Playing Catch-Up.

Been a while since the last time I wrote something, huh? Exactly a month from when I posted my blog on The Witness...At least as of when I wrote this. I probably waited a couple days before actually posting it. But enough preamble!

Rebel Galaxy.

I like Rebel Galaxy a lot. It has some issues, but overall, it's the sort of game that feels like it was made just for people like me. People that like space a lot, but don't want to get bogged down in the specifics of how to actually go about doing things in space, but with a distinct southwestern US flavor. Which, is mostly just in the music, but overall the music is rad and fits the game well. And then there's the Assassin's Creed sailing inspired combat, that I think is a lot of fun.

On second thought, calling it "inspired" by Assassin's Creed's sailing is putting it lightly. It's just that, but with some extra "stuff" and a lot more options for customizing your ship. In AC, you had broadside cannons, some explosive barrels you could drop out the back (that I never used), and a forward facing cannon with a different type of shot (multiple types that you could switch?). In Rebel Galaxy, you have different types of broadside cannons, with differences in range, firing speed, damage, and what type of shot (regular "shots" or lasers). Then there's turrets, which can be fired manually, but will operate on their own according to what you set their AI to target (I stuck to any target for most of them through the game). There's an even wider variety of turrets to pick from; too many to list. And finally you have a secondary weapon slot that can be used at the press of a button. I stuck with flak that stops missiles and damages fighter ships, but there's a variety of missiles that lock on, don't lock on, and other sorts of flak-ish shots that do things like EMP enemy shields. The missiles require ammo, so I stuck to the anti-missile flak because I found that quite useful.

And there's defensive customization too! Regular shields that recharge when not being shot, deflector shields that have to be manually triggered (you hold down a button), better engines, better warp drive, better boosters, and other upgrades like a robot that will repair minor damage to the ship (normally you have to go to a space station and pay for repairs). And that's not even getting into the ships themselves, which have different hull classes, different movement speeds, and most importantly, different numbers of slots for these things (hardpoints). All ships have a slot of shields, engine, etc, but an endgame dreadnought has waaaaaay more hardpoints than the starting ship. The starting ship has three broadsides per side, and two turrets. The ship I currently own (the biggest one you can in the game, so far as I know), has twenty broadsides per side, and sixteen turrets. Sure, it's sluggish and slow, but the Blackgate is a beast that doesn't need to be maneuverable.

That's not actually true though, because while playing post game missions (I stuck with a fairly small-ish one through the story) I ended up getting wrecked in some ambushes from high level enemies. I mean high level in the figurative sense, this game isn't an RPG where you level up (though there is loot to be had from some enemies). And that's certainly not a bad thing that the game doesn't just become a cakewalk once you get a big ship, because the combat is definitely the best part of the game. But having played the game for almost forty hours (longer than I thought, but I checked to make sure), I can also say that it definitely gets repetitive. To the point where I suspect that most people probably wouldn't stick with the story to the end.

The story is fine, but nothing special. It's good for giving you something to do that isn't just endless procedurally generated missions, and some of the encounters in the story are unique in that they aren't just generic missions that happen to have spoken dialog recorded for them. But also some of them are just that. The actual narrative has some interesting set up, but a lackluster ending. Though, there is a part that feels like it might be a branching choice thing, but I'm not sure if it is or not. Bear in mind, I played through that stuff a couple months ago at this point, so I don't remember exactly. That said, there was one point where the game made it seem like you could either go through the System Militia to advance the story, or go through one of the pirate factions (The Red Devils?).

I do know that there are meters showing how much the factions like or dislike you, and things you do through the game affect those meters. Simply fighting some of the factions is the most straightforward way to affect reputation, and you can do things like rescue civilians from pirates as well. Procedural missions change your standing with them, especially guild missions, which you need to do to rank up in the guilds (they offer guild specific ships if you rank up enough). There is a Trophy in the game for getting to a neutral rank with any of the pirate factions, so it is possible to do. But given that you start the game neutral with the Militia and civilians, and hostile to the pirates, I feel like the suggested route is to stick with the Militia and civilians.

