1. If you like games where you climb towers to reveal icons on a map, you will like this Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
2. You had better believe this is a AAA game, folks. There's like ten million logos when you start up; the voice actors have all had voice acting jobs before; and the sound effects have the basso profundo thunk of a high-budget Hollywood production. Huzzah!
3. This has the entire lore of Lord of the Rings available to it but the main character, Talion, is just Geralt from The Witcher, at least from a functional standpoint. They gave him a different back story to explain his abilities--he's dead, he's got a companion elf spirit, blah, blah, blah--but he's a dude that goes into super power mode to track creatures via little colored trails and caries two swords on his back for some reason. I feel that the influence here is unambiguous.
4. The eschews the standard tower-and-icons open world game type behavior where clearing icons gradually makes the areas of the world you've cleared them from safer to you. No matter what you do, the world remains crawling w/ Uruks, which are identical in all ways to orcs but apparently tougher according to some off-handed remark made in the game.
5. The effect of number 4 is a mixed bag. It makes the entire world seem dangerous and exciting to traverse for the whole game but since the world doesn't improve over the course of the game, the only thing that gives you a sense of progress is the fact that icons disappear from the map as you complete objectives.
6. *sigh*
7. Yeah, fine, there is also an RPG-like character system to give you a sense of progress--and it's a real doozy too. There are three kinds of experience points, skill trees w/o number and several essential combat moves aren't unlocked until a half dozen hours into the game. Nobody is going to accuse these AAA developers of skimping on the character progression, no way.
8. Mercifully, there is no crafting system. Instead, they have both hunt and gather requests which are less annoying but ultimately still just a stupid thing they tacked on that nobody asked for or cares about.
9. There are two open world areas. Neither of them are huge feeling but this actually works in Shadow of Mordor's favor. I found myself eschewing fast travel because it didn't take long to cross the map and I was sure to run into a couple entertaining encounters w/ Uruk that I could tackle in a variety of different ways, spending as much or as little effort as I felt either dispatching them or avoiding them.
10. The combat--esp. once you've unlocked all the various moves in the skill tree--is excellent. It has a similar button mashing flow as an old school beat-em-up. Attack, block and build combos to build up additional combos so you can keep building combos. It also adds a bullet-time type mechanic that you use w/ a bow and arrow, which functions as a sort of get-out-of-jail free card when things get too hairy. It never felt quite right to me to whip out a bow in the midst of a hectic melee fight but, as a game mechanic, it worked. Once you get the swing of things and a few upgrades, taking care of even large groups of enemies is not too much of a challenge but it's all done so stylishly that hacking through enemy waves never feels like a chore.
11. I could not give a hoot or a holler about the story in this game. Some Lord of the Rings stuff goes down and you crush some skulls. The rest felt superfluous, which is honestly fine by me. Gaming is a great storytelling medium but it doesn't have to be.
12. What it does do well is world building. W/ the big budget production and the ability to really lean into some well-known lore, this is a game that really puts you right there. You are in Middle-earth. You are riding on the backs of beasts and slaying evil in slow-mo w/ magic super arrows. Going back to the comparison to The Witcher, this provides the same kind of sense of adventure as those games but does it through gameplay rather than story. In some regards, this actually works better, esp. if you are a bourgeois wage-earner w/ limited free time.
13. The final boss battle is a quick-time event so I am going to half-ass the end of this review too.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Friday, November 17, 2017
13 Points on Nano Assault EX - Shin'en - 2013 [Nintendo 3DS]
2. There are two basic types of levels in this: free roaming missions where you cruise around the surface of oddly shaped cells, destroying enemies and collecting DNA samples and then there's rail shooter levels in the manner of Star Fox where the object is basically to stay alive until a boss fight.
3. I kinda wish they would have focused exclusively on one type of level or the other. Gameplay on both is good but they both fall a little short of being truly great. This is a game made by a small team and it just feels like they stretched themselves a little bit too far and left little bits that lack polish here and there. There's things like levels that can be beat by just spamming the special weapon or times when it's difficult to tell things that kill you from harmless things in the environment.
4. Even though this was made by a small team, it looks and sounds fantastic. The 3D effect works great. The music is competent if unexceptional. It set the mood quite well but I can't remember a single melody from it a minute after playing the game.
5. The reason abxy works well as a substitute for an actual stick is actually a bit of clever game design. The enemies attack such that the best strategy is to coral them into one area and then go side to side blasting them Space Invaders style. I found myself doing this even when using twin sticks.
6. If you fail a mission, you have to go through the whole process of watching a brief intro and selecting your special weapon again, which is not too bad but annoying regardless.
