Steam Sales Review #60: Cthulhu Saves the World

No doubt the most common villain in RPGs is Cthulhu.  Cthulhu is a creation of H.P. Lovecraft who is ominously one of the most popular fantasy writers of all times.  So because of this Lovecraftian invention it seems all of video games are plagued with Cthulhu.  Note that a lot of elements from this game take on elements from HP Lovecraft novels.

Cthulhu Saves the World tries to twist the formula by making some way for Cthulhu to actually be a hero instead of a villain.

If this sounds like a joke… well it’s because it is.

The game is made by Zeboyd Games.  They make these obnoxious retro RPGs which include Penny Arcade’s On the Precipice of Darkness 3 and Breath of Death VII.

Surprisingly however Cthulhu Saves the World is able to get a few laughs out of me while the other two were not.  So let’s look at Cthulhu Saves the World shall we?  Note this game often comes as a free bonus for purchasing a different game from Zeboyd Games.

First off really neat thing:

Yes it appears the game designers after re-releasing their second game decided to add commentary about their game design.  It’s interesting stuff if you’re into game design.

It comes up here:

I don’t want to spoil too many of the gems of this game however, so I won’t.

Instead I’d like to mention that most of the commentary is discussing all the great ideas they had for this game that they decided not to do because of time constraints.  You would think they would just re-build the game with added content since they re-released the game and all… but they didn’t.

The game much like many of the Zeboyd Games likes to point fun at gaming stereotypes.  One such is the traditional party group, which would look something like this:

Instead they give you this

Yes your first party member is in fact a self-described demon Groupie who sees Cthulhu through rose tinted glasses.

The next party member is Sharpe, a sword.

And finally

A Necromancer who wants to become powerful so she can enslave the zombies.

An alien cat (it’s green)

An old man who is out of his mind.

And a dragon

So Cthulhu is stripped of his powers.  The only way to regain his powers is to become a true hero.  He decides he will become a true hero in order to regain his powers to destroy the planet… oh the dry humor is already hitting me.

An interesting thing about this game is that every single battle is pre-programmed as opposed to random.  At the top of the menu is an indicator of how many monsters are left in that area to fight.

Once you have depleted them you will no longer fight monsters in that area and are forced to move on to the next.

This is an odd innovation because honestly these kind of games often have people just running around a single small plot of land until they are strong enough to move on.

This is not good because some items will be out of your reach:

So the game works like this.  You have moves that have a set number of attacks that stack into a combo meter.

Attack is a standard attack that adds one Combo point.

Tech are specific attacks designed for your hero that are automatically added.

Potions regenerate every singe battle and can be used to heal or bring people back to life.

Unite are group attacks that add extra damage.

Protect allows for a player to defend as opposed to attack.

What about magic you say?

Well every time you level up you will get a choice.

You have two choices.  Often it is between abilities and stats.  Sometimes it’s between different types of stats.  This adds an RPG element in which your choices actually do matter.  On the hardest difficulty it becomes impossible to win the game if you choose wrong.

But it ends up just being another Zeboyd Game.  They’re short, they’re grindy, they are not that funny, and they’re buggy.

Yes, buggy.

Note in this bonus added content that he has made a serious grammatical error “to handle to handle.”  That’s something that has been ADDED POST PRODUCTION.  As if he couldn’t even use a grammar check on his own script.

A lot of times when you see buildings you will see non-existent of buildings everywhere.  It’s just a mess.

It’s a really cheap game, but unfortunately it is not fun and it is not well made.  Of the three Zeboyd Games I’ve played, this is the best… but that’s not to say much.

Unfortunately this is the second game they’ve made of three and their work did not improve that much in On the Precipice of Darkness 3.

So don’t buy this game, it’s just not very good.

Without Internet I Review: Etrian Odyssey

Okay RPG fans, it’s time for me to look at another RPG… or should I say… revisit.

Now this game isn’t for you wimpy Skyrim fans.

Skyrim’s great and all, but the only difficulty on this game is Nightmare.

Etrian Odyssey has this odd problem of being an amazing game… that’s so complicated no one will ever want to play it.

And that’s just the case.

