And so ends my playthrough of the five games I got in the TinyBuild bundle. This one is a mobile puzzle game that got ported to Steam (as is so common these days), but it plays perfectly fine with a mouse. It made for a great thing to occupy my mind with while I was catching up on some podcasts ^w^ . It's got like 150 levels that took me like 6 or so hours to get through trying my damdest to get 3 stars on every mission (which I sadly could not XP), but I had a lot of fun~. It's also worth noting that the game basically has no text in it, and all the tutorials and cutscenes are communicated only through progressions of pictures, so while the theme is a bit dark, ability to read shouldn't stop someone from being able to enjoy it :)
The premise of Divide by Sheep is that Death is lonely and wants friends, so he goes up to the upper world to kill(?) sheep, wolves, and pigs to get him some fluffy animal friends to play with. Using some sheep, wolf, and pig ferrymen, you need to guide the correct number of each respective animal in the correct order to pass each stage, and fulfilling one of the missions will earn you a star (do all 3 to get 3 stars). You also occasionally need to kill a certain amount of animals to fill up Death's own ferry with souls, or feed a certain amount of any animal to a giant monster, and this makes for a total of 5 types of mission goals for each level. The theme is certainly macabre, but the art style is very cutesy and it has a nice sense of humor to it. There's even a set of lasers that sheep can go through to get cut in half (and take up twice as much space as they used to), but if you get two halves on the ferry, they'll tape the sheep back together with a big bit of duct tape around his midsection XD There are a certain number of islands in a 3 x 3 pattern that you can hop the animals between, but they can only go to adjacent islands, not all 9 islands are always present, and not every island is the same size. If you have 4 sheep on a 6-square island going to an adjacent 3-square island, one of those sheep is gonna die. You also have mechanics like how pigs always push off sheep of an island they're going to (even if space is otherwise free) and how wolves will eat sheep and pigs that they land with but then be unable to move again themselves. It's quite a complex puzzle game that I enjoyed quite a lot ^w^ Verdict: Recommended. It's a well designed puzzle game that gives quite a good amount of content for the $5 price tag. The only thing I'd say is that you're probably better off getting it on mobile unless you can get it for crazy cheap on Steam and you're okay playing it on a mouse. The levels are short enough that they're perfect to play during small breaks or if you just wanna kill time. A good little mobile game, but nothing that's setting the world on fire with ingenuity.
0 Comments
Even after playing through the main game twice, I was SO psyched to keep getting more I hopped right into the DLC sequel. The sequel is quite different in structure, storytelling nuances, and even gameplay mechanics, I thought it was a fantastic follow-up that does a good job of giving a conclusion to the story-line set up in the first game. It's worth noting that this game is a fair bit shorter than the first, taking me only 3-ish hours, so if you're someone who evaluates games by a pure cost/price ratio, the DLC may feel like a rip-off at $5 compared to the main game's $10. I certainly thought the game was worth the cost because the gameplay is good fun and the story is very well done. If the main game were $15 and the DLC were $10, I'd have some more reservations, but the whole package for $15 I think is a perfectly fair deal for an indie game.
ANYWAY, the plot of The Joyful (the previous game having the original subtitle "The Painful") follows the young girl from the first game, Buddy, now that she is on her own. In order to make sure no one ever messes with her again, she sets off on a quest in the Eastern part of Olathe (so no revisiting old areas) to murder everyone on "The List," a giant wall between East and West Olathe with the names of the most powerful warlords on it. However, despite Buddy's quest being explicitly focused on violence where Brad's was implicitly focused on it, Buddy's quest has a much different dynamic because her quest's goal is so different in goal, and because of who she is. Both stories are commentaries on the cycle of abuse, and Buddy's is used to comment upon Brad just as hers is used to comment upon his. The first big mechanical change, which isn't really emphasized, is that while Joy is still a mechanic, Buddy isn't an addict from the start and there is no narrative consequence for taking it. This was likely done because, due to Buddy's big secret that she's the only girl in the world, she can't trust anyone for pretty obvious reasons. Buddy is on her own for basically the entire story, which makes the way she has to fight a lot harder, so the auto-crits that Joy gives you are really valuable to not die all the time. This said, I played through it assuming taking Joy would change the ending so I didn't take any, and I thought the game was really fantastically challenging in how I had to manage health resources and single-use weapon items. Although if you want something a lot less challenging, Joy is kind of a must-use thing. Buddy being on her own is made more interesting in battle because of the new gameplay mechanics introduced to how she does her best attacks. For starters, she uses TP, not MP like Brad does, so she needs to deal and take damage to use her special attacks. From the start, Buddy can use a skill to inflict bleed effects by doing a small mini-game a bit like Elite Beat Agents by pressing the action button again as the circle closing in hits the middle circle. It takes a lot of timing to get down, but getting good at it is really important because you NEED to inflict as much damage as possible. Where the first game does a good job to showing the player how important status effects like stun, fall, poison, and others can be, Buddy's quest really forces the player to use bleed, poison, fluster, and Buddy's other statuses she can inflict to get any possible edge she can on her opponents. I really loved how much more engaging these mechanical shifts made the combat in this game, and I really didn't mind the lack of other party members as a result of it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's an evolution from the first in more ways than one, but it pulls it off brilliantly. Really the only bad thing I can say about it is that it's a bit too short because I just kept wanting more game to play when it was all done XD . If you like LISA, you will likely really enjoy LISA: The Joyful as well. I had heard this game was a pretty heavy game with a weird whimsy to how it handles things, and that's pretty close to the truth. LISA is like if Mad Max were a JRPG with an Earthbound-like whimsy to it. It's a really fun, albeit a little unconventional, JRPG that I enjoyed a lot ^w^. I beat it twice. Once on normal mode with the "Joyful" ending, and then again on Pain Mode. The first time through took me about 13 hours, and the 2nd took me about 7 hours.
