|
|
|
Main News Forums Games Games Database Top 100 Release List Support Files Features Reviews Previews Interviews Editorials Diaries Misc Download Gallery Music Screenshots Videos Miscellaneous Staff Members Privacy Statement |
Restricted Area Review
In the past years we´ve seen an endless flow of action-RPGs. Virtually all of them take place in fantasy scenarios, making them all look alike. Master Creating preferred a sci-fi setting for their debut game Restricted Area and when it came out in Germany in late Q3/04 it caused quite a discussion. Is Restricted Area a fresh breeze in the genre or just a repetitive cheap shot? We´ll get to the bottom of it ... The World It is the year 2083. The world is in ashes after a nuclear catastrophe. The population has found a new home in a few megacities. Although there´s a world government, its power is limited - seven giant corporations have the real power. They have built hidden fortresses in the contaminated wastelands outside the big cities and in these fortresses, only company law counts. They are a restricted area for everybody who isn´t on the payroll.Characters In the beginning the player can choose between four characters. Each has 6 attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Reaction and Willpower) and two skill pyramids, one with 15 standard skills, the other with the same number of unique skills.Here´s a brief characterization of the available protagonists: 1. Johnson is a former soldier who earns his living as a mercenary. His specialities are heavy weapons, grenades and an additional movement option - strafing - later in the game. 2. Kenji Takahashi is a former Yakuza on the run. He uses fast weapons for melee or medium distance combat: katana, cyberclaws and dual pistols. Especially the first two are nicely complemented by his martial arts skills. 3. Victoria Williams has to settle an old score with one of the big companies. When she was a child, Oxygenetic tried to capitalize on her psionic abilities. Vicky is equivalent to a mage, so she obviously tries to avoid close combat. Weapons are only of limited use for her, but this is more than compensated for by her powerful psionic skills. To make things more complicated, she suffers from a heavy penalty with implants of all kinds. In practice, she can only use genetically adapted bioware. Due to the large costs for good implants she is always short on money. 4. Jessica Parker received a life sentence for cyber crimes. After sidestepping this minor problem she fights the establishment as a hacker. Her main weapon is an indestructible drone, which follows her everywhere. It needs certain things from the cyberspace as fuel. Apart from the drone she can also use mines and sentry guns and modify cyberware and weapons. Guns are only an option in the first half of the game. Later on Jessica mostly relies on the drone because there aren´t enough skill points left to develop weapon skills. The characters get more complex, more interesting and more difficult to play in increasing order. Johnson is the equivalent of a primitive barbarian - give him a big gun, make sure he makes more boom every level and you can hardly go wrong. Jessica on the other hand is always short on skill points because she has the difficult choice between increasing skills useful to herself or those making her drone more powerful.
Story, etc. Story and dialogs are definitely one of RA´s weakest points. While the story is hurried, cliche ridden and shows a lack of substance, the dialogs offer an occasional highlight in the dialogs between the 4 main characters, which tells you more about their background and their motivation.Those who play the game with open eyes will notice more variation in the different characters than one would suspect after a brief look. Each character has his or her personal background and experience the story from a different perspective. In a certain mission, for instance, "A" has to rescue "B" from prison. You´ll be the active and the passive part if you play all characters. A few subtle differences are hard to detect. For example, several cut scenes are adapted to the chosen PC, and the NPCs in town modify their behaviour depending on dialog choices, the selected PC or a special quest. The one storytelling device which really stands out is the decision making during a FMV. In the middle of the video you suddenly have to make an important choice - seconds later you see the consequences. I would have liked to see this more than only once per character. Gameplay As in every action-RPG the gameplay is rather simple. Most of the time you´re busy killing things and collecting loot. Between missions you´re in the city to optimize your equipment and talk to NPCs which might have a quest for you.There are three types of quests: those advancing the storyline, an unlimited number of generated missions and rare quests given to you by NPCs. Naturally, the story-relevant quests are much more interesting than the generated ones. The latter are always the same - explore a dungeon until you locate the target then kill it, talk to it or collect it. Dungeons are randomly created by combining one of approximately seven available tylesets with a small number of different mission types. Although it will hardly take more than 10 hours to see all the random elements, it´s not that much of a problem because most of the time is spent in the significantly better main quest. Generated missions are a device to ramp up your character if the main quest becomes too challenging. Successful missions increase your reputation and failures decrease it - reputation determines the difficulty of the random missions. Finishing the main quest unlocks the next higher difficulty level for this character. Unfortunately, this adjustment by reputation isn´t flawless: at times I had only easy missions available and after winning the game, suddenly only hard missions. Some finetuning would be appreciated. Combat As a matter of course combat is the most important element in an action-RPG and Restricted Area delivers nonstop action. After selecting a mission, you find yourself standing next to Jason´s glider in the desert near the complex you have to infiltrate. 20 seconds later you have the first enemy contact, and you keep shooting things until the level is cleared or until you decide to take a break from moving forward.Combat tactics and speed can be influenced with equipment and character development. The player has a nice selection of skills and modifiers at his disposal. Speed enhancements like the "running" skill or faster attacking speed do make a noticeable difference. The same can be said about weapons with special features like "+ 40% against machines" or "extreme range". There´s an abundance of options - much more than can possibly be explored on a single run through the game. The action comes over hard and fast, without smoke and mirrors. You go forward, most critters attack on sight, making a direct assault. Only creepers try to escape when they see you kill a conspecific. Obviously the AI follows genre standards instead of raising the bar. Restricted Area also doesn´t set new standards for enemies, apart from a few spectacular boss opponents like the "twin bots". You´ll face modifications of the same basic enemy types over and over again. They´re the usual suspects like barbarian, zombie, robot, spider, etc. Sometimes you´re accompanied by an NPC. This makes the combat more frantic because your partner will be extremely aggressive and you have to hurry to keep pace with him. The computer controlled Johnson is a killing machine. ;)
Equipment RA uses bioware and cyberware instead of armour and amulets, just like can be expected in a cyberpunk scenario. Everything is implanted directly into the character, so you obviously can´t see anything other than the weapon.Both bioware and cyberware items have randomly chosen properties; for example "+20% attack speed" or "+35 hit points", and a certain required cyber-tolerance. Bioware can be genetically adjusted to the PC, which is a pretty expensive method to lower the cyber-tolerance requirement. Extremeties can be turned around - a left arm or leg becomes a right one and vice versa. Sometimes you can find a blank item - this includes weapons - with up to four empty stat slots. The doctor implements the stat selection of your choice into the item but of course, this is an expensive hobby. Weapons are also randomly created - you usually find gear your character can theoretically use now or in the near future. The available weapon types are: gun, pistol, katana, cyberclaw, flame thrower, shot gun and plasma gun. Self-learning weapons are a rare find. As one might expect, these get better over time dependending on the enemies they´re used against. Both vanilla and custom-made weapons can be enhanced at your local arms dealer´s. Handle adaptation and up to 10 upgrades make them much more powerful. Storing items is handled in a very convenient way. Your local cabby - the glider pilot Jason - has 4 trunks in his vehicle. 3 are exclusively for the current character and 1 is shared, so it can be used to transfer items between characters. Two other details worth mentioning are item sets - you get increasingly more "company bonus" the more items by the same manufaturer you wear - and the possibility to have a vendor hold back an item for you if you´re out of money. Stability & bugs The tested version 1.07b is stable. Unfortunately the bug situation still leaves room for improvement. Johnson´s and Kenji´s paths can be finished without major issues, however, Victoria and Jessica are more trouble. Here´s a list of the most drastic problems: One dead end in a generated mission - the target wasn´t where it was meant to be. One missing staircase to an earlier dungeon level - this means I couldn´t return to the glider to store loot. One inaccessable staircase due to crates in its keepout area - see above. Collision detection problems with "Psi Shot" and energy weapons - they fire through a certain sort of crates. Self-learning weapons didn´t work for me.Most of the listed bugs surfaced only once in approximately 40 hours. In the meantime, Master Creating released patch 1.09 and announced v1.10. Restricted Area probably needs another 2 or 3 patches to get rid of all A and B bugs. At the moment the game is in better condition than most action-RPGs at release, so I´m quite optimistic for the upcoming international version. Graphics Restricted Area uses 2D graphics in isometric point of view, enhanced with real-time shadows and a simple physics engine. The supported resolutions are 1024*768 and 1280*1024. Although this sounds rather unimpressive on paper, it´s actually surprisingly effective.As an example, a fully developed Psi Shot - the equivalent to a fireball - throws 5 blue energy balls at once, spread over a 60° angle. Each ball casts a shadow on objects near its path. The one or more shadow(s) per object are moving in real-time, without a significant influence on the frame rate, which is locked at 63 fps. Explosions are big and spectacular - a group of blown up barrels can fill half the screen. The videos are pretty good. Not groundbreaking but they´re dynamic and they do a good job connecting the main missions. While the dungeons look outdated the city and the static screens are quite pleasing to the eye. A stylish town designed by an architect plus fitting colours and illumination add a lot to the atmosphere. The animations are clumsy.
