CHRISTMAS AGAIN

 WHERE DID ALL THE TIME GO?

Hello everyone!

Like every year, once again I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and extend my holiday greetings to you all!

I am really sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while but yeah… what can I say; we moved to another place, jobbed on and off, argued extensively with ministries and I am still trying to survive the paper chaos of our modern bureaucraZy without getting a brain tumor… but I guess the biggest change in my life recently was the birth of my son, who is now already eleven weeks old.

How the time flies! – Exactly, and between sleep deprivation, taking care of the baby, working on a few projects and so on, there really was no time left to put out reviews. I didn’t even manage to be on Twitter that much… which is… ridiculous. But seriously, seeing our small boy smile every day is worth it.

I don’t want to make any promises but I really hope to be back again next year with more and regular posts. There are still too many games on my list, to many reviews in edit and in general too many things to say. I hope you will remain and check by some time.

In the meantime have a great Christmas time and celebrate the New Year with a bang! It has to get better at some point, it just has to. Stick to what you love, support each other and it will work out sooner or later.

Play more! Celebrate more!

FIREWATCH

WAPITI-BUPITI!!!!

Somehow I feel like there haven’t been to many lastingly positive reviews among the latest posts I put up… BUT this one will should balance it all out again! It’s already been a while since I played this game and its release for that matter, but seriously; Firewatch was one of the best games I have ever played and I highly recommend it to everyone who hasn’t played it yet.

There are a few points that could have made it an even better game in my opinion but compared to all the other games that surround us Firewatch is a true contestant for the title of game of the year 2016!

A PAUSE IN THE HALLWAY OF TIME

Firewatch was made possible by Campo Santo and Panic and is available on Steam and PS4. Not aiming at hyper-realism but in general having more of a cartoonish look to it, the game’s graphic and art style is nothing short of brilliant.

Because the game's visual art is perfectly coherent in style and consistent in its quality, together with harmonic colors as well as a remarkable work on the ambient lighting, Firewatch makes the environment feel pleasant and warm. There are no procedurally generated environments, there is no tree without a purpose; at Sunrise or sunset, with fog or smoke, the handcrafted and thought-out sceneries in this game are the perfect relief after a stressful working day. It shows why level design is also important in games that play outside and why more people developers should emphasize working out their levels instead of mass-placing terrain assets.

At its core Firewatch is a narrative driven first person game. So, if that is not your genre well… but otherwise in my opinion it is safe to say that is one of the best of these kind gaming experiences there is. Not only does the game make you feel as if you were playing the story in a deeply interactive way because you can always choose what to say next, it also has a great, sentimental and intoxicating plot with few but highly elaborated characters.

I don’t want to talk in more detail about it since I don’t want to spoil it for those of you who haven’t played it yet, but I will talk about one point that makes this game so special compared to similar ones. There is a twist! – Or rather the story is constantly twisting your mind! This game is does not only put you in a massively immersive setting where you still could easily get bored from redundancy for example. No! From the moment you start reading the first lines of the plot, which already hooked me before the game even started, there is not one moment where you feel sort of “And now what?” or “Boring!”.

This game always drives you forward. Smoothly and not with force there is always a purpose to all you are doing and every single trip you take to the forest, as the Firewatch-sheriff you are, adds more to a mystery that is constructed by your very own imagination until it all makes sense to you at the end. Ok, admittedly the end – the very end – of the game has been criticized somewhat justly because it simply does miss that certain climax. On the other hand I think you could say that the game didn’t need it because of its constantly evolving nature. However one of the points I think the game is definitely missing is multiple endings. - That could have solved the issue with the end and furthermore encouraged people to play the game more times choosing different approaches and experiencing a whole different story with other dialogue options. Especially given the overall playtime of about 2 to 4 hours at best, it is a shame that Firewatch has no immediate replay value whatsoever. It wouldn’t even have been necessary to put in more stuff for the players to explore, if they just had worked out different endings and certain key decisions in the game to favor one or the other… damn, this game would have be perfect!

