I'd been waiting years for my brother and I to finish Hyrule Warriors, assuming we'd finish it together, but given that he'll be buying the DX version of the game on Switch soon, I asked if it was okay if I finished it myself and he of course said yes XD . So I spent the last four or so days doing the last six missions in the main story, the Cia's Tales DLC levels, and unlocking the extra weapons and characters locked behind the main Adventure Mode. I was worried after giving my review of Fire Emblem Warriors that perhaps I was looking back on Hyrule Warriors with rose-tinted glasses, but I am so glad that I was wrong with that worry. Hyrule Warriors is still one of the best Musou games Omega Force has ever put out, and I've had so much fun over the past 20 or so hours of playing it re-confirming it that to myself.
There are only some 15 characters in the main game, not counting the 15 or so more through the DLC, but with the extra weapons characters can get, those weapons are effectively extra characters themselves, in a way (at least given how many characters only have one weapon while characters like Link have like seven). But with so many characters they feel SO different! Only two buttons, a heavy attack and a light attack, and usually similar chains of both, but the ways that each character and weapon have a different cadence to how their attacks flow, how some have attacks carry them forward with momentum, charge up a power bar, or even overheat their abilities, make every character and weapon feel special. I'd look at a character and be like, "Oh I don't really remember this character" or "I don't remember liking this character" and I'd discover eventually "WOAH this character plays SO crazy! I love it!" So many of the final levels on hard mode were giving me SUCH Dynasty Warriors 3 vibes, and in the best way. Big open levels connected through different corridors, but with different objectives and items of importance on each of them that each level is a giant exercise in strategy on how best to complete it. Particularly in the Adventure Mode, trying to get those A-ranks, trying for the most efficient path through a level to get those time-stamps or get to those heart containers or skulltulas in time is just SO much fun. Levels in Hyrule Warriors aren't obvious paths that feel like work to just reach the end of, they feel like an exercise in defeating an enemy force, crafty in its own ways and keeping precious loot from you! Verdict: Highly recommended. This is far and away my favorite Musou game. The co-op between the two screens is ingenious, the level design is great, and the each character is special, awesome fun to play in their own way. The fan-service is excellently done, and the voiced asides between levels detailing the military strategy taken by characters from Legend of Zelda never cease to be funny X3 . The DX version on Switch has all the extra Adventure Mode maps and more than doubles the character roster, so even though it doesn't have the nice co-op mode the Wii U version has, I'd still recommend all that in one easy place over the Wii U version despite the Wii U version's cheap base price combined with the DLC being very similarly priced.
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After my brother and I LOVED playing through Hyrule Warriors co-op so much, I of course was super psyched when Nintendo announced another Omega Force Musou game. I'm not the biggest Fire Emblem fan in the world, but two of the three games represented in this game are ones I've played through, so I thought why not give it a go. The end result of what I got isn't so much a bad game as a disappointing game. FE Warriors is a neat spin on the FE formula into a Musou game, but has far more of the lazier trappings of Omega Force's other Musou games, spin-off or otherwise, and it ends up feeling like an overall downgrade of the fantastic Hyrule Warriors from years prior. The game took me about 15 hours playing through on hard mode and doing about a dozen challenge missions.
The Good: We'll start with the good things, and they mostly fall under presentation. The visuals look very pretty, which each of the 18 characters in the main game looking very faithful to their art style present in the most recent rendition of their games. The finishing moves all look very flashy and nice as well, and even though the framerate drags a little in co-op, the performance is never to the point where it impacts gameplay. The music is also very good, with this probably being one of my favorite renditions of the Fire Emblem main theme ever done. The overall gameplay is very much the kind of flair Musou games have had for a long time. Fairly linear maps choke-pointed with bases that you need to capture, and objectives for missions usually revolving around defeating certain bad guys and/or capturing certain bases. You've got weapons and materials you find in each battle, and weapons have different passives and slots for passives and star-rankings that you can fuse weapons together just like in other Musou games. Very familiar to Hyrule Warriors, materials can also be used to perform passive upgrades on each character as well as give them more combos to use. The Fire Emblem spin on things is how the weapon triangle is used. Just like in FE, there is a weapon triangle where axes beat spears, spears beat swords, and swords beat axes. The three other weapon types present in the game are bows, manatekes, and magic, but they don't really have any particular rock-paper-scissors elements to their uses as magic's weapon triangle is not used in this game, so they act more like an "other" that isn't really good or better (other than magic being bad against pegasus knights and bows like 2-shotting them). Using a superior weapon means you can do a LOT more damage as well as you enemy being unable to block, so it's worth keeping track of. You also have the ability to pick 4 (of a possible 8 friendly) units per battle that you can use the D-pad to switch between on the fly using the D-pad. You can also pair up units as supports of one another just like in Awakening or Fates for a stat boost as well as being able to toggle between your partner unit if they're one of the playable 4. You can also bring up a big map of the battle field and order units around to do specific tasks like healing a friendly