Tag: PS4

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Game Ramblings #122 – Star Wars: Squadrons

More Info from EA

  • Genre: Space Flight Sim
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

Now I’ll be honest – I didn’t spend a single second in the multiplayer here. By all accounts it’s pretty fun and well made, but that was not at all what I wanted out of this game. What I wanted was a pretty specific thing – a quick hit of space flight in the vein of the Rogue Squadron or Starfighter games, and this really hit the mark there.

Compared to those two series I mentioned there’s really two main things that make Squadrons work so well as a modern game, and the first of these is perspective. The entire game is absolutely designed as a first-person experience and it makes the games work far better. I know that sounds silly, but it’s the same reasoning why I vastly prefer first-person views in racing games. The immediacy of input when you have a fixed perspective gives much better feedback to the player when they’re changing directions. That sort of immediacy in third-person more often than not feels awkward, so you get things like drag and delays on camera booms of third person cameras, which works well to smooth out the camera but gives the feel of delay on input.

It’s a fairly subtle change on the surface, but it results in a much better pace of gameplay. You see the results of input faster, so your reactions are faster, your dodging is faster, your kills are faster. However, that doesn’t just mean everything can just be faster – it means there can be more. Avoiding enemy fire effectively means there can be more enemy fire. Killing enemies fast means there can be more enemies. Quicker controls means there can be tigher spaces and debris that aren’t annoyances – but actual interesting gameplay opportunities. It all works well to ramp the spectacle at the same time as ramping the gameplay, and feels far more interesting than what came before.

The second real change is around handling of AI. It’s not so simple as to say they’re competent, but that they’re controllable. In a way it reminds me a lot of another Star Wars title – Republic Commando. The AI on their own can do a fine job, but where the real benefit comes in is in telling them what their focus should be. Have a guy on your tail that you can’t seem to quite shake? Direct the AI at them. Want the AI to focus on the main target while you take out TIE Fighters? Direct the AI at them. Again, this is a pretty subtle change, but its impact is immense. The battles become less about one-on-one or going after a specific target, and more about managing the flow of battle as it comes to you. If there’s only a main target left, you can all pile onto the target and take it out, but for larger battles you have a lot more flexibility to direct both yourself and your team in a way that pays the most benefit to you.

There’s some smaller systems that also work into this, but are more loadout based. On the surface, the loadout option to add a rechargeable repair droid to your ship seems like a safety valve for less skilled players. However, when I used it it allowed me to play extraordinarily aggressively, often to a stupid level, running right at larger ships and running through their shields while laying in damage. There were also options for main guns and missiles that allowed me to disable enemy ships, giving me options to disable and move on while sending my AI folks in for the cleanup. It’s things like this that add that touch of customization that modern games really lean into. It’s a level beyond merely picking your ship, and leans into making the game work for you instead of you fitting into the game.

I guess all of that is a long way of saying that this was fun and it really felt like it pushed the space flight Star Wars gameplay in a nice direction. You can feel hints of the Rogue Squadron and Starfighter games in there, but this is definitely a more modern approach. It’s also focused in its execution. Ya there’s single and multiplayer, but it’s not trying to be something it’s not. There’s no open world, there’s no overarching metagame, there’s no distractions. It’s space flight done well that doesn’t overstay its welcome. In that, it did exactly what I wanted it to do.

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Game Ramblings #121 – Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time

More Info from Activision

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One

I mucked around in the N-Sane Trilogy recently, and frankly it hadn’t aged well. The Crash series has always been on the far harder end in terms of difficulty, but that wasn’t really the issue I had going back to those games. There was just a lot of little things that caused a great deal of friction to the user in ways that no longer really fit in modern games. Crash 4 in that sense is a top example of a few little things going a long way. This game really isn’t that different from the original trilogy, but it’s such a drastically better experience anway.

If you haven’t played a Crash game before, there’s not that much to really explain. It’s a pretty standard platformer, but because it came out before the PlayStation had analog sticks, there’s a whole lot of side scrolling or running into/out of the screen, rather than an openness more typical of 3D platformers.. Where the Crash series really stood out was more in visuals and characters, and not so much in gameplay. Crash 4 is still basically that, but adds in a bit more of a loose sense of 3D space, as well as some masks that mess with the mechanics a bit. These aren’t usually big changes – a bit of gravity manipulation, maybe some time dilation – but they mix up the gameplay in fun ways.

