DWGames

2018-02-27

Game Ramblings #66 – Axiom Verge

Genre: Metroidvania
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: PS4, Windows, macOS, Linux, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

Solid core combat mechanics with a great range of weapons
Visuals nail the retro look without feeling unnecessarily simple
Traversal mechanics (or lack thereof) end up becoming a big problem as the game goes on

Axiom Verge is a bit of a tough one to crack. From a visual and combat mechanics standpoint, this is obviously a Metroid-inspired game, and in a lot of ways ends up surpassing what was done in those days. The variety of weapons in particular is a real high point. However, the game starts to drag as it goes on due to a lack of some traversal and map features that I’d consider standard in the genre, leading less to artificial difficulty and more to artificial time padding. While the game is ultimately pretty good, those things that were missing were pretty damaging to my overall feel for the game.

Visually the game often impresses, even more so when they manage to throw in some pixel explosions.

I generally don’t try to hide the fact that I enjoy Metroidvania games, so chalk this one up to another game I should have played a long time ago. Coming into this, the main thing that I’d seen in the past about it were the visuals, and we’ll start there. This is very obviously patterned more after the 8-bit style of the original Metroid, though in practice it ends up falling somewhere between the NES and SNES in overall visual style. However, the care put into the visuals of the game elevate it above a lot of other similarly retro-inspired games.

It’s often the little details that can be pulled off in modern hardware that end up being the most impressive. Bosses explode into pixel bits, covering the entire screen. Warping effects give obvious hints that things are going very wrong, as well as hints that this game isn’t exactly 8-bit. Enemy animations are simple, but very fluid throughout. Weapon firing across a wide range of weapons all have unique effects that very plainly tell the player how a weapon works and where it will be most effective. Overall, the game just looks damn good, even if it doesn’t look modern.

On the weapon front, things also continue to impress. Rather than Metroid’s slim selection, Axiom Verge comes with a wide range of weapons that can be selected from at any time. These range from your simple orb weapons to lock-on lightning beams to bouncing orbs to flails. This is combined with a default radial selection menu that can be hopped in and out of with great speed to allow the player to quickly and effectively switch their weapon to take advantage of their current enemy’s weakness. This is in effect the best part of the game where combat is no longer just run and gun, but often has wildly changing tactics even on a room to room basis.

Bosses are the first spot where the game starts to show obvious points of faltering.

I’ll be the first to admit that in my head the problems I have with the game generally feel like “old man complains about missing features”. That being said, I’ve moved on from games that came out 30 years ago. Padding time via artificial difficulty or re-traversal doesn’t feel nostalgic, it feels old. That’s where things started to fall apart for me in this game.

However, despite bosses being visually impressive in scale they also start to show the first sign of weakness in the game. Generally speaking each boss has one mechanic to worry about, and they fairly universally involve some sort of jumping mechanic. For example, the boss above involves hiding behind the purple walls that block shots, then peaking out and shooting the boss from range. A later boss involved an annoying sequence of pseudo-random projectiles that had to be avoided via teleporting. The long and short of it is that the bosses are visually cool, but ultimately pretty simple. Despite the typical pattern recognition of the genre, these just don’t live up to your Ridley or Kraid fights.

Get used to seeing these environments, because you will keep traversing them for hours.

This weakness is then exacerbated by some of the choices made in traversal mechanics. The singular main issue for me in this entire game is that there is no fast travel, and this causes a cascade of issues. As your character’s power curve advances, it just becomes a time waste to fight enemies in areas you had been to. You know their pattern, they die quicker, they pose no danger, but you have to run through or past them.

Generally speaking, the lack of objective markers wouldn’t be a problem in this genre, but the lack of fast travel made the end of the game a chore. By the end, I was basically doing circles around the game world to find the one spot that I could enter with a new tool, getting another new tool, then finding the next one spot I could now enter. If a spot I hadn’t been able to get to was still closed I moved on. There wasn’t much fun here, it just became the pattern that had to be done.

The real final problem was an expectation of how the map worked based on other games. Typical Metroidvanias at least give some notification if there is a hidden pickup in a general area, leaving it to the player to puzzle out how to find it. In Axiom Verge there is simultaneously no indicators and in a lot of places, no real in-world clue that there are hidden things either. I found a not insignificant amount of treasure in the late game by accidentally teleporting too far and ending up in a wall that looked in no way passable or breakable. For a genre built around exploration, those two things combined to just make the loot pattern feel really awkward compared to the norm.

The bee’s unamused look didn’t get any better as I proceeded to take it out.

So I suppose the question becomes, is this worth playing? I would say yes, with the caveat being that you probably want more patience for very old missing mechanics than I generally have. From a core fundamentals standpoint, this is a perfectly solid Metroidvania title. The variety of weapons does a lot to push the player to explore and find new combat situations, and honestly does a lot to allow me to ignore the very real problems the game has around traversal. However, if some of the problems I listed above sound like deal breakers, I’m probably fairly close to in agreement with you that this one is skippable. However, it may be worth a look even with the knowledge that it may just get shelved.

