Tag: platformer

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Game Ramblings #103 – Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

More Info from Playtonic Games

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

Where the original Yooka-Laylee was a clear love letter to 3D collectathons like Banjo Kazooie, this game is a love letter to 2D platformers like Donkey Kong Country. With the loss of a dimension of movement, we’ve ended up with a much more solid game. The levels are filled with great platforming and secrets to find. The overworld is more than just a set, and has a ton of puzzles to solve. However, the Impossible Lair of the name ended up being a bit of a head scratcher, and marred the ending of what was ultimately a really fun game.

This is through and through a Donkey Kong Country game in everything but IP. There’s a bunch of 2D levels with feathers instead of bananas, gold coins instead of KONG letters, feather-covered barrels, obnoxiously slow swimming levels, etc. Hell, there’s even a roll with an intentional jump that can be triggered in mid-air if you’re quick enough. However, despite being a mechanical copy, it definitely does a great job of getting those mechanics extremely right.

If there’s one thing I’d consistently point at as the difference between good and bad platformers, it would be the feel of momentum in the game, and this one gets it really right. It’s not just that running feels right. It’s little things like extra speed from rolling giving you extra jump height. It’s jumping off a platform to the right, switching direction in mid air, and smoothly moving back left to get to the platform above you without bonking your head. It’s smooth sequences like a roll off a ledge into a mid-air jump into a spin to give you just that little bit of extra distance to get to that platform with some hidden secret. It’s timing your jump off a moving platform to get a little extra momentum to get a hard to reach feather. All of these little interactions mean so much to a 2D platformer, and they’re done extraordinarily well here.

The thing that Yooka-Laylee doesn’t copy from DKC is their overworld. The one in place here is platformer overworld on steroids. It’s not just that the overworld here is non-linear, although that’s pretty neat itself. It’s that the overworld is literally filled with puzzles and interactable elements, a lot of which have an impact on the levels. See a level sitting in a pool of water? Throw an ice bomb at it, and now you have a level variant covered in ice. Have a level that takes place on a bridge? Lift the bridge and now you’re climbing the bridge instead of crossing a bridge. It becomes a clever way to get reuse out of levels without feeling repetitive while also providing a nice change of pace in puzzle solving between levels.

You mean I wasn’t supposed to be playing a Game Boy game?

There’s also a ton of collectable tonics in the overworld to puzzle out. Some of these may help or hurt you, with things like checkpoint count reductions or increased movement speed. Some of them are just silly, like the Game Boy color and resolution filters above. These are just another fun little thing to go looking for as a break between levels.

The overworld basically ends up being a nice way to break up the gameplay. You aren’t always in full speed platforming, and you aren’t always in full on puzzle solving mode. The cadence of doing a level, then doing a puzzle ended up being a great way to pace out periods of high stress and keep me playing at a pretty level clip.

These claws are as crushing as having to repeat completed sections of the Impossible Lair.

All that said, the “Impossible Lair” of the title had me scratching my head a bit. This level is effectively the end boss fight of the game, and consists of a no-checkpoint level with multiple boss fights sandwiched around longer stretches of high difficulty platforming. If you die, you go right back to the beginning with no skip forward in progress.

One of the core ideas behind it is that completing levels and searching the overworld gives you bees that act as a shield for this level. One damage hit = one bee. Running out of bees then dipped into the Yooka+Laylee pair mechanic, and you could indefinitely run until you lost both of them. What I suspect this was supposed to do was make the level easier to complete. What it instead did was simply just make my practice runs longer. Ultimately it didn’t really matter if I had 1 or 100 hits of damage to take going through a level if it was new to me. I was probably going to take some hits, I was probably going to learn the things to avoid pretty quickly, and on my next run through, I was going to avoid taking (most) damage. This generally stood as accurate, as each run into new areas generally was getting me 10-15% farther into the level.

The issue with all of this is that it was extremely boring. By my 3rd run I was already past 50% of level completion, which meant that each run through the level was already putting me at 5+ minutes of action that I’d already completed. Dying that deep into the level was a huge waste of time, and instead of feeling challenged, I simply felt bored. It’s not difficulty for the sake of pulling off skill-based mechanics. It’s difficulty for the sake of memorizing a long sequence of things to avoid. That kind of gameplay is just uninteresting to me.

