Monday, 9 January 2017

12 Weeks 2017, week 1

   Okay, so in recent years I've played a bunch of games in the first few weeks of the year (12 funnily enough) in order to get through some of my big backlog of games that have been acquired one way or another (largely PS plus/ Games with gold). The best way to make myself do this is to do a blog about it, so that's what this is. I've got it all figured out. As I mentioned last week I wanted to try and spend no money on games during this time but in March alone Sonic Mania, Mass Effect; Andromeda, Horizon and the Nintendo switch come out so that seems unlikely.
Mekazoo


   This is an indie platformer that came out in December that I've been interested in for a while. It's not your regular platformer though as you can't really jump, well, mostly. You play as a selection of animals that you can switch between at different places in the game. The levels are full of interactive circles and each animal has a different use for them. For example, the frog swings from them with his tongue, the Armadillo as a launching pad and so on. The Wallaby is the only animal that can actually jump, but he can't stop jumping.
   It gets very tough in places and requires a lot of precise timing of animal switching and interactions. There did seem to be a big difficulty spike half way through the game, but once I got over the hump there it all came together for me. It does have issues though. Firstly, there's a grinding element to it. Each level you complete gives you a token (or coin or whatever you want to call it) and then more tokens if you complete certain level challenges eg. Speed run. Point is, you need a lot more tokens than there are levels in the game to be able to advance in the game so there is a lot of replaying of levels, which I found really annoying by the end, this is not a JRPG. 
   As you can see by the above picture it has 'interesting' art style, and I don't like it at all. You can change how the animals look but i don't like this colour scheme at all and if anything I found it very distracting. Despite this game being unpolished it is still a lot of fun to play, just know that it takes a while and also there's no online guides for it at all, which was very annoying when I couldn't figure out what to do on one of the bosses in particular.

Bastion


   Remember when I talked about Transistor a couple of years ago? no? Well, I did. That was the second game by Super Giant games and this was their first. This game too is an isometric RPG, but this one is a brawler where you travel through short levels collecting Cores from a broken world to restore life to the region. The story is there and is told well trough the continuing narration in the game but is not particularly exciting. 
   This is an action RPG where varying enemies are to be fended off with an array of weapons that you pick up along the way. As you would expect the aim of the game is to loot and collect XP to move forwards, although some of that isn't compulsory, I finished the game at only level 5 of 10. It's a simple game with only a minimal amount of thought to play but it is fun despite not being challenging. It is worth a play although not worthy of all the hype that it had. Mind you that was  years ago. You're better off playing Transistor though. When it comes to Isometric games though, it's no Sonic 3D.

Sound shapes


   Speaking of over hyped indie games from the early 's 2010's... Sound shapes is an interesting platformer that is based around music. Parts of the level move in time to the beat and each of the levels has orbs to collect to add more to the music. If you don't collect these then there will be very basic background music but when you've collected a lot of them it becomes more groovy than Earthworm Jim. It also has the added element to the game play that you stick to the elements of the world, or most of them anyway and this is used well by adding 360 degree platforming. I do like the art direction in this game, the music is pretty good mostly and the difficulty scales well throughout the game and never gets to a point of great difficulty (assuming this is as much as a positive for you as it is for me).
   This is a native Vita game and it seems like this would be a perfect game for a Vita and although I do own one it hasn't worked in years but you can play it on PS4 (and PS3 in fact) anyway. Now, that sounds all super positive and it is gpod, but it's short and sweet. I had a fun time with it but it's not something that will stick with me and given the amount of praise this game launched with back in 2012 I thought it would be something more.

Completed

Mekazoo
Bastion
Sound Shapes

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