Tag: action

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Game Ramblings #143 – Watch Dogs: Legion

More Info from Ubisoft

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

I really enjoyed Watch Dogs 2. Ya, it’s clearly an Ubisoft open world game with all the things that come with that. Ya, it’s clearly got some elements of Grand Theft Auto. However, where it stood out was in its use of stealth and hacking to make direct combat largely a choice, and not a necessity. Legion continues that path, and improves in it in a number of ways. While some of their story and metagame choices didn’t hit as well as me, the stealth aspects alone ended up being enough for me to recommend this one.

We’re starting here because the stealth spider is where I spent probably 75% of my game time. I’m not kidding. As a gadget, it does damn near everything the player can do in terms of the core loop in Watch Dogs. It can take out guards, it can hack things, it can open doors, it can pick up items. What it also does is give a much smaller visual footprint, allowing for an even better ability to hide. It transforms the series from something where a stealth focus feels like a fun but lucky situation into a place where stealth is absolutely a primary way to play the game.

However, this thing isn’t just useful for stealth on its own. Outside of combat and need to get in tight spaces? Use the spider. Stuck in cover trying not to get shot? Toss the spider thing out to flank your enemies and start taking them out one by one to open things up a bit for you. Need some sight lines but don’t have a camera to hack? Toss the spider out to a spot with a better vantage point. It’s such a versatile tool that in a lot of cases it would feel incredibly overpowered. However, in game like Watch Dogs? It just makes sense thematically with all the hacking and hi-tech involved, and makes sense within the gameplay where stealth as a full-time option is already encouraged.

If there’s anything I really had a big issue with, it’s around the story. It’s not that I found it bad – generally speaking I found the overall story to be fairly interesting – it just felt unfocused.

One of the big marketing features around the game was that you can recruit anyone and play as anyone. That’s pretty close to true. If you see someone that you find interesting in the world, you can start a recruitment mission for them. Finish up the mission, and they’re added to your team roster. You can hot swap to them at any time and go right away. If you die in a mission, the person that died can either be perma-dead or on a bit of a timeout, depending on the difficulty you choose. This part is all pretty interesting. You can build out your roster focusing on the skill set you want – whether it’s hacking, weapons, stealth, team buffs, etc. In that regard, I think the system succeeded.

However, on the story front it felt less successful. Since anyone can be thrown into the story at any time, it felt like the story happened around the team members. If they die, it’s not generally a big deal. They’re replaceable. They each have some voice acting, but most of the story is presented by fixed members, whether it be your AI assistant, the DedSec London leader, or the antagonists. From a story perspective, it doesn’t really matter who you’re playing as so in that regard the stakes for individual team members feel pretty low. Within the overall narrative, you have an interesting tech-focused story, but it feels like something that happens regardless of who you’re playing as. It was kind of a weird thing that I never really could reconcile in my head, and it resulted in the gameplay being the thing that drove me forward, and not so much caring about where the story was going to end up.

Luckily, this is a game I would recommend on the basis of its gameplay alone. The core game is fun enough. Combat works pretty well, driving works pretty well, the upgrade systems work pretty well, there’s enough fun side content to do between story missions. However, the star of the show is the stealth aspects for me. Those alone make this game one that will bring me back when the DLC expansion comes out, and it’s enough to have me looking forward to the future of this series.

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Game Ramblings #129 – Shantae and the Seven Sirens

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, Apple Arcade

I fucking love Metroidvanias. I fucking love the Shantae series. Guess what? I fucking loved this game.

Alright, that was probably too simple of an opening. A lot of what I’d say about this game matches with exactly what I said in the ramblings for Pirate’s Curse or Half-Genie Hero, and that’s a good thing. This is another iterative release in the series, and it takes what made the past games really work and moves it forward in important ways.

The first big one is that instead of being level-based, this is 100% a true Metroidvania. The entire game takes place on a single unified map and new areas open up purely based on upgrades you receive. While I definitely liked the way previous entries encouraged re-traversing levels once you gained new abilities, there’s just something to having a pure open environment. You see and make note of those open ends of hallways that you can’t quite get to or those things in the environment that are obviously something that you can interact with, and make mental notes to return to later.

Where they end up making use of their history of level-based gameplay is in the handful of labyrinths that come up. These act as pillars to the overall story and upgrade path, but also serve as mini-tutorials to learn new powers, as well as the core spot for the big boss fights in the game. It gives a nice on and off pace to exploration where you kinda futz around finding new areas and exploring for hidden stuff, then go into a labyrinth and really focus on combat for a while in a controlled linear environment.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how well integrated the transformations were into gameplay. In a lot of ways, this felt very much like Pirate’s Curse. That game required upgrades to be fast and easy to use due to story reasons causing the loss of transformations. In this one, the transformations are automatic. There’s things like the newt form which gives you a dash and wall climbing. There’s things like the frog form which the frog which gives you the ability to swim. Thematically they make a lot of sense, and the fact that they’re automated makes the game flow pretty much a non-stop affair, which is a huge benefit to the game pace.

That’s not to say there aren’t dances, but in the case of this game they’re all there as one-off attacks that don’t have permanent transformations. These are definitely useful in their own right – for example an electric attack does AoE damage to all things on screen, as well as powering up mechanical devices – but they definitely have a much more straightforward use that isn’t tied to moving through the world.

