Falling Skies Finale - saving the world with a whimper, not a bang

Falling Skies was never without problems. The main character was forever speechifying in a way that could be boiled down to "USA! USA! USA!" and few opportunities were passed up to revel in American exceptionalism.

It's perhaps fitting that one of the characters gets so fed up with Tom Mason that he tries to kill him and sets off on his own because he's sick of listening to him... but at least the show didn't overstay its welcome.

There seemed to be a rather marked downturn in budget for this final season and while it's clear that Falling Skies was never cheap to make it clearly suffered from aspirations for a Hollywood blockbuster but on a TV show's budget.

Most perplexing though, is that the enemy for the entire show had one CRITICAL weakness - kill their queen (let's just call her Sarah Kerrigan) and they ALL die. All of them. Literally turning to ash. As this show rejoices in historical parallels to the American Revolutionary War... this would be like George Washington crossing the Atlantic, killing King George and that just destroying the entire British army.

It seems particularly baffling as prior to that magic bullet, things had been parsed in very much a resistance type way. The enemy was on the back foot after a series of hard won tactical victories... and then they allude to how the Queen is basically going to allow them to win (somehow) but all it takes is for the magical ER doctor Tom Mason to use a magical bioweapon grenade to kill her and commit genocide.

"LOLWUT?!" As the Internet is wont to say.

Was this supposed to be a climactic showdown? It felt as though someone suddenly got told "We're not getting another season." and it was 4:30pm on a Friday and they went "Oh, uh - then he uses this biological grenade thing and it kills all the aliens forever. The end."

Oh, wait - they had to do a bit more masturbatory "USA! USA! USA!" at the end. Naturally.

It just seemed to be an ending rather anathema to the whole programme's thesis.

Pillars of Eternity

There have been many who have argued that there has been a trend to simplify and streamline away much of what used to make RPGs so immersive and hearkening back to games as relatively recent as Baldur's Gate 2 or even Dragon Age: Origin, there is certainly an argument to be made that games now have dropped complexity in the name of accessibility - the results of which have been hit or miss.

This is what has spawned the cRPG subgenre. Games that seek to recapture the look and feel of the Baldur's Gate/Diablo 2... well, seemingly more Baldur's Gate as they owe more to the D&D inspired RPGs, whereas Diablo was always a hack-n-slash.

The first thing to say of Pillars of Eternity is that it effortlessly recaptures the feeling of Baldur's Gate in general look and feel... The game does trick you by seeming to offer voice actors and then making it rather obvious that they are going to be used only sparingly. That's OK but it just highlights how integral voice work has become to modern gaming.

As to the combat... perhaps action RPGs have spoilt me but it just felt like busy work (that said, Dragon Age: Inquisition fighting felt like busy work). You're stuck with D&D style fighting too so... forget mana bars or whatever - you get abilities that can be used a finite amount of times. These will recharge between combat or when you sleep and when you're out in the wilds, you can only sleep with camping supplies annnnnnnnnnnd you can only carry a fixed number of those (upgradable with some skills)... as this is the easiest way to regain health (unless you want to start dabbling in the now mandatory crafting system), you can find yourself tediously shuffling back and forth to inns a lot, which kind of kills the pace of dungeon crawling.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia but Baldur's Gate combat usually felt more interesting too and seldom as unrewarding...

I will give credit to Obsidian Entertainment for creating their own world but that creates some problems in itself - mostly the fact they apparently chose a Welsh and/or Gaelic name generator for everything. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had the first 30-40 minutes of people talking about things with Elven names and you'll get a feel for the kind of barrier Pillars of Eternity throws at you. It's as if it's daring you to give up because you don't want to wade through these gobbledygook names.

Once you manage to penetrate that though, it's not so bad. It's not exactly a world which will make you gasp at is originality but it works well enough. The story is serviceable, although it suffers from leading you along and then just the "TIME FOR EXPOSITION!" in the final act. Granted, it's hard to hint at revelations in these kind of games and those among you familiar with the tropes of science fiction and fantasy will probably have your suspicions but the twist is still neat...

The game's ending also feels like a direct response to Mass Effect 3's clusterfuck...

It was a serviceable game but really only serves to remind me that things have moved on. Given that the Baldur's Gate games are being re-released, it seems strange to want to recapture nostalgia and those more cynical might see cRPGs as a means to justify dramatically reduced production costs... although, if they allow smaller developers a chance to enter the marketplace, then there's nothing wrong with that.

