![]() There’s no snapping from one canned animation to another for Kathy. You’ve got full movement while you’re on the wall and the ability to smack your ice axe into any inch of the climbable surface. In fact, compared to the way pick-climbing works in Tomb Raider this is Assetto Corsa Competizione. About halfway through its nine chapters though, I found myself with clear mechanical preferences, and some degree of accumulating boredom whenever I was asked to pick my way along another climbing wall or aim some more beams into place. It’s a decent amount of variety for a game whose focus really lies in storytelling, and all those modes serve the story well thematically-Kathy behaves as an astronaut would behave aboard space vessels and on foreign planets. Deeper still, you’re breaking open the cases of energy beam emitters in a huge multi-beam puzzle that takes a good half an hour of head scratching and prism-refracting to suss out. An hour later you’re outside a space ship, repairing it by removing debris that impaled itself within one of the thrusters. Early on you’re lasering away some debris blocking an energy beam’s path at Cape Canaveral. Once you’ve been introduced to each of these concepts, the subsequent chapters find new ways to combine them into big set-pieces and escalate them in scale. Even if that means that two hours in, you’re still not really sure what game it is that you’re playing.Īs it turns out, in mechanical terms Deliver Us Mars eventually boils down to a combination of third-person platforming, a bizarre amount of ice axe climbing, energy beam puzzles, piloting bots through tight spaces, and-my personal favourite-lasering things apart in first-person. The interactions may not be deep or especially well-polished, but they do always feel contextualised and bespoke to the premise of the game. It’s not terribly far removed from Quantic Dream’s brand of interactive storytelling, but with one crucial difference: it’s never just a QTE standing between you and the next bit of exposition. Oh, now there’s an ice axe climbing section, is there? Good job I’ve still got some of that muscle memory from Tomb Raider. Then you’re in first-person, operating the controls of a space shuttle as it blasts off from Earth’s surface. Now you’re in third-person, platforming around a massive Cape Canaveral facility. Not only does it largely avoid cliche-not an easy feat when you’re telling a sci-fi story about mad scientists playing god and a doomsday scenario for Earth-it also keeps changing form into whatever suits the story best. I was completely swept up in that opening couple of hours. With sister Claire and a crew of intrepid space-goers, you blast away from familiarity and eventually find yourself on the red planet’s barren surface. As a qualified astronaut who aced all her exams, you finally have the opportunity to leave Earth’s atmosphere in search of the ARK colony ships that your dad and his Outward scientist rebels did a runner with many years ago. (Image credit: KeokeN Interactive) Growing painsĪfter a prologue that whizzes through Kathy’s childhood via a few of her most painful memories and idyllic moments turned tragic by the passage of time, you’re all grown up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |