Tag: platformer

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Game Ramblings #71 – Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Wii U

TL;DR

  • Solid entry to the DKC series.  Doesn’t necessarily do new things, but does most things to a high level.
  • Difficulty takes awkward swings depending on whether or not you have a secondary character available.
  • One of the better pure 2D platformers available on any platform, and a great one to have on the go now that it’s moved to Switch

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time I played this one.  I got through a lot of it back on the Wii  U, but ultimately rage quit due to some of the weird difficulty swings.  This time around, I took a bit more measured approach to how I was playing the game, and realistically took advantage of knowing the sticking points, and got through it.  Ultimately this is a great game and a leading example of how classic platformers can move into modern times, even if it’s not without its share of balance issues.

DKC fans will recognize a lot, including your occasional old rhino friend.

The obvious thing to start with is the fact that this is very much a Donkey Kong Country game.  It doesn’t really do much new, does what is expected really well, and is a lot of fun.  Your move set is pretty basic, with roll jumps really being the only semi-advanced feature.  The only real addition on the newer games is the ground pound to stun enemies.  If there is any problem I’d point out there, having ground pound and roll on the same button led me to roll to my death by accident more times than I care to admit.  Given the Switch has 4 face buttons, it’s weird that they only use two of them (A/B for jump, X/Y for pound+roll).

However, beyond that input is as expected.  Movement is really tight, even with analog movement available.  Jumping is really predictable and as expected allows for some variance in height based on hold time.  Rolling off the edge of a platform and late jumping still works and is still crucial for speed runs, just as it has since DKC1.  That set of core functionality just feels good the entire time, and allows for the difficulty focus to be on not dying, rather than fighting mechanics.

Rockets are the start of things that look different from the past, with some of the changes working better than others.

By and large the things that are different still work just as well though.  On the ride front you still have your mine cart levels, but you also have levels with rockets that are just as fun, and provide nice distractions from straight platforming.  However, the biggest difference is that the secondary characters in the game aren’t playable.  They’re there to work as a backpack with a second ability, and it’s here that things start to work a bit less well.

On the secondary front, you’ve got Diddy with a short time jetpack, Dixie with her hair flip hover, and Cranky that acts as a pogo stick to avoid damage on some traps and allow for killing enemies with head protection.  There’s no easy way around this – Dixie is by far the most useful and should be the default option.  Cranky’s ability works fine but is extremely niche.  It’s just not that useful in situations where the additional jump protection provides a measure of safety.  Between Diddy and Dixie, Dixie is easily the obvious choice.  They both provide a built in amount of horizontal hovering, but Dixie’s provides the secondary help of either gaining height at the top of the jump, or allowing the player to jump under an enemy, then hover up to a platform.  It’s simply more versatile to do the same end action.

Difficulty can be rough if you don’t have a secondary character, but bosses really emphasize this issue.

However, it really feels like the game was balanced around having the secondary character at all times, and losing them is a punishing penalty.  While it’s not ideal in normal levels to lose a secondary, it will happen often and you’ll deal with it.  Most of the levels have fairly rare barrels available to get a new character, so you learn to deal with the limitations in Donkey Kong’s movement and simply slow down.  However, bosses exacerbate the issue.

The bosses are by and large 90s-era fights for better or worse.  They’re multi-phase fights, all 9 hits to win, and generally simple mechanics.  They’re definitely favoring a showcase of skill over spectacle.  However, they’re also full of one-shot death mechanics, questionable hit boxes, and having to learn untelegraphed attack patterns through repeated deaths.  For the most part it’s as expected, but it’s fairly frustrating.  Losing your secondary character just means that you go from a low threshold of danger to almost no threshold for danger.  Given how quick you can exit and re-enter the boss fights, it generally makes more sense to do just that when getting hit, and that’s probably not what the design team was going for.

This game is basically what the DKC series pulled straight into this era should be expected to be, visuals, gameplay, and all.

So end of the day this is a game that lives by the fact that it’s very much a 90s game.  Building off a series that was so mechanically fantastic as DKC puts you at a point where that will generally work fine, and Tropical Freeze doesn’t falter.  There’s definitely warts here because it doesn’t try to be something overtly modern, but at the same time I played and enjoyed it BECAUSE of that.  Do I think people that aren’t fans of 90s platformers will enjoy this? Not really.  However, that makes it pretty obvious who the target market is, and those folks will be happy again.

