March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.

A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.

Witch cards will drop: Tower of Guns

Roguelites, which is a pretty vague half-genre description, spread to many different full genres and do many different things to those games. To my surprise, one of the genres that seems most easily adapted to roguelite behaviors is shooters the list of ones recommended to try is pretty short. I mean you have this one, Tower of Guns, and then you have that other one Ziggurat. Then I don't think much of any have come up as worthwhile.

You'd really think roguelites would prosper with FPS gameplay, given most if not all of the core elements are so easily transitioned over. Random drops, leveling, random events, levels assembled by quasi-procedural nonsense, FPSes can do all of this and maybe actually do it in fun ways. I don't know, maybe there's a literal ton of them, but I can think of like two indie FPS roguelites that don't fall on the list.

It's a little bit annoying that I keep running into roguelite games while doing this streak of reviews, but Tower of Guns I simply had installed from weeks or months ago and had forgotten about it. Recently, I picked up a used geforce 960 GTX, so I was looking at shooters I'd forgotten about and realized I actually had more than a few currently installed. Which is, you know, kind of silly. So I loaded this up and gave it a whirl.

Actually, though I guess I'll find a copy of Ziggurat eventually, maybe the reality is the problems with Tower of Guns highlight why FPS into roguelite is a bit difficult. Guess we'll see whenever that shows up in a bundle or whatever.

Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

Retro reviews: Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star 2 was released in the odd period between the NES and SNES, where it felt like developers really weren't tapping the power of the Genesis at all. The original Final Fantasy is its immediate FF neighbor in the West, and while Phantasy Star 2 is visually more enticing than that, it is so much worse looking than FFIV. It's funny how these games are divided by years, but as a teenager, it never really connected how big the gaps in development were. Graphical quality was increasing in huge jumps, as both the technical development improved and the sprite art improved as well.

Actually it's kinda funny how people in the modern day have zero concept of the gaps between game releases. I read some complaint about how Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (which is bad, don't get me wrong) made a guy "thankful" he had a SNES as a child. Alex Kidd predates the SNES by like, a year or something. You weren't playing Alex Kidd when the SNES was available, unless you rented it, at which point you were renting an old goofy Genesis game.

In spite of the fact I owned a Sega Genesis - a generation 1 model, in fact, bought almost on the day of release in North America- I never finished PS2. The game was rather unpleasant in terms of difficulty curve, as it never really became super obvious as a small child that 90% of RPG difficulty
could be mitigated with grinding and just drawing maps. The game is already far enough back that my only memory is getting the first new party member, and how awesome the box art is. It also seems to have nothing to do with anything, but hey, whatever. That art owns.

I really miss the era of non-anime box art for western releases of Japanese games. It went away sooner than later, but that is some trippy shit instead of the cool but kinda plain Japanese release art. Stuff like this dying out reminds me why I hate weebs.

RPGs on the SNES and Genesis were more expensive than their less memory equipped cartridge compatriots, owing to the necessity of adding additional physical media within their plastic prisons - the so-called 'battery backup' that actually really was. (I've read some games, however, had flash memory instead) As such, PS2 - and many of its ilk - weren't games my friends and I bought when I was young enough that this game was new, but rented. It's such a weird thing, remember how you'd basically "borrow" these games from a store and you'd often be praying weekend to weekend - or weeks apart - that someone didn't send your saved game off to oblivion.

Roguelite space platforms: Shattered Planet

I don't have a long history of playing roguelike games, but I do have a basic understanding of them. Ye olde venerated classic "Diablo" is actually - to what I imagine most people barely seem to recognize - based around roguelikes generations ago. I want to say it was based on "Angband", but I could be getting my history wrong. That's a dungeon in the pre-LOTR middle earth lore, if you don't know. A lot of the elements, like fog of war and unidentified items, owe their origins more to those games than the ARPG genre that later ran off with them.

ARPGs, of course, are generally more forgiving and built around smoother gameplay, but I don't think we're supposed to talk about that.

Shattered Planet cleaves closer to the earlier roguelikes. It is a turns and tiles based game, centered on exploring the eponymous shattered planet. The game makes quiet references to the idea that some scientific disaster tore the 'old Earth' apart, but within most of the game you will rarely see any real script on the topic.

You are, or rather you are a line of, clones sent down onto the planet for the purpose of exploring the planet. The game smoothly folds that element of the roguelike concept in, but a lot of the other stuff ... Let's say doesn't quite come together.

Over the verge; Axiom Verge

Axiom Verge is the product of a single dude, which has long since lost real meaning to me. Thomas Happ be his name, and he made a game about ... Whatever this game is actually about is somewhat hard to describe. I'm going to try to describe the game without spoiling the game, which is actually much more difficult than you'd think, because certain explicit and implicit elements of the gameworld are tampered with as a matter of due course for the story to unveil and then unfold.

At its core, before anything else is layered on, Axiom Verge is a Metroid leaning Metroidvania. There are a lot of reviews and a lot of commentary built from that central point, and a lot of it goes from there to become very hostile and negative. Oh how dare a single gentlemen lovingly craft a passion project in his side hours that builds from his experiences in retro-gaming of the Nintendo-kind! How dare he infringe on that holy space!

Thing is, as I said back in the Super cyborg review, I honestly don't care anymore. We're not in the early generations of gaming here, and the fact that someone who was raised on video games made a video game that feels like video games is like complaining that a major book series feels like a book within its genre. Yeah, it is a Metroidvania that feels like a Metroidvania.

Get over it. The genre is actually pretty narrow, if you actually want it to feel like Metroid, and not something like Strider where the Metroidvania elements feel like a contagion that infected an action game's genome and dragged the entire production down.

To me the real question is whether or not Axiom Verge, in and of itself, by itself, feels like a quality and polished product that I enjoyed playing, and/or, think others should play.

