Last Week's Games: Crash Bandicoot 2, 8-Bit Armies, Army of Two

Not 100% sure I've got the right game here...

As you might expect, on Christmas week there hasn’t been a massive amount of time for playing games. I managed to have a couple of goes with Crash Bandicoot 2: the Wrath of Cortex on the PlayStation 4, as part of the N-Sane trilogy. Some of you might remember I played through the original Crash Bandicoot over the summer, and I knew I was going to be busy, so I didn’t fancy picking up another long-form RPG I wasn’t going to have time to beat! Crash Bandicoot 2 was a typical sequel of its time; same as before, but slightly better. In this case Crash has a few new moves: A power slide, a crawl and a belly slam attack. He is on a quest to find a selection of crystals for Dr N. Cortex, the villain of the previous game; I’m only up to the third set of levels so far but I don’t get the feeling that this association is going to end well! I’m having a decent amount of fun with it so far and will probably see it through to the end, frustrating though the difficulty can very often be, but I doubt I will go for 100% completion.

An army in luminescent green, if you can believe that...

I also played a game on my laptop that I hadn’t played for a good couple of years: 8-Bit Armies. I played this game in 2017, got a few levels in to it and for some reason didn’t touch it again after that, which was a shame because it was pretty good, if a little basic in delivery. It’s a real-time strategy game with an 8-bit aesthetic, which basically translates to: “All the models have blocky textures.” Each level is fairly short and has its own gimmick and objective, which suits me fine as it means I don’t necessarily have to be playing the game for hours before I get to the next bit! I particularly enjoyed the level where the two bases are separated by an erupting volcano, which your infantry will find it very difficult to survive. I therefore had to attack the enemy base using nothing but tanks and armoured cars, and the game moves quickly enough that I could send multiple waves of units in sequence. I might see this game through to the end, I might not, but I’m even less likely to go back through the game and try to obtain all the achievement challenges for it; it’s good, but not that good!

Not that easy to tell Rios and Salem
apart once their masks are down.

Finally I got to the end of a game I started in 2015: Army of Two. I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this particular game. I’m pretty sure the only reason I bought it was because at some point I’d downloaded one of its sequels onto my Xbox 360 as part of the Games with Gold scheme and wanted to play the games in sequence. It was a war shooter that I didn’t find particularly engaging at that point in my life, and when a lot of things changed for me in a very short space of time, I wasn’t inclined to return to it. Then, over last summer, I thought I’d give it another go. I got up to roughly three quarters of the way through the game when my Xbox 360 broke, and I couldn’t get the controller to connect. So Army of Two was put to bed for a while, but I wanted to finish it off since I want to beat as many games as I can before the end of the year. I finally managed it late on Monday evening. I’m hoping to write a review about it that may or may not come out this Friday; it’s going to be a tough one to call though. Surely a game it took me years to find the time to beat shouldn’t get too high a score, but when I was playing it, I really enjoyed it. It has the interesting partner mechanics, tells a standard but workable story and the difficult sections weren’t too frustrating. I might come back to the game to beat it on a higher difficulty, but not just yet, I’ve got other games that need playing!

Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon with Spryo the Dragon

Don't mess with the dragon...

I’d never even have thought about buying Spyro the Dragon back when it was released on the PS1, and frankly I wouldn’t have thought to buy it now. However, last year my partner Kirsty bought the Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on the PS4, which I played when I wanted a game I could play around my young daughter.

It turned out to be really good! It is a 3D platforming game where you control a little dragon called Spyro on a quest to free the other dragons of the world from a spell put on them my Gnasty Gnorc that caused them to turn into jade statues. You run around the various stages, defeating enemies by charging in to them or burning them, and collecting treasure in the form of differently-coloured gems, before setting off on a hot air balloon to the next one. And having now not only played through the game but completed it 100%, I can honestly say that I don’t play enough of this type of game!

It's not looking good for that chicken...

Back when Spryo was first released, around the middle of the 5^th console generation, 3D platforming was still in its infancy, and while there had been some notable successes, (Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie etc) they were often poorly presented and didn’t handle very well. With Spyro, the rulebook had been thrown out of the window. The whimsical, fun design of the game wasn’t usual for Playstation games, (at least, not without being overly silly,) but opened the doors for a wider audience. The level design – bang on point, for the most part – had to compensate for the fact that Spyro can glide huge distances, so they are more explorative in nature. Different enemy types responded to different attacks; some were vulnerable to charging, and some to fire. And while the game’s enemies rarely present much of a challenge, finding all the collectables and rescuing all the dragons was a large part of the experience. But the best thing about the game is the support from the dual analogue sticks, which allowed you to control Spyro’s pace as well as the position of the camera. All of this makes the game fluid and an absolute joy to play. The flying levels in particular, while little more than showing off, are a great change of pace and offer a different kind of challenge to the rest of the game.

