Messages

[SEARCH, KILL, DELIVER. SEARCH, KILL, DELIVER.]

1

TalkBack / Deadcraft (Switch) Review

« on: June 08, 2022, 06:22:43 PM »

SEARCH, KILL, DELIVER. SEARCH, KILL, DELIVER.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60625/deadcraft-switch-review

Ever since the release of the original Rune Factory game, developers have been trying to create the perfect balance of farming simulation and action. Marvelous’ First Studio, the company responsible for Daemon X Machina, is here to take their own stab and bite at the genre with the release of Deadcraft. Deadcraft takes place in a future where meteors have fallen from the sky and destroyed the earth, bringing with them a virus that raises the dead.  It’s Mad Max meets the Toxic Adventure with Harvest Moon gameplay and a dose of superhero abilities.

The characters are very in your face with their design, such as Brandon, the first main boss of the game, who has hair reminiscent of Akuma from Street Fighter and has staples in his face to keep his left eye open.  A good amount of the text is voice acted and the developers were clearly going for B-movie overacting given how over the top everything is. You play as Reid, a half man, half zombie, who is looking to exact revenge on Nebron, the post apocalyptic overlord who has kidnapped Reid’s best friend, Gene. The game opens with you getting cast out of the Ark with little to no health and no resources. You grab an ax, eat a dead rat, and get started on your epic adventure.

Deadcraft has all the makings of your basic survival game. You have a hunger meter that you need to keep filled by eating rats and eventually food you can grow in your garden. There’s also the thirst meter that you keep filled by drinking a sludge material that actually damages you as well until you learn to make aqua cola.  You also have an energy meter that slowly depletes every time you take an action. If it runs out, you start losing life. In order to get that back up, you’ll have to eat certain cooked foods or rest at your residence. You can rest for any amount of time and get all of your health and energy back up—just make sure you have filled up your hunger and thirst meter.  These hunger and thirst meters don’t really affect you too much after a while since you can improve them fairly early through the upgrade system.

To put a spin on the survival genre there is also the zombie meter. The zombie meter acts as a magic point bar of sorts. The more you use your zombie abilities, the more human you become. The zombie meter takes the appearance of your character’s face, where half of it will look zombified and become more or less so depending on what you do and eat.  If you go full zombie, you will move slower and will be attacked once you enter a town or pass by any human character. When you have used up all of your zombie power, you will become completely human: your defense increases, and your life bar shrinks. This gives the game a cool system to play around with while you are fighting hordes of the undead. There are also specific food items that will increase or decrease your zombie meter.

The first place you go to in the game is the slums, where you will run into a shady character named Vernon. He asks you to rescue an even weirder character, Zombie Gramps. This is the first mission you have to complete in the game. Vernon is the one who will give you the main missions, and Zombie Gramps will help you upgrade your zombie abilities. One of the major missteps of Deadcraft is the story progression and mission completion. In the first couple hours, everything seems to be going very smoothly and it seems like you will head to the Ark in no time.  Unfortunately, the missions take a turn, and for the next few hours you are just doing fetch quests, which get tedious very quickly. Once you do enough quests you get to fight a boss and move on to the next area, where you will find more things to collect and craft with. Hooray? The experience eventually devolves into an endless loop of search, kill, deliver, search, kill, deliver.

A lot of these quests also involve creating specific equipment at your residence. You have an area on the map by your house where you can farm and create machines. You can unlock the abilities to create these machines by getting skill points. You can earn skill points by doing basically anything in the game, which is cool as you will get points for killing zombies, cooking food, finishing missions, etc., which helps with the game’s sense of progression. You can make so many different machines, like water filtration machines, smelters, metal cutters, and more. Each of these machines will require a certain number of resources that you need to collect along the way. These resources appear at random on the main hub but can become a pain when you are looking for one specific thing in particular.  You can buy some of these resources from the slums, but they will only sell a certain number at a time and will only restock once per in-game week. This cadence will leave you scouring the map for weeks to just get one thing to progress the story, making the game feel like a bit of a slog.

As far as the farming is concerned, you can create fields at your residence and buy seeds from the slums just like any other farming sim game. You have to till the soil and water the crops whenever they need it one square at a time. Thankfully, you can upgrade your skills to where you can till and water an entire field with a single button press. You can also alter your produce by watering the crops with zombie blood instead of aqua cola, which creates a zombie version of the food that you can use to fill up your life meter and increase your zombie meter. There are also zombie versions of practically all of the machines you can create for great bonus effects. You can make weapons out of the zombie parts; you can even grow zombies in your garden. The zombies you grow can be made into bazooka units for some of the tower defense parts of the game (yes, they have those, too), or you can use them as a Pikmin-esque army that will follow you into battle and defend your honor at any cost.

