Torn's Games: February 2018

Particle Fleet: Emergence

I played through the campaign of Particle Fleet: Emergence, and I must say that it isn't Knuckle Cracker's finest game.

Particle fleet is a game from the maker of the various Creeper World games, which were highly praised among free flash games, but the newest edition of that series, Creeper World III, holds up even to today's paid game standards, despite being a tad niche. This post isn't directly about Creeper World though, but since I hadn't written about it before, I figured I should. That is especially the case because Particle Fleet shares a lot of similarities, to the point of almost just being in a slightly different setting.
In both games you fight this single hivemind entity that pumps out an endless stream of fluid/particles. Your goal is to warp in to a relatively safe area, quickly establish your supply network, and set up defenses before the enemy reaches you. It's this tug-of-war kind of RTS, but the physics-based enemy is what makes it oddly more enjoyable.

I really liked the various Creeper World games despite the usual problem that plagues most strategy games based on bonuses from map control (snowballing). However, Particle Fleet feels like a step backwards. For one, the particle-based nature of the enemy slightly robs the game of it's uniqueness. Now you're fighting discrete groups of enemies, much like you would in a regular RTS. Secondly, the supply network system has been heavily dumbed down, with resources mostly just teleporting to where they are needed, as long as you are in range. Thirdly, your strategies and your capabilities are basically set in stone, because everything you can build has been predetermined, and you kind of have to use them to their fullest to win effectively. I really liked how Creeper World had a lot of different approaches you could take, even as far as not using some buildings if you didn't want to. There was fun in setting up custom rules for oneself if the missions ever got too easy. Not much of this luxury here, I'm afraid.

But what has Particle Fleet improved on? Nothing, as far as I'm concerned. It's mostly the same game, but with many systems just turned down to be less fun. I'd really rather just go back to playing Creeper World III, and not bother with this one at all. Perhaps things will improve in the next installment.

Kingsway

Kingsway - The roguelike where you can fight enemies, save the world, and fend off spam email, all at the same time. I've been having fun with it for the past day or so, have two completions of the game so far, but I'm still missing some potential endings or unique areas, I think. Regardless, here's what I think about the game.

Probably the first thing you would notice about Kingsway is its unique presentation - you're dealing with an operating system. You got your desktop icons, a start menu, a little clock in the bottom right, and of course all your windows for the various applications you'll run. All of the things present on your Kingsway OS are actually usable, and none are purely cosmetic, which is nice, but I wouldn't stop on the UI for too long, since, aside from the difficulty of clicking buttons in moving windows, it has next to no implications on the gameplay - peel it away, and you're left with a more-or-less regular roguelike.
Overall, while I would give points for the way the game is presented, I would also remove some for the difficulty of use that brings. Once the novelty wears off, some aspects just become tedious.

But let's not judge the game by what it looks like then, but by what it plays like. I found a whole lot of similarities with One Way Heroics, but I couldn't really say if Kingsway managed to out-do its predecessor in my eyes. The most glaring similarity is that both games have some nigh unstoppable force approaching from the west, forcing you to advance to the east while gaining power and searching for a way to stop the march of destruction. A lot of the other aspects are generally just characteristic of roguelikes, but they're still tuned to be similar to OWH, be that intentional or not.
During your adventure you level up, distribute your stat points, choose skills that are unique per character class, allowing for different play styles across multiple playthroughs, find or buy equipment that also plays a big role in defining your character... Pretty standard stuff. Throw in towns, dungeons, quests, random events, some secrets, a few different endings, and you got yourself the core of what this game is.

I don't actually have many gripes with this game, and definitely nothing major that bugged me. I'm not a big fan of action elements in otherwise non-realtime games, so the combat wasn't ideal, but since this is the main thing that actually synergizes with the unique UI, it also opened up some fun possibilities, and I can't really blame the choice.
I would say that, as always, a roguelike is very reliant on the amount of content it has, in addition to it having to be fun to play. I think The Binding of Isaac is a fine example of this, since the amount of content will keep people playing for hundreds of hours, instead of maybe 10 or 20. Kingsway is a bit weak in this regard. I like the gameplay, but quite quickly I've seen most of what the game has to offer.

So... I loved this game. I think I'll be playing it a bit more to 100% it, and I would definitely recommend trying it.
Edit: Here's a spoilery link to what I consider "beating the game". Note the character's shield slot and the ring on the left.

End-of-week Report

It's mostly been an uneventful week, not much to report.
School's being a burden, but I seem to have some time left over to play games too.
Heroes of the Storm finally got voice chat out of the blue, so that feels pretty refreshing, and people definitely seem to flame less over voice (but they still do flame).
I've been playing some Kingsway, so a review of that is probably coming soon.

As a follow-up to that "general thoughts" section of my Rumu review, I figured, "what the hell, why not..." I currently have an internal "top 10+50", so to say, leaderboard of various games that I've enjoyed. New good games push old ones out, and there's a hard limit on how many I can fit there. But when I asked myself for justification for this format over a similar format that wouldn't make me have to discard worse games, I couldn't find any. I'd still have to do the same stuff with ranking, but worse games would be pushed down, instead of out. I'd retain the option to not add games I didn't like there, or remove some games further down the line, but I wouldn't have to.
Once I'm done making this change on my own lists, I might make a copy of this leaderboard onto a subpage of this blog as well. I've actually been wanting to share those leaderboards for a while, but I didn't really find them fitting in their current semi-sorry state.

Games in backlog: 220 (+1)

of which VR: 17
of which Visual Novels: 40
of which Early Access: 54 (-1)

Games reviewed last week: 2

I wanna be The Cat

I took a very brief look at I wanna be The Cat today. It's a really, really difficult platformer game with sadly not much variety or fun in it.

The game boasts both randomly generated levels as well as "2000+ levels made by the community", and while I don't know which is correct, it doesn't seem like it matters from a gameplay perspective, since unless you're going to be playing this game for countless hours, 2000 levels is plenty to not repeat nigh any. The levels are quite short, generally simple, but just very difficult. If they really are randomly generated, then it would seem pretty impressive for me that the generator is able to make levels that are so difficult, yet not impossible.

While the extreme difficulty is part of the problem, it is not my main grief with the game. The problem is that I wanna be The Cat is just too plain. Move, jump, and occasionally shoot forward, and that's all you can do. The items and powerups advertised are not "crazy", and are mostly insignificant or a source of frustration if you use them up, fail anyways, and then have to complete a level you couldn't even complete with the powerup. Levels come down to your platforming skill - your capability to press the right buttons in the right order, with timings that are accurate to a tenth of a second. And for me, that just seems like a whole lot of work for not much fun, much like a rhythm game with no music, and where the track resets if your score dips below 99% the maximum possible. It's just repetitive and tedious.

A short review for a short attempt. Unless you've been looking for a featureless ultra-difficult platformer, I wouldn't recommend it. There's a also a multiplayer mode available if you want to get your mates together and race to the finish line, but I also feel like there's better platformers for that kind of stuff.

Rumu

I played through the short adventure game about a sentient vacuum cleaner, Rumu, just this morning, and I felt like I wanted to preface my thoughts on the game with some general thoughts regarding story-based games.

Story in games is different from gameplay in the sense that it sort of supports more variety. What I mean by that is that for games based on good and engaging gameplay, if you find two games that both try to cater to the same audience, that both are of the same genre, it's possible for one to "eclipse" the other. Sure, there's the fact that two games aren't exactly the same, and there's some freedom in personal preference, but at least for a single individual, it's simple to find one game to be better than another as far as not even wanting to play the other game at all. This would make it easy to choose like 20, 30, 40, or some other manageable number of games, and say: "Play these games, and you've experienced the best the industry has to offer on gameplay on all sides of the spectrum. Sure there's other good games out there, but you won't experience anything new or better in them."
However, I can't really say the same about stories. Different stories of similar genre or idea don't conflict, at least not in my mind. I could read 10 different fantasy books, or experience 10 different sci-fi stories, and I couldn't really say that one or two would be sufficient reading that would also cover the stories in the other 8 books. That's not to say I couldn't decide that some stories are better. A good story is hard to write, and a great one is all that much harder, but while I can choose my favorites, they don't make the worse-but-still-good stories seem insignificant.

I could ramble on about that for a while longer, but I'd also like to talk about Rumu. See, it's not that Rumu was some really great story that created all these thoughts in me. Quite the opposite actually. I found Rumu to be enjoyable enough to play through, but ultimately it was too short, and didn't evoke too strong of an emotional response from me. See, I keep a list of the best games I've played from various broad genres. I wouldn't want to just forget Rumu by leaving it off that list, but then again, it doesn't feel like it's worth including there. I'm conflicted, because the experience wasn't super good, but it's also not replaceable.

As a short story game, there's relatively little to be said upfront about it. You play as a sentient love-based vacuum cleaner named Rumu, cleaning up messes in a house and exploring the mystery surrounding your creators David and Cecily. You can navigate some rooms, interact with the environment through which you gain clues about the story, as well as solve small and simple puzzles. The entire thing takes maybe 3-4 hours to complete, if you're thorough.

I've already explained at length how I feel about the story, and obviously I'm not going to spoiler anything that's going to happen. I absolutely think it's worth your time to play through it, but don't expect it to blow your mind at any point.

But hey, at least I'll always have Steam reviews and my custom automatic leaderboards to track the best and not-best games of all genres and types. Individuals' opinions may be terrible, but as a grand collective, humans are pretty good at filtering out what's good and what's not.

End-of-week Report

Even though I frantically scrambled to complete two games just yesterday, I still fell miserably short of my goal at only 33% completion. Well, nothing lost in reality, but I should maybe consider cutting back on some other games. I already covered this subject last week though.
Another contributing factor is that school is in full swing now, and it's promising to be an irregularly busy semester with high workloads on some weeks and low ones on others as various project deadlines are set or close. What might be of relevancy regarding this blog are two of the projects I'm doing. In my Web Application Development course, I opted to make a site with Steam game leaderboards based on user reviews. Sounds familiar? Maybe. Anyways, I'm also taking a Computer Graphics Project course, and I thought about experimenting with shaders there. I've no clue what I can do in that field, but I'm hoping I can achieve some cool-looking visuals alongside much desired knowledge in that subject.

The backlog is still growing with speeds incomparable to those I wither it down with. If it gets really big, I could always go over it and purge some weaker candidates, but I'd hate for it to come to that.

Games in backlog: 219 (+5)

of which VR: 17 (+1)
of which Visual Novels: 40
of which Early Access: 55 (+1)

Games reviewed last week: 2
Progress to 18.02 game goal: 10 of 30 - Failure =(

I Am Overburdened

I Am Overburdened is a game that's addictive in its simplicity, but sadly a playthrough takes but an hour, and there is no progress and not much reason to replay the game once it's completed.

I Am Overburdened is a dungeon crawling rougelike reduced to the barest of bones. All creatures have four stats - damage, defense, health, and speed. The one with higher speed attacks first, deals (damage - defense) damage, then the other retaliates. Repeat until either side runs out of health. The world has about 30 floors, each being semi-randomly generated and containing 10 or so monsters, with a pick 1 of 3 store after every 3 levels. The monsters get stronger as the floors progress, but so do you by acquiring stat-ups and equipment. Spruce it all up with a few extra effects, and you have basically a perfect description of the game based on which you could make one such game yourself. That's how bare this game is.

I completed the game on the first try, with little difficulty. It was fun for an hour. But then the "Nightmare" mode unlocked, and just like a true nightmare, is was terrible. As far as I understood, you just started with lower stats, but as this is a game with heavy snowballing, that made all the difference. I'm not sure if the developer themselves managed to complete this gamemode, but I did maybe 50 tries, usually not getting even past the first three floors - it felt impossible.
The entire game is actually RNG-based, with some focus on choosing the proper order to kill and gather stuff. The player also has a luck stat, which influences everything from dealing and avoiding damage to finding better loot. It's the one nerfed the heaviest in Nightmare mode, to a grand -5, meaning things like not getting anything from a chest can happen. Through all the tries, luck didn't smile on me enough to snowball enough to get past half the levels, but it kept me trying.

While I Am Overburdened was really fun, I simply can't recommend it because of its lack of content. Were it a free flash game (which are a dying thing these days, being replaced by things that both cost, and are of worse quality), it'd be a nice way to spend half an evening, but among paid games, this simply doesn't meet my quality requirements.

Battle Chef Brigade

I'm not really sure what kind of game I was expecting from Battle Chef Brigade based on its Steam page. In hindsight, I guess it's pretty much what was advertised. I find it kind of hard to approach this review for some reason, but I suppose I'll just start describing it.

Battle Chef Brigade's gameplay is rather neatly split into two separate parts. The first is a side-scrolling brawler where you beat up monsters and gather their body parts. The second is a match-3 game where you cook said body parts into dishes. From that short description, you might already notice a little problem. The game is split and doesn't focus on a single aspect of itself, which usually means that instead of achieving one good game, you'd end up with two mediocre ones.
That is, of course, only in theory. In practice... it sadly holds true for this game as well, and the apparently small team Battle Chef Brigade was made with didn't have a positive impact on this aspect either. The combat feels fairly dull and mostly comes down to button mashing save for some larger enemies that actually require you to execute a repetitive combo while withering their health down. As for the match-3 part, the strict time limit which you're always on eliminates any possibility to carefully plan your dishes. And maybe this is just me, but a match-3 is the most unimaginative puzzle you could decide on. Personally, I quite dislike it.

While playing, I never felt like I had enough time, yet I didn't feel like the game was expecting me to be particularly skillful either. Much like running a race, it felt exhausting, yet very mundane with no tricks to somehow get an edge. That wasn't the only part that was rushing me along though, as new game mechanics were being introduced faster than I could really test them out and get comfortable with them. For better or for worse, I ended up being mostly okay with just ignoring nearly every new thing presented to me, and completing all the challenges regardless.

It seems like I'm criticizing the gameplay a tad too much. I haven't said a single positive thing about it, and yet my dozen-or-so hours of playing it weren't pure suffering. For one, it's because there wasn't anything particularly jarring that would make me want to quit outright. So it did a good job of keeping my hopes up, although never quite meeting them. Oh, and despite the individual pieces being rather bad, they're tied together well. It's sad that the gameplay, the most important part of a game, was the weakest part of this one.
So the good parts? Surely one of the first things you notice about this game are its hand-drawn visuals. They're not of superb quality, but they also fill all the practical requirements I would want from them while helping the game stand out. What really surprised me thoguh was the food system. Not the match-3 process of making the food, but the imagery and naming of it. Genuinely makes you hungry, and there's a seemingly infinite number of distinct dishes. A shame that all of that had no impact on the game at all.
The story though? Eh, I didn't feel invested, but it wasn't terrible, and wasn't forcing itself down your throat, so I'd label it a net positive for the game.

Overall, I would say it's a shame that the game's called Battle Chef Brigade, for I feel it could have achieved more if it had instead poured all its effort on those elaborate cooking mechanisms that I really couldn't experience enough. Still, I got a good amount of hours out of this game, out of which none felt wasted, but none also felt genuinely enjoyable. For my final verdict, I would have to refrain from recommending it.

End-of-week Report

It's that time of the week again when I can look back at my accomplishments in the past week and wonder "What in the world was I doing the entire week?"
But it's actually not that much of a mystery to myself. Two days of board games, one day of personal math problems, a lot of half days on Mabinogi and Heroes of the Storm, which are the real culprits here, Cities: Skylines over two days, and a bit of Battle Chef Brigade too.
I'm actually really enjoying Mabinogi, which is nice since I really want to like MMOs, but all the themepark nonsense these days is sickening. So even if it's cutting into my overall play time of other games, I'm okay with that. Heroes of the Storm is another topic though, because instead of a peaceful and relaxing grind of progression, it's the same toxic brick wall as all MOBAs. I've already kind of faced the reality that I'm not going to hit Grand Master, and that's fine. I don't need to be the best, it's not my goal, and it's not realistic because there's a lot of people trying a lot harder than me. So there's no progression past Master - what am I even playing for? Add to that the amount of games ruined by teammates talking trash, being trash, or flat out going AFK, and I'm not having a whole lot of fun on average. Maybe it's time for another long break from that.

One thing's for sure though - I'm not going to reach my game goal. Not with school starting again tomorrow.

Games in backlog: 214 (+8)

of which VR: 16 (+2)
of which Visual Novels: 40
of which Early Access: 54 (+2)

Games reviewed last week: 1
Progress to 18.02 game goal: 8 of 30

Cities: Skylines

For some reason I thought I had already written about Cities: Skylines. It's a city builder. As in, you build a city. I guess it might be more like designing a city, since you're not actually the one hammering the buildings together, but generally its genre makes it pretty clear what the game is about. If you've ever played any SimCity, then it's basically that, except everyone agrees Skylines is better. It really is pretty much the undeniable leader among city building and management games, and with fairly regular updates and mod support, it's unlikely that will change soon.
I had actually played it near its release almost 3 years ago, but since it is having a free weekend right now, I figured I would give it another try, see if it's gotten better - and it has. If you know that city building is your thing, then you can just stop reading and go play it, maybe buy it at a nice discount right now, the rest isn't much relevant to you. Otherwise, I'll share some of my personal thoughts on it that I had 3 years ago, as well as today.

As mentioned, Cities: Skylines is the best of its kind there is. That is the case not because there are few of its kind or that all the others are bad, but because it has pretty much everything you could ask for in a city builder with very few flaws to point out.
Whether you're great or bad at these kinds of games, the difficulty is adjustable and will ensure that your experience is neither too hard nor mind-numbingly easy.
There's a wide variety of things to construct, from the usual residential, commercial, and industrial zones, to public service places like schools, hospitals, police stations, parks, to various kinds of transport, and some unique buildings just in case. Basically everything major you would find in a real city.
The entire thing is really well simulated that creates a feeling of depth down to the tiniest of details. All of your thousands of citizens, all the cars, even the water in the rivers and lakes is tracked. You can really observe any building, person, truck, or whatever to see its life.

What impressed me the most was how the traffic ties into all of this. The thing is that various buildings that require other buildings don't just work by some magic over the air or via some AoE. If your citizens want to get to work, they will have to walk, take their car, or some public transport to get there. Garbage actually needs to be collected by trucks. Firefighters and police patrols actually have the get to the scene to do something. If the roads coming into your city are congested, your factories won't get their raw material imports which propagates to stores having less stuff to sell, citizens being less happy, and so on. Nothing teleports, everything has to be delivered, and if your roads are filled with traffic jams, everything will suffer. It's amazing.

A decade ago I would have played this game to no end, but these days I have games like Dwarf Fortress and Factorio, as well as a ton of other building and management games that are not about cities. They scratch the same itch, and do it much better for me, personally, since they're more specialized. Skylines is too general, and while that's what gives it its wide appeal, it's also the reason why I don't like it. There were quite a few features I didn't use, as well as some that I used only because I had to. The fact that I'd rather play just the traffic management part of it, like I would play OpenTTD, speaks quite a bit. Parts of the game felt like a chore so I could continue experiencing the parts that appealed to me more. There was too much to do, and the only goal for I saw behind it all was something that I didn't really feel like striving towards.
I felt this 3 years ago, and I still feel it today, despite noticing that Skylines has indeed improved. But these improvements are best for people who already liked it - they won't change my mind.

Finally, to answer the question I always do, because I always do... Would I recommend playing Cities: Skylines? Absolutely. But I won't be.

End-of-week Report

Woah, wait, what happened to last week? How is it Sunday already without me getting almost any games in? Have I really been spending so much time on my beloved infinite games?
I have gotten some other game time in though. I'm currently playing Battle Chef Brigade, which seems quite fun, and I tried to give The Coma: Recut a try. Alas, the latter had almost nonexistent keyboard and mouse support. It wasn't just bad, but I literally couldn't manage to start the game, so I didn't. It was a horror game anyways, so I don't feel like I lost much. I'll count this into the progress tab in a desperate attempt to fill it up in the next two weeks.

This should have actually been in or around last week's report, really, but I participated in the Global Game Jam. Finally got to make the type of game I liked, but this time the team was rather inexperienced. One of the three programmers had never used Unity, so he basically didn't get anything done, and our 3D artist decided to tell us after he'd been registered to our team, that he's never actually done any 3D. I know that these kind of events are for everyone, even beginners who just want to learn, but not being able to fill your role as the only representative of that role in the team means that someone else has to do it. All the 3D art was made by me and the other programmer, who knew what they were doing, but this meant we could spend less time doing what we wanted and were good at.
Further, I feel like these kind of game jams promote making bad games. For one it's obviously the short time limit, which teaches you habits of working fast, not well. Secondly, the short time limit on both making and playing the game incentivizes making very shallow games - games that are only fun for a short while. While I continue participation, maybe I should just try to game the system and try to get the most points instead of trying to make the best game. Would be nice training for making cash grabs if I ever run low on money, heh.
But here's the game, if you want to try it out.