Editorial | Manhunt: Do you like hurting people?

By Sam Coles:

There are some games that question us if we are enjoying what we are doing, this can be mundane such as crossing the finish line in Mario Kart or beating a boss in Dark Souls. However sometimes games will ask the question “Do you like hurting people”? Manhunt is a game that still lives in infamy even over 15 years since its release. Rockstar Games are more mature these days but in the early 2000’s they were generally known for their more edgy titles. Manhunt was different as the tone was on the other end of the spectrum compared to Grand Theft Auto, yes the GTA games were violent but they were so over the top that it wasn’t believable, Manhunt is more unflinching with its approach to violence. I want to go over different aspects of Manhunt and why to this day it is still disturbing.

Manhunt sees you take control of a death row inmate named James Earl Cash, generic names a side he is a mute and is designed to be an unlikable protagonist one could argue that he is an antagonist. He saved from his demise as an unseen mouthy pervert simply known as “The Director”, wants Cash to perform for his snuff film and wants him to slit, garrotte and plastic bag through his fellow man. The set up for the game is already disturbing, there is no up lifting morality and there is no sight of a happy ending with the completion of the task, just death and murder.   

The game is notorious for its violence, now Rockstar up to this point were known for their violent games; however the Grand Theft Auto games had a more goofy tone. The issue people had with Manhunt was the fact the tone was very grim and serious, the executions got people talking and had everyone turning their heads and not in a good way. It’s not easy to kill people in this game as some uneducated news outlets would let you believe at the time, no you are rather vulnerable as you have to be sneaky and quiet to takedown your enemies.

It maybe rather crude visually by today’s standard, but the animations in Manhunt are still unflinching, they are not over the top they are gritty and somewhat believable. The one execution that everyone sights is the plastic bag, for good reason because it is rather disturbing as you see Cash suffocate his victim and they struggle and scream while gasping for air. It’s something that still gets to me to this day, even 15 years after its release.  

Manhunt’s violence makes you think about your actions, it’s not the other top nature of other bloody action games, it throws it in your face with intense close ups and acute angles. You see every detail as a knife plunges into your victim’s throat, every blow of a bat and the serrated edge of a meat hook.  Now I’m not one to get put off by a game with its violence, however Manhunt presents it in such a sadistic way that it makes my skin crawl sometimes, there is a reason why I don’t play it often.

At the end of the day, Manhunt is arguably a critique of man’s inner primal instinct appeasing to the Heart of Darkness motif where Cash let’s lose with his savagery. One could argue that he doesn’t have a choice, but why does he execute his actions without blinking an eye? Who knows but I think it’s a great example of how a game (besides Spec Ops The Line) can make you question your actions.

Hitman 2 (2018) Review - No, not that Hitman 2.

By Sam Coles:

It has been nearly two decades since the bald headed, well dressed assassin Agent 47 debuted in the gaming industry with the unique brand of stealth gameplay where you had to take down your targets in creative ways. In 2016 IO Interactive rebooted the Hitman franchise, which had a mixed reception not because it was bad but it was due to its episodic nature. Now they have scrapped the episodic structure with Hitman 2, another example of the games industry messing with my archive system as I now have two games in my collection called Hitman 2.

You once again step into the smartly dressed shoes of Agent 47 the world’s most deadly assassin, who has been tasked with taking down several high profile targets who happen to be a part of a shadowy secret organisation. It turns out this is intentional as they are traitors and they are using 47 for their own agenda. To be honest the stories in the Hitman games have never been that good, with the exception of Absolution back in 2012, it’s about the gameplay in these games rather than the narrative.

The game is a stealth game set in big wide open spaces, where you are dropped into a location and are left to your own devices and have to decide how you are going to find and kill your target. This is what I love about the Hitman games as it is all about learning what your target’s routine is, where you can learn when they are going to eat dinner, go to the bathroom to relieve themselves or collect certain items in a secret place. This is where you can use the environment to you advantage, you can just shoot your target in the face but that is boring and you don’t get the highest score. No the game rewards you by being creative with the environment, this can range from poisoning food, tampering with a car so it spirals out of control or causing electrical faults with certain piece of equipment. The choice is yours.

Hitman does give you the choice to go loud and shoot everything in sight, but this is a bad idea as you will have more holes than the average flute because you will be gunned down immediately and 47 is as tough as a mouldy peach. It is very much encouraged to go in quiet, but again this can escalate quickly as you will get caught knocking someone out and then you have to knock that person out etc. It’s like spinning plates on a stick, when one falls and smashes the rest will follow, so it turns into this overwhelming mess that ends in your death.

