ToasterNinja
2017
There’s a misconception that “innovation is actually in the indie scene”, this is not without some merit of course, as the triple A landscape is following what seems like the same 12 templates of what they think “good game design” is. But indie games are just as derivative and trend chasing. This doesn’t have to be a negative either, as every once in a while a game comes along that uses current trends well, in Little Nightmare's case, that amounts to a great experience.
Little Nightmares is clearly chasing the 2010s fad of indie horror games having a heavy emphasis on hiding. I personally don’t care for that kind of game play, but given this is presented as a 25.d platformer with (mostly) fixed camera angles, it peaked my interest and I enjoyed my time with it.
The game does a good job of helping you get your bearings. After a brief ten second introductory cut scene that sets up the main antagonist, our MC Six wakes up in a boiler room with leeway to explore every single mechanic. If you see a dark area, you press B to use your lighter to illuminate it, then you’ll see cans and boxes strewn about, which you can pick up with the right trigger and throw, then big boxes and pipes to climb, hide in, and jump on, and finally a long narrow hallway you can use to practice sprinting, this tutorial ends after this room and the game expects you to have memorized all of these basics. In an era where games (aimed at adults especially) have over bearing and over explanatory tutorials that tell you everything, it was refreshing to play a relatively modern game that just let you figure stuff out on your own.
But tutorials often don’t just end with the player figuring out functions, they also have the need to show what the player should expect from the game for the entire experience, or at least give them a good generalized idea. Which is why I want to highlight the first sprinting section.
The game at first makes you think you only need two quick bursts to get past three rooms, but the reality is that the second sprint is one long, continuous one, but it is highly unlikely you will get this on your first attempt. As the room you dash through is a child's bedroom riddled with tons of objects to climb, and other points of interest highlighted in the shadows, which will make you stop and try going somewhere else instead of just the (correct) straight line. This is a brilliant way of communicating to the player to be observant and on edge, which requires them to not act with out thinking, but instead to over think a little while acting, which is great for a horror game. If a developer has a player on auto pilot when playing a horror game for the first time, the level design has failed, good level design in horror games forces the player to over think, and fear making a mistake.
I am not someone who foolishly believes there are games out there with out any kind of pathing, games have always given the player some indication of where to go or what to do next. And Little Nightmares is very good at this aspect. If a surface has juts and grooves, it’s probably climbable, if an object is framed prominently, it’s most likely of some importance, if an area is subtly lit up, you should probably focus on it. None of these are gaudily presented either with some stupid detective vision mechanic or streaks of paint on already bright or lightly colored objects, the game expects you to come to these obvious logical conclusions yourself and that is (sadly) so refreshing.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though when it comes to navigation, there was more than a few times where I got stuck on a lip in floor or a jut on a wall that the fixed angles didn’t do the best job of indicating where there, as the game is more obviously focused on the giants you have to avoid and has to frame them prominently. Some clipping through these lips and juts would have been appreciated, as it would make some set pieces a little less annoying.
When not hiding from the aforementioned giants, you’ll be solving puzzles to progress, these puzzles aren’t mind benders by any means, but they do require some thought to solve and never feel too easy. What makes them fun to figure out is that they play into what ever setting you are in at the moment, you will need to push a suitcase to pull a lever to drop a hide away bed down, or place chunks of meat into a grinder to make a rope of sausages, or close a stove door to make the chef giant panic and clear a path, to list a few examples. This helps the setting of the Maw feel like a character itself that six is exploiting to escape, and makes what could have been banal and mundane in another setting feel much more impactful.
And avoiding each of the giants is mostly a competent affair. Aside from some leeches you’ll run past in chapter 1, the only enemies you will encounter in the game are the giants, and they are designed mostly well enough to enjoy studying how to get past them.
The Janitor clearly had the most effort put into his sections and sets a good impression by being the first one you’ll encounter, with his long, lanky arms, he can catch you quickly and from (mostly) any distance in the room, so you’ll need to have memorized what kind of surfaces you can climb, what boxes and furniture to hide in, and how fast you should be going, given that he is blind and can hear you the second you sprint or push an object over. If you have been paying attention to the contents of the rooms he patrols, you’ll notice he has taken many toys from his victims as trophies. When you do encounter him later, you’ll naturally pick up on the need to throw cymbal monkeys that make noise that he will run over to play with, or turn on a TV with a nursery rhyme that he hyper focuses on. This then culminates into a solid boss encounter where you have to study the movements of his arms until they form a diamond, which indicates you can dash forward and pull two bars from under a door to cut them off. It feels incredibly cathartic to have a brief encounter after spending hours getting stalked and harassed, with said harassers most prominent features being destroyed incredibly fitting penance for his over persistence.
I wish I could lob the same praise to the other three giants, but the game streamlines them heavily in favor of keeping the pacing tight. Not a bad compromise of course, horror games should be short as over familiarity will breed indifference, but I would have liked the Chef encounters to use the kitchen a little more than just closing a stove door as mentioned above, then avoiding broken plates, and finally riding a meat hook while being chased at the end of the chapter (compounded by the final area having the aforementioned annoying lips and juts that you will probably get caught on a few times and end up dying because of it). The majority of the chapter aside from the final section is just hiding from the chefs under furniture or throwing something generic to distract them, and while the great pathing and aesthetics of the kitchen make this fun enough to do, the lack of using the area’s character is disappointing.
And while the next chapter in the restaurant does use the area’s character to some effect, it’s not enough to make up for the annoyances of the guests hit boxes being a little too long which led me to dying a handful of times and essentially had me rolling my eyes and sensibly chuckling at basically having to know exactly where to sprint across the tables speed run style. This could have had the potential of being a good change of pace to being an almost pure reflex section if the chef’s chapter was better, but instead it just compounds how the game trims a little too much fat.
And the last chapter really exemplifies that trimming, you simply push over a vase to get a key, do a brief and easy chase sequence, and then an incredibly bland final boss fight where you hold a mirror in a direction a handful of times, with the end of each sequence causing six to fall down briefly and forcing you wait a bit. It’s a very half assed climax to an otherwise well made game.
I saved talking about this until now cause I really don’t need to go into much detail as to how annoying these kind of sections are in games. At several points through out the game, Six will be struck with hunger, which will trigger a slow walking section. These are meant to make the player feel powerless, but the game proper already does that, Six can not fight back, she only engages in combat twice through out the entire game in the boss fights mentioned above. All these sections do is serve to annoy you and pad out the play time.
The game has a rather hands off approach to story telling and I greatly appreciated it.
The maw its self seems to be a metaphor for cyclical over consumption and the livestock industry, as the corpulent guests that seem to be an analogy for the mega rich can’t help engorging themselves on the bodies of dead humans, and even have no issue being fed the corpses of their own kind to keep themselves sustained, you also have the two chefs who are rather emotionless and indifferent in feeding into this dangerous and horrifically evil hedonism and addiction, and the janitor who works rather well as an allegory for workers who openly abuse livestock due to their perceived low value of life. While the presentation of these themes will be overly blunt for some, the execution is still good when combined with the games excellent art direction and atmosphere, combine this with the fact that the game has no voice acting or dialogue, and it makes this execution all the more effective in getting the player to think about what they experienced.
Visually Little nightmares is fantastic, and it was one of the main reasons I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if it had any other setting.
The first thing that strikes you about the maw is the scale, six is the size of a mouse in comparison to most objects and creatures around her and it makes almost every room feel oppressive and weighty in atmosphere. The lighting is incredible, with points of interest naturally hidden in shadow making you want to investigate to move forward, or moments of darkness having things be outlined just well enough to make you feel even more uneasy, and even when the rooms are brightly lit, there is still several disturbing elements and decorations, macabre paintings of murder and other monsters you never see are almost everywhere, bloody tools are displayed prominently on work benches, kitchen tables are covered in the filth from severed limbs, and so on.
The textures are quite detailed, you’ll have things like patches of rust on filing cabinets, gashes from tools on tables with fine wood, fuzzy rugs where you can count each individual strand of fabric, and lovely wet sheens coating the pipework during the transitional hallways you’ll be running through between chapters.
Then you also have the brilliance of six wearing a bright yellow coat with a distinct and unique diamond shaped hood so that the player never loses track of her when navigating the rooms. It’s clear Tariser studios wanted the visuals to enhance and compliment the game play, and they do a fantastic job at doing so.
Several paragraphs ago I mentioned that the level design its self, from a functional standpoint, is fine, and in most games it would just be ok. The point I am making here though is that even the most simple level design can be made much more enjoyable to solve when developers integrate the aesthetics of the world or tropes of the genre into them. During the janitor chase sequences for example, the fastest way to avoid him is to go through the lowest shelf, but you risk tipping over more objects he has laid there for alarms, meanwhile the safe but long way is to climb up the nearby stack of books to highest shelf. They’re simple solutions yes, but given this is a horror game, where quick pacing but slight over thinking is paramount, having two easy to execute, while still having varying levels of risk, choices to make in the moment, is brilliant. Nowadays many people assume good level design just means “execution of multiple button functions for one problem”, when it’s a broad skill that can implement many approaches.
Lastly on this, it is so refreshing to play a relatively modern game that has influences that aren’t just other video games. One of the many things I dislike about modern video games is that they have seemingly forgot that there are other forms of entertainment out there.
It seems every FPS now is inspired only by Bioshock, halo, or classic doom. It seems like every 3d platformer now is obsessed with having the player just press buttons in the air mario 64 speed run style and only make worlds based on other platformer templates. I could (and will in other reviews) go on about this, but I was so relieved that Little Nightmares’s aesthetic (and story to a small degree) influences were films like Spirited away (there’s homages everywhere, like the scene where Chihiro climbs the stairs or the guests entering the resort, and the Janitor is definitely based on Kamaji) and western horror films like Nightmare on Elm street and session 9 (you will never escape the chair), As someone who counts Spirited Away and Session 9 among his favorite films, this was great for me and fans of all three that I have mentioned will get a lot out of this game because of it. If you are tired of modern games being far too cannibalistic in terms of inspiration, this will be a breath of fresh air for you.
Musically the game is passable. You have your forgettable ambient music that most 2010s video games are so found of that thankfully isn’t intrusive due to the game being so puzzle focused, which is fine as that could be very annoying to players that are stuck. And then there’s the darker ambient tracks that will ramp up in pace when being stalked by one of the giants. If you’ve played an indie horror game in the last 12 years, you’ve heard this all before, really the only impressive thing is your controllers rumble pulsing to the beat when getting chased. Other than that, you certainly won’t be compelled enough to seek out the tracks on their own.
Little Nightmares is a good of example of less being more and taking into account just how much richer and more fulfilling video games used to be, and still can be, when they take influence from non gaming sources. In the hands of other studios, you could assume the game would just be taking cues from nothing but the resident evil remakes and outlast. But that thankfully isn’t the case. It’s a well crafted 5 hour experience that wears its film influences on its sleeves with pride and integrates the character of its world aesthetics and the tropes and needs of its genre into its level design to the full benefit of the medium it’s in. Poor music, the awful slow walking sections, and the over truncation of the last two chapters aside, it’s one of the better modern games I have played in a very long time.
8/10.
Little Nightmares is clearly chasing the 2010s fad of indie horror games having a heavy emphasis on hiding. I personally don’t care for that kind of game play, but given this is presented as a 25.d platformer with (mostly) fixed camera angles, it peaked my interest and I enjoyed my time with it.
The game does a good job of helping you get your bearings. After a brief ten second introductory cut scene that sets up the main antagonist, our MC Six wakes up in a boiler room with leeway to explore every single mechanic. If you see a dark area, you press B to use your lighter to illuminate it, then you’ll see cans and boxes strewn about, which you can pick up with the right trigger and throw, then big boxes and pipes to climb, hide in, and jump on, and finally a long narrow hallway you can use to practice sprinting, this tutorial ends after this room and the game expects you to have memorized all of these basics. In an era where games (aimed at adults especially) have over bearing and over explanatory tutorials that tell you everything, it was refreshing to play a relatively modern game that just let you figure stuff out on your own.
But tutorials often don’t just end with the player figuring out functions, they also have the need to show what the player should expect from the game for the entire experience, or at least give them a good generalized idea. Which is why I want to highlight the first sprinting section.
The game at first makes you think you only need two quick bursts to get past three rooms, but the reality is that the second sprint is one long, continuous one, but it is highly unlikely you will get this on your first attempt. As the room you dash through is a child's bedroom riddled with tons of objects to climb, and other points of interest highlighted in the shadows, which will make you stop and try going somewhere else instead of just the (correct) straight line. This is a brilliant way of communicating to the player to be observant and on edge, which requires them to not act with out thinking, but instead to over think a little while acting, which is great for a horror game. If a developer has a player on auto pilot when playing a horror game for the first time, the level design has failed, good level design in horror games forces the player to over think, and fear making a mistake.
I am not someone who foolishly believes there are games out there with out any kind of pathing, games have always given the player some indication of where to go or what to do next. And Little Nightmares is very good at this aspect. If a surface has juts and grooves, it’s probably climbable, if an object is framed prominently, it’s most likely of some importance, if an area is subtly lit up, you should probably focus on it. None of these are gaudily presented either with some stupid detective vision mechanic or streaks of paint on already bright or lightly colored objects, the game expects you to come to these obvious logical conclusions yourself and that is (sadly) so refreshing.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though when it comes to navigation, there was more than a few times where I got stuck on a lip in floor or a jut on a wall that the fixed angles didn’t do the best job of indicating where there, as the game is more obviously focused on the giants you have to avoid and has to frame them prominently. Some clipping through these lips and juts would have been appreciated, as it would make some set pieces a little less annoying.
When not hiding from the aforementioned giants, you’ll be solving puzzles to progress, these puzzles aren’t mind benders by any means, but they do require some thought to solve and never feel too easy. What makes them fun to figure out is that they play into what ever setting you are in at the moment, you will need to push a suitcase to pull a lever to drop a hide away bed down, or place chunks of meat into a grinder to make a rope of sausages, or close a stove door to make the chef giant panic and clear a path, to list a few examples. This helps the setting of the Maw feel like a character itself that six is exploiting to escape, and makes what could have been banal and mundane in another setting feel much more impactful.
And avoiding each of the giants is mostly a competent affair. Aside from some leeches you’ll run past in chapter 1, the only enemies you will encounter in the game are the giants, and they are designed mostly well enough to enjoy studying how to get past them.
The Janitor clearly had the most effort put into his sections and sets a good impression by being the first one you’ll encounter, with his long, lanky arms, he can catch you quickly and from (mostly) any distance in the room, so you’ll need to have memorized what kind of surfaces you can climb, what boxes and furniture to hide in, and how fast you should be going, given that he is blind and can hear you the second you sprint or push an object over. If you have been paying attention to the contents of the rooms he patrols, you’ll notice he has taken many toys from his victims as trophies. When you do encounter him later, you’ll naturally pick up on the need to throw cymbal monkeys that make noise that he will run over to play with, or turn on a TV with a nursery rhyme that he hyper focuses on. This then culminates into a solid boss encounter where you have to study the movements of his arms until they form a diamond, which indicates you can dash forward and pull two bars from under a door to cut them off. It feels incredibly cathartic to have a brief encounter after spending hours getting stalked and harassed, with said harassers most prominent features being destroyed incredibly fitting penance for his over persistence.
I wish I could lob the same praise to the other three giants, but the game streamlines them heavily in favor of keeping the pacing tight. Not a bad compromise of course, horror games should be short as over familiarity will breed indifference, but I would have liked the Chef encounters to use the kitchen a little more than just closing a stove door as mentioned above, then avoiding broken plates, and finally riding a meat hook while being chased at the end of the chapter (compounded by the final area having the aforementioned annoying lips and juts that you will probably get caught on a few times and end up dying because of it). The majority of the chapter aside from the final section is just hiding from the chefs under furniture or throwing something generic to distract them, and while the great pathing and aesthetics of the kitchen make this fun enough to do, the lack of using the area’s character is disappointing.
And while the next chapter in the restaurant does use the area’s character to some effect, it’s not enough to make up for the annoyances of the guests hit boxes being a little too long which led me to dying a handful of times and essentially had me rolling my eyes and sensibly chuckling at basically having to know exactly where to sprint across the tables speed run style. This could have had the potential of being a good change of pace to being an almost pure reflex section if the chef’s chapter was better, but instead it just compounds how the game trims a little too much fat.
And the last chapter really exemplifies that trimming, you simply push over a vase to get a key, do a brief and easy chase sequence, and then an incredibly bland final boss fight where you hold a mirror in a direction a handful of times, with the end of each sequence causing six to fall down briefly and forcing you wait a bit. It’s a very half assed climax to an otherwise well made game.
I saved talking about this until now cause I really don’t need to go into much detail as to how annoying these kind of sections are in games. At several points through out the game, Six will be struck with hunger, which will trigger a slow walking section. These are meant to make the player feel powerless, but the game proper already does that, Six can not fight back, she only engages in combat twice through out the entire game in the boss fights mentioned above. All these sections do is serve to annoy you and pad out the play time.
The game has a rather hands off approach to story telling and I greatly appreciated it.
The maw its self seems to be a metaphor for cyclical over consumption and the livestock industry, as the corpulent guests that seem to be an analogy for the mega rich can’t help engorging themselves on the bodies of dead humans, and even have no issue being fed the corpses of their own kind to keep themselves sustained, you also have the two chefs who are rather emotionless and indifferent in feeding into this dangerous and horrifically evil hedonism and addiction, and the janitor who works rather well as an allegory for workers who openly abuse livestock due to their perceived low value of life. While the presentation of these themes will be overly blunt for some, the execution is still good when combined with the games excellent art direction and atmosphere, combine this with the fact that the game has no voice acting or dialogue, and it makes this execution all the more effective in getting the player to think about what they experienced.
Visually Little nightmares is fantastic, and it was one of the main reasons I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if it had any other setting.
The first thing that strikes you about the maw is the scale, six is the size of a mouse in comparison to most objects and creatures around her and it makes almost every room feel oppressive and weighty in atmosphere. The lighting is incredible, with points of interest naturally hidden in shadow making you want to investigate to move forward, or moments of darkness having things be outlined just well enough to make you feel even more uneasy, and even when the rooms are brightly lit, there is still several disturbing elements and decorations, macabre paintings of murder and other monsters you never see are almost everywhere, bloody tools are displayed prominently on work benches, kitchen tables are covered in the filth from severed limbs, and so on.
The textures are quite detailed, you’ll have things like patches of rust on filing cabinets, gashes from tools on tables with fine wood, fuzzy rugs where you can count each individual strand of fabric, and lovely wet sheens coating the pipework during the transitional hallways you’ll be running through between chapters.
Then you also have the brilliance of six wearing a bright yellow coat with a distinct and unique diamond shaped hood so that the player never loses track of her when navigating the rooms. It’s clear Tariser studios wanted the visuals to enhance and compliment the game play, and they do a fantastic job at doing so.
Several paragraphs ago I mentioned that the level design its self, from a functional standpoint, is fine, and in most games it would just be ok. The point I am making here though is that even the most simple level design can be made much more enjoyable to solve when developers integrate the aesthetics of the world or tropes of the genre into them. During the janitor chase sequences for example, the fastest way to avoid him is to go through the lowest shelf, but you risk tipping over more objects he has laid there for alarms, meanwhile the safe but long way is to climb up the nearby stack of books to highest shelf. They’re simple solutions yes, but given this is a horror game, where quick pacing but slight over thinking is paramount, having two easy to execute, while still having varying levels of risk, choices to make in the moment, is brilliant. Nowadays many people assume good level design just means “execution of multiple button functions for one problem”, when it’s a broad skill that can implement many approaches.
Lastly on this, it is so refreshing to play a relatively modern game that has influences that aren’t just other video games. One of the many things I dislike about modern video games is that they have seemingly forgot that there are other forms of entertainment out there.
It seems every FPS now is inspired only by Bioshock, halo, or classic doom. It seems like every 3d platformer now is obsessed with having the player just press buttons in the air mario 64 speed run style and only make worlds based on other platformer templates. I could (and will in other reviews) go on about this, but I was so relieved that Little Nightmares’s aesthetic (and story to a small degree) influences were films like Spirited away (there’s homages everywhere, like the scene where Chihiro climbs the stairs or the guests entering the resort, and the Janitor is definitely based on Kamaji) and western horror films like Nightmare on Elm street and session 9 (you will never escape the chair), As someone who counts Spirited Away and Session 9 among his favorite films, this was great for me and fans of all three that I have mentioned will get a lot out of this game because of it. If you are tired of modern games being far too cannibalistic in terms of inspiration, this will be a breath of fresh air for you.
Musically the game is passable. You have your forgettable ambient music that most 2010s video games are so found of that thankfully isn’t intrusive due to the game being so puzzle focused, which is fine as that could be very annoying to players that are stuck. And then there’s the darker ambient tracks that will ramp up in pace when being stalked by one of the giants. If you’ve played an indie horror game in the last 12 years, you’ve heard this all before, really the only impressive thing is your controllers rumble pulsing to the beat when getting chased. Other than that, you certainly won’t be compelled enough to seek out the tracks on their own.
Little Nightmares is a good of example of less being more and taking into account just how much richer and more fulfilling video games used to be, and still can be, when they take influence from non gaming sources. In the hands of other studios, you could assume the game would just be taking cues from nothing but the resident evil remakes and outlast. But that thankfully isn’t the case. It’s a well crafted 5 hour experience that wears its film influences on its sleeves with pride and integrates the character of its world aesthetics and the tropes and needs of its genre into its level design to the full benefit of the medium it’s in. Poor music, the awful slow walking sections, and the over truncation of the last two chapters aside, it’s one of the better modern games I have played in a very long time.
8/10.
2019
Luigi’s mansion 3 is a game that made me take a good look at the modern industry as a whole. In an era where it seems developers in every region are all following the same 10-12 game play templates cause that’s what they think “good game design” is, or bloating the hell out of games with garbage filler content due to consumers constantly whining about “value for the dollar”, it’s beyond refreshing to play a game that is reasonably short enough to not overstay its welcome and is mostly brave enough to not bog down the experience with said garbage filler content. While being mechanically refreshing.
Since this is a post 2013 video game, there is some unfortunate heavy hand holding in the beginning. What starts as a funny, non intrusive tutorial on how to use the poltergust by showing how polterpup reacts to the breeze, turns into an annoying series of lectures and pop ups during game play to explain how mechanics work. I can somewhat forgive this given the games all ages appeal, but I can imagine younger players getting annoyed on subsequent playthroughs by this as well. The first game had the right approach by letting you play around in a training room until you got your bearings. That would be welcome here, as the game actually has some very visually appealing references in the menus in regards to the controls. It’s not as if the series has ever been mechanically complex either. These heavy handed tutorials aren’t worth anyone’s time.
And the combat certainly isn’t any better in that regard. It seems that Next level games is afraid to let the combat require a little dexterity to be fun, as the dumb super suction prompt from dark moon is back, but made even worse this time because it’s now a multi hit slam AOE that mogs other ghosts. I’m sure for a very young child this would be cool, but I greatly miss the slightly technical dexterity the original game required. It added a psychological edge to the combat. Luigi’s Mansion has never been a difficult series, I am not making any declaration of that here to be clear, but it really did not need this aspect watered down even more than it already was in the previous entry.
Enemy variety is also the absolute worst it has ever been in the series, with only 4 mook types you’ll be fighting over and over again (and one gimmick door ghost that shows up once in a blue moon), expect to fight the basic blue ghosts ad nauseum for almost the entire play through.
It’s not all bad on this front though. The stellar boss fights from Dark moon are back and mostly a great time. All of them have gorgeously over telegraphed attack animations and require you to use your brain to a reasonable degree to proceed. From the gardener needing you to cut his vines with a buzz saw, the pianist needing you to study his shadows and use the size of the massive arena to properly dodge his attacks, the pharaoh needing you to blow away her seat made of sand with wind as you would naturally expect, , and the eye on the prize mechanic that you deal with from three different bosses that somehow never gets old. Every boss is mostly smartly designed and a joy to fight.
I say mostly cause the final boss fight against King Boo is slightly frustrating in his final phase. You have the same eye on the prize mechanic (The game wants you to pay attention to which one tosses the correct bomb, instead follow my advice and focus on the one with four teeth, he’s the real one, you’ll thank me later if you do play this), but it’s hard to hit him if the real one is at either corner of the arena, due to the pillars at those corners causing the bombs you throw back at him to go flying elsewhere. I had to wait around until the RNG spawned the right one in the center to beat him. Other than that, he was just as well designed as the other bosses and another joy to fight.
For some reason boss fight cutscenes are unskippabble, but the game over cutscene is. So if you happen to die you’ll have to sit through a rather long pre fight scene again and this can get obnoxious fast.
