Tag: switch

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Game Ramblings #106 – Splatoon 2 Single Player + Octo Expansion

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Third-person shooter
  • Platform: Switch

I really enjoyed the original Splatoon, despite the fact that I was tragically bad at it in multiplayer. However, the thing that surprised me was how solid the single player experience was for a game where that was clearly not the focus. Some of that may have just been how fresh it was to play what is a third-person shooter in a very new way, but it really left a mark. For Splatoon 2, the initial single player was more of the same. While it was fun, it was a bit disappointing…..until I played the Octo expansion, which was an entirely ambitious push of single player content that I wasn’t expecting.

Mechanically speaking, this is still a fantastic game. This is one of the best shooter experiences I’ve had on console, thanks to it intelligently using motion controls to improve aim, rather than feeling ham fisted. It’s got your typical twin stick movement and aiming, but then you do little tilts of your controller for finessed aiming, and it all just clicks. Large motions go on the right stick, and kills come out of motion, and it’s as effective as any aim assists I’ve ever seen out of more traditional shooters.

The base single player is a pretty by the numbers copy of the original game. You’ve got a handful of worlds where you go through a series of puzzles and light AI combat levels, capped with a boss fight. What it ends up being is basically a tutorial for the core gameplay to lead you into the multiplayer. From that perspective, it’s super solid. From the perspective of a returning player, it’s repetitive. I’ve seen this content before, down to some of the bosses returning with only light mechanical changes. It was nice to see them pushing the lore of the series a bit, but it didn’t feel like something I needed to play again.

That feeling changed when I started the Octo expansion.

From a very high level, the Octo expansion is basically Portal. Like the screenshot above says, you’re literally doing a bunch of test chambers to prove your skill. After you pass through that section, you end up in a fairly linear sequence of levels to escape the facility. If that sounds familiar, it’s definitely intentional.

At its core, the thing that makes the Octo expansion work is the sheer amount of variety to play with. Each test chamber has its own little gameplay tweak to play with. Some levels are straightforward puzzles to get to the end of the level. Sometimes they get a bit cheeky and give you limited amounts of paint to use. Sometimes they force you into stealth segments. Sometimes they don’t give you any weapons at all, and make you traverse intelligently through.

However, it’s when things go off the rails that it’s really fun. There’s levels like the one above where you’re literally playing Breakout with paint. There’s some levels where you’ve got to push a giant billiard ball around the world without knocking it off the level. There’s some levels where you gain a jetpack instead of using the paint to traverse around. There’s even a level where you play Picross 3D to create a box fort shaped like a dog.

It’s the variety and jumps between traditional and fun levels that really give the expansion a really great pace. You’ll do something normal for a bit or hit a really high tension combat level, then be given a breather level to bring down your heart rate. You’ll go from using the typical shooter mechanics to using your paint gun to play tic-tac-toe. It’s all bite sized chunks that are the right length to want you to keep playing just one more level, until suddenly you’re 30 levels in and hours have accidentally gone by.

This is all capped by a fantastic escape sequence that culminates in a boss battle against the giant human statue above, combining all the skills you’ve learned in the single player game into a super intense and super fun sequence filled with platforming and firing.

The whole of the Octo expansion shows a level of creativity that is so typical of Nintendo, and yet was not present in the Splatoon series up to this point. The two games were both fantastically well crafted, but distinctly multiplayer-focused. What the expansion has done is shown that there’s a lot of room for this series to also have a single player tilt. Ya they’re sort of being tongue-in-cheek in riffing on the overarching Portal pattern, but there is so much more content here than that game brought to the table. At its core, Splatoon is an easy recommendation for me anyway just to experience what that multiplayer is like. However, with what I’ve played here, I think it may be worth getting Splatoon 2 + Octo expansion just for the single player experience alone.

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Game Ramblings #105 – New Super Lucky’s Tale

More Info from Playful Studios

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

This was another one that snuck into my start of the year kick into platformers. This game isn’t necessarily doing anything new and interesting, and it’s certainly not an overly challenging game. However, what it does end up being is fun; fun in the most pure way that mechanically solid platformers can be. The world and characters are colorful and charming. The levels you hop around in are extremely varied in their platforming styles. The little side challenges provide enough of a reason to explore every location. It just ends up with you having spent way more time playing the game than you expected because you never stop having fun.

Variety is really the name of the game here. At the start of the game, it looked like this one was going to be a standard 3D platformer experience. But then they throw you into a side scroller level, then an isometric level, then an auto runner level, then a Super Monkey Ball style rolling maze. The game really takes great advantage of using the core mechanics that are in place and putting them in all sorts of new environment types. When this is combined with a distinct overworld, it meant that I was never growing tired of the kind of gameplay being presented to me. You’re not going to play the same kind of level back-to-back, so it feels like there’s always something new happening, even if the mechanics are largely the same.

This is combined with a level structure that really encourages a bunch of exploration. Each level has the general end-level reward. It also has rewards for finding LUCKY letters, a hidden secret area, and a reward for collecting a bunch of coins. These all provide built-in excuses to go running around checking every corner It’s these kinds of little things that bring the levels from being just a straightforward point A to B to something that lets you get lost in them.

