Chivalry 2 - XB1 Review

Chivalry 2 by developer Torn Banner Studios and publishers Tripwire Interactive and Deep Silver—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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The original Chivalry title caught many people by surprise, myself included. At first glance, it really did not pique my interest, and I slept on it for some time. I finally got around to playing it though and found it to be pretty enjoyable. Now along comes Chivalry 2 several years later, and it has learned some lessons along the way and become a better game because of it.

Chivalry 2 has an interesting brand of chaotic player versus player carnage. Attacking is a relatively simple thing. Attacking effectively however, is a completely different can of worms. Early in, you get a feel for the maps, the different weapons and mostly just run up to someone and flail about with a weapon. It plays like somewhat dumb, shallow fun and if that’s all you’re looking to get out of the game, that’s okay too. You’ll die a lot, get some gloriously bloody kills in along the way and experience the progression systems here and there.

For those willing to dig in a bit deeper though, you start to realize that the melee combat is actually pretty deep, and that a combination of skill and patience is rewarded via gameplay success. You learn to start managing your stamina and instead of simply holding your shield out in front of yourself, to time them better so as not to drain yourself. You start to make your swings count more, waiting for opportunities instead of wildly mashing away. There is a definite sense of satisfaction in besting your opponent one-on-one, but it pales next to taking down two or even three people in rapid succession during frenzied combat.

The maps and their design elements are generally excellent – if somewhat lacking in overall number. With only eight different maps, it’s pretty easy to see all of the different environments rather quickly. That being said, there are some pretty innovative ways to interact with the environment, such as creating chokepoints near a crossing or using catapults to launch other players.

You have four core classes to choose from, which might not sound like much until you dig in and realize that they each have a few different subclasses. This when combined with the different weapons at your disposal can help to create some interesting, varied loadouts not unlike what you might do in a Call of Duty game – just with swords and shields instead of guns and flashbangs. Appropriately, each of these classes comes with their own plusses and minuses. Archers can provide support to comrades from relative safety, but in close range their dagger is almost useless. Hulking warriors with heavy armor and weapons can take and deal a lot of punishment, but they are slow moving from one point to another and can find themselves surrounded easily as well. They may be able to survive a one-on-one fight, but that lack of mobility might limit their usefulness in other ways, such as objective-based maps. That being said, it sure would be nice to have even more customization options. Faces get a good deal of detail, but the armor and weapons could stand to have a bit more flexibility.

I never really considered the first game overly attractive visually, but the sound effects brought the carnage to life in a visceral way that worked within the presentation. Chivalry 2’s audio remains really good, but I enjoyed the graphics more this time around too. Granted, some of the character animations can be just a bit stiff / slow, making countering certain attacks a bit dicey at times, but these are smaller issues. There is a lot to soak in on the different stages as you look around the maps. They tell a sort of silent story that appealed to me as I continued to discover more of them each time.

I was also really happy with the cross-platform play. These are some massive battles, sometimes with dozens of combatants. It might have been challenging to fill the lobby if you were only drawing from say, a PS4 crowd. But the fact that PC and all of the consoles get to play in the sandbox together? That just makes these largescale, robust battles that much quicker and easier to fill up. That said, I didn’t see any options to do cross-platform parties, which was a bit of a downer. Combine the robust online player base right now with the progression system that lets you unlock new weapons and armor along the way, and the motivation to keep playing is strong here.  Meanwhile, the core gameplay revolves around deathmatch and objectives – hardly new for these kinds of online competitive games, but they feel different due to the heavy melee nature of combat here versus the plethora of online shooters out there.

Summary

Chivalry 2 works on most fronts, and certain where it is needed the most – bloody, visceral combat. To that end, the hackfest that is Chivalry 2’s meat and potatoes delivers a lot of fun for both casual players and those who want to dedicate their time into digging deeper into the gameplay mechanics. The progression system and maps are both quite good, even if I’d have liked to see a few more options with both. All in all though, Chivalry’s carnage-filled gameplay is just a whole lot of fun.

Score: 8.5 / 10

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Maneater - XB1 Review

Maneater by developer Blindside Interactive and publishers Tripwire Interactive and Deep Silver—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes.

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Tripwire deserves a lot of credit for coming up with a unique premise in Maneater, and a lot of it works really well. However, a large chunk of the gameplay comes from combat, which can be a prove frustrating at times. Still, there is some savage fun to be had here in a surprisingly effective open-world action-RPG.

As the title indicates, your job is to eat a lot of men. Also women, children and other underwater animals. The idea to make the experience an open-world adventure is an inspired one. In many ways, Maneater immediately reminded me of several different Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Watchdogs to name a few. To that end, the level design is particularly interesting as it flips the script from the above titles. Verticality doesn’t come from climbing buildings or making precarious jumps but instead simply swimming up and down. This gave the development team a ton of flexibility in designing not just corridors to swing through, but spaces that are legitimately fun to explore.

Where the level design can get frustrating, and intentionally so, is that there is an entire world above the water. Docks, small islands and beaches all have objectives to find. Similar to many other open-world adventures, there are numerous things to be found, further encouraging exploration. Sometimes you find cashes of nutrients to assist in developing your shark, signs to smack your snout against (sort of a collectable to find), and side objectives such as killing a specific critter in a certain region. However, many of the goals require being up on land, and those just cannot be done early on.

As your shark develops, you can spend longer periods of time out of water, and you gain more acrobatic abilities to make movement easier, giving the game a very light Metroidvania flavor as the unlocking of abilities gives you access to areas – albeit small ones – you couldn’t access earlier. However, it is a little frustrating at times when a small island of land gets in your way and you accidentally beach yourself and struggle to find your way back to water. Granted, this is usually my fault / completely avoidable if I was paying more attention to the map, but sometimes when I am just hauling with my shark skimming the service, I found myself more focused on getting from A to B than probably taking the proper / expected route as part of the level design.

Things start off in fantastic fashion, introducing you to the game’s mechanics and making your shark feel incredibly powerful and dangerous with a scripted section that shows off the controls and how to attack and survive. Then, your shark is caught and the game’s true villain is introduced and a revenge story of sorts is presented. The entire thing is ridiculously over-the-top. My wife just streamed Jaws about a week ago, so the timing of this game’s release couldn’t be better from my perspective. I hadn’t seen Jaws in probably more than twenty years, and while that movie attempted to be grim and serious, Maneater takes the same principle and often just decides to have fun with it. In particular is the narrator for the game, spouting numerous ‘facts’ throughout (most of which are complete bs, making it all the more amusing). Granted, most of the characters – especially the shark hunters – are little more than caricatures not meant to be taken at all seriously.

There is also a really nice sense of progression. You earn experience from eating things and finding collectibles – pretty standard stuff for open-world, action-RPG games. Eating certain types of things also gives you specified nutrients needed to unlock more skills and progression. Over time, your baby ages into adulthood, and eventually you progress into a mega shark. You learn new abilities along the way that can be unlocked as well. All of this is a perfectly good carrot-on-a-stick to keep you going.

However, the biggest issue with Maneater that I had was with movement. I kind of touched on it with accidentally getting beached, but that was by and large my own stupidity most of the time. In combat however, the issues manifest even further. The actions and general movements make sense given the nature of the game, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find them highly frustrating at times as well. You have two primary attacks – a tail whip that can knock someone back and sort of stun / disorient them for a moment, and your primary attack – biting. Get something smaller and weaker in your maw, and you can thrash it back and forth to wear it down and kill it faster as well. However, even with the unlocking skills, the combat itself never really changes all that much, and it just feels clumsy in execution.

