Backlog Beatdown: Warring in the Stars with Star Wars: Starfighter

Recently, my daughter became interested in Star Wars to the point of watching all nine films in less than a week, and while I’ll happily concede that some of the films are better than others, I usually manage to find something to enjoy about them. Watching bits of Episode 1 back certainly piqued my interest enough to try out Star Wars: Starfighter, a game I’d picked up as part of a Humble Bundle purchase but hadn’t yet played…

Canyon runs need precision...

For a game that was released to fill a large space in the market for video games based on Star Wars while the prequel trilogy was in full swing, Starfighter seems to have its mindset firmly rooted in combining the game – a light fighter simulator – with what Star Wars is at its core: A character-driven story. You play as a Naboo Starfighter pilot called Rhys, a mercenary pilot called Vana and a pirate called Nym at various stages of the campaign, which tells a story of a run-up to the events of the Invasion of Naboo from the Trade Federation. Together with a non-playable mechanic called Reti, they are attacked, betrayed and otherwise set against the Trade Federation, and launch a guerrilla campaign against them in their fighters and bombers.

The inevitable comparisons to X-Wing and TIE Fighter come to mind but I found Starfighter to be a welcome break from that kind of simulation-style gameplay. Your guns either never run out of ammo or recharge, your shields recharge over time but there’s no faffing about re-distributing power, and your speed is managed through a simple speed up / slow down command. All the fighters handle the same but are played slightly differently depending on their armament; Rhys flies a standard N-1 Starfighter which is good for dogfighting, Vana pilots a Guardian Mantis that is good for disabling shields, and Nym pilots his Havoc which is primarily used for bombing runs. There are thirteen missions in the campaign, each one its own set of rules and objectives that must be completed to proceed, with additional objectives available to achieve if you wish.

The last mission takes place during the 
Battle for Naboo...

Starfighter is a good game, but you must be in the right frame of mind for it. The levels are varied and well-designed, and you’ll get past the first of them without trying, after which you’ll face a large difficulty spike where the objectives and threats leave more room for failure. And I can guarantee you’ll find fifty different things to hate about the game when you fail a mission over and over again – but when you finally work out what to do and manage a perfect run, you’ll feel a grin of excitement spread across your face as the Mission Complete screen comes up. Rarely have more modern games made me feel so good about beating a level! The last missions are absolute beauties, requiring knowledge of what’s coming and when, and managing your speed.

A quick note on graphics and sound: Apart from the Star Wars soundtrack which is always excellent, this game was released in 2001 and its assets are showing their age. The fighters and droid vehicles are functional enough, but even for the time, those character models were hideous, and the voice acting sounds cheesy even for a Star Wars game. It didn’t affect my enjoyment, just don’t expect it to be easy on the eye!

Nym's bombs take some getting used to,
but are a lot of fun!

Star Wars games often run into the problem of the stakes being relatively low. Either they’re following the mainline plot of the films, in which case you’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the films, in which case you don’t feel like you’re affecting the plot to any great extent because you know how it all works out. Starfighter is in the latter category. I don’t want to spoil the plot in the review so I won’t say if I was right – but I will say I wasn’t giving the game enough credit. I’ve described what I mean in the main blog so have a look at that if you’re interested.

I’d caution against spending any substantial amount of money on Starfighter, but if you can find it cheaply enough, it’s well worth your time.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Starfighter

Owing to my daughter’s newfound interest in Star Wars, I found myself playing a game I’d had for a while but never gotten around to playing: Star Wars Starfighter. I beat it as well, and the review for it is coming out on Friday. I’ve said most of what I want to say about the game there, but here I’d like to develop a point I made about the plot of Starfighter. Spoilers ahead, for whatever it’s worth!

Holding back the invading droids
was a huge amount of fun.

