#it's plenty of fun thankfully. i enjoy the battle system a lot & the maps can be challenging in a fun way

[orcelito]

Guys I think the writing for fire emblem engage is somehow worse than fire emblem fates. Im a longtime fire emblem fan, I've played every recent game, and this... this is just Awful lmfao

Im still having plenty of fun & I have my handful of characters I love soooo much. But God fucking damn this writing is just some of the worst I've ever seen in a game

(Major spoilers in tags. Ran out of tags so I can't spoiler tag hfkshfj.

Final conclusion (since I ran out of tags): What Even Is This Fucking Game. Definitely my least favorite fire emblem game in many respects, but By God I'm going to finish this bitch and I'm gonna have plenty of fun as I do so. And I'm also going to make fun of every narrative choice it makes along the way bc the writing in this game is just SO fucking bad holy shit. I just need to finish this game and get on with my life already. God fuckin damn.)

[lateviews]

LateView: Arkham Knight

I’m in 2 minds about Arkham Knight. On one hand it’s a brilliant game. Refined mechanics, gorgeous visuals, entertaining gameplay, serviceable story. On the other hand, Arkham City is just better.

Fret not readers, all the comments you may have seen about the launch issues are not relevant anymore, at least in my experience. I actually pre-ordered this game and thus recieved it during it’s infamous lockout period on steam and I downloaded it onto my machine that was using an AMD card, the very type of card that was supposed to be the cause of most issues and the game ran fine. I did reinstall the game for this review and I’ve not suffered any problems moving through about half the game (I 100% the game on my initial playthrough). For those that haven’t played an Arkham game before, about 30% of your time in AK will be spent in hand-to-hand combat in control of the caped crusader. The combat is from a third person and there’s no combos like God of War or Devil May Cry. Instead the game has you focus on your positioning and timing. The game popularised a counter attack system that countless games have copied from (Assassin’s Creed, One of the Spiderman games, the Shadow of Mordor series) and here, the creators of the system have done well by it. Different enemy types and enemy weapons shake up the fight and force you to adapt. For instance there are new medic enemies that attempt to stay away from you will resuscitate unconscious enemies and charge them with electricity, rendering them immune to your attacks until you remove it with your batclaw. The game continues to add new elements to try to overwhelm you with possibilities. New weapons, enemies and enemy attack patterns require new tactics each time and will quickly defeat you unless you’re prepared. Thankfully, being prepared is exactly what Batman is great at.

Around 20% of the time you’ll be entering sections that the game refers to as “predator puzzles”. This is where you have a number of vantage points above a room of heavily armed enemies and have to determine a way to takedown all the opposition without being shot (Batman is human and does not like being shot)(citation needed). This is where the plethora of batman’s gadgets get their usage. You can disable weapons, set traps, stealthfully eliminate isolated enemies. You really do feel like a predator during these sections. You have a constant stream of enemy chatter being fed through your cowl throughout the game but here it’s a reward in and of itself to hear enemies react to your brutal takedowns with fear and surprise. Once again, just as you feel confident they’ll start throwing spanners in the mix. How about drones that can see a wide area of the map? Or sentry turrets covering a walkway? Or what about one guy who blocks your detective vision (which is what let’s you see interactive objects and enemies through walls) and this other guy’s gear pinpoints your location if you spend too long looking through your detective mode? What about when Two Face robs a bank and the alarm is so loud that bad guys can’t hear you? And also the bad guys are shipping money/toxins/unobtainium from one end of the room to the other and you’re on a time limit?

Another quarter of the game is dedicated to puzzles. Most of these are because of the enigmatic Riddler but the game throws some at you through other villains as well. These puzzles range from simple visual problem solving to recreating the scene of a car crash in order to determine what happened. A lot of these also incorporate gadgets. Some of these frustratingly so. The game has a system that allows you to scan a riddler trophy’s location into your map so you can come back but it never feels good to leave an area knowing you’ll have to come back for the trophy. It feels even worse to know that you couldn’t have done it any better because you need a gadget that you haven’t unlocked yet. Through the main game and most of the sidequests, the puzzles serve as a nice break from the combat. Forcing you to think slowly and not quickly like the rest of the game does. The game does fall down a bit when it comes to the Riddler.

His plot in this game is that he has kidnapped catwoman and won’t free her until you use your batmobile in these 9 challenges. And these 9 challenges don’t become available until you have recovered a percentage of the riddler trophies smattered across Gotham City. During my second playthrough I tried to focus mostly on the main story and while I did encounter and solve a lot of Riddler puzzles, there’s still a lot left. I remember during my 100% playthrough that I had long since finished every other quest and still had miles to go before the Riddler was done. They’ve got this.. halfway solved thing you can do, wherein once you have enough trophies to finish the last Car challenge, Catwoman is free and the Riddler rides a mech to fight you but in the middle of the fight, with no warning, the Riddler goes, umm nup, not going to fight you anymore and peaces out through the floor, telling you that you need 100% of the trophies to finish the fight with him... talk about a buzzkill.

Thankfully, the rest of the game makes up for it. At least 10% of Arkham Knight’s gameplay, I am going to say comes down to exploration and story absorbtion. There’s a lot of moving between locations in AK and the game handles it well. The most advertised feature of Arkham Knight is the Batmobile. Yes, you can drive it around and mostly, the car is handled ok. I’ll go more into the Batmobile next as it deserves it’s own section. Here I’m talking about how it is to move around. Gliding and grappling is amazing, as always and they’ve amped up Batman’s (upgrade locked) abilities so that you feel stronger/faster than you did in Arkham City. As I said at the beginning, the story I believe is serviceable. Don’t get me wrong, there are awesome moments (like, the moment before you first gain control of Batman) but then there’s a lot of monotony as well. The titular Arkham Knight is just not an interesting character. He just seems like a bad guy. Someone who is really mean to Batman and his only motivation seems to be his hate for Batman. Let’s look at a couple of other Batman villains. * Penguin? Wants money and power. * Two-Face? Want’s poetic justice on Gotham, not just Batman. * Joker? “Some men just want to watch the world burn”. * Arkham Knight? “I hate you”. It just makes the Knight seem immature and short sighted. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been mad at people before but anger is quick to fade, especially when they don’t continue to wrong you and even after the big reveal of who the Knight is, I just don’t get his motivation. How could he not just get over it? What makes things worse is that the other big bad of the game is Scarecrow. Another guy with muddled motives. What does he want? To scare Gotham? I understand that he craves to instill fear but since we, the player, are Batman, we have no reason to fear him, yet the game plays him off like it wants us to fear him like you would fear the antagonist of a horror game. Hearing Scarecrow rant about fear quickly becomes eye-rolling as we start shouting at the screen, “You’re not scary! Just lie down and stop. Please!”

