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Devastation Review April 30, 2003 Tom Chick |
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Summary: There's a common thought among PR flaks in the industry whenever they hear the name Tom Chick. Listen! And understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with! It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your game is reviewed! With that cold, heartless, mechanical precision, Tom dissects Devastation. It's not pretty. Your mother probably doesn't want you reading anything this graphic. (hey, at least I didn't pun it, like 'Tominated' or something)
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Devastating
Let's cut to the chase: Devastation is a horrible game. If you've already shelled out money for it, you might still be in the throes of self-denial, frantically trying to justify the $40 you spent. "But it's got rat drones," you might say, trying not to think about what other games you could have bought with that money. "You can pick stuff up. The fire effects are cool. And they could still patch it some more."
The problem isn't so much the concept, which is benign enough. The basic idea behind Devastation is to take the Unreal engine, soup it up with some real-world physics, make some post-apocalyptic landscapes, and then tie it all into a single player game cleverly built around that old chestnut of infinitely spawning enemies. So far, so good. But then comes the execution.
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Where are the dinosaurs?
The physics system sounds a lot like a certain other bad game called Trespasser. You can pick up bottles and Coke cans. You can move barrels. You can carry crates. You can kick stuff. You can pick up nearly anything to use it as a weapon, move it around, or throw it to distract guards. And there are exactly zero times any of this comes into play.
There are a few of those annoying twists where someone takes away all your weapons (Oh no, you've been captured!) and you begin the level with a 2-by-4 or a combat knife. But guns are soon brought to bear in these levels, so the whole 'use a bottle as a weapon' conceit is about as relevant to the gameplay as lens flare. One unintentionally hilarious level in an insane asylum has you armed with a plank squaring off against doctors trying to jab you with needles. The only thing funnier would have been a level in an office supply store in which you have rubber bands and paperclips and you're fighting store managers armed with manila folders.
As for moving things around or throwing them to distract enemies, there are none of Trespasser's crate stacking puzzles (phew...) and you never have to sneak past a guard, making Devastation one of the only games in recent history to eschew the whole stealth craze. There are, however, a few times when a guard seems scripted to ignore you until you attack him, so throwing a bottle down the hall doesn't serve any purpose other than to call up the sound effect of a bottle being thrown down the hall.
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The physics system does accomplish one thing: it serves to reinforce disbelief rather than suspend it. Sometimes you'll walk into a small room and inadvertently kick a folding chair. It'll shoot off your invisible leg and ricochet around the room like Flubber. There seems to be mysterious wind blowing through some of the levels. Maybe a stack of boxes will suddenly fall over for no apparent reason. Turn a corner and you'll discover a barrel spinning on its rim. You can almost see the numbers from the physics code not adding up right and creating all sorts of wacky effects. It's as if someone forgot to carry the two, making a cardboard box skitter down a hallway like a pinball. And all the while, you're constantly accompanied by the noises of someone shuffling through a trash-filled alley. The soundtrack to Devastation may as well be the effects of rattling cans and knocked over bottles. This is a physics system serves little purpose other than to pose a great big unanswered 'why?'.
SIDEBAR: The Blue and the Gray refers to the colors of the uniforms of Union (blue) and Confederate (gray) soldiers during the Civil War. In this article, it refers to Tom’s ‘the gray and the gray’ heading, which is probably a play on ‘the blue and the gray’
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The gray and the gray
Devastation takes place in one of those trendy dystopian futures. You know the ones: the world is run by evil corporations, the cities are in ruins, Orwellian, bleak, blah, blah, blah. But what it all seems to come down to is the color gray. Remember what Quake did for the color brown? Devastation has a similar affinity for washed-out grays. Almost every level, whether its one of Devastation's many sewers or warehouses, seems to have been drawn from an oppressively pale gray palette, as if the world was covered in a mist of ash. At the very end of the game, as you're fighting your way up a corporate skyscraper, the gray seems a little brighter, but it's still all very gray. Devastation is the grayest game you'll ever play.
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The level design is largely an uninspired miasma of mazes and fake doors, cluttered and busy and devoid of personality. San Fransicso looks like LA, which looks like Taipei, which looks like Japan. The only way the developers distinguish different locations is to maybe stick a sign with Asian characters over the street or display the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking over some ruined warehouse or to explain during the exposition that you're on Alcatraz. The only level where the settings break out of their oppressive sameness is a subway level in which you're fighting down the length of ruined tunnels with derelict subway cars scattered between the stations. Otherwise, it's pretty much an assortment of sewers and warehouses.
The storyline casts you in the role of a bottle-blonde punk who's a resistance fighter. He uncovers an evil corporate scheme that lets soldiers respawn after they've been killed. "During my last encounter I believe to have witnessed some new technology that I cannot explain," he says at one point, displaying his mastery of the language. He proceeds to meet various other resistance fighters in bad outfits, all of whom have either bulging biceps or bulging breasts. Together they go on missions, chasing down arbitrary objectives (Find the security codes! Rescue Duffy! Destroy the generators!) and eventually getting their own respawning machines.
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The whole respawning machine concept is actually Devastation's best chance at being a half-way decent game. You can cut off the endless flow of enemies by destroying their machine. And once you gather the parts for your own machine, getting killed is no big deal because the level plays out like a deathmatch that you're bound to eventually win. There's a multiplayer mode, Territories, in which you have to get a key to the other team's base and then fight your way in to destroy their spawners. Devastation is onto something here: take a clichéd convention of the genre and build gameplay around it.
