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Dragon’s Crown

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/11/2014

Posted in: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles. Tagged: dragon's crown, jrpg, playstation, ps3, psvita, rpg, Sony, sorceress, vanillaware, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: Atlus

Developer: Vanillaware

Release Date: 8/6/2013

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Vanillaware is known for one of the hardest JRPGs on the PS2, Odin Sphere, and I was very excited upon hearing about the spiritual successor to that game. While Dragon’s Crown isn’t nearly as hard as that game (it’s much more forgiving), it still has a lot of challenges that await you. Dragon’s Crown’s biggest disappointment is its short length. There are almost no main quests and mainly side quests (about 50). Once you finish the game, you unlock a hard mode and then an inferno mode. Thankfully, the game can be played with up to four players, so it can be a blast.

The story is about a crown that has been taken by an ancient dragon. Your job is to return this crown to your kingdom and kill the dragon. The story is very light, and I know there could have been so much more here. But the super short length makes it impossible to write a better story. There are very few cutscenes and not much spoken dialogue (which is only done by a narrator). Once you jump into the game, you can attack, use items, cast spells, and use the right analog stick to move a hand around the screen to collect treasure. You always have a non-fighting thief with you who can pick locks on hidden doors and open chests. Sadly, you can’t change out your equipment during a mission (most levels can be passed in less than 10 minutes). However, at the end of each level is a boss, and they increase in difficulty throughout all 8 levels or so. Each level has two bosses at different levels for various players.

Once you finish a mission, you can return to town to appraise your items, bury or resurrect bones you find in levels for new AI partners, level up, acquire new quests, and buy runes. Runes are found throughout levels in pairs, which need to be matched with runes in your possession. These add various buffs to your party, which can turn the tide of a battle. Outside of those main things, there’s not much to do besides hit the level cap. The missions are extremely repetitive since you need to find nine talismans before facing the Ancient Dragon (that’s almost all there is to the entire main quest line), and once you are able to beat the Ancient Dragon (probably when you’re around level 30), you do it all over again on a harder difficulty. It gets kind of boring after a while and extremely tough towards the end. It’s best to go in with actual people since your AI partners can mess things up. Thankfully, unlike Odin Sphere, you have lives and can even pay to keep reviving with your coins. This alleviates some of the frustration.

I just wish there was so much more to this game. It feels so small and claustrophobic. The short levels, the nearly non-existent questline, and the story—but at least the characters you pick are fun to use, and the controls work well. The art itself is stunning, with beautiful water-color backdrops and crazy-looking enemies and bosses. This game is mainly designed for fans of the co-op arcade RPGs of yesteryear from Capcom. Not much of a story, but tons of combat, enemies to kill, and levels to acquire. If you want a story-heavy RPG like The Elder Scrolls or Fable, you won’t find that here.

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Need for Speed: Most Wanted

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 05/08/2014

Posted in: iOS, Microsoft, Mobile Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox 360. Tagged: 360, cars, directx 11, Microsoft, most wanted, need for speed, origin, pc, playstation, ps3, psvita, racing, Sony, vita, xbox. Leave a comment

Publisher: EA

Developer: Criterion Games

Release Date: 10/30/2012

Available On

Need for Speed has had a great comeback over the last few years, and Most Wanted seems to have topped it. Being a remake of 2005’s excellent Most Wanted, this version is a whole new beast. The streamlined menus, AutoLog, the massive amount of real-world cars, and the huge world to drive in are something to get excited about.

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My favorite feature has to be the new navigation menu. Being able to select races, customize your car, and jump to various cards with just the D-pad is great. There’s not even a need for a map. Select the race you want, and it will put the GPS line on your mini-map. Want to drive a different car? 3 D-pad clicks, and you’re there. This just seems nearly revolutionary for the racing genre, as they have been plagued with nasty menus for years. Outside of the menu are excellent racing moments and various types of races to do.

Sprints, circuits, fastest speed, and losing the cops the fastest are just a few types of races in Most Wanted. The whole goal is to find all the jump areas where cars are hidden throughout the entire world. Win first in each race for each car, and you will win part upgrades to make your car faster and better to drive. Some parts are better for certain areas, like offroad, but will slow you down on the asphalt. There are also various parts to help the cops, like re-inflating tires if you hit a spike strip or a stronger chassis for ramming through roadblocks. Like previous Need for Speed games (and any criterion racer), you can take down vehicles for more points to work your way to the number one most wanted.

