Skateboarding games have kind of died out over the past 5 years. With the last decent one being Skate 3, everyone yearns for the days of classic Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. OlliOlli brings back those arcade-like twitch reflexes on a 2D plane. There’s no story to speak of, and there shouldn’t be. It’s just you, the ground, and your board.
OlliOlli features a trick stick similar to EA’s Skate series, but it’s better (yes, a 2D indie skateboarding game does a multi-million dollar game’s trick system better). You use the left stick to do all the tricks, and there’s no ollie button. Pressing down and up will make your ollie, while pressing X just before you land will give you a perfect landing. This rearranging of buttons is perfect and exactly what this genre needs. Grinding is as simple as just ollieing on top of a rail; there is no need for extra buttons. The trick stick consists of grinds and flip tricks only; there are no grabs here because the game is all about completing goals on a short course with the highest possible score. On a 2D plane, grab tricks would just get in the way. A great change that’s small but big is keeping your speed by landing everything perfectly. You will eventually start slowing down, like in all skateboarding games, but perfect landings will give you speed boosts, allowing you to trick across an entire level if you are good enough.
There are quite a few levels, and each stage is completely different. The only major downside to this game is the constant trial and error because some goals require perfection. The game is very challenging and will push your skills to the limit. Thanks to the great animations and silky smooth controls, it can be somewhat forgiving in that aspect. Outside of the career mode, you can partake in daily challenges where you get to practice a run as many times as you want, and once you go for the real thing, you get one try only. If you fall within the first 10 meters, that’s too bad. This makes things super intense and really makes that one perfect run feel amazing.
OlliOlli may have a small trick book, but the way you pull these off is nearly revolutionary for the genre, and the accompaniment of smooth controls and animations just makes it that much better. The various goals, score attacks, and collecting of items can be downright tricky, but arcade skateboarding enthusiasts will have no problem pressing that restart button for the 25th time, knowing this time they will get it.
To the Moon is a 2D, 16-bit adventure game that follows two scientists who are fulfilling a dying man’s last wish. They use a strange computer to go into his memories to find the link that will allow him to go to the moon. To the Moon has a heartwarming story with a beautiful, sweeping musical score, but lacks any type of real gameplay.
The game is broken up into three acts, and during the first two, you are walking around John’s memories and have to find five memory links to unlock the shield surrounding time-jumping mementos. As you go further into John’s past, you find out why he doesn’t know why he wants to go to the moon. There is some memory block, and you have to find out what it is and remove it. Finding these memory links only takes a few seconds because you just click on the few items in the small area. Once you remove the shield, you play a little puzzle game, then move on to the next memory. This all just seems like an excuse to add gameplay to an otherwise visual-only adventure.
Through Act 2, you get to interact with two different mini-games, which are Whac-a-Mole and a zombie shooting section, and each is uninspired and pretty lame. The visuals are, like I said, 16-bit and pretty average. There’s nothing special here, visual-wise, and don’t even expect voice acting. The second-best thing about the story is the sweeping musical score. This score is beautiful and one of the best ones I have ever heard. I really wish that this game could have been more, but I understand most indie developers have small budgets.
Overall, To the Moon has a story that will tug at your heartstrings, as well as the music, but the gameplay feels like an excuse to extend the 1-hour story to barely four hours. If the gameplay was a little more engaging, I wouldn’t complain about it so much, but as it is, stay for the story and you will be entertained.
Quantic Dream is one of those developers who tries something new and tries to innovate in the game industry. They started out with Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit for Europeans), and it was an interesting concept that was executed surprisingly well. Heavy Rain was the same way, with a fantastic story and multiple choices that could change the ending. Using just various button presses to play the game could seem boring, but when the action picked up, it got pretty intense. You had a split second to press the various buttons to make the characters flee for their lives or fight off enemies. Beyond feels like a spiritual successor to both of those games but is less interactive than the other two.
