The only thing I really play Herfstone for anymore is the solo content because the writing is usually funny enough to make me laugh and the AI opponents you get are often fun puzzles to work through. Blizzard's latest Solo Adventure, The Boomsday Project, is literally all puzzles! At an entry price of completely free, as the last two solo adventures have been, I thought why not dip into it. I did them all without a guide and it took me like 10 or 12 hours.
The Boomsday Project is over 120 single-board puzzles to solve between four different objectives: Lethal, Mirror, Boardclear, and Survival. Lethal has you trying to deplete your opponent's health to 0, Mirror is mirroring their board exactly, Boardclear is wiping all minions from the board, and Survival is getting above a certain threshold of health. They're all just 1 turn, and the board's status, your starting hand, and starting mana are always the same. There's even a handy "reset" button right where the "end turn" button usually is for convenience. Given each puzzle is just a turn, a fair few of them are pretty dead easy, but some of them had me absolutely stumped for upward of an hour they were so hard. They're really cleverly designed puzzles, and especially the final part of each 4 segments had me crazy stumped for at least one of their sections. The writing isn't thaaat funny this time around, but I thought the puzzles more than made up for that. That said, John Dimaggio voices the main antagonist of the adventure, so that certainly makes up for it a little X3 Verdict: Recommended. For the cost of entry, they're really fun TCG logic puzzles that don't require even owning any cards in the game to try out. Playing through it doesn't get you anything but a card back, but it's fun enough that I didn't care. Definitely worth a look if you like logic puzzles that don't eat up too much time (usually XP).
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I backed this game on Kickstarter back in June of 2014, and given that there haven't been suuuuper frequent updates (but frequent enough), it was one I'd often forgotten I'd backed. After how much La-Mulana 2 totally blew me away a couple weeks ago, I'd been expecting this game, whenever it finally came out, to be an okay Metroidvania. I woke up this morning to see that I had the backer key for the PS4/Vita/PS3 versions bundle in my email inbox, and I redeemed it and started to play. Some 9-ish hours later I had beaten the final final boss and was watching the credits roll after nearly 100%-ing the game. This game caught me TOTALLY off guard with how damn good it was, and it was compelling and fun enough to have me complete the whole thing in one sitting XD
Timespinner is a Metroidvania set in a fantasy/sci-fi world where an inter-galactic empire is trying to steal your tribe's time travel device for their own evil machinations. You escape through the time/space portal to their homeworld to start your plans for revenge. In the process, you end up traveling between the current world and 1000 years in the past to try and right wrongs and weaken the evil empire to the point where you can take down the emperor. It's a fairly basic story on the outset, but it is more than it appears on the surface. If you're someone who hates political commentary or inclusivity in your games, you're going to hate Timespinner, because it has a lot of both done quite well. The story is full of commentary on the evils of fascism paralleled against commentary on the duality of justice as well as what being a hero really has to do with sacrifice. Granted their quests are more or less entirely optional, it has a well-fleshed out cast of characters of all colors and orientations who I thought were written really well. Hunting down the world-building is also more or less entirely optional, but I was so interested to see the history of the worlds involved and how my time traveling was affecting them that I hunted down every last one I could. The spritework is beautiful, the music is always appropriate and very atmospheric, and the presentation as a whole was an absolute joy for me. The game is also a great joy to play! This game wears its inspiration on its sleeve, as basically all the UI and even the mini-map are straight out of any DS Castlevania title, but quite frankly if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and this game uses those fundamentals very well. The gameplay is like if Symphony of the Night had a baby with Order of Ecclesia, and the difficulty is somewhere in between. All they buttons are even rebindable :D The Symphony of the Night DNA here is largely found in the way the map has many warps, as well as the present and past timeline maps serving as a kind of mirror. It's nowhere as massive as SOTN's map, but more akin to Harmony of Disonance's front-and-back castle design (although much