7. The special weapons are kind of crumby. I tried each one once and went back to the first one they gave you every time. Maybe I am just too dumb to figure this stuff out, I dunno.
8. If you like epic bosses, this has some epic bosses. The very final boss is decidedly less epic than some that come before it though. Whose design choice was that?
9. This game has several modes. You start out w/ story mode. As you beat levels in that, it unlocks them for arcade mode. Once you've beat all the levels, it unlocks boss attack mode. Once you beat boss attack mode, it unlocks survival mode. Story mode is pretty short but those who are tenacious arcade style gamers will get a ton of playtime trying to complete the extra modes.
10. All of the modes are exactly what you'd expect and I appreciate the clear naming conventions. The only caveat is that there is no story in story mode. I mean, there is, but it's like "something bad has happened, now you need to kill stuff."
11. My one complaint as far as gameplay is that even w/ the 3D on it can sometimes be difficult to judge how far enemy projectiles are from you. Also, when things get intense, it can be hard to keep your 3DS in the right spot.
12. The overall feel of this is old school but it is really not all that traditional. I suppose the rail shooter levels are a pretty spot on imitation of games past but the free roaming levels add a dimension (literally and figuratively) that is not something you frequently see in vintage shooters. Still, this somehow puts me in the same mood as playing an old scrolling shmup.
13. I can't shake this feeling of being disappointing that this game is not even better (see number 3) but I can give it my full recommendation because, simply put, it is a hell of a lot of fun while you play it. It could be more but what it is is wholly good.
Monday, November 13, 2017
Sort by Lowest Price: Driver: Renegade 3D - Ubisoft - 2011 [Nintendo 3DS]
Do you ever get curious about those bargain bin games that look interesting but are poorly reviewed? I am playing these games so you don't have to.
I played the original Driver way back when it was released so I took note of this when it first came out and proceeded not to buy it because it's a handheld exclusive from Ubisoft and thus likely to be a half-assed pile of dreck. I was right, of course, but couldn't resist picking this up for about a fiver from the webstore of a particularly prominent used games retailer.
The hell of it is Driver: Renegade 3D has the bones of a good game. It looks pretty decent. It's maybe a not a full step up from a DS game w/ its muddy textures and jagged edges all over the place but it's functional enough. The driving mechanics are damn solid too. It is basically on par w/ any arcade style driving game and while I wouldn't call the controls exceptional--they feel maybe a might bit twitchy on the 3DS analog stick--they certainly aren't broken. The music is fine if generic and about the same can be said about the sound in general. Overall, the presentation and gamplay here is passable at least.
The plot is kind of hilariously bad. It's camp but I can't really tell if it's intentional or not. It the kind of power fantasy where a man delivers justice w/o the frustrating shackles of due process or common decency, somewhere along the lines of Dirty Harry or Death Wish. It's delivered via minimally animated comic book style clip scenes, which is an economical but effective story telling means and I appreciate that. The voice acting is definitely not grade A but it seems they did at least hire actors rather than just getting people around the office to read the lines. Again, I'd classify the strorytelling as passable.
Where Renegade really breaks down is its maps and mission structure. For starters, this is strictly mission based and does not even have minimal open world elements like driving to start point of your next mission. That's actually fine by me--you get to go straight to the real action--but all the missions are on the same bland map.
It's set in New York City in theory but it's a New York City w/ less cars on the road than your average country highway. I get that replicating the actual traffic jam style of NYC driving in a game wouldn't exactly be fun but, really, if you want to have a game where you drive on roads where there's almost no other cars, just don't set it in NYC. I do kinda dig that you get to cross the bridge from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn but the whole setting is so half baked,
Even this would be forgivable if the missions weren't just so repetitive. There's only twenty of them and they still get boring because they are all based on one of four concepts: follow a car to some pre designated space, follow a car and blow it up, blow up all the cars and smash through various items on the maps. The AI is nowhere near good enough to spice up these simple formulas and often times does ridiculous or gets stuck in corners meaning completing missions is frequently just based on getting lucky enough to have the AI do something really stupid that makes it easy for you to win. You do the same thing over and over, getting frustrated when things don't work out how you want and when you win, you know all you did was beat an idiotic AI so you don't get much satisfaction out of it.
This is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments to this game. The hammy story is good for some laughs and there's sections where the AI happens to be firing on all cylinders that bring some legit white-knuckle thrills. This game is not a total disaster by any means. It just seems like they built a decent engine, threw the assets of a dying franchise at it and just left that at that. Had they been inclined to put a little more effort into this, Ubisoft could have made a really great game and being as there was not much out for the 3DS in September 2011, it could have even been something of a hit. Oh well, I suppose it is safer to not to bet big money on new platforms and just put some garbage out there in the hopes it makes a buck or two.
