The City That Never Sleeps is is effectively the title of the season pass of Spider-Man on PS4, comprising the 3 DLC mission sets released for it that together comprise what is more or less a 4th act that follows the main game's 3. It follows Spider-Man taking on a resurging Maggia crime wave led by Hammerhead. It took me about 12 or so hours to get all the trophies in all 3 DLCs, but that, as with the normal game, is a fairly easy task to accomplish compared to many other PS4 games.
Given that this is more or less 3 smaller stories that make up a 4th act, it almost feels like an expansion to the main game or a micro-sequel that reuses the same city. Swinging around the city was still as fun as ever, and the 9 new suits (3 per-DLC) were a very welcome addition to the base game's 29, but it is just more Spider-Man. Despite being shorter, the story is still well told, and I especially liked what they did with Yuri's arc over it. If anything, I kinda wish it had been one large expansion from the beginning instead of 3 smaller storys, as the larger connected narrative feels a little rushed compared to the base game's. The DLC's don't seem to run as well as the base game, though. There were several times where I would flying across the city on my way to another activity and the game would just freeze to load in the area I was going into, and a couple missions had a floating/frozen car that kinda made that mission freak out, where those were never things I encountered in the base game. The pack of 3 starts out a bit lukewarm, with The Heist having some remarkably aggravating and not fun challenge missions (which were already the worst part of the base game, so making those worse is saying something), on top of some other fairly uninspired side activities and a difficulty level that's a bit of a step down from act 3 of the base game. It really picks up the pace in the 2nd and 3rd bits of the pack though, with Turf Wars and Silver Lining having a very nice difficulty curve across the whole of the TCTNS expansion with some really brutal new enemy types, much better challenge design, and some enemy base missions that will really test just how good a grasp on the combat you have. Even the bosses are damn tough compared to a lot in the main game, with the final boss of the 3rd pack, while not having the atmospheric gravitas that the main game's climax has, it was certainly a far harder boss. If you were to buy the digital deluxe edition of the game, which is $80 compared to the normal game's $60, then that's a pretty good value proposition as far as I'm concerned. You're getting 33% more game, and you're paying 33% more for it. At $10 a piece separate, it's a bit of a bigger ask, as is the $25 for the season pass, but this is a very easy recommendation if you pick the digital deluxe edition on sale for $50 like it is at the moment of writing this review. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it's not exactly a must-play, completely revamped version of the main game's story, it's a very well executed expansion to the base game that is well-priced and has good value for money (which is something many other game's DLC's can't really say these days). Even if you may feel that paying $20-$30 extra bucks on top of the base game's $60 is a bit much, I can say with high confidence that this is gonna be something well worth checking out if and when Spider-Man ever gets a GOTY Edition sometime next year ^w^
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I heard a lot of really good things about this one and was planning to pick it up once it got cheaper, but I got it as an unexpected Xmas present from a friend on the grounds that I would start playing it with them. I went to hang out at their place to start it 3 days ago, and basically played it whenever I was able since then and got the (surprisingly easy) platinum earlier today XD . I expected this game would be good, and damn good it was.
