February 2018: Month of the dash

I'm stretching this one a little bit. All of these games do have a dash of some sort other than Rime. Which really only has a running animation with no real quick dash like movement but eh good enough. The first few months of the year are usually a great time for me to get around to playing some games that were bought but never booted up. Other than MHW I didn't really plan on playing any of these games. I just happened to notice them either via a update coming out or they just happened to catch my eye while looking through my slightly to large game collection.

Yet a new world always awaits no matter which game I start. Almost always seeing something new is cool even if the gameplay might not be unique. Like just listing off the stories I saw on this list is something else. The first two contrast each other. On one side we've got anime battle royale and on the other side a comic book story about taking down a megalomaniac. Right after that a endless space war awaits while endless depression waits on the shores of a isle. Then at the end monster hunting with super humans took up most of the hours I had to play games. How could I ever stop playing games with the wide variety of worlds all these developers craft every year?

List items

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  Under Night In-Birth

  With a updated version of this out by the time I post this list it seemed like I should have at least checked out this version since I bought it a while ago. Go me! Anyway it’s a fairly straight forward anime style fighting game. Plenty of air dashing and fairly simple combos. Pulling off cool looking combos without much time doesn’t happen to often so it was fun to see what I could do with only a few hours of playing each character.

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  Mr. Shifty

  Well I haven’t seen very many different takes on the Hotline Miami formula so after seeing Rorie play this a while ago I finally got around to playing it. To bad I waited so long since it has a good pace that never stops till the credits roll. Being a master thief with teleporting powers may sound like it makes his job to easy. But his latest gig requires him to knock out every guard with improvised weapons or his fists. Gratuitous use of his power is required to finish every level. Since he can only go about 5 feet quickly attacking someone and quickly dashing away is the main goal. Since the game continues to add new stuff to challenge the player it never gets old by the time the final confrontation happens. Plus it’s easily beatable in about 2 hours.

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  Assault Suit Leynos

  I very much appreciate that the dev team really enjoyed creating a simple space opera story so much that they made 4 different mech games. I missed out on the original game that was brought over here as Target Earth. So now I get a chance to play it now and it really shows how much they kinda just remade this again with the game I did play named Cybernator. The enemy may be different but scenes from one are literary transplanted from one to the other like the level consisting of going through a colony to stop a giant energy weapon from firing. Which was neat to see.

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  RiME

  Rime seems to rely on it’s beautiful art style to carry 80% of the game. Since the main gameplay element is competing simple puzzles that have very little variations on what you’ll have to do. While looking through all the beautiful environments the developer crafted was nice I just didn’t see enough of a reason to replay this after the credits rolled. Collecting random items scattered throughout each world didn’t really seem that fun to me.

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  Monster Hunter: World

  Ah yes this was the real game I really put some time into this month. With the internet being full of new fans of the series I ended up getting pulled in to check it out too. Turns out I really enjoyed it even if it still has some issues. Since it has been talked to death already I don't feel like I need to add anything to this discussion.