Co-Operate With Yourself
It’s hard being a fan of a niche sub-genre of games. Halo, Serious Sam, System Shock 2 and many others let you battle from start to finish with a few friends, but there’s a type of game that can be almost as much fun as that. I call them solo co-op games, and they’re sadly few and far between.
The idea is simple - switch between characters in a team, using their distinct abilities to progress past obstacles and help each other. Throw in the occasional bout of violence against enemies for good measure and voila - fun gameplay guaranteed.
Lost Vikings introduced me to this tiniest of genres. Olaf the Stout has his Shield (impenetrable and a solid platform to stand on), Eric the Swift can run and jump and Baelog can shoot arrows at enemies and buttons. These merry vikings get captured by aliens and must escape back home - deep fiction it is not, but ingenious puzzling it most certainly is. A worthy sequel followed on the SNES as well as a PC version with rubbish pre-rendeered graphics.
Project Eden was the last decent game Core ever made. It undersold but to me it’s just one of those games that I enjoyed far more than the average reviewer seemed to. This time we got an engineer, a fella in a hazard-proof suit, a hacker and a leader security privileges. Again, the name of the game is working out who needs to do what where in order to progress. Such a simple idea and yet far more satisfying than staring at a frustrating 3D puzzle for an hour. The puzzly level design was excellent, never feeling too forced or contrived. Here, try the demo.
Commandos should be on this list however the puzzles there felt too frustrating to be fun (though Strike Force has my interest for certain). There were a number of unimpressive clones such as Star Trek: Away Team. Desperados, however, I utterly loved (demo here). The combat was well done (you could queue up actions, often creating memorable shootouts) and once again you had to work with the distinct abilities and vulnerabilities of the characters to complete a level. Unlike Project Eden and Lost Vikings there was more flexibility in how to finish a level since there were far more abilities to play with. The 2D artwork was also beautiful, and somehow they’re recreating that look in full 3D for the sequel. Can’t wait.
January 25th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Don’t forget X-Men Legends, which lets you to seamlessly “coop” solo or with friends.
January 25th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
That’s more action game than puzzler, ala Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance and the like. Was the second one much better than the first? couldn’t get on with it particularly. :\
January 25th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Virtually identical, actually. Nothing in the second that would alter an opinion of the first.
I’d love to see a similar 1-4 player configuration used on a more strategic game.
January 25th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I think Project Eden can be played multiplayer. Have you tried System Shock 2 multiplayer?
February 3rd, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Interesting – single player co-op.
I think you’re missing an entire genre, though: the first person tactical shooter.
Games like the Rainbow Six series and SWAT 3+ allow you to take control of individual fireteams to coordinate an assault. My favorite part of these games is lining up my teams at multiple doorways to a room and flashbanging the shit out of it at the same time. They never see it coming.
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:10 pm
[…] Commandos: Strike Force currently sits at position 18 in the charts, it’s probably only headed downwards from there. I’m getting a Hostile Waters flashback here - brilliant game, terrible sales. But then this sort of self-co-op game is very much my sort of thing. […]