Land of the Dead

Also known as: Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green
Platforms: Xbox, PC
Release Date: 2005-10-26
Regions: USA

Resident Evil 5

Also known as: Biohazard 5
Platforms: PS3, Xbox360
Release Date: 2009-03-13
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Lack of scares can’t keep this action-oriented game from being loads of fun.

Resident Evil 5 is a great game. The art is beautiful, the control is dead-on, the challenges are well designed and the difficulty curve is just the right kind of x^2. There are some flaws–the story is bombastic and inane, the main character looks like he has hams for forearms, and the moment-to-moment game play barely resembles the games that made the series famous. But those are relatively minor flaws; over all, Resident Evil 5 is a well-made, fun, action-packed game.

It’s just not that great of a horror game.

Don’t get me wrong–RE5 tries hard to pull horror off given its action-packed game mechanics. All of the Resident Evil tropes are accounted for: zombie dogs, mysterious laboratories, people changing into giant tentacle monsters, and protagonists shooting said tentacle monsters with rocket launchers from escaping helicopters. Even many of the game play tropes have survived; the safe room / item box has transformed into a UI screen in-between levels, and the two character mode found briefly in almost every Resident Evil game (and the subject of Resident Evil 0) has been brought to the fore and online-ified. There are zombies, exploding heads, foreboding hallways, reports and diaries to read, et cetera–all of the details that you would expect from any Resident Evil game are present.

The problem is, these classic elements are all secondary traits to the game’s primary interest: action. The action-oriented game play doesn’t directly negate the horror elements of Resident Evil 5, but you can see that the development team’s focus was on making the explosions look cool rather than designing tension-inducing sequences. The spotlight is on the gun play, the enemy combat, and the (incredibly trite) epic battle between good and nonsensical evil. Which means that the horror elements, while present, feel like an afterthought.

I know that a lot of people have argued that Resident Evil 4 and 5 are not horror games because the emphasis on action robs them of their ability to scare. I don’t think that’s true; both games are capable of inducing tension, usually by throwing the player into a situation where they have limited resources and must overcome overwhelming odds by playing as perfectly as possible. That’s pretty much how the Resident Evil games have always worked–it’s just that the details have changed. “Playing perfectly” no longer means “find the fastest path between point A and point B while avoiding combat at all costs,” now it’s more like “defeat the following wave of 100 enemies given only the resources in your current possession.” But the effect is the same.

No, it’s not that horror and action are mutually exclusive elements, it’s that horror is a muscle that Resident Evil 5 simply chooses not to flex. There are a few moments in the game where the horror stuff takes over and those brief sections are a seat-of-your-pants experience. But the goal of the designers was not to make an action game with horror elements, not a horror game with action elements, and this decision shows.

Still, there are a few key design characteristics that help make the game play in Resident Evil 5 shine.

The decision to prevent movement while shooting has been decried up and down the halls of the internet as being “outdated,” but it absolutely makes Resident Evil 5 a fun game. The reason is that combat becomes much, much more intimate; the enemies are charging you and you can either run or fight, but not both at the same time. If you choose to run, you better be fast. If you choose to fight, the focus is on precision aiming and a misplaced shot could mean death. Either way the tension level induced by the combat is way, way higher than similar games in this genre, including Dead Space, Gears of War, and Dark Sector.

The inventory management has been dumbed down a lot since Resident Evil 4 (which is a shame), but the way that it fits into the death-respawn-retry cycle is genius. You get a chance to adjust your inventory and upgrade your weapons every time you start a level or restart at a checkpoint after death. This means that, while resource management is a problem in the very short term, it’s never an issue over the entire term of the game. One of the most difficult aspects of the original Resident Evil games is that you could play for hours and then suddenly run out of resources; if you didn’t have a save from far enough back in time the only solution was to start the game over and play more frugally. As Richard Rouse points out, Resident Evil 4 was designed to appeal to a much wider audience, and one of the things it did (in addition to making the control scheme and camera agree) was remove resource management as an axis for failure. Resident Evil 5 does it one better by keeping resource management gameplay as part of the equation (and rewarding people who, like me, are still in the habit of hoarding all ammo and health for some future boss), but making it a short-term, tactical problem. The player must decide what to bring into the next room, not what he’s going to need three hours from now. I commended Condemned for accomplishing the same thing by making combat very hard but sprinkling health packs all over the levels, but Resident Evil 5’s approach, while a bit more heavy handed, extends to all of the resource types in the game.

