Informative and well written review but I'm surprised at the score, as well as what seems like a general bias against giving AAA games 5 stars these days. The line I keep hearing consistently is that "we don't have any bias towards giving indie games higher scores because they were made by smaller development teams," but I'm not sure the statistics are bearing that out. Taking a look at the first page in "Reviews" currently I see the following five star reviews:
Stardew Valley
The Witness
Undertale
MGS V
Super Mario Maker
Axiom Verge
The top 10 list from 2015 also included Invisible Inc, Grow Home, and Kerbal Space program (as well as Undertale) while Bloodborne is absent as well as several other titles that everybody on the team gushed about for weeks at release. To me, it seems like it's becoming difficult to argue that there's not a growing bias towards favoring lower budget, smaller studio games.
/facepalm
Just accept that the game is good and move on.
Why on earth do you care about a one star difference?
You think they're getting paid off by the rich indie scene or something?
Feel free to have your own opinion about it, for me it's an interesting question that I don't think has fully been considered/discussed by most game journalists/reviewers as it's only a somewhat recent phenomenon. If you find it facepalm-worthy then it's probably not worth your making the effort to respond to, right?
I think a simpler explanation is that a lot of AAA games are very conservatively designed to the point of being same-y and padded out with filler. Naturally, smaller games have more freedom to stand out and do something truly original.
This game has one glaring flaw, and it's the fact it has no aiming reticle. Super weird that it doesn't have one. Besides that, I think I found my latest gaming obsession. It's so much freaking fun!
@humanity: sometimes randomly generated games aren't entirely randomly generated. Like with the binding of Issac each individual room IS Hand crafted by the devs. The layout of the level is what's randomly generated. I may be wrong, but that seems to be what this game does as well.
There is absolutely no way this is true. Binding of Isaac rooms are fucked in ways that only a malevolent computer can come up with.
I seem to remember the official Binding of Isaac updates mentioning "200 new room layouts", or something similar. I think the items / enemies you find in a room are randomly chosen (and even then I think certain room types are associated with specific enemy types / formations), but the basic room layouts are picked from existing templates. How the rooms are connected and which rooms appear is the more random thing.
I'll put in a positive word for the Steam Controller; since it didn't sound like Jeff was a big fan, and Drew hasn't had a lot of time with it yet.
I've had it for two weeks now, and I have to say I'm loving it. It definitely takes some time getting used to, but once it "clicks", it's hard to go back to using regular controllers for certain games.
The biggest realization was that you can use the gyro controls for fine-tuned aiming. For instance, the default Valve-recommended bindings for CS:GO have the right track pad set to move the mouse very quickly, and the gyro is set to help aim for small movements. I'm not there yet, but I think I could get to about 95% or higher of my performance with a mouse with more practice (the gyro is very sensitive, and very low-latency, and there are so many different ways to customize how it responds).
I broke out my copy of Descent 1 from GOG, and I was pleasantly surprised how well I could control that game with the Steam Controller. I never could get 6-degree-of-freedom shooters satisfactorily mapped on a 360 controller, there are too many bindings needed. The addition of the rear "paddles" (Valve calls them "grips"), and the mode-shifting functions essentially double the amount of bindings possible for most of the buttons.
For games with a lot of keyboard shortcuts, you can set a trackpad to a "touch-menu" type, where up to 17 different regions on the trackpad can be bound to different bindings, then double the amount just for that pad if you use mode-shifting (not to mention using the other touch pad). I think the ultimate test for this is to try a game like DOTA 2, or maybe even TIE FIGHTER (the latter practically used the whole keyboard), I have yet to try those but I'm looking forward to attempting them.
In summary, here are the games that work very well with the Steam Controller:
First person shooters / other First person games (especially ones that don't require as much pixel-perfect millisecond reaction times / headshots), first-person exploration games. TF2 and Portal worked very well. Call of Duty worked much better than a controller, because the "down-the-sights" aiming mode is perfect for Gyro controls. After getting used to the speed and precision of trackpad+gyro controls, it's hard to go back to a 360 controller.
3rd-person action games (MGS V, etc) - having the right trackpad bound to the camera ends up being so much faster and more precise than a joystick, and having a greater number of binding options ends up being useful.
