Atk reviews video games

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus 🔗

TL;DR: 👍
Available on: Steam

Wolfenstein 2 is a cracking game that picks up from where The New Order left off in a spectacular fashion. The gunplay is tight, fast paced, and varied in terms of weapon usage. The story is riveting and engaging, with a couple unexpected plot twists. The graphics of the game leave absolutely nothing to be desired, and the performance of the game doesn't suffer in the slightest because of it. The game's story is lengthy but never loses your interest and there's plenty of extra side mission-style content that's unlocked when you've almost finished the game.

The DLC are interesting, providing a different playstyle experience to the main campaign with all new areas, perks, characters, and stories. While the quality of the DLC means that it's not necessarily all that long in terms of gameplay time, I'd take this any day over some cosmetic or side mission adding DLC like you get in some other modern AAA titles.

At the price the game tends to go on sale for, I'd recommend it without hesitation. Get the DLC if you know you're going to enjoy the game.

Bright Memory 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam, GOG

The graphics are easy to get out of the way - they're great, they all form a cohesive art style, and the environments don't look like they were made in a matter seconds. That having been said, the level of detail in its graphics that this game opts for can make some enemies hard to see with all the noise coming from the detail of the textures and the very fast pace the game makes you play at.

The two pitfalls that are the reasons I refunded the game are the combat mechanics and enemy behaviour.

The combat mechanics feel as if they were made as a developer's first outing into FPS design. You want the game to feel fast, so you speed things up - enemy attacks, player movement, etc. It feels like the intuitive solution, but this is not the way it works necessarily, a fast paced game can be made to feel fast without everything happening quickly. Take DOOM 2016 - you move fast, but your rate of fire is controlled, and enemies all attack relatively slowly, despite DOOM's branding and success in being a fast paced FPS. It allows for decision making and greater observation of the environment not otherwise possible if you're always hard-pressed by enemies. In Bright Memory, enemy attacks for the mob enemies are seldom telegraphable due to the short duration of the animations. Bright Memory's intensity is then brought right down by the game's combat being in favour of kiting. Dashes only move you backwards, there is no cooldown (or if there is, I never noticed it), and no enemy moves faster than you can kite with this ability. From there, all you have to do is empty your magazine into the closest enemy, dashing further away again when they get too close. It is a boring gameplay loop which the game tries to break you out of by providing abilities, though the EMP's cast time still means you have to strafe and if you've kited a large group of enemies, it never seems to catch them all. My two sole deaths were environmental - once I accidentally backed into a fire and was unable to run out as I was being blocked by enemies, the other time I ran backwards off a cliff. If running backwards through every combat scene is going to be how the game is played, at least makes the walls smooth and environmental deaths like these harder to have happen.

Next in combat mechanics is gunplay. In this preview, you get three guns, only two of which that are really worth using, being the SMG and shotgun. The game never provides an obvious enemy type or environment type to let you know which you should use, you kinda just have to pick one and use it. Neither gun feels like it does much damage and all enemies are bullet sponges. The fact that the shotguns rate of fire isn't fixed is downright broken the second you let anyone remap their keys (why you can't is beyond me, gotta wait for the full game for that). The fact that guns have an ammo limit feels incredibly pointless - I never noticed any ammo pickups and I never was short on ammo for either gun. The ability to aim down sights is difficult to use given the pace of the game and lack of stationary gameplay as there's never any cover, so I don't really see why it's needed/included with the rest of the game balanced as it is. The game's feedback with hitmarkers and incredibly drastic time slow downs never felt consistent to me - I didn't know whether I'd killed an enemy or scored a critical hit, or why I was getting the feedback I did.

Enemy behaviour. First of all - why do I never die from enemy attacks? I never at once even reached a greyscale 'uh-oh' state from enemy attacks. Not that I know where/if I have a health bar. Enemy spawning is poor, the spawns seem fixed, meaning you won't always see enemies spawn in, or you can just farm where they spawn from a safe distance. To add to the first point, enemies will attack you even if they're off screen. This seems normal without considering the experience the player ends up with - you weren't even aware there are enemies and now you're being hit by them. DOOM 2016, by contrast, tries wherever possible to spawn demons in your cone of vision and ensures that for the most part, demons you can't see won't attack you. In Bright Memory, I can't recall any decent audio cues, and so the lack of visual information was very unhelpful and if there were directional damage indicators I didn't notice those either amoungst the rest of the HUD's clutter.