There is unfortunately a broken safety net in place in the form of gold bones. They only cost one thousand coins and will spawn you right back where you died if you have any on hand. In a game that is already incredibly easy as is, this is completely pointless. The slam already does enough damage when dealing with each phase of a boss, and the game is very generous with health hearts later in the fights given how hard the bosses hit anyway. At most if you are struggling with a boss you’ll get them on your third try. Having this is dumb and is something I posit (that I also mentioned in my Dark Souls 3 review) is only in here to get people through the game as quickly as possible so they can post “highlights” on social media, when the design of the bosses should speak for themselves.
Lastly on the combat front, if you’re playing in co-op the combat will be busted wide open, as enemy AI is only designed to deal with one player at a time, and both Luigi and Googi’s slam AOEs stack and they completely break the pace of boss fights as a player who knows what they are doing can do borderline speed run tactics to take away any sense of psychological satisfaction from the puzzle aspects of the encounters.
On the level design front, the game is excellent.
You start to notice just how good it is early on, The new plunger adds a nice tactile feeling when getting objects out of the way with some weighty slams and pulls, using the plunger to pull switches or rip objects of a wall (and sometimes a weapon out of an enemies hand) is immensely satisfying. The burst jump makes for some fun novelty moments involving waves/lazers and other dangers coming at you when dealing with traps and stage hazards.
Floor 3 is a very good tutorial for how gooigi works, You have to constantly move him through specific store grates in a mall, one of them even requiring you to use both characters to open a door, making this a great primer for what most of the puzzles will consist of. The green house has a great sense of vertical scale as you slowly climb your way up the plant stalk, chipping away gradually through each densely packed plant heavy room. But far and away the best floor was the movie studio.
I really enjoyed helping Morty make his movie, from the rather clever puzzles requiring you to use your logical thinking skills to memorize portals to get a bucket of water from one set to a well in another (Which is a funny homage to the ring), then growing a plant on another set and then getting a torch lit on the next set, then finally getting his megaphone back on the final set. It all wonderfully culminates in you helping Morty make a kaiju movie. The kaiju suit the other ghost is wearing always glows differently depending on the attacks it throws, showing how well telegraphed and crafted it all is.
The puzzles are overall challenging enough to be satisfactory for all ages while not feeling brain dead easy. My favorite was the weighted scale puzzle on floor ten, where you need to use precise amounts of sand and weighted vases to solve a combination lock. It was one of the best examples of intergrating physics into game design I have seen in a long time, many games have physics engines just to have them, so this was incredible to see.
The game has generally good pacing, as you’ll have a series of shorter floors after one large one, but the game unfortunately shoots its self in the foot four times, once where you need to find a mouse who steals your button on floor 3, then two awful hunts for the polterkitty when she steals your elevator button, then you need to backtrack down a few previous floors (in a row) and when you find her, wait for her to slowly walk behind you before you flash her with your light and then slam her, before going on your way. And then there’s a macguffin hunt where you need to rescue a toad and get a poltergust upgrade part back (for a one time set-piece that feels tacked on), then take the long way around from a floor you already explored, constantly getting stopped by monster closets where you engage in the boring mook combat until you get back on track.
Said monster closets become a major issue on late game floors. As they are far shorter to finish with far fewer puzzles to help the game not feel bogged down, but as I just mentioned said monster closets do exactly that, it got so bad that I knew after solving a puzzle I would encounter another eye rolling, mindless combat section blatantly placed there to pad out the length in the next room or back in the hallways.
There isn’t any psychological edge to the level design, dark moon lacked it too and the original had it in spades. You just go through the motions each floor and while I did enjoy my time in most of them as I gave examples above, the hotel really doesn’t feel like a hotel at all, but instead a series of theme parks from a “world template checklist”. The constant back tracking in the first game through similar yet different enough rooms got you intimately familiar with the mansion, it made the game feel extremely cohesive and made the mansion feel like a warped outlier in the mario franchise, and while I understand the criticism of the boos being mandatory, that game gave you more than enough hints to go after them while back tracking and punished you heavily late game if you didn’t. These “I should have done that” or “I should have thought of that” moments are defining aspects of the medium that make it unique and compelling. This could have been mitigated some what if after a floor was cleared, it would look like an actual floor, but alas that doesn’t happen. Ghosts respwan when you revisit making your progression feel a bit moot and it doesn’t lead to a conclusive sense of satisfaction.
The game does feature online multiplayer modes, and just like dark moon they aren’t very good. Scare scrapper is interesting for about half an hour before you’re going through the same 4 bland objectives over and over again. Engaging in the boring combat and just sucking up money or pressing X to find toads in the same few bland rooms. Scream park fairs slightly better, as you have Luigis using the mechanics in creative ways like using Burst to put hockey pucks in a net, or collecting coins while working around the games impressive physics engine, but once you’ve played every mode, you’ve seen everything this tacked on feature has to offer. Multiplayer has always gimped single player focused games in some way, and it would be vastly preferable if developers used those resources for a more polished single player experience, a good game will have replay value simply on the virtue of being good. You don’t need bloat like multiplayer to encourage re-playability.
And on that note about bloat, the boo hunts return in single player , as well as the gems from dark moon. But they are pointless to go after as the rewards you get are very underwhelming cosmetics. Getting all boos (who don’t even feel unique this time, you capture them like any other ghost) gets you a boo themed flashlight, and a diamond nozzle for the poltergust. These tacked on fetch quests would be a bit more tolerable if the rewards meant anything, but they’re just your standard modern game “value for the dollar” bloated garbage that damn near every game is plagued with now.
The story is nothing to write home about, for what it’s worth the plot never ventures into being any sort of bad, at best and worst it’s an inoffensive kid friendly story. The cutscenes do a good job conveying that Mario charm and cuteness the franchise is known for, but as someone who adores the original Luigi’s mansion, I take heavy umbrage with the “Mario” part of that direction.
The original Luigi’s Mansion was unique among the vast Mario IP because it had almost no cutsey sillyness. Sure, the portrait ghosts did some goofy things here and there, but for the most part, it was a PG horror style atmosphere where the ghosts acted like actual monsters rather than the school yard bullies enemies in other mario games act as. Luigi’s fear felt real because he was out of his element, with his desire to save his brother pushing him forward in spite of the other worldly danger he had to face.
With 3, the unfortunately goofy ghosts are back and even more obnoxious at points. The first game feels like a genuine outlier tonally now, as the light horror has gone into full fisher price horror, the mook ghosts are constantly shown goofing off, breaking things they accidentally drop, making silly faces, and other such child friendly things to appeal to fans of the Mario IP. It makes sense for Luigi to be scared by actual monsters that act very animalistic and destructive, it makes less sense for him to be spooked by what equates to spectral preteens with attitude.
Even the most simple stories can be enjoyable with the correct atmosphere and visual story telling, and 3 is heavily lacking in this regard.
What it isn’t lacking in is visual prowess. The series has always been a technical showcase for the platform it’s on, and 3 is no exception. It’s a mostly gorgeous game. Real time reflections are near flawless, gorgeously detailed shadows are abundant, and textures show incredible depth like stitching in clothes to scratch marks in gold doors.
And while I do have an issue with how the “theme park template” leads to a less cohesive feeling world, I won’t deny that the art direction was incredible. Each floor’s visual aesthetic clearly has a ton of effort and care put in to try an immerse you in that floors theme, from swashbuckling pirate treasure coves and medieval dungeons filled with traps, to pristine and clean gyms and a claustrophobic pyramid. It’s highly likely you’ll have at least one floor you’ll love based on theme you like, as Next Level games did an admirable job in trying to appeal to a wide range of subjects. As an old man the lack of cohesion to me is disappointing. But if you have a young child they’ll probably have a few floors they’ll really love as there’s bound to be one with a subject that is line with an intense interest they have.
The physics are a joy to play around with. Objects react realistically to how far away the vacuum is and fly away or toward you accordingly, smaller soft objects will even warp inward when being sucked up and objects you shoot out from the vacuum will change how much they bounce of walls depending on how far away you are. I was so impressed with how the sand reacted when sucking it up on floor ten that I spent a good 45 minutes just playing around with the sand physics there. The engine never stopped impressing me.
Unfortunately there is some ugly as hell bloom at the start. When you first enter the hotel you are blasted with such a powerful blooming glow it’s genuinely laugh out loud worthy, even the blooming text early on has bloom and it looks god awful. Thankfully once the ghosts reveal themselves, this ceases to be a problem.
The UI is very nice looking and inspired, with the main menu being an actual virtual boy, so you get some deep warm reds and sharp blacks to give a very other wordly vibe. And while I do dislike the goofy tone that has taken over the series as I mentioned previously, I do always like that Nintendo never pretends that the virtual boy never existed despite being a massive failure and always gives funny self deprecating homages to their coolest failure every once in a while. These small jokey homages are perfectly fine so long as they are done sparingly and not made over the top. Which is the case here.
The switch is more than capable of making some beautiful games (every system is), so it’s nice to play a game as beautiful as this one with such a well crafted physics engine under neath.
Music is the weakest aspect of the game, and always has been for the entire series, I doubt you’ll find even the most ardent Luigi’s mansion mega fans able to name a track beyond the main theme. You have your spooky whistles and string sections as you’d expect, and fast paced horns for combat sections. Really the only track that stands out is E.gadd’s shop theme. As it sounds like something you’d hear in an anime licensed game from the 2000s, with its fast paced warm and welcoming midi instruments and comfy synths.
While it’s a heavily flawed game with the modern trappings of bloat and extreme easiness that contemporary games are plagued with, I enjoyed Luigi’s mansion 3. The level design is a satisfying series of strong puzzles and boss fights in spite of the boring combat, the visuals are outstanding and the music is unoffensive. The fisher price horror atmosphere carrying over from dark moon is disappointing, as well as the cheap tacked on multiplayer and pointless boo and gem hunts, topped off with some annoying blatantly padded macguffin hunts. Despite that, it’s refreshing to play a solidly made, fun game that isn’t following the same 10-12 “good game design” templates that every game of every budget seems to be doing now, even if it’s a new entry an established franchise.
I’m no fan of the series becoming more and more kid friendly with each entry, but at the same time if you have younger relatives like I do, a game like this would actually be very good for them. The puzzles require moderate amounts of logical thought, the floors will probably appeal to an interest they have, and the very simple combat is flashy enough to make them feel cool. A child could be playing something far worse and less appropriate for their age group, so at the very least, a parent would have a good option in this game for something that might challenge their child in a decent way.
7/10.
Since this is a post 2013 video game, there is some unfortunate heavy hand holding in the beginning. What starts as a funny, non intrusive tutorial on how to use the poltergust by showing how polterpup reacts to the breeze, turns into an annoying series of lectures and pop ups during game play to explain how mechanics work. I can somewhat forgive this given the games all ages appeal, but I can imagine younger players getting annoyed on subsequent playthroughs by this as well. The first game had the right approach by letting you play around in a training room until you got your bearings. That would be welcome here, as the game actually has some very visually appealing references in the menus in regards to the controls. It’s not as if the series has ever been mechanically complex either. These heavy handed tutorials aren’t worth anyone’s time.
And the combat certainly isn’t any better in that regard. It seems that Next level games is afraid to let the combat require a little dexterity to be fun, as the dumb super suction prompt from dark moon is back, but made even worse this time because it’s now a multi hit slam AOE that mogs other ghosts. I’m sure for a very young child this would be cool, but I greatly miss the slightly technical dexterity the original game required. It added a psychological edge to the combat. Luigi’s Mansion has never been a difficult series, I am not making any declaration of that here to be clear, but it really did not need this aspect watered down even more than it already was in the previous entry.
Enemy variety is also the absolute worst it has ever been in the series, with only 4 mook types you’ll be fighting over and over again (and one gimmick door ghost that shows up once in a blue moon), expect to fight the basic blue ghosts ad nauseum for almost the entire play through.
It’s not all bad on this front though. The stellar boss fights from Dark moon are back and mostly a great time. All of them have gorgeously over telegraphed attack animations and require you to use your brain to a reasonable degree to proceed. From the gardener needing you to cut his vines with a buzz saw, the pianist needing you to study his shadows and use the size of the massive arena to properly dodge his attacks, the pharaoh needing you to blow away her seat made of sand with wind as you would naturally expect, , and the eye on the prize mechanic that you deal with from three different bosses that somehow never gets old. Every boss is mostly smartly designed and a joy to fight.
I say mostly cause the final boss fight against King Boo is slightly frustrating in his final phase. You have the same eye on the prize mechanic (The game wants you to pay attention to which one tosses the correct bomb, instead follow my advice and focus on the one with four teeth, he’s the real one, you’ll thank me later if you do play this), but it’s hard to hit him if the real one is at either corner of the arena, due to the pillars at those corners causing the bombs you throw back at him to go flying elsewhere. I had to wait around until the RNG spawned the right one in the center to beat him. Other than that, he was just as well designed as the other bosses and another joy to fight.
For some reason boss fight cutscenes are unskippabble, but the game over cutscene is. So if you happen to die you’ll have to sit through a rather long pre fight scene again and this can get obnoxious fast.
There is unfortunately a broken safety net in place in the form of gold bones. They only cost one thousand coins and will spawn you right back where you died if you have any on hand. In a game that is already incredibly easy as is, this is completely pointless. The slam already does enough damage when dealing with each phase of a boss, and the game is very generous with health hearts later in the fights given how hard the bosses hit anyway. At most if you are struggling with a boss you’ll get them on your third try. Having this is dumb and is something I posit (that I also mentioned in my Dark Souls 3 review) is only in here to get people through the game as quickly as possible so they can post “highlights” on social media, when the design of the bosses should speak for themselves.
Lastly on the combat front, if you’re playing in co-op the combat will be busted wide open, as enemy AI is only designed to deal with one player at a time, and both Luigi and Googi’s slam AOEs stack and they completely break the pace of boss fights as a player who knows what they are doing can do borderline speed run tactics to take away any sense of psychological satisfaction from the puzzle aspects of the encounters.
On the level design front, the game is excellent.
You start to notice just how good it is early on, The new plunger adds a nice tactile feeling when getting objects out of the way with some weighty slams and pulls, using the plunger to pull switches or rip objects of a wall (and sometimes a weapon out of an enemies hand) is immensely satisfying. The burst jump makes for some fun novelty moments involving waves/lazers and other dangers coming at you when dealing with traps and stage hazards.
Floor 3 is a very good tutorial for how gooigi works, You have to constantly move him through specific store grates in a mall, one of them even requiring you to use both characters to open a door, making this a great primer for what most of the puzzles will consist of. The green house has a great sense of vertical scale as you slowly climb your way up the plant stalk, chipping away gradually through each densely packed plant heavy room. But far and away the best floor was the movie studio.
I really enjoyed helping Morty make his movie, from the rather clever puzzles requiring you to use your logical thinking skills to memorize portals to get a bucket of water from one set to a well in another (Which is a funny homage to the ring), then growing a plant on another set and then getting a torch lit on the next set, then finally getting his megaphone back on the final set. It all wonderfully culminates in you helping Morty make a kaiju movie. The kaiju suit the other ghost is wearing always glows differently depending on the attacks it throws, showing how well telegraphed and crafted it all is.
The puzzles are overall challenging enough to be satisfactory for all ages while not feeling brain dead easy. My favorite was the weighted scale puzzle on floor ten, where you need to use precise amounts of sand and weighted vases to solve a combination lock. It was one of the best examples of intergrating physics into game design I have seen in a long time, many games have physics engines just to have them, so this was incredible to see.
The game has generally good pacing, as you’ll have a series of shorter floors after one large one, but the game unfortunately shoots its self in the foot four times, once where you need to find a mouse who steals your button on floor 3, then two awful hunts for the polterkitty when she steals your elevator button, then you need to backtrack down a few previous floors (in a row) and when you find her, wait for her to slowly walk behind you before you flash her with your light and then slam her, before going on your way. And then there’s a macguffin hunt where you need to rescue a toad and get a poltergust upgrade part back (for a one time set-piece that feels tacked on), then take the long way around from a floor you already explored, constantly getting stopped by monster closets where you engage in the boring mook combat until you get back on track.
Said monster closets become a major issue on late game floors. As they are far shorter to finish with far fewer puzzles to help the game not feel bogged down, but as I just mentioned said monster closets do exactly that, it got so bad that I knew after solving a puzzle I would encounter another eye rolling, mindless combat section blatantly placed there to pad out the length in the next room or back in the hallways.
There isn’t any psychological edge to the level design, dark moon lacked it too and the original had it in spades. You just go through the motions each floor and while I did enjoy my time in most of them as I gave examples above, the hotel really doesn’t feel like a hotel at all, but instead a series of theme parks from a “world template checklist”. The constant back tracking in the first game through similar yet different enough rooms got you intimately familiar with the mansion, it made the game feel extremely cohesive and made the mansion feel like a warped outlier in the mario franchise, and while I understand the criticism of the boos being mandatory, that game gave you more than enough hints to go after them while back tracking and punished you heavily late game if you didn’t. These “I should have done that” or “I should have thought of that” moments are defining aspects of the medium that make it unique and compelling. This could have been mitigated some what if after a floor was cleared, it would look like an actual floor, but alas that doesn’t happen. Ghosts respwan when you revisit making your progression feel a bit moot and it doesn’t lead to a conclusive sense of satisfaction.
The game does feature online multiplayer modes, and just like dark moon they aren’t very good. Scare scrapper is interesting for about half an hour before you’re going through the same 4 bland objectives over and over again. Engaging in the boring combat and just sucking up money or pressing X to find toads in the same few bland rooms. Scream park fairs slightly better, as you have Luigis using the mechanics in creative ways like using Burst to put hockey pucks in a net, or collecting coins while working around the games impressive physics engine, but once you’ve played every mode, you’ve seen everything this tacked on feature has to offer. Multiplayer has always gimped single player focused games in some way, and it would be vastly preferable if developers used those resources for a more polished single player experience, a good game will have replay value simply on the virtue of being good. You don’t need bloat like multiplayer to encourage re-playability.
And on that note about bloat, the boo hunts return in single player , as well as the gems from dark moon. But they are pointless to go after as the rewards you get are very underwhelming cosmetics. Getting all boos (who don’t even feel unique this time, you capture them like any other ghost) gets you a boo themed flashlight, and a diamond nozzle for the poltergust. These tacked on fetch quests would be a bit more tolerable if the rewards meant anything, but they’re just your standard modern game “value for the dollar” bloated garbage that damn near every game is plagued with now.
The story is nothing to write home about, for what it’s worth the plot never ventures into being any sort of bad, at best and worst it’s an inoffensive kid friendly story. The cutscenes do a good job conveying that Mario charm and cuteness the franchise is known for, but as someone who adores the original Luigi’s mansion, I take heavy umbrage with the “Mario” part of that direction.
The original Luigi’s Mansion was unique among the vast Mario IP because it had almost no cutsey sillyness. Sure, the portrait ghosts did some goofy things here and there, but for the most part, it was a PG horror style atmosphere where the ghosts acted like actual monsters rather than the school yard bullies enemies in other mario games act as. Luigi’s fear felt real because he was out of his element, with his desire to save his brother pushing him forward in spite of the other worldly danger he had to face.
With 3, the unfortunately goofy ghosts are back and even more obnoxious at points. The first game feels like a genuine outlier tonally now, as the light horror has gone into full fisher price horror, the mook ghosts are constantly shown goofing off, breaking things they accidentally drop, making silly faces, and other such child friendly things to appeal to fans of the Mario IP. It makes sense for Luigi to be scared by actual monsters that act very animalistic and destructive, it makes less sense for him to be spooked by what equates to spectral preteens with attitude.
Even the most simple stories can be enjoyable with the correct atmosphere and visual story telling, and 3 is heavily lacking in this regard.
What it isn’t lacking in is visual prowess. The series has always been a technical showcase for the platform it’s on, and 3 is no exception. It’s a mostly gorgeous game. Real time reflections are near flawless, gorgeously detailed shadows are abundant, and textures show incredible depth like stitching in clothes to scratch marks in gold doors.
And while I do have an issue with how the “theme park template” leads to a less cohesive feeling world, I won’t deny that the art direction was incredible. Each floor’s visual aesthetic clearly has a ton of effort and care put in to try an immerse you in that floors theme, from swashbuckling pirate treasure coves and medieval dungeons filled with traps, to pristine and clean gyms and a claustrophobic pyramid. It’s highly likely you’ll have at least one floor you’ll love based on theme you like, as Next Level games did an admirable job in trying to appeal to a wide range of subjects. As an old man the lack of cohesion to me is disappointing. But if you have a young child they’ll probably have a few floors they’ll really love as there’s bound to be one with a subject that is line with an intense interest they have.
The physics are a joy to play around with. Objects react realistically to how far away the vacuum is and fly away or toward you accordingly, smaller soft objects will even warp inward when being sucked up and objects you shoot out from the vacuum will change how much they bounce of walls depending on how far away you are. I was so impressed with how the sand reacted when sucking it up on floor ten that I spent a good 45 minutes just playing around with the sand physics there. The engine never stopped impressing me.
Unfortunately there is some ugly as hell bloom at the start. When you first enter the hotel you are blasted with such a powerful blooming glow it’s genuinely laugh out loud worthy, even the blooming text early on has bloom and it looks god awful. Thankfully once the ghosts reveal themselves, this ceases to be a problem.
The UI is very nice looking and inspired, with the main menu being an actual virtual boy, so you get some deep warm reds and sharp blacks to give a very other wordly vibe. And while I do dislike the goofy tone that has taken over the series as I mentioned previously, I do always like that Nintendo never pretends that the virtual boy never existed despite being a massive failure and always gives funny self deprecating homages to their coolest failure every once in a while. These small jokey homages are perfectly fine so long as they are done sparingly and not made over the top. Which is the case here.
The switch is more than capable of making some beautiful games (every system is), so it’s nice to play a game as beautiful as this one with such a well crafted physics engine under neath.
Music is the weakest aspect of the game, and always has been for the entire series, I doubt you’ll find even the most ardent Luigi’s mansion mega fans able to name a track beyond the main theme. You have your spooky whistles and string sections as you’d expect, and fast paced horns for combat sections. Really the only track that stands out is E.gadd’s shop theme. As it sounds like something you’d hear in an anime licensed game from the 2000s, with its fast paced warm and welcoming midi instruments and comfy synths.
While it’s a heavily flawed game with the modern trappings of bloat and extreme easiness that contemporary games are plagued with, I enjoyed Luigi’s mansion 3. The level design is a satisfying series of strong puzzles and boss fights in spite of the boring combat, the visuals are outstanding and the music is unoffensive. The fisher price horror atmosphere carrying over from dark moon is disappointing, as well as the cheap tacked on multiplayer and pointless boo and gem hunts, topped off with some annoying blatantly padded macguffin hunts. Despite that, it’s refreshing to play a solidly made, fun game that isn’t following the same 10-12 “good game design” templates that every game of every budget seems to be doing now, even if it’s a new entry an established franchise.
I’m no fan of the series becoming more and more kid friendly with each entry, but at the same time if you have younger relatives like I do, a game like this would actually be very good for them. The puzzles require moderate amounts of logical thought, the floors will probably appeal to an interest they have, and the very simple combat is flashy enough to make them feel cool. A child could be playing something far worse and less appropriate for their age group, so at the very least, a parent would have a good option in this game for something that might challenge their child in a decent way.
7/10.
2016
The legacy of mediocrity reaches its grand finale.
Before I begin I need to address some things in case they are brought up in the comments, as I have had genuine idiots start fights with me on my previous souls-borne reviews over the dumbest capital G gamer shit. I will number these points and I have taken care to truncate them to be as concise and brief as possible, if you wish to skip on down to the review proper, control+F to “Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland”. I understand that my reviews on this site are incredibly long as is, but I have to bring these up.
1. I have been accused by Souls fans on here of “Not explaining things” because the explanations I give are not to their personal satisfaction, just because someone’s point isn’t something you would like to digest, does not mean they did not explain something. When I say things like “Ranged Magic and Co-op break bosses cause they only focus one player cause their AI is only built for one player”, that is an explanation. I do not need to do animation by animation break downs of every single boss or regular enemy. That would make this hundreds of paragraphs long and that is ridiculous to expect.
2. I do not care about your personal play style or about how you played the game. This is a review. I have to take a different approach when playing the game for that reason. I have to test what mechanics are well made and which ones are poorly balanced and broken. I can not “just ignore it”, a flaw in a product does not vanish by just not paying attention to it, it is fair game to criticize it for existing as that is what a review does. I am giving the game an EXAM, this is not an ADVERTISEMENT.
3.Reviews and advertisements ARE NOT the same thing, a review tells you the pros and cons of a product, from a THIRD PARTY. An advertisement only tells you what the company trying to get you to buy the product wants you to think the selling points are. I am not here to validate your preconceived opinions of a game you already like (or dislike). If you like these games, that’s fine, but if you come at me, I will defend my position. If I have already debunked something, I am not going to waste my time (or yours) arguing against it again. Think before you respond.
4. If you want to play these games a certain way, have at it! But I am not here to validate said challenge runs or play styles, when I say a mechanic is pointless cause there is an objectively better option, I, and let me be CLEAR, AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO STOP PLAYING THAT WAY. I can not believe I have to clarify this to grown men and women on a video game website but Souls fans for what ever reason really struggle to comprehend this.
