Editor's note: Due to a discrepancy between the version of the game used for review and the full release, the original Action Henk review contained some inaccuracies. It has been updated to reflect the game as released. - KV, 5/14/2015
I like to think of Action Henk as a retired action hero on the fast road to retaking the spotlight. A distended beer belly hanging far over his belt, Henk is a small action figure sporting a wide, yet determined grin separating an impressive set of 1980s sideburns. It's hard not to root for him as he slides down ramps and over obstacles at a relentless velocity. This side-scrolling, speed-running platformer has the rush of a classic Sonic the Hedgehog game, without any of the irritating sidekicks.
Henk sets off on his pint-sized adventure sprinting along plastic orange ramps--like the ones for toy cars--and wooden blocks, leaping and butt-sliding toward the goal line--oh yes, butt-sliding. Holding down a button causes Henk to fly (literally) on the seat of his pants. Sliding down inclines builds up speed, and a comet-like trail of flame jets off Henk's plastic-molded posterior. You burn through loops and bounce off walls while rushing past checkpoints as you complete the first group of levels, which exist entirely on the floor of a child's bedroom, complete with jumbled clothing drawers, posters, and scattered video game cartridges. But you don't stay stuck in the bedroom for long. Soon, Henk finds himself making tracks on a beach resort, and later swinging through a lush green jungle. Despite his appearance, Henk moves through each level at an energetic pace, all to the tune of a jumping soundtrack.
Henk could use a good tan.
Action Henk is a fast ride and pure speed-running bliss from start to goal. It feels like Sonic in his glory days. Though the kindly faced Henk doesn't quite parallel the blue blur's devil-may-care attitude, he nearly matches the blistering speed with his stride. Many levels last less than a minute, but as you make your way around the track, you notice other pathways and ramps just out of reach. They all lead you to the same point, and yet the promise of more even speed makes the desire to reach them all the more enticing. There are tricks that only experience can teach--for example, hopping just before a declining ramp increases the speed of your butt-slide, rewarding you with more air time than ever before. Soon those other areas become attainable, opening up steeper slides and more death-defying jumps--all of which amounts to gaining even more of that gratifying speed and fewer moments of slowdown.
Completing levels nets you medals of bronze, silver, or gold, which are collected to unlock new areas. The setup is similar to that of some mobile games that require a certain number of stars or other related items to unlock gates. But the rules here are not nearly as strict. New sections open up quickly, and unlocking the final section is possible only several of hours after starting. It does make sense: this is a game whose conceit is unrelenting speed, not throwing out road blocks. Because of this playability, I felt myself running through older courses again because I actually wanted to, just for the fun, and not out of any sort of obligation. It cuts down on a lot of the undue stress usually presented by games that make it difficult to unlock new missions. If you're having trouble with any of the levels, you can race against a bronze, silver, or gold ghost, who will show you the way.
Though the kindly faced Henk doesn't quite parallel the blue blur's devil-may-care attitude, he nearly matches the blistering speed with his stride.
There is still some stress involved. At the end of most sections, you face a tough boss challenge. These races can require a lot of patience and restarts as they test your speed-running skills. The final section missions, however, are the most difficult, and are capped off with a boss challenge that had me wearing down my restart key. Earning a gold medal in every level of a section unlocks a touch bonus mission to collect coins. The medal also unlocks the rainbow medal ghost, as well as the ghost for the top player of the level--both of which are the hardest challenges you can face. The game doesn't suffer much from technical issues; there is minor lag in some levels, but it doesn't stay noticeable for long.
Though reaching the final series of levels is possible in only a few hours, there is still a lot of extra content to experience and discover. Completing challenges such as boss battles unlocks new characters and skins--the Sonic costume for Henk with his belly bursting through the front is an easy favorite. Action Henk is a community-focused game, and includes tools to build and share your own custom level and download other users' levels from its Steam page. I tried a few of the higher rated tracks, many of which are great. Some send you through enough loops to make your head spin, while others are designed for pure speed. There is also an online racing mode, where you and a group of fellow speed-runners compete for the best time in a level. You are given a time limit and as many restarts as possible to secure the best time and a chance to bop the top runner off the first-place podium. There is one problem with multiplayer, however. Having a text chat box is great, as it gives you the opportunity to talk smack or get running advice form the pros. But because of its size and position on the dark background, it covers too much of the screen.
The disco levels are groovy!
Completing Action Henk will set you back around five hours or so, and you will be at the edge of your seat for most of that time. The speed is immensely satisfying, and earning those precious gold medals after replaying levels feels good. It's a heart-pumping adventure starring action figures and toy tracks, so give yourself a break and come play.
When I was growing up, I always found myself surrounded by kids who wanted to be James Bond. Being at that age where you start to recognize things as being cool right around the time The Living Daylights and License To Kill happened probably had a little to do with that, but, really, shooting bad guys, playing high stakes card games, quaffing martinis, beautiful women going in and out of the bedroom's revolving doors--all of this has a universal, immortal appeal.
While I'm not made of stone, and certainly know suave and seductive when I see it, I never wanted to be Bond. I wanted to be M. I wanted to be the guy who had been doing the dirt, and doing it well for so long that he got to order dudes like Bond around, moving conspirators, double agents, and sensitive information around the globe as if he were engaged in a game of chess. I always imagined being the guy to scream into a microphone, "You've got the files, now get the hell out of there."
