Imagine a Super FX chip version of Deus Ex: that's Neon Struct whittled down to its essentials. If such a game had existed in 1993, we'd still be talking about it in the sort of reverent, hushed tones we'd use if we had been front-row center for Moses bringing two God-forged tablets down from a mountain. That Neon Struct still has enough going on to remain engaging in 2015 is a testament to the skill involved, but it simply can't help but suffer under the weight of its own ambitions.
The set up is straightforward. You are Jillian Cleary, a woman of mystery who carries out espionage missions for the world's most conspicuous spy agency against a backdrop of the neon cyberpunk future the 80s told us was coming. During the course of a mission, she discovers that the agency might be working as an illegal arm of whatever the future's iteration of the Patriot Act looks like. People of interest the world over have been implanted with surveillance chips for the so-called "greater good." Jillian is tossed in a cell for her silly belief in justice and clarity, but she breaks out and immediately goes to work to try and expose the truth.
Yes. Furtwengler. His parents HATED him.
Some heavy stuff goes on in Neon Struct storywise, which makes it all the more jarring that it's executed in an aesthetic that's not that different from the original Star Fox. The soundtrack may be a decent enough mixture of Vangelis-lite synth tones and beats, but polygons are intentionally low-res, enemies and NPCs are faceless and voiceless, and although you'll jetset back and forth across the country, environments always feature the same dark skies, sparse populations, and vague, looming, futuristic machinery. Instead of feeling like a final version, it feels like a pre-production build of a bigger cyberpunk adventure.
Stripping away the niceties of generations of graphical advancement is always a good road to take to get to the true heart of whether a game works or not. To wit, Neon Struct is functional as far as the most basic and fundamental stealth mechanics are concerned. There's even a satisfying purity to it. You can run, jump, climb over obstacles within reason, and perform a silent, cool, Mirror's Edge-like slide to slip into cover in a hurry. You have no weapons to speak of, though you do get a hacking tool, which allows you to bust open doors by playing a quick game of Breakout on whatever passes for an iPhone in this bright, shiny future. You also get a variety of stims, which give you a short but sweet special effect, like making your footsteps entirely silent or throwing a grenade that immediately teleports you to its location, Nightcrawler-style. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows you your visibility level, dropping to completely empty if you're invisible, which can happen even if some guards saw you duck into a shady corner just 5 seconds ago. You can knock out guards and toss their bodies into the nearest convenient tidy pile somewhere, but the checklist at the end of each stage frowns upon such violence and offers higher grades to those who can get around without ever resorting to this direct approach.
I flunked every single time.
Think for yourself, QUESTION DOORS.
The do-no-harm approach can be done, and there's plenty of challenge for folks who enjoy pacifist runs. The issue is that there are so few alternatives that don't involve waiting out guards on a leisurely midnight stroll through an industrial complex or taking a nightstick to the face. Cold-cocking a guard is just sweet, instant relief. Not that the guards are terribly smart to begin with--they're pretty quick to dispense nightstick justice. Even though you're equally quick to crumple like a paper towel after taking two or three hits, it's just as easy to watch them fumble around inches in front of your face and slip out of a hairy situation when they come stalking.
This is all perfectly well and good for a cheap-shot app offering quick doses of mindless stealth action on the go. The starting missions are simple sneak-in-sneak-out stealth runs, but Neon Struct has greater ambitions for its world. However, the sparse world building creates some gaping, disappointing holes. The better the story gets, the less the game built around it satisfies its needs. The earliest and best example is Jillian's jailbreak. She's just discovered a conspiracy that actually does go all the way to the top. When her grossly misogynistic boss has her tucked away in a detention facility until someone decides it's neutralizing time, her field handler, an Indian gentleman by the name of Vinod, manages to bust in and hack her door open. This is all fine, but the very quality of the story betrays what you expect when she's out. Most of the cells around her are empty, save one delusional prisoner. There's a workout room for guards and a two-way glass room for visitations; otherwise, Jillian's terrifying Guantanamo is a sterile, blocky hotel crawling with baton-wielding drones and the same three or four recycled textures. There are no indicators to be found besides the dots, question mark, and exclamation points placed over alerted guards, which helps with immersion but makes traversing the labyrinthine corridors a pain. That area's one of the most frustrating moments in the game for the same reason. The one button allowing you to exit the facility is in a security room that you'd never really identify as a security room except that one tiny, inconspicuous switch is located on a ledge in a room you might entirely overlook.
Aw, do I have to choose?
The sterility might make sense for a government facility, but it makes less sense when the game drops you into big, well-known cities and everything is faceless, abstract, and completely missing a personality (besides the game's default personality for everything, of course). A sequence on the next level has Jillian attempting to sneak into a medical facility to surgically remove the tracking device in her arm. You walk up to a bed, hit X, a spurt of red stuff hits the screen, and the objective is complete. Again, that's all well and good for an art project or a proof-of-concept, but it's not so great when we're asked to engage with much bigger ideas and action.
It's a double-edged sword, though. Can we really fault a developer for trying to give a very simple game more depth than necessary? It's a tough call. Neon Struct has the right spirit behind it. It tries to be a rebellious, anti-government tale of capitalism and intelligence communities getting into bed with each other to the detriment of all, and that struggle is far easier to believe than many of gaming's recent attempts to outdo William Gibson. But with the game-making tools at our disposal, that story should be told using as much fire and verve as can be mustered. Instead, it's told here with a technical manual's austerity. The story here acts as little more than the cellophane frames old-schoolers had to paste over their TVs to create a new background for the tiny lights that darted across the screen. Both do their jobs sufficiently, but we no longer have to simply dream of more.
Metaphor serves not only as one of the most used concepts in just about every medium imaginable, but also as the basis for entire works of art. Whole paintings are often metaphors for the artist's feelings or background, and movies can link chains of symbolism together to represent some more abstract concepts. Games can go further by inviting the player into the metaphor itself through interactivity, conveying difficult real-world problems like illness and societal inequalities. The trick to creating an effective metaphor as a game is to be subtle enough with your themes so they don't overwhelm the playing experience itself while simultaneously ensuring that the game still communicates the themes clearly. Sym, a platformer inspired by social anxiety, fails on both counts, leaving us with a clumsy, confusing experience whose bright spots are muted by rough design and heavy-handed themes.
Boiling down what Sym is about is simple: You play as a person trying to escape the prying eyes of other people by escaping into a world where they can't follow you, one where you can be alone. This is reflected in your experiences by your ability to sink into the floor and emerge upside-down on the other side. Suddenly, what were once solid platforms become empty space to move through, and vice-versa. Occasionally, you run into switches that cause blocks to appear and disappear in patterns marked with arrows, and, of course, you have to avoid enemies and hazards. However, most of the game's identity lies in its dual nature, forcing you to think about how far you need to progress before you have to switch orientation. Mapping out the correct path to the end is the most engrossing part of the game.
The words and phrases that litter levels can be a bit much.
Sym's mechanics falter when they're put to the test, however. The floaty jumping mechanics don't match up well with the frequent pinpoint platforming you're required to do. It's pretty difficult to land on a patch of safe ground only as wide as you are with the amount of control the jump physics allow, and not in a good way. Compounding matters is your character's hitbox, which extends past your actual body ever so slightly. You'll die by drawing too near a saw blade without ever actually touching it. And then there are narrow shafts you have to fall into at just the right angle or else get stuck awkwardly along the edge. The levels themselves are interesting thanks to good use of the orientation switching mechanic, but that's the only bit that works as advertised. These issues are small, but they add up, sucking away the promising potential Sym initially displays.
But its biggest failing is in how it fails to convey anything meaningful about its inspiration from social anxiety. You can see the obvious starting point for the extended metaphor in the central mechanic. Sinking into the floor is synonymous with hiding from the world's prying eyes as they try to drag you out into the light and consume you. What developer Atrax Games is going for here is pretty clear because of the game's very literal interpretation of these platitudes. The first set of levels features giant eyeballs that stare at you without trying to hurt you. In these levels, only environmental hazards, like sawblades and pitfalls, can harm you. Later stages have actual enemies that will kill you, like carnivorous plants that spontaneously grow out of seeds you see on the ground or hungry beasts that pace back and forth looking for a meal. Even the people you meet later on prove to be foes, pulling you out of your hiding place in the ground as you dissolve in a fit of social paralysis. It's all very on-the-nose, but you can see a vague character progression as fears intensify and you careen towards either finding friends amidst your anxiety or hiding away forever.
Arrows sometimes serve as a loose guide, but also indicates where moving platforms appear.
Though the game practically screams its inspiration at you, it has nothing coherent to say about social anxiety. The levels feature the aforementioned allusions to a hazardous world you must hide from, but everything else is muddled. The levels themselves rarely tell any sort of story on their own. Instead, anguished phrases are used to fill in the gaps where the game's thematic design drops the ball. But these also confuse any thematic ties the game manages to establish by reading like a moody high school student's musings scrawled in the margins of a notebook. That in itself is a cool idea, and it goes with the pencil-inspired graphics. But they don't reveal anything or lead the themes anywhere except to depict anguish for anguish's sake. Until the game splits off briefly into two different sets of final levels, the messages convey the same depth of pain and panic throughout. In fact, they sometimes border on incoherent ramblings not dissimilar to the stereotypically exaggerated dialogue you'd hear from a schizophrenic person on an episode of Law and Order, which matches poorly with the meager thematic progression the levels suggest. It's confusing, distracting, and occasionally insulting to those who suffer from social anxiety.
The few themes that do come through loud and clear--hiding from social situations, the fear and consequences of being caught in one, and the eventual message that finding and sharing the connections and burdens between people is the beginning of the answer--all would make a fine foundation for a game like Sym if they were handled with more subtlety. Likewise, the erratic writing plastered everywhere contributes very little, actively obscuring any sense of progression the themes try to develop. Even when divorced from its themes, Sym manages to be mildly entertaining but just shy of a competent game thanks to the many small yet significant design flaws you have to work through. Most disappointing, though, is that Sym manages to successfully convey nothing enlightening, moving, informative, or even coherent about social anxiety. Hiding may be a central mechanic in Sym, but obscuring your meaning to this baffling degree is never the answer.
Carmageddon, released in 1997, was a bloody and entertaining car combat racer for its time. It was one of those oft-declared "violent games of the '90s," featuring enough wanton carnage to attract the ire of hand-wringing parents, politicians, and censors. You raced and killed your way to victory in one of many exaggerated vehicles, each of them strapped with rough blades, spikes, and other nasty parts, as you wrecked opponents and turned mobs of wandering pedestrians into chunks of flayed meat. The game was defined by its era. Carmageddon: Reincarnation attempts to bring that game back to life, but it does little to improve on the old formula, and the result feels out of its time. The game would be mediocre at best, but a host of serious performance issues and slippery controls ultimately leave enjoyment idling in the garage, choking on fumes.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation has many problems under the hood, but clunky performance is worst of all. The frame rate struggles to stay around 30, occasionally diving to create something akin to a Red Asphalt slide show; at times, it sputters and chugs worse than a 1970s-era Chevy truck left to rot in the backyard. One map in particular, a small arena with a large metal saucer that periodically drops on any hapless vehicles below, is nearly unplayable. As cars and trucks get crushed, the game screeches to a halt, leaving you to ponder the game's fragile state and wonder just when it will all fall apart. But you won't have to wait for long--the game crashes, freezes, and locks up your computer, forcing restarts. Of course, you can lower your graphics settings to squeeze out more frames, but doing so offers no favors in a game that already looks aesthetically dull. The performance, however, would be at least somewhat bearable with vehicles that are fun to drive. Well, buckle up.
A host of serious performance issues and slippery controls ultimately leave enjoyment idling in the garage, choking on fumes.
You would expect a game entirely focused on vehicles, from racing to combat, to put the utmost care and effort into how well they handle. Carmageddon: Reincarnation, however, could have spent more time under a mechanic's careful eye--a lot more time. You can unlock a large roster of vehicles--most will be familiar to longtime Carmageddon fans--and send them soaring through frightened crowds of cows and human pedestrians (or peds, as the game refers to them), but precious few are worth taking out for a drive. Some of the heavier vehicles take to the road with the grace of a lobbed brick, but the majority control as though they're being driven over greased ice.
At the slightest provocation, from bump to severed body part, vehicles spin out of control, making you fight to stay on the road. Even a minimal increment, such as diving from road to sidewalk, can cause your car to wildly jerk to the side, or worse, flip end over end. Small ramps also hide untold danger because hitting them at the wrong angle will more often than not send you flipping through the air to land on your roof. Large vehicles with large tires to match tend to have more stability on and off the road, but they lack the speed of the faster, sportier cars. And because most of Reincarnation's game types favor zippy cars over slow-moving trucks, it's not likely that you'll stay behind the wheel of one for long.
At the slightest provocation, from bump to severed body part, vehicles spin out of control, making you fight to stay on the road.
