2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby VideoGameCritic » January 24th, 2015, 1:15 pm

I think these latest reviews reflect my discontent with my Xbox One.  Namely its tendency to pair controllers with profiles and its inability to properly function offline.

Astrosmasher1
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby Astrosmasher1 » January 24th, 2015, 6:25 pm

Two great reviews I agree with both of them.

This is my review of SO from another site.  I got continually trolled for this.  It is broadly the same as the Critics.

Introduction.

It's that time! The time when we get to play the over hyped games that everyone has been talking about. What do you get it you cross Jet Set Radio with Lollipop chainsaw? You guessed it, this game. Though it is not as good as the sum of its parts. Jet set radio was awesome as was Lollipop Chainsaw. Maybe I have a think for gals in mini skirts cutting zombies in half with chainsaws.

Story

A soft drink has mutated the population and you have to survive the boredom of skating over various rails whilst shooting the nasties to get out of the city. Much like if you were to cross Tony Hawks with Dead Rising. You play the role of a guy down on his luck working in a dead end job. Entirely the type of person who would drink this type of drink (based on demographics and sheer generalisation). You have to escape the city to tell everyone what is happening. Sound familiar? Yep, it is more or less the story used by dead rising. Resident Evil etc. So a totally unoriginal plot. Clichéd is the word I would use.

Graphics.

The graphics are good. They are very colourful. The monsters are great and have pustules all over themselves. It just wills you to put them out of their misery. The city looks very over crowded. With buildings and roadways really near each other. Also loads of convenient telephone lines to skate down. That effect is good and you get glistening lines of pastel colours to show when you are riding the rails. This is the good bit of the game.

Game play.

Feeble. This game is original? I was really looking forward to playing this xbox exclusive. If you like skateboarding games then you are in for a treat as you skate around this diverse landscape. Do you want to play on the ground and run away? If you do expect to die a lot. So skating and shooting which is close to my pet hate in FPSs where they put your in a moving gun turret and you have to shoot everything or face annihilation. You get presented with a lot of missions early on which you can use to boost up your character. They all seem to be the same, go here get that or protect the guy while he goes here and gets that.
I mean who does not know what skateboarding is about. I had one when I was a kid. Get a bit of momentum up grind on a few steps. Go down a hill fast. All the Tony Hawks games were the same. Do tricks get points. Add Dead Rising as in kill loads of zombies in unique funny ways. I liked that bit but having to do it on the rails was tedious. One mission was very much like the rest. I really wanted to like it but ended up hating it.
If you play Battlefield 3 there is this part where it switches from FPS to driving around in a tank. It is really good. In theory it is the same as SO but you can stop and take time to plan your shots. You are not on the rails and have to follow the cute paths the programmers want you to go on. You get a Abraham's M1 Battle tank with a 120 mm gun on it and loads of ammo to dispatch other tanks. It is superb. In Sunset Overdrive you get a hand gun, a vinyl record gun and a blunder bus. All with very limited ammo whist skating backwards. If you stop you get zapped, If you go on the ground you die within a few moments if getting attacked. Really this is what got me.


Sound

Well like most of the humorous games if you like the humour it is a great game. I found the humour lacklustre hence the annoying jokes the character and other non playable characters says got on my nerves. The song seems to be some Green Day wannabe band on a bad day. They just endlessly churn out this post punk pop drivel that made me mute my tv. I could not find the turn off the music option.

Overall

I played it for 6 hours as it was free. I just wished I had dumped it at about 10 minutes in as it never got any better. I was so grateful to MS for giving me a chance to play this game. I hated it. This is one of the most average games I have played on the One. That is because it had potential but you have to play it their way. It is a sandbox game which is mostly on the rails. I like Insomniac and Distrupter is one of my favourite shooters ever. Though for me they are yet to put out a really good MS game. This is a review of a game that could have been really good if it was not so on the rails/telephone wires.
Absolutely a try before you buy.


Rev1
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby Rev1 » January 25th, 2015, 1:48 pm

I'm glad that you actually take the time to incorporate information about a game's tendency to force you to download updates, install for hours on end, drag you online, etc. It seems to be a pretty big thing that most reviewers simply ignore but you take the time to point it out which is awesome.

eneuman961
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby eneuman961 » January 25th, 2015, 8:15 pm

It's rather interesting that there are still more comments on the recent Atari 2600 games post than this one.

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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby VideoGameCritic » January 25th, 2015, 10:14 pm

[QUOTE=Rev]I'm glad that you actually take the time to incorporate information about a game's tendency to force you to download updates, install for hours on end, drag you online, etc. It seems to be a pretty big thing that most reviewers simply ignore but you take the time to point it out which is awesome.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I've noticed this too.  It's like the magazine and web sites have this agenda to blur the line between physical media and online stuff.  In some cases, you can't even tell if the game they are reviewing is physical or downloaded.

Personally I think the installation/loading/update process is an important part of the experience as a whole.  I think the sites/magazines that overlook this stuff are doing their readers a disservice.

