Movie Review: Elysium - Self-indulgently Macho Sci-fi Satire

Elysium stands as an excellent example how to fashion a brilliant setting welded to a political statement and then largely waste the effort. While Neill Blomkamp succeeded in social commentary via sci-fi in his previous outing, Distrinct 9, his new movie Elysium failed to convince me that this splendid society of economic inequality was created for something more than furistic gunshots and exo-suit powered fist fights.

The story takes place in 2154. Matt Damon is the Earth-bound Max, a man with a criminal past just trying to make his way on a planet that has long since been abandoned by the wealthy elite. This patrician class has fled the desolate and ruined surface to a luxurious man-made habitat satellite in the sky called Elysium. When he finds himself with only a few days to live, he makes it his desperate mission to travel to Elysium where his solution awaits.

With Jodie Foster playing homeland security chief for the satellite promised land, the two soon find themselves at odds. Max battles an agent in her employ, Kruger (Sharlto Copley). Kruger is amoral, lives for combat, and has a terribly confusing accent. And of course, he has a major case of JWD (Just Won’t Die).

This conflict steals the show, but not for the better. The brutality of their back-and-forth devours the intended satirical effect of the movie. I was left longing for more exposition about the fascinating state of Elysium, or the day-to-day toils of those down on the surface of Earth. Instead, I got explosions, guns, and fistfights. These could have been lifted from any number of movies you’ve seen before. For example, within the whole fascinating world of Elysium, Blomkamp chose to put a protracted ten minute fight seen on a barren patch of dirt. Not only are the fights nothing special, they aren’t even performed on the proper stage.

With a premise as promising as Elysium’s, every punch thrown and shot fired felt like another wasted opportunity. It seems to me like Blomkamp might have taken the wrong lesson from his previous movie, District 9, ascribing its success to the action-packed bits at the end. What made that movie splendid was its attention to world-building and the characters that lived there. On the other hand, Elysium teases a dystopian future with depth to spare, yet barely dips a toe in the pool and fails to deliver characters that can carry the story. Perhaps next time Blomkamp ventures back into the realm of bleak sci-fi as social commentary, he’ll give his viewers a bit more credit.

#18: The Showdown Effect - Carnage and Cliche

The Showdown Effect is a mish-mosh of action movie tropes proudly assembled in the form of a 2.5D action sidescroller. Surprisingly, it focuses on fast-paced multiplayer matches with several unique game modes, with no true single player mode. These games are no longer than your average session of Call of Duty, with an equally impressive body count. Competition is fierce, and the skill required to be the best is deceptively high. If you're into skill-based multiplayer games and have a hankerin' for something fresh after you've exhausted Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Natural Selection 2, then The Showdown Effect delivers.

There are two basic varieties of weaponry: ranged and melee. Ranged weapons hit the opponent only if you click directly on the opponent, not behind them, a task that can be more difficult than expected. Melee weapons, on the other hand, deal massive damage and can be used to deflect incoming damage but are by their very nature more difficult to touch an opponent with. Add to this mix some dodge rolls, dives, bandaging, special moves, customized loadouts, wacky game modes, and active reloads a la Gears of War and you've got a Showdown.

Why shoot while standing when you can shoot while wall-jumping?

The basic deathmatch mode did not impress me. I found it to be relatively slow paced and uninteresting. With no single-player to speak of, the choice cuts of Showdown Effect lie in the less-played modes of One Man Army and The Expendables (referencing this). One Man Army is a different take on the classic FPS variant called Juggernaut. Everyone gets one turn per round as a super-powerful character while everyone else gangs up on them. The One Man Army who gets the most cumulative kills during their turn is declared winner.

