Isometrics Game of the Year: The Top Eight Games this Year

2014 was a rather interesting year of near misses and near brilliance, ruined by inexperience with new hardware or incompetence with porting. However despite this there were some truly brilliant games, and so I had to trim my shortlist a lot to get to my top eight best games this year.

Again, as with the worst games list, the games had to be released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, cannot be freemium games, and remakes are allowed if they change enough stuff to almost be considered a game distinct from the original. The first release of a game in English also applies here. No beta or early access games here, which basically wiped off a good chunk of my shortlist.

In the end though, this is my shortlist, and I'll do my best to explain where the rankings come from.

Here goes!

8: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Konami: PC/PS3/PS4/X360/XONE)

This was a game I really hoped they wouldn't screw up, but in a few ways it did so let me get the bad parts of the game out of the way first. The game is ridiculously short for its original price tag (£30!), clocking up at about an hour and a half for the main mission, though of course it contained a few side missions. There is only one map, and of course the story can't really get going, although we do get a lot of disgusting imagery which I won't get into which is a bit unsettling since none of the previous six or seven MGS games got anywhere near as visceral. It very nearly ended up on the end of the worst games list because of its length, and I'm not even kidding.

All that out of the way, the game was utterly magnificient. The control system, vastly improved from MGS4 onwards was absolutely joyeous to use. Graphically the game was spellbinding, using light and shade in a way I'd never seen in a next gen game, with some great details and amazing character designs. The AI is vastly improved and a legitimate part of the challenge, since they will call for help and go into alert if something logically untowards is discovered, reminding me a lot of the Hitman games in that regard. The story, such as there was, is evocative, expertly directed and brilliantly performed, particularly with regards to mental trauma and harm, obviously this will become a far greater part of The Phantom Pain. There are a lot of ways to handle each mission and a ton of weapons to collect to, so it is a case that if you enjoy the game there are plenty of reasons to replay.

Added to this is the phenomenal PC port, one of the best from a Japanese developer (and one of the most optimised Next-Gen games released on PC this year) and you have a brilliant game that only slightly disappointed.

7: Toybox Turbos (Codemasters: PC)

I agonised whether I was going to put this or BlazeRush on my list, and eventually it boiled down to a straight choice. While Blazerush was an amazingly fun game which really surprised me from a developer who hadn't made a game that good before, Toybox Turbos is simply a better game. It is a modern day Micro Machines, which is probably the greatest compliment you can give a party racing game.

The graphics are superb, there are plenty of cars and tracks to play and an excellent online mode. However the main star is the gameplay, which is as perfect as you can make a party racing game. Overall it is a little short in single player (3 hours, but the game was £11 new and of course there is the multiplayer) but get a few friends playing and you have a great party game.

6: Cloudbuilt (Coilworks: PC)

On the one hand, it's incredibly tough. On the other it's an absolutely gorgeous, fantastically designed joy to play. Coilworks' debut is amazing to play, basically getting to the core of what 3D platforming should be. Armed with a hover, a dash and the ability to run up walls, Demi can go basically anywhere, but the limits to all three of those abilities mean the game ends up becoming one of careful strategy and risk, particularly since there are so many routes you can take through levels, some unforgiving tough but very quick. Add to that an interesting story about journeying through trauma and a lot of interesting levels and you have one of the sleeper hits of the year.

5: Murdered: Soul Suspect (Square-Enix: PC/XONE/PS4/X360/PS3)

A game which scores a lot of its points with an interesting premise and an excellent adventuring mechanic. The best way to describe the game is Ghost Trick meets LA Noire, where you play a cop who has to solve his own murder in order to get into heaven. At times the game is complete nonsense but the game really does a good job of painting the ghost world as different from the real world. Add to that the interesting clue gathering and piecing together mechanics from LA Noire and you have a very good adventure game. The stealth sections, combat and the sheer amount of combat there is later in the game probably could have done with some balencing though.

4: South Park the Stick of Truth (Ubisoft: PC/X360/PS3)

Don't say I never give Ubisoft credit when it's due. For all the AAA problems they've had this year, they also released the touching Valient Hearts, the stylish Child of Light and The Stick of Truth, the single best licensed game released this year, and up on the list for being the best licensed game of all time.

Where it works is in the details. It looks like the show, and few games ever manage that. The writing is by the show's writers, the voice acting is by Matt Stone and Trey Parker and it is as hilarious, demented and absolutely brilliant as the show has become. The gameplay is akin to Paper Mario, right down to having patches, badges and extra abilities and may well be the most refined game Obsedian have made as well.

3: One Way Heroics (AGM Playism: PC)

There were a lot of RPGs in my shortlist, and again I was torn between the sublime Legends of Heroes, Trails in the Sky and this, and really both deserve to be on this list. One Way Heroics succeeds in having an excellent array of mechanics, a great pace to the game, lots of choices and customisation and really managing to do something new with the roguelike. The balance between getting experience and looking for items, as well as the potential for strategy is done excellently, along with one of the best soundtracks this year (in fact the only two soundtracks better than it are at #2 and #1 on this list). A sleeper hit in every regard.

