Bastion Review

Bastion is a top-down, 2-D action game with light RPG elements and an amazing fusion of non-conventional storytelling and world building. The music is pretty good too.

Bastion doesn’t kick off with any sort of background exposition or introductory cut-scene. The protagonist, a white-haired and capable young man referred to as The Kid, wakes up one morning to find the world has been destroyed. What ground remains now floats in the sky, each individual piece rising up to form the way forward in a striking and unique visual effect. 

Bastion's art would be right at home in a children's book.

The art is bold and colorful, mostly slightly cartoony 2-D images. Characters are lightly animated, although enemies do broadcast when they’re about to attack. Atmospheric effects like rain, falling cinders, and clouds drifting below the floating ground help bring the world to life. 

A Proper Story

From the moment the game begins Bastion is not just experienced, but narrated. Every action The Kid takes, every obstacle he overcomes, and every area, creature, and object he encounters is described and commented on by an unseen Narrator with a voice like honeyed whisky. The Narrator’s constant stream of commentary and advice fit seamlessly into the game, slowly building up a world we know nothing about into a place rich with history and flavor. 

 The Narrator blames the destruction on an event he calls The Calamity. His understated, sorrowful descriptions of the now obliterated city of Caelondia and the regions beyond bring the world to life and make the destruction of a world we’ve never seen before actually mean something. Close listeners may catch on that the Narrator may not be giving a completely unbiased description of past events, but there is no denying that his voice defines the game.  

The Narrator gets a bit morally suspect as the game progresses. He has his reasons.

Bastion is mission based, with the Narrator directing the Kid to surviving locations of interest. Each mission is a digestible twenty minutes or so of exploration and combat. It’s not possible to save in mid-mission, but they’re never long enough to become tedious. Successful completion allows you to improve the central hub, the Bastion itself, constructing buildings like workshops to upgrade your weapons or a memorial that unlocks lucrative in-game achievements.

(Note: Bastion is the name of the game. The Bastion is the game’s central location and the focus of much of the story.)

“A Cross Between a Zoo and a Prison Break.”

While the people of Caelondia were destroyed by the Calamity a great many creatures, security systems, and other hazards remain. Combat is fast paced and finely tuned, rewarding both good reflexes and intelligent tactics. The basic lock-on system is handy but not critical. To defend himself the Kid can carry a mere two weapons at a time, plus a single special ability. Weapons range from more primitive gear like a fast-striking machete and sniper bow to surprisingly advanced tech like a short range flamethrower and devastating mortar.

Anklegators attack from below. Keep moving.

While all of Bastion’s weapons are useful considering the right load-out for the challenge at hand is critical. The bow or carbine are great for clearing a field of turrets or thorn-throwing Pincushion plants, but won’t be much use against a swarm of fast-moving flyers. You can’t change your equipment on the fly, though new weapons are introduced just when needed. Both The Kid and other creatures can be sent hurtling over the edge into the abyss, though the Kid always lands back on solid ground with minor injuries.

On the defensive the Kid has an extremely handy evasive Roll and an indestructible shield that offers near total protection in whatever direction you’re facing. You can’t attack while shielding yourself, but you can still move at a reduced rate and bring it up just as an enemy is attacking to reflect the damage back in his face. Quick and skillful use of both abilities will let you avoid most damage.

“A Mighty Fast Learner.”

Special Skills are powerful, often enough to function as a panic button, but consume one of a limited supply of Tonics when used. Some are tied to specific weapons and let them perform unique and even screen-clearing attacks. Others grant more general abilities like summoning allies or snaring nearby enemies in place. The one Special Skill at a time limit feels a little strict and means many will never see use. A limit of three hot-keyed skills at a time, all pulling from your same limited stock of Tonics, would have been fair while allowing more diverse tactics. 

Each weapon has a bonus level that tests your skills. Here The Kid must defeat enemies with only the Shield.

Bastion isn’t quite an action-RPG in the vein of Diablo but you do earn XP and level up, slightly increasing your health and increasing the number of slots allowed for passive perks. Amusingly enough these perks are granted by various alcoholic drinks from the Bastion’s distillery, implying The Kid is constantly wasted through his entire adventure. With enough money and raw materials weapons can also be upgraded through several tiers of mutually exclusive improvements. Your choice of upgrades and alcoholic perks can be freely changed between missions, so if one is giving you trouble tuning your load-out and trying again is an entirely valid. 

“The Gods… they’re all Undone.” 

