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Gut Check – Journey to the Savage Planet

On its surface, Journey to the Savage Planet looks like another survival game, albeit in a beautifully rendered world, but that would be selling the whole game short. In Journey to the Savage Planet you play as an unnamed and mostly silent protagonist who works for a space exploration and colonization company and is tasked with exploring and cataloguing new worlds.

You do this through a combination of traversal, crafting and using your various tools to scan and document everything you can see. It can feel a little overwhelming in the opening minutes because everything around you is foreign and new to you, but that quickly subsides and gives way to the joy of exploring this intricately designed world.

As the title of the game surely implies, a lot of the stuff on this planet is eager to kill you, but not all of it is inherently hostile. The first beings you come across are these adorable, round little bird cyclops things that are harmless. Unfortunately for them, they become a puzzle solving mechanic pretty early on. I came across several blocked passages that would only open if I launched one of these innocent birds into the gaping, toothed maw of the creature blocking the way. But you can’t stop progress can you?

That leads into one of my favorite parts of Journey to the Savage Planet, which is the sense of humor on display. The first thing you see is a shoddily produced, full motion video orientation video starring the CEO of the company, touting how they are now the 4th best space exploration company around. You also get sent various ads produced in a similar fashion that are pretty good as well.

Even the things I don’t normally engage with, like emails in games, are genuinely funny and worth reading. One of them described how I was in almost $500,000 of debt that would take approximately 50 years to pay off, will now only take 47 years to pay off, thanks to my new job as a spaceman.

The best, but maybe even the worst thing Journey to the Savage Planet allowed me to do was select my character portrait from a veritable rogues gallery. I of course chose the dog, which on its surface was hilarious, but the follow through might be a little more than I can take. You see, picking this dog-stronaut, while hilarious, now means that every time my character makes a grunt from jumping, climbing or getting hit, it’s replaced with the dog version of that sound. This has become extra incentive for me to not get hit so I don’t have to hear pained dog noises.

“But what about the actual game,” I hear you ask. The long and short of it is that while it’s too early for me to definitively say one way or another, I can say that it’s a lot of fun to play and has yet to be overly difficult or punishing in any real way.

Considering that Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t actually a survival game, but just uses some of those mechanics, a lot of it ends up feeling more like an action or adventure game. Instead of managing hunger, ammo or the usual myriad of resources, the game simplifies it all into a health bar, stamina bar, and a handful of resources. It’s less focused juggling a bunch of meters, and more about just uncovering the mysteries of the world.

Mechanically, everything works the way you’d hope it would, making traversal pretty easy while the shooting feels tight and responsive. There has yet to be a moment where I’ve felt outgunned or unequipped to handle a threat. There was a “boss” fight that involved 3 armored dog creatures that would hurl rocks and charge at you that got a little hairy, but there’s always plenty of health around, and they had massive glowing weak spots on their tails. Though I don’t think the combat is the main draw for me anyway.

Instead, I think it’s the story that’s really got me hooked. When you arrive, you’re led to believe that all the planets the space company sends its employees to are devoid of higher beings. Your planet however, has a massive man made tower in the middle of it, that no one was aware of. This leads to the CEO urging you to go explore it and unravel the mystery, but that dude is shady as hell, so I think that there’s something else going on.

After my hour or so with Journey to the Savage Planet, I’m left wanting to uncover more of it and see where the story goes. You can play cooperatively through the whole story with a friend, but I believe you have to start a coop game to do so. I really like what Journey to the Savage Planet put forward in its opening hour, and I will certainly be playing more of it when I get the opportunity.

Blog: The Darkest Timeline – 02/05/20

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A few weeks back I wrote about Call of Duty Modern Warfare and how it brought up memories of playing games with my friends after we had graduated high school. It was spurred on by the realization that my friends and I had fragmented once again, but as adults. We’re still friends, but we rarely find time to sync up and talk and even less of that is spent playing games. But that’s about to change.

Well, considering that I’m currently writing this in late January, it hasn’t actually happened but it’s about to. See, after a conversation with my friend about his absence from our Discord server, we somehow drilled down on the fact that he’d been dedicating a lot of time to the World of Warcraft guild he had put together.