2: The Binding of Isaac Rebirth (Nicalis and Edmund McMillan: PC/PS4)

I love the Binding of Isaac, but there were a lot of slight technical problems with the original game which meant I never really got the fullest out of it. If it didn't do quite as many improvements, modifications, engine changes and the like to the game it might have been disqualified for being a rerelease, but because all those changes improve and change the gameplay experience so thoroughly, it has to be here. Since I bought it a month and a bit ago I have sunk 75 hours into it, and it has become the go-to game I play when I'm doing other things. The amount of content in the game is staggering, almost as much as how much that affects the game, with good and bad loadouts really meaning the difference between a tricky game and an incredibly hard one. Despite this you never feel the game has made it impossible for you, and it manages that great rogue-lite sense of risk and reward perfectly. Add to that a great mix between adorable and abject imagery and an incredible soundtrack and you have one of the best games this year.

1: Transistor (Supergiant Games: PC/PS4)

The game world this year has been characterised by games that promise a lot and simply do not deliver. Many games I thought would be spectacular at the start of this year have by its end either been forgotten or are not quite as great. Transistor however is not one of them.

I went into 2014 thinking this would be my game of the year, perhaps having to battle MGSV and Watchdogs for the top sport. But it simply did not disappoint. If anything, the game was better than I had anticipated, with all its functions and form coming together wonderfully with an amazing aesthetic. I love cyberpunk, and this mix of cyberpunk and art deco made for an arresting hauntingly beautiful atmosphere, particularly as the work of the Process serves to swallow it up.

The soundtrack is one of the best of all time, a mix of genres along with some sensational vocals creates that tragic out of time sense for the game, which just works perfectly for every scenario. The game is short but with a New Game Plus option and a heartbreaking story.

There were many good games this year. A few great ones, but it turns out only one of them managed to do everything right this year and that was indeed Transistor.

The Isometrics Worst Games of the Year: The Top Eight Worst Games of The Year

So after a long contentious year, there stands a stack of terrible games, some giftedly bad, others a sheer affront to the gaming Zeitgeist. However they got onto this list, they are games that really made a dent in arguments that video games are artistic statements.

Right, I covered the rules in a post last week, but just to clarify everything. I'll do a quick summery:

It has to be a full game released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, that is not a beta or in early access. Episodic games count from the release of the first episode, so long as the intent was to be episodic and not to sell a beta release. Freemium games are exempt except in particularly egregious circumstances. Remakes, ports and expanded rereleases can count either if they are the first version of a game released in English or are expanded to a sufficient degree that they could be considered a sequel.

In the end these are all subjective rankings, and I will show my working as much as possible in the process of writing the list.

Now, with that out of the way here is the bottom eight games of the year!

8: Watch Dogs (Ubisoft: PC/X360/XONE/PS3/PS4)

Speaking of subjectivity, this is a game I suspect might ruffle a few feathers, because on the face of it it's not a terrible game, with mostly functional mechanics and a few occasionally interesting twists on the Ubisoft Open World formula. This is on the list for three relatively minor things that in combination ruin the experience. The first is the simplification of basically every aspect, with the hacking on the go mechanic that is meant to differentiate it from other open world games almost never coming into play except in the most situational of circumstances. This spreads to the graphics, gorgeous in trailers but fairly mediocre and choppy in game. Speaking of mediocre and choppy, the PC port is particularly awful, with low framerates, poor textures and stuttering abounding and serving to ruin the experience further.

It is the most classic, and frustrating case of a game with a great idea that falls flat on the fundementals and simply ends up as a lifeless, dull and largely unlikable game. A crying shame.

7: Duck Dynasty The Game (Activision: PC/ X360/PS3)

Probably on a lot of people's top spot for worst game this year, Activision's take on the beardiest family in america caused a lot of eyebrows to roll. How would a game based on a reality (using the word under advisement of course) TV series pan out? The answer is generically. Outside of the baffling and occasionally unintentionally hilarious storyline (Any cutscene before a stealth section really speaks for itself), the game is a set of rather shallow minigames in a rather shallow open world. It's pretty low on this list in part because it at least works completely, though the fact that it is above a game that was almost completely broken on it's PC release speaks volumes about the quality within. Whatever you think about the Robertsons and the Duck Commander, this game commands you to throw it in the bin.

6: Takedown: Red Sabre (505 Games: PC)

This at first seemed like an excellent idea for a game. Bring back classic tactical shooting in the vein of the sublime Rainbow Six 3, even calling on a former developer of the title for support. Sadly the game was astoundingly bugged and even when it wasn't constantly crashing to desktop or sucking wind on fairly powerful PCs the actual content of the game was ferociously limited, with multiplayer being as unplayable a mess as possible. It is a crying shame that this game failed to live up to expectations and served, along with several other Kickstarter disappointments to really dent confidence in the crowdfund as a medium for distributing games, which is the primary reason why it makes it on this list.

5: Rambo: The Video Game (Teyon: PC/X360/PS3)

Oh dear. This is the first of many games on this list that are both utterly dreadful and utterly deceptive. The Steam page of the game suggests that your hard earned thirty pounds will garner you a crazy yet rather alright looking FPS based on the most manly man in the history of 80s manliness, John Rambo. However upon purchase the game turns out to be an on-rails light gun game. You may have noticed that there aren't any common light guns available for PC. The graphics, while passable in screenshots are terrible in motion, not helped by the fact that each of the stages has exactly one enemy type. Other mechanics such as perks and the rage bar seem tacked on and other than making the obligatory quick time sequences even less necessary don't serve to make the game suck any less. On top of all this, the dialogue is literally ripped from a blu-ray of Rambo, right down to sound artefacts in the background. Lovely.

4: Guise of the Wolf (FUN Creations: PC)

Oh dear. This isn't a game that people likely remember, but the sheer abject terror that is Guise of the Wolf can't be understated. Featuring appalling character design, questionable cel shading effects, an appalling mix of the most boring generic time consuming puzzles and awful combat, and a profound sense of obtuseness surrounding pretty much every other aspect. It is no combination of fun, challenging or rewarding, but an experience to be suffered through incredibly slowly.

