Design comments on Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Part 2 of 2

Below is part 2 of 2, covering what I disliked about the game. Click to read Part 1 in a new tab.

What I disliked:
Repetitive combat: 90% of the fights are on flat ground with random bits of cover scattered around. Enemies rarely appear above or below you. You can create makeshift grenades by throwing and then shooting objects such as fire extinguishers or propane tanks, but only when such objects are present (you can’t store them and it takes a sharp eye to spot them.) Doing so often kills the framerate.

The AI behavior is pretty straightforward, mainly: hide behind cover, pop out and shoot, repeat. Perhaps to compensate, the designers throw 10 to 20 enemies at you at a time. The result is that most of the game just feels like a shooting gallery. I was forced to copy the AI: hide behind cover, pop out and shoot, repeat. This got boring pretty quickly and most of my attempts to mix things up resulted in swift death, mainly because of...

Unbalanced combat: I selected the default difficulty, “Medium” (the others are “Easy,” “Hard,” “Extreme”) and found that most combat encounters felt like the minigun scene from Terminator 2 (with me as a cop.) In the hands of your enemies, every weapon is highly accurate at long distances, with enough power to incapacitate after just a few shots. Likewise, enemies are uncannily good shots, even while running and blindfiring. In the player’s hands all but the endgame weapons are frustratingly inaccurate and underpowered.

Headshots are devastating, but landing one with most of the weapons is difficult at best. It takes from 5 to 10 shots anywhere else on the body to take down even unarmored foes. Combined with enemies frequently hitting you with multiple, consecutive shots while blind-firing their weapons around corners, and combat quickly feels like a grind.

The game does let you take any enemy as a human shield, however most enemies won’t hesitate to shoot their friends or simply shoot the player’s exposed face. Perplexingly, taking a hostage puts you in control of their gun hand which will only ever contain a pistol, even for enemies that only carry automatic rifles.

Mismatched realism: As I mentioned, this game is awesomely realistic in terms of visuals. It frustrated me when combat mechanics didn’t account for a similar level of realism. I’ll freely admit this is due greatly to the influence of other modern shooters, but here is a good example from the game itself:

IO went to the trouble of setting up destructible windows and detailed collision geometry on cars, allowing me to blast through cars to hit my targets, as well as propane cylinders that will rupture and explode with a single 9mm bullet. And yet, a .45 slug won’t cut through 1/4 inch of particle board standing between me and an enemy.

Considering 90% of combat happens indoors, I think this feature would go a long way toward unifying the environments with the gameplay, and would alleviate many of the repetition and balance issues. I wouldn’t mind the shooting gallery nearly as much if I could use the high powered rifle I scrounged up to tag a foe through a flimsy aluminum air duct.

Nonsensical characterization: *SPOILERS AHEAD*--------- I grew tired of the plot turns created by characters saying one thing and then violently doing the opposite, thereby screwing over their companion. Some major examples:

-Kane (who is supposed to be the calmer, more rational of the two characters) agrees to let Brady’s girl go, then shoots her squarely in the chest.
-Kane and Lynch have agreed to go after Hsing, but Lynch hits Kane in the face instead of letting him shoot Hsing.
-Lynch shoots Shang-Si after promising Kane he wouldn’t.

It’s like watching a bad movie. Plot twists can be great narrative tools, but repeatedly uncharacteristic behavior makes me dislike the protagonists. I can no longer relate to them or respect their decisions (i.e. suspend my disbelief,) because I can’t understand why they are acting as they are.

As a player, this created a rift between me and the game. If Kane, the guy I’m playing as, really is a hardboiled mercenary then why would he make such a poor tactical decision by shooting Brady’s girl? He spends the whole game firmly reminding Lynch, and the player, that he is there purely there for the job. Why would he stick around to kill Glazer once the job was clearly off? Kane hates Lynch bitterly, but despite being constantly jeopardized by his companion, he stays with him and even helps try and rescue the man’s girlfriend. Why stay to go after Shang-Si? From what the designers showed me of Kane, I didn’t accept that revenge was more important to him than escaping with his life.

(Previous commentary: Mass Effect 2)

Design comments on Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Part 1 of 2

Because this post is so long, I’m splitting it up. The second half will go into what I dislike about the game from a designer and player standpoint. Click to read Part 2 in a new tab.

A friend of mine was very kind to get me a free copy of Kane & Lynch 2. I didn’t play the original, nor did I pay much attention to the alleged sacking of a Gamespot reviewer for giving K&L 1 a low score. I heard the first game wasn’t very good, but IO Entertainment’s Hitman games are among my all-time favorites so I came into the experience without many expectations one way or another.

The upshot:
The environment design and visual tech in this game is fantastic, and as always IO is wonderfully unapologetic about gritty content (the censor blur on headshots and nudity is a novel touch.) Gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, though. There’s a lot here, but for me the kickass elements of Kane & Lynch 2 are too disconnected from one another to satisfy my taste.

What I liked:
The visuals: Good lord, the visuals. The game takes place in fictionalized Shanghai and is presented as if viewed through a camcorder. Moisture and grime are paired masterfully with bright colors and neon lights to create a sense of urban decay. Post-processing adds touches like lens reflection and white clipping (bright lights blowing out the picture from the camcorder’s CCD) that make most of this game look startlingly believable. Camera shake is on by default, but can be turned off which I did for reasons I’ll describe later.

