Cowled craziness. That’s on tap with Magicka: Wizard Wars, a free-to-play multiplayer take on the action-first franchise that features those iconic wizards who have always reminded me of Star Wars' Jawas--only fancier. Despite this frenzied focus, much of the appeal of the core series has been maintained, due to the continued emphasis on slick player skill over gimmicks, and a genial, if bloody, sense of humor. There are a few rough edges here, however, thanks to some design miscues, a slightly buggy client, and a level grind that kicks in long before you get bored with incinerating enemy Gandalfs. Yet even with these issues, the game’s pace and light-hearted take on everything (how could I stay mad at a game that uses a corny Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator to call the action?) keep you coming back for more, even while the flaws try to nudge you away.
Basic gameplay breaks standard Magicka down to online battle arenas where mages duel to the death. The general feel is similar to the earlier games in the franchise, albeit without any single-player campaign or any sort of cooperative multiplayer. Here, you create one of the franchise’s trademark spunky magic users at the start of play and then head into one-off battle arenas. Over time, your spell-slinger develops by gaining experience points, leveling up, and acquiring gear and special magical attacks that let you become a more efficient mystical killing machine. Two forms of currency are used in the game. Mastery tokens earned with every level up allow you to purchase special gear, spells, outfits, and the like, while crowns awarded at the end of every match can be used in the in-game store to buy similar weapons, magic rings, and so forth. Real money can be used to buy gear directly and load up on both tokens and crowns, in case you want to cut some corners.
Getting killed is a common occurrence, especially when some smart guy whips out a meteor shower.
The game deals with primary magical talents that are performed by pressing the Q-W-E-R and A-S-D-F keys. Each one represents a particular arcane skill--fire, healing, death magic, lightning, and beyond--all of which can be called up via a quick key-press or three and then put into play through a click of the mouse. Those special magicks are one-off spells that are slotted in the 1-4 keys for occasional use. They are best when you need to go nuclear on enemies by using the likes of a meteor shower that covers the battlefield, a thunderstorm that calls up devastating lightning, or something a little more subtle, like haste (to run away) or midsummer’s blessing (to heal everyone simultaneously).
None of this is easy. While you can lean on simple presses, and you can of course deploy the big-gun magicks as needed, key combos are required for the best spells and the best blocks. So, hello there, steep learning curve and a whole lot of experimentation (although the game thankfully gives you tips for fending off specific attacks every time you’re killed). It took a long time for me to even start to become comfortable with the controls, and I was still routinely schooled by opponents the entire time I played.
I was never smacked around so hard that I became overly frustrated, though. Whether I was toasted by flames, blown up by a meteor strike, or even perforated by an enemy imp familiar when I wasn’t paying enough attention, I was able to laugh it off and dive right back in for more. Speed is the primary element staving off annoyance. It’s tough to stay mad for long when you’re respawning in seconds. The tactical layer of the game is another successful factor, too. A huge importance is placed on spell defenses, so I looked at the game as something of a strategic puzzle, and constantly went into new matches to test new possibilities.
The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology.
But while the core structure of Magicka: Wizard Wars works well due to its reliance on strong core mechanics, there isn’t a lot of depth here. There are just three modes of play, and the only one worth playing is Wizard Warfare. This is a pick-up-and-play mode, with simple rules that see two teams of four duking it out over stone circles that serve as control and spawn points. It moves quickly, due to small maps and teleportation rings that let the teams get into each other’s hood-hidden faces. I found that the zippy speed kept things likeably nuts and even helped emphasize teamwork, as the team must stick close together, help heal one another, and assault control points as a unit in order to survive.
Soul Harvest is the other headline mode of play, but it plays much slower and as a result isn’t nearly as exciting. It features a volved structure that has you slaughter monsters for souls in kind of a battle of attrition, with the final goal of demolishing the enemy home-base effigy. None of this jibes with the game’s strengths as a battle royal at warp speed. Teams patrol the map, kill wimpy respawning monsters over and over, and attempt to avoid one another. Duel is even flimsier, albeit for the opposite reasons. It is fast, with cramped battlefields that allow no leeway. There doesn’t seem to be room here for much more than toe-to-toe magical slugfests.
