Hey there! I don't have a ton of things to say about these things, but I do have things to say. I know both Mafia III and Rise of the Tomb Raider are out now on a platform I own (that's more specifically for Tomb Raider and its year of Xbox/PC exclusivity), but I've yet to have a chance to get either of those. Might wait for a sale? Mafia III seems like kind of buggy at the moment, and even if it does have all the DLC, $60 for a year old game seems a bit much, but I did really like that previous Tomb Raider, so who knows! I'll play both at some point, most likely.
Anyway!
Transformers Devastation.
Something that I had forgotten after (almost a decade) of the only mainstream Transformers presence being the Michael Bay movies was that I used to quite enjoy the Transformers. I feel compelled to also state that, as someone with horrendous taste in movies, I have enjoyed aspects of those Bay Transformers movies, but I hadn't really considered myself a fan of Transformers as a franchise since I was about 12.
And while I wouldn't say that Devastation has suddenly remade me into a huge Transformers fan, I do think it's a pretty fun game, and it made me more nostalgic for olde Transformers than I ever thought I would be. Partly because the original Transformers (an 80s cartoon) was actually before my time. That was still the Transformers that I watched, probably through reruns (though I do remember at one point (as a young kid) renting a VHS of Transformers episodes from that original series), but it wasn't at the height of Transformers as a thing that kids cared about. There were other shows, of course. I remember one (around that 12 year old range) that was much more Saturday morning anime-ish that I watched. I still have a Megatron toy from that show, actually. He turned into a tank. Even as a kid, I thought the fact that Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons and one of the most powerful Transformers, turned into a pistol that someone else had to shoot was really dumb.
But then again, Transformers are pretty dumb in general. In a good way! And Devastation leans into that, which I appreciate. It's the sort of game where at one point, a boss refers to himself, out loud, as a "Triple Changer." I dunno if that's a thing that existed in Transformers lore, or was just a marketing thing attached to some of the toys, but I definitely got a laugh out of that line.
You can pick who you play as (once you get past the tutorial), and one of them transforms into a dinosaur. Now, I remember next to nothing about the lore of original Transformers, but I always thought the point of the transforming was to disguise themselves from the humans. You know, "robots in disguise." Trucks, cars, planes, tape decks, etc, are all things that could be used as disguises in 1980s America. But a robot dinosaur? I don't understand the logic of that at all, aside from "kids like dinosaurs so let's make one that turns into a dinosaur." I'm sure there were more Dinobots on the show (and on store shelves), but Grimlock is the only one in the game, which is maybe for the best.
Though, given that you can't play as any of the Decepticons (which is a huge bummer because I wanted to play as Megatron), I'm not really sure why anyone would want to play as anyone other than Optimus Prime. I mean, he's kind of THE ONE, right? At least as long as there isn't any meaningful game play differences between them, which aside from Grimlock, there isn't. Each one does have their own special move, mapped to L1, but they don't make a huge difference in game. Optimus has a vehicular spin where his big trailer materializes out of thin air, and I think Sideswipe has an enhanced dash move for his. I don't remember any of the others. Grimlock's dino-form does play differently than the cars and trucks of the others (which largely feel the same), and he has some grapple type stuff.
But aside from the tutorial and a brief challenge map to try Grimlock, I played as Optimus the entire time because there's a Trophy for beating every chapter with him. There's actually one for doing that with all of the characters, which seems a bit excessive since I don't think this game would really be engaging enough to stay enjoyable for that many play-throughs. At least not without more variety between the characters. The different weapon types do change things up more than the characters do, but so far as I could tell, you can equip anything to anyone. Which was nice because Optimus' default ax was a bit too slow for me. I ended up swapping between a single sword and double swords for the melee weapons, and going with basically whatever for the guns. I did find a sniper rifle to be useful a lot of the time.
The weapons bring me to one of my issues with the game. The game has a loot system, not unlike what is in many games like Diablo or Borderlands. And on top of that, you can use (preferably) lower tier weapons to improve the stats on the ones you want to use, much like Darksiders II (or the Mag feeding of yore). First problem with this is that the menus are not great to navigate, and it takes longer than it should to get any of this stuff done. I don't come to Platinum Games games for menus, I come to them for stylish combat and action. Not only are they a chore to navigate and find what I want, but it takes a few seconds after confirming what I want to "synthesize" for it to actually make the weapon. I'm not sure if that's because the game has to load or process something, or if it's just to simulate the process of synthesizing a new sword, but it just feels sluggish and drags down the game.
The other issue is that it never really felt like that stuff made a meaningful difference in game. I certainly spent the time to do it, I got several weapons up to level 10, which is the max (I think). Maybe it did make a difference, and if I hadn't it would have made things harder. Anyway, it just seems like a needless system in a game that's more about timing dodges well to activate Prime Time (slow motion), parrying, that sort of thing. Having the different weapon types is great, and even different versions is fine, but I would have preferred a smaller number of discreet, bespoke weapons. Some of the elemental effects are cool, but acquiring them being based on random chance made me not really care or have any interest in them unless they happened to have the highest damage. And, honestly, aside from ice ones freezing enemies, I never really figured out what the different effects did. Maybe the fire can light them on fire and do damage over time? Maybe certain enemies are weak to electricity? No idea.
There's other stuff in other menus, like crafting TECH that provide passive bonuses, but the minigame to make them isn't great, and again, I never really felt those bonuses in game. You can buy a handful of new moves, and those are useful, for sure. I'd definitely recommend spending the in game money on those, rather than on new weapons or usable items. I got more than enough healing items and whatnot whilst playing as drops from enemies and breaking stuff.
All that said, I do think the actual combat in the game is a ton of fun. It feels like a mix of things from other Platinum games over the years. If you time your dodges well enough, time slows down and you can get in a few hits before the enemies speed back up again, much like Witch Time in Bayonetta. You can do a similar thing by parrying enemies, like in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Sadly, there's no zandatsu in this game. I want to say that transforming into a vehicle (or dinosaur) is the thing that sets this game apart from those, but really Bayonetta could transform into different critters, and she had attacks done involving those forms, so I can't in good faith even say that. After you complete a combo, you can do vehicle attacks, which involve things like turning into a truck and ramming into the enemies at high speed, often in the air. That's different from the other Platinum games, and very silly in a way that I quite like.
But, even if this game feels like a mishmash of old mechanics from previous Platinum games, it works. It's a lot of fun, and it stayed fun throughout the game. Granted, it's not a long game, and I enjoy Platinum Games games, so I have a certain amount of tolerance for how they design games. I could see it wearing thin for a lot of people even before the credits roll.
And that's partly because the game doesn't do a ton to vary up the combat over the game, and partly because the game built around the combat is, honestly, not very good. This is very much a game about moving through corridors until you get to the next open area, at which point you beat up a bunch of enemies, then move on to the next once the game stops to rank your performance. Which is also basically what both Bayonettas and MGR were, honestly (and even Vanquish, but those tended to be bigger battles in larger areas). There are moments that try to add variety, like a (pseudo) side scrolling driving bit, a turret sequence, and an inexplicably top down part where you are tasked with delivering a perpetually regenerating explosive brick, but none of them are especially good, or memorable. They don't really feel like big set piece moments either, at least not in the way that Platinum's other games have. In MGR, Raiden throws a Metal Gear into the air within the first 15-20 minutes of the game. Bayonetta 2 is chock full of set pieces that are absurd and really fun.
Perhaps the fights against the huge Deceptions were meant to be that, but they're not really big enough, or different enough from regular fights to feel like set piece moments. And you fight each of them multiple times through the game, so they don't feel like special, bespoke fights anyway. That brings me to another point, which is that a lot of this game feels like it was made on a relatively small budget. And that makes sense, given that this is a licensed game published by Activision. It feels like they put most of the resources into making the combat fun, and the characters look nice (they're beautiful), but everything else suffers as a result. The mission design is super generic, most of the environments are narrow, boring, and just plain drab. Having such bright and colorful characters is great, but they also help draw attention to how bad the environments look. Or, at least the "city" you spend a lot of time in. The Insecticon lair (or whatever it is) does look a bit better, with all its glowing hexagons, but even then, it still doesn't look as good as the characters.
Maybe it's intentional, I don't know. I remember having the same issue with Ni no Kuni, and someone told me that it's meant to make the characters pop out more from the environments. But, like I said, it has the opposite effect on me. Just makes the environments look that much worse in comparison. Either way, there's not much of interest going on in this game outside of the fights. It also doesn't help that there's a lot of backtracking through them, again, almost as if this game was made on a small budget and they had to reuse whatever they could, as many times as they could. It certainly helped drive in the fact that the "city" you traverse is really just a series of corridors with building textures on the walls.