The graphics and sound are very good; the art style works well on modern consoles and will still look good in years to come. The music was composed by Stuart Copeland, and while not particularly memorable after the fact, supports the game very well. The voice acting was good as well; it knows that it’s camp, silly and fantastic, and makes no pretence to the contrary.

It was actually harder to get the trophy for making
Gnasty run around the level five times than it
was to beat him...

I probably could have blitzed through the game in a single afternoon if all I wanted was get to the end, but I found that the real fun of Spyro is exploring the levels for the treasures, hunting around for those last few gems, and figuring out the secrets. For the most part this works well; it’s always good to have the answer to the problem lie somewhere in the level design, and the skills and move set you start the game with. The only slight clanger are those sections where the solution is based on the charge jump: By the time you’ve done the first one, you’re moving far too fast to plan your move; it’s going to cost you a few lives as you veer off the edges and plummet to your doom. I admit to having to look up some guides to find out what to do – if I’m looking to 100% a game I don’t want to get bogged down – but none of this is required to beat the game and is thankfully rare.

Spyro the Dragon is a great little game that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with. It’s competently designed and great fun. It’s not for everyone – hardcore gamers will find the presented challenge too easy, and even completionists may be expecting a little bit more – but for most people who enjoy playing games, you’ll have a great time with Spyro.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Inivisible Inc. and Pathfinder 2e

A lovely art style...

Early in the week, I had a go with Invisible Inc. This is a game that’s very difficult to fit in to my usual form of punctuation! It is a turn-based strategy game with an emphasis on stealth and hacking, rather like the game I imagined Shadowrun to be. It looks gorgeous and I’ve enjoyed it so far, I’ve beaten the first two levels and I’m looking forward to finding the time to do the rest. The stealth element forces you to think about what you’re doing, rather than rushing in for a full-frontal attack, and the game has as a pretty good risk/reward element: You’re rewarded with exploring the levels for money that can be spent on upgrades and equipment, but this increases the level of alarm which potentially means more enemies. I’ve put it on the easiest difficulty setting for now because it’s a whole new system I’ve got to learn – XCOM it most certainly is not! But I can see myself getting a lot out of this game.

Yesterday I got together with my regular monthly role-playing group and had a go with the new edition of Pathfinder. Pathfinder was my first RPG, and while I often describe it as Dungeons and Dragons with the rules turned up to 11, I have fond memories of both running and playing it. The real draw, for me, was the quality of the published adventures, which provides an in-depth experience for groups that want it or a dungeon bash for those who prefer that style of game. They have engaging plots, fleshed out characters and a whole lot of detail for people to explore. Therefore, were you to ask me, I would suggest that Pathfinder provides a richer overall RPG experience than the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons – if only barely.

And lovely art.

With the new edition, I haven’t got the rule book yet. I created a Halfling Rogue out of an app for it, and while I didn’t always know how the stats and skills etc were calculated, it was certainly an easier task than anything I could have generated from the rules at this point! When I buy the rules, I will look in to it and see the ways in which what’s happening on the app matches up to what’s written in the rules. There are a few changes to the rules that I came across in the one-shot game we were playing, some that I liked more than others:

Initiative: Instead of having an initiative statistic calculated from your dexterity modifier, it’s now based on skill. You can use skills to affect your initiative rolls, I’m not sure yet how it is decided what skill to use but I would imagine it’s situational. I like this, as it makes a lot more sense to decide initiative based on how your character handles certain situations and means some characters may react at different times depending on their own capabilities that aren’t necessarily tied up in dexterity.

Actions: This was the most obvious change; you get three actions per turn which could be anything from a move to an attack to almost anything else you can think of. There are limitations – there are penalties for trying to attack more than once, and if you want to use a shield you have to use an action to raise it before it will affect your armour class, but it’s more representational of what happens when you fight.

Mage Armour: This was a funny one because it’s changed for better and for worse. When you cast it, it lasts until you next prepare your spells. But the difference it makes to your AC is +1 rather than +4. On the one hand, the more long-term affect will stop situations where you use a valuable spell slot to cast it, get in to one fight and not use it again for the rest of the day. On the other hand, the effect is nowhere near as good.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else it’s got to offer. That rule book is enormous, though. It might require a bit of trial and error as we’re going along!

Backlog Beatdown: Answering the Call of Duty with Call of Duty: Classic

Call of Duty was always a bit of a funny one for me. I’m frequently in the mindset of “If everybody is going left, go right,” when it comes to choosing what video games to buy and play, on the basis that I’m rubbish at multiplayer modes and I don’t necessarily want a shared experience in a single-player campaign. But at some point, in 2013, I decided to buy a Call of Duty game, and with my almost OCD-like need to play games in sequence, I bought the first one on Xbox live: Call of Duty Classic.

