MysticWonder
I'm actually genuinely surprised at the high ratings this has. This game is quite bad, and somehow aged worse than the other two games before it. I have no clue what happened between Chamber of Secrets and this one but it's such a step down in quality and quantity.
For one thing, the visual fidelity is an absolute mess. In the two years between games, they somehow managed to double the texture size, but leave the model's poly count the same. This means you still have trees that are two planes but now they're higher texture quality ~ooooooo~. You get a lowpoly rabbit and a lowpoly dragon, but now their textures are high rez without any shading and it looks horrible. It's like they expected the game engine to fill in the blanks with shading, but forgot to actually add any normal maps or something. The outside of the castle took the biggest hit here, it looks like a brutalist sculpture with a mushy brick texture that hasn't aged well at all. It's a massive downgrade from the second game.
The character models and animations are so strange. Everyone moves and talks like a robot, but occasionally Hermione will just whip out a sick fully-realized talking animation that gives me whiplash every time it happens. It reeks of crunch and rushed deadlines.
But ignoring the visual problems, the game just doesn't work as a collect-a-thon anymore.
They give you almost no free time to explore the castle during the story of the game. No joke, they introduce you to Fred and Georges shop in hour 1 of the game, and you are basically unable to go back to it until you've completed the whole rest of the fucking game, it's ridiculous. The Buckbeak minigame is especially hilarious for the same reason, since cannonically he shouldn't even be around after the main story is over. But sure enough, that's the only time I could go back and finish it!
There are things to 'collect' for sure, but it's really just a chore most of the time. I was halfway through the game and I had 2k beans just jangling in my pocket and nothing to spend it on because I couldn't go back to Fred and Georges shop. The Wizard Cards make a much needed return, but sadly they made the stupid mistake of making some of them limited-time-only so if you accidentally completed a level without checking every corner for secrets you may be unable to actually get to the credits screen!
The new spells are kind of interesting, but don't actually add anything to the game. Carpe Retractum is just Spongify except more limiting. Lapiforse and Draconicorse (I don't care to look up the actual spelling of those) are cool on paper, but the controls of both the dragon and the rabbit are horrible and I'm shocked that it made it through the design phase unchanged. Glacius feels completely niche too, only really being used on the ice-slide set pieces that are sprinkled here and there. It's really jarring to be exploring a place and then 'oh cool here's 100 yards of ice slide, i guess it's that time again'.
None of these spells ever makes an appearance outside of the class trials and the story events, meaning unlocking these spells doesn't let you explore any new areas of the castle (not that it matters since the game doesn't let you do that in the first place).
The secrets take a massive downgrade in this one too. Apparently 'secret' went from finding a hidden door to a secret room, to, finding a skull on a shelf somewhere and hitting it. (Side note: Wtf is with the skeletons in this game? It's Harry Potter, not fucking Dungeons and Dragons, what were you thinking?) It gets even worse because most of the secrets in the castle have been replaced by special portraits that require you to purchase a passcode to access. Nothing screams 'secret' like extremely-noticable-mural-of-some-dude on the wall. And again, you won't get access to it until the game lets you go buy the passcode from Fred and George, so... yeah.
Combat's a joke too: They really want you to take it seriously but like the last two games there isn't anything hard about clicking on an enemy. They keep putting chocolate frogs here and there as a reward to replenish health but I would literally have to stand up and walk out of the room before anything in this game ever killed me. In Hermiones case, I literally did that during her class challenge and the green flumper-head-lookin-thing failed to do anything but spin around like a disco ball. The only thing that is at risk of dealing 2% of your health bar on occasion are the imps that throw wizard-crackers at you, and that mechanic deserved to stay in the first game for a reason.
It's also laughably short. Shorter than the first game, and though it hits all the storybeats it feels more like a themed ride than a game. Two and a half hours in, and I was already at the tail end of the story of the game, like wtf even happened?
And then there are the mini-games. There are three of them in here, and two of them (the Monsterous Book of Monsters and the Pixie Infestation) are click-on-the-enemy-simulators. They are copy-and-pasted encounters, with the models swapped out, and a minor behavior tweak. They didn't even bother to re-color the projectiles that the enemies shoot, it's fucking shameless. The last one is the Buckbeak minigame, where you get to fly through rings, with the same horrible controls that the dragon spell has. It's unnecessarily hard, and really just a pain in the ass but I had to do it to get all of the wizard cards.