By default this is a forgiving game. The Kid’s defensive abilities and stock of healing potions will see him through most battles, and for those only interested in the art and story there’s a “No Sweat” mode that allows unlimited continues. The focus is on delivering a diverse rather than a grueling array of challenges. One mission has you racing across a series of collapsing pathways, while another has you fending off ambushes in neck high grass. There’s always some new weapon, enemy, or mechanic to familiarize yourself with, right up until the very end where many games have long since emptied their hand. 

The Narrator has something to say about everything you find.

For those who crave a greater challenge Bastion has a surprisingly elegant system that lets the difficulty to be tuned to taste. As you upgrade the Bastion you eventually construct a shrine, containing idols to the various gods of the Caelondian Pantheon. Each idol you invoke grants a stacking bonus to money and XP rewards, but also grants enemies a specific power like increased speed or exploding on death. Invoke the aid of enough gods and Bastion starts to become an altogether more brutal game. 

The battle hungry can also tackle a series of optional arena-style dream sequences. These pit The Kid against waves of monsters to earn yet more money and XP, while the Narrator explains a character’s back-story in greater detail. These sequences aren’t necessary to complete the game, but they’re a good place to test different weapon load-outs and the secrets revealed add much to the characterization of Bastion’s small cast of Calamity survivors. 

Coming Home

While I can’t fault Bastion’s gameplay and combat it is ultimately the story and world that make the game a unique and memorable experience. Before the Calamity this was a world of bold pioneers, vast, hostile wilderness, terrible ethnic conflicts, and reckless technological advancement. Western and Steampunk elements blend cleanly into the narrative and art. The handful of characters are well developed, likeable, and believable, even if you never hear most of them speak. The game is a triumph of non-traditional storytelling and world building.

Rare voiced illustrations help bring the cast to life.

The Soundtrack is a stand out and well worth a listen. It makes good use of guitar and harmonica to give a Western flavor while maintaining a distinct identity. The few songs with vocals are used to great effect during the game and final credit sequence. 

Finally it’s worth mentioning that Bastion has an excellent New Game + mode to help extend its playable life. You’re unlikely to reach the maximum level or be able to afford all upgrades the first time through, but you can bring all that progress with you on restarting the campaign. There are multiple endings to experience, and the second play-through gives you a few extra options and perks that weren’t available the first time around. 

Reasons to Play: Vivid, unconventional world-building. Satisfying and tightly tuned isometric combat engine. Clever adjustable difficulty mechanic. Constant stream of new weapons, mechanics and challenges. Excellent Soundtrack. 

Reasons to Pass: Intense fear of falling off the world? None, really.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Review

Do you remember the 80s? I don’t. But I tell you, the 80s live. 

Blood Dragon is both a love letter too and an affectionate parody of 80’s action films, in all their ridiculousness and excess. The game is packed with homage’s to the iconic films of the era, from Robocop’s gun to an opening helicopter sequence ripped from the script of Predator. With a “Mark IV Cyber Commando” named Rex Power Colt as the protagonist (voiced by Michael Biehn of Terminator and Aliens fame!) Blood Dragon wastes no time in embracing the explosive and ludicrous nature of its source material.

You see Blood Dragon never tries to be smart. Blood Dragon does try it’s damndest to be fun, funny, and unrelentingly true to its deliberately chosen style and feel. It succeeds from start to finish.

The cyber-apocalyptic future.  2007

The tropical paradise of Far Cry 3 returns, but this time around the island is soaked in TRON style neon and chrome. A heavy sky crackles with dramatic lightning and the horizon is a skyline of ruined cities backlit by mushroom clouds. Nearby explosions send VHS scan lines tracking across your vision. The synthesizer heavy soundtrack, almost worth the cost of purchase alone, has to be heard to be believed.

For some reason my screenshot program made all blue colors red and vice-versa.
This Blood Dragon is actually really angry and warming up his laser beam eyes.

All creatures and enemies have received an overhaul that leaves them right at home in their new surroundings. Cobra commandos with computerized voices and convincingly low budget costumes replace pirates and privateers. Cyborg sharks and gorgeous Black Velvet tigers replace their real world counterparts. Blood Dragon adds a delicious layer of 80’s flavor, spray cheese style, atop of the rock solid FC3 engine. You can almost feel the muggy Miami humidity on the atomic breeze.

The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense (something about missiles and your former commander gone rogue) but then it doesn’t really need to. No part of Blood Dragon, from the deliberately intrusive and tongue-in-cheek tutorial to the cheesy dialog to the ridiculous weapon and creature descriptions, takes itself in any way seriously. Rex growls out groan worthy one-liners with every kill. At one point your mission objective becomes, quite literally, to jump the shark. The developers worked hard to make every aspect of the game so bad it’s good. 

