Darling Baphomet's Altar

[Darling Baphomet]

150: Astroneer - 5.47%

 

So, this is a lovely little indie game I've been playing with a friend for a week or two. I'm not really sure what genre to put it down as? Essentially, it's a game where you land on a planet with no resources, you go harvest resources, you build machines, and then you get better resources to make those machines build better machines. And then, eventually, you move on to the next planet. It makes for a fun little gameplay loop of building base after base, each more advanced and productive than the last, across seven diverse planets, each different from the last, with different resources and the like. I'm not sure if it'd be nearly as much fun playing singleplayer, but coordinating resource gathering and base building with a friend (or friends) makes the game a very engaging co-op experience. There is also a main questline of sorts which involves powering up ancient ruins, with the requirements becoming more and more daunting on every planet. I will not say more, but it provides a good purpose to your continued advancement.

The developers have added a number of new features over the years - hoverboards (which we never got to try), a flying vehicle called the VTOL - thank hell, because navigating the bumpier planets in the land vehicles is hell, and very recently, they added these cute alien snails to the game which in a few instances sing, and which generally serve as significant buffs while in your backpack - as long as you keep them fed. In all honesty the game is not incredibly challenging, and the snail update in particular made powering the previously mentioned ruins much easier (if you put four people in a game, you could probably power them on snails alone!), but I don't think is meant to be a particularly challenging game. Supposedly it was once much harder, with storms that would dispose of the items you leave on the floor (which I had quite a lot of), and ceiling grabbers akin to the ones in Deep Rock Galactic. But this current iteration seems a lot more chill. At its core, this is a game about building shit so that you can build more shit (rinse and repeat) and occasionally stopping to look at all the shit you've built and say, "I made this!"

One thing I will say is: hoo boy, this game struggles on PS4, at least in multiplayer. Supposedly it was much worse, with putting down too many tethers (oxygen lines) eventually destabilizing the game. We played too late to experience that in particular, however I (owning a PS5) made the mistake of letting my friend (who is on PS4) host a new game once the snail update came out, since I figured whoever could host. I was wrong, and that was a mistake. One planet seemed to just randomly break for us, and my friend would lag whenever I went near it. Another planet did the same later on, but then suddenly stopped. We had multiple crashes relating to the newly added snail  questline, and a few miscellaneous crashes. In all honesty, I'm not sure if the game wouldn't have gotten less stable on PS5 as we went, but I assume at the very least I wouldn't have experienced the severe lag spikes my friend did. With that said, we did finish the game, and it was quite playable, crashes aside. If you don't mind not earning trophies in the game, and have the opportunity, I would advise playing it on PC over PS4 / PS5, as it runs on 1080p and 30fps on both, and clearly struggles on PS4 in particular.

 

As a side, I am now putting platinum rarities in these posts.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

151: 8-Bit Invaders  - 1.51%

 

First off, I'm loving the matching plat number and rarity. Good shit.

So anyway, this is a game I bought for like 2$ back in early 2020. I originally intended to play it co-op with my friend, but we kind of both forgot about it, as you tend to do with games you buy solely because they're 2$. Today, I have the platinum! Honestly, the rarity is a bit exaggerated, although between needing three players (or consoles) to boost one trophy and some extremely frustrating levels it is not quite a walk in the park.

On to the actual game. So, this is a very competently made RTS created by genre veterans. The music is fantastic. The game itself is fun to play and, while somewhat simple, the game offers a variety of units and buildings and such. 8-Bit Invaders is a game centered around two factions - the marines, and the Cranoids. The game does very little to disguise its StarCraft inspirations. The Cranoids are essentially the Zerg, albeit made up of old Sci-Fi references - one of the basic infantry units is literally just a Xenomorph and their ultimate unit is an alien Godzilla - both their playstyle and their role in the campaign's story (what little there is) reflects this. It's harder to pin the marines as being directly StarCraft-y, just because 'space marines' isn't exactly a concept unique to it, however they play their part in the dichotomy. The marines are a more typical faction where you need to manage power and population, while the Cranoids aren't limited by power, only population, and are capable of pumping out large numbers of weak, but easy to produce infantry units, as well as teleport new units to the center of the battlefield. The factions are well thought out and provide a great contrast to eachother, and variety in their forces.

It's a very solid start for an RTS game. Unfortunately, that's where problems begin. The biggest issue is content - 8-Bit Invaders is one third in a trilogy of classic RTS games, each focusing on two armies - save for the first, which had a third added in after launch. If you own all three you can use all the armies in any game, but the problem here is that they're 30$ each (admittedly oft discounted), and the games do not quite have 30$ of content. There's two singleplayer campaigns with ten maps for each faction, however even that relatively sparse offering reuses most of its maps, and its story is limited to mission descriptions. They also offer challenges which unlock greater starting forces when completed, trivializing even the hard difficulty once you've done them all. The co-op campaign is quite solid - a very enjoyable experience with a friend - but it only has five missions per faction and lacks the natural progression of the solo campaigns, and does not allow you to unlock extra units through completing challenges. The meat of this game, then, is in PvP and skirmishes - but with the relative lack of maps and the paltry two factions, you're not exactly swimming in content to immerse yourself in. This could be mitigated, as the PC release comes with a level editor and an abundance of user created maps, however the console port gets no such features.

The second biggest issue is the port. It's generally competent, with a system where you can assign units to one of three groups to control them with one of three buttons; however you lack the ability to reassign units. There is no way to do it. Just plan better, right? The problem here is that in much of the campaign, you're given pre-existing groups of units, and in two missions in particular you're obligated to use stealth units, and if you want to complete one of the challenges for both of said missions (which is necessary for the platinum), you need to not lose any of those stealth units. Which is extremely difficult, especially since the units you start with are already assigned to the same group as the stealth units. The solo mission can be completed only with stealth, so it is easier, but in the co-op equivalent, you're forced to launch an all out assault against heavily guarded objectives. All while making sure your incredibly vulnerable stealth infantry does not march into enemy fire and get itself killed. With one button commanding both them and your tank battalion. I assume you see the problem. You can manually select individual units and tell them to do things, but this is extremely inefficient on a controller (honestly, it probably would be on PC as well), and is not viable for commanding your forces in the middle of a firefight. In most of the missions this does not matter, and I could dismiss it easily. However, these two missions in particular were copy pasted from PC with no thought whatsoever put into how shoddy console port controls would affect their difficulty. It is not an issue that will sink a game, but it is an issue which could so easily, with the bare minimum of playtesting, have been avoided - and it makes me think, "what the fuck were you thinking?"

In some ways this is a similar situation to Lost in Random - solid gameplay that simply lacks the fleshing out it needs. For what I paid, I would say 8-Bit Invaders is a solid title, and an enjoyable experience (if a frustrating platinum at times). If you like voxel aesthetics and the RTS games of yore, you may very well enjoy this and its predecessors (though Armies is apparently much worse than Hordes); however, it is more of a diversion than something to lose yourself in.

[Darling Baphomet]

New month! January was a fairly decent month for me, and I overshot my platinum goal of 5 platinums a month (which would guarantee 200 by 2023) by three plats. Hopefully I can keep it up, and perhaps even surprise myself.

 

Been kind of scattered lately; been working on Back 4 Blood, and playing the recently released Uncharted Legacy of Thieves collection. Considering platinuming the latter, although I find the combat somewhat grating and climbing simulators are not wholly my thing (Horizon did it way better, anyway), so I'm not yet decided on whether I'll platinum the game. Also set up my PSVR again, after a black screen scare - luckily managed to avoid the ridiculous 100$ repair fee and somehow get it working again. That means I'll be playing Beat Saber again, hopefully to the platinum this time, and I'm considering starting up Skyrim VR, although devil knows that's one hell of a commitment. Also bought the recently released Zenith: The Last City, a VR mmo that's been quite the buzz as of late, and Dysmantle - hopefully I'll be able to get into at least the top 25-30 first achievers for both. But I am a distracted gamer, so do not count on it. Also have Civilization 6 on hold - I had made a habit of watching Star Trek (specifically the Next Generation, which I had snubbed in favor of Deep Space 9) while playing it, but I haven't done that in quite a while.

 

Hm, perhaps I should bring back my backlog list. Probably needs a fair few changes.

 

152: Black Mirror - 51.96%

 

I'd seen this game on PS Now a fair few times, and while it occasionally sparked some curiosity, I never bothered actually playing it. Then, a few months ago, I saw a video on the original Black Mirror, which from what I've seen was quite the adventure game for its time. This reboot is... well, not quite that, however it is the most modern opportunity I'll have to play it, so I took the liberty of finally indulging my curiosity.

So, this is essentially a Telltale game, particularly of the sort from before all of their games were QTE fests - you know, back when they had gameplay, and even actual puzzles! It's creepy and atmospheric, and it has a few jump scares, but I wouldn't quite call it a horror game. You play David Gordon, whose occult-obsessed father recently perished, returning to the family manor to claim his inheritance and perhaps shed some light on his father's death. Then things get weird, as they do in any good mystery, and you're tasked with figuring out what the fuck is going on. You're also joined by a skeptical, therapist 'sidekick' a bit into the game, who serves as a good foil to the superstitious protagonist. Every detective needs his Watson, right?

Go to any discussion of this game, and you'll probably see bitching about the controls. And honestly, these controls should be bitched about! They are terrible. The camera constantly switches angles and the game seems to save your movement orientation from the previous camera angle, so you'll frequently end up accidentally going back through a door or into another part of a room. The camera is its own nightmare - examining objects and areas is extremely finicky, and worse, at times the developers seem to hide things in areas you don't think the camera can even reach with how weird it is.

But this ain't Doom. We don't need everything to be tight and sexy. We're here for the narrative. And the narrative is good. Like I said, it's an atmospheric game. It has a solid premise, and it does a good job of setting up the mystery, slowly revealing more of the Gordon family's lore, and so on and so forth. The characters are varied enough to be interesting, but they're not the game's strong suit - you're here for the mystery. And (perhaps until the end, where it starts to unravel a bit) you're constantly learning new things to keep it going. The game's length likely works to its advantage here, as it doesn't really give you time to be bored by it.

All in all, it's a janky, but rather fun adventure game. While it may not measure up to the trilogy it reboots, it stands well enough on its own, and if you have PS Now and like this sort of game, I'd say go for it. Otherwise, I'd say it's worth maybe 8-10$.