It's Spider-Man, and presentation-wise it is like a celebration of Spider-Man as a franchise. The web-swinging feels AWESOME. The game has a fast-travel system, but I barely ever even used it because swinging around is so intuitive, fast, and fluid. You can unlock all sorts of gadgets to use on enemies, and basically any suit Spidey has ever freaking worn to trot about the city in. The game also basically doesn't use pre-rendered cutscenes, so any suit you're wearing will be what he's wearing during whatever cutscene you happen to be in (which ranges from hilarious to kinda off-putting XD). The story is pretty damn good. It suffers from a decided lack of pacing that most of these open-world games suffer from in their main narratives, but the acting, cinematography, and pacing of the cutscenes are great. I've been told it follows the story of the rebooted comics to some extent, but I have no context for that from personal experience, so I have to take that at its word XP . Plenty of recognizable baddies from the franchise though, and Peter Parker's quips are as funny as ever. There was more than once where I had to nearly pause the game because a quip hit me so well XD. The combat is Arkham-y, but it's done really well. Perhaps it's just because I'm not sick of that style of combat like I know some people are, but I always found the combat really fluid and fun. You get level ups from doing map challenges, main and side-quests, as well as just fighting baddies, and you can put skill points you get from those into new moves you can use in combat. The combat has a real emphasis on air-juggling opponents as well as being mobile while also using gadgets to trip-up enemies and keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, and it has a very nice "easy to learn, hard to master" vibe to it. That said, I think it may be a little too hard to learn, given that I was nearly dying quite a bit in the tutorial mission XD. The game runs great on my normal PS4. The only performance hiccups were some slight framerate stutters during some cutscenes, but during actual gameplay it was always fine, and I can only imagine how well this runs on an a PS4 Pro. It runs as well as a 1st party title with this kind of budget behind it should, and I'm very happy with that. Verdict: Highly recommended. Watchdogs 2 is still my favorite GTA-style open-world city game, but Spider-Man has thoroughly dethroned Infamous 2 as my favorite super-powers variant of that sub-genre. It is a fantastic return to form for Spider-Man games as well as just a brilliant addition to the already overwhelming PS4 exclusives library, and something anyone with a PS4 should at least consider checking out if they're into open-world types of games ^w^ I had some time to kill today while I waited for a computer to factory reset, so I decided to pass the time with some Donut County. It turned out the computer took almost exactly as long to reset as it did for me to beat the whole thing, which was about 2 hours. It was also 2 hours that went by a LOT faster on account of having something so entertaining to do X3
Donut County is a port of an iOS game that came out a few months back, but only arrived on Switch last week. It's a simple game where you are a raccoon who operates a donut shop. However, instead of deliver donuts, you deliver just the hole, and you maneuver this hole around each environment, in a very Katamari-ish fashion, to go from a small hole to a much bigger hole as you get bigger and bigger stuff. Sometimes there are puzzles like you'll need to consume a camp fire in order to fill the hole with fire to reach up with flames and burn a tree to make it smaller to swallow up, but even then they're very simple puzzles. The real star of the game (along with the simple-to enjoy gameplay) is the writing, which is very silly and charming. Particularly funny is the Trashopedia, as the raccoon writes down in it all of the "trash" that he's taken into the hole on that particular level and always gives the most odd-ball descriptions of all sorts of items as viewed from a raccoon's perspective. Verdict: Recommended. It's probably going to be a bit of a steep asking price at $13 for a 2 hour-ish game, but it's a quality game nonetheless. I can certainly see myself getting more mileage out of this showing it to friends at get-togethers and the like, just because it is so charmingly written as well as easy to play. The Switch port is a good one, and this is a fine way to enjoy Donut County ^w^ This is a game I got as a part of this year's Jingle Jam Humble Bundle, and I got about halfway through it while waiting for Smash Bros to arrive two Fridays ago. Not wanting to leave a job unfinished, I sat down this morning and went through the last 50 levels. I played with a 360 gamepad and got all the apples in the main adventure, and it took me about 6 hours.
Slime-San is a Meat Boy-like platformer through and through to the point where I don't think it'd be entirely unfair to call it a "clone." A series of levels with an often out-of-the-way apple (like Meat Boy's bandages) to collect, and a speed-run time on each stage as well (also like Meta Boy). However, Slime-San has levels which are a series of 4 stages, each stage having its own apple but all 4 sharing one collective time goal (which can be insanely annoying if there's just ONE tough section near the end of a stage so you need to do the entire set of levels over again to get the time goal). The time trial stuff and apples are totally optional though. While Slime can wall-jump like Meat Boy, Slime can also slow-down time as well as do a dash. Slowing down time also causes Slime to go translucent and can pass through green objects. This differentiates Slime-San's playstyle pretty significantly from Meat Boy, and given the TONS of stages in Slime-San, there is plenty here to enjoy if this is more your style than Meat Boy. The only things I wasn't so hot on are the smaller nuances of the platforming, which is really make or break for a game in this genre. Stages are filled with neutral platforms as well as both green and red. Slime can pass through the green platforms (as well as green enemies) whenever he goes translucent/slows down time. Combine this with how some enemies and platforms can disappear/reappear when you are or aren't slowing down time. Part of why the game can be frustrating at times is because you need to keep track of SO much stuff (especially when you have a deadly ghost following you, tracking your movements), part of it is because the 360 D-pad was absolutely trash as usual, but the last aggrivating part can be the ambiguous hit-boxes on platforms as well as Slime. There were MANY times where it seemed Slime would have a very generously small hit-box, and other times where he'd just skim along platforms but not actually get a jump off of them, or be so suddenly big that he'd die by touching a bad platform I could've sworn was pretty far away from the hit-box. Bad controller aside, Slime's floaty movement combined with his weird hit-box made the game a lot more aggrivating at times than it needed to be (especially as dashing up is often needed in harder stages to act as a second jump, and a finnicky/unclear character hit-box makes that a LOT harder :/ ). The presentation of the game is fantastic. The music is great and the game has a kind of alt-Gameboy retro pallette going on. Lots of pretty pixel art done with only a few shades (although not genuinely monochrome) of green and red. There are also tons of little indie game characters and other references, sometimes genuine and sometimes changed just enough to be legal XD, that are fun to find around the game and the little city-area that you can muck around in between levels. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Perhaps all the negative control elements would be solved playing this with a Switch Pro Controller or something, but I'm fairly sure the faults in the mechanics of this aren't entirely down to my controller. It's a fine game and you'll probably enjoy it if you like this genre, but existing in such a crowded genre (especially on PC), you'll probably have a better time with something like Celeste or Super Meat Boy if you haven't already played those and just wanna check out his genre. I was hype af for the new Smash Bros last week, and boy was that hype met and then some! Yesterday afternoon I finished the last of the game's content, and I reckon it took me about 40 or so hours to totally do everything in the game 100% (except the online challenges as I don't have online). Compared to previous games in the series, the amount of absurdly difficult challenges for any kind of reward is substantially less, but I'm totally okay with that. This is a brilliant game and yet another example of Nintendo blowing precedent out of the water with a new title on Switch in an established franchise.
First what I did was Adventure mode, and that took me about 15.5 hours to complete. Adventure mode is yet another new take on a single-player content for Smash Bros, and it's the best they've ever done it. The player goes along paths on a world-map covered with fighters to unlock and other smaller fights to do for the game's Spirits. Spirits are buffs you can give you fighter in Adventure mode or in a spirits-enabled smash battle, and they provide attack and defensive buffs that increase as they level up by using them more to fight. They also have equip slots where support spirits can be put in that have effects from having faster charging smash moves to dealing more damage with some directional special (they're basically stickers from Brawl). In over 600 fights (MANY of which are entirely optional), you can go around the world map fighting battles themed around these spirits. For example, the Buzz Buzz spirit is fighting a stamina battle against a very tiny Mr. Game & Watch in the Onett stage who likes to avoid combat. The set-ups for these fights just never ceased to be clever and interesting, and some of them downright brutal in how challenging they are. Adventure mode also adds 7 new boss battles (like Brawl had in its adventure mode) against a powerful AI NPC opponent, and you can also unlock every fighter in the