Steam Demo Roundup
When I get bored, I download demos from Steam. Why do I do this? Bored. Also, hey, every once in a while I run into something fun. Mostly it’s crap, but every once in a while something good. So here’s the rundown on the demos I played this week:
The Longest Journey — So Steam’s classification system isn’t all it could be; I found this in the "action" listings, and it’s one of the most inactive and listless titles of all time. This is because it’s really an adventure game — and it’s not just any adventure game, it’s an adventure game with full voice acting and a heroine who walks extremely slowly. The voice acting is bad, which probably goes without saying, and it’s more annoying here than it is usually because adventure games don’t have enough gameplay to carry them across the room, so they really lean on the bullshit to keep you interested. And when the bullshit’s as annoying as the gameplay, you get a little bit pissed at what you thought was an action game with a Metacritic score of 91.
Gish — I really wanted to like this game. It’s a sort of zany 2D platformer where you play as this ball of tar and ooze your way through tunnels. You can stick to things and flow down drains and such, which is pretty cool. The problem is that you can jump. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those realism fags who get really annoyed when their sentient ball of tar with eyes can jump even though it doesn’t have legs. I get more annoyed when the jumping controls are really really twitchy and hard to use. That’s sort of a deal-breaker in a platformer.
The Wonderful End of the World — I have had a vision of the end of days, and, lo, it is strangely similar to Katamari Damacy. The game has a really cute aesthetic and a catchy theme song (though the in-level music isn’t as good), and the levels are clever, but it’s really really easy. I think I got five minutes of playtime out of the demo, and I got an A+ on both of its levels, so I wasn’t just scraping by. The retail version has only fifteen levels, so I reckon it’ll come in around an hour if it gets harder and you have to play some of the levels multiple times to beat them.
Audiosurf — The whole internet went queer for this game a few months ago, but I wasn’t very impressed. My main problem with it is that I thought it was surprisingly non-interactive — to wit, the title screen draws, and there are some buttons on it, but they sure don’t do anything when I click on them. So I never actually managed to play the game. The little X on the frame works fine, though, so that’s a selling point. For all I know, all those dudes who thought it was badass played the retail version, which maybe actually does start. But for all I know it doesn’t, and everybody was riveted by the installation process.
Chaos Theory — This is a promising little game about bouncing particles toward a particle catcher, but the level design doesn’t live up to the concept. Too many of the levels are just "grinding" until you find the right sequence of portals to shoot the particles through to get the the end, or the exact right angle to fire your particle at. I believe only one of the levels in the demo actually involved any proper figure-it-out puzzle solving, whereas there were a few that just required you to click on things rapidly and in the right sequence. All this emphasis on speed-mousing makes it that much more annoying that you’re forced to use a very slow mouse speed, since the game both ignores your Windows settings and doesn’t have its own.
Eets — Eets is a cute little puzzler; sort of a cross between Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. Eets himself is this little white monster dude who drops into the level and then walks and jumps on his own. You can’t control Eets directly, but there are several elements of the world that you can alter by clicking on them, and levels may start you with some elements that you can put in place while the game is stopped. If Eets dies or you press the "stop" button, the flow of the level is reset, but any pieces you placed stay where you put them, so you can see what effect you’ve had on the world and make changes. But you can’t add, move, or remove pieces while the system is running, which makes it a lot less intimidating than it may otherwise be, since you’ll never be wondering if you need to wait for some things to happen and then quickly stick in a new bit or move something around. The gameplay also appears to be entirely deterministic, so you can expect the exact same thing to happen every time you start the action (as long as you haven’t changed something yourself, of course). I like it.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War — I’m fond of Warhammer 40k, but don’t tend to love the RTS genre, so I wasn’t sure what to think of this one. In general, though, I like it; the squad-based combat helps to reduce the micromanagement issues I tend to have, since you don’t have to move and handle every single unit individually. I liked the skirmishes more than I liked the campaign, but the campaign in the demo is only one scenario cut out of the middle, so there were some bits I didn’t really understand. The demo also includes a tutorial mission, which is nice, but it does require you to complete every step it tells you before it moves on, which is ordinarily sensible but causes trouble here. The game doesn’t have any key binding options, so if you can’t perform the default command for a given action — for example, if, like me, you don’t have a wheel mouse — you’ll get stuck with the game telling you over and over again to zoom the damn camera in. There’s also no option to invert the camera tilt axis and make it work the sensible way, but this is fixed in the expansions, so it’s not a huge deal.
Bioshock — Yeah, surprisingly, I’ve never played Bioshock, even though it came out almost a year ago. I don’t have an Xbox 360, and until recently didn’t have a PC that would run it. Everybody raved about this game last year, and it seems decent though not as exciting as it was made out to be. For one thing, it’s really talky, and is constantly interrupting the flow of the action while it locks you in a box to play a cutscene. The Half-life-rip-off bathysphere ride at the beginning is a great example of the game’s bad instincts when it comes to cutscenes. You come into Rapture trapped in a bathysphere, unarmed and defenseless, and all you know if you’re being attacked by a "splicer" (no, you don’t know what that is yet). The designers, for no really good reason, chose to root you during this whole process, so you know you’re just watching a cutscene and there’s no real danger; you’re trapped in the sphere anyhow, so it wouldn’t have hurt anything to let you move around so you could at least struggle and maybe panic a little. But it just wants to show you a movie and make sure you’re not distracted from watching it by trying to play the game at the same time.
Hey kids, games are interactive entertainment. Stop forcing us to watch the story and start letting us play the damn story.
