I know, it must seem a bit strange to have two reviews of a game in succession, from the same person, and have completely conflicted results.  All I can say is that we’ve reached a point in games where single-player and multi-player are two completely different games in themselves.  Arguably these components could ship as separate titles, but that is a discussion for another time.  Today I am about to tear a new hole into the “improved” Horde for Gears of War 3.

Horde 2.0 feels like an emotional sinkhole, like some bully holding me by the head at arms length and letting me swing wildly just to get a laugh.  The game is tuned for 4 players, no more, no less.  This makes the 1-3 player experience nearly impossible to play and restricts the accessibility of the game mode when you have to either coordinate with 4 friends to be online at the same time or take your chances amongst the ocean of 14 year-olds suffering from Tourette’s.

The economy of trying to maintain barriers and still have enough money to buy weapons when co-oping (2 player) Horde is just plain broken.  You never have enough money to build anything and save yourself at the same time, even if you pool your money from 2 people. You are constantly hemorrhaging money with absolutely no sensation of progress outside of the superficial build level system.  The build levels feel more like the old school character locks in fighting games than a true sense of progress.  For no reason other than to artificially prolong the frustration, why else would I have to wait to become more proficient at hitting the Y button to build a higher level obstacle?

Barriers and turrets can be destroyed, which is a constant losing battle since they cost more money to repair than you ever earn in a wave, and they revert to level 1 if you don’t rebuild them.  This results in a downward spiraling economy of always scrapping for cash and almost never winning a later wave in the first attempt.  The lack of fine control over your funds means that you have to either spend all of your money to partially rebuild a barrier or lose the barrier and save the money to buy back in when you die, because you have no barrier.  Obstacles are reset to level 1 if you don’t rebuild them which defeats the purpose of spending any money at all on them when you can’t make enough money to maintain them.  All of this coupled with too little time between waves to manage your resources and an enemy difficulty level that is expecting obstacles to balance them out is a recipe for disaster.

I’ve beaten the original Horde on Insane through co-op and now in 2.0 I can’t get to wave 30 without simply giving up from boredom and frustration of poorly balanced enemy waves and constantly destroyed obstacles.  Horde 2.0 was sadly an experiment in Tower Defense that felt more like a lesson in today’s economy, ignoring what made TD fun.  To call this “a twist on Tower Defense” is an insult to TD.  What Horde failed to realize is that TD has a clear and open sense of progression.  You build a tower and it remains there.  You kill more bad guys to afford upgrades and more towers.  You are constantly moving forward and the strategy is in what you build, not how long you can keep it alive.  If TD involved a constant struggle of barely affording to keep 1 tower in working condition, I promise you that we would not be talking about that genre today.

I play games to escape the American economy, not be reminded of it.  I appreciate the grim, “we are all gonna die” feeling that the single-player campaign presented.  I’ll say it again, I loved the single-player campaign.  But where grim and depressing thrive in the story and plot, it has not place in the gameplay.  The gameplay is the part that is supposed to give us hope.  Hope, that if we keep earning money and buying our weapons and shields and turrets strategically that we may actually overcome the next wave.  Right now, Horde 2.0 does exactly the opposite.  This is yet another moment where the original flavor beats out the new and improved formula.  Horde 2.0 is the New Coke…

How do you know when you are playing a good game?  For me, it is when I spend more time picking at the little things that bother my sense of entitlement.  When there are things that I feel I should be able to do but I can’t within the confines of a game that was never meant to do those things.  When I notice things that I would have otherwise brushed off as a classic game development mistake.

Recently I played Gears of War 3.  Here are a couple of issues I had with the game despite consider it one of my top 2011 gaming experiences.

Example 1

In the game, I walked up to a vending machine.  I kicked the machine, at which point the candy fell into the collection bin.  Markus said, “It’s mine now,” but at no point was I able to grab the candy.  I’m not asking to implement an inventory system just so I can carry some HP boosting candy around but I was at least hoping for an achievement or bonus XP; something!  It would have been an insignificant effort but gratifying reward for not simply following the flow of characters up the obvious path.

Example 2

There were several times that Stranded attempted to talk to you.  Not only were these conversations late, since I had already passed by the person (I think) was trying to talk to me, but they felt hollow since I couldn’t respond to them.  If a Stranded character asked me to tell my subordinate to stop filling in the crossword puzzles, I wanted to slap the offender in the back of his head or tell the Stranded to piss off.  It wouldn’t have changed a thing in the game but it would have made me feel like I was interacting, walking through a living space.  Instead, it felt more like a museum of animatronic characters with one-directional dialogs.  Yes, I said it right.  It’s not a monologue if they are expecting a response from you, is it?

Example 3

I never understood why Markus was always yelling at himself.  “Go get the Silverback!”  “Pull that lever!”  It didn’t make sense because the AI never responded so who else was he talking to, me?!?  It was weird to have that 4th wall broken and it felt out of place to listen to Markus bark orders at me when I was trying to BE him.  Is Markus actually a Segregate android, does he bleed motor oil?  Was Markus’ father just his creator?  These questions were never answered…

Example 4

There were countless times throughout the game when I would engage an enemy and we would get caught in a dance.  The AI and myself would be touching backs and turning in place trying to circle-strafe the other in hopes that we could catch the other guy with a melee or chainsaw.  It looked more like a very awkward waltz than two burly men trying to eviscerate each other.  I wouldn’t have noticed a fluke but this happened a lot, and the waltz would last for as long as I continued to circle-strafe.  This meant I had to stop and hope that the AI would keep it’s current momentum to let me get the drop on it.  It usually ended in a 50:50 success rate that earned me a bloody screen of victory or a shotgun to my face.

Final Thoughts

We still saw the token, “you drive I shoot” moments in addition to the mixture of slow walking sequences followed by waves of bad guys followed by a cut scene.  This time however it all felt balanced, other than the transition from gameplay to cut scene, which was still as jarring and disconnected as ever.  I had a blast playing the game but a lot has changed in the world of game design since the first Gears.  I hope that Epic is doing their homework.  Now that the trilogy is out the door a clean slate is at their disposal.

These all sound like first-world problems and yet they seem to bother me as much as the more critical bugs like AI caught on the geometry or poorly designed checkpoints.  In the grand scope of Gears of War 3 I consider the experience to be truly the best in the series.  I feel that many of the staple mechanics in Gears 3 were it’s strongest suit as well as it’s weakest.  Still, it was a journey worth taking for any shooter fan.

DISCLAIMER: =) I’ve never actually played any Resistance game as I don’t own a PS3, but it was the catalyst that sent me down this rabbit hole.

I’m starting to get a little paranoid.  I was listening to the Game Informer podcast where they discussed their reasoning behind giving Resistance 3 a 70 score.  By their definition, this is qualified as an “average” game.

After hearing that Resistance had received such an unexpected score, I went to metacritic and did a little impromptu investigative research.  Here are some fun facts that I discovered.

• The ICO & Shadow of the Colossus Collection is the highest scoring title in the last 90 days with a score of 91.  It is also 1 of only 2 games to score 90+ in the last 90 days on PS3.
• Xbox360 hasn’t landed a 90+ rating but twice all year.
• Wii was lucky to get anything in the 80+ range all year.

Now compare this to the earlier years [of metacritic].

• In 2007, Xbox360 earned 8 games with a 90+ rating and 7 in 2008 and 2009.
• In 2008, PS3 saw 3 titles and later saw a steady climb up to 11 in 2009, only to fall to 6 in 2011.

Overall the scores seemed to show an interesting curve.  Now, without getting into a holy console war, my real concern here is the steady decline across all consoles.  It seems like the peak of consoles was somewhere in 2009 with both consoles scoring major games and high quality scores.

Still, the games seem to be getting better and yet the scores are starting to fall.  What is going on here?!?  To complete my feverish need for more bullet points, I’ll bring it around full circle with a list of theories.

• Enthusiast media just isn’t very enthusiastic about this generation of games anymore.  Having grown jaded of the current crop of games and their visual limitations, scores are naturally declining.   We’ve seen the peak graphical performance of these consoles.  Graphics will (arguably) earn you that extra 3-5 points you need to hit 90+ and what was new yesterday isn’t today.
• Developers have become complacent.  This is highly unlikely in my view, but there is always the chance that we have a large group of people who just want to keep their head down, work their 40 and try not to get caught up in the next round of layoffs.  Which leads to my next theory.
• Budgets are getting tighter.  Those $50M budgets are looking more like $10M now if we’re lucky.  Gamers and members of the press; being gamers themselves, are still expecting a $50M to $100M experience.
• It’s high noon; developers and hardware manufactures are standing off.  Developers don’t want to invest in a console that may be on it’s way out so resources are split between future research and current development.  This seems strange, though likely, since there is an install base of 50M consoles out there (pulled that out of my arse, I have no idea) and a new console might have 1M at launch.  Given the fact that it takes 1M just to break even on a current generation game, it would seem kind of dumb to shoot for 100% sell through when you’d only have to sell to 2% of the current installed base.
• 2009 was just some fluke that was never meant to be and may never happen again.  There were scrolls of 90+ games that year and it hasn’t been repeated before or after that time in this generation.