A fun feature here (and it threw me for a loop) was having to take down a most wanted car to win their car. Sure, you can beat them in a race, but what about taking them down? It adds a greater challenge, but if you miss them, you can always summon the car back via the navigation menu. It’s not hard to work your way up to the top if you try to get first in every race. Even after you beat the most wanted vehicle, you can earn parts and find every hidden vehicle in the city.

If that’s not enough, try the AutoLog recommended objectives or try to find and hit every billboard in the game. There’s a lot to do in this game, and even though it can feel repetitive after a while, there’s just a great sense of accomplishment from getting first in every race. Let’s talk about graphics. Most Wanted is one of the best-looking games on the Vita. The sense of speed is great, and the controls are amazing. It doesn’t look like the game took much of a hit from being downgraded graphically, but it was hand-tailored to the system. The game even sounds great, and I spent hours just racing around, completing races without ever getting bored. Is there anything bad about Most Wanted? Mainly how repetitive the races can get overall, but the variety of cars keeps this played down a bit. Crashing every 5 seconds can get annoying, but that’s expected. Most Wanted is a must-have racer for any system you can own it on.

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Final Fantasy X HD Remaster

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/27/2014

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox One. Tagged: ffx, final fantasy x, jrpg, playstation, ps2, ps3, psvita, rpg, Sony, square enix, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Square Enix

Release Date: 3/18/2014

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Final Fantasy X was a game in the series that really shifted things around. It broke some common JRPG rules and was a bit all over the place. This was the first JRPG I had ever beaten as a kid, and it was the first Final Fantasy I ever finished. I have a lot of fond memories of this game, and the HD Remaster brought a lot of those back.

The core game hasn’t really been touched, but US gamers will finally get a taste of the tougher international version, which adds an expert sphere grid and Dark Aeons, which are the toughest enemies in the game (some have millions of HP). Outside of the game, the game is still the same, with great characters that are memorable and beautiful locales. The story is a bit confusing at first, but very original, if not very deep. You play as Tidus, who is a young man sent forward in time hundreds of years into the future. His original home is now a sacred ruin, and a giant being called Sin is destroying humanity. Every 10 years, this sin comes back, and the calm ends. Another summoner must go on a pilgrimage to gather all the Aeons and take down Sin for another 10-year Calm. Your goal is to put a stop to this cycle. You gather your crew along the way to level up and put an end to all this nonsense.

Before you jump into this game, you must have a mindset from when the PS2 first launched. This game was fantastic back in the day and still holds up well. Most JRPG gamers will be thrown off by the Sphere Grid. There is no traditional leveling up where you gain levels. Instead, you acquire AP and get sphere points, which allow you to freely upgrade various attributes and skills for each character. The expert sphere grid allows you to use keys to go off your path and learn other abilities from other characters. This is a lot of fun and gives you total freedom over your character.

Outside of the sphere grid is the obvious combat. Yes, there are random battles, and some areas are so bad that you hit one every 2–3 seconds—literally. A maximum of three characters can battle at once with the freedom to swap out. It’s the usual JRPG turn-based battle system, but there are overdrives that are crucial to winning boss fights. Characters learn new drives as they battle. Aeons are also essential, but only Yuna can send them in. They are large, heavy hitters that will take away massive damage and can also be overdriven, which is probably the #1 technique for winning tougher boss fights. Like any other JRPG, learning enemies’ weaknesses and battling with magic is a must. Some bosses nearly turn into puzzles where you must cast Reflect on them so their healing spell bounces off of them onto you. Some bosses will cast status ailments that can cripple your entire party. If you don’t grind a bit and stay ahead of the game, you will struggle.

Outside of battle, there are the Cloister of Trials, which are a huge pain and aren’t fun at all. These are puzzles in which you place various spheres to unlock doors. Another huge pain is the Blitzball mini-game. This isn’t fun at all and requires math to actually play. It’s stiff, shallow, and just plain boring. I hated it as a kid, and I hate it even now that I know math better. It’s all nearly luck-based and a roll of the dice. You have almost no control over characters.