It's about robots: Primordia

So, I'd be the first to admit I couldn't tell you the difference between a puzzle game, a HOG or an adventure game or any of the myriad divisions. I mean some games are puzzle games, but there are also games which have puzzles in them? They are puzzling but not puzzled out? I would also be the first to tell you that I delight in robots - robots are very important to me. And Primordia is about robots.

Or it is sort of.

Primordia is a well-written adventure (!?!) game centered on a robot with a wacky pun spewing sidekick that has to solve the essential problem of power, since another robot showed up, shot him and took his "power core" that provides power to his ship. And oddly that song does fit the theme of the game, somehow. The game's story slowly comes together, and I don't really want to spoil elements, but I found it sort of an interesting take on post-apocalypse sort of things since the robots don't really recognize it as such. Or much of anything as such, but since they're robots, you go yeah ok this makes sense.

There isn't a lot to say about Primordia, given the gameplay is very simply and very soothing. The characters, pardoning the one, are very interesting and unlike Morningstar they're not intentionally pushed to be annoying. I wish I could have screenshotted more of the sidekick's puns, but unfortunately the game won't allow you to use the steam overlay screenshot tool OR the raptr screenshot tool (how that is even possible is beyond me) but will allow you to screenshot using the printscreen key.

Which makes no sense! Unfortunately that also advances the dialogue, so I'd see something funny and then the game would eat it. Sigh.

Eight weeks of playing roles: Shadowrun Returns

 

Roleplaying winter couple of months continues with some sort of successful kickstarter game. Hurray. It's cold out! Let's play the role of someone who can open their not frozen shut windows. Because I can't open my window. It is covered in ice. Is this ok?

I don't have any strong memories of Shadowrun as a teen; I'm not sure if I was too old or too young. I have the weird luck of having read Neuromancer in my formative years - like, to the point I was young enough that William Gibson marched me right past a sex scene and I didn't even know what they were doing - which I think shaped a lot of my ideas about how the future is going to go. Everyone should read Neuromancer, even if it isn't Gibson's best work. Shadowrun is, to my loose grasp of cyberpunk as a conceptual predecessor to the eventual genre it "became" Neuromancer by way of magic and other wackiness, likely making it more akin to the early Warhammer 40k lore which was also something of a melting pot of concepts.

Did you know Warhammer 40k actually originally had a sense of humor?

As for kickstarters, I was really excited when kickstarter first came into being as it represented gamers being allowed to choose what would be developed and influence the market in a more hands on, or wallets on, manner.  The end result however has been something of a mixed blessing. The whole cycle of Kickstarter into Early Access into Steam Cards into Steam Sale has really highlighted a lot of points where the game industry has problems that we all gleefully blamed on like, Electronic Arts and Bobby Kotick for the last decade and as it turns out those perceptions might not have been on the money.

See the joke there is kickstarter has wasted a lot of people's time and money, though I think it is less egregious than the whole green light early access "give me money for an unfinished product I don't plan on finishing chortle" set up.

But SR:R is a kickstarter "success"; the game was made on time, I think, came out and people reacted to it in a pretty reasonable fashion. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but it's a roleplaying game and I had more interest in playing it than finally trying to get through Fallout: New Vegas (which is just so hyped I'm scared) and trying to figure out what the first Dragon Age actually "is". Is it Origins? No I mean yes it is on Origin and I have the full version, but which one actually is it? I don't want to think about it. What happened to putting numbers or clear titles after games?

Right I'm getting distracted. SR:R is a top down, isometric RPG with guns, magic and trolls. It is a mix of cyberpunk and magic, though it ends up feeling like the cyberpunk side is pretty subdued compared to the magic, so that might disappoint a little. As I hinted by mentioned Neuromancer, it takes from an oddly bog standard view of the future, in which nations no longer quite exist and huge megacorps do things for money. Very close to Syndicate, I believe, which this game feels like the more honest RPG cousin of.

I'm referring to the shooter that people wanted to be an isometric RPG there, in case you didn't care. You don't. Let's move on.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ring Runners Flight of the Sages

If you caught me on a good day, when my memory actually works and asked me which game from my childhood I wish I could play as a child again with all the full delight of childhood I wouldn't answer Baldur's Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy IV. I'd likely answer either Herzog Zwei or Inner Space. Inner Space is something of a rare gem, a cute little "indie" title that offered an experience that mixed many genres, but was more or less built around Star Control style action with a rogue star fighter sort of deal instead.

Ring Runners reminds me a great deal of Inner Space, which isn't too surprising given there's probably some shared DNA in their ancestry, though I'd be surprised if the developers or anyone on the planet besides me has ever heard of Inner Space.

Regardless, after an hour of playing Ring Runners I had escaped from some essentially unknown facility that was never explained, which explodes, given a good ship, lost the good ship and was then assigned to pick up garbage for a while. Then the garbage king arrived and, in the garbage ship, forced me to do battle in some sort of trash related gladiatorial games. I had previously turned down the difficulty to get through a mission that felt bizarrely out of sync with the game's earlier difficulty in the hopes I could figure out later what I was doing wrong, but couldn't turn it back up, so I was sort of thinking if I had to spend another five minutes doing garbage gladiatorial games I would probably fall asleep at the keyboard.

The gunning in the space ships stuff is amusing enough, though not great, but fighting people in an arena in a garbage collecting cruiser is just fundamentally not something I ever want to be doing on easy. Or at all, but on easy I'm being punished for not understanding the one mission. So I dug around the options and found no way to turn the difficulty back up, but did find out I was playing 'the tutorial'. I thought to myself, of course, it's using missions to explain to me the mechanics, but certainly this will open up a more interesting, Inner space like experience right? Let's just skip the tutorial.

And then it just started vomiting increasingly larger piles of dialogue at me until I closed the program - Actually, I alt-F4'd, since you're not allowed to close the ring selecting map screen that doesn't really make much sense to someone who skipped the tutorial because it involved fighting in a garbage ship. And yes, I'm blaming the developers for that. You get one mission with the goofy garbage collecting ship to explain the mechanic - Not three in a row!

