Legends of Dawn Review

This Kickstarter-funded RPG promised a hardcore experience with all the features an RPG should have. Well, it does have them...

“I have a great idea for a video game!” is a dangerous phrase, often coming from someone who's played enough games to know what he or she likes, and thinks that combining enough of those components might make for an even better game. Thanks to the wonderful world of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, lists of great-sounding features can be funded to become games. But just because they sound like a pile of good ideas doesn't mean they'll coalesce into a great whole. Exhibit A: Legends Of Dawn, a role-playing game advertised as having the sorts of “great ideas” that RPGs are supposed to have, like a huge open world with freedom to explore and develop your character in whatever direction you see fit. Legends Of Dawn does deliver on both of these goals. It's just terrible at them.



It fails in two critical manners. On the technical level, it's a mess. This is, quite simply, not a game that's in a release-ready state. Despite a successful Kickstarter six months ago claiming that Legends was almost finished, today it's anything but. The first clue I noticed is that the draw distance for the barely detailed grass tufts is about 10 yards away from my character. Since the perspective limits the view to 15 to 20 yards anyway, the net effect is a halo of ugly grass that sprouts everywhere you walk. There are many, many more, but my personal favorite might be a particularly awful bug where my character’s magic points wouldn't regenerate above a certain point after level gains – they stayed at 28/XX.

That's ridiculous enough, but it pales in comparison to the instability of Legends Of Dawn. A not-insignificant percentage of the time I clicked on either the Save or Load button,
Legends of Dawn it crashed. As I investigated my problems, I found that some unlucky folks were suffering overheated processors and had their PCs shut down for several minutes. There is no reason that a game with these issues should be available for purchase without a giant alpha or beta label on it. It's an embarrassment to Steam and GamersGate that they would sell it without one.

Legends Of Dawn happened to be the bare minimum of playable for me, but it’s filled with technical issues and design annoyances (sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart) that constantly interrupted anything close to enjoyment. For example, items in my character's inventory could stack, but they don't automatically do so. Worse, when I tried to stack the same items manually, sometimes they refused to do so for no reason that I could see.

Meanwhile, half of the quests and dialogue fire without context. At one point I went to go talk to the first town's lord, and he told me I needed to return to a fort I'd never been to, then casually mentioned that my character's father wasn't the first person to die in that fort... despite the fact that nothing I’d seen previously had indicated that my father was dead. Almost every piece of quest dialogue has something like this wrong with it. Even the music, which would be one of the few genuinely good things about Legends Of Dawn, jarringly jumped from track to track when I stepped into a new zone or night shifted to day.



Even putting on my imagination cap and picturing Legends Of Dawn without all of these crippling problems, it would still suffer from a paucity of vision. It's obviously inspired by older role-playing games, but doesn't seem to understand what made them worth emulating in the first place. Perhaps most symbolic of its problems is an introduction movie, which says little more than “This is a fantasy world with a powerful magical artifact that's been shattered, but now a hero needs to find the pieces” is perhaps the most insipid storyline in video games, and yet here that story is, stinking up yet another game.

The fetishization of older games twists Legends Of Dawn into something annoying, not nostalgic. “Read the manual!” it demands, but why? Why did the developers take the time to type a manual for a digital-only game, while choosing not to include actual effects of items as tooltips in said game? The classic Ultima games are some of my all-time favorite RPGs, but Legends Of Dawn seems to be under the impression that what made them great was not conversation, morality, or exploration, but instead having to figure out what each color potion's effects were.

Likewise, lockpicking is one of Legends Of Dawn's few (only?) clever systems, where you collect runes and connect them to open chests. Yet it has no introduction in-game, and the description in the manual only mentioned half of what I needed to make it work, ignoring essential information about how the color of the runes fits in. The Kickstarter for Legends Of Dawn antagonistically declares that it's a hardcore game and not for casuals, but withholding critical information isn't hardcore. It's annoying.



In fact, there's nothing “hardcore” about Legends Of Dawn at all, other than how difficult it was to motivate myself to play it. Its systems (other than lockpicking) are all incredibly simple and generic. There are all manner of different things to craft, and nothing at all interesting about the crafting process – put points in a skill at level-up, and then click on items from an available-anywhere menu to craft or cook the item. It's as if a crafting system filled with hundreds of items exists only because RPGs are supposed to have crafting systems, not because it actually adds any depth.

