14 DAY TRIAL // Deus Ex: Human Revolution, BioShock and Borderlands restored my faith in the first-person shooter genre, after having it completely obliterated by seeing how popular Call of Duty was (and still is), in spite of the fact that Counter-Strike is a greatly superior multiplayer game.
I’m the kind of guy who likes full-priced games to have a strong single-player mode, because there are a ton of free-to-play multiplayer games out there. This means that whenever I look toward a new first-person shooter, I am actually looking for new ideas and a reason for it existing in the first place.
When I feel like running and gunning, I can always boot up Warface or one of the other three games I didn’t even bother remembering the names of. But when you have a budget in the millions, I expect to see something good come out of it.
This is why I am continually disappointed in the clichés that the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises are spurting year by year. The fact that competitions are played with controllers and that top-ranked players actually sit out in the open when guarding access points doesn’t even make me laugh, but instead puzzles me.
For me, they hold no multiplayer appeal. If I were allowed to use a mouse and keyboard setup in cross-platform clashes, then maybe I would consider them a fun investment.
But the way things are, with aim assist and insulation from the inferiority of using a controller for movement and aiming by not enabling cross-platform multiplayer, it’s nothing but a risible affair.
So when it comes to enjoying a first-person shooter, it’s the single player that I’m interested in. Truth be told, I didn’t even bother checking whether Deus Ex or BioShock even has multiplayer.
Sure, Borderlands is more fun in co-op, and so is Dying Light, but isn’t that the case with any video game?
Titanfall feels like a squandered opportunity
What I like the most about a shooter is how well it manages to immerse me into its world, how much it manages to make want to keep exploring it in order to discover the underpinnings of its systems.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution, BioShock and BioShock Infinite were pretty good with this. Dying Light had a more ham-fisted approach. Sure, it had some good elements, but they weren’t handled as well as they could have been, and overall, it was a mess of predictable and trite dialogue.
One key aspect that I think sold those previous three titles to me was how outlandish their entire premise was.
Cyborgs, mass surveillance, corporations controlling states and influencing the populace, an underwater city, representing the pinnacle of human achievement and liberty, turned on its head by the fundamental flaw of discarding basic human nature and being obsessed with unreasonable ideas, it all felt like a grand spectacle of introversion and exploration of our psyche.
They all had tons of interesting things to say about the time ahead and about the possibility that our thirst for knowledge combined with our thirst for power and gratification might not get us to the utopian future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in “Star Trek.”
Best of all, like all decent science fiction works of art, they raised questions about our present, while hiding them beneath the guile of a somewhat probable future, making us think about how the pressing manners of today will be reflected, amplified or diminished by tomorrow’s events, technology and beliefs.
A challenging game makes you ask yourself why you're doing everything
In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I got stuck due to a bug. At one point, the game asks you to press a button to pay your respects. The unfortunate thing is that, up until that point, there is no respect to be found within the game.
In the case of Deus Ex and BioShock, there is a lot of material and a lot of lore, so to say, which makes their shortcomings bearable, infusing them with a wide range of redeeming qualities.
Even though the games are laden with stereotypes and lazy writing, the fact that they delve into the unknown in order to try to cast a revealing light on the issues that we are often ignoring today is merit enough.
In all of these games, you are going against the status quo, breaking the law, inflicting harm upon others, most of the time because your character personally feels like doing it, is attempting to right a wrong, or is being manipulated into doing so.
You fight those who are in charge of maintaining order and enforcing the law, killing them in indiscriminate numbers, infiltrating organizations and sabotaging their actions without having the full picture of what’s going on.
You play the role of the bad guy, you are either the outlier or the renegade, the terrorist, you go rogue and do whatever needs to be done, eschewing all sense of morality, in the name of morality. This puts you in a unique position where you have to rethink your role, as you are not a hero, but an anti-hero, and even a villain from the perspective of those you are attacking.
You have to really take everything in and think about what’s going on around you, about the motives of the people you interact with, about the ramifications of your decisions, and about taking full responsibility for your actions.
It’s easy to shoot everyone because your government told you so, people are doing it all the time without breaking a sweat, but going against the world, all alone, in order to pursue your moral compass, is a truly challenging experience.
It’s the equivalent of having to go to a rehabilitation clinic to deal with your post-traumatic stress disorder, to be redeployed just as you get back to your family, or to find out what civilian “enemies” think about you at the end of a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign, only it’s in the actual game.