Tag: metroidvania

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Game Ramblings #74 – Shantae: Half-Genie Hero

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Strong continuation of the Shantae series.
  • Action/platformer gameplay is as strong as ever, and the DLC brings in interesting new gameplay styles in smaller segments.

The Shantae series has been one that’s always focused more on the action side of platformers, and this one is no different.  While it has little bits that read of Metroidvanias, its focus is still tightly constructed levels, use of different powers to traverse obstacles, and really big three cycle boss fights to cap a level.  Its all here like past games, but the quality is better than ever.  The introduction of DLC campaigns for other characters only enhances the total package, giving new gameplay styles within the framework of the Shantae universe to enjoy.

Powerups are definitely out in force in this game, once again tied to Shantae’s ability to use genie dances.

While the last game got rid of dances for story reasons, the core of the Shantae games has always been the use of power ups to get through levels.  The core platforming elements have always been there, but powerups are the driving force behind getting through the world.  In Half-Genie Hero, we’re back to using the genie belly dancing to activate these power ups.  These can range from the bat power above to fly over gaps to an elephant that can charge through walls to a spider that can walk on ceilings.  As you gain these powers, new areas in old levels become traverseable, and you go back through levels multiple times to both find story items, as well as find additional power ups.

If this is reading a lot like a Metroidvania, it’s because it definitely is to some extent.  Previous games in the series have definitely been fully open Metroidvanias, but Pirate’s Curse and this one both followed a more linear single-level experience, with the ability to go back to levels through a world map for quicker access.  What this really gains for the game over a typical Metroidvania experience is really speed of access.  You can hop into any unlocked level at any time, get to the power up or item you need, then immediately hop back into the world map to go to the next place.  There’s no slog of going back and forth through the same areas repeatedly to get to a specific area of the world.  It also means that the first-time entry into a level is really tailored to the story.  You get cutscenes about what’s going on, mini boss fights as a way to slow progress, and ultimately a big story boss at the end of each level.

The bosses are all universally a lot of fun, and generally speaking also huge.

The boss fights are also where some of the more interesting gameplay mechanics end up happening.  While there’s definitely simple bosses (it wouldn’t be Shantae without an appearance by the Squid Baron), you get a lot more experimental stuff going on in these fights.  The one above takes place in a circular arena that the player will wrap around, lobbing cannonballs back at the boss.  Another one of the bosses involves fighting against a giant mermaid, using hooks to make your way towards the boss’ face to land hits, a lot like old Donkey Kong Country gameplay.  By and large it is these segments that show some of the best growth in the core gameplay of the series.

The DLCs really start to change the gameplay in interesting ways, even if the level themes are shared.

The biggest change with Half-Genie Hero though has to be the inclusion of support for DLC campaigns, which are all now included in the ultimate edition release of the game.  These are fun mini-campaigns using other characters from the series.  One has you running around doing the Risky Boots story in a very tight platforming-focused campaign.  One has you playing as the three friends Sky, Bolo, and Rottytops using their unique abilities to get through heavy puzzle-focused levels.  There are even a few mini aracde campaigns with things like a gun-based police campaign or a stealth-based ninja campaign.

The end result of all this DLC is that you have a really solid main campaign that is really less than half of the experience at this point.  While you then go through and play through the same core level themes, the experience is always completely unique in each of the DLC packs, so you’re always learning fun new ways to replay the same content.  From a sheer value standpoint, the ultimate edition released recently with all DLC really can’t be beat.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this release, particularly if you wanted more variety than previous games.

The previous Shantae games were always really high quality examples of action platformer gameplay, and this one is no different.  The biggest difference here is that they simply went with the motto of “more”.   There’s more powers to use, more gameplay variety due to DLC, and more total overall time to spend in the game.  Despite all of the variety, the core gameplay hasn’t suffered at all.  This is still a really mechanically tight game, and one that fans of the genre really shouldn’t miss.

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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 #66 – Axiom Verge

More Info from Thomas Happ Games

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

TL;DR

  • Solid core combat mechanics with a great range of weapons
  • Visuals nail the retro look without feeling unnecessarily simple
  • Traversal mechanics (or lack thereof) end up becoming a big problem as the game goes on

Axiom Verge is a bit of a tough one to crack.  From a visual and combat mechanics standpoint, this is obviously a Metroid-inspired game, and in a lot of ways ends up surpassing what was done in those days.  The variety of weapons in particular is a real high point.  However, the game starts to drag as it goes on due to a lack of some traversal and map features that I’d consider standard in the genre, leading less to artificial difficulty and more to artificial time padding.  While the game is ultimately pretty good, those things that were missing were pretty damaging to my overall feel for the game.

