I really like Wolfenstein The New Order. It's one of my favorite FPS I've ever played with its big, meaty guns, fast-paced shooting, and alt-history Nazi-brutalizing story. All things I really enjoy. I'd held off on getting the stand-alone expansion for this long because I'd heard it was basically a re-hash of the first's biggest points but not quite as good. Having just beaten the first game twice in a row, I held off on getting TOB because I thought more of the same would probably burn me out. Having waited these 3 or so years to play it, it's played more or less exactly as I'd heard it did. I played on hard mode and it took me just about 10 hours.
The Guns: The shooting and gameplay is effectively identical to New Order. You can dash, lean to see stuff, dual wield most guns, all familiar stuff. There are some new weapons in the form of a standard rifle (not the crazy moon laser ones from New Order), a kind of "emergency" grenade pistol, a pipe melee weapon you can use like a bat, and a sawed off shotgun. Unlike New Order, however, no guns in Old Blood have an alt-fire mode. None of the new weapons are that special though. You can mow down enemies like nobody's business with the sniper rifle, because they love standing still so you can get headshots, so even someone like me who can't aim worth crap can even take down Nazi's like a champ. The pipe is pretty worthless though, as is the sawed-off, as Nazi's can melee you so quickly that you can never get in close to use it against them, and the sawed-off shotgun is basically just a gimmick weapon that's 100% worse than the New Order shotgun that it doesn't replace. It was just something to look cool in the trailer, as far as I can tell. The grenade pistol is neat, but ammo is so limited for it that I often just conserved it so much that I forgot I even had it XP With the silenced pistol and the pipe melee weapons, this game has more of a stealth-emphasis than New Order did, but I don't think it was really to the game's strengths. By having so many encounters so heavily encourage stealth (as so many have commanders that will summon TONS of reinforcements if you're seen if they're not silently taken out), it really takes away a lot of the frantic, fun running around from cover to cover that made New Order so much fun for me. A lot of this game's elements don't really gel well with the engine that it's building off of, and the level design is just one of them. The New Enemies: The other element of the game that really hampers enjoyment would be the new enemy type. The heavily armored Super Soldiers appear very briefly in New Order, but they're a regularly encountered enemy in this. They're a neat stealth-gimmick in the first level when you're unarmed, but later on when they're patrolling, they make a non-stealth approach basically suicide. They're usually patrolling an area with commanders about, so encountering them directly is mostly just a great way to die as they must first be shot near the head until they collapse, special melee'd to break off their chest, and then shot in the chest until they explode. Given the giant gattling gun they carry which can easily mince you, they're really best saved until last. The prevalence of Super Soldiers really makes the stealth approach the only viable one in most situations, especially in the late game, which is why I believe Old Blood was designed as a whole with a stealthy approach in mind and it's not just a case of me being dumb and doing it in a not fun way . The game just isn't designed around its strengths, and it really suffers for it. The other new enemy type is zombies, which while neat the first time are just so generally non-threatening that they REALLY feel like a gimmick. A quick shot with any gun to the head will kill them, and they never really appear in great enough numbers to pose any kind of threat worth taking seriously like the Nazis with guns are. Zombies occasionally have guns, but they move so much more slowly and aim so badly that they're only slightly more lethal than the normal unarmed ones. The zombies being so nonthreatening but only appearing mostly in the second half of the game is why the first 4 chapters took me about 5 hours to get through while the next 4 took me about half as long. Sure, they make it more action-y, but it isn't in a way that's really interesting or better when compared with the game this one directly compares itself to. I will say though, the final boss fight fucking rocks, and it's definitely the high point of the game. The Story: The game is very similar to New Order in story-beats as well. You go into a suicide mission, you get captured, your friend you go in with is killed by a horrible bad guy, you go kill that bad guy, you find the resistance, etc, etc. The main problem Old Blood has is its length though. You don't have time to get to know or care about any of these characters to really give enough of a shit about them. The only exception are the first big bad guy and the friend you go in with, who are both fun, good characters, but they're both death halfway through the game and all you're left with are the resistance members you barely interact with and a bad guy who is nowhere near as compelling as the first (although the game REALLY wants you to think that she is). That combined with how quickly the last half of the levels can be completed just give the second half of the game a weird, unfinished feeling compared to the first half. Verdict: Not Recommended. If you're a big fan of the way New Order plays and you NEED more Wolfenstein a like that, then this really isn't much of a game for you, because I'm that guy and I didn't really like it. If you like FPS games in general and you want something a bit different, then this may interest you. It's not as good as the first one. If anything, it succeeds at making New Order's mechanics feel mediocre and rushed. But it's far from a bad game, and it's far from unenjoyable. This is just another game that doesn't really do much anything that is both unique and actually an improvement on the games its directly comparing itself to (i.e. New Order). Anything it does well isn't done as well (or done just about as well) as New Order, and most anything unique it does isn't actually an improvement. Definitely not a bad pick-up if you can get it in the bundle for PS4 and Xbone that has it bundled with New Order (as it costs basically exactly the same as New Order stand-alone), but New Order is just SUCH a better game that it's really hard for me to recommend Old Blood for the price it still asks.
