This game has a great aesthetic but it looks boring to play and breaking twice in half an hour is just unacceptable. It looks like it might be worth picking up at a steep discount and playing through once with a friend, but for $15 it's a pass. It just looks monotonous, which I know is sort of inherent in a beat 'em up, but still.
I wish the aesthetic had been used for a more interesting game.
Come to think of it, it looks like this almost wants to be Halo: ODST for the 3DS, but they couldn't acquire the rights, so instead they turned to the IPs they DO have ownership of.
I understand why you said this, but I think it's unfair to ODST. ODST explores part of the Halo universe that's very interesting, the things going on with the non-supersoldiers in the war and civilian life under Covenant attack. It has a very distinct personality (the neon colors and the jazz soundtrack) and it was released as a sort of expansion 2 years after Halo 3 and 1 year before Reach, so Halo fans were not feeling neglected at the time.
This game, on the other hand, is released at a time when there hasn't been Metroid since 2010, and has no real personality or, as far as I can tell, story to tell. It's bland and generic in a way that ODST just isn't.
If this game had more personality and came out only a year or two after a well-received Metroid release I think it would be getting a very different reception.
As it is it just feels like a slap in the face and it LOOKS like a generic N64 shooter.
In fact it reminds me a lot of Jet Force Gemini for whatever reason. If Jet Force Gemini had no personality.
I actually bought this game on XBONE a couple months ago, played it for a couple hours and sort of liked what it was doing but found it too difficult and put it down. This quick look made it look a bit easier than I remembered so I picked it up again and...I'm having a lot less trouble with it. I don't know if they tweaked the difficulty (I don't remember enemies giving health back but maybe I forgot/didn't notice) or I picked up some tips from watching Jason or what, but I got further than I had and was having a better time in general.
The music is great (though as said above too few tracks) and I really enjoy the look of the game and how it plays. I do kind of wish it was just a straightforward game with a story instead of a rogue-lite though, but I guess this way is less resource intensive to make.
There's apparently a new balancing patch live on PC and PS4 but not on Xbox yet. I might wait until that is patched in on Xbox, but I'm definitely going to play more of this.
Thanks for the quick look. It was enjoyable, and it convinced me to take another look at a game I bought and put aside, which is never a bad thing.
I kept thinking about trying this - downloaded it on PC, but just never actually got around to it. The novelty of having a clicker on PS4 does appeal though - sometimes after I wrap up playing games with friends in the evening I want something for the last 10-15 minutes while we finish chatting before heading to bed. This might fill in that gap perfectly.
Don't do it. Get a real game that you can play and chat. If you want something FTP then the Magic the Gathering free to play game is ideal (if you like that) or of course there are a ton of arcade style games (Geometry Wars 3 for example), including some pretty great arcade classics like Twinbee. I mean AdVenture capitalist is free, so you can try it, but there's not enough there to play for 10-15 minutes at a time. There are a lot of good actual video games you can play in satisfying 10 minute sessions.
I will admit that I have played some idle games, and they are fine for something to mess with while waiting for a train, or while taking a quick coffee break at work, but part of that is that you want something that you can get into and out of in 3 minutes and that won't be too engaging or taxing. The idea of playing it on a console boggles my mind. If I'm going to sit down and turn on my PS4, as opposed to pulling my phone out of my pocket, I am going to be spending time playing a video game, and I want to play one that's more than a meaningless menu with numbers going up.
Blue Storm is a better jet ski game than the first Wave Race. The controls, the water, the mechanics - best water based racing in any game, ever. Its limited appeal to some people, I think, comes down to presentation. It lacked in presentation compared to the original, and it lacked in modes. But the racing itself was superb and I don't think I've ever got better at a game than that.
Didn't Blue Storm have a kind of negative announcer who would call you a disgrace if you did poorly, as opposed to Wave Race 64's super positive announcer? That always stood out as a weird choice. So much of what made Wave Race great was the super-positive sunny "this is awesome" attitude.
I wanted to disagree with Jeff's dismissal of Acclaim so I looked them up and..man. I used to think of them as a major mid-tier publisher, like THQ last gen, but...those first couple Burnout games were great and I loved Aggressive Inline, but they put out a LOT of trash. A LOT.
I kinda feel like I just got kicked in the childhood.
@hippie_genocide: They were always hideous swimmy messes. I remember being lukewarm on the PS1/N64 generation throughout (though of course there were some great games) and being super happy when the Dreamcast was released because finally there were some polygon graphics that actually worked.
I think that's a large part of Dreamcast nostalgia. It was the first console* where most of the 3-D games actually looked good.
*Note that I was also playing computer games at this time and computer 3-D got there way before console did.
This was a great Quick Look. Like a lot of people I was disappointed to hear that Austin was leaving, but this Quick Look was a good reminder that, you know what, Alex and Vinny are also darned talented and GBEast is going to be just fine.
Why does a community manager have a screen name of VR6Pimp? That seems...both informal and kind of gross for someone whose job it is to interact with customers.
First of all: I love Austin. It's not just his intelligence, it's also his infectious sense of glee at dumb things, which makes him perfect for this site and a great team with Vinny (perfectly counterbalanced with Alex's charming natural glumness.) This video really sealed for me how good the GBE team is together. Of course we all know it's Austin's ultimate fate to go back to the glorious socialist paradise of Canada and start Giant Bomb North, but I'll enjoy him while he does his GBE time.
Secondly: This video cemented that I will buy this game when it's real cheap. It has Freedom Launchers and teddy-bear bombs. It's like someone was making a grimdark shooter in one part of the studio and someone else was playing Sunset Overdrive in the other part, and they both just combined what they were doing with no thought about whether it made any sense to do so. It is really really really dumb and I look forward to playing co-op with my friends and making fun of it.
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