This game was invented for the Nintendo DS.  Yes, the NDS… not the 3DS.  There’s even a sequel to it, Etrian Odyssey 2 (and 3 and 4 for 3DS).

So where do we start.

There is this giant forest which blocks off the land of Etria from Verda.  Heroes often try to get through the forest but always seem to die.  People in fact form guilds to accomplish this task.

So all of the guilds are full and here you are an adventurer without a guild.  A stranger tells you why not just start a guild, and if you’re brave enough… join your own guild.

So you form a party in a style that resembles that of Dragon Warrior (if you haven’t played the game check out my video on tedious character creation here).

Typical fight in Etria

The game has something stupid like 10 classes.  Renn and Hexer are initially unavailable.  They all have funny names that don’t really mean much to people.  You select five character archetypes and arrange them in rows, front row takes damage, and back row gains a static damage decrease.

You go into the forest hoping you’ve picked the right people.  Truthfully if you haven’t picked an Alchemist… you are doing it wrong.

So after a while you will realize the error of your ways and get your alchemist and your healer and your swordfighter (you’ll find out around Level 14 why you want this guy)… and your troubadour.

Anyway your first task will be to draw a map.

This is actually one of the really cool and innovative parts of the game.

In an old first person dungeon crawler you would just endlessly go through hallways having very few ways of remembering how to get around.  It became a grind in which you sort of just guessed your way around.  Eventually people started putting maps in the game.

In this game as you move around you plot the map on your second screen.  You use blocks to indicated traversable spots, white lines to indicate walls and a number of symbols to indicate objects and places.

From what I gather from the lore here no one is ever supposed to be able to get through this labyrinth of a forest but you eventually do.

The odd thing is that they have a sort of heroes economy here.  Whereas popularized fantasy often has you being the only hero in which the town or world is relying on you, in this one you’re just a hero and there are in fact thousands of more capable heroes.

As you go through there are odd tasks in which experienced heroes are sitting in front of a big boss that they profess they could easily destroy but they save to help train up newer heroes.

This gives the game a dynamic in which you are a student who eventually surpasses a master.  This is refreshing story telling because most games set you as some super mega hero when there are literally thousands of other roles to play in a world.

Here you are a student becoming a master by reaching Etria.

Of course… you probably never will.  It takes insanely high amounts of time and dedicated to do anything at all in this game.  Just to sort of get started on this game it takes about 10 hours.  I honestly haven’t had a chance to finish this game in the past just because of how much time you had to dedicate to this (and my NDS with my Etrian Odyssey cartridge was stolen).

Make sure to bring your healer!!!

There are insanely high amounts of grinding in this game.  This is in part because of the economics of the game.  You collect animal parts from creatures you kill and trade them in to a weapon’s maker.  The weapon’s maker will start making a sort of item once they have enough to fulfill a recipe that is unknown to you.

Gathering involves moving to a gathering zone and just gaining random items in the categories of wood, flowers, and minerals.  You have to choose to level up this skill in place of actual damage skills in order to farm this stuff.

At first this might seem like a waste.  However by getting these gathering skills it allows you to get gear much faster… and gear makes up most of your stats.

The game also features a thing called a FOE.  These are super powerful enemies that need to be avoided.

Another really odd thing about this game is that even though you are supposed to be traveling through a forest labyrinth you are descending down steps… like it’s a dungeon.

The game is just a giant mess.

It’s a REALLY enjoyable long term game when you REALLY get into it.

But it’s really hard to get into.

In the end the game is overly complicated and really hard to understand.  If you’re a hardcore RPGer who is looking for a challenge this will be the game for you.

If you’re newer to RPGs and looking for a great place to start… maybe Skyrim’s your poison.

Since this is an Nintendo DS game it means you will probably have to purchase it off of eBay, through  a warehouse site or *gulp* emulation.

Steam Sales Review #55: Of Orcs and Men

Talk about a game that received absolutely no attention at all…. Of Orcs and Men.    This is another one of those games designed for the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network library.  What’s weird is how non-present this is on PC. As you can see by their website there isn’t even a mention that there was in fact a PC release:

So yeah pretty underwhelming launch for this game.  People gave it a little bit attention because of its PC release but ironically… they marketed towards the console community.

