Alan Wake

I'm a big fan of Stephen King: I’ve always enjoyed his style of writing and the mix between the mundane and the bizarre that King managed to bring to life. I am also a big fan of Twin Peaks: arguably one of the best written tv shows of all time that both kept you guessing and on the edge of your seat the entire time. It was the type of tv show that gave you as the watcher enormous credit while it explored the unfamiliar. These two things would’ve given me enough of a cv to work at Remedy back in 2010 while developing Alan Wake, where it seemed everyone on the design team had a hard on for both King and Twin Peaks. 

Vanquish

What a world we live in. We as gamers should feel so lucky to have such a variety of
different genres, fleshed out plots and characters and a bevy of mechanics to choose from,
unfortunately though if you chose to play Vanquish you got none of those things.

Resident Evil 4

Today I'm going to be looking at a game that I'm willing to bet the vast majority of you have heard of even if you haven't gotten around to playing it.

Resident Evil is one of those series that seems to have been around forever and therefore must be working off a tried and tested formula, except for one thing: They're terrible. As a lover of the series I say this with respect in the same way I would say that I don't like The Beatles but I respect what they have done for the music world or Jesus was pretty influential for a fictional character and now I've raised the controversy bar up a couple of notches I'll swiftly move on.

You play Leon Kennedy, a former police officer from Racoon City and all round sarcastic self aware arse with inexplicably good hair, and you're tasked with rescuing the presidents daughter, Ashley, who has been captured by a mysterious cult called Los Illuminados. Leon must travel to a vague rural Spanish village to find Ashley but the trouble starts as soon as he obliviously wanders into the first typically eerie and deserted little hamlet.

From there on out Leon is set upon by infect citizens of wherever-the-hell-we-are-

ville, which are different from zombies because as we find out these villages have been infected with a mind controlling parasite known as Las Plagas willingly rather than trying to escape from a flesh hungry hoard or the undead before becoming a more screamy rack of ribs.
Whilst on this rescue mission Leon gets captured and is injected with Las Plagas but escapes with the help of another captee, Luis, an ex Los Illuminados researcher.

Leon must battle against the growing parasite inside of him and the masses of infect Spaniards that want to murder him to take back the presidents daughter and save the world from a mass introduction to freaky worm things growing out of people's faces.

I said earlier about the Resident Evil series being terrible; terrible writing, below average gameplay with lots of needless fetch quests and repetitive boss battles, inelegant shooting mechanics with the inability to shoot from the hip or while moving, but RE 4 is the stand out of the series. Yes, it still have a lot of those thing but it refines, it making the fetch quests a bit shorter from point to point enabling less forgetting where you were going and having fewer boss battles so when they do repeat it doesn't feel so arduous. You still can't shoot from the hip or while moving but that's a staple at this point so you can forgive it, and the enemies aren't exactly fast so it makes it less of a miasma of bodies and snarls.

The story is fine, it's not stellar but its wacky and funny, I mean you're saving the presidents daughter, you're essentially Liam Neeson with a blonde emo fringe. The good points of the story outweigh the bad in a sense, all the meetings between Leon and the cult leader is a back and forth made up by over-elaborate threats and quippy one liners taken right out of a cheesy 80s action film. It does shine when squeaky voiced midget Napoleon gets introduced warping the typical feel of being overrun by ravenous villagers and adding an over the top comedy element to it which I like.

Overall, I like Resident Evil 4. It doesn't take itself too seriously which in a world consisting of realistic shooters far as the eye can see is a great thing to have to wind down and have fun.
Earlier I mentioned the bad points and one glaring annoyance is Ashley. To start with, she's your typical stock damsel in distress whimpering, screaming and running away at everything little thing, which in the middle of an onslaught of infected making there way to the Leon buffet, makes her a liability. You will shoot her and if she dies you have to start from your last save point lending itself to your increasing level of fucked off, you can tell her what to do but she interprets those as suggestions more than orders and it does little to help. The saving grace is that you can send her to hide in dumpsters and let you do all the hard work without a flailing mini skirt running around that takes your bullets as well as a pain if glass takes a sledgehammer. You have to play as her as well as escorting her which is painful, she has no defensive abilities and therefore her playable parts are just lengthened find open door button puzzles for Leon to progress.

In my opinion RE 4 is one of the best shooters of all time which might be a bit confusing. What I mean is it feels like the developers cared about it, it achieves what it sets out to do which is make you laugh and provide a good background to an ever increasing challenge and, while it might not hit every beat without fail, it feels more organic that your run of the mill shooters like CoD or Gears Of War railroading you through scenery to get to the next shorting gallery. Resident Evil 4 is the game I recommend to everyone and is on my "games you must play" list because it stands out and above all is fun, a lot of fun. Challenging yes but that's the point, you don't want a movie otherwise you would have watched a movie, you want an interactive story that unfolds in interesting ways and that's what you have here.

I urge you to pick up Resident Evil 4 which is easy because it's on pretty much every platform. Until then however, keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days

 Today, a lesson in contrast.

Contrast, by definition is "a state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association."
What this means is that bad things need to exist to make the good things good. Without the bad how would we know what's good? Everything, and everyone for that matter, would be on a level playing field which, as good as that sounds means that nothing stands out from anything else.

This is true in the gaming world as well. Thanks to games like Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days all other games must feel pretty happy with themselves, relieved at the fact that at least it wasn't them creating contrast by being so god damn aweful.

Well I guess I've given it away now but oh well I'm gonna keep going.
So for those of you that don't know, Kane and Lynch is a third person shooter for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC wherein you play the title characters as they make there way through Shanghai on a lovely holiday, soaking up the culture and sights and meeting new and interesting people. Sorry I think I pronounced that wrong, I meant shooting the culture and sights and shooting the interesting people.

Kane and Lynch are in Shanghai for an arms deal that isnt really explained well, only that its Kane's last job because he wants to get back to his daughter who you never see or really hear from in the little phonecall loading screens, so for all we know it could just be him making his excuses like a guy faking a phonecall when its clear that nothings appeared on his phone.

Shit goes down, the wrong person gets shot and all of a sudden the most powerful man in China is after them. Kane and Lynch set out to escape China with the help of a friend of theirs that cant wait to betray them and subsequently does, getting a nice bullet in the back for his troubles. Whilest trying to escape, Kane and Lynch have to fight their way through hordes of gang members, police and the Chinese army in the streets of Shanghai, all of them having nothing better to do than take down these two poorly equipped americans.

The big mechanic of Dog Days is cover based shooting, ya know like Gears Of War. However, Kane and Lynch has brought new innovations to the cover based shooting genre, namely being shit. When you're in cover you take about as much damage as when you're out of cover and the game gives an option to blindfire over whatever chesthigh crap you're "crouching" behind but you're hardly going to hit anything because it all looks the fucking same.

It's got this gritty realism thing going on where everything is grey and dark. Its supposed to have this film/found footage look, apparently, but the camera seems to be being held by some ethereal piss head because it wavers and flys around like noones business, enducing headaches and nausea for sure, and when you sprint all bets are off whether you will run to cover or right into the loving bullets of a Chinese official's gun. Every now and then the quality of the camera declines for a second and it all goes grainy which is exactly what you dont want in the midst of a firefight, especially when everything looks the same anyway and when its not the camera angle or quality thats screwing with you these weird vertical lense flare effects will. I know its supposed to be accurate to how video cameras were but its so distracting and can be to your detriment, while you're being blinded by a street light of in the distance beaming right into your eyes, every enemy in sight, and even some out of sight, are riddling you with bullets with their pinpoint accuracy.

The graphics are terrible. Like I said its supposed to be gritty and realistic but it just looks like vomit on a disc, everything looks the same, all the rooms have been rendered in the same way so all the furniture is an exact clone of furniture you had encoutered in the previous rooms. The sky texture is almost non existent and when you scope in to shoot people in the distance the camera isnt a great help there with everything in the distance still being blury and difficult to make out. The voice acting isnt much better, its passable but its just two men swearing at each other and then trying to act all human and like they care about shit in the cutscenes. Another lesson in contrast; make your characters reletable that way when missfortune befowls them I might give a damn rather than just skipping it to get back to let them uncaringly mow down more legions of the Chinese population.

That little snippit a couple of paragraphs in was the extent of the story that I remembered or cared about, it kinda loses focus from there on out. You start out trying to make an arms deal but along the way Kane and Lynch get captured and for some reason are taken, in a helicopter, to the big boss man that they are trying to get away from. Using the helicopter that they definitely shouldnt have been brought in, Kane and Lynch then start shooting into office towers, decimating the admin departments who for some reason keep Rocket Launchers under their desks or something, before crash landing on the roof. Now at this point I guess they think that they wont get a better opportunity than this, so they decide to kill the big boss dude on their way down and after and insultingly short game, full of overlong shoot outs and crappy story segments, you dont even get to shoot the guy, it just happens in a cutscene without even as much as a quick time event.

Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days is probably one of the worst games I have ever played. Its about four hours long, its not challenging, parts of it made me ill so I wasnt able to play it all in one go, almost every aspect is insulting to the player and nothing works.

Finally, taking it back to my original point, the contrast between Kane and Lynch and say Gears Of War is pretty stark despite them being very functionally the same game. Both base their game around cover based shooting both are supposed to be on the gritty realism side of things. But I'll leave you with this little statistic; Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days released in 2010 has, according to VGCharts as of May 2017, shipped 0.49 Million. Gears Of War, a game made four years previous accoring to the same site as of May 2017 has shipped 6.09.  Thats over twelve times as much and it shows.

Thats been my look at Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, I hope you had more fun reading it than I had playing it.
Keep checking back to Game Changers for more gaming news and updates.