FFX is also full of pre-final boss content, but there are a lot of requirements to get this stuff. Ultimate weapons are a must-have to do more than the 9,999 HP damage limit. However, they require you to be in certain areas, acquire certain other items, or even get through harder areas that require getting through other areas just to get to that area. Sounds confusing? It is. I spent a good 15 hours just trying to figure all this out and could get only one optional Aeon (Yojimbo). Anima is another optional Aeon but requires getting through a tough boss with the three weakest characters (Tidus, Rikku, and Wakka) and then getting all the destruction spheres in every trial. It’s a huge pain, requires a lot of running around and backtracking, and can make you frustrated. You can also monster hunt, but this requires training a Chocobo (which is tough as nails to get through), and then capturing the toughest monsters in the game easily requires ultimate weapons, which require more backtracking. It’s a frustrating mess but also somehow extremely satisfying once you do it.

With the main game out of the way, let’s talk about visuals. The HD upgrade isn’t exactly what you think. Most of the game has been remodeled, and all the main characters are completely redone; however, many monsters and NPCs just had a few passes of texture filtering, and that’s it. It really looks ugly in spots, but it’s not so bad if you’ve played the game before. I just wish the Japanese voice track was on here since the English voice acting is so terrible and embarrassing to listen to.

Note: Shame on you, James Arnold Taylor, for your terrible voice acting in Tidus. You’ve done better! Like Ratchet from Ratchet & Clank, Gabriel Logan from the PSP Syphon Filters, and even Marty McFly from the Back to the Future adventure games!

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Publisher: 2K Games

Developer: Irrational Games

Release Date: 11/12/2013

Available On

The long-awaited Infinite expansion set in Rapture is out and about. I honestly didn’t know what to really expect from this other than more questions and fan service from Rapture. The story started out very similarly to BioShock 1, where you are riding down the bathysphere into Rapture. It brought back a lot of great memories, and I was happy to see the beautiful Elizabeth throughout the whole chapter. What I wasn’t happy about was the length, the gameplay, and the lack of anything memorable.

You feel more like one level from a full game. The one level that is really just action is more than the story. It doesn’t pick up at all until the last 2 minutes of the ending, which is both shocking and expected and gives us more questions than answers. The same infinite guns are back, but with only one new power, and that is Old Man Winter. It is not much different from the freeze power in BioShock 1. It can freeze running water to make a bridge, and that’s about it. I ran around closing vents to draw Sally out (the girl who Booker must get back) and not much else. The ammo is extremely scarce, so you will be scrounging for it more than at any other moment in previous BioShock games. You also don’t get the full arsenal in Infinite, and nothing much else has changed gameplay-wise.

The setting is fantastic, however. The underwater city is memorable, and it’s great to be back before it went to crap from the previous games. We are seeing the calm before the storm here. The Little Sister program is starting, and so are the new Plasmids. It’s very interesting to see how things are happening when everything is prosperous and fun in the underwater utopia. Another great addition is the return of Sander Cohen, who is probably the most insane person in Rapture. This section is memorable but dies out quickly with more boring shooting and getting lost in hallways.

Outside of the interesting ending, there’s not much else. This was a real disappointment because of how long everyone waited. The gamer who just played Infinite and moved on shouldn’t even bother. This DLC is mainly for hardcore fans who actually want the ending in Episode Three rather than the tidbits from each episode.

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Keyboard & Mouse

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/16/2014

Posted in: PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: hatsune miku, playstation, project diva f, ps3, rhythm, Sony, vita, vocaloid. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Sega

Release Date: 8/27/2013 (PS3), 3/4/2014 (Vita)

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Vocaloid may not ring a bell to anyone outside of Japanophiles in the West. In Japan, Vocaloid is a major success, with dozens of albums and countless collaborations with various Japanese music artists. This is the first Project Diva game that has made it to the Western shores. Project Diva has a unique rhythm-based gameplay structure that is both tough as nails and addictive. Don’t let the cute “girly” visuals fool you. This game is for everyone who loves music or rhythm games.

Icons flash across the screen in different patterns, and you must press the corresponding face button. Arrows also require you to press the D-pad direction plus the color of that button. New in F are scratch stars, which also go into the technical zone segments, which are mandatory for getting higher grades at the end of songs. New on the Vita is the ability to use the touchscreen or rear touchpad to scratch these stars. This is so much easier than using the right thumbstick on the PS3. Technical zones are areas where you have to hit every note perfectly to get a huge boost in your score bar. Notes rank from cool, which is perfect, to awful, which is a complete miss. Cool and great scores will build up your multiplier. Safe or lower will drop it. Each song has two technical zones, with a chance zone near the end. New in F is the ability to build up a large star meter in your chance zone to unleash a mega scratch star to play an extra segment at the end. You must hit all of these to even get close to an excellent or perfect score.