[Darling Baphomet]

153: Dysmantle - 21.30%

(Still a new game, so rarity's a bit weird - 10% on PS4 and 21% on PS5. Probably go back and update this in a few weeks.)

Here's a game that lives up to its name - Dysmantle. It's a survival game wherein much of the gameplay loop revolves around destroying (dysmantling, if you will) various objects around the map, so as to get resources to build better tools that allow you to survive longer, fight better, and - you guessed it! - destroy more things. You go from extracting what scraps you can from mailboxes and fences to being able to demolish entire houses, and even trucks, and for the most part, the game has more than enough content to keep you occupied while you make that journey. For the first few dozen hours you're likely to be engrossed in leveling up, discovering and inventing new recipes, and harvesting the resources needed to build your new inventions.

It's not the most unique premise, really. This game is essentially an altar to the almighty grind; the game relies on systems which are often relegated to the background as secondary mechanics you only occasionally indulge in, and makes them the entire game. You go out, you get a backpack full of resources, you come back, you build something new - rinse and repeat until you've built it all. And honestly, it does it well. The game is satisfying. The progression is satisfying. And there's a slurry of quests and lore to go through while you're delving into your grind, to say nothing of some side grinds such as cooking and fishing - and of course, combat, as there's a variety of enemies around the map and tools to kill them with. Grenades, machetes, firearms - even turrets! What a world we live in.

One thing I will say is that the endgame (which is to say, running around the map finding collectibles) can be a bit tiresome, as at that point you'll have invented everything there is to invent and be able to one shot just about every enemy on the map, and destroy everything there is to destroy. This isn't really a fault of the game itself, as collectible whoring is a platinum hunter's burden, and the game remained quite engrossing for the first... fuck if I know, 40-50 hours? That's pretty fucking impressive for a game that sells at 25$ on launch. And the devs are continuously updating the game, so I'm sure there's a lot more content coming.

Edited March 19, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

I've been procrastinating on writing this update almost as long as cleanup for the end game took me. Ha! NEO: Twewy is the first JRPG I've platinumed in a very long time and god damn was it a grindy one. I unfortunately did not meet my 5 platinums per month goal last month, although I'm hoping this month turns out better. But we will see, as I'm shuffling quite a few games at once, currently. I'm mostly done with Hypnospace Outlaw (and by mostly done, I mean I am now stuck in collectible hell and only half done with that mess), have been making slow but steady progress in Skyrim VR, and have started playing Torchlight 2 and For the King with friends. On top of that, I bought Ziggurat 2 recently (fantastic game, by the way - if you've been following me for a while, you probably saw I loved the first game, and I'm loving the sequel, two!); so I am rather swamped with games, but hopefully they'll pan out and make this month a prosperous one.

 

I should really bring back my backlog list one of these days. But anyway, without further ado:

 

154: NEO: The World Ends With You - 17.21%

 

So, as said, this is the first JRPG I've played in quite a while, and it's a damn good way to get back into the genre. (Subgenre? Eh, semantics.) NEO: Twewy is the sequel to The World Ends With You, a cult classic DS game that was in its heyday back when I was still just a kid browsing Nintendo forums. The game follows two absurdly stylish teens who find themselves playing a mysterious game that rapidly proves to be life or death; but of course you end up with a much larger ensemble as the game goes on, in JRPG fashion.

The game's been criticized for riding very heavily on the first game's coattails, an assessment I have to agree with - while the game's plot is self-contained enough that you can play through it new to the series without being too confused, the game's constantly reintroducing characters from the first game that really don't have the same significance if you haven't played the first. I, unfortunately, did not get to playing it back during my DS owning days; however there is an anime adaptation that manages to summarize the plot of the first game well enough and prep you for the sequel.

For the most part, the game is composed of you completing various tasks and puzzles to progress in the Reaper's game, all while trying to assemble a larger team and competing against enemy teams. The first week or two, while occasionally having exciting developments, are somewhat mundane in that regard, giving you the sense of a story that's just focused on the day to day as opposed to having a clear, overarching plot. It picks up, of course, as you get farther into the game, but it's a game that could definitely benefit from a bit more tension, in my opinion. But with that said, the pacing is comfortable and I never got bored with it, and the characters are interesting enough to keep you invested in what happens next.

So, for the most part the game has you solving various tasks as your objections - tracking down clues, searching for specific noise (monsters, essentially), and occasionally engaging in turf battles. It's a fun enough mix, although the turf wars can get a bit drawn out. The game has an active combat system wherein you control every character simultaneously - every character gets a pin, giving them a single move tied to a button, and by the end of the game this means you'll essentially have six attacks (or defenses, or heals...) to use. It's a solid combat system, and it's fun to play; battles rarely feel monotonous because there's always something going on. With that said, the battles aren't the most intricate, either, and the fact that your camera is locked to targeting enemies can get extremely annoying, especially when you meet the chameleons in week 2 who can not only turn invisible but have a devastating aoe attack to force you out of visibility range, meaning you're frequently having to scroll through 6 enemies to lock back onto the one you actually want to attack in battles with them. You also only directly control the character(s) you're currently pressing buttons for (or last pushed a button for), with the others playing catch up, which can make things a bit imprecise especially when you have enemies that can only be damaged from behind. But these are minor inconveniences, and for the most part, it's a good combat system.

Similar to the original game, the style is a major selling point for this game - and while it doesn't manage to be quite as edgy in its 3D graphics as the original game managed to be with its sprites, it's still an extremely stylized game. All of the characters have unique, over the top aesthetics, the areas twist and warp as you run through them, and you're constantly listening to a very high quality soundtrack made up of various rock-ish and electronic songs. This is a game that bleeds style.

Lastly, you have the grind. Oh boy. The grind. So, like many JRPGs, NEO: Twewy appreciates its minmaxing - the game allows you to lower your health and chain enemy encounters in exchange for higher drop rates and play on higher difficulties, each with unique drops - and on the hardest difficulty, drop rates are so low you often need to not only chain 10+ encounters, but also constantly play at the lowest possible health in order to even have a chance of getting the drops you want. And you need to get every single pin in the game. Some pins evolve when leveled up, some 'mutate' when leveled up by a specific character, but most of them can be obtained through fights. There's over three hundred pins, and over a hundred separate encounters, each with 4 difficulty levels of drops (of which you'll need to get at least 80% for the plat.) So it's a grind. This game could easily be finished in 20-30 hours if not for the grind, but having to 100% it turns it into a hundred hour endeavor. Which is not too bad - I personally enjoy having games I can play with the sound off, while watching shows or what not - but in this game's case, it's definitely a bit excessive.

Overall though, this is a lovely JRPG and I highly recommend anyone into JRPGs (and especially the first game) play it. I'd give it a solid 8, maybe 8.5/10. It's unique, avoids being too full of JRPG tropes, and has a satisfying story and, again, a fantastic soundtrack and overall aesthetic.

[AJ_Radio]

I think threads like this deserve a little more attention especially when you've put effort into making the reviews and trying to keep up to date, which I'm horrible at doing in my own thread.

 

Can't say I know any of the recent games you've completed. As long as people still read your trophy checklists thread and offer the occasional upvote and comment, then that's good enough for most of us.

[Darling Baphomet]

6 hours ago, AJ_Radio said:

I think threads like this deserve a little more attention especially when you've put effort into making the reviews and trying to keep up to date, which I'm horrible at doing in my own thread.

 

Can't say I know any of the recent games you've completed. As long as people still read your trophy checklists thread and offer the occasional upvote and comment, then that's good enough for most of us.

 

Yeah, I mostly do it for my own sake but I enjoy getting a comment from time to time as well. I also tend to play a lot of obscurer games so I end up with a lot of unknown indies or otherwise less than mainstream games on my list. I enjoy being able to find new titles most people don't know about and experience them for myself; guess I like sympathizing with the underdog.

[AJ_Radio]

6 hours ago, Darling Baphomet said:

 

Yeah, I mostly do it for my own sake but I enjoy getting a comment from time to time as well. I also tend to play a lot of obscurer games so I end up with a lot of unknown indies or otherwise less than mainstream games on my list. I enjoy being able to find new titles most people don't know about and experience them for myself; guess I like sympathizing with the underdog.

Yeah. People think I’m an attention seeker on this website but in all honesty I like having people comment and critique my content. Keeps things interesting. 
 

I did obscure stuff for a while, now I’m mostly playing some fairly well known games because I honestly put them on the back burner for too long. Digital game sales are a killer to your gaming backlog, I can easily say this from experience. 
 

I’m just now getting into Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. An old game by now, was fairly popular with the masses, everything that was said about it has been said. Yet I’m looking forward to it challenging me a bit. 
 

I just play a variety of stuff. 

[Darling Baphomet]

155: Hypnospace Outlaw - 19.25%

 

So, first of all, this is a game like Outer Wilds. Not in any way that correlates to gameplay, but in the sense that you really want to know as little about it going in. Also like Outer Wilds, it's fucking fantastic. Seriously - if you buy this game, don't google anything unless you're extremely stuck. I ruined a few small surprises for myself that way, and I regret it. Hell, I might give away too much even in this review, but I will try my best.

So, with your expectations high, let's talk about what Hypnospace Outlaw is. Or rather, allow me to show you:

 

 

This video (and I say this almost unironically) conveys well enough the tone of this game, and what it's about. You are an internet cop patrolling the internet solving cases and uncovering thought criminals - you know, the usual - but all this is really foreplay for the actual meat of the game, which is browsing an extremely obnoxious, loving satire of the 90s internet, uncovering secret web pages and such, and learning more about the characters that inhabit it and seeing their stories develop over time. It's a game unlike any I've played before, and I doubt I'll play anything quite like it again - hello, Outer Wilds comparison!

The game is rather short altogether - another point in favor of just exploring it unspoiled - but it's meaty and unique. Every webpage is uniquely designed and possesses its own charms and secrets, and you're unlikely to get bored, at least not until you're forced to hunt down every single webpage for the platinum in the postgame. The plot, for a game about browsing the internet, is surprisingly engaging - the characters are genuinely interesting, and again, the world is rich and enjoyable to explore. Much like Outer Wilds puts you in a beautiful little star system and lets you explore the ruins of dead civilizations, Hypnospace plops you straight into a lovely little internet ecosystem and lets you uncover all the shitty meme music your heart could ever want.

 

Really, play this game. You'll love it. 97% positive on Steam don't lie.

