Breath of Fire 2 Review (GBA)

Following on from the excellent first instalment in the Breath of Fire series, Breath of Fire II has a lot to live up to. Set in the same world as the first title but five hundred years later, the second installment continues the story.

Though there may not seem to be too many similarities between the stories of the two titles, certain things remain the same - you still control the hero Ryu who will learn he has the power to turn into a dragon, and at the end of all the twists and turns there will still be a showdown with a mysterious goddess.

The story goes that, after the destruction of the evil Milia, the warriors hid themselves away from the world in such a way that they could never be found - as with their great power they had exposed the world to danger. Five hundred years later, after the memory of the eight brave fighters has drifted away like a gentle snowflake on the wind, a small boy in a tiny village is leading a humble existence with his father and sister. The boy's name is Ryu and he will shortly learn that his fate is entwined with the fate of the world around him.

Certain things have changed since the first game in the series: now you can no longer tell how much energy the enemy has left, healing is not always the first action that happens each turn in a battle, and a new town-building feature has been added. Breath of Fire had a large amount of features that meant the story kept progressing at a decent pace, with a smart player being able to gain the upper hand most of the time.

With the removal of some of these, the second title really makes it hard for you to achieve your goal. While some may welcome the dramatic increase in difficulty, the balance of the original seems to have vanished completely. This means that you may well end up doing the same section of the game at least fifteen or twenty times before getting through. This does not help the flow of an otherwise brilliant story - in fact, after you've heard the same part of the plot regurgitated time and again, you become indifferent to the detail; the broken narrative.

Cosmetically, the second instalment is much improved from the original. Characters and landscapes are bigger and contain a lot more detail - bringing the game closer to being a sort of Anime comic strip, though not quite making it. The world around you is depicted beautifully, with clouds passing overhead and a lot more variation in the terrain than before and all holding true to the established style of the series. Every aspect from a graphical point of view is bigger, more detailed and generally more charming.

Breath of Fire II truly is a gaming conundrum: you are presented with a beautifully detailed world, underpinned with interesting characters and a brilliantly developed plot, but you cannot progress anywhere because the difficulty level is so ridiculous. It just seems stupid - why make almost every section of the game so tough that you have to level up your characters for a couple of hours just to get through? And then, when reaching the next section, you have to do the same thing again. Surely it would have been better to simply reduce the difficulty of the sections to keep the story flowing and the player interested?

What we are left with is an RPG that is screaming out for 'essential' status, but due to the complete lack of a learning gradient ends up being unnecessarily difficult and frustrating to play. The title is still very good, and the story so engaging that some players will do whatever it takes to advance the plot, but for RPG fans in general, this amounts to little more than a failure to expand upon an exceptional first instalment. Breath of Fire II is good - but it could and should have been a lot better. Disappointing.

Overall 7/10

The Dig Review (PC)

Written by Dan Gill

The Secret of Monkey Island. Maniac Mansion. Sam and Max Hit the Road. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Full Throttle. Grim Fandango.  These titles – and indeed their sequels and prequels – are regarded by many as stone-cold classics; absolute pinnacles of the point-and-click adventure genre, and they gained LucasArts a reputation as one of the finest developers of the era, offering a friendlier alternative to the player-killing Sierra titles of the time.  While the aforementioned titles are well known by many, there are a few others which are often overlooked; Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders and Loom tend to have a smaller yet dedicated following, but one title which is considered by some as the black sheep of the LucasArts flock is The Dig – but why?

Beginning as an idea by Steven Spielberg for his Amazing Stories TV series, The Dig famously had a protracted development.  Deemed too expensive to film for TV, the idea was passed to LucasArts as a pitch for an adventure game, development on the title starting in 1989.  The game went through a drawn out process of adding and scrapping ideas, and staff leaving and joining the project throughout its six year creation.  Alongside Spielberg, the story was developed by interactive fiction author Brian Moriarty (whose previous gig with LucasArts was Loom), and dialogue was written by sci-fi author Orson Scott-Card.  The pedigree was certainly there for a solidly written adventure game, but looking back it's clear to see how the game was to differ from its stable mates; who's writing the jokes?  This is The Dig's first issue.  The house that brought us Guybrush Threepwood and Purple Tentacle has developed a more serious tone, and fans at the time perhaps weren't expecting this.

