witcher 3 review

Welcome To My Blog ;)

i will be posting my review as soon as possible, I invite you to bookmark this page 

Far Cry 3 review

Comments180

Tom Francis at 05:50pm November 21 2012

I don’t know what an Undying Bear is exactly, but I’ve vowed to kill it. I hope it’s just a name. This is a mission for the island’s Rakyat tribe, and Rakyat tradition dictates that I must defeat the creature with the infinite-ammo pump-action shotgun they’ve given me. A recent tradition, I would guess, but one I’m happy to honour. The truth is, I have an ulterior motive for finding and killing the legend: I’d really like a new rucksack.

A lot of what you do in Far Cry 3 raises perplexing questions: why would a rucksack made from the skin of the Undying Bear hold more than the one I made from four dead dingoes earlier? Can’t I just make one out of six dead dingoes? What is it about Undying Bear skin that facilitates a particularly capacious rucksack design? And more to the point: if it’s never died, how would anyone know?

But as I scramble away from it, panic-firing my traditional tribal pump action, what I’m actually wondering is this: when did Far Cry 3 become so good?

We’d been told it was an ‘open world’ game, but everything Ubisoft showed of it made it look like a monologue-heavy, tightly scripted adventure, its freedom limited to small mission areas. That is in there, it turns out: there’s an absurdly long series of missions about rescuing your friends from the pirates who’ve captured them. But it’s just one of the many different games you can play on this vast, freely explorable tropical island.

Hunting wild game to make bags out of their skin is another. Guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition require their own special container, and every size of every container can only be made from the skin of one particular species of animal. And while guns, money, syringes and all types of ammunition are abundantly available on the island, its people have apparently never invented the bag.

So you, American tourist Jason Brody, must bring your container technology to the island by personally inventing and reinventing various types of harnesses, wallets and sacks, culminating in your magnum opus: the Undying Bear Skin Rucksack, a masterpiece of dermatological engineering capable of holding up to 96 leaves.

If you’re going to ask players to buy into a system so hilariously removed from its origins in real-world logic, it had better work. It does. Making the island’s wildlife the fodder for your personal upgrade system turns you into a hunter, forced to study and understand the jungle as you explore it. The place teems with life, to the point that you’ll often just sit in a bush and watch it. Check out the leopard stalking those boar! What are those dogs howling at? Ooh look, a Komodo dragon mauling a villager!

They don’t just fight amongst themselves: the island is dotted with pirate outposts, and the roads are travelled by trucks and cars full of pirates, Rakyat rebels, and civilians. Almost any pair of these have some reason to scuffle if they blunder into each other on their randomised routes, and hearing it happen around you makes the place feel alive. Distant gunfire or beast growls are never just ambience: something’s actually happening over there, and you can go and find out what. Maybe steal its skin.

Those outposts are what the game is really about, and conquering one demonstrates everything that makes it great. Your first job is to scout: you’ve got an entire island of free space to circle this small settlement, and the zoom lens of your camera to study it with. The first Far Cry let you tag enemies with your binoculars: once seen, they’re marked on your map in real-time. Far Cry 2 ditched that for being unrealistic. Far Cry 3 brings it back with a vengeance: not only does your camera mark enemies on the map, it lets you see them through walls from then on. As with the skin-crafting, the philosophy is clear: screw reality, this ability makes the game more fun. It does.

Once you’ve scoped and tagged the 5-10 enemies guarding the outpost, you have perfect situational awareness. You could open fire, but at least one of the pirates will make it to an alarm panel. That brings a truckload of goons to reinforce, and things get very messy. So priority number two is to disable the alarms, and the systems for this are deliciously clever.

You can shoot them. OK, that one’s not clever, but it has an interesting complication: only the panel you shoot is disabled, and even a silenced shot will make enough of an impact noise to send the guards running to the others. If it’s a small camp, and you’ve scouted it thoroughly, and you’re sure you have line of sight to every panel, you can speed-snipe them all before the guards can set them off. This is cool.

Trickier, but cooler still, is to methodically eliminate each pirate without alerting the others. This is tough, but your tools support it: you can lunge for any unwitting enemy nearby and impale them on your machete before they can call for help. A perk system lets you spend experience points to upgrade stuff like this, including a great trick that lets you steal the dying guard’s own knife and throw it at someone else for a second silent kill.

My favourite method, though, is often more practical. If you can get to one of the alarm panels in person, you can tamper with it to disable them all. It’s silent, instant and comprehensive. But the panels are always in the heart of the outpost, watched by everyone. Getting to one requires perfect scouting, obsessive planning and steady nerves.