You play as a girl named Jodie (Ellen Page), who has an entity named Aiden attached to her. She can control him to do anything from knocking down a box to possessing someone and making them commit suicide. You bounce back and forth from her childhood to her adulthood, where she’s being taken care of by a scientist named Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and also when she’s in the CIA. This may seem confusing because the storyline is told in a random pattern, but it makes perfect sense. The story is well-balanced and easy to follow, and there are some great plot twists and changes.
Like in Heavy Rain, you can wander around and do things, but there’s less optional interaction in Heavy Rain. You will rarely find stuff to interact with just for the heck of it. When things start getting intense, you will need to keep Jodie alive by following her movements in slow motion. The action will slow down a bit, and you need to press the right analog stick in the direction that Jodie is moving. Sometimes this is hard to gauge due to an odd camera angle or her movements being too subtle. I never died in the game, though, but slower-reacting people may find the action sequences frustrating. That’s kind of where things become a problem. You will engage in a tense action sequence only to hit a chapter where you’re making dinner for Jodie’s date. There are some really dull and slow moments in Beyond, and there are too many odd inconsistencies.
Like in the mentioned scene above, I had to pick up clothes, cook dinner, and get Jodie ready for her date. This was slow and dull, and the inconsistencies drove me nuts. After putting dinner on the stove, I wandered around (the characters controlled it like awkward tanks). I took a shower, watched her drink some old beer, helped her pick out a dress, and the whole time (about 30 in-game minutes), the food sat in the pan, not being touched, and it never burned. One scene towards the end has Jodie and her three CIA agents in North Korea tracking down a condenser, which is a rift to the infraworld (the other side). They leave a house and do a lookout on a base, but one guy is missing for about 3 scenes, and it’s never explained where he went. Then he just appears out of nowhere.
Controlling Aiden is also another problem because the levels are hard to navigate. The rooms and hallways all look the same, and you will get lost often. Aiden controls it like a no-clip camera with a fisheye lens. He’s just a floating spirit attached to Jodie. Your goal is to look for blue dots to attach to and use both sticks to slam stuff around, possess bodies, knock stuff over, and distract people. He’s kind of the puzzle side of the game. When I first played Aiden, he was nearly impossible to control, and I almost threw up for how frustrated I got. Later on, I learned to get used to it, but this could have been done better.
Of course, the game is all about the story and choices, and there are quite a few, but in the end, the choices are pretty much predefined. Depending on who you keep alive or befriend, you get to choose who you stay with or a couple of other ending selections. They seem cookie-cutter, and your little, tiny choices didn’t really make a difference. Again, more inconsistencies. Besides the choices, the CIA portions were the worst and felt unnecessary for the game. It was just an excuse to add more action and close down these three condensers throughout the world. The more memorable moments were when Jodie was a kid and when Jodie had more one-on-one experiences with people as an adult, like when she was homeless.
The game does look damn good, though; in fact, it is one of the best-looking games of this generation; it almost looks next-gen. The voice acting and motion capture are unlike anything we’ve seen in this generation. Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe do an amazing job in their roles, but I can’t help but notice flaws due to the hardware limitations. Some facial expressions look overdone, and some textures look muddy and downright ugly. There is skipping when the game is loading, but it’s all minor stuff.
Overall, Beyond: Two Souls is 15 hours long, but it is filled with boring scenes that are there just to extend playtime. The CIA missions are boring and out of place, and there are many annoying inconsistencies with events in some scenes. The game looks fantastic, and the acting is superb, so this is a very entertaining weekend rental and nothing more. Don’t come here looking for action, because timed button presses are all you’re going to get.
I have never been much into Ys, but I have played past games. Memories of Celceta is the biggest Ys yet and the best traditional JRPG available on Vita right now. You play as Adol Christin, a red-haired boy who loses all his memories and must find them again. Of course, the story is much deeper than that. A god named Eldeel ends up creating a mask called the Mask of the Sun, and other people want it for its powers. The story gets pretty deep, yet the characters are completely uninteresting. They all have generic dialogue, and their personalities all feel stereotypical for JRPGs. While the game isn’t anything new, it does what has been done before really well.
The combat in Ys has always been real-time, and this helps alleviate the boredom that has come in JRPGs over the decades from random battles. The combat is fast-paced and fun, with skills you can use; guarding, dodging, and switching between three characters on the fly add a bit of strategy and depth. Each character has a weakness it can deliver to enemies, so you will always change who you put in your party. Aside from fighting regular monsters, the bosses are a lot of fun and quite challenging, but not so hard that you can’t beat them. Honestly, the game is perfectly balanced in that you will acquire the strongest weapons and armor by the end of the game, so you’re always one step ahead of your enemies.
The whole point of Celceta is exploration. Your main secondary goal is to discover the entire area and complete the map 100%. The sense of exploration is one of the greatest assets of Celceta, and you have a hard time putting the game down just to explore one more dungeon. When you’re in towns, you can buy items and exchange stuff you find in the wild. Minerals, beasts, and plant materials can be exchanged for larger and higher-quality items to reinforce armor and weapons. You can also craft items out of these materials as well. There are quite a few towns in this game, and each one has three quests you can complete. Some are hard, some aren’t, but they aren’t hard to figure out. In fact, I never really got lost that much in this game, which is normally common in a JRPG. There was a sense of direction without having to hold your hand, which is wonderful.
On another note, there are a few puzzles thrown in, but nothing that really takes advantage of the Vita’s features, which aren’t expected in a JRPG. I do wish the game had local or online co-op for up to 3 people, but that’s all right. The graphics look detailed but are dated, even for the Vita. It looks like a decent PS2 game at best and could have used some more detail. The textures can look really muddy and grainy, which is unacceptable on the Vita. At the end of the day, you will just love Celceta for the engaging story, fun gameplay, and combat. There are a good 20 hours just in the story alone, and another dozen if you want to get 100%.
Overall, Memories of Celceta isn’t perfect, but it has some great combat, bosses, and a sense of exploration that will keep you glued to your system. The graphics are dated, the voice acting is awful, and the characters are uninteresting, but that’s expected from a JRPG. Could Celceta have broken this trend? It may have been one of the best JRPGs in a long time. What’s here is solid and well worth a purchase for any JRPG fan.
Sometimes there are games that I just give the benefit of the doubt. Blood Knights seemed to have fast-paced combat with decent graphics and some interesting environments. I was wrong on all of those except one. The game has horrible voice acting, stiff, boring combat, terrible platforming, and bad everything else.
There aren’t that many great vampire games because they all end up like this. I honestly don’t even know what this game is about because it’s so boring and monotonous to follow, and the voice actors sound like bored high school students reading from textbooks. The combat is so boring and uninteresting. You just mash on the attack button and use your special moves until they cool down, and then mash them again. The animations are stiff and cumbersome; switching between characters just makes things more frustrating, and I died so many times from just falling off of cliffs.
If that’s not bad enough, there are repetitive and lame objectives like protecting this person until he fixes something or flipping this switch. I mean, really? In 2013, we’re still stuck on these objectives. Not to mention the fact that the checkpoints are spread so far apart that you will die and restart the same section over and over until you tear your hair out. There’s no new twist or interesting plot about vampires—just the typical horror story stuff we’ve seen too many times. At least the game looks halfway decent, and there are some nice details in the environments.
You would think that the RPG elements would add some depth, but they don’t. Sure, there’s armor to get, gold to spend, and XP to obtain, but you won’t care when you’re trudging through endless amounts of boring enemies. Some co-op would have been nice, or some clever puzzles that utilize both characters, but instead we just run around flipping switches. At least the game is really short; you can beat it in about 4-5 hours if you pound through it, but who would want to?
As it is, Blood Knights is a decent concept that is ruined by horrid gameplay mechanics that feel archaic and unforgiving. What could have been a decent vampire game turned into another potato in the stew?
The Halo series is probably one of the most repetitive and unchanging series I have ever played. The first three were pretty good, and Reach and ODST made me fall asleep. With Bungie out of the picture and 343 Industries in the captain’s chair, I figured Halo may have some great new changes. I was half right. The single-player campaign is pretty fun and is as tough as nails. The new weapons are awesome to shoot, and there are new enemies for once that are different. The story is convoluted and confusing, but hardcore fans may be able to follow it okay.
