And so comes to a close the other game on the PS3 God of War Collection I picked up, and I'm glad I did! This game is really everything a sequel should strive to be. It controls similarly but tighter. The puzzle and platforming has been tightened up a LOT. More bosses and better bosses. I honestly don't have THAT much to say about this given that I already have my God of War 1 review on here, but I'll give my thoughts on this nonetheless.
As previously stated, this is basically an improved version of the first game in every way. The level designed is really improved to make things better signposted (sometimes a bit TOO much and oddly sometimes not enough), with hidden items quite cleverly hidden. They're way more linear with less potential for confusing backtracking and levels that wrap around like the first game had. They flow much better, even if you're hunting for goodies. The puzzles are also a lot harder than in the first game. I never had to google a single thing for the first game, but there were like 4 or 5 puzzles I had to google the solution to (partly because they're relying on mechanics the game doesn't explain or doesn't explain well enough to apply, in my defense). The combat is largely the same, but your sub-weapons have been changed up a bit. Two of the magic spells have been swapped out for new ones, and instead of the sub-weapon sword from last game, now you have a hammer and a spear (eventually), so combat can really get mixed up depending on how you want to focus things. This game has WAY more bosses in it, like 3 or 4 times more, as well as more enemy types. The combat has also been fine tuned a bit to just make it more fun, in particular dodging has been made easier to break other combos to do and quicker to recover from, and that just helps the pace of everything else SO much that it can't be ignored. The presentation is also great. There's a lot more story in this compared to the first. Much more story, dialogue, and cinematics, as well as actually trying to add some kind of message to the story (although it's a fairly light one). Granted the first game's bar was basically touching the ground in regards to story, this game raises it more than it had to, and that's worth something I think. The music is also fantastic and especially the boss tracks really get the blood pumping. On top of that, perhaps it's just the PS3 up-res, but the polygon count on this game is incredible. This has to be one of the best looking games on PS2, bar none. Just the fact this game runs so well is an achievement on the hardware. If I were actually playing it on a PS2, I reckon smoke would be coming out of the back of it ;P Verdict: Highly Recommended. The first God of War feels like a first try, but this sequel is exactly what a sequel should be. It is an all-around refinement of everything about the first game. Easily one of the best action/adventure games on the PS2, and something well worth checking out if you're into that kind of thing and can handle the (admittedly rather tame graphically by today's standards) violence involved in Kratos' enemy executions.
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Tiny Barbarian was a Kickstarter game that was billed as a kind of retro throwback to classic action games. It came out over the course of four years in 3 parts, with the third and fourth parts coming out at the same time. I got this game pretty cheap on PC back around when Act 1 came out, enjoyed Act 1 well enough, and then put it down and waited for the other acts to come out (aka promptly forgot about it). The physical version on Switch goes for about 20 bucks now, so I picked it up at Best Buy a few weeks back and only now got around to playing it. There is fun to be had with this thing, but the conclusion I came to in my 6.5 or so hours with it is that it's a culmination of everything wrong with retro throwback action games XD
Tiny Barbarian really goes out of its way to evoke the feeling of games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania on NES, but with longer levels. You have a weapon that routinely feels like it doesn't have the range to comfortably deal with the enemies thrown at you, there are a lot of tricky jumps that range from close calls to pixel perfect bullshit, and the bosses range from fun, well-flowing events to the more frequent super frustrating bullshit. In scaling up an older action game-style to modern game sizes, Tiny Barbarian mostly succeeds in emphasizing how excruciating those games could feel. Levels are so dependent on positioning yourself well to both defect incoming enemy attacks (either slashing them or their bullets away from you) in combination with doing the tricky platforming that a lot of the game, particularly the boss fights, come down to rote trial and error to just memorize it as efficiently as possible. While the Mega Man homage section in the last act was fun, most of what this game did was remind me of just how much I do not enjoy the bulk of the games this game pays homage to. Mechanics and design aside, the game's presentation is quite good, although with some faults nonetheless. The game has a very pretty art style (in that "what if the SNES/Mega Drive could do lots of frames of animation"-kind of way) and the music is also routinely good. The only issue is that it is very frequently a problem of just keeping track of where your character is on screen. Particularly in the harder boss fights, the titular character being so genuinely tiny can really inhibit your ability to even maintain a hold of what's going on if you aren't paying strict enough attention to both your location and the location of your enemy and all their projectiles. Verdict: Not Recommended. As said before, there is fun to be had with this, but it's moreso in the bad way that hard games can be enjoyed: the relief when you finally finish a very difficult part you just wanted to get past. This is a game that feels too routinely unfair for me to ever feel comfortable giving it any kind of recommendation. That's not only because there are SO many other 2D action platformers that do this kind of action better (albeit most of the ones I can think of are rogue-lites or Metroidvanias), but also because if the game didn't have such forgiving checkpoints, there is no way most people would ever bother trying to see this game to the end, and that's for a reason beyond just "it's a hard game". From Dad of War to God of War, I thought I'd give the original God of War a go given that I was able to find the HD Remaster of 1 & 2 for PS3 at the resale shop the other day. I've played the first stage up to a little after the Kraken fight on the proper PS2 version, but I don't have that version anymore, so I went with the PS3 HD Remaster. It took me about 9 hours and I played through on normal mode.