You probably can see where this is going.

In his extreme generosity, mixed with his desire to play games with me, and my loneliness, he gifted me a a copy of Battle For Azeroth, the latest expansion to World of Warcraft, as well as one month of game time. Once again, a very generous thing to do, but also the darkest moment of my gaming career.

See, about 15 years ago or so when World of Warcraft came out, I tried playing this game for the exact same reasons with mostly the exact same people. I didn’t enjoy it then, but maybe I can appreciate it more as an adult. What I sure as hell didn’t appreciate or expect, (although it is a 16 year old game so why wouldn’t I expect this) was the 61 gigabyte download required for a game that I’m so on the fence about. Watching it install was agonizing, giving plenty of opportunities to smash that cancel button and run away from my computer screaming.

But that didn’t happen and now there’s a new icon on my desktop that’s taunting me. I’m excited to talk to my buddies again, but less excited about how it all came together. What’s even more interesting is that I’m going from abject silence and nothingness, to jumping into a populated Discord server with people who I don’t know that are all way into a game that I know I’m going to make fun of. Like, it’s going to happen. I’m going to say something about how asinine a mechanic is, and the chat will go silent and I might get a pity chuckle before the conversation shifts.

I’m also terrified at the idea that I actually have to do stuff. These guys are in a guild, and they raid and do important missions that I assume all involve collecting pieces of animals they kill in the woods, and they might eventually ask me to do something important that I know for a fact I will mess up.

But none of that happened as of writing this. As of the date it actually is, all of that might have changed. I will have booted up the game at least once since writing this blog and I literally have no idea what to expect. I’m so grateful I have a friend who enjoys my company enough to cover my entrance fee. He didn’t have to do that, and I appreciate the hell out of him. But all I know for certain is that I get to talk to my friends again because I gave into peer pressure.

The Master of Disaster: Don’t Take it Personally – 09

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Like the countless memes on the internet would lead you to believe, scheduling our Dungeons & Dragons sessions can be unnecessarily difficult sometimes. People have their obligations and responsibilities, and it’s important to recognize and respect that, because at the end of the day these are still your friends. I recently found myself getting very down due to the scheduling nightmare that is our D&D campaign, and it took some time for me to get over it.

For months now, my group had been on the verge of some pretty big revelations in our campaign that I’ve been eager to drop on them. The problem was, with the holidays and various personal obligations, we hadn’t been able to meet for a full session in weeks. Totally understandable stuff.

The problem is that at some point during this period, whenever I would send a text message to the group on game day, it always felt like a roll of the dice as to who would cancel this time and considering we’re a small group of 4, when one person bows out, we all bow out. It wasn’t their fault that something came up and I understood that. But after a while of this, it started to feel like I was bothering them and hounding them to play D&D.

I hated this feeling. I hated it so much that it somehow warped into resenting myself and to a lesser extent, them. I was angry at my friends and they had no idea. While I completely had no right to be angry, there I was, dejected and frustrated with the current state of things.

The problem for me was that even though the sessions had stopped for a bit, my brain didn’t. In my mind I’d been thinking about all the things I want to throw at them from combat encounters to story threads. Whenever I’d go to write these outlines out or make a map, I’d just get upset because I started getting overly defeatist about the situation.

It was stupid and immature of me to be so upset and filled with resentment, and eventually I realized that. The reasonable part of me finally chimed in, cooled me down, and made me realize how childish I was being. Even though we still haven’t played a session yet, I’m okay with it. I’ve started funneling my creative energy into other projects, and that’s been incredibly helpful.

Even though I know it was immature and shitty to harbor these feelings, it was just so deflating to have sessions get cancelled, the day of. So one decision I did make was that I wasn’t going to hound them about playing anymore, and instead wanted to let them come to me when they wanted to start up again. What I’m really trying to avoid with this strategy is having them feel like D&D is work. It’s a game that we play together, and just like other games, sometimes you can’t sync up.

Gut Check – Super Crush KO

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Super Crush KO is the kind of game that’s best played on the couch while something else is playing on the television. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it is a pretty mindless and repetitive one to be sure. But what it lacks in variety, it makes up for in tight controls, satisfying combat, and a whole lot of style.