unit, attacking an enemy unit, or guarding a location. This means you can strategically put your 4 playable characters around the map in a way that makes best sense for the strategy you're using to approach that level. That character changing mechanic is probably the best and most significant innovation that this Musou game brings to the table. The mission design is a mixed bag with a few quite cool and unique missions but a lot of really standard ones. The one that sticks out for me is when you have to keep Xandar and Ryoma from killing one another by taking a fort from each of their teams in quick succession. Past that, there really aren't many missions that make the character-swapping mechanic anything more than a neat convenience or gimmick. No outright bad missions or annoying platforming sections in them like in Dragon Quest Musou, but really nothing to write home about. The Bad: This brings us on to what I really didn't like about this game, and that's a fair bit. We'll start with the characters. Despite the large roster of 18 (+3 unlockable through challenge mode) compared to Hyrule Warriors' 9 (+4 through the challenge mode), the weapon triangle seems to have brought with it a real stagnation in character design. Characters like the twin characters that are part of the story of this game are more or less direct clones of one another, along with Chrom and Lucina obviously being near clones of one another. But beyond that, every character's combo list looks nearly identical. While Hyrule Warriors didn't exactly have the most diverse combo system in the world, most characters/weapons felt and played very differently from one another and even often had different dodge timings. Characters of the same class (i.e. weapon and mounted/unmounted) play very very similarly, and that really makes the large roster feel a lot less meaningful. Without spending AGES In history mode (tons of super repetitive challenge missions that take ages) to unlock a couple more characters, you have 8 sword users (one mounted), 3 axe users (One wyvern mounted, one horse mounted), 3 spear users (all pegasus knights), 3 magic users (one mounted), 2 archers, and one Manakete. This makes it feel more like there are 10 or 11 characters rather than 18 just because so many play so similarly to one another (the pegasus knights are SUPER similar to one another). There are very few direct clones, but if you don't like the weird floaty way the pegasus knights handle, for example, then you're SOL, because there are no other spear users in this game. While the combat is very satisfyingly flashy, this reduction in the variety is a textbook Omega Force tactic to give the impression of more content without actually providing it in a meaningful sense. The same goes for the way this game's story missions handle its maps. There are 20 missions in the main story, but just about all of them use the Omega Force tactic of using each map twice, but your starting point is different or you can only access half of the map this time. The maps are similar enough in design just by gameplay necessity (compared to say, Dynasty Warriors 3 where each map was so open and non-linear that they felt VERY different) that the small variety isn't a huge problem, but it's something worth mentioning either way. Next up on the Omega Force nonsense list is "NPC" characters. There are 4 friendly NPC characters (Navarre from OG FE, Owain from Awakening, and Niles and Oboro from Fates) who are completely finished and in the game but arbitrarily not playable at all. Where Hyrule Warriors put characters like this behind its adventure mode to unlock, FE Warriors decides to sell you these characters in its DLC packs. Not a huge problem, but something pretty cynical and shitty on the part of Omega Force to dangle characters you can't have in front of you just to demand more cash if you want to play them. There are then 4 boss characters that are totally unplayable by any means (3 mages and a sword user). That's not to say that there won't be a patch like Hyrule Warriors got to just make the boss characters playable for free, but it's really weird that something like that STILL hasn't happened where it was one of the first big patches that HW got, while we still haven't seen anything like that for FEW that has released the last of its DLC packs a good few months ago. The story is pretty standard fare for a Musou crossover game, but at the same time pretty bad for a Fire Emblem game. It's really dull and I almost always wanted to skip it, although I never did. SO much dialogue realestate is spent just repeating the same stuff you already know or reaffirming the same things. The "plot twist" was one I saw coming immediately, but one they never actually quite explain how it happened, in retrospect. Again, the story isn't very interesting, so I didn't really care too much. The English voice acting is absolutely dire (and not 90's fun dire, just modern really bland and boring dire), but the Japanese voice acting is a free download on the eShop and is far, far better. The last thing I'll mention is the pretty rough difficulty curve. It is one of the smoother ones than other Musou games I've played (it's nowhere near as all over the place as Dragon Quest Musou, for example), but it does have a few missions that really stand out as being far harder than others. The game still has a problem of being a bit too easy overall with most "harder" sections mostly being down to the enemies you need to kill using a weapon you can't get leverage over and/or being insanely fat and taking ages to kill. Verdict: Not Recommended. Omega Force and Nintendo really dropped the ball on this one. Honestly, given that it has co-op, it isn't quite as hard to recommend as Dragon Quest Musou, but nonetheless I still have a very hard time recommending this when there are so many better Musou games out there, especially Hyrule Warriors that now has a port on both systems this game is available on for about the same price. It isn't a bad game by any means, but it is such a mediocre Musou game that I really can't recommend it to anyone but the staunchest fans of the genre and Fire Emblem or for someone who is just manically hungry for more Musou on their Switch or 3DS after playing Hyrule Warriors to absolute completion. Uurnog is the latest game by Niffalis, the same guy who made Within a Deep Forest and the Knytt games. That said, this is far less ambient exploration like those two games and much more Metroidvania like Knytt Underground was. It's a free game they made for the Humble Store, and it effectively serves as a several hour long demo for the $15 game Uurnog Uurnlimited which is (or at least appears to be) an entirely different game. For absolutely free, this is a great game to put 2 or 3 hours into for an afternoon