5. While in the last year and a half I have reviewed DLC packs and expansions as their own games, to remain consistent with my previous Souls reviews, I will integrate the DLC into the entire review proper. I will do this by using examples from both DLC packs when talking about the game play, graphics, music etc.
Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland, designed by committee, boring jrpgs I have played in years. From soft has learned almost absolutely nothing from their previous four mediocre jrpgs in this mediocre franchise.
Now lets address the “almost” first. It took them five whole games, but they finally fixed the estus mechanic that was always some form of fucked in the previous games and ruined any kind of intended tension (Grasses, Humanities and Crystals in DeS, DS1 and 2, needing to grind for vials in BB). You can not use other recovery items this time, and you must choose between health and magic estus depending on your equipment load out. You are given a little more than enough estus to get through an area and your estus restores a good third of your health, making it actually feel important this time, rather than just another healing option that previous entries were plagued with.
This however comes at the expense of the level design. BloodBorne’s big rooms of nothing and long hallways with item nooks return with a vengeance here, you will never get lost as you just have to explore a big room’s nooks then go straight, or a narrow hallway’s nooks and go straight. It’s honestly pathetic at how under designed every area feels. There is very little if any genuine traps, with the only area in the game feeling genuinely designed being the catacombs with its arrow flinging button traps and massive bone spheres. But those aren’t even common enough in that area to feel threatening, only appearing once and twice respectively. Shortcuts also feel less like shortcuts more like regular elevators at this point, there isn’t a rewarding feeling in finding them, because the areas don’t take that long to navigate in the first place, given how much ground you cover while running back and forth.
There are some occasional stage hazards like giants and archers, but aside from a conjuring giant in the ringed city, killing these hazards eliminates them permanently and removes any further tension, the aformentioned giant isn’t even that much of a threat, as a few charged R2s from a high level weapon kill him in a few hits.
The game has completely given up any psychological aspect to the world and navigation. While DS2 and BB let you warp anywhere you have been from the start, they at the very least gave each of the bonfires in an area plenty of space to at least TRY and add some sort of tension, despite how easy those games were. DS3 has zero tension.
Bonfires are constant, take for example the undead settlement. The placement of the second bonfire in the undead settlement is laugh out loud worthy. Being right behind the first gate you stroll up to from when you arrive in 60 seconds. This is a problem all the way to the late game, after killing the Dragon slayer armour and lighting his bonfire, there is another bonfire right next to it at the entrance to the grand archives, for example.
The reason there are so many bonfires so close to each other can only mean one thing. It’s no secret that Sony and Namco use these games false perception of being “difficult” for marketing purposes, and with so many plentiful bonfires for checkpoints, you can just feel the cynicism in the design here as this is clearly made to help streamers and youtubers make quick and cheap “rage compilations” for free advertisement. If you actually play these games like the JRPGs they are however, that intended cynical design falls flat on its ass.
I will say this however, Dark Souls 3 is very good at conveying a sense of scale, due to how close the camera is to you this time and how tall the geometry is, the world feels massive. And the draw distance and landmarks of where you have been and will get too are a nice touch when at a high elevation.
On the surface it seems that from soft has tried to make ranged magic less useful and more balanced than previous games. The MP bar from Demons souls makes a return and the only way to restore it is with blue estus, and unless you start as a pyromancer or sorcerer, the bar is much smaller to compensate and try to make you use your melee weapon more. The stamina bar is also made small at the start to try and convince you to invest in endurance early to roll more often. Of course the gains to FP are quite high if you invest early on, I boosted all the way to 30 FP and had more than enough FP for boss fights so long as I took along two magic estus. And with as little as 30 endurance you’ll have more than enough stamina to block and roll your way to easy kills. With around 40 strength and 20 dex, 35 intelligence and 35 faith 100% of enemies and all but one boss in the game is a matter of when you will kill them than if.
A heavy investment in Vitality is also obviously needed to wear some pieces of heavy armour and for holding great shields that can fully absorb or mitigate attacks. And as long as you keep your preferred weapon upgraded (any weapon in the game will serve you well till the end game pretty much with few exceptions, I used an early game dark sword infused with a heavy gem for my entire run) you’ll find that the RPG mechanics of the game once again break the action parts of the advertised “tough” game play wide open once again.
You may be wondering why I listed my stats two paragraphs ago that high, and that’s due to the fact that exp gain in DS3 is very high, most likely to help along streamers so they can quickly power up and power through more of the game to make more cheap rage compilation content. A good 20 or so hours grinding in the high wall will make you more than strong enough for the endgame (most regular play throughs of this I studied had normal, everyday people, beating this in the mid 60s), hammering home just how easy these games have always been.
I said earlier that the attempt to balance out magic was only on the surface, and here’s why, enemy AI from the dregs outside the fire link shrine to the soul of cinder have no way of countering magic and pyromancies as their AI is entirely focused on on melee fighting, again, even if they don’t get stun locked when hit with ranged magic, they still zerg rush you like morons and by the time they reach you, if a regular enemy, you’ll be able to finish them off easily with your melee weapon. Even enemies that do cast magic make the effort to get close enough to you so can dash towards them, which makes them revert to melee mode, and ruins any potential solution to this classic flaw of the franchise.
Pyromanices are incredibly overpowered in the game, this seems intentional, given the massive circle jerk of fire related imagery and themes being drilled into you to drive the plot forward and establish the lore of the game. It’s not going to be an uncommon strategy to summon a helper for a boss and snipe them from afar with great fire ball and watch their HP melt. Some bosses are even more flammable solo, like aldritch, as simply having the grass crest shield, the chloranthony ring and a quick r1 finger is more than enough to kill him in less than 90 seconds with great fire ball.
The bosses haven’t improved from Bloodborne (or any of the previous four games really). They are still completely lost when you summon and snipe them with magic. And the DPS of either AI or especially a human partner is so high that the extra health they get from summons matters little. The bigger bosses are still camera devouring monstrosities that are genuinely laughable given how bad your visibility is when they get close, as the camera is not, and has never been, designed around enemies that large and it makes fighting them more a battle with the camera than the intended eldritch gods they want you to think you are fighting.
The game is also strangely obsessed with giving many of the bosses multiple phases. While this is common in JRPGs, these are more meant for skill checks to make sure the player isn’t mindlessly brute forcing their way through the game and in general are used sparingly. DS3 of course has dozens of multi phase bosses starting with the Abyss watchers all the way to the Soul of Cinder. To balance these fights out these bosses have less health than usual ones, but this makes the laughable action part of the combat even more so, because when you actually play these games as the RPGs they are instead of the circle button youtube rage compilations they aren’t. You see how poorly thought out so many aspects of them really are. As the lower health pools mean fuck all when you actually level up and equip properly.
There is one boss that is an exception to most of these criticisms. Dark eater Midir is an optional boss you fight in the ringed city, and the way you need to fight him is via casting poison magic. Since he has the most HP of any boss in the game, this means the poison will do 1K damage to him each time due to its scaling effect, which is critical to wear him down quickly, otherwise, you will most likely run out of estus due to how strong his attacks are. Co-op is a non factor for this fight as it will just bloat his health and fuck you over, and he resists magic and pyromancies. If he wasn’t huge and devoured the camera, the series could have had its first genuinely good boss fight, but alas, you should never underestimate souls games for underachieving.
The combat in general feels like it was retroactively changed to be more like bloodborne at the last minute. Enemies and bosses are much more aggressive and are more prone to use combo attacks, it’s clear that From soft has gone all in on the R1+circle button simulator jokes, as the hit boxes on boss and regular mook attacks are less about blocking and whacking R1 at the right time, and more rolling and then hitting R1. This becomes less and less of an issue the more you invest in stamina and upgrade your shields, but it’s still hilarious that from soft turned the combat into what even their own fans jokingly refer to it as.
Invasions are still annoying and immersion breaking. They’ve never added anything to enhance these games and have always been a tacked on multiplayer feature that should have died along with the 7th generation when that plagued damn near every game. Thankfully I always leveled high enough to mitigate this annoyance, but still had my fair share of them, which forced me to use the broken Alt F4 build before carrying on with the session. What’s especially funny is that the game has a separate PVP mode which isn’t available until very late in the game. Why invasions are even here anymore is baffling considering it was given its own dedicated mode that could prevent any of these annoyances from occurring in the first place.
Visually Dark souls 3 is as strong as you would expect from the series now. Stunning lighting and impressively huge level geometry are paired with detailed textures like scratches and gashes in your shields and armour, chips in your melee weapons sharp ends, and lovely cloth physics that flow elegantly and realistically. This is topped of with some amazing particle effects. Attacks feel like they have a strong effect when you see an explosion of sparks or magic dust.
Unfortunately due to the fire themed circle jerking in the story, your character pulsates an ugly and gaudy ember effect. This just bizarre to see as almost none of the enemies have this effect and look stunning regardless. We already know the player character is fire themed due to being called the ashen one, an ugly ember effect is not needed.
The animations are the best in the series so far, for as bland and mediocre as the boss fights are, the gorgeous and over exaggerated animations of the Abyss watchers unorthodox great sword swings, the animalistic claw swipes of the wyverns and midir, and many others are a sight to behold. Regular mook attacks are on the same level. With some like the tar demons pulsating pustules changing depending on the attack being an outstanding detail.
Menu UI has been fixed again, with BloodBorne's awful and unintuitive vertical menus gone. DS2’s horizontal menus return and the layouts do an excellent job of showing you where everything is, you even have dented tabs at the top this time to eliminate any possible confusion.
Musically, Dark Souls 3 is mostly quite bland.
While legendary video game composer Motoi Saukraba does return, he only does a handful of tracks this time. Said tracks are the best in the game, as Sakuraba is a master of his craft. Vordt of the Boreal Valley’s powerful horn section and thundering percussion set a strong first impression when you encounter the game’s first real boss. Then there’s Curse Rotted Greatwoods ominous strings and haunted chants, the foreboding violins of Crystal Sages, the scatter shot booming horns of Wolnir and the Bombastic fast paced tempo of Nameless King that sounds like it was ripped straight out of the Tales games. These will be the highlight of the game musically for you and don’t disappoint.
Most of the tracks are composed by Yuka Kitamura, and while she does a generally competent job, it’s very easy to notice she’s more or less just trying to copy Sakuraba’s style but rely more heavily on violins. The majority of her tracks start off the same way, with a big booming hook, followed by heavy use of violins. There is talent here and from what I have sampled of her Sekiro score (I have not played that one yet), she really comes into her own in that game. In the case of DS3, it seems more that she’s composing in a style that doesn’t suit her and it falls flat due to that.
I’ve saved talking about the story till last cause it’s nothing special.
In my Dark Souls 2 review I touched upon that the conclusive, makes you wonder what may happen but good enough endings to Dark Souls 1 was made completely pointless by the existence of Dark souls 2, the choices you can make in that game are also nullified by the existence of Dark souls 3, as both protagonists chose to link the flame and continue the world as is. Dark Souls 3, to its credit, does try and work with this buy having the linking of the flame become a tradition of sorts, which each successive linker becoming a lord of cinder. And toys with this tradition by having the linking of the flame not happen for what seems like hundreds or even thousands of years. The previous Lords of Cinder have gone mad during this time and it is up to the Ashen one to link the flame yet again before it is to late.
A solid premise on paper, but the execution is as expected, quite poor and under cooked. The story in typical souls fashion is presented in a very bare bones way and you are expected to get more from the lore of the world than the actual plot proper. You collect your lords of cinders ashes, and then make one of three choices that do nothing interesting with the souls formula. You become a god and subjugate the masses, link the flame and preserve the world, or let it die. All of these choices transpire in very brief cut scenes before fading to black. Given the series hasn’t continued at the time I post this, it seems that the choices are actual weighty choices now, but ring hollow with how bare bones the story is, being nothing but a quick premise, uninteresting macguffin hunt, and then rushed choices.
The side quests don’t feel fulfilling but this is to be expected, as they’ve always felt more like tacked on framing devices to get rings and spells rather than genuine side stories in a (on paper) rich world seemingly brimming with information. You will know that people like Greirat and Sirrius will die as that’s just how these games go at this point, and you’ll roll your eyes and power through to get the good equipment their quest will bring you in spite of their half assed implementation.
The lore this time isn’t even a modicum of interesting due to Lothric being Lordran several centuries in the future. DS3 is filled to the brim with lazy pandering towards DS1, like Oscars corpse being right in front of you at the start to give you your estus, Anor Londo briefly returning for cheap nostalgia claps, and the final boss fight taking place in the Kiln of the first flame which also plays Gywnn’s theme in the second phase, just to name a few of many eye rolling homages you will encounter.
The original characters for this game don’t feel interesting at all due the fact that they just contribute to the theme of cycles that the trilogy is built around. The lords of cinder for example are just people who did the same thing DS1 and 2 hero did and they’re nothing more than obstacles in your path due to how underwritten everything is.
Both DLC packs like the base game share the premise of a solid idea of a plot on paper but like the base game suffer from extremely skeletal, bare minimum execution to even forgetting the premise near the end in Ringed City’s case.
Arriendel’s premise of a magical world found inside a painting fading away due to the painting in the real world starting to rot due to not being preserved well is a very interesting idea. But aside from a few houses full of pus and fleshy walls, and anthropomorphic birds with huge rotten penises (yeah I don’t know how to parse that either), that premise is barely touched upon, and when you do finish the DLC, your entire journey feels like it was meaningless because you just accelerated what was already happening in the first place.
That leaves us with the Ringed City. Another interesting premise, the Ringed City which takes place in the same sort of dimension the Kiln is in, presents it’s self as a “Landfill of realms” so to speak. But this “Landfill of realms” is really just window dressing. Sure you’ll see buildings from Dark Souls 1 and 2 along the way, but the actual plot, if you can call it that, is about you confronting Gael at the end of the world to get a hold of the Dark soul, which he has been devouring pieces of before he returns to his niece in the painted world to save it. You then kill Gael and the hyped up “Grand finale of the soulsborne franchise” just kind of ends with him falling over, you don’t even get a cut scene for this. It makes the Ringed City feel incredibly unfinished, and given how I just described it in the entire paragraph, it probably was unfinished and rushed out.
Dark Souls 3 is a mediocre cap off to a mediocre franchise. Filled with both cynical design choices like plentiful bonfires to help along the uninformed twitch streamer rage compilation audience, to continued poorly designed boss fights, ok at best combat, under designed levels, bland music and a bare bones, by the numbers soulsborne plot that does nothing interesting with the formula. It was one of the blandest, most low effort JRPGs I have ever played and in this franchise that is saying something.
There has never been anything special about this series, its reputation as “difficult”, that comes from deceptive advertisements deliberately targeted at people who have never played a JRPG in their life, is far more anger inducing than any of the games could ever hope to be. Its mechanics it apes and takes from other series are also done much better in those inspirations. The only remarkable thing about these games has been an incredible talent at underachieving with their potential. From soft can not make action JRPGs with Zelda combat, but they can make interesting on paper worlds. A narrower, non RPG focus is something I feel would lead to a much better output from this developer, and the existence of Sekiro and Armoured core 6 at a glance feel like a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, those are better than the mediocrity this franchise has plagued the entire medium with since 2009.
4/10.
Before I begin I need to address some things in case they are brought up in the comments, as I have had genuine idiots start fights with me on my previous souls-borne reviews over the dumbest capital G gamer shit. I will number these points and I have taken care to truncate them to be as concise and brief as possible, if you wish to skip on down to the review proper, control+F to “Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland”. I understand that my reviews on this site are incredibly long as is, but I have to bring these up.
1. I have been accused by Souls fans on here of “Not explaining things” because the explanations I give are not to their personal satisfaction, just because someone’s point isn’t something you would like to digest, does not mean they did not explain something. When I say things like “Ranged Magic and Co-op break bosses cause they only focus one player cause their AI is only built for one player”, that is an explanation. I do not need to do animation by animation break downs of every single boss or regular enemy. That would make this hundreds of paragraphs long and that is ridiculous to expect.
2. I do not care about your personal play style or about how you played the game. This is a review. I have to take a different approach when playing the game for that reason. I have to test what mechanics are well made and which ones are poorly balanced and broken. I can not “just ignore it”, a flaw in a product does not vanish by just not paying attention to it, it is fair game to criticize it for existing as that is what a review does. I am giving the game an EXAM, this is not an ADVERTISEMENT.
3.Reviews and advertisements ARE NOT the same thing, a review tells you the pros and cons of a product, from a THIRD PARTY. An advertisement only tells you what the company trying to get you to buy the product wants you to think the selling points are. I am not here to validate your preconceived opinions of a game you already like (or dislike). If you like these games, that’s fine, but if you come at me, I will defend my position. If I have already debunked something, I am not going to waste my time (or yours) arguing against it again. Think before you respond.
4. If you want to play these games a certain way, have at it! But I am not here to validate said challenge runs or play styles, when I say a mechanic is pointless cause there is an objectively better option, I, and let me be CLEAR, AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO STOP PLAYING THAT WAY. I can not believe I have to clarify this to grown men and women on a video game website but Souls fans for what ever reason really struggle to comprehend this.
5. While in the last year and a half I have reviewed DLC packs and expansions as their own games, to remain consistent with my previous Souls reviews, I will integrate the DLC into the entire review proper. I will do this by using examples from both DLC packs when talking about the game play, graphics, music etc.
Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland, designed by committee, boring jrpgs I have played in years. From soft has learned almost absolutely nothing from their previous four mediocre jrpgs in this mediocre franchise.
Now lets address the “almost” first. It took them five whole games, but they finally fixed the estus mechanic that was always some form of fucked in the previous games and ruined any kind of intended tension (Grasses, Humanities and Crystals in DeS, DS1 and 2, needing to grind for vials in BB). You can not use other recovery items this time, and you must choose between health and magic estus depending on your equipment load out. You are given a little more than enough estus to get through an area and your estus restores a good third of your health, making it actually feel important this time, rather than just another healing option that previous entries were plagued with.
This however comes at the expense of the level design. BloodBorne’s big rooms of nothing and long hallways with item nooks return with a vengeance here, you will never get lost as you just have to explore a big room’s nooks then go straight, or a narrow hallway’s nooks and go straight. It’s honestly pathetic at how under designed every area feels. There is very little if any genuine traps, with the only area in the game feeling genuinely designed being the catacombs with its arrow flinging button traps and massive bone spheres. But those aren’t even common enough in that area to feel threatening, only appearing once and twice respectively. Shortcuts also feel less like shortcuts more like regular elevators at this point, there isn’t a rewarding feeling in finding them, because the areas don’t take that long to navigate in the first place, given how much ground you cover while running back and forth.
There are some occasional stage hazards like giants and archers, but aside from a conjuring giant in the ringed city, killing these hazards eliminates them permanently and removes any further tension, the aformentioned giant isn’t even that much of a threat, as a few charged R2s from a high level weapon kill him in a few hits.
The game has completely given up any psychological aspect to the world and navigation. While DS2 and BB let you warp anywhere you have been from the start, they at the very least gave each of the bonfires in an area plenty of space to at least TRY and add some sort of tension, despite how easy those games were. DS3 has zero tension.
Bonfires are constant, take for example the undead settlement. The placement of the second bonfire in the undead settlement is laugh out loud worthy. Being right behind the first gate you stroll up to from when you arrive in 60 seconds. This is a problem all the way to the late game, after killing the Dragon slayer armour and lighting his bonfire, there is another bonfire right next to it at the entrance to the grand archives, for example.
The reason there are so many bonfires so close to each other can only mean one thing. It’s no secret that Sony and Namco use these games false perception of being “difficult” for marketing purposes, and with so many plentiful bonfires for checkpoints, you can just feel the cynicism in the design here as this is clearly made to help streamers and youtubers make quick and cheap “rage compilations” for free advertisement. If you actually play these games like the JRPGs they are however, that intended cynical design falls flat on its ass.
I will say this however, Dark Souls 3 is very good at conveying a sense of scale, due to how close the camera is to you this time and how tall the geometry is, the world feels massive. And the draw distance and landmarks of where you have been and will get too are a nice touch when at a high elevation.
On the surface it seems that from soft has tried to make ranged magic less useful and more balanced than previous games. The MP bar from Demons souls makes a return and the only way to restore it is with blue estus, and unless you start as a pyromancer or sorcerer, the bar is much smaller to compensate and try to make you use your melee weapon more. The stamina bar is also made small at the start to try and convince you to invest in endurance early to roll more often. Of course the gains to FP are quite high if you invest early on, I boosted all the way to 30 FP and had more than enough FP for boss fights so long as I took along two magic estus. And with as little as 30 endurance you’ll have more than enough stamina to block and roll your way to easy kills. With around 40 strength and 20 dex, 35 intelligence and 35 faith 100% of enemies and all but one boss in the game is a matter of when you will kill them than if.
A heavy investment in Vitality is also obviously needed to wear some pieces of heavy armour and for holding great shields that can fully absorb or mitigate attacks. And as long as you keep your preferred weapon upgraded (any weapon in the game will serve you well till the end game pretty much with few exceptions, I used an early game dark sword infused with a heavy gem for my entire run) you’ll find that the RPG mechanics of the game once again break the action parts of the advertised “tough” game play wide open once again.
You may be wondering why I listed my stats two paragraphs ago that high, and that’s due to the fact that exp gain in DS3 is very high, most likely to help along streamers so they can quickly power up and power through more of the game to make more cheap rage compilation content. A good 20 or so hours grinding in the high wall will make you more than strong enough for the endgame (most regular play throughs of this I studied had normal, everyday people, beating this in the mid 60s), hammering home just how easy these games have always been.
I said earlier that the attempt to balance out magic was only on the surface, and here’s why, enemy AI from the dregs outside the fire link shrine to the soul of cinder have no way of countering magic and pyromancies as their AI is entirely focused on on melee fighting, again, even if they don’t get stun locked when hit with ranged magic, they still zerg rush you like morons and by the time they reach you, if a regular enemy, you’ll be able to finish them off easily with your melee weapon. Even enemies that do cast magic make the effort to get close enough to you so can dash towards them, which makes them revert to melee mode, and ruins any potential solution to this classic flaw of the franchise.
Pyromanices are incredibly overpowered in the game, this seems intentional, given the massive circle jerk of fire related imagery and themes being drilled into you to drive the plot forward and establish the lore of the game. It’s not going to be an uncommon strategy to summon a helper for a boss and snipe them from afar with great fire ball and watch their HP melt. Some bosses are even more flammable solo, like aldritch, as simply having the grass crest shield, the chloranthony ring and a quick r1 finger is more than enough to kill him in less than 90 seconds with great fire ball.
The bosses haven’t improved from Bloodborne (or any of the previous four games really). They are still completely lost when you summon and snipe them with magic. And the DPS of either AI or especially a human partner is so high that the extra health they get from summons matters little. The bigger bosses are still camera devouring monstrosities that are genuinely laughable given how bad your visibility is when they get close, as the camera is not, and has never been, designed around enemies that large and it makes fighting them more a battle with the camera than the intended eldritch gods they want you to think you are fighting.
The game is also strangely obsessed with giving many of the bosses multiple phases. While this is common in JRPGs, these are more meant for skill checks to make sure the player isn’t mindlessly brute forcing their way through the game and in general are used sparingly. DS3 of course has dozens of multi phase bosses starting with the Abyss watchers all the way to the Soul of Cinder. To balance these fights out these bosses have less health than usual ones, but this makes the laughable action part of the combat even more so, because when you actually play these games as the RPGs they are instead of the circle button youtube rage compilations they aren’t. You see how poorly thought out so many aspects of them really are. As the lower health pools mean fuck all when you actually level up and equip properly.
There is one boss that is an exception to most of these criticisms. Dark eater Midir is an optional boss you fight in the ringed city, and the way you need to fight him is via casting poison magic. Since he has the most HP of any boss in the game, this means the poison will do 1K damage to him each time due to its scaling effect, which is critical to wear him down quickly, otherwise, you will most likely run out of estus due to how strong his attacks are. Co-op is a non factor for this fight as it will just bloat his health and fuck you over, and he resists magic and pyromancies. If he wasn’t huge and devoured the camera, the series could have had its first genuinely good boss fight, but alas, you should never underestimate souls games for underachieving.
The combat in general feels like it was retroactively changed to be more like bloodborne at the last minute. Enemies and bosses are much more aggressive and are more prone to use combo attacks, it’s clear that From soft has gone all in on the R1+circle button simulator jokes, as the hit boxes on boss and regular mook attacks are less about blocking and whacking R1 at the right time, and more rolling and then hitting R1. This becomes less and less of an issue the more you invest in stamina and upgrade your shields, but it’s still hilarious that from soft turned the combat into what even their own fans jokingly refer to it as.