The story of Super Crush KO is pretty slight, involving your character having their cat kidnapped by some alien-lady who has a robot army at her disposal. Naturally, your character decides to take on every last robot that stands between her and her kitty. The writing is charming and the cut-scenes are done in a comic book style that really works for the whole aesthetic of the game, but the story isn’t why I’m sticking with Super Crush KO.

The main attraction of this 2D brawler is unsurprisingly in the combat. You’ve got your standard attack that chains into a combo, then you have directional power moves like uppercuts and ground pounds, but you also have this gun that locks on to nearby enemies that’s really good for dispatching flying baddies or keeping your combo going.

I’ve reached the third world of Super Crush KO, almost solely because of how good the combat feels, but it isn’t without its flaws. As I said earlier, the game is woefully repetitive, from level design, to enemies, it is quite literally you running from combat arena to combat arena, to fight the same horde of robots. It’s a real shame considering how strong everything else in the game is, because the repetition starts to feel like a real wet blanket on a game with such a strong first impression.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t introduce new mechanics or abilities, it just doesn’t do enough of that at least from what I’ve seen. I think I’ve seen about 5 or 6 different enemy types which is fine, but the bosses at the end of the first and second level are basically the same, only changing their attack patterns. In the first set of levels, you get four or five new abilities in rapid succession, but since that there hasn’t really been anything new aside from jump pads in some of the combat arenas that do more harm than they’re worth.

The only other gripe I really have with the game is how it handles difficulty. Super Crush KO is part 2D brawler and part bullet-hell that seems to just throw more enemies at you to make the whole game seem harder. Mission accomplished on that front, but it feels really cheap when you clear a screen of enemies only to have more just respawn in their wake. This might be a me specific issue, but I constantly found myself unsure of which attack would interrupt the attack of an enemy. Sometimes you can uppercut them out of their wind up, but sometimes, despite hitting them, they still just follow through with their attack and hurt you. Like I said, this could very well be a failing on my part, but its happened enough times for me to vocalize it here.

But at the end of the day, I’m going to keep playing Super Crush KO, almost solely because of how satisfying it is to play. It’s repetitive and at times tedious in terms of level design and combat arenas, but the gameplay is strong enough to keep me playing for the time being.

Blog: Big Delay Energy – 01/29/20

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Less than a month into 2020, several high profile games have already been pushed back and delayed. More time to work on a game is generally a good thing, but the finish line for the current generation of consoles is in sight. Not only do these games have to compete with other titles, but new hardware, which makes their delays a little more worrisome.

Before we talk about the games in question, it is important to know that Microsoft has already committed to Xbox One games working with the Xbox Series X, mitigating some of my reservations about migrating player bases. We don’t know what Sony has in store on that front, but I’m willing to bet this is all a moot point because every game on this list is going to get a next generation re-release.

So with all of those caveats, here are the big delays in question along with the effect it will have on the product as a whole… I assume.

FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE

First on the list is a game that I honestly could not care less about, but the gaming audience at large loves, Final Fantasy VII. It got bumped from a March 3rd release date, to April 10th.

In the grand scheme of things, this one isn’t so bad. People have waited a hilariously long time for this game to come out that I don’t think another month is too much to ask. It doesn’t matter anyway consider no matter what happens, people are still going to complain about the changes that were made.

This delay is far enough away from the launch of the next consoles that sales won’t be impacted at all.

MARVEL’S AVENGERS

So here is where we get into the more concerning delays. Marvel’s Avengers is an already strange product, marrying single player and cooperative third-person action with a live service model. I’m not saying it can’t work, but it’s a weird fit for a long awaited Avengers game.

Regardless, the game was pushed from May to September 4th of this year. We can assume that the next consoles will come out around November meaning that this live service game has roughly 2 months or less of capturing an audience.

Now yes, I understand that not everyone is going to buy a console the second it’s released, and yes I understand that Xbox is doing their “all games work on both consoles” thing, but with it releasing so close to a new console launch, there’s no way that Marvel’s Avengers doesn’t either get re-released on the new consoles, or just get delayed and released as a launch title.

