Gamershell demo randomness #1 - Darkest Of Days
Despair in the face of imminent lunchtime boredom demands I hit up Gamershell.com and browse their astonishingly eclectic selection of demos. Much like the rumoured vaultfuls of looted artwork stashed beneath The Kremlin, everything from the mundane (patches for World at War and Lineage II) to the completely random (Jawbreakers Return anyone??) is here. Speedily, I select a sampler of titles I’ve either heard of previously, sound interesting, or just have a quirky name. I grabbed about a half dozen random demos – the first one is below:
Darkest of Days - 8Monkey Labs
It’s an FPS. So far, so standard. But an FPS in which a time-travelling future-soldier pops in on major historical dust-ups (WW1 / American Civil War etc. etc. ) in order to save the universe by slaughtering everyone with a laser rifle. Timecop meets Dynasty Warriors! Sounds amusing – particularly given the fact that developer 8monkey Labs have only been around since 2005, and haven’t really done anything else… Except for an iPhone game called AquaSpank. Yeah. AquaSpank. Quite frankly I don’t care if your game is the best thing since Katamari Damacy na-na-na-na-na’d its way into everyone’s hearts. If you call your game AquaSpank, I’m not fucking playing it. Period. Even if it does look kind of cool… Anyway, in the background as I do my research, DoD completes installing, here we go! Very first impression? My god, their options screen looks like ass. This is a final game?!? Seriously. Never mind, it’s only polish - just launch the thing. Once ingame, my first impression is somewhat confirmed: this looks pretty ropy. While I can’t really speak to the texture quality (set to low due to the coal-powered PC I’m playing it on) the animation looks kind of cumbersome. Especially the damned reload animations - Jesus, are Counterstrike and Killzone the only games that will ever manage to do this properly?! Bah.. Introductory battlefield sequence / plot exposition aside, I’m now in what looks suspiciously like a tutorial. Well, the intro to a tutorial. This would be the plot happening then. Now, I always, always watch all the cutscenes in games. I annoy my friends in multiplayer by insisting on it. People yell at me because I stop to read books in WoW dungeons. This particular cutscene however, I’m sorely tempted to fastforward. The VO is so flat it’s practically crease-free, and the script is… balls.
Ah! Now for the tutorial sequence proper. Oh look! It’s turned into Gears of War. Gratuitous swearing and militaristic yelling combine with, well, you know the timed reload mechanic that GoW used? It’s been nicked. Wholesale. Amateurs plagiarise, professionals steal I guess… After a few minutes more I’m through the tutorial and into the demo proper. This is more like it. The initial ropiness is giving way to something a little more accomplished. Admittedly there’s still a certain lack of polish, and it’s all very very vanilla but hey, I’m shooting things! Things are dying! This is fun, right? All of a sudden though, the game throws you a curveball and, bizarrely puts you on rails…
This is bizarre. It’s Killer 7 in a cornfield but… nothing’s happening. If this was an Infinity Ward game there’d be cannonballs howling past, airborne limbs hurtling everywhere, proto-QTEs involving bayonet-charging badguy ambushes and a fearless officer yelling “Forward!” in a slightly posh accent and waving his service revolver. Right before taking a stray round through the head.
Rail-shooter section over, play continues until, aha! An encounter with a friendly fellow-timecop offering me a shiny machinegun! Say hello to my leetle fully-automatic future-friend ya slavery-loving redneck scumbags! Under the influence of something approximating actual glee, I storm forth and start slaying everything in sight.
It takes a full five or so minutes before I realise the inconvenient truth: The whole premise of this game is a bit like getting bored with DOOM, whacking on God mode, awarding yourself the BFG and rampaging around killing everything. Sure, it’s a blast at first, but after a while it gets boring. The mix of historically accurate weaponry and future cannons is interesting at first but rapidly pales. Why am I being forced to dick about with a musket and then told to go slaughter everything? Why not START with the future ubercannon? Because otherwise you’d get bored faster. Sad but true. Nice premise. Shame about the execution.
If your game is another massively derivative checkpointed FPS, then you need more than just a neat hook to hang the story on. You need to make it look shiny as hell. You need decent writing and solid voice acting. You need to stand out. Otherwise, why would anyone bother? Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood has (I feel) some of the same issues, and there’s whole levels of polish on that game that are missing here. It’s a nice concept, but, if you an example of how a promising concept can be trashed by executing it as an unimaginative FPS? Just wait until you’re 0:55 into that video.