Down The Road - Red Dead Redemption 2

Finally after however long I got to finish Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS4, so I'm going to talk about it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was the long awaited sequel of the adventures of cowboy with a heart of gold, John Marston. It's set a couple of years before the events of Red Dead 1, following John's kind of adopted brother Arthur Morgan as the events that lead to the end of the gang of Dutch Van Der Linde play out.

So I have to say up front that overall this game was good.

Not amazing but good.

I started Red Dead 2 when the game came out, like everyone else, but after several chapters and many hours my motivation got a bit weaker, I reached a bit of a slow patch and I stopped playing. It wasn't exactly because the game was bad, but because it was providing something I wasn't looking for at the time, which brings me to my main gripe with Red Dead 2, Time Wasting.

Now this is something that I feel like other people really liked in this game, but it annoyed me to no end. there was so much time in the game spent on not doing things, because in real life you wouldn't be able to do them so quickly, that it made the game feel really slow and boring to me in a lot of places. The main way this came across was in the travelling. Red Dead 2 has a fast travel system, but it doesn't want you to use it. You have to wait a while and spend a bunch upgrading your camp before you even unlock it and it only works from your camp to somewhere you've been. The rest of the time it expects you to ride your horse around or take a train. Now the riding does have a nice cinematic mode that lets you stop controlling so that it takes you there, but not only are the cinematic ride and the train ride all in real time, but the horse ride doesn't stop random encounters from happening, so you could very easily be halfway through a journey, when your not playing and suddenly a bunch of bandits are shooting you, and you have to get back into the controls very quickly.

So when you finish up a quest and you're far from your base you have to ride all the way back, which can be up to fifteen real world minutes. I found this very frustrating because it meant that in my 1-2 hours of gameplay per night I would find that I've only been able to do one or two missions because I've spent a little under half my time just travelling.

The other gripe I had was the epilogue, for the same reason mostly. It felt like a waste of time.

Without giving away spoilers, it's a 4+ hour epilogue, most of which you spend building a farm, doing ranch work and mostly just being a rancher. The final part of the epilogue was a big fight on a mountain as you try to get your vengeance, but waiting 3-4 hours between the admittedly excellent main story finale felt like a massive break in the pacing that didn't feel nice at all.

I kind of understand what they were doing, they wanted to show you how things came to be in the original, but the things that they showed felt a lot more like how in 'Solo a star wars movie' they gave the dice on his mirror significance and a history, like it wasn't important before but you're acting like it is. showing where wolverine got his jacket in the x-men origin movie, I would have been happy with 'he bought it' but you've given it significance. In this they show how John got the farm from the original game. I had always assumed that he bought it. As it turns out i was right so I'm not sure why I needed to learn that over 4 hours.

What I will say though is that it's a game that knows how to make you care. It knows how to pull on your heart strings.

The end of the main story, the music, the slow deterioration of the gang and your family... it's brutal and beautiful.

The characters for the most part were great. I had the same problem early on with the game that I did with Last of us, where the main character was just kind of an ass hole and I didn't like him, but as the game wore on and I did more and more honourable things to improve his outlook the more I cared. To the point that I simply cannot imagine the game played dishonourably.

Overall I think it's a good game that just requires more patience than I have. By the end I loved the story, and it was almost enough to get over the time wasting.

Right now Red Dead 2 has a metacritic score of 97 and  a user score of 8.2. I think that the user score is pretty close to the mark. I'd give it an 80%, maybe so low as a 75%, but no lower. It was a genuinely good game that just happened to be asking for something I wasn't willing to give; my time. Something that at the time of playing was a high value commodity so the constant having to manually go everywhere in real time was frustrating.

Cheers,
 - James
Red Dead Tube

P.s.
Recently completed Hitman 2 and then had a couple days off of games and now I'm playing Last of Us 2!

Down the Road - Control

So I've been working from home for 2 and 1/2 weeks now and I've started to get into a routine. I get up at 8, work from 8:30 until 16:30, then I go for a long walk around the block and spend the rest of the evening playing games, watching shows or generally chilling out.
I basically live in a single bedroom so it gets a little stir crazy if I'm not doing something at any time.

Most recently I've been playing the game Control by Remedy games on the PS4.