2018-02-21

Game Ramblings #65 – Fire Emblem Warriors

More Info from Nintendo

Genre: Hack and slash ARPG
Platform: Switch
Also Available On: New Nintendo 3DS

TL;DR

Probably the best Warriors game that will come out this year
Same Warriors gameplay that can be expected from Dynasty / Samurai / Hyrule Warriors games
Good implementation of standard Fire Emblem mechanics (weapon triangle, class upgrades, etc)
History Mode not as varied as Hyrule Warriors‘ Adventure Mode, but still a nice side mode to the main story

Being perfectly honest, there’s no real surprise to playing Fire Emblem Warriors if you’ve played any previous Warriors title. You’ve got a big ass field with forts, captains, commanders, and outposts that have to be captured and defeated. You’ve got big story events that cause a constant ebb and flow of control of the field as you and your commanders attempt to win battles. You’ve got a huge variety of units at your disposal of multiple types. However, like Hyrule Warriors before it, this game takes the standard mechanics of its parent series and marries them nicely with the standard Warriors gameplay to do just enough to differentiate itself from the mainline games.

It’s not just combat mechanics that are pulled over from Fire Emblem. Unit class mechanics are as well.

The big thing that’s always been noticeable about the spinoff Warriors titles is that they nearly always do a good job bringing together the core hack and slash mechanics with things straight out of the franchise they are pulling from. For Fire Emblem, this ends up pulling from a few specific areas.

On the gameplay side, the weapon triangle is the big one. The core FE mechanic of swords beat axes beats lances beats swords is still there and as important as ever. There’s also the archer advantage over flying units and the inclusion of mage and dragon units and their typical advantages and disadvantages. Overall this does two great things for this game. For one, AI units feel a lot more valuable than in my typical past experience with Warriors games. While the AI battle pace is still slow, I can now order units into advantageous fights and assume they will win, allowing me to take the unit I’m in control of and deal with more pressing issues instead of having to be involved in every single captain or fort fight. It also means that I was more willing to use a large roster than in past games. I wouldn’t ever want to be at a complete disadvantage, so I’d spread my types around and hop between units, taking advantage of the weapon triangle to fight with as many units as possible throughout the game.

There’s also a few smaller features at play here that are straight out of Fire Emblem. Like more recent games in the series, pair units are included, and allow for some flexibility in covering a disadvantage of one unit. For example, pairing an axe unit to a sword unit allows for turning around the disadvantage of fighting lances pretty handily. Unit bonds are also available, which unlock character-specific items that can be used for some of the higher level upgrades in the game’s version of the skill tree. Finally, master seals are available, which unlock the higher tier class for a given unit. In general, like Hyrule Warriors this game once again manages to feel a lot like its source despite the obvious change in style from a tactical RPG to an action RPG.

The rest of the mechanics are all Warriors, including the flashy specials.

Everything else that is there is to be expected. You’re still going to be facing seemingly endless hordes of enemies while tearing through the battles. You capture outposts to minimize extra spawns, capture forts to lower enemy morale, defeat captains and commanders to eliminate high powered dangers, throw flashy special attacks to eliminates dozens of units at a time, and more. It’s as satisfying as the Warriors games ever are, even if it often feels like barely organized chaos at times.

That’s not to say there aren’t some weird little things that are fairly unique to this game. Despite the unit variety, I pretty much exclusively stayed away from flying units. While they were fine in the hands of AI, I often found that they would lift into the air during large combos, causing me to stay in the air flailing at nothing. It was strange and frustrating, and generally just wasted a lot of time. I also generally had some problems using enemy level as a gauge of relative power, particularly in the History Mode side content. Even within single battles, I occasionally found myself battling things of the same level and same weapon type with wildly different results. While some of this came down to simple character archetype stats, it threw me off enough times to consider it a bit unexpectedly weird.

The game likes to play favorites, giving you the generally most popular units from Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates.

All that said, I generally didn’t have that many issues with the game. Is it a deep game? Not really. You run around, kill shit, rinse and repeat with a bit of variety in mechanics between maps. Is it an innovative game? Not really. It takes the same core mechanics from Warriors and Fire Emblem and combines them into something that happens to work. But is it a fun game? Absolutely. Even if it’s kind of stupid fun I can be pretty happy about that.

2018-01-27

Game Ramblings #64 – NieR:Automata

More Info from Square-Enix

Genre: ARPG
Platform: PS4
Also Available On: Windows

TL;DR

Excellent story largely based around what it means to have a soul. Multiple endings work fantastically in keeping you coming back.
Excellent combat that takes a mix of action and bullet hell mechanics and somehow blends them into a cohesive whole.
Biggest downside is that enemy variety is pretty low, with the environments being fairly sparse.

