I really love the first Dishonored, but I'd heard the sequel wasn't exactly setting the world on fire and also had some performance issues, so I passed on it. But it's on Game Pass, so I figured "why not" XD. 52-ish hours later, I have completed my no powers, no kills, never sighted run of the game, and I more or less agree with the statements I'd heard about it before. It's not a bad game, but it's overall a rougher package than the original.
Dishonored 2 is certainly more of the first game on the surface, but there are some fairly neat innovations made for the stealth system. The most immediately noticeable is that they have made the leaning far more like classic Thief's leaning, where it moved your camera AND your body. Gone are the days of Dishonored 1's poking your head far around corners but still technically being hidden, and as someone who played the game with no blink or see-through-walls abilities, many many quick loads were done after being sighted while leaning XP. The other most significant change is to the enemy AI. Now their line of sight is no longer tied to where their body is facing, but it actually comes out of their eyes. If they tilt their head to the right to light a cigar, their line of sight also shifts to the right. It's a really neat addition that took me a while to realize, but makes the game feel a lot more alive. The last slight addition outside of the super powers is to how enemies react to things. Some enemies will react to some things being different in the environment in a way they didn't do before, like going over to inspect a door that was previously shut, but this isn't universal. It's only some enemies and some doors/windows/etc., and honestly it just makes all the times they don't do that that much more noticeable XP. They aren't all positive additions (I really hate how they changed leaning), but it makes the nuances of the stealth feel different from the first game at the very least, even though the broad strokes of it are still very similar. By far the biggest casualty from the first game to the second is the narrative and storytelling. Where the first game was just Corvo, a silent protagonist, now you can choose at the start between Corvo and Emily (as this game takes place well in the future from the first), and each has different powers from each other to make the stealth and combat feel different depending on who you pick (at least if you choose to have powers at all). Both characters now have voices. They talk in the opening cutscene, they'll have conversations with NPCs they meet (of which there are many more, even in the stages themselves and not just in the between-level hub area), and they'll comment on things they see. However, this largely only drags the game down. The monologue comments are rarely ever anything more than just stating the obvious of what they see (or making the rare homage to Thief by repeating a well-known line from those old games). When they aren't, they're what most of the rest of the dialogue in the game is: shockingly ham-handed talking to the camera in the most blatant way possible. This game very routinely throws away any attempt at nuance in its storytelling by genuinely talking directly to the player character to explain the moral stance/position of a certain character at a certain moment. It comes off as very unnatural, and makes the already fairly small cast feel really weak and unmemorable. There is so much dialogue of the variety "I am sad, so I will paint" or "I feel bad because of X, so I will Y" that it often feels a bit patronizing. There is never any need to try to infer how a character's actions or comments speak to their real intentions because they will always outright tell you what they really think and why with a long line of exposition (especially in the voice recordings you find). It's like they either didn't really have any interest in making characters whom you learn about in more nuanced ways like the first game, or they just assumed their audience was incapable of understanding even the remotest hint of nuance. The VA also ain't that great, and is at some points stand-out bad (particularly the Duke). There are a few things that are interesting tried with the plot, I will admit. The diversity is really nice (PoC major characters, characters of varying sexualities and even a major trans character, even an insinuation that a certain major character might be asexual, which I thought was cool). They go for a different angle on the main villain and try and make them a more sympathetic figure than the first game (even if they go about it in an often comically tactless way). It doesn't make up for the poor way they tell the story, not by a long shot, but I do have to give them points for making a real effort to not just have the plot of the first game again. Other than the new hub area inherently being far worse than the old one, I don't think their changes to the plot are to blame for the other presentation aspects falling a bit flat. Speaking of presentation, the visuals and music will be very familiar to anyone who played the first game. The grungy, cynical not-quite-Victorian-England style for the world and the characters is back from the first game, although the actual environments have a more Italian vibe to their designs. The weird way the people look is absolutely still a feature though. It doesn't really look better or worse than the first game, although it does have a bit more color to it. Especially the more interesting levels like any of the big mansions have a lot of neat aspects to their designs. Overall the game's architecture and level layouts are far more memorable than most of the characters, if I have to be brutally honest XD. The music is still very Dishonored, I think, but I wish there was less of it. Very often I found myself wishing the music would just shut the hell up from trying to be atmospheric so I could hear if there were any enemies around me XP. The physics of how dialogue work are also very strange, with the direction you're looking playing a very uncannily huge part in whether you're hearing a conversation or not, and trying to ease drop can be a real technical challenge trying to find just the right spot where you can hear them talking. The level design is pretty on-par with the first game for the most part. A lot of early levels, especially without powers, are a real bastard to get through without being seen because the world suddenly becomes a corridor you have no chance but to try and get lucky to sneak through when the 4 guards around it happen to be looking away. And that's if they don't decide to just see you through a wall or magnetize directly to you instead of the distraction item you threw (technical bugs like that were few, but often enough that it was very annoying). The game's first half is far weaker than its second half, with the game having some really cool level designs and gimmicks (particularly levels 6 and 7). One level even lets you skip nearly the entire level if you want to spend like an hour decoding a very difficult logic puzzle (which I did, and then did the level anyhow X3). It has some very high highs, but I can't help but feel like the choice to design the game around having blink AND not having blink compromised the level design to make the lows feel as low/frustrating as they do. I honestly wish I'd played through the game with powers instead of without, and also kinda wish that a no powers option had been restricted to NG+ or something to save me from myself XD. Verdict: Recommended. While I definitely can't recommend this over the first game, it's still a fine first person stealth game. It's more of the first but a bit weaker, but being a bit disappointing doesn't mean it's awful. If you really want more Dishonored gameplay, this will totally scratch that itch. If the slow world building and voyeuristic approach to learning about side characters was the part of the first game you liked the most, you should probably temper your expectations a fair bit for this one.
0 Comments
This is another "why not" Game Pass game, and that sorta ended up how I felt about it at the end. I saw the last half of this game played on a livestream maaaany months ago, probably around the time it came out, and was always mildly interested, but nearly enough to pay real muns for it. I'm pretty glad I held out, at this point, because while Minit is neat, the kind of experience it offers isn't something I think I'll get as much mileage out of as a similarly short game like Blazing Chrome. It took me like 50 minutes to beat, and that's knowing nothing about the first half of the game.
Minit is the story of a little blob thing who one day finds a sword on the beach but it's CURSED, and will kill you in one minute! Your goal is to break the curse in a series of minute-long runs where you die at the end and respawn at your home. You can find other homes to respawn in as well as teleporters linking them as you go through the game, but the world map is still fairly small. The most limiting factor is obviously the minute-long death countdown. It's a simple adventure game with very little combat (although there is some) and is more about enjoying the quirky characters in the world and solving puzzles than any kind of action. There's quite a fair bit of hidden stuff to find in the game, and even though I was looking, I only found 63% of it, according to the end-game counter, so you could theoretically spend a fair bit of time replaying or just straight up playing the game looking for all the secret coins and heart containers lying around. There's also a challenge mode you unlock when you beat the game once that makes it so you only have FORTY seconds instead of sixty, which I have to imagine makes the game a fair bit harder, but that wasn't something I was really interested in. The presentation is fine, but nothing to write home about. It's a charming monochrome pixelated style with fairly minimal use of music. The game runs and controls fine on the Xbone, not that I'd have any reason to assume it isn't. The writing is minimalistic, as you can't exactly spend much time talking to people when you only have 60 seconds to live, and characters will even auto-talk to you just by walking up to them. Amusingly enough, you can actually stab every character in the game, and they'll all react in some way as well, which is fun. There's a very lighthearted way to the way the game is written though. My favorite is when there's a guy who talks realllllly slowly, and you basically need to spend your entire "life" listening to them talk so you can hear the secret they say at the end XD Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Minit isn't a bad game, but it's a very particular kind of game. It's a very particular kind of game that you may well enjoy well enough, but I think relatively few people are going to enjoy Minit enough to feel justified paying the $10 it goes for on the Switch eShop (for example). If you have kids who are just getting into games, this would be something great to play together, or if you're really into adventure games and want something a little bit different you will probably quite enjoy Minit. With everything that $10 can buy you, I think Minit doesn't do quite enough to stand out from the indie crowd. Personally, I'm glad I got it effectively for free through Game Pass, because I did not feel that I got $10 worth of enjoyment out of Minit despite relatively enjoying the time I did spend with it. I'd heard this was an exceptional Contra-style game, but I'm not usually one for action games. These days, I'll often play through a game like this one time after a lot of frustration and then never pick it up again, which seemed like a pretty good reason to not pick it up at the like $15 it goes for. However, since it's on Game Pass, I figured it would be worth giving a try, and dang was it EVER. I beat it last night, and then played through it maybe four or five times more this morning just because I was having so much fun. I don't think I've ever enjoyed an action game this much, at least since I started writing about games in any capacity. I've spent maybe 5 or 6 total hours with it, but I doubt that this will be the last time I blaze some chrome.
Blazing Chrome is a 2 player co-op Contra-style run'n'gun game that's pretty immediately familiar to anyone who has played 16-bit Contra, especially Contra: Hard Corps. That said, it also takes a fair bit of inspiration from Metal Slug, and I was getting the feeling of at least a dash of Mega Man Zero. The style is VERY much an homage 90's gritty pop, and they do a great job of replicating the Contra aesthetic while still putting their own flair on things. The playable character designs are fun, and I like that half the cast are both female and designed in a way that is more "power" than "sex appeal". It's a nice change from how the casts of games like this have been in the past (and often still are). The music is pumping and fits the game really well, and the game has a great "16-bit if the animations were way better" style to it, kinda like how Shovel Knight looks 8-bit but with far better animation quality. The game knocks it out of the park for presentation for sure, even going as far as to include really low-quality voice samples to make it feel like a REAL 90's game XD There are different types of weapons you can get and swap between (like Contra), and if you get close enough your character will do a quite powerful melee attack (like Metal Slug). You can even find mechs to stomp around in in some levels, also like Metal Slug. What gives me a bit of Mega Man Zero vibe is just how powerful the melee attack is. The melee attack in Metal Slug is good, but it never seems good enough to warrant using as anything other than a last resort. Your soldiers in Blazing Chrome have both a powerful melee attack (with a quite large arcing range) as well as being nimble enough to dodge around enemies, giving a really big risk-reward to meleeing enemies instead of just shooting them. That was one of my favorite parts of Mega Man Zero, and this is really scratching that same itch. There are two types of characters in Blazing Chrome, but one set of them you only unlock after beating the game once. The default ones play very much like classic Contra characters, with nimble jumps, hitting the triggers to change between your collected weapons (which you lose if you die with it, except for your default weapon), and the aforementioned auto-melee attack ala Metal Slug. There are also support bots you can pick up which can provide two extra hits before death, be an auto-firing option for you, or make you faster and give you a double jump! You also have an invincible, Smash Bros-style dodge roll you can do by holding down and pressing A, but I really wish that could be rebound. SO many times I died by trying to fire downwards and then trying to jump, or trying to jump down through the platform I was standing on (something this game doesn't have at all). The other characters you unlock after beating the game once are what the game calls the ninja characters, and they're far more melee-focused and totally change how you play the game. Not only do they not have an auto-melee, they don't even get multiple weapons. What they get instead is VERY powerful though. Their one weapons is a medium-range melee attack that is only manual, but if you charge it, it gets way more powerful and has a screen-wide range. Instead of having the triggers change weapons (which they don't have), it is an air-dodge that they can do which even hurts enemies you pass through. This makes them really good at bosses but struggle a bit with normal enemies (because of the more limited range), which is the opposite of how I felt the default, range-focused characters play. Using the normal dodge rolls, let alone the airborne dodges, takes some getting used to, but you feel like a BOSS when you can actually start dodging enemy attacks properly XD. Then probably the last thing I really love about Blazing Chrome is the difficulty. The game is as hard as you want it to be, with three modes of easy, normal, and hardcore (which is locked until you beat normal). Easy is normal mode but with 8 lives per continue, and normal has 6 lives per continue and more enemies. Hardcore mode is only 4 lives per continue, but is the ONLY mode with limited continues (4 of them) and has a CRAP ton of enemies (I could never beat it on anything but normal). But even then, levels are split up into several sections, and while dying instantly respawns you Contra-style, using a continue restarts you at that section and not at the start of the whole stage. This makes the game feel far less punishing than an actual 90's game and really helped me stick with it because it's so much easier to practice the bits you're having trouble with. That's by no means to say that Blazing Chrome is an easy game, but I really appreciated just how much it allows the player to engage with it on their own terms in a way that is really not common with games like this (in my experience at least) outside of breaking out a Game Genie. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely one of my favorite games I've played all year, and one of my new favorite action games ever. Blazing Chrome is a love letter to 90's run'n'guns that is faithful, improves on those old games' faults, and manages to stand on its own without feeling like some cheap copy. It is an absolutely stellar game and if you like run'n'guns at all, you are doing yourself a great disservice by holding out on Blazing Chrome. It was on Game Pass, and I really wanted more of the villains from the first game after playing Guacamelee 2, so I decided to play through this today. It is very much more Guacamelee, as is probably easy to guess. More brawling + Metroidvania gameplay, just as the second one continues, but it's surprisingly different from the second one in ways I didn't quite remember. It took me about 6.5 hours to 100% the game on normal mode.
It's Guacamelee like it's always been. Beat 'em up arenas intermixed with platforming corridors that use your brawling special moves to help navigate them, both done very well. The brawling is fun, and the platforming is tricky without being super frustrating. The only really tricky times I had with it where when I'd just forget which buttons did what XP. Especially in the more difficult platforming sections you need to do to get the best ending, hitting the bumper that turns you into a chicken instead of the one that toggles between the living and dead worlds is a mistake I made more often than I'd like to admit XP. The brawling isn't super hard unless you're going for the best ending, and especially if you're going for 100% area completion like I did. There are some really killer arenas in some optional sections. I definitely prefer the writing in this game over the second game's. The first Guacamelee is often irreverent and silly, but not in a way that was really breaking my suspension of disbelief. There are pop culture references here and there (especially in the luchador wrestling promotional posters in the background), but for the most part, the dialogue is funny/silly by virtue of the characters themselves having good personality injected into them. SO much of the second game's humor is reveling in how DGAF it is about referencing pop culture and memes that it makes the humor feel far more one-note and less memorable. Guacamelee 1's villains have so much more personality to them than the 2nd game's and the main story has some genuinely sweet moments (though they're easy to miss) to the point where I'd easily put the first game's writing above the second's. Guacamelee 2 makes jokes at itself in the form of Youtube comments calling filling your game with tons of memes "lazy writing and not very funny", and while it's nice that the game itself acknowledges that kind of complaint, it doesn't make it feel any less true when you compare it to how well the first game handled its humor. As far as differences mechanically from the 2nd game, there is a little more than I remembered there being. I knew that the chicken form being able to fight was something introduced in the second game. What I had forgotten was what the second game outright removed. First, the costumes Juan and his co-op partner Tostada can wear aren't just cosmetic in this game, they grant passive buffs and debuffs to reward certain playstyles (like halving your health in exchange for more stamina and life-draining melee attacks, or giving you infinite stamina but no way to heal). They're a neat way to spice up how you play that I missed in the second game. The other feature completely removed from the sequel is the Intenso meter, which lets you transform into Intenso Mode and get far stronger attacks for as long as you can keep your combo meter up. That's a nice panic button for when things get hard, but Guacamelee 2 is so much easier than this game that while it's unfortunate that the sequel canned that feature, it's not as significant a loss as the costume abilities (and this game overall just has way more costumes than the 2nd despite the 2nd game recycling some costumes from this one). Aside from that, the two games' combat is nigh identical, with even enemy types being almost entirely the same between games. The presentation graphically and musically is just fine. I think this game's music might be a little bit better on the whole, but that may just be me imagining things. Both games have pretty similar-sounding music, but the graphical quality is a much larger difference. It's a very similar stylization, but the first game is from last gen and it shows. It's not an ugly game, but it doesn't look quite as good as the 2nd game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is closer to the lower end of my highly recommended games, but it's still up there. Guacamelee is a game I love a lot more than I thought I did until this playthrough, and it's really surprising just how much better than the sequel it is. The sequel is a bit longer, perhaps, but with how little it changes compared to how much it outright removes or makes less good, I can easily recommend the first game over the 2nd. If you want a not-too-long Metroidvania with a brawler-twist, Guacamelee 1 is definitely the place to get it UwU The Game Pass Metroidvania train keeps on a'chuggin' as I finish yet another. Yoku's Island Express is what would happen if someone took Sonic Spinball and made it a Metroidvania with a charming, light tropical island theme. It is, as strange enough as it is to say it, a pinball take on the Metroidvania genre, and it actually pulls it off pretty damn well! I did 95% of the stuff in the game, apparently (the last couple achievements were so time consuming I didn't bother) and it took me probably around 12-ish hours (the game has no playtime counter, so far as I can tell, and the Xbone itself won't tell me either).
