7 First Levels that are Easily the Best Bit of the Game, So You Can Stop Playing Now

opening levels are really important after all it's a game's first impression like this intro it's got to be the nest I've been messed I mean best some games go for the Slow Burn setting up a grand story before your character can do anything and others like to drop you right into the deep end but occasionally game openings make the unforgivable mistake of being much better than the rest of the game setting up their players for a huge dollop of disappointment have you forgotten your so get ready to quit without saving these games as we look at seven first levels that are easily the best bit of the game so you can stop playing now but we're spoilers for The Following games but if you follow our advice you won't be playing them for very long anyway foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] Shack shell the key lies Beyond her gaze key this is it on there the Tomb Raider reboot series promised us lots of things and one thing it really delivers on is great puzzles and impressive set pieces oh impressive when the final installment 2018's shadow of the Tomb Raider opened with Lara puzzling her way through an old tomb before running through the apocalyptic scene of an entire town being destroyed we had high hopes that this trend would continue but once you start playing beyond that it all goes downhill from here and not in a fun action scene way after this opener no other set piece hits quite as hard not only that but as players are whisked out of Mexico and into Peru they discover more of the game's flaws and it becomes obvious why the Cozumel opening was the bit they let people play at all the preview events Lara who traditionally is famous for exploring tombs all by herself is suddenly exploring uh Hub worlds and isn't by herself but is surrounded by NPC Merchants who repeat the same lines over and over you have made an excellent choice my friend I am certain you will find it useful I am certain you will find it useful you have made an excellent choice my friend I am certain you will find it useful I'm certain they should have kept this voice actor in the booth for another hour beyond that Kick-Ass opening the whole game is unpolished and imbalanced for example how come you get more money for killing tiny spiders that leave you alone than for killing massive leopards that try to eat your face off and why am I killing spiders at all when I could be tomb raiding and as players delve deeper into new areas they quickly discover that all the diary entries and interesting documents that Lara finds are no longer voiced by the people who wrote them instead Lara reads them out with all the enthusiasm of a teenager forced to read Pride and Prejudice out loud in English class follow the Napo to the Amazon nothing but jungle for weeks Phillips got the fever and I had to drag the bastard through this forsaken jungle for the last few days oh my God Lara at least sound like you want to be here besides all the technical and game design changes and some pretty huge bugs on release one major problem for the game is that in kicking off the apocalypse Lara goes into a real woe's me panic mode and it's really grating to the point that even gentle giant Jonah snaps everything is about you omg preach Jonah also FYI mate she's going to be like this for the whole game making everything works the game's not a total disaster but certainly nothing in the rest of the adventure quite fulfills the promise of the opening level partly because the rest of Shadow isn't as polished as its intro or the previous two titles and partly because instead of making Lara a nuanced character who builds upon her experiences from the first two games they just have her say all the time [Music] [Music] you know what Lara you're saying what we're all thinking about Shadow of the Tomb Raider [Music] foreign half an unidentified synthetic splattered across the deck in here which half well he ain't saying much then find me a half it does that actual out Aliens colonial Marines upon release was met with univ Universal praise uh oh no wait sorry it was met with universal mockery at how it didn't even reach mediocre wow don't know how I read that so wrong this game was roundly panned upon its release thanks in part to how the graphics in the demos previously shown looked a whole lot better than the final product but we would like to humbly suggest that this game doesn't totally suck that's if you stop playing it after about five minutes see the opening part of the game has some real atmosphere first there's good marine action I'll have the second film James Cameron's aliens this is a liquid situation information to follow as it comes online after a scarily timed explosion Cuts you off from your ship you find yourself stranded on the USS solaco another vessel that sent out a distress signal here you find fellow Marines in trouble and you have to go off on your own to find the ones who are missing but wait is that an additional bleep on your motion tracker wait I got an unidentified signal oh okay the lighting definitely isn't as atmospheric as it was in the demo but we can work with this next comes a cool few minutes as you wander the dark empty Halls of a creaking ship with vents opening lights flickering and horrible shapes screeching out of sight oh God what was that further in you find yourself in a part of the ship that has clearly been Infested by Xenomorphs and it's horrifying there are open egg sacs and you find that your fellow Marines have been gunked up to the walls and used as incubators going by the gaping holes in their chests [Music] no but joy there's one still alive but oh no this is when the game immediately gets worse this is because as soon as you go to cut him down you have your first xenomorph encounter and far from being the intelligent and terrifying creature it is in the films or the much better alien isolation these Xenomorphs are less a perfect organism whose structural Perfection is matched only by their hostility and more uh like this from here on out the failures of the game's AI are laid bare a far cry from what was promised by gearbox co-founder Randy Pitchford in the 2011 E3 demo aliens can climb on the ceilings on the walls it's all driven by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence on the plus side if AI programmers can't even make an alien walk in a straight line maybe the robots are unlikely to rise up and overthrow Humanity foreign [Music] I can't tell you how happy I was to hear they'd mounted this revival gaze best work by Fall