P.T. Review

Like most people, I had heard all the buzz and theories around P.T when it came out and afterwards as well.  But not being in possession of a PlayStation 4 at the time, sadly I was unable to play it.  And also like most people, I was deeply saddened to hear about Konami cancelling the full game Silent Hills which P.T. acted as a proof of concept for.  I was saddened again and shocked when they also decided to pull P.T. from the PlayStation Store completely not even allowing those who already owned it to re-download it.  Effectively erasing it from history.  So anyone who missed their chance to download it at the time or who had it and deleted it will never get it now unless they buy a machine with it pre-installed or go through some quite lengthy procedures to share it with a friend.  Fortunately for myself however, a good friend of mine was one of the lucky ones who did download and keep it on his PlayStation 4 so we teamed up with a third friend to brave what has been called the scariest game ever made to see if all the hype was true.

The first person view and narrow hallway makes things very claustrophobic

The entire game takes place from a first person perspective.  So you see everything as your character in the game sees it.  This different viewpoint choice which contrasts from the usual third person of previous Silent Hill games seems to have been done mostly for cinematic reasons.  The older Silent Hill games feature a lot of combat so the third person view is important to be able to place enemies and yourself effectively in battle.  P.T. features no combat and the first person view is in place specifically to limit your field of view.  From this perspective you can only see what is in front of you and not anything that is behind you.  But that’s not to say you won’t be able to hear things behind you…  Whether you turn around to see what’s making that noise is a choice that you have to make yourself.

Oh fuck

The basic premise of Playable Teaser is that you are stuck in a long L shaped corridor.  This corridor consists of a couple of chests of drawers that have various objects on them, a bathroom and a door in and out.  The game operates in cycles and you must perform certain actions in this hallway to make the door out on the far end unlock.  But once you go through this door, you will be back at the start of the L shaped corridor where you came in.  However, each time you do this, things change a little and you must do something different to unlock the door again and get to the next “cycle”.  That is the basic premise, but as usual, the nuance is in the details.  You do not know who you are or why you are here.  Maybe if you’re lucky you can piece together some of it….

Various pieces of family history and life are strewn about the corridor revealing snippets of the lives of the people who lived here

You will be introduced to a hostile ghost very early in the game referred to as “Lisa”.  Lisa is a tall woman who appears to have had an eye gouged out and wears a single high heeled shoe.  The first time you encounter this creature is nothing short of terrifying and this terror is enhanced by the first person perspective as well as the feeling of being locked in this narrow corridor which no way to escape and no way to defend yourself.  This game utilises jump scares quite readily (usually with Lisa) but they do not feel cheap or just there to try and artificially make things more scary than they are.  This game is already extremely scary even without jump scares so they are just one more trick it has to make you afraid.  Lisa’s single piece of footwear also gives her a distinctive clip-clop sound of her footsteps which is utilised excellently to increase your paranoia.

OH FUCK

As you progress through multiple cycles of this corridor, things get stranger and more disturbing.  Without wanting to give away too much or spoil anything, I can only say that it goes to some very unnerving places.  There is a radio in the corridor that will sporadically announce local news reports giving you pieces of the story and allusions as to what might have happened in this house.  It will also occasionally break the fourth wall and talk to you directly or begin to muse on what could be happening to you which only adds to creepy and unsettling atmosphere.

JESUS FUCK

The atmosphere is definitely the outstanding element of Playable teaser.  Veteran gamers who have played a lot of survival horror games have probably now developed a high tolerance for the strange and disturbing things seen in horror games, but Playable Teaser brings it to a new level.  Having played and seen played many horror games myself, I am here to tell you that this is genuinely the most frightening game I have ever seen or played.  As mentioned before, I played it “co-op” with two other friends and each time one of us completed a cycle and moved into a new iteration of the corridor, we passed the controller on to the next person.  Each time, the player relinquishing the controller felt a huge sense of relief and the player being passed the controller felt a great sense of dread.  It had us all inching forward and peering round corners slowly and carefully in apprehension of what horrors we would see next.

FUUUUUCCCKKK

The one weak point is what at times feels like artificially imposed difficulty which is caused by the extreme obscurity of some of the actions you must perform to progress through cycles.  In the early cycles, they are not too difficult to find and can be figured out with some exploration and experimentation, but towards the end of the teaser, the last few actions in particular are all but impossible to figure out on your own without spending hours or days hoping to come across them by sheer luck.  Our time was limited the evening we played this so we were forced to resort to a walk through to complete the last section and once we saw what we were meant to do, we all were in disbelief at the pure obscurity of it.

