Tag: action

Posted on

Game Ramblings #154 – Kena: Bridge of Spirits

More Info from Ember Lab

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Windows

In general I don’t really like Souls-like games, but I keep dipping my toes into ones that try a little something different. Jedi: Fallen Order managed to keep the combat approachable enough through the use of hand waivey dodge mechanics made possible by Force powers existing. Games like Ghost of Tsushima were generally more fast action-oriented, leaving the Souls style one-on-one mechanics for well tuned individual fights with an engaging open world. Kena definitely ends up leaning more towards straight Souls combat, but with a few tweaks, some that work well and some that really don’t. By the end it was a bit grating to me, but it definitely was another that pushed me further into the subgenre.

This is very much a Souls game in general combat. It’s heavily tuned into proper timing of dodges or parries. However, it also has a very effective shield, and that was the thing that really felt the best to me in terms of Kena feeling tuned to be less dramatically unforgiving. It’s sitting on the same button as parry, so rather than parry being a direct action it feels more like a well-timed shield deflection in practice. Being able to avoid damage because you are too early and going right into a shield is a huge benefit to difficulty. It lets you deflect a few hits while you get your timing down, then letting you parry your way through the rest of the fight. That reduction in learning through dying is such a better experience than a lot of Souls-likes, and it’s due to a relatively small change.

The game also fed me a useful bow and arrow, which is always going to be a positive in my book. A lot of the later fights started really being mechanically dense in a way that I didn’t want to be in melee range, so I’d stick back, get damage with arrows until a parry opportunity came up. At that point I could lay in some big damage and get the hell out of the way.

However, the game’s boss fights really ran out of steam in a hugely negative way. By about the end of the second act, it was clear that the game was mechanically done growing. At that point the boss fights just started throwing arbitrary things at you to distract you. Endless adds, off-screen projectiles, radial explosions. The fights just kind of become annoying, rather than challenging. I liked the fights when they were challenging because I had to properly time things. Once I was getting hit by attacks I didn’t see because my view was constantly being pulled all over the place I no longer wanted to deal with the bosses. At that point I lowered the difficulty to easy and powered through the rest of the game.

By that point, the studio’s lack of experience started to show in some of the overall combat polish as well. A lot of the arenas were just dark. Dark bosses against dark backgrounds with very little in the way of highlighting. It made fights unnecessarily difficult just because of lack of vision. Some of the tells were also just kind of odd to me. A lot of them would start with some big tell then have a large unnecessary pause followed by a wildly fast dash. It didn’t feel smooth and it didn’t feel consistent. The difference between tells for weapon throws vs tells for dash/melee was also pretty arbitrary, which reduced the ability to effectively pick parry or dodge as your defensive attempt. On individual fights you would eventually learn the specifics, but I started just getting to the point where I would see some of the tells starting and immediately just hold shield to learn. It felt kind of sloppy.

Ultimately though, a decent difficulty slider allowed me to push through the rest of the game. I was enjoying the overall story and exploration a lot, so I wanted to keep playing, even with my frustration around the boss fights. It was always interesting to go see little hints in the environment and go off to find new things. It might be a hat for your little helper creatures, it might just be some currency, it might be a little side quest type of thing, but in all cases it was a good change of pace and something that felt worthwhile to pursue. That ability to dump the difficulty down to get through the parts I wasn’t enjoying to let me get through the parts that I was enjoying was hugely welcomed. It may just be numbers in the backend, and a lot of people may not want to see it in a Souls-like, but I will always support studios that get that type of stuff in there.

I’m probably not a good person to go in recommending Souls-like games, but in this case I’m pretty comfortable recommending this one. It’s got some rough edges, but combat is fun enough, the exploration was super enjoyable, and it’s a downright gorgeous game. It’s backed by a story that I wanted to see through to the end. Ya, I cranked it down to easy to power through for the things I wanted, but I got through it nonetheless, and for a Souls-like, that’s pretty rare.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #153 – Eastward

More Info from Pixpil

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam

Unless something drastic happens, this is likely my last completed game of 2021, and it really wasn’t a bad one to end the year on. I’d seen this one described as a Zelda-like, which is really what caught my attention. That’s not necessarily a bad description, but it’s definitely an oversimplification. There’s a much greater emphasis on narrative moments and linearity than the 2D Zelda games, and frankly the combat is a lot different. However, it does share the DNA. While it doesn’t necessarily reach those lofty heights, it’s still a title worth checking out.