better, imo, as that game is such a bitch to get around in because you don't have warps). The game definitely isn't as stupid easy as SOTN, but it's nowhere near as hard as OoE either. One of my main complaints, to be honest, is that the game locks hard mode from the start, and it really would've been nice to be able to pick a harder mode from the start. The Order of Ecclesia DNA comes in how your character fights. Your combat, instead of monster souls, is based around magical orbs you find. Each orb has a certain main attack quality to it that can be equipped in one or both hands (although each hand are the same button and you attack in a fairly standard combo style, unlike OoE, iirc), with each main attack having a certain attack speed associated with it. You keep getting orbs throughout the entire game, and I was always finding new ways to experiment with them. A big help to how you can experiment with them has to do with how they can all also be used to infuse power (but not consume the orb) into a necklace for a special mana-consuming charge ability, or into a ring for a special passive ability. You can use the trigger buttons to swap between 3 different sets of them, and although there were about only 4 or 5 different attacks I really favored through my playthrough, there are like 15+ different orbs to find in the game. The most unique mechanic to the game itself quite fittingly has to do with time, and this is a time-stop ability you can use whenever you have enough "sand" for it. You get more sand whenever you hit an enemy or break a passing candle stick. Sand is separate from mana, which they don't call mana but call "aura", and it can be REALLY helpful to beat a lot of the harder parts of the game with. That said, I'm so used to my Metroidvanias not having an ability like that, and the game plays so well during the fighitng without using it, I basically never used it for combat XD . I used it most during the puzzles that require it, as there are several areas you can get a nice treasure in a little early if you stop time just right to use an enemy as a platform to get to. It's a neat gimmick, but it's a very unintrusive and easily ignoreable one. It also has RPG elements as many recent Metroidvanias do, but I wouldn't say all of them land quite so well. You have your standard level ups, as you get stronger for killing things, as well as the standard Metroidvania hard stat-increase items to expand your max sand, as well as your max aura or HP outside of your level-ups. The main things I took issue with are the somewhat Secret of Mana-style way that your orbs, that is your weapons, also have levels independent of your character. Use a weapon more, and it gets more powerful The power differences between them aren't THAT noticeable, but if you're going for the harder optional bosses or doing hard mode, sticking to one thing that works really well is really in your best interest, and this kind of thing discourages experimenting significantly with new orbs you find. The last neat feature of this game are familiars you can find, kinda like SOTN. Better than SOTN, though, is that not only can your famliars fight for you, but a second player can hop in and control them as a flying invincible battle partner! It's super easy hop-in-hop-out local multiplayer, and I really appreciate when a game makes an effort to do that kind of thing, especially when it's done this well :D . The only thing about the familiars is that, like the weapons, they level up as you use them, so it kinda discourages trying out the new ones you get (even though there are only 6 or 7, and they're often very well hidden after the first one you can't miss). They also get only 1XP per monster killed, and they have to have landed a hit on that monster for the kill to count towards their XP, leading to often just waiting for them to bop the monster before you mince it if you're trying to level up a new familiar to see how you gel with it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This game was a delightful surprise and something I just didn't want to end. It gives most of the Igavanias a run for their money with its quality, and if you like Metroidvanias it simply cannot be overlooked. It's currently on PSN and Steam and apparently coming to 3DS later this year, but they're also apparently looking at other possible port options, so I wouldn't discount it coming to Switch eventually if you can wait that long for a game this good~ ;3 I had not one but TWO gaming friends over as a bit of a surprise last night, and since they're my friends who both like playing Magicka 2, we tried out Magicka 1 at the insistence of my friend I attempted to play it with last time. This review is going to act like more of an addendum to my other Magicka review, because the game still has all the mechanical and crashing problems that it's always had.