The mood lighting is not helping. FUCK

P.T. Review Summary

Playable Teaser is without a doubt the next step forward in horror games and is a horrifying vision of what the next Silent Hill could have been.  Sadly though due to Konami killing it off, P.T. will be forever relegated to the pages of history as a tale of what could have been.  For anyone who downloaded it at the time and never played it or has access to it on someone else’s PlayStation 4, I highly recommend you give P.T. a try.  It can be completed in a single evening if you are brave enough and is a piece of gaming history that everyone should witness first hand.  I can only hope that something, anything, can come of this amazing proof of concept.  At least is has inspired some others to have a go themselves.

Final Score: 4/5

Okay time to leave. FUCK.

I played through this game with my good friends Eugene and Tommy, the latter of which is the PlayStation 4 owner kind enough to let us join in.

The post P.T. Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

The Evil Within And DLC Review

Anyone who has played any games in the Resident Evil series, particularly the newer action orientated ones and especially Resident Evil 4 will find a lot of familiar ground in The Evil Within.  The main reason behind that being that it was directed by the main man behind Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami.  As mentioned, it shares most in common with the ground-breaking Resident Evil 4 and feels like a natural evolution of the game-play from that game.  Allow me to elaborate.

Things start weird and only get weirder

In The Evil Within, you play Sebastian Castellanos who is voiced by the main character Cullen Bohannon from the excellent AMc series Hell On Wheels.  This southern twangy accent gives him the feeling of a modern day cowboy which fits into the theme of the game well.  Sebastian is a member of local law enforcement who has been called in to investigate a disturbance at a nearby mental hospital.  The minute you set foot in the door you can feel that something is very wrong in this place and as you investigate things rapidly go downhill.  You are immediately and inexplicably brought to a strange and disgusting place full of hideous creatures and can do nothing but run the hell away.  As you progress, you collect weapons and various other means of defence but you always feel extremely vulnerable as you move from one horrifying place to another again each time with no explanation as to how or why it is happening.  This creates a strong feeling of disorientation and confusion leaving you on the back foot always trying to figure out the mystery of what exactly is happening while trying to not die at the same time.

What in god’s name?

The one place you are brought to which does offer a small piece of solace and act as a sanctuary is the abandoned hospital which you can travel to by staring into cracked mirrors (very little in this game makes sense).  This abandoned hospital is staffed by a single nurse  and plays music that is strangely familiar and soothing.

This nurse is clearly trying to comfort and calm you with and uses mostly the right words but her voice shows no concern or emotion whatsoever so her efforts are quite in vain.  In this hospital you are safe from the monstrous creatures that hound you and can further comfort yourself by saving or collecting bonus items or upgrading your weapons and skills.  This theme of a safe haven where the danger cannot reach you has been a common theme since the first Resident Evil game and carries through them all even to this spiritual successor of the series.  But this time, your happy place is larger and has more ways to aid you.  But as comforting and safe and warm as this place is, you know you can’t stay there forever.  You know that once you’ve done everything you came there to do that you will have to leave this oasis of calm and once again go out to face the horror and defeat it.

The hospital and it’s peculiar nurse is your only bastion of safety

As you progress through the disgusting and disturbing places, you will realise just how scarce ammunition is.  Over the course of the game you do collect a decent amount of firearms, but ammunition to put in them is incredibly scarce.  You do not have anywhere near enough ammo to kill everything, or even half of everything, using your weapons so you soon learn that wasting shots is a definite no-no and if you are going to shoot, shoot to kill and do not miss.  This scarcity of ammo further reinforces your feeling of vulnerability in this terrifying and disorientating place and forces you to find other ways to dispose of your enemies such as sneaking up on them and going for the stealth kill or using the environment around you as a lethal weapon.  But there are still some situations where none of these options are valid so the only thing you can do is run away and hope for the best.  Being able to identify how to handle different situations and identifying which ones are no-wins that you should run away from is one of the trickiest things to get used to in the early game and early uncertainty may cause quite a few deaths before you get a feel for it.  This is not a game where you run forwards feeling confident and powerful dealing with anything that comes your way easily and on the fly.  You creep slowly into each new room carefully and feeling very unsafe evaluating it and it’s contents thoroughly and gradually developing a plan of action.

Go carefully. Go very carefully.

Some ways into the game, you are provided with a unique signature weapon for which you can craft a variety of special ammunition.  But again, the materials to do so are quite rare so even this becomes a special use weapon as well reserved for dire circumstances.  It does however provide some pleasant variety to the usual by the numbers array of hand weapons.  There is also the added bonus that some enemies will not stay dead unless you set them on fire.  And as usual, your means of doing this are limited.  So it is another tense gamble trying to guess which ones will rise again and which will not as well as trying to cluster multiple enemies together into one fireball.

Fire is (sometimes) your friend

One other thing that you will notice as you move through the chapters and acts of the game is there there is no real continuity between them.  It is unclear how one location is connected to another and sometimes you can just be mysteriously brought to a new location with no rhyme or reason.  This disjointedness of events and areas with no logistical or physical coherence again heaps onto the mountain of madness that is occurring around you and over time starts to make you question the sanity of your character.  He is losing his mind?  Is everything I’m seeing an illusion?  Is this place real?  Was the last place real?  All you can do is press forward and hope you can find out.

Now just how do you think you got here?

As you press forward you will also become acutely aware of his revolting the set-pieces are as well as the creatures that inhabit them.  This is especially true of the boss monsters that you will encounter which at times can be almost nauseating and genuinely scary when they are running at you full pelt.  One unfortunate aspect of some of the boss fights is that they are linear and scripted requiring you to perform specific actions to damage the boss or move to the next area.  This can sometimes cause the player to feel lost unaware of the correct action to take and result in death or worse, wasting bullets.  Thankfully, there are not a lot of boss fights like this and most of them are quite enjoyable challenges and extremely satisfying to see these hideous things go down at your hands.

The boss monsters are all very unique and panic-inducing

The Assignment DLC

The Assignment has you taking on the role of one of your associates from the main game, Kidman, who is mysteriously absent through most of it and only pops up inexplicably every now and then.  In the assignment, you find out the answers to some questions that were left rather ambiguous in the main plot line and you also discover that Kidman is not quite who she claimed to be.

Take control of one of the main story’s side characters in The Assignment

Sadly, the game-play of The Assignment is an enormous let down compared to that of the main game.  Whereas in the main game, you have plenty of choices of how to deal with situations in the form of shooting, fire, environmental hazards, stealth, etc, in The Assignment for 99% of the game, you only have one option: stealth.  The number of times you have a weapon capable of killing an enemy can be counted on the fingers of one hand and for the rest of the DLC episode, you must make your way through purely by remaining unseen.  You must avoid the enemies, hide from them, distract them but never confront them.

All stealth, all the time

This drastic change of pace was a huge disappointment for me as I despise being forced to use stealth.  It’s okay to be able to sneak up behind an enemy and take them out quietly.  But to have to sneak past and leave them alive and keep sneaking past repeatedly, usually failing and dying many times, completely rubs me the wrong way.  Sadly the added exposition of the story could not save this extremely annoying stealth based DLC episode and it was much more irritating than it was enjoyable.  Even the boss encounters had you sneaking around trying to stay hidden and then sneaking up behind them to strike a blow in the back of the head before turning tail and running again.  Not the way I like to play a game at all.  I prefer my fights face to face.  Avoid this one unless you’re desperate to know all the answers.

The Consequence DLC

The Consequence takes a slight turn for the better with some more options and additional combat spaced throughout it (you actually get a gun!) but sadly there is still too much forced stealth in it for my liking.  Most of the same thoughts from The Assignment apply here.  You play as Kidman again and it provides a few more answers to questions but in my eyes, it’s still not worth trudging through the maddening stealth sections.

Even more stealth in The Consequence

The Executioner DLC

The Executioner episode is an extremely drastic departure from the previous DLCs and everything else in the game so far.  In this one, you play as one of the nastier boss monsters from the main game and do so in first person perspective switching briefly to third person for some of the nastier finishing moves.  In extreme contrast to the all-stealth-all-the-time Kidman episodes, the executioner is all attack all the time.  The Executioner DLC is essentially a boss rush where you step into the shoes of a huge and horrifying monster and engage in a number of head to head battles with even huger and even more horrifying monsters.

