PC Review: Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten

Over the last five years indie games have gained a steady and impressive following among both PC and console gamers, giving rise to a rebirth of many classic game types and the birth of many creative new game styles as well. One of the game types that has benefitted the most from the rise the indie market is the Tower Defense genre, and there are few games that exemplify the quality an indie title can reach like Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten.

At first glance Defender's Quest does little to inspire confidence in the overall product. With a rudimentary title screen and an almost complete lack of graphics options the game will seem lean on content to start with. Even the cinematics in the game are somewhat jarring and a let down, consisting of still images that, in all honesty, would feel more at home in a flash game than a title developed for sale.

Delving deeper into the game, however, will quickly show you the quality that lies beneath this initially lackluster veneer. The in-game graphics are a wonderful modern take on the 16-bit era, colorful and with enough animation to keep battles fairly lively and interesting. While the graphics options are sparse at best, the game wows with how much customization it allows in its gameplay experience, allowing players the option to tune experience gains, character downtime penalties, and even monetary gains to suit most players from the most hard-core strategy gamers to those who are looking for a more relaxed experience. Despite the less than stellar presentation for cutscenes the characters themselves are all colorful and fun, and the art design itself only fails due to a lack of consistency between cinematics and gameplay. Characters offer a rudimentary RPG-style skill and level up tree, and combining that with the ability to level up characters mid-level to gain access to more advanced combat techniques gives the entire game a great deal of depth. The equipment system is underwhelming, with new swords and armor offering nothing in terms of rewards beyond an incremental stat boost, but the entire design shows a great deal of promise, if not polish.

Gameplay is often quick, but can be paused to allow the player time to consider strategy as often as one needs to. Overall the difficulty curve on the game is well managed: with rewards turned up the game is a relaxing affair that still manages to hold your attention, while turning them down increases the difficulty and need for strategy without ever becoming unfair. Controls with either the keyboard or mouse are generally responsive and convenient, and there is next to nothing in the experience that will frustrate most players unduly. Level design is well handled as well, with the levels scaling nicely to present new placement and enemy challenges as the player progresses through the game.

With an intriguing storyline, good characters, and incredibly scalable gameplay that allows it to appeal to audiences of varied skill or dedication, Defender's Quest succeeds in presenting its players with a high-quality product worth investing your time in. While visual presentation suffers due to a mish-mash of different styles, it is only a minor flaw in the face of an otherwise well-made and solid game.

Final Rating: 8 out of 10.

Despite its visual shortcomings many game designers could learn a thing or two from Level Up Labs about accessible gameplay. By appealing to users seeking a hardcore strategy experience as well as those looking for a more casual game the creators have come up with a stand-out strategy title for both markets.

Post Types On Game Academy

In the future posts on Game Academy HRO will be loosely divided into categories, defined by not only the labels used for the posts but also by the titles themselves. Currently the intended post types are as follows:

Gaming lessons

No, these are not going to be pretentious "this is what it means to be a gamer" posts or how-to-plays or guides on how to think. Gaming lessons are going to be site content engineered toward understanding and appreciating the history and significance of gaming in its myriad forms. These lessons will follow a class-styled naming convention, consisting of the lesson value (Gaming 101, Gaming 302, etc,) followed by the subject matter of that lesson. Start looking forward to "Gaming 101: What Is A Game?" some time in the near future.

Tabletop Concepts

Tabletop Concepts are going to be articles and even opinion pieces focusing on tabletop strategy and role playing games. In these the site will focus on discussions about game mechanics, systems, and the roles tabletop gaming has played in culture from a less historically-oriented perspective.

Reviews

While the long-term plan is to have reviews play as small a role in the site's content as possible given their abundance from other sources, reviews will nevertheless appear on occasion. Reviews will always be the opinion of the writer and not of the site as a whole, and will be labeled by the system the review is for, such as in the case of our Arkham Origins review.

Opinion Pieces

Opinion pieces and editorials, at this time, will not have any special naming conventions applied, so if an article or piece appears that does not have a colon in the name, it's automatically an opinion piece. While the long term plan is to phase these into only sporadic content, much like the reviews, the short-term is likely to see many of these pieces to help build content strength for the site.

More content types will possibly be added to our repertoire in the future, but for now, these are the types of content you should expect to start seeing in the near future.

PC Review -- Batman: Arkham Origins

While overall not a BAD game, Arkham Origins fails to live up to a lot of its pedigree.