Though it's kind of a Metroidvania, you don't really get upgrades past initially unlocking the ability to store items. Instead it's more when you unlock certain items and how you unlock different areas to get money from. The actual gameplay is a little bit like Mario 2 (you can pick plants up out of the ground to get items from them and throw them at stuff) but is far more Lyle in Cube Sector as far as the larger gameplay mechanics and artistic aesthetic goes. Your goal is to find one of each animal around the world and take them back to your safe room. The safe room is where you spawn and respawn and is also where you send items back to because that room never changes while all other areas reset when you die. Slowly finding more keys to unlock doors to new areas is fun, and there's even a small puzzle that unlocks you a kind of second ending, but it took me maybe 2 more whole minutes than beating the normal game, so it's not terribly labor intensive and can easily be done just hopping back in once you complete the animal collection. Verdict: Recommended. It's not a must-play game by any means, but for a free game it is an excellently designed game that plays great and looks wonderful. It's a good way to spend a sleepy morning if you can't sleep like I had this morning Xp I was kinda so-so about eventually picking this game up until I had two friends recommend it to me in the span of the same week. I'd picked it up on sale on PSN a month or so ago and decided to try it out. It's certianly frustrating at times, but the 20+ hours I put into this in 2 and a bit days should speak for itself just how hooked this game got me
The Witness is a game all about exploring an island in first person and solving mazes, like pen-and-paper mazes you'd see in a children's activity book. It uses that concept as far as it can go with all sorts of interesting twists on just how a maze could be solved or different things your solution may have to incorporate beyond simply finding the way from the start to the end. Once you've grasped the rules to each kind of modifier, the puzzles are just so engaging that they're hard to put down. That said, one of the biggest problems I have with the game is just how the game teaches you how to solve each modifier. There are a number of areas around the island that teach you how to do each modifier, and also have progressively harder puzzles using several modifiers. The main issue I had is that some of these areas are very poorly signposted and quite easy to miss. There was one area in particular I didn't even realize had puzzles in it until I'd nearly beaten the entire rest of the game and had to look up how to solve the modifier that area teaches you how to solve. This game would've seriously benefited from some better signposting, because there is one area in particular where it looks like it's teaching you how to do one variety of puzzle, as it resembles previous teaching areas, but it's so hard that I just thought I was too dumb to figure it out. It turns out that isn't actually the area you learn that, but I had no real reason to believe otherwise. The island itself is created with an astonishing amount of care and detail. There are environmental puzzles all over the place that don't even relate to the main "quest," they're just there to find and solve. As a result, every aspect of the world has a very dliberate and meticulously crafted nature to it, and it shines through every aspect of the world's beauty. Almost like seeing the patterns that chemicals make themselves into to make up the nature of the real world, there really is a great feeling of discovery as you notice another maze-line to solve as you look at a shrub or pile of metal. This did result in me getting SO enthused in finding them, though, that for about a day after I beat it I was still looking for mazes everywhere in real life, which while funny to me was apparently more concerning to people I told about it The game has a kind of a story, but it's very safely and easily ignored. A lot of it is in the form of audio logs you find around the island as well as movie you can unlock to watch by solving certain very difficult puzzles, but most of them are just unrelated readings from philosophers or thinkers about aspects of life. Given that this came from the same guy who made Braid back in 2008, the odd, pretentious story really isn't too far from his MO. Verdict: Recommended. The only reason this isn't very recommended is because of the price tag of $40. While this game really could be enjoyed by someone of just about any skill level who enjoys puzzles, not everyone will like this game, and $40 is a really steep price of entry for something you may well not even enjoy the main concept of or get so frustrated with how impenetrable some puzzles are meant to be taught to you that you put the game down and don't come back (as I very nearly did). It's on sale on PSN until the 22nd for $16, which I think is a much easier entry price to handle, though. It's not a perfect game, but it's a very well designed puzzle game and there really isn't anything else like it at this level of presentation. The first Legend of Grimrock was a game that I learned about mostly through accident when I saw it on a Youtuber's channel a little after it came out. I picked it up and ended up loving it way more than I thought I could love a game like that. I was extatic when I heard a sequel was coming out, so as I usually do, I proceeded to wait years to even pick it up and then longer to even give it a go All the talk around this month's FPDC theme for TR gave me all the motivation I needed to finally give it a go, and I'm so glad I did! Grimrock 2 is everything about the first game cranked up a few notches. I played on normal difficulty with ironman saving (couldn't save other than at save points, so no quick save/quick load) and it took me around 23 hours.