My favorite, however, was The Expendables. Both teams are the same size, but one is stronger, spawns with their loadouts and special abilities, and can self-heal. How could the other team possibly win with their weaker characters and randomized weapons? Simple: they have instant respawn times while the super-team respawn timer gets longer and longer. Then teams switch. A sample game:

I join a game and choose Dutch McClone, whose terrific and intentionally generic backstory involves having no memory, being a clone and trying to figure out who took away his memory. My loadout has me using dual hand-crossbows, a rifle, and a golden ax. I load in on the overpowered team, where we fend off the henchman hordes for about twenty or thirty points. Suddenly, things go downhill: two team members fall, with respawn times above forty seconds.

Blue here is on the "Heroes" team, so if he dies to that rocket, he's got a long
respawn timer ahead of him. 

I flee from the marauding hordes of rocket-toting rabble. They outnumber my remaining teammate and me, and we both know our only hope is to run, try and pick them off one at a time, and stall until we can re-assemble. The tension of holding out against the endless henchmen as long as possible is one of the most enjoyable multiplayer moments I've had in recent memory, made even better by playing on a team with a few friends.

I do doubt the long-term replay value of the Showdown Effect, but I would have also said the same about games like Call of Duty. Many gamers continue to play the franchise with only glacially slow modifications to the formula, so what's fun may stay fun.

There is also the issue of map variety and the amount that player skill can be tested by awareness of surroundings. There are limits to how much these factors matter in a game that only moves from side to side. Bringing some buddies will drastically improve your mileage; when you get tired of gibbing folks with your shotgun, you can always get into a healthy diving-enemies-off-of-cliffs competition.

Its shortcomings aside, the Showdown Effect is a kitchen sink-salad of disparate game genres that shouldn't work nearly so well as it does. The simple deathmatch I first jumped into underwhelmed me, but my experimentation with the novel game modes alongside my friends made it clear that the risks Paradox took making this were rewarded. As I often find myself saying in my reviews, for $2.50 on sale or $10 full price, it's a worthy purchase. I'd more strongly recommend a 4-pack though; this is a game best played on a team with three friends.

3.5/5

#17: FTL: Faster Than Light - Boldly Go Where You'll Go Many Times Again

In FTL: Faster Than Light, you captain a starship on a secret mission. You carry information critical to the success of the last stand of the Federation fleet. As you can imagine, the "Federation" isn't doing too well if they're having a last stand. Outer space is full of people that want to shoot missiles, lasers, and people into your spaceship until it blows up. Once it blows up, it's game over, and it will blow up. And you will start over. But that's how the game works.

You see, FTL is randomly generated each time. As you jump from waypoint to waypoint across the stars evading the advancing rebel fleet, unpredictable encounters with enemies and conditional-friends will help you collect fuel, missiles, weapons and scrap with which to upgrade your ship. Upgrading is essential: the opposing ships rapidly increase in power and will leave you in the dust unless you use every trick in the book to stay alive and make your ship battle ready.

The UI is initially overwhelming, but you'll quickly be rerouting power from healing bay to shielding like a pro.

A typical game sees me starting out in my bare-bones ship, sending my crew members to their stations and warping to the nearest point of interest. I encounter a basic automated drone; because knocking out the oxygen will do nothing, I opt for the simple and direct approach of blasting at its shield generator until it explodes in a shower of debris, awarding me with some scrap.

Next, I find a slave ship. It offers to sell me a slave for a sum of scrap I cannot afford. My other two options are to fight it or leave. I opt to fight it; after beating their ship within a few seconds of death, they offer me terms of surrender: I take a slave for free, or else they will all die. Acknowledging my need for another crew member more than scrap, I agree to their terms. My crew member is not human, though; he's a rock-person, with 50% more HP, fire resistance, and half speed.

Jumping to the next waypoint, I encounter a planet of strange, six-legged, doe-eyed creatures. I am given the option of harvesting them to sell or attempting to communicate with them peacefully. In my greed, I opt to harvest them for money, only to have them turn aggressive and kill one of my crew members.

