Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 10

Game review: Psychonauts for Steam

I need to apologize for the long, long gap in between posts and explain myself before I get to the actual review. You see, I’ve bought three games, and in all three cases, I bounced off of them hard before I could get anywhere close enough to write a review. I’m just about done with a book for review, but lately it seems like I only read at work during breaks. Otherwise, I can’t seem to make myself sit to read.

Because of the gap between posts, it annoys me to be making this a negative review, but it can’t be helped. Let me start by saying that I bought Psychonauts around six years back and found the controller support to be pretty bad. I tried playing with mouse and keyboard, but I had major issues with the camera controls, leading to me rage quitting very early into the game. Recently, I saw someone comment that the controller support had been improved, so I loaded it back up and started over. I almost wish I hadn’t.

I don’t have any nostalgia for this game, or for Double Fine. I’m coming at this as someone who’s heard endless praise for this title as one of the greats, and went in mostly flying blind. What I found was a mess that gathers all the worst habits of early 3D platforming and covers them in an oh-so-wacky wrapper.

The story goes that Rasputin, or Raz, wants to be a Psychonaut, so he sneaks into a super secret camp for psychic cadets. Despite being told that he can’t participate without his parent’s permission, the instructors all let him do so anyway because…because. Over the course of one day, Raz uncovers a plot to steal brains and use them to TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Hi-larious hi-jinx ensue.

*Sigh*

I suppose I wouldn’t have been so annoyed by the story if the controls had been at least a little more refined. I could say it’s not so much the controls by themselves as it is the way the camera keeps taking control from me even while I’m using the right stick to try and find a viable path ahead. But even setting aside the misbehaving camera, there were times when I’d press a button and the game wouldn’t react. So I might be climbing a tower and need to make a precisely timed jump, only to step off the edge instead and plunge many floors, cutting off five minutes of painfully earned progress.

Another example is the target lock, which at times just decides it doesn’t want to work. It might just spin the camera away from the enemy I need to shoot, sending my blast out into empty space. Dealing with earlier enemies who do half a health point of damage, this is already annoying. But near the end of the game, there are floods of small enemies who burst into clouds of poison gas, inverting the controls, blurring the screen, and dealing 4 points of damage with every hit. So being unable to target them until they’re already close enough to cause AOE-type harm is infuriating.

So much of this game’s other sins could have been a lot more forgivable if I wasn’t constantly walking over ledges or randomly mounting and sliding down staircase handrails. It’s because of that constant friction of wrestling with the controls that I could never cut any other part of the game any slack.

The graphics, for instance, are pretty bad, with character’s faces sporting visible seams where the textures don’t quite meet. Environments have blurry textures, looking more like a PS2 era game than XBOX 360. The music is okay, except it loops in such short bursts that it quickly became grating. I can thank this game’s loop for making me hate the 1812 Overture, and I love that song. Or I did. And the voice acting…I lost track of how many times I found myself groaning “God, will you please shut up already?”

(Side note: I’m still prickling at a line tossed out as a “funny joke” that goes like: “And remember, I am a Frenchman. Nothing less than the most delicate of delicacies could harm my delicate French stomach.” Oh, hahaha. This shit wasn’t even funny when it was written, and now it’s aged like cottage cheese left in a refrigerator for all this time.)

I also can’t forget that like so many early platforming games desperate to pad out their length, Psychonauts has a checklist of useless shit to collect. To progress the story, Raz must rank up by collecting Psi Cards and Psi Orbs, or Fragments, or by collecting Emotional Baggage, (oof) and he must buy equipment using (heavy, heavy sigh) Psychic Arrowheads as currency.

I actually got up to a point in the game without buying a so-called Cob-Web Spinner, and that halted my progress. I realized that I could either back out of that level and go hunting for five hundred more arrowheads in the night time phase of the camp, (which includes more telekinetic bears and adds pyrokinetic mountain lions because why the fuck not) or I could restart the game and use an early training session to grind out enough currency to just buy everything in the store all at once. So I went with option B. Yes, losing progress was preferable to the prospect of a much slower grind.

(To be fair, though, I realized after restarting that I could have just gone back into the earlier training session using another plot device called a Brain Tumbler. So, that’s on me for not thinking through my problem before hitting the reset button.)

Somewhere around the mid-point of the game, Raz picks up a portal that allows him to access other people’s minds. Which, again, with better controls, might have been a good time. One of the first forays into a brain is a giant mutant fish, and their mental space is the set of a giant monster movie, with Raz acting as the kaiju Gogaroo. It could have worked and been a funny rampage through a fishy metropolis. Instead it was an aggravating slog to try and hit little enemies between excursions to hunt down every last stupid collectible item. The TV news program breaking in on the gameplay to track Raz’s progress started off mildly amusing, but when it kept breaking in for another cut scene, and then another, it just added more friction to what already felt like an unpleasant intimate experience with sandpaper.

Each of these mental romps ends in a boss fight, and they all have a gimmick. Until you grasp the gimmick, you can’t do any damage. One fight has me tossing spears at a boss bull, only to remove them and use “confusion grenades” in combination with the spears to protect the same bull from an evil matador. It sounds neat in theory, but in practice, with these shit controls, it’s another teeth grinding slog.

Then we get to the big finale, and it’s a shit show circus. I’d seen comments from the game’s fans who said the last level was bad, but I didn’t really appreciate how bad until I was struggling with the controls, the camera, and the environment all at the same time.

After all that work, the ending is about as satisfying as a wet fart right after I just put on clean panties. I find myself struggling to find anything nice to say, but I’m drawing a blank. This is exactly the sort of 3D platforming garbage that sent me off to PCs for a better alternative with first person shooters, full motion games, and point and click adventures. Since then 3D games have evolved and addressed issues with poor controls while pulling away from the “collect 900 MacGuffins” method of padding their slim offerings. But this is a relic of an older, sadder time, and I feel bad for having completed it.

I’m giving Psychonauts 2 stars. Yeah, it’s a beloved artifact for some, but to me, it’s just proof of how much better games are today without all the extra baggage attached, pun intended.

I’m going to talk about mobile games now

When I first got my Kindle tablet, and later my first Android phone, I imagined that I would have a new and near endless source of review material. In theory it’s a pool of free games so I can have a new review every week to fill in the gaps made by my lowered PC and PS4 game budget. (And by my frankly abysmal recent track record with reading books for review.)

It sounded good, in theory, but in reality I ended up deleting a lot of games within hours of starting them. Some were puzzle games that insisted on showing me what gems/candy/critters to match if I even hesitated for one second and gave no option to turn “idiot mode” off. Others built their platforms around watching ads for other games. (Some games have asked me to watch no less than ten ads per day just to pick up daily reward items that other games gave just for signing in.) If I delete something that fast, I can’t really review it, can I? No, that simply won’t do.

There are games that I didn’t delete, and I kept thinking to review them, except I didn’t want to recommend any of them. I’m playing them regularly, most certainly am getting something out of playing them, and don’t see a reason to quit. And yet, I hesitate to offer them out and say, “You should play these, too.”

I think it comes down to two reasons, which I will name and then illustrate with examples from each of the games that are still holding my attention even as they frustrate me with free mobile mechanics. For now, the reasons I hesitate to endorse these better examples of the free market are their shockingly high prices for cheap digital tat and their built-in methods of hindering progress just to drag out the whole experience.

Let’s start with the high prices. As of this writing, Summoners War has a pack of 3,000 crystals for 109.99 euros. This may sound like a lot of a premium currency, but it’s around what I can make in two weeks with daily play, and it can be spent in less than an hour just by summoning a few extra monsters, most of whom will be garbage duplicates.

