Review: Exodus

The Greenlight project has a habit of filling itself with crappy games and then Greenlighting the average ones.  This is an average game that just so happened to get Greenlit.

Thing is, the game is one year old.  For this reason it’s only $5 at regular price.  So is the game worth your $5 bill, or should you save your money?

Exodus sets itself out to be a fusion of Metroid and Castlevania…. but lacks the elements that made those games great (the weapons).

Instead the game is a bit of a weird puzzle.  The goal is to clear all 70 screens and four bosses.  To do so you need to kill enemies to get orbs that you can use to level up and jump higher, run faster, or use various abilities.  As you level up each your cost to upgrade goes up and you can unlock new abilities.

The game has two possible attacks, Shoot and Claw.  Enemies are pretty mixed up so which attack ends up being better to use is entirely dependent on the enemy.  The game has a leveling tree for both.

The big weakness in the game is that it’s really grindy.  If you want to get one step higher you need to grind out 100 points to get to that area.  But if it’s 4 jumps higher then you need to grind out 1000 points.  And if you need to double jump you can round that up to 1400 points.  The game lacks a real sense of progression that you have in most games.  Instead you’re stuck running in circles constantly killing enemies that respawn every single minute.  It feels like an MMO on launch day.

The Metroid and Castlevania series’ could get away with this because there was a huge variation in play styles and weapons.  In this game you really do feel like you just run around punching things.

Leveling up and advancing your character is just not that exciting in this game.

The game lacks gameplay bugs and has polish.  Unfortunately the game just lacks progression from starting out to concluding.  Even on the easiest difficulty you are starting at the hardest level of solving the screens.

Steam Sales Review #79: Sonic CD

In 2012 an Xbox Live Arcade PC Port of the old classic Sonic games were all made available to the general public.  These were re-makes with minor bits of touch up.  The original PC Port was in 1996, this one has been adjusted to add in leaderboards and gamepad support.

But are the touch ups enough to make these games worth while.  I sat down with Sonic CD… and in two hours I had finished it.  Keep in mind that’s about right for what you’re paying.  This Sonic game costs $5.  If you buy all its only $30.  If you decide to ever buy Sonic Generations (which I would recommend it’s an excellent game) you can buy the entire Sonic bundle and all Sonic Generations DLC far cheaper than you could just Sonic Generations alone.  So it immediately becomes a worthwhile purchase in light of bundling options.

But is the game very good.  That’s an eerie problem for the Sonic franchise isn’t it?  In fact, very few of the Sonic games are very good.  They’re all very short, they’re all sort of the same thing, and they all suffer from requiring very little skill.  The leader boards allow you to challenge for a “top spot” but realistically people will stop using leader boards after a while.

This was the launch title for the Sega CD and was rather mediocre.

When you play the game for the first time you get to see this amazing cartoon cinematic playthrough of Sonic in this amazing graphical form running around.  But then it brings you into the actual game which isn’t that brilliant.

None of the levels are also particularly good.  They’re all very easy to play very short and really lack a lot of the complexity you find in other Sonic games.

Overwhelmingly this game is only worth a purchase as part of the Sonic Steam package.  Otherwise avoid at all costs.

Steam Sales Review #74: Prince of Persia

Ten years ago Ubisoft bought the rights to the Prince of Persia franchise.  They hired on the original developer of the game and got to work on a master re-imaging of the series.  The result was overwhelming praise from everyone.  Everyone who played the game loved it and bragged about how great it was.

Despite this, the market reported something really different.  Despite being one of the greatest games ever made, it only saw 3.5M sales.  To compare Halo: Combat Evolved saw 6.5M sales.

When Halo 2 came out their sales doubled.  When Prince of Persia: Warrior Within saw almost half as many sales as the original game.

The Prince of Persia “Sands” franchise saw roughly 1,000,000 devoted fans which was enough to keep pushing out titles, but not enough to improve the series.

Eventually they decided that they would “refresh” the series again and in 2007 we saw a re-imagining with a brand new art style.

I have to say this new art style is absolutely breathtaking.

So why did this game overwhelmingly do so poorly?

This review is a list of gaming defects that stop the game from being the greatest puzzler that ever lived.

#1 Difficulty

One of the major design elements of this game that has made massive waves in the industry is the idea that death was a mechanic designed to get children to throw quarters at an arcade machine.

