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Jun 11th, 2023 at 13:24:55 - Metal: Hellsinger (PC) |
Metal: Hellsinger is a rhythm game meets modern Doom. The draw of the game is that it uses metal music. It’s a cross between melodic death metal and new wave American heavy metal, apparently composed in-house by part of the dev team, but featuring well-known metal vocalists from Arch Enemy, Dark Tranquility, Lamb of God, Soilwork, etc., plus a couple surprises, including the guy from Refused and someone else you may not have heard since the early 2000s for the final boss battle. The story and environments are whatever. They do the job of giving your character some motivation and space in which to be pissed off and slaughter hordes of Hell demons on your way to killing the biggest baddie demon. I did end up enjoying the comic book ish art style of the cut scenes, but the narrator didn’t fit for me. I am not sure why they went with a “wild west” narrator. There is nothing about the game that has a wild west vibe. But if you’re going to do the wild west in hell, then you need to license Pantera’s Cowboys from Hell no matter the cost! Missed. Opportunity.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is awesome, but I have to explain how the music builds for it to make sense. You have a “fury” multiplier (x1, x2, x4, x8, x16) that increases as you perform actions to the beat of the music. As you increase your fury, the music tracks layer on top of one another. Fury x1 is a basic drum track. At fury x2, the drums pick up. The guitar might pick slide in the mix. By fury x4, you’ve got the whole band playing the instrumental song in a relatively restrained part, then at fury x8 the song goes full force instrumental and you’re nodding your head. Fury x16 kicks the vocals in, and at that point, your head is banging. Fury constantly drains over time, so you have to keep hitting enemies, dashing, and so on to the beat to keep it up. Like Doom Eternal, the game rewards risk-taking, alternatively weakening enemies with guns, then pressing “E” at the appropriate time to melee kill them and get some health.
Enemies spawn in waves and there is a nice variety, from ones that charge at you in a zig-zag pattern, to support enemies that spawn homing mines, to shielded ranged attackers, to quick teleporting melee assassins, and more. Throwing various types at you at once keeps you on your toes. You can also build up a hit streak, but if you take damage, it resets, and I found it difficult, especially later in the game, to avoid taking damage. I could keep fury up at 8 or 16 pretty good, but rarely had much of a hit streak (I had a GETTING hit streak, ba-dum-tss!).
This is probably my main minor gripe with the game, that as it becomes more of a bullet hell toward the end, the music and what’s going on on the screen cease to match clearly, making it easy (or necessary) to lose the beat. That drops your fury because you’re performing actions off-beat, and since your fury level is tied to your damage output (higher fury = higher damage), you get stuck in a bad cycle of not doing enough damage against hard enemies. Granted, the game isn’t THAT hard on the regular (second) difficulty. I only had to redo a level once, a result of my one death in the game on the final boss (though I beat her the second time with the tiniest sliver of health; I would have died a second later!).
I understand that the increasing difficulty makes it challenging, fun, immersive, etc., but although I absolutely loved shooting demons to metal music, by the time you’re toward the end, it’s not novel anymore. You’re shooting demons to the beat of the same metal music as you were 4 hours ago and you GET IT. Any longer and the game would have worn out its welcome. So actually the THREAT of dying and having to replay the level was motivation to really not screw up. There are optional “sigils” to acquire in special arena battles with modifiers like “your weapon randomly changes after each kill.” Sigils provide various bonuses, such as making your fury level not fall below x4 or letting you take a free hit before resetting your hit streak. There are three of these sigil battles after each of the main levels. I did probably 8 of them (out of maybe 21 or 24), then they started getting pretty hard, and I ignored the rest. But, getting sigils gives you some grace to screw up, and would certainly make the late game (and harder difficulties) more forgiving.
Anyway, if you like FPS games, rhythm games, and metal music, this is a no-brainer. It’s short and sweet and you get to bang your head and stress out about keeping various meters and streaks up.