Trite as the story is, it’s well told. I commented about this while playing the game, and it’s worth mentioning here again. The game is chalk-full of details about the characters and backstory, and if the player is interested there’s a whole lot of exploring to do. Dead Space made a pretty good attempt at this too (though its story was also lame for different reasons), but I think Resident Evil 5 does it better. Both of these games are still learning how to integrate dialog, text, and other types of narrative bits into an action-centric game from titles like Bioshock, but the results are not bad.

It’s just that, when all is said and done, the game’s not too scary because it doesn’t care to be. Rather than be Alien or Aliens, it’s gone for Independence Day. And that’s fine–there’s room in the genre for big, bombastic horror games that could be more effective but choose to put their efforts elsewhere. I have to admit, however, that as tired as the old Resident Evil format was, I find myself missing many of its classic elements, especially when I see them being reused in this most recent iteration of the franchise.

Fatal Frame 3

Also known as: Rei 3
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2005-11-08
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Girls visiting sinister Japanese buildings at night continues to be a successful formula for this series, though to be fair Fatal Frame III does have some new tricks up its sleeve.

Fatal Frame III is subtitled “The Tormented.” I don’t understand why games have subtitles; it seems like the name of the franchise and the number of the series should be enough. In any case, “The Tormented” is a terrible subtitle for this game because it contains very little actual tormenting, either of the player or the player characters.

Like the previous two games in the series, Fatal Frame III is about girls stuck in scary old Japanese buildings fighting off ghosts with an antique camera. Tecmo’s classic brew of vulnerable protagonists and dilapidated Japanese mansions is as potent as ever, even though some of the content has been lifted wholesale from the previous titles. Temco has also tried to make some changes to the formula, with mixed results. But generally, Fatal Frame III is a competent horror game and an excellent addition to the series.

For this iteration, the Project Zero team has changed the context up a bit. Instead of a single character exploring an ancient Japanese home or village, several characters are playable in different, interlocking locales. The main protagonist, Rei, visits the sinister “Mansion of Sleep” every night in her dreams, but during the day you have the opportunity to move her around her regular home. She eventually begins to experience other people’s dreams, which is how the game allows the player to play as different people. During the day, Rei can develop film that she took in her dream, investigate the history of the spooky mansion, save the game, and review other information about the story that she has collected. At night, Rei travels to the Mansion of Sleep, and each night she is able to dig a little deeper into its maze-like depths. As other characters are introduced, new sections from the mansion are revealed and unlocked. If you’ve played the first two Fatal Frame games, you’ll recognize some of the sections as ares from those two games. In fact, the protagonist from the first game, Miku, is one of the playable characters.

The separation of the day world and the dream world is really well done, and it allows the developers to give the player a breather without including Resident Evil-style safe rooms. Later in the game, the horror of the dream world begins to infect the regular world, which is a startling and extremely effective way to scare the player.

The fear factor in this game is also very high during the mansion sections. The mansion is claustrophobic and oppressive, and seems far more unsettling than the previous games. The amazingly well-done music and visuals really help sell the experience, and when playing the game I marveled at the degree of queasiness it was able to produce in me. I haven’t felt like that since the underground prison section in Silent Hill 2.

The addition of multiple playable characters isn’t quite as smooth, but it’s still pretty cool. The problem is that there’s no real difference between most of the characters. One of the characters, Kei (the first playable male in the series), has the ability to hide from ghosts, and his camera works slightly differently than the others, but these changes do not improve the game. If anything, the inconsistent camera rules make combat with that character annoyingly difficult. The other problem with the multiple-character approach is that while all three characters add to the same score pool, each of their cameras must be upgraded independently. Since you have to spend score to upgrade a camera, it is pretty easy to max out one character while neglecting the others. There is also some weirdness when it comes to camera upgrades and items: some upgrades apply to all three characters, while others are character-specific.

Fatal Frame III is a lot longer than its predecessors. I finished in about 15 hours, which is pretty long considering that the previous games clocked in at under 10 hours. In fact, the title may be a little too long: once all of the mansion has been uncovered, the game sort of degrades into a shortest-path problem, with few story events or fights in between. Towards the end of the game the developers add in a sort of time limit, which makes traversal of the map more arduous and is generally annoying. I think it would have been a tighter experience if they cut the playtime down a little bit.

