There’s been a couple of occasions, playing these games and writing these posts, that I’ve tried and failed to connect to a game to such a degree that I’ve not bothered to do my usual 5-700 words. I’ll just mention it in this opening bit and move on to something that clicked with me a little more.
All Walls Must Fall came very close to receiving this fate, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the game, but it’s at least interesting enough to warrant the proper word count.
Set in a cyberpunk, cold war Berlin circa 2064, All Walls Must Fall is a turn based strategy game that has hints of a visual novel or dating sim when it comes to interacting with NPCs.
These very short sequences are undertaken by selecting one of four conversation branches that affect the conversee, positively or negatively, in one of three ways. If you make sure at least one of these is affected 100% positively you’ll get whatever it is you want. It could be information or it could be entry to a nightclub. If any are impacted too negatively, it’s shootin’ time.
If you’ve heard of this game before it’s very likely to have been the setting in and around the city’s gay scene that registered on some level. Every scenario plays out in a nightclub, and this feeds into the games vaguely rhythm based approach to the action which first manifests when you set your route and your character moves along it in time to the music, but that's just the tip of the musical influence iceberg.
Before I get into that though I should also mention that there are time travel and manipulation elements to the gameplay and story - the full extent sadly lost on me at this time, but at the least it’s a quirky way to introduce an ‘undo’ button in the gameworld. There’s definitely more to it than that, but my lack of specifics is indicative of a game that is not very good at introducing and explaining the nuances of its structure.
It’s also a bit of a shame that, despite nods towards espionage, hacking, and the aforementioned conversation and persuasion techniques, it appears inevitable that every mission will end in a gun-fight. It’s not that these aren’t great fun (more on that later) it's just disappointing that there don’t seem to be other options.
Furthermore, these gunfights can get pretty chaotic as the isometric view of the play area clashes with the inherent clutter of a club full of people and the cyberpunk design ethos. It’s not unusual to be in a very small room with several npcs exchanging gunfire, and far too often it’s all a bit confusing, messy even, and it’s near impossible to see who is in front of what and where without several circuits with the camera.
But when you do navigate a situation like this, winning out in a turn based battle of wits and weapons with various nefarious characters, that’s when the All Walls Must Fall plays its trump card.
Once the turn-based action has concluded you ‘drop’ the sequence into the timeline permanently, and at this point the action is played out again, with more dynamic camera angles, and with movements and gunshots timed perfectly to the beats of the club's music. It’s a unique and rewarding mechanic that can be a genuine joy to behold.
On it’s own it might not be enough to overcome some of the issues I had with the game, but some of this may be self inflicted - although I’m only taking partial responsibility…
I don’t play my PC at a desk, so any game that relies on mouse control is pretty much out of the question to me. Weirdly, All Walls Must Fall lets you map every action to whatever keys, button, or controller-stick you want… except the left and right mouse clicks.
It’s such a bizarre decision as, other than this, the game works well enough with any dual stick controller, and there are exactly the right number of actions for buttons on the most popular models.
Obviously this could be circumvented with a tool such as joy-to-key, or even if I’d had the forethought to unearth my Steam controller (which is my likely route when I try the game again) because the set-up I landed myself with was far from conducive to an immersive experience, but with a more controller friendly set-up in the first place this kind of work around really wouldn’t be necessary.
And I will be trying this game again. I hope that once the control quirks have been sorted I can come at it again and hopefully pick out the nuances that I missed with my first, brief experience, and fully appreciate the game world and the idiosyncrasies of the systems built into it.
All Walls Must Fall came very close to receiving this fate, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the game, but it’s at least interesting enough to warrant the proper word count.
Set in a cyberpunk, cold war Berlin circa 2064, All Walls Must Fall is a turn based strategy game that has hints of a visual novel or dating sim when it comes to interacting with NPCs.
These very short sequences are undertaken by selecting one of four conversation branches that affect the conversee, positively or negatively, in one of three ways. If you make sure at least one of these is affected 100% positively you’ll get whatever it is you want. It could be information or it could be entry to a nightclub. If any are impacted too negatively, it’s shootin’ time.
If you’ve heard of this game before it’s very likely to have been the setting in and around the city’s gay scene that registered on some level. Every scenario plays out in a nightclub, and this feeds into the games vaguely rhythm based approach to the action which first manifests when you set your route and your character moves along it in time to the music, but that's just the tip of the musical influence iceberg.
Before I get into that though I should also mention that there are time travel and manipulation elements to the gameplay and story - the full extent sadly lost on me at this time, but at the least it’s a quirky way to introduce an ‘undo’ button in the gameworld. There’s definitely more to it than that, but my lack of specifics is indicative of a game that is not very good at introducing and explaining the nuances of its structure.
It’s also a bit of a shame that, despite nods towards espionage, hacking, and the aforementioned conversation and persuasion techniques, it appears inevitable that every mission will end in a gun-fight. It’s not that these aren’t great fun (more on that later) it's just disappointing that there don’t seem to be other options.
Furthermore, these gunfights can get pretty chaotic as the isometric view of the play area clashes with the inherent clutter of a club full of people and the cyberpunk design ethos. It’s not unusual to be in a very small room with several npcs exchanging gunfire, and far too often it’s all a bit confusing, messy even, and it’s near impossible to see who is in front of what and where without several circuits with the camera.
But when you do navigate a situation like this, winning out in a turn based battle of wits and weapons with various nefarious characters, that’s when the All Walls Must Fall plays its trump card.
Once the turn-based action has concluded you ‘drop’ the sequence into the timeline permanently, and at this point the action is played out again, with more dynamic camera angles, and with movements and gunshots timed perfectly to the beats of the club's music. It’s a unique and rewarding mechanic that can be a genuine joy to behold.
On it’s own it might not be enough to overcome some of the issues I had with the game, but some of this may be self inflicted - although I’m only taking partial responsibility…
I don’t play my PC at a desk, so any game that relies on mouse control is pretty much out of the question to me. Weirdly, All Walls Must Fall lets you map every action to whatever keys, button, or controller-stick you want… except the left and right mouse clicks.
It’s such a bizarre decision as, other than this, the game works well enough with any dual stick controller, and there are exactly the right number of actions for buttons on the most popular models.
Obviously this could be circumvented with a tool such as joy-to-key, or even if I’d had the forethought to unearth my Steam controller (which is my likely route when I try the game again) because the set-up I landed myself with was far from conducive to an immersive experience, but with a more controller friendly set-up in the first place this kind of work around really wouldn’t be necessary.
And I will be trying this game again. I hope that once the control quirks have been sorted I can come at it again and hopefully pick out the nuances that I missed with my first, brief experience, and fully appreciate the game world and the idiosyncrasies of the systems built into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment