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Jun 7th, 2025 at 08:33:17 - Doom: The Dark Ages (PC) |
Doom: The Dark Ages was a good time, but the franchise is starting to take itself too seriously. I remember enjoying the stories of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, but this one was an eye-roller. Of course, it's just an excuse to kill demons, which is fine, but I don't need the excuse. It provides the Slayer motivation too, but again, I don't need him to have a reason for what he's doing. I didn't care about any of the characters--not the king, not his daughter, not the various named lieutenants and soldiers whose names I never learned. The main bad guy was very evil and bad, as befitting a prince of Hell, but I don't know what his motivation was besides...power? Kill Sentinels? Why? The fat guy, Kreed Makyr, I liked better. He reminded me of Baron Harkonnen in Dune. So, story, overly serious and who cares.
The running and gunning is as satisfying as ever. Whereas the previous two Doom games focused on the risk/reward of proximity, The Dark Ages edges away from melee. Although there are melee weapons, the star here is your new shield. You can use it to close in quickly and bash enemies, but I far more often used its thrown buzzsaw function, which stuns enemies and allows for various effects. For example, you can upgrade the regular machine gun to ricochet when shooting an enemy affected by the buzzsaw shield. Throw the shield, fire the machine gun, watch the bullets tear through nearby enemies. Very satisfying.
The roster of guns is great and, as with Doom Eternal, most have their place for rock-paper-scissoring enemies in certain situations. The plasma rifle explodes enemies with plasma shields. The shotgun and the ball-hurling gun do more damage to armor, which you can then break by throwing your shield. The machine gun that does spread damage is great for clearing out hordes of fodder demons. The one that I used the least was the sniper rifle, which wasn't really a sniper rifle. You can't zoom and it more "lobs" the bullet (arcs and falls short) than shoots it straight. So, you can't actually snipe, which is fair enough; it just made the gun pretty pointless for me. All guns can be upgraded a few times, and I ended up playing almost exclusively with the alternate plasma rifle, which supercharges, doing tons of damage to an enemy and arcing electricity to nearby enemies, which then explode when you shoot them.
In terms of the combat encounters, this was an evolution of Doom Eternal, which was nice. I liked the somewhat open maps where you'd stumble upon groups of enemies, rather than walk into a room, have the walls come up, and do one arena battle after another. Although walls would come up, creating arenas, they were usually much bigger, more varied, and felt more organic. By the end, you were dealing with numerous tough enemies at once, sprinting around, targeting armor, parrying, cycling your weapons, etc.
And I have to mention parrying, another new combat focus. This was in Doom Eternal a little bit, but parrying is now a big part of combat. Enemies sometimes have a green animation with their attacks, or will shoot a green projectile at you. These can be parried. Parrying has various effects, such as stunning nearby enemies, spawning an auto-turret, and shooting out a fan of homing knives. You have to learn to telegraph enemy moves and parry in the midst of all the chaos on the screen. It was FAR more forgiving than something like Sekiro. I'm also currently playing Nine Sols, which has Sekiro-like parrying. Hopefully these games help me with Sekiro!
There are also three different modes of combat. Mostly, you are the Slayer, on the ground, running and gunning. Sometimes, you pilot this giant mech to fight enemy titans. Other times, you fly a dragon and engage in some air combat. These segments were epic for sure, and they broke up the gameplay, but I much preferred the regular on-the-ground combat. It's so crunchy. Everything has weight to it, sounds great, looks awesome. Finally, there are secrets galore, so you can spend your time exporing the maps, poking around to find all the gold, upgrade materials, collectibles, and so on. I did not focus on this, and probably averaged like 60-70% completion on the maps. You use your shield a lot for platforming around, throwing it at switches and whatnot. I probably would have explored more, but, you know, Game Pass only lasts for a month and I've got a lot to get through! First Game Pass game of June, down. Definitely recommend Doom: The Dark Ages if you want a fast and frantic FPS.
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May 28th, 2025 at 07:51:46 - Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (PC) |
This is a solid metroidvania, hits high marks in all aspects. It's not Hollow Knight and it's not Ori, but it's up there. It’s set in a dark medieval fantasy type world, has a beautiful soundtrack and great artwork. The story is presented in that cryptic souls-like fashion and told primarily through notes in the environment, usually written by characters that you defeat or White Priestesses. It tells of the Blight, a never-ending rain that falls, infecting people and driving them mad.