So this game removed the sand dagger that would give you one chance to re-do what you just screwed up and gave you Elika, a Princess who had magical powers that would save you every single time you died.

This mechanic is excellent.  Ever played I Wanna be the Guy or I Wanna Be the Boshy?  These are really cheap looking indie titles that are hyper difficult but always set you to automatically re-appear every single time you die.

By having no death it means you can scale up that difficulty to ridiculous ways.

But Prince of Persia (whose franchise is known for hard games) didn’t scale up the difficulty one bit.  The whole game you were being slow pitched and when you get to the difficult part of the game… it is very very short.

This was a huge lost opportunity here.

#2: Non-Linear Puzzle Game

Ask yourself this question, how many non-linear puzzle games are there out there.

If you’re left scratching your head the answer is, none.  There are none… at least not successful ones.

The reason why puzzle games are linear is because they are supposed to scale up in difficulty over time allowing you to sequentially make things more complicated and make the solutions that much harder to get to.

But when you have a game that isn’t linear it means you have to slow ball pitch all the content to the player.  It means there is no reasonable point for you to adjust that difficulty rating until you get to the end of the game.

There is a hipster gamer boogie man that cries how bad linear games are.  In truth, many game formats just fit as being linear.

What can be non-linear is puzzle design and puzzle solutions.  It is possible to have possibles that have multiple solutions.

HOWEVER, puzzles with multiple solutions tend to be easier and thus less fun for a puzzler.

#3: Lacking Puzzles

A puzzle game should have puzzles.

At first looks it would appear this is a jumping puzzle game.  Almost all puzzle platformers involve getting in somewhere or getting out of somewhere.  This game at its core should be a puzzle platformer in which you have to get somewhere.  But it’s not.  When you hit your magic button a path is revealed to you telling you exactly what path you have to use to get somewhere.

The pathing indicator was REALLY cool and really well implemented… but it took away from the solving bit.  It meant that the actual puzzles which involved moving parts became the only puzzles.

And this game had three puzzles total.  It just needed to have more puzzles and more stuff for people o try and solve.

Just having three puzzles wouldn’t have been so bad… if it didn’t only take me 2 minutes to solve each one.

#4: Dat Story

The most notorious thing about this game on PC is the story.  If you play on console you get all this lovely DLC that makes the story better and expands it.

But if you played the game on PC, you are likely to just hate the story.

The game runs about 10 hours long.  The story goes like this, 30 minutes in you find a man with his donkey named Farah (a throwback because Farah was the name of the woman from the original reboot).  The man runs into the princess, saves her, and is enthralled in an adventure to stop an evil god.

9 hours take place in which nothing is really happening except for random shots of what is happening and a few back story elements to some villains.

And then you get to the end of the game in which the awful ending explains away everything in seconds.

It was just really really bad.  On top of that… you are very likely going to be upset about the ending which was designed entirely to make DLC viable…. and there’s no DLC.

#5: No DLC

One of my biggest complaints about this game is… it’s actually a great game.

Yeah you didn’t see that one coming, did ya Internet

No it’s a really spectacular game that has no bugs, is really smooth, and the parkor and art style is amazing.

But with that being said the fact that there is no DLC on PC is very bad.  The single DLC pack on console was really unpopular because of how difficult it was.

But had that DLC pack been tagged on to the game or given for free, the main game would have been far more worth playing.

But without the DLC available on PC, it’s not worth the time.  If the entire game can be solved in less time than it takes to solve an average puzzle in another game… there’s a serious problem.

It’s a real shame that so many great game mechanics are gone to waste and that there couldn’t be another 30-40 hours worth of DLC available.

But that just ends up being the case.

Steam Sales #48: Bastion

I decided to trudge into a game I bought but haven’t played… I wanted something that felt very indie… so I went with Bastion.

But as it turned out it wasn’t as indie as it looked as it was published by Warner Brothers Studios… which means Warner Brothers officially owns all of the characters in this game… interesting.

The Brief: The Indie Craze

Somewhere after the release of the PS2 and the release of the Xbox the caliber of games severely decreased.  Studios started focusing on creating lush and amazing graphics and moved away from inventing new gameplay to inventing new polygons.

