Zombies, Edgy Mirrors, Basket Cars, and Ninja Souls.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. I am, in fact, putting up another blog only about a week after the last one. It's good to be writing more than once a month again. Probably won't last, of course, but still good. Anyway, enough preamble! Time to amble! (Pretty sure I've made that joke before.)

Zombi.

Zombi, perhaps better known as ZombiU, is an interesting game. Or, at least a more interesting game than I was expecting. Given that it was originally a game built around the Wii U Gamepad (a controller I have publicly disparaged in the past), going in I was mostly just curious about how well it would translate to a good controller without the Wii U Gamepad's unique features. As luck would have it, not only does it translate pretty well, I had a fun time with the game as a whole, and I'd guess a better one than I would have had if I played the Wii U version.

If you don't know anything about Zombi, then the most buzzwordy easiest way to describe it (whilst killing my soul a little) would be to say it's a survival-horror game with roguelike and Dark Souls elements set in a zombified, apocalyptic London. I don't mean apocalyptic as in a biblical Apocalypse, I mean that almost everyone in the city is either dead or undead, and there's little hope for escape, or survival. But, if you're careful, methodical, and resourceful enough, with the help of the few other survivors in London, you'll make it out alive.

But if you're not, you'll die and have to do a corpse run. If you die in this game, you lose everything you had in your bug out bag (which is the term the game literally uses, and is given to you by someone called "The Prepper"), and you switch to playing a new character back at your safe house. However, when you return to the spot you died, you'll find that the previous character is now a zombie. Kill that zombie, and you can take all of the stuff you had back. What you don't get back are the various weapon "skills" that you get for using them. I quote "skills" because it's just basic stuff like a smaller aiming reticle for specific weapon types (for whatever reason, you can't actually aim down the sights unless a gun has a scope).

It's an interesting system, but I have a couple issues with it. The first is that, despite this being a game where the character you play as is completely disposable, and ultimately meaningless for the progression of the story (and there is a story, though it's a bit thin), there's nothing resembling a character creator, or any choice for who you play. That's not a deal breaker by any means, but it's nice to at least have the option to do things like play as a lady, you know? Which, some of the characters the game gives you are ladies, but, well...

I never actually died in this game. Or, at least I never unintentionally died. At one point I wanted to see how the death actually worked in game, so I uploaded my save to the cloud, died to an enemy near a spot easy to get to, and went on a "corpse run." It's an interesting mechanic, but not interesting enough to make me not want to see if I could beat the whole game without dying, so I downloaded my save back from the cloud and proceeded to finish the game without dying. In retrospect, I wish I had played on the difficulty where you only get one life so I could have gotten that Trophy. Well, that's assuming that's the only change, and I have no idea if that's the case. Speaking of Trophies, I was a little upset that I didn't get the one for finishing the game on easy by finishing it on normal. Just a little irksome when games do that.

But don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't call Zombi an "easy" game. The reason I was able to get through without dying is because I was slow, careful, and methodical. Because I always used the scanner to checks for zombies, and because even when the game "cheated" and spawned in zombies I couldn't have detected, I was prepared and able to react fast enough to deal with them. Most of the time, the game rewards patience, and thinking before acting, and I like that a lot.

It's when the game deviates from that, that's when I start to take issue with it. There's more than a few instances where zombies might as well just be appearing out of thin air to attack you, and in rather large numbers. Obviously I managed to get through them all, but there were times when I felt like the game was breaking its own rules with regard to how zombies act, and with how you could detect them, all in the name of some jump scares and making you face a whole bunch of them at once.

I guess I should describe what these methods you have for finding and dealing with the zombies are, huh? The main one is the scanner, which acts a lot like the scan visor from the Metroid Prime games. It shows if containers have loot in them, if doors are locked, and lets you mark things like items and zombies to the map. It also marks the zombies on screen, and the markers disappear when they die (unless they have an item), so it's useful for knowing when they're finished.

In the Wii U version, you used this scanner by holding up and moving the controller, and had to manually touch the screen to scan everything in (at least based on re-watching the Quick Look). On PS4, you just hold a button and move the scanner with the right stick, and it auto-scans everything you look at. When you didn't have the scanner up, it was a map on the controller on Wii U, whereas the map is just an on screen minimap on PS4. I'm not a big fan of minimaps, but I'm less of a fan of the Wii U Gamepad, so I'm happy with the version I played. There's upgrades for the scanner that you get as a part of the story, which increase its range and eventually let you decode hidden messages in the environment.

