2016 and 2017 have been great years for games, seeing the release of “Overwatch”, “NieR: Automata”, “Dark Souls 3”, and a host of other titles. Many highly-anticipated games were released, like new installments in a series or games from developers of our youth. However, not all of them shone as much as we anticipated, and some feel like they served only to milk the cash cow of a franchise.

While this is nothing new in any franchise of any industry, video games in particular are being held to higher and higher standards as technology increases, and large-scale developers and publishers that can invest the money into quality games are held to different standards than, say, an indie developer creating a quality game.

What games am I talking about exactly? Well, we’ll start with one that’s been pretty negatively received recently.

[yp_banner img_src=”https://theicon.com-content/uploads/2017/04/andromeda.jpg” img_size=”1400×600″ banner_size=”mid” top_position=”false” boxed=”false”]1. Mass Effect: Andromeda[/yp_banner]

People waited with bated breath for the next title in the “Mass Effect” franchise. While it wasn’t the fourth direct installment some were hoping for, the promise of a new story with a new cast was intriguing and garnered the title a lot of hype before its release.

Then the game actually released.

Most of the negative reception stemmed from the slightly uncomfortable to downright bizarre facial expressions of the characters, and the way those expressions reacted or responded to stimuli in the world around them. This is particularly evident in the case of Pathfinder Ryder, where (when playing as the female protagonist), they smile and continue to smile as they explain that their father is dead.

The game was also released riddled with bugs, and with what has been deemed to be a flimsy, forced story. Many user reviews repeat an iteration the same thing: “it feels lazy and unfinished”.

Considering the critical reception of “Mass Effect” titles in the past, and the quality of said titles leading up to the “Andromeda” installment, it’s disappointing to have a large-scale developer release a buggy, oddly animated and seemingly rushed game.

[yp_banner img_src=”https://theicon.com-content/uploads/2017/04/Yooka-Laylee_Waterfall.jpg” img_size=”1400×600″ banner_size=”mid” top_position=”false” boxed=”false”]2. Yooka-Laylee[/yp_banner]

The name “Banjo-Kazooie” invokes nostalgia for many people, a popular platform title from 1998 and one of the great collectathon games. When “Yooka-Laylee” was announced as its spiritual successor, people were ecstatic. Trailers revealed beautiful, colorful worlds and you could only think back to the first game with fondness as you watched.

When the game released on April 11 this year, excitement turned to boredom for some. While graphically beautiful, the charm of collectathon games was lost in translation in the brave attempt of “Yooka-Laylee” to return us to that magic of our youth.

One of the outcries surrounding the title has concerned the lack of direction for the game, with a plot that centers only around collecting pagies to complete the game, as well as missions and levels that started to feel recycled and lazy.

Lazy. There’s a familiar word. Wonder where we’ve seen that before.

Many claim that the level design feels outdated, which is certainly something to debate as the game presents itself on the shoulders and premise of a 90s classic, but the lack of inventiveness in these decades gone by is disappointing, to say the least.

[yp_banner img_src=”https://theicon.com-content/uploads/2017/04/final-beat1.jpg” img_size=”1400×600″ banner_size=”mid” top_position=”false” boxed=”false”]3. Final Fantasy XV[/yp_banner]

The much anticipated installment of the “Final Fantasy” franchise wowed people with its stunning graphics and exciting premise, leading to a lot of excitement as its release date got closer and closer.

As people began to play, they realized that the components that made “Final Fantasy” what they are was lost in this title. While beautiful to look at, the franchise has always sold itself on its story–for better or worse. In “Final Fantasy XV”, that story is surface level, with a jarring pacing and many events that happen off screen with little explanation, and characters that come and go and aren’t particularly memorable.

The open world itself is somewhat rough, and many quests seem repetitive in their fetching. A lot of people have questioned whether there is meant to be more that was not included in the release because the game feels unfinished and rushed.

There’s some familiar words again.

Overall, people agree that Final Fantasy XV is not necessarily a bad game, but one that was put out too early, and that it needed more, feeling like bare bones of a game.

