Quick Look: City of Brass

Is it me or has the last few videos been missing the iconic GiantBomb intro sound?

@xolare: Maybe the muted intro is an artistic choice?

The chip in the scimitar would cause an incredibly high chance of failure for the blade to fail and also affect the edge of the weapon to be less effective. Also there are few magical weapons throughout history that have been as useful as a blunt object vs the skeleton enemies of our past especially in ancient Arabia. I just have a hard time believing the sword is able to withstand all the punishment because with a weapon with that large of a chip it would continue to chip until the blade failed. I hope they address this somewhere in the story why the sword is broken.

Looks better than what I thought it would.

Ah, the Giantbomb tradition of not looking at what's on-screen and then suffering for it continues in its ever-resplendit glory :D

Wow, really cool looking game. Also an entertaining quick look. Thanks for covering this guys! I feel like you don't see too many games with this setting these days.

Brad: I'm on a time limit so I'm going to try to keep moving.
Me: Uh huh
Brad: Dithers around for three minutes while jawing on about game systems

Another Video without the HD download link. If anyone is looking for it, copy the High link and replace 3200 with 4000 and you're golden.

This seems fun in a B-Game type of fun, which is great because we don't really get much of those nowadays. I don't see myself buying it, but I wouldn't mind getting it on PS Plus.

Hm, came to check why my RSS downloader didn't catch this, guess there's no HD download :(

I was looking forward to this game but this QL turned me away. The spike traps and looking for coins in every pot disrupts any sense of flow. On top of that, the enemy design is very dull and repetitive. I still have Immortal Redneck to beat so I'll stick with that. All my complaints with this game can be addressed with future patches. Hopefully, this is one of those roguelikes that gets updated consistently unlike, say, Flinthook which could have been amazing with a couple patches.

Wth happened to the intro sound? it's the second video that's like this I've seen

The FOV is really really low

I'm kinda really into how this looks.

Also, this is the most Brad-ass QL in recent memory. Great performance, good sir. I laughed my ass off.

Oh man, this looks fun. Love this style of rogue-lite, and the whip looks satisfying to use.

Seems pretty fun

I've been watching Breaking Brad the past few days (Demon Souls), glad to see Brad doing a QL here.

Seems in form.....

Roguelite.

I downloaded this on PS4 and gave it a run or too, but it just feels so stiff. I like it in concept, but I'm not so sure about the execution

Brad: They don't explain anything about what these items do.

Ben: Hit J

Ben Spikes! Pack

@comradesolar: God I love Brad.

Can anyone who has played a significant amount of this game chime on the long term depth? This QL looks rad and makes me wanna buy it but I'm still kind of on the fence...

BRAD


AT


GAMES

@sully907: I've put in probably about 6-7 hours and I would say I like but don't love it. It is a little stiff at first, and it is INCREDIBLY unforgiving, but those are both things that you sort of get over and get used to, but what does get old fast is the fact that it takes a lot more luck to get far than I'd like, at least so far. This could all change as I get better (like similar games, I found the first zone extremely difficult and now I can beat it with relative(ish) ease -- the boss is a pain in the ass), but right now, basically, once the game starts throwing combos of enemies that do a huge amount of damage and shoot projectiles at you as well as traps that slow your movement, it becomes A LOT to manage without the right items, and the items almost always only come through purchases (chests will drops some, but almost always drop gold, so you're basically down to using gold on shops, and therefore subject to what the shops offer which means, having to hunt the shops out, which can mean costly loss of hearts or time -- also, if what the shops have suck, you have to waste a wish to get better more expensive options and that's fine until you find yourself later on with an angry genie that would be extremely helpful if you could turn him to your side*).

*sidenote, the orange genie Brad encountered is an example of this. If Brad had run up to his base he could have used a wish and basically made him thrown fireballs for him. This can be VERY helpful later on, especially as some variations spawn dudes to fight for you and having that to help with crowd control can be a godsend.

So, I don't know if that is helpful or not. The tl;dr would be that it's got some good ideas that I like, but I'm not in love with it like I hoped I would be. Overall, it just feels like it leans a little too far into the luck of the draw side of things for my taste thus far.

Kinda into the look of this game. Also Brad going back to his roots on this quick look.

Yeah, I would call it a Run-based 3D Action Platformer, to be technical. I don't see anything Rogue-like about it.

Seems fun though. =]

City of Brass is 1st Person Action-Roguelike

I like how you pick up stuff by whippin' it good.

Also, lets see a City of Breaking Brad to celebrate the humble spike trap! hehehehe

This QL is peak Brad.

SPIKES

Can we PLEASE stop using the term Rogue-Like/Rogue-Lite? Most people have no clue what Rogue is, and have never played it, and the people who do know (Like me) think it really doesn't define the genre that well to begin with. I bet you 95% of people who use that term have never even seen Rogue. We as a people need to come up with a better term/genre for games like these.

I don't think a genre team that has been around for about 10 years now will go away; when you say it, people know what you're (in general) referring to. It doesn't matter what the origin of the genre name was, or whether that origin makes sense.

Okay, picked it up and played a few runs. Holy shit, this game is hard (like, harder than the QL makes it seem, Brad deaths and all), but it's super addictive and satisfying. Weirdly unoptimized, though... it shouldn't have any problems on my PC, but it chugs quite a bit in spots, and never feels quite as smooth as it should. Hope that gets patched.

On another note, are we really still complaining about "rogue-lite"? The term is here to stay despite being less than perfectly accurate. And really, Rogue isn't as obscure a game as folks make it out to be. Honestly, at this point it's starting to sound like everybody really wants everybody else to know that they know what Rogue is.

@themadman007: Or, don't get so bent up about it.

The anxiety when Brad turns his camera away from the skeletons and stops in front of a shop to read the items that they have :D Out of sight, out of mind :)

What's up with the silent intro? Terrible choice imho

Those spike traps and the constant pot smashing money hunt are both big, big turn offs for me. The one is punishing in a way that isn't fun, and the other is just lame. Looks pretty cool otherwise, but those two problems bump it off my list of maybe-buys.

Call of Spike Duty

New feature: City of Brads.

@themadman007:

I mean, there are people out there who likely have no idea what a "Metroidvania" is either, but are we gonna stop calling it that because of them?

No. But, we probably should because "Metroidvania" is a dumb name for a genre. Roguelike/lite is too, but here we are.

As others have said, the enemy designs seem very repetitive. And while I'm not into progression systems in the best of days, I don't like how this seems to be tuned at all. Like Destiny it just seems like a constant uphill battle instead of a carrot to keep you going.

Roguelike/lite is a dumb name for sure, but I feel like it's quite descriptive, at least to me.

Roguelike: Games with very little to no permanent power gains between runs. Binding of Isaac, FTL, Into the Breach etc. There might be some permanent upgrades, but they aren't directly tied to making you stronger, but rather just make the gameplay more varied.

Roguelite: Games with a decent emphasis on permanent upgrades, but still run based. Darkest Dungeon, Rogue Legacy, Solitairica, Dead Cells etc. The gameplay is designed to inherently gate progression behind permanent power gains obtained through repeated runs.

That's how I see it at least. I find it a useful distinction as I tend to enjoy Roguelites much more than Roguelikes. Not a big fan of the "start over, nothing you did mattered" approach, although I can see the appeal.

Sheesh. 5 min into the quicklook and im already staring at the PS store screen. Picking up 3 other games this week so I think i might have the strength to hold off tho.

Hmm, I feel like when I first heard of this game, I figured it was more Indiana Jonesy, what with the whips and stealing artifacts, but this just seems like Ziggurat with no projectiles. And I wanted to love Ziggurat so much more than I do.

Spike Duty is my favorite anime character.

I think technically speaking the games listed in both your categories would all be considered rogue-lites, and rogue-like is only really used for games extemely close to tthe style of the actual game Rogue.

@grondoth:

Without the leads bit of hyperbole...I literally just spat out apple juice at my computer screen. I've no idea if that term already existed, all I know is I owe you a debt of thanks for bringing to to me.

The problem is that people really don't know what someone means when they say Rogue-like now, and have to take a second look and judge for themselves whether the game actually is. Most of the time, they're referring to a Rogue-lite or completely off-genre game because they don't care about whether there's a difference. For me, one of the key parts of the Rogue-like genre is that it's turn-based, so any game that isn't turn-based immediately gets categorized as Rogue-lite or run-based. That confusion renders the term less and less useful as it's applied to more games.

If the only thing "Rogue-like" about a given game is that there's permadeath and procedural levels, it should be called "run-based". Kind of like we wouldn't call an Uncharted game a "Doom-like". Not all shooters are Doom-likes, not all adventure games are Zelda-likes, and not all run-based games are Rogue-likes. We wouldn't call an RTS a Civ-like, because that wouldn't make any sense.

Oh and I do want to point out that none of this is qualitative snobbery. I enjoy all the genres listed above, and have no problem with blending and introducing new mechanics to older genres. I just have a problem with false advertising, and not letting the audience know what they're getting in to. "Run-based" is a much better descriptor of what people actually mean when they describe a game like Eldritch, Nuclear Throne, FTL, City of Brass, etc.

Thanks for the detailed response @sethmode ! Maybe I'll still pick it up but just make sure to keep my expectations tempered