Ring Runners looks like a game I would have enjoyed immensely as a 12 year old, but the writing is really wooden and the inertia based 2d ship combat even after an hour of playing just felt jarring and way too zoomed in. I swear I've played Star Control 2 (Ur-Quan Masters) recently, on a notebook keyboard no less, and I had way less difficulty with the controls in that game than this one. I understand that if you continue to apply thrust in a direction in zero gravity without anything to cause friction or what not around you, you'll eventually have to apply an equal amount of force to negate that inertia but that's not a fun gameplay mechanic. At least I think that's what they're going for when you spin your ship three hundred and sixty degrees, apply afterburners and still ram into an object. You actually do have air brakes in space but that just begs the question as to why flying is such a damn chore if you're going to follow physics some of the time?

Also there's just too many buttons. I had less buttons in UQM, but felt more in control of the ships I was flying.

Anyway, in conclusion, I played Ring Runners for an hour and found it interesting enough that I'm not griping about the play time but it really didn't grab me at all. Quite liked the music though, and some of the more peaceful bits were super zen. The game felt pretty good when I had the sweet ship at the start, but then it took it away, put me in a garbage scow and then ... Do I need to keep going? Why would you do this? Why would you program in a mission to collect garbage?

You can tell they really wanted to jam dialogue based on the length of the title. Just go with Ring Runners! What's a sage? No, never mind, I don't want to know.

The Secret to Success is Card Work: Syder Arcade

This is going to be a weird one just on the back of things not working out as expected. See, like many steam users, I've got too many games and many of those games come with cards. Cards are nice, since they sell for a dollar or two in total but they encourage me to idle games using a program that reports to steam the game is being played. But I like to lead a review with my play time and idling prevents that from being useful. And sometimes, I just don't really get grabbed by a game but I don't want to badmouth it either. It just goes on the back of the list.

Anyway the idea here was going to be - I would play a game til I got the card drops, then move onto a couple other titles with cards I probably won't get around to writing full reviews of. It's not as serious a process, but I could preface it as such! One problem: Syder Arcade appears to be too short to obtain all four of its card drops. I'm certainly willing to admit maybe I just missed a mode unlock or something, but eh, we'll get into it...

I have a real soft spot for side-scrolling shooty ship games and graphically this game is a joy to look at.  The engine is pretty smooth, the ships all look good, the characters (all four of them) look great during the little silly pseudo cutscenes and the enemy ship designs are visually pleasant. There's sort of a weirdness to how they seem to be two very distinct styles of design, but whatever I don't think thematic linking is all that necessary in a shmup. While I have a soft spot for spaceship bullet hell games I am not fundamentally any good at them - I might have been decent as a child, but I don't have the visual responsiveness necessary to be any good now. So I played through 'the campaign' on the 2nd up difficulty, which was a bit too easy in parts.

The art assets really shine on the HUD, it just looks quite nice to me and information comes readily. The game also does audio alerts and the announcer voiceovers are good, but not spammy. You fight some giant bug monster stuff and then descend to an ice planet, with a sort of mediocre boss fight...

Then, abruptly, the game just ... Ended? A little credit bit starts playing and one of my big issues with the game comes up - I can't quit the game! So it's just rolling along with these credits and I quickly tire of watching names, so I alt-f4 and flip through the campaign menu, realizing these are all just levels and not individual campaigns. Which is sort of a bummer. And seriously, I hit every button on my keyboard and gamepad. Is this an amiga reference? I have no idea.

The game does come with a survival mode, which I gave a couple tries to, but the fact of the matter is - to me anyway - the enemies are way too bullet spongey. So I'm basically focusing all of my efforts on dodging enemy fire, not really killing anything and then the screen is covered in enemy units. This works pretty nicely in the campaign since you end up dodging around against a limited number of foes, but in survival it reminds me of playing a RPG and wandering into a zone you're too low level to do. Just sitting there, plinking away ineffectively. Maybe that's something shmup lovers are big on, but it didn't work for me.

The music and audio clips are excellent - Well, I think one song wasn't so good, but I generally quite liked what was hitting my ears. The game also does this neat thing where you can flip directions and turn around, which is pretty neat in the campaign and again really unenjoyable in the survival stuff. Again I'm not sure if this is common as I haven't played so many shmups, but it's new to me.

So, to conclude, I liked the game and I was given it so I'm not fretting too much, but an hour of play time for $10 is probably too much. Maybe pick it up cheap, or maybe the devs will add some content later on? Hard to say and hard to recommend as such, but the complaint "there isn't enough" is not so bad a complaint when it ends with "because I wanted more!"

Shootember: Hard Reset

 Expectation is a hell of a thing.

Hard Reset was introduced to me as "an old school" FPS game. For me, that means Doom and ... This is not Doom. I'm just saying that right out because Doom is a piece of nostalgia to me that should not be invoked unless a game really feels old school. Maybe Hard Reset is middle-school, which I think is fair to it. It reminds me a bunch of Quake 3. I think this took a ton of my enjoyment right out of Hard Reset's hands, since telling me I'm going to experience Doom again is just so unfair to any game. I'm generally pretty good about nostalgia, having replayed many of the old games I once remembered fondly. But Doom man, Doom just is.

Doom to me is very similar a discussion as the early Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a wealth of features people can't seem to successfully weave together. Lots of callbacks and references, but they never seem to get there. Doom is essentially a 2d game pretending to be 3d, which is in and of itself a big part of why it works. It also features health packs, key cards, ammo attrition elements, back tracking, secret doors, a "lighting engine" that actually does something and a banging sound track that all add up to a surprisingly easy to mentally integrate atmosphere. Demons from Hell, stuff happened, you are shoot man, go forth and SHOOT. What Doom lacked in story, it made up in sentiment. Shoot man wanted to shoot his foes and felt a sense of accomplishment in trekking through each treacherous environment.