But, for all this, the story keeps ensuring that you HAVE to do some side-quests and I quite enjoyed this. It’s almost like the game sat down and said, “Hey, I know you’ve been ignoring these side-quests because of our big bads but here, have a break. Your next main story objective, is to do some side story objectives ok? Have fun sweety!” And the game is all the better for it because all the side characters are more interesting than the big bads. With this system, the game keeps you going. Sometimes you’ll have this awful feeling wherein you need a gadget to do a side-quest, and the only reason you then return to the main quest is to get the gadget. If that’s a reason to play the story then it’s not a great story.

So. Batmobile. Initially you view the car as this massive, beastly machine. Any fight hand-to-hand fight becomes elementary with the car. Enemies just don’t pose a threat and this feels great. The game then very quickly implements a Batmobile sized threat for you to deal with in the form of Drones. Batman of course can’t hurt people so the only way he’d get any use out of his TANK CANNON is if SOMEBODY decided to drive into town with a bunch of robot cars that need blowing up. How convienient. So, now that the game has a Batmobile and Batmobile sized threats, the game now needs sections of the game for you to fight them. If you blatantly ignore all the side-quests, there will only be a few of these. Namely when Batman launches the car into a new area and it’s populated by tanks. You blow them up. The Arkham Knight sends in more tanks. You blow them up later on. You’ve now got third-person shooter segments in your fighting game and despite the multitude of enemies and weapons for hand-to-hand combat, there are only 4 drone types. After that they simply just throw more tanks at you to up the stakes. There is a 5th type of tank but it’s reserved for tank stealth sections. Yes, you just read that. You have to sneak up on these Cobra tanks and shoot them from behind (after waiting for the obnoxious lockon time). Without a doubt, the dedicated car-battle sections are the worst part of this game. They just didn’t get it enjoyable enough to endure how hard these sections can be. Couple that with the fact that the Riddler requires you to use the car in some of his puzzles and the fact that the boss fights of the game come down to you fighting another bigger tank and there’s plenty of reasons to see why people hate the car. In the beginning, I mentioned that Arkham city was better and, yeah I have to agree. Some things were improved, like the complexity of hand-to-hand combat but all that was improved didn’t really matter. It’s only a slight improvement compared to the degrade in the story, the warping of the environment to allow for the Batmobile, the fact that you had fights you had to use the batmobile for. Arkham City is an amazing game. Then Arkham Knight sought to try to make it perfect, but they were trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Imagine you were a painter, trying to paint a picture. You finish your painting of a fruit bowl and you notice the Banana is a little wonky. You try again, except that you can’t just paint the same fruit bowl. You rearrange your scene and try again. This time, your banana is impeccable but you realise that you accidentally fudged the background and the orange seems to be melding with the apple. It’s like in programming when you iron out one bug and 2 more appear. That’s what happened here. They wanted to fix some minor details of the game and they just couldn’t replicate the rest of the game. There’s no point fixing 50% of your game if the other 50% is going to suffer for it.

In conclusion, go buy Arkham City. If you’ve already bought AC and loved it, you can give Arkham Knight a go. It’s mostly the same.

[operationrainfall]

By all rights, I’m the last person at oprainfall that should be covering Code Shifter. Not cause of any existing bias against the game or team behind it, but because I am woefully inexperienced with the library of Arc System Works and Technos. I know who they are, but don’t have much experience actually playing their titles myself. I haven’t played any BlazBlue titles, nor Guilty Gear, and haven’t touched a River City game. Hell, the only games in the vast roster I have firsthand familiarity with are Double Dragon and RADIO HAMMER STATION. So you may be asking – why am I writing up Code Shifter? The reason for that is the same reason this piece is so late. I tried in vain to find another taker at the oprainfall site, and had no luck. So it ended up in my hands. Thankfully, though I’m not experienced with Arc System Works, I am an old hand at platformers. So let’s see if this plucky platformer made a convert out of me.

The first thing about Code Shifter that stuck out to me was the candy colored aesthetic style. It’s an attractive game that almost has a Pixar vibe to everything. You play Stella, a programmer that made the titular program, Code Shifter, in order to debug viruses. When you’re trashing viruses, your avatar is a powerful hero named Sera. She’s able to double jump, slash and generally bounce around each stage with impunity. At first I really liked how quickly Sera could get around, but I soon discovered her fatal flaw – Sera is about as physically intimidating as a bag of kittens. That’s not to say she can’t deal with foes, but rather that it takes plenty of rapid fire combos to deal with most serious threats. Thankfully, there’s another option to combating foes – transforming into hero codes you find in stages. These are pixelated representatives from many games from the Arc System Works library, and I recognized a few of them. They’re delightfully old school, and most of them pack a much more powerful punch than Sera. So letting her utilize them does help with her general weakness somewhat. Hero codes also can manipulate the environment a few ways. Some can trigger electrical devices and others can break boxes. This is actually indicated by the icon next to their name, a handy feature I discovered about an hour into my experience.

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Other than using the power of hero codes, Sera can also equip skills before taking on a stage. You get these by beating any given stage with an S rank, which is a lot harder than I expected. You essentially have to beat a stage as quickly as possible while taking very little damage. If you lose one life, the best score you can get is an A. I actually found myself wishing that a score of A could provide one Skill, and a score of S could get another. But unfortunately that’s not how this system works. You can get more skill parts by beating stages on higher difficulties, but frankly Code Shifter is plenty challenging on Normal. What frustrated me most about skills is that most make a very slight difference to your stats. Many of them do things like increase attack power or jump range, but to a minuscule degree. They’ll boost you, but only by like 5%. And honestly, it’s hard to comprehend how much of a difference these boosts actually make. The skills that helped me the most were ones that enhanced my loadout of available hero codes, since initially you can only hold one at a time.