For that reason alone, Invisible, Inc. now owns a tiny piece of my heart. It's a tactical, turn-based stealth espionage game where I am the eyes of God, looking down on the isometric, randomly generated playing field. There's infinite time to plot out my spies' every move and observe the guards' reactions before completing the mission, ordering the spies to make a beeline for an extraction point, and beaming them out. The game recalls XCOM in in the way a fallen spy succumbs to permanent death, and in its randomly generated levels; few stealth games are this slick, and even fewer are unwilling to sacrifice any opportunity for tension or raised stakes to make its hero look cooler. Here, the silent, invisible completion of the mission is all that matters, and the stakes are too high to waste time grandstanding.
The situation: It's the distant future, and after years of digging up serious dirt on the megacorporations of the new world, the titular spy agency is raided, forcing the chief, her two best agents, and Incognita--their all-encompassing JARVIS.-style AI--to go on the run. You start off with just the two agents, with a maximum of four active at a time (10 total are coming as downloadable content down the road), and your overall mission is to gather enough expendable resources to strike back at your enemies within 72 hours. This is the point where the portable version of Incognita loses power.
"I don't even see the mainframes anymore. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..."
Sadly, the telling of the story is reduced to well-written but sparse lip service after the fully-animated intro, but it's less of a problem once you realize how carefully considered your actions in every subsequent mission have to be. From your jet, you have to infiltrate various corporations around the globe. Sometimes it's to get new confidential info out of a corporate facility; sometimes you have to hack into an executive's mind and fend off his private security while waiting to download the goods; sometimes it's just to get your hands on some brand new spy toys. The thing is, virtually everything is a resource. Aside from the expected mechanics of a tactical role-playing game--moving around and carrying objects are governed by quantifiable stats (movement points and inventory space) you must wisely invest in--you also have a security level that rises steadily with every turn, and each trip around the wheel, an obstacle appears to make your life a little harder, be it new armored guards, or a security protocol that makes hacking a greater danger.
Until much later in the game, ambushing and knocking out a guard typically involves using electrical, non-lethal means which, because you're not operating out of an agency, have limited uses. Guns make things easier, but while guards and robot drones are always packing heat, ammo is a seriously rare commodity. There's a shot you can buy to Pulp Fiction a fallen agent back from the dead, and a very limited option to rewind a bad move (an option that becomes negligible at higher difficulties); otherwise, a dead agent is a dead agent. Occasionally, agents survive, and the enemy takes them hostage. You can potentially set out on rescue missions, which appear later in the game, but that involves hours you don't necessarily have, because jetsetting around the planet costs more time than you think, depending on the distance to your mission. If Incognita goes bye-bye, or if all your agents are dead, guess what? Game over. You're starting from the beginning.
Define "Worst case scenario."
The upshot is that this isn't so tricky a proposition, since a player comfortable with the relatively simple setup can blow through the game, good ending or bad, in about four to five hours. But this isn't a game like many role-playing games of its ilk where there are pawns to sacrifice for the sake of letting someone charge some special maneuver, or to absorb a bullet while other soldiers move around. If you move a spy around, you have to consider every possible outcome of both your move and the reactions of the guards around the facility, because being wrong will cost time and life. Taking your time and playing smarter, not harder, grants missions a pleasant clockwork precision, with every agent in the field working in tandem towards a common goal--and that goal is "attack" far less often than in a typical spy game.
The flaws are all in the execution. The facilities your agents infiltrate are busy enough, with movement grids, wireframe scans that Incognita can hack, and vision cones from all the cameras and guards in the vicinity. Add in the random industrial trash scattered around, and the never-quite-right camera angles, and there are times when the screen is just total chaos. Enemy AI is rather typical for a stealth game, where the same guard can range from implausibly obtuse (why didn't that guard open fire the second he saw me duck into a hiding spot instead of announcing to nobody, "I'm gonna investigate"?) to trigger-happy sharpshooters who can shoot the hair off your eyebrows from two rooms away in a matter of minutes. Like many stealth games, Invisible Inc.'s systems--several types of vision cones, night-vision goggles, and so forth--provide explanations for highly game-ish behaviors, but those behaviors don't necessarily adhere to the logic of human nature.
Trilbys are back in the future. The dark future.
The biggest problem is the simple fact that while the ticking clocks in and out of the actual espionage provide a nice anxious framework for the game, the story in between is a letdown. Missions are often interchangeable, with the same briefing used for multiple stages with the same objective across the board; the between-stage dialogue, while sharp, doesn't exactly tell the same escalating story as the gameplay.
Luckily, the gameplay sings, making for a game that's not as powerful as it could be, but undeniably accessible. The random levels contribute to the joy, meaning no experience is ever truly repeated, and each stage's relative brevity and array of objective types makes it rather light and breezy while still maintaining a measure of depth. It's not quite the patient MI6 power fantasy I had in mind as a kid, but it's close. It's a fine, unique, strategic experience that has occasional frustrating glimmers of the possibly of being something more. Then again, every great spy story is contingent on people not letting people know or care about "something more," isn't it?
