Category: Adventure

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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.

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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.