Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 9

Versus Series: Dark Souls Remastered VS Dark Souls III

Welcome back to the second installment of the Versus Series, which will be pitting Dark Souls and Dark Souls III head-to-head to determine the superior Souls experience. Unlike the first entry in this series, today’s competition is more difficult to point to a clear winner. To make a proper comparison, I started both games with the Thief class before pivoting to magic casting. I did this to get access to the Bandit’s Knife, a dagger that does bleeding damage and is so fast that it can get in three attacks before most enemies and players have a chance to react. As for using magic, I mostly didn’t until well into the mid-game runs, when I finally got access to the real heavy hitting pew-pew. That’s the sweet spot where the saying “magic casting is Dark Souls on Easy Mode” actually becomes true. Before that, playing as a magic caster is like asking for a handicap in both PVE and PVP.

Before I start, I’ll answer the inevitable question: Why did I not include Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin? The simple answer is, I just don’t like it as much as the first and third entries. I’ve racked up over 600 hours playing it on PC and PS4, so I’m not saying I hate it. It’s just that I’ve logged thousands of hours in the first and third entries, and I just keep coming back for more. That claim isn’t hyperbole, either. My Steam copy of Dark Souls Remastered has 922 hours logged. Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has 451, and that’s not including my time on the Xbox 360 version. My PC version of Dark Souls III has 1,117 hours logged, and I played almost as many hours on PS4. By comparison, Dark Souls II has only 347 hours on Steam, and maybe half that for the PS4. Again, I don’t hate it. I just don’t love it the way I do the first and third games.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I played the series in reverse order, being initially intimidated by all the discourse about how hard FromSoftware’s games are. I avoided Dark Souls and the second entry because I didn’t feel like being abused for being a mediocre gamer, but I was convinced to try the third thanks to a video by James Stephanie Sterling. In it, they argued that the games weren’t as hard as the hype made them out to be, and what’s more they were incredibly fun and rewarding. So I bought the game the day after that, going into it blind just to see who was right.

My first playthrough, I didn’t even understand how embers worked, or how I could summon help for boss fights. I didn’t know I could farm embers, so I treated them like the rarest loot and hoarded the few I had for boss fights that I just needed a little more health to survive and win. I didn’t get invaded because most of the time, I was walking around in useless ash mode. Even so, the setting and monsters grabbed hold of me. The NPCs were interesting, and the vast array of ways to play were intimidating, but also intriguing.

Later on, I started learning how to break the game, and being embered, I engaged with the PVP, finding it almost as much fun as the PVE. I made builds according to the metas, went to the designated arenas, and even hosted a few fight clubs myself. In every way, it was an experience that kept giving new reasons to return, and that was before the DLC came out and dropped a ton of new toys to play with. (And easily one of the most fantastic fights with a dragon I’ve seen in any game, EVER.)

Because I enjoyed it so much, I got Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, played it and found the core game and DLC content fun enough that I got the Xbox 360 version of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. Since I had gone backwards in the series, a weird thing happened: I felt the first game was easier. I could parry most enemies like a boss, even though I struggled to do so in the later games. Most bosses seemed slow, and their tells were projected so early that I had plenty of time to react. Some boss fights were cheap, like the first two real bosses fighting in narrow arenas with no room for mistakes, and the second demon even bringing along a pair of cheap-ass dogs because just being in a tiny hallway wasn’t trollish enough for From.

By the second playthrough, I’d taken to heart a lesson I uncovered from speed-runners, and I embraced the cheese. I don’t fight the Capra Demon and his evil dogs. I use a bow to aim over his fog gate and throw fire bombs until he and his mutts are burned to a crisp. I don’t fight the Taurus Demon on his terms. I run around him and climb the tower to plunge attack him to death. Embrace the cheese. The cheese is your friend.

From that point on, every run I play in the first or third game was meant to test out different ideas, sometimes even played side by side to see how certain weapons and builds evolved over the years. I came to appreciate why there are so many strength builds, even if it’s not my preferred playstyle. I tried just about every flavor of dex builds, every magic class, and even some odd hybrid builds. Through it all, I’ve never gotten tired of playing. There’s always some random thing that happens and makes me yell, “What? I’ve never seen that before!”

It’s obvious that I love both games by now, I think, so which is the winner? The answer is still complicated and comes down to what I’m in the mood for. Sometimes I want the more old-school approach that Dark Souls offers, but other times, I want all the bells and whistle that Dark Souls III added.

But this is a contest, and there has to be a winner and a lo-hoo-hoo-ser, right? So, by a slim margin I have to give the W to Dark Souls III, and I will explain why. Trust me, better graphics isn’t anywhere on that list.

For starters, Dark Souls III is fairer. I’ve heard veteran fans say the original is best because “the enemies follow the same rules as you do,” and that’s simply not true. My character can barely hop a curb with a running head start, while the lowest enemies can leap twenty meters up a flight of stairs and around a corner to hit my character. They can do damage through a shield or block an attack at their back by also holding up their shield. I could go on, but the point is, enemies in Dark Souls III really do seem to adhere more firmly to the same rules that my character has to live by. (Though there is a certain doggo that has Instant Transmission the moment you look away from him, but he’s the exception rather than the norm.)

There are a lot of small quality of life improvements that make the journey less irksome. The wight limits are less restrictive before characters start “fat rolling,” for starters. Characters can carry three weapons for each hand, and four rings instead of two. There’s even more granular improvement, like the Ring of Favor and Protection not breaking just because you need to swap rings for one boss fight or another. None of this was a deal breaker for me playing the first game, but cumulatively, they help make Dark Souls III a better gaming experience.

Next is the FP system or the Attunement stat. Formerly just the “magic user stat,” Dark Souls III offers every build a reason to invest in FP. How? Special Attacks. Even the purest strength build meathead using a great sword will notice that they have a nifty surprise attack available that uses FP. If they ignore attunement, they might get four or five special attacks between visits to the bonfire. OR, they might get smart and invest a few points in the skill and give themselves more chances to surprise the in-game enemies and invading players.

This applies to every build and every weapon. Just when some invader thinks they’re in your head, you whip out a special attack, and suddenly they’re shook like a pastor at a tax audit. FP is the power to turn any weapon into a guessing game, and suddenly attunement isn’t just for mages and clerics. That’s a massive improvement.

In fact, I mentioned at the beginning how for this experiment, I was using the Bandit’s Knife as my main weapon. Well in Dark Souls III its special trick as a slide step that has invincibility frames. This means you can dodge just about anything (there are exceptions, usually anything that’s swing has a wide, WIDE arc) and end up on the flank or rear of an enemy, boss, or player. You might say, “Yeah, but it’s just a toothpick. How useful is that?” Well, in this run, I put down Dragonslayer Armor on my first try, with no phantoms summoned, or even an ember for extra health. Let me put that in perspective. The first time I played, I had the Hollowslayer Greatsword, easily one of the best swords in the game, and I needed forty attempts to beat that suit of magical armor. By using the slide step and FP, I felled that same giant in two minutes. I beat Lothric and Lorian in almost the same amount of time. I needed sixty attempts to understand their teleporting gimmicks on my first game, and I wrecked them both before Lorian even had a chance to attack after being resurrected by Lothric for the second time. One toothpick, two minutes. FP isn’t just a gimmick, folks. It’s a genuine game changer.

While I’m on the FP bandwagon, it’s time to mention blue estus flasks, AKA: “NO, I’LL DECIDE WHEN I’M DONE CASTING SPELLS!” See, in the first two games, magic users had a limit on spell casting. One scroll might offer 16 casts of magic missiles (Soul Arrows, but you old school RPG nerds know the real name), so to get more, you had to find someone else to sell another scroll, or wait until New Game+ to get more casts. Even if you have more scrolls, you need more Attunement slots to get those extra casts. But in Dark Souls III, you can just allot your “Sunny D” into “Blue Mountain Dew,” and suddenly your 16 magic missiles become 32 or 48, or 64. Now that invader who showed up with only healing potions and a giant sword isn’t guaranteed victory just because you’re a squishy mage. They have to work to earn that win, because you are a GAWD of Pew-Pew.

Of course, the same is now true for all classes. Melee fighters can sip a little blue juice to keep dishing out the pain, and bow users can add more oomph to all their arrows. Hell, users of the Dragonslayer Greatbow can add a puncturing effect to their arrows so it shoots through two Sun-Bros, the game host and a purple invader before lodging in the ass end of the next region. FP just makes every weapon that much more awesome.

I’d be remiss in mentioning the terrible gimmick bosses of the original Dark Souls being a point against them. On every run, I spend hours thinking about the end-game run, asking myself which assholes I want to get out of the way first.

Is it The Witch of Izalith, a boss so bad that if you die (and you will, often) FromSoftware let you go back into the fight without restarting the previous phases?

Or is it Seath the Scaleless, who requires that your character die the first time they meet, AND THEN traverse a maze-like library to find an exit, AND THEN navigate a garden of invisible platform bullshit, AND THEN fight or avoid a room full of man-eating oysters, AND THEN require either perfect skills or a ring swap and a full load of humanity to overcome his curse-breath nonsense?

Or is it the Four Kings, running on a timer before each new king arrives, so there could be five or even six of the useless motherfuckers by the end of the fight?

And who could forget Nito, Lord of Death? FromSoftware didn’t think it was fair to leave Nito alone with only his ability to send an underground torpedo anywhere in the room even if he can’t see your character, his giant sword, and his toxic farts of death. No, he needed an army of constantly reviving skeleton warriors to protect him from the squishy stupid player.

Read that over. If you haven’t played Dark Souls, you’re thinking, Man, that’s a lot of bullshit. And if you have played, you’re thinking, Okay, yeah, that was all bullshit. Lothic and Lorian teleporting as they please are a freakin’ cakewalk compared to the four lord souls needed to reach Gwynn, who ends up being pathetic compared to his closest buds.

The final point in favor of Dark Souls III is generosity. Let’s say you’re a total noob and don’t know what weapon you prefer. In the first game, this can quickly become a penalty because you need to know the exact right region and enemies to farm to build up other options. But in Dark Souls III, you can farm enough titanite shards to sample several weapons and decide what’s right for you before climbing the upgrade tree to murder perfection.

There is one teeny tiny caveat to this praise, because the original Dark Souls has New Londo Ruins. It’s a shithole populated at first by ghosts who can’t be harmed without using a spell item called Transient Curse, or by actually being cursed. (You lose half your health while cursed, and all it takes is one ghostly gangbang to explain why that option sucks.) Once the town has been drained of flood waters, the lower regions is filled with Darkwraiths ready to fill your butt with giant blades. But if you can kill these bony bastards, they drop Titanite Chunks and Titanite Slabs. Which means you can upgrade all your weapon to The Ultimate Killing Level with just a bit of patience. Okay, a lot of patience, as Titanite Slabs drop at about the same rate as Steam Sales you actually care about.

Closing out this contest, I can honestly say that anyone who does not agree with me, and who decides to stick to their favorite souls game is not wrong. ANY entry in the Soulsborne series is worth your time and attention, and if you like any of these games over the other, well, you do you. But for me, the first game in the series that I played is still the best. It’s full of quality-of-life improvements, improved storytelling, and expanded options for all kinds of players. So, if you haven’t yet experimented with any FromSoftware paraphernalia, let me suggest going in reverse order like I did. You’ll find that previous entries have their charms, but the true souls king delivers the same experience while also trimming away the worst salutes to old-school D&D.

Oh, and one final aside…can someone please explain to me why FromSoftware hates Clerics so much? I’ve tried to make a fun Cleric build in all three games, and every time, I get to the end of the run with wimps who do less magic damage than Sorcerers or Pyromancers, and less physical damage than pure strength or dexterity builds. Worst of all, they don’t even get their attack spells until mid-game. I’m not buying “the Cleric is meant to be a support role,” because most of the time, I’m playing it as a single player game with a side order of online PVP. I’m not supporting anyone, and as a Cleric, I almost need support from literally any other class or build.