These scores will unlock new items to buy in the shop, which is the other half of Project Diva F. You can outfit your diva’s room with new tables, chairs, decor, computers, etc. You can also unlock new costume pieces for your character. There are plenty of items to unlock, so you will be kept busy doing this long after unlocking all 30+ songs. The Vita features a new edit mode for making your own music videos or editing already-made videos and sharing them online. Project Diva F has a lot of content and will keep you coming back for higher scores or just to play your favorite songs.

When it comes to song selections, these aren’t as great or memorable as the PSP Project Diva games, but some songs are fantastic and memorable, while others are pretty lame. It’s a mixed bag, and everyone will have different favorites, but there are enough songs to please everyone who plays this game. The graphics are a step up from the PSP games, but I feel they could have been a bit better on the Vita. The textures look a bit muddy on Vita, but overall, the graphical style is very unique and spot-on when it comes to Vocaloid. I would have liked to have seen at least one pre-rendered video per song, but everything is performed in real-time.

As it is, Project Diva F is a fantastic game and the best rhythm game on Vita. If you love your J-Pop or want to venture out into something new, then take this game for a spin. Just be warned: the songs are all sung in Japanese, and the lyrics are in Japanese as well. Don’t bet on any localization because it wouldn’t be Vocaloid or Miku if it were.

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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/06/2014

Posted in: Microsoft, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox 360. Tagged: metal gear rising, Microsoft, pc, playstation, ps3, revengeance, Sony, x360, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Konami

Developer: Platinum Games

Release Date: 2/19/2013

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The Metal Gear franchise hasn’t seen too many spin-offs. Acid is the last one. Revengeance puts you in the shoes of Raiden, a cyborg fighting against other cyborgs for the greater good. The plot is supposed to hover around MGS4, but it’s boiled down to a confusing and ultimately uninteresting mess. There’s something going on about children’s brains being harvested for implants and people making money off of war. Raiden is the good guy trying to stop all this, but the game is so short and broken up so much that it’s hard to follow.

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What is great is all the action. Raiden responds wonderfully and has an array of flashy moves that would put most action-adventure games to shame. As you progress through the game, you can upgrade your life, fuel cells, weapons, and moves. The whole game pretty much revolves around a slicing engine. When you defeat an enemy enough, you can slow down time and use the right analog stick to slice enemies up into ribbons. It’s pretty fun and never really gets old, but it’s sensitive and sometimes finicky. Boss fights will rely on this, and line-up squares can cost you the entire battle if you aren’t quick enough.

I honestly wish Platinum never put stealth sections in the game. This isn’t Solid Snake; I want to run around slicing things up. The enemy placement isn’t smart and laid out like in a typical Metal Gear game. You get seen most of the time, even if you try hard not to. One problem lies in the fact that there’s not much else to do. It’s just wave after wave of enemies and then a boss fight. It also doesn’t help that the game is ridiculously hard outside of easy mode. Even though it took me less than 6.5 hours to finish the game, it was broken up throughout a year of playing. I would spend hours in some areas just because of how hard the game can be. There’s no block button. Let me throw that out there right now. Instead, you can dodge and parry, which is extremely difficult to do. You can die in just a few hits, and healing relies on slicing enemies at the right moment and getting their nanostrands to fully heal. You must slice them before they hit the ground; this can be really tricky to master.

The enemies also repeat often, and the game is overly generic in tone. Sure, the graphics are fantastic, the music is great, and the action is fast-paced and looks amazing. However, the enemies are just generic soldiers and geckos. The environments nearly all look the same, and some boss fights even repeat. I appreciate the difficulty that forces you to master the combat system, but a larger variety of gameplay would have been nice.

So the final question is this: Is revenge the be-all-end-all of the action-adventure genre? Not likely. Sure, it’s up there with some of the better games combat-wise, but everything else just falls a bit flat.

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Thief

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/30/2014

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: directx 11, Microsoft, pc, playstation, ps3, ps4, Sony, thief, x360, xbone, xbox one. Leave a comment

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Eidos Montreal

Release Date: 2/25/2014

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Thief has been one of those franchises that has been on the back burner of gamers’ minds for over a decade. Like Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, and various other decade-long franchises, Thief went through its own development hell. The end product isn’t exactly something that’s worth waiting ten years for, but it’s a fun game with fantastic visuals and some great stealth gameplay.

