View Single Post
Old 01-01-2007, 05:23 PM   #28
Aj_
Beyond Belief
 
Aj_'s Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Blighty
Posts: 2,186
Default

It's sad because BS4 actually tried to correct a lot of the problems BS3 had, but the majority of the time they were worse because in principle they'd work, but the execution was extremely poor. The camera, controls, item interaction.

The item menu didn't pop-up 100% of the time, the mouse was laggy so when trying to click on something when the camera was moving was quite hard. The ramp infront of the slaughter house/meat processing factory (perhaps, I forget exactly what it was) was anoying, the camera and dodgy movement controls conspired together on that one. I don't see how the game got through testing.

It was the non-skippable repeating sequences that stopped me from finishing the game in the end. That's a slight lie, because I've played through badly designed games before, for the story, and BS4's story didn't interest me at all. This type of game gives the impression that Adventure games should be "suffered" for the story, and thus we have Adventure "sucesses" with no Adventure gameplay in them (or about as much as you find in most games, including shooters). It's sad that we blame a game for trying, but praise games that don't try on the gameplay side at all, I hope this trend doesn't continue.

Tomb Raider Legend was inspired by the original game (the only one that was good until Legend IMO), and I think there was a very similar situation with BS4 (I thought BS2 was mediocre, and BS3 was bad), but the developer didn't have the quality or the writers to pull it off in BS4's case, while Legend got moderately good reviews all round (at least the ones I've read).

Dreamfall was by far the biggest disappointment though, considering the previous effort, with a very limited budget and experience. The gameplay is completely forgettable and so was the story. BS4 was by far the worst game if not factoring in expectations that I played this year. I doubt I'll ever play any of the other games on the list (I've already heard they're bad or broken).

Last edited by Aj_; 01-03-2007 at 08:37 AM.
Aj_ is offline