Now that the winter doldrums are here, I’ve got a bit of time to get to games that should have been played before and NieR was high on the list. Having dipped my toes a bit into the overall Drakengard universe, I had some idea of what to expect but I was still surprised by how well this one was pulled off. NieR is a game that spends a lot of time making you think about what it means to actually be alive and have a soul, whether synthetic beings can actually be capable of emotion, and ultimately what would happen when you find out everything you knew was a lie. It wraps this into a fast-paced action combat system that seamlessly blends melee elements of standard ARPGs with ranged mechanics straight out of bullet hell games to create a game that is uniquely its own.

Combat mixes melee and bullet hell in a fantastic manner, usually to spectacular effect.

Since this is an ARPG and you’ll be spending the majority of your time involved in it, we’ll start off with combat. Rather than being a straight melee hack and slash game, NieR blends in a lot of ranged mechanics for both player and enemy to make the actual process of fighting enemies a lot more varied than is typical of the genre. Beyond the obvious picture of an enemy screen spamming bullets above, the player characters also have both a friendly pod that provides ranged damage as well as the ability on a lot of the weapons to do ranged attacks via slashing attacks that send out projectiles themselves.

The end result of all this is that directly hitting an enemy isn’t really all that important, and the movement ends up being the driving factor of battle. Regardless of what range the player is at there’s always at least some damage source that can be used, so the actual process of avoiding damage becomes the most important factor. The combination of all these attacks and an instant dodge with no cooldown gives the combat an extremely fun and fluid feel that I can’t really remember out of any other ARPG series.

Variety in battle is also a key, with multiple other battle types popping up to keep things from being repetitive.

It is worth noting that other battle systems do pop up from time to time to keep the player on their toes. At times, you’ll take over giant ass robots that act as bullet sponges just for the sake of blowing lots of things up. Sometimes you’ll enter a flight suit or hacking segments and switch between both vertical scrolling and dual-stick shooter modes to take out flying enemies. Sometimes even in standard combat you end up in camera-restricted sections, giving a more side-scrolling focus to combat. Just being able to hop into all of these things on the fly kept the game fresh when it could have otherwise been a long train of the same action combat on repeat.

It’s also worth noting that all of these combat types are tied into the same fantastic gearing system. While there are the basic trappings of the genre (player level boosts base stats, weapons are upgradeable, the player’s ranged pod helper is upgradeable, etc), the real core of the system is the game’s chip system. Chips are a customizeable feature where the player can slot helper items into a board. Each item has some effect and some cost, so managing the benefits of the chips that are applied allows the player to setup the character in a style that fits how they want to play without being stuck in one path the entire game. For my playthrough, I ended up applying a few basic increases (HP, Attack Power, etc), a few HUD helpers for convenience (in particular, one that revealed items on the overworld map), and most importantly for me a passive helper that gave me 40% of my own health back on a kill. For me this meant that I could go into any encounter, dodge around like crazy killing things, and not be overly worried about taking too many hits. If I took some hits it wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d get a kill, heal up, and continue on. A more passive player could load up on HP, defense, and ranged attack power, leaving it to their pod to whittle away enemies while they stay out of danger. A real glass cannon could go heavy into attack power one shotting enemies in their way, but without any real safety if they got hit themselves.

Visuals are generally pretty good but some standout areas are definitely there, such as this area built entirely out of untextured assets.

The rest of the game may not be as good as core combat, but overall the pieces are all on average pretty damn good, and certainly better than most ARPGs out there. Combat visuals are flashy but don’t interfere with the player’s ability to understand what is going on. Environments are generally kind of sparse but all look really good with solid differences in theme between them. Enemy variety is kind of low but the silhouettes always give proper immediate feedback as to what can be expected out of attacks. The soundtrack has too many instances of repeating songs but what is there is extremely well done and catchy. That’s kind of the overall end result where I can nitpick all day about specific things but end of the day what is there is all really high quality.

The story ends up being a great thinker if you pay attention, but it’s certainly not without its moments of comedy; intentional or not.

Ultimately I’d generally recommend playing this game if for no other reason than to play through the story. I really don’t want to say any more than I did in the opener to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say if you are a fan of stories that involve ponderings over the meaning of life, this one will likely stick with you. It’s also spread out over multiple characters to allow for great side-by-side comparisons of multiple viewpoints. For reference, the game plays through the first half of the story from the perspective of two main characters (listed as A and B routes in the game). It then provides a C/D route that plays through the second half of the story with two branching endings. An E route then provides an ultimate ending after the conclusion of the game. Because of the multiple viewpoints the story is able to give much greater depth to the overarching theme of what it means to truly be alive, with each character fighting their own struggle to figure it out. The rest of the alphabet is then filled with a number of secret endings, typically the result of some joke sequence. For example, the player can remove their OS core from the android player characters, immediately killing them and ending the game.

I suppose the question becomes, should I have gotten to this sooner? Ya, probably. NieR is a game that mixes a lot of action combat elements into a cohesive whole that somehow works. It adds a great sci-fi story from multiple viewpoints to keep you coming back to the game. A dash of comedy here and there keeps things light, while segments of other combat types keeps the variety strong. If you haven’t gotten to this one yet, I guess you can consider this my glowing recommendation. Just make sure you play after the first credits roll; there really is a lot more there.