Sanctum 2 Review

       You know you're about to review a good game when you get ready to start writing and instead you just start playing the game for a half hour. That's what just happened to me when I fired up Sanctum 2 to let it run in case I needed to reference it during the writing of this review.

       Sanctum 2 is an FPS tower-defense game. It's a pretty even match of both genres. In each level, you construct, upgrade, and configure an array of towers. Then, you face a wave of enemies. You whip out a gun and run around shooting enemies. Between the towers and your own firepower, you must defend a giant sphere called a core in the level. If your core survives the wave, you get more resources to build and upgrade your towers, and then you face the next wave. If you die, you re-spawn. You only lose if your core gets taken out.

       Sanctum 2's story is told in a really ingenious way. You are given no back story at all. You are thrown right into the thick of the action and you'll have to catch up with what is going on as you go. The story is told through beautiful comic book style panels that appear between levels. The story is ingenious because you basically pick it up through context and reading conversations in the comics. You aren't directly told anything, but you soon get a grasp on the basic situation, and by the end, you feel like you really know the characters and the story just as well as if it had been to to you explicitly. I haven't really seen a game pull this kind of story off in this way before. It really adds to the drama of the action to not know exactly what is going on at first. You feel like you are being dragged along for the wild ride; sort of like a movie that starts in the middle of an action scene and explains the situation later. Unfortunately exactly what happens at the end is a little unclear (although it is clearly really cool), but up until that point the story and its method of delivery is just great. Now, given what I just told you, I obviously can't tell you anything about the story.

       So, when you fire up Sanctum 2 and load up a level, you must first choose a character. There are four to choose from. Each character is defined by their main weapon, which no one else can use, and a few unique abilities. Without getting into the nitty gritty details, there is Skye, who has an assault rifle and can double jump. Then there's Sweet, who has a rocket launcher and has better maneuverability while jumping. SiMO is a robot with a sniper rifle who does extra damage if he hits enemies in their weak spot, and Haigen has a shotgun and does more damage if he is close to the enemy. Once you pick a character, you pick a secondary weapon for them. Then you pick what towers you want to take into the level with you, and then you take perks for the character. So there are a lot of choices to make to trick out how you want to play. You gain experience for playing, and when you level up, you unlock new secondary weapons, towers, perks, and tower and perk slots that let you take more of those things with you into battle. There are quite a few weapons and towers to earn, and many perks, and taking different stuff drastically changes your performance in the level. I found a few favorite perks and stuck with them (such as the one that heals the core after each round), and rotated my other perks based on what was needed for the level and character (there is one that make you re-spawn instantly instead of having to wait 10 seconds, one that damages all enemies around you, one that makes enemies explode when they die, and many others). I found tower combinations that I liked to use early on, but was able to experiment enough that I would change my line up from time to time. I tried to rotate which characters I used. My most used was Haigen, whose shotgun, which can charge up and fire extremely strong blasts, is devastating and extremely useful, but I also had a good run sniping enemies as SiMO for a few levels. And while I was less successful playing as Skye and Sweet, I still used them for a couple of levels and enjoyed playing as them a lot. Helping you pick your favorites in all these categories are numbers that pop out of enemies when you damage them, RPG style. I love this. Just like in Soldner-X, this addition really adds a lot to the gameplay and feel. It's like it's asking you to experiment and try new things.

       Once you are in the level, you select a tower to build with the d-pad. You then aim the reticle where you want to build using classic FPS controls; left stick to move the character, right stick to aim the cross hair. The level is divided into a grid with each tower taking up a square. You hold R2 for a second to build the tower. R1 recycles it, giving you back the resources you used up to build it. This lets you change up your build between rounds and experiment. Holding R2 while aiming at a tower allows you to upgrade it. You start with a general cannon tower, but soon start to earn more exotic ones, such as a gatling gun, a mine dispenser, and a tower that boosts other towers' attack power (plus there are 8 others, but I don't want to spoil them!). Besides these offensive towers, you also have tower bases, which act as blockades. Usually you have enough of these that you can build a maze that the enemies have to run through in order to get to the core. You can never close off a section of the maze completely; there must always be a way for the enemies to get through, but besides that rule your imagination is the limit. Designing these mazes is really fun, and the controls make it easy to do quickly. Two tools aid you in the design process. The first is the mini-map on the side of the screen, which can be blown up to nearly full screen size instantly by holding R1. The other is a line that flies through the air at regular intervals showing you the route the enemies will take to get to the core. This line updates in real-time as you build and is visible both in the level and on the mini-map. Building towers in the first person view might sound a bit cumbersome, but it actually works really smoothly. And the design part of it is really deep. You'll get some great “Aha!” moments as you design mazes that double back on themselves to let a tower get a second crack at the enemy, or create a shape that routes multiple enemy forces through the same kill zone of towers. The line that shows you the enemy route is an ingenious idea.

       You start the round when you are ready by pressing select, although some rounds start automatically after a timer ticks down, which puts the pressure on you to build quickly. The shooting controls are pretty standard. R2 is fire and R1 is alternate fire. All weapons have really cool alternate fire modes. For example, the shotgun's alternate mode charges up its power, the rocket launcher locks on to enemies if you hold alt fire, and the SMG secondary weapon shoots poison darts! L2 is the aim button, which slows your movement to a crawl but zooms in down the sights of your weapon allowing for better accuracy. Square is reload, X is jump, triangle is switch weapon, and clicking R3 makes you run. Some enemy types like to attack you if they get the chance while others will totally ignore you and make a bee-line for the core. Sanctum 2 really feels different in the shooting department because your weapons don't have all that many shots in their magazines. Ammo is unlimited, but you'll have to reload a lot, and you only have 2 weapons. Reloading is a little lengthier affair than in most games, but your guns can reload themselves while you are firing your other gun (I think this is because they are all energy weapons and are technically cooling down, not reloading). The only way to continually lay down fire is to constantly switch between your two weapons. You must always be sure to empty your clip to cause an automatic reload or to press the reload button before switching weapons. Otherwise you will be switching over to a weapon with only a few shots left and be stranded without the ability to shoot for a few precious seconds. This forces you to play really well and always manage your weapons correctly and to make sure your tower design is tight, as you can't rely on being able to save the day totally on your own.

       And that's the real beauty of Sanctum 2. It is balanced to a T. You need to personally play well and shoot straight, but you also need to design a clever maze and set up your towers in just the right configurations. If you fail at either, you probably won't be able to defend your core through enough rounds to clear the level. It truly is tower defense and first-person shooting at the same time. Both are equally important. The difficulty is keyed right into this formula too. Many of the levels took me several lengthy tries, but the game is so engaging and there are so many methods and combinations to experiment with, I would often play these levels over and over again in a row without getting bored.

The level design is also pretty brilliant. The levels are very varied. They seemingly take you through every type of situation you could imagine, from defending a single core from a single attack point to defending multiple cores from multiple angles. There are wide open arenas for you to build in and tight spaces where every tower placement drastically alters the enemies' movement pattern. There are cores that are in the middle of the level and must be protected from all sides and cores that need to be almost fully protected by towers while you personally guard another core yourself. You will build mazes that funnel enemies into big killzones for your towers and mazes that just lead the enemies on a circuitous route to buy you some time. Some levels don't even let you build a maze at all, making you place towers with a totally different philosophy. Most make you think about how you are going to take out both mobs of little enemies and attacks by titanic armored beasts given the current terrain. There are 16 levels, and they are all really well-designed and fun. They even have secret areas you can explore, which usually contain mines you can bring back to the main part of the level and plant. And the last level... your jaw might drop when you see how that is set up. Brilliant.

