Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 8

Game review: Gotham Knights for Steam

I got Gotham Knights as part of a Humble Bundle, but I was actually donating to get the full run of Saga as PDF files. The open world adventures of the Bat Family got critically dead-panned so hard that I didn’t add it to my wishlist and wait for a sale. But in a bit of strange timing, the game also released a performance patch the same week that I got the bundle, and I figured I already own it, right?

Before getting to the review, I have a theory for why the content of the game got slammed by reviewers separate from the tech issues. It has to do with quantity drowning out quality. By that I mean, if you’re a reviewer of a major gaming site and you’ve already played ten other open world games this year, Gotham Knights is going to grate because it’s very much more of the same design elements with a different franchise slapped over the surface like a hastily applied coat of Rustoleum.

I haven’t played any open world games for close to a year and a half, so I don’t have any fatigue for the formula. Perhaps because of that, I had a pretty good time in Gotham Knights. I can’t say I loved the whole thing, as some parts were grating or outright aggravating. But on the whole, beating up bad guys as four members of the Bat Family turned into a pleasant surprise that I might even go back to some time in the future, just to goof off, much like I do in Grand Theft Auto V.

Oh, beware mild spoilers after the cut.

So, batman dies in the first cut scene. Surprise! Or not, if you were exposed to any of the publicity leading up to the release of the game. The marketing went so far as to constantly repeat that yes, Batman is really, really, really dead, and this is not at all a bait and switch method of promotion. To that end, they weren’t lying.

There’s some niggling story beats early on that ignore the current state of the Bat Family, but I decided to look at this as an alternate universe. Ever since the first season of Star Trek Discovery, I’ve become more receptive to alternate world stories. The Batman further cemented my acceptance that, okay, this isn’t the world I knew, but it’s still an interesting variant to explore.

So, Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake, gather after the death of Batman at the hands of Ra’s al Ghul, (also dead, but for real this time) and commit to taking over patrol duties to prevent Gotham’s criminals from tearing down the city. In this world, Jim Gordon is also dead, and the new commissioner of the GCPD hates vigilantes and doesn’t really seem to care that the vast majority of her force is on the take with multiple crime gangs. As such, Bruce’s adopted family find themselves very much in the same starting point that he did early in his career, as vigilantes breaking the law to keep their city safer.

The story kicks off with an investigation into Bruce’s last case, which was unknown to Alfred, and involved investigating the murder of a well-known scientist, Dr. Kirk Langstrom. (Long time comic readers probably just now went, “Really,” like I did. But trust that his name keeps popping up right into the last chapter of this story.) The ensuing investigation reveals cover-ups, conspiracies, secret armies, and an impending gang war. So, pretty much an average Tuesday in Gotham.

Let’s skip spoilers and talk about the controls. Driving is…it’s not great. I’d liken it to the driving mechanics in Sleeping Dogs, where the slightest tap of the analog stick leads to the vehicle veering wildly off course. Thankfully driving is very much optional, because you can always take to the rooftops with your trusty grappling hook and leap from building to building until you hit one of two massive rivers. A few patrols in, Lucius Fox (I took to calling him Luscious Fox) will present you with a fast travel option, with the caveat that you have to do the usual open world task of “scanning the area.” Which is a pain, yes, but it’s one of those open world themes that publishers still can’t get rid of, or else we’d all just get on with playing the game instead of dealing with their gatekeeping.

The core game loop is going out on patrol with one of the four “bats,” usually setting a marker for your preferred mission, and frequently getting side-tracked saving citizens and cops from random acts of crime. You can go in all slow and methodical to silently take down enemies or drop in loud and hard. I often did both depending on who I was fighting or how dire the current crime seemed, and they’re both a good time. Traversing the city feels great, and hearing gunshots and racing to save the day is just awesome. I felt like a real super-hero no matter who I was playing.

Though I experimented with everyone, my favorite crime fighter ended up being Jason Todd, aka: Red Hood. Armed with non-lethal guns, he needs some XP investment to make his ranged attacks worthwhile. Once those points are invested, he can act as a sniper to clear crime scenes of the lower minions, making the mini bosses much less annoying to single out and dismantle with melee and ranged combos.

(But really, the rest of the Bat Family have great melee and ranged toys, and while the control scheme is the same across all of them, their moves and upper tier world traversal options are different enough to reward switching characters and finding the one that’s right for you.)

The controls are very simple to grasp. Tapping an upper face button activates an light melee or ranged attack, and a long press is for a slower but beefier heavy attack. You’ve got jump and and a wimpy dodge that can turn into a slide when the bats are sprinting on the lower face buttons, some special tasks on the D-pad, and the shoulder and trigger button work pretty much like they do in every modern game. I’d explain in more detail, but the game does a fine job of easing you into the controls. There’s even a training mode to cover both basic and advanced moves, so even the most noob gamer can get into the role with some practice. (I only did the training needed to unlock Knighthood powers, which were AWESOME and worth the time to complete the requirements.)

If I have one bit of advice for new players, it’s not to get attached to any of your current gear. Every other trip back to the home base will reveal new blueprints for suits, melee, and ranged options. Do change up often, and don’t be afraid to try new things. During two boss fights, I’d just changed my suit on a whim, only to discover that I’d happily picked the elemental resistance to make said boss’ attacks less effective. In the same vein, I picked elemental ammo for their effect on minions, only to find their boss wasn’t too happy with my super painful selection.

Oh, and I need to give a random shout out: there’s a few puzzles here and there, and they have rules that make sense, and were fun to sort out and solve. There’s only a few, which is also nice in that they don’t wear out their novelty. Each time I saw one, I thought, Oh, cool, which is a nice difference compared to other games where I thought, Oh God, not again.

I know a lot of reviewers weren’t fond of all the busy work the game keeps adding, like locating misplaced batarangs or bat bike time trials, or locating Bruce’s secret equipment stashes, and I suppose that criticism is fair provided you personally feel obligated to complete everything within an open world game. I don’t, and that’s incredibly liberating. I didn’t even feel the need to grind up to legendary gear because what I crafted from the rare and epic tiers were more than enough to get me to the closing credits. There were lots of little markers and tasks left unfinished, but I’m okay with that. After all I don’t play games for the complete list of trophies. I play them to have fun, and there’s only so much busy work I can do before it becomes boring. Your mileage may vary, of course, but because of this attitude, my entire run clocked in at just over 53 hours. That’s short enough that I can look forward to playing it again without feeling like I have to invest too much time in it.

I now have to tamp down all of my praise for some issues, and yeah, they do drag down the experience a bit. As I said, I wasn’t a fan of the driving, but there were also times where I tried to grapple onto a roof I was facing, only to have the game decide to shoot for the building above and behind me. You know, the one I just leapt off of. It didn’t happen all the time, but it was just often enough that I started grumbling, “Are you kidding me?” when it did. It’s a shame because when it works, the grappling hook feels so good, and it is an integral part of making me feel the role.

There’s also a lack of enemy targeting that makes large fights dicey, particularly when I want to focus on the dude pointing a gun at me, and the auto-targeting instead shoots everyone around him. It’s no better with melee, as I’ve ran close to a shooter and launched several meters away to hit someone way behind the character who poses no immediate threat. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it can be irksome to try and take out a gunner, only to fly away from him and then catch a stream of lead in the chest.

And then there’s Mr. Fucking Freeze. I need to say, every other boss fight was interesting and fun, and had me scrambling to recognize attack patterns and openings for counter-attacks. But someone at WB said, “Mr. Freeze should suck in both of his boss fights,” and the programmers complied with extra effort. Both times, his arenas are white, and his “tells” for ranged attacks are white lines. He’s in a white suit the first time and on a white mech the second. Are you seeing the problem? As someone with failing vision thanks to getting older, that son of a bitch was the only boss who had me swearing like a drunk sailor, and that’s before I mention his vast array of cheap tactics that drag his two fights on and on, and on. There are a few times when it’s obvious the game was built for co-op play, (hello army of forty minions involved in kidnapping a single person) but Mr. Freeze is the point when, as a solo player, I wanted to visit the studio, find every person responsible for these fights, and kick them in the taint as hard as I can.

Setting that aside, I got to the end credits feeling pretty happy to have given this a chance. I liked the core loop, the loot crafting, and even the Bat Family cut scenes. The late game plot twist wasn’t that much of a surprise, but it was a fun change in the power struggle. It led to an end-game boss fight that I was expecting right as soon as a certain character was named dropped, and I was not disappointed.

 I’m going to give Gotham Knights 4 enthusiastic stars. I went in with real low expectations, and came away hoping for a sequel. Of course, I might have to avoid open world games for some…oh wait, I just remembered that Epic Game Store gave me the whole Arkham Knight trilogy for free last year. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some tights to slip into.

Hitman, you’re too good for me…

When the Epic store released Hitman for free, I added it to my list just because it’s free, and as the wise sage Usagi Tsukino once said, “Nothing is cheaper than free!”

