Been playing
Rodea: The Sky Soldier from 2015. The original one, on Wii.
So this is Yuji Naka's swan song on Wii, and in Japan it's even the final game on that system since Ubisoft doesn't grant them yearly Just Dance instalments. It took forever to come out (I don't think it ever got a stand-alone release here, just as a bonus disc with the Wii U game of the same name), and spoiler alert, it wasn't quite worth the wait.
Note: there's 3 Rodea games in total. This one on Wii which is Yuji Naka's original vision, a 3DS game which is pretty different, and a Wii U game which is basically an up-port of the 3DS one. The Wii U/3DS games aren't as well-regarded.Rodea on Wii's a rather wonky and uneven game in which you play as a robot, you fly through the air and collect
rings gems, occassionally grind rails, punch bosses in their glowing weak spots, and skip through story beats.
Consider what a combination of NiGHTS Into Dreams... and a 3D Sonic game would look like, and you're pretty close here. It's a Wiimote-only game, where you point at where you want to go, press B to zip to it, and maybe press A to use an attack while going there. This results in a game largely revolving around 2 things: keeping up momentum to stay airbourne (see NiGHTS), and locking onto enemies/objects and using a homing attack to knock 'em out (see Sonic).
The Good:+ The stages are decently laid out for what they want you to do here. You keep pointing into the screen, so it makes sense the levels are narrow on both the X and Y-axis, but they stretch far into your Z-axis.
+ There's a general upbeat vibe, with colourful levels and a somewhat simple, arcadey quality that keeps drawing you in.
+ Levels are around 15 minutes long, meaning shorter play sessions are accomodated for.
+ NIS America provides both a Japanese and English dub. Switched to Japanese immediately after the tutorial, the voices are insufferable.
+ Every cut-scene and instance of dialogue is mercifully skippable.
The Bad:- The story is laughably generic. Amnesia, robots with a heart, etc. Could be a Saturday morning cartoon.
- Every character is dumb, states the obvious, and the jokes are bad.
- Characters designs have that distinct Beyblade quality about them. (By which I mean a distinct lack of quality.)
- Camera controls are bad. Pointer used both for camera & movement, so it's always behind you. Turning is a real slog.
- Bossfights are severely hampered by the camera issues, because you can't quickly turn/look behind you to switch targets.
- No checkpoints during bossfights. The final one is 15+ minutes.
The only reason I'm posting this in the 'playing' thread rather than the 'beaten' thread is because I can't beat the final boss after 90 minutes of trying (for reference, that accounts for ~20% of my total playtime!!!). The game suddenly wants precision and high-speed turning from you, when neither of these are easily done with its controls.
Maybe I'll magically ace it in one go next time I try, that tends to happen to me sometimes, but it's definitely souring my opinion on the game a little.
Rating: 2½/5 stars, cautiously recommended, provided you're the kind of person who looks at NiGHTS or Billy Hatcher and thinks "huh, could be interesting." For what it's worth, this is at least
much better than NiGHTS on Wii, but it's not great either. I wanted to like this more.
Topic: What are you playing? (Read 809920 times)
