Category: PS4

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Game Ramblings #31 – Gravity Rush 2

More Info from Sony

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Action/Adventure

In a lot of ways, Gravity Rush 2 is entirely a sequel by the numbers.  It’s taken both the good and bad of its predecessor and given us what is essentially a larger, more colorful package with a new story.  To some extent the game felt like a couple of separate games plugged together in the middle, with a nice epilogue to round things out.  Ultimately though, this melding of everything worked out and made the game worth playing.

The first thing that fans of the first game will notice is that this game is fantastically colorful.  The new city of Jirga Para Lhao is a huge step up from Hekseville in presentation alone.  Soaring through the sky just running through the city is still the best part of this game, and it’s absolutely more beautiful than ever.  The idea of everything being bigger and brighter sort of becomes the theme of the changes.  Rather than the flat upgrade system of the previous game, there are now non-stat ability upgrades AND talismans, acting like customizable add-ons for Kat.  Rather than just one set of powers, there are now two new forms that supplement Kat’s ability set, giving much needed to the combat system.  Rather than just running around one city, you now get two (as well as a pretty substantial side trek after the first time the credits roll).  Basically, a lot of what made the Vita original so enjoyable is all there, but with some added layers on top of it to expand it into a more typical AAA experience.

However, it’s this idea of bigger and better of the original, rather than better for the sake of being better where things started to sour for me.  In some ways, this sequel feels like they didn’t really learn anything from the original game.

Although entirely due to the nature of the gravity shifting, the camera is still dead awful.  This is combined with boss battles that often lose a noticeable horizon to result in combat that can often be at best disorienting.  The camera also tended to deal with blockers extremely poorly, resulting in Kat disappearing and losing complete sense of direction any time I was near a wall or large enemy.  It’s also worth mentioning that motion controls haven’t really translated that well from the Vita to PS4, though they are entirely optional.  However, using just the right analog to control the camera results in a lot of the lack of precision problems typical of action games on console.  The combination of poor camera and somewhat finicky controls resulted in combat situations again being my least favorite part of the game.

The challenge areas and climb through the World Pillar also make their return in this game, and like the original, they often go on way longer than are necessary.  These areas basically exist to remove core mechanics from the game in order to present players with different gameplay.  However, rather than feeling challenging, they often simply slow the game’s pace down, as there are more than enough other powers to get through the game safely.

Like the first game, the story was what kept me going through the game.  However, this one was somewhat disjointed.  My best non-spoiler description of the story is that it felt like it was supposed to be comprised of at least 2 games the length of the original, with the epilogue chapter being absolutely important, but not large enough to be a third on its own.  The TL;DR here is that the first half of the game is in the new city, the villain is defeated, and you’re off to Hekseville.  The second half of the game has a seemingly new villain, and only at the very end of this portion, and specifically in the credits, are the connections to the first half of the sequel, as well as HUGE revelations to the first game and anime revealed.  The two halves have their ties, but ultimately felt like it was planned as two Vita-sized games that were squeezed together to fit into a PS4 game.

The strangest thing here though is that after the credits roll, the game was not remotely complete.  There’s an entire multi-hour epilogue to the game that wraps up the series’ story, as well as reveals the entirety of Kat’s back story prior to the first game’s start.  Fans of the series absolutely must complete this, as it completes the entire saga across both games.  However, because it wasn’t tied to any of the core story, it kind of exists on the side and can easily be missed if you turn off the game after the credits roll for the first time.

In the end, this was a strange game.  Anything that was a plus or minus in the first is still here, so you kind of know what you’re going into if you’ve played the first game.  The gameplay definitely has some fundamental problems with pacing, controls, and camera, but it’s still a fun game at its core.  The story itself is also great, but feels like it was three independent ideas that were shoved into one game to complete the series.  Given how neatly everything was wrapped up, I suspect this was the last we’ll see of Kat’s adventures, but if it is the end, they did a great job wrapping up the story in a complete fashion.

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Game Ramblings #30 – Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

More Info from WayForward

  • Platform: PS4
  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Also Available On: 3DS, Fire TV, Steam, Wii U, Xbox One

The Shantae series has been around for a while, whether as one of the most valuable Game Boy Color games, experimenting with digital distribution on the DSi, or getting Kickstarted for its latest entry.  This time around I played the third in the series, Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse.  As the series has evolved, it’s generally followed a Metroidvania style, with some key twists to stray a bit from the formula.

One of the key differences typical of the series was that Shantae gained Genie transformations, rather than the more typical weapon upgrades of the Metroid series.  However, that went away for Pirate’s Curse for some relatively valid story reasons.  This one uses the more typical gear upgrade path, but with a bit more themed variety.  Since this is ostensibly a game involving pirates, the gear upgrades end up being things like a pirate hat to slow falling, a cannon to allow multi-jump, or pirate boots to allow for speed boosts.  It all ends up feeling much like the Metroid upgrade path, with a very appropriate theme for the game.