The best part is that eventually, your ship will be unprepared. You'll be boarded and your crew overpowered, your ship obliterated by overwhelming firepower, or simply gimped by an opposing ship that knocks out your engines and has defenses you can't penetrate in time.

"That's the best part?" you might be justified in asking. "Dying?" 

Of course it's impervious to heat. I mean, why wouldn't it be?

Yes. It is the knowledge that your ship is woefully unprepared that makes the run when the stars align and you power your way through the universe that much sweeter. For those who have ever played The Binding of Isaac or another rogue-like, it's the blistering difficulty and element of the unknown combined with permanent death that makes every attempt intense and enjoyable.

If it was not already obvious, I've enjoyed my time with FTL. I admit it was improved by my appreciation of sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek and Firefly, but I think that's more of a cherry on top than anything. However, the game has a few snafus.

After a few runs, it starts to feel like there are too many ship fighting events and not enough of everything else. The way ship shielding works can create a brick wall for players that, through sheer luck, are unable to properly equip themselves with appropriate weaponry in time, and this can be frustrating when it puts an end to an otherwise flawless run. And lastly, without revealing too much, you may very well never fully complete the game, and I would not blame you.

Despite its flaws, I think FTL is one of the most bold. inventive, and lets not forget fun indie games around. I recommend it sincerely and particularly because it is only $15 even at full price.

4.5 out of 5


If you found this review useful, please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. If you suggest a game and I own it, I'll play it for a future entry.

#16: Dust: An Elysian Tail - A Furry Case of the Metroidvanias

Dust: An Elysian Tail is an exercise in genre-blending. With its 2D platforming elements and slowly trickling supply of new tools to navigate hidden areas, it quickly prompts comparison to the famous Metroid and Castlevania games. Where it diverges noticeably, however, is in its approach to combat. Put simply, it's a brain-melting frenzy of projectiles, sparks and numbers, with combo counts in the hundreds for even basic enemies.

There's probably a Dragon Ball Z move to reference here,
but it's not one that I'm familiar with. Missed opportunity.

Within minutes, I was hitting X, Y and B in essentially random arrangements, with my Dust (the name of the protagonist) soaring into the sky, comboing baddies with my talking sword, and flooding my screen in a manner I would normally expect from a Japanese bullet-hell shooter. I was expecting the classic game design trick of "now that you know how powerful you can be, we'll take away all your powers!" But it never came. You start Dust: An Elysian Tail with most of your combat skills, and quickly gain those that remain. The rest of the game feels like that final hour of most RPGs when the player is a nigh-indestructible demigod. Once you gain a basic grasp of how to fight, the game actually expects you to achieve 300+ hit combos: you gain bonus experience for chaining hits! And you will. It's easy and satisfying to alternate between covering the screen in projectiles to stack up your combo meter and attacking foes directly to recharge your special gauge.

As you can see, the whirly-blur is using lightning to create
yellow numbers out of the purple smears.

The RPG elements spill over to the quest-driven nature of the game, with towns full of NPCs just chomping at the bit to send you off on a fetch quest. You equip Dust with various armor which enemies can drop or by crafting recipes using specialized materials (that enemies drop and are sold in stores). Level ups let you prioritize your favorite stats first, although for the most part it doesn't make a huge difference.

In fact, there were only two occasions I wasn't enjoying myself during Dust. The first was any time I was being forced to
backtrack because enemies respawn in rooms behind you.
Luckily, this did not happen too often.

Beware: for better or worse, this critter follows you all game.

The second issue, unfortunately, was more front and center: the characters and plot fell completely flat for
me. Within the first ten minutes, Dust is established as an incredibly talented warrior with amnesia who is mysteriously united with a sentient, talking sword. Without going further than that, I can assure you things don't get much better. If that weren't groan worthy enough, your flying orange squirrel companion has an appearance and irritating voice straight out of Digimon. In fact, all the main characters had melodramatic voice acting combined with hackneyed writing that made me want to play with subtitles only. Additionally, the decision to make every single character an anthropomorphic anime animal did not fit the attempted seriousness of the story. If you were wondering why the subtitle says "tail" instead of "tale", that's why.