God of War plays a little like a cross between a Mario and a Zelda game. I just don't really know what else to compare it to. It's a character-action game with both a heavy emphasis on combat and puzzle solving but also on platforming (you even have a double jump). It's kind of a lot going on, and it does it all well enough, but a bit frustrating. The combat isn't QUITE tight enough to feel like you can easily make sense of what you're doing wrong when things start going badly. The platforming isn't QUITE tight enough (mostly due to the fixed camera) for the jumping and such to feel too good. It's decent fun to wail on enemies with your sword and glaives, and it's certainly beatable, but it just doesn't play QUITE right and will likely frustrate people used to more modern 3D action games that control better. This goes especially for the SUPER aggravating timed jumping and block-pushing puzzles. Those things more than once made me question whether this was a game I really wanted to care to finish XD The story is neat and flashy, but largely throwaway. The game actually has like 40+ minutes of making-of featurettes on the disc just like a film would, and they basically admit that this was supposed to be a big angery power fantasy in a Classical Greek setting, and that's exactly how it comes off. The plot itself is interesting, and this is a very pretty PS2 game as far as enemy and environment designs are concerned so the setting is used well, but the actual presentation of the narrative is about as bog-standard talking directly to the player about the story as you can get. The PS3 port is great, especially on the visuals. The game looks really nice upscaled to HD resolutions, and the framerate just about always stays at a nice high point. The only real fault with the PS3 port is how many doors and environmental QTE's require mashing the R2 button, and that's a LOT harder on the PS3's analog triggers than it was on the PS2's digital buttons. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is a good time to be had with the original God of War, even if it's just to see where the series started. It's JUST rough enough around the edges that I wouldn't really outright recommend it, but it's far from a bad game. It's a good first try for an action/adventure title, and the combat especially was fun and smashy enough that I'm looking forward to giving the 2nd game on the HD Remaster pack a try soon~ I've never been a fan of God of War. The old action games were always somewhere between not having enough meaningful narrative and not really being gripping enough on a gameplay level (as well as just being genuinely nauseatingly gruesome at times). When I started hearing about the new God of War though, which I will call from here on Dad of War as to avoid confusion with the PS2 game of the same title, I was increasingly interested all the time. A shift away from the old character-action games and into something more somber and reflective on a story level and something between a Soulsborne and a Zelda game mechanically, my interest was definitely piqued. Now that it is the second PS4 game I've ever platinum'd, I can safely say that it didn't just not disappoint, it absolutely blew me away.
