@Frigate It's strange because the missions are starting to get quite repetitive but oddly they're still fun. And like you say, just when you think you're getting bored of the gameplay loop, a great cut-scene comes along and you think "right well I have to keep going then"
When I've got work to do, or some household chores, I usually close whatever game I'm playing and put Spotify on. But Mafia 3 has stayed on in the background so I can listen to the soundtrack while I'm doing ironing or whatever!
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
Been struck down by bad Man flu this week but managed to finished 2 games.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole. Played this on Switch and ended up putting a lot of time into it. I liked it (as a big South Park fan) but I had literally come off the back of The Stick Of Truth and I thought it took a step backwards. I preferred combat in SOT but I can see how the grid helped. However, the story and the world travel was more convuluted and it felt more 'Ubisoft' then the first release. I know Obsidian were contracted for the first one so that probably explains it but there felt like there was more filler in TFBW. Also, loading times on the Switch version were pretty poor and quite annoying.
Gears 5 - I have played all Gears games except Judgement (ain't nobody got time for that) and this was, in my mind, the best since Gears 2. The story was character driven largely, the combat pretty smooth and it did a good job of explaining the world and the threat in good detail. I also liked Kait as a character. Not groundbreaking, sure but a decent enough campaign.
Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot
@Rudy_Manchego Funny that as I thought the biggest improvement between the two games was the combat.
In the first game, it felt like you could just stick (no pun intended) with the same characters and just mash the same couple of attacks over and over whereas the second game was more tactical with movement, AoE attacks etc (particularly the one fight later in the game where you needed to knock enemies back to defeat them).
I did prefer the superhero theme though but the first game was set around the time I still watched the show so I knew a lot more of the references etc.
@Thrillho I agree that it made it far more tactical, in that different enemies needed you to experiment with different team members and your own moves - the knock back one being a prime example. At the same time, I missed the RPG elements where you could build up a costume and attacks etc. I also thought you could develop your own style in Stick of Truth as there felt like more point in upgrading. I also liked that consumables didn't take a turn - I guess that made it easier but just seemed to make the battles quicker.
Also, with the experiementation, I found a few situations that made things harder like the knockback boss. I didn't have any knock back attacks so found that harder without changing.
The superhero theme was very funny and I liked it a lot but I guess I enjoyed the ribbing that Skyrim took in the first one. Maybe because I never stopped laughing at Cartman doing the background singing when you were walking around the city!
However, these are the first two turn based games I have played end to end in years so hopefully I can take that further in other games!
Now I may be an idiot, but there's one thing I am not sir, and that sir, is an idiot
@RogerRoger Great work there on that post! An enjoyable read on a game I actually didn’t know existed. Love the screenshots too. It’s an Indy extravaganza lately for you! (I feel the same with Marvel lately since watching the movies inspired me to play Spider-Man)
I actually finally finished Lara Croft Go today, which is also one for the relic-hunting adventure theme here. I recall it being one of your favorites, and your recommendation is one of the reasons I picked it up. I’ve said a little about it before, and I will say that I enjoyed it for what it was — a simple puzzle game within the setting of the TR Universe. The perfect portable short session palate cleanser for when I didn’t want to be bogged down by booting up a PS4 game and investing a bunch of time. The puzzles got to be very challenging toward the latter half and for me it was hard to do them all without hints. I did finally get the platinum though. 🎉 The worst thing I can say about it though is how poorly it runs on Vita. Between inaccurate input (especially with the analog stick, less of a problem with the touch screen controls) and unacceptably long load times, it dragged down a pleasant and creative experience to something of a chore at times. But overall it was definitely worth it and I’m sad to see it end — that desire for more is testament enough to the quality of the game. I considered picking up Hitman Go in the current sale, but I don’t have an invested interest in the Hitman world yet.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@RogerRoger How big are those air vents when it looks like that skeleton could be stood upright and still have a metre or two of space above it??