I could go on about Doom for hours, but it was fast, it was fluid, it didn't go out of its way to punish you but attrition kept the game tense. Even many modern elements would work fine in Doom, but the atmosphere is what I miss. I also miss, more than anything, the feel of bleak openness - I honestly think the open world sandbox games are much closer in design to Doom than most modern shooters. The games care less about aiming, more about movement and you feel way more powerful in Saint's Row 3 than you do in most FPS games.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on Hard reset in this comparison, I'm not really. I don't know that it's something they intentionally marketed their game to be or if the gaming press just picked up the idea. If there's one thing media loves, it is to A) bash modern fps games since they're the largest or at least most hyped up market B) Decrying the new school, they flip out and claim everything is old school that isn't a big budget AAA shooter.

Which is bizarre - There are different eras of shooters. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone Aliens of Gold and a fair number of other early titles represent a fundamentally old school design. There's also middle ground between now and then, with many of the 'old school' elements actually being stuff from middle era or later games. The first Crysis for example barely feels like Doom but it doesn't feel like a chest high man shooter cinematic set piece game either.

Anyway to summarize what I mean, Hard Reset essentially feels like a middle ground shooter. There are attempts at weaving some Doom like elements into the game, but it also feels like it has many modern elements as well. So like I said, expectation is a Hell of a thing, but once you get past the idea it was aiming to be a mix of all three eras you get a better sense of the game and judge it a bit more fairly. You stop thinking "why aren't I playing Doom, I was promised Doom" and instead think "I'm playing Hard Reset at least, which is better than Rage anyway..."

Belated Shootember! Splinter Cell Conviction OR Adventures in uPlay

choke 'em out UNDER THE CLOWN

I didn't buy this game, but I've wanted to try a Splinter Cell thingie for a while, so when my friend offered to give me a free copy generated via a nvidia promotion I was all excitebike. Or, well ok, not so much excited as vaguely interested. The promotion was for the deluxe edition of Splinter Cell: Black List, but for some reason also came with a free copy of this game, which is pretty nice given I hadn't played any of them. It's pretty weird that a deluxe edition (ie, purchased by the game's core audience) would come with an extra game but hey that's really nice of them.

uPlay though, man oh man is uPlay a thing. I have two experiences previous with uPlay: One, I installed it to add a key from one of the Assassin's Creed games. I think Brotherhood, or something. The key was generated via a pricing error, so it was eventually revoked. I'm not upset about that, but it's worth pointing out that Electronic Arts had a pricing error that gave up hundreds of thousands of copies of games and they didn't revoke a single one. It worked too, that's why I have Origin and have actually given them money for Origin titles - Kingdoms of Amalur through Gamersgate, but certainly more of a success than nothing. My other experience is installing uPlay to figure out what I actually had on the account and the entire process being a bit well into irritating.

This latest experience is just a hassle. My friend gave me the code amazon had spat out. This code then goes into the nvidia website, which requires a webform. That gives me a coupon code for the ubistore, which uses my uplay account credentials. But it isn't uplay, really, because upon finishing the checkout process after getting all my ducks in a row (and it changing my address to a US postal code matched to Alberta, Canada which is a place I do not live in) it spat out ... An email. The email gave me the Conviction code, which I would then I have to input into uplay myself. But there was no Blacklist code!

No, that code shows up later, because this was before the release date. My word, there are so many more steps here than if it was on Steam. And most of them involve using outdated storefront software and gee wilkers mister ubisoft, get your damn shit together! Later it gave me Blacklist anyway and emailed me to let me know, but there's just so many things about this whole experience that gives me the feeling uplay is a year too early. Then an Installshield Wizard popped up and I honestly thought I'd traveled back in time.

I don't know overmuch about Splinter Cell, beyond the main character having a name I like and something about Tom Clancy which to my understanding is like a kiss of death? A friend of mine read spy novels by the dozens and Tom Clancy apparently upsets him. But this series has been going on long enough that something about it must be worth playing, right? And then the voice actor for Sam Fisher becomes apparent and it's the guy who played Ultra Magnus in Transformers Prime. UM was a space cop in the IDW run, and it's hard not to connect everything in my head and it's just so awesome. Sam Fisher, duly appointed enforcer of the awesome accord. Hells yea.

And then I remembered this is this VA's last game and damn it now I get why people were mad!

Tower Defense Expertise: Defense Grid, the Awakening, the Oodles of DLC

Way way back I got talked into getting Steam at the beginning of the winter sale season. 2010, I think, the year I gave up the WoW and returned to the fold of the glorious PC gaming master race, gpu under one arm, keyboard the other, mouse dangling from my twitching hands. Glorious discount gaming master port gaming race. Blargh. The first game I got was gifted - Shatter, which is a nice little game - but the first one I really got into was Defense Grid. I think I paid 2.50 for it originally, with all the (then) DLC packed in and I've given them money twice more for DLC. Hilariously enough, this is the first tower defense game I'd ever played and probably the first time I'd really gotten into the genre. I think I'd played maybe ten minutes of it on a mod or something. I was never big into RTS games, and then I played WoW and Magic for a couple years, so I'd missed a fair bit of the middle years of gaming.

So Defense Grid was my introduction to tower defense. Since then I've played two of those Orcy games, Sol Survivor, Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Dungeon Defenders and perhaps some other shit I've forgotten about. Of all of those ... Defense Grid is the only truly pure TD game. Sol Survivor is close, as the interaction is limited, but the other ones all dumb down the TD mechanics in exchange for more action elements, for better (Orcs Must Die) or worse (Dungeon Defenders, ugh). Ironically, or not, there's a reverse bell curve in action; the more action game, the worse. Then the better!

Defense Grid is very, very pure TD. The tension doesn't come from running around or fighting Orcs, but in very carefully aligning the load balancing of the grid. Doing a fight well requires increasing amounts of precision, on two planes. First, when and where aliens die impacts your "recovery" rate, which is both in terms of interest, access to interest and a couple other little things. Second, the way your towers are structured - the build of the maze - relies on committing to the plan and guiding it as it goes. A couple towers spin into a maze, and then the maze's parts align together to do force multiplication until you have killzones that dispatch ten times the number of aliens the towers would if they weren't working in tandem. I'll talk about this again in a moment.