Where this game also really hasn’t changed is that it’s still really fucking difficult. Some of that comes down to the camera – for example depth is often very not obvious and it feels like this is done on purpose. Some of that is in view restriction – for example traps like to be just off screen for you to fall into. Some of that is down to the timing window being really tight – for example if you don’t get on a wall run at the right height and don’t jump off just when you get the right sound effects you’ll fall to your death. Some of that is just physics being wonky – I died a number of times just to the jumps not really performing in a consistent manner, particularly on moving platforms. None of this is really new to the series. In the past this would be infuriating, and result in me shelving the games. However, this is where Crash 4 really shines.

That user friction from the original trilogy? It all came down to the lives mechanic. You had a small amount of lives, and when you ran out, it was game over. You lose progress in the level and have to start it over again. In a lot of cases, a game over would be followed by a game over where you didn’t even get back to the original point you were at. It was frankly a tired mechanic 25 years ago, and it’s even worse now.

Luckily, the real big change for this game was getting rid of lives. Ya, there’s technically a mode you can play where it uses the original lives system, but frankly I don’t see a reason to play it. However, they handle removal of lives in a way that works for all levels of users. Want to be that hardcore 100% run player that wants to finish levels without dying? Well, there’s rewards for that. But if not, you can die away and get through the level a checkpoint at a time until you reach the end. The challenge is now in simply iteratively progressing to the end of the level, not in being super careful to avoid losing lives. It reduces overall user friction and in many cases simply serves to improve the overall gameplay pace.

Speaking of checkpoints, those have seen some nice touches. Since lives are now removed, you can be dying a whole bunch of times and not making forward progress. The checkpoints that were there in the past are still there, and even more important now that you can die a lot. However, in a lot of cases you may get stuck in one area where maybe you have a long stretch between checkpoints or a specific obstacle blocking you. Part of the improvements here is that after a few deaths in a segment, you gain an Aku Aku at spawn. If you die a few more times, but have progressed far enough between checkpoints, you may gain a new dynamic checkpoint that replaces a crate. Again, it’s an improvement to reduce friction and allow you to perhaps take things a little less carefully, improving the overall pace.

The checkpoint work also extends to boss fights. In general I found these to be surprisingly easy in relation to the normal levels. That said, the checkpoints in place were well appreciated. The way those work in bosses is to put a hard checkpoint after each damage event, which typically would come as a result of some stretch of obstacle avoidance gameplay. It meant that seeing and losing out to a new mechanic in a new phase of the fight wasn’t a huge loss in time; it was just a reset to the beginning of the phase, and a chance to use what you learned to get through it. Again, another case of reducing friction.

Ultimately it’s that reduction in user friction that makes this one feel like a modern videogame. They didn’t have to fundamentally change the gameplay to be like Mario or Ratchet or A Hat in Time. They didn’t have to artifically make the game easier and leave their nostalgia blast behind. They didn’t have to change genres to appeal to a modern audience. They simply had to take friction points and get rid of them. I know that sounds easy to say, and I guess to some extent it is, but it’s not a choice without some level of care behind it. The points of friction that got removed are all things that have a very specific purpose – they allow people who are masters at the game to still earn rewards and have a sense of accomplishment for completing levels in a “perfect” manner, but allow the game to gracefully adapt to skill levels down the chain. It’s a shedding of tired things like lives and regression in progress in order to favor a less careful and higher pace of gameplay. It’s keeping simply what worked the best, and getting rid of things that worked the worst. In doing these things, what pops out is a game that is simultaneously retro and modern, and much better than the core trilogy that precedes it, despite largely being the same.

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Game Ramblings #120 – 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: RTS
  • Platform: PS4

I know it’s weird that a game by Vanillaware is a strategy instead of a side scrolling action-focused combat game. However, it oddly works really well. This one combines Vanillaware’s history of good writing and branching narrative, their very distinct art style, and an RTS combat system that combines fast action with some clever tricks straight out of JRPG combat systems into a game that is definitely niche, but something worth exploring.

The first thing to really understand is that 13 Sentinels is to some extent two separate games. Narratively speaking, there’s an entire visual novel section that goes into the back stories of the title’s 13 sentinels and how the characters all came to be together. The RTS section of the game takes place largely after the game’s core narrative, serving as a way to finish the story. While that may sound confusing, narratively it works really well.

