Recent reviews by Just Five Minutes

If you're not sure about buying Crysis, here's a video of the first hour or so's gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl_ejaafmkw

The problem with reviewing The Stanley Parable is that it is a game that is much easier to write about than it is to make a video about; in The Stanley Parable you spend most of your time running around an office complex, and so it is difficult to put together enough compelling footage for a five-minute video. The Stanley Parable is much more interesting than I make it sound, but any video-review is nevertheless going to be featuring some sweet corridor action.

In its first astonishing innovation, The Stanley Parable casts you as Stanley, an office worker who one day notices that everyone in his office has disappeared. Aside from a sociopathic failure to notice the world around him, Stanley is also seemingly afflicted with schizophrenia, his adventure narrated by the only other character in the game, called the Narrator, in The Stanley Parable’s second dizzying innovation, an omnipotent being who comments upon Stanley’s actions as you play through the game.

Before I continue with this review, I shall pause for a disclaimer: there is no way of talking about The Stanley Parable without sounding pretentious and wanky. Words like ‘deconstruction’ and ‘interrogate’ and ‘neck-beard’ circle like crows over any writing concerning this game, but the very act of my pointing this fact out lets me get as pretentious as I like so game on.

Now that elephant in the room has been acknowledged, I realise that I have been less than accurate in describing the game and we are only in our fourth paragraph. Though you may play from the viewpoint of Stanley, you never play as him. How could you, you madman, you are sitting comfortably at home with Stanley dangling at the end of your puppet-strings. Stanley has a life, and a wife, and something else ending in –ife, and you fling him from irresponsibly-designed freight lifts, you monster!

You, the player, are the third and final character, and the game spends a significant amount of time musing on the relationship between players and their avatars, which is rather jolly in a beard-stroke-y way. ‘Choice’, narrative, and even the idea of an ‘ending’ in narrative entertainment are The Stanley Parable’s subject matter, and the game does a very good job discussing these themes in a way that is both entertaining and lucid; the whole idea of ‘a’ story in entertainment is commented upon with the introduction of the patented The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™ and some raucous music and the game does a good job of balancing what could be quite a dull subject with amusing and entertaining moments; humour and wit oozes from every line of dialogue and witty whiteboard doodle, the Narrator character deserves to join the pantheon of video game characters alongside GLADoS and Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, and you, as if you weren’t already frantically fumbling for your debit card, get to play Portal and Minecraft in a glorious fourth-wall-smash-y sequence. The environments are well designed (as should be expected really, as the developers wrote an ending in which you can explore the prototype designs for Stanley’s office) and you are always aware of the choices you have made to reach one of the game’s endings, and as a result you know what choices to make next to reach a new ending.

While The Stanley Parable is certainly not without its amusing and entertaining moments, they are just that really, moments, interspersed with some top-drawer dialogue undoubtedly, involving what can quite quickly become tedious corridor marathons. The question I asked myself most often as I enjoyed The Stanley Parable’s four-hour run time was ‘Where is the game?’ There are almost none of the activities we have become accustomed to in the last 25 years of videogame development, and the designers have made this decision very deliberately; you do not shoot anyone, there is no HUD display, and, Witcher fans revolt, you can’t have awkward videogame sex with anyone. There are, however, no fetch-quests or escort missions. In fact, absence and lack-ofs are a large part of The Stanley Parable experience; the game will not end, despite my polite requests after hour four of tearing up and down corridors, and while the player is presented with ‘choice’ almost constantly, this choice is proved to be illusory. You will restart the game once you realise that the choice you have made is leading you toward an ending you have already experienced, but the writing makes you understand that even restarting the game is a choice in itself.

As an ostensible purveyor of videos and articles that criticise videogames as both art and products for entertainment, I must ask whether I would recommend The Stanley Parable to anyone not interested in the murky waters of videogame narrative. It would undoubtedly give one plenty of street cred to display The Stanley Parable’s achievements in your Steam profile, but as a piece of entertainment that has at best three or four hours of content is paying full price worth it if you are not writing a PhD on videogame narrative?