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Jun 11th, 2023 at 13:21:46 - Tunic (PC) |
This was something truly special. I was on the fence about playing it because it looked like some other good games I've played in the past year or so (Death's Door, Nobody Saves the World), but less interesting. A cuddly-looking fox dressed like Zelda? Meh. I'm not a giant Zelda or souls-like fan either, and it draws comparisons to those. I had also read that it could be a bit obtuse, that you had to interpret an instruction manual, and it sounded like it might be tedious. Boy was I wrong. This is one of the best games I've played in a long, long time. Zelda-esque (very), soulslike (light), and to my pleasant surprise, Fez-ish too.
You do play as a fox, but you can imagine any animal you like because it doesn’t matter. You like armadillos? Great, you’re an armadillo with a sword. An ancient armadillo spirit is trapped and you have to find three keys to un-trap her. You explore the map, which consists of a bunch of interconnected areas, and kill the bosses holding the keys. Exploring the map is fun, and you will constantly come upon something new. The sense of discovery in Tunic is wonderful. If you play, you should go in as blind as possible, and try not to use a walkthrough. I only got really stuck one time and caved in. It turned out that I missed a little path to where I needed to go, probably because I was being inattentive, but also maybe because I didn’t walk far enough for the camera to spin and clearly reveal said path (I like to think I would have noticed it…). I did consult a walkthrough one other time because I was tired of inching my way through the Quarry and wanted to make sure I was headed in the right direction. During the final boss fight (very difficult!) I caved in a third time and looked up what each of the cards does. I don’t think they did me many favors, but I did learn that one would have made the Quarry significantly easier. In the Quarry, by the way, you basically have to be perfect! Crystals drain your max health to 1, which means that every enemy one-shots you. Further, the crystals distort your vision. I died probably 50 times in there. I was there WAY before I should have been, and actually cleared most of it out then, and later finished it when I was so much stronger.
Such is this game! You sometimes learn information or find a location far before you need to, and other times far later. This is the gimmick: the instructions for how to play are scattered around the world. You find pages of the instruction manual as you play. It’s brilliant. I’m not sure how easy it is to miss vital information, but I can see it happening. I was attentive to finding manual pages, secrets, and generally poking around everywhere, so I didn’t miss much. In fact, at the end of the game, it said I’d missed two pages (out of 50-something). Thorough! But even when you do get manual pages, you have to interpret them. The game is mostly presented in some fake language, so you have to study images, maps, what little English words there are, and piece together what the manual is trying to tell you. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, sometimes it’s not. I can only imagine how someone who hasn’t played a ton of games in their life would struggle with this. I benefitted from interpreting a lot of the manual simply because I’ve seen such manuals and played such adventure games 100 times before. But I still felt an amazing sense of discovery and “aha!” when I’d figure out what a page was trying to tell me. It might tell you how to upgrade skills, where a key is located, how to unlock a secret, and so on. If you don’t spend time thinking about the manual (and paying attention to the details), you’re going to end up more lost than not. I’ve read about people not figuring out how to upgrade skills, for example, and then complaining about the combat being too hard. It sucks if they missed the manual page that explains it, but maybe they had the page and didn’t make sense of it!
I imagine that because of the interconnected nature of the areas and the way that you can find manual pages out of order, players have very different experiences with Tunic, like perhaps defeating bosses in different orders and so on (like, I wonder if I did the Librarian out of order because he was bizarrely easy). I am so impressed by Tunic and would love love love to play another adventure game just as clever and challenging. I would recommend this to anyone.
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Jun 5th, 2023 at 07:43:16 - A Plague Tale: Requiem (PC) |
This was an improvement over Innocence (a game I certainly liked) in every possible way. It picks up shortly after the events of the first game, as Hugo's symptoms have calmed, and the family is seeking shelter with The Order, an ancient...order...that knows about the Macula. But things are not calm for long! You get a couple rat-free hours of playtime, but then all hell breaks loose.
I remember thinking that the story in the first game was mediocre, that it was a bland medieval tale that took a left turn when it started talking about the Macula. This one is more coherent. It's a story about the Macula and rats from the very beginning--you know what you're getting into, you know it's going to be over-the-top. Indeed, while the first game ended on a high note with a boss fight featuring rat tornadoes, this one gives you rat waves. The rats are far greater in number, though they don't do anything different than Innocence in terms of gameplay. The rats are still afraid of light, and that's primarily how you get past them. But due to the story, the rats seem more sinister to me now.
