Category: Action

2017-08-312017-08-29

Shelved It #7 – Hollow Knight

Genre: Metroidvania
Platform: PC
Also Available On: Mac, Linux, Switch

TL;DR

Solid mechanics, solid visuals, solid audio all put together a great base that can be built on.
Small bits of lack of polish, rather than anything egregious led to frustration, and eventual shelving.

This is going to sound weird for a game I’m shelving, but Hollow Knight is really quite good. It’s a pretty traditional Metroidvania in layout, using a solid short-range melee system and some occasional powerups to round out the move set. This is complemented by a solid visual style, and great audio and soundtrack to put together one of the best themed titles in this genre I’ve recently played. However, this was a case of a thousand cuts, where small lack of polish in the details led to a continuous pattern of one step forward, one step backward in my progress. This was combined with a somewhat questionable use of the Souls death mechanic, to where body runs began to feel like a slog, rather than a good balance of penalty and learning reward. In the end, the good couldn’t outweigh the bad for me to continue on.

Early example of some of the fantastic visuals you’d see in this game.

However, let’s start with the good. As with a lot of recent Metroidvania games, particularly in the indie scene, this one is a fantastic looker of a game. Like the recent remake of Wonder Boy 3, or other Metroidvania titles like Ori and the Blind Forest, this one has a fantastic visual style. Everything has a great hand-drawn appearance, with thick painterly lines. It’s a fairly distinct style, and works rather well. This is combined with great use of dynamic lighting to give some dramatic areas. The biggest problem with it all is that most of the areas share a similar color range, so things can begin to look rather samey as you continue on. On the other hand, it never got old running through the environment and having all the little blades of grass in the scene explode into similarly styled particles as I swung through them. As a whole, this was a part of the game that never really diminished in my time playing it.

The core combat is also really well put together. The base of the combat are melee strikes, which sounds simple at its core. However, there was a smart choice made specifically in the horizontal strike, giving some verticality outside of the swing’s hitbox, and allowing players to hit things both slightly above and slightly below without having to be super precise with jump heights. This was extremely nice for how small some of the hitboxes on armored bosses and enemies could be. This was backed up by a strong set of spells and abilities that are earned throughout the game to fill out the move set. Examples here include mid-air dashes and double jumps for traversal, or energy missiles and dive bomb spells for damage. Generally speaking, the game gives you a bunch of tools to use, and its up to you to then figure out what is most effective for each situation.

However, as I continued on, the little details that didn’t quite have the polish of the visuals and core combat started giving way to more frustration than fun.

The first big place this showed for me was in their use of the Dark Souls death mechanic. The basic system is that at death, your soul gets stuck in the world along side all currency you earned during that life. If you get back to the soul and defeat it in combat, you earn all the currency back. If you die before that, you permanently lose all of it.

Generally speaking, I’m pretty neutral on this system. There’s a fine line where this system works well, and to me it requires enough save points in place that are both close enough together, as well as close enough to where players will die so that the game doesn’t heavily discourage exploration, and keeps game pace post-death high. To me it feels like Hollow Knight fails on both of these counts. Many areas had a bunch of save points clustered near the center of the zones, but fewer out towards the edges where a lot of boss battles or more dangerous sort of side dungeons were. There were also hardly ever any save points actually immediately before or immediately after boss rooms, so deaths during bosses (which are extremely common) often resulted in a long run back to the boss. It just felt like a lot of wasted time, rather than a good chance to learn and retry the boss quickly. This was compounded by a number of times where my soul spawned out of reach, effectively ending my change to re-earn my lost currency, so I eventually just stopped exploring altogether, choosing to go the lower risk way of sticking to main paths and simply grinding out kills if I required more money or power for skills.

There were a bunch of other little details that also compounded on top of this core problem for me. First and foremost, jumping feels awkward. This is a game with purely digital left/right movement, and no in-air momentum. If you’re jumping and let go of the stick, you fall straight down. It just feels weird, and eliminates a lot of subtle movement flow that a lot of better examples of the genre have. There’s also a really obnoxious backwards impulse after hitting an enemy. This is combined with somewhat imprecise collision on platforms to put me in situations where trying to jump and hit enemies mid-air around small platforms was pretty much a death sentence if solid ground wasn’t below me.