That generally means creating a distraction, and that’s another thing Far Cry 3 is great at. You have a dedicated button for throwing a rock, and the sound will distract any idle guard in earshot. It’s not a new feature for the series, but short-sighted enemies, more predictable AI and the see-through-walls thing make it massively more useful this time. And those same factors apply to other distractions: a car-full of rebels showing up, a stray bear wandering past, or the pirates’ pet leopard suddenly finding its rickety bamboo cage shot open.

Last time I did the cage trick, the leopard savaged every pirate in the camp, waited for my Rakyat allies to show up and take over, then savaged all of them too. That camp is under leopard control now. I gave him sovereignty.

Part of what I love about all these systems in Far Cry 3 is the way they chain together. I find myself hedging my bets: I want to take an outpost down undetected, but I’ll try to sneak in and disable the alarms first in case I screw it up. And before I do that, I’ll drop some C4 under a nearby truck: if I’m close to being discovered, detonating that’ll take their attention off me. Often, halfway through carrying out my plan, the guards catch sight of something they want to attack outside the outpost walls, and rush off to shoot at it. So you have to be ready to restrategise on the spot, and sneak through any window of opportunity that opens up.

Once, when I couldn’t get to an alarm panel, I was rumbled halfway through eliminating the guards. I finished the rest off before the reinforcements arrived, but that left me trapped in an empty building with eight angry pirates hunting for me. It was heart-poundingly tense. I’d peek out of windows to tag them with my camera, then watch their silhouettes through the walls until one strayed close. I couldn’t risk leaving the huts, so I’d just throw a stone near the doorway. The sound would lure him inside, I’d impale him on my knife, drag his body out of view, then wait for my next target.

If you do manage to disable the alarms, your reward is an even more satisfying second phase to the fight. You still have to eliminate all the guards, and it’s still good to remain unseen, but now it doesn’t matter how panicked they get as their friends drop around them.

Far Cry 2 had outposts too, though they were smaller with fewer ways to approach. They were also the source of my biggest problem with that game: they repopulated. Far Cry 3’s solution to this problem is: they don’t. You can conquer the whole island, outpost by outpost, turning each into a rebel base with hunting and assassination missions to help secure the area. It’ll just take you a while, because it’s huge.

Taking over an outpost gets you a new safehouse with a built-in shop, selling a fairly ridiculous array of guns and attachments. These are unexpectedly satisfying to use, and Far Cry 2’s slightly tiresome habit of causing them to randomly jam is gone. It’s also very generous about which ones you can fit silencers to – I ended up taking a silenced SMG, a silenced sniper rifle, the silent bow, and a grenade launcher for emergencies (leopards, basically).

Yes, it’s a game in 2012, so it has a bow. Along with the endlessly distracting rock and the brutally effective machete, the bow makes you feel like a hunter, stalking and butchering teams of heavily armed guards with nothing but blades and guile. You’re never forced to get it, and it’s not actually as effective as a good silenced sniper rifle, but it gives you a sense of identity the other two games never had. As you walk through a silent town of corpses, pulling your arrows back out of their skulls, you can’t help thinking, “Christ, I’m glad I’m on my side.”

Your captured outposts become hubs for two types of missions: assassinations and hunting quests. Both are fun, but assassinations are the highlight: you’ve got to take out an enemy commander with only your knife.

I’ve been putting it off, but I should probably talk about the story missions. The pirates have captured – no kidding – you, your brother, your brother’s girlfriend, your girlfriend, your friend, your other brother, and your other friend. By the end of it I was surprised we didn’t also find my mother, niece and high-school English teacher somewhere in the compound.

It’s not all bad. About half of the Jesus Christ thirty-eight missions give you enough freedom to have fun with the predatory combat systems that make the outpost fights so great. The other half… erk. They’re like a guided tour of all the clumsiest ways to mash story and videogames together until both of them break.

You left the mission area! Restart! You lost the target! Restart! You failed the quicktime event! Restart! A plot character got themselves killed! Restart! We spawned some enemies in a spot you knew was empty! Restart!

I don’t feel like you have to be that smart to predict this stuff won’t work. You don’t have to play a lot of games to see how it backfires. And you don’t have to talk to a lot of gamers to find out how much we hate it when you cheat or punish us to make a scene play out the way the story needs it to. It’s so painful to see clumsiness like that in a game that’s otherwise so elegantly designed.

The island itself is so rich and interesting to explore that it’d be a fantastic game even without any main story missions. So the question is, does the presence of a half-rubbish campaign hurt it? A bit, thanks to one unwelcome quirk of the level-up system: most of those neat perks, including the knife-throwing one, are locked off until you reach certain points in the plot. That pretty much forces you to play it, though thankfully not for long. Most of the good ones unlock at the same time as knife-throwing, a few hours in. You can safely stop there and get back to the good stuff.

Elsewhere in Far Cry 3’s efforts to be all things to all people, it somehow has four competitive multiplayer modes and a separate co-op campaign. Playing this pre-release, it’s too soon to review the competitive stuff. The co-op missions are a lot of fun, though: brisk, ridiculous shooting galleries about helping each other plant explosives and repair vehicles. There’s no server browser, unfortunately, but they’re best played with friends where possible. My favourite moment was taking a stealthy loadout and playing scout for a heavy-gunner friend in a dark cave: I’d ‘spot’ targets in the dark to highlight them on his HUD, he’d gun them down and draw all their fire.

Another caution about online stuff: Far Cry 3 uses Ubisoft’s Steam-like service uPlay, and if you play online, your game can get interrupted temporarily if your connection or their servers go down. It’s just a brief pause, though, and you can always start the game in offline mode to avoid it entirely. You miss out on uPlay achievements and a few lame unlockable rewards that way – I didn’t particularly care.

Other than that, it’s a nice PC version: responsive mouse movement, specific graphics and FoV options, tutorials reflect your custom controls, and it runs decently on Ultra-everything on a modest 3GHz dual core machine with a Radeon HD 5800. The engine doesn’t quite suit the jungle as beautifully as it did the African desert in Far Cry 2, but it has some beautiful views.

The original Far Cry’s developers Crytek used to describe that game’s philosophy as ‘veni, vidi, vici’: you show up, you scout out the situation, and you decide how to conquer it. Ubisoft kept the Far Cry name, and Crytek tried to stay true to its spirit in the Crysis games. But only Far Cry 3 really feels focused on doing that concept justice. You’ve got a huge island to explore, ridiculously effective tools for scouting every hostile situation, and so many clever intersecting systems to inspire creative ways to conquer them. It’s a better stealth game than Far Cry 1, set in an open world that feels richer than Far Cry 2’s. That’s an amazing thing to play.

Verdict

A huge and excitingly rich open world. Prowl it like a hunter, plan sneaky attacks, and turn the animal kingdom into bags.

Tags: Far Cry, Far Cry 2, Far Cry 3, top, Ubisoft

The Witcher 2 review

The Witcher 2 is a game that shoots for the sun while its rivals are still lining up their sights on the moon. It’s an AAA RPG with an indie soul, and a charged, exciting adventure you can really sink your teeth into, admire, and for the most part, love. From the raw technical wizardry of the engine, to tent walls rippling in the breeze and villagers running for cover when it rains, it’s a game built with burning, red-raw passion and exactly one goal. To be the best RPG ever, whatever it takes.

Ultimately, it falls short of that, but not without giving it a damn good go. Over its 20-30 hours of almost relentlessly superb moments, Witcher 2 raises almost every bar it can get its hands on. It’s let down by only two things: an undercooked combat system, and a story resolution that it actually hurts to watch. The rest is simply amazing, from the beautiful writing to the gorgeous visuals, meaningful choices, and a world that feels like a real place that exists beyond the game’s limitations.

One minute. I feel the need... to pose...

For fans of the first game, this shouldn’t be a surprise. You don’t have to have played The Witcher to get into Assassins of Kings, although expect a confusing intro if you haven’t. After that, it’s a brand new story, with our hero Geralt – a travelling mutant monster-hunting-swordsman-alchemist – on the run after being fingered for the death of the Temerian king he was meant to be guarding, while powerful factions try to take advantage of the post-regicide chaos. The best thing about Assassins of Kings? They only think they’re in control. Really, you are. The Witcher 2 is packed to the gills with big decisions and major plot branches, and unlike most RPGs, these have consequences far beyond whether or not you get a magic karma point, a kiss from an NPC, or an extra bit of shiny loot from a treasure chest.

When the funky shaders kick in, you know the battle is Serious Business.

In the opening section, for instance, you’re sent to take down a traitor, Aryan La Valette. Whether you kill him in a duel or make him surrender, the game happily rumbles on. You may not even realise that talking him into giving up is a possibility. If you do, though, you meet Aryan again not long afterwards in a dungeon and join forces. If you killed him, on the other hand, there’s another scene entirely, which changes the way you escape, as well as giving you more exposure to a key political faction.

The scale of the consequences of many of your choices is almost ridiculous. Chapter 1 features two completely different final acts depending on who you work with, both of them dramatic and well-produced. Chapter 2 takes this to a whole new level, offering two completely different towns depending on your earlier choice. The basic goal is the same on both sides, and they share some maps, but the characters and sub-quests and perspective are unique. Not everything splits the story this much, but even the choices that only affect dialogue or the course of single fight are effective.

"My one-sided workout is coming back to haunt me."

