy and now the game taunts me to play through again to accomplish this little task. One day, I’ll do just that, and dance back into Demon’s Souls for another fifty hours, but there are more games on my shelf which demand attention, and the spiritual sequel, Dark Souls, is on the horizon.
[Oh, and as a sidenote, in a show of true gaming excellent, there’s a video on YouTube of someone completing this game (which took me 53 hours) in under 49 minutes. It’s the most impressive show of computer game skill I’ve seen in years and makes all those people playing GH3’s Dragonforce on Expert blindfolded look pathetic by comparison!]
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Swords and Soldiers : PS3
Sometimes at two in the morning, I find myself with slightly bleary eyes looking through the Playstation Store and downloading demos. Sometimes at three in the morning, I find myself having enjoyed the demo enough to pay for the real game and one time, that led to my playing Swords and Soldiers.
Swords and Soldiers is a real time side scrolling strategy game. Yup, that old chestnut. This amusing idea is coupled with some cute little graphics, a silly irreverent storyline about chilli peppers and some neat mechanics to make a game. As leader of the army (which can be Viking, Aztec or Chinese, depending on what you are doing), you get to summon up an assortment of men who plod on from left to right, smashing their way through everything they come into contact with in an attempt to do away with the opposing army. To add another level of interaction, you also get to throw the odd magic spell out there to aid your horde, some of which are quite original.
It’s a fun little game and I enjoyed completing the campaign mode (which took a few hours) but there’s not really enough here to have me coming back. Like Mushroom Wars, this is a console real time strategy game with all the problems that has (console controllers are not the king when it comes to ordering armies about) and like that other game, in order to make it work the game is very much a limited experience lacking the depth that even a mediocre true computer game would have. That doesn’t make it a bad experience, but it does mean that there is little calling you back for repeat plays. It’s a true two-in-the-morning game; enjoyable to play when you are tired and hunting around for something quick, but not good enough to set aside time for.
There’s also a multiplayer mode, but for whatever reason (user base?) I could never get a game against another person going, even when I waited for twenty minutes. Shame.
inFamous 2 : PS3
From the outset, I think it’s important to say that I loved my infamous-playing experience. With the first game, I found something which impressed me with its plot and drew me in with its gameplay to mean that I was enjoying the (if I’m objective and honest) repetitive trawl to get all the collectables. I completed inFamous with a 90% trophy set and was very pleased with the result. I pre-ordered the sequel and when it dropped through my door the morning before the street release day, I was very excited, even if I did have to wait a bit to get the time to actually play the game.
The first, and the most major, change from inFamous to inFamous 2 is in the graphics. To say these have been upgraded is a real understatement; in fact, the graphical update to the game is so vast that it makes looking at the original game almost painful. Cole, who was never the most likeable character, now has a level of graphical detail to pull him in line with many other top-of-the-line PS3 games, and the dull monotonous grey of Empire City has been given a loving run with the green-brush, as we leave that location and move to a New Orleans-like city with plenty of foliage. It looks lovely and considerably more vibrant, even if it’s still not Uncharted quality.
Pleasingly, the game takes some note of all the effort you put in before, checking your inFamous save file and following on by starting you with either a good or evil based character continuing your ending from the previous game - this is an important thing to do in sequels and it would have been a great shame had it not done this, but so many games fail to remember you have played before that it is worth mentioning. I knew I’d be playing through inFamous 2 twice (once for good and once for evil) and having enjoyed being good more the first time, I started by continuing my good agenda here too.
The storyline does well to limit your powers a little bit in order to get growth in the new game, while not nerfing you fully. You come into inFamous 2 with plenty of abilities and thus you continue on sensibly. This means that a lot of the muscle memory that moves you around works flawlessly and you’re not forced to start the game without, for example, the glide ability. Again this is important for continuity and would have caused frustration were it not the case. It’s so nice to see games in general growing up.
Once the game gets going though, any veterans from inFamous know exactly what they are doing. Sure, there are some new touches, but really if I’m honest, this is the same game just with knobs on. It looks a lot better, it feels upgraded, but it doesn’t break any new ground. This isn’t a bad thing if you are as much a fan of the first game as I am, as I found myself smiling inanely at having a whole new run of inFamous to play, but I can imagine people coming to this and complaining that it doesn’t do more. InFamous 2 is unabashedly an inFamous sequel, and not a reinvention or major change to the series: more of the same, but not in a bad way.
At this point, I feel obliged to talk about the User Generated Content, or UGC, that is so touted. On the face of it, this is great stuff and the first few UGC missions I did with glee until I realised that the biggest problem with UGC is the U part of it. Sadly, most people out there in the unwashed internet are not good level designers; hell, most of them can’t even spell ‘level design’. What the UGC means for the most part is having a huge swathe of monsters spawn next to you which you bash to death and then being told ‘congratulations, you finished the mission’ or whatever. Ninety percent of the UGC missions are painful to play just because you have to read the mission descriptions in txtspk or whatever contractions people believe pass for English on the internet, and those few that get beyond this are unlikely to be well-designed. The truth is that although the ability to design your own levels and play other user-designed levels looks great on the face of it, you’ll spend many hours sifting through badly conceived trite before you find a single unpolished gem and, other than getting the trophy for 25 completed UGC missions, I couldn’t see any real point in it. Certainly it wasn’t enough to draw me back to the game once it was all completed, which is, I believe, the point.
So back to the main game. You run, you jump, you float over buildings with all the relaxed skill of a superhero, you beat up a selection of tougher and tougher bad guys and it’s very enjoyable. The story starts to progress and you find there are others like you out there and even get to team up with one or two (depending on how you play) for the odd fun mission. The introduction of fire-girl (if you are playing evil) and ice-lady (if you are playing good) actually worked quite well for me, interested in the plot-line as I was, but really they are a little superfluous and what powers they add to the table have little relevance.
In fact, as I type this, I realise that inFamous 2 stands or falls on two things: the first, whether or not you, as a player, enjoyed the first game enough to want another full spread of missions; the second is whether or not you become engaged in the storyline. I found thankfully, that I was a fan of both, but I can imagine it failing on one, if not both, of these points for a lot of players; and that’s a shame because it really is good fun.
In inFamous, the plot works really well; enough to mean that on my first completion I was grinning at its brilliance, and eager to play again to see what it looked like from the evil perspective. With inFamous 2, the storyline doesn’t have the same edge but in all fairness it would have been near impossible for it to have done. What it does have is a continuation of story and ideas which are very pleasing for the fan and probably indecipherable for anyone coming to it without having run through the first game. This is at the core of inFamous 2’s strength and its greatest weakness - you have to like this game to like this game, and if you like this game, you’ll like this game. It’s a very odd position for it to be in, and probably one that doesn’t work for a large number of people. It works for me though and there are some scenes in this game which had me grinning like a loon, or being near frozen with upset; scenes that would be utterly lost on a casual player and yet they are the moments where inFamous 2 shows its greatness.
Five days after getting inFamous 2, I had my first platinum trophy. One hundred percent of, well, everything. So yes, I loved this game. I loved the first one and I loved all the upgrades that make the second one a worthy sequel. It ticked all the right boxes for me and I was quietly sad when it was all done (whilst still being elated about seeing that platinum trophy!). If you loved the first game, you should already have this, but if you didn’t, then give this a miss because it’s not going to do it for you.
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