Six years later I beat it, and then had the much harder task of reviewing it. When you review a game that’s more than a generation old, the question is going to be: Is it still good today? And that was a question I found very hard to answer.

The ubiquitous war-torn environments...

The premise of this First Person Shooter game is that you control three soldiers – an American, an Englishman and a Russian, which straight away sounds like a bad joke – at various points of the latter part of the Second World War. You’re thrust into chaotic and intense combat situations and must run and gun your way through the level, with some support from a squad in certain situations. There are usually mission objectives, which develop along with the level you’re on. You’re provided with an arsenal of a sidearm, grenades, and up to two small-arms weapons at a time, and it is up to you to get to the end of the level and beat the campaign.

The game handles reasonably well; I was playing it with a controller and the control scheme was becoming standardised at this point. Some of the controls are a bit clunky – crouching then going prone is something that is rarely employed – but overall the controls are fine. The levels are designed for something approaching realism, which fits the theme of the game but creates some rather cheap situations where you can be under fire, have no idea where it’s coming from and be shot to pieces before you can react to a threat you had no way of responding to. Yes, this is probably closer to the experience of being in a battle than many other of Call of Duty’s contemporaries, and it doesn’t derail the game entirely as there are checkpoints that save the game as you’re going along. But it can feel cheap at times, and these situations are not much fun.

Stalingrad. Not exactly a holiday destination
back in those days!

The other problem you run in to when you’re going for realism in design is that there’s not much variety in enemies. They’re Nazis, you shoot them, and that’s about it. Some of them may have different weapons but other than that there’s no sense of scale in the quality of the enemies you’re fighting. There is some variation in tank and turret sections, but there’s usually no climax to the levels, they just sort of end, and leave me feeling a little flat.

The graphics in Call of Duty are fine for the time, about as good as any game in the 6^th generation was ever going to get. They haven’t necessarily aged well but you don’t play a game released in 2003 to ogle the graphics engine! The sound is ok, with some reasonably competent voice-acting from Jason Statham, and the guns have a nice kick to them.

The guy with the megaphone is warning
the troops of what will happen if they desert...

The multiplayer mode is non-existent in the Xbox 360 version I was playing. Maybe it was a thriving community at some point, but no one seems interested in playing it now. Call of Duty became the pinnacle of online shooters later, so it would have been nice to experience its original form, but it was not to be.

While Call of Duty: Classic is a competently-designed game presented well with a full campaign, I can’t believe the franchise didn’t get better later. The cheapness of some of the deaths and the lack of a functioning multiplayer mode makes it very difficult to recommend this game at the end of 2019. If you’re interested in how this long-running series got started, give it a go. But don’t spend any significant amount of money on it.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Dragon Quest, Spyro and Legions

At one point in the week I found myself with quite a significant gap between one engagement and the next, and decided to fill the time with a couple of hours of Dragon Quest, which was released on the Nintendo Switch recently. It’s a relatively early form of JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) and the start of a long-running series of games. I’ve spoken quite a lot over the last few years about playing the first iterations of games to see their core mechanics; they rarely provide as deep an experience as their later games but it’s always interesting to see. Dragon Quest plays like an early Final Fantasy, or Phantasty Star game, where you’re set on a quest to find the Ball of Light and rescue the Princess from the Dragon Lord. This doesn’t sound particularly inspired, but sometimes the simplest plot lines are the most effective!

Stay off the purple patch until you can handle it...

This game doesn’t have the depth and options of games that followed, either to its sequels or to the vast amount of games it inspired. The turn-based combat is entirely menu-driven, the magic system is very basic, there’s no party, no visible customisation and no crafting. With that being said, I’m pleasantly surprised about how much fun I’m having with it. It’s challenging, but well-balanced. Admittedly, the first fight I got in to was with a monster that was too high-level for me and I died straight away, but this is actually quite a rare occurrence and the difficulty of the monsters scale up quite well. You have a choice of where to go in order to complete your objective, but not too much choice. The world map looks big but doesn’t look like it will take too much time to see the significant areas. There is a certain amount of grind required to get through the game – you’re relying on your equipment to a certain extent, and treasure is not dropped at a rate where you have more money than you can spend, so it will be a while before you get enough gold together to buy the best gear – but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The result is a standard but enjoyable experience that I’ve had a good time with so far, and I hope to be able to pick it up again soon!

I’ve also been playing Spyro the Dragon, and this time I managed to complete the game 100%! I’ll do a blog about that at some stage, so I won’t say anything more about it here other than what a delightful experience it was, and hopefully I’ll get some time to play the other two games on the disc!