And yet, I did not start playing it right away. I could lie to you and say the slow speed of my internet connection put me off of trying it, but the honest truth is, I was scared. See, I played the original PC release of Hitman, and I was terrible at it. Back in those days, I might have spent an hour tailing my target to the loo, cornered and strangled him with a garrote, only to have a random stranger walk in on us and run off screaming at the top of his lungs, “There’s a white bald killer on the loose!”

I bungled my way through three levels like this before admitting that maybe I was just kinda shit at being an assassin. I hung up my guns, garrote, syringe, and knife, and despite lots of Hitman games coming out afterwards, I always said, “Yeah, it’s not you, it’s me.”

But I got this free hit, so to speak, and then we got a much better internet connection, so I downloaded the game and played the tutorial. Without hyperbole, I was fucking amazing at killing targets. The first fake yacht, I went into the target’s office, killed him and dragged him back to his bathroom, and then I left before anyone could notice the body.

It took me two tries to actually get onto the training base for the second part of tutorial instruction, but once I knocked out a military guard and stole his uniform, it wasn’t that hard to locate the target, knock out his escort while my target’s back was turned, and then strangle the poor bastard before slipping away like a fart in a strong breeze.

Then the game says, “Okay, do it again, but this time do it with style.”

So I snuck in, knocked out the guard and took his uniform, but this time I sabotaged the ejector seat of a jet and tricked the target into following me for a flight check. He went up in a blaze of glory, and I went on to pass the tutorial with flying colors. It’s at this point that I thought, “Okay, I think I can do this!”

Oh, what a fool I was.

The first level took me to Paris in Fashion Week, and I needed two real-time days to wander the whole level just to understand what was where. Then I needed another two days to wander around and absorb all the little dramas taking place at this fashion show. Everyone from the models to the caterers were full of interesting stories, so I lost track of actually being a killer to take in the side show.

I think it was almost a week later that I managed to sort out the best plan to pose as bartender and poison the main target, sneak into a bathroom with him, and drown him in his own vomit. What happened with the secondary target was a disgusting case of save scrubbing that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say, I had hell finding the right blind spot to drop her body so I could reach the exit before some guard screamed that old chestnut, “Oh my God, there’s a white bald killer on the loose again!”

The game then said, “Good job, now go find these two guys in the same level.” So I did, and I similarly offed the three targets in the next side mission. All that time goofing off paid off because I knew the building like the back of my hand. At that point, I was feeling like Death Incarnate, so when the game offered a new set of targets in the same place, I said, “Nah, bitch, we good.”

Oh, what a fool I was.

The next mission was in Sapienza, a fictional Italian town that instantly entranced me. Let’s be clear, though: after living in Italy for close to two decades, the all-American vocal cast broke my immersion to the point where I walked away for a week. But before that “ugh-quit,” (credit me when this becomes a thing) I was thinking, Wow, this is the most amazing place I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve been to a nudist beach in France!

Once I logged back in, it was just like Fashion Week, but times eleventy. I kept wandering off to explore, eventually tripped over a security camera or someone who didn’t like the look of my agent and had a shit fit, so I kept starting over. And over, and over, and over. One attempt, I looked at my phone and realized I’d just spent two hours wandering the coast to admire the boats. Another, I lost and hour and a half just watching people.

Sure, I made some attempts to reach my primary target, but I was observing him in his back yard when the game pointed out his pack of weed and said, “Hey, you can poison this!” That sounded fun, so I restarted and added poison to the safehouse stash, and then I reloaded the level to hunt down the safehouse.

It’s been two months of attempts, and I still haven’t found the fucking safehouse. Maybe I’d have more luck if I didn’t get distracted by every little conversation and assassination opportunity, but I can’t help it. Like many gamers, I am sick to death of games that hold my hand to the point of drawing a line on the ground so I can’t get lost, but this is a level of freedom so vast that I can’t complete my assignment because I’m flummoxed by the options available to me. I can poison my target’s food by posing as a caterer, or I can poison his weed. I can hunt him down and stab him, or I can use a sniper rifle to tag him from across the peninsula. I can sneak into his office while he’s away from his guard all sneaky like, or I can get crazy and whack everyone in full view of God and the tourists roaming this pretty, pretty level.

Only, I can’t commit to any of it. Hitman is quite possibly the greatest game I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t play it because it’s given me too much creative freedom to play in its sandboxes. It’s not a crushingly difficult game, and is in fact quite forgiving of fuck-ups. I just can’t seem to do what it wants from me because wandering up side alleys and listening to tourists complain is more entertaining to me than killing the dude who very obviously needs killing. (He’s tailoring a virus that can kill specific targets. Yeah, it’s unbelievable sci-fi dreck, but if you’ve got to have a reason to kill a scientist, that’s as good a reason as you can hope for.)

Maybe someday I’ll get over my inability to commit to a plan and do the whole game, but given how long one level is tripping me up on the little details and freedom of choice, I think it might be the last thing I do before kicking the bucket. Then maybe the plaque next to my urn of ashes can read, “Here lies Zoe E. Whitten – She finally beat Hitman.”

But I wouldn’t place bets on that happening.

Game review: Firegirl Hack ‘n Splash Rescue DX for Steam

Watching trailers and reading the Steam page for Firegirl Hack ’n Splash Rescue DX, it certainly looks like my kind of game. It’s a platformer with a unique mixture of 2D sprites in 3D environments. The levels are procedurally generated, and the movement options look exciting thanks to a fire hose acting as both the primary weapon and as a rocket for verticality. Plus, who doesn’t want to fight fire monsters while rescuing people and kittens? Sounds awesome to me.

What a shame that it turned out to be an actual garbage fire. Pretty much from the moment I started playing, the game was ruined by repetition, cheap shots in the place of real difficulty, dull grinding, and terrible writing. I slogged through the early parts in the hope that with some equipment upgrades, the game might evolve into something more fun, but even at “full power” Firegirl never realizes the entertainment promised in its trailers.

The biggest problem is that after the tutorial, there’s only one level to play for an agonizingly long time. Firegirl goes to put out fires in the same “building” (the level actually takes place across a block of buildings) over and over. Even this would be forgivable, except at the start of the game, both her hose pressure and water reserve are so low that she’s frequently left with nothing in the tank to reach the exit. Adding insult to injury is the frequency where the exit is in sight, just beyond her reach, and nothing can be done except let the timer run down. The developers didn’t even think through their design enough to add an option to restart the level or leave early in unwinnable situations.

Then there’s the cheap shots. The random placement of enemies frequently drops gotcha traps on the other side of doors, and while the controls allow for looking up and down to assess threats above and below Firegirl, looking left and right wasn’t considered necessary. Even after I finally ground enough cash to add more oomph to the fire hose, I was still getting downed close to the exit thanks to traps I wasn’t allowed to see coming.

Eventually, the game unlocks a second scenario to play, a runaway train that’s broken into sections, and I lost track of the number of times I died on it because I ran out of water trying to cross platforms and landing on the tracks for a one-shot kill. Even after I had maxed the water tank capacity, the growing length of these trains combined with exceedingly rare water refills made them painful slogs.

The tank upgrade options also dangle an expensive carrot in front of you, allowing Firegirl to refill the tank using humidity in the air. It starts out at 50,000 dollars, but one of the firehouse workers you can rescue will reduce the cost of upgrades. (After paying him, of course. Wouldn’t want to skip the grind, would we?) Thing is, I ground out 47,000 dollars to get this upgrade, only to find out it refills at a rate that might as well be doing nothing at all.

After rescuing a few more workers, the payout for both successful and failed missions begins to make the grind less painful, but that’s damning with faint praise because win or lose it’s still a long, painful process to upgrade equipment.

The next level unlocks are a forest fire followed by Nekotomi Plaza, and in both cases, they suck until the hose pressure is upgraded to a minimum of level seven. Before that, enemies are always just out of reach, and trying to handle the platforming sections will leave Firegirl without a way to reach the survivors, let alone the exit. Oh, and fall damage is a thing in this game, and the high heights of both levels will ensure that Firegirl is breaking both legs with routine frequency.

Getting stuck on the environment also becomes a problem in the forest and tower levels. Piles of rubble and rocks can glue Firegirl in place or lock her in a falling animation, and while I can usually free her after some combination of jumps and water blasts, the time and water lost trying to free her almost always meant the mission was a failure. And let me point out again, there’s no way to quit or restart. You just have to hope you find an exit to take the bare minimum payout instead of burning up and losing funds to the infirmary.

Nekotomi Plaze also adds in a further cheap shot, a new fire monster who lobs ranged attacks like a sniper, but who can’t be harmed. This asshole is in pretty much every tight corridor and stairwell, making sure to lop three or four hearts from Firegirl, plus all her armor points. (Armor must be purchased, of course. LOVE THAT GRIND, BABY!)

I can’t fail to mention that what kills the fun isn’t just that there’s so few levels to play in, but the fact that it’s possible to keep playing the same level over and over until I’m sick of seeing the same things, even if they’re in a different layout each time. I would be thinking, I’ve done the train three times now. Please, just let me have something different! But no, it’s back to the train again.

