Quick Review: Three Heroes

No thanks, I stopped at two heroes. I just… I just couldn’t.

Boars, wolves, bandits... the usual, really.

A creation from Cats Who Play released on September 17th, 2015, Three Heroes (often known as Fairy Tales: Three Heroes) is the story of Alesha, Dobrynya and Ilya, the titular characters. After their original years of heroism, the three grew apart. Alesha is one day assaulted by bandits at home. After he kills all of them but one, the last opens up about thievery having grown completely rampant in the area. There are more troubles further, there’s even talk of some sort of sea monster attacking people in the east! And Novgorod is being assaulted from two sides! …Okay, this is a very Russian game, I see. Not that a game’s geographical origins has anything to do with its quality.

Get yourself ready, 'cause you're gonna fight a lot of
enemies.

You start with Alesha, the archer. You later gain Dobrynya, who wields the handle of a spear to beat down enemies with; and, at last, Ilya, who has the classic sword and shield getup. Characters move with WASD, can turn with Q and E, attack with the left mouse button, and use special moves with the right button. You can switch to a different hero at will once they’re unlocked (pressing F1 for Ilya, F2 for Dobrynya, F3 for Alesha). The characters you don’t control will follow the one you play as, but you can ask them to stay in one place by pressing C, or make them run back to your hero with Z. You can focus on a specific opponent with the tab key. Need help? Open the advice menu with G! Finally, you can use items by pressing Enter and move between items with the [ and ] keys.

Okay, okay... shooting multiple arrows at once? Sure.
We can also steal stronger bows from enemies, that's cool.

You can open the special moves menu with T, and switch between special moves with the number keys (1 to 7). The game includes an EXP and level-up system, and each level grants a skill point to be used to unlock a new move or upgrade one that was already unlocked. All moves can be upgraded to up to three stars, which boosts their attack power, efficiency, and often reduces their cost in Heroic resolve points (a gauge that takes a moment to refill). Some moves can be practical outside of battle, like Dobrynya’s pole vault, which lets him jump over water.

Pole vault! And no horizontal bar to smash against!

Do I even need a spear? Just the stick beats down everything
in Dobrynya's way!

Now, onto gameplay proper! The game is split into maps. Like a long stage, each map has story quests that must be completed to progress, and side-quests that can yield rewards. On the first map, Alesha helps a traveling merchant whose guards ran off in fear after they were attacked, first by retrieving said guards, and then attacking the bandits’ camp as a team. Then he meets Dobrynya, and on the second map, they rescue villagers taken as captives by more bandits. This ploy involves poisoning the thieves’ well to weaken them, and using their own traps against them. It's a decent idea to make each hero’s unique skills necessary for progression, and strategizing can be useful against hordes of enemies.

Yeah, we aren't playing Hawkere or Greeen Arrow here.

But here’s where things go downhill. For starters, combat could have been refined. Alesha’s archery fucking sucks, and the further away an opponent is, the more his so-called skill comes down to sheer dumb luck and hoping you hit. Aiming is for losera, apparently. You can focus on that enemy alright; doesn’t help the aim, though! The first skill you unlock for him does allow you to aim for a specific spot, but the game’s hitboxes are so screwed up that even with that crosshair, you can still miss.

The crosshair does help. But still.

Okay, fine. Seeing bandits get tossed around can be
satisfying. They deserve it, anyway.

The game does NOT save automatically; you must press Esc, open the save menu, save, then come back. And if even one of your three heroes dies, it’s Game Over; go back to the last save point. I started saving obsessively to ensure I wouldn't lose the smallest bit of progress. And I was right to do this, because on several occasions, I got a Game Over for no apparent reason! This was fun, especially when it made me lose ten minutes of progress because I wasn’t yet saving at every hundred feet walked! And, oh yeah – if you don’t carefully follow the plot as it is requested (ex. If you go someplace you weren’t supposed to, or fail to execute a specific action), that can ALSO trigger a sudden Game Over.