The thing I thought most worth mentioning about this DLC was that when I tried it before solo, it was basically impossible. However with two other people (only one of which really knew what she was doing, mind you), absolutely PLOWED through this thing in less than an hour before the game could even crash on us once. We only ever got one game over even! I don't know why I didn't see it before, but Magicka 1 is very much a game with the Borderlands 2 problem. The game is really REALLY heavily designed around the assumption that you will always be playing co-op. As a result, there are some bosses that are effectively impossible to beat solo because they assume that the player will have another player to kite their attention while another player smashes them in the face. Otherwise the boss has virtually no downtime and is a far, FAR more difficult fight to get through. Granted, Magicka is still a buggy mess, so the more players you have online make it that many more times likely to crash in the middle of the stage while you're playing it because the netcode also sucks. Verdict: (still) Hesitantly Recommended. I hung out with a friend I hadn't seen in a while the other day and we had some extra time, so we played Switch in one of the lounge buildings at my old college. We ended up having so much fun we played through it from beginning to end XD
Snipper-Clips was the poster-boy first-party game for the Switch's eShop at the time of the system's launch, and there's a good reason for that. It's a great game! You and another person (up to 4 people) each control a little paper shape. You turn yourself and cut the other's shape by overlapping it with your own to solve puzzles like manipulating liquids or filling in outlines. It's only a couple hours long, but it's tons of fun to play and replay with other people :D Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you have anyone you wanna play games with, gamer or non-gamer, Snipper-Clips is a game simple and slow enough that anyone can enjoy regardless of skill level. It takes some brain power, so it's probably best not to play it with a little-little kid, but if they can figure out how to move the little character, then they're bound to have a good time ^w^ Yooka-Laylee was a game I backed the Kickstarter for and was fairly excited about, but then, as I do with all the Kickstarter games I back, wasn't quite in the mood to play it when it came out :P . It was toted as a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by many of the same team who made the originals, but it received VERY mixed reviews upon release (like, not just middling, usually either stunning or condemning ones). I finally got around to beating it yesterday, and it was about as mediocre as I'd heard it was. I went into it with an open mind, very ready to enjoy it, but while the writing is often quite funny and the world and character designs are aesthetically right on the money, there are some core design decisions that are just fundamentally bad. It took me around 11 hours to beat getting juuust over 100 Pagies. I wanted to get them all at first, but I didn't even play the final world because I was so ready for the game to just be over XP
The game controls just fine. I never had any problems getting Yooka and Laylee to go where I wanted them to or go where I wanted them to go because of how they move. The bigger problem here is the camera and world design. The levels have a very unpolished feel to them that comes mostly from how basically ALL terrain is climbable if it has an edge, meaning you can go tons of places, sometimes entirely around puzzles, with even the slightest look-around. This is absolutely ruined at the end of the game where they give you the power of nearly unrestricted anywhere-flying, like Banjo-Kazooie had in its early prototypes, but they couldn't get balanced properly so they took out, and it ruins this game just like it would've ruined that one. The engine feels very ill-designed for a game like this with how caught on the tight scenery the camera can get and how easily scale-able EVERYTHING you can see is. The way the flying effectively destroys the rest of the game's jumping puzzles is just a cherry on the sundae on top of the other worst design choice: World expansion. Instead of having 10 worlds, Yooka-Laylee has 5 that you expand after first unlocking them. Roughly half of the collectibles in each world are stuck behind this expansion that expands the map and makes everything bigger, but this mechanic just plain sucks. New quills (the notes of this games) or Pagies will be sometimes where the old world already existed, meaning you effectively need to retrace your steps around the ENTIRE world to make sure you haven't missed anything. Put this on top of how the first 3 worlds have several areas you absolutely can't get to without moves from later worlds, and combine that with the flying you get after world 4 before world 5, and you have a game that just feels absurdly unbalanced in its puzzles and design at times. If you play the puzzles as intended they're often good fun, but the game makes it so easy to just go around the intended solution that it almost feels like a waste of time to do that. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Yooka-Laylee is a fine game, but it really never gets exceptional on any respect that would make it very easily recommendable. It's basically all of Rare's collectathon's on the N64 boiled down into a mish-mash of good flair and questionable design choices, so while you could certainly enjoy it if you really like those kinds of games, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of Yooka-Laylee. Otherwise, you're probably better off playing any of Rare's old collectathons and re-enjoying them, because even DK 64 has more polish in its world design than Yooka-Laylee. Watching a let's play of La-Mulana was one of my first introductions to gaming on the internet outside of the AVGN. When I just happened to look at Kickstarter, one of the last times I ever did, and saw a post of La-Mulana 2, I thought it had to be a joke. It turned out to be completely legit, and 3 years later we finally got it, right at the beginning of this August. I waited to play it not just because I wanted to wait for bugs to be polished out (of which there were apparently very few; mostly balance changes from the looks of things), but to wait for other people to beat it and post guides about it because, knowing La-Mulana 1, I knew there was no way that I was gonna be able to solve the whole sequel by myself. I was very right! After 27 hours of playing, I finally conceded and started using the wiki. EVEN THEN, it took me a little over 45 hours to completely beat the game. I played through on hard mode (effectively meaning many more late game enemies in earlier areas and all bosses have double health and do double or triple damage), and got all the achievements (to unlock the fun extra outfits :D ) except for beating every boss without using subweapons (because as in the first game, you'd have to be absolutely insanely good at the game to do that on even normal mode :P ).
La-Mulana is a 2D action adventure game in the mold of old MSX games such as Castlevania and Galius Maze (mostly Galius Maze). It's all about exploring a giant series of ruins, reading slabs and talking to natives to learn about puzzles, and fighting tough enemies and tougher bosses. It's a serious combination of mental and reflex power, and the sequel is largely more of the same with some significant changes and upgrades. The most obvious change, of course, is a whole new set of ruins to explore full of all new puzzles, enemies, and bosses to conquer! But there are more nuanced changes as well, of course. Mechanically, there are some immediately noticeable changes from the original. The game has been brought into the 21st century by not only allowing you to duck but also to jump onto ladders! (You can't jump off them though). Although the weapons, subweapons, and even nearly all the extra passive items are taken from the first game, these additions make the game play very differently from the first (especially once you get the item that enhances "weapon technique" so you swing faster but also up and down-facing slashes). The way enemies and pots respawn has also been slightly changed to be both proximity and time based, so if you leave a room and immediately re-enter it, the enemies won't necessarily respawn like they did in the first game. The other REALLY nice improvement from the first game is that you can buy an item fairly early on that gives all mini-boss and boss enemies a health bar at the top of the screen, and that thing is SO nice to have XD . The presentation has also received a significant upgrade. The remake of the original freeware game (which was made to look like an MSX game) was originally designed for Wiiware, and the graphics look it. La-Mulana 2's spritework is a significant upgrade on every front, and the higher resolution really shows its strengths here. The music is all good, but I would say that it's biggest fault is constantly reminding me of the music in the first game which I have a lot more nostalgia for. All great music: I just like the first game's music more :P . The story is a LOT more lore-based now than the first game. Where the first game revolved more around a slow discovery of the truth of the ruins, this game kinda follows something similar, but the cat is already out of the bag in regards to the twist from the first game. This means that, at least as far as I can remember from the first game, there are a fair few more puzzles that focus on talking to an NPC to get a task, doing the task, and reporting back to that NPC once it's done. Speaking of that, the overall comparison of this game to the first, to me, is that this is the superior game. The original game had a lot of holdovers from the original's remake, mostly in its puzzles and map design, that had tried to recreate more vindictive elements of older MSX adventure games. La-Mulana 2 is certainly a longer game, but it's also just far more fun to play to me because it is just generally not as mean and cryptic. La-Mulana 1, at least the opening, is far more about taking things section-by-section, one level at a time, so things get very confusing when later on puzzles span the entire length of the ruins and you need to readjust your brain completely. 2 starts expanding things immediately out of the gate, and also gives you the App to record NPC dialogue and signs you read right at the starting village, so you can immediately start taking note of suspicious or confusing things you read to use in later puzzles. That's not to say that La-Mulana 2 is an easy game by any measure (the hard mode only affects combat, not puzzles, and puzzles were what I got stuck on time and again XP ). The 2nd and 3rd bosses were SO hard I thought I was sequence breaking (nope, they were just really hard :P ). That's like nearly ALL of La-Mulana 1 though, so I'd say the boss design is just generally more fun and less vindictive than the first, even if a good portion of that may just be that they have a health bar so you can see how well you're doing against them. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If mind-bending puzzles and tough action adventure combat and platforming are your jam, you cannot go wrong with La-Mulana 2. The game does spoil the plot of the first game more or less entirely, but none of its puzzles. As the first game's plot is such a backseat to the bosses and puzzles, this is an excellent primer to the original game's remake if you've ever thought of playing that. Even if you never beat it, I got more than enough out of the first 27 hours I could actually figure out myself to justify the 15 bucks I spent on it. This is a sequel that is largely more of the same on the surface, but all the more nuanced improvements make this an overall fantastic improvement on the original :D I had my friend whom I play tons of co-op games with over over the weekend, so we played some games and finished some others, one of them being BBT. I have beaten it before on a friend's 360, but now we finally finished the co-op story mode on my own machine XP