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Another factor that can help you a bit are hero assists. These are ones you summon to the field for a variety of effects, from dealing damage to boosting Sera’s stats to healing you. This is cool, but the cooldown to use them again made them a feature I typically ignored, especially during boss fights. Overall the combat in Code Shifter is fine, but it lacks finesse. Sera has no dodge or block move, which makes most battles a frenetic scramble with enemies trying their best to stampede you. This is problematic when you’re transformed into a larger hero code, which makes you a perfect damage sponge. Another issue is that when you lose a life, you’ll lose all your hero codes with it, other than assist summons. And though I appreciate how the game displays Sera’s moveset from the pause menu, along with assist abilities, I found it odd hero codes you directly control don’t display their movesets anywhere. It’s really too bad, cause there’s a lot of speed and flexibility to the combat in the game. It just lacks the tightness and balance of a truly great example of the genre.

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Besides the basic combat, there’s a mini game in Code Shifter. It’s called Colorful Fighters, and it features tons of pixelated reps from Arc System Works games. You start out with a handful, and can unlock more by beating EX stages. I like that in theory, but to do so you have to defeat demonic versions of the characters first, and they’re frankly more difficult than the regular bosses in the game. I managed to beat one, but since that stage featured a couple and required me to beat both to unlock either, I��m still working on making serious progress. Thankfully you can play with just the default characters, and Colorful Fighters is a chaotic scramble. It is 4 v 4 insanity, and it’s like a manic Smash Bros. I can’t say there’s much strategy to it, but it’s a fun diversion.

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Now, despite my issues with the combat, I did find Code Shifter a moderately fun experience. There’s actually even a halfway decent plot here that might go someplace interesting. It’s all about a company getting a new game ready to launch when suspicious viruses start delaying progress. I’m not sure if this indicates an industrial espionage angle or what, but it’s fun watching things progress with Stella and her coworkers. The only downside is how they all speak. They sound like horny metal squirrels copulating. Normally I don’t mind gibberish talk in games, and have enjoyed it in Banjo-Kazooie and the SteamWorld games. But here it’s super irritating. Also annoying is moving about the office. It’s really easy to bump into invisible geometry and get stuck. Luckily you can pause to select a location you want Stella to move, and thus have her go there instantly.

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Despite issues with combat, the platforming is actually pretty fun in Code Shifter. It’s basic, but there’s some tricky maps to navigate as you hunt for viruses to slay. The game makes use of disappearing platforms, warps, air vents and more to keep things interesting. And most areas don’t overstay their welcome, only featuring a handful of story stages and optional EX ones. Again, the big issue I ran into was how unbalanced and loose combat felt. Especially since the game inexplicably forces you to use the joystick to move around, instead of allowing that and D-Pad. Which is odd, since you can use the D-Pad to navigate sub menus. Altogether this made challenging parts of the game a real slog. I almost gave up entirely at one miniboss, who kept spamming a revolving shield. Eventually I got past it with a summon assist, but the lack of clear strategic options in the game doesn’t help matters. It’s never clear which heroes you should keep and which you should toss aside, other than ones you need for getting to the stage exit. And while I wish I could say I loved the bosses I’ve faced, they were just as awkward as the rest of the combat. On the plus side, the visual flair of the game is nice and the music is better. Each hero code you play as has an accompanying soundtrack, and that really livens things up.

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Sadly Code Shifter didn’t quite pass muster with me, though it did make me curious about exploring more Arc System Works titles. There was a lot of potential here, but the ideas didn’t quite mesh enough for it to make a deeper impact. But if you’re a fan of platformers and want something different, Code Shifter might be for you. Especially since it’s available on many consoles. For everyone else, this one might not be worth your time.

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IMPRESSIONS: Code Shifter By all rights, I'm the last person at oprainfall that should be covering Code Shifter. Not cause of any existing bias against the game or team behind it, but because I am woefully inexperienced with the library of Arc System Works and Technos.

[barbosaasouza]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance Review: Fantastically Frustrating

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has arrived after pulling in over $1 million in 2014 via crowdfunding on Kickstarter, and now those that supported have an opportunity to see what grew from the many seeds they planted. WarHorse Studios’ major debut is a great game that doesn’t entirely break under the developers’ ambitions, but surely does bend.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a loosely accurate tribute to medieval Europe and, when it comes to the dev team’s desire for fun gameplay based in realism, it executes in more ways than it doesn’t. The combat is challenging whether you focus on melee or ranged and I cherished the deep physics system is as I layered my armor and watched the attacks of enemies glide off of me later in the game.  Fighting is complex and, no matter how skilled I felt I was, I always ran the risk of returning to a save point if you’re not geared up correctly. 

Ah, the save point. Many frustrations found in Kingdom Come: Deliverance can be summed up by the way the developers address saving your progress. There are autosaves at regular intervals, but there are mechanics surrounding manual saves that can punish you if you abuse it. Early on, the alcoholic beverage you have to have in your inventory is an expensive item to buy, so I had to manage my time wisely and be extremely careful with my decisions. As you progress, you find that you can craft the drink via the Alchemy system to save a great deal of time and in-game funds, but it’s entirely understandable if you’re too frustrated to care by then. The save system is a creative mechanic, but the game isn’t polished enough to warrant a player’s investment into it. All too often a bug or series of bugs would put me in a position where I’d need to spin up on old save file, but I’d have to weigh the decision to go back a good bit into the game or just deal with the consequences. Thank goodness the game was fun enough that I didn’t completely hate the idea of a bit of retread, but it’s something that held a solid game back.

The quests are really well done, so it hurts when you work through such an entertaining moment only to be derailed by a missing NPC or some other bug that ruins the quest outright and you move on without completing or you replay it altogether. Witcher 3 is another game that comes to mind when I think of collections of side quests and optional activities that don’t bore you to death with repeated tasks with a slightly different theme to them and Kingdom Come: Deliverance executes in this regard. The herbalist suddenly went missing? There’s a fight club outside a home disturbing the owners sleep at night? A plague has broken out in the village? At every turn I caught myself diving deeper into side quests, rarely ever feeling like being roped into the mundane.