Another pack is offering 3 Devilmons and 2 five star Rainbowmons along with 1,000 crystals and 50,000 mana stones (the base currency for the game) for 54.99. This one is a bit more devious because of those special monsters. Devilmons are extremely rare and are needed to upgrade the spell abilities of monsters. (They’re supposed to be saved up for sup rare monsters, but I’ve seen new players mistakenly use them on common monsters, thus wasting what is in essence another form of in-game premium currency.)

Just to fully skill-up all of one monster’s spells requires ten to twelve of these Devilmons, so it’s an obvious ploy to extort funds from people desperate for progress. The same goes for five star Rainbowmons, who take forever to grind in monster upgrades, or through purchases from the in-game shops. You need five of them for each monster raised to the final tier of six star monsters. If you have three five star monsters and need two more to make the upgrade, this package creates the temptation to fork over the price of a premium game…for a purchase that will be used two minutes later.

But if you think that’s bad, head on over to Centuria War, the card fighting cousin of Summoners War. As you play, you unlock legendary monsters, and that in turn unlocks a temporary chance to to buy ONE CARD, 3,500 crystals, and 5,000 mana stones. This package is 53.99, and gives one level to the monster you just unlocked. But maybe you are hesitant to pay that much for something that will last three seconds. Well there’s a timer informing you that you only have 6 days to buy it before you lose the chance. So that’s a shitty product offered at a ludicrous price attached to a FOMO (fear of missing out) timer to prod you into making a bad decision. You can hopefully begin to see why I’m reluctant to endorse any of this. I have a strong enough willpower to ignore these kinds of offers, but I don’t know you people well enough to think you have the same level of self-control and willpower.

Over in Grand Summoners, which sounds related to the first two examples but is no relation, there is a pack of five separate currencies, which individually will buy maybe one item in game through their respective shops or be used to upgrade one character one time. This pack is 89.99, close to the asking price for a new console game. (Which is fodder for a whole other rant, but I digress.)

In some cases I want to give money to the game makers to pay them back for the time spent playing their creations, but at these prices, and considering how little is being given for such exorbitant rates. I’d rather keep playing for free forever, no matter how punishing that feel at times.

On that note, let’s move on to the grind for the sake of grind. Almost all of these games require you to level up monsters/heroes/characters by using up more of the same summons. In this regard, Summoners War is perhaps the most forgiving initially because you can level up monsters by feeding them just about anything. Low-level monsters of the same types can also offer a skill level up for spell. It’s possible to raise the level of, say a Water Fairy, with other fairies from fire, water, wind, light, or dark. But once a monster gets to the four star range, growing to the final 6 star cap of level 40 takes a nightmarish amount of grind time and resources. I’ve been playing for two years and just now have 10 6 star monsters. Yes, if I paid for packs I might get there sooner, but playing for free means enduring endless aggravating grinds.

This isn’t even taking into account higher level monsters who have rare summoning levels. I can either wait eons to get resources to skill-up on monster, or use the aforementioned super-rare Devilmons to shorten that grind to a few months instead. MONTHS, y’all, and that’s the “convenient” path for playing the game for free.

All the other games I play require getting summons of the exact same type. In Dragonball Dokkan Battle, if I want to upgrade my “Tournament of Power Android 18,” I need 5 copies of the same card plus an enormous buttload of resource currencies. I can’t use another Android 18 card, even from the same element type. It has to be that exact same card, which has a 2% chance of dropping.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS! You see, this hero card has a “Dokkan Awakened” form that requires making another awakened character of the same type. S to get to that level, I need to get six more cards of the same type (The base card plus five for skill unlocks) and use up even more resources. (Which, btw, one of those resources is a medal that I can only get by playing side content missions. I need ten medals, but to get them, I have to play the same level over and over, in this case close to forty times to get those ten medals. That wasn’t fun, it was tedious.)

If Android 18’s card was always available, this might still seem doable even with the shitty drop rates, but Dokkan Battle has so many cards in their roster that they archive character cards to keep the summon rates of any one card above .01%. So I have to not only grind summons over and over while the card is active. Every time I log in, I have to check the available pool of cards to see if I even have a chance of upgrading. I love Dragonball Dokkan Battle, but this level of bullshit has me walking away for months at a time because I can’t progress through any of the side content without first grinding up a whole team of heroes for fucking ages.

But if I thought that was tedious, Lost Centuria goes for the “hold my beer” approach with respect to how its monsters level up. The first level up requires another card, and the next requires two. After that it goes five, ten, twenty, and so on. So, for a low level monster, it’s more likely that you can get to level ten within a reasonable time frame. But for a rare or legendary monster? Fugedaboutit. Every summon I’m begging for just the monsters I already have, and of course I get something new. So instead of waiting to grind one new monster, now I have a whole stack of monsters too low level to use for now, and with no way to level them up other than suffer the slow grind.

Lost Centuria is a game centered primarily around real-time PVP, where each round costs 40 points of one currency to play, and each day starts with 200. While there are ways to buy more with base currencies or win it through various awards, once I use up that pool of currency, it recovers at the rate of one point every 4 minutes. So just when I’m really having fun, the game goes, “Nope, you’ll have to stop and grind away time before you can have more fun.” Of course there’s a package offering 200 more PVP points for a mere 10.99 along with some other goodies. That almost sounds reasonable until you realize you’re spending 11 bucks just to buy 15 more minutes of game time.

But let’s move on to the greatest source of irritation for me, the tie-in event summons. Grand Summoners had a Yu Yu Hakusho tie-in. This is one of my all-time favorite anime series, and I had just watched it over again on Netflix with my hubby. So yes, obviously I wanted to get in and summon some of my favorite characters, but I ended up walking away from it once I started doing the math. Even if I bought a summoning pack for extra chances, the “special summon” portal that teased chances of getting Yusuke, Kuwabara, Kurama, and Hiei also dropped common trash characters from the main game. I still gave it my best shot and used up all the summons I’d been saving up for a special occasion, and I didn’t get a single one of the tie-in characters, nor did I even get any good summons from the game’s main cast.

Along a similar vein, Summoners War held a crossover event with Street Fighter, and oh how I wanted to add a Chun Li to my roster. I didn’t even care that I’d have to buy up twelve more Devilmons to make her playable in end game content. I just wanted her. She was my main for three generations of Street Fighter, so I wanted her like no other digital tat toy. At the time, I had 300 mystical scrolls saved up, and the summoning circle had an added option claiming to have higher odds of summoning Chun Li, Ryu, Ken, Dhalsim, or Bison. I used up all my scrolls, and then all of my crystals, and I never got Chun Li, or any of the fighters, for that matter. I ended up rage quitting for two months, and every time I fight in the arena against other players and see any of the Street Fighter crew, it brings back bitter memories.

Before I close this out, I want to stress that these are games I play actively, some of them every day or even multiple times per day. In Summoners War, I’ve logged hundreds of hours over the course of two years. I’m just getting into Lost Centuria, but I’ve logged in every day to do the PVP and complete enough daily missions to get more of the premium currency for free. It can fairly be said that my time in the games does not feel wasted.

Still at the end of the day, I think all of these games would be better if they just charged a flat rate fee and got rid of all these grinding mechanics and absurdly priced transactions. (Because you can’t call packages selling for between 30 and 100 euros microtransactions, at least not with a straight face.) More to the point, these are games aimed at kids and teens, who have poor impulse control when it comes to buying stuff. I can’t recommend this kind of game to them, or to people who have addictive personalities.

That might still leave the door open to suggesting these game to other people, but I can’t do it. I play them and enjoy them. But would I recommend them to you? No. I think the mobile market is in a sad state when so many games are modeled on exploitation of the player base, and when Apple gets praised for launching a subscription service of curated games that drop all these toxic practices even though they were the same corporate monster that created this environment inside their precious walled garden in the first place.