Visually the game often impresses, even more so when they manage to throw in some pixel explosions.

I generally don’t try to hide the fact that I enjoy  Metroidvania games, so chalk this one up to another game I should have played a long time ago.  Coming into this, the main thing that I’d seen in the past about it were the visuals, and we’ll start there.  This is very obviously patterned more after the 8-bit style of the original Metroid, though in practice it ends up falling somewhere between the NES and SNES in overall visual style.  However, the care put into the visuals of the game elevate it above a lot of other similarly retro-inspired games.

It’s often the little details that can be pulled off in modern hardware that end up being the most impressive.  Bosses explode into pixel bits, covering the entire screen.  Warping effects give obvious hints that things are going very wrong, as well as hints that this game isn’t exactly 8-bit.  Enemy animations are simple, but very fluid throughout.  Weapon firing across a wide range of weapons all have unique effects that very plainly tell the player how a weapon works and where it will be most effective.  Overall, the game just looks damn good, even if it doesn’t look modern.

On the weapon front, things also continue to impress.  Rather than Metroid’s slim selection, Axiom Verge comes with a wide range of weapons that can be selected from at any time.  These range from your simple orb weapons to lock-on lightning beams to bouncing orbs to flails.  This is combined with a default radial selection menu that can be hopped in and out of with great speed to allow the player to quickly and effectively switch their weapon to take advantage of their current enemy’s weakness.  This is in effect the best part of the game where combat is no longer just run and gun, but often has wildly changing tactics even on a room to room basis.

Bosses are the first spot where the game starts to show obvious points of faltering.

I’ll be the first to admit that in my head the problems I have with the game generally feel like “old man complains about missing features”.  That being said, I’ve moved on from games that came out 30 years ago.  Padding time via artificial difficulty or re-traversal doesn’t feel nostalgic, it feels old.  That’s where things started to fall apart for me in this game.

However, despite bosses being visually impressive in scale they also start to show the first sign of weakness in the game.  Generally speaking each boss has one mechanic to worry about, and they fairly universally involve some sort of jumping mechanic.  For example, the boss above involves hiding behind the purple walls that block shots, then peaking out and shooting the boss from range.  A later boss involved an annoying sequence of pseudo-random projectiles that had to be avoided via teleporting.  The long and short of it is that the bosses are visually cool, but ultimately pretty simple.  Despite the typical pattern recognition of the genre, these just don’t live up to your Ridley or Kraid fights.

Get used to seeing these environments, because you will keep traversing them for hours.

This weakness is then exacerbated by some of the choices made in traversal mechanics.  The singular main issue for me in this entire game is that there is no fast travel, and this causes a cascade of issues.  As your character’s power curve advances, it just becomes a time waste to fight enemies in areas you had been to.  You know their pattern, they die quicker, they pose no danger, but you have to run through or past them.

Generally speaking, the lack of objective markers wouldn’t be a problem in this genre, but the lack of fast travel made the end of the game a chore.  By the end, I was basically doing circles around the game world to find the one spot that I could enter with a new tool, getting another new tool, then finding the next one spot I could now enter.  If a spot I hadn’t been able to get to was still closed I moved on.  There wasn’t much fun here, it just became the pattern that had to be done.

The real final problem was an expectation of how the map worked based on other games.  Typical Metroidvanias at least give some notification if there is a hidden pickup in a general area, leaving it to the player to puzzle out how to find it.  In Axiom Verge there is simultaneously no indicators and in a lot of places, no real in-world clue that there are hidden things either.  I found a not insignificant amount of treasure in the late game by accidentally teleporting too far and ending up in a wall that looked in no way passable or breakable.  For a genre built around exploration, those two things combined to just make the loot pattern feel really awkward compared to the norm.

The bee’s unamused look didn’t get any better as I proceeded to take it out.

So I suppose the question becomes, is this worth playing?  I would say yes, with the caveat being that you probably want more patience for very old missing mechanics than I generally have.  From a core fundamentals standpoint, this is a perfectly solid Metroidvania title.  The variety of weapons does a lot to push the player to explore and find new combat situations, and honestly does a lot to allow me to ignore the very real problems the game has around traversal.  However, if some of the problems I listed above sound like deal breakers, I’m probably fairly close to in agreement with you that this one is skippable.  However, it may be worth a look even with the knowledge that it may just get shelved.