
Baldur Dash?
I’ve been waiting for this game for quite some time, ever since I saw early snippets revealed on X-Play. Those folks over at G4 seem to be quite riled up about it as well, either that or they’re taking some kinda of kickback or bribe from those over at Silicon Knights for how much coverage this game has gotten prior too its release.
Leasing upto last weeks E3, there even seemed to be more than average coverage of Too Human, and during E3 itself, Silicon Knights revealed a demo would be available for download on XBox Live on July 14.
I waited until yesterday to download it, all 1GB+ of it. Prior to that I had read on multiple forums that people were finding the control schema a bit awkward and counter-intuitive, but before I make any judgements myself, I had to give it a shot myself.
What I found was a beautifully rendered game with cutscenes and all. Despite only being able to play one class of character, the Champion, out of the five that will be in the final release, it gave me a good taste on what to expect.
While realizing it was only a demo, there wasn’t too much explanation on the very detailed equipment controls and offerings. Apparently there will be quite a bit of customization with salvage, loot, and blueprint options. There’s also a skill tree that was a little vague on understanding until you start adding point and begin to level up. Once you play for a bit, it begins to make sense.
Unfortunately, while there is a pause option there is no save option in the demo. So I tried my best to play what I could in the 75 minutes allotted to me as ‘free’ time. I was able to take my Champion from lvl 1 to lvl 5, and only began to slightly overwhelmed once I hit this point in the demo.
The cutscenes are indeed beautiful and have a great spin on the techno-Norse mythology alluded to in interviews and previews. They can be a little awkwardly placed at times dividing the present action into a sudden past-tense reveal then back into the action. The first time this happened, I was wondering what the heck happened. Was the level over? Was the demo over? Did I do something? No to all of the above as once the scene was over, I was back in action where I had left off. Slightly odd.
The animations are smooth, fluid, and very pretty. The detail in lighting really sets the mood in the level I played and the environment lent to the idea that the place was big. Really big.
Okay, so about the controls: I can sort of understand the complaints that I’ve read on various boards, and even I’m surprised that Silicon Knights went with this control layout. For people that have played plenty of FPS games (Halo, CoD4, etc.), the controls are gonna take time to get used to. I think it will just take time to re-adjust, but certain actions just don’t seem intuitive to the way our hands and fingers have been trained. Granted, I only just played once, but even after 75 minutes, I still found myself fumbling on what was the melee action versus which was the projectile action. But again, that’s just being re-trained. The most difficult and awkward mechanic was the camera controls and how you move. The camera seems to be independent at times on where you are facing. This can be easily corrected by hitting the left bumper button, but in the heat of battle where enemies are swarming from all directions the re centering of the camera to get your bearings can be a buzz-kill. So can the auto-lock feature as well. There were times I was locked onto a missile firing foe, just so my Champion then locked onto the projectile instead of my initial target thus throwing off my strategy.
Will I get this game? Probably. Hopefully Silicon Knights have heard some of the complaints and choose to address them (though this late in the mix, they probably won’t). It has a lot of potential from a beautifully rendered game and excellent story telling so far to RPG and Hack/Slash fast action elements. Not sure if it’s the next GoW though, and if the controls are still funny, I may feel more comfortable if it was at a $49.99 price point.
Filed under: Gaming, XBox 360 | Tagged: Baldur, demo, E3, G4 TV, mythology, Norse, RPG, Silicon Knights, Too Human, Video Games, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment »