The final bit of expansion DLC for Sleeping Dogs that I also accessed via the Definitive Edition extras. Similar to Nightmare in North Point, it's a little extra content that isn't really connected to the overall plot super importantly. It's just a little more Sleeping Dogs for you if you hadn't quite had your fill yet~. It took me around 4 or 5 hours to do everything in it.
Year of the Snake actually does canonically take place after the main story. Wei Shen is on thin ice with his superiors after the giant fiasco that took place in the main game, and now he's a beat cop patrolling the streets. That is, until he accidentally uncovers a cult's plans to blow up Hong Kong in an effort to usher in a doomsday prophecy. Officer Wei is once again called into action to help save Hong Kong~. The story is once again nothing special, and it's a little more tame than even Nightmare in North Point was, and that was pretty tame and bare bones. In both mechanics and story, it feels like the Cop Job side-content from the main game but spread out into 4-5 hours. The missions themselves are actually more numerous and varied than the ones in Nightmare, but they don't feel like anything you haven't done before, for the most part. The most interesting thing about it is that you're always a cop now, no undercover stuff. That being the case, you now have special cop stuff like the ability to arrest people or tazer them (basically special melee combat options). It gives the way you play the game a neat new framing, but nothing as interesting or silly as Nightmare was. I know that the canceled sequel for Sleeping Dogs was going to have Wei as a cop working with a criminal, so perhaps this was originally intended as a setup for that idea of a more cop-stuff-focused mission structure. Verdict: Recommended. For another $7, this also is a pretty good value proposition. It feels the least movie-like out of the 3 stories, but it also has a reasonably more large amount of content to do compared to Nightmare, so it's hard for me to recommend one over the other if only could pick one. It's a fine addition to the Definitive Edition's content, and a well-priced bit of add-on content if you only have the base game.
0 Comments
Technically a part of the Definitive Edition, but it was originally sold as an additional bit of DLC, so I'm reviewing it as such (as we usually do here). It's fairly short, but it's a fun, campy bit of spooky fun that took me about 4-ish hours to do all the content in.
Nightmare in North Point is a side story that seems to sorta take place either near the end or after the end of the main game's story, but that has little to no bearing on the actual plot of either. Wei Shen is on a date with Not Ping on the night of the Festival of Hungry Ghosts (basically the dead who were never buried, so who are doomed to wander hell forever with a never-ending hunger). Not Ping is captured by a mysterious ghostly assailant who Wei is totally incapable of hurting, and it's slowly revealed that not only have all of the citizen of North Point been replaced with ghastly possessed corpses, but Jiang Shi (hopping vampire/zombies) and Yaoguai (demonseses) have also come to wreak havoc! With the help of Old Salty Crab and your until-recently-dead friend Vincent, Wei sets out to save his girl and his city from a vengeful ghost! The story is, much like the Zodiac Tournament small DLC in the main game, a very campy fare that is somewhat of an homage to Hong Kong movies of old, just this time horror films instead of action films. The paper talismans you stick on the Jiang Shi to kill them read "巧克力煙肉", which means "chocolate bacon", and the ending to it all is a Thriller reference. Not Ping and especially Old Salty Crab were already some of the most fun side characters in the main game, and the dead enemies of Wei who get revived for it are also a fun little throwback. It doesn't take itself seriously at all, which fits its fairly short run time quite well. Mechanically, the main differences are fairly slim. The DLC only takes place in North Point, the starting area of the game (which is also the best designed, so no problem there, personally), it's always night time, there are no civilians or police, and you can't even earn money, really. The possessed civilians will randomly attack you as you walk/drive around, and Jiang Shi are very tough compared to normal baddies, and given that the main game only has like 3 (technically more like 4) enemy types, it's pretty cool this DLC has two completely new ones. Jiang Shi can grab you for a really horrible melee attack that'll drain your health like no one's business, so you need to quickly press the counter button once they get you if you don't wanna say goodbye to a quarter or even half of your health. Yaoguai start out a lot scarier than they end up being, as they can teleport around you to get out of the way of your attacks. The missions themselves aren't that different from anything in the main game, and the most significant new bit of content are the new enemy types, if I were to really boil it down. Verdict: Recommended. If you have the Definitive Edition of Sleeping Dogs like I do, then this is a no-brainer to check out if you enjoyed the main game. It's more Sleeping Dogs, as fun as it always was, with that same silly sense of humor to it. If you were picking up the DLC by itself, the base price of $7 is pretty fair, I'd say, at least compared to the base game's normal $60 price. I was thinking it'd be like $15 or at least $10, but it's nice to see a DLC pack that has no delusions about how much content it actually has and is priced accordingly. I heard Jim Sterling praising this game a few months back, and I stuck it on my list of games to look out for to try and get cheap during my stay in the States. Luckily for me I was able to find it, and I finally got around to playing it now~. I knew it was a bit like GTA, but other than that I really didn't know much more about it. I was very pleasantly surprised with what I found. It took me around 40 hours to get all the collectibles and do all the missions/jobs/tasks in the main game as well as the two smaller DLCs part of the main story.