Step into the Executioner’s shoes to bust some heads

As soon as you realise this, it quickly kills the initial rush you get from being in the shoes of such a powerful character.  When you start this episode you will think that it will be a walk in the park because your character has so much capacity for destruction.  However when you realise that most of your time will be spent fighting even stronger beasts, that feeling of superiority quickly wanes and you will soon realise that you are on the back foot again.  Only at least this time, you can smash things in the face with your huge hammer and toss the smaller enemies around like they are made of paper.

Then immediately get your head busted by some even nastier monsters

You acquire additional weapons and items throughout the course of this adventure and can upgrade them much in the same fashion as you do in the main game but you will rarely stray too far from your trusty giant hammer.  Unlike both of Kidman’s DLC episodes, the Executioner’s is much more enjoyable despite being much less relevant to the story.

The Evil Within And DLC Review Summary

The Evil Within is a worthy successor to the mantle of the Resident Evil games. I would have preferred this to have been Resident Evil 6 rather than the actual Resident Evil 6. Just replace the bulk of the monster enemies with zombies and bingo. It provides a well-adjusted balance between fear, stealth and fight or flight game-play where no situation has an obvious solution and each one requires careful planning and forethought. The one weak point is the plot and this just seems to have been hobbled together as an after-thought to allow the designers to create the environments precisely how they wanted and string them together with little regard for having to worry about disturbing the narrative because there basically is no narrative. Besides this lack of coherence, The Evil Within is one of the best survival horror games in recent years because instead of going full retard and all out action like the newer Resident Evil games, it provides a more thoughtful and balanced approach to the game-play. It mixes the excellent action with stealth that is not overly tiresome, the need for careful resource management and countless horrifying and WTF moments. An easy recommendation to anyone who enjoys the action or horror or stealth genres as it provides a superb mix of all of them.

You’ll have a lot of fun with The Evil Within. Trust me.

Unlike the main game, the Season Pass for The Evil Within is a bit of a mixed bag. The first two Kidman based episodes add a little more to the story but are big let downs unless you are a lover of stealth and the Executioner episode is a jolly action romp change of pace but quite inconsequential to the story.

Final Score: 4/5

The Evil Within on Steam
The Evil Within Let’s Play footage

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Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review

Anyone who has played Klei’s Mark Of The Ninja will find a lot of familiar territory in Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China.  Both are 2.5D side scrollers.  Both place an emphasis on stealth but do have some combat mechanics.  Both involve sneaking around, hiding, taking enemies unaware, and confronting them if necessary.  Where Chronicles differs is that it puts the Assassins/Templars story into the mix and is quite a lot more difficult.

Those sneaky Templars are up to their usual tricks

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China tells the story of Shao Jun in 1526 who has been trained by the legendary Ezio Auditore.  Keen fans of the Creed series may recall her appearing in the animated film, Assassin’s Creed Embers.  This time around she is chasing a mysterious box stolen by the Templars which is suspected to contain a Piece Of Eden.  These McGuffins are long standing key items in the series which were left behind by an ancient race and are key to saving the human race in the future.

Get skooled by the legendary Ezio Auditore da Firenze himself

One of the first things you will notice about this game is the gorgeously hand drawn artistic style for all the game-play as well as the story book cut-scenes.  This gives the whole thing a great fantastical feel as everything is rendered in soft water colours and is very pleasing to look at from start to finish.

Everything is very easy on the eyes being rendered in a hand-painted watercolour fashion

The majority of the game-play is quite similar to the aforementioned Mark Of The Ninja where you move through the levels either avoiding or eliminating enemies in your path.  Some levels will contain environmental puzzles and some contain scripted scenes where you must escape the level within a time limit.  While scripted scenes like this are tense and exciting sometimes it is unclear which way to go which will usually cause you to die and have to restart somewhat breaking the tension and immersion.  Depending on how stealthy you are at the end of each level, you get a score and are awarded points which can be used to buy upgrades to your character and new equipment.  Besides just getting through them and/or killing targets, levels also have extra bonus objectives like freeing prisoners which will net you more of these points.

Go out of your way to complete bonus objectives and you will receive handsome bonus points

Being an assassin you do have some special tricks up your sleeve.  The trademark Eagle Vision of the assassins comes back once again in this game allowing you to see the paths that guards will take which puts you in a better position to evade their routes or get behind them to eliminate them entirely.  You can also see the cones of vision that each guard has further aiding your path finding, timing and evasion.  Having all these abilities would lead one to think this game is quite easy, but you would be wrong.  It’s actually still quite difficult because the guards are very plentiful and have cleverly thought out paths that will make getting past them quite tricky especially when there are many of them around.  Many sections, especially in the later game, will require careful planning and multiple attempts to get through.  Sometimes it is all but impossible to get through completely undetected and you must run the risk of combat or being spotted and running away like a champion in the hope of losing your pursuers.  There are also a small number of boss fights some of which are scripted events and some of which are free for all combat.  Again, the scripted events are not always very obvious and can result in many deaths.