Pain mode can be activated (a bit too easily, imo) by picking a choice at the beginning of the game, but it's not exactly hard mode. It just adds a couple extra (and not very hard) mini-bosses as well as making each save point only usable once. It adds an interesting level of planning to the game as well as challenge of just "don't die, lol", but it honestly doesn't change the overall game enough to realllly warrant it for most people, and the 1-use save points make it too hard to make it really recommendable to ever do on your first playthrough. The story of LISA has you in the shoes of Brad, a man living in the post-apocalyptic land of Olathe after some catastrophe has led to the disappearance of all women and a society of only men dreading their eventual extinction. Fates change when Brad happens upon an infant lying in a field, and upon bringing it back to his camp of friends discovers that it is indeed a baby girl. Brad decides to raise the child as his own adopted daughter, as his friends help keep her a secret living in a cave below their tent. Years pass as she grows into adolescence in total secret. Then one day, Brad returns to see that his friends have been murdered and the girl has been stolen away, and Brad sets off on a mission of revenge to get her back. This is an extreme simplification of these events, but LISA's story takes a series of turns that get the story to a pretty dark place. I'm not quite sure I'd compare it to Undertale (not just because Undertale came out about a year later), as the path of the story is linear and doesn't have that level of choice-making, but by the end of the game you will certainly begin to question whether Brad is/has been doing the right thing. I'm leaving it really vague as to not to spoil, but I personally really enjoyed the story and how it deals with themes of 'what it really means to sacrifice for someone else' as well as 'when justice becomes injustice.' I do feel it's worth specifying very clearly, though, that LISA deals implicitly and/or explicitly with themes of violence, emotional/sexual abuse, and sexual violence, so if those aren't the kinds of things you can handle, playing through LISA is probably not a good choice for you. The gameplay is fairly standard JRPG, but not that typical in some ways. The game has very few areas where you could actually grind for EXP. Most enemies you fight are single-battle enemies or mini-bosses who die when you beat them, so you can't re-fight them. There are some fields of snakes or trash men at certain points, as well as a wrestling ring you can get to later that you can use to grind for EXP, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Random battles are not something LISA has many of. There are a TON, like 25, playable party members, all with fairly varying styles of how they play. Brad, for instance, is one of few characters who can use combos of the WASD keys to both do 5 regular attacks, or chain them together to activate one of his special moves (a very tiny bit like Sabin in FF6, but your D-pad inputs do damage as well in addition to the moves taking from a mana pool). There are a few more standard spell-users, a couple more combo-users, but you also have characters who need TP (which is basically a "rage" mechanic) where they get MP by both taking damage and dealing damage with their normal attacks. Out of the 25, there are some team compositions that are better than others, of course, but there are very few party members who are straight-up awful. Members who are very powerful often aren't very flexible, and vice-versa. And those who are fairly powerful and flexible strategically are often addicts and that's something else entirely. Brad is a recovering drug addict from the drug Joy (and if you don't take any or give any to other party members, you get a secret ending on normal mode). Several party members come already addicted to Joy, and if they don't take it they go through withdrawal. Taking a Joy gets you the Joyful status effect which makes all your hits crits for like 1-5 turns (which can be very powerful on a character like Brad who effectively can get 4-5 standard attacks + a special move off all in one round). Being in withdrawal basically sets your attack power to 0 as well as tanking your speed, defense, and max HP, so it REALLY sucks. Your special attack doesn't decrease though, so you can still do special moves to hurt stuff, but it's nothing like not being in withdrawal. You can either get out of withdrawal by taking Joy, of which you cannot buy and have a very limited supply of the stuff you can find (there is a hard limit in the game of the stuff, so you NEED to conserve), or go through however many turns of combat (usually around 10, but it could be way less or even more than that) and it will eventually go away until it comes back again sometime while you're wandering the overworld. Addiction adds a whole new level to how you strategize the boss fights, but the game is very beatable without it if you find a team that works for you. (I personally really liked using Nern, Fly, and then either Jack or Carp). One of the last things I'll mention is that there are SO many party members (all but 3 of which are optional and need to be hunted down, and most of them aren't too hard to find) is that there are some things that will permanently kill party members. Mostly it's story choices or optional bosses, but how because them permanantly dying IS a thing that can happen, that's why something like Pain Mode with limited saves would be so ill advised on your first runthrough. Because EXP grinding isn't easy to do to grind up a new character, losing a team-mate REALLY sucks if you aren't expecting it, so save-scumming is something that is basically mandatory to conserve your sanity XD Verdict: Highly Recommended. LISA is a fantastic JRPG that is pretty far off the beaten path as far as a typical narrative or mechanics go. I even didn't mind immediately replaying through a fairly long game because the character variety is so great and the world is just so cool. This is a great game totally worth picking up if you want something to make you think a bit but not too far from the mechanics you're familiar with in a JRPG. Next (and likely last) up on my TinyBuild marathon is Mr Shifty, a game most people have called Hotline Miami with teleportation mechanics. They're right to do that, because that's exactly what it is XD . Mind you, a copycat isn't necessarily a bad thing, and this game is great fun!