It's my opinion that Dust: An Elysian Tail is an excellent expansion upon the 2D platformer explore-a-thon genre typified by games like Metroid, adding incredibly stylized combat to the mix and empowering the player with more RPG elements. The attempt to introduce a serious plot using essentially cartoon animal characters, though it fell flat, was at least an admirable risk. For $7.50, I'd certainly recommend giving it a shot. Go grab it while it's on sale.

4 out of 5

#15: Darksiders II - Who Knew Death Could Be So Much Fun?

I must admit that I originally planned on reviewing both the original Darksiders and the sequel, but I found that there were enough similarities that discussing them back to back would be a waste of words. So instead, I opted to talk about by far my favorite of the two: Darksiders II.

Both games are a mash-up of several other famous game franchises, Darksiders II even more so. This creative franken-game combines the combat of God of War with the loot and talent system of Diablo II, the questing of an MMORPG, the wall-running gymnastics of Prince of Persia, the dungeoneering of Legend of Zelda, and even a little bit of Portal. While some might expect these elements to jive poorly, I found them to combine to create a game greater than the sum of the ingredients.

Fans of Norse settings will love the first 1/3 of the game

3rd person shooter section? Why not?

Perhaps you've seen Darksiders before and been intrigued by the darkly ornate art style or the classic "Angels and demons, heaven and hell" setting. Both games are heavy on the visual flair and light on the story, so appreciating the aesthetic is important. I could tell you everything you need to know about the story of both games in about three sentences, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers I will simply say that you play as Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I am personally a huge fan of what they've accomplished both in character design and in their environments. Whether tearing into an enemy with dual scythes or simply galloping about the overworld, I found myself marveling at my surroundings and taking copious screenshots.

The combat in Darksiders II, as mentioned earlier, borrows heavily from God of War. What makes it unique is the presence of equipment and two distinct skill trees that lend themselves to either a merciless melee-heavy shredding machine or minion-and-ranged necromancer play style. You can painlessly respecialize Death with a simple trip to a vendor, so players can feel free to experiment with whichever style they prefer. The equipment drops off of enemies and from chests throughout the game, and comes in multiple levels of rarity, including legendary weapons from specific bosses and possessed weapons that players can "feed" extra items in order to boost their stats. The level of customization the player is offered for combat is frankly remarkable for this style of game.

Most dungeons have some kind of twist. This one gives you huge
rolling stone golems with rocket fists.

Death finds himself plundering Legend of Zelda style dungeons with regularity in Darksiders II, even down to the grappling hooks, bombs, switch puzzles, and long-running collect-a-thon sidequests. While the puzzles never quite seem to reach too far in complexity, they're enough to make most players do a double-take before coming up with a solution. The original Darksiders had puzzles that were too easy for most of the game, but the follow-up gets it right. Darksiders II is not a short game, either; it contains a solid 20 to 30 hours of gameplay for those who do the side quests, and that's before the "New Game+" that lets you bring all of your equipment, levels, and stats into a second playthrough.

Death's "Reaper Form" is only available in short bursts, but
 is completely awesome and unstoppable.

I came very close to ending this review with a wholehearted seal of approval, but I simply can't in good conscience ignore a few major flaws, particularly in reference to the DLC (an area of discussion that often doesn't get a proper review; aren't you glad I was late to the party now?)

First of all, the game never explains the stats beyond giving you a number that goes up or down. I guess most gamers can probably figure out that "Strength" helps you with melee attacks while "Arcane" helps you with abilities, but what about melee attack abilities? What about abilities that summon minions? Does it increase the health of the minions or the damage? What about defense, does that reduce all damage? Is it a linear reduction or are there diminishing returns to stacking defense? What does "health regen: 36" even mean, that isn't a rate! While this might seem like nitpicking, I believe that trawling the internet to find this information is ridiculous when it's central to the function of your character.

