BobOnTheKebab
This review contains spoilers
Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance II is one of the first games that spring to my head when I think of the PS2. As someone who was born only a year after the PS2 released, this game just feels very representative of the era to me: a short and simple hack-and-slash game where all you really need to do is go kill everything in sight (aside from the select few NPCs you talk to) and loot whatever you see. Of course, a lot of that is bias on my part, since I have very fond memories of playing this game with my brother when we were both kids. It makes for a great couch co-op experience, but I found its also still fun to blow through in single player even in 2023.
As far as this port job goes, it feels exactly like I remember it, just with the addition of keyboard controls and a few weird visual bugs that unfortunately popped up. The game did also lag a little whenever I skipped through dialogue just before certain boss fights, but it picks right back up once the cutscene ends. I will say that the current asking price is a bit too much in my opinion since this is pretty much an emulated PS2 game, but that doesn't really have to do with the game itself. The way the game looks takes a bit to get adjusted to. I think that cleaning up the visuals like this port did actually makes the game look worse than playing it on a PS2, if that makes sense. However, I am really satisfied with just how smoothly the game runs: there are virtually no loading times at all and saving is damn near instantaneous, unlike playing the original.
The gameplay is simple but effective. Press A (I played this on a 8BitDo Xbox controller) to attack, hold RT to block, press B to use spells, use up and down on the D-Pad to cycle through spells, press Y to jump. I think the only thing that might trip some people up is some of the actions mapped to the D-Pad, like how swapping weapons (if you've equipped multiple weapons) is on the left but toggling the mini map is on the right. Otherwise, its very straightforward. Admittedly some of my perception of the gameplay is colored by my class choice: as you'd expect in a game based on D&D, your choice of class affects how you play the game. I went with Barbarian, which is the prime candidate for any player that wants to just mindlessly attack everything in sight, and I like it that way. It might be just a tad more complex for people that play the Elf Necromancer or the Dwarf Rogue, but the fundamentals are still super simple. When you level up, you get points to put into abilities, whether they're passive or active. In my Barbarian playthrough, most skills were pretty obvious priorities: grab Death Blow for higher critical hit damage, grab that one passive that gives you a higher chance to get critical hits, max out your Barbarian's signature Rage ability, etc. I will say that I was surprised by the Rage since I'm mostly familiar with 5e (fifth edition) D&D; as it turns out, in whatever edition this game is based on, the Rage has you sacrifice defenses for more attack power, whereas in 5e you're both tankier and more powerful when you Rage. Barbarians also get a really cool ability called Hero's Arm that lets you dual-wield two handed weapons, which makes them really strong. I found that the bosses are a lot of fun, but most of them are either way too easy to just waltz in and destroy or are really hard until you find out the cheese you need to obliterate them. Any boss that uses melee attacks sucks at following you, so I took advantage of that with the last two bosses and ran in a circle the whole fight. They aren't quick enough to get right in your face, so you can just get free hits in while they're still trying to follow the circle you made. I think the only boss I actually had to think to defeat is the zombie pirate captain who has a bunch of mobs he can revive and make the fight a living hell. To beat that guy, you just need to lure all the other enemies away from the boss room and kill them first, then you can go give evil Captain Crunch an easy whooping. The structure of the game is split into acts: Act I, II, III, and IV. Act III is probably the shortest one since its just you entering all four elemental planes to kill one boss for each plane. Longest act for me was probably Act II, since you need to go through four different long areas with some diversions along the way to grab some special artifacts. The overall structure of the game after you rescue Randalla from the goblin camp in Act 1 pretty much just becomes "Talk to someone, they tell you to do a thing, go do the thing" on repeat, which might get on some people's nerves but I didn't mind it at all. Oh, also, the game has a pretty cool Workshop system that lets you upgrade your gear with a wide assortment of gems that each have different effects, so long as you have a Rune Stone available. You might be thinking the game is too generous with gold and potion drops early on, but don't underestimate just how expensive the Workshop can get and how many potions you'll drain through in some of the lategame boss fights. You also pretty much need to use the Workshop to make sure your gear is as good as it can be, at least in Act III and especially in Act IV. I went from having nearly 140,000 gold in the beginning of Act III to only around 30,000 by the end of Act IV.
The story isn't really anything special, but its still fun to go through. It takes place after the first game, as you might expect; basically, the vampire lord Mordoc (not Murdoch) has kidnapped the adventurers from the first game. His big plan is to take over the Onyx Tower after its previous ruler, Eldreth, was slain by the DA1 adventurers. You go all throughout the different lands of the Forgotten Realms to help the Harpers - pretty much planar peacemakers - with the ultimate goal of finding out what Mordoc is up to and taking him out, although the player character doesn't know who he is until pretty much the end of the game and they don't know what goal they're working towards until the beginning of Act III. You go to a surprising variety of locations; even just in Act II you get to go to some elaborate underground Dwarven ruins, a gothic castle with a dungeon underneath, a desert gorge crawling with gnolls, a cave near the sea, a fishman (or maybe they're frog men) religious temple, and a Lich's castle complete with an observatory at the top. Lots of classic, if not a bit tropey, D&D places to explore and tons of cool enemies to slaughter.
Overall, my appreciation for this game is definitely boosted by my nostalgia for it, but I still think its just a really fun time and a symbol of a bygone era. Earns a solid 4 stars from me.
As far as this port job goes, it feels exactly like I remember it, just with the addition of keyboard controls and a few weird visual bugs that unfortunately popped up. The game did also lag a little whenever I skipped through dialogue just before certain boss fights, but it picks right back up once the cutscene ends. I will say that the current asking price is a bit too much in my opinion since this is pretty much an emulated PS2 game, but that doesn't really have to do with the game itself. The way the game looks takes a bit to get adjusted to. I think that cleaning up the visuals like this port did actually makes the game look worse than playing it on a PS2, if that makes sense. However, I am really satisfied with just how smoothly the game runs: there are virtually no loading times at all and saving is damn near instantaneous, unlike playing the original.
The gameplay is simple but effective. Press A (I played this on a 8BitDo Xbox controller) to attack, hold RT to block, press B to use spells, use up and down on the D-Pad to cycle through spells, press Y to jump. I think the only thing that might trip some people up is some of the actions mapped to the D-Pad, like how swapping weapons (if you've equipped multiple weapons) is on the left but toggling the mini map is on the right. Otherwise, its very straightforward. Admittedly some of my perception of the gameplay is colored by my class choice: as you'd expect in a game based on D&D, your choice of class affects how you play the game. I went with Barbarian, which is the prime candidate for any player that wants to just mindlessly attack everything in sight, and I like it that way. It might be just a tad more complex for people that play the Elf Necromancer or the Dwarf Rogue, but the fundamentals are still super simple. When you level up, you get points to put into abilities, whether they're passive or active. In my Barbarian playthrough, most skills were pretty obvious priorities: grab Death Blow for higher critical hit damage, grab that one passive that gives you a higher chance to get critical hits, max out your Barbarian's signature Rage ability, etc. I will say that I was surprised by the Rage since I'm mostly familiar with 5e (fifth edition) D&D; as it turns out, in whatever edition this game is based on, the Rage has you sacrifice defenses for more attack power, whereas in 5e you're both tankier and more powerful when you Rage. Barbarians also get a really cool ability called Hero's Arm that lets you dual-wield two handed weapons, which makes them really strong. I found that the bosses are a lot of fun, but most of them are either way too easy to just waltz in and destroy or are really hard until you find out the cheese you need to obliterate them. Any boss that uses melee attacks sucks at following you, so I took advantage of that with the last two bosses and ran in a circle the whole fight. They aren't quick enough to get right in your face, so you can just get free hits in while they're still trying to follow the circle you made. I think the only boss I actually had to think to defeat is the zombie pirate captain who has a bunch of mobs he can revive and make the fight a living hell. To beat that guy, you just need to lure all the other enemies away from the boss room and kill them first, then you can go give evil Captain Crunch an easy whooping. The structure of the game is split into acts: Act I, II, III, and IV. Act III is probably the shortest one since its just you entering all four elemental planes to kill one boss for each plane. Longest act for me was probably Act II, since you need to go through four different long areas with some diversions along the way to grab some special artifacts. The overall structure of the game after you rescue Randalla from the goblin camp in Act 1 pretty much just becomes "Talk to someone, they tell you to do a thing, go do the thing" on repeat, which might get on some people's nerves but I didn't mind it at all. Oh, also, the game has a pretty cool Workshop system that lets you upgrade your gear with a wide assortment of gems that each have different effects, so long as you have a Rune Stone available. You might be thinking the game is too generous with gold and potion drops early on, but don't underestimate just how expensive the Workshop can get and how many potions you'll drain through in some of the lategame boss fights. You also pretty much need to use the Workshop to make sure your gear is as good as it can be, at least in Act III and especially in Act IV. I went from having nearly 140,000 gold in the beginning of Act III to only around 30,000 by the end of Act IV.
The story isn't really anything special, but its still fun to go through. It takes place after the first game, as you might expect; basically, the vampire lord Mordoc (not Murdoch) has kidnapped the adventurers from the first game. His big plan is to take over the Onyx Tower after its previous ruler, Eldreth, was slain by the DA1 adventurers. You go all throughout the different lands of the Forgotten Realms to help the Harpers - pretty much planar peacemakers - with the ultimate goal of finding out what Mordoc is up to and taking him out, although the player character doesn't know who he is until pretty much the end of the game and they don't know what goal they're working towards until the beginning of Act III. You go to a surprising variety of locations; even just in Act II you get to go to some elaborate underground Dwarven ruins, a gothic castle with a dungeon underneath, a desert gorge crawling with gnolls, a cave near the sea, a fishman (or maybe they're frog men) religious temple, and a Lich's castle complete with an observatory at the top. Lots of classic, if not a bit tropey, D&D places to explore and tons of cool enemies to slaughter.
Overall, my appreciation for this game is definitely boosted by my nostalgia for it, but I still think its just a really fun time and a symbol of a bygone era. Earns a solid 4 stars from me.
This review contains spoilers
Small side-note: For some reason, Steam isn't showing up as a valid platform for this DLC on Backloggd, so I had to pick Switch even though I actually beat this on Steam.
By all means, this is a pretty bite-sized DLC. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but admittedly I was hoping there would be a second story mode campaign alongside the new Survival mode. That didn't happen, but this is still a pretty fun mode and a worthwhile addition to the game nonetheless. Plus, for only 8 bucks, you can't really go wrong.
The selling point here seems to be the playable characters. I haven't tried out Karai yet, but I was really looking forward to seeing Miyamoto Usagi in this game since I just started reading his comics about a year ago. Although he's a lot of fun to play, unfortunately I'm just not as good with him as I am with characters like Raphael and Splinter, so I had to swap to them to make much progress in Survival mode. Speaking of that mode, I'm relatively unfamiliar with roguelikes, having only really played Hades to the end (or, rather, one of many possible ends) and a tiny bit of Enter the Gungeon at a friend's house. From what I understand, the roguelike elements are quite light; you fight waves of enemies, and after beating a wave you have two portals with different powerups or benefits to grab. For instance, the Parasite perk lets you heal whenever you do damage for three waves, but it saps health from you if you aren't attacking enemies (it was barely noticeable for me though since I'm a pretty aggressive player in beat-em-ups). There's also some mutagen canister powerups that let you play as some of the bosses, specifically Bebop, Rocksteady, and Shredder. They're a lot of fun and very strong, especially since it works as a second health bar. The game has about seven dimensions, and you progress to the next one by collecting enough crystal shards. The shards are either very rare drops from enemies or obtained from going through a portal that has shards as its reward. One thing roguelikes are infamous for is punishment for dying, but thankfully the punishment here isn't all that bad since you don't really lose anything except for needing to start over from the first dimension again. You get permanent perks from leveling up, one of which gives you the ability to choose where you want to start at. You might think that feels like it eliminates the point of the roguelike, but, if you continue on after beating the intended final boss, you can't get back to exactly where you were (the dimensions are tied to "difficulty level" and a second harder run is just classified as Level 6+), so I guess that's still preserved. Also, the actual final boss was unfortunately a reskin of Super Shredder, but they did buff the fight so my complaints about the story battle against Super Shredder being underwhelming has been band-aided a little. Still only took me two tries to beat this new Super Shredder, though.
I think another big plus to this DLC are the skins you get. Unfortunately, they can't be used in Story mode as far as I know, but they do serve a really cool novelty within Survival mode. The different dimensions you traverse through are mostly based on specific parts of Turtle history, whether that be the obvious homage to their black and white comic routes or something more obscure like whatever Omnichannel 6 is meant to be. I'm a huge TMNT fan and I still didn't know what that was referencing, if anything at all. Regardless, the skins you unlock seem to be tied directly to these new dimensions you go to. There's also a good amount of skins you just get for free without needing to be unlocked and those are awesome too. Every character (except for Usagi of course) gets a skin based on the '80s live action TMNT movies, the 2003 TMNT cartoon, the 2012 TMNT cartoon, Rise of the TMNT, and the classic all-green Game Boy screen, respectively. As a huge fan of the 2003 cartoon in specific, I was really excited to see this, especially since it means characters like Splinter, Casey Jones, and Karai also got their 2003 versions. I wish I got to see Usagi's unlockable skins, but since I beat the mode almost entirely using Splinter I did get to see our favorite sensei rat's unlockable skins. He gets a black and white skin, a blue and white skin seemingly based on the screen of one of the Game Boy consoles (don't remember which one had that color combo), and an NES color pallet. These represent the Mirage comics dimension and the 8-Bit dimension.
Overall, I think this was a neat little addition to the game. Nothing too major, but the introduction of two new characters is appreciated and having a new game mode makes for more replay value. Survival mode wasn't all that interesting to me, but it did make for more beat-em-up action and I suppose that's all I could really ask for. Solid; earns 4 stars from me.
By all means, this is a pretty bite-sized DLC. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but admittedly I was hoping there would be a second story mode campaign alongside the new Survival mode. That didn't happen, but this is still a pretty fun mode and a worthwhile addition to the game nonetheless. Plus, for only 8 bucks, you can't really go wrong.
The selling point here seems to be the playable characters. I haven't tried out Karai yet, but I was really looking forward to seeing Miyamoto Usagi in this game since I just started reading his comics about a year ago. Although he's a lot of fun to play, unfortunately I'm just not as good with him as I am with characters like Raphael and Splinter, so I had to swap to them to make much progress in Survival mode. Speaking of that mode, I'm relatively unfamiliar with roguelikes, having only really played Hades to the end (or, rather, one of many possible ends) and a tiny bit of Enter the Gungeon at a friend's house. From what I understand, the roguelike elements are quite light; you fight waves of enemies, and after beating a wave you have two portals with different powerups or benefits to grab. For instance, the Parasite perk lets you heal whenever you do damage for three waves, but it saps health from you if you aren't attacking enemies (it was barely noticeable for me though since I'm a pretty aggressive player in beat-em-ups). There's also some mutagen canister powerups that let you play as some of the bosses, specifically Bebop, Rocksteady, and Shredder. They're a lot of fun and very strong, especially since it works as a second health bar. The game has about seven dimensions, and you progress to the next one by collecting enough crystal shards. The shards are either very rare drops from enemies or obtained from going through a portal that has shards as its reward. One thing roguelikes are infamous for is punishment for dying, but thankfully the punishment here isn't all that bad since you don't really lose anything except for needing to start over from the first dimension again. You get permanent perks from leveling up, one of which gives you the ability to choose where you want to start at. You might think that feels like it eliminates the point of the roguelike, but, if you continue on after beating the intended final boss, you can't get back to exactly where you were (the dimensions are tied to "difficulty level" and a second harder run is just classified as Level 6+), so I guess that's still preserved. Also, the actual final boss was unfortunately a reskin of Super Shredder, but they did buff the fight so my complaints about the story battle against Super Shredder being underwhelming has been band-aided a little. Still only took me two tries to beat this new Super Shredder, though.
I think another big plus to this DLC are the skins you get. Unfortunately, they can't be used in Story mode as far as I know, but they do serve a really cool novelty within Survival mode. The different dimensions you traverse through are mostly based on specific parts of Turtle history, whether that be the obvious homage to their black and white comic routes or something more obscure like whatever Omnichannel 6 is meant to be. I'm a huge TMNT fan and I still didn't know what that was referencing, if anything at all. Regardless, the skins you unlock seem to be tied directly to these new dimensions you go to. There's also a good amount of skins you just get for free without needing to be unlocked and those are awesome too. Every character (except for Usagi of course) gets a skin based on the '80s live action TMNT movies, the 2003 TMNT cartoon, the 2012 TMNT cartoon, Rise of the TMNT, and the classic all-green Game Boy screen, respectively. As a huge fan of the 2003 cartoon in specific, I was really excited to see this, especially since it means characters like Splinter, Casey Jones, and Karai also got their 2003 versions. I wish I got to see Usagi's unlockable skins, but since I beat the mode almost entirely using Splinter I did get to see our favorite sensei rat's unlockable skins. He gets a black and white skin, a blue and white skin seemingly based on the screen of one of the Game Boy consoles (don't remember which one had that color combo), and an NES color pallet. These represent the Mirage comics dimension and the 8-Bit dimension.
Overall, I think this was a neat little addition to the game. Nothing too major, but the introduction of two new characters is appreciated and having a new game mode makes for more replay value. Survival mode wasn't all that interesting to me, but it did make for more beat-em-up action and I suppose that's all I could really ask for. Solid; earns 4 stars from me.
This review contains spoilers
I did not expect to be playing this game so soon after beating the first LEGO Batman, but, hey, I needed something to tide me over while waiting for Baldur's Gate 3's full game release, so I figured I might as well. Since LEGO Batman 2 is yet another LEGO game, I'll try my best not to repeat what I've already said in my other reviews. Surprisingly, this one took me much less time to complete than its predecessor or LEGO Star Wars TCS, perhaps because it forgoes the whole system of dividing levels by episode (with about five or six levels in each) and instead focuses on one continuous story with 15 levels in total.
