Category: games

Aka could have used a little more structure. It’s never very clear what you’re supposed to do. You start the game on a new island with an urn of your war friend’s ashes and the mission to spread these ashes on the highest mountain peak. It doesn’t take long to find this mountain and complete the quest, though, at which point, you might think, “Okay, now what…” I get that Aka is a casual game, so you could theoretically spend the rest of your time doing whatever you want. And by whatever, I mean farming. But the farming aspect has very little payoff. It’s not like you can sell the produce, so the main goal of farming is to make dragon food to fulfill an optional quest about baby dragons. Unfortunately, you have to make a lot of dragon food to get anywhere with this quest. You will most likely have exhausted everything else there is to do long before then.

So the real objective in Aka is actually to help several ghosts who are byproducts of the war. I do like how such a seemingly cute game on the outside has a fairly dark story about war and death. Many of the ghosts you meet are people you failed to protect in said war, after all. Once you realize the ghosts should be your focus, it’s not a terrible gameplay loop to track them down and meet their demands. It’s just a little annoying that the ghosts only come out at night, leaving you with nothing to do during the daylight hours. I mean, yeah, there’s always the garden, but gardening sucks. And most other quests boil down to repetitive busywork, like cleaning up the same three types of garbage on all four islands. Again, the game gives you the tools to play indefinitely, but it fails to also give you any reason why you would want to.

Kena has a bit of an identity crisis. The art style and overall presentation make it seem like this is going to be a chill, accessible adventure game. The actual gameplay, on the other hand, is surprisingly combat-focused with intense arena battles that can’t be fled. In the first hour, I was already dying a lot and eventually had to bump the difficulty down. It doesn’t help that the parry, a skill the game requires you to know, is simply too hard to time correctly. Combat takes some getting used to, but you can unlock new skills and upgrades that make it easier to get by. You receive a bow pretty early on, for instance, and that alone helps significantly. I totally get how someone would abandon this game within the first few hours, as I was tempted to do, but powering through eventually paid off. Sure, I never fully enjoyed the combat, but I found a rhythm that worked, and the non-combat sections kept me hooked.

The adventure side of things comes with its own asterisk, though, because the world is not as open as you might think. I’ve never seen so many invisible walls before. But even within its limitations, there are plenty of secrets to find. While many of these secrets only reward you with hats (or money to spend on… hats), just as many rewards level up your combat skills. Given how difficult the combat is, there’s definitely incentive to spend time exploring your surroundings. I also quite liked the premise, that you are this spirit guide who has to clean up a destroyed village and help the deceased residents move on. The game expends its best emotional arc too soon, though, with your first quest being to help a spirit come to terms with failing to protect his younger siblings. The second quest falls flat in comparison. Still, I enjoyed the game overall, but you do have to temper your expectations and accept that this is not your typical adventure game.

My opinion of this game changes drastically depending on if you ask me about the first half of the game versus the latter half. Kamikaze Veggies starts out as a quirky, serviceable stealth/action game where you’re often forced to sacrifice one of your bomb-strapped soldiers to clear an enemy obstacle. You can even blow up your last remaining soldier to take down the main objective and still win the level, which is a really nice touch. I also like that you have limited funds and can only hire so many soldiers per level. Do you splurge on the better soldiers or fill up your team with short-fused expendables? Tough decisions. Oh, and the whole campaign can be played co-op, which adds some great strategic moments where one player can act as a decoy to distract a group of enemies. The game is a lot of fun in the beginning. And then it suddenly isn’t anymore.

The second half of Kamikaze Veggies really outstays its welcome. The last few levels in particular drag on for way too long. There is one level where you have to make your way across a moving train, and it feels like the train cars are never going to end. And then, of course, the level concludes with a boss fight… The concept of bosses feels so out of place given how the first half of the game was structured. Worse yet, many of the later levels have puzzles in them. Not cutesy environmental puzzles, either, but table top, Lights Out style puzzles where you have to figure out the order in which to turn switches on or off. These kinds of puzzles are infuriating on their own, so to have them disrupt the middle of a stealth/action game, in a level that feels like it should already be over, does not work. It is truly baffling that a developer would sabotage their own game like this. They had such a great thing going for them, and then they went… kamikaze.

In my never-ending pursuit of co-op busywork games (and in particular, co-op cooking games), I totally overlooked that PlateUp! is a roguelike. “Overcooked but roguelike” is a dangerous combination. This genre of games is already rife with yelling at your friends and family. The added stress that one mistake can reset your entire progress makes it so much worse. Each “run” consists of 15 days, and if one customer leaves unhappy—be it that they waited outside too long or waited for their food too long—it’s game over for you. And unlike other roguelikes that reward failed attempts with things that might better help you the next time around, PlateUp! mostly just gives you alternate restaurant layouts and recipes to toy with. Recipes are severely uneven, though. Some recipes require so many steps that taking them into a run with you nearly guarantees you’ll fail.