The mechanics are pretty much the same as in previous Halo games. There are no iron sights; the game is fast-paced with high jumping and fast sprinting. There’s still no cover system, which is a shame, and the game is damn hard. I felt the story was a bit random, and the environments felt the same way. One minute I’m shooting the same tired Covenant, then these machines type aliens, then mutated Covenant, then regular Covenant. There were some vehicle sections, and I was riding a giant vehicle. The game just felt all over the place, but it was fun, at least.
The story is really confusing and never makes much sense. Something about Cortana being infected and a giant being called the Didact trying to destroy everything. It’s nothing fancy or sophisticated, but you can’t expect much from an FPS. At least the game just feels tighter, a bit heavier, and less floaty than other Halos. I felt the weapons had weight to them, and the sheer variety had me switching them up all the time for different situations. I did find that there were repetitive scenarios throughout the whole game, like jumping into stations to hit a button at the top and running back down to get to the next one. This scenario repeated often throughout the whole game and felt archaic and overly simple.
While the structured campaign felt old and tired, multiplayer is still the best part of Halo. The constantly updated match types make you come back for more all the time. The game feels faster-paced and just more fluid and balanced than any previous Halo game. Customization is deep for your avatar; there are many levels to climb, and the unlocks are sweet and rewarding. After you beat the Halo campaign just once, I doubt you will ever go back because of how forgettable and repetitive it feels. I honestly think at this point, Halo should just continue as a multiplayer-only game and maybe jump on board with PC.
The few little tweaks here and there help the game become more balanced overall. The lack of dual-wielding makes the game feel more raw and “hardcore.” The various adjustments in damage from each weapon and the increased damage for melee attacks are nice. I also love how great the game looks. This is the best-looking Xbox 360 game out, and the voice acting and animations are so lifelike. However, the Xbox 360 doesn’t have the same processing power as the PS3, so you won’t see The Last of Us-quality textures and lighting effects. There are some ugly textures in Halo 4, and they really show sometimes. Surprisingly, there weren’t any slowdowns or glitches that plagued other Halo games.
Overall, Halo 4 is a great final opus for the 360, but it isn’t the revolutionary new Halo like everyone thought. The campaign is repetitive, extremely difficult, and confusing; the story is so-so, but the multiplayer is where the meat of the game is.
Castlevania has struggled for years in the 3D department. Lords of Shadow was the first solid Castlevania that was in 3D and did the series justice. Some hardcore fans shame the game, but I think it is one of the best action games of this generation. Mirror of Fate brings that same awesomeness to the 3DS with great combat and solid platforming.
You play as four protagonists throughout the whole game. Simon, Alucard, Gabriel, and Trevor. The game has simple 2D platforming with jumping and swinging, but the combat is solid enough. You have two attack buttons and a special power button. The special powers vary from axes (CV1, anyone?) to passive powers like being invincible for a short time or turning into a werewolf (Alucard). The combat is punchy and powerful and feels great. However, the game is incredibly hard. It requires a lot of skill and mastering the combat to get through the game because it can just get downright tough, but it’s beatable. Apart from the combat, you are mainly solving puzzles and finding secrets.
Puzzles involve pushing and pulling objects into the right places, flipping switches in sequential order, and sometimes even labyrinthine mazes. The map is very useful since you can place notes, and it will tell you if there’s a secret or something useful nearby. Upgrading health and magic seems like a standard affair, but you have to find these chests and make an effort; they aren’t handed to you. There was some annoying backtracking, which felt a bit cheap, and the fast travel system is nearly useless since you never know which level you will end up in. I did get lost a few times, and the puzzles can be real head-scratchers, but platforming fans shouldn’t struggle too much.
The story is pretty short, and there’s no reason to really come back. People who have never played Lords of Shadow won’t really get the story since the ending is extremely sad. The graphics are amazing, and these are the best 3D effects I have seen on the 3DS thus far. They pop out and just make the whole game come to life. I honestly didn’t see much that wasn’t in 3D in some way.