I’m so curious about this game, and every time I hear more about it I get more and more concerned. Hopefully someone who gets paid to make these decisions has a plan, but from the outside looking in, it doesn’t look great for Marvel’s Avengers.

CYBERPUNK 2077

There’s no possible way that Cyberpunk 2077 can possibly live up to the hype, but I’m still hopeful. Originally slated for April 16th, Cyberpunk 2077 is listed for a September 17th release date.

While it isn’t a live service game like Marvel’s Avengers is, Cyberpunk 2077 is a massive, open-world action-RPG that’s going to take some time to get through if The Witcher 3 is any indication. This one isn’t so much as me being worried that the new consoles are going to eat Cyberpunk‘s lunch, but more me just wanting it to be a next generation title at this point.

In fact, I kind of wish Cyberpunk was planned as a next generation title in the first place. Everything that they’ve shown looks beautiful and ambitious, and I worry that the hardware it’ll be running on won’t hold up its end of the bargain. Maybe an Xbox One X or PS4 Pro will handle it better, but for those of us with launch hardware, I’m not convinced that we’re going to get a technically solid experience.

With all that said though, I’m sure that this game is going to get some sort of “game of the year” version with all the DLC or whatever after a year or so into the next console cycle. Cyberpunk 2077 is gonna be just fine.

DYING LIGHT 2

Now this one is concerning because it went from having an ambiguous “spring 2020,” release date, to not having one at all. Dying Light 2 was pitched as a highly ambitious game, particularly in the storytelling department, promising players vastly branching paths with difficult decisions that have actual impact on the story and world. It sounds great, but it also sounds like something that could be oversold very easily.

More to the point, without a window of time to expect Dying Light 2, it’s easy to assume the worst for the game, but I don’t think it’s on the verge on complete cancellation or anything like that. What I do think is that the pitch and scope of the game vastly overshadowed what the team at Techland can actually deliver. That isn’t an indictment of them as a studio, it’s just me pointing out that the initial pitch was lofty to begin with.

Do I think this game is doomed? No. Do I think that it’s going to be scaled back? Yes. Do I think it’ll be a next generation game? 100 percent. Am I any less excited to play it? Nope.

Full disclosure; this was written over a week ago, so I’m sure 15 other games got delayed since then. I welcome all delays, but if Nintendo bumps Animal Crossing back once more, I will riot.

Early Impressions: New Cities

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If I had to list my favorite genres of games, strategy and tactics would probably hover somewhere by the bottom. But there’s always an exception to the rule, and city building games are mine. Having dumped endless hours of my life into games like Sim City 4 and Cities Skylines, it was a no-brainer backing the New Cities Indiegogo campaign.

The first few days of receiving a key for, and downloading New Cities, I would try to launch the game from Steam only to have it immediately crash. Considering New Cities is only available to backers of the campaign, I wasn’t surprised to find that there were no answers to my dilemma. So I reached out to the developers behind the game, Lone Pine, and over the course of a handful of emails and a few days, I finally got the game up and running.

Finally able to actually play New Cities, I loaded up a new world only to be a little intimidated by the sheer scope of the city I could make. In games like Cities Skylines, you’re given a large map with several plots of land to pick from to start your city in. New Cities goes hog-wild with this idea, and just allows you to start anywhere on the map. You can zoom in and out till your heart’s content and just kind of build whatever you want anywhere, which is a little overwhelming.

Unlike its modern counterparts, New Cities is going for the Sim City 4 approach of having things be more grid-based, and not allowing for curved roads or anything like that. Which is fine for now honestly considering I start all of my cities on a grid anyway, but I’m sure people would like that option in the future. This throwback style not only exists in its mechanics, but in its visual presentation. Everything has a low-poly look too it, with buildings and scenery drenched in these shifting pastel hues. Sometimes everything is covered in a cool purple light, and it feels like I’m building a vapor-wave city which is something I’m very into.

Keeping in mind how early of a build of New Cities I’m currently playing, it doesn’t feel right to harp on the things it’s missing or aren’t surfaced well just yet. I’m sure everything is subject to change, but it’s worth highlighting some areas of improvement.

