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Breakdown [Xbox]

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Anyone played Breakdown, Namco's first-person brawler released for the original Xbox in 2004?

I've been reading little bits of hype about it recently, here and there, specifically with regards to the way it treats player embodiment and game-world interaction. It sounds quite interesting, but the execution is apparently flawed and the game proper is largely forgettable.

No real details of the aforementioned more intriguing game play mechanics in the reviews back then at GameSpot or IGN, and Eurogamer were certainly less than impressed*.

But I found it online for £3 on Friday (including free delivery) and thought, fuck it. Should turn up sometime next week, assuming CeX can be trusted. :hmph:

I'm interested to know if any other Thumbs have played it and, indeed, if it's worth the high-brow wank being fostered upon it elsewhere on the web.

* And surprisingly racist too, I noted. :(

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I played it for a bit and thought the totally consistent first-person perspective coupled with some scenes any other game would've cut-scened was awesome. I stopped playing because it just got too hard. But it was pretty intense while it lasted.

edit: Having watched the video review, I'm getting memories of thinking the game just got boring. So maybe not intense but boring. Anyway, I remember this sequence where you're hiding from a guy searching the room, trying to find you, and that was sort of cool. I think.

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I played it and enjoyed it. No idea what the "high brow wank fest" you're talking about is, but it had some fun moments, some mindfuck moments, and some really frustrating moments.

I'll admit it had some of the better hand-to-hand combat of a first-person game I've yet seen, but the gunplay, with its erratic auto-aim, was pretty clunky. You are in first person the entire time, but actually see your body unlike Half-Life. In terms of storytelling and gameplay, Half-Life obviously blows this away. Some of the artifacts of focusing on your physical presence - such as laboriously animating picking up a gun, removing the cartridge, and placing it in your pocket, which requires THREE button presses - are neat touches at first, but get annoying. It is pretty neat, though, to get picked up by an enemy, knocked to the floor, and actually see your perspective pitch up facing the ceiling, seeing your torso lying on the floor.

In terms of combat, it plays more like a fighting game than anything. Once you outgrow the guns, blocking becomes essential, and the game *will* punish you for failing to read enemies. I lost count of how many times I died the first time the game expected me to take on two enemies hand-to-hand at once. There are dramatic difficulty spikes: the aforementioned two normal enemies, a part where you have to fight two miniboss-like enemies at once, a later part where you have to fight two miniboss-like enemies who are backed up by 4 snipers, and this evil, evil, evil, evil room two scenes from the end which expects you to take on FIVE WAVES of enemies, each wave of which has roughly twice as many enemies as you're used to fighting, and can only conceivably be beaten by finding a cheap undocumented move in an online guide. It isn't an easy game by most standards, it does keep throwing in new twists to challenge you while simultaneously increasing your powers, with a few scenes giving you powers to kick ass where previously you were severely outmanned.

The plot is... decent. Nothing too special, a bit cliché (oh noez, teh amnesiac has the power to save the world), but I still walked away as thinking it was decent for a Video game. I seem to remember the plot was one of the things that kept me playing till the end, probably because of a few ballsy decisions. I'm mainly thinking of the incredible mindfuck of the climax 2/3 of the way through the game. If you're thinking of playing the game, please don't read this spoiler, because it's a lot cooler if you don't see it coming. MASSIVE, MASSIVE SPOILER:

The game acts like it's building towards a finale. You're chasing the big baddie through the enemy's homeworld, but pretty much everything that can go wrong does. Fighting the boss, he kicks your ass. Lying on the ground, the home troops announce that they're out of options and decide to nuke the place. A missile bearing the text "game over" crashes down (and I half expected to see the credits rolling in one of the most depressing Video game endings ever). When the explosion settles down, you awake in a machine in the lab that makes most of the beginning of the game and are told that everything up to that point was you remembering the past. When you step out of the machine... your HUD is gone. No health gauge. No targeting reticule. Just your character's hands. That floored me while playing. Like most things in the game, though, the moment of brilliance was quickly surpassed by frustration at trying to kill an annoying difficult room of enemies without having time to get accustomed to combat without the HUD.

Worth playing for the experience, if you are able to dedicate the time to get over some of the clunky controls and occasionally frustrating fights.

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Weird, I've been meaning to play this for years (I bought it a while ago), and literally had it in my hands a few days ago, about to put it in -- then I decided to play Bioshock instead (just beat it an hour ago). So now I'm back to meaning to play it.

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Bastard Microsoft took their bastard BC update servers bastard offline last bastard night, right in the middle of me doing the necessary bastard update. So I didn't get to play it after all. Bastards!

Might give it a shot tonight, as I managed to get the download to complete first thing this morning and the intro played fine as a result.

Looking forward to experiencing how Namco have handled first person embodiment in Breakdown, having read a fair bit about it [see OP] and watched some more gameplay videos in the meantime.

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I got about halfway through the game, and I think I'm done with it. They should have subtitled it, "Breakdown: Identical Grey Hallways." There are some interesting concepts for sure -- drinking Coke in first person looks cool. I'm still not sure why everything takes so many button presses. I have to hit X to "bring up my hand"?? Then X to pick something up. Then X a third time to eat/use it.

Blocking by clicking the left analog sucks. Having a third of the screen covered by your gun is annoying, and having 2/3 of it covered by blocking is worse. The story kept me interested, and I wanted to keep playing to see the rest, but I just wasn't having fun with it. I have much better games I could be playing, and not a ton of time. I really liked all the tripped out scenes though, like the talking blood on the wall, ghost cats, etc. Also when you're

stuck in a time loop, running through the facility, out of body. I ran a couple laps, groundhog day style, before realizing I had to quickly run to the door before it closed, to break the chain.

MASSIVE, MASSIVE SPOILER:

When the explosion settles down, you awake in a machine in the lab that makes most of the beginning of the game and are told that everything up to that point was you remembering the past.

Have you played "Second Sight"? There was a very cool, kinda similar (but better, I think) twist in that. Also MASSIVE SPOILER, for a better game, so go play it if you haven't:

It's been a while since I've played it, but basically:

Throughout the game you keep having playable flashbacks. You keep gaining new powers (telekinesis, etc.). Towards the end of the game you run out of time and you fail to save [someone] and defeat [whomever]--but you gain your final power, which is the ability to see the future. You realize that those "flashbacks" were actually the present time, and everything else was seeing the future. Meaning it's not too late to save the world, and you now have the foresight to succeed.

-----------

EDIT: Regarding the spoiler in Breakdown -- I just read a "plot faq" because I wanted to know what happened. You left out a huge part of the twist!

It's not just that the beginning of the game is your memory, it's that it's also the "future," in that you and Alex travel back in time, which is how Alex knew you at the beginning of the game (since you didn't actually meet until 15 years later). And so on.

After reading the whole plot, I really do want to see the rest of the game! But I don't want to play it. Where are the speedrunners when you need them?

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