What really gets me is that the rings you fly through on Buckbeak are comprised of a particle effect that is inexplicably made out of bats. Fucking..... BATS?! Sir, this isn't Batman this is actually a Harry Potter game I mean -- OWLS ARE RIGHT THERE!!! Yeah, so, that's a bit of a nitpick but, after seeing them do almost everything else in this game wrong I have to bring it up.
Exploration has taken a back seat to spectacle and combat. But the spectacle is boring, and the combat is horrible. So what do you have left? A game that's only gotten worse with age. Yikes.
For one thing, the visual fidelity is an absolute mess. In the two years between games, they somehow managed to double the texture size, but leave the model's poly count the same. This means you still have trees that are two planes but now they're higher texture quality ~ooooooo~. You get a lowpoly rabbit and a lowpoly dragon, but now their textures are high rez without any shading and it looks horrible. It's like they expected the game engine to fill in the blanks with shading, but forgot to actually add any normal maps or something. The outside of the castle took the biggest hit here, it looks like a brutalist sculpture with a mushy brick texture that hasn't aged well at all. It's a massive downgrade from the second game.
The character models and animations are so strange. Everyone moves and talks like a robot, but occasionally Hermione will just whip out a sick fully-realized talking animation that gives me whiplash every time it happens. It reeks of crunch and rushed deadlines.
But ignoring the visual problems, the game just doesn't work as a collect-a-thon anymore.
They give you almost no free time to explore the castle during the story of the game. No joke, they introduce you to Fred and Georges shop in hour 1 of the game, and you are basically unable to go back to it until you've completed the whole rest of the fucking game, it's ridiculous. The Buckbeak minigame is especially hilarious for the same reason, since cannonically he shouldn't even be around after the main story is over. But sure enough, that's the only time I could go back and finish it!
There are things to 'collect' for sure, but it's really just a chore most of the time. I was halfway through the game and I had 2k beans just jangling in my pocket and nothing to spend it on because I couldn't go back to Fred and Georges shop. The Wizard Cards make a much needed return, but sadly they made the stupid mistake of making some of them limited-time-only so if you accidentally completed a level without checking every corner for secrets you may be unable to actually get to the credits screen!
The new spells are kind of interesting, but don't actually add anything to the game. Carpe Retractum is just Spongify except more limiting. Lapiforse and Draconicorse (I don't care to look up the actual spelling of those) are cool on paper, but the controls of both the dragon and the rabbit are horrible and I'm shocked that it made it through the design phase unchanged. Glacius feels completely niche too, only really being used on the ice-slide set pieces that are sprinkled here and there. It's really jarring to be exploring a place and then 'oh cool here's 100 yards of ice slide, i guess it's that time again'.
None of these spells ever makes an appearance outside of the class trials and the story events, meaning unlocking these spells doesn't let you explore any new areas of the castle (not that it matters since the game doesn't let you do that in the first place).
The secrets take a massive downgrade in this one too. Apparently 'secret' went from finding a hidden door to a secret room, to, finding a skull on a shelf somewhere and hitting it. (Side note: Wtf is with the skeletons in this game? It's Harry Potter, not fucking Dungeons and Dragons, what were you thinking?) It gets even worse because most of the secrets in the castle have been replaced by special portraits that require you to purchase a passcode to access. Nothing screams 'secret' like extremely-noticable-mural-of-some-dude on the wall. And again, you won't get access to it until the game lets you go buy the passcode from Fred and George, so... yeah.
Combat's a joke too: They really want you to take it seriously but like the last two games there isn't anything hard about clicking on an enemy. They keep putting chocolate frogs here and there as a reward to replenish health but I would literally have to stand up and walk out of the room before anything in this game ever killed me. In Hermiones case, I literally did that during her class challenge and the green flumper-head-lookin-thing failed to do anything but spin around like a disco ball. The only thing that is at risk of dealing 2% of your health bar on occasion are the imps that throw wizard-crackers at you, and that mechanic deserved to stay in the first game for a reason.
It's also laughably short. Shorter than the first game, and though it hits all the storybeats it feels more like a themed ride than a game. Two and a half hours in, and I was already at the tail end of the story of the game, like wtf even happened?
