Category: Gaming

My time with: Middle Earth: Shadows of War

I bought this because it was cheap and I remember vaguely enjoying the first one. The best way I can describe it is Assassin’s Creed with a Lord of the Rings skin. It’s a game about fighting and climbing fast-travel points to reveal lots of things to collect and missions to do. 

It’s Nemesis system is the best thing about it, orcs that have personalities and grow stronger if they defeat or escape from you. In my opinion that’s the only thing this game does that stands it above anything else. Even that becomes a chore. I loved murdering captains to get info on warchiefs and then murdering them to assault a castle and take it. I loved it once, but when you have to do it 4 or 5 times it’s just busy-work. The story missions are mostly completed in 5-10 minutes and then you’re back to the day job of stabbing Orcses. 

If you’re a fan of Lord of the Rings lore then you need to be able to set that aside if you want to enjoy this game, it very much makes it up and makes some changes that are not Tolkienian in any sense of the word. Isildur is revealed as a Nazgul, even though the first sighting of The Nine happened more than 1000 years before the battle of the last alliance and Isildur’s downfall.

In the first 10 minutes we’ve seen your character forge a new One Ring and seen Shelob, last spawn of Ungoliant as a sexy lady giving you visions of the future. Having forged that Second Ring, we find out that we get betrayed by things we’ve dominated before for no reason and encounter orcs that cannot be dominated near the end. It’s an inconsistent mess. 

The future is where we run into another problem. We know that in the future Sauron dominates Mordor and moves to assault Middle Earth. Here we are in game, trying to liberate Mordor from him and depose him, which we know fails. It makes it all seem a bit pointless.

The end of the game tries to frame this in some way that doesn’t work in my opinion. Celebrimbor betrays you and tries to fight Sauron, he loses, you die and become a ringwraith and are told to conquer Minas Morgul. When you’ve spent 25 hours dominating orcs to build an army to defeat him and the game ends with – ah sorry no – you need to go to this green place and stay there forever, that’s not a twist as much as it is breaking the ‘promises’ that the game made to you in the beginning.  

I can’t recommend it honestly as the game exists in such a strange place. If you like Assassin’s Creed, then play Assassin’s Creed. If you like Lord of the Rings, this game will most likely be quite annoying and you’d be better off playing Assassin’s Creed. Bottom line, it doesn’t do enough better than Assassin’s Creed and does lots worse. I paid £6 and still think it was a waste of money.

My time with Torment: Tides of Numenera

Torment: Tides of Numenera was released in 2017 and was the self-confessed spiritual successor to 1997’s masterpiece Planescape: Torment. I’m not sure why it took me until this last month to play it, perhaps I was worried somehow that it wouldn’t live up to the expectations I had. Planescape is my favourite game of all time and I regularly go and replay it. I think Tides of Numenera slightly misses the point of Planescape, and would have been a far better game without tying itself to the name. 

Tides of Numenera has you playing as a former avatar of the Changing God, a discarded shell now given agency and an individual life. I think here is where problems begin. While addressing similar depth and ideas of a long immortal life, in Planescape all those lives are you, you are personally responsible for all the actions of your previous lives, there is no passing it off to being possessed by the malevolent god. 

There is a moment in Planescape where you are forced to confront just how evil some of your previous incarnations have been and you have no choice other than to feel all the pain you have caused others and break down in tears. It’s absurdly powerful storytelling and something that Tides never really reaches. Numenera has you acting out a ‘save the world’ story where, rather confusingly, you aren’t the only former host of the Changing God running around, you meet many in the game which rather more confuses the plot, I was wondering why I was saddled with the burden and why someone else couldn’t do it instead. 

Planescape was all about your character finding out who you are. The single largest experience gain in Torment is finding out your own name, the player doesn’t even know what it is, but your character does. The NPC’s and party members are broken, conflicted people all with real-life issues. Planescape echoes real life issues in a fantasy setting where Tides plays out a story that can completely wash over you. 

