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Dec 17th, 2021 at 08:36:00 - Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (PC) |
Really enjoying this so far. I was pretty sure I would since this is always held up as a phenomenal modern tactics game. It's set sometime in Edo period Japan after the shogunate unified the country and created a period of isolationist peace. Well, it's peaceful because your happy band of "blades" (one character doesn't use a blade at all, but I'll let it slide...) is putting down threats.
The game's style feels very authentic, from color palettes to music to environments. I feel transported to these locations. It's easy to feel immersed because both story and gameplay are highly engaging too. Characters are well written, and their abilities reflect their personalities. The game plays from an isometric top-down perspective like a classic CRPG. In each mission, you control pre-set (so far) combinations of your five characters and are (usually so far) given a couple different ways to meet objectives.
The five characters all have some similar and some different abilities. One type of passive abilities define movement. Hayato, Yuki, and Aiko are the three agile, really sneaky ones. They can all climb ivy vines, grapple up and down rooftops, and enter water. They can all carry bodies, though the two girls (Yuki and Aiko) drag them, while Hayato carries them. This is interesting because it means that Yuki and Aiko are crouched while moving bodies, which means they are invisible in the "shaded" part of an enemy's vision cone while doing so. Hayato, on the other hand, stands and carries bodies over his shoulder. He can move a little faster while carrying a body, but is visible in the shaded part of an enemy's vision cone. These three can also swim, while the other two characters can't. Mugen is a big, beefy samurai. He can't grapple, climb ivy, or enter water, but he can carry two bodies, which is useful because one of his main attacks is an AoE that can kill three enemies at once. The last character, Takuma, is an old man with a cane and a wooden leg. His movement abilities are obviously the most limited. In fact, he makes noise while walking unless he's crouching.
Each character has a unique combat strength. They all have some version of a main attack (which is killing one enemy with their respective blade, except Takuma, who is a marksman and has a long-range rifle), a more powerful/situational secondary attack (Hayato can throw a shuriken, Mugen has his powerful AoE attack, Yuki can set a deadly trap, Aiko can...I forget what hers is..., and Takuma has a couple grenades), a distraction (Hayato throws a stone to divert enemies' attention, Mugen can lure guards with a flask of sake, Yuki similarly lures guards with a bird whistle [luring them into her trap is fun], Aiko can actually pick up disguises and distract enemies with conversation, and Takuma has a pet tanuki that he can order around to make noise), a flintlock pistol (Takuma has something more powerful), and a healing ability (each can heal three HP one time).
In each level I have played so far (5 or 6) I've had two or three characters. You can immediately see how their movement abilities and skills work together to tackle different potential challenges in a level. For example, in one memorable level, I had Mugen and Yuki. We had to steal documents from an official without killing them. Yuki is more stealthy, being able to clamber around on rooftops, so she took the high route and cleared the way for Mugen to follow on the ground. This is a common thing that you can do with Hayato and Yuki especially, take the high route to thin out enemies for the characters on the ground. Mugen, for his part, being a big beefy guy, had to destroy a wooden tower to lure a bunch of guards away from the official. So, you have to get Mugen to the tower, and then get Yuki to the official. Since there are like 5 guards around the tower after Mugen destroys it, he's stuck there hiding in the bushes. You have to figure out how to get the official alone with Yuki with no help.
Enemies all have vision cones, which you can see by clicking on the enemy. Vision cones have two parts, a dark part (they can see you unless you are hidden, like in a bush) and a shaded part (they can see you if you are standing but not if you are crouching, and unless you are hidden, like in a bush). Enemies are usually scanning side to side as they stand or patrol, so you can't just come at them from the side; they'll look that way. Also, enemies don't just magically spot you. If you are in their vision cone, it fills yellow, and when the yellow reaches you, that's when they actually spot you, yell, attack, and sometimes call for reinforcements. This creates fun risk/reward situations where you can like sprint through their vision cone and try to make it to a bush before the yellow reaches you. There is a useful marker you can place that lets you know when and which enemies can see it. You can use this marker (it's a non-diagetic UI feature) for planning purposes.
One thing about Shadow Tactics that I didn't know is that it's real-time. I definitely assumed it was turn-based. But, there is one turn-based-ish mechanic called Shadow Mode (I think that's what it's called), where you can queue up one action per character. So, imagine that there are two guards facing each other. You have gotten a character positioned hidden in a bush behind each guard. If you kill one guard with one character, well, the other guard will see you (the yellow is irrelevant if you're murdering a guard; they just see you). So the trick is to queue up both characters to kill their respective guard simultaneously. When you push Enter after setting this up, it activates whatever you have queued in Shadow Mode. This has already gotten really tricky to play with! For example, imagine there are three guards who are blocking your path forward. They are all looking in your general direction, so you can't just run past and you can't just kill them. You might queue Yuki to do her bird whistle to make one guard walk away to the right, queue Hayato to throw a rock to the left to distract the second guard, and then time Mugen to sneak past while the first two guards are turned away and while the third guard's view cone is swinging to one side. Then with Mugen behind all three, when they reconvene to their positions, he can use his special attack to kill all three, thus clearing the way for Hayato and Yuki to proceed.
