Category: games

I thought the first Yooka-Laylee game was a good (not great, but good) tribute to Banjo-Kazooie style 3D platformers. So I’m surprised they went with a 2D approach for the sequel. I can understand why a developer like Krome Studios needed to “downgrade” Ty the Tasmanian Tiger from 3D to 2D, but Playtonic doesn’t seem to be cutting costs here. The production value for Impossible Lair is really high, and the game is still technically 3D. The levels are all modeled in 3D, and the overworld plays out like an isometric platformer. So going 2D for the main levels was a conscious choice.

To clarify, I do like a good 2D platformer. I just don’t think this is one of the good ones. The controls are too limited. I kept waiting to unlock a double jump or wall jump or something that would make the platforming feel better, but the tonics you can find and apply are more aesthetic than helpful. The platforming is made worse by the fact that you can only get hit twice, but you lose Laylee after the first hit and become useless without her, thus guaranteeing you’ll get hit again. Checkpoints are also unevenly spaced, often placing a mundane stretch right before the trickier part that you’re actually stuck on.

It’s not a total wash, though. The thing is, I really like how the overworld is built. The overworld is filled with secrets to find and puzzles to solve while being a much more laidback experience than the main 2D levels. I would love an entire Yooka-Laylee game done in this style. I also think it’s pretty cool how adjustments you make in the overworld change the 2D levels. Like, you can flood a field, which then spills into the level entrance and totally changes how that level is played. I always looked forward to seeing what else the overworld would do. I just dreaded having to play the 2D levels to open up more of that world.

The word “simulator” gets thrown around a lot in games, so I wasn’t expecting a true bee simulator here. I don’t mind that this took a more child-like, story-driven approach. I actually think the world they built is pretty cool. There’s a very realistic sense of scale as you—a tiny bee—fly through a park, zoo, amusement park, and lake. What holds the game back is its missions. They’re all extremely dull and repetitive, boiling down to three types: fly through rings, repeat a directional pattern, or perform quick-time events as part of a fight sequence.

The fact that every mission is a cheesy mini-game ruins any sort of magic this game had going for it. Why go through the effort of building such a huge, believable world if you’re just going to populate it with the most basic gameplay mechanics? The same can be said for the advertised “co-op” mode. The story is not co-op. Rather, playing with friends means flying around a fenced-off part of the main game, looking for missions of the same variety mentioned above. There is just so much wasted potential here. I can only hope the developers use this engine for something more engaging next time.

The Soulsborne games are what they are and I’m not going to go into the merits of the difficulty of the games or obtuse nature of the storylines/ plots. Just know that I really enjoy these games. I love them. I have achieved a platinum trophy in all of them and then kept playing. I might have a problem. E.g., I played Demon’s Souls on the PS3 a little over a year ago and even though it was 10+ years old, required hours of grinding, a completely deserted online component, and old janky, broken-ass game mechanics (tendencies are the worst), and really not being all that fun, I liked it. As I age and become more cynical, I often wonder if I even like video games anymore, because I just don’t get excited about them often. When the PS5 version of DS was announced as a full remake, it became my most anticipated game of the past few years. I couldn’t find a PS5, so I watched hours of people playing it on Twitch to glean some of the experience. I had never watched Twitch for more than a few minutes previous. I was excited.

It drove me to push for an early PS5 and the game is an amazing remake. It’s all positive. BluePoint made a very careful game that improved the visuals, mechanics (tendencies still suck), items, jank, and even added some really cool Easter eggs. They took an unfun game and made it better, but it is still just as unfun! This time I used an early exploit to get endgame gear first thing and just ROFLStomped everything the whole way through. (Soulbrandt FTW!) I wasn’t stressed or worried at all. Combine that with playing with friends and an online community with lots of invasions and it was easily the most fun I’ve had playing a game in a long time. I would highly recommend trudging through Boletaria to you, if these games are your bag. If not, well, it still is what it is.

It’s no secret that Immortals Fenyx Rising got its inspiration from Breath of the Wild. And that’s not a bad thing. Breath of the Wild was a great game, an experience I’ve wanted to have again without actually going back and re-playing the exact same thing. Immortals is different enough to warrant a play through and actually does some things better… but also some things worse. In all fairness, a lot of my issues with the game stem from playing it on Switch. The graphics really limit your field of view, and the over-reliance on the Joy-Con’s mushy shoulder buttons makes combat less enjoyable.

I think I’m having more fun exploring the world of Immortals over Zelda, though. Zelda felt very real in the sense that large stretches of the map were empty, whereas Immortals litters each area with a huge variety of temples, statues, and other monuments that usually act as cover for some sort of mini challenge. It really works for this game’s Greek mythology aesthetic. Plus, the treasures and secrets you find actually make you feel like you’re getting stronger as opposed to finding a new weapon that’s just going to break in the next fight.

I don’t want to rag on Zelda too much, though, because it’s still the superior game. While Immortals throws a lot at you, the majority of its puzzles and challenges are actually kind of annoying, when they’re not outright derivative. Note to all game developers: stop using slider puzzles! And even after totally re-mapping my button layout, it still took a long time to get into the combat. That only happened after significantly leveling up my skills. But the fact that you can level up in meaningful ways makes the world more fun and rewarding to explore, and that’s exactly what I was hoping to get out of this game.

After almost 20 hours with this game, I’m still having a hard time quantifying how much I actually liked it. This is a very mindless but surprisingly addictive crafting/collecting sim. The hook is that you can buy pieces of land to expand the game world, and you never know what you’re going to get. Will the new land have a dungeon, an NPC, a puzzle, a new biome? The world expansion is mostly what kept me interested even as the rest of the game started to get on my nerves. Forager places a lot of emphasis on resource collecting. Objects spawn on every tile and max out your backpack every 30 seconds. If you leave a section of land unattended for too long, it will become so densely populated with trees and rocks and monsters that you can’t walk through it.

The resource spawning almost drove me to quit halfway into the game. That is, until I found the lightning rod. This weapon is a blast, because it’ll zap everything within range, making it easy and fun to clear out those cluttered landfills. With lightning rod in hand, I found a great rhythm with the game that pushed me to finish buying all of the remaining land. Forager doesn’t have a true end goal, though. You basically set your own goals. Buying all of the land and completing the four mini dungeons were my goals, but they left me feeling unsatisfied afterwards. There’s no big celebration for anything. You get an achievement, a treasure chest, and then it’s back to the grind.

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.