Some of those era tie-ins which just retold the story of the film were a little weird. I seem to remember a level in the PS1 game version of The World is Not Enough had a casino scene where you actually had to gamble to get enough money to progress.
@Th3solution The loading times almost killed the game for me. Utterly grotesque port. Luckily the quality of the puzzles shone through - some are really well designed. It's a neat little game, just a shame about the loading times and control lag.
@RogerRoger Nice review. That last screenshot is terrifying! The presence of air vents in Indiana Jones sounds somewhat out of place. Were there conspicuously placed oil barrels too?
@RogerRoger Wow, that review can pass as actual magazine review. Great stuff.
"We don't get to choose how we start in this life. Real 'greatness' is what you do with the hand you're dealt." -Victor Sullivan "Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing." -Solid Snake
Note: I liked the use of screenshots in one of @Thrillho 's reviews recently, so I was inspired to incorporate them into my own when possible. Also trying for a more organized and less scattershot approach.
Most of this was written on a cellphone while I was on vacation (no access to PC and limited access to dead trees), so please excuse me if the writing seems rough. I'll try to touch it up when posting, as I need something to do in-between washing the insane amounts of laundry we came back with!
Spirit Hunter: Death Mark + DLC chapter
WHAT IS IT?
A horror game by developer Experience Inc. where you play as a cursed amnesiac (the curse manifests itself as a mark on the host's body that steals their memories before killing them) who, under the guidance of a mysterious talking doll named Mary, investigates paranormal mysteries and helps people confront the angry spirits and monsters that have also given them similar 'death marks.'
PLATFORM
Playstation Vita
LEVEL OF COMPLETION
Everything. Platinumed it.
GAMEPLAY
Similar to the horror game Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, it's a classic adventure game (exploration happens across static screens where you pixel hunt for items to collect, objects to manipulate, and puzzles to solve) with heavy visual novel elements (lots of dialogue and automated, dialogue-driven sequences). Additionally, you'll frequently be confronted with "live or die" scenarios, where a health meter of sorts called "Soul Power" will run down as you're confronted with something dangerous (usually a run in with a lesser spirit), and you have to choose between three or four ways to react. If you react properly (you often get hints on how to react to these sequences based on information you learned earlier in the chapter), you'll not lose health from your meter; wrong answers or actions will see dramatic reductions to your available health meter, and, if it reaches zero, you'll die, and to start over either from your last save (you can save almost anywhere, thankfully) or from the beginning of the live or die scenarios. You'll find talismans hidden in your environment that will boost your available health in each chapter, thankfully.
In an interesting twist, almost every chapter in the game features a boss battle against the primary spirit you're investigating (a different one each chapter), where you have to engage in certain combinations of actions or combine certain items at the right time to either destroy or save the spirit (saving the spirit involves engaging it with items from its past life as a human, almost always found while investigating haunted locations throughout the chapter, that force it to confront the emotions of anger and grief that inform its campaign of terror in the first place; as is usually the case in Japanese ghost stories, the intense karmic impact of human brutality and cruelty continues to manifest itself even after everyone involved is long dead).
You meet new "mark bearers" each chapter, and the game allows you to take one other person with you on your investigation. While this seems like a fluff feature at first, you quickly learn that certain partners have certain skill sets that are required for beating certain challenges in the game (for example, in one boss fight, you'll want to bring along someone who knows how to play the piano).
PRO:
I love that, if you die in a "Live or Die" scenario or in a boss battle, you can restart from the beginning of the encounter right away. Great feature!
It's pretty standard for a VN, but I continue to appreciate when a fast-forward button is included that allows me to rapidly skip previously seen dialogue when I replay sections of the game for trophies.
CON:
Weirdly, in the menu screen, the game seems to assign a set of stats to each character, but these stats never seen to feature in the actual gameplay. It's just a strange bit of misleading design fluff.
While I appreciate how little of the "rub every combination of items together with every object in your environment to find out how to progress" nonsense this game has, I do find the amount of environmental interactivity here to be extremely limited.