It's election season. How will you campaign for mayor? Will you promise better schools? Guarantee that you'll fix all those potholes? Perhaps you'll run on the more straightforward assurance that you will "shoot criminals in the face"? That last one might not be the most humane of political platforms, but it makes for an entertaining 2D action game.
In Not a Hero, you are a hired gun for a politician named Bunnylord, an anthropomorphic purple rabbit who has come from the future to, presumably, save the world. He is convinced that to prevent the disastrous future he has seen, he needs to be elected as mayor by the end of the month.
In theory, this would make you, his employee, a hero. But true to the title of the game, you do a lot of things that aren't very heroic. Sure, you might take down a drug lord and save some hostages, but along the way, you murder a lot of people. Bunnylord himself isn't a big believer of things like court trials. He has open disdain for religious people, hates children, and throws around a word that disrespects the mentally handicapped. It's odd to think that he's supposedly on a mission to save the world, considering that he doesn't seem like a very nice man (or rabbit ... whatever).
The violence in Not a Hero might be disturbing if it weren't for the absurdity wrapped around it.
To help Bunnylord get elected, you mostly shoot people and blow things up. Even mundane tasks like putting up campaign posters or collecting wind chimes (which is very important for, well, reasons) involve leaving a trail of bodies, most of which die in a comically over-the-top fashion.
For the most part, you can run left and right, slide and shoot. Not a Hero's shooting is "cover based," but you don't actually need to be behind any cover--just kind of near it. Hitting the cover button often makes you just sort of hug the wall, shrouding you in shadow for protection and, if you haven't been spotted by nearby enemies, keeping you out of sight. Hitting the fire button while in cover pops you out long enough to take a shot, and you're relatively safe unless an enemy gets close enough to punch you.
The moment-to-moment action, including running, shooting, sliding into cover, and shooting some more is great … most of the time. Occasional hiccups occur when the game forces you to aim right when you're trying to aim left. Or you might try to take cover where you are, but, because the "cover" button is the same as the "slide" button, you suddenly find yourself sliding right towards the barrel of a criminal's shotgun. When you start the game, the temptation is to run in guns blazing, Contra style. But until you get a good grasp of Not a Hero's quirks, it can be better to take it slow.
Cool guys run away from explosions.
Your health regenerates, but you can go down quickly in a hailstorm of bullets. Sometimes the better course of action is to be methodical, watching and listening for cues telling you that an enemy's clip is empty before you pop out of cover. It's also smart to use the game's executions--brutal kills you can perform on a stunned enemy after sliding into them.
Beyond those basics, each of the game's nine characters have different traits that affect how you control them. For example, when playing as most of the characters, you have to be very careful when you choose to reload because you can't move or cancel out of the reload animation once it starts. One character can move while reloading, however, while another can shoot to cancel the reload. One character is very fast but has very little ammo, while another has lots of ammo but moves slowly. My personal favorite character, Clive, can run fast while shooting two guns straight in front, like he jumped straight out of a John Woo movie.
The violence in Not a Hero might be disturbing if it weren't for the absurdity wrapped around it. Bunnylord might order you to shoot someone in the face, but he also brags about how he's reduced the city's amount of "illegal dry-humping." One problem with the game's humor, though, is that it tends to try too hard. Every mission begins with a lengthy briefing and ends with a debriefing, each of which are primarily vehicles in which the writers cram as many attempts as humor as possible. Every line reads as an attempt to elicit a laugh, but most are only good enough for a chuckle at best--especially since you never get a break from the insanity. Before long, I wanted to skip all the dialogue (which, thankfully, is an option) rather than sit through a lot of dumb jokes.
Every line reads as an attempt to elicit a laugh, but most are only good enough for a chuckle at best.
It's to the gameplay's credit that I usually wanted to get through the story beats quickly and jump into the next mission. Each of the game's 21 levels (24 if you count a few secret ones) are short and relatively straightforward--kill enemies, maybe collect a few things, find the exit--but each stage's layout is well-designed, often offering a few different paths to the goal (maybe, for example, you crash through a window instead of entering a room from the door on the opposite side). A few different enemy types also help mix things up because several of the bad guys you come across are immune to certain attacks, like slide tackles. Occasionally, the longer levels in the game can be frustrating thanks to enemies that have a tendency to kill you in one hit (forcing you to go back to the beginning), but their size and complexity is still welcome.
The plain "kill all enemies" mission structure is also broken up with extra challenges to complete in each level, such as ... well, "kill all enemies." Other than that, you might be asked to find a hidden item, defeat a certain number of enemies without getting hit, or complete a level without using a certain number of bullets. You can reach the game's credits without completing any of these objectives, but they usually add challenge and variety to what might otherwise be a bland mission.
If you don't try to complete all these challenges, you can easily blast your way through Not a Hero in a handful of hours, unlocking most or all of the characters along the way. You can extend your time in the game by completing levels with all the different characters, but the game doesn't do a good job of incentivizing you to do so. Still, there's a lot of fun to be had in this explosive quest for political domination. Not a Hero's humor may not always hit the mark, but the action makes up for it.