 

... And yes, this game is pretty much just a web browser (with occasional desktop-ing), so you do have to be rather deranged to play it with a controller. It's not a terrible experience, but if you don't care about earning trophies, give Steam your money for this one.

[Crispy_Oglop]

Hypnospace Outlaw looks right up my alley! Based on your review, I think i'm going to get this one on payday along with another one i've been planning on picking up called Stories Untold, which seems like a similar experience as far as format goes.

 

If you are looking for recommendations, I highly recommend Return of the Obra Dinn & Observation, both of which offer some interesting stories and gameplay. There is also another game which I really wish came to PS called 'There is no game' which I played on PC a year or so ago and was utterly blown away by it. Probably the most meta game i've ever played.

[Darling Baphomet]

10 hours ago, Crispy_Oglop said:

Hypnospace Outlaw looks right up my alley! Based on your review, I think i'm going to get this one on payday along with another one i've been planning on picking up called Stories Untold, which seems like a similar experience as far as format goes.

 

If you are looking for recommendations, I highly recommend Return of the Obra Dinn & Observation, both of which offer some interesting stories and gameplay. There is also another game which I really wish came to PS called 'There is no game' which I played on PC a year or so ago and was utterly blown away by it. Probably the most meta game i've ever played.

 

I've never heard of Stories Untold; it looks damn interesting though. Another game similar to Hypnospace that I completely forgot to mention in my review of it is Do Not Feed the Monkeys - in both games you are, in a sense, a digital voyeur, learning more about the people you spy on to accomplish various tasks and such. I would argue Hypnospace is the superior game, but DNFM is a very solid, bizarre indie game as well.

 

Obra Dinn's been on my radar for a bit, however I kept waiting for it to get a good sale (50% is usually my "yep, that's a good sale" threshold) for a while, but it seems like the devs are a bit stingy, so perhaps I'll just pick it up next time it gets a sale at whatever price. Observation I'll have to keep an eye on as well; admittedly I skipped over that one purely due to the fact that it doesn't have a platinum. Call me vain, I guess.

 

I do wish more indie games would come to Playstation - unfortunately Sony's just... not very good at drawing attention to indies, and many indie developers don't view Playstation as a worthwhile console to port to. I recall hearing the developer of Eastshade (that lovely Skyrim-esque game where you paint pretty pictures of landscapes) saying that the PS port sold so little that it was barely worth it.

 

On 3/19/2022 at 2:04 PM, AJ_Radio said:

I did obscure stuff for a while, now I’m mostly playing some fairly well known games because I honestly put them on the back burner for too long. Digital game sales are a killer to your gaming backlog, I can easily say this from experience. 
 

I’m just now getting into Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. An old game by now, was fairly popular with the masses, everything that was said about it has been said. Yet I’m looking forward to it challenging me a bit.

 

I've been meaning to play MGS V for... well, probably five years now, ever since it came out on PS+. Unfortunately between my overindulgent spending habits and rapidly growing landfill of a backlog it's so easy for games to simply get lost in the backlog. Sales definitely tend to drown out anything else - lately I've been fond of buying 2-3$ indie games that I'm not sure I'm ever even play, because I guess my brain just likes the "haha, money go brrr" dopamine. Or serotonin? I always forget which.

 

Sales are a great way to encounter obscure indie games at reasonable prices, however, and I do value my obscure indie games.

[Darling Baphomet]

156: Ziggurat 2 - 8.25%

 

(Why is the platinum image literally just the game image?)

The first Ziggurat was a beloved addition to my platinum collection, providing a fantastic combination of fantasy roguelike and (very, very high speed) FPS. So when I heard there was a Ziggurat 2 in development, I eagerly awaited the console ports, and for the most part, I'm very pleased with this sequel. The first game was admittedly bit lackluster in its graphics, and this game provides a massive visual overhaul, and runs at 4k / 60fps on PS5 in quality mode (well, most of the time - there are massive dips that are unfortunately a bit too frequent). In addition, characters are now much more diverse, with every character being given a unique ability and perks that build around that ability, and we now also have the ability to climb up ledges and dash, which are very welcome movement additions. Is it a groundbreaking sequel? No; it's really just "more of the same" with a few additions and tweaks to the game's classic formula. But if you liked Ziggurat 1 (or just like both FPS games and roguelikes), you'll very likely enjoy this game as well.

 

But that's getting ahead of myself - as said, this is an FPS, fantasy roguelike. You run very, very fast, you collect a variety of different weapons of four different categories (wands, which regenerate mana, then spells, staves, and alchemical weapons), each of which have about a dozen weapons for you to unlock, providing a massive, highly varied arsenal. You run from room to room, in roguelike fashion, clearing rooms of enemies and sometimes having to accomplish special objectives - push the buttons in the correct order, destroy obelisks, capture nodes. On every level up you're given the option of (normally) 3 perks to choose from, giving the game a more deliberate strategic element to it, as you're able to craft builds around defense, collecting barrier, stacking XP boosts (a personal favorite), etc, as well as take oaths (perks with downsides) and buy new weapons and perks at stores. The game is frantic and intense, and if you're not constantly moving and thinning out the hordes you're presented with, it's likely because you're dead. This frantic, almost retro FPS-esque action is the core of the game, but the perks and characters you build around are what really make the game as engaging as it is. You have a dark mage who can sacrifice HP for extra damage, and whose perks revolve around sacrificing health or defense for extra XP and damage; a knight who passively loses mana, but can become temporarily invincible and turn hits taken into mana, and a necromancer who can summon skeletons to fight alongside her, alongside a handful of other characters.

 

Probably the biggest addition to this game is the campaign mode. Rather than the standard roguelike runs that made up the meat of the first game, you instead have a much more roguelite-esque experience; you're able to level up characters, weapons, and amulets, choose equipment to take into missions, and invest insight into passive buffs across the board. The levels have changed too, with there being a few level types available to you, and every mission varies in terms of difficulty and length, with the shortest missions being a measly two floors. At first, I was not particularly fond of this - I wanted a full roguelike experience, not two floor mini-dungeons - but the game quickly started to catch up and give me full sized quests, so it was not too major a gripe. You're also offered 'classic' modes, which feature a standard roguelike run with none of the aforementioned modifiers, as well as an infinite dungeon and wave based gauntlet mode.

 

So, all in all, it's a diverse game that offers plenty of game modes, characters, and builds to choose from, structured around a tight arena FPS sort of feel. Again, if you like both roguelikes and shooters, you'll probably like this. I normally only buy games on sale, but I thought 25$ was a very fair price for the amount of game I got out of it.

 

And now, with my glowing endorsement out of the way, let's gripe a little, shall we?

The biggest problem with this game, by far, is the balance. It's not so broken as to make the game particularly unplayable or even unfun, but everywhere you go, you'll notice that the game's balancing is slightly off. In the aforementioned campaign mode, for instance, the ridiculous upgrades you can get combined with how percentage modifiers stack exponentially (e.g. if you get two 50% damage buffs, you don't just get 200% damage, you get 225%) make the late game a breeze, even on the hardest difficulties. In the late game, I would frequently find myself at max barrier (temporary hp) throughout the late game, and often would find myself being able to take down bosses in mere seconds. On the other hand, the classic modes, which lack those modifiers, are much more difficult, and the complete lack of damage buffs makes firefights feel very slow compared to the campaign, making me believe that the classic modes were an afterthought and not balanced for.

 

In addition, a handful of items are just... subpar. Pretty much every grenade, while I'm sure technically holding up in terms of total damage dealt, whittles away enemy health so slowly that I've almost never felt the need to use them; they feel more like water balloons than they do grenades, and many weapons with much better single target potential can also affect multiple enemies at once. Melee weapons, of which there are luckily not many, are also virtually a death sentence unless you're playing the previously mentioned knight with temporary invincibility, but even then, they are never going to be your first choice. Shield, which is HP that you can regenerate, is made virtually useless by the midgame due to the fact that it gets damaged after barrier, there are very few ways to increase shield and even less to build around it, and it recharges at a snail's pace, even on the character whose whole gimmick is shield. A lot of amulets (active items which come with a passive buff) when leveled up have extremely underwhelming active effects, but ridiculous modifiers like +35% damage for all weapons. Certain characters as well I simply didn't find worth playing; for instance, the necromancer, whom the developers have defended by saying that her summons' ability to draw aggro is extremely powerful, has almost no way of making her summons combat viable due to the long recharge time of her ability and most of her character specific perks being things like 'extra fire rate when a skeleton dies', or '1 second of recharge back when a skeleton dies' (for reference, her ability takes 30 seconds to recharge, and summons 3 skeletons). It's not great. She's a summoner, sure, but she has no way to build around her summons and they essentially become glorified meat shields as the game progresses. Perhaps there's a point in that, because you don't really want your action FPS to become an action first-person-summoner, but... why make a character with a gimmick you don't actually want her to be able to fully utilize?

 

Then again, it's not like roguelikes have ever been a particularly balanced genre. The Binding of Isaac, which is perhaps the most important roguelike in existence, is a complete mess if you try to look at it from a balance perspective - many runs you are simply never given the tools to succeed at all, while on others you get handed Brimstone on the first floor. Certain characters are wildly overpowered compared to others, and that's part of its charm. Some upgrades are practically worthless, while others are so powerful they can singlehandedly win you a run.

Ziggurat 2 isn't really like that. For the most part, you have the chance to win every run you set out on, especially as you begin investing in upgrades and figuring out good synergies. The difficulty is more typical of an FPS than a roguelike, and you rapidly get used to winning most missions you set out on. And so it often doesn't feel like you're in a hostile environment just barely getting by, grateful for every chance at survival you're given; you have time to weigh every option, and notice how some options are just... not good compared to the rest. In the Binding of Isaac, choosing to skip a power up is a fairly big deal, as it means you've basically wasted an item room; in Ziggurat 2, you can safely skip a weapon, amulet, or perk without much consequence, especially because weapons and amulets you find becoming higher level as you progress almost guarantees you'll find something better later on.

Edited May 14, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

157: Torchlight 2 - 15.21%

 

Ah yes, Torchlight, that one Diablo clone I played a bit in my childhood, despite never having played Diablo (or any other Diablo clones.) The first Torchlight made a big deal out of its randomly generated dungeons, as it predated roguelikes' hostile takeover of the indie scene by a good few years; the second Torchlight is hardly revolutionary, but improves upon a good game. Torchlight 3 seems to have bombed from a cursory examination of it, having apparently been a scrapped MMO repurposed into an ARPG, and the future of the series appear to lie in mobile games. So Torchlight 2 will likely remain the apex of the franchise for the foreseeable future.

