Tag: action

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Game Ramblings #163 – Trigger Witch

More Info from Rainbite

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Windows

This is one of those rare situations where two types of games mixed together actually works out. The best way I can describe this is Link to the Past if it was a twin-stick shooter. At face value it doesn’t make much sense, but when you add in multiple weapons with upgrade paths you get enough of a power curve that it really fits into what you’d expect out of a Zelda style game.

It’s not too difficult to write this off as just a violent twin-stick shooter given the above video and that isn’t necessarily inaccurate. If you ignore the sort of story/meta game aspects of this, that is certainly a lot of it. The core twin-stick aspects are done really well. The guns are varied enough that you can find a set of weapons that both feel good to the pace of gameplay you want but still fit a bunch of different situations. Movement is tight in a way that you don’t often feel cornered while still giving you a get out of trouble dodge that you can use in tough situations. Basically, on its own the game probably would have been fun enough.

It’s where it starts to lean into its ARPG roots where it really starts to shine though. It’s not necessarily that it’s Zelda and full of items and stuff, but it brings in the things that make total sense within the gameplay at play here. The main overworld is definitely there, and that plays into the overall metagame. Besides getting cash from killing things, you’ve got weapon upgrades hidden all over the world that really encourage exploration. Those weapon upgrades then take cash to apply, which gets you into the main meta upgrade loop that worked so well in Zelda. There’s always a reason to be out killing things, so it never feels like wasted time even when you’re retraversing.

The dungeon loop is also the same, which is to say that it’s not really original but it’s still pretty fun. You still get keys, you still get a dungeon map, you still have some light puzzles, you still end the dungeon in a boss fight. Where they do kind of bend to something unique at least to this type of game is that the dungeons generally also have some kind of flying broom segment, where rather than being a twin-stick shooter you’re playing a vertical scrolling shooter. Again, it’s not necessarily that it’s unique on its own, but it brings an unusual little change to the gameplay to keep it fresh as you’re getting through things.

This is just one of those indie games that hits the right positive notes. It’s not that it’s incredibly unique, but it blends a few genres in a way that feels interesting without needing to push too many boundaries. It’s fast moving, tight to control, and doesn’t take itself seriously (….I mean come on, Mecha Stalin.). It’s super easy to just jump in and enjoy without really worrying too much about fussy mechanics, and after some of the longer games I’ve been playing recently it felt like just what I needed.

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Game Ramblings #158 – Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

More Info from Star Wars

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series

It’s been a bit since my last ramblings. I decided to do carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists at once, as one does. What that does is makes videogames surprisingly not very fun to play. When I was figuring out what I wanted to play first after getting my sutures out, this one was sitting there ready to go. It feels like it’s been forever since The Force Awakens, but the full 9 episode saga is here and it’s a lot of fun.

The Lego games have always just kind of been collectathons, but it surprised me how much this felt like a complete game, and not just a Legoified version of the movies like a lot of past games. There were some pretty obvious changes to the core combat mechanics as well as a much better expansion to the metagame between story segments that really made the whole thing work.

The biggest obvious change is that there’s ranged weapons everywhere! You’ve got blasters of every flavor, bows of all sorts, you can chuck your light saber like a whooshing boomerang. However, unlike The Force Awakens, which sometimes had ranged weapons but clumsy aiming due to the fixed camera angle, we’re now seeing a full third-person game. You’ve got all your typical trappings of shooters, such as ADS on the left trigger and full camera manipulation on the right stick. In doing this change, the game now feels like a modern title along the lines of something like a simple Ratchet & Clank, rather than a sort of clumsy Lego-themed isometric platformer.

The metagame is also just a lot more free flowing in a way that encourages the use of the typical large character roster of the series. You’ll jump between segments of free roam where you can use any purchased characters and segments of story where you’re restricted to relevant characters. In allowing the free roam segments, the game is doing a great job of slowing down the pace of the game in a way that is still fun. Where a typical Lego Star Wars title was around 10 hours, this one is about 20. While that is much longer, it now covers all nine movies instead of just a handful, so the pace slowing down is definitely necessary.

What you end up doing is completing a specific story segment, then being unleashed into what is essentially a movie-themed playground. Scattered around are all sorts of miscellaneous rewards, so it becomes a game of finding out how to get them all. Some spots are simply puzzles of choosing the right person to get to the glowing spot. Some of them are mini races or combat segments for a reward. Some of them are side quests where you interact with characters from the movies in fun ways in order to unlock them for play. However, the important thing is that it’s varied and quick to do. You’ll spend a few minutes per-reward, then move on to the next thing. It keeps things fresh so you aren’t stuck in one spot for long periods of time, but also provides a nice change from the purely linear story segments that you’re doing the rest of the time.