Folks, I’m a gamer. I love everything from 3D fighters to puzzle games to 2D platformers and RPGs. I love that I can whip out my phone whenever I’m bored and pull up something to play. I just wish most of the market wasn’t slathering over my wallet like starving vultures over a nearly dead horse.

Game review: The Legend of Bum-Bo for Steam

It’s funny that in my last blog post, I mentioned The Binding of Isaac for both being aggravating and entertaining. While searching for a new puzzle or card game to play in between shooters and more hardcore stuff like Dark Souls, I randomly ran across The Legend of Bum-Bo on sale on Steam. The description for it is a deck-building puzzle RPG, and a prequel to all the various flavors of Isaac. Having seen trailers and gameplay preview videos, I had some idea of what I was going into, but I had no clue how fast the gameplay loop would hook me. There’s still problems that bugged me, but this is for sure going to be one of my more positive reviews in a while.

Before getting into the details, I think a warning of sorts is fair. Edmund McMillen games all have a certain level of shit in them. I don’t mean a bad game element. I mean feces and urine are quite common in his stuff. If I ever interviewed Ed, one of my early questions would have to be “did you get trapped in a sewer while tripping on acid or shrooms?” This game is no exception, so if you find weaponized poo and pee offensive, Ed’s games are not for you. And that’s okay.

But to begin with, Bum-Bo’s game isn’t so much a direct prequel as it is a setting imagined by Isaac before his mother’s psychotic break with reality forced him into hiding. Each level is made inside a diorama with puppets dangling from strings or sticks, and pretty much every element is constructed from paper and/or cardboard. It sounds dumb described in mere words like this, but in practice, the treatment gives most levels a kind of charm that was missing from Isaac’s top-down twin-stick shooter.

The term deck-builder is perhaps not the right choice, as it creates for me an image of a card deck. Instead, Bum-Bo has a short stack of spells that are acquired by clearing floors from each “Chapter.” These chapters end with a boss, who offers either another spell or a trinket, which can augment Bum-Bo’s spells or grant buffs like improved attack damage, stat bonuses, or extra movement. (ie: action points.) There’s lots of other effects to trinkets, but half the fun of this game is in finding new stuff and seeing what it does. For this reason, I’m going to be light on details to let you discover what all the good stuff is yourself.

To cast spells, Bum-Bo has to match tiles on a 9 by 4 grid. The lines are shifted up and down or left and right, with a minimum of 4 tiles matching required to get a reward. Brown mana will toss out poop shields to block incoming attacks. Yellow pee droplets will recover action points, and green snot will bind an enemy in place, preventing them from attacking or even moving for one turn. Both grey teeth and white bones will act as ranged weapons, dealing out 1 damage for matching 4 tiles. But matching more tiles on bones will allow Bum-Bo to throw more bones in a single turn, while matching more than 4 teeth will increase the damage of a single attack. Match seven tiles or more, and both of these tile types will unleash some very interesting mega-attacks.

Oh, but lest I forget, certain stat bonuses will increase the base damage of both puzzle attacks. Combining these bonuses with similar spells and trinkets can result in a normal attack scaling from a measly 1 damage into a far more respectable 5 or 6. We’re talking one-shot attacks for everyone but bosses. It’s good stuff, y’all.

Beyond the immediate effects of matching tiles, each tile also offers up a type of colored mana. (Brown, yellow, green, grey, and white. Oh, and there’s also hearts, which are about as useless as they are in Captain Planet. I kid! OR DO I?) These mana points are what power spells, and this is where things get interesting because even after using up all of Bum-Bo’s action points, it’s possible to use spells. For the starting character Bum-Bo the Brave, this amounts to adding one or two more attacks per turn, but that can help to keep the incoming waves of enemies at bay.

The first time through the game, there’s only one dungeon to complete, leading to unlocking a second dungeon or “chapter” as well as a new character, Bum-Bo the Nimble. This second character has a spell to remove a tile from the board, and so it becomes possible to toss out spells AND also manipulate the board to keep getting more action points or attacks.

Two rounds later, Bum-Bo the Weird is unlocked, bringing with him one spell to copy tiles, and another that gathers all the tiles of the same type to fling them as a ranged weapon. The more of the same tile gets thrown, the higher the damage. Additionally, each time he kills an enemy, he gets another action point.

It’s at this point that it becomes possible to pick a path through the tiles, dishing out massive damage in each room without ever once letting the enemies take a turn. This right here is what keeps me up at all hours of the night, trying to pull off a perfect run where no one gets to move in any dungeon except my man Bum-Bo.

It’s harder than it sounds because the more times the game is played, the more the difficulty is cranked up with the introduction of new bosses and combinations of some truly dickish enemies. Some can steal moves and/or block your use of your best spells. Some are just straight up immune to spells or puzzle damage, while others recover health or cast shields to protect their…comrades? Co-workers? I don’t really know the organizational structure of video game dungeons. But my point is, when I get wiped in a losing run by a cheap attack, and I don’t even have time to lament before I’ve started a new game to keep chasing that perfect run. It’s just that addictive.

For as much fun as some characters are, others are kind of annoying to try and win with. Bum-Bo the Stout gains bonus mana for matching tiles, but at the end of each turn, he loses everything. If there’s nothing on the grid to sustain him, Bum-Bo the Stout can have a run end very badly for him very quickly, and there’s not much you can do to turn it around.

Then there’s Bum-Bo the Dead, who has the mana costs for spells change each time the spells are cast, meaning every spell use is a gamble on whether you’ll have the right mana type to power the next cast. His ability to manipulate the tiles is great, except when all of them require the same mana type, and suddenly you can’t get that tile to drop. Then it’s turn after turn of groaning “Can I just have four poops already?!” (Side note: video games make us say some weird things sometimes, don’t they? Like “okay, first I’ll drop the poop shield, and now here’s a booger bomb, and I’ll finish up with a bone in your face.”)

Next is Bum-Bo the Empty who–I shit you not–swaps spells on every floor. The game still offers you new spells after beating a floor, but they’re meaningless because the spell list will swap without you even getting to try them for one floor. Even if you somehow find one spell that doesn’t suck or works well with another, the next floor, you’re back to a waist-high stack of garbage.

Here is we get to the other trait of McMillen’s games that I’m not nearly so fond of, and that’s his quasi-masochistic need to find ways to fuck over the player with random bullshit. Just as Isaac can take a pill or an item that poisons him or saps his attack power, these variations on Bum-Bo are less about making a strategy as they are dealing with a constant stream of dick moves invented by RNGesus. They weren’t fun in Isaac, and they aren’t any more fun with Bum-Bo.

At this point I’ve unlocked all the characters, including the free DLC addition, Bum-Bo the Lost. I had to make it through the first three dungeons without taking damage to do it, and that was not easy. For all that work, I was kind of expecting something OP like Bum-Bo the Weird, and instead, I’ve yet to make it past the first dungeon with him because he’s so fragile. There’s got to be a trick to turn him into a badass, I’m sure of it, but now he’s kind of aggravating. I feel like “This is my reward for managing a flawless run? Meh! Meh, indeed!” Ah well, if I never get the hang of him, at least there’s other Bum-Bo’s I still want to play.

Much like with Isaac in all his DLC flavors, I long for the chance to do a real RPG character creation. I don’t mean mods, either. Give me an option in the game to pick a set of skill points to divvy up and make my own character, and then give me a set of spells to start off with. The rest can still be added via RNG, but let me decide what stats to Min-Max and what initial spells to load my fighter with. That way, even as I’m slaying the same hordes over and over, I feel like I have some control over my starting point.

