Category: Action

Posted on

Shelved It #14 – Earth’s Dawn

More Info from oneoreight

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

I spent most of my time playing this in a state where I wanted to enjoy it and generally was enjoying it, and then I’d hit a boss battle and no longer be enjoying it. It wasn’t that the bosses were hard, but they just weren’t fun. I puzzled on it a bit, but when it hit me what was really feeling off to me, I knew it was time to shelve the game.

I really wanted this to fit into that sort of Odin Sphere / Muramasa slot in my brain, and for a while it did. Its combat is pretty similar in core focus. You’ve got a main melee chain, the ability to rapidly dodge, and a way to set enemies into temporary stun states. For the first couple of hours, that was more than enough to be fun. I was going around getting comfortable with chains, getting comfortable with some of the basic enemy types, getting comfortable with the overall flow of the game.

Outside of combat, the game has both solid gearing and skill setup that I was enjoying a lot. Gearing is purely crafting-based, but had a solid number of archetypes to choose from. Guns could range from shotguns to rifles to uzis. Swords could be different lengths and weights. Overall it allowed me to craft in a direction that fit my favored play style. The skill setup was the more interesting part. Skills are basically two parts, earning it and the ability to equip it. Equipping is purely having enough available resources to do so, but the resources to do so came purely out of killing enemies in the world. The skill earning itself came from completing missions quickly. Those two in conjunction led to a place where you would identify the missions that currently had the skills you wanted to get combining into then completing them with full exploration to maximize your resource gain. The overall flow that came out of that reminded me a lot of something that honestly would have worked well on the Switch. You can play this game for minutes or hours, and in both cases you can complete some number of that core game loop to at least make valuable forward progress no matter the case.

So at this point you may be wondering why I shelved it. Over time I was noticing that on occasion I was getting into places where my dodges were missing when I was surrounded by enemies. For a while I chalked it up to multiple enemies causing me to get into stun states or something to that effect, and figured I just needed to be more careful. I then started noticing it happening on bosses, so I began to experiment a bit. What I ended up figuring out is that it was doing such aggressive button caching that I would be able to queue up multiple attacks in my chain ahead, and then not be able to interrupt that to dodge. When a dodge may only give you fractions of a second to execute it, having that all backed up behind attacks was deadly and it completely changed how I was approaching the game.

When I can’t cancel out of an attack into an immediate dodge, I go straight into Souls mode, and frankly I don’t like that kind of gameplay. Rather than aggressively attacking, I sit back and wait. I look for tells, then do my dodge in isolation, then get a few safe quick attacks in and back off. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It’s boring. But, it’s safe. When playing aggressively results in death and significant time loss, it’s not a decision. You just play safe. Sure, I could grind away in side missions and power my way through, but that’s also not particularly fun. When I shelve games it’s usually a single cause – a small mechanic, something dumb that just gets under my skin. This was it. If I was going to be playing slow just to not die, why am I playing the game?

Like most games I shelve, I’m not really shelving the game because it was bad. It’s ultimately because the developers made a decision I didn’t like, so that’s kind of the way it is. On the other hand, I wonder how much more I’d be enjoying those moments given a dodge that guaranteed immediate fire and interrupted whatever I was queued up to do. That small of a change is often the difference between me liking a game or not, and in this case it went the wrong way.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #155 – Guardians of the Galaxy

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

This is a AAA B-Movie in the best way possible. It’s doesn’t necessarily have the best combat or the best story or the best pacing but as a sum of parts it’s fantastic. It was hard to go through most of this game without a stupid grin on your face. It’s a lot like the movies in that respect.

This one as a whole turned out much better than The Avengers did. A lot of that came down to its focus as a purely single player narrative experience. It wasn’t hobbled by the needs of being a live-service title – the need to XP grind to keep players in the game, the need to patch in new content to keep players returning, etc – so it ended up being relatively focused. You’ve got a 15-20 hour long narrative mostly consisting of set-piece combat with relatively predictable outcomes but a ton of spectacle. What it does gain from its length over the movies is better pacing. There’s a kind of on/off rhythm to the chapters. You’ll go through a long stretch of just combat, then a long stretch of general exploration / puzzle solving. It keeps the game from becoming too stuck in a single rhythm, which helps to break up the game into much more enjoyable chunks When the combat does kick in though, it’s a lot of fun.

This game really threads a good line where you feel powerful because of indirect things happening, but still feel like you aren’t just being led by an AI that can’t lose. There’s a few systems to that. One is that you’ve got absolute control over the timing of special abilities for the other team members. They kind of passively attack and are effective at clearing lesser enemies, but if you want big damage it’s up to you. You can definitely win without using these specials, but it becomes quickly obvious that all you’re doing is making your own life slower and more difficult.

Another is that you’re the only party member that can quickly break shields. Having shields tuned to specific elements that Peter can fire allows for the player to do non-damaging stuff that is vitally important while letting the rest of the team to take out unshielded, less dangerous enemies. This has the important side effect of reducing the time just needlessly fighting easy trash. The element system also has some nice crowd control effects. Ice can freeze enemies in place. Electric can hop between enemies and stun. Wind pulls enemies to Peter. Fire can add DoT damage. All of them allow for increased damage if the enemy is under the effects. They’re not necessarily large changes to just general weapon fire, but they serve well to give better situational handling to the arenas if you’re getting overran by too many enemies.

The final one that really stood out is combo attacks. For the most part, melee is generally the more dangerous route. However, because your AI teammates are mostly melee, there’s often opportunities to go in and help them out. Comboing with your teammates can get a bunch of big damage out quick, as well as increasing the likelihood of stunning an enemy, giving a better opportunity for some easy gun-based damage.