3: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

Just as we thought Sonic had managed to escape the throes of terrible gaming, sadly Big Red Button productions drags the blue blur back into the fold. The television show and indeed the 3DS game are at least debatable in quality, however the Wii U release Rise of Lyric has a budget game rip-off feel last seen with the reprehensible Ride to Hell: Retribution. Sonic's trademark speed is limited to brief on-rails segments, the beat-em-up mechanics are tedious, as indeed is the different platforming sections for your four playable characters, every single one of which seemingly having a fetish for Boost Rings that moves into concerning by the end of the game. Add to that a co-op mode that slows the game to a crawl, random slowdown anyway and a pause glitch that allows you to jump infinitely off the edge of the world, and you have a recipe for a disaster worthy of comparison to the execrable Sonic 2006.

2: The Slaughtering Grounds (Digital Homicide Studios LLC: PC)

2014 was a year in which Steam opened the floodgates, allowing pretty much anything willing to pay their cut to release a game on Steam. This lead to some abominable atrocities, zillions of straight up ports and rereleases and a flurry of awful unfinished games so huge that Steam altered its curation system to mitigate the damage. Then came the Slaughtering Grounds, a game that brought back the dark old days of shareware, with hideous graphics, a useless interface, controls designed for someone with at least three thumbs and some of the worst FPS gameplay seen on Steam. As far as attempts to co-opt the success of Killing Floor go, this is possibly the most atrocious example, and there is very little fun to be had.

Of course the creators of the game seemed to disagree and created a series of potentially libellous videos mocking critic Jim Sterling, who voiced what can only be described as the truth. Bashing the critics for skewing your work has never ever succeeded in doing anything but making you look bitter, insecure and unable to admit your product has serious flaws.

1: Air Control (Killjoy Games: No Longer Available: PC)

The other major trend of 2014 was the idea of Youtube Fodder: deliberately bad games that would be made fun of by major content creators in a bid to artificially create buzz and sales. Games like Goat Simulator really towed this line, splitting the critics as much as it split sides, while other games like Surgeon Simulator AE and I Am Bread managed to succeed far more as games. At best this allowed silly concepts to be released and generate a lot of interest, but at worst it was an excuse to sell utterly broken unplayable games. Guess which one Air Control is?

Air Control, by the rather appropriately named Killjoy games is just atrociously bad in every important respect. It's difficult to decide where to begin, be it with the assets stolen from other games and other game engine assets, the repeated ripoffs of Flappy Bird, the controls that don't work and even have “Lock Mouse” buttons to further cripple them, the fact that the game has a two part casual mode which means nothing and crashes the game if you try to switch between the modes, the litany of other game bugs, most of which are game breaking, the questionable censorship of criticism by Killjoy themselves, the accusations that critics simply have computer that cannot run the game despite it looking like an 11 year old's first attempt with Pie in the Sky, deleting criticism of the game as well as requests for refunds and the sheer audacity of trying to charge money for a game like this.

Some have argued that this is all a satire of Youtube fodder and Steam's curation policy or lack thereof but none of that stops it from being the worst, most absolutely rancid and toxic game of the year, and better yet because the game is no longer available for sale I'm not enabling this kind of irresponsible behaviour among game developers.

After that lark, come back to the Clinkening tomorrow for a far more positive look on the year, and look out for the Isometrics Awards and New Years Resolution post later this week.

Thanks for Reading!

An Isometric 2014: On Transition, Change and Challenge

The year 2014 has been a year of flux as a whole, and the gaming world has been shaped in part by that flux. Compared to the amazing artistic swansong that was 2013, it may be easy to see 2014 as somewhat of a disappointment, critically, creatively and culturally, however peel away the dank cynicism and there is a lot more hope for the future than one might imagine.

The biggest thing of the year is of course the release of the next generation of consoles, with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One being part of a somewhat acrimonious console war. Many of the news stories, trade events and interviews featured more than a few potshots and particularly tactical marketing decisions intended as much to put the enemy down rather than big up the system itself. Things like the rather bitter tit-for-tat exclusivity deals (“You got Titanfall and Rise of the Tomb Raider? Well we'll get Street Fighter V!”) and the increasingly secretive marketing deals and relationships between giant companies and the larger web-based gaming media was something that would have massive echoing effects throughout the year.

Despite the plaintive cries of the PC faithful who claim they had all the power of the new systems years ago (Full Disclosure: I built a gaming rig this year), the systems were genuinely more powerful and brought the potential for newer and bigger gaming experiences. Sadly, those experiences weren't entirely realised within the bigger budget games, and my top ten lists will reflect the fact that there wasn't a AAA title around that didn't come without the sting of disappointment. The ambition and attempts at new ideas and new intellectual properties shouldn't be understated however, even if the chequered reception to Titanfall and the rather poor release of Watch Dogs didn't seem to foster much in the way of confidence. Generally the biggest two bugbears of the past, overhyped and undercooked releases, ended up having a greater effect than ever, with Assassin's Creed Unity being the inevitably bad result.

This was the first year to see some major broken promises in the case of crowd-funding platforms as well, with Double Fine's fall from grace being a particularly dark indicator of the importance of really planning for every possible eventuality when asking people for money to fund your project. That said, despite some major issues, the majority of successful Kickstarters are still trucking, which if all goes to plan will lead to a 2015 stocked to the brim with amazing unique ideas.

