Every time I read something like: “Battlefield 3 has the best graphics right now, bla” I’m always thinking first, “what? don’t they know of Trine?!?”… Because let’s face it, these things have nothing on the gorgeous, almost breathtaking looks of Trine! This is what I call beautiful graphics!
There’s not that much new stuff in the sequel, I would even say that the aspects that are just different outweigh true novelties (which isn’t a bad thing, if you come from a fantastic game anyway – in that regard it’s similar to BAC). The wizard can’t create triangles anymore (I can understand why they removed those) and inventories/items are gone for all characters. The latter weren’t completely forgotten though. When the heroes take a dive for the first time, the thief is asked what happened to the amulet that allowed her to breath underwater (that was awesome and the game could have used much more of that!). :)
Obviously new were the giant creatures and what I liked (in addition to their visual brilliance), was that they didn’t do this thing (which I almost always end up somehow regretting), where everything is evil just because it’s big/there; there’s an octopus who kinda helps the player by holding up platforms with its tentacles so it’s possible to jump to the other side. Another creature is just in the way and leaves without aggression, after the puzzle is solved.
The single negative part of this game, to me, is the story is more or less just a placeholder. One had to be there, apparently, so this template was chosen. It’s not as bad as I might have made it sound right now, it’s not insulting or anything, it just lacks depth and doesn’t hold any surprises. Trine is really all about the environment (its looks), all the puzzles/physics, the heroes and their abilities, the wonderful soundtrack and how flawless it all melds together into… Trine 2 (not necessarily in that order).
I bought the Collector’s Edition (retail) and it has an artbook (to me it’s actually interesting and not some superfluous goodie), the game and soundtrack on disc and a Steam code for Trine 1 as well (so it’s ideal for people who are new to the series – “sadly”/luckily I already had Trine 1 since…). There’s (naturally) a digital CE too, which has the artbook and soundtrack in the game’s folder after download – exactly like the retail version. So with the latter you get the physical AND digital artbook. Therefore, I really have no idea for which type of customer the fully digital version could be the preferred version. And all these realizations hit before considering that the retail is – on top of it all – cheaper… Crazy, right?
I finished the game, but I will get back to it, to collect more of the secrets I overlooked so far. As I already mentioned, the items (Trine 1 featured as secrets) are missing, so this time secrets are poems and paintings.
I guess I’ve already covered, that I’d love Batman: Arkham Whatever more than my life if I didn’t need it to PLAY Batman: Arkham Whatever, so I can probably (indeed I can) jump right into babbling about whacky details I can remember!
Lucky for me, they didn’t descend into the madness of considering any significant changes to an already almost perfect gameplay & handling. Sometimes developers think they need to change an already great concept for the sequel and that’s when everything goes down the drain. BAC kept most aspects that were good and enhanced many of them/built upon those. I missed only one thing in BAA and that was a bigger world – so with BAC I got exactly what I hoped for (the free gliding is quite addictive).
Of course a bigger game world can mean that the (main-) story isn’t as tightly paced as it could be in a smaller environment, where nothing else is going on anyway, but that was no downside for me. In great games I never rush to the finish line as fast as possible. Besides, even in Arkham City, players could just run from one main-mission to the next. Hotspots are even marked with the bat signal shining above them in the sky. :) Another design decision paying tribute to the bigger size of AC is a relatively huge crowd of different characters. Couple folks seem to perceive this as some sort of an overload. But given the choice of having tons of the villains (they addressed this nicely btw, because Batman doesn’t fight the same guys again [except for Joker, because he's... Joker]; Poison Ivy might be in the game, but only Catwoman has to deal with her this time) in one place at the same time (and having to accept that this is maybe a little bit unrealistic), or lacking many interesting ones, I will still have to choose the former. The mere thought of a big, _empty_ game-world is demotivating to me. By the way, they struck a next to perfect balance. I deem the size of a game-world near perfect, if it’s neither so small, that there can be no exploration at all and there’s basically only one path to everything, nor so big, that traversing it is often uneventful and feels dead and barren (and everything looks alike). I’d vote details over unnecessary size any day. BAC is really the prime example I’d use to describe this near perfect balance.
