Category: Action

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Game Ramblings #36.1 – Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds

More Info from Guerrilla Games

Original Ramblings

  • Genre: Open World Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds does do a lot to generally continue what was great about the first one.  The setting is still fanastic and drop dead gorgeous.  The moment to moment combat is still a lot of fun with a lot of variety in ranged weapons.  Exploration is still always worth it, with things to find all over the place.  Basically, they didn’t screw up what was good.  Luckily, they also fixed my two biggest gripes with the base game, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.

This time around you’re running around Yellowstone and the surrounding areas. It’s definitely seen better days.

The end of HZD really annoyed the hell out of me, and it was because of two reasons.  The first was the lack of progression with the main melee weapon leaving the end hours of the game focused on much stronger ranged attacks, and the second was the design of many of the boss fights being an effective circular arena fight where you could generally stay safely at range the entire time.  While neither of these problems really ended up being a killer in the game’s overall result, they were definitely annoying problems that left me scratching my head a bit.

The melee weapon itself is definitely helped this time around by having an end game upgrade path.  One of the first side quests you come upon when entering the new area of the game ends with you upgrading your spear to support the modification system that the ranged weapons all had.  While I could definitely gripe about this being hidden behind a side quest, and I could gripe about the spear still not having inherent stat upgrades, this change alone is huge in changing how late game melee combat worked for me against higher level enemies.  Now I could build the staff to my play style, whether that’s a pure damage build, one focused on debuffs, or one focused on getting some ticking damage out on enemies.  While this was simply using a system that already existed for the ranged weaponry, gaining this system for melee was a huge change for the better.

While boss fights are still in relatively obvious arenas, they are much more varied landscapes, and the bosses themselves are significantly more aggressive against the player.

The handful of bosses in the expansion are also much improved over the base game.  While they still take place in relatively obvious arenas, there’s a much better variety in how the arenas are laid out.  In the example above, the player is sort of ducking in and around little outcroppings, giving a lot of line of sight breaking when fighting the boss.  In general, that is pretty common, allowing the player to fight in a much more stealth-based way.  This is really important based on a change in overall design of the boss AI.

The original game suffered from bosses that could generally be kept at range, letting the player just kind of tick away at them with the bow with very little danger.  The bosses here feel a lot more like large versions of the world machines instead.  They move around a lot to keep the player from being grounded.  They do a lot more melee and charge attacks, keeping the player’s dodging finger ready.  Even when the bosses are doing ranged projectile attacks, the danger of being hit and knocked down is a lot higher due to the ability of the bosses to close the gap and melee the player while they are down.  Overall the fights just feel a lot more dynamic, rather than the circle strafe grinds that the original game suffered from.

Since this is Yellowstone, lava is the name of the game. It looks even better in motion than it does in screenshots.

Overall this was really just a solid expansion.  It took what was great about the original and gave you more, and fixed a few of the larger problems while it was at it.  The new content was a lot of fun, the new weapons felt impactful and slid naturally into my arsenal (super bonus mention to the energy projectile cannon you get about half way through the expansion), and the handful of new enemies fit into the existing roster really well while giving some new mechanics to watch out for.  In general, this one leaves me wanting more of the series than the original game even did, and that leaves me excited for the future of the series going forward.

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Game Ramblings #75 – Watch_Dogs 2

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Really good open-world action game with a great take on the San Francisco Bay area
  • Emphasis on hacking-based stealth over combat is a nice change from the typical GTA-style combat mechanics

Generally speaking I’m more of a fan of RPGs over action games, but I definitely don’t mind hopping into the action genre from time to time.  When I do though, I usually prefer games that emphasize stealth and planning over run and gun action, and I think this is where Watch_Dogs 2 hit for me in the best way.  While this game definitely doesn’t lack action sequences, the pure action moments feel very tailored, leaving enemy interactions to focus more on the stealth and hacking mechanics that the story itself wants to push forward.  In doing so, this became a very different take on the GTA-style city game formula, and for me was a format that I enjoyed more because of this change in focus.

