Metal Gear Revengeance (Steam):
Action games demand a lot more from both player and game design. Game has to be fast, fair and provide a freedom of options at every given moment.
Revengeance has some elements of that, but fails to bring it together. The biggest problem (one of the very, very many) is camera. It's not a even a design flaw. No designer in his right mind would knowingly sat down and designed most frustrating and malevolent camera in action games genre. They ran out of time or lacked people or something. It's an obvious bug. It's not supposed to be that way:
The problem is actually three-pronged. In action games camera AI, enemy AI and lock-on mechanic are all interconnected always ensuring player doesn't get offscreen attacks and can see what's going on.
In this hot mess of a game, all three components **** the bed individually in spectacularly fashion and also fail to interact between each other. Lock-on completely overrides manual camera movement and thus becomes unusable in groups with more than one enemy (read: all of them). Camera fights you all the way through the game, and enemies are just fine with attacking you from off-screen.
At least i finally discovered "the secret" behind MGR. To parry you actually don't need good timing or deliberate attack patterns, which is what i expected coming from better designed games.
Apparently you just need to mash! It's that easy. When you see incoming attack jerk stick into the enemy and when you see Raiden go into block position, keep jerking the stick.
No wonder so many people like this game.
The other "secret" was that you're supposed to level-up your weapons, which is an outrageous proposition for an action game, because if you allow blatant damage boosting you can kiss your game balance goodbye. For example you can't properly set fixed time limit for getting highest rank because fully upgraded sword will kill a boss twice as fast. Unless you are setting the limit with fully upgraded stats in mind from the beginning but then it's even worse because you are now forcing players to grind and make it impossible to do a "perfect run" on single playthrough.
Concept of "perfect run" is also ruined by another design goof: shooting enemies. How are you supposed to "perfect" the game where most of the enemies can randomly decide that it's time to shoot at you and do 0.2% of chip damage to you ruining "no damage" bonus?
Sub-weapons (rocket launchers and grenades) also haven't been polished much. They just doesn't mesh with the rest of the game and when game forces you to use them it (save a civilian by shocking soldiers about to shoot him or shoot down flying enemies) it just becomes frustrating.
I've beaten it once and went on to Hard difficulty. Fully upgraded sword and mashing "technique" makes bosses on second playthorugh compete joke. I got no damage on Mistral in less than a minute.
Oh and unfortunately
Mistral theme turned out to be the only good theme song in this game. All other songs continued to be cacophony with vocalist screaming his ass off.
Other bosses were fine i guess. Solid Platinum bosses, some nice use slicing mechanic. I kinda liked Sundowner boss fight in that regard.
Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain (Steam):
Grinding my ass off.
Wings of Vi (demo on Steam):
This seems like a good La Mulana replacement while i wait for a sequel.
It has similar hard difficulty and weird jumping mechanic.
Only Wings of Vi has some generic indie-game sprites, while La-Mulana had a more distinctive look based on images of various mythological creatures from around the world.
Outside of that this looks like a game for me.
Binding of Isaac (Steam):
wutBinding of Isaac continues to be a great lunch-break waster on work.
Topic: What are you playing? (Read 700219 times)