I personally found the language very confusing. Instead of Mage, Fighter, Thief we have Glaive, Jack and Nano. Instead of spells we have esoteries and instead of buffs we have fettles. We have oddities, artifacts, cyphers and all manner of confusing things. I’d never come across the Numenera world before so maybe it’s my own fault but I find it immersion breaking. It’s not as if there are any actual changes either to justify the language, it’s just a skin placed on top of already familiar mechanics and ideas. 

I think if the game was called Tides of Numenera it would have been a lot better. By attaching Torment I’m coming from the expectations of the masterpiece and there’s only one way to go from such heights. Judging the game for itself would have given me a far more positive impression of it, I would have enjoyed it for its own merit. While playing Tides of Numenera all it did was make me want to play Planescape: Torment again, after all, what can change the nature of a man?

My time with Salt & Sanctuary.

I have had Salt & Sanctuary installed on my PC for a long time and never gotten around to playing it. I was hesitating for some reason, either a fear that I wasn’t going to be good enough to play it or of perhaps their addictive quality. A week or so ago I dived in and sure enough this ‘Soulslike’ has absorbed all my gaming time. 

I dislike the term ‘Soulslike’ as for me it’s often so vague and doesn’t always mean that the qualities that made the Dark Souls games so captivating are present. A game can call itself Soulslike for only having a mechanic that punishes you on death for example and share no other similarities whatsoever. Lords of the Fallen would be a good example of this. For me what made Dark Souls and Bloodborne so amazing were the combination of a whole host of different features, themes, mechanics and ideas.

I think I’m about halfway through and in my opinion this is one of the better Soulslike games out there. By that I mean it feels the most like Dark Souls, in fact it was called the 2D Dark Souls in a number of reviews and I think it’s mostly gotten there. In terms of atmosphere, interconnected level design, music, upgrade systems, combat and scope it feels like Dark Souls. I feel desperate to make it to the next sanctuary to not lose my acquired salt, I feel the dread of every new area and boss and the greed for the last strike to down a boss where I should jump back and heal. 

One way in which the game isn’t quite up to the mark is in the lore. Some of the Dark Souls lore has been the most beautiful storytelling I’ve come across in gaming. Perilously close to Tolkienian levels of depth. I’m not saying there is no lore in S&S but I’ve not discovered anything that comes close to even the more minor plotlines in Dark Souls or Bloodborne such as Pinwheel or Gascoigne. 

I don’t particularly find the bosses to be that difficult either. Many of them so far have been a case of equipping the right items and stat effects and being ultra aggressive, very rarely have I come across a boss that has taken me more than 3 attempts. Compare that with the Orphan of Kos from Bloodborne, the Fume Knight from Dark Souls or the Demon of Hatred from Sekiro and you’re dealing with bosses that are difficult even with late game knowledge and items. Many other 2D side-scrolling games have far higher levels of challenge and don’t call themselves Soulslike and yet one that does is frustratingly lacking in that key identifier. 

I’ll complete it and enjoy it and think fondly of it, but I don’t think I’ll ever replay it. Which is fine, not every game has to be a masterpiece, but I think by adopting or allowing the comparison with Dark Souls you are, in a way, elevating the expectations of the players. 

I’ll shortly be reviewing a game called Torment: Tides of Numenera which shares the same flaw. The game was advertised as a spiritual successor for Planescape: Torment, my favourite game of all time and by attaching that reputation it fails in living up to it. An expectation I wouldn’t have even had if they had just called the game Tides of Numenera. It’s a subtle thing but it shifts your position from which to think about the game. Call a game a Soulslike and I’ve come down from the top with expectations I won’t fall far. Let me approach a game from below and I’ll likely feel more positive coming up to it. 

Salt and Sanctuary draws heavily from Dark Souls and that is both a blessing and a curse, it gets very close and probably would have been better for taking more of a sidestep away from the Souls series. I think it is a really good entry place for anyone looking to get into Dark Souls that has been too cautious to do so. 

Having said all this, would I have even played the game without the link to the From Software legacy? It’s a frustratingly complex idea to discuss and think about as I predominantly played this game looking for that Dark Souls feel and I think overall I did get it.