I will come right out and say this: the story is almost complete garbage. It’s a discombobulated mess of disjointed segments strewn together in eight chapters of gameplay. You play as a master thief, Garret, who is trying to get his friend Erin back, whom he let down during a big heist. You need to get a hold of some powerful people to answer some questions and find a mysterious stone. There is some anarchy and revolution thrown in, as well as some sort of plague called The Gloom. I honestly don’t know why any of this is happening or why Erin has a power called the Primal. It’s a huge mess, and nothing is ever explained. That’s too bad for a game, as cinematic as it is, that can’t tell a decent story. At least the gameplay is fun, and that’s why most people are here.

The stealth gameplay consists of sneaking and hiding in the shadows, like in previous Thief games. Garret isn’t really about killing enemies, so you just knock them out with your famous Blackjack. You can kill enemies by using arrows, but it takes away from your level score. Like in past Thief games, arrows are your whole arsenal. Water arrows can put out fires, giving off light; rope arrows can help you swing to a new area to get around guards; poppy arrows can stun enemies; and blast arrows can take out a group of people or cause a distraction. Your arrows are a playground for anything you want them to be to your heart’s content.

Like in previous Thief games, you can take multiple paths to get around guards completely undetected or by taking them out one at a time. Some of the paths are hard to find, and some just lead to the treasure. Picking locks and finding loot to gain gold are very important if you want to stay stocked up on arrows. Sometimes it’s not worth getting caught just for a piece that’s worth 10 gold. Sometimes animals are guarding a piece, or there are too many guards or lights to get around. Thankfully, vertical play is quick thanks to your claw, which lets you climb taller areas.

An odd addition to the series is weird creepy horror segments straight out of Amnesia. You can’t kill these things; you can only sneak around them. Sure, they were creepy, but why? It felt out of place. Also out of place are the awkward boss “fights” that just feel loose and sloppy—maybe even shoehorned in. The flow of the game is also off quite a bit, with side missions taking you to weird areas of town and not really being worth anything. I honestly felt the whole world was limited to just side missions when it could have been a whole larger open world.

Outside of all that, there’s not much else to the game. It doesn’t feel like the ultimate revolutionary stealth game like the first two games felt. The AI is dumb most of the time, and the game can be beaten in less than 8 hours, even if you try to gather all the loot. With side missions, you may extend to 20 hours, but just barely. The graphics are just fantastic, with advanced DirectX 11 effects and a great art style that feels like Thief; there aren’t even any memorable characters in the game—Garret included. What we have is a fun weekend rental and nothing more.

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Keyboard & Mouse

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/15/2014

Posted in: 3DS, Nintendo, Retro Consoles. Tagged: 3ds, dark moon, luigi, luigi's, mansion, mario, Nintendo. Leave a comment

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Next Level Games

Release Date: 3/24/2013

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Luigi’s Mansion was a cult hit on the GameCube but didn’t see much commercial success. The 3DS seems like a perfect home for the sequel, so Nintendo went for it. You play Luigi, who is tasked with dispersing a small town of ghosts with the help of Professor E. Gadd. You take your Poltergust 5000 and suck and blow anything in your path. Be it cloth on walls, rugs, pulleys, or using your other powers to reveal hidden objects or even your flashlight to help battle ghosts, There are quite a few elements in play here, and they are done fairly well. Ghosts don’t just stand around and let you suck them up. Some are protected by objects or are inside other objects and require coaxing out in various ways. This, with the inclusion of puzzles, makes Luigi’s Mansion a fun trip.

It isn’t without its problems, and there are more than meets the eye, like most recent Nintendo games. Sure, the game looks great and plays well, but it gets repetitive halfway through and gets frustrating. You’d expect tougher ghosts to come into play at some point, but instead, you get the same ghosts with bigger life bars and more thrown at you. As you progress, you find cash throughout the game to upgrade your equipment, so this isn’t a problem. I was nearly maxed out towards the end of the game. The issue is redundancy and constantly revisiting the same areas just to fight different ghosts. Some puzzles are hard to figure out, and some require insistent backtracking that gets very dull. The game had the Mario charm thrown in, but I expected more variety. After the third area, you really start getting tired of the game, but that doesn’t mean it’s terrible.