Seriously, FromSoftware, show us on the doll where the Bad Clerics touched you, okay?

Versus Series: Fallout Shelter PC VS Mobile

While I haven’t been playing many new games lately, I have still been playing a lot. To give an idea how much, I had to buy a paint pen to redraw the button letters and symbols for both my PC controller and my PS4 controller because I wore the old ones off. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to play newer games like Elden Ring, either. It’s just that right now, my PC’s graphics card can’t handle newer games, and the bare minimum card is priced just a hair over 700 euros. (Thanks, crypto-bros.) On the PS4, I’d have to get PS-Plus, and we’ve managed to have a financial disaster every single month for a year and a half. The latest is an eye infection that almost blinded my dog, and who now needs weekly visits to the vet to make sure she won’t need surgery.

So…no PS Plus, and no money for a graphics card has me playing my older games, quite often to answer random questions that I hadn’t considered before. For example, what happens if I “kill everyone” in Fallout New Vegas? (The answer is kinda meh, as lots of NPCs respawn after a set number of days, doing anything even remotely nice breaks each faction’s karma system to the point where they don’t react to being massacred, and Mr. New Vegas doesn’t have any scripted content for the rapidly vanishing population aside from Benny, Mr. House, and Caesar. Even the ending is broken, with the narrator praising The Courier for building a “truly independent New Vegas” before the faction montage proceeds to list all the casualties.)

This kind of experimentation led me to start playing certain games together to answer the question, which is better? For this first entry in the series, I got started playing Fallout Shelter on my phone, and after a couple days, I wondered how it compared to the PC version. One download and two rage quits later, I have an answer, and…the results may surprise you.

Let’s just get the clickbait answer out of the way with super speed, yes? Yes. The mobile version, with its ad-incentivized features, is hands down the better version of the game. I can’t even believe I’m writing this because I normally consider ads to be the bane of the entire mobile gaming market. I very much prefer paying for a game to get rid of ads, only now the latest scam is paying a monthly fee to lose the ads rather than a single payout. And yes, paying Google or Apple for their curated games also counts as part of the scam. Both companies created this toxic market, so them asking for money offering a solution to a problem they invented is the very definition of a scam.

Setting that aside, Fallout Shelter’s implementation of ad-services is the least aggressive, most optional offer I’ve ever seen. What’s more, the ads give tangible incentives to take that 20-30 seconds watching the usual shovel-ware ads. There’s one ad option that refreshes every five hours which will gift players with caps, loot boxes in three flavors (lunchboxes, pet carriers, and Mr. Handy units), or Nuka Quantum. It’s that last option that really begins to pay off with just a few ads, because with a steady supply of “fast forward juice,” it’s possible to bypass a lot of the game’s most tedious timers. Need to speed up a new dweller’s training? Use some Quantum. Want to skip the wait and get right into a quest? Quantum. Need a new gun in a rush? Quantum.

The constant influx of caps also means there’s no boringly slow wait times to build new rooms. On the PC version, I had to wait whole days to get the funds to build and upgrade a clinic, just so I could start making Stimpacks. On the mobile version, I had that and the science center to make Rad-Away up and running on the first day. The difference in time saved is massive.

There is another ad on tap for vault dwellers exploring the wasteland, an actual fast forward button that speeds up their progress by thirty minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, but it can often result in explorers picking up an extra gun or outfit just by watching an ad. And again it’s optional, so if you’d rather not bother with the offer, you can happily ignore it.

Those are the main ways the games are different, and both versions had implemented some changes that I had highlighted in my original review. For one thing, in the original release, any raid in the vault made dwellers lose health at the same rate, regardless of their level or Endurance level. Now each dweller takes damage slower of faster depending these factors. I admit it’s still ridiculous that everyone in a room is losing health to, say one radroach, but it’s still a big improvement that makes upgrading SPECIAL stats more meaningful.

Another welcome change is that armor actually seems to do something, both during vault raids and in quests. Before, the difference between a vault suit and power armor just felt like a costume swap, but putting someone in that armor now will greatly mitigate health loss. It’s a pity that so much of the best stuff is lock away in blueprints, because I want to dress all my people in the sturdy versions of their uniforms, and I still haven’t found the plans for any of them on either mobile or PC.

One problem that I had with the game is also still present in both the PC and mobile versions. Clicking or tapping on a vault dweller is supposed to pop up a card with their stats and equipment, but that may not work in one of two infuriating ways. Sometimes, when trying to click on one dweller after another to administer Stimpacks, I will often have to click them twice to get their card to pop up. More infuriating than that is how often a click will move the camera across and down just slightly enough that it’s interpreted as a command to send the dweller to the floor below, and also sending someone up from the corresponding room. To fix this room swap, I have to send one dweller to a living quarters or warehouse, send the other back to the proper room, and then return the displaced dweller to their assignment. This happens at least once per session, and has occurred multiple times in sessions to the point of causing curse-filled rants. It’s seriously the worst part of both games.

I mentioned at the start that I ended up rage quitting the PC version twice, and both times were for the same reason. One of the loading title cards states, “Leaving a dweller to explore the wasteland longer will result in them finding better gear.” THIS IS A LIE. I have left people out exploring for forty-eight fucking hours, only to have them return with the same shitty rusty b.b. guns and .32 pistols. The real way to get better gear is by crafting it or by going on quests. On the mobile version, having that steady supply of Quantum meant that when the raids got progressively harder, my dwellers had the appropriate gear to manage their disasters. On the PC, most of my people still had shit guns as the raider parties gave way to feral ghouls, and then to deathclaws.

But the cherry topping that sent me running away from two separate vaults was the radscorion raids. This a two part problem, with the first being how the game prioritizes Stimpacks over Rad-Away. As the radscorpion attacks, it deals massive radiation damage, which is implemented in the Fallout 4 style. The health bar turns red, covering up the green health instead of being a separate meter like in Fallout 3 or New Vegas. This would be fine if the game requested Rad-Away first, but it instead pops up a symbol for the Stimpack first, then Rad-Away, and then asks for another Stimpack. This massive drain on resources is compounded because radscorpions have a ridiculously high pool of health. They can wander through as many as four rooms per raid, and with each room having four to six people, trying to make it through one raid can mean losing an entire supply of Stimpacks. Just when I get half of my supplies back, hey look, it’s another radsorpion raid. I got to the point where I would load the game to check on a quest timer and INSTANTLY trigger another radscorpion, and so in both vaults, that was the point when I said, “No, fuck this, fuck Bethesda, and fuck everything!”

By comparison, my vault on the mobile version is simply better equipped to handle all threats, including the reviled radscorpion. Only the newest arrivals to the vault have crap guns, and my definition of crap is raised to assault rifles and enhanced shotguns. On both the PC vaults, well over eighty percent of my folks were still using repeating rifles and sawed-off shotguns. The slow, slow drip feed of junk made it damn near impossible to craft better weapons, and the fucking timers for gear crafting is criminally offensive. (No, nine fucking days for a single laser rifle is not acceptable, especially when I have to suffer through raids every five minutes, hobbling along with dwindling resources and watching explorers return with another thirty shit guns.)

So the conclusion to this first experiments is a shocking endorsement of the ad-incentivized version. While I normally consider ads an invasive menace to gaming, in this one very specific instance the loot provided by accepting the ad bribes actually makes the game fun because I’m spending more time playing, and less time watching timers trickle my life away for no good God-damned reason. Yeah, games are by definition time wasters, but there is good time wasting, and there’s watching an actual timer count down, the whole time wishing you could be doing something fun. The mobile version, with its generous offers of Nuka Quantum, ensure that you can have that fun and skip the timers all the time. So get that vault on your phone, and play the game the way it should be played, instead of suffered through.

Game review: Dwarven Dungeons (Android/Netflix)

When Netflix announced plans to release mobile games as part of the standard subscription service, I got a little excited that finally, I might find some curated games without ads, in-app purchases, or annoying gameplay meant to coerce me into buying items to speed up the game. I’ve now played 6 games, and with few exceptions, I’ve dropped them all the same day I installed them. They may no have ads or in app purchases, but they are all still set up to run almost exactly like freeware games. I expected a similar result for Dwarven Dungeons, mainly because it’s an idle clicker, and I tend to lose interest quickly in games that pretty much play themselves. Instead, I stuck with this game for around a week and a half before rage quitting and deleting it.

In theory, it’s not a bad game, and even makes some improvements on the idle clicker formula. The story goes that a great evil had invaded the homes of the Dwarf kingdoms, and now five brave warriors have volunteered to reclaim their lost homes. That’s the whole plot, and gameplay is similarly easy to explain. Each of the five dwarves is armed with a pick axe  and a weapon. The pick axe is for busting rocks, and the weapons are for the monsters rooming the halls of each dungeon. In order to progress to higher levels, the dwarves need to be leveled up with gold, minerals, new weapons and new armor, which are found in every dungeon by breaking open treasure chests. Lastly, in addition to weapons, each dwarf has an elemental spell that can be upgraded to extend its reach as well as multiplying the damage it can do. The dungeons are randomly set up with a number of rows that must be cleared, at which point you can choose to press a button to go to the boss, or keep mining for gold and loot to raise your team’s power levels.

That’s the whole game right there. It’s a dumb premise, too. This great evil you never face decided that the best use of all this subterranean real estate was to pack it full of rocks, the occasional monster, and random treasure chests full of loot only fit for his enemies. But hey, game logic rarely tries to make even a lick of sense, so let’s just run with it. Or crawl, mostly, because the pace of every dungeon dive quickly turns tedious.

I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me back up. The innovative part is that with each switch to another dungeon, the dwarves spend all their gold and lose all their accumulated power levels, but keep their armor and weapons, which have their own bonus power levels. This means that even though they’re technically starting from zero for each run, they still keep accumulating power. Within a brief time of loot collection, working through the obligatory rows to reach the boss of the dungeons goes by much faster. It’s even possible to play through the whole cycle of dungeons and bosses in ten minutes, and the bosses all die with one hit. Each time a dungeon is cleared, it collapses and reopens with a higher power level requirement. But no matter how high the numbers go, your squad is always ahead of the curve.

The game then introduces two bonus levels, and completing these will reward a rune to increase the percentage of bonus loot for one dungeon. (But not the percentage of how often bonus loot drops, which I will most assuredly come back to later.) One bonus dungeon has you fighting monsters from around the map—rat men, spiders, trolls, etc.—and killing certain green tinted monsters recovers the health of the whole team. At the end, the team takes on a boss, who is usually dead in one or two hits. In the other variant, the dwarves must bust rocks with a dragon in “hot pursuit,” blowing fire on their butts. At the end of the dungeon is a giant treasure chest with a big health bar. This bonus dungeon is always labeled medium difficulty, but it is ridiculously easy to break by having one dwarf spam their spell casting so they fall behind the rest of their squad. The dragon only moves forward when the last dwarf does, and the fire never seems to do any damage to the lagging magic caster. Meanwhile, the rest of the team can safely reach the chest and bust it open long before the dragon has a chance to catch up. Easy peasy.

So far, so good, right? Well, it’s also at this point that the game injects a delaying tactic into the upgrade process by sealing one of the dungeons on a rotating pattern. Let’s come back to this point in a moment and talk about upgrades. Upgrading the dwarves is broken into categories. Higher level armor doesn’t improve defense, but instead adds to the overall power level along with weapons. To boost defense requires upgrading resistance, and the game requires upgrading resistance to every enemy type. Completing the 4X damage resistance list unlocks a free buff of the same amount to all monsters and opens a new list of 8X resistances to fill up, but doing any of these upgrades requires gathering minerals and other loot from monsters. Similarly, each dwarf must upgrade their gauntlet to deal more damage by monster type, and their pick axe by dungeon type. And wouldn’t you know it? All of these require huge amounts of the same overlapping materials.

