Thoughts about games and the gaming world

This is going to be a two games in one post since I played one right after another. Surprisingly both were not worth my time to finish playing through it. I know Xmen had a bad review but I really wanted to play a superhero game for some reason. I was giving it a chance since it was developed by Silicon Knights but I guess I should have known after all the bad reviews and Too Human. However I wasn’t expecting Shadows to be bad but it wasn’t my type of game. And as you can tell from my previous posts, my range in games isn’t very limited.

I’ll start with Xmen. In the game, you are asked to pick between three different characters: the jock, the average white American, and a Japanese girl. Whoever you choose doesn’t affect what kind of powers you get later on. You get to choose those powers afterwards. Speaking of powers, the game does not give you any access to your powers until about an hour into the game. An hour! What kind of an Xmen game does not allow you to get your powers in the beginning? Or at least one power for me to use so I can at least feel like a superhero. You do get to see this amazing cutscene in the beginning of the game of your character using all the powers you’ll probably get throughout the game. I was stoked when I saw that video. I was thinking “Sweet I picked Nightcrawler’s powers so I should be teleporting everywhere with this!” Unfortunately, I don’t even think I have that power. I stuck with the game thinking that it will get better when I get my powers but it turned out to be some cheap powers that wasn’t in that amazing cutscene. I don’t know what Silicon Knights guys were doing when they created that cutscene but I don’t think you should be showing a cutscene like that and then not even give the player any of those powers. What’s worse is that as you’re going through the level, you see all the other Xmen and Brotherhood mutants using their powers. You get to see Ice Man sliding around in the air making ice walls. You get to see Quick Silver running super fast like the flash as he is attacking enemies. Whenever I saw that, I kept wondering why they wouldn’t let me play as them? They have all the assets already. Why couldn’t they just map some controls to those characters? I believe the game would be much better if they had allowed the players to choose or unlock the real mutants throughout the game.

The game would be better but it still wouldn’t be great. The graphics in the game looks like it could be a Wii or even a PS2 game. Textures are blurry and things still pop out and slow down occasionally. Even the character designs look boring. I don’t know how they could get Xmen character designs to look so boring but they really accomplished it. Another thing that really bothered me was how you couldn’t skip conversations. Even if you accidentally replay that conversation, you’re tasked to wait until they finish talking. Another thing you can’t skip is the camera walk through of the level. Normally in most games, as the level starts, the camera would walk the player through the level so that the player would know where the end point is. The camera walk through in this game, however, is so slow and you can’t even skip it. I feel like the developers were trying to extend my game times with these annoying bugs and it doesn’t make the game any better.

As for Shadows of the Dammed, I didn’t get to play that much. Everything is fine with the game except for it’s repetitiveness. You play as Garcia Hotspur and you’re trying to get your girlfriend back from a demon in hell. The conversations between Garcia and his demon pal Johnson are hilarious and I wish the game was more interesting enough for me to keep listening to their conversation. The game mostly revolves around darkness filling the room and the player being tasked with searching for a goat head to shoot at. I know it sounds weird but imagine doing that in every room. Also the game heavily relies on get key to open certain door mechanic. Even the HUD has three slots for the keys. When a game has slots in the HUD for the same keys to be used, you should be expecting to do this same mechanic a lot. Some times you may have the wrong key so you have to look for the other key. Sometimes you might have to use that wrong key in some way to find the right key. There aren’t many ways to go find a key and I believe I’ve seen all the ways this game has to offer. The shooting is okay too in this game. The aiming feels iffy and while there are settings to change this, I didn’t want to spend my time figuring it out. I wish the game wasn’t as repetitive as it was. Otherwise, I think it would have been one of those unique games that I finished.

So there you go, two games I haven’t finished and probably would not finish because I believe that they are not worth playing.