       Visually, this is a really unique and interesting world. The player characters are all wearing this futuristic white armor with mostly rounded edges. Thy all have one normal hand and one gigantic robotic hand that holds their heavy weapons. SiMO has a holographic screen for a face that makes silly images and also displays information readouts that the other characters read like a computer screen. The weapons all look really great too. Even familiar weapons look exotic and different, and the guns have lots of weird moving parts and interesting visual features on them. The towers are incredibly sleek and clean, like they are medical equipment or something. The enemies are amazing too. They have a beautiful purple and black color scheme with one bright red eye-like slit in the middle. This design carries over to flying enemies with fluttering tentacles, giant four-legged beasts, massive boss monsters (which are the only enemies that can destroy your towers, I should mention), and other strange monstrosities, like a four-legged enemy called a Soaker that carries a gigantic red, pulsating bulb on top of it, and small kamikaze enemies that look like they just crawled out of on of those underwater caves that are out in the middle of nowhere. The enemies are grotesque, bizarre, and beautiful and very unique. My reaction to the human, mechanical, and creature designs was that I want action figures or model kits of them, and I can think of no higher praise. The landscapes of the levels and the art in the comic strips lives up to this same very high standard.

       If you want to mess around with the game's basic formula, there are some interesting ways to do so. You can switch to survival mode, which makes waves of enemies continue to come past the levels' normal ten or so rounds. The level goes until you loose the core in this mode. More interesting to me however, are the feats of strength. These are settings you can add to a level that make it more difficult and give you an experience bonus. There are five of these, and they do things like make enemies faster or stronger or harder to kill. After beating the game, I wanted to try and beat it with all five enabled, as the trophy list beckons you to do. After awhile, it became clear to me that even when using the ingenious strategies I found on this youtube channel (which I recommend only using after you beat the game with your own strategies!) I am not quite good enough to beat most of the levels this way. I decided to beat the game with 3 feats of strength active. I beat most of the game this way, but had to turn it down to 2 feats of strength for a few of the tougher levels, and even down to 1 for the craziness that is the final level (especially because the strategy used on the youtube channel for this level has been patched so that it doesn't work now! I had to improvise my own strategy based on the idea in the video). The feats of strength are basically a customizable hard mode that you can tailor to your needs while increasing your XP gain, which is awesome. It's a great way to do a hard mode that more games should consider.

        The music side of Sanctum 2 is solid. There are a few calm beautiful tunes that play during the building phase and on the title screen, but the music that chimes in during the attack phase is epic – movie score type stuff that gets the adrenaline flowing. The song that plays during the build phase of the final level is a standout. It's like a slowed down chill remix of an early Daft Punk song or something. The calm tune on the title screen is also great as you stare into the distant landscape featured there.

       I want to take a minute and congratulate Sanctum 2's developers for their handling of texture pop. The level loads up in the background while you pick your character and loadout. So when you drop into the level, it is fully loaded! Amazing! I think it's pretty obvious that you need to do something like this if you are using Unreal engine, but most games totally ignore this concept and just have the textures pop in as you go, which looks incredibly stupid and kills any immersion they might have going on. Come on AAA games! You couldn't figure this out!

       Sanctum 2 occasionally has some frame rate drop when the action gets really, really out of control. There are two levels where this might happen and even when the problem shows up, it's not that bad, and the game runs smoothly otherwise.

       You can play up to four player co-op, and I can see how it is really designed for co-op play in many ways as the different characters are pretty varied and are much better at certain things than the others. The also levels feature situations that would allow for coordinated attacks and such. From what I hear the difficulty scales up as you add more players too. I still felt like I got a great, perfectly balanced experience playing solo though. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to test out the mulitplayer at this time.

       I am really jealous that the Steam version of this game has a lot of DLC with new levels, enemies, weapons, towers, perks, and even a new character. Even the 360 version got some of those things too. From what I read, the PS3 version of this game was a flop (which is insane as this is such, such, such a great game) and there are no plans to bring the DLC over. Sadness.

       Sanctum 2 is a nearly perfect game. If it had just stuck the landing on the ending and lost the framerate problem, it would probably be there. It is unique and executed almost perfectly. It's balance reminds me of the superb difficulty tuning of the Wipeout games. It's amazing that it does something so different and does it so well. The next article I write for the blog will be the 2^nd Annual Game of My Year Awards, and Sanctum 2 is a big contender. It is so close to a perfect score. It's deep, yet fun to play. It requires planning and strategy but also twitchy shooting skills. Its character, creature, and mechanical design are among the best in gaming. It's addictive and varried and difficult. It's a great game, tier 2.

Papo & Yo Review

      Hearing that Papo & Yo was about some guy's relationship with his abusive Dad piqued my interest quite a bit because that's not the kind of thing that is typically the focus of a game. Watching a quick video of one of the game's surreal environment manipulation puzzles sealed the deal for me; I was in without needing to see or hear anything else.

       Papo & Yo is about a boy named Quico who during a moment of fear and crisis finds himself transported to a strange world. It's a 3d 3^rd person puzzle-action game. You move through different areas solving puzzles to continue on.

       Typically, these puzzles involve manipulating the environment and the npc's to get to where you need to go. The world Quico enters is one of those south-american towns that is made out of little square house all stacked around each other. Like the one that Will Smith drives a hummer through in Bad Boys II. Pretty sure that's the movie where that happens. To Quico, these small square houses are literally building blocks. Through the use of magical chalk drawings on the walls and floors of these areas, houses can be re-arranged and manipulated. For example, there might be a lever drawn on a wall that when pulled moves a whole building or group of buildings around. Or there could be a set of gears drawn onto a wall, and when you connect the gears, a building might rotate or platforms might emerge from the ground. That's the tip of the iceberg of what you can do The game is not especially long, so I don't want to be too specific about the puzzles, but I'll give you a glimpse of one that can be seen in videos about the game. There is a part where you come to a large river you need to cross. There are some cardboard houses lying around that were obviously made by children. If you pick one up, a whole house gets plucked up into the air and starts moving along with the cardboard box house. I'll leave the rest to your imagination... These puzzles are great fun to go through. Some of them are as simple as what I just described, but they also scale up to some pretty epic and mind-boggling manipulations. If you're like me, you'll just stare at the screen in wonder at some of things you end up doing during these puzzles.They are typically pretty simple to complete, and there are often pictographic clues nearby inside of cardboard boxes that you can put on your head. But they are not so simple that they aren't fun to figure out. I'm going to compare this game to Ico a bit, so using that metric, the puzzles are a step or two less complex than Ico's puzzles, but comparable.

       The other type of puzzle you'll encounter involves Monster, your giant companion throughout the majority of the game. You need monster to activate some giant switches by standing on them. Getting him to do what you want typically involves motivating him with food. You can also get him to go to sleep and then bounce on his belly to get to high ledges. Sometimes you need to transport him using strange chalk-magic constructs. But be warned, if monster eats a frog, he flies into a rage, and will attack and maul you.

       The game controls pretty basically. The left stick moves Quico, who runs around at a fast pace. The right stick moves the camera. Square is used to interact with chalk constructs. You can pick up and throw items, such as fruit to lure Monster, with O. X is jump. In some areas, you are accompanied by a robotic friend named Lula, who can hold onto your back and let you hover for a second if you hold down X when jumping, and who can press far away switches for you if you aim at one and press triangle.

       The visuals are very good. The character design is great, and the environments are surreal and imaginative. Wherever the world gets distorted by your manipulations, a strange white substance is revealed, like a layer of reality that lays just underneath everything we see. There is also a lot of really great graffiti made by real artists in the game that adds tremendously to the mood.                            Unfortunately there are a lot of graphical and gameplay glitches. There is a bunch of screen tearing (at least I think that's what it's called), weird camera movements, and some frame rate problems. There are also problems while playing, such as Quico getting stuck in the jump animation or getting trapped on some geometry. One time I even had to reset because the camera suddenly zoomed out like a mile away from Quico and wouldn't switch back. These glitches are actually all really forgivable because of how much fun the game is and how riveting the story and theme is. Also, not really a glitch, but mouths don't move when people talk, which is a bit of distracting problem, but you get used to it.

       The music is really great traditional south-american tunes, mostly very upbeat. All of it is pretty good and really meshes well with the sense of discovery and figuring things out that the gameplay evokes. Some sequences even have sound effects when you do stuff that fit in perfectly with the music, which gives those parts a great feel. There are a couple of really stand out pieces, especially the song during the game's powerful final sequence. The game's dialogue and lyrics are in spanish, with word balloons providing translation to English for most of the dialogue. You're on your own with the lyrics in the song or two that has them and a few of the shorter lines of dialogue.

       Papo & Yo's story is an emotional and intense one. From what I hear, it is semi-autobiographical for the main game designer, and it really goes into some big problems. It has some really shocking, disturbing moments. However the story is balanced out nicely by it's tender moments and its overall whimsical feel. Still, there are a few times when I really felt some strong feels as I stared at the screen in shock. It's moving and meaningful, really great stuff. Obviously one of the main themes is the father-son relationship, but childhood in general also seems to be a big theme, and there are a few others I won't spoil, including the one disturbing theme that hit me the hardest... These themes are not only a part of the cutscenes and audio/visual experience, but are also tied tightly into the gameplay and interactive elements of the game. Which segues me right into my comparison to another game that does the same thing....

        I said I was going to compare the game to Ico. They are quite similar in length, puzzle design, and even in the fact that you often have an AI character to interact with and move around with you. Actually, it feels more like The Last Guardian since you are with a giant monster instead of a person. Also the game's ending sequence, meaning the last hour or two, reminds me of Ico's a lot as well as it is very focused, intense, story-driven while still being almost completely interactive, and near perfect. Much like Ico, that last 90 minutes or so is intensely riveting; there's no way I was getting up from my seat until it was finished (or there was some emergency or something. Or if my mom called for me). The game is like Ico in the best way possible. It captures some of that same feel, both in its gameplay and story/ theme. That's one of the strongest compliments I can give a game, as Ico is probably my favorite game. Also, you play as Quico. Get it.... quICO.

       After you beat the game, there are a few odd trophies to collect. One of them is kind of dumb. It wants you to beat the game without using the cardboard hint boxes. This is done easily enough on your second playthrough, or even your first, but the hint boxes have great pictograms in them and also tie-in with the theme and story really well, so it's weird to encourage people not to use them. One of the other main trophies tasks you with getting all the collectibles in the game, which are wearable hats that you find. You can only collect these hats on your second playthrough, although you can see where they will be on your first playthrough. There are dolls hidden all over, and in the 2^nd playthrough and later, the dolls will be wearing the hats. It's a cool way to do collectibles, as you are wondering what the dolls are for in your 1^st playthrough, and then you have fun scouring every nook and cranny trying to find them during your 2^nd playthrough.

       Papo & Yo is not as good as Ico, but it's comparable in all the right ways. That means it's a really great game that succeeds in theme and story on a whole nother level when compared to what usually gets made. It's flaws barely matter in the face of how meaningful it is. I think it's going to strike quite a personal cord with most people that play it. It doesn't hurt that it's beautiful, well-designed, and fun to play, either. It's a great game, tier 2.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams Review

            From what I understand, the original Giana Sisters game, The Great Giana Sisters, was a Mario clone back in the day. If you look at screenshots, it looks like it uses assets from Mario, or has at least copied some of them almost exactly. In more modern times, there was a DS sequel, and also this Kickstarted entry in the series, Twisted Dreams.

            Twisted Dreams is a 2d platformer with a polarity shifting mechanic reminiscent of Ikaruga and Outland. You travel through it's lengthy levels facing various enemies and obstacles, shifting between two dimensions to manipulate enemies and the environment as you go.

            The left stick and d-pad move Giana. X is Jump, and R2 changes you polarity. Or rather, it changes your form. You can be either Punk Giana or Cute Giana. Each of these forms has a movement power associated with it. Pressing square makes Giana do a fire dash. This move is associated with Punk Giana, so if you are in Cute form, you will instantly transform as you do this move. It can be used to reach high places, kill enemies, and also to bounce around the environment, sometimes at high speeds a la Sonic. Pressing triangle makes Giana leap into the air and spin rapidly, slowing her descent. If you are in Punk form, you will instantly transform to Cute mode when you do this move. Interestingly, you can transform freely while you are using this twirl move. Killing an enemy, either by jumping on their head or smashing into them with a fire dash, allows you to do another move without touching the ground, allowing you to combo-kill enemies and leading to some interesting movement puzzles where you must dash between enemies to reach certain areas. Besides the preference for one of the two moves, Giana's two forms are identical, and like I said, either form can do either move at anytime, it's just that you will instantly transform if you aren't already in the form associated with the maneuver.

             Giana Sisters takes these simple mechanics and uses them and some environment manipulation puzzles and creates a lot of large and varied levels for you to run through. In my opinion, it's a pretty hardcore platformer. It's very hard, but not very punishing. There are many checkpoints throughout the levels, and you have unlimited lives, but many levels have really difficult sections that demand perfection to get through. For example, some levels have difficult jumping sections occupied by 2 types of ghosts that chase Giana when she is in one of her forms. You have to rapidly change forms as needed to keep the two groups of ghosts at bay all while doing pretty difficult manuervers to get through the area. Other areas feature moving platforms that change direction whenever Giana switches forms, and manipulating their direction is key to surviving. Other levels feature enemies that do drastically different things depending on which form Giana is in. There are platforms that you can only stand on when you are in one form or the other. There is swimming, moving walls of fire, and herds of enemies that move in circular patterns. There are very difficult boss battles. And spikes. There are lots of spikes everywhere. Giana can only take 1 hit, unless she has a shield power-up, so you will be dying a lot. On the hardest levels, I died close to 40 times. Fortunately this game is the very fun kind of hard, just shy of frustrating. It's addictive to keep trying the hard segments over and over until you finally get them.

            The entire visual and musical landscape also shifts drastically whenever you transform Giana. First off, there is Cute Giana world. Giana is just a normal looking girl here. The music is kind of classical, though occasionally hard-driving classical. The enemies are demons, and everything is scary and Halloween themed. There are bones, torture devices, and mushrooms all over the highly detailed backgrounds. Switch to Punk Giana, and the soundtrack instantly switches to soaring electric guitar solos playing the same melody as the cute songs. The backgrounds and enemies all instantly change: demons become cute little owls, skeletons become trees, horrible dungeons are suddenly furnished with high quality furniture. A million little details all change in a split second with some great transformation animation to boot. You can change back and forth as much as you like, and the environment and music will shift right along with you. And because the graphics are really, really good, this effect is pretty stunning. You have to see it for yourself. Both versions of the world are full of an amazing amount of detail, and the way everything instantly moves and shifts to the other version is a sight to see. And the music... it reminds me of The Trans-Siberian Orchestra: happy little classical music that can shift at any instant to soaring, driving, epic guitar solos. The music will be in your head forever. It's also great to play a cutesy platformer with the guitars going full blast. Really near perfect audio-visual presentation that does something no other game I know of has done.