Twice in the game, the final boss is shown as a huge and unstoppable Fire God. So going into the final level, I kind of expected to be playing it over and over. But no, despite all the cheap shots and dull repetition in the regular levels, the boss goes down with pathetic ease. Even though he’s got twenty hands, he can only wave them up and down or punch in and out of holes in the walls. It’s easy to avoid him, rescue all the people inside, and then hose his teeth down. (Bizarrely, the developers didn’t think to pull back the camera to show the scale of the boss, the ONLY boss of the whole game, I might add.)

I’m not even touching the story because it’s pathetic. I’d barely started when I called out the story to my hubby, and it’s easy to guess not only because of the cringy cut-scenes, but because the villain is literally signposted outside the starting area. I keep forgetting that even though as a medium, video games are literally older than me, game writers still prefer to crank out the most simplistic drivel possible. This kind of mental garbage is why gamers go ape shit over more complex stories like The Last of Us and Control, because it’s so rare to play anything where the writers seem to give a shit about provoking actual thought instead of just “You good, they evil; shooty shooty time!”

Y’all should know the drill by now. I so want to give this hot mess 1 star, but that’s reserved for the “broken and unplayable” category. Even with the occasional trapped character moments, this is still playable for the most part. I just kind of wish I hadn’t fallen for the trailer’s charms, because Firegirl Hack ’n Splash Rescue DX turns out to be a cheap barbecue that’s all sizzle and no meat. I give it 2 stars and move on to what I hope are better games. I recommend it to people who love grinding for hours only to get the barest minimum of return on their invested time. And hey, I’m not judging you, really. If that’s your idea of fun, you do you.

Game review: Tomb Radier Reloaded for Netflix (Android)

Let me start by saying that I was actually thinking about talking up another game this week, but initial reviews on Tomb Raider Reloaded grabbed my attention because it was being compared to Vampire Survivors, which I very much liked. I liked it enough that I got the DLC just to send more money to the developers, so having another game with the same flavor sounds really good. As an added bonus, Netflix has the game available with some of the live service bits neutered, and I’m a Netflix junkie, so I already have access to this library of games.

I wish I could share some of the enthusiasm for the game’s take on the newly emerging reverse bullet hell genre, but the problem is, no amount of neutering can change the inherently grindy nature of this beast. With Vampire Survivors, it’s okay to keep going back to the first level, because each run is with a new unlocked character, or a new weapon, or even with a new build in mind. With Tomb Raider Reloaded, the first level is a mandatory grind to collect enough resources to level up Lara Croft’s weapons, outfit, accessories, and ammunition. All of these have to be ground for a couple of days just to make it to the end of the third level. I cannot stress how dull the process became even after just a few hours, let alone days.

Let’s start with the gameplay when it still feels good. Lara is controlled with a single virtual direction pad. When she moves, she can’t shoot, and when she’s stationary, she decides what to target. Killing enemies gives her XP, and with each level up, Lara is given a choice of three power upgrades. A lot of these options are really nice, like bouncing bullets that bound off walls or other enemies, one power that makes defeated enemies explode in a shower of bullets, or just pure damage and attack speed boosts. In the first two levels you might be forgiven for thinking, “Hey, this is kinda fun,” because it really is scratching that same power creep itch that makes Vampire Survivors so satisfying.

But then there’s the third level, where every enemy needs a ridiculous number of shots to kill, easily overrunning Lara and wrecking her health. Even the smallest rat becomes a problem, which is frankly…well, it’s ridiculous. It’s a rat. Not a Dark Souls giant rat, or some kind of armored cyborg rat. It’s just a tiny garden variety rat, which should take one bullet to kill. Eventually if you grind in the first two levels to upgrade your guns and bullets, and once you upgrade Lara’s outfit and backpacks for more health and armor, it’s possible to reach the last room and open up tomb levels and level four. It’s at this point that the game says, “Oooh, level four is going to be tough. You better go grind some more.” Like that isn’t what I was already doing over the last three god-awful days because the game simply refused to drop enough weapon manuals to upgrade my chosen weapon. So maybe like me, you’ll try the shorter Tomb Levels, only to discover that the game shifts from reverse bullet hell into just bullet hell.

It doesn’t help that from level two onward, enemies begin teleporting into the room, and many of the newly spawned enemies off-screen have ranged attacks with no warning given that they’re coming in. Adding to this confusion is Lara’s own showers of bullets making the screen awash in visual vomit. In many rooms, it’s possible to lose half Lara’s health because you move her to dodge an attack, only to stop right in front of another attack you didn’t see coming. This kind of crap is already annoying in level two, but in the Tombs and level four, it becomes downright unbearable.

This brings me back to the biggest problem: the grind. To upgrade every part requires manuals. There are gun manuals, ammunition manuals, backpack manuals, bracelet manuals, and mask manuals. In any given run, you might only get a handful of each type, which isn’t so bad when you only need four to upgrade an item. But obviously that number climbs quickly, and getting any weapon up to level 5 alone is so tedious and tiring.

Then the game unlocks crafting, where collecting three of the same guns of the same quality level makes a new gun one class higher. So you can then make a rare gun with three uncommon guns of the same type, which means you need nine guns of the common type. Even with generic blueprints helping to make the process less grindy, there’s no escaping the hamster wheel of the first levels all in the name of “getting ready for level three.”

But this is what the game is built for. It’s a hamster wheel meant to frustrate and eventually drive players to desperation. Then they will buy the purple crystal premium currency to buy crates of guns, ammo, and manuals. In that case, let me save you from wasting some money. You see, the version on Netflix is very slightly more generous with that premium currency, so I saved up a whole bunch to simulate paying for a crystal pack, and those loot boxes are full of garbage. Even the most expensive loot crates are worthless.

You pay for nothing, and still get pushed back into the hamster wheel. It’s like the developers think you’re a pet, and they’re patting their thighs and saying, “Yes, get in that wheel! Oh, this is fun isn’t it? Gosh, you didn’t get enough manuals to upgrade yet. Come on girl, get back in that wheel for another run. Or, you know, give us money to skip the run. Oh darn, you STILL didn’t get what you needed. So, which is it now, girl? Wallet or wheel?”

This isn’t fun, and the real tragedy is, there’s a great game buried inside this live service nightmare. Without the power creep of the levels, I can imagine a game telling a new Tomb Raider story revolving around main dungeons and smaller Tomb side quests. That game would be brilliant, and I would even happily pay for that experience. Instead, what could have been a really great game is burdened by attempts to exploit gamers and force them to spend money. It’s even worse because there’s no benefit to spending money. Even a “best value” collection of gems can’t hide the greed inspired grind-fest that poisons a truly great idea.

In conclusion, I’m giving Tomb Raider Reloaded two stars, and I’m issuing a warning to avoid it at all costs unless you get the “free” version to experience the early gameplay for yourself. Even then, I’d advised dropping it quickly and finding anything else to spend your time and attention on. It’s a sad, pathetic attempt to exploit you, and it doesn’t deserve one slim dime from anyone.

Game review: Starman on Google Play Pass

My efforts to find anything decent on Play Pass that isn’t just free crap with the microtransactions removed has finally hit a mostly decent game with Starman, a good old-fashioned puzzle game with no energy meters, gimmick items to let you skip intentionally unsolvable situations, or timers to limit what you can use or when you can play. If not for the last few levels, I’d have bestowed a full five stars on it. But we’ll get to those qibbles in a bit. First, let me tell you what Starman does right.

The game is mostly monochromatic, like a less dark version of Limbo. The titular star man is an astronaut who solves puzzles to power up locations, grab a little orb, and take it to an island, where he burns the orbs and they turn into butterflies. I know what you’re thinking: The fuck did I just read? It’s great stuff, really. This is a game that exists solely to service some puzzle, and there’s not a story or any real world sense of logic to why this little guy is doing these things. You just get some puzzles of varying difficulty with no hints, and the reward is a little pride at finally sorting out what the fuck that one level was on about.

The thing is, quite a few of the puzzles are brain ticklers. Some of them, I needed to walk away from and come back with a new take instead of banging my head on an obvious dead end. So yes, when I finally got the solution a day later, I felt happy. Or, at least I did until the next puzzle threw some new concept out that stumped me again. I can’t even give examples because spoiling the solutions ruins the fun of coming to terms with the game’s random rule changes. I can vaguely say that some puzzles want the astronaut to directly interact with the puzzle, while others want the player to interact with the environment, and it’s not at all obvious which is which going into each of the levels.

Level lengths also aren’t consistent, with some taking only a minute or so to complete, while others might take ten or fifteen even when the solutions are more obvious. The little astronaut might solve one room in a level, and then move into another, and then another, until the last room reveals the pad that delivers the winning orbs. Then in the next level, the puzzle is all in one room, and a minute later, the astronaut is headed back to his little island to free another butterfly.

The last couple of levels, however, required me to interact with several elements rapidly, and it’s almost like the developers forgot that people are playing this on phones or tablets. Even though I knew exactly what I had to do, fumbling with the controls to make the astronaut run to the right switch or valve meant I had to cuss my way through a lot of failed attempts.

