I was a bit wary of the traversal mechanics being the prime gameplay feature; how are you supposed to vary the challenges enough when the individual traversal tools are so rigid? thankfully ubisoft montreal took cues from ico and instead tried to create intricate rooms where finding out that subtle path to get where you can not walk or jump on your own is its own reward. granted, sands of time is much less concerned with atmosphere and a sense of place than it is showing off how cool and versatile the prince is, but at the very least these sections feel good to pull off and are smartly laid out. at worst you'll have to contend with the occasionally-jumpy cinematic camera as well as the prince's fiddly slipups (it can be a chore to get him to wall-run horizontally when he would rather do it vertically), but overall for the time period they nailed the feeling of doing death-defying acrobatic feats without it getting stale by the end.
part of this is thanks to the sands of time itself, which serves as a glorified soft-reset. in practice: honestly totally necessary to paper over the game's clunkiness at points and make the overall experience seem more fun. given how often you'll likely miss a given jump either from misunderstanding the environment or screwing up the input, the reset makes things a lot more manageable. as the advertised mechanic of the game... philosophically I guess that sits poorly with me, but also whatever, I guess I just expected more use for the time gimmicks other than freezing enemies and rewinding time when you inevitably plunge to your death.
on its own merits it would be a pretty fun early aughts linear romp with constant setpieces and fun little puzzles, but they had to shoehorn combat in. an absolutely embarassing display on all accounts. did they somehow play ico and not play devil may cry at the same time? I don't need a full-on character action game, but at the very least some basics like "require different strategies for each enemy" and "make the soft lock-on subtle" and "don't map too many things to the same button" should have crossed the devs' minds. the fights are monotonous with enemies that blink into existence in waves in what feels like eons before each battle is finished, and occasionally they'll spawn in on top of you and really mess up your day. you're required to suck the sand out of each enemy as well, which is a rather long animation and will often get you hurt if an enemy decides to interrupt it, which happens an awful lot considering that enemies seem programmed specifically not to bother you while you're occupied. there's no hard lock-on and the soft lock-on seems to change targets literally randomly, occasionally making the prince roll completely away from where you intend to attack someone yards away from your original position. because of this issue, your sand-retrieval move will often be preempted by a freeze move on a different enemy given that the game does not take your left stick position into account at all when throwing out the moves, thus wasting your meter and resetting your sands timer down to zero. which by the way, if you retrieve sand from an enemy or freeze them or kill them in whatever way and then you yourself get killed, the whole sands of time reset gimmick isn't going to help you one bit. the list goes on and on with these weird little details about combat (why do they need to teleport? why does the camera seem to always want to get so close to the prince?), it's just absolutely atrocious in every conceivable way. the only thing good about it is that it affirmed that I do consider drakengard's combat mostly competent and that I don't feel bad giving it a good score when a game like this released to near-unanimous praise.
I think that overall critical reception relies a lot on the balance of the gameplay, and thankfully I'd say there's a good 60/40 ratio of traversal to combat here. the majority of what's here is fun, and even the combat can be mostly tuned out once you begin jumping over enemies' heads ad infinitum (this works flawlessly on both bosses as well). the game juices every possible thing it can from the movement and continues adding new wrinkles up until the late game. there's nothing here that makes it dynamic beyond some simple timers and cycle-based platforming, but when the room and scenario design is as rock-solid as it is here there's little to complain about. just make sure to put on a podcast whenever you get to the combat sections.
also I have not played the original version(s) of this but I found the ps3 hd remaster pretty poor all things considered. I'm trying to be nice and gloss over the many bizarre glitches I ran into (including the prince turning invisible and having his polygons stretch out into space whenever he appeared in a cutscene) assuming that they're results of a shitty port job. everything down to the sound mixing and the game select UI is shoddy to be completely honest. it doesn't help that the in-engine cutscenes are very unflattering and the in-game models look blocky and cheap compared to similar work from contemporaries.
part of this is thanks to the sands of time itself, which serves as a glorified soft-reset. in practice: honestly totally necessary to paper over the game's clunkiness at points and make the overall experience seem more fun. given how often you'll likely miss a given jump either from misunderstanding the environment or screwing up the input, the reset makes things a lot more manageable. as the advertised mechanic of the game... philosophically I guess that sits poorly with me, but also whatever, I guess I just expected more use for the time gimmicks other than freezing enemies and rewinding time when you inevitably plunge to your death.
on its own merits it would be a pretty fun early aughts linear romp with constant setpieces and fun little puzzles, but they had to shoehorn combat in. an absolutely embarassing display on all accounts. did they somehow play ico and not play devil may cry at the same time? I don't need a full-on character action game, but at the very least some basics like "require different strategies for each enemy" and "make the soft lock-on subtle" and "don't map too many things to the same button" should have crossed the devs' minds. the fights are monotonous with enemies that blink into existence in waves in what feels like eons before each battle is finished, and occasionally they'll spawn in on top of you and really mess up your day. you're required to suck the sand out of each enemy as well, which is a rather long animation and will often get you hurt if an enemy decides to interrupt it, which happens an awful lot considering that enemies seem programmed specifically not to bother you while you're occupied. there's no hard lock-on and the soft lock-on seems to change targets literally randomly, occasionally making the prince roll completely away from where you intend to attack someone yards away from your original position. because of this issue, your sand-retrieval move will often be preempted by a freeze move on a different enemy given that the game does not take your left stick position into account at all when throwing out the moves, thus wasting your meter and resetting your sands timer down to zero. which by the way, if you retrieve sand from an enemy or freeze them or kill them in whatever way and then you yourself get killed, the whole sands of time reset gimmick isn't going to help you one bit. the list goes on and on with these weird little details about combat (why do they need to teleport? why does the camera seem to always want to get so close to the prince?), it's just absolutely atrocious in every conceivable way. the only thing good about it is that it affirmed that I do consider drakengard's combat mostly competent and that I don't feel bad giving it a good score when a game like this released to near-unanimous praise.
I think that overall critical reception relies a lot on the balance of the gameplay, and thankfully I'd say there's a good 60/40 ratio of traversal to combat here. the majority of what's here is fun, and even the combat can be mostly tuned out once you begin jumping over enemies' heads ad infinitum (this works flawlessly on both bosses as well). the game juices every possible thing it can from the movement and continues adding new wrinkles up until the late game. there's nothing here that makes it dynamic beyond some simple timers and cycle-based platforming, but when the room and scenario design is as rock-solid as it is here there's little to complain about. just make sure to put on a podcast whenever you get to the combat sections.
also I have not played the original version(s) of this but I found the ps3 hd remaster pretty poor all things considered. I'm trying to be nice and gloss over the many bizarre glitches I ran into (including the prince turning invisible and having his polygons stretch out into space whenever he appeared in a cutscene) assuming that they're results of a shitty port job. everything down to the sound mixing and the game select UI is shoddy to be completely honest. it doesn't help that the in-engine cutscenes are very unflattering and the in-game models look blocky and cheap compared to similar work from contemporaries.
Pangburn
1 year ago