The game only has one major flaw. There are a couple of other minor flaws (the control scheme is beginning to feel a bit long in the tooth, I wished that there were more interesting camera upgrades, and there are a couple of enemies that you have to beat over and over again), but the only huge problem I had with the game was the boss fight. I ranted about this problem already, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say that the end boss is so poorly designed that I almost gave up on the game instead of finishing it.

The story in Fatal Frame III is ok. Like previous Tecmo stories, it’s a little less trite than other video game franchises but still fairly trite all the same. It doesn’t really matter: the visuals and characters sell the experience on their own, so the story isn’t all that important to the experience. As usual, the rest of the production is top notch: the visuals are astounding and the audio in particular stands out.

All in all, I liked Fatal Frame III better than most of the other critics. Though the game play is still a bit simplistic, and even though the end boss fight made me want to throw my controller through the screen of my TV, the game still ranks in the top tier of horror games. The concept remains unique and fun, and there’s really nothing about the presentation that can be complained about. And perhaps most importantly, Fatal Frame III is pretty damn scary. While not a masterpiece, I think that Tecmo has done quite well with the third installment of this series.

Condemned

Platforms: Xbox360, PC
Release Date: 2005-11-16
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
Condemned is in many ways a classic horror game dressed up as a first person next-gen launch title. A gem!

Condemned was one of the first titles released for Microsoft’s Xbox360 platform. As a launch title, I expected that it would be pretty poor. The demo I saw the of game at E3 in 2005 seemed to confirm my suspicions; Condemned looked like a first-person brawler in which you beat homeless people to death with a steel pipe–not exactly my idea of a good time. So even when I found the game for $20 new, the only reason I picked it up is that some of the readers of this site had given it glowing endorsements. I’m delighted to say that my initial impressions were completely wrong and my readers were absolutely right–Condemned is a great horror game, and it is very scary.

The main character in Condemned is FBI agent Ethan Thomas, a specialist in tracking down serial killers. With the city’s crime rate skyrocketing and drug use at an all-time high, there are a lot of serial killers out there for him to find, and each has his own twisted M.O. While investigating the scene of a murder by a killer called The Match Maker (so named because he leaves his victims posed with mannequins in macabre death scenes), Thomas is framed for the deaths of two police officers. He realizes that the only way to prove his innocence is to track down the real killer, which requires him to crawl through the underbelly of modern society, through one abandoned and dilapidated building after another, into areas of the city that even the police avoid. Along the way he is constantly assaulted by drug addicts and psychopaths, and eventually things that are even more sinister.

Despite its “next generation” trappings and first-person perspective, Condemned is at its core it is a dyed-in-the-wool survival horror game. The developers at Monolith have expertly lifted fundamental elements of the best horror games and transplanted them into this first person adventure. As I played through it I marveled at how many of the mechanics and ideas from Silent Hill and Resident Evil had survived the translation from third person to first; though the level structure, combat mechanics, and story line are very different from the third person horror state of the art, Condemned makes use of key elements of other horror games extremely well.

For example, one of the key elements of progression in Silent Hill 2 is descent. Condemned picks up on this theme are uses it effectively: the player is constantly delving deeper and deeper into the areas he visits, and each subsequent basement increases the level of tension another notch. As in Silent Hill 2, Condemned also asks the player to make one-way descents, by jumping though holes or otherwise moving downward along a path that will obviously not allow a return. The combat system is another axis for horror: like the Silent Hill games, almost all combat is with melee weapons and some weapons can degrade and break over time. Condemned’s combat is actually fairly unique (it uses a first-person attack and parry system, the kind you might expect in a sword fighting game), the context within which it operates is well trodden ground. In fact, a lot about Condemned reminds me of Silent Hill: the character has a flashlight, film grain is used to make the world seem more gritty, and the story keeps you on your toes about which events might be reality and which might be illusion.

