So, I did an Exhuminator the other week and bought some random Vita game because it looked cool and I'd never seen it before. Though I did look up some reviews online in the store before I checked out, I was fairly interested with a weird-ass title like that, although healthily skeptical given that this is a game published by NIS. I heard of several comparisons to LIMBO, and was warned to change the controls ASAP to version C as to turn off all touch controls and switch them to joy-stick ones. Both of these turned out to be very true.
The comparisons to LIMBO were very apt. It's a very beautifully drawn puzzle platformer that has virtually no text in its story-telling elements. However, the story telling is a good bit more in depth and complicated than LIMBO's, as well as the gameplay. There are cutscenes between each chapter, as well as one memory fragment in each stage which reveals the backstory to what you're going through (you need them all to get the true ending and final boss, but that's not too hard a task with the stage select feature). The story does get fairly dark, and really had me switching on who I was actually rooting for, which I commend, given that its told completely without words of any kind. The simple interactive cutscenes portray their story well, and I was satisfied with the true ending (the regular one is like "wut"). You have a fairy you control with the left stick, and the player character follows it. Follows it down passages, up ladders, can tell her to sit still, interact with objects, the works. You also can toggle the world into shadow with triangle, and move with the darkness fairy through the shadows of the world to activate far-away items or switches. They're fairly neat mechanics and are explored in quite fun ways. There was never a time when I was just completely, unfathomably stuck. There was always some way to progress. The only puzzles I straight up didn't like were the "don't touch the walls" mazes, which could be very annoying because of how somewhat inaccurate the sensitivity with both the touch controls and analog controls can be though. Far from a game breaker though. Just a bit annoying. Verdict: Recommended. If you enjoyed LIMBO, this is a good one to pick up to scratch a very similar itch. It's not too long a game, and the art and music are great, so that someone could very easily enjoy watching you play a fair bit if you were to slap it onto your PSTV.
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I really loved Infamous 1 and 2, and I was pleasently surprised when I heard that another one was being made back before the PS4 came out. When it eventually came out, I'd heard that it wasn't amazing and it was kinda short, and that led to me not regarding it as very important in terms of a "must own" title (or console). Fast forward to the other day, where someone on some other thread complained about it, which reminded me that I actually finally have it and hadn't played it. Ultimately, I gotta agree with the popular opinion here: This is definitely the least good Infamous game. For those who might care, I played through on Normal, and it took me 10 or 11 hours to 100% the game. (I didn't do the Paper Hunt DLC because it seemed immensely tedious with all the running back and forth between your PC and your console).
Some of the biggest problems this game has are pacing in both the story and gameplay. Story-wise, it's just really kind of a hot mess (perhaps because they originally wanted to make it longer?). There are so few characters at the start that the game feels baron, and it's a bit tiring on how much time they spend treading over the same relationship-building points between the 2 main characters (they're total opposites. We get it). This ultimately feels like time wasted because it's a ton of time that could've been used to get us to care about these characters more instead of just doing silly quips. Then later there are SO many characters who all need their own little redemption arcs that none of the effect they're going for sticks, and the whole second act feels really rushed. Compared to the other two games, it feels like this game is missing like 4 or 5 hours of another island area (there are two actually in the game) and all the character development that went with it. Infamous 2 was how to write and pace a story around a fairly crowded cast of conduit characters. Infamous Second Son is how not to do that. Ultimately, I didn't hate the main character (I know a lot of people found him really annoying), and I actually occasionally found him quite funny, but the reason the story makes me mad is because it just reeks of wasted potential of a rush-job. On top of that, you've got the way they kinda ret-con the lore of the first two games, and the ending of the second game, but those are hardly the biggest problems this game has. Also, I didn't at any point know the real answer to this during the game (it was only after in online lore shit), but this follows the hero-ending to Infamous 2 (it really could plausibly follow either the hero or evil ending tbh). This also continues the trend of REALLY heavy handedly binary morality in Infamous games (You're either a saint or a heartless monster with nothing in between), so that wonderful quirk hasn't gone away :/ Gameplay-wise, we got similar-ish problems. To start off with, there are some very nice quality-of-life improvements from the first two games. First off, the shard things that you constantly would mash R3 to scan for are gone, and now they're quad-drones that are parked at or flying around certain locations, and you can see them on the mini-map all the time. However, the "control the city district" mini-games are really lacking in variety compared to other city-sandbox games. There are really just two other than the base assaults, and they're not amazing. The base assaults are some of the most fun parts of the game though, combat wise. The way you need to plan your approach to most efficiently take out everyone and then the core were the most satisfying moments of combat for me. Speaking of the combat, I'm of two minds about it being some of the best and some of the worst. For good points, you have fairly good enemies. There aren't that many enemy types compared to the other games (only like 5 or 6), but there are 2 light guys and 3 heavy guys, and after all of the fuckers you had to QTE to death near the end of 2, I was very happy to see them gone. However, compared to Infamous 1, this game is really seriously lacking in enemy varieties both mechanically and cosmetically, although that's mostly down to the pacing of when you get certain powers. WHICH brings me to the bad points. The pacing of the power is terrible. You get several different trees of powers through the game, and because of that, you're like constantly getting new powers. Compared to the other games, where you quite slowly and methodically built up new repertoires of power, slowly mastering them, you're like constantly getting new ones for different trees. As a result, where you basically built up from human thugs to other conduits in the other games, you go straight to fighting conduits in this game as you start the game out with just about your entire base power set (hence the small enemy variety, as it's only the end of that spectrum of enemy progression). On top of that, you get 4 different power trees, but the second one is clearly the best, and there's really just never any reason to use the others as they're all just differing levels of "meh." Verdict: Not Recommended. If you really, REALLY want a super-powers game specifically on your PS4, then go right ahead and give this a go. Otherwise, I'd probably just play through Infamous 1 or 2 again and just call it a day. This game is very much like Overlord II in that it really does nothing to surpass previous games in any way meaningful enough to justify its existence, which is a very sad thing for me to say about a series I like so much |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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