What I didn’t like was only very little and hardly of the nature that would have a negative impact on my enjoyment. Another of the greatest parts of BAC was Catwoman. She wasn’t just some gimmick or minor selling point, her handling, animations – everything was as good as playing Batman himself (Batman of course has more moves and gadgets and…, but that’s beside the point). Given how flawless she was implemented, it was quite sad, that her mini-campaign was so short. I get it, it’s a Batman game after all, but still… I’d buy a Catwoman spin-off immediately.
The real downsides happened outside the game. The PC version was delayed a month (naturally many people assumed this was to give the title some additional polish) and when it came out, even the developer recommended not playing the game using the DirectX 11 mode (the launcher had it disabled from the start, even on machines that should have been able to run it – just so fewer people would play using DX11 – they totally knew from the start). The funny part is, that this game was used to advertise Nvidia graphics cards (BAC codes were given away with Nvidia card purchases) and then this selling point, of all things, was bugged.
I wasn’t really bummed out about it, because DX9 looked like a dream come true already (all screenshots are DX9!) and the differences wouldn’t have been that big – the real problem was, that there was only little communication about the issues and it was easy to think, that Rocksteady didn’t care at all about the PC version. After a patch came out in December, it took another month (!) just for them to officially offer a standalone download for the first patch… It’s really only such a minor, little thing, but they didn’t bother. Although it has been suggested, that there will be another patch, there is basically no information on what this second one might contain, or what the status is. The game itself is so fantastic and brilliant in all the glory of its content, but I’ve seen small indie developers with 5-10 dudes do a better job at supporting a game after it shipped, than what happened here. It sold pretty damn well AFAIK (4,6 million units shipped in the first week alone! one of the fastest selling games ever…), so it doesn’t make sense to treat it like that. It seems as if supporting a title after it has shipped really isn’t their strong suit. They manage to craft such an awesome masterpiece and then it’s like they all just go home and forget about it. The first installment received only one patch too (although I have to admit that I don’t remember any problems with BAA).
I’m planning on playing the “new game plus”-mode next, but I will certainly wait for the patch to appear (since they are taking their time I’m getting a vibe this might also be the last one), because otherwise I will regret having played it again without enjoying possible improvements. Seeing the DX11 effects for the first time might be another nice motivation.
Miscellaneous:
The final Riddler segment is triggered after “only” 400 collected secrets, because people without Catwoman DLC (comes with 40 extra secrets) must be able to complete it too (only DLC on consoles, PC has it integrated generally). So after gathering all 440 riddles/secrets, nothing happens anymore. :(
Why the hell did he carry out *beep* at the end of the game, when he could have carried out *beep*? Weird choice Bats, weird choice!
I was delighted that the game started with Bruce Wayne as a playable character. A truly wonderful idea. Making your way towards your gear was quite engaging.
I never learned how to do the blade takedown (or however it was called) properly (just jumped above them and punched them from behind or used a combo takedown – quite lazy, I know), while I mastered all other moves (it was a great decision to include most moves in the riddler challenges)… Maybe next playthrough?
[...] this game’s most impressive component is its gunplay…
“Rage Review.” Game Informer. Issue 223. November 2011. Page 99
I really thoroughly enjoyed Rage. In fact, someone from id must have insulted someones mother or something to trigger all those lackluster reviews I read or saw in the past. :P I expected something a lot less fun. Too many people seemed to have warped expectations or outright misunderstood what the game was supposed to be about. I also encountered none of the issues that seemed to dominate the usual coverage (just a glitch). Turning around as fast as possible was one of the first things I tried and I didn’t have delayed loading of textures at all (I had cache set to max though). But obviously I already played it with the first patch and current driver versions (waiting paid off… again), so either that fixed it nicely, or my PC wasn’t affected in the first place. And I’m playing on/with an AMD Radeon (descriptions stated that this brand was primarily affected, after the initial release of Rage).