It’s only in recent years that they have moved back to creating good games with new gameplay elements.  It was an entire era where people like Peter Molyneux and Richard Garriot could go on a tirade about how bad video games were… and be right.  Today these guys just sound like douchebags.

But during this odd era you saw endless numbers of sequels were shying people away from gaming… that is the hardcores.

As people with disposable income were jumping into MMORPGs with their subscription fees the large casual base was stuck with very crappy games.

The result was the beginning of development for indie games.  When Xbox 360 introduced their indie arcade this allowed room for many indie developers to grow.

Xbox Indie Arcade was notorious for producing crap.  But then there was a sudden rise in amazing platformer games.  People were jumping into these games like crazy.

Whereas a standard game cost $60 and lasted about 10 hours, these cost about $15 and lasted 2 hours.  The first of these was LIMBO a game about a child who is trying to survive limbo so that he could go to heaven.

The result of its success was endless retro feeling indie games.  Studios were coming out of nowhere, tones of one and two-man teams.  These studios were independent and had been working on these games for quite some time.

This indie trend largely died a little after the launch of Minecraft.  The indie games coming out around Minecraft are largely the end of independent studios plopping up and creating games and supplanted by people putting games on Kickstarter in hopes of getting groundswell of support for their game.

Synopsis

Bastion follows the story of a boy who wakes up in a world in which no one is alive.  It is narrated by Logan Cunningham who sounds like a badass old Texan (he’s actually a black man).

As the character does things Cunningham constantly narrates exactly what he is doing as he is doing it.  It’s a design element in which after smashing so much with one weapon he will talk about that weapon.

As you go through the game you start finding and rescuing new characters.  They go to a place called the bastion… as in the last bastion of humanity.

The goal is to get “cores” to this place in order to power it up so that humanity can survive.

As the hero goes around society he finds places are in very poor condition and finds very few survivors.

Instead he finds various gangs of monsters have inhabited the world.

To beat these monsters he has a variety of weapons.  The game features two weapon’s slots with the choice of up to 12 different weapons.  There is also a special attack slot that allows for a very powerful weapon with a consumable based attack.

Each weapon can be upgraded based on picking up items and a special currency.  The special attack can also be selected from a group of items you pick up.

There is also an odd difficulty scaler.  As you go through the game you can make enemies more powerful in exchange for more experience and more money.  Money of course once again is used for upgrading things.

Experience is used for unlocking brews.  These alcoholic concoctions don’t really do anything actively.  Instead it is just a way of showing off passive stat increases or special attack bonuses.

I tried taking some screenshots of the game, but all of them ended up like this:

Just such an odd thing to happen.

The game is worth about 5 hours of gameplay if and only if you complete all of the challenges as well.

The side challenges are used to unlock rewards but represent some relatively hard things to do.  I actually skipped these myself and knocked an hour off of the game, they simply did not interest me.

I think the problem to me is that the difficulty scaler ends up being kind of useless.  If you increase the difficulty early on the later part of the game becomes jokably easy… unless you keep the scaler on.

If you don’t put the difficulty scaler on at all anywhere in the game it is still jokably easy.

I don’t mind difficulty being hard for being a challenge… but this game presents it in terms of earning rewards.

It’s not a large enough flaw to hate the game however.  It is very well designed and at $15 regular price, being on sale is well worth buying.

I’d recommend this game full heartedly to anyone that is looking to burn a few hours.

Steam Sales Review #44: Jamestown

When I was installing my new video card I forgot to install the drivers.  Dumbly I deleted Steam and re-installed it thinking there was a problem… when in reality it was my drivers.  So I was stuck dumbly re-installing all my games.  I needed something to play for a day.  I looked at my 8-Bit titles and found one called “Jamestown.”

You know, I don’t think I even paid for this game.  At a normal price of $9.99 free was hard to turn down… in fact I couldn’t.  This game was forced on me.  On sale it generally goes for $2.

So let’s pretend this review is based around a $2 purchase.

The Brief: The Shooter

Today when you think of a shooter you think of a first person 3d shooter.  It is weird to think that shooters at one time were divided into “top down” and “side scrolling.”

These days you might not even consider anything a shooter but a first person shooter.  You don’t even mention that it’s “3d” these days.

But it is important to have some standards and identify shooter classifications.

Shooters come in two formats, 2D and 3D.

