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Game Ramblings #228 – Splatoon Raiders

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Third-person Shooter
  • Platform: Switch 2

This is a nearly perfect modern version of what Nintendo championed for so long in their handheld console range – a game that you can pick up for five minutes or five hours and still make meaningful progress. It expands the Salmon Run mode from the core Splatoon games into something much larger while still maintaining the excellent shooting of the series. For me as a fan of single player Splatoon, it’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

This is a game that is inherently tied to a power curve loop from action RPGs and it’s probably the main reason why the game works. You’ve got leveling for core stats (health and base attack power) that feels impactful on its own. However, the meat of the game is the weapon system. Even if we ignore the wide variety of weapons, weapons themselves are upgradeable. Even if we ignore the flexibility of secondary gadgets, the gadgets themselves are able to be heavily modified with upgradeable customizations. This is a game where you will constantly be tinkering to get a build that you really stick with.

For my own personal example, I had ended up on a few specific things. As my weapon choice I ended up with Twincans – a variety of the dual shooting weapon that lets you dodge while firing. They have a bit more power than base dualies at the expense of higher ink use, which for me was nice to more quickly dispatch smaller mobs. I then paired this with gadgets featuring even more mobility, like the blast boot that lets me jump into an area while doing explosion damage to clear mobs and freeze effects to stall things that didn’t die, or the jump bomb that let me get airborne away from damage while doing similar impacts on landing as the blast boot. To some extent this build allowed me to simply pull mobs around the environment as I wished, but they also allowed me to change my initiation point to a new area if something more relevant was drawing my attention. However, this was simply my preferred way to play. Because there’s 11 core weapon types – each with at least a subtype – and 15 gadget types and dozens of gadget mods you can kind of build out how you prefer. You can build for speed or avoidance or power and find something that is just as effective and fun.

The important thing is how this is tied to progression and the core game loop. This is every bit a game that is built around loops that are 2-5 minutes. You jump into the world map, pick a location, go in and do some quick singular objective and get out. You get a bunch of currency or materials that you then go back to your base and use to upgrade any number of things. You tweak your gadget loadout a bit or switch to a new weapon, then get right back into it. This is classic Nintendo handheld loops where everything is fast but there’s always meaning. A run doesn’t feel wasted because you are always getting something towards increasing your power and it nearly always feels immediately impactful when you go back into the game. The meta loop also solves at least some of my problem with Splatoon 3’s single player in that the added context gives more meaning to ideas that feel recycled from past games where there’s still value beyond just discovery of the specific mechanic tied to the level.

So then this all ends up working because the game is fun on its own, but that isn’t really a surprise. The Splatoon shooting mechanics have been tried and tested now for years, and that’s still the case here. The core loop of laying down ink, swimming through it, and laying waste to anything that moves has always been fun. The Salmon Run mode in recent Splatoon games has proven that a horde of enemies coming at one person can be fun. This is now just more. This is a game that is taking advantage of the Switch 2 hardware increase not to really do new things but to do more. You have more enemies, more ink flying, more explosive attacks, more range to attacks, more long sight line areas due to level design. Visually I would say they took a huge risk in that nearly everything is a muted color scheme at odds with the series past, but it ends up highlighting how drastically different everything looks once you and the enemies end up covering it with bright ink. It ends up oddly being a really convincing exhibition for the power of the Switch 2 hardware compared to the previous generation.

I’m not entirely surprised I enjoyed this since I largely enjoyed past Splatoon single players. This is definitely taking ideas from those, as well as the ideas present in the Salmon Run mode. The combination of them tied to a much more expansive progression and customization loop just hit a really nice spot that makes this game incredibly easy to recommend.

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Game Ramblings #227 – 007 First Light

More Info from IO Interactive

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows, Switch 2

I’ve always been a general fan of the Hitman series and have jumped into the recent trilogy a number of times. The way that you could take things on in a number of different ways and carefully plan the missions has always been really engaging. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of how they handled failure. It’s always felt too cut and dry to me. When things go incredibly wrong you basically fail and restart rather than adapt. In making the game focused on the Bond IP, First Light solved a lot of that problem for me.