Invasions are still annoying and immersion breaking. They’ve never added anything to enhance these games and have always been a tacked on multiplayer feature that should have died along with the 7th generation when that plagued damn near every game. Thankfully I always leveled high enough to mitigate this annoyance, but still had my fair share of them, which forced me to use the broken Alt F4 build before carrying on with the session. What’s especially funny is that the game has a separate PVP mode which isn’t available until very late in the game. Why invasions are even here anymore is baffling considering it was given its own dedicated mode that could prevent any of these annoyances from occurring in the first place.
Visually Dark souls 3 is as strong as you would expect from the series now. Stunning lighting and impressively huge level geometry are paired with detailed textures like scratches and gashes in your shields and armour, chips in your melee weapons sharp ends, and lovely cloth physics that flow elegantly and realistically. This is topped of with some amazing particle effects. Attacks feel like they have a strong effect when you see an explosion of sparks or magic dust.
Unfortunately due to the fire themed circle jerking in the story, your character pulsates an ugly and gaudy ember effect. This just bizarre to see as almost none of the enemies have this effect and look stunning regardless. We already know the player character is fire themed due to being called the ashen one, an ugly ember effect is not needed.
The animations are the best in the series so far, for as bland and mediocre as the boss fights are, the gorgeous and over exaggerated animations of the Abyss watchers unorthodox great sword swings, the animalistic claw swipes of the wyverns and midir, and many others are a sight to behold. Regular mook attacks are on the same level. With some like the tar demons pulsating pustules changing depending on the attack being an outstanding detail.
Menu UI has been fixed again, with BloodBorne's awful and unintuitive vertical menus gone. DS2’s horizontal menus return and the layouts do an excellent job of showing you where everything is, you even have dented tabs at the top this time to eliminate any possible confusion.
Musically, Dark Souls 3 is mostly quite bland.
While legendary video game composer Motoi Saukraba does return, he only does a handful of tracks this time. Said tracks are the best in the game, as Sakuraba is a master of his craft. Vordt of the Boreal Valley’s powerful horn section and thundering percussion set a strong first impression when you encounter the game’s first real boss. Then there’s Curse Rotted Greatwoods ominous strings and haunted chants, the foreboding violins of Crystal Sages, the scatter shot booming horns of Wolnir and the Bombastic fast paced tempo of Nameless King that sounds like it was ripped straight out of the Tales games. These will be the highlight of the game musically for you and don’t disappoint.
Most of the tracks are composed by Yuka Kitamura, and while she does a generally competent job, it’s very easy to notice she’s more or less just trying to copy Sakuraba’s style but rely more heavily on violins. The majority of her tracks start off the same way, with a big booming hook, followed by heavy use of violins. There is talent here and from what I have sampled of her Sekiro score (I have not played that one yet), she really comes into her own in that game. In the case of DS3, it seems more that she’s composing in a style that doesn’t suit her and it falls flat due to that.
I’ve saved talking about the story till last cause it’s nothing special.
In my Dark Souls 2 review I touched upon that the conclusive, makes you wonder what may happen but good enough endings to Dark Souls 1 was made completely pointless by the existence of Dark souls 2, the choices you can make in that game are also nullified by the existence of Dark souls 3, as both protagonists chose to link the flame and continue the world as is. Dark Souls 3, to its credit, does try and work with this buy having the linking of the flame become a tradition of sorts, which each successive linker becoming a lord of cinder. And toys with this tradition by having the linking of the flame not happen for what seems like hundreds or even thousands of years. The previous Lords of Cinder have gone mad during this time and it is up to the Ashen one to link the flame yet again before it is to late.
A solid premise on paper, but the execution is as expected, quite poor and under cooked. The story in typical souls fashion is presented in a very bare bones way and you are expected to get more from the lore of the world than the actual plot proper. You collect your lords of cinders ashes, and then make one of three choices that do nothing interesting with the souls formula. You become a god and subjugate the masses, link the flame and preserve the world, or let it die. All of these choices transpire in very brief cut scenes before fading to black. Given the series hasn’t continued at the time I post this, it seems that the choices are actual weighty choices now, but ring hollow with how bare bones the story is, being nothing but a quick premise, uninteresting macguffin hunt, and then rushed choices.
The side quests don’t feel fulfilling but this is to be expected, as they’ve always felt more like tacked on framing devices to get rings and spells rather than genuine side stories in a (on paper) rich world seemingly brimming with information. You will know that people like Greirat and Sirrius will die as that’s just how these games go at this point, and you’ll roll your eyes and power through to get the good equipment their quest will bring you in spite of their half assed implementation.
The lore this time isn’t even a modicum of interesting due to Lothric being Lordran several centuries in the future. DS3 is filled to the brim with lazy pandering towards DS1, like Oscars corpse being right in front of you at the start to give you your estus, Anor Londo briefly returning for cheap nostalgia claps, and the final boss fight taking place in the Kiln of the first flame which also plays Gywnn’s theme in the second phase, just to name a few of many eye rolling homages you will encounter.
The original characters for this game don’t feel interesting at all due the fact that they just contribute to the theme of cycles that the trilogy is built around. The lords of cinder for example are just people who did the same thing DS1 and 2 hero did and they’re nothing more than obstacles in your path due to how underwritten everything is.
Both DLC packs like the base game share the premise of a solid idea of a plot on paper but like the base game suffer from extremely skeletal, bare minimum execution to even forgetting the premise near the end in Ringed City’s case.
Arriendel’s premise of a magical world found inside a painting fading away due to the painting in the real world starting to rot due to not being preserved well is a very interesting idea. But aside from a few houses full of pus and fleshy walls, and anthropomorphic birds with huge rotten penises (yeah I don’t know how to parse that either), that premise is barely touched upon, and when you do finish the DLC, your entire journey feels like it was meaningless because you just accelerated what was already happening in the first place.
That leaves us with the Ringed City. Another interesting premise, the Ringed City which takes place in the same sort of dimension the Kiln is in, presents it’s self as a “Landfill of realms” so to speak. But this “Landfill of realms” is really just window dressing. Sure you’ll see buildings from Dark Souls 1 and 2 along the way, but the actual plot, if you can call it that, is about you confronting Gael at the end of the world to get a hold of the Dark soul, which he has been devouring pieces of before he returns to his niece in the painted world to save it. You then kill Gael and the hyped up “Grand finale of the soulsborne franchise” just kind of ends with him falling over, you don’t even get a cut scene for this. It makes the Ringed City feel incredibly unfinished, and given how I just described it in the entire paragraph, it probably was unfinished and rushed out.
Dark Souls 3 is a mediocre cap off to a mediocre franchise. Filled with both cynical design choices like plentiful bonfires to help along the uninformed twitch streamer rage compilation audience, to continued poorly designed boss fights, ok at best combat, under designed levels, bland music and a bare bones, by the numbers soulsborne plot that does nothing interesting with the formula. It was one of the blandest, most low effort JRPGs I have ever played and in this franchise that is saying something.
There has never been anything special about this series, its reputation as “difficult”, that comes from deceptive advertisements deliberately targeted at people who have never played a JRPG in their life, is far more anger inducing than any of the games could ever hope to be. Its mechanics it apes and takes from other series are also done much better in those inspirations. The only remarkable thing about these games has been an incredible talent at underachieving with their potential. From soft can not make action JRPGs with Zelda combat, but they can make interesting on paper worlds. A narrower, non RPG focus is something I feel would lead to a much better output from this developer, and the existence of Sekiro and Armoured core 6 at a glance feel like a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, those are better than the mediocrity this franchise has plagued the entire medium with since 2009.
4/10.
2002
It’s always great to play a game that takes a simple approach to game play, nails it, and runs with it to the finish line. GunGrave is one of the best examples of this.
If you’re old enough to remember just how huge Max Payne was in the 6th generation (For those who don’t, Final Fantasy and Star Wars copied that formula), you’ll remember most of the games that aped its mechanics not doing to much to mess with such a winning system. GunGrave does boldly subvert this, in the most 180 degree way possible. Instead of being focused on nonstop fluid movement, GunGrave wants you to stand still.
With a combat system designed around gaining a high hit count, the game optimizes the narrow hallways you’ll be trudging through expecting you to stand still, hit square, and be aware of your surroundings, shooting absolutely everything.
Your attack animations are much faster when standing still, with Grave doing stylish gun kata desperado esque aiming, and you’ll quickly rack up a high hit count, as enemies often are just far away enough shooting at you that you can quickly swerve in place and shoot them to keep your combo going. Enemies also have just enough but not too much health to add a fair amount to your hit count without the game feeling overly generous, and when you do need to move forward to reach more targets, you can risk moving slowly, with less accuracy, or dodge rolling forward, which maintains your standing still shooting speed, but leaves you wide open to eating enemy fire. The flow of combat is instantly learnable and it then falls on the player to memorize the level design.
And what great level design at that, while I did criticize the empty hallway levels in my Ghost Rider review, the emphasis was on “empty”. In GunGrave, each combat segment has strategically placed enemies and objects where a skilled player can get the most out of each layout. And there is a great risk versus reward dilemma for every mob, do you shoot up objects immediately to get a high initial beat count? Or do you take the safe route and rush to a point to take care of enemies first, then shoot and move towards the remaining objects. There’s a lot of fun in either the thrill of clearing out everything, or strategically planting yourself and taking out every object and mook line by line. This loop never wears out its welcome thanks to the games short length, which is a great show of restraint.
There are some minor issues with certain sections, due to how big Grave is, when turning he can often obscure your view of what you need to shoot, and the camera occasionally glues its self to his back. This is most egregious during a train set piece where you need to shoot missiles and a helicopter outside from the windows, but it’s highly likely you’ll hit the bezels between the windows instead, my only advice is when you see that hit count on screen to plant your self there and hit square until you need to dodge, and unfortunately due to the missiles and helicopter constantly moving horizontally, you can’t just memorize a spot and circle back, you can only hope RNG is in your favor. This is only one of two low points of the game play thankfully, but you can only wish they just dropped this segment entirely.
In order to make this approach work, the health system is very similar to the Halo games, you have shield meter that will refill after no one is hitting you for a few seconds, and health meter that can only be restored with demolition shots (more on those later). You’ll clue in quickly as to which enemy to focus on to not have your shield drained by smg toting enemies melting it the quickest. This makes what could have devolved into senseless square whacking into strategic shooting galleries where you constantly shift focus to smg enemies that could melt your shield and zerg rushing big brutes and melee weapon wielders to keep a combo going. It’s incredibly rewarding to engage with such well designed, smart combat. With the game expecting you to notice these things without explicitly telling you as well, so it doesn’t feel condescending.
As I said in my Ghost Rider review, when an action game includes a screen nuke mechanic, it’s beyond imperative for it to be conveyed to the player why, and most importantly, when to use it, and then properly balancing it. While Ghost Rider was designed around you using the nuke as soon as you get it in order to get your feet in the water to maintain a good combo rhythm, in GunGrave it’s the opposite, and just as well designed.
You only have two demolition shots, with two upgraded versions you unlock via getting high ranks . The first shoots vertically and kills any enemies in front of you, and the second is a 360 spin that kills enemies surrounding you in close. The caveat to using either of these is that your combo count is reset to zero every time, and during boss fights, the damage they deal is minuscule compared to a high volume regular shot volley from your regular pistols, taking out only 10% of a bosses health bar. It’s great that the game treated these as bail outs for mistakes that you can’t fall back on, the only way to build up meter and stocks for demolition shots is get a high combo count, and you only build chunks of meter every 20 hits. So you will need to play well regardless of how invested you may be in getting the most out of the game mechanically. As you won’t have access to your bail outs if you aren’t that invested regardless.
You can also spend a demolition shot on refilling 70% of your health meter, which is a much better use of them. Playing well will cap your max number of demo shots at 9, which during boss fights is invaluable as you can heal often while getting your bearings. Much like the offensive shots, healing also resets your combo to zero, but if you’ve been playing well during the levels, and getting high hit counts on bosses before you heal, this won’t affect your end rank in a significant way. It’s always great to play an action game that knows when and why to use your nuclear option, and GunGrave is one of the best at it.
Boss fights in GunGrave are (mostly) thrilling and engaging. For the most part, you’ll have an empty flat plain to give you enough lanes to dodge bosses attacks. The first boss does an excellent job cluing you in for how they work. If a boss is coming at you from above with a ground slam, you just hold circle while holding the stick backwards to fast hop. Vertical charges just need you to dodge left or right, and projectiles need you to dodge left or right, then run by holding circle. Every bosses attack is very well telegraphed and they only have a handful of moves, so mastery of the fights will come quickly as long as you are observant. Boss AI knows when to react and counter as well. Once your shot volley starts melting their HP, they’ll signal to you that they are ready to attack, so you can’t camp and shoot under any circumstances. The game does a great job of making you feel powerful during these fights, as bosses will lose bits or armor and limbs as they lose more and more health, which is a great detail.
There is one bad boss fight unfortunately. At the start of chapter 6, you’ll engage in what you think would be a rival fight, but it feels anything but that. He’ll charge at you, then when his health hits 40%, he’ll run behind a pillar and start recovering his health. This wouldn’t be to much of an issue if the pillars weren’t made intentionally huge to slow you down and obscure your vision to make the fight artificially harder. What you need to do is let him recover, wear him down again, and then repeat as he will recover less and less health each time. But this is incredibly boring and blatant padding. It’s genuinely astounding how poorly designed this fight is. It’s the absolute low point of an otherwise stellar game.
GunGraves story is quite poor. While you are presented with an incredibly interesting and visually rich world to engage with, the game makes no effort to make any of its character or its plot writing as interesting or rich. And it’s a shame, cause you have all the makings of a classic battle shounen story here. An elite organization you fight through a gauntlet one by one, a planet where classes are separated by wealth, (with the lower classes living in the lower levels, and the elite classes living skyward) and a great visual contrast between these classes with dirty industrial lower levels, and cyberpunk and angelic far future tech for the higher levels. It’s an utter waste.
Grave himself doesn’t express or assert himself in an interesting way, which is incredibly important for silent protagonists. And Mika and DR T are simply just there for the ride. The reach of the Syndicates influence is never really conveyed. We have no idea if they control the planet or just a few businesses, and Harry is a very one note antagonist, he betrays Grave and that’s it. You track him down and kill him, and then the game just ends. If the game actually had a few more cut scenes to flesh out every one, the game would be a masterclass, rather than just outstanding.
Visually GunGrave is outstanding. With character designs from the author of Trigun, you’ll get some really cool looking elements like bulky rectangular weapons, incredibly busy and loud patterned trench coats, and heavy uses of red and gun metal gray through out. This is paired with beautiful, fluid animations that take clear influence from Desperado and John woo films, with gun kata-like shooting and environmental destruction everywhere.
Mech designs also feature a prominent Japanese manga artist. Kousuke Fujishima lends his skill for the vehicle designs here, and they are as good as you’d expect. With bulky and bubbly juttings and rounded, steam punkish looks. As well as heavy uses of lenses and windows.
All of this is presented in a gorgeous cel shaded look that makes everything pop. From graves dusty brown trench coat giving off a smooth sheen that draws your attention, to huge bosses oozing detail with exposed sinew and veins that pulsate and tear. Lighting is also outstanding, with dingy lower levels being dim and dirty, and the aristocratic upper levels being bright white and angelic.
UI has a ton of personality, looking like you’re going through a well used weapons cache, with metal plates and skulls everywhere. The skull in your health meter will growl when you gain meter, which is a really cool detail, and while menu navigation is stick only, you won’t be constantly menuing, so this annoyance isn’t to much of an issue.
While the story isn’t great, cut scene direction will make you wish it was. Models move with an intentional stiffness which contributes very well to the gritty, dreary atmosphere the plot seems to want to convey, and one of the coolest choices artistically is to give only very important characters mouth animations, which is a clever way of hiding the games AA budget.
Optimization is never an issue either, no matter if you are being swarmed by a horde of mooks, or fighting one of the gigantic well detailed bosses, the game maintains a locked rock solid 60fps.
The games OST is composed by the same guy who did the music for the Trigun Anime, though thankfully unlike other anime/television/film composers who try their hand at video games and trip over themselves adapting to a medium that requires a different approach (See Hiroyuki Sawano’s terrible Xenoblade X score, or BloodBorne’s cluster fuck of trash) that isn’t the case here. You’ll get a Trumpet heavy ost that wonderfully compliments the games high octane fast paced gameplay. Stand out tracks include Ear fudge, with its trumpet heavy tempo contrasting wonderfully with the ambient backing track, China moon’s slow gingerly saxophones and steady percussion section, and Tough Cookie’s serene pianos and fast paced drums blending with the bombastic trumpets.
The most memorable track in the game that will stick with you though is “Here comes the rain”, that plays during the stage select screen, a calming ballad that helps you decompress after the intense action you just experienced.
It’s one of the most enjoyable and memorable OSTs I experienced in a shooter, that I will definitely keep listening too outside of the game.
GunGrave is a fantastic game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. You have a great combat system that requires strategic thinking and memorization, great visuals, and a outstanding ost. While it is kneecapped by a barely there, severely under cooked story, the incredible combat and level design makes this a must play.
9/10.
If you’re old enough to remember just how huge Max Payne was in the 6th generation (For those who don’t, Final Fantasy and Star Wars copied that formula), you’ll remember most of the games that aped its mechanics not doing to much to mess with such a winning system. GunGrave does boldly subvert this, in the most 180 degree way possible. Instead of being focused on nonstop fluid movement, GunGrave wants you to stand still.
With a combat system designed around gaining a high hit count, the game optimizes the narrow hallways you’ll be trudging through expecting you to stand still, hit square, and be aware of your surroundings, shooting absolutely everything.
Your attack animations are much faster when standing still, with Grave doing stylish gun kata desperado esque aiming, and you’ll quickly rack up a high hit count, as enemies often are just far away enough shooting at you that you can quickly swerve in place and shoot them to keep your combo going. Enemies also have just enough but not too much health to add a fair amount to your hit count without the game feeling overly generous, and when you do need to move forward to reach more targets, you can risk moving slowly, with less accuracy, or dodge rolling forward, which maintains your standing still shooting speed, but leaves you wide open to eating enemy fire. The flow of combat is instantly learnable and it then falls on the player to memorize the level design.
And what great level design at that, while I did criticize the empty hallway levels in my Ghost Rider review, the emphasis was on “empty”. In GunGrave, each combat segment has strategically placed enemies and objects where a skilled player can get the most out of each layout. And there is a great risk versus reward dilemma for every mob, do you shoot up objects immediately to get a high initial beat count? Or do you take the safe route and rush to a point to take care of enemies first, then shoot and move towards the remaining objects. There’s a lot of fun in either the thrill of clearing out everything, or strategically planting yourself and taking out every object and mook line by line. This loop never wears out its welcome thanks to the games short length, which is a great show of restraint.
There are some minor issues with certain sections, due to how big Grave is, when turning he can often obscure your view of what you need to shoot, and the camera occasionally glues its self to his back. This is most egregious during a train set piece where you need to shoot missiles and a helicopter outside from the windows, but it’s highly likely you’ll hit the bezels between the windows instead, my only advice is when you see that hit count on screen to plant your self there and hit square until you need to dodge, and unfortunately due to the missiles and helicopter constantly moving horizontally, you can’t just memorize a spot and circle back, you can only hope RNG is in your favor. This is only one of two low points of the game play thankfully, but you can only wish they just dropped this segment entirely.
In order to make this approach work, the health system is very similar to the Halo games, you have shield meter that will refill after no one is hitting you for a few seconds, and health meter that can only be restored with demolition shots (more on those later). You’ll clue in quickly as to which enemy to focus on to not have your shield drained by smg toting enemies melting it the quickest. This makes what could have devolved into senseless square whacking into strategic shooting galleries where you constantly shift focus to smg enemies that could melt your shield and zerg rushing big brutes and melee weapon wielders to keep a combo going. It’s incredibly rewarding to engage with such well designed, smart combat. With the game expecting you to notice these things without explicitly telling you as well, so it doesn’t feel condescending.
As I said in my Ghost Rider review, when an action game includes a screen nuke mechanic, it’s beyond imperative for it to be conveyed to the player why, and most importantly, when to use it, and then properly balancing it. While Ghost Rider was designed around you using the nuke as soon as you get it in order to get your feet in the water to maintain a good combo rhythm, in GunGrave it’s the opposite, and just as well designed.
You only have two demolition shots, with two upgraded versions you unlock via getting high ranks . The first shoots vertically and kills any enemies in front of you, and the second is a 360 spin that kills enemies surrounding you in close. The caveat to using either of these is that your combo count is reset to zero every time, and during boss fights, the damage they deal is minuscule compared to a high volume regular shot volley from your regular pistols, taking out only 10% of a bosses health bar. It’s great that the game treated these as bail outs for mistakes that you can’t fall back on, the only way to build up meter and stocks for demolition shots is get a high combo count, and you only build chunks of meter every 20 hits. So you will need to play well regardless of how invested you may be in getting the most out of the game mechanically. As you won’t have access to your bail outs if you aren’t that invested regardless.
You can also spend a demolition shot on refilling 70% of your health meter, which is a much better use of them. Playing well will cap your max number of demo shots at 9, which during boss fights is invaluable as you can heal often while getting your bearings. Much like the offensive shots, healing also resets your combo to zero, but if you’ve been playing well during the levels, and getting high hit counts on bosses before you heal, this won’t affect your end rank in a significant way. It’s always great to play an action game that knows when and why to use your nuclear option, and GunGrave is one of the best at it.
Boss fights in GunGrave are (mostly) thrilling and engaging. For the most part, you’ll have an empty flat plain to give you enough lanes to dodge bosses attacks. The first boss does an excellent job cluing you in for how they work. If a boss is coming at you from above with a ground slam, you just hold circle while holding the stick backwards to fast hop. Vertical charges just need you to dodge left or right, and projectiles need you to dodge left or right, then run by holding circle. Every bosses attack is very well telegraphed and they only have a handful of moves, so mastery of the fights will come quickly as long as you are observant. Boss AI knows when to react and counter as well. Once your shot volley starts melting their HP, they’ll signal to you that they are ready to attack, so you can’t camp and shoot under any circumstances. The game does a great job of making you feel powerful during these fights, as bosses will lose bits or armor and limbs as they lose more and more health, which is a great detail.
There is one bad boss fight unfortunately. At the start of chapter 6, you’ll engage in what you think would be a rival fight, but it feels anything but that. He’ll charge at you, then when his health hits 40%, he’ll run behind a pillar and start recovering his health. This wouldn’t be to much of an issue if the pillars weren’t made intentionally huge to slow you down and obscure your vision to make the fight artificially harder. What you need to do is let him recover, wear him down again, and then repeat as he will recover less and less health each time. But this is incredibly boring and blatant padding. It’s genuinely astounding how poorly designed this fight is. It’s the absolute low point of an otherwise stellar game.
GunGraves story is quite poor. While you are presented with an incredibly interesting and visually rich world to engage with, the game makes no effort to make any of its character or its plot writing as interesting or rich. And it’s a shame, cause you have all the makings of a classic battle shounen story here. An elite organization you fight through a gauntlet one by one, a planet where classes are separated by wealth, (with the lower classes living in the lower levels, and the elite classes living skyward) and a great visual contrast between these classes with dirty industrial lower levels, and cyberpunk and angelic far future tech for the higher levels. It’s an utter waste.
Grave himself doesn’t express or assert himself in an interesting way, which is incredibly important for silent protagonists. And Mika and DR T are simply just there for the ride. The reach of the Syndicates influence is never really conveyed. We have no idea if they control the planet or just a few businesses, and Harry is a very one note antagonist, he betrays Grave and that’s it. You track him down and kill him, and then the game just ends. If the game actually had a few more cut scenes to flesh out every one, the game would be a masterclass, rather than just outstanding.
Visually GunGrave is outstanding. With character designs from the author of Trigun, you’ll get some really cool looking elements like bulky rectangular weapons, incredibly busy and loud patterned trench coats, and heavy uses of red and gun metal gray through out. This is paired with beautiful, fluid animations that take clear influence from Desperado and John woo films, with gun kata-like shooting and environmental destruction everywhere.
Mech designs also feature a prominent Japanese manga artist. Kousuke Fujishima lends his skill for the vehicle designs here, and they are as good as you’d expect. With bulky and bubbly juttings and rounded, steam punkish looks. As well as heavy uses of lenses and windows.
All of this is presented in a gorgeous cel shaded look that makes everything pop. From graves dusty brown trench coat giving off a smooth sheen that draws your attention, to huge bosses oozing detail with exposed sinew and veins that pulsate and tear. Lighting is also outstanding, with dingy lower levels being dim and dirty, and the aristocratic upper levels being bright white and angelic.
UI has a ton of personality, looking like you’re going through a well used weapons cache, with metal plates and skulls everywhere. The skull in your health meter will growl when you gain meter, which is a really cool detail, and while menu navigation is stick only, you won’t be constantly menuing, so this annoyance isn’t to much of an issue.
While the story isn’t great, cut scene direction will make you wish it was. Models move with an intentional stiffness which contributes very well to the gritty, dreary atmosphere the plot seems to want to convey, and one of the coolest choices artistically is to give only very important characters mouth animations, which is a clever way of hiding the games AA budget.