The teleportation mechanic makes the arcadey Hotline Miami formula that much more hectic as you teleport around to get behind bad guys with guns and punch them up while trying to avoid their friends who also have guns. Tricking enemies into doing friendly fire, throwing items you find at them (or clobbering them over the head with them), and getting around/into walls are all things totally required to get through this admittedly fairly short game (it took me about 3 hours). The story is silly and campy, with the literally silent Mr Shifty getting instructions from his female operator over his headpiece and the enigmatic and boastful Chairman Stone taunting you the entire game. There was more than one line from Stone that was just so campy it made me genuinely laugh out loud, so in my mind the story did exactly what it needed to. It's not trying to be some mysterious grandiose statement about something or other, it's just fun window dressing for a game about teleporting around bad guys and punching them. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The $15 price tag is gonna turn some people away from a 3 hour game, but if you look at it like a $10 movie ticket, this is pretty good value in my mind. It's a fantastic arcadey brawler that's a very fun way to burn away an afternoon (or two) with. :D Another game I got in the Tiny Build bundle that I bought solely because the trailer looked cool, and another game that really didn't disappoint. It's a weird thematic story combined with a weird mish-mash of gameplay mechanics, but it's fun and it just all kinda works XD . It took me about 4 hours, and I got just about all the achievements.
So the theme/story to me felt a bit like Evangelion but if it were about zombies from space, but even that is REALLY inaccurate to the actual plot. Apparently it's based off of the work of a famous pair of Russian brothers (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky), given that there's a statue honoring them in one side-area of the game and it's by two Russian devs, but having never heard of them before that realization meant nothing to me Xp . Regardless, the narrative is interesting and engaging, even if at the end of the day it's all a bit too vague for any really obvious message about the human condition to be discussed around it. The main thing that hurts the story is the game's pretty bad translation. MANY places in the game, in both side and main dialogue, characters will confuse "has" for "had" and also drop articles and identifiers ("a" and "the") for words and it makes the dialogue read confusingly. It's not EVERYWHERE, but it's often enough that it's jarring when it happens. Given that no localization element is credited in the credits, I can only assume they did it themselves. The gameplay is like a 2D action/adventure survival horror game intermixed with a train maintenance sim, which sounds insane as well but I can explain XD . The game is mostly the former, intermixed with the latter. You're a train driver (perhaps not the best, but you ARE the last) going from stop to stop in a zombie-ish (it's very complicated) apocalypse. You go from stop to stop going out to collect the code to allow you to progress the train, and to do this you need to shoot and punch enemies you encounter as you try to find cash, materials, ammo, medkits, food, and survivors. The aiming is done with the mouse, but the game is on Xbox as well apparently, so you can also use a controller (although I used a mouse). There are basically 4 types of enemies, with two of them having stronger versions you eventually meet, but the environments are varied enough that fighting them never really gets boring with how relatively short the game is. You collect all that stuff to use during the other part of when you drive the train. Now the driving of the train is automated, but the maintinance isn't. As you drive, at one of 2-4 systems in the train will need you to do a very simple mini-game (like holding down the mouse, or timing mouse clicks correctly) to keep the train from super-dying. Your survivors you've collected don't take care of themselves either, as they'll need food and medkits accordingly when their bars run out. They'll have pretty interesting text conversations to one another during the train ride, but their conversations all happen in real-time. If you're doing something like working on maintaining the front of the train or getting a medkit so the one with the head injury doesn't bleed out on the floor, you won't "hear" what they're saying because you aren't in the passenger compartment. There's more than just achievements at stake for saving them too, as each one gives you a cash reward as well as possibly some more ammo, materials, or even a weapon upgrade at the time they reach their destination. It's a really neat mechanic, and even though when you really look at it the train bit is not that brilliant as far as gameplay, it really works well to even out the pacing of the more tense action sequences (as the game itself really isn't THAT hard, as even I didn't need to use a single medkit while playing). The game actually does a really good job of building a tense and mysterious sci-fi atmosphere between the two gameplay types. Talking to people in the town segments (the non-train bits with no combat in), overhearing survivors on the train, reading notes as you explore for access codes and supplies. Rough localization aside, They all add up to create a pretty tense feeling and slowly reveal to you (or not) what may or may not be actually happening in the world to cause all this madness. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you enjoyed a modern take on indie survival horror like Lone Survivor, you will probably have a lot to enjoy about The Final Station. It's not quite as polished as that game, but it's also not as derivative. I'd hesitate to call it an indie Resident Evil, but I also don't think that's too off the mark. Where Party Hard made me kinda question the original MSRP of $15, I think The Final Station is unique enough and engaging enough to quite fairly justify that price tag, and if you can get it for $3 on sale like I did then it's an absolute no-brainer if you like 2D action games with survival horror elements :D Continuing the TinyBuild bundle marathon I've been on the past couple days, I played through this today. It bills itself as a survival horror "twin-stick shooter," so naturally I broke out my usual 360 gamepad to play it with, but OH was that a mistake and a half. I'd never heard of any other survival horror twin-stick shooters, and it turns out there's a good reason for that.
In GARAGE, you play as guy with amnesia working his way through a parking garage as some kind of zombie apocalypse occurs. You have melee punches and kicks to start, and then you find stuff like an ax, a shotgun, a pistol, etc. to kill baddies with. The narrative gets pretty wild from there at its own weird pace, but at the end I was surprised at just how very grounded and thoroughly explained it all was. The game really doesn't sell itself on its narrative, and I didn't really care about it too much because the rest of the game was so frustrating mechanically, but it's actually a pretty good story that I could really never guess the next turn in. The game sells itself a lot on its presentation and style, and not undeservedly so. The visuals are technically 3D, but it doesn't seem like that most of the time because of a scan-line set that are ever-present on the screen, as the game is going for a kind of VHS B-Movie Horror aesthetic in all kinds of ways. The colors will spasm, the screen telescopes (kinda like Hotline Miami but you don't really have control over it), and the blood and gore are EVERYWHERE as you fight increasingly crazy monsters. The only real complaint I have with the visuals is that they're sometimes a bit TOO crazy, and they can make what you can and can't walk on confusing as well as make hitboxes unclear. Interesting presentation and premise aside, the game really starts to tank in the mechanics department, as the game's largest problems come from its survival horror meets twin-stick shooter design. Functionally it's adequate enough to complete the game, but I'd be skeptical on how long you could keep your sanity if you played through with a gamepad the whole way through. The only reason I was able to stick with it is because I switched to mouse & keyboard a couple hours in. And before I continue on, I will mention that the controls are bugged for gamepad for the Steam version of this (I believe it's also at least available on Xbox One), as you can't actually steer vehicles with the gamepad. The animation for turning happens, but you don't turn. You need to use WASD to turn the motorcycle in the earlier chapters and it's crazy awkward (but at least it's a short section). When I think "twin-stick shooter," I think crazy arcadey action like Smash TV or Forgotten Worlds. Using one stick to keep yourself alive and the other to fire wildly at the oncoming onslaught. When I think "survival horror," I think careful, methodical playing to conserve the limited rations you have, because every enemy is dangerous and your resources for dealing with them are very limited. Why anyone though mixing these two genres would be a great idea, I have no clue, but GARAGE fails to execute this fusion well. The simple fact is that this game plays like garbage on a gamepad (with twin-sticks) because it is unreasonably difficult to aim accurately with the right joystick compared to aiming with your mouse. Conserving ammo is basically impossible because stuff is so hard to hit in the first place, and the game is hard enough and your ammo caps are low enough that you really can't afford to mess up too many shots. You melee attacks are absolutely garbage, and this also brings me onto another important point that exemplifies all of the trouble with the lack of thought that went into crafting the mechanics of this "twin-stick shooter": Rats. Rats are the very first enemy you meet in the game, and they'll be jumping you to try and attack you the whole way through it up to the very final boss fight. They go towards you slowly, then CHARGE at you, almost faster than you can move, and they also do tons of damage, so they can't just be ignored or gone past. Your choices to deal with rats are two: You can either use a precious bullet of the few you have to shoot the rat and hope you hit that tiny target, or you can kick it. Kicking is a special melee attack that you can do no matter what weapon you're holding. You can't kick while moving, it has a very short range, and the range isn't even the width of your already thin character. If the enemy isn't within about the middle third of the front of you (and nearly on top of you already), you aren't gonna land that kick. Add on top of that that rats take not one but TWO kick to kill, and you have an insanely infuriating enemy that is present throughout the whole game, whose main design flaw would've been dealt with had rats been melee-able just like any other enemy in the game. And the list of problems with the genre mash-up absolutely doesn't stop there. - You have a dodge roll, but you already normal-walk faster than most any can run and the walls are lined with deadly fire and pits that can kill you so it's totally useless or worse almost the entire game. - The telescoping screen and crazy lights don't just make you sick, they can also hide enemies with guns off-screen who can see you but you can't see them, and they deal SO much damage that you may as well trial-and-error your way through a section to see where all the hidden gun-guys are so you don't just die a bunch just from not being psychic. - To add icing on the cake of cheap enemies with guns, they also have guns with much higher accuracy then you, so they'll routinely empty an entire clip into you while you literally can't hit them that many times from the same distance away with (supposedly) the exact same weapon. That's about everything, but I'm sure I've forgotten something. Regardless, I hope I've made it evident that the mechanics in this game REALLY needed some rebalancing and re-thinking before launch, because they make an already annoying genre mash-up even less bearable. Verdict: Not Recommended. For the most part, GARAGE really nails it on the presentation (I mean the trailer certainly sold me on it), but it completely shits the bed mechanically. While playable, a litany of ill-thought out mechanical design choices make the game a challenge that is consistently more frustrating than genuinely enjoyable or fun. Despite getting more fun when you start getting to less crazy-tight corridors (with less, but not absent, rats) in the last 3 or so chapters, it really wears out its welcome at 6 hours, and for a $15 asking price you can do a lot better. I don't really have people over much these days, and when I do we always just play Jackbox Party games if there's more than one of us. That being the case, I was absolutely ready to give Super Mario Party a pass on the grounds that I'd just never have a good excuse to play it, but after seeing the praise on the Switch thread here on Racketboy and catching one of Nerd-Cubed's Twitch streams of it, I was absolutely sold. It's not the 100% BEST Mario Party ever made, but it's damn near up there (and depending on whom you are, it may well be the best ever for you). "Beating" the game to see the credits involves unlocking all the characters, mini-games, and winning on each board/route of each mode once, and that took me about 20-ish hours, but it was very fun, even mostly by myself
The Mechanical Changes Super Mario Party is at once a return to form as well as an evolution of the old and new. From the older Mario Party's 1-8, we have a lot of the aesthetics/themes of Mario Party 1 (in Nintendo's current trend of nastolgia-pandering in EVERY game it releases, granted I'm not complaining about it ) as well as individual movement of each player. Gone are the mini-stars and group-car from the more recent games, and now each player can once again move on their own to traverse a board, earn coins, and reach the star location to purchase one and get ahead in the rankings. Depending on what spaces they land on, they'll get a 4-player, 2v2, or 1v3 mini-game at the end of each turn (although battle mini-games and item-mini games are both absent here). Even items are back (no orbs!), and you can hold 3 at a time. The items are all great too. There aren't any that are super circumstantial or flat-out useless like in the old games. Getting an item is always a good thing now! From the more recent 3DS entries as well as from 9 and 10, it takes a more balanced approach to make the game a better party game and not just a wash for the person who owns it (and who is best at the mini-games). First place for a 4-player mini-game gives 8 coins, but 2nd place gives 4 coins, and 3rd place gives 2 coins. No longer can the best mini-gamer shut-out the other players simply by matter of being good. This, combined with how stars only cost 10 coins, means that while doing well in mini-games is good, it is by no means an assurance of victory. From the most recent 3DS entry it also makes your choice of character more than just cosmetic. In addition to their normal 1-6 die, each player has their own special die they can roll whenever they want (for example, Mario has a die with 1,3,3,3,5,6 on it, and Wario has a die with two 0's that make him lose 2 coins as well as four 6's). This adds a TON to how Mario Party is now actually a good board game. Several core features have been seriously changed to make Mario Party not only a more accessible party game but also a much better board game. While the boards (of which there are 4) are more the traditional Mario Party-style, they're much smaller, meaning where you go on them is very important but also very doable, even with only 10-turns (10, 15, and 20 are the options for each board, and 5 turns is about 30 minutes) to go around it. Stars are also now only 10 coins, so it's very difficult for a player very good at mini-games to shut-out the other players from ever being able to afford one. Cheaper stars combined with the special die and smaller boards means that how you move and where is now a very important strategic decision, and the strategy of how you move as well as the chances you're willing to take on your special die are much more likely to win you the game than just earning tons of coins in mini-games. This is all on top of the new ally mechanic. If you land on an ally space, you'll randomly get a character who isn't currently one of the 4 playing as an ally. This not only means that you'll get their character die to roll whenever you want, just as you can your own, but your new ally will also roll a die each turn that has an equal chance of giving a 1 or a 2, and that roll is added to whatever your normal roll is! Allies are by far the most important part of the new mechanics, because you can have up to 4 allies at once! The ally spaces are quite uncommon, but when they get landed on they can really be game changers. My only real complaint with the new mechanics is that the AI can be kinda dumb at times. I've had enemy AI on hard mode (the 2nd highest difficulty of 3) go the entire game without using mushrooms or golden pipes (the new magic lamp items) for absolutely no reason. I think there may be some issues with how the AI hits flags on when it thinks it should use items. The Mini-Games The mini-games are good quality, but suffer sometimes from a kinda lack-luster AI (although that isn't a huge problem, as I'll explain in a little bit). Most mini-games are very quick (under 30-seconds), and also very simple. Almost none of them require more than two button pushes or a waggle of the joycon, meaning they're very easy to just pick up and start playing even having not done them before. Intros to them have been massively improved as well. There is no longer an initiation of a practice for the mini-game. Now, where there used to be a demo-screen of the AI playing the game, THAT is your practice where all 1-4 of you can practice the mini-game just as it will be when you're really doing it. Add onto this how instead of one player pressing START, EVERY player now must ready-up for the mini-game by pressing both shoulder buttons (buttons never used for anything else), and you have a situation where a player should never have to go into a new mini-game feeling unprepared just because another player hit a button by accident or was impatient. Finally, this game can ONLY be played with a joycon (no pro-controller or even handheld-mode), so you can do 2-player right out of the box, and there are only 6-buttons on the controller to worry about. All this means that the mini-games are now more party-friendly than ever as they're super accessible to new players. There are 80 mini-games (and 4 special ones in a side area, Toad's Rec Room) that you could play between the modes. They're all good quality and fun, but none especially stick out to me as fantastic new ones. They're very much there to support the board-game element rather than the other way around (as imo the previous entries really leaned on). There is a interesting tilt away from 2v2 games during the normal Mario Party (I think I played 3 out of 50 turns of different boards), but I think that's because you play SO many (one about every other turn) in the Team Party mode. One interesting part about mini-games is how the game encourages good sportsmanship very subtly through the "high-five" system. Whenever you win a game you were on a team with, you can coordinate with the other players to all pump the joycon (or just press A) in unison to do a group high-five for a job well done. This isn't just flashy, but also gives you 2 extra coins (so instead of 8, you get 10!). It's a very clever team-building exercise that tries to emphasize how you're all in it to win, but you all do still need to work together (even irl) at the end of the day, so being a good sport pays literal dividends The only real dampener on the mini-games is the lackluster AI I mentioned before. The AI is very good at most of them, but has some serious issues navigating in some others. This is largely due to how a lot of the mini-games have been designed to be very good games for humans to play together, but not so much for AI to navigate. Especially mini-games that require rowing, some of the motion-controlled timing ones give the AI a LOT of trouble and they're either trouncing you or they had no chance in hell of ever winning. Perhaps the Very Hard AI is better balanced, but I haven't given them a try yet. New Modes & Features Aside from the normal Mario Party mode, there are 4 other main modes in this game. First up is Team Party mode. In this mode, 2 teams of 2-players compete against one another in drastically revamped versions of the 4 boards from the Mario Party mode. For starters, there are no set paths! You can move anywhere you want, from square to square, using the rolls you get each turn. You and your partner each roll a die, and you each get the sum total of those dice to move (although any ally bonuses or used items apply only to the player who has/used them). It's a really cool mode that I really want to give more time to play with real people. It makes the strategy of picking a character a lot bigger simply on the grounds that you need to think of whose character die syncs well with or makes up for the shortcomings of whose. My only real complaint is that you're playing the same 2v2 mini-games over and over a lot in this mode, because there are far more 4v4 mini-games than 2v2 mini-games. An extra 10 2v2 games really would've made this mode's mini-games feel less repetitive. Second is River Survival. This is a completely co-op mode where 4 players work together to row a river raft down a raging river. There are 5 different ends at the end of a series of forks in the roads, but reaching them isn't too easy: you're on the clock! You need to coordinate your rowing to both avoid obstacles to maintain speed as well as collect stopwatches (for +3 seconds) and hit mini-game balloons to do 4-player co-op mini-games that are only in this mode (which can get you up to an extra 40 seconds (and an extra 3 if you nail the high-five ;3)). To "beat" this mode, you need to get to the end of each of the 5 paths, but as with Team Party this mode really suffers from a dearth of mini-game variety. There are only 10 of these special co-op mini-games, so you're playing the same ones a TON to get to the end of this mode. At least playing by myself with 3 computers, I thought this mode got really boring because of how often you were playing the same mini-games, and was by far my least favorite part of the game. 1 character is locked behind completing a few of these, and I was glad I unlocked him ASAP XP. Third is the Sound Stage, which has 4 players competing in a series of mini-games that involve waggling the joycon properly in rhythm to a series of 3 mini-games. It feels almost like competitive Rhythm Heaven and it's really fun! There are only a total of 10 rhythm mini-games, but to "beat" the mode you only need to beat each sequence of them once, so it doesn't wear out its welcome and it's something I'm looking forward to trying out with friends sometime Last is Challenge Road. It's a mode that will seem very familiar to people who've played the first two Mario Party games, as it's a sequence of every mini-game in the game (you need to have unlocked all the other mini-games in order to play this at all) and you need to do well enough (usually either just win or get however-many points/coins that they tell you to) in order to finish it. It's WAY easier than past ones though, as not only do you have unlimited lives, you can even skip one you're having trouble on if you fail at it 3 times. All you have to do to beat it is reach the end, and that doesn't mean beating every single challenge, really just the challenge at the end of each of the 6 worlds. This means that even though two character are locked behind completing worlds, even if you REALLY suck, as far as I can tell you only need to beat 6 challenges (the one at the end of each world) to beat the whole of challenge road. The last new mode I'll comment on is the Mariothon Mini-Game Challenge, which is this game's online mode (although not having Switch Online I never tried it out). Bafflingly enough, despite Switch Online launching just a few weeks ago, Super Mario Party has no way to play the actual Mario Party (the ones with the boards) online. The only online mode this has is the Mariothon, which is a series of 10 mini-games that you play against others online to see who does the best out of 10. And the selection of mini-games isn't chosen by you, it's chosen by Nintendo which mini-games are competed in on a rotating basis (like how Splatoon 2 has some modes available on a rotating basis). You can play with friends in this mode, but I really just cannot fathom why this game doesn't have a proper online mode when I would assume the hardest part for latency (the mini-games) have been proven to work well enough online that they're actually a part of the game. Perhaps Nintendo has said something about making the actual board modes playable online eventually, but I am unaware of anything like that as of the time of this writing. It's not a deal breaker for me personally, but I wouldn't fault anyone for having gripes at its omission to the point where they wouldn't want to spend the $60 on the game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The lack of proper online play will certainly turn off some, but for those who want to play alone or couch-multiplayer, this is one of the best Mario Party games in a LONG time (perhaps the best ever!). The new elements of strategy as well as the simplification of needlessly messy UI and introductory elements have reborn Mario Party as an actually good party game in the mold of the older games (which weren't very good party games). Absolutely a good pick-up if you're at all a fan of Mario Party The Humble Store is just finishing up its "Build your own Tiny Build Bundle" sale, and this is one of five games I picked up on it this morning. I'd heard it was a little janky mechanically back at launch, so I decided to wait on it. I'm not sure if it actually plays any better now, but it ended up being quite fun :D . The main game took me about 3 hours, and the remix stages (kinda harder versions half of the main 12, but not exactly) took me about another 2. For the $3 I paid for it in the bundle, I more than got my money's worth. (I tried the free Castlevania-parody-ish DLC, but that level is long and horrible, so I just said screw-it pretty quickly XP).