Now, again, I haven't played many Diablo clones. I haven't played Diablo, either. So if you're a fan of this genre, my analysis of it will likely be largely useless to you.

 

So, essentially, Torchlight 2 is a neat little dungeon crawler with the previously mentioned randomly generated dungeons (and overworld maps), randomly generated loot (naturally), and four classes to pick from - a neat little upgrade from one's three. You also get a pet companion of a large variety of species, who is largely useless but can be used to sell items for you, and becomes a bit less useless if you use fish to permanently transform him. You get to pick between an embermage, outlander (gunslinger) - both of which are fairly standard - a very aggressive berserker and an engineer who utilizes mechanical summons. I played two of them, the embermage and the berserker, and I greatly favored the embermage, firstly because primary attacks are absolutely terrible in this game (more on that later), and secondly because one of Torchlight's high points is its constant barrage of spectacular particle effects, and who better than a mage to showcase that?

 

For the most part the gameplay follows a standard formula - you get a quest in town, you run around a large overworld map to the appropriate dungeons and perhaps pick up a side quest or two, and then you move on to the next town or overworld. The story is not particularly interesting, so what you'll be playing for is the opportunity to brutalize hordes of enemies, pick up ever better loot, and create your own build through a mix of stat allocations and active and passive skills, and with multiple tiers of new game + as well as an infinite supply of randomly generated dungeons, you have all the opportunity you could want to minmax to your heart's content. The game offers quite a bit of build diversity as well, although a lot of skills aren't very well balanced and some are outright useless.

 

The combat is, for the most part, satisfying (although I do not recommend playing a melee character), the loot chasing is fun, and the dungeons are relatively diverse and not too time consuming, so you do not feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again. It also features fully functional co-op, so you can play through the entire game with a friend or three, which greatly improves the experience. It also runs in 4k and 60fps (unlike its ill fated sequel) on the PS5, which is much appreciated. The sound effects are solid, although I found the music extremely unimpressive, even during boss fights, and so this quickly became a "grind while watching youtube essays" game for me. And it serves that purpose well. You go around, you use your skills, and enemies explode. And sometimes they give you things that make it easier for you to make enemies explode. Torchlight 2 was a solid game when it released, and it still is now; a solid 7.5-8/10, in my opinion.

 

And now for the complaints!

Okay, so first of all, the melee controls on this port are fucking atrocious. The game has a weird system where it's not quite "you can only attack while you're in range of an enemy" and not quite "you can attack whenever you want" - you can attack whenever you want, however you cannot aim your character freely, and they instead autolock onto whatever enemy, and if that enemy is out of range, between swings they may try to run towards it. Or sometimes they don't. Sometimes you're literally right next to an enemy and your character just decides to punch into the void. Or you're trying to destroy a structure (which the game does not autolock onto) that keeps spawning enemies, and by the time you're finally able to get your character to punch the thing you're attacking, it's spawned another enemy and your character decides to auto target and run off to chase it instead. This... this isn't good. It's not good. Skills work better, because most of them are AOE effects and you can trigger them as you please, and ranged attacks are more satisfying as well.

 

That's the biggest complaint. Secondly, no respecs. Well, kind of respecs - you can respec your skills, but not your stat points. So if you decide halfway through that putting all your points into focus as a berserker was a bad idea, well, bum luck for you.

 

Thirdly, it can be rather difficult to keep up with the levels of the areas and enemies. You essentially have to comb every map for enemies and do every sidequest, or else you start falling behind in terms of levels. On a few occasions I had to reroll the world (which you can only do in multiplayer) in order to grind enemies and get to an appropriate level range for the next main area.

 

Lastly... the one million gold trophy is terrible. Absolutely terrible. Without duping items, playing on the easiest difficulty, or using a second character on a second console to store your gold, this trophy would be ridiculously difficult. The game doesn't allow you to store gold normally, and so you're forced to carry all your gold on you at once. This is a problem because, firstly, even in the late game as I approached level 100, I was only getting something like 50k gold per dungeon clear, and secondly, every time you die, you're given three options: return to town for free (which can mean 5-10 minutes of backtracking to where you were), restart at the entrance of your current floor for 10% of your gold, or respawn on the spot for 30%. And this is particularly bad because (perhaps this is just because I was playing a mage) the game is filled with things that can instantly kill you. On NG+ and the later parts of NG, I found myself dying perhaps two to three times a dungeon, even with vigorous potion usage, because you unfortunately cannot heal one hit KOs. So imagine if I was running around with, say, 600k gold - my options would be to either lose 200k to respawn on the spot, lose 60k and spend several minutes running back, or respawn at town for free and endure multiple long (even on PS5!) loading screens and traversing dungeon floors I'd already cleared. If I picked the reasonable option, which is to say, restarting at the entrance to my current floor, I would already have lost more money than I would be able to make in that entire dungeon.

Could be worse, though, I guess - Torchlight 3 has a single trophy for killing one million monsters which supposedly takes upwards of 400 hours. For reference, I played Torchlight 2 for something like 60 hours and only killed around 40-50k. I'm considering attempting the Torchlight 3 plat, if only so I have a consistent game that I can grind while I watch whatever show I'm binging at the moment, however it might be a little bit too ridiculous.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

158: Crysis Remastered - 26.06%

 

Can it run Crysis? Yes. Can it run Crysis well? Well... that's another story entirely.

So, Crysis is made by the same devs as Far Cry 1 (I still resent Ubisoft for turning Far Cry into a generic "go exotic places, shoot humans" franchise), and it has a lot of similarities. You go to an exotic island, you shoot a bunch of people, and as the game progresses you start shooting things that are distinctively not people. Both games were very graphically impressive for their times, and Crysis still manages to be rather pretty on a PS5 (even though it's capped at 1800p). The island's lush with foliage, and there's a pretty attention to detail with the (relatively) well modeled wildlife, as well as obnoxious displays of physics common for mid 2000s games. 

You play as a member of some kinda US special forces unit that gets power suits, granting you super speed, strength, invisibility, and armor. This allows for some fairly impressive displays, although for the most part this game feels like your typical cover shooter; your armor melts instantly, and strength amounts to only 'throwing boxes at people' and very awkward high jumps, so you really only have super speed and limited stealth to distinguish yourself from your average CoD protagonist. On normal difficulty you can more or less play it as a regular cover shooter, but on the harder difficulties it's practically mandatory to abuse cloak and focus on hit and run styles of attack. (Hot tip: shooting while cloaked drains all your energy, however you can decloak instantly, then fire, then recloak right afterwards.)

The story is... well, the story's there. It's a decent enough FPS campaign. It gets the job done. The game's not particularly long, and your arsenal isn't massive, although it has all your staples, as well as a fancy alien gun you get to use for a bit. Probably the most distinctive feature is that the levels are rather open and freeform; you can outright skip many combat sections if you so choose, and you can drive every vehicle featured in the game. It's a solid game, and most certainly fantastic for the time, but in retrospect, our shooters have advanced a fair bit since the days of Crysis. Overall, I'd give this game a 7/10 or so.

 

Another hot tip, free of charge: if you play the game on normal first, you have to delete your save data (off the actual console) in order to get the Delta trophies to pop properly. I wasn't able to find an option in game to clear save data, and starting a new game didn't cut it.

 

Bring on the complaints!

I've been waiting for this. Alright, so, first of all. The port. The port! Jesus fucking christ. First off, the aiming is terrible. It almost feels like aiming with an etch a sketch - the game seems to only want your joystick to move in 8 directions. It's bad. And there's no real way to make it better.

Secondly, the new power controls, while admittedly simplified, limit the player - for instance, sprinting automatically makes you use the super speed power mode, however that means that in order to recharge your super sprint, you need to not be using it - e.g. walk at a normal pace. The default controls allow you to just... disable super speed and sprint while having your suit recharge. However, at least one trophy doesn't pop while the classic controls are activated, so... that's cool.

Thirdly, and this is probably the worst offense - they removed the ability to quick save. They removed the ability to quick save. As in, it was there before, and now it's not. This means you have to rely entirely on auto saves, which while sometimes frequent to the point of ridiculousness (one driving section, I popped three auto saves in about a minute, for instance), other times leave you replaying 5-10 minutes of gameplay every time you die. This shouldn't be hard! The game industry discovered save files decades ago. Why remove them now?

 

And speaking of dying - hoo boy. This game's AI has... issues. Stealth while uncloaked is essentially impossible, and unfortunately I attempted it quite a bit before learning you could just decloak before firing to not drain all your charge. The enemies' lines of sight are bizarre and nonsensical - I'm talking, sneak behind a guy and he turns around and opens fire kinda bizarre. And on top of that, not only are enemies dead precise (catch me getting sniped by a machine gunner on a boat a few hundred feet away) but some of them have absolutely absurd vision ranges. With the snipers, for instance, on several occasions I found myself being spotted before the sniper's model loaded in. Turning a corner or crouching up a hill only to instantly be fired upon before I could even see the enemies who were shooting me was a frequent occurrence. There's technically an awareness meter, however there may as well not be one - if an enemy catches even a whiff of you, you're getting a bullet in your face. Of course, once I figured out I could just abuse recloak to essentially be permanently cloaked during combat, it became a lot easier. But up until then... god damn.

Also, the final bosses are absolute ass on Delta. The first final boss has an extremely wonky grab attack which can get you even when you're nowhere near it, and can trigger immediately after a previous grab, while you're trying to make distance. Both bosses also have this annoying freeze beam attack which is impossible to escape once you're in it, and for whatever reason flips your camera on its side in a very janky way which makes me assume it's a bug. The second final boss's freeze beam not only traps you, but also guarantees death since you can't activate your armor and it eats all your health. There's also an instakill explosion attack from the second boss (and a weaker version from the first), the second of which is particularly annoying because you'll be dealing with flying minions who can kill you in seconds if left unchecked and not exactly able to keep track of what the boss is doing at all times. When I finished the bosses, I didn't feel like I'd conquered a challenge, I felt like I'd finished a very badly designed boss fight. (I had a similar feeling with Demon's Souls, except for the entire game. Thankfully, Crysis is not Demon's Souls.)

 

I'll probably rent the Crysis trilogy (I played this one off of Now) in the future, but until then... Crysis averted.