But honestly, coming back to the playtime of “just” some hours; I really do have to say that in the case of this game the rather short playtime felt great to me. You know how most games try to push gametime with ridiculous measures like sending you back and forth, giving you redundant tasks and so on. There is nothing of that sort in Firewatch and that I want to applaud until my hands get blue. I would rather spend 3 hours of quality time than 15 hours of annoying repetition and pseudo-gaming! We did not know too much when we played the game. Yes, we knew some trailers, and honestly we had a completely different idea of the game (more on that later) and then on the same evening the credits rolled. – It was a great feeling to finish a game in one session, given the time constraints life brings with it as you grow older.

Like I said, the only bitter pill is that now since I have played it once there is really no reason to play it again soon. I know what the story is and how it works, there is nothing more to explore and unfortunately not even one alternative ending.

SOMETHING'S NOT RIGHT HERE

Lastly I just have to mention that just from the E3 trailer alone this game was seriously advertised wrong. Many people say that in the great big web and in my opinion they are right. You see a vast forest, there’s a serious and rather dark tone to it “The isolation gets to people”, “Two young woman have been reported missing”, “Then,… who is [in your tower]?”, you see a guy picking up an axe… Do I have to say more?



Maybe we are really all too over-saturated with all the open world and survival and crafting and zombie games, but seriously that’s what I expected from this game. Well, at least in my case, I was positively surprised after a while in the game and I remember myself stating something like “Cool, the game is more like Ethan Carter. That’s AMAZING!”

Still, why didn’t they show selecting a dialogue option or write somewhere something like “Walking Simulator” or “Story-driven”? I think nowadays you have to promote the true type of the game you are making a bit better and this might be one of the few cases where I can related to some of the younger Minecraft kids, wearing their brains with questions like “What is this?” or “Why are they talking so much?”. – Oh, and on that note: You see people? This is how you do it in this kind of games! Let the people talk! There can be some notes to read but tell the story with real, and like in this case, good voices.

WHERE THE BIRDS AND THE BEES WON'T KNOW ME

I really don’t know why this part always comes up so separate from the rest of the game… maybe it’s just hard to talk about everything at the same time? Anyways, the soundtrack of Firewatch is simply put a musical masterpiece. Not only in regards to the game and the atmosphere it conveys but also musically and on its own. It has already landed in my playlists for programming, relaxation, outdoor- and forest related adventures, and many more. I can listen to this soundtrack all day long and still find it great.

"YOU GOTTA GO SEE HER, HENRY."

Again; I highly recommend this game to everybody searching for a great story experience circled around loneliness, and the attempt to escape the more demanding circumstances of life. Imagine spending some months in summer on watch in an isolated tower in the middle of the wild; no phone calls, no internet, just the sun rising and setting down, only the wind in the trees, books to read and the radio to chat with the other towers. Every once in a while you would have to hike out and check everything is in order while witnessing the true wonders of natures. Wouldn’t that be something… something real?

Play more! Watch more!

FALLOUT 4

OPEN WORLD, OPEN WORLD NEVER CHANGES

Again “better late than never” here are my thoughts on Bethesda’s highly anticipated sequel to the Fallout franchise, many still claim to be a worthy candidate for the title of game of the year 2016.

For me this was the first Fallout game I have ever purchased and played. Yes, I always heard that the previous parts were great from a ton of friends, but I never got into them because I thought those games were just too much for me to handle. Nevertheless I guess there comes the point where curiosity wins and you just have to experience it for yourself. Unfortunately the game came nothing short to my mostly negative expectations and to this day I have neither finished it nor do I think I ever will.

TOO BIG FOR ME

First of all Fallout 4 is not a super pretty game… talking about the console versions, of course. That being said I again have to emphasize that graphics don’t really matter to me, but at the end of the day this game clearly false under the label “wannabe next-gen but really isn’t”. It’s no secret that Fallout 4 uses an older engine instead of a new one that would have most likely worked way better with the next-gen consoles. Years past the release of our next-gens and already on the brink of becoming outdated with Sony’s new Playstation 4 Neo and the Xbox Scorpio, I am sorry to say that something like this shouldn’t pass anymore. - At least not as nominee for the game of the year 2016.

