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Apr 4th, 2025 at 18:33:00 - Shogun Showdown (PC) |
Clever little tactics roguelite. It reminds me of Into the Breach and other tactics games where you are given clear information about what enemies will do each turn. It's also reminiscent of Into the Breach because of the small play space. Basically, the game takes place on a 2d plane that is divided into like 8 or 9 spaces. Any given character occupies 1 space and can move left or right. You build a "deck" of "tiles" that include attacks and other special abilities, many of which involve movement (e.g., a forward dash that moves to the nearest frontal enemy and deals 1 damage). Your goal is to build up your tiles and progress stage by stage until you kill the Shogun.
During each run, you can purchase and upgrade tiles, mostly increasing their damage or decreasing their cooldowns, purchase passive abilities, use items, and other standard roguelite stuff--make yourself stronger by strategically handling whatever random things you get.
Most every action you do takes a turn, and all characters take turns at the same time. So, you move right (1 turn) and all the enemies do a thing (one might move left toward you, one might queue up an attack). Then you queue up an attack, and those two enemies might queue up an attack and attack, respectively. Actually, it also reminds me of Crypt of the Necrodancer, which works like this, where all characters act simultaneously. In that game, when you move, everything else moves. Shogun Showdown is like that. When you do something, the enemies do something.
I beat the Shogun for the first time this evening, which was maybe my fifth run or so. I had what felt like extremely overpowered weapons, a sword that I'd leveled up to deal 5 damage with only a 2-turn cooldown. I also had a bow-and-arrow with 4 damage and a 3-turn cooldown. The kicker though was a curse that doubled the next damage on an enemy. So, I'd just queue the curse, the sword, and the arrow. That took literally half the Shogun's health bar. Did it again, dead and into phase 2. No problem. Did it two more times. Dead. Easy. When you beat the Shogun, you unlock "day 2", which is the next difficulty level. You can also unlock additional characters with different skills, and you can keep unlocking new tiles and stuff. I consider it beat after taking out the Shogun once. It's a fun game, really tight, and makes you think ahead. It doesn't do much that you haven't seen before though.
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Mar 10th, 2025 at 17:15:54 - 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PS5) |
This is a visual novel/RTS hybrid for the PS4 that I'd never heard of until I was looking for PS5 games. It's really well reviewed and caught my eye since it's from Vanillaware, who has made some great RPGs.
One thing to note is that although it’s a genre hybrid, its constituent genres are presented in unique ways. I haven’t played too many visual novels, but this one has more interactivity than what I have played. You control characters (13 of them) in wonderfully drawn 2.5d locales. Each scene looks hand-painted. The game is beautiful. But, you run around and talk to other characters like an RPG, exploring different story branches for each character, all of which contribute to telling the whole complex narrative. As you talk to characters, you discover “thoughts” and consider them in your “thought cloud.” Having more thoughts opens new interactions and branching pathways.
On the RTS side, battles involve your squad of up to 6 characters defending a node in the center of the screen. It’s not tower defense, not that kind of defending. It’s also not really MOBA-esque. It’s more like a horde mode, except it’s an RTS instead of a shooter. Hordes of kaiju are encroaching on all sides, gunning for the central node, and you need to prevent them from destroying it.
So, those are the two halves of the game. Do the “Japanese high school” sim thing, then do the “kaiju mech combat” thing.
I found the visual novel portion to be far more compelling than the RTS portion. The story is very complicated, which made it fun to try and follow. It’s also well-written, with a useful encyclopedia of people, places, and things, as well as the option to rewatch any scene you want to. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with something like this (nor cared to), but it was so creative, and they throw a lot of twists and turns at you, so it was consistently exciting. There are 13 protagonists, numerous other characters, and like 5 time periods (yes, time travel). And the story is told in a completely nonlinear way, as you bounce around from character to character, with scenes unfolding anywhere across the span of the like 200 years that the game takes place in. This means that some of the protagonists are different people in different times or timelines. This was confusing at first, but once you realize this is happening, you just need to learn who is who when. To make it even crazier, you learn that some characters are androids, others have implanted memories, some characters are figments of imagination, and others appear to be cats. And since they’re in high school and this is a visual novel, they are all romantically attracted to someone.
