Lucius III – a game review

Art by Flexith

Lucius, one of the many sons of Satan is ready to take his place next to his father and start the apocalypse. To do this he has to kill various ‘horsemen’ to unlock a sacred scroll.
It’s time for the young boy to start killing again!

Lucius is back again and this time the game-format is back to the first part but on a larger scale. What I read online was that some people disliked the second game for some reason or another (I personally enjoyed the freedom). So the developers decided to let the final entry in the unholy trilogy to be more reminiscent to the first game: kill people and there are only a handful ways to do it. A shame really!

And there is no tricycle in sight.

Bigger, buggier and uncut
The file-size of this third instalment is massive. This game hasn’t been compressed at all and relies heavily on modern-day processors to render the open world in real time. Of course this works but, I argue, if it would work better if the game was divided up a bit more.

Now technological issues pop up like being able to reach into a room through a wall because the room itself is part of the world and not a separate level. Another (hilarious) example had me walking around on the roof of the police station. There I was a young boy doing something immensely dangerous and as I walked past the window of the chief of police he greeted me with a charming: “Hello Lucius.” This was weird.

Other problems had to do with lighting of the various sets. This caused the constant lingering question whether the failure of lighting effects had everything to with bad design or my pc specs.

According to YouTube- the first.

As a final notion I feel that the open world is a bit too open to have a lot of fun in.
The natural barriers the sandbox-notion of this game sets (a mountain and a sea) are well chosen but too far apart. This isn’t a town but rather a collection of houses with a million miles between them.

Also, nobody inhabits this town. There isn’t a single person on the street for some reason.
The filling of empty space therefore of some trees here and a cornfield there doesn’t really add to the scope of things because the game doesn’t ‘feel’ lived in.
Still, I understand why the game makers decided to let the playing-field remain big: you can transform yourself into a raven and fly. But such a gimmick only works if the world itself is interesting enough to fly over it.

I think Lucius III would have benefited from either a smaller playing field or a large space with various interesting nooks and crannies.

Just look at what a ‘lived in’ undead world the creator of State of Decay (2013) managed to create. So it is possible.

Unfinished?
What does bother me is that (apart from the massive amounts of bobble heads to be found throughout the game –too many- sometimes three or four in the same location) the game feels unfinished.

Plus these bobble heads respawn due to a glitch.

There are various spots you can visit and see some kind of newspaper clippings on the ground or on a desk and a dialogue states: that you learned something. Great...I guess...what’s the point?
It’s like there are these plans that will only come to fruition in later updates and patches. That, to me is not a game; we’re not going to be all EA gaming here.

Buggier
As I said Lucius III is a lot buggier than the first two entries. Truly, at times, it is a marvel that I managed to finish it on my second try (it bugged itself short on my first try – I couldn’t get past the final church). Especially if you keep in mind that the game’s save system is rather terrible. Take for instance, the strange occurrence that if you load a previous save before and then a later save the game will automatically resort back to the tasks you had back then in this later chapter.

Strange structure
You have to be wary during this game or you’ll suddenly find yourself finishing it without realizing it.
For a moment there I actually thought that I had managed to glitch myself to the end. Here I was happily murdering a Norman Bates-wannabe and suddenly I found myself in a church burning the remaining survivors to smithereens.

Hitchcock will be turning in his grave if he sees what Lucius III did with his masterpiece.

It is a blatant rip-off but without the ‘good guy’ suspense. Nope, Norman is a murderer and he must die instantly.

Still kudos for bringing a game in which I can actually explore Bates Motel in real time.

The enormous amount of cut-scenes in this game rather pushes you forwards on the main narrative instead of allowing you to have some fun on the side by trying to kill secondary characters. That’s why my church was filled to the brim with characters trying to attack me in the end because I didn’t take the side quests. I figured I would have time near the end. Nope, the cut scene immediately dropped me at the church.

This is especially annoying since the main narrative (and the helper character MacGuffin)

How about a Hitchcock reference.

Isn’t/aren’t very interesting. You don’t want to hear a reaction from some clearly insane guy every time you do something bad. You want to carve your own path in this open world. Or, at least, I did.

And then there are complete narratives missing. Like the judge. One appearance and then he’s gone. The minute you find him you immediately kill him even though I did want to know a bit more about his relationship with the Dante family.

Never very subtle.
As I said when I reviewed parts I and II: ‘subtlety isn’t Lucius’s game’. Now, with those games the balance between wicked fun and borderline distasteful was quite well struck. Lucius III, however, goes overboard quite a few times.

For instance, at one point you literally dress up like a member of the Kluk Klux Klan to lynch a character. Or there is a family called: the Friedman’s (and a chapter called: capturing the Friedman’s). These are real-life cases that maybe shouldn’t be put in an entertaining videogame.

Then again, I must, admit that the Lucius series is blatantly cruel to people of the Christian fate; so maybe the makers whished for me to feel uncomfortable as well.

On a more pop-culture level the game is, once again, filled to the brim with little (or blatant) references. So far I got: A perfect day, Jaws, Psycho: the remake, The children of the corn, It and The ring.

Conclusion
Lucius III, like its predecessors, remains buggy as ‘hell’. But in a buggy-its-hilarious kind of manner. I could reach through walls; the lighting often disappeared completely on me and not the mention the fact that I could hear the Norman Bates-wannabe masturbate for miles.

I did not expect that I would ever write the above sentence.

Also the fact that the game pushes you forwards constantly is a bit of a miss for me. That and the overkill of cut-scenes rather destroyed the ‘sadistic entertainment’ of figuring out how to murder various characters. In the end I miss the freedom I had in part II to just walk around and kill people whichever way I saw fit.

Finally the game is too big for its own goods. Uncompressed in file size but also too big a world to explore in the game itself. Bigger isn’t always better. Now there is this vast open world with very little to do.

As I’m writing this there are already two massive updates available for this game. I assume more will follow. Something tells me that the game was released too soon and that the developers still have tons they want to add to it. So maybe I should consider Lucius III: Lucius II.5.

Maybe, in a year’s time the game makers will have fixed the many technological, graphical and narrative issues that bog this game down. ‘Till then I will thank the makers very much for this third entry but rather return to the first two entries of Lucius’s demonic journey.