Edited April 17, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

159: Odin Sphere Leifthrasir - 22.29%

 

I'd been meaning to play this game for years, having constantly heard about how good it is and how it's one of the better unknown PS4 exclusives. I came into this game knowing practically nothing about it except that it was a remake of some PS2 game and supposedly very good.

Odin Sphere Leifthrasir is a 2D platformer / brawler wherein you play one of five different characters (each has their own story you progress through, one after the other), each with diverse gameplay styles, but it all essentially comes down to running around and button mashing, with the occasional interlude of a skill used. The combat is pretty solid, although it does tend to come down to button mashing. The story is a very intricate one and is told almost entirely through cutscenes which always play at the same times - at the beginning of a dungeon, before that dungeon's boss, and then another one plays after you've defeated the boss. The dungeons start to get fairly repetitive, particularly since you keep revisiting the same areas (even if their layouts change each time) on every character; most of the enemies, mid bosses, and even some of the end bosses are shared between runs. I found myself watching TV shows or youtube essays for much of my time playing this game, plugging back in only to listen to cutscenes, which worked well enough, although the grind of the dungeons made it somewhat hard to get into the story when it was time for cutscenes to play again. Nonetheless, the story was good, and is more than adequate to keep a player going.

The story itself is... well, it's decent enough. Certainly more than I would expect for a game like this, with fully voiced cutscenes and an abundance of them. The stories are rather fairy tale-esque, as indicated by the fact that each individual campaign is literally just a book being read by a little girl in an attic. While I was somewhat invested in the first character's story, once I realized all the stories were (well, partially) disconnected, it became harder for me to invest in them as much, especially since the story was told through blocks of cutscenes in between repetitive dungeons. The perceived repetitiveness was at least partially my fault, as I may have been a bit overzealous in collecting food for recipes, which are the game's way of leveling up - even though I'm not sure what leveling up really affects besides giving you more points for skill trees, which you easily max out. The game has a host of RPG features like these - skill trees for passive buffs which you get more points for by leveling up, individual abilities you need Phozons (gained by killing enemies) to invest in, and equipment that changes your stats. The game has a slurry of abilities for you to use, however I found myself usually investing in 2 or 3 and just sticking with those for the rest of a character's story, as Phozons are rare and you likely won't come close to leveling even half of your abilities.

The quality of the art should be pointed out - apparently Vanillaware tends to just make pretty games in general, but the art for this game was very well done and gorgeous, and helps cement the fairy tale aesthetic. Things as minor as eating dishes get their own, unique animations (which is signfiicant with there being something like 50+ dishes). The bosses especially are massive and usually have very intricate designs, particularly the spider queen of the underworld. The sound design is... rather uninspiring, unfortunately; the music is adequate but rapidly becomes repetitive, and I felt I lost nothing of value (except audio indicators for mandragas being nearby) by unplugging my headset and watching things on my laptop while playing.

Overall I'd probably give this game a 7.5 or 8 out of 10 - a solid, quality game that's not really exceptional in any aspect. If you can get it on sale and like platforming brawler type games (not sure what the actual genre name is), you'll probably enjoy this, especially if you've liked Vanillaware's other works.

[Darling Baphomet]

160: Shadow Warrior 3 - 27.41%

 

Earned a platinum two days in a row! That's something you don't see a lot from me.

Anyway, here's Shadow Warrior 3, which is on PS Now until July, and a wonderful addition to the service, even if 3 is a bit short compared to previous entries and, much like its protagonist, seems to struggle with its identity.

 

Shadow Warrior is what you might call a boomer shooter - originally a game in the build engine, IIRC, released around the time of Duke Nukem, and with a lot of the makings of that era - ridiculous secrets, fast paced gameplay, and shitty one liners. After almost two decades, the series returned as a shiny, modern FPS with retro trappings - secrets, health packs, you get the drill - and a really fancy melee combat mechanic, one of the few games that actually used the PS4's touchpad well, allowing you to perform moves by making particular gestures on the PS4. Then Shadow Warrior 2 came by, and it was... different. In a time before Borderlands 3, it looked to be a Borderlands killer, and although it didn't quite have the content or DLC support needed to make that reality, it gave us a solid co-op shooter with tons of randomized gear, repeatable missions, etc; the sword play was not anywhere as in depth as 1, but you were allowed a variety of different melee weapons that functioned as actual weapons, not just melee buttons, so it still had some of that emphasis.

 

Then comes 3, which once again changes the formula, this time imitating Doom Eternal. Melee combat is a shadow (heh) of its former self, the game now has resource management mechanics and executions, and the levels are a series of closed arenas set in massive, awe inspiring environments, much like in Doom Eternal. In this entry in the series, Lo Wang has lost his "mojo", and spends much of the game going through an identity crisis and being nowhere near as cocky as he was in the first game, which ironically seems like a good metaphor for the series itself. But with that said, Shadow Warrior 3 isn't a poor Doom Eternal clone - it's not a substitute for Doom Eternal, but if you've platinumed Eternal as I have and want more of its combat, Lo Wang's latest adventure is a worthy addition to your library. Maybe not for 40$, though, as the game is... very short, and there's no extra content once you've finished the story.

 

Now to actually talk about Shadow Warrior 3. Jesus. As said, Shadow Warrior 3 is largely a Doom Eternal clone, and it performs that job admirably. It noticeably lacks some of the polish of Eternal - there's only one finisher animation per enemy, collision detection can be a bit weird, with enemies often bouncing off of instakill spikes, etc. But what it doesn't lack in the fundamentals. You have an arsenal of powerful weapons, you run around shooting enemies and switching between melee / ranged weapons to restore ammo and health respectively, and every once in a while you'll get a finisher in. Finishers in this game are interesting, because although they do restore health like in Eternal, they're not nearly a necessary way to regain health (and you won't be doing them nearly as often), and the real reward of finishers is getting various gore trophies from the enemies you kill - some of them are grenades, the most common enemies let you double your normal health, and the biggest enemy of all (who is literally just a Mancubus. Seriously.) gives you a minigun. These weapons are all very creative and fun to use, although as you progress through the game some of them rapidly become undesirable due to power creep.

 

The core gameplay itself can be summed up with, again, "Doom Eternal clone". You can dash, jump twice, you have your (simplified) sword, a grappling hook you traverse the meat of many levels with, you can upgrade weapons and yourself through upgrade points hidden through the world and redeemable through challenges, etc. If you liked Eternal, you'll probably like this. The gameplay is simplified somewhat, and it's never quite as chaotic as Eternal gets to be, however the unique setting, enemies, and mouthy protagonist more than distinguish it from its inspiration. The levels are all colorful and otherworldly, ranging from demon infested forests to the back of a world destroying dragon (the series has taken a bit of an apocalyptic turn), and as mentioned before they're all rather large and set in beautiful, massive environments. Shadow Warrior 3's much more focused than its predecessors, and despite its short length, this is at times an advantage - every level feels distinct from the others and takes a "quality over quantity" approach - you have river shootouts where you're on a raft, chase sequences, and then your run of the mill run of the gun weapons. It's not size, it's how you use it, as Lo Wang would probably say. (His dialogue is... well, maybe it's always been this corny, but it's extremely corny in this game.) The enemies are also worth noting; while you'll be fighting the same common enemies in every battle, the higher tier enemies show a lot of variety, from swordsmen, to literal Mancubi, to the screaming head guys from Serious Sam but with a Shadow Warrior paint - no, seriously. Exact same scream, and everything. This game does love its homages. Also, the soundtrack is pretty badass, if you can hear it. Also worth noting that while it doesn't have a PS5 version, it at least runs in  60 FPS, unlike its predecessors.

 

All in all, it's a good game and was a lovely surprise from PS Now. If you have PS Now, play this. Otherwise, I'd buy it for maybe 15-20$ or so. Solid 8/10 in my books.

 

And now the complaints!

 

I honestly don't have that many for this game. If I'd paid full price for it, I might be a bit cranky about its length, but as is it's a worthy addition to my catalogue of PS Now games. The biggest issue I have is that this game is one of that all too common genre of games where the music is quiet as fuck. This sucks, because the music is fantastic (as one would expect, given its inspirations). But with everything set to 100%, the music is almost impossible to hear. I finally resolved to just raising my system volume and lowering everything else to 70%, but it was still pretty quiet. What in the feck is the point of being able to customize your audio settings if you can't even make a game's soundtrack audible without messing with your system's sound? Normally I wouldn't even care, but you do not want to miss this game's soundtrack.

 

Also, again... it's glitchy. Not in a "wipes all your saves randomly" way, but just a "haha, what the fuck is happening" way. On quite a few occasions I would leap towards a climbable / wallrunnable wall and my character would just limply slide down it, into the abyss. Enemies would often just bounce off of instakill spikes. Sometimes I would push enemies off of edges and they would play their leaping animations, as if they were still on ground, and just jump right back at me. The grappling is also a bit wonky at times, but not in any significant way. You can feel this jank throughout the game; animations are a bit wonky as well, and the finishers often feel a bit clunkily animated.

[Darling Baphomet]

161: Operation Tango - 28.40%

 

So, for a game whose tagline literally starts with "It takes two", and has an achievement named the same, this game actually has no similarity to It Takes Two except that they're both games designed for co-op. There's no witty banter, the gameplay is completely different, and the story is... hands off at best. The game is more accurately compared to the We Were Here series, and that's a comparison wherein it holds its own much more effectively. I'd like to say Operation Tango is a high budget take on We Were Here, but in some areas Operation Tango actually feels less impressive - for instance, its puzzles are often 2D for one player and 3D for another, with the 2D sections more often than not looking like flash games.

 

The Operation Tango formula is, again, very similar to that of We Were Here - you have two players in two different sections, with solved through changing things in one section to affect the other, and communicating hints and clues available to one player but not the other. Operation Tango takes a slightly different take on it - while in We Were Here, both players get access to elaborate 3D environments, in Operation Tango you play as either the hacker or the agent, with the agent essentially being the "protagonist" of the game in terms of how much she gets to do and the environments available to her, while the hacker is mostly relegated to menus in cyberspace that are nowhere near as the pretty low poly aesthetic of the agent's environments. The approach has its advantages - the hacker is allowed to watch the agent's progress at all times and it makes for, if nothing else, a more thematically interesting dynamic than just "two people stuck in two different parts of the same castle".

