Quick Review of Open Betas

This one got delayed for college obligations, so let’s jump to it. Here are three open betas of games that you may be tempted to buy. Don’t do it. Open beta has yet to launch, and at this point none of these games can compensate for their deep flaws.

Painkiller: Resurrection

I know, I know, it looks badass. The above picture shows as much. But really, it went so far:

• A crappy, annoying menu where detail wasn’t taken in account.
• A 10-minute video, which is basically a narrated comic book about a random hitman who accidentally blows up a bus with his target and himself and goes to hell for his troubles. Unfortunately, it’s unskippable, which is a no-no for any company except perhaps Square Enix, and that’s because their videos are AWESOME. This one was evidently produced with a scanner, Photoshop and a video editor.
• After the video, it reveals the worst level design that I’ve ever seen in a First Person Shooter, with a weird saw-hook that nobody tells you how to use (nobody tells you even the basic controls) with an endless wave of enemies that your bullets don’t touch until you hit them in the gut.

So, after a few frustrating attempts at playing this game, it got deleted and I jumped to the next one:

World of Battles

This RTS game, despite having decent stuff like locking a formation or letting them go at their different speeds (something that is annoying to do in other games — case in point: Dawn of War), ramming people with cavalry and other details, seems familiar:

• Humans have the best cavalry, and the only modification is that they became reputation whores. Really? What happened with knighthood, when things like chivalry were developed for making an army not kill each other indiscriminately, huh? This modification was lame.
• Dwarves, who are the toughest/slower army.
• Orcs, that are a Warhammer ripoff point by point, get to spam slightly tough cannon fodder and not-so tough cannon fodder.
• Undead, who, for spamming, get even more cannon fodder as well as the brown skeleton of Everquest/Diablo (can’t remember which one).

Seriously, I used to think that Tolkien, what with being public domain, was the worst thing that could happen to the Fantasy genre. Then I discovered Buffy and Twilight, but still, I just can’t play another Tolkien game — especially one that doesn’t even attempt to be original.

So we finally get to:

League of Legends

OK, this one isn’t that bad. It was produced for the guys that made the Defense of the Ancients custom map on Warcraft 3. It has the “so cartoonish that you don’t care much about the polygons” look that will last and, in essence, is fun to play.

The story is about a bunch of Champions that  are chosen from different universes, which is another cool aspect of the game. There are a lot of them, and they are all different and weird, fighting on behalf of the “Summoners,” which are you and me — the individual players. Basically, you need to zerg the other team’s base before they zerg yours, and it has the same balance as a WoW arena match, which means that it is based on finding the most flawed combination of Champions and zerg first.

It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, and since everybody can pick any character it doesn’t hurt as much, but it feels broken. It didn’t pass the Blizzard Rule: If, while playing a game, I think “I could have more fun playing WoW right now,” it gets deleted. If you are fine with that, go ahead; the 20-min matches are intense, and you don’t need to play much more than that.

Another mistake they made is putting a leveling system on the Summoner, instead of just the one in the character on each match (e.g. Warcraft 3). That means that you will lose before you can scrap enough experience to start winning. Frankly, it isn’t fun enough to bother with. At least not for me.

And here it ends. Three games that look cool,but just don’t cut it. Unfortunately, mediocrity is a word that you will find in many, many games. The good news is that you can know if a game is going to end up mediocre from the beta. If it got deeper problems than bugs, don’t bother and don’t preorder. The latter rewards the over-hyping of a marketing team.

Tagged as: Entertainment, videogames