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I remember this game being talked about a fair bit back when it came out as a really good "Nindie" title on Switch that was a loving tribute to Legend of Zelda games from the LTTP-era. It's on sale for like 50% off for Nintendo's post-E3 sale right now, so I decided to pick it up. While a very competent game, I don't think Blossom Tales is really for someone like me who's beaten all the other 2D top-down Zelda games already. I hunted around for goodies as much as I could but still apparently missed quite a few (or at least a couple, if there aren't actually 2 complete rows of hearts), and it took me about 8.5 hours to beat. While I did enjoy my time with the game to a point, I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret buying it at least a little.
Blossom Tales' narrative conceit is that it's a grandpa telling a story to his grandchildren. The game is very much in the style of a LTTP or GBC Zelda game, and doesn't so much wear its inspiration on its sleeve as it has it tattooed on its forehead, as it even opens with the grandpa wanting to tell them the story of the little boy in green who saved a kingdom beginning with H-, but the kids have heard it so many times he has to think of another story. The humor is silly, but the narrative is fairly spread apart enough that it's not really a super big part of the game. You really rarely have to talk people if you don't want to, but the grandpa's asides explain further goals or introduce bosses. There are twice where the kids will actually argue about what the story will be (like what kind of enemy you're about to fight) and you, the player, get to pick which one of them is right, but it only happens twice, so it's not really a mechanic/gimmick the game takes much advantage of. The dungeon design is super duper simple. Basically every dungeon of the four in the game are just a series of rooms, sometimes branching off of a main room, full of either corridors full of traps, self-contained puzzle rooms, or monster arenas, and you have to complete that to get to the next room. You'll eventually come across a switch that will unlock the way forward in the aforementioned main room. Rinse and repeat. There will be a mini-boss and eventually a boss in there somewhere, but all 4 dungeons in the game follow that same formula. Again, it's competently done and can be quite fun, but it's hard to get excited about after playing so many actual LoZ games that do this so much better. The music is very heavily Zelda-inspired, one town in particular very clearly opening with the first few bars of Zelda's Lullaby (I'm sure other places do that too but I don't know Zelda songs well enough to tell :P ), but there wasn't anything particularly great other than the blacksmith theme you barely ever hear because you're in the blacksmith for maybe a total of 20 seconds in the whole game. I found the graphical style fairly ugly, to be honest. The monster design, particularly the boss design, is pretty good, but the world felt fairly generic (albeit nice looking) and the NPC characters and player character all had oddly simplistic design compared to the rest of the world and it just didn't look nice to me at all. The combat and item use can be pretty annoying as well. Unlike the GBA or GBC Zelda games where you can slash with impunity and it's always the same slash, BT has a 3-step slash where first it's to the right, then the left, and then a roundhouse swing and there is a slight pause in the momentum of the swings. This combined with the often huge enemy hordes you're fighting actually makes the combat fairly frustrating, compared to LoZ, as you just can't help but get hit because you can't kill stuff fast enough (most enemies take 3 hits to kill). Trying to fight stuff with the sword was almost always more trouble than it was worth, especially because your sub-weapons are SO much better. Your items like bombs, arrows, and boomerang (among others) all just use a constantly regenerating "energy" so you don't need to refill them at a shop ever, but they also do like 3-times as much damage at your sword, which basically makes the sword your last line of defense and something you basically never want to use. This is made pretty annoying at how you can't actually sort the sub-weapon menu in any way, but that's a very minor annoyance. The combat may be frustrating at times (particularly before you have very good sub-weapons), but the game is actually really easy. It's one of the easiest games in this style I've played. The damage you take is super forgiving, and on top of that the game just spits defense, healing, and revive items at you quite a lot. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Blossom Tales really isn't a bad game, but it was not the game for me. If you just like the exploration, dungeon trekking, and simple combat of Zelda, you'll probably quite like this game despite the fact that it ever really presents a challenge. If you wanted to get a non-gamer or a kid into Zelda games, this is a great first-step into the genre with how relatively easy it is compared to most Zelda games. If you're someone who loves 2D Zelda, has played them all, and is looking for a new interesting or challenging take on the formula, however, Blossom Tales will very likely leave you quite disappointed even at the sale price going on at the moment. I bought this game back when I beat BOXBOY! last year and really enjoyed it. I had some time while waiting for a doctor's appointment earlier today, and decided to bring along my 3DS with me and fired up BOXBOXBOY! to play. Like 8 or so hours of playing later, I was done with a game that is a significant improvement on its original. I did a "perfect" on every stage, so I basically 100%'d the game, but it isn't that hard. I needed like 11 or 12 hints, and used the wizard costume to get an extra block to get like two of the crowns because I absolutely couldn't figure out how to get them XP