Secondly Fallout 4 is – at least was, at the time I’ve played it – full of bugs and problems. It simply felt like a mostly unfinished product to say it with different words. While the quest and the story part was naturally mostly working, to me especially the “new” features of this part felt as if they were just implemented yesterday and shipped without thorough testing and quality assurance. As the old “base-builder” and horder that I am naturally the Minute-Man build your bases/refugee camps mechanics of the game got most of my attention. Unfortunately they didn’t live up to even half of my expectations; Why aren’t the already present buildings that survived the nuclear bombs becoming more and more pretty as you develop your settlements? – It is really annoying to see people live inside of houses with gigantic holes in the roof. I mean, yes, we are dealing with the post-apocalypse here but still…things are progressing, the survivors are rebuilding and repairing, or not? Why won’t they at least repair their cheesecakes of houses so that it doesn’t rain inside? Honestly I haven’t seen one single building part that looks somewhat nice. Why does everything need to look so messed up and improvised in this game? – I think atmosphere and coherence is really important but at least to a certain degree the game could have some aesthetics for those of us who like to build something nice. Just imagine you were in that situation and you could rebuild a small house for yourself; Would your skills regarding wood-work really be so bad that you couldn’t even nail to wooden boards together without leaving cracks of several centimeters? Everything built in this game looks as if it was done by a four year old! – I don’t know about you but that seriously destroys the immersion to me.

But besides the missing optics, when it comes to settlement building, I think you understand what I meant with “it felt like a mostly unfinished product”: The few tutorials we actually get are short and imprecise, the more important ones are simply missing and require your own online research. The whole placing of objects is complicated, misses key features in terms of usability and on the top of that does not work way too often… seriously… objects are falling through each other, wires won’t connect and not only people but even cows get stuck inside and might even block your way out, leaving you with no other choice than fast-travelling out of a room! What annoyed me the most however was definitely the fact that there was no way of salvaging your collected items into the base resources you need to build things, other than dropping all of them onto the ground and manually dismantling them before storing the resources in your chest. – I am sorry, I might be a bit picky and probably super stupid to do that, but I don’t want to have three desk lamps stored in my chest and need to count the single resources that would yield from the top of my head. I want to see at a glance how much copper, how much iron and so on I have at my disposal.
And lastly there were way too many settlements. I mean, c’mon! If you were to (re)build all the possible settlements in the game you could alone from that reach a playtime of 50 hours for sure. At some point it all just gets too much… which is also the last major point where this game – as ridiculous as it sounds according to my expectations – failed for me.

The game is simply too big yet surprisingly empty to me. There is too much to do, too much to see, too many quest and side quest and distractions… seriously, why do people have the need to get lost in all this indulgence? Can we not have a game that doesn’t have 1000 quests and meaningless repetition but instead something a bit more momentous and to the point, together with great incentive to play the whole thing again?

I am really disappointed that Fallout 4 for me was again another game where I was constantly watching the clock ticking off its hours but getting no progress or achievement along with it. After a while the repetition kicks in and – at least to me – everything there is too do becomes nothing more than a burden and a pointless, time-consuming task; “Do you really want to go inside that door?”, I often asked myself, while running around across the vast map. Sooner than expected I usually began to answer it like so: “No, actually I don’t want. It’s another small location in there. I simply have to kill all the enemies and collect all the garbage lying around. Then I will have to travel back to base and dismantle all that crap, put it in the correct boxes and drawers… until I am back on the way to the main quest about 2 hours will have past and I will have to go to bed.” Isn’t that rather sad? Unfortunately I think so.

I DON'T WANT TO SPEND TIME ON THIS

Honestly I get a similar feeling in most of the modern games, but sometimes there is at least something that motivates me to continue. Be it for example the story or the battle system but Fallout 4 didn’t really appeal to me in that either. The story was… well… something and nothing as it is most of the time with open-world games. All the people you meet never seem to have any significant story or background to me. They are just there. And after trying them as partner for a while they usually annoy me so much that I prefer to fight alone.

– Holy poop bags, not even the dog made it as partner for me because his AI was just so unbelievably stupid, haha!
The battle system many found players of the franchise like so much… I don’t know. But what is the point of playing with guns without having to aim yourself?

