Author: LepcisMagna

SPAAAAAAAACE!
Owlboy
by LepcisMagna

I’ve been looking forward to this game.  I’ll admit, I am one of the suckers for high quality pixel art graphics, and this game offers that in spades.  You are Otus, a mute Owl-creature-scout-thing.  You fly about your town and scout for pirates, unlocking new areas by making friends and solving puzzles – until pirates attack and you are sent on a mission to save the Owl temple.

I had a lot of fun in my first hour, and the atmosphere is certainly more charming than cliche (which can be a real problem with retro pixel art games).  The music is fantastic, and the few mechanics I did unlock promise variety in combat and fascinating puzzles.  We’ll see if it can hold up through the rest of the game, but for now it is a solid Tier One entry.

Steam link

Poly Bridge
by LepcisMagna

I love bridge building games.  I have yet to find one that properly balances a good challenge and detail of strain with the freedom and ease of use of a video game.  The closest was probably Bridge Construction Set.  Poly Bridge is in that same vein, but also knows that sometimes you are just building something that will launch a car spectacularly.

There’s nothing wrong with Poly Bridge, and it is probably fun enough to pick up at some point.  But it doesn’t seem to have the depth of Bridge Construction Set and errs on the side of a consistent and simple visual style (which I can’t blame).

Steam link

Sproggiwood
by LepcisMagna

Sproggiwood is a roguelite with a home town element.  You can throw yourself against a dungeon an infinite number of times while gaining gold (though losing your levels each time you die).  Once you’ve completed the three level dungeon, you can spend your gold to improve your home.  And I hate to say it, but it’s really boring.  Perhaps if they’d drawn me in with their story, I could’ve found myself playing it more, but it just didn’t click with me.  The endless interruptions explaining the most basic of game mechanics didn’t help either.  Overall, though the graphics have a nice style, there just isn’t anything to sink your teeth into here.

This is the sort of game I wish I didn’t have to put into Tier Three.  I like game developers, and I hate the thought of telling them that they’ve made something that I don’t find interesting in the slightest.  I don’t want to put this into the same Tier as all the games that are just intentional garbage.  I suppose that’s the worst part: it’s not that this game is bad – it’s just that there is nothing new or interesting here.

On a side note: one of the top Steam reviews says “I usually don’t care for roguelikes, but this one being turn-based really did it for me.”  I suppose this day was unavoidable.  People have now used the word roguelike to describe so many things that it no longer has any of its original meaning.

Steam link

SquareCells
by LepcisMagna

While this puzzle game is interesting (and includes some mechanics I wasn’t expecting), I’m just not sure it’s worth my time.  My only complaint is the scoring system – there’s no way to just try a possible solution without being immediately told it is incorrect.  If it were a mobile game for those five minutes of down time, I could almost see playing it some time.  So while it certainly isn’t a bad game and I don’t think I wasted my money (I mean, it was less than a dollar), I also don’t particularly see myself trying to beat it.

Steam link

Shovel Knight
by LepcisMagna

Oh thank goodness – I’m not becoming a bitter old man.  Shovel Knight is Tier One, and it feels good.  The controls are tight, the fighting varied and clever, and the story just the right amount of cliché “save the world”.  I should have more to say, but Shovel Knight is simply some good retro fun.  It’s a 2D fighting platformer, but it’s a great 2D fighting platformer.  And there’s a ridiculous amount of content – I can see why people love this game so much.

Steam link

Prince of Persia
by LepcisMagna

I thought Ubisoft had only been making the same game for 10 years.  It turns out it is closer to 15.  Originally, I gave a pass to the original Assassin’s Creed because it was a novel concept – a freerunning game set in an open world with climbing puzzles.  It was pretty neat.  The sequels were terrible since as Chezni just mentioned, they haven’t changed the game in years – just better graphics and a different story.  It turns out I was mistaken for even giving the original a pass, since the mechanics were already present in another game series by Ubisoft: Prince of Persia.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

As I played my hour, I started giggling.  Then laughing.  Then crying a bit, because this is just Assassin’s Creed in a more primitive engine.  Since this game, Ubisoft has just remade this exact game over and over again.  It has freerunning.  It has the exact same buggy “no, I didn’t want to run up that wall, I wanted to run through the door” problems that haven’t been fixed in any of the AC games.  It has the exact same weird bars you swing around on.  It has the exact same horrible, horrible action camera.  It has the exact same dagger stun locks.  The only improvement brought by the original Assassin’s Creed was the open world (which, granted, is fairly significant), but at the cost of wallrunning and reversing time (which was actually fun).  This game is forever tainted because of my experience with Assassin’s Creed, which affects my tiering.  I can’t play it because it just reminds me of all the things I hate about Assassin’s Creed and what that series stands for.  I could almost see myself playing it at some point because the time reversal seems fun and the characters/story interesting – though the dramatic cutscenes every time you sheath your sword or drink water (no, I’m not kidding) is more hilariously bad than fun.  To Tier Three it goes – play Lara Croft’s Tomb Raider Legend or Anniversary instead.