Really, the only thing that I think would've been better on Wii U was inventory management. As is the case with most survival-horror games, you have a pretty limited inventory (which can be upgraded), and so far as I could tell, there's no way to manually move things around that inventory in the PS4 version, but ole PK Thunder (Patrick "The Hat Trick" Klepek) was definitely doing that in the Wii U Quick Look. For all I know there's a button for that, but unless I'm really unobservant and played the entire game without seeing a prompt for it, the game doesn't tell you that. But given that I played through half of Dark Souls III without realizing there was a quick option for Firelink Shrine on every page of the warp menu, that's distinctly possible.

Another issue I have with the inventory is that there's no way to remove the cricket bat or the pistol. I understand that the developers wouldn't want you to go out without a way to defend yourself, but after finding better guns and better melee weapons, I would rather have those extra two slots to have an extra health kit, flare, Molotov, or ammo for a gun I actually use. Especially in the case of the cricket bat, I have no idea why you would ever use that again after finding another melee weapon. This isn't a game where you have to balance the tradeoffs of the melee weapons, at least not so far as I could tell. I only found a couple, but they were all objectively better than the cricket bat. I guess you might want to leave them at the safehouse (which also has limited inventory space) in case you die? Even then, if I have something else in my inventory to be my melee weapon, I should be able to drop the bat in favor of what I want to use. Especially when sometimes the quick select for melee would give me the wrong thing.

All that said, I did quite enjoy Zombi. It's got too much backtracking in the back half of the game, which I assume is because it was a Wii U launch game with a short-ish time in development, and it has those other issues I mentioned. But it does some neat stuff with the zombies, and is pretty effective at raising the tension when it really wants to. Especially when you come across what I dubbed the "EMP zombies," which stop your scanner from functioning, and warp around to stop you from killing them too quickly.

It's the sort of game that I waited until I got it free on PS+, but I do think it's worth paying some amount of money for, if you want a decent survival-horror game. It won't knock your socks off, and it won't blow your mind, but it's fun. I'd recommend it. Too bad it's already off PS+ by the time you read this. Sorry about that!

Mirror's Edge Catalyst: The Beta.

I've been cautiously optimistic about Catalyst since it was announced. I was late to get on the Mirror's Edge train (didn't play the first one until early last year, after EA made it free at that Sony event), but I liked that game a lot. Aside from a few sections where you were clearly supposed to take a gun and shoot dudes (which I didn't because I wanted the Trophy for not shooting dudes), I thought it was a really fun, and kind of unique game. The announcement of a new one had me intrigued, and hopeful, but also concerned.

It's been a long time since the first one released. The EA of today is a pretty different company than the EA of eight years ago. They were taking chances back then, and putting out some pretty cool games that weren't parts of long running franchises, or "safe bets" for new franchises. Some worked better than others, like Dead Space, which got multiple sequels, spinoffs, and even an animated movie or two (most of which was probably not great, aside from Dead Space 2, and one could argue it didn't actually work out that well given the current state of that series (or lack thereof)). Conversely, Mirror's Edge came and went, leaving only a cult following in its wake. And when I think about what Mirror's Edge Catalyst is, I don't think EA would be letting DICE make that game if it wasn't for the fact that Mirror's Edge has, over those eight years, developed quite a following.

What worries me, though, is that it might be too little, too late. Or that Catalyst might be focusing on the wrong things to truly be the game that these people have clamored for all these years. And what I wanted after playing the original last year. The original Mirror's Edge was a very linear game, and a very focused one. It was a game about movement. About finding the fastest, most efficient, and most stylish way through mostly linear environments. Sometimes there were enemies to run around, but for the most part, the challenge in the game was navigating the environments. Well, actually, that game's biggest issue was probably that there were too many instances of enemies, but you get the idea.

Catalyst, on the other hand, is an "open world" game. Or, at least, it's an open game with an "overworld" that connects places that lead into more linear story missions. At least I assume that's the case, there's really only one of those in the beta, but I'd assume there'd be more throughout the final game. Additionally, to populate that overworld with things to do, there's variants on time trials, multiple types of collectibles, billboards to climb/hack, and security tower things where you beat up some dudes and then hack. For the most part that stuff's fine (the combat isn't great, but after some practice it's at least not bad), but it feels a little...lifeless. It feels like filler content that's there because they wanted to make the game longer, which, in turn, has me worried about the amount and quality of actual story missions in the game.

