HIGH Goodbye “Quests”, hello “Leads”!

LOW Shallow gameplay mechanics.

WTF They “say less is more” but isn’t it too little!?

Atomfall is Rebellion’s timely break from the Sniper Elite franchise.

Officially called a first-person survival actioner, this work of historical science fiction is a reasonably-sized double-A project that does not want all of a player’s time and attention, instead offering a short, mysterious adventure filled with conspiracies and moral dilemmas.

Atomfall‘s story is set five years after the UK’s (real life) Windscale Fire nuclear incident of 1957. In this alternate take, a military quarantine protocol is enacted and players control of someone who’s had an accident that left him unconscious for five years. Upon waking up, the protagonist discovers that he’s lost his memory and now must find the truth behind the incident and a way out of the quarantine that’s been in effect for all this time.

Atomfall is played from a first-person perspective, and employs stealth and shooting elements. In the early stages, firearms and bullets are rare and combat is mostly focused on melee. Later on, different types of firearms such as revolvers, marksman rifles, and bows can be acquired through looting, exploration, or trading. The world consists of four areas that are connected through a hub-like facility called The Interchange. Different factions reside in each part of the world, and as one might expect, the factions can consider the player either friend or foe based on their choices.

Atomfall can largely be seen as two halves — the gameplay and the narrative.

Though there is a barebones skill tree that improves combat, stealth, and survival capabilities of the player, it doesn’t provide any active special abilities. As such, Atomfall largely plays the same at the end as it does at the beginning, resulting in the combat and stealth feeling shallow, especially since the mechanics (in general) are on par with something from the early 2000s.

For example, players can crouch or hide in bushes to prevent being detected and to take out enemies silently from behind but that’s all there is to it. The awareness of enemies is also incredibly high, which makes it nearly impossible to stealth without it eventually turning into a shootout. The same goes for combat. Melee is tanky and slow because there’s no dodge or deflect, and shootouts are all about hiding behind a rock and returning fire. There are no cover systems or special abilities to add depth or strategy to any of the action. In fact, the only good thing about combat is the weapon variety and the ability to upgrade later in the campaign, increasing a weapon’s stats and their looks.

With such straightforward action, Atomfall‘s narrative and story are certainly its strongest suits, and to be fair, its opening is a good one — imagine leaving an underground bunker, suffering from amnesia and the very first thing in view is an atomic powerplant on the horizon surrounded by strange cyan auroras. Before that sight can be properly digested, a nearby payphone rings and a monstrous voice on the other side requests the death of someone called Oberon! Just five minutes into the experience we’re already faced with so many questions — what happened to that powerplant? Who is Oberon? Who are these people living in this mess? And what is my role in it? Mystery is a classic way to kick off an adventure, and the team at Rebellion have nailed it.

Atomfall also tries to redefine the notion of quests and rebrands them as “leads” — and they don’t start and end in a traditonal linear way. Some of the leads players find at the beginning of the story will continue to get updated until the very end. Sometimes finding an object updates the log for multiple leads and adds entries about them. Every lead might be as important as the next, and players will find themselves in a web of interconnected leads whose value and importance are sometimes revealed only after their conclusion.

Further, Atomfall doesn’t believe in handholding when it comes to exploration and lead design. Players must follow visual clues such as a bloody set of footprints that lead to a waterfall to find a hidden cave behind it. Such do-it-yourself encounters are the basis of exploration which might result in finding rare resources, weapons, quest items, or more leads.

While Atomfall‘s ending isn’t a top-notch example in the genre, it is highly reflective of the choices players make and their interactions with NPCs. Supporting characters met along the way are well written and each have characteristics that make them feel like unique human beings with agendas and aspirations, and very often they’re in contrast with what someone else wants — for example, one might be focused on accepting what’s happening in the zone, another NPC asks you to fight against the odds, while yet another might suggest jumping ship and leaving everyone else to their fate. Credits will roll accordingly.

Atomfall is ultimately what I call a “chimera” game — it incorporates elements from different genres, but keeps their influence on a surface level. It has resource management and crafting mechanics of classic survival titles, multiple endings and choice-related story and gameplay outcomes akin to classic RPGs, and an emphasis on exploration usually seen in action-adventure counterparts. These are all good things at first glance, but the lack of depth in most regards makes it hard to recommend to dedicated genre fans while also making it relevant to any discussion on traditional boundaries of defining genre.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy Atomfall: PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is published and developed by Rebellion. It is available on PC, PS4/5, and XBO/X/S. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 14 hours were spent in single-player and the game was completed. There is no multiplayer.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood, Language and Violence. The site reads: Battles are highlighted by gunfire, cries of pain, and blood-splatter effects. Players have the ability to attack/kill bystanders and civilians, snapping their necks and/or slashing them repeatedly, with large blood-splatter effects. During the course of the game, players can encounter bloodstained corpses and/or blood on the ground. The words “sht” and “prck” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are not present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles and visual options available in the game, all of which can be adjusted. There were no audio cues of note. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Atomfall Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Pulling off a perfectly-timed string of hits without hesitation.

LOW Where is the last guy on this level?!

WTF The balancing of the last two stages!

It’s been a minute since Hotline Miami came crashing in with its sublimely disturbing tale of bloody, ruthless murder amid twisted conspiracies. It was a tough act to follow, and even its own sequel couldn’t carry the torch of its unnervingly-cathartic action paired with puzzle-like structure. However, Children of the Sun might be considered the next real contender for that crown.

Players star as a nameless teenage girl gifted with immense psychic powers, on the run with her injured father. When he succumbs to his injuries, she goes on an absolute bloodbath against the cult responsible for her abilities, and for mortally wounding her father. With a sniper rifle, she’ll hunt down their leader – a psychopath in sunglasses who apparently thinks he’s Jesus reincarnated, judging by his outfit choices. The cult is terrorizing the local area, so stopping them is arguably the right thing to do… but exacting revenge is still a harrowing task. 

Despite how intense the subject is, Children of the Sun is a surprisingly simple shooter. Players are set on a linear, semi-circle perimeter that they can walk back and forth across. While walking the perimeter, they can aim down their scope to mark enemies, and once they’re ready, they pull the trigger and fire a single bullet.

Players then guide their bullet with the heroine’s psychic powers. With each strike, they can pivot it in any direction, chaining an ever-escalating bodycount until every member of the cult is six feet under, all of it achieved with just a mouse. It’s incredibly smooth to control. Other than some balancing limitations for how much each bullet’s arc can be altered, pulling off brutal headshots has never been easier.

Over time, the heroine’s powers evolve to allow for adjusting the shot’s course after it’s fired, first subtly, then more, and the finally upgrade enables a brutal charged shot that requires enough distance to pierce the defense of the heavily-armored enemies.

Wild birds and fish can be used as ‘bonus’ targets that link the bullet into deadly chained hits across great distances, letting the shell effectively leap from one vantage point to the next. Also, clever environmental trickery rewards not only with faster kills, but can lead to achieving bonus objectives themed around each stage. It’s still just killing bad guys, but sometimes with an extra flourish, like using explosive to kill them, or getting two kills with one shot.

I tended to mark every enemy I could see before firing my shot, but the sometimes-frustrating irony is that later stages will hide some enemies in such a way that a player can only find them after their bullet is in the air. Most of the time this works out fairly enough, but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few instances when a hidden straggler was just too out of the way, testing my patience.

Nowhere was this more evident than the final two stages. I won’t spoil what happens, but it’s so trial-and-error that it feels built to pad out the runtime and desperately needed a mid-level checkpoint. I totally understand why in smaller stages, with only six to eight targets, that there’s no room for error. Starting over takes seconds. The final stage takes substantially longer, not as a test of skill, but a test of enduring tedium. There are also two weird back-to-back minigames that are mandatory, inspired loosely by Pac-Man and WarioWare. I couldn’t begin to explain why they’re there.