Gameplay wise, yea its the exact same song and dance as other LEGO games, but again that's never a complaint with these games for me. The main way LEGO Batman 2 differentiates itself from the others is through the big open world, which, of course, has many different places to explore. It's FAR from the deepest open world, but it was quite ambitious for a LEGO game and I remember spending countless hours exploring it as a kid. The world is now the primary way to unlock characters; instead of just unlocking characters through a menu, you need to find them all throughout the many areas in the game and defeat them in a mini boss fight, only after which you get the option to purchase them afterwards. If its just a regular enemy you're looking to unlock, though, all you need to do is beat up a few of them until one of them surrenders, then you can buy 'em. I skipped out on exploration so I could tunnel-vision on the story, so I'm mostly relying on memory to describe this. Its usually better to complete it first before exploring since you have to unlock the option to play as whoever you want, which just makes things a lot easier since you can pick a character like Superman or Green Lantern to fly around Gotham. Speaking of which, unfortunately the flying in the open world feels just as weird and unintuitive as I remember it feeling as a kid; you have to hold X (I'm using an Xbox controller) to move and there's a pointer you move with the stick that dictates where you're going. It's great as a quick way to get around, sure, but turning feels terrible and you move too fast to be able to precisely land anywhere. It just feels very clunky and that's really frustrating when its absolutely going to be your main way of getting around unless you REALLY like walking (playing as The Flash at least makes that more bearable though). Levels in the Story Mode do have some new things, but most are just those character-specific puzzle gimmicks that LEGO games always add more of to spice up the gameplay a little. I do notice the way the levels are structured is a little different, mainly in that they seem to go for more of a cinematic vibe with varying lengths and a few different segments of the same level. This would make sense considering that this game actually puts more emphasis on its story, which I'll get to when I get to my usual dedicated story paragraph. Some levels are very short, others feel absurdly long; that's not something that I experienced with the first LEGO Batman since each level felt similar in length to me. One level in LEGO Batman 2 - Chemical Crisis - is so long that it takes around 310,000 studs to get the Super Hero rank (for reference most levels in this game typically take about 120,000 at most) and YouTube videos about this level tend to be around the 40-50 minute range, sometimes 30 minutes if the player is quick and can optimize the run. Worth noting that the game does have checkpoints and an option to save at certain points of levels, so its not like this is egregious, but nonetheless it is pretty odd with how consistent most older LEGO games have felt in terms of length.
Interestingly enough, LEGO Batman 2 does have a bit more of a focus on story. For one, its the first LEGO game to have full-on voice acting, and it definitely takes advantage of this with its many cutscenes. The game managed to get some big name voice actors like Nolan North, Troy Baker, Clancy Brown, Rob Paulson, and Laura Bailey, among others. The humor shifts a little away from typical LEGO stuff, focusing less on things like slapstick or body language and more on dialogue based gags like Batman always being grumpy after being helped by Superman. The story itself starts with Bruce Wayne nearly receiving a Man of the Year award, then The Joker pulls a usual Joker move and crashes the party with other members of Batman's usual rogue gallery. Once Batman puts them all back in Arkham Asylum, Lex Luthor decides to test his new invention - the Deconstructor - on the walls of Arkham Asylum to free The Joker and make a deal with him. He wants The Joker's laughing gas to force people to have a positive opinion of him so he'll win the presidential election, while The Joker's only real rewards are freedom and causing mayhem...so, of course, the clown gladly accepts, and he also frees all the other villains while he's at it. They turn out to be quite a devious combo, even having discovered where the Batcave was and making a wreck of it. Superman and Batman must work together to take down their worst enemies, but, despite Superman being overpowered, its still difficult. Lex knows to put Kryptonite everywhere, so Superman can't just waltz in. The last few missions focus on the absolute chaos Lex and The Joker are causing with the giant clown mech they built, ending on nearly destroying Wayne Manor before the Justice League come in to end things. At the end of the day, its not much of a story, but its still a whole lot more than any other LEGO game at the time tried to have (if you don't count the LEGO Star Wars games retelling the stories of the Star Wars movies). As much as I will always love the classic LEGO mumbles and its comedy based on body language, I think the voice acting works here, and its no surprise that pretty much every LEGO game going forward uses voice acting.
Overall, LEGO Batman 2 is surprisingly ambitious for a LEGO game, but it also doesn't really do that much to reinvent things. Not a bad thing at all for me, since, once again, I go to LEGO games for the comforting familiarity, but your mileage may vary. I will be trying to explore the open world, if anything just to find and unlock my favorite characters, but the game is absolutely finished as of my time writing this review. LEGO Batman 2 gets a good 4 stars from me, the same score as its predecessor.
Gameplay wise, yea its the exact same song and dance as other LEGO games, but again that's never a complaint with these games for me. The main way LEGO Batman 2 differentiates itself from the others is through the big open world, which, of course, has many different places to explore. It's FAR from the deepest open world, but it was quite ambitious for a LEGO game and I remember spending countless hours exploring it as a kid. The world is now the primary way to unlock characters; instead of just unlocking characters through a menu, you need to find them all throughout the many areas in the game and defeat them in a mini boss fight, only after which you get the option to purchase them afterwards. If its just a regular enemy you're looking to unlock, though, all you need to do is beat up a few of them until one of them surrenders, then you can buy 'em. I skipped out on exploration so I could tunnel-vision on the story, so I'm mostly relying on memory to describe this. Its usually better to complete it first before exploring since you have to unlock the option to play as whoever you want, which just makes things a lot easier since you can pick a character like Superman or Green Lantern to fly around Gotham. Speaking of which, unfortunately the flying in the open world feels just as weird and unintuitive as I remember it feeling as a kid; you have to hold X (I'm using an Xbox controller) to move and there's a pointer you move with the stick that dictates where you're going. It's great as a quick way to get around, sure, but turning feels terrible and you move too fast to be able to precisely land anywhere. It just feels very clunky and that's really frustrating when its absolutely going to be your main way of getting around unless you REALLY like walking (playing as The Flash at least makes that more bearable though). Levels in the Story Mode do have some new things, but most are just those character-specific puzzle gimmicks that LEGO games always add more of to spice up the gameplay a little. I do notice the way the levels are structured is a little different, mainly in that they seem to go for more of a cinematic vibe with varying lengths and a few different segments of the same level. This would make sense considering that this game actually puts more emphasis on its story, which I'll get to when I get to my usual dedicated story paragraph. Some levels are very short, others feel absurdly long; that's not something that I experienced with the first LEGO Batman since each level felt similar in length to me. One level in LEGO Batman 2 - Chemical Crisis - is so long that it takes around 310,000 studs to get the Super Hero rank (for reference most levels in this game typically take about 120,000 at most) and YouTube videos about this level tend to be around the 40-50 minute range, sometimes 30 minutes if the player is quick and can optimize the run. Worth noting that the game does have checkpoints and an option to save at certain points of levels, so its not like this is egregious, but nonetheless it is pretty odd with how consistent most older LEGO games have felt in terms of length.
Interestingly enough, LEGO Batman 2 does have a bit more of a focus on story. For one, its the first LEGO game to have full-on voice acting, and it definitely takes advantage of this with its many cutscenes. The game managed to get some big name voice actors like Nolan North, Troy Baker, Clancy Brown, Rob Paulson, and Laura Bailey, among others. The humor shifts a little away from typical LEGO stuff, focusing less on things like slapstick or body language and more on dialogue based gags like Batman always being grumpy after being helped by Superman. The story itself starts with Bruce Wayne nearly receiving a Man of the Year award, then The Joker pulls a usual Joker move and crashes the party with other members of Batman's usual rogue gallery. Once Batman puts them all back in Arkham Asylum, Lex Luthor decides to test his new invention - the Deconstructor - on the walls of Arkham Asylum to free The Joker and make a deal with him. He wants The Joker's laughing gas to force people to have a positive opinion of him so he'll win the presidential election, while The Joker's only real rewards are freedom and causing mayhem...so, of course, the clown gladly accepts, and he also frees all the other villains while he's at it. They turn out to be quite a devious combo, even having discovered where the Batcave was and making a wreck of it. Superman and Batman must work together to take down their worst enemies, but, despite Superman being overpowered, its still difficult. Lex knows to put Kryptonite everywhere, so Superman can't just waltz in. The last few missions focus on the absolute chaos Lex and The Joker are causing with the giant clown mech they built, ending on nearly destroying Wayne Manor before the Justice League come in to end things. At the end of the day, its not much of a story, but its still a whole lot more than any other LEGO game at the time tried to have (if you don't count the LEGO Star Wars games retelling the stories of the Star Wars movies). As much as I will always love the classic LEGO mumbles and its comedy based on body language, I think the voice acting works here, and its no surprise that pretty much every LEGO game going forward uses voice acting.
Overall, LEGO Batman 2 is surprisingly ambitious for a LEGO game, but it also doesn't really do that much to reinvent things. Not a bad thing at all for me, since, once again, I go to LEGO games for the comforting familiarity, but your mileage may vary. I will be trying to explore the open world, if anything just to find and unlock my favorite characters, but the game is absolutely finished as of my time writing this review. LEGO Batman 2 gets a good 4 stars from me, the same score as its predecessor.
This review contains spoilers
Since I just beat LEGO Star Wars (The Complete Saga), I figured I would start playing through some more LEGO games. What better than to go for another LEGO game I'm nostalgic for, right? As of typing this review, I've just beat both the hero and villain story missions for LEGO Batman. Ultimately, this game took me just a few hours less to complete than LEGO Star Wars TCS, and I ended with 71.2% completion. Unlocked all characters and vehicles except for Hush and Ra's Al Ghul, since the requirements for these two characters are to find all the civilians hidden in most levels and complete the game 100%, respectively.
Gameplay wise, yea this is absolutely the standard LEGO game, but I don't mind at all since I go to these games for the comfortable familiarity (sort of like my relationship with Musou games). Solve rudimentary puzzles, beat up any enemy in your way, destroy any object you can for Studs, use those Studs to buy more characters and/or fun little Extras, occasionally play a vehicle level that's always worse than the regular ones...the whole shebang. However, LEGO Batman did have some things unique to it for a LEGO game released in 2008. For one, it tries to spice up combat just a little bit by including a score multiplier to any Studs you grab within a very short period of time for keeping a combo going. Its a small thing and unfortunately I found that some characters just can't really make much use of it, but it compliments the other new combat feature: grabs. You can grab with B and then press A or X (I'm on an Xbox controller) to toss them, which grants you some studs. Also, in my opinion, characters generally feel a lot more unique in this game, aside from all the random filler characters which are way too plentiful. Many characters have unique grabs and throws, which were fun to look at but can be quite lengthy. The kinds of character-specific hazards feel pretty different from LEGO Star Wars and it just feels like there's more of them this time around. Toxic gas that only characters like The Joker or Poison Ivy can pass through, pink slushy goop and water that you need Mr. Freeze to freeze, electric terminals that only The Joker can activate, question mark doors that Scarecrow and Riddler can interact with, hot LEGO pieces that can only be built by Batman in his heat suit...there's a lot of this kind of thing and its pretty cool. I get the feeling part of it was probably inspired by how Batman seemingly has a suit for every occasion in this game, which eventually got expanded into things like unique villain powers.
There isn't much of a story here, but there does seem to be more emphasis on cutscenes in this game than in LEGO Star Wars, so I will be talking about that. They're more of a vessel for dispersing the lighthearted comedy LEGO games are iconic for rather than telling much of a story, though. The game's split up into Episodes, just like LEGO Star Wars, with about 5 or 6 levels each. 3 Episodes for the heroes, 3 Episodes for the villains, a different story for each. For the heroes, each Episode revolves around chasing a different main bad guy, who has a few other members of Batman's rogue gallery working with them to achieve some sort of villainous goal. For both heroes and villains, Episode 1 focuses on Riddler, Episode 2 is about The Penguin, and Episode 3 stars The Joker. I've never been much of a Batman fan aside from enjoying a movie or video game here and there, so I can't comment on what this game is using as inspiration for the story or these versions of the characters. Overall I found this pretty enjoyable, its rather amusing how Cat Woman and Killer Moth sometimes act like the animals they're based on and Robin is an absolute cornball here.
I don't know if I'd say LEGO Batman is better or worse than LEGO Star Wars. They feel about the same in quality and LEGO Batman's differences are more so just something nice to see that helps give the game its own identity rather than something that's directly better. I will say that I think campy superheroes fit the LEGO brand better than Star Wars and, considering just how many superhero LEGO games we've gotten over the years, I think most people agree with that. This game gets a solid 4 stars from me. I'll get to LEGO Batman 2 eventually, which might be more fun to play since I have much fonder clearer memories of that one for things like wandering the big hub world.
Gameplay wise, yea this is absolutely the standard LEGO game, but I don't mind at all since I go to these games for the comfortable familiarity (sort of like my relationship with Musou games). Solve rudimentary puzzles, beat up any enemy in your way, destroy any object you can for Studs, use those Studs to buy more characters and/or fun little Extras, occasionally play a vehicle level that's always worse than the regular ones...the whole shebang. However, LEGO Batman did have some things unique to it for a LEGO game released in 2008. For one, it tries to spice up combat just a little bit by including a score multiplier to any Studs you grab within a very short period of time for keeping a combo going. Its a small thing and unfortunately I found that some characters just can't really make much use of it, but it compliments the other new combat feature: grabs. You can grab with B and then press A or X (I'm on an Xbox controller) to toss them, which grants you some studs. Also, in my opinion, characters generally feel a lot more unique in this game, aside from all the random filler characters which are way too plentiful. Many characters have unique grabs and throws, which were fun to look at but can be quite lengthy. The kinds of character-specific hazards feel pretty different from LEGO Star Wars and it just feels like there's more of them this time around. Toxic gas that only characters like The Joker or Poison Ivy can pass through, pink slushy goop and water that you need Mr. Freeze to freeze, electric terminals that only The Joker can activate, question mark doors that Scarecrow and Riddler can interact with, hot LEGO pieces that can only be built by Batman in his heat suit...there's a lot of this kind of thing and its pretty cool. I get the feeling part of it was probably inspired by how Batman seemingly has a suit for every occasion in this game, which eventually got expanded into things like unique villain powers.
There isn't much of a story here, but there does seem to be more emphasis on cutscenes in this game than in LEGO Star Wars, so I will be talking about that. They're more of a vessel for dispersing the lighthearted comedy LEGO games are iconic for rather than telling much of a story, though. The game's split up into Episodes, just like LEGO Star Wars, with about 5 or 6 levels each. 3 Episodes for the heroes, 3 Episodes for the villains, a different story for each. For the heroes, each Episode revolves around chasing a different main bad guy, who has a few other members of Batman's rogue gallery working with them to achieve some sort of villainous goal. For both heroes and villains, Episode 1 focuses on Riddler, Episode 2 is about The Penguin, and Episode 3 stars The Joker. I've never been much of a Batman fan aside from enjoying a movie or video game here and there, so I can't comment on what this game is using as inspiration for the story or these versions of the characters. Overall I found this pretty enjoyable, its rather amusing how Cat Woman and Killer Moth sometimes act like the animals they're based on and Robin is an absolute cornball here.
I don't know if I'd say LEGO Batman is better or worse than LEGO Star Wars. They feel about the same in quality and LEGO Batman's differences are more so just something nice to see that helps give the game its own identity rather than something that's directly better. I will say that I think campy superheroes fit the LEGO brand better than Star Wars and, considering just how many superhero LEGO games we've gotten over the years, I think most people agree with that. This game gets a solid 4 stars from me. I'll get to LEGO Batman 2 eventually, which might be more fun to play since I have much fonder clearer memories of that one for things like wandering the big hub world.
2017
This review contains spoilers
West of Loathing is a game that honestly surprised me in many ways. Its a small and short game - especially when compared to the vast majority of RPG games - but its also loaded with side quests and even little instances of meaningful player choice, so you always feel like you're being productive. One look perusing through the wiki revealed a good amount of stuff I didn't even get to see despite how thorough I was with completing as many side quests and discovering as many locations as I could get. I'd definitely say I enjoyed my time with this one.
As far as gameplay goes, West of Loathing is a bit basic for RPG standards, but it does still have some kind of depth to it. Get ready to read a lot, since you get some text to read when you do just about anything and there's zero voice acting. Personally, I don't mind this at all, but if that doesn't sound appealing to you then you may not be a big fan of the game. You can explore the overworld, interact with or pick up stuff in the environment, talk with people...you know, typical RPG overworld things. The real unique thing with it comes from how you can interact, whether its through dialogue or objects. If you encounter a potential enemy, sometimes the game will let you handle the situation in a different way using a specific skill or item. West of Loathing has a robust XP system with a bunch of different skills you can use for different things (typically in the form of skill checks in interaction to do a specific thing). Of course, there's also the usual stats for combat. Your character doesn't level up in this game, so all the XP you get is free for you to dump into whichever skill or stat you want to level up. Some of these skills are ones you need to unlock through various methods, with some being earned through more quirky or obscure ways (like how if you flush a bunch of toilets you find in the overworld you get a skill that permanently increases your Muscle stat by 3) while others are learned through books you can find. An easy example to point to is Foraging, which I learned from a book at the very start of the game and was perhaps my most used skill since it lets you get food, alcohol, or combat items from the special plants you come across in the overworld. There's also some skills that have no real use and are just there for some extra flavor, like how Nostalgia Mode puts the game in a sepia filter and Stupid Walking makes your character's walk animation cycle through a few different goofy animations. Also, the combat is pretty basic. It's turn based and every battle is on a simple grid. Whenever a fight's more difficult or has a bunch of enemies, you'll definitely need to strategize more (I died a surprising amount of times in this game), and you do get a decent amount of skills and combat items to play around with in fights. In most fights, though, you can get away with just blitzing your foes, especially if you were focusing intently on boosting the most important stats for your class like I was. It helps that your health is fully restored before every fight. Oh yea, forgot to mention classes; I can't speak as to how the Snake Oiler or Beanslinger play (as far as I know they're pretty much just "the gun class" and "the wizard class" respectively), but I played a Cow Puncher which is basically this game's warrior or fighter focusing mostly on punch attacks. You can definitely be more flexible with your builds thanks to the wide variety of gear and items that can increase your stats by a ton, which was helpful for whenever I needed a Mysticality (stat for spell casting) or Moxie (stat for shooting) stat check, but generally you'll want to focus on what your class excels at.