[yp_banner img_src=”https://theicon.com-content/uploads/2017/04/Who-cares_sml-e1493247141781.jpg” img_size=”1400×600″ banner_size=”mid” top_position=”false” boxed=”false”]4. So What?[/yp_banner]

With downloadable content capabilities and content that has already been released for some of these titles, these games certainly have room to improve and grow. However, the point is that for these titles to be piggybacking off of the commercial and critical successes of well established franchises or titles, a game feeling “lazy”, “unfinished”, or “rushed” is inexcusable.

It’s important to voice your thoughts on these games, too. Not only because it stinks to see a developer just milk a cash cow, but because sometimes they listen. After the initial flood of reviews for “Mass Effect: Andromeda”, BioWare released a statement in a tweet that they were taking everyone’s concerns seriously and looking to plan and provide solutions for players. You can read the tweet here.

Not every developer will necessarily pay attention to the criticisms of their games the way that BioWare might, but they do want people to continue to buy their games, and to do so they have to work to improve the negative feedback they receive.

This is why reviewing is important, people. Making sure developers hear your voice helps them realize the faults of their games, and (hopefully) work to improve those problems in patches, DLC and future titles. Large-scale developers should always be looking to put out high quality games for players, so there should be very little room for excuses or lazy, unfinished titles.

I picked a lot on these three games in this article, but they aren’t the only ones to do it. If you feel that something isn’t holding up to the standard of the titles before it, make your voice heard! It can go a long way, and maybe even lead to solutions for the problems. Just don’t harass them, please.

I’m in a landing craft headed for Omaha Beach. The Germans have undoubtedly set up snipers and machine gunners, sure to shred my comrades and me. Suddenly, the craft and all the soldiers inside begin shaking uncontrollably before coming to an abrupt stop on the beach, where the boatly jitters continue. The crafts open their gates and us Americans are immediately thinned out by the Nazi hordes.

Dead allies fall limply, without any sense of weight or impact.

I look down the beach to see a handful of dead bodies, but a handful of fellow living Americans. Our forces total 16 men. Intel says there are just as many Nazis.

I take aim with my trusty M1 Garand, hearing the faintest bullet impact as a German goes down. I glance to the top right to see if I killed my target. As I’m distracted, I’m shot from God-knows-where before being greeted with a respawn timer that ticks down from 9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1.

I’m back in the action, controlling a fresh man. After a few seconds this one, too, falls to the dastardly German sniper.

2…1. I’m back again, much quicker this time. Myself and a few others meander over to the first line of Nazi defenses and plant charges, which explode in a disappointingly small puff.

Oh yeah, I think to myself. I’m playing an Early Access game. 

A few days too soon, a few dollars too much

“Days of War” is not a bad game. The Steam Early Access World War II multiplayer shooter simply has an identity crisis.

Hearkening back to genre classics including “Call of Duty 2″ and—most prominently—”Day of Defeat,” “Days of War” also tries to be something new. The game’s Steam store page proclaims that “THE NEXT GENERATION OF WW2 IS HERE” while it panders to nostalgia hounds with its promises of classic, skill-based gameplay.

“Days of War” nails the spirit of old-school shooters, but falls completely short in the feel department. Movement and shooting is imprecise, a sensation that isn’t helped by terrible sound design and visual feedback. However, weapons are appropriately lethal, with most killing in two or three shots; sniper and bolt-action rifles usually kill in one hit, and shotguns are absolutely dominant in close-range engagements.

Players cannot simply spray and pray. The extreme recoil on automatic weapons assures that semi-automatic and bolt-action users have a fair—perhaps too fair—fighting chance. But aimed fired, even with automatic weapons, is fairly accurate, meaning the most efficient way to avoid fire from any shooter is to strafe back and forth around corners like a lunatic. In motion, firefights end up looking ridiculous a good portion of the time as bitter enemies engage, carefully plotting their chicken dance as they exchange fire.

This focus on what is ostensibly skill-based combat certainly lends to the old-school vibe, but the floaty controls and lack of visceral response do their best to tear that down. “Call of Duty 2” and “Day of Defeat” feel crisp, with the former having hitmarkers and kill notifications, and the latter displaying gratuitous levels of blood when you hit someone. “Days of War” offers no hit indication other than an easily missed hissing sound. You’re simply left to glancing at the killfeed when you think you may have gotten a kill.