It’s also worth a mention that space combat is another one of the things that acts as a nice pace change. Some of the areas are Star-Fox inspired – such as the Death Star trench run – and some of the areas are distinctly open flight. Mechanically these are definitely simple. You’re basically firing a relatively large angle auto aim machine gun or firing a very generously homing proton torpedo. However, in all cases it’s another place I can point at where the segments are used as a way to breakup the pace of the game and keep the overall flow fresh.

Ultimately that’s the biggest thing about this title that I could point at as an improvement over past entries. You’re running through a bunch of story very quickly to cover nine movies, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming or boring at any point. Because the specifics of what you’re doing change so much, you don’t really have time to become bored with any specific type of gameplay. You kind of do one type of gameplay for a few minutes in a story mission, then go into free roam, then go into another story mission with completely different gameplay, then back to free roam. Because everything has some currency being given that allow you to get more stuff, it also never feels like you’re doing something unrewarding.

If you’re a fan of past Lego titles this is an easy recommendation. If you’re a fan of Star Wars this is an easy recommendation. However, more than that this feels like a much easier recommendation to the general game audience. This is a much more complete game than past titles. Rather than being a game that leans on its IP to be good, this feels like a generally good game that is instead boosted by its use of the IP. While the reports of severe development problems put a bit of a black eye on things, this game is showing a bit of hope that the Traveller’s Tales Lego series can be a bit thing again going forward.

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Shelved It #14 – Earth’s Dawn

More Info from oneoreight

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

I spent most of my time playing this in a state where I wanted to enjoy it and generally was enjoying it, and then I’d hit a boss battle and no longer be enjoying it. It wasn’t that the bosses were hard, but they just weren’t fun. I puzzled on it a bit, but when it hit me what was really feeling off to me, I knew it was time to shelve the game.

I really wanted this to fit into that sort of Odin Sphere / Muramasa slot in my brain, and for a while it did. Its combat is pretty similar in core focus. You’ve got a main melee chain, the ability to rapidly dodge, and a way to set enemies into temporary stun states. For the first couple of hours, that was more than enough to be fun. I was going around getting comfortable with chains, getting comfortable with some of the basic enemy types, getting comfortable with the overall flow of the game.

Outside of combat, the game has both solid gearing and skill setup that I was enjoying a lot. Gearing is purely crafting-based, but had a solid number of archetypes to choose from. Guns could range from shotguns to rifles to uzis. Swords could be different lengths and weights. Overall it allowed me to craft in a direction that fit my favored play style. The skill setup was the more interesting part. Skills are basically two parts, earning it and the ability to equip it. Equipping is purely having enough available resources to do so, but the resources to do so came purely out of killing enemies in the world. The skill earning itself came from completing missions quickly. Those two in conjunction led to a place where you would identify the missions that currently had the skills you wanted to get combining into then completing them with full exploration to maximize your resource gain. The overall flow that came out of that reminded me a lot of something that honestly would have worked well on the Switch. You can play this game for minutes or hours, and in both cases you can complete some number of that core game loop to at least make valuable forward progress no matter the case.

So at this point you may be wondering why I shelved it. Over time I was noticing that on occasion I was getting into places where my dodges were missing when I was surrounded by enemies. For a while I chalked it up to multiple enemies causing me to get into stun states or something to that effect, and figured I just needed to be more careful. I then started noticing it happening on bosses, so I began to experiment a bit. What I ended up figuring out is that it was doing such aggressive button caching that I would be able to queue up multiple attacks in my chain ahead, and then not be able to interrupt that to dodge. When a dodge may only give you fractions of a second to execute it, having that all backed up behind attacks was deadly and it completely changed how I was approaching the game.

When I can’t cancel out of an attack into an immediate dodge, I go straight into Souls mode, and frankly I don’t like that kind of gameplay. Rather than aggressively attacking, I sit back and wait. I look for tells, then do my dodge in isolation, then get a few safe quick attacks in and back off. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It’s boring. But, it’s safe. When playing aggressively results in death and significant time loss, it’s not a decision. You just play safe. Sure, I could grind away in side missions and power my way through, but that’s also not particularly fun. When I shelve games it’s usually a single cause – a small mechanic, something dumb that just gets under my skin. This was it. If I was going to be playing slow just to not die, why am I playing the game?

Like most games I shelve, I’m not really shelving the game because it was bad. It’s ultimately because the developers made a decision I didn’t like, so that’s kind of the way it is. On the other hand, I wonder how much more I’d be enjoying those moments given a dodge that guaranteed immediate fire and interrupted whatever I was queued up to do. That small of a change is often the difference between me liking a game or not, and in this case it went the wrong way.