Culturally the video game community saw its biggest shifts to date. Youtube as a gaming media platform really hit the spotlight this year, first being treated as a threat through the ContentID shenanigans at the start of the year that received no limit of coverage, to the giftedly bad games seemingly designed to be let's played, to the increasingly questionable issues of payola, reaching a zenith with Yogsdiscovery, a scheme that at least was a pretty blunt statement of intentions. Youtubers making careers on the platform is a relatively new thing and so certain basic things like disclosure and the trust between content provider and the audience was broken on more than one occasion over the year, and the less said about the insane tribalistic mess that was the entire Gamergate story the better, as prominent people both for and against seemingly different interpretations of the core ideologies climbed over themselves to yell obscenities at each other in a way that served to leave people caught in the middle feeling more than a little isolated. This coupled with the market censorship of a few controversial titles adds further questions to where gaming stands on the cultural front between toy and transcendental art.

In the end though, there is the sense that deep within all this pain, harassment and epithets is a discussion that needs to be had, about the relationship between developers, the gaming press in its nebulous state and gamers themselves, as well as the identity of a gaming culture faced with its own adolescence. What is gaming and what are gamers going into 2015? That answer is something every gamer will have to face themselves but having written Isometrics on and off this year on top of news and reviews for two sites now, the answer for me personally is a web of fear and doubt over where gaming will move to over the next few years, but like all good adventures a sense of wonder comes directly from this. 2015 looks promising, and looking forward rather than back, 2014 looks pretty good too.

With the amazing promise of last year it was going to fall below our expectations, but it is possible that the progress of last year might be discolouring the achievements and great games of 2014. Even with me playing catch up on 2013's releases I still had more good games than bad in my shortlists, and there were some fantastic games that lived up to their promise. With the recent release of new consoles a sense of conservatism was inevitable, with the market dominated with updated re-releases and HD ports. However, a year sandwiched between the artistic accomplishments of the past and the great expectations of the future to not be branded a total write-off is a good achievement indeed.

Happy Christmas, hope 2014 wasn't too brutal, and I hope you stick around for the Isometrics Awards

Isometrics: On New Beginnings and the Isometrics Awards

Welcome to Isometrics, the Belated Bellevue of the literary world of computer and video games. It has been an amazingly long time since the last Isometrics, for various reasons I won't go into here, but suffice to say many of those concerns are no longer a factor in my life and thus Isometrics lives again. I figure the best time to come back would be December because it means I can discuss the gaming year and will have more than one post a week.

There's a little bit of caretaking and cobweb dusting to do first before we leap back into the fray, so I apologise in advance for a bit of a cluttered article. Currently all my old Isometrics posts are on Geek Pride (Link to a little library of them here), but as far as I know in the immediate future they will be on The Clinkening, which is my old blog of sorts (there's plenty of my old stuff here but don't look, it's terrible!). That will be the home of Isometrics until I either create a new site or someone decides that they'd like to see these articles on their website and I somehow pitch it successfully.

In any case, the time has come for the Isometrics Awards, which is a set of five articles that will be released over the Christmas period. This didn't happen last year because they would have been my first Isometrics articles and it didn't seem right to discuss a year I'd not written about in some way.

The first will be a review of the year “On Gaming in the Year 2014”, where I discuss how gaming changed, progressed and changed in the year 2014, and my oh my is there a lot to talk about. That will be up either this week or next, depending on how everything falls into place in terms of my life. That should be up on Friday all going well

Next week there is the crowning of the Worst and Best games of 2014. I've wanted to do a list like this for so long, where I chronicle the crowning achievements and the deepest lows of video games in 2014, from the most evocative epics to the most repulsive ideas. There are ground rules I hold, which I'm not sure are the same for every games media person doing a list like this, but mine are as follows:

To qualify, the game must have received a full release in one of the three major territories (Japan, USA and Europe) between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014. A release in this definition is a retail release of a full game, or in the case of freeware games that may make the list, the release of a 1.0 and a sourced report that the game is no longer a beta. The reason for the date overlap is that while this list is based on a full year, it will by definition be released before the start of the next, so to ensure that games that may have been ignored in the lull after cyber monday are not ignored, they are eligible for next year's list as well.

Games released in a paid beta programme or Steam's Early Access are not eligible until they receive a full release, to encourage the speedy development and release of said games. Episodic games are eligible, providing their first episode was released within the window of release, so long as the game's intention was to be episodic, as opposed to an attempt to buy more development time (This is known as the Broken Age Rule).

Freemium games (aka “Free to Play”, “Free to Start” and “Confidence Tricks”) are not eligible due to the inherent issues with the format. Exceptions will be made for particularly egregiously terrible examples that defy the standard issues that plague Free to Play games. Note that I have not mentioned any ways Freemium games could enter the Best Games list. A particularly excellent example may well qualify, but it is difficult to explain the conditions that would lead to it, and will likely be decided on a case by case basis.

There is a thorny issue of remakes, ports and expanded rereleases. Generally as a rule straight ports of a game are not allowed as a means to get around the release date limit. This would for example, disqualify Valkyria Chronicles from the 2014 lists (For the record, it would have been very high up the Best of list, had it been allowed.). HD Rereleases, expanded ports and remakes are disallowed unless they have enough content and gameplay alterations to differentiate themselves from the original game, which may well be up to me to justify. An example of this in action is that Resident Evil would qualify for 1996 for being an original game. Resident Evil for Gamecube (the REmake) would also qualify for 2002 for being significantly different from the original game (new enemies, new enemy types, story differentiation, new modes), while the 2015 HD rerelease of that would not qualify because it is not different enough. It is a rule that makes more sense in practise.