It's not a visually stunning game, though its art direction and conveyance is pretty solid. The locales are extremely varied, lending a ton more flavor to the game than it would possess otherwise. Maps include icy canyons, various high tech installations and the edges of future cities. The audio direction is really good. You're paired with an AI that ... Well, honestly isn't much more than a cheerleader, but he talks and rambles, gives some back story to aliens being pew pew'd by towers.

Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

The humor of buying this game is I never really intended to. I can't remember why, but FO:NV was on my wishlist, so a friend bought it for me. Or maybe it wasn't and he just bought me it, I don't know. I'd never played through FO:3 and I was told FO:NV totally replaces three.

I'm a little weird in this - If there's a sequel that totally outpaces the original, I always want to make sure I give the original a fair shake, because there's no going back. So I bought FO:3 because someone else bought me FO:NV when I didn't really want either. Then I started playing FO:3 when there are other games I felt like playing, but I just finished a controller game and I was trying to avoid RPGs since I wanted to play Witcher 2 a year after the first one. So I started playing ... A controller game that is also a RPG.

Ahem. I'm playing it KB+M though!

Fallout is a little weird for me as well because I never played the originals. One of my close childhood friends had three 'favorite' games: X-Com, Master of Orion and Fallout. Oh, and probably Simcity, but I'd played that before I knew him. So he loaned me two of them and I don't think I ever loaned anything else. X-Com and MoO are amazing classics, so I never played Fallout. That's sort of dumb, but for some reason I just never did even though he raved about it tons when we were kids. That's probably pretty shameful as my PC gaming cred goes, but I honestly don't have any cred. I just played lots of X-Com.

And it wasn't hard.

I do not necessarily like the post-apocalypse dystopia setting in any broad sense of the term. Though I don't think that post-apoc is necessarily as bad as say, time travel, it has a certain way of ruining any thematic sense. Stuff just gets thrown in without any real sense of logic, creating game worlds that lack any sort of coherence. I do love Dark Sun mind you, but fantasy post-apocalypse is a pretty rare treat comparatively. I like to classify Morrowind, likely my favorite true fantasy rpg, as sort of in that vein as well. Granted, I know basically nothing about Fallout's setting, but I'm leaning against it almost on an innate level.

So Fallout probably always had its work cut out for it. But hey Rage managed it, right?

Shootember: Fall of Cuberbots

I don't usually like to play sequels shortly after finishing a previous chapter in a series. It towards doing two main things: Graphics are always better, gameplay is always worse. Gameplay might not actually truly be worse, but it feels worse as you struggle to nail down changes in motion and control scheme.

just walk right into the gun

First impressions out of the gate: The game is definitely prettier, in fact, it might be one of the best looking games I've ever seen. WFC was attractive and polished, but Fall of Cyberton is actually legitimately gorgeous even beyond the environments which were already stellar. Gameplay is a bit weaker, but even more varied. I feel like it has encroached a bit too close to 'modern shooter' for my tastes, although it still doesn't have a full cover button scuttling walls "thing" that I've seen in some other games. Compared to the first it feels a bit sluggish and transforming comes off as slower. There's less a feeling of agility in much of the game.

literal of tower of power

The game's plot picks up what I imagine is some additional amount of time after the first one, though it's hard to pin down how much. As far as I can tell they have stopped talking about DARK ENERGON which is a massive, unreal huge improvement. I have no idea who settled on that plot device for the first game but I hope he sobered up and is living a healthy life now. It's hard to think he was in a good place when he imagined up that particular macguffin. There are more characters and more variety in enemies, though enemies still suffer from difficulty in being differentiated at a glance. It's a bit saddening since this is an issue in just about all FPSes, but in this game you can design totally different bodies for them! This is jarring when you run into "name" characters, who all look extremely different from the mainstay buffoons. Except the Combaticon fivesome, who look quite similar to the primary decepticon models. I found that interesting to see in action, as though the art team changed gears near the end of develop to put them into the game using other models as the basis. They look great, so it's not a complaint, but it's odd how Megatron or Starscream look so different from all of their soldiers.

haven't seen any others of those, huh

The plot remains, on the most part, pretty weak. Most characters and most dialogue is good; Megatron remains an awful eyesore with horrible dialogue and just ridiculous nonsense spewing from his mouth at all times. It's very strange how in the moment the game feels good, but you stop to consider what is going on and it is just silly. I have no idea what Megatron's overarching goal was supposed to be, other than just being angry about ... Something? I don't want to sperg out about the plot, but even more than the first game it really feels like Megatron just yells reality into warping itself to his desires. Stuff around him just doesn't make sense.

While character driven dialogue - the exchange between guys, the plans, the cut scenes and various speeches - are all really good, one thing that really stood out about the game is the very weird taunts the enemy units I think are directing at you. It's very strange because the audio direction is set up in such a way that I wasn't sure for most of the game who they were at all talking to. Were they talking to each other? The wall? It wasn't really clear.

Transitions through chapters and the general pacing of the game is much better than the first one, with lots of variety in those chapters as well. Transforming is unfortunately somewhat marginalized here, with enemies basically never transforming in a meaningful way and much of the vehicle stuff basically forced into the moment. When you do need to transform though, the vehicle sections are much better. The game is surprisingly when you consider just how poorly most vehicle sections are in most games. I mean the tank part of Crysis was so terrible - out of nowhere - that I actually cheated past it. I guess that's more of a FPS thing, maybe, thinking back on the vehicle sections in Just Cause 2 which were good. My favorite vehicle stuff involved the mid-game helicopter level with Vortex, who felt like you were rewarded for using each of his weapons and both of his forms. Also watching the thruster animation as the helicopter started jetting around never ceased to amuse.

