Tag: switch

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Game Ramblings #72 – Owlboy

More Info from D-Pad Studio

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • High points are non-gameplay.  Story, visuals, audio are all top notch.
  • Mechanically does enough to get the job done, but is pretty standard.  Bosses are pretty simple, not too many upgrades, not much reason to back track.

Add this one to the list of Metroidvania games that I’m always a sucker for, and it was definitely solid enough to be worth playing through.  This was definitely an indie darling as it was in development, and it properly earned a lot of accolades, particularly for its visuals.  However, in being a game that did its non-gameplay elements so well, it’s a bit unfortunate in that the gameplay itself is pretty much hitting the minimum standard, and not really doing much to separate itself from the pack.

Right from the start this game has fantastic pixel art, and it compares well against the best of the Metroidvanias of recent years.

It’s pretty easy to see from the start where Owlboy earned its biggest hype from.  This game is drop dead gorgeous.  It’s easy for pixel art games to become difficult to play at times from overly busy visuals, but this one escapes all of those traps.  The backgrounds are high detail, but use muted color palettes to separate themselves from the foreground.  Characters are all fairly low-resolution, but have unique looks of their own so you can immediately tell who is who.  Even more important, the character animation is phenomenal.  There’s enough frames of animation for everything to look really fluid, whether in normal traversal or in combat situations.  Even little details like character facial reactions during cutscenes lend a lot of life to scenes where 2D games typically have to depend more on text.

This high attention to non-gameplay detail also extends to the story and music.  From a non-spoiler perspective, the story focuses on the growth of the main character in trying to learn to be an owl, and how the world around him has gotten to the state it’s in.  The characters he meets with throughout, and those that end up travelling with him are all well written, each with their own motivations as to why they’re joining the party.  As for the soundtrack, it’s a well orchestrated set of pieces, ranging from lighter pieces in town to high action pieces in battle.  Overall, I recommend giving it a listen.

Bosses are the high point of combat, even if they tend to be pretty simple.

The gameplay on the other hand is a lower point in the game.  It’s not that it’s bad – in fact, it hits pretty much all the expected notes for a game of this style.  It just doesn’t really do anything to stand out.

Out of all of this, bosses really are the high point.  They’re pretty standard sort of 2 – 3 phase fights, with damage being the phase trigger across the board.  For the most part, the bosses also introduce new mechanics as they phase transition.  However, the bosses themselves are still fairly simple.  Typically speaking, you get a new upgrade, and face a boss weak to that upgrade.  In the one above, you’d basically just been using a spin move to knock armor off enemies a bunch, then immediately get this boss.  Spin hit the armor off the turtle, shoot it a bunch, repeat.  This was pretty much the same thing across all bosses, and it basically meant that they were never really much of a danger.  You knew going in what you were going to be expected to use, you’d have been given an entire level before hand to learn the ability, and you just have to use it to finish.

But again, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that it went that way.  Upgrades are basically in two forms; characters that you can carry with you, and health upgrades earned by collecting coins.  The characters were a unique way to handle the typical weapon upgrade.  You only earn three – a standard gunner, a shotgunner, and a spider web launcher – but their integration into the story and gameplay as a whole was a unique way to give a voice to the upgrades, rather than them just being a pickup in the world.  It also gave much greater weight to them coming and going from the party based on the story, and ultimately made the story a lot more impactful.  Losing a party member due to something occurring in the world wasn’t just part of the story, it also meant that your combat strategy was about to drastically change for a while.

However, it also meant that you never really had a reason to back track.  While getting 100% of coins to get all optional upgrades is a back track path, the core upgrades were guaranteed along the main path, and I never needed to do the full collecting since I was rarely in danger of being low on health.  The end result of all this is that I treated the game less like a Metroidvania, and more like a typical linear action/adventure game, which probably got me through it quicker than was really intended.

Sometimes you just end up riding a boss upside down through a cave. It happens.Realistically, the game is pretty typical of a lot of top tier independent titles.  The things where it stands out are pretty high end, and the rest of the game kind of sits in decent but average shape.  It’s obvious that visuals and tech around it were going to be the focus of this game, and they really nailed it.  In nailing those things, gameplay looks to be the thing that suffered a bit from lack of development focus, but overall it worked out well.  Would I consider this in the upper echelon of Metroidvanias?  Not really, but I still have a pretty easy time recommending at least a play through.

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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.