            The boss enemy design deserves a special shout-out too. The first boss is really disturbing. The second will give you nightmares if you are scared of Cthulu or ever wonder about what's down in the deep dark ocean. The final boss has an amazing texture on his skin. Gameplay-wise, each of these fights is fun and unique and extremely challenging.

            The weird parts of Giana Sisters for me are its alternate modes. They are STUPIDLY hard in my opinion to the point that they are un-playable to all but the most hardcore people that want to spend several dozen hours memorizing every nook and cranny of its massive levels. For example, you can unlock hardcore mode, which takes away the level checkpoints. This is kind of laughable, because as I said, some levels took me almost 40 lives to complete. There is instant death around every corner. Re-playing the entire level 40 times to get to the hard part and die again does not sound like fun at all to me. And then you can unlock Uber Hardcore mode, which is perma-death mode. This mode might literally be impossible. If it is possible, it would take maybe hundreds of hours to prepare for and beat. There is also Time Attack mode and Score Attack mode – both of which require near perfection to get through in the target time and score goals. None of these are appealing to me at all since the game is extremely hard, and if you beat it, you are a really good platformer player in my opinion. There's no need to ruin your life by playing this game obsessively for months to play these other modes. Then again, if you are a really, really hardcore game player looking for a title that offers some truly remarkable challenges, this game is definitely for you. But for you normal people out there, that means there isn't much to do after beating the main game.

            Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams is an expertly designed platformer that innovates on the polarity mechanic seen in Ikaruga and Outland in some great ways, both in its extremely challenging gameplay and its one-of-a-kind dueling audio-visual presentation styles. It's a joy to play. It feels great. It looks stunning, and it sounds like a dream. It flirts with a perfect score. It's a great game, tier 2.

  

         

Hysteria Project Review

       Hysteria Project truly is a mini. There is about ½ hour of content, and that is it. The game costs $3, so that ½ hour would have to be really, really great to justify buying it. Unfortunately, despite some cool ideas, there's not enough there.

       The game is pretty basic. You see a short video segment (and I mean real video with actors) and then you must make a decision about what the character you are controlling will do. You have two choices. If you choose the wrong one, you die. If you choose the right one, you may need to follow some onscreen prompts to press buttons as they flash on the screen. If you press the wrong button or don't press the buttons fast enough, you die. Dying sets you back to the last checkpoint.

       You wake up in a room and have to try to escape and then make your way through the woods while being pursued by a relentless axe-wielding figure. That's the gist of the story. There are a few interesting wrinkles to it. There are about 3 pretty interesting developments that happen while you are playing.

       The video quality is really bad. I imagine it looks a little better on the smaller screen of the PSP, but I was playing on my PS3, and it was pretty grainy. However, in a horror game like this, that's not the worst thing. It looks a bit like a found-footage movie, which isn't a bad look. Although if it was a few shades sharper and in HD, it would still look like found footage and be a little more palatable.

The presentation does have some good qualities to it. It is shot from a first-person perspective, and it pulls that off very well. You often see “your” arms touching branches while going through the woods and the perspective looks great when you are performing tasks. There is also a neat effect where you blink from time to time that works really well. On the other had, the action is frequently broken up by checkpoints, which save your game on a seperate screen, and the decision screens, which take you to a separate screen away from the images of the video. Both of these elements break up the flow and should have been super-imposed on the screen while the video was still rolling. It's strange that they aren't since the quick-time events are super-imposed on the moving video, so the developers obviously know how to do it. Then again, if the video rolled straight through without the screens popping up to break up the action, the game would only be 20 minutes long...
       I also think the game would be better with some gore, since it supposed to be a horror game and you die a lot. Not every horror game needs gore, but this guy pops out and chops you with an axe from time to time and the screen just turns red and you die. Some low-budget gore would be really cool and appropriate, methinks.

       The music is pretty good. It's quite dark and dread-inspiring.

       This game was obviously made by a few people in the woods on a very small budget. In order to be a better game, it would need more content, more mechanics, better video quality, and a presentation tune-up. A few of its narrative ideas are interesting. The “epilogue” of sorts that you can access after the game ends is dumb and threatens to ruin the mood of the game. A few days after playing it, I realized I barely remembered it existed, which is a bad sign. I wanted to like the game a lot, but it's a Bad Game, Tier 1.

Dyad Review

       I always heard that Dyad was awesome, but I wasn't totally sold when I played the demo. Many months later, I tried the demo again and really got addicted to it. It may be that it is such a different game that you need some time to get used to it. Kind of like when you listen to new music. You may not like it at first, but when you recognize its pattern again months later, that's when it really syncs up with your brain.

       Dyad is a bit hard to describe. It's like tempest, sort of. You are in a tube moving forward. By “you” I mean this weird ball with lots of flowing tentacles. You propel yourself forward by hooking enemies. You do this by pressing X when they are in front of you in this long wavy channel that extends out in front of you. That is the basic building block of Dyad's gameplay, but it wastes no time introducing new elements and goals. Soon, hooking pairs of like-colored enemies will give you a speed boost. Then, later, it creates zip-lines in the tube between the enemies you hook that greatly boost your speed. You are also introduced to grazing. When you hook an enemy, a shape extends out on either side of it. If you move through, or graze, this shape, you fill up a meter, and when the meter is full, you can press square to lance. While you are lancing, you move very fast and can smash right through enemies. There a quite a few more enemies and mechanics introduced, including enemies that create zip-lines when hooked but also attack you, invincibility shields that last as long as you can keep colliding with enemies, and bullets that fly down the tube at you, as well as several others.

       Just like the enemies and power-ups populating the tube frequently change, so do the goals of the levels. Some are time-trial style races to the finish. Others require you to hook certain amounts or types of enemies within a certain time limit. A few levels have more exotic goals, like reaching a high maximum speed, staying invincible for as long as possible, and lancing large numbers of enemies in only a few lances, just to name a few. The varied enemies, objects, and goals keep the levels feeling fresh and interesting and keep you guessing as to what is coming up next.

       Things get even more outlandish in the game's trophy levels. Each level has an alternate version you can unlock by getting a 3-star ranking on the normal level. These are called trophy levels as you get PSN trophies for beating them. These levels usually have a different layout than the original level and feature a different goal. The goals in these levels are usually not as straightforward; some involve doing a certain action a lot within a time frame and some have totally unique goals, such as one that starts you at high speed and wants you to slow down. These trophy levels are the only way to earn trophies in the game, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the dedication needed to beat these levels exceeds my desire to work too hard at them. It's certainly fun and worthwhile to play around and grab a few of these trophies, but the gameplay is not compelling enough to inspire a few dozen hours of practice needed to get these levels perfect. That said, I am very proud of the trophies I did earn: Tune in, Dyadic, Danger, Line 'Em Up!, The Light Spectrum, Winds of the Dawn that is My Crown, Becoming Purple, Giraffes? Giraffes! In Outer Space, I Really Missed Jack, and Perpetuation. The other trophy levels were just too much for me. A lot of the levels I didn't get a trophy for I couldn't even earn the three stars needed to unlock the trophy level. But I felt a great sense of accomplishment earning the ones I did get. There is a nice guide on PlaystationTrophies.org that gives some general useful tips and advice on each level that helped me out quite a bit. Also, did you notice how awesome the level names are in this game? If I remember correctly, from the interview I heard with the game's creator, some of those names come from a philosophy his friend invented or something.

