Here’s a gameplay demo of the new project from Ubisoft Montreal.

First it looks like a Person of interest videogame. Then it looks like a big-budget version of Gunpoint. And finally the protagonist gets a gun and it all devolves into yet another GTA clone. Brilliant.

Metro 2033 () is a game that by all accounts should not work. It’s rather crudely designed, most mechanics work, but just barely. But it makes up for it with an interesting setting, a good number of creative weapons (particularly the ones the pneumatic ones you have to pump manually as an additional reload mechanic), and an all-around good atmosphere. The sequel’s so far universally praised, but I’ll wait for a bit before getting it. If at all.

Renaissance Heroes () plays a lot like Quake 3! If Q3 only had variations on the machinegun, railgun and rocket launcher! And character traits! But you could only have one of each for the entire match! And really basic maps! And there’s levelling! And RPG elements! And bonus objectives! And no rocket jumping! And pay-to-win elements! Luckily, no Judeo-Christian Odin.

Admittedly, the characters and weapons look fittingly over the top, if somewhat cluttered and not particularly original. But since when does an arena shooter rely on its visual aesthetic? There’s one somewhat original game mode, too: touchdown. It’s sort of like a half of CtF, you have to make it to the other team’s base to score. It’s basic, but at least it has some semblance of originality. And I like how the goal area there expands and shrinks a little, not really affecting anything, but supposedly it’s involved with balancing. Right.

It’s an interesting contrast with Shootmania (): both attempt to streamline the experience, but one felt like a polished and endearing experience even in Beta, the other is a money-grabbing, visually cluttered mess that’s overcomplicated in all the wrong places. It still works, of course. It’s just pointless.

Speaking of arena shooters, I don’t think I’ve even seen a worthwhile one after UT3 (), and that wasn’t even very good. There was Warsow, but barely anyone played that last I checked, and it’s gone too far with making it even more of a bunnyhop marathon.

I kept playing Ragnarok Online 2 for a couple of days out of a twisted sense of nostalgia. That didn’t last me long. Seriously, why. Even Korean grinding games seem to be trying to move away from having just one linear path to grind through. Major Western MMOGs, meanwhile, try to move from the traditional tank-healer-damage model towards something more free-form. But no, for some reason in 2013, RO2 drops by with both of those. I don’t even.

Monsters don’t even seem to drop any hats! Hats were a major thing in RO, but nope — the paltry half-dozen or so costumes in the game are only available through the cash shop, as rentals. Monster cards only grant attributes, and still only a minor part compared to the characters’ fixed stats. Even if they did, out of two stats each character gets, one (strength for spell-casters and intelligence for fighters) is explicitly useless and two scale so poorly with level they may as well be. Equipment is completely linear and first-class versions of it stop appearing at all by the time you’re supposed to switch. Supposed to, because you can still gain levels, and there is at least one mission in the bonus quests, titles, achievements thingy is completely blocked off by class change, courtesy of the aforementioned inconsistent rules.

Then my nostalgia got the better of me and I installed the original Ragnarok. It’s still nearly empty. It’s still a magnificent grindfest. It still doesn’t take any attempt to balance itself. It’s still got a half-second (at least) lag for Europe. It’s still bot country. And it’s still Ragnarok. Let’s see how long that holds me.

At the very least, cheers to the iRO team for recognising Renewal (a major redesign of the game’s core mechanics) as a questionable move, and keeping a separate server running with classic mechanics.

Firefall got another update. Mostly tweaks and fixes to existing stuff (XP curve and thumper difficulty in particular), but this one has finally tipped the scales, making the game appealing to me, personally, and hopefully the average gamer.

Capitalism 2 () doesn’t contain much in the way of yayifications or ho!, but this little game from 2001 is very interesting. Generally identfied as an economic strategy, it’s more like a business simulation — so much so that it’s rather difficult to understand without prior knowledge of, well, business.

But where else can you helm a huge multi-billion-dollars corporation that makes and sells sofas, cigars, bottled milk, cars, TV sets and microwaves? Or just play in the stock market all day. If you can make it through the fairly intutive, but at the same time confusing interface.

