Category: Action

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Shelved It #22 – Spirit of the North 2

More Info from Infuse Studio

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series

I so badly wanted to like this game more than I did. The first game is a perfect example to me of a sit and chill game. It had some puzzles along the way, but it was largely just a relaxing walking simulator that looked fantastic. This one made some major leaps in its iterative choices – it’s open world, it’s got a lot more lore to discover, a much longer length, and it even has some combat. The problem for me was that by and large the iteration just did not hit.

The first obvious change is the move to an open world. For the most part this didn’t really change how I approached the game that much since linearly wandering and completing puzzles doesn’t feel that different to me than aimlessly wandering and completing puzzles. However, there’s a few things that snuck in to compensate this design that really dragged the experience down for me, both of which are tied to needing to find things in the environment.

One of these was the collecting of soul wisps. These are dotted around the environment or purchaseable via shops and are used for other things. In some cases, it’s things like ancient trees for skill points or for unlocking gates to get into other puzzles. The problem I had with them is that they are not marked at all on maps like the puzzle areas are, so finding them is either luck of walking past them or a need to wander in a very precise manner to cover the whole area. This is compounded by your ability to carry a fairly limited stock of them (I was up to 7 by the time I shelved) so you could easily cap them out and not really be in a position to remember where new ones are to pick up later when you need them. It ends up being an incredibly tedious system where to really be smart with it, it made sense to immediately just go wander around dumping them into things when you cap out instead of taking the game at your own pace.

There’s also a number of situations where you have to carry things to specific places, and that almost always feels like a drag. Sometimes it’s a need to find a torch to light a thing to let you into a puzzle area. This requires you to a) find a torch, b) light the torch, then c) walk to the spot to use it. Sometimes this is crucial story items at the end of puzzles that you then have to carry to some temple and place down. Until you do that (often a pretty significant walk) you also can’t really pick up other things without the risk of losing the key item, so you can’t even always complete other puzzles along the way. In these cases it just feels like the game is dragging you down to slow the pace in a negative way. This is compounded by the lack of fast travel potential. The handful of portals and the ability to fast travel to your last den are not really sufficient given the scale of the environment.

What this really results in is that the game feels open world for the sake of open world with a lot of the design decisions compounding negative feedback for the player experience walking around completing puzzles. Compared against what was essentially really enjoyable linear wandering in the first game, it feels like a big step backwards.

The new boss combat also feels like an unintentional misstep. Where boss fights feel like a good idea on the surface to get a bit more of an action tie-in to the story, these fights end up feeling slow and unforgiving.

The screenshot above is an encounter where you have to avoid attacks while tethered to the center of the arena for 30-45 seconds before spirit walking to the pillars in the background to activate them. This fight had a few problems. One was practical – some attack tells were simply below the visuals of the arena making it impossible to see them. Another was balance – I could avoid getting hit for most of a phase, but then get hit once (see previous problem…) and I could easily be juggled from 100-0 health being bounced between attacks without an ability to get out of them. It never felt fun and finishing the fight was a relief instead of a triumph.

The last boss fight I did before shelving this was a set of two wolves. Each had their own attacks, but it was basically a very slow progression of them choosing a bite attack that I had to dodge, then a secondary attack that was a bit more randomized. Finally, they would move to a phase where they shot out rings of fire after which I could attack them. This was a case where I was able to again get through the fight completely unphased at full health, but a mistake in the last hit of the last phase of the fight meant that one of the wolves got its bite attack (which locked me in place) while the second wolf activated a fire beam (which I couldn’t avoid) and got knocked from 100-0 health without a chance to do anything.

As a developer this feels like a classic case of the team not compensating for their own skill at playing the game. Once you do a fight 5…10…100 times in development the fights become second nature to the point where it’s easy to forget what the experience will be like for a player getting to it for the first time. These are all cases of that for me. Stun locks are not fun. Being juggled without invulnerability after being hit is not fun. Randomized attacks that can flood the entire arena and sometimes just not allow dodging are not fun. However, these are things that are easy to miss when the fights are muscle memory, and that’s what it feels like happened here.

At its core this game didn’t really lose what made the first game enjoyable. The wandering and puzzle solving and beautiful visuals are all there. The problem I ultimately had was that that new things never felt like they stood up to the original game, so the experience kept feeling dragged down by them. The new things to support open world gameplay weren’t fun. The scale of wandering between things with nothing to do wasn’t fun. The boss combat, despite being well tied into the story, was not fun. It kind of just feels like a step to far for the series, where maybe a third title could have ultimately ended up here with a bit more of an iterative step in between.

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Game Ramblings #220 – Retro City Rampage DX

More Info from Vblank Entertainment

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, MS-DOS, PS3, PS4, PSP, Vita, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS, iOS, Android

This game is an absolute guilty pleasure. I’ve played this game a number of times on a number of different platforms and every time I play it it’s a great time. I don’t think I really need to cover what the game is that much here, but I was instead surprised by how much the Switch really brought the game into an interesting new place for me. Each platform has its own set of quirks – the Wii had NES-style controls, the PSP had its small screen experience, the PlayStation consoles had the big screen. I think the Switch might be the best of all worlds.

If you haven’t played this game before, the best way I can describe it is pre-3 Grand Theft Auto through a modern lens, fed through retro nostalgia. It’s top-down action largely involving over the top set pieces, stealing and driving cars around the city, and a bunch of missions you can play in generally a linear order. If you’ve played GTA 1 or 2, you know basically what you’re getting into.

So, why did it work so well on the Switch? Changing modes. I pulled this out to be my work day waiting on a build and can’t touch my computer which meant the Switch was sitting on my desk with a controller and being played in short segments. I then brought it up after work to play while other things were going on. After the kids went to sleep it then got docked and played in a long session on the TV. All three modes worked equally well for different reasons, but importantly they were all fun and they worked seamlessly. This game’s ability to context switch between short and long forms of game is really its biggest strength. If I had two minutes waiting for a build to deploy, I could turn it on and run through a couple of weapon challenges completely separate from the story. At night I could instead run through the entire chain of story missions without stopping. Both types of play were fun and just worked.

Importantly though, all modes of play also controlled well. The game is fun on some of the other platforms I played it on, but frankly this game works best as a twin stick shooter and that wasn’t always available. The Wii Remote doesn’t have any analog sticks. The PSP had the small screen, but only one stick. On the other hand, the PS3/PS4 have the good controls, but not the easy pick up and play short segments. The Switch simply turns on and is in-game in seconds in all variants. Some other platforms like the 3DS could do that but suffered on controls. The Switch is like picking the best parts of each and running with it.

It’s probably an easy conclusion to draw that the Switch works so well here, but I don’t really have that many points of comparison like this. There aren’t many games that are widely available on so many platforms that fit into a performance envelope where the Switch port isn’t obviously being hurt by the lack of hardware strength. Even with the Switch 2, it is often obviously sacrificing image and gameplay quality to choose it as your lead platform over a PC or current generation console. This game is a perfect storm where it just fits the platform perfectly.

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Game Ramblings #214 – Ghost of Yotei

More Info from Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5

For all intents and purposes, this is a perfect iterative sequel. It’s familiar enough to not be different from what I enjoyed about the original, but it’s got enough changes to feel fresh. In some ways that is probably something that people would criticize as feeling safe, but for me it’s hitting a fine line of moving the gameplay forward without losing what it was, and that’s a tough balance to hit.

If I put this up against what I thought of Tsushima there really isn’t a huge difference in my mind. They both do the Assassin’s Creed combat hub and free range stuff meta loop very well. They both have incredibly good combat aligned with some really effective stealth moments. They both have the same general discovery loop of looking for landmarks in the world (ex: steam -> hot springs, big fire -> inn, for all of them you can find a yellow bird to follow). Where this one improved for me really did end up being in the iterative nature of its combat.

