T w e n t y S i d e d

Last time I whined that there was too much combat in what should be a slow-burn mystery thriller. But that’s not my biggest gripe with the game. My biggest gripe is how the game manages difficulty. For you. 

Death-Based Difficulty is a Terrible Idea. Please Stop. 

I should have remembered that Remedy is fond of auto-balancing difficulty based on death. That’s a system where the more guys you kill, the harder the game hits. The more you die, the more foes are nerfed. In racing games we call this “rubber banding”, where the other cars will drive faster if you’re ahead and slower if you’re falling behind. It makes the race exciting and interesting until you spot the cheating, at which point it ruins the entire experienceFor me, anyway. The practice is so common I figure it must be what most people want???. 

The last chapters of the original Max Payne were an exercise in obsessive save-scumming to compensate for the ridiculous insta-deaths you’ll experience when entering a new room. Once you’ve killed enough mooks without dying, the rest of them are turned into flawless killbots with millisecond reaction times. You’ll open the door and instantly three mooks will snap fire directly at your face for an abrupt and unavoidable trip to the Game Over screen. When this would happen, I’d deliberately charge face-first into the room a few times and let them murder me until the difficulty system had backed off again. 

It wasn’t a very good system.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Control Part 3: Unbalanced by Design”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.