Deadcraft can be really fun at times. The story, setting, and overacting will really grab you if you are into the low budget monster films of yore. Just be ready to do a lot of search and fetch quests. These can really slow down the pacing, but when the adventure gets going, it can be a bloody good zombie killing/farming time.

[Afterlife difficulties.]

2

TalkBack / 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure (Switch) Review

« on: May 16, 2022, 09:42:46 AM »

Afterlife difficulties.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60464/8doors-arums-afterlife-adventure-switch-review

Have you ever wondered what happens when you die? 8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure will answer that very question as you explore through the afterlife according to Korean mythology. The story begins with Arum’s dad dying in a peculiar way that makes her question the reason for his death. Protagonist Arum dives into the depths of the afterlife in search of her father’s spirit.  You will search through various parts of the afterlife, or Purgatory to be exact, to figure out what has happened with your missing father. On the way, you get to see the whole process of how souls are judged and categorized, i in addition to meeting some interesting beings along the way.

8Doors will seem very familiar to fans of Hollow Knight, and it follows a lot of the same structure in which you have to find someone to buy a map from in each area instead of the map filling in itself as you go. Instead of earning experience points, you purchase your upgrades with in-game currency gained from defeating specters.  8Doors is very much a Metroidvania; you explore eight connected realms, picking up various tools and skills in each to get you to the next part.  You have what is called a “face plate” which gets filled in with different abilities that you unlock from each defeated boss. You can also unlock other upgrade points by finding hidden shrines in the game or from reaping a certain number of lost souls spread out through the realms. You can use these points to buy perks, which are other lesser buffs like higher damage or defense.

The presentation of the game is great. All of the characters look hand drawn and have a very fluid animation. The music is very fitting and moody for each situation and area. The art style for each realm is different enough so that each one has its own unique feel and design. What’s really captivating is that the afterlife isn’t portrayed in the way you would think; there is no fire and brimstone or endless clouds as far as the eye can see. This afterlife is more like the real world. Here, you have to get a number at the counter and wait to see what your future may hold. It’s reminiscent of businesses in the real world where you might lose a soul because they weren’t properly filed or their name was misspelled. This adds extra personality and enjoyment to the system of how the afterlife is run and how Arum’s Father went missing in the first place. The story stays gripping enough that you will want to try your hardest to get to the end to see who has been corrupting the afterlife and messing up the filing system.

Throughout the adventure, the enemies that Arum runs into will remind her, “Death is inevitable.” This couldn’t be any closer to the truth. 8Doors is incredibly hard, and the difficulty spikes as early as the first boss. Challenging games can be fun and rewarding when you take the time to learn the attack patterns of each boss character, but the problem here is that a lot of the challenge comes from unfair game mechanics more than the bosses themselves. The further you get into the game, the farther apart the checkpoints are from the challenging areas or bosses. It can get really irritating when you have to navigate multiple environmental hazards on the way to a boss that you are expected to play over and over again. This can get very tedious, very quickly, and you really have to have a lot of patience to persevere.  There is an easy mode called “story mode,” but I could see people getting just as stuck on that as well if the checkpoints are as sparse as they are in the normal mode.

Thankfully, there are some warping areas; the problem is they only exist in one spot in each of the areas, making it very difficult to move through them quickly, so backtracking continues to be more of a chore than a fun exploration. It really would have benefitted the game if you were able to earn a way to at least teleport between the save stations that you had discovered. I found myself in some areas saving by a teleport and then teleporting to the area where the boss was because the save point was so far away in that particular realm and the hazards you had to go through weren’t worth repeating. That is where the big problem is. Instead of being able to go and find an area to grind in when you get stuck on a boss, you’re trapped wherever a given checkpoint is, which basically halts your progress in the game. Going all the way back to find the warp area is too treacherous, so you just have to throw yourself at the boss and the hazards along the way over and over again until you emerge triumphant or get bored and quit. This issue can result in multiple hours spent on one boss that could be taken out more easily if you had better access to the upgrade area.

8Doors doesn’t really stick the landing at the end, either. Most of the weapons are animated well and move in the way you expect except for the last one you get, which is a traditional fan. You use the fan to create wind that damages enemies. The animation for this is so stilted that it really feels like it was tacked on without the care that the other weapons received. There are also so many puzzles involved around the fan that become all the more frustrating because of the way its integration was handled. For example, you use the fan to make another fan move, which creates a platform around a spikey area so you can progress. So you have to jump, activate the fans, wall jump, dodge, and double jump; doing all of these together just doesn’t feel as fluid as it could be. On top of all this, there are parts in the game where the platforming can get very frustrating. For instance, in the latter half of the game there are a lot of sections where there are jumps where you have to reach the full extent of your jump each time to progress. There isn’t much margin for error, so it’s easy to mess up. This can become incredibly frustrating when you have to get across a large area with no save points, and this level design comes up a lot especially toward the end.

8Doors takes about 15 hours straight through, depending on how long you get stuck on each of the bosses. If you like the challenge of the game, there are plenty of additional bosses to find and beat in order to get the “true ending.” There are definitely some spots towards the end that feel like they were just thrown in to add some extra padding, like repeating quests you’ve already completed and even having to replay a boss fight. It can really take you out of the moment and halt the flow of the game. With the long distance between save points, difficult bosses, and sometimes frustrating platforming, this game will really make you ponder how much suffering you are willing to endure to reach full enlightenment.

[Let’s kill Hitler for the fourth time.]

3

TalkBack / Zombie Army 4: Dead War

« on: April 22, 2022, 06:00:00 AM »

Let’s kill Hitler for the fourth time.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60242/zombie-army-4-dead-war

Zombie Army 4: Dead War is the fourth installment in the Zombie Army series, which is a spin off of the Sniper Elite Series. Sounds like a lot right? Thankfully, you don’t need to know all of the back story of the three earlier games or anything from Sniper Elite to jump into it because Dead War brings you up to speed with a wrap up video at the beginning that is a mixture of found footage and clips from the previous games. The story takes place in an alternate history where when Germany was losing World War II, Hitler resurrected the dead in order to level the playing field.  After Hitler was killed off in the first trilogy, the Nazi Zombie Army continued to lay waste to the world with no expected end. That’s where you come in! The main mission of the game is to find the source of these Zombies and close it up.

Zombie Army 4 is a third-person survival horror/action game where you destroy hordes of zombies in order to go from Point A to Point B. There are eight different characters to choose from, and each has their own strengths and weaknesses; for instance, June is fast yet has weak melee attacks, and Karl has increased critical hit chance but slower health regeneration. The game is playable online with up to four players or local as well if you have four switches and four copies of the game.  Unfortunately, there weren’t any multiplayer lobbies available at the time of review, but hopefully there will be a decent player base after launch.

Thankfully, the solo mode is just as fun as the multiplayer would be. The basic layout of every level is fairly simple: you start in a safe zone where you make the necessary preparations (collecting ammo, med-packs, grenades, etc.). Once you leave the safe zone, you fight your way through hordes of zombies and get to the next safe zone. There are three weapon types in the game: sniper, secondary, and pistol. You alternate through these on the fly and try to balance out the amount of ammo you have in order to survive to the next area. There are upgrades you can get either through acquiring an item in the level, leveling up, or doing specific things with that weapon, like getting a specific number of headshots. There is an arcade feel to the experience, where one main mechanic is getting combos and scoring multipliers depending on how many zombies you can shoot in a row. The number of points you gain translates to experience points that award level-ups and the ability to customize your character.

In terms of performance, the game runs really well on the Nintendo Switch. There aren’t any noticeable frame problems in docked or handheld mode. This is good since the Zombie Army 4 is so fast paced; when you die you only have yourself to blame. The game has great gyro aiming that can help you tilt to get that satisfying head shot, too! It has a good pick-up-and-play feeling, which works great for on-the-go gaming.  

Each level has four parts to it with a boss style event at the end. The inter chapters of the levels could be completed in 15-30 minutes. There are generous checkpoints as well. While the premise may seem simple, Zombie Army 4 does a great job of keeping things from getting stale through level variety and a wide range of zombie types. The levels are enjoyable and unique; you go to an abandoned zoo infested with zombies, fight on a boat through a canal, and battle at an abandoned train station. Each level has a cool grindhouse style movie poster with a credit block at the bottom and a recognizable font.

Just like the zombies ooze with blood after a well-placed headshot, the game itself oozes with style. The way the levels are designed and the amount of gore used in each and every zombie death show how the developers are leaning into the horror genre. The soundtrack is great as well, with eerie synthesizer beats that make you feel like you are in a classic ‘80s movie, even though it takes place in the ‘40s. There’s a decided fear factor to the experience, too. There is a level where all the lights are out and you have only the flashlight attached to your gun to see with. As you move through this warehouse in the dark searching for fuses to get the power back on, these xenomorph-looking zombies called creepers attack you from the ground and crawl in through the vents.  Before you know it, you will be grasping the controller with white knuckles trying to survive enough to make it to the next safe zone.

This is a Switch port of the original PC game, which came out two years ago. It could be easy to balk at the value proposition here for a two-year-old game, but fortunately this version comes with all the DLC from the first season. Hopefully there will be access to the already released season 2 and 3 after the official launch date. As of right now there are new weapons and characters  shown as DLC but are not accessible. If you have already bought the game on Steam, you can import your save to the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, there is no cross play. The regular campaign will run you about 10-12 hours; plus there are an additional three missions of DLC you get to play after you beat the main campaign.  Not to mention the horde mode, which is an endless onslaught of enemies where you just mow down wave after wave of zombies to gain a high score and challenge your friends in multiplayer. There are a multitude of different maps to play in this mode, from snowy mountains to hell itself.

Playing Zombie Army 4 was a really great experience.  The campaign stayed fresh from beginning to end with a fantastic climax. The additional levels from the included DLC are just as gripping as well. It’s a great game that you can play solo or with friends, and it does a great job combining horror and action.  If the online ends up working as well as the offline does when the game releases, you will lose loads of hours in this world. With all of the customization that you can do for multiple characters, weapons, and abilities with much more paid DLC to come, it’s easy to imagine sinking tons of hours and bullets into this never-ending zombie war.

[Quantum Leap Meets Chibi-Robo or Time Cop Tinkertoys?]

4

TalkBack / Time Loader (Switch) Review

« on: March 28, 2022, 11:18:43 AM »

Quantum Leap Meets Chibi-Robo or Time Cop Tinkertoys?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60039/time-loader-switch-review

When I first saw a trailer for Time Loader on the eShop, I was intrigued. A Switch port of the Steam version that launched in 2021, it looked like a puzzle-based Metroidvania involving time paradoxes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite come together as well as advertised. The game does have a very interesting premise, though: it begins with a wheelchair bound scientist feeling regret that he never became the professional baseball star that he always wanted to be. You see him tripping over a toy car when he was young, which resulted in an accident causing him to lose the use of his legs. He has been spending years trying to find a way to go back in time and fix this accident. He creates a crude machine that consists of a claw and wheels. This machine gets sent back in time with a fancy time microwave, and that is how the game opens.

It’s a pretty cool setup and you can already feel the comparisons to something like the sci-fi show Quantum Leap.  I was excited to move a little robot through a house to save the future of this scientist. It turns out, though, that the game is not exactly what it seems. First off, the robot moves painstakingly slowly, making the game feel like such a slog from the very beginning. There is no speed upgrade, so you are stuck with that for the whole game; patience is essentially a requirement. The graphics leave a lot to be desired as well. The art design consists a very basic style completely devoid of textures. The house that you move around in seems quite bland because of this.  It would have been much more immersive if there were wool textures to give you the feel of the softness of a couch or a wood grain on the shelves in the basement.

The premise of Time Loader starts off with a mission to find and destroy each thing that will cause the scientist’s tragic accident to happen. Once you dispose of one thing, another becomes the cause, and this continues until you get rid of all the possible threats. For example, the original accident was caused by a child tripping on the race car; once that car is eliminated, it shows that the child will still fall from getting electrocuted by the lights on the roof. So the next objective is that you have to find a way to turn off the electricity and so on. Once you find out that eliminating the target object doesn’t fix the future, you get to continue on from where you were. This is a plus since you don’t have to repeat the whole first part again. Time Loader drops you right into the action, literally. There is a running joke about you losing your wheels because of this drop in. You don’t really get a whole lot of direction aside from a goal arrow and things you can interact with being highlighted with a box, or a circle for the things you can swing from. The basic gameplay is solving mouse-trap style puzzles to get from Point A to Point B. The problem is that a lot of these puzzles are either badly designed or the answer doesn’t make sense. I found myself just pushing the machine up against walls to see if I could climb over it. A lot of times you can just climb over things, but that didn’t feel like the way that the game wanted me to do it. It doesn’t really explain what can be climbed over and what can’t, so I found myself glitching through some things when I couldn’t figure out the puzzle.