I've been anxious to get a chance to play this game since it came out, and a recent sale finally allowed me the opportunity to delve into the world of Gotham once again as everyone's favorite caped detective. Sure, I'd read many of the reviews proclaiming the game "good, but not up to snuff" in comparison to the other games, but I was willing to give it a shot nevertheless on the basis that even a half-decent Arkham game was likely to outweigh the quality of most of what is put out nowadays.

I was quickly surprised by many small signs of quality immediately apparent in the product. The graphics for the game are quite nice in general, with well-detailed and varied enemy models and a solid design for the Dark Knight himself. Controls are exactly what you'd expect from an Arkham game at this point, which is to say a controller is highly recommended, with combat just as fun as it is in prior games in the series if somewhat more stilted due to the ability unlock system, but more on that later. Likewise, sound design is solid as well, with the voice actors chosen doing admirable jobs. Overall the aesthetics of the game are spot-on, balancing appeal with performance and doing it all while pulling solid framerates on my fairly mediocre specs even when maxxed out.

Where the quality starts to fall down is in the gameplay itself. Gadget unlocking is not the steady stream you have grown used to from the older games in the series, and uses are not always clearly laid out. In fact, several of the gadgets fail to serve any purpose in the game whatsoever other than padding out your inventory. The game world itself is large, but even more sparcely populated than Arkham City, and far less visually dynamic, lending many of the locations you visit a very "been there, done that" feel to events. Even the puzzling from the older entries is largely absent, with even the most complicated of applications involving little more than the systematic application of one to two inventory items, and only about six items in total are ever used for the puzzles period.

To give the game credit the story itself is fun and, so far, quite professional in its application. You run into the expected rogue's gallery of villains, and the game does well in playing off of the difference in strength between the various foes you encounter, even allowing for the occasional bit of humor in their handling. On the other hand, there is next to no sense of urgency about events in the game's core story, with the only goals that convey any feeling of anxiety to complete being side quests that are completely optional. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for the existence of a time limit on the overall game, but some sense of a need to hurry and tackle the story would have been nice, and would help to add a sense of purpose to the overall world. Even the goals themselves boil down to nothing more than "open door, punch enemies, repeat," with the puzzles or exploration to accomplish a goal being below the standards set by the previous two games. I understand that the game was made by a different developer, which requires some allowances, but more essential puzzles would have greatly enhanced the game as a whole.

Overall, the game has been good. BUT.

Yes, but.

There are two parts of the game that I have to admit to having serious issues with.

The first issue I'll bring up is one that is not necessarily the game's fault, and that is my problems with stability. I say not "necessarily" the game's fault because, in PC gaming, certain allowances always must be made for different hardware and setting within said hardware. Despite those allowances, though, the glitches I've encountered in the game have all been quite frustrating and not fun. I've encountered multiple instances of interrogation subjects glitching into architecture and refusing to allow me to interrogate them, with one fight in particular requiring me to re-start the encounter four times because the enemy glitched the same way the first three times I tried it. In addition to that, I've encountered issues where controls will simply stop working. The game is simpler than the older games, to be sure, but losing one's ability to use gadgets still renders the game unplayable. This is an issue with the game and not my controller because a quick jump to the title screen and back to my most recent saves fixes it, but this shouldn't be necessary. In addition to all of this, there have been several times the game has slowed to an absolute crawl or even froze up, causing me frustration and even nearly crashing my entire computer. My system's no behemoth: AMD A8-3850 quad-core 2.9 GHz, 8 Gb DDR3 1600, AMD HD 6870 1 Gb GDDR5 -- but it averages 80 FPS in the game at 768p, so these slowdowns are very problematic and disturbing.

More than any of these issues, though, my biggest complaint about the game is the ability unlock system.

The regular ability trees are fine if not exactly ideal, and at the point I'm at I'm facing the frustrating issue of leveling faster than I'm unlocking abilities to apply my ability points to. What's more annoying is the abilities tied to accomplishing goals within the game. The system in general is one I appreciate and even commend, but the linearity of it is a ♥♥♥♥-poor way to handle a system of unlocks that is obviously intended to reward exploration and experimentation.

You have three notable sections of mini-goals for the game that allow you to unlock some of your abilities: abilities that can be unlocked no other way. These mini-goal tiers are each associated with a particular element of Batman, and the abilities and goals that are tied together are well considered. BUT. The goals can only be completed in order. What this means is that you cannot get credit for completing goals in a tree -- no matter how many times you do the action that should do it -- unless you've completed all lower goals. This might not sound flawed at first, but in practice it becomes an exercise in frustration.