Once the game is complete, a new mode is unlocked, Flow. It’s…half baked. Some of the puzzles presented in the sandbox are neat, but even more of them fall flat for me. It gets back to the same problem as the final levels, where fiddly phone controls make a seemingly simple task way harder than it needs to be. Again, I’d like to cite examples, but that would spoil the solutions. So you’ll just have to take my word that some of the end-game puzzles are better than others.

Setting those aside, I do appreciate what Starman does, especially for what it doesn’t do. It plays by its own rules and won’t even give you the slightest hints when it decides to rewrite those rules. It doesn’t make things hard to sell a digital cheat. It just wants you to use your head and suss out the answer. You know, as a puzzle should.

Missteps aside, I’m giving Starman 4 stars and recommending it for fans of puzzle games who want to feel a little challenged before they can feel smug for a few seconds at a time.

Versus series: Runescape VS Runescape Old School

Hey, would you look at that? I’m back in the metaphorical saddle with another contest. Just as with the battle between Fallout Shelter versions, this contest began on my phone. I found Runescape Old School on the Google Play store, and had been playing a few weeks before a random quest sent me looking for the wiki. It was then that I found out the game was also on Steam, and from there, I found Old School side by side with the “newer” version.

I played both on alternating days at first, though often one or the other got extra attention because I became focused on a certain goal or quest. Unlike previous Versus entries, the question in this case was never “Which is better?” This is because both are fun, through often for different reasons. No, this time, the question was, “which version would I rather pay for a premium membership?” That being the case, it’s not even a tough decision. In Texan dialect, this would be described as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. That’s how uneven it is.

Here’s the thing to keep in mind: when a formerly paid MMO experience goes Free To Play, they have a lot of options about how to entice new players into parting with that monthly fee. The best examples I can offer for this are Anarchy Online and Ryzom. With Anarchy Online, all of the base game is free, but if you want access to guilds or the two very fun expansions, then you have to pay up. I played for months without spending a dime, but those expansions were so tempting that I went in for a six month pre-paid block, and I never regretted spending that money.

With Ryzom, which is now a fan-supported effort, I just got started playing it again after being away for many years. I’m actively considering dropping 30 Euros for a year of paid service, and I haven’t even left the tutorial island yet. This is because all of the game is available to me, but paying for memberships means I’d get extra XP to level up faster, access to an apartment to stash my stuff, and a pack mount to carry tools and materials for me. It’s a good deal when I consider how much fun I’m already having with the game doing the starter missions for each skillset.

That why when it comes to this entry in the series, Runescape Old School is the big loser because it holds a whole lot of stuff hostage, constantly reminding you that as a filthy FTP plebe, you don’t deserve even some of their basic features. Compounding this are a number of other factors that the newer version changes or gets rid of altogether to make for a smoother experience for new players.

Let’s start with the tutorial area. In Old School, the blacksmith introduces players to both the mining and smithing skills. After mining copper and tin and smelting them into bronze bars, players are tasked with making a bronze dagger. Then they move on to the combat tutorial, where the next instructor claims the dagger is worthless and gives out a bronze sword and a basic shield. But let’s say that like me, you thought, I’ll make a sword and armor before moving on. Well the game says, “No, you can’t do that in the tutorial.” Even after you leave and hit the mainland, none of the other bronze items are accessible until after you craft around a dozen daggers. Then each item is drip fed at a painful rate. Players can’t even forge bronze armor for legs until after gaining access to iron smithing, which starts the same slow grind to unlock items.

BUT to even accomplish this new grind, players have to walk all the way to another town, past a group of high level Dark Wizards who can and will kill them in one or two attacks. Outside of this town is the first mining location for iron, which must be carried to the bank because the player backpack only has 28 spaces, and many of those will be filled with tools, spare weapons, and food for healing. Oh, and did I mention there’s a mugger patrolling the mining site looking for noobs to kill?

Once the player has enough iron, they have to walk to another town past some mid-level barbarians, who will turn aggressive unless the player has sunk time into grinding up their combat levels. Here at the smelter, they discover that iron ore can fail to make iron bars at an alarming rate. I’ve gone to the smelter with 18 spaces of ore and returned to the bank with six iron bars. Yes, it’s that bad.

But wait, we’re not done. Players must then walk back to the second town to find an anvil to smith with. They can’t go back to the starting town because that anvil is only capable of smithing bronze weapons for the stupidest of reasons. This means for every new material unlocked, a whole new layer of bullshit gets added to the already laborious process.

Let us return to the tutorial area, this time for the newer game. For the player who asks, “Can I craft armor?” the answer is, “Sure, make a full set of bronze armor if you like.” If the same player decides to skip all the little weapons in favor of a two-handed sword, they can do that too. This freedom means that in the combat tutorial, they will straight up wreck the giant rats and be on their way to the next step in a few seconds.

Every level of mining and smithing is just as easy to access. Level up mining by ten levels, and a new material is unlocked. Remember the issue with iron failing to smelt? Doesn’t happened here. Additionally, one of the first things the game gives out is a tool belt, so even though players still only have twenty-eight spaces in their backpack, tools no longer take up those spaces. Then the players are told that if they want to work on mining skills, they can smith an ore box that will store up to 100 ore samples, further freeing up space and making trips back and forth less frequent. As new materials are unlocked, the ore box can be upgraded for a reasonable material cost, and it’s still backwards compatible with lesser quality ores. Lastly, every item is unlocked to smith right at the start, so there’s no need to grind daggers just to make a helm.

Then there’s the ore and bar banks. When players get to the smelter, they can press a button to bank all their ore samples at once. From there, they can decide to smelt some bars, or they can just go back to the mine and keep pulling ore. Once they do smelt bars, they can carry them to the forge and bank the bars with the same options to make an item, or go back to the smelter for more bars. Both activities offer XP in smithing, so even before a single item is made, players can level up by smelting and banking materials.

The newer game does add an extra step to smithing at the forge, where larger items may cool while being worked on the anvil and must be returned to the forge to reheat. But instead of being annoying, it kind of adds an extra layer of immersion that I rather liked.

Let’s look at another skill, cooking. Both games start you off by making a campfire and tossing raw meat onto the fire, and both games start off with around the same ratio of edible to burnt meat. But in Runescape Old School, almost every time players level up, they will get a message like this: “Paying member can now make three new recipes.” Non-paying members get nothing. Oh, every once in a while, they might get offered a crumb, like a different meat to roast, but it isn’t until level 25 when they get access to stews. By the way, stews burn at about the same high rate as iron fails to smelt, and in both cases, players don’t get XP for failed attempts. What this creates is an artificial inflation of grind times, and between it and the constant reminders that I as a non-paying player don’t deserve anything new to try out, I found this to be a recurring source of frustration.

Meanwhile, the newer game regularly drops new recipes for both paid and non-paying players. The first recipe I sat up and got excited for was meat pies, and it was all quite involved. I had to first mine some clay, soften it with water at a well to get soft clay, and then take that to the pottery wheel and kiln to make pie pans. Each round of cooking this recipe thus offers XP in mining and crafting. Once I have pans I have to go kills some cows or chickens (XP in combat and health) cut down a tree to make a fire (XP in woodcutting and fire making) and cook the meat. (XP in cooking) Next, I have to craft up some jars, go harvest wheat, and grind it at a mill to get flour. (Harvesting and making flour generates no XP in any skill, though, so that’s a bit of a bummer.)  Taking buckets to a well or water source, I combine water and flour to make pie dough, add the dough to the pans, add the cooked meat to the raw crust, and carry all these raw pies to a stove range to cook them. They can still fail to cook properly, but the burn rate is less frequent than in Runescape Old School, so their high cooking XP for each successful pie means it’s possible to level up cooking even faster. To compare, I’m level 26 in Runescape Old School, and 38 in the newer version. And yeah, it’s a complex process just to make pies, but it feels accurate to an actual cooking process instead of just combining random items to suddenly get a completed dish.

I know this is already getting long-winded, but I want to point out combat in both games, because lots of y’all are bound to want to engage in a bit of digital monster slaying, right? Right, so in both games, I spent a lot of time grinding to get both characters to the same combat level. The newer game made this easier because the starting town is geared toward learning to fight with various weapon classes. New players might go with melee, or archery, or magic. In all cases, the starting adventure will have players kill some low-level mobs before taking on their first boss. They will probably be like me, reaching the end of that boss fight with a sliver of health left, and excited for more battles of that level. Well in short order, I found more small dungeons in neighboring towns, and I fought two more bosses, winning and getting a goodly amount of combat XP in the process.

New levels in the newer game unlock combat skills that can be triggered manually, or left to the game to automatically trigger. An early defensive skill will channel all the accumulated “adrenaline” from a fight into healing the player, so instead of wasting food, players can focus on making more progress into the dungeons. Finally, higher combat levels will mean players will be dishing out lots of damage. I frequently got critical hits of 350 HP on enemies, killing them in just a few swings. That felt satisfying, especially when the first swing might only be 80 or so, and then BOOM! Super critical! Aw yeah!