Despite having so much dialogue, the game doesn't really have much of a main plot. Basically, you've been living out in the boonies for forever, so now you're looking to head out and start an adventure. You look to head far west, so eventually you do that. That's...kinda it for the main story. The game's final boss, if you can even call him that, is some random guy named Norton who proclaims himself an emperor and throws some dust in your eyes when you don't have a crown to give him. You beat him up because he did that to you and then the game gives a sort of "ending" that isn't really an ending since you can just continue playing the game. Maybe there's some kind of true ending I missed, I dunno. The real meat to the story comes from all the lore about this world that you learn as you make your journey throughout West of Loathing's surprisingly large amount of areas. Apparently, the wild west is a very strange and sad place overrun by hell cows, the undead, goblins, and clowns. The flavor text of food and potion items often comment on how terrible the living conditions are, with good sanitary food or medicine being nigh impossible to come across. Of course, you come across tons of different people that give quests, which give a bit more context to just how strange this world is. This is a world where you can literally snap a bowlegged man's legs into place, take shrooms to open your third eye, fight the goofiest criminal gangs that commit the dumbest crimes, and come across a drunk horse that's walking around on two legs. The grossest spittoons always have equipment lodged inside them to fish out, flushing a toilet gives you experience, using a pickaxe on a pile of rocks activates a teleporter that takes you to a room built with ancient alien tech...yea, this place is weird. There's absolutely a sense of comedic absurdity to the world at all times, with many moments using ridiculous or dark (or both) humor and a decent mix of satire. One of the most amusing examples of satire in this game in my opinion is in the ghost town of Ghostwood. It sort of makes fun of how ineffective, incompetent, and overly complicated government services like getting an ID or trying to get signings on a ledger can be. It wasn't really laugh-out-loud funny but it's still pretty funny how the game keeps sending you from building to building, which all have such similar names that it can be very easy to lose track of which one you're supposed to go to (especially when their main advice is "next door" which can mean to the direct left or right). Lots of signing and back-and-forths with fetching items, like when you lend your pencil to the mayor to sign the paper, but then need to go back to the mayor's office to get the pencil back so you can sign the paper again. Nonetheless, there are some more serious side stories in the midst of this crazy world, like the ghost of Granny Smith that needs your help to remember the name of her last daughter. One side quest story involves a surprisingly tragic tale of a daughter receiving a haunted doll which the game implies killed her and her entire family. You get a cursed blood goblet with the blood of the massacred family that you can use for a "tea party" with the doll. You get the option to shatter the goblet, but I assumed that'd start a combat encounter, so I didn't do that.
To wrap things up: I think West of Loathing is a good example of a short game that uses its time wisely. There's a bunch of side content, differing outcomes depending on your actions in-game, and customization that spice the game up. If you don't bother with any side stuff, you could probably complete this game in like 5 hours, but if you're looking to see everything the game has to offer, you may spend more time than I did (for reference, I took 15 hours)...especially if you're trying to get all the Achievements, since that's impossible to do without having multiple playthroughs. Overall, I was surprised by how much I liked my time with it. Solid 4 stars from me.
As far as gameplay goes, West of Loathing is a bit basic for RPG standards, but it does still have some kind of depth to it. Get ready to read a lot, since you get some text to read when you do just about anything and there's zero voice acting. Personally, I don't mind this at all, but if that doesn't sound appealing to you then you may not be a big fan of the game. You can explore the overworld, interact with or pick up stuff in the environment, talk with people...you know, typical RPG overworld things. The real unique thing with it comes from how you can interact, whether its through dialogue or objects. If you encounter a potential enemy, sometimes the game will let you handle the situation in a different way using a specific skill or item. West of Loathing has a robust XP system with a bunch of different skills you can use for different things (typically in the form of skill checks in interaction to do a specific thing). Of course, there's also the usual stats for combat. Your character doesn't level up in this game, so all the XP you get is free for you to dump into whichever skill or stat you want to level up. Some of these skills are ones you need to unlock through various methods, with some being earned through more quirky or obscure ways (like how if you flush a bunch of toilets you find in the overworld you get a skill that permanently increases your Muscle stat by 3) while others are learned through books you can find. An easy example to point to is Foraging, which I learned from a book at the very start of the game and was perhaps my most used skill since it lets you get food, alcohol, or combat items from the special plants you come across in the overworld. There's also some skills that have no real use and are just there for some extra flavor, like how Nostalgia Mode puts the game in a sepia filter and Stupid Walking makes your character's walk animation cycle through a few different goofy animations. Also, the combat is pretty basic. It's turn based and every battle is on a simple grid. Whenever a fight's more difficult or has a bunch of enemies, you'll definitely need to strategize more (I died a surprising amount of times in this game), and you do get a decent amount of skills and combat items to play around with in fights. In most fights, though, you can get away with just blitzing your foes, especially if you were focusing intently on boosting the most important stats for your class like I was. It helps that your health is fully restored before every fight. Oh yea, forgot to mention classes; I can't speak as to how the Snake Oiler or Beanslinger play (as far as I know they're pretty much just "the gun class" and "the wizard class" respectively), but I played a Cow Puncher which is basically this game's warrior or fighter focusing mostly on punch attacks. You can definitely be more flexible with your builds thanks to the wide variety of gear and items that can increase your stats by a ton, which was helpful for whenever I needed a Mysticality (stat for spell casting) or Moxie (stat for shooting) stat check, but generally you'll want to focus on what your class excels at.
Despite having so much dialogue, the game doesn't really have much of a main plot. Basically, you've been living out in the boonies for forever, so now you're looking to head out and start an adventure. You look to head far west, so eventually you do that. That's...kinda it for the main story. The game's final boss, if you can even call him that, is some random guy named Norton who proclaims himself an emperor and throws some dust in your eyes when you don't have a crown to give him. You beat him up because he did that to you and then the game gives a sort of "ending" that isn't really an ending since you can just continue playing the game. Maybe there's some kind of true ending I missed, I dunno. The real meat to the story comes from all the lore about this world that you learn as you make your journey throughout West of Loathing's surprisingly large amount of areas. Apparently, the wild west is a very strange and sad place overrun by hell cows, the undead, goblins, and clowns. The flavor text of food and potion items often comment on how terrible the living conditions are, with good sanitary food or medicine being nigh impossible to come across. Of course, you come across tons of different people that give quests, which give a bit more context to just how strange this world is. This is a world where you can literally snap a bowlegged man's legs into place, take shrooms to open your third eye, fight the goofiest criminal gangs that commit the dumbest crimes, and come across a drunk horse that's walking around on two legs. The grossest spittoons always have equipment lodged inside them to fish out, flushing a toilet gives you experience, using a pickaxe on a pile of rocks activates a teleporter that takes you to a room built with ancient alien tech...yea, this place is weird. There's absolutely a sense of comedic absurdity to the world at all times, with many moments using ridiculous or dark (or both) humor and a decent mix of satire. One of the most amusing examples of satire in this game in my opinion is in the ghost town of Ghostwood. It sort of makes fun of how ineffective, incompetent, and overly complicated government services like getting an ID or trying to get signings on a ledger can be. It wasn't really laugh-out-loud funny but it's still pretty funny how the game keeps sending you from building to building, which all have such similar names that it can be very easy to lose track of which one you're supposed to go to (especially when their main advice is "next door" which can mean to the direct left or right). Lots of signing and back-and-forths with fetching items, like when you lend your pencil to the mayor to sign the paper, but then need to go back to the mayor's office to get the pencil back so you can sign the paper again. Nonetheless, there are some more serious side stories in the midst of this crazy world, like the ghost of Granny Smith that needs your help to remember the name of her last daughter. One side quest story involves a surprisingly tragic tale of a daughter receiving a haunted doll which the game implies killed her and her entire family. You get a cursed blood goblet with the blood of the massacred family that you can use for a "tea party" with the doll. You get the option to shatter the goblet, but I assumed that'd start a combat encounter, so I didn't do that.
To wrap things up: I think West of Loathing is a good example of a short game that uses its time wisely. There's a bunch of side content, differing outcomes depending on your actions in-game, and customization that spice the game up. If you don't bother with any side stuff, you could probably complete this game in like 5 hours, but if you're looking to see everything the game has to offer, you may spend more time than I did (for reference, I took 15 hours)...especially if you're trying to get all the Achievements, since that's impossible to do without having multiple playthroughs. Overall, I was surprised by how much I liked my time with it. Solid 4 stars from me.
2021
This review contains spoilers
I'd say I had a fun time with Spectacular Sparky. Its definitely a bite-sized game, but it did still have a good amount of content in it for what it is. Took me 3 hours to beat this one.
The gameplay is definitely mainly what you're here for with this sort of game. I thought it was good overall, though it did trip me up my first time playing since some parts of the design were things I had to get used to. Spectacular Sparky is a shoot-'em-up platformer, sort of like Mega Man or Cuphead. Add in a dash of Contra with the temporary weapons that change the way your gun works, of which you can grab two and cycle between. There's five regular stages, each with four levels (think of it like how classic Sonic games have the levels split into Acts) that always end with a boss, and three ship shooter levels that are one-and-done. Of course, its always going to be fun melting enemies, but probably my biggest gripe with the gameplay is that there's a heat meter; if you hold down the shoot button for too long, you can't use the gun again for a short recharge time, and you lose whatever new weapon you were using. I've never seen a shoot-'em-up game not just let you fire infinitely and I really don't see any reason why this game needed it, especially since the game does have ship shooting segments that let you fire infinitely (though those also don't have any temporary weapons to grab so maybe that's why). This game also has quite a few moments where it feels like there's enemies you simply can't avoid damage from, so you need to take hits to take them out...which isn't really a big deal, of course, but it can be a little annoying and maybe even result in a death if your health is too low. Aside from my gripes, though, it is a solid little shoot-'em-up. I like the Cuphead style dash that lets you bypass hazards or enemies temporarily, it got a lot of use even if it was a little tricky to get used to the timing of. I thought it was pretty cool that each of the four parts in every level has a boss to call its own; some were pretty tough, others were on the easy side, but I always died at least twice before beating them.
Spectacular Sparky has little to no story, though there is some little sprinkling of lore exposition every now and then like how Dr. Votsit (the final boss) was Sparky's creator or that one of the bosses - Sgt. Blownaparte - is essentially a dictator ruling a totalitarian country with an iron fist. The titular Sparky is an intergalactic bounty hunter working under an ex-soldier shark-pig named Shig, who gives Sparky a new mission for every level. I think the characters will be very hit and miss for most people, since the way they're all written sort of feels like the game is trying too hard to be quirky and silly. The writing is very quippy and its sort of a running gag that any attempt at real story bits is undermined by jokes. Personally, I found it to be pretty charming, but, again, your mileage will vary on how you feel about this sort of thing. I think the best character was probably Sparky himself, who is a self-proclaimed sociopath with a huge ego that loves to wisecrack almost as much as he loves money. There's a recurring gag that he's an obsessive fanboy of Nightshade, a famous fellow bounty hunter, to the point where he's honored that she chose him as her bounty. Also, small shoutout to the voice actors in this game, especially the one for Sparky. I think they did an excellent job selling the cheesiness of this game.
Overall, I think Spectacular Sparky has some really fun characters and enjoyable gameplay, but its not exactly a hidden gem. I would agree with a few other criticisms I've seen lobbied against the game, like how its level design can be pretty repetitive.
The gameplay is definitely mainly what you're here for with this sort of game. I thought it was good overall, though it did trip me up my first time playing since some parts of the design were things I had to get used to. Spectacular Sparky is a shoot-'em-up platformer, sort of like Mega Man or Cuphead. Add in a dash of Contra with the temporary weapons that change the way your gun works, of which you can grab two and cycle between. There's five regular stages, each with four levels (think of it like how classic Sonic games have the levels split into Acts) that always end with a boss, and three ship shooter levels that are one-and-done. Of course, its always going to be fun melting enemies, but probably my biggest gripe with the gameplay is that there's a heat meter; if you hold down the shoot button for too long, you can't use the gun again for a short recharge time, and you lose whatever new weapon you were using. I've never seen a shoot-'em-up game not just let you fire infinitely and I really don't see any reason why this game needed it, especially since the game does have ship shooting segments that let you fire infinitely (though those also don't have any temporary weapons to grab so maybe that's why). This game also has quite a few moments where it feels like there's enemies you simply can't avoid damage from, so you need to take hits to take them out...which isn't really a big deal, of course, but it can be a little annoying and maybe even result in a death if your health is too low. Aside from my gripes, though, it is a solid little shoot-'em-up. I like the Cuphead style dash that lets you bypass hazards or enemies temporarily, it got a lot of use even if it was a little tricky to get used to the timing of. I thought it was pretty cool that each of the four parts in every level has a boss to call its own; some were pretty tough, others were on the easy side, but I always died at least twice before beating them.
Spectacular Sparky has little to no story, though there is some little sprinkling of lore exposition every now and then like how Dr. Votsit (the final boss) was Sparky's creator or that one of the bosses - Sgt. Blownaparte - is essentially a dictator ruling a totalitarian country with an iron fist. The titular Sparky is an intergalactic bounty hunter working under an ex-soldier shark-pig named Shig, who gives Sparky a new mission for every level. I think the characters will be very hit and miss for most people, since the way they're all written sort of feels like the game is trying too hard to be quirky and silly. The writing is very quippy and its sort of a running gag that any attempt at real story bits is undermined by jokes. Personally, I found it to be pretty charming, but, again, your mileage will vary on how you feel about this sort of thing. I think the best character was probably Sparky himself, who is a self-proclaimed sociopath with a huge ego that loves to wisecrack almost as much as he loves money. There's a recurring gag that he's an obsessive fanboy of Nightshade, a famous fellow bounty hunter, to the point where he's honored that she chose him as her bounty. Also, small shoutout to the voice actors in this game, especially the one for Sparky. I think they did an excellent job selling the cheesiness of this game.
Overall, I think Spectacular Sparky has some really fun characters and enjoyable gameplay, but its not exactly a hidden gem. I would agree with a few other criticisms I've seen lobbied against the game, like how its level design can be pretty repetitive.
This review contains spoilers
So, my only knowledge with One Piece is from my time with Pirate Warriors 3 a long while back. There's a whole lot of details I don't really remember about that game as a result, but I do recall it being a fun time. Since this game is its sequel (and the version with all the DLC was on sale for like 8 dollars on Steam), I figured I'd go ahead and grab it. I was looking for a new Musou game to sink my teeth into, anyway, and I did remember enjoying Pirate Warriors 3. Took me about 18 hours to blitz through the campaign, known as "Dramatic Log" in this game, and I only played two of the Treasure Log (basically a bunch of bonus missions) levels so far. I've enjoyed my time with it.
I'll start with gameplay. Well, for the most part its pretty standard Musou affair, but I've already talked about how I love these kinds of games despite them rarely changing things up, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much. The main unique things about Pirate Warriors 4 seem to be the giant characters (this might've been a thing in other Musou games but I've never seen it in one before), destructible buildings, and the glorified skill trees called the Growth system. This is where you increase your health, increase your attack, and all that jazz. You also get four Skills, which are kind of like supers in that they have a cooldown and pack a wallop. Most are just for unleashing a bunch of damage, but others power you up temporarily (they're called Focus Bursts) and there are a few that are more utility like how Brook has a Skill that heals him. You can upgrade Skills and get different kinds to cycle between through the Growth system. Interestingly, this game does not have the iconic Musou bar that the genre is known for, so these Skills seem to have taken the place of it entirely...which isn't too surprising when you see just how powerful they can be. I think the Skills are sort of a double-edge sword when it comes to this game's Musou style gameplay: on one hand, they're great boss destroyers and are pretty fun to use, but on the other hand their existence makes it to where a lot of combat is just waiting on them to go off cooldown so you can smoke your enemies easily. People that miss having to do the old fashioned strings Musou is known for may not appreciate this big focus on "press RT + Y to destroy your enemies". Also, Pirate Warriors 4 takes the Warriors Orochi approach by having each character categorized under a certain archetype: Power, Speed, Fly, and Technique. Each have unique attributes, but, in all honesty, they aren't THAT different from each other (though Fly characters become invincible in their Focus Burst and that's pretty insane). Speaking of characters, I enjoyed most characters the game saddled me with for Drama Log missions, but I'm still experimenting with them to see who my absolute favorite is. I know my favorite Straw Hat to play was Brook, but that's also partly because he's my favorite of the crew as well. In Pirate Warriors 3, my favorites were Brook and Kizaru, though unfortunately I don't have Kizaru unlocked in Pirate Warriors 4 since his requirement is a little hard to reach. Right now, I think my absolute favorite is leaning towards Akainu; I've been playing him through the Treasure Logs and its fun melting my enemies with hot lava. Still, though, I hope I can eventually play all the characters at least once, and my favorite will likely change once I do that.
The story...I don't feel like I can fairly comment on it, since my knowledge on this series is really limited and this game's story feels like it was intended for people more familiar with the series, especially since the final arc is original to this game (which is thankfully pointed out in-game). Nonetheless, the most notable thing about the story to me is just how much seems to be skipped in Pirate Warriors 4, even compared to Pirate Warriors 3. From what I can tell, they kinda just speedrun through a lot of the story by telling good chunks of it all in cutscene form, which was entertaining but left me wondering why we didn't play through some of it. I remember the previous game had us playing through the arcs that introduced characters like Chopper and Brook, but instead those essentially just get abridged retellings so the game can quickly move on to the stuff it wants you to play through. Hell I remember Pirate Warriors 3 made a big deal out of that guy with the big ears that I don't remember the name of, but in this game he doesn't even get so much as a passing mention. I know One Piece is a huge series and I shouldn't expect a game to be the definitive experience, but it was still a little jarring to me, especially since the last three Mission Log arcs feel much less rushed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed what was on display here and I think it was enough to at least get a good grasp on the characters, their motivations, and a general idea of what each of these arcs were about. Again I can't say much since I'm not a One Piece fan, but still I think this was serviceable.
