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Aug 7th, 2014 at 11:33:25 - Sanctum 2 (PC) |
This is a tough one to write. I want to love Sanctum 2 so much, but in the end, I just can't. The original Sanctum was an awesome blend of Tower Defense and FPS. Sanctum 2 swaps the focus, so it's an FPS/TD hybrid rather than a TD/FPS hybrid. Sanctum 2 modified almost every aspect of Sanctum, some good, some bad. Here are the pros and cons:
PROS
There are 4 playable characters. Each has a unique gun and special ability. Skye has an assault rifle and can double-jump, the ninja has a high-powered crossbow and is fast, the military guy has a shotgun and extra HP, etc.
The levels are much more explorable. There is random stuff to wander around and see and poke at, including mines you can pick up and place near the core for when enemies reach it. There are a few achievements for finding secret areas in some levels. There are also some infantry sitting around that will shoot enemies for you. It's cool that there's some more life to the environments, which look great.
The new map UI is excellent. There's a minimap in the upper left that constantly shows the routes enemies will take, where your blocks and towers are, where the enemies are. If you hit Tab, a bigger map appears showing the same stuff, but with clearer information about your towers, where they are, what kind they are, what level they are. It's a really nice map.
There is a new rank leveling system. You get earn XP for headshots and other things. As your rank improves, you unlock towers, guns and perks. The perks are all new in Sanctum 2 and are basically little buffs you can load out with. You can wind up with 3 equipped at a time. The last level I played, since I kept dying, I was using one where the core regenerates 10% HP after every wave, the core damages enemies for 2000 that are attacking it, and when I died, I respawned instantly and had 25% increased damage for 15 seconds, instead of taking the usual 10 seconds to respawn. I usually used damage perks, like dealing 45% more damage to enemy weak spots, making my fast weapons have half ammo and half firing speed, but do 200% more damage.
Finally, feats were pretty cool. This reminded me of Bastion in that you can set map modifiers to make your life more difficult and grant you bonus XP if you win. I completed the achievement to beat a map with all 5 feats (the first map, haha). The feats make enemies have 20% more HP, hit harder, regenerate, 20% faster, and make it so you don't get cash back when you sell towers. Ouch.
Those are the positives.
THE CONS
75% of the game is following enemies through a maze with your finger on the fire button. The towers take such a backseat to the shooting. The reason this is the case is because towers have been severely restricted. In your loadout, you can select 2 weapons, 4 towers and 3 perks. In Sanctum 1, I believe you could choose 8 towers. So, half the towers, check. You also now have a tower cap. I could place 15 towers only on a level. However, I rarely got anywhere near that (usually had about 5) because the game gives you so little money after each wave. There were many waves where I built nothing. What kind of tower defense game is it where you don't build towers?!
You can't upgrade your guns anymore, and towers cap at level 3 (instead of Santcum 1's 6, I believe). I usually had like 5 towers because I'd upgrade some of them. I guess I could have 10 or 12 if I didn't upgrade any, or if I just used the cheapest ones all the time. So basically, you just set up one little choke point on the whoooole biiig map. There is a TON of wasted space.
Some of the most badass parts of Sanctum are not here anymore. Where are the floor tiles?! Those were the coolest things. There is really a lack of towers.
There are no saves! NONE! No manual saves, no autosaves, no checkpoints. Died? Great, start the whole level over, have fun. In Sanctum, by the end, there would be 30-wave levels. I've only seen up to 12 in Sanctum 2. Sanctum would checkpoint save every 3 or 5 levels, so if you died, you go back a bit. Why the hell doesn't Sanctum 2 save? The last level I played, I died 3 or 4 times before I finally beat it. It was really annoying having to do the entire level over 3 or 4 times.
Building mazes in Sanctum 2 is so tedious. Maybe that's what TD stands for - not Tower Defense, but TeDious. I'm so clever...In this biiiig map that I kept dying on, I had to run around, run run run around watching 3 entry points, while my 5 towers watched over one little area. Then build the maze bit by bit. Die. Oh, do it all over again.
When Sanctum 2 came out, I bought the season pass. This is the first and last time I will ever buy the season pass. I thought I'd love the game, but I don't. I would LIKE to check out the DLC that I paid for, but I can't! It's LOCKED until you beat the main campaign? What?! Is this a normal condition of DLC? I paid for the DLC, why can't I play it? I should be able to skip to it without beating the main campaign.
Finally, the game has co-op. I bet it would be fun to play with someone I know. I tried to play with strangers. What happened every time was that, if someone entered my game, they hijacked it, would delete my towers and build their own. There was no teamwork. Someone would just come in, never speak to me, and proceed to be the Master Builder. When I entered other people's games, I inevitably would get banned. Why!? Oh, because people set their games to public without realizing it, or they were playing with friends already or something. I don't know. But out of 10 times, I never had a satisfying co-op experience.
Really really disappointing!
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Aug 7th, 2014 at 12:09:24.
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Aug 2nd, 2014 at 17:13:46 - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC) |
Well that was short and sweet...and buggy as hell!
I'd heard this game was buggy. After the first hour, I'd already gotten stuck on a curb, run into an invisible wall, and when I minimized the game to look up how to open a safe, not only is the way to open it different than the game tells you (game says enter the numbers clockwise, you actually have to go right, left, right, left turning the dial, NOT clockwise!), but the game window disappeared, yet is still running on my computer. I cannot find it anywhere, and it won't shut down through the task manager. So I have to restart my computer! Since then, I learned that the game crashes if you minimize it, I hit several more annoying bugs, like one where I couldn't get on some moving box properly, and then the sound would screw up every time I did it.
Finally, I encountered one of the game-stopping bugs, which I learned is referred to as the 'blue lights' bug, closely related to the 'invisible reef' bug. This happens about 80% of the way through the game. You're on a ship sailing toward Devil's Reef (or Demon's Reef, or something like that), and you have to look through a cannon's zoom to target 3 enemies on the reef and kill them. The enemies are supposed to be represented by blue lights, but in my game, when I zoomed in, I was like, wait what am I supposed to shoot?! There were no blue lights! So where were the enemies? How can I kill them?
I looked this up online and some people had come up with clever solutions, such as mapping where to aim, where the blue lights should be. You're supposed to memorize the locations. Even then, it takes these experts about 15 minutes to kill the 3 enemies. It would have taken me god knows how long. The cannon zoom view barely moved, and I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to max, but even then, by the time I'd find about where I thought I should target, the enemies would cause another tidal wave, and I'd have to go hide somewhere while it passed.
So, I finished the game watching a walkthrough on YouTube where a guy was going for an "A" ranking by saving less than 5 times and meeting some other insane requirements.
Why is saving less than 5 times insane? Because this game is not easy! I'd read that it was frustratingly difficult, and I assumed that was in the typical survival horror way where ammo and health are scarce. However, neither were scarce, and the game was hard for surprising reasons. First, your character, Jack, dies fairly easily. I suppose it's realistic in that way. Instead of just getting shot and losing health, you lose mobility if you get shot in the leg, aim if in the arm, you get dizzy from head injuries and so on. Further, you can have just scratches (require bandages), deep cuts (require sutures), breaks (require splints) and so on. So the health and healing system was more involved than normal. I actually thought it was pretty cool, but it does make things difficult at times! You can't just pop a medkit. Jack actually pulls out the healing supplies and performs the action on himself, vulnerable the whole time. So it's usually a good idea to hide before healing. Sometimes it was eyeball-rolling because he would get hurt so easily. For example, if you jump off a crate, you might break your leg.
Jack can also go insane, which was an obvious influence on Amnesia. The screen shakes, he sees bugs, hears voices, becomes paranoid, that kind of thing. It was cool. He loses sanity from looking at disturbing things mostly, like corpses, or statues of Cthulhu and whatnot.
There are plenty of little puzzles. Many are annoyingly obscure to solve, and the game definitely had an adventure/puzzle game element where you have to use items on things and it is sometimes something I'd never ever think to do. Opening safes was particularly stupid. I swear the game tells you exactly how to open that first one, then you have to do it a different way. Lots of the puzzles were just trial and error type things. Sometimes I wouldn't know where to go next because what I thought would work would keep getting me killed, but nothing would deter me from thinking it was the right thing. For example, this one time I was trying to escape Innsmouth. I found a way to go with lots of enemies. I kept trying to get past them, shooting my way through. After many deaths, I finally decided the enemies were infinitely spawning (they do that sometimes, very irritating!). If they are infinitely spawning then what am I supposed to do?! I know I have to go that way. I used a walkthrough a good 5 times to figure out what the hell to do next. In this case, I had to go find a key and let a guy out of jail first. He gets a truck and then we DRIVE that way. OH OF COURSE.