While this isn’t a 1:1 San Francisco, people that are familiar with the city definitely won’t feel lost driving around.

It’s easy to assume that open world games in general will take liberties with the cities they exist in, but this one definitely feels like San Francisco through and through.  It’s a bit compressed, but the main sights are all there and relatively in the right spots, whether you’re driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, watching sea lions at Pier 39, or driving around by the Transamerica Pyramid, this feels a lot like San Francisco.  While it’s not important to the fun of the game, it ends up doing a great job of getting you into the game at the start, and for folks that have been to the city, an immediate sense of familiarity with where they are.

That said, it’s the gameplay that makes you stick around, and this one was a lot of fun for reasons that aren’t necessarily typical of open-world action games.

Hacking is the name of the game, and you end up doing that a lot throughout, including going in to mess around with some rockets.

Looking at screenshots or videos of this game, it’s easy to assume that this game is a real-world rip of Grand Theft Auto, since the player is completing story quests, going around fighting people, and generally just ramping up chaos as much as possible.  However, that’s just one way to play the game, and I’d argue it’s the wrong way to play the game.

At its core, the story of this game is built around a group of hackers exposing governmental and private-sector secrets that are affecting everyday people.  That can run the gamut from data protection to facial tracking and more.  It’s a lot of things that are hot topics today, so it ends up being a really compelling narrative to tie the group’s goal together.  Where this really becomes important is that the hacking capabilities of the player become the forward focus for an entire stealth style of playing the game.

It’s pretty close to guaranteed that any story mission will end up bringing you into an area that requires interaction with guards of some sort.  You can definitely go in guns blazing, taking everyone out and getting away.  However, you can also go full-stealth and hack your way through the game.  The tools at the player’s disposal even give you multiple paths above and beyond just going stealth.  Want to stay entirely out of the area?  Send in a little robot to do the work for you.  Want to cause some chaos and sneak in behind as that’s going on?  Send a false report in to draw gangs to the area to fight the guards.  Want to use vehicles to your advantage?  Hack a crane and have it carry you over the top of everything.

Each situation gives you a bunch of different ways to achieve the end goal, and its the exploration of this set of skills that really gave Watch_Dogs 2 its legs.   The depth of possibilities allowed me to always be trying something new and something fresh to get to the end.  In a lot of cases it also brought side entertainment in just watching how the systems worked together to achieve a result.  There’s something just inherently entertaining about hacking a robot to chase guards, then sending in a gang to attack them, and watching the entire thing unfold while I’m perched above on a rooftop with really very little outright control of what’s going on.

The game is also not lacking in action sequences, such as controlling a killer robot spider.

That’s not to say action sequences don’t work well.  There were more cases than I care to admit where I screwed up, got caught, and had to go in shooting.  In these cases the game still works well, giving you a wide variety of fun to use weapons and a pretty satisfying regenerating health mechanic.  There are also some really good tailored pure action sequences.  The spider fight above was one great example.  One of my favorites though was a sequence involving stealing a KITT-clone and driving around San Francisco running from the cops.  You drive around with the car talking to you, hacking the streets to cause explosions, and generally just causing mayhem.  It’s pure action-movie stupidity, and the sequences that are tailored to it are even better off for having  strong standalone focus.

This series in general has been pretty easy to dismiss as a GTA clone, but I don’t really think that does it justice.  Is it the best of open-world action games?  No, and I don’t think Ubisoft is ever going to want to actually compete with the type of budget Rockstar throws around for GTA.  However, this is a really good game on its own.
The inclusion of stealth and hacking mechanics is a great way for them to differentiate themselves from the pack, and really pushes this game into the realm of something that you should check out.  Given Rockstar also doesn’t look real keen on doing single player GTA content any time soon, this will at the very least scratch the itch in the genre while we seemingly wait forever.

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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.