Control is... well it's weird.
I honestly don't know what is going on. I'm a few hours in and so far what I can tell you is that I've walked into a building of a government agency for the first time and they've made me the boss. I think it's a government agency... it had Federal in the title, but they don't seem to talk about the government ever.
Now that I'm in charge I have to run errands for everyone. there's a bunch of magic items that when I touch them, they disappear and just give me magic powers.
I think I'm basically an inter-dimensional Jedi with an inter-dimensional magic gun... but honestly if you demanded I explain in full I can't promise I'd be able to.

Okay, that's not exactly true. I know whats going on, I just don't know what's going on, and if that statement makes sense to you then you'd probably get this game.
So the game just starts, you're walking into the Federal Bureau of Control and it's all messed up and you got to fix it. It feels like I've stepped into a movie halfway because there's a lot of stuff that's already going on with my character that she already knows but that I'm learning... I'm still not sure what any of it is.
What I think that they were going for was less 'this is chaos' and more 'this is mystery' and maybe as I continue that will become clearer.
So what do I know?
Control is a game about Jesse Faden. A woman who is searching for her brother, who she believes was taken by the Bureau when they were children. At the same time that he went missing she met an inter-dimensional being that she calls Polaris who has been with her as part of her consciousness since. What all that means I'm not sure yet.
When we enter the game Jesse has just found the Bureau and it is in absolute chaos. She is made the director and - at the point I have reached in the game - spends the game trying to put the Bureau who she has hated and searched for back together so that she can find her brother, and stop the hiss - another inter-dimensional entity - from destroying them.
Like I said, it's kind of chaos and I don't know 'why' anything.

Over all it's an interesting game.
I like the feel of it, I like how powerful the character can feel with all her telekinetic abilities but there are a few things that bugged me at the beginning, and one or two that haven't gone away.

First of all is Dodging. In the beginning you can't dodge but they have all of the sorts of gameplay around the dodge button. short fuse explosives, explosive enemies, snipers that give you time to dodge and telekinetic enemis that you need to be out in the open to hit, but almost kill you if they hit you. It feels from very early on that it's a game built around being able to dodge, and the fact that you don't get the ability to dodge until a solid chunk into the game, and it comes up as a side mission. You can completely ignore and miss it if you are just aiming for the main missions.
My advice? Every mission you get check to see if it talks about an object of power go do it as soon as possible because it's going to give you a useful new power.

Second is the reload button, or lack thereof. I think that the developers were trying to be nice, trying to remove the need to worry about ammo and reloading, but it just feels weird. In Control you don't have ammo in the traditional way. It says ammo, but it's more like energy in your gun. when you fire it uses up the energy and after you stop firing it automatically recharges, so all you have to do to reload is not to fire, but this feels very strange for anyone who has played a traditional shooter, and especially for someone who plays shooters a lot and uses reloads a lot to keep their ammo clips full.
For me, every time I fire I will reload so I never find myself prematurely empty, I even do it in Control, despite there being no reload button. What I find myself doing is tapping the natural reload button and then realising that all I've done is swap weapons. It can be very frustrating when you go into the next firefight and you're using the shotgun at long range instead of the sniper you were just using.
Honestly I think this is a design problem, not taking into account consistency across the market. It feels, to me like the equivalent of making triangle on the PS4 controls a back button instead of the circle. People are just so used to the circle back button your one game making it different is going to be very confusing to them.

The last point I have feels a little petty, but it's also about UX and design. The map. Control's map is turned on by pressing up on the D-pad. It comes up over the entire screen blocking the entire screen. It feels like a menu that you press circle to leave, however it doesn't block any controls input and it is just a pop-over. It wants you to press up to toggle it on and off again, but it feels like a new screen I'm supposed to exit.
This is made worse when you get the aforementioned dodge ability as this is assigned to circle. More than once I have flung myself off cliffs to my character's death because I was trying to close the menu.