       The game's audio-visual design is pretty special. Each level has a different color and pattern scheme. Many of them are pretty trippy, and when things get chaotic, they can get to the point of blurring so crazily that you can't see what's going on. This is done quite well though, because at that point you aren't supposed to be able to control things properly or see what's going on, such as when you reach a blisteringly fast speed or the screen becomes over-crowded with enemies. The music is great electronic stuff that leans more towards ambient sounds than club music. The sound is drastically affected by what you do. Every hook, every lance, and every interaction cues different sounds and tracks in a way that most games that have reactive music can't match. The sights and sounds are beautiful, and you are shaping both as you go.

       The menu design rivals the Wipeout series. It's visual and audio design is simple and beautiful. Navigating the menu is a joy. In fact, one of the best experiences you can have with the game is scrolling through the level select screen and seeing how the music builds on and subverts itself instantly as you highlight each level and look at all the changing solid colors. There are also some great graphs and charts that show you your progress during levels and on a results screen. These are easy and fun to read and give you a good sense of how much you need to improve to get better scores.

       I've heard that Dyad is kind of defined by its final level, and I would have to agree. The game itself shows you the name of the final level, Eye of the Duck, right on the main menu, which gives you this great sense of building up to some grand finale. If you think you've seen it all in the arena of beautiful trippy graphics, you need to play Dyad through and check out this final area. I won't go into detail since you have to experience it for yourself. I'll just say that, despite that fact that Dyad is a totally abstract game, Eye of the Duck is a beautiful, emotional, profound, and moving experience that left me with eyes a little moister than when I started. It's a great way to do an ending that's different and interesting and really a legitimate piece of artwork.

       Dyad is a unique game that has a great flow to it due to it's constantly shifting set of goals and interactions with it's otherwise identical tube levels. The beautiful visuals and unique reactive music keep pace, making every level a totally new experience. The final level is stunning and really leaves you with a great impression. It would be better if the basic gameplay was compelling enough to warrant the dozen or two hours it would take to get all the trophies. But Dyad's audio-visual design and wonderful ending really edify it into a must-play experience. It's a great game, tier 2.

Lone Survivor: The Director's Cut Review

      I've had a note on my calendar for most of the year reminding me to play Lone Survivor during October for Halloween. Fortunately I've had the opportunity to play a lot of scary-ish games during the Halloween season, as you may have noticed if you look at what I've reviewed in October. Lone Survivor is certainly the most horror-ish of them all.

       You play as a young man who appears to be the only person left who hasn't turned into a monster in his apartment building and possibly the whole city. Information about how we got into this situation is sketchy, as there is no one to ask and the main character's mind is starting to slip, both in memory and his perception of reality. The game constantly has you questioning if you are hallucinating certain experiences. The disease that turned people into monsters almost sounds like the more sci-fi elements of many zombie movies, but you have to call either that theory or your mind into question when you start seeing more and more bizarre things happening.

       In the game, you walk around rooms and hallways in 2d using the direction buttons or the left stick. If you go through doors (by pressing X), you are now in another hallway or room you can walk around. The view may not stay consistent, but your character's left and right do, so you have to orient yourself by your character's new position on the screen. This allows you to follow the maps that you pick up and can view by pressing circle. For example, if you know you want to go left once you enter a door, you need to go to the character's left, not your actual real-life left, as the two may or may not sync up depending on the new 2d vantage point. This sounds counter-intuitive but works fine once you understand it.

       You typically are given a location you need to get to on a map, and you explore your way through rooms and hallways in an effort to get there. You can search through rooms by pressing X in front of things of interest. There are many items you can pick up, such as food and tools that help you out, plus lots of other stuff. Many areas are dark, so you'll need your flashlight, which you can turn on and off with square. Triangle pulls up your inventory, where you can select tools to use, eat food, and look at stuff you've collected. The main character will often comment on what he is feeling or needs. For example, he might say he's hungry, so you might want to eat some food. Or he might say he's growing tired, and you might want to make your way back your apartment to sleep. There are no meters or stats governing hunger or fatigue, but when the character's running comments start to become more desperate and the screen starts to distort, you are going to feel some motivation to take care of him for fear he might be approaching a bad fate. These elements of the game almost become a bit of a life simulator, as you spend a lot of time making sure you get a good night's sleep, a nice cup of coffee made up in the morning, and making sure to scrounge up some half-way decent food so that you don't have to resort to... unpleasant... alternatives.

       The monster's roaming the halls can sometimes be avoided. You can lure them to a section of the screen by placing rotten meat down and then hiding in the shadows by pressing X near certain background areas that allow you to hide in them. Rotten meat can be placed by holding L1 and pressing triangle. A few other items are hot-keyed into this L1 menu as well for your use. Holding R1 pulls out your pistol. When it is out, X fires it and O reloads it. If a monster sees you, it will attack you, and you will die if you take too many hits. A lot of these fights are intense as multiple monsters might spot you if you turn on your flashlight at the wrong time. You'll struggle to fire at them and reload as they charge you and attack.

       Lone Survivor is a 2d pixel-art game. The characters and backgrounds are made out of big, chunky pixels. It's drop-dead gorgeous and pretty unique looking, like a living cross-stitch pattern. There are a lot of environments, items, and characters, and they all look great in this art style. Particularly great are the grotesque monsters roaming the halls of your apartment building. They are really horrific, and fit perfectly into the pixel art style. You can't see details in the pixel art, and that is kind of the point with these monsters. There is something terrible going on with them that you can't quite figure out. Something you can't quite perceive.

       The sound design is also amazing for these creatures. The sound of them walking around, and especially the sound of them eating, is terrible to hear and really establishes the mood. The music contributes to the atmosphere too, switching from hopelessly low-key sounds to disturbingly optimistic sounding depending on the situation.

       The writing is also very solid. The main character almost constantly narrates his mood and needs and comments on everything. This gives you a great feel for his state of mind and body, and what he thinks about all the stuff he witnesses. Between the art, the sound design, and the writing, the game is a near perfect depicter of its intended mood – desperation, fear, and mental breakdown.

       That's not to say the story is that great. The one big flaw with the game is that the endings are pretty weak in my opinion. I didn't get too much out of them despite the big potential to do interesting things with the settings and characters that are so well presented along the way. That said, there is one element of the endings that is really special. It's shocking the first time you see it, actually. Obviously, I can't say what it is. I was thinking about alluding to what it is, but I won't even do that, please check it out for yourself.

       The journey is very important in stories like this, so it's not the end of the world that the endings didn't live up to the potential that was there. This is a game where I had some true empathy with the character, where he would sometimes say things that I was thinking in my head as we both witness some new horror or experience. Very few games have done that too me. There is a lot to discover and see, and you are right there along for the ride with this poor guy. The general loop of exploring, discovering, trying to take care of your mind and body, and desperately avoiding and fighting monsters is also very fun. That's why Lone Survivor is a great game, tier 3. It would have been tier 2 or higher if it could have pulled together something special in the endings too. Still great stuff though.

Left Behind Spoiler Post!

SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS@@@ SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!

