Sword & Sworcery came out for Steam this week, and I'm at a tad of a loss exactly how to review this. I first played it on the iPad, where it took me about 2 weeks to finish it. Not because it was a long game, but because it was a leisurely game. It's comfortable with its slow pacing, encouraging you to play for a bit, enjoy a puzzle and some scenery, then put it down for a few days. The long meandering sentences, the moon phases, the drawn-out combat: where other games jog or dash, this game walks and points out the little rabbits in the bushes. I'd liken it to Dear Esther in how it uses slow pacing to bolster atmosphere and provide an experience, except where Dear Esther feels like a movie, this feel like an episodic TV series.
I can review it in just a few days, but I suspect it'll be missing some aspect of the experience.
Oof... why did they release 2 RPGs during tax week? Between Avernum and Grimrock, I barely had enough time left over to give Scarygirl or Lunar Flight some attention. Despite the efforts of Steam and the U.S. Government, I've still managed to play 3 games enough to offer my thoughts on them. (Grimrock will have to wait a few days; I want to try finishing it before I post a review.) As usual, following links lead to the full reviews:
Scarygirl: (2/5 stars, $10) A rushed Xbox port with good graphics but clumsy controls. Unfortunately, interesting art style alone does not make a good game.
Lunar Flight: (2/5 stars, $10) Twice the hassle and a quarter of the scenery of your typical flight simulator. Crash a dozen times! Go into debt from replacing lunar modules! Wonder what twisted mind decided that only experienced pilots could buy upgrades to make flying it easier!
Avernum: Escape from the Pit: (5/5 stars, $10) A remake of a classic shareware RPG that combines turn-based grid combat (ala early Ultima) with an open world full of nooks & crannies to explore (ala Skyrim). As enthralling now as it was back then; an insane value for any old-school western RPG fan.
Which one do I want to keep playing? Avernum. Gonna play some more right now. Bye.
But you need to finish Grimrock! Yeah, yeah, I know... *sigh*
Shoot Many Robots: A great co-op robot-killing loot-gaining game. Looks good, sounds good, has a plenty of humor and the item loadouts encourage thought & synergizing.
I also played Gotham City Imposters and Asura's Wrath; GiantBomb nailed my thoughts on them pretty well in their reviews, so I won't waste precious time repeating them. They're worth your money if you enjoy humorous multiplayer FPSes or crazy awesome anime respectively: 4/5 for both. (Yes, I know you can finish Asura's Wrath in a rental period; I still bought it. Why? Because this is the type of shit I want to encourage.)
So, which games would I keep playing? Well, I'd like to finish Shoot Many Robots when I have more time, and Gotham City Imposters is still entertaining. Unfortunately, taxes come first, especially with April 15th so close. Expect my reviews for the Steam indie games released this week to be late; other things take higher priority, like making sure I don't have to talk to IRS agents. If you don't want to wait for my reviews to go up to learn what I think about them, be sure to Follow me; I'll be posting my thoughts on them in my Activity Feed.
Got a couple $15 games in the mix this week; two of them caught my eye, and I was gonna play them anyway, so why not review them as well? Probably just as well; pickings this week were pretty slim, and few of them were appealing. As usual, quick summaries below, with links leading to the full reviews.
Space Ark: Yeah, I know it wasn't released this week, but they finally released a patch for the tutorial crash I was experiencing. I wasn't missing much; the dual-character control scheme is kind of interesting, but a weak combo system + saccharine cuteness + losing 15 minutes of progress by screwing up a level kills my interest in this Arkanoid variant.
Ys: Oath in Felghana: An old-school remake that improves on the original. It's standard stuff done well and it just hits that old-school action RPG sweet spot for me.
Gettysburg: Armored Warfare: Nifty idea, but I don't think its small online community will survive a buggy launch with clumsy gameplay.
Haunted Houdini: A decent adventure game with hidden objects, puzzles, and a hint system & guide to get you through any place you get stuck. I still liked Pickers better, though.