Speaking of the procedural aspect of the game, quite a bit of it is procedural. The different systems you can travel to, what they're named, what's in them, the economic situations of all the space stations, and how the factions interact with each other are all procedural, so far as I know. Sometimes a faction will lay siege to another faction's station, and you can go in and help one faction or the other. I'd recommend helping the one that doesn't shoot you on sight, though. I'd occasionally see things like treaty vessels being escorted through space, and a variety of economic booms and crashes in different stations.

I really don't know how much of it is actually the game just simulating grand scale space interactions, and how much of it is just random chance. Like, I don't know if a siege is happening because the game flipped a coin and decided there was going to be a siege, of if that siege happened because one faction got wronged by the other, or because they were out of resources, etc. Given the small size of the development team, I'm more inclined to think it was the random coin flip, but that's irrelevant. The point is that the game feels more, for lack of a better word, alive than it would without that stuff.

Conversely, while the game feels like all this cool space stuff is just happening around you, you really only have a couple ways to interact with any of it. You can deliver cargo for money (either specific missions, or buying and selling on your own), or you can engage with enemies. And chances are that even if you're just delivering cargo, you're going to run into enemies along the way. Often more than once in a single trip, even across just one star system. And it definitely gets repetitive after a while. Occasionally the enemies will hail you, and you could, in theory, abandon your cargo to them and have them leave. You can also do what I did, which is just threaten them every time, but the vast majority of the time it didn't change anything. Once I got a dreadnought, there were a handful of situations where my threats caused them to back off, but not many. I don't expect a game made by so few people to have a Mass Effect level of talking with NPCs and being able to talk out of plenty of fights, but it'd have been nice if it had skewed a little more toward being able to talk your way out of stuff.

The music definitely gets repetitive, which isn't helped by the fact that a bunch of it has lyrics. But that may just be me that finds music gets repetitive faster if there's lyrics. I can play through a JRPG with the same battle music playing in almost every battle for dozens of hours, and it never gets old, but then have something like DMC4 where that one song gets on my nerves the second time it plays during a fight. Which, in my memory, that song plays during every fight in that game, even though I know it actually doesn't from watching a speed run during AGDQ this year.

Repetition aside, I did enjoy my time with the game a lot. It's a good podcast game, if you turn off the music, which I did after finishing the story. Good for just grinding out missions to get that money for the dreadnought. Speaking of, the last thing I want to mention is that the game is really good about letting you sell things back for their actual value, rather than a fraction of what you paid. That's really useful for buying new ships, since you can't own more than one at a time. Getting trade-in value equal to what you paid might not be realistic given the wear and tear, but it makes affording them easier. And I definitely prefer this to the aforementioned games where you get a fraction back.

It's a fun game, and it has my recommendation. But I'd say play the PC version if you can, given that it has extra options for the soundtrack, and presumably the frame rate is better. Not that the frame rate is bad on PS4, but once I got a dreadnought, which is waaaaaaay bigger than the stuff you start with, I definitely noticed a little bit of frame chunking in some situations. Nothing game breaking, but still not ideal. Not like...

BroForce.

I'm going to preface what I have to say by saying that I think the core of BroForce is fine, and for a while, dumb fun in a way that I was actually enjoying more than I expected. Blasting my way through levels blowing up everything in my path with blatant rip-offs of action movie (and other sources) characters is silly in a way that appeals to me. Even if it's through a layer of "Bro humor." By which I mean all the names are Bro-ified versions of the originals. Things like MacBrover, and Rambro. Some work better than others, but some feel like they didn't even try. The fake John McClane is just called Bro Hard, which, isn't even the name of the character! And the whole thing has a tongue in cheek jingoistic "satire" vibe that I think is okay too.

That said, this game is kind of broken on PS4. Well, I feel wrong saying broken, given that I was able to finish it, but especially later in the game, I felt like I was fighting the game's technical problems more than I was fighting the game's enemies. And on top of that, it has some design decisions I don't care for either, but I'll get to that after the technical issues.

The first one, which Jeff brought up on the most recent UPF, is how you just lose control for a second a few seconds after every level starts. Now, you might think something like that would be the worst issue in the game, but it isn't. It's actually not that bad of a problem in most levels, because usually you're not in immediate danger when it starts. But there's a few where you are, and it certainly doesn't help matters.