All three modes of play are made more entertaining by colorful visuals and bombastic sound. This isn’t a game to take seriously, even with wizards regularly exploding into bloody chunks. The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology. Sound is also compellingly boomy and whooshy, and the aforementioned Schwarzenegger soundalike is hilariously understated. I never got tired of hearing him tell my team that a spawn point had been stolen by the enemy and that I needed to “steal it baaack!”
Hey, what are you trying to push on us?
The free-to-play structure causes problems, however. Both the mastery tokens and crowns are slow to accumulate and the prices for items are through the roof. The 25 tokens you might earn per level don’t go very far when the average mastery upgrade costs 50 or more. Making matters even worse, all mastery gear is nested in locked trees that force you to buy three or four items you don’t want, just to get one that you do. The same goes for the store: the average match brings in only a few hundred crowns, while even the lamest gear has a price tag of at least 5,000 or 10,000. After the first five or six levels, the game feels like a grind.
The temptation, of course, is to spend real money on upgrades such as the heavily promoted experience boosters and wizard starting packs (which seem reasonably priced, as far as these things go). But with that said, you can’t buy your way to success. Although picking up some extra goodies with cash can put you over the top, the game is all about player skill and speed. No matter how cool a robe you have, no matter how powerful your magic items and special spells, you can still be killed by a rival player with basic gear and faster fingers. So there really is a balance here, even with the grind providing ongoing temptation to whip out your credit card.
More options need to be provided. I really wanted the ability to trick out Wizard Warfare matches. Just being able to play best two out of three would have helped keep the momentum flowing, as the one-off games that generally last just four or five minutes are the only ones currently available. I spent way too much time on the matchmaking screen, waiting for the same four or five minutes on average (much longer later at night) to get a game. I’m not sure if these waits mean that there aren’t very many players online or if this is some shortcoming of the software. Regardless, I spent about as much time waiting for matches to be made than I did actually battling mages.
Working as a team is essential, especially in Wizard Warfare.
Another shortcoming is the inability to boot players. Although I didn’t have a ton of trouble with griefers, I did encounter at least a few idiots who just ran around maps killing anyone and everyone indiscriminately and still clocking high scores. There needs to be a way to kick these people out, or at least to stop rewarding them for killing allies.
On occasion, bugs interfere with setting up matches. I encountered frame-rate glitches, stutters in the main menus, and the odd crash to the desktop. I also encountered a “Code Marlin” error that made it impossible to start a game. Whenever this would occur, the game would refuse to register that there was a full complement of eight players logged in, even though everyone was apparently ready to go on the starting screen. Since this error seemed to take place in bunches, this got frustrating real fast, as it would block matches from starting for 10-minute stretches.
As entertaining as Magicka: Wizard Wars can be, the game has yet to achieve greatness. The quick-paced and skill-driven combat system casts a charm on you in the beginning, but the delights wear off over time due to the presence of only a single good mode of play, grinding, and a few irritating bugs. The game's heart beats strongly, strengthened by great control mechanics and colorful warfare. But Wizard Wars needs work if it is going to realize its full potential.
At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.
Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of "will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.
Menus: Windward's most exciting facet.
That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they’ll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn’t give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don’t engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.
The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.
We love playing David to countless video game Goliaths. Bosses are, more often than not, larger than the game heroes who defeat them. In Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains, you're never short of giants to vanquish as you reenact scenes from the anime and manga from which the game was adapted. If there are thrills to be found, they come from swinging through a map using the maneuver gear. Using this mobility against the titans can provide a rush as you amass your first dozen kills, but don't expect this excitement to last. Humanity in Chains is a surprisingly soulless affair, a reminder that sometimes it takes a game packed with titans to make us appreciate refined adventures with fewer behemoths.