A place where things do get mundane, though, is with the random encounters that happen as your traveling between towns. At first, they felt as well executed as the full-on side quests. At one point, as I searched for the young man I mentioned early that had info about bandits, I came across a dead body in the woods. I checked it for loot, assuming nothing out of the ordinary, right before a woman ran up to me and accused me of murder. She scared the crap out of me, but I noticed she was a bit out of her mind and seemed to be carrying the murder weapon herself. I accused her, she took off running, and I ended up losing her in the woods. It was a briefly terrifying moment in a game with none of the fantasy elements that usually anchor similar situations, but it was sullied as I kept running into the same thing over and over again. There are other random events that occur as you travel, but they all lose their luster over time. In a patch, the devs even increased the frequency of these occurrences and I feel that took away from a cool idea.

Waiting to strike!

Kingdom Come: Deliverance afforded me a lot of freedom and that’s one of the most incredible parts of the experience. I can wander to essentially anywhere I wanted to at any time, as long as I’m ready to deal with the consequences. Quests were presented as is typical with an RPG of this kind, but, I regularly would take note of some little bit of information an NPC gave me and find ways to complete a task more efficiently. For example, at one point I was on the hunt for a young man that had information about an attack from a group of bandits. The quest log on my map showed me a handful of places where I could find the next bit of information, but a couple details about what direction he fled in and the friends he usually spent time with put me on the right trail faster than running off to each marker to ask questions. Those details weren’t saved anywhere in the menus and, if I hadn’t been giving the conversations I had with random villagers my full attention, I’d have missed out. The game does hold your hand for a little while as you work through quests, but you have an opportunity to run off into the wild and accomplish things your own way if you want to risk it. Time progresses in the game realistically and that’s another element that influenced what I ran into as I maneuvered through Bohemia.

Learning to read actually helped me investiage a murder.

The freedom and realism also made me question a few design decisions from WarHorse Studios, one being the decision to not allow players to create a unique character. Henry is the game’s lead and, while you can shape him in many ways as you play, he has a story for you to experience. Thankfully, it’s a good one. Henry is one of the most endearing lead characters in recent memory and I enjoyed watching (and shaping parts of) his growth to see how it impacted his interactions with lowborn and nobles later in the game. My Henry had a pretty wonderful relationship with both, which is something that can even be influenced by some skills you earn, but it is interesting to navigate both worlds. Regarding Henry's skill progression, you must really practice to get better at everything. Whether it be lockpicking, combat, reading, or crafting potions, all the mechanics are really involved experiences and practice legitimately made me more adept in addition to earning me skill points.

On the other hand, the attention to realism made other elements stand out in a bad way. I played as a character whose energy, nourishment, and overall health I had to manage by taking to time to eat and sleep. If I didn’t take care, Henry’s performance would suffer in various ways. These survival mechanics weren’t overwhelming, kept me engaged throughout, but were strangely absent when it came to my horse Pebbles (I never upgraded from the starting horse). Not having to worry about my horse’s well being other than when it gets skittish during a storm or battle was a missed opportunity by the devs, but the real problem is when I would hit “X” to instantly summon my horse to me. Those moments snapped the immersion right in half and the list of places where I couldn’t summon him to me was pretty small.

I played the game on a GTX 1060 and, initially, I got really good performance out of the game at high settings. After I made it through the well-crafted segment of the game that serves as a four to five-hour tutorial, I started losing a lot of frames. I dropped the settings down to “Low” so I could have a smooth performance throughout my playthrough and the game was still quite pleasant to look at. Lighting, textures, and characters didn’t take too much of a hit at all and Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a visual feast on higher settings.

It’s a long path to the final chapter and the devs made one head-scratcher of a decision in the end. No explicit spoilers, but the path to the game’s final conflict starts off beautifully. There's a twist focused on Henry that kind of falls flat, but the events around it get the blood pumping. For the majority of the game, I felt that I’d have a pretty neat bow tied on the game’s major conflict. The first turn in the final chapter bucks that entirely and set me on the exceptionally jagged path to the final battle, excitement at nearly every turn. After a few significant moments that are obviously building up to the big crescendo, the pace completely falls off a cliff.

Wasted a lot of time waiting for this thing to be built.

At this point, I’d already experience the “point of no return” message and taken on some big quests. Right before the big battle though, I’m offered a ton of optional quests and an accompanying main quest to the final battle that forces me to return to the slower pacing of the game before we’d reached the point of no return. While it does play into the realism that the developers so excitedly aspire to in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, there’s plenty of opportunity before the point of no return to get these things lined up in the open world and keep from crippling the pace before finishing.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a fantastic and absolutely frustrating experience. I was treated to a memorable lead character whose agency and development was largely wiped away with a twist late in the game and a collection of incredible gameplay mechanics and quests repeatedly stifled by bugs. Despite its downfalls, though, the good parts of the game are so good. I spent 50+ hours in the game’s version of 15th century Bohemia and that’s with me rushing through the latter half of the game, leaving plenty interesting side-quests to be unfinished. I’d have done a whole lot more if I didn’t want to get the review out in a reasonable amount of time, and I will definitely be returning in the future.

This review is based on a PC code provided by the developer. Kingdom: Come Deliverance is now available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One for $59.99. The game is rated M for Mature. Check out our Kingdom Come: Deliverance Guide and Walkthrough for tips that will help you survive Bohemia.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance Review: Fantastically Frustrating published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[rate-out-of-10]

STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT II REVIEW

Two years after the mixed bag that was the rebooted shooter, Star Wars: Battlefront (2015), developer DICE is back with production company EA to bring their Star Wars license to new heights, and hit the notes that were promised in the original game. Battlefront II takes a lot of cues from fans and critics of the first, in many ways is an improvement on the original while keeping the parts did work well, like the fantastic sound score, graphics, and gameplay.

NOTE: My review of Star Wars: Battlefront II is based off my experience with the game on PlayStation 4.