Navigating the UI is a little more cumbersome than I would like. The menus aren’t overly complicated or complex, but there aren’t any tool-tips that can explain what I’m clicking on. Opening up the statistics on your city give you various graphs and numbers that I’m sure would help me if I could understand what I’m looking at. Like I said, it’s still in development, so I’m not upset these things aren’t super well explained, but these things are definitely issues I’d like to see fixed.

Along with UI issues, just like a lot of city-builders, not a lot is explained to you in terms of progression. When you start, you do the standard thing of building roads and zoning for residential, retail and agricultural and that’s it. There’s nothing else you can build in the early goings until you get upwards of 1000 – 5000 residents in your town. Without things to build, terraforming, or unique infrastructure, it makes your city feel very empty and extremely generic.

There aren’t any power, water, or sewage requirements, which takes away the resource management of traditional city-builders, making the early game even less engaging, making the only thing you need to pay attention to be your cash flow. There are some icons that’ll pop up over buildings that indicate joblessness, lack of customers and something that just says, “no freight,” but there’s nothing that I’ve found that really instructs you as to how to deal with any of that.

One interesting thing about New Cities is how expensive everything is. I understand that in the real world, things are expensive and buildings and infrastructure are pricey, but it’s a little weird when a police station costs more than half of your starting budget. That isn’t a complaint, that’s just me being caught off guard by the sheer price of everything. I kind of screwed myself in one city by starting on an island. Once I ran out of space, I decided to expand onto the mainland. Or at least I would have done that if bridges didn’t cost 300 million dollars to build. So now I just have like 9000 people stranded on an island forever.

But I can’t be too hard on New Cities considering it’s still in active development, with plans of hitting early access later this year. The experience is thin and in places obtuse, but this feels like a really good proof of concept to, pardon the pun, build off of. The core of New Cities is solid, but needs an injection of things to build and manage especially in the early game, as well as a general pass at improving the little quality of life stuff like tool-tips. I think New Cities can be something special with enough time, and I look forward to following it as it progresses.

Gut Check – Pokemon Sword & Shield

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Having been out of the Pokemon game for decades, I never found myself yearning to get back into the mix and catch them all like I did when I was a child. But recently thanks to the kindness of a friend, I was given the opportunity to try the latest Pokemon offering in the form of Pokemon Shield, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Pokemon Shield starts pretty similarly to every other Pokemon game, with you setting out as a wayward child in the hopes of becoming the greatest Pokemon trainer of all time. Sound familiar?

I’m not well versed in the modern Pokemon discourse and don’t really have an opinion on all of the hubbub surrounding this latest release, but from the little I’ve played of Pokemon Shield, it seems fine. You’ve got all the staples of Pokemon games in the battling, catching and getting ambushed by people in the woods who are bloodthirsty and always ready to throw down.

The variety of new Pokemon seems pretty good from what I’ve seen, but then again I only really know the original 150 and not much else, so these could be older Pokemon from generations I’ve never played. That being said, they still have that great Pokemon charm with creatures ranging from adorable to utterly confounding.

It’s hard to talk about Pokemon Shield as a game considering that most of what I’ve done so far has been pretty boilerplate for the series. I did appreciate how I could skip some of the tutorials about how to catch and battle Pokemon, but somehow was still drowning in excessive exposition and redundant conversations. I don’t need my rival to explain to me three times in one conversation that he wants to be the best trainer and win the championship or whatever. You’ve mentioned it in basically every conversation we’ve had buddy, do you ever think about anything else?

But that’s Pokemon right? Just a bunch of wannabes vying for the top slot but never being good enough to overcome you.

The thing is that I don’t really have strong feelings about Pokemon as a concept or a game, so I can’t make a qualitative statement about Pokemon Shield because I’ve been so far from it for so long that it wouldn’t be fair. But what I can say is that it was a little disappointing to boot up the game and just go through the same motions that I did over 20 years ago.

I don’t know what people want out of a new Pokemon game, nor do I know what I’d want out of a new entry in the series. But I guess it’s important for me to remember that these games aren’t for me, they’re for kids and fans of the series. It doesn’t feel right to be overly critical of something that’s so foreign to me, but as it is I don’t think I’m really going to continue playing Pokemon Shield that much because it just feels like I’m playing a prettier version of the same thing I played as a kid.