The silver lining to all of this is that most of the frustration is drowned out by wonderful little touches and clever design wrinkles. Without even trying, I binged the entire campaign in one sitting. There were points where it made me feel over the moon with glee at a perfectly-chained series of strikes, and times when the plot left me deeply disconcerted in just the right way.

It’s not gonna be a game for everyone, but for some, it’ll be an unforgettable ride.

Final Score: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Rene Rother and published by Devolver. It is currently available on PC. This copy of Children of the Sun was provided via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Four hours were dedicated to the single-player campaign, and it was completed.

Parents: Though not yet rated at the time of review by the ESRB, this game is full of M-level mature content, including Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual References and Use of Drugs. You’re essentially playing a serial killer villain with psychic powers. Everything is both graphically violent and morally ambiguous at best. Though you only kill with a sniper rifle against stylized, low-detail enemies, the context is in no way distanced from the player’s mind. This is not a game for kids.

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes available. Certain enemy designations are indicated by slight color gradient variations when marked by the player. This may cause difficulty in tracking targets for those who are colorblind, though there there are other distinguishing factors to set various enemy types apart.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game features limited subtitles, and otherwise relies almost entirely on visual prompts for how to proceed. Regardless, it’s a reasonable experience to play without sound, and I would say that it’s at least near-fully accessible.  

Remappable controls: No, the controls are not remappable. The entire game can be played one-handed with a mouse or controller.

The post Children Of The Sun Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finally tracking down a black bear on a moonless night.

LOW Being forced to hunt rabbits – again – to unlock the next level.

WTF How am I supposed to tell which of these sheep is legendarily formidable? They’re just sheep!

It’s nice when a title serves as a statement of purpose. There are no frills here, no fancy setup or elaborate narrative. The game simply wants to simulate hunting. So, how good a job does it do from the viewpoint of someone like me, who knows absolutely nothing about hunting?

Hunting Simulator allows players to explore more than a dozen enormous maps across a hundred missions, crawling through deserts, hiking up hillsides, and creeping through brush in the hopes of sighting and shooting their intended targets. Players can move around and explore in either first- or third-person perspective, then use rifle scopes once prey has been spotted. Fundamentally, the gameplay isn’t so different from a stealth/sniper title. The goal is to move carefully and deliberately through an area without being spotted, and then get a clean vital shot. The fact that I’m attempting to shoot a deer in the heart rather than a Nazi in eye doesn’t have that much of an effect on the mechanics.

From that mechanical point of view, this is a fairly forgiving simulation. Players don’t have to bother with wind speed or bullet drop – once a target has been sighted it’s a simple matter of point and shoot. Far more in-depth are the stalking mechanics, which reach a level of detail for which I was completely unprepared. Every animal can become aware of the player based on smell, sight, and hearing. Target an enemy and three bars appear on the screen, which gradually fill as any of the sense are triggered. If any of the lines fill up, the animal will spook and run for it. Avoid this — even with slow motion aiming in effect, a running animal is far harder to hit than a still one.

Each animal has unique abilities, and must be approached with different strategies. Wolves and bears, for example, have incredible smell, so players can use a puff of powder to determine wind direction and and then circle around to attack from downwind. Other animals have such keen hearing that players will have to slow-crawl to a good vantage point if they want a chance at a decent shot. While the shooting gameplay may be nothing special, the stalking is impressively designed, and does a great job of making players feel like they’re working hard to earn their shot opportunities.

However, there is one problem with the stalking mechanic, which keeps it from feeling like a truly effective simulation – the way the game handles tracking.

Each hunt starts with the player being told about a general area they might be able to find traces of the animal they’re searching for. Once they’ve found a track, they can analyze that and see an illuminated set of tracks letting them know what direction the animal was traveling, and how long ago the tracks were left. This information places a circle on the map, letting players know roughly where the animal can be found, and finding subsequent tracks will update that circle accordingly. That all sounds good, but all tracks are placed there artificially. In this game, animals do not leave tracks in real time.

For example, if I shoot an elk and only injure it, it’ll make a run for it. While it’s running, it doesn’t leave any marks on the ground whatsoever, making it impossible to track. If it happens to die, a marker will appear on my map. If it doesn’t die, it essentially ceases to exist once it’s out of my sight.

If my shooting makes animals run away, I don’t have the option of following them — all a player can do is wander around the map, hoping to find a new set of tracks leading to some freshly-spawned animals, and this lack of a proper tracking mechanic is the game’s biggest problem by far. This omission seems especially strange when one considers that the player character leaves footprints wherever they go. Would it really be so hard for the animals to do the same? Other non-simulator games have managed it, why is that feature not here?

The only other real flaw to Hunting Simulator is its puzzling unlock system. The game offers a wide assortment of maps, each with its own set of exclusive animals, but it only lets players take them on one at a time. I understand wanting to make the player sample every area before moving on to the next one, but forcing them to complete every single hunt before letting them see the next location is oddly frustrating. Also, the weapon unlocks are a complete mystery – players can see a list of guns an equipment that they’ll eventually gain access to, but there’s no criteria for how to unlock them. These two odd choices combined to create a great deal of frustration in the first two maps, in which I was expected to hunt down rabbits and birds nearly ten different times all before I finally unlocked a shotgun – the best weapon for doing that – on the third map.

So, how well does Hunting Simulator simulate hunting? I can’t speak to its verisimilitude, but as a game, this is a solid animal-stalking experience which has its best parts undercut by a frustrating menu system and unrealistic tracking mechanic. The shooting, simple though it may be, is satisfying, and there’s definitely a worthwhile amount of challenge to be found in carefully sneaking up on prey. This is a good hunting game, but these technical issues keep it from being a great one. Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Neopica and published by Bigben Interactive. It is currently available on PC, XBO and PS4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. 2 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Violence. It’s a hunting game, what did you expect? This is filled with imagery of adorable animals being shot and killed, with bullet-cams lovingly depicting the flight of projectiles into the flesh of the unsuspecting prey. There’s none of the Sniper Elite borderline pornographic X-Ray damage cameras, but it definitely has the potential to upset even younger teens.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: While listening for animal calls is a key gameplay mechanic, there are visual cues to help impart that information as well. All instructions are offered through text, although the text is not resizable. This is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. there is no controller diagram. The player controls their hunter with the left thumbstick, the camera with the right. The shoulder buttons handle aiming, shooting, and switching camera modes. Face buttons handle pose changes, reloading, and item use. The touchpad opens the map.

The post Hunting Simulator Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 – is it a buggy disaster, or the game of the year? Could it be both? Join a trio of critics as they explore this modern shooter that’s as brilliantly designed as it is nearly unplayable!

Host Dan Weissenberger (@gc_danny)is joined for this podcast by:

Elijah Beham(@paradigmfallen), whose unabridged video game reviews can be found at the Unabridged Gamer YouTube Page, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. (@WritNelson), a narrative designer whose Patreon offers a better Bio than I could ever write!

Below, you can find the most amazing examples of SGW3 bugs that we’ve collected!

The post GameCritics Radio: Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 – The Definitive Podcast appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Nailing a long range shot without gameplay assists.

LOW Feeling like little more than a dancing puppet throughout the game.

WTF Spotters are undoubtedly the real heroes, not snipers.

Pulling off tricky shots with a sniper rifle can be one of the greatest feelings that a first-person shooter has to offer, whether nailing an enemy Elite in Halo from halfway across the battlefield, or silently taking out an entire enemy encampment in Far Cry 3. Such satisfaction makes it all the more confusing as to why so few developers who specialize in the art of long-distance murder are able to produce a product that expands on these moments and transforms them into a satisfying full-length game.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is one of these failures, for example. It's a mediocre five hour romp through ten different stages set against a completely forgettable military-themed backdrop with the goal of retrieving a bioagent that apparently "makes the Black Death look like a head cold." Given that the bioagent in question is never unleashed, it might as well be about a magical banana that shoots businessmen at the sun.