A Much Needed Story

Probably the most substantial addition to Battlefront II is the inclusion of a full cinematic campaign. Battlefront II takes place at the end of the Return of the Jedi (1983) film and mainly follows an Imperial Inferno Squad member, Commander Iden Versio. Overall, the campaign I thought was very well done. Cinematics were top notch and the voice casting was great. Iden Versio became a standout character by the end. She began as somewhat very stoic and unemotional, but through the campaign she opened up quite a bit and became a very strong personality on screen. What the campaign did unexpectedly well was the inclusion of switching perspectives through the story. There are missions placed intermittently where you play as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Lando Calrissian. I was very surprised by these segments, mostly because I wasn’t expecting to play as heroes. Luke is the first you play as in the campaign and I was stoked to have that saber in my hands and have the power of The Force. The game is also interlaced with several flying sections, having you pilot TIE fighters and X-Wings. The variance of gameplay was fantastic. Also, you could customize Iden’s loadouts through the story too. You begin each mission with an already curated loadout that the developers thought to be good to play with through that particular mission but there are creates you come across that allow you to choose different abilities and specials and weapons. You’re also able to access this menu upon death. The campaign started out extremely well. The opening mission has you take control of a droid first thing and break Iden out of Rebel containment. It’s a stealth section to kick off the story that I very much appreciated; but once you free Iden and take control of her, the action kicks up immediately as you begin blowing away Rebel soldiers. By the end of the campaign I was feeling very excited and was enjoying myself very much. For what it is, a story that now exists within the film canon, it’s really good.

If anything negative can be taken away from the Battlefront II campaign is that it was pretty short. Maybe 5, 6 hours at most. I wish they would’ve delved a little deeper into Iden and her loyalty to the Empire, her relationship to her father, Admiral Versio, her friendship with her Inferno squad mates, Del and Hask. The pacing of the campaign felt very quick, jumping from moment to moment, battle to battle, without ever taking a substantial breath. It was fun, don’t get me wrong. It never felt dull or played out too much; I was very happily drawn into the story. But I will also say that the perspective of playing from the Imperial perspective was fun and intriguing, however it was over far too quickly, as Iden defects and reluctantly joins the Rebels. It’s just another drawback from how short the game was. Also, there was a section where you play as Han Solo who is trying to procure top secret information regarding the Imperial occupation of Kashyyyk, the Wookie home world. I was excited to drop in on the planet and free the Wookies that have most likely been living in slavery and tyranny since the ending of Revenge of the Sith (2005). Will it be a part of a future story DLC? I sure hope so, I definitely don’t want to wait for Battlefront III to have that answered.

Speaking of a prospect Battlefront III, I did not like the cliffhanger ending that the campaign ended on. The epilogue section has you playing as Kylo Ren decades after the main events of the campaign, and that was fun and all, but after the events of this final chapter, you’re itching to get the controller back in your hands and play as an older Iden and fight the early spawn of The First Order. But it leaves you hanging, almost insultingly. With the pushback on the first game’s lack of campaign and story, this game’s campaign had to be definitive, and part of that definition comes from conclusiveness, but we don’t get that here unfortunately.

Gameplay & the Multiplayer

The first Battlefront game brought the excitement of Star Wars to next-gen consoles in a big way. Classic locations and hero characters battling it out on beautiful maps backed by the iconic John Williams score. Battlefront II brings back all of those iconic aspects, thankfully. The game feels smooth and authentic to the Star Wars universe.

Before I get into the online multiplayer I do want to talk about the “Arcade” mode that was placed in the game. The first Battlefront had a place in the game they passed off as “missions”, where they were actually just a short few mini-missions and the Survival game mode (basically horde mode) on the multiplayer maps. Battlefront II’s Arcade section of the game has a section for “Battle Scenarios” where there are eight missions on both the Light Side and the Dark Side and they’re basically bot matches, you just get to control heroes. There’s also some Split-Screen arcade parts where you can load in bot matches with some customizable options and either play together as allies or versus each other. Aside from the Split-Screen bot games, I’d would have completely substituted out the Battle Scenarios for Galactic Conquest. I know I’m probably the millionth person to ask for Galactic Conquest back from Battlefront II (2005) but it’s a staple to the Battlefront franchise now, and to willingly omit that game type in place of useless and boring Battle Scenarios, it’s a little insulting and lazy. There are plenty of locations in this game that could’ve supported Galactic Conquest. It could’ve gone through all three eras, starting in the Clone Wars, through the original trilogy’s Empire, and then in the sequel’s First Order Era. It could’ve been a great addition that could be played solo or split-screen; I’m not even asking for online, just solo or split-screen, that’s it. That would’ve been great. But no. We get Battle Scenarios instead.

Another piece of the multiplayer is the Star Cards and gear customization. To a lot of pushback, Battlefront II has an in-game currency and crafting system for players to purchase new items and abilities. The micro-transactions is a big piece of controversy for the game, it came under a lot of fire pre-release for its questionable loot crate system, many people were afraid that the game is pay-to-win. But since the early release for Deluxe edition owners, the general manager at DICE, Oskar Gabrielson announced that they were going to suspend the in-game purchases of crystals within the game and focus on progression through game play. I have to give points to DICE on this one. I have no doubt it was the execs at EA that pushed for micro-transactions and give props to DICE  for basically going against their major publisher for their players.

But other than this, the game still has a few problems within the progression. There are now four basic classes (Assault, Heavy, Officer, and Specialist) and each has their own unique abilities and special weapons to use. What makes these classes a little underwhelming is that the weapons they have are extremely limited. Each class has only four guns to use. To make matters worse, the guns aren’t too different from one another. There needs to be more variance with the class weapons. However the special star cards you can get for the classes do vary a good amount and they each have their own use on each map with each game type. Hero characters return and they’re a lot of fun to play. Jedi, specifically, got a tune up. I use to favor the gunner types like Han Solo, but now for reason I like the Jedi more. Perhaps it’s the additions of Kylo Ren and Rey. Finally, you’re able to use heroes based on your in-game performance. You earn Battle Points through games via kills, objective plays, etc. and you can choose to play a hero by spending those points in-game.

