Game #1069: Scott Pilgrim VS The World - The Game Complete Edition

  They are using word, 'Complete', I do not think it means what the think it means.

 After much begging, campaigning and praying, Scott Pilgrim VS The World: The Game Complete Edition got a re-release, as this was one of those games that showed why physical media matters so much. But Ubisoft is Ubisoft, so they even managed to botch the limited physical release: Knives Chau can only be unlocked by syncing with a Ubisoft Account. Bunch o' jokers, the whole point of this release was that digital media is not as reliable as physical media.

 But I digress, I'm happy I finally get to own the game, even if it isn't quite as good as I would've liked. Scott Pilgrim is a beat'em up styled after River City Ransom. You move from left to right beating up every baddy in sight, while picking up the money they leave behind so that you can buy items or food to restore your health and/or enhance your stats. And you'll want to enhance your stats, 'cause the game can be downright brutal even on the easiest setting until you get properly leveld up. Enemies will gang up on you, they'll lock your attacks and they'll be really friggin' cheap.

 Gameplay is simple, Y is your weak attack, X is your strong attack, you have a summon attack, a 360 degree attack that consumes health, you can get new moves when leveling up and you can also pick up a plethora of weapons to make your job easier. Or harder, if the weapon you pick up sucks. The engine is pretty good, and you can get some decent combos by juggling enemies in the air, but it's definitely not as refined as Streets of Rage 4.

 The game NEEDS to be commended on how GOOD it looks. The sprite-work is reminiscent of  custom, detailed sprite-art you can find on the internet... but in playable form. If you like 2-D pixel art this game is pure eye candy.

 The game is very brief, shouldn't take over two hours, and that's considering I did some grinding for money in order to get my stats up to par. If you are so inclined, this game includes a few bonus modes that sed to be DLC, such as survival

 I'm glad Scott Pilgrim got the Physical release it deserved, it's a shame Ubisoft hid some content behind a download, but of course, they are Ubisoft, when was the last time they did something without ruining it in some way, shape or form? I'm a bit disappointed that the game is not as great as its reputation would suggest, but the game is far and away from being bad, it's just that I think it's mythical status might play against it.

 6.5

Game #1068: inFamous - First Light

  I finally get to play as one of my favorite singers of all time, Pink!

 Considering how much I like the inFamous franchise it was about time I took inFamous: First Light for a whirl. Originally released as a stand-alone companion mini campaign for Second Son, it got its own physical release so I was able to give it a try, and unlike Festival of Blood, I get to keep it.

 Basically, it's just like Second Son but you play as Fetch, the girl with the Neon Powers. Her moveset is quite different from Delsin's, which mae her enjoyable to play as. The story campaign is very brief, but you do get a small sandbox to play in, and it has a few side missions, such as collecting Lumens, races and graffiti tags. It's nothing super involved, but it's decent padding.

 What makes fetch different is how she plays. Her neon form allows her to dash all over town very quickly, which made it pretty fun, and her powers are more deliberate than Delsin's. While aiming you can slow down time and highlight an enemy's weakpoints, hit them and they die instantly. If you get the right level ups, you'll refill your slowodown gauge when taking down enemies like this, which makes her combat a bit more slow-paced... but fun in its own right.

 While Fetch's backstory isn't particularly bland, it seems that the focus of this companion piece was to add more replayability in the form of Challenge Arenas you can play in. If you have a Second Son save file you can even play as Delsin, good or bad, instead of Fetch, and you even get to play around with his Stone powers. Can't say I was too interested in this side content to be honest.

 As a small piece of inFamous... it's fun. It can't be as fun as the main games as it's a much shorter and shallow affair, but I appreciated getting to play as another Conduit with her own powers, as well as getting new ways of moving around with super powers, somewhere where I think the inFamous games excel at. So, yeah, I wouldn't recommend it over a main game, but anyone who likes inFamous should give it a try. 

 7.0

Game #1067: Rage 2

 It did fill me with rage, Gamer Rage. 

