Kojima Crosses the Street

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Jeff Gerstmann (0:40)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Hi, welcome to the program. It's me, Jeff Gerstmann, your host for this week's edition of The Jeff Gerstmann Show.

SPEAKER_1 (0:47)

Hello.

Jeff Gerstmann (0:49)

It's been a wonderful week in video games.

No? All right, well, I don't know. Big games are happening. I immediately, you know, like any, look, any time I can go from reviewing something like Wolverine, and then get right into something like a control resonant, it's nice to have big games coming out, you know, at the bare minimum. At least there's that. Hi.

Gosh, it's been a weird week. There's a story on my mind here that I don't even, there's something I saw, it just reads like it's complete, it could be complete utter bullshit, and it's just like the, there's a certain responsibility of like, do you bring things that might be complete bullshit onto the program or do you let that bullshit sit? Sometimes, it's a weird dichotomy sometimes, but bringing dichotomy is probably not the right word to use there. Hey, anyway, Wolverine is out this week, and I played through that last week. There's a written review up over at jeff.zone. You can go read that for zero dollars. Go check that out. There's also a review podcast deal that is available either on YouTube or it's in the podcast feed over on Patreon, if you are so inclined. So I guess all that is to say, I don't know that I'm going to exhaustively go over everything about Wolverine all over again, because I think if you want that, there are... You know, I have other places for you to see that. The short version is Wolverine is dull. The short version is Wolverine is a very straightforward video game with a lot of increasingly tiresome ideas about its combat. And it kind of never really goes anywhere. The line I had been telling people, you know, it is five hours of video games stretched out across 10 hours. You know, it's five hours of ideas rather, stretched out across 10 hours of video game. And in some cases, the five hours might actually be kind of generous. It's a shame because, you know, it starts out pretty strong and then as you sink into what Wolverine actually is and how its combat works and how the game is balanced around that combat system, that's where it starts to fall apart. And then I think, you know, by the end of that, you get to the value conversation about like, okay, this is, you know, this is not a lot of video game for $70. I don't know. Like it's, it's the sort of game that if it were spectacular, you know, the price might be hard to justify for some folks. But, you know, it's a game, you know, I don't really think it compares to the Spider-Man games all that much. Like they're not really, there are similar ideas in play here where like, if you get the special edition of the game, they're going to give you bonus skill points, which is sort of a weird thing for what Wolverine ends up being, but they did it here anyway. But, you know, Miles Morales was a great spider. Miles Morales is the only great Spider-Man game that Insomniac has made, I guess I would say. Spider-Man 1 and 2 are like one of those, it's like those are phenomenal achievements. But I don't know that I would call them games that are exciting and thrilling and awesome start to finish, if that makes any sense.

And Miles Morales trims the fat, you know? Spider-Man 1 is a killer game. It just overstays its welcome a little bit.

And you know, you kind of end up with some of the stealth sequences and what have you, like, you know, again, it's a game that wears out, it's welcome. Wolverine does all of that in just 10 hours. You know, the full cycle of like, okay, I don't know if I want to do all this other stuff anymore. Like it burns through that goodwill real, real quick. I was poised to really enjoy this game. I was like, man, you know, Wolverine is a fun character. And, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to do some really cool shit with Wolverine here. And they were willing to go the distance on the M rating. And I really appreciate that about this game. You know, he's just like, he's getting completely destroyed. Like, they do like Metal Gear Solid 4 levels of like crawling through the fucking microwave thing multiple times in this game. And so there's like a brutality to all of it that I think is nice, because I think it would have been very easy to shy away from that and go like, well, you know, Wolverine has been in T rated stuff as well. And so it's nice that they went there. And when they went there, they went there. Once they realized, hey, we're going to make a game that has like, you know, pretty brutal violence and dismemberment in it, they said, okay, well, the script is also going to be M rated in nature as well. And so they went with a very, you know, there's a lot of cursing in the game. And it's done well. I think the writing is nice. The dialogue for the most part is good. The story at the center of Wolverine, about Wolverine and Jean Grey, I think is really well told. And an interesting kind of way to spin these characters, right? I mean, you know, they're able to walk away from a lot of what you think you know about Wolverine in terms of the people around him and whatever else. So, you know, them being able to kind of reinvent or not, it's not a full reinvention. I mean, it's still fucking Wolverine. But because they're like, hey, you know, we're, we got our own number to Earth. Marvel gave us our own number for the Spider-Man games. So we're gonna use that to tell, you know, kind of our own story. I appreciate that on some level. You know, I'm not like the biggest comic book guy in the world, but I like that there are things about this game that you will see coming if you know what these characters are and what they have done. And there are things about these characters that you won't see coming based around, you know, some of the things that they've been able to unwind or retell. And I appreciate that about it. It's not an X-Men game. It's not a game where the X-Men exist, you know, it's, they're able to kind of do their own thing. And I appreciate that, if nothing else. And then that's kind of where it stops. It actually is kind of, there is kind of nothing else. It's a game with a really wide parry window. You can make adjustments like a lot of modern games. You can tweak and tweak individual things like the parry window to your liking. And I messed around with a lot of that stuff after getting deep into the game. And I don't think that that's going to fix the actual problems that the game has on the combat side. Other than like, the parry is very sloppy. You can slop your way through the parrying by kind of just going, like, by kind of, as an attack, as you're coming out of your attack animation, you start mashing the parry button and hope for the best. And more often than not, it kind of works out for you. And you get away with some stuff on the default settings. The problem is that they built a lot of that combat around that parry and around the expectation. Like there are literal boss fights in that game where the only way to disrupt the enemy from healing is to parry the shit out of them. And so enemies are building up stagger meters and you know, there's a lot of stuff like that where, you know, you're literally expected to do this parry again and again and again and get people into a stunned state as quickly as possible as well. Because once an enemy is stunned, you can just murder them. And a lot of times that gives you a bunch of life back, depending on if you kill them the right way. And as you fill out the skill tree, there are more and more right ways to get that health back. But you don't need it. You know, the thing I settle on is something you kind of pick up around mid-game. And it is, you know, when you basically like you hold heavy attack in the middle of a combo or after your four hit combo. And he will charge up an attack that does a great deal of staggered damage. And then once they're staggered, you hit heavy attack and he runs up to them and murders them. And you get half your life bar back.