2D shooters are divided into side scrolling shooters and top down shooters.

Side scrolling shooters are those in which the screen moves from left to right and you aim at enemies while moving through platforms.

I shoot you with pine cones!

A top down shooter can come in many formats.

Any-direction shooters often involve moving around a map or a zone with fluidic control of which direction you are shooting.

Up facing top down shooters are those in which you can only go up and must hit targets while you are being forced in an upward direction.  Jamestown is one of these.

The other type of top down shooter is one in which you are forced to go from left to right and much like the up facing top down shooter you must kill enemies.

When you get into 3d shooters there are two types.

The first type is the first person shooter in which the perspective is from the vision of a person.

The second type is third person shooter in which you can see who you are supposed to be but you are still in a 3-dimensional world.

Good, now we can move on.

Synopsis

The year is 1614 and it is the famous Battle of Jamestown.  The British colonial powers are being invaded by the Spanish on all flanks and the British must reinforce their colonies to defend them.

You travel to the peaceful new world…. on Mars.  War breaks out at Jamestown, Mars and you are forced into a (space) ship to do battle with the evil Martians and Spaniards who are assaulting Mars.

Through out the game there are visions of British and Spanish soldiers doing battle below you, all the while you are dealing with those pesky Martians.

The game has six levels total.  These range in difficulty from Normal to Impossible.

The game has an odd progression style.  Basically after beating the first three levels you have to do a higher level difficulty to unlock the next.  After unlocking that one you have to finish all available missions on another harder difficulty.  After defeating that one… same thing for next.  As you progress you begin to lose difficulty ratings and you’re stuck with only the hardest modes possible.

OH GOD!!

The game is co-op which is a plus.  There is no network connection… which is a negative.  On PC you can have one person using a gamer pad (or 4) and one person using a keyboard and mouse.  However being a loser who is used to network connections, I did not invite anyone over to play.

Before a level you can choose which ship you want to use.  There are eight ships total, you start off with two.  Each ship is unlocked by purchasing it with money, which is rewarded at the end of each mission.

Money can also be used to purchase an alternative story line and challenge modes.

Challenge modes offer moderate replay value.  One challenge I ran into was “Survive 15 Seconds.”  Well that doesn’t sound so hard… I thought.  2 seconds later… I’m dead.

Each ship comes with two weapons, the main firing weapon and a secondary feature.  Having different ships is a welcome shift in this particular genre.  Each ship has its strengths and weaknesses… which works really well with friends…. I wish I had friends.

A third option is to gain a super power, everyone gets the same one.  After collecting so many coins you can use them to create a small weak shield and all of your abilities get increased damage… sounds like something useful for a boss.  There is also an achievement for not using this at all.

Strengths

• Addictive
• Ship Selection

I found this game really hard to put down.  I really felt like playing every single level and trying with every single ship just to see if I can hit up a high score.  It is most definitely a casual game designed to jump in at any time.

I really enjoyed this ship with the giant red ball

The ship selection is a welcome twist to a familiar formula.  In most of these games they are made super hard and you get your weapons as you are playing.  In this one you get your weapons pre-emptively and you can play around with different styles per level.  It also helps in team play with different people having different firing mechanisms, one guy can be a boss killer, one guy can have spread shot, and another can pad damage and get high points (like a boss).

Weaknesses

• Poor XBLA Port
• Forced Replay

I found throughout the game there were a lot of atrocious graphical errors.  Sometimes I didn’t have a ship.  Sometimes the boss was just a giant white thing.  It kind of reminded me that this game was originally released on the Xbox Live Arcade and was not really a PC game.

This just doesn’t seem like an acceptable boss….

The feature I most hated about the game was how you were forced to replay older missions on harder difficulties in order to finish the game.  Honestly, I was happy just trying to finish the game on Normal first and then going back over and doing it on the hardest difficulty.  But no the game made me slowly progress my way up doing every single mission five times.

Concluding Thoughts

If you have to choose between an XBLA game and the PC one, choose XBLA.  At the discount price of $2 it’s hard to be hard on this game.  It has many shortcomings and will represent a solid three hours of play from you.  Some of this is forced on you due to unlocking levels.

Honestly I wouldn’t buy it alone though.  If it’s offered as part of a bundle of sorts it might be more worthwhile, but it’s honestly not even worth your time.