To finally round out the list of complaints, it also kind of sucks that despite adding all these different enemies and bosses and variant forms, there’s only one final boss, and he’s just not that interesting. He doesn’t even make sense to the story. Okay, true, the story is being told by a toddler, but why am I chasing this monster through 4 dungeons, only to find him limp on the floor at the end? How did he even manage to hobble all this way in his condition? It’s pathetic.

Give me a boss like one of the Horsemen from Binding of Isaac, or Isaac’s angel form. Give me a boss that I’m excited to fight, and give me more than one boss to expect after my slogging journey through all these dungeons. Even if it is one boss, don’t make the final fight so underwhelming, yo.

Even with those complaints in mind, I have no trouble giving The Legend of Bum-Bo a solid 4 stars. If you can get past the scatological obsession and aggravating nonsense dished out by RNGesus, this is a surprisingly deep puzzle game that offers many, MANY hours of engagement.Let me put it this way. I got this on sale on Steam, but now I’m considering paying 16 Euros to buy the game again for my phone. That’s how much I’m enjoying it. I want to play with video game poop while I’m pooping. If that isn’t a ringing endorsement enough for you, well then you’ll never be convinced.

A non-review of Dreamgate for Steam

All right, so this is not a review because Dreamgate is still currently in early access. As such, many or all details I share with y’all might change before the game goes gold and launches for real. But really, in this modern era of gaming, updates and patches post launch might radically change any game after it’s reviewes. Take Dead Cells for example. I gave that game glowing praise as an early access offering, and after going gold, the developers have continued to shit on the game with new unbalanced biomes and one-shot enemies that cater only to the hardcore crowd while telling those of us who supported them in early access that we can kindly go fuck ourselves for enjoying their product on a lowly casual level.

*Sighs* But I’m not bitter about it or anything.

Anywho, Dreamgate is a card game merged with a dungeon crawler. It’s similar to Slay the Spire, but offers more player classes, and boasts on their Steam page that there’s no mana or energy required to play cards. (I’ll be coming back to this selling point soon, because it’s the main reason I bought the game.) You start out with one passive skill and a tiny deck, and then you slowly collect more cards through winning battles and leveling up. Defeated enemies give XP, and each level-up offers up three new cards. Don’t like any of the new options? Hit Skip and hope for a better pull on the next level-up or dungeon room victory. (Though it should be mentioned that certain low-level rooms don’t drop cards, so it’s entirely possible to win four and five battles for no reward.) 

Defeating the boss at the end of a dungeon floor offers the chance to replenish your healing potion card, drop off all gold/money cards so as not to lose them after dying, try your luck for new skill cards or passive skills, or exile cards from your deck. All of these options use a certain number of action points, so the routine most of the time is dump gold, refill potion, hunt for one new skill. Later on after unlocking more action points, that last part can be expanded to hunting for one new passive skill and one skill card.

Between runs, the gold that was saved up during runs can be spent to unlock some options on a skill “tree.” I put tree in quotes because none of the classes have many options to unlock, and even after all of them are unlocked, they don’t do much to help improve the characters or the gameplay loop. They feel tacked on just to make the jump from rogue-like to rogue-lite.

Where things really begin to break down, even before all the classes are unlocked, is that there’s not many monsters included in the game, and most of them are more annoying than they are challenging. There’s the enemies who force you to discard right at the start of your turn, enemies who force you to discard at taking damage or dying, enemies who force you to use only a certain number of cards per turn, and enemies who deal damage to you with every card, even when you’ve killed them. There’s even an enemy who upon death will destroy a random card from your hand. So that one good card you’ve been relying on? Yeah, it’s gone for the rest of the run unless you luck out and find it in a later level. (This is not impossible because there’s so few cards in the game overall, but still very improbable.)

This is before you get to rooms with special stipulations like “all attacks deal 3 damage.” That seems great if you’re throwing knives, as that 1 damage weapon now does 3. But it’s not so nice when a card meant to do 12 damage is nerfed, and meanwhile the enemies can still shell out their full damage with no penalty.

But the thing that’s really grinding my gears about this game is that “no mana/energy” claim, because it’s pure unadulterated bullshit. It implies that you can play all the cards in your hand without limitations, and this game chock full of limits. There’s even a whole class of weapons that have the term Limited on them, which means you can only use one Limited card per turn. Now before fans of the game get nitpicky, yes, there is a passive skill that can be found on certain runs that will allow for the use of two Limited cards per turn. But that’s not a guaranteed drop, and in the meantime, it’s entirely possible to draw a hand of 7 fucking cards and only be able to play one because they’re all fucking Limited. ASK ME HOW I KNOW THIS. ASK ME!!!

*Sighs* But I’m not bitter or anything.

Beyond the Limited cards and the enemies and passive skills that all limit how many cards you can play, the developers also added Arcane cards that in fact require energy to play. They have spell cards that require using item cards to gather energy, with a cost of 3 or 4 energy to be cast. Playing as the Battle Mage? Well you’ve only got 2 energy per turn, so you need two energy crystal cards and the spell to all appear in the same hand. RNGesus is almost never going to be that kind to you, so these spells are essentially useless for most runs. Useless, and a direct lie about that “no mana/energy” selling point.

Add to this the cards with the Fumble characteristic. To play these, you have to choose another card or two to discard first. There’s a starting weapon common to several classes that fumbles one card in exchange for doing 5 damage. This is fine if you have an unplayable card like a curse, toxin, wound, or a gold card to shuffle away, but less than optimal if all you have are weapons and you have to choose which attack to give up. Oh, and if you end up with only a Fumble weapon in your hand, but nothing to discard, you have no weapon, simple as that.

Pair Fumbles up with an enemy who forces a discard at the start of every turn, and another who forces a discard if you so much as play a card, and suddenly your “unlimited” options quickly dwindle down to nothing for multiple hands in every run. No seriously, you can have runs where you can’t do anything because the combination of a lousy draw and the enemies’ stipulations tie you into inaction. But hey, at least there’s no mana or energy, right?

But let’s drop that worried bone and get to the final point. There are only four levels to this dungeon crawl, only one final boss, and said boss has 400 fucking hit points and a rotating but unchanging set of phases to make sure every run ends in the most boring slog possible. I need to make this clear. I’ve beaten the last boss with every character class. He’s not challenging, he’s not fun. He’s just boring.

When it comes right down to it, this is the same problem that made Slay the Spire so unenjoyable so quickly. Dreamgate has very little variety to make additional runs worthwhile. There’s other character classes, but they all share an overlapping pools of cards and passive skills. The enemies get stale quickly because there’s just not enough of them to make the core gameplay loop compelling. There are no other modes to change things up, so it’s just this one stale grind every single time. And for the love of RNGesus, games like this need to design way more bosses if they expect people to keep running on the same hamster wheel over and over and over.

For all my problems with Binding of Isaac, that rogue-like offered up a huge pool of bosses, and every update has deepened that pool with new options. These rogue-lite card games don’t have a quarter of the enemies and bosses to fill their dungeons, and so I can’t even make it past 40 hours before I’m bored away from their loops.

I wish I could say something positive, but all I can finish with is that this is an okay distraction for a week or two. For the price, that’s not bad, so I’m not saying don’t buy this because it’s hot garbage that’s not worth your money. I’m saying it’s not worth much time, and it could be so much more compelling with more content and at least 25% less annoying bullshit.

Game review: Borderlands 3 for Steam

Oh, my, Gawd, y’all. It feels like I have been playing this game forever. Steam says I’ve played 200 hours to reach the end, but in my mind, it feels so, so much longer. It isn’t because the game sucks or looks bad. Let me be clear, it just feels like an eternity since I first started up my first run through Borderlands 3 because there’s so much packed into this package. That should come across as a ringing endorsement, and yet here I am, feeling fatigued and a little sick of having too much to do.