In my perception id just tried to make a game like their previous ones and decided to throw in a couple of other stuff on top of _that_. That’s it. And at that, they certainly succeeded. So if now someone criticizes, that Rage’s story doesn’t hold up against Fallout’s… It wasn’t supposed to. It didn’t try to (if it would have, the story would indeed be quite unsatisfying :P). There’s just some stuff they threw in as a “bonus” (Rage has even a few mini-games – a card game, some dice betting and playing with knives). No one ever asked in older id games, why it’s only about grabbing a gun and starting to shoot at monsters. Everyone knew, that this was what they were signing up for. Maybe that’s not everyone’s cup of tea (anymore?), but it’s a little bit weird/double standard, if games like Painkiller/Serious Sam/… are applauded for delivering this exact experience and Rage is criticized, although it should be known what it’ll be like. Even games that were 13 years late, had questionable humor and offered mediocre fights found their audiences. But I don’t really mean to compare…
Although it’s certainly true that many textures in Rage were more on the blurry side than crispy sharp (something that was probably done to be super-fast on consoles – I’m guessing, I’d be stunned if this would be the limit of the engine [1]), the level of detail was still very impressive (it probably didn’t help much either, to have blurry textures in a game that was supposed to promote a technology called _MegaTexture_, of all things). In that it was like Batman: Arkham Whatever – a game that rather wants to be the “most detailed world”, than “the biggest world” and I very much prefer this design decision (more on this if I ever get to write something on Skyrim/the Bethesda open-world games :P). The levels were designed masterfully – although they turned out to be guiding the player most of the time, it hardly ever felt this way. Sometimes I felt successful for discovering an exit, when in reality, this was the sole path I could have continued on anyway. Despite that, there were still enough nooks and crannys to search for all kinds of items. The method with closed doors that needed extra items to open them, reminded me positively of Dead Space (where you have to give up power nodes for some rooms with goodies). The missions were noteworthy by themselves, there was always something going on that added a nice flair. Either there was a character that needed to be saved and accompanied the player a bit, or the “boss” of the location teased/threatened the player over speakers during the fights, or… It kept things fresh and interesting.
The character and facial animations were very good as well. Enemies don’t just drop dead or pull the always identical ragdoll routine, there are many spectacular animations, where they still run a few steps and stumble and somesuch. It’s too rare a detail, to overlook this. Few games have this; some enemies even “jump around” (e.g. using walls) before they attack, which makes them harder to hit. The last game that surprised me with something like this, was the final fight in Mass Effect 1.
What also highly spoke in favor of this game, was the really different enemies and their lairs. Missions usually have the player run into a cave, subway shaft, ruins, factory, creepy hospitals/science buildings… And nothing looks alike. Nothing feels like it’s just another tunnel. The player knows exactly where he is. Even the roads connecting important locations can be easily distinguished (driving/racing is fun btw – way cooler to drive to a mission, than being simply dropped off there). Every single of these locations is unique. There is even all kinds of crap lying around everywhere. This is something most games fail at (or don’t intend to succeed at). To me this is always a major reason, why games like… say BioShock are so superb. It took me around 16 hours to complete the campaign and I didn’t even use the job board in Wellsprings much (those seemed more on the generic side, AFAIK). That’s a lot of content. Especially for such a shooter. I’m not trying to determine which has the shortest campaign, but those usually start showing the ending credits after ~8 hours. Point for Rage, as far as I’m concerned.
On that note I was a little disappointed, that you couldn’t return to the game, after the ending credits were done. Another crack at the jobs board would have been nice, without having to start the game all over again, or reloading an earlier save.
