Thursday 30 June 2016

Mars: War Logs (Xbox 360)

Welcome, to planet Mars! The sandy, dry wasteland, home to many inhabitants. The first game to the recently released, Technomancer. The battle for water, between Abundance and Aurora, two major factions, leads to where we start the adventure, a POW camp.

You play as Roy Temperance, a POW who hatches a plan to escape. Specialised in combat, stealth and technomancy, a sort of magic, the ability to craft weapons and better outfits for defence to help you through some tough combat. The game is small, but it has a fair amount of content including side missions, crafting and upgrading.

The areas you traverse tend to be quite small, but during the story and side missions, there's a lot of back and forth so it turns out to be a bit of a plus side. Only main parts of the map require a loading screen, as oppose to every door you enter. The loading times are also very quick. You also get a companion in almost the whole game, you can choose to go alone in parts, but they're a nice way to distract enemies when you have a bunch to fight at once. There are vendors to trade with and there's plenty of crafting, you can create components that will help you create ammo or better gear. I enjoyed the combat, I thought it was done well and the evade is your best friend, especially on the higher difficulties. I think the best thing in the game is the extreme difficultly, it's the 4th tier difficultly and it definitely is a challenge, there were times I thought I'd never get through it. However, when you know about the crafting and selling well enough, you could just manage your gear well and buy a tonne of ammo and health to aid you more easily.

As much as I liked this game, it had lots of problems. Like I said earlier, there's lots of back and forth, ninety percent of the game is just fighting. The voice acting is one of the worst, I don't think any voice in the game was a professional actor and the beginning of the game, there's some sort of monologue by a guy named 'Fatso', who is without a doubt the worst voice actor ever, play the beginning and you'll see! The graphics are also very poor, there's no detail in anything and just because it's a desert planet, it's not an excuse. Only detail seemed to go into the main character. The character you play as isn't even likeable either, he's not hateable though, he's just boring and forgettable. You could get other companions in the game but they came far too late, the guy you're stuck with for the majority of the game is by far the worst also, he's weak and does practically no damage to enemies. The story seemed like it was gonna be great, but things happened too quickly and it just deflated and left me disappointed.

There were plenty of bugs and issues too. The amount of times I got killed by getting hit through cover and walls was atrocious. Sometimes my weapons would disappear and I would be swinging air but it still did damage, poor lip syncing, slow textures, lots of clipping when there was nothing there. After ending combat you would have to wait for your character to put their weapon away before you could search bodies or open doors and it just took far too long. I found the technomancy powers pointless because they took so long to initiate and when I was low on health, I would spam the health injection and still get killed because the health didn't work and I hadn't realised, this happened far too often.

I did enjoy the game for what it was, one of the biggest challenges I've had in gaming (and I finished it for your information, which I'm proud of!) but, it just fell short. It was a great idea and with more work could be something great. I'm looking forward to The Technomancer and seeing as it's a full release, I'm expecting it to be good!

6.6/10

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