At this point I'm just recycling pictures of Legions
I've used before and seeing how long it takes
people to notice.

Finally, I was putting a lot more time than I expected into The Horus Heresy: Legions. I got caught up in the politics of the Warrior Lodge I am a part of – it takes itself a bit more seriously than my last one, and there is an expectation that we will get a certain amount of points before the end of the bi-weekly events or we will be kicked out. I came to within about a day of this happening, so I stepped my game up and actually ended up doing quite well, which at least partly resulted in the lodge getting the second highest reward crate available. They’ll never do any better by my intervention, as I refuse to spend any money on tickets, but they’ll have what help there is in me!

I also found myself enjoying the cards in the new event, as for once I’ve read the material it’s based on: Macgragge’s Honour, a graphic novel. Also, Ouon Hommed – my preferred choice of warlord for this – has a very powerful card-drawing ability that I suspect will get reduced for balance purposes in later iterations. However, I managed an eight-win run with him, which is my best run yet, and won the achievement for doing so which is a positive thing! I’m going to try a few more runs with Hommed to see if I can get him up to twelve wins – the maximum you can get off one ticket – before his abilities are modified, as for once I might have a hope of managing it!

Backlog Beatdown: Manning the Rays with Rayman Legends

Rayman: Legends was one of the first games I owned for the Nintendo Switch when I had it for Christmas last year and it is by far the game that I’ve played the most on it since. I’d been aware of the franchise since the ‘90s, but Legends is the most recent iteration of the platforming series with a surprising amount of longevity.

It looks chaotic but is really well paced.

Rayman: Legends is a puzzle-platformer, concerning the titular hero Rayman, his detached limbs and several of his friends as they battle across platforming level to free the Teensies from the nightmares and the Dark Teensies. It sounds mad and it absolutely is, but a fantasy-based game always benefits from breaking free from the Tolkien-esque western fantasy that is the staple of many current games. It’s been released on every major platform since the 7^th generation and is well worth a look on whatever system you own.

I describe the game as a puzzle-platformer but it’s remarkable how Rayman: Legends manages to, for the most part, keep those two aspects of it separate. You can get from one side of the level to the other, defeat enemies, handle some platforming sections and beat the game that way. Or you can take your time, explore the world, find all the secret entrances and solve the puzzles within if you want to complete as much of the game as you can. Certain of the platforming sections have their own gimmicks that need to be used to beat the level; sometimes there are light puzzles and sometimes you get a long-ranged attack for the level, but by and large, it’s standard stuff. It works because the game handles so well. All your abilities are either available to you at the start of the game or are handed to you at certain levels – no levelling up, or better characters; if there is a problem, the solution is within the level and the abilities you have. The controls are fluid and responsive, and the level design is on point, allowing for some spectacular platforming and some challenging sections without becoming too difficult. The immediate aim is to get to the end of the level, but there are bonuses available for collect a certain number of Lums and rescuing all the Teensies. You need to do at least some of the latter to progress, but this shouldn’t stand in your way.

This invasion level took me a long time...

The game mixes things up mechanically by adding some variation to the level parameters. The most obvious of these are the invasion levels, where you must complete certain sections of levels within a minute – and preferably forty seconds to rescue all the Teensies strapped to fireworks. These require a different frame of mind and some precision-platforming and can be frustrating – but the payoff for beating them is even more fun for that! Brilliantly, there are a set of “music” levels, where Rayman becomes a rhythm game – you control the game as normal, but the level and music are designed in such a way that your jumps and attacks must be in time with the music in order to progress. It wouldn’t work if that was the whole game, but they are a lot of fun when you play them!

There's all sorts of post-game content -
if you want to unlock it.

The graphics are gorgeous; cartoony art styles age very well and the backgrounds are beautiful. The soundtrack is good as well, notwithstanding the slightly irritating squeaky voices on certain tracks. Every Rayman game I’ve played has looked and sounded well, and without any obligation to put an iteration of the game out every year, it’s given itself enough time to find its feet and come up with a style of gameplay that really works well for this generation of gaming. The Nintendo Switch is the perfect system for a game like this – you can pick it up for half an hour, do a few levels and put it down again.

I don’t know how many people would see Rayman: Legends through to the end, but anybody should be able to pick up this game and have some fun with it. It’s a charming game in a gaming world that needs its colour and wit – without it or it’s player base taking themselves too seriously.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Monster Hunter World, Murder in the Alps, Takenoko

Three things to mention this week:

They don't present a massive challenge,
but they're hard to find!

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter World on the PlayStation 4. This is the first Monster Hunter game I’ve ever played, and at this point I’m not sure what to make of it. It seems to be a role-playing game that involves hunting monsters on an island for research; that’s the basic plot. But there’s a lot going on with it, namely upgrading your equipment from parts of the monsters you have hunted, as well as the usual levelling-up progression. I’ve had a decent time with it so far, the combat system is interesting and the world is beautiful, although the most significant challenge it’s offered to me so far has come in the form of the mission where I have to kill twenty Vespoids – and that was mainly because that was the only mission where there was a real possibility of over-extending the 50-minute time limit, as I had to spend a lot of time looking around the map looking for the things!

Apart from that, the main thing I’m having to battle is the game’s insistence on being an online MMO-like experience. I haven’t got PlayStation Plus – I don’t play the kind of games that would make it worth my while. Unfortunately, Monster Hunter World doesn’t seem to want to let that go, assumes it’s connecting to PlayStation Plus when you boot it up, and even when you bypass all of that, it still talks up the multiplayer content as part of the game. Sorry, but MMORPGs are not my thing at all – if I had a group of friends who wanted to play one then maybe but playing with some random people who want to do it a lot quicker than I like to pace myself doesn’t appeal to me at all.

This one is off the... no. No. That's too obvious.

I came back to Murder in the Alps on my mobile last week too. Near to the start of the year I was playing the first run of mysteries, and I thought I’d have a go with the second. It’s basically Murder on the Orient Express – The Game, and I was engaged enough to want to get to the end of it, though the fact that it’s a hidden object game requires some suspension of disbelief. If the character has found the item she’s looking for, why does she keep looking for the other twelve? It’s like that thing people say when they’ve found something they lost: “Always the last place you look.” One might reasonably wonder if they keep on looking after they’ve found whatever they lost. In this game, that’s more or less what you’re doing!

A game about growing Bamboo, with a cute panda.
What's not to like?

The final game I played this week was a board game: Takenoko. This is a game in which you must build a garden for a panda to live in. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s actually really good – you have to build up the different colours of the garden in a certain configuration, grow a certain amount of bamboo in a certain place, and have the panda eat a certain set of bamboo in order to score. I played it with Kirsty, and I’ve said it before but it’s always a sign of a well-designed game when the gap between your first turn and learning how to play the game is relatively small. It only took us a few goes, and we were building gardens according to our cards, and trying to have the panda eat certain types of bamboo, this that and the other. I won in the end, but only by a point. Kirsty realised quite late in the game that her scoring cards were relatively low, where as most of mine were mid-range, which gave me more points. It was too late for her to do anything about it by then, but I considered afterwards how looking for a lot of low-scoring points cards might be a viable strategy with three or four players. I suspect that you wouldn’t want to get bogged down with higher-scoring points cards when your opponents have three or four completed ones already!

That was it for this week, I’m a little short of time next week so we’ll see what I can get done!

Last Week's Games: Rayman, Call of Duty and Spyro

I haven’t been very well this week, mainly with a cold but it nonetheless drags you down! So, with a very busy week, and in a state of almost constant exhaustion, my time for playing games was limited for the first half, and heavy for most of Monday where I refused to do anything else. Because of that, I managed to beat two of them. They were: Rayman Legends on my Switch and Call of Duty: Classic on the Xbox 360.

This level took a few goes!

I’ve talked about Rayman Legends on this blog enough times for you to know I’ve been enjoying it, and I’d rather reserve any additional remarks I have on the matter for the review. I will, however, say that it is nice to still be having fun with a game with the post-game content, and in games like this, getting to the end is only half the battle! It’s one of the few games I have a hope of achieving 100% completion on, and if I’m still having fun on the journey, one wonders why not.

Seen one bombed-out ruin, seen them all...

Call of Duty: Classic was a different matter. I bought this game in 2013, I think. (It was somewhere within the bracket of buying the Xbox 360 in 2012 and making a habit of keeping track of what games I was buying, which was 2014-2015.) I’d probably thought at some point that if everybody else was playing Call of Duty by then, I might as well play it too, and given that I almost obsessively had to play games in sequence at that point in my life (still do, though I’m less finnicky about it now!) I was always going to start from the first one and work my way up. Never mind that, at the time I bought it, Black Ops 2 was out, Ghosts wasn’t far away and the part of the game that everybody liked – the multiplayer – dies as the yearly sequel spawns; I wanted to play through those campaigns! If I’d have known at the time it would take me over six years to get through even one of them, I might not have bothered. Nonetheless I managed to get to the end of the first Call of Duty game. It was OK. It’s showing its age now, obviously. It’s playable enough, but brutally hard in places and some of it feels quite cheap. However, I’m rather smug to be able to say that I got through the second half of the game without using the Lean function even once. This was because I only remembered it existed when I checked a Wiki to find out how in the world you are supposed to get all the achievement points by beating the game on its hardest difficulty setting – apparently this is a key skill for most of it, though it won’t help in certain “turret” situations, and “that” level in Russia where you somehow have to hold a building for four minutes. I was also surprised to learn that it was originally a PC game, and not, as I had previously thought, a port of Call of Duty: Finest Hour, which I owned for the Xbox at one point but traded in.

There's a secret room behind him...

Earlier in the week I carried on with Spyro the Dragon, beating the Beastmakers levels – not without some help from a guide for those last few gems; I’m not looking to get bogged down – and did the first level of the Dream Weavers, which I found quite colourful and endearing! I haven’t got much further than that though as my attention drifted over to Call of Duty, which sounds bad but let me explain: Kirsty’s PS4 is in our living room, my Xbox 360 is in our bedroom. Noticing I wasn’t well, Kirsty convinced me to come to bed where it was warmer and play some games there. The original plan was to play some co-op games but when all the Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve been saving for co-op turned out to need a separate profile in order to play them in co-op mode, I moved swiftly on! Kirsty didn’t seem to mind watching me getting killed in CoD over and over again, so no harm done.

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Backlog Beatdown: Going into the breach with Into the Breach

I picked up Into the Breach roughly a year ago, having been made aware of it by the adverts on the Steam info page for FTL: Faster Than Light (both games have the same developer,) and an article on Rock Paper Shotgun where Into the Breach was at the top of its list of the 50 Greatest Strategy Games. I was intrigued by the idea that a game stripped back to the essentials of what makes a strategy game should be such a compelling experience.

Artillery blasts are always fun...

Into the Breach is an absolutely brilliant game. It is a turn-based strategy game where you control a squad of three “mechs,” who have gone back in time to free what is left of the planet from the Vek, an alien race of giant insect-like monsters who are destroying what remains of the planet’s population. The game presents you with four themed islands, which have several stages you must get through in order to clear the island and defeat the boss – usually a variation on an enemy you’ve already fought with more health and a different colour palette. The mission takes place on a 16x16 square grid and is usually quite simple: Stop the Vek from destroying too many civilian buildings, as they are forming a power grid that powers your mechs. What’s great about the battle system is that your mechs move then attack – the Vek attack, then move, then telegraph their next attack. Once you realise that your attacks move the Vek when they hit, you discover that this is your opportunity to strategically plan your moves so that the enemy does as little damage as possible. If enough of the power grid and at least one of your mechs is still operational at the end of four or five turns, you win the battle.

Don't think I've used this weapon before...

Variety is added to the missions by completing additional objectives: Protect specific buildings, destroy certain parts of the environment, avoid killing a ‘Volatile’ Vek that will explode if it takes enough damage are just a few. Your reward for completing these is either more power to your grid, or reputation points that can be spent at the end of an island to kit out your mechs. Once you’ve cleared at least two islands, you can attack the Vek on their base island, and if you can beat that mission you win the game. This mission scales in difficulty based on how many islands you’ve beaten, so you can’t fully level up your pilots and kit out your mechs and hope for an easier time – it’ll be a challenge either way! The game takes an hour to two hours to beat, and there is a plethora of stuff to unlock as you’re going along; I’ve beaten the game, but it will take much longer than that to complete!

The Final Mission is a blast!

The graphics are of a 4^th/5^th (console) generation pixel art style; it doesn’t look particularly special, but it will still look that good in ten years! The sound effects are of a similar standard, with the exception of the soundtrack. The music in this game is wonderful; it strikes the balance of being atmospheric and ambient enough to support the game without getting in the way of the action, but memorable enough to stick in the mind long after you’ve finished playing. Subset Games have a very talented composer in Ben Prunty!

Into the Breach is an excellent game with a lot to offer. While the fact that it is a turn-based strategy game might limit the appeal initially, its presentation makes it accessible to most people. The interface is fine; there’s very little clunk and it doesn’t take you long to figure out how everything works. There is a deeper plot than the one suggested, but apart from the fact that most of the characters have quite distinct personalities, you’re left to discover the intricacies of the plot on your own. The game allows you to uncover its weapons, upgrades and ideal paths at your own pace, and your reward for doing so is addressing the challenges the game presents using whatever option it gives you on each run. A fine game, and one that everybody should at least try.

Final Score: 5/5: Beyond excellent. 
 

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!

Last Week's Games: The Elder Scrolls: Area, Super Castlevania IV, Fire Pro Wrestling World

Now that I've seen this, I've got Medusa and Hemlock
by Cradle of Filth buzzing around my head...