But don't get me wrong, I think the core combat is a whole lot of fun. If you have any interest at all in Transformers, or Platinum Games, you should give this one a shot. Especially while it's free on PS+. I don't know how much money I would recommend paying for it (certainly not the $40 that's listed as the normal price on PSN), but for free, you can't go wrong. It's a lot of fun. Repetitive fun, but fun nonetheless.
I just wish I could play as Megatron.
Resident Evil: The PS4 Remaster of the Gamecube REmake of the PS1 Original.
This is actually the first pre-RE4 Resident Evil that I've played to completion. I tried playing the original (on DS, for whatever reason), RE2 (on N64), but until now it was only 4, 5, and 6 that I had played to completion. You know, the ones that are straightforward action games. It took me setting the game to its easiest difficulty, and using a guide for a couple of things in the latter parts of the game, but I did finish it. And I know what you're thinking (you're not wrong), yeah, setting it to easy robbed the game of basically all the tension and, well, difficulty.
But it was also an interesting experience, because it helped drive home how much it really is just an adventure game with stiff combat, disorienting camera changes, and inventory limits. I wish the combat was better, because any time I tried playing these games before, it felt more like I was fighting against the controls, and the game than I was trying to deal with the enemies. I understand that the way you're "supposed" to play involves avoiding them more than fighting them, but that's kind of hard to do when half the time I can't see what's around the corner, and even when I do, the controls aren't good enough to let me do what I want to do.
I guess that's all intentional though, huh? Well, all that said, setting it to easy, and using the "alternate" controls where I can push in a direction to run helped me enjoy this game more than I expected. The adventure game side of this is fairly bare bones, as most of the "puzzles" are pretty easy, but I enjoyed most of my time wandering around the mansion, figuring out where to go next, what to use where, etc. Part of that is because I think it's still a really nice looking game. Or, at least the environments still look pretty good. The 3D models don't hold up as well, and certainly look a lot more like they were from a Gamecube game. Especially the faces during cutscenes. Those were probably the scariest thing about the game. That, and the voice acting doesn't hold up. It's "better" than the original PS1 game, but about on par with most games of the Gamecube era, so it's still not very good. And it's not even comically bad like the PS1 game, so it really doesn't hold up.
I do like the things changed from the PS1 original, though. I'm no expert on that game, but I remember enough to notice when things (at least in the early game) were changed. For example, that one hallway where the dogs jump in through the windows. This REmake messes with the expectations of the people that played the original, and I think that's super cool. That's the right way to remake a game like Resident Evil. Staying true to the spirit of the original, but improving on things, and changing them to keep even experts of the original on their toes. Of course, this REmake is 14 years old at this point, so I'm sure said experts have this game memorized, but for me, it was a good, refreshing time.
Which is not to say it's a fantastic game, even with the combat rendered less of a deal. Some things are frustrating, and don't make a lot of sense. Take the Crimson Heads. In this game, when you kill a zombie, if its head wasn't destroyed, or its corpse wasn't burned, it'll come back to life later as a faster, more powerful zombie. I think that's a cool mechanic, but of course the game doesn't really tell you this until it's too late (and the Crimson Heads work differently than I thought they did, going off what I'd read in passing online). My issue is that if you don't luck into having the zombie's head blow up (I think aiming up helps, but isn't guaranteed), you have to use up some kerosene to burn the corpse. And that requires you carry a flask of kerosene and a lighter with you at all times. That's two of my eight (I played as Jill) slots used up. Chris has the lighter in his special slot, so it's just the flask for him, but he only has six total.
Anyway, that's less the issue, and more that one time in the game, Jill curb stomped a zombie and destroyed its head. It was a special animation, after a zombie on the floor grabbed her by the leg, but it happened. Why on Earth isn't that a thing I can do normally? There's no explanation for why I have to lug around kerosene (a finite resource) and a lighter to burn them, when she's capable of stomping them. I get it's a game design thing, and they want you to have to think about how you use resources and all that, but there should be a logical reason for why I can't also do this other thing that she did during that one animation.
That's about all I have to say about the REmake. Again, for free on PS+, it was certainly worth my time. It did, however, get me thinking about "survival horror" as a genre, and about where the Resident Evil franchise is at now. While I certainly agree that they needed to do something different after the bloated mess that was RE6, and I appreciate that Resident Evil VII is going in a much different direction, it really feels like too different to me. Or, not so much that it's different, as that it's different in ways that, from what I've seen (and played of that demo), make it into something I won't want to play.
The modern "mold" for horror games seems to be to make them bad stealth games. That's what Outlast (the only one I've played) was, that's what Amnesia, Soma, Alien Isolation, and probably countless other Steam horror games are. The goal is to get through an environment without being detected, or caught. But, unlike (what I consider) good stealth games, there's usually no, or no effective way to deal with whatever you're trying to avoid.
I get that horror games don't want to be power fantasies like good stealth games like the Metal Gears and Deus Exes of the world. But Outlast, at least, wasn't fun at all. It also wasn't scary at all. It was just frustrating. Dying repeatedly because I kept getting caught didn't make me afraid, it made me want to quit playing because it was badly designed. It made me more painfully aware that I was simply playing a bad video game, rather than trying to escape from murderers. I did finish that game, but it was because of my stubbornness to not quit.. It was also another game that I only played because it was on PS+, for the record.
And maybe RE VII will be more than that. It sounds like that game will have weapons of some sort, but hey, so did Alien Isolation. Everything I've seen of that game so far makes it look like it's trying to be something like Outlast. If that's really the case, then I don't think it'll be for me. I guess that's not really the end of the world. Even though I've long thought of myself as a fan of the Resident Evil franchise, it's really only 4 and 5 that I really like. I don't hate 6 as much as most people do (it has its moments, along with lots of really bad stuff). But aside from those games, I really only ever liked bad voice acting.
I was never really the fan I thought I was. And that's fine. Oh well.
Overwatch Check In.
I had actually fallen off of Overwatch a bit. Not to say I was disliking it or anything, but the lack of new content combined with my having played it for over 200 hours led to me taking a bit of a break from it. But then they went and added a bunch of spooky Halloween stuff, and I'm back to playing a bunch of it in an attempt to get cosmetic stuff. At least this time you can spend in game money to get that stuff, even if it's way overpriced. It's 3000 Overwatch Bucks a pop for the Legendary skins! They are nice skins, though. Certainly better than the fauxlympic ones were.
The other changes for the Halloween event include a spookier version of the Hollywood map, and a new mode. You'd think a new mode would be the highlight, but honestly I like the spooky Hollywood map more. I hope they leave it that way once Halloween is done, but I doubt they will. Hopefully they'll at least let there be a chance it shows up after. Have a fifty percent chance of spooky Hollywood. Night setting, jack-o'-lanterns, spooky posters. It's nice.
The new mode is, frankly, disappointing. It involves the creations of the Mad Dr. Junkenstein running amok, and a group of four players gunning them, along with "boss" characters, down. What that really means is that you stand around shooting at mindless drones as they lumber forward, trying to protect a door from them. Some lob projectiles, and those boss characters are just different characters from the game, but with their spooky Halloween skins. There's some new dialog, and it is charming at first, but it's not especially fun after a few minutes.
My biggest issue is the limitations on what characters you can play. You only have access to Soldier 76, Ana, McCree, and Hanzo. And there can only be one of each on the team. I wouldn't be as upset if I was great with all four of them, but the only one I do especially well with is 76. When the stars align I can get it done with Ana and McCree, but even then, not really in the context of shooting dozens of drones. And Hanzo? I'm certainly more Robin Hood Daffy than Robin Hood, if you get what I mean. The first round of it I played (set to easy), I got 76, so everything went well. Second time (on medium), I wasn't fast enough to get 76 or McCree, so I was Ana. Things didn't go as well. I wouldn't say our loss was entirely my fault, but you know.
But hey, it's a free update, so I'm not going to complain. It's certainly better than Lucio Ball, even if that's a fairly low bar. Once it's all said and done, I'll report back on if I got anything good. Hopefully I will, but I've been having terrible luck so far. We'll see!
Anything else?
I don't think there's anything else. It was just the two PS4 games on Plus this month, and I haven't bought anything new in a while. I have been replaying Borderlands The Pre-Sequel as a podcast game, but I don't have much to say about that. Athena is a cool character to play, though.
As for the future? I still would like to play Mafia III and Rise of the Tomb Raider, as I said at the start. Titanfall 2 is out in a couple weeks, I think. Hopefully that's good. And there's whatever is up on Plus next month. This month and last month were both pretty good, so here's hoping they keep it up.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a swell day!
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