Optimization is never an issue either, no matter if you are being swarmed by a horde of mooks, or fighting one of the gigantic well detailed bosses, the game maintains a locked rock solid 60fps.
The games OST is composed by the same guy who did the music for the Trigun Anime, though thankfully unlike other anime/television/film composers who try their hand at video games and trip over themselves adapting to a medium that requires a different approach (See Hiroyuki Sawano’s terrible Xenoblade X score, or BloodBorne’s cluster fuck of trash) that isn’t the case here. You’ll get a Trumpet heavy ost that wonderfully compliments the games high octane fast paced gameplay. Stand out tracks include Ear fudge, with its trumpet heavy tempo contrasting wonderfully with the ambient backing track, China moon’s slow gingerly saxophones and steady percussion section, and Tough Cookie’s serene pianos and fast paced drums blending with the bombastic trumpets.
The most memorable track in the game that will stick with you though is “Here comes the rain”, that plays during the stage select screen, a calming ballad that helps you decompress after the intense action you just experienced.
It’s one of the most enjoyable and memorable OSTs I experienced in a shooter, that I will definitely keep listening too outside of the game.
GunGrave is a fantastic game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. You have a great combat system that requires strategic thinking and memorization, great visuals, and a outstanding ost. While it is kneecapped by a barely there, severely under cooked story, the incredible combat and level design makes this a must play.
9/10.
2007
There are some cases where a clone exceeds what its inspiration is. In Ghost Rider’s case that isn’t hard, as Devil may Cry is an atrocious series. In terms of its other inspiration, God of war, it falls short, but impresses with what it has.
Game play is divided into two segments, on foot and bike levels.
Before I begin, I highly advise that you save and reload in the first level over and over to fully max out ghost rider before continuing with your play through, the game is at its best when you are fully upgraded with a full move set.
I also implore you to not play this on anything higher than normal. The damage scaling on hard or higher is ludicrous, you’ll be getting 2-5 shotted nonstop and it will do nothing to instill you in the required rhythm the on foot combat requires, or the quick reflexes of the bike levels.
Combat in Ghost Rider is fun and competent, unlike DMC, you actually have a reason to get a high style rating even after you are maxed out, when you get a B rank, the size of your attacks hit boxes are extended, making it imperative that you maintain a high rank (getting hit resets it to zero). You also only get green orbs for your screen nuke when you have a style ranking on screen, with more rewarded the higher the rank. It’s astonishing but also hilarious how a pathetically shallow mechanic was made genuinely useful here.
As for said screen nuke, don’t be afraid to use it! The game’s waves after waves of enemies are designed around you firing off a link charge once the meter is full to quickly build style, which can then be quickly refilled with green orbs enemies leave behind. This makes combat frantic and tense, and solves the issue most games have with screen nukes where you are never sure when to use it.
You also have this games take on Devil Trigger, named Retribution mode here. It’s best saved for dealing with large brute demons, as they normally don’t stagger when hit. If you are being liberal with your screen nukes and maintaining high style, your spirit gauge will fill very fast and you will never have to worry about being SOL to use it.
As for your regular attacks, they all feel useful. All of them are just fast enough to feel smooth, but not so much that it ruins game balance. Like God of war, there is a heavy emphasis on crowd control. You’ll need to be using strings like triangle X2 > square > triangle to supercharge your style meter to level B, and for solo foes, it’s best to launch them away with basic combos or use strings like squarex2 > triangle X2 to knock them aside so you can pull off a risky taunt that leaves you wide open but fills an entire meter of style, or execute a safe finishing prompt by pressing circle to avoid enemy attacks with I-frames. By using your Nukes, Retribution, Finishers, and crowd controlling regular attacks, the wave after wave of enemies you’ll be dealing with never feels tedious at any point due to the game forcing you to use these well designed tools.
There are also skill check enemies that have barriers around them where you can not damage them unless you have a certain style level, further incentivizing you to learn how combat should be played rather than just whacking the triangle button in a hallway. There is no pretentious, shallow. and pointless mechanical bloat like DMC here. You must learn the game to survive.
In terms of enemy design the game makes up for it’s low budget by expecting you to rely on audio cues snyched to decent animations. Each enemy has a distinct sound you’ll need to memorize so you can block or dodge accordingly. Making combat feel much more involved. All regular enemies aside from brutes only have one attack, which have competent animations and are perfectly synched to audio cues, so memorization comes quickly. Your Dodges also have zero i-frames, so you can not abuse holding the right stick, Your recovery animation is also a little slow, so poor dodging can rightfully punish you as well.
Blocking is the fastest animation in your toolkit, but like God of war the game balances this out by making it so only the first two hits of your strings can be block canceled, meaning that while you must use a variety of moves to maintain high style and keep those larger hit boxes, you also need to know when to use your long, non cancelable and powerful last button inputs, making any instance of button mashing incredibly punishable. Whacking triangle and dodging every blue moon will not work here, you need to actually be aware of your attack animations and properly weigh the risks. A movie licensed game going this far to make sure they have smart combat is incredibly commendable.
Your shot gun is also an incredibly useful tool. From stopping an enemy dead in their tracks, or opening up space so you can execute risky moves, It should always be in your rotation, and the fact that it also uses up one bar of retribution is a great balancing act, as you somewhat need to weigh the risks of creating space to survive, or eating the hit and saving your meter for brutes.
The game does unfortunately lack a good screen shake effect, so while attacks feel fine to execute, they lack the sheer raw power of God of war or the finesse and skillful swiftness of Ninja Gaiden. Enemy damage animations are good enough that this is mitigated somewhat. But the combat is definitely missing that last bit of torque to make it truly incredible, rather than just great here.
While combat is carried by its strong rhythm, level design for the on foot segments is non existent. You’ll be going north-south and then, in a funny coincidence, going south-north DMC4 style in order to pad out the games length. Thankfully when going backwards, the game does have different enemy sets, and you can also ignore most of them during the back tracking if you want to get over the level quickly. The game was originally planned to have puzzles in the levels, but due to the film being pushed up to February of 2007, these had to be cut out. It’s unfortunate that the level design had to be left with hallways, but at the very least the combat makes up for it.
Breaking up the game play for variety, and authenticity to the character, are motorcycle levels, These are simple, fun segments that don’t over stay their welcome and make ghost rider feel unstoppable as you light up enemies with homing shots, power slide under rails, and make massive jumps over gaps. There is some trial and error in later levels, as the steering is very sensitive and knowing when to double jump, or lean forward to not run into walls can be annoying, but the track design is so well telegraphed and laid out that knowing where to land is never an issue, ramps will have huge arrows and rails have orangish red piping to let you know well ahead of time how to react. Once you nail down the timings after a few retries, it becomes and absolute joy to chain together power slides and huge jumps for the segments 2-7 minute play time.
While I did recommend earlier that you should reload your saves in the first level to fully max out, so long as you maintain a good style meter, you’ll have plenty of souls to spend on upgrades, though you’re better off doing as a I recommended and using those extra souls for unlocking the neat bonuses like concept art, behind the scenes videos on the games development, and a random assortment of comics picked from the Johnny Blaze era of the character. These bonuses are nice extras that very few licensed games would even bother trying to include, so it’s awesome they are here.
The game does suffer unfortunately from very poor boss fights. For the on foot ones, you will simply run around and wait till a boss makes themselves vulnerable, and then wail on them with a screen nuke or retribution, Black Heart is the worst offender of this, as he is one of those god awful “Giant creature who slams down fists” fights that plagued video games in the late 2000s. The two bike boss fights don’t fair much better, as you’ll just wail on circle when chasing Vengeance, or dodge a few slow attacks from Black-Out before again wailing on circle.
When you finish the game, you unlock Blade as a playable character , and while it’s great that he has his own move set, he only has 4 combos in his kit and no Retribution or screen nukes. Making all of the combat encounters an absolute slog as you’ll have no way of getting out of tight jams with a well timed screen Nuke or Retribution. The game does try and balance this by giving blade decently larger style gains, a quicker taunt animation, and the ability to drain health from stunned enemies by pressing circle, but it is ultimately a waste of time. If blade had his own levels designed around him, this could be a great bonus, but instead, it comes of as an unfinished concept at best.
You also unlock cheats when you finish the game, though the only one worth mentioning here is Turbo mode. Just like DMC, Turbo mode destroys the game balance due to the fact that enemies are not designed around your increased attack animation speed, like wise, your timing for blocks and dodges are thrown off as the audio cues and animations do not line up properly. The increased speed also destroys the timing for jumps and slides when playing the motorcycle sections, meaning you have to annoyingly retrain your brain if you wish to do these segments with this toggled on. Hilariously, Turbo mode does make playing as Blade far less tedious due to the increased game speed ,as it makes his light attacks borderline unstoppable, and it does make the slow chugging menus far smoother, but the breaking of game mechanics is not worth your time.
The story is basic and uninteresting. Presented with cheap, overly grainy, motion comic cut scenes. Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to round up demons who have escaped from hell that he can not go after due to his agreement with heaven, you then go to location after location, mop the floor with a villain, and then repeat until surprise surprise, Mephisto was wanting to trigger the apocalypse the entire time and needed Ghost Rider to unknowingly draw a glyph with the flames of his bike. You don’t actually fight Mephisto though as Black Heart comes out of nowhere, somehow seals him away, and then you fight him in an incredibly mediocre final boss fight. At the very least the game play is mostly solid enough sans boss fights that you can keep coming back on replays for a good time, cause the story sure as shit isn’t the reason why.
Graphically the game impresses. Bloom is used intelligently to make hellfire glow eerily, and textures are solid, though a bit flat in places. Environments often have massive moving background structures, like gigantic gears in hell, a fire breathing skull at the circus, and massive pipes with huge waterfalls for example. You also have some good looking particle effects, like dust blowing in San Venganza, dry ice mist in the government facility, and sparks when in hell.
While the level design on foot is borderline non existent, the game makes up for this in location variety. From the creepy, industrial prison that is hell, the dilapidated and abandoned wild west town of Sanvenganza, the rusted out laboratories of the military base, and the macabre circus, you won’t be wanting for location variety. All of this is presented with stylish fixed camera angles that frame a world under siege in a beautiful way.
Menus are OK looking, but definitely look like a “good enough” job, you may get a giggle out of the PNG of Sam Elliot in the upgrade menu, but the slow main menu with a grainy FMV will get annoying every time you launch the game, as said FMV makes it chug with every confirm or back button press.
The game mostly runs at a very smooth 60FPS, but it can drop to the low 40s when over 8 enemies are on screen during on foot levels, or heavy density sections of the motorcycle levels, these drops thankfully only last a few seconds, but can feel quite jarring when they happen.
Musically the game kicks ass. Composed by Timo Baker, who if you’re in your mid 20s-early 30s you may recognize as the man who did the music for River Monsters on the Discovery channel, you’ll get a fantastic duo of ambient hellish tracks and fast paced demonic rock. The game gives a great first impression with both tracks in “Arrival in hell”, the ambient version features minimal instruments and notes, with loud short horns instilling a sense of unease, and reverb heavy painful moans letting you know you are in the land of the damned. When combat kicks in, your drawn in to a fast paced guitar solo frenzy, with steady drums hyping you up for the proper rhythm for combat. Other tracks that stand out are the strum heavy sounds of “Perimeter breach (fight)”, the electronic wubs of “In Black-Outs Wake”, and the wild west rock rich “Lightning strikes”.
There is a good amount to like in Ghost rider, you have a very intelligently designed combat system that requires full memorization of your small but powerful toolset to survive, cool motorcycle levels that are a good 7 minute power trip, great visuals and an excellent sound track. And while it is marred by 50% mediocre unlockable content, empty hallway level design, mediocre at best and bad at worst boss fights, and a boring by the numbers plot, It’s still a great hack and slash in spite of those flaws and well worth the 2-3 hours you’ll put in.
8/10.
Game play is divided into two segments, on foot and bike levels.
Before I begin, I highly advise that you save and reload in the first level over and over to fully max out ghost rider before continuing with your play through, the game is at its best when you are fully upgraded with a full move set.
I also implore you to not play this on anything higher than normal. The damage scaling on hard or higher is ludicrous, you’ll be getting 2-5 shotted nonstop and it will do nothing to instill you in the required rhythm the on foot combat requires, or the quick reflexes of the bike levels.
Combat in Ghost Rider is fun and competent, unlike DMC, you actually have a reason to get a high style rating even after you are maxed out, when you get a B rank, the size of your attacks hit boxes are extended, making it imperative that you maintain a high rank (getting hit resets it to zero). You also only get green orbs for your screen nuke when you have a style ranking on screen, with more rewarded the higher the rank. It’s astonishing but also hilarious how a pathetically shallow mechanic was made genuinely useful here.
As for said screen nuke, don’t be afraid to use it! The game’s waves after waves of enemies are designed around you firing off a link charge once the meter is full to quickly build style, which can then be quickly refilled with green orbs enemies leave behind. This makes combat frantic and tense, and solves the issue most games have with screen nukes where you are never sure when to use it.
You also have this games take on Devil Trigger, named Retribution mode here. It’s best saved for dealing with large brute demons, as they normally don’t stagger when hit. If you are being liberal with your screen nukes and maintaining high style, your spirit gauge will fill very fast and you will never have to worry about being SOL to use it.
As for your regular attacks, they all feel useful. All of them are just fast enough to feel smooth, but not so much that it ruins game balance. Like God of war, there is a heavy emphasis on crowd control. You’ll need to be using strings like triangle X2 > square > triangle to supercharge your style meter to level B, and for solo foes, it’s best to launch them away with basic combos or use strings like squarex2 > triangle X2 to knock them aside so you can pull off a risky taunt that leaves you wide open but fills an entire meter of style, or execute a safe finishing prompt by pressing circle to avoid enemy attacks with I-frames. By using your Nukes, Retribution, Finishers, and crowd controlling regular attacks, the wave after wave of enemies you’ll be dealing with never feels tedious at any point due to the game forcing you to use these well designed tools.
There are also skill check enemies that have barriers around them where you can not damage them unless you have a certain style level, further incentivizing you to learn how combat should be played rather than just whacking the triangle button in a hallway. There is no pretentious, shallow. and pointless mechanical bloat like DMC here. You must learn the game to survive.
In terms of enemy design the game makes up for it’s low budget by expecting you to rely on audio cues snyched to decent animations. Each enemy has a distinct sound you’ll need to memorize so you can block or dodge accordingly. Making combat feel much more involved. All regular enemies aside from brutes only have one attack, which have competent animations and are perfectly synched to audio cues, so memorization comes quickly. Your Dodges also have zero i-frames, so you can not abuse holding the right stick, Your recovery animation is also a little slow, so poor dodging can rightfully punish you as well.
Blocking is the fastest animation in your toolkit, but like God of war the game balances this out by making it so only the first two hits of your strings can be block canceled, meaning that while you must use a variety of moves to maintain high style and keep those larger hit boxes, you also need to know when to use your long, non cancelable and powerful last button inputs, making any instance of button mashing incredibly punishable. Whacking triangle and dodging every blue moon will not work here, you need to actually be aware of your attack animations and properly weigh the risks. A movie licensed game going this far to make sure they have smart combat is incredibly commendable.
Your shot gun is also an incredibly useful tool. From stopping an enemy dead in their tracks, or opening up space so you can execute risky moves, It should always be in your rotation, and the fact that it also uses up one bar of retribution is a great balancing act, as you somewhat need to weigh the risks of creating space to survive, or eating the hit and saving your meter for brutes.
The game does unfortunately lack a good screen shake effect, so while attacks feel fine to execute, they lack the sheer raw power of God of war or the finesse and skillful swiftness of Ninja Gaiden. Enemy damage animations are good enough that this is mitigated somewhat. But the combat is definitely missing that last bit of torque to make it truly incredible, rather than just great here.
While combat is carried by its strong rhythm, level design for the on foot segments is non existent. You’ll be going north-south and then, in a funny coincidence, going south-north DMC4 style in order to pad out the games length. Thankfully when going backwards, the game does have different enemy sets, and you can also ignore most of them during the back tracking if you want to get over the level quickly. The game was originally planned to have puzzles in the levels, but due to the film being pushed up to February of 2007, these had to be cut out. It’s unfortunate that the level design had to be left with hallways, but at the very least the combat makes up for it.
Breaking up the game play for variety, and authenticity to the character, are motorcycle levels, These are simple, fun segments that don’t over stay their welcome and make ghost rider feel unstoppable as you light up enemies with homing shots, power slide under rails, and make massive jumps over gaps. There is some trial and error in later levels, as the steering is very sensitive and knowing when to double jump, or lean forward to not run into walls can be annoying, but the track design is so well telegraphed and laid out that knowing where to land is never an issue, ramps will have huge arrows and rails have orangish red piping to let you know well ahead of time how to react. Once you nail down the timings after a few retries, it becomes and absolute joy to chain together power slides and huge jumps for the segments 2-7 minute play time.
While I did recommend earlier that you should reload your saves in the first level to fully max out, so long as you maintain a good style meter, you’ll have plenty of souls to spend on upgrades, though you’re better off doing as a I recommended and using those extra souls for unlocking the neat bonuses like concept art, behind the scenes videos on the games development, and a random assortment of comics picked from the Johnny Blaze era of the character. These bonuses are nice extras that very few licensed games would even bother trying to include, so it’s awesome they are here.
The game does suffer unfortunately from very poor boss fights. For the on foot ones, you will simply run around and wait till a boss makes themselves vulnerable, and then wail on them with a screen nuke or retribution, Black Heart is the worst offender of this, as he is one of those god awful “Giant creature who slams down fists” fights that plagued video games in the late 2000s. The two bike boss fights don’t fair much better, as you’ll just wail on circle when chasing Vengeance, or dodge a few slow attacks from Black-Out before again wailing on circle.
When you finish the game, you unlock Blade as a playable character , and while it’s great that he has his own move set, he only has 4 combos in his kit and no Retribution or screen nukes. Making all of the combat encounters an absolute slog as you’ll have no way of getting out of tight jams with a well timed screen Nuke or Retribution. The game does try and balance this by giving blade decently larger style gains, a quicker taunt animation, and the ability to drain health from stunned enemies by pressing circle, but it is ultimately a waste of time. If blade had his own levels designed around him, this could be a great bonus, but instead, it comes of as an unfinished concept at best.
You also unlock cheats when you finish the game, though the only one worth mentioning here is Turbo mode. Just like DMC, Turbo mode destroys the game balance due to the fact that enemies are not designed around your increased attack animation speed, like wise, your timing for blocks and dodges are thrown off as the audio cues and animations do not line up properly. The increased speed also destroys the timing for jumps and slides when playing the motorcycle sections, meaning you have to annoyingly retrain your brain if you wish to do these segments with this toggled on. Hilariously, Turbo mode does make playing as Blade far less tedious due to the increased game speed ,as it makes his light attacks borderline unstoppable, and it does make the slow chugging menus far smoother, but the breaking of game mechanics is not worth your time.
The story is basic and uninteresting. Presented with cheap, overly grainy, motion comic cut scenes. Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to round up demons who have escaped from hell that he can not go after due to his agreement with heaven, you then go to location after location, mop the floor with a villain, and then repeat until surprise surprise, Mephisto was wanting to trigger the apocalypse the entire time and needed Ghost Rider to unknowingly draw a glyph with the flames of his bike. You don’t actually fight Mephisto though as Black Heart comes out of nowhere, somehow seals him away, and then you fight him in an incredibly mediocre final boss fight. At the very least the game play is mostly solid enough sans boss fights that you can keep coming back on replays for a good time, cause the story sure as shit isn’t the reason why.
Graphically the game impresses. Bloom is used intelligently to make hellfire glow eerily, and textures are solid, though a bit flat in places. Environments often have massive moving background structures, like gigantic gears in hell, a fire breathing skull at the circus, and massive pipes with huge waterfalls for example. You also have some good looking particle effects, like dust blowing in San Venganza, dry ice mist in the government facility, and sparks when in hell.
While the level design on foot is borderline non existent, the game makes up for this in location variety. From the creepy, industrial prison that is hell, the dilapidated and abandoned wild west town of Sanvenganza, the rusted out laboratories of the military base, and the macabre circus, you won’t be wanting for location variety. All of this is presented with stylish fixed camera angles that frame a world under siege in a beautiful way.
Menus are OK looking, but definitely look like a “good enough” job, you may get a giggle out of the PNG of Sam Elliot in the upgrade menu, but the slow main menu with a grainy FMV will get annoying every time you launch the game, as said FMV makes it chug with every confirm or back button press.
The game mostly runs at a very smooth 60FPS, but it can drop to the low 40s when over 8 enemies are on screen during on foot levels, or heavy density sections of the motorcycle levels, these drops thankfully only last a few seconds, but can feel quite jarring when they happen.
Musically the game kicks ass. Composed by Timo Baker, who if you’re in your mid 20s-early 30s you may recognize as the man who did the music for River Monsters on the Discovery channel, you’ll get a fantastic duo of ambient hellish tracks and fast paced demonic rock. The game gives a great first impression with both tracks in “Arrival in hell”, the ambient version features minimal instruments and notes, with loud short horns instilling a sense of unease, and reverb heavy painful moans letting you know you are in the land of the damned. When combat kicks in, your drawn in to a fast paced guitar solo frenzy, with steady drums hyping you up for the proper rhythm for combat. Other tracks that stand out are the strum heavy sounds of “Perimeter breach (fight)”, the electronic wubs of “In Black-Outs Wake”, and the wild west rock rich “Lightning strikes”.
There is a good amount to like in Ghost rider, you have a very intelligently designed combat system that requires full memorization of your small but powerful toolset to survive, cool motorcycle levels that are a good 7 minute power trip, great visuals and an excellent sound track. And while it is marred by 50% mediocre unlockable content, empty hallway level design, mediocre at best and bad at worst boss fights, and a boring by the numbers plot, It’s still a great hack and slash in spite of those flaws and well worth the 2-3 hours you’ll put in.
8/10.
2000
If you’ve ever installed Google Chrome or Ungoogled Chromium from your Linux distribution’s app store, you’ve come across Chromium BSU. And while the game is rather basic, it does nail most fundamentals.
Before you play I implore you to make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled. The game’s target 50FPS will not be hit other wise.
The game is an endless shooter, you move with the mouse and fire your weapons with the Space bar. Enemy waves are smartly composed to take advantage of mouse movement. Triangle formations require you to quickly jerk your mouse back and forth, purple bubble enemies need you to gently glide your mouse in a circular motion, the two boss enemies have you making sudden sharp movements to avoid beams with massive hit boxes etc.
Controls are tight and smooth and mastery will come quickly. The game’s HUD is also immersive and non intrusive. With striped beams on the side of your screen showing your ammo, shields and health. Every time you pick up a power up the corresponding beam will flash, which is useful when just starting out or coming back after a while.
The player must kill every enemy coming at them or they will lose a life for each one that escapes, power ups are plentiful but you only have a limited amount of ammo, and the game will punish you for holding down the space bar. So you’ll need to show some restraint or face brutal but fair punishment. The game throws just enough power ups at you for most waves to take care of them, but it’s still up to you to use them wisely. This simple yet brilliant approach kept me coming back for several hours to try and perfect both my reflexes and ammo management. It’s the clear highlight of the game and nothing else matches it.
There are only two boss enemies In the game and they aren’t very fun to fight, while their tells are fun to figure out the first time, since this is an endless shooter, you’ll encounter them nonstop the more you play on. This lack of enemy variety extends to the regular ships too, as the same 4 ships, 3 of which barely function differently, get old very fast.
There is one enemy that is unique but not to the games benefit, from level 2 onward you will be bombarded by bright purple bubble disc ships that require you to gingerly make a circular motion with your mouse to avoid their fire, the issue is that they are almost always paired with the other 3 types, meaning you’ll be eating attacks nonstop most of the time, they even show up during boss fights to make them artificially harder, which is just eye rolling.
The game also lacks sound effects when enemies take damage, while you do get a nice stock explosion sound with regular mooks that go down quickly, this lack of sound effects makes bosses feel much more bloated then they actually are, and gives them even more of a chore like feeling when fighting them non stop the further you play.
Visually the game is pleasant, you get a solid standard 90s sci-fi look with heavy piping, scuffed metal surfaces on ships, and circuitry heavy UI. The game lacks graphical options, and the resolution caps out at 960p, so jaggies are unfortunately everywhere.
There are only two music tracks and they aren’t very good, track 1 is a generic cyberpunk beat and track two repeats the same 3 chords nonstop during game play. It gets grating fast and since the game lacks damage sound effects anyway, I muted subsequent runs as it made no difference.
Chromium BSU is a decent time waster should you choose to install it from your distro’s app store, but there are far better Foss games out there.
5/10.
Before you play I implore you to make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled. The game’s target 50FPS will not be hit other wise.
The game is an endless shooter, you move with the mouse and fire your weapons with the Space bar. Enemy waves are smartly composed to take advantage of mouse movement. Triangle formations require you to quickly jerk your mouse back and forth, purple bubble enemies need you to gently glide your mouse in a circular motion, the two boss enemies have you making sudden sharp movements to avoid beams with massive hit boxes etc.
Controls are tight and smooth and mastery will come quickly. The game’s HUD is also immersive and non intrusive. With striped beams on the side of your screen showing your ammo, shields and health. Every time you pick up a power up the corresponding beam will flash, which is useful when just starting out or coming back after a while.
The player must kill every enemy coming at them or they will lose a life for each one that escapes, power ups are plentiful but you only have a limited amount of ammo, and the game will punish you for holding down the space bar. So you’ll need to show some restraint or face brutal but fair punishment. The game throws just enough power ups at you for most waves to take care of them, but it’s still up to you to use them wisely. This simple yet brilliant approach kept me coming back for several hours to try and perfect both my reflexes and ammo management. It’s the clear highlight of the game and nothing else matches it.
There are only two boss enemies In the game and they aren’t very fun to fight, while their tells are fun to figure out the first time, since this is an endless shooter, you’ll encounter them nonstop the more you play on. This lack of enemy variety extends to the regular ships too, as the same 4 ships, 3 of which barely function differently, get old very fast.
There is one enemy that is unique but not to the games benefit, from level 2 onward you will be bombarded by bright purple bubble disc ships that require you to gingerly make a circular motion with your mouse to avoid their fire, the issue is that they are almost always paired with the other 3 types, meaning you’ll be eating attacks nonstop most of the time, they even show up during boss fights to make them artificially harder, which is just eye rolling.
The game also lacks sound effects when enemies take damage, while you do get a nice stock explosion sound with regular mooks that go down quickly, this lack of sound effects makes bosses feel much more bloated then they actually are, and gives them even more of a chore like feeling when fighting them non stop the further you play.
Visually the game is pleasant, you get a solid standard 90s sci-fi look with heavy piping, scuffed metal surfaces on ships, and circuitry heavy UI. The game lacks graphical options, and the resolution caps out at 960p, so jaggies are unfortunately everywhere.
There are only two music tracks and they aren’t very good, track 1 is a generic cyberpunk beat and track two repeats the same 3 chords nonstop during game play. It gets grating fast and since the game lacks damage sound effects anyway, I muted subsequent runs as it made no difference.
Chromium BSU is a decent time waster should you choose to install it from your distro’s app store, but there are far better Foss games out there.
5/10.
Hinokami Chronicles has set a sad and potentially depressing precedent to me that CC2 can’t even live up to their own standards of a basic but enjoyable display of spectacle.
As someone who absolutely adores the manga (yes the manga, the anime is an adaption, it is not Koyoharu Gotouge’s work) I knew going in that since this is based on Ufotable’s terrible anime adaption, I shouldn’t be expecting it to capture everything that made the manga such a great read. But even people who like the adaption will be let down here.
Asking for an Anime licensed arena fighter to re tell the story it’s based on well is already asking for a bit much, but I didn’t expect CC2 to be so lackadaisical that pivotal scenes like Sanmei testing Nezuko’s resolve to be shoved in lazy flashback slide shows using stills from the anime with adobe after effects filters slapped on top. The usual issues of just telling the cliff notes version of the plot that most of these games suffer from is also on full display here, but the models here don’t even have canned animations for emotions either, making the story feel extra cheap in the process.
You also get these pseudo omakes that have some charming low rate frame animations to them, but they’re just a different framing device for the same lazy slideshows made to save money.
Given this is aimed at people who are fans of Ufotable’s poor anime adaption, I expected that the cut scenes would at least carry over some of the goofy faces and non sequiturs that make the manga so enjoyable, as that is one thing the horrible anime adaption gets mostly correct. Sadly you’ll barely see them aside from a handful of major moments of humour that just couldn’t be cut, (like Zenitsu’s rant about how the boys aren’t exploiting getting nursed by good looking girls enough) so you’ll just be bombarded by bland, lazy stiff cut scenes for around 8 hours.
Due to the hacked up cliff notes approach, the pacing is sometimes even worse than the anime adaption, as the story constantly gets in the way of the game play with scenes that drag. Many scenes and events the anime fucks up by extending them for far too long over several episodes (Like the 1st training arc, which in the manga is at most a 20 minute read) is fucked up in the opposite direction by being overly brief and never having time to breathe.
Game play wise you’ll get an attempt at level design, but the implementation is so astoundingly minimal and low effort it borders on Devil May Cry levels of terrible. Aside from the collectible fragments (that unlock more slideshows) and paltry points globs you can spend in a shop, You’ll just be running through a flat hallway to point B marked on your map so you never have to worry about getting lost (you wouldn’t anyway cause you always go north).
This is also sometimes turned into boring slow walking sections, with Zenitsu’s two segments being insufferable. Yes, he is supposed to be immature and annoying and obnoxious, but what works in a manga panel that you can read through in around 12 seconds becomes borderline unplayable in a video game when you need to navigate him through a hallway and he frequently stops in place to have screaming fits. When creating a licensed game it is imperative that developers know exactly what won’t translate well to a video game. I am baffled that CC2 decided that a character that is intended to be insufferable should have two scripted segments where he annoys you cause of misplaced authenticity, this could have been replaced by something actually fun like Inosuke shoulder charging through walls, but that would probably cost too much money.
Combat is thankfully enjoyable. It’s even more simplified than the Storm series was but that’s not a bad thing as pure spectacle is the goal here. Unlike the storm games matches aren’t absolute hell on higher difficulties due to substitution spam being non existent. Chaining infinite combos is impossible thanks to a smart blow back timer that expires after around 4 seconds, and you have to weigh the risks of calling in your tag partner to rescue you from a combo as it will use up both of their assist slots and put you at a disadvantage for around 10 seconds.
Damage scaling is also incredibly well done, once your combo hits around 15 you start doing chip damage, you can either make the most of this by chaining your ult after hit stun, or use your forward special to build even more meter for a boost or another ult, or your neutral special to send them flying so you can recharge your energy. The flow of matches is incredibly fast thanks to no substitution spam, and the risk of boosting and surging for a somewhat glass canon approach with super armour, or playing it safe to chain an alt is very thrilling.
You do have a smash bros style panel unlock system in that you can either spend points to unlock stuff like music tracks, online profile banners and the like early, or you can collect exclamation points and get high ranks in story mode fights to unlock them at no charge, this would be a fine mechanic if the main way of grinding points wasn’t online matches, as I can attest at the time of writing this, the servers are completely dead. I tried searching during peak hours in my timezone, and late at night for people in Asia and Europe, and still found no one. While there is a good offline fail safe for unlocking stuff, the tedium sets in fast if you choose either method.
If you bought the digital deluxe edition, you would be gifted 8k, I highly recommend spending that on the two stages on chapters 8’s panel (It’s rather difficult chapter to S Rank), as characters will just be unlocked naturally and most of the stages are tied to bland generic demon matches after a chapter is completed that you can mop up later with OP characters like Hinokami Tanjiro.
Thankfully the game does have a good ratio of CC2’s fun boss fights. All five of them have great exaggerated tells and the reward of exploiting their openings to whittle down their health to get to the incredibly well animated QTE segments never gets old.
Rounding off the game play is two very basic rhythm mini games that are a fun novelty at first, but you’ll end up saying “fuck it” when you find out two stages are locked behind S ranking the hard versions and just want to spend points on them instead.
The visuals as expected of CC2 are outstanding. The anime’s more solid coloured and rounded designs translate to a video game perfectly. Environments do cut a few more corners with some rather basic or outright flat textures in places, but strong lighting covers up these weaknesses unless you really look for them. The series iconic elemental beams of motion look like a Ukiyo-e painting in motion, with graceful front, side and back flips making combat feel incredibly satisfying. The QTE segments look outstanding as expected, with great mixes of motion blur and quick camera cuts to convey power scaling.
Body language is also captured perfectly. Inosuke’s are wild, raw and brutish, Nezuko’s are feral and animalistic, Shinobu’s are graceful and calm etc.
Musically the game sounds almost exactly the same as the Storm series. So while you won’t remember any tracks in particular, you will enjoy the competency of the strong string sections, prominent Taiko drums and serene Shakuhachi’s
If you like Demon Slayer, you’ll get some enjoyment out of the combat and well translated feel of the characters when playing with them. As well as the strong fidelity and competent music. Unfortunately the story is a hackneyed cliff notes adaption of an already bad anime adaption of an exceptional manga. If you’ve already read the manga, this is really only worth your time if you just want to fuck around with a character in vs mode you enjoy from the first half of the story. Compared to CC2’s previous efforts, it’s incredibly cheap, and even if you really enjoy the source material, it’s an ultimately mediocre game.
5/10
As someone who absolutely adores the manga (yes the manga, the anime is an adaption, it is not Koyoharu Gotouge’s work) I knew going in that since this is based on Ufotable’s terrible anime adaption, I shouldn’t be expecting it to capture everything that made the manga such a great read. But even people who like the adaption will be let down here.
Asking for an Anime licensed arena fighter to re tell the story it’s based on well is already asking for a bit much, but I didn’t expect CC2 to be so lackadaisical that pivotal scenes like Sanmei testing Nezuko’s resolve to be shoved in lazy flashback slide shows using stills from the anime with adobe after effects filters slapped on top. The usual issues of just telling the cliff notes version of the plot that most of these games suffer from is also on full display here, but the models here don’t even have canned animations for emotions either, making the story feel extra cheap in the process.
You also get these pseudo omakes that have some charming low rate frame animations to them, but they’re just a different framing device for the same lazy slideshows made to save money.
Given this is aimed at people who are fans of Ufotable’s poor anime adaption, I expected that the cut scenes would at least carry over some of the goofy faces and non sequiturs that make the manga so enjoyable, as that is one thing the horrible anime adaption gets mostly correct. Sadly you’ll barely see them aside from a handful of major moments of humour that just couldn’t be cut, (like Zenitsu’s rant about how the boys aren’t exploiting getting nursed by good looking girls enough) so you’ll just be bombarded by bland, lazy stiff cut scenes for around 8 hours.
Due to the hacked up cliff notes approach, the pacing is sometimes even worse than the anime adaption, as the story constantly gets in the way of the game play with scenes that drag. Many scenes and events the anime fucks up by extending them for far too long over several episodes (Like the 1st training arc, which in the manga is at most a 20 minute read) is fucked up in the opposite direction by being overly brief and never having time to breathe.
Game play wise you’ll get an attempt at level design, but the implementation is so astoundingly minimal and low effort it borders on Devil May Cry levels of terrible. Aside from the collectible fragments (that unlock more slideshows) and paltry points globs you can spend in a shop, You’ll just be running through a flat hallway to point B marked on your map so you never have to worry about getting lost (you wouldn’t anyway cause you always go north).
This is also sometimes turned into boring slow walking sections, with Zenitsu’s two segments being insufferable. Yes, he is supposed to be immature and annoying and obnoxious, but what works in a manga panel that you can read through in around 12 seconds becomes borderline unplayable in a video game when you need to navigate him through a hallway and he frequently stops in place to have screaming fits. When creating a licensed game it is imperative that developers know exactly what won’t translate well to a video game. I am baffled that CC2 decided that a character that is intended to be insufferable should have two scripted segments where he annoys you cause of misplaced authenticity, this could have been replaced by something actually fun like Inosuke shoulder charging through walls, but that would probably cost too much money.
Combat is thankfully enjoyable. It’s even more simplified than the Storm series was but that’s not a bad thing as pure spectacle is the goal here. Unlike the storm games matches aren’t absolute hell on higher difficulties due to substitution spam being non existent. Chaining infinite combos is impossible thanks to a smart blow back timer that expires after around 4 seconds, and you have to weigh the risks of calling in your tag partner to rescue you from a combo as it will use up both of their assist slots and put you at a disadvantage for around 10 seconds.
Damage scaling is also incredibly well done, once your combo hits around 15 you start doing chip damage, you can either make the most of this by chaining your ult after hit stun, or use your forward special to build even more meter for a boost or another ult, or your neutral special to send them flying so you can recharge your energy. The flow of matches is incredibly fast thanks to no substitution spam, and the risk of boosting and surging for a somewhat glass canon approach with super armour, or playing it safe to chain an alt is very thrilling.
You do have a smash bros style panel unlock system in that you can either spend points to unlock stuff like music tracks, online profile banners and the like early, or you can collect exclamation points and get high ranks in story mode fights to unlock them at no charge, this would be a fine mechanic if the main way of grinding points wasn’t online matches, as I can attest at the time of writing this, the servers are completely dead. I tried searching during peak hours in my timezone, and late at night for people in Asia and Europe, and still found no one. While there is a good offline fail safe for unlocking stuff, the tedium sets in fast if you choose either method.
If you bought the digital deluxe edition, you would be gifted 8k, I highly recommend spending that on the two stages on chapters 8’s panel (It’s rather difficult chapter to S Rank), as characters will just be unlocked naturally and most of the stages are tied to bland generic demon matches after a chapter is completed that you can mop up later with OP characters like Hinokami Tanjiro.
Thankfully the game does have a good ratio of CC2’s fun boss fights. All five of them have great exaggerated tells and the reward of exploiting their openings to whittle down their health to get to the incredibly well animated QTE segments never gets old.
Rounding off the game play is two very basic rhythm mini games that are a fun novelty at first, but you’ll end up saying “fuck it” when you find out two stages are locked behind S ranking the hard versions and just want to spend points on them instead.
The visuals as expected of CC2 are outstanding. The anime’s more solid coloured and rounded designs translate to a video game perfectly. Environments do cut a few more corners with some rather basic or outright flat textures in places, but strong lighting covers up these weaknesses unless you really look for them. The series iconic elemental beams of motion look like a Ukiyo-e painting in motion, with graceful front, side and back flips making combat feel incredibly satisfying. The QTE segments look outstanding as expected, with great mixes of motion blur and quick camera cuts to convey power scaling.
Body language is also captured perfectly. Inosuke’s are wild, raw and brutish, Nezuko’s are feral and animalistic, Shinobu’s are graceful and calm etc.
Musically the game sounds almost exactly the same as the Storm series. So while you won’t remember any tracks in particular, you will enjoy the competency of the strong string sections, prominent Taiko drums and serene Shakuhachi’s
If you like Demon Slayer, you’ll get some enjoyment out of the combat and well translated feel of the characters when playing with them. As well as the strong fidelity and competent music. Unfortunately the story is a hackneyed cliff notes adaption of an already bad anime adaption of an exceptional manga. If you’ve already read the manga, this is really only worth your time if you just want to fuck around with a character in vs mode you enjoy from the first half of the story. Compared to CC2’s previous efforts, it’s incredibly cheap, and even if you really enjoy the source material, it’s an ultimately mediocre game.
5/10
As I played through the final DLC episode for Arkham knight, I could not help but feel Rocksteady was giving their best “we’ll give it 60%” type of effort. Much like the NightWing episode before it. You have a decent time on your hands here. Though ultimately one only hard core Bat fans would enjoy.
Robins sole predator segment is one of the coolest in the series, right off the bat you’ll have your detective mode disabled, and you’ll need to memorize the massive map before hunting down the guard with a jammer, who is several floors deep. For the first time in the entirety of Knight, the Fear Multi takedown actually feels like just another tool rather than an overpowered insta win aimed at the lowest common denominator. This map is filled to the brim with guards and you’ll want to thin the herd as quickly as possible to get your bearings and search for the guard with the signal jammer.
Once both problems are dealt with, you’ll find out you have a few glass ceilings for gels, but your much more risky, yet viable option is to place remote mines on guards you just took down to detonate later. The balcony heavy design of the map encourages you to risk semi exposing yourself in order to set up these quick and thrilling mine placements. It’s the highlight of the DLC and I can see some people going back to replay this section.
If you managed to save a fear takedown, the next section will be one of the most rewarding puzzles in the franchise. Where after blowing up a mini gun mook with a gel, you then need to disable the right turret, fire of your fear take down when the other turrets are at the apex of their vision cones, and then quickly disable the other two sentry guns. It’s a nice puzzle a good break the previous episodes usual cheaper predator and free flow only segments.
There’s a set piece after where you need to use Robin’s riot shield to move towards a sniper in a hallway, and it’s as boring and uninspired as it sounds. You then are thrown into a free flow segment where you are provided plenty of baseball bats to blow through defences before jobbing Two Face with a QTE in a cut scene. It’s rare for me to play a game where 50% of the game play is mediocre, but this is one of them.
It’s a massive missed opportunity to not have some puzzles or mechanics centred around Tim Drake’s detective skills. In the comics Tim is a better detective than Bruce Wayne. I’m disappointed yet not surprised this aspect of the character wasn’t explored, as the season pass is more concerned with providing a little more of the same every few months to keep a customer engaged, rather than take the opportunity to actually try new ideas with well established fleshed out characters from the medium it’s adapting.
For the final time, you have yet another bland story to move the game play along. Robin needs to stop Twoface, and he does. His insecurities about living up to Batman’s legacy are told in throwaway lines that can be interrupted by thug dialogue, which is funny all things considered, but it really feels that the “we are tired of this IP” feeling that permeated Knight is at full circle here.
There’s of course no new music either, I’m at the point where I forget if these games even have an OST to be honest. The bland orchestral stuff will just be mush in your mind for better or worse. It was never a strong point for the series and this final episode makes no effort to improve on it.
The strong visuals are on full display here. Sparks fly and shine in the mesmerizing god rays. The museums busted structures and maggot infested trashcans give the feeling of a city yet again on the decline, and the mid day setting really makes the fantastic texture work pop,
The Robin Episode is worth playing if you enjoy good level and puzzle design. There are two excellent examples here. But the (thank fully short) second half is a clear message that Rocksteady just did not care anymore and wanted to move on to other things, I can’t really fault them, as Asylum was only their second game, yet it’s monstrous success trapped them in Bat Hell for five years. You’ll get one last pretty stealth game with decent combat in this episode, and while it’s 15 minute playtime makes sure it never overstays it’s welcome, it’s only worth it for hardcore Batman fans.
6/10
Robins sole predator segment is one of the coolest in the series, right off the bat you’ll have your detective mode disabled, and you’ll need to memorize the massive map before hunting down the guard with a jammer, who is several floors deep. For the first time in the entirety of Knight, the Fear Multi takedown actually feels like just another tool rather than an overpowered insta win aimed at the lowest common denominator. This map is filled to the brim with guards and you’ll want to thin the herd as quickly as possible to get your bearings and search for the guard with the signal jammer.
Once both problems are dealt with, you’ll find out you have a few glass ceilings for gels, but your much more risky, yet viable option is to place remote mines on guards you just took down to detonate later. The balcony heavy design of the map encourages you to risk semi exposing yourself in order to set up these quick and thrilling mine placements. It’s the highlight of the DLC and I can see some people going back to replay this section.
If you managed to save a fear takedown, the next section will be one of the most rewarding puzzles in the franchise. Where after blowing up a mini gun mook with a gel, you then need to disable the right turret, fire of your fear take down when the other turrets are at the apex of their vision cones, and then quickly disable the other two sentry guns. It’s a nice puzzle a good break the previous episodes usual cheaper predator and free flow only segments.
There’s a set piece after where you need to use Robin’s riot shield to move towards a sniper in a hallway, and it’s as boring and uninspired as it sounds. You then are thrown into a free flow segment where you are provided plenty of baseball bats to blow through defences before jobbing Two Face with a QTE in a cut scene. It’s rare for me to play a game where 50% of the game play is mediocre, but this is one of them.
It’s a massive missed opportunity to not have some puzzles or mechanics centred around Tim Drake’s detective skills. In the comics Tim is a better detective than Bruce Wayne. I’m disappointed yet not surprised this aspect of the character wasn’t explored, as the season pass is more concerned with providing a little more of the same every few months to keep a customer engaged, rather than take the opportunity to actually try new ideas with well established fleshed out characters from the medium it’s adapting.
For the final time, you have yet another bland story to move the game play along. Robin needs to stop Twoface, and he does. His insecurities about living up to Batman’s legacy are told in throwaway lines that can be interrupted by thug dialogue, which is funny all things considered, but it really feels that the “we are tired of this IP” feeling that permeated Knight is at full circle here.
There’s of course no new music either, I’m at the point where I forget if these games even have an OST to be honest. The bland orchestral stuff will just be mush in your mind for better or worse. It was never a strong point for the series and this final episode makes no effort to improve on it.
The strong visuals are on full display here. Sparks fly and shine in the mesmerizing god rays. The museums busted structures and maggot infested trashcans give the feeling of a city yet again on the decline, and the mid day setting really makes the fantastic texture work pop,
The Robin Episode is worth playing if you enjoy good level and puzzle design. There are two excellent examples here. But the (thank fully short) second half is a clear message that Rocksteady just did not care anymore and wanted to move on to other things, I can’t really fault them, as Asylum was only their second game, yet it’s monstrous success trapped them in Bat Hell for five years. You’ll get one last pretty stealth game with decent combat in this episode, and while it’s 15 minute playtime makes sure it never overstays it’s welcome, it’s only worth it for hardcore Batman fans.
6/10
After the underwhelming Catwoman DLC, it’s nice that the NightWing follow up was a decent time all things considered.
While NightWing being talkative is a staple of the character in the comics, I will commend Rocksteady for having him be tight lipped during this episode. One of the most infuriating things about 8th gen-onwards games is that no one ever shuts up. So for NightWing, of all characters, to be showing restraint, is a sad statement about how insufferable the state of the industry is.
The rest of the story, like the previous episodes, is nothing special. NightWing foils Penguin’s escape attempt and that’s that. No one is really compelling or enjoyable, but no one is insufferable either.
Visually the game offers some nice visual variety in that it takes place in rainy overcast daytime. This shows just how detailed the textures truly are with some extra light on them, with individual grooves in metal, grainy cracks in glass, and deep gloss on vehicles. There is also of course outstanding particle effects with a ton of density.
Nightwing’s two free flow segments are fun, though on the easy side. As there is an over abundance of weapons you can pick up to blow through defences. The second segment is a rehash of the GCPD defence set piece in the base game, where you just run around the roof to abuse some insta kill environment take downs. It’s ultimately boring, though inoffensive.
Nightwing’s sole predator segment is well designed, with multiple floors requiring a lot of patience to lure guards to objects with the voice modulator. Unfortunately Nightwing also shares the overpowered fear take down mechanic Batman has in the main campaign, which makes the layered, thoughtful level design of the map somewhat moot.
Once again there is no new music. So get ready for more fast tempo generic orchestral sound with heavy strings.
There isn’t a lot to dislike about this episode, but at the same time there’s not enough to praise highly either. The choice to make a talkative character tight lipped for a more enjoyable experience in regards to the medium are appreciated, and the level design is solid, in spite of a broken mechanic rearing its ugly head again. You’ll play far worse in your life time, though if you’re not into Nightwing as a character, this is best left for a watch on the internet instead.
6/10.
While NightWing being talkative is a staple of the character in the comics, I will commend Rocksteady for having him be tight lipped during this episode. One of the most infuriating things about 8th gen-onwards games is that no one ever shuts up. So for NightWing, of all characters, to be showing restraint, is a sad statement about how insufferable the state of the industry is.
The rest of the story, like the previous episodes, is nothing special. NightWing foils Penguin’s escape attempt and that’s that. No one is really compelling or enjoyable, but no one is insufferable either.
Visually the game offers some nice visual variety in that it takes place in rainy overcast daytime. This shows just how detailed the textures truly are with some extra light on them, with individual grooves in metal, grainy cracks in glass, and deep gloss on vehicles. There is also of course outstanding particle effects with a ton of density.
Nightwing’s two free flow segments are fun, though on the easy side. As there is an over abundance of weapons you can pick up to blow through defences. The second segment is a rehash of the GCPD defence set piece in the base game, where you just run around the roof to abuse some insta kill environment take downs. It’s ultimately boring, though inoffensive.
Nightwing’s sole predator segment is well designed, with multiple floors requiring a lot of patience to lure guards to objects with the voice modulator. Unfortunately Nightwing also shares the overpowered fear take down mechanic Batman has in the main campaign, which makes the layered, thoughtful level design of the map somewhat moot.
Once again there is no new music. So get ready for more fast tempo generic orchestral sound with heavy strings.
There isn’t a lot to dislike about this episode, but at the same time there’s not enough to praise highly either. The choice to make a talkative character tight lipped for a more enjoyable experience in regards to the medium are appreciated, and the level design is solid, in spite of a broken mechanic rearing its ugly head again. You’ll play far worse in your life time, though if you’re not into Nightwing as a character, this is best left for a watch on the internet instead.
6/10.
In 2009 I did not think that Albert Wesker’s 7 minutes quote would apply to my own agency in a completely different IP (That also has a character with the last name Wesker), but the Catwoman DLC for Arkham knight fulfilled that prophecy.
Catwoman’s predator segment is done twice. The first time you need to pickpocket 3 key cards. I was hoping this would be the norm for the entire DLC, as since Catwoman is a thief, logically like she does so in the comics, you would think she wouldn’t want to attract any attention. Of course the game just has to have you knock out all of the guards to progress.
