Tag: PC

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Shelved It #7 – Hollow Knight

More Info from Team Cherry

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: Mac, Linux, Switch

TL;DR

  • Solid mechanics, solid visuals, solid audio all put together a great base that can be built on.
  • Small bits of lack of polish, rather than anything egregious led to frustration, and eventual shelving.

This is going to sound weird for a game I’m shelving, but Hollow Knight is really quite good.  It’s a pretty traditional Metroidvania in layout, using a solid short-range melee system and some occasional powerups to round out the move set.  This is complemented by a solid visual style, and great audio and soundtrack to put together one of the best themed titles in this genre I’ve recently played.  However, this was a case of a thousand cuts, where small lack of polish in the details led to a continuous pattern of one step forward, one step backward in my progress.  This was combined with a somewhat questionable use of the Souls death mechanic, to where body runs began to feel like a slog, rather than a good balance of penalty and learning reward.  In the end, the good couldn’t outweigh the bad for me to continue on.

Early example of some of the fantastic visuals you’d see in this game.

However, let’s start with the good.  As with a lot of recent Metroidvania games, particularly in the indie scene, this one is a fantastic looker of a game.  Like the recent remake of Wonder Boy 3, or other Metroidvania titles like Ori and the Blind Forest, this one has a fantastic visual style.  Everything has a great hand-drawn appearance, with thick painterly lines.  It’s a fairly distinct style, and works rather well.  This is combined with great use of dynamic lighting to give some dramatic areas.  The biggest problem with it all is that most of the areas share a similar color range, so things can begin to look rather samey as you continue on.  On the other hand, it never got old running through the environment and having all the little blades of grass in the scene explode into similarly styled particles as I swung through them.  As a whole, this was a part of the game that never really diminished in my time playing it.

The core combat is also really well put together.  The base of the combat are melee strikes, which sounds simple at its core.  However, there was a smart choice made specifically in the horizontal strike, giving some verticality outside of the swing’s hitbox, and allowing players to hit things both slightly above and slightly below without having to be super precise with jump heights. This was extremely nice for how small some of the hitboxes on armored bosses and enemies could be.  This was backed up by a strong set of spells and abilities that are earned throughout the game to fill out the move set.  Examples here include mid-air dashes and double jumps for traversal, or energy missiles and dive bomb spells for damage.  Generally speaking, the game gives you a bunch of tools to use, and its up to you to then figure out what is most effective for each situation.

However, as I continued on, the little details that didn’t quite have the polish of the visuals and core combat started giving way to more frustration than fun.

The first big place this showed for me was in their use of the Dark Souls death mechanic.  The basic system is that at death, your soul gets stuck in the world along side all currency you earned during that life.  If you get back to the soul and defeat it in combat, you earn all the currency back.  If you die before that, you permanently lose all of it.

Generally speaking, I’m pretty neutral on this system.  There’s a fine line where this system works well, and to me it requires enough save points in place that are both close enough together, as well as close enough to where players will die so that the game doesn’t heavily discourage exploration, and keeps game pace post-death high.  To me it feels like Hollow Knight fails on both of these counts.  Many areas had a bunch of save points clustered near the center of the zones, but fewer out towards the edges where a lot of boss battles or more dangerous sort of side dungeons were.  There were also hardly ever any save points actually immediately before or immediately after boss rooms, so deaths during bosses (which are extremely common) often resulted in a long run back to the boss.  It just felt like a lot of wasted time, rather than a good chance to learn and retry the boss quickly.  This was compounded by a number of times where my soul spawned out of reach, effectively ending my change to re-earn my lost currency, so I eventually just stopped exploring altogether, choosing to go the lower risk way of sticking to main paths and simply grinding out kills if I required more money or power for skills.

There were a bunch of other little details that also compounded on top of this core problem for me.  First and foremost, jumping feels awkward.  This is a game with purely digital left/right movement, and no in-air momentum.  If you’re jumping and let go of the stick, you fall straight down.  It just feels weird, and eliminates a lot of subtle movement flow that a lot of better examples of the genre have.  There’s also a really obnoxious backwards impulse after hitting an enemy.  This is combined with somewhat imprecise collision on platforms to put me in situations where trying to jump and hit enemies mid-air around small platforms was pretty much a death sentence if solid ground wasn’t below me.

The final sort of annoyance was in the mapping system mechanics.  Rather than mapping out rooms when you walk through them, you had to clear a couple of hurdles first to map out a zone.  First and foremost, you had to buy a map of the zone from a vendor within the zone, generally well within the zone and out of the way (see annoyance with losing currency when your body run fails due to spawning out of reach….).  This only opened the ability to map the area.  It then didn’t mark areas on your map until the next time you reached a save area (see annoyance with the location and frequency of save poiints….).  Otherwise you were basically flying blind, and have to remember your path through areas until you hit both points above.  Generally speaking, it just felt like an additional unnecessary money and time pit, where I’d rather be spending my currency on functional upgrades.

End of the day, the further I went into Hollow Knight, the more the small details outweighed the good of the core systems.  Could I have grinded through it without too much trouble? Sure.  Are the problems going to be something that bothers everyone? Nope.  However, I’ve got plenty of other games to play, and seeing lack of polish in the details just generally distracts the hell out of me.  However, for those with more patience than me can probably find a lot to love here, so if nothing else, I’d recommend taking a look the next time a Steam sale rolls on through.

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Shelved It #6 – Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom

More Info from Enigami

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One
  • Main Reason for Shelving: Questionable combat system decisions

I’m starting this one off with a screenshot, because it immediately gets into my theme here of wasted potential.  This scene is the first thing you see when you take control of the game, and the scenery you see continues to be at this level of quality.  This is a phenomenally beautiful game with good music, a good cast of characters, and an enjoyable, if simple story.  When the combat works, it’s also a ton of fun, with great pace, decent combos, and a nice mix of melee and ranged abilities.  However, as the game ramps up the difficulty, the combat very quickly goes from extremely fun to occasionally unfair to downright bad, and it’s really a consequence of one main issue; bad resource generation.

I guess first to set the stage, a bit about how the battle system actually works.  Base melee attacks are comprised of kicks and punches, which can be comboed together.  Ranged attacks are comprised of four sets of elemental attacks that use individual element-based resources.  For avoidance, the player can dodge or parry.  Parry uses the Tension resource, while dodge does not, which is a somewhat strange decision from a high level point of view, but makes sense in practice given how ineffective dodging is against melee attacks.  Finally, Tension can also be used to throw a set of more powerful combo moves, or stored to throw what is effectively an ultimate power move.

So then, let’s start with magic generation since it’s the less frustrating of the two.  While fighting in an arena, there’s a color-coded barrier that periodically changes.  By standing still, you can activate a recharge.  The element color that matches the barrier quickly recharges, while the non-matching elements recharge excruciatingly slow.  This presents two main problems.  For one, you have to stand still.  In a combat system that is heavily based around quick combos and high action, this means that you have to be at high range to even think about recharging.  It also means that characters have to be built for all elements in mind, as fights that don’t cycle between the elemental colors you want effectively negate the use of those elements.  While yes, non-matching elements recharge, it’s so slow as to be impractical in practice.

Unfortunately, Tension is an even worse resource.  It gets generated through melee attacks, but typically requires three or so hits to generate one bar of tension.  Unfortunately, this also puts you in range of enemy melee attacks, which means you’ll be in melee range of enemies, requiring heavy use of parry to avoid damage.  Unfortunately parry itself requires a full bar of Tension.  Generally speaking you can expect an enemy to start a melee chain sooner than you can get in three hits, so you end up generally just having to eat massive amounts of damage.  This is compounded by the fact that stronger enemies tend to have some form of stun lock-style maneuver with little to no tell, so you’re hoping that the moves you decide to parry vs. the moves you decide to eat damage end up being the right choice.  Worst of all, a successful parry does not give any Tension back, so you can very quickly run dry if you have to dodge two or three hits in a row by the enemy.  Changing this alone to give Tension for a successful parry could have saved the battle system, giving an advantage for well timed dodges through the system.

This is compounded by poor choices in the combo maneuvers.  Standard combos tend to only use one or two bars of Tension, but also tend to be short range and missable, so the price of using one is more than just the loss of a potential parry.  There is also then a super move which uses the entire tension bar, but can easily be interrupted by the enemies you’re facing.  When the super move is typically a 5 button chain, it’s simply not worth the price of admission to use them and lose all Tension for potentially no gain.  In general, I ended up avoiding use of the combo moves altogether, because they simply were not worth losing the resource that I could be using to parry and avoid taking more damage, particularly when one missed parry could be a 100-0 death chain.

The unfortunate thing is that a handful of changes could have been done to establish the quick pace while making things actually fair and challenging, rather than unforgiving.   Outside of the stun locks, enemies just were not challenging, so it felt like all challenge was put into catastrophically fucking the player over.  The stun locks should have been outright removed.  They’re just not fun, especially when a single miss can be a 100-0 situation.  Ideally parry should not be on a shared resource with combo moves, and realistically should not be a on a resource at all.  Even if it had its own resource, generating that for a successful parry would encourage well timed moves there instead of button spam.  With parry in a better place, and the 100-0 stun locks removed, the enemies could then have their overall difficulty adjusted up to make the skill of the fights all about constantly timing parry properly, rather than a guessing game of when you were about to be screwed the most.