Over in Runescape Old School, even having a combat level of 32, with attack, strength, and defense all at level 28 each, combat is a slow affair. It goes zero, zero, zero, zero, one HP taken from the enemy; zero, zero, zero, two HP taken from the player; zero, zero, zero, oh! Two HP taken from the enemy! Only 15 more hit points to go.

HP does regenerate, but it’s so damned slow that you can get kicked for being AFK while waiting to recover. So you might eat some meat to recover faster, only to get back into the same slow slog. I haven’t seen a boss yet because every quest I’ve done is just fetch quests of the worst sort. Go to City A and fetch an item. Go to City B to get another. In City C, trade the second item to get a dye to recolor the first item. Take that item back to the quest giver, who says, “Ugh, I hate that! Go do all the same steps again, but bring back the same item in a different color!” And that’s a real quest, and you have to do it three times for very little XP or monetary rewards. It’s all a colossal snore, and real combat with epic bosses feels hopelessly locked behind weeks of grinding against trash mobs.

So yeah, there’s no real competition this time around, because the question is which game would I rather spend money on to get access to the “good stuff?” The newer Runescape promises boss fights and raids, more recipes added to the already generous offerings for me as a non-paying player, more materials to smith with, and special epic weapons and armor. I can have pets to summon, access to guilds and an apartment, and all kinds of neat goodies.

What do I get with Runescape Old School? The same grind, but with extra recipes unlocked, and access to what should have been free skills, like fletching arrows or training agility. I’d still have to grind through each new material just to make a freakin’ pair of pants, and I still wouldn’t want to fight any real monsters or bosses without more minion grinding because paying to play doesn’t make combat any less of a slog.

I’m not saying Runescape Old School isn’t without its charms. After all, I’m playing it on my PC and on my phone. I wouldn’t bother with either if I hated the game. But if I had to choose which version to plunk down eleven Euros a month for, Runescape Old School just doesn’t have a chance. It comes off as stingy, petty, and even a little bit cruel to non-paying folks. It’s a case of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, and the newer Runescape is a honey pot brimming with promises of epic adventures and epic loot. So yeah, that’s going to get my wallet open a lot faster than “Members can now cook fishing bait, brew Dwarven Stout, and bake fish pie, and you can go fuck yourself, plebe.”

That’s it for this entry in the Versus series. I hope you enjoyed it, and I’ll see you next time for…drum roll, please? Ryzom VS Runescape VS Anarchy Online. That’s a whole lot of MMO territory to cover and grind through, so maybe don’t expect that until next month at the earliest. Until then, happy gaming, y’all.

Game review: Donut County for Android

Completely unrelated to the proper review, I’d like to mention that I got Google Play Pass to see if it was worth the subscription, and so far, it is not. The first game I tried, Party Hard Go, kept glitching and popping up a developer’s debug menu warning of a bunch of unplayable sounds. This happened so frequently in the first level that I just deleted the game and moved on. Almost everything else I’ve tried has turned out to be the free shovelware prevalent on Google Play, but with ads disabled and all the microtransactions made free. And you know what? They still aren’t fun games.

It was in the midst of rifling through unsatisfying titles that I remembered Donut County, a game I’d meant to play, but that got pushed to the back of my mind in favor of larger games. First I searched to see if it was part of Play Pass, and it was not. But it was only €4.29, and that’s cheap enough that if I didn’t like it, at least I didn’t have to be angry about losing too much cash. I’ll drop spoilers right now and admit that I liked it quite a bit.

Donut County is a game told in chapters. The first is a prologue set in the present, while many chapters speed forward to the future and tell their parts as flashbacks revealing the slow destruction of the town. The final chapters return to the present, culminating in a final chapter with not one but two boss fights, and then there’s a prologue of sorts added to the closing credits.

So, what’s destroying the town? I don’t want to spoil too much, but it involves a racoon and an app that summons holes. You move the hole around to collect small objects, causing the hole to grow, and the larger it gets, the bigger objects you can collect. This escalates in every level to taking people, their cars, and their houses. (In many cases this includes the surrounding rock formations, warehouses, and even a skyscraper.)

It’s a fairly simple game mechanic that works whether you do it with a controller on the PS4, Steam, and GOG versions, or with a smartphone screen on Android or Apple. Even after the game introduces a new catapult feature, it’s very easy to use, though some of the puzzles employing it are trickier than the usual “make the hole bigger” solutions. Note, I didn’t say they were hard, just trickier. Most of the game has a very chill vibe to it, which is helped by the soundtrack being full of nice music to relax to.

But then there’s the boss fight. I went from lying back in bed to sitting tensely huddled over my phone, alternating furious thumb swipes to dodge the boss’ first attack, which could render the hole inoperable for one round. This by itself wouldn’t be so bad, except after each round where the hole was filled, the boss would attack the protagonist and do damage. Fail three rounds, and it’s back to the start of the fight. Add to this that in the second and third phase, the boss drops barriers to try and trap the hole, and it gets very tense. Like white knuckle, swearing profusely tense.

Now imagine my dismay when, right after dispensing the boss after six failed attempts, another boss arrived, this time armed with a bazooka. But it turned out the second boss was kind of a gimme, maybe as a mea culpa for cranking up the tension so cruelly. In any case, the final boss fight sees the town freed of the menace and returning to their now vacant lots to rebuild.

All told, the whole game took me around three hours to beat, which I did in one session. Sure, I could have taken it in bite-sized portions, but once I got into the game and its story, I wanted to see how it ended. Ultimately, it’s a cute tale about owning one’s mistakes, and it ends in a satisfying way. I’m not sure I’d play it again, but I don’t need to in order to feel like I got my money’s worth out of it.

I’ll give Donut County 5 stars and recommend it to anyone looking for a cute, simple game to pass an evening with. Whether you play it on PC or a smartphone, it’s wonderfully intuitive and easy to grasp, though certain stages will involve a bit of experimentation to reach the solution. (I thought the first “bunny love” level was quite clever once I sorted out what I was doing wrong.)

So, take this mostly spoiler review to heart and consider picking up Donut County in whichever flavor you prefer. If you get it on mobile, maybe we can someday convince more developers to just sell us a game as nice as this, instead of more ad-infested, gacha-bloated, microtransaction-loaded shovelware. Well, maybe not, but I can dream, right?

Game review: Vampire Survivors on Steam

You know, I honestly did not expect to go this long without reviewing anything, but as I’ve mentioned before, a series of crises month after month left me with no free funds to buy new games. It wasn’t terrible for me, as I’ve got maybe a hundred old games to keep me entertained. But it’s been hell on my poor blog, and my dipping interest in my TBR pile hasn’t really helped matters much. (To be clear, I am trying to read. I just keep hitting points in each book where I add them to the Did Not Finish pile, and I don’t review what I can’t finish. In my mind, it isn’t fair to the author for me to go in swinging with a half-formed opinion.)

Anyway, the gaming sites all released their Game of the Year lists, and Vampire Survivors kept popping up. I wasn’t sold on the sales pitch given by most writers at launch, but when it showed up on so many lists and is apparently crushing the most played lists on Steam and consoles, I figure maybe there has to be fire under all that smokey hype. I went to Steam and saw it was on sale for 3.99, and I thought, Hey, if it sucks, it’s only 4 euros, so there’s no need to be angry about not liking it.

So how do I like it? Let me give you the short version first: I just unlocked all of the in-game collection to get the final character, Queen Sigma, and tonight I’m buying the DLC to keep playing. Yeah, it’s good stuff, y’all. This is a rogue-lite where every round can only last 30 minutes before you’re booted back to the main screen. (Although later on you can turn off that timer if you want.) But it’s that short “bite-sized” chunk of gaming that inspires so many late-night “just one more run” sprees. Every run can unlock something new, or provide its own unique challenge, so the temptation to keep dipping back in for “just one more” is super strong.

Without knowing the developer, in early playing I imagined some programmer at Konami going into a meeting and pitching a new Castlevania game during one of those down times when Dracula was still sleeping off his last Belmont-induced defeat. Said programmer pitched it as such: “The survivors of Dracula’s last attack must clean up all the roaming monsters infesting their lands, and to do so, they’ll level up a bunch of weapons and become walking bullet hells!” Then the Konami execs said, “It’s too crazy and will never work. Get out of here! Baka!” So the programmer left the building, turned around, and yelled, “I’m not crazy, and I can make it work! It’ll sell like chocolate dorayaki! You’ll see! Kusou!” (That last curse being uttered because they looked around and realized that to all the gathered observers, it looked like he was shouting at the building, and thus was thoroughly insane.)

In reality, this game is developed by an Italian, but the art style combined with some very familiar enemy types lend this game a very Castlevania feel. BUT, the real trick is how this doesn’t come off as a play for nostalgia. I think because taking all those familiar enemy concepts and injecting them into a top down free for all makes it all feel new and fresh.