Even if you take an easy recipe into the run, there are checkpoints in the 15 days where you have to choose to sell an additional dish or accept a negative effect like customers being able to come in after closing time. It’s actually a neat risk/reward system, though the randomness that is roguelikes means sometimes both choices are equally terrible. My wife and I got lucky one run with generous options and power-ups throughout. But after beating that run and not unlocking anything special, I immediately lost any desire to play again. It’s not like the restaurant mechanics are that great, anyway. Plate management is a huge pain in the butt, given that you can only hold one plate at a time, sinks can only hold one plate at a time, and even if you upgrade a sink to hold more, it cannot hold dirty and clean plates at the same time. Honestly, I’d rather just wash dishes in real life…

I went into this game completely blind, ’cause I’m a Zelda fanboy and knew I’d buy it regardless. So the first few hours really caught me off guard with just how disappointing they were. Then at some point, everything finally clicked, and I got totally sucked in. I’ve now spent over 50 hours with the game and will put in at least another 20 before calling it quits. So, yes, ultimately, Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, and a better game than Breath of the Wild, but the reasons are not so obvious. First, the tutorial area in Tears is a downright slog compared to BotW. It really sets the wrong tone and presents too linear of a structure for a game that likes to tease “freedom.” Even after you touch down on the main world, you still have to follow the story quests for a fair bit to unlock key gameplay elements. I would never want to restart this game from scratch because of it.

The other off-putting thing about Tears was the new Ultrahand ability that lets you build contraptions by gluing objects together. Frankly, Ultrahand is a clunky pain in the butt. I appreciate that many of the shrines are designed to teach you all of the creative ways Ultrahand can be used, but I more often than not just cheesed my way through their intended solutions. If you remove Ultrahand, though, it kinda feels like Tears doesn’t have much more to offer over BotW. They both use the exact same overworld and four-temple narrative, with Tears adding a paltry number of floating islands in the sky. Big whoop. Tears also introduces an underworld, though, that feels both empty and pointless, yet mysterious and full of secrets. It’s hard to explain, but I loved and hated exploring this underworld. It is anxiety-inducing, for sure, but I would purposefully get lost down there for hours just to see what else it might be hiding from me.

The overworld itself adds extra touches in the form of explorable caves and wells, with these often leading to special collectibles that certain characters will trade you for. It’s a better reward system than finding yet another weapon that you either don’t have the inventory space for… or you do, but what’s the point, it’s just gonna break in the next fight, anyway. Unfortunately, Nintendo did little to improve the combat in this game, and I still found it easier to avoid confrontations as much as possible. But there are many other improvements that go a long way to making this a better sequel. There’s a huge amount of actual side quests, a camera that’s used in more interesting ways than just “fill album,” this random dork brain who consistently needs help with basic physics, etc. The amount of content is reminiscent to Fenyx Rising, where there was something to do around every corner. It’s been hell for my short attention span, but in 50+ hours, I haven’t once been bored.

I hate to be “that guy,” but Stray is kinda overrated. The hype surrounding this game was huge. But here’s the thing… what people were raving about—getting to explore a post-human city as a cat—is pretty great. However, all these fans failed to mention that such exploration is only half the game. The other half is dedicated first to running away from flesh-eating aliens, and second to sneaking around security bots. Both of these seem like very weird elements to introduce to a game whose selling feature is “cute cat.” I can’t imagine anybody saw the somewhat misleading trailers for Stray and thought, “I sure hope there are aliens that can eat him!” I understand the aliens are integral to the story the developers wanted to tell, but there’s a way to make their presence known without making them a Game Over-able threat to the player. The alien sections (and, to a lesser extent, the security bot sections) are simply not fun.

Fortunately, the game is saved when it actually delivers on its promises. There are two sections in particular where you get to freely roam through a robot-populated neighborhood and solve environmental puzzles. I loved these moments. Exploring the buildings from the perspective of a cat is definitely fun, but it’s also interesting just to uncover the world’s mysteries and meet the various robotfolk. I only wish the game had double-downed on the cat stuff and not introduced a flying robot sidekick. Once this robot joins you, it no longer matters that you’re a cat. The robot translates and exposits everything for you to the point where the journey is more about him now than you. The developers could have told the same story exclusively through the eyes of the cat, and it would have been amazing. As is, I feel like their insistence on getting you to understand the plot prevents the gameplay from being able to truly shine.