But here’s the rub: because every dungeon is randomly generated, many runs have either a very low number of monsters, or no monsters at all. The boss will drop twenty of the same item collected from monsters, but when you need 150 troll teeth in three upgrades slot for EACH member of the squad, that kind of stinginess leads to some of your crew being fragile eggs against even low-level monsters. And while you’re doing the circle jerk to try and get those precious resources, the game slams a locked door in your face and goes, “Come back in fifteen levels, loser!”

Let’s put that aside and talk about spell upgrades and daily goals, as they go hand in awful hand. Completing each dungeon run gets you one spell rune. At first, upgrades are pretty easy to do, but soon the number needed to upgrade even one dwarf is like twenty-eight runes, meaning you have to grind for hours to power up just one dwarf. On top of that, the daily goals frequently list “Power up the spells of any three dwarves.” That’s an all day kind of task, which is already bullshit. So, what is your reward for completing all of these goals? A paltry handful of minerals and resources and ONE spell upgrade rune. The game goes, “Great job working all day on this non-paying job. Your reward is useless crap. You’re welcome!”

Obviously one of the points to an idle game is that you walk away and go do something else. Well don’t worry, because that part of the game is terrible too. Yep, if you start a dungeon and walk away for eight hours, you come back to see your crew is hammering at rocks with nigh-infinite health bars, or being one-shot beaten into unconsciousness by uber-monsters. Even upgrading power levels leaves them unable to progress, unlike normal clicker games. Because the dwarves couldn’t go very far into the dungeon, the reward in loot and minerals is pathetic. But okay, say you level your dwarves up a bit at the start of a run, or even a lot, and then you walk away for eight hours. THE RESULT IS THE SAME. The power creep in just a few rows of each run gets so ludicrously high that there’s no point to treating this as an idle game. You have to play actively to get anything out of it.

Now we get to one of two deal killers that led to my rage quitting. First, the buttons to power up the dwarves is located at the bottom of the screen. The vast majority of the gameplay loop is just tapping these buttons over and over, right? Well, how about a nifty “feature” that blocks the buttons every few seconds? That’s right, every time a dwarf busts open a treasure chest, the loot menu pops up over the power up buttons. Better still, the buttons stop functioning a second before the pop-up menu appears. So the “feature” constantly breaks the rhythm of the gameplay loop, often leaving several dwarves lagging behind in power levels. I’ve even had cases where after lowering the loot pop-up, I noticed the button hadn’t been tapped, and when I tried to tap it again, another pop-up blocked me AGAIN. “But surely, Zoe,” you say, “that kind of rage inducing thing never happened three times in a row, did it?” YES, KIND READER, IT DID.

But then we come to my rage quite moment. Remember those loot bonuses I mentioned before? They are absolutely vital to keep upgrading the whole team in a single sweep instead of picking one upgrade after six runs through the same dungeon. (That’s six runs of every other dungeon in between, by the by, with most dropping bonus loot each time.) Thanks to the power of random number generation, the one dungeon that I desperately needed bonus loot on never dropped any from the boss. Every single one of my team needed hundreds of troll teeth for several upgrades, and I could only pick them up twenty at a time. So one night, after getting bonuses between 360 and 480 for other materials that I didn’t need, I started a run in the troll dungeon that had no monsters, and no bonus loot drop. AND THEN, the game slammed the locked door in my face again, and I swear it took every ounce of self-control I had not to hurl my phone across the room. In fact, I’ve had to wait a week on writing this review so every other word in said review wasn’t fucking.

But now I’ll say it. I give Dwarven Dungeon 2 fucking stars because it’s an okay game that fucking ruins itself with some of the worst fucking interface decisions and a terrible fucking grind made even fucking worse by pulling some fucking freeware bullshit. I didn’t just dislike this game at the end. Fuck no, I fucking hated it, and I’ll be fucked before I ever fucking recommend it to anyone.

God, that felt so fucking good.

Game review: Salt & Sacrifice for EGS

Salt & Sanctuary was one of my favorite 2D games in a long time, so much so that I bought it again on the PS Vita and played through all the classes again after beating the game 12 times on the PS4 version. When the sequel Salt & Sacrifice was announced, I was ready to join the hype train until I watched the trailer, and then I commented, “Looks good, but hunting mages is kind of a big step down from fighting actual gods, isn’t it?”

When it finally arrived on the Epic Game Store, Salt & Sacrifice proved to have deviated wildly from being a Dark Souls inspired platformer to borrowing heavily from another genre. Most folks are comparing it to the Monster Hunter series, which I don’t know because I bounced hard off of two separate games. But the new formula is also a bit like the God Eater series, which I had a better time getting invested in. I’d also compare it to the free-to-play Suda51 slugfest Let It Die. Whether you can get into this mage hunting labyrinth will depend entirely on how willing you are to indulge the daily grind lifestyle.

The way it works is like this: first, you hunt a named mage with a specific set of themed skills. They start out with the elements you would expect, with a pyromancer and a cryomancer being your first options. Then the game adds a hydromancer and an electromancer before tossing in venomancer, aereomancer, necromancer, and so on and so forth. After you defeat the named mage one time, somewhere in their starting area will be a shrine to unlock a slightly stronger nameless mage hunt of the same kind, and finding a Tome of Fate in the area unlocks Fated Mage hunts, which are like randomly generated daily hunt lists.

“But why would I want to keep hunting the same mage over and over?” You ask. Well, killing each named boss unlocks a set of armor and weapons specific to their class. So you’ll want to harvest icky bits from each mage to make the equipment that strikes your fancy. Additionally, mages have the potential to drop Pyrstones or upgrade materials that take all equipment from “cute but useless” to “workable instrument of death.” There is, however a huge but on farming pyrstones coming later in the review, much bigger than mine and my hubby’s combined, and that’s a whole lotta but, let me tell you. But first, let’s cover the basics: story, setting, and controls.

The story seems to be a sequel from the first game, possibly centuries or even a millennia after the great war that I’m guessing Askaria won because the symbol shown during the start of the game is a modified form of The Three. (A triumvirate of gods called only The King, The Judge, and The Knight.) I make this interpretation because Askaria was supposedly the largest of the nations in the war, and their religion fits strongly with the themes found in this new setting. Anyway, in this somehow even more grimdark world, those gods demand sacrifices in a convoluted reverse pyramid scheme. If three sacrifices are offered, one should be taken. So, if 9,000 prisoners of war are gathered, 3,000 should be slaughtered to appease the gods. Like I said, grimdark to the Xtreme.

At some point, the Altar Stone Kingdom began pursuing mages, who in an effort to defend themselves started digging into forbidden magics to become supermages. These hulking monstrosities lost any semblance of humanity and their misuse of magic led to corruption of their environments and the inhabitants. The kingdom took up mage hunting over sticking to their obligatory sacrificial rituals, which ticked off the gods, leading to their mage hunters slowly being turned into even more mages.

There’s an added plot twist I want to mention, but it is spoiler material that isn’t revealed until very late in the game. The point is, your character is a newly imprisoned member of the Altar Stone Kingdom who is offered a choice between a death sentence or a life of indentured servitude as an Inquisitor, a mage hunter. Your task is to hunt down every last mage, tear out their still beating hearts, and devour them. Yuck, right? Like, they don’t even give you any hot sauce or anything, just “eat this heart, bitch!”

So you drink a potion, perform a little ritual, and are escorted to the front lines of the war between the kingdom and the mages…where you are promptly and unceremoniously killed. But hey, good news! The magebane ritual worked for you, and you can’t die. With the help of “Guiltless Shards” (Likely a riff off of Human Effigies from Dark Souls 2) you can rejoin the ranks of the living to recover your full health and stamina.

Here is where the first frustration with the setting creeps in. Without consuming Guiltless Shards, your character is always at a disadvantage. Stamina drains quicker, and about a quarter of the health bar is lopped off, so any attacks, even from smaller minions, becomes way more punishing. Additionally, at the start of the game, your supply of health potions is quite stingy. Also, regardless of which class you choose, their stats are all garbage. Like, the Cleric of Dark Souls 2 garbage. (If you didn’t play it, the Cleric started out so weak that they couldn’t even wield their own starting weapon without two-handing it, or wear pants without fat rolling.) Your first few hunts have to be made in this half-dead state, with garbage stats and crap gear. It’s not “tough but fair,” or “challenging but rewarding,” or any other coded phrase meant to make tough games seem more approachable to a wider audience. It’s just a hard game to get into. Really, really hard.

As an added frustration, during character creation, there’s no explanation of any of the equipment, something both Dark Souls AND Salt & Sanctuary offered. For instance, you have to pick a crime that your character committed, which gives one starting item. You don’t even get a hint of what these items are, or how they help your character, so you just have to pick one at random. This is true for all starting equipment. My first class was a high blade, only because I thought, “Well, that looks like a katana, so…dex build, I guess?” Only after making other characters did I learn how similar all the class stats are, a huge break from all Souls games. So again, no matter who you start with, you have no advantages against the mages.

Killing your first mage immediately unlocks the next hunting zone, but I highly recommend avoiding it until killing at least the first three named mages to get a better feel for movement and also put some levels into your build. You might even want to farm one mage for a few times to make their armor and some weapons to replace your crap starting gear. Beyond Ashbourne Village, the starting area, everything just gets harder, so without upgrades to armor and weapons, you might as well go in naked and armed with a toothpick.

Now, let me be clear. If you don’t bounce off of the difficultly level, eventually the game opens up to offer more…fun? Like, I have sunk 220 hours into the game across three characters to try almost all the weapons, and I have frequently had sessions where I cackled maniacally while carving a gruesome path through the mages and their minions. I’ve also had awful times because three or four mages all dropped into the same tiny area and filled it with so many summoned minions that it was impossible to move, much less dodge or attack. Those moments almost always resulted in a death, and it just feels so cheap to be killed by “rush hour traffic” when there is literally no skill you can use to get out of the mess.

The other frustration lies in the controls, which sometimes feel too restrictive, and other time are unresponsive. One of the first movement upgrades you get is a grappling hook, which seems like it might be totally liberating. But many grapple points only work in specific directions. So for instance, you can’t jump up and grapple the first tether point you see, even if it’s just above you. No, first you have to jump toward a wall farther away, jump off the wall, and then launch the hook. It drove me crazy how I couldn’t latch onto something two meters over my head, but after jumping off a wall, suddenly the rope length was able to stretch up to ten meters to reach the same grapple point. Oh, and lest I forget, the window of time to throw the hook out is fucking minuscule. It’s so tiny that I developed the habit of triple tapping the right trigger to make damn sure I was going to swing over a chasm instead of plunging to my death. Even then, I plunged to my death a lot. (My husband got real tired of hearing me shout, “No! Shitshitshitshitshit fuck!”)

One final note on the controls is that there doesn’t appear to be any kind of input buffer. So if I dodge roll away from a boss and need to drink a health potion, if there’s even one frame of dodge roll animation left, my press of the shoulder button is ignored. This often leads to a chain of panic rolls followed by shouts like “Drink, damn you, DRINK!”

With that out of the way, let’s get to the real meat of the gameplay, the bosses. They come in two flavors in each area, with a third related to NPC quests. The mages are all some flavor of “mancer,” which become steadily more ludicrous as they come out of hiding. There’s a mechanomancer, a giant walking mechsuit whose minions look like tributes to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a sanguimancer, which is really just a vampire with as stupider name, a corpumancer who made a flesh suit similar to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, a chronomancer with a giant working clock strapped to his butt, and a bibliomancer who is a right proper bible thumper. (By which I mean he’s going to beat you to death with his book.) In all cases, I stopped using their real titles almost immediately in favor of made up titles like Shocko, Snakey McSnakeman, Mecha Man, Frosty, and Windy Blowjob. (My own characters were named Lady Zerp, Zappo McZapzap, and Shildius McBloko, so obviously I took all of this very seriously.)