This is just a really fun game. There’s not been that many Metroidvanias that really have high pace gameplay and almost purely melee combat, and the Shantae series continues to be at the forefront of that style. Movement is fun, combat is fun, the bosses are fun. It’s just all fun and I can’t think of many better series to recommend in this genre right now.

….and don’t worry. Everyone’s favorite Squid Baron makes his return.

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Game Ramblings #118 – Ghost of Tsushima

More Info from Sucker Punch

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

There’s no doubt that this is the feudal Japan Assassin’s Creed that everyone has been asking for, but I’m not saying that as a bad thing. This takes a lot of what’s made the past few AC games great with some clever changes to the overall structure. It also features combat that clicked for me way more than it ever did in those titles. Overall I was left playing a game that surprised me in how much I enjoyed it, despite its familiarity.

If there’s two main things that I think separate this one from AC, it’s that there’s generally less to do, and that combat is a bit more nuanced. The first one provides a greater focus on the overall meta game, steering you to do fewer activities, but ones that generally feel like they have a great impact on your character progression. The second provides changes to the moment to moment action as you go through. Combined with a high level of polish, this gives us what feels like the next step in this type of gameplay, and hopefully a bar for Ubisoft to hit with Valhalla.

Taking a look at the map, you get that immediate feeling of familiarity. There’s fog of war in areas you haven’t been to. There’s icons for quests and towns and activities all over that pop up. However, they all serve some sort of purpose. Rather than climbing towers to lift fog of war in an area, you have to invade Mongol camps and take out their leaders. Side quest aren’t just fun little story points – they also give rare resources to upgrade existing gear, and in some cases completely new gear. In many cases, you won’t even know what the icons on the map are for until you get up close to them.

However, there’s a lot of in-world hints as well to help steer your exploration. If you want to focus on gaining some health, you’ve got to keep an eye out for steam columns where you can use hotsprings. If you need to boost your resolve to have access to more special moves, you’ll be on the look out for banners marking the location of bamboo strikes. If you want to get some accessory charms, you’ll want to keep an eye out for small yellow-leaved trees to follow foxes around.

All of these little things do a lot to make that exploration focus just work. There’s always some visual clue to pull your attention and there’s always some tangible reward at the end of it. None of the things feel like a waste or a grind. You do a thing, you get an immediate reward, and you immediately know what it does. It all just feels really natural in practice. Where AC Origins and Odyssey started to shed some of their collection-heavy past, this one feels like it took the next step that Ubisoft was perhaps hesitant to do.

Combat has a similar thing where it feels like a logical next step in the process. Stealth is still in play, and is still super useful. Parries and dodging are there like in AC and are still your main means of avoiding damage. Combat still kind of breaks down when there’s large groups, largely because there’s only so many directions you can focus on at once. However, where things really clicked for me were in the duels.

Duels are effectively your boss fights for this game. Starting one off always has a great intro cutscene to establish the fight, then your camera comes in super tight and you’re off. The actual combat is still the same, but the one-on-one focus allows for a lot tighter overall action. Where dodging without care for timing will generally work well against trash mobs, mistiming your dodges here could put you in a spot where the opponent can immediately hit you with a second attack before you can respond. On the other hand, timing your dodge perfectly puts you in slow motion with the ability to quickly attack. The same thing also stands with parries. Time it well, and instead of just a simple parry you will break your opponent’s defense and have them lined up for a critical strike. It’s also hugely beneficial that parryable and dodgeable attacks are different and have obviously different visual tells. It puts the combat into a place where there’s no guessing and it’s all about timing and skill, then solid execution of attacks when you’ve put yourself in a place to go on the offense.

There’s also something to be said of the fact that there’s very distinctly strong stances in this game, and in that regard it feels like it’s pulling a lot from the Yakuza series. As a player you have 4 main stances, each good against specific enemy types – swords, shields, spears, and brutes. While you can definitely fight any enemy with any stance, the skill of identifying and fighting with the right stance is hugely beneficial to clearing out enemies as quick as possible, while also minimizing the damage that you end up taking. This ends up being the real saving grace for group combat, as using the stance switching can allow you to quickly clear up the easier targets, leaving you to focus on one or two of the more problematic ones.

It also dawns on me that I didn’t take any screenshots of me using either of the bows. That’s kind of a shame because they’re honestly very good. You have a short bow (quick draw, lower damage) and a long bow (slow draw, large damage, can pierce metal) that are both very effective at their role, especially in stealth situations when taking out sentry units. They’ve got a pretty solid impact feel to them, they’re generally easy to fire, but with gravity effecting the arrows they aren’t trivially easy. There’s also a bit of aim assist typical of gamepad, but it’s not overbearing. It ends up falling in a place where there’s enough skill involved to make using it feel fair, but enough assists in place to make it still feel natural with gamepad aiming.

I certainly won’t sit here and claim that this is generally an original title, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. It takes the framework established by the recent Assassin’s Creed titles, and iterates enough on it to feel like its own thing. What it does do is give me hope that we see it push Ubisoft to take that next step with Valhalla or Sony with the next God of War, because as a genre these open world action games just work very well. This one added a really well developed feudal Japan setting and interesting story to the overall game framework, and it hit really well as an end-of-generation title. It also served as a really interesting change in direction for Sucker Punch after wrapping up some of their Infamous story line early on in the generation. Now, admittedly I wouldn’t mind seeing them go back to Sly Cooper after this, but they did a hell of a job pushing the open world action game in a direction of continued improvement here.