Overall, Mirror of Fate is a solid yet difficult platformer that will make any Castlevania or platformer fan happy. The story is interesting, the 3D effects are amazing, and the combat is solid. Just be prepared for some backtracking and short game time.
Amnesia is probably one of the scariest games ever made. I’m talking about The Dark Descent. It made you fear every sound and corner due to the fact that you couldn’t fight enemies. The atmosphere was so scary and haunting, not to mention the extremely scary monsters. A Machine for Pigs gets picked up by a new developer, The Chinese Room, of Dear Esther fame. While it’s still scary and haunting, it doesn’t make you fear every second like the first game did.
Honestly, the story is confusing and makes no sense. It’s a garbled mess, and all I got out of it was that there was a machine that processed pigs for mass consumption in 1899. You play as a man named Mandus who is trying to find his two boys who went down into the depths of this machine. That’s pretty much all I got out of it. What this machine is doing is creating man-pigs that are trying to “cleanse” the town of people for the coming 20th century. The ending sucked, and the game is overall just really short and anticlimactic.
A lot of features were stripped from The Dark Descent. You no longer use tinderboxes to light areas, and you don’t need oil for your lamp. You just run around with a lantern, flipping switches, and solving extremely basic puzzles. The Dark Descent had you really scratching your head, but A Machine for Pigs doesn’t even try to challenge you. In fact, there aren’t even that many monster encounters. Sure, when you reach them, they are scary and intense, but the first 2/3 of the game is uneventful. As you get to the last few chapters, it’s mostly story and nothing else. The whole feeling of progress from The Dark Descent is absent here, which makes no sense. A Machine for Pigs felt more like a barely interactive story than a game.
Towards the end of the game, it just feels disjointed and unbalanced. You bounce around from level to level, and nothing feels connected. Many times, in the beginning, I wandered around, not knowing where to go or what to do. The game just lacks guidance or real direction and can’t be felt from the very first level.
That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It’s not nearly as good or memorable as The Dark Descent should be. The graphics are really dated, despite the nice art style that is carried over from The Dark Descent. A Machine for Pigs feels like an average indie horror game with a story that can’t be followed. Fans of the original will be highly disappointed, but newcomers should just skip this and play the first game.
Remember Me is a brand new IP from Capcom. I always welcome new IPs because you never know when you’re going to get the next Assassin’s Creed. Once I started to remember me, I instantly fell in love with it. The art style is fantastic, the story is engaging, and the characters are memorable. This will be a game I talk about for years to come—at least the story anyway.
You are Nilin, a memory hunter fighting against M3morize. M3morize is a corporation that invented technology to let you forget any memory you want and gain memories. As you can tell, this leads to civil war because everyone eventually becomes Leapers, who are completely corrupted and bereft of memories. It turns out that there is some sort of new world order to wipe out everyone’s memories and make them all mindless soldiers. That’s the gist of it, and if I say any more, I will give too much away. The story is fascinating and really plays well with the art style and atmosphere.
The problem with new IPs is that the developers concentrate on just one aspect of the game, and the rest gets left behind. This is apparent in Assassin’s Creed 1 after playing AC3. You can see the difference. Remember Me has an amazing story and characters, but the gameplay is just lacking; it just feels useless and unnecessary. The tools you have to play don’t really mean anything in this game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. The first thing is the combat system. While it’s unique, it is very limited and actually holds the player back. Nilin has four different combos she can do over the course of the game. You fill these combos with two different attack buttons called presses. These presses can increase your health, decrease S-Pressen cooldown timers, give you more powerful attacks, and cause a chain reaction. This seems really interesting—gaining health during combat? It’s more frustrating and limited than you think. With just four combo chains, you have to memorize all four of them and also remember what presses are in each one. I had one as a focused cool-down combo, then one for health, and the third was for power. The further in the combo the pressen, the bigger the effect. With just four combos, combat gets really repetitive and super boring; it just never picks up.