Once you get into combat in Eastward, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t really a Zelda-like. It’s simultaneously simpler in some ways, but more complex in other ways, and that really breaks down into the interaction between the two characters. John is basically your primary attacker – he’s got a pan for melee and a handful of guns with slightly different characteristics, as well as a handful of bomb types for AoE purposes. Sam is not a damage dealer at all, apart from one specific enemy type, but importantly can shoot out a magic attack that causes time to freeze for the enemy that got hit. That ability is where she becomes special.

A lot of the core enemy combatants are frankly annoying to try to hit. They move fast or jump around a lot or do dash attacks through the player. They basically exist to be annoying and deal as much damage as possible while staying at range. The rhythm of the combat then becomes a pattern of switching to Sam, freezing enemies, then whittling them down with John. That can be freezing to hit at range with a disc gun or to hit in melee with a pan, but the end result is the same. Sam is an incredibly effective crowd controller, John is an incredibly effective damage dealer, but their abilities work in tandem to maximize effectiveness. Large count encounters can still be somewhat chaotic in a less fun way, but this is outweighed by the fact that the combat really hits its mark well during boss fights.

The other interesting mechanic that comes out of two PCs with different abilities is separation for puzzle solving purposes. Sam is short and can fit through tubes, as well as activate magic switches. John is strong and can pull large crates and blow up walls with bombs. Separating the two during puzzles often means chucking things across impassable barriers to help the other person move forward just a bit more until they can eventually reunite.

This is put to the test very well near the end of the game. At that point, there’s a string of puzzles that are all time limited. These were by far the most fun puzzles to complete because of the added level of stress. You’re really pushed to be accurate and fast, while also minimizing the use of resources so you can crank through a puzzle before time runs out. You may need to drop a bomb, charge an attack, and launch it across a gap to hit a switch, but if you’re not accurate it’s going to send you back to the start. You may need to separate the two characters, but if you hit switches in an inefficient manner, it may mean you’re wasting precious seconds waiting for a platform to move back through the world to you, causing you to miss out on time. It really ended up proving out the systems in a surprising way to me, largely because I typically despise time limited segments that remove my ability to plan out my actions more carefully.

Ultimately it’s the progression that really separated this one entirely from Zelda. It’s not that it’s entirely linear, but it’s not far off. The game takes place across a number of smaller hub worlds, typically with a couple of specific types of shops (upgrades, food stuff, general goods) and you’ll spend a couple of hours in the general vicinity, but this isn’t the open world of something like Link to the Past. This becomes especially true in the last few hours where the game is totally linear. Once you leave an area, it’s also not somewhere you can return to. If you miss something, you’re not getting it later on. This wasn’t a particular issue for me as one of the first upgrades you can buy is a hidden item sensor and everything is generally near the golden path, but it’s worth noting.

It’s also worth noting that this game had some weird stability issues on Switch. Throughout my play, this crashed probably about a half dozen times in about 20 hours. Particularly annoying were crashes that happened at the end of boss fights on a few occasions. This was also combined with some odd framerate issues when the enemy count got high. Having done some work on Switch titles, I get that the hardware is limited, but this wasn’t the type of game that I would have expected these kinds of problems to crop up in.

So at the end of the day, this may not be a game that will totally blow your socks off but it’s still something worth playing. It’s got a charming story backing generally fun combat and generally fun puzzle solving. It takes the general Zelda formula and changes enough about it to make this game feel unique without being unfamiliar. It makes a two-character core loop work well without feeling like a neverending escort quest. In general it just proved that it was worth the time.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #149 – Metroid Dread

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Platformer, Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch

This is very much an iteration on the work that was started with Metroid: Samus Returns, and that’s a great thing. Quite frankly, you could read my notes on that one and it would be a 1:1 retread of what worked for Metroid Dread. However, this feels like a clear iteration on the formula and even more importantly a clear end point to the series’ story – whether or not that’s ultimately what will happen. This is just a fantastically good game that took far too long for someone to convince Nintendo to spend money on, and I’m glad it finally happened.