The two modes on offer—Domination and Detonation—are unimaginative, but tried-and-true. Domination sees teams battling for control of a linear sequence of five flags, and Detonation has Allies rush Omaha Beach trying to blow up a series of objectives. There are only three maps—Carentan, Kaysersberg and Omaha Beach—and Omaha Beach only supports Detonation, while the former two only support Domination.

Unfortunately, the maps are unbalanced. Picking Americans off is far too easy for Germans on Omaha Beach, because the Axis team has a clear view of the Allied spawns. Similarly, Carentan allows for German snipers to easily set up shop and spawn trap the Americans; there is also nothing stopping players from literally running into enemy spawns and sitting there. Because both teams spawn in a preset zone no matter what objectives they control, there is virtually no way to escape spawn traps other than luck.

Another side effect of this one-spawn-zone policy is that one team can get completely steamrolled if their frontline is wiped out, allowing the enemies to capture any and all objectives between the spawn and the new engagement zone. But even that can’t stop most battles devolving into fights for inches at a few inevitable chokepoints on every map.

I never once saw the Americans win a match on Carentan, and only saw them win once on Omaha Beach. Kaysersberg is more balanced, but I have never seen either team win before time runs out because the chokepoints are so severe. A likely contributor to matches going nowhere is that there is no indication of objective locations on your HUD—you can only see where objectives are if you look at the minimap. Players usually end up just running to the fight, beelining right past objectives that aren’t clearly marked. Such a basic feature’s omission is, quite frankly, inexcusable.

As a result of the shoddy map design, battles don’t feel like they’re taking place in real locations. There are no flanking routes, no secret passages (Kayersberg does have a sewer system that runs underneath the streets above, but it follows the exact same paths so proves unhelpful) to turn the tides of battle. Every match simply ends up as a battle over a few chokepoints, a trait that screams, You are playing a very deliberately designed video game, with strategically placed closed doors to ensure you do not deviate from this map’s simple, predictable three-lane structure. The maps on offer could be easily salvaged if they received a little TLC and some alternate routes to make battles a bit more fair.

Truth be told, “Days of War” is too simplistic and old-school to be “THE NEXT GENERATION OF WW2,” but not polished enough to feel as crisp as the games it takes inspiration from. The game was originally funded through Kickstarter, and the pitch video showcased some more impressive sounds and environments—no doubt as more proof-of-concept than representative of actual gameplay—as well as total destruction of buildings, “Bad Company 2” style. If that is truly a preview of things to come, then the future could be bright. Some larger-scale forest warfare and snowy mountaintops could, indeed, make for more interesting gameplay than the fish-in-a-barrel design currently on offer.

Developer Driven Arts plans to add two more maps, Russian and British content, a map editor and three new game modes in the next few months, but there is nothing here now—other than a fair start—to warrant a purchase. Driven Arts also said there will be better kill feedback, sounds and graphics in the future.

This all begs the question: why was “Days of War” released on Early Access so…early? The game is hardly past the alpha stage, it seems. There is just too much placeholder content and too many missing features to warrant the $25 price tag. There is a solid foundation—Driven Arts is made up of industry veterans, after all—but it all feel a bit rushed.

Wait and see on this one, or wait for a sale.

I’d like to present this game review in a professional and respectable manner, so I have structured this review in a list of positive and negative characteristics.

The Pasture is a real game, that takes real time to play, and costs real money to purchase. Mikhail Maksimov developed this software which includes 3D models of actual Russian artwork. Sometimes You published this application, Steam’s community voted for this software on Greenlight, and this product will launch on January 17, 2017.

I have exhausted my list of positive features.

The Pasture is not a “game,” it’s more of an experience. The kind of experience that the “down-to-earth” hipster girl would praise while having a frappe at your local, free trade, non-GMO cafe. Which, sickeningly, makes this experience that much worse.

