Category: Action

Posted on

Game Ramblings #66 – Axiom Verge

More Info from Thomas Happ Games

  • 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.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #61 – Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

More Info from Cornfox & Bros.

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4 (previously on iOS)
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, Xbox One, Vita, Switch, iOS, Android

TL;DR

  • Decent take on a mashup of ideas from Zelda entries A Link to the Past and Wind Waker
  • Much improved experience playing the console version
  • Biggest weakness is in simplicity of the puzzles, though a end/post-game island shows promise in a sequel

The biggest surprise to me in playing this is how much the actual flow of the game had improved over the original iOS release.  I’d played it a few years back using one of those clamshell controllers for my phone, and while the game showed a lot of promise, it was extraordinarily easy to kind of lose track of what you were actually supposed to be doing.  Patches since that initial release, as well as the release on other platforms have brought a much better game, complete with additional cutscenes, voice acting, and some new items to help things out.  While it’s still a bit weak in the puzzle solving department, this ended up being a pretty solid take on the classic top-down style Zelda game.

While the camera is spun 45 degrees, there’s no mistaking the viewpoint straight out of the top-down Zelda games.

Let’s get this out of the way; yes this is a direct take on the Zelda series.  You go around to a series of dungeons, use a sword and shield as primary weapons, a handful of items as secondary helpers (including bombs, a bow, and a few helper magic spells), puzzle solve your way to a master key, fight a boss, and repeat.  It takes place in a world where you have to sail around to small islands after a large apocalyptic event killed nearly everyone (hello Wind Waker!), where you ultimately set forth the events that should help rejuvenate the world.  It’s a direct take, but it does a solid job of taking it on.

One of the big positive changes is that due to the inclusion of analog movement, you aren’t restricted to swings from a specific direction like the typical 2D Zelda games.  This allows for a lot better fine-tuned control over attacking enemy weak points.  The sword swings also have a small combo chain, rather than a single fixed swing and stab, giving a lot more potential in fighting in a more nuanced way.  This is backed by some nice changes to secondary weapons.  The bow and arrow is pretty solid on its own, with a bit of shot magnetizing to make things a bit more feasible at range.  However, the inclusion of being able to shoot through flames to make fire arrows is a nice touch.  On the bomb front, they basically work like Zelda items in the environment, but when thrown at enemies they explode on contact, giving a lot more direct way to use them offensively, and not depending on timing as much.

There’s a boss in every dungeon, each with its own set of mechanics to deal with.

However, that mechanic change can be exploited, particularly on bosses.  The bosses in the game all have their own mechanics to learn.  The one above for example has tentacles that have to be killed out before the weak point is exposed.  In another, the player has to use a reflective shield to deflect a laser into the boss’ weak points.  However, by the time I got into about the middle of the game, bombs were my weapon of choice at a boss.  They have AoE damage to hit multiple targets, which is nice for taking out spawned adds.  They also do significant damage on their own at range, so I didn’t generally have to get into a dangerous spot to throw them.  Overall it made the difficulty of the bosses go way down, where I’d have preferred to see a little more use of clever mechanics to make specific items the preference, similar to Zelda series bosses.

There were other areas where I also saw this sort of not quite to Zelda level experience.  The dungeons have the typical puzzle solving, but by and large they consisted of simple box maneuvering or one-time use of items (shoot a target, drop a box on a switch, etc), rather than more involved experiences.  In general it made the actual puzzle solving pretty simple, which was a bit of a disappointment.

The Island of Whispers is the best puzzle-solving in the game, involving the collection of 10 cursed skulls.

The Island of Whispers is the one exception to the easy puzzles in place.  This island came out in the 2.0 release of the phone SKU, and has been in the subsequent PC and console releases, and involves the collection of 10 cursed skulls across an entire island.  Due to this, the entire island becomes the puzzle area, instead of a cramped dungeon.  Some skulls are simply there to find if you’re paying attention.  However, some require specific use of certain items, or chained use of multiple items.  Some require manipulation of the environment in order to gain access to new areas.  Basically, this one island shows a lot of potential for the sequel’s ability to grow in interesting directions, as well as the potential of the growth of team in tackling the ARPG genre.

So is this going to stand up against the Zelda series? No, not really.  While it is solid, there are some core things that bring it down a few notches.  However, I would say it’s worth the $15 asking price to play it.  It’s an entertaining experience with at the very least solid mechanics, has about 10 hours of content to run through, and at least brings this style of game to some platforms that are often missing out on Zelda.  While it’s not quite up to the level of the upper echelon, continued improvement by the team could bring us something really interesting when Oceanhorn 2 comes out some time here in the future.

So I also want to have a bit of an aside here on a particular fish (and ignore my PS4 typing skills), because I’m a sucker for fishing in videogames.  The fishing system in place here is one that is inherently RNG-focused, with an emphasis on player endurance to catch the fish.  The fish will somewhat randomly move left or right, with the player pulling against it.  After a period of pulling in the correct direction, the fish strength meter will go down.  If you pull in the wrong direction, or the fish is dancing back and forth, the meter goes up.  In general, this means that the way to catch a fish is to ride out the points where you can’t make gains (and usually have losses), while holding out for the moments of rest where you can chip away at the fish.

Generally speaking this is a fun way to make use of an inherently RNG-based system.  Skill can’t entirely stop the fish from fighting back, but it can stop things from running away from the player entirely.  However, this all falls apart when the fish adds in an offensive mechanic that kills the player.  Now instead of enduring for the big moments of gains, you’re rolling the dice that those moments of big gains will actually happen in time for the fish to get caught.  It’s a weird change in mechanic that eliminates the skill factor and turns the entire system into an RNG mechanic.  This is made worse by the fact that missing the fish LITERALLY MEANS YOU DIE, so you have to backtrack to the last checkpoint, heal up, do whatever is involved with that to get back to whole, and try again.  It was a weird change that I only happened upon because I enjoy fishing.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #60 – Agents of Mayhem

More Info from Volition

  • Genre: Open-world Action
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Great mix of characters with different capabilities, ranging from melee to various ranges of projectile-based weaponry.  Hot swapping of characters leads to good real-time tactical changes.
  • Story is a silly, but fun take on the 80s action cartoon.  Unfortunately ends abruptly in a cliffhanger.
  • Environment severely lacking in variety, particularly with enemy lairs.

In a lot of ways this feels like a natural (if not subdued) extension of where the Saints Row series had been moving in IV and Gat Out of Hell.  You play a series of more or less super powered humans, some of which have unnatural abilities, and some of which are simply taking advantage of unrealistic technology.  The action itself is still all there, with a large variety of weapons to take advantage of.   The open world is there, filled with missions, small side tasks, and a bunch of things to collect.  The over the top plot is there, where you’re trying to stop an evil doctor from recreating the world.  However, despite the core of the game being really solid, it never quite reaches the heights of the Saints Row games.  I couldn’t quite place my finger on what happened – perhaps being their first game designed for the PS4/Xbone generation, perhaps they just ran out of time to release – but the experience never really coalesced into a strong whole.

One of the first signs of restricted content is this hallway. You see this theme about every 10 minutes for every enemy lair.

In general, there’s just a lot of signs that something caused a severe cut or restriction in content in the game.

One of the core pieces of the game’s progress loop is that missions will invariably send you to invade and disrupt LEGION lairs, the hiding places for the game’s primary antagonist group.  However, apart from a few that were carefully constructed for particular story reasons, the rest all follow the same visual theme.  I couldn’t tell you how many times you enter the same hallway, go through the same half dozen rooms and connecting pieces, find treasure chests in the exact same room 100 different times, fight the same half dozen trash enemies in each one.  It just feels like they got the gameplay loop in place, then ran out of time before fleshing out the rest of the system.

This also to some extent extends to the story.  I’d estimate roughly the first 75% of the game follows a pattern of recruit new story-relevant agent through a few missions -> find and capture/kill an enemy lieutenant through a few missions.  There are also some side agents to recruit, and each one has a dedicated secondary mission, but those agents fill more of a gameplay gap than a story one. However, the last three lieutenants simply go back to back to back in a set of missions that starts fantastically, but starts to feel like it falls off.  By the time you get to the ultimate baddy, the game drops you into a fantastically cool new environment filled with very little to do but kill some trash enemies, then a boss fight that abruptly ends mid-fight and throws you into a cliffhanger story cutscene.  It was another case where it just felt like they had the core in place, then ran out of time and had to patch everything together to get the game out the door.

The boss fights are some of the best parts of the game, including this one against a giant ass robot.

Luckily the gameplay does to some extent redeem the game.  While the combat isn’t in practice that much different than Saints Row, the practice of swapping entire characters instead of swapping weapon inventory feels really powerful.  Each character is basically the combination of a personality, a weapon, and two special abilities, and running out into the city becomes a practice of finding the right mix of these to flesh out your party enough to be successful.  You’ve got your general gun-based characters running from short-range shotguns to pistols to SMGs to assault rifles.  There’s also some a really satisfying to use archer hijacking the name Rama, a melee-based assassin that is a ton of fun, and a ice-powered Russian that can freeze and shatter enemies.  Probably my favorite character ended up being a female engineer that could lay down turrets while she went through firing a plasma stream weapon, giving me a lot of flexibility in attacking enemies from two directions.

The flexibility here is really important in keeping the combat fresh.  Despite fighting the same enemies repeatedly, I could switch out to different characters based on the tactical advantages of the environment.  If I’m climbing a tower, I could switch to a long-range gun or archer to pick off enemies one by one from far away.  If I’m in close quarters, a shotgun could wreak havoc to enemies.  If I needed to sneak around and distract enemies while hacking consoles, the turret engineer was a great call.  By being able to form my team in this way, I could fit the team to multiple styles, while still being able to play how I wanted at any one time.  Without fail, the characters also felt fun to use, so it was never a chore to go around sending baddies to their doom.

This all takes place in a relatively compact, but extremely full version of Seoul.  Beside the actual missions to do, there’s a ton of side content.  On the simple end, this is simple vehicle races, patrol take outs, and hostage rescues.  The complexity moves up a bit in taking out a variety of large weaponry, from ice cannons to gravity portals.  Ultimately, you can also invade and take over a handful of enemy strong holds.  The city is also scattered with treasure chests filled with money, resources, and cosmetics, as well as a ton of crystals that can be used to buy further upgrades for the agents.  Basically, you’ll never be out of things to do as there’s always something around the next corner to keep you happily distracted.

While some of the outfits are probably legally questionable, you can always be ready to cruise the city in style.

Ultimately, the downfall of this game isn’t the quality of the gameplay, it’s that it feels incomplete.  What is there is a lot of fun and basically plays out like a videogame version of every stupid 80s action cartoon that I used to watch as a kid.  As a natural extension of the Saints Row universe, it also feels entirely in place to the style and attitude of those games.  I can only speculate as to what happened to get the game shipped in this state, but hopefully it doesn’t prevent from further use of the IP.  Given a second chance, I suspect we’d be looking at a game that a lot of people would remember for quite a while.