Doom’s gameplay pattern is a cool ebb and flow of gunfights to keep yourself healed up, then chainsaw kills to refill your guns. So to get ammo, you have to kill monsters with your chainsaw. As you shoot things, you get the healing candy you needed to stay alive. In this year’s Doom reboot, monsters killed with guns spit out little bits of healing candy. These are the cornerstones of good game design. That might not seem like it’s a big deal on its own, but this is a game design brimming with these kinds of carefully considered concepts. Shadow Warrior 2 knows a fireball spell is redundant if you’ve already got a flamethrower. So all your mana management - it’s called chi, but I know mana when I see it - is a facet of crowd control. To actually kill a monster, you must shoot it. Whereas your guns kill monsters, spells can only knock them back, freeze them, or make them ignore you. But once you get all the spells in Shadow Warrior 2, you might realize they have a specific role: crowd control. Oops, you’re out of mana, time to chew through some ammo. Oops, you’re low on ammo, time to use mana for your magic missiles. Shoot monsters with guns, but sometimes shoot them with magic missiles. That’s how it would work in any other game. You might think they’re just different ways to kill monsters. Dare I say cerebral? Well, let’s not get too carried away.įor instance, consider the difference between guns and spells. It’s overwhelming in the same sense that a Christmas morning would be overwhelming if you thought you’d opened all your gifts, but you kept finding another one behind the tree.īut Shadow Warrior isn’t just dumping out a big splashy bucket of stuff, any one of which is as as good as any other. The more you play, the more of this stuff spills from the absurd gaping maw of the Shadow Warrior cornucopia. Now have some burning and freezing and poisoning. But who could blame you for thinking this is all just a glut of silly killing? The game seems to say as much. As you play Shadow Warrior 2, one of things you learn is that the absolute batshit over-the-top nonsense isn’t, in fact, nonsense.
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