game by going around the board and fighting them (but only unlocked for normal Smash when you finish Adventure mode). Outside of Adventure mode, there is also the Spirit Board, where you can just do these spirit fights outside of adventure mod against a cycling selection of 12 spirits to fight (and even after 100%-ing adventure mode, there are like 400 spirit fights not in Adventure mode only on the spirit board). Now on the topic of unlocking characters, this game has a TON to unlock. In a roster of 74 fighters to unlock, only 8 are unlocked at the start: the roster from the original N64 game. Every 10 minutes played in any mode, you'll get a new challenger approaching from the list. Alternatively, completing anyone's classic mode will get you a new challenger to fight, and each classic mode takes about 10 or so minutes as well, as every character has their own specific classic mode with 6 fights centered around a theme (for example, Dr. Mario's is fighting 1 v 3's against opponents colored in yellow, blue, and red XD ). The classic modes are clever and fun just like the spirit fights are, and it was a joy to go through them just as it was go through the Adventure mode. That said, for over 60 characters at 10 minutes a piece, that's over 10 hours to unlock every fighter in the game. In a game with nearly 1300 spirits to collect, I think this game already had MORE than enough collectables to hunt down to have them put the main meat & potatoes of the game behind a slow grind of over 10 hours of play time. This is compounded further by a lot of these challenger fights being quite legitimately hard (even for an experienced, decent Smash player like myself). The AI in this game ain't no slouch, and I have seen no shortage of complaints online about what a pain unlocking all the characters is, particularly for someone not that great at the game. Not having an easier method outside of using amiibos to unlock the characters really flies in the face of Smash being a party game, and is one of very few things I would say the previous Smash game did better than this one (as nearly every character was already unlocked). This huge time investment to unlock characters is really the one significant complaint I have with Smash Ult, and even then it's not that big a complaint. Other complaints are far more minor, with the most minor being some somewhat problematic (although very Japanese) spirit design as both black human spirit characters (Dee Jay from Street Fighter and Mr. Sandman from Punch Out) are 1v1 fights against primates (Diddy and DK respectively Xp). And then this game also doesn't fix Smash 4's problem of a generally confusing and not entirely intuitive main menu system full of menus within menus that take some time to just suss out what is where through trial and error. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As I said earlier, I loved this game to pieces. I was super hyped for it, and it delivered on everything I hoped for and then some. With a massive roster and an equally massive amount of single-player content (even outside of unlocking characters), Smash Bros Ultimate has really earned its title of the "Ultimate" Smash Bros game. I thought this game looked cool, and I'd heard good things about it, but I honestly went into this game more or less blind. Given how that could very much be setting myself up for failure, I enjoyed the hell outta this game. I played the game on a PS4 Slim, and I beat it without killing any NPC characters and it took me about 35-40 hours.
Vampyr follows the story of Doctor Johnathan Reid, a combat medic just returning to London from the French front in the final days of the first World War. He wakes up after being thrown in a mass grave with an unquenchable thirst for blood, and ends up feasting on the first human he sees, which is unfortunately his sister Mary. With barely any time to grieve for the sister he just unwittingly murdered, he is chased from the scene by vicious vampire hunters. This begins his quest to not only learn about who made him a vampire and why, but also how to bring relief to London from the horrible plague of the Spanish Flu. Vampyr really goes out of its way to take its own twist on the concept of a secret society of vampires, and I really enjoyed the world building and overall narrative. The guilt Dr. Reid feels for murdering his sister gives him a very good grounding point as a character, and is a very clever narrative conceit for why he isn't just some mass-murdering maniac now that he has such powers of unlife. The main narrative/gameplay gimmick that sets Vampyr apart from something like Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (other than the better performance and combat) is how you gain XP. While, like VtMB, you only really gain XP from doing quests (you do gain XP from combat in this, but barely any at all), the other main way to gain XP is by drinking blood from (and killing) NPC characters. As you go through the game, your "mesmerize" level goes up, and once it hits the level of a certain NPC, you can mesmerize them, take them into a shadowy corner, and drain them like a juice can for a BIG boost of extra XP. You also get far more XP from them if you take time to talk to them and learn about them through dialogue choices, eavesdropping, and asking other characters about them. You can honestly spend