Regarding games with inferior ports, generally I will go with whatever version I've played (Almost entirely the PC this year), as opposed to treating different ports as different games. It just gets confusing that way especially with games like GTA V, which would in theory be eligible for three years in a row.

Finally, while all my reasons and justifications will be explained in my review, they are in the end subjective, at least based on what I have and have not played. I will only be including games I have played myself this year, which may discount a lot of AAA games. My judging criteria is based on active joy and active malice, so the game that gave me the most amount of joy and did the most amount of amazing things with the medium will win Game of the Year, and the opposite is true for the Worst Game of the Year. In the end these are all basically opinions I explain and elaborate, so don't take it to heart if a game you really like is not in my list.

I've been looking forward to this all year, and my list has changed in so many ways since my predictions at the start of the year.

Then there is the Isometrics Awards, the big list of miscellaneous awards based around the world of literary gaming, from the ridiculously serious to the seriously ridiculous. Basically as much of the craziness, joy, splendour and stupidity of video games and game culture will be brought to the fore.

After all that, there is the Isometric New Year's Resolutions, which will be five predictions/hopes/pleas to the gaming zeitgeist for things to change in 2015. I had a blast writing the resolutions last year and so I'll definitely have a ton to say this year.

With everything else I want to say to everyone who read Isometrics (or pretty much anything else I posted), thank you ever so much. It meant a lot that people read my works. I had some great discussions with friends about the things I had written and the feedback I received was nice. I'm also really sorry that other articles and work commitments got in the way of new articles, but with a new beginning for 2015, there will be a greater endeavour to continue writing what I love rather than what I need to.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and all the rest!

On the Enjoyment of Critical Analysis of Video Games: A Tomb Raider (2013) (Xbox 360) Review Part 2

So, after just shy of 1600 words of a preamble, we might be ready to see what this game has to offer. Now I've completed the game once, though not 100% (I saw the challenges I had left and decided I needed some time to gather my thoughts) so I think I can give a fairly comprehensive account. If there's some hidden documents or lore you get for a 100% completion drop a line to the usual addresses.

The first thing is that the game dumps you in very quickly, from selecting your difficulty to the first instance of what will be a long, almost aristocrats joke level of pain is less than 30 seconds, as the Endurance is racked by storms and ripped apart, Lara almost drowning before being thrown off the ship, waking up tied up in a sack. From here is a series of limited gameplay bits, where you first set the sack alight, and fall on the only spike on the ground. From there is a mini tutorial of sorts, as you move and solve different little puzzles to get a hang of the controls, or face a small quick-time event. Both of which have the same conclusion, some sort of painful endeavour, before you finally make it out into the Coastal Forest: the first proper area of the game, though still mostly a tutorial, the goal merely to find the means to survive, which means a source of fire and food.

And it's here that I can get the actual gameplay aspects out of the way, so if you're after a review of this as a game, rather than an interactive story, I'll signpost the actual gameplay review parts. The graphics are absolutely incredible. The character animations are smooth, the textures are amazing, the character models manage to avoid the uncanny valley effect by being both stylised and relatable enough to reality and are really beautifully done and the attention to detail is just staggering. The actual locations you explore are open world and relatively small but the amount they manage to pack into the areas is fantastic, full of little nooks and crannies and secrets that I think I trebled the gameplay time just having fun looking for them. The fire effects look amazing, and it's clearly something that was a priority for the development team, given the large amount of puzzles and set pieces that require the use of fire to solve. The platforming is a heavily refined variant of the Underworld system, being essentially jump, drop and move around on different bits of the scenery. Unlike Underworld though, the climbing controls when not on a straight ledge are far more responsive, so you don't often feel like you should be able to climb to a nook that you can't. The controls are very responsive, something that again wasn't in Underworld due to a slightly dodgy animation engine.

The gameplay structures itself as a pseudo-open world with different areas that you can explore at will, full of secrets and different things, inspired more by Assassin's Creed this time than Prince of Persia. Helping in this regard is Eagle vi- sorry, Instin- damn it! Survival Instinct, the latest incarnation of the very useful indicator system. Hitting the left bumper makes a pulse hit and turns the screen grey scale to identify all the useful things you need to know on the screen in different colours. Enemies in Red, climbable stuff in white, where you need to go as a shining beacon and so on. Basically if you didn't like it in Assassin's Creed or Hitman Absolution, it's not exactly necessary to complete the game but it does very much help, particularly since in this very dense jungle there are far more things to catch you out, like rope traps that send you upside down.

The final part of the tutorial of sorts requires you to collect a bow from a poor former explorer and hunt a deer, and people who like hunting a bit too much will be pleased to know that both head shots and heart shots are one shot kills.

It's this kind of attention to detail that you must value in review you know!

This allows Lara to get back to the camp, enjoy some deer and watch some videos her best friend Sam was to put on youtube. Yes, there's a found footage aesthetic in the game where Lara and her surprisingly large supporting cast (for comparison, in the early games you had maybe three characters total including the butler, and even in the Crystal Dynamics games you only had three sidekicks, also including the butler) interact and try desperately to break the stock character types they've clearly been assigned. Joining Lara on this intrepid adventurer is the Geeky one, the Spineless one, the Ripley, the best friend with awful luck, the native american, the old captain and the Northern Bastard.

