Wrappin’ Things Up: Eurogamer Expo Part II — The Finale

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

Right, seventh inning stretch!  Last two previews, coming at ya!

The multiplayer for When Vikings Attack has a very simple premise.  Two players control a tiny crowd of about 10 people and your goal is to wipe out the other player’s crowd.  You can’t punch each other or anything like that, though.  The way that you take out the opposing team is to use your crowd to pick up objects in the environment and fling them at your opponents.  Bikes, benches, lamp-posts… most of it can be picked up and sufficiently hurled at your opponent in, what is essentially, what happens when a group of bowlers take a sh*t tonne of drugs and decide that it’d be fun to try bowling, but with themselves as the pins.

And it is fun; for a while.  Matches are very fast-paced with best-of-three rules in effect which often means that games are over just as they’re getting started.  This does, however, mean that it’s hard to get bored and games can be dragged out slightly if you start playing tactically.  The game has an auto-target feature for when you do throw your objects which, whilst not necessarily guaranteeing a hit, does make the whole affair a lot more on the easy side of things.

Again, though, it is fun to fling a giant lamppost at your so-called friend and watch it effortlessly take out two thirds of their team.  But I have serious concerns about longevity.  After 5 minutes with it, my interest was already starting to slip away slightly, and I really have no idea how the single player would work (I was going to try it, but everyone kept wanting a game with me for some reason).  When Vikings Attack just doesn’t strike me as something I’d willingly pay money for.  As a Flash game?  Yeah, I could see myself playing it often.  But as a downloadable title that costs money?  Probably not.

This preview is very tricky for me to write.  You see, when I played Zone Of The Enders HD at the Expo, it ran perfectly fine.  There was no slowdown anywhere and it looked gorgeous.  I pretty much only had good things to say about it.  Unfortunately, since then, news stories have come out, backed up by video evidence, of the collection being bogged down in, quite frankly, horrendous slowdown.  So much as to render the game almost unplayable.  This has led me to question whether the game runs as smooth as I thought it did, or if the demo stalls were just set up to ensure that such slowdown did not occur.

Away from the slowdown issue, I can and am happy to report that the actual game is otherwise exactly as you remember.  My stall was set up to play the first ZoE and, consequently, the memories came flooding back.  Combat is seemingly simple, but actually rather deep and complex, the game has a great sense of scale (your giant mech manages to tower over most buildings but not unreasonably so) and the writing is great if you happen to like the sort of storytelling that Japanese anime provides.

It holds up really well, is what I’m saying, and the HD touch-up created the illusion that the game hadn’t aged a day, that’s how pretty it is.  Well, until the FMV cutscenes crop up (anyone who has played any HD collection understands what I mean when I say that), anyway.  Of course, though, I’m brought back to the slowdown issue.  There is pretty much irrefutable video proof that this is the Silent Hill HD Collection all over again.  I want to recommend the Zone Of The Enders HD Collection based on what I personally played, but that slowdown that I am seeing is convincing me otherwise.

In all honesty; it’s probably best to wait and see if there’ll be a patch.  It plays exactly like you remember it and the game hasn’t aged much at all, but that slowdown will be killer in these games, so it’s not worth getting if they won’t fix it.