For quite some time, my friends have been encouraging me to play Gears of War, but seeing as how I only play on the PC (or my Nintendo DS), I never got a real chance to do a serious play-through of the single-player campaign.  Eventually, though, when it did arrive for the PC, I decided to give it a shot, and see if it lived up to the hype.  Long story short, it didn’t – and while I have plenty of criticisms to heap on it, perhaps the biggest one was that I was only able to play one-fifth of the game on the easiest mode available.

You see, towards the end of the first act, you end up in a building with a huge enemy that you can’t actually shoot – you have to lure it outside first so you can hit it with an orbital beam cannon.  Okay, easy enough, right?  You get to a point, the game saves its checkpoint, and then there’s a (luckily brief) cutscene of the enemy slamming through a wall, roaring, and then charging towards you.  

At this point, it’s probably a good idea to mention that if the enemy so much as grazes you, your character dies instantly.  And so the enemy charged towards me, my character died, and the game spent its sweet time reloading the save point, and playing the cutscene again.  I figured out how to sidestep, and managed to lure the enemy to the next room – where it promptly killed me again.  Painstakingly, being killed again and again, I was able to dodge long enough get the enemy to smash into the next of the series of chambers – where it promptly killed my character again.  Which meant waiting for it to load, watching the cutscene, and starting the challenge all over from the very beginning.  Not once, out of over twenty attempts, was I able to get any farther than that.

And so, with that, Gears of War went from a moderately enjoyable, by-the-book TPS into an object lesson on two of the most aggravating features of modern games, especially console ports: checkpoint saves, and enemies that can kill you instantly.  Either one can be aggravating but usually not insurmountable, but put them together and you get one of the biggest sources of frustration in gaming today.  

My first experience with this came when I was playing Halo, Bungie’s first game release after being bought up by Microsoft.  (As an aside, I was a big fan of their original trilogy, Marathon, the FPS game series that swept the Mac alongside Doom and Wolfenstein for the PC, and so I was dismayed that the spiritual successor to Marathon went over to the “dark side” and was years late to arrive on the Macintosh).  Being designed for consoles, it featured save checkpoints, instead of the more common save-anywhere feature used in most PC FPS games (admittedly, the original Marathon only let you save at certain locations, but you could at least choose the when, or backtrack to a save location if necessary).  And, a ways into the game, I experienced the thrill of making it most of the way through a battle, getting hit by a few random shots, and then having to do the whole thing all over again, an experience that did not especially enamor me to the game.  It was also an experience that grew far worse when the game introduced enemies (flood armed with rocket launchers) that could kill me instantly, at any time, forcing me to play through one segment endlessly, carefully sniping from a distance for a good while, only to get just a bit too close and get blown to smithereens by the same f***ing missile.  Needless to say, I eventually overcame it and went on to play through to the finish (it was a Bungie game, after all), but the overall experience of checkpoint frustration dulled the excitement of what could have been an enjoyable ride, reducing it at times to a painful slog of trial and error.  As a result, despite my once-respect for the game studio, I have had no desire to pick up another title in the Halo series, as I am hardly eager to experience two more games filled with the same level of frustration.

While I grouse about that, though, and complain about such features in general, in few games have I seen this combination used in a worse manner than in Kane & Lynch.  Yes, the game’s uneven reviews set off the biggest controversy in game-review politics in quite some time, but despite the mixed reception, I ended up picking it up on impulse after seeing a developer demo video on a game-trailer site.  

Here’s how the gameplay in one part transpired:  You are being chased by police, and eventually have to exit the vehicle and shoot out a police roadblock.  So you exit the van, and the checkpoint saves.  You spend a good deal of time weaving through cars, taking cover and exchanging fire.  And then, as you get closer to the roadblock, it appears.

It, in this case, being a little screen in the bottom left corner, showing a sniper scope rapidly zeroing in on your character’s head.  When it pops up, you have a scant few seconds to find adequate cover, or a sniper in the distance takes your head off – end of story, and back to the checkpoint you go.  And note that I said you have to find adequate cover.  This isn’t Time Crisis – you don’t just kick a footpedal and instantly pop behind cover.  You have to find something to cover behind, get behind whatever side of it actually blocks the view of the reticle, and hit the key that brings you into cover.  And if the thing you decide to take cover behind doesn’t sufficiently block the view of your head in the sniper reticle, boom – it’s all over.  Realistic, maybe, but it’s a lousy gameplay mechanic, and there isn’t the slightest thing fun about it – it interrupts the flow of gameplay, causes you to restart from a checkpoint and replay many minutes of the game just to get back to that point, and there’s no reliable defense.  You just have to keep trying to find cover, and through trial and error – and probably luck – find a way to make it through.  I finally did, gritting my teeth in frustration, only to move on to even more frustration.  One escort mission later (I’ll cover that horrible idea in another post), your character is placed in an even more impossible situation with the sniper reticle that I was never able to play through successfully – and, to boot, the last save point comes before a lengthy cutscene that leads into the shootout (okay, I did figure out how to skip it, but it’s the principle of the matter).  Because of the extremely poor use of checkpoints and insta-kill mechanics, I could only conclude that the game was irretrievably broken, and wondered why I’d picked it up in the first place.

