And the game’s expansive environments are filled with the same old things: idiots who need saving from – you’ve guessed it – titans. The game dresses up this pattern as “escort”, “set a trap” or “defend the objective”, but each one plays out in a similar fashion. Almost every mission consists of the same pattern: get placed in an open area, slaughter titans near objectives, kill the last, extra-strong titan known as the “final subjugation target”. Since most giants can be struck down with a single hit, combat feels more like a one-button slaughterhouse than a test of agility and guile.Įase and repetition also plague the game’s macro elements. This can only lead to one pattern of attack: grapple on nape, find angle, strike nape, move to next titan. Inevitably, you’ll want to play efficiently, because you’re going to be killing a lot of the same enemies over and over again. If the titans were quicker on their feet, then hacking off a leg might be a wise course of action, but they’re lumbering beasts who can, on the whole, be kept at bay with ease. I refrained from attacking anything but the nape for hours – with the exception of the odd boss-level titan who has to be slashed in a specific order – and still accrued enough resources to max out my current set of weapons. Unfortunately, the economics of this system are broken, and most of the time it simply makes more sense to cut down the buggers as fast as possible. Wings of Freedom incentivises the severing of limbs before the last strike at the nape by granting a player resources to buy weapons. You glide, you circle, and then move in for the final blow on the creature’s only true vulnerable spot: the nape.Įxcept that it’s almost never the “final blow” it’s the first. It’s here that Wings of Freedom delivers on the fantasy of being a titan-slayer. What could’ve resulted in clunky Tarzan fails is, in fact, a series of comprehensible swings. There’s a rhythmic enjoyment to firing cables from position to position and feeling hyper-mobile. You’re much more vulnerable on the ground than in mid-flight. At the same time, players must remain aware of a titan’s attempts to grab and gobble, as well as their cables, which become obstructed by other titans and the environment. Players can attach themselves to one of five spots on a titan’s body: legs, arms, or nape, and enter its orbit, then moving in to deal damage when the appendage is vulnerable. The system does tend to cause collisions with buildings and other objects with annoying regularity, but when it works, you’re a dual-bladed eagle of the skies.Īll of the fee-fi-fo fighting is also conducted using the same gear. Anyone who watched the anime’s Survey Corps with envy will undoubtedly spend their first hour delightedly “winging” their way from place to place. WoF manages to replicate this improbable equipment surprisingly well, allowing players to swing across the map semi-elegantly, and effectively removing all borders from the environment. Think Spider-Man with 19th-century pressurised cable guns. It allows the soldiers of humanity to ascend to the skies and fight monsters that are often 20 times the size of a normal person. The piece of equipment that so captured the minds of viewers in the anime is known as 3D manoeuvre gear. With that in mind, let’s first focus on where the game succeeds, before we descend into my myriad complaints. Typing each of these criticisms pains me, since the anime captured my heart back in 2013, and Wings of Freedom is a child of the show rather than the manga. Titan killing quickly becomes a factory floor of identikit button presses, and the game almost exclusively consists, not surprisingly, of killing titans. Inside the reaches of WoF, players find themselves slicing and dicing more regularly than a high-street butcher – and, more worryingly, with as much ease.Īlthough the game captures an essence of aerial combat that’s true to its source material, and still somewhat satisfying in its ad nauseum mechanics, it suffers from repetition on the macro and micro scale. Mikasa, the most talented member of mankind’s troops, is celebrated for having killed two dozen titans in the anime. It’s here that Wings of Freedom is a bizarre inversion of the franchise status quo. Every small victory was celebrated, the countless losses mourned. The wildly successful manga series and an anime that preceded Wings of Freedom was engrossing because homosapiens were the underdog in a losing battle. For the first time the dominant species finds itself outmatched. The human race has been all but wiped out by mysterious giants who devour their victims whole. Attack on TItan is a story about the horrors of war, the frailty of mankind and, most importantly, the terrifying nature of the incomprehensible.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |