In a different 1995, a company called Uexplore began offering cost-effective trips to a distant planet. Upon arriving at their destination, private citizens piloted miniature ships known as Small Craft as they explored peaceful environments on the planet Spectaculon, taking in the alien sights and claiming territory for their own. After three days, a ship picked them up, and they returned home to tell others of the grand adventures waiting at the edge of the universe.
Affordable Space Adventures is the story of one pilot--you--who is nearly done enjoying an excursion to that same distant planet. Suddenly, everything goes wrong. The carrier ship you are supposed to ride home in crashes and leaves you stranded until you can find a functioning communication pod and send a distress signal. Unfortunately, the surrounding environment isn't nearly as hospitable as the promotional videos led you to believe. You need to use every function your diminutive vessel possesses if you want to live to enjoy a bright tomorrow.
The planet is beautiful, even when it's trying to kill you.
At a glance, Affordable Space Adventures doesn't look particularly unique. It could easily be mistaken for a horizontal shooter like R-Type or Gradius, only with better graphics. However, the emphasis here is on solving puzzles rather than explosions and high scores. There's no thumping soundtrack, only ambient noises and the occasional bit of piano work that barely even registers. Truly intense moments are quite rare, but the experience is likely to stick with you for a long time because it doesn't feel like a hollow imitation of classic digital journeys you may have already taken.
The game's interface deserves much of the credit for that accomplishment. Using the gamepad, you control the Small Craft with the left analog stick while the right one aims a spotlight that can also scan for potential hazards or fire flares. That's basic enough, but your vessel improves over time as its features come back online. You soon find yourself monitoring thruster levels, stability, and even gravity controls. Eventually, you're able to switch between engines on the fly and activate boosts. The various options are presented on the gamepad screen in a manner that feels like part of the experience rather than just a generic control scheme, and this setup is used in some interesting ways as the adventure unfolds.
Some of the visual design just plain rocks.
Early stages lead you through verdant environments, but you soon head beneath the planet's surface to explore dangerous interior areas patrolled by sentries and floating pods. If you attract their attention, they'll swiftly take you out of action, which means you must make frequent adjustments to sneak by them undetected. In the opening areas, changing from one engine type to another is often sufficient because you put out less electricity or noise. Later puzzles grow increasingly demanding, though, and you sometimes have to get more creative and take bigger risks. In a vertical shaft, for instance, you might need to briefly kill your engine so you can drop past a drone that is alerted by sound, but then you want to bring your thrusters roaring back to life in time to avoid dropping across the path of a nasty laser beam.
Most stages aren't especially large, but there are plenty of them to traverse. Checkpoints are placed at reasonable intervals, which is important given how easy it is to meet a premature end. If you clear a puzzle, you're seldom forced to do so repeatedly to try your hand again at an obstacle further down the line that is giving you fits. Affordable Space Adventures is by no means an easy game, but it's also not overly concerned with putting you through the wringer for no good purpose. Once you have a feel for things, you can probably get through everything in a couple of hours without much fuss, but your first trip through could easily take several times that long, particularly if you refuse to take advantage of the option to lower the difficulty between levels.
They say some chain will do you good.
Returning to Affordable Space Adventures down the road should be easy because you can save up to three adventures at once. You can also revisit any stage you've already cleared by selecting it from a map. There are only a few tutorials throughout the experience, each limited to a few quick text prompts, so you won't have to wade through a bunch of filler if you decide to take another run at it. Another reason to revisit the campaign is to enjoy the game's multiplayer support. Any time you load a save file, you can assign second and third players their own tasks on Wii remotes and Wii U pro controllers. One player can control the ship, another can direct the spotlight, and a third can make internal adjustments on the gamepad.
By nature of the game's design, teamwork and careful coordination are required in order to find success. Whoever has the gamepad at the moment also has a lot of power, and may find it difficult to resist killing the engine in the middle of a daring maneuver, with disastrous but short-lived results. Eventually, everyone will surely agree that it's time to do things right, and reaching an area goal together without too many mistakes always feels satisfying. It's a refreshing option, though it naturally wreaks havoc on the sense of isolation that the single-player mode so beautifully establishes.