Party Hard is about a guy who just CAN'T SLEEP because of the parties going on next door, so he gets up, gets a mask and knife, and goes on a murder spree to let himself get some peace and quiet. Apparently this is a country-wide crusade for peace and quiet, as the 12 stages take you from San Francisco to Miami, but the narrative really isn't the most important thing here. The narrative is told through stills coupled with voice-over between stages, and it's nice window-dressing for a little extra context flavor, but it's nothing great (and really doesn't have to be :P ). The game is a top-down stealth-action game to try and kill all the party's attendees without getting arrested by the police. You can do this in a manner of ways ranging from setting environmental traps (like turning on a car's engine to flatten a huge queue of people), using items you find in the stage (like a stun-bomb to knock out a bunch of party-goers dancing in a big group), or good old-fashioned marching in with a knife and going crazy (although that's pretty dangerous XP). If a party-goer spots a dead body, they'll go call the police, but if you're far enough away they'll just assume it's some random dead person I guess, because the cop comes, puts it in a body bag, and leaves XD . There is no attempted reason to try and explain why people keep partying with body-bags everywhere, but it's just a video game at the end of the day, isn't it XD . Regardless, if they spot you, the cop will come after you (until he gets bored and gives up, but he'll be more persistent every time he's called for you), so using your limited sprinting to get out of the way before you're seen is key! The game's 12 stages (although some of the main 12 are already "remixes" of one another, aside from the extra 7 remix stages) could technically be completed in a couple minutes a piece, but that's if you're both VERY good and VERY lucky. Each stage will probably take you at least a try or two because of either getting lost keeping track of everything important, or because you don't get very good trap-RNG. Each stage has a randomized series of traps that can be present in it, to a punch-bowl that can be poisoned to a horse you can frighten to kick people in the face to a speaker system you can make explode. Given that the game does give you a score at the end, it's a little odd that it has these randomized elements, as some make each level FAR easier to complete than if they weren't there. The score attack element really clashes with these RNG elements, although I'm not one for score attack stuff, so making the stages a little different each time was a fun bit of challenge. Verdict: Recommended. It's not the best 2D action-stealth game on Steam, but it's a damn good one. At an MSRP of $15 normally, such a short game is going to be a difficult sell to most people. If you can get it for $3 like I did on sale, then it's an easy recommendation, but a lot of my hesitation to Party Hard comes down to how much you value time/money in your games. It's a tiiiiny bit buggy here and there, but any I ran into were always in my favor, so I didn't mind :P . It does have local co-op (which I didn't get a chance to try) and Twitch-integration (the chat can vote on things to fuck you over with :P), but it's a hard M-rated game, so it's not really a family game for most people. Nevertheless, it's a fun way to spend an afternoon (home alone with no kids, anyhow XD ) Before today, I'd never heard of this game, but I'm glad I have now! I looked at the new Humble Bundle available now and saw it in the > $1 tier, so I thought I'd pick up the average price tier and give this one a shot. I had expected it to be a kind of Metroidvania, but it isn't really. It's an adorable but surprisingly difficult action adventure platformer, that was well worth the price of admission. It took me about 9 hours and I got about 80% on hard mode, which I thought was juuust the right difficulty for me (although easy, normal, hard, and impossible are all unlocked from the start, which is nice :D ).