Combat and movement are both tight and responsive. There are like 25 weapons. I think that the most unique design piece is that your weapons are not weapons at all, but are the spirits of (mini)bosses that you defeat. Your character is a frail priestess and the spirits fight at her command. You can equip six of them at once (in two sets of three), so you always have a variety of attacks to deploy. Some are “main” attacks and others are “subskills.” The difference, usually, is that main skills can be used an unlimited number of times, while subskills have a specific number of uses before they run out. When you stop at a respite (save point), you refill your skill uses and health potions. Some main skills do have limited uses though, and near the end of the game, I realized that you can equip multiple main skills in each set. I had assumed that you could have one main skill and two subskills per set of three. This seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t even try to equip multiple main skills and only did so by accident! I wonder if my play style would have changed had I discovered that earlier. Anyway, some skills are melee, some are ranged, some excel at hitting airborne enemies, there is a strong poison cloud that deals damage over time, a movement skill, a stun skill, fast weak attacks, slow strong attacks, skills that can charge attack, and so on. Since you can equip six, you’ll have something for every occasion, and can really tailor them for boss fights. One neat thing is that you can use multiple skills at the same time. Since “you” are not attacking, your spirits can do so simultaneously. All skills can be leveled up using a specific type of experience, basic stuff.
The level design is pretty good, but the rooms do get kind of same-y and boring after a while. This sucks because you will backtrack a lot. The map doesn't help with this, since it doesn't give you much information. For example, the rooms are all represented with variously sized squares or rectangles and no other defining features. The only icons on the map are respites (save points), white lines connecting rooms you have been to, and red dots for entrances/exits that you haven't been through yet. Rooms will also turn orange if you have collected all the items inside, which was handy. But there are no icons indicating other objects, obstacles, or enemies. Metroidvanias often mark bosses on the map, mark obstacles with some icon indicating what it is or what tool you might need to bypass it, and so on. Given the amount of backtracking to explore new areas after getting new traversal abilities, it became frustrating that the map didn’t tell me which obstacles were where. This meant that I had to try and remember what obstacle was blocking the constant number of 10-20 unexplored entrances, making my way back through sometimes maze-like rooms to check each obstacle to see if I could bypass it now. So, the map was a bit disappointing, but I guess props for giving me a feeling of achievement and discovery by making me work for exploration.
Miniboss battles were easy, basically just buffed versions of regular enemies. I recall dying a few times on the first ones, but I think I one-shot like 15 of them. Boss battles were excellent and provided more of a challenge. Most bosses have three phases that predictably change at 66% and 33% HP. Most took less than a few tries, but I remember three that took a while, including the last boss, which I looked up how to beat because I just wanted to finish the game. I learned that a lot of weapon and relic combinations are (over)powerful. I had been dying for a good hour on the final boss, but after I looked it up and tried a suggested build, I killed it in two tries (and had full health, no health potions used!).
There is a sequel out. It has overwhelmingly positive ratings on Steam but it looks really, really similar to Ender Lilies. It would be another solid metroidvania to play, but if it's just more of the same (though by all accounts polished in every way), then I'm not particularly interested, at least no time soon. I do have Nine Sols to play on Game Pass (soon?), so maybe I’ll get a pretty direct comparison to another recent highly rated metroidvania.
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May 21st, 2025 at 11:13:31 - Monster Hunter: World (PC) |
Next up is a retirement (ooh, ahh!). I bounced right off of Monster Hunter: World. Never played a Monster Hunter game before and am surprised that I don't like it. But after playing a while, at least I understand why. My expectations were a bit different than the reality. I know that the name of the game is what you do, but I assumed there would be more narrative or more traditional, tight, RPG or action RPG elements. But I would characterize the game as a massive grind. I know that this is how it is described (kill monsters to get materials to improve equipment to kill bigger monsters to get more materials to improve equipment, etc.), but I just thought there would be something else to it. And I'm sure that the hunts get more exciting, but I also know that the game is long, and I don't feel like grinding my way there to begin enjoying it after 50 hours or whatever.
Some things that made me bounce off include:
1. A gazillion items to pick up. What is all this stuff? If you walk around in the field, you are prompted every 2 feet to harvest an herb or mine some ore or something.
2. Inventory management. Inventory was full very quickly, which prompted me to sit there trying to learn what all the stuff does. Short answer: crafting.