Scripted sections can sometimes leave you confused as to how to proceed properly

Unfortunately, some of the controls are less smooth and can be a little sticky at times causing incorrect climbing and falling when negotiating the landscapes as well as not always performing lethal take-downs when meant to.  This can cause guards to be alerted instead of dying and combat to ensue.  On the topic of combat, it is something that you preferably want to avoid if possible.  It is possible if you are stubborn and persevere and have built your character towards offence, but it is heavily dissuaded as you can only take a couple of hits before dying.  Blocking is possible, but also a little flaky and difficult to regularly get to work.  The enemy skill levels as well as the damage they do ramp up quickly so taking them out with surprise/stealth is usually the best way as combat in later game is almost always suicide especially if there is more than one enemy involved.

Direct combat is doable, but very difficult to escape from alive

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review Summary

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China is one of the few games that does stealth and get it right so that it is not maddeningly frustrating to play.  Long-time readers will know by now that normally, I am not a fan of stealth and prefer to brute my force through most stealth sections.  For me, stealth is more often than not incredibly trial and error and results in countless retries any time you put one foot wrong which can get incredibly frustrating.  However Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China and Mark Of The Ninja are two stealth based games that do stealth in a way that does not make me want to rip my own face off.  Yes, you will fail and have to retry sections, but it is a lot less trial and error than most stealth games and if you are determined and ready for it, you can still fight your way out of situations if needs be.  And this is the key difference between an enjoyable stealth game and an un-enjoyable one to me.  Being able to successfully execute a plan B of killing your way out if needs be.  Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China makes executing this plan B challenging but definitely possible.  I would recommend this game to any fans of stealth games or people who have previously tried stealth games and been over-frustrated by them.  This one will be a lot more fun.  I promise.

Final Score: 3/5

Stealth is hard to get right, but Chronicles China nails it

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China on Steam

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China Review Let’s Play Footage

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Super Time Force Review

A few years ago, I played Capybara Games’ fantastic musical adventure, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and have been following them keenly ever since.  I am still waiting patiently for their similar game, Below, but in the meantime, I was more than happy to play their more recent and silly title, Super Time Force.

Super Time Force must travel through time to sometimes save the world and sometimes to do other stuff.

This game was originally exclusive to the Microsoft consoles, XBox 360 and XBox One but in time did come to PC (with the suffix Ultra and some extras) and is slated to come to PS3 and PS4 sometime in 2015.  But I could not contain my excitement and wait for the PC version, so for the purposes of this review, I played the XBLA version on XBox 360.

The great pixel art holds up well on any platform

The basic premise of Super Time Force is just as it sounds.  You are a time travelling special forces unit that visits various periods in history sometimes to prevent catastrophes and sometimes just to fix minor inconveniences like browser updates.  The plot line is just an excuse to go side-scrolling through history blasting apart bad guys and using time travel.  There are a variety of characters for you to use and unlock and each has their own special skills such as extreme fire-power, ricocheting shots, blocking ability, explosives and so on.  While there are a good variety of characters and powers, I was able to go through almost the entire game using just the explosives expert.  Perhaps the other characters would be more necessary in harder difficulties and such but in a straight run of the normal game they are not terribly necessary.

Different characters have different skills. Some more useful than others.

The art and writing style are one of the main appeals of the game with the pixel art being extremely detailed and well together.  The many one liners, catchphrases and pop culture references that come from your commander help to keep things light and are quite genuinely funny without ever feeling too forced.

Your C.O. Commander Repeatski is a very funny guy.

As you can probably guess from the name of the game, the main mechanic is that of time travel.  Despite being a single player game, it is widely touted to be a single player co-op game.  The reason behind this is that you can rewind time any time you die (or just any time at will) which creates a clone of yourself.  If you can stop your previous self from dying by killing whatever killed him first, then he will continue to live in a paradoxical time situation and continue to run along with you aiding you in the fight until he dies again.  Employing this mechanic, you can have multiple versions of yourself on screen at once repeating your previous movements and attacks and then carrying them on as best as they can.  Most levels have a short time limit so using this mechanic to keep improving your “team’s” performance to get through the level faster is crucial.  While this is fun and useful in the side scrolling levels, the real stars of this game are the boss fights.  Most of these will only have a one minute time limit so you must spawn many copies of yourself to be able to kill these beasts within their short time limits.

The boss fights are some of the most frantic sections of the game

For a while, I was having difficulty figuring out how to best manipulate the time mechanics towards victory, especially in these very time limited boss fights.  I was trying to use rewinds to get as much damage in as possible in real time.  It wasn’t until it clicked that I had to maximise the killing potential of each rewind (because the number you have is limited) by rewinding to the start of the boss fight each time and doing as much damage as possible before dying and rewinding again that I started to have an easier time killing these bosses.  Once you have defeated each boss, you are treated to seeing the fight in real time which shows the chaos of multiple copies of yourself spawning and fighting and dying over and over again within sixty seconds creating your very own personal bullet hell to rain down upon the huge bosses.  The sheer chaos of these fights in real time makes you glad that the time travel mechanic exists and slows it down for you making it more manageable.

The madness is only made manageable thanks to the time travel mechanic

Super Time Force Review Summary

I was expecting to like Super Time Force but it easily passed my expectations with its great use of humour and excellently implemented time travel cloning mechanic which makes it possible for mere mortals to unleash absolute clone terror over and over again in a highly satisfying manner that makes you go “whoa, did I do that?” once the dust has settled.  This is an easy recommendation to make to anyone but will be of particular appeal to fans of side-scrolling shooters and classic bullet hell shooters

Final Score: 4/5

Join Super Time Force and embark on super-important missions today!

 Super Time Force on Steam

Let’s Play Footage of Super Time Force

The post Super Time Force Review appeared first on Life On The Grid.

The Banner Saga Review

This game started off life as a Kickstarter which was successfully funded and was recommended to me by my sibling, Jason who knew my fondness of turn based strategy games.  After researching it a little more, it seemed like it was worth a shot so off I went to Steam to get it.

Prepare to do battle in a Nordic era

The first thing you will notice about this game is the fantastic hand drawn art style that everything is rendered in.  The art style is influenced by that which was used in very early Disney films, particularly Sleeping Beauty.  Everything has a great amount of detail and nice touches to it and it makes everything very pleasant to look at.

Every detail is lovingly hand drawn

You play from the viewpoints of various members of a Nordic tribe who are travelling across the land to escape a force of mindless automatons referred to only as “The Dredge”.  The tone of the game overall is very bleak with the only real goal most of the time being to stay ahead of The Dredge and stay alive in the hope of finding a safe bastion somewhere.  You are always on the back foot and always feel pressured to keep moving to survive.  As the game progresses, more enemies and problems begin to pile up and it can feel like there is no way out and no escape from the situation.  All you are doing is delaying the inevitable as foes close in on all sides.

You must keep your caravan moving with ample supplies and good morale

The main selling point of the game is the tactical turn based combat and although it is well implemented and satisfying to execute, it is not too frequent.  You are also presented with choices at several points that can reduce the amount of combat you get to do even more meaning if you are not a fan of this combat, you can end up doing very little of it.  But seeing as this is one of the main draws of the game that would be a bit pointless.  The turn based combat itself is mixed up a little by a few different mechanics one of them being that health and strength are linked.  So if your character has taken a lot of damage, his damage output will also be drastically lowered.  This means you must be careful to keep damaged characters off the front line unless you want to use them as bait.  There are also a number of special moves available to each character but these mostly seem very special case use so aren’t often deployed and are wasted for most characters.  The rest of the turn based mechanics are quite normal allowing you to level up the statistics of the character over time and adding new members to your team as the campaign progresses.  But overall, the low difficulty and rareness of these sections made the feeling that it was not actually meant to be the focus of the game and it left me wanting more from the combat aspect.

The turn based combat is enjoyable, but fairly infrequent and unchallenging

The rest of game is spent travelling across the land with your group and the caravan with various events popping up as you travel and you are presented with decisions that must be made about them.  This aspect of the game is quite reminiscent of the classic Oregon Trail.  Like Oregon Trail, it is quite unpredictable and random as well as difficult to know how the different choices you make in the game will play out.  On more than one occasion, I made what I was sure would be the best choice only to have it blow back in my face with severe consequences.  This unpredictability further adds to the atmosphere of desperation and despair when you don’t know what is going to come along and make your life harder next.  Some of the biggest events and largest surprises happen in this travelling mode.