The RTS part didn’t engage me as much because it was simple compared to the thought-provoking story. It’s connected, of course, but you basically earn upgrade points (can’t recall the actual name) throughout the story and by racking up high scores in combat. Spend those on unlocking and upgrading special attacks. Deploy your forces, and on normal at least, you will easily win all battles until the very end on normal by using basic tactics. There are four classes of sentinel (the giant mechs that the teens pilot to fight the kaiju): a brawler, a long-range one, an “all-rounder,” and one that flies. They’ve all got their strengths. Brawlers do big damage up close to ground enemies. Long-range sentinels get some powerful missile barrage attacks. Some characters are geared toward support. It didn’t seem to really matter what I upgraded. I actually just applied upgrade points completely evenly across all equipped skills for all characters (get everyone’s skills to level 2, then all to level 3, then all to level 4, etc.). And I totally ignored putting upgrade points into base stats. I am sure this is all more important on higher difficulties. Like I said though, it did get hard on normal at the very end. I turned the difficulty down to easy for the last two battles because I kept dying to a boss. Easy is easy.
So yeah, that’s 13 Sentinels. The visual novel part was great and the RTS part was fun enough to carry me to the next visual novel part. It also took me quite a bit longer to play than I thought it would, and I’m not sure why. On the plus side, I got a lot of exercise done while playing since it was so much reading! Step, step, step.
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Feb 16th, 2025 at 12:10:31 - Wingspan (PC) |
The tutorial for Wingspan felt overwhelming (over an hour of tutorial!), but once I started playing, everything quickly clicked. I really liked it, and played it until I got all the Steam cards, but there's no narrative or anything to motivate me to continue. Its focus seems to be on multiplayer, though I didn't play against people, just AI matches. There are 50-something achievements, which is what I ended up focusing on until I got the Steam cards. I would keep playing for some achievement hunting (play x points worth of birds; end the game with at least x points; etc.), but that will generally involve starting matches to aim for one specific achievement or another (e.g., I'm only going to focus on high-point birds), which feels grindy. The AI also doesn't provide much of a challenge. On easy, they seem to have no strategy whatsoever. On normal, they...also don't seem to have much of a strategy. And on hard, they...also don't seem to have much of a strategy. At least, I couldn't figure it out, and I obliterated the AI on every difficulty.
The game itself is definitely a nontraditional card game in that you aren't fighting. You're trying to fill your nature preserve with birds, and you simply want to outscore your opponents. I like the emphasis on nature, conservation, and birding. There are many ways to get points, from playing birds with point values, to laying eggs, to caching food, to pursuing randomized round-based objectives. At its heart, the game is about generating and spending resources. You have food, eggs, and birds (cards). You need food and eggs to play birds, and different birds have different effects. Some effects trigger when you play the bird, others trigger when you perform an action in its habitat, others trigger when other players perform a specific action, and so on.
There are three habitats. In the forest, you can get food. In the grasslands, you can lay eggs. And in the wetlands, you can draw cards. When you play a bird, it goes into one of the three habitats (indicated on its card), where it also boosts the action in that habitat. For example, if you lay eggs in the grasslands and have no birds there, you will get two eggs to distribute among your birds. If you have one bird there, you will get two eggs and have the option to discard a card for a third egg. If you have two birds there, you will get three eggs. And so on up to five birds. So, the more birds you have in any habitat, the greater utility that habitat's action will have.
You can immediately see that some strategies might call for focusing on a specific habitat (draw a ton of cards by stacking birds in the wetlands, for example), or balancing birds across all three. Sometimes, strategies will revolve around placing birds you already have, aiming for generating their particular food needs, while other times, you'll want to focus on amassing food and let existing food drive your choice of playing birds. Sometimes, you'll want to focus on meeting round-based objectives to score points, while other times you'll want to focus on laying a ton of eggs, or some variety of means to gain points.
There is no "deckbuilding" per se. It's a card game with a finite deck from which all players draw. So, play is very much dictated by what players tend to draw from the deck, with less ability for overarching strategy. How you play each game will depend on what you start with, what the random round-based objectives are (assuming you want to aim for them), and what other players do. There are a couple expansions that add some more mechanics and cards, but they cost $$. I'd be curious to find some people to play this with and get more into it. Or, perhaps I'll grab the board game!