What it really felt like was needed was a skill-based checkpoint system for the level. Complete an area with no damage taken? Great, here’s a checkpoint. You’ve proven you’ve mastered this area, so stop wasting your time. That little change both solves the boredom problem AND would have allowed them to make the lair experience longer and more compelling, rather than have it sit in the experience it is now.

Weird ending aside though, this was a fantastically fun game. Despite the fact that we recently got the Switch port of DKC: Tropical Freeze, I really am happy to see more quality straight 2D platformers. We see a lot of Metroidvania-esque titles at this point, but we really don’t see many games like this. Despite my misgivings about the end, this one still very strongly falls into the recommended category. There’s a ton of game to enjoy up to the end, and for that it’s worth the play.

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Game Ramblings #102 – Iconoclasts

More Info from Konjak/Bifrost

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

It’s no surprise that I like Metroidvanias, so hopping at another indie take on the genre is never something I’m going to argue. A lot of the time it can feel like they’re trying to out difficulty each other instead of just having compelling gameplay. Luckily, Iconoclasts definitely falls into the latter category. It combines some solid gunplay with interesting puzzle mechanics to really be a standout entry in the genre.

The big thing to notice was really how variety was pulled into this game, in a way that isn’t necessarily typical of the genre. It has a few things that are your typical “door opener” type of upgrade, but the more often than not, upgrades were used to solve full room puzzles that ended with the room being permanently traversable in a fast way, rather than being something that has to be run through every time. It was a nice difference to the norm where retraversal for new upgrades or new paths was generally going to be done as quick as possible to minimize wasted time.

A lot of this is built into the player’s weapon set – a giant wrench for melee, and a set of a pistol, grenade launcher, and beam pistol for ranged. Some examples of upgrades include an electric charge that is used to raise and lower platforms, the wrench’s built in ability to turn bolts to open doors, or a spin maneuver used to quickly crank gears. The electric charge is also built into the grenade weapon – any launched grenades while charged gain an electric charge – and some blocks that can hold a charge. This wide range of abilities are all built into the puzzle sets, where some puzzles require multiple combinations of the skill range to complete.

In practice, it works extremely well. Puzzle rooms are pretty well segregated from combat, allowing the player the time to think and plan for how to complete the room. The puzzles are also more often than not focused around a new power, giving the player a good chance to reenforce the use of any new skill.

These abilities also extend into combat. Each of the ranged weapons have a secondary charge mode – for example, the pistol charges into a shotgun blast, the grenade into a missile – that are used as ways to take out enemies in unique ways. This is particularly important in boss fights, where they will generally be specifically weak to either a specific mode of a weapon, or a specific area in the combat arena. Because of this setup, the bosses are more often than not a puzzle in itself, alongside needing to it out.

This is probably the point where the game really earned its fun for me. The game is challenging but fair, instead of being difficult for the sake of difficulty. I definitely died a few times, but it was either because I was being careless, or because I was learning new mechanics. Bosses will hit you if you aren’t careful, but you’re not going to die in a couple hits. You’ll die to trash if you’re not avoiding damage, but you’ll be fine if you’re paying attention. More often than not, the bosses also have adds that spawn health. It feels like the developers want you to win, and give you ways to do so, as long as you’re generally moving forward and learning as you go. That difference there has often been a rare thing to find in the independent scene in the past few years.

Add this one to the list of Metroidvanias that I’ve been playing over the last few years, and more importantly, put this one up at the top. It was able to combine really solid combat, really solid puzzles, and gorgeous visuals into a package that punches above its weight. This one avoided the indie trap of being exceedingly difficult, and instead crafted a great experience that was challenging but fair. This game took a long time to come out, but the effort definitely shows, and I’m hopeful that whatever comes next out of the team’s brains can be similarly positive in whatever genre they pick.