The game overall feels fun and polished. I think I enjoyed the story but it felt pretty weak and lacklustre.
Honestly by the end I understood everything and it was all pretty clear, however the problem I have with it was that it felt like a big mystery but the mystery payoff felt weak, and I think that it felt weak because there was no setup.
Thinking back on it the mystery was something I was unaware was a mystery. The payoff was something that wasn't alluded to or questioned in any way throughout. and the things that were didn't get paid off. at least not well.
I don't want to spoil anything in case you go and read it so I wont say more specifics, however I will say that any question you have when playing this game, probably not the thing that they felt was important to tell you.
It could all have been solved very easily by having a flashback sequence at the beginning to show the things that caused Jesse to search for the Bureau. This would give us attachment to her and her brother (especially if he saves her or something) and they could have made it clear to the audience what the bad guy was and maybe caused us to ask those questions that they seemed to want us to ask.

Control has a current metacritic score of 82/100 (7.3/10 for user score). I'd say that's marginally too high simply for dropping the ball on the story. User score about covers it. I would give this game a 7.5.
Otherwise; yeah half a year down the road Control still feels pretty good, it's great fun to play, I just wish they'd had a bit more cohesion on the narative.

Cheers,
James
Control-Tube

Down the Road - Last of Us

When I was in Uni I always wanted to create a games review website called '3 weeks later'. it would be your average run of the mill games review site but with one big difference; I'd do the review 3 weeks later after all the hype died down.
Grand Theft Auto 4, amazing game when you first play it, but 3 weeks later? it's pretty good, but I want to kill my cousin, and the fact I'm still getting tutorials is jarring and makes me feel like I'm still not out of the opening. You see what I mean, how would I review the game 3 weeks later with the benefit of time?
However I don't have the time to be sure that I'll have a review ready exactly 3 weeks later so if I want to do it I have to change the title (or be okay with people being confused). Thus 'Down the Road' is born.
So with the sequel coming out in a couple of months I'm going to start with;

Specifically the Remastered version.
I played the Last of us when it first came out in June 2013, and I liked it, but I found the controls a pain, especially in combat and eventually just sort of stopped playing. I remember getting about 1/3 of the way through and just picking something else up and not going back.
I also remember going back once more when it was remastered and not getting into it, not even getting as far as I had, but I'd always heard how amazing it was, and I've spent the last couple years watching Critical role (one of the cast of which plays Ellie) so recently (7 years late) I finally went back to try and complete it and boy was I in for a ride.

So first of all lets address the issue I had when I first played it; the controls.
The controls, even now, are garbage. Especially the combat controls. Aiming was awful, trying to hit things without wasting a ton of ammo on flailing shots felt awful, and trying to do anything in that scene where you're hung upside down and there's zombies running in is like trying to hit a bulls eye while throwing your darts with your ass.
That said, by about halfway through the game I started getting better at it. I don't know if this was because I'd bought the right upgrades, or because I'd just gotten used to the controls, but I started being able to shoot straight, which felt fantastic. It didn't make up for the shoddy early game controls, but now I was past them I could enjoy the game, potentially how I was always meant to enjoy the game.
There's also a part of me that wonders if the bad controls were intentional because you're not playing a soldier, your just playing some guy and you're not meant to be good at shooting, but even if that's the case it's bad game design. If a dev studio did that on a free to play game they'd be out of the running before it reached launch.

So the controls were garbage and it took about half the game to make them usable, and it's about then that something strange starts to happen.
It's about then that you start to care. Ellie's always been this tough no nonsense kid that you root for, but Joel's always been kind of an ass hole, and then suddenly, a little by little you can see the humanity coming back into Joel and while he's not great at saying it, you can see how much he cares about her.
The story and the twists of this game are the only thing that matter about it by the end. The things you experience with them, the stuff that happens, good and bad... it's very possibly the best story game I've ever played. At least one grounded in the real world. I love me some sci-fi/fantasy.
It's hard to express how good the game is without spoiling things, but it really was great.

The best advice for anyone wanting to play this again and having a tough time with the controls is this; Stealth is your friend.
At the beginning when I couldn't shoot for shit I spent the majority of my time sat in one spot silently watching everyone and slowly picking targets off one at a time and never firing a shot. If you can't shoot, then don't be seen.

Overall I loved this game, hard to get into, but once I did I devoured it. played it every night until I completed it.

Does it hold up to the 95% it has on metacritic? probably not, I can't give a game that has such bad early game controls a score that high, but is it worth it for the story? without a doubt. If this was a movie or a TV-show I would have binge watched it five times by now.

Hope that was an interesting read. I'll see if there are any more of these that I could do in the future.

 - James
Cat-tube