One problem that most Star Wars games run into is that they can’t really tell their own story without reducing the stakes. Most of the so-called Extended Universe has been declared Non-Canon now, presumably because Disney didn’t want to have to ret-con anything while they were making the new films, so that doesn’t help, but they still struggle either way. Of the games that are available, either they follow the mainline plot of the films, in which case they’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the mainline plot, in which case you never really get the sense that you’re affecting anything major since the key points of the Star Wars saga happened in a story you’re not involved in.

Starfighter was always going to run into this issue, but it never loses sight of what Star Wars is at its core – a character-driven story adventure. It handles it quite well: The plot is set during the run-up to the Battle of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. Through their own activities as fighters, mercenaries and pirates, the four pilots discover a droid production facility on one of the planets and must work together in order to blow up the facility. The threat is established by showing the duplicitous nature of the Trade Federation to two of the characters in the early game, and resolved by having them participate in at least some of the battle of Naboo in the later game – you really do get a sense of how worse it could have been for Naboo had the Droid army been at full strength, which if your characters hadn’t been involved, it would have been.

Flying around a hangar is
always a bit fiddly...

Where Starfighter lets us down plot-wise is in the final boss. The fight itself is fine and takes a lot of the skills you’ve been building throughout the game, if a little annoying when you don’t know exactly where it’s going. But the problem with any battle fought in the Separatist portion of the saga is that as your opponents are always droids, they lack the necessary levels of humanity influence the plot themselves. Starfighter tries to get around this by having the Trade Federation employ mercenaries to interfere with negotiations at the start of the game when you’re escorting Queen Amidala, Rhys’ mentor is killed by one of them and he turns up at the end as the final boss having not participated in the story at any point in between. First, it doesn’t make sense for the Trade Federation to have attacked Queen Amidala before she signed their treaty, and second, it very much felt like a final boss for the sake of having a final boss.

None of which spoils the experience of the game, you understand. It’s still a fun space shooter that I was happy to play, and it made a refreshing change for me to play a game I can wrap up in a few days rather than several months! But it did make me think about the reasons that the plot of most Star Wars video games is often its weakest point and realise that we can be thankful for those games that counter it with some very solid gameplay.

As an aside, the exception here – and probably why this game is so fondly remembered – is Knights of the Old Republic. This was set far enough away from the plot of the Skywalker saga that the galaxy would have had time to sort itself out whichever way it went, but also Bioware had a very talented writing team at the top of their game telling a fun story with twists, stakes and bitter struggles that many still hold as the standard of RPG storytelling to this day.

 

Backlog Beatdown: Assaulting Aliens with Super Mutant Alien Assault

I can’t quite remember when or why I made the decision to buy Super Mutant Alien Assault; most likely from the release sections of one of the Co-Optional Podcasts. I do remember the art style having a 2D “SNES” feel to it, and that would have engaged me as much as anything else. However, it was a long time between buying the game and playing it…

Super Mutant Alien Assault is an arena / roguelike game released in 2015.The premise is that aliens have taken over some space ships in three different galaxies, and you play as a security robot tasked with eliminating the aliens and saving the human race, or something along those lines. Let’s be honest, you don’t usually play games like this for the plot!

One of the boss battles...

The game is a fast and frantic platform shooter, with the roguelike elements linked mainly to progression – extra starting items unlock the more you play through the game. There are three galaxies and four levels per galaxy; each galaxy ends with a random boss battle and the other three levels are randomly generated as well. You must take on hordes of irradiated aliens, killing them quickly before they mutate into their upgraded forms, whilst completing the level objectives to move on, beating the boss on each level, until you clear the game on one run. No easy task!

A lot of frantic action is sometimes
hard to keep track of!

You start off without weapons, but can pick up a primary weapon on most levels – these start off with the fairly standard shotgun, uzi and rocket launcher, but later go on to include laser guns, plasma cannons, a handheld weapon of concentrated light that is definitely not a lightsaber, and even a chakram that holds exploding bombs. You also have secondary weapons – pistols, chackrams and a burst assault rifle. There are explosive weapons as well, ranging from grenades to trip mines to entire bomb packs. And finally, you have some special abilities as well – higher jumps, faster movement, plasma blasts. Play the game for long enough and you’ll find a combination of weapons and upgrade items that you like, but the game randomises the equipment drops so there’s no guarantee you’ll get the one you’re looking for – you get what you’re given, and it’s up to you to make it work.

Super Mutant Alien Assault works very well; the game has tight and responsive controls, challenges you at the right level and the levels are quick enough for an engaging experience that don’t require too much of a time investment. Killing aliens is always fun, but additional objectives in the missions, plus the game not always giving you access to certain kinds of weapons, and only allowing you to heal once per galaxy, lend a strategic element to the game that requires strategic thinking and forward planning. The graphics are nothing special, but they don’t need to be; they’re top end of 5^th generation 2D graphics and will still look as good in 20 years. The sound is good as well; the sound effects are marvellous, and the backing music is made up of dubstep tracks which are just old enough in 2021 to provoke a feeling of nostalgia.

In these levels, you must get the green capsules
up to the receptical at the top...

If there is a criticism to be made it is in the difficulty: It’s a little too easy to beat. I defeated the three galaxies and bosses quite easily and found most of the challenge in trying to get through the entire game – the advanced difficulty levels don’t unlock until you’ve done this. With Roguelikes, most of the progression is found in unlocking extra items and upgrades, but you really don’t need to be playing for very long at all to have found all of these. It’s not necessarily a problem for me as I wasn’t looking for a long experience, but people who like a tough route to progress through the game might expect a little more.

All in all, Super Mutant Alien Assault is a great game that I’d happily recommend. It’s a great introduction to this sort of game, plays very well and a lot of fun. Roguelikes aren’t everybody’s preferred style of game, and this game lacks exposition, but most people will have a good time with Super Mutant Alien Assault.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon again with Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

 I’ve been playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as part of the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Details of how I came to own this are detailed in my original review of Spyro the Dragon, and the same basic details apply, so let’s jump right into it:

Do you know what he is?

The plot of Spyro 2, such as it is, picks up from where the previous game left off. Spyro is looking to go on vacation with Sparx to Dragon Shores, but instead gets summoned to a fantasy realm called Avalar. There, he meets with Elora the Faun, Hunter the Cheeta and Professor the, er, Professor, who tell him that they’ve summoned him there to help to defeat Ripto, a diminutive but malevolent… I don’t know what to call him. Warlock, apparently. Anyway, he’s taken over Avalar with the help of his much larger minions Crush and Gulp, and since he comes from a world of Dragons who keep him in check, Spyro has been summoned to try to beat him. With the help of his new friends, Spyro chases Ripto across the Summer Forest, Autumn Planes and Winter Tundra, hoping to defeat the evil warlock and bring peace to Avalar.

The underwater sections added a
new dimension to the levels.

The gameplay is much the same as the original Spyro the Dragon, but the game was so good that this hardly matters. Spyro still has his old moves; he can charge, breathe fire and glide over long distances. In addition, he can hold projectiles in his mouth and manually aim them to spit them out again, and gain a quick hight boost while gliding. Later in the game, Spyro learns to swim, climb and even perform an overhead smash. It’s everything a sequel should be – everything that made the original game great, with enough new mechanics added to open the level design and vary the challenges.

The levels in Spyro 2 usually have an overarching objective – usually get to a certain point on the level, by which time you’ll have defeated the enemies that form the main antagonists for that level. There are also some orbs you must collect in order to open up certain sections of the game, and these are attached to your side quests. Some of these are quite mundane, such as killing a certain number and type of enemy, and most of them are fairly easy, but some of them are actually quite challenging, and apart from a couple of clangers where the solution is deliberately obtuse, they’re pretty good fun. The highlight for me was the Ice Hockey mini game early on! The flying levels make a welcome re-appearance as optional changes of pace, and they have time trials attached to them as well to make sure you’re bringing your A-game!

Gulp proves a significant challenge
when aiming for completion...

I also managed to complete the game 100%. This isn’t too hard to do, since there are no trophies tied up in multiplayer modes and the tasks are, with a few exceptions, quite easy – a fine game to play if you’re a completionist looking for something you can breeze few in a few hours. Just keep in mind that, unlike the first Spyro game, some of the areas are locked behind mid-game abilities so some backtracking is necessary.

The presentation is great too. The voice acting is spot on, the graphics show significant improvement from the original PS1 games with the Re-ignited trilogy and are absolutely gorgeous, and Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack is a great augment to an already fantastic game. The developers really hit their stride with the level design; a little more linear than the previous game but still with a sense of openness that put them ahead of their contemporaries. There are a couple of aspects that niggle – I’m not sure why, when returning to a level, you have to watch the cutscenes and in some cases do the main quest again; this feels like something that could have quite easily been left out.

All in all, Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage is a great game that anyone should be able to pick up and have a decent amount of fun with. It is not a hard-core experience, but it knows what it is, tells the story it wants to tell and is the game it wants to be.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Backlog Beatdown: Going on a Warhammer Quest with Warhammer Quest

 I bought Warhammer Quest when I was on a, er, “Quest” to buy all the Games Workshop licensed games – good or not – so that I could play them and make up my own mind. Interestingly, those games that I have played have rarely been “good,” in the usual sense, and Warhammer Quest is no exception – but I tend to like them anyway because of my fondness of and investment in the Games Workshop properties. Warhammer Quest is no exception to that either.

Skaven can be threatening in large numbers...

At its most basic level, Warhammer Quest is a dungeon-crawler set in the Warhammer world, in certain parts of the Empire. You have a group of four Heroes: A Human Marauder, a Dwarf Ironbreaker, a Wood Elf Waywatcher, and a Human Grey Wizard. They’re very simple roles – the Marauder is your attacking hero, the Ironbreaker fights best in bottlenecks, the Waywatcher picks off enemies with her bow, and the Grey Wizard pulls double-duty as the party’s healer and magic user. More heroes are available as DLC but it’s not an avenue I intend to explore in the short term. You travel to towns and get given a quest which almost always entails going to a dungeon (and crikey, there’s a lot of those in the Empire!) and are rewarded with experience, loot and gold. Your principle enemies are Orcs, but in certain parts of the game the Skaven make an appearance, and the Undead turn up from time to time – rarely as the main enemy though. There are thirty-one quests you can get from towns, plus each town has a dungeon in between that you can explore for more items and experience. You must at least pass these to get to the next town, so it’s always worth a look. Later in the game there are some special missions that are handed to you, and you must complete these in order to beat the game.

The screen can be spun around to odd angles.

This game was originally designed for IOS, and it shows. It controls on a point-and-click strategy game basis, though in practice there’s very little strategy to the game. You click on the enemies to attack them and they lose some health until they die; that’s about it. There’s no positioning tactics, no flanking bonuses – the nearest you come to tactical manoeuvring is deciding whether to put your two fighters at the end of a corridor to limit the enemy’s action economy, or use the Marauder to take the battle to the enemy in the room knowing that his multiple attacks mean he’ll likely drop at least some of the enemies, and he probably has enough hit points to take any reprisals. This was fine by me, as too much complexity overwhelms me after a while. It looks OK, the graphics are as good as they need to be for a game like this though all the cut-scenes are text scrolls which takes away from some of the atmosphere. The sound is pretty good as well; fantasy-level orchestral and choral scores, with some functional if predictable sound effects for the towns and weapons.

Losing your ability to act isn't much fun...

Warhammer Quest has several flaws, the main one being the Spiders – try taking these on in any significant numbers and they’ll use their webs to prevent your party from moving and slow the game right down, often forcing you to quit out of the dungeon and start again. Randomly spawning enemies every few turns are supposed to keep you alert but it happens a little too often – sometimes in the middle of an already painful fight! Some of the controls make sense on a tablet but could easily have been modified for PC. There should be a hotkey for the End Turn button at the very least, and some of the clunk could have been removed from activating abilities.

