Stories: The Path of Destinies

This game has a great story and I really enjoyed seeing it unfold. Wish I could say the same about the combat gameplay.

Stories: The Path of Destinies takes place in a world populated by animals, in Aesop's Fables style. You play as Reynardo the fox, fighting against an evil Emperor (who is a toad) on the side of rebels against his army of ravens. It's a swashbuckling setting where Reynardo fights with magic swords in settings ranging from forests to mountains to leaping across the decks of battling airships.

It doesn't take long to get through the story...once. Reynardo has many choices to make as he heads towards a confrontation with the Emperor. Inevitably, the fox falls in the final confrontation. At which point he wakes up, back at the beginning, but with the knowledge he gained in his earlier failure. Each failure teaches our hero one of four truths, and once he knows them all, he can navigate towards a successful ending.

The story is told largely through a narrator, who not only tells you what's happening along the way, but also comments on how you go about your business. It reminds me a lot of Bastion. For example, if you're destroying barrels and crates, expect some snarky remarks about how destructive you are. And of course he has something to say when you die.

Which happens a lot, at least if you're as bad at these kind of games as I am. The combat expects you to fight a bunch of enemies at once, reacting quickly to impending attacks with blocking and using special moves against specific enemies. My twitch-reaction is awful, and it doesn't help that attacking with Reynardo's sword locks you into an animation, so you can't move until it's done. Also, you can't do the special moves at all times...I'd hit the dash button to get away from an explosion, for instance, and Reynardo would just stand there and die even if I had the stamina necessary for the skill. I did OK through the early game, but around the time I found the second truth, battles became a real pain.

It doesn't help that it's very difficult to heal Reynardo. There's a health-stealing sword, but you can't use it much before running out of energy. Occasionally you can find health in the environment, but you have to waste time breaking crates and such. That takes forever due to the aforementioned attack animation lock...move to a crate, break it, wait for Reynardo to finish his follow-through, pick up loot, repeat. It's tedious enough that I gave up after the first couple of levels and just waded into battle without full health. Which means that I died even more, of course. Fortunately you revive at the start of the battle and can retry it as many times as needed, but each time you start at half health, not full. During the entire second half of the game, I don't think I ever had more than half health.

The game is also very slow to start up. I've got plenty of computing power that runs most games easily, but this one took several minutes to load and switch between areas. I assume that's a result of the cross-platform nature of the programming, since the game was released for both Windows and PS4. It's a minor thing, but annoying. Add to that the fact that there's no way to skip the narration at the start of each area, even if you've heard it several times before, and the wait time before actually playing gets pretty tedious.

I really liked the concept behind Stories: The Path of Destinies, with the different ways that Reynardo's story could unfold. If it wasn't such a pain to actually play the game, I'd probably have seen more of those different stories. As it is, one time through was enough.

BioShocked

First-person shooters are not my favorite genre. I played my share of Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake like every other nerdy high school and college student in the 1990s, but they always took second place to strategy and role-playing games. So it takes something more than just running around with a weapon and a target-rich environment to convince me to devote time to a shooter. BioShock is one of only two such series that have done that and held my attention enough to play all the way through. (The other is Mass Effect, though I've yet to try the new Andromeda entry in that series. Probably not a coincidence that both have science-fiction aspects.)

Much of BioShock's appeal for me is the world-building. BioShock and BioShock 2 take place in the 1960s in Rapture, an underwater city with a steampunk feel that's populated largely by genetically modified monstrosities. The environment has a post-apocalyptic feel as you pick your way through what remains of the once-luxurious city. BioShock Infinite is a bit of a different animal, as it takes place in a floating city called Columbia in the early 1900s. Unlike Rapture, Columbia isn't a run-down wreck and many of the people are normal civilians. (At first, anyway. Plenty of destruction as the game progresses.)

In both games, you pursue leaders who created a dystopia while following their own vision of perfection. In Rapture that largely takes the form of genetic modification, with lots of physical and psychological manipulation to keep the resulting monstrosities under control. In Columbia, you're working against an elitist, racist cult. There's a "grand society gone wrong" feel to both Rapture and Columbia, paired with a mix of old and future technology. That combination reminds me of golden-age science fiction in many ways; playing through these games feels much like reading some of those old stories.

In Rapture, there's a major moral choice in whether to save or harvest "little sisters" that provide power for your genetic modifications. (Personally, I have a hard time believing that anyone doesn't want to save the little cuties.) The choices don't have a lot of effect on the gameplay, but the ending differs based on what you've decided to do along the way. Nothing in BioShock Infinite's Columbia setting seemed to provide the same kind of moral decision-making, which was a little disappointing.

The two settings do eventually connect, but not until near the very end of BioShock Infinite. There's an add-on story called Burial at Sea that was released as DLC for BioShock Infinite that makes the link much more explicit. I thought the add-on was very well done, worth playing for anyone that enjoyed BioShock Infinite, but it's clearly targeted for people who have played the games in both settings.