Overall, Pirate Warriors 4 is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Its a fun time and it is indeed another Musou game, but it doesn't feel all that remarkable, especially since I'm not already a One Piece fan. Gets a perfectly fine 3.5 stars from me.
I'll start with gameplay. Well, for the most part its pretty standard Musou affair, but I've already talked about how I love these kinds of games despite them rarely changing things up, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much. The main unique things about Pirate Warriors 4 seem to be the giant characters (this might've been a thing in other Musou games but I've never seen it in one before), destructible buildings, and the glorified skill trees called the Growth system. This is where you increase your health, increase your attack, and all that jazz. You also get four Skills, which are kind of like supers in that they have a cooldown and pack a wallop. Most are just for unleashing a bunch of damage, but others power you up temporarily (they're called Focus Bursts) and there are a few that are more utility like how Brook has a Skill that heals him. You can upgrade Skills and get different kinds to cycle between through the Growth system. Interestingly, this game does not have the iconic Musou bar that the genre is known for, so these Skills seem to have taken the place of it entirely...which isn't too surprising when you see just how powerful they can be. I think the Skills are sort of a double-edge sword when it comes to this game's Musou style gameplay: on one hand, they're great boss destroyers and are pretty fun to use, but on the other hand their existence makes it to where a lot of combat is just waiting on them to go off cooldown so you can smoke your enemies easily. People that miss having to do the old fashioned strings Musou is known for may not appreciate this big focus on "press RT + Y to destroy your enemies". Also, Pirate Warriors 4 takes the Warriors Orochi approach by having each character categorized under a certain archetype: Power, Speed, Fly, and Technique. Each have unique attributes, but, in all honesty, they aren't THAT different from each other (though Fly characters become invincible in their Focus Burst and that's pretty insane). Speaking of characters, I enjoyed most characters the game saddled me with for Drama Log missions, but I'm still experimenting with them to see who my absolute favorite is. I know my favorite Straw Hat to play was Brook, but that's also partly because he's my favorite of the crew as well. In Pirate Warriors 3, my favorites were Brook and Kizaru, though unfortunately I don't have Kizaru unlocked in Pirate Warriors 4 since his requirement is a little hard to reach. Right now, I think my absolute favorite is leaning towards Akainu; I've been playing him through the Treasure Logs and its fun melting my enemies with hot lava. Still, though, I hope I can eventually play all the characters at least once, and my favorite will likely change once I do that.
The story...I don't feel like I can fairly comment on it, since my knowledge on this series is really limited and this game's story feels like it was intended for people more familiar with the series, especially since the final arc is original to this game (which is thankfully pointed out in-game). Nonetheless, the most notable thing about the story to me is just how much seems to be skipped in Pirate Warriors 4, even compared to Pirate Warriors 3. From what I can tell, they kinda just speedrun through a lot of the story by telling good chunks of it all in cutscene form, which was entertaining but left me wondering why we didn't play through some of it. I remember the previous game had us playing through the arcs that introduced characters like Chopper and Brook, but instead those essentially just get abridged retellings so the game can quickly move on to the stuff it wants you to play through. Hell I remember Pirate Warriors 3 made a big deal out of that guy with the big ears that I don't remember the name of, but in this game he doesn't even get so much as a passing mention. I know One Piece is a huge series and I shouldn't expect a game to be the definitive experience, but it was still a little jarring to me, especially since the last three Mission Log arcs feel much less rushed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed what was on display here and I think it was enough to at least get a good grasp on the characters, their motivations, and a general idea of what each of these arcs were about. Again I can't say much since I'm not a One Piece fan, but still I think this was serviceable.
Overall, Pirate Warriors 4 is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Its a fun time and it is indeed another Musou game, but it doesn't feel all that remarkable, especially since I'm not already a One Piece fan. Gets a perfectly fine 3.5 stars from me.
2000
This review contains spoilers
I'm really surprised by just how mixed my thoughts are regarding my time with this game. I think I'd ultimately say it was a fun romp overall, but there's a good amount of things I'm either disappointed with or just found underwhelming. It took me a whopping 62 hours to beat this game on my Wii U, which was admittedly stretched out considered the times I left the console on accidentally but is still mostly accurate (and was a big surprise to me). I had to take breaks from playing for a while since, in all honesty, the game was really losing me in the early game and portions of the midgame. Nonetheless, I'm here since I did end up beating it.
I'll start with gameplay, as I usually do. This will be the start of MANY times I compare Paper Mario to Super Mario RPG, but with how similar they are (and the fact that this game was famously called Super Mario RPG 2 at one point), I don't think that's out of line. Paper Mario's combat sort of takes the base Super Mario RPG formula, mainly seen through including that game's unique gimmick of timed hits - now called Action Commands - and the inclusion of abilities you need to do different actions with to increase the power of (like rapidly flicking the stick backwards or holding A and releasing at the right time). They even call the resource you use for these abilities Flower Points, just like in Super Mario RPG. Weirdly enough, you don't start with the ability to do Action Commands, but you get it so early in the game that it makes me wonder what the point of barring it through progression was. One major way the combat deviates from Super Mario RPG is that certain enemies are immune to certain attacks, like fire enemies can't be hit by fire abilities, you can't touch a flying enemy with your hammer, or some tough enemies can't be jumped on. That's all fine and dandy, but, in my opinion, the real way this game stands out is through Badges. They're sort of like this game's gear system if you don't count the boots and hammer upgrades you get throughout the game, but there aren't many typical JRPG stats to increase, so the Badges instead get to shine through having really unique effects. Some give you access to a new move, some simply just make Mario stronger through buffing stats (more FP or more HP for example), some have useful utility effects like making Action Commands easier to pull off or letting you jump on spiky enemies, and the rest are more so just miscellaneous stuff like jump sound effects or joke badges no one would ever seriously use. I expected them to not be anything all that interesting, but once I started grabbing some unique ones and increasing my Badge Points a little, I found this to be a really interesting system. There are a TON of them in the game and I found it fun to try creating builds that have good Badge synergy. There's probably tens of hundreds of builds people have come up with online finding ways to make good use out of tons of Badges. Of course, its also worth mentioning Partners. They're a little different from Super Mario RPG's party members in a few ways, perhaps most notably in that they have special effects in the overworld whenever you press down on the C-Stick. These are mostly used to solve puzzles, like how Bombette can blow up cracks in the wall or how Parakarry can lift you to a platform you can't reach. Overall, the combat is something that starts out very boring in my opinion, but blossoms into something much more engaging when you get further in the game. You unlock more Badges, more moves, more Partners, until suddenly you're actually thinking about what you're doing and the game becomes really fun. The early game probably felt like the most boring part of the game to me, though, and unfortunately there were some spots later on that also bored me. Imo it just takes too long to really get into the meat of Badges and Partners.
The story, world, and characters of Paper Mario is probably where I feel the most divided. The story moves away from Super Mario RPG's tendency to break the Mario series staple tropes, though Paper Mario's story does still take inspiration from SMRPG's story and it does take risks in its own way. Whereas Super Mario RPG almost seemed to revel in its weirdness, introducing you to bizarre lands and enemies that the Mario series has never seen before with only a small mix of regular Mario stuff in-between, Paper Mario seems to want to ground itself in established Mario series territory. The vast majority of enemies and characters in the game are based on an already existing Mario species, from your basic Koopa to the Fuzzies. The locations are unique, but feasibly feel like something that could exist in a mainline Mario game, like the snowy village hosting a bunch of gossip-heavy penguins or the boo mansion in a spooky forest that seems to have inspired Luigi's Mansion at least a little bit. I was genuinely not expecting to see Yoshi's Island, though, so that was a pleasant little surprise. I also thought it was pretty interesting seeing some friendly versions of the enemy species for once, since species like Goombas and Lakitus have been established as purely enemies for the longest time. I'm still not sure if I like this direction of sticking to more "Mario-y" themes and characters rather than Super Mario RPG's menagerie of strangeness, but I do think it works well for this game. As for the story itself, the spine is as basic as it can be: Princess Peach gets kidnapped yet again, and its once again up to Mario to save her. He soon finds out he must rescue the seven Star Spirits so that he can bring wishes back to all the people of this world. Bowser stole the star rod and used its wish granting powers for evil, so go beat him up and save everyone. Frankly, though, if you were expecting a grand story in a Mario game, I think you're a silly goose, so I'm not about to complain about that. I think most people will agree that where this game truly shines is in the characters, and, of course, I must share that opinion. Even the regular townsfolk can have pretty amusing or plain fun dialogue. In all honesty, I do think this game is the weakest out of the Mario RPG games I've played when it comes to humor and charm, but when these games are so good at it, it's always hard to pick a worst. My favorite character is Kolorado; his dialogue was always really fun to read since he's a hasty, over-the-top, extremely British explorer who's obsessed with treasure and has the attention span of a squirrel. He also likes to say poppycock a lot, and admittedly that got a stupid grin out of me every time.
I think I definitely enjoyed my time with Paper Mario overall and most my opinions on it are positive. I'm mostly just mixed as far as gameplay goes since the beginning and portions of the midgame felt pretty boring to me. I didn't mention this in the review, but I actually died a lot in the early parts of this game and that wasn't very fun either. And, of course, I already mentioned that I'm not sure if I like this "back to basics" approach to story, characters, and world in comparison to what Super Mario RPG did. Still, though, I think I can confidently say the game is a 3.5 for me. Far from bad, but it did have some rough spots that made me take considerable breaks from the game.
I'll start with gameplay, as I usually do. This will be the start of MANY times I compare Paper Mario to Super Mario RPG, but with how similar they are (and the fact that this game was famously called Super Mario RPG 2 at one point), I don't think that's out of line. Paper Mario's combat sort of takes the base Super Mario RPG formula, mainly seen through including that game's unique gimmick of timed hits - now called Action Commands - and the inclusion of abilities you need to do different actions with to increase the power of (like rapidly flicking the stick backwards or holding A and releasing at the right time). They even call the resource you use for these abilities Flower Points, just like in Super Mario RPG. Weirdly enough, you don't start with the ability to do Action Commands, but you get it so early in the game that it makes me wonder what the point of barring it through progression was. One major way the combat deviates from Super Mario RPG is that certain enemies are immune to certain attacks, like fire enemies can't be hit by fire abilities, you can't touch a flying enemy with your hammer, or some tough enemies can't be jumped on. That's all fine and dandy, but, in my opinion, the real way this game stands out is through Badges. They're sort of like this game's gear system if you don't count the boots and hammer upgrades you get throughout the game, but there aren't many typical JRPG stats to increase, so the Badges instead get to shine through having really unique effects. Some give you access to a new move, some simply just make Mario stronger through buffing stats (more FP or more HP for example), some have useful utility effects like making Action Commands easier to pull off or letting you jump on spiky enemies, and the rest are more so just miscellaneous stuff like jump sound effects or joke badges no one would ever seriously use. I expected them to not be anything all that interesting, but once I started grabbing some unique ones and increasing my Badge Points a little, I found this to be a really interesting system. There are a TON of them in the game and I found it fun to try creating builds that have good Badge synergy. There's probably tens of hundreds of builds people have come up with online finding ways to make good use out of tons of Badges. Of course, its also worth mentioning Partners. They're a little different from Super Mario RPG's party members in a few ways, perhaps most notably in that they have special effects in the overworld whenever you press down on the C-Stick. These are mostly used to solve puzzles, like how Bombette can blow up cracks in the wall or how Parakarry can lift you to a platform you can't reach. Overall, the combat is something that starts out very boring in my opinion, but blossoms into something much more engaging when you get further in the game. You unlock more Badges, more moves, more Partners, until suddenly you're actually thinking about what you're doing and the game becomes really fun. The early game probably felt like the most boring part of the game to me, though, and unfortunately there were some spots later on that also bored me. Imo it just takes too long to really get into the meat of Badges and Partners.
The story, world, and characters of Paper Mario is probably where I feel the most divided. The story moves away from Super Mario RPG's tendency to break the Mario series staple tropes, though Paper Mario's story does still take inspiration from SMRPG's story and it does take risks in its own way. Whereas Super Mario RPG almost seemed to revel in its weirdness, introducing you to bizarre lands and enemies that the Mario series has never seen before with only a small mix of regular Mario stuff in-between, Paper Mario seems to want to ground itself in established Mario series territory. The vast majority of enemies and characters in the game are based on an already existing Mario species, from your basic Koopa to the Fuzzies. The locations are unique, but feasibly feel like something that could exist in a mainline Mario game, like the snowy village hosting a bunch of gossip-heavy penguins or the boo mansion in a spooky forest that seems to have inspired Luigi's Mansion at least a little bit. I was genuinely not expecting to see Yoshi's Island, though, so that was a pleasant little surprise. I also thought it was pretty interesting seeing some friendly versions of the enemy species for once, since species like Goombas and Lakitus have been established as purely enemies for the longest time. I'm still not sure if I like this direction of sticking to more "Mario-y" themes and characters rather than Super Mario RPG's menagerie of strangeness, but I do think it works well for this game. As for the story itself, the spine is as basic as it can be: Princess Peach gets kidnapped yet again, and its once again up to Mario to save her. He soon finds out he must rescue the seven Star Spirits so that he can bring wishes back to all the people of this world. Bowser stole the star rod and used its wish granting powers for evil, so go beat him up and save everyone. Frankly, though, if you were expecting a grand story in a Mario game, I think you're a silly goose, so I'm not about to complain about that. I think most people will agree that where this game truly shines is in the characters, and, of course, I must share that opinion. Even the regular townsfolk can have pretty amusing or plain fun dialogue. In all honesty, I do think this game is the weakest out of the Mario RPG games I've played when it comes to humor and charm, but when these games are so good at it, it's always hard to pick a worst. My favorite character is Kolorado; his dialogue was always really fun to read since he's a hasty, over-the-top, extremely British explorer who's obsessed with treasure and has the attention span of a squirrel. He also likes to say poppycock a lot, and admittedly that got a stupid grin out of me every time.
I think I definitely enjoyed my time with Paper Mario overall and most my opinions on it are positive. I'm mostly just mixed as far as gameplay goes since the beginning and portions of the midgame felt pretty boring to me. I didn't mention this in the review, but I actually died a lot in the early parts of this game and that wasn't very fun either. And, of course, I already mentioned that I'm not sure if I like this "back to basics" approach to story, characters, and world in comparison to what Super Mario RPG did. Still, though, I think I can confidently say the game is a 3.5 for me. Far from bad, but it did have some rough spots that made me take considerable breaks from the game.
This review contains spoilers
To tell the truth, LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (I will refer to it as just TCS for brevity's sake) is a game I wasn't sure about getting. The original two LEGO Star Wars games are ones I hold near and dear to my heart. In fact, they introduced me to Star Wars as a whole, and I have very nostalgic memories of the games. I typically just pop my discs in the PS2 whenever I'm looking for a LEGO Star Wars fix, so I've never owned TCS until recently. I saw it was on sale on Steam for like 4 dollars, and...well, if its that cheap, I lose nothing by buying it. I found myself pleasantly surprised by it, and I've clocked 27 hours in it according to Steam (but 17 hours in-game).
To clarify, my main concern was that this was going to feel pointless to grab since I assumed it was exactly the same as the original games. I already love the games, so I wasn't worried about not enjoying it. For the most part, TCS pretty much is the same, but there's a good amount of nice little changes that improve the game overall and make it feel like a definitive edition package deal of the originals. For me, the little things are what make LEGO games so fun. The core of it is stuff you pretty much know what you're getting, since they're well known for being incredibly easy games and most are licensed games based directly on the source material. That being said, the changes in this game were almost entirely for the better in my opinion. Would you believe me if I told you Count Dooku and Emperor Palpatine didn't have Force Lightning in the original duology? Well, they do now, and frankly they should've had it to begin with. Other small neat changes include Chewbacca being able to tear off the arms of prequel Clone troopers (this wasn't a thing in the first game which had the prequel missions), your ally trying to attack you in the hub if you have a hero as your partner when you're a villain, some additional content like a 2 player arcade mode or characters that weren't present in either the first and second game, and probably more stuff I missed since many of these changes are admittedly quite small. The most changes was for content from the first game based on the prequels. Considering that it was the first of the hundreds of LEGO games out there, its not surprising that it got this treatment. The hub world is now based on the Cantina from the second game, whereas in the first game it was Dexter's Diner. A few levels from the first game got altered significantly: Gunship Cavalry - a mission in Episode 2 - was once an autoscrolling shooter (and a very frustrating one at that since it was so easy to go out of bounds), but it got changed to be uniform with the rest of the ship missions in TCS that were all based on the second LSW game's ship missions. In fact, Episode 2 is the only one that had an entirely new mission added in TCS, which shows the ship chase from the movie featuring Anakin and Obi-Wan hunting down the bounty hunter Zem Wesell. Worth noting that the Pod Racing level also had some major differences, mainly in that its been shortened considerably and made less punishing overall. Also, every level from the first game had locations for Red Bricks added in, since Red Bricks weren't in the first game. Basically nothing from the second game's missions got changed at all. Needless to say, aside from the core of the game being almost entirely the same, TCS did make good changes to the content that I appreciate.
