Tag: adventure

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Game Ramblings #83 – SteamWorld Dig 2

More Info from Image & Form Games

  • Genre: Metroidvania – Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Vita, 3DS, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastic Metroidvania that mixes that genres typical features with a solid mining mechanic to push progression
  • Great visual style and audio kick up the presentation aspects of this title
  • Fantastic gameplay loop that really fits the on-the-go nature of the Switch

My ramblings don’t hide at all that I’m a big fan of Metroidvania titles. However, I typically stay away from playing them on portable devices since the gameplay loop doesn’t typically feel that good in short bursts. SteamWorld Dig 2 is definitely a big exception to that rule. In crafting a really solid Metroidvania title on its own, the team behind this game has also crafted one that encourages fast travel and exploration in short bursts with frequent returns to base to power up, and given us a title that is both a great Metroidvania as well as the perfect game to play on the go, even if that wasn’t exactly how I went ahead playing it.

This is 100% a Metroidvania, so of course you’ll be spending a lot of time in the map looking for new secrets.

Let’s get this out of the way – yes there’s a whole lot of digging in this game, but this is still a Metroidvania in every way. There’s a ton of secret areas to find, a ton of upgrades to get along the way, and a lot of little enemies to destroy for loot. You’ll spend a lot of time traversing and retraversing levels as you gain access to abilities to let you get through new block types, let you grapple hook, let you fly, and more. However, it is that little mining detail that really separates this game from the pack.

Digging is in the name of the game, and it’s what you’ll really be building your abilities around.

While combat is there to some extent, digging is the real core upgrade loop here and it isn’t as simple as it looks. Throughout the game you end up gaining upgrades to your pickaxe, but you also gain a bunch of other things with similarly destructive tendencies. This ranges from things like jackhammers to mines to grenade launchers, all set in a bid to blow up as much stuff in your way as possible, and the more destructive it gets the more entertaining the result. Throughout this entire process you’re also digging not just to clear paths, but to find gems to sell, upgrade tokens for obvious purposes, and the occasional treasure that can be traded for upgrade blueprints. Basically, you’ll want to always be digging somewhere in order to find every little thing that can be used to move you along the upgrade path.

There’s also a bunch of really smart passive upgrades that may sound weird to Metroidvania veterans, but really do a good job of smoothing out the grind as the game goes on. Just when you get tired of gems falling down into pits, you can purchase an upgrade to draw gems into the player. Just when you’re getting tired of searching every nook and cranny for gems, you can purchase an upgrade that visualizes these things on your active minimap. Just when you’re starting to get tired of searching for those last few little hidden spots, you gain an item that will show a sparkle in-world if you’re near a hidden breakable block. These are all things that simplify the experience to be sure, but they’re given at points well past where mechanics are learned as a reward for getting so far, so they end up feeling like a huge thank you to reduce grind mechanics at the point where it would start to become tiring.

Sometimes you just accidentally start up fire robots to take out enemies that are ahead of you. Oops.

However, the thing that most impressed me is how good this entire loop works for a portable device. Getting through this game is a huge bunch of effectively 5-10 minute sequences where you mine for a bit, fill your bag, and return to town to sell your loot and upgrade your abilities. This is smartly capped by other things that make you want to go back to town anyway, such as a lantern that runs out of fuel, water resources that can sometimes be hard to find, or health that can sometimes be a bit difficult to come by. Typically these things could be really frustrating, but in practice it really reenforces the loot, sell, upgrade loop that Dig 2 is pushing so hard for. There’s a ton of fast travel devices that you unlock all over the world, so there’s almost always somewhere near your start and end of a single loop to warp around which does a ton for minimizing unnecessary retravesal as well.

This basically then becomes the perfect portable title. Grab your Switch, 3DS, or Vita, play for 5-10 minutes, get a loop in, and put the device to sleep. You’re always making progress, always increasing your power curve just a bit, and always doing something beneficial to getting towards the end. With a typical playthrough clocking in at the 6-8 hour range, this gives you a whole bunch of little loot loops to take advantage of as well so you end up getting a bunch of mileage out of it when played this way.

Really this ends up being a great Metroidvania title, even if it’s a bit off the typical path for this genre. Even just from presentatin aspects this one hits all the right marks. Visually this is a looker, the audio and soundtrack are all fantastic, and the framerate and controls are solid throughout. From a portable perspective this is also the perfect way to play the genre, with a game loop that enforces a 5-10 minute mini-run setup instead of longer form gameplay that these can sometimes get stuck in. Would this game work fine as a console or PC experience as well? Absolutely. However, I think this one really nails it as something you’ll want to bring along with you as the perfect travel companion experience.

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Game Ramblings #80 – Shadow of the Tomb Raider

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux

TL;DR

  • Consistently good combat, exploration, and puzzle solving
  • Entertaining story involving the legend of the city of Paititi and a mix of Inca and Maya lore
  • On console, nice option to prefer framerate over visual quality. 60 FPS feels really good during the heavy movement segments of the game.

If you’ve played the prior two games in this trilogy, you know what to expect – solid semi-open world exploration, good puzzle dungeons, excellent stealth mechanics, and fun combat when pressed into action. Although this is definitely starting to trend towards being formulaic, there’s a few things here that made this feel like the best iteration on the gameplay that’s come out of the trilogy.

The game is only really a semi-open world experience, but the handful of larger towns are still fun to explore.

One of the reasons that I’ve really enjoyed this trilogy is that it’s only really openish. It’s got some open world trappings in terms of a relatively seamless world and a ton of things to collect in it, but in general this is still a fairly linear experience. The handful of times you get an open-style area, it’s really to allow you to breath between strictly linear story segments and give you a place to return to when a story spot is complete. These larger areas also give you the push to explore to find tombs – after all this IS Tomb Raider – that act as a significant side item to do.

The tombs are the best part of the game, giving you a mix of puzzle areas to engage in.

The prior titles in the reboot series had their share of tombs to go into, but it never really felt like a focus. While the content here is still entirely optional, the quality and count of tombs available in this game feels more significant than before. Its these tombs and crypts that are the best part of the game for me, and pushed me to seem them out whenever I could.

Each open area typically has somewhere between 3-6 hidden areas to explore with a single focus in each one. Some tombs are focused on manipulation of light to open doors to proceed further. Some focus on weight-based puzzles to open up paths to move on. A couple of them really end up being purely about climbing from point A to B without dying. These are entirely optional experience, but they’re worth seeking out simply because they are so much fun to complete. On their own, you could make a game out of a series of these and it would be worth playing, but as a part of the greater experience they still stand out. It also helps that they tend to have skill rewards at the end to really push the need to complete them.

I’m a sucker for stealth games and bow + arrow games, and this gives me both in great supply.

Combat remains largely the same as previous iterations, but is still a ton of fun. That said, the fact that there is less of it throughout the game oddly makes it feel even better. The previous titles had similar problems to Uncharted where almost any story area had obvious segments of a room of bad guys, then a room of jumping, then a room of bad guys, etc. Shadow significantly reduces this, and the game really only ends up having a handful of significant combat events in the entire game. Of this, most of them can also be completed entirely through strong stealth mechanics. When you do end up firing weapons, it’s usually for a strong story-reason, and luckily the handful of weapons (pistol, shotgun, auto rifle, and in particular the bow) all feel solid to fire.

Overall, Shadow felt like an appropriate ending to the reboot trilogy, and probably a good ending for the series on the current generation of hardware. There’s some obvious fluff to the experience that could be trimmed away, particularly with side quests that generally involve running around towns doing nothing in particular, but the overall game feels like it has reached a solid peak. Combat is fun, the puzzle solving is the best it’s been, and the origin story for Lara wrapped up in a relatively satisfying way. I’m hoping the next generation of hardware allows the series to stretch into new directions in a way similar to God of War, but for now I’m happy in where this one has ended up and can’t wait to see where Lara’s adventures take us next.

