2019 was a weird year, almost more about hardware than software thanks to a bunch of VR hitting all at once. Let's see what happens in an actual hardware year!
Showing 1-10 of 48 items
iOS - 4/5 - Lostbelt 5 part 1 Bit of a sag in the middle but a great climax. Good battle balance, fantastic character moments and I can't wait for the second half!
PS4 - 5/5 I'm still recovering from the end but I think that this might be my favourite in the series. Just full of passion on the part of everyone who made it, from the new game system through the ridiculous amount of fan service in side quests, story and assistants, all the way to the emotion of Kazuhiro Nakaya's performance as Kasuga. Yokohama's a huge map with multiple sections and I didn't even reach the top edge of it once til I was about 30 hours in. It's wonderfully rendered, full of life but not too foreboding to cross because of the new fast travel system. That's the only thing I think can definitely be changed for the next one though as it takes a few too many button presses, both to activate taxi ranks and to get to the taxi app on your phone. The battle system's been controversially received but for a first effort it's incredibly well put together, and full of RGG flavour. Characters grab and kick items to do more damage and the pace is actually pretty good. At first it seems a bit slow but when you realise you can set up your favourite moves to the dpad it speeds up a lot. By the end you're just constantly firing off brutal Heat moves and cleaning up late game mobs which would take a fair while in earlier games in seconds. Boss battles do miss the special QTE animations but the actual fights end up becoming a solid challenge, and you do have to prepare properly for fights by the end of the game. Finally, the story and characters are as good as any of the previous games. It helps that Kasuga is a much more outgoing personality than Kiryu, and his weird self-delusion that he's the hero of a classic JRPG (which is remarked upon early on!) makes for some amazing speeches as you go through the game. His merry band of straight men (and women) are all great too, and all have their moments. The story builds up to as great climax and the ending's really terrific. In the end, this is kind of what Persona would have been if all the characters were 20 years older. It swaps between reality and hyper-reality multiple times a minute while still being grounded in the story of a group of people just trying to do what they can in a bad situation. I definitely want some more of this, but first I'm ready for the return of Judge Eyes!
PC (via Oculus Link) - 3/5 (first loop) Hmm. Looks great, but I had a lot of framerate trouble on an RTX 2080. The movement is excellent - gliding along the clouds between islands never got old, flinging yourself up mountains is enormous fun (and incredibly intuitive) and coupled with being able to borderline fly means the movement is probably my favourite in any VR game yet. I just never really got into the combat; the shield you get is super unreliable unless you're playing standing and the weapon handling just doesn't feel great. The game's also based around a weekly (in real time) loop rather than being a full 'campaign' as well, which was a bit of a drag when I realised that's what they were doing.
PS4 - 2/5 (RPG mode) Fun game, loads of character. The RPG mode has some good systems and as a player of the mobile game it really feels authentic. The problem is that it’s a bit of a technical disaster at the moment: it crashed 5 times in what was about an 8 hour mode, including the first time I beat the final boss, and the loading is awful. If you are playing versus it should be OK but I can’t recommend it for solo play at the moment. Actually, fuck it, it’s a 2. It’d be a 4 without the problems but ultimately it’s just got 11 characters which just isn’t enough. I just went to my character list on the mobile game and I have 348 - admittedly including repeats and collab characters but I think that it still says a lot.
PC - 4/5 This is a Good Atelier! The new battle system, the way the alchemy works and just the overall way the game was put together feels like there's been a lot of effort put in. Ryza's a likeable character and there's actual character development there, of a fashion. The vocal songs were rubbish though, especially the unintelligible ending track. We're a long way from Kanako Ito songs as boss themes like in Dusk now.
PC - 4/5 (Xen section) This ened up being really good. They definitely got that Half-Life feel down for the most part with a lot of reasonably organic feeling paths through levels. It does have you rely on basically one gun for a large chunk of it though, and it is maybe a bit long, but overall I'm really impressed. Good use of music and there's one great boss in there!
