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From the excellent minds at Double Fine, Psychonauts is a platforming adventure for the PS2, Xbox, and PC. You play as Raz, a boy who goes to psychic summer camp in order to become a Psychonaut—a kind of psychic secret agent.
I confess, the art style turned me off at first, but it definitely grew on me. Perhaps being inundated by bald space marines, colorless military grunts, and Japanesy anime characters has left me more receptive to anything that doesn't resemble the aforementioned styles. The art is charming, unique, and completely appropriate.
Psychonauts successfully merges the gameplay with narrative. The level design is artistically and mechanically demented. Rooms turn topsy-turvy, disorienting your perspective, and provides unique navigational challenges. New abilities are gained under the guise of "Merit Badges," tying into the game's setting of summer camp. Each stage is trip through a different character's mind, and gives the designers an excuse to throw you through a variety of gameplay types, from light puzzle solving to straight-up combat. Rest assured, all your psychic powers will come handy at some point, whether to solve a puzzle or defeat a boss, the game doesn't leave any power unused.
Platformers are fundamentally about collecting stuff, and Psychonauts doesn't lack in that department. Each stage is filled with collectibles that help raise your rank (the max rank is 100). Advancing in rank grants new abilities and upgrades existing powers. Trying to nab every last figment will test your ingenuity and willingness to explore the levels.
The game is rife with unusual characters, accented voices, and clever lines. The story's an enjoyable romp that feels like an animated movie or Saturday morning cartoon, but it’s punchy and clever. The main adventure lasts about ten hours, but you can tack on a few more extra if you're a completionist.
If you’re a fan of fun, clever, and devilish platformers, you owe it to yourself to play Psychonauts. You won't be disappointed.
In this level, I go into Milla Vodello's mind and pick up the new levitation power. Instead of floating around as one would expect, the power manifests as a bouncy ball. It improves your running speed slightly and lets you jump much higher than normal. By holding down the aim button, you can also glide across chasms. It's adds a lot of dimension to the solid platforming.
By using slopes and curves, you can build momentum and speed up significantly. The level has a small racing section filled with ramps and collectibles. I barely won by the skin of my teeth.
The glide function allows you be moved by air currents. In here, columns of bubbles denote air columns where you can glide upwards. In a previous area, you use an air current to glide over a large chasm.
The core gameplay allows for multiple approaches to a situation. It's possible to go through the entire game without killing a single person (bosses aside). In some ways, it’s my dream game. It’s a perfect blend of free exploration a la Skyrim, the cover-based stealth mechanics of Splinter Cell, and the branching narrative of Mass Effect. It's like somebody took all the best ideas of Western game design and distilled it into one game.
A large part of this has to do with the impeccable map design. The levels are made with pockets of sneaking space, ventilation shafts, flowing cover, and different elevations to take advantage of Adam Jensen's unique traversal abilities. He can super jump, fall from great heights, punch through walls, and see through them. By that same token, locked doors can be blown up, hacked, or bypassed with codes lifted from Pocket Secretaries.
The game is all about stealth and punishes you appropriately for not moving around with finesse. Getting caught isn’t a death sentence, but unless you’re properly equipped, it might as well be. Even if you elect to go Rambo with your arsenal, you’ll still be utilizing cover a lot.
Whether it’s eliminating enemies with takedowns and headshots or bypassing security systems with vent-crawling and hacking, you are rewarded with XP. After gaining enough XP, you level up, granting “Praxis” points, the games upgrade currency. You use these points to upgrade augmentations that allow Jenson to move more effectively, hack more effectively, and kill more effectively. They’re a limited resource and force players into distinct play styles based on what kind of upgrades they acquire.
Now this could’ve been the greatest game of all time if it wasn’t for one little thing: the boss fights. The boss fights force an awkward style of gameplay incongruent with rest of the game’s design. If you’re going for a stealth-only run, encountering a boss fight is the moment you are screwed. They become frustrating roadblocks in an otherwise stellar experience.
Deus Ex fills out the definition of “cyberpunk” nicely, checking off the box for “hackers,” “corporations,” and “civil unrest” over the issue of human augmentation. The plot takes a backseat to the setting. Neo-Detroit and the fictional Chinese city of Hengsha are appropriately dark, seedy, and technologically-infused in its realization. Hacking computers to read emails and picking up ebooks flesh out more of the world’s backstory.