Cowled craziness. That's on tap with Magicka: Wizard Wars, a free-to-play multiplayer take on the action-first franchise that features those iconic wizards who have always reminded me of Star Wars' Jawas--only fancier. Despite this frenzied focus, much of the appeal of the core series has been maintained, due to the continued emphasis on slick player skill over gimmicks, and a genial, if bloody, sense of humor. There are a few rough edges here, however, thanks to some design miscues, a slightly buggy client, and a level grind that kicks in long before you get bored with incinerating enemy Gandalfs. Yet even with these issues, the game's pace and light-hearted take on everything (how could I stay mad at a game that uses a corny Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator to call the action?) keep you coming back for more, even while the flaws try to nudge you away.
Basic gameplay breaks standard Magicka down to online battle arenas where mages duel to the death. The general feel is similar to the earlier games in the franchise, albeit without any single-player campaign or any sort of cooperative multiplayer. Here, you create one of the franchise's trademark spunky magic users at the start of play and then head into one-off battle arenas. Over time, your spell-slinger develops by gaining experience points, leveling up, and acquiring gear and special magical attacks that let you become a more efficient mystical killing machine. Two forms of currency are used in the game. Mastery tokens earned with every level up allow you to purchase special gear, spells, outfits, and the like, while crowns awarded at the end of every match can be used in the in-game store to buy similar weapons, magic rings, and so forth. Real money can be used to buy gear directly and load up on both tokens and crowns, in case you want to cut some corners.
Getting killed is a common occurrence, especially when some smart guy whips out a meteor shower.
The game deals with primary magical talents that are performed by pressing the Q-W-E-R and A-S-D-F keys. Each one represents a particular arcane skill--fire, healing, death magic, lightning, and beyond--all of which can be called up via a quick key-press or three and then put into play through a click of the mouse. Those special magicks are one-off spells that are slotted in the 1-4 keys for occasional use. They are best when you need to go nuclear on enemies by using the likes of a meteor shower that covers the battlefield, a thunderstorm that calls up devastating lightning, or something a little more subtle, like haste (to run away) or midsummer's blessing (to heal everyone simultaneously).
None of this is easy. While you can lean on simple presses, and you can of course deploy the big-gun magicks as needed, key combos are required for the best spells and the best blocks. So, hello there, steep learning curve and a whole lot of experimentation (although the game thankfully gives you tips for fending off specific attacks every time you're killed). It took a long time for me to even start to become comfortable with the controls, and I was still routinely schooled by opponents the entire time I played.
I was never smacked around so hard that I became overly frustrated, though. Whether I was toasted by flames, blown up by a meteor strike, or even perforated by an enemy imp familiar when I wasn't paying enough attention, I was able to laugh it off and dive right back in for more. Speed is the primary element staving off annoyance. It's tough to stay mad for long when you're respawning in seconds. The tactical layer of the game is another successful factor, too. A huge importance is placed on spell defenses, so I looked at the game as something of a strategic puzzle, and constantly went into new matches to test new possibilities.
The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology.
But while the core structure of Magicka: Wizard Wars works well due to its reliance on strong core mechanics, there isn't a lot of depth here. There are just three modes of play, and the only one worth playing is Wizard Warfare. This is a pick-up-and-play mode, with simple rules that see two teams of four duking it out over stone circles that serve as control and spawn points. It moves quickly, due to small maps and teleportation rings that let the teams get into each other's hood-hidden faces. I found that the zippy speed kept things likeably nuts and even helped emphasize teamwork, as the team must stick close together, help heal one another, and assault control points as a unit in order to survive.
Soul Harvest is the other headline mode of play, but it plays much slower and as a result isn't nearly as exciting. It features a more involved structure that has you slaughter monsters for souls in kind of a battle of attrition, with the final goal of demolishing the enemy home-base effigy. None of this jibes with the game's strengths as a battle royal at warp speed. Teams patrol the map, kill wimpy respawning monsters over and over, and attempt to avoid one another. Duel is even flimsier, albeit for the opposite reasons. It is fast, with cramped battlefields that allow no leeway. There doesn't seem to be room here for much more than toe-to-toe magical slugfests.
All three modes of play are made more entertaining by colorful visuals and bombastic sound. This isn't a game to take seriously, even with wizards regularly exploding into bloody chunks. The color palette is almost unrelentingly bright, with mages apparently costumed by Crayola, and spells going off like huge displays of the very best in modern fireworks technology. Sound is also compellingly boomy and whooshy, and the aforementioned Schwarzenegger soundalike is hilariously understated. I never got tired of hearing him tell my team that a spawn point had been stolen by the enemy and that I needed to "steal it baaack!"
Hey, what are you trying to push on us?
The free-to-play structure causes problems, however. Both the mastery tokens and crowns are slow to accumulate and the prices for items are through the roof. The 25 tokens you might earn per level don't go very far when the average mastery upgrade costs 50 or more. Making matters even worse, all mastery gear is nested in locked trees that force you to buy three or four items you don't want, just to get one that you do. The same goes for the store: the average match brings in only a few hundred crowns, while even the lamest gear has a price tag of at least 5,000 or 10,000. After the first five or six levels, the game feels like a grind.
The temptation, of course, is to spend real money on upgrades such as the heavily promoted experience boosters and wizard starting packs (which seem reasonably priced, as far as these things go). But with that said, you can't buy your way to success. Although picking up some extra goodies with cash can put you over the top, the game is all about player skill and speed. No matter how cool a robe you have, no matter how powerful your magic items and special spells, you can still be killed by a rival player with basic gear and faster fingers. So there really is a balance here, even with the grind providing ongoing temptation to whip out your credit card.
More options need to be provided. I really wanted the ability to trick out Wizard Warfare matches. Just being able to play best two out of three would have helped keep the momentum flowing, as the one-off games that generally last just four or five minutes are the only ones currently available. I spent way too much time on the matchmaking screen, waiting for the same four or five minutes on average (much longer later at night) to get a game. I'm not sure if these waits mean that there aren't very many players online or if this is some shortcoming of the software. Regardless, I spent about as much time waiting for matches to be made than I did actually battling mages.
Working as a team is essential, especially in Wizard Warfare.
Another shortcoming is the inability to boot players. Although I didn't have a ton of trouble with griefers, I did encounter at least a few idiots who just ran around maps killing anyone and everyone indiscriminately and still clocking high scores. There needs to be a way to kick these people out, or at least to stop rewarding them for killing allies.
On occasion, bugs interfere with setting up matches. I encountered frame-rate glitches, stutters in the main menus, and the odd crash to the desktop. I also encountered a "Code Marlin" error that made it impossible to start a game. Whenever this would occur, the game would refuse to register that there was a full complement of eight players logged in, even though everyone was apparently ready to go on the starting screen. Since this error seemed to take place in bunches, this got frustrating real fast, as it would block matches from starting for 10-minute stretches.
As entertaining as Magicka: Wizard Wars can be, the game has yet to achieve greatness. The quick-paced and skill-driven combat system casts a charm on you in the beginning, but the delights wear off over time due to the presence of only a single good mode of play, grinding, and a few irritating bugs. The game's heart beats strongly, strengthened by great control mechanics and colorful warfare. But Wizard Wars needs work if it is going to realize its full potential.
At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to Sid Meier's Pirates! reveal themselves to be a masquerade--yet it still finds more time for the yawns, for good measure.
Windward presents itself as a "chart your own adventure" high-seas simulator promising great ocean expanses, complex economic trading, diplomatic engagement, and high-octane sea battles for whoever wishes to find their inner Magellan or Admiral Horatio Nelson. You sail your ship (and the small fleet you gather at the beginning of the game) around procedurally generated seas trading goods, hunting pirates, laying siege to cities, and building diplomatic relationships with towns and opposing alliances. But every mode features the depth of a freshman-level philosophy course, and if you want to engage in any of the non-combat options the game offers, you must deal with rote, padding-fueled combat for extended stretches.
The see is deep; Windward is not.
For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out. The best way (honestly, it's the only reliable way) to gain money in Windward is through trading. You enter a town (through a bland menu) and either buy goods the residents have too much of or sell them goods they are short on. That's it. It never becomes more complicated than that. The aggravating, time-consuming portion of the system is that for the first few hours of the game, you're stuck with ships with a two-slot cargo hold, which means you can only sell two trade goods at a time. So you're forced to waste time sailing around these large-ish maps unloading your cargo rather than taking care of a significant amount of business at once.
To further that aggravation, the questing/diplomacy systems--which feed into experience you get to make your ship better (read: survivable)--also take up space in your cargo hold. So, if you're ferrying passengers for a quest, you can only carry one trade good. That creates an interesting incentive to make sure you're maximizing your time, but it mostly creates an incentive to never quest (and therefore rarely engage in direct relationship-building services) because it never pays half as well as the more rote side of trading.
For a game that features an entire faction dedicated to trading, Windward's economy system is both comically simple and overly drawn out.
But, wait! Exploration! I love exploration! I will spend hours just walking around The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and not fighting anyone (if I can help it), or questing, or doing anything because I just want to take in the gorgeously realized environments. I will happily get lost in a part of Brooklyn I have never visited before because I will be overcome by the stunning Victorian houses, the trees that seem to be more than just streetside window dressing, and the innumerable churches that are genuine architectural wonders. Exploration in Windward never achieves a fraction of that pleasure, because exploration is fun and intoxicating only when you're presented with a space worth exploring. Gone Home is literally a walk through your house, but every nook and cranny of the Greenbriar abode offers a glimpse into the lives of that family. Eidolon drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.
Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of "will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.
Menus: Windward's most exciting facet.
That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they'll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn't give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don't engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.
The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.
Color Guardians is a beautiful headache. The idea is simple enough: you're a colorful mascot, running mostly from left to right and dodging back and forth along three lanes to avoid upcoming hazards while you collect glowing orbs to boost your score. The experience could have been delightful, but instead wavers between monotonous and infuriating.
As the game begins, most of the color is sucked out of a magical world and replaced with darkness. You, a red guardian, and your two friends--blue and yellow--are the only ones who possess the ability to restore the vibrant hues that otherwise will be gone forever. The setup is reminiscent of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse or de Blob, only this game is populated by generic characters you've never seen before and probably won't care much about now.
And for every failure, a two-star flag to remind you.