Combat may be the worst system of all, or perhaps it just feels that way because Legends Of Dawn, like many RPGs, is filled with fighting. You click on enemies to attack them, slowly and repeatedly. That's it. There are no special moves or skills outside of magic, and the combat is too slow to be anywhere near comparable to a Diablo, even though it looks like it should be. When it's over and you need to recuperate, chowing down food or potions could help, but those ran out quickly. Health automatically regenerates with time, but there's no rest button, so I found that the often best thing to do in Legends Of Dawn is standing still. Yes, this is a game where doing nothing is often literally the most efficient way to “play.”

The Verdict


Even ignoring its frequent crashes and bugs, Legends Of Dawn's clumsy roleplaying systems and combat are poorly done. But you can't ignore those issues. This amateur roleplaying game shouldn’t even be sold as it is, let alone purchased and played. If you already did, the most efficient way to deal with it is to delete it from your hard drive and demand a refund.

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Report: Arkane is Making Prey 2 After All

According to leaked emails, Arkane Studios is indeed working on the project, positioning it as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2.


http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/16/r...-after-all

Report: Arkane is Making Prey 2 After All

According to leaked emails, Arkane Studios is indeed working on the project, positioning it as a "spiritual successor to System Shock 3."


http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/16/r...-after-all

Microsoft Closing Games for Windows Live Marketplace

Microsoft Points are going away in the next Xbox 360 update, which will have a huge effect on PC gamers using GFWL.


http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/15/m...arketplace

Deadpool Review

Deadpool talks a big game but delivers a standard action experience that is the turducken of videogame parody: It is what it parodies what it is.

Playing through Deadpool feels about as schizophrenic as its main character. On the one hand, it’s zany, wacky, goofy, silly, sophomoric, and many more adjectives that Thesaurus.com suggests. This is a funny game – that is, if you’re into dick jokes and casual sexism. If not, then Deadpool – the character and the game – will grate on you like a buzzsaw on hard cheese.

On the other hand, much of the Deadpool gameplay experience is formulaic and safe…so safe you might think developer High Moon Studios is playing some sort of self-referential “hey, isn’t it ironic how normal this is?” meta-gag on you. But it’s not. No, Deadpool talks a big game but delivers a standard action experience that is the turducken of videogame parody: It is what it parodies what it is.



For those not familiar with the glory of the one and only “Merc with a Mouth,” the spandex-clad Deadpool is himself a parody of an anti-hero. A mainstay of Marvel Comics, he was given a healing factor by the Weapon X boys (the same ones who adamantium-ized Wolverine) in an experimental procedure that left him certifiably insane – and self-aware that he is in fact a comic book character. For that reason, Deadpool also knows he’s a videogame character. In fact, he starts the story – what little there is – by forcing High Moon to make a game about him and then throws out the script it sends over to him for approval. It’s a fittingly insane approach that’s true to Deadpool’s character, even if it doesn’t make for a strong story.

Armed with guns, katanas, and an unhealthy love for chimichangas, Deadpool pokes fun at videogame clichés and tropes almost as much as he pokes bad guys with sharp objects. It’s pretty obvious that Deadpool’s writers had a blast bringing this character into interactive 3D; he regularly has arguments with the voices in his head, and at one point can hop on word bubbles emanating from his diseased mind to cross a toxic river. At one point, you can even instigate a creepy stalker situation between a dialogue tree option and yourself. It’s pretty inventive, clever stuff that’s made even more enjoyable by Nolan North’s very enthusiastic delivery as the voice of Deadpool.

But then there’s the little matter of the repetitive gameplay. In pseudo Batman-style, you can chain together combos with a mix of melee and shooting combat that, while not exactly bad, starts off uninteresting and grows more stale the longer you play. It can be fun slicing into a henchman one second before finishing him off with a shotgun blast to the head, but there’s not enough variety in attacks and tougher enemies can seem unreasonably resistant to your relentless hacking.



The higher the combo chain, the more DP points you’ll earn. These can be spent on purchasing new weapons (shotguns, sledgehammers, grenades, bear traps, etc.) or on upgrades to existing ones. But few of these options really change up the gameplay – most only enhance damage and make enemies take fewer hits. It’s a perfunctory upgrade system and doesn’t exactly stretch the creative grey matter. This is Deadpool we’re talking about here! Why so serious?