On the more disappointing side was, that the ending reminded me of Half-Life², there was no real boss fight. I was really stunned when it just switched to the outro, after fighting normal enemies. I was just getting warmed up and expected a big boss to show every second – but that never happened. The game had only 1 real boss fight and that was quite early in the game. That felt somewhat unbalanced/unfinished. It’s like they developed missions separately and pieced it all together in the end and somehow there was nothing special left for some parts, but it was already too late to do something about it.
PS: Those wingsticks were a good addition to the player’s arsenal! I already thought the boomerang in Arcanum was quite rare and I liked it to see something similar in such a first person game. :) Is it too late to mention the engineering system, that allows the construction of various items, as long as the plans and ingredients are at hand?
PPS: Doom 4 is still happening, right?
[1]
On August 1, 2008, John Carmack, the co-founder and technical director of id Software said that Doom 4 will look three times better than Rage does, as it runs at 30 frames per second, on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, rather than 60 that Rage targets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_4
I have a real talent for falling through the map in games. :D This time: RAAAAAAAGE. :P Too bad I don’t have a collection, maybe it’s a good time to start. ;) All you gotta do is trying to run off the elevator that leads to the resistance base in Subway Town before it’s really fully done descending. Voilà!
Steam claims that it took me 10.7 hours to finish this, which would make it the longest DLC I ever played. The piece does basically everything as good or even better than the rest of the game did (yes, I dared to claim DLC can be part of the “real” game['s story]). It already includes the developers reaction to feedback received for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. For some reason the boss fights weren’t universally well received (I’m used to boss fights playing differently than the rest of the game – boss fights are supposed to be “special”, after all – so _I_ didn’t really mind either way) and the confrontation with the boss in The Missing Link works now completely different. Maybe I should browse the web a bit to find out, what people dislike now… :P Anyways, there’s story, dialog, guards are next to always in conversations when Jensen lurks around and even lone guards make comments every now and then (I’m bored…). I’m not sure they did that in the main installment.
A similar level of detail can be observed with the environments. Some desks now have unique photographs on them and even some of the obligatory offices look memorable. Secrets aren’t just back, a few of them are now a little bit harder to find, than just having to crawl through a vent. Because Jensen starts without augs (I smell a plot hole here, because how is an EMP chair supposed to stop Jensen, if he already had the EMP protection?), stapling crates becomes necessary every now and then to reach the unreachable. :P I liked that, it made it important to observe the environment carefully. It’s nice when there’s more than just having to look for guards and cameras. That’s definitely part of why I didn’t have the slightest interest in rushing through this adventure and it pulled me in in exactly the same way the full campaign did. Twice.
Missing Link also shows, that achievements don’t have to be dumb and lazy, when they are only rewarded for finding actual secrets, instead of getting one for every inevitable occurrence like booting up the game.
The DLC is installed as an extra game. It’s not technically a part (only the story, which adds more details to the whole picture, is) of the original installation. That makes it especially ridiculous, that only owners of the main title can buy it in Steam. I’m guessing it would work for everyone and doesn’t seem to require any resources of the original. That’s probably why it’s over 2 GB in installation size too – some of the files are now using up space needlessly twice. To complete this impression, the DLC is launched in the Steam games list using a separate, extra entry. It behaves as a stand-alone expansion would.
I got it when it was 66% off and _that_ sum it was totally worth to me, especially when considering that I certainly will play it again at some point. Their dirty mind game worked on me and I’m excited to see, if they can come up with more adventures of this scope.