I had to wait for the game to come to Steam, as Epic’s storefront is a bit meh, even if they keep giving out nice free games to try and entice me over. Steam’s interface is still shit, bit Epic is even more shit, so I had to be patient. In the meantime, I read all kinds of middling reviews about how Borderlands 3 just wasn’t that good, and I worried that after all this time, it wouldn’t be worth the wait.

So now I’ve had the chance to play it, and what is my own verdict? Well…I mean, it’s good, but it’s just so fucking long.

Let’s start with some good points. The controls are as nice as the previous entry, but there’s added movement options in the form of sliding and climbing ledges. This opens up all new areas for exploration, and there is so much to explore. You can’t swing a dead slag without hitting a side mission or hidden area. No matter how laser focused you are on “the mission,” something will distract you, leading to some hidden side quest or treasure.

Setting that aside, the story opens with your vault hunter joining the “rebel alliance” to fight…Twitch streamers with bandit followers? I may seem too sarcastic, but Tyreen and Troy Calypso are supposed to be a comparison to online influencers with so much power. To me, they represented the mirror image of the old vault hunters. The Calypso twins tell their followers to go die for them, and their family do as they’re told. But even on the “good guy’s” side, Lilith sends the next generation of vault hunters off with a single command, and they will kill thousands because they think they’re the good guys. Both sides are using their powers of social influence, and both sides are willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to emerge victorious. So who’s really good or bad?

I found a lot of the writing in the early to midway missions to be far smarter than I’d expected based on my experiences with Borderlands 2, but because the game keeps insisting on throwing in new threats from various corporations, the good stuff gets buried under too much other stuff. It’s not even bad, just that the constant deluge creates pockets of unmemorable events.

As an example, late in the game, a Maliwan general shows up and starts yelling about taking his vengeance on me for killing his younger brother. I honestly couldn’t remember who he was talking about, both because it had happened 150 hours prior, and because I’d killed so many corporate mini-bosses that there was no way this poor guy could stand out as memorable.

I think that’s one of two major problems with this “more is more” approach to making games. The other is that with such a huge variety in side missions, by the time I arrived to the end of the game, I was so freaking powerful that nothing could worry me. In the final 50 hours, I only died three times, and those were all me stepping off a cliff because I was looking through a scope instead of paying attention to my surroundings. No one, not minions or bosses, could threaten my final plodding pace to the big finale.

Even in the final boss fight, I only needed a few seconds to read the boss’ patterns and understand when to move in close and when to give them space. For all that lengthy effort to reach this pinnacle, the final fight was super underwhelming. The only way I could make it better is to play again, but ignore everything except the story beats. That kinda sucks because a lot of the side quests are fun stuff that I wouldn’t mind repeating.

It is true that the game also has harder difficulties if I choose to play again in True Vault Hunter mode, but that’s a big ask for anyone, to invest 200 hours just to get to the point of restarting with a full skill tree and a higher difficulty level.

The thing is, I don’t mind investing time in games. I’ve logged thousands of hours in each of the Dark Souls games, a little under 900 in Dragon’s Dogma, and around 700 in Borderlands 2. But I have those numbers because each run takes maybe 20-40 hours at most before I go back around to the start for a new run with a different class and weapon loadout. Some of my challenge runs might even go 10-15 hours. They’re practically bite-sized by comparison.

Being stuck with the same character for 200 hours, even with the possibility to respec, makes me much less enthusiastic about doing a new game plus mode, or even to go back to the start with a new class. That’s very much a detriment to a game that otherwise doesn’t have that many flaws. It feels good to platform and shoot in any given session, and the varied planets beyond Pandora all have their own unique art styles that make them wonderful eye candy. The music is great, the many characters you meet are mostly charming, and the variety of enemy types is happily diverse. But there’s just too much to do, so all the good points get diluted into a mediocre slurry.

I want to again illustrate my point by highlighting Dark Souls. When I play any entry from the series, I’m committed to play one run through to the end, and I will rarely play anything else until the run is done. With Borderlands 3, I might play two or three sessions in a row, but then I’d arrive to the point where I no longer wanted to keep going because it was all blurring together and giving little sense of progress. So I’d play other games for a week or two before finally coming back to do another two sessions and bounce off of it again.

Finally, I have to address the other problem, which might only apply to me on this run thanks to the random nature of loot, but I feel it bears mentioning. The loot—guns, sheilds, mods, and artifacts—mostly sucked.

In Borderlands 2, I frequently ran into the problem of having too many good weapons to use them all, so I would either have to throw stuff away or sell it to make room for more awesome loot. But in Borderlands 3, I went multiple sessions with the same weapons because even if the level numbers of the loot got higher, the actual weapon stats were always below my lower level gear.

I’m not talking about comparing grey common gear to legendary loot. In a like for like comparison, a level 32 purple gun outperformed a level 40 gun of the same rarity, and that was the case with all my gear. I couldn’t find a new handgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, smg, or grenade mod to replace my stuff for ten. Fucking. Levels. I didn’t even bother picking anything up to sell it because it was all worthless junk. Again, maybe I just got the worst RNG luck, and this isn’t normal. But damn did it frustrate the hell out of me.

I want to close this post on a positive note, so I will say that playing with the new siren gave me incentives to play in a manner vastly different than I might have tried in the previous game. (Also, full disclosure: I never played the first game because I watched hubby play it, and I wasn’t impressed.) Amara’s skillset made me more aggressive and willing to sprint across the battlefield to take huge risks where I might normally hang back and snipe targets to thin out the hordes. In short sessions, it felt thrilling to wade right into a battalion of troops and wipe them out like a thundering demigod of death and destruction.

I also played just enough of a new game with Zane, the specialist, to know that his play style is different from Amara’s, and so I imagine Mose and FL4K also have their own unique styles. I will also say that the new modes coming in the DLC packs sound like a faster and more accessible way to test out those different characters and approaches to combat. But until I can afford to buy them, I’d be reluctant to jump back in for a new run, or to go with the same character on a higher difficulty.

It really is a shame, too. There’s so much to like in Borderlands 3 when taken in little bursts that I feel bad giving it a score lower than 5 stars. But I can’t deny the fact that I had to force myself to stick with the game, even if all the ingredients individually should have kept me hooked in for the full run. That’s why I have to give 4 stars and recommend that even if you’re a fan of the looter shooter genre or of the Borderlands franchise, you might want to mix this with something else to keep it from getting stale.

Netflix nosedive: Mystic Pop-Up Bar

Hoo boy, this show, y’all. It’s not at all what I thought it would be. I watched it because there’s no new Midnight Diner, and Mystic Pop-Up Bar looked to be offering the same balance of food porn and plot based on the trailers. But instead it’s the kind of show that twists and contorts at the oddest moments. One scene, it’s saying, “Oh, I’m just a silly slapstick comedy! Look at these exaggerated movements and facial expressions! Hear those cartoony sound effects? So wacky!”

But then an instant later, the show punches a hole in your chest, rips out you heart and goes, “Are these heart strings? You mind if I pluck out a few sad chords?” It then proceeds to play the saddest song possible, and it’s brutal. There was one episode where I was sobbing with two fistfuls of tissues to catch my tears, and I thought maybe I was just being too sensitive. But I glanced at my hubby, and he was ugly crying too. And he don’t cry for nothin’ y’all. So consider yourself warned. If you come for the laughs, be prepared to cry as well.

With that warning out of the way, Mystic Pop-Up Bar is about an traveling bar owner, Weol Joo, who has been sentenced by the devil to help 100,000 people settle their grudges or face soul oblivion. She does this by entering their dreams and sussing out the best strategy for healing their spiritual wounds. Weol is actually pretty close to reaching her goal, but she’s also begun dragging her heels on solving her last few cases. So the powers that be give her a deadline: finish those last few cases, NOW.

