Gamer’s Thoughts: My Palworld wishlist

Steam store page – Twitter/X – Wikipedia

I know that I’m extremely late when it comes to the Palworld hype. Palworld released in early January 2024 and currently, since there aren’t a lot of updates dropping, the hype died out. Yet, the roadmap looks extremely promising. Since this game is still in early access, I’m always hesitant in writing about the game. Since, you never know which mechanics or things will change and evolve during the early access period. Especially since we are currently only at v0.1.5.1. So, I decided to hold off on my first impression/review article for now. But, I wanted to talk about this game. So, here are some things I’d love to see in the full version of Palworld or even in one of the next updates.

First of all, what is a Palworld?

Palworld is a combination of several games, all thrown into one. It’s easy to describe Palworld with saying which games it combines.

Foremost, at its core, it’s a game you can somewhat compare to Ark Survival Evolved. When I first started playing, I noticed the similarities right away. The way how you have a crafting system to build your base, and you have monsters running around you can tame/catch is totally here as well.

I haven’t played a lot of Ark, so I can’t say if this mechanic is also present in Ark… But, the fact you can use your monsters to preform tasks in your base reminded me quite a lot of The Survivalists. A game where you are stranded on an island, and you can train monkeys to preform actions for you. The big difference is that now certain monsters can only preform certain tasks, instead of the monkeys just copying you.

Now, a lot of other articles describe this game as Pokémon with guns. After playing this game, I think that’s a somewhat unfair comparison. When I think Pokémon, I think a journey with gyms and an evil team. I think turn based battles and a big ending tournament as its conclusion. While some Pals share a very similar design language to some Pokémon, most of the mechanics of what makes a Pokémon game aren’t in this game. The other big mechanic is the capture mechanic, but by now this isn’t exclusive to Pokémon games anymore. Especially since we have games like Coromon.

There are also influences of the latest Zelda games. Especially Tears of the Kingdom. There are these huge, strong bosses roaming around on the huge open world map, you can beat at any time. Also, the korok seeds to upgrade your character are also here in the form of effigies and Pal souls to upgrade your monsters.

This game really feels like the developers looked at all the games they liked playing, looked at what worked and threw it all together into one pot and shook it until it all clicked together. The mechanics of this game really click extremely well together. If I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t be surprised if I said that this was a finished game.

There are some silly bugs here and there and in some spots, this game feels unfinished. But, overall the game we have currently is amazing and if you would enjoy a game like this after reading what I wrote here… Give this game a try. I only told you the most basic things in this game. This game is a survival game with elements from a lot of other games like those I have already mentioned but also Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders and various others.

Let’s talk improvements

While the game is a lot of fun to play at the moment, there are some things I wish that were improved or updated. While you get a lot of warnings that there are: save corruption bugs, crashes and bugs… Besides sometimes the lighting engine giving up for a moment or the AI of the pals or enemies doing some funky stuff, I haven’t seen too many worrying things.

Take for example this floating rock screenshot here. I have explored roughly half of the map after 35 hours of play, and this was the only floating rock I could find. That’s extremely impressive, especially since if you look at the size of the map… It isn’t small at all. In the future, new islands and area’s will be added so if they deliver them with this kind of quality, I have no complaints.

Well, I do have one recommendation. I’d love to see more landmarks in the map. Currently, almost all the landmarks in the game are based upon the terrain. I’d love to see more villages or ruins of them. I loved finding these things in the Zelda games and letting my mind wonder what happened there. It’s a very difficult balance act, since too many landmarks would make the map feel crowded and limit the amount of possible base locations.

Basically, I’d love more reasons for me to go exploring these regions and get unique rewards. Besides completing the Paldex, there isn’t a lot of reason to go exploring in certain area’s. And when you have set up the right kind of farms and work stations for your pals in your bases, the chance you run out of resources is rather small.

Speaking about bases, currently you can only have three bases. Most likely, this is done to improve the multiplayer performance. Since, the game emulates the three bases in the background, so you can easily have a base close to big ore clusters to farm those while you are working in your other base. If you don’t place a cap on those, it’ll tank the performance of any computer or server. Yet, I’d give the tools to the player to increase the cap. Personally, I think Minecraft has one of the best systems with the game rules. You can almost change anything to your playstyle and even disable or remove caps that are there for performance reasons. You already have quite a lot of toggles and sliders in Palworld, but I’d also expand on that.

Currently, the building system is decent, but it needs a lot of polishing up. The biggest problem I have with the building system are the stairs. It’s a nightmare sometimes to place stairs to go from one to another floor. Also, why can’t we place a full wall next to stairs? Most likely because some pals their hitbox would do some crazy stuff? Also, placing certain items or crafting stations on elevated floors doesn’t always work the best.

On top of that, besides the visual look of the floors, walls and ceilings, what’s the point of being able to unlock stone foundations? As a test, I tried to build a high tower with wood and one with stone. I didn’t find a difference. I’d love to see more meaning to what I unlock. Granted, stone can’t burn down. So, if you have any raids with flamethrower or fire enemies, your base isn’t in danger. But what’s the difference between stone and metal, then?

I honestly think that it’d be a bad idea if PocketPair only created more content and not make the mechanics have more depth. For example, something I’d love to see them implementing in the pal task system is a mechanic I love in Cult of the Lamb. When you welcome a new member in your cult, you can set the main focus of a member there. I’d love to see that you are able to set the main focus per pal. For example, when things are damaged in the base after a raid, you select one pal to go and get the repair kits and repair all damages first before going to do their usual tasks. Or when you have a pal that can do multiple things, and you mostly need that pal to pick up items, you could disable their other abilities. Maybe we need some items for that and those items can be only found in the wild, and we need to hunt for them. That’s an interesting idea to lure players out of their bases.

Dreaming like a madman

There are some UI elements I’d love to see change as well. First, I’d love to have a mini-map. The compass at the top of the screen only shows things in roughly 300m range, and that’s too short. Especially since in some areas the warp spots are spread quite far apart. A mini-map where you can pin certain things like the nearest warp spot would be amazing.

Secondly, in terms of the weapons. I’d love to see their stats before I craft them. Now it’s a guessing game that if I craft a certain weapon, if it’s going to be stronger or better than the one I currently have. It’d also be amazing if the durability is shown outside the inventory as well. There is some space in the UI element at the bottom right, so why not show it?

Now, in terms of the inventory. Sometimes I have issues with combining stacks of items. Sometimes I have to do it twice or thrice before they are combined. This is a rather small things, but outside of those… I don’t have a lot of small quality of life things that I could recommend. Maybe that if you sleep during the day in your bed, you can skip to night if you are hunting the nightlife pals?

Maybe there is one quality of life feature I think would be amazing. Quite often, when I’m hunting the stronger pals, I have my pal instructions set on “Focus on the same enemy”. I think it would have an amazing option if you have a feature where you are able to say to your pal if they are allowed to kill the wild pal or not. Since, if they are dead, you can’t capture them.

There is one attack that is a double-edged sword. In the Pokémon games, you have the self-destruct attack. You also have this one in Palworld, yet, some wild pals with this attack always take it over their other attacks. These bee pals always swarm me and instead of being able to weaken them, so I can catch them, I just get blown up. You barely have a chance to do any damage to weaken them to make capturing possible.

I just remembered one other quality of life feature. You can create saddles, gloves and other things to do special things with your pals. But, why I am allowed to create more than one? I mean, I can only use one of them at a time and they can be interchanged. So, if you make a saddle for a certain bird pal e.g. Helzephyr, that means you can use it on all Helzephyrs you catch.

But the biggest quality of life feature PocketPair could add is a mini-map inside caves/dungeons. The times I almost got lost in these caves is insane. Especially since there are only a handful of rooms in these and it’s easy to get turned around and confused.

Now, to completely change the subject… I wish there was more music in the game. The soundtrack in this game is amazing. Sadly, there isn’t enough in the game at the moment, so there are some silent moments. A little bit more ambient tracks would go a really long way in this game.

But, I saved one of my biggest things for last. That is inventory management. This is a total pain in bases. Since pals can put things inside chests, you can forget organisation. Thankfully, while crafting, the game pulls from all resources in your base, but if you need a certain item to use at another base, have fun to go searching through all your chests. What I usually do, if I can, is start crafting an item with the one I want to move and then cancel it. Since it drops the resources then and there. Now, how to solve this without breaking the game and the idea that pals can put things in chests? What if you have a new skill that pals can have? An organisation skill and depending on the level, they either put red things with red things or make a weapons chest and come to complain to you when there aren’t enough chests for their organisation?

If your base is fully set up, the proper of a lack of depth starts to show as well. When you build your base, why should you return to it besides needing to craft or repair your weapons? Give us some activities we can do in our base when we build them. I mean come on, we even have the amusement furniture set. If only we could play some mini-games with our pals to increase their sanity for example? Since currently, there is not a lot you can do when a pal is stressed.

Of course, a certain balance needs to be maintained. The more things a pal can interact with, the more chance you have to create lag or overwhelm the player. Also, the more depth you create, the more things you have to maintain and maybe that’s not the type of game that PocketPair wants to create. How I currently see Palworld is a playground sandbox in the schoolyard. It’s an amazing playground where you can make your own fun but it’s only part of the schoolyard and only has a swing, some monkey bars, a climb rack, a small castle and a slide. It’s all solid built and amazing to spend your time in… But, then you notice the potential this sandbox has to grow. What if we enlarged that sandbox with another castle, so the multiplayer can be player vs player as well? Or wait, why don’t we add an underground to that sandbox?

All I’m saying is that currently Palworld has an amazing foundation. The biggest issue at the moment is that the game lacks depth. While the current roadmap has a lot of expansions and more content, I hope PocketPair doesn’t forget to also make it more than just surface level. For example, imagne that the raid bosses can be captured and barely have an unique skills. Why should the player do the raids then? What reward do you get out of it? Not all mechanics can be fun because they are enjoyable to do. Players will get bored and they will look for a way to spice things up or to challenge themselves.

Now what that said, I’m going to close off this article. I’m quite excited for the future of Palworld and I’m going to wait a few more updates before I decide to write a review on the game. But overall, I’m really liking what I see. The basis of an amazing title is here already and I think we are going to get an even better game when this comes out of early access. Let’s wait and see what happens when the first big updates drop. Especially the raid bosses that got teased a few weeks ago.

Thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. What do you think of PalWorld and what should be added or changed? Let me know in the comment section down below. Also, what do you think of my idea’s? I’m curious, feel free to leave a comment about that one to. But, I also hope to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (PC – Steam) ~ Role playing With Guns

Official microsite – Steam page – Wikipedia

Something that is on my bucket list for a while now, is playing a round of Dungeons and Dragons. Currently, I haven’t made the time to actually do it. But, when I saw that there was a shooter with a lot of dungeon and dragons elements, I got quite interested. I mean, I love unique shooters, so I gave it a shot. I didn’t know that this game was a spin-off of the Borderlands series, another series that is on my bucket list but… you guessed it, I haven’t played yet. But, is this game any good? I mean, I placed it on the 9th spot of best game I played in 2023, so you would think it’s good. But perhaps it’s a “me thing” and if I look with a critical eye, this game might be full of flaws. There is only one way to find that out, and that’s taking a good look at it, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of the article in the comment section down below.