Which is a bummer, because Catalyst is really fun to play. Sure, it really doesn't do much (if anything, in the beta (apparently there's going to be a grappling hook in the full game?)) that the original didn't do, but I loved playing that game, and like I said, it's unique enough that I don't know of anything else I've played that has come close to scratching that specific itch. Dying Light had okay first person parkour, but it never had the flow and style of Mirror's Edge, but Catalyst does.

I really hope Catalyst slam dunks it out of the park and is a great game. So much that I intentionally combined two sports I don't care about for that sentence. The potential is there, because aside from a couple small, baffling things (like abilities you have to unlock that should be available by default (the tuck and roll when landing and quick turn, the latter of which has a dedicated button!)), and some framerate issues (it got real stuttery some of the time, in a way that could be game ruining if it happens a lot in the final game), the core is there, and is spot on. I want this to be a game that I go out and buy close to release, but I'm worried it'll be a game I wait six months for a steep discount to play. We'll just have to wait and see, but I've got my fingers crossed that it'll be good. Let's have, and have faith.

Rocket League Basketball Mode That I Forget the Actual Names Of.

I guess it's just called "Hoops," and the arena it's in is the DUNK HOUSE. Dunk House is a better name than Hoops. Anyway, they put basketball in Rocket League, and like the rest of Rocket League, it's fun! I still think the original "soccar" mode is the most fun, but Hoops is worth playing. Especially if you have a friend to play with who doesn't really know much about basketball so I can just make things up whilst chatting. Er, I mean, explaining the very real and accurate history of how Jebediah Basket "invented" the sport by stealing it from the indigenous peoples of North America.

Not much else to say, but yeah, it's fun. I like that the Tron lines on the ball change color depending on which side of the court it's in. Speaking of, I do wish there were a few things about this mode that were closer to actual basketball. It'd be neat if getting the ball through the hoop was two points, instead of one. And it'd also be neat if the court was a bit bigger, and scoring from beyond the three point line made it three points. For better or worse, that's not the case, but what's in there is fun. As I say every time I play some Rocket League, I wish I played that game more often than I actually do.

Nioh Alpha Demo.

If you haven't heard of Nioh, or watched GB East's recent attempt to live stream the demo (in which they met many errors connecting to the server and discovered Alex's magical server reconnection powers), then you're probably better off for it. Actually, that's not fair, for as much as I left the Nioh demo feeling more frustration than anything else, it does have some good ideas, and some interesting ones. Which only makes the things I don't like about it more frustrating because I feel like it's close to being something really cool.

Nioh, in many ways, feels like a combination of Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden, which makes sense given that it's a game made by Team Ninja, and is very obviously taking a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls. Structurally it's very similar. Instead of souls, you get amrita for defeating enemies. Instead of resting at a bonfire and spending those souls to level, you pray at a shrine and use the amrita to level. When you die, your amrita and spirit guardian (more on that later) get left where you died, and if you can recover it, you get that stuff back. You die again, it's gone forever, aside from the spirit guardian, which just returns to you. All the enemies respawn when you die, just like in Dark Souls.

It does have substantial differences, though. Like the spirit guardian. You can pick one at a shrine, though I only ever used the default fire dog. If you fill a meter (not sure how, but it's either by killing or attacking in general), you can summon the spirit guardian to help. In the case of the fire dog, it lit my sword on fire and gave me a big damage boost for a short time. I have no idea if the other ones are just different types of weapon buffs, or if they do different things entirely.

Combat in general feels a lot different than Dark Souls, despite some similarities. Aside from block still being on L1, the controls are quite different. Light and heavy attacks are on Square and Triangle, dodging is on X instead of Circle (perhaps the most confusing change from Dark Souls), and R1 is used along with the face buttons to change stance. Each weapon has low, mid and high stances, and katanas can be sheathed for quick draw attacks.