What about the boss fights? Same as the rest of the game honestly, strafe and aim for the head, empty magazine, reload. The character's commentary doesn't match up with what's happening during fights I found (specifically the knight dude), and the enemy AI doesn't seem to know what to do against a strafe queen, which is weird considering that's what you spend 98% of the game doing. The knight fight I would literally just back strafe and shoot the knight in the head while he walked slowly towards me. For the whole fight. Even the extras that get spawned couldn't do anything because I was kiting them one and the same. Poor, honestly. Bosses, especially in large arenas, need gap closers (not smaller arenas, that makes everything worse). Bosses movesets are incredibly limited (I identified maybe 3 moves for each boss) and they don't perform any combos or anything, just dice roll which attack to do (or so it seems).

If the above was fixed, I'd happily keep the game and be able to enjoy playing it, nothing else is so awfully wrong that it'd stop me wanting to play. That having been said, here are my nitpicks:

1. The HUD is awful, there is literally clutter in the middle of your screen that serves no purpose. The game was noisy enough alright?
2. The style system seems pretty stupid honestly. It doesn't fit the game's genre and however the scoring is decided, it will nearly always be flawed. I didn't feel 'A' tier constantly back strafing, bumping into things, and getting hit by enemies I couldn't see
3. Buying the game on Steam might get you a copy of the full game, but I am very concerned by the explicit non-promise to release on Steam. I will not support an Epic Games accepting title/developer
4. The framerate isn't consistent enough. You can often get large FPS drops right after cutscenes and when initiating abilities. This preview isn't in early access, it should be better optimised
5. The story doesn't make any sense. Hopefully it will in the full game with more time to explain
6. There are very few enemy types. I think maybe 6 excluding bosses, but some are very similar despite being strictly different (just giving a dude a shield for instance). Once again I'd expect the full game to include more
7. They literally reused an area in the game. The character even calls the dev out on it
8. The one puzzle is pretty poorly done honestly, when you realise the solution it takes an incredibly long time to solve still. There is no clear correlation between the symbols on the floor and those on the wall either
9. An EMP does not (in real life) make enemies float, put out fires, or break wooden objects. In this game, and EMP is never used as an EMP. It is a vacuum creator with some gravitational pull to go with it and should be named more accordingly

NieR Automata 🔗

TL;DR: 👎
Available on: Steam

NieR Automata is the more approachable NieR game that trades in the amazing personalities in NieR Replicant for some minor quality of life improvements (and even more side quests!). It’s a lukewarm entry in a series I don’t think deserves to be so critically acclaimed.

While NieR Automata is strictly the sequel to NieR Replicant, you could absolutely play the games in either order, as they’re only very loosely tied. If you only want to play one game, it’s honestly a toss-up. NieR Automata has fewer extremes of good and bad compared to Replicant, and is maybe slightly nicer to play overall. That having been said, in hindsight I think Replicant is my favourite of the two, because the character design & voicing (aside from the protagonist) are stellar. If you expect to play both anyway then naturally you should play Replicant first, as that’s correct chronologically, plus if you can make it through its 45+ hours of main endings, NieR Automata’s <30 hours for the main endings will feel relatively fast & refreshing.

Before I settle into full reviewer mode; a couple of useful knowledge nuggets to improve your gameplay experience.

For us Steam gamers, I’d strongly recommend leveraging Steam Input in this game in order to change the shoulder buttons (for pod fire & abilities) into toggles. It’s such a simple usability change, and while it can mess you around if you open the menu with a toggle on, the lack of hand contortions during gameplay is absolutely worth it. It blows my mind that they’re not toggles in-game by default. There is a preset available if you don’t know how to edit the control scheme yourself.

Also, the modding scene is pretty good for this game – there’s a good range graphical improvements (some of which should not need to exist, but hey ho), and outfit/model/weapon swaps, which can add some fun/flavour when you’re playing the game with an attractive protagonist. Oh, and there are memes, for when grinding endings is getting stale and you want Among Us & Shrek robots to fight. The game doesn’t officially have modding support though, so getting everything set up and working can take some time investment and requires more experience poking around in game files than, say, a Bethesda game. There is a community-made mod manager which may help you, but I didn’t use it myself so I can’t comment on it.

Kicking off the review properly then, combat in this game is 💃stylish💃. That’s not to say it’s challenging – this game is definitely a hack ‘n’ slash unless you choose to make it a Souls-like – but it feels suitably cinematic and juicy. Animations all around are clean; well-timed evasions have a sick cartwheel animation with a slow-motion effect that lets you get extra damage in, and you have enough different attacking moves and short combos for things to not start feeling too same-y too quickly. (Being realistic, I think anyone that pushes themselves to 100% this game will be sick of almost all of it by the time they get there.) Another strength of combat comes from the chip customisation system – although never explained/tutorialised by the game – which allows you to choose how to approach fights and suit things to your play style, which makes things more satisfying and damage number go up. The counter chip was a serious missed opportunity for a super-cool animation with gratuitous hit-pause, but it does add the option of a high-risk high-reward playstyle if you want to get your blood pumping (basically everything can be parried with this, and as a result it’s often the best strategy for pure damage output). Personally, I’m not a huge fan of JRPG-style levelling and progression (though there is almost no enemy scaling), but if you want to scale better and kill enemies faster you can use chips that boost experience or damage, or alternatively – because this is a single player game and it’s morally acceptable to make games more fun for yourself – cheat (for instance, with a stronger damage/experience multiplier than the game otherwise provides). One fortunate upside of this JPRG-style progression is that because character level and chips matter far more than weapon stats, weapons become far more of an aesthetic & playstyle decision, whereas in NieR Replicant you’re just clamouring for the highest damage stat. NieR Automata also far better caters to combat enthusiasts than the previous game, thanks to the addition of colosseums. There are three of these to discover, each providing escalating challenges to complete that test different facets of the game’s combat.

Minor spoiler warning from here. I want to be able to talk about the game’s themes and how it shows the characters’ perspectives, but without spoiling the plot. If you want to go in completely blind, stop reading here.

The big overarching theme of the NieR games is, as far as I can tell, existentialism: trying to address what it means to be you and/or what it means to be human. However, NieR Automata falls short of realising this goal in my opinion by having a large portion of the cast with a limited emotional range (2B, A2, the Commander, 21O – 9S’ operator), and not giving the characters any breathing room between story beats to discuss or air their feelings. Whenever 9S starts to question the orders him & 2B have been given by YoRHa, 2B’s response is robotic and pre-programmed. This makes sense to start with – androids are obedient by default, 2B being no exception – but the fact that this never changes as the plot progresses causes the game’s execution of its core theme to be lacklustre. Players aren’t going to think about the bigger picture in half as much depth without the space and prompting to do so; the game must facilitate this through its narrative. As another example, at one point 9S makes a bombshell discovery, but is never given the time to discuss this with 2B, and subsequently buries his own feelings & doubts to better aid her in the present moment, skipping another chance to crack their world views wide open. NieR Replicant doesn’t handle this particularly well either: it crams the character’s discovery of these same main themes into the endings, but it still feels more explored than what little Automata manages to achieve.

I also feel that NieR Automata struggled to develop its characters, and what personal/relational progression there is in the game came off as awkward or abrupt. The obvious citation to reach for is the relationship between 2B and 9S: they’re the canon couple the game ships, but without persistently reading between the lines, I think one could reasonably interpret the pair as nothing more than good friends/comrades by the end of the game. There is one single instance I can think of where 2B says anything approaching familiar/flirty to 9S, and as 9S portrays the awkward kid with a crush, he struggles to articulate how he feels. It’s only once you play 9S’ own arc in route B that you see how deeply invested he is in 2B, at which point I just started feeling frustrated that despite how much time I’m spending running around with both of them doing inane side quests, these characters can’t find the proper time to speak talk about their feelings. I could see this maybe being intentional to an extent, in order to allow the player to ship themselves with 2B, but if that’s why this is so poorly handled, I think it’s a detriment to the game regardless. A2 arguably has the strongest and most noticeable progression arc of the main cast, but sadly is introduced to the player (outside of a brief drive-by) very late, and never does anything to push the other characters out of their comfort zone. Hell, the pods go through more relationship progression than 2B and 9S once you’re getting into route C/D.