Deadpool is also armed with a teleportation device that lets him *bampf* short distances like Nightcrawler, which can be useful for dodging attacks or making a quick escape when cornered. The downside is that the teleport button is the same one that appears over an opponent’s head to trigger a special combo; get the timing wrong and you may zap behind him instead of hitting him. Teleporting in tight spaces can be especially disorienting because of the close camera perspective, with enemies suddenly off-camera and you not knowing exactly where you are in relation to them.

Another annoyance is the lock-on targeting button for gunplay. It works most of the time, but sometimes pressing it will lock onto a spot just to the side of a target’s fleshy, perforate-able bits. When a bunch of identical bad guys rush into a room to charge you – and they will, repeatedly - the last thing you want to do is waste precious time re-targeting their melons.

But where Deadpool really doesn’t surprise is in its level design. In a game that’s a send-up of videogames, you’d expect to see an office level, a sewer level, a jungle level, etc, but you’d also expect these chestnuts to be turned on their metaphorical heads with a design that skewers your expectations. Instead, each of these visually uninteresting levels is played relatively straight. Sure, there are the occasional unexpected non sequiturs (Deadpool gets sucked into an 8-bit dungeon crawler, Deadpool hallucinates a scene in LittleBigPlanet-style graphics); it’s just that these bits are handed out like treats for slogging through the comparatively lackluster levels.



Some later levels do show some more imagination, especially when Death herself (a frequent love interest for Deadpool) submits him to a series of introspective challenges to test his worth. In one set up like a theme park ride, he has to shoot cardboard cutouts of the demons escaping from his own fractured psyche before they can destroy him. It’s stuff like that I wish there was more of.

Because the Big Bad is Mr. Sinister, a supervillain with a penchant for cloning, Deadpool the game is chock-full of samey-looking bad guys. And I have to question Sinister’s choice of cloning subjects, because he apparently picked the dumbest available henchman. Some weakly attempt to take cover, but most just stand in front of you and shoot. Even the boss battles against supervillains are dull and repetitive, not to mention pretty easy. The winning strategy is to run away to recharge health and shoot from a distance while teleporting to dodge charges and power attacks.

Lastly, Deadpool is almost nearly devoid of secrets and collectibles: a huge disappointment for a game that parodies videogames and stars a superhero. If you’re expecting to unlock alternate costumes, comic book pages, or really anything that’ll entice you into replaying the 10 or so hours of action a second or third time, you’ll be a sad puppy. Once you play through the linear campaign, the only reason to keep the disc around is to play the Challenge Mode levels, which are merely a series of survival modes set in the same levels you just played through.


The Verdict

Behind Deadpool’s demented humor, creative script, and brilliant sight gags is a fairly conventional, generic action game. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly good, either – and without oodles of hidden secrets or unlockables to discover, there’s really no reason to replay it once you’ve finished. Developer High Moon gets the character and brings the funny, but none of the action finesse that would make Deadpool stand out. If you’re a fan of boob jokes and dumb, repetitive, yet mildly fun gameplay, then Deadpool will offer you a weekend’s worth of silliness.

Gone Home Review



A remarkable first-person adventure that tells one of the finest video games stories in quite some time.

One of the most rewarding moments of Gone Home, and any work of fiction for that matter, is when you take a jumbled mess of oddly shaped metaphorical puzzle pieces and finally put them together to resemble something familiar. This revelation sprang forth for me a few hours into my first-person walkabout through the Greenbriar household. As I rummaged through an abandoned kitchen examining refrigerator notes, discarded paperback books, and surprisingly named bottles of salad dressing, the proverbial light bulb suddenly illuminated.

Yes, I was exploring the Greenbriar home, a digital space where the first game by The Fullbright Company is set. But perhaps more importantly, I was exploring something strikingly similar to the house I grew up in. Each time I clicked on an item owned by a family member and studied its various traits, like empty liquor bottles belonging to a father who may or may not drink too much, or a sarcastically written term-paper on the female reproductive system that highlights a young woman's sharp wit, I was brought back to the uncountable innocuous nick-nacks that populate my parent's house.