I hope I didn’t step on to many feet with this review. As always it’s just my opinion on the subject. I completely understand why you like the franchise or this part of the franchise. It’s cool. You might even be into the mods too, right? Well… also in that point I cannot walk alongside you for too long because mods – or what I know to be mods on the PC – usually also annoy me to the abyss and beyond. – All this downloading, overwriting files, corrupting the game, reinstalling it over and over…
So yeah, maybe mods can add a whole new dimension to Fallout 4. Maybe they already have? I don’t know. There could be already several mods out there addressing the problems I’ve had with the game – especially regarding the settlement building. Have fun my friends but my Fallout cruise has ended; the weather was bad, the service poor and the price way to high for the Mediterranean. I will book my next vacation somewhere else.

Play more! Dismantle more!
 

HALO 5: GUARDIANS

STRRRIKE! YOU’RE OUT, CHIEF.

Finally, after almost half a year of playing this game I am ready to write about it. I guess I am late because I have always been a big fan of the Halo franchise and I was sort of trying to crack the numbers and searching for a long time to justify that game as at least somewhat acceptable to my consciousness…

Well, although there are things that are definitely good about Halo 5 there is a far more devastating majority of things that pissed me off in such an extent that I simply have to state that this was the last part of the franchise I have purchased.

“WE’VE LOST. THE WAR IS OVER.”

Yes, I am quoting Angry Joe from my memory here but I am 100% sure he nailed it somewhat similarly. So to refresh your memory; what war are (we) talking about? – We are talking about the cancer of the videogame industry, about the other half of the coin, the dark side of the force, if you will: micro transactions, free to play, pay to win and all that nasty things!

For so long people like us have tried to warn the more consuming players, we stood firm against the current of commercialism and the relentless business machinery that wants nothing but money. We have tried to educate the next generation of gamers not to buy into that scam just because they are used to it already from their mobile “games”, if there is such a thing. It was a harsh war and while a few battles were lost now and then, for a long time we were successful in keeping that bullshit at least away from the consoles. But, with Halo 5, as one of the biggest and most cherished console franchises, a level was reached that unfortunately leaves us no alternative but accept defeat. If I remember correctly the H5 Requisition already generated about half a million dollar within the first week after release. So, do we need to talk more about it, to continue hoping? By now I would assume the whole micro transactions system easily cashed in about 3 million dollar…

 As a gamer and unfortunately as a completionist who would never spend a single cent on crap like this, there is no other analogy describing the situation better than feeling like a drug addict being constantly teased but also helpless to stop playing in the grand illusion of owning all the virtual rewards one day. Rest assure: There won’t be a new Halo soon without micro transactions!
If you take a look at how people are still protecting the system and what kind of brainless comments have been made about it since this was first announced by 343, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a new generation of zombie gamers.


This is the apex of blunt videogame addiction and new, masked drug dealers but with games, or rather virtual content, in their hands instead of heroin or weed. Although it might sound a bit harsh but other than I can’t think another way to say it, and before this explodes any further let’s talk a bit about the game itself and try to find some of the more positive things.

THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK

Let’s start with the graphics – an already enough controversial topic. In short: They are sufficient. But that’s also really all there is to say about it. In contrast to the character works (and admittedly the rocks in that picture), Halo is and always was a rather minimalistic game regarding environment graphics; big structures with clean, almost flat and futuristic, plain surfaces, not a lot of textures and things to look at when close but more than impressive from farther away. That’s not bad at all! In fact the art style of Halo was always pretty original and a welcome change to the eye with its simple and abstract yet coherent and well harmonized look, compared to games that aim for the ultimate and contemporary realism. But similar to other current games the question is undoubtedly justified whether a game like Halo 5 is really next-gen or not. – Have you ever thought about why there really is no split-screen in Halo 5? I give you a second…
Because if they’d implemented a split-screen the graphics would have dropped below a threshold unbearable for any current audience and the rants would have been devastating. – Of course I am speculating but seriously… I am certain a split-screen Halo 5 would have looked not even 10% better than Halo Reach on 360 and in my opinion that is the reason why we (even as players who don’t give that much about graphics but wanted to play together with friends) didn’t get it.