The takeaway lesson here is an easy one: don’t make checkpoints the only save mechanic in your game.  Having a save-anywhere setup that also auto-saves in case you forget to is fine, but artificially restricting saves does not help your game move forward, and hours added in frustration should not reasonably count towards gameplay time.  If you really must use save points, at the very least, make them occur frequently and in sensible places.  And, for pete’s sake, you’ve already bought the game, this isn’t an arcade where people make more money every time you make another attempt.  Cut out the cheap insta-kill stuff.  It’s annoying, it’s the opposite of fun, and it adds nothing that I can see to any decent game outside of the platformer category (and I can’t say I even like it much there).

In the end, I finally had to undergo an elaborate save-game hack just to see any of the levels in Gears of War beyond that one boss battle.  Using the hack, I played a bit more, before coming to the realization that I could have been playing Quake 4 instead, given how the games seemed to me to be essentially interchangeable (and Quake 4 at least features an actual color palette and a slightly interesting set of weapons, along with enemies that have at least a shred of charisma and originality to them).  It’s possible that I might have played through it anyway, as it was fairly entertaining in a shoot-everything sort of way, except that my experience with one frustrating boss battle led me to expect more of the same.  I suppose, in a way, it’s fitting – I ended up buying the game for a fraction of the retail price, and in return got a fraction of the gameplay.  Had I bought it at full price, however, I would have been even more frustrated, and rightly so.  And I’m still kicking myself for paying full price for Kane & Lynch and getting a sack of ill-concieved frustration in return.  

Seriously, game developers.  You are developing a product that is supposed to be designed for people to enjoy, not for people to curse at as they slam their fists on the keyboard in anger.  Unless you’re a sadistic bastard like Takeshi Kitano and actively want to torture potential players, I would think you would want to create games that are a joy to play, both for your playtesters and for the general audience you are trying to convince to buy your game.  Of course, most of the examples I cited have sold countless copies (well, maybe not Kane & Lynch), so perhaps other people see something in these games that I don’t, or simply enjoy them enough that they are willing to suffer through some of the gameplay in order to enjoy the game’s other aspects.  But I’ve been burned often enough by the mechanics of console ports to be exceedingly wary of buying any in the future, without some assurances that the game will not end midway through in the usual endless loop of “reloading save point” screens.

On a related note, I would honestly love to see a full-fledged game review site written by non-hardcore game reviewers – heck, I’d even prefer one written by random people pulled off the street and plunked down in front of some new releases.  In essence, I would love to have a source where I could go and get my one simple question answered: will any gamer who plunks down the cash for the latest and greatest game actually be able to play all the way through and enjoy a frustration-free experience?  Graphics are all well and good, but almost no reviews seem to be able to answer this most basic of questions.  Instead, you’re left with the occasional oblique comment about the steepness of the difficulty curve, and must attempt to use that to judge the game’s overall playability at your particular skill level.  All I want is for some reviewer out there be able to state “I’m a casual gamer at best, but I was able to complete this one anyway.”  It’s such a simple thing, and it would make buying games so much easier for the non-hardcore gamer.

And finally, on a complete tangent, what’s up with the enemies in most gamers standing there and displaying no reaction when you shoot them over and over again, until they just keel over with the final shot?  Soldier or Fortune wasn’t the best game ever, but at the very least, the enemies showed some reaction to being shot.  There’s just something wrong with enemies that charge at you willy-nilly as they soak up ammunition, only to just sort of collapse with that one additional shot.  I know that games tend to cover up displays of violence “for the children,” but seriously, it’s like shooting at animated store mannequins.  That’s where games like Gears of War fail – you might as well be chucking cardboard boxes at the enemy for al the apparent affect it has, and it kind of kills the immersion, especially when each enemy can just stand there and soak up most of a clip before anticlimactically roaring and falling over.  Seriously, either you chainsaw your way though the entire game, or you end up wondering why the game has absolutely nothing about its combat mechanics to distinguish itself from any other shooter out there.  I mean, freakin’ Infernal, the game usually described as a tech demo on steroids, has more compelling gameplay than this.  And despite all of the reviews to the contrary, I’m honestly not kidding about this.  How did Gears of War get such widespread acclaim, anyway?  I’ve played as much of it as I could, and I can’t figure out how so many people could possibly have enjoyed it much once they got over the chainsaw, as I can’t really see anything at all new that it brings to the table.

1 Comment
Articles