There are certain expectations around the Bond IP that come from decades of films and videogames. Sure, he’s going to be the ladykiller spy with cool gadgets and an ability to adapt to his environment. However, the important thing for this game is that when things go wrong in a Bond movie – and they always do at some point – he will action star his way out of trouble. That is the biggest thing about this as a difference against Hitman. I can carefully plan my infiltration to areas and make sure to stealth or fake or distract my way through areas, but when things go wrong I don’t reset. I punch and I shoot and I laser gadget and I explosive my way through. Sure, I can reset the scenario and try a different approach but it doesn’t feel like as much of a punishment as it did for me in Hitman because the action escape is simply another part of the experience and another tool in my bag.

This obviously wouldn’t work if the action parts weren’t fun. Luckily, the experience here is sharp. Melee is your typical experience at this point. The AI will generally line up attacks one at a time to avoid overwhelming the player. There are color coded tells for parry and dodge-focused defense. You can punch and grab and throw things to get in offense. It’s fine and it works. What surprised me is how good the gunplay was.

This plays a lot closer to something like a Tomb Raider than a Goldeneye 64 when gunplay is active, and that’s a huge benefit to the game. There’s a pretty narrow variety of weapons, but they cover a few specific wider types. There’s a couple pistols, a couple SMGs, a few rifles, and a couple shotguns. They’ve got enough coverage to be useful in generally different ranges but you also don’t really sit on them for too long. The game plays a pretty tight line where ammo is not overly abundant so you are frequently changing out weapons to kind of whatever is nearby. This also leads to the thing that I really liked in that careful targeting is very important, but the game is also generous with its aim assists. As an example, headshots are incredibly important in reducing ammo use as they are a guaranteed kill. However, there are a lot of enemies that wear helmets. These are a guaranteed two shot kill done well – the first shot pops the helmet off in a satisfying way and the second shot is your kill shot. All of this encourages the player to efficiently dispatch enemies and preserve ammo as it can become a hazard to get out of cover to find more weapons.

This would all be incredibly more annoying if the game wasn’t fairly generous with its aim assists. It doesn’t necessarily aim correct much but it definitely leans into camera magnetism in a way that lets the player pan and scan and get close enough to an enemy’s weak point before getting pulled in to the target. This obviously helps with general clumsiness of gamepad inputs, but it also helps more importantly in preserving the speed of gameplay. The skill is in identifying targets and getting over there, and the game provides that last push once you’ve gotten to the right spot, rather than fumbling around to hit the perfect final tap of the stick. It feels like the team approached the reality of gamepad-focused gameplay with a lot more realistic of a mindset of what benefits the game as a whole, rather than being focused on whether or not there should be a skill wall involved, and I think the game ends up being better on the other side of it as a result.

Where I kind of think this falls apart a bit is in boss fights. They all kind of felt too scripted and too heavy handed. You generally can’t just melee your way through these fights or shoot your way through these fights. They generally require you to use things like gadget moves to distract the enemy and get a hit in, then run away to find a new unique distraction to do. They generally require some specific melee combo of a parry of a very telegraphed attack into a single hit, then some waiting around for it to happen again. What they are is generally slow and not really presenting the player with actual choices they can make to impact the experience. In a game so heavily leaning into letting the player approach situations in any way that they felt like, the change to heavy scripting felt jarring in a negative way.

As a whole, this is a really impressive experience. On its own it proves to be a really fun mix of Hitman stealth/planning with more typical action-oriented gameplay possibilities when things go wrong. It feels a lot more weighted toward real time adaptation over resetting than Hitman and that’s a huge win. Add in the fact that this is a Bond game that feels like how I imagine Bond would be and that adds up to an incredible experience. Goldeneye was fun, but it was distinctly an action FPS and had nothing else to really feel like Bond. The games that came after it never really stepped out of its FPS shadow. First Light feels like the franchise finally merging the movies with videogames in a way that feels correct to the IP and all it took was bending the rules of Hitman a bit to make it more shooty.