Only recommended for those that actually played the likes of Baldur's Gate and truly want to have something which doesn't feel a need to hold your hand.

Jupiter Ascending

A film where a mostly oblivious humanity is little more than cattle to be harvested by a cold, calculating and far more technologically advanced civilisation - where people with what amount to superpowers have fights over a special individual who unwittingly holds the fate of the world in their hands... Gosh, how would you ever know this was a film by the Wachowskis?!

What's most surprising about this film though, is that it's NOT an adaptation of a young adult novel. It clearly owes much to the recent successes though, as the eponymous Jupiter is the chosen one - who is swept up into a galaxy spanning adventure, where everyone needs her but she has almost no agency.

The reasons for her being the chosen one are even more hilarious than usual. Despite being a highly technological society, apparently this galaxy spanning civilisation is practically religious about DNA and what amounts to reincarnation exists... and so, Jupiter is what amounts to the prophesied reincarnation of the matriarch of what amounts to this universe's interstellar equivalent of big pharma.

And, if you hadn't already guessed from the Matrix reference earlier, humanity (existing on presumably hundreds or even thousands of planets) is harvested for the purposes of a super duper youth formula that allows people to live for tens of thousands of years - so long as they're alright with entire planets, whole CIVILISATIONS just being erased from existence so they can go on living.

That might actually be an interesting idea for a film if it was explored but the film is far more interested in Jupiter scrubbing toilets and being a damsel in distress. Say what you will about things like the Hunger Games and its myriad rip-offs but at least they understand that the heroine should DO something.

Jupiter spends most of her time being a credulous fool, waiting to be saved and getting saved. She's not tough, she's not clever, she's not strong - she just wants to make googly eyes at Channing Tatum, her genetically engineered half-dog protector (it's OK, she always liked dogs).

Anyway, after having recklessly endangered all of humanity JUST to save her extended family and been saved about a dozen more times by Channing Tatum - Jupiter is the heir to an interstellar empire (on account of reincarnation  allowing for you to write yourself into your will) and decides to just... go back to scrubbing toilets.

One might argue something about humility, except for the fact that Jupiter is ignoring however many billions of humans are still out there, being harvested when she is now eminently placed to help put an end to this. It would be like Frodo getting back from destroying the One Ring, finding Saruman running the Shire and going "That's cool, man. You gotta do your thing." Which is to say, as stupid as it is negligent.

She doesn't even THINK of doing it. There's no suggestion of alternatives and yet, we KNOW that she's one of the richest and most powerful people in the galaxy. OK, maybe explaining to the people of Earth that she owns their planet would be counterproductive but she's now afforded a place amongst the nobility (although, they seem to use companies/houses/nobility/royalty entirely interchangeably) and just goes back to cleaning toilets.

The heroes journey shouldn't be seen as the beall and endall of storytelling but to have a protagonist go through all their trial and tribulations, end up back where they began and just shrug and say "Back to scrubbing toilets!" with a smile on their face? Whether it's an attempt at a subversion of the genre or just idiot writing... well, given the rest of the film - idiot writing but it's just baffling as to how this could be considered a GOOD ending?

Arbitrary Animus

Assassin's Creed had a problem right from the get go (beyond even the snivelling pleas to not be offended because some of Ubisoft's best friends are black/Muslims/Templar/British) in that the "present day" was always linked in the most tenuous way to the actual story.

Outside of one rather clever moment at the end of Ezio's story, there's nothing to elevate the Animus beyond an increasingly irrelevant framing device. With the original trilogy concluded and the world saved, it seems little more than an after thought now - indeed, perhaps in line with the fact these games are now on a conveyor belt... there's not much of anything at stake anymore.

The much hyped (and then relentlessly slated) Unity wasn't even an artifact hunt, you were just looking for a body and (spoiler alert!) you could just have stayed at home but then, that's been a problem since the start. The denouement of the first game is finding the piece of Eden after a big ol' boss battle... and then you're back in the real world and everything is terribly anti-climactic.

It's also a problem because as is often the case, the Animus presents vast opportunities but ends up only being used to find the artifact of the week. Obviously, these searches tend to conveniently tie in with some historic struggle but... well, you somewhat undermine those events when the ONLY reason to experience them is to find the McGuffin.