I am sure this is going to get exceedingly more complex and I'm loving it. One thing I'm looking forward to are some even bigger levels with even more objectives where I get to use four or even all five characters. It would be great if there were different objectives for each character. I've played one level where there were two ways of completing it, one that involved Yuki poisoning some tea, and another that involved Takuma shooting someone with a rifle. Each way of completing the mission necessitates different approaches. I completed it with Yuki and used her and Hayato to infiltrate this island where the tea ceremony was happening, and used Takuma to shoot some annoying guards on towers so they wouldn't be spotted. If I'd done it the other way, actually, I think it would have been similar. I would have used Hayato and Yuki to get to the target's dog, do something to it (free it? take its food?). I would have gotten Takuma in a marksman's position somewhere to get a clear shot at the dog area. Then when the target came to check on his dog, Takuma would have shot him dead.
Anyway, I wasn't going to play this morning, buuuuuuut writing this has got me thinking about it. I chose to play this now because Desperados III is free on Game Pass and I wanted to play Mimimi's earlier game before their later one, since I'm sure the gameplay has been tweaked for the better. The only issue I have with Shadow Tactics right now is that sometimes it's hard to click on exactly what you mean to click on when there is some clutter of interactable objects. I've grappled up buildings when I meant to jump down. I've picked up/put down bodies when I was trying to do something else. I've crouch-walked up to enemies and not attacked them because I was accidentally clicking on something right next to them. The game encourages quicksaving (there's even a timer showing when the last time you quicksaved was, and it flashes every minute!), so these missteps are never punishing. You're meant to fail a lot and retry and experiment. That's what I mean though, I expect Desperados III to be more polished and I didn't want to be in any way disappointed if I went back and played Shadow Tactics second. So I'm doing them in the proper order!
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Dec 14th, 2021 at 14:50:59 - Halo Infinite (PC) |
Campaign complete. It's fun to play through, if a bit bland. The shooting is the star. Weapons feel great and have a big variety. Enemies are varied and deadly. I didn't play around much with vehicles, but Halo driving physics are as zany as ever. I initially thought vehicles would be the way to get around fast, but the new grappling hook is faster (and more fun).
The whole game takes place on one small, broken piece of a ring, so, unfortunately, you're in the same type of location the entire time. Well, two locations: topside (one hilly, mountainous environment) and in buildings (usually feel like you're in a corridor or a cavern). I assume multiplayer has more varied maps than "mountains" and "inside."
I enjoyed the tone of the story and, from what I could follow, the threads of it. I'm not a big Halo person, so the constant references to people, places, and events in past games were lost on me. They could really use a compendium or encyclopedia or something in the menu. I followed the story for probably the first half of the game, and then again toward the end. There is a time though when there's all sorts of stuff with Cortana (AI from previous games) and the bad guys talking about Halo lore, which I had no clue about. During those times, I just listened politely and then got on with the shooting.
Thinking about the relatively barren world and the way the story is presented, Halo Infinite strikes me as a bit minimalistic. The visuals and audio support this as well. There are no pounding drums or frenetic music. It's choral sci-fi sounding stuff. Earlier I said that the buildings all looked the same inside and that they often felt like corridors or caverns. I actually liked that minimalist feeling. Buildings look slick and have tall ceilings, everything is metallic.
Random thought while playing: Why are there basic grunts in the end levels of the game? Or of any game? Like, the deepest, most badass of places guarded by...3-foot-tall yelping grunts that run away when you kill one of them. It should be nothing but hunters! Is there a social hierarchy of Halo enemies? Do the hunters make fun of the grunts when they are guarding the same area? One wonders.