This week I’ve been playing a bit of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This was the first Elder Scrolls game released in 1994; I’ve had a dalliance with some of the Elder Scrolls games that have been released since then but have never seen one through to the end. While a lot of the ideas that ended up in the later games were there from the beginning, the interface shows its age! I’ve had a reasonably good time having a go with the different character races and classes, which is easier to do in Arena than it was in Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim because the first dungeon (in which you start as a prisoner, so it’s good to see the Elder Scrolls series started as it meant to go on) can kill you quite quickly if you’re not careful! I got to know the area very well; where all the loot drops and enemies were, as I explored it multiple times with different characters. I eventually settled on a Wood Elf mage; I’m aware that the stats of a Wood Elf don’t necessarily support the Mage class, but I found that it had enough physical power to outlast a lot of the other classes I’d been playing. I guess this is one of the areas where video games differ from table top RPGs; when there’s only one player character, you must be able to handle more than the situations your class would normally deal with! I eventually managed to get to the end of the dungeon but then emerged into the town in the middle of the night and got killed by the enemies hanging around the town; often before I even knew they were there! Thank goodness I thought to save the game. It was also amusing to see that the Khajit were originally human in appearance, rather than the feline appearance they later acquired. 

Tricky though this bit is, it's nothing
compared to the next bit...

I also tried Super Castlevania IV on my WiiU again. I played the level where some of the old music from the previous games had been remixed for the 4^th iteration of the game – including a track that was involved in one of Jim Sterling’s “F**Konami News” gags, so that raised a smile from me! That level has some very tough platforming segments, so I didn’t get very far, but my three-year-old daughter noticed what I was doing and wanted a go. I set her off on the first level; she hasn’t quite got the dexterity to handle platforming yet, but she was having a fine time making Simon Belmont walk up and down the stairs on the first screen! She enjoyed the results of whipping the skeletons too, though she hadn’t got the reaction times to do it quickly, so I often ended up doing it. But it’s all good; at this point she just enjoys doing things with her Daddy!

Alright mate, put it down; you'll get DQ'd!

Finally, I had a go with a game I’ve left far too long without trying: Fire Pro Wrestling World. It’s been a while since I had a wrestling game to play with, and the WWE series that started with Smackdown has, if I understand the commentary on it correctly, disappeared into its own bottom trying to make the best and most comprehensive creation mode while forgetting to make the gameplay itself any good. Fire Pro Wrestling, free from the shackles of having to use licensed wrestlers or keep up with constantly-evolving graphics engines, has certainly put a lot of thought into the gameplay. The controls are more of a timing-based system than WWE’s button-mashing, and you have to balance light and strong attacks, or you will very easily be countered. I’m currentlyplaying through the mission mode, where you have to achieve a certain condition by the end of the match (not always a win!) This is a great way for me to get used to the different wrestlers in the game, and to learn the mechanics. I even streamed some of it earlier today and put on a rather embarrassing show, but the one person watching it sat through most of it so I’m not complaining! I’ve really enjoyed Fire Pro Wrestling World so far, and I hope I’ll continue to do so!

Last Week's Games: Into the Breach, X-COM: UFO Defence, Sega Megadrive and Ninja Gaiden 3

The first thing I did in the week was beat Into the Breach for the first, and hopefully not last, time. I’ve written the review for it and it’s coming out on Friday, but I thought at this point I’d make a few additional remarks that I didn’t think fit the purpose of the review:

Always a fun time splattering bugs...

It came to my attention, I can’t remember how, that the scope of the game was quite a bit bigger than what we eventually received. There was supposed to be a much deeper strategic element to the whole campaign, with some XCOM-style base management in it. However, at some point the developers had to have a very difficult conversation when it emerged that those wider elements of the game just weren’t any fun. It was just bulk, micro-management, padding out the game, and their play-testers weren’t enjoying it. So, the decision was made to scrap those elements of the game and make a game based almost entirely around the tactical game I’d been enjoying. I’ve got a lot of respect for decisions like that; it’s never easy to look at something you’ve been working very hard on over months and years and decide that it’s not up to standard and needs to be shelved. Maybe we’ll see those ideas come up in a later game, I don’t know. But it was a brave decision to chop out a lot of the game’s intended content to make a better game, so well done on that.

After XCOM Enemy Unknown it was surprising
how squishy these soldier's were...

Elsewhere, I had a go with the original X-COM game. On the icon on my laptop it’s called X-COM: UFO Defence, but I know it better as UFO: Enemy Unknown. I’ve always enjoyed the X-COM games, Enemy Unknown and Interceptor were my favourites, but playing it back twenty years later I couldn’t get quite as in to it as I had been before. Maybe it’s a bad time for me to be throwing myself into another long-form strategy campaign, maybe it’s because the interface really hasn’t aged that well and I’m getting frustrated at losing soldiers and battles because I’m getting the implicit rules of the games wrong, but it wasn’t happening for me that night.

Eternal Champions. Another tough one!