No Fate

The FC3 engine allows for a seamless flow between tactical stealth and balls-to-the wall action. Either is an equally viable, rewarding, and fun approach. Enemy cyborgs are easy to sneak up on or pick off with the bow, but when alerted aggressively search the area and home in on gunfire. You always have a good sense of how close to being detected you are. When you get spotted it doesn’t feel like a reason to re-load the game, just an excuse to break out the heavy weapons. 

Sneaking up on and knife-tickling hapless goons remains a joy.

Roaming the island and preying on your Omega Force foes is both entertaining and profitable. Stealth takedowns return from FC3 and can be chained together to silently wipe out an entire squad. Patrolling jeeps and all the soldiers inside can be eliminated with a well placed mine in the road or a single explosive round. You can hang back and tag a garrison full of guards with your “Cyber Eye” to see them through walls. Or you can kick down the front door, blazing away with the classic shotgun from the Terminator films and reenacting the police station scene.

The major gameplay addition is the titular Blood Dragons themselves. These massive, glowing neon dinosaurs roam the island, devouring everything within reach and blasting everything else with their mighty laser-beam eyes. Immune to fire and extraordinarily resistant to conventional weapons each encounter with a Blood Dragon is a mini-boss fight in itself.

One Blood Dragon can usually clear an enemy garrison on it's own.
Of course then you have a Blood Dragon sitting in your new base.

Fortunately Blood Dragons can be manipulated to your advantage. If you destroy or deactivate the barriers protecting enemy garrisons then the Dragons will rush in, doing most of your work for you amid a chorus of cyborg screams and weapons fire. The beasts also have an appetite for cybernetic hearts, which can be harvested from your enemies and thrown to distract attacking Blood Dragons or sic them on Omega Force patrols. The dynamic encounters between Omega Force, the friendly scientist faction, the cybernetic wildlife, and the almost unstoppable Blood Dragons makes the island a lively and dangerous place.

Ain’t got time to bleed

Blood Dragon is a shorter, sleeker, more focused game than its parent. It trims out a lot of the Far-Cry 3 fat, like crafting and vehicle challenges. You’re given access to a potent suite of weapons, explosives, and abilities right out of the gate. As a Mark IV series cyborg Rex can run as fast as a jeep, leap from any height without injury, and breathe underwater. This isn’t a game about going from a spoiled thrill seeker to a badass warrior. Rex starts as a badass able to bail out of a hang-glider from 100 feet up, shank the hapless cyber-goon he lands on, and then mow down a dozen of said goon’s friends with a chain-gun. 

The Mini-Gun. Old Painless. Hold down the trigger and roar along!

There is still a basic XP and level-up system in place, but it’s entirely linear with no assigning of points. More difficult kills, like stealth takedowns and headshots, award generous dollops of XP. Rex is a bit fragile at the start of the game but each level adds extra bars of health and other perks, many adapted from the FC3 skill trees.  

Blood Dragon’s campaign is quite short and can be polished off in a few hours if you rush straight through the handful of missions. Side content takes the form of liberating garrisons, converting them into friendly bases that function as re-supply and fast travel points and allowing access to hunting and hostage rescue missions. There are also VHS tapes (each with descriptions parodying a popular 80’s film genre) and other collectables scattered around the island, along with a scavenger hunt of various animals to kill.

Big cats are even more majestic with full chrome bodies.

The point of all this is to unlock attachments and upgrades for your weapons.  The assault rifle gains laser bullets, while the sniper rifle upgrades to explosive rounds that can one-shot a light vehicle (turning it into essentially a hit-scan rocket launcher with a scope). The shotgun eventually evolves into an amazing quad-barreled semi-automatic monster that sets enemies on fire. 

Blood Dragon’s core gameplay is so much fun I found myself finishing all the side missions and still hungry for more. Even if you 100% everything gameplay clocks in at a modest 8-10 hours. Perhaps it’s for the best that Blood Dragon doesn’t overstay its welcome. The game builds to a finale that manages to start at utterly ludicrous and yet somehow keep topping itself, piling excess atop excess on the way to complete sensory overload.

Game Over Man!

Blood Dragon is tremendous fun from both a gameplay and stylistic perspective, but it does have a few rough spots. The dark color scheme, scan line filter, and heavy use of neon can start to tire the eye after a few hours. There’s no “New Game +” mode or way to reset the island’s garrisons, so by the time you’ve leveled up Rex and unlocked all the upgrades for your guns you’ve finished all of Blood Dragon’s content. Ubisoft also deserves a slap on the wrist for forcing the instillation of their Uplay digital distribution system when I’ve already bought the game on Steam.