PC - 5/5 Best VR game yet, and a real step forward in combining physics and motion controls as something cohesive. Less freedom than Boneworks but much less glitchiness too! As a shooter I would say it's my favourite campaign since Titanfall 2; basically ten hours or so of setpieces and plenty of memorable moments that'll stay with me for a long time. It's also the best looking game I've seen in VR, with surprisingly good performance.
Switch - 4/5 Great atmosphere, good cast, amazing soundtrack. Still miss the little musical interludes with the vocal tracks, the one at the end was really good. I liked the way they did the crafting and the idea of the largely unstructured scenario is a good one. The old Atelier standard of becoming outrageously powerful at the end is still present, and still great. ..but there remain a few too many rough edges. Yes, I am bitter that I missed one ending because I killed an enemy too early, and missed the true ending because I didn't have a certain character in my party. More generally, the Switch version runs pretty badly; this is because it's the last of the Atelier games on PhyreEngine, with the sequel moving to KTGL which has settled nicely on the Switch (indeed, I played an hour of E&L and it runs great).
PS4 - 3/5 Really dropped off at the end, I thought. I've got a lot of thoughts on this but by and large they can be boiled down to: when it's following the original or building on it, it's lots of fun, exciting and enjoyable, but when it branches out or (god forbid) tries to be clever, the whole thing just kind of falls apart. The exception is the music, which is the opposite: when it's just the original tracks but with orchestral synths it's boring and annoying (especially when it gets stuff wrong on purpose to try and make you anticipate it getting it right) but when it goes off in its own direction it fits a lot better. Special mention goes to the battle system - what a mess. Basically the only way it can make enemy actions matter is to make them ignore your characters and interrupt them. Biggest culprit are the worthless dodge roll and awful counter moves you have. In addition, the fact that hitting elemental weaknesses is so strong massively limited my materia choice: since you can't change in battle, you have to be ready for anything. Suspect that this is one of those games that I'll feel less keen on the more time passes. I'm already feeling like I'm forgetting the positives in favour of the negatives.
PC - 3/5 One step forward, two steps back. About twice as long as the previous game and at time it dragged; I went back to some of the earlier levels to get the remaining items and I was struck at how far it could get between fights. The story stuff doesn't help the game at all, with bizarre repetition (there's a line in the second to last level which was verbatim repeated three times!) and a tone which veers between overly self-serious and borderline meme level. My main gripe with the actual game part is what I guess I can boil down to the designer being a bit too dogmatic in terms of wanting you to constantly change guns and cycle between glory kills, flame attacks and chainsaw usage. Once the pressure on ammo lets up then it's easy to see what they were going for and swapping between weapons for different enemies becomes fun. Before that though, as you're stumbling around trying to find something to chainsaw while getting caught on bits of the scenery, it's infuriating. On that note, this game has the absolute worst auto weapon switch system I've ever seen because it's seemingly random - when you run out of ammo for one weapon if swaps to another but it's never the right one. At the end it even swapped to the shitbox Unmaykr when that shouldn't have been possible. Burn through BFG ammo, realise, escape, restart from checkpoint. That's not to say absolutely everything they introduced to this is bad - the super shotgun now comes with a grappling hook that lets you fling yourself towards enemies which is excellent. The music and graphics are also really great. The engine basically held 120fps for the entire game. Special mention to the music in the final level too, the riff in that was almost parody in how heavy it was. Helped that the last couple of levels were probably the most entertaining, too. The second to last boss was genuinely fun. Trim several hours, have fewer corners to get stuck on, and a decent amount of ammo for your guns from the start and we'd have been talking about a classic. As it is, it's something which infuriated for five hours and too often annoyed and disappointed for the rest. When talking about FF7, I said that I suspect that my opinion on it would probably lessen over time. With this, I suspect that once I forget the worst bits then the stuff that really shone will remain with me.