Two Hit Review Combo! It's super effective!

[IamLEAM1983]

Halloween is only a few weeks away now, and Outlast managed to put me in the mood for some extra ghastly diversions...

Sniper Elite : Nazi Zombie Army

A year ago, Rebellion Interactive released Sniper Elite V2, a third-person shooter with strong sniper mechanics and achingly precise gun physics; largely to middling reviews. The environments felt muddled, the game ostensibly wasn't much more than you mowing down one set of S.S. and proceeding to a new area where you'd do more of the same. Still, there was some reward in the fact that as a sniper, OSS agent Karl Fairburne needed to keep a low profile. Sniper shots rang clear in the post-war air of ravaged and sacked Berlin, circa 1945, so each bullet you'd place had to count. To that end, you had access to Fairburne's rather common take on Bullet Time, here titled Focus Mode. Coupled with his samurai-worthy ability to empty one lung at a time, and you had the tools needed to craft the perfect shot. Low difficulty levels stuck to a simple point-and-shoot set of mechanics, while higher ones required the player to take drag and bullet weight into account.

Narratively, the game was a simple enough affair. Your job was to work in the wake of Operation Paperclip's securing of German scientists for American interests and do your best to end what remained of the Third Reich's V2 Rocket program. If you succeed, Allied cities will no longer be bombarded. If you don't, History plays out as we know it. In this quasi-postwar context, it felt a little odd to be given such a momentous objective. With the Allies at Adolf's door, it seemed a bit odd to assume that some lone crack-shot sniper had to slip behind enemy lines to try and prevent Hitler's forces from using the V2s as a means to turn the tide.

Honestly, though, it could've been worse, as Nazi Zombie Army suggests. Hitler could've gone all Hellboy and opted to turn his fallen soldiers into unstoppable undead abominations – because Dieselpunk Urban Fantasy, natch. That's the premise of this little standalone expansion that runs at about five hours, maybe ten if you're particularly bad at Horde Mode shooters.

As that's the name of the game, honestly – and it's rather disappointing. Reach Arena A, Survive X Number of Waves, Progress. Reach Arena B, Survive X Number of Increasingly Complex Waves, Progress. Reach Arena C; Boss Fight.

Yeah.

I don't particularly mind, especially when games of this nature aren't shy about what they are. God Mode knows it's just a silly Horde Mode shooter that's never going to last more than two months on my hard drive, and it revels in it. As for NZA, there are definitely times where you feel the devs at Rebellion knew that they were putting together a short-term oddball beast. The game is awash in anachronistic and ominous synth beats that feel like a close cousin to Blood Dragon's – a clear indication that the game knows it's a parody of something. The problem is you're never quite sure what Nazi Zombie Army wants to be.

Is it a love letter to classic horror movies? Is it some sort of paean for Call of Duty Prime-era design sensibilities, back when the defacto evil NPC wasn't necessarily brown, but rather white, blonde, and blue-eyed? Is it an in-depth sniper simulation or a third-rate third-person shooter?

Mind you, a lot of those questions also featured in the core game. V2 was a title that had precisely one gimmick, shoved it in your face with all the abandon of a self-conscious kid who'd be eager to please, and that otherwise focused on humdrum design elements that tended to reinforce the idea that in Sniper Elite V2's design document, the only weapon the devs had consciously accounted for was the ubiquitous rifle. You were given a Welrod, a Webley, a Luger, a Lee-Enfield or a Mosin Nagant and a few others – but the game supported non-sniper forms of death delivery in an extremely grudging fashion. You were instructed to create “kill nests” by booby-trapping the doors and entryways that stood behind you, and to lie prone for several long minutes – sometimes for a full half-hour of gameplay. A bit like Metal Gear Solid's The End, you'd practically doze off while waiting for the right APC to roll past or for a platoon of enemies to stroll on by. The game's few moments of sheer brilliance came from those golden instants where you realized that because of your angle, the wind's drag and the exact placement of your enemies at this exact second, you'd be able to take out five soldiers with a single bullet. If you did this right, the game rewarded your insane and comparatively easy displays of marksmanship by showing you a slow-mo kill cam – complete with gruesome X-Ray effects in those instances where your payload ruptures vital organs along the way.