Weol encounters a young man, Han Kang Bae, who has a unique ability: people spill their darkest secrets to him with a single touch. Han considers this power a curse, and Weol promises to help him get rid of his abilities if he helps her find the last few clients to erase her debt to the devil.

That’s the basic premise, and it works to give a core cast reasons to do their thing around an array of constantly changing actors. Some are great comedians, hamming up their roles, but others are simply great actors, able to dispense laughter and tears with equal measure. Alongside Weol and Han in the regular cast, there’s the bar’s “manager,” Chief Gwi; Department Head Yeom, the local incarnation of death, the devil herself, and a lonely security guard who comes in a bit later in the season. All of them are fantastic and endearing, so much so that when the season ended, I began looking up news sites to see if anyone had announced a second outing.

I think it helps that there’s no way to know which way an episode is going to go. Most start off playing up the comedy, but as soon as the new client’s grudge is revealed, the episode might go light, dark, or very, very sad. I’m really not kidding on this point, as several episodes blindsided me with how sad they got, and for a show full of old school sound effects like sproings and tin whistles, it’s those sadder moments that stuck with me. Granted, I also liked the lighter episodes where I got to laugh all the way through, but I appreciate a show where they can hit me in all the feels just as quickly.

Near the end of the season, there’ an added twist of an unexpected protagonist who I want to spoil, but won’t because it’s so good to be surprised as suddenly as I was. But it turns out that most of the core cast are more related than one might expect at the start, and those final episodes seem to relish tossing in one twist after another.

I’m going to keep the review nicely short and spoiler free, giving Mystic Pop-Up Bar 5 enthusiastic stars and recommending it to everyone who likes comedies and having their hearts extricated violently by sudden plot reveals.

Netflix Nosedive: The Umbrella Academy Season 2

Right, let’s just get this out of the way and drop a cut: if you haven’t seen season 1 of The Umbrella Academy, don’t read this review unless you’re fine with spoilers. If you hate spoilers, at least go watch the first season and know all the joy it entails to watch a thing spoiler-free. As for the second, I’ll try to be as vague as possible, but there will still be mild spoilers. Right, with the warnings out of the way, cue the cut now…

After completely botching their efforts to stop the apocalypse by replacing it with a planet AND moon killing event, the members of the eponymous Umbrella Academy use Five’s time traveling powers to jump back to a point in time before the world was doomed and their sister Vanya was a budding supervillain with godlike powers. But, since Five barely has a handle on jumping himself through time, it will come as no surprise that he botches the jump and sends each of his siblings into the same Dallas alleyway at different times within the early 1960s.

Five himself lands smack dab in the middle of another apocalypse, with the Russians invading and then nuking the city into a molten pit. But just before everything goes tits up, former Commission assassin Hazel shows up to pull Five ten days before the end of the world for yet another attempt at preventing the apocalypse. To do so, Five must reunite his family and once again find out why the nuclear war was triggered.

For the first episode, all the Hargreeves siblings are separate. Former team leader Luther has become a pit fighter working for Jack Ruby. Allison, AKA: The Rumor, has recovered from her injury and has gotten married to a local civil rights activist. Diego, realizing he’s arrived in time to save Kennedy from assassination, gets himself locked up in an asylum for stalking and harassing Lee Harvey Oswald. Klaus manages to literally stumble over a sugar mama, who helps him build a religious cult inspired by Klaus’ knowledge of Destiny’s Child lyrics. (No, seriously, the cult is called Destiny’s Children.) And finally, Vanya staggers out of the alley only to be struck by a car, giving her amnesia as well as a new home on a farm outside the city.

In short order, the siblings begin connecting with each other, while Five finds a new headquarters and ally. He also finds a lead left by Hazel about what might have started the war. But in typical Five fashion, he initially misinterprets what’s actually happening. And hilarity ensues…and chaos.

As all of this is happening, The Commission is still sending out assassins to try and eliminate the Hargreeves, thus ensuring an apocalypse will happen. This time around The Commission sends three brothers collectively known as The Swedes, and I have to say it’s both their presence and The Commission’s very vague sense of how exactly they are protecting time that rubbed me the wrong way.

Think of this way: In season 1, The Commission wanted to keep Five from stopping the apocalypse because that’s how the flow of time was supposed to proceed. Fair enough, but when the family ends up in 1963 and this DEFINITELY isn’t the way history is supposed to flow, why are they so hell-bent on trying to ensure the world goes boom roughly fifty years too early? On the same line of thought, there are often statements made that no life is unimportant for the security of the timeline, but The Commission’s assassins don’t seem to mind killing indiscriminately, as if no life matters in the grand scheme of things. It’s annoying.

There are two possible reasons this might be the case, though. One is that the upper brass of The Commission are more focused on the bureaucracy of keeping their establishment in power rather than protecting the timeline. The other possibility is that they believe eliminating the Hargreeves from the 1960s might somehow restore order to history. The problem is, they end up being the stereotypical villains trying to stop a prophecy who end up almost fulfilling said prophecy with their own reckless actions.

But this leads me to one other nagging question, and it has to do with Reginald Hargreeves. The Commission has to know he’s a time traveler actively meddling in the timeline, but they never seem to acknowledge him, even though they know all about his kids. Again, I think there are two explanations here. One is that at some point in the past they tried to eliminate him and realized he was too dangerous. The other is that being from the distant future, perhaps he has some kind of technology that cloaks his presence, preventing The Commission from becoming aware of his tampering.

Staying with the commission for just a moment longer, in the last season Hazel resigned by shooting The Handler in the head. Well, turns out she has a metal plate in her skull. But due to her failures, the leadership role is turned over to A.J. Carmichael, a goldfish who pilots a humanoid robot body with a fishbowl for a head. Oh, and the fish smokes cigarettes. Anywho, The Handler is parked at the same desk jockey position she tried to push Five into, so obviously it isn’t long before she’s plotting a coup.

With all the players working to serve their own agendas, I expected the second season to play out much like another sophomore superhero outing. I thought the Hargreeves would all remained divided by conflicting agendas until the very end, much like what happened in Titans season 2. Instead, the family gathers together several time for routine arguments before forming smaller clusters. For example, Allison and Klaus take off with Vanya for a side mission, or Diego and Five infiltrate a consulate party with Lila, a new…friend of Diego’s. Or in another example, Luther teams up with Five and…Five? Yeah, it gets a bit weird in places, but some of the best humor comes in these moments of micro teams coming together. (Mild spoiler for a line that made me laugh hard: *O-okay, that was just lunch…shut up!”)

In the end, the Hargreeves family manages to sort out what causes the war and return back to their own timeline…except it isn’t right. Sure there’s no dead world, but their antics in the past have created huge shockwaves to the timeline, and the present is…well, it’s kinda fucked. This sets up some interesting questions for the third season, none of which can be asked without spoiling the events of the second season. I’d really much rather direct you to go watch it and find out what those question are on your own.

I’ll give the second season of The Umbrella Academy a solid 5 stars. It’s funny, touching, terrifying, sad, and exciting in just the right quantities to make an almost perfectly balanced show. There’s even more character development for the whole dysfunction family. (Though patriarch Reginald is still a major douche who can never admit he’s just as awful at saving the world as his adopted kids are.) If you like superhero shows and films, you really need to be watching this, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Game review: 20XX for Steam

20XX was added to my Want To Play list right after I saw the first trailers for it. Basically it can be summed up as “Mega Man, but roguelite.” I’d just completed Mega Man X on my Vita for the first time, and I was ready for something else to fill that platforming action void.