3SwitcheD: No full review yet because its game page is still being set up, but this describes it succinctly: WHY DID I PAY $10 FOR THIS CRAP?! It's a Bejeweled clone with an annoyingly gushy announcer and a 3D gimmick that is only used to change your viewing angle for a game that's played on a 2D PLANE! Is it a commercial tech demo? A way to con us into spending money to register our Email addresses with them? An early April Fools joke? Either way, I feel like I've been had.
So, which game out of these would I play again? Ys: Oath in Felghana, an easy choice. It might be nice to revisit Gettysburg once it works out the kinks, but I don't think its player base will survive that long.
Well, that's it for this week. Hopefully Steam will ease up on the game releases before April 15th, or I might need to skimp on my reviews to finish taxes...
Q: How does a reviewer finish a backlog of 8 games in 3 days?
A: Have 2 of them crash on you and halt all forward progress, then skip the one that already has 4 reviews written on it.
It's been a strange, hectic week. But I've finally got my review queue back to 0 (except for Ys: Oath in Felghana, but that's $15 and not on sale so no need to rush that) and a whole slew of new reviews. This time, we've got quite a few stinkers, a couple crashes (and thus unreviewed), and 2 surprises. Without further ado, let's get to those reviews! (As usual, they're summarized in this post, but the links lead to the full reviews. Unless the name's italicized, which means, "Hey, no full review for this one, take a look at its wiki page instead!")
Bumbledore: An Android puzzler port that emphasizes high scoring through precise spell use. I found it decent; kids would probably love it.
Cubemen: Interesting "tower" defense concept, barebones execution with a horrendous aiming AI that is too random for this type of game.
Space Ark: No review; every time I finished the Tutorial stages, it crashed. It involved controlling a trampoline and the animal bouncing off it at the same time, which I'd compare to trying to drive and walk simultaneously. Probably a 3/5 if I ever got used to the controls... and it quit crashing.
Waveform: A strange, polished, addictive take on... I dunno, platforming meets puzzler meets Guitar Hero? Go read the review, the pictures help. Whatever it is, I got drunk with high score glee on it. Highly recommended.
Fowl Space: Crashed during the 2nd level boss fight due to some camera zoom bug; it zoomed out past the edge of the level, caused me to simultaneously die & win, and promptly caught the auto-save in some Schrodinger loop where it's not sure if I'm alive or dead. I really don't want to play it for 45 minutes again just to see if it happens again or not. It's a pity; the gameplay was decent and I was really digging the art style (and the weird sense of humor). Probably would've been 3/5 or 4/5 if it hadn't ate my save.
Mutant Storm Reloaded: The only thing going for this mundane dual-stick shooter is its price. Go spend an extra $5 on a shooter you'll actually remember the next day, like Scoregasm or Really Big Sky.
WARP: Skipped due to time constraints and because there's already 4 reviews up of the Xbox version. I might quickly look at it later just to see how the port fared, but I figure I would have very little to add that hasn't already been said about it.
Ys: Oath in Felghana: Not reviewed yet because I'm only 3 hours into this action-RPG. My thoughts so far: They make a potentially awkward control setup work and have some decent upgrade options and plot to back up the gameplay. It'd fall at a 4/5 right now.
Adam's Venture, Episode 1: Oh look, a decent discount adventure puzzler ala Tomb Raider for only- wait, it's supposed to be a Christian educational game? Why do they think Christianity is just about rote Bible passages?! We produced Faust, why can't we-*hauled off in a straitjacket*
What would I play again?Waveform, definitely. (I still have 4 levels to finish.) I would also finish playing Fowl Space... if they could fix my save. *sigh*
Well, that's it for this week. I'll have another stack of reviews ready in a couple days for your perusal & entertainment.
Well, that's one way to quickly knock a game off the review queue...
I won't be reviewing Space Ark because the game kept crashing after I finished the Tutorial. Sorry, but if I still can't play your game after the 3rd attempt, something's wrong. I'm tempted to give it 0 out of 5 stars, but my computer may just be wonky about that game. Ah well, on to the next game...
P.S. Only 3 days into the week and they've already released 4 games under $10. This is gonna be a long weekend... and I wanted to review the new Ys game, too.