Dad of War, as the fan-given title implies, frames Kratos not as some power-driven killing machine, but as a settled down with a family. Not in Greece either, as he's run all the way up to Midgard, a land of Norse gods, to try and begin this new life. His wife has just passed, and he and his son Atreus venture off on a quest to fulfill her final wish: to have her ashes spread from the highest peak in the realms. What follows is a slow story commenting not just on how Kratos' has mellowed, but how he struggles to bond with his son and teach him how to be a good person. It's a story of them slowly learning to respect and understand one another through shared adversity and communication borne from that adversity, and it's a slow burn but brilliantly done. This isn't relegated to the core story moments either. Where a game like Spider-Man struggles to keep up the pace of the main narrative while it throws so many fun, optional side missions at you, the narrative premise of Dad of War really helps it out in overcoming that stumbling block. Because the narrative is driven from a place of personal motivation, it allows the story to take weaves and turns for sidequests without significantly affecting the pace of the narrative. The real point of the plot is Kratos and Atreus learning to understand each other, not them saving the world or something like that. The implementation of this blend of gameplay with narrative is of a quality I haven't seen in any AAA game in recent memory. The combat starts off a bit hard, even for the first real fight in the game (also quite like Spider-Man), but the combat is just so fast, visceral and fun that it just fit perfectly for my tastes. Kratos' Leviathan Ax is so great to chuck around or slam into enemies, and Atreus' magical moves and bow attacks add in just one more thing to think about, and that's before things like Kratos' runic specials and ALL the special moves you can unlock as you level up. You don't really level up hard with power, rather your gear adds to a general relative power level for your character. What you actually spend XP on is new moves, so you're just constantly upgrading and enhancing your move-set of how you deal with encounters. Normal enemy encounters are something closer to a Soulsborne game, while bosses are more like a Zelda game, but the boss encounters were still some of my top-favorite parts of the playing parts of the game. It's some of the most fun combat has been in a modern game for me recently, and that's saying something with how much I loved Spider-Man's combat. The world it takes place in is just so beautiful as well. Playing this on a standard PS4 Slim, not even on a Pro, the game still looks amazing. There are a couple framerate stutters in some cutscenes, but the game never suffered during gameplay because of it, and the textures manage to look fantastic the whole time to boot. The fans on my PS4 were going nuts the whole time I played the game, so I could visibly hear just how much strain this game was flexing out of the PS4 to get it looking this good, and it paid off in a great way. Exploring every little nook and cranny for more gear and story stuff is that much more fun when the areas are both designed so well and look as good as they do. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Santa Monica Studios has given themselves one hell of an act to follow. I don't think I've ever played a Zelda-style game this good, and I'm not sure I ever will again. Dad of War takes the mantle that Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom held for me of best non-Zelda Zelda game, and if you like Zelda games, this is absolutely a can't-miss game, even if you don't know or don't like anything about the previous God of War games. Got this on a Switch sale a month or so ago because I dig the art style and I love me a good rogue lite (especially a good'n' on a portable console), and this did not disappoint. Showing it to a friend, she compared the playstyle to MegaMan Zero, which I think is honestly not too far off, save that you don't have a sword and instead you have 360-degree firing capabilities.
FlintHook is a rogue-lite that sees you as the titular FlintHook as they try to save their fellow lighthouse keepers from their prisons aboard the ships of the most dangerous space pirate kings. It is an action-platformer that has you going between rooms and shooting baddies while jumping, wall-jumping, and using your hookshot to fling around on hooks and launch yourself around stages. There's even a bullet-time feature you can toggle for good measure. It's not the most original concept in the world, but it's executed very well and is a joy to just launch yourself around in and fire away at baddies. Every time you level up you get a new perk or two that you can put on before you start a run, and there are slight upgrades you can buy for yourself with rewards from playing runs, but this is a very skill-based rogue-lite compared to something like Binding of Isaac. Your gun can get some moderate changes to its power, trajectory, range, etc., and you can get slightly better defenses, but generally you can stay alive for as well as you can play the game. The enemy variety isn't too huge, but it's more than big enough to make for interesting encounters. Paired with the traps and the staggering variety of room layouts for each room type (battle, corridor, and treasure/trap), I played for like 15 or so hours and I'm still finding rooms I've never seen before to test my abilities. There are only 5 different "bounties" you can do (basically a certain number of levels before the same boss ship at the end), but each has a harder variant that seems to add yet more possible rooms to encounter. It's a game that is a perfect fit for Switch, because it's a brilliant time-filler and because your abilities are basically always the same, it's easy to put down and then pick right back up again in a few days when you have time/motivation to continue the run you were on. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Like Binding of Isaac, FlintHook is a rogue-lite that doesn't have THAT much in it, but it uses tight controls and deliberate design of what is there to make for an addicting and replayable experience. FlintHook isn't nearly as difficult as many other rogue-lites on the market, but it doesn't have to be. It's a more casual while still difficult rogue-lite that is ultimately a bit simple but also equally unobjectionable in its well executed design. A good addition to the digital library for any Switch owner for sure~ |
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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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