It’s not just because Assassin’s Creed is, simply, a higher profile series – although I will admit that the core concept and gameplay of AC is more engaging to me. No – ACB gets away with it because, whilst the gameplay is very similar to that of Assassin’s Creed 2, Ubisoft make it feel different. Tropico 4 has plenty of new missions and additional buildings to add to your island nation, but it’s all presented in the same art style, the same graphics, the same music, the same everything. Remove the revamped UI from screenshots and it’s difficult to tell Tropico 3 from Tropico 4.

ACB plays in a very similar style to AC2 and the story, whilst being reasonable in and of itself, doesn’t take the series very far at all, minus the obligatory plot twist at the end. Crucially, however, the feel of the game is very different, because of the new landscape of Rome, the new music and the new characters. Even Ezio’s iconic Assassin outfit is slightly tweaked. The new map of Rome is essentially the same playground for running and jumping about in as Florence and Venice were in AC2, but it is manifestly a new, different game regardless.

So although Tropico 4 and ACB both recycle a lot of material, the former doesn’t make enough of an effort to even slightly alter or update the tone of its predecessor, whilst the latter does more than enough to feel like a different game, despite not updating too much in the gameplay department. Some said that it was a tad cynical on Ubisoft’s part to flog ACB as a full-priced sequel, but I don’t at all – the fabulous art and evocative sights of Rome do more than enough, alongside good amounts of content, to make it a new, full game. Tropico 4, though? Not so much.

I mentioned the boredom in the full review, since to a large extent it’s what characterised the whole game for me. In brief, the game’s fairly spacious Caribbean setting requires you to point your ship at a quest marker on the edge of your map and take several minutes to arrive at your destination with nothing to do in between unless you fancy engaging in the ship-to-ship combat.

Even as I typed down my criticisms of it, however, a thought struck me – isn’t this quite similar to the gameplay I love in Mount and Blade? This has another map that you must guide your warband around, merely by clicking on where you want them to go. Need to get to the other side of the map? Just click on your destination and wait. There are towns and cities to enter along the way which offer various items and services, much like those in Pirates. Yet I’ve sunk what must be close to 100 hours into both Mount and Blade games whereas Pirates bored me in about three.

There is certainly more to do when on long journeys in Mount and Blade: a tournament might distract you, or a quest you fancy might be offered in a town along the way. This obscures the real reason why Pirates is better, however. Even if there were a million more things to do, it wouldn’t match up to the brilliance of Mount and Blade because of one simple thing: the core combat. Mount and Blade‘s combat is magnificent; charging knights, arrows and crossbow bolts flying everywhere, the cheers and shouts of fighting men and your own character, in my case, flying through the melee on a courser dropping my enemies with horse archery. That’s why you travel to places – the promise of glorious battle throughout the land. It’s why I’ll pounce on even a tiny band of looters that I can mop up in seconds with my huge army, for no reward other than the fun of playing in that combat engine.

But Pirates? My reward for going places is a stripped down strategy game with no depth or excitement, with repetitive enemies, with no strategy or tactics to engage in. If I stick to open sea I might get in a fight with another ship, but the experience is again so minimal that it’s not worth it. What Pirates of Black Cove demonstrates is that the core gameplay must always be the main method of involving the player. A game might have an incredible world built around the gameplay, or fantastic support structures, minigames and additional mechanics, but if the heart of the game isn’t engaging enough then, ultimately, the game has failed. If, in Pirates case, the support isn’t there either, then the problems are doubled.

As I stated in the review, the base mechanics behind VT are well proven and fun, as they should be for a series that’s made it to its tenth birthday, but over and above that there simply isn’t enough to make the game interesting. The world tour mode is fine when you’re playing matches, but there are too many repetitious training sessions and one-off exhibition games in between the tournaments. To slip into MMO terminology, levelling a player to the sort of ability needed to challenge the top seeds at the highest difficulty level can only be done through minigames that are interesting to start with, but increasingly more dull. It’s the essence of the ‘grind’; performing the same tasks over and over again to allow you access to the good stuff. How did this sneak into an arcade sports game?

