Gears of War of the Ring
What also happens in those first few levels, or may happen to certain gamers, anyway, is a weird flashback effect. A one point I was briefly confused as to what I was playing. See if you can guess what the trouble was.
I was cruising along, doing the usual dungeon-crawl thing, hacking through hordes of orcs and snatching up their stuff, until I hit a little scripted moment. A goblin was manning an emplaced ballista turret, shooting the hell out of my party of heroes. I had to outflank him, knock him off, take over the turret and mow down a wave of bad guys that conveniently charged out in front of my giant crossbow. Then I had to fight back a well-worn compulsion to run up and chainsaw the stragglers to death, until the flashbacks wore off and I remembered which disc was in the Xbox 360.
There’s a lot of Gears of War in this game, not just in a general sense but also in a specific one. Those turret set-pieces, so well-known to Gears players, are just a really obvious example. Also hauntingly familiar are the cooperative death-and-revival mechanics, several different enemy designs and Beleram the giant eagle, who will come down and carve up a crowd of bad guys providing there’s an open sky above them. (Xbox 360 veterans will remember that this is exactly how the “Hammer of Dawn” weapon worked, back in the first Gears game six years ago.)
Snarking aside, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (And in fairness, it works both ways — the bad guys in Gears are in many ways basically orcs with machine guns.) From a practical point of view, it’s no great sin to be derivative. The deadly sin in games is being boring. Unfortunately, War in the North is not quite innocent.
Don’t Feed the Trolls
By the third act of the story, as the action moves out to the Ettinmoors, those specific resemblances start to thin out. The scripted set-pieces aren’t so clichéd and obviously familiar. At the same time, though, the level of difficulty jumps up considerably, and not in the wisest of ways. At a basic level, enemies take a lot more damage to kill. The player’s attacks are less likely to stun them, too – quick first strikes and counterpunching won’t put them on the ropes, which makes it much harder to start up a smooth attack chain. Big, powerful enemies like mountain trolls show up more often, the kind that won’t go down without a long and often repetitive campaign of sticking and moving.
There’s a line between battles that call for strategy and quick reflexes and battles that mostly call for endurance. Many of these are on the wrong side, whether because a few enemies are way too resilient (those bloody trolls) or because an endless wave of mooks keeps charging in. A feeling of uneasiness bubbles up after a while during some of the latter encounters – “Did I miss a scripting trigger? Am I going in the wrong direction?” – when the real problem is the unreasonable number of enemies that have to die before the game decides enough is enough and moves the plot along. Even worse, a lot of those enemies tend to be the same kind of enemies, calling for the same basic pattern of tactics to beat them, same as the last time, and the time before that…
All this speaks to the larger issue of pacing, how much time and effort should go in to bashing the way towards how much reward. Traditionally, dungeon-hacking games have a quick, staccato kind of pace – kill, loot, kill, loot, kill, loot, kill. Rarely does any specific instance of killing or looting take a whole lot of time or effort. The effect is to keep the player in a constant state of low-level instant gratification. Diablo is the classic example. That was exactly how Dark Alliance worked as well.
What War in the North does, besides just changing the camera perspective, is change up the pace compared to Snowblind’s traditional dungeon crawls. Along with all the different cinematic bits and bobs, it has the pace of a game like Gears of War. Encounters aren’t over after a couple of speedy mouse clicks. They take a lot of hacking and hammering away before all the bad guys are dead and it’s time to hoover up the rewards.
This worked in Epic’s Gears of War games, at least in its better moments, because it had a lot of tactical depth. It was fun and challenging to have to move around an environment, shifting from one bit of cover to another, flanking and counter-flanking, using different weapons. What War in the North needed to work at this pace was a little more depth like that. As it is, too many encounters boil down to doing the same damn thing over and over again, especially given the way that a few enemy designs crop up so often through so many levels. They’re mainly a test of patience, and that patience runs out before the quest is over.
A One, a Two, a Three
Obviously, the multiplayer co-op mode does help out in that department. Even simple gameplay is almost always more fun when there’s another person to share it with, and in this specific case it’s much easier to use the different heroes’ support skills when you can coordinate with another thinking person. The elf’s healing and defensive spells tend to have an area effect instead of a specific target – they create a stationary circle with healing or whatever other handy bonus. It’s nice to be able to say, “put the anti-missile field right there,” instead of hoping that the AI is smart enough to figure out the right way to do it. This adds more of that tactical depth we were talking about, and it cuts down on the dying, also a helpful bonus.
On the other hand, playing with a friend points up some of the flaws in the solo game’s AI and level design. For instance, a sequence of siege encounters towards the end of the fifth act almost demands another human player, because the ally AI isn’t smart enough to figure out the division of labor that the objectives call for.
Take one scene where two giant trolls and some cannon fodder charge a gate to batter it down. After a couple of tries, it isn’t too hard to figure out a basic strategy to counter them: the dwarf slows down one troll, the ranger delays the other troll, and the elf takes care of healing and crowd control. Unfortunately, it seems like the AI is a little too binary in its thinking to work out the three-way split. That usually leaves a single human player to die tackling both trolls alone, or get caught up fighting the munchkins while the trolls beat down the door.