You play as Yoku, the new postmaster on the island of Mokumana. Though a dung beetle, Yoku rolls around a white ball of rock to get from place to place, and that is your pinball. In places that aren't too steep, you can use left and right to roll around, but otherwise you're usually using the left and right triggers to activate yellow and blue bumpers all over the world to get you from point A to point B. You get new powers as you go through the game, as fits the genre, such as a noisemaker to toggle things in the environment, wallet upgrades to allow you to hold more fruit (basically coins that are also a kind of points that you earn as you play that unlock stuff in the game), the ability to swim, but the overall mechanic of pinball doesn't change much outside of the occasional spot to grapple hook. There generally two kinds of areas in the game's fairly large contiguous map. You have more corridor-like areas where you're doing more simple bumper-based platforming to get from place to place, and then you have what are effectively mini-pinball tables to get through to get to the next area (often after doing some kind of thing within the table). Those tables are fun, but can often be frustrating with the very precise angle you need to hit. This is mitigated a bit by the bumpers themselves glowing where you touch them, so there's a clear visual cue for your position and therefore the spot you should be aiming to hit once you've done it correctly, but it's still so tricky that it's never really a solved problem (if you view it as a problem in the first place). Those tables also make it a real pain in the ass to re-navigate through them though. Navigating to a specific spot on the island can be a real chore due to the lack of save points and somewhat limited fast-travel system, but the very good overworld map helps mitigate that. The writing is simple, but the humor is charming and not overtly in your face. The presentation overall is very laid back and pleasant. The music is very good, especially the main theme is one I can't stop humming to myself X3. The world is also awash in color and style. The 5 or so areas of the island have their own look to them, and the pretty, painted-looking style to the world makes everywhere very pretty. Put that on top of how there's never any kind of failure state beyond having to redo a little bit of pinball or re-collect a bit of the already super abundant money-fruit, and this makes for a very laid back Metroidvania experience (outside of getting frustrated at pinball, anyhow XD). Verdict: Recommended. The frustration on the precision of the bumper hits and how long it can take to get around the island keeps this from being higher recommended, but I still had a fun time with this. It took me a time or two booting it up to really get into it, but once I did I was hooked and had a great time with it. It's certainly not for everyone, even people who consider themselves fans of Metroidvanias, but if the concept of a pinball Metroidvania sounds like something that'd be up your alley, then Yoku's Island Express is probably something you'll enjoy ^w^ Maru has said for a while that this is a really good game, and since it was on Game Pass and I'm still on a Metroidvania kick, I decided to give it a go last weekend. That turned out to be a pretty dang good decision, as it's certainly the best Metroidvania I've played so far this year ^w^. It took me just over 9 hours to do everything in the game and collect all the things (as well as do the "sequence break" achievement) on normal difficulty.