The main issue is it's a large cast for a survival game, particularly when for massive portions of the game you only get to interact with one of them over the radio, 'Northern Bastard' Roth. Each of them does get a character moment, typically when they die, but the interesting part in the discussion is generally Lara, not the other character, which in itself is interesting since in most of these games you have the exact opposite issue: A great supporting cast carrying a deliberately underdeveloped protagonist.

One of the things I think that is fixed right from the start of this is that unlike the trailer, Lara is given some stellar voice work, and her writing and vocal mannerisms capture a lot of different disparate effects in a small amount of words, proving that some of Prachett's father's influence rubbed off. The dialogue Lara has with other characters, and more fundamentally with herself is very well told, and because for large stretches of the game Tomb Raider is a one-woman show, she is naturally the one who develops the most and in the most interesting ways.

And speaking of which, it's probably time to get into the scene that caused so much controversy in June, to see if context aids the uncomfortable imagery, as Rhianna Prachett argues.

The scene in question comes surprisingly quickly, barely an hour into the game, at the end of the second chamber, Lara and Spineless (sorry, his name's Whitman but for almost the entirety of the game he's one dimensionally pathetic, occasionally adding elements of prissyness) get captured by a group of Russian-esque mercenaries or scavengers, who rough up the captives, including backhand slapping Lara to the ground. This leads to an interesting stealth section with your hands tied behind your back where you end up in the situation in the trailer, caught in the middle of a tiny hole in a structure, forced at gun point out and trapped as the guard attempts to touch her in a rather uncomfortable quick time event. There's only two (maybe three) vaguely sexual parts to the scene until it becomes a struggle for the gun the scavenger is carrying until the inevitable shot. Now, in the trailer it kind of cuts away here, but the scene afterwards justifies the ordeal, as Lara breaks down and swears that she's just killed someone, before picking up the gun and attempting her escape.

Now, it's clear that there is no actual threat of rape in the code, if you mess up the quicktime button press Lara gets strangled: an awfully visceral death but not sexual in the least. The issue I have is that they make the vague pass at having the attack sexualised but don't do anything to justify it or to imply it has consequences, as if it was only there to make the man in question look like a sadistic idiot. A lot of people feel better about it but I still maintain that adding a sexualised element to it in any way was unnecessary, since any kind of sexual abuse, assault or even harsh language about women (I think “fucking bitch” might get said once throughout the game) isn't ever mentioned or hinted at again. It's a gripe, but it's a gripe that is more than forgiven by the following fifteen minute section of the game where Lara escapes the abandoned village where she was brought to, having to shoot scavengers that fire at her, which is probably one of the most effective, tense and emotional fifteen minutes of pure gameplay I've played in years. Part of this is the excellent gunplay and cover systems. Gunplay is standard, LT to aim, RT to fire with Lara automatically hiding behind cover, but the viscerality of it is emphasised, and it makes you feel a thick cocktail of emotions. It's not like Spec Ops: The Line, which made the gunplay adequate but not fun, to add to the narrative's message on the horrors of war, since it is still enjoyable in its own right, but the scene before it, the first taking of a human life then the desperate cries as Lara guns down people, asking them to leave her alone as she blows their brains out is oddly effective, and makes me believe Rosenberg missed a trick. I didn't feel like I wanted to protect Lara, particularly not in that very patronising “I wish to protect you because you're a cute girl” way he was implying, but there was parts to the initial gunplay where the player and Lara's pain matched, at least to a certain degree, which like in The Line, can only be a positive thing regarding the effectiveness of the narrative. This is probably the emotional high point, the big change where Lara stops being a headstrong fastidious intelligent student and becomes a survivor and an adventurer.

That makes this a bildungsroman. I don't care what you lit snobs think!

There is actually a significant amount of weight to this being a bildungsroman, which to non-pretentious northern bastards like Roth and not like me, is a novel of development, where a child struggles to become an adult and find his place in society. Think something like Great Expectations. The key to a bildungsroman is indeed the struggle and I suspect that's what the developers were going for, in a rather hamfisted way. The idea is you feel all this pain and horror and mangled emotions first, and then, like Lara, build yourself back up through force of will. It's surprisingly effective, and probably is why the majority of the game looks less and less like the first hour and a half. The game, as part of its development from a survival horror (indeed, the bit in the mountain village feels like a very truncated version of I Spit on Your Grave, albeit without the particularly grotesque, gruesome and uncomfortably exploititive parts of that premise), but the next few scenes feel less and less so. Sure, survival is still a vital part of the game, with the game very tepidly promoting stealth in a few areas (this isn't MGS3 though, don't expect to pull off a no-alert pacifist run here), but ammo is plentiful, the controls are good and you get greater rewards for fighting, although of course you run the risk of death, which refreshingly unlike most games is something that is actually quite likely on normal mode, even if you adapt to the cover system quickly. Survival becomes less a matter of concern and more a matter of getting more experience points which you can spend at base camp.

Now that the more intense parts of the review are out of the way I can finally get into the last major part of the gameplay system: Base Camp. Base camp is effectively the fires in Dark Souls, a kind of save point, but also the place where you can upgrade yourself (with skill points you get from XP you get from killing enemies, finding hidden items and raiding optional tombs) and each of the four (well five, if you count the axe you use to pry open doors and boxes) weapons you get (through finding salvage, the other collectable). Both are fairly expansive, though if you go off the beaten track even a tiny bit you'll probably get enough experience to get all the extra skills, and most if not all of the weapon components which get you the best versions of each weapon. If it sounds like I'm not selling it much, all I need to tell you about it is that you can get a shotgun that lights people on fire. It's awesome, though I think it does reflect a problem with video game narratives a bit, particularly ones which deal with the theme of killing, since it tells you this is bad and you should try not to end up like the monsters you fight and have the abyss stare back at you, yet at the same time the more you play with the weapon customisation and skill sets the more fun the gunplay is, particularly when you unlock the weapon finishers, special moves you can do up close when you hit the Y button after knocking someone over. It's not a big deal, since the game does have moments where you do feel that guilt the game is trying to make you, mostly early on, and by the end it's part of the bloodthirsty nature of the character people didn't like when she wiped out entire species of tiger in the early games.

