RRR: WinBack (N64)

What I thought back during release….

Winback is a flawed, yet fun experience. The cover system is truly a unique spin to the third person shooter genre, allowing me to hunch up on a wall, and peer around the corner for some safe shooting. Characters look good enough, and scenery is varied enough. The one thing about the graphics that bothers me is the amount of fog, and how hard it is to see enemies very far away. The difficulty is definitely ramped up there, especially if you try and play a “run and gun” style. The things that pull this game down a few notches is weapon variety is severely lacking, and repetition sets in thick with the cover system. Even though emphasis in on taking your time and using your cover, Winback feels like it relies too heavily on that aspect. Regardless, it’s a fun play through and a challenge to most gamers.

Rating Then: 6.7

Judo CHOP!

What I think years later….

This Winback re-review was brought on by a comment made by Nozdeuce in my first RRR, Die Hard Trilogy. This was not a title in my queue, however, I made an exception to add it and bump it up to release on this day, as it was a game I do remember. My memories of the game are mixed, however I do remember enjoying my time playing it, for the most part. For all intended purposes, the cover system serves as one of the most memorable precursor to games such as Kill.Switch, which was also a precursor to Gears of War. Auto aim helped make the game have a better flow, especially with aim precision. It was far from perfect, but I did have a good time with it, and even bought it when it came out on the PS2. My first time playing this game was nearly ten years ago. How does it stack now against other third person shooters in its generation, and was I perhaps a bit too favorable towards Winback as a whole?

I’m already off to a bad start. I remember the lack of any voice acting, something that wasn’t very practical or realistic on a cartridge from a company other than Capcom. That was fine, as the age text barriers was slowly being dismantled. What made me gag, and what I had totally forgotten about, was that music. This is based off the title screen cut scenes too, which, now that I remember, doesn’t vary much from the in game soundtrack. At least things look somewhat faithful to what I remember way back when, right down to the low draw distance.

What I didn’t expect whatsoever, was how I was re-introduced to the game after pressing start. You see a plane flying, and the camera pans through it, and pauses for a moment (I kid you not) at the name on the plane –

ALL ABOARD! SCAT flight number 2-4-1 departing from Poop Creek, OR. Destination: Marked Tree, AR.

Yeah.

So after drop out SCAT (sorry), you begin to play the game. As with most games I have not played in ages, I forget what button does what. Regardless, I march forward, all four steps, where the game auto walks you to the side of a crate, and an enemy on the other side. Alright, I figure out how to wall cover. Once I get that out of the way, I set up my shot. Whoops! I snapped out of cover and am standing out in the open like a fool. So I duck behind the crate in front of me as the enemy runs up to me and decks me, taking nearly 2/3 of my health, which results in a lagged and annoying hit animation. That animation has to run its course, which is about two long seconds of over dramatization. I run back and away, and he magically hit me from four feet away from the melee blow, killing me. A second try at the same scenario and I seem to have got my groove back, in a near expert-like maneuver, I hide behind the cover, roll out, and pop about four caps into him.

Too bad the roll I did was unintentional. But hey, it looked pretty damn sweet.

Your aim, while the button is held, automatically tacks onto the closest enemy. From there you can aim your laser sight around to target body parts, though sensitivity is a bit excessive.

Control wise, its never been complex, but its never been something you can jump into and master in seconds. Something that I’m noticing that I don’t ever recall happening….the cover system doesn’t always work. What I mean is that I can be right near a very large barrier of some sort, and no matter how close I am, or how I press the buttons, I won’t take up the cover. Not only does this happen with large walled areas, but even small crates that can be ducked behind and leaned on. Right now for every ten attempts, four of those tries won’t let me take cover. Very aggravating to say the least.

Not even 3 minutes in, the audio will start to piss you off. It’s like there’s one music track in the game, and it does nothing but loop. The only variation is based off your current health. You’ll want to have laser precision, and avoid any and all damage taken. If you don’t the music starts to speed up, reminding you how much you suck and annoying you so much, it makes you want to take a death just to shut it up. The sound effects are beyond generic. Gun fire, enemies grunting and whatnot when shot, and nothing much in between. You can probably play this with headphones on, blasting the theme to Sponge Bob Square Pants and ou won’t be missing anything crucial, or outstanding.

You have three options here: a) Find health fast .. b) Take a death so you can spare yourself from stabbing your ears .. c) Put on your kids favorite Barney music CD to drown the games music out.

After a while….actually about the same time you discover how unholy the music is, you start to notice how plain Jane the game looks. Trees look out of place, some wall textures look pretty weak, and distant enemies are hard to make out. Draw distance is hampered in part to a fog in the background. This makes the visibility up ahead very poor. A lot of the time, enemies will be coming from around corners and other close by areas, but the point is that you really cannot many anything out from afar. For the N64, it really wasn’t that horrible, but it was far from the prettiest title in the library.

Winback can also be a very punishing game. If you don’t use cover, you will die repeatedly. You need to be sure that you don’t take your sweet time killing enemies either, as some have a tendency to rush forward and give you the butt of death with their guns. Later on, you’ll encounter parts where you need to pass through lasers that are deadly to the touch. Very frustrating because it’s hard to judge its height against your character, making evasion and bypassing too tricky for its own good.

You seet that gun? This will be your best friend throughout Winback, since there's infinite ammo for it, and your other weapons have really poor ammo drops throughout the game.

All together, I can describe a average play through of Winback as robotic. Walk a little, enemies pop out, take cover, have said cover work only a portion of the times attempted. pop out for pot shots, kill, rinse and repeat. The characters feel robotic, the world feels robotic, the controls feel like a broken down robot sometimes, and the music….well that’s not robotic. More like regurgitated.

It what seems like a dominant trend through the first four RRR, it seems like these games I once saw in a more positive manner, just seem very weak now. Well, Bubsy 3D was never positive — it blew hard when I played it. Although Winback is not such a pitiful excuse of a game like Bubsy 3D is, it’s not even close to feeling like a decent experience. As a stealth game, it fails, as stealth kills and opportunities are too few and far between, whereas games like Metal Gear Solid run rings around this title. As a shooting game, the cover system, which is good when it work, slows the pace down considerably. It’s hard to properly define and label Winback in any other way, aside from “bland”. I think the best thing I could say about this one, is how it serves as one of the memorable stepping stone to cover systems that are present in games such as Kill.Switch, 007: Quantum of Solace, Gears of War, and Terminator: Salvation.

Rating Now: 4.9