Category: games

I played a lot of Wolfenstein and Dark Forces as a kid, so I appreciate the retro design decisions made in Project Warlock. This is a great example of a classic PC shooter, right down to the beautifully janky graphics and secret walls that require spamming the action button. I enjoyed Project Warlock quite a bit, but that’s only because I powered through the game’s lackluster first act. Level 1 is an especially bad first impression where you’re expected to make do with a handful of melee weapons amid some pretty grating music. And the boss of the first act can feel extremely unfair if you didn’t have the foresight to buy the right spell or weapon upgrades leading into it.

The second act onward, however, is much better. The music and sound effects are still hit and miss, but the action is great. The game starts dumping lots of cool weapons on you, and the upgrade points start paying off in noticeable ways. I’m glad that the difficulty didn’t scale in such a way where you always feel like you’re behind. I definitely felt stronger as the game progressed, despite levels throwing more and bigger enemies at me. The last act is particularly insane when the game just tosses in every enemy you’ve ever seen since Level 1, but now you’ve got laser guns and rocket launchers to mow them down with. It’s an exhilarating experience through and through.

This is quite possibly the most Rareware game that wasn’t actually made by Rare or former Rare developers. Even the music sounds a lot like the Rare platformers of the N64 era. I like to imagine that Super Lucky’s Tale is the kid-friendly Conker game we never got to see. But just because it looks and feels like a Rare game doesn’t mean it’s as good as truer Rare clones like Yooka-Laylee. Compared to that and other modern 3D platformers, this one’s a little weak. The level design, puzzles, and boss fights simply lack creativity and cleverness. Sure, you can still have fun with something that doesn’t push any boundaries (I have), but that leads into the bigger issue with Lucky’s Tale: the friggin’ camera.

Weirdly, the camera is mostly fixed. You can only rotate it 2-3 clicks to the left or right, if at all. This means the game is very forward-moving; you’re not meant to backtrack or explore every nook and cranny. And you can forget about tilting upwards or downwards, making it hard to judge the distance between you and the floating bee in front of you. Why would you make a 3D game but make navigating its 3D world so restrictive? Maybe this is why they periodically threw in a 2D level, almost like an apology. But the 2D levels are even less fun, because Lucky still moves like he was intended to be in a 3D world. Man, this game would have been great if it was more open. It’s really polished in every other aspect. But the camera design is a total bummer.

I first tried DeathSpank years ago and gave up on it early on, because the advertised humor and co-op gameplay were not that great. Player 2 plays a very limited role, and it felt like the majority of the humor boiled down to, “His name’s DeathSpank! Isn’t that funny? He wears a thong! Ha, ha, ha!” But after giving the game another try as a single-player experience, I grew to really like it. The joke writing improves a lot the further you get into the game, and the action RPG mechanics remain fun and engaging throughout. So of course I immediately jumped into the Thongs of Virtue sequel after beating the first game. Alas, the sequel is not as good, but I still liked it enough to play ’til the end.

The main problem with Thongs of Virtue is that it simply tries to do too much. Where DeathSpank 1 excelled at being a riff on the fantasy genre, DeathSpank 2 lampoons everything. It’s got World War II soldiers, pirates, robots, old Western saloons, space aliens, and Santa’s reindeer. I understand wanting to go all out for a sequel, but the downside is that there’s no unifying theme. It’s just a bunch of random ideas all thrown in the same pot. Because of this hodgepodge of themes, there’s a bigger variety of items and weapons. Unfortunately, they fill up your inventory super fast. Inventory management wasn’t a big deal in DeathSpank 1, but it’ll consume a lot of your time in the sequel.

The sequel is also harder in general, especially in the first few areas. Coming straight from the first game, the difficulty spike is somewhat welcome. However, what makes the game harder is that too many enemies have long-range weapons. I was getting really frustrated trying to escape from every other flamethrower, machine gun, or bow and arrow. It wasn’t until I found a decent long-range weapon myself in the form of a raygun that the difficulty leveled out, and I started really enjoying the latter half of the game. So yes, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in this DeathSpank sequel. But the entry price for said fun requires you to have a love for the first game and a willingness to tough out a somewhat annoying opening act.

Spyro was one of those franchises I missed out on due to being a Nintendo fanboy. I had listened to the games’ soundtracks a lot, though, so a big part of the enjoyment I got out of this Reignited Trilogy was experiencing the music in its original context. Spyro has some awesome music, by the way. I don’t know if anything else about Spyro would be considered as timeless, so the full-blown remake of these games is entirely justified. But wow, they really went all out. The Reignited Trilogy looks and controls great, as great as any other modern 3D platformer. I frequently forgot I was playing what is technically a PS1 game.

The novelty of a spit-polished Spyro does wear off, though, when you start to realize that the gameplay between all three titles doesn’t really change much. Spyro 1 was perhaps the most fun, simply because it was my first official introduction to the franchise. Spyro 1 is also the most streamlined, being a straight-up platformer with few to no gimmicks. Spyro 2 is where things start to crumble, as the franchise tried to pull a Banjo-Kazooie and introduced a lot of unnecessary and borderline aggravating mini-games. Spyro 3 doubles down on the gimmicks but is more enjoyable than Spyro 2 overall.

Frankly, this trilogy might have been too much all at once. I could see Spyro being loads of fun if you had 1-2 years in between games. Getting all three in a bundle means you can finish one and immediately jump into the next without missing a beat. Because the gameplay is so samey, though, the levels start to blend together, and the “you picked up a gem” sound effect becomes super grating. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved my time with these games and consider this one of the best things to come out of 2019. If anything, it’s my own fault for rushing through the games as quickly as I did. But it’s hard to have any restraint when a company gives you such a well-crafted remake.

Link’s Awakening for the Switch is everything a remake should be. It’s more or less the same game as the original GameBoy release (as far as I can remember), but better in every way. Since it was on GameBoy and hasn’t received the same re-release attention that other games like A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time have received, I haven’t played it in at least 20 years. My only complaint about the game is the price, but more about that in a moment. Nintendo applied the almost toy-like aesthetic to this game that makes it easily the cutest game I’ve ever played. They even added some new features too, like the fishing and dungeon building (Is the fishing new?) that I enjoyed. The gameplay and story are much sillier and more fun than any other Zelda game and the cameos of chain chomps, goombas, thwomps, piranha plants, and even Kirby add a lot of charm.

I really can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed playing this short and easy game. That’s the real kicker. $60 for a game I was able to get 100% completed in a week worth of moderate to light gaming time seems like too much. That being said, my 7-year-old has played through it twice, my 14-year-old has beat it and even my wife fell in love with and played through the whole campaign. When I look at it from that perspective, that $60 went a lot further than most of the video games I purchase. Is it fun and worth playing? Yes. It worth $60? Well, that’s up to you.

Once again, Steam has swooped in to provide a way for me to experience classic games I missed out on years ago. The downside to these re-releases is that some of the mechanics definitely feel dated. For instance, the real-time battle system of Symphonia, while way more engaging than your usual turn-based fare, veers on the clunkier side. It takes several hours to get used to and good at it. Unfortunately, the first several hours of battling also comprise some of the harder boss fights. It isn’t until your party gets a competent healer that battles start to feel even remotely fair. I came close to giving up many times, because over-relying on healing items seemed like an inefficient strategy going into a 40-hour long RPG.

But then the character, Raine, learns some kickass healing spells, and all’s right in the world again. Well, in Tales of Symphonia, nothing’s really right in the world. This is one of those RPGs where the story’s constantly blowing up with twists and double-crosses. It’s weird, because the first third of the game focuses on how important Colette is, but she becomes a total non-character after a while. Symphonia suffers from too many characters who stop serving a purpose early on and then become dead weight. I was actually getting annoyed by the game continually setting up what felt like an ending only to introduce more characters and more towns and more dungeons. Symphonia certainly wears out its welcome, but I still had fun with it for the most part.