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Game Ramblings #226 – American Truck Simulator

More Info from SCS Software

  • Genre: Simulation
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS5, Xbox Series

I’m not generally a fan of score-based reviews. I don’t think they really map the subjectivity of user preferences to the objectivity of a number. For me it comes down to two buckets – recommended or not. Sometimes there’s a third bucket for me – games that are perfect for me right now. Sometimes it’s games that are legitimately great like Super Mario World as a kid. More often than not it’s games that I just vibe with perfectly like Final Fantasy XII. American Truck Simulator for whatever reason is one of those.

On its surface this is a game with legitimate obvious problems for a simulation game involving long haul trucking. Visually it’s fine but not a stand out experience with most areas only vaguely looking like their namesake with a couple particular things to match the real world. Traffic density never really changes whether you’re in a city or in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. The game has a real loose understanding of how traffic works in the US with a distinct lack of things like blinking yellow left turns. Traffic laws are extremely exploitable with things like being able to blast through the shoulder at full speed or run cops off the road to avoid speeding tickets. But really, none of that mattered as soon as I started vibing with the game.

When you’re driving around the environment really does become enough to convince you you’re in reality because I can recognize things that I’ve driven through. The curve of I-5 through downtown San Diego isn’t really the right scale but it’s there. The stupid giant cross in Effingham, Illinois is just as bizarre as it was when I moved west. The drive south past the Tacoma Dome and down through the coast of Oregon is convincing enough. I-70 through the midwest and I-5 through the central valley of California are both horrendously boring. It’s all just so compressed that you see highlights that are close enough and lose all the things between there that you hit a really good pace of something interesting to see very frequently while otherwise trying to deliver goods all over the country. I suspect as things continue to push east into other areas of the country that I’ve lived in I’ll continue to have those hits of familiarity.

It does help that the simple act of driving in the game is a lot of fun. I play enough racing games that I’ve got my wheel setup ready for a game like this, and that’s definitely part of it. It’s just fun to sit behind the wheel of something as large as a big rig in a way that I can drive without the danger of….having to avoid crashing. I can sit there and try to row through 12 or 18 gears without really caring about wrecking a transmission with poor clutch usage. However, the simulation-enough aspect of driving also has interesting side effects where I can’t treat this like a racing game. I have to properly manage my gear selection to make sure that I have enough torque to make it up hills. I have to maintain my momentum through uphills to try and avoid scrubbing too much speed. I have to manage my speed through engine braking going downhill so I don’t just runaway and risk tipping over. It sits in a very narrow band somewhere between simulation and arcade that pushes into the fun side of things over the realistic side of things.

There’s then enough on the business side of trucking to give me enough outside of driving to be interesting. The money I’m making is going toward equipment and garage purchases and hiring of drivers. Over time my ability to make money is becoming less and less important as my drivers are taking on more and more of the percentage of revenue of my company as a whole. What I assume my path will end up being is that over time I will simply stop doing deliveries and just managing and driving. There’s a lot of side content around discovery of towns to offer more locations to find jobs at or picture locations to discover for landmarks or dealers to purchase trucks from, and that’s awkward to do when you’re on deliveries. Right now you can purchase a truck and drive around without a trailer attached to do that, but they are also planning on releasing a DLC around Ford pickups, and that feels incredibly intentional. The long term of the game from the business side is that you become a manager and not a driver, and it feels like it’ll be much more fun to do the discovery driving in a regular vehicle.

So then why is this a perfect game for me now? It’s incredibly drop-in friendly. I’m in the middle of a project completion pass and time is inconsistent. Sometimes I have 15 minutes to kill waiting on a build to finish to test, and I can complete a local delivery. Sometimes I’ve got to kill several hours because I’m waiting on things like a multiplatform shader cache update and I can do a long haul trip of several thousand miles. Sometimes I need to distract a 5 year old and I can sit him on my lap and drive around because he loves to see big trucks. It hits such a wide band of my current potential use cases while not really requiring me to think too deeply about what I’m doing. I simply jump in, pick a goal, and drive. For right now, it’s simply perfect.