Most of my gaming time last week was spent on Arcania; the
not-very-good RPG I’ve been playing on the PS4. I’m not sure where I am in
relation to my progress through the game but I’m in the area of the game that
features a lot of swamplands, which has been curiously named Tooshoo. It’s not
so much an open world RPG as several open questing areas chained together in a
sequence, which is fine by me; I don’t necessarily like the whole world hitting
me in the face at once! And I’m enjoying the game at least enough to overlook a
couple of its major flaws:
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| That Stamina bar is a bit redundant... |
First, the stamina bar. You have three bars on the bottom of
the HUD, (Heads Up Display, if you don’t know!) one for health, one for mana,
and one for stamina. You can increase these attributes as you level up. The
problem I’ve run in to is that I’ve not been able to do anything that decreases
the stamina bar. Nothing you do in open play seems to affect it, and even the
moves that should affect it either doesn’t, or the move doesn’t work at all.
I’d have thought dodge-rolling, at the very least, would be a way to exhaust
it, but I’d be wrong apparently. Now, you’d think that this was a positive
thing rather than negative, since what essentially amounts to unlimited stamina
would make the game easier to play. And it does… but it also removes a lot of
the challenge and makes some of the skill upgrades redundant.
The other glaring issue is feedback. Apart from your health
dropping – and you’re not always looking at the HUD – the player character
doesn’t react at all to being hit. There’s no hit animation, no cry of pain,
nothing. Hit detection is a little off from the enemies as well, so there’s no
telling whether the moves they have done have hit or missed. Often, you don’t
know you’ve been hit at all until you’ve looked at your health bar or died.
Again, it’s not impeding my progress in any major way, but it could have been
handled a lot better than this. A shame, really, as there’s about 60% of a good
game in there somewhere, but I’m finding it hard to recommend a game as mired
in flaws as this.
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| He's invisible at the moment... |
I’ve tried to play Doom as well, but I’ve found myself stuck
on Deimos Lab. I’m having to be careful with my ammo as there are a lot of
enemies in this section of the game and I am woefully unequipped to deal with
the huge rush of them at the end of the level. I find myself running out of
ammo before I can hit the relevant switches to open the end of the level, and
even if I manage it, I won’t necessarily be in a good place to tackle the next
one! I find myself wondering if I should be more careful in looking for the
game’s secrets, as the increased difficulty setting that I’m playing on may
require some extra work!
I also went back to the Horus Heresy: Legions. I have been
booted from my lodge, because there was a gap of a couple of months where I
wasn’t playing at all, but I’ve joined another one mainly for the card rewards.
They won’t be as good – there aren’t as many members, and the ones that are
there aren’t as busy – but I’ll keep playing with them until I get a 12-win
run. I keep playing single matches with my Space Wolves as well; they’re always
fun!
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| I tried to find a different picture, but all that comes up on Google Image Search is the character from Pokémon. |
Finally, I played Misty again with Kirsty. She had a better
handle of the game this time and put up much more of a fight as we tried to
arrange our window drawings strategically. I won again, but not before we’d
forced a fourth round out of a draw! The main benefit of this game, we
discussed afterwards, is its simplicity. If you’ve never played a card drafting
game before, this one is pretty easy as the cards only do a limited number of
things; we’d be happy to play this with younger or older family members!
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