The initial elevator pitch of a reverse bullet hell shmup (shoot ’em up) didn’t do much for me because I expected the endless waves of enemies would still require me to abuse my controller and my thumb to dodge. To a certain extent, the final seconds of many runs can turn out that way, but the first fifteen minutes are mostly just a chill time where I’m lounged back in my seat, picking out which weapons go with what passive items to form evolved weapons. And don’t worry about trying to remember what to do on each run, because all the combinations go in a short list as you unlock them. So at the start of a run, I would pause to dip into the list, and then start the game already knowing which way I wanted the build to go.

At first, getting the final result is harder because with every level earned by picking up XP crystals, a menu pops up with three or four options. (Depending on a character’s level of luck they may have a percentile chance to access a fourth option, but even for them it’s not guaranteed.) There’s no option to skip choosing, so the first few rounds rely more heavily on RNGesus being kind or mean to you. And in this game, RNGesus is not a forgiving role model like Real Jesus. No, in this game RNGesus can often decide he wants to see if you’ll live on the random shit builds he gives you. Yes, it can be done almost every time. But when I’m aiming for a “Bible Thumper” build and I get  “wimpy glass canon” instead, it did chafe my nips a bit.

But this is a rogue-lite game, meaning that you can invest gold accumulated from runs to unlock permanent upgrades. Among these are options to re-roll level-up items and to banish them for the rest of a run. There’s also an option to seal items from all runs, but I never tried using it because really, any weapon can work if you just take the time to evolve it and see how the end-game plays out.

Some weapons are more tricky to level up because the items needed to do so are scattered across the map, and you’ve only got 30 minutes to walk virtual miles. In the end, getting the items and leveling them up will leave you with mere seconds to see what they can do before the Grim Reaper stomps over to kick you out of the sandbox. There is, however, another power-up to unlock that will let you choose an endless run. Then the Grim Reaper is banished, and to leave, you either need to die or manually quit the game. Here, you can really test out those high level evolved weapons and builds, and I’ve used the mode frequently to grind for gold to buy more unlocks. (Prices do get a bit high on some of them, so you have to choose only upgrading after lots of short runs or making a few longer grinding runs.)

There comes a point in the journey of unlocking upgrades and grinding when it becomes possible to set down the controller and leave the room. Yes, readers, even before unlocking all the goodies, I made builds so ridiculously OP that I shut off my monitor and went downstairs to make dinner, watch a movie, play a game on my phone while I’m in the bathroom, and then return to the office to check my progress. Then I’d say something like, “Oh, only level 345? Hmmm, something is still missing, then.” I was missing something because in later runs, I could leave for the same amount of time and find my character is up between  745 to 750. At those levels, the enemies’ strength, numbers, and speed combined with my character’s damage output render the screen in a wash of blinking lights that do very much justify the epilepsy warning at the start of the game.

I’d be failing as a reviewer if I didn’t mention the “flavor” of character and item names. After playing for a day or so, I ended up watching a YouTuber playing the game, and he unlocked a bird and pronounced Peachone as “peach-own.” This is likely to happen for anyone not knowing a little about Italian pronunciation, but the correct way is “peach-oh-nay,” and is a bastardized spelling for piccione, or pigeon. Yes, one of the best weapons in the game is a pigeon. One of the evolved spells in the game is called Mannajja, which is close enough to the proper spelling that I don’t have to explain how to pronounce it. It’s Sicilian dialect, and it loosely translates to “Damn it.”

There’s characters from the cheese families, starting with Imelda Belpaese. Later on you unlock Pugnala (poon-yalla) Provola, Poppea Pecorina, Concetta (Cown-chetta) Caciotta (Cah-chot-ta) and Cavallo (Which may be referring to a horse, but I believe he’s also named after a cheese, Cacio Cavallo.) There’s an in game item that temporarily lets all survivors shoot fire from their mouths and—with a certain Arcana card—out of their asses. It’s called Nduja (en-du-ya) Fritta, and if you don’t know why this is hilarious, you’ve never eaten N’duja. (A very spicy cured meat paste with a lovely smokey aftertaste. When coming to Italy the first time, I ended up eating this on bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for many weeks. It was simply too good to say no to. But eating too much of it can lead to what Johnny Cash called the ring of fire.)

Before concluding the review, I cannot say that the game is all stress-free. The fifth and final regular map gave me fits trying to sort out what build would get me to the end, as did the challenge rooms like The Bone Zone, Tiny Bridge, and Moonglow. Boss Rash (their misspelling, not mine) similarly took me quite a while to unlock because the slow, slow rate of leveling left my characters too weak to actually eliminate any boss, much less take on five bosses all at the same time. I ended up quitting and restarting the Eudaimonia M. boss fight over and over because many characters’ starting weapon and stats left them severely handicapped and unable to deal damage. To be fair, I knew the moment I picked the right character for the run when their starting weapon whacked the boss three times in rapid succession, and that felt real good. In all cases, I took the challenges in stride because after several days of too easy runs, it was interesting to have to sit back and really think what specific character and build direction would get me the win.

Certainly, I could just keep playing the base game to try out more character/build combinations, but as I said at the start, the game has left me with such a glowingly positive feeling that I am going to get the DLC and see if that’s as good or better than what I’ve played. Even if I don’t like it, the developer deserves that little extra reward for making such a damn fine chunk of pure fun. This kind of game proves that you don’t need photo-realistic graphics or a hundred hours of content to be enjoyable. More hardcore gamers will probably finish this up in a week, maybe less, but they’ll come away enjoying their time spent in this little world. Many of them will probably keep coming back for more because it’s just so addictive. Hell, if I’d known it was this good, I would have paid the full asking price for it, since it’s a great deal either way.

I give Vampire Survivors 5 enthusiastic stars, with the caveat that if you have a history of epilepsy, this game is not safe for you. End level flashing is frequent enough that it will trigger an attack, so just don’t risk your health. But for everyone else, from casual gamer to hardcore, this is a fantastic game that will give you many, many hours of joy. So go out there and get it to help show the big companies that some of these indies can succeed by taking big risks instead of retreading the same open-world live service reboots.

Versus series: 3D Fallout brawl…out

I need to apologize for the lengthy delay getting this entry posted, as it was finished last month as a Word file. said file has been sitting on my desktop, hidden in the clutter of game tiles, often overlooked and forgotten as I search for what to play next. Then yesterday, I was starting to think of my next review when I thought, Crap, did I ever post the Fallout battle? I did not, so here we are.

For me, the Fallout series (or at least the 3D iterations of the series) are kind of like Borderlands 2. I don’t really like the overall story, and a lot of the details “under the hood” annoy me. So why would I play them? Well, it’s because I like how the shooting feels.

Both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were games my husband bought to play on our Xbox 360. I remember trying Fallout 3 for the first time, entering Megaton, and meeting Mr. Burke. As he was offering caps for killing an entire town, I told him to leave. He said he would, and then he just sat there, staring at me. I pulled out a 10 millimeter pistol and shot him in the forehead. He immediately stood up and shouted, “Uh, you’ve got blood all over my suit!”

I shot him six more times in the head before he died, and then I shut off the game and walked away for almost a year. Mr. Burke is not wearing an armored helmet. He does not have a metal plated skull, but the damage of a Fallout gun is so pathetic that a fedora can count as effective armor.

I would later bounce out of the game again for side quests that made no sense, for the godawful way Karma works (or doesn’t, in so many cases), or for random bullshit like VATS firing all of my selected shots through the doorway behind the gun instead of the target just two inches in front of the barrel.

And yet, like a fungus, certain aspects grew on me over time. I liked picking locks and hacking terminals to get into secret stashes or through shortcuts to sneak by guards. I liked slowly sneaking up behind those same guards to assassinate them, even as they spout lines like, “When I find you, you’re dead!”

So once I beat the main game (I don’t like Fallout DLC from any of the games, so there won’t be a contest between them), I went on to play Fallout: New Vegas. When Fallout 4 came along, I got it a few days after release. How could I not? Weapon decay? Gone. Karma? Also gone. Dialogue could be walked away from instead of having to say goodbye. Loot in containers could be accessed more easily. Greater graphical fidelity. A far more detailed wasteland. All of this sounded great.

To be sure, Fallout 4 does have a leg up on both of its older siblings for all the quality-of-life features combined with a much more stable experience. Oh, it could still crash from time to time, but it did so far less frequently. Like the other games, bugs could pop up from time to time, and it’s a guessing game which bugs will or won’t be in each playthrough. But overall, Fallout 4 finally felt like the work had been put in to provide a smoother, less janky taste of life in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Since its release, I have frequently gone into Fallout 4 and the previous 2 games to test random builds, or to ask specific questions like “Which game had better laser guns?” (Fallout 3, by the way.) It’s during these kinds of cross plays that I started to notice some irksome habits of Fallout 4. Fog can roll in and blind me at any given time, making navigation almost impossible. I have to find a working chair or bench to pass time instead of just pressing a button and waiting. Ghouls go from slow shambling to sudden impossible bursts of rollerblading, sliding their feet over three meters of pavement before leaping another ten to clothesline my character. Raiders who are wasted off of a massive cocktail of drugs somehow still possess the accuracy of a sober soldier and can snipe a headshot from 500 meters away.