Sleeping Dogs is the story of Wei Shen: A cop who was raised in Hong Kong, moved to San Francisco as a young boy, and has now returned to go undercover in the triads just like he did back in San Francisco. The cast is pretty huge, so there sadly isn't a ton of character development into anyone other than Wei and a couple of his friends, but it never felt like it was outright wasting my time with its story. It even has a fair number of good, plot-involved (or as involved as any of the side characters are, anyhow) female characters, which is a nice change of pace for mafia-centric video game stories. One of my personal favorite smaller quests is when you're following one of the girls you're dating for cheating on you, and when you confront her she calls you out on your double standards for sleeping around, storms off, and then that's the end of the mission XD. Another cool thing is that a fair bit of the dialogue is in Cantonese (with some characters speaking entirely in Cantonese), although that does mean that you'll need to read some subtitles (although, also quite cool, you can turn subs off completely if you want). The story is just as much about Wei's decent into making his infiltration personal rather than professional, but it's not a story that has a ton to say, ultimately. It deals with some very interesting themes, especially about how difficult it can be to have grown up between two places (feeling like an ex-pat in your own country), but it sadly never does much with them. There's certainly an aspect of what feels like missed potential with its narrative, but it still succeeds well in being an entertaining gangster drama that is very often funny but also occasionally horrifically brutal and violent with its portrayal of the dangers that a life of crime can lead to (this is not a game for those with weak stomachs). Mechanically, Sleeping Dogs does a good job of fitting into a role between Yakuza and GTA, albeit not a perfect one. It's got driving I found tons of fun, and the missions and side missions that these sorts of games tend to have. It's got a good variety of mission styles that never got boring for me. You can also buy clothes to get certain passive perks (more XP, better damage, higher health), and also some very silly Squenix-themed super outfits if you want to do the game dressed as Adam Jenson X3. The different kinds of XP are interesting, as they reward you for doing different but not mutually exclusive things. You have Face XP (which is gotten for doing non-story missions, generally), but then you have Triad XP and Police XP, and each kind of XP allows for upgrades in entirely different upgrade paths. Triad XP is gotten for getting kills or doing combat in interesting and varied ways, while Police XP actually starts out maxed and you lose from your total when you do non-cop-ish things (like property damage or harming innocents). It incentivizes playing in a safe but brutal kind of way that I found very enjoyable and fits the games themes well. It has a fair bit of gunplay, but the main focus is on an Arkham-style melee combat system. There aren't a ton of enemy types, but the challenge in combat generally comes from just keeping on top of the numbers around you. For people who've played a ton of games with that style of combat, they might find it a bit easy, but it was always just challenging enough for me. The gunplay is a bit more meh. There's a lot more in the later game than the early game as the narrative heats up, but a lot of the guns aren't that interesting to use, and I often found myself just looking for a pistol instead of a shotgun or a rifle because the pistols were so much more accurate and one headshot kills every enemy. Now, this is Hong Kong, so guns themselves are pretty rare to find outside of missions, so you have no inventory with which to hold a gun (you can stow a pistol in your belt, but even something like fast travling via a taxi will take that from you). They tried to balanced their melee-focused combat with their gunplay that a gangster story usually has and didn't quite hit the mark. The gunplay isn't bad, per se, but it's unremarkable to the point that I kinda wish they'd just leaned harder into making the (already reasonably move-rich) melee system more involved. The presentation is quite nice, but you can tell it's a remaster. Hong Kong is pretty big, but pretty obviously not as large as the actual city. The environments are pretty and the remaster has treated them very well. Hong Kong is a colorful, beautiful city that comes alive in a way that looks fantastic for what's effectively an up-res'd last-gen game. What the remaster hasn't treated so well are the character models, whose lip movements especially can