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Game Ramblings #22.1 – Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels

See original post covering Forza Horizon 3

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: Windows 10 (Microsoft Store – Digital Only)
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

This screenshot is the best quick peak I can really give to describe this expansion.  There’s a loop in the back left, some obligatory fire in the right, and an entire mountain covered in looping track in the center.  This is as close as you’ll get to your childhood fantasy of driving a full size Hot Wheels car in a full size Hot Wheels universe, and damn is it a lot of fun.

This is the second expansion released as post-release content for Forza Horizon 3.  The first one, Blizzard Mountain, added a bunch of snow-focused rally events that were solid but didn’t stray too far from the core gameplay established in the base game.  Horizon Hot Wheels throws the idea of the base game out the window.  All of the expectations of a Hot Wheels theme are there.  There’s brightly colored blue and orange track (with the all important little side walls) built in impossible angles to drive around on.  There’s soaring banks and loops that seem impossible to drive on (and yes, you can fall off if you’re going too slow at the top of a loop).  There’s gigantic jumps everywhere, most of the time preceded by a little black boost pad to really get you up to speed.  There’s even an occasional T-Rex there just to make sure things stay grounded in reality.  Despite it all, this still works as a solid Forza experience.

While Horizon has always leaned distinctly more towards arcade than the core Forza titles, it still had a relatively realistic feel to driving, and that’s maintained here.  The best times are still going to be had by paying attention to your breaking lines and properly hitting corners.  However, the track designs greatly changed how I approached racing.  My preferred setup has always been the cockpit view, and the ability to see where I’m going in a standard car on standard roads was never a problem.  What I didn’t take into account is the fact that I may be turning UP, instead of left and right, and that’s the biggest gameplay change that the Hot Wheels expansion brings to the table.  Because of the significant inclusion of things like loops or Immelmann loops, I tended to heavily lean on cars that either had significantly large windshields, or cars that were roll cage only, giving me a lot more ability to see where the corners were approaching in a completely foreign direction from what I was used to.

That said, not everything worked out fantastically.  The Hot Wheels cars themselves were unsurprisingly bad at being cars.  The designs have always been hilariously impractical as actual car designs, but having the cool looking toy and actually trying to drive the cars are two different things.  This is especially bad when you can’t actually see where you’re going:

Yep, that’s a big ol engine block in the way.  The designs that are there are definitely authentic to the originals, but I tended to stick with normal cars when I could just for playability.  The AI also was having some significant problems adjusting to the strange track designs, particularly in high speed banks where turning really wasn’t that important.  I can’t recall more than a handful of times where I really saw the AI ever flip over in the base game, but it was pretty routine to see multiple cars in a race go flying off the track to their doom here.  The AI also felt like it had some adjustments to its rubberbanding since I last played, because the AI was often pulling off impossible feats in acceleration to pass me.  I’ve never driven the Halo Warthog, but I king of suspect it can’t out accelerate a Jaguar F-Type.

However, the things I found wrong were at best minor nitpicks.  They’re immediately forgotten the first time you go off a blind jump through a fire hoop, see the car tilting up, and just watch the sky for seconds at a time not really knowing when you’re going to land.  It’s those kinds of outlandish moments that make this feel like playing in a giant Hot Wheels set, despite still feeling like Forza.

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Shelved It #4 – Persona 5

More Info from Atlas

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: PS3

Admittedly this is a shelved it, kinda sorta.  I fully intend to play through the rest of this in some form, even if it involves just turning down the difficulty to get through boss fights.  I’m at a point where my lack of patience for the boss fight structure makes me not care about spending the effort to get through the fights, but the world that was built for this game is so good that I still feel compelled to see it.  However, given I’m bending the rules to move forward, I felt like it was worth writing about this as a normal shelving incident.

I’ve played a lot of the Megami Tensei games, whether it’s the mainline titles, Persona titles, or even tangentially related ones like Tokyo Mirage Sessions. It’s worth noting in particular that Tokyo Mirage is probably the best straight JRPG I played in 2016. The biggest core problem that I typically run into is that while the shared battle system encourages smart planning to chain moves in killing enemies, it simultaneously encourages the enemies to have extremely high damage and the same chaining abilities as a balance point. The end result is a mix of fights where the difference between an extremely easy fight and one where I get one turn wiped is one that doesn’t involve player skill at all.

In general I like the battle system that these games use.  The general setup is that you have a collection of demons with varying stats, strengths, weaknesses, and abilities, as well as core physical attacks.  By taking advantage of the range of capabilities at your disposal, you can maximize damage and knock down enemies through attacking opposition weaknesses.  In doing so, you gain extra attacks for hitting these weaknesses, giving the ability to chain attacks through the entire enemy party.  Once they are all down, the group can attack the entire opposition at once, generally resulting in a complete wipe of the enemies.  This system works fantastically well for your normal trash fights, and I could generally do most trash fights without ever being attacked, let alone taking damage.  First times against new demons up being an interesting puzzle-solving opportunity in figuring out what weaknesses can be exposed, then further fights are usually a quick mop up.  Getting through dungeons generally then becomes limited more by a lack of resources, or a need to go buy more SP items, rather than a need to run away for safety reasons.

