Are gimmicks ruining games?

I had to write this post now because I am just bloody furious right now. I just downloaded and played through the demo of “Fracture” and it was one of the most hateful experiences of my life. Being honest, I didn’t like the game one bit, its not because I have something against 3rd person shooters or even that I hated the deformable aspects of the environment; I loathed that the gimmick of changing the landscape had taken such importance in the experience that the core mechanics of a 3rd person had seemingly become pushed to one side and forgotten during the making of the game.

We all l know that the marketplace for games is now much more crowded than it has ever ben before, especially for action games of both 1st and 3rd person aspects. due to this crowding, we get the gimmick as developers fumble around to try and create something which stands out rom the crowd. It’s not difficult of course, in a world where any FPS released on the power consoles or PC will have the same M.O as most others (you are a *insert elite military branch* fighting your way through wave upon wave of *insert alien race* in a grey brown landscape of the future earth or alien homeworld; all running in glorious 720p 60fps with a 8/16 player online deathmatch mode) anything other than this stands out as a gimmick. The problem is that in many of this type of game, the gimmick becomes dominant as a sales technique but in terms of gameplay it is either underused or annoyingly overused.

Maybe you are asking what I am talking about, what exactly qualifies as a gimmick? A few of my favourites are listed below;

• Haze (you take drugs)
• Timeshift (you control time)
• Fracture (you control the ground)
• The Darkness (you have big devil arm things)
• Mace Griffin bounty hunter (you fly a ship and walk off it without loading screens)

The gimmicks in all the games listed above have at one stage accomplished their goal because we have all heard of them and no doubt at some point have read an overexcited preview from some publication or another crowning its gimmick as being revolutionary to the genre but have ultimately been shown to be anything but. The problem is that all these games above fail in 2 areas; firstly none of them manage to present a solid and well formed core gameplay without the gimmick, none of them have particularly fluid controls, good graphics, textures, AI or level design. Second and most importantly, none of them manage to be remotely fun, interesting or entertaining to play; in fact they are more frustrating than fun.

Maybe the gimmick is not the problem but the implementation. Games like Burnout, Motorstorm, Resistance and even GTA have a gimmick of sorts but they manage to succeed on a different level because the gimmick does not dominate the game (Burnout took a few sequals to get the alance right) as the core mechanics of the gameplay are strong enough to carry the game without the gimmick.

My personal thinking is that the games I have played most in the past year or so (COD4, Uncharted, GT5:P) have all summarily eschewed the gimmick and instead have been solid simple and thoroughly enjoyable games because they did the basics well. I don’t think it is a coincidence that those 3 games have been some of the highest sellers inthe past year while bunf like Haze and Timeshift bombed. The message therefore must be that by all means bring a gimmick to the table, a 3rd person shooter where the heroes absurd JRPG style hair is able to grow and change colour at the players request and be used as a weapon is more than welcome, but if the core of your game like the controls and AI is not up to scratch without the gimmick then your game is destined for a quick nosedive from the sales charts to the bargain bins and deservedly so.