Much of the best anime is set in worlds you wish you could visit, such as the early 1980s interpretation of metropolitan Japan in Urusei Yatsura, or the sprawling vision of Earth in Dragon Ball. As good as the original material is, its setting is an utterly miserable world. One hundred years of peace have just been shattered by the return of remorseless giants who only want to eat humans. What are you to do but try to defend yourself, especially if you're a revenge-hungry teen who watched helplessly as your mom became a snack? The titans' perpetually maniacal faces only add insult to one's presumable fate to become a decapitated morsel. For once, we have an anime in which teenage whining, scolding, and anxiety-driven introspection is justified, even if all this motivational talk, pointless or otherwise, comprises one-third of the anime's content.
Bless you.
Humanity in Chains spares you these moments of angst while framing story missions with many of the show's most memorable scenes. If this game is partly designed to attract Attack on Titan virgins to watch the show, these brief videos are its most effective selling tools. The game is punctuated by the two opening themes and credits. If anything convinces you that you're about to experience the playable version of a well-received anime, it is the rehashing of a catchy and memorable title sequence. I haven't watched Attack on Titan since it appeared on Netflix over a year ago, so reacquainting myself with the resoundingly Germanic choral chanting was exciting, if only for a few minutes. The only thing missing is a Netflix streaming voucher to watch the show on the 3DS.
Attack on Titan inadvertently poses a question that could have been asked decades ago: What if Spider-Man had a penchant for bladed melee weapons and his arms were freed from web-slinging? Add the mutant-hunting sentinels and you essentially have the gameplay premise for Humanity in Chains. Much like Spider-Man, you don't question how your gear manages to find an attachment point every time; you just run with it because there are more pressing matters, like a city filled with invading titans. You spend most of your time swinging from point to point because moving on foot is impractical and, more importantly, is the easiest way to get yourself killed.
Saving teammates, AI or otherwise, isn’t as gratifying as it sounds.
The point of all this maneuverability is to position yourself to attack the titans' napes, their main weak spot. Thanks to a lock-on function, this is a peculiarly simple task, provided you make an effort to avoid approaching titans from the front. Once you've initiated the attack, the only challenge lies in lining up a timing ring within a larger ring; pulling that off results in a hit. This challenge, unfortunately, makes up the bulk of your goals in Humanity in Chains, so it's normal to feel bored after about an hour of play. Aside from an optional spin attack and the ability to hinder a titan's mobility, there's no depth or nuance to combat. You're either aiming to deal a lethal blow to the titan or you're making a brief retreat in order to regroup. We've come to expect third-person adventures chocked full of objectives in a given sortie, which can take anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes to complete. There are missions in Humanity in Chains that take 30 seconds to clear. And when you're not killing titans, your tasks are more menial jobs, like performing CPR on fallen comrades or collecting food. The art department didn't even design the food; you just have to find gleaming blue dots on the ground.
Not wanting to stick solely to the anime's script, developer Spike Chunsoft added world mode, a feature that lets you grow and customize your own squad of titan killers and team up in multiplayer. It's a well-intentioned mode that is meant to add replay value and an RPG-inspired sense of character ownership by starting you off with baseline stats. The world mode menu screen overlooks a base with multiple facilities, giving you the impression that there are a lot of activities there with which to eat up an afternoon. It is true that you can upgrade squadmates' abilities and craft weapons in world mode, but incentives to apply these enhancements in the field are sorely lacking. Not only are you stuck with the same types of titan takedown missions found in story mode, but now you're greatly underpowered. The chances of getting grabbed by a titan are much greater, as is the unlikelihood of freeing yourself from its grasp. Learning the ropes and learning from defeat would be engaging if not for that fact that world mode doesn't unlock until you've beaten seven story missions. By then, you've been spoiled by controlling top-tier titan-killer talent, ruining any motivation to start over again as an entry-level grunt. It's a case of foreplay deferred after a game has already spoiled its best moves.
Attack on Titan, purveyor of dadbods.
Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is further proof that the seemingly obvious genre for an anime-to-game adaptation isn't always the best one. Take the Ghost In The Shell games as another example. As enjoyable as it was to play as Motoko Kusanagi in third-person adventure , it was an even better experience playing as the Tachikoma spider-tank in the original PlayStation game. The disappointment of poor mission variety in Humanity in Chains is compounded by the brevity of each assignment. And while world mode had the potential to show the franchise's appeal beyond the main story, its team customization allure is severely hobbled by the same shallow combat in story mode.
Between the can't-look-away morbidity of being eaten and watching the ensemble cast persevere, there's no denying the draw of Attack on Titan and the potential for a superb game adaptation. Humanity in Chains just isn't that game. Given the squads of soldiers, the seemingly limitless influx of titans, and one's mobility options, there is surely hope for an excellent game set in this universe in the far-flung future.
A good 4X strategy game is a bit like a slow-burning fire--something to be stoked every now and again with a click of the mouse and watched through half-lidded eyes into the late hours. When that contented sort of complacency sets in, I'm more easily coaxed into "just one more turn." These empire-building games make it easier still because they tend to defer the consequences of poor moves. Mistakes amount to small hang-ups in the otherwise effortless forward momentum of upgrades and technological developments, lost in the spaces between ascending data points on one of the genre's ubiquitous end-of-game line graphs. It's only when I come out of my daze a few scaled eras later that I often find myself long surpassed by opposing empires, the graphs telling a story of steady mediocrity since, oh, sometime in the Middle Ages when production took a brief turn towards the slightly sub-optimal.
The thing is, 4X games don't have much patience for an also-ran. They're "games" in the same way that the game of thrones is a game: you win or you die, and the middle ground is really just another burial tract. And if the same goes for the crowded, largely homogenous genre they belong to, where does that leave an entry like StarDrive 2? For the most part, the game seems to be a proper execution of its developer's vision; it's worked its way up its chosen tech trees, so to speak, arriving as a sci-fi empire builder in the grand tradition. And yet, when it's time to take stock, StarDrive 2 finds itself firmly in the middle.
Planets are key to out-producing the enemy, but they can be arduous to develop and defend.
But 4X games always begin full of promise, at least. StarDrive 2 offers the selection of a space-faring race--always a good time, unless you pick Human--and, if you want, a complete overhauling of its prepackaged traits. The system, like many others in the game, is cribbed directly from , but it remains rousing and balanced. "Peerless Starfighters" might sound like a must-have bonus, but can you stomach the "Repulsive" or "Corrupt" negative trait you'll have to equip to zero out the ledgers? And then there are the races themselves: an eclectic bunch that includes Cthulhu-likes, an ursine shogunate, and a narcissistic collection of pods that speak through the hijacked brains of alien owls.
As if to further signal that you're not supposed to take the ensuing intragalactic war too seriously, there's a color commentary robot that periodically interjects to introduce the competing races in a segment called--wait for it--"racial profiling." And as if to signal that this is a terrible idea for a feature, there's also an option to turn it off. But whether you listen to the introductions or not, it behooves you to immediately start spreading out across the star map from whatever randomized homeworld you've been deposited on. Exploratory fleets can be sent across the universe with a click, revealing new planets of varying hospitality to colonize. The best ones go quick--opposing empires in StarDrive 2 gobble up territory, and they're not shy about claim jumping either.
Opposing empires take their borders to your doorstep if you're not quick.
These enemies can be held off for a time via diplomacy. Technological advancements are divided into mutually exclusive sets of three and are often differentiated by whether they provide an immediate benefit or one that scales better over a longer period of time. Researching one cordons off the other two, so the best way to snag them is through trade. That, in turn, plays out via a now-overly familiar interface, wherein resources and policies are given a unifying currency and exchanged between two empires at something resembling a fair rate. There's also a limiting "tolerance" meter that hints at a xenophobic civilian population weighing the deal behind the scenes. Combined with a capricious AI and the utilitarian feel of the diplomacy system at large, the meter mostly just contributes to StarDrive 2's gravitational pull towards war.