PS: They still haven’t fixed this crash, that often occurs when switching a lot between normal inventory and quest items and selecting examine on them. And the other crash, when choosing to exit the game (yes the game crashes when wanting to close it anyway, funny…) is alive and well too. So I’m assuming that not too much has changed, although the 2 separate exe files for DXHR and The Missing Link have different version numbers (and sizes). :)
Advent Rising is the first game I post here, that I never finished completely (pretty sure). I played it roughly 1 year ago and still had the screenshots. The reason I never finished it, was the rather lengthy final boss fight, in which always the same thing happened: an explosion (I think) tossed my character with his head into the wall and all he did after that was to struggle with his feet, but was otherwise completely stuck. I played this fight 4-5 times with always the same outcome, which had me so frustrated, that I never tried it again. Apart from that (or up until that point) the game was quite good.
Advent Rising was supposed to be the first game in a trilogy (or so the rumor goes), but that plan didn’t work out and therefore this stays the sole installment. It’s good handling and fast action that makes this title worth playing and “details” like story and soundtrack what raises it above mediocrity. Except for the soundtrack none of the individual parts are that special, but it works all really well together. It’s also a nice example for what changed between the Unreal 2.x engine and the more current 3.x.
Since I learned only recently, that an unofficial patch for this game exists, I might still try once more to finish it. :)
- 12 Xbox cutscenes and one movie file that were removed from the PC version
- Fixes to 49 of the game’s 64 cutscenes
- Corrections to timing and various subtitling errors in all of the game’s subtitles
- Edits to the .ini files that:
- Enable 4:3 display without the black bars
- Enable trilinear filtering and Vsync
- Bind the V key to teleport
- Bind F5 to ShowDebug
- Bind F6 to ViewBot
- Bind F7 to free camera
- Bind F8 to level skip
- Bind F9 to screenshot
- Edits to engine.int to correct a few problems with objectives
- Edits to Interface.int, EonWeapons.int, and EonPowers.int to correct some issues with weapons, weapon screens, and descriptions (including resolution-dependent issues)
Ah Arcanum… :P (I wonder how the game would have been named, if it would have been released after Valve’s Steam was started) Just (a few days ago actually) finished Arcanum. It’s one of those famous & legendary (to me) Troika games. I didn’t get to play this one when it came out originally. Which is really good, because (knowing myself) I never would have had this much fun with the original game. Now there’s the unofficial patch, the high-res patch, high quality town maps, high quality music and lots of other stuff. And the fact that the graphics are old now, has little effect on me. The game mechanics are complex and there’s lots of text/story. Makes more than up for it.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed this game very much before the unofficial patch, considering there are still a few bugs in it even now. To be honest I found only one really big bug in the game, but this one was so annoying, that I almost would have stopped playing. I’m very glad I that I didn’t allow it to turn me off too much though. In Arcanum every NPC has a reaction value towards the PC, that determines how he will react in several nuances ranging from immediate attack to very polite conversation. Basically a very good idea and very ambitious too, most (role-playing) games only have a binary good/bad reaction implemented, if at all. In addition, the PC has a reaction modifier that influences the normal reaction value, which is based on several character attributes like beauty or charisma – also, certain clothing/equipment can have a positive or negative effect. Sadly several NPCs throughout the games are bugged, in a way that I can only describe as some sort of “buffer overflow”. These characters don’t seem to reach a maximum value, if they already like the PC and then a huge modifier is added, instead they apparently bounce over a barrier and then have a negative value – which makes them attack right away. This is especially frustrating, when this person is a quest giver. Madam Lil in Tarant and her half-orc bartender are prominent examples. The orc (Ogdin, I think) on the isle of despair is another. An early workaround I used, was to wear an armor that would make people like the character less, thus preventing the overflow. Crazy, right? At one point it got so bad, that this didn’t work anymore (by having solved some quests for these people, their initial reaction value was raised and the armor no longer lowered the modifier enough to still compensate for that – a positive reputation was also toxic) and I could only play certain quests, by editing my save. In one city (could have been Caladon, but I forgot) was a dwarf, who attacked me on sight, so I never did his quest, because I was too annoyed at this point.
Apart from that I didn’t encounter any bugs, which would be worth mentioning. It also didn’t crash once. Especially noteworthy, considering the hours it took to complete this epic tale.
