World War Z Ubisoft

[Kym Wash]

Tomy absolute shock, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is not just one of the better games based on a film franchise in recent memory, but a breath of fresh air and one of the best open world games Ubisoft has published in years.

I've spent some time with Sony's new PlayStation 4 exclusive Days Gone recently, playing it a few hours at a time over the past week and a half. I'm not done with the game yet but I have a pretty good idea of what it has to offer.

The point is, Days Gone is a strangely addictive, decently fun open-world game that's just incredibly generic in every way except for the cool zombie hordes. It's like Red Dead Redemption 2 but with a bike instead of a horse, a less compelling story and setting, and only a fraction of the emphasis on realism, though you'll have to keep your bike's tank full.

Combat is okay. The game could really benefit from a lock-on system, as aiming (especially up close) can be pretty wonky. This makes melee a much better way to take out all but the most distant enemies, and even then it can be a chore since good melee items break quickly. Having to fix up your hatchet or any other found melee weapons becomes tiresome quickly. The one melee weapon that doesn't break is your knife, but it takes forever to kill something with it.

Then there's all the ammo, the searching of corpses, the prying open of car trunks, the myriad side missions and plethora of busy work. You can't hold very much of anything at a time, so you'll use it up then have to search for more.

For open-world junkies, fine. This might all be delightful. But there's very little that strikes me as particularly creative or fresh about Days Gone. Compare it to something like Dying Light, an imperfect yet refreshingly unique take on the zombie apocalypse that blended RPG elements with a fun parkour system and creative day/night cycle. Days Gone just doesn't have that kind of twist.

There was one time when I was following a helicopter and your character says something like "hold up, they're stopping" and so I stopped my bike and got ready for another stealth mission. But then nothing happened. I had to keep driving my bike close enough to trigger a cut-scene where I drive right under the helicopter and they shoot at me. Stuff like that, where you have agency one moment, but then have to follow the script, is really grating. (It's still not as bad, in that regard, as Red Dead Redemption 2 at least). There are times when you wander just a tiny bit out of the mission zone only to have "LEAVING MISSION ZONE" flash at you on screen. One time I had to search a cemetery for something, and even while I was inside the cemetery still I kept getting that message.

The story, however, leaves me a little cold. Deacon and his wife, Sarah, were separated at the outbreak of the apocalypse and now, years later, you think she's dead. But is she? Flashbacks and cutscenes are abundant. The mystery is there for you to unravel. The shady Nero organization has its fingers in everything. One of the camp leaders, Copeland, will broadcast his anarcho-libertarian "Radio Free Oregon" show as you drive about the wilderness. It's reminiscent of the Far Cry games in a lot of ways, but without the gonzo sense of humor.

Graphically, Days Gone is kind of like it is in every other way. It looks . . . fine. It's very pretty at times, but there's nothing that really stands out. Facial animations are decent. Nothing here is going to win awards or wow players, but none of it is particularly bad either. I like the Oregon setting, even if the game seems determined to not do very much with it.

Days Gone certainly has its charm. Despite numerous bugs, some weird audio stuff (why is Deacon talking so loud sometimes?) and the tedium, I've actually still had fun with the game. I'm certainly going to continue playing it. The voice-acting is pretty good and the story, however basic, has some interesting twists and turns and decent enough characters. It's nothing special but it's not terrible by any means. I enjoy riding a motorcycle around, though there's nothing super fun or outlandish about Deacon's bike. Like the game itself, it's more of a workhorse than a plaything.

I've been trying to figure out what "scoundrelly" means in a videogame context. Whatever it means, Han Solo homage Star Wars Outlaws ain't it. Here are some basically non-scoundrelly, very Ubisofty things I did during my 60 minutes with Massive Entertainment's open world adaptation at Summer Game Fest this week: climbed around rectangular arrangements of yellow handholds. Shot at baddies over rectangular cover layouts. Collected 7/10 pieces of scrap with some Star Wars flavour text that unlocked an item recipe of some kind. Deployed my chibi Chewbacca sidekick Nix to distract Imperials with cute wiggles and belly boops so I could sneak behind them. Got discovered sneaking behind them and murdered them all before one could run to a terminal and summon reinforcements. OK, maybe that last one is getting there.

Crept through vents, shot at slightly out-of-view power nodes to switch on doors and elevators, abseiled from precisely placed grappling icons, hurried through collapsing derelicts that blew up according to an obvious script. Hacked a door using a rhythm-matching minigame and hacked a terminal by figuring out the right sequence of glyphs. Pecked a few Tie Fighters to shrapnel in my Trailblazer starship, and zipped around a chunk of desert on my speeder. Watched a few cutscenes in which protagonist Kay, a plucky young smuggler who has double-crossed a galactic crime syndicate, attempts to bluff her way past former associates. Kay talks a lot - every mission is a litany of notes to self about your next waypoint - but she's got minimal stage presence. Watching her stall for time feels less like Han vs Greedo than somebody complaining her way out of a parking ticket.