Literally no one paid attention to this game because of its launch during the same time as a lot of AAA titles.

This is another one of these cheapy RPGs made by Focus Home Interactive.  The other one of course is Mars: War Logs which received tones of attention.

How odd.

Oh well.  The game is made by the same guys who gave us Blood Bowl.

The premise of the story is that the big bad evil humans have gone to war with Orcs.  Orcs were winning however they rallied all of the nations of elves and dwarves to their side and fought them back.

Unlike The Lord of the Rings in which people rule justly, the humans started taking orcs as slaves and were slowly wiping them out.

A group of Orcs ban together to try and stop them from ending this.  At a random Orc band everyone is given a job, you (a mighty Ork known for a mass slaughter of humans) have been given the task of assassinating the enemy’s king (who is unjust).

You are assisted by a cheeky Goblin who doesn’t seem to say a single word without a swear word.  There’s also no real parental blocks in the game so yeah… don’t let your kids play this one… it’s just non-stop swearing.  There’s so much swearing in this game that they started to invent their own swear words just to lower the amount of actual swear words.

On the massive plus side of the game is the combat system, which is the crux of the game.  In this you control two different heroes separately.  You queue up attacks while choosing your target (kind of like Knights of the Old Republic).

You have two different stances.  The first is aggressive.  This gives you higher damage but leaves you vulnerable to attacks.  The second is defensive which gives you higher defenses and often block or interrupt aggressive attacks.  A third category of special attacks have neutral valued attacks that do something special like stun.

You queue up to five of these per hero while in combat with the ability to slow down time and modify your ordering as you go.

This is also an action RPG game.  The RPG elements include being able to choose attacks, upgrading said attacks with a unique modifier, equipping gear, and choosing a static stat increase.

When looking at RPGs this would be seen as very linear with about 20 hours of gameplay. The whole game is going through narrow corridor to narrow corridors and engaging in fights.

And our villain will be…. man

I think my major problem with this game was that I just didn’t enjoy it excessively.  It wasn’t a bad game or anything but I really had problems sitting down and finishing the game.

I would just play 30 minutes at a time and then turn it off.

Unfortunately the game is very simply and it will get very repetitive doing the whole dialogue and killing stuff endlessly.

It’s another game that I’m REALLY undecided about.  In one sense, I enjoyed it in short segments.  On the other hand I only played short segments.  I might say if you are buying this game only buy it if you have other games or other things to do.  For a person who can play 30-40 minutes a day this game is perfect.

If you however are a person who is looking to do some mega 8-hour days on this game… it’s just not happening.

It’s an average game and it gets an average review.

An Ode to Square-Enix

I’ll be honest, I never liked Square-Enix.  I mean I used to like them in the Super Nintendo days when they made great games…. but something happened to them in between all that time.

Oh I know what it was, Final Fantasy 7… and the failure of Final Fantasy 8.  After Final Fantasy 8 I think Square pretty much only started making ‘safe games’ and there was an endless wave of sequels.

Even when they weren’t making sequels they were buying licenses and ideas from other successful games and using them.  Sleeping Dogs for example was originally set to be a sequel to True Crime.

So when Final Fantasy 14 came out I didn’t buy it… but a lot of people did.  And no one was impressed.  Word of mouth spread very quickly that this was a bad game and soon one of the most anticipated AAA MMORPGs of the year became a laughing stock.

And that’s when Square-Enix impressed me.

You see, most developers out there just make stuff up.  They just bullshit promise people all sorts of stuff and just don’t deliver.

These developers are scum.  They are looking to squeeze dollars out of their customers while they can.

No Square-Enix actually did something very decent, they dropped the sub fee.  Anyone who bought the game would play the game free for a full year while they were working on fixing the game.

As many expected fixing the game meant getting it on PS3.  So now a beta has come out for the new Final Fantasy 14 after it was fixed and I’m actually excited.

Of course it’s impossible to get into this beta because the queue is so huge.

But I can also dream.

Square-Enix has shown a lot of heart in admitting that their game sucked and working to fix things.  I’ll be paying Square-Enix a little more attention in the future.