Whereas AC1-3 let you go around and talk to people, check you e-mails and so on - and in the case of AC3, get a whole mess of backstory about the Precursors - AC4 bumped you down to a silent protagonist, who wandered around an office block between sessions and Unity does away with that entirely... you just get prompting from the Assassins on your mission objectives and occasionally the mandatory banter.

It's clear that the Animus has become an after thought, if not an active impediment to the way the franchise is proceeding. While Desmond was pretty flat, we had at least SOME investment in him and it meant we were invested in what was happening in the present day... It seems pretty obvious that this change of direction is a response to Ubisoft's desire to pump these games out but if that's the case, it seems like abandoning the framing device of the Animus and JUST telling the story would be far more sensible than demoting them to "peace of Eden hunt seven".

The Evil Within

If Shadows of Mordor is the best Assassin's Creed game since Revelations, then The Evil Within is the best Resident Evil game since... the last alright one?

There's so little to say about The Evil Within - you play a generic cop, with a generic backstory and you're fighting through a series of generic Resident Evil/Silent Hill settings. An insane asylum, a spooky village, a spooky mansion (wherein unethical experiments are being carried out and overly elaborate traps abound), some kind of underground industrial area, a deserted city... oh and a spooky corrupted church.

There are no real characters in this game - backstory is related exclusively to you by journal entries for your generic cop that you read before going to your "save game" asylum (no, really). This is also the place where you can upgrade your character and use keys you find to get more gear.

Your main enemies might as well be zombies but as this is 2014, they have to have SOMETHING to elevate them above being JUST zombies. So their eyes shine and you can blow half their head off and they'll keep coming. There's a LITTLE variety, you get fat ones (the game even TELLS you they have more health... and they say it's bad for your health), stabby ones, ones with masks and later on you get some Assassin's Creed cosplayers that can summon an insta-death creature.

The game does have a good number of bosses (although a few you'll face multiple times) but none of them are particularly exciting... and pretty much all of them amount to attack weak points for massive damage, you can use your "agony bolts" to do fancy things like freeze, shock or blind them (it's hard to tell if there's any material difference between as they're basically all different flavours of stun) but firing explosive crossbow bolts at their face seems generally a better use of your time and resources - although, obviously you can stun them and then use your shotgun, which you keep for close encounters.

Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the game (beyond the occasional sudden flip of camera angles when the game gives you instadeath runaway sequences) is the level transition. The game is - SPOILER ALERT! - all in the Matrix (kind of)... but (as oft seems to be the case), there's no particularly imaginative use of that, beyond one moment being in an asylum and the next a spooky village or windowless industrial complex.

That might be why, when a level ends, it feels the need to announce that you've finished it. There's no real point to that beyond explaining the transition.

With unremarkable gameplay, non-existent characters or plot... there's absolutely nothing to recommend this. It does the absolute bare minimum to hold your attention and you'll be waiting for an exposition dumb that never really comes - the ending seems to suggest some sequel baiting or DLC to answer some of the unresolved questions but with such a lacklustre and banal game... why would you care?

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a game that gets the Alien franchise. Everything from the art design to the attitudes of the individuals and corporations speak of people who have not just an appreciation but an understanding of what the films (the first two, before it all went downhill) mean.

It's also a game which understands the survival horror genre... Even in its first incarnation, Dead Space put most of the emphasis on run and gun... yes, you sometimes had a situation where you'd be running low on ammo but it was ALWAYS expected that you'd shoot your way out of danger. Alien: Isolation is completely the opposite.

For most of the game, you're helpless. It takes a while for you to get your first gun - which you're very rarely going to have enough bullets for and even if you DO have bullets, the xenomorph just gets pissed off if you shoot it - although, a shotgun round at point blank range is enough to give it pause.

About two thirds of the way through the game you get the flamethrower, which evens up the playing field a little but all it does is make the xenomorph run away for a while and you really can't afford to waste the ammo.

Some games promote stealth by giving you extra XP points or rewards - this game does it by not killing you as much and on the highest difficult, this game is going to kill you plenty... Mostly because the alien is (mostly) a one hit kill and it is FAST. If it sees you, you're dead.

It's not the only danger though, you've got a bunch of human survivors who are either going to shoot you immediately or shoot you slightly LESS immediately and the creepy Working Joe androids... It all plays into shiny veneer of corporate hype over the gritty, dirty, noisy reality.

Sevastopol station perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a future full of broken promises. Sevastopol was a failed endeavour, in a backwater, peddling substandard androids and now in the process of being decommissioned... which is probably why they weren't best equipped to deal with a xenomorph infestation.

So, you're Amanda Ripley - the daughter of Ellen Ripley - and fifteen years after the events of Alien, you're still wondering what happened to your mum... so, you immediately head off when you hear that the flight recorder of the Nostromo has been recovered, along with your friendly android and a corporate lawyer.

You can't dock, so you have to go EVA and things IMMEDIATELY go tits up, when an explosion means you lose contact with your buddies and the ship. From there, it doesn't take long for you to realise that everything has gone to hell on the station but unlike Dead Space, the game doesn't immediately blow its load and have you grappling with a xenomorph.

It lets the tension build, as you find out that there has been a complete breakdown of law and order and everyone has adopted a very "everyman for themselves" attitude because of one certified grade-A alien killing machine but the build up to the reveal is nice, it lets the suspense build.

Unfortunately, once the xenomorph is revealed, it follows you around like a puppy - in that regard, the game could certainly have benefitted from a less is more approach but as soon as it turns up, it's on you like glue for the majority of the game and most of the time, it'll be sitting between you and your objective.

The fact that pretty much all of its attacks are instadeath, combined with the save mechanic (the game has very few checkpoints, the overwhelming majority of saves are done at savepoints but they're fairly liberally sprinkled through the levels... although, their gentle beeping will become a heavenly sound) can make that feel cheap, at times - especially when you've gone through a section three or four time, JUST to get chomped because the alien decided to turn around.

Of course, that's usually the trade-off in this kind of game - much of the tension is generated by the knowledge that the game isn't holding your hand by giving you checkpoints every five steps you go and when you finally get a break and manage to run through that door and lock it behind or get into the lift and mash the button, the sense of achievement and relief is that much more palpable.

Games with checkpoints make death little more than an inconvenience, psychologically at least - Alien: Isolation makes it meaningful and the inclination to hold your breath when you're hiding in a cupboard and an alien is right outside, as well as the way your heart races when you're on the last stretch to the end of a level.

Really, for a franchise which has just had the clusterfuck of Colonial Marines - this was much needed. The story COULD have been a little more involved and there's a tendency for characters to help Ripley only to conveniently get chomped before they might get to tag along... but that's kind of a staple of the horror genre.

The game does end with a shameless bit of sequel/DLC baiting but that seems to par for the course these days and really, while it's cheap - this was such a good game, more is really warranted and purely from a canon point of view - we know that Amanda Ripley dies of old age...

Strange that a developer synonymous with RTS games should be the one to break the run of bad Alien games with an FPS - strange and impressive. The whole game is like a love letter to the film but not in a gormless fanboy way.

Gotham is so bad, I think it gave me cancer

Gotham gives the impression of some subpar police show that was thrown back and told "You need a gimmick"... That gimmick? BATMAN! Kind of. Not really but you get the feeling someone said "Hey, Batman is popular and Batman fanboys are idiots that will lap up anything even remotely Batman related!" and with such a profound indictment of the bottomless, ruinous stupidity of fanboys - Gotham was greenlit.

It's quite possible doctorates will be penned on the terribleness of this show. For something to prime an audience on a show, it has one trick "HEY, YOU KNOW BATMAN STUFF?! Do you? DO YOU? DO YOU?!?!" because nothing else in the show is worth noting... well, nothing good.

The acting is wooden, the directing and editing is piss poor. We're supposed to believe that all these characters in Batman lore are interconnected from before the word go and hey, there's nothing wrong with re-imaginings but prequels are always a nightmare, even when well conceived and this is anything but that.

Catwoman witnesses the murder of Batman's parents, Jim Gordon (and Harvey Bullock) investigate. Montoya is tipped off it was a framejob (on Poison Ivy's father) by the Penguin, The Riddler works in the police department. Oh and obviously, they're all doing their schtick. Riddler riddles, Catwoman (a peri-pubescent youth) is flipping around the rooftops, Poison Ivy is always fondling plants, the Penguin starts out with an umbrella.

This stuff makes Smallville seem Shakespearean by comparison.  Even Arrow!