Once you unlock S-Pressens, things get a tad bit interesting, but only during boss fights. These are powers that can let you attack really fast, stun everyone, place a bomb, and even turn invisible and get a one-hit-kill on an enemy. You can use two different ones on robot enemies that will attack you. These S-Pressens are key to winning tougher battles later in the game. That’s all there is to combat, and it is so limiting and repetitive. I actually only kept going because of the story.
Another part of the game that is never fully developed are the puzzles. There are only four in the entire game. These allow you to remix people’s memories to make them think something happened in a different way. You watch a cutscene and then rewind it, looking for glitches that can change the scene. You have to set off the right glitches to change the memory. The problem is that there are no multiple outcomes. You just keep retrying until you get it right; there’s no fun in that. If I mess with someone’s memory, let me decide how it goes. I also wish there were more of them. There are also memory puzzles that you interact with in the world. They are usually really easy, and the answer is given to you after just a minute. I hate how these things were so underdeveloped; they are great concepts. There are a couple of move-the-stuff puzzles using your arm’s special powers, but I felt these were useless. You unlock a gun-type thing that can blast enemies and move things. Why do I need to unlock this throughout the game? Honestly, the moving and blasting open doors just felt like pointless filler.
Lastly, the exploration is very linear. The controls respond well, but the best part is just viewing everything. You get taken from the slums to the richest areas of the city. The journey is fascinating and breathtaking. Remember Me feels like a mix of Mirror’s Edge, Steven Spielberg’s A.I., and Blade Runner. I ate it up, and the characters are very memorable. I just wish it had better gameplay to complement it.
After you finish the game, you will be talking about the amazing story for a while. While none of these mechanics are bad, they are just underdeveloped and feel like they need more work. The combat is interesting but very limited and repetitive; the same five enemies repeat often; and the puzzles are underdeveloped. I hope Remember Me comes back because I love Nilin and her journey through this breathtaking world, which just gives us better tools to explore it.
The idea of using shadows as puzzles is fascinating, and Contrast has one of the most unique puzzle elements I have seen since Portal. Arranging objects in a room to make the layout of the shadows just right to get to where you need them can be very satisfying. Bringing objects into the shadow world and pulling them out is also very fun. The story is also kind of touching. You play Dawn, who has a mysterious childhood friend, Didi, whose parents are going through hard times, and she wants to bring them back together. Her father is always getting into debt trouble and decides to open a circus using a magician. Everything goes wrong for her father, so it’s up to her and Dawn to fix it all.
The story itself is pretty interesting, but the ending stinks. It honestly just ends, and you never find out what this mysterious shadow world is. She and Dawn are the only people who are in the real world. Her parents talk to her on the walls as shadows. It makes me wonder if Didi has mental issues and is imagining all this. Is Dawn a figment of her imagination? No one else can see her, but it’s never explained. These mysteries can be frustrating in the end when they never make sense.
The game is actually poorly paced. There are a lot of little cutscenes that break everything up, and it gets really annoying. You will walk ten feet, cutscene, walk ten more feet, scene, pull a switch, scene, solve an easy puzzle, scene, and it continues like this. The puzzles are extremely easy, and a few were head-scratchers for a few minutes towards the end, but nothing I couldn’t solve after a little thinking. The game is very linear, and you only explore a few areas, but explore is the wrong word to use here. The only thing you can do that’s extra is find collectibles and find luminaries to be able to start certain puzzles. That is literally all there is to this game.
The game itself can be beaten in about 4 hours. The graphics are really nice; however, they are a little dated, and there are numerous bugs and glitches. The game would crash; Dawn would get stuck in a T pose during certain jumps; Crates would get stuck due to weird physics issues; and they all required restarts. That’s unacceptable, and hopefully it will be patched. I honestly can’t recommend this game for the asking price, but maybe for a sale, it would be worth it. The game isn’t bad; it just seriously lacks content and depth and has a disappointing ending. The shadow puzzles are very inventive and fun to do, but they just need to be more.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !