What we've been playing - comments are back
A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
6th November
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. We held the article back because it didn't make much sense without comments, so now that I'm publishing it, it means, yes, we have comments again. Thank you for patience surrounding the prolonged outage, and thank you for your continued patience with any teething problems we may have.
But more to the point: What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Mouthwashing, Steam Deck
The PS1* aesthetic becoming a legitimate stylistic choice makes me feel about 40,000 years old, because I can vividly remember the eras in which it looked shockingly real – being absolutely blown away by the TV spots for Gran Turismo 2, for example – and in which it looked bloody awful (the second the Dreamcast arrived).
There was a general critical consensus some time ago that the reason why loads of games tried to mimic the 16-bit era was that it was timelessly beautiful, and that there wasn't the equivalent nostalgia for the 32-bit look because it was cack. For my part, I regarded the fifth gen as an era of stifled artistic expression, where the look of everything was dictated ultimately by hardware limitations and little else. Ineffective at conveying ideas. Polygonal compromise.I was talking rubbish, obviously. To be honest, I've come to regard the endless crusade for photorealism as a millstone around the entire medium's neck. Would it be so bad if graphical fidelity plateaued at the current level? The economics of video game production are already completely broken. We need to go back. Mouthwashing is a showcase of what is possible within the loosely-defined limits of the PS1 aesthetic. It's deeply unsettling, and so persuasively atmospheric that it fully engrossed me on a rickety GWR train to Paddington last weekend (for that games expo thing in London, can't remember the name of it). A small but brilliantly drawn cast of distinctive characters and effective writing really pull you along its relatively short, grim, surreal narrative. It's laugh-out-loud funny in places too, as I'm sure my fellow GWR passengers can attest. All the best horrors are.
It's an all-timer, I think. And one that joins an ever-growing chorus of ambitious, engaging, and quality experiences for whom lo-fi visuals are not a compromise, but a strength. See also the likes of ADACA, Dread Delusion, El Paso, Elsewhere, and Signalis. In amongst all the doom and gloom currently overshadowing this industry (for good reason), there are glimmers of a hopeful future for the engaging single-player experiences that many of us crave. Experiences driven by the desire to tell a story, to impart a vision, to take us on a journey, that don't need to be bogged down with hopeless microtransaction miasma to break even.The "I want shorter games with worse graphics" meme looks like it is coming to fruition by necessity. I just hope we, as an industry, don't forget the "paid more to work less" part – because if even throwing back to the fifth gen doesn't redress some of the shocking imbalances in the system, then we might as well just pack the whole thing in.
*Yeah, I know.
-Jim
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector demo, PC
The memory of Citizen Sleeper is nestled in a really warm place in my heart, but one thing I think the game lacked, for better and worse, was tension. I didn't feel like there was ever a question of if you'd accomplish things, only when, and as much as that made it peaceful to play, it made the mechanical substance of the game, the dice-related stuff, feel superfluous. I'm not sure if that's the right word but it felt like a first attempt, probably because it was. But there's been a lot of work done since to make Citizen Sleeper into a tabletop role-playing game, and the sequel benefits enormously from it.
It's still broadly the same experience - all of the stuff I love about the original is there: the heartfelt relationships with other characters, the sombre science fiction, the succinct writing, the gorgeous character art - but on top of it comes nail-biting tension. Now, it feels like you can fail.
This is most apparent in the new crew missions, whereby you hire a crew (up to two others) and fly out to take on a multi-part mission that usually has a timed element to it - at least the two crew missions I tried in the Steam Next Fest demo did. Roll your dice well and spend them wisely and you'll scrape by, but roll badly or spend your dice unwisely and bombs - sometimes literal - will go off. Fail states are there.
Playing into this are a bunch of new tension-risers, such as the ability for dice to break and for you and your crew to get stressed out, and it's in this way that over the course of these missions, the game twists the screws further and things get increasingly fraught. I was gripped; it's a powerful mix of ingredients.
There's a lot of other stuff to like about the new game too, such as more distinct character classes and additional skill trees that revolve around leading crews. There's real mechanical substance in this sequel. I cannot wait to play more.
-Bertie
MechWarrior 5: Clans, PC
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is one of the best games I've played this year. Beyond a cursory single-player campaign, there's a deep, highly moddable sandbox that sees you commanding a mercenary company of MechWarriors, beginning with basic 20-ton mechs that look like those 'chicken walker' AT-STs from Star Wars, and salvaging your way up to 100-ton goliaths that stamp around the map eviscerating everything in their path, in a hail of laser, missile and autocannon fire.
That's not the game I want to talk about, though, because I've been playing the recently released MechWarrior 5: Clans. Despite the name, this is a full sequel, one that kicks off spectacularly as a long-discounted in-universe theory is revealed to be true. The powerful army that disappeared beyond known space hundreds of years ago as the first interplanetary government fell is still out there, and while the bickering nation-states of the Inner Sphere surrounding Earth have regressed, with crucial technologies being lost and mech manufacturing nearly ceased, the descendants of that lost army have been slowly building strength. Now, they're back, with stronger mechs, better weapons, and a weird clan society that values animal mysticism, a rigid caste system, and not using contractions over human rights.
You play as a MechWarrior for one of the titular clans, Smoke Jaguar, and it is just fantastic. Every mech you pilot tends to be comically over-armed and more mobile than its Inner Sphere equivalents, so you can take on numerically superior forces without breaking stride.
The OmniPod system offers a different kind of customisation too, with the ability to mix and match between different mech variants to make terrifying loadouts, and you don't have to really worry about salvage or repairs as you did in MW5 Mercs. Research does improve your mechs and weaponry, giving you a reason to retry missions in the sim pod beyond a few extra challenge objectives, but missions never feel unfairly tough even if you're using stock weapons or mechs, such is the Clan advantage.
The overall structure of the game is brilliant too. The sandbox has been jettisoned for a tight and reasonably extensive single-player campaign, there are proper cinematics and voice acting, and despite a few constraints - 'perfect' motion capture is still out of reach of AA studios and performance is dire at times - everything comes together in the end. The only thing really missing is a New Game+ mode, but looking at the comprehensive MW5 Mercs update schedule I have no doubts that community feature requests - and additional story content - will eventually be fulfilled.
The AA space that developers Piranha Games exist in is under threat, so I'd encourage you to check out the game on PC or console.
-Will