Gameplay wise, TCS is like any other LEGO game. If you've played one, you've pretty much played them all, but honestly that's no knock against them in my opinion since the core is fun. You go through a linear set of missions where the goal is to solve easy puzzles and fight any enemies in your way so that you can progress to the end. Each mission often follows events of the source material the game is based on. Missions are divided by which movie the events depicted take place in, from Episode 1 to Episode 6. Each episode has about 5 or 6 missions in them, plus a bonus mission not related to the story that's unlocked whenever you complete the episode. You're free to do the episodes in any order you like as soon as you complete Episode 1, but I finished them in numerical order anyway. While you're completing these levels, you come across Studs, the currency of the game. You get Studs from doing pretty much any sort of interaction with objects, from destroying them to using the Force for various effects on them. You can then use these Studs in the hub world to unlock characters after beating the story mission necessary to gain the option to buy them (there's also stuff like Extras or vehicles you can grab with Studs). Each character is in a sort of character archetype that has unique powers utilized in the missions, oftentimes needed to either access an optional room or activate important parts of a puzzle. Jedi and Sith have the Force, gun characters have a grapple hook they can use on red target spaces, bounty hunters have bombs to blow up silver objects, Astromech droids and Protocol droids have special terminals to open doors or do other important functions for progression...that sort of thing. This way, unless the character you're playing has no weapons at all (and no other uses like how young Anakin can't do anything in combat but can slip through vents), every character has some kind of purpose to fulfill in a mission. If its just characters you're looking for, then you'll easily be able to afford almost everyone just from playing if you're patient enough to get as many Studs as you possibly can from missions. Admittedly there were a few missions that were such a pain in the neck to keep my Studs on that I just finished them with very few on me. Speaking of which, ship missions are lame and I dislike them. They all play practically the same and they just feel very tedious to get through because of how much focus is put on the torpedos you need to find. The controls are also very odd, far from smooth.
Overall, I think The Complete Saga manages to be a truly definitive package. There are some details I would have liked to see added, like perhaps giving an option to go to Dexter's Diner for those with nostalgia for the first game (like me), and some sore spots of the originals are still there. I was disappointed to see that the ship missions are just as boring and annoying as I remember them being as a kid. Nonetheless, I have little to complain about here as a longtime fan of these games. I enjoyed my time with this.
To clarify, my main concern was that this was going to feel pointless to grab since I assumed it was exactly the same as the original games. I already love the games, so I wasn't worried about not enjoying it. For the most part, TCS pretty much is the same, but there's a good amount of nice little changes that improve the game overall and make it feel like a definitive edition package deal of the originals. For me, the little things are what make LEGO games so fun. The core of it is stuff you pretty much know what you're getting, since they're well known for being incredibly easy games and most are licensed games based directly on the source material. That being said, the changes in this game were almost entirely for the better in my opinion. Would you believe me if I told you Count Dooku and Emperor Palpatine didn't have Force Lightning in the original duology? Well, they do now, and frankly they should've had it to begin with. Other small neat changes include Chewbacca being able to tear off the arms of prequel Clone troopers (this wasn't a thing in the first game which had the prequel missions), your ally trying to attack you in the hub if you have a hero as your partner when you're a villain, some additional content like a 2 player arcade mode or characters that weren't present in either the first and second game, and probably more stuff I missed since many of these changes are admittedly quite small. The most changes was for content from the first game based on the prequels. Considering that it was the first of the hundreds of LEGO games out there, its not surprising that it got this treatment. The hub world is now based on the Cantina from the second game, whereas in the first game it was Dexter's Diner. A few levels from the first game got altered significantly: Gunship Cavalry - a mission in Episode 2 - was once an autoscrolling shooter (and a very frustrating one at that since it was so easy to go out of bounds), but it got changed to be uniform with the rest of the ship missions in TCS that were all based on the second LSW game's ship missions. In fact, Episode 2 is the only one that had an entirely new mission added in TCS, which shows the ship chase from the movie featuring Anakin and Obi-Wan hunting down the bounty hunter Zem Wesell. Worth noting that the Pod Racing level also had some major differences, mainly in that its been shortened considerably and made less punishing overall. Also, every level from the first game had locations for Red Bricks added in, since Red Bricks weren't in the first game. Basically nothing from the second game's missions got changed at all. Needless to say, aside from the core of the game being almost entirely the same, TCS did make good changes to the content that I appreciate.
Gameplay wise, TCS is like any other LEGO game. If you've played one, you've pretty much played them all, but honestly that's no knock against them in my opinion since the core is fun. You go through a linear set of missions where the goal is to solve easy puzzles and fight any enemies in your way so that you can progress to the end. Each mission often follows events of the source material the game is based on. Missions are divided by which movie the events depicted take place in, from Episode 1 to Episode 6. Each episode has about 5 or 6 missions in them, plus a bonus mission not related to the story that's unlocked whenever you complete the episode. You're free to do the episodes in any order you like as soon as you complete Episode 1, but I finished them in numerical order anyway. While you're completing these levels, you come across Studs, the currency of the game. You get Studs from doing pretty much any sort of interaction with objects, from destroying them to using the Force for various effects on them. You can then use these Studs in the hub world to unlock characters after beating the story mission necessary to gain the option to buy them (there's also stuff like Extras or vehicles you can grab with Studs). Each character is in a sort of character archetype that has unique powers utilized in the missions, oftentimes needed to either access an optional room or activate important parts of a puzzle. Jedi and Sith have the Force, gun characters have a grapple hook they can use on red target spaces, bounty hunters have bombs to blow up silver objects, Astromech droids and Protocol droids have special terminals to open doors or do other important functions for progression...that sort of thing. This way, unless the character you're playing has no weapons at all (and no other uses like how young Anakin can't do anything in combat but can slip through vents), every character has some kind of purpose to fulfill in a mission. If its just characters you're looking for, then you'll easily be able to afford almost everyone just from playing if you're patient enough to get as many Studs as you possibly can from missions. Admittedly there were a few missions that were such a pain in the neck to keep my Studs on that I just finished them with very few on me. Speaking of which, ship missions are lame and I dislike them. They all play practically the same and they just feel very tedious to get through because of how much focus is put on the torpedos you need to find. The controls are also very odd, far from smooth.
Overall, I think The Complete Saga manages to be a truly definitive package. There are some details I would have liked to see added, like perhaps giving an option to go to Dexter's Diner for those with nostalgia for the first game (like me), and some sore spots of the originals are still there. I was disappointed to see that the ship missions are just as boring and annoying as I remember them being as a kid. Nonetheless, I have little to complain about here as a longtime fan of these games. I enjoyed my time with this.
2018
This review contains spoilers
Took me a while to get to this one after having played the whole classic God of War trilogy back to back (none of the PSP games or Ascension though since I figured they weren't necessary), but man I think this is a really good game. I genuinely couldn't think of any major complaints I had with it. For those curious, this game took 43 hours to beat. Certainly longer than the average playthrough, but hey I'm a slowpoke with games so that's no shocker.
I'll start with the gameplay. I still came out of this thinking the old games were more fun with the straightforward hack-and-slash style they have, but I found the overhauled combat systems this reboot has to be pretty interesting and fun in its own way. Instead of the magic spells that you casted with mana in the original God of War and God of War II, here you have Runic Attacks, which are basically spells that you press either L1 + R1 or L1 + R2 to activate depending on the type (there's one Runic Attack slot for each of the two types, Heavy and Light). They don't have a cost since there's no mana at all in this game, but they do have a significant cooldown that you can lower through improving your Cooldown stat. Speaking of which, yea this game goes for the whole shebang when it comes to RPG stuff; you got a big skill tree to sink your Experience into, three gear slots (Chest, Wrists, and Waist), enchantments to socket into your gear, Talismans, and weapon pommels. It's not at all hard to understand how any of these work, though, since they just increase your stats and have certain special effects like "High chance to gain a Strength buff after killing an enemy" or something of the sort. There's probably a wide variety of builds you can go for, but I mostly focused on Defense, Vitality, and Strength, though I also managed to get a ton of Runic (stat that dictates how powerful the Runic Attacks are) through the strong gear I got at the end of the game. That's the boring stuff, though. The fun stuff is the actual combat itself, which I thought felt a lot more in-depth than the classic trilogy due to all the moves you can get in the skill tree, even if it did take me a while to get used to it. All those extra moves plus having to remember Atreus is there to shoot arrows at your foes (thank god he can't die lol) might seem a little overwhelming, but you gradually work up to that so you have enough time to get used to everything first.
I was going to include this in the gameplay paragraph, but, in typical Bob fashion, I rambled on too long and now it's its own paragraph. Outside of combat, the exploration of the world feels pretty basic. You unlock fast travel relatively early on, although for some reason you can only go to one point on the map until your travel stone gets upgraded halfway through the game. I don't really understand why they did that, though I suppose it lets you actually see the world while you're traveling on boat to get where you need to go. One thing I will complain about is that this game does the whole open world thing of counting down a hundred different things you can do, but thankfully side-quests are kept to a minimum so I didn't feel like I was running around everywhere before I could continue the story (since I typically like to do side-quests first unless it doesn't feel worth it or is in a very inconvenient spot). It helps that the worlds themselves are actually kind of small and linear for open world standards, so its not like my time playing Skyrim or Breath of the Wild where there's so many things to do and so many places to see that I get completely overwhelmed. Most side activities are just a bunch of small optional stuff, like sometimes you see Odin's ghostly ravens all around the world that you can take down. There's 51 of those ravens if I remember correctly and I only found 5. Similarly, there's a bunch of chests you can find around the world that give you different things, whether that be just some Hacksilver (the currency of this game) or something more rare like resources for crafting and upgrading gear or even items that permanently increase either your health (Iðunn's Apples) or Spartan Rage (Horns of Blood Mead). Sometimes you also come across Yggdrassil Tears, which permanently increase one of your stats by two. There's also entire other realms to explore, with four of them being areas you go to in the main story and two - Muspelheim and Niflheim - being optional content you need to collect some stuff to gain access to (unfortunately you can't go to Asgard, Svartalfheim, or Vanaheim even though they're right there at the realm Travel Gate). Point is, there's a lot of stuff to do, but it never felt overwhelmingly large to me which is a big plus in my opinion.
God of War 2018's story is probably the main selling point of the game. It's very cinematic and atmospheric overall. Frankly I find it impressive how the game is littered with lore all around that you can read in-game whenever you kill a new enemy, learn new information in the story dialogue, or find the glyphs and papers you need. Unfortunately I don't know that much about Norse mythology so I can't attest to how accurate this is, but it was still really cool to read up on in-game. As for the actual story that unfurls while you play the game...man this is some really cool stuff. In my God of War III review, I complained a lot about the ending and how it tried too hard to redeem Kratos. Its been so deeply cemented that he's a terrible person, willing to use most people in his way regardless of if they're innocent or not. Occasionally he does good things, of course, but usually not for anything but his own gain. Sure, he has always had a tragic side to him, since the games establish that he is a broken man tortured by the gods and consumed by vengeance, but frankly the kind of vile acts this man has done makes it to where I'd need some convincing to believe he's a changed man in this game. Unfortunately, we learn basically nothing about how exactly Kratos got to these Scandinavian lands, which I feel should have been pretty important considering that God of War III ends on a completely destroyed Greece and Kratos only barely getting up after stabbing himself with the sword of the gods and beating Zeus to a pulp. This is pretty much a timeskip to a later time, where Kratos has hidden himself from the world and decided to start life over again. Despite my gripes about God of War III's last bits of story, I do think they managed to convincingly show Kratos's growth as a person in this game. He's just as stoic, suspicious of everyone, and cynical as he's always been, and he never really tries to play hero. There's a lot of characters in this game he would have never helped if it weren't for his son convincing him, since, just like the games of the past, Kratos is single-mindedly pursuing his one goal. He does soften up just a little more over time thanks to the efforts of the allies on this journey, though, and in a way that surprisingly felt natural for him since its not like he just becomes a nice guy. He's still stoic, commanding, and distant even by the end, he just grows to trust his son a lot more. Something I really like about how he was handled in this game is with his relationship to Atreus, his son. Atreus is a bit of a handful, as kids tend to be, but he has a very strained relationship with his dad because the man was basically absent in his life until the events of this game. Although Kratos clearly loved Faye - Atreus's mother - a lot, he was also very distant with his son, so Faye basically raised Atreus by herself while Kratos was off doing...uh, whatever he was doing. You can really feel the tension in the early parts of the game, with how cold and detached Kratos is and how frustrated Atreus is. Sadly we never get to see what Faye was like when she was alive or even what she looks like (which is quite unfortunate imo since she is obviously a major character motivation of both Kratos and Atreus), but I suppose that was to service this game's heavy beginning. The goal that starts this whole journey is Kratos and Atreus traveling to disperse Faye's ashes on the tallest mountain to fulfill her dying wish, but, of course, there's a whole lot more to the plot than that. Eventually we meet some of the new allies in this game, my favorites of which being Mimir and the two Dwarf brothers Brok and Sindri. If you know me, you know I love a good comedic relief, which all these guys bring plenty of while still fitting the grisly tone the story mostly has. Soon enough, we meet Freya, though we don't yet know that's Freya until a bit later. She's mostly just there as the resident healer who Kratos often goes back to for help with patching up allies, though she also knows Kratos is a god and tries to nudge him into telling Atreus the truth of who he is. It does feel like a very Kratos thing for him to refuse telling Atreus the truth until Atreus literally gets an illness from being a god who doesn't know he's a god, and even then he's still hiding secrets that do eventually get revealed to Atreus much later...in also similarly dire circumstances, where Kratos is pretty much forced to tell the truth. Honestly, you can really understand why Atreus would be so frustrated with his father, but you can also understand why Kratos wouldn't want to reveal all of this to his son. In a way, his fears are almost vindicated in a segment of the game I see people often hate on (for understandable reasons imo) where Atreus suddenly becomes an egotistical asshole after learning he's a god. Anyway, Baldur is the main villain of this game and honestly he was actually a more interesting villain than I thought he'd be. From his first appearance, you get the impression he's just an immortal lunatic who wants something out of you that he never discloses even after you finally get to kill the bastard, but once you get further in the game you get to learn more about him which makes him an interesting tragic character. Its not until the very end of the game that you learn the reason he keeps chasing you down and fighting you all the time is because he was looking for Faye, presumably because Odin promised Baldur he would get rid of the immortality if he killed Faye. As it turns out, Baldur is the son of Freya, and their relationship is...well, very complicated. Freya used magic to make Baldur immune to everything except for mistletoe (hey that's one bit of Norse myth I've actually heard of before playing this game), meaning he feels no pain at all from anything and he regenerates from any wounds he gets. She did this since she firmly believed it was a blessing to protect him from all harm, but Baldur sees it as a miserable curse that ruined his life and he hates her guts for it. I think its actually a pretty interesting relationship to compare with Kratos and Atreus. The Kratos comparison is obvious and blatantly stated in game: Baldur was consumed by vengeance, willing to do all sorts of terrible things to achieve it, just like Kratos once was. But the parallels in Kratos and Atreus's relationship is in how the bond between Kratos and Atreus could be reforged despite their flaws, meanwhile Baldur was just too vengeful and venomous to reconcile with his mother. The final fight of the game has one last epic fight between Kratos and Baldur, all the while Freya controls a dead giant to try to break it up. You can definitely sympathize with Freya's anguish, but, at the same time, Baldur is too far gone. Even when Baldur is about to choke Freya out, she lets him nearly kill her, and she even gets angry when Kratos stops him. The grief is strong and the whole moment is just really emotionally powerful. Uh, anyway, I think this is the longest story paragraph I've ever written, so to stop myself from droning on even more, I'll just say this was a really great story and I loved it.
Overall, God of War 2018 was a great game in my opinion. Fun gameplay (even if I prefer the classic trilogy's style more), an excellent story, cool lore...lots of stuff to like, not much at all to hate. Earns a splendid 4.5 stars out of me. It was so close to a 5, but it just barely missed the mark for the fact that the combat wasn't as fun as I hoped it'd be. Very curious to try out Ragnarok whenever I get that.
I'll start with the gameplay. I still came out of this thinking the old games were more fun with the straightforward hack-and-slash style they have, but I found the overhauled combat systems this reboot has to be pretty interesting and fun in its own way. Instead of the magic spells that you casted with mana in the original God of War and God of War II, here you have Runic Attacks, which are basically spells that you press either L1 + R1 or L1 + R2 to activate depending on the type (there's one Runic Attack slot for each of the two types, Heavy and Light). They don't have a cost since there's no mana at all in this game, but they do have a significant cooldown that you can lower through improving your Cooldown stat. Speaking of which, yea this game goes for the whole shebang when it comes to RPG stuff; you got a big skill tree to sink your Experience into, three gear slots (Chest, Wrists, and Waist), enchantments to socket into your gear, Talismans, and weapon pommels. It's not at all hard to understand how any of these work, though, since they just increase your stats and have certain special effects like "High chance to gain a Strength buff after killing an enemy" or something of the sort. There's probably a wide variety of builds you can go for, but I mostly focused on Defense, Vitality, and Strength, though I also managed to get a ton of Runic (stat that dictates how powerful the Runic Attacks are) through the strong gear I got at the end of the game. That's the boring stuff, though. The fun stuff is the actual combat itself, which I thought felt a lot more in-depth than the classic trilogy due to all the moves you can get in the skill tree, even if it did take me a while to get used to it. All those extra moves plus having to remember Atreus is there to shoot arrows at your foes (thank god he can't die lol) might seem a little overwhelming, but you gradually work up to that so you have enough time to get used to everything first.
I was going to include this in the gameplay paragraph, but, in typical Bob fashion, I rambled on too long and now it's its own paragraph. Outside of combat, the exploration of the world feels pretty basic. You unlock fast travel relatively early on, although for some reason you can only go to one point on the map until your travel stone gets upgraded halfway through the game. I don't really understand why they did that, though I suppose it lets you actually see the world while you're traveling on boat to get where you need to go. One thing I will complain about is that this game does the whole open world thing of counting down a hundred different things you can do, but thankfully side-quests are kept to a minimum so I didn't feel like I was running around everywhere before I could continue the story (since I typically like to do side-quests first unless it doesn't feel worth it or is in a very inconvenient spot). It helps that the worlds themselves are actually kind of small and linear for open world standards, so its not like my time playing Skyrim or Breath of the Wild where there's so many things to do and so many places to see that I get completely overwhelmed. Most side activities are just a bunch of small optional stuff, like sometimes you see Odin's ghostly ravens all around the world that you can take down. There's 51 of those ravens if I remember correctly and I only found 5. Similarly, there's a bunch of chests you can find around the world that give you different things, whether that be just some Hacksilver (the currency of this game) or something more rare like resources for crafting and upgrading gear or even items that permanently increase either your health (Iðunn's Apples) or Spartan Rage (Horns of Blood Mead). Sometimes you also come across Yggdrassil Tears, which permanently increase one of your stats by two. There's also entire other realms to explore, with four of them being areas you go to in the main story and two - Muspelheim and Niflheim - being optional content you need to collect some stuff to gain access to (unfortunately you can't go to Asgard, Svartalfheim, or Vanaheim even though they're right there at the realm Travel Gate). Point is, there's a lot of stuff to do, but it never felt overwhelmingly large to me which is a big plus in my opinion.