The final sort of annoyance was in the mapping system mechanics. Rather than mapping out rooms when you walk through them, you had to clear a couple of hurdles first to map out a zone. First and foremost, you had to buy a map of the zone from a vendor within the zone, generally well within the zone and out of the way (see annoyance with losing currency when your body run fails due to spawning out of reach….). This only opened the ability to map the area. It then didn’t mark areas on your map until the next time you reached a save area (see annoyance with the location and frequency of save poiints….). Otherwise you were basically flying blind, and have to remember your path through areas until you hit both points above. Generally speaking, it just felt like an additional unnecessary money and time pit, where I’d rather be spending my currency on functional upgrades.

End of the day, the further I went into Hollow Knight, the more the small details outweighed the good of the core systems. Could I have grinded through it without too much trouble? Sure. Are the problems going to be something that bothers everyone? Nope. However, I’ve got plenty of other games to play, and seeing lack of polish in the details just generally distracts the hell out of me. However, for those with more patience than me can probably find a lot to love here, so if nothing else, I’d recommend taking a look the next time a Steam sale rolls on through.

2017-08-142018-01-13

Game Ramblings #45 – Yakuza 0

More Info from Sega

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: PS4

TL;DR

Excellent combat with multiple styles to fit different fights
Swapping between characters worked well due to how the story timeline worked between the two
Difference in tone between serious story missions and almost 100% non-serious side missions somehow didn’t cause issues

The Yakuza series has always been more of a Shenmue than a GTA, and Yakuza 0 doesn’t change any of that. This one provides a new starting point for the series, providing some back story to the events before the original entry in the series. It takes the same mix of combat, light puzzle solving, and high levels of drama, and modernizes it a bit as the first PS4 entry in the series, giving us another great entry to play. Despite being played across two characters, the story manages to send enough clues cross-character to weave together a fun narrative, with plenty of action and violence expected of the genre.

The combat in place is similar to past games, taking place in small areas walled off by onlookers, where enemy groups of varying size can be attacked. Combos of attacks can be grouped to knock down enemies, building up secondary resources to do more spectacular (and powerful) attacks. From a high level it’s fairly simple, but different variations of button holds, character placement, environmental interactions, and most importantly, multiple fighting styles add a lot of depth. Of note, the fighting styles all feel fairly different, and bring advantages to different fights. Both characters have a fairly standard brawling style and legendary fighting style, but the real fun is in one of each character’s other styles.

Kiryu’s Beast mode allows for slow but heavy attacks in a wide range, as well as a number of wrestling-inspired finishers. More importantly, it also allows for automated grabbing of environmental objects to swing at enemies, including things like motorcycles. On Majima’s side, the real standout is Break mode. This uses a series of breakdancing moves to quickly and heavily take out large groups of enemies through effective AoE attack and dodge maneuvers. In general, I was able to switch to a mode that made sense for each fight, whether I needed to do heavy damage to individuals, or keep it safe while whittling down a large group.

On the story end, there’s not too many surprises here, but it’s definitely entertaining. The more surprising thing for me was the mix of the serious story with incredibly non-serious side missions. The side missions typically had similar gameplay, but the characters you meet during them were generally absurd, whether it’s Mr. Libido being unable to contain himself, helping out fake Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg make Thriller, or Kiryu mixing up visas and pizza when helping an immigrant, I could pretty much expect side missions to go straight for the absurd. Given the seriousness and level of chaos that most of the main story had, it meant I could use the side content as a way to unwind between places where I knew I could get into big fights. This is backed by a surprisingly entertaining set of real estate content for each character to add even more depth to the things to do on the side; Kiryu runs a full real estate company and Majima runs a cabaret club.

Totally not Spielberg stares into your soul.

If there was anything I would directly point to as a severe negative here, it’s that at a number of points the story missions simply don’t tell you what to do. You’d be given a vague goal (find somewhere to hide!), with no map marker, and no obvious place to go, and be forced to wander around until you hit the magic trigger. More often than not these places would be triggered in areas where you had no NPC contacts, no reason to be in the area, and would never revisit the place for any other reason. While filling gap time between story missions doing side content allowed me to accidentally wander into these from time to time, I was still forced to effectively blanket the map covering all roads until I found the specific spot. Any sort of minimizing of the vague nature of these would have been a great help, but luckily these types of missions were the minority in place.

Overall though, Yakuza 0 was a ton of fun to play. The combat was solid, the story was enjoyable, and the side content had a lot of flat laugh out loud moments. If you’re wanting to play a Japanese GTA, this is not the right game, but if you’re looking to rekindle memories of playing Shenmue, this is a great place to start.

2017-04-092017-04-17

Game Ramblings #36 – Horizon: Zero Dawn

More Info from Guerrilla Games

Platform: PS4
Genre: Open World Action/Adventure

I really felt like I need to hold off on posting this for a while. It’s not that the game was bad; realistically it’s already likely to be top 5 for the year. It’s not that I was necessarily unexcited to finish; I really felt compelled to keep going through the story missions. It’s just that the end of the game so entirely infuriated me that I didn’t think I could give this one a fair shot right in writing if I didn’t let things settle for a while. If there’s any crime that this game was actually guilty of, it was coming out the same week as Breath of the Wild, which at minimum provided a hugely good benchmark to compare it against. Luckily Zero Dawn didn’t stumble, even if their launch timing was pretty poor. So with that said, let’s get the good out of the way first, because there’s two main things I really want to rant about, but are ultimately unimportant to the quality of the game.

This game really nailed the future post-apocalypse setting in a way that a lot of games fail to do. It mixes a fantastically beautiful open world landscape with very obviously hi-tech robotic enemies to fight against to provide a great starting background for a people that are obviously not the ones in control of the technology. As the story unfolds, it becomes a fantastic telling of an AI clearly gone wrong, and how the world came to be in the state that it’s in. By mixing in obvious landmarks, scannable audio and holographic logs, and ruins of cities of the past, the world’s depth grows in a way that I’ve only rarely seen in games like the Metroid Prime series.

This world is backed by an open world gameplay style that definitely hits more than it misses. There’s definitely some typical trappings of open world games – towers that reveal the map, optional items scattered around to collect, hidden dungeons to explore – but it’s nothing that gets in the way, and the developers at Guerrilla definitely minimized their use to avoid some of the tiring grind that I would typically see of the genre. The real highlight though is the robots that you fight. These start as small as small as elk, big cats, or hyena type robots that can be stealth killed. From there things grow tremendously until you’re fighting gigantic crocs, T-Rexes, and huge eagles.

The larger monsters themselves greatly depend on the use of ranged weapons, and this is where a lot of the weapon upgrade path is focused. There’s things like your typical bow and arrow, providing decent damage on the run. There’s more focused heavy-damage bows that trade much slower reload for heavy damage or heavy part stripping capabilities. There’s slings that can throw various grenades with different elemental, sticky, or proximity attack characteristics. There’s even a set of crossbow-style weapons that let you lay rope traps in preparation for taking down an enemy. Despite all being ranged weapons, the tremendous breadth of capabilities means a normal fight may have you switching between three or four weapons on the fly, stunning an enemy, laying some traps while it’s down, then taking out pieces of its armor until it’s dead. There becomes a pretty strong rhythm to the normal fights that gets hit here that most open world games have never really gotten this right.

The unfortunate thing is that my overall enjoyment was clouded realistically by two things that should not have been a big deal.

The first problem I ran into was the lack of melee weapon progression. You gain your first melee weapon right at the start of the game, using it for close-in attacks, as well as single shot stealth kills. This becomes a tremendously fun way to get kills early on in the game, luring enemies into tall grass and killing them in one blow. However, beyond a handful of small skill point upgrades, there is no melee weapon upgrade until very nearly the end of the game. As the enemies you face become stronger, even smaller enemies can no longer be one shot, so I ultimately started avoiding packs of enemies because the risk vs. reward was no longer worth getting into multi-enemy fights.

The second main problem was the general design of the boss fights. Pretty much without exception all the boss fights were just kind of boring. The fights pretty much all followed the pattern of

Cluttered circularish arena with too many things that block dodge rolls
Giant enemy with predictable patterns
No reason to move into melee range because the melee weapon sucks against bosses and ranged is much safer

Ultimately though, I would get through the boss fights because exploring the rest of the world around me was just so much damn fun, and it made it worth playing the game. At least it gives them some things to clean up for the sequel.