Text changes color depending on whether the main character or someone else is speaking, but, without names on the textboxes or even character illustrations at many points, it can occasionally become confusing to ferret out who is saying what when three or more characters in a scene are talking together. Especially since this game has little to no voice acting. Not a huge issue, but little niggles like this eventually add up.
There are a noticeably large number of typos in this game. The localization script job seems a bit sloppy in a number of ways, actually. Count the number of times characters use the phrase "up and [x]" during the game, for example ("up and left;" "up and lied;" etc.)
STORY/CHARACTERS
The game feels rushed to me. Each investigation flies by so quickly that the story never feels like it has time to really organically develop, and each chapter instead goes through the motions of shuffling you through a repetitive formula of sequences. It's a very rote form of storytelling.
The game shifts to an almost entirely new set of supporting characters with each new investigation, which makes it where we never get much time to spend with most of these people. Especially considering the investigations all take between 1.5 - 2 hours. Some of these characters are fun, but the constant turnover means we never really get attached to them.
This is remedied, weirdly, in the DLC chapter, which reunites most of the side characters introduced throughout the game to excellent effect. Actually, the DLC chapter is more developed story-wise and marginally more well-written, too.
ART/CHARACTER DESIGNS/MUSIC
One of the highlights of the game is the art design. Environments are suitably atmospheric and beautifully gothic. Character designs find some middle ground between traditional anime and Junji Ito, and it works well with the horror setting. The CGs that crop up throughout the game, while often creepy and disturbing, are often weirdly detailed, and just gorgeous to look at. Despite the clearly low budget presentation, it still manages to be a reasonably attractive game to look at.
The monsters and spirits in this game are often spectacularly grotesque, but the game does a good job of mostly keeping them off-screen until the climax of an investigation for maximum effect. It's handling of the material is effective
One thing to note is the light but noticeable eroguro vibe this game has. While the game doesn't really feature heavy amounts of what might be called "fanservice," and the designs of the female characters are fairly normal and modest, there is quite a bit of implied, referenced, and after-the-fact sexualized violence against women in this game. You'll see a lot of voluptuous corpses in this game in various states of undress. Sexual assault, while never seen or played for cheap drama, does become a plot point as well. Doesn't bother me, but some people might want to know about this before buying the game.
The music, while not terribly memorable, does its job of communicating the horror atmosphere effectively. Sound design is decent throughout: while it probably wasn't the intended effect, the spooky chime noise and text that slowly crawls across the screen when the game is trying to scare you with something really gave me the giggles. There's a certain cheesiness to the whole affair, but not everything can be Silent Hill. In general, fans of ghost stories will dig what this game has to offer.
CONCLUSION
While the game is saddled with pacing, translation, and QoL issues here and there, it was still, overall, a pleasant experience. One that was, unfortunately, over just a bit too quickly. The genre and art both resonate with me, so I had a good time. There's definite room for improvement, though, and I'm not sure I'd recommend someone pay full price for this.
@Ralizah Nicely written and the pics do help break it up as well. Did you not find that being able to instantly restart the boss “battles” made the choices you made less important? And how does taking the “wrong” companion along affect things; do you need to restart the whole level to change them if you think it will help?
@Thrillho
1) I think being able to restart the boss battles saves primarily on tedium. And considering the loopy adventure game logic of some of the puzzles involved with saving them (destroying them is usually much more straight-forward), it's a feature I deeply appreciate. I think the developers know that forcing players to backtrack any length to restart the battle is just going to encourage people to look up information online, which kind of spoils the fun.
2) So, at pretty much any point before the final battle, you can backtrack to the mansion that functions as your home base and switch out partners, which you'll probably need to do at least a few times to either beat the big bads or even get to them in the first place (sometimes you need specific party members for specific interactions in the level itself). This can get a bit tedious, as it involves deliberately backtracking one screen at a time, and each transition takes, at minimum, a few seconds.