Story-wise the game is also OK but unfortunately nothing mind-blowing. It is probably the shortest story/campaign of all Halo titles, it ends with a rather unsatisfying cliffhanger and the whole marketing campaign teasing an epic showdown between Masterchief and Locke was nothing more than an empty promise putting the one and only John on to the bench and leaving not only me but a whole lot of players deeply unsatisfied.

Regarding gameplay and mechanics H5 introduced really cool things if you ask me. Especially the abilities to climb ledges or to hover in midair as well as the option to permanently sprint and using dashes add huge mobility to the character and thus the game absolutely feels like the fastest and most responsive Halo I have ever played. I think it’s pretty cool to see how over the past Halo games most of those special abilities, first introduced also be Reach, finally made their way into the core gameplay of Halo. While Breakout didn't catch my interest too much I really appreciated the new Warzone multiplayer mode. Yes, there are several flaws that can be traced back to the drawing board, for example that the AI bosses always appear at the same time at the same locations in the same fashion, making games predictable and partially decide the outcome already within the first minutes, but all in all that mode offered me a lot more fun than playing Arena (the usual multiplayer mode). I also find it great that Warzone is not only built around large teams but to the bigger part on the requisition system, allowing you to utilize tons of different weapons and vehicles that can literally turn the tide. It feels absolutely great to have that many different weapons. We all know most of the weapons in Halo since more than a decade, but with this approach we not only get new ones but new ones times three and all play a bit differently and come in handy in different situations. So yeah, in a sense the requisitions are good; they initially offer a great way to collect things, to become better and to change your playstyle on the fly in various degrees, but unfortunately they are based on a model of micro transactions that in turn completely ruins the fun.

HOW TO PLAY THE FLUTE

A MASTERCHIEF PIED PIPER’S GUIDE TO PROSPERITY

You see, the problems with system like the requisitions is, that they are fundamentally conceived to make players buy things instead of unlocking them through simply playing the game. To achieve that you just have to follow some simple rules:

1. Make a lot of items to unlock! Why make one armor set if you can make ten “different” ones with absolute minor and utterly negligible differences? Halo 5 did very well at that point and so you already had more than a hundred “different” helmets and a hundred “different” armors to unlock at the release of the game.
2. Make even more items to unlock and separate them into tiers! Make some better than others. That way you can directly stimulate the player brain’s reward psychology mechanisms and maybe even cause addiction.
3. Add all those items to a single, vast pool and only dish out very few of them at a time. – In H5 you unlock only two of the relevant items per pack for example.
4. Make MORE items and make sure that you make a lot of crappy ones. – With hundreds of utmost useless and idiotic emblems that further reduce the value of already only two relevant items you can get to zero or one and add nothing whatsoever to the game, here is where Halo 5 really shows its true face!
5. Regularly update those items with “new” ones, so that for example every month the (addicted) players have to play more and more and as a best case scenario they will never be done with the game. Currently Halo 5 offers about 200 “different” helmets as well as 200 armors.
6. Make sure that the (free) points you give the players to unlock the items without spending real extra cash are as low as possible, sitting just above the pain threshold. To purchase a gold package of requisitions in H5 you will have to spend 10000 req points. That is equal to about 5 to 6 Warzone games lasting about 22 minutes on average, boiling down to somewhere close to two hours of playing. – Well done, 343 mathematicians!
7. Put a lottery component in charge so that it becomes random whether the players get “trash” or “better” items to play with If you did well so far you don't even need to rig the lottery because the math does the magic for you.
8. Whether rigged or not, never tell the chances of that lottery machine. A magician never tells his tricks.