There are some hidden items in each area, and they aren’t too hard to find if you explore every little area. These range from gems to cash to a hidden boss in each level. It feels less like a collectathon and more like exploring an area. The objectives are clear, and your map is useful. With that said, many objectives are also repeated throughout, like chasing down a ghost dog to find a key and getting back parts from various ghosts. It just got old, and I just kept telling myself, “Not this again!”

Dark Moon is one of the best-looking 3DS games out there. The game has high-resolution textures, great-looking models, and some impressive lighting effects and physics. I almost felt like I was playing the Wii U. The 3D effects are nice, but they don’t add anything to the gameplay. I loved the attention to detail from Luigi’s voice to his animations. The game has great production values but could have used a better variety of gameplay elements.

God of War: Ascension

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/27/2014

Posted in: PlayStation 3, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: ascension, god of war, greek, kratos, mythology, playstation, ps3, Sony. Leave a comment

Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Santa Monica Studios

Release Date: 3/12/2013

Available Exclusively On

God of War was once Sony’s unstoppable powerhouse that helped sell consoles and push them to their limits. While God of War was revolutionary at the time, it’s starting to show its teeth, and it’s never more apparent than in Ascension. While the game shines in production values, the quality and content are seriously lacking compared to past games, even the smaller PSP ones.

You play the angry Spartan demi-god, Kratos, once again. This time you are playing through a prequel to the first game. Kratos is trying to free his bonds from Ares after swearing and giving up his life to defeat his enemy. He has to defeat the Furies along with his living prison, the Hechatonchires. The game starts out with an epic giant boss fight, as usual, and even a cinematic torture scene where you get to start beating down one of the Furies right off the bat. It starts out with a bang and quickly fizzles out once the combat system is introduced to you. Honestly, it’s nearly ruined. The combat engine has been tweaked so much that it just doesn’t flow like it used to. It’s now based on a momentum system where the more you hit without getting hit, the more damage you do. I honestly hate this, as it sets you back in difficult areas. What’s more, the magic system has been screwed with too much, and the same goes for the upgrade system.

I like the idea of having four different blades with elemental abilities, but they don’t mean anything. Should my fire blades be strong against an ice enemy? It doesn’t seem so. Each sword is supposed to have one magic attack because they are acquired at certain upgrade levels, which I really hate. The rage meter has been turned into a bar that slowly fills as you hit enemies. If you get hit, it rapidly drops, and your damage dealt is reduced along with your more powerful moves. The game is hard enough as it is with enemies wailing on you, so your best moves are locked away until you can get enough hits in to “acquire them” temporarily. A horrible system that needs to go away in the next game.

With that said, Ascension has the most cerebral puzzles in any God of War game, which is a nice change. I had to actually think about nearly every puzzle, and some were completely stumped. Some new passive abilities are ones where you can decay and heal objects. Another ability allows you to duplicate yourself to solve puzzles and do extra damage in combat. These are probably the only things in the game that show an overall evolution.

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With that aside, let’s talk about bosses. God of War is famous for its epic and memorable bosses that are larger than life. Ascension has the weakest bosses in the entire series. First off, there’s a lack of them. Most are small, about the size of regular enemies. The only exceptions are the beginning boss and the end boss. That’s nearly 7 hours in between weak fights. The overall flow of the game just feels messed up and broken. I kept looking forward to amazing boss fights that blew me away, but I just kept getting regular fight after fight. This really brings the God of War experience down quite a bit. Ascension just feels like a basic, bare-bones God of War without all the memorable moments.

Like I mentioned before, the production values are at least here. Ascension is probably one of the top five best-looking PS3 games or even games of this generation of consoles. The game just looks freaking fantastic and will blow you away. However, you start to not care if there aren’t those amazing boss fights and fast, fluid combat. Ascension is a step in the wrong direction for the series, showing that tweaking something to the point of nearly breaking it isn’t the answer to innovation. Should ascension have never been made at all? We certainly wouldn’t miss it if it completely disappeared, but what’s here is a decent game with some experimental multiplayer that will last for a few weeks, and you will move on to the next game.

OlliOlli

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/14/2014

Posted in: 3DS, Android, Linux, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Mobile Reviews, Nintendo, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Retro Consoles, Sony, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox One. Tagged: 2d, olliolli, playstation, skateboarding, vita. Leave a comment

Publisher: Roll7

Developer: Tom Hegarty

Release Date: 1/21/2014

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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.

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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.