Breath of the Wild First Impressions

Since about mid December I've been slowly working my way through Breath of the Wild on my Switch.  I've been playing it for a good while now, got a handful of things but I'm sort of teetering on the point where the adventure is really going to get into full swing so before I grab my Master Sword and get in some big ancient robots, I'll post some of my thoughts about this game so far.

First lets get some good things out of the way.  The game is HUGE, and I don't just mean in terms of actual game world but there's also a ton of stuff to do.  I've not even seen close to all of it but I'm constantly finding quests, big enemies, shrines, interesting looking landmarks, towns etc.  There is definitely a ton of fun to be had just running around and looking for things which, in fairness, is what I've spent the vast majority of my time doing with the game up to this point.  With a lot of these open world type games its easy for the world to be big but sort of barren of anything interesting (New Fallout for example) but Zelda just constantly has stuff popping up every which way.  You'll set a goal for some quest or to get to some shrine and then on the way there about 7 different things will distract you, but in a good way.

\

But after you get over the vast and varied world, things tend to go downhill a little bit.  Zelda doesn't have your usual set of dungeons to explore and conquer.  In this game you have 4 divine beasts that you must go inside and defeat the boss of and then go hit up Hyrule Castle to go slap Ganons shit in.  Conventional dungeons have been replaced with Shrines which are sort of short puzzle or combat sequences which will net you a spirit orb.  4 spirit orbs give you either an extra heart or extra stamina, that choice is up to you.  Since exploring the world is so fun, the act of hunting around and finding these shrines are cool but the only thing that awaits you on the inside is pure disappointment.  Every single shrine is some kind of brain dead puzzle to solve or some shit, non threatening, easy as hell enemy to defeat.  This wouldn't be a problem if the shrines were not such a big part of the game but doing a number of shrines is VITAL to success.  For example getting the master sword requires you to have a certain number of hearts in order to pull it from its stone and so you have to do a button of shrines to get enough orbs to get those hearts.  Health in general is a problem in this game because of my next big gripe which is the combat.

The combat in Breath of the Wild is shit.  There's no if, ands or buts about it, it's just shit.  Partly it's shit because of the breakable weapons thing that the games decided to use and it seems that there isn't a weapon in the game that doesn't just shatter after about 7 or 8 hits.  This problem however is more of an annoyance than a real deal breaker but the deal is indeed broken when you consider the difficulty of combat.  A combat encounter will only really go one of two ways.  The first is that you fight the enemy for a bit and then it lands a hit on you and you die instantly, this is basically the only way to game over.  The second is that you will fight the enemy for a bit and he lands a hit on you and doesn't kill you instantly.  In this situation the enemy has literally no chance of winning the encounter because if your health becomes critically low, you can just chow down on one of the hundreds of steak skewers in your pockets or just spam apples until you are full HP again.  All this challenge (or lack thereof) means is that there exist little pockets of Hyrule that you can't go to yet until you find either enough shrines to get enough hearts or until you get armor strong enough to make sure you don't die in a single blow, after that, every single combat encounter in this game is free.

The tedium of the shrines and the atrocious combat are my two BIG gripes with this game but I'm fully aware I'm only scratching the surface.  I've not done any of the divine beasts yet and there seems to be plenty of stuff dotted around the world that might make up for these two glaring problems by the time I get to the end.  I don't hate this game, but I think that all the hype I encountered before getting my Switch made me think I was in for something really special when all I seem to be getting right now is a mediocre open world action adventure.

I'll do another post after I finish it to see if my opinion changes at all

Horror Games Need Combat

So Alien Isolation popped up on my Steam for a pre load and after doing some digging to get some information.  As far as I'm aware Alien Isolation is basically Amnesia but with Alien which is fine for a series like that, but in general there's this annoying trend for horror games to be all about running away from something.

Really it all started with Amnesia a few years ago.  Survival Horror was getting a bit stale and then suddenly this little indie title pops up for PC and everyone goes nuts.  Amnesia was different from a lot of horror games because ALL combat had been removed and the idea was that you were to run around solving puzzles while avoiding any confrontation.  In the event that you were found by the big monsters, you weren't able to do anything to it so your only option was to run.

Amnesia was a good game, I really enjoyed it but it started this annoying thing where now there are LOADS of horror games with 0 combat and it's all about running away.  I find this annoying because it's gone and removed the "survival" from survival horror and in a lot of cases there isn't much horror to be found either.

Combat is important to survival horror because it adds that extra layer of tension and uses game mechanics to create an extra level of fear.  If you go back and play something like Resident Evil now it's not scary because of it's laughable graphics and voice work but it's still fun to play and extremely tense because of how that game manages combat.  Ammunition and healing items are scarce and actually engaging in combat is a big decision that you have to make as a player because you have no idea when you might need those bullets or herbs for something nastier that may come later.

Fatal Frame took this idea another step further by not only making resources hard to find but by making combat extremely intense by basing damage on proximity and timing.  In that game you're using a camera so to get a good shot and do a decent chunk of damage you have to be in their grill except if you want to maximise your damage then you have to grab a shot of the ghost JUST before it hits you.  It's intense, scary and daunting even if you've beaten the game a few times before.

Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space made this a non issue because in those games you ALWAYS have ammo and healing and you are ALWAYS sure that there will be more around the next corner which is why when a game like Amnesia came out it was such a breath of fresh air.  However I think that horror games are missing out on something by not having combat.  No more am I planning the best route through a given situation but I'm just saving and loading in order to find the best space to hide and progress to the next part of the game.

There were times in old horror games when I was legitimately worried that my trigger happiness or the fact that I had taken too much damage meant that I wouldn't be able to beat the game and that's a feeling I want back.  What made survival horror such a great genre way back when was the fact that it was scary AND challenging.  Now the challenge has been removed and it's all about running away and I feel the genre is worse off for it.