Throughout Gone Home, a first-person exploratory adventure game, you'll poke around a beautifully created house and examine the artifacts that populate each well-designed room, and everywhere you look the house has a warm, lived-in feel. The family's study is filled with interesting books to browse, records to listen to, and liquor cabinets to raid. The kitchen is as wonderfully disorganized as my mom's, and the bedroom of an angsty teenager feels like the bedroom of an angsty teenager. It oftentimes felt as if I had broken into a museum in the middle of the night with the goal of touching the very things that I was told not to touch. Games like The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite allow us to explore exceptionally realized worlds, but Gone Home's world just feels straight-up real.

Despite an ever-present sense of dread – lights flicker sporadically, a fierce thunderstorm rages outside, and the house itself seems to moan at times – there's nothing to fear in Gone Home. The only skeletons here are figurative, which you'll eventually discover as you explore the house and begin to unravel the family's past.

As you delve deeper into the Greenbriar residence, you'll come across telephone messages, scrawled notes, and diary entries that provide the clues needed for you to begin illuminating the dark corners of this family. The writing and voice work here are among the best I've ever experienced in games. It's not stylish or exaggerated, but rather painfully real. Unraveling the story of your character’s teenage sister Samantha's coming of age, the complicated intricacies of your parent's marriage, and eventually the reasons why you left home in the first place make Gone Home a powerful piece of storytelling. I'm being a bit vague for a reason, because so much of the emotional impact I felt stemmed from discovering these bits of backstory and piecing them together myself.



The writing and artifact design are so good that I felt compelled to grab everything that wasn't bolted to the floor and give it a closer examination. Turning around a can of soup reveals a fully written label. Thumbing through a VHS collection highlights a wealth of classics from Gone Home's mid-'90s setting. And entering a closet only to find it filled to the brim with board games, subtly weathered with use, all contribute toward making the Greenbriar household feel like a living, breathing place.



Doing this isn't just some menial task – scouring the house with a fine-toothed comb leads to optional story revelations, humorous asides, and sometimes both. For example, while rummaging through my father's study, I came across a box filled to the brim with dozens of copies of his unsuccessful second novel. But after removing the top few layers of literature, I unearthed he awful Pandora's Box of his smut magazine collection. This moment walked such a fine line between painful and comical, and it's only one of many that did so throughout my three hours in the house.

The only drawback to the inanimate objects that lay about the Greenbriar home is that by the end, you're sometimes examining a handful of the same things. Coming across the same box of tissues in every other room pulled me out of the world just a tad bit – like a deja vu glitch in the Matrix. Also, the first time I held my father's sophomore novel, I was completely enthralled with studying its cover. The second time, it made sense since that book was a commercial failure, and unsold copies would litter this house. The fifth time: not so much. But despite this infrequent repetition, Gone Home continually won me over in spades partially due to its impeccable use of music.

A successful mix of a moody, ambient score and a variety of cult Riot Grrrl hits (played by sticking various cassette tapes found scattered throughout the house into a tape player) create an affecting ambiance. The two styles might seem to clash in stark juxtaposition on paper, but they somehow managed to meld together to give Gone Home a musical backbone that's riddled with both teenage angst as well as an air of mystery.

The Verdict

When Thomas Wolfe wrote "You Can't Go Home Again," the mere idea of Pong would've wrecked his fragile mind. But nearly a century later, Gone Home presents us with a game that both embraces that melancholic notion while simultaneously exploring the roots, secrets, and artifacts of a family that feels as real to me as my own. Stepping foot inside of the Greenbriar home and discovering the things they left behind is a powerful experience. Gone Home is a remarkable achievement, and piecing together its poignant story will stick with me forever.

A Decade of Call of Duty

Getting excited for Ghosts, we take a quick journey through the past ten years of Call of Duty.


http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/08/15/a-d...ll-of-duty

The Last of Us Multiplayer: Behind the Scenes

The Last of Us' campaign is extraordinary. Then again, so is its multiplayer. Learn more about the creation of TLoU's online straight from the man who helped make it happen.


http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/15/t...the-scenes

Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 Review

The Penny Arcade RPG comes to a close with a whimper in the series' weakest entry to date.


http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/26/p...s-4-review