The answer is in the question. VT was born in the arcade, where players get a few minutes of fun biffing the ball about before they get beaten and have to pay up for some more. The only elements were your choice of player and the tennis match itself. At the core of the series those features are the only constant, but that’s not enough for a home release. The other features, then, like the world tour and player creation, are bolted on additions, loosely tied to the heart of the game and so they take on the appearance of chores that must be completed to get to what VT is all about. Look at another sports game. It could be argued that at the heart of Pro Evo, all there is is the football match itself, but that neglects the teamsheet, substitutions, tactics and plenty of other features that are all part of the basic game before you start thinking about the Master League mode or a lengthy tournament.

Virtua Tennis, however, has so little depth in its core gameplay that after playing for ten minutes, you’ve seen everything, and other modes like the World Tour are so detached from the gameplay that instead of deepening the pool, they merely provide extra puddles to splash around in – and whilst that’s kind of fun, you quickly realise that your feet are soaked and you fancy going inside. It’s not something that makes VT4 bad enough to hate – to extend the already-stretched metaphor, you can quickly put on a nice dry pair of socks – but it doesn’t make it very appealing in the long run.

How wrong I was. Panzer Corps is a well put together title, providing tidy, expansive war-gaming with no frills but a good degree of depth. You’ll be able to read more about it in my review, which should pop up on Gamedot in the next few days (EDIT: here it is now), but for now I’d like to look at something else. I’m going mildly theoretical again, so brace yourselves for some rambling.

I couldn’t help but think about the nature of the entertainment offered by the game. Whenever I come to that most annoying part of reviews, the score, I inevitably end making a judgement not in isolation, but by looking at what I’ve awarded previous games. So, despite my only complaint against Panzer Corps being ‘Nothing new’, with some very healthy positives on the other end of the scale (‘good concept, well executed’ and ‘plenty of depth’), it lands a 7/10, which may as well translate to ‘meh’ for some readers. The truth is that there was nothing more that developers Slitherine could have done to hit the giddy heights of an 8/10, because, to my own mind, experiences such as these can’t get that high when they offer entertainment of this sort.

Some games might be art, conveying emotional experiences equally as potent as those provided by other media, but a game like Panzer Corps seems to me to be the gaming equivalent of a crossword or a sudoku; a mental challenge that gives your strategic powers a workout and can give you some satisfaction upon completion, but does nothing more. Obviously it has more depth and more paths to victory, as well as a narrative of sorts, in which the player can rewrite the history of WW2 if they win big enough victories. It’s not a story, though, just a bit of historical flavour layered on top of the game’s central attraction, that of pure, simple strategy. This is chess dressed in uniform.

The most interesting comparison I thought on was between this game and Civilization V, which I gave a 9/10 in my review last October. At their core, both games have similar mechanics, being games of conquest played out on a grid map. Civ, of course, is a very different game, but every other feature boils down to what goes on between your cities and armies on one side of the map and the opposing kingdom on the other. Panzer Corps executes this premise admirably, so is Civ better just because it has more stuff in it, like city management, technology trees and diplomacy? No; I can’t argue that a broadly-focused game is inherently better than a good streamlined one. Is it because it’s more fun? No; if fun were the only barometer of a game’s quality, I’d have given the bug-ridden Test Drive Unlimited 2 a 10/10. So why is it?

To be terribly facetious, it’s because a video game is about more than just its mechanics. In Panzer Corps, mechanics are king; everything else, everything, is window dressing. Civ wins because it has personality, because it weaves whole new stories every time you play through the details and sideshows, not just because the map is different. I’m tempted to say that you don’t ‘play’ Panzer Corps in the same way that you don’t ‘play’ a crossword, but that would be too critical. Nonetheless, you certainly don’t play this game in the same sense that you play a game of Civ. If anyone can come up with a new word somewhere between ‘playing’ and ‘doing’ a round of Panzer Corps, you might just help me to make this post 400 words shorter.