The game is especially interesting for its capacity to actually continually improve over the course of the chapters, as many action games tend to get worse after blowing the opening set pieces. I wasn't at all impressed with the Metroplex stuff, but the middle levels are just a rush of really interesting set pieces as characters react to the climax of Metroplex's ascension and defense of Iacon. Then the plot falls back away as it attempts to slide back to the starting, as the entire game is a flashback. It kinda sticks gears with Megatorn returning to give boring speeches about how he's so angry about something. Given his giant phallic gun and his transformation into a huge dong, maybe it's pent up ... robo ... Something? Still, the levels continually improve other than his first couple scenes, which sucked. The last level reaches a fever pitch that actually got pretty exciting. As climaxes go, other game companies could learn from their lessons here - It briefly uses many of the assets introduced in the game

In the final conclusion I think the game is, in many ways, a slightly worse game and definitely a worse shooter than the first one. Many of the elements, especially the lack of transforming enemies and somewhat reduced variety of basic encounters, really takes away from the pound the ground combat the first game excelled at. On the other hand, the graphics engine has been pushed so far its glorious to just watch in motion, and the various chapters all have a ton of variety. This is a game where you spend some time as a hover jeep, a helicopter, a phallic tank, an eight foot tall titan, an angry brain addled robot who transforms into a dinosaur and even fits in a sweet little stealth action level. That's a ton of variety and presented in such a way where you legitimately wish the game was just longer! The ending alone has four completely different styles of play, with a gladiatorial battle, a dave and goliath fight and so on.

gimme five

That's pretty swell and I give them high praises for putting out so an interesting set of experiences. I wish I was better at multiplayer, but I'm so atrocious I'm not even going to bother. I'm a terrible shot, sigh. And yet I still quite enjoy shooters, and odd paradox.

In space, ships are made of grey with splashes of Red

The first thing that stood out about this game, especially after playing Mass Effect 2, is how wonderfully quick the saving and loading is. Seriously! I was like wow, it saved that fast? Loads up that quick? It's delightful. The weird thing, I mean, is that this actually seems really important to a horror game. If the game had long loading screens you'd end up like ME2, where I often accidentally misclicked after tabbing back into the game.

The second thing is holy cow is that ever a ton of blood. I mean there is blood everywhere, on everything. There's more blood than there is much of anything else. It starts to completely lose impact, as blood doesn't really indicate violence coming to you. It just looks like you're actually on some deep space raspberry jam factory ship.

The blood and its over-abundance sort of defines the main thematic thrust of the game. It is horror executed through absolutes. It's not violent, it's ultra violent. There is little in the way of pacing, little in the way of slow build up in encounters. Shit goes bad quickly and then it just blasts it in your face. The game is a fire hose of gore, violence and blood to the point it's a weird mix of comical and gross, but not really horror.

What confused me at first is the fact the game does in fact understood horror. There are bits where it is decidedly creepy and atmospheric, with some really nice attention to detail. Little tricks of the lighting and odd well placed sounds that tickle you just the right way. Then some corpse smashes its skull against a pipe and all atmosphere is instantly lost. I think the end conclusion is they simply firehosed the game with absolutely everything: ultra violence, atmosphere, weird sci-fi ideas, blood, gore and every spooky anything they'd ever seen.

I've heard of the great outdoors but this is

The sci-fi elements are surprisingly a step above my expectations. I'm not necessarily saying that the game spews chemistry and physics at you, but sci-fi concepts like cloning labs, zero gravity and air production at least show an interest in outlandish concepts. It does, on some level, feel like some fifty year old crappy spaceship would perhaps feel. Or at least feels like someone sat down and thought about the possibilities - There is a serious attempt at world building. The storyline angle world building is mediocre, but the ship itself is truly awesome.

So then we move onto the "game" in and of itself. Gameplay is pretty simple stuff: You're an engineer, you shoot the monsters du jour with various weapons that actually feel like less than military hardware. Gunplay is pretty accurate and monsters feel tense without being overwhelming. The game is generally pretty fair about combat in a way I like - I find myself looking around and wondering where the freshly arrived enemies are, but usually they don't go for me before I get a chance to find them. It seems weird to complain about this, but going into a "horror game" you expect a ton of cheap ass bullshit. The game is mostly well paced and fair in that regard, at least on normal. I did say mostly - There's some crap, especially in zero gravity environments, but also awkward 'lockdown' scenes where you're jammed into a closet.

Enemies remain scary, even though they're not much of a threat in the true sense of the word. They're at least dangerous enough that you pay attention to them, though scary in this context may not be quite the correct word. Combat is surprisingly interactive, as you need to aim to remove limbs, not just body and head shots. You don't just find the target and hold down fire, but quickly move to tear it to pieces.

Puzzles, unfortunately, vary between interesting and totally boring. One of the issues I have with the game is that save points, as a rule, should always come before and after puzzles that take a couple minutes to solve. I mean literally the save point should be right there. It's all well and good to have checkpointesque system, and I can live with that, but several of the larger puzzles have combat in and around them. That's irritating. More frustrating is the fact that the game basically loses its stride in regards to puzzles, eventually just using them to burn time. The crate shit at the end is beyond obnoxious. I honestly don't understand the purpose of boring me to death (ha) with moving boxes around or fetch quests.

The storyline is ... I don't know. I started to pick up that there were going to be derpier elements as I went. The game didn't go outright berserk with them, rather it keeps much of it pretty low key, but there's some definite macguffin action to try to tie things together.  There's an especially odd moment where one of the cast just ... Screws you over. For reasons I'm largely not altogether too sure, other than the needs of the narrative, really work. The macguffin itself is at least given a sense of, if not personality, then at least a certain feeling of inevitability that governs its "actions" in the game. The subtle difference between a plot object that people just do things crazy like around, and a plot object that drives people crazy to do things around for it, is enough that the story never really catches itself too harshly.

There's a couple other elements that felt bent in to feed the needs of the narrative. I've mentioned the game just has too much blood, but it also has too many corpses. Now this may sound odd, but the game implies that the necromorphs are made from the dead, very actively at that. And yet there's just random bodies and bits all over, just to add to the gore factor. Thing is, those bodies should just be necromorphs, not gorish decorations. Also you're generally supposed to smash bodies, which is just more hassle and chore added in. There's also way too many of the "baby" necromorphs - which do actually have an explanation in game for existance, but they make up like half the necromorph population in game.