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Feb 14th, 2025 at 10:30:14 - Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (PS5) |
Spider-Man 2 was great, astounding. This was my first AAA game on the PS5. The audio, the graphics, the animations, all made me feel as if I was in an action movie. It weaves in and out of cut scenes and playable parts, especially during the impressive action sequences and boss battles. I would stop sometimes and just admire what I was seeing. At the same time as I can’t really say anything negative about it, aside from some minor complaints, I can’t really add more positive things either. It was simply stunning to play. Like, everything about it. It’s very similar to the first game, which I said the same things about. But, since I want to write something, here are some slightly more specific thoughts:
• Thank you for including fast travel and making it quickly and easily available. Web-swinging through New York City is fun, but getting to objectives quickly is more fun.
• Combat is ridiculously tight. There is good enemy variety, it’s challenging, and the Spider-Men’s move sets are fun. My one combat gripe is that enemies got spongy at the end when you’re fighting all the symbiotes. It made those optional nest missions especially annoying, and those are the only ones I didn’t happily complete. One other combat comment—not a gripe—is that the variety gadgets and special moves that the Spider-Men have are all useful, but for me they were functionally equivalent. You will end up with four equipped special moves and four equipped gadgets. I used whichever one was available on cooldown. It didn’t matter what it was because they all serve one function: temporarily immobilize enemies (well, two for the special moves I guess because those do deal damage!). So like, two gadgets and two special moves are available. Which do you choose?! Doesn’t matter. They all temporarily immobilize some enemies, letting you get some free punches and kicks in.
• One major improvement that Spider-Man 2 has over the first one is that stealth is better integrated. In the first game, I disliked MJ’s and Miles’s stealth sequences. But, MJ’s are really fun in this game. She gets a gun, which is part of it, but somehow they were just better sequences, more engaging. Maybe they were shorter than the first game’s too? Maybe it was the switching back and forth between three playable protagonists, who were often collaborating on a mission, that made her parts more exciting? The first game would switch to MJ, and I’d lean back in my seat: “Sigh.” This game would switch to MJ, and I’d lean forward: “Time to taze some fools!”
• I completed all the side missions early (except for the nests, which unlock later and I ignored). It was funny when Pete and Miles would say, “let’s see what needs doing around the city first,” in between main missions to encourage exploration and side missions, and there was nothing to do because I did all the side missions already. So I’d go pet my cats for five minutes and come back to a new main mission. As with the first game, side missions are so well woven into the gameplay, narrative, and exploration, that you don’t even notice you’re “just” doing optional open world content.
• Speaking of side content, there are a bunch of suits to unlock. Many of the suits have three styles, so there are literally probably a couple hundred. There are also a ton of upgrades to gadgets, health, and so on. You’ll get many of these just as a matter of course. They generally didn’t feel that important, but I am sure they served me well.
• The overarching and interweaving stories are really strong again. I remember being impressed with this in the first game, too. It’s cool that here all the villains from the first game are rehabilitated (or rehabilitating). You think that the main bad guy is Kraven and his hunters, but it turns out that’s just a set-up for the main antagonist in the game’s latter third. I suppose you could see it coming, maybe clearer if you are a big Spider-Man fan. I didn’t see it coming, but looking back, it’s awesome how those parallel storylines built up and then intersected. The only story gripe I have is that, man, these young adults are melodramatic. They are in their feelings so hard. It was a little exhausting.
• On the other hand, the representation in this game is great. If you want to see diversity in video games, Spider-Man 2 is a shining example. There is a deaf character who signs, and Miles and some others speak with her in sign language. The game references African American history in terms of museum exhibits about jazz music, it talks about BIPOC artists, your playable characters are a White man, a White woman, and a biracial Black and Hispanic man, who speaks Spanish sometimes with his mother (and signs with his friend). The New York City in the game feels culturally rich and like a celebration of the real New York City, its people, and its culture.
• One final note is that I recall thinking that the first game felt a bit bloated with all the side missions and the forced-feeling stealth sequences and the constant twists and turns of the story that kept it going and going. I did not feel that at all in this one, except perhaps with the health sponge enemies at the end, but that’s so minor taking the whole package together.
Wonder when the third one is coming out!
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