Speaking of game modes, let's go over which ones are good and which ones are bad. Ok, that was a trick statement: none of them are that good. In Classic Carma, you can win in one of three ways: finish a race, kill all the pedestrians, or destroy every opponent. Colored oil drums that dot the map provide you with the means for victory. Red barrels provide weapons and items, including flying Acme-sized anvils, explosive mines, oil slicks, and springs that propel nearby opponents and pedestrians through the air or into walls. Yellow barrels add a few more seconds to a countdown timer or some extra points. Those points can also be used to purchase weapons or defensive boosts, which you can add to a set of hotkeys. The mode takes you on a tour of the maps in Carmageddon: Reincarnation, which are surprisingly large (leading to lengthy load times), providing long, winding races across beaches, through sea towns, under icy caverns, and past industrial complexes.
Classic Carma is Reincarnation's best form. To my surprise, I stumbled into rare moments in which racing along as my opponents and I exchanged metal and flak was actually fun. But these offered short bursts of excitement, and they were dragged down by technical issues and, after a while, boredom. Yes, you can only spend so many hours smashing lazy pedestrians and tumbling onto your roof for the umpteenth time before the game's cheesy metal soundtrack gets drowned out by your tired sighs.
The Fox 'n' Hounds game mode is a frustrating mess.
The other modes, many of which are inspired by those from the original Carmageddon, are mostly omissible. Two of them, Checkpoint Stampede and Ped Chase, are practically the same. One has you and your foes drive through a checkpoint, and the other asks you to crush a highlighted pedestrian on one side of a map. In the Car Crusher arena, you must destroy opponents to gain a point, while getting wasted costs you one. Another mode, Death Race, is fairly self-explanatory.
Fox 'n' Hounds, however, is just bad. In this mode, one player is the fox and is highlighted in blue. To win, you must spend a certain amount of time as the fox while avoiding being touched by other combatants, who otherwise become the new fox. Naturally, you would think that just avoiding enemies would be enough to snag an easy win. But the elementary intelligence powering your foes deflates any fun and challenge the game type could offer. Enemy cars smash into the fox, creating a twisting, writhing clump of metal as the fox title gets passed around so quickly that the game announcer has a hard time keeping up. This is the majority of my experience in Fox 'n' Hounds, a mode I eventually avoided like it was an oncoming bus.
The frame rate struggles to stay around 30, occasionally diving to create something akin to a Red Asphalt slide show.
The game also offers an online mode, in which you can test your ped-crunching skills against actual humans, who are smarter and deadlier than any CPU opponent. Here you are privy to all game modes, save Classic Carma, with the only major change being that resetting your vehicle takes three seconds instead of happening instantly. I didn't get as many hours into the online portion as I wanted, mainly because I rarely found a game with people to play against.
So, with poor performance, stiff controls, and relatively dull game modes, I suppose the only thing Carmageddon: Reincarnation has left to offer is its dazzling sense of humor. Perhaps I have simply grown up, but I no longer chuckle at splattering dumb pedestrians against the hood of a digital car, with heads and viscera flying in all directions. I remember playing the original Carmageddon in my youth, giggling at a flying severed arm or three as I tore down a street. It's all the same in Reincarnation, and I can't get over how tame it feels. It's not just that other games do violence better; this is the game's humor, and it just doesn't cause a reaction. During your travels, you will also spot a phallic-shaped building in the distance or hear frightened people screaming on a runaway elevated train as it tears around a city. There are rare chuckles, and I am not completely humorless, so hearing my car squeezing out a mine to the tune of a gurgling fart as it pummels disco-dancing bovines did provide a short laugh. But there isn't much beyond that. After playing for a few hours, the humor was all but spent, as was much of the game.
Carmageddon: Reincarnation has the same flavor as the Carmageddon of yore, but not much attempt has been made at a revolution. It's the same as it always was, and that isn't exactly a point in its favor. Mowing down hundreds of the same meandering pedestrians demonstrating the same lousy animations is no longer as fun. Some games today, such as anything from Saints Row, do a much better job at car combat, racing, and killing heaps of pedestrians. Instead, the only thing Reincarnation actually achieves is standing as a reminder of how far gaming has come. The vehicular manslaughter of thousands of listless fodder swiftly falls into tedium after only a handful of hours, long before reaching the end of the game's surprisingly lengthy 16-chapter campaign. The rose-tinted glasses are off; I was glad to have experienced Carmageddon all those years ago, but that's where it should have remained.
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