This is all helped by the fact that the game is mechanically very sound. This does all the little platforming things really right. Jump heights and distances are very obvious, and that surprisingly carries through despite the large differences between the various gameplay types. Where you’re landing is really obvious thanks to having drop shadows directly under the player at a long visible distance. These all seem like obvious things, but they’re all things that a lot of platformers get extremely wrong. When done well like here, they’re simply things that work as expected instead of being deterrents.

However, the mechanic details extend to things like boss fights as well. Take the screenshot above. Early in the fight, the purple patches are small and easy to avoid while showing very obviously that they’re damage zones. It immediately enforces that you want to move towards blue as the boss fight progresses and the safe zones get smaller and smaller. Other bosses have similar paths, such as single laser sights becoming multiple sights. These all play well into the fairly standard multi-phase platformer boss fight gameplay, but again to where them working well means they are simply working as expected, rather than being a deterrent.

The game’s biggest issue overall is that it’s ultimately a fairly easy game to play. Ya, you’ll lose lives occasionally, but the game is both generous with health pickups and generous with additional lives, so you’re not going to be pressed to stay alive. Realistically this might as well have gone with the more modern approach of just not having lives, and having a death be a level reset or checkpoint reset. However, that lack of difficulty was never a particular deterrent. Figuring out where the secrets were became the real fun of the game. Puzzling out what the boss’ mechanics were, then defeating them with those mechanics became the real fun of the game. I wasn’t having to slam my head against long fights and long precise levels, but instead simply enjoying the game for what it was.

To be perfectly honest, that lack of difficulty in place of just having fun is something that I find myself enjoying more and more these days. I just don’t have the time anymore to repeat difficult experiences getting incrementally better for the sake of difficulty, and have found myself enjoying experiences that are fun for the sake of being fun. Super Lucky’s Tale really hit that mark for me. It puts together an experience that is mechanically sound to the point where you don’t think about the game mechanics, combines it with a bright and enjoyable world, and gives you enough of a reason to explore that each level is its own little self contained playground. It unfortunately sounds like the studio has been having some financial trouble, so I don’t know how much more we’re going to see specifically of Lucky, but it’s clear that the devs behind this are going to end up making fun experiences wherever they end up.

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Game Ramblings #104 – Octahedron

More Info from Demimonde Studios

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox One, PS4

Octahedron is a wild ride. At its core, it’s a really mechanically tight puzzle platformer. However, that’s way oversimplifying it. As you dig in, it becomes a wildly fun experience dripping in an ’80s color palette that moves wildly between tight platforming sections, quick movement sections, and even a little bit of offensive weapon flair to your move set.

I figured I’d start with this short video, because it kind of shows a bit of everything. You see the core mechanic of the game – the ability to create a platform that moves underneath you. There’s a bit of the puzzle and offense, where my platform drops an explosive to open up my path, then I use my platforms to get around the enemy spawner. You’ve got the over the top visual style and audio, which the game is largely synced to.

The most important thing about all of this is that it’s mechanically really tight. That’s always the big differentiator between good and bad platformers. Jump heights and jump distances feel really consistent. The height gaps between platforms as you move up and down are obvious, so there’s no second guessing whether you are going to make a jump or need to lay down a platform of your own first. The obstacles moving in time with the background music sets a great internal rhythm to threading the needle through the level which added a nice secondary layer of confirmation to the way I was playing the game.

That’s not to say that things are necessarily easy. What it comes down to is the precision places everything on player skill to complete the game. Generally speaking there’s levels of difficulty to this. Simply completing the level generally provides a nice challenge that ramped up slowly throughout the game. Doing a full completion pass on the level started to add things to grab that were in out of the way or more challenging spots. Then completing a level quickly and with minimal use of player-created platforms is another level of difficulty altogether.

This ends up providing a bit of a choose your own adventure style to the game, and is where it really leans into the puzzle side of things. You’re no longer simply getting from point A to B in safety. You’re now having to be more precise with your jumps to minimize platforms. You’re taking some risks to move through the level as quick as possible. You’re keeping an eye out for secret areas that hold the last few bits of collectables that you need to grab. It all just works very well as a whole. If you’re having trouble with a level, you can kind of pick and choose what your goal is and come back later to wrap things up, so even the hardest content has ways to alleviate frustration and keep you moving forward.

Also a bit of a shoutout to Demimonde themselves. I hit a bug where a section of a later level wasn’t aligned properly until I restarted a couple times. We had a bit of a back and forth trying to narrow down what was going on. While we ultimately don’t have an answer, it was good to see them digging for info to potentially fix the issue, especially in light of the great speedrunning potential for a game of this style.

This is going to sound kind of weird, but if I were to give this one a comparable, it would probably be Super Mario Bros 2. Something about the way that the platforms you create move and glide with you gives it the same sort of floaty kind of platforming feel with similar amounts of precision really feels like that one. However, Octahedron is so much more when you really start digging into it. It takes those tight mechanics and adds a bunch of completionist tasks to really hone in on a super tight puzzle platformer. Combined with great audio and visual style, this one’s a pretty easy game to recommend.