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Game Ramblings #68 – Kirby Star Allies

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Really low difficulty continues to be the weak point of the series
  • Solid amount of content, lots of hidden secrets, really good end boss sequence
  • AI characters are surprisingly competent as co-op replacement; combinations of powers are a compelling addition to the Kirby formula

It’s been kind of the standard fare for the Kirby series over the last 10 years or so that the games end up being really solid, have one neat twist to their mechanics to stay fresh, but end up being really too easy.  Planet Robobot gained a mech suit to do occasional wrecking of things.  Triple Deluxe brought in a lot of use of multiple planes of depth.  Epic Yarn had the obvious visual style and strong environmental manipulation.  By and large they have all been really good games that leaned on just being purely fun, rather than difficult.  Star Allies doesn’t change that at all, this time playing into a multiple character theme where you can recruit enemies to help you out, as well as combine their powers to solve puzzles.  It’s definitely an easy game, but it didn’t end up hampering the experience in a negative way.

This game is flat out gorgeous right form the start.

I know this is a weird place to start rambles, but holy hell this game is beautiful to a point that really caught me off guard.  While the Kirby series has always held its own pretty well, and in some cases had some unique visual treatments, I was not expecting this one to impress me so much.  That screenshot above is the spawning spot for the first level in the game, and it continues to impress throughout.  There’s a large variety in visual themes from deserts to forests to fields and later on right into space.  Each level is distinct from the other, so as a player I never grew bored of the areas I was going through.  For a game built around keeping relatively similar gameplay throughout, this was a huge help to not feeling burned out on the experience.

Combos are the new thing in the game, and they end up working out really well.

But enough about that, let’s talk about what this game brought to the series; combination powers and multi-character gameplay, and how they feed into each other.

This game is 100% a four-character experience, and it doesn’t matter if that’s AI or players controlling it.  Anyone can drop in and take over a party member, but the AI are competent on their own to help you out.  However, the great part of the whole system is that everyone but player 1 is controlling an enemy archetype.  Combined with Kirby’s continued ability to copy powers, this gives the party access to 4 core powers at once.  This is backed by the fact that AI attack when needed and use their powers to clear puzzles, allowing the player to focus on simply exploring and finding secrets in most cases, rather than finessing the AI into precise spots.

The good thing that comes out of this system is that you can also combine powers.  The screenshot above is one of them (rock power +ice power), and this combination mechanic is used in a ton of ways.  Weapon-based powers can all gain elements to do new things.  The ninja power can gain wind to throw air columns.  Swords can gain fire to burn everything it touches.  The rock gaining ice allows it to slide along killing enemies.  However, this is also backed by some clever environmental mechanics.  The ice power can freeze waterfalls.  The bug power allows you to throw characters through breakable walls.

The end result of all of this is that the game’s difficulty can be low without negatively impacting the game.  The challenge becomes the puzzle solving involved in using your party to find secrets in the environment, whether it be switches to open secret levels or puzzle pieces to collect for pictures.  It’s by far the most puzzle solving I’ve done in a Kirby game, and it makes for a really satisfying loop in trying to find all the little secrets in each level.

Classic bosses return, but that shouldn’t be a surprise at this point.

In no surprise though, this game also doesn’t steer away from some classic expectations of the series.  Standard bosses return, like the Whispy Woods tree or Kracko.  You still romp through Dream Land for a while.  The majority of the enemies that are there are still powers from past games.  However, it never feels dull.  It reuses what is expected of the series in new ways, either through new mechanics added to the bosses, or clever new uses for the absorbed powers.  It gives the right blend of nostalgia and new, which has been a hallmark of the series for a long time.

Admittedly though, I did mostly play this game as a sort of no-thought gap game.  I knew there were games coming out soon that I wanted to play (looking at you Ni no Kuni 2), so I didn’t want to play something long.  This was a quick hitter, easily finishable in 6-8 hours.  It’s also not difficult, so the level of frustration is low.  However, it’s just flat out fun.  It doesn’t take itself too seriously, once again brings some new mechanics into the series, but still plays enough of the old beats to be familiar.  While it’s hardly going to be a game of the year candidate, it’s pretty easy to recommend taking a look at this one at the very least.

Also, as mentioned in the Kirby: Planet Robobot ramblings, Nintendo has once again put in an updated little adorable Kirby icon for their website.  Nice touch.

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Game Ramblings #57 – Super Mario Odyssey

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Another great entry in the Super Mario series, with great platforming mechanics, a predictable but fun story, and great world locations to explore
  • Collectathon-style worlds didn’t work as well for me as the more focused Mario 64/Sunshine style individual stars, but the story moons in particular were great
  • New core mechanic of taking over enemies and using their abilities was a great focus for the design, and works fantastically
  • Theme song of the year – go buy it on iTunes or Google Play Music

I’ll be perfectly honest from the start here; I still think Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine are better games.  While Super Mario Odyssey is definitely a fantastic game on its own, the change to the star collecting mechanic into something more akin to Banjo-Kazooie often felt weird to me with a strange mix of really good focused moons alongside completely incidental ones that you can find in things like piles of leaves.  That said, once I get beyond that change the rest of the game was fantastic and is as good as any Mario game we’ve seen before.