Fast mentioned in the Slack chat that this game is basically like a Warehouse Cleaner (Soukoban games) and a platformer had a baby, and that isn't exactly inaccurate. It's a puzzle platformer by HAL, and it just drips with all of Kirby's charm but in a much more subdued and relaxed package. The presentation, from the graphics to the music to the simple design of Qbby and his friends are all simple and easy to distinguish while very aesthetically pleasing. If BOXBOY! is the single-player version of Portal 2, then BOXBOXBOY! is the co-op mode of Portal 2, where the addition of a second set or portals makes the potential puzzles far more complex and interesting. As the title suggests, Qbby can now generate two sets of boxes instead of just one, and that makes the puzzles SO much more fiendish than the first game had. The first game felt almost like work for a lot of the puzzles because they were so simple. BOXBOXBOY!'s puzzles will really test how you think with boxes. :P Verdict: Highly Recommended. BOXBOXBOY! is a fantastic sequel to an already well designed game. It only does a simple change to the overall formula, but the level design is done in such a way that it feels like a totally new experience and in only positive ways. For its $5 downloadable price tag on 3DS, it's a very easy recommendation for me to be a time-killer when you have some down time, or something to go through on a day off I started going through the GBA version of this about a month ago, and then realized that I really wanted to play a different port of it on a TV, because the 4-button controls of the GBA were driving me crazy :P . Flake had brought to my attention a week or so earlier that you could play PSP games on the TV through a PSTV, so I fumbled through getting PSN cash onto my Japanese PSN account and bought the PSP remake of Tales of Phantasia on the Japanese PSN store, and boy was it ever worth it! I played through it in Japanese, on normal mode, and with only slight use of a guide to get past some of the less self-explanatory puzzles, it took me just about 36.5 hours. This is my 8th game completed in the main Tales series, so I have finally completed half of them :D
I'm unsure on if there's a translation patch available for the ROM or anything, but the PSP ports (a slight variation of this version is packed into the PSP remake of ToP's GBA sequel) are definitely the ways I'd most highly recommend playing through ToP. Fully voiced main-story dialogue really brought some emotion and life to the story that I'd really not felt in the GBA version. Quality of life features that were added after the SFC version like 8-directional movement and a lower encounter rate are also present. The music is also beautiful, as I believe it was taken from the PS1 port. The music and overworld as well as much of the battle sprites were taken from the PS1 version, with a lot of the in-town designs taken from the SFC version. However, most of the item placement is more like that of the PS1 version (from what I can tell from guides online XP). The 3D overworld is a bit hideous compared to the how pretty the 2D towns and dungeons, but it's far from a deal-breaker, as you spend far more time in towns and dungeons than in the overworld. Playing through it on a PS3 controller was way more comfortable than using the PSP or GBA controls ever would've been, and I never had any problems controlling it on the PS3. The controls and battle system are very Tales but with some notable differences from later versions of the fairly familiar way the 2D games operate their battle system aside from the fact that only the main character can be played. The most notable differences are firstly that you cannot select your target and that "manual" control mode isn't a default control option. You just sorta need to point yourself at what enemies you're trying to fight, but the PS1's battle sprites are so big and well detailed compared to earlier versions that I never really had a problem with this. This does, however, also mean that you can't have a life-bar on any enemy unless you're actively using a Lens on them, which is annoying but not unique to this game (although it's something I would've liked to see fixed in an enhanced port like this :/ ). It's also worth mentioning that even though this version still has the battles freeze while most spells are happening, the port of ToP found packed in with the remake of the sequel also on PSP allows the