The Stanley Parable is an essay in the form of a computer game, but crucially it knows what it is doing, and, ultimately, is there any better way of illustrating and analysing the characteristics of our chosen medium than through the use of the medium itself? All of the criticisms I have of the game are pre-empted by the game, and to pursue them further would make me seem rather petty and stubborn. While some may argue otherwise, for me the game’s problems are ultimately diffused by it referring to them before I have even noticed, and as such I am left with no choice but to declare The Stanley Parable the perfect videogame, and, in tribute to a game with nineteen endings and so simultaneously no endings at all, refuse to give my review its own logical conc-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omGaRA0niF8

*sound of paper rustling* sorry I’m just reminding myself of what I said in my previous Wolfenstein review… great blend of action and stealth, interesting concept… boob appendage… OK, I’ve got it, *ahem*

Well don’t I look foolish. To quote myself, Wolfenstein: The New Order ‘signals an end of the World War Two-themed shooter’ and ‘any future game involving Nazis on any level will have The New Order somewhere in its DNA.’ It seems I was wrong about the first, but prophetic about the second, because Wolfenstein: The Old Blood certainly returns to the bottom of what has turned out to be an extremely commodious barrel when searching for subject matter, and if Humans and Bananas share 97% of their DNA, then The New Order is the human and The Old Blood is a giant walking banana waving an assault rifle in your face.

I returned briefly to The New Order while writing this review because I needed to remind myself exactly what it was that I didn’t like about that game, which might seem like the wrong way to go about reviewing a completely different game, but The Old Blood isn’t completely different; it shares really quite a lot indeed with the first game, including the setting, main character, sense of humour, knowing winks toward the player, mechanics and satisfactory shooting, but at the same time it manages to be more than just a map pack or an origins story.

If The New Order is a summer blockbuster, The Old Blood is a low-budget B-Movie, and is all the better for it. You are William ‘Billy Boy’ Blaskowicz, tasked with securing documents containing the location of General Deathshead’s compound. BAM! There’s your story, and The Old Blood delivers it with all the straight-forward no-nonsense story-telling one would expect from a plot that you can describe in one sentence. Where The New Order establishes character by making you play a creepy card game, The Old Blood does the same by having a character laugh in a slightly un-hinged way, in the best of B-movie traditions.

Speaking of B-movies, there is definitely the wiff of Indiana Jones about The Old Blood, and that’s not just because of the Nazi soldiers. The suggestion of the supernatural bubbles underneath The Old Blood during the first two-thirds if you bother to read the newspaper cuttings littered throughout the game (hint to game developers: establishing your world in-game is a great way to immerse your player; interrupting game play so that they can read some vaguely amusing newspaper article about Hitler isn’t) before literally bursting through the surface in the last third.

But story-schmory right? What about the shooting? The shooting is certainly satisfying; you point at things until the things fall down, the gore is pleasingly splashy and overblown, and my issues with the floaty shotguns in The New Order seem to have been addressed. But it’s not as if the shooting in The New Order was bad and needed fixing; exactly the same system is in place in The Old Blood, so the game doesn’t score any points for having good shooting. Half Life 2 had good shooting and that came out ten years ago, while also managing to have relatable characters, a complex plot and, perhaps most crucially, crossbows.

The Old Blood effectively blends stealth and action in much the same way as The New Order (and still doesn’t score points for it) but I found myself reloading every time I alerted one of the Lieutenant enemies because a) I find stealthing my way through games introducing Mr Serrated blade to Mr Jugular Vein much more satisfying than introducing Mr Buckshot to Mr Chest Cavity, and b) I felt like I had in some way failed when I did. Alerting one of the Lieutenants brings the entire Nazi army down upon the conveniently-sized air-duct where you happen to be hiding, and they will keep coming until you manage to kill him, at which point the German Empire assumes that he must have just lost signal and will call back if it is important. The enemies after the next checkpoint, however, seem to assume that the gunfire and screams from the neighbouring room are just someone playing Wagner’s Ring Cycle a little bit too loud.