Your shark needs to be moving, so you chomp and swim (sort of like a hit and run). Then you wheel around and try to get them again and again. It’s an interesting mechanic in theory, and not unlike a shooting action-RPG in that you have a repetitive action used to whittle away at your opponent until you best them. However, in practice you never really get to make those incremental changes like you might in a shooter because your entire position is altered each and every time you try to bite. There is a loose lock-on mechanism, but I just feel that this needs to be tightened down on so there is less aimless lunging and missing or lunging and barely glancing. The confusion is only compounded when battling another underwater enemy, because they tend to attack in the same way. For better or for worse, most humans are somewhat stationary-ish in the way they shoot at you from above (though they are moving slightly while on boats most of the time, but it is a predictable pattern of movement, not herky-jerking-lunge-at-you movement).

That is not to say combat is particularly challenging. Once I evolved and gained some stat gains, I was regularly able to take things out stronger than me by a few levels or so. It required a lot of patience though, because we were just sort of clumsily lunging at one another, trying to bite hunks out of one another’s flesh. If I got dinged too hard, I’d go gobble down nearby fish to regain some health since I was generally faster than whatever I was fighting. I felt as though the issue was exacerbated by the ability to move in all directions. It would be like trying to jump and melee someone in an uncharted game who is five feet above you. It is clumsy and wouldn’t work very well – so that is why you shoot them. Here there are (rightfully) no ranged options, so you instead move up, down, left, right, forward and so on – often missing as much as connecting.

I think if the lock-on was used a bit more for actually targeting the opponent and taking some of the misses out of combat, making it a shorter, tighter affair, most of my grumbles around the combat would be better. I realize it is a hard balancing act with the nature of the content, but more often than not I felt like a blind, clumsy underwater log than a ferocious killer, and since the combat makes up a very meaty portion of the gameplay, it did worsen the experience for me at times.

Maneater is not a AAA title by any means, with water effects that do not look as good as many other contemporary games, but the underwater vistas can be almost enchanting to look at. I’ve always been fond of aquariums and underwater life in general, so to that end I am the target audience for this aesthetic. However, the water ripples on the surface and the shadowing / lighting effects under water did remind me that this was a slightly budget game. Music and sound effects were good, though some more voiced dialog to push the ridiculous shark hunters further over-the-top.

In small doses, Maneater is pretty mindless fun. Exploring is entertaining, there’s enough shiny objects scattered about to keep things interesting and the progression options are nice to see as well. However, the progression path could provide a bit more meaning if the combat and movement were somewhat more refined. Considering the bulk of the time is spent moving and fighting, that is a somewhat severe drawback from what would otherwise had the potential to be a pretty fantastic guilty pleasure.

Score: 7 / 10

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Killing Floor 2 - Xbox One Review

Killing Floor 2 is the sequel to Tripwire Interactive's 2009 cult hit Killing Floor, which is actually a full release of the popular Unreal Tournament mod that debuted in 2004. With a long and relatively successful history, Tripwire took to the masses back in November 2016 by releasing Killing Floor 2 on Windows and PlayStation 4 platforms to favorable reviews (scoring around 75% on MetaCritic). Nearly a year later Killing Floor 2 has finally come to Xbox One and those of us that prefer Microsoft's home console for FPS games are finally able to join the fray… Unfortunately for us though, Killing Floor 2 feels a bit dead in the water, lifeless, and redundant given the abundance of far superior first person shooters available today.

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Killing Floor 2 - PC Review

Zeds to the left of me, Zeds to the right and here I am stuck in the middle with… where did everyone go? Successor to the multiplayer-centric Killing Floor, Killing Floor 2 has just released from its Early Access for party based mayhem which will see anywhere from one to six players join forces in order to survive the onslaught of genetic abominations as they come at the survivors in waves. Quick disclaimer that if you are looking for a single player and narrative experience? You won’t find it here. If you’re looking for pure multiplayer shootouts with a class based system to play with friends? This should meet all of those needs.

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