Last Week's Games: Lumo, Planescape Torment, Assassin's Creed 2, Tekken 6

I’ve not been in the best of health this week; nothing worse than a cold but it’s knocked me about!

I like being able to change the colour of the character...

I’ve played some more of Lumo on the Nintendo Switch; the puzzling nature of the game makes it better enjoyed in short bursts, but I’ve been having fun with it. Collecting all the rubber ducks continues to be a challenge, but it became a lot easier once I’d gone online and found that you can hold down the jump button to jump as soon as you land. This isn’t usual for platform games but is a welcome addition here! There are other elements to the game too; a minecart level, and I’ve reached a rather odd section where you have a space-shooter mini-game, of all things – an odd addition to an already very surreal game, and I’m hoping it will all make sense by the time I get to the end! I’ve also found some measure of combat in the game, though currently this amounts to nothing more than shining a light on your wand and scaring spiders away.

The starting room. Grim.

On advice from my sister I gave Planescape Torment another go. I say another go, but it’s been nearly two decades since the last time, when I owned it on CD-ROM! This is a computer RPG in a similar style to Baldur’s gate, except that the setting for this is Sigil, the City of Doors – and is quite frankly bizarre. You play as The Nameless One, a human-like being of some considerable power but not much in the way of memories, as you journey through a morgue trying to find out who and what you are. This is about as much as I’ve been able to discern so far, both from the time I’ve spent playing it and what I can remember from playing the game all that time ago! It is a complex plot and a very involving game, and like many RPGs I will be surprised if I manage to see it through to the end, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far and I hope I continue to do so.

Managed to pull this move off the other day...

I continued my game of Assassin’s Creed 2, guiding Ezio through a few speed and assassination challenges. Assassin’s Creed games can very often feel like busy-work, and this is no exception, but I enjoy what I can in short bursts and progress through the game a bit at a time. That way, I enjoy what time I put into it – even if it isn’t very much! I particularly enjoyed the mission where I had to assassinate four guards without using my weapons. Three of them were easy – they were on top of buildings, I just had to push them off – but the fourth was on the ground level, and the way I had to beat them was to hire a group of mercenaries to do it for me. This may seem counter-intuitive because on the surface it seems like you’re paying a certain amount of in-game money for the game to be played for you, but it got more interesting once some of the other guards started to interfere – at that point, I could join in the fight, as I was allowed to kill the guards that weren’t my targets!

Boom!

Finally, Kirsty and I played Tekken 6 on the Xbox 360. Tekken has always been a good set of games and I’ve enjoyed each one I’ve played, whether in the arcade or on various iterations of the PlayStation. I downloaded this version off Games with Gold, and we had a fine time experimenting with the different characters, finding out who we liked and who we didn’t. I used the random generator to pick a different character each time, whereas Kirsty likes who she likes and tended to go for Panda, Jack and Eddy. Eddy is probably the best character in the game for button-mashing, and Kirsty has a track record of winning with the bigger lads by spamming a low kick attack. We played 11 matches and Kirsty won 6 of them; some of them were close calls! It’s a pretty good game, and I’m looking forward to getting more deeply in to it later on.

 

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies, Lumo

My time has been limited this week, but since that means I’ve played less games, I’ve got a little more space to write about them:

See what I mean? Exactly the same either way.

I’ve been soldiering on through 8-Bit Armies, and I’m not far from beating it now. Those of you who have been following me for a while will have seen that I’ve been mostly positive about the game so far, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. However, I want to talk about an aspect of the game I’m not enjoying so much: The level design. All the maps I have played on in the campaign so far have been almost completely symmetrical, either two, four, six or sometimes eight-way.

The problem I have with this is a matter of suspension of disbelief more than anything else. This might seem like an odd thing to say about a game like 8-Bit Armies, which understands that it is a video game. But the map design is not very inspired at all. It always places your home base, and that of your enemies, in a raised easily-defendable position at a corner of the map, and while that is strategically sound, it’s hard to believe that it’s ever that simple for military forces. It keeps the pace of the game going, I guess, but it’s hard to be particularly engaged with a map where the key to victory is almost invariably smashing a gauntlet of gun turrets at the top of a hill to where the enemy base is, and defending your own is nothing more complicated than building a set-up of gun and rocket turrets. Would it have been too much to ask to create some different maps that would force players to use their positions and resources more creatively?

There's a Red vs Blue series in here somewhere...

I can see why they would have done this for the multiplayer aspect of the game, as you’re not going to want to design your map so that one player or team has an advantage over another. But even then, some asymmetry wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. Perhaps they could have designed some maps so that the tactics used for each side of the map were different, but would have created an equal chance of winning or thereabouts? Part of the skill of strategy games is learning how to use the lay of the land to your advantage, and with 8-bit Armies, you only need to do that once and then you’ve learned the enemy strategy for the entire game.

Having said that, I really enjoyed one level that occurs late in the game. Your mission is to destroy three enemy HQs, but that’s nothing unusual. What is less regular is that your centre ground is almost always under attack, so you must keep your eye on your defence network there. Also, the level starts you off with a few harvesters and refineries already active, which means the oil fields around your base deplete quickly, forcing your harvesters to look for resources in less-well-defended areas. I was surprise by the few times the enemies had found my harvesters and had brought a tank company to attack them; having to respond to that was an extra level of challenge the game just hadn’t managed at that point.

If you put the soap in the water it will clean it.
It will still kill you though.

Elsewhere I have been playing Lumo on my Nintendo Switch. This is an interesting isometric puzzle platformer, where you play a boy or girl dressed as a wizard trying to navigate your way through a labyrinth of blocks and jumping puzzles that take the form of, from what I’ve seen so far, the basement of a castle. Your aim, I think, is just to get through the castle, but there are lots of collectables lying around as well for you work out. The Rubber Ducks, for example, appear in water that kills you if you touch it. You have to jump on to the duck, then you have about a 15^th of a second to jump onto the next platform, or you die and have to start again. It’s the kind of game I play the Switch for, and I’m enjoying it so far, though as it can get frustrating it’s better played in short bursts.

Until next week…