But the worst problem in the game is the framerate. At first, it's fine. When there's a ton of explosions on screen, there's slowdown, but nothing too bad. The problem is that the deeper and deeper into the game that you get, the worse and worse it gets. By the time you get to the last set of levels, I swear there is more slowdown than there is the game running at the speed it was supposed to. Almost constant slowdown. Definitely constant slowdown during the final boss fight, which certainly doesn't help. At this point, when I say slowdown, what I mean is that the game is crawling, not running. It's one of the worst framerates I've ever seen in a game, maybe the worst. Certainly the worst in recent memory.

And there's other technical issues too, even if they're more annoying than anything else. Like how sometimes the game will just go to a black screen when loading, and stay there for what feels like over a minute, but I never actually timed it. Several times I thought it had caused my PS4 to hard lock, but every time I hit the PS button to check, it brought up the main menu like everything was fine. I'd go back to the game and eventually it'd load into the level.

Honestly, I'm surprised the game got onto the PS4 in this state. I know we all like to joke about how so many games are broken, and how much the big console companies let slide these days, but nothing about this game feels like it should be this broken. When I play something like Fallout 4, it doesn't surprise me that the game is a buggy mess because it's an enormous game with thousands of moving parts, any of which could break at any given moment. This is a 2D platformer with destructible environments. I would let it slide if there was a little bit of slowdown during the really big explosions, but to the extent that there is in this game? And the other issues like the controls just stopping, and those black screens? That's not acceptable!

My gut reaction is to go on a tirade about how clearly no one spent the time to optimize this game, etc, but I'm glad I stopped myself because I don't know what was going on in the development of this game. I don't know what went on with this specific port. But I do think that for a game that is high profile enough to be picked for a user vote for PS+, I'd hope Sony would have a higher standard for this sort of stuff. PS+ should be used to promote good stuff, not buggy messes like this. But then again, when that deal was made, I have no idea what Sony did or didn't know about this version, so I've probably already speculated more than I should. Sorry.

Instead I'll critique the game itself from here on. Like I said at the start, the goal is to get through the levels, ideally blowing up as much stuff as you can because that's the best part of the game. Aside from the platforms on which the checkpoints are placed, you can destroy everything in each level. There isn't any sort of bedrock or anything down below that stops you, so you can leave yourself in situations where there is literally no way forward, and all you can do is jump into a bottomless pit and restart the level (or restart from a big checkpoint). But there are also some levels where you can just bypass almost the entire level by tunneling above or below all the enemies. I think that's cool that you can do that, even if the implication that I would sometimes want to just skip levels doesn't say much good about the levels themselves. If the framerate was better, I'd have been less inclined to do that.

I should clarify that the game has two different types of checkpoints. The little ones just respawn you if you have a remaining life (or lives), but the big ones respawn you even after you've run out of lives, which is handy.

Aside from the Boondock Bros (my favorite "character" in the game), every character you play as dies after one hit. The reason the Boondock Bros are my favorite is because you control two at once, and if you get hit, just one dies (which sends the other into a rage where he shoots way faster). And the special ability resurrects the dead one (or summons a third guy if you have both Bros, and he's a dude from that movie but I forget who because I've only seen it once and I didn't think it was that great). But for all the other characters, if you get hit, you die. You get more lives by rescuing POWs, and every time you do, you switch to a different character. Rescue a certain amount of them, and you unlock new ones. There's a little over thirty total in the game, and according to a wiki, I had unlocked all but one of them by the time I beat the game.

I think the different characters are both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, there's a lot of variety to them. They all have different primary (which has infinite ammo) and special (which has limited) weapons/abilities. Some like Rambro are straightforward; he has an assault rifle and grenades. Some are similar in that vein, like Bro Hard, who uses dual Uzis (might as well be the same), but has flashbang grenades that stun enemies. The Brominator, meanwhile, uses a minigun that sends him flying backward, and his special puts him into robot mode where he becomes invincible for a short amount of time. The amount of ammo those have varies from character to character, with the really powerful ones like The Brominator and the Boondock Bros only being able to have one "ammo" at a time. And some of the other characters play totally differently, like MacBrover, who throws dynamite for his regular, and a large turkey stuffed with even more dynamite for his special (which you detonate remotely). And there are melee characters like Brade (Blade) and Mr. AnderBro (Neo from The Matrix (surprised they didn't go with NeBro)).