You play a little blob, of a species called Wums, who lives in the Wumhouse and gets thrown out (literally, from the 4th floor balcony) for being a lazy good-for-nothing who always gets ice cream everywhere. With nowhere else to go, you set out on an adventure to find a new place to call home. Sooner than later you get a head-mounted gum cannon, and that's when the game takes a turn to be the 'action' part of this action adventure platformer. It is certainly odd playing a 2D game like this that ISN'T a Metroidvania. You never get any movement upgrades, and all progression is done through solving world puzzles to open up new areas via the story or just because you've gotten to a new location. From the moment you're flung from the balcony and your television falls out of your gut (making you far less heavy so you can jump much higher), you are as able to do the platforming as you'll ever be. You never get a dash move. You never get a third jump. You never get a local teleport. You get a bazooka cannon and a rapid-fire water gun fairly quickly, and you can also buy mods for your guns later too, but your general power level never really changes much, and your mobility never changes, period. The world is big, bright, colorful, and alive though. Walking through Popo City (that's what it's called! He founded his own city of Wums! :P ) or through the amusement park and seeing all the other little blobby members of society waiting in ques (and you'll have to wait behind them for things like going through customs or riding the roller coaster), purchasing items, getting arrested by the police, it's a kind of microcosm of a society that I've never seen in a 2D game like this. Even the train runs on a consistent schedule and if you're late for it you'll have to wait for the next one. I'd have to say at least half of my nine hours playing was just wandering around the world looking for more people to help, looking for more film-reels to bring to a projectionist to play for me to learn the lore, looking for more whacky fun bosses to fight. It's kinda crazy JUST how much of the game's content is optional proportional to what isn't. It's hardly Breath of the Wild in terms of the "alive"-ness of the world, but it's certainly exceptional for a game from such a small team in a genre like this. The world itself is great fun to explore though. A lack of any destructible or hidden walls means you're always exploring just what you can see, as most secrets lie in doing quests for NPC's that can range from fishing up someone's hat from the bottom of the polluted river to breaking someone's definitely-a-criminal friend out of jail! The platforming is very tight, and I never had a problem with it. The boss battles are also plentiful and always a good challenge (and if they're too hard, there are 4 difficulties at the start. I'd say a veteran to the Metroidvania genre would feel right at home on hard mode though). The most fun part about the boss battles has to be with the weird controls, or at least controls weird for a game in this genre. It may seem odd at first that you move with the left joystick and jump with left-trigger, but once you get your gum-cannon and learn that you use the right joystick to aim and fire it like a twin-stick shooter, the weird jumping button becomes much more clear. Though it seems odd, I never had a problem with how the game controlled (and the buttons are rebindable if you wanted to make them more normal-feeling :D ). Verdict: Highly Recommended. Considering it's a buck right now and bundled with 2 other great games on Humble Bundle, this is something very easy to recommend. This is a great game full of charm and style and I've never played anything else quite like it. If you want something simple and colorful that the kids can watch if you have a weekend with nothing better to do, then this is something that fits the bill just right ^w^ I'd heard Hollow Knight was a great game for a good while now. I bought it in a Steam sale some time ago and was just sorta sitting on it because it hadn't been in the mood to play it. I was really in the mood for some more Metroidvania after Timespinner, so I thought why not play this. 28-ish hours later, I do not regret my decision one bit. Hollow Knight deserves its fantastic reputation, because I haven't played a Metroidvania this good in a VERY long time, if I've ever played one this good. The fact that this came out of Kickstarter from an indie team is just crazy to me with just how much there is here and just how well its done.
Design-wise, Hollow Knight lacks a level-up system, which makes it more like a Metroid, but the combat is all melee except for a couple spells (that have very limited mana) making it more like a Castlevania. The map is also HUGE and very non-linear right about after the 2nd area. It gave me a very Symphony of the Night vibe with just how huge and how maze-like the map can be, and definitely gives that game a run for its money in terms of the sheer size and scale of the map (ignoring the upside-down castle, anyhow). There's tons of enemy variety as well, with some having their appearances limited to only one or two rooms despite having their own unique attack animations and everything, which is no easy feat when your art-style is so close to hand-drawn. This is a game with an incredible amount of content for being an indie game or otherwise, and it nails it. There isn't an auto-map, but instead there's an NPC in each area you go to (almost always quite close to the start, depending on where and how you happened to bumble into the area) you buy a map from. You hold a key to have The Knight look at the map, which also doesn't pause the game. Even looking at your inventory doesn't pause the game, but you have little reason to pause the game for your inventory anyhow as things like managing the charms you can wear can only be done at a save point. You have a certain amount of charm slots (think BP from Paper Mario) to equip your badges with, and they can provide all sorts of modifiers and boons from having money magnetize to you, to being able to heal quicker, hit harder, hit faster, or even seeing your own position on the mini-map . The combat and platforming is super tight and feels great. The boss battles are fantastic, and the checkpoints before them are very forgiving and allow for a quick rematch if you suffer a defeat! You have a couple offensive spells, but you also can hold the spell button to stand still for a while and recover some health. You regain mana by hitting enemies with your melee weapon, though, so a pure-spell run just isn't possible. The main meat of the game is your melee weapon, but you can use it as little or as often as you want to. Especially once you get the dash and double-jump, the platforming and dodging you can do in areas and boss fights just gets nuts. The platforming can get pretty damn hard in the later areas just because of how the platforming mechanics work. In addition to your air-jump and forward-dash, if you slash downwards into spikes or an enemy, you get to do another air-jump and dash. This makes for some optional platforming sections that are fiendishly hard, but none of the mandatory ones are THAT mean (If you're going for the first ending, anyhow ). The presentation is beautiful. Lots of somber, very atmospheric tracks combined with some great dramatic boss fight music. The whole setting is all about a kingdom of bugs, so there are tons of little bug fellows to interact with (but mostly fight). The art style is a beautiful hand-drawn aesthetic (although I dont' think it's literally hand-drawn animated like Cup Head). A very Dark Souls approach to narrative, that being a very gloomy but indirect and fairly indirectly told one, adds all of it up to a very unique experience. I've played a lot of Metroidvanias, and none have felt quite like exploring Hollownest. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While Timespinner is still my favorite narrative in a Metroidvania, Hollow Knight is the best one mechanically I've ever played. It knocks it out of the park and completely deserves the great praise its been given. There are several endings, some of which requiring MUCH more platforming and boss fighting (think how much more game the second caslte in SOTN adds), so you can still see the end credits even if you don't want a crazy hard game. The game is certainly far from easy, but should give a good challenge to even genre veterans near the end. If you like Metroidvanias, this is one you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice to pass up. |
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
|