you've seen it before once my father will be here as a child I remember little of it I don't suppose tonight will afford me the luxury of a proper viewing either afraid it won't Assassin's Creed 3's opening is famous for having you play not as the Assassin Connor but as his father hatham Kenway who turns out spoilers is a Templar Baddie I can kill you now if you prefer poor Connor sometimes gets a bad rap in the Assassin's Creed Universe thanks in part to players having bonded with his dad on the way over the Atlantic only to be yanked away from the Intrigue and thrown into a tutorial on how to play hide and seek as a child but here on outside extra we're going to make an even Bolder claim no part of this game even all the other bitsy players hate them is as good as the opening assassination mission in the Opera House in a bold opening act players find themselves in 1754 in the Fancy Shoes of Haytham Kenway on his way to the Opera players get to step into the gorgeous Theater Royal at Covent Garden since renamed the Royal opera house to capitalize on what they probably thought would be the Eternal popularity of Opera as an aside the pedant In Me Is compelled to point out that this is not the same Theater Royal as the one sat in Drury Lane of Covent Garden which is currently home to Frozen also Big Ben is the Bell not the clock tower sorry I just had to get that one in there but back in the other theater Royale of 1754 we get one of the best assassination missions in Assassin's Creed first off you explore one of the most beautiful building renderings in the series history all while Haytham gives players the true theater experience of awkwardly shuffling past people in their seats I apologize and then as if that weren't already a treat we get to climb around this famous historic theater keeping hatham out of sight of people in the boxes before clambering around backstage with every bit of scenery seemingly wanting to drop you right into the Opera on the stage below like Ubisoft decided to just add everyone's worst nightmare into their Assassin game no I don't know any of the lines please don't put me on stage as you stealthily kill your Target in the Royal box and calmly make your escape from this gorgeous building you are knowingly leave behind the best 10 minutes of the game and instead head towards the new world which is a bunch of two-story wooden buildings surrounded by mud and a bunch of boring politics with American historical figures I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare with utmost sincerity I do not think myself equal to uh if I wanted to know what you think Washington I'd go watch Hamilton [Music] Sonic Adventure 2 isn't the worst Sonic game by a long way sorry just just thinking about some of the others oh boy but it's fair to say Sonic Adventure 2 probably never gets better than its opening level City Escape and thanks to Ox supporters Club member Mr futago for suggesting it when we asked in the Discord for your ideas on this theme anyway this isn't so much a slam on the rest of Sonic Adventure 2 as it is a statement about how good City Escape is [Music] in this stage which is the first level on the heroes path in the game you play Sonic himself which is a good start and it begins with you smashing your way out of a military helicopter tearing a piece off of it and snowboarding that piece of metal down the hills of what is clearly San Francisco while the cops lose their damn Minds attention all units drifting through San Fran is rad as hell especially if Sonic doesn't seem too bothered about the safety of any other Road users and you can ping cars hilariously downhill in a way that is just so satisfying [Music] after the snowboarding intro the game introduces you in quick succession to the Tony hawk's-esque grinding mechanic plenty of high-speed platforming and some more extremely fun and fast downhill sections [Music] to you also at this point you're already listening to the levels theme tune which has no negative qualities except putting the phrase rolling around at the speed of sound permanently in your Lexicon until the day you die [Music] you might get some sense that Sonic still hasn't really made a very elegant transition into 3D video games and that the controls are quite fussy and imprecise but you won't dwell on it because holy hell now a truck is chasing you wrecking everything in its path yes it's an extremely cool opening to a game that never feels quite as polished ever again and does go on to feature several stages of either walking around slowly in a Mech or treasure hunting while you're stuck listening to Knuckles rapping on the soundtrack as you desperately hunt for Chaos Emeralds [Music] why is knuckle oh Knuckles rapping like a wrap on the knuckles I I guess well played Sega we're here to sell [Music] it if there's one word to describe how Gamers felt about the reveal of the Marvel's Avengers video game that word would be yeah when it was first shown off people were intrigued by the look of the gameplay which was action-packed and full of Avengers even if their faces looked all non-canon but then the structure of the game was revealed and Marvel's Avengers delivers a narrative over multiple years with exciting new content released at a regular basis huh that sounds less like a tightly packed single player adventure and more like a live service game how is that going to work for the big fast-paced multi-superhero game you just showed it's the answer that it won't turns out that gameplay demo was part of the opening level of the main campaign and heck to be fair to the game it is a very exciting mission to play through after a cute setup with a teeny Kamala Khan meeting her Heroes you get to play every single one of the main Avengers each getting a really cool fight that shows off all their abilities with a huge action-packed sequence except Hawkeye he must have had to pop to the shops or something or more likely the other Avengers sent him to the shops on the other side of town but after you've played through this high octane character switching section of the game the shine comes off somewhat porkomala is dispatched on a storyline in which she must Wrangle a bunch of emotionally immature superheroes who aren't talking to each other anymore oh my God can these people stop making this kid do all the work and just go to therapy as the story progresses and Kamala teaches them how basic communication works you eventually bring back each Avenger to your team but it quickly becomes apparent that the game's main campaign is just an intro to the long grind of the multiplayer