Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Arcania, Assassin's Creed 2

I’ve slowed down on the painting since last week. I made a start on six of the Terminators from the Space Hulk set, but after the third rather thin layer of red paint I put on, I didn’t take that any further. I probably will this week – but I struggled to find the inclination last week. There were a few different reasons for that, including the fact that I was enjoying playing some other games in the evenings!

Not looking good for Europe...

At one point me and Kirsty had another go at Pandemic so that we could try to beat it again with proper regard to the rules this time. Some of you may remember we tried the game a few weeks ago but got two rather important points wrong: you’re supposed to draw two infection cards after an Epidemic, and for that reason, we didn’t get a single Outbreak; and you’re only allowed to give or take a card if you’re in the city of the card you’re trading, unless you’re the researcher which neither of us were. So, we tried again with those rules in place and the game beat us this time; we arrived at the end of the Outbreak track but there were only two cards left in the draw deck so we would have lost the following turn anyway. It didn’t help that we’d got a particularly harsh draw at the start of the game and an early Epidemic; both New York and London had three infection cubes on them and as they’re next to each other, when those cards came up again they were a part of a triple outbreak across Europe and North America, and the blue cubes even found their way to South America.

The Shadow Beast.,,

I spent a couple of evenings playing Arcania on the PS4. One of the problems I run in to when I’m blogging long-form RPGs is finding things to say about it without repeating myself; if you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know that by the standards of most of what you can buy for the PS4, Arcania is pretty poor. And yet this is the game I’m sticking with! I’m not far away from the end of the game now (the target level for the end of the game is 30 and I’m at 25,) and I think that, for all its faults, Arcania does have some positive qualities. I’ve never particularly liked Crafting systems, for example, so it’s nice to play a game where I don’t necessarily feel obliged to use it. But I think the main benefit for me is the linearity. This is no open world game where you can wander around the map becoming hopelessly lost and confused; it’s always obvious where you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. The dungeons are challenging in their own way, and often quite fun. And while there are side quests, there are not too many of them – they don’t necessarily distract from the main storyline. Sadly, the main storyline is also marred by the cutscenes not working properly, and I missed some crucial pieces of information – thankfully you can read the finer points of these in your quest log – but there are some redeeming qualities. The voice acting, for example, while far from great, somehow manages to convey the urgency of your mission. And the unnamed lead character, while a complete doofus in many situations, has a B-movie-like self-awareness – almost as though he knows he’s in a video game. I might even get to the end of this one!

Just done the bit with the Golden Mask...

Contrast that with the other long-form game I’ve been playing a lot of lately: Assassin’s Creed 2. While this game is far more competently put together, Ubisoft were finding their stride in creating huge open-world sandbox games, with plenty to do in them, yes, but a lot of it feels like it’s padding out the game. I guess it represents good value for people who bought this game new and that might be the only one they buy for three months, but for me there’s quite a lot of unnecessary faffing about in Assassin’s Creed games. Still, I’m close to the end of it now!