God of War 2018's story is probably the main selling point of the game. It's very cinematic and atmospheric overall. Frankly I find it impressive how the game is littered with lore all around that you can read in-game whenever you kill a new enemy, learn new information in the story dialogue, or find the glyphs and papers you need. Unfortunately I don't know that much about Norse mythology so I can't attest to how accurate this is, but it was still really cool to read up on in-game. As for the actual story that unfurls while you play the game...man this is some really cool stuff. In my God of War III review, I complained a lot about the ending and how it tried too hard to redeem Kratos. Its been so deeply cemented that he's a terrible person, willing to use most people in his way regardless of if they're innocent or not. Occasionally he does good things, of course, but usually not for anything but his own gain. Sure, he has always had a tragic side to him, since the games establish that he is a broken man tortured by the gods and consumed by vengeance, but frankly the kind of vile acts this man has done makes it to where I'd need some convincing to believe he's a changed man in this game. Unfortunately, we learn basically nothing about how exactly Kratos got to these Scandinavian lands, which I feel should have been pretty important considering that God of War III ends on a completely destroyed Greece and Kratos only barely getting up after stabbing himself with the sword of the gods and beating Zeus to a pulp. This is pretty much a timeskip to a later time, where Kratos has hidden himself from the world and decided to start life over again. Despite my gripes about God of War III's last bits of story, I do think they managed to convincingly show Kratos's growth as a person in this game. He's just as stoic, suspicious of everyone, and cynical as he's always been, and he never really tries to play hero. There's a lot of characters in this game he would have never helped if it weren't for his son convincing him, since, just like the games of the past, Kratos is single-mindedly pursuing his one goal. He does soften up just a little more over time thanks to the efforts of the allies on this journey, though, and in a way that surprisingly felt natural for him since its not like he just becomes a nice guy. He's still stoic, commanding, and distant even by the end, he just grows to trust his son a lot more. Something I really like about how he was handled in this game is with his relationship to Atreus, his son. Atreus is a bit of a handful, as kids tend to be, but he has a very strained relationship with his dad because the man was basically absent in his life until the events of this game. Although Kratos clearly loved Faye - Atreus's mother - a lot, he was also very distant with his son, so Faye basically raised Atreus by herself while Kratos was off doing...uh, whatever he was doing. You can really feel the tension in the early parts of the game, with how cold and detached Kratos is and how frustrated Atreus is. Sadly we never get to see what Faye was like when she was alive or even what she looks like (which is quite unfortunate imo since she is obviously a major character motivation of both Kratos and Atreus), but I suppose that was to service this game's heavy beginning. The goal that starts this whole journey is Kratos and Atreus traveling to disperse Faye's ashes on the tallest mountain to fulfill her dying wish, but, of course, there's a whole lot more to the plot than that. Eventually we meet some of the new allies in this game, my favorites of which being Mimir and the two Dwarf brothers Brok and Sindri. If you know me, you know I love a good comedic relief, which all these guys bring plenty of while still fitting the grisly tone the story mostly has. Soon enough, we meet Freya, though we don't yet know that's Freya until a bit later. She's mostly just there as the resident healer who Kratos often goes back to for help with patching up allies, though she also knows Kratos is a god and tries to nudge him into telling Atreus the truth of who he is. It does feel like a very Kratos thing for him to refuse telling Atreus the truth until Atreus literally gets an illness from being a god who doesn't know he's a god, and even then he's still hiding secrets that do eventually get revealed to Atreus much later...in also similarly dire circumstances, where Kratos is pretty much forced to tell the truth. Honestly, you can really understand why Atreus would be so frustrated with his father, but you can also understand why Kratos wouldn't want to reveal all of this to his son. In a way, his fears are almost vindicated in a segment of the game I see people often hate on (for understandable reasons imo) where Atreus suddenly becomes an egotistical asshole after learning he's a god. Anyway, Baldur is the main villain of this game and honestly he was actually a more interesting villain than I thought he'd be. From his first appearance, you get the impression he's just an immortal lunatic who wants something out of you that he never discloses even after you finally get to kill the bastard, but once you get further in the game you get to learn more about him which makes him an interesting tragic character. Its not until the very end of the game that you learn the reason he keeps chasing you down and fighting you all the time is because he was looking for Faye, presumably because Odin promised Baldur he would get rid of the immortality if he killed Faye. As it turns out, Baldur is the son of Freya, and their relationship is...well, very complicated. Freya used magic to make Baldur immune to everything except for mistletoe (hey that's one bit of Norse myth I've actually heard of before playing this game), meaning he feels no pain at all from anything and he regenerates from any wounds he gets. She did this since she firmly believed it was a blessing to protect him from all harm, but Baldur sees it as a miserable curse that ruined his life and he hates her guts for it. I think its actually a pretty interesting relationship to compare with Kratos and Atreus. The Kratos comparison is obvious and blatantly stated in game: Baldur was consumed by vengeance, willing to do all sorts of terrible things to achieve it, just like Kratos once was. But the parallels in Kratos and Atreus's relationship is in how the bond between Kratos and Atreus could be reforged despite their flaws, meanwhile Baldur was just too vengeful and venomous to reconcile with his mother. The final fight of the game has one last epic fight between Kratos and Baldur, all the while Freya controls a dead giant to try to break it up. You can definitely sympathize with Freya's anguish, but, at the same time, Baldur is too far gone. Even when Baldur is about to choke Freya out, she lets him nearly kill her, and she even gets angry when Kratos stops him. The grief is strong and the whole moment is just really emotionally powerful. Uh, anyway, I think this is the longest story paragraph I've ever written, so to stop myself from droning on even more, I'll just say this was a really great story and I loved it.
Overall, God of War 2018 was a great game in my opinion. Fun gameplay (even if I prefer the classic trilogy's style more), an excellent story, cool lore...lots of stuff to like, not much at all to hate. Earns a splendid 4.5 stars out of me. It was so close to a 5, but it just barely missed the mark for the fact that the combat wasn't as fun as I hoped it'd be. Very curious to try out Ragnarok whenever I get that.
1995
This review contains spoilers
I never hear people talk about this Kirby game, so I was quite interested to jump into it after it got added to the Nintendo Switch Online service. Being the sequel of the very barebones but respectable Kirby's Dream Land, I wasn't really sure what to expect; I ultimately found this to be a very middling experience overall. Of course, its a Game Boy platformer, so its not going to take you too long to beat, but man something about this one was almost mind-numbing to me. Perhaps that's part of the appeal for some people, though.
Even for early Kirby standards, Kirby's Dream Land 2's gameplay felt very middle-of-the-road to me. For one, the game drags on too long; whereas the first Dream Land only has four levels, so it'll take you at most an hour or so to beat it, the sequel has seven worlds that each have at least 3 levels in it, with the later worlds stretching on to a maximum of 8 levels. I just didn't see the justification for this one to be so much longer. There's even some kind of percentage completion thing in the save file menu and I'm genuinely confused as to what I'm supposed to be doing to fill that to 100% considering that there really isn't much of anything to do in the levels. Speaking of which, the game has rather uninteresting level design that all sort of just blurs in together to me, with the more memorable levels typically being the more frustrating ones like some of the autoscrollers or the levels that have wind as the main gimmick (sometimes combined with autoscrolling). I like some of the ideas here, but, in execution, its just rather unremarkable. For instance, the animal buddies seem to be this game's main new thing, and they do have a neat gimmick in that each have a different way to use Kirby's copy abilities, but two of them have pretty major flaws and one is just so much obviously better than the others. Kine the fish is terrible on land and is clearly built to be a water specialist (too bad every level I found him in doesn't make much use of water before I lost him due to being forced to be on land with him), making him unfortunately straight up worse than just being Kirby. Rick the hamster also feels like a worse Kirby, since all he can do is jump and the ways he uses the copy abilities aren't all that great. Koo, on the other hand, is honestly kind of brokenly strong, since he is always flying and he uses the copy abilities very well (Parasol Koo in particular is wild since he's just immune to everything for up to three hits or so while still being able to move). The copy abilities with Kirby himself feel very underwhelming, though; this was before Super Star came in to give them some sort of expanded toolset, so they're just very basic here. Freeze makes you shoot ice, Spikes basically turns Kirby into a pink urchin for a few seconds, Spark makes a barrier of lightning around Kirby...you get the picture. They're also unnecessarily extremely weak on bosses, especially on King Dedede, and the fact that many of them are close range AND require you to stand still to use them make them quite ineffective in my opinion. Was never able to actually keep my animal buddy to the boss fights, so maybe this was done out of fear that Koo could just make quick work out of every boss, but it also has the unfortunate effect of making using copy abilities with just Kirby feel pointless in boss fights. Stone especially feels useless since, if you stay in the form for more than like two seconds, you will get hit by something despite still being in rock form. Speaking of bosses, they feel a little more involved than the first Dream Land, but they are pretty boring overall. Kracko and Dedede are decently tough and somewhat memorable for that, but I literally just beat the game and I don't even remember all the bosses I fought.
I think Kirby's Dream Land 2 is the game I would use as the definition of "mid". It's not bad, its not mediocre, its not even all that annoying despite some of my complaints about it, its just rather boring. I can't really justify giving this one anything more than a 2.5 stars. Again, NOT a bad game, and I do realize this is still Kirby's very early years (before Super Star revolutionized the Kirby-sphere).
Even for early Kirby standards, Kirby's Dream Land 2's gameplay felt very middle-of-the-road to me. For one, the game drags on too long; whereas the first Dream Land only has four levels, so it'll take you at most an hour or so to beat it, the sequel has seven worlds that each have at least 3 levels in it, with the later worlds stretching on to a maximum of 8 levels. I just didn't see the justification for this one to be so much longer. There's even some kind of percentage completion thing in the save file menu and I'm genuinely confused as to what I'm supposed to be doing to fill that to 100% considering that there really isn't much of anything to do in the levels. Speaking of which, the game has rather uninteresting level design that all sort of just blurs in together to me, with the more memorable levels typically being the more frustrating ones like some of the autoscrollers or the levels that have wind as the main gimmick (sometimes combined with autoscrolling). I like some of the ideas here, but, in execution, its just rather unremarkable. For instance, the animal buddies seem to be this game's main new thing, and they do have a neat gimmick in that each have a different way to use Kirby's copy abilities, but two of them have pretty major flaws and one is just so much obviously better than the others. Kine the fish is terrible on land and is clearly built to be a water specialist (too bad every level I found him in doesn't make much use of water before I lost him due to being forced to be on land with him), making him unfortunately straight up worse than just being Kirby. Rick the hamster also feels like a worse Kirby, since all he can do is jump and the ways he uses the copy abilities aren't all that great. Koo, on the other hand, is honestly kind of brokenly strong, since he is always flying and he uses the copy abilities very well (Parasol Koo in particular is wild since he's just immune to everything for up to three hits or so while still being able to move). The copy abilities with Kirby himself feel very underwhelming, though; this was before Super Star came in to give them some sort of expanded toolset, so they're just very basic here. Freeze makes you shoot ice, Spikes basically turns Kirby into a pink urchin for a few seconds, Spark makes a barrier of lightning around Kirby...you get the picture. They're also unnecessarily extremely weak on bosses, especially on King Dedede, and the fact that many of them are close range AND require you to stand still to use them make them quite ineffective in my opinion. Was never able to actually keep my animal buddy to the boss fights, so maybe this was done out of fear that Koo could just make quick work out of every boss, but it also has the unfortunate effect of making using copy abilities with just Kirby feel pointless in boss fights. Stone especially feels useless since, if you stay in the form for more than like two seconds, you will get hit by something despite still being in rock form. Speaking of bosses, they feel a little more involved than the first Dream Land, but they are pretty boring overall. Kracko and Dedede are decently tough and somewhat memorable for that, but I literally just beat the game and I don't even remember all the bosses I fought.
I think Kirby's Dream Land 2 is the game I would use as the definition of "mid". It's not bad, its not mediocre, its not even all that annoying despite some of my complaints about it, its just rather boring. I can't really justify giving this one anything more than a 2.5 stars. Again, NOT a bad game, and I do realize this is still Kirby's very early years (before Super Star revolutionized the Kirby-sphere).
2023
This review contains spoilers
So, Diablo IV. I feel like I say something to this effect in most of my reviews lately, but I've never really been a HUGE Diablo guy. I enjoyed Diablo III's base campaign and I played a bit of Diablo II Resurrected, but I only occasionally play the games and I don't know much about the lore. I ended up quite enjoying my time with Diablo IV, though, of course, it does have its issues. Overall, its a pretty fun top-down hack and slash style game that loves to throw tons of enemies at you, which I'm usually down for. I've been playing it exclusively when grouped up with some friends, mainly some people that tend to play on and off. I'm engaging in endgame content as of typing this review, doing Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons, and the like.
Before I talk about the real meat and potatoes of the game, I have to be honest here and say I have some complaints with Diablo IV. To be clear, the game has been pretty much nothing but smooth sailing for me as of today and yesterday and it is a fun experience, but I did encounter some frustrating, weird, or just plain funny glitches. For one, the game is...well, let's just say it was a rough launch and could have absolutely used more time in the oven. At launch, there was an annoying issue with the queue being infinite, but thankfully this was quickly fixed. There's a few minor issues, mainly with stuff like the graphics not loading in, which can make the game look like garbage (which is weird considering that the graphics in this game overall are pretty great imo). Had plenty of seemingly random lag spikes, too, but I don't know how much of that was the server's fault or my own internet or PC's fault considering I don't exactly have a top of the line gaming PC. Last minor gripe from me of note is that the power scaling felt a bit off when you're with three players, but I noticed this became a non-issue once my group got the endgame gear and abilities we needed to become very strong. If I only had small issues, though, then I wouldn't be dedicating a whole paragraph to this, so rest assured I saw some bafflingly strange glitches. The most irritating of these is that, very rarely, the game will sometimes just decide that you will not be allowed to attack at all, and I only was able to fix this when I turned the game off and opened it back up. Initially happened to only me, then spread to the person I was playing with as well. We're lucky we were in an area that was easy to escape from; if we were in a boss battle, we would have been screwed. Granted, this hasn't happened to me since, but the fact that it happened at all is truly confusing. We also once went into a dungeon that had a bugged objective, so we couldn't clear it because it acted like we were missing something that wasn't there. We checked the whole dungeon, so we knew we didn't just miss something, and other people have reported the same thing. The real kicker of a glitch - the magnum opus - was, fittingly, saved for the last boss of the game: during the final battle with Lilith, because my other party member skipped the cutscene and started the fight, I was taking damage and quickly died while the cutscene was playing. This caused the game to freak out and the cutscene was playing with no voices or subtitles, with the camera occasionally glitching out and battle effects still showing. Once the cutscene ended, I was treated to my character t-posing for a few seconds before the game showed I was dead by having my character disappear. Also I just had to move and I suddenly reappeared and was able to fight again as if I never died. I wish I recorded it, but it was very funny in the moment and there is a video showing pretty much exactly the same glitch that happened to me out there if you really want proof. I can overlook all of this, but, quite frankly, its just unacceptable for a game to be releasing with such game breaking bugs, especially if its an AAA quality game you're paying $70 for. It really makes me sad that we can't just expect these games from big developers with tons of money behind them (that also charge a lot for their games) to launch as a complete fully polished package like they used to. All that money and you can't make sure your game comes out polished?
Alright, time to talk about the actual content now. How about gameplay? Well, I think its pretty good, though I recommend playing in a party of friends. I was playing a Barbarian, so naturally my play style was simple, but it was still fun bashing my enemies skulls and stunning them a bunch. I felt just fine as far as power goes very early on, not super strong but decently powerful. Although, as I mentioned earlier, I was playing with a party of fluctuating numbers of players, and I always felt considerably weaker than my Sorcerer bro (which I sort of expected since I figured my defenses and decent crowd control made up for it). Then, once I got a little further in the story - around late Act 2 to early Act 3 - I found myself frustrated by how weak I was. That frustration persisted all the way until the end of the story and a tiny bit into the endgame, but I found that, as soon as I swapped from the talent build intended for leveling that I was using to a different build meant for endgame, I was becoming more beefy and dealing more damage just like how I felt like I should have been during the story. Now I have a bunch of very good gear and I plow through everything while barely having to think about my health bar, whereas before I was constantly dying and my damage output felt so low. I think this goes to show just how important it is to fully understand all of this game's systems and to have a guide on you while you play, though I dunno if I'll ever find out why that leveling build felt so pitiful to me. Speaking of which...