Where this game highly differs from the typical style of the genre is that it is level based.  Each piece of gear is found within a dungeon hidden within a themed level.  The typical path is to get to a new level, explore and do some story quests to open up the dungeon, then head on in for an upgrade and a boss fight centered around the new piece of gear.  In a lot of respects, the game feels like it brings in a very Zelda-esque focus there, where the boss fight is clearly themed around the particular item you got.  There is some back and forth going to levels that were already finished for side quests and upgrades, particularly in picking up the effective replacement for health tanks, as some are out of reach without later upgrades.  Overall while the setup is very familiar to the Metroidvania genre, the breakup across different themed levels brings a nice change of pace to each new area as you get to it.

In general this is one of the mechanically better Metroidvanias in recent years that I’ve played.  Traversal is rapid, but easy to control.  Jumping feels extremely tight, and mixes in some of the Mario-style jump height differences based on how long the button is held.  The upgrades all serve noticeable purposes in enhancing the skill set available to get around the environment.  Generally speaking, the core melee attack is going to be the 90% usage, but there’s also upgrades available for it, so there’s a noticeable power curve as the game goes on.  The bosses are all pattern based, and by and large have some amount of challenge, but are fair and typically obvious in their weak points.  Despite its relatively short length (avg 7.5 hours), the time spent in the game will go fast due to its fun play.

All that said, the last dungeon nearly made me shelve the game entirely, and did stop me from completing a 100% run.  The tl;dr here is that its a multi-level dungeon with each level having its own mechanic to complete.  However, they were more often than not based around memorization, rather than pure skill.  One level had me using the boots dash to traverse across a set of spike traps.  Due to the speed of traversal, I basically couldn’t see where I was going, or which path was the valid one until I hit a wall and died.  Another level had me using the multi-jump cannon and destroying blocks in my way as I went through another series of spike traps.  However, there were a few spots where I couldn’t see ahead, and basically had to blindly jump and die until I shot out my perfect path to get through.  Once I got to the boss, everything was fine, but for a game that had to that point been so skill based in its traversal, it felt like a really strange turn right at the end of the game.  My as spoiler free as possible recommendation here is to finish the 100% run as much as possible before entering the last dungeon, as you need to be there to get the true ending.

In the end, the game was still worth playing, especially for fans of Metroidvania style games.  It’s mechanically sound, has a good story and soundtrack, and is visually fantastic.  Given the recent rarity of the genre outside the indie space, you could definitely do worse than to give this series a try.

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Game Ramblings #28 – The Last Guardian

More Info From Sony

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

The Last Guardian is about as niche a recommendation as I can ever give to a game that I highly enjoyed.  This is definitely a game that has taken the things that were learned on the related Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to make a great experience.  However, it also brings most of the negatives along with it.

The thing that stands out to me the most having completed this game is how realistic the actual character of Trico feels.  Despite being a giant flying dog thing with the attitude of a cat, it feels like a creature that would not be out of place in our world.  It was typically the little things that Trico did that brought this out.  When going into tunnels that it can’t fit through, it sticks its face into the hole and sulks like a dog that had been punished.  When you call out to it to follow after you, it will bark back at you.  When its facing enemies, it will growl and roar at them while attacking.  The realism that they’ve brought to the character is fantastic, but it also leads to some of the game’s biggest problems.

Like Ico, this game is effectively a long chain of puzzles surrounding an overarching protection quest.  Like Ico, this also brings a lot of the same AI-related problems with it.  While in a lot of ways the somewhat catty behavior is often purposeful, I spent a fair bit of time simply fighting with Trico to go to the right places.  Since a lot of the spots I would end up could only happen while on Trico’s back, there were sections where I’d be spending 5+ minutes simply trying to get the AI going back in the right direction.

The Shadow of the Colossus influence comes in with how the game plays.  Interactions with Trico are very similar to interactions with the colossi.  You jump up onto the soft areas of Trico, and can climb around all over its body.  However, you aren’t stabbing Trico, but giving him commands about where to go, healing injuries sustained in fights, or simply using Trico as a leg up to get to higher platforms within puzzles.  However, like Shadow, the climbing is also extraordinarily clumsy, to the point where Trico’s movement was often throwing me off his body, many times to my death.  Climbing through the environment also has a lot of the same difficulties.  In the end the game’s animation is both its blessing and its curse here.  While the character animation for this traversal is spectacularly good, its reliance on IK solving means that all motion is realistically paced, which for games translates to slow and often unpredictable.

The rest of the problems from the past couple of games are sort of scattered throughout as well.  The art style itself is going to be hit or miss for a lot of people.  There’s a lot of work put into the real-time feathers covering Trico, but the rest of the environment is generally fairly simple and visual the same throughout.  Outdoor scenes are a mixed bag of scenes lit spectacularly, and scenes suffering from severe overbloom.  Performance in general is pretty unreliable, particularly outdoors.  Puzzles can often be fairly vague leading to a lot of guess work, particularly when they’re relying on Trico’s AI doing things to solve them.  The camera is also a mixed bag, often getting stuck on scenery, particularly when riding on Trico’s back.

So all that said, if this sounds an awful lot like a combination of things seen in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, that’s because it basically is.  For better or worse, the things the team learned in the first two games, and the problems that existed in the first two games are both here.  Fans of either of those are largely going to find that this is the game they’ve wanted for the last ten years, but if you don’t find yourself in that group, this is going to be a pretty rough place to hop in to the line.