I played the original Driver way back when it was released so I took note of this when it first came out and proceeded not to buy it because it's a handheld exclusive from Ubisoft and thus likely to be a half-assed pile of dreck. I was right, of course, but couldn't resist picking this up for about a fiver from the webstore of a particularly prominent used games retailer.
The hell of it is Driver: Renegade 3D has the bones of a good game. It looks pretty decent. It's maybe a not a full step up from a DS game w/ its muddy textures and jagged edges all over the place but it's functional enough. The driving mechanics are damn solid too. It is basically on par w/ any arcade style driving game and while I wouldn't call the controls exceptional--they feel maybe a might bit twitchy on the 3DS analog stick--they certainly aren't broken. The music is fine if generic and about the same can be said about the sound in general. Overall, the presentation and gamplay here is passable at least.
The plot is kind of hilariously bad. It's camp but I can't really tell if it's intentional or not. It the kind of power fantasy where a man delivers justice w/o the frustrating shackles of due process or common decency, somewhere along the lines of Dirty Harry or Death Wish. It's delivered via minimally animated comic book style clip scenes, which is an economical but effective story telling means and I appreciate that. The voice acting is definitely not grade A but it seems they did at least hire actors rather than just getting people around the office to read the lines. Again, I'd classify the strorytelling as passable.
Where Renegade really breaks down is its maps and mission structure. For starters, this is strictly mission based and does not even have minimal open world elements like driving to start point of your next mission. That's actually fine by me--you get to go straight to the real action--but all the missions are on the same bland map.
It's set in New York City in theory but it's a New York City w/ less cars on the road than your average country highway. I get that replicating the actual traffic jam style of NYC driving in a game wouldn't exactly be fun but, really, if you want to have a game where you drive on roads where there's almost no other cars, just don't set it in NYC. I do kinda dig that you get to cross the bridge from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn but the whole setting is so half baked,
Even this would be forgivable if the missions weren't just so repetitive. There's only twenty of them and they still get boring because they are all based on one of four concepts: follow a car to some pre designated space, follow a car and blow it up, blow up all the cars and smash through various items on the maps. The AI is nowhere near good enough to spice up these simple formulas and often times does ridiculous or gets stuck in corners meaning completing missions is frequently just based on getting lucky enough to have the AI do something really stupid that makes it easy for you to win. You do the same thing over and over, getting frustrated when things don't work out how you want and when you win, you know all you did was beat an idiotic AI so you don't get much satisfaction out of it.
This is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments to this game. The hammy story is good for some laughs and there's sections where the AI happens to be firing on all cylinders that bring some legit white-knuckle thrills. This game is not a total disaster by any means. It just seems like they built a decent engine, threw the assets of a dying franchise at it and just left that at that. Had they been inclined to put a little more effort into this, Ubisoft could have made a really great game and being as there was not much out for the 3DS in September 2011, it could have even been something of a hit. Oh well, I suppose it is safer to not to bet big money on new platforms and just put some garbage out there in the hopes it makes a buck or two.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
13 Points on Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - Nintendo - 2014 [Wii U]
1. Long story short: there have been two Mario-related games in the last decade that I feel actually gave you something new and worth playing. One of those games is Super Mario Maker and the other one is Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. If you have a Wii U, get this.
2. I suppose you might damn this by calling it a kids game but I prefer to think of it as suitable for all ages.
3. I see this often classified as puzzle game but this really isn't about puzzle solving. It's about exploration and discovery. Certainly, there are puzzle solving elements but if you are looking for Portal, play The Talos Principle.
4. Actually, this does have something in common w/ Talos in so far as it pieces together assets from a better known game into something rather different. The Mario tie in is more obvious here than the Serious Sam basis of Talos but both games give you the feeling that the developers pushed themselves to do something new and different and that's what makes them fun.
5. I have a metric for judging Mario games which is how far in I get before I get sick of collecting the optional collectables. This never happened in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I never got sick of collecting the three optional gems on each level. Never.
6. There are also additional bonus challenges for each level that I only completed when they seemed fun to me. One of my few complaints about this game is to meet the requirements of these challenges, you sometimes couldn't also collect all three gems. It's no big deal unless you want to do 100% speed runs or something.
7. This is a pretty deliberate game so maybe not appropriate for speed-running anyway. Even more than the fact that you can't jump, I'd say this difference in pacing is what sets it apart from a standard Mario game. The focus here is on planning your path through a level and examining every last inch of it, rather than avoiding hazards in a precise manner.
8. This plays to the Wii U's strengths, graphically. The levels are small but camera scrolling is super smooth, polygons are sharp and the colors are bold and bright. Basically, it's a first party Nintendo game. Yay!
9. The sound design is decent too but the most standout part to me is when Toad shouts what sounds like "Diaper adventrure!" before each level.
10. The story here is Captain Toad and Girl Captain Toad take turns getting kidnapped by a giant owl and you need to find each other by collecting stars and three optional gems.
11. There is something about the gameplay that I find very relaxing w/o it becoming boring. The levels are mostly pretty short, which helps since you don't lose much progress when you die. It is just a combination of basically getting to take as much time as you'd like to look around and explore but then also having it spiced up by some brief dexterity challenges here and there. There is a real kind of flow to it.
12. This is a pretty streamlined package overall.There's sixty some levels to begin w/ and then an additional bunch of bonus levels once you've finished. There are really no lengthy cut scenes or special modes or any of that kind of thing. You get the game and some optional objectives and that's all you really need. For what it does have, there is a good amount between how the levels play w/ some boss battles and even a couple minecart levels that play like rail shooters.
13. Playing a game called Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker kinda brings to mind that old adage about riding a moped and your friends finding out but, honestly, I've been telling everyone I know w/ a Wii U to play this game. (Note: this is two people.)
2. I suppose you might damn this by calling it a kids game but I prefer to think of it as suitable for all ages.
3. I see this often classified as puzzle game but this really isn't about puzzle solving. It's about exploration and discovery. Certainly, there are puzzle solving elements but if you are looking for Portal, play The Talos Principle.
4. Actually, this does have something in common w/ Talos in so far as it pieces together assets from a better known game into something rather different. The Mario tie in is more obvious here than the Serious Sam basis of Talos but both games give you the feeling that the developers pushed themselves to do something new and different and that's what makes them fun.
5. I have a metric for judging Mario games which is how far in I get before I get sick of collecting the optional collectables. This never happened in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. I never got sick of collecting the three optional gems on each level. Never.
6. There are also additional bonus challenges for each level that I only completed when they seemed fun to me. One of my few complaints about this game is to meet the requirements of these challenges, you sometimes couldn't also collect all three gems. It's no big deal unless you want to do 100% speed runs or something.
7. This is a pretty deliberate game so maybe not appropriate for speed-running anyway. Even more than the fact that you can't jump, I'd say this difference in pacing is what sets it apart from a standard Mario game. The focus here is on planning your path through a level and examining every last inch of it, rather than avoiding hazards in a precise manner.
8. This plays to the Wii U's strengths, graphically. The levels are small but camera scrolling is super smooth, polygons are sharp and the colors are bold and bright. Basically, it's a first party Nintendo game. Yay!
9. The sound design is decent too but the most standout part to me is when Toad shouts what sounds like "Diaper adventrure!" before each level.
10. The story here is Captain Toad and Girl Captain Toad take turns getting kidnapped by a giant owl and you need to find each other by collecting stars and three optional gems.
11. There is something about the gameplay that I find very relaxing w/o it becoming boring. The levels are mostly pretty short, which helps since you don't lose much progress when you die. It is just a combination of basically getting to take as much time as you'd like to look around and explore but then also having it spiced up by some brief dexterity challenges here and there. There is a real kind of flow to it.
12. This is a pretty streamlined package overall.There's sixty some levels to begin w/ and then an additional bunch of bonus levels once you've finished. There are really no lengthy cut scenes or special modes or any of that kind of thing. You get the game and some optional objectives and that's all you really need. For what it does have, there is a good amount between how the levels play w/ some boss battles and even a couple minecart levels that play like rail shooters.
13. Playing a game called Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker kinda brings to mind that old adage about riding a moped and your friends finding out but, honestly, I've been telling everyone I know w/ a Wii U to play this game. (Note: this is two people.)
Friday, November 3, 2017
Why I Stopped Playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Firaxis Games - 2012 [PlayStation Vita]
Like many, my gaming time is limited. This is a series where I outline why I decided to shelf a particular game.
I have been a longtime advocate for busy people (read: adults) to check out modern handhelds for their gaming fix. The ability to stop and resume games on a dime is priceless if your free time comes in twenty minute spurts. I'm always excited to see a new franchise come to handheld from console or PC and tend to be especially excited when the game you get is the real deal and not cut down to size to fit the handheld.
Turn-based strategy games seem a perfect fit for this. They rely not on spectacle and fast pacing, where the less comfortable controls and lower graphical power of a handheld would be much more of an issue, but on slow, contemplative decision making. Unfortunately, this game just never clicked for me. This is partly my fault, partly the design of the game and party the port to Vita.
On my end, I went into this knowing perma-death is a hallmark of the series and just couldn't help really wanting it to be Fire Emblem. It's not, obviously. Your characters are persistent mission to mission but they don't have personalities other than whatever you might come up w/ roll playing in your head. You learn how to use them tactically but your attachment to them is based on their usefulness to you and not to them as characters. This is all fine but it took me a while to get used to an essential aspect of playing XCOM: some of your characters are supposed to die.
Playing through, I eventually realized that this is actually a strength of the game. It adds a shade of military realism to it. You don't get to soldiers alive at the expense of the mission just because you like them. You make choices that put people in harm's way and sometimes the result of that is, well, harm to those people. This is not a game where you dominate w/ perfect strategy but one where strategy is the means by which you squeak by by the skin of your teeth.
The downside to this is you can lose. You can put a dozen hours into a campaign and have one mission go sideways, lose all your best characters and find yourself in basically and untenable position. Fire Emblem (usually) deals w/ this by letting you grind through relatively easy random encounters to rebuild your party. In XCOM, you restart the whole game or save scum your way through.
This, again, is one of the game's strengths ultimately. You have to employ both a broad strategy and tactics in individual missions to be able to win. You can't just lean on your best characters and maximize their stats by only bringing them along on missions because if things go south, you are left w/ almost nothing. You need to make sure to bring rookies up through the ranks quickly and always keep some of your best characters in reserve so getting nailed in an encounter doesn't leave you helpless. You need to make best use of your limited technology and resources so that you
This all actually sounds awesome to me, honestly. Reading back what I just wrote, I feel an intense urge to pick XCOM back up, like, right now. The thing is every time I do go back to play it, it's just feels like a slog.
For starters, the tactics lean on what they call a flanking mechanic but is really just line-of-sight based cover. From a gaming standpoint, I see what this is supposed to do. If you've got line of sight on an enemy, they've got line of sight on you. It's a high-risk/high-reward proposition. It works fine but why settle for fine? Make it so which way the units are facing matter. Allow players to engage the enemy w/ one unit and then route said enemy from the side with a different unit. This is how flanking actually works in military tactics and I think this one additional element would add a ton of depth to combat.
The other factor that really killed me is when you run into an enemy, it immediately gets to move against you. Like, right in the middle of your turn it gets to move. The character you are moving stops dead and the enemy gets an extra turn then your character finally gets to finish moving--and you don't even get to adjust your move in reaction to the new situation. This seems to almost always leave your one unfortunate character helpless unless you've played extremely cautiously.
Ultimately, the one strategy I found that consistently worked was to always move all my units as one group. Move slowly and throw every character into a defensive mode called overwatch that allows you to fire back in the event you run into hostiles. Never attempt to flank the enemy unless you have them greatly outnumbered. When in doubt, stay hunkered down.
In short, XCOM seems to want you to play aggressively w/ its flanking system but then has a mechanic where you will almost always get rocked if you actually do so. The end result is a crawling pace.
I didn't want to but I eventually ended up save scumming. One thing was glitches, which I'm not sure are unique to the Vita version, but could be real party killers. If you accidentally move one step farther than you intended, you sometimes aren't able to shoot which turns a substantial chance to get a kill into a substantial chance to be killed. So I started save scumming to avoid that. Then I slowly let myself start restarting missions rather than take heavy losses just so I did not have to restart the whole game. Then I started allowing myself to return to my safety saves just because my turn went badly to avoid having to restart the mission. So, yeah, I am a damn, dirty cheater and I don't deserve a game like XCOM.
Having said all this, I feel like the two main arguments I will get will boil down to "Git gud" and "That's XCOM baby!" and, whatever, fair enough. Everything that drives me nuts about this has a positive side--well, except the glitches aren't the funny kind and the load times are terrible on the Vita--and I would never say its a bad game. It's just not for me. If it makes you feel any better, I will put it on my long list for a replay next time it goes on sale for PC and I find myself w/ a few dozen hours to kill on a Friday evening.
I have been a longtime advocate for busy people (read: adults) to check out modern handhelds for their gaming fix. The ability to stop and resume games on a dime is priceless if your free time comes in twenty minute spurts. I'm always excited to see a new franchise come to handheld from console or PC and tend to be especially excited when the game you get is the real deal and not cut down to size to fit the handheld.