This wouldn't bother me if they weren't more or less a chore to deal with.

The other thing that becomes such a chore is the audio. Now, I understand the idea that you want spooky sounds in a horror game, but Dead Space's audio direction is just goofy nonsense. About halfway through the game, I just muted it. That's really bad. The big problem here is that yes, a horror game should have spooky and tense sounds, but after a while you just get sick of all the goofy noises the game constantly makes. It's just constant grinding, irritating slop bucket noises, off key chanting and Isaac panting just to fill dead air. It's entirely fine for a horror game to ease up and just have normal sounds for a while, you know?

there's a hole in your plan

So in summary: A largely good and interesting game, bogged down by overwhelming audio direction, puzzles that slip into terrible and way too much pointless gore. The boss fights especially where mostly neat, though the end of the game (past about chapter 9) just turned into a monstrous chore. I get that you need a macguffin to justify all this gore, but seriously, I shouldn't spend multiple hours of my life pushing the fucking thing around. If I were to assess the game by its ending, I would actually call it "terrible" but that's probably a little unfair.

Though seriously, pushing a crate around? Like, seriously? What the fuck is wrong with a development team that honestly thinks a human being wants to spend more than an hour of their life pushing around a box, clearing the way for a box, pushing the box some more, so on?

The last boss, though, was pretty good. Neat and epic. Ended the game on a far better note than I was expecting. The boss fights really were, on the most part, the stand out elements of the game.

what a fucking Shock

Video game branding and in fact the fundamentals of branding have shifted further away from the ideals of my childhood, or at least the claimed but truly not attended to ideals of my childhood.

I want to say that marketing people were more creative in those by gone lost halcyon days but a deeper resentful thought occurs to me that whenever people refer to eras we can barely recall they are entirely full of shit. One I'm fond of is "Gamers these days are dumber" and "has to be dumbed down for the console crowd!"

I'm old as gamers go but I really don't think there was an era where game and intelligence were some sort of ubiquitous marriage. People like to say this but in which era exactly? The mainstream when I was very young was ... Mario. I didn't really enjoy Mario so much as a kid, preferring Sonic through into my teens (and then getting out of console gaming when Sonic should have too) but either or you really can't make an argument for Mario being an especially harder to play game than say, Call of Duty. Have you ever played a fucking FPS on a console? It's quite a bit more difficult than Mario's beep boop run jump gameplay, at least from a mechanical perspective. You could sort of argue that RTS games require 'more' out of the player than either, but RTS games never "Dumbed down" or "dumbed up" anyone. They're just there and they're pretty much the same. There is perhaps some progression of titles that "would have been" for the PC slipping onto the Xbox or what have you, but I'm A) not entirely sure those titles would have existed at all without consoles B) actually any stupider. More RPGs which aren't dumbed down are actually just really irritating and filled with tedium, which in case you haven't solved all the fucking mysteries sherlock, are not actually on any level an interaction with your potential or lack thereof intellect.

So I think that's a load of shit and I think waxing nostalgia about a past era were marketing departments didn't fuck rape the sequel engine is probably intellectually dishonest as well. Still it's hard to really look at Bioshock Infinite and not seriously wonder at least a little bit about the stillborn progression as it goes. I was re-watching some Yahtzee videos (Zero Punctuation) to see how he felt about stuff I'd recently played and watched Bioshock 2's review. I agreed pretty much totally in regards to this one, the game largely did not need to exist and wasn't very good. It was good enough to finish, but not really better than say reinstalling the first game and just replaying it again.

This is a snapshot of Bioshock Infinite's wikipedia page at the time of this review, whenever the fuck that is. The problem here, if one is not certain, is that the game isn't on speaking terms with actually being FUCKING OUT, OR PLAYABLE. There is more detail here than most games I've played or will ever play, in spite of the fact none of these people have to my knowledge played it. Maybe they have, at which point ... Should wikipedia seriously be hosting what is essentially an internally review product shot? (Maybe there's something here to be discussed regarding the natural progression of media outlets arriving and eroding until they become 'mainstream journalism' but cyclical shit is JUST THAT)

But still I digress - the part of this game that I truly well and hate is that it's named "Bioshock" in the first place. Bioshock itself is billed as the spiritual sequel to "System shock" a series I've never played but have been told I'm a bad person for not playing. Tough but fair. The name Bioshock comes from the impact of genetic engineering techniques either on your person, or on a society, at least on a general level. The SHOCK of BIOtechnology. Har, dee har, har... har... I mean maybe it's actually named for two programmers eating too much Domino's pizza and brewing up some truly shocking biology. Maybe. The SHOCK of colon BIOlogy?

What exactly is Bioshock about this one? It appears to grope the same "We're nouveau artists of the sublime video realms" tree as Bioshock -or at least the same low hanging branches- in that this giant paragraph here seems to talk about nazism, but beyond that I'm at a loss. Does it have the same characters? No. Same mechanics? Other than guns in general it sounds like no. Some connection to the story? Coy answers from the marketing department who haven't determined the first fucking thing about their game. Fire all marketing departments.

So they could have called it "something"Shock and most likely it would have fit fine. I would say 'Skyshock' is the easiest from what the game seems to be about, which sounds like Bioshock and I think 99% of the population would get it. I'm not really suggesting that name, since that name is sort of mopey.

But they literally think we're so unbelievably stupid we can't assemble the publisher, the developer, the lead programmer, the genre, the word shock and successfully deduce that this is the successor to Bioshock. It's a real fucking mystery is what it is, and there just can't ever be enough clues! Just never enough FUCKING CLUES! Need INFINITE CLUES! So instead they re-use the same name and then tack on Infinite, as if to reinforce we're infinitely stupid and can't solve the mystery of the missing Bio.