But the downside is that some characters just aren't as fun to play, or are at distinct disadvantages in certain situations, like boss fights. Cherry Broling (based on the lady with the machine gun leg in Planet Terror) is really useful in some situations (she only shoots down, and can use it to hover a little), but is useless in others. And there are some characters that I don't want to play because I hate the thing their from (The Brode, based on Kill Bill's The Bride), or because they're based on Chuck Norris and I don't like him as a person (sadly the characters based on his characters are actually really good in the game). Having no way to pick which one you get can lead to situations where you might get lucky and just destroy a boss in no time, or have no viable way to actually do damage in a timely manner. And since you basically need to keep getting POWs to get more lives, there are plenty of times where I'd go from a good character to one I don't like. It also led to times where even if I didn't have any more lives, I'd just stick with the Boondock Bros because they can take that extra hit or two.

For the early parts of the game, the random characters don't really matter than much. You can just blast through without worry. But the later you get, the harder it gets, and like I said, some characters just aren't suited for some situations. Especially once the game starts introducing new enemies, like aliens (as in fake Xenomorphs, complete with acid related attacks) and demons (in a very long string of levels with no return to the main map, though thankfully it will save your progress at certain points if you back out to the main menu (though I'd guess abandoning the mission or returning to map might cancel that out, so be careful (though when I loaded back in it put me at the map first, so I dunno (also this is terrible sentence structure, sorry)))).

And the game doesn't explain what any of these characters do. I still don't know what the Broniversal Soldier does. Maybe I'd have been able to figure it out if I had ever seen Universal Soldier, but even then, I dunno. Well, according to a wiki that I checked, apparently his special skill resurrects dead enemies and they then fight alongside you. Again, no idea that's what that did, I guess I never did it near any corpses. The game doesn't explain other core mechanics either, like that you can double tap in a direction to sprint. I had to look that up online too, because you need to do that to get through an early (optional?) mission.

The last thing I'll say about this game (as I've already said more than I intended, and more than it probably deserves) is that I think it's weird that with a cast of over thirty characters, only three of them are women. Honestly, given the Bro-ness of it, I'm kind of surprised there are any at all. Or, really, what I expected was that there would be exactly one (Ellen Ripbro), as some sort of parody about how there's usually one token woman in these sorts of things. But three is well short of what there should be, you know? There's certainly characters I can think of that would be more deserving than some of the ones in this game. Mostly I'm just upset that there's no Imperator FuriBrosa. She'd be a better fit than Broden, who is the one character in the game based on something from another game (Raiden from Mortal Kombat). Well, yes, there were technically MK movies, but he's from the games first.

Anyway, BroForce is a dumb game that I spent too much time playing, and too much time writing about. I'd say that free is the right price for the game, but really you'd be better off waiting for a good Steam sale or something. That's assuming the PC version is less framerate-y, but I don't know. Or I guess click the thing on the PS+ to "redeem" it and then wait and see if they ever fix it. Or just play a few levels, go, "That was dumb but kinda fun" and never think about it again. That's probably the way to go.

Actually, that's a bit harsh. I hadn't prepared any screenshots for this game, and was going to just include some pictures of MacGyver and Mr. T as a joke, but instead I went and took a few for the blog. And, you know, I still think the early parts of the game are pretty fun. It's shallow, and dumb, but it's fun. It's a real bummer that it has so many technical issues on top of having some not great design flaws.

Moosey's Quickies:

Grim Fandango Remastered.

I don't have a ton to say about Grim Fandango, but I did enjoy it. Or, rather, I enjoyed the characters, the voice acting, the "world," and the story. I had to use a guide to get through most of the game, because so many of the puzzles are just random nonsense that have basically no way for you to logic your way through them. Or at least that's the vibe I got. But in one of the commentary bits, Tim Schafer even said (paraphrasing), "How did we expect anyone to be able to figure this out?" If you do play it, I recommend keeping a guide close at hand, but don't read too far ahead, so you don't spoil anything. Listening to the characters talk is the best part of the game, after all. And the commentary is worth listening to, so turn that on, I'd say. While I think they look nice, the pre-rendered backgrounds and static camera angles really just led to me not being able to find certain areas at all until the guide told me to find them, which was irksome. Only a couple, but still. My anti-pre-rendered backgrounds in general stance stands.