Yeah, I guess there is a lot of the dark side in contemporary video games. If you somewhat followed that short list you should be able to see the parallels to H5 and a lot of other games. The goal isn’t any more to make it possible for the gamers to legitimately obtain rewards. In truth we are far from it. What systems like that aim for is to make it rather impossible to obtain rewards just by playing a game. They want you to realize that it is (almost) impossible and that it is easier just to spend a few bucks on a package for which you would have to spend two or more hours to get it otherwise. Oh, and wait; your smart brain already calculated that in order to get “everything” you would have to spend about xxxx hours so why not just buy 30 packages for 150 bucks and get another 15 for free! Man! You are saving 45 bucks and you will get 90 items at once. – Hopefully you have also calculated that those 90 items are just a fraction of the total items and you don’t get disappointed after opening all of them and only getting a bunch of useless emblems, armors and minor tier weapons…

I am sorry but in my world there is simply no cause or noble promise that justifies systems like that in videogames. I want a simple model of what you see is what you get; big addons and expansions are always welcome, but I want a complete game (at release!) for the price of x and without any additional and/or anyway unattainable garbage. That’s it. The price should include the development of the game [period!] If the game is good it is anyway selling well too and you should be making enough money to ensure the production of a sequel and be on a prosperous road into the future. It’s as simple as that. But we know the wheels are turning differently these days, right? It’s all about franchises and brands beautifully and directly piped to our brains by the advertisement. And the money that doesn’t even exist needs to be flowing already years before it even gets printed – if at all.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Besides the micro transactions and the other already mentioned points, for me Halo 5 failed drastically in several other aspects: One being the fact that it is (also) absolutely nothing for gamers who like to collect in terms of achieving. This point has nothing to do with the requisitions but it sort of has the same meaning. Against prior announcements not only some but ALL ranked arena playlists are reset every month! Yes, you heard right! – They not only screw you with the constantly expanding requisitions, but also every month you have to start from scratch to earn a rank in the competitive playlists, essentially removing all progression and every (rank) goal you might have wanted to achieve, work on and sadly feel good about. And please let’s not argue about a True-Skill system and more accurate matchmaking at this point. Systems like that still remain a dream and nothing like that can ever really work in a game that matches teams and single players together! Trust me, at the end of the day under a 50:50 rule, the whole matchmaking system either fires in the completely wrong direction or it keeps a slave to RNG. Fun at Arena matches in terms of playing against equal opponents simply is nothing but an illusion! Sadly I also have to admit that it seems I have lost the touch and it seems the age is kicking in slowly here as well. I remember times when I played Halo competitive and even finished games first in the team with up to 30 kills and 0 deaths, but I guess that was a long time ago. Maybe the competitive shooters became too fast for me, maybe the new breed of shooter fanatics are simply too good for me, maybe it’s RNG, maybe it’s cheating (and yes, I consider playing a shooter with a mouse on console also as cheating), maybe it’s the ping… I don’t know. And honestly I don’t even want to know. I just feel old and unfortunately Halo 5 is not giving me a reason not to feel that way. Why did they remove Swat with DMRs? Why again do we get a Halo without a brilliant Firefight mode like in ODST? Why are there so many 12 year old brats I have to listen in the pregame lobby screaming or talking bullshit probably without even knowing that their kinect microphone is turned on and transmitting everything throughout the net?

Another very crucial point where H5 utterly fails for me is the fact that it is not working at all from time to time. Seriously, this game’s connection issues are unrivaled. – And that several months after release! Honestly I don’t want to put all the blame 343 for this because I am pretty sure the problems exists mostly because of Xbox Live and the networking architecture the game needs to utilize in that regard. So again and unfortunately persistent, I am really sad to say that Xbox Live – also after several major updates and by now years of use for the Xbox One – is still a wreck compared to what we had back in 360 times… and beyond those few words about Xbox Live I guess it’s good that I am simply speechless or else I’d have to add another page just about that to this already extensive review.