       Quick little spoiler post here. So... I guess Ellie is a lesbian. I'm really conservative about most issues and I believe that homosexuality is morally wrong per the teachings of the Bible. Of coures, I also adhere to Christ's strong commands to love everyone and not judge. So of course I still love Ellie as a character, but I'm also a little upset that what I view as a negative thing is portrayed as one of the only positive things in Ellie's life. I also feel like it kind of takes away from the great hours I spent with Riley in the mall. That felt like such an innocent playtime between two young girls, but the scene in the department store at the end soured that for me a bit (still very enjoyable though. Got a vibe of realism from their conversations and behaviors that I recognize from seeing teenage girls talk and run around malls).

       Ellie still comes off as quite the innocent character, and she's still great. And I still loved this DLC. I just wish Ellie and Riley were friends only. Hopefully I don't draw too much ire for this opinion. It's also a bit weird that this is revealed as a sneak attack in DLC months after the game came out. Very similar to what we learned about a certain character in a certain series of books after they were all published... It seems like nowadays we have to always think about sexuality as a possibilty when two people of the same gender are good friends, which to me is weird. Obviously some people of the same gender become attracted to each other, but there are also really strong, intimate friendships between people of the same gender that don't have any sexual undertone. I hope that kind of friendship can still be portrayed in fiction without people getting the wrong idea or making assumptions. I'm sure it can, I'm just throwing this idea out there. Thank you for listening, please don't send me hate mail :) Of course non-hate mail disagreeing with me is fine :)

      The combat situation I was talking about in the review is the handful of times there are infected and hunters running around in the same area. Throwing bottles at the hunters to make infected attack them is great, as is getting snuck up on by infected while hiding from hunters. Having both after you at once is quite frightening and also opens up room for some interesting tactics, and as far as I remember, there wasn't a scenario like this in the main game.

       I wonder what Naughty Dog is working on now... Hopefully something good.

The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC review

Note: This review contains the mildest of spoilers for the main of The Last of Us.
       I played Left Behind on grounded mode, which you can do if you have purchased grounded mode. It was a lot of fun that way. The final encounter is really epic and took me 15 + tries to complete. When I finally beat it, I felt like such a baller. That's the great thing about super hard modes. Many of the times I failed this scenario were also lots of fun as I tried to adapt when I made a mistake. Sometimes I would make it really far doing really risky stuff. But then, of course, somebody would take me down... It's funny, I found a lot of materials on my playthrough, but never enough to make anything. Then when I played some sections on easy to get trophies, there was stuff everywhere. That's grounded mode for ya.... Anyway....

       Left Behind is a short DLC chapter for The Last of Us. It took me about 3-5 hours on grounded mode. It takes place in and around the events of TLOU. I'll try not to spoil exactly what's going on... You play as Ellie, so you'll be knifing people rather than choking them out or punching them. The action parts are great and tense, and put you in some very interesting combat situations that you don't see in the main game. Now that I've seen these scenarios, it's actually pretty weird that they aren't in the main game. They were a bit of a surprise to me, and I had a great feeling of the gears clicking in my mind when I saw what was going on, so I won't mention exactly what happens so you can hopefully get that feeling too.

       A big part of this DLC involves doing non-combat stuff. And those parts are really fun and really well written. Switching from playing as Clementine in The Walking Dead Season 2 straight back to Ellie is quite jarring and really emphasizes the drastic differences between these two characters that sound almost identical on paper. The story fills in a few interesting blanks, and doesn't feel tacked on at all, especially if you play it some time after playing TLOU proper (although a few of the artifacts you find are kind of dumb, or at least placed in weird places. Some are cool though). I imagine it probably does seem tacked on if you were to play it immediately after beating TLOU. Then again, maybe not, since the ending of TLOU pretty directly leads into some of what you'll experience in Left Behind.

       Left Behind is a great game, tier 2, just like TLOU.

The Walking Dead Episode 5: No Going Back SPOILER POST

YOU KNOW THE DEAL ABOUT SPOILERS!!!! YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO READ THEM!!!!

YOU KNOW THE DEAL ABOUT SPOILERS!!!! YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO READ THEM!!!!

YOU KNOW THE DEAL ABOUT SPOILERS!!!! YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO READ THEM!!!!

Here're my stats:

I protected the baby.

I shot the zombies instead of going to help Luke in the ice.

I did not ask to leave with Mike.

I shot Kenny.

I was with Jane and the family in the end.

       Man, I think Jane is like the new Kenny now. She kinda made me kill Kenny, and I'm really mad about that. But I had to go with her as that's the best chance for the baby to live. And she did kinda prove her point about Kenny being crazy. Clementine's reaction of saying everything's ok with Jane is not how I feel. I'm mad, and I don't trust Jane now. But I need her help to protect the baby. Maybe I should have said I didn't want to go anywhere with her. But she is great at surviving, and AJ and I need all the help we can get. That's a pretty haunting ending, and another step toward becoming a messed-up adult for Clementine. Clem really took a physical beating this season too. She's going to have a bunch of scars. We'll see where things go from here in season 3. I think a bit of a time jump would be appropriate. Things went so bad for so many people this time around. I wonder if Mike and Bonnie and Arvo are still alive... One of them might be. We'll see if they turn up. 
       That Lee flashback was great.
       I talked to a friend who finished the season, and in the end, his Kenny killed Jane and then he and Clem went to this town they were hoping was safe, but they only let Clem and the baby in. Totally different than my ending! I wonder how season 3 is going to work since the two endings are so different. It seems like it would be hard to bring them back together to follow only one path for a bit in season 3. Maybe there will be two paths from now on? Sounds like a lot of work...
       Great stuff. Not as good as the first season, but still great stuff, and pretty unique among video games. 

The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 5: No Going Back Review

       Due to the month-long break from playing video games I took to work on my Dropzone Commander miniatures, I missed out on playing episode 4 and 5 of The Walking Dead Season 2 when they first came out. So I actually just played them in a row, one a night for two nights. It's a little weird since I played the other episodes a month or 2 apart. I loved playing episodically, but finishing off with two in a row worked out pretty well. I just finished writing my episode 4 review last night, so this one might reference that a bit.

      Like for starters, Episode 5 ran much, much, much better than the mess that was Episode 4's technical side. In fact, this might be the best running episode of the season, although it still wasn't perfect. There were a few instances of animation stutter and freezing at the beginning of a scene, but that was it. I felt like the graphics really shined in this episode too. The lighting work on people's faces was especially great looking, and a few of the special effects used this time were a bit more impressive than past episodes.

       As for the story, well, another Season is wrapped up, and I am certainly feeling some feels. I don't know if I made the right decisions. How many games leave you with that feeling? This season is not as good as the first, but it is certainly head and shoulders above most video game storytelling. It continues the first season quite well. Wow, it's great stuff.

       Despite my constant griping about the technical problems plaguing this Season (which will continue until they are fixed), I greatly, greatly enjoyed the second season of The Walking Dead, and the last episode is fittingly enjoyable. It raised the story back up to the level of the first two episodes of the season. I hear that season 3 is in the works, and I will definitely play it. Hopefully it can keep this good thing going without losing the magic, and hopefully attain a perfect score by fixing the technical problems. Episode 5 is a great game tier 2, and the season as a whole is as well.

The Walking Dead season 2 Episode 4 Amid the Ruins SPOILER POST!!!

DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU HAVE NOT YET PLAYED THIS EPISODE!!! MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

Real quick, here are my choices:

I saved Sarah at the trailer park (Although I thought very seriously about leaving her both there and when she fell off the deck. Especially off the deck)

I robbed Arvo, thinking he was lying about his sister since he appeared to be making some kind of shady drop and had a TON of medical stuff.

I crawled through the ticket booth.