It was an interesting week. I'm still working on the backlog because I was also paying Cargo! Quest for Gravity and Defenders of Ardania at the same time. (Yeah, I know they're a tad more expensive than the usual games I review, but these were personal buys.) I hope to have reviews of Bumbledore, Cubemen, and Space Ark up shortly; I don't want to fall behind now that I've reached the 25-review mark. In other interesting news, 3 of the 4 games I'm reviewing this week previously had GiantBomb Quick Looks, but only 1 of them actually had a review posted. That's a shame, isn't it?
Anyway, without further ado, here's this (er, last?) week's reviews! (Note that the links go to the reviews themselves, not the game page.)
All Zombies Must Die: Too generic, doesn't pack enough punch to stand out amidst the zombie crowd.
Defenders of Ardania: So broken... I nearly wept. I really wanted a good tower defense game here.
Wizorb: Like playing an old NES classic. Cheap too.
Which ones would I continue playing? None, really. I'm a bit tempted to go into Sandbox mode on Cargo!, but I have too much else to do right now, including review the other games from last week before my backlog builds up too high.
And since I've reached the 25-Steam Reviews milestone, I plan to do a breakdown of the games I've reviewed so far later. Should be interesting to see just how the genres/game styles break down.
So many games last week! So many bad games last week! Test my resolve, they did! I did not escape unscarred; I have turned to Majesty 2 to soothe the pain. (Hmm, this indirect control setup sucks and there's not much strategy... so why am I still playing?) In the meantime, the games are vanquished, the reviews have been planted as their tombstones, and you are hereby invited to browse them! (Full reviews through the links.)
Auditorium: Abstract color/sound conversion makes for relaxing fun, when you aren't pulling your hair out over some of the devilish puzzles here.
Painkiller: Recurring Evil: Get locked into a cramped arena, kill multiple waves of enemies. Rinse & repeat... for the entire game.
Which game would I continue playing? Well, I'm still chipping away at Auditorium bit-by-bit (solve 2 puzzles, hit a stumper, turn it off and let it percolate until the next time I have a few minutes to spare), but I'm sorely tempted to play through Luxor Evolved on Hard mode again to satisfy my puzzle & shooter itches at the same time. Recurring Evil was so disappointing I'm currently downloading the original Painkiller just to assure myself it's much better. All of this, of course, is inbetween finishing up Majesty 2 for... some reason I can't quite explain. Boredom, perhaps?
Hmm, finishing up last week took longer than I thought. Hopefully the game queue for this week is much smaller.
A new week, a new crop of indie games. These reviews are up a bit later than usual; for some reason, all the cheap indie games this week were released on Wednesday or later. That really makes it hard to play through everything before Saturday night. Anyway, here's links to my reviews, along with a short summary:
1000 Amps: A fun Metroidvania puzzler, but a horrible map and some unnecessary backtracking really drags down the last half of it.
Pickers: An open world picture hunt with shopkeeper mechanics. More fun than I expected, but overstays its welcome.
Really Big Sky: Psychadelic, procedurally-generated dual-stick shooter with a touch of absurdity and snark. Valuable to shooter fans who want to squeeze as much out of a title as possible, but a bit lacking in mechanics and variety for everyone else.
Which of these 3 games would I play more of? Really Big Sky. The other 2 had lousy endgames that went on too long, while I am morbidly curious what mixture of death & destruction Really Big Sky would toss at me next if I continued playing.
With that, I am off for now. I'll continue testing Realm of the Mad God and elaborating on my theory of value/time reviews for games when I hit the next lull in indie titles, but for now I have other things to work on.
Ryan's jar musing on reviews yesterday skewed strangely close to my own recent ponderings on the subject. It was originally going to be a short entry, but after a bit more thought it just expanded into a large post and then some. Time to start getting it out of the brain...
The rise of indie & downloadable games has spread out the potential prices you could pay for a game. There were always shareware games, but now every console has a downloadable market, Steam often discounts its games for 50-75% off, and everyone's competing with cheap online and smartphone games. It's tough to justify having a game's price influence its rating: should a game be rated better than a similar game just because it's $20 less? That's why I wanted to add another metric to reviews: how much I'd pay for it, compared to its actual price.