Blood Dragon features frantic pitched battles over traditional boss encounters.

Blood Dragon’s lower budget means that many climactic moments, including your final showdown with your traitorous commander, are done in deliberately low-rez cutscenes that would feel at home on an NES cartridge rather than via gameplay. This is likely a necessary trade-off to keep the cost of the game and production time down, but it’s still slightly disappointing. To be fair it’s not like the original FC3 had great boss fights either.

These minor complaints aside Blood Dragon is a perfect example of the way DLC should be done. Rather than just delivering a mission pack of more of the same the developers took their already polished and playable engine and took it in a different direction, taking a real risk they probably couldn’t have gotten away with in a $60 core game. The game sets out to achieve a very deliberate stylistic vision and it succeeds brilliantly. Other developers with finished engines and an interest in producing DLC should take note.

Winners don't charge $10 for 2 hours of re-hashed content. Blood Dragon is a Winner.

Reasons to Play: Hilarious tribute to everything awesome and excessive about 80’s entertainment. Kicking synthesizer soundtrack. Seamless blend of tactical stealth and explosive action. Roam the island harvesting cyborg hearts and battling giant lizards with laser-eyes. 

Reasons to Pass: Life threatening allergy to synthesizers and neon.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Red Faction: Armageddon Review

 

Note: Since I started writing this review Armageddon publisher THQ has filed for bankruptcy. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but perhaps we can learn something by examining the last games they published. 

The Red Faction series has always been a bit uneven. The first two entries were middling FPS games that tried but never quite managed to satisfyingly implement their “Geo-Mod” technology, allowing the player to blow holes in everything around them. The series finally hit its stride with the third-person Grand Theft Auto style demolition fest that was Red Faction: Guerrilla, turning you lose on the surface of Mars to lead a rebellion via blowing up all the fascist occupiers’ buildings and anything else that got in the way. 

Red Faction: Armageddon certainly holds true to the uneven pacing of the franchise. The game moves the series forward by offering fun and interesting weapons while at the same time dragging the player down from the free-roaming world of Guerrilla into claustrophobic underground caverns. Things have changed on Mars, and not entirely for the better.

Get your ass to Mars

Guerrilla established that Mars had been terraformed, meaning you can run around outside in shirtsleeves rather than a space suit. At the start of Armageddon a group of cultists with vaguely defined plans and a love of spiky armor attack the Terraformer keeping the planet habitable. You, in the boots of Darius Mason, snarky son of the protagonist from Guerrilla, are sent to stop them. 

If it's man-made, you can unmake it.

Just to spoil things you don’t succeed. The surface of the Red Planet is reduced to a storm racked wasteland and the Martian colonists flee underground. On one hand it’s always a bit annoying to be handed a defeat that you, as the player, have no way around. On the other I appreciate that you at least get to fight through the battle at the Terraformer first hand rather than sitting through an extended cut-scene. As always the strength of games is in letting you do stuff yourself, not just watch passively.

Demolition Man

Like Guerrilla before it Armageddon is played from a third person “over the shoulder” perspective. Also like Guerrilla large parts of Armageddon’s environments are highly destructible. Any man-made structure is susceptible to explosive weapons, demolition charges, or just beating the hell out of it with your mighty sledgehammer. Many enemies have explosive attacks, meaning no piece of cover lasts long in a pitched battle.  

Anything broken can be fixed by waggling you magic bracer or "Nano-Forge" at it.

New to the series is the ability to rebuild anything that’s been destroyed through the sci-fi magic of your Nano-Forge. This device handily lets you rebuild demolished cover in the middle of a fight and repair destroyed critical paths. While it would have been cool to materialize turrets or defensive barriers on the fly you’re restricted to only rebuilding what existed beforehand. The effect is visually interesting and prevents wanton destruction from making any area impossible to complete. 

Weapon selection is strong, with plenty of satisfyingly loud and destructive ways to obliterate your enemies and anything nearby. Conventional assault rifles and shotguns mix it up with more exotic fare like a wall piercing sniper rifle, disintegration beams, and a terrifyingly destructive black hole launcher. There’s hardly a bad option to be found in Armageddon’s arsenal.  

Tools of the Proletariat

The Magnet gun deserves special mention. This device lets you fire two magnets at different objects, which then rush together with bone-splintering speed. You can splatter enemies against the ceiling, crush them under a mass of rubble, or slam them into their buddies with a sickening “CRUNCH”. The possibilities are nearly limitless, and there’s a perverse pleasure to be found in sending a three-ton monster slamming up into the ceiling every time it tries to struggle to its feet. The Magnet gun is such a unique and fun weapon it could almost carry a physics puzzle type game on its own.

The strongest gameplay addition is in the form of a handful of pseudo-magical powers fueled by the Nano-Forge.  You start with a simple directional kinetic blast, but soon unlock tactically interesting abilities like a defensive energy shell and a shockwave that leaves enemies dangling helplessly in mid-air. All are great fun, recharge quickly, and when used intelligently make Darius just short of unstoppable. 

The Shockwave power leaves enemies floating helplessly, perfect for skeet shooting.

The biggest disappointment with this latest addition to the Red Faction series is that you’re no longer free to roam Mars at will. Armageddon takes place largely underground, in a series of heavily scripted and linear levels. The socialistic revolutionary theme and oppressive human foes of previous games have been replaced with an army of giant alien bugs. This particular breed of space-bug is colorful and agile, but they could be seamlessly dropped into any sci-fi shooter. They’re not bad enemies, just generic and symptomatic of Armageddon’s problems.

God of War

Darius makes for a tough and resilient player character, an interesting decision when many modern shooter protagonists are more on the squishy side. Between weapons and nano-powers it’s almost trivial to tear through space-bugs by the dozens, especially once you get a few upgrades under your belt. Melee is so effective and powerful it felt like the giant alien bugs should be running away from me, not the other way around. Even on hard difficulty I rarely felt seriously threatened.

Combat is more forgiving and less cover based than it was in Guerrilla. As ugly and numerous as the alien swarm is they lack the automatic weapons, keen aim, and air superiority that made the EDF soldiers in the previous game so dangerous. The human cultists certainly feel dumber and less threatening on the rare occasions in the campaign they show up. 

Vehicles, like this Leo Armor, are so powerful you'll wonder how the bugs are supposed to be winning.

Vehicle segments serve as palate cleansers between the on-foot action. There are a few variants of mech suits, insectoid walkers, and a VTOL hovercraft, but all are blisteringly powerful. Armageddon’s vehicles aren’t deep in terms of gameplay, but they do let you cut loose and obliterate everything in your path without needing to think about it. If anything the vehicle sections go on a bit long.

Rounding out gameplay is a “Horde Style” Multiplayer mode that lets you and up to three other schlubs fend off wave after increasingly difficult wave of bugs across a handful of maps. Like much of Armageddon it’s not tactically complex, but it can make for chaotic fun if you’re willing to crank up the difficulty and use basic communication and coordination. Playing alien volleyball with magnet-guns is well worth the price of admission.

The co-op multiplayer is a good excuse to explode things with friends.

As a nice touch upgrades and upgrade currency carry over between multiplayer and single player. It’s not hard to max out your character long before finishing the campaign. Finally there are a few small free-form demolition maps that might kill a few minutes of playing with explosives. 

Start the reactor. Free Mars…

Plot has never been the strongest point in the Red Faction series, but Armageddon’s is especially problematic. The story holds together for the first third of the lengthy single player campaign before it starts to fragment, with Darius jumping from location to location with steadily less explanation or flow. It feels like the developers ran out of time and resources and were forced to curt a fair bit of content, then weren’t quite able to calk over the cracks.

A sniper-rifle that lets you see and shoot through walls is almost cheating.

Many elements, like the your Marauder allies and their exotic technology, are given a cursory explanation if covered at all. The main human villain dies with a surprising number of chapters left to go, ham-stringing much of what dramatic tension the narrative has been able to muster. The story finally coasts to a face-palm inducing “We didn’t think of this solution before because we’re brain-damaged” conclusion. None of this will stop you from enjoying exploding hundreds of alien bugs, but it certainly doesn’t help.

Ultimately Armageddon just isn’t as strong at its predecessor. It sacrifices much of what made Guerrilla interesting without adding a lot in return, becoming a generic sci-fi action shooter. Its unsurprising that the game sold poorly, leading to the cancellation of the series and perhaps contributing to the collapse of THQ as a whole. If all you need is fun weapons and explosions Armageddon will probably scratch your gaming itch, but fans of Guerrilla expecting a sequel that builds on the successes of the first will be disappointed. 

Reasons to Play: Powerful weapons and destructible environments. Fun “Nano-Forge” powers. Decent co-op Horde mode. Magnet gun. 

Reasons to Pass: Mindless action soon becomes repetitive. Discards free-roaming world of previous game for linear levels. Story loses steam, becoming steadily less interesting and coherent.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.