Legend of Grimrock is a series of first person dungeon crawlers very much in homage to games like Lands of Lore. Grid-based, first person movement is the name of the game as you kite around monsters, hunt walls for secret buttons, and solve brain-bending puzzles in an effort to escape the island you've been marooned on. I really only have experience in the genre with the Grimrock games, so this review will basically only talk about them in relation to one another. The main thing that separates Grimrock 2 from 1 is that the game is far less linear because of the island setting. Grimrock 1 took place entirely inside a giant tower you were descending, and had a very linear map design as a result. Even if you backtracked a little at times, you were always going towards the goal of finding the real exit to that particular floor. Grimrock 2 has a giant island to explore where you're hunting for gems of power to unlock the giant castle in the middle. You can go to almost anywhere on the island as soon as you're done with the starting area, so the game has a very non-linear feel to it in comparison to its predecessor. This led to me spending hours just following the next little clue, the next passageway, a new piece of loot. The expanded, non-linear map really gave the game a flair of exploration the previous game lacked, which I really loved. The only down-side to this is that, at least on normal mode, there were some areas I'd go to and get fucking destroyed by the monsters in while some I'd go to and have no problem at all. Some of that I think was down to thematic reasons (of course the pyramid has mummies, even though they suck), but it definitely felt like the enemy balance wasn't exactly perfect. I never felt like I was in an unwinnable situation though. It just took getting slightly more crafty with how I handled enemies in that area, as even the weaker enemies always had stronger, scarier friends not too far behind XD You make a party of four characters of five different races each with their own racial perks, pick some starting abilities for them, and give them a class. The cool thing about Grimrock 2 is that your class only very slightly restricts what you can actually do in the game, as it really only influences the permanent stat boosts you get when you level up as well as some other small passives (like how only alchemists can have herbs grow in their inventory, or only farmers level up by eating food instead of fighting monsters). Any character can level up any skill as easier as any other, so any class can effectively wield any equipment if you decide to level them that way. Want a wizard who can wear heavy armor? You can do that! A berserker who can cast spells? As long as he has a wand to use, he can do that! Most weapons also have a special move that can be used by holding down the button for them, so even non-caster characters get a chance to have mana as a valuable resource now The puzzles in this game are damn hard. There was only one, maybe two puzzles I had to look up in the original Grimrock, but there were at least half a dozen or more I had to for this game. They're all online, often with hints followed by the actual solution, which was nice, but they really cranked up the amount of vague hints you need to decipher or environmental clues you gotta gather to understand how to get through an area Xp Verdict: Highly Recommended. Legend of Grimrock was a fantastic homage to old FPDC's, and the sequel expands on its mechanics in ideas in just about only good ways. If you like FPDC's, you will probably love this game. If you just like RPG's or adventure games, you'll probably like this game as well. It's a fantastic modern entry to the genre that I can't recommend well enough Deadbolt is a game I didn't even know existed until a few days ago when I got a Steam coupon for it for owning Risk of Rain. Deadbolt is another game by the Risk of Rain guys, so they gave out coupons to everyone who owned either for the respective other game, and it certainly worked on me this time . It's a fun but short game that was well worth the $5 I paid for it.