Music, etc. The game comes with two non-dynamic sound tracks, which are in two different flavours of industrial. Standard choice is a melodic sound track by Dynamedion (SpellForce, The Moment of Silence). The alternative is harder, reminding me of Nine Inch Nails´ work for Quake. Both are quite fitting.The developers took a no-nonsense approach with the sound effects, just like the visual effects: both weapons and explosions have a crisp, aggressive sound, which fits the game´s style. Restricted Area continues the latest trend of high quality localizations for the German market. Master Creating really walked the extra mile to get high profile voice actors including the standard cast for the German voices of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Angelina Jolie, Jet Li, Jennifer Love Hewitt and, I think, The A-Team´s Hannibal Smith. The result is top notch. To summarize the technical categories, the game has a strong audio department while the graphics are a mixed bag. Interface The polished interface is Restricted Area´s true highlight. It´s fast, stylish and unobtrusive. Combat options can be bound to 3 mouse buttons, as well as "activate skills or "use medikit". Skills can be assigned to the number keys 1 - 8, which are then used to select the desired skill.You can not only shoot a target, you can also shoot in any direction you desire, with or without walking there. Inventory handling is comfortable, due to "pick up everything" and "auto-sort" buttons. Item infos are displayed on mouse-over - thankfully clicking is unnecessary. Buying and selling is done with drag & drop, item enhancements are ordered with a single mouseclick. Other convenience functions include keyboard short cuts for just about everything, a button to auto-equip the best implants, mousewheel zoom and a minimap in the top right corner. Money is automatically collected, which is a good idea - can there be any reason not to take it? Restricted Area offers two save options: quicksave & quickload and "save & exit". The game automatically quicksaves when you enter a new level. Missions can be aborted at any time, so getting stuck in dead end is impossible. Misc. Multiplayer is only a nice gimmick. RA supports cooperative play of generated missions for 2 players over internet and LAN. In the first case you need to know your partner´s IP. MP was not tested for this review.Beta mod tools are available and the full release versions will come in a few weeks. Publisher Vidis released the German version back in September while Whiptail Interactive acquired the worldwide rights except the German market and Eastern Europe. Expect to see Restricted Area on the shelves in late Q1/05. Playing time is approximately 10 hours per character. After that you can continue playing on a higher difficulty level. Conclusion Restricted Area basically transfers standard action-RPG elements to a dark future scenario, replaces world exploration with a dungeon generator and adds some creative twists. The game is deeper than it seems at first sight, especially if you start with Johnson, the newbie character. He offers simple gameplay, which gets more complex after a few hours when he can use grenades and heavy arms. Johnson is a nice warm-up - not more. The other characters are much more interesting, fortunately, because they can be developed in more than one direction.Fun grows with complexity in Restricted Area. If you leave the special skills largely unused you only have a vanilla action-RPG. Although the mission generator gets the job done it feels as if the developer's didn´t exhaust their hand. At least two tylesets from the main quest are not used in the generator and including them along with 2 or 3 new mission objectives would have made the missions significantly less repetitive. For that matter, how repetitive is it? You play the same story 4 times from 4 different angles, face the same enemies in their specific regions over and over again and work on your old addiction - one more dungeon, one more unique item. Sounds similar to other popular hack & slay RPGs. There´s no denying it, though: RA builds its dungeons with a limited number of base components. Naturally a game with a carefully crafted world with scripted events offers more diversity - but it´s also slower because you have search for action, while RA transports you to it. Ideal for players seeking instant action. The core gameplay works like a charm, due to well thought out game mechanics supported by a superb interface. Lack of polish and budget prevent RA from being a classic, though. Up to date dungeon graphics, more of everything and better balancing would improve the game considerably. As it is now it´s a good sci-fi action-RPG.
Rate this title and view comments Game Info Printer Friendly Version |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
All original content of this site is copyrighted by RPGWatch. Copying or reproducing of any part of this site is strictly prohibited. Taking anything from this site without authorisation will be considered stealing and we'll be forced to visit you and jump on your legs until you give it back. |
||
 |
|
 |