Kane and Lynch’s banter: IO recorded a ton of dialogue between the two characters. The over-the-top shooting action is tempered by lines that you’d probably actually hear in a desperate firefight, such as: “I’m doing the best I can, goddamn it!” Kane and Lynch are not Master Chief or Gordon Freeman, and their fear and uncertainty comes through without interfering with gameplay.

Sound effects: Excluding kicking down doors, which sounds more like stepping on a graham cracker, the sounds work well. Ambient city noises and bullet collision/ricochet add to the sense of realism.

Imperfect cover system: The bread and butter of combat in K&L 2 is the cover system. While under cover, it’s still possible for stray bullets to hit you. Since health is regenerative it wasn’t a big problem for me (Disclaimer: I played on the default difficulty) and actually added a dimension of vengeance to enemy encounters that made victory more satisfying.

(Previous commentary, Mass Effect 2)

Design comments on Mass Effect 2

This post is long, so I'll briefly say that I liked Mass Effect 2 overall. BioWare continues to do good things. As a player, I enjoy their products; as a designer, I think they are doing good things for gaming and interactive storytelling.

Things I liked:

Character interaction: I am a sucker for backstory (I actually read all those encyclopedia entries) and by the end of the game I felt connected to my crewmates. In talking to them, I got to know them as people and not just extra guns with legs. Thane and Samara were my favorites. While extremely capable and powerful individuals, they still have flaws. (This is something BioWare is very good at. To my knowledge, there are no Mary Sues in their stories.)

Dilemmas: There were a few points where it actually felt like my decisions affected more than just the little blue and red paragon/renegade bars on the character screen. In particular (no spoilers: the dilemmas of Tali and Legion, and the choice you’re faced with at the very end of the game were all defining moments for me.

Things I disliked:

Disjointed science fiction: Sci-fi is established when the story world exists outside the “real world,” with enough connection to be believable or accommodated by suspension of disbelief. (For example, Star Trek characters eat and drink regular food that is impossibly constructed atom-by-atom in a few seconds.) Two examples from Mass Effect 2: the salarian GameStop game shop clerk on Ilium who talked to me about DRM, and the chain email I received at my personal terminal on the Normandy (as in "forward this to five people or you'll be mauled by pandas" chain email). Immersion was broken for me both times.

Inconsistent dialogue patterns: Normally, the left-most conversation option opens branches with more information (the “Investigate” option.) Once you are finished in that branch, you can resume the main thread and progress conversation. In a few instances, some of those Investigate options move the main dialogue thread forward. It’s rare, but frustrating.

Mystery meat design: *SPOILERS AHEAD*--------- There are a few people out there mystified by the ending choices [1] [2] [3]. When I myself lost two of my team members during cinematics, I almost put down the controller without finishing the game.

I thought I had been so thorough, pairing what I knew of my squadmates with the bio information in the selection screen to choose the best person for each job. Anthony Burch sums it up well in his Destructoid article: “[They] died not because I'd made difficult choices that indirectly led to their deaths, nor because I'd specifically chosen to save one person over another. No: they died because I chose the wrong answer to a multiple-choice question.”

I was especially frustrated when Grunt was killed by stray bullets coming through the door. Grunt’s loyalty mission teaches the player that Krogan are the toughest fighters in the galaxy with redundant vital organs and physical regeneration, with Grunt himself being the “ultimate Krogan” (i.e. the one creature in your group that can’t be killed by a few stray shots.)

I respect the drama and finality that the designers wanted to put into this part of the game and I can't wait to see this refined and expanded in Mass Effect 3. However, this time I was left feeling like my team members were killed not by our mutual enemy, but by bad design.

(Next commentary, Kayne and Lynch 2: Dog Days)
(Previous commentary, Red Faction: Guerilla)

Design comments on Red Faction: Guerilla

Some things I've had in my head that I'll kick off this blog with:

Red Faction: Guerilla was a fantastic game that frustrated the heck out of me. The random spawning of enemies (sometimes literally right behind you) necessitates hit-and-run tactics, i.e. don't hold still, because you'll be surrounded and shot down. However, one of the game's main mechanics (and greatest selling point) is destroying physically realistic buildings. Buildings take time to destroy, either methodically chewing through with a sledgehammer or finding and attacking weak points with explosives, and obviously require you to stay more or less in the same place.

For me, there was a constant struggle of trying to destroy buildings (extremely fun) while dealing with soldiers appearing from the ether (at best distracting, at worst pointless and irritating.) I watched my radar and saw red dots appearing around corners, inside buildings, and outside the game's rendered view.

Ultimately, I was armed to the teeth with an arsenal that I felt was mostly wasted on fighting an unending stream of foot soldiers rather than using it to bring down buildings in superbly rendered bouts of physical destruction.

This enemy spawning isn't turned off for all missions, either, so the player must contend with the designed encounter on top of whatever the random spawn algorithm comes up with. The difficulty curve becomes exaggerated at times when the player can't even rely on rote memorization to pass a tough spot because the parameters of the fight keep changing.

The random spawning does add some great tension to the open world. I really did feel like a fugitive, avoiding main roads and driving through most roadblocks rather than fighting. It quickly gets old, though, as enemies appear from impossible places in never-ending waves.

As a designer: the action curve starts going up and quite often never comes back down until the player is killed or artificially reduces it, i.e. interrupts what they are doing and drives back to base.

As a player: can't a guy just kill everyone in the base and then raze it in peace once in a while?

(Next commentary, Mass Effect 2)