1. I don't know if you've read any other reviews of this--or anything on it at all--but you might have heard it is along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. Well, congratulations, you heard right. The influence of that classic franchise is all over Hob.
2. It is not exactly a clone or anything. Hob has a much lower emphasis on combat and puzzle solving and a greater emphasis on pure exploration. A good deal of the appeal of Hob is simply being in its gorgeous world. You are rewarded for diligent adventuring w/ new places to diligently adventure. It's a good system when there's things that are worth seeing all over the place.
3. And seeing things in this game is something else! Hob really grabs your attention w/ its visuals. It's got a playable cartoon vibe w/ its cel-shaded graphics and bright, high-contrast fantasy setting. Stunning bright greens and purples in the overworld which cool off to muted blues and purples underground. It is simply gorgeous, start to finish.
4. Hob's world is set up as a formerly lush and green living world that has seen finer days. While swatches of it maintain its character from better times, much of it is taken over by a venomous purple creep. Early in the game, your character loses a hand to this active, slimy growth and another of the world's stony-looking residents helps you replace it w/ a giant mechanical stone hand. The same stony-looking humanoid marks a point on your map and from there, the majority of your in-game time will be spent going from marked point to marked point. Your task, it seems, is to repair the world--and I mean repair in the same sense that a mechanic repairs a car. Hob's green and living game world is made out of some sort of crazy, somewhat magical seeming machinery. As you progress, machine pieces pop into place and lead you to more areas to explore.
5. The storytelling here is sparse and basically all told environmentally so you are really just feeling your way through. The few NPC's you meet speak in gibberish and gesture vaguely before marking points on your map. In-game lore is presented through murals only. It's not a whole lot to go on and intentionally ambiguous at times.
6. The general lack of direction and outright explanation fits Hob well. As you literally explore the world so too are you invited to explore within yourself, the
possible nature of your task and the reasons behind the current state of the world.
7. *the sound of minds blowing*
8. Speaking of sound, what Hob has going on is equally as sparse as its storytelling. Its soundscape consists mostly of drones and ambient sounds punctuated by an occasional short melody when various tasks are completed.
9. The world is designed such that it takes a long time to see everything but you open up paths over time that allow you to traverse most areas much more quickly. Several fast travel locations help out as well. The biggest frustration is some areas require a bit of platforming and this can be a bit fiddly. Save points are placed pretty generously but this is still enough to be occasionally frustrating, esp. because platforming mistakes frequently feel like they are more the fault of the controls than player input.
10.
Also, holy crap is the camera ever bad. It is mostly a slightly
angled down top-down view but it changes angles and zoom levels as you
move around. These moves seem to be mostly for the sake of creating
dramatic shots rather than giving you more information about your
surroundings. Every aspect of the game from combat to exploration to
platforming is negatively affected by this at some point.
11. Enemies are pretty well varied throughout. There's not a ton of different kinds but many can be felled by different strategies and your combat style can evolve a bit as you unlock new abilities. Combat never really gets into too engaging of a flow though and it is ultimately a good thing that almost all enemies stay dead once you kill them. It also means the classic gamer logic that finding living enemies mean you've discovered a new area.
12. Hob has puzzle solving elements but they are mostly of the find-the-switch-and-hit-the-switch variety. It is more of a call to further explore each area than something that really teases your mind. In a sense, the entire world is a puzzle like this. It might not be too difficult but the game keeps you engaged enough that seeing each piece snap into place is enormously satisfying.
13. Going back to the Zelda comparison: that feeling when you finally get an item that allows you to reach an area you could see but couldn't, that is the drug that Hob deals. I have used the word explore approximately three million times in this review because exploration is so unquestioningly the core of this game. Hob builds a world that is worth exploring and then sets you off too explore it. It's awesome.
Showing posts with label top down. Show all posts
Showing posts with label top down. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
13 Points on Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - Rockstar Games - 2009 [Sony PSP]
1. Chinatown Wars borrows the top-down perspective from the first two GTA games but its closest cousin is GTA III and you get all the freedom and mayhem you could ask for from the series.