But then a lot of other games caught my attention, and it wasn’t until a random YouTube hiccup brought the game back to my attention that I tried it out. Now I’m deeply conflicted about how to review this. In short doses, it’s great, scratching that old school itch with just the right level of challenge and action. But it doesn’t take long to notice there’s not enough variety of environments or bosses to keep this from getting stale quickly.

In classic Mega Man style, the story casts you as Nina the good robot versus a squadron of evil robots and their minions. You defeat robot bosses and can choose to take their powers. But as an added twist, you might opt to get some extra currency instead, or you might select an extra augmentation to help beef up your robot’s health, energy, or their basic attacks.

The thing is, although gaining boss powers can make the game somewhat easier, it’s also possible to beat every boss with the standard weapons, be it Nina’s buster cannon clone or alternate character Ace’s sword. So it’s not quite the same thing as Mega Man, where you want to pick the boss who annoys you least and then start working through the rest using the boss weapon they’re weak to.

Certainly in other respects, the game feels like a proper spinoff to Mega Man. The jump and shoot technique comes back with ease thanks to muscle memory and the button layout being just right. The platforming mostly feels good, except when it doesn’t (fucking flame jets next to tiny conveyor belts, I’m looking at you, bastards), and the boss fights carry the same excitement, even if the boss designs are all a bit on the meh side.

Each level has secret chests to provide extra boosts or augments, as well as a challenge room that offers more upgrades for completing tests like killing waves of enemies in a time limit, or without taking damage, or outracing a horde of little bat robots. On a good run, these challenge rooms and hidden chests can grant double jumps, extra armor, or new guns. (My favorites are the four way cross shot and the three way spread shot, though I understand there are more to unlock that I haven’t seen yet.) On a bad run, they tend to keep throwing out upgrades for the same body part, like one helmet after another while offering nothing for the chest, legs, or arms.

I feel I should mention the game’s mean spirited attempts at humor. There’s two scientists filling in for Dr. Light and Dr. Wily, and they’re more like Waldorf and Statler in their heckling act between levels. Their exchanges are like: “Good job, I guess you’re not totally useless after all!” followed by the “punchline,” “Yes, just mostly useless.” Bu-dum-pish. Then on the tally screen after each death, there’s a pithy quote that someone must have thought was humorous, but to me just comes across as antagonistic. I’m used to indie humor being off, but this feels more spiteful than funny.

By the way those scientists are also the end bosses for some reason. One or the other being the evil genius responsible for the robots going mad would be true to the story they’re cloning, but both seems kinda dumb. They also add into the problem of the boss designs being bland and uninspired.

Returning to the gameplay, there’s something that can’t be ignored for very long, even with the addition of daily challenges, boss rush modes, and extra characters through DLC. The problem is, there’s only five environments to play through, and even if they are proceduraly generated, it doesn’t take long to start feeling like you’ve played the same level over and over, often within the same run. There’s no big pool of bosses swapped out for an 8 level jaunt, just the same robots over and over followed by your snarky bosses. I can see this being something to put away and come back to every month or so to scratch an itch, but even after a few hours, 20XX suffers from a lack of content.

Keep in mind, what content there is is quite lovely. The levels are colorful in ways that make the old 8 bit Mega Man games look drab in comparison, and the music is catchy and enjoyable even after hearing it multiple times in one session. The controls feel good, and the upgrades system gives a nice incentive to keep plugging away for more currency. The boss weapons can create some interesting combos for more creative players, and the augments can help turn even the wimpy basic shot into a much more powerful weapon.

But I can’t help feeling like this would have benefited from the kinds of updates we’ve seen from other indie games, adding new levels and bosses to flesh out this skeleton with some meaty variety. What’s there is good, but it’s just not enough to keep me plugging away like many other roguelites can do.

In the end, I think I have to give 20XX 4 stars. There’s nothing wrong with it that would sink it to the 3 or 2 range, and I do enjoy my time in it. But it needed more content to raise it up to a perfect game status, and given that the makers are working on the sequel, it doesn’t seem likely that this will ever get the last coat of polish that it deserves. Shortcomings aside, I’d still recommend it to Mega Man fans looking for a clone to play between doses of the real deal.

Dead Cells Revisited

These days, no game is a static object, with updates and patches optimizing or fixing different features, or overhauling the gameplay in radical ways. Because of this, a review written at the launch of a game might not apply a year down the road. Old complaints or praise might need to be readdressed as a result of tweaks or changes.

This is most certainly the case with Dead Cells, a game I initially reviewed positively, but which has lost a lot of enjoyment with each new update since it has come out of early access. What started out as a fun platformer suitable for all levels of gamer has now catered itself almost exclusively to the hardcore fans while abandoning everyone else.

During early access, it was clear that certain weapons and skills were just preferable. For instance, the Sinew Slicer and Double Arrow Trap both had short cooldowns and a steady rate of fire, making them damned handy in every boss fight. Grenades, on the other hand, had crap damage and a ridiculously long cooldown rate. To counter this kind of dependence, the game makers nerfed the useful traps and put a limit of only one trap of any kind. Sounds good in theory, except the grenades are still garbage and have a stupidly long cooldown, so they still aren’t an option.

Another change is that crossbows are now two-handed weapons, meaning there’s no access to a backup weapon. With the so-called Update of Plenty, a backpack was added to allow carrying another weapon, except there’s no way to use it aside from throwing away the crossbow. I envisioned a system similar to Dark Souls, where I could swap from the one-handed weapon in a time of need, and then move back to ranged attack. But no, it’s just more hot garbage, poorly thought out and even more poorly implemented.

New biomes have been added, with enemies who do vastly more damage, usually with bullshit gimmicks like being able to fire through walls or teleport to the player, or to teleport the player to them. There’s a special kind of rage that comes from being one-shotted on the second level because I don’t yet have any health, or even any decent weapons or skills. Balance or any sense of it has gone right out the window, so only the hardcore players will get anything out of these “improvements.”

Another change I’d hope would fix past updates was a tweaked economy. Here again, my expectations of gaining a little more gold and thus being able to afford new gear was met with disappointment. In fact, it doesn’t feel like there’s any change whatsoever to the economy. Enemies still drop a miserly sum of money, and the shops all price stuff just out of my reach unless I scour a level and kill every single last enemy AND hunt down every single hidden treasure spot. Or I can try running for the door to get into a challenge room, but usually going that route leaves me woefully equipped to handle anything, even the wimpiest enemies.

Finally, there was a mention of adding more scrolls to the early levels to help level up damage and health, but in the vast majority of my runs, I found the exact opposite to be true. Before the last update, I might make it to Black Bridge for a fight with the first boss and have eight scrolls collected. Now even after scouring each level thoroughly, I’ve had to go into the same boss fight with four or five scrolls. It’s still doable, but if the update was supposed to increase the number of scrolls per level, it’s failed spectacularly.

I’ve been falling out of love with Dead Cells going back to the first tweaking updates that removed or ruined my preferred mutations, and every update after that has further chilled my feelings toward the game. The Update of Plenty gave me hope that perhaps there was still a chance it could be salvaged, but I can’t deny it’s no longer fun to play. It’s aggravating, and the combined effect of these updates is alienating me while catering to a different segment of the market. If you’re one of the hardcore gamers who love brutal games that punish you for the slightest mistake, this could still be your cuppa. But if you’re a casual fan just looking for a platformer to chill with, Dead Cells is no longer meant for you, and you should avoid it.

Perhaps with time, more updates could correct this, but history has shown that the makers of Dead Cells really only care about one segment of their users, and the rest of us can just stop playing for all they care.

Game review: Slay the Spire for Steam

In theory, Slay the Spire should be a perfect game for me. It’s a rogue-like card game climbing three randomly generated towers to battle monsters and bosses with one of four unique protagonists. In practice, however, my enjoyment of the game quickly evaporated because it crosses off every checkbox of bad indie rogue-like design: dully repetitive opening levels, a lack of enemy diversity, a stingy in-game economy combined with overpriced shops, and a slew of items meant specifically to fuck you over, and over, and over again.

