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!