Just one last thing: Ever heard of the expression “Size matters.”? Well, Let me tell you when it comes to videogames, it does. Halo 5 is the biggest game on my Xbox One with an astonishing 70+ GB! Currently there is already the next update with 8+ GB pending to download. I didn’t download the update and I am not going to. For me the mark is clearly overstepped in that point alone. My Xbox has the default hard drive with 500GB and it is filled with only a hand full of games! I have zero tolerance that games sizes are exploding and nearing the three digits of gigabyte, or rather that this wasn’t anticipated by the console manufacturers. Furthermore I have had it with games telling me that I have to monthly update them with up to 10 gigabytes of content I don’t even care for the slightest. Yeah, I am most-likely going to delete Halo 5 from my hard disc altogether because without the update I am anyway not able to play the game anymore, isn’t that great?!?!? That not only means that right now I am not even able to play the game I bought for a lot of money at all, but also that if I deleted the game completely and in say half a year I just want to play the campaign again, I would have to download 70+ GB anew. I guess that’s it… not only will I probably never play Halo 5 again but I am out completely from that farce. Personally I will handle it similar to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I will not buy another game of it. I will maybe play the next Halo together with friends where we all share the costs of one copy and resell it afterwards, but that’s it. Goodbye Halo, I am out.

FINAL WORDS

I am sorry. Seriously, I am sorry that this review got out of hands and I am sorry if you as a diehard fan or maybe as developer might feel offended by it. I am sorry for myself, because I always considered myself a diehard fan as well. Hell, Halo even was the reason why I decided to get an XB1 and not a PS4! I really wanted to see beyond and I put in a lot of time to find something that would have justified holding on to that franchise, but I couldn’t. Sometimes it’s time to let go. If you like this game, please, be my guest and have all the fun you can have with it.

Play more! Lose more!
  

STREETJUSTICE

BECAUSE WE REALLY SHOULD

Dear readers and friends!

I am very proud to finally go public with the current project sIPXgames is working on: StreetJustice.
Over the course of the last year I was lucky to get to know some other indies from Austria who not only share a similar passion and understanding for games but who also wanted to work together on a mutual and for the first time commercial project. Coming from various backgrounds, we quickly formed a harmonic team and complemented each other's skills.

Although we might be considered as startup and the "best is yet to come", to put in the obligatory game quote, I think I speak for all if I say we are taking the production of this game absolutely seriously and we even aim to have a demo press-release ready by the end of this summer. At the moment we are 5+ people and we have covered all the key positions necessary to work according to our project plan and to our personal standards of quality, of course.

Besides production, design, 3D stuff and writing I will of course take care about trying to give you the most information, education and entertainment possible. Although I am not yet sure what that means... I am certain there will be all kinds of different contributions in form of blog posts, devlogs and/or vlogs, maybe even some live streaming or other fancy stuff.

In this post I will however stick to the (old-fashioned) pen&paper-approach and try to outline most the aspects of the game. I know already now that it will surely go beyond the scope but I would rather get done with the preliminaries so that we can get into detailing individual topics with posts along the road.

DRIVING IS WAR!

Before talking about the game in detail I why don't we take a look at the motivation behind the idea first?
I am a driver and I am not particularly proud of it. I am maybe proud to be a responsible driver, but if it was up to me *insert evil laughing cat* I would surely prohibit more than 50% of the cars currently driving around in Austria and rather improve the public transportation. Unfortunately though I am living in a time and a place where, despite the fact that it is getting better, public transportation is still either non-existing at all (especially outside of major cities) or if; unreliable, slow and way too expensive. - The latter of course getting worse every single year.

Most of the other developers on the team are drivers as well, and we think that there are some serious problems when it comes to driving in Austria: There are masses of irritatingly old sport bicycle drivers in spandex pants, annoying horse transporters, an almost infinite amount of tractors and trucks for example. There are drunken drivers, too young drivers and too old drivers... and somewhere between the occasional horse riding along the road and an annoyingly loud scooter of a rebelling teenager, few absent-minded even come up with the ideas for an illegal street races with their completely unnecessary cars. Individual cases, you think? - We don't.
We think driving a car is currently one of the most dangerous things to do. There are supposed to be rules; like that you have to stop your car for two seconds at stop sign no matter what, that you cannot overtake a car in a zone where it is clearly forbidden, that you should not drive too close to the car in front of you, and so on... Unfortunately, despite those being very reasonable rules, to us it seems nobody cares to follow them anymore and we also agree on that the situation is getting worse. It's not only that people are not following the rules anymore but also that they seem to be lacking any form of respect for other traffic participants or a general appreciation of life for that matter!

