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| Hijacking this into general multi-review post by Rafiki 01/19/2014, 3:28pm PST | ||||
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| Broken Age
"Why am I playing this instead of just watching a movie?" Looks nice, sounds nice, gameplay simplified to the point of why am I playing? Puzzles are barely difficult, and very limited point and click for a point-and-click. Wants to tell a story more than it wants to be a game, honestly. I do appreciate that I can double-click exit points to move to the next screen so I don't have to watch my character slowly walk there. Super Hexagon Jsoh wrote: 'Nuff said. VVVVVV Somebody's adventures in game design more than a product I can recommend. Beat it in 1 hour 53 min, got 'stuck' for awhile on some ridiculous falling puzzle at the end. The $0.50 I paid for it is about right. Guacamelee I liked this more than Mischief Maker since I wasn't looking for a deep brawler experience, but Lurker is right in that it's very very casual. I was looking forward to it since it was going to be Metroid with melee combat, but it's much shallower and disappointing in that respect. The main game is quite short, and getting 100% and 57/60 achievements clocked in at 11 hours. They also play up the combo system and even have a trainer that gives you a bunch of combo challenges to pull off as a mini-game, but I could never ever see trying to pull them off in real combat because a) the enemies would probably die before you finished, b) the tougher enemies that might not die have counter-attacks and evasions they can use mid-combo, and c) if there's multiple enemies you'll probably get interrupted. There's an achievement to score a 300-hit combo and even a challenge room to get 400, and it turns out the secret is throwing. When you throw an enemy, hitting another enemy counts as a combo and it sends that one flying, and starts a chain reaction that knocks over enemies and racks up combo hits. So the secret to the combo system is just chain throwing :( DuckTales Remastered It's DuckTales. It's as good a platformer as the NES version. Buy it on sale, don't pay full price. I guess there was a big complaint when it was first released about being interrupted constantly with cutscenes and having to rewatch them every time you replayed a level, but you can skip them now so it wasn't a problem. I did actually enjoy the artwork unlocks to see how something goes from a sketch to final product, and the official Disney production pieces to see how anal professional cartoon artwork is. But they lock it behind having to collect gems to "buy" it, and you'll never get enough gems in one playthrough to unlock it all. And if you want to change difficulties, you have to overwrite your save game which also deletes everything you've unlocked, so if you want to unlock everything you'll have to grind for like 6 hours after you've finished the game which is insane. The Cave I liked this. It's a fun Lost Vikings clone, if a little simpler. Euro Truck Simulator 2 It turns out driving a big rig is like driving a car: really boring. I should have thought more about this before I bought it, because I figure the point of simulation games is to give you access to something you might not have the time or money to dedicate to learning, like flying a plane or interacting with a live woman, but I already know how to drive. But I'm saying all this as a middle-class white person in a first-world nation, so maybe I need to check my privilege and think about children or poor countries where people can't afford a car. Or maybe fuck them, and this game is still boring. Little Inferno Did I ever talk about this? I played it a year ago. It's a puzzle game about burning things. You get a sticker book identifying item combos to burn with a name and the number of items required, and you have to figure out what items are required with only the name as a hint. The premise can't possibly hold up on its own and it doesn't, but it would be excusable if the burning was spectacular like anyone who bought this game was surely hoping. It's not. Burning shit in real life is awesome. Who doesn't like to huck things into a fire and see how it reacts? If you're going to make a game about it, you need some amazing special effects and this game falls way, way short. The worst thing is that burning things gives you some cash which you use to order more things out of a catalog to burn, and there's an arbitrary "delivery" time that you have to sit and wait through before you can use your items. Your game will grind to a screeching halt as you sit around and wait for your items to activate and there's nothing else to do in the meantime. The game is also a satire of consumerism and sitting around wasting time watching TV or playing games, but when you're taking my money and deliberately wasting my time you need to go fuck yourself, satire or not. Rayman Legends (Wii-U) Origins was better. This is more of the same, so it's still a pretty good game, the music levels are great, but Origins was overall the better game. There's a bunch of Lemming-like levels where Globox is on auto-pilot and you have to move obstacles to get him through the level. You use the touchscreen to move the obstacles (not sure how it works on other platforms), and it works just fine, but in a platformer game it's kind of boring to sit around and wait for an NPC to plod through a level. Also, the worst thing about requiring you to use the Wii-U touchscreen for this is that the artwork in this game is GOOOOOOOOOOOOORGEOUS. Ubisoft still has the best artists. But I'm sitting there with an HDTV with it's huge beautiful picture, and I have to stare down at this little standard definition touchscreen. Worst idea in the universe. |
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