@Ralizah yeah, the location of most of the DLC is pretty obtuse. The game likes hiding stuff behind fake walls but some of these were in places I would never have found without a guide. Watching videos of the path of pain brings me out in cold sweats now. And it’s all for a two second cutscene!
Nightmare King Grimm is a real challenge for the Grimm Troupe DLC But, again, I have no idea how you’d think to trigger it without knowing how to do so.
Level of completion: Achieved the best ending and defeated all bosses (including the optional final boss) on Furi difficulty. There are other modes, such as an unlockable difficulty, speedrun mode, etc., but I didn't bother very much with those.
What is it?: A cool indie boss rush. You play as a mysterious man fighting his way out of an incredibly elaborate space prison that is guarded by nine warriors who have dedicated their lives to keeping you from escaping.
Things I liked:
For an indie title, the presentation is pretty genuinely stunning. You can tell it's not a big budget effort, but the art design is fantastic, and the character models are quite easy on the eyes.
The music, similarly, is quite impressive, with a number of contributions from exciting new synthwave musicians, including Waveshaper and Carpenter Brut.
There's a good deal of spoken dialogue in this game, and it's uniformly well-delivered and interestingly written.
The real dish on what's actually happening in the game isn't handed to you on a platter, and you're able to gradually read between the lines, so to speak, and figure out what's going on as the game progresses. The story itself is quite interesting, even if it does have some presentation issues.
Controls are razor-tight in this game. They'd have to be.
The battles in this game are simple enough mechanically, but also exhilarating due to the split-second timing required throughout. You'll learn to expertly switch between twin-stick shooting, melee sword combat, and dashing to evade enemy moves or sneak around them for a devastating surprise attack. And you'll really have to memorize enemy tells and become comfortable with your moveset, because defeat comes upon you like lightning in this game.
Despite the high skill level of the gameplay, it never felt unfair. You learn the rules early, and its up to you to twist them to your advantage to reign supreme. You'll learn early on about the value of baiting enemy attacks, for example.
Reloading to the beginning of a battle from the start menu is almost instantaneous, which is good, because, unless you're really, really skilled, you'll be doing this a lot.
This game also takes inspiration from bullet hell shooters, and every boss' final phase usually involves a sequence where you're desperately having to weave between countless enemy bullets or lasers to survive.
Things I disliked:
While the story and worldbuilding itself is interesting, the way the story is presented in... underwhelming. I didn't mind the gradual drip of information related to what was going on as you progressed through the game, but the ending is incredibly anti-climactic. The real final boss is even hidden behind an optional ending. What particularly hurts about that is that the penultimate boss (the last mandatory boss encounter, though) is, far and away, the easiest one in the game. While I often struggled mightily to best a lot of the warriors in this game, and even died a number of times against the tutorial boss, I didn't die once against the final required boss encounter in this game. I do think there are thematic reasons for this, as she's very much presented as an amateur and a weakling, but it doesn't take away from the sense of disappointment I felt upon beating her.
Despite the interesting characters on display here, the one that accompanies you the most never gets a proper character arc, which is unfortunate, because it seemed like the game had been hinting at him playing a much larger role in the story than he ended up adopting.
The Furier difficulty option that unlocks after you complete the game once. Granted, I don't object to its existence, but the game is already reasonably difficult on the normal difficulty, and, when I tried beating the TUTORIAL BOSS on this higher difficulty level to see see what it was like (I've S-ranked a few of Cuphead's bosses on Expert difficulty and figured it couldn't be any worse than that), I discovered that he was almost more difficult to beat than the late-game bosses on the normal difficulty level. So... I won't be torturing myself like that.
The dash in this game only executes when you release the button, instead of when you first press it. I get why this is (like attacks, you can charge up your dashes, which is a necessary skill to master if you're going to dodge some utterly brutal attacks in this game), but it doesn't make it less annoying when the dash command always feels like it has the tiniest delay to it.
For some reason, when you beat a boss and are walking to the next one, the game transitions to fixed camera angles, like in a Resident Evil game. Aesthetically, this is fine, but fixed camera angles without tank controls kind of suck, and sometimes they're positioned in such a way that it's difficult to tell if I'm going the right way or heading back where I came from.
Conclusion: A superior effort all-around that is hampered by a small number of issues related to the narrative presentation and character development. Really impressed with Furi and am eager to play the developer's upcoming RPG now.
@ellsworth004 I play a fair number of independently developed games. More often than not, I find that a lot of bigger budget games from major Western studios just don't resonate with me.
Currently Playing: Fields of Mistria (PC); Cookie Clicker (PC); Metaphor: ReFantazio (PC); Overboard! (PC)
@KratosMD I never played the first or second games and don’t feel I missed out on much. Lots of people who played TW3 said the second game plays terribly after playing 3 so don’t get put off by it!
Coincidentally I also finished Uncharted: The Lost Legacy yesterday.
I really enjoyed it, certainly more than Uncharted 4. Chloe and Nadine make a brilliant team. I enjoyed their banter and how their characters grew over the course of the game. Very well paced with a particularly thrilling final chapter. It's also very, very beautiful to look at.
Yakuza 6. This was my first Yakuza game and even if combat wasn't anything great, all the rest surely was awesome.
Now I'm playing ME Andromeda; I'd better not compare the facial animations between the two games!
After rage quitting Sonic Mania this morning, I went back and finally reached the end of Transistor.
I enjoyed this game, although I think the cult following of the game and the high Metacritic scores are probably overselling the game a tad. It’s a reasonably short experience — probably took me about 6-8 hours. The art style is lovely and the music is top notch. The protagonist, Red, is endearing to play as. A singer who had her voice stolen by the enemy and is subjected to traveling through the dilapidating city of Cloudbank which has been over-run by “the Process” - a robotic futuristic force that creates mechanical enemies and altered humans for you to fight. The whole thing is all very artsy and bizarre, actually. The story barely makes a modicum of sense and the way it’s told is so cryptic that I don’t think I truly understood it all. The pinnacle of the outlandish premise is that your weapon to fight with is the ‘Transistor’ - a large sword-type thing (think Kingdom Hearts keyblade but instead of a huge key sword the Transistor is a huge SD memory card like you’d put in your digital camera) that houses the consciousness of a dead nameless man in whom it was impaled. It is this man, whose voice will narrate out of the Transistor throughout the game. And he talks, a lot. And Red can’t talk. So I got sick of his voice after a couple hours. I don’t mind the strange premise and the cryptic story-telling style, but the voice actor’s delivery just ruined it for me and some of it was the poor script he was working with. In the end, the story came around and I appreciated the conclusion. Again, there’s some heavy dose of suspension of disbelief to swallow, but I ended up liking the ending.
The gameplay and combat was really quite good. A strange amalgamation of action and turn- based strategy, you can pause time and line up some attacks, or just fire away in real time, and often you need to do a combination of both. Various powers unfold through the game and they are fun to mix and match to get desired effects and boosts. The game was never brutally hard, but it does have a steep learning curve.
The maps, although pretty, are barren of life and simplistic. At times the atypical 2.5D presentation has you having trouble knowing where the opening for the next area of the map is, but it’s impossible to get truly lost.
I’m glad I played The Transistor, and I think it’s worth the time, especially for the unique take on combat.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Yeah, I don't think classic Sonic games are for you.
You mentioned people overselling Transistor. I haven't played that game yet, but I actually felt that way about another game from the same developer that I did, Bastion. It has some praiseworthy aspects, but it was a very mixed experience for me.
Bastion also had a non-main character who would JUST. NOT. STOP. TALKING.
The dialogue was OK, but I don't want to hear a narration through the entire game, y'know?
Combat and the setting sound a lot more interesting in Transistor, though, based on your description, so I'll definitely have to check it out sometime.
Currently Playing: Fields of Mistria (PC); Cookie Clicker (PC); Metaphor: ReFantazio (PC); Overboard! (PC)
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