 'twas but a few months ago that I played Rage and I friggin' adored it. It was fairly simple and straightforward, but I felt that it did what it did pretty darn well. And the reason I wanted to play Rage... was because Rage 2 looked pretty fantastic. In the end... it's better in some aspects, but failed pretty hard in others.

 The first thing you'll notice is the bright pink that highlights pretty much everything in the game. They went with this 80's pink and blue synth-wave theme that hilariously enough makes the game a bit more forgettable. Rage was accused of lacking a personality, but if you ask me, giving Rage 2 a personality... actually robbed it of one, as this theme feels very cliched and it's not used in very interesting ways. Eventually you just forget about it.

 While Rage 1 had an open world the game didn't really revolve around it, as it worked more as a tool to immerse the player in the game. Rage 2 says screw that and went full open world, the game is MUCH larger than the original, and it's plagued with busy work that gives you negligible rewards but is framed in a way that hits all your dopamine receptors. As a matter of fact, there aren't true side missions in the game, but rather, optional busy work. Liberate areas, destroy Authority Turrets, Find the Arks(The only ones worth a damn, as they hold new weapons and powers), etc. Thankfully the combat is a load of fun so it doesn't feel as repetitive as it really is. What will really annoy you is that you'll spend hours searching for chests in order to fully clear an area, and they are pretty well hidden. You can unlock an ability that gives you a radar, but it only tells you if you are close to something, so you'll still waste a ton of time hunting for these dumb chests.

 Combat is what should've made the brunt of the game and not the open world, for it's where the game shines brightest. At first, it's your basic first person shooter, with a proper, oldshool lifebar, but if you explore the Arks you'll obtain powers that run on cool down. A quick dash that can turn into a dash punch, a deployable barrier, a grenade that blows enemies into the air leaving them in stasis so that you can pick them off at your leisure, a ground pound(Super useful and fun to use), extreme dashing and a shockwave. Using these powers is SO much fun, and as you level them up you'll make them even stronger and with shorter cooldowns. It's so good that it's a shame how much time you'll spend driving from one point to another, or searching for dumb chests, as fighting enemies is so incredibly enjoyable, and the weaponry you get is pretty fun and it's fun to use.

 Racing returns, but, to be honest, driving in this game didn't feel as good as it did in the original game. It's not bad, it simply feels a bit wonky, so after I finished the mandatory race in the main story I avoided racing entirely.

 Another thing I liked is that doing all the optional busy work will reward you with different forms of currency or points, and you get a ton of different things you can enhance. The abilities your suit grants you, the Predator Vehicle, your Weapons(And you can equip them with Mods to specialize them in different areas) and even more global skill trees tied to the three major allied characters in the game. Heck, you can use some special items in the Wellsprings town to get buffs to your health or strength. Getting noticeably stronger as you go through the game feels SO good and rewarding.

 Well, but the game has two big issues. Firstly, the framerate, it can take a hit, at least on base PS4, and it does so often. That alone I could live with. But the other problem is much worse, so much so that I couldn't finish the game. At this point I had two manual saves and various autosaves. I was playing normally and I skipped a cutscene... which made the game stutter all the time. I exited and loaded my save and... the problem persisted, so I completely closed the game, upon booting it up again... all my saves got corrupted and the game deleted them. All of them. I had sunk in over 10 hours into it, I had done most if not all of the side-content.... Yeah, I'm not playing it again.

 While Rage 2 is much better when it comes to combat I think that Rage 1 worked better as a whole. The open world wasn't as intrusive, the driving was better and I liked its personality, or lack there of, much more than this one. But what really killed me was the corrupted saves, and I looked it up and I wasn't the only victim to it. Bethesda should've done better.

 6.0

Game #1066: Samurai Warriors 5

 The reboot of a reboot.

 There's something perversely funny about calling Samurai Warriors 5 a reboot of a reboot, but considering that these games retell the same story with every iteration... This is exactly that, a more extreme reenvisioning of the series.