And then there are the mini-games. There are three of them in here, and two of them (the Monsterous Book of Monsters and the Pixie Infestation) are click-on-the-enemy-simulators. They are copy-and-pasted encounters, with the models swapped out, and a minor behavior tweak. They didn't even bother to re-color the projectiles that the enemies shoot, it's fucking shameless. The last one is the Buckbeak minigame, where you get to fly through rings, with the same horrible controls that the dragon spell has. It's unnecessarily hard, and really just a pain in the ass but I had to do it to get all of the wizard cards.
What really gets me is that the rings you fly through on Buckbeak are comprised of a particle effect that is inexplicably made out of bats. Fucking..... BATS?! Sir, this isn't Batman this is actually a Harry Potter game I mean -- OWLS ARE RIGHT THERE!!! Yeah, so, that's a bit of a nitpick but, after seeing them do almost everything else in this game wrong I have to bring it up.
Exploration has taken a back seat to spectacle and combat. But the spectacle is boring, and the combat is horrible. So what do you have left? A game that's only gotten worse with age. Yikes.
This game goes so hard for no reason. The first game was just alright, a serviceable tie-in game that loosely followed the plot of the first game while being a decent 3D Collect-a-thon.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
It's a bit of a strange tie in game, but it's alright. It completely fuckin blows over the story of the first book but it hits the story beats in an abridged sort of way.
2001 Hagrid is a joy to look at, and honestly some of the environments hold up pretty well.
Some of them also look like dogshit, but hey it was 2001 and this game had to be ported to god damn toasters for consoles so I'm giving it a pass.
2001 Hagrid is a joy to look at, and honestly some of the environments hold up pretty well.
Some of them also look like dogshit, but hey it was 2001 and this game had to be ported to god damn toasters for consoles so I'm giving it a pass.
2022
Splatoon is a weird franchise. I honestly didn't get the hype for the first two games. It always had this 'baby's first fps' kind of vibe that turned me off of them. The idea seemed promising but I couldn't get behind the weird 'squid' music and it all just seemed so childish to me. I completely ignored them and stuck to my hardcore tactical shooters like Apex Legends and Rainbow 6 Siege that I knew and loved and let Nintendo's weird newest IP pass me by.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
2019
God damn it Pathway I really wanted to like you.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
1980
I donno man.
I get that it's from 1980, but maybe if your control scheme requires 'R' and 'r' to do completely different things, your game might be suffering from a UX problem.
Outside of that, the game is just -- okay.
You move around and beat shit up. You go to the next floor and move around and beat more shit up. There are items to help you beat shit up, and items that help you get not beaten up. It's not exactly hard to get.
Oh but don't get me wrong, the game is definitely challenging. But it's challenging in the tedious way. The 'oh my run ended because of some bullshit' way. The 'oops I guess I ran out of the food' way. The 'oh is that the fifth enemy with a stun ability in a row' way.
Couple all of that with such interesting minute to minute gameplay as:
Walking!
And you'll see why I'm not exactly raving to play more.
Like, I see why it was a hit for the time, but after decades of iteration on the formula, there remains nothing terribly interesting about the game now besides the challenge.
I get that it's from 1980, but maybe if your control scheme requires 'R' and 'r' to do completely different things, your game might be suffering from a UX problem.
Outside of that, the game is just -- okay.
You move around and beat shit up. You go to the next floor and move around and beat more shit up. There are items to help you beat shit up, and items that help you get not beaten up. It's not exactly hard to get.
Oh but don't get me wrong, the game is definitely challenging. But it's challenging in the tedious way. The 'oh my run ended because of some bullshit' way. The 'oops I guess I ran out of the food' way. The 'oh is that the fifth enemy with a stun ability in a row' way.
Couple all of that with such interesting minute to minute gameplay as:
Walking!
And you'll see why I'm not exactly raving to play more.
Like, I see why it was a hit for the time, but after decades of iteration on the formula, there remains nothing terribly interesting about the game now besides the challenge.
Okay, I almost never review a game that I haven't completed but I have so many strong feelings about Penny's Big Breakaway from my time spent playing it that I really want to get down on paper while I'm thinking about them.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
2024
This little ditty gave me 45 minutes of joy. Sometimes that's all you need!
2023
Hellcard is great! It's a rouge-like deck builder that you play with friends with a number of different playstyles and challenges to overcome. I played it with two of my other friends to death last year, and we had a pretty good time every time we brought it out.
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
2015
I have only a handful of games that I consider 'Must-Plays', for anyone who likes video games. It's not a hard game. It's not even a particularly impressive game. But it is one of the best games of all time none-the-less, and you should play it.