I don’t know the story behind Arcanum, so all of this is nothing but pure speculation, but the ending felt a little rushed. Combining this with the amount of bugs the original release had, it probably didn’t receive a lot of polishing and had to be released. The ending features one of these concrete epilogues, which are based on the player’s decisions throughout the whole adventure (very similar to the Fallout 1+2 games, for example). These epilogues however, featured info that I never would have expected to see there and left out many more I would have liked some closure for. Some half-orc, who only appeared in a short/minor side-quest is mentioned very prominently, while all the huge characters the player could have in his party for the majority of the game, weren’t mentioned at all (including the player character!). Today they would probably consider a Director’s Cut Edition or a DLC to “fix” this (given the company still existed), if the game would have sold well enough (Arcanum was Troika’s biggest financial success AFAIK). Alas, now certain questions will never be answered, at least it doesn’t diminish the core experience significantly. In the end, the Rumors & Notes section in my log book had 84 pages alone, plus 23 more for the quests I did. That’s still a lot of content, even for an RPG.
Unnecessary to mention it’s quite good, otherwise I never would have finished this big game, compared to this type of game, the main storylines of modern RPGs like Skyrim are just short.
Since “everyone” only talked about the multiplayer of Battlefield 3, this was ample reason for me to try the single. I strongly dislike all this talk, that single wouldn’t even matter anymore (at least in the context of such games) and multi would be “everything”. Down the road this mindset could very well be one of the reasons, why no one bothers anymore, to make a singleplayer part at all – or at least a good one. Cutting costs is always attractive.
Once again I found the negative descriptions (for the campaign) mostly unfounded. At least the SP part of BF3 wasn’t worse than the equivalent in Call of Duty: Black Ops and that game’s SP parts didn’t receive so many negative comments (the story in most of these games is typically rather… I don’t want to insult anyone, let’s just say I was shocked to learn during the ending credits, that BF3 had 4 writers :P). In fact, BF3′s campaign was a little more “engaging”, than Black Ops’, because I thought BO had little to do, except for running behind a “guide” for almost the whole duration. I find this almost insulting. If I intend to watch a movie, I won’t grab a game instead. That’s little difference from playing a rail shooter right away (please start making Rebel Assault 3 if you are into that). Though BF3 has this “follow the leader” bullshit too, there is often a little more exploration and running around involved (running too far away gives starts a time limit, during which the player has to return to the allowed area… I guess it’s not that different from placing walls, still…).
I was also curious, because I never played a game using the Frostbite 2 engine thus far. Because I’m not a graphics fetishist, I’m almost always very happy with how games look (if I care at all – good graphics don’t make me play bad games, most of the time :P, and unimpressive graphics don’t keep me from playing/replaying great ones), I only get keen-eared when some games are praised for their looks, while others are not (or even receive some critics), despite looking pretty much the same. BF3 seems to be fitting this scenario, because it is sometimes even described as “the PC-game with the prettiest graphics right now”. Yeah… With such expectation it’s usually a short(er) way to disappointment. While I would naturally deem the visuals as good, the game looks in some aspects better than comparable games and in others worse. In that regard I would judge such descriptions as exaggerations. Of course it’s impossible to judge the potential of the engine by that.
Unofficial English Patch 7.9 by Wesp5 (221 MB) / Changes
v7.9 22.11.2011
—-
- +Restored Giovanni spirit, video victim and fifty five scenery props.
- +Changed condition for forklift sequence and restored Protean icons.
- +Added option to send Gimble to Vandal and a museum panel inspection.
- +Restored final two music pieces, thanks to Malkav and Rik Schaffer.
- Corrected Romero not mailing and Vandal not giving additional lines.
- Fixed chandelier and camera rod textures and drinking glasses clip.
- Removed newspaper from downtown in basic and fixed minor map issues.
- Added Packfile Explorer 3.9 to Extras folder, thanks to Dave Gaunt.
- Fixed Hitman quest problem and restored lines of Lu Fang and Carson.
- Repaired dancer behaviour at Confession and added it for Glaze too.
- Restored Blood Hunt music, ballroom shaft of light and Sin Bin sign.
At first glance Driver might look like GTA without the option to leave the car, but that would be selling it short. It’s more than that and most important: it’s worth playing. The main character is a cop with the ability to “shift” into the body of any other driver in the city (yeah, similar to Quantum Leap) and thus control the respective car. This gameplay mechanic is used really well throughout all the various mission types and even the story. Besides featuring a DeLorean, the major highlight for me was, that they made the effort to record countless conversations, that occur once the player shifts into a car. It’s often funny, unexpected but almost always very entertaining. Same goes for several missions, one of the first in the game contains driving so reckless, that the driving instructor in the car offers cheaper lessons. :D Sometimes little side-stories even span through several of the chapters of the game’s story. One of the best arcs features two brothers, who wanted to go to college, by winning enough money in illegal street racing. :D It’s now up to the player to win the actual races. Although the dude promises it’s the last race, they show up again and again. :D Such bits were a lot more fun than the main story, which was more or less the usual “bad guy”-situation. :P
The game design is of the kind, that will (in the end) “test” everything the player has learned over the course of the whole game. That’s very satisfying and more than (especially) most action titles will deliver.
So for everyone who is into some (arcade style) racing and also prefers some nice gameplay twists, Driver might be just the thing.
Bastion is an action role-playing game with stunning graphics, amazing artwork and an absolutely noteworthy, beautiful soundtrack. The player controls an unnamed hero, who can be armed with an array of different weapons, skills, passive enhancements (think of the tonics in BioShock) and could be influenced by idols in a shrine. Of course it’s up to the player, to select/mix weapons loadout and other equipment. The obvious mission is to gather certain items, which can be found throughout the game world/at the end of most levels. This principle is complemented by proving grounds for each weapon, which test the player’s skill with each and every one of them and a few extra tough challenges inside the Bastion (basically the base of operations).
The game doesn’t overexpose the player to certain effects, but uses those it has very effective. For example the whole game is basically narrated by just one character, but the slightly creepy voice overs always seem to know how to keep it interesting. There’s always a little suspense and the commentary is even triggered by the player’s actions.
The impressive environments were very diverse and the game had lots of different enemy types – some of them even required different tactics to beat them. :P In the end there are even some minor choices, on how to resolve the story, but I haven’t tried all of them. I might if I replay it in “game plus” where it’s possible to have all weapons and former experience right away.
Bastion makes me think of Infinity Engine games and is a good example of how brilliant such isometric games could look today, if done with current technology.
All in all I’d say that Bastion is quite unique and will definitely be something that sticks in my mind. Everyone who’s into “smaller” games besides the well advertised, so called AAA titles, should consider checking this out.
Unofficial English Patch 7.8 by Wesp5 (214 MB) / Changes
- +Added Masquerade violation on public sweeper kill, thanks to Malkav.
- +Made artificial claws do only lethal damage according to WoD rules.
- +Restored hidden sequence about Obfuscated Sabbat in SM but moved it.
- Added original particles to basic so it will revert them from plus.
- Toned new music on the pier down and improved Obfuscate description.
- Repaired Victor loop and added glass breaking sounds to beachhouse.
- Decreased skybox reflections in SM and the ENB mod, thanks to Felix.
- Re-fixed theatre camera bug and corrected several minor map issues.
- Fixed schrecknet commands being available after hubs were activated.
- Added diagonal third person view camera commands to keydef options.
- Removed Jack from haven during taxi ride and repaired Phil/Bill fix.
- Made it possible to continue E’s quest after visiting Vandal often.
- Added bus stop and sewer map landmarks and fixed a lamp texture bug.