Mages can be found freely roaming areas or as part of hunts. Whether a named, nameless, or fated hunt, the real target will always leave behind a faint trail to track them with. But say for instance you just go to an area to explore or gather resources (more on that later), and you run into a mage that you decide to fight. In this case, said mage will drop some minions and teleport away until they’ve lost a certain amount of health and decide to stand and fight to the death. Those kinds of mages don’t leave a magical vapor trail until they’re very close to fighting, which can make them harder to track. I’ve lost as much as 10 minutes wandering around before finally finding my target, only for the bastard to drop two more minions and flit away before I could get close enough for an attack. These kinds of fights always brought me such joy.

Oh, and there is a “fun” little glitch that can happen to mages, in that they can randomly decide they’re immortal. I’ve seen this with roaming mages who have no visible health bar more often, but even in fighting mages with health bars, sometimes they will just have a little sliver left, yet even as you continue to whack away at them, they won’t go down. In some cases, this state only lasts a few seconds, but in the more extreme instances, I’ve had to fight a mage for upwards of five minutes on that one last damned hit point before they finally stopped glitching. In several cases in early game runs, I had to abandon roaming mage hunts because I had nothing left to fight with, and they were still adamant about staying upright. It’s even worse for a Fated Hunt because your character is locked in an arena with nothing but death as an exit option.

Moving along, the second kind of bosses are named guardians, and some are clearly still paying homage to Dark Souls bosses like Quelaag and Ornstein and Smough, while others seem to be new creations. The homage characters are actually the easier bosses to fight in the whole game because they have tells and patterns that are easy to learn. On the other hand, there were guardians like The Green Huntsman and Marega Gredanya who both had little to no time between attacks. The learning curve for these two was so high that I had fits trying to kill them for the longest time. When I finally beat The Green Huntsman after TWO DAYS of attempts, I put down my controller and got up to shake my hands to ease the stress tremors out of them. Then once that was in order, I had to try breathing slow to lower my heart rate. There was no joy of overcoming adversity, only a relief that I was finally able to move on. Marega took almost as much time to beat, and with a similar reaction to defeating her. (I will add that when I started up runs with two other classes, these two guardians were much less trouble because I finally had a grasp on what to do and how to avoid their worst attacks.)

Lastly, there are NPC inquisitors you encounter in each area that lead to boss fights with them. I’ve seen only two of these, but there may be a third that I just couldn’t figure out where he went next in his story line. In any case, one boss is a soldier who keeps asking you for Guiltless Shards as he falls to the mages you kill. Eventually he’ll become fixated on “the peaceful dead” and attack you, forcing you to kill him and grant him freedom from his never ending duty. The other is a scholar who begins his journey insisting that magic isn’t really bad, just misunderstood. Obviously he eventually hulks out as a really devastating bird themed mage who will easily two-shot even heavily fortified characters. Both of these NPC fight were exceptionally challenging, forcing me to come up with strategies specific to them because everything I’d used against other bosses didn’t apply.

So…what’s left? Resource gathering. Everything in your arsenal, from health potions, ammo for ranged attacks, mana potions for “focus” attacks, down to antidotes for poisons are crafted using supplies found in the field. You can buy them from merchants as you rescue them and bring them to your central hub, but they are quite expensive, and at first your intake of silver is low and slow. There will be times in early to mid-game where you will go on resource runs. You’ll look for red bushes to harvest valley herb and blood fruits for health recovery, haze spirit from stone cairns to recover focus, whispleaf to craft antidotes, and mine irona ore from crystal deposits to make more ranged ammo. (The last one is a bit silly because you use the same material whether your ranged attack is an arrow, a knife, or a magic blast of elemental damage.)

This kind of trek is not optional, and you do not want to be locked in a high-tier fated hunt only to discover that you have no ammo and no healing potions. (Or with Snakey McSnakeman, out of antidotes while you are losing health at an alarming rate thanks to his toxic status effect.) Yes, it’s a pain in the butt to take time away from the more exciting bits, but like the saying goes, an ounce of prevention will keep the mages from killing your dumb ass. Or something like that.

Oh, and I cannot fail to address the other resource gathering elephant in the game, the grind and how Luck is NOT an optional stat.  As I mentioned early on, mage squishy bits are combined to form equipment, and mages drop special stones to upgrade all your gear. But once you get past the twin pyrstone level, which is still low level garbage rank stuff, trying to gather pyrstone trios, clusters, and bricks involves a hellscape of waiting days for Fated Hunts with the right kind of high-tier mages, followed by a fifteen to twenty minute hunt, only to see that the felled mage didn’t drop anything but low-tier trash. I spent a week killing Frosty mages trying to upgrade my armor, and for every four I killed, I might get one frospyr cluster. You need twelve clusters to level up your armor to the pentultimate rank, followed by four bricks, which only drop from very, very powerful mages. (And yes, you can find one brick or three clusters in bags scattered in the later areas, but when you need six bricks, bare minimum, for a full set of armor and weapons, that one free brick is more like a slap in the face than a gift.)

The only thing that can make this kind of hunt less hellish is dropping points into luck, and while there are whips that scale their damage with luck, for everyone else, luck is just there to take away from your actual damage dealing stats like dexterity, strength, arcana, and conviction. So, you may be tempted to skip luck because it doesn’t do anything for your DPS. (damage per second for the noobs.) DON’T DO IT. Skimping on luck means adding days or even weeks to your quest to upgrade your gear. My first character had starting-level luck, and I needed 150 hours to get my weapons maxed out. I still couldn’t get my armor past mid-level ranks. My other two character both have a luck around 20-30, and they both got higher ranking gear with much less grind time.

So at this point, I need to pause the review to complain. Why do game makers at all levels not respect our time? Why must I spend weeks grinding for raw materials just to ensure later sections of the game are slightly less hellish? I am sick to death of having to level up “Item discovery” in games when all it does is improve the chances of a rare loot drop from 5 to 6 percent, even after I’ve dumped 10 or 20 points into that stat. Item discovery is a bullshit padding technique to artificially inflate game time. Take away this kind of grind and most of these games can be beaten in a few hours, and speed runners are proof that this grind is all just meant to keep the rest of us mediocre players on a fucking hamster wheel for no good goddamn reason other to add a label like “hundreds of hours of fun” somewhere in their product description. Well, with no due respect, fuck that shit. Item discovery needs to die. In fact, let me double down on that. ITEM DISCOVERY NEEDS TO FUCK OFF AND DIE PAINFULLY AND SLOWLY IN A DITCH FULL OF DIARRHEA!

Ahem. I now return you to the actual review.

What else? While getting a graphical overhaul, it’s clear that there are a lot of reused assets from the prior game, including returning enemies and even bosses. (Hi, Mad Alchemist. I so did not miss you.) There’s a reskinned dragon boss, but instead of breathing fire, he is now blue and has frost breath that covers the entire arena. So, pro-tip: learn to block because dodge rolling away from his breath will just get you killed in two seconds. ASK ME HOW I KNOW! It’s not really a complaint that critters and sound effects got recycled into the sequel, just a statement of fact. Lots of the big game makers also do this, and Ska is a really small studio, so this is perfectly understandable.

The music is good for all the regions. Some, like the desert, are worth finding a safe spot to put down the controller and just chill with the song for a bit. I feel like some of it has been recycled or upcycled from the last game, but I’d have to play the first game again to be sure.

Lastly is the part I really can’t review, the co-op and invasion options. It’s not that I didn’t try, mind you. But I did one co-op attempt that landed me in a game with someone clearly in new game plus. I hit a common enemy with my heavily upgraded sword for like 10 points of damage, and then he slapped me for seven eighths of my health bar. I sucked down three health potions and ran to catch up to my partner, who started The Green Huntsman fight. Then I was killed with one arrow and said to myself, “Welp, I guess online play is for someone else to review.”

I come to the end of this review feeling deeply conflicted about how to score it, and who to recommend it to. As I said before, this is a hard game, one that a lot of folks will bounce off of before ever getting anywhere close to the good bits. Are there good bits? Sure, or else I wouldn’t have sunk 200-plus hours into playing it, with future plans to play more. Moreover, it’s getting me inspired to go back and play the first game with a different mindset about certain builds that I hadn’t considered. To me, that makes it money well spent. But there were often times when only my stubborn wounded pride kept me from binning this game, either for making yet another high-level mage hunt only to get garbage loot again, or for running into a boss who made all my efforts look pathetic.

In the end, I give Salt & Sacrifice 4 stars, with the caveat that I can only recommend it to the folks who are okay with being abused by both bosses and the daily grind. I cannot stress enough that at times, the grind made this feel like work more than play. But if you’re okay with that, then this might be a good time for you. Otherwise, I’d suggest approaching this with caution after it goes on sale. I mean, if you’re going to bounce out of it, you might as well get that frustration at a steep discount, right?

Game review: Control for Steam

“Oh, boy, another review from Zoe,” you say. “How much did she hate the game this time?”

Well, in a plot twist you may not have seen coming, I LOVED Control. I was dazzled by the graphics, the story, the characters, the gameplay; everything. Is it a perfect game? No, but those don’t really exist. Is it a great game? Yes, absolutely, and barring a few complaints, I’m putting this beautiful beast firmly in the “need to play again” category.

Let’s start with the plot. Your character is Jesse Faden, a young woman guided to the offices of the Federal Bureau of Control, a Men in Black government organization full of the finest conspiracy theories, to search for her brother. The FBC took him years ago, and Jesse is ready to search for him inside their home base. But she’s shown up just in time to catch the middle of an invasion from extra-dimensional aliens who have possessed most of the staff and are using the FBC headquarters as a staging ground to invade the rest of the planet. 

Jesse is aided by a silent partner, a mental hitchhiker who she frequently talks to while running through the halls of the FBC HQ. At first, I thought she was talking to me in some kind of fourth wall experiment, but the real answer of who the partner is is slowly revealed, and it’s a great bit of storytelling.

There’s plenty of interesting side characters, some of whom Jesse interacts with, and one she only sees in informational videos peppered throughout the building. There’s a Finnish janitor whose face is so familiar I’d swear I know him from somewhere, and a security guard whose every answer to Jesse’s questions had me saying out loud, “Oh I like this guy.” Even the building itself is sort of a unique character, a living entity that reacts both to the presence of the invaders, and to Jesse’s efforts to clean the place up. Again, kudos must be given to the people who wrote this plot and fleshed out all these great characters. Game writing can often be too simplistic in its need to convey a simple “me good, them bad” plot, so it’s refreshing to play something where half the time, I’m left guessing who’s the real bad guy in all of these proceedings.

But let’s set aside all that gushing to talk about the graphics. My word, the graphics, even on my lowly PC, where amazing. Everything is such a marvel to gawk at. The levels are full of nice little details, and tight cramped hallways frequently open into surprisingly open spaces that left me gaping in wonder. The enemies are scary, but also equally well-crafted, and Jesse and the other members of the FBC are a joy to watch in-game or in cut scenes. When the bad guy finally shows up, oh, what a delicious scene chewing bastard he is.

The soundtrack is mostly this crazy gibberish that you can sort of make out, but never quite fully comprehend. It’s the chant of the invaders, a song of madness that lends an overall creepy vibe to the entire game. Every once in a while, there’s real music, but that serves as a brief respite before returning to the crazy incantation. It works to really sell that nothing is right in this place.

I haven’t even got to talk about playing the game yet, but it’s just as great as the rest of the full package. The controls are smooth and easy to remember. Jesse starts out with just a gun and a basic jump, but as she unlocks new abilities, more buttons are added to the “flow” of combat. It’s drip fed in at a rate that allows for learning a new way to play before bringing in some new concept. So by the end of the game, Jess can jump over a ledge, levitate over her enemies, dash to dodge their attacks, and rain down a variety of gun and telekinetic attacks before floating gently down to a ten point landing. It all feels good, like the best kind of power fantasy where you’re given a bunch of superpowers and told, “go crazy with it.”

Or, it did until my left stick started acting up. This is not the fault of the game…well, it partly is. See, I play most of my PC games with a wired PS4 controller, and Control wouldn’t recognize it even though Steam did. I couldn’t get it to work at all, so I had to dig out an older XBox-style controller, and the stick on that had been acting odd already. It would frequently make characters walk slow even if the stick was pushed all the way up. Sometimes, pressing the stick down to sprint didn’t work at all. So this kind of behavior was already “normal” given the controller in question. But then after a few hours, letting the stick return to the center would cause Jesse to turn around and walk toward the camera, or to walk backwards if she was aiming at enemies with her gun. A lot of later levels feature bottomless pits, so you can see how plunging to Jesse’s death over and over could be a problem.

That’s before you take loading times into account. The cost of all those pretty details and uncanny valley NPCs is that loading from death or a fast travel frequently took around one to two minutes. So now picture dying repeatedly in one section, and having to sit and wait a seeming eternity to get back into the action. It’s not ideal.

Now in some cases, those deaths were on me. Rather than do the side quests that were being offered to me, I just kept pushing through the main plot. I heard a lot of reviewers say that playing all the side quests left them so overpowered that they felt the later half was wimpy. So my logic was “If I don’t do all that other stuff, it should make the ending harder.” Well I was right on that part of the plan. I put enough points into my energy for more ammo and a bit into health and damage boosts for my telekinetic launch attacks. But my health was a bit thin, so my version of Jesse was a glass cannon. Yes, she could dish out a lot of damage, but all it took was a stray grenade or melee attack to send her back to a loading screen and a checkpoint. (Oh, I should mention, there’s no save scumming in this bad boy. Death can often mean a long run back to where you were headed.)

Then I got to the final level, and the controller problems were combined with a terrible level design to put me in a couple hours of gamer hell. The last level is all in red, and in addition to bottomless pits, there’s also areas filled with poisonous gas. I couldn’t tell where the safe zones were versus the pockets of gas, so I died over and over to that nasty trick. When I did finally find the right tiny platform to land on, the controller would act up and Jesse would pivot to walk off the ledge and back into the poison.

Once that nightmare was done, the final, final area is the same all red motif and joyful bottomless pits, but with an added horde of enemies I could barely see. I either got pounded to death by stuff I couldn’t see coming, or in trying to fight, I discovered Jesse had been walking backwards without me noticing. Cue another plunging death, another two minute load time, and a whole lot of cussing on my part.

But once I beat the game and set that busted ass controller down to watch the credits, I immediately thought that I’d like to try another go once I bought a new controller. For one thing, there are other gun configurations I hadn’t given the proper attention to, other possible builds that could have added even more options to my fight through the FBC HQ. (I didn’t even unlock the dive bombing ground pound, and that attack sounds awesome. There’s also an ability to create a shield of debris pulled from the surroundings. Again, I didn’t bother unlocking it cause it seemed like it might make the game too easy. Crazy, I know.) For another, I haven’t touched any of the DLC, and I’d like to see what’s in there once I have better control of Control. (Sorry, not sorry.)

But if I’m already looking forward to playing again in spite of my frustrations, then that right there is a great game. In fact, I’m ready to give Control a very rare 5 stars. There’s so much to praise and so little to nitpick that my gripes still can’t knock off a single point. This is a game that deserves all the praise and awards heaped upon it, and I would highly recommend it to fans of action games with super creepy sci-fi themes. It’s damned good stuff, y’all.

Game review Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech for PC

OOOoooh boy, this game, y’all. I’ll be honest, I several times thought about just walking away from it, but then I remember I needed to review something, and I’ve already dropped something like 40 mobile games for being utter shit. Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech isn’t utter shit, and for long spans it was even somewhat enjoyable. It’s a bog standard RPG story about friendships and family wrapped around a card game, and I do like card games.

But you know what I don’t like? Games that randomly introduce absolute bullshit mechanics to give them the illusion of challenge because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. I’m talking about enemies who can kill player characters with one hit, or others who can instantly recover all of their health, dragging an already agonizingly long fight to double or triple the time they take to finish. There’s monsters who can hit all party members for half their health, meaning the next turn has to be spent guzzling expensive health potions instead of playing cards. Half the time, they’ll just cast the same spell again. It’s almost like they only have two cards in their deck.

All right, let’s set that aside. First things first, here’s the story. The game starts with two friends, the wannabe knight hero Armilly and the aspiring mage/alchemist Copernica, wandering outside their village to search for the great MacGuffin, conveniently leaving them unaware that the Void army is burning their homes to the ground and kidnapping the Heroes Guild to make way for unleashing The Behemoth and thereby destroying the world. As usual.

Upon returning to town, they pick up their childhood friend Galleo, a recluse living in his mother’s basement who serves as both a tank and a healer while also acting as that one guy who’s always complaining about doing any of this crazy adventure stuff. Later on, the trio are joined by wandering ronin Orik, who has a mysterious connection to the villain of the story, and then by twins Tarah and Thayne, orphans who are presented as thieves, but mostly serve as backup mages and healers.

Each character starts as a trope, and they follow the tried and true path of becoming a family during the journey to kill about 5,000 enemies and bosses. It’s fine, perfectly serviceable as a game story goes, but it’s a little disappointing that the story is so adamantly devoted to sticking to the same old cliches.

I’ll leave that alone too. The core gameplay is good, with you controlling an active party of three characters, each of which has their own pool of eight cards to add to the deck. Over time, more cards are added for each character, and many cards can be upgraded to add more oomph to them. (One card in Copernia’s deck, however, does not seem to work. Arcane Detective is supposed to grant an extra turn, but it doesn’t.) Basic attack cards cost nothing to play and will generate a cog, while more advanced cards spend cogs, making it something like a mana pool.

Armilly, Galleo, and Orik all have cards that will use “X” cogs to dish out power attacks, so if you fill up the cogs meter over several turns, they can deal out a huge amount of damage. Lastly, in any given turn where you play all three of one character’s cards, a fourth is added. The fourth card is always the same, and is determined by the character’s current weapon. For instance, Copernica can wield a spell book that grant’s protective shields to her companions, or she can use another that puts one enemy to sleep. This makes it possible to tailor the team’s fourth card perks to your liking.

It’s not all fun and games, though, because it’s possible to get a hand that can’t be played. Even with careful curation of the ratio of “free” cards, you still might get a whole bunch of cards with high cog costs. In these situations, you can only redraw two cards, which can also have the same problem. It is extremely aggravating to have to sit and take blows from enemies for two or three turns and be able to do nothing because the luck of the draw isn’t with you. An easier solution to this would have been to redraw the whole hand if the current one is unplayable, but that’s obviously not an option.

Certain cards have team link abilities, so for instance, using Tarah and Thayne’s card to steal health from enemies also activates Orik to cast an additional healing spell. This further incentivizes you to think not only what cards to play in your deck, but what members to add to your party. It’s a neat idea that can help pull the right teams out of tricky situations.

Although I frequently swapped parties to keep all the characters at even levels, the grouping that worked best for me was Orik, Copernica, and Tarah and Thayne. Orik and the twins both have healing spells, and they have some useful spells that can benefit the whole party. Later in the game, the twins get a card called Doom that attaches bonus Arcane damage for every time the afflicted enemy takes damage. Since they already have a card adding poison to their attacks, it’s entirely possible for a single enemy to be waylaid within two turns. Add to that Orik tossing out Storm damage and Copernica slinging all kinds of elemental hell, and they’re a good crew to wreck everything from lowly minions to big bosses.

In fact, I’m glad I went into the final two boss fights with them, because any other configuration would have surely led me to losses and probably tossing the game in frustration. The first fight was against a dude with 50,000 health, and carving that down took forever and used up a lot of health potions. Then with only 100 health left, he regenerated back to full health, so I had to do it all over again. I finally beat him, and he just stood up and cast the popular RPG villain spell Go Fuckest Thineself to paralyze the party and escape to set loose the big bad evil and cue up the final fight of the game.

But if you thought that last fight was bullshit, get ready for the All You Can Eat Buffet of Bullshit. The final boss has a head and two limbs, and in each phase, the “mouth” seals with a gate so that every attack is reduced to 1 damage. First you have to fight the arms, both of which have 6,200 health and decks full of area of effect attacks. So you say, “Well, that’s not so bad,” right? Except the bastard’s head has 50,000 health, and after defeating the arms and dealing a couple thousand points to the head, this dickhead casts a healing spell that says on the card 510 points, but still refills the full 6,200 health on both arms, closes the mouth, and effectively restarts the fight all over again. This goes on forever, in my case 7 rounds. Oh, and even if you still have some health potions left, you’re not allowed to use them. Isn’t that fun?

No. No, instead it was a thirty minute slog through a swamp of bullshit, and the final payoff was underwhelming. Not terrible, but not really great either.

Before I get to the scoring, I should mention the other important stuff. The graphics are good, with the animations for the party and their enemies adding some life to the fights. There are a few too many reskins for my liking, but at least moving from one region to the next leads to whole new groups to fight instead of just another bunch of palette swaps. The backgrounds are nicely colorful, many also animated to reflect the current situation (ie: Fires burning because the village is being ransacked, and stuff like that for the rest of the game, too.) The card art is good, and the variety of cards available for each character can lead to a high degree of player choice. There’s also a New Game+ mode, letting you take all the unlocked cards and equipment into the start, and an optional higher Legendary difficulty level for all you masochists out there. The music is okay. It’s not bad, but for a game of this length, it could have done with a little more variety. The voices are RPG gibberish, the kind of stuff meant to still claim to have voices in game without paying voice actors much. It’s serviceable, if mostly forgettable.

This is one of those times when assigning a numerical score is a real burden. Did I dislike the moments of annoyance and aggravation enough to knock it down to a 2 or a 3? Or will I ignore those and factor in the many hours where I thought it was mostly alright and go with a 4 or a 5? In the end, I have to give it a 3 and offer an explanation. During the last quarter of the game it just felt like every other fight had enemies that were meant to either slow down rounds of combat or to waste resources. The latter kind forced me to go back to previous regions to grind fights for money. So by that point, I wasn’t playing because I was having fun. Rather, I was just doing it to complete the story and be able to make this review.

So where do I stand on recommending Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech? I guess it depends on your threshold for annoyances. If you don’t mind them, then this could be your kind of game. It’s got a lot of creative energy and good ideas when it comes to cards and teamwork. But it also has some really bad ideas for how to challenge players, and the story is mostly meh. Anyway, it’s your call. Have at it.

Game review: The Outer Worlds for PS4

Fair warning: this review is a lot longer than my usual write-ups, and there are a few spoilers. If you want to avoid those or just wanted a TL;DR version, here goes: I didn’t like it. For the rest of you, sorry I got so long-winded, but this one really rubbed me the wrong way, and I feel a need to overshare.

There’s a very vocal contingent of gamers who insist that among the first person iterations of the Fallout series, only Obsidian’s Fallout New Vegas is worth a damn. The story is more interesting, the system of skills and perks are superior, and overall, the gameplay just feels better.

With all due respect, I strongly disagree on all counts. Fallout New Vegas was ridiculous in depicting its factions, quite frequently forgot where it was going with the plot and thus didn’t offer dialogue options to explore tangents, and copy pasted a lot of the same butt ugly character models. It created the worst Vegas experience, an empty city cut off by loading screens every two hundred yards, and was still prone to crash after progressing too far into the story. When I say crash, I mean freeze the console and corrupt the save files so badly that one must restart from the beginning. “Just use mods,” some folks say, to which I point out, the game is on consoles, and there ain’t no mods to fix that broken, graphically hideous, fumbling mess. What you buy is what you get, and it’s what gets reviewed.