Other thoughts: (1) Halo Infinite has sweet boss battles! Like more than a few of them. They are all intense. They should keep doing this; (2) The voice actor for Cortana/the Weapon is great; (3) The waypoint feature doesn't always correspond to map markers, which is confusing, and the waypoints will move about (one time I spent 10 minutes looking for the Pilot because the map kept changing where it was telling me he was; finding collectibles could also be really annoying because of this); (4) I forgot that in some earlier Halo games you can just sprint through checkpoints and avoid fighting. It was magical when I remembered and tried toward the end. This is a fun challenge and I should have a plaque for sparing the lives of countless baddies; (5) Can't you dual wield other Halo games? I remember dual wielding Needlers. No dual wielding here :-( but the constant changing of weapons and being able to switch between two is a fine replacement; (6) In many ways, the campaign just feels like a "lite" version of some other, bigger open-world shooter games like the Just Causes and Far Cries of the world. The "things to do" besides the story in Halo Infinite are bare-bones (rescue allied squads, kill some named bad guys, shoot up some bigger facilities, destroy comms towers, find collectibles). I did that stuff for about half the game, at which point I basically had all the skill upgrades I wanted, and so I just shot through the story after that.
Solid game, all in all, with some really high points and some bland points. Worth a play through, especially if you like Halo.
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Dec 13th, 2021 at 00:21:22 - Psychonauts 2 (PC) |
Such a creative game. This is a gem. The artwork is gorgeous. Some of my favorite minds were the psychedelic one where you have to get the band back together, the cooking show one, and the early one where you learn the Mental Connection ability (the word associations were underutilized so much!). In the word association "puzzles" there are connected ideas (like maybe fire---hot or ice---cold) and isolated ideas like (money) or whatever. You can rearrange the connections to change what a character thinks. Maybe you are trying to get the character to take a job in a cold climate (this is a random, non-Psychonauts example), so you would go in and connect cold and money, and then the character would be like, "Oh, there is a lot of financial opportunity in cold places!"
The game is really funny. If you connect thoughts that aren't the solution using Mental Connection, the character will always have a comment. For example, I connected "socks with sandals" and "disgusting" and the character whose mind I was in said, "What if my husband starts wearing socks with sandals? I don't think I could love him anymore." Nearly every character cracks jokes (or is a joke). They range from silly to deadpan. Fantastic writing.
There are only two real criticisms I have. First is that combat is simple and easy. I even equipped the "do extra damage but take extra damage" pin, and even though I was taking extra damage, I still only died in combat like twice. You can basically just circle strafe most enemies. Some are a little tricky, but unless you're not paying attention, they're not going to kill you. Bosses are more fun though. The cooking show level was one of my favorites, where you have to do some puzzle platforming to cook dishes for three chefs in a game show. At the end, you fight the chefs (one of whom turns into a blender and another of whom turns into a spatula during the fight).
The second criticism is that there's an absurd amount of shit to pick up and collect. I scoffed aloud at the beginning of the game when it told me "You'll get a rank (level) for every 80 figments you find!" 80! Well, turns out that levels have at least that many on average, plus the emotional baggage (find the tags and the bags for about four per level), the "half-a-brains" (two per level), the "nuggets of wisdom," and all the PSI cards (usually 20 or so per level) and a couple other things. That's great I guess for people who want to 100% the game, but you absolutely do not need to collect all the things. I finished the game at like rank 70 without trying too hard to collect things (and I especially quit trying toward the end). For perspective, the highest level item you can purchase (besides something at level 102) is at about level 58. And I had unlocked nearly every level of every ability (and had long ago unlocked all the useful stuff).
The game is already a bit long. The story did seem to drag on (though it is well written and interesting, with lots of fleshing out of the Psychonauts and other characters). I "thought I was almost done" for like 4 hours before I was actually done. The game would be much quicker without bothering with collectibles.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed being in the world of Psychonauts again. I played the PS2 game years and years ago. It's just such a fun, joy-filled game! Actually, there are plenty of mature themes in it too, which surprised and impressed me, but the overarching feeling while playing is just...playful. It's so creative, seriously. I can't get over how they came up with that stuff and made some of the crazier levels work!
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Dec 10th, 2021 at 16:12:29 - The Riftbreaker (PC) |
I've been playing this a lot the last two days. It's a crazy hybrid of tower defense, RTS, action-RPG, a horde mode, and more genres. I have never played anything quite like it. The closest thing overall might be Sanctum, which is a tower defense game where you also control a character, though it was tower defense and FPS, whereas this is tower defense/horde mode and top-down action-RPG/bullet hell. The humongous research tree is bigger than anything I've ever seen in an RTS and can only approach Path of Exile's skill tree in size. My initial impressions were surprise that everything clicks. You might think that all these genres can't be mashed together, but they are mashed really well.
If you play the campaign, you'll quickly realize that the story is bland though. It's just a pretense for base building and killing aliens. I read a review that said if you watched Avatar and rooted for the industrialist colonizers, then this game is for you (although the main character, Ashley, at once cares for the environment and destroys it, supposedly in service of extracting resources for life on Earth). You are plopped down on a planet. Your goal is to explore, catalog alien life, extract resources, and then get the hell out of there. You pretty quickly get the objective to get back to Earth, but that requires three other sub-objectives to build components of the teleporter that will take you to other biomes on the planet to face new environmental and faunal (is that a word?) challenges.