Blog: Like the Old Days – 01/22/20

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Sometimes games strive to endear themselves to you through a healthy smattering of nostalgia, which usually yields mixed results at best. But some games exist solely for the purpose of reigniting old flames you thought had died in you long ago. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a prime example of the latter.

For context, the original Modern Warfare came out in 2007 when my friends and I had all graduated from high school. It was the perfect time for a game like that to keep us all together and talking considering we wouldn’t be forced to be in the same place for five days a week. It was a nightly ritual that involved us playing long into the night and talking to one another. It isn’t a unique story by any means, but it’s one that I look back on fondly.

Fast forward to today where everyone is scattered about and doing their own thing. I bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare out of some weird longing mixed with the general hype I’d heard since it released. Within the first few minutes of playing it, I immediately was flooded with memories of those long nights we would spend together online, and how important that was to me.

Nowadays my gaming buddies and I have drastically different tastes in games, making it hard to sync up on a purchase we can all enjoy, so I knew this game wouldn’t appeal to them. But I picked it up anyway, just for my own curiosity. It’s still incredibly fun and chaotic just like I remembered it, except this time around I’m flying solo. That sounds sadder than I intended it to, but it’s no less true.

There’s still something satisfying and endlessly replayable about the core mechanics and progression in the Call of Duty games that few other titles have matched. While I may not have my friends in my ear, cracking jokes and complaining about how “cheap” the enemies tactics are, I still get that endorphin rush of just running laps around a map and ~~blasting my enemies away~~ getting killed constantly.

Yet for as much fun as I’m having playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it still feels like half of an experience without friends to play with. I know I’ll never get those late night game sessions back and quite frankly, I don’t think I really want them. Hell, I can barely stay awake past 11 o’clock these days let alone play a game until 2 in the morning. But there’s something about Call of Duty that makes me wish I could. I guess that’s the power of a good nostalgia trip.

Gut Check – Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

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There are games that nail various aspects of their design, from story to gameplay and so on, but rarely do I find a game that is so fascinating that I’m willing to overlook its various shortcomings. That’s the way i feel about Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and its bizarre offerings.

I guess you could call Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey an action-RPG with survival mechanics if you really wanted to put it in a box, but it’s so much more than a genre descriptor could ever truly describe.

You play as an early hominid about ten million years ago, trying not only to survive, but to learn and pass on as much knowledge as you can to future generations. The pitch is incredibly interesting, but the execution is questionable at best.

The idea is that you’re learning along with the player character, not necessarily in what skills and concepts you pick up, but in how to do literally anything in the game. It kind of feels like you’re learning two games at once.

I wouldn’t normally explain control schemes, but I feel like it’s necessary in this case. You’ve got standard movement and camera controls, but to run or jump you have to hold down the A button to run, and release that hold to jump. It reminds me a lot of how Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater controlled oddly enough. You also have different sense mapped to different face buttons. One activates your smell, your hearing and your intelligence I think? But rarely have any of these senses been useful because everything is so obtuse in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

For instance, there are essentially mini-games that you need to succeed at to do everything. Want to sharpen a stick with a rock? Well you need to not only have a rock in one hand and a stick in the other, but then you need to play this timing based game where you repeatedly smash the rock into the stick until it’s sharp. Want to stab a wild boar? Well you can’t unless you have the sharp stick in hand and dodge into the attacking boar at the right time. Weird, right?

It gets even more confusing when you are unlocking new abilities. You have a skill tree for your current character, and you unlock abilities by doing or encountering things. For example, I ate a mushroom that poisoned me, but not because it was poisonous, but because I was a carnivore and my metabolism wasn’t prepared for an omnivorous diet. Eating more of these would increase my tolerance, (I think?) and allow me to unlock a better metabolism in the skill tree.

But that skill only applies to this current character. To lock these in, you need to take a kid along with you on your adventures so they learn it. Doing that allows you to “reinforce” a skill, making it something that is inherently known for future generations. But if you die with a baby on your back, you suddenly play as the baby who has to find a hiding spot. Once you do that, you transport into another living adult, and have to recover the child by finding them, and playing the worst mini-game I’ve ever seen. You have to essentially calm the kid by howling at it at the right time, but it feels completely arbitrary as to when that timing window is, and doesn’t give you any feedback at all.

And that’s all I came back with in the first hour or so! Who knows what other craziness is thrown at me later in the game.

Ultimately we have a game that controls oddly, doesn’t give you any real direction, and has obtuse and obfuscated mechanics. All of that said, I can’t stop thinking about this stupid game. It’s so weird that despite all of the fundamental issues I have with it as a game, I need to know what happens next. Is there a point where I eventually become a human? Do I learn how to make fire? Can I make weapons and hunt stuff instead of being terrified of literally anything that crosses my path? Who can say? All I know is that despite its flaws, I want to see what else is going on in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.

Blog: Virtually Real – 01/15/20

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For the past few weeks I’ve had ample access to an HTC Vive, showing it off to family and friends alike, but mostly just messing around with various physics playgrounds and breaking things. Aside from the setup, the sweating, and occasionally knocking things over, it’s been pretty great. There are a handful of games that I’ve been playing, some old and some new, that I thought I’d highlight.

VACATION SIMULATOR

Recently a new feature was launched on this site called Gut Check wherein I talk about the opening hour or so of a game and go over my impressions of them. I decided to start out with Vacation Simulator, a game I ultimately ended up enjoying a lot. Now, you can read my initial take on it here, but not much has changed from that.

I still find some of the design decisions questionable, but I’m still having fun with it and its charming atmosphere. There’s just something fun about picking things up and throwing them around in VR. I will say that after playing it some more, I find that a lot of the objectives are pretty rigid and don’t allow for much in the way of creativity. It feels more like a puzzle game than its predecessor Job Simulator, but it’s still a fun VR experience nonetheless.

I EXPECT YOU TO DIE

Speaking of throwing things around and solving puzzles, I Expect You to Die is a really cool puzzle game that puts you in the shoes of a secret agent trying to escape from various traps and accomplish missions.

The first case you’re assigned on is to escape a car that’s in the back of a cargo plane that’s filling up with noxious gas. In what’s basically a tutorial, I had to do things like disarm a bomb and dodge laser beams along with less exciting things like burn notes to find the secret note hidden underneath.

It’s a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and let’s you mess around with everything you can reach. My only complaint is how much it relies on trial and error, making you replay the entire level in the hopes of making it to where you died and hopefully figuring out the solution. It just feels a little tedious sometimes, but it’s still a lot of fun.

BLADE AND SORCERY

So I’ve basically been playing Blade and Sorcery every time I put on the headset. You play as some sort of fighter in a suit of armor, and go to different levels and take on different combat challenges. Sometimes it’s one on one fights, sometimes you’re vastly outnumbered, but no matter what, it always feels good to swing a sword in VR and this is no exception.

For as fun as the core loop of just sword fighting fools is, I found the overall game to be pretty thin at the moment, not really offering anything in terms of progression or diversity in objectives, but it is in early access to be fair.

I also found that sometimes the movement controls just don’t work which might be a game problem or my specific VR kit problem, I can’t be sure. But I really would like to see more sorcery from a game that has sorcery in the title. As of now, you can only really zap people with lighting which stuns them and will kill them if sustained long enough.

But the real highlight of Blade and Sorcery isn’t what’s in the game, but what you can mod into the game. Full disclosure, I got this game because I saw there was a mod that turned it into a Star Wars experience. So whenever I want to hop into some action, I grab a light saber, a blaster, and mow down an endless horde of Sith and Jedi alike. And that’s all made better when you install the infinite magic mod which allows you to have infinite slow motion. It let’s me feel like the baddest of asses and I’m 100% onboard with whatever they add into the core game.

I really enjoy VR, but it just doesn’t have enough quality content available to move headsets. Along with that, we’re still a few iterations away from getting a powerful, wireless headset that wont set your head on fire and somehow has a decent battery. Till then, just find a friend with VR and experience it through them.