Part of why this all works is that in order for the combat to start, things before it have to be explained, and boy do they get explained in great detail. Each of the 13 main characters has their own back story that you work through in a branching fashion. Completing branches gives some back story, but also starts to unlock the stories of other characters. You then end up revisiting a lot of these story points with the other character, seeing how they got there and where they go from there.

For a story that should have been so confusing, it ends up working in a way that somehow didn’t lose me. Reinforcing a plot point from a different point of view really reinforces remembering the core plot. It also effectively fills in information gaps throughout. The way that you jump between characters and different plot branches then ultimately ends up dropping breadcrumbs in a way that gives you enough information to infer some plot points ahead of time, but not enough to avoid some of the big surprises from catching you off guard.

This is all helped by the fact that I wanted to know more about the plot of the game. If I didn’t care about the plot, I definitely would have been lost. However, this one really hit a sci-fi slice that I really find enjoyable. Without giving away too much, you’ve got giant hilarious mecha, you’ve got time travel paradoxes, you’ve got androids and future weapons, you’ve got self-replicating robotic enemies. It’s just such a core of things that I find enjoyable that it was easy to continue to hit the button to start the next story segment and just lose track of time. Ultimately this is Vanillaware’s narrative sense working at full capacity in a way that works far better than it should.

This is all backed by the visual style that Vanillaware is known for. It’s still got a gorgeous hand-painted aesthetic with fluid animation that just continues to work so well. If you’re played Muramasa, Odin Sphere, or Dragon’s Crown, you’re familiar with it. If not, well, there’s three more games I highly recommend…

The other half of the game is all about combat. Technically speaking, it is part of the narrative, but the connections to the story really don’t start to make sense until closer to the end. Luckily, the combat is fun in a way that allowed me to get to the end, and then some.

Good RTS games outside of PC are such a rarity, and a lot of that has always come down to odd control schemes compared to your normal PC keyboard/mouse setup. Games like Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings have worked by replicating that control setup on a touch screen. However, 13 Sentinels goes in a different direction, and is helped along by three main things.

The first real benefit is that control is down to single units. You aren’t trying to group select a bunch of things and move them around all at once. You move one unit, you attack with one unit, you use an ability on one unit. It reduces a point of complexity down to individual decisions that allow you to quickly hop around with cycling on the d-pad, rather than having to drag select a bunch of stuff.

The second is that attacks are not point and click, at least not in the traditional sense. Every unit attack or ability has some sort of AOE capability. Basic attacks may just be first-target or narrow cones. More costly abilities things may be circular AOE or long range line attacks. However, they all originate either from the unit itself and can be set by just pressing a direction on the joystick, or they originate from a specific location in which case you’re just dragging a targeter around on screen. It’s all incredibly effective, but also incredibly intuitive to just drop into. You start an attack, you move it with left stick, and you confirm. No fuss, no fighting controls. Your focus stays on the result of the attack.

However, the third thing is probably the most impactful. While this is technically an RTS, the combat system pulls some features from ATB-style JRPGs. Namely, it brings in meter charge to start a turn, and it brings in combat pausing when it’s a unit’s turn. These two add a nice sense of control the the combat pace which plays well with the general limitations of the platform. What this ends up meaning is that the game can also throw hundreds of enemy units at you without giving you a sense of being overwhelmed.

That said, the combat does have some rough points, particularly around overall balance as the game progresses. I got to a point probably around the 60-70% point where I’d upgraded a bunch of units that can spawn turrets, and it was basically an unbeatable strategy. ALWAYS have four turret guys, then add in two random units, and I was basically going to win with some small amount of effort. As the screenshot above shows, the turrets will shoot all over the place and hit everything, and when upgraded with more range and damage they got kind of ridiculous.

It didn’t ruin my sense of enjoyment of the game, and there’s definitely something to be said about trying out different strategies just for the hell of it, but if you’re a one-and-done clearing type, there’s distinctly optimal crews to use.

All that being said, this was a hugely enjoyable game. It hit a sci-fi plot that really worked well with me. It had the Vanillaware touches that I’ve always loved in their past titles. It had a unique RTS combat system that blended in some JRPG mechanics with some clever choices around console limitations. In general, it all worked in a way that surprised me, even given the studio’s storied history.

Is it niche? Yep, it sure is. Is it worth playing anyway? Also yes.