So here we are with The Outer Worlds, which fans have heralded as Fallout in space, jeering that after the disaster that was Fallout 76, Obsidian has effectively out-Fallout-ed Bethesda. Admittedly, I haven’t played Fallout 76 because it looked like a bad deal right from the start, but I do know that The Outer Worlds is no Fallout.

In every way, this adventure is inferior to any entry in the Fallout series. The levels are restrictive and littered with the same few enemies, the weapons are limited copies of each other that lack any sense of heft or impact, skills and perks have been overly simplified, enemy and companion AI is almost embarrassingly bad, and the story just starts to become interesting before it slips and falls flat on its face because the biggest question of “Why?” is answered in the dumbest way possible.

But what I think is most damning about The Outer Worlds is how much the developers want so desperately to cling to Fallout that they can’t abandon some of their dumbest ideas and try something more original.

Before I get to nitpicking every little thing and giving spoilers, I should at least praise that the game is stable. In the twenty-eight hours I played, there was never a single crash. Aside from some occasional lag that was annoying, but not so bad as to make the game unplayable, everything worked as intended. That much the fans can crow over, because Bethesda can’t release anything without crashes, bugged quests, visual glitches and lag so bad it freezes the screen for several seconds at a time.

The graphics are also quite good. Mesmerizing, even. Each planet, moon, and asteroid that I played on had me stopping to take in the views, and they all made me feel like an alien setting down on distant worlds unlike any place on Earth.

It’s a pity, then, that in every other aspect the figurative ball was fumbled, picked up, fumbled again, and then kicked off of a cliff, never to be recovered again.

But before we talk about the mess, here’s the rundown on the start of the story. Dr. Phineas V. Welles awakens your character from a long hibernation and informs them that they are the only hope of saving all the other passengers in cryogenic stasis aboard the Hope. Yes, you are the only hope for Hope. (Ba-dum pish!) Anyway, the good doctor wants you to go out into the colonies of the Halcyon Group to get some super rare chemicals, which are the only way to revive the others without causing Explosive Cell Death. (Which is really more of a liquification.)

So, your character is tossed into an escape pod and dropped unceremoniously onto Terra 2, and also directly onto the unfortunate captain who was supposed to be your pilot and guide in this new solar system. Why did he die? Because he was holding the drop signal beacon. Ah hahahahahaha…aahhh.

But here I pause to offer criticism on the shoddy writing. You see, Captain Alexander Hawthorne is shown through journal entries and dialogue with others to be a rather keen fellow. He was modifying the AI on his ship to make her uniquely more human-like as well as modifying a cleaning robot to act as a combat backup in the field. He was a shrewd businessman, cultivating favor with members of the board and with shadier freelance companies. But to get this story going, the ONLY thing the writers could come up with was, “Man, he’s so stupid that he didn’t know how a beacon works.” It directly contradicts everything you learn about the man throughout the rest of the game.

This could have been addressed by making the captain a temporary companion during the tutorial before killing him off in a more heroic way. Maybe pushing your character out of the way of a rock slide or a charging beast. Instead, the laziest possible option was taken to get him out of the way. Which, as it turns out, is par for the course.

Once you arrive in Edgewater, the town owned by Spacer’s Choice, you are instantly inundated with hints that things are real, real bad for the colonies. The local factory workers are being worked to death, either from fatigue or from plagues caused by malnutrition. The company is renting graves out, and if someone commits suicide, all the employees are held financially responsible. Perhaps more intriguing is that all the local robots have been secretly modified and no one in the colony knows why or even who did it.

It’s in Edgewater that you pick up your freshly minted captain’s first two companions, Pavarti Holcomb and Vicar Maximilian DeSotto. Pavarti is a company engineer and mechanic who is desperate to get out of the job that’s slowly crushing the life from her, while Vicar Max asks to tag along with your crew to look for an apocryphal text that will supposedly help him find enlightenment. Upon recruiting both, you learn one of the few joys of the game, that you can have two companions at the same time, and they interact with each other much like the party in the Dragon Age games. And just like with Dragon Age, as you find more companions, you’ll want to mix and match your landing parties just to see what any two characters have to say to each other. Some of these combinations aren’t nearly as satisfying, but most provide some color commentary and exchanges that hint at growing friendships. It’s a nice touch.

But now I have to mention the downside to companions, as they are dumb as dirt and likely to get downed in combat very early on by running into the open to be perforated from several different angles. If you don’t set their behavior to ranged, they will take out melee weapons and run across open killing fields to try and wack some enemy in the head. This works about as well as you would expect. But even with their behavior set to use ranged attacks only, they will still fall quickly because they leave themselves exposed and insist on running into obvious traps.

Even if you opt to do all the work yourself, both ranged and melee weapons are highly ineffectual. You have the option to tinker on weapons at a workbench, which amounts to you sinking ridiculous sums of money into making incremental improvements in damage. None of this matters because the armor rating of all enemies negates most of the damage. The weapon description may say it does fifty damage, but with armor factored in, it’s more like four. So every fight through the first half of the game sees you burning through huge amounts of ammo to little effect. (Later fights use up similar amounts of ammo, but by then you’ll have a larger stockpile to work through.)

This brings me to my other big complaint about ranged weapons. Where is the pew-pew? Aside from some plasma guns and a late game N-Ray rifle, it’s all bullets. Where’s the lasers? Where’s the rail guns, or anything remotely futuristic? It’s almost all bang bang and no pew-pew. (There’s a shrink ray, but the effect is short lived, and not worth wasting ammo on.)

No matter what you use, the effect on enemies is negligible. You can use time dilation, this game’s version of VATS, to target specific body parts, and they will be highlighted with options like blind, maim, cripple, stagger and bleed. But none of these options lasts longer than two second at most. Now, I’m no medical expert, but if I shoot a dude in the dick, I’m pretty sure he isn’t going to pop back up after a second and keep running at me like he isn’t gravely wounded. This kind of shit was a MAJOR problem in New Vegas as well, where an enemy limb is technically crippled, with no health found in VATS, but they can still pick their rifle back up and continue firing like nothing is wrong. So while the move to Unreal Engine resulted in a prettier game and no noticeable bugs, no effort was put into the underlying systems for weapon damage and enemy reactions.

If you were a fan of the hacking and lock picking mini-games from Fallout entries, you’ll be disappointed to see how the skills work here. It’s strictly a numbers game. If your skill is high enough, you can unlock stuff without tools. If it’s not quite high enough, you use up mag-locks and bypass shunts to pass the skill check. To make it feel like you’re doing something, the more “keys” you need to open a device, the longer you have to press the activate button. It’s…not good.

Moving to another similar problem, ammo is overly simplified. It’s all heavy, light, and energy. So if you have a sniper rifle, an assault rifle, and a pistol, they’re all potentially drawing from the same pool of ammo. All ammo is fucking expensive, and it’s doled out in pathetically small amounts. I would have killed for a perk to find more ammo like in Fallout games, but no, that wasn’t one of the things Obsidian clung to. (To be clear, there is a perk for vending machines to stock more than fifty of each ammo type, but that’s not what I needed.)

What they did hold onto is their fetish for ancient forms of advertising and propaganda. I brought this is up with my hubby and he didn’t see what the problem was, so let me articulate a bit.

See, both this game and the Fallout world are based on the idea that for whatever reason, all culture stagnated around the 1930s, or 40s, or 50s. (Whichever one suits their current game.) In the Fallout world, this means that there’s no new music past the 40s and 50s, even though the games take place much, much later. Fallout 3 tried to suggest this was because ALL the artists and musicians everywhere went into the same vault and died, which is so laughably pathetic as an excuse that Bethesda went ahead and contradicted it in Fallout 4 with a lounge singer who was writing her own music and recording it on holotapes. This is why all the games should have the classic songs mixed in with some original content because there would be new artists and musicians born after the apocalypse. (But then again, there would also be new engineers and mechanics born, so literally everything about Fallout’s wasteland setting is bullshit, but let’s go back to the real game on review.)

For The Outer Worlds, Obsidian didn’t even bother trying to put together a similar kind of soundtrack. Instead, they were content to crib some old-timey advertising art styles and hired one group to sing all the jingles for all the corporations in the Halcyon Group. Here’s some examples:
At C and P, we know our C’s and P’s!
Whoa-oh-oh! It’s Rizzo’s!
T and L! Simply the best!

All the ads in the game are all delivered by the same drone voice and ended with the same quartet of voice actors singing the jingle. They couldn’t even put in the effort to make the companies feel different from one another. The same goes for the propaganda posters. They all feel designed by the same small ad team, not by a group made up of multiple corporations. Aside from slightly different logos, the whole conglomerate might as well be one entity since they all offer similar products with only slightly different coats of paint.

Let me segue to some false advertising of the real sort. Once you get off the planet and onto a space station, The Groundbreaker, you meet another companion, Ellie. She featured very prominently in the ads for the game, and was one of the reasons I had even a little hype. She seemed to be the voice of concern, informing you that the situation in the colonies needed a new leader willing to make the tough choices between corporations and the little people.

But the character Ellie in the game isn’t at all like that. She’s shallow and superficial, questioning your every morally good decision with long speeches about how everyone is in it for themselves, and you’re either stupid or naive if you think otherwise. There’s never a turning point for her. She’s revealed to be a rich child, literally born into wealth, and she eschews that world not for some high-minded principles but because, “Meh, there’s too much paperwork and rules in high society. I’d rather go for anarchy and illegal work to piss off mummy and daddy.” Hell, even the narrator at the end of the game admits she has zero character growth despite the efforts of an entire crew trying to show her a better way of living. The cleaning robot on your crew has a more satisfying development arc.

So…I know, you’re already at the “Zoe, we get it” point, but there’s something else that needs to be picked at by way of an example. In Borderlands 3, you get in a fancy space ship to hop between planets, and each planet has their own ecosystems. People on one world have their own meat and plant food sources because that’s what’s available locally. Yeah, the bandits are all similar, but they’ve been shuttled around by the big bads, providing a somewhat realistic reason for their persistence. Everything else on every planet is unique and distinct. For as much as I hated slogging through the huge vastness of Borderlands 3, I cannot say it was a copy pasta effort.

The same cannot be said of The Outer Worlds, where several creatures show up on multiple planets and moons. If one were desperate to find a cause, they might say the corporations were importing the critters. But given how much property damage the animals do, it’s unlikely that companies desperate for profits would sabotage themselves in this way. The direct rebuttal to this idea is on Scylla, an asteroid where energy shields are erected to provide an atmosphere. There’s no vegetation, no air, no water, nothing to support life at all, and yet one of the enemies on Scylla are the primals, ape-like monsters found on Terra II, and on Monarch as well. It’s almost like Obsidian couldn’t be bothered to make more than a handful of enemies and copy paste them wherever.

Oh, and remember how I mentioned the robots being wired to kill? Yeah, the game claims that was just an insurance scam for the first planet, but those robots are haywire everywhere. It’s almost like Obsidian couldn’t be bothered to make more than a handful of enemies and copy paste them wherever.

Then there’s the marauders, the typical crazy psycho fare found in Fallout. They’re barely coherent or capable of sustaining themselves, but can somehow pilot ships to move between worlds. These ships are super rare due to scarce resources, but are somehow a dime a dozen for the mentally ill killers with little money to their names. It’s almost like Obsidian couldn’t be bothered to make more than a handful of enemies and copy paste them wherever.

Before I finish, let me get back to the spoiler about the story I mentioned near the start. It’s eventually revealed that these corporations are shitting all over their people because they’re trying to hide a problem from the masses. The transplanted crops aren’t drawing enough nutrients from the soil, so everyone is starving to death. And…they’ve been starving to death for all these years? This doesn’t make a fucking lick of sense, and after seeing all the examples of company abuse, this is the best reason Obsidian could come up with for why the companies are acting the way they do. (Well that and they lost contact with Earth, which make even less sense for them to try so damned hard to destroy themselves and their dwindling resources.) I mean, given their past writing efforts, I didn’t expect much, but even by their standards, this is pretty bad. 

I could go on, but I’d just be whipping a dead horse. Fans of Obsidian will insist I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I’m obviously a Bethesda fangirl. Except, I don’t like Bethesda either. This isn’t a bias for one flavor of first person adventure over the other. I went into this a little excited based on all the positive reviews, but having played all the way through and exhausted all the side missions, I’m decidedly under the lowest whelm limit possible.

I’m giving The Outer Worlds 2 stars. I’m glad I got it on sale to limit my rage (Note the more limited use of fuck in this review if you doubt my claim) and if I ever get the forthcoming sequel, I will also be waiting for a steep discount before wading in. If you’re an Obsidian fan, this is probably something worth your time, but I felt like it just wasted mine.

Game review: Monkey King: Hero is Back for PS4

Folks, my disappointed feelings toward Monkey King: Hero is Back are entirely my fault for failing to pay attention to what I was buying. See, a few E3s back, a Chinese company released a gameplay trailer for a game tentatively titled Black Wukong, and it looked amazing. So picture me in a Gamestop, sorting through used titles when I see a very unmistakable Sun Wukong on the cover of a game. I got all giddy, like a kid at Christmas who doesn’t yet realize they’ve got the wrong gift by mistake. Did I check to make sure it was the right game? Nope. The fact that it was just 8 Euros only made me think “Maybe it wasn’t received well here, where not too many people know Journey to the West.”

But no, this is in fact an adaptation of a CG cartoon of the same name from 2015, and like so many film-to-game adaptations, this one isn’t very good. I knew that less than five minutes into the game, but I figured I bought it, so I might as well see it through and finally have something to review. What followed was roughly twenty hours of stale hell with the two worst traveling companions I’ve ever had the displeasure of being saddled with.

I don’t know how faithful the game is, but I doubt it did more than pay lip service to the script before wandering off to do its own thing. The story is simple enough. Sun Wukong, aka Dasheng, is trapped for 500 years in an ice prison before being released by Liuer, a young monk who needs help to discover why monsters are kidnapping children from all the villages. Dasheng initially couldn’t care less, but is forced into fighting by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, who promises to remove the chains binding his magic if he continues to do good deeds. Although the opening scene is set with a fully animated vignette, many other cut-scenes are shown in still frames or with minimal animation. I’m not sure what the point was, except possibly to save money.

Before I get to the griping, I need to mention two special exceptions who deserve praise for their efforts. The team of artists who worked on the level design really pulled off some amazing sets, from tiny villages in the middle of a valley forest, to shrines hidden away in the highest mountains with waterfalls flowing beautifully from every peak. Similarly, the team responsible for the music deserve praise for their stellar efforts. Every level has its own special vibe thanks to the music, which goes hand in hand with the level designs to establish a mood. Sometimes it’s a chill mood, and others are tense, and on their own merits, these two teams did some awesome work.

Everyone else, though, should be sad about what they produced, because it is sad, and now I’m sad for having played this game. Because it is sad. Okay, I’ll move on.

The biggest obstacle to enjoying the game lies in bad combat, and given that this is the core loop, that’s a pretty big hurdle to stumble on. Dasheng, the titular Monkey King, starts out with a lousy 3-hit combo for weak attacks, and a ridiculous “wind-up” punch for his heavy attack. Unless an enemy has hunkered down to block, they will either walk away to “dodge” the attack, or they’ll attack and knock Dasheng out of the animation. Meanwhile the weak attacks often have no discernible effect on enemies, who will still draw back and swipe at Dasheng. Worse, once he’s locked into an animation, he can’t dodge. While this improves slightly later in the game at the start, it’s hugely frustrating to sort out how to deal with multiple enemies without losing a massive chunk of health.

Timing a weak punch at the same time an enemy is attacking triggers a one-on-one fight, which is just a quicktime button mash of the weak attack. This doesn’t annoy me as much as some QTE-laden games because the required cadence to mash at is pretty forgiving. Clearly, this is a game geared towards kids, so nothing is too taxing. That may be one of the few good points to combat, but as I’m pointing out a “good” kind of QTE, I consider it damning with faint praise.

The game offers up two melee weapon options in the early levels, and they both suck. First is a bench. Yes, it’s just a simple short bench, and later Dasheng can unlock the ability to summon a magical bench. Both versions suck because they slow Dasheng down and reduce his dodge roll to a pathetically short dash, like just carrying this little wooden stool is too hard for him. There are also rocks and vases that can be picked up and used to club enemies with. Both the weapons can be thrown, causing them to explode on impact. Even if they’re used as melee weapons, they have a durability so low as to be made from papier mâché.

Just to evolve from this miserable state, a scavenger hunt has to be undertaken to look for the hiding places of Earth Gods. These are similar to Kodama in Nioh, but in this case you MUST find them because they are the only way to level up and get more health, magic points, and add extra moves to Dasheng’s attack combo. The same upgrade adds more oomph to every hit, so it’s vitally important to do this scavenger hunt.

But this means that after killing every enemy, you can look forward to wandering back through a level, looking for every plate, pot, and stone mound where an Earth God might be hiding. The game wants you to use a spell called Mind’s Eye to reveal their locations, but given how much magic this uses, it’s easier to just spot the common objects where the gods like to hide and either capture them or break open the thing they’re hiding in. Some of the breakable jars are hidden up in trees, on rooftops, or along cliffsides, requiring a thrown object to break. It’s like an Easter egg hunt organized by the neighborhood’s most sadistic parent.

There’s another scavenger hunt for flowers, insects, lizards, and minerals, which can all be traded to a merchant for health and magic restoring potions, as well as amulets and protective items. If you’re short on some items, you might be able to trade two or three of one material for one of another. Initially it feels like a pretty stingy economy, but by the end of the game, I had a decent stockpile of restorative potions as well as charms to protect against all elemental status effects. This was due to me wandering back and forth over a level in search of those accursed Earth Gods, so I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Again, that’s damning with faint praise because this kind of backtracking was tediously dull. Plus, without all the wandering, I probably could have completed this game in half the time.

Beating bosses will unlock more spells, and these can be upgraded by harvesting souls from enemies. Think Dark Souls, but with flashy Chinese symbols instead of white energy orbs. In a similar vein, it is possible to make soul vessels that will break open and offer varying levels of soul currency. But this is where Monkey Souls: Hero is Lame ends any semblance to the far superior trilogy of darkity darkness.

Enemy types are pretty scarce, and the first level already begins palette swapping the same enemy in the place of actual variety. Your “helpful” companion Liuer even feels the need to point out “Look, Dasheng, that monster is a different color,” just in case he suddenly went blind. Even the unique bosses…no, let me pause here to talk about the other HUGE problem this game has.

See, after the first level you have not one, but two “helpful” companions. They will talk constantly to remind you of the current objective, or to scream “Aaaah, monsters!” every time an enemy goes into active attack mode. They’re just annoying in Chinese as they are in English, so it may be best to just drop the voice volume entirely. You can’t clip through them, so they can block doorways or force you to run around them. Yeah, they’re a part of the story, but just having them along made the game ten times worse. In fact, there’s a certain point where it becomes possible to explore previous levels as memories, and the absence of their grating voices immediately brought my enjoyment of the game to a much higher level.

I cannot stress enough how annoying they are, so here’s an example. Late in the game, I was winding my way up some mountain pathways in search of a mystic shrine, and I suddenly noticed how exquisitely pretty the level was. The moon was full and bright, the stars all twinkling and lovely, and everywhere I looked were majestic waterfalls. So I stopped moving for TWO FUCKING SECONDS and my other companion Zhu Bajie quips, “Are you lost, monkey boy?” And then I shouted, “OH MY GOD, CAN YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND JUST LET ME ENJOY THE VIEW WITHOUT RUINING IT?” And the answer is no, they will always ruin every moment in the game, turning even the slightest crumb of joy into agonized rage.

Right, so where was—? Oh, right, enemy variety. Some new types are added along with the minion-level goblins, but soon they suffer the same regurgitated palette swap duties. Red types shoot fire, and blue types shoot ice, while yellow shoots electricity and purple shoots poison. There’s some spiky crocodiles and enchanted suits of armor to spice up the variety, both having variants. All of these would be fine if they had more friends along for the ride, but this tiny crew has to support most of the game between the five unique bosses. Before being able to fight the final boss, Hun Dun, you have to fight the first four bosses over again (and the first boss is pressed into guard duties with palette swaps several times). Just a little before the final level is a series of “training fights” that repeats the same sad collection of monsters in different clusters over and over and over. It’s more padding because the game has so little to offer.

But the thing that really slays me is how in the closing seconds of the game, the developers tease you by letting you play a super-powered version of Dasheng, and suddenly he can fly and launch magic missiles and smash boulders with a mere flick of his hand. He has cool magic armor and transforms into a blazing fireball that destroys the final boss by blasting through him, and then that’s it, that’s the end of the game.

It’s like the opposite of so many games, where the developers let you get a taste of what your character can do at full strength before stripping away all their abilities through amnesia or flashbacks or whatever plot device they like. Here, you struggle throughout the game with shitty combat, no camera lock, terribly weak weapons and a pathetic jump height, and only at the very end do the developers go, “You could have been playing this god instead.” It’s almost enough to reduce me to bitter tears of frustration.

So, again, I admit that this time the bad review is on me for pulling the “confused grandma” routine and buying this instead of the game I really wanted. (Which isn’t even out yet.) Additionally, I only paid eight Euros for it, and it’s hard to be mad at losing the money when I did at least get about twenty hours of game-time out of it. But pretty scenery and lovely music cannot save bad gameplay and putting up with two annoying anchors constantly dragging the fun out of every action.

So with that in mind, I’m giving Monkey King: Hero is Back 2 stars. I might recommend it for small children who are fans of the film, but everyone else should find something more interesting to do with their time. Like, slamming your head into a wall, for instance.

Book review: I Am Behind You by John A. Lindqvist

A book review? Do I even know how to do this anymore? I’ll tell you what, let me do two short hit jobs on a couple of other books that I didn’t finish as warm up stretches before getting to the real review. Sound fun? Let’s begin.

First up is that book I mentioned reading at work that got stolen along with my bike. I said before that I had maybe 30 pages left and I wasn’t sure if I cared how it ended. With more time to reflect, I can now say I don’t. The book is The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer, and I know I said in reviewing The Host that I would read her work in any genre, a spy thriller featuring a romance between a CIA torturer and her victim was apparently a bridge too far for me. Sorry, Steph, but better luck next time. Oh, and hey, good on you for having twins in a book and not using the hackneyed psychic twin connection trope, unlike my next victim.

Book 2 on the hit list is Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Clone, er, Owen King, and I shit you not, I tried sticking with this book for well over a year and a half even through reading each chapter felt like crawling across a carpet made of thumbtacks and table salt. Leave it to King to come up with a premise where all the women get transported to a magical land where they can rebuild society over many months, hold social circles, and eventually decide they really need the D. Meanwhile, over in the man’s world, only a few hours have passed, and that short time is a fucking endless treadmill of “Man, men sure are shit, right?” Yeah, I get it. I got it after the first five examples, and after that shit got drainingly repetitive, not even the promise of an explosive man battle could get me through the last 100 pages. I still remember King saying he was retiring because his stuff was getting repetitive, and while I have a top ten list comprised solely of his works, I kinda wish he’d either get back to retirement, or get back on the kinds of drugs that made his earlier work more interesting.