3. I usually don't enjoy crafting a lot of stuff in games, so this was not good for me.
4. Annoying cat puns.
5. The map is so busy, and the first area was super confusing to navigate.
6. Boring story and characters.
7. "Tracking" monsters was a matter of clicking on enough footprints to "level up" your knowledge of it or something. Then, you follow some glowing flies around until you see it. This did not make me feel clever, like I was hunting. I was following a green path of fireflies the whole time and pressing B when prompted to "study tracks."
8. The UI is really cluttered and could be improved in so many ways.
9. You have to play online (though you can set your game to 1 player). I didn't know there was such an online multiplayer focus.
In the end, Monster Hunter: World feels like a single-player(ish) MMORPG. My days of World of Warcraft are far, far behind me, and this brought back all the memories of years of grinding in that game. I can't do it! And now I know that Monster Hunter isn't for me!
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May 21st, 2025 at 10:48:42 - Quantum Conundrum (XBONE) |
Been playing this with Patrick for most of the semester and we finally beat it last night. It's a mixed bag, but overall positive. It absolutely rides the coattails of Portal, and we read that it was directed by the lead designer on Portal, so no surprise at the similarities. I'll get the negative things out of the way first:
1. It tries to be funny, but it falls mostly flat. The funniest things were Ike (this little imp creature that makes silly faces at you) and the way that the paintings change when you use the abilities (often funny and surprising!). What was supposed to carry the game's humor--the narrator/uncle--didn't. He delivered his lines just fine, but they didn't land. Given that you play as a child, he can't be as sarcastic as GlaDOS in Portal. Given the more family-friendly aesthetic, the jokes were sillier. Given that he and the child actually don't seem to have much of a relationship, nor is it developed throughout the game, there's little relational history and context to draw from. And he usually only pipes up in between puzzles to make brief comments that don't add much.
2. The level of precision required for the first-person platforming was rough. Many puzzles require excellent timing and precision for jumping, throwing and catching objects, and so on, and the game just didn't handle that well. The movement controls are oddly both too tight and too floaty at the same time (I'm sure I'm mischaracterizing this in my description, but this is what it felt like). We OFTEN fell off flying objects, jumped too far or not far enough, missed catching things because of the camera, and so on. Actually, it was irritating for the first half of the game, and it became funny to us as the levels became more complicated. Like last night, Patrick tried for 15 minutes to execute the moves on a puzzle before handing it to me to finish. It would take 1 minute to figure out what you need to do and 14 minutes to accomplish the task. I felt bad watching Patrick sometimes because he's not great at precision controls, so he would fail and fail and fail, hand me the controller, and I'd do on the first try what he'd tried 20 times (though I certainly failed my fair share of times because of the controls!).
3. The ending was uninspired and happened quickly. I'm not entirely sure why what happened happened and I don't care. It obviously set up a sequel that never came.
That's it! Those are the negatives. The positive, though, is the puzzles. They are great, consistently fun and challenging. You're in your uncle's crazy science mansion, and there are four ways that you manipulate objects to solve puzzles by swapping to different "dimensions." First, you can make objects "heavy." Second, you can make objects "fluffy." Third, you can slow time. Fourth, you can reverse gravity. Only one dimension can be active at a time, but by choosing sequences of dimensions, you do some cool things. For example, one common object is a big safe. You normally can't pick up a safe (or other large objects), but activate the fluffy dimension and it becomes light as a feather. This way, you can move safes around to toss them through windows (throw and change to "heavy" before it hits the glass), depress buttons (place them them change to "heavy"), or fly through the air using a combination of dimensions. For example, carry the safe with fluffy, throw it and quickly slow time, jump on top of the safe you just threw, use reverse gravity to travel upward, and (voila!) you've used a safe to get to a ledge above you.
Puzzles utilize various combinations of dimensions, and often you have to find these little capsules to trigger the dimensions in the first place. So task 1 will be acquiring the capsules for dimensions in a puzzle area, then you can start solving the harder puzzles in an area. It is totally linear though, so it's not like you'll be trying puzzles you can't complete. Unlike something like The Witness, you're always at a puzzle you can solve. So if you can't figure it out, then it's you. Like Portal, there are various obstacles and death traps, including deadly pools of "science juice" (like acid), lasers, robots that push you off ledges, and so on.
I do recall getting bored and sleepy earlier on, but to be fair, we were always playing Quantum Conundrum at night after work, and I have learned that puzzle games are a genre not best suited to play while exhausted at night. Nevertheless, it held our attention, and by at least halfway through, we were thoroughly enjoying the puzzling. So, the short version is: Portal is better by far, but Quantum Conundrum scratches the itch.
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