Author: schenksmill

Posted on

Game Ramblings #72 – Owlboy

More Info from D-Pad Studio

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • High points are non-gameplay.  Story, visuals, audio are all top notch.
  • Mechanically does enough to get the job done, but is pretty standard.  Bosses are pretty simple, not too many upgrades, not much reason to back track.

Add this one to the list of Metroidvania games that I’m always a sucker for, and it was definitely solid enough to be worth playing through.  This was definitely an indie darling as it was in development, and it properly earned a lot of accolades, particularly for its visuals.  However, in being a game that did its non-gameplay elements so well, it’s a bit unfortunate in that the gameplay itself is pretty much hitting the minimum standard, and not really doing much to separate itself from the pack.

Right from the start this game has fantastic pixel art, and it compares well against the best of the Metroidvanias of recent years.

It’s pretty easy to see from the start where Owlboy earned its biggest hype from.  This game is drop dead gorgeous.  It’s easy for pixel art games to become difficult to play at times from overly busy visuals, but this one escapes all of those traps.  The backgrounds are high detail, but use muted color palettes to separate themselves from the foreground.  Characters are all fairly low-resolution, but have unique looks of their own so you can immediately tell who is who.  Even more important, the character animation is phenomenal.  There’s enough frames of animation for everything to look really fluid, whether in normal traversal or in combat situations.  Even little details like character facial reactions during cutscenes lend a lot of life to scenes where 2D games typically have to depend more on text.

This high attention to non-gameplay detail also extends to the story and music.  From a non-spoiler perspective, the story focuses on the growth of the main character in trying to learn to be an owl, and how the world around him has gotten to the state it’s in.  The characters he meets with throughout, and those that end up travelling with him are all well written, each with their own motivations as to why they’re joining the party.  As for the soundtrack, it’s a well orchestrated set of pieces, ranging from lighter pieces in town to high action pieces in battle.  Overall, I recommend giving it a listen.

Bosses are the high point of combat, even if they tend to be pretty simple.

The gameplay on the other hand is a lower point in the game.  It’s not that it’s bad – in fact, it hits pretty much all the expected notes for a game of this style.  It just doesn’t really do anything to stand out.

Out of all of this, bosses really are the high point.  They’re pretty standard sort of 2 – 3 phase fights, with damage being the phase trigger across the board.  For the most part, the bosses also introduce new mechanics as they phase transition.  However, the bosses themselves are still fairly simple.  Typically speaking, you get a new upgrade, and face a boss weak to that upgrade.  In the one above, you’d basically just been using a spin move to knock armor off enemies a bunch, then immediately get this boss.  Spin hit the armor off the turtle, shoot it a bunch, repeat.  This was pretty much the same thing across all bosses, and it basically meant that they were never really much of a danger.  You knew going in what you were going to be expected to use, you’d have been given an entire level before hand to learn the ability, and you just have to use it to finish.

But again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that it went that way.  Upgrades are basically in two forms; characters that you can carry with you, and health upgrades earned by collecting coins.  The characters were a unique way to handle the typical weapon upgrade.  You only earn three – a standard gunner, a shotgunner, and a spider web launcher – but their integration into the story and gameplay as a whole was a unique way to give a voice to the upgrades, rather than them just being a pickup in the world.  It also gave much greater weight to them coming and going from the party based on the story, and ultimately made the story a lot more impactful.  Losing a party member due to something occurring in the world wasn’t just part of the story, it also meant that your combat strategy was about to drastically change for a while.

However, it also meant that you never really had a reason to back track.  While getting 100% of coins to get all optional upgrades is a back track path, the core upgrades were guaranteed along the main path, and I never needed to do the full collecting since I was rarely in danger of being low on health.  The end result of all this is that I treated the game less like a Metroidvania, and more like a typical linear action/adventure game, which probably got me through it quicker than was really intended.

Sometimes you just end up riding a boss upside down through a cave. It happens.Realistically, the game is pretty typical of a lot of top tier independent titles.  The things where it stands out are pretty high end, and the rest of the game kind of sits in decent but average shape.  It’s obvious that visuals and tech around it were going to be the focus of this game, and they really nailed it.  In nailing those things, gameplay looks to be the thing that suffered a bit from lack of development focus, but overall it worked out well.  Would I consider this in the upper echelon of Metroidvanias?  Not really, but I still have a pretty easy time recommending at least a play through.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #71 – Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Wii U

TL;DR

  • Solid entry to the DKC series.  Doesn’t necessarily do new things, but does most things to a high level.
  • Difficulty takes awkward swings depending on whether or not you have a secondary character available.
  • One of the better pure 2D platformers available on any platform, and a great one to have on the go now that it’s moved to Switch

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time I played this one.  I got through a lot of it back on the Wii  U, but ultimately rage quit due to some of the weird difficulty swings.  This time around, I took a bit more measured approach to how I was playing the game, and realistically took advantage of knowing the sticking points, and got through it.  Ultimately this is a great game and a leading example of how classic platformers can move into modern times, even if it’s not without its share of balance issues.