Although the game generally does a good job of anticipating and avoiding basic technical issues that might have dampened the experience--the controls are suitably precise, and the action is silky smooth, at least when your ship isn't sputtering through the early areas after recovering from early damage--it's still not without occasional faults. A couple of the later areas are overly demanding on the default difficulty setting, requiring precise timing and quick finger work for more extended periods as you are forced to stealthily navigate corridors stuffed full of floating sentries. The need for frequent adjustment can get tedious, particularly because the ship's settings revert to a safe default whenever it is taken out of commission. If you're retrying an area and you want to take another run at a particular gauntlet, you have to make a bunch of tweaks before you're even in a position to engage the engine. That slows down the pace and can make gameplay monotonous, but it's fortunately the exception and not the rule. Finally, in a few instances, load screens wear out their welcome, including the one that lingers when you first boot up the game, but those delays aren't persistent enough to ruin the experience.
Perhaps someday, space travel really will be cheap, safe, and available from a company much like Uexplore. That day probably won't come during our lifetimes, though, which leaves us to seek our thrills in movies and games instead. Affordable Space Adventures is a great way to do precisely that, and it's especially welcome if you've been looking for a Wii U title that uses the hardware to offer a genuinely unique and reasonably substantial experience. Are you looking for a journey into the digital unknown that won't break the bank? If so, then is the one that you should embark upon.
Assassin Shao Jun really wants a box. Apparently, the box holds a precious artifact left from the time of the First Civilization, but it is simply the ultimate in MacGuffins; it's the Maltese Falcon, the briefcase from Pulp Fiction, and the Ark of the Covenant. What it does is irrelevant and never elaborated upon, at least not in this story, for its purpose is to kick an adventure into action--in this case, a beautiful and ultimately boring trek that cribs from Mark of the Ninja but can't capture the earlier game's cleverness or excitement. It's tempting to praise Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China for squeezing the series' signature elements into two-and-a-half dimensions, and for making stealth gameplay more vital than it has been in an Assassin's Creed game for years. But Chronicles rests on being pretty, adding new mechanics over time but flattening the pace and allowing exploits and glitches to suck out the rising tension.
If a game must rest on being pretty, then at least Chronicles makes the most of it. This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty. In one level, an impossibly large, bright moon rises in the sky, shining through the mist and illuminating willow trees in the foreground, which have the natural smudges and brushstrokes you would expect to see from the Qing masters. Elsewhere, a distant waterfall glows of its own accord, as if pure moonlight had been mixed into the paint that created it. Each scene comes to life with an inviting softness; even simple gray walls depict hushed details, like an underlying paperlike texture, where darker rings reveal where water droplets might have landed on the canvas.
It doesn't matter why you're there. What matters is where you are.
It's a gorgeous style, relegated to an atmospheric role; Chronicles' wan storytelling, which mostly occurs in hand-drawn interstitials, doesn't engage in much world- or character-building, leaving the art to provide the game's aesthetic, along with an unobtrusive, string-heavy soundtrack. As Shao Jun, a silent killer trained by none other than Assassin's Creed II hero Ezio Auditore, you move through these spaces, sneaking past patrolling guards and avoiding their vision cones; they cannot see more than 20 feet in front of their own faces, and will not notice you at all when they engage in conversation with each other. Avoidance means slipping behind a pillar with a flick of an analog stick, hanging from a front facing ledge, spidering along a ceiling, or tumbling into a pile of hay. (Of course, in Assassin's Creed fashion, you will occasionally make a leap of faith into one of these bales, an action as satisfying to perform in two dimensions as in three.)
You make your way from one array of guards to another, sometimes flinging your rope dart towards an overhang and swinging towards the camera (or away from it) and into a different adventuring layer. Chronicles makes good use of these layers, giving its best levels a sense of depth. You spend more time, however, navigating past the guards that bar your way, either by sneaking around them, stealthily assassinating them, or, rarely, by directly confronting them. My favorite approach was assassination, because it is in silent assassination that Chronicles stays truest to the games that preceded it. When you plunge your hidden dagger into an enemy from behind, you hear an eerie crunch as metal permeates flesh; your target grunts and falls to the ground, and blood seeps across the corpse and dissipates as if soaking into the paper upon which the game is drawn. Performing an assassination while hanging from above is even more enjoyable, thanks to the way Shao Jun points her blade downward as she falls, as if absolving herself by letting gravity perform the cruel deed. Later on, you can sprint forward and slide into unaware guards, which makes for a smooth and rewarding way to combine momentum and quiet butchery.