If making everything right only required you to gather the orbs strewn about the three lanes, Color Guardians wouldn't offer much to challenge you, even with the addition of the environmental hazards. However, as a guardian you possess the ability to change between the three primary tones, and must utilize that gift in order to make real headway. If you pass over orbs while appropriately colored, you gain rewards. You do better still if you press one of three buttons as you find yourself in position. This is a neat idea on paper but tedious in practice. Imagine if your score in an old Sonic or Mario game were dependent on your willingness to press a button each time you passed over a ring or coin.
Earning the best possible ranking in a stage is difficult, since you must manage a nearly perfect run to do it. A two-star rank is essentially the default. If you mess up badly enough that you're in line for a lesser accolade, you seldom survive the effort, at least during the first half of the game. After that, it sometimes seems the only way you ever reach a goal is by the skin of your teeth. Fortunately, you can resume as often as you like from a checkpoint, once you pass one. The downside is that these are in rather short supply as the game wears on, and thus you have to retread a lot of hostile ground.
Early on, the challenge isn't severe, but that changes with the introduction of new mechanics. You eventually find oversized parasols that you collect automatically as you pass over them, and these carry you into the air for a while, after which you can either descend slowly or discard them to initiate a quick dive. Elsewhere, your path is blocked by color-coded barriers that recede only when you approach them with the proper hue applied. There are mushrooms and giant fans that allow you to quickly gain elevation, but your color must match theirs, or they're useless.
Bringing the color back, one kingdom at a time.
None of that may sound especially taxing, but it comes together in some truly exasperating ways. The developer did a commendable job of taking full advantage of each new gameplay wrinkle. Less admirably, it produced a lot of seemingly simple scenarios where you must do the opposite of what feels natural or face the consequences. Because of the particular button layout, it's easy to associate each color with a particular lane, but any color can require your interaction at any time, often in a rapid-fire sequence and with all manner of distractions. This dynamic is of course exploited frequently. Likewise, the game eventually trains you to switch hues so that you can gather trinkets and spring triumphantly from color-coded mushrooms. You then tackle a level that forces you to do precisely the opposite, lest you launch into inky spirits flying overhead. In the third world and elsewhere thereafter, you ride in mine carts that only switch lanes if you press a button corresponding to the desired lane. Such areas force your brain to adjust yet again, especially when segments of track are interrupted by ledges for a brief time. The net effect of the game's design is that you spend your time racing through one level after another, failing frequently until you memorize every danger that lies between one checkpoint and the next. Each stumble is punishment for your lack of a crystal ball that might allow you to divine what obstacle comes next. Successes don't feel like proof of skill; they merely attest to your ability to memorize another sequence.
The irksome platforming is exacerbated by a number of related issues. You frequently find yourself floating over wide gaps, forced to land briefly on small islands and launch from pads. Sometimes, you must drop your parasol and quickly switch colors and spring into the air again before changing to another lane. Then, as you tumble into an abyss, you realize that you actually needed to switch two lanes at once, which wasn't immediately apparent. An on-screen indicator lets you know where you will land, but it's mostly only useful to explain your mysterious death so that you can do things differently the next time around. Another problem is that sometimes the game hangs for a split-second without warning, which murders your timing, or indicators pop up as you pass score thresholds and ruin your concentration.
Whatever its other issues are, Color Guardians at least nails its presentation. Its visual design in particular is quite appealing. Regions start out draped in shadow, but everything comes to vibrant life as paint washes over it. There's lots of activity most of the time, as well, from floating spirits to mischievous goblins and dancing light and shadows. The music and sound effects set the stage nicely, being both mystical and energetic in just the right proportion.
Expect to see a lot of this guy.
If you find yourself enjoying the game despite its excessively punishing design, or perhaps even because of it, there's good news: the five worlds possess around ten stages apiece, along with boss encounters (though each of these offers increasingly challenging variations on a theme, rather than wholly distinct confrontations). When you defeat the recurring baddie at the end of an area, you can backtrack and search for hidden sprites and unlock additional stages, or just revisit your familiar stomping grounds in search of better scores. Leaderboards let you know how you rank compared to other players, which should be a nice incentive once the game has been in the wild long enough.
Color Guardians features a concept that's still new enough to feel fresh, and makes the most of it. All too often, though, the stages are designed in such a way that you're tricked into failing, and any technical issues stand out more than they might elsewhere because precise timing and concentration are so vital to success. You can always rebound after failure, but sometimes it's difficult to muster the energy to do so when part of you knows there's bound to be another trick of some sort waiting just a few screens away. It's all very pretty, sure. It's just not worth it.
We love playing David to countless video game Goliaths. Bosses are, more often than not, larger than the game heroes who defeat them. In Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains, you're never short of giants to vanquish as you reenact scenes from the anime and manga from which the game was adapted. If there are thrills to be found, they come from swinging through a map using the maneuver gear. Using this mobility against the titans can provide a rush as you amass your first dozen kills, but don't expect this excitement to last. Humanity in Chains is a surprisingly soulless affair, a reminder that sometimes it takes a game packed with titans to make us appreciate refined adventures with fewer behemoths.
Much of the best anime is set in worlds you wish you could visit, such as the early 1980s interpretation of metropolitan Japan in Urusei Yatsura, or the sprawling vision of Earth in Dragon Ball. As good as the original material is, its setting is an utterly miserable world. One hundred years of peace have just been shattered by the return of remorseless giants who only want to eat humans. What are you to do but try to defend yourself, especially if you're a revenge-hungry teen who watched helplessly as your mom became a snack? The titans' perpetually maniacal faces only add insult to one's presumable fate to become a decapitated morsel. For once, we have an anime in which teenage whining, scolding, and anxiety-driven introspection is justified, even if all this motivational talk, pointless or otherwise, comprises one-third of the anime's content.
Bless you.
Humanity in Chains spares you these moments of angst while framing story missions with many of the show's most memorable scenes. If this game is partly designed to attract Attack on Titan virgins to watch the show, these brief videos are its most effective selling tools. The game is punctuated by the two opening themes and credits. If anything convinces you that you're about to experience the playable version of a well-received anime, it is the rehashing of a catchy and memorable title sequence. I haven't watched Attack on Titan since it appeared on Netflix over a year ago, so reacquainting myself with the resoundingly Germanic choral chanting was exciting, if only for a few minutes. The only thing missing is a Netflix streaming voucher to watch the show on the 3DS.
Attack on Titan inadvertently poses a question that could have been asked decades ago: What if Spider-Man had a penchant for bladed melee weapons and his arms were freed from web-slinging? Add the mutant-hunting sentinels and you essentially have the gameplay premise for Humanity in Chains. Much like Spider-Man, you don't question how your gear manages to find an attachment point every time; you just run with it because there are more pressing matters, like a city filled with invading titans. You spend most of your time swinging from point to point because moving on foot is impractical and, more importantly, is the easiest way to get yourself killed.
Saving teammates, AI or otherwise, isn't as gratifying as it sounds.
The point of all this maneuverability is to position yourself to attack the titans' napes, their main weak spot. Thanks to a lock-on function, this is a peculiarly simple task, provided you make an effort to avoid approaching titans from the front. Once you've initiated the attack, the only challenge lies in lining up a timing ring within a larger ring; pulling that off results in a hit. This challenge, unfortunately, makes up the bulk of your goals in Humanity in Chains, so it's normal to feel bored after about an hour of play. Aside from an optional spin attack and the ability to hinder a titan's mobility, there's no depth or nuance to combat. You're either aiming to deal a lethal blow to the titan or you're making a brief retreat in order to regroup. We've come to expect third-person adventures chocked full of objectives in a given sortie, which can take anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes to complete. There are missions in Humanity in Chains that take 30 seconds to clear. And when you're not killing titans, your tasks are more menial jobs, like performing CPR on fallen comrades or collecting food. The art department didn't even design the food; you just have to find gleaming blue dots on the ground.
Not wanting to stick solely to the anime's script, developer Spike Chunsoft added world mode, a feature that lets you grow and customize your own squad of titan killers and team up in multiplayer. It's a well-intentioned mode that is meant to add replay value and an RPG-inspired sense of character ownership by starting you off with baseline stats. The world mode menu screen overlooks a base with multiple facilities, giving you the impression that there are a lot of activities there with which to eat up an afternoon. It is true that you can upgrade squadmates' abilities and craft weapons in world mode, but incentives to apply these enhancements in the field are sorely lacking. Not only are you stuck with the same types of titan takedown missions found in story mode, but now you're greatly underpowered. The chances of getting grabbed by a titan are much greater, as is the unlikelihood of freeing yourself from its grasp. Learning the ropes and learning from defeat would be engaging if not for that fact that world mode doesn't unlock until you've beaten seven story missions. By then, you've been spoiled by controlling top-tier titan-killer talent, ruining any motivation to start over again as an entry-level grunt. It's a case of foreplay deferred after a game has already spoiled its best moves.
Attack on Titan, purveyor of dadbods.
Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is further proof that the seemingly obvious genre for an anime-to-game adaptation isn't always the best one. Take the Ghost In The Shell games as another example. As enjoyable as it was to play as Motoko Kusanagi in third-person adventure Stand Alone Complex, it was an even better experience playing as the Tachikoma spider-tank in the original PlayStation game. The disappointment of poor mission variety in Humanity in Chains is compounded by the brevity of each assignment. And while world mode had the potential to show the franchise's appeal beyond the main story, its team customization allure is severely hobbled by the same shallow combat in story mode.
Between the can't-look-away morbidity of being eaten and watching the ensemble cast persevere, there's no denying the draw of Attack on Titan and the potential for a superb game adaptation. Humanity in Chains just isn't that game. Given the squads of soldiers, the seemingly limitless influx of titans, and one's mobility options, there is surely hope for an excellent game set in this universe in the far-flung future.
A good 4X strategy game is a bit like a slow-burning fire--something to be stoked every now and again with a click of the mouse and watched through half-lidded eyes into the late hours. When that contented sort of complacency sets in, I'm more easily coaxed into "just one more turn." These empire-building games make it easier still because they tend to defer the consequences of poor moves. Mistakes amount to small hang-ups in the otherwise effortless forward momentum of upgrades and technological developments, lost in the spaces between ascending data points on one of the genre's ubiquitous end-of-game line graphs. It's only when I come out of my daze a few scaled eras later that I often find myself long surpassed by opposing empires, the graphs telling a story of steady mediocrity since, oh, sometime in the Middle Ages when production took a brief turn towards the slightly sub-optimal.
The thing is, 4X games don't have much patience for an also-ran. They're "games" in the same way that the game of thrones is a game: you win or you die, and the middle ground is really just another burial tract. And if the same goes for the crowded, largely homogenous genre they belong to, where does that leave an entry like StarDrive 2? For the most part, the game seems to be a proper execution of its developer's vision; it's worked its way up its chosen tech trees, so to speak, arriving as a sci-fi empire builder in the grand tradition. And yet, when it's time to take stock, StarDrive 2 finds itself firmly in the middle.
Planets are key to out-producing the enemy, but they can be arduous to develop and defend.
But 4X games always begin full of promise, at least. StarDrive 2 offers the selection of a space-faring race--always a good time, unless you pick Human--and, if you want, a complete overhauling of its prepackaged traits. The system, like many others in the game, is cribbed directly from Master of Orion, but it remains rousing and balanced. "Peerless Starfighters" might sound like a must-have bonus, but can you stomach the "Repulsive" or "Corrupt" negative trait you'll have to equip to zero out the ledgers? And then there are the races themselves: an eclectic bunch that includes Cthulhu-likes, an ursine shogunate, and a narcissistic collection of pods that speak through the hijacked brains of alien owls.
As if to further signal that you're not supposed to take the ensuing intragalactic war too seriously, there's a color commentary robot that periodically interjects to introduce the competing races in a segment called--wait for it--"racial profiling." And as if to signal that this is a terrible idea for a feature, there's also an option to turn it off. But whether you listen to the introductions or not, it behooves you to immediately start spreading out across the star map from whatever randomized homeworld you've been deposited on. Exploratory fleets can be sent across the universe with a click, revealing new planets of varying hospitality to colonize. The best ones go quick--opposing empires in StarDrive 2 gobble up territory, and they're not shy about claim jumping either.
Opposing empires take their borders to your doorstep if you're not quick.
These enemies can be held off for a time via diplomacy. Technological advancements are divided into mutually exclusive sets of three and are often differentiated by whether they provide an immediate benefit or one that scales better over a longer period of time. Researching one cordons off the other two, so the best way to snag them is through trade. That, in turn, plays out via a now-overly familiar interface, wherein resources and policies are given a unifying currency and exchanged between two empires at something resembling a fair rate. There's also a limiting "tolerance" meter that hints at a xenophobic civilian population weighing the deal behind the scenes. Combined with a capricious AI and the utilitarian feel of the diplomacy system at large, the meter mostly just contributes to StarDrive 2's gravitational pull towards war.
If the end justifies the means--and the end involves every race that isn't you being purged from the galaxy--nothing is ever really beyond the pale, is it? The enslavement and bombardment of civilian populations, consequently, are perfectly tenable according to StarDrive 2's rules of engagement (albeit partially lampshaded by the cartoonish aliens and abstractions of the game's model). The infrastructure of a colonized planet is indicated with a list of the buildings it's added, and its farming, manufacturing, and scientific output are represented. As an example, these outputs are represented for the Kulrathi Shogunate by bears holding pitchforks, pickaxes, and beakers, respectively.
The ship design interface is deep but easy to grasp.
To protect them, you kit out a starfleet or two. Here, StarDrive really feels like it's found its wheelhouse. All ships have a single frame housing a few different pre-existing equipment packages, but they're used more effectively when you customize their payloads yourself. The ship editor uses a lo-fi but intuitive version of EVE Online's similar interface, where armor plating, power generation, weapons, and cockpits all take up a certain amount of tiles on a planar overlay atop the ship's frame. A bigger missile launcher is surely more effective, but it'll take up valuable tiles that you might need to use for thrusters or point defenses.
If any system isn't being adequately accounted for, you find out quickly when StarDrive 2's ship-to-ship combat plays itself out. When two fleets collide on the star map, they're set down across from each other on a new screen, where they trade maneuvers and lasers semi-autonomously. A pleasant feedback loop plays so you can see how the battles resolve themselves, note deficiencies in your lineup, and run back to the hangar to draw up a suitable counter to the tech your enemy is fielding.
It isn't all quite as tidy as opposing empires trading volleys across their borders. StarDrive 2 introduces a refreshing amount of entropy to the system via third-party raids, discoverable anomalies, derelict ships, and mission pop-ups that can throw a wrench into your previous priorities. But these instances frequently mean that you need to engage in ground combat, a half-baked, grid-based affair that sees two squads march up to each other and wail away until one drops.
"Prideful" nations are a particular pain during diplomacy.
You can give ground units tools and abilities, too, but they don't fundamentally alter the static nature of the combat--if you need to wait 20 turns for an ability to recharge and the enemy hasn't spotted you, you might as well press "next turn" 20 times until it refreshes. This is silly, because StarDrive 2 has no pressing need to render ground combat. There's enough of a draw in the larger scale, ship-based combat and exploration as well as the thrill loot-seeker get from discovering a planet with a unique resource and scrambling to claim it first.
But even though these systems achieve competency, they've been done before (and done better) in many other games. So any praise leveled at StarDrive 2 inevitably ends up faint when it's taken alongside other entries in the sci-fi 4X genre. Is that a flaw of a navel-gazing piece of genre fare or of our own tendency to internalize lessons from an empire builder--that there can only be one winner and that existing for the sake of existing isn't enough?
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