Why else was it hard? Hmm..Oh yes, the AI. At times they were your typical omniscient goons, knowing exactly where you are. At other times, they were complete idiots, running around in circles while you stood right in front of them. They'd patrol sometimes. Sometimes they just seemed erratic. Their aim was usually terrible, but sometimes the game would decide that they could blast you from the other side of the room with ease. Yeah, just very unpredictable. I guess that made it important to learn to be stealthy. Once you get guns, especially in the later areas, the combat became easier.
Oh, and Jack is a perma-walker. He never runs. Even when caves are crumbling or buildings are burning, he walks. And if he hurts his legs, he walks.real.slow. That's another weird thing that seems inconsistent with the plot. You think you'd run if you were being chased by fishmen. He's also never out of breath. His speech is always completely level, normal, and he's always got attitude. Even if he's going insane or his friend just got killed or both his legs are broken, he's a sassy 1920s cop. His best line was when some fishmen trapped him in a tunnel, one said "I don't believe you're on the guest list for our little party." Jack replied, "Just check the guest list again. I'm on the section not reserved for ugly freaks." I laughed at that one.
Anyway, cool game, great atmosphere, genuinely creepy. I'm glad I played it, even with all the bugs and the eventual gamestopper.
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Jul 30th, 2014 at 14:38:16 - Dino D-Day (PC) |
Some bundle site has been giving out free Steam keys for a handful of games. I couldn't resist grabbing Dino D-Day because...Hitler found a way to resurrect dinosaurs and use them during WWII? Yes please.
Unfortunately the goofy premise is entertaining for all of half an hour. What's left is a mediocre class-based shooter.
Yeah, you can play as dinosaurs on either the Axis or Allies side. Yeah, you can claw people to death as a Velociraptor, explode as another dino, spit acid as another dino, and eat a lot of sheep scattered around the maps. Be ready for a dose of Jurassic Park references.
Yeah, you can also play as humans with guns. You can be the medic, the flamethrower guy, the shotgun guy, the sniper, the machine gun guy...
After playing all the dinosaurs and a couple human classes, totaling maybe one hour, I was bored. There are a few game modes, mostly standard. One has one team piloting a giant dino that the other team has to kill before it reaches a checkpoint, but in a few games, no one got close to killing it. It just blasts you to death if you get close.
Also there were 3-4 servers up when I was playing, with maybe 10-15 players total. Not many people...and the game crashed twice while I was playing, once when I clicked on a 'storybook' button, some feature that isn't implemented yet, and a second time just in the middle of a fight. Hmm.
Glad this was free. Funny concept. Maybe one day the devs will do something more interesting with it. I'll take my Steam cards and go now.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jul 30th, 2014 at 14:41:29.
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Jul 30th, 2014 at 10:08:06 - Paper Sorcerer (PC) |
Cute old school RPG made mostly by one guy. I got this in a bundle with another game I actually wanted, but ended up enjoying this one to completion too! So, a nice surprise.
You're a sorcerer trapped in a book. You must fight your way through 10 levels of the book's dungeon and break the book's bindings (kill the boss) on each level to advance. On the way, you learn to summon at least 3 party members. Since I didn't know what the game was going to be like, I just picked the first 3 available, which were Werewolf (agile melee attacker, lots of party buffs), Minotaur (strooong DPS), and Skeleton (tank). You are always the Sorcerer (magic DPS). There were probably 7 or 8 other options, and then you can find more minions along the way. Like, I found a puppet that I could swap in if I wanted.
There are all the normal stats and a large set of skills for each character to learn. Buy equipment in 'town,' rest in your room to heal, use items to help in battle, normal stuff.
On the way through the book's dungeons, there are a number of secrets to find. These were always rewarding to discover, and any time there was a quest that I actually completed, that was rewarding also. The secrets and quests are not necessarily easy to find or complete. The game is punishing in that if you, for example, use the wrong key to open a door, or use the wrong item for something, the item becomes irreparably damaged! So don't use items that you aren't 95% sure are correct for the task.
The game itself was pleasantly challenging, especially toward the end. Actually the challenge was mainly from the normal enemies you encounter on each level. These especially became more difficult, and I think this is because I was very outleveled, like on the magnitude of 10-20% lower level. You can sort of grind in a couple spots, but I really didn't want to. The bosses were difficult in the earlier game. The later bosses were a cinch, and the final boss wasn't any trouble either.
And...that really is the entire game. It pushed a lot of the right old school RPG buttons and I found it quite charming. It's not the prettiest game, and there are like 100 typos, but hey, props to the guy who made it!
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