The game does suffer from drawbacks. Certain augments are completely useless and the hacking minigame gets tiresome quickly. Just like in Mass Effect and Bioshock, an interesting time diversion increasingly becomes a distraction to the core gameplay. Developers should realize that at the highest levels of hacking, the final upgrade should simply automate the process. I would certainly max out my hacking skills just to skip the minigame.
Unfortunately, the game ends with a bitter taste. The conclusion pays no heed to your choices throughout and essentially gives you an opportunity to view four slightly different cutscenes.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a fantastic experience marred by a couple boneheaded design decisions. If it weren’t for those missteps, I would have no trouble calling Deus Ex: Human Revolution a true masterpiece. As it is, it’s a pretty damn good game and among the best for 2011.
As you've no doubt heard by now, the ending wasn't quite what most people were expecting. Sloppy finishes aside, does Mass Effect 3 live up to its storied name?
It's interesting to chart the series evolution (or devolution, some would argue) from start to finish. While the games maintain a similar core throughout, each installment contains radical differences. It's clear that with each game, the designers followed a new philosophy to—dare I say it—"dumb" it down for the masses. This jump is obvious between ME1 and ME2 with the omission of Mako side missions entirely. Rather then try to fix it; they simply eradicated it from existence.
While linear game design isn't always bad, for a series known for branching paths, the straightforwardness of ME3 is rather jarring. The difference in the amount of freedom between ME1 and ME3 is staggering. RPG enthusiasts may lament this more streamlined approach, but it isn't without merit. It guarantees a steady pace for the story and allows players to get down to business quickly.
There's really no excuse for getting rid of exploration entirely though. The Citadel remains the only hub world in the entire game, and every other location you visit you only visit once. That sense of world and environment has been replaced with "urgency" and set-pieces that funnel you through action-packed events. It's a style that works for Modern Warfare, but it's slightly out of place in ME3. At least it makes for some memorable moments. The adventures on various homeworlds, including the Krogan home planet of Tuchanka, will stick with you for a long time. Overlapped with these sequences are payoffs from decisions you've made years ago in the previous games, putting closure to dangling plot threads.
Although the RPG elements suffered, the core combat has improved by leaps and bounds. The introduction of roll dodges makes me wonder how we ever got along without it. Movement, aiming, and shooting are tighter, and the biotic powers spice up combat encounters quite nicely.
Character upgrades have essentially boiled down to combat abilities, which offer your usual assortment of buffs and debuffs, and a couple unique physics-driven showcases thrown in for good measure. The weapon upgrade system has been extremely simplified, reduced to merely buying upgrades for entire weapon classes and inserting mods. The options aren't as numerous as before.
Upon reflection, I realize that Bioware "cheats" with the narrative. The first game thrilled us with its fully realized universe, replete with detailed environments to explore and deep customization options. Our freedom has decreased steadily over the course of our journey, but in its place, we've shared experiences with our crew. As Commander Shepard, we’ve cultivated relationships with our shipmates, romanced some of them even, and let others die. Perhaps we were blinded by our devotion to these characters, for they kept us from seeing ME3's squandered potential.
ME3 abandons its RPG roots and aspires to be a shooter. Fortunately, ME3 is a more than competent at the task, and the use of biotic powers is unique enough to shield it from criticisms of imitating more accomplished genre franchises such as Gears of War or Uncharted.
Even though the story makes the game palatable, the ending ruins everything by invalidating all of the choices you've made in the previous 3 games. Whether you played as Renegade or Paragon has no bearing in the end, and it's completely antithetical to the game's philosophy. It introduces three arbitrary, binary, and bizarre choices with a poorly thought-out explanation for the Reaper invasion. When an ending proves so controversial that it forces Bioware to redo it (although they promise it will maintain their "artistic integrity"), that's when you know that that they've screwed up big time.
Mass Effect 3 is a great game, one of the best for this year possibly, but only for your virgin playthrough. Mass Effect has always encouraged replays with different styles, but when faced with such a disappointing end, the motivation to start up a new game is completely gone.
It's an adventure that no Mass Effect fan should miss out on; just make sure you turn the game off before going up the magic space elevator. Trust me, its better that way.