Like Dark Souls, managing stamina (or ki, as the game calls it) is very important, even more so than it is in Dark Souls. Here if you deplete the meter, and try to do something before it fills back up at all, your character (Anime Geralt, as I call him) gets winded, and stops in place to breath heavily until the meter refills up to half. You can tap R1 after an attack to refill that bit of meter more quickly, but that seems like a mechanic too far in terms of making it too complicated for me to remember and effectively use everything. Even without that, switching stances mid fight seemed like it only got me in more trouble than it was worth, but with practice I bet the stance changing adds a lot of depth to the combat. There's also some level of customization for how the combos work, which involves skills you unlock with skill points you get for leveling...But I don't think I got far enough in to really figure out how much of it worked.

The problem is that, outside of one on one fights, I don't think the fights in this game are fun, or at the very least well balanced/designed. Unlike Dark Souls, which starts you off against enemies that are pretty slow, Nioh throws you against quick enemies right off the bat. Granted, I have no idea if the demo starts at the start of the game, but given that you start without having leveled up at all, I'd assume it has to be pretty early in the game. Again, one on one, I think Nioh's combat is engaging and a good challenge. But against two, three, or especially four enemies at once? The systems in place don't feel like they were designed to be dealing with that many enemies at the same time.

Your stamina depletes too quickly to really get in more than a couple hits and back off for it to recharge. The healing items take way too long, and heal way too little (less than half a full health bar, and you only get three when you pray at a shrine) to encourage riskier, more aggressive tactics. Enemies are too relentless to make running away and hoping most of them go back to where they were a valid tactic. Stuff like this wouldn't be the end of the world if it felt like there were ways to lure out enemies one at a time, but for a lot of it that doesn't seem to be the case. You can throw stones to single out a specific enemy and have him chase you, but that doesn't work if all the enemies are hidden. There were multiple times in the demo where I felt like all I did was step forward one foot too far, and then suddenly I was being hounded by four ninjas with no hope of being able to succeed, and no apparent way to take the situation differently.

In a lot of ways, it feels like these encounters were designed for a different game. If this was actually Ninja Gaiden, these fights might still be a challenge, but they'd be way more doable, because you don't have to worry about stamina there, or weapons/armor degrading (they fall apart way too quickly, and there's not nearly enough repair items, at least not that I could find). One might even say that it feels like a game that was half built years ago, and then at some point recently they slapped a bunch of Dark Souls inspired mechanics on it in an attempt to make it something more than a generic action game. That's in reference to the game's apparent decade plus long development.

My reaction to this game reminded me of a lot of things I've seen other people say about Dark Souls over the years. Getting frustrated while others weren't. And maybe that is the case here. Maybe Nioh just isn't for me, but maybe it's actually pretty great. Maybe it'll have its following, and maybe those people will like it a whole lot.

But maybe it's just a poorly designed game that managed to make me, someone who generally has a lot of patience, delete the demo off my PS4 after numerous failed attempts. Honestly, if I had to put my finger on the one thing that made me give up, it was the low durability. I'll bang my head against hard things a lot of times, but weapons just degrade way too quickly, and I didn't have the patience to switch to other, weaker weapons/armor, and in the process make progressing even more difficult.

The last thing I want to mention is that I think it's interesting that the game has options for "Movie Mode" and "Action Mode." Movie Mode "Stabilizes the resolution," while Action Mode "Stabilizes the framerate." It defaults to Movie Mode. I didn't try Movie Mode, but I also wouldn't describe the framerate in Action Mode as "stabilized." But I'm no frame counter, so I don't know. I do think it's interesting that it's in there, and I wonder if more games will have similar features in the future. Probably not. That lower (unstable?) resolution made some of the menus harder to read, which didn't help because they were already not great menus.

I'll end with this: Nioh? More like, Ni-No! Actually, that's not great because that just reminds me of Ni no Kuni, which I liked a lot.

Anything Else?

Not really. Uncharted 4 is out next week, and I'll most likely be playing that. I'll probably write something about it, though I'm not sure what. I feel like it'll be a Dark Souls III situation, where I like it a whole lot, but I don't really have anything meaningful to say, so what I write ends up being kinda lousy. I'd still like to play that Ratchet and Clank remake at some point, and I'll mess around with the next batch of PS+ games once those are out. I have low expectations, based on the list I saw of what they are. Tropico 5 is the sort of thing I'd probably like, but I dunno how well that'll work on a controller. I don't even remember the rest. Some racing games and Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 on PS3? Been playing a bunch of Desert Golfing lately too. Nothing to say about that, other than that it's gotten pretty purple.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Hope you have a swell day!