So bad it's awful.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

If there's one thing that gaming has done to death its WW2 and particularly Nazis because... who can resist killing Nazis? They're about as close as you get to pure evil in the real world but Wolfenstein: The New Order puts a new twist on things. Your protagonist is involved in a last ditch attack to try and stop the Nazi warmachine, gets knocked out - (actually, it's the third time he's KO'd but this time he's in a coma) and wakes up in the 1960s to find that the Nazis won.

The art design of this Nazi run alternate future is genuinely impressive - mixing the futuristic tech with the retro-60s look... Everything from the big clunky robots to the space shuttle, it all seems nicely coherent... and contributes nicely to that continuous oppressive feel the game has, although the subject matter helps in that regard too. This game doesn't shy away from some of the obvious issues when it comes to the Nazis - one of the missions even takes you to a labour camp but it doesn't really out-and-out confront it either but that works for it.

In this world, the Holocaust is only one of many atrocities visited upon the world by the Nazis - who nuked America, have ongoing labour camps (that are cremating people too weak to work) and are enacting genocide against Africa - the last real place to hold against Nazi rule but that's never really thrust in your face. It's a bit like Half-Life 2 in that respect, although it lets you read full news clippings and get actual audio logs - also, cutscenes.

As far as FPS go, this is rather old school. There are sections where stealth is possible and even advisable but there are other parts where the game flat out says - here's a bunch of Nazis, gotta kill 'em. That's actually entirely fair, you're not in Splinter Cell... you're a soldier, not a ninja... but the game does reward you  for different play styles, as well as giving you successive upgrades to guns... and shockingly, NO TWO GUN LIMIT!

Speaking of shocking - regenerating health is done rather different here. It's not just getting jam on your face or the screen going grey or red or whatever - you lose a wodge of health, it's gone until you get a health pack... of course, the game follows the recent trend of having protagonists who walk through firefights getting injured in cutscenes - in one scene, you're STABBED REPEATEDLY AND LEFT FOR DEAD... but you're fine. The next time that happens (yes, really - it's as bad as getting KO'd) it kind of cripples you... for a few seconds.

So, overall - a pretty fun game. It's a wonderful treat for old skoolers. It doesn't QUITE go back to old skool gaming but it at least pays homage and really, it's just a fun FPS. Which in this age of dull and dreary ones, is sadly exceptional.

Watch_Dogs wasn't worth the wait

You know what? There just isn't a lot to say about Watch Dogs. The best way to describe it is hollow.

At some point - perhaps - there might have been a good idea in there but all we've got in a very banal storyline (which doesn't even include the titular Watch Dogs) and the usual growly, angry and very stupid protagonist (although, obviously his stupidity is what's required to push the plot along) atop gutted GTA gameplay (and we're talking maybe Vice City and that's being generous) with a bunch of random stuff lifted from Assassin's Creed (including actual animations) tossed into the mix, with the addition of the hacking stuff which is mostly mini-games or used to make-up for the inability to fire weapons while driving (hence being sub-GTA as that's something it added several titles ago).

In fact, it's more likely that you can't shoot and drive as that would make the already somewhat extraneous hacking pretty much entirely irrelevant given that about half of your hacking abilities are for stopping cars. In actual combat, it's really only useful if the mooks are near the ubiquitous explodable items that are apparently integral to Chicago's infrastructure... and as soon as you go exploding something - there goes the element of surprise. Which means that - if you're playing on the highest difficulty, where all it takes to kill you is some harsh language - you're going to want to hold off doing that and just go for KOs or stealth kills if possible.

There ARE some interesting ideas used - finding the QR codes by getting the right camera... Using cameras to track down boxes... but the hacking mini-game itself gets old pretty fast... and really, it feels as if the game would have been better had it concentrated on large mission areas, rather than a whole open world. The experience is just so diffuse and while the game is pretty, it feels unfocused... although, with such a bland storyline - that's hardly surprising.

The worst part being that the game seems certain it has this complex mystery plot and when it finally does reveal what set in motion the events of the game, it's such a let down (and especially if you listen to the audio logs) that it makes it that much worse. It also has the bland main character - so we can all pretend we're him - who is surrounded by far more interesting characters... who really don't get nearly enough screentime.

Needless to say, the biggest question there is to ask when it's all finished is - what did they spend those extra eight months on? It certainly wasn't polish.