If you're bad about making multiple save files (oh! forgot to mention that, but you get a lot of save files, and you're absolutely going to want to use all of those if you plan on getting the best ending and/or unlocking all the trophies), the game still allows you to jump back to a point before the last major decision in a chapter, thankfully. The developers were very considerate about not allowing the player to trap themselves into an unwinnable position.
I'll probably continue to opt for that former style for smaller games that make less of an impression on me. I have to up my game, though, as people on here are starting to outshine me with their write-ups.
@RogerRoger I imagine you're playing some ancient PC game like with with KB+M, right? How well does an Indiana Jones game control without a controller?
The screenshots make it look really good for a game from 2003.
@RogerRoger Wonderful review, that brings back memories. I used to enjoy Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb back in the PS2 days, but have forgotten most of it by now. I can still vividly recall running around the castle and also that tank level late in the game though.
@Ralizah Excellent writeup. It's the first I've heard of that game, but it does sound rather interesting.
How much did I play? Got the Platinum Trophy and also completed the DLC.
In many ways Spider-Man is beholden to the usual tropes generally associated with open-world titles - from the mission structure, multitudinous side activities and collectibles, to even how the story unfolds. The map is gradually unlocked by activating police signals - Spider-Man's equivalent of the ubiquitous Ubisoft tower - and in each district an array of activities are vomited at the player. These same activities are repeated throughout the game ad nauseam. As an open-world game, Spider-Man is far from exceptional. So why did I enjoy it so much?
What foremost elevates proceedings is the elegant manner in which Spider-Man traverses the city. There's an almost tangible fluidity to each swing, jump and launch. Run up the side of a building, launch off the top and hurl Spider-Man into the air before grabbing a building with his web and swooping through on a full swing. It sounds complicated, but is largely operated with just the L2 and R2 buttons. It is this simplicity that is key to the enjoyment slinging round the city offers. In short, it's fast and an absolute joy. Unusually for an open world game and aided by a relatively compact map, I found I very rarely fast-travelled. Insomniac absolutely nailed the feel of Spider-Man.
Web-slinging traversal is joined by an equally flowing, tactile combat system. At its core it is a melee system, relying on punches and kicks and augmented by Spider-Man's unique abilities and web gadgets. To begin with Spider-Man's abilities are almost painfully limited, though over the course of the game more and more are unlocked, using either skill points or various "currency" tokens obtained from completing the large number of side activities. Combat is intensely satisfying when all of these gadgets are available and fully utilised in the field. Indeed, they will need to be, as when surrounded by a myriad of foes half the challenge is in crowd control. Pin enemies to walls, electrocute them, or even hurl them to the air in an anti-gravity field. Manifold combinations offer a surprising level of flexibility. Different challenges in side missions will yield extra XP or tokens, pushing the player to be more creative. Hilariously, although much is made of Spider-Man's non-lethal approach, a common challenge is to hurl enemies over the edge of skyscrapers, which I assume leads to their demise.
Spider-Man is most effective when attacking from the air - indeed he is slow and easily surrounded on the ground. To this end he can grab enemies with his web and pull them up to his level, before unleashing a combo and moving on to the next foe. After filling up a meter, there will also be access to a finisher move, which is best saved for more difficult enemies - the most irritating of which are late-game rocket boosting monstrosities.
Of course, Spider-Man wouldn't be Spider-Man without his spider sense, and here it allows him to anticipate an incoming attack or projectile, giving the player a short window of opportunity to dodge. One unlockable skill (yes, on a skill tree) upgrades this skill further to allow him to counter with a finishing move, or even return rockets to their sender. There's a separate meter to activate a "suit power" - a unique move or ability unlocked through buying different suits. One of my favourites unleashes a flurry of webs hitting everything in sight and pinning unfortunate victims to the nearest surface.
Later in the game, with difficult enemies and so much going on in the heat of combat, things can get a little hectic. There is a lot of button pressing involved, which made it a little tricky for me, even playing on easy.
Stealth is less important, though incredibly useful in certain story missions, or where there are a huge amount of enemies, or in the opening phase of crime warehouse gauntlets. Stealth is as equally satisfying as combat, particularly when crawling on ceilings and hoisting up and webbing enemies.