battles to keep moving during spells, which will likely make them move much faster but also I imagine would make them more difficult. The semi-auto mode of control in this game has your main character running forward and back trying to automatically do doges and sprints, when mostly what it does is mean you're letting off pressure allowing the enemy to regain its composure to start attacking you back. You can only stop this by putting your character control on manual mode, but that can only be done while wearing the "Technical Ring" accessory, so you need to sacrifice an accessory slot to actually not play in a way that will kill you. There are some times where playing in semi-auto is more beneficial just because the game handles upward/aerial attacks so much better than you, but it's still a really stupid design decision. They did move the technical ring much farther forward in the game (you get it like 10-ish hours in instead of right before the end of the game), but that's another thing like how Lenses work that is just a stupid design choice from the original that really had no reason not to be updated for a modern release. The game controls just fine and the annoyances can certainly be operated around, but that doesn't negate that fact that those annoyances are still there. The story is a bit rough, but the voice acting really helps carry it despite the fact that it feels disjointed and slightly unfinished at times. Given that the story was adapted from an unreleased book the creator had originally written, that's not to be entirely unexpected, but it's still an issue. Things like the relationships between the main party members and how sympathetic/unsympathetic the main villain may or may not be are done adequately but still feel rushed or incomplete at times, particularly the details surrounding the main villain's motivations and the party's speculations about them. Daos is far from the worst villain the series has had, and is more than serviceable even if it feels like he probably should've been given more screentime, and while the main cast are almost entirely archetypes the Tales series would come back to again and again, they're done well enough not to feel boring just as the other Tales games tend to portray them. Verdict: Recommended. It's far from the best Tales game, but it's also very far from the worst. It shows its age and its being first in the series through annoyances in its combat system and gaps in its story, but they're far from deal-breaking. This is a fantastic port of Tales of Phantasia, but if you like retro ARPG's then this is definitely one to check out no matter what port you're playing I had my friend whom I play Magicka 2 over with yesterday. We never really planned on beating Magicka 2, but we just eventually started playing just to see how hard we could get on BANANAS?! (very hard) mode, and then 6 or 7 hours later we'd actually done it! I never thought we'd actually be able to beat that game on that mode, but we actually did! I still can't believe it XD
God DAMN, that game is a mean son of a bitch on very hard mode. I don't think it's just because we had two people, but there were SO many really hard enemies SO much earlier than they should've been otherwise, and the fact the regen some monsters had was so fucking crazy didn't help things. We actually got WAY better at imbuing our melee weapons with elements, and the Mallet weapon imbued with something like fire or steam really wrecks shit up, because the beam weapons, even a lot of concentrated beams, really just aren't reliable enough on a DPS or "not getting interrupted"-level to actually be effective when you have the very hard mode difficulty modifiers on (50% health, slower Magicks regen, 300% friendly fire damage, crazy enemy health regen and 150% enemy health). Verdict: (still) Highly Recommended. This game is still awesome. One of my favorite multiplayer action games I've ever played. I could and probably will beat it again someday with a friend. It's just so damn good. I go into more detail in my other reviews exactly how, so I'm gonna leave it a bit short here, but this game really is SO fucking well designed, and it's a damn shame that Magicka 2 never got any of the big story DLC's like Magicka 1 did. I pre-ordered the special edition of this game back when it came out some seven or so years, and I really couldn't get into it. I thought the pacing was really slow, the tons of tutorializing and controls were frustrating, and the dungeons and story weren't really grabbing me. I really liked playing as Ghirahim in Hyrule Warriors last week, so I decided to finally give this game another shot. I still had a lot of the same problems with it, truth be told, but I clearly managed to actually finish it this time. As far as my overall feelings about the game go, I think Flake put it best in the Slack chat best when he said, "Skyward Sword would have benefited from being a 20 hour game." I did damn near everything (although apparently missed 5 heart pieces), and it took me about 36 hours, but there honestly isn't really that much side content to do compared to the proper game content. At the most, six hours of that was side-quests, and that's a liberal estimate.