Boss fights in the game generally involve the same fight pattern, with the obvious difference of not being able to one shot the fight.  I’d go in with some assumed set of gear that I kind of hoped would be close to functional, then either win with no trouble or wipe immediately to some form of chain attack.  If I wiped, I’d reshuffle gear, make sure I had different Personas equipped, and generally get through the phase where I died.  This cycle would continue until the boss ran out of new mechanics and I won.  My problem with this is that at no point did I feel the challenge was actually in finishing the boss fights.  It was entirely in getting arbitrary gear to block mechanics, and having no trouble once those were covered.  Rather than wipes being something that were caused by lack of skill, wipes were something I fixed by changing my accessories.  The cycle of discovery in this was not something I was doing for fun, but something I was doing because the battle system actively seeks to punish you for not having specific setups.  Once that setup is achieved, the boss fights lose their challenge, and end up being simple rotation fights that are not any different than big number trash fights.

The unfortunate thing is that the world surrounding this is fantastic.  Persona games have always been good at mixing relatively believable characters with the Japanese lore-based fantasy and this one is no exception.  The cast of characters that I had seen thus far covered a pretty wide range of personalities from your jocks to the more reserved, as well as their typical animal that talks stand-in.  The visual style, particularly within the dungeons, is also about as fantastically stylish as you’ll see in a JRPG.  This is backed by another fantastic soundtrack that pretty seamlessly flows between rock and acid jazz to fit the situation.  On its own I don’t know that we’re going to see another game this year that will be so iconic in its visual and audio design as Persona 5.

Ultimately I’m not that surprised I’m at this point.  Since I’ve played this series before, I knew what my problems were going to be with the battle system going in.  I guess if there’s anything I’m surprised about, it’s that I’ve already hit the point where I stopped caring without being anywhere near the finish.

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Shelved It #3 – Yooka-Laylee

More Info from Playtonic

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Steam (Linux, Mac, Windows), Xbox One, Switch

Hit or miss is the best way I can describe Yooka-Laylee.  The team of ex-Rare developers clearly recognizes what made Banjo-Kazooie a good game, but at the same time it feels like they never did anything to pass that mark, and in trying to aim at nostalgia, they also didn’t fix many of the original flaws.  I got through the bulk of the first two worlds, as well as their expanded forms, and while there was definitely some fun to be had, the amount of boring fluff content, and somewhat subpar writing never really gave me a drive to plow through the slower areas of the game to see the better parts. The unfortunate thing is that there is some flashes of good here, but they tend to be balanced out by negatives at the same time.

While the various jump mechanics feel good and have a nice weight to them, the camera’s inability to not get in your way means a lot of missed jumps.  Even in areas where the camera is fixed, the sometimes strange angles and FOV selection ended up causing severe depth perception issues.  The most unfortunate thing is that the game is drop dead gorgeous, but I spent so much time fighting the camera that I never could really be at a point where I could fully enjoy it.

While the boss fights I did tended to be a lot of fun when I was doing them correctly, odd design choices on how damage occurs often frustrated me.  As an example, the World 1 boss involved leaping over rolling logs on a slope, where hitting a log would have you slide back down to the bottom.  All that was fine, but hitting a log at the top would still leave all the logs I had passed, and I could receive damage on my way back down while being significantly less controllable while sliding.

Individually some of the pages were in areas where puzzle or combat segments could be fun, but an equal amount simply involved using the duo’s powers to very slowly get up a path with little to no resistance.  The fact that the worlds are leveled up, rather than simply doing a larger spread of smaller worlds means that there’s a significant amount of retread through the environments.  Worst of all were the arcade games, which while curious, did not need to be given multiple pages to force replays.

I think if there’s anything that I found the most surprising, it’s that the writing was just not that good.  Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, or Conker’s Bad Fur Day were all examples of games out of Rare that, while goofy, had entertaining and solid writing.  The writing in this game seems to just lean on puns and self-referential one liners, a lot of which are not going to stand up 5-10 years from now.  It feels like they turned the humor knob of Conker too far, giving a story that even in the section I played never coalesced into something worth pushing me forward.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.  I think this game just missed the mark.  Even if we just look at core 3D platformers since Rare’s heyday, we have games like Jak & Daxter, the Sly Cooper series, Mario Galaxy, or the Skylanders titles.  We can even stretch from there and go into the heavy weapon action of the Ratchet & Clank games bringing new twists on the genre.  I suspect there’s a lot of life left in this stlye of platformer, but sitting on nostalgia just isn’t doing it, particularly if the problems of the original games are just going to be ignored.