The story involves three astronauts being sent to a potentially earth smashing asteroid in order to alter its trajectory.  As the game progresses the player discovers there's more to the asteroid than there seems, sending the team across the universe to another world.  There's no doubting the engrossing nature of the story, and that is one of the game's strongest assets.  Each development compels the player to make progress in order to see what will happen to the intrepid explorers next, and there's a desire to open up more of the alien landscape.  As expected from LucasArts, the background art and characters look great (for the time), and the 2D and 3D animated cutscenes have a distinct mid-nineties allure with their grainy, low resolution charm.

As expected, gameplay centres on exploration and puzzle solving.  Perhaps due to the game's setting, the puzzles differ slightly from the rest of the LucasArts catalogue, preferring to take inspiration from somewhere between the “use X with Y” approach of its peers, and the abstract headscratchers from aesthetically pleasing slideshow puzzler Myst.  This is a refreshing approach, but may dissatisfy those who didn't get along with Cyan's game.  The puzzles can sometimes be a little obtuse, but no more so than those of Monkey Island 2.

So far a mixed bag then, but I found my biggest problem with the game to be its voice acting.  A shame, since Robert Patrick and Stephen Blum are involved.  While Blum (a seasoned voice actor) plays astronaut Ludgar Brink well, Patrick's Boston Low and Mari Weiss's Maggie Robbins lack any kind of emotion in response to the game's events, really taking the shine off the title's presentation.  One can imagine the two of them stood in the recording booth reading the script verbatim whilst thinking of what they'll spend their fee on.  As such I'd recommend turning off the vocal track and sticking to the text.  The soundtrack's rather lovely and otherwordly, so it's certainly a decent alternative to the dull reading of Scott-Card's script, which itself is pretty good, but peppered with a dusting of awkward, stilted lines.

So, not one of LucasArt's finest (although it was their biggest selling title at time of release in 1995), but not worth missing out on.  I think it's fair to say that if The Dig were released by another developer it would have had much more critical recognition and praise.  It's a solid game that offers a good few hours of adventuring, a decent story, some reasonable (and slightly obscure) puzzles, a good musical score and some great environments and ideas.  If it passed you by first time round I'd certainly recommend playing through it now.  It deserves a place in your LucasArts point-and-click collection alongside those classics, just don't expect too many jokes.

7/10

Never Alone Review (PC)

In Never Alone you play as a small Inupiaq girl named Nuna as she sets out from her village one day and finds herself lost in a terrible blizzard. She stumbles upon a small arctic fox and together the two set out to return home. Along the way they become swept along in various stories from the folklore of the Inupiaq people in what is a puzzle/platform game that has a heavy dose of storytelling and a magical atmosphere not like anything else we’ve played before. The relationship between the two builds throughout as they simply can’t survive the environment without one another.

The game is a 2D platformer much in the mould of something like Limbo. Imagine Limbo with a more natural looking design and the black replaced with white and you wouldn’t be far off. As the pair of Nuna and the fox you must work together to make your way across the harsh landscape of Alaska. Nuna can run and jump and eventually gets access to an ice smashing bolas. The fox can scramble up walls and also talk to the many natural spirits that inhabit the world.

Many of the puzzles involve getting the fox into areas where he can then draw spirits back to help Nuna. Spirits generally take the form of birds that can be used as platforms or creatures that can be used to climb walls. The fox can also control trees and fish. It’s a nice mechanic and one that normally works well. You switch between the two characters with the press of a button or a second player can be brought in to help out. Together you need to overcome everything from polar bears and strong winds to breaking ice and even the odd menacing and magical creature.

