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chuckroIt’s time to clear a variety of games off my Steam backlog. Five roughly ten-hour experiences in radically different genres:
Kingdom Rush Vengeance - A tower defense game with a nominal plot (a sealed-away dark wizard escapes and sets out to conquer the world) that’s really an excuse to set your minions against everyone in your way. The Kingdom Rush series has always sat in my “middle ground” place for tower defense, because what I really want is something totally grind-able (like Gemcraft), and this only gives you upgrades when you complete the main campaign stages and has limited levels for your heroes. (I do really like the click-and-find achievements hiding in most stages, though.) Still, it came as part of a Humble Bundle and I got my money’s worth of entertainment, even without re-doing every stage at higher difficulty/challenge mode and also doing all of the expansion stages.
The Messenger – A Ninja Gaiden-em-up with tongue planted firmly in cheek; you spend a lot of time clinging to walls, air-jumping off projectiles, and rope-darting across gaps. The second half switches from being linear to being a metroidvania that I would have found too obtuse without a guide—the world is too large, the travel too treacherous, and the fast-travel points too few for the amount of crisscrossing the map you have to do. The difficulty starts very reasonable (for the genre) but my number of deaths rose dramatically as the game went on. (You have infinite lives, but the demon buddy who revives you takes a bunch of the Time Stones you collect when you respawn.) I found that the difficulty level teetered just on the edge of too much; I had a bunch of points where I died a lot, got frustrated, but eventually came back and made it through. This was very much a game I had to play in bursts and stop to rest when I started getting sloppy—but in turn I’m rather smug that I got through the whole thing.
Ocean’s Heart – A 2D Zeldalike with a mixed amount of open-worldness; pirates attacked your town and kidnapped your friend, so now you need to follow in your father’s footsteps and go hunt them down. Along the way you’ll find the usual selection of bombs, bow, boomerang, and spell amulets. (Bombs are maddeningly limited for much of the game.) Instead of heart drops, you need to collect fruit or craft potions to restore health, though that also means you can build up a huge stock of healing by the midgame. There are also a lot of weapon and armor upgrades to find and collect, so the difficulty of various areas can be wildly variable depending on whether you’ve done sidequests. I died a LOT in the first couple of hours, but once I had a few armor upgrades and health upgrades (not to mention a proper stock of health potions) I didn’t die at all in the latter two-thirds of the game. Especially if you’ve been keeping up with upgrades, bosses are actually really easy and it’s only attrition that’ll take you down—which is avoidable with your massive stock of healing items. I would have liked proper dungeon maps and maybe a more detailed world map, but the quest log is great and the fast travel is very helpful. This is a fun game with just enough plot for the dungeons and vice-versa.
Children of Zodiarcs – A “Square-Enix Collective” game which mashes together a tactical rpg, a deck-builder rpg, and a dice-based combat system. You maneuver around the battle map in classic trpg style, pick your attacks from your custom attack deck (and the size of your hand also impacts some effects and can be affected by spells), and every attack is resolved by rolling custom dice. You gain new cards by gaining levels; you win new dice in battle or craft them from your excess stock. There’s no equipment or consumables; and each character is unique with no class system or anything like that. Despite the abundance of systems, there’s actually very little customization and you don’t even get to choose your party for battles (and about a quarter of the battles are with completely uncustomizable teams anyway). You can grind side battles on normal mode, but if you’re underleveled the enemies are weakened anyway, so it’s not necessary and at least once for me was counterproductive; you really can just charge right through and if luck goes against you, reset and try again. This game has an amazing amount of board game-ness to it for something that doesn’t play at all like a board game. The plot revolves around a small street gang who’ve happened into a very important artifact in a world that had previous been decimated by wars that used the Zodiarcs; but it stays in a very small corner of that world and you basically fight the same battles with the city guard, the rival gangs, and the weird cultists half a dozen times each. I suspect people were expecting a big Final Fantasy Tactics experience from both the systems and the story here, and the disappointment is what lead to mixed reviews of the game. That said, while I don’t think it was brilliant and I didn’t feel the need to thoroughly do everything, I beat it and had some fun with it.
Worlds of Magic – I backed a Kickstarter for this and it was released back in (checks notes) 2015…and it’s sat on my backlog since. It’s a fancy, juiced-up version of the 4X classic Master of Magic, that I’ve replayed (and played official enhanced hacks of) several times in that interim. They added a lot of new overworld features and tweaked a bunch of mechanics, but the majority of the actual gameplay (including unit types and tech trees) is identical. A bunch of the mechanics are a little janky (and not just in that they fight my muscle memory), as units tend not to move along set paths you make for them and need to be micromanaged. There are also graphical glitches in battle to the point of the game freezing if you bring a magic spirit into a battle on water. Also, Hero inventory is a mess where things appear and disappear at random. But the biggest change and the biggest problem I found was that units don't gain experience over time, only in battle, and the battles that you can beat are very limited. Which means leveling up your heroes is a mammoth endeavor (of micromanaging!) and that really changes the power curve of the game. I think it’s also interesting that most of the achievements—including the really basic ones you can get in the first few hours—have a very low percentage of players who have them. That implies that a lot of people who bought this barely touched it. (And reviews from the people who played more of it complain that it’s unfinished and prone to crashes in the late-game.) I gave it the ol’ college try and played ten hours, conquering the Prime Plane (and covering it in settlements) and meeting the enemy wizard in the Water Plane before I decided I’d gotten the experience and my money’s worth.
Overall: A mixed bag, though I enjoyed them all for the time I put in. The Messenger and Ocean’s Heart get recommended if the descriptions appeal to you.
