#PS4
#PS4
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Russian Subway Dogs is pure arcade joy. It’s nothing more than a series of levels where you scare train passengers out of their food and watch a combo multiplier go up. What makes it work is the way you juggle items, and the increasing complications each new stage introduces. It’s tricky and taxing, and while it sometimes gets tough, it’s a clean design that makes the endless score chase appealing.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
I started Airheart captivated by its beautiful world. A land set in the clouds, rendered in painterly style, populated with appealing mechanical designs. The story seemed intriguing too, setting up a journey through the clouds to the top layer, with revelations waiting for me. Instead I was surprised to find that Airheart was almost free of direction. Ascending cloud layers and upgrading my machine provided an implicit direction, but after the tutorial it was largely free of objectives or guidance. So I wandered the clouds, fishing, fighting bandits, and scrounging up enough money to try and push higher each time.
For a while this provided a pleasant grind. Flying about the clouds and catching fish almost put in the same mindset as thatgamecompany’s Flow. There was a similar relaxed vibe, and a back and forth between the layers that recalled the same changes in intensity. That all changed after the first plane crash.
By Amr (@siegarettes)
Super Skull Smash GO! 2 Turbo has a pretty ridiculous name. Thankfully, it also has a pretty simple pitch. It’s a retro style puzzle platformer where you jump on skeletons then collect their heads to smash into a holy temple. It’s about as fun as that sounds. The platforming feels good, the feedback on delivering craniums to the cross is great, and the boss fights are tense and satisfying. It feels a bit like My Owl Software’s Apple Jack series in the way it takes simple platforming and throwing mechanics and creatively builds upon them.
What holds SSSG2T back is how it manages to feel retro in a different way, which is how it tests your patience. SSSG2T is a challenging game, filled with instant death pitfalls and tricky platforming. It’s thankfully never feels unfair or ridiculously precise, but its easy to make a few wrong moves and find yourself restarting the stage. Stages are relatively short, taking only a few minutes or less to run through, so it’s never a huge loss…until a few worlds in.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
By the time I’d got around to playing games, I’d associated Atari more with middling licensed Dragon Ball Z games than their early videogame contributions. By the time the last generation ended, Atari had pretty much become a company failing to capitalize on those early games with middling remakes and reboots. So it’s a trip to see the Atari logo on a new game, let alone a new Tempest. Doubly so, considering it was just three years ago that the previous incarnation of Atari had threatened legal action against Jeff Minter for his work on TxK for its resemblance to Tempest 2000, a Tempest remake he created for Atari.
Given that context, Tempest 4000 almost feels like an apology to Minter. It’s recognition of the absurdity of the situation created by the previous holders of the Atari name, and an invitation to make it good by paying Minter to return to the well. And Minter isn’t shy about returning to the source.
by Amr (@siegarettes )
Some games use their user interfaces to great effect. They become expressive tools that communicate mood, give tactile sensations, or reveal and obfuscate information as contributions to the narrative. Then there’s Frost, which gives a somewhat interesting digital deck building game all the fussiness of a physical board game.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I’m a sucker for a good racing game. Hell, I’ll hang around for longer than I’ll admit for an OK arcade racer. So when All-Star Fruit Racing showed up looking like it had stolen SEGA All-Stars Racing’s drifting I jumped on it. Seriously, the drifting in those games is incredible.
All-Star Fruit Racing’s drifting, as it turns out, is not incredible. It’s not even good. In fact the driving in general is underwhelming and by trying to build on this middling foundation All-Star Fruit Racing ends up with an inconsistent and mundane racer.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
I love being proven wrong. After doing this for a while you get a sense for how a game will generally turn out, and everything I’d seen of Vampyr didn’t give me much confidence. There was plenty of promises of meaningful choice and interlocking systems, big words that more often point to overambition than anything else. Vampyr definitely doesn’t escape that overambition. There are many rough edges–abrupt loading screens within open areas, dialogue playing over itself, oversights inside of main quests–these are only a few of the things that point to Dontnod reaching beyond their resources.
Despite that Vampyr has been surprisingly compelling. Its focus on conversation and investigation gives weight to the web of relationships within its cast. Character dialogue is limited, but the process of tracking down people, learning about them, and slowly coming to a greater understanding is deeply satisfying. Characters have tangible histories, and I often found listening to them tell their own stories as engaging as following my own.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
Riddled Corpses is the kind of game that I like to wind down to. Difficult enough to keep me engaged, straightforward, but with enough considerations to make it more than just pointing your gun in the right direction. Each stage is made up of multiple arenas where waves of enemies approach, with transitional moments where you fend off attacks as the screen scrolls to a new part of the stage. There’s a decent combo system that gives you a multiplier for points and damage as you chain kills, and there are destructible objects in the environment that can set enemies alight.
There’s also enough character in the sprites and enemy design that keeps it from blending in with every other twin stick zombie shooter I’ve played. The story involves demons and time travel, and honestly isn’t very engaging, but it does keep the mix of enemies and stages more interesting than the same tired archetypes that populate zombie fiction.
Right, so that’s an easy recommendation, yeah? Well, it would be, if I didn’t find its upgrade system so tiring.