There is a lot of give and take with the multiplayer in Battlefront II. The game type list has shorted to five modes, but I really enjoy each mode. Heroes vs. Villains returns and gets a nice tune up. There aren’t any random troopers ruining the hero fights anymore; instead it’s a 4v4 match with each player as a hero. Each round, there is a Target player that the opposing team has to eliminate. First team to 10 eliminations wins. This is a lot of fun. It gives everyone the opportunity to play as some of their favorite heroes. There are a lot of tense moments through these matches and great 1v1s. Boba Fett still destroys everything, some heroes still need to be rebalanced. The major game type in the Balltlefront II is Galactic Assault, a 40 player dynamic objective mode. Galactic Assault is a lot of fun. The games rely heavily on teamwork, some games can be tense, close battles, or completely one-sided blow outs. The games that last are the best ones. There’s plenty to enjoy in these game types for the competitive gamers and the casuals.

Final Rating 7.75/10

It’s a definite improvement upon the working formula that was introduced to us in the first Battlefront. Game play remains tight and enjoyable, and the visuals and sound design/score is impeccable. Battlefront II is definitely one of the best looking games out right now. The campaign is admirable really. Iden Versio is likable and is well written. I really wish it were longer allowing the story to explore this extended piece of the universe more deeply, but I enjoyed the campaign very much overall. The multiplayer is a mixed bag, yet again. The game play remains strong and the game modes are truly fun in their own right. However, the progression and loot system is where the game begins to rust up. Battlefront II needs to be straight forward with its progression. A basic reward system based on gameplay achievements and time is the clearest way to move forward with the future of Battlefront. I hope DICE takes these lessons into serious consideration and push even further to make the best Star Wars game possible. But for now, this will do just fine. Future free DLC is very exciting; I hope in-game tune ups and restructure is also on the menu.

[nealiios]

“The Derrick”: Part I - Returning To My RPG Roots

I’ve chosen to create a short game scenario set in a universe I’ve been building for literally decades. “The Derrick” has been a very long time in coming.

THE DERRICK - The title card for a possible upcoming interactive horror mystery game. 

Now as with almost every story I ever tell you, I have to back up a bit to explain where some things have their origins, specifically the concept behind "The Derrick” as well as the fictional setting of Adams, Oklahoma (in which my upcoing short story “The Tome” is also set). 

Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 1970s and the 1980s, I was an avid player of Dungeons & Dragons, and I spent a lot of time kicking down doors, slaying monsters, and trying to hit on succubi (since I couldn’t land a girlfriend in real life in those days). It was a marvelous first introduction to the world of role-playing games.

One day while perusing my favorite game store in Tulsa, Oklahoma I accidentally came across something which nearly cost me my sanity -- which was highly appropriate given that the game in question was the RPG Call of Cthulhu based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I was already a gigantic fan of Lovecraft’s literary work, and had devoured nearly everything he’d ever written, but the possibilities of actually playing in his horrifying universe was something that immediately “called” to me. I remember being so excited about it that I didn’t even wait to get home to break open the box, and I sat in the parking lot reading the instructions in my non-air-conditioned car on a punishingly hot Oklahoma summer day.  

ROLL FOR SANITY LOSS - Discovering Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu boxed set introduced me to the sanity-losing joy of one of the best RPG systems ever devised. Several year’s later, Call of Cthulhu developer Sandy Petersen wrote the introduction to my book “Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games.”

By the time I finished reading through the full rule set (thankfully in cooler circumstances), I realized that I’d finally found the game system for me. D&D was hellaciously fun, but sometimes the gameplay felt repetitive. With my group, we mostly spent our time murdering monsters to get their stuff so we could get better equipment to kill bigger monsters to get even better stuff...rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Call of Cthulhu, however, was a game that was about exploring mysteries, solving puzzles, and doing your dead level best NOT to end up in a gun battle with eldritch Outer Gods (which never, ever, ever went well for players who tried to pay CoC like it was just D&D in 20s drag.) I loved that players were constantly battling to stay sane, and that everyone was HIGHLY mortal. Characters never leveled up to being unkillable demi-gods. You were always at risk, always challenged, and you had to use your head while simultaneously terrified about what was lurking around every corner. If you did your job properly as Keeper -- essentially a role equivalent to a Dungeon Master in D&D -- you scared the crap out of your friends as they worked to save the world from cultists, and conspiracies, and monsters who often concealed their actions behind phenomena which ordinary people might dismiss. It helped if you were someone with a strong sense of paranoia about the world. 

While CoC was a great game, it was not a title that had a strong following in Oklahoma at the time. It didn’t have the strong word of mouth, and a lot players simply didn’t see the appeal of a horror game set in the 1920s. (It also didn’t help that the Cthulhu pantheon were, for a short time, a badly handled part of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. They were later retconned into a number of other monsters, with mindflares being the most clearly obvious remnant of Cthulhu’s original imprint on the D&D universe.) For a long time it was simply something I had to love without a regular group, but that didn’t keep me from working diligently on developing my own scenarios to run at OKON, the largest science fiction convention in Oklahoma at the time. 

Like most Keepers, my first scenarios were focused on events in the typical settings of Innsmouth or Dunwich or Arkham. There was, after all, a seemingly bottomless wealth of source material upon which to draw from Lovecraft and his Kalem Club contemporaries. What I didn’t love about using his established canon, however, was that it was too easy to have certain details of each town too easily recognized by reasonably well-read players. They knew who Pickman was and what Whaley was up to in the woods. They understood what was happening when people began to display that “fishy” look in Innsmouth. Often they’d have the mysteries solved before we got very deep into my adventures which meant that I had to change my approach. In order to get players off the scent, I had to take them where they’d never been, and introduce them to characters they’d never met. Ardently I set about the creation of an entirely new Massachusetts town named Tallchester, determined to create it in as great a detail as I could manage. Although I wouldn’t have recognized it as that at the time, I was developing my first real experience as a game designer and as a world builder.

A MOLDERING, ANCIENT TOME - My notes on the Tallchester setting have not fared well over the decades, but it somehow makes the content feel moodily appropriate.

DOWNTOWN TALLCHESTER - One of several maps that I drew up as part of the Tallchester campaign setting.