I think its very worth mentioning that, for me, Diablo 4's sense of progression was a little odd and honestly pretty overly complicated at times. There's plenty of systems to engage with, like the typical ARPG talent tree where you get points every level to sink into new abilities or bonuses to stats, some light crafting systems using the tons of materials you find through exploration, the Aspects system (Aspects are specialized effects that are either randomly added to gear as soon as you find it or can be imprinted on gear yourself once you earn some from completing dungeons or extracting the Aspects from gear you already have)...the rest of the systems are endgame stuff, but are also a little perplexing, like how you stop getting talent points after about Level 50 and instead get another separate tree called the Paragon Board, which contains little bonuses to sink your points into (think stuff like "+2.50% total health") that can also have slots for special effects called Glyphs that you throw XP into during Nightmare dungeons to then toss into this board's slots once you work your way far enough into the tree to reach the glyph slot. If you want more talent points, you need to go out and explore or finish side quests to finish certain Challenges. Even just getting rid of your old gear is something to contemplate on; do you sell them, or do you salvage them for important materials used to upgrade your weapons and armor? For me, the answer was usually to salvage everything until I reached endgame (I started selling every piece of gear I didn't need that wasn't a Legendary or Sacred item then), but some players might find the money more immediately useful. There's a ton of gems you can socket into your gear for bonus effects; how will you know which ones you need without a guide? Which of the metric tons of possible Aspects do you need for your class + build, and will you extract your Aspects from gear or go complete dungeons to have them permanently for imprinting on any gear you find? And, when you decide to do one of the main endgame content activities - Nightmare dungeons - you have to collect Sigils, which are one time use consumables that activate the Nightmare dungeons. If you want to do a specific Nightmare dungeon, you need the right Sigil to unlock it. Nightmare dungeons also have varying tiers of difficulty that different Sigils correspond to. Oh, and this isn't even getting into how there's a whole bunch of stats to consider, so finding which ones are best for your class can be a little rough (again without a guide). Sometimes RNG gives you gear with stats that aren't all perfect fits for your build, like ranks in an ability you will never use or unimportant stats. In the endgame content I was playing through last night, my Sorcerer buddy was very annoyed by the lack of gear with stats he actually needs, though maybe he was just very unlucky. I think all of this sheer amount of stuff really went over my head early on, and, while I understand it all pretty well now, quite frankly there's a lot of shit here. Maybe I'm overestimating how convoluted others may find it, though. Either way, if you're a new player, you got quite a bit to learn here.
Let's finally talk about the story. I said this before, but I'm far from a Diablo lore buff. Nonetheless, there was still some great stuff to enjoy about this story in my opinion. There's a big focus on characters here, with the idea seemingly being to have you get attached to them by seeing the sacrifices and struggles of these allies you've gathered as well as the motivations of the villains. The main villain - Lilith - is one of the Lesser Evils, the second strongest rank in the hierarchy of demons, who manages to get summoned to Sanctuary (basically the human realm) and immediately starts corrupting everyone in her path. As the main character, of course, your goal is to try and stop her. The game starts you off in a tundra with no explanation, where you nearly freeze and die until a wolf saves you. Then you find a village of Lilith cultists who seem like a helpful bunch at first, but immediately turn on you as soon as you fall unconscious from drinking whatever they put in your drink. A villager drags you out into a hut to try and corrupt you too through a common magical item of Lilith: the blood petals. A monk named Iosef that you met earlier saves you right then and there. From there, you follow him to Kyovashad, which is pretty much the main city of the game. To summarize, the story takes you on a journey all around Sanctuary, where you slowly learn more about Lilith, gain allies, and encounter some twists along the way, like how you stumble upon the mysterious Tree of Whispers in the heart of a dark swamp after taking psychedelic drugs, or how Elias was the pupil of Lorath gone rogue that managed to achieve immortality (and you also get to fight him like five times throughout the story which got annoying real fast). Perhaps the most interesting story parts of this game imo have to do with Lilith and especially the brief bit that explores her relationship with the angel Inarius. They are actually the reason humanity exists, since the Nephilim were born out of their relationship. It makes for a neat dynamic in that, despite Lilith being the Daughter of Hatred, she is still portrayed as closer to a benign figure than Inarius, who is a prideful arrogant warrior who almost seems to spit on his followers despite the immense faith they have for him. It also sort of shows why humans were so close to follow her without hesitation: Lilith's goal - or so she claims - is to stop the Eternal Conflict (infinite war between angels and demons) for good so that humans can reach their true potential. As for the best character, I liked Donan the most. He's a mage that once traveled with a group of adventurers to fight the powerful demon Astaroth, though they could not kill him and could only seal him away in a Soulstone. Everyone goes through some terrible events and has to make heavy sacrifices in this game, but Donan's is probably the most easy to sympathize with, considering that his adventurer companions are mostly dead and his son is turned into the host for that same demon he fought long ago (and we unfortunately have to kill him). The grief he feels for his son's death gets a good amount of emphasis and for good reason. From what I've seen, one of the most hated parts of this story is Donan's death, not because he died but because the way he went out was the stupidest most uninteresting way possible. When you're exploring Hell with your allies, they seem to be fighting back just fine, but Donan gets caught off-guard by a random demon tree in the background once and almost instantly dies from it. It actually made me do a double take on if that even happened; this character they built up an attachment with dies that easily? Well, regardless, I thought this story was pretty good and I had no major complaints about it other than maybe the pacing dragging out too long at times. It can sometimes feel like the narrative isn't actually progressing and you're just wasting your time.
Overall, despite the utterly bizarre but admittedly rare bugs, I found Diablo IV to be an enjoyable game. Cool story, fun gameplay, decent graphics...although its not really above a 3.5 stars for me. Keep in mind, that's not a bad score in my book. For me, 3.5 stars means I like the game but it has various problems in there that prevents me from ranking it much higher.
Before I talk about the real meat and potatoes of the game, I have to be honest here and say I have some complaints with Diablo IV. To be clear, the game has been pretty much nothing but smooth sailing for me as of today and yesterday and it is a fun experience, but I did encounter some frustrating, weird, or just plain funny glitches. For one, the game is...well, let's just say it was a rough launch and could have absolutely used more time in the oven. At launch, there was an annoying issue with the queue being infinite, but thankfully this was quickly fixed. There's a few minor issues, mainly with stuff like the graphics not loading in, which can make the game look like garbage (which is weird considering that the graphics in this game overall are pretty great imo). Had plenty of seemingly random lag spikes, too, but I don't know how much of that was the server's fault or my own internet or PC's fault considering I don't exactly have a top of the line gaming PC. Last minor gripe from me of note is that the power scaling felt a bit off when you're with three players, but I noticed this became a non-issue once my group got the endgame gear and abilities we needed to become very strong. If I only had small issues, though, then I wouldn't be dedicating a whole paragraph to this, so rest assured I saw some bafflingly strange glitches. The most irritating of these is that, very rarely, the game will sometimes just decide that you will not be allowed to attack at all, and I only was able to fix this when I turned the game off and opened it back up. Initially happened to only me, then spread to the person I was playing with as well. We're lucky we were in an area that was easy to escape from; if we were in a boss battle, we would have been screwed. Granted, this hasn't happened to me since, but the fact that it happened at all is truly confusing. We also once went into a dungeon that had a bugged objective, so we couldn't clear it because it acted like we were missing something that wasn't there. We checked the whole dungeon, so we knew we didn't just miss something, and other people have reported the same thing. The real kicker of a glitch - the magnum opus - was, fittingly, saved for the last boss of the game: during the final battle with Lilith, because my other party member skipped the cutscene and started the fight, I was taking damage and quickly died while the cutscene was playing. This caused the game to freak out and the cutscene was playing with no voices or subtitles, with the camera occasionally glitching out and battle effects still showing. Once the cutscene ended, I was treated to my character t-posing for a few seconds before the game showed I was dead by having my character disappear. Also I just had to move and I suddenly reappeared and was able to fight again as if I never died. I wish I recorded it, but it was very funny in the moment and there is a video showing pretty much exactly the same glitch that happened to me out there if you really want proof. I can overlook all of this, but, quite frankly, its just unacceptable for a game to be releasing with such game breaking bugs, especially if its an AAA quality game you're paying $70 for. It really makes me sad that we can't just expect these games from big developers with tons of money behind them (that also charge a lot for their games) to launch as a complete fully polished package like they used to. All that money and you can't make sure your game comes out polished?
Alright, time to talk about the actual content now. How about gameplay? Well, I think its pretty good, though I recommend playing in a party of friends. I was playing a Barbarian, so naturally my play style was simple, but it was still fun bashing my enemies skulls and stunning them a bunch. I felt just fine as far as power goes very early on, not super strong but decently powerful. Although, as I mentioned earlier, I was playing with a party of fluctuating numbers of players, and I always felt considerably weaker than my Sorcerer bro (which I sort of expected since I figured my defenses and decent crowd control made up for it). Then, once I got a little further in the story - around late Act 2 to early Act 3 - I found myself frustrated by how weak I was. That frustration persisted all the way until the end of the story and a tiny bit into the endgame, but I found that, as soon as I swapped from the talent build intended for leveling that I was using to a different build meant for endgame, I was becoming more beefy and dealing more damage just like how I felt like I should have been during the story. Now I have a bunch of very good gear and I plow through everything while barely having to think about my health bar, whereas before I was constantly dying and my damage output felt so low. I think this goes to show just how important it is to fully understand all of this game's systems and to have a guide on you while you play, though I dunno if I'll ever find out why that leveling build felt so pitiful to me. Speaking of which...
I think its very worth mentioning that, for me, Diablo 4's sense of progression was a little odd and honestly pretty overly complicated at times. There's plenty of systems to engage with, like the typical ARPG talent tree where you get points every level to sink into new abilities or bonuses to stats, some light crafting systems using the tons of materials you find through exploration, the Aspects system (Aspects are specialized effects that are either randomly added to gear as soon as you find it or can be imprinted on gear yourself once you earn some from completing dungeons or extracting the Aspects from gear you already have)...the rest of the systems are endgame stuff, but are also a little perplexing, like how you stop getting talent points after about Level 50 and instead get another separate tree called the Paragon Board, which contains little bonuses to sink your points into (think stuff like "+2.50% total health") that can also have slots for special effects called Glyphs that you throw XP into during Nightmare dungeons to then toss into this board's slots once you work your way far enough into the tree to reach the glyph slot. If you want more talent points, you need to go out and explore or finish side quests to finish certain Challenges. Even just getting rid of your old gear is something to contemplate on; do you sell them, or do you salvage them for important materials used to upgrade your weapons and armor? For me, the answer was usually to salvage everything until I reached endgame (I started selling every piece of gear I didn't need that wasn't a Legendary or Sacred item then), but some players might find the money more immediately useful. There's a ton of gems you can socket into your gear for bonus effects; how will you know which ones you need without a guide? Which of the metric tons of possible Aspects do you need for your class + build, and will you extract your Aspects from gear or go complete dungeons to have them permanently for imprinting on any gear you find? And, when you decide to do one of the main endgame content activities - Nightmare dungeons - you have to collect Sigils, which are one time use consumables that activate the Nightmare dungeons. If you want to do a specific Nightmare dungeon, you need the right Sigil to unlock it. Nightmare dungeons also have varying tiers of difficulty that different Sigils correspond to. Oh, and this isn't even getting into how there's a whole bunch of stats to consider, so finding which ones are best for your class can be a little rough (again without a guide). Sometimes RNG gives you gear with stats that aren't all perfect fits for your build, like ranks in an ability you will never use or unimportant stats. In the endgame content I was playing through last night, my Sorcerer buddy was very annoyed by the lack of gear with stats he actually needs, though maybe he was just very unlucky. I think all of this sheer amount of stuff really went over my head early on, and, while I understand it all pretty well now, quite frankly there's a lot of shit here. Maybe I'm overestimating how convoluted others may find it, though. Either way, if you're a new player, you got quite a bit to learn here.
Let's finally talk about the story. I said this before, but I'm far from a Diablo lore buff. Nonetheless, there was still some great stuff to enjoy about this story in my opinion. There's a big focus on characters here, with the idea seemingly being to have you get attached to them by seeing the sacrifices and struggles of these allies you've gathered as well as the motivations of the villains. The main villain - Lilith - is one of the Lesser Evils, the second strongest rank in the hierarchy of demons, who manages to get summoned to Sanctuary (basically the human realm) and immediately starts corrupting everyone in her path. As the main character, of course, your goal is to try and stop her. The game starts you off in a tundra with no explanation, where you nearly freeze and die until a wolf saves you. Then you find a village of Lilith cultists who seem like a helpful bunch at first, but immediately turn on you as soon as you fall unconscious from drinking whatever they put in your drink. A villager drags you out into a hut to try and corrupt you too through a common magical item of Lilith: the blood petals. A monk named Iosef that you met earlier saves you right then and there. From there, you follow him to Kyovashad, which is pretty much the main city of the game. To summarize, the story takes you on a journey all around Sanctuary, where you slowly learn more about Lilith, gain allies, and encounter some twists along the way, like how you stumble upon the mysterious Tree of Whispers in the heart of a dark swamp after taking psychedelic drugs, or how Elias was the pupil of Lorath gone rogue that managed to achieve immortality (and you also get to fight him like five times throughout the story which got annoying real fast). Perhaps the most interesting story parts of this game imo have to do with Lilith and especially the brief bit that explores her relationship with the angel Inarius. They are actually the reason humanity exists, since the Nephilim were born out of their relationship. It makes for a neat dynamic in that, despite Lilith being the Daughter of Hatred, she is still portrayed as closer to a benign figure than Inarius, who is a prideful arrogant warrior who almost seems to spit on his followers despite the immense faith they have for him. It also sort of shows why humans were so close to follow her without hesitation: Lilith's goal - or so she claims - is to stop the Eternal Conflict (infinite war between angels and demons) for good so that humans can reach their true potential. As for the best character, I liked Donan the most. He's a mage that once traveled with a group of adventurers to fight the powerful demon Astaroth, though they could not kill him and could only seal him away in a Soulstone. Everyone goes through some terrible events and has to make heavy sacrifices in this game, but Donan's is probably the most easy to sympathize with, considering that his adventurer companions are mostly dead and his son is turned into the host for that same demon he fought long ago (and we unfortunately have to kill him). The grief he feels for his son's death gets a good amount of emphasis and for good reason. From what I've seen, one of the most hated parts of this story is Donan's death, not because he died but because the way he went out was the stupidest most uninteresting way possible. When you're exploring Hell with your allies, they seem to be fighting back just fine, but Donan gets caught off-guard by a random demon tree in the background once and almost instantly dies from it. It actually made me do a double take on if that even happened; this character they built up an attachment with dies that easily? Well, regardless, I thought this story was pretty good and I had no major complaints about it other than maybe the pacing dragging out too long at times. It can sometimes feel like the narrative isn't actually progressing and you're just wasting your time.
Overall, despite the utterly bizarre but admittedly rare bugs, I found Diablo IV to be an enjoyable game. Cool story, fun gameplay, decent graphics...although its not really above a 3.5 stars for me. Keep in mind, that's not a bad score in my book. For me, 3.5 stars means I like the game but it has various problems in there that prevents me from ranking it much higher.
This review contains spoilers
Ah, Wrath of the Lich King. WotLK for short. This expansion was once the peak of World of Warcraft subscriptions, so perhaps its no surprise that its also around when I first started playing; I can never remember the exact year, but I know I started playing in-between WotLK and the previous expansion (The Burning Crusade). Fans like to refer to people like me as "Wrath babies". Nonetheless, when WoW Classic was first announced, there was uncertainty of if they would revisit the other expansions and not just World of Warcraft in its original 2004 state, but most people I saw were excited for the mere idea that they could play WotLK (officially) again. Now that its been back for a while in the form of WotLK Classic, I've been playing this on and off. I've mostly fallen out of favor with World of Warcraft in recent years, but this was enough to bring me back and level a character to max. Despite my long history with this game and my love for it, I've always been very casual with it, so I didn't do any endgame content (raids) or dungeons. Nonetheless, I did enjoy my time with this one.
As essentially an emulation of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, WotLK Classic is pretty much just like how I remember Wrath being, aside from some modern things like level boosts and the surprising omission of Dungeon Finder. Dungeon Finder was part of the original expansion, but I suppose it was removed in Classic to encourage players to group up themselves rather than through a queue. Despite my fond memories for WotLK, though, I have to admit that I had never even gotten a character past Level 30 during my time playing a ton of WoW as a kid (I was a hopeless altaholic that couldn't get anywhere), so this was actually my first time really experiencing all WotLK has to offer as distinct from the current retail WoW. The new (at the time) continent of Northrend is a huge place with interesting area design and some cool quests. Whereas Outland - introduced in the previous expansion - was the bizarre continent warped by demons that generally had more desolate landmasses that almost felt alien at times, Northrend feels more high fantasy, yet grounded to earth in comparison. I think Pandaria will probably always be my favorite WoW continent just because of its wonderful aesthetic, but Northrend is great too. Nonetheless, I find WotLK Classic to be a good imitation of the original expansion, and that sold me on this being a great idea.
I felt more involved in the quests and stories in WotLK than I did in The Burning Crusade's, and certainly much more than vanilla WoW. There's something so cool and interesting about the things going on, from the resistance against Arthas and his wretched Scourge faction to the story of the Death Knights that once fought for Arthas but broke free from his control. Unfortunately there's a good amount of context in the main plot that is lost if you don't at least know how things went down in Warcraft 3; I imagine I'd care a ton about characters like Arthas and Muradin if I played those games, since their appearances here are relatively unexplained in WoW itself aside from one quest in the Dragonblight area that briefly shows how Arthas got corrupted into the Lich King after wielding the cursed sword Frostmourne. I've never been a WoW lore buff, though I'm still rather familiar with the stories of the more famous characters like Thrall, Varian Wrynn, Malfurion, and Arthas. Regardless of your lore knowledge, though, the various stories you get to see questing throughout Northrend would still be pretty engaging in my opinion. There's a common theme of fighting against the Scourge that was pretty cool, and each area typically has some kind of unique storyline to drive interest. WoW quests (and I suppose MMORPG quests in general) are infamous for being uninteresting and formulaic, but I think WotLK Classic still managed to have quests with some unique fun goals or interesting story flavor to break up the monotony.
Normally I'd include a gameplay section here. For what its worth, WotLK Classic's was fun, but I don't really have a lot to say about it since, unless you're doing the hard endgame content, its going to be pretty simple. Each class generally has a rotation of spells they're going to use for each fight that doesn't typically change much. I was playing a Druid in the Balance spec, for instance, and I found my rotation in that was pretty easy: add any buffs you may not have already (usually Mark of the Wild), Faerie Fire for the debuff, apply damage over time effects with Moonfire and Insect Swarm, then spam Wrath or Starfire until you get either the sun or moon passive which just makes one of them have a higher crit chance. I did also have some useful situational spells I had to use sometimes, but, for the vast majority of the time, my rotation was the same. I think this sort of thing is probably present in any MMORPG, though, so I wouldn't fault WoW for it. It was still a fun time.