Facebook App Review #3: Dawn of Darkness

Well it’s time for another casual game review.  There’s honestly only so long I can play these games and I feel these kinds of games have to be looked at over a fairly long period of time.  So after two weeks with Facebook game Dawn of Darkness, my thoughts.

Dawn of Darkness is an RPG game in which you select one of six hero characters.  Each is a sort of stereotype of a hero type.  There are three females and three males.  I went with the Robin Hood look a like.

NO NOT THAT ROBIN HOOD

Much better.

The screen indicates no descriptions of any particular roles the characters play or even what their classes are.  They’re just characters. This of course means there is not going to be a lot of variety in the game, everyone will be one of the six possible characters.  So either the classes don’t matter and they all play the same or you’ll never know what possibilities you have.

So upon finishing the create a character you get sent into this chaotic world:

In it are all of the other players collecting their quests.  The screen is larger than my 23 inch monitor so you don’t see most of the UI options.

Along the top right of the game screen are the five bonus buttons.  Each of these offer some sort of bonus for either playing or promoting the game.  Bookmarking for example gives you free money.

There is also an achievement button on the right side.  Upon clicking on it we get this menu:

Yes there are in fact achievements for spending money.  To be fair there are tiers of achievements that will unlock every 10 levels.  However even when looking at those you find there is need to spend money to get those achievements as well.

There is also an arena button that’ll allow you to PvP people.  It’s kind of dull to be honest… given the style of combat we’ll get into later.

The arena is an easy source of income because most people who play the game don’t get crafting and equipment.  Every day you get so many free fights.  I’m not even sure people know you are fighting them.

On the top of the screen is a meter indicating power which basically tells you who will win right off the bat.

Moving on there are seven UI buttons along the bottom.  You can’t see them in any of these images because of how GIANT the UI is for this game.

The first is a button is heroes.  This is just a list of heroes you have and give you options to spend some money and purchase new heroes.  You get three free heroes and then they continue adding super cool heroes for free.

Then there’s your bag which doesn’t fill up very fast and just usually has vendor junk.

The “enhance” button allows you to enhance your gear by leveling it up and spending money.  This is why I win arenas… because I enhance my gear effectively.  Enhancing gear is the difference between winning and losing battles.  You can also upgrade weapons via crafting which will also take time.

Train allows you to level while you are offline.  This means using small amounts of gold to level up your characters over 12 and 24 hours.

Battle allows you to pick battle formations.  These are the other way of determining battles.  In my time I picked up two formations one for standing in a line and one for standing side by side.  The formations are the other way of deciding battles.  Formations decide who gets attacked and relative attack strengths.

The others are quest and social options not really worth mentioning.

So after all of this you go to the over world:

After getting a quest you will auto path to this over world.  You will click on a number and go into a zone.  The zone will have 1-5 enemies to murder.

This is where it gets bad.

The game automatically completes the battle for you.  The game even makes sure to explain how the automation works… as if you were actively doing something.  The only things you can do to win battles are enhance gear, add talents, and set formations… so not much.

Yeah it’s kind of lame.

After each zone is complete you will get some story.  This is usually done in greyscale story telling.

The story actually does progress through the various over world levels.  Each over world will vary from 9 to 30 levels.  You get to the next over world by beating the last one.

Yes… this game is very very linear.

For faster experience you can actually download the flash client to your computer.  I didn’t do this because it ruined the Facebookesque experience.

I think the biggest weakness in this game is I see no reason to ever team up with people, join a guild, or be social.

As far as a casual RPG goes it is very casual and you can choose to jump into it at any time.  But it just might be too casual.  As I’m writing this review I’m playing the game by clicking a single button and letting the game play itself.

In fact the hardest part about this game is waiting for all of your energy, slot tokens, cards, gold, silver, and points to re-fill up every day.

It’s my humble opinion that this game is simply not worth your time… and ought not to be played by anyone.

As a final stab the game cannot keep running in the background as it takes tones of Internet power and actually slowed down my Age of Empires Online and Wargame: European Escalation matches, yikes.

The game is quite bad and heavily addictive…. that’s an evil combination.