It's a puzzle platformer by the guys who brought you Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers, and it knocks it out of the park yet again. Great sense of humor, fun art style, fantastic music, all around great level design make this an absolute joy to play with a friend. The controls aren't the most complex thing in the world, but they can take some getting used to, but it handles that well with clever level design and a gradual difficulty curve. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The other game we finished was the first Magicka. We've beaten Magicka 2 together 3 times across all three difficulties, so I thought we should try playing the first one together. It's still the co-optional friendly-fire murder-fest of fun the second game is, thankfully :D . However, while Magicka 2 is a little shorter and has far less add-on content than its predecessor, Magicka 1 is riddled with a score of other problems that make it a horrible bastard to play at times XP
First of all, this game runs like absolute trash given how long it's been out and that this is the only platform it's on. It crashed on us at least one every hour or two, and with a game as difficult and with fairly unforgiving checkpoints as Magicka, that was a real ball-buster. Some of the DLC's don't even have save-points in them, meaning a crash resets your ENTIRE PROGRESS. The crashing isn't so much a problem in the main campaign, but in the DLC's that's absolutely inexcusable. If your game is prone to crashing (as Magicka 1 has been since launch), give your add-on content hard save points! It wasn't even a problem with net-code (which Magicka 1 also has such a problem with they made fun of it in the promo-song/trailer they announced the sequel with), because we were playing local co-op, but that is a WHOLE other barrel of problems. Magicka 1 was designed completely with PC in mind. You need 8-keys with your left hand (Q, W, E, R, A, S, D, and F) just to assign your 8 elements to cast spells, and this isn't counting aiming spells with the mouse and your several other keyboard buttons to do different kinds of spells (AOE, beam, imbue weapon, etc). Needless to say, playing it on a controller would be pretty hard (although Magicka 2 found a great solution to this, thank god). Magicka 1 does have controller support, but the controller support is so god damn terrible that it may as well not have. Magicka 2 uses the 4-face buttons (using a shoulder button to toggle between the first and second 4 elements) to assign elements so you can cast spells as quickly as if you were pressing buttons on a keyboard. Magicka 1 has the absolutely insane method of doing Street Fighter-style quarter-circle movements on the right joystick to assign spell elements (up and counter-clockwise, up and clockwise, left and counter-clockwise, etc), which works about as well as you think it does for a game that assumes you can cast spells in less than a second. This makes the person with the keyboard carry the team as hard as possible the whole game, because the inherent slowness in the controller controls makes it so your other player(s) is fundamentally worse than you. Like, it IS nice that it's there, but it is so ridiculously unusable that it may as well not be :P . Magnifying these other problems is the difficulty, which from being a bit too hard due to retroactive "balancing." (The game was complained at first for being too easy, and then all the enemies' stats were given a hard buff by the devs to shut people up without actually changing the encounters at all, meaning some come off as a bit more than a little unfair). It's still fun, but some encounters really come off as unfair with how many enemies you're expected to kill between checkpoints. One or two bosses in particular come off as CRAZY difficult without knowing very specific ways to kill them (which you are given no indication of) as a result of them being so beefed up. Multiple difficulty options really would've done Magicka a lot of good because there's really no reason they can't be here. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you're a BIG fan of Magicka 2 like me, then this will probably give you some enjoyment on the writing alone, but it just runs so badly that it's really hard to recommend given that Magicka 2 and Nine Parchments are so much better designed. Magicka 1 is notable and important for the kind of game it brought about and better imitators it gave rise to, but it really hasn't aged very well as a result and often ends up being more frustrating than fun. |
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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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