2. This was not some handheld cash grab either. Lots of big developers farm out their handheld versions of big franchises to third parties and the end result is frequently half-ass. Rockstar put considerable effort into making this a complete GTA game. Case in point: the theme song is a full-on banger featuring Ghostface Killah and MF DOOM. This shit is real.
3. While Chinatown Wars is top-down, it really feels more like the 3D GTA games than the first few. The camera twists and turns to stay behind you so it's really more of a long-distance third person camera than truly overhead view. From a technical standpoint, I think this is used to deal w/ what would be the lack of draw-distance had the camera been over-the-shoulder. It's a compromise but a good one and it's pretty rare that the camera causes issues where you can't tell what's going on.
4. You play as Huang Lee who just arrived Liberty City, which is the series's take on NYC, from some unspecified location in China. Huang's father was recently murdered and Huang's out for revenge even though he doesn't really much seem to care about his family or family business.
5. Your strategy is essentially to play both sides against he middle until you find the perpetrator of your father's killing--only there's like five sides to the complex organized crime rivalries in Liberty City. Throughout all this nobody seems to know or care too much that you do outside of your immediate relationship to them. You can show up to their hideout w/ a police tail immediately after assisting their rivals and nobody much cares if you do what they ask.
7. This is all fairly improbable but it actually works w/ the wacky logic that pervades the GTA universe. This is a series of games where you can often get away w/ gunning down civilians in a public park but police will engage you in a high speed chase if you fail to pay a toll. It wears its lack of realism on its sleeve.
7. The story is presented through stylish comic book panels and dialog is delivered via text w/o any voice acting, which is fine by me. Though Chinatown Wars's cast of ethnic crime bosses, corrupt cops and assorted crime drama standbys generally play it straight, you always get the sense that Huang is completely aware of the absurdity of the situation and his wry sense of humor gives you the impression he is in on the joke w/ you.
8. The main game menu, where you access the map and get incoming missions, is on a PDA rather than a smartphone. I'd say this is a funny quirk of the times but Chinatown Wars was released two years after the first iPhone and a decade after the first BlackBerry so using a PDA was a bit anachronistic even then.
9. The missions don't have checkpoints. Most missions ramp up in difficulty as they go along so this means you'll likely spend an awful lot of time replaying the least interesting parts of the game over and over. You do get to skip the occasional driving section and every now and again some trivial part of the mission gets left out on replays but having to repeatedly redo boring shit remains an problem from the beginning of Chinatown Wars until the end.
10. The theme song never reappears after the intro but Chinatown Wars's soundtrack stays solid throughout. It provides a fairly diverse array of contemporary music styles, often licensed from popular artists. (The PSP version has more licensed music than the DS one if you are concerned w/ such things.) You can switch the radio station using the main game menu but music seems to be custom picked for your current mission so I generally chose to just let whatever the game chooses for me rip.
11. In addition to your standard mucking about w/ firearms and stolen vehicles, there are a bunch of mini-games you have to do when you do things like hot wire a car or plant explosives. I say "have to do" because they are no fun at all. They are also clearly designed for the DS touchscreen so they really feel forced into the PSP version as well.
12. GTA has always been central to the controversy surrounding violence in video games. This time round a drug dealing mini-game was the subject of public ire, dealing drugs being such a great crime compared to killing hundreds of human beings. What a country!
13. Whether you actually play through the story or just like to get in a vehicle and mow down pedestrians, Chinatown Wars will give you what you want out of a GTA game. It actually replicates the full-blown versions to a fault including the fact that the missions get all samey halfway through and the mid-game really drags. I have to give Rockstar credit for this one.They changed how their 3D games looked but not really how they played. This is a really well-done handheld adaptation of a big series and a good game in general.
2. This was not some handheld cash grab either. Lots of big developers farm out their handheld versions of big franchises to third parties and the end result is frequently half-ass. Rockstar put considerable effort into making this a complete GTA game. Case in point: the theme song is a full-on banger featuring Ghostface Killah and MF DOOM. This shit is real.
3. While Chinatown Wars is top-down, it really feels more like the 3D GTA games than the first few. The camera twists and turns to stay behind you so it's really more of a long-distance third person camera than truly overhead view. From a technical standpoint, I think this is used to deal w/ what would be the lack of draw-distance had the camera been over-the-shoulder. It's a compromise but a good one and it's pretty rare that the camera causes issues where you can't tell what's going on.
4. You play as Huang Lee who just arrived Liberty City, which is the series's take on NYC, from some unspecified location in China. Huang's father was recently murdered and Huang's out for revenge even though he doesn't really much seem to care about his family or family business.
5. Your strategy is essentially to play both sides against he middle until you find the perpetrator of your father's killing--only there's like five sides to the complex organized crime rivalries in Liberty City. Throughout all this nobody seems to know or care too much that you do outside of your immediate relationship to them. You can show up to their hideout w/ a police tail immediately after assisting their rivals and nobody much cares if you do what they ask.
7. This is all fairly improbable but it actually works w/ the wacky logic that pervades the GTA universe. This is a series of games where you can often get away w/ gunning down civilians in a public park but police will engage you in a high speed chase if you fail to pay a toll. It wears its lack of realism on its sleeve.
7. The story is presented through stylish comic book panels and dialog is delivered via text w/o any voice acting, which is fine by me. Though Chinatown Wars's cast of ethnic crime bosses, corrupt cops and assorted crime drama standbys generally play it straight, you always get the sense that Huang is completely aware of the absurdity of the situation and his wry sense of humor gives you the impression he is in on the joke w/ you.
8. The main game menu, where you access the map and get incoming missions, is on a PDA rather than a smartphone. I'd say this is a funny quirk of the times but Chinatown Wars was released two years after the first iPhone and a decade after the first BlackBerry so using a PDA was a bit anachronistic even then.
9. The missions don't have checkpoints. Most missions ramp up in difficulty as they go along so this means you'll likely spend an awful lot of time replaying the least interesting parts of the game over and over. You do get to skip the occasional driving section and every now and again some trivial part of the mission gets left out on replays but having to repeatedly redo boring shit remains an problem from the beginning of Chinatown Wars until the end.
10. The theme song never reappears after the intro but Chinatown Wars's soundtrack stays solid throughout. It provides a fairly diverse array of contemporary music styles, often licensed from popular artists. (The PSP version has more licensed music than the DS one if you are concerned w/ such things.) You can switch the radio station using the main game menu but music seems to be custom picked for your current mission so I generally chose to just let whatever the game chooses for me rip.
11. In addition to your standard mucking about w/ firearms and stolen vehicles, there are a bunch of mini-games you have to do when you do things like hot wire a car or plant explosives. I say "have to do" because they are no fun at all. They are also clearly designed for the DS touchscreen so they really feel forced into the PSP version as well.
12. GTA has always been central to the controversy surrounding violence in video games. This time round a drug dealing mini-game was the subject of public ire, dealing drugs being such a great crime compared to killing hundreds of human beings. What a country!
13. Whether you actually play through the story or just like to get in a vehicle and mow down pedestrians, Chinatown Wars will give you what you want out of a GTA game. It actually replicates the full-blown versions to a fault including the fact that the missions get all samey halfway through and the mid-game really drags. I have to give Rockstar credit for this one.They changed how their 3D games looked but not really how they played. This is a really well-done handheld adaptation of a big series and a good game in general.
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
13 Points on Titan Souls - Acid Nerve - 2015 [PC]
1. I couldn't beat this game and I am reviewing it anyway. I know, I'm terrible.
2. Titan Souls does retro right. It combines elements from a few classics and molds them into something new. If you could disassemble The Legend of Zelda into little Lego bricks and put them back together as Shadow of the Colossus, you'd wind up w/ something pretty close.
3. The gist of it is,you gotta seek out and kill the titans, which are big and need to die for some reason. You spend a moderate amount time exploring the otherwise tranquil overworld and then face any titans you can find until you can move on to the next area and repeat the process.
4. The simple control scheme in this has me enamored. Two buttons plus the stick. One button let's you dash and run. The other shoots your arrow--you only have one--and draws it back to you. The stick lets you move and aim. This is all you need and it's great.
5. Despite the simplistic controls, Titan Souls really pushes the amount of things you can pay attention to at one moment. You've got to dodge multiple attack types from each boss and additionally need to pay attention to its weak spot, where you are aiming and where your arrow lands. It feels almost bullet-hellish at some points. It's easy to lose track of one or more of these things and find yourself dead in a hurry--esp. since you can't move when you are shooting or retrieving your arrow.
6. After you die--which you will do a lot--you have to walk a few seconds back to the boss and fight it again. I have mixed feelings about this.When you get stuck on a tough boss, it can really get on your nerves but I feel like overall it helps to put you into the game world. It makes it feel more like an adventure and less like an arcade game.
7. It helps that the overworld is gorgeous, done in the game's retro hi-bit pixel art style. It's here that you get just that little bit of pull on your Zelda heart-strings. It is honestly a minor aspect from a gameplay perspective--it's all about those boss battles--but enough to give you a sense of being in a different world. There's a bit to explore, some minor puzzles to solve. It adds a lot w/o being the main focus of the game.
8. The sound is anything but retro. A fully orchestrated soundtrack is punctuated by clear sound effects. Even more so than the graphics, this soundtrack seems to emphasize the size and power of the bosses and contrast it w/ the relative tranquility of the overworld.
9. It's important the presentation gives such a sense of the world as the story is pretty sparse. There's a plot hinted at but it's intentionally opaque, leaving you to fill in the blanks w/ whatever you might chose to glean from what happens while you're playing.
10. The first handful of bosses are great. Tough at first but then they seem almost easy when you beat them. Killing them is as much about figuring out how to kill them as it is mustering up the needed dexterity. You feel like you've solved them as much as you've beaten them.
11. By the midway point though, the strategy starts boiling down to just trying to shoot each boss really fast before it can kill you and hoping you get lucky.
12. I stopped playing after I beat a couple bosses in a row this way and got stuck on the third. I kept trying to find a new pattern and eventually resorted to looking up a video of how it was done. Turns out I was doing the right thing, I am just too enfeebled as a gamer to pull it of w/ any sort of consistency. I said to myself, "Okay, I am going to try this boss ten more times and after that I am never playing this game ever again." I did and... Well, maybe I'll pick this up again in a couple years.
13. In the end, it wasn't so much that I couldn't beat Titan Souls, it's that I didn't want to. I am perfectly capable of sitting there for an hour and grinding to get just the right shot but I've got limited time on this earth--or so I'm told. I do very much admire this game's presentation and core concept so I will eagerly pick up any sequel if ever one is made. I actually even recommend people to go ahead and play this because the good outweighs the bad if you don't let yourself get frustrated. Have at it, folks. Let me know how it ends.
2. Titan Souls does retro right. It combines elements from a few classics and molds them into something new. If you could disassemble The Legend of Zelda into little Lego bricks and put them back together as Shadow of the Colossus, you'd wind up w/ something pretty close.
3. The gist of it is,you gotta seek out and kill the titans, which are big and need to die for some reason. You spend a moderate amount time exploring the otherwise tranquil overworld and then face any titans you can find until you can move on to the next area and repeat the process.
4. The simple control scheme in this has me enamored. Two buttons plus the stick. One button let's you dash and run. The other shoots your arrow--you only have one--and draws it back to you. The stick lets you move and aim. This is all you need and it's great.
5. Despite the simplistic controls, Titan Souls really pushes the amount of things you can pay attention to at one moment. You've got to dodge multiple attack types from each boss and additionally need to pay attention to its weak spot, where you are aiming and where your arrow lands. It feels almost bullet-hellish at some points. It's easy to lose track of one or more of these things and find yourself dead in a hurry--esp. since you can't move when you are shooting or retrieving your arrow.
6. After you die--which you will do a lot--you have to walk a few seconds back to the boss and fight it again. I have mixed feelings about this.When you get stuck on a tough boss, it can really get on your nerves but I feel like overall it helps to put you into the game world. It makes it feel more like an adventure and less like an arcade game.
7. It helps that the overworld is gorgeous, done in the game's retro hi-bit pixel art style. It's here that you get just that little bit of pull on your Zelda heart-strings. It is honestly a minor aspect from a gameplay perspective--it's all about those boss battles--but enough to give you a sense of being in a different world. There's a bit to explore, some minor puzzles to solve. It adds a lot w/o being the main focus of the game.