The only comment I have on the remastered aspect is that while it looks nice, there are certain objects in the environment that I had no idea you could interact with because they blend in too well. But then I'd switch back to the original, and they stick out like sore thumbs. I guess I could have just walked around every square inch of every room and paid attention to what Manny was looking at, but I didn't realize I'd have to do that until the guide started telling me to pick up things I didn't know were there.

Nom Nom Galaxy.

I'll be honest, I only played the tutorial of this game, and the odds were stacked against my liking it from the get go. Between the meme-y name, and my longstanding anti-soup stance, I was already not feeling this game before I even started playing. That said, the game itself is totally fine, and I don't have anything against it. Though, I will say that it seems like a thing where every level is just you starting over and building a new soup factory on a new planet, and that doesn't really appeal to me. If I'm collecting resources and building things, I'd rather just build up one really big thing and have that be that. I don't want to start over from scratch every level, you know? I'm sure it does things to mix stuff up later on, but for now at least, I don't really have a desire to go back for more. I do like that there's a subtle curve to the planets, even if I feel like it was kind of messing with my head when I played.

Tom Clancy's The Division The Beta.

Honestly, if I'm going to go and critique things about this, I'd rather just wait until I play the final game, and give it more space than I have here. This blog is long enough as is. That said, you can probably tell my general reaction by the fact that I think I'll wait for a fairly substantial sale before buying this game. But I do want to play it eventually. If I had a crew of people I knew I could play through the whole thing with, I might have already bought it. But I don't.

Uncharted 4 Multiplayer Server Stress Test Beta Thing.

Hey, guess what? Uncharted multiplayer is still fun. It's been years since I played any of it in the other games, so I'm not going to try to say how it compares to them. Other than there's no airplane level with a moving airplane like there was in Uncharted 3, the current best Uncharted game. So clearly it's inferior. In all seriousness though, it's fun, and has me more excited for Uncharted 4 than I had been. Though I do wonder if this will be like 2 and 3 where I enjoyed the multiplayer betas, but never ended up playing the multiplayer in the actual games. Only time will tell!

Hitman Beta.

I'm a little surprised this even had a beta, honestly. It's not a multiplayer game, or anything like that. Really they should have just called it a timed demo, or something. But that's irrelevant, because I did enjoy what I played. Enough that it got me interested in playing the new Hitman, which just came out. Or, at least the first area of which did. So, naturally, I...started replaying Hitman Go and downloaded Hitman Blood Money HD. Hitman Go is still Hitman Good.

And next time on Moosey's Blogs?

Probably Hitman Blood Money HD. So, when I originally wrote this blog (before posting), I had a paragraph about how I hadn't started it yet and that I was going to start in the near future. Since then, I played through about half the game, according to a list of the missions I found online (the last mission I did was the parade/festival one with the bird costumes). I won't get into specifics for now, but I will say that I feel my interest in it waning, and I don't know if I'll finish it. We'll see, and either way, I'll actually critique it next time. But it might be a shorter blog.

As for other games, well, I've been poking around in The Witcher III again, but not really enough to write anything new about it. Didn't buy the DLC or anything. I've also had an urge to get back into Borderlands (probably because of Tom Clancy's The Division being a shooting game with loot), so I might start a new character in BL2 or something. Or Pre-Sequel, I dunno. Probably just keep going with the ones I have, though.

Unless there's a good sale on The Division in the near future (I doubt it), the next big release I'll buy is Dark Souls III. Which, honestly, at this point I'm more excited for DSIII because it's been so long since the last big game I bought, more than I'm actually excited for the game itself. Maybe that's because I've intentionally kept myself away from coverage about the game, but I'm also worried that it'll be the "over-saturation" point for me. I know Bloodborne was that game for a lot of people, but to me Bloodborne did enough things differently that it felt fresh. And I enjoyed what it did differently more than I did the stuff in the Dark Souls games. I still like that world and that lore more than the Dark Souls world and lore. I'm worried that one last trip into the world of Dark Souls might be one too many. I'm sure it'll still be a great game on its own merits, but I was already pretty disappointed in a lot of things about DSII, and I hope this isn't a repeat of that. But we'll see. Hopefully I'll like it a lot!

And that's it for this time! I hope things are going well for you, and I hope there isn't another month+ long break before the next time I write something. But we'll see!