live service section where you'll spend most of your time leveling up Heroes who are already strong enough to destroy a planet and filling a million trillion armor slots yeah well jokes on them I'm not playing the multiplayer I'm just gonna watch him as Marvel on Disney plus again and have a much better time let's clean this mess up stop admiring your work hey that's cute and all but I'm disappointed Pierce I mean you failed to spot the nasty inter-gang drama I'm creating here I don't like loose ends let's get him out of here no too late bottom of the eighth Chicago's ahead game's almost over we are out of time Watchdogs was a really good game once you added a 2 to the title the second game in this series was very well received but thanks to things like the overselling of how good the graphics were going to be the first Watchdogs game didn't quite get the reception that publisher Ubisoft had surely hoped for Damien it's over and disconnected one thing that didn't help it as pointed out by OS XC member Miss Spooks was that the first level was way cooler way more focused and way less confusing than anything else in the game it opened with the ultimately forgettable Aiden Pearce actually being quite badass interrogating a hired goon who was supposed to scare Aiden but instead caused the death of his niece in a car accident a tent scene that ends up with Aiden absolutely doming the killer with a battle on plus they introduced this guy Jordy who seems a million times cooler than Aiden and is not in the game enough after this level he's talking to me oh what I want to play as him look at that suit damn however what really makes this level even cooler than just having Geordie in it is the location if all the sporting equipment wasn't a giveaway you're in a stadium and you have to use your hacking skills to make your Escape especially after Jordy calls the cops in a highly chaotic move to make all these dead bodies look like the result of gang Warfare I got the cops you didn't so what follows is a high pressure but well-balanced stealth Mission as you avoid getting caught by the police as well as by Stadium security the level not only tutorializes and highlights Aiden's cool hacking abilities but all of this hacking and sneaking through VIP rooms culminates in a really cool moment when Aiden blows the power to the whole stadium [Music] foreign after this dramatic move Aiden has to sneak through in the dark without his hacking powers and then leg it to a car outside before the police can find him creating a brilliantly tense end to the mission sadly after this players are thrown into the open world under the illusion of free play which can be fun sometimes but in Watchdogs mainly consisted of tailing missions everyone's favorite damn he spotted me or driving around in a huge map not completely sure of what you need to do next before stumbling across story missions that never quite hit the same Mark as the intro look we're just saying that linear missions with clear objectives and cool set pieces might be more entertaining than driving for 20 minutes across a map as the most Bland man in video games I wish Geordie was here whoa what have you been up to no one's seen you for hours oh nose to the grindstone you know then why haven't I heard a single whoosh through the door since 10 o'clock did you forget we're having deirdre's birthday party we've got a pinata we happyview has one of the most brilliantly creepy and action-packed openings to a game it starts off chill enough you are our fair and you find yourself in an office redacting news articles for some government agency but then one of them brings back some repressed memories oh God you reach for some pills do you take them say no and in comes a collie to deliver the most butt clenchingly intense line in the whole game have you forgotten your joy of course not snug as a bug on a drug oh God please don't think I'm lying please don't think I'm lying as you make your way through this half deserted office it's slowly revealed to you through Eerie tableaus that everything here is well not quite right no no leave me alone [Music] oh hi Arthur this is confirmed when your last dose of bad Vibe suppressing drug joy runs out you discover the pinata you've just been smashing is actually a rat and your horrified reaction kicks off a terrifying Chase sequence as the coppers are called and you absolutely stack it down a set of stairs before running off to hide in the tunnels under the town louder at which point the game unfortunately becomes somewhat Less Fun yes this game was correctly suggested by oxsc member spooky burb because when the opening sequence ends you're thrown into the procedurally generated city of Wellington Wells which is well fine but doesn't quite have the same creepy Factor as the carefully crafted opening also itsuma comes clear that this game has survival elements like stopping to find food and water so players suddenly find themselves not lost in a terrifying story but scrounging around for enough resources so that you're not disadvantaged in a world where half of people are trying to kill you it's a real step down from the first few minutes of the game and it didn't help that the very polished looking opening was used as a gameplay reveal at E3 2016 when the rest of the game was rather different when it first reached the hands of the public yes this opening shows off the setting brilliantly but it definitely doesn't make clear what players will be doing for the majority of the game more bobby pins my favorite now I can make lock pick so I can find more bobby pins great so those were seven games where the opening was basically the coolest bit and you could kind of stop playing after that can you think of any other examples if so drop them in the comments and if you would like to go the optional extra mile of supporting the work we do here then there is a link on screen now to our patreon which you can sign up to there's a cool Discord where you can chat and suggest video ideas and all sorts of stuff like that hang out during live streams it's a good time and there are some other videos on screen that we think you'll like go check that out as well thank you for watching goodbye

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 571,800

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra, video games, gaming, shadow of the tomb raider, aliens colonial marines, assassin's creed 3, sonic adventure 2, marvel's avengers, watch dogs, watch_dogs, watchdogs, we happy few, lara croft saying shit

Id: wlCutFpX610

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022