There is for what it is worth fun to be had in this segment. Catwoman’s take down animations are very long so you have to be very strategic in how you go about each guard. You are heavily encouraged to use her caltrops to divide and conquer and the game punishes you if you camp on the ceiling after a take down since the AI will instantly look up to cover every angle they have.
This is where the fun ends, as after this you then solve an incredibly simple puzzle that requires no more than 2 tries due to only having 4 switches which only do 25% damage if you press the wrong one. Then you do what is probably the worst free flow segment in the entire series, with Riddler’s annoying as hell hazards exploiting your magnetized attacks, forcing you to engaging in mashing Y so you don’t go flying into the lasers or electric tiles. I’m not gonna lie, I’m impressed when some games actually live up to the jokes about their combat mechanics, much like how soulsborne fully lives up to the joke that all you do is press R1 and circle, the Catwoman DLC lives up to the joke about Free flow being a Y button whacker.
The fidelity is as strong as always, I never had time to appreciate the details in Catwoman’s costume in the base game, so I enjoyed the cool details like the outline of her underwear in her suit or the subtle jiggle physics on her backside. The toy store gives a twisted sense of dread and conveys the childishness of Arkham’s take on the Riddler.
Though I will be honest I hate the Arkham series take on the Riddler, by the time of Knight he’d been reduced to an unironic caricature of a redditor (There’s a painful line in his side quest where he talks about astroturfing himself on a twitter clone by arguing with his sock accounts), while Riddler is indeed arrogant and pretentious in the comics, he’s still quite smart and far more focused on his goals. His obnoxiousness in this DLC is cranked up to eleven here, as his cadence is no different than a twitter addicted clout chaser imaging a guy and getting mad about it, which Catwoman easily exploits.
The DLC then ends with Catwoman draining Riddlers one bank account cause I guess him being stupid enough to have all his money in one place must have been really funny (it is not), and the game fades to black. It took me seven minutes to finish this, which would not be an issue if the quality was there. But it isn’t for 70% of the playtime.
There is no new music as expected, so you’ll have nothing but bland dark orchestral background noise for the millionth time.
So far this DLC has been the absolute low point for the season pass. It’s nothing more than a cheap poorly/under designed cash grab with one of the worst interpretations of an iconic super villain. If you’re really curious, just watch a play through online and save yourself the trouble, time and money.
5/10.
Catwoman’s predator segment is done twice. The first time you need to pickpocket 3 key cards. I was hoping this would be the norm for the entire DLC, as since Catwoman is a thief, logically like she does so in the comics, you would think she wouldn’t want to attract any attention. Of course the game just has to have you knock out all of the guards to progress.
There is for what it is worth fun to be had in this segment. Catwoman’s take down animations are very long so you have to be very strategic in how you go about each guard. You are heavily encouraged to use her caltrops to divide and conquer and the game punishes you if you camp on the ceiling after a take down since the AI will instantly look up to cover every angle they have.
This is where the fun ends, as after this you then solve an incredibly simple puzzle that requires no more than 2 tries due to only having 4 switches which only do 25% damage if you press the wrong one. Then you do what is probably the worst free flow segment in the entire series, with Riddler’s annoying as hell hazards exploiting your magnetized attacks, forcing you to engaging in mashing Y so you don’t go flying into the lasers or electric tiles. I’m not gonna lie, I’m impressed when some games actually live up to the jokes about their combat mechanics, much like how soulsborne fully lives up to the joke that all you do is press R1 and circle, the Catwoman DLC lives up to the joke about Free flow being a Y button whacker.
The fidelity is as strong as always, I never had time to appreciate the details in Catwoman’s costume in the base game, so I enjoyed the cool details like the outline of her underwear in her suit or the subtle jiggle physics on her backside. The toy store gives a twisted sense of dread and conveys the childishness of Arkham’s take on the Riddler.
Though I will be honest I hate the Arkham series take on the Riddler, by the time of Knight he’d been reduced to an unironic caricature of a redditor (There’s a painful line in his side quest where he talks about astroturfing himself on a twitter clone by arguing with his sock accounts), while Riddler is indeed arrogant and pretentious in the comics, he’s still quite smart and far more focused on his goals. His obnoxiousness in this DLC is cranked up to eleven here, as his cadence is no different than a twitter addicted clout chaser imaging a guy and getting mad about it, which Catwoman easily exploits.
The DLC then ends with Catwoman draining Riddlers one bank account cause I guess him being stupid enough to have all his money in one place must have been really funny (it is not), and the game fades to black. It took me seven minutes to finish this, which would not be an issue if the quality was there. But it isn’t for 70% of the playtime.
There is no new music as expected, so you’ll have nothing but bland dark orchestral background noise for the millionth time.
So far this DLC has been the absolute low point for the season pass. It’s nothing more than a cheap poorly/under designed cash grab with one of the worst interpretations of an iconic super villain. If you’re really curious, just watch a play through online and save yourself the trouble, time and money.
5/10.
As I dive further and further into Arkham Knight’s Season Pass content, I am reminded that Rocksteady still remembers what their strengths are, yet are either too stubborn or even apprehensive to not make a game with a pointless open world.
The Bat Girl DLC for Knight is a good example of what everyone liked about Asylum, tight and focused linear design where each area felt like it had purpose. And while this does not reach those heights, it does come relatively close.
Batgirl herself feels like a “lite” Batman in a physical and electronic sense.
You’re dropped into a free flow segment almost immediately, and I could not help but feel a bit disappointed that she shares so many animations with Batman, thankfully her faster animations make her feel a little more difficult to get the hang of and given her much lower health, you can’t button mash like you could in the base game. Batgirl’s speed is balanced by having her attacks cause much less damage, but the game also takes this into account by never throwing extremely large mobs at you when solo to pad out the play time.
In the comics Batgirl is a master hacker, and the game incorporates this skill into the game play frequently, with the tutorial section outright locking you in place until you use her remote hacking device. As someone who pen tests for their day job, I found that the hacking only consisting on hitting left trigger to brute force a trap or having to do the series staple password cracking rotating sticks mini game very underwhelming. There could have been mini games where you engage in social engineering to gain access to passwords, install key loggers on consoles to gain access codes to doors, subtly place usbs with malware on the ground, or tailgate a thug who has a key card, as a few examples.
This underwhelming feeling is exacerbated because you’ll be “hacking” after every free flow and predator segment. The fact that Rocksteady dropped the ball this hard on such an integral aspect of the character is astounding.
Batgirl only has around 1/3rd of the gadgets Batman has, which feels deliberate in order to make you focus on the remote hacking device. During predator segments, you’ll need to lure enemies to exploding consoles in order to use it effectively. As the enemy placement is smart as to not have you abuse it. The AI during these segments is some of the most impressive in the entire franchise, as some grunts will stand near certain vents and vantage points in an attempt to flush you out, as well as grouping up and constantly turning around for coverage. You will have to use your smoke pellets far more here, as once again this DLC does not have a lot of grates you can hide in to abuse. As well as plenty of open doors forcing you to thoroughly study your surroundings.
While I feel somewhat sick that I have to praise the bare minimum here. There are a few puzzle segments where you have to know what gadgets to use to progress, and unlike 90% of 8th gen-current games, Batgirl never tells you what to do, you must figure it out on your own. I was pleasantly surprised by this, as sad as that sounds given how far the industry has fallen in this regard.
The amusement park you spend your 90 minutes of playtime in is thankfully quite small and intricate instead of being an open world. The game also clues you in when you first arrive that the closer objective markers are the easier tasks, but you have the freedom to go about them in any order you wish. You even get rewarded for exploring of the beaten path if you play some of the carnival games with audio logs of the history of the park. Many games fail at teaching with out telling when it comes to non linear progression, so it’s great to see it be nailed here.
Once again the boss fight is incredibly poor. You’ll just be wailing on thugs until an LB prompt shows up every 4- or so seconds, you then run up to Joker or Harley, press the button, and repeat for 4-6 minutes. I’m not surprised at the continued dropping of the ball when it comes to the boss fights in Knight, I fully expect it now.
The plot isn’t anything special, Batgirl needs to save her father and she does her job well rescuing hostages and defusing bombs along the way. Joker and Harley never make the effort to truly test her physical or hacking skills and it gives the entire story a clock in clock out 9-5 vibe.
While the music is still mostly reused from the base game, there is a new track this time that plays during predator segments, it features far more slower paced percussion to illustrate that Batgirl is not at Batman’s level just yet and is a nice addition, though the dlc really could have used another 3-4 tracks.
Graphically the DLC is as impressive as ever, from little details like the stitching and scratch marks on Bat Girls ass plates, to the dilapidated rotted wood and twisted marine creatures of the amusement park, you’ll be in for a feast for the eyes.
Matter of family was heavily marketed as the marque title for Arkam Knight’s Season pass back in 2015, and from a glance it certainly is the cream of that crop. Like every other piece of Knight’s dlc it clears the low bar its base set, and you’ll have a good time that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, though it can’t help but make you long for a more fleshed out campaign.
7/10.
The Bat Girl DLC for Knight is a good example of what everyone liked about Asylum, tight and focused linear design where each area felt like it had purpose. And while this does not reach those heights, it does come relatively close.
Batgirl herself feels like a “lite” Batman in a physical and electronic sense.
You’re dropped into a free flow segment almost immediately, and I could not help but feel a bit disappointed that she shares so many animations with Batman, thankfully her faster animations make her feel a little more difficult to get the hang of and given her much lower health, you can’t button mash like you could in the base game. Batgirl’s speed is balanced by having her attacks cause much less damage, but the game also takes this into account by never throwing extremely large mobs at you when solo to pad out the play time.
In the comics Batgirl is a master hacker, and the game incorporates this skill into the game play frequently, with the tutorial section outright locking you in place until you use her remote hacking device. As someone who pen tests for their day job, I found that the hacking only consisting on hitting left trigger to brute force a trap or having to do the series staple password cracking rotating sticks mini game very underwhelming. There could have been mini games where you engage in social engineering to gain access to passwords, install key loggers on consoles to gain access codes to doors, subtly place usbs with malware on the ground, or tailgate a thug who has a key card, as a few examples.
This underwhelming feeling is exacerbated because you’ll be “hacking” after every free flow and predator segment. The fact that Rocksteady dropped the ball this hard on such an integral aspect of the character is astounding.
Batgirl only has around 1/3rd of the gadgets Batman has, which feels deliberate in order to make you focus on the remote hacking device. During predator segments, you’ll need to lure enemies to exploding consoles in order to use it effectively. As the enemy placement is smart as to not have you abuse it. The AI during these segments is some of the most impressive in the entire franchise, as some grunts will stand near certain vents and vantage points in an attempt to flush you out, as well as grouping up and constantly turning around for coverage. You will have to use your smoke pellets far more here, as once again this DLC does not have a lot of grates you can hide in to abuse. As well as plenty of open doors forcing you to thoroughly study your surroundings.
While I feel somewhat sick that I have to praise the bare minimum here. There are a few puzzle segments where you have to know what gadgets to use to progress, and unlike 90% of 8th gen-current games, Batgirl never tells you what to do, you must figure it out on your own. I was pleasantly surprised by this, as sad as that sounds given how far the industry has fallen in this regard.
The amusement park you spend your 90 minutes of playtime in is thankfully quite small and intricate instead of being an open world. The game also clues you in when you first arrive that the closer objective markers are the easier tasks, but you have the freedom to go about them in any order you wish. You even get rewarded for exploring of the beaten path if you play some of the carnival games with audio logs of the history of the park. Many games fail at teaching with out telling when it comes to non linear progression, so it’s great to see it be nailed here.
Once again the boss fight is incredibly poor. You’ll just be wailing on thugs until an LB prompt shows up every 4- or so seconds, you then run up to Joker or Harley, press the button, and repeat for 4-6 minutes. I’m not surprised at the continued dropping of the ball when it comes to the boss fights in Knight, I fully expect it now.
The plot isn’t anything special, Batgirl needs to save her father and she does her job well rescuing hostages and defusing bombs along the way. Joker and Harley never make the effort to truly test her physical or hacking skills and it gives the entire story a clock in clock out 9-5 vibe.
While the music is still mostly reused from the base game, there is a new track this time that plays during predator segments, it features far more slower paced percussion to illustrate that Batgirl is not at Batman’s level just yet and is a nice addition, though the dlc really could have used another 3-4 tracks.
Graphically the DLC is as impressive as ever, from little details like the stitching and scratch marks on Bat Girls ass plates, to the dilapidated rotted wood and twisted marine creatures of the amusement park, you’ll be in for a feast for the eyes.
Matter of family was heavily marketed as the marque title for Arkam Knight’s Season pass back in 2015, and from a glance it certainly is the cream of that crop. Like every other piece of Knight’s dlc it clears the low bar its base set, and you’ll have a good time that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, though it can’t help but make you long for a more fleshed out campaign.
7/10.
Over the years I (and many others) have discarded the old notion that a game must be lengthy and packed to the brim with content to be worth playing. The DLCs for Batman Arkham Knight laugh in the face of the base game being a bloated, unfocused and bland mess with short and sweet scenarios that are at the very least worth one play through.
I always have to commend Rocksteady for masterfully portraying body language through animations, Red hood’s walking, fighting and take down animations convey him as a savage, rage filled brute who does not fuck around. Jason Todd’s pure ruthless nature leads to brutal neck snaps, pistol whips and hip firing his dual handguns to make you feel like a savage.
The handguns can not be abused for easy victory in free flow segments thanks to them being well balanced with a long startup animation, cleverly conveying to the player that it should only be used against a charging thug, this makes Red Hood’s free flow sections slightly more difficult than Batman’s. But not impossible, as you simply have to be smart with your X presses and not mash and catch yourself getting punished with a magnetized leap towards a stun baton enemy.
Red Hood’s sole predator segment is a challenging but fair scenario. His reckless brutality will sometimes have him shooting a thug during a take down, forcing you to memorize the layout before you act. The lack of grates and the AI also making sure to search the grates addresses one of Knights biggest issues, being that the predator maps in the campaign had an abundance of them to shill the overpowered fear take down (which is thankfully absent in most of the DLC). The AI’s tendency to pair up means you’ll also be forced to strategically use your flash bang grenades to divide and conquer, as the abundance of open doors means you can’t just crouch walk and take down with out a second thought. It’s one of the best predator maps in the series, which is high praise given how great they generally are sans base Arkham Knight.
Unfortunately the poor Boss fights that plague Knight once again rear their ugly head here. The Black Mask boss fight is nothing more than just beating up his thugs till a Y button prompt shows up every 20-40 seconds, then whacking LT and repeating. I was truly hoping for a predator segment where you would have to outsmart him ala the MR freeze fight in City and Origins, but sadly Rocksteady decided to take the low effort option to cap off what is otherwise a good DLC.
The visuals are as outstanding as always, Red Hood’s hood sways and shakes subtly depending on how fast you are moving, the scratches and scuff marks on his chest plate show plenty of detail, and the rain effects and dark lighting contribute to a killer brooding atmosphere.
The music is rehashed from the main game once again, the continued lack of music that could fit the theming of each character continues to be a big mistake, as the same tired high energy string sections get old fast.
The story isn’t anything special but it gets the job done, Red Hood sets out to kill Black mask and does exactly that. In the few cut scenes the DLC provides, Red Hood finds what he is looking for and then kills his targets to make sure he leaves no loose ends. The final scene where black mask begs for his life, and you assume Jason might spare him, since you may have done this many times as Batman, only for Jason to kick him out of a window with out a second thought, excellently portrays the callous no nonsense lethality of the character.
There’s a lot to enjoy with the Red Hood DLC, two solid game play segments, fantastic visuals and great character writing carry the ten minute plot very well, though the continued mediocre music and terrible boss fight leave much to be desired.
7/10.
I always have to commend Rocksteady for masterfully portraying body language through animations, Red hood’s walking, fighting and take down animations convey him as a savage, rage filled brute who does not fuck around. Jason Todd’s pure ruthless nature leads to brutal neck snaps, pistol whips and hip firing his dual handguns to make you feel like a savage.
The handguns can not be abused for easy victory in free flow segments thanks to them being well balanced with a long startup animation, cleverly conveying to the player that it should only be used against a charging thug, this makes Red Hood’s free flow sections slightly more difficult than Batman’s. But not impossible, as you simply have to be smart with your X presses and not mash and catch yourself getting punished with a magnetized leap towards a stun baton enemy.
Red Hood’s sole predator segment is a challenging but fair scenario. His reckless brutality will sometimes have him shooting a thug during a take down, forcing you to memorize the layout before you act. The lack of grates and the AI also making sure to search the grates addresses one of Knights biggest issues, being that the predator maps in the campaign had an abundance of them to shill the overpowered fear take down (which is thankfully absent in most of the DLC). The AI’s tendency to pair up means you’ll also be forced to strategically use your flash bang grenades to divide and conquer, as the abundance of open doors means you can’t just crouch walk and take down with out a second thought. It’s one of the best predator maps in the series, which is high praise given how great they generally are sans base Arkham Knight.
Unfortunately the poor Boss fights that plague Knight once again rear their ugly head here. The Black Mask boss fight is nothing more than just beating up his thugs till a Y button prompt shows up every 20-40 seconds, then whacking LT and repeating. I was truly hoping for a predator segment where you would have to outsmart him ala the MR freeze fight in City and Origins, but sadly Rocksteady decided to take the low effort option to cap off what is otherwise a good DLC.
The visuals are as outstanding as always, Red Hood’s hood sways and shakes subtly depending on how fast you are moving, the scratches and scuff marks on his chest plate show plenty of detail, and the rain effects and dark lighting contribute to a killer brooding atmosphere.
The music is rehashed from the main game once again, the continued lack of music that could fit the theming of each character continues to be a big mistake, as the same tired high energy string sections get old fast.
The story isn’t anything special but it gets the job done, Red Hood sets out to kill Black mask and does exactly that. In the few cut scenes the DLC provides, Red Hood finds what he is looking for and then kills his targets to make sure he leaves no loose ends. The final scene where black mask begs for his life, and you assume Jason might spare him, since you may have done this many times as Batman, only for Jason to kick him out of a window with out a second thought, excellently portrays the callous no nonsense lethality of the character.
There’s a lot to enjoy with the Red Hood DLC, two solid game play segments, fantastic visuals and great character writing carry the ten minute plot very well, though the continued mediocre music and terrible boss fight leave much to be desired.
7/10.
Arkham Knight wasn’t a very good game, it was not only blatantly unfinished in spite of having the usual issues open world games are plagued with like far to much side content that is meant more as busywork to keep a customer hooked with a sunken cost mentality, instead of keeping a player engaged, but it was also full of under designed predator sequences, horrible excuses for boss fights, and a terrible story.
Which is why the Harley Quinn pre order DLC is a pleasant surprise. Despite its short length (around 45 minutes), you’ll most likely enjoy your time with it.
The biggest improvement over the base game is that the DLC feels mostly finished in terms of predator and free flow scenarios, which isn’t a high bar but it clears that well.
The predator sequences are a welcome twist on the usual Arkham fare. Due to her psychotic nature, Harley’s take downs cause a lot of noise and you’ll need to make use of her enhanced super human agility to quickly navigate the maps.
Harley is much faster than Batman and you’ll be escaping enemy detection very quickly. To compensate for this, the enemy AI sticks together in small groups far more often, but unlike the base game where you would just abuse the fear multi take downs, here you have to actually use Harley’s two gadgets rather extensively, whether you use laughing gas to take them out one at a time, or play it safe and use an exploding jack in the box to lure them to their doom, you’ll have several options of how to go about it thanks to the abundance of dead end office cubicles to use these, a welcome change from the abundance of grates from the base game.
Harley’s Free flow combat mobs are as polished as the main games, though with the added benefit of far less gadget bloat. Her enhanced speed and superhuman gymnastic skills will have her effortlessly zipping around each mob, with the added cool factor of her doing attacks bouncing off of walls adding to the chaotic feel. Due to how fast Harley’s animations are, this makes mob fights much easier, which is great from a character standpoint as she does have superhuman abilities (In the comics poison ivy exposes her to spores which give her enhanced agility) and is a good change of (literal) pace from Batman.
Harley does also have access to a super mode called psycho mode, which makes her 2-3 shot mobs. The meter is thankfully balanced by filling up very slowly during free flow sections and very fast during predator sections, the player will be clued in quickly to not waste it during predator segments due to how powerful it is.
Unfortunately due to this, it also makes the terrible boss fight against Night wing even more terrible, as you can just save up psycho mode and wail on X till it runs out, or simply flip over him, press B, then mash X. The most annoying aspect of this fight is that not only are you constantly harassed by re spawning guards, but the camera also constantly gets caught on the left wall, obscuring your vision from Night wing's very dangerous attacks (He also never shuts up which is incredibly annoying, even if it is accurate to the character). Thankfully due to how powerful you are, this fight ends quickly, but it’s a poor finale from a game play standpoint to a mostly solid DLC.
Visually the game is as beautiful as the base game. Textures are deep and sharp, with details like rotted wood, visible skin dimples and pores, the lighting casts realistic shines and reflections on linoleum tiles, and the phenomenal dense particle effects are a sight to behold.
Harley’s version of detective vision, named psycho vision here, is a great visual twist on the mechanic, her insanity is on full display with the walls covered in hand written scribbles and demonic clown imagery. It’s a cool metaphor for the imagination of a psychopath.
The animations are also top notch, Free flow feels smooth due to animations being fast and simple in favour of good response time, and Harley’s loud take downs during predator segments are wonderfully over animated and overly detailed to convey her psychotic nature. This is paired with impressive jiggle physics on her breasts and skirt, which bob up and down and side to side realistically depending on how fast she moves. And one of the coolest details is how she walks backwards much more slowly than every other character in the series due to wearing heels. The dedication to capturing the feel and nature of the character is translated wonderfully from the medium of comics to the medium of games, incredibly impressive.
Musically the game offers nothing new, as it just reuses music from the main campaign, if you like the generic high tempo semi dark orchestral music the series is inundated with, you’ll have more of the same here for better or worse. The lack of any new tracks that would fit Harley’s bubbly, ditsy personality is quite disappointing.
The plot is also nothing special, Harley is hired by scarecrow to free Poison Ivy and that’s where the story begins and ends. Night wing just shows up at the end and gets jobbed with nothing interesting happening in between, and the DLC does not even have an ending cut scene, making it feel as unfinished as the base game.
There’s some slightly funny banter with Penguin simping for Harley and offering her money to work for him, and she casually tells him to fuck off due to her Stockholm syndrome for the Joker still affecting her, which is nice, but Harley’s character is still captured much better through the game play. I would have loved for the DLC to be around 3-5 hours instead of 45 minutes to really flesh her out more.
There’s a lot to enjoy with this DLC if you’re into Harley as a character, as the game captures her nearly perfectly, paired with the high visual fidelity, and good level design and fun combat, you’ll have a good time, though the poor unfinished story, extremely short length and bland music leave much to be desired.
7/10.
Which is why the Harley Quinn pre order DLC is a pleasant surprise. Despite its short length (around 45 minutes), you’ll most likely enjoy your time with it.
The biggest improvement over the base game is that the DLC feels mostly finished in terms of predator and free flow scenarios, which isn’t a high bar but it clears that well.
The predator sequences are a welcome twist on the usual Arkham fare. Due to her psychotic nature, Harley’s take downs cause a lot of noise and you’ll need to make use of her enhanced super human agility to quickly navigate the maps.
Harley is much faster than Batman and you’ll be escaping enemy detection very quickly. To compensate for this, the enemy AI sticks together in small groups far more often, but unlike the base game where you would just abuse the fear multi take downs, here you have to actually use Harley’s two gadgets rather extensively, whether you use laughing gas to take them out one at a time, or play it safe and use an exploding jack in the box to lure them to their doom, you’ll have several options of how to go about it thanks to the abundance of dead end office cubicles to use these, a welcome change from the abundance of grates from the base game.
Harley’s Free flow combat mobs are as polished as the main games, though with the added benefit of far less gadget bloat. Her enhanced speed and superhuman gymnastic skills will have her effortlessly zipping around each mob, with the added cool factor of her doing attacks bouncing off of walls adding to the chaotic feel. Due to how fast Harley’s animations are, this makes mob fights much easier, which is great from a character standpoint as she does have superhuman abilities (In the comics poison ivy exposes her to spores which give her enhanced agility) and is a good change of (literal) pace from Batman.
Harley does also have access to a super mode called psycho mode, which makes her 2-3 shot mobs. The meter is thankfully balanced by filling up very slowly during free flow sections and very fast during predator sections, the player will be clued in quickly to not waste it during predator segments due to how powerful it is.
Unfortunately due to this, it also makes the terrible boss fight against Night wing even more terrible, as you can just save up psycho mode and wail on X till it runs out, or simply flip over him, press B, then mash X. The most annoying aspect of this fight is that not only are you constantly harassed by re spawning guards, but the camera also constantly gets caught on the left wall, obscuring your vision from Night wing's very dangerous attacks (He also never shuts up which is incredibly annoying, even if it is accurate to the character). Thankfully due to how powerful you are, this fight ends quickly, but it’s a poor finale from a game play standpoint to a mostly solid DLC.
Visually the game is as beautiful as the base game. Textures are deep and sharp, with details like rotted wood, visible skin dimples and pores, the lighting casts realistic shines and reflections on linoleum tiles, and the phenomenal dense particle effects are a sight to behold.
Harley’s version of detective vision, named psycho vision here, is a great visual twist on the mechanic, her insanity is on full display with the walls covered in hand written scribbles and demonic clown imagery. It’s a cool metaphor for the imagination of a psychopath.
The animations are also top notch, Free flow feels smooth due to animations being fast and simple in favour of good response time, and Harley’s loud take downs during predator segments are wonderfully over animated and overly detailed to convey her psychotic nature. This is paired with impressive jiggle physics on her breasts and skirt, which bob up and down and side to side realistically depending on how fast she moves. And one of the coolest details is how she walks backwards much more slowly than every other character in the series due to wearing heels. The dedication to capturing the feel and nature of the character is translated wonderfully from the medium of comics to the medium of games, incredibly impressive.
Musically the game offers nothing new, as it just reuses music from the main campaign, if you like the generic high tempo semi dark orchestral music the series is inundated with, you’ll have more of the same here for better or worse. The lack of any new tracks that would fit Harley’s bubbly, ditsy personality is quite disappointing.
The plot is also nothing special, Harley is hired by scarecrow to free Poison Ivy and that’s where the story begins and ends. Night wing just shows up at the end and gets jobbed with nothing interesting happening in between, and the DLC does not even have an ending cut scene, making it feel as unfinished as the base game.
There’s some slightly funny banter with Penguin simping for Harley and offering her money to work for him, and she casually tells him to fuck off due to her Stockholm syndrome for the Joker still affecting her, which is nice, but Harley’s character is still captured much better through the game play. I would have loved for the DLC to be around 3-5 hours instead of 45 minutes to really flesh her out more.
There’s a lot to enjoy with this DLC if you’re into Harley as a character, as the game captures her nearly perfectly, paired with the high visual fidelity, and good level design and fun combat, you’ll have a good time, though the poor unfinished story, extremely short length and bland music leave much to be desired.
7/10.
1995
I’ve always had a love for games that proudly wear their tech demo moniker on their sleeve while also having simple yet incredibly well polished mechanics. Astal is one of those games. Astal being a marque title for the Saturn early in its life was met with derision by many, as 3D games were becoming more and more common, a 2D sprite based platformer was deemed a waste of resources and step backwards at the time. Of course this sentiment has faded by the wayside in the years since, and Astal deservedly holds a reputation as being one of the best games in the Saturn’s library.
Due to the bizarre game play changes in the international localization for North America and Brazil, I played the Japanese version for this review. The international versions made the game artificially harder, reducing your health from 5-3 hit points. And changing your continues from unlimited to 1. I highly recommend playing the Japanese version for the best game play experience, as well as not having to hear the horrendous English dub.
Astal’s story is brilliantly blended with the game play. Astal’s aggressive, determined and focused attitude is reflected in his animations and how he controls. His walking animation is long, strong strides, his running animation has just enough screen shake to convey his raw power. And his ground grabs and aerial overhead smash have the perfect amount of smear frames to make you feel incredibly powerful.
The environmental story telling is top notch, navigating a world that Astal is partially responsible for destroying in his recklessness is a great concept. You’ll be travelling through empty oceans, disease ridden swamps, and dark, and blown out caves. The lifelessness of the enemies until you get close hammering this home further, as their intentional stiffness vanishes into well animated attacks to kill you.
Geist is one of the best rivals I have seen in a video game. He is the perfect antithesis to Astal. He fights in the air instead of the ground, he is fast and lithe. he’s articulate and condescendingly polite, and he’s entirely loyal to his masters whims. Which makes the penultimate boss fight against him the best in the game.
Jerado is a great main antagonist, with no regard for his minions, he simply wants a world to conquer, and is perfectly content with using them, and Astal, to revive himself.
Every character in the game is a Shounen anime trope polished to a mirror sheen, combined with the aforementioned environmental story telling, it makes the solid game play all the better for it.
If you’ve played Mischief Makers or Klonoa, you should feel at home with Astal, as it does feature grabbing and throwing. Though in Astal’s case. It’s not used for platforming.
Astal isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel from a game play standpoint. It’s simple and very easy to grasp in a few minutes. The B button throws an enemy behind you, C jumps, and A has the bird that follows you perform an action you cycle through with the L and R buttons. The X, Y and Z buttons simply execute some bird actions, which are very useful in boss fights, should you wish to use them.
The throws on the ground are immensely satisfying to do. Unlike his contemporaries from Mischief Makers and Klonoa, Astal has no time for the fancy throwing to jump higher shenanigans. His chucking of enemies over his shoulder is both funny and raw as hell. It conveys to the player that Astal has no patience for wasting time to save his friend. The satisfying whoosh when they fly by the wayside make every throw (which you will be doing constantly) immensely cathartic.
Astal’s Aerial overhead smash is also very fun to use, nothing is better than laying down a literal smack down on flying enemies and bosses. It also becomes an essential platforming mechanic later, as it freezes Astal for a few seconds, allowing you to land on moving platforms if you over or under shoot your jumps, or avoid large boss projectiles by timing at just the right moment. A simple yet brilliant correction tool for player error that also isn’t an instant win option.
While the bird is integral to the story of the game and is very useful, I only bothered to use her to gather fruit to restore Astal’s health and the dash and screen nuke during boss fights. This is thankfully balanced very well, as the meter only fills with some enemies being crushed, and she only gathers fruit that the player can get in the stage rather than generating it. Bosses can also I-frame through the screen nuke, so timing is paramount in using it effectively. The dash can be quite useful in stopping boss projectiles, but so few of them have any that it’s better saved for the final boss, where it is much more useful than any other situation.
Astal’s level design is simple yet varied enough to never bore you.
While you will be simply going left to right, the platforming is very tough to master, as Astal is very heavy. Knowing exactly where to jump and dash jump is paramount to survival, as he drops like a rock and reckless jumps can make you over and under shoot platforms. Fully understanding the weight was empowering, and it hasn’t been since Rocket Robot on Wheels that I’ve seen a platformer nail weight this well.
Most levels do feature a gimmick of some sort, but they never interfere with the mechanics in any sort of way. From the cave having swarms of bats that you need to asses how hard and where to jump to avoid getting hit, to the volcano where you need to blow out fires and when to stop on a dime to avoid falling lava rocks. The game will always keep you on your toes.
I particularly liked the Crystal palace, as the higher, more difficult path had less enemies but much tougher platforming that required you to be pixel perfect due to the pillars constantly crashing to the right, As well as the swamp where you are riding a monster and need to ground pound and aerial smash at the right times to avoid spiky fruit. Both of these highlighted the creativity yet brilliant simplicity of the level design.
Astal’s boss fights are exceptional. Each boss has a clear weak point that isn’t pointed out to you, but instead plays on your assumptions, such as the Bat with its eye, the plant with its bulb, and the ram with his face. All of them give out bestial yelps when thrown or smacked, and the non intrusive crystal in the top right displaying their health adds to the cathartic nature of the fights, as they gradually shatter and become smaller and smaller, until the turn to dust.
The penultimate fight against Geist has to be one of my favourite rival fights in a video game. Geist’s lithe aerial attacks force you to pay attention, his hiding behind his projectiles while he is on the ground level and vulnerable shows his more tactical and calm nature compared to Astal’s recklessness. During the 2nd phase, his frustration boils over and he forgoes any tactics, he constantly dive bombs at Astal, leaving himself wide open. It’s an outstanding fight thematically and mechanically, one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
The final boss is also very good, though lacking the thematic flair of the Geist fight, it has equal thrills mechanically, almost all of his attacks can be countered, with the right timing and observations you can even no damage the fight. The culmination of all of your skills being viable in the games final hurdle is a testament to the fantastic game play.
Unfortunately there are two moments/ one mechanic in the game that are outright bad. There is one boss fight where Astal is imprisoned and you take control of the bird, this fight is very frustrating because the bird is very slow and dodging the bosses attacks are unfairly difficult, It’s guaranteed you will finish this fight with 1 hit point left, as the boss always seems to get in a free hit after the birds melee combo.
The last full level in the game has a novel idea for a set piece, with you needing to avoid stomping dinosaur legs, but the legs are spaced way to close together and you need to be on the exact pixel to avoid their just big enough hit boxes. The end of the level where you are chased by a Dino would be fine if that was the only danger, but you are also being pelted by Geist’s crystals and you need to jump over and over on enemies, It’s incredibly difficult to pass this section due to the enemy placement, which means you will most likely go into the Geist fight with low health, meaning you will have to self destruct in order to fill up your HP again.
Astal does feature a rather bare bones Co-op mechanic where player 2 controls the bird, but it’s mainly just being a support to Astal, which the AI does a fine job of already regardless. If you want the game to be artificially harder, then this is your mechanic to use I guess.
Astal’s music is striking, with heavy emphasis on string instruments and timpani’s to give the sound a quick tempo to match our main characters sheer determination. The use of electric guitars in stages like into the darkness, which much heavier focus on platforming, creates strong immersion and serenity.
Boss fights do not skimp on the cymbal crashes and woodwinds, making all of them feel incredibly tense.
Astal is one of the best looking 2D games of the 5th generation. All animations are hand drawn and have the perfect amount of smear frames to convey weight and impact. The parallax scrolling never becomes distracting, with the foreground and background objects appearing natural within the world. The back layers often having things like flowing water falls, an exploding volcano, and shimmering god rays. Astal and the bird’s colour pallet will change in certain stages that are extremely hot or extremely cold, which is a nice detail. The sprite scaling never blurs any thing to over pixelation either.
One detail I found very alluring was that many of the bosses are digitized 3D models converted to sprites. This is a brilliant way of telling the player these enemies are not like the average mooks and that you need to be on your game.
As expected, the game runs at a rock solid 60 fps, with no drops ever occurring. And considering the sheer massive scale of many of the boss fights, is very impressive optimization.
There is a lot to love about Astal, it’s polished Shounen archetypes are a joy to experience, it’s normal level game play is simple yet brilliant, with the perfect balance of empowerment and skill based weighty platforming, the mostly out standing boss fights are the perfect test of skill and pattern memorization. It’s soundtrack is serene and immersive, and its visuals are some of the best of that generation. With one terrible gimmick boss fight and set piece heavy final level aside, It’s one the best games not only on the Saturn, but one of the best Sega has ever made.
9/10.
Due to the bizarre game play changes in the international localization for North America and Brazil, I played the Japanese version for this review. The international versions made the game artificially harder, reducing your health from 5-3 hit points. And changing your continues from unlimited to 1. I highly recommend playing the Japanese version for the best game play experience, as well as not having to hear the horrendous English dub.
Astal’s story is brilliantly blended with the game play. Astal’s aggressive, determined and focused attitude is reflected in his animations and how he controls. His walking animation is long, strong strides, his running animation has just enough screen shake to convey his raw power. And his ground grabs and aerial overhead smash have the perfect amount of smear frames to make you feel incredibly powerful.
The environmental story telling is top notch, navigating a world that Astal is partially responsible for destroying in his recklessness is a great concept. You’ll be travelling through empty oceans, disease ridden swamps, and dark, and blown out caves. The lifelessness of the enemies until you get close hammering this home further, as their intentional stiffness vanishes into well animated attacks to kill you.
Geist is one of the best rivals I have seen in a video game. He is the perfect antithesis to Astal. He fights in the air instead of the ground, he is fast and lithe. he’s articulate and condescendingly polite, and he’s entirely loyal to his masters whims. Which makes the penultimate boss fight against him the best in the game.
Jerado is a great main antagonist, with no regard for his minions, he simply wants a world to conquer, and is perfectly content with using them, and Astal, to revive himself.
Every character in the game is a Shounen anime trope polished to a mirror sheen, combined with the aforementioned environmental story telling, it makes the solid game play all the better for it.
If you’ve played Mischief Makers or Klonoa, you should feel at home with Astal, as it does feature grabbing and throwing. Though in Astal’s case. It’s not used for platforming.
Astal isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel from a game play standpoint. It’s simple and very easy to grasp in a few minutes. The B button throws an enemy behind you, C jumps, and A has the bird that follows you perform an action you cycle through with the L and R buttons. The X, Y and Z buttons simply execute some bird actions, which are very useful in boss fights, should you wish to use them.
The throws on the ground are immensely satisfying to do. Unlike his contemporaries from Mischief Makers and Klonoa, Astal has no time for the fancy throwing to jump higher shenanigans. His chucking of enemies over his shoulder is both funny and raw as hell. It conveys to the player that Astal has no patience for wasting time to save his friend. The satisfying whoosh when they fly by the wayside make every throw (which you will be doing constantly) immensely cathartic.
Astal’s Aerial overhead smash is also very fun to use, nothing is better than laying down a literal smack down on flying enemies and bosses. It also becomes an essential platforming mechanic later, as it freezes Astal for a few seconds, allowing you to land on moving platforms if you over or under shoot your jumps, or avoid large boss projectiles by timing at just the right moment. A simple yet brilliant correction tool for player error that also isn’t an instant win option.
While the bird is integral to the story of the game and is very useful, I only bothered to use her to gather fruit to restore Astal’s health and the dash and screen nuke during boss fights. This is thankfully balanced very well, as the meter only fills with some enemies being crushed, and she only gathers fruit that the player can get in the stage rather than generating it. Bosses can also I-frame through the screen nuke, so timing is paramount in using it effectively. The dash can be quite useful in stopping boss projectiles, but so few of them have any that it’s better saved for the final boss, where it is much more useful than any other situation.
Astal’s level design is simple yet varied enough to never bore you.
While you will be simply going left to right, the platforming is very tough to master, as Astal is very heavy. Knowing exactly where to jump and dash jump is paramount to survival, as he drops like a rock and reckless jumps can make you over and under shoot platforms. Fully understanding the weight was empowering, and it hasn’t been since Rocket Robot on Wheels that I’ve seen a platformer nail weight this well.
Most levels do feature a gimmick of some sort, but they never interfere with the mechanics in any sort of way. From the cave having swarms of bats that you need to asses how hard and where to jump to avoid getting hit, to the volcano where you need to blow out fires and when to stop on a dime to avoid falling lava rocks. The game will always keep you on your toes.
I particularly liked the Crystal palace, as the higher, more difficult path had less enemies but much tougher platforming that required you to be pixel perfect due to the pillars constantly crashing to the right, As well as the swamp where you are riding a monster and need to ground pound and aerial smash at the right times to avoid spiky fruit. Both of these highlighted the creativity yet brilliant simplicity of the level design.
Astal’s boss fights are exceptional. Each boss has a clear weak point that isn’t pointed out to you, but instead plays on your assumptions, such as the Bat with its eye, the plant with its bulb, and the ram with his face. All of them give out bestial yelps when thrown or smacked, and the non intrusive crystal in the top right displaying their health adds to the cathartic nature of the fights, as they gradually shatter and become smaller and smaller, until the turn to dust.
The penultimate fight against Geist has to be one of my favourite rival fights in a video game. Geist’s lithe aerial attacks force you to pay attention, his hiding behind his projectiles while he is on the ground level and vulnerable shows his more tactical and calm nature compared to Astal’s recklessness. During the 2nd phase, his frustration boils over and he forgoes any tactics, he constantly dive bombs at Astal, leaving himself wide open. It’s an outstanding fight thematically and mechanically, one of the best I’ve ever experienced.
The final boss is also very good, though lacking the thematic flair of the Geist fight, it has equal thrills mechanically, almost all of his attacks can be countered, with the right timing and observations you can even no damage the fight. The culmination of all of your skills being viable in the games final hurdle is a testament to the fantastic game play.
Unfortunately there are two moments/ one mechanic in the game that are outright bad. There is one boss fight where Astal is imprisoned and you take control of the bird, this fight is very frustrating because the bird is very slow and dodging the bosses attacks are unfairly difficult, It’s guaranteed you will finish this fight with 1 hit point left, as the boss always seems to get in a free hit after the birds melee combo.
The last full level in the game has a novel idea for a set piece, with you needing to avoid stomping dinosaur legs, but the legs are spaced way to close together and you need to be on the exact pixel to avoid their just big enough hit boxes. The end of the level where you are chased by a Dino would be fine if that was the only danger, but you are also being pelted by Geist’s crystals and you need to jump over and over on enemies, It’s incredibly difficult to pass this section due to the enemy placement, which means you will most likely go into the Geist fight with low health, meaning you will have to self destruct in order to fill up your HP again.
Astal does feature a rather bare bones Co-op mechanic where player 2 controls the bird, but it’s mainly just being a support to Astal, which the AI does a fine job of already regardless. If you want the game to be artificially harder, then this is your mechanic to use I guess.
Astal’s music is striking, with heavy emphasis on string instruments and timpani’s to give the sound a quick tempo to match our main characters sheer determination. The use of electric guitars in stages like into the darkness, which much heavier focus on platforming, creates strong immersion and serenity.
Boss fights do not skimp on the cymbal crashes and woodwinds, making all of them feel incredibly tense.
Astal is one of the best looking 2D games of the 5th generation. All animations are hand drawn and have the perfect amount of smear frames to convey weight and impact. The parallax scrolling never becomes distracting, with the foreground and background objects appearing natural within the world. The back layers often having things like flowing water falls, an exploding volcano, and shimmering god rays. Astal and the bird’s colour pallet will change in certain stages that are extremely hot or extremely cold, which is a nice detail. The sprite scaling never blurs any thing to over pixelation either.
One detail I found very alluring was that many of the bosses are digitized 3D models converted to sprites. This is a brilliant way of telling the player these enemies are not like the average mooks and that you need to be on your game.
As expected, the game runs at a rock solid 60 fps, with no drops ever occurring. And considering the sheer massive scale of many of the boss fights, is very impressive optimization.
There is a lot to love about Astal, it’s polished Shounen archetypes are a joy to experience, it’s normal level game play is simple yet brilliant, with the perfect balance of empowerment and skill based weighty platforming, the mostly out standing boss fights are the perfect test of skill and pattern memorization. It’s soundtrack is serene and immersive, and its visuals are some of the best of that generation. With one terrible gimmick boss fight and set piece heavy final level aside, It’s one the best games not only on the Saturn, but one of the best Sega has ever made.
9/10.
2000
It’s a little baffling that despite being the symbol of open source software and even bigger than the kernel itself, It took a solid 9 years for someone to develop an appropriately Open Source freeware game starring Tux. Even more surprising, but cool, is that the iconic bird’s first game was simply a project the developer had to make for his computer graphics course. In an astonishing three days.
Tux Racer is not a racer in the traditional sense, but instead a down hill slope game more inline with 1080 snowboarding and SSX.
Before I continue, I highly recommend playing this with a controller, as the default arrow keys are very uncomfortable after a few minutes.
You have two modes of play, Cup and Practice.
I highly recommend playing each course in the practice mode first, and I’ll go even further and say that if you feel like playing this casually every so often to only dive into this mode. Each slope is very well designed, being built around Tux’s momentum, many branches in them can be accessed via pulling back hard on the joy stick or being just fast enough to soar across the gap.
The game communicates to you which surfaces slow you down and speed you up. Dirt slows you to a crawl, Snow makes you moderately fast, and Ice makes you speedy to the point of turning being quite difficult. This makes each run of a track a little different each time, with some slopes on the 2nd track needing you to glide a bit over dirt to slow your momentum or risk overshooting and missing fish on a small cliff, or 3rd to last track punishing you for just going straight and trapping you in a wall, with no momentum to get you out, it’s nice to see the initial five tracks for the project, and the 8 added ones, keep the solid fundamentals.
If you want a challenge, the cup mode does provide it, but the time requirements are far to stingy for it to be fun or fair, Many of the fish you need to collect you need to be pixel perfect to get, with extremely specific areas of each track requiring precise and exact amounts of momentum that most will never consider. If the time requirements were dropped, I would definitely recommend checking this out. But as is, it’s a poor antithesis to the great track design you can enjoy at what ever pace in the practice mode.
Graphically the game looks quite good for something made in three days. All of the assets blend wonderfully and the photo of the mountains in the background help give the game a relaxing feel, there’s a really impressive snow trail effect you’ll see when behind Tux as his rotund form slides down each slope, and the Ice in particular has a nice glossy sheen that helps convey how it makes the bird slide faster.
Tux himself looks quite good. His smooth glossy plastic look matching his official iconic Raster art. His flippers do oddly bend inwards when turning, but it’s not enough to be a major distraction.
While IGDB only lists Linux for platforms, this will run on Windows and Mac machines. I tested this on my Kubuntu desktop, Windows desktop, and 2011 Macbook pro running high sierra and got a rock solid 60 fps on all three. Which is to be expected from a freeware game, but the basics should always be hit, so it’s nice to see. You will have to open the config file in notepad to change your settings, but changing your resolution will not break anything. I ran this at 1080 and 800p with zero issues.
The music is memorable because there is only three tracks. The title theme is a nice mix of chimes and flutes, and race 1’s trumpets, chimes and xylophones give a good sense of pace while also feeling very relaxing as the portly bird slides down the slopes all by himself. Helping convey it’s just you and the routes, and you can take as much time as you need.
Tux Racer would have probably fallen by the wayside if any original character made for the game was used, hell, the game and source code probably would have been discarded. As a piece of Linux history it’s an endearing reminder to the non linux savvy public that games can work on the kernel thanks to the decision of a few creative students, and as a video game it’s a relaxing downhill racer that feels rewarding every time you’ll go back. Everyone has that one game they go back to and casually play for a few hours at random points, and Tux racer is a game that fits that vibe for everyone.
8/10.
Tux Racer is not a racer in the traditional sense, but instead a down hill slope game more inline with 1080 snowboarding and SSX.
Before I continue, I highly recommend playing this with a controller, as the default arrow keys are very uncomfortable after a few minutes.
You have two modes of play, Cup and Practice.
I highly recommend playing each course in the practice mode first, and I’ll go even further and say that if you feel like playing this casually every so often to only dive into this mode. Each slope is very well designed, being built around Tux’s momentum, many branches in them can be accessed via pulling back hard on the joy stick or being just fast enough to soar across the gap.
The game communicates to you which surfaces slow you down and speed you up. Dirt slows you to a crawl, Snow makes you moderately fast, and Ice makes you speedy to the point of turning being quite difficult. This makes each run of a track a little different each time, with some slopes on the 2nd track needing you to glide a bit over dirt to slow your momentum or risk overshooting and missing fish on a small cliff, or 3rd to last track punishing you for just going straight and trapping you in a wall, with no momentum to get you out, it’s nice to see the initial five tracks for the project, and the 8 added ones, keep the solid fundamentals.
If you want a challenge, the cup mode does provide it, but the time requirements are far to stingy for it to be fun or fair, Many of the fish you need to collect you need to be pixel perfect to get, with extremely specific areas of each track requiring precise and exact amounts of momentum that most will never consider. If the time requirements were dropped, I would definitely recommend checking this out. But as is, it’s a poor antithesis to the great track design you can enjoy at what ever pace in the practice mode.
Graphically the game looks quite good for something made in three days. All of the assets blend wonderfully and the photo of the mountains in the background help give the game a relaxing feel, there’s a really impressive snow trail effect you’ll see when behind Tux as his rotund form slides down each slope, and the Ice in particular has a nice glossy sheen that helps convey how it makes the bird slide faster.
Tux himself looks quite good. His smooth glossy plastic look matching his official iconic Raster art. His flippers do oddly bend inwards when turning, but it’s not enough to be a major distraction.
While IGDB only lists Linux for platforms, this will run on Windows and Mac machines. I tested this on my Kubuntu desktop, Windows desktop, and 2011 Macbook pro running high sierra and got a rock solid 60 fps on all three. Which is to be expected from a freeware game, but the basics should always be hit, so it’s nice to see. You will have to open the config file in notepad to change your settings, but changing your resolution will not break anything. I ran this at 1080 and 800p with zero issues.
The music is memorable because there is only three tracks. The title theme is a nice mix of chimes and flutes, and race 1’s trumpets, chimes and xylophones give a good sense of pace while also feeling very relaxing as the portly bird slides down the slopes all by himself. Helping convey it’s just you and the routes, and you can take as much time as you need.
Tux Racer would have probably fallen by the wayside if any original character made for the game was used, hell, the game and source code probably would have been discarded. As a piece of Linux history it’s an endearing reminder to the non linux savvy public that games can work on the kernel thanks to the decision of a few creative students, and as a video game it’s a relaxing downhill racer that feels rewarding every time you’ll go back. Everyone has that one game they go back to and casually play for a few hours at random points, and Tux racer is a game that fits that vibe for everyone.
8/10.