 Core gameplay remains the same, you vs thousands, so I'll delve deeper into that a bit later, for now I want to focus on what makes this game different from the previous entries in the series. And you might notice just by looking at the game's cover, but the series' poster boy, Yukimura(Nobushige) Sanada is nowhere to be seen, for this game takes the series to a place before his birth, and focuses on Oda Nobunaga's rise, from the Fool of Owari to the Demon King. As a matter of fact, the brunt of the story has two branches: Oda's chapters and Mitsuhide Akechi's chapters. That said, this is Tecmo Koei, so they went about it in the laziest way possible, so both chapters share a lot of identical stages with identical objectives, sometimes you can even pick both Oda and Akechi as the duo to play as, making you, in a way, having to play some stages twice. Really, Koei? This entry also focuses a lot on its story, featuring more dialogue than previous games, but... I do feel like most of the dialogue is a whole lot of nothing. Oda's transformation into the Demon King feels rushed and undeserved.

 This game also sports a beautiful new look reminiscent of Borderlands, with textures having thick black lines resembling comic book art, while characters are coated with cell-shading. Attack effects borrow from classic Japanese brush-art. All of this makes for a really good looking game. The Warriors series of games always redesign the characters on every new iteration, but they went further with it with this entry, as 90% of the redesigns are unrecognizable. This was also an excuse to make the character roster smaller, as we are down to 37 characters... And only 15 unique movesets. Just like Dynasty Warriors 7 did back in the day, every character can equip any weapon, however, in this game you can only have a single weapon equipped in battle. And sure, characters have favorite weapons, which means they get 2-3 unique attacks with them.... but only 27 characters have favorite weapons. That's right, for whatever reason they couldn't be bothered to give 2-3 unique moves to 10 characters. How lazy can you get? And mind you, I LOVE the game's new look, I like the new emphasis on the narrative, even if I do feel it needs more work, but it feels so lazy. 15 possible movesets for 37 characters. And 27 of them don't have favorite weapons AKA unique attacks. How was making 30, at most, new animations so expensive or time consuming? I am perfectly OK with downsizing the character roster considering that they really tried something different with this game's looks and new focus on the narrative, but they failed really hard when it came to character diversity.

 As for the gameplay, Hyper Attacks return from SW4, which is really cool as they made for an easy and satisfying way to clear open battlefields of enemies. They finally added a lock-on feature, making taking down generals much easier, and they also borrowed elements from Pirate Warriors, namely, the possibility of having four unique attacks that run on cooldown gauges. There's not a lot of variety here, there are four buff moves, every character has his or her own unique skill, and four skills that depend on the weapon you have equipped, but even if there aren't many option, there are enough to play around with to find what works for you or the weapon-moveset of your choice. You can also take two different officers on most battle and swap between them at any time.

 I like most of the changes in this game. The new art-style is glorious, every change done to the gameplay works great and makes the game more fun, and I appreciate the new emphasis on the narrative. That said, it's a shame that Koei had to be lazy. They could've knocked it out of the park if they had had at least 30 unique movesets. It would've been tolerable if at least every character had a favorite weapon. But they went with all these weird choices in order to cut costs. Also, as much as I appreciate the focus on the narrative, I think they could've pulled it off better, and I hope they continue this trend with SW 6. I'd have less boring dialogue scenes, but make each one count, I'd also remove duplicate stages if they plan on having different routes. But I'm getting ahead of myself, as far as Samurai Warriors 5 goes, I think they should maintain this new direction going forward.

 8.0

Game #1065: Dungeons & Dragons - Dark Alliance

  To the dungeons with this one!

 While I haven't played the Dark Alliance games yet, it is a series that I plan on eventually trying out. Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was a game that instantly caught my attention the day I learned about it, so I purchased it day one. Then they announced that couch co-op would be patched in later down the line, which immediately raised red flags: Clearly, the game wouldn't be finished at launch. The game came out, and so did the reviews and... in some ways it's better than you'd think, in others it's as bad as people have made it out to be.