All kinds of surprise events pop up as the caravan rolls on. Some easy to deal with. Some not.

The only real negative point that I had about this game is that when playing with a PC controller, the central dead zone seems quite off even after much repeated calibrations which caused the cursor to move on its own a lot.  I never did get this resolved but it was a minor gripe so I did not research it extensively.

The Banner Saga Review Summary

Overall, I thought The Banner Saga was an enjoyable mix of two usually very separate genres but these are two genres that should probably stay separate.  A pure turn based strategy game like Fire Emblem Awakening is better because of the increased focus on combat and depth of the system.  Likewise a pure travelling simulator like Oregon Trail or Organ Trail would be better because of more emphasis on this aspect.  The Banner Saga felt like it had its attentions divided between the two areas too much so neither is as strong as they could be.  It is part of a planned trilogy but at this point, I am unsure if I enjoyed it enough to carry on with further entries in the series.  If you are looking for something a bit different and enjoy turn based strategy and/or Oregon Trail you can give this one a quick go as it is fairly short clocking in at around 7 hours but it may well leave you wanting to play something else similar that has a bit more depth to it.

Final Score: 3/5

All you can do is keep moving. Hoping you can find somewhere safe.

The Banner Saga on Steam

Let’s Play footage

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Donkey Kong Country Returns Review

We haven’t heard from the Donkey Kong Country series since the rather disappointing Donkey Kong 64 which was for most people, just a means to acquire the very difficult to find N64 Expansion Pak.  Since Majora’s Mask was the first major game to require this accessory, most people tried to hunt one down after getting the game with little success.  The only reliable way to get them at the time was to buy Donkey Kong 64 which also required the Expansion Pak and came with a free one in the box.  Donkey Kong 64 itself was quite underwhelming so a lot of people just bought it for the Expansion Pak and never played the game.  Unfortunately, I did play the game and was very let down by it overall.  But now, Donkey Kong Country is back on the Wii and has allegedly returned to form.  But is it true?

The Kongs are back!

First of all, let me get one very large gripe out of the way.  I played this game co-op with my co-op buddy Phil Wilson and we had both heard the game was quite difficult, so we hoped having two of us would alleviate said difficulty giving us a backup should one person die and so on.  How wrong we were.  Like the older entries in the series, Donkey Kong Country Returns maintains a lives counter and if you run out of lives, game over.  However, one of your lives is removed every time either player dies and respawns.  But should both of you die, then a further two lives are taken off your total.  This is an extremely harsh and cheap method to artificially enhance the difficulty and on the more difficult levels, you will be chewing your way through lives at a staggering pace leading to many many game overs.  With that main gripe out of the way, let me get to some of the games good points.

Extra lives can be bought in shops, but you’ll still run out. Fast.

The art style in the game is excellently put together.  Levels are well varied having many different themes and are full of colour and life with things going on in both foreground and background.  The soundtrack is also very well suited to the levels remaining pleasant and ambient on the slower more careful levels and increasing the pace for faster more frantic levels.  Many of the old mechanics from previous Donkey Kong Country return here like the blasting barrels, mine cart levels.  Sadly, Rambi is the only animal friend to return and I would have liked to see more like Blinky the frog or Enguarde the swordfish. A number of new mechanics are also introduced like rocket barrels that have limited and difficult controls and grass surfaces that you can grab on to climb across ceilings.  The mixture of new and old help keep a good balance of nostalgia and freshness at the same time and none of them are ever over-used making them tiresome.

Jetting around on a barrel is fun but like most things in the game, quite difficult

The bosses are still the real star of the show though.  Each world’s boss is an extremely formidable character and they are all original, well-thought out and tough as nails.  Sometimes you will instinctively be able to tell what they are going to do, but for the most part, the first time you play each boss, you will probably die many times just because you don’t know what their patterns are.  But having said that, even after you know the patterns, knowing and doing something with them are two separate matters.  They are still very difficult no doubt about it and each boss will most certainly result in many many game overs.