Most mouse driven games (FTL, Cities Skylines, Civilization) - note that you can bind BOTH trackpads to the mouse, and also even bind the gyro to the mouse, and end up with far more speed and precision than you might think you would have initially.
Top-down ARPG's (Diablo III worked very well)
Most Arcade / platforming games (Meat Boy and Spelunky worked fine), so did Lumines, Tetris. The main constraint here is if you don't like how "out of the way" the face buttons are, and if you are OK using the trackpads mapped to the d-pad or face buttons.
Driving games - I was very shocked how well the gyro could control a steering wheel - it's very accurate, very low latency, so I ended up turning the dead zone all the way down to zero. There are lots of options with how you configure the shape of the response curve of the gyro; and I ended up feeling like I had much more fine control than a joystick.
Here some I think are a bit weaker, but still doable:
Pixel-perfect FPS games where you "fire from the hip", without any delay and without "iron-sights" (Counter Strike, Quake Live, although I do think that with practice you could get 95% of the way to mouse performance using the trackpad / gyro combination for large / small movements).
Fighting Games, or other games where you are using the D-pad for complex, quick motions (the left trackpad worked OK as a D-pad, but didn't feel as good as the real thing), and games where having large, easy-to-reach face buttons is important, or situations where multiple face buttons need to be pressed at the same time (doing this with the right track pad simulating face buttons felt weird).
Dual-joystick shooters - Obviously there is a joystick on the left side of the Steam Controller, but no joystick on the right, so you need to use the right trackpad as a simulated joystick. It works OK, and I'm sure I could get used to it, but playing Geometry Wars just felt much more natural on a regular controller.
Very difficult with Steam Controller:
RTS / MOBAs (have a LOT of key bindings, requires constant quick reaction times and precise mouse placement). I'm not dismissing this yet, some folks have made a lot of progress on figuring out good bindings and building muscle memory.
"The lasting appeal of any multiplayer-focused game is heavily determined by its progression system..."
This line stood out to me (as an overall observation), such a shame that we have reached a point where even reviewers feel the need to focus on the progression systems and number of unlocks as a key reason to continue playing.
Remember the days where there were no unlocks or a XP bar constantly being filled to keep you going, if a MP game is fun and enjoyable you shouldn't need any unlocks or progression indicators to keep you playing.
Old man cynicism aside, it's a fair point considering the lack of depth in the actual game itself.
Pretty much this. Progression is a crutch for games where the core experience doesn't have enough skill and variety to keep you engaged, and it sounds like this game doesn't have either.
I've never found a control layout for a flight stick that makes sense in Descent-style games.
Flight sticks make sense in games where you have constant forward motion and you're primarily controlling the pitch and yaw (i.e. aim) of your craft. Here you need to control both your aim while making very quick changes in movement in 6 directions.
I've tried mapping forward and back to throttle and sliding/strafing (both vertical and horizontal) to hat switch, but it just never feels natural or usable at the speed these games demand.
Twin stick gamepads are a slightly better fit, but I don't even find them to be ideal, because there's never any good way to map vertical strafing on them as Jeff and Drew discussed. I always end up using WASD + mouse, and then putting vertical strafing on space and control (i.e. typical controls for jump and crouch [vertical movement] in first person shooters).
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I've seen some people use dual joysticks with the trigger and thumb buttons for up/down control.
I'll put in a plug here for the Steam controller, which I've been using to play Descent for the last few days; with the added Gyro control, rear "paddles", and the ability to mode shift some of the buttons to have an alternate function, it's more than enough to map everything you need in a 6-DOF shooter.
This reminds me of a simplified version of x86(Intel) assembly code. Also it sounds like Austin is having a panic attack watching this.
Wow, that's exactly what this is; I'm taking a low level programming course right now that has us doing stuff with i86 Assembly code and stepping through it with the debugger to figure out what is in the register and memory.
This game basically looks like my homework made prettier.
So every discussion of Split screen has been in the context of the co-op campaign. Have they also removed split-screen for the deathmatch / slayer stuff? If so, that really does kill a big reason I've played Halo in the past.
I have to say, that Draft Kings "Fantasy Esports" ad on this podcast felt really dirty. Hawking shady gambling sites isn't a good look for Giant Bomb stuff, and now that it's tied directly to betting on video games it feels even worse than when it was betting on Football.
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