Steamworld Dig 2 is the sequel to the far simpler Steamworld Dig, a game I played a year or two ago on my 3DS and also liked quite a bit. This sequel expands on the original as a sequel really should. It improves the good and builds on top of it. The core concept of the game is a Metroidvania mixed with resource farming, I guess. It's almost like if Spelunky was slower-paced and also a more linear Metroidvania XD You have a main mine underneath the main town, and you dig down there as well as fight enemies to find minerals to sell back in town. You can spend this cash you get on upgrades to your base stats and equipment, and you also find new equipment periodically as you progress through the story (like a grappling hook or a bomb launcher). There's a main mine that you dig in more or less to earn money, and then there are side dungeons as well as main dungeons you navigate through for bonus collectibles, (which also are required for the best ending), upgrade cogs (you can use them to toggle on and off upgrade abilities), extra cash, and even optional new powers and equipment. After a few hours the game becomes a lot less linear, and you can start exploring around everywhere and engage in quite a lot of sequence breaking to get to areas you technically aren't supposed to be in yet. I really enjoyed how much the game embraces just letting you go where you want at your own pace like that. There are even upgrades you can get that make seeing secret areas easier. This is the first Metroidvania I've played in quite a while where I got EVERYTHING without once needing to look online where something was, and I like a game with secrets that intuitive (or at least a game that lets you eventually see the secret spots a lot easier XP). The exploration and platforming is really where it's at with this game, and the combat is largely secondary. The ranged weapon you eventually get has VERY limited ammo, your melee attack has a short range that never really gets any longer, and you're often fighting in very compact spaces where maneuvering is difficult. That said, combat is a very secondary feature of the game overall, and the overall design of the world and the challenges you face within it are designed around your limited ability to fight things. The story and world building are interesting, but ultimately kinda have a crap payoff. The character that is there among all the townsfolk as well as for the main character and her sidekick are charming and fun, and I honestly kinda wish there was more of it. But the final resolution to the story is sorta defying expectations by defying the normal expectations, which leaves the end result with kind of a strange message of "no wait, that prejudice was entirely justified after all". The narrative is certainly not the main event here, though. I'd put it solidly below the exploration, resource gathering, and action mechanics. While I did play the original on a 3DS and this one on an Xbone, the art design and presentation of this game is MUCH stronger. It's a very pretty game that is often quite atmospheric. The music isn't anything super stand-out (at least for me), and I listened to podcasts most of the time I played this, but I didn't always have a podcast on. Especially one area that has a much more tense atmosphere where they take away your mini-map: that area is VERY well done and genuinely creepy. Verdict: Highly recommended. This is definitely one of the stand-out better Metroidvanias to come out in the past few years. It's fairly challenging (sometimes a bit too hard, tbh) on normal difficulty, but it has the difficulty options to mitigate that. It looks nice, plays well, and doesn't outstay its welcome. The twist it puts on the Metroidvania formula is a gimmick, sure, but it's a strong one and provides a good change of pace between resource gathering in the main mine and platforming challenges in the optional side areas. If you like 2D exploration games and/or Metroidvanias, this is definitely a game to not let pass you by~ Continuing my spree of playing through recent indie Metroidvanias via Game Pass, I played through Guacamelee 2. I quite enjoyed the first game, but never got around to playing the 2nd one until now. It took me a while to click with it, but I enjoyed my time with this game. It took me roughly 9 hours to beat on the normal difficulty with the best ending and full completion.
Guacamelee 2 is very much more of the first game. I'd heard that before I started playing it, and that's pretty true to what it is. There are a couuuple new things. The number of character in co-op has been increased from 2 to 4 (although I've heard that the game is utterly unplayable with 2, let alone 4 people trying to do the same platforming puzzles), and the chicken form has been given some new moves. I wanna say there also are a few new enemy types, but I don't' remember the first game well enough to say just how many of these are new. Other than that, this game will be mechanically and stylistically very familiar to anyone who has played the first game. Sequences of platforming intermixed with brawling arenas in the "Metroidvania but a beat 'em up" style that Guacamelee 1 did so well with a heavy aesthetic of Mexican Luchador wrestling. It wasn't broke, so they didn't fix it. However I would say that this game is a bit easier than the first, from the platforming to the combat encounters, it never feels like I'm really struggling like a good few areas in 1 felt. The writing is a very irreverent and meme-filled style that the first game also had, but this feels cranked up a notch. The villains aren't as memorable as the first game (although the best characters from the first game do make reappearances, especially Flame Face), and at least as far as I remember, there are a LOT more outright meme references in this one than the 1st one. Some of them land, a fair few of them don't, and I'd be lying if I said it never got grating. To be totally fair to the game, a lot of the meme stuff and homages to old games/other indie games (of which there are quite a few and are often boring/bad/weird) is all optional content, but if you want the best ending to the game, you'll come across them if not finish them in your hunt for the 5 special things you need. There are also a lot more new versions of the Luchador-ification of pop culture characters in the form of wrestling promotional posteres in the background (one of my favorites being a He-Man & Skeletor one), and they do not disappoint. The game definitely looks a lot prettier than the first. Guacamelee 1 looks like a game that was made to be able to run on a Wii U, while 2 really cranks up the art style. The angular, not-quite-hand-drawn style is really boosted by a lot of flourishes that bring enemies and environments to life in beautiful color, and the game never suffers any performance drops for it (as I'd damn well hope it wouldn't). The music is nice, but never super stand-out memorable. I mostly had podcasts on while I played it, but I did still have the sound on enough to hear the largely atmospheric music. Verdict: Recommended. Certainly not a bad game, but nothing super duper special. Especially if you've already played the first one, this game isn't a must-play if you have very limited time. But if you're like me and love any Metroidvania you can get your hands on, you'll enjoy your time with Guacamelee 2. If you wanted more Guacamelee, this delivers it in a way just as good as it was the last time (for better or worse). Also known as just Momodora 4, this is a Metroidvania I decided to check out not only because it was on Game Pass, but also because it seemed we were looking for some kind of first-hand opinion on it recently. All I knew about it is that it was fairly difficult but also fairly short, and both of those proved to be true. It took me a little under 6 hours to do a 100% run on normal difficulty.