Nazi Zombie Army still has these features, yes, but it mostly leaves them to rot. You'll largely be shooting down slow and lumbering reanimated dead who only stop long enough to pick up blunt objects along their slow shuffle towards you. Time your movements right, and you'll be able to thin the herd without so much as a single dead-head intruding on your improvised inner sanctum. With the A.I. having been intentionally dumbed down, this dastardly diversion offers a fairly standard shooting gallery where as in the George Romero classics, “those things” patiently trundle into your sights and are mindlessly dispatched. The only enemies that dare to break the pacing involve nimble animated skeletons who have nothing but a gleaming heart as their single weak point or kamikaze zombies that charge you with a fittingly flanged and distorted cry of “Achtung, grenate!”. Once or twice, you'll find inhuman enemy snipers bounding between rooftops and demanding exact headshots in payment for the hot lead they'll send your way, or minigun-wielding bruisers who essentially exist to serve as the requisite Bullet Sponges.

So, is it fun?

It is, especially if you manage to play cooperatively. If not, you're treated with a game that has all the trappings of an honest-to-goodness Pure Sniping experience but that only commits to half of the required package.

In The Walking Dead, we see a man struggle to cope with the recent loss and zombification of his wife. For all of his noise, he's able to casually sit in the second storey of a house and pick off Walkers as practice. Nazi Zombie Army functions as though that father should have landed a few sweet headshots and then recklessly thrown himself into the fray, pistols and submachine guns blazing.

If you aren't looking to flat-out parody a specific genre, you don't get to denature a game's concepts to generate easy revenue. Karl Fairburne and his optional Russian and German survivor pals shouldn't have to betray their deeper natures as expert marksmen for the sake of a Horde Mode DLC title that feels frankly undercooked.

Amnesia : A Machine for Pigs

Two years ago, Frictional Games, a Norway-based independent developer, released Amnesia : The Dark Descent. It emerged as a harrowing and fittingly Lovecraftian experience that married choice cuts of the barest exposition and explanation with copious amounts of what-the-fuckery. By the end of the game, you'd feel as though you'd been played for a fool the whole way through, the end result deliberately leaving you a bit sick. Your final choice had impact, considering what you'd gone through, and all of it hinged on an impeccably produced sense of utter dread that no guns-raised corridor-crawler could ever replicate. Helplessness was a game mechanic in and of itself, and it feels safe to say that if it weren't for The Dark Descent, we wouldn't have had the chance to play Outlast.

Around the same time frame, indie developer thechineseroom released Dear Esther, which had initially begun as a sort of deconstructed and Source Engine-based tale. Produced as its own beast, the game offered cleaner visuals, yes, but also a strangely limp narrative, with its pieces cast aside here and there like pieces of driftwood. Traipsing around the island with absolutely no gameplay mechanics to speak of, you'd get a better sense of who you were playing as, what you were doing on that island, and what your goal ultimately was. With no way to fail but every possible reason to dither around and catch the sights, this little indie number was a press darling for quite a few months. For a while, it seemed as though we'd found our perfect representing object for the “games as an art form” school of thought.

Then, Frictional and thechineseroom partnered together, with TCR set to produce the game and Frictional merely lending the rights to the Amnesia property to their new friends. For a while, people had brain-gasms online. Can you imagine the sheer terror and suspense of a Frictional game married with the smart story design and streamlined approach to game-making that thechineseroom guys display?! That's gotta be awesome, right?!

Right?