Let’s start with the initial positives. You start playing as The Ironclad, a typical video game warrior carrying a giant orcish longsword, armed with a deck of the most basic stuff. You can lay out a Defend card to block 5 damage for one energy (out of three, though later cards and items may grant you addition energy units per turn), Strike for one, or use a Bash card that consumes two energy and applies a Vulnerable status on the enemy, making the next attack cause more damage. At first, sorting out a strategy amounts to deciding how much damage you want to dish out versus how much health you want to lose. So you could deal more damage by not blocking at all, or cast two Defend cards and only take one or two lost health points while dealing 6 damage. But either way, you will be losing some health in every fight.

Beating each monster offers a reward of three cards to choose from, which—again, in theory—should help move you toward a better strategy than just tanking hits to trade blows. Some rooms have a merchant offering other cards for sell, as well as relics that grant buffs or debuffs for the duration of the run, and potions that usually grant an effect only for the current turn. (Some might give you a card that will last throughout the current fight, but will vanish before your next fight.) Beating the boss of the tower offers up a choice of three boss relics, most of which offer a benefit combined with a negative caveat.

Then you unlock The Silent, a shaman with a different set of cards to collect that changes your strategy past the first tower. She favors poisons and spells, some of which can deal a lot of damage. A good shuffle from her deck can end fights on the first tower quite quickly. (A bad shuffle, though…woof. But I digress.)

Next is The Defect, kind of a magic powered robot who uses orbs to channel lightning, ice, plasma, and dark. Each has its own powers, both passive and evoked. For instance ice will passively apply two armor, while evoking it will grant five armor. Plasma grants extra energy per turn, so it is very useful, but unfortunately is very rare. (At least it was in all the runs I made.)

Finally, beating the three towers for the first time with any character unlocks The Watcher, a poorly chosen title for a blind monk whose gimmicks is changing stances. The Wraith stance allows her to deal higher damage, but for some reason allows the monster to increase their damage as well. (Quite often I would enter Wraith hoping to finish an opponent, only to miss one health point and have them kill my character with a super-powered attack that I buffed for them. Very much an insult added to injury.) The Calm stance is pretty much useless because it only offers extra energy as you exit the stance. If you can pick items that offer extra energy, then entering and exiting Calm becomes an option. But with the base card to do so costing 2 energy, yeah, it’s pretty useless in most situations. At later stages with a lot of energy, swapping from Wraith to Calm often allow you to play zero cost attacks up to three times. But by that point, the monster’s health is so ridiculously high that even a triple attack from the same card is like an annoying scratch.

It’s entirely possible that before unlocking the final character, you’ll become bored or frustrated by the gameplay loop. This is because every character starts with the same blocks and attacks with two class-specific cards. (Three in the case of The Watcher.) So every run is the same tanking and trading blows no matter who you play as. The floors may be slightly different, but the enemies really aren’t. I could usually predict who I would fight depending on which path I took in any tower, with almost no surprises. These kinds of randomly generated games need enemy variety, or they quickly lose any appeal for players, and this one has a woefully small pool of enemies and bosses.

You’ll arrive at the first merchant after ten or so floors, only to find that you can’t afford the items or cards you actually do want, while there’s a few garbage cards and items on sale for cheap. If you pick those up, you most assuredly won’t be getting good cards or items at the next merchant, who you probably won’t see until the second tower unless the floor layout has decided to be less asshole-ish.

Then there’s the ? rooms. Very rarely, they offer up some helpful stuff, like choosing between healing or gaining a bonus to maximum health. But the vast majority of the time, they’re just one long line of giant “Go Fuck Yourself” options. There’s the room that promises a relic can be found in a mound of acidic goop if you lose a little health, but it always fails to deliver until the third attempt, meaning you lose 18 health for a relic that could be garbage or actively harmful to your run. Or how about the room with a pool of acid that takes your gold and forces you to choose to leave it behind, or collect your shit and someone else’s pittance at the cost of more health. Or the room with an asshole snake who offers a pathetic amount of gold in exchange for cutting off HALF your maximum health. Finally, it might just be another monster or elite monster room, so there’s the faintest hope of a good reward being stomped to death with spiked shoes. It’s like the game developers were thinking. “This game is too much fun, so how can we ruin it?”

This isn’t even getting into fights where the enemies have ridiculous amounts of damage coupled with debuffs that lower the value of your blocks and attacks. So a monster can have 300 health, do an attack for 50, and have a special power that increases its damage if you try to use block cards or any skill other than attacks. So if you can somehow throw up five block cards to stop 15 damage, that 50 damage attack is now 70. Oh, and your attack is doing three damage because it’s been reduced with a debuff as well.

There’s monsters who have shit-tons of regenerating armor, meaning your little attacks do nothing, and they have items called Artifacts, which negate attempts at debuffing them. Or maybe the room you enter just has five slimes, with four of them attacking for 5-10 damage while the fifth casts debuffs to weaken your blocks and your attacks. Then there’s the trio of flying monsters, who ignore some of the damage you deal because they’re flying, and who cast strength spells to do progressively more damage with every turn. I’m lucky to leave that room with half my health remaining, and wouldn’t you know it? Healing potions are also super rare AND wimpy in how much they’ll heal.

Your only real respite from this bullshit is campfires, which can heal 30 percent of your health or allow you to upgrade one card. On the first tower, you might try to gamble and get in one card upgrade provided you haven’t lost too much health. But in the second tower, the game has a tendency to generate five to six enemy rooms before the first campfire, so you’ll be arriving with maybe ten health, if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you’ll lose one the room right before the campfire. Or here’s another variation of agony: there’s a ? room right before the campfire, and it’s an elite with two minions, and you have two health. Again, it’s like the developers were looking for ways to make the experience as miserable as possible.

Even if you do beat the final boss, the ending isn’t really satisfying. Your character finds a giant heart and launches an all out attack that does nothing to the heart. You are informed how much damage you dealt, how much damage everyone has collectively done, and then your character passes out and you are presented with the banner Victory? The only way it could be more disappointing is if a wet fart sound tooted out a “wah wah wah wa-wa-wa!”

I feel like I need to point out that a lot of what makes this game bad is terrible random generation coupled with a pool of mostly shit items and too few gems to make repeated runs worth the effort. To further explain, consider a game like Spelunky. In every room in Spelunky, the first pass of the random generator is mapping out a path to the exit. You might trap yourself with bad choices, but there is always a way to the exit. The second pass litters items around the room, some of which are specific to a region, and others which can be found all over. (ie: bombs, ropes, prisoners to free.) Some of those items are worthless, but in any given run, it’s more likely you’ll find something that tickles your fancy, and lots of runs will give a wildly fun combination that damn near breaks the game by making you too OP. Even the runs that give weaker items are still fun to play by upping the challenge without being unfair. Then there’s the third pass that generates enemies specific to the region. You won’t find the hordes of the hell level in the jungle level and vice versa. Finally, there are secret items and shortcuts for specific rooms that will always be generated, with the actual location moving around to keep things interesting.

If Slay the Spire is judged by Spelunky as the gold standard of rogue-like games, then Slay the Spire doesn’t even earn a medal. I want to give it 2 stars, but there were just enough fun runs that I will give it 3. The problem is, for every one fun run, I had to sit through twenty boring or aggravating runs, and one out of twenty is not a good ratio for any game, randomly generated or not. I’d have a hard time recommending this to anyone, even fans of card games or rogue-likes. There are better games to spend your money on that will provide a more balanced and consistent experience. Hell, even Dark Souls with a randomized item mod is more fair and balanced than this.