Momodora is a Metroidvania with very obvious inspirations from Fromsoft's Souls series. Especially thematically and aesthetically, the relatively few NPCs, the lethality of normal enemies, healing items that refresh at checkpoints, and even the "you're a savoir from a far-off land here to save this land from a corrupted monarch", this game's design shows its inspirations on its sleeve. That said, I wouldn't call that a bad thing. Momodora has a beautiful pixel-art design with very fluid 2D animations. Oddly enough, with what a nearly all-female cast with a somewhat anime art-style, the aesthetic came off to as a "Touhou meets Dark Souls 1" at times XD. There isn't a ton of enemy variety, but what is there has lots of corrupted, creepy designs, and the boss fights and designs are fun while never feeling unfair, as the game is quite generous with checkpoints. The combat handles consistently and nicely, and you can really start wrecking stuff once you get the hang of how the game plays. The mechanical design feel a lot like Hollow Knight, but if Hollow Knight were a more conventionally designed Metroidvania. The scope is much smaller compared to Hollow Knight's massive and sprawling area maps, you have an auto-mapping system as you explore, and you only ever get a couple of new combat abilities to augment the otherwise unchanging power of your normal sword slash, ranged attack, and dodge roll. "Hollow Knight with a far narrower and conventional design" is my one-sentence summary for this game. My only real complaint would be the game's difficulty curve. The game's mechanics are simple, but they have a fair deal of weight to them. Especially getting used to how long/far you can dodge and how much recovery time you need before you can start moving again once you finish your normal attack combo can both take some getting used to. However, once you get the hang of those and start finding health upgrades, the game gets a lot easier. There are a few activatable items other than your not-Estus Flask that you can find as well as some passives you can equip, but they don't really change the combat much other than sometimes buffing your attack power. The first couple bosses were way harder than the last few because I could tank SO much more damage. I didn't even die once on the final boss (who is admittedly, not that hard) because I had such a big health pool and so much ability to heal. Not a huge design flaw or a deal breaker outright, but I wish the game would've had a smoother difficulty curve than more of a downward slope. Verdict: Recommended. If you want a Metroidvania that's short, sweet, and to the point, then you can do a lot worse than Momodora. It doesn't do anything super unique or unconventional, but it does what it does very competently and the challenge provided is engaging. If you bounced off Hollow Knight because of the great difficulty AND huge length, then Momodora's difficulty settings and much smaller scope may well be right up your alley~ I didn't really have this game on my radar until I started seeing people talking about it. I then very much had it on my radar once a friend of mine gave me an old Xbox One that came with his apartment (often you get some kind of gift from the owner/landlord when you move into a house/apartment in Japan) that he never used, so suddenly I had a machine that could access Game Pass and therefore, this game. The original Xbox One is hardly the ideal way to be playing games this far into the console generation, but it was more than serviceable to play this game. I enjoyed my time with TOW immensely, and it took me a little over 40 hours to do everything I could in my first playthrough on hard mode.