 D&D:DA is, plain and simple, a dungeon crawler looter, in the same vein as Diablo, but it does things its own way. You can pick from four pre-defined, uncustomizable characters, made up of two fighters, and archer and a rogue that plays like another fighter. It sorta feels like a beat'em up at times, thanks to the third-person camera and how the game plays, for y'see, R1 and R2 can be mixed together to perform different combos. As you level up, you can use money to unlock new moves by inputting or holding down different directions as you tap R1 or R2, giving it a very unique feel among dungeon crawlers. To further aid you in combat, you can press Square after basic attacks to perform more powerful, gauge-consuming attacks, you can hold down L1 to block or tap it before getting hit to parry attacks and open up enemies and you even get an evade. Landing hits fills up your Ultimate gauge, which can then be used on the previously mentioned Square attacks or by pressing L1+R1 to perform your Ultimate move. Lastly, characters have up to eight different skills, but you can only equip two at a time, one by tapping triangle and the other one by holding down triangle. In paper, I'm sure this sounds really cool, and at times, it actually feels fun, at least when playing as Drizzt, but....

 ....where should I start? Firstly, the AI is downright idiot. They love standing in place while you go to town on them or on their buddies. Sometimes the engine works in hilariously mysterious ways, enemies might go out flying to the skies after you hit them or they might behave like a runt out of Hokuto no Ken, standing in place for a few seconds before realizing that they are already dead. And even though enemies are this stupid, at least on single player, the game can have some ridiculous difficulty spikes, so that even if your 'power counter' is way above the recommended level, you'll still get absolutely demolished in a few seconds because enemies get such a ridiculous power boost. It's hard to gauge if you should tackle a higher difficulty level BEFORE trying out the level, and exiting a level only to retry it again on a lower difficulty level feels like such a waste of time. It's also a waste of time because lowering the difficulty lowers the XP rewards and the loot rewards, so strengthening your character slows down to a crawl.

 And leaving that aside, some mechanics are just broken or poorly designed. The lock-on camera is a must if you don't want your combos to hit thin air after a few strikes, but... locking onto an enemy gives you this awkward below-the-waist angle that makes it impossible to see your surroundings as you pummel an enemy. There's also a stamina gauge that governs your basic attacks and your evades. Why is there a Stamina gauge on a dungeon crawler? It's a dumb mechanic, and the cherry on top is that as you expend it... it's maximum amount will go down, and you'll only be able to fix the cap by random enemy drops, by drinking a potion or by toggling a checkpoint. It's such a dumb mechanic. It was probably put in place to have the player consider toggling a checkpoint, for y'see, after some enemy waves a Rest point might spawn, which you can use to restock your consumables, trigger a checkpoint and heal your life and stamina gauges, however, not using them makes the rarity of the loot you find higher. Thing is... I never used them. And even then it still felt like most of the stuff I was finding was garbage.

 But the stamina gauge isn't even the game's worst design choice. How about the way the game doles out experience? Defeating enemies helps a tiny bit... a bit, but 75% of the XP you earn is obtained by finishing a level. You could skip most enemies and you'd miss out on very little extra XP. Oh, and you might've guessed it by now... you only get XP after finishing a level, so no mid-stage leveling up or allocating stat points. Lame. This also holds true for loot, you can't check what you found until you finish a level, so no mid-stage swapping, which is also so incredibly lame.

 And the money you obtain? Well, you can use it to purchase new moves, strengthen restockable items(Mostly potions) or change the color of some equipment pieces, but funnily enough, the store has no items or equipment for you to buy. Equipment can only be found or sold, not purchase. Why? That said, different equipment pieces do reflect on the character model, which was pretty cool, and every character has their own set of unique-looking equipment, so I'll give it that. The final bit of praise I'll give the game is that the cutscenes look REALLY good, they are very well animated.

 Oh, and I'm not proud to admit it, but I rage-quitted the game, the bugs got too bad. I mean, at some point trolls started spawning on the air, and they wouldn't attack, so I could only kill them with ranged attacks, which was boring, but their drops would also fall higher up on the air, which was annoying. This bug with the trolls was pretty frequent. Not as frequent as the enemy life bars just disappearing for no good reason... or the AI disappearing as previously mentioned. Oh, and one type of cape for Drizzt's would NEVER display properly on the inventory screen. I don't know if I should count it as a bug, but sometimes it felt as if pressing square wouldn't register when I tried to grab loot when moving, I think it has to do with a few seconds of input delay that the game suffers from. What does count as a bug is the fact that the game crashed on me. Twice. I lost over half an hour of progress both times and had to replay dungeons. It was super boring. But the cherry on top was when I was exploring a level and... Drizzt fused with the environment. No mid-level saving, no 'reload last checkpoint' and no way to get out of the environmnet.... yeah, I had enough of the game, so I just rage quitted.