As you can see, my folder for Tallchester is now a crumbling, moldy mess that would be well suited for discovery in the basement of Miskatonic University. In it I have extensive maps, character bios, and a multi-page print out from a BASIC program I’d written to randomly generate NPCs for the entire town. I had reams of handouts to give to players about events mentioned in the local newspaper, some of which were relevant to scenarios I was running, and others of which were “seeds” for adventures still to be written.

YOU LOOKIN’ FER A HANDOUT? - No Call of Cthulhu scenario is complete without a fistful of handouts, and “The Curse of Tallchester” was no exception.

I could easily have spent forever building up that fictional town, but I found that players at conventions really enjoyed it when I relocated my adventures to more familiar settings. Tulsa and its environs had been a major city during the oil boom, placing it right smack dab in the middle of Lovecraft’s 1920s. The richest oil magnate in the world at the time, J.P. Getty, lived in the Mayo Hotel. Movie stars made a point of being seen in the oil capitol, and major aeronautics companies were furiously building there. The north side of Tulsa was for a time the most prosperous black community in America, so much so that it was called “Black Wall Street” (and tragically it would also become the site of the worst race riot in America’s history). In a lot of ways it was an absolutely perfect Lovecraftian city, and all I had to do was put in the work on a source book.

Starting around 1987, I began spending a lot of time in the newspaper archives of the Tulsa Tribune, looking for any sufficiently weird headlines which might serve as the start for an Oklahoma-based Call of Cthulhu campaign. I did not come away disappointed. Between the strong streak of yellow journalism of the day and the strangeness of a world still grappling with spiritualism and science, the Tribune ended up being a gold mine of ideas. There was plenty of stuff to work with, and it was dovetailing with another project of mine to explore the ghost stories of my family and of the neighboring town of Sand Springs -- a town which originally had been named Adams before the land was bought and redeveloped by benevolent city founder, Charles Page. 

FRONT PAGE OF THE TULSA TRIBUNE, 2/6/20 - Even Tulsa’s real newspaper was covering some eldritch-level creepiness back in 1920. 

Around the time that I was beginning to draw these elements into a cohesive whole, the unthinkable happened. I got a full-time, salaried job in the computer game industry doing EXACTLY what I’d been doing for fun on Tallchester and for Tulsa. I relocated to the west coast where my life became a full time dive into other worlds and other projects. As I lived and breathed new settings with very little spare time, the Tulsa Call of Cthulhu sourcebook was placed on hold and would stay there for a number of years. It wouldn’t be until a visit to the Sand Springs Cultural and Historical Museum and a discussion about the town’s folklore that I’d begin to see an opportunity to fuse both projects into a fictional setting (see my previous blog post about “A Ghost Town of My Own”). My new world would be a dark, mirror image of both Tulsa and Sand Springs and would serve as the heart of a written-for-Chaosium campaign that I wanted to name Crude Awakenings. Not only could it serve as a game framework, it would also serve well as a fictional “verse” for short stories, films, comic books and a number of other potential properties that today we’d call transmedia. Tentatively I began toying with ideas for short stories all set in this universe, with the first tale to be called The Tome set in the city’s gothic and terrifying library. 

For another long spell the ideas sat until last November when I began to dust off my notes. I considered the possibilities of simply taking The Tome and turning it into a game, but after reflection, I realized that it wasn’t well suited to being a game. I needed something that would lend itself well to the format, and which wouldn’t need to be completely restructured in order to be made interactive. And so I returned to my notes on Crude Awakenings and the first scenario that I’d described for the campaign. “The Derrick” began with an oil derrick, a mysterious death, and a romp that could lead on to a globetrotting adventure of mystery, exploration, and horror. 

And that’s where we begin, back where we started, standing over a dead man in the oil fields south of the eldritch city of Adams, Oklahoma. 

[operationrainfall]

Title Vitamin Connection Developer WayForward Technologies Publisher WayForward Release Date February 20th, 2020 Genre Experimental, Multiplayer Platform Nintendo Switch Age Rating E for Everyone – Comic Mischief, Mild Cartoon Violence Official Website

In a weird way, I’m kind of glad I only recently found the time to play through Vitamin Connection. Because what better time to play a game all about fighting infectious diseases than during a worldwide pandemic? Dark humor aside, Vitamin Connection is a very hard to explain game. It’s incredibly unique and experimental. I recognized plot elements that reminded me of Powerpuff Girls or Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, mini games that would have fit right into WarioWare, and controls that reminded me somehow of Yoshi’s Island. That’s a diverse mix right off the bat, and I applaud WayForward for their ambition. The question then was did this heady mixture of disparate elements come together in a cohesive elixir? Or did it erupt in an alchemical misfire?

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The entire plot of Vitamin Connection revolves around the Sable family. They’re an idyllic bunch – scientist father, bad-ass housewife mother, energetic young boy, psychotic baby and lovable dog. Something has caused bacteria to infest the entire family, and one by one, they come down with mysterious symptoms. Before you discount this as happenstance, I can tell you there’s actually something sinister afoot. I didn’t realize that until late in the game, but suffice to say the experience is as much about healing the family as it is discovering the source of their infection. You do so as the heroes of the game – Vita-Boy and Mina-Girl. They pilot the minuscule Capsule Ship, which enters bodies, finds bacteria and blasts them to smithereens. Each of the game’s levels has you wandering through veins and sailing towards major organs. Once you find a source of infection, your job is to beat them in a mini game. These can involve dancing, grabbing items, obstacle courses and much more. Oh and did I mention all of the viruses can talk (which is voice acted) and they love to trash talk you? Yea, this is a strange experience, but not without its charms.

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When I compared Vitamin Connection to Yoshi’s Island, it was mostly due to the very unique controls found in both games. You can play this game either single player or with a friend. I have a feeling the latter is the way it was meant to be played, but in the spirit of self isolation, I played this solo. In single player, you control all the aspects of the gameplay, whereas you split duties when playing with a friend. Or so I understand, I didn’t actually try multiplayer. In any case, there’s a lot of really cool features to the gameplay. As you wander through bodies, you can rotate your Capsule Ship with the right and left triggers, clockwise or counter clockwise. This is important, since touching any structure harms your ship, and if you take too much damage, you’ll die and have to restart from your last save. You use the joystick to control your beam, which can be shot in any direction you aim, making it very versatile. To make up for that, you have a limited charge to use it with. If you use the beam too long, the power of it is vastly diminished until it has a chance to reboot. You also later get a claw module that can grab and move things. It’s nifty in theory, but in execution it was very different. Mostly cause it was mapped to the same joystick used for firing your beam. So it’s very easy to accidentally arm the claw when you’re trying to blast, or vice versa. And since the claw’s controls are very, very finicky, I grew to dislike its inclusion in short order. You can also speed up how fast the level speeds past you by holding any two buttons on the right Joy-Con, which is handy. Especially since you otherwise can only maneuver your ship around with the left Joy-Con.

