2012 was something of a “restart” year, where I try to get back into gaming after a long hiatus. I bought some games three years ago while I was still writing my PhD thesis, which I never even took out of the box, and have led to serious bouts of angsty guilt, so I’d like to make my way through some of them and not feel like I’ve missed out on the last half-decade of games.
January. Hews very closely to the Modern Warfare formula, and ended up being a bit boring for it. Multiplayer is probably as-good as Modern Warfare 2. The things that have changed are different to be different more so than for any other reason. Liked the SR-71 level! Completed single player and played a bunch of multiplayer.
February. Probably would’ve enjoyed this a lot more at the time it came out, when cover mechanics and so on were still relatively new. The trophy support was added in after launch, and you can tell. It’s the most uninspired trophy list I’ve seen. Fun game, well-produced, some frustrating elements. Beat it in one solid day of play. Interesting to see reviews for it were relatively restrained at the time, seeing it as largely derivative. With all the hype since, I expected it to have been a bigger hit. The sequel seems to be much better regarded.
Disappointing. The single-player is plodding, with unsatisfying gunplay on anonymous enemies and a complete over-reliance on destructible scenery, which hasn't held up well. The dialogue is relatively entertaining, especially having experienced Battlefield 3’s unbelievably serious narrative, but the story lacks context (Where is it set?). Feels like a tech demo for the Frostbite engine.
April. A truly artful experience. The whole thing is wonderfully polished and cohesive. The game tells you almost nothing, communicating goals through simple economy of expression: you’re surrounded by desert with only two objects to regard; a glowing mountaintop in the distance, and a crop of stone pillars jutting out of the sand. Thus, you have your long-term goal and your immediate next actions elegantly mapped-out for you.
The seamless, anonymous multiplayer setup is a wonder, creating only the smallest motivations for the players to cooperate, and stripping away any way to distinguish or assume anything negative about the other players, only that they have the same intentions as you, to go forward and explore. Tiny affordances like sharing energy and heat by huddling together as you climb snowy mountains is all the motivation players need to stick together and look out for each other.
The graphics and art design are both exceptional throughout, delivering distinct environments out of the same basic building blocks of sand, air and dilapidated stone masonry, varying the palette and the pace of movement through it to measure out what is a brief, but memorable experience.
June. A little wonder of a game. Completed almost all standard cubes and a bunch of anticubes.
June. Across every technical discipline — art design, graphics, sound, animation, direction, voice acting, writing, the game is exemplary. The main gameplay systems of traversal and third person gunplay are solid, and thankfully the bodycount that Nathan racks up over the course of the game is somewhat justified, better than in the original certainly. I agree with Eurogamer’s Simon Parkin though about the over-zealous inverse kinematic system in the series, and the feeling it evokes. At many points, the game contains a horrible sense of simply going through the motions to move the story forward. The worst way this manifests in gameplay is that you are so frequently making blind leaps of faith, jumping out onto a ledge or onto a pole or up a set of handholds simply because it is the only route out of a room, with no plan or understanding of where it might lead. The pacing was great, and it ended satisfyingly, I just wish there was a bit more freedom to explore different ways to approach a puzzle.
July–August. An interesting game. It contains plenty of flaws that riddle games of this genre: mindless fetch-quests, endless travelling around, complicated UIs. However, it’s nice to see a team take on such an ambitious project as their first ever game (and support it so well after launch, too). It is set in an enchanting world with memorable characters, strong art design and structure. I quite enjoyed learning about the alchemy system, perhaps because I haven’t played many games with such a complex internal system before. I found The Witcher to be quite similar to Mass Effect in so many ways — particularly the prologue and first act in both structure and tone.