Steam link

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

See above, only the composer played Doom in between.  Add heavy metal, angst, sexism, and a worse camera…somehow.

Steam link

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

Though the camera is still terrible, it’s less terrible than the previous two.  The combat is more fluid, and the angst seems to be gone from the previous game.  This one goes to Tier Two for me – I’m not sure I’ll play it soon, but it’s probably worth picking up at some point.

Steam link

Prince of Persia

Ah, of course.  The eighth game of the Prince of Persia series: Prince of Persia.  Naming conventions are apparently no longer in vogue in the gaming industry.  Ah well.  At least it’s a fun game.  The combat is a little simplistic and honestly a bit frustrating at times – they could really have used some sort of stamina mechanic – but overall the freerunning and attacking does feel more fluid.  There does seem to be a bit of “collect all these things” leaking in, but the chemistry between the main characters keeps up a good level of patter.  I can definitely see myself playing more of this – Tier One (Two Thrones might squeak in as well, now that I’m thinking about it).

Steam link

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

This goes into my “Technical Issues” category because it would require that I install Uplay.  I refuse.  I’m a bit disappointed since not a single one of these games actually let me take screenshots and I had hopes for the most recent one.  But Uplay isn’t worth the sacrifice.

Steam link

Ubisoft

Ubisoft is a Tier Four developer.  Between their ridiculous DRM, Uplay launcher, and rehashing of the exact same game over and over again, I have sworn off buying any of their future games (and playing any of their Uplay games).  The soul of the company was slowly drained ever since the Sands of Time.  I have considered doing an Assassin’s Creed series review, but there is too much pain (and the Uplay launcher, which is kinda the same thing) down that path.  I have learned my lesson the hard way – they just don’t make good games any more.

Receiver
by LepcisMagna

I think this is the second game I’m going to put into Tier Four (Plankton doesn’t count – it was less of a game than Mountain).  Part of this decision is that it was part of a 7-day challenge to make an FPS – and from that perspective it is an interesting exploration of some FPS concepts – but nobody should actually spend money on this.

Continue reading “Receiver” →

imprint-X
by LepcisMagna

Made by the same people as RymdResa, imprint-X is a puzzle game.  When they said this was a game about pushing 700 buttons, I thought they were being whimsical.  But no.  After a very long cutscene intro about aliens destroying an asteroid base and enslaving the population or something (which sounds way cooler than it was), you are asked to push buttons in a specific order.  The camera moves about even though the entire puzzle fits in the screen, and the girl/android in the bottom right makes squeaking noises every time you push a button – which isn’t annoying at all.  Tier Three.

Steam link

RymdResa
by LepcisMagna

RymdResa is a game about floating in space.  That space is mostly empty.  I’ve been trying to come up with a blanket term for games that try this – like Sunless Sea, Kentucky Route 0, or Voyageur, and to an extent FTL.  These are games where mechanics are usually simple but interact well, the focus is on the exploration of an other-worldly place, there’s typically a lot more text or audio clips than NPCs, and the music (if it exists) is solidly in the “ambient” category.  I’ve settled on the term “sublime-like”, but it doesn’t quite have the ring to it that I’d like.  In any event, being a sublime-like is a tough mood to pull off.  RymdResa tries, but doesn’t quite make it, I think.

At first, RymdResa had potential.  You float through mostly empty space looking for a new home – avoiding asteroids and suns.  You can explore planets and locations you come across for a chance at resources.  This is a solid start, but there just isn’t enough variety in the random generation to make things interesting.  Worse, when you die, it’s usually out of your control: when an asteroid comes flying at you ten times faster than you could ever hope to fly, there’s little you can do.  What really rubbed me the wrong way was the lack of a real sense of space.  Asteroids with WWII-era planes ten times larger than you embedded in them float by right after you flew over a galaxy only twenty times larger than you.  But worst of all is that there are immovable walls in space – an unforgivable sin in a space game.

Steam link

Stardew Valley
by LepcisMagna

Stardew Valley seems to be a very slow paced game.  Your character, fed up with working in a cubicle farm, heads out to renovate the farm your grandfather left you and make a new life in the country.  At first, I thought it was just going to be Farmville.  Happily, farming is just a single option – there’s also adventuring, mining, and more.  From what I’ve heard, this game has crazy amounts of depth – on the level of Terraria, they claim – and it was made by a single person.  It seems like a very relaxing slice-of-somebody-else’s-life game, though it does look like grinding is probably going to factor in heavily as you spend more time playing.

So why I am I putting this into Tier Two?  Quite honestly because it seems like it will take too much time.  I could spend a bunch of time playing this game, or I could beat Dark Souls III.  Granted, Dark Souls III isn’t going to be nearly as relaxing.  But Tier Two is for games that I might pick up at some point after polishing off my Tier One.  And I think that’s where Stardew Valley falls for me.  If you think you’d like a game similar to Animal Crossing with a SNES art style, I’d recommend you give Stardew Valley a shot.

Steam link