The gameplay is similar to the first, focusing on stealth, but with more options for combat, which I enjoyed. The first game was too linear, and while this is still a linear game, I no longer found the stealth sequences boring. The areas are expanded too, so there are often multiple paths through an area and multiple options for dealing with human enemies. Amicia's sling can throw rocks (which one-shot kill enemies without helmets) and she can douse the rocks in alchemical substances for varying effects. She can throw fiery rocks, rocks that put out fires, rocks that give off odor and affect rats, rocks to coat surfaces in tar (though I never figured out how to use this one...). She also gets a crossbow and can find knives for one-off kills.
Different enemy types force you to use different strategies. Enemies with helmets can't be killed by rocks to the head, for example, while some of the bigger, armored guys require use of jars of tar or other things in the environment to weaken and kill. There are a few boss fights, which are cool, but none quite so exciting as the rat tornado boss at the end of the first game. There are, however, many exhilarating chase sequences, and the last couple hours of the game I found absolutely thrilling.
Locations are gorgeous, the music is top notch, the voice acting is outstanding. I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. The after-credits scene drops a teaser for what happens next in the story, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't excited for the next-level rat carnage of a potential third game.
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May 19th, 2023 at 08:23:25 - Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4) |
Finally finished this last night. It has its ups and downs, and I probably shouldn't have played another open world game with stealth, crafting and etc. after playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. My girlfriend called it "jank Assassin's Creed." It's different, of course, notably for the unique worldbuilding, story, and the giant robots. Well, any robots. Assassin's Creed has no robots. But Horizon Zero Dawn has no Templars. But it does have a cult. The comparisons are endless.
Anyway, you play as a young woman named Aloy, an outcast from her tribe with a mysterious connection to the past. If I say too much about the plot, I'll spoil things, but suffice to say that the overarching story is really, really interesting. It's revealed bit by bit, such that I often thought I understood what was going on, and then it would reveal another layer. In the latter quarter of the game, you get a ton of answers and learn so much about the history of the game world. The way you learn about the world must mirror the way that its inhabitants, or humans in general, knew nothing, and then made discovery after discovery that illuminated the darkness.
The sense of discovery isn't just the story, but the gameplay as well. Yes, the open world is beautiful, etc., etc., but there are giant robots everywhere! They are like "species," meant to resemble animals: some have herd behaviors (like horses), there are robot crocodiles, robot bulls, giant robot killer sandworms, robot pterodactyls, robot T-Rex, robot velociraptors, and a giant spider mech that looks like something out of Metal Gear. As you progress through the world, you encounter ever more dangerous robots and, if you're brave enough, can learn how to override them to make them fight each other (very entertaining).
Combat is largely bow-and-arrow-based, with various types of ammo that have various effects. There are other weapons, bombs, traps, and so on, some of which have novel uses. For example, you can lay down trip wires, then herd robots into them. Honestly, I barely used anything except my bow and arrow and my spear. The spear is useful for stealth. You can hide in tall grass, lure enemies, and stealth kill them (humans or weaker robots) or override them (robots). I guess I played the game a lot like it was an Assassin's Creed game. But I generally found the crafting, looting, and upgrading systems tedious, so I didn't bother. Another neat thing about the combat with robots is that you can shoot off parts of them. Robot firing missiles at you? Destroy its rocket launcher. It might even pop off for you to pick up. Need materials for crafting fire arrows? Shoot the incendiary containers off the backs of robots. It was fun to slowly dismantle the bigger robots like this.
Overall, it was neat to play Horizon Zero Dawn. I enjoyed the overarching story the most, but the moment-to-moment gameplay was fun too, with combat being an intense affair, especially against the more challenging robots. Segments where you have to clear human bandit camps were less inspiring. Side quests and characters were also pretty uninspiring, and I did stick mostly to the main storyline. There is a sequel out that I don't think I'll play, though I wouldn't mind reading about it.
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