DKC fans will recognize a lot, including your occasional old rhino friend.

The obvious thing to start with is the fact that this is very much a Donkey Kong Country game.  It doesn’t really do much new, does what is expected really well, and is a lot of fun.  Your move set is pretty basic, with roll jumps really being the only semi-advanced feature.  The only real addition on the newer games is the ground pound to stun enemies.  If there is any problem I’d point out there, having ground pound and roll on the same button led me to roll to my death by accident more times than I care to admit.  Given the Switch has 4 face buttons, it’s weird that they only use two of them (A/B for jump, X/Y for pound+roll).

However, beyond that input is as expected.  Movement is really tight, even with analog movement available.  Jumping is really predictable and as expected allows for some variance in height based on hold time.  Rolling off the edge of a platform and late jumping still works and is still crucial for speed runs, just as it has since DKC1.  That set of core functionality just feels good the entire time, and allows for the difficulty focus to be on not dying, rather than fighting mechanics.

Rockets are the start of things that look different from the past, with some of the changes working better than others.

By and large the things that are different still work just as well though.  On the ride front you still have your mine cart levels, but you also have levels with rockets that are just as fun, and provide nice distractions from straight platforming.  However, the biggest difference is that the secondary characters in the game aren’t playable.  They’re there to work as a backpack with a second ability, and it’s here that things start to work a bit less well.

On the secondary front, you’ve got Diddy with a short time jetpack, Dixie with her hair flip hover, and Cranky that acts as a pogo stick to avoid damage on some traps and allow for killing enemies with head protection.  There’s no easy way around this – Dixie is by far the most useful and should be the default option.  Cranky’s ability works fine but is extremely niche.  It’s just not that useful in situations where the additional jump protection provides a measure of safety.  Between Diddy and Dixie, Dixie is easily the obvious choice.  They both provide a built in amount of horizontal hovering, but Dixie’s provides the secondary help of either gaining height at the top of the jump, or allowing the player to jump under an enemy, then hover up to a platform.  It’s simply more versatile to do the same end action.

Difficulty can be rough if you don’t have a secondary character, but bosses really emphasize this issue.

However, it really feels like the game was balanced around having the secondary character at all times, and losing them is a punishing penalty.  While it’s not ideal in normal levels to lose a secondary, it will happen often and you’ll deal with it.  Most of the levels have fairly rare barrels available to get a new character, so you learn to deal with the limitations in Donkey Kong’s movement and simply slow down.  However, bosses exacerbate the issue.

The bosses are by and large 90s-era fights for better or worse.  They’re multi-phase fights, all 9 hits to win, and generally simple mechanics.  They’re definitely favoring a showcase of skill over spectacle.  However, they’re also full of one-shot death mechanics, questionable hit boxes, and having to learn untelegraphed attack patterns through repeated deaths.  For the most part it’s as expected, but it’s fairly frustrating.  Losing your secondary character just means that you go from a low threshold of danger to almost no threshold for danger.  Given how quick you can exit and re-enter the boss fights, it generally makes more sense to do just that when getting hit, and that’s probably not what the design team was going for.

This game is basically what the DKC series pulled straight into this era should be expected to be, visuals, gameplay, and all.

So end of the day this is a game that lives by the fact that it’s very much a 90s game.  Building off a series that was so mechanically fantastic as DKC puts you at a point where that will generally work fine, and Tropical Freeze doesn’t falter.  There’s definitely warts here because it doesn’t try to be something overtly modern, but at the same time I played and enjoyed it BECAUSE of that.  Do I think people that aren’t fans of 90s platformers will enjoy this? Not really.  However, that makes it pretty obvious who the target market is, and those folks will be happy again.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #70 – God of War

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4

TL;DR

  • Phenomenally well made game that brings the series out of its brawler roots and straight into a full blown action RPG.
  • Well written characters and story, to the point where they effectively make you hate the son when he’s acting like an ass.  Does a good job blending in Norse mythology to what was previously a Greek-focused series.

