Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Starfighter

Owing to my daughter’s newfound interest in Star Wars, I found myself playing a game I’d had for a while but never gotten around to playing: Star Wars Starfighter. I beat it as well, and the review for it is coming out on Friday. I’ve said most of what I want to say about the game there, but here I’d like to develop a point I made about the plot of Starfighter. Spoilers ahead, for whatever it’s worth!

Holding back the invading droids
was a huge amount of fun.

One problem that most Star Wars games run into is that they can’t really tell their own story without reducing the stakes. Most of the so-called Extended Universe has been declared Non-Canon now, presumably because Disney didn’t want to have to ret-con anything while they were making the new films, so that doesn’t help, but they still struggle either way. Of the games that are available, either they follow the mainline plot of the films, in which case they’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the mainline plot, in which case you never really get the sense that you’re affecting anything major since the key points of the Star Wars saga happened in a story you’re not involved in.

Starfighter was always going to run into this issue, but it never loses sight of what Star Wars is at its core – a character-driven story adventure. It handles it quite well: The plot is set during the run-up to the Battle of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. Through their own activities as fighters, mercenaries and pirates, the four pilots discover a droid production facility on one of the planets and must work together in order to blow up the facility. The threat is established by showing the duplicitous nature of the Trade Federation to two of the characters in the early game, and resolved by having them participate in at least some of the battle of Naboo in the later game – you really do get a sense of how worse it could have been for Naboo had the Droid army been at full strength, which if your characters hadn’t been involved, it would have been.

Flying around a hangar is
always a bit fiddly...

Where Starfighter lets us down plot-wise is in the final boss. The fight itself is fine and takes a lot of the skills you’ve been building throughout the game, if a little annoying when you don’t know exactly where it’s going. But the problem with any battle fought in the Separatist portion of the saga is that as your opponents are always droids, they lack the necessary levels of humanity influence the plot themselves. Starfighter tries to get around this by having the Trade Federation employ mercenaries to interfere with negotiations at the start of the game when you’re escorting Queen Amidala, Rhys’ mentor is killed by one of them and he turns up at the end as the final boss having not participated in the story at any point in between. First, it doesn’t make sense for the Trade Federation to have attacked Queen Amidala before she signed their treaty, and second, it very much felt like a final boss for the sake of having a final boss.

None of which spoils the experience of the game, you understand. It’s still a fun space shooter that I was happy to play, and it made a refreshing change for me to play a game I can wrap up in a few days rather than several months! But it did make me think about the reasons that the plot of most Star Wars video games is often its weakest point and realise that we can be thankful for those games that counter it with some very solid gameplay.

As an aside, the exception here – and probably why this game is so fondly remembered – is Knights of the Old Republic. This was set far enough away from the plot of the Skywalker saga that the galaxy would have had time to sort itself out whichever way it went, but also Bioware had a very talented writing team at the top of their game telling a fun story with twists, stakes and bitter struggles that many still hold as the standard of RPG storytelling to this day.

 

Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles, requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to play a relatively short game!

Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system
that goes across your field of view.

Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.

Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations, asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent, an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1] Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with games like this, nothing is as it seems…

Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.” There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of “haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.

No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the
blood splatter effects on the screen.

As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well; we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it, rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK. What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well. Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely, but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a unique if unsettling experience.

Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

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[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!

Last Week's Games: Roll the Ball, Ultra Street Fighter 2 and Plot Depth Discussions

I’ve been playing a lot of Roll the Ball on my phone this week, as my gaming time has mostly been limited to whenever I can get a moment to sit down and do some none-work related recreation! If you don’t know from my previous coverage, it’s a puzzle game where you have to connect tiles with paths through them to roll a ball from the start of the level to the end. I downloaded it onto my phone last summer and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since.

This is a different mode entirely,
but we'll get to that...

I played through and beat Bianca level pack on Star Mode. The basic principles of this are described above; what Star Mode brings to it is that certain of the tiles have stars in them; three per level. You have to connect the two ends of the path using the tiles, and the more star tiles you use, the higher number of stars you get at the end of the level. This rarely requires much thought, as it’s usually pretty obvious what you have to do to make the path, and only becomes challenging once they start introducing star tiles in the tiles that can’t be moved – you then have to work out how to move the rest of your tiles around them. But for how much of a faff the rotation levels turned out to be, it was nice to be able to blitz through some of the levels. I proceeded to the Bravo level pack in Classic mode, where you have to create the path for the ball in as few moves as possible, with three stars given when you achieve the target number. Usually this is obvious but there are a few challenging levels in there which take a few goes to get it right – the paths are often easy to make, but doing it with maximum efficiency is a different matter entirely! I’ll be on these levels for a while.

I might have to write a review of Roll the Ball soon. I usually only do this once I’ve beaten a game, or when my time with it has reached its logical conclusion. But the time it’s going to take me to do this with Roll the Ball could potentially run in to several years; I may even have a new phone before I do! As it stands, I’ve had a go with all four variations of the level design. Nothing will be news to me now; I’ve seen all there is to see, so I might as well give it a review!

Will a Sonic Boom help against Fei Long?

I had a go with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers on my Switch too. This is the only game I’ve played on the Switch so far, and I’m enjoying it. Most of us have done Street Fighter 2 at some point; the addition to this game other than re-done voice-overs and graphics is that Akuma, Evil Ryu and Violent Ken are available to play from the start. I played it a lot over the Christmas break and managed to beat the game on its hardest difficulty, my favourite character being E. Honda due to his power, speed and reach. But I had another go at it recently and couldn’t even get past the first fight! Arguably I was out of practice, but it didn’t help that the game kept putting me against Fei Long, who is absolutely nails.

I also had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend Kirsty while she was playing Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on her PS4. Four out of the seven games we have for it are remakes or remasters of older games, in some cases several generations old. Kirsty was talking about the difference between Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, the nearest the PlayStation really had to mascot platformers, with regard to the plot. Crash never had much going for it in that regard but Spyro’s seemed to be fleshed out a little more. I don’t know, I never really played much of either game, but perhaps it highlights the evolution of story-driven games during the 5^th console generation. It’s worth thinking about, if only to get some insight on the level we enjoy games on these days!