If the end justifies the means--and the end involves every race that isn't you being purged from the galaxy--nothing is ever really beyond the pale, is it? The enslavement and bombardment of civilian populations, consequently, are perfectly tenable according to StarDrive 2's rules of engagement (albeit partially lampshaded by the cartoonish aliens and abstractions of the game's model). The infrastructure of a colonized planet is indicated with a list of the buildings it's added, and its farming, manufacturing, and scientific output are represented. As an example, these outputs are represented for the Kulrathi Shogunate by bears holding pitchforks, pickaxes, and beakers, respectively.
The ship design interface is deep but easy to grasp.
If any system isn't being adequately accounted for, you find out quickly when StarDrive 2's ship-to-ship combat plays itself out. When two fleets collide on the star map, they're set down across from each other on a new screen, where they trade maneuvers and lasers semi-autonomously. A pleasant feedback loop plays so you can see how the battles resolve themselves, note deficiencies in your lineup, and run back to the hangar to draw up a suitable counter to the tech your enemy is fielding.
It isn't all quite as tidy as opposing empires trading volleys across their borders. StarDrive 2 introduces a refreshing amount of entropy to the system via third-party raids, discoverable anomalies, derelict ships, and mission pop-ups that can throw a wrench into your previous priorities. But these instances frequently mean that you need to engage in ground combat, a half-baked, grid-based affair that sees two squads march up to each other and wail away until one drops.
"Prideful" nations are a particular pain during diplomacy.
You can give ground units tools and abilities, too, but they don't fundamentally alter the static nature of the combat--if you need to wait 20 turns for an ability to recharge and the enemy hasn't spotted you, you might as well press "next turn" 20 times until it refreshes. This is silly, because StarDrive 2 has no pressing need to render ground combat. There's enough of a draw in the larger scale, ship-based combat and exploration as well as the thrill loot-seeker get from discovering a planet with a unique resource and scrambling to claim it first.
But even though these systems achieve competency, they've been done before (and done better) in many other games. So any praise leveled at StarDrive 2 inevitably ends up faint when it's taken alongside other entries in the sci-fi 4X genre. Is that a flaw of a navel-gazing piece of genre fare or of our own tendency to internalize lessons from an empire builder--that there can only be one winner and that existing for the sake of existing isn't enough?
[UPDATE 2] Insomniac has now confirmed that the new Ratchet & Clank game for PS4 has also been delayed to 2016. Get the full story , and will have "new visuals that rival the best PS4 games on the market."
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the ninth game in GameSpot history to receive a ten. We invited reviewer Kevin VanOrd onto the show to answer your lingering questions about this wonderful game.
Nintendo on Wednesday announced its plans for E3 2015, which kicks off next month in Los Angeles. The company made the announcement through a funny YouTube video. Watch it below.
The most important bit is that Nintendo's E3 briefing--a digital event, compared to the live, in-person briefings from other companies--will take place on Tuesday, June 16, starting at 9 AM PDT.
That's Nintendo's usual day and time, but this year, it's also the in stores the week of E3.
Anyone who visits participating Best Buy stores can play Mario Maker on the following dates:
June 17 -- 4-9 PM
June 20 -- Noon-5 PM
Finally, Nintendo announced that it's reviving the long-dormant Nintendo World Championship event this year on Sunday, June 14 in Los Angeles. Qualifying competitions open May 30 at Best Buy stores. Winners of regional events, along with "competitors chosen by Nintendo," will battle it out in Los Angeles on June 14 at the Nokia Theatre as part of a multi-round competition. One player will ultimately be crowned champion in the first Nintendo World Championship since 1990.
If you're in Los Angeles, you can attend the tournament in person, while it will also be streamed online.
Kevin had a chance to check out The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III and was impressed by its focus on story.
PlayStation Access take a long, long walk across the world of The Witcher 3 and Naughty Dog details their graphical improvements for Uncharted 4!
Caught up in all the Arkham Knight controversy, Lucy calls out other season pass offenders like Evolve, Destiny, and Titanfall.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the ninth game in GameSpot history to receive a ten. We invited reviewer Kevin VanOrd onto the show to answer your lingering questions about this wonderful game.