The issue that most people immediately notice in Skyward Sword is the glacial pacing, and it is a problem the whole game. Outside of the perhaps the Triforce piece hunt in Wind Waker (which I didn't mind too much), this is probably the only Zelda game I can think of where the game feels actively padded with a ton of uninteresting, frustrating, and/or repetitive content. The second and third imprisoned fights, getting the water dragon's healing water, and escorting Scrapper up the volcano were just all miserable and I did not enjoy them at all. Then you have stuff like the entire Hero's Song section, which the Thunder Dragon part was fairly fun of, that still feels really unnecessary and only added to pad out the game's clock. That's just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, and that stuff takes up at least a third of the game's run-time. All that on top of the flying, which is the boring sailing parts of Wind Waker but now the game forces you to pay full attention to it all the time to actually get where you're going, just makes the game feel like such a slog so frequently. Twilight Princess was a game I thought outstayed its welcome with its length, but Skyward Sword commits that sin on top of not actually doing it with new areas more often than not For all the relentless tutorializing this game does, where it feels the need to remind you that your Wiimote's batteries are running low, what a boss door looks like, telling you what you're doing yet again when you walk to a new location, reminding you what all 36 materials and bugs are every time you pick them up between play sessions, this game just does not give you a good enough explanation of how to actually play it. From rolling bombs being unclear, to constantly having to realign your cursor to aim any ranged weapon, even the main selling point of the game, the sword combat, I found to be strangely temperamental and not explained very well. Ghirahim, the first boss fight, is so incredibly unintuitive with the way he uses his hand to block your attacks where every enemy up until that point has used a sword or had some obvious dividing line down where you're supposed to slash them. It makes for an incredibly difficult and frustrating boss fight when it's just the first boss of the game, and yet this is trying to teach you not to telegraph your attacks. Ghirahim is the only enemy who uses such a small defensive point to block attacks with, so presenting him in this way is only unintuitive but needlessly confusing. You don't even need to not telegraph your attacks. If you lazily drag your hand from one side to the other, he just doesn't block from that angle you've now moved to, meaning not telegraphing your attacks isn't what you need to do to beat him at all, you just need to know how to beat him. Stacked on top of how I could only get Link to do the slashes I wanted him to do around 60% of the time, and the sword combat was just pushing me away from the game the entire time I was playing it. On a more positive note, the game looks and sounds beautiful. It's a bit pixely, sure, but the art style makes the world, the enemies, the bosses, the NPC's all look charming and beautiful in their own ways. The music as well is some of the best the series had had until Breath of the Wild (or so I've heard, having not played it yet). As annoying as the Bokoblins are to fight, they and the other enemies have such charming, well-animated designs that I can't help but like them. The dungeon designs are also quite good, if still fairly typical and fairly linear Zelda dungeons. The one inspired by Buddhism (the 4th one, I think) was definitely my favorite on a design level, even though I think it was my least favorite to play through The story is also one of the best in the series up to that point. Groose, Zelda, Impa, and (all the problems I have with how his "fop" character archetype is portrayed aside) Ghirahim are some of the best characters the series has ever had, and the twists the story takes with them are nearly all ones I genuinely didn't see coming. Groose has at least 4 or 5 different versions of his theme for different points in the story and his character arc, and that attention to detail is something I couldn't help but love. I have fairly mixed feelings about the crafting and items in the game. I thought the pouch-system was fairly clever, and the way you had to choose between more shields, medals, and bottles made for some really good opportunity cost when it came to preparing for missions, even if shield destruction was never a problem I encountered. I really didn't like how you could never get permanent upgrades for your bomb-bag and arrow quiver and such, mostly because it made Batreaux's side-quest (even if I liked the concept of how it was presented, with more side-quests tangentially contributing towards one instead of one long trading sequence) feel totally pointless because the bigger wallets he gives you (instead of say, a bigger bomb bag or quiver) are totally useless because you absolutely never need that much money for anything. I overall liked the equipment upgrading for better arrows and bug net and such. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is probably the closest a game I've played has come as close to being Not Recommended in quite a while. I mean, if I did damn near everything like I did, it must've been doing something right, but this game has some big caveats to enjoying it. Unless you really like motion controls or are willing to look past them, you really won't enjoy this game. This game deserves the controversial place it holds in the fandom because it genuinely has a lot of serious problems in its design as well as a heap of brilliant innovations. If you can find it for cheap, it's worth checking out at the very least. |
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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
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