I gotta be honest with you, that's one of the worst blog titles I've ever come up with. You'd think that with PlayStation Now and Evolve as the things I want to write about that I'd be able to come up with something better, but apparently not. Maybe I'll think of something better whilst writing this blog. In which case the smart thing to do would be to write another intro, but I'm too far into this one Now to do that.
ANYWAY, over the last couple of weeks I was in some PS4 "Alpha" and "Beta" Server Stress Test Things for Evolve, and I had a seven day trial for PlayStation Now. And Now I'm writing about both of these things. Starting with Evolve. Because why would I write about PlayStation Now right Now when I can write about it PlayStation Later? I'm really upset I couldn't think up a good Now pun or something.
Evolve Stress Tests.
So, Evolve actually "went gold" before either of these stress tests I played, even though it was referred to as both a Beta and a "Big Alpha" in the emails they sent me about it (also as a stress test). But we've known for a long time that terms like that are completely meaningless these days, which is something I find extra funny when there are more Alphas and Betas available for people to play than ever before (just look at Steam Early Access). But to me, this was more of an extended (and time limited) demo where the developers (hopefully) got some data on server load or something. But that's irrelevant to me, because based on the time I spent playing the game, I have little to no intention of ever playing this game again.
Which is not to say that it's horrible, or even outright bad. It's not great either, but it's....okay, I guess. It's one of those games that I find it hard to feel strongly about either way. When it works, it's pretty fun, and exciting. But when it doesn't work, it's as boring as watching paint dry. And I don't mean that in the literal sense of the game being technically broken, as I didn't run into any glitches, or obvious instances where things didn't work as intended. Instead, it's a game where a lot of things have to line up correctly in order for it to be fun, and in the time that I played (probably five or six hours total, maybe closer to seven, I didn't time it), that didn't happen most of the time.
If you don't know anything about Evolve (which I doubt if you're a Giant Bomb user who is reading blogs on the site), then it's a four versus one game with a team of four humans against a monster. In the stress tests the only available mode (so far as I could tell) was one where the humans win by killing the monster, and the monster wins by either killing all the humans (at the same time, there is a very lengthy respawn timer), or evolving to stage three and destroying a big generator thingy. Even though it's never explained why the monsters are so hell bent on wreaking all this havoc when there's plenty of wildlife around to eat and survive. But for all I know, maybe that is explained in the full game, so I shouldn't harp on that.
Especially when story clearly isn't the focus on this game. Then again, maybe it is fair game, because it's not like the game has literally zero story, or zero justification for why it's happening. See, the human characters (hunters) aren't just completely blank slates where you equip whatever you want. Instead, there's four classes (assault, support, trapper, and medic), and every time you play there has to be one of each class. Each class has several characters to choose from, though only one of each is unlocked from the start, in true video game fashion. Unless you pre-ordered the game, in which case they let you skip past a lot of that because apparently no one buys video games to play them these days (there's several monsters to unlock and choose from too). Anyway, I didn't play enough (or well enough) to unlock any of the characters, and I didn't even have a chance to try playing the trapper class at all.
Anyway, the point I was trying to get to before I started over explaining the game was that these characters are actually characters, in the sense that each one has a name and a personality. Or, at least just enough personality that allow them to be distinguishable from each other, but not enough that I actually feel like they deserve to be called characters. All you get are a couple lines before the start of each mission, and a few quips through the matches. Maybe there's tons and tons of lines for each character that only play in specific situations, or specific modes, but it didn't take long for stuff to start repeating for me, and it got old fast. Which is not a good sign for a game that is almost entirely focused on multiplayer (though it does have a solo mode that I didn't try (I don't know if it was even open in the stress tests)). Some of it is useful in game, with the characters saying things relevant to what is going on, but even then, it's got too much flavor text in it that got old fast. I know the birds are doing your job for you, trapper lady whose name I've already forgotten. You don't need to say that every other time the birds go flying!
The classes do all play very differently from each other, which is good for a game that forces one of each class. Assault is all about doing lots of damage, support is a mix of buffing the others and doing a decent amount of damage, medic is about debuffing the monster and healing the hunters, and trapper is a mix of finding the monster and then keeping the monster in place long enough for the others to damage it. And the first one has an alien dog thing named Daisy. I liked Daisy, mostly because Daisy is a great name for a monstrous looking alien dog thing.
And the monsters? I did not enjoy my (brief) time playing as the monster. It's unwieldy, and the third person camera for it (the rest of the game is first person) didn't help. Speaking of viewpoint stuff, I dunno if it's the FOV, or what, but something about this game looks...weird to me. Not always, but if I'm standing still and look around, stuff in the distance looks like it distorts in width? It's hard to explain, and of course I didn't think to PlayStation Share any footage of it. It's the sort of thing where mountains in the distance look like they get narrower as they get close to the center of the screen, and widen as they get outside it. Or was it the other way around, where they widen as they get closer? I should have jotted that down, or saved a video of it. Damn it. Anyway, it looks weird, and it's the sort of thing that I don't notice most games doing. The last one I remember it sticking out in was Portal 2, and I hated it there too (but I had a lot of other reasons to dislike Portal 2, if you don't remember).
That paragraph got off topic very quickly. Anyway, the monster wasn't fun to me at all, as opposed to playing as a human which was fun maybe...twenty or thirty percent of the time. The reason for that being that actually fighting against the monster was fun. The different classes have different abilities, and weapons that make them fun and interesting in their own ways. Markov (the assault) has a gun that shoots out giant arcs of electricity that home in on targets, but it has short range, which makes his personal shield useful. Hank (the support) can turn invisible and direct a shield onto other people, or call in orbital strikes. And Val (the medic) has sniper rifles that can tranq the monster (slowing it down) or weaken its armor in certain spots so the others do more damage if they target those areas. And I didn't play as the Trapper, so I dunno what she does besides make a big dome around the area that can keep the monster from running.
That part of the game is fun. It's the rest of it where you're just running around blindly trying to find the monster that is very boring. This is also the part where not playing with friends hurts the experience a lot. And, unfortunately, I was only able to play one match with someone that I knew, and he disliked the game so much that he just wanted to play Advanced Warfare after one match (which we did). The rest of the time I just played with random people, and of course I didn't even try to communicate with them. This seems like the sort of game where communication and coordination would improve the experience a lot.
But I know that I'm not going to have a group of friends playing this game often enough to justify paying $60 for it. And even if I did, I don't know that I'd want to pay $60 for this game, or that I'd want to play it enough to warrant paying that much. Fighting the monster was fun, but not THAT much fun. I'd rather just keep playing a game I already own online, like CoD, or Battlefield, or any one of a number of other games.
Playing Evolve got me thinking about something, mostly unrelated to the rest of that. How did this game get the hype that it appears to have? Is it because of the developer? Is it because of the marketing? I never really bought into the hype, I only signed up to get in on the "beta" stuff (months ago, it feels like) because I like trying games before they're released. But after playing it, I just can't comprehend how people are excited for this game, especially if they haven't played it. If you've played it, and enjoyed it more than I have, then I see how you'd be excited for it (and good for you, it's certainly a very interesting game). But just based on the marketing stuff? I dunno. Does "from the creators of Left 4 Dead" really resonate with people that much? Granted, I've only played about twenty minutes of Left 4 Dead in my entire life, and I didn't care for it much, so perhaps I'm not one to speak on this subject.
Still kind of a bummer, though, that I found it to be as boring as I did. It certainly has potential, and I'm sure it'll have its audience of people that play it a lot. And I hope those people have fun, because it's not a bad game. Just one that I find boring. Maybe if the game was more of an RPG, with loot, and leveling, and customizing your character, then I could get into it. Make it a mix of Destiny and Monster Hunter, where you can go out hunting on your own, against different AI controlled monsters, but have the meat of the game be online. Still have the player controlled monsters, but make those special boss fights. Well, that'd probably be much harder to coordinate, then. It's meaningless either way, because that game isn't going to be what Evolve will ever be. Maybe Destiny 2 will be that game and I can enjoy Destiny without feeling bad and feeling like the game is abusing my time and I'm just going to move on now because I've gotten off topic and this is a run on sentence done for mostly comedic effect even though I doubt it's actually funny and if anything probably just annoying and hard to read so I'm going to stop it Now.
PlayStation Now.
Still haven't thought up a good Now based pun, and I still wish I could. The worst part is that I bet someone will comment with a good one and I'll feel like a dummy because it'll be something super obvious that I didn't think of. Anyway, PlayStation Now is Sony's thing where games are run on a server somewhere out in Sony Land, and the video is streamed to your PS4 whilst your inputs and being sent out to Sony Land Servers for the game to...do whatever it is that games do with inputs. A subscription service was recently added, to entice people who are too smart to play the outrageous prices for renting games on PS Now. Even though I think $20 a month is also outrageous for the selection of games available, but luckily there's a seven day trial that I was able to take advantage of.
As much as I'm harping on the price (which is too much), I was actually impressed with how well PlayStation Now works. Which is to say that it works. Granted, it's not lag free, and I don't know that something like this ever could be lag free. At least not with the internet speeds most of America has (or at least the speeds around here). But the lag is low enough that most of the games I tried playing with it were playable. I didn't try a huge number of games, but I tried a handful of them. For whatever reason, aside from one game, I didn't really think to try playing games I've played before and compare them to the offline versions. That would have made too much sense, I suppose. Instead I focused more on games that I hadn't played before, mostly because I wanted to try to use PS Now to play some stuff that I hadn't played before, but for free. Anyway, here's a little bit about the stuff I tried.
Virtua Fighter V and Dead or Alive Five.
I have played the PS3 version of this game before. It was a PS+ game a couple of years ago, I think. Anyway, I didn't play a ton of it on PS Now, but it seemed playable. That's about all I have to say about that, and I didn't really play much of DoA 5 either. I hadn't played that before, and only played a few matches of that (online against my friend Jay, who was also playing the PS Now version). Seemed playable, but I can't really say much more beyond that.
Sonic Generations.
I feel like this is the game where the lag hurt me the most. And that's fitting, given that this is a game all about speed, and platforming. And I'd also say that the lag stopped me from playing a larger amount of the game, because it actually seemed pretty good, for a Sonic game at least. That's me being overly negative, Sonic Generations seemed like a game that if I was playing it properly, and spent the time to get good at it, I'd enjoy it a lot, because while it shames me to say today, I actually kinda liked the 3D Sonic games back when I was a dumb kid.
But after the first three Zones (each of which has two levels, one side scrolling only for Sonic Classic, and one that mixes that and 3D movement for New Sonic), you have to complete some challenges in those levels to progress onward. And maybe I just picked a bad one, but I found the lag too much to be able to enjoy some of the more precise stuff I had to do. Even before then, playing as New Sonic in the 3D sections felt like I was playing as Drunk Sonic. I dunno how much of that was the game, but I'm willing to bet a lot of it was the lag, which is a shame. It's a shame because I'll probably never get back to this game and I was enjoying it quite a bit. Oh well!
Dead Island.
I had never played Dead Island before, and I have to say, I didn't enjoy playing it at all. Much like the 3D Sonic sections, this game felt like I was playing as a drunk person. Which, I'm inclined to think was mostly the lag's fault. But, it's hard to say because Dead Island totally seems like the type of game that would have gotten a crappy PS3 port. I think the lag was affecting the combat a lot too, because that felt bad all around. Maybe going straight for the analog combat was a bad idea, in retrospect. I know that everyone says that's the way to play the game, but I imagine most of those people don't play inverted, like I do. And inverting the camera seemed like it inverted the weapon control as well, which might work for some people, but it wasn't working for me. I kept doing things like swinging up when I wanted to swing down, and vice versa. Left and right were the same, because I'm not a monster that inverts the X Axis, but up and down were not working with my brain.
I'm sure it's the sort of thing that my brain could get used to, with time, but I wasn't willing to put in that time. The lag wasn't helping, but even if I had been playing that lag free, I don't know how much of it I actually would have wanted to play. But I can't really say either way, because the lag could have been affecting it a lot more than I thought it was, and maybe it's way better without it, I don't know. But when fighting games felt all right with the PS Now lag, I'm inclined to believe that a fair amount of it was just the game being janky.