Turn-based strategy games seem a perfect fit for this. They rely not on spectacle and fast pacing, where the less comfortable controls and lower graphical power of a handheld would be much more of an issue, but on slow, contemplative decision making. Unfortunately, this game just never clicked for me. This is partly my fault, partly the design of the game and party the port to Vita.
On my end, I went into this knowing perma-death is a hallmark of the series and just couldn't help really wanting it to be Fire Emblem. It's not, obviously. Your characters are persistent mission to mission but they don't have personalities other than whatever you might come up w/ roll playing in your head. You learn how to use them tactically but your attachment to them is based on their usefulness to you and not to them as characters. This is all fine but it took me a while to get used to an essential aspect of playing XCOM: some of your characters are supposed to die.
Playing through, I eventually realized that this is actually a strength of the game. It adds a shade of military realism to it. You don't get to soldiers alive at the expense of the mission just because you like them. You make choices that put people in harm's way and sometimes the result of that is, well, harm to those people. This is not a game where you dominate w/ perfect strategy but one where strategy is the means by which you squeak by by the skin of your teeth.
The downside to this is you can lose. You can put a dozen hours into a campaign and have one mission go sideways, lose all your best characters and find yourself in basically and untenable position. Fire Emblem (usually) deals w/ this by letting you grind through relatively easy random encounters to rebuild your party. In XCOM, you restart the whole game or save scum your way through.
This, again, is one of the game's strengths ultimately. You have to employ both a broad strategy and tactics in individual missions to be able to win. You can't just lean on your best characters and maximize their stats by only bringing them along on missions because if things go south, you are left w/ almost nothing. You need to make sure to bring rookies up through the ranks quickly and always keep some of your best characters in reserve so getting nailed in an encounter doesn't leave you helpless. You need to make best use of your limited technology and resources so that you
This all actually sounds awesome to me, honestly. Reading back what I just wrote, I feel an intense urge to pick XCOM back up, like, right now. The thing is every time I do go back to play it, it's just feels like a slog.
For starters, the tactics lean on what they call a flanking mechanic but is really just line-of-sight based cover. From a gaming standpoint, I see what this is supposed to do. If you've got line of sight on an enemy, they've got line of sight on you. It's a high-risk/high-reward proposition. It works fine but why settle for fine? Make it so which way the units are facing matter. Allow players to engage the enemy w/ one unit and then route said enemy from the side with a different unit. This is how flanking actually works in military tactics and I think this one additional element would add a ton of depth to combat.
The other factor that really killed me is when you run into an enemy, it immediately gets to move against you. Like, right in the middle of your turn it gets to move. The character you are moving stops dead and the enemy gets an extra turn then your character finally gets to finish moving--and you don't even get to adjust your move in reaction to the new situation. This seems to almost always leave your one unfortunate character helpless unless you've played extremely cautiously.
Ultimately, the one strategy I found that consistently worked was to always move all my units as one group. Move slowly and throw every character into a defensive mode called overwatch that allows you to fire back in the event you run into hostiles. Never attempt to flank the enemy unless you have them greatly outnumbered. When in doubt, stay hunkered down.
In short, XCOM seems to want you to play aggressively w/ its flanking system but then has a mechanic where you will almost always get rocked if you actually do so. The end result is a crawling pace.
I didn't want to but I eventually ended up save scumming. One thing was glitches, which I'm not sure are unique to the Vita version, but could be real party killers. If you accidentally move one step farther than you intended, you sometimes aren't able to shoot which turns a substantial chance to get a kill into a substantial chance to be killed. So I started save scumming to avoid that. Then I slowly let myself start restarting missions rather than take heavy losses just so I did not have to restart the whole game. Then I started allowing myself to return to my safety saves just because my turn went badly to avoid having to restart the mission. So, yeah, I am a damn, dirty cheater and I don't deserve a game like XCOM.
Having said all this, I feel like the two main arguments I will get will boil down to "Git gud" and "That's XCOM baby!" and, whatever, fair enough. Everything that drives me nuts about this has a positive side--well, except the glitches aren't the funny kind and the load times are terrible on the Vita--and I would never say its a bad game. It's just not for me. If it makes you feel any better, I will put it on my long list for a replay next time it goes on sale for PC and I find myself w/ a few dozen hours to kill on a Friday evening.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
13 Points on 10 Second Ninja - Four Circle Interactive - 2014 [PC]
1. It seemed to be semi-controversial that this game was priced at ten bucks at release. This is just fine. In the nineties, we payed the
equivalent to today's AAA prices for a game w/ this much content. AND WE WALKED
TO SCHOOL IN THE SNOW, UPHILL BOTH WAYS.