I can't show you a screenshot of when the game crashed, since
I had to log out to undo it. Instead, have this memory of me
doing a side-quest and then dying due to failing to jump
over water on bthe way back, having to restart the previous
10 minutes. Fun. /s

But the death blow was the game working fine for an hour at a time, and then crashing afterwards. Badly, at that, superimposing its final frame over my entire computer screen, impossible to dislodge even with the task manager, and forcing me to literally log out and back into my session to make the damn thing disappear. Good freaking thing that OBS saved my playthroughs even when it had to get turned off by force like this! I quit trying to give this one a chance before I even met the third hero, Ilya.

Honestly? Don’t play this one. It had decent ideas, gameplay-wise, and felt overall promising. I like the possibility of following three heroes and switching between them, even if the plot is weak and the characters speak like their lines were shoddily translated from Russian to English. I could have taken that. But the saving issues, the sudden deaths, the constant bothers, the utter jank of controls and aiming, and of course the crashing… yep. I REALLY don’t recommend this one.

…But hey, if you want to risk it anyway, it’s cheap. Three Heroes is available on Steam for 3.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Storm of Spears

Time for the mandatory RPG Maker game of the year! And, uh, I have thoughts.

The first of many major fights.

Developed by Warfare Studios, published by Senpai Industrial Studios (which publishes a lot of RPG Maker games), and released on June 17th, 2016, Storm of Spears is set the fantasy world of Gallagar, led by a tyrannical queen. Rebellion is usually squashed fast. We follow a group of four mercenaries known as the Night Swords, led by Sura. When talks of plans of a true, widespread rebellion comes to them, they are thrown into action, at great cost. Sura’s younger brother is mortally wounded during the liberation of their home town, which leaves her determined to see this to the end, no matter what it takes.

This RPG is simple, with- whoooooah there! Okay, I must address this before everything else.

...These both look uncomfortable.

For some reason, the "serious, complex story" and
"boobs out portraits" combo makes me REALLY
uncomfortable. Like those elements are so
diametrically opposite, they shouldn't be mixed.

Compared to NPCs who get just a headshot next to their text, we get full-body art of the four main characters: Sura, Edryan, Valeese and Gyorg. Fine for Gyorg, he’s an older man; Edryan has his six-pack abs uncovered, not very practical for action. Sura and Valeese, the two women of the team, are wearing stuff you’d expect on strippers, not action heroines! I know the chainmail bikini trope has been mocked to Hell and back already – these outfits don’t even count, they're not chainmail! My issue isn’t so much about the outfits themselves, it’s how gratuitous and out-of-place this near-nudity feels, ESPECIALLY with everything else in the game. The main character’s younger brother just died? Let’s have a body shot of her with her breasts practically bursting from her top!

Okay. Bad first impression. How’s the rest of the game? Well, combat itself is about as basic as it gets for an RPG, with everything you have come to expect; physical attacks, special spells to cast, characters with different classes (which means specific types of armor and weapons for each), and a level-up system with new attacks or spells learned periodically. It’s almost cookie-cutter in that way.

I love that the environments have plenty of detail.
And I realize I only say that 'cause I saw many RPG Maker
games that didn't bother putting in the extra effort.

They're two, we're four. I like these odds.

One difference with other RPG Maker games is that the game opens with a difficulty selection screen. Casual, Normal or Hard. I’m playing on Normal difficulty, and the game is way too easy. Very few battles proved troublesome. Most enemies go down in two hits. Even the bosses were laughable, with just two maybe putting on a fight. Most random encounters only have two enemies, so you can often finish them before they even have time to strike. You’re warned at the start of the game that some side-quests may be too hard when you receive them and you may need to come back to them later – but I never ran into that issue! On the contrary, everything was too easy!

Also, I kept thinking spells would work with typing
advantages and weaknesses, but Holy Light never did
anything against ghosts, demons, and monsters.

Another issue I noticed was that all four characters could get equipped with the best gear, which made them strong in battle; however, it meant that I rarely, if ever, needed to use any magic spells. The team wizard’s offensive spells paled compared to the damage he dealt by attacking physically, which turned all fights into spamming the attack button for all characters, knowing it would work better than creating a strategy.