 It's definitely not the worst game ever made, I can see a lot of potential in the combat engine, and I know that some care went into designing the various equipment pieces for the character models, plus, the cutscenes are a thing of beauty. But even so, the game suffers from so many poor design choices as well as a slew of bugs that go from funny and harmless to downright frustrating, making it extremely hard to recommend, even to fans of the genre.

 3.5

Game #1064: Scarlet Nexus

  Low-budget nexus

 I had very high hopes for Scarlet Nexus, ever since I saw the reveal trailer way back then, it looked really cool, so I avoided every and any news about the game. And then it released and... it received very positive press, with comparisons to Devil May Cry. And then I finally played the game and... this is it?

 I've long gone trying to skip talking about a games's plot, but man... it's bad, Firstly, while you'd think this was a high budget game... 90% of the game is told through image stills. Why? How? They look so bland and do little to engage the player. Add to this how uninteresting the story is, it's as anime as anime gets, throwing loads of world-specific terminology you don't care about and characters like behave like anime tropes and cliches that have been running rampant since the late 80's. You can play as either Kasane or Yuito, and both characters get 12 chapters, in-between chapters you can talk with your party members to initiate 'bond scenes', but these were SO boring, after chapter 6 I just started skipping them, as they weren't fun or interesting, plus, the fact that it was told through boring stills only added to the tedium. Oh, if you know anything about anime, you'll figure out which characters will die and which characters you'll end up fighting after the first chapter. It's that predictable.

 Gameplay fares a bit better. As previously stated, you either play as Kasane or Yuito, and you can have up to two other teammates fighting alongside you. They might as well not be there, but hey, sometimes they can distract enemies. What really through me off at first is how floaty moving around feels, it felt kinda wonky until I got used to it. Combat takes place in real time, you use Square and Triangle to attack with your weapons, or R2 to use Telekinesis and attack with objects lying around. As you recruit characters into your team you'll be able to use their skills. For instance, you can set your blade ablaze or electrify it, another character makes you invulnerable, one makes you super fast, one makes it so that you instantly teleport next to an enemy when you attack, etc. These abilities are locked behind their own individual gauges, and by the end of the game you'll have access to 8 different abilities.

 It sounds interesting but it's super basic. Triangle always performs the same spinning attack, and you only get a single square attack combo that can go up to five hits. Interacting with party members during intermissions can upgrade them and give you access to a few new abilities, but nothing game changing. It's flashy, and when you are mixing in telekinetic attacks between sword slashes it's rather fun, plus, there are some special objects that allow for more powerful Telekinetic attacks, such as riding a bus, which was admittedly kinda cool. But there's no denying that it all ends up feeling very repetitive, particularly since stronger enemies can soak up quite a bit of damage, so you'll be relying on the same strategies to bring each type of enemy down. A huge flaw with the combat is how poor the targetting system is, as your character won't automatically direct their attacks toward the target and sometimes the camera pans to slowly towards the targeted enemy. Pathetic. Oh, and there's no dodge cancel and attack animations are a bit too long, so you'll be taking a lot of damage, which felt a bit unfair. Some bosses do take the cake, as it seems they are way too hard being able to murder you way to quickly. I mean, it's an easy game on the default difficulty setting, but there are these three bosses that are just crazy tough for no reason.

 I did enjoy the upgrade system, leveling up nets you Skill points which you can then invest on various new abilities, from passive buffs, to new abilities such as double jumping or aerial dashing. You can buy new weapons that have their own unique 3-D model, and you can customize characters with a few accessories, albeit it's very limited. Most accessories are of the joke variety, and in-game alternate costumes are just white color palettes, if you want the red color palette you better pony up some cash. There's not much in the way of extras, no secret bosses, and the sidequests are boring "Kill X enemy in X way" affairs that have very crummy rewards.

 While Scarlet Nexus is NOT a bad game, it's certainly very disappointing. The presentation is very lackluster, the plot is trite and predictable, with it's only redeeming quality being its combat, which is fun, it really is, but the game is way too long so even the combat loses some of its luster once you are 2/3rds through the game. I think that considering the budget wasn't very big it would've been a better idea to ax one of the playable characters, ax the bond scenes, since characters weren't very interesting and a lot of money probably went into voicing those boring scenes, and with the money they saved up, animate every cutscene and add more combat moves. Those are my two cents anyways.

 7.0

Game #1063: The Mummy Demastered

  Can't we at least have a playable Dark Universe? Pretty please?

  Wayforward is one of the most interesting Western developers, as I feel most of their work is pretty darn impressive considering they've mostly tackled modestly budgeted games. The Mummy Demastered is yet more proof as to why you should call these guys when you need a movie tie-in game.

 This game might as well be a sort of spiritual successor to their other licensed gun-toting metroidvania, Aliens: Infestation. You play as a faceless agent, one of possibly many, as you try to hunt down the Mummy before it lays havoc on earth. In Aliens the gimmick was that any of the of the unique marines could die, in this game, once you die that agent is dead, or rather, undead, so you play as the next guy in line and you must kill the previous agent in order to recover your upgrades. All of your upgrades: Your weapons, your health upgrades, the whole inventory.

 Since killing your previous agent is this game's gimmick they made the game harder than you'd expect. In all honestly, I only died once, to the second boss, but I had some close encounters here and there, and some bosses felt unnecessarily lengthy. I also feel some of the challenge is more annoying in nature, for instance, there's no quick way to heal yourself, so you'll have to enter-and-exit whatever room you feel has plenty of enemies or objects you can break to slowly refill your health bar. If you explore the game's world, and you should, you'll unlock new weapons you can carry that are much stronger than your assault rifle, although the have limited ammo, however, getting to any ammo-depot room will instantly refill your ammo. Would've been nice to have something similar for your health. Wasting time to refill your health isn't challenging, it's just boring. Speaking of challenging, considering how tough the previous bosses were, particularly the second one, the final boss in the game is just pathetic. Maybe the fact that I was carrying the best weapons, a ton of health upgrades and ammo capacity upgrades helped, but still... the final boss shouldn't be one of the easiest battles in the game!

 I also feel like they tried to make the game difficult by placing the player in annoying scenarios. Plenty of rooms have endlessly spawning enemies, so enemies might spawn RIGHT beneath you while you defeat other enemies. And by the end of the game, basic enemies can handle ridiculous amounts of damage, at least from the default assault rifle. Once again, as hard as they tried to make the game I only died once, but I feel like the challenge came from the game being cheap rather than fairly challenging the player.

 Still, healing issue aside, what really grinded my gears was how unhelpful the map was. Wayforward have made Metroidvanias before, they know how to make them. Here's the thing, the map graphics don't show openings. So you'd better remember if there was a door you couldn't break somewhere. You'd better remember how rooms connect together, because the map won't be of much help. 

 On the flipside, it's a fun game to play once you get used to shooting and rolling, as well as get used to the annoying enemy patterns and placement. As with any other Wayforward 2-D game, it's a visual delight, so it's always fun to come across new enemies or try out new weapons. It was also pretty fun testing the limits of how you could explore the game, as being creative enough with your running jumps can get you into areas you should be using the phase shift to get into!

 The Mummy Demastered is a decent little game, with a few design choices that veer a little into the annoying, but thankfully the core gameplay is pretty solid, as exploring the world of the Mummy is pretty fun, the rate at which you can acquire upgrades and weapons is slow enough to keep you interested in exploring more areas and the absolutely gorgeous sprites makes it so that finding new enemies is always a treat. Not Wayforward's best, but definitely a good one.

 7.0