When Warhammer Quest gets it right, it can be a thrilling experience; this usually comes in the form of a reasonable but challenging timed mission. The rest of the time, it’s a solid, functional dungeon crawler. It breaks no boundaries and has little to reward you for seeing it through to the end, but if you like Warhammer or simplistic dungeon-bashing, this will keep you entertained for a few hours at least.

Final Score: 2/5: If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Warhammer Quest, Magic Labyrinth, Ninja Dice and Dungeon Roll

I’ve been playing Warhammer Quest again this week and finally reached the end of it, after ages of slogging through endless dungeons, hordes of spiders and timed quests which were the highlight of the game! The review will be up on Friday but I have a few additional points to make here: The ending was a bit of a let-down; it’s hard to spoil a game that has no real story to speak of, but it essentially amounts to a text scroll. Having said that, and as I mentioned in my review and some of the other blogs, when the game really goes for it – cuts your health down to the wire and forces you to win in a couple of turns or die, and puts timers on certain missions forcing you to act quickly – it can create some very tense and thrilling sections of the game which I’m glad I played! I spent a lot of time deliberating over whether to score it 2/5 or 3/5; I enjoyed it enough for it to be a three, but I always find something to like about Warhammer games and I can’t objectively say anybody else will enjoy it in the same way. In the end it came down to: “Did I enjoy it more than Regicide? No.” Therefore I gave it a two.

Snotlings aren't much of a threat but they're
always fun to splatter.

One thing I was quite pleased about when I reached the end of Warhammer Quest is its treatment of Orcs. This echoes back to something my friend Victor mentioned to me a while ago: Orcs, or Orks (their Warhammer 40K equivalent) are very often presented as hulking stupid lummoxes with nary a brain cell between them, and while that’s not necessarily the case – they tend to possess a certain amount of low cunning at the very least – it does make it very easy for writers to show them as being subjugated by a higher power. In video games, Orcs are almost always under the control of Chaos agents, or Skaven, or even Eldar depending on the game. This has the effect of limiting the Orc’s potential as a threat and knowing that the twist is coming gets old after a while. The main villain at the end of Warhammer Quest is an Orc, and I was delighted to see that for once they’ve allowed the Orcs to have a leading antagonist role. Let the Orcs be the bad guys!

Where are the walls?

Elsewhere, I tried some hobby games with Jessie. The discovery for us this week was Magic Labyrinth, the game in which you search for treasure in a maze where you can’t see the walls. This is aimed at quite a young audience, but Kirsty and I have enjoyed it well in the past, and Jessie seemed to like it too. She loves treasure hunts, so it was an easy sell! I really like this game as it is a good balance of luck and skill: The maze is constructed prior to the game, but once it starts, you find the walls via trial and error, which is where the element of skill comes into it. As you can twist the board around before the game starts, you’ve got potentially eight variations of the two mazes it gives you, and it’s given you rules for constructing your own. Also, you use a 6-sided dice for movement, which adds a random element to the game. Magic Labyrinth was easy enough for Jessie to understand, but random enough that I wasn’t necessarily at an advantage for having played it before, and in fact Jessie won the game by collecting five treasures!

I mean who wouldn't want to see
what's in the box, at least...

We also had a go with Ninja Dice; this didn’t go so well as I haven’t played it before and wasn’t able to explain to Jessie how to play (she was allured by the admittedly brilliant “box” art!) So, she quickly became bored with Ninja Dice and we moved on to an old favourite: Dungeon Roll, where she gets equal enjoyment from playing the heroes hunting for treasure as the monsters defending it. I need to modify the rules down slightly for the game to work, but she loves the theme and understands the basic mechanics. Not bad for a four-year-old!