DARPA Suits and Spiders

Last week’s technical hiccup now thankfully behind me I’m ready for blogging again and while I haven’t gotten my hands on any new games in the recent past, there’s still a couple of titles I played a few months ago that are more than worth mentioning.

Vanquish

I think it’s fair to say that most cover-based shooters are somewhat paced affairs, it’s in their nature. You get behind some cover, you shoot a few enemies, you move up and shoot a few more enemies, and so on. With this in mind it was a great to see a game that could turn the typical elements of the genre on its head and present a collection of traditional cover-based battles alongside situations where nowhere is safe for too long and the player is often encouraged to fly around the virtual environments at ridiculous speeds, rocket jets jutting out the back of their legs. In some ways Vanquish is the reverse Gears of War, they’re both good cover-based shooters, but not only does Vanquish have a streamlined, fast-moving protagonist where Gears of War has bulky, slow characters, but where Gears chooses to depict it’s semi-apocalyptic world through dark colour palettes and gritty visual design, Vanquish opts for a world of white metals and blue skies.

The intensity of both the visuals and the gameplay of Vanquish did mean that I felt a little burnt out when playing it for anything more than short bursts, but anything that works to prolong the amount of time the game takes to play isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the game is a bit on the short side. While consistently absurd and often exhilarating I also didn’t feel as though it managed to keep up quite the same vibe of unrelenting ridiculousness that Platinum Games’ Bayonetta did, and its cast of characters weren’t quite as engaging as those of Bayonetta’s either. None the less Vanquish is a very well-crafted game and it deserved to sell many more units than it did. I only hope that Platinum’s next game can match up to the likes of this and Bayonetta.

Limbo

I’d seen the pictures of Limbo, watched videos of it, even heard plenty of stories about the game, but none of these things really conveyed what an atmospheric experience Limbo is. Limbo does a fantastic job of using a small handful of rather basic elements to create a world that is both mysterious and intimidating. The sense of bareness and desolation in the game is not only conveyed fantastically by the silhouetted, monochrome environments but also by the lack of GUI and absolutely minimal use of button prompts, music, or even text. We’ve seen plenty of games where enemies gush blood like macabre fountains and foes are enormous, misshaped beasts but the air of subtlety Limbo manages to tap into allows the game to do things others can’t, such making the protagonist’s deaths appear truly gory even to many seasoned veterans of video game violence and presenting the Spider as a truly detestable foe that you’re only too happy to get rid of (although perhaps this says more about my dislike of spiders than anything else). The lack of sound also made the single point in the game where there was strongly audible music a fantastic moment for me, however possibly my favourite part of the Limbo was the ending.

The ending of Limbo felt like the perfect conclusion to the game, its abruptness and ambiguity left me with a feeling of confusion and slight lostness that seemed to fit only too well. It also really pushed me to think about the events of the game and what they all represented, something that it still seems hard to apply any true answer too. All in all Limbo is one of the best indie games I’ve ever played.

Duder, It’s Over

And so concludes another blog. Thanks for reading, good luck, have Gnome.

-Gamer_152