 

The mini games are diverse and entertaining, offering a variety of gimmicks and gameplay features. They're engaging without generally being too hard or obtuse, and in my playthrough with my friend we were rarely ever stumped as to what to do next. Operation Tango takes a 'short but sweet' approach to things, and there's plenty of puzzles and mechanics in it I would have loved to see more of (e.g. more sections where you hack turrets.) This is a definite advantage over We Were Here in that while We Were Here's puzzles were generally environmental - while in We Were Here your puzzles consisted of reading books to figure out how to mix potions together, or what order to press buttons in, in Operation Tango you're frequently treated to fun little diversions like taking control of turrets and a variety of minigames, some of which are quite fun, although others are overused a bit. The story is... there; I did not find it particularly inspiring, but it exists to get you playing the game, and it does a good job of doing so - and personally I'd rather have a lowkey story than the convoluted nonsense that goes on in the later We Were Here games. It's a futuristic secret agent type deal and gives you an excuse to navigate pretty environments and solve puzzles. That's all we need here.

 

Overall, it's a fun little co-op game that many of us with PS5s received free on PS+ a while back, and between it having a free friend pass and having crossplay with PC, if you have this game and a willing friend, there's no reason not to give it a try. It's short, entertaining, and relies heavily on communication and cooperation, making it a lovely co-op game. Solid 7.5/10 from me.

 

And lastly, it's not really enough to warrant a complaint section, but this game is glitchy as fuck. There were multiple occasions in our platinum journeys that required restarting the game to progress. Also, the game has frequent FPS drops on PS5 which is a bit disappointing.

[Darling Baphomet]

162: THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM VR - 1.69%

 

... Is anybody going to say it? No? Okay, fine, I'll do it. Nice.

So, I'm gonna try to avoid reviewing Skyrim here and stick to Skyrim purely as a VR experience, because we've all been exposed to way too much fucking Skyrim in the decade since it was inflicted upon the world. That being said, obviously some commentary on the base game is inevitable. But I digress. Here goes.

 

So, Skyrim VR is simultaneously a bad VR game, and one of the greatest. It doesn't do anything particularly new or immersive. It pioneers absolutely jack shit. Its VR implementation is in some places extremely half assed. In a generation or two we will have open world games designed exclusively for VR that will make Skyrim VR feel like playing Bubsy 3D. But we do not live in the world of next-next-gen VR, and so we have Skyrim. There are many games that are more immersive from a gameplay perspective, which allow you to interact with the world with far greater impact and accuracy than Skyrim VR does, but you can only be so immersed in a game that takes place entirely within 3-4 rooms or a series of wave defense missions. Skyrim VR does the bare minimum in terms of a gameplay perspective, but solely by virtue of being Skyrim and of having the hundred+ hours of content that comes with being Skyrim, it blows the vast majority of PSVR games out of the water.

 

You may essentially be playing a flat game with a VR interface, but that doesn't change that there's something extremely satisfying and compelling about running through the open landscapes of Skyrim, doing quests, and watching your extremely generic companion who has at best two lines of unique dialogue running alongside you. There are other VR games that give you NPC companions, run through large areas, and do quests, but none with the scale of Skyrim, and that scale is essential to making you feel like you're in a world that matters. And that's the joy of Skyrim VR - being able to put on your headset and, for the next 1-6 hours, be immersed in a world entirely unlike your own, a gorgeous (if often far too grey) fantasy landscape where you are the hero, you have a world to save, and all that video game nonsense. What it lacks in the pure magic of a game built around VR like Astrobot Rescue Mission, it makes up for in long term immersion - in making sure you have enough world to get immersed in.

 

Again, the game is rough as shit. It's as buggy as it was ten years ago, with a few new bugs for VR, the tracking is... iffy, the graphics are very questionable (particularly on the base PS4 - it's far, far better on PS4 Pro and PS5), and yet throughout my playthrough of it, even into the hundred hour mark, I could not help but keep stopping and just looking at the world around me and thinking, "god damn, this is the most gorgeous ugly, janky piece of shit I've ever seen." After a dozen or two hours in my playthrough, I started listening to Spotify while playing, which made for almost dreamlike experiences some nights, with auroras in the sky and matching soundtracks playing. For a variety of reasons relating to IRL shit, the last few months have been extremely stressful ones for me, and so Skyrim VR became something of a comfort to me, a safe harbor to lose myself in for a few hours at a time. And it was very good at that. Again, no matter how good Skyrim VR is as a VR game, it is still Skyrim in VR, and you cannot overstate the significance of that.

 

I'm sure many people have very well put together rants about how Skyrim is a disappointment as an RPG, and how it presents you a lake a mile wide and an inch deep, allowing you to do everything, but only in the vaguest, barest sense possible. And those people aren't wrong. Skyrim is a very shallow RPG. And yet this actually works to its advantage in VR - you (or at least I) don't really want your VR open world game to be an immersive sim where you spend most of your playtime in shitty 2D dialogue boxes. You want to be out there killing shit, discovering new locations, getting new gear, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it'd be real fuckin nice if most NPCs didn't just repeat the exact same goddamn lines of dialogue to you over and over again, but you don't really go into VR to listen to people talk for hours on end. VR is still very much a novelty to most people, something fresh and shiny and new, and so the sheer number of things you can do in Skyrim works to its advantage. This playthrough I, as the platinum demanded, did pretty much every major questline, a significant amount of the side quests, and as a first I actually got into archery, enchanting, conjuring, and smithing this playthrough, alongside the usual destruction and one handed skills, leading up to crafting a full set of double enchanted dragon bone gear near the end game that was extremely satisfying. If I had had to spend the entire game building around a specific type of weapon (or magic), it'd probably have gotten tiring real fast. Perhaps when there's more Skyrim VRs out there I'll crave a more committed adventure in VR, but that does not seem like something I'll have to worry about anytime soon.

 

As a last bit I don't know where else to fit, the few VR implementations that are there are a lot of fun - using the bow, namely, is great. Being able to rapidly load an enemy up with arrows is as entertaining as it is ridiculous. Blocking a dozen spears with your shield is realistic. Going berzerk on an enemy with two one handed weapons is satisfying and exhausting. Unfortunately, not everything in the game gets this treatment - wood chopping and mining seem to try to lock you into a minigame (or just an animation that you don't get because you're in VR?) wherein nothing happens - you get a mining pick in your hand, but you can't actually mine. You get an axe, but no wood shows up on the block, nor do you have anything to chop. Horse riding is great. Magic is a bit disappointing at times, and for the most part the listed examples are the most you'll get out of the world in terms of VR features outside of becoming a werewolf or vampire lord. Also, the 2D interfaces are terrible and whoever thought browsing menus with a move controller was a good idea is a sadist. You also can't drag bodies anymore for whatever reason (no, seriously, why), which breaks, as far as I can tell, a secondary objective, and forces you to use another object to move bodies in a Dragonborn DLC quest.

 

Well, that's all she wrote.

[Darling Baphomet]

 163: Ghost Giant - 35.63%

 

Another game with an extremely lazy trophy set. Literally every trophy image is just the game's logo. Sigh.

So, remember my review of Skyrim VR? Well, to quote it, "There are many games that are more immersive from a gameplay perspective, which allow you to interact with the world with far greater impact and accuracy [...] but you can only be so immersed in a game that takes place entirely within 3-4 rooms", and this is a perfect example of that sort of game. It's a game similar to Moss, wherein you are some giant guardian entity guiding a much smaller creature through a suitably small world, with the difference being that Ghost Giant is more akin to a point and click adventure game, having virtually no combat, and is played with the move controllers.

 

Without too many spoilers, in Ghost Giant you follow a sad cat child who looks like an Animal Crossing character as he tries to cheer up his mother. You escort him through various small set pieces - a farm on a hill, a small slice of city, etc, interacting with the environment to help him accomplish various tasks as he goes about. It's a very short game, lasting only a few hours, and the puzzles are for the most part very simplistic, but on a few occasions ventured into adventure game moon logic. Luckily, there is not too much to interact with in any given world, so if you set to trying to do everything, you'll manage. The gameplay is cute and is adequate as an introductory experience to VR akin to Moss, however as a veteran I found it rather lacking. The story is the draw here: your interactions with the main character are cute, as are his dialogue, even if the story is overall a melancholic one. The trophies were not too hard either, although they tested my patience as some challenges, e.g. having to throw basketballs into far off hoops, were made absurdly difficult due to arbitrary restrictions - you're unable to move your hand past a certain 3D box "frame" in any scene, which as you might imagine makes throwing motions difficult. For one challenge, for example, I had to try to sling the ball upwards with an underhand throw, which is... not extremely accurate, because even if I contorted my body downwards I would still hit the 'ceiling' anytime I tried to do a proper throw.

 

Overall I'd give the game a 7/10. It's not revolutionary, and I wouldn't buy it for more than 10$. But if you can get it cheap, it's a fun, cute few hours of your life.

 

I'm going to talk about the story further. Big spoilers. So for safety's sake, I'll spoil it. The TL;DR is that a few reviews led me to believe this would be a story about depression, but it's not in any meaningful way, and I found that rather disappointing.

Spoiler

So, overall, I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed with Ghost Giant's story. I'd seen people talk about how insightful the story was and how it explored depression, and perhaps I read too much into a single few reviews, however, I came to expect more from it. Ghost Giant is not a game about depression. It is a game about a child whose mother is depressed. There is no meaningful commentary on depression, and you do not find out why the main character's mother is depressed, nor see any satisfying resolution to that depression. Her depression exists only as the closest thing this game has to an antagonist, and the most clarity you get about it is that she's 'sick'. It's nowhere near enough to be offensive, however between being neurodivergent and expecting a story that actually focused on depression as opposed to how depressed people burden others, I was... well, disappointed will work, even if it's too gentle a word.

 

With that out of the way, you essentially act as a guardian to a child wrought with guilt about his mother's depression and his inability to fix it. This is a story about companionship, of being there for someone who needs you. It's a silly, cartoonish game peppered with somber moments. There isn't really any real narrative in the way you'd think of it, it's more just a funny occurrence in someone's life - you, the ghost giant, show up, you bond with this child, you do some things together, and then it's over. There's no dramatic, rising tension, it's just a steady bit of life with an ending that just confirms that this isn't some dramatic fantasy epic, not really answering anything, simply assuring you that life goes on. For a game about companionship, perhaps that's better than if it did have some awe-inspiring climax to tie it all together. With the previous disappointments out of the way, I'd say the story is fairly decent. It does what it needs to, and gives you a cute, but melancholy narrative that moves you between locations as the game requires.