God of War is one of those series that screams Sony first-party, but it’s been eight years since the Greek timeline games ended.  Ya we had Ascension, but that was a prequel and even that was give years ago.  After such a long gap, announcing a Norse reboot / sequel was already a head turner.  Announcing it as a drastic genre departure was another, with this game now being very much an action RPG with all the free roam trappings that come with it.  Side quests, item collection, crafting, upgrades, skill trees and more are all there.  Despite it all, this is both extremely fitting for the series, and quite possibly the best entry of them all.

The entire game is the story of Kratos and his son’s travels, and that’s where the differences begin.

This first screen shot says a lot about the differences in this game relative to the original.  For one thing, Kratos now has a son and he hasn’t managed to accidentally kill him in a rage.  Beyond that though, you start to see little details.  The son brings in a set of ranged combat possibilities that add some new depth to the core combat.  Kratos is wearing gear that was crafted at a vendor.  We’re clearly no longer romping around in Greece.  On the far left, Kratos is using an axe instead of blades (although the blades come back later).  Basically, this is still God of War, but it’s not quite what we’re used to.

The combat front straddles that line between familiar and new in a really good fashion.  This is still melee-chain combat, but it’s not quite as high speed as the original.  You still have your light and heavy attacks, but there’s a much larger focus on parrying and dodging.  Later on in the game, you end up juggling between frost and fire weapons based on the enemies that you are attacking, so there’s some built-in strategy.  The skill tree that is there brings in some familiar special attacks, but the risk of being hit during them is much higher, so their timed use becomes much more important.

It’s the son that ultimately brings in some of the big changes.  While his positioning isn’t directly controllable by the player, his basic move set is.  He’s got arrows that can be fired at enemies, sometimes for additional damage, sometimes for the use of crowd control, sometimes for the use of stunning to allow Kratos to get damage in.  He’s also got some special attacks that can be triggered on cooldowns.  However, it’s his passive skill growth that becomes the most useful.  By late game, he’s got skills that allow him to engage in melee combat more often, including things like hopping on enemies backs as distractions and doing his own quick hitting melee.  Basically, as the son grows as a plot device, he becomes inherently more useful as a combat device, and it eliminates the frustration that typically comes with escort-based secondary characters.

Now, that’s not to say that moving to more of a core RPG combat has removed some of the flashiness. Case in point:

The big flashy scenes are largely reserved for finishers in battle, and more specifically generally against bosses and minibosses.  Stun kills on trash enemies also have mini-cutscenes, but these are quick hitters and don’t try to keep you out of combat for very long.

Despite the changes, the flow of combat feels phenomenal overall.  Most engagements are going to be a heavy mix of attacking, watching for enemy tells to parry, or really large attacks to dodge.  Its a system of constant movement, rather than a system of waiting for moments, and it really works well.

If you want to, you can spend a lot of time in boats exploring

If you really have that RPG itch though, this is also a great game for that.  Beyond the main story line, there’s side quests and collection galore.  For the most part, these simply exist for purposes of getting more gear, but that becomes important for the post-game content.  The end boss is by a long shot easier than some of the creatures out in the world and some of those fights are among the most fun in the game to engage in, so you have a lot of reasons to get out there exploring.  If you’re a lore or collection nut, there’s also a lot there.  Shrines, treasure hunts, rare ingredients, dragons to free, and more are there for exploring.  If you’re really feeling brave, there’s also two realms that exist purely for the sake of side quests.  Basically, once you finish the game you aren’t really finished if you think you want to get a bunch of hours out of this one.

At this point in the game I wanted to kill the kid, and that’s a lot larger of a complement to the developers than it sounds.

However, the thing that kept me coming back is that this was a well told story.  The interplay between Kratos and his son starts off as somewhat hilarious on the surface as Kratos pretty much spends hours yelling BOY GET OVER HERE.  However, once the boy finds out what he really is, he becomes effectively a pompous ass for an arc of the game.  The fact that I was legitimately pissed at the kid says a lot about how effective their writing was.  The gods they meet throughout, the secrets beneath the surface, and to the end of the game the little plot twists that were thrown in were all part of what would make this one great, even for folks watching it like a movie alongside someone playing.

So, I guess I’m somewhat surprised even if I shouldn’t be.  The God of War series has always been somewhat of a hallmark for the quality of Sony’s first-party teams.  However, it always was kind of a brawler with a cool theme, and not necessarily a super deep experience.  This one turns all that on its head, giving us an extremely deep action RPG that still feels familiar despite all the changes.  The fact that they so fundamentally evolved this series is a phenomenal achievement.  This is the type of game that turns other platform traditionalists into PlayStation owners, and I can’t recommend it enough to go out and play it now.