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Game Ramblings #100 – Indivisible

More Info from Lab Zero Games

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

I’m glad that this game was a milestone number for my ramblings, because it’s the kind of game I really live for. It’s both instantly recognizeable, but completely unique. It’s kind of an ARPG, kind of a JRPG, kind of a Metroidvania, but really it’s none of those things alone and all of those things together. It takes a bunch of pieces that shouldn’t work together, mashes them together, and spits something out that is phenomenal.

The first thing that really stood out was that the game was flat out gorgeous, though that isn’t much of a surprise. This is the team behind Skullgirls, which gameplay aside, was always known for its visual style. Right from the start, it’s a great mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D character art that pops like very few games do. Particularly in battle, the animation is all ridiculously well crafted hand-drawn art that really brings a bright and fun visual style to life. Amidst the chaos of battle, it’s all a joy to watch.

However, it’s that battle that really pulls you into the game. This is a bizarre mix of two RPG subgenres that somehow mash together. On the one hand, the battle system is very much an almost ATB-style system, where the characters charge up attack slots at different speeds up to a cap. However, those attack slots are not your typical menu slots – they’re instead button presses tied to each character, which can be comboed with directional inputs to do any sort of mix of functionality. This is expanded by different characters having different capabilities to really bring a simple but extremely deep combat system to life. It’s not unlike Valkyrie Profile in a lot of ways, but it definitely feels very much its own.

For example, Ajna can break enemies that are shielding with an up+down combo. I used a healer named Ginseng that built up power with straight attacks, then activated a power scaled group heal with their up attack. For flying enemies, I had an archer named Zebei that could shoot enemies out of the sky to be attacked by the rest of the party. At one point I even had a dog named Lanshi whose sole fight pattern was to bark at the enemy party, dealing large AoE damage. This is backed by a charged special attack bar that the entire party could use to do significantly large and flashy attacks to all enemies, like the one below.

On the defensive side, it’s all timing based. Correctly timing a button press when being attacked can block incoming damage, starting with partial block and growing all the way to character heals by the end of the game. This ability to block damage means that missing the button press is absolutely hazardous, as the game is scaled around the player preventing incoming damage as much as possible. A good player will basically never take damage, while a lesser player will likely need to grind a bit to become stronger, so this also works as a pretty solid built-in difficulty mechanic to allow better players to simply move forward.

In general, this battle system was just straight up fun. I spent a decent amount of time when grabbing new characters playing around to see how they felt, but over time settled on a party that really fit my preferred style. For me it was all about fast charging characters with good single target attacks, backed by Ginseng’s healing capabilities, and very little defense other than good timing. It fit a really fun sort of zerg rush pattern that I leaned hard into by the end of the game.

The Metroidvania aspect of the game is generally the weaker part of this mash of genres. It’s not that it’s implemented poorly – the levels all have a ton of side paths that are slowly unlocked as the player gains new abilities. It’s that the level layouts don’t really feel tuned to Metroidvania-style retraversal. It was pretty much without fail that I’d start on one end of a region map, get all the way to the far other side of the region map, and hit a story block with no new power helpful to the current region, requiring me to go completely back across the map to get to a ship and move to a different region. More often than not, the new paths opened with new abilities were typically smaller side paths that existed to collect upgrades, and not necessarily new paths for traversing the level in a different fashion. By doing this extreme side to side layout design, it really ended up making me retraverse the levels with nothing new to do, rather than the more Metroid-typical pattern of earning powers often, and traversing a region with full new paths. Things opened up a bit more by the end of the game, but by that point it kind of felt like too little too late.

That being said, the traversal not being great didn’t minimize my enjoyment of the game. This was ultimately one of my rare PS4 platinums, clocking in at a bit under 20 hours to get the full trophy set. Within that, I got to experience a bunch of great combat, some fantastically flashy and memorable bosses, and more than a few laughs at the party’s expense. For me this is even better, as I was a backer of their Indiegogo campaign, so watching this one come to life, and having it live up to my hopes is something that I’m always wishing for. At this point, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a proper non-mobile Valkyrie series entry out of Square, and if Indivisible is the way that someone runs with the gameplay, I’m certainly excited about the end result.