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Game Ramblings #159 – Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

More Info from 2K

  • Genre: FPS
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Windows

It’s been a long time since I played a Borderlands. I loved the first couple, quickly fell off The Pre-Sequel and altogether skipped 3. However, this one pulled me back in with a somewhat more unique setting thanks to them diving full into Tiny Tina’s shenanigans. I’m not going to pretend that the writing felt like it was aimed at anyone older than 12 years old, but boy does the game loop still just work.

If I was to point at one thing that made this work so well for me, it’s that the typical Borderlands gameplay just slots right in. Those games already had elemental attacks, so there’s your fantasy magic. Those games already had alien creatures, so fantasy-focused characters just slot in. Those games had the sirens, so mages just fit in place. The core was there, so even in a completely D&D focused setting it all feels entirely familiar. Guns are perhaps a bit weird, but whatever it’s D&D. I’m sure someone has made it work.

That’s not to say that things felt stale though. The way I built out my character felt unique in a way that I don’t remember being able to push in previous games. I ultimately went with a two-class combination of the Spore Warden and Clawbringer class archetypes. The first of those is a poison summon-focused class with an emphasis on critical hits. The second is a fire/lightning summon-focused class with an emphasis on damage mitigation. The obvious thing to notice there is that I’ve got three elemental damage sources already, but it’s more than that. The crit + damage mitigation let me do silly things with stats.

Ultimately my character ended up being a glass cannon. All of my stats went into three things – crit chance, crit damage, and elemental damage. I did nothing with any mitigation stats so if I took damage I was more often than not dead. However, my increased crits meant I could save myself in almost all situations extremely effectively with a kill while bleeding out. If not, my mushroom summon could also revive me while my secondary wyvern contined to dish out damage. Also, because my summons had three elemental types I could build into a fourth (in this case, health drain) that helped me stay alive at a higher rate while still hitting enemy weaknesses. I furthered this by exclusively picking shield wards with low health pools but quick recharges, where my goal was to have its recharge be less than 2 seconds. Basically, I could probably take one hit but would need to be getting out of harm’s way, but could quickly rejoin the fight afterwards.

It’s a build that for me really hit into the strengths of how they setup the classes for this game. They really kind of just turned the ridiculousness knob a bit more and pulled out some unique combos that feel like they’re pushing the mechanical boundaries for the game in fun ways. It let me mould my gearing around my class setup, and in this case allowed me to treat the game as more of a cooperative experience despite playing in single player. It’s the kind of thing that really is truly unique to the Borderlands series.

I will give a shout out to their overworld change as well. Getting rid of vehicles is one of the best things about the metagame here. Rather than travel through miles of garbage to get to your main story locations, you have a relatively nice area to explore. It’s got a lot of side quests and collectables and combat encounters to do. However, it’s also much faster to get through. It’s a fairly common improvement that the game has shown. Everything here is much tighter. As an example, the side quests feel much better integrated into the story’s golden path, so you can do them as you wander through instead of going out of your way. They’re also generally more often substantial side stories rather than collection quests. The whole experience is very much Borderlands with less padding, and it’s to the benefit of the game.

That said, the screenshot above in which you seduce a drawbridge is indicative of my main problem with the game. The comedy just feels immature. Some of it is funny, but I found myself groaning instead of laughing more often than not. In a lot of ways, it really just made me feel old…..which might be true, but it’s not something that I ran into in past games. It’s things like the queen of the land being a unicorn named Butt Stallion, or seducing the drawbridge, or Torgue’s cursing being bleeped while being far more common under the guise of trying to stick to a teen rating. Rather than trying to hit a rating, it just feels like it was written for that level of audience. It was never egregious enough for me to not want to play the game, but the writing definitely was not helping the game for me.

This game feels like it’s going to end up on my long term short list. Borderlands 2 filled that role for a long time as the game I could hop into and just play for the sake of playing. Diablo 3 filled that role for a while, especially on the Switch. Of late that distinction has gone more towards games like Forza Horizon. However, this one may take over for a bit. It’s just such a well refined gameplay loop that it’s easy to hop in, and for me it’s made the series feel fresh again. In good news, gear hunting after the first play through also means I can just ignore the comedy and gear grind, which is probably what I wanted anyway.

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Game Ramblings #158 – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

More Info from Star Wars

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

It’s been a bit since my last ramblings. I decided to do carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists at once, as one does. What that does is makes videogames surprisingly not very fun to play. When I was figuring out what I wanted to play first after getting my sutures out, this one was sitting there ready to go. It feels like it’s been forever since The Force Awakens, but the full 9 episode saga is here and it’s a lot of fun.

The Lego games have always just kind of been collectathons, but it surprised me how much this felt like a complete game, and not just a Legoified version of the movies like a lot of past games. There were some pretty obvious changes to the core combat mechanics as well as a much better expansion to the metagame between story segments that really made the whole thing work.

The biggest obvious change is that there’s ranged weapons everywhere! You’ve got blasters of every flavor, bows of all sorts, you can chuck your light saber like a whooshing boomerang. However, unlike The Force Awakens, which sometimes had ranged weapons but clumsy aiming due to the fixed camera angle, we’re now seeing a full third-person game. You’ve got all your typical trappings of shooters, such as ADS on the left trigger and full camera manipulation on the right stick. In doing this change, the game now feels like a modern title along the lines of something like a simple Ratchet & Clank, rather than a sort of clumsy Lego-themed isometric platformer.

The metagame is also just a lot more free flowing in a way that encourages the use of the typical large character roster of the series. You’ll jump between segments of free roam where you can use any purchased characters and segments of story where you’re restricted to relevant characters. In allowing the free roam segments, the game is doing a great job of slowing down the pace of the game in a way that is still fun. Where a typical Lego Star Wars title was around 10 hours, this one is about 20. While that is much longer, it now covers all nine movies instead of just a handful, so the pace slowing down is definitely necessary.

What you end up doing is completing a specific story segment, then being unleashed into what is essentially a movie-themed playground. Scattered around are all sorts of miscellaneous rewards, so it becomes a game of finding out how to get them all. Some spots are simply puzzles of choosing the right person to get to the glowing spot. Some of them are mini races or combat segments for a reward. Some of them are side quests where you interact with characters from the movies in fun ways in order to unlock them for play. However, the important thing is that it’s varied and quick to do. You’ll spend a few minutes per-reward, then move on to the next thing. It keeps things fresh so you aren’t stuck in one spot for long periods of time, but also provides a nice change from the purely linear story segments that you’re doing the rest of the time.

It’s also worth a mention that space combat is another one of the things that acts as a nice pace change. Some of the areas are Star-Fox inspired – such as the Death Star trench run – and some of the areas are distinctly open flight. Mechanically these are definitely simple. You’re basically firing a relatively large angle auto aim machine gun or firing a very generously homing proton torpedo. However, in all cases it’s another place I can point at where the segments are used as a way to breakup the pace of the game and keep the overall flow fresh.

Ultimately that’s the biggest thing about this title that I could point at as an improvement over past entries. You’re running through a bunch of story very quickly to cover nine movies, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming or boring at any point. Because the specifics of what you’re doing change so much, you don’t really have time to become bored with any specific type of gameplay. You kind of do one type of gameplay for a few minutes in a story mission, then go into free roam, then go into another story mission with completely different gameplay, then back to free roam. Because everything has some currency being given that allow you to get more stuff, it also never feels like you’re doing something unrewarding.

If you’re a fan of past Lego titles this is an easy recommendation. If you’re a fan of Star Wars this is an easy recommendation. However, more than that this feels like a much easier recommendation to the general game audience. This is a much more complete game than past titles. Rather than being a game that leans on its IP to be good, this feels like a generally good game that is instead boosted by its use of the IP. While the reports of severe development problems put a bit of a black eye on things, this game is showing a bit of hope that the Traveller’s Tales Lego series can be a bit thing again going forward.

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Game Ramblings #157 – Kirby and the Forgotten Land

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

This isn’t quite the open world revelation that we all hoped it would be after the first trailer. It also isn’t at all a challenging game like Elden Ring. It doesn’t really do anything all that ambitious, even for the Kirby series. However, what it is is fun. It’s fun in that weird unexplainable way that so many Nintendo games just are and so many developers wish they could capture. It’s that fun that makes this worth playing.

Within the opening sequence of the game you become the car above and that really just sets the stage for the game. Kirby is taking his hoovering mechanic to a new level here and more often than not it serves as an outlandish way for the game to get you through a specific mechanic. Need to cover long distances fast? There’s a convenient car. Need to shoot at enemies or break through a wall from range? Why not becoming a soda shooting vending machine. Need to pierce through a weak point in the ground? Well, a traffic cone is the right shape.

The thing about all these instances isn’t necessarily that they are new mechanics. What they are wrapped in is a layer of magic. There’s something entirely unknown to me about why the simple mechanics are so memorable here, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to the attention to detail in the buildup of the world itself. It’s little things, like the way Kirby’s animations show squish and stretch when there’s changes in velocity. It’s things like the subtle freeze frames that occur when you smash through something as car Kirby. It’s things like seeing the same damn tree boss that every Kirby games has, but now with a tropical flair and a change to the camera angle to hit both nostalgia and mechanical interest. That attention to detail is so utterly hard to grasp as a developer, but is something that Nintendo has routinely done so well that allows its otherwise simple games to nearly universally be regarded as great.

Luckily, the game doesn’t just skate by on polish. Despite being easy, it’s got a surprising amount to do, which gives a lot of interesting content for players of all skill levels. Each level has your normal end point, but within that there’s also a bunch of hidden objectives. Each level has a collection of hidden waddle dees, but the rest of the objectives run the gamut from beating enemies with specific powers to finishing encounters without taking damage to beating bosses quickly to simply just finding cool hidden shit. It provides enough of a distraction for completionists to be chasing a bit of a carrot that’s beyond just simply finishing the levels. That’s not to say that it doesn’t start to wear a bit thin by the end, but it was nice to have something to strive for and even replay levels for

However, my favorite thing were the treasure road levels. These are effectively single-power time trials, and they’re a speed runner’s dream. Each one drops you into a level with a specific power and a handful of encounters to finish between you and the goal. Everything between that point is entirely up to your skill level. In doing these, you very quickly learn how to efficiently use your powers, allowing you quicker and quicker times through the specific level. That then leads to more efficient and more clever use of the powers in regular levels and boss fights, giving a positive reinforcement loop to the player’s skill in the game.

That kind of a loop is also a classic Nintendo thing. If you think about something like level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros – you run the right, see a Goomba, maybe you die, but if you jump and land on it you now know a core mechanic. As you keep running to the right, you see a few more as well as some pipes. You know how to jump, so now you’re learning how to jump well. Each little step along that way reinforces what you learned in previous things to become better at the game. Kirby treats the treasure road levels the same way. They’re run on their own, but the skill improvements you get in them just serve to improve how you play through the rest of the game.

All that said, if you want something ambitious or innovative, this isn’t it. This game should be played because it’s purely fun. It’s not fun in a new way, and it’s not often fun in an explainable way, but it just is. If you’re wanting something more forgiving after Elden Ring, give this a try. If you want something fun to just fill a gap, give this a try. End of the day it’s just a mindless title, but it didn’t stop being fun for me the entire time.