I suppose I’ll close with an example here that basically killed the game for me.  The second real main boss that you hit is a multi-stage battle against some mobs, then a sub-boss, then a main boss controlling said sub-boss.  In between rounds of killing and reviving the sub-boss, the main guy would throw an orb of magic at me, which could be parried back to deal damage.  It was 100% the Ganon baseball fight from Ocarina of Time.  Unfortunately, it also meant that I needed tension to win, and the amount I needed inherently ramped up each time I hit the main boss.  Because I needed Tension, I had to eat damage, but mechanics started ramping up to include floor traps that slowed my movement and attacks, AoE magic, sub-boss throwing magic spells, etc.  In general it became more of a fight where I was dodging constantly until the opportunity for one or two hits arrived, while minimizing the damage I was taking as much as possible.  Sure I used healing spells and healing items to survive, but quite frankly the fight was just a chore.

The developer has shown some willingness to respond to feedback, so I’m hoping some things can be changed to ultimately rescue the game, but the things I suspect need changing may be too core to really do too much here.  The unfortunate result there is a lot of wasted potential.   This is the type of high quality ARPG that you usually don’t see from a small developer, because quite frankly they’re hard to make enough content for in a reasonable time.  Unfortunately a few highly questionable decisions in the combat mechanics ultimately ground this game, and prevent it from really reaching the potential it shows.

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Game Ramblings #22.1 – Forza Horizon 3: Hot Wheels

See original post covering Forza Horizon 3

  • Genre: Open World Racing
  • Platform: Windows 10 (Microsoft Store – Digital Only)
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

This screenshot is the best quick peak I can really give to describe this expansion.  There’s a loop in the back left, some obligatory fire in the right, and an entire mountain covered in looping track in the center.  This is as close as you’ll get to your childhood fantasy of driving a full size Hot Wheels car in a full size Hot Wheels universe, and damn is it a lot of fun.

This is the second expansion released as post-release content for Forza Horizon 3.  The first one, Blizzard Mountain, added a bunch of snow-focused rally events that were solid but didn’t stray too far from the core gameplay established in the base game.  Horizon Hot Wheels throws the idea of the base game out the window.  All of the expectations of a Hot Wheels theme are there.  There’s brightly colored blue and orange track (with the all important little side walls) built in impossible angles to drive around on.  There’s soaring banks and loops that seem impossible to drive on (and yes, you can fall off if you’re going too slow at the top of a loop).  There’s gigantic jumps everywhere, most of the time preceded by a little black boost pad to really get you up to speed.  There’s even an occasional T-Rex there just to make sure things stay grounded in reality.  Despite it all, this still works as a solid Forza experience.

While Horizon has always leaned distinctly more towards arcade than the core Forza titles, it still had a relatively realistic feel to driving, and that’s maintained here.  The best times are still going to be had by paying attention to your breaking lines and properly hitting corners.  However, the track designs greatly changed how I approached racing.  My preferred setup has always been the cockpit view, and the ability to see where I’m going in a standard car on standard roads was never a problem.  What I didn’t take into account is the fact that I may be turning UP, instead of left and right, and that’s the biggest gameplay change that the Hot Wheels expansion brings to the table.  Because of the significant inclusion of things like loops or Immelmann loops, I tended to heavily lean on cars that either had significantly large windshields, or cars that were roll cage only, giving me a lot more ability to see where the corners were approaching in a completely foreign direction from what I was used to.

That said, not everything worked out fantastically.  The Hot Wheels cars themselves were unsurprisingly bad at being cars.  The designs have always been hilariously impractical as actual car designs, but having the cool looking toy and actually trying to drive the cars are two different things.  This is especially bad when you can’t actually see where you’re going:

Yep, that’s a big ol engine block in the way.  The designs that are there are definitely authentic to the originals, but I tended to stick with normal cars when I could just for playability.  The AI also was having some significant problems adjusting to the strange track designs, particularly in high speed banks where turning really wasn’t that important.  I can’t recall more than a handful of times where I really saw the AI ever flip over in the base game, but it was pretty routine to see multiple cars in a race go flying off the track to their doom here.  The AI also felt like it had some adjustments to its rubberbanding since I last played, because the AI was often pulling off impossible feats in acceleration to pass me.  I’ve never driven the Halo Warthog, but I king of suspect it can’t out accelerate a Jaguar F-Type.

However, the things I found wrong were at best minor nitpicks.  They’re immediately forgotten the first time you go off a blind jump through a fire hoop, see the car tilting up, and just watch the sky for seconds at a time not really knowing when you’re going to land.  It’s those kinds of outlandish moments that make this feel like playing in a giant Hot Wheels set, despite still feeling like Forza.