Hitman has always been on the line between grim and goofy as you can kill people in brutal and horrific ways, but you can also do it dressed as big bird as you throw an explosive rubber duck at someone.  This leads into the disguise system, you can take down targets in your standard suit, but this makes things very hard and will take longer. You can dawn disguises to help you slip into restricted areas, you can find them in lockers or you can take a score penalty and knock someone out and steal their clothes. People will no longer stop you going into certainly places, but there will be high ranking officials in that profession you have disguised yourself as who will see through your deception.

Visually the game is okay, not a bad looking game by any stretch it’s just okay. The main focus of the game are the big wide open environments and the crowd system, the game is really ambitious with the amount of people there are on screen which does make the framerate tank a bit if you play with the uncapped mode which I would recommend locking the framerate. The game’s environments are varied and quite beautiful, you have the cyan soaked waters of Miami to the humid and drug riddled jungles of Latin America, they are all interesting and never get old.

Hitman 2 is a great stealth game that will test you with both patience and skill, it’s nice to play a game that kicks back and tells you to take your time compared to the more action focused game. It is a step up from the 2016 reboot and builds upon its framework, where it ditches the episodic nature and gives you a highly re-playable game with different play styles for each level.

Editorial | The Order 1886: 4 years later.

By Sam Coles:

As I get older I find myself mellowing out when it comes to games, a game has to be really bad for me to get genuinely angry about it. When I first reviewed The Order 1886 back in 2015 I was very harsh about it, not to say my criticism wasn’t justified in some aspects. As I look back at The Order 1886 four years down the line, I have to say it is a game that is underrated to a certain degree, now I know it is a short game and I would have been annoyed if I had spent £50 on it at launch for a 4-5 hour experience. However what we have here is a unique setting, and these days you can pick it up for £5 second hand. I want to talk about this game and why you should give it a go today, and what it could have been with a sequel.

The Order 1886 is a what if scenario where King Arthur’s knights had discovered the Holy Grail, where they become a secret police for the royal family as they protect the citizens of London from werewolves and rebel incursion. You play as Sir Galahad a loyal knight who has been fighting for several centuries at this point. His loyalty starts to waver, due to his organisation covering up a sinister conspiracy.  The great thing about this premise is that you could set in anytime period after they had discovered the Holy Grail, you could even set it when they are on the crusade to find the Grail the possibilities are endless with this concept.

The gameplay was where everyone was split; honestly I thought it was great with the gunplay. However it’s the segments when the game decides to take control from you, where it forces you to walk, blocks off convenient passages and doesn’t let you switch or brandish you firearms at all. It kills the pace and makes replaying the game a pain in my plebeian backside.

The gunplay on the other hand is fantastic; you have the guns of the time period such as revolvers, early semi-auto pistols and bolt action rifles. On the other hand you have more exotic weapons such as, the arc gun which shoots a bolt of lightning, a thermite rifle that peppers enemies in dust where you can set on them fire with a flare and my favourite the triple barrel shotgun with dragons breathe shells that that eviscerates enemies. A lot of people criticised the gunplay as Gears of War in the 19^th century which I would retort with “So what”?  If you are going to take a framework of a third person shooter there is nothing better than Gears, with its tight and precise controls. The controls are great; you get good feedback when you gun down enemies with blood flying everywhere, heads exploding like grapes and skin torn off arms and legs as buckshot shreds like a guillotine.  

The most startling aspect about The Order are the visuals, even to this day The Order is one of the best looking games I have played on the PlayStation 4 it is mind blowing that 4 years later it gives most games that have come out recently a run for their money. When it was first announced at E3 of 2013 I thought there is no way that the game looks this good, you have to bear in mind that me and most gamers were still gaming on an Xbox 360 and PS3 at the time. I thought it was another fake “gameplay” trailer from Sony, similar what they tried to pull with Killzone 2 back in the day, but no I was wrong when I got to review it back in 2015 when Sony sent me a copy of the game and I was flawed with how good it looked.

When I first booted up The Order I couldn’t believe what I was looking at, it looked like a pre-rendered cutscene but when gameplay kicked in I realised no that is what the game looks like. The character models look amazing with an exquisite amount of detail, what also helps is that the motion capture and acting is superb with convincing performances from the entire cast. 