look, ironically enough, like a bad English dub at times with how they don't quite seem to sync up with what's being said. The music selection is good for missions, but the car radio stuff is less than stellar (at least from how I can remember enjoying other, similar game's radio selections). What I did LOVE about the music is not only the karaoke minigame (where the voice actor for Wei is actually singing songs like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Take On Me), but they actually made original songs for the game's in-universe pop idol. I love when games go that little extra step to make their worlds feel more alive ^w^ Regarding the two DLCs in the main story, that's Wheels of Fury and The Zodiac Tournament. Wheels of Fury is a fun diversion to get yourself a super car among super cars. It's a really fun set of missions to get through (especially the first one) to get a nearly indestructible, super fast EMP-enabled car with retractable mounted gun turrets XD. The game's aesthetic and presentation already lean into a sort of Hong Kong action movie-style, but The Zodiac Tournament cranks that up to 11. Complete with its own opening credits crawl (totally separate from the main game's) and film-grain effect, it's meant to be a campy, old action movie about a bunch of martial arts experts from around the world all brought to one island to fight for tons of cash by a crazed drunken master! It's mostly just some fairly difficult melee fights, but it rocks its theme so hard that it's a good time despite the relatively unremarkable mission design. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you are a fan of GTA-style open world games, this is absolutely one not to pass up. It was really cool seeing a game in that style that takes place in such a different setting, despite the narrative shortcomings. It's not mechanically perfect, but it's really solid in all the ways that matter. It's a damn shame that we'll almost certainly never get another one, because with some more polishing, Sleeping Dogs could've been an all-time great in the genre instead of just another fantastic entry. I played this for the Racketboy Together Retro theme this month of games that came out in Europe and Japan but not America. I didn't think I had any games that fit that bill, at first, until I remembered that I picked this game up AGES ago (when I first moved into this apartment!). I didn't know a ton about it other than it was a Nintendo thing, and I was kinda surprised to see it was a Monolith Software game as well. This game was first described to me as a mixed bag, and that is a sentiment I agree with, albeit I did not enjoy the contents nearly as much as the person who first told me about it XP. It took me around 8 hours (and that's with one level being replayed) to beat the story mode on normal mode while rescuing every person possible.
This game is about the "one heck of a day" of Raymond Bryce (aka Ray), a former rescue team member who quit when his partner died in a mission gone wrong. He's called back into action by the FBI to stop a terrorist organization known as STORM (yes, really) who have taken hostage a famous seismologist as well as Ray's partner's little sister (who blames Ray for killing her brother). Over the next 24 hours, Ray goes through a flame tornado, a 9.0+ earthquake, a mega tsunami, a hurricane, a massive flood, and a supervolcanic eruption in his mission to save the girl and save AMERICA. It's a super cheesy homage to old disaster and action movies, and the VA isn't half bad (it's exactly good enough to fit the tone of what they're doing). Despite this being the Japanese version of the game, there is only an English dub available, which leads me to believe no Japanese dub exists (it's just Japanese subtitles), so even though you couldn't read the instructions on how to do anything, it's somewhat import-friendly in that way. The narrative is definitely the strongest point in the game and ties the rest of the action together, even if some cutscenes can go on for what feels like ages (in a very Monolith Software way). What IS the rest of the action? Well, that's where the mixed bag's uglier bits start to come full center. Disaster came out in 2008, and as with a lot of early Nintendo-published Wii games, its mechanics are pretty focused around showing off as many Wii gimmicks as possible. As a result, there are four main modes of gameplay: Adventure, Driving, Light Gun, and what I'll just call "Rescue" events. They each deserve their own specific elaborations, so I'll try and give each its dues. - Adventure: This is composed of running around as Ray with no real action happening. It's largely an activity that fills up the spaces in between the other