The Wheel of Dubious FPSes Episode 03-04: Strife and Killzone

Strife

So apparently the reason the Night Dive remaster is called "The Original Strife" is because there was a (now defunct) MOBA using that name. Video games are dumb.

Developer: Rogue Entertainment

Release Date: May 15, 1996

Time Played: A little more than two hours (some of which was offstream)

Troubleshooting: Used Night Dive’s remaster, so there was none whatsoever

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Sewer Count: One is still one too many

Would I play more?: see the benefit to first person shooters over RPGs is that shooters tend to not be 40 hours long, which means there’s a higher-than-zero chance of me revisiting them even if I’m not entirely thrilled with what they’re doing.

Video game criticism wirt large has more than enough things to say about Doom and why it’s an important thing that is also still good. It’s almost a self-evident truism, which is why I, being the contrarian hipster piece of shit that I am, find far more pleasure looking at the weird, questionable, and obscure deviations of popular games than the games themselves. Strife is a game that, by all metrics, is “impressive for the time.” It’s a first person shooter running in the Doom engine, but it has quests! NPCs! Shops! Voice Acting! A main hub! Something resembling a narrative! In a world where FPSes (or “Doom Clones” as they were known) were still very much a series of bespoke levels, one after the other, the idea of one of those games where you don’t immediately shoot everything in sight is novel indeed. In The Year of Our Lord 2021, the things Strife does are just things that every video game does now.

Do not get me wrong, it's in fact very cool that all of this is happening In the Doom Engine. I get it. But as a shooter in the Doom Engine it's on the "eh" side of "fine"

I don’t want to be too dismissive out of the gate, because hey I would probably still play this over Hexen, which takes Doom’s formula and says “what if you had to find eight switches to progress.” But in this particular case, pretty much everything that made Strife ambitious and interesting in 1996 is now commonplace. As a result, I cannot muster more than a general “this is neat” to what the game is trying to do, and I think part of that boils down to execution. Contrast this with my reaction to Black Mesa, which I had a great time with last year and which gave me a pretty solid grasp for why Half Life is as important as it is. Sure it’s a polished up, prettified version of that game from 1998, but I think a lot of it is just core design fundamentals.

As a video game, I think Strife firmly falls in “okay” territory. There’s an abundance of 90s energy coming from the character portrait art (which is actually stylized and pretty good) and the sassy woman who is constantly talking and cracking wise in your ear (which is bad and I hate it.) As a shooty shoot the vague focus on “narrative coherence” actually is a minus for the level design. That sewer level is infamous for a lot of reasons, and while I eventually managed to get out of it (after finishing my stream, naturally) it’s bad and labyrinthine in a way that would make even Sandy Petersen blush (this is a Doom level design joke; that’s how far I’ve fallen.) There’s a vague attempt at stealth mechanics that doesn’t work because of how binary it is, but it’s once again “neat.” Similarly, the weapon arsenal is novel mostly due to being one of the first “actually good flamethrowers” in one of these, but is otherwise mostly fine? It’s fine. This game is fine. You can play it on a Switch. That's neat.

Killzone

This is the most miserable I've been streaming a game in the last month and if you've seen what I've streamed in the last month you know that's a feat

Developer: Guerilla Games

Release Date: November 2, 2004

Time Played: Around 2 hours

Troubleshooting: I mean unless you count the absurd chain of devices I use to capture PS3 games, not much at all

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Halo Killer? No. Not remotely.

Would I play more? WHY DID I PAY $15 FOR THIS

Killzone looks and feels like a fake video game. Its entire existence feels less like the product of creative impetus and more the result of Sony’s first party development desperately trying to fill a hole in their catalogue. To say it bluntly: it is a product that existed to counter Halo 2, which meant something back in yonder days of 2004. In every aspect of its being, of its execution, it seems intended, with precision, to Kill Halo, which as we all know was the goal of every console FPS between the years 2002 and 2008. It came out a week earlier, and I can only imagine the quality and tenor of online discussions surrounding these two directly competing juggernauts. Yes. Directly competing.

Except, here’s the thing. Halo 2, for as dumb as its non-ending is, is still a damn good game, almost seventeen years removed from its release. Halo, while diminished, is still a big franchise in the VideoGameosphere. I played some of that multiplayer test flight last weekend, and it turns out I still think Halo is pretty good. I don’t see anyone on the internet going to bat for Killzone, with the possible exception of the truly zealous console warriors still litigating arguments from more than a decade ago. I’m going to try and avoid just going down a laundry list of direct comparisons, because that serves no one. I’m just going to say that even by the standards of mid-00s console shooters, Killzone is this weird, slow, clunky mess of a thing. There’s no one thing I have a problem with; moreso it’s everything. I think I might hate everything about this game. It’s a better game than Red Faction 2, I’ll give it that. It has a coherency of design RF2 lacks, and while it had one turret sequence within 10 minutes of game starting, said turret sequence lasted 90 seconds. If the undercurrent of this feature ends up being “Did I enjoy this game more or less than Daikatana” then I’m okay with that, but let it be known that Daikatana has no turret sequences. Point in favor of John Romero.

Tell me this screenshot doesn't look like a mockup someone made to the prompt "generic sci-fi shooter"

Instead your group of characters (who have vaguely different abilities, like “stealth” and “holding three guns instead of two) go in a vaguely straight line shooting British Space Nazis in a bunch of dull scripted moments with characters constantly yelling in your ear, punctuated with a bunch of dull weapons and aggressive animation priority. For example, the Helghast assault rifle has what is basically an underbarrel masterkey shotgun as its alt fire, which should be cool. I think Buck is pretty cool in Rainbow Six Siege, and was always a fan of the goofier underbarrel stuff in various Call of Duty games. Whatever cool factor having an assault rifle that is also a shotgun goes out the window when you realize there is no way to cancel out of the (lengthy) reload animation between every single shot. Instead you’re left vulnerable for seconds at a time and as a result should probably just stick to that gun’s extremely large magazine of regular bullets. And I feel like that sums up the moment-to-moment gunplay pretty well. The entire thing just feels like it’s running through molasses, but the time to kill is still pretty low, for both you and the Helghast. It doesn’t work in a tactical sense; it’s just sluggish. Throwing a grenade takes way longer than you think it should, and the way the animation plays out means it’s hard to get a judge of where exactly you’re chucking the thing.

Now, to be entirely fair, it sounds like Killzone 2 and 3 are a significant improvement, and I’d be remiss if I judged the entire franchise based on this incredibly dull fucking boring-ass grey fucking boring piece of shit. There was some temptation to go with them (and Insomniac’s Resistance games) over this, but instead I’m $15 poorer and significantly grumpier. I’ve spent more money on worse purchases, even for dubious wheel streams, but there’s something about Killzone that stings more than normal. Maybe it’s just the complete absence of anything I can call “interesting” or “mechanically satisfying”. Instead I’m left with the video game equivalent to Worker and Parasite. Don’t play it! I mean, this feature should probably not be buying advice for anyone who is not also a sicko (outside of my entreaty to play Wizards and Warriors, you coward.) This is an exception to that. You probably weren’t going to set up your Playstation 3 to buy the HD version of a game from 2004, but just in case you were thinking of it, don’t!

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