While Spider-Man is controlled for 99% of the game, there are a handful of story missions where the player is put the shoes of MJ or Miles Morales. These are stealth missions by default, as getting caught will lead to instant failure. Miles uses simple hacking gadgets to distract enemies, while MJ has to rely on knocking over suspiciously placed toolboxes. Neither are as compelling as when controlling Spider-Man and their missions are a touch repetitive.
Spider-Man's version of New York is rendered in exceptional detail. It's on a smaller scale than the real Manhattan, of course, and missing the northern tip of the island, but most major landmarks are there. To tie it into the wider comic book world (or MCU), the Avengers tower and Doctor Strange's Sanctum are also present.
The story hides no real surprises, particularly if you've seen the various films or read the comics, though it is exceptionally presented. Voice acting, led by the ever-youthful Yuri Lowenthal, is outstanding (bar one character, the horrendous "Screwball"). There's also plenty of set-up for the expected sequel, both in the main story and DLC. The story centres primarily on Mister Negative and later the "Sinister Six". Boss battles - from the opening with Kingpin to the end - are thrilling set-pieces and a highlight of the game.
Despite the repetition and severe case of "open world-itis" everything is held together by the exceptional world traversal and combat system. Topped off with excellent visuals and presentation, Spider-Man is a real treat that I thoroughly enjoyed playing. Insomniac have captured the almost intangible essence of Spider-Man, and that is worthy of some praise.
I thought collectibles/side missions were nicely done with them being "released" periodically through the game. They also had a good variety from simple collectibles, like the backpack, through to the science stations which themselves were well varied.
As you say, the movement is spot on, and just feels fun at all times, and combat feels equally as fluid so you do feel like you're playing as Spidey rather than generic computer game hero #64. The fast travel system is also quite clever and I did enjoy the different cut scenes it bought up.
What were your feelings on the DLC though? I gave my thoughts again in the game's thread but thought it was fine but a bit superfluous, especially going straight into it from the main game. Screw the Screwball challenges though.
@Thrillho The most repetitive bit for me were the various "crimes" in each area, which got a bit much by Act 3. A lot of the individual story missions are really quite cool and I liked the science stations, which are the most varied of the side content, but overall for me it was the side-stuff that dragged down that side of the game.
I agree regarding the DLC. It's alright as an extra and I enjoyed that it was "more of the same" because playing as Spider-Man is so fun, but at the same time it didn't feel quite necessary. That said, part of the third DLC (the ending of a side mission) certainly seems like potential set-up for the sequel, which might confuse people who end up not playing the DLC. Screwball is quite possibly the single most annoying character in any video game I've played. Ever. Absolutely hated her and her stupid missions and haven't sworn that much at a game in a long time. Much more annoying than the Taskmaster ones and at least he's a better character.
@mookysam Nice write-up. It's amazing how much fun, fluid movement can elevate an otherwise decent game. I'd argue it's a huge part of the appeal of games like Gravity Rush, Breath of the Wild, and InFamous: First Light.
Unfortunately, like the former two games, it seems Spider-Man has also fallen into the trap of putting forced stealth into a game where free movement is half of the fun. I don't mind proper stealth games, but I really wish stealth segments in non-stealth games would just disappear. They're ALWAYS the worst parts of the games they're in. Even Trails in the Sky FC had a stealth section! And it also sucked!
The game does sound fun. I decided not to go for it early this year when it was on sale with all DLC for $24 or so, but if it gets a similar discount in the future, I meet bite.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Ralizah@mookysam You definitely should! The stealth sections do feel very out of place and added very little to the game. I remember I had one with Miles that I kept getting caught out on which became pretty frustrating.
@mookysam Oh yes, wonderful write-up. Well done.
Not only was it an enjoyable read, but I completely agree with you on pretty much all counts. I’m about to finish the game myself and you’ve saved me the effort of writing my own impressions because they would be pretty much exactly what you’ve said. Thanks!
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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