Speaking of the early games, the primary challenge of the bildungsroman is to connect the scary survival stuff with the supernatural tomb raiding of every other game in the series, which is done through the Island itself. Yamatai, in the Dragon's Triangle (the Japanese equivalent to the Bermuda triangle) is an island racked by freak storms, most of which, in true Resident Evil fashion, destroy your only means off the island, over and over again. Seriously, at least three planes and helicopters get demolished in the game that you try to escape on. The idea is there is no escape, caused by the mysterious Queen Himiko, a sort of Boadicea-like figure known also as the Sun Queen. The game's thematic through-line is the nature of myth as a reflection of some kind of truth. In game this refers to the question of how real the myths of Himiko are, but you could take a metafictional reading here and claim that it's a comment on the Myth of Lara Croft herself, and how much of the 'reality' of the character was seen in the earlier games, or more recently how much of the game itself was really seen from the myth of the trailer. It's an interesting theme, and part of what justifies some of the later interactions with the characters is their inability to see the connections between myth and reality. Lara Croft in particular is a well suited protagonist to a game suiting this theme, as she herself is haunted by the ghosts of her pasts, of her late father who she early on in the game condemned for believing in myth, her feelings changing as she realises there was more truth than she could first see, and that change, that acceptance of her heritage and her family is also a symbolic acceptance of the heritage and the tone of the older games, although whether it's an acceptance of the shorts I think is a mystery that won't be solved until the inevitable sequel.

The game itself runs about 8-20 hours, depending on just how much of a completionist you are, and of course not counting DLC, which I didn't get any of with my copy. The pacing regardless is superb throughout and there aren't really many deadspots even if you're hunting for collectibles given survival instinct and the beacons systems. There are optional tombs to raid, although these are more like simple physics puzzles rather than the huge multi-level environments of old. Still a ton of fun though and I suspect what most of the DLC will consist of. There are a few glitches with the game, particularly with regard to the physics engine and how the game deals with Lara being out of the physical bounds. Once I managed to make a box push Lara through the geometry and out of the game world, which took me out of the experience a little bit. Mercifully it only happened a few times and a quick reload checkpoint thing meant I only lost about two or three minutes of progress total. It's a very enjoyable ride from start to finish, with only a few little lumps and bumps in between and tiny gripes, and seemed to simultaneously enrapture me in its awe and wonder and gave me enough to ensure that a critical reading of the game and its story was positive.

The final question on everyone's lips is whether this is a good feminist game and it certainly tries to be, the little gripe with the trailer notwithstanding. Lara is a character of deep layers and hidden strengths and with each challenge another veil is parted to show another strength. I get the complaints with the character in the past, that she seemed to barely exist in the world where the challenges exist. She knew the answer before it was asked and barely seemed to be in any danger. They say legends are born from tragedy and triumph, and with the new Tomb Raider, the balance is struck between the two, and hopefully in the same vein, there is something really empowering about Lara's tragedy and triumph here, that felt organic, rather than either a cardboard character or the subject of a feminist thesis.

Verdict: Just buy it already, I can't recommend it more.

On the Enjoyment of Critical Analysis of Video Games: A Tomb Raider (2013) (Xbox 360) Review Part 1

Hey there, I've just completed (though not 100%ed) the New Tomb Raider game and thought I should provide a somewhat lengthy review of it, not just as a game or a gaming experience, but through the feminist critique people threw at it during those initial trailers. Because the complete experience of the game is vital to most readings of this game in particular, there'll inevitably be spoilers, even though you've already figured out how the game will turn out. Also, while I'll try to be academic about it, large chunks of it will have to do with my own personal experience of the game. So yeah. Have fun!

Preamble: Things Left Behind

You figured it would happen eventually.

Last year I posted the first part of an aborted analysis I was going to do on the issues of gender equality in video games, particularly in the protagonist archetype. Effectively the nub of my analysis is how the gaming heroine experience changed, from barely existing, to distaff counterpart, to the mixed blessing of the 'Girl Power' era, where action girls were created that amazingly missed the point, before moving to a worrying trend where, far from being equal, female characters would be lightening rods for serious abuse in a misguided attempt to be 'serious' or 'edgy', while male characters seemed to be the same bulletproof action hero fantasy figures they always were, just with even massiver muscles. I stopped that, mainly because I didn't feel I'd researched enough feminist theory to really do it justice, but it is something I maintain is the case.

The first game I planned to talk about was Metroid Other M, a painfully misguided game which tried to make a character who never speak never shut up. The biggest problem wasn't that though; it was the rampant misogyny, shown mainly the strange patriarchal complex Samus developed at the start of the game, obsessing over the 'perfect military mind' Adam, doing everything he told her to despite having no reason or incentive to do so, and not daring to touch the equipment she has unless Adam says its okay, and being so obsessed she runs through a volcanic area, burning herself alive until Adam lets her turn on the Varia Suit she already had! Then there was the bloody maternal metaphor, which including such things as Samus being drawn by a distress signal called a “baby's cry”, which was hamfistedly monologued about for a good five minutes. It read like the developer shockingly realised Samus was a woman and was like “Oh no! What do women do? Have Babies? Alright, there's our central metaphor, we are aware of gender issues!” And then there was the Ridley fight, where she developed a PTSD that seemed to serve no purpose but act as a trigger for abuse sufferers and I could go on for an eternity about it. It was living proof that a bad story badly told can ruin what was otherwise a very fun game.