Infinite fuck yous, Bioshock. Not buying you til you're $5 anyway cuz I still haven't beaten ALL THESE GAMES.

Oh and on a side note if you're one of those arrogant and self-congratulating plebs who like to talk about how 'people these days are so gosh darn stupid look at blah blah' you should really ground yourself in a deeper understanding of the material at least insofar as human history. Not only do basic statistics technically argue otherwise, but the most basic points just don't make any sense.

I mean the most ironically parroted one is the bit about how only idiots breed with idiots nowadays, which sounds like good logic if you're a nazi and you think eugenics is proven to work but ... It just doesn't add up. Have you looked at your ancestors? I mean really looked at our pool of ancestors? There's several generations who engaged in gun warfare where they lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other. Before that they were peasants in the dark ages, or busy fucking goats in rome. It's a wonder we don't have goat genome in our blood stream somehow. Or thought the sky was made of Magic. When were our ancestors brighter? Maybe there's a couple glorious civilizations, like say ancient China, but those people turned around and starved to death because they decided to just stop farming.

And sure, you can point to popular culture. Go for it. Thirty years ago was the eighties mother fuckers. Reality TV ain't got shit on this! Bright neon rollerblades and rapping Turtles!

Get your hands on your wand

I didn't like Magicka. I tell you that because if you did like it, don't go int othis trying to defend it. You're not going to argue out of this one: I didn't like it, and I'm not going to like it.

I bought it for three dollars. I might have bought some DLC with it. The game is relentless in terms of DLC, I think they released like 17 different piles of shit to throw onto the turd furnace and it just boils with fecal rage. I don't generally like DLC, because it usually just makes me wait even longer to buy games I'm not even going to play.

So maybe I should like DLC for doing me the favour? Thanks DLC!

Anyway - Magicka. The single player campaign is all I have strong memories of. I tried playing multiplayer and it was just a clusterfuck. I know, you're going to say "That's part of its charm" and I'm going to respond I don't care. Diablo 2 multiplayer was a clustfuck with explosions and blizzards, barbarians yelling and other wacky shit. That game was released like a hundred years ago and it looked better, played better and was on every level better than this shit piece of a game. Though it actually comes with its own set of excuses, it doesn't have the issue of "I'm not even sure which character is mine and I no longer even care". That is a problem I actually had with this game in multiplayer - the controls are so sluggish and horrible that I wasn't sure which dope in a robe I was actually playing for a minute or two. I played MP for a couple minutes. I eventually got bored and just went AFK; the game continued without my input, or maybe it didn't, but I didn't really care. I think they might have been mad at me for leaving, but then I was mad for being told to buy and/or play this fucking awful game.

The title screen looks like garbage and the opening screens all look like garbage. I would say the game looks like garbage, but I actually dig the art style of everything that isn't a focus for the player. Which is to say; I liked the backgrounds! It's slow and clunky to get to whatever it is you want to do, which is always a good sign.

so then you get to single player, which appears to be ... I don't know, it looks like it's trying to be cute and funny, but it's a complete failure in that regard. I just found the accents and dialogue to be a rather weak, dull attempt at lightening the mood to help make up for just not having any idea how to make an interesting anything. It feels like a clown at a funeral. I was doing the single player for an achievement, which was irritating and forced me to play for an hour when I'd already realized from my earlier multiplayer that the game was stupid and not worth my time.

Maybe my patience is not at its strongest when I feel like I'm being forced to play the game. I mean yeah you don't have to do the coal thing and who cares, but I already owned it so I felt like I should go through with it, get it done.

The main character looks stupid as fuck, but again, the game is trying to be cute and funny so ... Yeah? I guess? Is that really much of an excuse or something? Crap looks like shit because it's supposed to be so LIKE IT?

The tutorial is terribly boring, but it does manage to explain the basics of the system. After being buggy and not working for a bit mind you. Not really sure how you code a tutorial that instructs you to do something and then you can't do it? After getting that to work it explains the element thing.

This is where the game breaks down. The game is essentially, as best I can tell in my two hours of hating my life edit playing it, structured around mixing elements in two fashions. Actually mixing them on your bar and then mixing then on enemies. So you make enemies 'wet' then you 'freeze' them, and then you smash them. You can mix the elements to make like, water and freeze bombs, and then maybe some other shit I never bothered to figure out because...

The game is a clunky mess. Combos take several clicks to activate, then to charge up, all while dodging around various enemies. The controls are sluggish and you get debuffed often, then enemies jump on you, then I'm just really tired of playing this shitty game. You're not really punished, most of the time, but it adds this constant layer of tedium and annoyance to doing even the simplest thing.

The combo system is an amazing idea on paper as well as in execution and in the embrace of a better game would be stellar. I mean it is stellar and really cool, but in this game I feel like I'm repeatedly entering my pin code at the grocery store while the cashier talks to me. I don't know how else to express the feeling of awkward mixed with annoying. I'm buying cottage cheese and spinach and the cashier is looking at me funny. Oh, she forgot to ring up my jalapenos.

That is the feeling I get playing this game. This creeping dull ache that lodges itself right between my eyes, that's the feeling I get.

I felt the entire time like I was wrestling with a snake covered in shit, but with more button pressing. The other big problem is the game just has no space to do anything, the arenas feel very pinched in and tiny.

So I got my achievement and literally alt-f4'd that very second. This is after reloading into an earlier checkpoint when I got to a push that, as best I can tell, was actually created to punish me for not being careful when it came to getting the achievement earlier. The dull ache in my head completely prohibited figuring out the regenerating can't hit snake boss, so fuck you. Then I uninstalled it.

This is actually in a category of games I firmly wish I could delete from my steam account forever and not have to see ever again. The best description I can give of this game is playing a poorly written sitcom with wizards doing chores while you enter pin codes over and over again.

It's just really dreary. Maybe I'd enjoy it drunk, but you know what else I'd enjoy while drunk? Walking home in the cold. So that's not much of a compliment.