We’re just about to get to the crowning of a winner, but before we do, let me explain why Fallout: New Vegas takes last place in this three-way race. Certainly, stability factors into it. I’ve heard a fan brag that the game was made in only 18 months, and given how broken it is, I don’t feel like that’s something anyone should hold out as a brag. But even after buying the game on PC and adding mods to patch a laundry list of problems, it can still crash to the desktop or freeze the computer entirely from a loading screen. Every time I enter a new building or use fast travel, there’s a chance that I will have to reset my computer because the game locked up so hard that I can’t open the task manager.

Beyond that, I have to add another mod to slow down the rate of weapon and armor decay because the fine folks at Oblivion apparently thought firing a shotgun four times would make it damn near unusable. Get shot once? Ooh, that body armor is ruined now, buddy. I don’t want the decay to go away, you know? I just don’t want it so aggressive that I’m spending more time micromanaging my wardrobe and arsenal than I am actually playing the game.

Then there’s stuff that mods can’t help. The eponymous city in the game is a barren collection of tiny courtyards gated off from each other because the game struggles to load even a few characters. Megaton has more people in it than any part of New Vegas. There’s no excusing that level of brokenness. Or try visiting the city and fast travel away. Now listen carefully and realize the sounds are still coming from the city, and will remain that way until you save, quit, and reload.

In the first Versus contest, I mentioned making a “Kill Everyone” run. There is a mod that supposedly makes this a bit more difficult because everyone, even wandering merchants will turn hostile at the first sight of your character. But I wanted to test how the game reacts when I’m being an absolute “Chaotic Evil” aligned character. It simply does not work.

Let me explain. I first went to the NCR prison to kill all of the Powder Gangers. I didn’t take the mission to do it; I just went in there and killed them. That act led to me gaining good Karma with the NCR. Because of that, my Karma can never drop to reviled status, and because it can’t I can wipe out a whole building of NCR soldiers, exit the building, and have the guard outside greet me as if we were allies. I was on my way to being reviled in Novac, but killing motel owner Jeannie May gave me a positive Karma boost. It’s didn’t matter that I’d already killed all of her residents, both her guards, and the shop owner. I killed a Bad Person, so it all balances out. THAT’S NOT HOW KARMA SHOULD WORK, PEOPLE.

That’s leaving out that no one, not even the radio news broadcaster has anything to say about the continuing string of mass murders moving methodically from town to town. Nothing about Goodsprings, or Primm, or Novac. Even after wiping out every person at The Topps, the radio is still playing a news piece about the new owner consoling people after the death of Benny, and the new owner is dead, too.

Oh, and I cannot move on without highlighting how terribly inaccurate and underwhelming lasers are in Fallout: New Vegas. In Fallout 4, their damage is a bit meh compared to Fallout 3, but they’re still mostly accurate. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s a beam of light. There’s no risk of lower accuracy due to bad rifling (or no rifling in the case of pipe weapons), and no weapon kick to throw off your aim. And yet, somehow I can fire a laser with iron sights ten times in Fallout: New Vegas while standing still, and only hit my target once. Just so you understand, this is still true after spending skill points to get energy weapons to 100. Yes, Fallout 4 screwed up lasers in their own special way, but Fallout: New Vegas broke them so pathetically that to use them exclusively in a run should be considered its own form of a punishing challenge.

With that out of the way, it’s time to crown a winner, and the W is going to Fallout 3. I needed a lot of time to debate which game should get the honor, and as much as I wanted to give it to Fallout 4, I simply prefer the wider assortment of options that come with Fallout 3. It’s so much easier to walk away from the main story and just do my own thing.

The skills and perks are more satisfying to use. Take Grim Reaper Sprint, for example. In Fallout 3, killing an enemy while using VATS will refill your action points. In Fallout 4, it only has a small chance of doing anything. Why break one of the greatest perks in the game?

Plus, there’s something to be said about the “feel” of both games, and Fallout 3 nails the right feel for so many reasons. Darkened rooms mess with my eyesight, as they should. I fear traveling at night because I don’t know if I’m going to stumble over a wild dog or mole rate, or worse, a Deathclaw. In Fallout 4, I can see even at night, and while it’s nice to see stuff coming, it’s not as immersive.

Finally, there’s the weapon and armor decay. Yes, I like that Fallout 4 doesn’t have them. But if I have to have decay as an added mechanic, Fallout 3 nailed the right balance between no degradation and insane levels of breakdown. Is it realistic? No, not really, but neither is no decay at all. Besides, why am I going to quibble about realism in a game where giant ants are spitting fire at my character, right?

So there you have it, another surprise winner in the Versus series. I hope you’ve enjoyed these entries, and I hope to bring you more in the future. But for now, this is the final entry. I could try something like pitting all of the Borderlands games against each other. But I would have to play them all again, and making it through Borderlands 3 is…well, it’s a task and a half. I’m not saying I won’t get to it eventually. I’m just saying don’t expect it to go up next week.

With that, thanks for checking the series out, and I’ll see you soon with another review.

Versus series rematch: Dark Souls DLCs

I actually had another versus match planned between Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4, but I was still debating who gets the win on that trio. At the same time, I’ve been continuing to play through the DLCs of the Dark Souls games when it struck me that for as much as I love the vanilla games, I mostly just suffer through the DLC to get the extra loot.

I think it comes down to the design philosophy that goes into balancing the main game versus the ones used for end game content. The directors want to keep your character on the back foot in the DLC, so everything, even little minions do massive damage. You’re feeling confident coming off a well earned win against The Nameless King and his giant thunder turkey and yet, the moment you step into The Dreg Heap, pathetic crawling imps rise out of the ash and with a weak ass swing lob off half your health. The very first boss is a pair of demons, and when they both fall, one rises for a second phase fight. Doesn’t matter which one you kill, they both have massive super attacks in their second phase. Where you were dishing out 500 points of damage per swing of your OP weapon of choice, suddenly it’s only doing 100, and that Demon Prince is damn near one-shotting your character with every attack.

I think in most cases, the developers wanted you to do the DLCs co-op. The number of minions and the sheer density of them suggest that they didn’t want players to go it alone. For instance, in Ashes of Ariandel, there’s a forest with over forty soldiers as well as some dire wolves and a few giant warriors just to sprinkle a little extra pain into the mix. Frequently, once one enemy is alerted, it starts a train of new arrivals, and as a single player experience, it’s frustrating to have killed twenty enemies in a single area, only to turn around to see three more running up to join the fight.

This is to say nothing of the bosses, all of whom demand an almost Ultra Instinct level of fight awareness. Yeah, they can be soloed with enough practice, patience, and a stubbornness to never give up, even though this motherfucker has already dusted your carefully crafted character fifty times before. We’re talking about Kalameet, Manus, Artorias, and that hellacious Sanctuary Guardian. I called the bosses of the vanilla Dark Souls easy compared to Dark Souls III bosses, but then I got into the DLC and my confidence dried up faster than a drop of water on a hot skillet.

Do you remember how I said I played the series in reverse order? The second game and its DLC brought more even pain with a trio of crowns to be collected before fighting the true final boss, the Scholar of the First Sin. This takes place after suffering through Elana the Squalid Queen, Sihn the Slumbering Dragon,  and the triple threat of Afflicted Graverobber, Ancient Soldier Varg, and Cerah the Old Explorer. That’s just one of the DLC packages, and in the next chapter, you also have to fight a second, stronger version of Smelter Demon, Sir Alonne, and Fume Knight (which can be even harder if you didn’t collect all of the smelter wedges to banish the four ash idols outside of his arena, because then they will heal him during the fight…yeah, it’s a real bitch to win if you leave even one idol, and damn near impossible if you leave all of them up and running.)

For the last DLC (relatively speaking, since you can take these in any order), you fight a tiger who can be invisible if you failed to get the right item. But let’s say you did, and you can see Aava, the King’s Pet. Doesn’t matter because this beast is still going to kill you a lot. Then you have to wander through a blizzard with these weird demon deer/elk-like beasties coming out of nowhere to fire magic missiles or just trample you to death. Get past that and the game goes “Man, wasn’t that tiger fight fun? Why don’t you try that again, but with TWO TIGERS.” (Yay?) Then you rescue some imprisoned Ivory Knights and get to the fight against The Ivory King. Oh-ho-ho, but before you actually fight him, you must slay wave after wave of corrupted knights, waiting for the freed Ivory Knights to seal the portals spewing an endless army of pain. Then, and only then does the king himself arrive, and partway through the fight he goes, “Surprise! Twenty foot magic sword!”