activities and cutscenes. You can run around and look for people to save and boxes to crush for goodies, and you only need to worry about the occasional quicktime event/next activity starting. Occasionally there will be some active danger you need to get through, like getting through fire that'll burn you, or smoke that'll suffocate you, or getting through an area before a timer runs out, but those are all pretty well done. The camera even has an auto mode in addition to re-positioning it behind you, which is a nice feature. The only seriously clunky parts of this are the platforming. Ray can jump, but he's no Super Mario. The jumping and even the running are stiff and do not feel good, although actual platforming sections are mercifully few and far between, not to mention the hardest ones are always optional. The very first level has a fair bit of platforming in it, which gave me a bit of a worry that the whole game would be like that, but it's luckily fairly unrepresentative of the full product. - Driving: Driving is (usually) first-person driving sections where you hold the Wiimote like a steering wheel (because of course you do). The controls are acceptable, and the addition of using A as a handbreak to drift is neat, but that's more or less where the positives end. The driving sections are easily the worst parts of the game, as they don't control as well as they need to, visibility is usually either poor or even non-existent (I'm looking at you tsunami level!!!), and they can be (or at least feel) pretty frustratingly long. These sections are utterly dreadful, and it really sucks that you can't skip them at all. The requirement to have to push through the driving sections is easily the #1 thing that would keep me from recommending this game to someone. - Light Gun: This is one of the game's stronger action elements for sure. Ray very routinely needs to fight STORM soldiers in guided light gun shooting gallery segments done by pointing the Wiimote at the screen. You shoot with B, hide behind cover by holding Z, shake the nunchuk to reload, and even zoom in for better aim and damage by holding C. You can even earn points for doing well at them, and then use those to purchase new guns and upgrade the ones you have. You can even find a special NPC around some maps who will give you tickets to the shooting range that you have access to between levels, and clearing those gives you access to special super weapons! I personally mostly just used the pistols, since they have great range, infinite ammo, and perfectly fine damage if you're doing headshots. That said, I'm sure the other guns are much more useful on hard mode. Some of the boss encounters can drag on a bit and have irksome difficulty spikes (glares at two-jeep battle), but I had a fair bit of fun with this mode even if it can get a bit repetitive after a while. - Rescue Activities: These are activities you do to save people throughout the game, and they can range from ALL sorts of stuff that you'll do with the Wiimote. Pointing it at areas on their bodies to bandage them if they're hurt, pumping it in time with a rhythm to do CPR to them, waving it out at just the right moment to catch their hand to save them from a fall. They're fun diversions, and some of the better quicktime events. Speaking of quicktime events, the game does have a LOT that pop up during Adventure points, but they're alright and work well for the most part. Some seemed very unreasonably temperamental with how I needed to waggle the Wiimote. Gestures that had been totally fine an hour ago were suddenly giving me failed results, and that can get really irritating in things like in the last level, where one of the last sections is a long series of quicktime events you can only miss one or two of before you need to restart the section. The game is thankfully very merciful with checkpoints, but there are still times I wish it were even a little more merciful with them. Had this been a Nintendo game that came out these days (well, for one, they probably wouldn't say "shit" in it), the game would probably have the option to just auto-complete an action segment you failed enough, and it'd be much easier to recommend. But this is a game from 2008, and it doesn't have that, and the experience suffers for it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The campy presentation is fun and silly, but the game's runtime kinda outstays its welcome. The story is also so silly and fluffy that it makes it kinda difficult to get really invested in, and being invested in seeing the narrative to its conclusion is pretty important if you're gonna stick through the worst of the action sequences. This game is just as entertaining as it is frustrating, and it's