The bosses are both awesome and bone-shatteringly difficult at the same time

Donkey Kong Country Returns Review Summary

Donkey Kong Country Returns is a definite return to form for the Donkey Kong Country series and provides all the fun and variety of the older SNES entries in the series.  If you enjoyed Donkey Kong Country 1-3 but disliked the N64 Entry, Donkey Kong 64, then you will definitely enjoy this Wii version.  But as mentioned before, the difficulty level is quite high especially on co-op where having a second player is actually more of a hindrance than a help.  This game was later ported to the 3DS which includes an easier difficulty level so if that is a major problem, the 3DS version could be the way to go.  It requires two systems and two game cards though.

Final Score: 3/5

Great game, but man is it difficult.

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Not A Hero Review

This game kind of came at me out of the blue.  I had not heard much about it prior to its release but then started to hear more and more about it as its release neared and after checking out some game-play footage, it looked like it would be a lot of frantic fun so I decided to pick it up on Steam and boy am I glad that I did.

Get ready for some early morning murder.

The simplest way to describe this game is a 2D cover based shooter.  You are sent on various inane missions by an anthropomorphic rabbit called Bunnylord who for unknown reasons must become Mayor to prevent the world from being destroyed.  According to him, the largest aspect of winning a political campaign is murdering lots of bad guys in the morning.  So this is what you are sent off to do.  From start to finish, this game is an absolutely and totally utterly insanely fast paced adrenaline rush which has you rolling, ducking, dodging, shooting, exploding and generally causing as much chaos as possible at a break neck pace.  You can take cover behind most objects to avoid bullets, but there is no hiding from the melee enemies that appear later on and you just have to kill these guys before they can get to you.  There is a good range of different enemy types that are introduced over the course of the game and some of them are so unbelievably and instantly lethal they will have you dreading the sight of them.  There are various limited use weapons enhancements you can pick up along the way such as explosive rounds or extra powerful bullets and these become practically essential in the later levels.

KABLAMMO

The difficulty ramps up a lot towards the end of the game.  And I do mean a lot.  It can be quite maddeningly difficult at times because there are no checkpoints whatsoever so if you die, you must do the whole level over again.  This is again especially annoying in the later levels because these are both very difficult and very long so you will have to do the bulk of these levels many times over.  But you want to persevere.  You want to keep going.  Because of the frantic pace, you don’t have a lot of time to get irritated at the game and just want to keep getting back in there blowing fools into pieces.  It’s no Hotline Miami, but it is quite difficult in the final stages.  Seemingly unintentionally at times because there are many sections where you must roll and/or jump between buildings with judge drops below you.  As one would assume, a large fall is instant death and at times, it is difficult to ascertain exactly which way is the correct one so sometimes experimentation in these scenarios can also be very lethal.  The health system is based off a regenerating one that slowly restores your health if you avoid damage, but you do not have a lot of it to begin with, so just a handful of quick shots are usually enough to do you in and all melee attacks are instantly lethal.

Many different enemy types will try to murder you.

There is a great variety of characters unlocked as you progress all of who have different special skills, weapons, speed of movement and such, but I found that only a couple of them are genuinely useful and most of the rest were more hindrances than helpful.  My favourite for most of it was the most basic and very first starting character but he was later replaced with a slightly better one in the endgame.  All of the characters have hilarious cockney, Scottish, Welsh and English accents from various regions.  Their speech during the missions is also extremely vulgar and entertaining so it’s worth trying each character at least once to hear what kind of stuff they come out with in the heat of battle.

Samantha is from Wales

One negative point I found is that the controls can be slightly fiddly at times.  Particularly with the fast-paced frantic game-play sometimes you will end up rolling into a hail of bullets or a sword instead of taking cover like you wanted to.  Also, the dialogue is very funny most of the time but occasionally feels a little forced and is being just a little too wacky for the sake of being wacky.  This is usually when Bunnylord is giving you your briefings and feels like he is just being random in an attempt to be funny which does not always work.

Some of Bunnylords briefings are funny. Some are not.

Not A Hero Review Summary

Not A Hero is an extremely enjoyable new twist on the cover-based shooter genre.  The humour and the breakneck speed add greatly to the overall sensation and atmosphere.  Once you are in the groove, you will be sliding through the levels at blistering speed with a huge smile on your face as you decimate your enemies in the name of Bunnylord.  And then you will be screaming profanities like a sailor with Tourette’s when you die over and over again.  But you will want to keep going back and do it again because it’s just so purely enjoyable.

Final Score: 4/5

No frills. Just death.

Not A Hero on Steam

Not A Hero Let’s Play footage

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