Lucius 2: The Prophecy
Shiver Games
If you read my
review of the first game you might be wondering what I am doing back
here. I myself wondered, about whether the good bits had been released
from the weight of all the other bits, and what the result might be.
Put simply, the whole thing has
been tipped on its head, or rather into a great big killing sandbox.
The psychological unravelling of
the family in the first game provided the narrative glue and much of the
tension. What we have now is none of the latter and a largely
superfluous story, primarily because it runs second third and fourth to
the main point of the exercise, which is lots and lots of killing.
I hesitate to call it mindless,
as much of it is fairly creative. Early on you will have electrified a
water pipe, poisoned some coffee, lobbed an incendiary device through a
heating duct and dropped a ceiling fan on a seated guard. A lot of it
was at the behest of messages appearing on walls. Perhaps that is
mindless after all.
Not as mindless though as the AI
controlling the NPCs. This is an asylum, so I guess not a lot should be
expected, but they are way closer to willing participants than hard to
kill. They are somewhat tricked up, becoming either suspicious or
panicked in increasing degrees depending on what is going on. But you
can pretty much ignore panic, suspicion takes very little to overcome,
and then the spree continues.
Which I confess makes it more
fun that it would have been had they pounced on me whenever they got the
tiniest bit edgy and locked me back up.
I mentioned the asylum, which is
where Lucius finds himself, not surprisingly, after the events of the
first game. Somewhat more surprising is that the detective from the
first game has a become a convert, seduced by Satan himself. Satan has
also apparently spawned another, who may or may not be in competition
with you. I was never quite sure. It didn’t really matter.
As in the first game, you have
access to a range of powers, although these will have to be acquired
then levelled up. Daddy apparently took them off you. As in the first
game, I never really mastered them, although possessing people did
produce some interesting deaths. I tended however to stick with the
physical in the world, and spent lots of time throwing things at other
things.
Which is an art, or it might be,
if I had mastered it. Which I didn’t. But then there wasn’t much about
the controls I did master. I can’t say I even got used to them, but I
did manage to use them, despite their overly confusing nature.
There are some comic moments,
and some crass and tasteless moments (and jokes), and graphic novel
style cutscenes which work quite well. Homages to classic horror movies
are peppered throughout, and some stereotypes add a little something to
some deaths (the “compelling” donuts for instance). Deaths are generally
over the top, both in terms of look and feel.
I could tell you more but there
isn’t really much more to tell. To me this is a messily made kill fest,
which is all about the killing rather than the challenge. I wrestled
with it just to get into it, then had a period of wickedly gleeful
carnage, which ultimately became too much the same and I lost interest.
Somewhere in between the two games might be the right one. Perhaps
Lucius 3 will nail it.
Grade: C
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 7800 2048MB
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April 2015
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