The only issue with the visuals that got on my nerves is the aspect ratio, Read At Dawn decided to go with a cinematic widescreen aspect ratio throughout the entire game, it looks great in cutscenes but it is very annoying and restrictive in gameplay. I say restrictive in gameplay because it greatly reduces the field of view, this is doubly irritating when you are in cover as all you can see is the wall texture you are hiding behind. This is not an issue these days as I replayed it on a 50 inch television, but when I first reviewed it back in 2015 I played it on a dinky 20 inch monitor which caused some visibility issues.

The Order 1886 is a game that has become lost in the archives in Sony’s library, yes it is short, yes it has its issues but it is something that is truly unique with its story, setting and gameplay when it ramps up. I understand at the time people felt burnt paying £50 for a game that last between 5-7 hours, but if you haven’t tried it I urge you to as you can pick it up for £5 second hand. I hope one day we get a sequel and hopefully Ready At Dawn have learnt from their mistakes, as we could get something special.

Editorial | Resident Evil's Atmosphere.

By Sam Coles:

Resident Evil tends to be the punchline for a joke, mostly due to the writing resembling someone trying to write Shakespeare in snow with their own urine and Resident Evil 6. However I never came to the series for the stories it’s the atmosphere, there is something about Resident Evil’s atmosphere that gives me the chills.

Let’s start off with the voice acting, now I can hear your monocles pop off while you say “Oh my”. Just hear me out, the voice acting is bad, stale bread levels of bad, but it is the strange nature of the voice acting that puts me on edge. What I realise is that yes the acting is bad, but also it’s so bad you think there is something strange going on where no normal person acts like this, it just makes you think that something is happening in the background. The next time you play any of the earlier games keep this aspect in mind and it might surprise you.

Let’s talk about sound, what Resident Evil has always got right is its sound design this can range from the weapons that pierce the silence to the more mundane such as footsteps. The first time I entered the mansion in the first game and you hear your foot steps on the carpet which then leads onto the stone floors, the difference is staggering with the muffled thuds to the echoing clicks as Jill’s heels connect with the floor. This really emphasises tension in some areas of the games, the parts that really have me on the edge of my seat are the rooms that have no music at all. These parts all you can hear are the taps of your feet and the distance noises of unknown threats, you can hear the distance moans of zombies as well as their decaying flesh squelch as they shuffle towards you at an eventual pace.

The scenarios you find yourself in make the atmosphere more terrifying, yeah sure in the first game you started off in a spooky house however it’s the overall context that is truly frightening. The reason why I say this is because Resident Evil is not supernatural horror it's science gone wrong.

When I played these games as a child (sorry Mum), the foot and mouth crisis was happening here in England and it spread at an extraordinary rate and we had these leaders that didn’t know what to do. Resident Evil evokes this situation where a virus/disease spreads rapidly where authority figures are in a panic, and this truly frightened me. Now I know that this sounds laughable, but I had an overly active imagination as a child but you can see why it seems believable with a virus being ignored until its final breaking point.

A final noteworthy addition to Resident Evil’s atmosphere is the music, often people sight that you don’t need music to make for a tense situation which is somewhat true. However Resident Evil strikes a balance of tense horror and safety, you can be walking down a corridor and this intense and oppressive track will be looming over you as you hear the distant shuffling of monsters. Where on the other hand, you can have these soothing tracks that evoke a sense of safety while at the same time it is telling you that you have to go back out there and deal with the imminent danger. The music in the series has always had this great juxtaposition of making you feel tense in one situation to letting you have a breather; this is what makes the player constantly on edge.

Resident Evil is a series that always has you on edge with its atmosphere (minus Resi 6), its believable scenario of science gone wrong with epidemic proportions of infection, a tense musical score and the odd voice acting that leads to believe that something strange is going on make for great horror. They look to recapture it once again with the remake of the fan favourite Resident Evil 2, with dark claustrophobic corridors and the unknown moaning in the distance.

Editorial | Dutch Van Der Linde: Charismatic leader to madman (Some spoilers).

(Some spoilers)

By Sam Coles:

Red Dead Redemption had a lot of mystery surrounding the leader of John’s old gang Dutch, he was just presented as this nutty hermit that lived in the middle of the woods with the natives. When Red Dead Redemption II was announced and we saw a younger Dutch, I was excited to see the downfall of the character how went from this Robin Hood like leader to complete madman. I’m going to discuss the interesting aspects of Dutch Van Der Linde, which by the way there will be some spoilers for both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, so click off if you don’t want to know.

When we first see Dutch in Red Dead Redemption II, he is a man with passion and sees the world in a different light compared to normal society. He wants to take care of his fellow gang members, he comes across as more of a father figure instead of a bandit who wants to rob people. He sees that the modern government is no better than them, as he and to quote him "I rob, you rob. The difference is I choose who I rob". He has a Robin Hood mentality, where he only steals from the rich in order to help the poor but as the story goes on he slowly drops that moniker and only thinks for himself.

Dutch is not an inherently evil person to begin with, he is a caring person as all he wants to see from his brothers and sisters is food on the table for them each night as the embers of the campfire light and warm their faces. He genuinely get’s up set when his fellow gang members get hurt, or if they are gunned down you can see him withhold his tears whenever they are in dire situation. However this personality slow dwindles when he gains more money.

This all starts to take shape when a robbery goes horribly wrong, where one of his fellow gang members (not going to say who) is gunned down by the Pinkertons and he and the rest of the gang have to flee from the country. When they get caught in a storm and wash up on an island, something snaps in Dutch’s mind where he starts to kill indiscriminately and greed starts to grip his mind.

When they return back to the United States, Dutch’s plans (make your jokes here) start to lack focus, where Arthur starts to doubt him and loses faith due to his new outlook. This new mindset of greed, starts to tear the gang apart because Dutch becomes extremely paranoid and starts blaming his most loyal brothers and sisters. Arthur by this point has had enough and helps John escape his wrath, so he can lead a normal life with his family.

Fast forward a few years Dutch has become a hermit, where he lives in the mountains with his new gang of oppressed Native Americans as he still tries to live outside of society. However the modern era of the 20th century is closing  in on him, and his old and senile mind can't quite comprehend this so he still tries to fight back. Even John Marston his once most loyal follower speaks of him in a fond light when discussing his past to others, realises that you can’t stay stuck in the past and act in such a savage way. Dutch with no escape of this reality can only do one thing; he takes the easy way out.

Like John Marston Dutch goes through a deep character transition, but it is the complete opposite. He doesn’t learn from his mistakes, he just ends up going further and further down the pit of despair isolating himself from others until his ultimate demise.

Editorial | The beautiful world of Oblivion.

By Sam Coles:

Oblivion! Now I know I can hear your eyes roll like saucepans in a tumble dryer with me talking about this game again, but I have never really done an editorial about why I love this game with the exception of an editorial about the Elder Scrolls. I just want to talk about why this game is special to me.

When I was 13 years old I didn’t really have any consoles I could call my own, yes I shared a PS2 with my brother but besides that I had no consoles or anything gaming related to call my own. When I was around my friends house he was playing this game that caught my attention, it was something that was unusual (on console anyway), where it was a Tolkien inspired adventure which I was obsessed with at the time. The reason it caught my 13 year old mind, is because I had never seen anything like it as at the time I only had a PS2 and my taste for open world games stretched to Grand Theft Auto.

In 2009 for my 16th birthday I asked my parents for an Xbox 360, fortunately I got one with a copy of Halo 3 and Mass Effect and a few months later I had my very own copy of Oblivion and then I was lost in the land of Cyrodiil. It was when I’d first emerged from the dark and damp dungeons of the of Imperial Prison was when I was enamored with the world, I was looking across the lake and was in awe as I saw the rolling green hills and trees stretch out into the distance.

What captured my heart with Oblivion was the fact you could do well.... anything. You can completely ignore the main quest altogether and go in the other direction and explore an elven ruin, it may seem rather trivial by today’s standards but this was a 2006 console game. I love exploring the plains of Cyrodiil, where I would come across random people who need my help or an out of the way village populated by various people who live outside of society.

What makes it more convincing these citizens have routines, where they will get up, go to work and settle with a nice pint in the evening after a hard day’s work. It truly is a living and breathing world, where it would continue to live even when I would turn the game off. It made me look at games in a different light, I saw them more as games, they could be these living breathing worlds where I could forge my own stories and inhabit somewhere that I know more than my home town.

What also caught my attention with Oblivion was the soundtrack, back then I didn’t really pay that much attention to musical scores in games, but Oblivion was something special. The melodic tones from the genius Jeremy Soule are beautiful, it can be calm and soothing, intense and haunting and very emotional. I often listen to this soundtrack when I want to relax or when I’m writing, as it is truly special and I almost shed tear each time as it reminds that the world is beautiful and I can just hide away and venture through the world of Cyrodiil.

Oblivion is a game that I still adore even nearly 13 years later, yes it shows its age with character models and dialogue but the world is still beautiful to explore coupled with Jeremy Soule’s superb soundtrack. It’s a game that I play when I’m feeling down, as I feel safe when I’m in this world where no one can find me and the citizens of Cyrodiil need my help. It’s a game that everyone should play!