The enemy design in this game is so bad, and I’m not just talking about how they’re all just robots. Dealing with the enemies is almost entirely about using the dodge button to duck in place. There isn’t a lot to learn about any particular enemy movesets nor do you need to play with your movement and positioning because all you need to pay attention to is when a flashing color signal appears letting you know when an attack is about to happen. So it ends up being a lot like Batman style combat. They might as well all be the same enemy because you fight them all the same way. Do whatever attacks you want and then just press dodge when it prompts you.
Most of your attacks have heavy magnetism and auto aiming so it’s not like you have to play with your positioning, and since you can just instant dodge everything it’s not like you ever have to use movement to combat enemies. The only way movement comes into play is that the game will throw overwhelming numbers at you, particularly projectile enemies, so you just need to back up and get out of the crowd so when you do a dodge you don’t get hit during your recovery animations.
What it really needs is some sort of meta game on top to give you something to play with while doing the simple combat. It should have at least tried to be more musou and give you a combo counter to try and build as high as you can.
my favorite part of games like Marvel’s Avengers is that they slow down your walking speed when you’re in your gigantic home base to be more realistic and/or allow for loading time, but someone realized just how much of a slog it is to get around that in one two-floor room they added a random open segment one one of the upstairs walkways so you can just fall down to the first floor instead of walking all the way around to the stairs
As your team talks about how your about to head to the final battle Iron man says he wants to make everyone new suits for no particular reason. So before you can play the climax the game asks you to collect 20 of resource X by killing enemy X, 20 of resource Y by killing enemy Y, and 1 of resource Z by killing rare enemy Z.
I don’t know why this game waited until the last mission to finally have a real boss battle. Every character gets their own variation on fighting MODOK and they’re, like, actual boss bottles with weakpoints and jumping over attacks and doing a thing three times to win. So clearly Crystal Dynamics can make bosses in this game, they just didn’t for the entirety of the game. Maybe they thought they needed to save any interesting boss idea for The Raid? There are also some side questlines so it’s possible something might pop up in those, but I’m not hopeful.
The main story is a back and forth between linear story missions where you walk forward a lot while examining environmental cues and regular MP-mode style missions where you just run through a big area and kill guys. But, to it’s credit, it does have a lot of cutscenes and dialogue to tell it’s blockbuster hollywood story. It’s a fairly basic story but I think it’s acted and written well enough that I see why people have been so receptive to it. it has some decent character moments that are not earned in any way, but I guess they don’t really have to be for the main audience of these kinds of things.
So I think there’s just enough switching between story scenes, linear setpieces, and generic MP missions that it feels a bit more like a regular action game campaign, even if nominally. Due to the game’s structure and pacing if it were marketed differently it could easily be seen as a game with a story mode that has an optional GAAS endgame. But the game’s marketing strategy has to be a story in itself considering how focused it was on the GAAS and how poorly it presented the content of the story mode. The entire public reception to the game has been people being surprised at how much they like the story mode while they hate the GAAS as much as they expected to.
I imagine there’s a reason for it, probably related to the game’s obviously tumultuous development. Maybe CD weren’t sure much of the story mode content would make it to release so they didn’t want to bank the marketing to it. But man this is a buggy game, and it’s so bereft of variety in content despite around 5 years of development time that I’d be surprised if the game’s last development reboot wasn’t really recent.
I’ll post clips here and there of funny glitches I’ve captures as I can pull them off my PS4 but check out this cutscene towards the end where the voice acting and the subtitles are two completely different conversations.
Playing and analyzing this fuses all my anxieties about my own failures trying to wrangle dozens of people into making something tight and cohesive with everything I dislike about Uncharted where every line has to be a quip and somebody always has to be talking and everything I dislike about Marvel movies, which is everything
It does feel like a game where no one was able to reign in all of the disparate parts of the game into a single concept, so every team ended up having to make something based on their own interpretation of what the game was going to be. Like the combat mechanics and the combat scenarios are on opposite ends of the spectrum. The characters have tons of moves with different possible hit effects, all sorts of cancel points and juggle systems. But it’s, like, a combat system that works for small groups of enemies because your hit boxes and attacks are based around hitting only a small space in front of you.
But the actual battles are against 20+ enemies from all directions including above you, 2/3 of them having one of several variants of Shields that nullify any hitstun or damage, and since it’s a loot based game they’re all tuned to do tons of damage that bypass all of your defensive abilities. Doing combos and fancy mechanics is bad you need to be attacking lots of people instead of one person, and because you need to be canceling into a dodge every 2-3 seconds because 1/3 of the enemies are projectile enemies attacking you from far away off screen.
I think it was supposed to be announced last week during the launch WARTABLE (the name of the game’s live streams, named after the table where you choose your missions because of course a hero would have a map they call their “wartable”). But the it never showed up. The stream did open with a note that they had changed the content of the stream due to the passing of Boseman, so people are assuming the The Raid must have been Black Panther themed and got cut.
Last night I did play some sort of mission called a Vault where you were shown number based passcodes and had to go and activate terminals with the correct numbers in the correct order. I’m not sure what other special mission types there are other the game’s standard variations on King of the Hill, Point Control, Horde Survival, and Destroy Targets that make up most of the game’s missions. I know I heard there are supposed to be a variety of endgame activities rather than it being solely focused doing a The Raid. It’s not like you can’t do funky puzzles or environments with a beat em up game, I just don’t have faith this game will do any considering how stale the existing level design is.
A few of the bosses were giant and had you running around and on top of it shooting vents and shield generators to open their weakpoints, but their AOE attacks were awful and ineffective. The MODOK boss fights at the end were relatively okay, featuring some arena wide attacks that you needed to dodge by running around or jumping over stuff, but need a bit more meat. So I guess a The Raid could have bosses that improve on that. Hopefully. All they really need to do is copy some MMO boss mechanics, sans the healer gear checks.
What if I told you after you beat the game the post game tells you your adventure has just begin and it opens up continuing story lines- which, great! More story!- But most of them require you to grind Faction XP to progress in them, which in turn require you to complete faction specific daily assignments just like Destiny?
I think the most emblematic moment of the game is the final shot before the credits of a picture of Kamala with all of the Avengers at the Avengers festival at the beginning of the game. Considering you yourself play Kamala as she gets to that festival, and you experiences it up until it goes haywire, you know that that picture literally never happened because she was never with all of the Avengers together at any point.
I suspect at one point this game had an original character creator where you, the newly mutated Inhuman, choose your power/appearance/etc. before they got feedback that people want to play as Named IPs.