Heck, sometimes they even gloss over bugs, saying "they'll probably be addressed in a patch."  Lame!

eneuman961
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby eneuman961 » January 25th, 2015, 11:14 pm

While I don't think it's right to excuse glitches, what do you think about updating a review once a patch is released to accommodate the improvements it supposedly makes? And hey, patches are better than a game staying broken in some way forever...as was sometimes the case in the pre-Internet era.

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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby ActRaiser1 » January 27th, 2015, 9:30 am

IMHO when you look at the current library of games for the Xbox One, Sunset Overdrive moves into the B or B+ range.  Now, if you're comparing it against the Wii U's library then a C is certainly fair.  However, we're not.  We're comparing it against what other games are on the Xbox One.

As such, at least in my opinion, it is a good solid B game on a system that doesn't have as many unique, fun games compared to other consoles yet.

When you die, you're treated to unique reanimations from a coffin popping out of the ground to a rocket dropping you off to any other sort of weird, "I'm back" vidnet.  It's little touches like that that make it go from average to a good effort.  Likewise, there're co-op multiplayer modes that can be activated at any time in the game itself.  Finally, some of the best aspects of the game are weapons that can be upgraded over time.  My favorite being the TNTeddy.  

Nitpicks for me are repeatable fetch quests for side missions.  Those need more variety. The concern about the game not letting you play it how you want, ie stand still and shoot stuff is fine but that destroys the goal of forcing you to constantly be on the move.  Once one understands that the game as a whole is incredibly easy.  

In conclusion there aren't too many games that hold my interest through to completion these days, but Sunset Overdrive did.

ptdebate1
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby ptdebate1 » January 27th, 2015, 11:58 am

[QUOTE=videogamecritic][QUOTE=Rev]I'm glad that you actually take the time to incorporate information about a game's tendency to force you to download updates, install for hours on end, drag you online, etc. It seems to be a pretty big thing that most reviewers simply ignore but you take the time to point it out which is awesome.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I've noticed this too.  It's like the magazine and web sites have this agenda to blur the line between physical media and online stuff.  In some cases, you can't even tell if the game they are reviewing is physical or downloaded.

Personally I think the installation/loading/update process is an important part of the experience as a whole.  I think the sites/magazines that overlook this stuff are doing their readers a disservice.

Heck, sometimes they even gloss over bugs, saying "they'll probably be addressed in a patch."  Lame![/QUOTE]

I don't think it's an "agenda" so much as the fact that most consumers don't care whether a product comes on physical media or not.

Just as a side note--much of the pain of updating is particular to America (among developed nations). Internet speeds are so fast in European and Asian countries that a 1GB update can be completed in seconds.

Although I don't make a habit of defending huge corporations, I have to say in this case that the state of games today is a result of ever-expanding consumer expectations. Even with a $500 million budget, game developers struggle to deliver the quality and quantity of product that gamers expect. Dave the Critic may just want simple fun, but the hoi polloi want online multiplayer, DLC, and 50 hours of gameplay. That's why games are too long, have too many features, are too buggy, and cost too much.

Rev1
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby Rev1 » January 27th, 2015, 6:01 pm

[QUOTE=ptdebate][QUOTE=videogamecritic][QUOTE=Rev]I'm glad that you actually take the time to incorporate information about a game's tendency to force you to download updates, install for hours on end, drag you online, etc. It seems to be a pretty big thing that most reviewers simply ignore but you take the time to point it out which is awesome.[/QUOTE]

Yeah I've noticed this too.  It's like the magazine and web sites have this agenda to blur the line between physical media and online stuff.  In some cases, you can't even tell if the game they are reviewing is physical or downloaded.

Personally I think the installation/loading/update process is an important part of the experience as a whole.  I think the sites/magazines that overlook this stuff are doing their readers a disservice.

Heck, sometimes they even gloss over bugs, saying "they'll probably be addressed in a patch."  Lame![/QUOTE] I don't think it's an "agenda" so much as the fact that most consumers don't care whether a product comes on physical media or not. [/QUOTE]

I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. If most people don't care the Xbox One wouldn't have received as much negative criticism as it did when it was first unveiled. It was so bad that Xbox reversed their whole stance on the console after public outcry. If you forgot here is a link to one of the many articles that discussed the topic.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/06/19/microsoft-to-reverse-xbox-one-policies-after-fan-revolt/

Sure, we're heading in that direction and one day all the consoles will probably be download only (along with all media) but I don't think we're quite there

Vexer1
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2015/1/24: Xbox One: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Sunset Overdrive

Postby Vexer1 » January 29th, 2015, 1:14 am

Bear in mind that sometimes review copies are played under different conditions that may not adequately affect a consumer experience, for example the multiplayer for the Master Chief collection was done on a closed-network, so it was essentially impossible for reviewers to re-create the same bad experiences consumers were having with it. So I don't believe there's any sort of agenda so much as the majority of reviewers having a very different gaming perspective then yourself.

ptdebate- I think it's silly to complain about games having too many features, I say the more the better. For the most part I also have no issues with games being long as long as they remain interesting(Alien Isolation was one game that admittedly did kind of drag on at times, I wouldn't have minded if there wasn't so much backtracking in third-act)



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