That said, Condemned isn’t derivative at all, and it was designed with remarkable acumen. One element I really like about the design is that while combat itself is very hard, the game doesn’t allow that difficulty to compound across the entire level. Health kits are easy to find and plentiful, so if you can survive a particular encounter with a lunatic wielding a fire hatchet, you will probably be able to heal before the next attack. This means that combat itself is hectic, difficult, and highly stressful, but that the progression from one fight to the next doesn’t become exponentially difficult. It’s enough for you to be able to best a particular enemy or set of enemies; the game designers don’t mind refilling your health before the next fight, which keeps the frustration level low even though difficult sections. There are many such design decisions throughout Condemned, and they really improve the overall experience.

I’ve not yet discussed the most fundamental element of Condemned’s design: claustrophobia through level design. Fear in Condemned is not a function of the enemies populating the world but rather the world itself. The game takes place in a series of extremely dilapidated locales, and each is claustrophobic and oppressive. It’s constantly dark, often pitch-black, and as you stumble through the ruins of some old department store or out-of-service railway, the tight, flicking beam of your flashlight is just enough to keep you oriented. The level design and art in Condemned absolutely makes the game; very few games that I have played have been able to invoke this level of tension with setting alone (Silent Hill 2’s underground prison, however, is still the king of this particular contest).

Speaking of the level art, I should mention that the graphics and art in Condemned are very good. I was particularly impressed with the lighting used throughout the game–there are a few scenes where I had to stop and look around just to enjoy the competency with which the lighting was composed. There were things about the art style that I didn’t like (more on that in a moment), but the level art is fantastic. I don’t really believe that better graphics make better games, but Condemned is an example of a game that gets a lot of benefit from the convincingness of its visuals.

Not everything about Condemned is perfect, but I don’t have a lot to complain about. The game does get a little repetitive after the first eight or nine hours; the basic formula is good and the levels keep changing but sometimes there’s a little hint of monotony. The very last level takes place outdoors and consequently the game loses a lot of its power over the player. The CSI elements, where high-tech gadgets are used to find evidence and progress the story, are great but underused. The main character seems to be the worst-looking character in the game; he’s bulky and unconvincing when you see him in cut scenes. The story, while not exactly predictable, ended up being slightly more straight-forward than I would have liked; the details are underdeveloped and parts of the plot can only be accessed by completing achievements, which is kind of dumb. The game didn’t do a good enough job of teaching me how to play early on, and I played almost the entire game without realizing that I had access to certain moves. The game is so dark that I had to play it at night time (the best time anyway, but still) as any glare completely obscured the view. I have a couple of little gripes about the AI, and the way damage is communicated to the player, and stuff like that. But really, all of these complaints are minor; they don’t really damage the overall experience enough to warrant expounding on.

Condemned is a scary game, and while it looks and behaves a little differently than other games in the genre, it is a game that knows its roots. It’s also an excellent example of how mechanics from fundamentally different types of games can be repurposed to create something new and exciting; it is much more than the sum of its parts, even though not all of those parts are original.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind

Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: 2005-09-26
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
Though this sequel is very similar to its predecessor, some balancing and plot problems prevent it from being completely successful.

Official site at Surreal Software.

The Suffering: Ties That Bind is the sequel to the 2004 title The Suffering by Surreal Software. If you played the first game you’ll know what to expect from Ties That Bind; the two games are so technically similar that the sequel could almost be a really long expansion pack for the first game.

Ties That Bind picks up right where the original Suffering leaves off, with Torque in a boat on his way away from Carnate island. But when he arrives in Baltimore he is surprised to find that some crazy para-military organization is after him and that the horrific monsters from Carnate have followed him to the mainland. Like the first game, Ties That Bind uses supernatural horror to comment on real life problems. In addition to bloodthirsty monsters with knives for forearms, Torque is surrounded by crime in the ghetto, drugs, rape, and corruption. In fact, the monsters themselves seem to be the most explicit manifestation of society’s problems. The developers clearly want you to understand that some aspects of real life are far worse than creatures who are out to kill you, and this idea adds a lot of depth to the story.

As in the first Suffering, Ties That Bind is all about shooting. The game continues to follow FPS rules: your health bar will regenerate up to a certain amount, you can only hold two weapons at a time, walking over weapons refills your ammo, etc. Most of the game is spent running from place to place and terminating everything you see. The morality system from the first game also returns, so you’ll have the opportunity to decide whether to kill or help the innocent people that you meet along the way. Your choices will eventually affect how the game ends.

