Month: December 2017

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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.

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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.

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Game Ramblings #59 – RiME

More Info from Grey Box

  • Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Light puzzle-based gameplay feels like it aspires to be Ico/Journey, even if it doesn’t quite reach those heights
  • Fantastically good soundtrack and beautiful visual style
  • Disappointing performance problems on the Switch, even in docked mode

Admittedly this is a game that should be played on something other than the Switch.  At the end of the day this is more of an experience than it is a straight game, with the bulk of the gameplay existing as small and simple puzzle segments wrapped around a lot of audio and visual mastery.  As such, it deserves to be played in as high fidelity as possible.  That said, I’m an Unreal Engine developer, and this is using UE4, and my curiosity got the better of me.  While the Switch did an alright job keeping up, it was clear that the folks couldn’t quite wrangle the hardware in a great fashion, but the downfalls there couldn’t stop this from being a worthwhile play through.

The story runs through the five stages of grief, with visuals matching the appropriate area. In this case, depression carries the theme with rain and dark lighting throughout.

Any game that tries to be more of an emotional experience than a typical game needs to carry a strong theme, and RiME does a lot to succeed here.  In this case, the story takes place going through the five stages of grief, with each of the four main levels and epilogue covering one of these.  While your typical gameplay was the same in each area, the dangers associated with each spot tended to carry towards the theme.  In bargaining, for example, the player is attempting to resurrect robots in a series of dark caves while attempting to avoid a horde of faceless humanoids.  By the time we get to depression, these faceless creatures have stopped even attempting to interact with the player, leaving him to his own as things start to crumble around him.

In the anger level, the player is constantly harassed by a bird-like creature, attempting to stop his journey.

The best use of this though is the anger level.  Immediately upon entering it, the player character is thrown by a flying creature down into a small desert area.  Throughout the rest of the level, he has to dart from hiding place to hiding place avoiding being attacked, and never really being allowed to rest.  While there’s no actual dialog in this game, the idle animations make it clear that the player is afraid of his situation, and the direct anger shown by the creature plays right into the theme of the area.

The fox partner is an important helper in showing the player where to go, which is often necessary due to somewhat inconsistent level design.

That said, the gameplay doesn’t quite keep with the rest of the presentation aspects.  One of the most obvious problems is that it can often be REALLY easy to get lost.  While there is some merit to exploring and finding some hidden artifacts and collectibles, there were quite a few times where I simply didn’t know what direction I was supposed to be going.  The real main clue that something is the right direction tended to be looking for climbable ledges in weird spots, rather than more elegant environmental solutions.  This is solved through the use of a fox, which tends to place itself in the direction you want to go, yelping away to lead you in the right direction.

Beyond that though, the rest of the gameplay is pretty basic.  The pattern has a tendency to be a single room puzzle, followed by a bit of traversal, or a single room that can be looped back into itself in multiple vertical layers.  Puzzles run the gamut from block pushing to light manipulation to the use of physics to get through the environment.  However, they don’t really ever get to a point where the solution isn’t pretty easy to arrive at, and feel like they serve more as pacing instruments than actual gameplay.

While the Switch version doesn’t lose as much visual fidelity as I expected, performance suffered as a result.

Having played this on the Switch, I can also only recommend to play it elsewhere.  It’s not that the Switch version is bad, but the performance was pretty typically under 30 FPS.  In general, as an Unreal developer this was a disappointment.  There’s some areas where things could have been obviously cut to improve frame times (sight lines in open areas are huge, and could have used more aggressive LODing).  The level streaming the other platforms use to break up the levels is also in place here, but causes a much more significant framerate impact.  That wouldn’t typically be a huge issue, but a lot of the streaming points took place at areas where more important interactions with the environment were occurring, rather than at more passive hallway areas.  In general, it doesn’t feel like a game that should be suffering from the sort of performance issues I was seeing, especially relative to its competition on the system.

All that said, this is absolutely a game worth playing.  While it’s not quite the classic that Ico or Journey have been recognized as, it’s still a pretty solid example of a game as a piece of art.  Visually it uses a simple art style to very cleanly represent the emotional state of the player’s story arc.  The audio design is fantastic, and its soundtrack is one of the best of the year.  However, play this one on as high-performance of a platform as possible; it’ll be absolutely worth the bump.