The Darksiders franchise has a uniquely mechanical
take on the appearance of angels.

The second issue is that the DLC has some quality control issues. The first DLC, Argul's Tomb, is very bland, with the only highlight being the use of an icy mountainous setting. The second DLC, The Abyssal Forge, is acceptable though short. The third DLC, The Demon Lord Belial, is fine enough . . . if you can even play it without your game crashing.

See, there's a crippling freeze bug in Darksiders II that can happen to anyone but tends to rear its head for players working their way through the DLC, particularly those who reach the third one. Eventually, your character's safe file is "too big" for what the game is set up to handle, and basic actions will cause the game to crash. Despite this being known for months prior to THQ's own death, it was never fixed.

Luckily, one intrepid internet troubleshooter created an executable that fixes this bug as long as your Darksiders II game is saved in the Steam default location. I personally thanked him for his troubles, as it allowed me to finish playing this otherwise enjoyable game. For those who are interested, you can find it here (make sure to turn off Steam auto-updates for Darksiders II after applying the fix): https://code.google.com/p/ds2fix/

The Verdict

Darksiders II was an excellent hybrid of several phenomenal game franchises. In addition, it has its own endearingly intense and unabashedly over-the-top artistic direction. I recommend Darksiders II to nearly anyone who enjoys one of the "component games", with the caveat that you might need to do some self-troubleshooting. The publisher THQ is now defunct, so I can only pray that someday the IP for Darksiders gets picked up and a third entry (starring Fury or Strife) is given the attention it so clearly deserves.

4 out of 5

Thanks for reading! Please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. If you suggest a game and I own it, I'll play it for a future entry.

#14: Resistance: Burning Skies - Better Than Nothing

As I was just freed from a lengthy 17 hours worth of flights, you can imagine that I had an awful lot of time to kill. I spent a reasonable chunk of that time sleeping awkwardly in the fetal position, to take advantage of the adjacent empty seat. At some point I clawed the businessman next seat over in half-awake confusion.

The other chunk of time was spent playing my freshly purchased PS Vita that came with Resistance: Burning Skies. I'm aware it's not a Steam game, but I personally believe that consoles and handhelds have great offerings as well. Unfortunately, this particular entry in the Resistance franchise was average in almost every way, which was both a slight disappointment and better than nothing, especially considering a certain critically-reamed Call of Duty spin-off on the Vita.

The gameplay is everything you'd expect from a shooter on the Vita, which comes with the caveat of "there is no gold standard for what to expect from a shooter on the Vita". You aim down various gun barrels at various baddies, with just enough of both to be kind of interesting. There's generous aim correction out of necessity, because even though the Vita has two control sticks, they simply cannot replicate a console controller.

Because the plot is just so incredibly forgettable and cliche (you play as a one-man-army fireman fighting for his family), Resistance: Burning Skies really depended on the gunplay to save it and only barely succeeded. Enemy AI is a joke; they move in a jerky, illogical manner and seem to always enter the battle in strategic locations in lieu of actually having any logic governing their behavior to lead them there. There are really only five types of standard enemies, each assigned a specific gun, and they all have quirks that don't feel quite intended. For example, I found the enemy type that sports the wall-penetrating "Augur" gun to be easily countered by stepping left and right and firing an Augur back at him. They don't seem very inclined to move while shooting.

Generally when I died, it was because I was caught by an enemy with a clean line of sight on you at close range. I get the impression enemy accuracy was reduced by giving them unnaturally high bullet spread; this means that when even the lowest level baddie gets a few feet away, he can still kill you in two seconds by himself. I think switching it to "Hard" would have perhaps caused me to die to other things as well, but even on normal, point blank enemies hurt so bad that the shotgun was often too dangerous to use.