something I'd only recommend to people who really like the Wii (i.e. motion controls) and have plenty of patience. Add on top of that that most people who read this would have to import the game to play it, and it's really difficult to justify recommending such a mixed experience with such a potentially high barrier to entry. I've always been a big Wario fan, and I'm also quite the WarioWare fan, so this is a game I've had on my radar for a while. But once I saw online that this actually has a ton of Wario VA and little cutscenes in it, I knew I had to pick up the English version (as the Japanese version doesn't have Charles Martinet's Wario in it). It took me 14 hours to finish story mode and clear out the capsule machine (from where you get collectibles). I didn't unlock nearly everything (there are a lot of challenges way too hard for me to try XP), but I certainly got what I wanted out of it, at least for now~
WarioWare Gold IS a new WarioWare game, but it's also largely a compliation of all the previous handheld entries' best games. It's not all the games from the original GBA game, Twisted, and Touched, but it's a LOT of them (over 300, as the back of the box says). There's a story mode with 15 stages, five for each of the three games types (mash (just D-pad and buttons), twist, and touch), and then three final stages that are a mix of the three. These encompass the very silly story of WarioWare Gold. After his most recent heist of a priceless ancient pot, Wario discovers he's totally tapped out for cash. What's his solution? Hold a giant video game tournament and stream it! And what better way to get games for people to play on it (people being you, the player) than to call up his friends and trick them into making games for free yet again? You need to battle your way through his tournament and win that cash/save the day! There are very silly cutscenes before and after each of the stages that feature Wario as well as his friends (9-Volt, Orbulon, Mona, Kat & Ana, and many more). They're silly and adorable in a way I found endlessly charming. Wario's instructional dialogue for how to play each type of game in particular is what caught my eye online and convinced me to buy the English version of this in the first place X3 Other than the main microgames that make up the meat of the game, there are challenge modes as WarioWare often has. Endless gauntlets of each type of game, a gauntlet with only one life, a gauntlet at the highest speed, even a split-screen mode where you're quickly going between the top and bottom screen to do games as fast as you can! There's also a collection of dedicated minigames you can play for score attacks, and a bunch of other weird and interesting features to unlock by using the coins you earn by playing the game on the little gachapon machine. You can get little trading cards that have details of each character in the game, you can unlock a museum of Nintendo toys and consoles with descriptions and pictures dating from their hanafuda cards all the way to the Switch, you can unlock music tracks of famous songs from WarioWare that even have the lyrics to sing along with (for those that have lyrics), and weirdly enough you can even unlock character-themed alarm clocks. You set the timer on it, leave your 3DS on overnight (presumably), and then it makes a big noise in that character's voice, and it won't STOP making that noise until you get up and WIN three of those character's mini-games! Verdict: Highly Recommended. I'm not sure when the next new-new WarioWare game will be, but this is a fantastic love letter to the series and to Nintendo's history as a whole. If you like WarioWare, this is about as close to a "definitive" experience for it as you're gonna get. Easily worth the price of admission for any WarioWare fan~ Puzzle Quest on the original DS is one of my favorite games ever and one I've beaten more times than any other RPG I can think of, having completed it once with each of the original four classes over the years. I was super psyched to see that Puzzle Quest had come to Switch, and then sprung on the remake a month or two ago when I saw it was on sale half-off. I didn't realize at the time that this wasn't a direct port of the old DS and PSP game. It isn't even a complete collection of the PS3/360 versions bundled in with the expansion content released for that version of the game as well. This is the original game, the Plague Lord expansion, as well as a heap of more brand new content to make Puzzle Quest feel more different and alive than ever. The Switch doesn't tell you playtime from an easily accessible place, but I'd reckon it took me at least 40 hours to complete all the game's main and side quests on normal difficulty.
