Review: Psi-Ops

A review I did of a game some time ago. It's set from my standard perspective of analyzing a game for what makes it fun, and what doesn't. I don't talk about it in the review, but the pacing in this game is quite good. Pacing is a very, very powerful idea, and one that I'll expound more on this Tuesday.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Psi-Ops is a fairly decent Sci-Fi FPS. It’s plot is okay – nothing spectacular, but certainly passable. You infiltrate the bad guy’s base, using your guns and your psi powers to kill bunches of people, recover special moon rocks, and save the world from the evil general. Evil twins and psychically-themed villains abound.

The psi powers, to me, are the highlight of this game. You have telekinesis, remote viewing (AKA astral projection), Mind Control, pyrokinesis, and “sense aura” (a cheesy, puzzle-only power). Pyrokinesis, sadly, is just another gun, effectively, and sense aura could’ve been a handy-dandy infrared-vision, but no, just a lame puzzle-solving power.

The FPS combat is nothing exemplary – it’s a lot like many others, with a minor difference in the auto-aiming dot that aims for a body part and shows you which. Don’t do this. Auto-aiming, if it has to exist, should be largely behind the scenes – plus, this wasn’t done that well – it made it harder at times to aim at heads. Also! Hit detection = terrible. Sniping someone’s head was nigh-impossible. For goodness sake, test your hit detection, people.

I do, however, commend this game for having co-op, difficulty levels, and creative uses of telekinesis (hold them with one hand, shoot with the other; rolly balls of doom) and mind-control (Finally, a “kill yourself” option!). That said, Pyrokinesis should have just lit the target on fire, or pierced/worked around terrain to make it more than just a gun that ran on psi. Aura View should also have been infrared vision, more distinctly than it already was.

Also, rolling balls of telekinetic doom = awesome.

Lessons to be learned:

Don’t give me powers just to make fricking everyone immune to them at the end. Balance your game without resorting to such cheap tricks.

Don’t ever, ever give me a move or item that is only useful when you say it is. Ever! Zelda games could learn from this, as well. I’m looking at you, statue-controlly rod from Twilight Princess. (If you absolutely, positively have to do this, scatter things that I can use it on throughout the game, not just at puzzle-solving points.)
-Actually, the real problem is when one out of a set of useful things is only useful when you say it is. For example, when I go through a Zelda dungeon, I will get a nifty new item. In addition to this item being necessary for me to complete the dungeon, I expect it to be just generally useful. When it isn’t, I am disappointed. However, I’m perfectly willing to accept songs (a la Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker) that are only useful when you say they are, because all songs are like that. It’s only when you break the “useful” mold and give me something that isn’t that I get annoyed.

Auto-aiming needs to be less annoying and blatant.

Dear god, test your hit-detection. Sniping should WORK.

Guns and powers should be separate. Powers should not just be guns that run on Psi.

Creative uses of telekinesis = win.