Yes, driving is war! And while the sounds of it can be heard everywhere outside, there seems to be less and less police on patrol and taking care that people behave. Well, while we kind of understand why we are almost back in the Wild West, we still don't have to like it and decided to take the law into our own hands and give you a police man with the rights and the means to clean up the mess. There will be no negotiations, no bribing, no escape,... if you break the rules you will be blown to pieces no matter if you are a regular person, a gang member or a trespassing deer.

Hopefully with that said it becomes clear that, although we will do our best to make fun of our small and proud home country, we don't want to push agendas here. We don't want to send subliminal messages and convince people of some greater and reasonable purpose or secretly point fingers. We are making a game! Yes, the game is based on real places and real impressions but there is simply too much material to be left alone and not made fun of. Naturally StreetJustice is going to be subject to interpretation but let's keep in mind that it remains entirely fictional and that it will be a game that is supposed to be funny and entertaining!

THE GAME

So, how will the game be? Above all other things StreetJustice will be a driving game. Despite us working with an abstract layer of the most realistic physics I have ever seen on an artificial car, the game will definitely feel more "arcady" and not like a realistic simulator. We want awesome handling, action, explosions, fast-pace driving and shooting on the one side but also adventures, exploration and tactical gameplay on the other. For us "patrolling the streets" means to take care, to learn and obey the rules yourself and to blend in. But if you spot a crime... BOOM! - Justice!
While every crime that you witness leads to more or less the same outcome (you blowing the culprit to pieces and cashing in) one of the most funny aspects of this game surely is what crimes we are coming up with... here are a few examples:

• Driving racing bicycles on main roads
• Birds sitting on the roads or flying too low
• Horse riders overtaking cars,
• Having the music turned on too loud within villages

GRAPHICS AND LOOK

As you can see in this first-ever (early) screeshot of the game, graphic-wise we are going with a fusion of cel-shading and low-poly 3D inspired by comic books with a perspective trying to convey the feeling of an old-school top-down game. Initially I really was not that much of a low-poly fan but I have to say that I am pretty happy by the results we are getting and how our art style is coming together.

In the end we strive to have a rather vast representation of Lower Austria for you to explore and have fun with.


We don't want to confine you to the streets, on the contrary: We want to encourage you to use farm tracks and scout the land to find more quests, crimes, resources or just magical places. We want you to feel as if you are really driving in Lower Austria: There will be rapeseed, pumpkin and wheat fields, wind wheels, purple cows and all that good stuff we see all the time.

GAMEPLAY AND STORY

As indicated before in StreetJustice you don't just drive around and shoot bad guys. Although we want the game to feel as energetic as an arcade shoot 'em up from time to time, we can't stress enough that you are supposed to be the "good" guy. You will play the role of Paul Frabitz, one of the last remaining police officers and head of Street Justice Department 3. That means you not only have to patrol the streets but you also have to manage and expand your home base and influence. You will need to hire and assign workers, deputies and scientists, research new tech and weapons, gather money and resources, build new parts to your base, discover and revitalize old abandoned police posts, and much more. Only with your equipment being constantly improved will you be able to complete the story campaign structured in simplified quests similar in style to any given open-world game. - Actually really classic and colorful rpgs might be an even better comparison.

OTHER FEATURES

Since we will be having lots of fantastic vehicles and playable characters, we are also working on a multiplayer mode for the game that supposed to be the cherry on top. Currently it will work only offline and locally but it is already supporting up to four players simultaneously. Maybe in the future, depending on how things go, we also consider making the multiplayer modes online. I honestly can't tell you too much about the multiplayer since that is just secondary process and not entirely thought through. For now we only have one mode and that is an arena/deathmatch type similar to games of the Super Mario Kart or Twisted Metal series that was originally developed to test out our weapon and driving physics.

WHERE TO GO NEXT?

As mentioned before, the majority of the news and information about StreetJustice is going to be channeled through here. But we also already have a small website solely for the game. The whole website is subject to change and there will be massive upgrades beginning Q2 this year. Besides that we also already have all the social channels ready for you to give us your thoughts to the game. We are really looking forward to seeing you at:

www.streetjustice.at
@StreetJusticeAT
+StreeJustice Game
facebook

Play more! Respect more!