As an example, I am stuck in one of the trees on a goal to complete a predator encounter without being seen. This is a VERY EARLY goal in the tree, but one that I have progressed in the story to the point of rendering it next to impossible, partially due to lack of abilities unlocked by moving up in the tree. Why didn't I complete this already? Because my combat style did not automatically lend itself to one of the lower goals, which took longer than it should have for me to accomplish. I managed no less than 3 predator encounters completely invisible prior to completing that one lower goal, but none of them count, oh no, because the system is built so linear. The older games liked to have goals you could accomplish that stacked toward certain bonuses, but were much more freeform in how they handled these, and as a result much more fun and, dare I say it, more user-friendly. By hard locking the order these goals must be accomplished in the developers have turned a system that could have rewarded creativity and experimentation into one that instead punishes the player for not doing things in the precise order the devs wanted, which is a terrible, terrible thing.

Is the game on the whole fun? Yes, it is, as is evidenced by my hours already in it. I've yet to complete the main story, but despite all my issues with the game the overall experience is good enough that I DO intend to. Frustrations with poor design choices aside the game is a good addition to the Arkham universe, albeit one I would recommend playing before the older games, not only due to its prequel status but also to minimize frustration over the game's inferior state. Combat is in most cases just as satisfying as in the previous entries, if a touch slower than Arkham City, but the puzzles themselves are far less interesting and the world feels, for lack of a better word, flat in comparison to the other games.

Final Rating: 6 out of 10

While not a bad game, Arkham Origins fails to build upon, or in many ways live up to, the older entries in the series. Some good visual production values fail to pull what is otherwise an empty and sometimes glitchy experience up to a higher level of quality.

An Introduction to Game Academy

Hello people, and welcome to what, with luck, will be the first of many entries into my new blog about gaming: Game Academy.

Let's get the obvious part out of the way first: the name. Yes, I have no doubt it will come across as rather pretentious given that I am an amateur video game aficionado, and given that I couldn't take "Game Academy" as my URL I'm assuming someone else has and may just take umbrage to my desire to use it. BUT, there is a method to my madness. The name is chosen to imply exactly what I want to convey in this blog: not just opinions and reviews, but articles over the history of gaming as a whole. There will likely be a heavy emphasis on video games, at least in the early life of the blog, but the goal is to eventually start providing readers with information and lesson plans focusing on the development and cultural significance of games as a whole, from card games to pinball, all the way to the modern home console markets. As such, Game Academy is a very apt name for what I intend to supply my readers.

Now that that's said and done, on to the fun stuff. Content will start out being posted as I write it, with no set plan or order. Once I've achieved a certain amount of content it will become my goal to schedule posts to the blog based on subject matter. In the long term the goal is to focus on purely informational posts rather than opinion pieces, but at first things will likely consist of mostly reviews, opinion articles, and the like. These will continue to be a part of the blog's content, but will move from being major content to weekend or special event content as more informational and lesson plan material is worked up.

Reviews will be posted for games and hardware, and will cover both old and new releases as they are reviewed. Everything will be reviewed on a ten-point scale structured as follows:

-1- Lowest of the low. No redeeming qualities. Avoid at all costs.

-2- Trash. Perhaps a good idea or concept, but awful execution.

-3- Amateur. Glitchy or broken, but with strong concepts that make it worth consideration.

-4- Below average. Problems mar an acceptable experience, but the product fails to stand out.

-5- Low average. Nothing exceptionally bad or good, kind of a meh game.

-6- High average. Entertaining, but flawed, or exceedingly well executed but fails to enthuse.

-7- Above average. The product as a whole is strong and has merit beyond simple entertainment.

-8- Good. A cut above, exemplifying good construction in story, gameplay, or both.

-9- Great. Stylistically or technically impressive. What every game should strive to obtain.

-10- Ideal. Nigh impossible level of perfection in technical, gameplay, or story detail. A game for the ages.

The scale above lists standards based on games, but the same general level of consideration will be applied to hardware as it gets reviewed. Note that mid-level scores are average, not low. This means that just because a product fails to obtain a superior score -- and few will -- does not mean it is a poor product overall.

The last thing I want to cover in this introductory post is writers. For the moment I am the only writer, though it is my intention to recruit others to the cause as well. A more typical "getting to know you" article from me will appear in the future, and as new writers are added and contribute material such articles will appear to cover them as well.

With all of that said and done, welcome to Game Academy! I hope we can all have a great time and learn a lot of great things!