In Tsushima I specifically mentioned that duels were where I felt combat really hit its stride, and while that is still largely the case here I do think that the wider group combat saw enough of an improvement to be of note. My problem with the previous title was that group combat never felt like I had a good way to focus on where to look, and a lot of that came down to what felt like a lack of obvious prioritization of incoming damage. That feels much improved here.

Part of it is that NPCs simply are better at taking turns. I know it sounds weird for a group of enemies to attack one-on-one, but from a gameplay perspective it makes sense for the player. Spamming dodge or parry buttons because multiple NPCs come after you more or less simultaneously is not a fun experience. Having the NPCs take turns – and more importantly giving the player time to attack the NPC that they successfully dodge or parry – is a big win in playability and letting the player feel powerful against a larger group of enemies. From a danger perspective it also felt like the NPCs would attack more quickly in succession if I wasn’t correctly dodging or parrying, so it encouraged me to be precise in order to not be overwhelmed. Another part of it for me is that rather than using stance switching to go against enemy weaknesses, Yotei uses weapon switching. From a result perspective this is exactly the same – you switch stance/weapon in both games to give yourself an advantage. However, recontextualizing this to something even more obviously visual feels better in a way that I can’t really place my finger on.

It also may just be placebo or fading memory, but it also felt like the general tells about incoming attacks were more obvious. Visually there were fewer large feints to make you guess incorrectly. The visual language of things that are dodgeable or parryable felt more clear. The audible tells of ranged attacks felt like they punched through the general noise of combat better. These are all things that were important to the larger group combat scenarios to make them feel more immediately manageable compared to the original title to really elevate that part of the experience to allow it to shine. It may not quite match the spectacle of duels yet, but rather than feeling like a negative of the experience I was generally able to enjoy combat in all situations much more easily in the sequel.

If there was one thing that I felt did take a step back here it would be the presentation of the story. The story is a generally non-linear set of sections sandwiched between a fixed start and end. What this means for the player is that once they get into the world, they can generally pick the direction they want to go. Each smaller region of the overall game world was its own self-contained experience where entering the zone triggers some story moment to occur, with the zone having its own plot line, side characters, and wrap up moment. However, that section of the game could occur in any order, so it had very little in terms of ties to anything else.

The practical impact for me is that this title felt like what would normally be a series of smaller independent expansion packs, rather than a whole new title. Each section kind of gets you an upgrade path of some sort and a character that ends up being important later-ish but because they have to work independently it often feels a lot like the zones are – for lack of a better description – nerfed down to just kind of be played through. Narratively it works well, but I’m not sure it was the best for gameplay purposes. On the other hand, when it does tie together for the final zone of the game, the toolbox as a whole works incredibly well so I’m not sure I’m overly fussed that each tool you gained had its own zone to learn the thing in with repeated use.

In some respects it also felt like this change might have forced a bit more simplification of side content, which was something I enjoyed about Tsushima over the larger Assassin’s Creed games. There is still some side content in place, but apart from a couple small specific places there isn’t side content that reaches across zone lines. It helps keep the side content locked to very specific upgrade-focused bits, alongside some side quest lines that deal with things specific to zones – for example, all upgrades for kunai take place in the zone where you earn kunai. I can’t tell whether it was an intentional change to match the narrative setup, but I do think the reduced stuff continues to be a benefit to reducing boredom in games of this scope.

I said this of Tsushima:

I certainly won’t sit here and claim that this is generally an original title, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. It takes the framework established by the recent Assassin’s Creed titles, and iterates enough on it to feel like its own thing.

I think that is particularly relevant here. Ghost of Yotei feels even less original, but I don’t think it needed to be original. Tsushima was a wildly successful and fun game. This takes the core put in place there and iterates on it, and in doing so didn’t lose what made the game a standout. Yotei is a wildly gorgeous game with extremely tight combat and that’s all I really needed it to be.