Kingdom Rush Vengeance - A tower defense game with a nominal plot (a sealed-away dark wizard escapes and sets out to conquer the world) that’s really an excuse to set your minions against everyone in your way. The Kingdom Rush series has always sat in my “middle ground” place for tower defense, because what I really want is something totally grind-able (like Gemcraft), and this only gives you upgrades when you complete the main campaign stages and has limited levels for your heroes. (I do really like the click-and-find achievements hiding in most stages, though.) Still, it came as part of a Humble Bundle and I got my money’s worth of entertainment, even without re-doing every stage at higher difficulty/challenge mode and also doing all of the expansion stages.
The Messenger – A Ninja Gaiden-em-up with tongue planted firmly in cheek; you spend a lot of time clinging to walls, air-jumping off projectiles, and rope-darting across gaps. The second half switches from being linear to being a metroidvania that I would have found too obtuse without a guide—the world is too large, the travel too treacherous, and the fast-travel points too few for the amount of crisscrossing the map you have to do. The difficulty starts very reasonable (for the genre) but my number of deaths rose dramatically as the game went on. (You have infinite lives, but the demon buddy who revives you takes a bunch of the Time Stones you collect when you respawn.) I found that the difficulty level teetered just on the edge of too much; I had a bunch of points where I died a lot, got frustrated, but eventually came back and made it through. This was very much a game I had to play in bursts and stop to rest when I started getting sloppy—but in turn I’m rather smug that I got through the whole thing.
Ocean’s Heart – A 2D Zeldalike with a mixed amount of open-worldness; pirates attacked your town and kidnapped your friend, so now you need to follow in your father’s footsteps and go hunt them down. Along the way you’ll find the usual selection of bombs, bow, boomerang, and spell amulets. (Bombs are maddeningly limited for much of the game.) Instead of heart drops, you need to collect fruit or craft potions to restore health, though that also means you can build up a huge stock of healing by the midgame. There are also a lot of weapon and armor upgrades to find and collect, so the difficulty of various areas can be wildly variable depending on whether you’ve done sidequests. I died a LOT in the first couple of hours, but once I had a few armor upgrades and health upgrades (not to mention a proper stock of health potions) I didn’t die at all in the latter two-thirds of the game. Especially if you’ve been keeping up with upgrades, bosses are actually really easy and it’s only attrition that’ll take you down—which is avoidable with your massive stock of healing items. I would have liked proper dungeon maps and maybe a more detailed world map, but the quest log is great and the fast travel is very helpful. This is a fun game with just enough plot for the dungeons and vice-versa.
Children of Zodiarcs – A “Square-Enix Collective” game which mashes together a tactical rpg, a deck-builder rpg, and a dice-based combat system. You maneuver around the battle map in classic trpg style, pick your attacks from your custom attack deck (and the size of your hand also impacts some effects and can be affected by spells), and every attack is resolved by rolling custom dice. You gain new cards by gaining levels; you win new dice in battle or craft them from your excess stock. There’s no equipment or consumables; and each character is unique with no class system or anything like that. Despite the abundance of systems, there’s actually very little customization and you don’t even get to choose your party for battles (and about a quarter of the battles are with completely uncustomizable teams anyway). You can grind side battles on normal mode, but if you’re underleveled the enemies are weakened anyway, so it’s not necessary and at least once for me was counterproductive; you really can just charge right through and if luck goes against you, reset and try again. This game has an amazing amount of board game-ness to it for something that doesn’t play at all like a board game. The plot revolves around a small street gang who’ve happened into a very important artifact in a world that had previous been decimated by wars that used the Zodiarcs; but it stays in a very small corner of that world and you basically fight the same battles with the city guard, the rival gangs, and the weird cultists half a dozen times each. I suspect people were expecting a big Final Fantasy Tactics experience from both the systems and the story here, and the disappointment is what lead to mixed reviews of the game. That said, while I don’t think it was brilliant and I didn’t feel the need to thoroughly do everything, I beat it and had some fun with it.
Worlds of Magic – I backed a Kickstarter for this and it was released back in (checks notes) 2015…and it’s sat on my backlog since. It’s a fancy, juiced-up version of the 4X classic Master of Magic, that I’ve replayed (and played official enhanced hacks of) several times in that interim. They added a lot of new overworld features and tweaked a bunch of mechanics, but the majority of the actual gameplay (including unit types and tech trees) is identical. A bunch of the mechanics are a little janky (and not just in that they fight my muscle memory), as units tend not to move along set paths you make for them and need to be micromanaged. There are also graphical glitches in battle to the point of the game freezing if you bring a magic spirit into a battle on water. Also, Hero inventory is a mess where things appear and disappear at random. But the biggest change and the biggest problem I found was that units don't gain experience over time, only in battle, and the battles that you can beat are very limited. Which means leveling up your heroes is a mammoth endeavor (of micromanaging!) and that really changes the power curve of the game. I think it’s also interesting that most of the achievements—including the really basic ones you can get in the first few hours—have a very low percentage of players who have them. That implies that a lot of people who bought this barely touched it. (And reviews from the people who played more of it complain that it’s unfinished and prone to crashes in the late-game.) I gave it the ol’ college try and played ten hours, conquering the Prime Plane (and covering it in settlements) and meeting the enemy wizard in the Water Plane before I decided I’d gotten the experience and my money’s worth.
Overall: A mixed bag, though I enjoyed them all for the time I put in. The Messenger and Ocean’s Heart get recommended if the descriptions appeal to you.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-19 04:45 pm (UTC)(this was the one I was failing to remember last night that I wanted to comment on)