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In case it’s not already evident, the controls in Vitamin Connection take some getting used to. And even then, they can be a handful. As you navigate about, you’ll come across colored blue and red cords that block your path. You have to rotate your ship around so the proper colored edge is facing the cord, and then by ramming them at the proper angle, you’ll cut your way through. This was fun at first, but the game starts to go crazy with how many cords you come across. It’s also exacerbated by the tunnels you drift through often being very narrow, meaning that if you’re facing the wrong direction, you’ll sometimes have to rotate through the stage, harming yourself, just to be properly oriented. It wouldn’t be an issue if the game previewed that a cord was coming up, but it doesn’t. It’s also nerve wracking since if you get too far behind the stage as it scrolls, you’ll constantly take damage every few seconds. This didn’t happen often, mind you, but when it did I got very frustrated. And keep in mind that you’re not just wandering through harmless areas. There’s lots of bacterial enemies, and they love to get in your way, blast you from a distance or otherwise harass you.

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I mentioned mini games earlier, and there’s plenty of them in Vitamin Connection. One of the most iconic ones has you bust a move in dance battles against bacteria. That’s really cool in theory, but actually doing it can be very tough. Reason being, when playing in single player, you have to watch prompts for dance moves as they scroll on the periphery of both sides of the screen simultaneously. I started to feel like a chameleon playing this game, with my eyes trying to focus on two things at once. I did sort of get the hang of it, but it’s just an example of how mechanics in the game aren’t always well-implemented. The worst example was actually a mini game that involves extending a mitt to grab a certain amount of items. The first few times you encounter this, you’ll have to navigate around moving bacteria, since touching them hurts you. The last iteration of the game has bacteria that don’t move. I was totally flummoxed, until I figured out that you’re supposed to extend your mitt upward inch by inch, with minute flickers of your joystick, while simultaneously maneuvering your ship around, and then do the same thing in reverse to bring the items towards you safely. Suffice to say, this mini game was so irritating I nearly gave up on reviewing Vitamin Connection. Thankfully, I found some deep reserve of patience and pushed through. Maybe it’s not so bad with a friend, but if not, then something needs to be done to streamline it for solo gamers.

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I don’t mean to make it sound like everything in Vitamin Connection was a slog, cause it wasn’t. Oftentimes this is a very charming and funny game. Even though your heroes Vita-Boy and Mina-Girl are totally unvoiced, the other characters are bursting at the seams with personality. The game almost plays out like an old Saturday morning cartoon, full of humor and silliness. I especially liked the design of the various bacteria, such as giant cyclops bats, happy amoebas, candy colored rhinos and more. This is only boosted by the tremendous voice acting, which even minor characters like bacteria get. Visually, it’s a really attractive experience as well. Though it mostly plays off bright, crayola colored areas, the use of bold colors and cartoon style really makes it stand out. Musically the game is even better, and features tracks that would fit in perfectly in JPOP or KPOP, full of funky beats and mellifluous singing. Honestly, if I were just scoring the game on aesthetic or even creativity, it would probably have gotten a perfect score.

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Although I estimate I got through the main game in about 6 hours, there’s actually pretty decent replay value here. Each mini game you play is unlocked for free play later on. Additionally, by collecting all 5 hidden Ion Stars in a stage, you’ll unlock an accompanying bonus stage. These are fun and short affairs that play more like a SHMUP than the rest of the experience. Also, you unlock New Game Plus after you beat the final stage, which apparently lets you play as a different character. I say apparently since I haven’t tried it myself yet. Either way, I always appreciate reasons to come back to a game, and find it laudable Vitamin Connection is trying to put its best foot forward. Having said that, I probably would have preferred a longer main adventure with more story and hijinks to enjoy, since there’s only 6 main levels.

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Before I close things out, I need to touch upon some areas that really hurt the overall experience. Earlier I mentioned cutting cords in stages, and how it can get tricky when you’re navigating tight tunnels. This was problematic in one long stretch that leads to a stage’s last Ion Star, and I simply couldn’t manage it. I wish the game offered the ability to switch the color orientation of your ship, instead of just rotating it around and around. Another area of contention is with the save system. It autosaves whenever you are at a junction or after beating a mini game. My issue is that one time I was playing a mini game, about to win, when Vitamin Connection had an error that forced me back to the Home Screen. When I booted it up again, I wasn’t placed right at the start of the mini game, but instead at the tunnel branch which led to it. I also can’t express enough how much I wish the claw controls were separate from the laser controls. I had so many times where not only did I have trouble using the right tool at the right time, but even had tons of times where the claw was ready, I tried to grab something, and instead the claw retracted back into my ship. There’s actually a final boss in the game, in a fight that plays a lot like a battle in Mischief Makers. Problem was, it forces you to use the claw to fight back, which made things far more difficult. Oh and the Love Test game that plays after you beat stages really should have clarified that you don’t actually play it, but instead that it rates you on your overall performance. And lastly, while this is a minor quibble, it seemed odd to me that in a game so full of personality, the main characters are totally unvoiced, and don’t even get dialogue.

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Ultimately, I feel there were tons of cool ideas on display here and tons of charm, but that it wasn’t fully realized. Vitamin Connection is still a fun experience, and I appreciate the creativity. I just feel that perhaps some features required more time in the oven, so to speak. Honestly though, for only $19.99, it’s hard to take too much fault with the experience. I’d say if you want to support a cool indie company, you should give it a go. Just be ready for a steeper challenge than you might expect.

[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3″]

Review Copy Provided by Publisher

REVIEW: Vitamin Connection Title Vitamin Connection