I held the baby.

I shot Rebecca.

       The emotion I felt a lot in this episode was anger toward Kenny. I know he's going through enough to literally make someone crazy, but he was treating Clementine terribly. I know it's good writing because I was genuinely mad at him. But now he seems to be doing pretty good. Arguing with Luke is almost a good sign. Man, a lot of people died horribly this episode. Can't wait for the finale!  

The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 4 Amid the Ruins Review

       So this review is much the same as all the others, but a little worse. This episode ran worse than any other with the exception of some sections back in season 1. The amount of frame-rate drop and animation chugging and skipping that goes on is downright embarrassing. I've played a lot of games with much more complex animation than this that were made by only a handful of people that ran smooth as butter. As I watched the credits roll and saw the several dozen names of the people who made this game scroll by, all I could think was how can this many people let something with this many technical problems out the door. Didn't any of them think to themselves, “Wow, this game runs TERRIBLY.”

     It's to the point now that it is really starting to break the immersion, and immersion is this game's main thing. The story is still great (although this chapter is not quite on par with the first two of the season, but it's slightly better than episode 3. Not that episode 3 is terrible, it was merely great when I am expecting perfection), but didn't quite totally suck me in as many episodes have. The technical problems played a big role in that. It's very distracting. I can only hope that someone at Tell Tale reads this and is shamed into making future episodes better. Seriously, I don't care if you delay an episode by months, don't ship it like this.

     My missing stats from episode 3 appeared when I downloaded episode 3, so that's good. But then there was no "next time" preview at the end of episode 4. Another glitch? Or maybe they just didn't make one? Either way I missed it as I love the previews.

     All that whining aside, this episode continues one of gaming's great stories and succeeds pretty well at continuing it. There are a few rough patches in the story, but in general it's pretty great. I felt some emotions I don't usually feel while playing a game (and not the normal tug at the heartstrings either, see my spoiler post for details). I am of course, really pleased with it in general and glad I played. It just doesn't even come close to flirting with perfection like the best Walking Dead episodes do. It's a great game, Tier 3. Onto the finale!!

Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer Review

      Crazy German name, check. Story that can justify you fighting any kind of mechanical or biological enemy, check. One vs. thousands theming, check. Pre-flight checklist complete, must be a shoot-em-up!

      Starting up Soldner-X, I could immediately tell it was made by Eastasiasoft and Sidequest studios, the same people that made Rainbow Moon. It shares some assets with that game, including a few fonts. The style is also similar, with many of the enemies having a very sprite-like appearance despite not actually being sprites (or maybe they are HD sprites, I dunno). I think it is because they have some small bits of animation to them that loops, much like a classic sprite. Soldner also features multiple pop-up tutorials to teach you it's many systems, just like Rainbow Moon. And by that I mean that they are the exact same boxes.

     Soldner is one of the hardest 2d space-ship shooters I've ever played, and I feel like I am pretty good at them. I can hold my own in Ikaruga, Philosoma, R-Type, and quite a few others. Soldner has been carefully designed to put it on par with games like that as far as difficulty goes. I started playing on normal mode. After about 5 attempts, I pushed the difficulty down to easy. Then I went down to very easy. Even with earning a few extra continues along the way, I think it took me a few tries to beat the game on very easy, which is where I recommend everyone should start. Then I went back to easy and was able to beat that in a few tries. I never beat normal mode. This all took 27 tries and over 20 hours (estimated).

     Soldner sets itself apart from your typical shooter mechanics with a few neat systems and ideas. One of the most noticeable is the chain system. Killing enemies with the same weapon builds up a chain meter. Once full, you gain a chain level if you switch to another weapon. Completeing multiple chains in a row releases power-ups. You need power-ups bad, so following this chain system is really important to keeping a good flow of power-ups coming your way. This system is easy to follow even for a beginner because there is a helpful chime that tells you when to switch weapons. This system really gives Soldner a different feel than other shooters, and since there are so many shooters in the world, you need something different to hold your attention. There are a few odd quirks to this system though. If you want to keep using the same weapon and still build your chain meter, you can simply switch to a different weapon when the meter is filled and then switch right back to the first weapon. This is tempered by the fact that your weapons overheat if used too much. It's also weird that when you gain a chain level that will release a power-up, you don't automatically start a new chain, you have to switch weapons to manually release the power-up and get the new chain started. This can mess up the flow a bit if you forget to do it.

      Soldner is also different than other shooters in that it has a lot of different power-ups, including some very clever ones, such as weapon protection, which keeps your weapons powered-up in your next life if you die. This is really important as getting downgraded from throwing out hundreds of bullets to a pea-shooter is frustrating and can lead to a chain of deaths. It's reminiscent of the way you could keep weapons powered up in Philosoma by manipulating what weapon you had equipped when you died. There is also an armor piercing shot power-up that makes you do normal damage to heavily armored enemies that take very little damage from your normal shots, a cool-down power-up that stops your weapons from over-heating, and bad power-ups that give you de-buffs, including a particularly evil one that kills you outright if you pick it up!

Soldner has another great mechanic giving it a unique feel: beserking. When your health gets low, you enter beserk mode. You take half damage and deal out double damage. This makes most deaths very dramatic as you become extremely powerful right before you die. This often allows you to finish off a mini-boss or blast through a difficult section and is a tremendously great idea. It would fit right into almost any video game. I'd love to see the same thing in more games as it is really fun. One more thing, Soldner also shows you how much damage you are doing in the form of RPG style hit point numbers bouncing off enemies as your shots hit them. Genius, I love seeing that in a shooter setting for the first time.

      The Soldner X fighter has 6 weapon systems it can use. You always have the standard rapid-fire shot and the lightning shot, which can hit multiple enemies at once but does less damage. You can also pick up a few more powerful weapons in some levels. Rather than overheating, these weapons have limited ammo. You can get a very-short range flamethrower that does massive damage and a powerful laser shot that arcs in an interesteing firing pattern. You can also hold one traditional bomb, which blows up in a wide radius (but which does not destroy bullets like many bomb weapons do), and up to five rockets. If you equip your rockets, holding down fire causes them to lock onto the enemy on-screen with the most hp. Releasing fire launches the rocket, which then heat-seeks it's way around the screen to the target. If it hits, it does massive bomb-like damage. Some enemies are equipped with these rockets too though....

      The game constantly encourages you to find hidden keys in its levels, promising some kind of cool unlock if you find a majority of them. These are carried by enemies or hiding in destructible objects and out of the way spots. I won't spoil what you unlock, but I'll say that it is very, very worth getting.

      So those are a few of the things that make Soldner X different. Beyond that, it is a very standard horizontally-scrolling shooter. The d-pad is move, X is fire, square is use bomb, and L1 and R1 cycle through your weapons. The enemy design and backgrounds also include a lot of things you have seen in other shooters. Some enemies, especially the more civillian and military looking enemies, look almost exactly like some designs from R-Type and Philosoma to me. There are a few really cool and unique designs among the more standard stuff. A few bosses stand out in particular as being either unique or a nice homage to some famous bosses from other games. The Soldner X fighter that you control is a great design too. The story, which is told by some terribly written mid-level text over nice art pieces, is almost exactly the same are R-Type (an evil force in space is corrupting everything). Surprisingly, the ending to the story is quite good.