Eh. A Machine for Pigs is the hotly-anticipated result of this collaboration, and it feels as though the end product is a definite case of Your Mileage May Vary. You play as Oswald Mandus, an amnesiac London socialite who awakens in a caged-off four-poster bed. The year is 1865; and your two children are incessantly calling out to you. You must find them, and doing so will involve digging through the Mandus estate to discover the sordid underbelly beneath – and the nightmarish machine that has somehow been built below.

In Amnesia, progress towards Alexander of Brennenberg's Inner Sanctum tended to signal the ratcheting-up of tension. In A Machine for Pigs, your surroundings play their cards expertly and actually do appear unnerving (shifting corridors included), but the sense of threat they try their best to evoke never materializes. Only once or twice will you have to actively run away from an encroaching threat – the disfigured pig-men of the title. You're otherwise left seeing fleeting glimpses of your children, the boys Enoch and Edward or subjected to strange quakes that elude to something monstrous lying in wait below the Mandus Estate.

To force dread upon the player, The Dark Descent relied on its Sanity mechanic and on the protagonist's natural fear of the dark. That fear ran in opposition to the one thing that would guarantee your safety, which was the cover of darkness. The Dark Descent was acutely, painfully good at forcing the player to choose between life-preserving visibility or continued sanity.

A Machine for Pigs can't be bothered with that. Infinite Lantern Powah for everyone – have we got a story to tell! Anything else would get in the way, wouldn't it?

The truth is I don't mind a good story. I can appreciate a lovingly crafted game world as much as anyone else, but please don't put your story on so high a pedestal that it dwarfs the actual gameplay's allure! If anything, it makes the end product feel a bit presumptuous, as though thechineseroom assumed that people would be so deeply engrossed in what is still a fairly by-the-numbers story of a father discovering his innate murderous and monstrous urges. It's an interesting yarn that's spun out for us, true – but “Digging Deep and Finding the Squick Inside of Us All” - especially when the digging part is presented literally through the mansion grounds' offered bit of world-building – is a story hook we've seen a thousand times already. It feels as though the script is the work of an extremely talented, if overeager Philosophy freshman who's just taken to Nietzsche and who's had his eyes opened to the potential savagery we could all choose to dish out.

It's been the subject of zombie and serial killer movies. It's motivated supernatural action flicks and also serves as one of the critical underpinnings of at least one acclaimed television series about a high school teacher dabbling in illicit operations that shall remain inconspicuously unnamed...

It's a concept that's seeped into genre cinema and popular items of fiction to such an extent that we hardly notice it anymore. The fact is, we rarely do because it's married with other, more interesting aspects. Dexter has his simulated mundane life and Walter White has his dwindling sense of guilt and his pervading demons to battle. In the more popular mindset, Spawn fits that trope because he's been roped into the process of doing fairly horrible things purely because he rejected the injustices he'd been subjected to. Practically every “dark and edgy” superhero to exist can be seen as a discourse on Ohmigod, what have I become, I hate my life so THEY'RE ALL GONNA PAY.

You can laugh when Wolverine does that because it's so over-the-top. Thank you, Hugh Jackman, for the slow-mo Screams of Utter Anguish. You can groan when Alex Mercer does it in PROTOTYPE because Jackie Estacado and Al Simmons do it too. You can nod your head when Batman does it because it's become a codified part of the character. Scott Kurtz once produced a small strip that consisted in the World's Greatest Detective getting the drop on a smattering of crooks while repeatedly bemoaning the loss of his parental figures through Liefeldian gnashed teeth.

When a game with the Amnesia tag does it, though? The experience is cheapened. The individual journal entries you'll find throughout your sojourn descend into increasingly maudlin territory, to the point where you end up thinking that the Convenient Plot Device Magical Brew should have triggered plain and simple death, rather than retrograde memory loss.

It's a beautiful piece of Steampunk dread in some places and you do get to see glimmers of potential in a few scenes – but A Machine for Pigs is ultimately too preoccupied with its own reflection in the mirror and its own vapid caterwauling to give much of a care about the actual player's expected requirements.