SIDEBAR: Tom, like CalBear before him, seems to have something against bulging breasts. Maybe I should bring the two of them to dinner and then discretely leave? After all, CalBear lives in the Bay and Tom is an actor… hmm…
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Just add ninjas
But a lot of amateurish game design and filler gets in the way. Over half the single player missions are played without spawners by the tired 'die and reload' rules. There are some tedious boss battles, usually against helicopters with a gazillion hit points; you'll plink away with whatever weapons have the most ammo, wearily wishing the game had a rocket launcher in its hoary arsenal. The last boss battle is an exercise in reloading and trying for the umpteenth time because your health is low and there's no healing in the little arena where you have to fight the uber-boss and his respawning henchmen. Near the end of the game, ninjas suddenly appear for no good reason. It's as if the developers yelped, "Cripes, we forgot to put in ninjas! Get me some ninjas, quick!" By the time some of the bad guys defect and join you for a bit of late game exposition, the cutscenes are too painful to watch. Time to get a sandwich rather than sit through any more of the excruciatingly bad voice acting.
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Of course, none of this is surprising after one of the first levels where you come across a construction worker taking a leak. He's been carefully placed at an oblique angle so you can see the arc of urine streaming from his crotch (the developers use this trick in at least two more places just so you don't miss how funny it is). This is clear indication of the level of maturity you're in for. Add all this to the bad physics, the gray level design, and the dopey storyline. And cap it off with one of the worst AIs you'll ever encounter.
Artificial inanity
That's right, one of the worst AIs you'll ever encounter. I cannot stress this enough. Some AIs are bad in that they're just easy to kill. Some AIs are bad in that they're just unreliable or inconsistent. Some AI just makes no sense. But the AI in Devastation is a hard impediment to playing the game. There are some levels that are almost impossible to finish because of the AI. Let me repeat that: almost impossible to finish. Again: almost impossible.
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Here's how Devasation is supposed to work: you have up to eight team members scripted to go on missions with you. You can give them guns as you find them, allowing you to custom arm your team. Using the standard Unreal Tournament command interface, you can give orders to follow you, hold a position, defend the base, or attack the enemy. These orders can be given globally or to individual team members. This system works well in Unreal Tournament, which makes for some satisfying team games with bots. So you'd think this should be pretty nifty in Devastation, right?
SIDEBAR: Tom loved Black Hawk Down, known the world over for its ‘stellar’ (ie, spaced-out) AI, but has problems with Devastation? Man, this must be bad!
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Dead to Wrongs
You'd be dead wrong. The first problem is that on missions without respawners, a dead teammate is a fail state. No matter where you are, no matter what's happening, no matter how close you are to finishing your objectives, if one of your teammates dies, the mission will instantly end in failure. So when the bots start doing stupid things like shooting each other, which they'll gladly do when they're not busy shooting you, the mission will come to a screeching halt. When they're not busy shooting each other, they'll shoot at walls. They'll get in your way. They'll ignore your orders and do whatever they feel like doing, which generally involves shooting each other in a blind attempt to drill their bullets through any obstacles in the general direction of an enemy bot, who is simultaneously doing something just as stupid. Some missions begin with friendly and enemy units so close that as soon as the game loads, the firing begins and your teammates start dying. This is when you'd be hard-pressed to think of a game more aggravating than Devastation.
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Best game with a remote control rat!
The animation is just as bad as the AI behavior. Bots jump straight in the air as if they were on pogo sticks. Movement has that whole ice-sliding/moonwalking/rotating-in-place dynamic. The game is unstable, frequently crashing to desktop and only sometimes generating a crash save so you won't have to backtrack to your last saved position. Sometimes you'll get stuck on some invisible obstacle with no way out other than reloading the game from the last time you saved.
The weapons are tired variations on the same old themes: pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, miniguns, and shotguns, all in two or three different flavors. There's a rail gun that sets your enemy on fire before he evaporates in a shell of ash. The rat drone in an earth-bound variation on the redeemer; you drive a rat with a camera on his head around the level, detonating it with the click of your mouse button. This is used in the only thing in Devastation that might pass for a puzzle.
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So at least you have your multiplayer support, right? It's the Unreal engine, there's the cool Territories mode with respawners, and the last patch gave the weapons a bit of aural punch. Let's go online. Where, surprise! surprise!, we'll find a wasteland of uninhabited servers every bit as deserted as the level design.
SIDEBAR: Daikatana had two teammates who couldn’t die, and their AI was actually quite impressive (though still fatally flawed). Devastation has up to eight. Didn’t anyone learn anything?
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Pros
Respawning
Devastation builds some interesting gameplay around this tired old cliché
Rat drones
A cool weapon that’s halfway between the snark and the redeemer
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Cons
AI
So poorly done that it’s an active impediment to playing the game
Physics
Not only useless, but thoroughly wacky
Level design
From the Make Everything Rundown and Gray school of design
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Storyline
It’s a standard-issue dystopia, but with guys peeing
SIDEBAR: Tom must be one unhappy guy. I blame it on his relation to Jack Chick (he denies it.)
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