Soldner's music is also quite good. It too seems to be homaging some famous shooter music. One amazing track sounds very similar to a track from the game Phalanx (which is hidden on the disc with the PS1 game Zero Divide). And if I remember right, the Phalanx level with that track has you shooting down asteroids just like the Soldner level does.
      My only real complaint is the presence of some cheap deaths when you re-spawn into solid objects. You have a few seconds of intangibility when you re-spawn, but it's still easy to get stuck inside an object and instantly die during some crowded sections. This is really frustrating as you need every life you can get. It's also hard to succeed when you re-spawn without a lot of firepower in a really hard section. This can cause multiple deaths in a row. The game will often drop you some free power-ups if this happens, but not enough to get you back to full strength if you were really powered-up before.

      Soldner looks very much like a standard shooter, but actually playing it gives you a different feel than most games because of all the unique features built into the game. Standard features, such as enemy patterns and boss fights, are also superbly designed. Enemies move in quite dastardly ways to try to get hits on you, and boss fights are slug-fests against dynamic foes with some interesting attacks and patterns. Soldner stays fun whether you are fighting hundreds of tiny ships, dodging mines, taking on a trio of mini-bosses and their entourage, or navigating deadly cave walls or asteroid fields. A lot of tiny tweaks to the standard formula make for a great game, tier 3. Just don't expect to be able to beat it on normal mode without putting in a few dozen hours. It's disturbing to think that there are 3 difficulty levels above normal....

Patchwork Heroes Review

            Like all the portable games I play these days, this one was played almost exclusively during my lunch break at work in a small room with several people staring at me, wondering why a grown man enjoys lunchables and videogames so much. And like Bangai-O Spirits before it, it has become something of an institution for me. I played it almost every week day for like 30-40 minutes for over a month. And in this case, I played it for 30 hours. That's a lot. 

            Patchwork Heroes is a 2d game in which you and a small crew must crawl around on a giant flying airship. Your objective is to saw it to pieces until you get it very small, causing it to crash. You must do this before time runs out and it gets to your village and bombs it HARD. You crawl around on the ship with the analog nub or the arrows. L makes the view zoom out as long as it is held down. You will usually need to switch between this zoomed-out view and the normal view quite frequently to keep an eye on your surroundings. Holding down circle makes you saw. While sawing, you move slowly. If you separate a piece of the ship completely, the smaller part falls away, so ideally you want to chop whatever is left of the ship in half to get rid of the most at once (although this is almost never possible once you get into later levels. I'll explain why soon). The bigger the piece of warship you chop off, the longer the airship will temporarily stall, which freezes the countdown timer. Pressing square makes one of your squad members stay in place with a bomb that will go off in a few seconds (they parachute away as the explosion goes off). This is useful for taking out areas that are reinforced metal, which you can't saw through. However, each member of your squad also acts as a hit point, so you must be aware that you are trading a hit point for an explosion. You can have up to four people on your squad. You usually start a stage with a few and can also rescue others who are trapped in prison cells on the airships.

               Guarding each level are robotic defenses. These range from stationary missile turrets to insect-like robots that chase you. Each robot has a different AI routine. Some chase you down mercilessly. Others move in a set pattern. Others only attack while you are sawing, or when you aren't sawing. There is quite a variety, and there are usually quite a few in each level. You can block enemy attacks by hiding behind a shield by holding R. You can do this indefinitely, but the clock is always ticking... Surprisingly, you can't directly attack enemies. The only way to kill them is to saw them off with the piece of ship they are standing on or  trap them in the blast of a bomb. Killing enemies fills up your mojo meter. If you have any mojo, you can press triangle to activate a mojo attack. While you are in this state, the mojo meter drains rapidly. You run quite fast, sawing as you go, and you can saw through reinforced metal in this state. You are a little hard to steer, though, as you are propelled forward without stopping and have to take big wide turns instead of sharp ones. You can often try to set yourself up for a mojo attack that chops the ship in half, which in turn nets you lots more mojo so you can go and try to repeat the feat. 

             This all might sound somewhat basic. It's easy to understand, but the game really sets itself apart with its incredibly clever level design. Once you get a few levels in, the design of each ship is really, really smart. There are some that are very complex and interlinked in many ways, almost like a little maze. Others seem basic but have different sections connected in multiple little walkways that all need to be cut. Others seem straigh forward until you see the little bits of reinforced metal you have to find a way to deal with. Many also featuring strategically placed enemies that chase down and repair any cuts you make in the ship. Many levels also feature objectives you must complete, such as saving prisoners with time-bombs on them or not chopping off a certain part of the ship, or using timefreeze power-ups and stalls to complete a level with only 5 seconds on the clock. All these levels are quite different from each other, but they are all very efficient at making your task of slicing the ship anything but straightforward. You need a plan in order to chop that thing up in time, especially if you want to rescue all the optional prisoners as well.

            There are many levels. I played all 30 story levels and all 50 challenge mode levels on normal and pro difficulty levels. That's 160 levels played, and I was having a blast all the way to the end. It's quite challenging even on normal mode, and pro mode makes everything move maybe 2-3 times as fast, which is hilarious and makes even basic enemies very deadly. Challenge mode, which gives you alternate win conditions such as winning without sawing, or without bombs, or any number of other conditions, gets really out of control toward the end. It's quite challenging but so engaging that you won't mind re-trying its hardest levels 20 times.

            The game also has a great art design, nice music, and a cool story. The art looks like Russian steam-punk or something. The airships look like giant quilts. The menus are all animated tube screens, mechanical gears and gadgets, and projections. There are also little mechanically animated dolls all over the place in the menus. It's all in nice dull colors. The music is also great. There is a lot of horn and woodwind work that fits perfectly with the visuals and is a nice change as you usually don't hear that kind of stuff featured so prominently in a videogame. The story focuses on a captain in the airship fighting squad named Titori, the missions he and his friends undertake to defend their home town from the airships, and the things that start to come to light about the airships when he meets Asli, a young woman who joins his community and starts to ask him to retrieve airship parts for her while he is out sawing airships. This story starts out pretty strongly, and I had high hopes for it, but it doesn't finish as strongly as I would have liked. It's still pretty solid though, and also adorable.

            The game has a strong sense of theme to it in the way it does many different things. For instance, each time a squad-mate dies, the screen temporarily freezes and their name and age pops up on the screen along with the word “dead.” It's kind of heart breaking, especially since these people end up in a graveyard that you can visit between levels. You can even think of them fondly and place flowers on their graves. The game also encourages you to try and save as many prisoners as possible for moral reasons. Characters say thing like “You wouldn't leave them behind, would you?” Each person you rescue (and there are a few hundred) has a little write-up about them and a unique portrait. You also get a nice sense of progression as each mission earns you pay depending on your performance, and you increase in rank after you get paid a certain amount. Rank increases usually unlock bonuses, like songs to listen to or special cutscenes and even a gallery with 99 wonderful pieces of concept art. Even when you don't earn a rank-up or reward, the game will comment on big accomplishments, such as congratulating you on beating story mode or challenge mode on pro, or completing the game having rescued every prisoner. Unfortunately this is one of those games where you need to have played the game on every difficulty for your save to read 100%. Not a big deal, but it bothers me a little that after playing on the normal and pro difficulties, I would still need to play every stage on easy and hard to get to 100%. I'm not going to do that. I wish beating a stage on pro made it count as if you've beaten it on every difficulty.

            It's hard to think of any flaws in Patchwork Heroes. I'm not sure there really are any. I don't think I'll give it a perfect score, but it certainly flirts with it. It might be there if the story took a little different direction and had a stronger conclusion. The game's simple concept mixed with its smart implementation and scenario design and wonderful aesthetics make it great fun for the long haul. It's a great game, tier 2.