Like the first game, Ties That Bind also has strong, well-developed characters. Most of the cast is new, though a few personalities from the previous game do make an appearance. Torque also runs into a couple of long-dead Baltimore murders who serve as this game’s version of the undead chorus, but the killers are a little less interesting than their predecessors. Still, the dialog is good, and while the story has some serious plot holes, it’s mostly pretty well realized.

When I reviewed the original Suffering, my main complaints with the game were that it was not balanced well and that it was buggy. Unfortunately, I have almost exactly the same complaints about Ties That Bind.

Levels in Ties That Bind are all laid out in a predictable manner: you progress forward for a while, killing enemies that pop out at you. After a little while you’ll reach an open area, where you’ll have to kill a particularly strong enemy or a stream of enemies before you can progress. While this sort of level design is in keeping with the first Suffering game, the enemy mega-battles occur too frequently and become too difficult towards the end of the game. When you are progressing linearly through the levels, the difficulty of the game feels correct and lots of fun, but when you get to these kill-everything-in-an-area-to-progress sections, suddenly the difficulty spikes and the game becomes very frustrating. This sort of design seems like it might be a necessary hack to maintain challenge in a game that allows you to save at any time, but I found it really detrimental to the experience, especially in the last third of the game. Some of the fights took me twenty or thirty tries to complete, which is unreasonable and unfun.

Part of the problem is that the game sometimes requires you to switch into monster mode to complete a section. As in the first game, Torque can turn into a devastating monster when he fills a special meter up, and as this monster he can do lots of damage to enemies. In fact, some enemies can only be defeated by changing into a monster. However, the only way to fill up the monster meter is to kill guys, so very often the game will put you in a situation where mass carnage is required just to ensure that you have a full monster meter to kill one otherwise invincible enemy. Since there is no way for the game designers to guarantee that you will enter the section with your meter full, they have to throw an infinite number of enemies of you just to enable a particular challenge. This would be ok with me if they also balanced the infinite stream of guys with an infinite supply of health, but since they do not do this I found this design paradigm annoying. The problem is aggravated by the fact that you automatically collect health items and use them up even if your health is almost full.

The other issue related to play balancing is that the enemies that can fire projectiles are extremely overpowered. The Arsonists in particular do much more damage than they should (they can usually kill you in a hit or two, since their attacks set you on fire). It got to the point where I would often have no hope of winning a battle if an Arsonist spawned in, where as any other enemy could was easily dispatched.

The other issue I had with Ties that Bind is that I ran into a number of bugs. The game actually crashed for me quite a number of times: once at the main menu, several times when restarting at a check point, and once or twice in the middle of play. Though crashes are serious, they didn’t bother me too much because I never lost any work. If you play this game, my advice is to save often.

Though there were things about The Suffering: Ties that Bind that really bugged me, there were a lot of cool things as well. The guns are all fun to wield (though it’s still pretty much impossible to tell which guns are particularly powerful or particularly weak), the control scheme is solid, and the monster design is top notch. The environments are again really well done (I particularly liked Torque’s apartment), and the morality system is effective without being complex. The graphics are pretty awesome (particularly the lighting effects and in-game animation sequences), and the characters are interesting. As in the first game, the events Torque goes through are something of a metaphor for his own internal search for truth. As he descends into the depths of Baltimore he is simultaneously learning more and more about who he is and what kind of person he was before he went to prison. While the game never quite reaches the Silent Hill 2’s level in terms of presenting physical places as a manifestation of the protagonist’s psyche, the attempt is still pretty effective.

One thing I really liked about Ties that Bind is that the end of the game mostly takes place in a prison. The prison section from was easily the first game’s strongest moment, and it was so good that subsequent levels felt lacking in comparison. In contrast, the finishes the game up inside a well-realized prison, and is able to capture some of the feel of the first game in as the story builds to a climax.

All things considered, Ties that Bind is a pretty good successor to The Suffering. While it is mechanically very similar to the first game, the new levels, story, and characters are strong enough to make the game stand out on its own. Though I had some problems with the way encounters were designed, most of the rest of the game (the parts where you progress forward through the environment) were a whole lot of fun. The team at Surreal is still the best horror game team outside of Japan as far as I am concerned. If you enjoyed the first game and want more, or if you are looking for a shooter with a solid narrative, you could do a lot worse than Ties that Bind.