You need to be able to make your own fun in Resistance: Burning Skies. Your various weapons all have imaginative secondary fire modes, like the franchise trademark "Bullseye" automatic rifle's "tag" that causes all bullets fired to home in on the tagged target. Because the environments are lazily-made hallways with cover leading to rooms with cover leading to hallways with cover, the only meaningful variety must come from the player's usage of their toys.

Let me put it this way. Resistance: Burning Skies is not worth the price unless you are truly a die-hard Resistance fan or you're desperate for a shooter on the Vita. I personally acquired my Vita for so cheap that the copy of Resistance was just a bonus, so I don't feel slighted in the least.

I'm going to start assigning numerical values to my evaluation of games, because the way I look at it, if Tom Chick can end up on Metacritic while shattering the "game review scale" under the justification of total subjectivity (2/10 for Halo 4?), then my number is just as good. So...


2 out of 5


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#13: To The Moon - I Hope They Have Kleenex There

Borrowed from the Wiki page!

If you've ever wished your video games made you get weepy more often, then To The Moon is the game for you. We're going to cover some ground similar to my Dear Esther review here, but rest assured that I think To The Moon stands on its own two feet as an enjoyable experience. Just make sure to play it alone and in one sitting, because it's like a movie both in structure and length.

To The Moon is a touching story about fulfilling a dying mans wish to, you guessed it, go to the moon.. It's got a sort of science-fiction tint to it since it's done through a device that allows traveling through memories and modifying them in a manner similar to a combination of Inception and Memento. As with any tearjerker story, a romance is involved. Considering the game uses a retro pixel-heavy art style, you've got to have at least a little bit of imagination for it to work, but I think the creator has done an admirable job.

To The Moon's gameplay is shallow at best. It can be played with a gamepad, arrows and spacebar, or a mouse as a point and click adventure, but it makes little difference because there is no skill element whatsoever except for a simplistic panel-flipping mini game you encounter in order to progress. Essentially, the story is stapled to a skeleton of a game that sometimes feels utterly unnecessary except to keep the player directly involved in what's going on. The story truly carries it all the way from beginning to end, to the extent that sometimes it feels like segments that are player controlled would be better off as cut scenes. Whether you feel cheated when you play To The Moon will be determined largely by whether you're in it for the story or for depth of mechanics. Luckily, I knew what I was getting into when I played it, and the narrative was more than enough to make me happy (and sad).

Image credit: MajorMitch at Giantbomb.
My Steam overlay wasn't playing nice for taking snapshots. 

I don't think it's possible to talk about To The Moon without mentioning the soundtrack. The score truly sets the mood. The music is haunting and beautiful, particularly the "main song" of the story. You'll know which one I'm talking about when you play, because it's played so much it almost (almost) loses its effect.

I must make a few comments on the narrative while hopefully avoiding anything too spoiler-y. I do not think that the story was well served by the "sci-fi memory diving machine" aspect. It was almost entirely separate from the true story being told, the dying man's life story. I also found that the dialogue was sometimes painfully unrealistic or awkward, particularly between the two doctors working through his memories. There were too many moments that felt like the writer was saying "Look! This character is a nerd! You are probably a nerd! This makes this character cool!" I found that particular character obnoxious because he was inconsistent with the tone of the story.

Despite my narrative bashing and dislike of cliches, my cynical self was shedding manly tears by 2/3 or so through the game. I cry when things are sad, so your results may vary, but there's a certain twist that left me pleasantly surprised.

To The Moon is a good peek at how narratives in video games could develop in the future. Between Bioshock: Infinite and this, I am optimistic (though I think I've had enough stories with lighthouse motifs for a while.) It's nowhere near perfect, particularly in the "game" aspect, but it's a step forward. For that, To The Moon was totally worth $2.50, and I'd recommend picking up the soundtrack as well if you've got the cash.


Thanks for reading. Please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.