The movement feels really clunky, too. There was one puzzle where I had to push all of the drawers of a dresser at different times so that a can could fall through to the bottom. You have to push one drawer and then jump to the other to push the next one before it comes back. I found that the controls and jump were so floaty and unresponsive that it took me forever to just jump to each of the levels. This made the game much more painful to go through. Compounding this is that some of the puzzles are simply confusing. There was one that I got stuck on and it turned out that I could just drive the robot through a small tunnel that I couldn’t even see.  I had to look that up because there were no hints pushing me in that direction.

All in all, the story, even with some unexpected turns, still comes out fairly predictable. There is a part at the end that makes it feel like the gameplay is going to change in a very exciting way, but ultimately it still turns out just like any other chapter. If the game would have truly delivered on that tantalizing promise, it would have felt like a more memorable experience.

The running time is around five hours, and there are four different endings depending on how much you do in the final act. The game was already getting really frustrating with the clunky platforming by the third chapter, so it was really a massive slog at the end. By the time you reach the end there isn’t much of a reason to go back and try for the other endings since they aren’t that much different. There are some cool ideas here, but the execution never fully loads in.

[An anti-phone adventure that’s light on gameplay time yet heavy on heart.]

5

TalkBack / Land of Screens (Switch) Review

« on: March 12, 2022, 05:15:13 PM »

An anti-phone adventure that’s light on gameplay time yet heavy on heart.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/59898/land-of-screens-switch-review

In a screen-dominated world where games fight over which has the most content or longest campaign, Land of Screens was a breath of fresh air. Land of Screens is a charming point and click/visual novel. The story starts off with the main character, Holland, getting dumped by her boyfriend of five years, Brian. Holland is having a bad time relaxing once she finds out that Brian has posted this break up on social media. In an attempt to make herself feel better and distract herself from the comment section, she calls her old best friend from High School, Cody, and the adventure begins from there. From being somewhat of an anti-phone/screen person myself, this game really hit home for me. The gameplay in itself is pretty simple, all you really need to do is move the main character around and interact with the people around you. After Holland’s anxiety peaks from social media and losing her phone charger, she decides to find ways in every scenario to get people off of their phones.

The presentation is great, and the art design is great in its simplicity. The character design really sticks out as they are flat images on a 3D background. It almost reminds me of a more modern looking Paper Mario game.  The characters move fluently and the animation is top notch. There is a fixed camera angle perspective where you can only go left, right, forward, or back somewhat like an old beat ‘em up game. As far as the story goes, I thought it was really well written. I was laughing out loud at some of the things the characters were saying and I was into it for the entire two-hour anti-phone adventure. The quest of finding ways to lure people away from their phones in each chapter is very endearing. For example, at one point in the game you end up at a concert where you have to convince fans of the band to put their phones away or the band won’t play a very special acoustic encore! You even get to settle an online battle on a message board for the band that is happening between two people only a few feet away from each other! It’s really interesting how they get you into a situation in each chapter where you have to separate people from their phones.

The major negative (or maybe positive) thing about the game is that the length is fairly short. Some of my favorite games are 100+ hours and I find it very hard to finish any of them because of that. Sometimes games of that size can overstay their welcome, but Land of Screens feels just right. The price of the game fits the size at its budget price. For me, every chapter was the right length and felt important to the story. It was a great modern tale of trying to find human connection again after everyone in each scenario has been taken over by their screens, which feels like it’s becoming a fairly universal theme.

Should you find yourself looking for something to take you away from your own mobile screen (not the Switch screen, of course), give Land of Screens a look. It is on the short side, but the story is heartfelt and incredibly charming. You can play through any of the chapters a second time if you so choose, even though there isn’t much of a reason to do so. I could only think of a couple of times where you can make a choice in the game and the only thing it would affect is a handful of dialogue responses. As far as I know there aren’t any alternate endings, so there isn’t much of a reason to play through it again. It did leave me interested in the other games from the publisher already available on the eShop. If you are looking for a chill, short, impactful game with a great story,  Land of Screens comes highly recommended.

6

TalkBack / Re: Bloodrayne Revamped (Switch) Review

« on: March 08, 2022, 12:30:54 AM »

I completely agree with this! I really enjoy playing retro games on Switch, especially Retro First or third person shooters. I was excited about trying out this one. Unfortunately it ended being more of a hack and slash with shooter elements than a full blown third person shooter. Also no saving at any time! WTF!