Overall, this was a nice trip along memory lane for me, as well as just being a genuinely solid MMORPG journey from Level 1 to Level 80. Very time consuming, but addicting. I think WotLK really was as good as people say it was and not just a nostalgia thing, which I was glad to see for myself. Maybe at some point I'll try raiding; for now, I'm satisfied just having a max level character.
As essentially an emulation of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, WotLK Classic is pretty much just like how I remember Wrath being, aside from some modern things like level boosts and the surprising omission of Dungeon Finder. Dungeon Finder was part of the original expansion, but I suppose it was removed in Classic to encourage players to group up themselves rather than through a queue. Despite my fond memories for WotLK, though, I have to admit that I had never even gotten a character past Level 30 during my time playing a ton of WoW as a kid (I was a hopeless altaholic that couldn't get anywhere), so this was actually my first time really experiencing all WotLK has to offer as distinct from the current retail WoW. The new (at the time) continent of Northrend is a huge place with interesting area design and some cool quests. Whereas Outland - introduced in the previous expansion - was the bizarre continent warped by demons that generally had more desolate landmasses that almost felt alien at times, Northrend feels more high fantasy, yet grounded to earth in comparison. I think Pandaria will probably always be my favorite WoW continent just because of its wonderful aesthetic, but Northrend is great too. Nonetheless, I find WotLK Classic to be a good imitation of the original expansion, and that sold me on this being a great idea.
I felt more involved in the quests and stories in WotLK than I did in The Burning Crusade's, and certainly much more than vanilla WoW. There's something so cool and interesting about the things going on, from the resistance against Arthas and his wretched Scourge faction to the story of the Death Knights that once fought for Arthas but broke free from his control. Unfortunately there's a good amount of context in the main plot that is lost if you don't at least know how things went down in Warcraft 3; I imagine I'd care a ton about characters like Arthas and Muradin if I played those games, since their appearances here are relatively unexplained in WoW itself aside from one quest in the Dragonblight area that briefly shows how Arthas got corrupted into the Lich King after wielding the cursed sword Frostmourne. I've never been a WoW lore buff, though I'm still rather familiar with the stories of the more famous characters like Thrall, Varian Wrynn, Malfurion, and Arthas. Regardless of your lore knowledge, though, the various stories you get to see questing throughout Northrend would still be pretty engaging in my opinion. There's a common theme of fighting against the Scourge that was pretty cool, and each area typically has some kind of unique storyline to drive interest. WoW quests (and I suppose MMORPG quests in general) are infamous for being uninteresting and formulaic, but I think WotLK Classic still managed to have quests with some unique fun goals or interesting story flavor to break up the monotony.
Normally I'd include a gameplay section here. For what its worth, WotLK Classic's was fun, but I don't really have a lot to say about it since, unless you're doing the hard endgame content, its going to be pretty simple. Each class generally has a rotation of spells they're going to use for each fight that doesn't typically change much. I was playing a Druid in the Balance spec, for instance, and I found my rotation in that was pretty easy: add any buffs you may not have already (usually Mark of the Wild), Faerie Fire for the debuff, apply damage over time effects with Moonfire and Insect Swarm, then spam Wrath or Starfire until you get either the sun or moon passive which just makes one of them have a higher crit chance. I did also have some useful situational spells I had to use sometimes, but, for the vast majority of the time, my rotation was the same. I think this sort of thing is probably present in any MMORPG, though, so I wouldn't fault WoW for it. It was still a fun time.
Overall, this was a nice trip along memory lane for me, as well as just being a genuinely solid MMORPG journey from Level 1 to Level 80. Very time consuming, but addicting. I think WotLK really was as good as people say it was and not just a nostalgia thing, which I was glad to see for myself. Maybe at some point I'll try raiding; for now, I'm satisfied just having a max level character.
2022
As a disclaimer, I've never really played the original Pac-Man World, so I can't comment on how good of a remake this is. I'll be treating my thoughts of this as if it was a standalone game, basically; my only familiarity with the World series is playing a tiny bit of 2. That being said, yea overall I thought this game was just alright. You can sort of feel that this was originally a PS1 game, with some jankiness being present, but for the most part it was fine.
The gameplay is ultimately just alright in my opinion. Aside from the occasional jank I mentioned (mainly in the awkwardness of the dash move in my opinion), it plays and controls well. Pac-Man's move set is pretty simple: he's got a butt bounce, a chargeable dash, and a chargeable projectile that I hardly ever used. Apparently, he also has a flutter jump, but I'm gonna be honest and just admit that I never bothered to figure out how to use that. The level design is okay, its like a typical platformer in that the goal is to get to the end (marked by a big statue of the main villain - Toc-Man - that you bounce on to grab a coin that ends the level) and there's various collectibles to find along the way. The classic fruits from the original Pac-Man are scattered through levels for you to find. They are also used to open up gates, which can reveal switches for you to bounce on that have various effects. Oftentimes you'll need to do this to find the letters throughout the level; this game pulled a Donkey Kong Country by having you find letters that spell out PAC-MAN in each level as a little bonus collectible that sends you to a special bonus room when you find them all in a level. Pac-Man World Re-Pac has a surprising amount of focus on these, which encourages some backtracking and whatnot. You can probably tell by the tone I'm using in writing these paragraphs, but I did not find this game all that engaging to play and part of it can be chalked up to the level design. There is no real incentive to get any of the collectibles if you don't care about getting a high score, though I did still manage to find every letter except for one in almost every level just by playing them normally. I get that these are optional, but they honestly felt pretty pointless to me. Probably doesn't help that the actual level design as a whole is just...mid to me, not sure how else to explain it. The final few levels were cool, and I did enjoy the boss fights, but this is not really a game I am going to remember or want to replay in the future (though the latter is not always a bad thing since there's plenty of games I love that I don't want to replay).
Pac-Man World Re-Pac is another one of those games where there is basically no story, so I'm taking this section to talk about the little things that make up this game. This game's visuals are pretty unremarkable in my opinion. They look nice, but don't really stand out much aside from some of the more bizarre worlds like the one that's essentially one big circus. The levels of each world all blend in with each other, sharing pretty much exactly the same aesthetic until you move on to the next world. I kinda understand why they did that, though, since it unifies the levels more. I didn't really listen to the music since I was watching/listening to other stuff in the background when I was playing, but I imagine it is alright, maybe even good. Also, I know I'm playing this on Switch, but I really have no idea why a 2022 remake of a PS1 game is lagging on my Switch. There's no way its that intensive, right? I had to put this on Performance Mode for it to not be distractingly laggy and it still had moments of lag. Strange, but I suppose its not worth ragging on.
I know this review must come off especially nitpicky and whiny, but I figured I should reflect my true thoughts playing this. In my opinion, Pac-Man World Re-Pac is a serviceable 3D platformer with some neat ideas in there, but is otherwise kind of unremarkable and dragged down by some bland level design. That's a 3 star if I've ever heard of one, sorry to anyone that loves this game.
The gameplay is ultimately just alright in my opinion. Aside from the occasional jank I mentioned (mainly in the awkwardness of the dash move in my opinion), it plays and controls well. Pac-Man's move set is pretty simple: he's got a butt bounce, a chargeable dash, and a chargeable projectile that I hardly ever used. Apparently, he also has a flutter jump, but I'm gonna be honest and just admit that I never bothered to figure out how to use that. The level design is okay, its like a typical platformer in that the goal is to get to the end (marked by a big statue of the main villain - Toc-Man - that you bounce on to grab a coin that ends the level) and there's various collectibles to find along the way. The classic fruits from the original Pac-Man are scattered through levels for you to find. They are also used to open up gates, which can reveal switches for you to bounce on that have various effects. Oftentimes you'll need to do this to find the letters throughout the level; this game pulled a Donkey Kong Country by having you find letters that spell out PAC-MAN in each level as a little bonus collectible that sends you to a special bonus room when you find them all in a level. Pac-Man World Re-Pac has a surprising amount of focus on these, which encourages some backtracking and whatnot. You can probably tell by the tone I'm using in writing these paragraphs, but I did not find this game all that engaging to play and part of it can be chalked up to the level design. There is no real incentive to get any of the collectibles if you don't care about getting a high score, though I did still manage to find every letter except for one in almost every level just by playing them normally. I get that these are optional, but they honestly felt pretty pointless to me. Probably doesn't help that the actual level design as a whole is just...mid to me, not sure how else to explain it. The final few levels were cool, and I did enjoy the boss fights, but this is not really a game I am going to remember or want to replay in the future (though the latter is not always a bad thing since there's plenty of games I love that I don't want to replay).
Pac-Man World Re-Pac is another one of those games where there is basically no story, so I'm taking this section to talk about the little things that make up this game. This game's visuals are pretty unremarkable in my opinion. They look nice, but don't really stand out much aside from some of the more bizarre worlds like the one that's essentially one big circus. The levels of each world all blend in with each other, sharing pretty much exactly the same aesthetic until you move on to the next world. I kinda understand why they did that, though, since it unifies the levels more. I didn't really listen to the music since I was watching/listening to other stuff in the background when I was playing, but I imagine it is alright, maybe even good. Also, I know I'm playing this on Switch, but I really have no idea why a 2022 remake of a PS1 game is lagging on my Switch. There's no way its that intensive, right? I had to put this on Performance Mode for it to not be distractingly laggy and it still had moments of lag. Strange, but I suppose its not worth ragging on.
I know this review must come off especially nitpicky and whiny, but I figured I should reflect my true thoughts playing this. In my opinion, Pac-Man World Re-Pac is a serviceable 3D platformer with some neat ideas in there, but is otherwise kind of unremarkable and dragged down by some bland level design. That's a 3 star if I've ever heard of one, sorry to anyone that loves this game.
2023
This review contains spoilers
I cannot stress enough just how charmingly goofy, weird, unhinged, and cartoony this game is. I've never really seen anything that feels like Pizza Tower in all the games I've played, despite the obvious inspiration it lifts from Wario Land in the gameplay and music. Something about it made it to where I could tell it was a passion project that took many years to create, even while only having heard of this game from people that rave about how good it is. I really couldn't come up with any major complaints, so this review won't be as nitpicky as some of my other reviews. I am legitimately considering grabbing that official Pizza Tower shirt just to represent how much I like this game.
When it comes to gameplay, like I mentioned earlier, it does feel a lot like Wario Land 4. The game is divided into separate levels (aside from the hub world), each of which have five collectibles you need to find most of to get access to the boss. The levels only end once you destroy an object (in WL4 you jump on the blue frog bomb and in this game you run into the Pillar John to destroy it), where you then have to make a mad dash back to the entrance to escape. The punishment here for failing these sequences, which the game calls Pizza Time, is much more severe than the "Hurry Up!" sections of Wario Land 4, since you just straight up die and have to start the level from the beginning. Another thing taken from Wario Land is the transformations, though they work quite a bit differently here since they can just be straight up weapons you use (like the face bullet pistol or the shotgun). Peppino is the main character and his moves feel pretty similar to Wario's. You got your dash to quickly build up speed, a ground pound, and a single short jump, for example. I noticed that he feels much smoother and more fluid to play than Wario, though, which seems to be because Peppino's move set is built to fit the sort of ridiculously speedy theme this whole game's design has. You can still go through the levels slowly, but just about everything in this game is encouraging you to run like a maniac, like how Peppino can run up walls or how he has to dash to break through certain blocks. When you build up speed, any enemy in your way dies (with only a few exceptions like the ghost enemies), although you have to be careful of hazards or you lose your momentum entirely. There's a combo system that this dashing plays directly into, so you're in a mad dash to keep your combo going as well as find any collectibles you may need. The gameplay loop is genuinely really fun, although it took a bit for me to get used to since I'm more accustomed to my platformers being on the slower side. I liked how some levels have you play as another character, the tag team duo of Gustavo and Brick. Gustavo is a pretty obvious Mario expy and Brick is a cute but weird fat rat that's like his Yoshi, except they're together at all times. It was a fun spin on the game, though I don't think you really get many opportunities to play as them. Oh, also Pizza Tower has a ranking system, but its only important if you're trying to 100% the game. I have to admit that it feels nice getting a good rank even in a casual playthrough, though it ultimately doesn't matter since all you really need to progress are the Toppins. The P Rank is the best, but its very difficult to get, so, naturally, I never managed to get one. Best one I got was A.
From what I could tell, there's barely any story here, so I'll take the usual dedicated story paragraph to instead talk about the other minor but charming aspects of the game, mainly soundtrack and visuals. The visuals are very colorful and strange, giving it a distinct style that almost looks like it was drawn in MS Paint to me if that makes any sense. It looks like a cartoon that you play, just in the form of pixel art. The levels tend to have unique aesthetics from each other, whether it be something more standard like Oregano Desert or something bizarre like Don't Make a Sound. There's a fun sense of parody in a lot of this game's designs, with an easy example to point to being how The Noise is a pretty obvious parody of The Noid, Dominos old mascot. The level Oh Shit -amusing name aside - has references to the Mario series, since you go through green pipes to traverse the level. There's actually a good number of Mario series references and parodies, which perhaps comes with the territory considering that Pizza Tower is inspired by Wario Land. The game also just straight up has a Five Nights at Freddy's inspired level, complete with its own animatronic jump-scares, which I was not expecting at all but found pretty amusing. At the end, you get a shotgun to destroy all the annoying animatronics with. It'd be a crime if I didn't at least bring up the soundtrack, so I'll shout that out here. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve, but man it manages to be so good. My favorites in the officially released soundtrack are Cold Spaghetti, Tropical Crust, and Tubular Trash Zone, but really all the songs are amazing in their own ways aside from maybe the songs made for the Fun Farm level (sorry just not a fan).
Overall, this was a really fun experience and I love so much about this game. Insanely charming characters and visuals, great soundtrack, speedy thrilling gameplay...it lives up to the hype in my opinion. I give this game a solid 4.5 stars; I have just barely enough problems to not put it at a full on 5 stars, but I was very close to putting it there.
When it comes to gameplay, like I mentioned earlier, it does feel a lot like Wario Land 4. The game is divided into separate levels (aside from the hub world), each of which have five collectibles you need to find most of to get access to the boss. The levels only end once you destroy an object (in WL4 you jump on the blue frog bomb and in this game you run into the Pillar John to destroy it), where you then have to make a mad dash back to the entrance to escape. The punishment here for failing these sequences, which the game calls Pizza Time, is much more severe than the "Hurry Up!" sections of Wario Land 4, since you just straight up die and have to start the level from the beginning. Another thing taken from Wario Land is the transformations, though they work quite a bit differently here since they can just be straight up weapons you use (like the face bullet pistol or the shotgun). Peppino is the main character and his moves feel pretty similar to Wario's. You got your dash to quickly build up speed, a ground pound, and a single short jump, for example. I noticed that he feels much smoother and more fluid to play than Wario, though, which seems to be because Peppino's move set is built to fit the sort of ridiculously speedy theme this whole game's design has. You can still go through the levels slowly, but just about everything in this game is encouraging you to run like a maniac, like how Peppino can run up walls or how he has to dash to break through certain blocks. When you build up speed, any enemy in your way dies (with only a few exceptions like the ghost enemies), although you have to be careful of hazards or you lose your momentum entirely. There's a combo system that this dashing plays directly into, so you're in a mad dash to keep your combo going as well as find any collectibles you may need. The gameplay loop is genuinely really fun, although it took a bit for me to get used to since I'm more accustomed to my platformers being on the slower side. I liked how some levels have you play as another character, the tag team duo of Gustavo and Brick. Gustavo is a pretty obvious Mario expy and Brick is a cute but weird fat rat that's like his Yoshi, except they're together at all times. It was a fun spin on the game, though I don't think you really get many opportunities to play as them. Oh, also Pizza Tower has a ranking system, but its only important if you're trying to 100% the game. I have to admit that it feels nice getting a good rank even in a casual playthrough, though it ultimately doesn't matter since all you really need to progress are the Toppins. The P Rank is the best, but its very difficult to get, so, naturally, I never managed to get one. Best one I got was A.
From what I could tell, there's barely any story here, so I'll take the usual dedicated story paragraph to instead talk about the other minor but charming aspects of the game, mainly soundtrack and visuals. The visuals are very colorful and strange, giving it a distinct style that almost looks like it was drawn in MS Paint to me if that makes any sense. It looks like a cartoon that you play, just in the form of pixel art. The levels tend to have unique aesthetics from each other, whether it be something more standard like Oregano Desert or something bizarre like Don't Make a Sound. There's a fun sense of parody in a lot of this game's designs, with an easy example to point to being how The Noise is a pretty obvious parody of The Noid, Dominos old mascot. The level Oh Shit -amusing name aside - has references to the Mario series, since you go through green pipes to traverse the level. There's actually a good number of Mario series references and parodies, which perhaps comes with the territory considering that Pizza Tower is inspired by Wario Land. The game also just straight up has a Five Nights at Freddy's inspired level, complete with its own animatronic jump-scares, which I was not expecting at all but found pretty amusing. At the end, you get a shotgun to destroy all the annoying animatronics with. It'd be a crime if I didn't at least bring up the soundtrack, so I'll shout that out here. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve, but man it manages to be so good. My favorites in the officially released soundtrack are Cold Spaghetti, Tropical Crust, and Tubular Trash Zone, but really all the songs are amazing in their own ways aside from maybe the songs made for the Fun Farm level (sorry just not a fan).
Overall, this was a really fun experience and I love so much about this game. Insanely charming characters and visuals, great soundtrack, speedy thrilling gameplay...it lives up to the hype in my opinion. I give this game a solid 4.5 stars; I have just barely enough problems to not put it at a full on 5 stars, but I was very close to putting it there.