Deadbolt Is like a more action-focused Gunpoint, so it's a 2D, stealth-based action game but with a far heavier emphasis on combat and gunplay than Gunpoint (ironically enough). The plot is something like you're a kind of grim reaper-type hunting down unruly undeads for some unnamed candle-god thing, but it's not terribly important. Hunting the monsters is still pretty fun though, and it gives excuses for enemy types like vampires that come back to life until you break their phylacteries. All the guns don't feel exactly balanced, as I ended up using the scythe for most of it, but even then the game almost became a kind of puzzle on how I could manipulate the AI to allow me to use the scythe for like every level . You can't jump, but you can turn to smoke to dash through vents really quick, which makes outmaneuvering your enemies something that's always a fun trick. You DO die in one hit (generally) though, so you can't get tooo crazy with how you move There are a dozen or so guns and like half a dozen melee weapons as well as a dozen or so enemy types, but the enemies can't pick up weapons lying around like you can. Most melee weapons can be thrown, as you aim both your gun and the melee throw with your mouse pointer and guns have an accuracy that is variable depending on how far you're aiming and how much you're moving. It's a really fun little system and even though I died a fair bit, going through the enemies again was always fun. You earn "souls" as a currency by completing achievements and beating missions, but all they do is unlock more weapons that you can start missions with. They don't unlock hard-passives or things like that, and given that weapons don't have much ammo, they really don't affect the game that much, for better or worse. There are 30 or so missions, and I beat the game in about 4 or 5 hours, but it's apparently completable in under an hour if you're really good. Mission types aren't super varried, usually just either accessing "information" (i.e. an interaction point) often in a difficult place or eliminating all the enemies. Occasionally there's a gimmick like doing it in a certain amount of time or eliminating a boss character, but the bosses are either literally normal enemies but different looking or taken out just as easily as a normal enemy. It's more than serviceable for the fun combat and stealth stuff though. Verdict: Recommended. This is a fun stealth-action game you can knock out in an evening, and the game grades you on stuff like time, accuracy, and head shots, so if you're someone who likes 5-staring things, this game has you covered for replaying levels in the most clever ways you can suss out. Hearthstone's new solo-content for its new expansion came out the other day, and I enjoyed the last one so much that I had to dive right into this one. It took me WAY shorter a time to complete it, like a tenth or an eighth of what Dungeon Run took me, mostly because there's a weird combo of much more new content than the last one but also far less actual objectives to shoot for. Monster Hunt is ultimately a kind of easy-mode for the AI-adventure X Arena Draft that Dungeon Run started, and I'm A-okay with that. There's nothing wrong with a more accessible version of an already great fun game mode
The "more" of Monster Hunt are the new classes that you play within it. Instead of making drafts of decks of the standard 9 classes like in Dungeon Run, Monster Hunt has 4 all new custom classes that you play within it with their own hero powers and deck-draft archetypes. A Tracker who can Discover a class card previously used that match, a Cannoneer who has an indestructible cannon on the board he can fire to damage enemies in front of it, a Houndmaster who can summon a 1/1 hound with Rush, and a Time-Tinker who can reset to the beginning of her turn for free once-per-turn. This leads to very cool deck varieties that you just won't find in other parts of the game, as there are even passive treasures that are unique to each class, like permanently buffing the cannoneer's cannon shots or allowing the tracker to use her hero power for 1 mana twice a turn. Each one has their own "nemesis" final boss AI that will always be their 8th boss until you beat Monster Hunt with them for the first time, and each class character has a bunch of fun dialogue with the other bosses and a lot with their nemesis. Beat the hunt with all four of them and you unlock a final battle with the leader of the monsters. That final boss is really hard, but you don't need to go through any bosses to get to it. You can retry it as much as you like easily until you beat it to unlock the new card-back for it (which is thankfully far less ugly than the Dungeon Run card-back). The only bad things I could really say about Monster Hunt are things that really aren't inherently bad. While there are another 40 bosses to fight, they are on the whole far, far easier than any in Dungeon Run. You can win almost every fight you go up against as long as you play well and have been trying to make a deck that works. I beat two of the classes' challenges on my first try, and the other two on their second and third runs respectively. On that note, the classes themselves don't feel terribly balanced to one another, even though that doesn't really matter as none of the game isn't against AI. Tracker is clearly the best though, followed closely by Cannoneer with Houndmaster a distant 4th, so the first wins on some are far more irritating than others. And again, because it's pretty easy, it's not terribly long, but it's really different from the last one, easier and more accessible, and also free, so it's hard to complain about it legitimately, tbh. Verdict: Recommended. If Dungeon Run was too frustratingly unfair for you to tolerate (and believe me, it was frustrating bullshit XD), Monster Hunt is a much more satisfyingly easy romp. If you like the silliness of the Hearthstone solo adventures and the challenge of deck-building in arena and want an easier version of Dungeon Run, this is a great addition to the Hearthstone solo adventure content |
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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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