In a few levels, you can hide in a crowd, but the people vanish in a puff of smoke if you're caught.
The game awards you the most points for complete avoidance, yet it is when skirting around your enemies that Chronicles' flaws most often surface. In most stealth games, there is intrinsic reward in sticking to the shadows--or in this case, slipping into a dark doorway, or dropping into crevasses that guards ignore unless you've alerted them to your presence. Yet over the game's four-hour (or so) running time, the challenge rarely grows. You earn upgrades to your stealth repertoire as you progress, such as a limited ability to flit from one cover position to the next as if you were a ghost on methamphetamines, but there is no sense of rising anxiety. The puzzles don't noticeably increase in complexity, keeping pace with your new moves but not pushing beyond them, and a few ideas--wind chimes that jingle if you don't crouch under them, for instance--appear too rarely to invigorate any given level.
In time, you discover ways to exploit the AI's limitations, rushing out of guards' view if you alert all of them, and waiting to return until they resume their patrols just a few seconds later. Of course, you could accuse many stealth games of allowing similar exploits, but in Chronicles, each guard is leashed to such a limited area that the ease with which you can simply sprint away and wait it out makes the entire setup feel contrived--quite a feat in a genre that, by nature, can feel particularly game-ish. And occasionally, the game doesn't know how to respond to your reactions and glitches out. At one point, the AI remained on high alert even though I'd escaped the area and was no longer in view; at another, two guards got stuck in place as they searched for me, halting the game and forcing me to leap out of hiding just so I could put the adventure back in motion.
This side-scrolling stealth game is overflowing with watercolor beauty.
Going toe-to-toe with the enemy is an option, yet an unsatisfying one. Combat has never been Assassin's Creed's strong suit, but swordplay has always featured an understandable rhythm. In Chronicles, you are meant to avoid combat if possible; perhaps battle was made to be purposefully awkward, so that you avoid it when possible. Design choice or not, fending off patrolmen is hardly fun. It's possible to escape with your life if you are incredibly careful and alert, even when flanked on both sides by multiple sword- and gunmen, but the entire affair is clumsy, and death is quick in many of these situations, regardless. There is no cadence to enemy behavior, nor do the fiddly controls invite fluid motion. Direct confrontation is best circumvented, making a boss fight that requires combat all the more mind-boggling.
Another boss fight puts to use your throwing knives, one of a few gadgets you have on hand for solving Chronicles' super-easy pseudo-puzzles. You can distract and lure enemies by whistling or throwing a projectile, and momentarily stun them with fireworks, but the predictability of level layouts and ease of AI exploitation means that your strategies can remain the same from start to finish. Ironically, this stealth game's finest moments arrive when it allows you to break free and sprint ahead in order to flee encroaching danger, such as a blazing fire. In no way do these escape sequences match those from the recent Ori and the Blind Forest, but they are the closest Chronicles comes to delivering the series' signature freerunning. You vault over obstacles and slide into shellshocked guards, cutting them down as you rush from danger, watching Templar baddies succumb to flames and crumbling infrastructure. It's a lively diversion in a game that is otherwise mostly devoid of forward momentum. You know the end is about to arrive because the cutscene narration tells you as much, and because the music's tempo has increased, but the gameplay hasn't built to this moment. The credits roll. The game is over. But there was no more excitement in that finale than there was in the opening minutes.
Collectible shards fill up the meter that powers your ghostly sprinting.
Chronicles' passive pacing is a shame, because the pieces, combat notwithstanding, are mostly strong. Furthermore, the exquisite environments craft a setting that makes me eager to see the two upcoming sequels--Chronicles: India, and Chronicles: Russia--in action. If they follow in Chronicles: China's footsteps, they will be beautiful to behold. I hope, however, that unlike the first entry, they take the leap of faith required to make them play as boldly as they look.
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