I guess what I am trying to say is that The Old Blood just isn’t as dynamic (if I may use the vocabulary of a tosspot) as it needs to be. It isn’t enough to be a good shooter any more. I completed the game twice on two different difficulty settings and for the life of me couldn’t tell the difference apart from the amount of damage enemies dealt. Castle Wolfenstein seems to have been host to the annual Med Pack and Body Armour expo the weekend before BJ turns up and its occupants absolutely haemorrhage ammunition regardless of the difficulty you play at. The level design does make a gesture toward offering different paths for you to choose that allow you to approach situations in different ways which is good but these options are scarce. Perhaps most damningly, Hatoful Boyfriend offers the player more choice than The Old Blood, whose sole contribution to interactive storytelling results in a different Steam achievement, and a slightly different cut-scene.

Finally there are technical issues with the game; where The New Order seemed rushed in terms of storytelling, The Old Blood seems rushed in terms of the writing of the game’s code itself. There are at least two points in the game where it is a legitimate option to just run past hordes of enemies to the next checkpoint, whereupon they promptly give up the chase. The game kicked me to desktop a number of times (with one occurring within the first fifteen seconds of me booting the game for the first time), all of which combined gave me the impression that The Old Blood wasn’t keen for me to feast on its juicy innards if that isn’t an odd expression.

I am aware that I have drawn some comparisons between The Old Blood and its predecessor (or is it successor if The Old Blood is a prequel? Answers in the comments) which may seem like poor critical practice because they are different games and, some might argue, should be considered independently of each other. I even cited Half Life 2 which is never a fair comparison, even if the game in question is Bioshock. It is just impossible to talk about The New Blood, a prequel shooter with Nazis, without in some way referring to other Nazi games with shooting. The Old Blood has a lineage which cannot be ignored in any real criticism of the game.

The Old Blood is ultimately a great shooter but that isn’t really enough anymore. Its story is much better told and crucially shorter than The New Order, but it nevertheless fails to harness the strengths of the medium to tell it; you could tell the same story in a film and the experience would remain largely unchanged, which is one of the principle problems with computer games in the twenty-first century. We rely too much on other media to both criticise and develop our games. But I now realise I am veering dangerously close to my PhD territory, so I’ll shut up now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er4MRQ6UePs

I wasn't sure whether to buy the first episode of this series but I'm glad I did!

For those who still aren't sure, here's a gameplay video I did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9mX0i3gfw

The Second World War really is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of popular entertainment from the last two decades to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if every major game and film production company met up in the mid 1930s and somehow engineered the conflict so that they could have a guaranteed source of income forever.

The New Order is the latest entry in a long history of games that ritualise the slaughter of helpless Nazis. You play as William ‘B.J’ Blaskowicz, a man with a head that couldn’t be squarer if it never touched drink or drugs in an alternate timeline in which the Nazi’s have nuked New York and take over the world. You wake from a coma in 1960 and join a small band of resistance fighters as they struggle against the impossibly evil German Empire. It is a simple set-up and a strong one, as the test of a good idea is one’s ability to sum it up in one sentence, and in this case The New Order’s one sentence elevator pitch is “What if the Nazi’s won the Second World War?” an interesting question that the game explores briefly, before becoming bored and turning back to blasting Nazis in the face.

First issue with The New Order: impossibly evil Nazi enemy. I understand the legacy of the Wolfenstein series as essentially inventing the Nazi-em-up, and I understand how an alternative timeline in which the Nazi’s won the Second World War creates tension in your game, but this timeline is so alternate it feels like it’s from another planet. Though I would agree that perhaps the Nazi’s didn’t get everything right, I would also suggest that they weren’t so evil as to engineer giant robotic dogs and a division of mutant super-soldiers stitched into demonic power armour.

I wonder though whether the developers weren’t trying to make a point by pushing the evil meter to eleven when designing their Nazi empire. The game isn’t above the use of caricature; you have the pervy General, the General with the eye-patch, the vaguely ♥♥♥♥-sexual General, the General who listens to classical music, and the slightly un-hinged lady General. The characterisation of the low-level grunts is more nuanced however and does portray at least some of the Nazis in the game as vaguely human. You overhear conversations between soldiers talking about their families and children, all the while running a thumb along the edge of your blade and eyeing their jugular hungrily. The New Order exploits the player’s understanding of the Nazis as portrayed in the last five decades or so by juxtaposing the depiction of its characters while simultaneously taking a sideways-glance at the genre it invented, a comment that is well executed when you give the game time do its thing.

If Wolfenstein invented the concept of Nazis as guilt-free bullet and blade storage solutions, it also invented shooting from a first-person perspective, and while I don’t want to get into an argument about ‘the original FPS’, Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the first to marry Nazis and heavy ordinance in a video game experience. There has been over two decades of development in the FPS genre since Castle Wolfenstein, and The New Order references every major milestone along the way; the crowbar from Half-Life, the beach assault section from pretty much every Medal of Honour game, character perks from Borderlands, and Vault 101 from Fallout all make appearances in The New Order. It doesn’t really do anything with these references though, aside from saying ‘look, Half-Life is a game that exists,’ and I can’t help but think that an opportunity has been lost.

If the Wolfenstein games invented shooting, The New Order doesn’t reinvent it. The way the game blends stealth and action is excellently executed – in the first two thirds of the game, almost every situation can be resolved quietly with a knife, or brutally with a shotgun, and you are never penalised for going all-out stealth or all-out action. Instead, The New Order cleverly rewards you in a way that is appropriate for your play-style; it understands that players who prefer to stealth their way through the game are more likely to be interested in collectibles, and so rewards stealthy players by highlighting the locations of collectibles on the in-game map, for instance.

When things do go loud the gameplay is somewhat less satisfying, however. Shooting is competent at best and dual-wielding weapons is a novelty I used a handful of times before returning to wielding one weapon for greater accuracy. Shotguns are also curiously float-y, and, since most of the combat is at mid-range anyway, rather pointless as well. There are also sections in the game where what is meant to be a quick, exciting escape from a powerful enemy turns into tedious trial-and-error. Call me inept but in some instances I only found the way to escape by accident rather than by any intuitive understanding of what I needed to do. I understand what the developers are trying to do with such sequences, but the impact of a sudden heart-stopping struggle in the middle of gameplay will be lost unless you manage to survive it first time.

As the game progresses, an attempt to ratchet up the action to an explosive crescendo means the emphasis leans much more toward action than stealth. The latter third of The New Order is all shooting with very few stealth paths available, and as a result the game suffers. Stealth is really where The New Order shines, but it seems to get bored around about the point you go to the Moon (spoilers) to literally print-off some nuclear deactivation codes and from then on is room after room of Nazis eager to have their faces rearranged with your lead.

The last third of the game in general seems rushed; character relationships are hinted at and then forgotten, some characters are forgotten about entirely, and in one section (if you’ve played the game, you’ll know exactly this point) ripe with potential for some interesting physics-based combat, you walk from one point to another and destroy exactly three drones.

All of this is frustrating because the game starts out so well; it’s alternative history setting is interesting, the blend of stealth and combat is excellent, and B.J’s character is well developed through a combination of cut-scenes and interior monologue. Once The New Order leaves Earth’s atmosphere though, it turns into Call of Duty but with Nazis. And Call of Duty has already done Nazis. So just Call of Duty then.

The difficulty with finding issues with a game like The New Order is in recognising the difference between genuine flaws in the game and flaws in the FPS genre in general, as the game has it’s tongue so firmly in it’s cheek it often isn’t clear whether the game is making a comment or not. Its attitude toward women is certainly taken from the modern-day FPS, with the main female character stepping into her role as boob-appendage with considerable aplomb. The visuals are average, with the occasional muddy texture, and more polish could have been used in cut-scene transitions, with somewhat jarring jumps from and into gameplay being the most common example.

What The New Order signals is an end of the World War Two-themed shooter, which is a shame because I think there are plenty of stories left to tell from that era . The problem is that any future game involving Nazis on any level will have The New Order somewhere in it’s DNA, and as soon as we start referencing games that are already themselves parodies, the space-time continuum will collapse.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O4Jo4c-1f8&w=560&h=315]

My video review of Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments: https://youtu.be/cJtb0smiak8