I have concluded that the developers intended to make a statement—just one that I will never understand. In my best interpretation, I believe that The Pasture is a satire on the curation of “modern art” while simultaneously mocking art in its entirety, or at least the upper echelons of artists from the past century. While conceptually Maksimov could have done plenty with this game to make it satirical, he fails to realize any potential. Maksimov should have added interactive commentary, included art of varying mediums, or at least incorporated the FEATURES LISTED, to improve the experience. Instead The Pasture presumptuously sits on its laurels and expects you to stand there, gaping, at the presentation. 

Maksimov’s game design requires the player to exercise an incredible amount of patience. Launching the game, I was assaulted with several different problems, firstly that The Pasture always launches at a resolution of 3840 x 2160 (4k). The game saves no preferences whatsoever, and you will be required to reset the resolution each time you restart the game. The main page includes your basic instructions. All user interaction for The Pasture requires the arrow keys, space bar, and mouse. The menu “music” is jarring and sounds like you’re standing in a tunnel while a plane turbine starts up. I found the user interface didn’t work either. Sometimes the mouse disappears and you can’t start playing, making my journey with The Pasture that much more frustrating.

“Well, how does the game play?” I hear you ask. Well, it plays like garbage. At startup the player has two “choices” about which character they want to play: Grandpa Eggplant-Bat and Goldfinger Dominatrix, each with their own unique characteristics and inflections. For instance, Grandpa Eggplant constantly speaks in Russian, while Lady Goldfinger incites violent coughing wherever you go.

The game controls like someone intentionally stapled your hand to piece of wood. Except this piece of wood is acidic and covered in dull knives. As stated earlier, the game accepts 5 inputs, but the exhibit is incredibly challenging to navigate. You look at your character from a “first-person perspective” and move by holding down. Essentially, you are moving through the game backwards while controlling the camera left and right. The game also prohibits you from moving for too long because holding the down arrow also increases the “time before you die” meter. This meter resets once you stop moving, but the audio visual feedback of the game is so atrocious you may just find yourself having a mental breakdown after a few hours of playing.

Now, I hear yourself saying, “Dave, why would you put yourself through playing this game for hours?” I don’t have a justifiable answer other than I needed to review this game. I don’t know if I beat it, but I have played The Pasture for about 5 hours now. The game has 5 tasks that you must finish. At first these tasks don’t seem too daunting. Most are tied to collecting art pieces throughout the exhibit. Unfortunately (fortunately) the game doesn’t acknowledge all the pieces you collect so it’s impossible to get the final check mark. So I don’t know how it ends and frankly, it’s not worth me finding out.

Visually the game is atrocious. It’s clearly running on a free engine and uses stock UI that is poorly translated. The 3D visuals are a Frankenstein’s monster of models that were hastily stapled together. Almost everything in the entire game moves with broken animation. The game is also covered in tombstones that read “You are Disabled,” and these tombstones are prominently shown when the player dies. I hope that Maksimov mistranslated the tombstones because otherwise this slight will insult anyone disadvantaged. I cannot believe someone could release such visual assault in the current gaming landscape.

Death in The Pasture is the second most insulting experience of the game to say the least. The player is overloaded with audio/visual feedback after they exceed their moving limit, while their character presumably murders the camera. Once dead, a satirical quote about art appears on the screen, affirming to the player that everything you just experienced was worthless. Why they subject you to watch this death sequence is beyond tolerance, but remember, this game is a test of patience. After each session, I found the experience offensive and cynical at best.

*SPOILER ALERT* (Can this game have spoilers?)

The most insulting content in this application is the “winning” scenario. You can “win” by getting your character to a loosely defined meeting point where, the creatures will sit themselves upon a throne made of feces and needles. The throne has emoji style poop floating above it and really drives home how worthless this whole endeavor is. If that wasn’t bad enough, the camera begins to spin wildly while the sound once again cranks all the way up, spamming your ears with painful music.

*SPOILER OVER*

I cannot recommend anyone play The Pasture. The game is cynical and half-baked. If you want to play a game that actually challenges the art of video games, try The Stanley Parable because it offers far more amusement for your money. Overall, I left this experience somewhat offended and depressed that anyone could have such a low opinion of art or video games. While this game’s premise has some potential, the overall experience truly fails to accomplish anything it has set out to do, and I feel the whole application is a waste of time.

TLDR: DON’T BUY THIS GAME.