They were just slowing me down.

Ragnarok Online 2 (). I don’t think anyone expected it to resurface about a half a year ago much less appear on Steam on release day. But it happened. You see, the original RO was the game that got me into MMOGs in general and helped form a lot of what I consider important to the platform. The original game had a long and hard history, being crippled by a hacker attack during a late stage of development, sold to a lot of small local publishers all over the world, some of which added their own significant modifications, leaked to pirates who made thousands of their own servers, a general slew of questionable, poor and/or outdated design decisions. To the day, the game is an odd patchwork of features, some of which went nearly unchanged for its entire 10-year run, some basically rebuilding the way the whole game works. By today’s standards, it never was a very good game. But it was unique, and it was interesting to play, if you could tolerate the massive grind, unforgiving mechanics, and primitive graphics.

The sequel continues the tradition by running a nearly finished beta version in Korea (everyone else had to basically commit identity theft to get in), scrapping it, going nearly silent for years — until now. The launch was fittingly rocky, and the Steam version still insists on having you register for the game, even if you had an account before.

How did that even happen?

And the game’s bad. It looks like it was made sometime in 2006, and plays like it was designed in 2004. Completely linear areas! Monsters spawning in exact same fields! Separate quests to kill said monsters and to take their stuff — from the same NPC! Movesets that require modifier keys to use fully! Potion spam! Linear, class-restricted equipment! Awful translation! Basically nothing in common with the original Ragnarok! For Judeo-Christian Odin!

The only redeeming qualities are the soundtrack, done partially by Yoko Kanno, and the whimsical and cool — if cool can be measured in belts — character and monster designs. Then again, the latter is mostly carried over from RO and the manhwa that started it all.

Oddly enough, RO2 seems to have a good community. Granted, it’s mostly light-hearted trolling, but people are having fun and interacting with one another. For the first time in years have I seen people manning those online-only vendor stalls and hawking their wares. After playing the game for a couple of days, I have more people in my friends list than I had after months in GW2.

I’ve also played through Hotline Miami (). Fun game that seems to be carrying some sort of message about video game narratives and/or violence. I’m not going to interpret it right now. Does it really carry a message, and if it does, should we care?

Also, La-Mulana. La-Mulana La-Mulana La-Mulana. I think I’m completely stuck, and I can’t even tell how far I am into the game. Maybe around halfway? Games like that (practically all Maze of Galious derivatives, really) heavily rely on the social element — something that’s not really present in gaming now. The best I can hope for is watch someone else’s prerecorded LP. Entertaining as it is, it’s just one step away from consulting a walk-through, isn’t it?

La-Mulana is many more kinds of awesome than I originally thought and I’m ashamed for not playing it earlier. Not only is it huge and difficult, its puzzles are quite resistant to brute-forcing. And it’s very non-linear: I take occasional glances at an LP of it, and we progress through the game through very different paths.

7.62 is a hard game to return to even after a few days’ break. So much equipment to divide between (up to) six mercs, it can take over an hour just to remember what everyone does.

Then after a rather long period of just wandering around doing missions that seem more appropriate to an RPG, the game finally decided to get a major battle between the government and the rebels. One where I’m friendly to either side. Except the AI treats any damage as a declaration of hostility, including stray grenade fragments and ricochets. Fun!

That said, the game has some unexpectedly good side/town missions — they could use a better writer (and/or translator), but the general ideas are interesting. And it avoids the usual good vs. evil scenario by making everyone ambiguously bad.

It’s deeper than I expected.

Age of Wushu (Age of Wulin in Europe, currently in closed beta. I do not have access, so everything I write is about the American version) is a Wuxia-themed MMOG. Despite the generic name, it’s different from most other games of the type. Offline characters don’t despawn instantly, instead taking up one of a number of jobs available in the area and wander around as NPCs, boosting defence in some PvP scenarios or offering targets for kidnapping. The game’s towns look bustling with all the crowds this creates.