a good few hours JUST talking to people once you hit a new area if you're so inclined, as there are plenty of people to talk to, and it's all voice acted quite well. You don't have to if you don't want to (you can just mash square to skip the dialogue if you so please), but the amount of XP you get for learning the extra facts about characters really starts to add up, as does the XP you get from their quests, so interacting with them on some level, while optional, is highly recommended even if you're just gonna eat 'em all eventually XD. The game's combat isn't the most difficult thing in the world, and you can make up for low levels by upgrading your weapons a bunch, but the combat is certainly involved enough that it can be veeery tempting to take out a few NPC's to get your levels up to a point where they perhaps should be. The game also has a Bloodborne-style auto-saving system, so you only have one save file and you cannot go back on any decisions you make. And letting NPC's live for story reasons (like because you don't wanna kill anyone, like I did) isn't the only reason to let them live. Districts have an overall health rating that goes off of how many people in it are still alive as well as how well they are (characters can get sick and you can give them medicines you make to make them well again). The higher the rating, the lower prices are in that region's stores. However, should a district get below 50% health, that district is fallen to the plague. A fallen district loses ALL it's remaining NPC's (they go "missing"), so their quests effectively disappear if you haven't done them yet, and the district gets filled with lots of more dangerous enemies as well. A district can also fall if no one is killed but everyone gets too sick with serious illnesses. Illnesses develop every time you go to bed, and you need to go to bed to level up (think of it like leveling at a bonfire in Dark Souls), and an illness will slowly get worse over several days until it reaches level 3. If a lot of characters in a district have level 3 illnesses, the district can also fall, but it takes quite a while to get to this point, so you don't actually NEED to be constantly going back and forth, playing doctor and delivering medicine every time you go to sleep. You have time to wait until it gets bad-bad-bad if you really care that much. The combat is like if Yakuza borrowed Bloodborne's combat (but not the difficulty) and aesthetic but swapped the Victorian Lovecraft for 1918 London Vampires. The combat is far more like Bloodborne in the sense that you have a primary melee weapon, an offhand weapon you can use for stabbing to collect blood (mana) or stun enemies that can also be a firearm, and a dodge move all connected to a stamina bar that you gotta let refill before doing tons of stuff again. The enemy variety is more like Yakuza in the sense that there aren't a ton of really crazy and outlandish bosses like Bloodborne has. A lot of the enemies you're fighting have fairly recognizable abilities and while they are usually quite a danger to you, there isn't a ton of enemy variety. More or less all of the sub-bosses are just very strong versions of existing enemies, but the big bosses thankfully do have more unique elements to them that make them stand out a bit more. I played this game on a normal PS4, and it REALLY shows. The game is quite a bit like Bloodborne again (at least how it originally was) in that this game has some feckin' LONG load times. There aren't that many, thankfully, but when you're going into a new map (i.e. inside a building) or going back outside a building, the loading times can approach like 20 or 30 seconds. Also, if you're running from area to area without really stopping, the game will stop to load in the new area. The framerate also has some problems, especially when lots of NPC's are on screen, but it honestly never really affects the gameplay. I would normally totally expect a game like this to have the combat really suffer from the framerate, but the combat sections were always really well optimized for me and I never had any problems. It's more-so when you're running around crowded safe-NPC areas that it will jump and hiccup a bit, but even then it's never to a really annoying effect, just a noticeable one. The presentation is good, but a bit affected by the hardware. This is definitely more of a "AA game" compared to a AAA game. Like, if this were a higher budget title, it'd probably have several outfits for Dr. Reid to wear, the character animations during dialogue would probably be a bit more extensive, there'd probably be more voice actors. That said, what's here is still very well done. It's far from something like Red Dead 2 as far as production value is concerned, but it's still a game that looks and sounds nice. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is probably one of my favorite games I've played this year. It's almost certainly my favorite game I've played that released this year (granted I've played like, 5 of them including this XD ). The combat is super fun, the story is well told and engaging, the world is familiar but new. It's all around an excellent game, and it's left me super excited for the next project this team will take on ^w^ |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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