Role playing with guns

In this game, we play as a new character joining a group of D&D players who are about to wrap up a game. At the start of the game, you can customize your character. The amount of customization options you get are quite overwhelming. The amount of control you have in this game to fine tune your character is possibly a game in itself. Now, it’s a shame you don’t see your character yourself outside the pause menu or some cutscenes.

The pacing of this game fully depends on if you do any side quests or just want to explore the world. Overall, the writing of this game is charming. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you really feel that the main characters are a group of friends who welcome a new player into their world. During the game, the personalities of the characters really shine through in the world building and through the voice acting.

We get quite the diverse cast of voice actors lending their voice to this game. I have to say, they did an amazing job bringing this world to life. The personality and the emotions of the characters really shine through, giving this game even more of a Saturday morning cartoon vibe. While the story is predictable and silly sometimes, it’s written in such a way that you always want to know what’s going to happen next or how they are going to resolve the current crisis.

The silly puns of the enemies, the charming world, the over the top writing… It’s like I said earlier, this game’s story feels like you are watching a Saturday morning cartoon. There are also various different builds you make, so I think that the replay value of this game is going to be quite high. It wouldn’t surprise me that all the different builds play quite different from each other.

Now there is a whole multiplayer section to this game. Personally, I don’t play a lot of multiplayers. So, I’m not going to talk about it in this article. But, it sounds interesting. I wonder how they balanced this game, since overall this game feels a bit easy to me. Maybe I got quite used to keep moving and prioritizing enemies after playing games like Metal: HellSigner and Doom Eternal. But, if you balance your weapons and equipment to your playstyle, this game isn’t too much of a problem on normal difficulty.

On the fly polish

Visually, this game goes for the Borderlands style. This game uses a lot of shell shading and comic book style to present their world. It has quite realistic environments, but I do have some complaints.

The first complaint is that after fast traveling or traveling between zones, the game took quite some time to load in the high resolution textures. If I compare my computer specs to the recommended specs for this game, I shouldn’t have any problem. Thankfully, this is something that quickly fixes itself. After max 5 seconds in an area, the whole area loads.

The second complaint I have about the visuals is that in some houses, their front door is open. Yet, it’s a complete black hole with an invisible wall. You can’t even enter the houses. I can totally understand that modeling a lot of houses and balancing the loot and such inside of them is a lot of work, but this is just bad. It feels unfinished. You would think that there is only one of these houses like this, but oh no. There are several. Even some side quests have an NPC exit a house and, behind the front door, it goes completely black. Why?

But my biggest complaint is how quest markers aren’t visible enough on the mini map. In the screenshot I placed a bit higher, you can see that small blue marker above my ammo count in the right corner. Guess what, that’s a main quest marker. Now, you also notice that same marker on the mini map on the top right. But, if the area isn’t on your mini map, you don’t see it. You don’t get a hint in which direction you should go. So, we start playing a game where we have to open the pause menu to look at the map.

Overall, this game looks and runs amazingly fine. Just like the options to create your character, there are a lot of options you can tweak to your liking. There is even in a built-in benchmarking feature. I raised every setting to the highest it can go, and let me tell you, the game looks amazing. The vibrant colors and the smooth animations of this game are really great. Apart from the complaints I talked about above this paragraph, I don’t have anything really that I didn’t like about the visual presentation.

Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. In this game, you go from area to arena to finish battle arena’s. Honestly, I call it Doom in a Medieval fantasy setting. That’s one of the core gameplay loops in this game. Now, this loop has one negative, the risk of the game becoming repetitive. Let me tell you, this game can be quite repetitive. Outside the battles, there isn’t a lot to do in this game, and the fact that the enemies respawn in certain area’s for you to grind isn’t doing the game any favors.

Now, you also have the overworld sections of this game. This is nothing more than a fancy level select. Now, you do have these wild Pokémon encounters… Well, I call them Pokémon encounters because they spawn randomly, and you go into a small arena to battle for weapons amongst other things. The biggest difference is that you can’t really run from these battles and don’t really have a clear indication on how many enemies are left in the encounter. Apart from that, you have some minor environment puzzles where you have to go through a dungeon to get a key to open a gate, or a cheese chip. Yeah, a cheese chip.

Overwhelming

Now, there is a lot that this game does right. The amusing story, the amount of depth are just two examples. Visually, this game is also quite good.

Now, something I don’t really like is how many stats there are in this game. It didn’t take very long before my inventory was filled with various items like weapons and armor that I didn’t know what to do with. Also, the amount of ammo creates in the area is just too much. I rarely ran out of ammo. To a point that I that the ammo that the enemies dropped fill the floor.

You also have a helpful dragon that attacks enemies for you on the battlefield and saved my skin several times. You have a whole tree to upgrade your companion. And on top of that, you also have a melee attack you can preform. But, that melee attack is quite risky, since the animation takes quite some time… more than enough time for the enemies to gang up on you and do some serious damage.

The game feels a bit overwhelming sometimes. Especially for loot goblins like myself, who don’t throw any loot away and think that we can use them to craft or upgrade them for stronger ones. And this game is also hell for somebody who wants to open all chests in this game, since your inventory is anything but big enough to hold all that loot.

You’ll need to make decisions and adapt to the environment. Thankfully, we can run around the environment with responsive and easy to learn controls. I only have two complaints about the controls. The first one is that in certain menu’s like the blacksmith menu, the way to move left/right/up and down isn’t changed with the controls in the options’ menu. That menu uses WSAD to move, and I use an AZERTY keyboard here in Belgium… So, I have to set my fingers quite unnatural to move in that menu.

The other complaint I have about the controls is that you need to hold some keys to preform an action. In general, this isn’t a bad thing, since now we don’t have to deal with silly “are you sure” boxes. But, if your inventory is full, and you are fighting, and you are standing on top of some junk… the pickup key turns into an equip key. Sadly, the communication to the player that your inventory is full isn’t strong enough and I equipped weaker weapons and armor so many times. Just pay attention to that.

This brings me to the music and sound effects for this game. The sound effects in this game are overall very impactful. You really feel the impact of the guns you shoot and projectiles hitting you. I don’t have any complaints about that part, apart from sometimes not having a clear enough sound effect when you pick up health or when your inventory is full. I mostly had this problem in hectic battle situations. Thankfully, the visual effects sometimes helped to solve this.

The music in this game is amazing. I didn’t hesitate to buy the soundtrack of this game to add to my playlist. It’s very bombastic and orchestral. It’s loud and proud. Furthermore, it fits the game writing like a glove. I tried to play this game without music and the impact of some scenes really was lost. The battles also became a bit boring.

While, I’m currently midway into the main campaign and I haven’t touched any of the DLC’s yet… I’m quite enjoying myself with this game. This game isn’t perfect, it has some flaws. But, the positives far outweigh the negatives in my opinion. I actually had a hard time finishing this article because I kept playing this game while taking notes to finish this article. While I said that the gameplay loop might be somewhat repetitive earlier in this article, I still enjoy it. I also enjoy that you can get a second chance in a battle and revive yourself. The frequent saving in this game and the fact you can have multiple characters in this game is another cherry on this cake.

Personally, I recommend this game to everybody who enjoys playing shooter games and don’t mind having a bit of fantasy in their shooters. It’s an unique RPG where your main weapon isn’t a sword but it’s a gun. It’s a great game and if this is what the Borderlands series is about, I’m quite interested to give the whole series a chance. If I would give this game a score, I would give it a 70/100 for now. But, I haven’t finished the game, so I’ll leave my final score up for when I write a review of this game or fully finished it.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

Review: Doom Eternal (PC) ~ Just A Little Bit More

Wikipedia – Steam – Official microsite

I still remember when I had beaten Doom 2016, I wanted to play the sequel. Yet, for some strange reason, my PC which was strong enough couldn’t run the game. Now, I was planning to build a new computer and recently I did. Now, I have a totally new computer, and I got Doom Eternal for free via my Humble Bundle subscription. Currently, I have beaten the main campaign, not yet the DLC. So, was it worth the wait for the new computer, or should I have played other games first? Well, in this article, I’ll talk about my honest first impression of the game and what I thought of it. I only focused my playthrough on the main campaign. So, no opinions on the DLC and the multiplayer. Also, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.

Just A Little Bit More

Doom Eternal is a game where the core mechanics of Doom 2016 are taken and expanded upon. Kind of like Tears of the Kingdom did for Breath of the Wild. The first piece of evidence of that move is the story.

In this game, we play as Doom guy. 14 years after the ending of Doom (2016). And of course, we get no explanation why it took Doom guy so long or what happened during that period. We do get some amazing voice acting from an outstanding cast. But the story this time around isn’t the best. While yes, we don’t play Doom for the story… But, this story has some problems.

There is a lot of technobabble in the game. Various things you can understand from context clues, and I mean the word context here in any way shape or form. Others are never explained at all. Of course, we have the scattered lore documents… But, that’s not the way how you pace a Doom story. We don’t play Doom to read notes, we play Doom to shoot demons and save Earth. If there was a bit more: “This is such and such, a member of that demon race that invaded Earth after that energy source was discovered…” or amongst those lines, it would feel a lot less mediocre.

Also, the unexplained 14-year gap between both games isn’t doing the story of this game any good. Quite often I felt I was playing the 3rd game in a story driven series. Where in the second game, a lot a thing happened and step up this 3rd story.

I think the balance between not explaining and explaining things is off here. Suddenly we are hunting for Hell Priests now, why are these important? How powerful are they? Why are we hunting them and… Hold up… Is this taking the gag of not caring about the details of the story to an extreme? Maybe so. Yet, this execution falls flat on its face in my opinion when it takes itself so seriously.

The expanded lore is there through the sometimes quite hidden notes you can pick up. So, if you want to make sense of the story and the events, you can read them. But, like I said… We don’t play a Doom game for reading, we play a Doom game to play a badass and challenge ourselves in tricky arena’s.

Nevertheless, I think the story is okay. I’d give it a just passing grade, out of 10. I just feel that it could have been fleshed out a bit more. Not only that, but I couldn’t help myself compare it to the opening of some of the previous Doom games, where things gradually build up, and we get to learn what everything is. Just like how this game introduces all the returning and new enemies to us.

Oh boy, the enemy roster is quite expanded in this game. And some of the new enemies are fascinating. For example, the Carcass. This enemy can put up energy walls that serve as shields. And they are used to protect their demon kind from an attack. Also, the new Whiplash snake enemies are creepy. They are snakes with whips that are quite annoying to hit when they are moving on the ground. There are other enemies like the Marauders. These just frustrated me to no end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the start of this part of the article, I said that Doom Eternal is an expanded version of Doom 2016. So, if you have played Doom 2016, you will feel right at home in this game. This game is still the action packed and tense shooter where you feel that you are locked in with the demons, but the demons are locked in with you.