The thing that really stood out to me in this one was its difficulty, and that seems to be a common theme across the feedback I’ve seen about the game. A lot of people are calling it simply hard, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. What it really feels like to me is that it’s precise, and that’s really the difference to me in why I had the patience to enter death loops. I’ve shelved a lot of games in the last decade or so within the sort of rise of the indie games. A lot of games feel like they do hard for the sake of hard. Something precise and mechanically tight will come out like Celeste and be incredibly difficult but fair, then a bunch of games will follow that are simply…..difficult. It’s not fun. Dread very much feels like it falls within the difficult but fair.

Bosses in this game are no joke. A missed mechanic will take a full health tank or more. If you aren’t being precise with your movement, you will die. However, once you learn the mechanics and once you get your movement down, you’re just as likely to take no damage in these fights. In that respect it’s incredibly fair. You take damage, you learn mechanics, you avoid damage, you win. Sure you may die a couple times, but you aren’t getting screwed by RNG and you aren’t getting screwed by the fight.

You’re given a lot of tools to avoid damage that aren’t typical of the Metroid series – things like a slide that can transition into the morph ball or an instant dodge that gives some amount of i-frames – that really lean into damage avoidance as a key mechanic. You’re also given some really good new offensive tools to make damage a little more passive and a little less precise in those big moments – things like the return of the melee counter from Samus Returns or a lock-on multi-hit charge missile – that allow you to build up damage without having to be right up in the enemy’s face or having to pause and engage in the slower free aim. The end result of all of this is that while the game is still distinctly Metroid in style and mechanical knowledge, it feels substantially like a modern game where you have full control of damage mitigation and aren’t just being slammed with unavoidable nonsense.

There’s also just a ton of little things that the game does very right that make it feel both Metroid and modern. You’ve still got pickups that drop when you kill things, but they get sucked in at any range. Combined with melee counters dropping more items, this both increases the general pace of the game AND allows the game to have higher difficulty, since you’re always pulling in resources. One of the early upgrades is the return of the pulse radar that reveals hidden breakable blocks. This is again probably controversial, but this feeds into increased exploration and increased pace since you aren’t just playing a game of shoot every block to find the hidden trinket. Free aim is back to give much more freedom of hitting things from any angle, making a lot of the trash encounters much quicker to deal with. The new slide move both replaces a lot of the slower morph ball stuff, but also acts as a fast transition into morph ball tunnels when unlocked AND a way to actively dodge attacks in a lot of the boss fights.

However, the real important change compared to Fusion or the Prime games is that the game really doesn’t give you any direction. You’re chucked into the world and told to get to the surface. You’re given some lore as things go, but more often than not it’s up to you to find your way. This is very much an old Metroid thing that started to go away over the years, so it’s interesting to see it return to very little direction. For me, this is precisely what I’m looking for in a Metroidvania. I love to scan the map to find doors that I haven’t entered or mysterious holes in the map that I haven’t explored, then going back to find new things. Where things really work for the better is that the map itself is far more readable than past 2D entries, although that is entirely down to just having more modern hardware and higher resolution to display the map. It’s just far easier to find things when you can pump more obvious information on the screen and it really benefits the loose structure of the classic Metroid formula. It’s even better with a bunch of fast travel teleportation spots that open up as you find more upgrades, allowing you to quickly scoot around the world at will.

This just ended up being such a good game. It’s been so long since a 2D entry came out in this series that there was probably some amount of valid concern about whether or not this could be done and still be fun. Samus Returns proved that the formula still worked and Dread proved that the series can move forward. This hits just the right mix of classic Metroid and modern gaming, and in a couple key ways goes backwards compared to Fusion and Prime, but it comes out as such a great mix. The difficulty of the game will probably turn some people away, but for me it again hits the perfect mix – it’s perhaps unforgiving, but it’s precise and fair and not based in RNG. You’ll learn where things go wrong, then make it right. It may take a few tries, but you’ll learn and get through it.

It’s also funny looking back at my notes about Samus Returns. That one ended with a new little cutscene showing the rise of the X parasites on SR388. I mentioned in passing that maybe they were hinting at something else. Boy was it ever. I don’t know if they were still hoping to do a Fusion remake or Dread at that point, but seeing the end of the post-Prime Metroid and X saga finally arrive is both great to see and something that I never really expected to happen.

Seriously, go play this.