I played these games mostly to work my way through the story, so the actual gameplay mechanics weren't my main focus. I purposely chose the easiest difficulty mode to avoid getting stuck in long fights, and picked abilities that minimized the need for shooter skill. For instance, in BioShock 2, I picked up the Security Command ability and upgraded it so I could summon a robot to fight for me. You can't ever avoid the shooting entirely, but it can be made less painful. Even so, there were sections where I had trouble making it through alive. Fortunately, death is a temporary state in these games.

It's possible to find some replay value in the BioShock games, either finding different ways to fight or changing moral choices to get different endings. None of that appeals to me, though. Most of the fun for me is in discovering things about the world as I move through the story. Once those surprises are gone, it's no longer very interesting, even if there are some differences. And playing with more difficult combat, like BioShock Infinite's 1999 mode, holds zero appeal whatsoever for me.

The BioShock series is well worth playing through at least once for any gamer. Even if first-person shooters aren't your thing, the story and world-building are worth the effort.

Divinity: Dragon Commander

I picked up Divinity: Dragon Commander (D:DC) in a recent Steam sale with fairly low expectations. The game got mostly middle-of-the-road reviews, and what I'd seen posted on gaming forums wasn't greatly encouraging. But I bought it anyway for two reasons: 1) you get to play as a dragon that shoots fireballs at things, and 2) most of the complaints seemed to be about lack of depth. Everyone likes #1, and I'm OK with #2 since I have enough ridiculously complex games already.

You play as the half-dragon son of a recently deceased emperor, who is supported by some of your father's ex-advisers in a quest to conquer various enemies and restore the empire. The campaign moves from conquering outlying lands to taking the heart of the empire to fighting a world-spanning evil demon. Along the way, you gain followers, upgrade your technology, and improve your dragon skills.

D:DC is a mashup of three genres: role-playing, real-time strategy, and turn-based strategy. Each aspect affects the others as you play. A decision you make in the role-playing portion might affect what resources you have during your next strategy turn. The forces you decide to use on the turn-based map affect what you start with in the real-time battles. I didn't find these effects to be significant, but they added some flavor to how the game moved alone.

The role-playing aspect was my favorite of the three. As you move along in the campaign, your various followers bring matters to your attention. There are followers from five races (undead, elf, dwarf, lizard, and imp) and each has different priorities. Your decisions range from political (should women have the vote, will the empire be reformed to a republic) to social (is gay marriage allowed) to matters of law (does the murdering noble get punished despite being technically innocent). Every decision makes some of your followers happy and upsets others. If a race becomes particularly happy or unhappy, it affects how territories of that race behave in the strategy game. I didn't worry much about that, though, and just made each decision as it came up without paying attention to who liked me. By the end of the game, the undead religious conservatives (amusing, that combination) and dwarven wealth-mongers hated me, the lawful lizards and nature-loving elves loved me, and the technological imps were mostly happy but didn't like that I'd turned down their request to lobotomize workers (for higher efficiency) and develop nukes. Whether that says something about my political and moral decision-making is an exercise I'll leave to the reader.

Progress in the game is driven by the turn-based strategy portion. You're basically moving armies around a map, in a manner familiar to anyone that's ever played Risk. Take territories with your units, build resource-producing buildings, construct armies, invade more territories. You can either fight the battles yourself via the real-time strategy portion (more on that later) or allow the battle to auto-resolve, which is basically a series of behind-the-scenes die rolls weighted by what units each side has in play. You can tilt the odds in your favor by having the bigger army, of course, but also by sending one of your generals to take command or by playing battle cards. These cards come from certain buildings on the map, and some can also be used outside of battle to gain strategic advantages. I found this aspect of the game to be adequate: no significant issues, but nothing really exciting either.

Then there is the real-time strategy aspect. Once per turn on the strategic map, you can choose one battle to fight in as your dragon self. This puts you in command of your forces on a real-time strategy map. The goal is to capture various resource points, use them to build units, and wipe out your enemies' units. Usually there's just one opponent, but occasionally multiple players will invade the same territory and you can end up with multiple parties all battling it out. You've got all the usual types of fantasy-RTS units (infantry, armor, ships, airborne, healers aka shamans, mages aka warlocks), and the usual tactics of either zerg-rushing or turtling up with protected resources. I had a really rough time with this part until I found the setting to turn the game speed down to its lowest setting, and even with that done things still moved fast enough that I couldn't actively make use of some of the cooler abilities on my units. Turning into a dragon is pretty neat, and can certainly have a big effect on the battle, but there are some pretty strict limitations (presumably for balance reasons) so it wasn't quite as fun as I'd expected. This was definitely my least favorite phase of the game. It was fun the first few times, but by the end I actively avoided it, using auto-resolution on the battles whenever doing so had a decent chance to win.

So in the end, playing as a dragon wasn't quite as enjoyable as I'd expected. But the various decision points in the role-playing side were fun, and the strategy portion wasn't too onerous, so I enjoyed it anyhow. I ended up spending about 16 hours with the game. I can't see myself ever coming back for more, but for one play-though, D:DC was worth the time.