The experience system also combines time-based progression, generic and specific experience, and a classless system, encouraging spreading out and doing a lot of things instead of grinding some one thing.

Of course, all the problems of a free-to-play B-MMOG are there: poor translation, lots of spam bots and lack of a proper tutorial or direction for new players.

Still, this thing looks like it can be interesting, offering a sandbox, open-PvP experience without much grinding involved.

Gimbal () is great. It plays a little like Altitude, except it has a top-down perspective and heavily customisable ships. You literally build them out of parts and assign controls. This allows for some interesting combinations and keeps things changing. I’m worried that a few optimal designs for each task surface later on, but right now it’s definitely fun. It definitely needs more players and servers, though: right now it’s limited to a TDM variant with little variety. Go vote for it on Greenlight!

I poked libtcod some more this week. More stuff came out. It’s still not stuff I’d care to show, but I’m making progress. Enough progress to start reading other people’s code, in fact. It’s quite fun, unexpectedly enough.

Warframe () has a premise straight from the nineties: space ninjas! Fighting space nazis, zombies and robots! In space! With 4-player co-op! And stealth elements! In space! That sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. It’s an ambitious game, supposedly planned since 2006, but it shows a serious lack of focus or decisiveness on the developer’s part. It’s obviously trying to be too many things at once. Stealth mechanics are too simple (complete with invisibility powers on some classes), and once an alarm is sounded, they stop working altogether. The game can’t seem to decide whether it wants wall-running, sword-slashing, highly mobile action, or tacticool breach-and-clear action. One is not supported very well by the level design, the other makes a lot of undeniably cool abilities go to waste. Add the just a little bit too tough enemies, and both kinds start dragging out just a little bit longer than they have to. Plus, for all the movement abilities (you know, ninjas) quite responsive controls and nice animation, the game feels stiff and lifeless, somehow. Even the visual aesthetic seems interesting on paper, and it still manages to look bland and generic. I don’t get it.

It’s not all bad, though. Digital Extremes certainly got some dynamics right. Limited ammunition and energy, and endlessly respawning enemies encourage mixing up your weapons and abilities, sticking with your team, and impose a soft time limit. Missions are randomised, adding new objectives after the initial task is completed or throwing in new enemies (complete with infighting), making gameplay less predictable and offsetting the game’s general lack of variety.

Of course, my usual complaints for co-op games are still there: insufficient communication options and missing match-making make playing with random teammates quite an unpleasant experience. The usual.

It’s a near miss, and it looks like with some more thought and polish, Digital Extremes’d have a great game on their hands. But right now, it falls flat every time it almost reaches that goal, making it all the more infuriating and painful.

Embarrassing moments in gaming: I tried playing La-Mulana () three or four times before. Both the original and remastered versions. I never knew you could save in the dungeon.

Not much to write about this week. I spent some time poking libtcod with my finger, and stuff came out. Nothing worth showing anyone yet, but it’s a start. Turns out, making a functioning roguelike is much easier than I thought it’d be. That left me with a lot less time to play new stuff, and then I generally stuck to simpler games.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit() is, after all, the closest thing on Steam (that I know of, at least) to a traditional roguelike. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly good. The game relies heavily on crafting new things, but you don’t know any recipes initially: you have to find them via experimentation or pulling and deciphering data from computer consoles. Consoles are fairly rare and only one of the three characters has a decent chance of using them. Of course it’s the weakest fighter! Likewise, crafting station are rare, have a limited number of uses, and waste resources used for a failed experiment, without giving any clues to recipes.

There simply isn’t that much depth to what I’ve seen of the game so far: characters simply have very few abilities of their own and have to use limited items to do anything but move, shoot or stab. You have to find or make more, which is problematic when crafting stations are so few and far between, ingredients are mostly random, and recipes are largely unknown.

On the bright side, the enemies are fairly varied and have decent AI, capable of trying to stay out of sight, retreating when wounded, or simply not pursuing the player and staying where they are. That’s not a lot, but enough to be exploited. The biggest problem of the game, then, is that for all this variety in enemies, there isn’t any real variety available to the player making things extremely formulaic and predictable. All this may only hold true for early game, but I’ve yet to get it past that, and tedious and repetitive early game is generally what ruins roguelikes for me.