This is Obsidian's latest game, and as a result, story is a big part of what it brings to the table, and does it ever. Taking place in the 24th century, humanity has invented faster than light travel and begun to colonize the galaxy. The game takes place in the Halcyon Colony, and you play the role of a would-be colonist woken up 70 years late because your colony ship dropped out of FTL speed and got lost in the vacuum of space. With the Board of the colony not believing it was worth their time to save you and your fellow cryogenically frozen colonists, a scientist with an axe to grind against the Board wakes you up to help his fight against the Board and wake up your fellow colonists. But that's just the set-up. The premise of TOW is certainly a political piece on the inherently destructive (and often self-destructive) impact of capitalism on people, the environment, and everything generally, but you don't HAVE to help the scientist who saves you. You can even almost immediately betray him to the Board and have a far different path through the game's main plot. While there are ultimately two sides to the conflict (anti or pro-Board), where characters themselves lie in it and how they justify it to themselves are where the more grey areas of morality lie. They've also really gone out of their way to give Halcyon a diverse cast of characters, with humans of all colors and creeds playing prominent roles in the story. I especially appreciated just how many women and women of color play prominent roles not just in the story, but in Halcyon's society in general. It's not something you see in a lot of games like this, so it made for a welcome change of pace that more games should aspire towards in how they cast their sci-fi worlds. Obsidian does a great job as usual making characters with spirit, personality, and compelling motives for what they do and a logic that dictates what they believe. Even in fairly incidental characters like shopkeepers or information givers, there's a good degree of nuance to their acting and dialogue that really says a lot about who they are and what they believe that could've easily been lost with a less talented writing team. You get a total of 6 companions and can have 2 in your party at a time (in a very Mass Effect sorta way). Also in a sorta Mass Effect way, they'll have chats on what you're doing, will interject in conversation, or will even approach you about a decision you're about to make if they have some sort of opinion on it. 5 of the 6 of them have character quests, and out of those I'd say 3 are very good. The companions are on the whole quite good, but range from very forgettable and annoying to stand-out exemplary in their quality. Ellie and Parvati were my two favorites, but Parvati is my #1. She is by far the best example of asexual representation (something quite close to my heart, being I'm asexual too) I've seen in any media, let alone a video game, and her character quest was one I identified with a LOT of. I really loved the writing in this game, from the world to the companions to even incidental logs and books you find in the world, and I think it's one of the biggest selling points of the game. Beyond the writing, this is an FPS RPG very much in the vein of the newer Fallout games, but also not quite. For starters, especially for an Obsidian game, this game runs fantastically at launch. Technical limitations on the Xbone aside, I encountered one soft-crash my whole 40 hours with the game, and one small audio bug that went away quickly. Beyond that, it isn't one giant world map, but a series of small maps that you unlock as you progress through the story (and depending on how you progress through it, you'll unlock different ones at different times). These smaller maps allow the experience to be much more curated and deliberately designed than the massive sprawling worlds of Skyrim or Fallout 3, but also sacrifice those games' elements of emergent storytelling and outright exploration because of it. This is an even more guided story than Fallout: New Vegas was, so if you like these sorts of games for the super open exploration, that is largely not what you'll find here. I prefer the more deliberate design, though, so I was very happy with what's here. The shooting and combat are much tighter than Bethesda's Fallouts though. Instead of Fallout's VATS system, you have an ability to slow down time to target specific enemy body parts to debuff them in certain ways (shooting a limb will mean they have weakened attack, shooting the head will blind them, etc), as well as hovering over enemies in general to get a look at their stats. You can also do things like issue orders to your companions to attack or use their abilities more easily during this time, as while not moving or firing your weapon, your slow time-meter goes down very slowly. The game is also designed to make any kind of playstyle doable. On top of hacking or talking your way out of a potential fight just about always being an option, dialogue and tech skills also have uses in combat as well, so being a smooth talker genuinely makes you better at fighting too. You can even completely respec your perks and stats at any time on your ship to experiment with different ways to play. I'd heard that normal difficulty was a way too easy and that hard mode provided a better challenge, and I'd absolutely agree with that statement. Hard mode was a good sweet spot of challenging, but not impossibly hard. To comment on the hardware I played it on, the Xbox One version of the game is serviceable, but not great. Tons of texture pop-in, especially when talking to characters is a very consistent problem. There's also a good deal of slowdown when looking around very quickly as texture/objects quickly pop into existence. That said, it was only cosmetic difficulties for me. Never once did the hardware affect how I dealt with the combat in a significant way, so while this is far from the prettiest way to experience The Outer Worlds, it's a perfectly fine way to enjoy the game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I went in expecting to like this game, and I came out absolutely loving it. This is easily one of my new most favorite Western RPGs I've ever played, and it's nice to see that Obsidian can make a first-person game that isn't buggy as hell XD. If you like story-driven sci-fi and like a story that isn't afraid to critique while poking fun at modern socioeconomic problems, this is a game I cannot recommend enough. |
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
|