Currently Playing

• Brutal Legend
• Watchmen: The End is Nigh
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune 2
• The Darkness
  

I've been very busy this weekend. Reviews for three of those four titles are forthcoming, for sure.

I've always been something of a music and audio nerd. Not on the technical side of things, really, but I always listen for that sort of thing. Good sound design always makes a difference; you can just prove this by muting your television and seeing how boring games are without any sound whatsoever. No, good sound is key when you're making a game.

It obviously comes down to what sort of game you're making, but everything like the music, sound effects from footsteps to the swoosh of a sword, and the ambient noise like the patter of rain on the ground or hum of an engine. You should be able to close your eyes when you fire the game up and have a good idea of the atmosphere of the game, and you should even be able to paint a simple picture in your head of the feel of the game.

Two of these games I've played this weekend are prime examples of good sound design and bad sound design... and if I asked you to scroll up and look at those four titles, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to pick which one I'm going to name for each of those examples. They were both unexpected for me for sure. In fact I'll hold on for a moment so you can scroll up and try to figure it out, I'll wait. Which game has good sound design, and which bad? I'll put a sweet picture of a zombie getting punched here to break the page a bit. Related note: I'll be getting world at war for next weekend so I can get some nazi zombie-punching action on my nice new TV in preparation for Halloween. Also, this picture isn't a hint.


Okay, that's time then. The game with the best sound design was Watchmen: the End is Nigh. Why? Because they did what I said a well-designed game does in terms of sound: it creates atmosphere. The low, humming music blends perfectly with the constantly rainy, gritty atmosphere. Flaming barrels litter the streets adding a nice crackle to the alleyways, the character's voices match the characters and their contrasts perfectly, and the combat... oh the combat. Each punch sounds like an absolute bone-crippling crack on impact, and every weapon produces a new disfiguring sound. It suits the style of the game so perfectly that it alone got me so much more into it.

On the other hand... worst sound design of the four? Brutal Legend by a long shot. You'd think a game centered around playing rock music would focus considerably on good sound design. But there were far too many occasions where sounds and music just cut out, or were too muffled to be heard. The soundtrack itself sounds fine, as does the voice work by the main cast (which is actually quite entertaining), but everything else... from monster, vehicle, explosion, and weapon sounds... are all awful. They don't carry any kind of impact behind the source of the noise and if you weren't looking at the screen, you'd have no damn idea what was going on in an action-based cutscene because it would be a collection of muffled audio jibberish.

Now my review of Brutal Legend is still going to be positive and you'll see why if you read that when I post it later this week. But. Any game that sacrifices good audio content during its gameplay is really muddling the experience up a great deal and it'll never be as good as it could have been if more thought was put behind it.