The land has been at peace for many centuries, but the sudden appearance of undead lead the headstrong young knight (the main character) on a quest that quickly goes from simple errand running to saving the whole world from the reincarnation of a death god. The story telling is nothing super special, but the main character is way more of a jerk than I remembered them being. There are two endings to the game, but they rely on whether or not you make one specific choice very early in the game, and it's one you probably had no idea could cascade that far down. There are other binary choices you can make in certain side quests (of which there are VERY many), and this version also removes the ability to save-scum like you could in some older versions, so you're stuck with the choices you make. The presentation is pretty typical Western fantasy tropes, but the cast of side characters isn't without its standout fun additions (like Drog, the super hungry Ogre who is always on the hunt for his next meal, be it animals, rocks, or something beyond our plane of existence XD). The main draw is, as ever, the same thing Puzzle Quest has always had. The meshing of a match-three Bejeweled-style gameplay on top of an RPG game works as well as it always has. You play against an opponent, and the board has four colors of gems you can match for that element of mana, skulls to match to deal damage, stars to match to get EXP, and coins to match for gold. Depending on your character class, you'll learn spells as you level up, and the mana you get in battles can be used to cast those spells (doing everything from board resets, making the enemy lose turns, buffs/debuffs, etc). You have four types of equipment you can equip to give all sorts of passive bonuses (including very important elemental resistances to give possibilities for enemy spells to fizzle). You also have skill points to allocate every level to increase chances for free extra turns, maximum mana pools, wildcard multiplier generation chances, and the rewards of EXP and gold after winning a battle. The game is RNG at its core, but there's a LOT you can do to mess with the game and try and break the systems in ways that fit to how you like to play it. The main systems aren't without their hiccups though. There's a personal citadel that you can build up with the gold you earn to be able to do things like capture enemy units to learn their spells or use them as mounts (to get their spells). You can also search non-city travel nodes for magic runes that you can use to craft your own equipment at your citadel. However, while the spells are often useful, they're SO hard to learn (it requires getting luckier for longer on a match-3 board, trying to hit certain totals of collected magic) that they're hardly worth putting much time into because the spells you learn normally are usually more thane enough. The same goes for the equipment you can craft yourself, as anything really worthwhile will take you AGES to successfully craft, and the equipment you get from the main quest, side quests, or even the stuff that appears in the shop (from a massive, random pool of items) will be more than enough, not to mention often better, than anything you can craft yourself. A lot of the stuff in the shop is REALLY good as well. There's no way I would've ever beaten the Plague Lord content's final boss if I hadn't stumbled across a magic tome that makes you immune to disease, turning that fight from something nearly impossible to a far fairer fight. You will get bogged down as you traverse the map fighting really easy monsters at times, who don't take that long to kill but it's still time taken up, but it's possible to skip them by entering and then abandoning the fight, but it depends on the speed of your mount. It's a mechanic so poorly explained it's taken me until this, my 5th playthrough, to realize it's a thing, and it was by such accident that I thought I'd found a glitch on this port instead of a mechanic I'd never realized before. The additions to the original DS game are twofold: The Plague Lord DLC that was for the old console release, and the entirely new stuff for the Switch version of the game. The Plague Lord DLC is an interesting late-game diversion that is somewhere between pretty par for the course and outright unfair. The disease debuff is REALLY nasty if you don't have a good way to deal with it with your chosen class (as I didn't until I got that particular disease-proofed item). That especially goes for the Plague Lord himself, who is genuinely somewhat of a piss-take with just how absurdly hard he is without that item that makes you immune to disease. The content added for the Switch version is stated to be the Golem Lord quest line, but it's actually a fair bit more than that. Three major quest lines that are in the beginning-to-middle point of the game have been added, including the Golem Lord, on top of some other miscellaneous additions. These largely consist of giving you more enemy variety (my personal favorite are the giant ants), new mounts, as well as more potential companions to recruit from all the new side quests added. One of the two ending paths through the game takes away a lot of your party members, but going through all the new side content will allow you to get back up to a full roster of 8 followers (who don't actually fight in battle with you. They're just passive buffs that trigger against certain enemies), and that was a really nice addition. It fleshes out the world a bit more, particularly in the area around the beginning of the game, and it's a lot of really quality content. Not all of it is perfect, as the Golem Lord quest line in particular has no level requirements to begin it, meaning that you can start fighting opponents who are WAY too strong for you very close to the beginning of the game. Hardly a cardinal sin, but something that could easily discourage a newer player, and given how well paced and power-gated the rest of the game's content is, it's really weird that it's so poorly done in this one instance. The presentation is all around just fine. The art has a nice hand-drawn style to it, even if the characters/enemies who were added in the expansions, particularly the stuff made for the Switch port, are REALLY obvious to pick out, as their art style is clearly different from the original's, but it still all fits the same general aesthetic well. The music is fine, but I had a podcast on for most of the game, as you can only listen to the same few tracks so many times before it gets a bit dull in a game this long. The performance is fine, although the game does have loading hiccups during battle from now and then, and one time the game did soft-crash on me just as a fight ended (but it did save that I'd beaten the fight, so all I lost was the time it took me to hop back into the game). Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's still Puzzle Quest as good as it ever was. If you didn't like it before, this is absolutely not going to win you over, but if you want a good, low-stress time waster that's really easy to hop in and out of on your Switch, you're gonna get a lot of mileage out of your $15 if you go with Puzzle Quest. |
Categories
All
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
|