Category: games

I originally played this game on the Xbox 360 and didn’t get very far into it before giving up. When I restarted with the Switch version, I was hoping whatever qualms I may have had with Diablo III were fixed, but it didn’t take long for old “demons” to resurface. And the big problem I have with Diablo III is that it’s just too friggin’ easy. You can bump up the difficulty at any time and unlock harder difficulties as you progress, but it wasn’t until Master (three tiers up from Normal) that the game started feeling like a challenge. And even then, there wasn’t much of a penalty for dying. You can resurrect yourself after a 10-second cooldown and come right back without losing any progress.

Getting the difficulty right in games like this is tricky. If it’s too hard, it’s not fun. If it’s too easy, it’s not fun. But it honestly feels like Diablo III didn’t even try. On Master, I still rarely died, and knowing that I wouldn’t be set back if I did die caused me to not care as much about the majority of fights. It’s a shame, because everything else about the game is super polished. It looks great. It controls great. The spells and moves are fun to experiment with. There’s a lot of content and a lot of dungeons to explore. It supports local co-op! But it became a little too mindless. Don’t get me wrong, I like mindless hack-and-slashing. However, I also require the bare minimum in stakes if I’m going to stay invested.

Kirby Star Allies looked like it’d be a return to form for the pink puff, much like the Wii’s very excellent Return to Dreamland. The Wii entry is still the better game, though, for a few reasons. In Return to Dreamland, other players could still be Kirby. In Star Allies, only Player 1 gets to be Kirby, and it’s only Player 1’s death that matters. Extra lives are liberally handed out, though—my wife and I had over 100 extra lives by the end—and the game’s pretty easy, anyway, so there’s little threat of “losing.” Only the boss battles really pose a challenge, and they can easily be beat if Kirby just hangs out at the top of the screen while his 2-3 other minions… I mean, friends… finish off the baddies.

What made Return to Dreamland challenging, if you were looking for a challenge, was that some secrets couldn’t be obtained if you failed to hold onto a power-up long enough. In Star Allies, however, the game makes sure you don’t miss anything. Optional puzzle rooms give you everything you need, and not much thought is required to solve the problem at hand. Honestly, the best part of this game was after we beat it and opened up four bonus levels in “Another Dimension.” The puzzles here could be missed if you weren’t careful. The main game, however, was a button-mashing cakewalk that certainly oozed of cuteness and fun powers but was a pretty forgettable experience overall.

The difficulty of this game is an interesting story. Apparently the developer, after the game had already been released for a while, decided that “normal” was too easy after all and made a new difficulty setting called “souls.” The normal difficulty was then renamed to “toddler,” and souls became the new default. I did not realize this at first and was pretty flustered when my wife and I couldn’t even beat the second level. Downgrading to the toddler setting seemed a bit demeaning at first, but even toddler packs a wallop. Some levels still took us several tries to beat.

The thing about McDROID is that it’s crazy. The game will send hundreds of bugs towards your base, which, combined with the many explosions of your own weapons and towers, creates a chaotic cloud of noise that can be hard to make sense of. That’s not necessarily a complaint, though. McDROID is a lot of fun, and if you’ve been prepping your base and towers correctly, those final waves of chaos are fairly manageable. Harvesting strawberries as the game’s currency, spending special gems on extra robot buddies, or upgrading towers to the point where they take up half the screen are all rewarding elements.

So if you haven’t guessed yet, McDOID is another tower defense hybrid, but it’s very hands-on and action-oriented. You’ll spend just as much time collecting stuff around the map as you will tending to your towers and attacking the enemies yourself. Because the game is so big in scope, though, it’s no surprise that there are glitches. Online multiplayer frequently stopped responding for one player or the other, and even on the lowest graphical settings, certain maps were framerate deathbeds. But it’s easy to forgive such flaws when everything else about the game is an absolute delight.

I’ve seen a lot of other reviews compare Fortified to Orcs Must Die as if the developers should be ashamed of themselves for not having a more original idea. Here’s the thing, though: the world can’t have enough tower-defense hybrid games. It’s one of my favorite genres, so I’ll take an Orcs Must Die clone any day. In fact, I find the retro sci-fi aesthetic of Fortified to be a bit more endearing. Aliens, robots, cheesy dialogue, freeze rays, and WWII-style soldiers? Sign me up! Oh, more importantly, the game’s co-op, albeit online only. But tackling this with a partner is really fun.

What helps is the variety of “towers” you have to work with. Like Orcs Must Die, some of these are basically traps that are either one-time use or have a cooldown. Others are guns that will continue to shoot within a radius, or you can deploy troops who can be ordered to guard specific spots or follow you around the map. I felt like I had a lot of options as to how I wanted to approach each level, and I frequently needed to change up my strategy and restart. The difficulty was nicely balanced (when playing with two people) and kept my wife and I thoroughly entertained through all twelve levels.

I feel like a bit of a Xenoblade Chronicles apologist in that I’ve liked all of the games so far even when a lot of friends and family haven’t been able to get into them. The thing about these games—and XC2 in particular—is that you gotta get past the opening fluff before it really grabs you. In the case of XC2, that doesn’t happen until about 10+ hours into the game, which seems like a rather tall order to ask of someone. Unfortunately, the story is pretty dumb… and only gets dumber as the game progresses. I ended up skipping, like, 80% of all cutscenes. It was your typical JRPG melodrama with cringe-worthy, anime-style “humor,” and I just didn’t have the patience for it.

When it comes to Xenoblade Chronicles, though, I’m in it more for the combat and exploration over anything else. And once the game opens up and lets you start exploring, it really is awesome. There are so many different lands to visit, so many different towns to shop in, and so many different quests to complete. Yeah, a lot of the side quests boil down to “find this, kill that,” but many other quests tie into the unique personalities and abilities of the secondary Blade characters. I’ve ignored the main story for hours at a time as I chased down side quest requirements just to make my party’s Blades more powerful.

The Blade system is an interesting mechanic that’s both fun and annoying. Most Blade characters are summoned from “core crystals,” and it’s pure random luck which one you’re gonna get. For the longest time, my healer character was stuck with tank Blades, and my tank character had all of the low block-rate Blades. But with so many Blades and options, it does keep the battles from getting stale. You can always switch up people’s roles if you get bored and experiment with different moves, weapons, and elemental specials. I’ve always liked the XC battle system, and XC2 is no slouch. It’s a bit complicated, sure, but once you find the rhythm, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, even 60 hours in.

I frequently went from loving this game to hating it. The thing is, A Hat in Time is a fantastic 3D platformer… when it’s actually trying to be a 3D platformer. But more often than not, you get caught up in the game trying to be different and zany. And so we end up with really frustrating boss battles, annoying stealth missions, and one-off scenarios that attempt “cleverness” by putting you in a murder mystery or parade. These genre departures simply don’t work, though, and those were the moments where I was really not enjoying myself.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other sections where A Hat in Time is pure platforming gold that sees you scaling beautiful cliffs, effortlessly swinging across lava pits, and using newfound hat skills to discover rewarding secrets. World 4 in particular was a delight, because it was very open-ended and took place in a gorgeous setting reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda. Had the game been more of that instead of, say, World 2 (where you alternate between movie sets), this would have ranked as one of my all-time favorite platformers.

I get why the developers pushed so many new ideas into their project, though. Had they not, they would have risked A Hat in Time being labeled as yet another generic Mario or Banjo-Kazooie clone. It’s not like classic 3D platformers are a rarity anymore, with solid games like Poi and Yooka-Laylee already out in the wild. I’d rank A Hat in Time just below those two, but if you’re a long-time platformer fan, you’re still gonna find a lot to like about this one. Unfortunately, you’re also gonna find a lot to hat. I mean hate…