RATING:
Pros: Pretty fun, amazing graphics.
Cons: Not the best character control, bad camera control.
Score: TBD
During the last few days, we were finally allowed to participate in the closed beta testing of Square-Enix' and United Front Games' new title Triad Wars. In contrast to its predecessor Sleeping Dogs, in which you slip into the role of an undercover policeman who infiltrates the Sun On Yee Triad organisation in Hong Kong, Triad Wars actually turns players into the bad guys, allowing them to try and form their personal criminal cartel, competing against rival gangs as they build up their business.
The sandbox environment of this action game allows players to explore vast open urban areas where it’s up to them whether to steal a car or motorbike, to beat innocent passers-by even to death or to commit any other crime. Triad Wars is pretty much a solo experience and actually extremely similar to a single-player title. It mainly revolves around building up your personal gang in competition with others, acquiring resources, kitting out your Triad and training up your personal Enforcer character to be well-prepared for facing the foe in person.
The Enforcer part is the action-packed portion of the MMO that allows for a rather active style of play with players controlling their character. In order to discover territory occupied by rival gangs, you are able to open a map in the open world to then attack your rivals in a Raid, which means entering a rival player’s turf and fighting your way through the defending NPC gang members to loot as much as you can. As your time in enemy territory isn’t unlimited, you have to hurry up when deciding to benefit from the opportunity to also take out the variety of criminal rackets your target has built, which provides extra resources and money to be claimed, as to not being caught by the arriving cops when trying to get away with your loot.
The raider’s principle goal is to make it into the enemy’s safe house where a fight with the owner Enforcer awaits. The latter is represented by an NPC that has the same talents and abilities as the player that normally controls it. Prior to raiding, players are able to first perform 2 Operations in order to give themselves a larger amount of time for their Raid. These small mini-missions task them with randomly generated quests that see them hunt down their target’s NPC gang members and disturb their rackets (at least from what we experienced, these quests are completely random and most probably on rotation with no relation to the target player’s actual choices or businesses). The idea with running Operations before starting a Raid is to attract the policemen’s attention, thus keeping them away a bit longer from your planned Raid to give you more time.
The Raids aren’t that much of a challenge at first, as the NPCs guarding the territory can be killed fairly effortlessly while the computer-controlled Enforcer although possessing the same skills as the player it represents isn’t capable of the same reflex reactions. So that it’s just an AI scripts vs. player battle after all. Combat as such is quite thrilling, including grapples, stuns and combo building; the most compelling aspect, however, is the ability to interact with your surroundings when you get hold of your foe, which enables players to smash the enemy’s head through speakers in a radio shack, body-slam them onto crates, crack their heads into windows, throw them into garbage dumps, and even perform several quite mean back-breaking moves.
As players level up, they will earn points they’re able to spend on their various skills and stats such as speed and strength in order to enhance their character’s abilities and actively make it stronger (as well as the NPC version representing them and defending their own safe house).
You also have the option to spend these points on upgrading your NPC gang members to make them more powerful defenders of your safe house, territory and assets for when a rival player’s attack may occur. This is the rather passive aspect of Triad Wars that players are responsible for managing without being actively involved in during a rival attack, instead it being the AI defences they choose to put in place.
In addition to enhancing their Gang, the player is also able to set up businesses to earn money, be that dealing stolen goods, money-laundering, gambling dens or other criminal activities. These businesses may be upgraded individually as well, with players only being limited by their safe house’s level as to which level they are able to enhance their rackets. It’s therefore vital to well balance your efforts put into setting up businesses, enhancing the defences provided by your gang members and your Enforcer character’s training, which will ensure you’re able to defeat your rivals to loot some additional resources.
So this is what the title generally revolves around, but now on to our own thoughts and impressions! We have to state that we were quite thrilled when already the tutorial offered us the chance to kill someone at a construction site by ramming their head into a table saw. The combat seems quite action-packed and fast-paced, allowing players to leap obstacles during pursuits on foot, rolling over objects and dodging blows. We even managed to get our hands on a machine gun as we ploughed through an enemy turf.
One of the aspects that we found the most thrilling was in the tutorial as well as the kind of mission that reappears throughout Operations where we took the passenger’s seat, being driven by an NPC and hunted by members of a rival Triad on their motorbikes and in their vans, to hang out of the window shooting back at our pursuers, blowing out wheels and sending cars into huge flips, which was a particularly cinematic and absolutely epic experience.
We felt that the open sandbox environment rather serves the purpose of being a more interesting way of getting from A to B when players aren’t on an Operation/ mission, but have to admit that it’s quite fun though. We once picked up an operation that tasked us with getting to a rival gang member’s location before some business went down, which put us on a timer. We therefore stepped on the accelerator and were flying through the city streets when we unfortunately clipped a police car as it was passing by. This resulted in the entire police force chasing after us straightaway, forcing us to escape from them to get out of their chase zone while simultaneously attempting to still reach our operation objective location in time.
The police in the game are quite unrelenting and difficult to shake off, which becomes a bit easier in case you manage to get a sports car or a motorbike from a city inhabitant. It’s extremely thrilling to literally ride at breakneck pace, dodging and weaving through the traffic. However we have to establish that it actually is much more difficult to fall off your motorbike than to knock someone off one when you hit them and you seem to be able to crash into environments before being thrown off (at least it is a lot more forgiving than games like Grand Theft Auto).
And be warned that it’s not a good idea at all to commit a crime with the cops watching you, especially when you happen to only have a sluggish vehicle. As soon as you begin trying to get away, they’re quite swift to get reinforcement and ultimately smash up your vehicle. Once we ended up on foot being chased by half a dozen cops into a shipyard and the only way left to escape was by diving into the water. We were fortunately lucky enough to find a harbour boat we were able to steal to dry land again in a different part of the city!
In case you can’t manage to get away in time and end up caught by the cops, you’ll not only lose "Face" (basically the points you gain from completing raids and operations to increase your game rank), but all your vehicles and gear as well when respawning in front of a police station. Luckily, you’ll typically find an unguarded police car in the parking lot. And in case you’re ill-fated enough to get killed, then you’ll spawn at the hospital. We managed to be gunned down by police, thrown from our motorcycle at high speed in a pursuit, hit by a lorry, and to simply perish because of a glitch in the game that threw us high up into the air, then tumbling back down to earth with a sickening crunch. When waking up in hospital for the first time, we had the glorious idea to just for fun tackle one of the nurses, unconscious of the policeman standing just outside. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
On the whole, we extremely enjoyed playing Triad Wars, in spite of some pretty poor camera angles and the sometimes awkward controls, and even though it doesn’t quite possess the perfected mechanics of Grand Theft Auto (the game is too easy to make the comparison). The more active aspect of committing crimes with your Enforcer character somewhat overshadows the strategic aspect that comes with figuring out how to spend your points. As of now, the game is pretty much a single-player one and Gang Wars, which enable players to form their personal Triads (groups/ guilds), are only announced for the future, with nobody knowing when exactly, meaning at this precise moment that in our opinion the game completely lacks the MMO aspect, the "players" turf you attack could equally be just NPCs for all the difference it makes.
Due to the fact that Triad Wars is still in closed beta testing, there are obviously still a few problems, especially with connection loss and full game crashes (which occurred on a pretty regular basis to us, from time to time giving us quite a hard time completing missions). Yet we’re convinced that this is something that will undoubtedly be resolved before the official launch. As a game it’s a great title, but as a multiplayer game it’s currently seriously lacking.
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.