8. The sound is anything but retro. A fully orchestrated soundtrack is punctuated by clear sound effects. Even more so than the graphics, this soundtrack seems to emphasize the size and power of the bosses and contrast it w/ the relative tranquility of the overworld.
9. It's important the presentation gives such a sense of the world as the story is pretty sparse. There's a plot hinted at but it's intentionally opaque, leaving you to fill in the blanks w/ whatever you might chose to glean from what happens while you're playing.
10. The first handful of bosses are great. Tough at first but then they seem almost easy when you beat them. Killing them is as much about figuring out how to kill them as it is mustering up the needed dexterity. You feel like you've solved them as much as you've beaten them.
11. By the midway point though, the strategy starts boiling down to just trying to shoot each boss really fast before it can kill you and hoping you get lucky.
12. I stopped playing after I beat a couple bosses in a row this way and got stuck on the third. I kept trying to find a new pattern and eventually resorted to looking up a video of how it was done. Turns out I was doing the right thing, I am just too enfeebled as a gamer to pull it of w/ any sort of consistency. I said to myself, "Okay, I am going to try this boss ten more times and after that I am never playing this game ever again." I did and... Well, maybe I'll pick this up again in a couple years.
13. In the end, it wasn't so much that I couldn't beat Titan Souls, it's that I didn't want to. I am perfectly capable of sitting there for an hour and grinding to get just the right shot but I've got limited time on this earth--or so I'm told. I do very much admire this game's presentation and core concept so I will eagerly pick up any sequel if ever one is made. I actually even recommend people to go ahead and play this because the good outweighs the bad if you don't let yourself get frustrated. Have at it, folks. Let me know how it ends.
Friday, December 8, 2017
13 Points on Retro City Rampage DX - Vblank Entertainment - 2014 [Nintendo 3DS]
2. This is basically a really easy version of the top-down GTA games w/ a bunch of little mini-games built in. It also has a lot of references to to 80's and 90's games and culture.
3. Lots and lots and lots of references.
4. I played the 3DS version. I don't think there was anything wrong w/ it at all but I'd recommend the PC or a home console version. This would be a fun game to pass around the controller w/ some friends w/. You could see who could pick out the most 80's and 90's games and culture references.
5. If, like most people, you don't have friends, go ahead and get a handheld version.
6. I would say the main issue w/ Retro City Rampage is it spreads itself too thin. The main gameplay is solid but never great. It never feels like it really hits its stride, esp. in terms of providing a nice progressive challenge. The mini-game sections are also fine for the most part but feel like interruptions rather than anything that adds true depth. Some of these mini-games are required to advance in the main plot-line and often have odd difficulty spikes which are very aggravating at times. It seems like more focus could have been placed on pacing rather than cramming every possible joke into every possible second.
7. Jokes are fine but I've yet to play a game that was worth playing solely for humor.
8. One of my gaming pet peeves is when there is a tough final boss that is fought in a different style than the rest of the game is. Retro City Rampage's final boss is pretty tough and is done as a level of a 2D racing game, which is not really done anywhere else in the game. This is pretty much just an example of what I was talking about in number 6 but I found it particularly annoying.
9. The open world aspect seems to be emphasized heavily but never struck me as especially fun. You basically just go around running down pedestrians or causing whatever mayhem you chose while the cops try to stop you. This is probably identical to what you would do in any GTA game but there is not much challenge and that makes it somehow unsatisfying. In the old GTA games one singular bullet was enough to end your rampage and that made it much more aggrandizing when you were finally able to steal the SWAT van or do whatever it is you set out to do.
10. There are also side missions you can do but you are really not directed toward them or encouraged to do them in anyway. I played a few. It didn't really feel like much of a departure from the rest of the game so I didn't really think about them from then on.
11. This has some cool graphics settings to fiddle w/ if you are into fiddling w/ such things. You can basically translate it it to they style of many different old consoles and PCs. Some of the gameplay is impossible in certain modes due to lack of colors but it's pretty fun regardless.
12. Even though Retro City Rampage didn't play great in the strictest sense, I still had a good amount of fun with it. It seemed to drag on a little too long and there were bits I rather disliked here and there but overall I'd say it's good enough that it is not a waste of time or money.
13. Damned by faint praise maybe but that's how I feel about it.
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