It wasn't long before even that hit issues. I thought it would just involve multiplying a game's rating by how long it took to complete it to figure out what it was worth, but World of Warcraft dashed that plan. It's one of the best MMOs out there, easily worth 4 or even 5 stars, and I've played it for over 4,000 hours since it was released, but was it worth $20,000? (That uses Portal 2 as a baseline: $50 for 10 hours of great gameplay.) No, not really; I'd barely put it at worth $1,000. Past a certain point, I would even reduce what it's worth for how much time it took. Other games took a similar hit the longer they took: I rated a 4-star game that lasted 2 hours as worth $5, while a 3-star game that lasted 20 hours was only worth $15.
The problem became clear when I was discussing game lengths with a friend. He has a part-time job where money's an issue; I have a full-time job that pays well, but leaves me with only a few hours to relax a night . He wants a good, long game that would stretch his dollar; I want a good, short game that wouldn't waste my time with filler. A 200-hour game would be a good deal to him, but an aggravating purchase for me. A simple 1-to-5 rating wouldn't differentiate between our different needs, and even a written review might leave it too vague. What could show both of us at a glance whether a game was worth our time?
Show Me the Money (Chart)
It depends how much your time's worth. Divide a game into hour-long chunks, then ask, "What would I pay to play this hour of the game?" Chart it & you have a good indication of where a game's worth lies.
The numerical rating is an artifact from movie reviews. They are fixed-length entertainment, and it's sensible to judge entire products under one score because they have similar times (~2 hours), similar costs (way too much nowadays), and one uninterrupted experience from beginning to end. Games have different times (2 to 200 hours), varying costs (free to $60), and multiple modes distinct from each other (single-player, multi-player, coop, challenges, etc.). Not only that, but quitting the game without completing everything is common. With that many extra variables to cover, a conversion from a 1-dimensional score to a 2-dimensional chart is necessary to convey that info without writing a thousand words on it.
Previous charting attempts have tried to grade different components of a game (Graphics, Sound, Gameplay, etc.), but they strayed from the primary review question ("Is this worth my time and money?") and led to an overemphasis on graphics we're still trying to pull ourselves away from. Gameplay and graphics are not enjoyed separately; they are enjoyed together, with that enjoyment rising & falling to different levels as you put time into the game. The Money Chart reduces it to Time & Money instead, making it easier to answer, "If I have this much time, is it worth my money?"
It's definitely not easier for a reviewer to make, though. Trying to go back through every hour I played a game & assigning an arbitrary value to it was difficult. The disciplined route would be to jot down a value every hour, but would I keep that up for a 60-hour game? Would that reduce a game's worth because interrupting the game that often would break the flow? Generalizations might work just as well; you may not remember each exact hour of gameplay, but you definitely remember the highs & lows of specific points in the game. Just looking at the timer whenever you're really enjoying (or hating) a game could provide enough info to chart the value curve of a game. After enough games, patterns would begin to pop up.
Game Patterns
Take Portal 2, for example; one of the few games with a 10-hour campaign worth $50, IMO. It's a perfect example of a Fast Blast game: you finish the single-player, then the coop, and you're pretty much done in ~15 hours. It packs in a high value/hour. Even the starting tutorial is valuable because of the humor & plot in it. The plot and puzzles build throughout the game, culminating in one of the best endings I've seen for a while. Very dense, very memorable, very short. A perfect game for someone short on time.
Space Pirates and Zombies takes a more leisurely approach. This $10 game takes ~30-40 hours to beat on the default settings, but it involved a lot of backtracking, building up resources, and doing sidequests. It's a Slow Burn game that doesn't have big stand-out moments; the fun is in leveling up, researching tech, and building your ships instead, and even that becomes a grind occasionally. People with the time to pump into this one will get their money's worth, but if you can only play it for a dozen hours, it's not worth the cash.
Most games can probably be divided into Fast Blast or Slow Burn categories, depending how quickly you should finish them & how interesting it is to replay them. There's also games that peak at the start and games that peak at the finish. The whole thing begins to look like the Rising Action/Falling Action charts I made in English class, but I also notice a few areas of the games don't follow a simple curve. I'll post about those later, once I've had a chance to ponder them.
In the meantime, I hope to try this system on a few of my reviews; first I need to find some better (free) graphing software, though.
Log in to comment