Kirsty bought me an ATGAMES Sega Megadrive Plug & Play for Christmas in 2017, and a few nights ago I finally got around to having a go with it! It’s got quite a few games on there, many that I can only describe as “The Usual Suspects,” (Sonic, Golden Axe, Columns etc) plus several arcade games that I’ve never heard of. I had a go with Comix Zone, Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions, perhaps because I just wanted to beat something up after the complexity of some of the other games I’ve been playing. Unfortunately, these were all games that I’d either owned or borrowed in the past, and because of this, I realised that the emulation wasn’t quite on point. The games were playable enough and I had a decent time, but the music and sound effects were all about three semitones too low, and with Comix Zone in particular, it made the music in the game sound horribly out of tune. But it’s a fun enough time, and I’m sure I’ll give it another go in the future.

No idea who this is but it took a few goes to beat...
Him? Her? I couldn't tell. The sound was down on the TV.

Finally, I had a go with Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge on the Wii U. I’ve played a couple of Ninja Gaiden games in the past, but this is the first time I played one in a while and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult they can be! At this point I’ve just about got past the boss on the first stage. It’s a strange one because the game seems to want you to learn all the moves and the combos when you just want to be mashing buttons, but there’s a sense of satisfaction when you analyse the attack patterns of the bosses and work out the best strategies to beat them. Nonetheless, the game is brutally hard! We’ll see if I can see this one through to the end, but it’s always good to play a game I’d never played before.

I’ve also installed Elder Scrolls: Arena, so we’ll see what next week brings!

Backlog Beatown: Charting Fortunes with Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

I bought Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Trilogy soon after I gained access to a PlayStation 4; having been on Xbox and PC for most of the years prior, I hadn’t played any Uncharted games prior. I knew the basic premise of the game, (Gears of War meets Tomb Raider,) and I knew the lead character Nathan Drake was a wise-cracking rogue who could never quite make you sure whether you wanted to buy him a drink or deck him, but other than that, Uncharted was a blind buy.

Straight in the nuts. You know
you want to!

I had a go with the first of the three games it showcases – Uncharted: Drakes Fortune – and I found what for me was a standard action-adventure. You play as Nathan Drake; an Indiana Jones-like character who bears a passing resemblance to a younger Gerard Butler and is voice-acted by the renowned Nolan North. You’re on a quest to find the treasure of El Dorado, either for fame and fortune or for the fact that you may or may not be related to Sir Francis Drake who was looking for the treasure originally – probably a little of both. Along the way, you get caught up in a conflict of interest between Sully, your mentor, Elena, a reporter, and a group of criminals and mercenaries who also want to find El Dorado. Conflict escalates, and you are forced to run, gun and jump your way through an increasingly hostile environment as you search to find the truth behind the treasure and save your friends.

There are two main sections to the game: Platforming, in which you jump from wall-section to ledge in order to traverse difficult-to-get-to areas, and combat, which mainly involves shootouts with modern-day pirates. The platforming is not difficult; it is rarely a challenge to see where you need to go and even if you do get stuck, the game will show you where you’re supposed to be going next if you stand still for a few seconds. Once you know where you’re going, the route is usually obvious, and the challenge is avoiding traps and making sure you don’t linger to long on a ledge lest it crumble beneath your feet.

The bulk of the game's action is in scenes like this.

The combat is standard cover-based shooting, and is handled well enough, with the one puzzling exception that grenades are mapped to L1 (R1 is the standard, right?) You shoot some enemies, move up to the next area, find some cover and shoot some more enemies. There is an array of weapons in the game, but you can only carry two at a time; a pistol and one other weapon. These are what you would expect; machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers. Uncharted is very much “of it’s time” in terms of its level design; the ammo pick-ups are in all the right places so you’re never out-gunned, and conserving resources between one fight and the next is rarely a consideration. One particularly memorable moment near the end of the game came when I was in a church with snipers in the raised areas; this could have presented a very different challenge if there hadn’t been a sniper rifle lying around in the first place you dive for cover; classic 7^th gen design!

I mean, even if Wikipedia wasn't a thing,
you'd know how this was going to end up...

Uncharted is presented well; the voice-acting is spot-on, and the graphics are good for their time. The sounds are as good as they need to be, the gun sounds work fine and the music fits the environments, though it isn’t particularly memorable. The game is not especially long, but it tells a fun story with an effective twist, and it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

It’s difficult to know how to call this one. While I was writing this, I had to go back and check all the times I’d written the word “Standard” and go back and change some of them. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in 2007 and, while it’s still fun to play now, doesn’t bring anything to the table that wasn’t there before. It’s as standard as a 7^th generation game gets, and is very competently put together, but now that I’ve got to the end of it, I’ll be more likely to put it to bed than go hunting for all the achievement trophies.

Final Score: 3/5. Worth a look.