The other game was the then-upcoming Tomb Raider, and I'm glad I waited until I put the controller before I touched it. The main dilemma with the game is obvious. The game is pitted as a reimagining of not only the series' gameplay, but primarily the series' protagonist, the unflappable Lara Croft. She's always been a polarising figure in feminist debate, considered possibly the greatest emblem of the 'Girl Power' era; she kicked mountains of ass, was a smart, interesting character and was in the business of tomb raiding entirely for herself, however that was offset by her image, which was cheesecake and increasingly exploited to drum up sales (a running gag went for a while in the 90s about just how big Lara's breasts would get, given they got bigger each game). Sexualisation in video games was hardly a new thing in video games; even Metroid had it if you beat the game fast and complete enough, but it was one of the most prolific and successful examples. It was difficult to really condemn or celebrate her as a feminist figure without coming to complications about representation, she was too strong to be sexy and too sexy to be strong, apparently.

As an eight year old struggling with the complicated all weapons code and accidentally making Lara blow up in Tomb Raider II, all of this went way over my head, as did most of the sexualisation stuff. It was something you heard about and giggled about like you did about anything adult when you were that age; I was too young to understand it enough to be affected either way. Regardless, I loved Tomb Raider, and tried really hard to beat it and let her get the Dagger of Xian.

After reminiscing, I kind of want to play it again, regardless of the fact Lara is a tank in a tank top in that game. The gameplay was fun and the writing slightly better than one could expect from that era.

I was also too young to realise certain problems with the action girl era. I just thought they were cool and wondered why there weren't more of them, then shrugged and went on to play Mario.

I really got into the later three games before this latest reboot (Legend, Anniversary and Underworld), coded by Crystal Dynamics (who completely incidentally designed the Gex series of games, which were far too awesome to fade away). The pacing was quicker, clearly inspired by the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time series and their flowing parkour style of platforming (Incidentally, the last game Core Design, the original makers of Tomb Raider made was called Free Running and somehow was stodgier than the Tank-like Tomb Raider games they made previously). Lara's wit also quickened and sharpened too, the return of series creator Toby Gard probably having an effect on the direction of the series. They were fast fun, full of secrets and cool things and had enough of a plot to string together the more impressive physics puzzles and set pieces.

There is a point to this preamble, I assure you.

After the allegedly disappointing sales of Underworld in 2009 (It sold 2.6 million copies, so take what you will from the 'allegedly'), there was much speculation as to the matter of why it didn't sell, and in the end they put the blame on the alleged bulletproofing of the character, internally dubbing her “Teflon Lara”. She never felt in any peril, or at least in any believable peril and despite no parkour platformer ever having serious peril and threat as a part of it (Prince of Persia in particular making it near impossible to lose with various timeshifting and magic powers), the decision was to reboot Lara Croft as a younger, more vulnerable figure who it was hoped you'd care for more than a climbing running avatar.

The result of this is already clear to people who saw the reactions to the trailer for “Tomb Raider” (named pretentiously as such like all reboots to imply the earlier game never happened. See Also: Prince of Persia). What was meant to be an attempt to portray Lara as less badass and more fragile was taken out of proportion by pretty much everyone (including me). The trailer had over 50 screams and grunts of pain, there seemed to be a bizarrely fetishistic amount of pain, and most covered in the press there was an unfathomably uncomfortable scene with overtones of sexual assault and sexualised violence. None of this was helped by Ron Rosenberg actually saying they 'try to rape her' in an interview shortly afterwards, and various other things that caused a majority of feminists to want to lynch the bastard (including me). It is a shame he positioned the story as because it meant a large amount of the other things shown in the trailer were ignored, such as the new gunplay system, hunting, and some more traditional platforming parts.

Blaming all this on a misunderstanding of the project he was in charge of is a bit of a fools gambit and doesn't justify anything he said or implied, but there was a lot of it. His comments about how Lara becomes like a wounded animal in a flight or fight scenario or how the player desires to protect Lara probably sounded innocuous in what he understood of the game, failing to realise that pretty much everything he said exuded an unfortunately putrid misogyny, effectively implying to an unknowing crowd that we are both playing the damsel in distress and her knight in shining armour. In short, the way he worded it made it sound like some kind of male power fantasy that somehow leapt out of the TV and into your lap. Couple this with the Hitman Absolution trailer and it doesn't surprise anyone other than the team at Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics that there was a huge debate about misogyny in video games (including me, well, partly).

The thing is, what the project designer says is one thing, and the complete opposite reaction by Rhianna Prachett, the lead writer is quite another, but in the end it is down to the finished product and the way the game is played to reveal something about the video game Zeitgeist and whether it's still as hostile to women as was perceived back in June.

New content

Hey guys. So much for one update a week at least eh? Well hopefully I can make up for it with a big review I will post in two parts tomorrow on one of the hot topic games at the moment: Tomb Raider. I've a hell of a lot to say (in fact i spent the last two and a half hours writing a journal article's length review on the bloody thing) but I hope you'll enjoy it.