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Game Ramblings #79 – Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

More Info from Ninja Theory

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

TL;DR

  • Fantastic storytelling backed by a phenomenally good audio design
  • Combat is the obvious weakpoint for the game – it’s serviceable, but nothing special. Also not a reason to avoid the game.

Hellblade is a curious game to recommend. It’s technically an action game, but its action is not a reason to play it. It’s purposefully AAA in quality, but not in scope so it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s also the rare game that I would highly recommend wearing ONLY headphones for, even if you’ve got a high end audio system purely based on the merits of its audio design. It’s proof that a high focus on a specific element can result in an extremely high quality title without the need to add unnecessary fluff to pad the experience.

The game is entirely based around Senua’s psychosis, and everything from the audio to world design focuses in on that.

I’m really regretting not pulling some video footage of the game’s audio design while I was playing, because that’s where I want to start here. Up in the TL;DR I mentioned that this game is worth playing with headphones, and it’s entirely because of the focus on Senua’s psychosis. Throughout the game, the player hears voices in Senua’s head that act as something of a narration. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to the narration that takes place in the game Bastion, but in this case is often telling the player the opposite of what they want to do. These voices are entirely spatialized, so you spend a lot of the game with voices floating around inside your hearing. It’s a simple audio trick, but it’s fantastically impressive in practice, and one of the few true good uses of stereo panning of audio that I’ve heard in a game in recent years.

The fact that you can’t see anything in this screenshot is very much on purpose – it’s the mechanic of an entire level.

The heavy emphasis on audio even becomes game mechanics on its own. One of the puzzle segments of the game from the screenshot above involves effectively removing the player’s vision. The entire level takes place in near blackness, with only things directly next to the player even being visible as a fog. Throughout this entire section of the game, the player depends on their sense of hearing, and to some extent sense of touch through controller vibration to get through the game. Within the context of the game’s story at this point, it’s a fantastic way to force the player into an uncomfortable position where they can’t depend on what they see to give them clues of where to go. Everything comes down to your ability to listen to what’s going on, and move towards the sounds that can lead you to the exit.

These kinds of use of strong technology also abound in how puzzles are solved. The little video above is one example in how they manipulate the environment through the use of portals to open up progress to the player. There’s a few variations of this type of mechanic around, and it plays a really nice balance between making the player pay close attention to what they are looking at without being a vague guessing game.

Combat was clearly not an emphasis, but the bosses themselves are still a lot of fun to face.

If there’s anything where the game could have used more time, it’s probably in combat. The combat that is there is effective, but it’s pretty simple and has its own share of problems that grow as the game nears its end. This game has the problem that I’ve seen in a lot of melee games where the combat is fun against one or two tough enemies, but not fun with a bunch of weak enemies. The sections with weak enemies near the end of the game end up being an effective dodge spam to avoid a bunch of attacks, then poke damage to kill the enemies. There’s never much danger from the enemies themselves but I ended up dying a few times simply from getting stuck in chains or other environment pieces that seemed like they weren’t really meant to be hazards.

That said, the simple nature of the combat does shine in boss fights. The handful of bosses have a pretty wide range in sizes and mechanics, so they end up being the satisfying nearly Souls-style fights, where you slowly face off against the boss to learn its mechanics, minimize damage, then really go on the attack as you learn the patterns. Because many of the boss attacks are one or two shot deaths, finishing off the bosses is always really satisfying due to the recognition that the difference between you winning and you dying was really down to skill.

Ultimately this is a game that is really easy to recommend. Just on its gameplay and story alone, it’s probably worth the look for a lot of people. It’s a relatively short game that takes place as a single continuous camera shot (about 6-8 hours in general) and will come in at an affordable price at this point. However, the audio design is above and beyond what almost any developer is doing at any level these days, so on that alone I give it a nod. Now that Ninja Theory is under the Microsoft umbrella, I’m hoping we see more experiences like this where a strong focus wins out over marketing bullet points.