You do all this, and then you have to go through a gauntlet of bosses. This part was apparently so cruel that FromSoftware, Kings of Sadistic Gameplay, decided that once you defeated one wave of the gauntlet, you didn’t have to do it again. So first, there’s a pair of jokers called Throne Watcher and Throne Defender. You have to defeat them both quickly, or else the one you didn’t put down will revive their ally and heal them up a bit. They both hit like jackhammers, and they LOVE pulling trains of pain on your ass. Survive that, and it’s on to Nashandra, a corrupted queen who summons orbs that will curse your character over and over. Every time you get hit by another curse, you lose another massive chunk of health. So you survive all of this, and it’s time to face the eponymous Scholar of the First Sin, who loves two things: setting you on fire, and violating you with giant tentacles. (How very anime!)

Yes siree Bob, this triple gauntlet of DLC followed by ANOTHER triple gauntlet of bosses is one of the main reasons why I play the second game far less frequently than I do the original and third outings.

Oh, but when I played Dark Souls III the first time, there was no DLC. So I thought The Nameless King was The Literal Worst Boss Ever. No, those honors are a quadruple-tied knot of agony spread across two DLCs. In Ashes of Ariandel, you’ve got Sister Friede tag teaming you with her adopted father, a corrupted king who will try to beat you to death with a stone bowl the size of a small car. After you beat them both, Sister Friede jumps back up for a second round of Fun with Frostbite. So you suffered two phases of agony and put her down again. Well, guess what? THIRD PHASE, BITCH, and this time, Sister Friede is powered up with super anime black flame effects. And yeah, it looks cool. You might even go “Ooh, pretty!” right before she cuts you down with a flaming scythe. It took me forever to solo this chick, and even on lucky days when I could find folks to summon for help, Sister Friede could easily put all three of us down before ever getting to the third phase. She’s legit a beast of a boss.

Let’s say you wanted to get into the new arena combat for some meaty PVP. To do that, you have to defeat the Champion Gravetender and the Gravetender Greatwolf. First, the Champion has a set of normal sized dire wolves who, like real wolves, will try to flank you and attack from angles you can’t see them coming from. The Champion himself has a sword and shield, and they hit HARD. If you fail to put him down quickly, you’ll be fighting him and a gigantic white wolf who has a special attack where he leaps at you and creates a vortex of snow. Get hit by him or the vortex and your health plummets. Two dashes chained together can kill you even if you stat dumped in Vigor. And this asshole often spams that attack eight, nine, or ten times. There’s a way to cheat and break this boss fight, and it takes almost half an hour to do all the convoluted steps to make it happen. I legit would rather do all that bullshit than have to get blizzard-fucked to death a hundred times.

Over in The Ringed City, you can decide to retake on Dragonslayer Armor as an optional mini-boss and maybe feel good about yourself until you first meet Dark Eater Midir, a dragon who antagonizes you on not one, but two bridges, even before you fight him as a boss. The first time you meet him, he’s doing flybys, using his flame breath to keep you from getting to the next bonfire. You have to sprint to a cave, where FromSoftware set up a troll up to push you back out of the cave and into toasty, crispy death. Dodge the troll and get inside, and then you have to make another sprint to drop off a ledge and to a supposed safe spot. Oh, but there’s another troll ready to jump on you and stab you in the face. When you make it past all this bullshit, Patches, AKA: Troll Number One, will show up to kick you off a ledge. There’s an NPC invader with a giant hammer, a dozen well armed skeletons, and finally, the bonfire. So you light it and step outside, and there’s Midir lounging on the side of a bridge, ready to roast you again. Worse, this time he can do a Godzilla style breath attack that starts off as fire and ends as a super heated plasma beam.

Past this point, you finally get the chance to plunge into his lair and fight him for real. So, one, his flame breath is actually also poisonous. Two, his claw swipes require perfect timing to dodge. You get cute and try to get under him to hit his back legs, and he’ll just rear up and blow flame on you. Oh, also, he can fly, so half of the fight will be you running back and forth without landing a single blow and screaming “WILL YOU JUST HOLD STILL FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND!” This guy took me over a hundred tries to beat, and later, even my personal best runs were around ten to fifteen attempts. Finding anyone to summon on this guy is damned hard, and that’s no shock because few people want to dance with Midir unless they have to to get his nifty katana boss weapon.

Last but not least, there’s Slave Knight Gael, whom I hate, and it’s not just because of the boss fight. When you get to The Cleansing Chapel about midway through the vanilla game, Gael is huddled over making a raspy gasping prayer for someone to enter his painted world and get fucked by Friede’s scythe a hundred times. If he did it just once, it would be fine. But every time you fast travel back to the chapel bonfire, Gael winds back up with “Oh merciful goddess…” and he does the whole fucking prayer again and ends with the same creepy gasp that sounds like he’s cumming himself. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. FromSoftware, I didn’t need every trip to a busy hub to filled with “You know we’ve got DLC? Uhn uh uh uuhhhhh!!”

But let’s set that aside. Take deep breaths, and proceed to the ultimate troll. Slave Knight Gael makes it to the home of “The Furtive pygmies, so easily forgotten.” Yes, at the end of the world, FromSoftware looped back around to that old chestnut, and Gael eats them. All of them. What a swell guy, right?

Now, in theory, this should be one of the most forgiving boss fights in the franchise because the arena for the fight is huge, and there’s none of the usual clutter of obstacles to trip you up. All you have to do is dodge, get in a good swing, and don’t be greedy looking for chained attacks. You get him down to half his health and think, Wow, this is actually kind of easy. I might even— That’s when the cut scene triggers, where Gael sucks himself off and becomes bigger, stronger, and faster. He throws out spinning discs that you can mostly dodge, but you can also be hit by when they fly back boomerang style. He grows a cape made of death, and every spin attack he does makes the cape flare out. If it so much as touches your toe, it does massive damage. He can shoot out a flood of little red skulls that are like homing missiles. Individually, they’re not so bad, but if more than one hits you, it might trigger a stun lock, granting the rest of the skull barrage time to arrive and send you back to the start of the fight all over again. Each time after that, you’ll know the easy first half is a troll, and it will just make you madder to have to do it again.

I could mention Halflight, Spear of the Church, but they don’t really count as a boss fight. The idea is certainly novel enough. Players who join the covenant of Filianore can be summoned into the arena to become the boss. To this end, their equipment and spells are augmented by some special bossy attacks. When the DLC came out, this shit could be downright devious because a lot of those master “Soul Level 1” runners were jumping in to stomp people like me of more mediocre levels.

Just getting to Gael’s fight could be a real struggle…unless you just went to offline mode. The NPC version of Halflight is decidedly less troubling. I’m not saying he’s a cake walk, but every time I’ve fought him, I’ve only needed three or four attempts to get back into the muscle memory groove needed to beat him and his minions. (More NPCs get summoned, and these can heal Halflight, making their death mandatory. It sounds vexing, but is still manageable.) After the first few months, trying to Be The Boss meant standing around for as long as half an hour with nothing to do until you get the call. So even playing online, nine times out of ten, you’re getting the NPC boss, and they’re just not that big a deal compared to the other bosses in the Dark Souls III DLCs.

Okay, so first, I apologize both for how long winded this got, and for the added F-bombs. But I really wanted to convey why the DLCs are frequently not part of my runs in either of my favorite editions, and I wanted to make it clear that because the DLC of Dark Souls II is damned near mandatory to get the “Good Ending,” it really weighs heavily on my mind whenever I ask myself “Should I try it again?”

With that out of the way, it’s time to crown a winner in the contest, and this time, you might be surprised because I’m giving it to Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. Let me go back to Fume Knight to explain. I fought him maybe twenty times before deciding I needed to get back to the old crones at the start of the game and rework my character’s stats. Another twenty attempts in, and I was back at the old crone’s shack, thinking “Okay, this time for sure.” Ten attempts later, I finally landed the killing blow, and I set the controller down, walked to the kitchen to pour a drink, and then took it to the living room to toast that evil bastard.

Dark Souls fans frequently love to gush about the euphoria of finally beating that one ultra-hard boss, though for each fan, that one boss might be different. I’m not really that kind of gamer. Most of this time, that final victory doesn’t lead to joy, only relief that the slog is finally over. But most of the DLC bosses in Dark Souls II did lead to that joyful celebration when I finally put down one hard boss after another. The flood of happiness I got for dodging the Ivory King’s giant magic sword one last time to cut him down from his flank brought a genuine cry of “”Woo-hoo!” out of me. I needed ten minutes after that to get out all the laughter and other celebratory cries before I could move on.

I’m not saying that didn’t happen with Midir when I finally brought him down, but he’s just one boss in a DLC with two others, one of whom was a relief to be done with, and another who was just disappointing. Similarly, Sister Friede brings me no joy to defeat, just a sensation of untensing all my muscles because now I can stop being angry. The same goes for the DLC bosses of the original Dark Souls. So even though I rarely play them, even though the idea of slogging through the longest chunk of extra content makes me feel tired, I have to admit that those were the bosses that finally brought me the joy that so many other FromSoftware fans feel. I think that sense of connection makes those fights all the more special for me.

So, there you have it; the dark horse of Dark Souls charges out for a surprise first place DLC finish. See you next time for another (wink wink) upset victory.