Right, with those victims dispatched, let’s talk about I Am Behind You by John A. Lindqvist, or rather, let’s take a moment to appreciate what a shitty choice of English title this is compared to the original. The original title is Himmelstrand, which refers to the songwriter and journalist Peter Himmelstrand. Peter’s songs are part of the story, as well as the writer himself. So even if the original title is a bit meh, it at least fits the story. Meanwhile, I Am Behind You is just meaningless. There is never a killer behind a victim. No one is ever behind anyone, for that matter. I Am Inside You might have worked, but whoever chose the English title needs to reread the story over and over until they come up with something more fitting. I know, it’s a moot point since they already published a trilogy and tripled down on these garbage names, but a girl can dream, yo.

Setting that aside, I Am Behind You may be Lindqvist’s most vague horror book yet, and as a result, probably his most approachable. Every previous book has had at least one “what the fuck” moment so intense that I had to put the book down and walk away for a breather. Little Star had that moment early on, and it was so bad I needed a month to calm down and come back to the book. It had more shocks later on, but after that first hard jolt the rest were striking a numb target, so I only needed a few minutes to get over them.

There’s nothing like that here, which isn’t a knock to the story. The book was good enough to invoke that good old “one more chapter” impulse, leading immediately to the “fuck, is it really 4 am” reaction. When it comes to books, I don’t think there can be any endorsement higher than not wanting to stop reading well past one’s normal bed time.

The story starts with the occupants of four caravan campers waking up to discover that they’ve been transported away from the campgrounds to somewhere else. What is this place? It’s never really given a name or even a vague hint. Composed of a wide disc of flat grassy plainlands and sunless blue sky, it is surrounded by a wall of darkness that no one can see until they drive right up on top of it. A few characters insist that God is also missing because they can no longer feel Him, but that feels a bit like unreliable narration, so I didn’t put much stock into it.

The monsters of the story are similarly vague, composed of two types, neither of which is given a name. The first to show up aren’t shapeshifters so much as projectors of a viewer’s worst fears or desires. One woman sees Jimmy Stewart in many of his film roles, while a little boy obsessed with Star Wars sees stormtroopers. Another sees his dead father, and another sees…traveling salesmen? That is never even explained with a flashback, it’s that vague. They seem to be some kind of immortal ghosts, attaching themselves to a human host in the physical world before eventually taking over. Whether that takeover is what started the journey from the real world to the disc world is never made clear, though it is obvious that the two are connected somehow.

The second group of monsters to show up act like zombies but only drink blood. So they show up, do their thing, and then wander off. One character’s transformation at least explains how they change into a monster, but another character shows it is possible to escape the process to become human again.

I really hate having to be so vague to avoid spoilers, and I must insist that the hazy nature of the setting and its monsters was never a drag for me. It kept me reading in the hope of finding answers, and while there were a few, I was left feeling slightly disappointed at the lack of any more concrete labels or myths to latch onto. And then again, maybe there was a definitive answer, and it eluded me because I’m not nearly as well versed in Scandinavian mythology and monsters.

It’s a minor complaint, I suppose, and perhaps the other two books in the trilogy will give more definitive answers. Either way, I’ll give I Am Behind You four stars and recommend it to fans of cosmic or cerebral horror. There’s some blood on display, but no guts or viscera to create deep shock value. So if you’re timid about jumping into horror, this might be worth exploring before wading into the murkier, chunkier waters in the oceans of horror.

Game review: My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge for Android

I’m sure I mentioned in my last post that I was close to finishing a book to review here, and it wasn’t long after that when my bike was stolen, along with the thermic backpack I needed to work, and the aforementioned book. I’m debating buying it again because I’m not sure if I liked it so much that I want to pay for it twice. On the other hand, I did only have 30 pages left…

Anyway, this is a review for My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge (I will be shortening the title to Pedro for the rest of this post), which just came out on Android and I believe also on iOS. It is published by Devolver Digital, whom I have a lot of respect for even if I have yet to find a single game from their collective of indie developers that has fully clicked for me. That’s also the case here, but I want to talk about the game’s better points before laying out why it didn’t always work for me.

For starters, you can download the game for free and play all the levels, provided you don’t die. Doing so will result in the game asking you to buy the premium version before bumping you back to level 1 with all the levels you’ve played locked once again. In theory, if you were a badass gamer, you might be able to play the whole thing for free. I am not, so after a few rounds of making it to level 4 or 6 and dying, I said, “Eh, it’s only 2.49 euros, so I’ll just go ahead and buy it.” (I believe it’s $2.99 in the US.)

(Edit: This was how the game functioned at the time of release, but now the free version allows for saving progress by watching ads. I can’t speak to how that works because the update came out after I had already gone in on the premium version.)

That’s perhaps another point in the game’s favor. It doesn’t cost much, so even if you don’t like it, it’s like the price of a cup of coffee. For that pittance, you get the whole game with no obnoxious ads and no pleas for more money through microtransactions. You buy the game, you play the game, and if you like it, maybe you try to get better scores on some levels. Or maybe you’ll try out all the levels using Bloodrush Mode, which I’ll get to later. But I digress, the game has to be praised for charging a reasonable price and providing several hours to days worth of gameplay, even if you only play it once.

Pedro is either a sequel or a prequel to the PC game My Friend Pedro. It’s hard to tell because the masked protagonist of both games is bonkers and follows orders from a talking banana no one else can see. This second entry in the series could have happened before or after the main game, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference either way.

In any case, the eponymous banana boss Pedro asks for the masked gunman’s help to rescue his family, Billy Banana, Milly Apple, and Maria Banana. Each one has been taken by a different gang in the city, so the gunman must leap through a series of platforming puzzles, killing all the bad guys to rack up points. At the end of each level, a star rating is given, from 1 to 3, and while some levels have a pretty easy 3 star score limit, some require an insane amount of fast movements to get the score multiplier high enough to crack the second and third star.

The controls work like this: you set your thumb on either corner of the screen which slows down time. Dragging your thumb across the screen creates an arrow to roll in one direction or the other if your motion is straight across, but if you pull down (or up depending if you choose inverted controls) a dotted arc will appear, showing where the gunman will land after jumping. Land on a wall, and it’s possible to wall-jump, reaching higher platforms.

Levels constantly introduce new weapons and gimmicks in an effort to keep the platforming fresh and interesting. One area introduces targets to ricochet bullets off of to hit enemies and gas tanks at an angle. Another brings in a frying pan with similar ricochet mechanics, while another introduces compressed air tanks that can be used as rockets to kill enemies and blast through weakened walls, but also as a rideable platform, provided you get the gunman to jump off before the tank explodes.

Between each gang’s area are sections of highway where the gunman rides a motorcycle, swerving and hopping to avoid obstacles while shooting enemy bikers. The last of these stretches of highway has what serves as the game’s only boss fight against a transport truck filled with enemies and mines. I’d say it’s about twice as long as the other sections, but that may just have been a warped perception based on how I played the highway sections. (I’ll explain more in a bit.)

Where things fell apart for me over and over was in wrestling with the controls. When the game is asking for a very tight set of inputs, I often struggled to make the jump arc go where I needed it to. If the game froze time completely, fiddling to get the arc just right might not be so aggravating, but because the gunman is still in motion, it’s quite often the case that nailing a jump has to be worked out in seconds, or else the gunman will die. If I screw up a jump and get him killed, that’s on me. But if I spend two full seconds trying to aim the arc at a platform, only to have it constantly miss the mark, that’s on the controls for not being quite polished enough.

Before this week, I might have assumed the problems with the controls were an issue with my screen because I’ve dropped my old phone a lot. (I am a klutz, yes.) But I bought a new phone and loaded the game up, finding the same issue with a shiny new screen. Now obviously, later updates might make this a moot point, and I will check back to see how it goes. But believe me when I say there were levels where I was so grateful just to make it to the end after many failed attempts that I was like “Mang, I don’t even care that I only got one star. I’m just glad that bullshit is over.”

Additionally, there were a few times when the predicted jump arc was wrong about where the gunman would land. This didn’t happen more than a few times over the course of the entire game, but when it did, it usually got the gunman murderized quickly and brutally.

Later levels throw in fast moving conveyor belts and scales that retract the floor under the gunman after a very short amount of time. In both cases, the time slowing effect doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for mistakes. With the conveyor belts you have to land EXACTLY on the edge in order to have enough time to plan the next jump. Otherwise, the gunman will just get tossed back where he started, or worse, into a pit of barbed wire. With the retracting platforms, you often have to shoot a bunch of gang members while also trying to look out for where to jump next. Which is fine when everything is working right. But you get just one input wrong, and you are screwed and have to start the whole level all over again. In these later areas, there was much cursing and growling on my part.

Also, it bears mentioning that sometimes the game will spawn an enemy on the screen underneath my thumb. So I’m watching the gunman get shot up, losing one heart after another, and not seeing who’s doing the massacre. It was only after the gunman got whacked that I would lift my thumb and find the bastard responsible. Now it’s true that kind of troll trick only works once, but I don’t like that a game knows how their touch controls work, and nevertheless opts to place enemies under my thumb. It’s just so…so trolly.

Getting back to the highway sections. I often found that the delay between me pressing the screen and the time slowing effect kicking in left me no time to maneuver around obstacles, and enemies on bikes went from tiny specks on the horizon to up in my face too quickly to avoid getting shot. So my only option was to hold my thumb on the screen for the vast majority of these sections. This was both boring to endure and painful keeping my thumb pressed on the glass. But the alternative was smashing the poor gunman’s face through one roadblock after another and getting shot to pieces a moment later. It’s a nice idea in theory, but in practice, these levels end up being the weaker parts of the game.

This is also why the final boss fight felt longer, because there were dragging moments watching the truck do nothing, waiting for anything to happen. Yet the moment I’d let go of the screen to speed up time, whoop, here’s a hippy on a bike riding up the gunman’s back to shoot him before I can react. I really feel like some tweaking might be in order to make these sections tighter without needing to keep my thumb down for the entire run. Maybe just decrease the delay from when I press the screen to when time slows down. I think that would help a lot by itself. Well, that and giving the gunman a chance to shoot enemies before they’re right on top of him. Let’s move on.

As a result of the update that changed how the free game works, a new mode was added, Bloodrush. In this mode, the gunman starts with five seconds, and killing gang members adds 1.25 seconds to the clock. I played a few of the early levels to see it in action, but I’m pretty sure that until the controls are tightened up in a future update, I ain’t never gonna make it through those later areas fast enough to complete this mode. That’s for better and more dedicated gamers than me. I’m just glad to have seen the corny, corny ending.

Controls aside, let me highlight a few other good points the game has. The masked gunman and the three gangs he’s facing are all cartoonishly cute. There’s old men, trash lovers with popcorn buckets on their heads, and mushroom loving hippies. Their designs are ridiculous, but in a good way. The gunman’s acrobatic animations are equally cute, with his head stretching far away from his shoulders during his descents. The way he crouches in slow motion before jumping is what the term totes adorbs was made for.

Level designs are mostly good, clearly communicating where I need to go and how I need to proceed to get there. There’s only a few gotcha moments where a pit or crevice filled with barbed wire is placed out of sight, (and I hate those troll areas) and the rest is visually easy to interpret even on a smaller screen.

Lastly, the music is bangin’. I’m talking put the game on pause and just chill to the tracks. Normally with mobile games, I will turn off the music and sound effects to conserve battery power, but with Pedro, I actually started putting on headphone because the music was just that good.

I arrive at the end of this review, and I want to give Pedro 3 stars for the crime of annoying me. I’m going to go ahead and give it 4 stars because this is exactly the kind of mobile game I want to see from other developers. It creates a unique control scheme to overcome the lack of physical buttons, offers up a constantly changing variety of tools to play with, and it makes me feel at the end that I got a great deal of value for the money I paid. If more mobile companies would take risks like this, I would totally open my virtual wallet to buy their stuff.

So yeah, some parts annoyed the piss out of me, but I’d still recommend Pedro to anyone looking for a platforming mobile at a fair price. Give it a try, and let both DeadToast Entertainment and Devolver Digital know they’re on the right track with paid mobile games of this caliber.