All this detail and ambition comes at a price, however. The Witcher 2 often feels like CD Projekt struggled to take a step back from their game, or were unwilling to bring in fresh eyes to playtest it. Quest markers and descriptions are frequently confusing, wrong, or just plain missing – very much the sort of mistake someone wouldn’t notice if they already know where they were going and why. As for the plot, there’s so much lore and so many factions and elements that go unexplained that it’s easy to feel lost. Technically, yes, much of the information is available in expensive real-world books and in Geralt’s journal, but neither is any use when you’re trapped in a key conversation with no idea why everyone hates Nilfgaard, or the political implications of a Temeria/Redania pact.

On the plus side, the problems of the first games have mostly been dealt with. The Witcher 2 still has too much backtracking and too many invisible walls, but neither are on anything like the same scale as before. You don’t have to buy books to complete basic missions any more. The towns are even smaller than Witcher 1′s Vizima, particularly the dwarf city Vergan, but you don’t bump into the same character model every five seconds. As for the infamous sex cards, they’re gone, replaced with animated cutscenes full of uncensored nudity, but which are true to the characters involved and pack a decent amount of sentiment in with their gratuitous fan-service. Even in the intro, with Geralt’s arm carefully positioned to frame his lover Triss’s bare buttocks while she sleeps, it’s not subtle, but it works.

Most importantly, while the opening chapters of the first game practically defied you to actually play them, The Witcher 2 hits the ground running, with huge armies clashing, dragon attacks, daring escapes, and an opening village full of drama and intrigue and interesting moral dilemmas. Lessons have been learned, and learned well, across the board. At least, for the most part…

"Touché?"

The new combat system is a more mixed bag. As before, the gimmick is that you use a steel sword against humans, a silver one against monsters, along with several simple magic spells to stun, burn and otherwise tip the balance in your favour. Between fights, you mix magic potions to adjust your stats in various directions, and lay down traps. Instead of pointing and selecting like before though, every attack is a direct interaction with the game: mouse-clicks for fast and slow strikes, and hotkeys to hurl magic and bombs, parry attacks and roll. This works well against one or two opponents at once, but a mix of long, non-interruptible animations and bad targeting can make fighting groups a pain.

Oddly, this is especially problematic early on, when Geralt has almost no stamina, his spells are weak, you can’t block more than a couple of hits at a time, rear attacks deal 200% damage, and you can easily be obliterated by random encounters. Many early skills aren’t about making Geralt a better fighter but stopping him being a crap one. This means that combat can be much harder at the start of the first chapter than anywhere else in the game, with little sense of escalation outside of specific boss fights.

Going to need a silver-ier sword.

Playing on Easy, this is never a problem – the enemies practically beat themselves up. I played on Normal, and after the first few levels, most combat quickly became trivial. I kept a bag of basic Swallow potions on hand, and rarely bothered with anything else unless I was fighting a boss. A couple of sword upgrades mixed with hefty use of the Aard (stun) and Quen (shield) spells dealt with everything, even before unlocking the special ‘I Win’ group execution attacks during Chapter 2. In fairness, there are harder difficulty modes available, but I never felt tempted to switch to them. The combat was OK, but it was firmly the story, and spitting in the faces of kings and demons alike, that kept me going.

Which, tragically, is where things went wrong. Just an hour before the credits rolled, I had The Witcher 2 pencilled in for 92%. Great game. Some annoyances, but drowned out by the good stuff. Chapter 1 was glorious, beautiful, involving and heartfelt. Chapter 2 was even better: epic, dramatic, amazing. When I hit Chapter 3, it felt like the game-changing mid-point, where the gloves would come off and the second half of the story absolutely explode into life in a flurry of fire and steel.

The combat is fun, but the story is the main attraction.

It wasn’t. Chapter 3 turned out to be the end, as if The Witcher 2 suddenly looked at its watch, and went ‘Whoa, is that the time?’. Things are resolved… mostly… but in the most cack-handed ways. Plot threads are unceremoniously dumped, characters sidelined and forgotten, a couple of final quests rushed through as quickly as possible, and then the word ‘Epilogue’ appears like a slap in the face. Huge, world-changing events happen, but get no time to breathe or explore the consequences that were the whole damn point of making those big choices in the first place. It’s as if there’s a whole concluding chapter simply missing. Ending the story like this isn’t just disappointing. It’s a betrayal.

For such a story-based game, this is a killer – the only reason you’re not looking at a 90+ game. But make no mistake: everything leading up to that point remains amazing, and this is still one of the best RPGs in years. It’s not the deepest, the longest or the toughest, but nothing touches it for great moments, genuinely meaningful choices, or the passion that makes it easy to ignore the many rough edges – at least after a little levelling up and tooth-grinding.

Ultimately, The Witcher 2′s only major crime is simple: failing to live up to its own high standards, even after exceeding almost everyone else’s with fire and passion and style. All things considered, that’s not a difficult thing to forgive. Forgetting? Overlooking? Not so easy. Still a great game though