Sniper doesn't hold the player's hand; it shackles them in chains and beats them mercilessly around the head and shoulders if they so much as cough without permission.

AI spotters (primarily an omnipotent superspotter named Diaz) will do all the hard work and make all the decisions. If he says to hide in some bushes, not hiding in some bushes will incur the wrath of God from nearby enemy forces. Want to go left instead of right? That'll be a game over most likely, or at least a couple of bullets in the thigh. There's little leeway to formulate a plan that doesn't coincide with what the game expects of players–going too far off the beaten track will simply have the screen dim and flash a warning message to get back inside the mission area before a timer expires.

Outside of the hardest difficulty, everything is set up in such a way that sniping over vast distances is the easiest thing in the world. AI teammates tell the player exactly who to kill, when to kill them, and even note their location with convenient HUD markers for easy target acquisition. Rest the sights on them for a moment or two and a secondary red dot will begin to glow, indicating where the bullet will land after bullet drop, wind interference and other mathematical macguffins work their digital magic. Then it's time to still some breathing and… pop! Dead enemy.

Dead idiotic enemy, actually.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 features the kind of AI where a missed shot pinging into a rock at a goodly distance can immediately give away the player's position, but the enemy will routinely fail to hear their comrade's freshly squeezed corpse slumping into a wall right beside them, or even the sharp crack of the player's unsilenced rifle from relatively close range.

It has to be said that kills are also lacking the graphic payoff that rival sniping game Sniper Elite V2 offers up. In that game, shooting someone in the eyeball didn't simply have the enemy go limp and fall over, it was more likely that players would be treated to a hilariously overdone slow motion X-Ray closeup as the projectile burrowed through his eyeball, spiraled slowly through his brain (spattering chunks of gray matter all over the place) and then triumphantly emerging from the back of his cranium with a solid chunk of his head missing. Written down, it sounds thoroughly disgusting. In practice, it was a comically overdone, yet ultimately satisfying payoff to a shot well targeted.

In Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2? Everyone simply falls over.

Occasionally a kill-cam will leap into action to portray a bullet's magnificent journey into someone else's nutsack, but it always ends up with the bad man simply grunting before promptly falling over.

Not to worry though. If a heavily-scripted four or five hour campaign with dreary fatalities doesn't get one's saliva all a-drooling, why not hop into the multiplayer mode for the intoxicating adrenaline rush of competing against unpredictable human opponents? Filled to bursting with two whole multiplayer maps and offering the ever-popular Team Deathmatch, it's… sorry, I can't take this any further. It's not awful, but for most people the multiplayer will likely prove to be a waste spent watching the scenery for minutes at a time as they attempt to discern miniscule flickerings of movement through their scope.

It probably reads like I despised Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, though that's not entirely accurate. It was no more boring than certain competing AAA titles that are so petrified of things going wrong that they never allow the player to experiment further than holding "up" during a cut-scene where the entire world is exploding around them. It was simply another bland experience where I found myself listening to someone telling me what to do, who to shoot and when. Rinse and repeat until the world is saved.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 does a mediocre job of offering up a shooting gallery, but it's so limited in scope that it's almost impossible to recommend to anyone who doesn't feel a strange sense of arousal whenever they imagine popping a bullet into someone's head at several hundred yards. Well, whenever Diaz finally tells them to, of course. Rating: 4.0 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via rental and reviewed on the Xbox 360. Approximately six hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. One hour of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains blood, drug references, intense violence, sexual themes and strong language.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: There are quite a few moments where the inability to hear certain audio cues or background noise would be disadvantageous, despite subtitles being available for conversations and the like. Be prepared for a more challenging experience.

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