Occasionally the computer AI will let you down and your partner will do something stupid and die but on the whole it didn’t stop our progress and there isn’t anything here that should cause you too much frustration in that respect. We also had a few technical issues during our play through like ice not smashing but there wasn’t anything major enough to ruin our experience and a simple checkpoint reset always fixed the problem. The fact checkpoints are fairly generous also helped to keep the frustration low.

It’s hard to talk about the game without giving away much of its magic and surprises but we will say that you are constantly faced with something new to play with or overcome. Each chapter is distinctly different from the last and almost all of them introduce a new mechanic or toy to play with. This means that the game always remains fresh and is all the better for it. It has a fairly brief run time at about three and a half hours but it’s an experience that is far richer than the run time would suggest.

The whole thing is underpinned with some beautiful graphics and a haunting score and these combined with the howling winds make a perfect setting for the story and fill the whole game with a unique and wonderful atmosphere. The narrator of the story also does an incredible job of drawing you in and making you feel real empathy for a little girl and fox lost in the snow. The narration is done in the indigenous language which is a very clever choice as we don’t feel narrating in English would have had anywhere near the same impact. You can just imagine everyone huddled around a fire in the snow listening to him tell the tale.

Overall, Never Alone is a wonderful piece of storytelling tied to a very good platform/puzzle game. It’s an original take on a well-trodden genre that draws inspiration from a rich culture that many of us will know very little about. As such, it creates something unique and new for audiences to enjoy. It creates a world filled with magic and wonder and isn’t that something we all want in our lives a little more?

Overall 8/10

Frozen Synapse Prime Review (PC)

Written by Thomas G.J. Sharpe

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Frozen Synapse. In equal measures frustrating and exciting, but I cannot hold the former condition as a fault in the game. It was always my impatience and my lack of forethought that caused me to lose games. Arguably, this is a sign of a thorough game, a formidable design and a ruthless challenge. Indeed, the original game posed one of the most interesting multiplayer situations I've recently encountered.

Frozen Synapse Prime is a ground-up remake of the original Frozen Synapse. A squad-based, tactical, cyberpunk themed chin scratcher. With a varied squad of combatants, you direct their movements, aiming, engaging and so forth, using an intuitive waypoint system. It is devilishly easy to learn and with Prime, The developers have refined the interface. The use of a radial, key-bound menu is better than what was a clumsy list. This is a significant point, as the ease of ordering the squad around the arenas should be as elegant as possible, as underneath is a game of precision, preparation and consideration.

The twist is the ability to plan and waypoint enemy squad members, to predict the outcome of your movements. If your machine-gunner moves here, does he get brained by a shotgunner? Slight adjustments can save lives, allowing you to get the jump on your enemy. This is where Frozen Synapse as a concept really shines. You can agonize over decisions, as most of the time, one careless move is enough to tilt the advantage toward your opponent in a critical way.

For me, the original was all about the multiplayer, although the single player campaign is nothing to sniff at. The dialogue is fantastic, the story classically cyberpunk, tongue in cheek and full of character. I however find the missions and A.I underwhelming after the excitement of peer-to-peer, and this is where I predict most of my time will be spent with the game. Honestly, I lose most of my games, but it keeps me coming back. It is similar to X-COM. It doesn't give an inch, brutal but it is never the game.

Aesthetically, this sequel is a huge advancement, however much the Tron-esque futurist-minimalism was both atmospheric and playful. Where before the neon walls were devoid of humanity (fitting for the context of the story), the new arenas are steel-panelled joylessness, functional and brutalist. It looks great, and they've kept the battlegrounds uncluttered. The music is, as before, a slick blend of tense ambient classiness. Sound design in general is subtle, well-placed and sparse.

Overall, a worthy successor to a game that now looks like proof-of-concept. I am confident that veterans will on the whole welcome the update, and certainly the accessibility of this tough game has been increased for the newcomer. Not a lot is really new, but it was pretty much spot on before, and I look forward to being dispatched by my tactical and intellectual betters over and over again.

8/10