Author: Clark

I like to think I’m no prude. I’ve played games like Conker’s Bad Fur Day and The Stick of Truth and found them to be amusing. But the humor in Spiral Scouts was really off-putting. There’s one joke in particular about a guy who literally humps his wife to death after drinking a Viagra-like elixir. After that scene, I just couldn’t find anything about the game funny. Fortunately, scenes like this only play out as dialogue. But the dialogue in Spiral Scouts is so juvenile. Like, this is the kind of dialogue you would expect from a preteen who just discovered how to swear. It tries way too hard to be edgy.

Honestly, I would have liked the game a lot more (and I think it would have been more successful) if it had gone for a more Paper Mario-like sense of humor. I mean, they already nailed the art style. This game looks fantastic. But unless you’re going to go uber violent with it a la Happy Tree Friends, trying to adult-ify something like Paper Mario just doesn’t work. The sex and drug jokes fall flat every time, and none of the characters are likable since they only act as a conduit for the humor. The main character’s personality constantly changes depending on who she’s talking to and which jokes she needs to say next.

I still powered through the entire game, though, because I enjoyed the puzzles for the most part. Deceptively, this is not an adventure game but rather a series of unrelated puzzles. You can tackle these puzzles in any order, abandon one halfway through if you get stuck, and go find another puzzle to muse over. While many of the puzzles are pretty fun to figure out, just as many require note-taking and memorization. Yep, I had to have a pen and paper nearby, which is never my preference for video games. So that part of Spiral Scouts isn’t perfect, either. It’s a very hit-and-miss kind of experience that seems to actively try to get you to dislike it.

Here’s another gem I missed the first (and second) time around. Though I feel like waiting for an HD remaster was the right call. The art style had always intrigued me about Okami—screenshots of the game are absolutely gorgeous—but seeing it in action is a different story. Even in HD, the janky cel-shaded graphics can be a bit of an eyestrain. Coupled with a claustrophobic camera, Okami can be physically uncomfortable to play. It took a few hours for me to get used to it. I was never inclined to abandon the game, though. 3D adventures a la Zelda are kind of my thing, after all.

And, oh boy, this is quite the adventure. The map feels both small and maintainable yet large and full of secrets. I was continually surprised by how much the world opens up. Early on, there’s a lot of importance placed on defeating a certain monster, but defeating him only marks the halfway point, and suddenly you have 15 more hours of adventuring to do. My favorite village came immediately after this halfway point, where I lost track of time running errands for the townsfolk. Like any good Zelda game, there’s a great mix of village side questing and dungeon exploring.

That halfway point does deflate the story, though. I lost interest in the stakes shortly afterwards and started fast-forwarding dialogue much more often. This game is really wordy. I don’t know what it is about Japanese adventure games that feel the need to spell everything out to you, like Zelda reminding you what a rupee is every time you pick one up. Similarly, your side character in Okami will not shut up and spoils every puzzle before you’ve had a chance to solve it on your own. But despite the overbearing hand-holding, this is a fun game that any Zelda fan will find a lot to like about.

I was a big fan of N64 shooters back in the day, but I totally missed out on the Turok franchise. So I enjoyed playing Turok 2 on Steam for no other reason than to catch up on its historical significance. It’s hard for me to recommend the game to others, though, because I had a lot of issues with it. The level design, for instance, is absolutely maddening. Each level is a friggin’ maze, and if you don’t take the time to explore every path, you’ll miss a key that’s needed to unlock the next level. I had to run through Level 2 end-to-end at least four times to find one of these keys. Fortunately, when you backtrack, most enemies are forever gone, but the game still respawns a handful of monsters just to seemingly annoy you.

To be fair, the combat in Turok 2 is pretty intense and has some fun guns. Watching a cerebral bore tear apart a monster’s head is satisfying, even with the chunky graphics. The problem is that it has too many guns. I hated having to cycle through so many options just to keep using my 3-4 favorites. What’s worse is that each gun doesn’t hold much ammo. So in a big gunfight, your go-to weapon will run out and auto-switch to the next one, which probably isn’t very helpful in your current situation, and then you’ll waste several seconds trying to get to the right weapon. It was kind of a frustrating experience, to be honest, and yet I’m glad I played it. This was probably an amazing game when it originally came out. It’s fun to relive those N64 glory days, warts and all.

It’s been far too long since I last played a good tower defense hybrid. Hypercharge has certainly piqued my interest in this niche genre again, though the game calling itself “tower defense” is a little misleading. Tower building is the least important and least satisfying part of the game. The thing is, you’re very limited as to where you can place towers. The more useful and interesting towers cost too much money and use up battery power that’s better saved for your cores’ shields. And towers are easily destroyed by mobs, thus making you feel like you should have splurged on weapon upgrades instead. There’s even one level that has no tower placement whatsoever, turning Hypercharge into the first-person shooter that it ultimately is.

When viewed as an FPS platformer with very light TD elements, though, Hypercharge is pretty fun. The toy theme alone is absolutely charming. I really enjoyed exploring the house-themed levels, uncovering knock-off toy packages, and figuring out how to find/reach those special collectible medallions. If the game had more levels, I’d still be playing it today. I’m just not into redoing the same levels for a perfect score, especially since later levels throw in so many enemies that shoot back at you. Again, the game is totally a shooter trying to win you over with the promise of tower building. So if you’re a TD-or-bust kind of gamer, you’ll probably feel a bit swindled. But if you also enjoy shooting and platforming and co-op and ’90s toys, there’s plenty more to like about the game.

This is clearly an Uncharted knock-off, but since I’ve never owned a Playstation and never had the chance to play those games, I’m willing to let it slide. Deadfall Adventures is a serviceable action game that mixes shooting with puzzle solving. Both aspects can be fun when done right. Unfortunately, the game is kind of all over the place in terms of quality. The puzzles range from embarrassingly obvious to annoyingly vague. There’s even a friggin’ slider puzzle at one point. You know the developers are running out of ideas when they resort to slider puzzles. Your character has a notebook that you can reference for hints when you come across a difficult puzzle, but even with the hints, I still had to look up walkthrough videos to get past them.

As for the shooting, this also comes in two flavors. You’re either thrust into a showdown with a bunch of Nazis, or you’re fending off hordes of mummies. Let’s be real, though. Mummies are just naked zombies, and zombies are my least favorite video game monster. Thus, I really didn’t care for any section where I had to fight mummies. I did enjoy the gunfights with human opponents, especially when the game was gracious enough to momentarily lend me a sniper rifle. So, yeah, Deadfall Adventures has a lot of ups and downs. And if you’ve played the Uncharted games and/or maybe even several Tomb Raider games, the “ups” will feel even less impressive. Taken as a passable time-waster, however, Deadfall Adventures was good enough.