The pacing is also actively broken up in other ways. There’s sections like above that take place in actual space combat. It’s a very Star Fox type setup, with both on-rails and free fly sections but keeps the elevated combat pacing in another fun context. There’s sliding sections where the player is going downhill avoiding obstacles and jumping over gaps, giving a fun third-person auto runner type feel. There’s a handful of sections that do camera chases with a feel more reminiscent of the chase sections of the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games. These fall into the sort of on/off action pacing of the overall game, but because they aren’t just more combat for the sake of more they serve well to keep the entire game fresh as you go through it.

The rest of the game that surrounds the combat is just really well realized. The worlds are large and filled with bright colors. Everything has that kind of technically plausible but incredibly alien feel to it. Places like Knowhere feel like large space ports where you can run around buying all sorts of cool outer space shit, even if it mostly serves as a way to shuttle you to important story beats. The enemy designs again are close, but slightly twisted. Things like walking squids or cube-shaped jelly creatures bring the sea to land. Things like giant space dragons pull in a bit of fantasy elements. There’s the little callbacks to the story out of the comics with mentions of people like Thanos or Yondu, even if they aren’t directly in the game. It’s all just a love letter to the ridiculousness of this series, and it works well.

This game really just falls into a place where it should be played simply because it’s fun. Games like Hot Wheels Unleashed or Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart or Cadence of Hyrule come to mind in recent times that kind of fall into that area. They aren’t necessarily the best written or the best gameplay or the best visuals, but put together you just can’t help but enjoy your time with it. Guardians is definitely that. It’s got good enough combat, good enough visuals, good enough of a story. Put together you just smile the entire time, and you can’t ask for more than that out of a game.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #154 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits

More Info from Ember Lab

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows

In general I don’t really like Souls-like games, but I keep dipping my toes into ones that try a little something different. Jedi: Fallen Order managed to keep the combat approachable enough through the use of hand waivey dodge mechanics made possible by Force powers existing. Games like Ghost of Tsushima were generally more fast action-oriented, leaving the Souls style one-on-one mechanics for well tuned individual fights with an engaging open world. Kena definitely ends up leaning more towards straight Souls combat, but with a few tweaks, some that work well and some that really don’t. By the end it was a bit grating to me, but it definitely was another that pushed me further into the subgenre.

This is very much a Souls game in general combat. It’s heavily tuned into proper timing of dodges or parries. However, it also has a very effective shield, and that was the thing that really felt the best to me in terms of Kena feeling tuned to be less dramatically unforgiving. It’s sitting on the same button as parry, so rather than parry being a direct action it feels more like a well-timed shield deflection in practice. Being able to avoid damage because you are too early and going right into a shield is a huge benefit to difficulty. It lets you deflect a few hits while you get your timing down, then letting you parry your way through the rest of the fight. That reduction in learning through dying is such a better experience than a lot of Souls-likes, and it’s due to a relatively small change.

The game also fed me a useful bow and arrow, which is always going to be a positive in my book. A lot of the later fights started really being mechanically dense in a way that I didn’t want to be in melee range, so I’d stick back, get damage with arrows until a parry opportunity came up. At that point I could lay in some big damage and get the hell out of the way.

However, the game’s boss fights really ran out of steam in a hugely negative way. By about the end of the second act, it was clear that the game was mechanically done growing. At that point the boss fights just started throwing arbitrary things at you to distract you. Endless adds, off-screen projectiles, radial explosions. The fights just kind of become annoying, rather than challenging. I liked the fights when they were challenging because I had to properly time things. Once I was getting hit by attacks I didn’t see because my view was constantly being pulled all over the place I no longer wanted to deal with the bosses. At that point I lowered the difficulty to easy and powered through the rest of the game.

By that point, the studio’s lack of experience started to show in some of the overall combat polish as well. A lot of the arenas were just dark. Dark bosses against dark backgrounds with very little in the way of highlighting. It made fights unnecessarily difficult just because of lack of vision. Some of the tells were also just kind of odd to me. A lot of them would start with some big tell then have a large unnecessary pause followed by a wildly fast dash. It didn’t feel smooth and it didn’t feel consistent. The difference between tells for weapon throws vs tells for dash/melee was also pretty arbitrary, which reduced the ability to effectively pick parry or dodge as your defensive attempt. On individual fights you would eventually learn the specifics, but I started just getting to the point where I would see some of the tells starting and immediately just hold shield to learn. It felt kind of sloppy.

Ultimately though, a decent difficulty slider allowed me to push through the rest of the game. I was enjoying the overall story and exploration a lot, so I wanted to keep playing, even with my frustration around the boss fights. It was always interesting to go see little hints in the environment and go off to find new things. It might be a hat for your little helper creatures, it might just be some currency, it might be a little side quest type of thing, but in all cases it was a good change of pace and something that felt worthwhile to pursue. That ability to dump the difficulty down to get through the parts I wasn’t enjoying to let me get through the parts that I was enjoying was hugely welcomed. It may just be numbers in the backend, and a lot of people may not want to see it in a Souls-like, but I will always support studios that get that type of stuff in there.

I’m probably not a good person to go in recommending Souls-like games, but in this case I’m pretty comfortable recommending this one. It’s got some rough edges, but combat is fun enough, the exploration was super enjoyable, and it’s a downright gorgeous game. It’s backed by a story that I wanted to see through to the end. Ya, I cranked it down to easy to power through for the things I wanted, but I got through it nonetheless, and for a Souls-like, that’s pretty rare.