Hectic micromanagement

Most of the gameplay loop is still here from Doom 2016. But, like in Doom Eternal tradition, there is more. The first big change is that there is no pistol anymore with unlimited ammo. So, if you run out of ammo, you’ll have to rely on the chainsaw.

You’d think that, like in Doom 2016, you’d use glory kills to refill your ammo as your health. But, oh no. In this game, that’s only for health. If you want ammo, you’ll have to chainsaw attack the enemies. So, it’s a good idea to keep the weaker enemies around to chainsaw them if you are running low. New in this game is that you don’t have to refuel the chainsaw when you are out of fuel. One piece of fuel automatically recharges. You can pick up more fuel if you want or have to chainsaw the bigger enemies.

Now, Doom Eternal got a lot more tricky compared to Doom 2016. If you are quite used to the Doom 2016 combat loop… Well, you will be thrown for a surprise here. This game is even more of a balancing act than before. You have so many options to kill demons, it’s a joy to enter an arena and fight your way through it.

Overall, Doom Eternal is quite linear. You go from A to B and overall, the path is almost always clear on what to do. And if it isn’t clear, a quick glance at the map will help you to figure out where to go next. At first, I was afraid that this would mean that secret hunting would be quite easy, but oh boy was I wrong. When I finished my first level and saw that I didn’t even find half of the secrets, I was surprised.

I can’t wait to replay through some scenario’s and try things differently or look at what I might have missed. Since, sometimes the secrets are quite helpful in your quest. And other times, they are fun collectables to decorate your ship.

Personally, I think this game can be a bit overwhelming. There is so much you can do in this game, it’s hard to keep track of everything. There are so many different types of enemies with their own unique weak points. You also have to juggle your ammo pool and on top of that, you have secrets to find… It took me until over the halfway point before I understood a lot of the finer mechanics of this game.

At a certain moment, the game just started to click. Yes, there is a lot in this game, and don’t expect to be able to find everything at your first playthrough. Unless you are using a guide, that is. Overall, this game took me 14 hours to complete, and I felt I found quite a lot of the secrets. There are several I didn’t find, but that’s for another playthrough.

The gameplay loop is mostly the same as Doom 2016. You go from arena to arena, shooting up waves upon waves of demons. If you stand still or let yourself get cornered, you’ll die. In this game, you can pick up extra lives. Now, these extra lives are extremely worth it. They respawn you when you die without you having to reload from a checkpoint. Let me tell you, if you think that this makes the game easier, oh boy… At the final three levels, I had close to twelve one ups in the bag. Even while being careful, I had zero of them at the final boss fight. This game will punish you if you don’t keep moving and prioritize certain enemies.

If you kill the weaker enemies right away, you’ll be in trouble. Since, it’s quite easy to run out of ammo. Even when you fully upgrade the ammo cap. Then, you’ll have to stagger the weaker “fodder” enemies to chainsaw them for ammo. Or blow up barrels for ammo. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t playing a shooter but an action strategy puzzle game.

Especially because this game becomes a sort of game where you have to make quick decisions. Remembering your controls and what does what is essential. I even mapped various things to my mouse for quick access. The trickiest thing is deciding if you chainsaw or glory kill the fodder enemies. Do you need health or ammo? Since, chainsawing fodder enemies gives you less health than glory killing. I do have one complaint about that, if you have the bad luck a stronger enemy comes in front of you, and you press the chainsaw button instead of the glory kill button, the animation of “not enough fuel” takes a bit too long before you can really preform your glory kill or chainsaw the right enemy… Or even shoot.

Outside the shooting, this game turns into something resembling the modern Tomb Raider trilogy. There is a lot of jumping and platforming puzzles in this game… So much so, that I even considered subtitling this review “Doom’s Identity Crisis” where I started to compare both games. In most cases, the way forward is very clearly signposted, so it’s quite rare to get lost or not know where to go. In very rare cases, it was not. It was either a swing bar being a bit too hidden or a switch that I didn’t know I had to hit. For example, in the later levels, swimming sections gets introduced. In these sections, there are tubes you can shoot into to shoot a button. Thankfully, I know from previous Doom games that this is a mechanic in the series, but newer players will have a tough time figuring that one out.

Happy journey

This article first started out as a first impression article. Since I played this game with a lot of breaks in between, I felt that I had to play this game again for a longer time to fully form an opinion. So, I played it quite a lot these past days and I even finished it.

I wondered if it’s better to play this game in one long sitting or in short bursts. To be honest, I don’t have a clear answer on that. The game is a lot of fun to play and when you get into the rhythm of things, it’s hard to put down. But on the other hand, I felt that this game was repetitive in longer bursts.

Now, during my research for this article, I noticed that a lot of people praised this game for it’s polish and smoothness. I do have to agree for the most part. Visually, this game is amazing. It’s gore and creepy in the right places and gorgous when it needs to me imposing. Very rarely I encountered some visual strangeness. Sadly, a few times I noticed some rough parts of the game. A door texture in the main hub here, a floating arm there.

Something that I felt that was off is when the Archvile spawned enemies, they don’t come alive right away. It’s an amazing effect to see them get “build to life”… But, quite often it took a few seconds for them to become active. As if the newly generated object was loading in the code of the AI for that demon. It felt jarring sometimes especially since this game runs so smooth. Just like me having the game sometimes not boot when I change my screen resolution.

Something that’s also quite impressive in terms of the visuals is the fact you can dress up your slayer as you wish. There are a lot a cosmetic options and skins you can unlock. Some of them ingame, others via cosmetic DLC. It’s amazing to see that all the cutscenes and reflections in game change as well. But, the cosmetics don’t give any buffs or change anything gameplay wise. So, having around € 90 of cosmetic packs in the Steam store, no thanks.

In terms of preformance, this game ran amazingly on my new computer. I had quite the smooth framerate and I have to agree that it’s optimized quite well there. Yes, the game is overwhelming and there is a lot going on… But, all sound cues and visual cues still give the player the information they need. Very rarely I nocited some input lag with the jumping.

The controls are quite good as well. Thankfully, the keys are shown in the UI, so you can quickly find what you are looking for at a glance. The UI isn’t “in your face” but gives you a lot of information as well. The only annoying thing in terms of the controls is that near the end of the game, you have to “use” some doors instead of what your are used too, runnig up to them and open them.

Now, I touched upon sound cues earlier. In terms of the music and sound effects, this game is just amazing. You’ll have a hard time playing this game without the sound. There are so many sound cues like low health or bosses charging up, it’s quite important. Thankfully, most of these sound cues also have a visual cue so deaf people won’t have trouble with this game too much there.

The music as well is amazing. The heavy metal tracks by Nick Gordon just pump you up for the action and add some amazing atmosphere to the game. During writing of this article, I have beene listening to my buddy Kovic his arrangement and I’m reliving the game again. I just have a weak spot for heavy metal soundtracks from shooters.

Now earlier, I said that I mostly agree that this game is extremely optimized. Sadly, I did encounter a few things that raised my eyebrows. First of all, sometimes after ammo depletion of one of my gun suddenly switched to the BFG. In the hectic fight, I didn’t notice that right away and the amount of times I shot a BFG round without wanting too, is just sad.

Also, I did notice some minor bugs. Twice, I clipped through the floor while climbing raising platforms. Sometimes I found a spot where I could clip into the level geometry. Yeah, some parts weren’t solid. Thankfully, these parts are very far and few between.

One thing that really felt “bad” is one boss fight. I’m sorry but the Khan Maykr boss fight is just silly. Just like others, I quite often ran out of ammo during that boss fight. Now, it turns out that when you shoot the new minion enemies in the head, they drop ammo. This is fine and all, but Khan Maykr eletricifies half of the arena and there are no fodder enemies. So, if you really run out of ammo… Though luck. That means you have to redo that boss fight. And how do we learn that these minions drop ammo? Well, from the codex page of course in the menu… Unlike all the other new enemies where you have an introduction screen with their weakspot.

This bossfight was needlessly hard and I honestly didn’t like to play it. Since, a few too many mistakes in your ammo management and it’s game over. Even all other boss fights spawn fodder enemies for you to heal or get more ammo. Why not this time? You can’t recover after a few mistakes and that just feels unfair. Especially when you read online that several weapon mods are quite effective… But, what if you weren’t focussing on these mods?

One other thing that I felt was disappointing in this game was that some mechanics are underused in the main campaign. During one moment in thte campaign, you can take control of a Revenant. You have a battle as that demon. There are also upgrades for that fight in your suit. But, this is only a short fight and once during the entire game. But maybe I can experiment with that more in the endless battles or the new battlemode that update 66.6 brought.

Now, I fully know that I haven’t talked about everyting this game has to offer. But there is just so much that this game has to offer that talking about everything would make this review take hours to read and weeks to write. So, I’m leaving various things as a surprise for you to discover when you give this game a shot.

Conclusion

The good:

+Addictive shooter loop.

+Amazing music and audio design.

+Great animations and visual presentation.

+Replay value in a linear shooter.

+Secret hunting is a lot of fun.

+Amazing controls.

+Great voice acting.

The bad:

-This game can be a bit overwhelming, so it’s easy to forget certain mechanics or features.

-Very minor visual hickups here and there.

-Presentation of the story. A bit too much reading for certain lore points and twists to make sense or have any kind of impact.

-Too many cosmetic DLC’s.

Conclusion:

If you enjoyed playing Doom 2016, you’ll love this game. This game is an amazing action game where quick decision making is key and central to the gameplay. I only have two major problems with this game.

First, is the story and how a lot of the lore and background information is explained in notes. Notes that are sometimes hidden in secrets. It’s a shame it’s presented like that since the pacing, writing and voice acting is amazing.

Secondly, the game is a bit too filled with content. This is a very tricky balacing act since as a casual player, you can only remember so much. The game is a bit too hectic to always remember that you have challenges and such. Thankfully, this makes the game quite replayable. Hopefully, the second time you play it in a different way so you unlock the other things.

Now, I’m happy that I played Doom Eternal. I can’t wait to start the two DLC campagins and explore all the mechanics and modes that I have missed. This game is amazing ride and an amazing follow up to Doom 2016. In my Doom 2016 review, I wondered if this game fixes a lot of the grips I had with Doom 2016. They set such a big step in the right direction. I honestly think that if in the next Doom game, they explain the lore eabout certain things more.. I think I’ll have a hard time finding flaws in this game.

If you enjoy action shooter games and don’t shy away from an interesting puzzle… This game is for you. You don’t need to have played Doom 2016 for you to play Doom Eternal. It wouldn’t surprise me that this game will be on my top 10 games of the year list. It is an amazing gamee with a few flaws but overall, these flaws didn’t hinder my enjoyment with this gem of a game. While the main campaign will take you 14 hours, I can totally see myself sinking a lot more hours in it.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reaeding it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welecome you in another article, but until thene have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 90/100

First Impression: The Survivalists (PC – Steam) ~ Monkey Business

Steam store page – Official site

Sometimes, I just need a game to get lost in it. A game where I can dive into and play for hours upon hours. Games like Minecraft and Terreria come to mind. Since last year, a 3rd game joined that list for me, and that’s The Survivalists. But why did I give it a spot on my top 10 games of 2021? Did it deserve that spot, or did I change my mind already? So, let’s start monkeying around and let’s talk about this game, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.

Monkey Business

This game is an adventure survival game through and through. The game starts with you getting shipwrecked on an island, and it’s your task to escape. Now, you might think that this game is similar to other survival games like Forager for example. But, this game has a unique mechanic that I love.

During your adventures in this game, you can free imprisoned monkeys. As soon as you free these monkeys, they’ll join your party, and you can use them for anything you want. You can teach your monkeys to do stuff for you. This game slowly goes from a survival game to a micromanagement game. Since these monkeys can learn how to farm, craft, fight, gather resources… So, basically, you can leave the grind tasks to your monkeys. They can level up in these tasks, to complete them even more efficiently. Or you can have an army of monkeys following you around to battle enemies and such.

But I might be going a bit fast here. What’s the story in this game? Well, there is none apart from you shipwrecking and trying to find a way out. You do meet some taskmasters, but those don’t contribute anything besides being your quest givers. So, if you are looking for a survival game with a story of any sort, I think you’d look elsewhere.

Anyway, back to the monkeys. They are the game-changer, and micromanaging them is one of the biggest mechanics in this game. At this moment in my playthrough, I have freed 20 monkeys and trying to find the right balance in which monkeys are assigned to which tasks are an amazing puzzle. Together with an easy-to-understand tutorial, this game teaches you the ropes without holding your hand. After that, you are free to explore the islands.

The difficulty of this game really depends on the random islands you spawn on and in which order you tackle them. So far, I have two playthroughs running, and I have to say that the difference in difficulty makes the game fresh. To make an efficient base and craft the correct equipment to go exploring, is also a great mechanic in this game.

At the start, this game is overwhelming. There are islands to explore, crafting trees to unlock, resources to keep high, dungeons to explore, treasures to find… But, in its current form, the game lacks depth in some areas. There are a lot of mechanics that can be improved or expanded upon.

For example, the blueprint system. You can’t rotate buildings OR cancel blueprints once they are placed. Another example, why can’t you sort your monkeys by e.g. skill in your menu or see their names on the map? Once, one of my monkeys glitched out and got stuck in the middle of the sea without me being able to pick him up. I could use a summon-banana, but I had no idea of the monkey’s name.

If I list all the mechanics that could use a bit more quality of life features, I’d be here for a long time. But, don’t get me wrong here. The features that are here are amazing, but certain things would make the game even more enjoyable to play. For example, see the radius of where gathering monkeys will go to pick up materials. On the other hand, it makes the game a bit more challenging, since you need to plan your building quite well.

Open sea

This game was released in October 2020. Since then, it got 4 big content updates. These updates brought a lot of new things to the game. Sadly, since last summer, there hasn’t been a lot of development of this game. And if there is, I haven’t found any traces of it on the social platforms or on their Discord.

It’s a shame really since the potential of this game is huge. Currently, you can explore 5 islands. At first, I was afraid that it would make the world too small. But thankfully, that’s not a big issue. Each island serves its purpose and going from island to island takes up a lot of time. Thankfully, you can set up transport gates.

These transport gates are one of the best additions to the game in my opinion. They increase the game flow so much. I don’t like having a monkey with me that carries a big chest for storage. Since, when they get knocked out, they don’t re-pick up that chest, and it doesn’t appear on the mini-map. And with the small inventory, these transport gates are a blessing. And it’s also really helpful that items don’t disappear from the ground. On my adventures today, I found some leaves I have thrown out of my inventory when I first discovered the island over a month ago.

Exploring the islands can be quite tense. Since you never know where the enemy villages are. And let me tell you, some of these enemies can pack a punch. Mastering the combat in this game is essential to survive. I also bought this game on my Switch and I have to say that I highly prefer the controls on the PC version. Maybe that’s because I got so used to them with mouse and keyboard, that I have some troubles playing this game with a controller… Which is also an option.

That being said, this game controls amazingly. Sometimes, I had a bit of trouble canceling some crafting of my monkeys, but that was partly my own fault since I placed so many crafting stations so close together.

With these wonderful controls, we can explore the amazingly designed world of this game. While there are only a few biomes, they are all well-designed and have their own reasons to be explored. It’s really quite impressive how well this game runs. In some cases, there is a lot going on, and I barely see any lag or slowdown appear. Which is good, since you’ve to be on your guard in some areas to survive.

I always tense a bit up when I heard that battle music coming. I always look around to make sure if it’s safe to continue to gather the supplies I was gathering or if I should first go into combat mode. The music and sound design are really well done, and it adds so much to the atmosphere of this game. I didn’t hesitate to buy the OST DLC to be able to put the music on my playlists while I’m working.

Replaying

One thing that really tripped me up several times is that this game doesn’t have an autosave. To save your game, you have to sleep.

The loading of another world also isn’t quite easy to do. But, once you have done it, it’s easy to do. You just need to know that “Save slots” is your world select. And, you better have some sort of note system since you can’t give your world’s names. 😦

This game also has multiplayer. I haven’t played a lot of multiplayer, but from what I have played… It works fine. The limited communication options through emotes are somewhat disappointing to me. Sadly, the last two times I got bad experiences in multiplayer with a broken temple and a very spammy host with emotes.

Personally, I don’t regret putting this game on my top 10 games list last year. Yet, I can totally understand why people expected more from this. This game is from the same studio that brought us Overcooked and Worms. The charm in this game is huge, but charm can bring you only so far.

I love playing through this game in short bursts from time to time, trying to finish all the quests and explore everything my islands have to offer. I’m also trying to avoid all outside help from wikis and such since the in-game tutorial and hints are great enough to help you with that.

You can finish this game in roughly 20-ish hours, but currently, I have played this game for 35 hours and I haven’t beaten it yet. Since I want to see everything this game has to offer. In general, I think this game has the potential to become even bigger, but for that, the game will need more content and some major quality of life patch. Like, being able to choose the world you want to open when you start the game?

I wish this game wasn’t such a hidden gem. If the community was larger, I’m sure that this game would get more frequent updates. But, now, I rarely see other players online… I wish there were more online, so I could experience the multiplayer. Maybe I should invite some friends to play this game since I think this game is even more fun when you play it with others. And possibly then I could unlock those final achievements.

If you enjoy games like Forager, Minecraft, or Terrarria… to name just a few; I really think you’ll enjoy this game. At the moment of writing, this game is on sale and I highly advise you to pick up the digital deluxe edition. The additional cosmetic content is totally worth it and the additional hats you can find for your monkeys make it easier to tell them apart.

And with that, I have said almost everything I wanted to say about this game for now. In short, I really like this game. While it has some rough edges, those aren’t a dealbreaker. While this game might not please every fan of the genre, I think there is something here for everyone. Let’s go monkeyin’ around since this is a tense adventure. An adventure worth your bananas and monkeys.

Before I ramble on, I want to thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Review: Blood: Fresh Supply (PC – Steam) ~ He lives AGAIN.

Blood_logo Wikipedia entry – Steam link – Steam link
The Build Engine. One of the biggest game engines ever created in 3D shooter history. Three landmark titles have been created in that engine called Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and today’s topic: Blood. Back in the day, I used to download a lot of old archived shareware or demo versions of old DOS games. In one of these adventures, I downloaded the demo for the legendary Blood, and I was hooked. At the time, things like Steam weren’t what they are today and I still was in secondary school (high school for you Americans) and too young to start a holiday job. Then, on one summer Steam sale, I found this game for a rather cheap price and I thought: “Why not.”. So, I bought the game for €1 and moved on with my day. Then, COVID-19 happened last year, and I was looking through my game library to play after work. I booted up Blood, and it got my top 10 games of 2020 list. Why did I give this game a spot on my top 10 games list? What did I like so much about this game to place it on that list? Let’s find out together while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts/opinions on the content of the article and/or the game.

He lives AGAIN

Blood 1 In this game, you take on the role of Caleb. Caleb has a reputation for being a merciless gunfighter from the Midwest. Caleb is a servant of the god Tchernobog and his minions called ‘The Cabal’. Now, for some reason, our “friendly” god kills Caleb and his fellow chosen for whatever reason and dumps Caleb in a grave. Caleb rises up from his grave several years later, and he is looking for vengeance of course.

Like your typical old school 3D shooters, the story isn’t the main focus of this game. Most of the story in this game is told through cutscenes at the start and end of a chapter and the environment that you are going through. Speaking about which, there is are a lot of moments like: you start on the train you that you crashed in the previous level. The whole game feels interconnected due to small details like that.

There are a few cutscenes in the game that enhance the story by a little. The reason I’m saying only a little is that the total runtime of these cutscenes is give or take only 5 minutes. Which is a shame, since the cutscenes really added to the atmosphere of the game. On the other hand, I think that if this game had more cutscenes, it would overpower the gameplay and the environmental story telling.

There is voice acting in this game. Of course, you have your typical enemy shouting that is as immersive as the cowboy shouting from Outlaws. You also have your wise-cracking main character Caleb voiced by Stephan Weyte. Stephan also did voice work for one of my favorite edutainment companies Humongous Entertainment. He voiced several side characters in the Pajama Sam and Freddi Fish games. Before I start rambling about unrelated things for this review, I have to say that Stephan killed it with his performance in this game. His delivery is extremely memorable, and I love his voice work for this game. A fun fact is that the voice acting for our evil god has been done by the executive producer Jace Hall.

Should you play Blood for the story? Oh, heavens no. Don’t misunderstand me here, the story of this game is fine, but it is far from the best story you can experience in a shooter. The story is there to set the mood and set up the atmosphere of this game and to help you immerse yourself in the game. But, nothing more nothing less.

Now, if we check on the Blood Wiki on the amount of different versions and ports that this game got we learn that there are two versions of this game on Steam. You have Blood – Fresh Supply and Blood – One Unit Whole Blood. At the moment of writing, the “One Unit Whole Blood” version has been removed from Steam and the “Fresh Supply” version is still up for sale. I found a nice forum post about the biggest differences on the GOG.com forums between the two versions. As the title suggests, I played Fresh Supply for this review.

Crazy cultists

Blood 3 I don’t think I have to explain what you have to do in old school 3D shooter games. You have to fight various enemies, find keys to open doors, do some platforming and solve some puzzles. Personally, I compare this game in a way to games like Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D. It’s an old school 3D shooter with amazing weapons and power ups to aid you in your battle against your enemies. There are a lot of different enemies with their own attack sound, strengths, and weaknesses.

Most of the weapons in this game has a secondary fire mode. For example, the double barred shotgun secondary fire shoots both bullets at once or the Tommy gun’s second fire let out a burst of bullets where you swing the weapon back and forth. You can even use one weapon as a turret and another weapon is a voodoo doll.

But the most iconic weapon in Blood is the dynamite. There are big differences in terms of the dynamite you can use. You have your normal dynamite, proximity, and dynamite you can remotely detonate. Depending on the chosen difficulty, the skill to use your weapons and especially dynamite is essential to your survival. I can’t count how many times I had to resort to dynamite to “thin out the herd”.

Speaking about the difficulty, if you aren’t too familiar with all Blood’s mechanics and secrets and different routes, I don’t advise the higher difficulty settings. I have to admit that I’m not the most skilled player when it comes to shooters and I had an extremely hard time with the medium setting. Get used to the mechanics of this game before you play on the highest difficulty settings and thank me later. The game is otherwise too frustrating for newcomers.

Earlier, I said that this game feels quite interconnected due to the level design. That start of the level represents the previous level. Most of the levels have a sort of linear design. You have to backtrack quite rarely. Yet, I found myself stuck in a few levels and the map system, while impressive, was far from helpful. Now, in terms of map systems, I think I might be spoiled by the more modern design methods where the key door locations are marked on your map.

Sadly enough, there are some moments that the level design wasn’t the best. For example, I found one or two spots where you can get soft locked. But more annoyingly, I found some monster rooms quite annoying since the exit gets locked, and you have to go switch hunt. I think these moments could have benefitted from Caleb saying: “Where is the switch” when interacting with the door.

This game is controlled through mouse and keyboard. While this game has controller support, I only played this game through mouse and keyboard. I didn’t have any problems with the controls and felt they worked amazingly. After a minor bit of tweaking to fit the AZERTY lay-out better that we use here in Belgium, I was able to master the responsive controls.

Visually, this game still looks fine. The visual improvements you can choose to either enable or disable are a great way to choose between the vanilla textures and the newer “more modern” visuals. Of course, this game really shows its age in the visual department but, that isn’t a bad thing for this game. I still find that the visual atmosphere is created amazingly, and I feel that the world still feels somewhat real and alive.

Something that truly impressed me are the animations. The animations in this game are a masterclass in how animations should look in shooter games. Enemies that get shot in the legs crawl towards you and keep shooting, enemies set on fire with a flare run around crazily… And that are just two examples.

Very rarely, I found some visual glitches. In one level there was some Z-fighting with a pillar switch. (Z-Fighting is when two textures overlap and the game can’t decide which one to show, so it flickers in between them.) In some spots, the shells of the Tommy gun vanished. These moments were thankfully rare and didn’t impact gameplay too much.

Dynamite

Blood 2 The sound design in this game is extremely important. If you don’t pay attention to the well crafted sound effects, you might miss some important enemy cues especially from the zombies. Since those don’t die right away from the weaker weapons. So, yeah, heard of hearing and deaf people are disavantaged when it comes to this game.

Sadly enough, the soundtrack could have been better. I feel that it’s too short and for some reason, it bugged out during my playthrough and it didn’t always play. While I was writing this section of the review, I was listening to the soundtrack on YouTube and I heard some tracks I haven’t heard in the game. While the music in itself is quite good and adds a lot to the atmosphere but it being only around 30 minutes, I felt that the soundtrack is too short for the game’s length.

This game has the perfect length for a shooter game like this. This game packs all the expansion packs so that means that a casual playthrough might take you around 10-ish hours. If you want to go for 100% you might be able to double that. But, this game gets so much more challenging and rewarding when you play it on higher difficulty settings so you might be able to get a lot more hours out of it than that.

Now, there is one thing in terms of the UI I really didn’t like. That’s the weapon wheel / ammo system. Let me explain. In the bottom center, you can see how much ammo you have for your weapons. Just like in other shooters from that time period, you have no idea which number corresponds with which weapon. It still shows “0″ even when you don’t have that weapon. The weapon wheel also doesn’t really show well to which weapon it’s going to switch since, it’s a wheel. When you pass the last weapon, it goes back to the first.

There is one thing I feel that the game totally dropped the ball on. And that’s the saving system. It’s not that the saving system doesn’t work, but it’s extremely bare bones. This game uses manual saving. There is no checkpoint saves when you enter a new level, but that isn’t such a big problem. I don’t mind manually saving once in a while I enter a new level or passed a difficult section. What I do mind is that the load system doesn’t give you ANY information in which level the save is. On top of that, you only have a limited amount of save slots and no visual information when you successfully saved the game. I worked around it by naming my saves with the level name like: “E1M3” (Episode 1 Map 3) and some additional info, but it shouldn’t be such a pain. Thankfully, we have a way better system now-a-days.

A minor thing that I really didn’t like in this game is the respawn mechanic. Of course, when you die, you are going to respawn at the start of the level with only your pitchfork. No problem there. But, the issue is in my opinion that the reloading just take a bit too long for my liking. It’s always faster to load your save from the pause menu then waiting on the game to respawn you. It might also save you some frustration since “pitchfork starting” isn’t always the most enjoyable way to play some levels.

This game also has Steam Achievements. These were a whole lot of fun to try and get. After I had beaten the game, I got 6 out of the 20 achievements. I could have gotten more but for some reason, my game glitched out and some achievements are still locked. Oh well, all the more reason for me to play through the game again at a later date.

There is quite a long list of references in this game. While I was 5 years old at the time of the original release, I had to admit I was able to pick up on several references. Maybe my love for retro games and retro media might have helped me out quite a lot there.

Oh, before I forget, there is a multiplayer mode in this game. I’m sorry but I haven’t played it at all so I’m not going to comment on it. But, from what I have read and seen, you both have your typical death match gameplay and a way to play through the campaign in a co-op fashion. That is sounding quite interesting for when I can let friends come over again.

And with that said, I think it’s high time for me to wrap up this review. I have said almost everything I wanted to say about this game and before I ramble on and on, I’m going to wrap up this article in a neat conclusion like I usually do for my review articles.

Conclusion time

The good:

+ Amazing shooter with replay value.

+ Easy to learn but oh so difficult to master.

+ Still good looking after all these years.

+ Amazing audio design.

+ …

The bad:

-The save and load system isn’t the best.

-The weapon wheel is a bit broken.

-Some softlocks / switch hunting moments.

Final thoughts:

Blood is a game that came out in 1997. This game is almost 25 years old and I have to say that this game still holds up amazingly well. The visual improvements that the Fresh Supply remake brings to the table are amazing. It gives a breath of fresh air in an already amazing game.

While I was researching this game, I found several video’s by one of my favorite YouTubers Civvie11. The release of this remake wasn’t the best. Thankfully, through the years, the game got various patches and updates that improved the game quite a lot to the point that I barely noticed the points that Civvie gave in his original “Blood: Fresh Supply is broken” video.

Apart from some flaws, this game holds up amazingly well. I knew that Blood had a high reputation when I started playing it and I was so happy when the game didn’t dissapoint me at all. Of course, I encountered some jank because this game isn’t the newest but that’s to be expected.

Would I recommend this game to people who enjoy shooters? Absolutely. This game gets an easy recommendation from me. The game costs only 8,2€ here and let me tell you, you can play a lot worse games for that price. The few issues this game have can be taken care off and they won’t hinder your playthrough too much. Is Blood one of the best retro game shooters? Easy answer, yes. Yes, it is. It’s as good as the original Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem and if you enjoy retro games and especially shooters it should be a crime to not at least give this game a try.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article and until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 95 / 100

Game Quicky: Sweet Witches + Swaps & Traps (Switch) ~ Sweet Traps?

Today I’m going to do something special. I’m going to write a game quicky about two games. The reason for that is that I got both games from the publisher at the same time, so I’m going to review them at the same time. So, let’s take a look at their latest offering on the Switch. Sweet Witches & Swaps and Traps. Disclaimer, the publisher asked me to give my 100% honest opinion on these games, so that’s what you will find in this article. If you are unfamiliar with the Game Quicky series on my blog, these articles are a quick review of the game. I also use this series to review smaller games that don’t have a lot of stories or are rather short. In any case, let’s start with one of the games. And as usual, feel free to leave a comment down in the comment section with your opinion on the content of this article and/or the games.

Sweet Witches

Nintendo UK microsite – Publisher website – Developer website

H2x1_NSwitchDS_SweetWitches_image1600w

The gameplay

You play as one of two witches and try to plant flowers in order to earn candy.

Each level plays on one screen where you need to avoid enemies to pass each soil patch once to plant a flower. When you planted a flower on each soil patch, you can continue to the next level. Some enemies can even destroy your flowers, so plan out your route carefully. That’s the basic gist of this game.

The good

NSwitchDS_SweetWitches_02 When you boot up the main menu, the charm of the game is quite clear. A lot of love went into the game. The visual presentation is amazing in this game. The artwork looks a bit creepy and cute at the same time. In addition to that, the animations are quite well done.

Depending on the difficulty setting you choose, you can adjust elements of the game. In the easiest difficulty: you can adjust the number of lives, the speed of the enemies and friendly fire. Since you can choose to play this game alone or even in co-op mode. Besides that, you even have a multiplayer mode. I’ll talk about the single-player a bit later but the multiplayer looks like a lot of fun. If you are looking for an interesting multiplayer game, this is the game you should take a look at. The idea is that you play a level but try to get as many of your own flowers planted. The more the merrier. You can also change the flowers of your opponent in your own flowers by simply walking over them. In addition to that, your opponents can attack you and you also have to dodge enemies.

The UI and controls of this game are responsive and good. I would change two things. The first thing is that you can use the (+) button in the game to go to the menu to adjust settings or go to the main menu. The other thing is that it’s unclear when your game is saved and if you choose the story mode if you are going to continue or start a new game. But, besides these two things, the UI is pretty good. The controls are easy to get used to and are useful in hairy situations.

The bad

NSwitchDS_SweetWitches_01 While the animations and visual presentation are quite amazing, there is so much they could have done to improve this game even more. For example, it would be extremely handy if the soil changed when you planted a flower on it. During some levels, I had trouble to see which patches I missed. Another example is that after the screen transition to the new level, you have to quickly scan the bottom of the screen to find out where you spawn. It could use a bit more fine-tuning.

Something that seriously disappointed me in this game is the sound and music department. Now, the music itself isn’t bad by any means but it totally doesn’t fit the theme of the game at all. The whole soundtrack is from Kevin Macleod, the guy who provided a lot of music that can be freely used in videos and games. But the music selection, oh boy. It’s the generic music I hear in a ton of other YouTube videos and to be honest, I have heard them a bit too much.

On top of that, there were a lot of moments where I felt that there were sound effects actually missing from the game. From completing a stage to ladder climbing sounds. If there is one area where they dropped the ball, it’s in the sound and music department.

To be quite honest and frank, the single-player isn’t too much fun. It got old pretty quickly for me. There is no jump button, so avoid enemies gets quite tough. Very often I got stuck between two enemies and I was unable to escape with a ladder or stun them. Speaking of stunning enemies, you still lose a life when you walk passed a stunned enemy.

The game is also quite unforgiving. There is no way to earn additional lives and if you get hit once by an enemy, you lose a life. Thankfully, you don’t have to redo the whole stage but if you lose all your lives, you do have to redo the whole world. And because you don’t know how many levels are in each world, I got frustrated when I reached the 6th level and suddenly I lost my last life due to a stupid mistake.

This game could have benefited from a bit more variety. Let the player do something else then always planting flowers. For example, getting rid of flowers of the bullies or trying to kill all the enemies in one stage. The repetition of the game is a bit too much. Besides that, the enemies’ AI is so unpredictable you can barely plan out your next move.

I understand that the game is hard to mimic the old school Amiga, but due to that derpy AI, the game gets a bit too frustrating. But, that might just be me.

Conclusion

This game is bittersweet for me. There is a ton of potential for this game. Visually this game looks amazing. But, it’s clear that this game is somewhat rushed on the Nintendo Switch. Personally, I didn’t like the single player that much, but I’m happy that I have this game since I’m quite sure that this game will be a lot of fun at parties. Maybe I should give the co-op game mode a try with a friend.

If you are interested in a cheap and challenging puzzle adventure game, this is the game for you. But do know that it lacks some polish and that there could have been so much more if this game got a better soundtrack and a bit more sound design.

I just think that the reason that I’m disappointed with this game is that I see the unused potential and only wished that they delivered that game instead of what we got. Maybe they can improve this with some patches or a sequel, but only time will tell.

Score: 5/10

Swaps and Traps

swapsandtraps

Nintendo UK microsite – Publisher website – Developer website

The gameplay

So, if you remember Dead Dungeon, you will be quite familiar with the gameplay of this game. The idea is that you get a key to open the door to the next level. But, there is a twist. When you get the key, the antagonist “The Divider” actually swaps part of the level. So, you have to figure out how to jump while getting parts of the level and pasted elsewhere. This game really challenges your spacial awareness.

The good

NSwitchDS_SwapsAndTraps_01

The unique mechanic of this game is just amazing. You really have to think about how you are going to parkour your way around to beat the level. It’s also really confusing because you would think the actual level geometry swaps places as well, but it doesn’t. The original layout of the level stays the same. But the location on the screen changes. You can press the “B” button to see a picture of the level before any swaps occur.

This game is a great game to speedrun. The developers actually knew this and added a speedrun timer. Your overall time and amount of deaths are visible on the pause screen. I only wish that this was also kept somewhere after I had beaten the level. Then again, this might over clutter the UI, so I don’t think that’s a good idea. There is also a leaderboard per level where you can compare your time with the time of other players. I honestly wonder if these are the times of the PC players are also included. But the fact that there are icons of the Nintendo Accounts next to the names, I think it’s the Nintendo Switch version only.

The audio in this game is really nice. The music and the sound effects really help sell this game. I really liked the soundtrack in this game. The voice acting in the cutscenes is really corny and it really fits the atmosphere of this game.

The controls of this game are simple and work almost perfectly. In almost every case, I felt that every death was my own fault. And due to the quick respawning, I was able to quickly give the level another shot. Since this game hooks you in with that: “Just one more level and one more try” mentality.

I adore the UI of this game. Especially on the pause screen. You have quick access to the sound and music settings and you see all the info you need. It’s quick and easy. Great job on that!

The bad

NSwitchDS_SwapsAndTraps_03

The leaderboard could be so much more. If only there was a section where you can see the time of friends, that would be amazing.

The fact they ported the achievements over from the Steam version into the Switch version is a bit pointless. I can understand that some players love to try and unlock every achievement but to me, it’s rather pointless. Since you can’t display them on your profile. If only Switch games took achievements a bit more seriously and have them display on your profile screen. But, is this a negative of the game…? Well, yes and no. Let’s not forget that I didn’t even know that I unlocked an achievement when I did since it showed a small icon in the bottom right corner with barely readable text.

This game would be even more amazing if you were able to remap the jump button and the “show picture of the level” button. More often then not, I wanted to jump and I hit the other button. But this is a minor complaint and might just be me.

Conclusion

While this game is extremely confusing and frustrating, it’s a lot of fun to play through. I really enjoyed my time with Switch and Traps and I think it’s a great puzzle platformer.

If you enjoy puzzle platforming games or really hard platformers like Electronic Super Joy or Super Meat Boy, I really think that you should give this game a try. I even had trouble finding negatives for this game. For the price, this game is totally worth your time and money.

Score: 8/10

Closing off

And with that said, I have to thank the people at Drageus Games for providing me with press copies of these games. I actually really enjoyed myself with these games and I enjoyed writing this article and reviewing two games.

I don’t know if I’ll review two games at once in the future in the Game Quicky series but who knows, maybe I might review two small games that are sequels of each other or something. I have to think about that.

Now, I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I also hope that I can welcome you in a future article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

NekoJonez – The Versatile Blogger Award #2

Every so often, I receive something that I call “a tag award”. These tag awards are a special way of other creators to show recognition to each other. It always puts a smile on my face when I get selected for these “tag awards” since I’m able to answer some interesting questions or talk about something interesting. This time, I got the Versatile Blogger Award from TwoTall4uFool. An award that I also got in 2013 and the rules haven’t changed since then. So, if you want to read up on the rules, you can read them in that article. So, it’s time to get into this award.

TwoTall4uFool

If you are interested in reading articles about newer games and various accessories, I highly recommend that you give his blog a read. His blog mostly focuses on the gaming and tech niche, like myself, but there are also articles on movies and other subjects. Here is a link if you want to check out the amazing writing of TwoTall4uFool:

https://twotall4ufool.com

The seven things about NekoJonez

So, I have to tell 7 things/facts about myself. To make it a bit more interesting to read, I picked 7 different things than in the 2013 article. So, here we go!

I enjoy wearing watches

A comment I often get is either: “As a tech guy, why do you still wear a normal watch” or “As a tech guy, why don’t you buy a smartwatch?”

Well, the reason I still wear a “normal” digital watch is that I find it easier to keep the time instead of pulling my phone out of my pocket and looking at it that way. Besides that, I’m rarely at my desk at work and just having a watch is handy when I forget my phone on my desk.

Besides that, I have been wearing a watch since I was a kid and I honestly never stopped wearing a watch. On top of that, the past few plays I was in, I was able to use the fact I had a watch. For example, I had to play an irritated and annoyed waiter in a tavern and I was able to use my watch pretty well then.

The reason I haven’t bought a smartwatch yet, well, that’s quite simple. I don’t find any benefits for it for me personally. So, just to buy a smartwatch to use as a gadget… Nah, I rather spend my money on other things.

I call my gaming style: “Expert casual”.

In my collection, you can find a game in almost every genre. Even in the genres I dislike playing or in genres, I’m not too skilled in. My least favorite genres are racing, rhythm and fighting games. My favorite genres are an adventure, RPG and visual novel games. Besides that, I enjoy playing (grand) strategy games, tycoon games, action games, casual… You name it.

So, because of this, my playstyle is what I call the expert casual. I rarely play games to have the most efficient or most challenging experience. I rarely to never play on the hardest setting. I just play games to enjoy myself and have a great time.

It really shows when you ask me to play multiplayer. For example, I’m a real pushover when it comes to Pokémon battles to other players. I’m terrible at remembering meta gameplay. But, I don’t mind that I’m not that good at that. The actual experience is what counts for me, having fun with my friends talking about games and creating memories is what counts.

That is a big benefit of my playing style. Because my playstyle is “jack of all trades, master of none.”, I have played a LOT of games and had some many different experiences, I can talk about almost every style of game.

Evening person

I’m a very big night owl and an evening person. I feel more creative and productive in the evening. That’s why I always write my articles after 5 or 6PM. At those moments, I find that I can write more easily than in the morning.

I especially noticed this when I was writing the write up for my final project this year. I noticed that a lot of sections I wrote in the early parts of the day had more mistakes or had more structural issues than the parts I wrote in the afternoon or during the evening.

I also have trouble waking up. I always have several alarms programmed in my phone to make sure I actually wake up. And when I have to go to work, I wake up an hour before I have to go to the station, so I can wake up calmly and prepare myself without rushing myself. I hate rushing myself in the morning because I know that it’s something that makes me cranky for the rest of the day.

Other media

My biggest hobby is playing video games. Apart from that, I tend to write this blog and I’m also a hobbyist actor in one of my local theater groups. Now, sometimes I get the question to give my opinion on a recent novel or in a recent movie. More often than not, I have to pass on those questions.

As a child, I also loved reading books. But, since I discovered the power of visual novels, I have stopped reading books. I feel that I get more pulled into the story when I’m able to either interact or visually see the story. Something I hated while I was reading where the long, and in my opinion boring, descriptions of how people actually look like. When I write stories, I rarely spent time in describing how the world or the characters look like. I love leaving it up to the readers’ imagination.

Now, I have periods of time that I play a lot fewer video games and I tend to be more interested in watching movies and series. I mostly watch anime when it comes to series. I feel that those more appeal to my style of humor than other shows. But, I also watch other series outside of anime; I love watching police series like CSI or other similar shows. A show I also adore is Relic Hunter since it reminds me of a lot of my favorite movie series Indiana Jones.

A TV-show I watch every year with my family is “Wie is de mol” (Translated: “Who is the mole?”). It’s a game show that is quite big here in Belgium and the Netherlands. I have linked the Wikipedia page of the English version if you want to read more about it.

Yet, I find myself mostly enjoying video games. I think it’s because in video games you can interact with the world and makes the experience more personal for me. The only difference in experience when you read a book or watch a movie is how you interpreted it. Maybe that’s a bit of a weak argument but it’s what I think.

Motivation

Now, at the start of the year, I have been chosen as a creative director in a dream development team by LaterLevels. How am I able to work full time, write an article on a new game every week, be a part of an acting group, taking care of live stuff, collecting video games, improving my tech skills… without burning myself out?

Honestly? I have no clue to be quite honest. I just found a workflow that fits me and helps me to get things done. I also try to be as efficient as possible. For example, I never take notes during my play sessions to avoid breaking my flow and to avoid that I focus too much on the smaller details in my review instead of the overall game. Another example is that I play a lot of the games I want to review during my travel times to and from work.

Besides that, I mostly focus on the things I’m passionate about. It’s obvious when you read my blog that I adore playing games and that I seriously enjoy writing. The fact that people actually read my work makes me proud. Even when my article gets read by only 5 people, I’m happy.

Reading

An extremely strange fact about me is that I don’t read that often. Here and there, I read other people’s blogs or various articles on things that interest me but I get bored easily if I have to read a lot of text on a screen. Something that makes this even stranger is the fact that I love playing through visual novels that have long bits of dialogue.

It has been a year since I actually started reading a book. It was a book about cybersecurity and how you can protect your network against malware and phishing. The last time I read a novel was 4 years ago, I read a police thriller about a murder in an online roleplay.

If the text doesn’t catch my interest, I just stop reading. Even when it’s about a topic I’m really interested in. I do have moments where I sit down and read things but they are quite rare. And most of the time, they are other people’s blog posts of authors I know to bring an interesting point of view on the subject.

Rapid-fire facts

Let’s give a few facts that don’t need to have a lot of explanation/story to them:

My favorite color is the color that the metal silver has. I’m really drawn to that color.

I highly dislike swimming. When a pool uses chlorine, I get very itchy and sometimes even sick.

I use my right hand to write. My handwriting is a mess and it gets even worse with my left hand.

My mother tongue is Dutch (well, Flemish actually… But, not everybody knows the difference between Dutch and Flemish. It’s a bit like you have British and American English.), besides English I can also speak French. I also have a basic understanding of German.

Besides games, I also love collecting old computer software. I just love messing around with old computer programs to learn about the history of computers and just because it’s fun.

Something I have a love-hate relationship with is the trackpads on laptops. I dislike using them but I love them whenever I’m somewhere that doesn’t have room for an actual mouse.

Nominations

Now, here are the 11 people I nominate for the award and invite to write an article about this. I’m so sorry to all the friends I leave out.

Wrapping up

So, thank you for reading this article. Thank you, everybody, for the support that my blog gets. I’m extremely thankful for everybody who talks to me about games that I have talked about on my blog. Thank you for leaving a comment and or liking a post. It really makes my day when I see that somebody enjoyed reading through my article or my blog and maybe discovered a new game to play.

I can spend hours thanking everybody, but I think I made my point. Thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then; have a great rest of your day and take care!

Review: Kirby Star Allies (Switch) ~ Let’s Be Friends

Official website

I enjoy the Kirby games quite a lot. The atmosphere and gameplay are the biggest reasons I’m drawn to the series. So, when I learned that a new game got released on Switch, I placed it on my “To Buy” list. Earlier this month, I bought myself a copy of this game on a small sale. So, today I want to give my honest opinions on the game. Is it any good or is it not worth your time? After playing Kirby Triple Deluxe and Kirby Planet Robobot, I was quite interested to see what the new offer on the Nintendo Switch will bring. As usual, feel free to leave your opinion on this game and/or the content of this article in the comment section down below.

It’s raining hearts

Kirby is peacefully sleeping in his house when he gets a rude awakening. Some dark hearts are raining down on his homeland, the land of Popstar. Of course, Kirby goes on an adventure to save the day.

As usual for a Kirby story, the story isn’t the big reason you play this adventure. If you played Triple Deluxe or Planet Robobot, you have seen and experienced this storyline and structure before. The writing is solid and together with the character noises, the story comes somewhat alive. But, again, the story shouldn’t be the reason you play a Kirby game.

If you do care about spoilers, don’t highlight the following part. But, I want to tell you some things about the ending of the main story. So highlight the rest of this paragraph if you don’t mind spoilers or have already beaten the game. … Okay, while I was playing the final levels of this game, I got a déjà vu. And I had to look it up. This ending has actually been done quite a few times before, but the reason I got a deja vu is that this ending is so similar to the ending of the Kirby game on NES. Seriously, watch a video from the final boss of Kirby Star Allies and then Kirby on the NES. You will be surprised. But, I guess it’s a reference or easter egg?

Alright, the spoilers end here. Before I continue any further, I want to say that this game is extremely short. You can finish this game in an afternoon since the main story will take you only 6 hours. If you want to complete the whole game, you can do this in 14 hours. This was a huge let down since the 3DS games were longer than that to fully complete. If you wanted to fully complete those games, you have to put aside 26 hours for each game.

I honestly don’t understand why this game is so short. Since the worlds you explore are fun to go through. Yet, there are only 4 worlds, well 5 if you count the one-stage world to fight the final boss in.

Besides that, there are a few mini-games and a co-op mode and that’s it. The post-game content isn’t anything special. I’m sorry, but Nintendo, why is this game priced at 60€? Are we for real? You can get 3DS games for less money. Also, other Switch games like Super Mario Odyssey have a lot more to do in it for the same price tag.

Anyways, I’m not going to ramble about the price & length for too long. Otherwise, it will overtake this whole review. Let’s be friends and review this … short … adventure.

Let’s be friends

Each Kirby game has a unique gimmick that sets the games apart. In this game, you can recruit 3 enemies to fight along your side. These characters can be controlled by either a pretty good AI or a friend.

I haven’t played this game with a friend so, I won’t comment on that but, you can play this game with up to 4 players. Since the game is quite short, this game would make for the ideal late-night gaming session to play through with your friends.

Now, this game goes further with the gimmick and sort-of reuses a gimmick from a previous entry in the series. Remember Kirby 64 – The Crystal Shards, where you were able to combine two different powers to create one unique power? Well, that returns in this game. Sort of.

For example, when you get the sword’s ability, you can hold up your sword up in the air. When some elemental friend sees this, they will infuse their power with the sword. So, you can get a flame sword. This leads to some unique strategies and puzzles to get the collectibles.

I found it quite enjoyable to see which unique combinations I could make by mixing powers. While some combinations create the same outcome, I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t too many joke combinations in this game. That was part of the charm in Crystal Shards. Where a combination could turn Kirby into a fridge.

Each time you combine power, an animation plays where Kirby shows his new weapon/ability in a short of Smash Bros style. Surprisingly, you can change this in the options menu. You can choose between “always show them” or “show them only once.”. If you pick the last one, it will play the animation for each combination one time and when you make that combination again, it won’t play that animation.

There are various new unique abilities in the game as well. For example, the spider and art ability. To be honest, the art ability is overpowered, even for a Kirby game. It can spawn in various healing items with a short cool down. So, you can heal yourself and allies very quickly.

Now, I might be a bit too harsh on this game now. While the game is too short and could have been expanded a bit more, the level design was a blast to play through. The various abilities and friend combinations you can have to make for a very replayable game. Also, in the puzzle rooms, the abilities you need are usually inside the room. And if the AI kills them, just walk off-screen, wait a few moments and go back and they will have respawned.

The collectibles this time around are puzzle pieces. The hunt for them reminds me of the puzzle mini-game in the Mii Plaza on the 3DS. There are two types of puzzle pieces inside the levels. The normal blue ones and the special rainbow-colored ones. The special rainbow-colored ones unlock the pink pieces. The blue ones unlock a random piece of a picture. These pictures are just for having something to collect. I think they unlock new characters in the Dream Palace, but I’m unsure. Since I got every character unlocked by beating the game but I haven’t got all the puzzles unlocked. The message after unlocking a puzzle stats: “You will be able to meet legendary characters”. So yeah.

It’s no secret that the Kirby games are easy and have a more challenging mode for more experienced players. To fully complete the puzzles, you will have to look around at the various levels. If you would have missed a unique piece, you can see that right from the level select screen. Included on the level select screen, you can also see if there is a hidden switch in the level that opens a hidden level. Including the hidden levels, there are 40 levels in total.

Press X to revive

These 40 levels take you through 4 different chapters. During these 4 chapters, you explore various locations presented with amazing visual polish.

The artwork in this game is really good. Together with great animations, the game’s visual presentation is top-notch. I don’t have anything to criticize that front.

In terms of music and sound, I do have something to say. The soundtrack of this game is pretty good. For those who love nostalgia as much as myself, you will be happy to know that there are a lot of musical references in this soundtrack. Now, there are a few tracks of this soundtrack I disliked. These play in the final moments of the game. Thankfully, it’s only for one battle.

Now, speaking about battles and combat, the controls for this game are good. I did have some minor issues here and there. With some abilities, I was unable to easily switch directions, like with the bird ability. When I started attacking, I felt I was locked in that attacking animation. Giving my enemy the chance to put in some damage.

It’s a minor problem since I finished this game with 85 additional lives. You only lose a life when Kirby dies. When an ally dies, you can hold “X” for a short time to revive them with a 1/2 health bar. Speaking about those friends, like the music there are some amazing references there too. My favorite reference is the return of the animal buddies from Kirby’s Dreamland 2 on the GameBoy. That game was one of the first Kirby games I ever played.

Anyways, I was talking about the minor issues I had with controls. Another minor issue is that when you have a certain ability and you want to release that ability as a friend… Well, though luck. I haven’t found a way to do that.

The gameplay in this game is like any other Kirby game. It’s a 2D platformer-adventure game where you try to get to the big door at the end of the level. Now, another unique gimmick appears in some levels. In some levels, you will need to have 3 friends before you can progress. You can come across pedestals where you can “merge” together to from a bridge for an ally with a key to cross or you can form a boulder to roll down smashing rocks. I know that it’s a kids game, but the names the developers gave for some of these things are just… “The Friendship Bridge”… Do I have to say more?

The game is still a blast to play. I enjoyed myself quite a lot and rarely got annoyed with the level design. The final level gets a bit tricky with moving blocks. I lost a handful of lives thanks to being squished by those blocks. But, I was rushing things where I needed to take it slow.

Besides the music and various returning characters, the game has other references to previous games in them. Just look at what statues Kirby can change into using the stone ability. The Kirby dance makes a return as well and is adorable as ever.

In this game, there are also various puzzle rooms where you can get bonus stars, puzzle pieces, and various other things. By default, the game tells you which abilities you need to use to solve the puzzle. You can disable this in the options menu, from the main menu. Why are the options you find in the main menu not able to be changed during gameplay? I can understand that it’s tricky to code while you are on a level but I think it would serve no big problems on the world map right?

The post-game content is decent but I expected a lot more from it. The two new modes are fun to mess around with but I feel like they are more designed for multi-player than for single players.

Anyways, that’s everything I wanted to say about this game. I think it’s time for the conclusion of this article and my final thoughts on the game.

The conclusion

The good:

+ Fun new gimmicks.

+ Fun to play.

+ Great visual design.

+ Great soundtrack.

+ The nostalgic references.

The bad:

-Way too short & too expensive at 60€.

-Minor control issues.

-The story…

-Useless collectibles.

Final thoughts:

Is this game a bad game? No, this game is a decent game but it’s too light on content. This game has the usual Nintendo polish and there is nothing really game-breaking wrong with the game.

My big problem with this game is the length and the price they ask for it. In addition to that, some parts of this game are more designed for multiplayer. I feel that this game could be more fun to play with friends or family.

I do recommend this game, but wait for a price drop or buy it on the cheap. If you pay full price for this game like myself, the shortness of the game might be disappointing. I was able to beat this game in 2 days. This game just needed longer development time.

That’s everything for this article. Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, take care and have a great rest of your day.

Score: 65/100

EDIT: This post got a “Nice Job” badge from NormalHappenings. Read more here: https://normalhappenings.com/2018/09/14/nice-job-badges-for-september-14-and-a-guide-to-making-the-most-boring-game-show-ever/

First Impression: Dragon Of Legends (PC) ~ DRAGONS!

dragon of legends Steam page – Official website

Today I wanted to talk about a game that drew my attention instantly when I saw the pitch. The name of the game is “Dragon of Legends”. Now, I can’t explain why, but I have a big fascination for dragons if they are used right in stories. This interest led me to play a lot of interesting games like the before mentioned Legend of Dragons. So, when the developer of this game and I mailed a bit back and forth, he gave me a Steam Press key to try out the game. I want to make one thing clear, he said that he didn’t want to read the article before it went up since he didn’t want to influence me or my opinion. So, this will be my opinion. So, this game is still in early access and under active development. So, that means that the issues and things I talk about in this article will be irrelevant or changed when you read this article in the future. For this review, I played version 1.01 released on 22^nd December 2017. As usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the content of this article and/or the game.

PS: on this date, the game has been released on Steam for one month! Congrats to the developers!

Signs of things to come

20180107181728_1 In this game, you play as a character you make and name yourself. In this game, you shipwreck on a beach and you find your mentor, Aldar dying. He provides you with his book and you set on a journey to unlock the secrets of that book. In addition to that, you must clear you and your mentors’ names for a big disaster.

That’s the story of the game for now. I wonder if the introduction will be changed in the final version, but I honestly like that there isn’t too long of an introduction. You get right into the game without any delays instead of having to sit through a long-winded introduction.

Before I talk about the game, I wanted to mention a strange issue I had with the main menu. The game usually boots in a windowed mode. If I full-screened the game in the main menu or the adventure menu, the UI glitches out and made some buttons hard to click. Yet, after I loaded my character, it fixed itself. This was so strange. It’s something you will only experience in the main menu and the character menu. Since the issue was back when I went to change the character on the load screen.

20180107173913_1 In any case, in this version, we can choose between three character classes. A mage, a warrior, and a ranged character. The editor to create your character has quite a few options, but the female characters aren’t in the game at this moment in time.

After I created my character, I was on my merry way, exploring the beaches my character just stranded on. A short explanation happens when your mentor dies and you must take his place. This is how your quest starts.

The story is far is rather enjoyable. The writing in this game makes the world come alive and has a unique atmosphere. You really get the feeling you start your adventure small and you work your way up to improve your skills.

While the controls of this game are currently hardcoded into the game, the developer actually said in the Steam Forums that you will be able to rebind the keys in a future version. So, for now, I must awkwardly switch between AZERTY and QWERTY. This isn’t a big problem at all since it will be fixed in the future. So, the game will be polished in the future.

Balancing combat & polish

20180106173521_1 Something I found surprising is that in a single-player, the game isn’t paused when you open the pause menu. This will be most likely a bug, but I hope this will be fixed in a future version of the game. If you want to play this game, remember that you will be playing a very early build. The game lacks a lot of polish and not everything is implemented into the game yet.

Something that should be polished is combat. Maybe it’s just me or the way how I play RPG’s like this but the combat is broken in my opinion. One of the first quests is to defeat 5 wolfs and 5 boars. Both enemies charge at you, making range combat difficult.

Something that could help is that you aim where you point your mouse instead of where your character is oriented. This could avoid unnecessary damage, in my opinion. Since I feel that it is cheap hits if you have a mouse pointer and you attack in the direction you are facing. It would make a bit more sense in my opinion.

Also, the difficulty for the first quest is might be a bit too high in my opinion. The enemies hit a tad bit too hard for the introduction quest of the game. Or that might just be me.

If you died during a quest, you need to restart that quest. I think that it would be a bit more interesting if the stakes were a bit higher. What I mean is that you should lose some items or some money instead of just respawning at the latest spawn point you activated.

20180113162841_1 Gameplay-wise, this game plays an RPG. While it’s currently quite rough around the edges, the game is still in early alpha. While it was tricky to figure out how I could equip armor and find things in the UI at first, as soon as I got used to it, I was able to do everything.

Another thing the developer could do to improve this game is by adding more sound effects. In the build I played, there was a huge lack of sound effects. I can understand that it’s an alpha build, but the world and game come way more to life if the right sound effects are used.

Some additional visual effects might be a great idea too. For example, you get a sound effect that plays when you level up, but a visual effect would be nice too. To remind the player that they leveled up and can spend points to upgrade your character.

I touched upon this earlier, but the game isn’t paused when you press “ESC”. Well, this is a lot of the UI. If you open the quest menu, you open a book with your quests. I understand the design choice since it has a story context. But, at least, pause the game so the player can read what to do.

In this version, some bugs are present. Of course, it’s an alpha build after all. For example, you can walk next to the doors and you enter the building. While you are doing this, you clip through the building.

Another example is, if you start a dialogue with somebody and you run into another direction so the character is off-screen, the dialogue box will follow you and disappear after a while. This can be fixed in two ways, either you lock the movement of the player until the dialogue is over OR you avoid that the textboxes move when they are off-screen.

The final example I want to give is the fact that you can use potions to heal when you died. I can go on for a while, but these things are things you can patch out in future development versions. That’s why this game is released in alpha, to iron out the bugs and add additional content. (Like, where is the potion shop?)

So far, I have beaten the first quest and tried to find as many bugs or issues with the game as I could. While there are a lot of things that could improve, most of them are not that game-breaking. The game that’s currently here is solid and enjoyable to play.

DRAGONS!

20180106173045_1 The visual presentation of this game is right up my alley. The pixel art and 16-bit inspired look, I find amazing. It’s no secret that I enjoy playing a retro game occasionally, and I get nostalgic seeing this artwork.

There is one minor thing I would change in terms of the UI, and that is the portrait in the top left of the screen. It would add so much if that portrait changes into your character’s face. If that’s planned for a future release, please do it.

If I could change one thing in the game, that would be the font. I mind opinion, in some places, the font looks blurry or badly rendered. Also, it made me think of some places there were some black bars or white spaces between the UI.

The animations are good. While some of them lack impact due to not having sound effects yet, some require just a bit more work. Like, the stunning animation. I would think it would have more impact if the character wobbled a bit.

So, in terms of the presentation, you also have the music. The music is rather calm and melodic. I really enjoy this music and I think it really fits the game quite well. Maybe this might be just me, but it makes me nostalgic for the MIDI-music from back in the day. If the soundtrack would be sold for a cheap price on Steam, I wouldn’t mind buying it and add it to my playlist when I’m relaxing.

The game does autosave, I think. I have no idea at what points it autosaves though. So, I think adding an animation for that would be nice. Like a map screen, that would be a handy feature to have as well.

20180113162841_1 Trying to review an early access/alpha game is a tricky thing to do. On one hand, you know that there still some work that needs to be done to finalize the game while on the other hand, I want to review the experience I just had. At its current state, the game needs a lot of improvement, but it’s on the right track.

Personally, I believe that if the developer continues with the development and improving the game, I think this game might become even better. At this moment, the game is a bit rough which makes the 10€ asking price a great price to try the game out.

If you enjoy or find interesting what I have talked about, give this game a shot. It comes recommended from me. It has quite a lot of potential. I’ll certainly keep an eye on this game while it develops further since I enjoyed this game quite a lot.

That’s everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to see you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Gamer’s Thoughts: Mekamon (Robotics) ~ Robot Games

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Hello there, dear reader! I hope you are having a great day today. If that isn’t the case, allow me to give you something to read to escape the reality for a bit. So, today I’m going to talk about something unique. Most of you know that I’m studying to become a computer scientist. I specialize in networking and computer techy. Yet, I’m always interested in the fields of computer science that I lack the skills for. One of these fields is robotics. By the way, one of my blogger friends KillerRobotics writes an interesting blog about robotics. So, go and check him out, okay? As usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the article and/or the robot in the comment section down below!

Mekamon

Last week, I received an email from the people over at Reach Robotics. They are developing one of the first gaming robots called Mekamon. While I’m personally not too well versed into robotics, the videos they have put out, look rather interesting.

They have put out two videos about the robot. One where they show off the robot on the playground and one where they show off how the robot walks on any surface. You can find even more information on their blog.

Here is something quite interesting that the developers behind this robot told me:

MekaMon is the world’s first gaming robot. A fully modular, augmented reality enabled, connected battle-bot. And now’s your chance to see it in action. We’ve been busy creating a short series of videos to let users know that their MekaMon isn’t just for the living room floor. From MekaMon’s day out in the park, to terrain trials, we’ve brought viewers into the world of MekaMon’s amazing movement.
MekaMon features three degrees of freedom per leg, which offers motion unprecedented in the world of consumer robotics. Take that motion into our Mek v. Mek battles or AR single player missions and you’ve got a serious gaming platform, straight from the control of your smartphone.

Old robotic toys

I remember that there were robot-buddies in the past. But those robots haven’t been popular here, where I live. What interests me the most is the fact that this robot is modular.

Most of the robotic toys I saw in the stores or at my friends their houses were mostly voice controlled or had just a few games or things you could do with them. MekaMon is modular so you can add additional modules to create a new experience.

I’m still a bit bummed out that I wasn’t allowed to mess around with the robots that my friends had. Since I had a “curse” on me, I was able to “break” the robot and make it do funny things. In retrospect, I was able to find bugs in the programming and exploit them and make the operating system crash.

I had the biggest issue with voice recognition robots. When I was younger, most of those type of robots were unable to recognize my voice. Maybe I tried to pronounce it in a wrong way or maybe I didn’t use it in the right way.

Happy to see

You know, I’m quite happy to see things like this happening. One of the biggest reasons I’m quite a big fan of Nintendo is because they try to promote their consoles with different gimmicks. The Wii has motion controls, the 3DS has glassless 3D, the DS has two screens and so on and so forth.

White_WMM_StandardPackage_CUFront

As a game collector, I’m quite interested in various ways to experience a game. This is a unique way of playing games I haven’t seen a lot. A robot that you can take outside to play games with in real life, it’s Pokémon Go all over again.

I really hope something like this picks up steam. It might do something of the stereotype some people have about the gaming community. That we are all so-called shut-in people that do nothing besides looking at their screens all day. Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh on our community but sadly enough, I know people who really think that way about us.

Yet, ranting about that is a totally different article. I’m quite interested in seeing what kind of games you will be able to play using the MekaMon. The only thing I’m somewhat worried about is the fact that it’s controlled by your smartphone.

Now, hear me out about this. If they don’t pull this off right, hacked clients might pop up on the internet and may skew games with all those annoying consequences as an unwanted bonus.

But, I’m certain that things like this will be monitored when the robot is released and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are going to be methods in place to prevent things like this happening.

In any case, I’m going to follow the development of this robot. Since I would love to see the games you can play with it and see some demo videos of people actually playing a game with them.

If this article made you interested in the MekaMon, go to their website I linked at the top of this article. It’s a quite nice read and you don’t need to be very tech savvy to understand everything. I can’t wait to see where this is going and I wish the developers the best. And if this robot is released, I might even buy it, if my budget allows it that is.

But, you don’t have to wait. If you go to the official website of the robot, you can get in the pre-order queue and pre-order this robot for when it comes out! Here is the official website, if you didn’t want to go back to the top of the article.

So, that’s everything I wanted to talk about for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

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Sweet Witches

Swaps and Traps

Closing off

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