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.

Quick Review: Revolution Ace

Wait, are you saying that giving AI to drones and war machines is a bad idea? Someone should tell Spotify’s CEO about that.

A creation of Laser Guided Games, LLC released on March 19th, 2014, Revolution Ace is set in a future where humans decided to fight all their wars with automated machines, greatly reducing loss of life in conflicts. However, at the start of this story, the machines began acting on their own and gearing up to fight humanity. It’s up to you to stop the mechanical threat using the last man-piloted war jet!

Let's see how far I can get... And at which level does this
turn into a Bullet Hell.

The shmup genre is hard to reinvent; it always boils down to a small character/ship moving in one direction, fighting waves of enemies, avoiding thousands of bullets, and getting either permanent upgrades or temporary power-ups. Revolution Ace does a few things I’ve seldom seen with the genre; the first is a level-up system. Finishing a stage gives EXP, and at each level you either unlock new pieces to purchase and add to your ship, or choose a new perk granting an advantage on the field. You move with WASD, use your primary weapon with the left-click button, your second weapon with the right-click, and the Superweapon (the bomb-type attack that needs to reload after a number of seconds) with the mouse wheel.

Looks like my carpet bombs just aren't doing enough damage
to beat this damn base.

The second fresh idea is that stages have an added element of depth. Since you fight in the skies, some of your weapons can only hit flying enemies; but some threats come from the ground below, and thus you eventually need to equip your ship with both air and ground weapons to deal with everything coming your way. The early stages don’t call attention to this much, and you may be left wondering why you should even bother… until you reach the game’s fifth boss, which is a base on the ground, which can thus only be hurt with weapons that can reach it.

You cannot select previous levels during Campaign Mode; however, if you’re struggling with the latest level, need extra experience to get better weapons, or are short on scraps (in-game money) to upgrade your fighter jet, there’s Skirmish Mode, which lets you play previous levels and even a couple of bonus challenges (such as boss gauntlets).

That mechanic either looks like he belongs in the greasy '80s
or is seconds away from saying "Think Big, s'tie".
Only Québécois will understand the latter joke.

OK, that's getting tougher... not too tough yet, though!

However, one major facet of this game is multiplayer, as you can compete against another player in Versus Mode, or challenge other players’ best scores in specific stages in Battle Chains. In that second mode, you’ll play side-by-side against another user (whose performance was, I think, pre-recorded), on a specific stage and difficulty (often boosted), and must attempt to score higher than them. It’s not so much about beating the stage first; it’s all about the score. A lot of Superweapons have bonus effects in Versus Mode as well, generally causing negative effects to the opponent (like stealing some fo their shield).

Yeah, I doubt I'll do good here, the CPU is already on
boss #3 and I'm still on #2!

Eh… this is fine. It’s a fine game. I don’t really have strong feelings for it, but I still can see how it could get people to play the campaign to the end and then compete in the multiplayer modes. The mechanics added to classic shmup give it more depth than the average: The experience system, customization of the jet’s equipment with new slots unlocking as you gain levels, the occasional perks. It’s a change from shmup ships that merely improve during stages, through power-ups. I guess I also like the depth of strategy that involves fighting on two planes at once, both air and ground, and some of the design choices made in that regard. I think the multiplayer concepts are alright, not that I do well there, but hey, Laser Guided Games likes the idea enough to encourage buying this for both yourself and some friends with a 4-pack option on the game’s page.

Revolution Ace is available on Steam for 4.99$ USD.