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the final entry in a five game series by (mostly) solo indie developer RDein, and man it's really fuckin hard to rate. I've fiddled with the star rating at least 10 times while writing this review.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
2014
Wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Halfway is an XCOM-like. It's a difficult turn based strategy rpg set on a space ship that is mysteriously under attack from uncertain outside forces. You scavenge weapons and ammo, recruit and rescue colorful characters, and face down an ever changing cast of enemies in a fight for your lives.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.
2009
Left 4 Dead 2 is the only video game I've played so far that properly captures the feeling of being truly alone in a zombie apocalypse. And really, no other game even comes close.
It's also one of the only coop pve shooters worth playing, as countless other developers have tried to recreate what L4D2 did, and failed spectacularly.
As for L4D2 itself? It's fine. Really, it's just kinda fine. I played through the entirety of the L4D2 campaign again this past October and it really kinda struck me how bare bones it is, and how that's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it's easy to pick up and play with a group of friends. It's a curse, because if it's your Nth time playing the game, it can get to be super fucking boring and repetitive.
I don't think L4D2 would stand to improve from adding any more complexity to it though, I think that Valve developed the game to be the former (quick, easy, fun with friends) and kinda got stuck with the later on accident (boring and repetitive).
It's also a 15 year old game by now, so maybe I've just played too much of it.
I guess to summarize: it's solid. Not exemplary, not too flashy, it came, it saw, something something, 'pills here'.
It's also one of the only coop pve shooters worth playing, as countless other developers have tried to recreate what L4D2 did, and failed spectacularly.
As for L4D2 itself? It's fine. Really, it's just kinda fine. I played through the entirety of the L4D2 campaign again this past October and it really kinda struck me how bare bones it is, and how that's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it's easy to pick up and play with a group of friends. It's a curse, because if it's your Nth time playing the game, it can get to be super fucking boring and repetitive.
I don't think L4D2 would stand to improve from adding any more complexity to it though, I think that Valve developed the game to be the former (quick, easy, fun with friends) and kinda got stuck with the later on accident (boring and repetitive).
It's also a 15 year old game by now, so maybe I've just played too much of it.
I guess to summarize: it's solid. Not exemplary, not too flashy, it came, it saw, something something, 'pills here'.
FTL is great. It makes sad to call this an 'Old' Indie game, but I guess 12 years ago is a long time now.
It's a space-battle micro-management rogue-like, which is a mouthful but that's the only way I can really describe it. You manage a bunch of bars and systems to blow up enemy ships before they blow up you. It is just simple enough to not be entirely overwhelming to me, but I can see if other people might not enjoy that level of complexity.
To be critical, the game is ridiculously difficult. It's a struggle to beat the game on Easy difficulty, and it's made even harder by using the newer advanced systems. I know of a number of people who have put 20+ hours into this game and haven't even come close to beating the Easiest difficulty. The final boss is definitely a huge difficulty spike that I think could be toned down a bit.
It also, with help from Binding of Isaac, really put Roguelikes on the map in the indie space. But maybe that's revisionist history - I was still in my adolescence back then, so maybe the genre has always been popular.
Ben Prunty absolutely kills it on the soundtrack and I'm so glad they brought him back to do the Into the Breach soundtrack. Love his work.
It's a space-battle micro-management rogue-like, which is a mouthful but that's the only way I can really describe it. You manage a bunch of bars and systems to blow up enemy ships before they blow up you. It is just simple enough to not be entirely overwhelming to me, but I can see if other people might not enjoy that level of complexity.
To be critical, the game is ridiculously difficult. It's a struggle to beat the game on Easy difficulty, and it's made even harder by using the newer advanced systems. I know of a number of people who have put 20+ hours into this game and haven't even come close to beating the Easiest difficulty. The final boss is definitely a huge difficulty spike that I think could be toned down a bit.
It also, with help from Binding of Isaac, really put Roguelikes on the map in the indie space. But maybe that's revisionist history - I was still in my adolescence back then, so maybe the genre has always been popular.
Ben Prunty absolutely kills it on the soundtrack and I'm so glad they brought him back to do the Into the Breach soundtrack. Love his work.
I like Aria of Sorrow more, but Harmony of Dissonance grew on me the more I played it. It really is just kind of Symphony of the Night again, but if you haven't played Symphony of the Night (like I hadn't when I first played this) you'd think that the duel map was a sick idea.