2. While there is a lot of stuff like this for free and cheap, I don't think a race to the bottom price-wise is good for indie games.
3. I got this as part of a bundle so I'm no one to talk.
4. 10 Second Ninja is a pretty great concept, decently but not perfectly executed.
5. The art is a bit basic even by indie game standards but the music is great and its funny enough that it got a chuckle or two out of me, which is next to impossible because I am an old, cranky man.
6. Gameplay is just fine. Controls are simple and responsive. You basically just have to beat short platforming levels really, really fast, and that is pretty fun.
7. You will accidentally hit the restart level button nearly as often as you actually die. It turns out this is just fine.
8. Remapping controls just prove it's actually hard to manage three buttons plus a d-pad plus the restart button at the speed this game demands.
9. This is a sincerely hard game. It strikes me though that almost all of the levels would be rather easy were it not for the strict time limits opposed.
10. Number 9 is both cool and frustrating. I think I would prefer if this upped the puzzle aspect by making it more of a challenge to find the best path through a level. This really is, for the most part, part just having to really nail a series of perfectly timed button presses.
11. Having to nail a series of perfectly time button presses is just fine.
12. I played this for an hour and feel like I honestly got the full depth of what it has to offer. This is really a game dedicated to people who like tough platformers and who are completists as far as collecting every last achievement. This is where most of the replay value is. If you like this sort of game, congratulations, you found something that was made for you.
13. GET OFF MY YARD!
2. While there is a lot of stuff like this for free and cheap, I don't think a race to the bottom price-wise is good for indie games.
3. I got this as part of a bundle so I'm no one to talk.
4. 10 Second Ninja is a pretty great concept, decently but not perfectly executed.
5. The art is a bit basic even by indie game standards but the music is great and its funny enough that it got a chuckle or two out of me, which is next to impossible because I am an old, cranky man.
6. Gameplay is just fine. Controls are simple and responsive. You basically just have to beat short platforming levels really, really fast, and that is pretty fun.
7. You will accidentally hit the restart level button nearly as often as you actually die. It turns out this is just fine.
8. Remapping controls just prove it's actually hard to manage three buttons plus a d-pad plus the restart button at the speed this game demands.
9. This is a sincerely hard game. It strikes me though that almost all of the levels would be rather easy were it not for the strict time limits opposed.
10. Number 9 is both cool and frustrating. I think I would prefer if this upped the puzzle aspect by making it more of a challenge to find the best path through a level. This really is, for the most part, part just having to really nail a series of perfectly timed button presses.
11. Having to nail a series of perfectly time button presses is just fine.
12. I played this for an hour and feel like I honestly got the full depth of what it has to offer. This is really a game dedicated to people who like tough platformers and who are completists as far as collecting every last achievement. This is where most of the replay value is. If you like this sort of game, congratulations, you found something that was made for you.
13. GET OFF MY YARD!
Friday, October 20, 2017
13 Points on Hook - Maciej Targoni, Wojciech Wasiak - 2015 [PC]
1. My life is inundated w/ millions of disparate cables which are always in various states of disarray and tanglation. About once I year, I grab all my numerous boxes of knotted cables and sit down w/ a couple more beers than maybe I should drink in one sitting and untangle the lot of them systematically. Playing Hook is very much like doing this.
2. This is the sort of puzzle game that frequently gets damned w/ the casual tag. Fine. Hook is a casual game. You are not going to spend five hundred hours honing your skills on this game. It's simple. You can play it on your phone if you want. Is that a horrible thing?
3. What it does give you is one hour of gameplay that is really good for a buck.
4. The graphical presentation here is extremely minimal. It's all black and white lines and circles and dots. The puzzles look like stylish circuit diagrams. I personally found this quite alluring and picked this up mostly because I saw the screenshots and wondered what it was all about.
5. The sound is similarly subdued. Slowly played electric piano notes sprawl and reverberate. The switch-flip clicking effects from your gameplay provide the percussion. It fits together cohesively and fits the graphics well.
6. Hook teaches you how to play just by presenting the puzzles in the right order. You start it up and are immediately presented w/ the first puzzle. You sit there huffing glue and drinking grain alcohol, waiting for the title menu to pop up but it never does. Eventually you click a few times on the most obvious thing to click and off you go.
7. Basically, what you do is untie knots. The little stylish circuit board traces are laid out such that they are in great tanglations w/ each other. You need to unravel this disorder by clicking on them.
8. As per puzzle game standard, you start w/ just a few elements and it grows more complicated from there. At first you spend a few levels just click, click, clicking away in whatever order you chose. Eventually, there are wires that hook around other wires that must be removed first. Then there are wires that cross through other wires. Then there are little turny bits that let you rearrange the wires and after that there are little symbols which are interconnected through magic and cause wires to be connected in strange and complicated ways.
9. When solving the puzzles, your next move is always just to remove any unencumbered piece of the puzzle w/o disturbing anything else. You spend a bunch of time turning turny bits and tracing traces and making sure this is all set up correctly before you make your move. There are no time limits, no turn limits and no limits to how many times you can change things in the puzzle.
10. The result of a wrong move is you have to restart the puzzle and have to redo your first couple moves again. No big deal. The more complicated puzzles later in the game give you three chances.
11. The end result of 9 and 10 is Hook never gets seriously difficult but this also makes it unique. Most puzzle games require you to do some mental gymnastics and lateral thinking to beat them. This just requires plenty of patience, which keeps the puzzles satisfying w/o requiring too much mental energy. It works.
12. I feel like there was some missed opportunity for replayability after your first playthrough here. It seems like the developers could have added some extra layers of challenge by adding a timer, having a no mistakes mode where you return to the beginning of the game if you screw up once and/or challenging players to solve the puzzles w/ the fewest moves possible. Then again, part of the beauty of this game is its simplicity so perhaps that would be too much.
13. Hook provides a lot of what people find appealing in walking sims--that ability to just drift along and enjoy the game w/o having to tense up and challenge yourself too much--in a much different format. It's a puzzle game that only kind of has puzzles and still manages to be engaging moment to moment. It's worth a dollar and, more importantly, it's worth an evening of your time.
2. This is the sort of puzzle game that frequently gets damned w/ the casual tag. Fine. Hook is a casual game. You are not going to spend five hundred hours honing your skills on this game. It's simple. You can play it on your phone if you want. Is that a horrible thing?
3. What it does give you is one hour of gameplay that is really good for a buck.
4. The graphical presentation here is extremely minimal. It's all black and white lines and circles and dots. The puzzles look like stylish circuit diagrams. I personally found this quite alluring and picked this up mostly because I saw the screenshots and wondered what it was all about.
5. The sound is similarly subdued. Slowly played electric piano notes sprawl and reverberate. The switch-flip clicking effects from your gameplay provide the percussion. It fits together cohesively and fits the graphics well.
6. Hook teaches you how to play just by presenting the puzzles in the right order. You start it up and are immediately presented w/ the first puzzle. You sit there huffing glue and drinking grain alcohol, waiting for the title menu to pop up but it never does. Eventually you click a few times on the most obvious thing to click and off you go.
7. Basically, what you do is untie knots. The little stylish circuit board traces are laid out such that they are in great tanglations w/ each other. You need to unravel this disorder by clicking on them.
8. As per puzzle game standard, you start w/ just a few elements and it grows more complicated from there. At first you spend a few levels just click, click, clicking away in whatever order you chose. Eventually, there are wires that hook around other wires that must be removed first. Then there are wires that cross through other wires. Then there are little turny bits that let you rearrange the wires and after that there are little symbols which are interconnected through magic and cause wires to be connected in strange and complicated ways.
9. When solving the puzzles, your next move is always just to remove any unencumbered piece of the puzzle w/o disturbing anything else. You spend a bunch of time turning turny bits and tracing traces and making sure this is all set up correctly before you make your move. There are no time limits, no turn limits and no limits to how many times you can change things in the puzzle.
10. The result of a wrong move is you have to restart the puzzle and have to redo your first couple moves again. No big deal. The more complicated puzzles later in the game give you three chances.
11. The end result of 9 and 10 is Hook never gets seriously difficult but this also makes it unique. Most puzzle games require you to do some mental gymnastics and lateral thinking to beat them. This just requires plenty of patience, which keeps the puzzles satisfying w/o requiring too much mental energy. It works.
12. I feel like there was some missed opportunity for replayability after your first playthrough here. It seems like the developers could have added some extra layers of challenge by adding a timer, having a no mistakes mode where you return to the beginning of the game if you screw up once and/or challenging players to solve the puzzles w/ the fewest moves possible. Then again, part of the beauty of this game is its simplicity so perhaps that would be too much.
13. Hook provides a lot of what people find appealing in walking sims--that ability to just drift along and enjoy the game w/o having to tense up and challenge yourself too much--in a much different format. It's a puzzle game that only kind of has puzzles and still manages to be engaging moment to moment. It's worth a dollar and, more importantly, it's worth an evening of your time.
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