Mr. Ivanov has a plan!

I was right. 7.62 — High Calibre is one of those games. It takes a while to get started proper, a lot of early game is spent avoiding fights where possible, and the main plot, token as it is (looking for an escaped con man, but you only find out he’s a con man if you read the manual. Which you probably should when you start playing), takes a back seat to side missions and gearing up. Also, poor translation, sometimes odd pathfinding, enemies phasing through walls and I’ve already had to reinstall the game completely to get it to work. On the other hand, gun porn. You’ve got exotics like the Gyrojet and OTs-20 Gnom, different versions of the same weapon, optical sights, bipods, laser aiming modules, folding stocks, flechette rounds for your shotgun and a lot more stuff. You can even alternate different types of rounds within the same magazine. I like that the game doesn’t seem to be forcing me to choose between supporting the government or the rebels — in fact, it seems quite content to let me do missions for both and trying to weasel my way out when they conflict. Dispelling any doubts there could be, Arulco gets name-dropped a couple of times, as well.

The guy I played co-op with decided to play SimCity.

In the opposite end of the spectrum, Cities in Motion 2 () is out! It’s a boring eurogame for boring people, just what I like. It’s very different from the first game, being set in modern times and works on a much smaller time-scale of days and hours instead of years. Now in addition to trying to cover most of the city with your transport network, you have to manage each line’s timetable. It also removes the original’s constant gridlock of major streets — that alone turned me off that game than anything else. Traffic still plays a role, of course, but it doesn’t make road vehicles almost useless anymore. Unfortunately, the map design is less inspired, landmarks no longer exist, and all cities are entirely self-contained. Even tourists seem to live there permanently, or maybe they use quantum teleportation to get in and out. Interface seems to have gotten worse, as well. Sometimes it’s quite informative, but it refuses to provide some important statistics (like which lines are turning a profit) and tends to spit a lot of pop-ups at you. Another important addition is multiplayer, offering both co-op and competitive modes.

I never noticed that there aren’t that many videogames that fit the eurogame mould. Eurovideogames? Videoeurogames? How do you even call those?

Not a word has been exchanged.

Defiance () is out. It hasn’t changed from what I’ve wrote about it earlier. Except what I originally mistook for a general excess of toughness in monsters is actually the difficulty scaling being overeager — it only increases toughness, not strength or numbers. It’s fine when there are maybe four players in the area, but more than that, and it starts getting ridiculous. And it’s still the quietest MMOG I’ve seen to date. No-one seems to talk or interact in any meaningful way.

Another slow week.

Last week’s Firefall update wasn’t as good as everyone expected. The new progression system requires huge amounts of experience and minerals, the only way to get those minerals in sufficient quantities is mining them with thumpers, and those have been turned much too difficult (requiring more firepower than skill, admittedly). The crafting redesign seems interesting, but it’s still a very early iteration of the new system. Too early to pass judgement. I’m beginning to suspect that for a crafting system to be worthwhile, it actually requires a degree of overcomplication.

I’ve stumbled upon 7.62 — High Calibre. It’s a tactical game that takes a lot of (read: practically all) cues from Jagged Alliance 2 (which I haven’t played until now). Highlights include loading individual magazines and duct tape which can be used to stick two of them together for faster reloads. But it’s one of those games where you fight the controls as much as actual enemies. And it doesn’t look like much. Funnily enough, what interested me in both games in the first place was not the tactical depth, story or gameplay. It was lots of relatively realistic guns. Who’d have thought I’d start turning into a gun nut.

Funny thing about indie bundles, you buy them for one or two games, and then you look at your Desura catalogue, and don’t even know what half of these are. Nothing to catch my eye from mine, though — Master of Alchemy () turned out much more primitive than I thought it’d be. Then again, it was a mobile game initially, as I understand, so I really shouldn’t have expected much.