Star Wars Outlaws is probably a fun weekend in with a family-sized bag of chips, but it's no scoundrel. There's nothing really flamboyant or roguish or improvisational about the experience so far, and while it has a couple more sides to it than the average Ubisoft blockbuster - not least an open world broken across multiple planets, each ruled by different gangster families - it also doesn't really have a standout feature, beyond the fact that it's a Star War.

It does a fairly good job of being a Star War, mind you. Developer Massive seem a great fit for the Lucasverse inasmuch as their previous Division games are object-worlds as exotic and scattered and greebly as any Mos Eisley cantina - fallen cityscapes with an obsessively recreated minutiae of bodybags and graffiti and crates of rations in all the colours of the rainbow. You feel that knack for location design the second you set foot in one of Outlaws' cities. There are skeevy locals lounging against walls or bars, gossiping about sabaac or the ruling crims. There are glitchy holographic ads and ship traffic overhead and gusts of industrial vapour and a rich stew of noise from heaving drug dens and marketplaces.

I don't think it's as mesmerising as, say, that first step out into Night City, but it's got enough ambience to lure you away from your waypoint. It's just that everything you do within and around these places is at best formulaic and at worst, undecided.

The game's combat feels unsure about whether Kay is a Hannah Solo or a sneaky escape artist or a Thomasina Clancy. Your dashing, modestly upgradeable pistol aside, you can make temporary use of chunkier, on-map weapons such as forceshielded heavy blasters and charge-to-fire sniper rifles, sending your Ewoky cat acquaintance to scoop them up while you cower behind the shrubbery. You can also have Nix yank the pin from an enemy's thermal detonator (they never seem to notice in time), or pounce on a foe's head to tie them up for a few seconds.

In general, Nix is the MVP, because he is secretly a Division drone in axolotl's clothing. Between his tactical assists, and your ability to do headshoots and overload personal shields with ion ammo, you can mow down battalions of Stormtroopers with relative ease. But I'm not sure Outlaws wants you to do that. The vaunted gunfeel is hesitant and, I think, deliberately short on flair: it's just pouring blaster bolts into health bars, with opponents blowing about the layout doing combat barks without much ceremony or style.

The stealth is similarly dutiful: Nix remains the MVP, luring Stormtroopers out of position with a reliability which seems forced even by Stormtrooper standards, while you scurry towards terminals and hatchways. The corridor platforming bits are uninspired pieces of stagecraft in which you can often predict the cadence of rubble falling off the ceiling or walkways crumbling beneath you. And the spaceship combat feels, at times, like driving Dodgems underwater, with stop-start acceleration and open world contrivances such as Imperial arrays you can hack to make all the pursuing Imperial pilots forget your existence.

Again, I think all of this will probably add up into somebody's idea of a good time, specifically a Star Warrior who's not played any Ubisoft games for a while. Bland and unwilling as the mechanics can be, they're an adequate delivery mechanism for the setting. I'm just not sure it's possible to recreate the specific energy of Harrison Ford's Han Solo in an open world shooter such as this. Han Solo is a mix of clown and cowboy: he's courageous and crafty with a good eye, but he's fundamentally a faker who relies on a mixture of luck and charisma and Chewbacca. I don't think you can plot that kind of thing out as a cover-hugging tactics-me-do - the closest anyone has ever gotten is Uncharted. Let's hope MachineGames fare better with Solo's brother-from-another-genre Indiana Jones.

I'm really glad Ubisoft Massive had a different idea. Frontiers of Pandora is Avatar Far Cry, but it's also the best Far Cry game to date, and easily the best sandbox Ubi has put together in years. It feels great to have been this wrong.

It's also great to be a Na'vi in first-person. I was worried not being able to see my blue body all the time would make me forget I'm not playing a human, but it's the opposite. I'm reminded of my size and power every time I square up with the RDA or bonk my head on a ceiling, and I don't think those moments would land the same way with an over-the-shoulder camera that tries to keep everything in the frame at once. I don't always feel like a nine-foot-tall alien while running around gigantic forests, but you actually spend a good chunk of Frontiers looking down at pipsqueak humans and literally ducking under low-clearance doorways. RDA goons look like ants as they patrol around oil refineries, and their puny guns are just a nuisance in small numbers. Get close enough to punch one out and they ragdoll 20 feet forward.

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