I imagine that the Portal 2 team are feeling pretty smug right now. The game that they have created has a few niggles of the sort that reviewers (myself included) pick out when they want to avoid looking biased – but that’s it. I haven’t played a game that is this tightly packaged since Arkham Asylum, with both sharing in common an armour of gameplay, story and polish that made them nigh-on bulletproof, vulnerable only to the sort of subjective criticism that emerges once the critics have had their say and the inevitable forum backlashes begin.

My review of the game has just gone up, sporting a hefty 9/10 at the end, but it wasn’t a particularly easy one to do. There were points I wanted to raise against the game that seemed petty in light of all the things Valve has done right. Loading screens were something I wanted to bring up, given that they pop up every five minutes, but after a little thought I realised that they didn’t actually bother me that much, that I was fishing around in the dark for something to put in the ‘bad points’ box at the top of the review. Eventually I lunged for the criticisms of ‘some pacing issues’ (a fluff phrase if ever I’ve written one) and ‘minimal replayability’: but why should a good game want you to play it again and again? I wouldn’t want to listen to the same symphony or watch the same film too many times in succession, however amazing the experience is.

This post, then, has to redress the balance, because, in the end, I’m not that taken with Portal 2. Objectively, it’s great; but that doesn’t mean that I’m particularly enamoured with it, as I was with Arkham Asylum (to date, just about the only game which I wanted to immediately replay upon completion).

Firstly, though, I concede that I missed out one plus-point in my review. The art design is stellar: the test chambers have that same sterile gleam that they had before, but in the areas beyond the lab walls Valve went for broke and succeeded spectacularly. Some of the vistas are staggering, imbued with a sense of monolithic scale unmatched by anything else you’ll see in gaming for years. I think it’s the artificiality of the Aperture facility that does the trick.  Watching the sunrise on a mountain ridge in Oblivion is impressive; admiring the fields and towers of San Gimignano in Assassin’s Creed 2 is a delight; but the cold, hideous immensity of some of Portal 2‘s landscapes blows both right out of the water. The first game hinted at this close to its ending, when we first saw GlaDOS’s chamber from the outside, and the sequel builds on this to colossal effect. Two areas in particular stand out: the very bottom of the facility in the chapter ‘The Fall’ and the wide-open expanses of the upper test chambers in the final two chapters. I haven’t stopped and gawped at a game in this way since 2007 and Bioshock.

If anything, however, this gargantuan scope feeds into my main concern, something unpredictable for which I don’t fault the developers one tiny bit. Portal was a clever, wonderful little puzzler for two-thirds of it’s length, before transforming into one of gaming’s more eerie titles in the escape sequence. It gave exactly the right amount of scenic exposition, only briefly revealing the vastness of what was going on behind the scenes so as not to compromise the integrity of what was, after all, a three-hour long sideshow intended to be the light dessert to The Orange Box‘s main course of Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2.

Portal 2 had to up the scale and raise the stakes, which it does very well – but the two-toned approach to the game makes for an odd experience. On the one hand, we have the comedy: no other blockbuster will be out to make you laugh as much as Valve wants you to, whether it’s from GlaDOS’s pithy sarcasm, Wheatley’s giddy buffoonery, Johnson’s macho posturing or the empathic whimpers of the turrets as you blow them up with a laser.

On the other, there’s the epic side of things: the story of a young woman seeking to escape from a malevolent, all-powerful nemesis, forced into a journey of discovery and struggle in order merely to escape. Then there’s the additional threat at the end of the game of the entire city-sized facility going the way of Chernobyl. All this in a game with four principal characters, only one of whom is A) a human being and B) alive. The two facets of scale and humour make for a not unsuccessful, but very odd combination, contributing to making Portal 2 an epic in a closed, consequence-free, hermetically-sealed box. The end sequence sums things up perfectly: for all the stupefying adventures beneath the ground, all there is of Aperture on the surface is a small shack in the desert.

I’m a sucker for the tale of myth and destiny, for galaxy-spanning intrigue, for stories of gods and monsters, heroes, wars, love and death, salvation and redemption. Portal 2 appeals to me because of its scale, because the sweeping, silent expanse of the Aperture facility says more than any amount of dialogue ever could about the ambition and horror of the powers behind it. Yet simultaneously it feels limited, as it never once engages (one easter egg aside) with the wider universe beyond it. And that’s the weird point: the scale makes you want wider consequences and ramifications, yet the intimate, personal tone of the game is so unique and unspoilt that further expansion into the wider Half-Life universe that it inhabits would only serve to dilute it.

I’m not criticising Portal 2. It is an amazing work that I would encourage anyone to play, the sort of game that should be preserved, replayed and studied generations down the line – but that mix of tone, of epic-in-a-vacuum, means it’s just not the sort of game that I can grow to love.

Adventure games are probably the clearest example of these. I’ve reviewed three of them in the past six months: pirate-dog mash-up Jolly Rover, the asylum-bound Edna and Harvey: The Breakout and further pirate weirdness in the revival Tales of Monkey Island (freshly reviewed on Gamedot this very day). Each had its moments, some more frequently than others, and each brought about some frustration; but what strikes me is just how similar they all were.

In their current state, point-and-click adventure games are a novelty, their mechanics having barely changed from where they were in the 90s, when Lucasarts dominated the genre with games like Grim Fandango, Sam and Max Hit the Road and the original Monkey Island adventures. The gameplay in each of the three modern successors I reviewed was identical, following the standard formula of A) pick up everything that isn’t nailed down; B) use and/or combine items in bizarre yet weirdly logical ways to solve puzzles; C) wonder who dreamt up this madness. The genre appears to be entirely stagnant.

Tales of Monkey Island occasionally came up with something different, such as the use of world-altering maps and a face-pulling minigame, but these inevitably resulted from or led into more of the same puzzles. Likewise, Jolly Rover (which apes classic Monkey Island in just about every way) introduced a neat voodoo spellbook that ended up being absorbed into the other puzzles. Edna and Harvey had the worst gameplay of the three not because its rivals had cooked up different ideas, but because its execution of the same time-honoured principles was woefully inadequate, including as it did a overly cluttered inventory and brutally difficult puzzles with facepalm-worthy solutions. Perhaps even a double facepalm (resist urge…to post…Picard and Riker picture…).

The best conclusion I can come to regarding the genre is this: success rests almost entirely on presentation. Good writing, characters, voice-acting, art design and music are what differentiates these games from one another. Despite Edna and Harvey being one of the most infuriating games I’ve ever played, its oddly unsettling plot and unique tone damn near converted me, whilst Tales of Monkey Island was easily the best of the three because it was the funniest, best-looking, best-sounding and most endearing because of it. The gameplay was also a step ahead, but this wasn’t what made me rattle off the whole thing in a few days: what managed that was the aesthetic appeal of the thing, especially the characters, who had more charisma individually than the other two games could muster from their entire casts.

Jolly Rover, by contrast, was instantly forgettable, if pleasant enough when being played, because it played everything so safe, particularly with its archetypal characters and unimaginative locations. In the end, I gave it seven out of ten, that oddly-dreaded gaming score which indicates ‘satisfactory’, and a score which, in hindsight, I would lower. Monkey Island got an eight, because it was an excellent adventure game but one still stuck with being, well, an adventure game, whilst Edna and Harvey got a five when its gameplay alone would have merited only a three or a two (or even a one – dare I go there?). I’ll likely end up reviewing more point-and-clickers soon (Telltale’s upcoming Jurassic Park adaptation looks intriguing) but it’s hard to see them and the genre as a whole escaping from the mid-table. They’re fun, they’re enjoyable, but they’re not really going anywhere.

Being sent things to review, as opposed to buying them myself (in the halcyon days of first-year student newspaper contributions) means that some bad games come along from time to time, but I’ve been fortunate enough with Gamedot to have only been asked to play one other really bad game as well as Sanctum of Slime. This game was Ship Simulator Extremes, which was perhaps the least extreme game I’ve ever played and was a depressing title to have to play for only my second review. Its problems weren’t to do with design, however, but rather in the performance departments: it was riddled with bugs and chugged like a knackered steam engine even on low graphics settings. A shame: some of the videos online looked quite pretty, and I expressed in my review that games like this, for all their quirks, have a certain charm and appeal (when they work properly).

I gave Ship Sim a 3/10, the same score that I’ve given Ghostbusters, but I think it’s the latter that I dislike more. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems so cynically made. It’s core systems are something that I’d be happy with if I was an amateur developer. I’d be pleased at having coded a combat system that works without breaking, at having made a game that functions – and that’s all this game does.

A professional studio, working with a strong license, have made nothing more than a piece of software, where the triggers function as they should, the right audio cues come at the right times and the frame rate stays solid. They dug the foundations – the three weapons and a few environments – but couldn’t be bothered with building anything on top, resorting to copy/paste level design and raising the difficulty by spawning more and more baddies. The graphics are passable, the sound is fine (the theme tune is the best thing about the game), but everything that makes this program a game is so minimal, unambitious and lazy that it becomes not just a bad piece of code, but a really unappealing one.

There we are: my position as a right grumpy bugger is cemented. You’ll see what I mean when a review link pops up sometime soon…

…like now.

This time round the subject is Men of War: Assault Squad, a second expansion in the World War II strategy series.

 I haven’t played its predecessors, so I stepped onto the battlefield with my squad of soldiers, eager to take the fight to the enemy, before wiping in around about three minutes.

Oh. Try again. Wipe. Again?…Hurray! You cleared the first objective! As a reward, prepare to face a tank rush. Wipe.

This was, apparently, a tutorial level. Before getting into Assault Squad‘s successes, its basic failures in not teaching new players enough need to be addressed. The difficulty curve is absolutely brutal, even on the low difficulty settings (presumably playing on Heroic is equivalent to facing off against a Rommel-Patton-Zhukov dream-team). Until you’ve experimented with every tank and support gun, you’ll have no idea what does what due to the lack of information on offer. The UI is also flawed: at the start of battle, a few icons will indicate your squads and other units, but in the thick of things it becomes monstrously cluttered and nigh on unmanageable, particularly given that selecting a single soldier instantly detaches him from his squadmates, resulting in a unit bar full of icons representing each and every individual soldier on the battlefield. The game can quickly devolve into a micromanagement nightmare.

Yet the sheer depth of the game, exemplified by the micromanagement options, is astounding. Every soldier has an inventory, which can be restocked from supply dumps, trucks or from fallen soldiers. If you’re so inclined, a squad can be acutely tuned to be entirely made up of snipers, or sub-machine gunners, if you can find the equipment. Then there’s ‘direct control’, which allows you to command a single squaddie with the WASD keys, aiming and firing with the mouse. It’s a bizarre, but oddly compelling feature. The use of grenades, or different types of shell, is down to the player, as are uses of repair kits and morphine. Tanks have different armour grades on specific locations like the main gun, turret or tracks.

This isn’t what I find compelling about the game. It’s the fact that it lacks any sort of rock-paper-scissors approach. From individual infantry encounters to massive tank duels, it seems as though anything could happen. Just as in real warfare, no plan survives contact with the enemy. The game demands constant adaptability. There are doubtless stock strategies employed by the multiplayer community, but they can be so swiftly broken by chance events, like the lucky immobilisation of a tank that then forms a roadblock that must be overcome. When a plan does come off, it’s completely thrilling, even if it is rare.

Trying to compare the game to something like Company of Heroes only works in a superficial sense, hardly conveying how it plays. It’s certainly enjoyable, but in an odd way, with victory not bringing euphoria but rather a sense of deep satisfaction at having negotiated the maze of combat options, pitted wits against a rampant AI and a hideous learning curve, and coming out on top. I’ve only finished one map in about five days. One. But I’ve reloaded the maps I’ve tried so many times, in so many separate places, just to test out new ideas. I don’t think it will absorb me – I’m too much of a fan of structure and order in games – but Assault Squad could very easily be a game that will devour the time of others.

My full review of Men of War: Assault Squad will be up on Gamedot soon, at which point I’ll post a link.

EDIT: …and here it is.