Earth Defense Force 2025.
Oddly enough, this game ended up being the biggest hit of the ones that Jay and I tried on PS Now. We played in co-op, and this game is just the sort of already janky and incredibly stupid mess that I think worked well on PS Now. It's the sort of game that is already so bad and wonky that a little bit of lag probably didn't hurt it much. We had a lot more fun playing this game than I thought we did. To the point where we tried, and hoped we would be able to finish it in co-op. But, sadly, Jay's PS Now trial ended a day sooner than he thought it did, which left me on my own to try to play the last few missions without him.
And that didn't go as well as I had hoped. First off, online and offline progress don't carry over to each other. Meaning that in order to pick up where we left off, I had to go into online mode. But, the game lets you play online by yourself, the downside being that it didn't let me pause. I was able to get through one mission on my own, but it just wasn't very much fun without Jay there playing with me. And then when I got to Mission 9, I ended up just giving up. It was frustrating, and not fun. See, the game doesn't have mid-mission checkpoints, and without another player to revive you, you have to start the mission over from the beginning.
It's kinda hard to not die when spiders snipe me from across the level and start dragging me in with a web that is slowly draining my health. On top of that, the web restricts my movement, presumably to keep me from running away, but it also kept me from running closer at a faster speed. Given the swimmy aiming (no doubt made swimmier by the lag), and the general inaccuracy of the weapons, I wasn't really able to do much damage to the spiders at range, which meant I was just shooting futilely at a spider as it slowly dragged me in, and slowly drained my health. After dying several times on Normal, I tried bumping it down to Easy, but even then I died, so I just gave up. I'll never know how the game ends.
Which is a bummer, because I thought the game's B Movie "story" and voice acting was hilarious. Everything about the game is pretty funny, really. From the terrible way the "giant insects" (half of which are spiders) animate to the way that building poorly fall apart (or "levolve," as Jay and I called it (a reference to Battlefield 4's "levelution")), to the aforementioned voice acting, it all fits perfectly into a mess that I liked a lot. Don't get me wrong, it's a bad game, but a bad game that I enjoyed. I did genuinely like that you can destroy pretty much any building in the game, though I didn't really take the time to try to see if you can destroy literally any building.
I hope there's an EDF game in the works for PS4. That's something I'd totally buy for really cheap.
Anyway, that's it for the games I tried playing on PS Now. Yeah, I know, not much for seven days worth of a free trial. I kinda got my "I want to check to see if this works" out of my system the first day, and spent the rest of it harassing Jay to play more EDF with me. And I was playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, but I'll wait until the next blog to write about that one. But like I said before, PS Now works, and it works better than I thought it would. It still has issues, with things like how you can't PlayStation Share screenshots or videos of the PS Now games.
And the selection of games is still pretty bad for what they are charging. For $20 a month (or $45 for three months, I think), it needs to be a much larger selection of games. Like, all of them. That, or they need to lower the price, or something, I don't know. I'm not a business man, but I can't see how charging that much a month with that selection of games will keep a large enough audience of people subscribing to it long term. It just seems weird to me that PlayStation Plus would be a fantastic value, but then the company would put out something like this which seems like a pretty crappy value. Granted, my opinion is being affected by things like the fact that I've played a lot of the games being offered in PS Now, but even so, they need to either add a lot of games to that, or change the pricing. Or not, like I said, I'm not a business man.
Anything else?
That's about all that I really have to write about. I'll discuss Galaxy 2 next time. I still haven't gotten around to playing any more PS Plus games, but The Swapper and First Light and next on my list after I finish Galaxy 2. That means I probably won't have a PS+ Catch Up blog this month either, but hey, I imagine you're not too upset over that.
Oh, and there's that podcast that I was in that I'm going to link to again. This time it's a new, slimmer and smaller file size than before, because a "fan" complained (jokingly) that the file size of the (three hour and twenty-ish minute long) podcast was too large. He ended up taking it and doing some sort of wizardry to it to get the file size down to less than half of what it was, so hats off to him. I dunno what his GB username is, but thank you again, Dino. :D
LINK.
But that's it! See you next time. I never did think of a better title. :(
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