The next Meeting will take place on June 6th at Vocari Hub. It starts at 1 PM and ends at 10 PM, but you don’t have to stay the whole time and can come and go as you please. The featured games are 007 First Light and Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight. I’ll have both games on two PlayStation 5s and two Xbox Series X systems and Lego Batman on one Switch 2. I will provide four pizzas, cola, and bottle water for guests to eat during the party.
007 First Light is an origin story that shows James Bond join MI6 and be trained as a secret agent. It’s made by IO Interactive who are known for the Hitman and Kane and Lynch series when they were part of Eidos.
007 First Light is mostly a stealth game, there are also jumping and shooting sections but at least 80% of it is stealth. I don’t generally enjoy stealth games so I was worried about this, but the stealth aspect seems arcadey and casual with almost no fail states so it shouldn’t be too frustrating. For example if a guard finds you have ten seconds to either knock them out or lie with the bluff system and convince them you are not a threat. Even if you fail at both of those tasks the guard might call over his friend or two or three more guards, however unlike most stealth games you won’t have to restart the level and the whole base won’t be alerted, just the guards in that particular room. Once you are made or get tired of sneaking around you can fight the security in a interesting hand to hand combat system involving strikes, grabs, throws, dodges, and using any nearby object as a deadly weapon. Q gave James a watch to label his objectives and make the stealth sections even easier. The watch can override electronics and set traps for guards, shoot lasers to burn or blind attackers and has darts that will make them violently ill.
What’s unusual in a secret agent game is James Bond can’t just shoot people whenever he wants. Instead he has to follow the rules of engagement and wait for enemies to start shooting at him first and then ah icon for License to Kill is displayed at the top center of the screen and he can fire back. James can carry two weapons at once and can dart in and out of cover. He can even use instinct power to slow down everything like bullet time in the Max Payne series. James Bond can throw empty weapons, disarm guards, or even pistol whip them with their own gun for extra humiliation.
I’m not sure how long the game is or how many levels there are, but I would guess between ten to twenty stages ranging from thirty minutes to an hour to complete. At the press event I watched videos from the stage set in England was pretty long and the most interesting. It starts with a boss fight, then a jumping section, exploring a museum, a stealth section, a shooting portion, another boss fight and a driving section. The driving, jumping and boss fights seem pretty linear, but the museum and stealth portions gave players more freedom. You couldn’t leave the building but there were multiple paths and two to six ways to complete an objective. I worry about the difficulty since I want the stealth areas to be very easy but the shootouts to be hard and I’m not sure there’s an option for that. I also heard you can replay levels in a challenge mode that also might change things like the time of day or where key items are located.
This is I think the fourth Lego Batman game overall and Lego Batman 3 came out in 2014. I selected it since it has two player cooperative play throughout the story mode. Normally a Lego game is based on a film series or tv show. Legacy of the Dark Knight however has a different theme for every level and attempts to stitch them together to form a cohesive plot. There are levels based on Batman Forever. Batman & Robin, Dark Knight, and even the Arkham Asylum video game and the plot is split into three acts. Some of the voice acting seemed a little too low key and not very enthusiastic from what I’ve seen. Between levels you can explore Gotham City to find collectables or switch costumes. Supposedly there aren’t as many playable characters as other Batman games, only eight are confirmed so far, but each one has at least two vehicles to drive around and ten different costumes to unlock, with Batman having much more then that with one hundred all be it similar batsuits.
In most Lego games you enter a room, fight a few thugs and then reach a dead end and must either switch characters or build something to open the door and solve a puzzle. That’s still the case here but now you have the combat system of the Batman Arkham Asylum games, strike, counter, dodge and even do finishing moves with some of the same punch sound effects. There’s also some stealth sections, but enemies don’t seem to patrol the areas too much and the punishment for getting caught is a big fifteen person brawl, which I prefer anyway. It does seem like the game might be a little too easy, but there are three difficulties so I’ll be playing it on hard mode.