The world’s design is good; lots of detail, lots of creative map-building with variety and set-dressing. You can easily tell when the work was put in based on the look of the maps. It's much nicer than some RPG Maker games I've played where the maps were large, but empty, barren, and boring. In all fairness, all the dungeon areas are a bit lacking in enemies; there are no random encounters with invisible opponents here, only roaming ones. An enemy battle is engaged when you make contact with those.

Setting up a Quests section in RPG Maker isn't
simple, so I appreciate this game doing it.

Beyond the story, there’s plenty to do. The pause menu includes a section tracking your ongoing quests; this includes the main plotline (where you can kepe track of what to do next to progress the plot), but also a decent quantity of side-quests to find across the world map. Two quests are larger; the first involves defeating eight elemental lords imprisoned in spires (those bosses have a lot of fanfare but have mostly turned out easy). The second is all about finding fifteen Frozen Tears, hidden all over the kingdom; finding them all unlocks the fight against the final elemental lord. Four more bosses can be encountered, the Golath Souls.

Sure, the big bosses look cool and impressive. But they
fold like marginally-stronger enemies.

As for the story itself? I was surprised at how much it pulled me in. This plot is well-written, with unexpected twists and turns. There are plenty of little scenes for worldbuilding and stuff to read about. There’s never too much backtracking necessary, aside from a few moments related to story events. The characters are well-rounded and interesting, and we often explore their deeper motivations.

In short: A better game than I would have expected from just the first impression, with those full-body portraits. Great story, but the difficulty could have been kicked up several notches, and some specific elements related to combat, like magic spells, could have been fine-tuned so that they’re worth using. Maybe someday I’ll try the hard mode to see if it makes a significant difference…

Storm of Spears is available on Steam for 1.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Spaceport Hope

A courier investigating a strange, multi-planet conspiracy!

Just the first blood. Slugs are great first enemies.

Developed by team BitClub, published by them and Sunken Treasure Games, and released on April 15th, 2016, Spaceport Hope is a platforming action shooter with very light Metroidvania elements. Your character is a courier (…no name given, who cares about names anyway), and he lives in a town on a planet led by a nebulous Government that seems to also rule over several planets in the system. At the beginning of the game, he is tasked with delivering a crate of medicine to the Spaceport Hope space station. However, the load turns out to be contaminated by radiations, which gets the hero in trouble. To clean his record, he must escape, investigate the situation, and find the true culprits. This adventure will take him to every planet and make him encounter pirates, hackers, and perhaps even worse.

"Shoot till their HP falls to 0." Easy to do with the base gun.
Also, monster, alien, animal, or just some random human
doing their job (that involves shooting back at you), no
matter! Shoot to kill either way!

The controls: The arrows to move, A to jump (with the ability to double jump), S to shoot. Q and W to cycle between weapons, E to interact with stuff. F to open the inventory of items, and G to open the weapon menu and toggle which guns to add to the weapon cycle. You can always shoot upwards, and downward while in midair. Your starter gun has infinite ammunition, and you find new weapons over time, with plenty of ammo lying around to reload.

A big dinosaur with poisonous spikes in the metro
tunnels. Just another day in this solar system.

Enemies don’t show health on screen as a bar that gradually decreases; instead, when you hit an enemy, a number flashes showing how much health it has left. That’s for regular enemies; bosses have the classic health bar. Most enemies and bosses have gimmicks we’ve seen before, but I can let that slide personally. The game isn’t easy per se, it’s very easy to land in a situation with too many enemies and you never have so much HP as to feel comfortable for too long. Thankfully, save points serve as respawns, and they heal the Hero anytime he touches them – but they’re also sparse enough that going back to them can be tricky.

Dangerous laboratories? Sure. Hey, I'm trying to make sense
of a situation in which I was framed, I'll visit every place that
can help me!

The Metroidvania side? While it’s among the keywords for the game, that aspect is underutilized. You never really upgrade your base abilities to access new areas, and thus you rarely have reasons to return to previous dungeons. You will be coming back to previous areas occasionally, but it will usually be because the plot opened a new dungeon in the area. A few moments do require the Hero to purchase (or find) items beforehand – like scuba-diving gear to visit an underwater dungeon, or a gas mask to bypass a wall of poisonous gas. But you’ll gather enough money from killing enemies and looting chests that getting those items shouldn’t be an issue.

Some boss battles get pretty tough, like when they have a
weak point that doesn't show up frequently. Like this guy.

As soon as you can travel through space, you have access to several minor dungeons with a handful of extras to look for, like additional health and other items you can use to get deeper into the game. You’ll also often find data to access other planets, so there are indeed pans of this universe that you won’t see until you’ve gotten to that point in the story.

Gotta love those ledge-camping enemies that foirce you to
juml in place shooting till they're dead, 'cause if you touch
them you'll get hurt.

Is Spaceport Hope amazing? Nah. Is it bad? …Not at all, actually! It ranks firmly in the “okay bordering on good” category. It doesn’t set out to break any ground and reinvent its genre; it just features very common gameplay elements, but executes them well. There’s variety in the enemies and bosses you can encounter, with many of them requiring specific strategies to deal with. You can find a decent choice of weapons, difficulty progression is steady (though, genre-wise, it feels purely like a shooter platformer and the Metroidvania aspect is barely there). I didn’t run into any gameplay issues, everything worked right. The sprite art is pretty good, and the music is alright. The story is generic, but not terrible. In short: Not a must-play, but its quality and its low price make it plenty accessible if you’re looking for another run’n’gun-like platformer.

Spaceport Hope is available on Steam for 1.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Sonic Mania

Apparently I didn’t cover enough Sonic media this year – that’s alright, this one’s quick! (Also, sweet timing, so close to CrossWorlds' release!)

Come on, Tails, catch up!

Developed by Christian Whitehead, Headcannon and PagodaWest Games, published by SEGA, and released on August 29th, 2017, Sonic Mania is a 2D Sonic platformer paying tribute to retro Sonic titles in the best way. This one opens on Sonic and Tails investigating a strange energy reading. They find Eggman’s robots foraging the site, digging out a strange jewel that flips all the colors and even appears to teleport them around. This is the Phantom Ruby, which you might know better as the item used by Infinite in Sonic Forces… whose events happen in a whole other universe than this one. Don’t question it, Sonic continuity is weird. Anyway, that jewel is bad news, so Sonic and Tails team up to stop Eggman and his new, Ruby-empowered Hard Boiled Heavies. Oh, and Knuckles can get dragged into all this, too.

I swear Knuckles always looks angry that he gets caught
in the story of the day when he could be guarding the
Master Emerald instead.

Unfortunately for Tails, solo he's the absolute worst character
to use. But he's still a great sidekick to Sonic.

On the main menu, you can play either as Sonic and Tails, or just one of either of the three playable protagonists, each with their own gimmick. Sonic is the base, Tails can fly at the cost of any protection, and Knuckles can glide and climb walls. The Sonic and Tails combo is the easiest, since Tails can help through stages and even land an extra blow to bosses. However, all four options have their own perks, secret areas, and little changes from each other, which makes them all worth trying. And in true Sonic fashion, the stages get downright labyrinthine. That’s before getting into all the references to past games – several worlds are outright pulled from Sonic classics.

It's juuust out of reach! Gotta go Mach 3 to catch up and...
well crap, I'm out of rings, the timer ran out.

Of course, a 2D Sonic game wouldn’t be complete without the Chaos Emeralds and a final confrontation accessible after finding them all. You can find large 3D rings that take your current character to a 3D track on which they hunt down a UFO fleeing with an Emerald. It’s too fast, so you first have to collect blue spheres to increase your own Mach speed in order to catch up. You can also collect rings to increase the time limit. There’s a second type of bonus challenge that involves collecting blue spheres (again) and rings on a spherical plane, avoiding the red spheres. My only issue with these is just how hard it can be to find the giant rings. I think I’ve only seen two! Thankfully, Level Select is unlocked after beating the not-actually-final boss, so it's possible to go back and hunt them down afterwards.

Impressive! Sure hopw the Phantom Ruby doesn't next land
into the hands of even more competent villains.

Good thing Eggman sucks at his own game.

Another thing I loved here was the boss battles. Lots of creativity to be found, plenty of nods to Sonic’s history. There's a battle against Metal Sonic in the Sonic CD-inspired world, and another “boss” is a puzzle fight inspired by Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Many more throwbacks can be found, especially if you’re well-acquainted with the 2D “classic” era.

As a bonus, the game also has a DLC allowing you to play as Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Squirrel, both of whom have seldom appeared since 1993 before making a comeback here.

Looks like Eggman finally found a way to make Sonic
stay still. Vengeance best served cold and all that.

Lots of boss battles have their own mechanics, so the
little gameplay changes every now and then help keep
the game fresh, interesting, and never too easy.

All in all, a fantastic product from beginning to end – a true love letter to the classic era. Packed with references to the adventures and games of that time, only a few hints of game design throughout can betray that this game is a product of the 2010s. One of its developers, Christian Whitehead, helped port Sonic CD to PC, so the team knows a thing or two about Sonic game design! It looks exactly like a classic-era game and has the perfect music to back that up as well. The worlds are varied, and often feature their own unique little mechanics, which add flavor to them. Sincerely, I don’t think there’s much if any negative I can point out in this one, it’s great. (…Yep, it overshadows Forces in every way.)

Sonic Mania is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Shantae: Half-Genie Hero

She’s back, and ready to defend Scuttle Town again!

If we're starting with the downtown on fire... We're in for
something good.

WayForward’s Shantae series has quite a few games; I covered another one, Risky's Revenge, long ago. The entry covered today, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, was released on December 20th, 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. However, in place of a Metroidvania-style, interconnected world, we have a game split into stages. Most of them contain secrets inaccessible until Shantae collects the right abilities and forms to turn into (through her belly dancing, of course). You can return later to find those and expand your arsenal.

Factories? Mermaids? Crocodiles? Better investigate this.
I'm supposed to be looking for maidens, not mermaids!

After another attack from Risky Boots and her pirate crew on Scuttle Town, Shantae’s elderly inventor uncle begins making a machine, using old blueprints, that will protect the town in her place. However, she'll need to find the items he needs. And solve problems across the land, while she’s at it. Maidens are disappearing in the next town over? Everyone in Scuttle Town loses their memories and another half-genie looks like the culprit? Stopping a heist at the grand flying carpet race? Other than her uncle’s machine, what could tie these things together? Maybe the occasional dream Shantae has been having of the genie world, which speaks to her…

We're gonna need a bigger boat. ...Okay, that joke
is probably in poor taste to talk about a giant mermaid.

Wham! Need power to push large blocks? Become elephant.
Stay cute either way.

With the jewels you collect, you can buy additional upgrades for Shantae, such as magic spells to use (with the C key), or improvements to the attack power and speed of her hair whip. Over the course of this adventure, she regains her classic forms – the wall-climbing monkey, the ramming elephant, the swimming mermaid, and so on. Some forms have a secondary ability must be unlocked by finding it. As an example, the mermaid form starts out defenseless against underwater threats, but Shantae later learns to shoot bubbles to attack.

Uh oh, gotta escape the giant worm (which is dead when we
return, so yep, can't "finish" this area in one go).

Splitting the game into stages, each with lots of secrets, does help in some capacity. However, it means you’ll be revisiting eqch stage many, many times to find new abilities that were previously impossible to get. You do gain access to teleportation tools to quickly leave a stage once you got what you wanted, or to warp directly to the next area if you know exactly what you're looking for and where it's located.

Past the main mode, you can play the game again with various twists: A Hero Mode with all transformations unlocked from the start, a Hardcore Mode, and a Jammies Mode with Shantae in her pajamas and fighting with her pillow (yup). The store page includes DLCs for two additional quests, one playing Risky Boots’ side of the story, another playing as Shantae’s friends, and three “costumes” that come with their own arcade-like gameplay!

In Jammies Mode (implied to be one big dream), her pillow
atrtacxk is somehow stronger than her regular hair whip.
Also, this mode turns the game into a genuine platformer.

Some of these quests feel like a point'n'click. You obtain the
candy from the dotor, which you see after getting sick, which
happens after finding five relics for an archaeologist in the
desert tower, and finding said relics requires the ability to
ground-pound with the elephant form. ...Phew!

WayForward knows how to craft a good Metroidvania – as proven repeatedly by this very franchise. But if you bought Shantae: Half-Genie Hero hoping for one, you might be disappointed that it's split into stages rather than being a continuous world, even if the spirit remains and the game is still very good. As pointed above, this change does lead to some degree of repetitiveness, though there's a few workarounds. As usual, this is paired by a great soundtrack, a beautiful hand-drawn art style (seriously, the game looks awesome), and inventive stages and bosses with always something new to discover. It’s worth checking out for fans of the genre or of the series. Good time all around.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD. Or, alternately, you can get the Ultimate edition released two years later, in May 2018, which includes all the bonus material.

Quick Review: Riff Racer

One more entry in the Game Eulogies, this is turning into a yearly thing here. Okay, this one isn’t dead, but it might as well be.

Oh yeah - my copy defaults to French. Oh well!

Created by FOAM Entertainment and released on May 12th, 2016, Riff Racer is no longer available for purchase on Steam. Its concept, and the reason people loved it so much, was that it was like a more advanced version of Audiosurf. In both games, there are songs available from the get-go, and you could race on those for a high score, toggling difficulty to your liking. However, the big draw was that both games allowed you to upload your own music tracks, after which the game would procedurally create a stage based on your settings, with the song as basis and background.

I will give the game that; it looked really damn cool.

No no no!! I'm tailspinning! I'm going sideways!
Ironically, none of this, not even falling off the track,
is much of a step back.

Both games allowed; past tense. Audiosurf still does it, because it generates the game track client-side. Riff Racer used to do it server-side. As in, the server in FOAM Entertainment’s studios. Which means that, now that the game has been delisted and the servers shut down, well… you’re left with the inability to pick a track from your collection and turn it into a custom level. Unfortunately, that specific feature was the entire selling point FOAM Entertainment was counting on. Makes complete sense that they’d no longer sell the game, then – with that feature gone, what's the point. (A few games I’ve done Eulogies for should take notes and delist too. Damn things can still be bought even when they literally don’t work anymore.)

Excuse me while I stare at my collection of 3,000 songs that
will never be used here...

And, if you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know that I’m a big fan of music in general, I listen to a lot of stuff. And for years I would amass music, because I wanted it of course, but there was frequently that tiny voice at the back of my mind, “hey, when the time rolls around to review Riff Racer, I’ll have all those songs to try out, it’s gonna make for fun gameplay recording sessions, right?” Well, I got around to it too late then, didn’t I.

Which isn’t to say that fans of the game haven’t found some way to make it work, creating their own servers and giving detailed instructions to let anyone connect their copy of Riff Racer to those custom servers. Which, for some reason, makes track generation possible again. Although I commend the effort and ingenuity, I don’t think I’d feel enough interest going through that just to play on some tracks. I just don’t have the attachment to this one that others may have had. And I was too late to cultivate such an attachment, too.

You have a couple of carsd to choose from, and you could
earn in-game money to spend on... uh, stuff, I guess.
Doesn't really matter much anymore, does it.

Yeah, there’s no way I’m gonna play 20 hours of that one. I doubt there’s much point in telling you to buy it, but yeah – if you own it and haven’t touched it, and have no plans of touching it, you’re not missing out. Go back to Audiosurf (1 or 2) instead.