One main part of the game is base building. In this, the game is very much like an RTS. You build buildings, which unlock other buildings. Research down the skill tree to unlock upgrades and still more buildings. Extract resources to power all the buildings. Everything can be upgraded several times, and all these upgrades require ever more rare and difficult-to-extract resources. You'll create numerous mining outposts just to harvest xyz types of resources, which eventually involves you juggling your main base and a lot of other outposts at the same time, warping back and forth to maximize production and check on your defenses. In the base building, there are obvious Factorio inspirations. You know, those games where you maximize efficiency for automation and production and you see screenshots of people's games and you wonder how much time it took them to plan so precisely, as if they traced a blueprint on grid paper on their computer screen and filled it in.
The tower defense is part of the base building. You're going to get attacked (often) by hordes of aliens from all directions, so you need to build walls around your base, build towers (all the types, all the upgrades), make sure those towers are powered (yes, you have to manage a whole power grid), make sure those towers have ammo (yes, you have to build ammo storage; in fact, you have to build storage for just about every resource), and make sure that you can get through the wall to fight the aliens directly (don't forget your gates!). I never really made it far in the tower building department, as I preferred to take on the aliens myself. Well, maybe this is because I was no good at building my base...
Aliens attack in waves. You can clear them out on the map, but they respawn, and still new waves will attack your base. These waves quickly become massive, overwhelming. It was quite frustrating for me. I am on the "build a uranium outpost" level and I cannot get ahead of the alien swarms. I have established a perimeter around my base, but I can't build power arrays and towers fast enough before the next wave comes. I held off a couple with relatively minimal damage, but the last wave just annihilated my base. I mean, they destroyed my whole eastern wall, most of my solar power generators, my power storage, my outpost building, a bunch of factories and power plants, a bunch of power grid connectors. It's very demoralizing having to rebuild the entire base. And then, when you build it back, the aliens just come full force again. One thing that this game could benefit from is having a list of currently built buildings, or some indication of which buildings you are missing. It does well to show you when a building lacks power, and some other notifications, but after my base gets halfway destroyed, there's so much shit on the map that I am not sure which buildings were actually destroyed. I have to go through and catalog everything to figure it out, which is probably why I am unprepared for the next alien wave!
I was having early success taking on the attacking hordes myself. You control a big mech with a cool arsenal of weapons (all of which must also be researched, crafted, upgraded, equipped, and modded). The flamethrower is great for swarms of weak enemies, mines are useful for extra defense, beefed up machine guns will annihilate some ranged enemies, and so on. The top-down bullet hell/action-RPG combat is fun, smooth, and challenging. There are a ton of weapons, upgrades, and mods. But eventually, the enemy number became too great and I could only hold off so many, while the rest destroyed my base.
I could continue rebuilding, learning from my mistakes, maybe making my base smaller and building more walls (as I saw people doing on stream, building walls like 4 thick), but man, it's frustrating! There was a level I was playing yesterday where you are learning how to pump mud into a water purifier, which you then route to a building that basically plants plants (for you to harvest after you've built a harvester building). In this level, you have to run a pipe almost the whole length of the level. This sounds easy, but it took me probably 3 hours. First, I was running the pipe through quicksand, which destroys it after a while (it took me some time to figure out this was the cause of my destroyed pipes). Second, aliens periodically attack your pipe (I learned to set teleporters along it so I could zip to the problem areas). The mud problem was solved by re-routing the pipes around mud. The alien problem was solved by, well, running up and down the length of the pipe repairing it and killing aliens, back and forth, back and forth, until I finally didn't have any holes in the pipe.
I think that, overall, that last example sticks with me the most to sum up The Riftbreaker. It's exhausting. Stressful. Frustrating. It's also very neat, but it is still all of those annoying feelings. I am also aware that it may take upwards of 40 hours to complete the campaign, which as I said earlier you are not doing for the story. The gameplay has to carry it. I would be more motivated to stick it out, to retry more times, if there was some interesting story thread, or if there was some mystery or question to be answered. There's not though! I can see the next 25 hours clearly: I'll continue unlocking everything in the skill tree. Once I finally get my uranium outpost up and running, I'll have to do the same thing for two other rare elements. I'll scan a million plants and animals (this is really boring), constantly fight while exploring the maps (this is already getting old because the enemies are so plentiful and aggressive), constantly defend my bases, and eventually open the rift back to Earth.
I'll keep this installed for the duration of my Game Pass time just in case I am inspired to go a'base building, but may not come back to it.
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