 

Edited May 20, 2022 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

164: Horizon Forbidden West - 42.49%

 

Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games of last gen, and had the rare honor of being one of the few singleplayer games I replayed (multiple times!) after having platinumed. Forbidden West is a worthy sequel; while it is not as groundbreaking as some sequels are compared to their predecessors, Forbidden West innovates enough to keep things fresh, while retaining much of the core gameplay of Zero Dawn. Also, much like Zero Dawn, it is one of the prettiest games of its respective console, and much like in Zero Dawn I found myself constantly taking screenshots just because of the sheer gorgeousness of the areas I found myself in.

 

I won't spoil much of the story, but it's a worthy continuation of Zero Dawn's - Aloy is now seen as a hero by all, no longer an outcast, except by choice. The game's plot appropriately takes a larger scale after the revelations and progress made in Zero Dawn, which makes it feel like a true sequel as opposed to just being the same story in a different setting. One thing I will note is that even though Aloy is taken to foreign lands, she's immediately re-dubbed a hero, which I felt missed some potential for a 'stranger in a strange land' story similar to that of Zero Dawn. The dialogue choices of Zero Dawn are also even less present than they were in Forbidden West - I believe in the course of my playthrough I encountered perhaps half a dozen of them, and they rarely affected much. This is a bit of a shame, as Zero Dawn's dialogue system could have used added complexity, and Forbidden West is a step backwards in that regard; dialogue is typically either a typical cutscene with little interaction from you, or just a wheel of questions for you to ask, without much input from you in regards to the tone or nature of the conversation. With that said, Zero Dawn was never really that much of a choice based RPG, it just took on some of the appearance of one, and Forbidden West does not suffer too much from dispensing with that pretense.

 

The combat of Forbidden West has also been revamped, however it is very much a mixed bag, and as such I cannot say it's a straight improvement from Zero Dawn. HZD was notoriously easy, and where I'm usually content playing games on normal I found myself playing harder difficulties on Zero Dawn just so that the game wouldn't be laughably easy. So Forbidden West trying to be a harder game is a welcome change - however the way it goes about this is... questionable. Enemies are much more aggressive and harder to kill, and most attacks from major enemies will drop Aloy to the ground, with her having the approximate getting up skills of an old woman from a Life Alert (tm) commercial. In the early-mid game, they also will drain almost all of Aloy's health. This means that you never want to be in melee range of an enemy if you can help it, which is a bit ironic given the emphasis Guerilla put on how they revamped melee combat. While melee combat is more mechanically fun, it also does an incredibly low amount of damage and is virtually a death sentence against larger machines. Even against smaller machines, melee just doesn't do enough damage to be worth using when a well placed shot or two could take down an enemy with much less risk. And mind you, the combat has actually been massively improved since launch - at launch you could still take damage while knocked down, meaning getting knocked down would be a death sentence. Even now, I've had times in the game where a knock down hit would eat most of my health, and then before I could roll I'd get hit again and die. The worst thing is that this doesn't actually fix the difficulty issues of Zero Dawn - by the midgame I was already strong enough that I could dispatch every machine with little issue; the game is still easy, but the easy battles are frequently interrupted by Aloy napping. Getting constantly stunned is not fun.

 

On the good side of things, there's much more weapon variety - perhaps too much, as my early game inventory was flooded with weapon variants with slightly different stats that I couldn't afford to upgrade - and there are a large number of new machines combined with machines from HZD returning. The number of... towering? I'm not sure how else to describe them... monsters is also massively improved compared to the paltry two of Zero Dawn's base game. FW also has a large number of minigames and side activities added into it - ruins that are essentially little puzzle dungeons, mounted races, and the game's own board game, which is fairly solid despite being a defensive game and higher tier AI opponents turtling constantly. Overall, Forbidden West is chock full of variety, where HZD was a rather limited game, and that goes miles to make it feel more interesting. The side quests are also all very intricate, and while you do rarely get fetch quests, for the most part even the errands are interesting enough to be worth doing; I ended up doing all (or almost all) of the side quests and a fair few of the errands as well, and didn't find them boring in the slightest. The game also introduces flying mounts, which are cool, but introduced so late in the game that they're rather inconsequential besides a few quests that require a flying mount and trivializing Tallneck climbs. Lastly, the game introduces underwater sections, which are pretty, however Aloy controls very awkwardly while swimming, and as such even though swimming is a nice addition, I do wish less sections relied so heavily on it.

 

The graphics, as previously mentioned, are absolutely breathtaking. Performance mode sometimes goes down to a jarringly low resolution during cutscenes, and as such changing to resolution mode during cutscenes may be advisable, however particularly with the recent patch the 60fps mode holds up nicely compared to its 30fps equivalent. The sound design is fantastic, and you're almost always surrounded by the sounds of wildlife and such; it's a very solid usage of the PS5's 3D audio.

 

Overall, it's a solid sequel to HZD without really breaking from it too much - if you liked HZD, you'll probably like HFW. If you didn't, you won't like this one either. It is, in many ways, a larger, more varied version of HZD with next gen trimmings. Personally, it's probably the best exclusive I've played on the PS5 so far.

 

Now for the griping!

 

While I detailed the failings of the combat previously, some of the challenges needed for trophies are something else. The arena's final challenge, for example, gives you a set of weak weapons and armor and puts you against an apex thunderjaw and scorcher, and it's an absolute nightmare. You're having to constantly dodge attacks from the thunderjaw while the scorcher either charges at you or shoots waves of fire that take out almost all of your health instantly, which essentially results in the entire challenge just being constant rolling punctuated by bouts of being knocked down, with occasional cameos by instant death once you stand back up. It's a mess, and I ended up just completing it on easy, because the few times I did manage to get the thunderjaw alone my arsenal was so underpowered that I couldn't finish it off in time. The melee pits are also rather annoying - they have a separate mode for tutorials, and yet the challenges are also largely tutorials, requiring you to perform specific combos and resetting if you do anything wrong, or if the game just feels like it - for instance, in one challenge I was supposed to jump over an enemy and attack the enemy behind him afterwards. At one point, I used the jump over move, but the other enemy had moved closer and so it hit him as well, which failed the challenge. The challenges were not particularly hard, but having to perform janky, unskippable tutorials in order to get to the actual melee fights was annoying. The final melee opponent is also a complete mess - you are once again given extremely weak armor and locked off from access to your abilities, this time put in an extremely cheap boss fight. Your opponent can parry your attacks, an ability you lack, while also being able to whip out hitscan arrows with zero warning or build up that instantly take out over a third of your health per shot, in chains that consist of 3-4 arrows. While your own arrows do all of 1-2 damage to them. If you roll precisely when you're being shot, you can avoid the damage, however there is no warning to that attack and as such you might just suddenly lose the last of your health while going in for a melee attack and not even realize what killed you. On top of this, there's an attack they can do without warning that puts you in a takedown animation and eats almost all your health. And it's an animation, so you can't roll, or react, just sit there.
 

Forbidden West unfortunately often ventures into the "fuck you" side of difficulty, where the game isn't even too difficult, it's just an asshole about its difficulty. I'd say I preferred Zero Dawn's difficulty, or rather lack thereof, but again, that's the thing - Forbidden West's normal difficulty becomes ridiculously easy by the midgame as well. It's just that it's an easy difficulty punctuated by you getting stunned frequently, and some of your weapons being annoyingly inaccurate.

 

Lastly, upgrades require an absurd amount of materials in this game, which punishes you from switching weapons or outfits frequently. This is particularly true of the assorted legendary gear you can get, which requires multiple parts from various top tier machines, many of whom only have one or two spawn points which will only spawn one at a time, per upgrade tier. By the time you're able to grind upgrades for the legendary weapons, you probably won't even need the upgrades, given you're able to grind the most powerful machines in the games for parts. I suppose now that the game has an NG+ mode they at least have some potential utility.

[Darling Baphomet]

I've been putting off writing this for... a week now, geez. Been busy and dealing with chronic pain (and getting obsessed with Planet Coaster) so I haven't had the energy to bother with updates for a bit. But without further ado, here's one of the charming 'literal who' indie games I tend to pick up on sale, which I platinumed exactly a week ago:

 

165: Goetia - 29.64%

 

 

So, I have a weird relationship with adventure games. I grew up playing 3D point and click type games like Sam & Max, the Telltale Monkey Island games, and so on and so forth. (Come to think of it, my childhood adventure games were basically all Telltale games from before they became the movie game company.) I think they can tell good stories and generally be a lot of fun. The problem is, I suck ass at them. I've watched enough game reviewers talk about "adventure game logic" to suspect perhaps I'm not entirely at fault for having no fucking clue as to what to do in adventure games, but I inevitably end up having to use guides to progress in them, which kinda makes me feel like I'm missing the whole point of playing them. Goetia is surprisingly decent in terms of adventure game moon logic - while I did have to look up guides a few times (why the hell am I supposed to know that polaroid cameras react to magnesium? And how am I supposed to read all these goddamn fucking music sheets I need for puzzles? There's so many of them.), I generally found the game's puzzles not too hard to decipher, which was helped by the fact that there's little in the way of item combining nonsense and every item generally has one, and only one, usage. In addition, the game lets you highlight all interactable things in a room, which is a massive help.

 

Anyway, onto the game itself. Goetia is more or less a point and click adventure game, with a twist - you are the 'cursor', a little ghost ball which represents the spirit of a deceased something year old girl, who has mysteriously found herself back in the world of living near her family mansion, which is now decrepit and seemingly abandoned. Rather than picking items up and storing them in your ass inventory, you instead can possess objects and drag them around to whatever you need to use them with, which presents some challenges since your character, Abigail, can go through walls as a ghost, however you cannot bestow that same ability to physical objects. The game naming itself after real world demonology would make you think that it's a horror game, but it's not, functioning more as a creepy mystery with  pervasive occult themes - which I appreciate, both disliking horror and having dabbled in the esoteric; I have not studied demonology myself and as such I cannot speak to the game's accuracy per se, but at the very least the game manages to portray convincing depictions of occult study as opposed to the secret society boogeymen you would usually expect.

 

Honestly, the game is pretty janky. I experienced a number of bugs throughout my playthrough, most of which simply required a restart of the game, but I found myself having to restart the game probably once every 2 hours on average.  On multiple occasions I'd try to do something, and then frustratedly look up a guide only to find out I'd been doing the right thing, but for whatever reason it simply didn't register correctly. The art style is also similarly jank, using what appears to be parts of real photographs to populate its backgrounds and items, which at times can be somewhat hideous when there's visible artifacts and color distortion, although for the most part makes for a surprisingly pretty game world. The NPCs use a mixture of what appear to be real pictures and... I don't know what to call it, image distortion? to enable facial animations, which is a bit odd, but more or less works.

 

Despite the occasional jank, though, Goetia manages to maintain a very solid atmosphere and story - the music and locales build up a lonely eeriness to the game while you investigate the fates of your family members and the mystery of what transpired in your home since your death. Lonely, abandoned environments mesh with aspects of the supernatural and windows to other worlds which makes for a solid variety of settings, while the story, which you largely discover scattered through notes and letters, is intriguing and surprisingly unpredictable. The puzzles are also quite clever at times, although sometimes absolutely contrived (and, again, there's too many goddamn puzzles that want you to know how to read music.) Despite occasional interactions with spirits, the game is a very isolated one; the characters are developed through what you read about them more than any actual presence within the game. All in all, it's a very interesting adventure game and one of the few that I've seen approach occult subjects from anything but the perspective of a hysterical layman. Perhaps not worth a full 15$ given it'll probably last you 5 or 6 hours if you're flying blind, but it drops to much lower than that frequently.

[Darling Baphomet]

166: Planet Coaster - 5.60%

 

I was something of a RCT kid - a roller coaster tyke, even - countless hours of my youth were spent designing parks, many of which were hell gauntlets that guests were incapable of escaping from, to say nothing of the mass drownings that were known to happen with some frequency. Most of my time was spent with RCT2, which is as cherished a childhood game as I can name, although I also dabbled in RCT3 a bit, but never nearly as much as I had with 2. Planet Coaster, being a 3D spiritual successor to RCT, takes more after 3, and offers many of the same features - flat rides and coasters, attractions, entertainers, a ride camera letting you experience your rides for yourself, and so on and so forth. It's altogether a very entertaining successor to the originals, even if it does not make too much effort to innovate.

 

The gameplay is about what you would expect from an RCT game - you make rides to draw guests in, make food stalls to capitalize on their hunger, and try to manage guest and staff happiness as best you can, all while researching new rides and, in many of the game's scenarios, paying off loans - some of which get quite ridiculous if left unchecked; compound interest is a hell of a drug. It's an addicting gameplay cycle and I often ended up making large, sprawling parks I was quite proud of. The minute management aspects of this game aren't all that hard - make sure staff have staff buildings and give them a 5-10$ raise when you higher them (and on every training), and their happiness will be 100% all of the time; take a loan or two at the start of the game, pause it, and then build everything you can, and you'll unpause to a profitable park. Guest happiness can be trickier, but is generally easy to maintain so long as you higher enough security guards and janitors, and make sure none of your rides are overpriced.

 

One of the major features of the game is managing scenery - scenery is vital to the success of your park, both helping you to achieve higher park ratings in general, attracting more guests, and also increase the prestige of and thus amount of money guests are willing to spend on your rides - this is mostly centered around queue lines for flat rides, although they can benefit from being surrounded by scenery as well, albeit in an unpredictable way I haven't quite been able to figure out. It's a fun system that gets you to actually decorate your parks, although it's easily gimped by simply wrapping your queues around pre-existing scenery or placing shops, whose prebuilt buildings come with scenery of their own; later in the game I found myself simply letting a drink or food stall do the work scenery normally would, since they have the added benefit of providing refreshments not only for guests exiting your rides, but those drawn towards your rides.

 

Coaster building, on the other hand, is... rough. Probably because I'm not good at it. I gradually became better at it, however for some of the rides needed for scenario objectives I found myself building and re-building rides over and over again, having to rewatch the coaster go through a ride over and over again as I fiddle with the problem spots and try to create something vaguely coastable - one time, it took me over an hour to finally figure out a coaster that met the requirements. Eventually I just largely gave up on coasters and would only build them when the objectives demanded them, finding building and decorating flat rides, shops, and even hotels and restaurants (new additions to the game) to be much more rewarding and far less frustrating. In the late game I was fairly consistently able to build coasters with all their stats in the green, but even then, the process was just such a hassle that I found myself simply downloading other people's blueprints as needed for the later objectives, which demand absolute mastery of the process. Perhaps I'm just not that big on the "coaster" part of RCT - even as a kid, I always found it more rewarding to build flat rides than bother with coasters, although the 2D nature of 2 did make them a lot easier to build and decorate than in Planet Coaster. I just want to build a pretty park and get money from guests, gosh darn it!

 

Besides that, the game can be... glitchy. The game on PS4, I hear, is severely limited in terms of just how big parks can get, and even on PS5 I found my parks were getting big enough to overwhelm the game, resulting in strange bugs like janitors just standing around, miserable, doing absolutely fuck all, being unable to build rides, etc. These issues were not too bad for much of the game, but in the later stages they started to get quite annoying as my parks became bigger and bigger.

 

Overall, it's a solid RCT successor, and a damn fun game in its own right, as well as being one of the better PS+ offerings in recent memory as I'd been waiting to buy it on sale for quite a while. The number of DLC packs can be a bit overwhelming, however when on sale they're largely worth it, although the vintage and world's fair collections are said to be much lower effort (and unfinished in terms of building sets) compared to the rest. The platinum rarity on this one is a bit strange, even for a PS+ title; admittedly some of the harder challenges are a massive pain in the ass without other people's pre-built coasters, so perhaps that is what gatekeeps it. Or maybe I'm better at park management games than I think.

 

And because I'm vain, here are a few pictures of my final park I created for the challenge mode, complete with an annoyingly long walk to the actual park and a conveniently placed Gondola to get them there faster (for a modest fee):

 

[kingofbattle8174]

Ahh Planet Coaster. What a great game. Not as over the top as Thrillville could be but still gets pretty crazy. I got stuck in the campaign for some time until I found the tool for the best pricing. That matters so much by the Pirate levels. I did get slightly addicted to this game after watching Lets game it out. He gets his so over the top. 
 

Congrats on finishing it up. I need to keep mine going now as I work on my backlog. 

[Grotz99]

4 hours ago, kingofbattle8174 said:

Ahh Planet Coaster. What a great game. Not as over the top as Thrillville could be but still gets pretty crazy. I got stuck in the campaign for some time until I found the tool for the best pricing. That matters so much by the Pirate levels. I did get slightly addicted to this game after watching Lets game it out. He gets his so over the top. 

Lets game if out is the reason I bought it on PC, that and Planet Zoo. He finds a way to play the games the way they are probably not intended to be played...

[Darling Baphomet]

No wifi because I'm running off of an incredibly shitty mobile plan right now and I'm fairly certain my PS5 would drain it within an hour, buuuut today I managed to platinum a fun little game I got on sale a bit ago, so I figure I may as well do the write up, even if my trophy list isn't updated to show for it.

 

167: Unholy Heights - 13.51%

 

Unholy Heights is a landlord simulator with tower defense and uh... eugenics? elements. Suffice to say it's a weird fucking game. Your character is "The Devil", a middle aged balding man who is apparently a drop out and has decided to start his own hotel full of monsters, to which he will bait adventurers so that his monster tenants will be forced to kill them and make him rich.

 

Mechanically, the game is simple enough that it could probably be a flash game, and has a lot of similarities to idle games - I left it on overnight and while out and about a few times so as to build up the funds necessary to buy more love balloons and "erotic cake" to fuel my search for the Perfect Child(tm). In practice it takes a bit more management, as you need to manually trigger "quests" (which initialize tower defense like waves of enemies), and if you're planning on playing the game effectively, you'll be wanting to constantly get your tenants partnered and breeding, and evicting the children out to make way for a new generation of offspring, as children are almost always stronger than their parents. Despite this being a landlording simulator, you actually don't want to live up to your name, as satisfied tenants get significant stat boosts, and tenants who can't make rent are likely to bolt in the middle of the night, which you do not want if they're a genetically engineered super soldier chicken 10 generations in the making.

 

The game essentially just consists of you attracting new tenant species, breeding more powerful versions of them, taking on harder quests, and making more and more money, which you can use to decorate your rooms, expand your apartments - which functions as the main progression of the game, consisting of about 4 acts - and buy the two most important items in the game, love balloons and whatever the fuck erotic cake is supposed to be. As the game progresses, you unlock new species of monsters, some through quests, some through raising the affinity of their respective monster groups - demons, for instance, will only like you if your tenants die frequently, and will not be happy housed with demihumans, who want you keeping everyone alive. Early game monsters are a bit plain, both aesthetically and design wise, however due to how breeding works it can be hard for the cooler late game monsters to catch up to them stat wise. One complaint I do have is that the monster designs basically follow one of two patterns. The first is having both genders just be the exact same sprite, except for one having a ribbon put in some very awkward position on the female - the other is having the male be a big, grotesque monster, and then the female be... just some random woman. Case in point:

 

 

You've got to be smoking something when you're designing a species and think "yeah so, the dude is gonna be six fish stacked on top of eachother with legs, and the chick, uhh, yeah, the chick has a uhh,,, fish tail! That's it!"

 

 

There's a certain hilarity to things like breeding the next in your line of warrior chickens and have the (often repetitive) random name generator assign it the name "Peee," and some moments in the game are funny in an almost touching way - for instance, early in the game I had just managed to get a couple to conceive for the first time, only for them parents to be almost immediately slain. I lowered the rent to zero, but the now orphaned child was stuck something like 150 gold in debt, and as such would frequently run away in the middle of the night, which I avoided by save scumming. When she grew up, she was stronger than her parents were, however, she was unable to land a job, and was unemployed - meaning she could not repay her debt, and would still have that chance to runaway despite her rent being zero. I was finally forced to recruit a boyfriend for her who actually did have an income and was finally able to pay off the room balance, and contribute to the birthing of a new and greater continuation of the fish people lineage. Unfortunately, once breeding became a constant cycle I was grinding, moments like this became rarer and less heartfelt; but they were there nonetheless.

 

Ultimately, it's a mechanically simple but charming game which has more than enough depth to earn the 5$ you can catch it on sale for.

Edited June 24, 2022 by Darling Baphomet