The remainder of this review is going to be dedicated to comparing NieR Automata to Replicant, mainly discussing the improvements made in the new game. Without the context of at least my Replicant review, or ideally having played the game, this commentary mightn’t be the most useful to you. Spoilers are fair game from here on out.

The most valuable improvement NieR Automata makes over Replicant is misusing the ending system. Both games have five main endings/routes, however NieR Replicant tells the same story (excluding the ending) four times and the fifth diverges. NieR Automata, by contrast, only makes you repeat the main story once, and yet in doing so manages to cover far more new ground than NieR Replicant does in its three re-runs: changing the character you play as (giving you their perspective in the process), adding a gameplay major mechanic (hacking), and using the character change to smoothly transition into the – gasps – direct story continuation for the third route! The euphoria that hit me not having to repeat more of the game just exemplifies how poorly this mechanic suits the games’ stories. My next question is, why not take it further? Entirely ditch the ‘endings’ paradigm and tell the story entirely linearly from the get-go. Merge routes A & B (weaving between 2B and 9S’ perspectives, the existing route C/D demonstrates the game can do this sort of thing well already), and then after getting ending C or D, just give the option to go back and make the other choice for the rest of the plot (since E automatically follows once you have both C & D). And yes, I know there are 21 hidden ‘endings’, keep those in, sure, but I would 100% make the main story linear; I think it would benefit the game’s pacing and the delivery of its character development.

One of the most immediately noticeable upgrades you get in NieR Automata is waypoints, quest markers, and a mini-map. This is a huge quality of life upgrade for questing, helping you more easily find the people you need to talk to, and making it easier to optimise your pathing to hit as many objectives as possible on runs to and fro. That having been said, it’s not an amazing quality mini-map, as it’s not very detailed and doesn’t clearly contain height information (except by unhelpfully hiding markers that are at a significantly different height to you). It also doesn’t convey what terrain is traversable, or where ladders/entrances/exits are (e.g. to the underground tunnel system in the desert). Better than nothing, but easy to improve upon.

Healing has two major changes compared to NieR Replicant. The good is that choosing your healing item no longer pauses the game, the bad is that the healing itself is still instant once selected, and the ugly is that you can carry up to 99 of each healing item on you. Coming from the country famous for its National Health Service, I thought the 19x healing in Replicant was ridiculous, and yet now we are out here with up to 198x healing (depending on the depth of your pockets) – really illustrating the power of privatised healthcare. Overall though, I do think the improvement outweighs the healthcare joke; finding the time and concentration to open the menu and select your healing item might not be anything compared to Helldivers 2’s stratagems, but it’s a darn-sight tougher to pull off in the heat of battle while you still need be evading than having the game pause for you to do so. This actually led me to value the auto-healing chip quite highly, and while this is definitely a skill issue on my part because I suck at using a controller, even the chip isn’t foolproof: it’s not instant to respond so multiple quick hits can down you still, and if an enemy can just blast you for over 40% of your health in a single attack (definitely not unheard of), you might be dead before the chip even knows you’re in trouble.

The fast travel you get about two thirds through the game is also far more flexible than that of its predecessor, actually putting you close to where you need to be, instead of just cutting a chunk out of your marathon. There are only a couple of locations in the game which will take over a minute to get to after fast travelling.

Final revenge parting shot: NieR Replicant’s music was better. There’s beauty in the score of Automata, but it definitely fades into the background during play, whereas for me, the vocals in Replicant’s soundtrack really helps it stay present and remain a core part of the game ‘experience’.