Flick a hat at an enemy and more often than not you take them over, gaining their abilities and strengths.

Since it is the core difference in the game, let’s start with the takeover.  For various story reasons, your hat is now alive and can bind Mario to the soul of his enemies, or something to that effect.  The end result is that you can now become your enemy.  Take over a Goomba, and you can now build stacks of goombas and stop sliding around on ice.  Take over a Cheep Cheep and you can now swim under water without needing to breathe.  Hell, take over a T-Rex and stomp the shit out of everything around you just for laughs.  This even extends to seemingly mundane things like the little traffic cones in the city that you can use to catapult Mario around.

This new core ability and the set of enemy mechanics that come out of it are used to great effect.  A large portion of the boss fights use specific environment and enemy combos to change things from just being your standard 3 butt stomp affairs.  Almost any puzzle solving segment will involve finding the nearby enemy type to use their skill set.  Even just for changing up gameplay a bit, it’s nice to be able to warp into an enemy and use a completely different set of skills than Mario on his own can do.  There’s even a surprise at the end that leads to one of the most bombastic finishes to a Mario game that I can remember.

While most bosses are typical scale for a Mario experience, that wasn’t always the case.

On the boss front, there really was a much wider variety than normal.  There’s a recurring set of bosses that act as this game’s substitute for the Koopa kids, and they’re the normal 3 hit to kill with minor mechanical changes.  However, there’s definitely a few much larger bosses in place.  For example, the New Donk City segment has a large centipede boss that can warp in and out of buildings, and the only way to defeat it is to hat-possess a tank and shoot its weak points.  A later fight pictured above has a very non-Mario dragon boss that ends up being more about attack avoidance than offense, with distinct cooldown segments where Mario can land his damage.

The end result of all this is that both by sheer quantity, as well as mechanic variety, this is the widest set of boss fights that Mario has ever seen, and the game’s pacing greatly benefited from it.  At a typical rate, I was seeing a boss every 30-45 minutes, giving me a nice set of pseudo-open world collecting, followed by a high intensity battle.  The consistency of this pace and the mechanical variety allowed for the game to pump up the action when needed to avoid the slow pace trap that other heavy collection platformers have fallen to.

Little touches like the 2D segments gave a lot of life to the world, and some fun hints at the past.

However, it was that collection aspect that ended up being the strong low point for me in an otherwise fantastic game.  The amount of collection just didn’t make sense, and often times felt like fluff to me.  In a typical world, you’d have 3-5 moons that were mandatory per-story, then the need to collect an additional 15-20 just to power up the ship and leave for the next kingdom.  Out of those, I’d estimate about half were purely incidental; a glowing stump may be a hint at a hidden moon, a music note starts a 10 second run to collect all notes, or hell, just a moon floating out in the open that you have to climb a tree to collect.  Among the ones that required a bit more effort, you’d typically see a segment similar to a simplified hidden shines in Super Mario Sunshine, where some quick platforming or single-mechanic enemy would grab you a guaranteed obvious shine and loosely hidden shine.  While there were certainly a lot of shines to get, it often didn’t really feel like there was much point to a lot of them, and I’d have rather seen a larger focus on expanding the story or hidden-area shines into something more meaningful.

There’s definitely a few other minor things there that didn’t really hit.  The motion controls in particular are pretty terrible, but purely optional.  On the hardware front, I’d recommend playing with a Pro Controller over the Joycons, as I had far too many deaths caused by the signal loss that is effecting them.  Some weird mechanical bugs, such as an unintended quick pivot when using fire flower boosts also killed me too many times in some tight movement areas.  However, they’re not really the types of things that kill enjoyment of the game, at least beyond some grumbling at the time problems came up.

What kind of Mario game would it be without Bowser’s Castle? It’s seen some upgrades this go around.

That said, while the collectathon may prevent me from ever doing a 100% run, it certainly didn’t stop me from really enjoying the hell out of what I did play.  End of the day, the core mechanics of the game are just too good to miss out on.  The platforming is as fun as it’s ever been and for the moons that push for depth, it’s more important than ever to be on top of my game.  Even just the act of running around the worlds to get to the next objective is fun to do due to the much larger inclusion of vertical elements and enemies to takeover to traverse them.  While it may not hold up to me like 64 or Sunshine, this is still a game worth getting a console for, and that right there says a lot about the quality that’s in place.