I definitely think it helps to be somewhat familiar with either soccer or basketball sports games in general. Especially if you prefer playing NBA 2K on the Broadcast camera rather than the 2K camera (I'm still amazed the game defaults to Broadcast considering how little of its player base insists on using it) or play a ton of FIFA you'll likely have a better read on the playing fields as courts of a sort. Initially, the game feels a bit awkward until you realize exactly what the auras are useful for, and that passing the ball frequently between characters to adjust the angles of the field and move friends out of harms way a fraction of a second before their banishment, you begin to see that the game is actually super active and twitchy. The struggle is that most of the first round of Rites, which is also the longest round, doesn't necessarily make this clear, and it's only as your enemies gain their own special abilities and the A.I. gets smarter that you realize slowly meandering across the field A) is kind of no fun and B) really limiting your potential for big plays.
I bought this game during a recent sale and just finished my third round of Rites and I'm totally hooked on this game. It's a blend of a lot of lesser versions of games I've loved in the past: Banner Saga (1, for some reason I never played 2), NBA Street, Transistor. The consequences of the story aren't as dire as Banner Saga, the flair isn't as Chotchkie's as NBA Jam and the narrative thrust isn't as smooth as Transistor nor the combat depth necessarily as obvious, but it all comes together in this way that is incredibly propulsive. I wouldn't even say the story is good, necessarily, but in fact its vagueness and lack of coherence via the out-of-time dropping of pages in the book adds to the mysteriousness nature and makes the big reveals hit harder than I think they would if these characters spoke more specifically than they do, or animated more than the not-at-all we have here.
Again, I'm not finished with the game yet, though I predict I'll finish my first (of at least two) play-throughs today. But to get back to my Transistor point, this is an interesting feeling I have about Supergiant Games' games: Bastion was a lot of fun, and it felt complete. It had a loop, as it's now apparent these guys want their games to have, but it felt like it had basically expressed itself by the time the first run was done. Transistor, on the other hand, I presume was off-putting to a handful of people because its first run was either needlessly complicated or awkwardly simplistic depending on your aptitude for its systems. That was a game implicitly designed to be played twice. Likewise, in that vein, Pyre is beginning to feel like a game that might not allow itself to actually get going. I find myself emptied by the team standings page and the slowing drip of new characters, curious what this game would look like with longer seasons, in-season trades, financial (or whatever) budgets, rivalries that build over real, true years rather than these oddly accelerated timelines.
In short, I'm finding myself wondering what Pyre would've looked like as a straight up sports game, in which the salvation aspect were disregarded in favor of a weird world full of disparate factions looking to claim the title of Greatest Ritesballers on the Planet, slowly coming to the realization that teams were more interesting and competitive if the specific factions split up and found the best versions of themselves by working together. But I mostly play MLB The Show and NBA 2K, so of course I would wind up most curious what this game would've looked like with less of a story mode and more of a GM mode.
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