![]() ![]() Lucas Sullivan Hyper Light Drifter (PS4, Xbox One) Not since Symphony of the Night and Guacamelee have I been this focused on full completion, and every moment of my quest to see the entirety of Headlander was a hoot. But perhaps the piece de resistance of Headlander's wonderful little details is the dance button: every last body type you can take over has a unique animation to let you get down with your bad self, and they're all utterly delightful. The '70s ambiance of your surroundings - from the groovy tunes to the abundance of shag carpeting - is wonderfully unique in a quirky, retro-future way, and Headlander shines with Double Fine's trademark humor that's as heartfelt as it is ridiculous. By exploring the picturesque space station as your free-floating head, then hijacking any robo-body by catapulting yourself onto its neck-socket, only you have to power to restore freedom to the metallic masses who all act like brainwashed hippies. Headlander's premise is sci-fi so silly, you can't help but love it: you're the last living human - that is, the last living human head, encased in a hovering helmet - in a 2.5D world where everyone's uploaded themselves into robots straight out of '70s visions of the far future. Anthony Agnello Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PS4, Xbox One)īlessed are the Metroidvanias that encourage and reward your efforts to explore every last inch of their expansive maps. No one knew how badly they wanted that until 2016. Plus: it’s a mech shaped like Kirby’s face. The challenge of these games is always finding the hidden items in each stage, and learning how to properly manipulate Kirby’s new mech and its powers spices up that process nicely. Gorgeous, lengthy, and tactilely delicious, Robobot nails the balance of action and puzzle solving that makes for a great Kirby but also warps it with a novel twist. HAL makes some of the best damn platformers on earth and Kirby: Planet Robobot is one of them. The cycle’s worked for a quarter of a century now, but the result is that people tend to forget that the weird ones like Rainbow Curse aren’t the only great Kirbys. Think how Kirby: Return to Dreamland showed up on Wii and then the next one was Kirby and the Rainbow Curse traditional platformer and then a zany claymation, all touch screen sequel to a decade-old DS game. First you make the totally normal one and then you make the crazy one. HAL Laboratory has a system for making its Kirby games. Anthony Agnello Kirby: Planet Robobot (3DS) A town of winged farmers, a lonely robot tending her creator’s house for centuries, and the repopulation of a world that you thought was just a single island I could have kept unraveling its tiny but long story threads for another 70 hours. Moving on the map with your small group of characters, even small personal moments and slow changes in the landscape strike with the impact of massive action scenes in Final Fantasy and The Witcher. Yet Dragon Quest 7 takes the brutal tedium of classic RPGs, elongates it, and somehow turns it into one of gaming’s most pleasurable slow burns. The most mechanically satisfying part of the game, its class system that lets you train in disciplines like mage or weird stuff like shepherd, doesn’t even open up for a third of the game. Over the course of 70 hours adventuring, you will have to explore every single dungeon at least two times, often more than that, and there’s no way to effectively fast travel to them half the time. No monsters appear to fight you for at least 90 minutes. Susan Arendtĭescribing Dragon Quest 7 makes it sound like an absolutely miserable exercise in drudgery. And if you can put all four crewmembers on Mars playing on Hard? Just go ahead and apply to NASA. (What, too soon?) The randomness of the dice means you’ll lose more than you’ll win, but when you finally do manage to set down on Mars, the victory is just that much sweeter for all the suffering you’ve been through. Tharsis is brutally difficult and doesn’t do enough to teach you how to actually play, but once you make it over the learning curve you’ll find the challenge to be as satisfying as a home-cooked meal. See, your food stores were lost in the collision, and your ability to fix the ship is directly proportional to how well-fed you are, so you may find yourself forced to use the one source of nourishment left on board: each other. It’s like Apollo 13, but with more cannibalism. Each turn in this dice-based strategy game represents one week of your trip, where things keep going terribly, terribly wrong. A ship bound for Mars runs afoul of some asteroids, leaving you and your crewmates struggling to survive for the ten weeks remaining in the journey. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |