Undertale

When I first started up Undertale it reminded me of something like Earthbound or Pokemon.  It starts off pretty simple with a tutorial that you might even call painful to get through.  The first character you meet, Toriel, holds your hand through a few puzzles and is too worried to allow you to do anything for yourself.  Toriel also encourages you to talk to the randomly encountered enemies until she comes and helps you. 

It's a fairly unique way to start the game and at least for me it had the effect of making me really want to get into it.  It takes a lot of time to spell out some things that are second nature if you'd played RPGs before.  However, Undertale is not like other RPGs.  

I didn't really know much about Undertale going in.  I knew it was an indie game with great reviews and that was about it.  In Undertale's kickstarter it was called "A traditional role playing game where no one has to get hurt" which is something I wasn't aware of.  When Toriel said I should be talking to the enemies in the game, I thought it was a joke.

Every enemy can be talked to and you don't actually have to do any damage to them.  They will keep hitting you though while you try to talk them out of fighting.  You also don't gain any experience points if you don't kill them.  Wanting to level up my character I found myself monsters largely because I wanted her to be strong enough to handle the challenges ahead.  This wasn't really necessary though I think a totally peaceful play-through might be more difficult than a violent one.

It's a neat and quirky for non-ethical reasons as well.  For instance, when I tried to "SELL" an item in a shop, the storeowner told me that they wouldn't be in business for very long if they bought every piece of junk that was offered.  It's also neat how the enemies' personalities are all complex and how the game combines a bullet hell game with RPG mechanics.  There also seems to be a lot of hidden content and if you do a second playthrough, some of the dialogue will change and some decisions will persist.

It's a good game that's been getting a lot of attention lately.  It's also cool that this was made by only one person (or at least mostly, there are names other than Toby Fox in the credits).  I recommend this game.

8/10

Gauntlet: Slayer Edition

Gauntlet: Slayer Edition is a dungeon-crawling hack and slash game which I played on the PS4.  It's easy to pick up and with a few exceptions it doesn't really get that much harder.  This makes it a good option to play with friends when you're just looking for something casual.

Each playable character is upgradable but not to a very large extent.  Comparing this system to Diablo 3 (another game I have on my PS4) it's considerably easier to learn and there's much less need to spend time navigating menus.  Many of the upgrades are cosmetic but some of them change your attacks.  The new attacks aren't necessarily better though, they're just different.

Another comparison that can be made between Gauntlet and Diablo is that the original Gauntlet likely provided inspiration for Diablo but today Diablo is clearly the stronger franchise.  I'm sure the success was largely because of Diablo's multiplayer.

After each level is complete the players are told how many kills they've achieved, how much gold they've earned and who was the greediest.  This is very relevant because the gold goes to whoever picks it up first and limits the upgrades of the other players.  Somehow I ended up getting this "award" in most of the levels we finished despite one of my friends using a powerup to turn all the health pickups into money.

All in all it's a good light game.  It's one of the better PS4 options to play with somebody who doesn't really game that often but experienced gamers can appreciate it as well.

7/10

Super Time Force Ultra

I can't think of any bad games that use time control as a mechanic.  STFU is a rogue-like platformer with a twist.  When the player dies, they can spawn a new character at any point in the previous play-through before their death.  This allows you to layer more and more characters on top of each other in order to kill enemies faster, pick up hard to reach collectables, and finish the level as quickly as possible.  

For me at least, the game didn't seem overly difficult until I decided to started trying to win the badge for finishing the level in record time.  30 do-overs is enough to finish most of the levels normally.

The different characters are a pretty cool feature of the game.  Not that they're balanced though, there are some characters that I found myself using again and again, some that were pretty handy in special circumstances and some that I looked at only once before giving up on.  With the ability to double-jump, activate a shield, and kill enemies without aiming, I found the character from Journey to be pretty stacked for instance.

Although it was good, the game was very short.  I'm sure if I were to attempt to complete and unlock everything it has to offer it would take quite a long time though.  Deciding to collect the optional badges is also a good way to add time to the game, and difficulty.  I feel like more games have been doing something like this lately; including optional elements to make the game more difficult rather than including a difficulty setting.

8/10

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 starts out with a bang.  You get the power armour and a minigun almost right away and end up fighting a deathclaw.  These are all things you wouldn't have seen until much further into Fallout 3.  At the same time though the power armour becomes upgradable and it's power source start's off in short supply.

I wanted to wait until I finished this game to write a review for it which makes it a little difficult to write this review.  It took about 40 hours to finish the main plot spread out over a month and a half for me. By the time I got to the ending though I was pretty over-powered and it was pretty easy to complete.

In most games it seems like the main plot is sort of the premium content and the rest of the missions are something similar to filler.  This really isn't the case with Fallout 4 though.  In fact, I preferred exploring the wasteland independently more than I did following the main quest.

The weapon crafting system was a very cool feature.  However, it's inclusion did mean that the shopkeeper's rarely had stronger equipment than what I had already.  In the previous games allying with stronger factions like the Brotherhood of Steel was the best way to get good equipment.  In Fallout 4 this didn't really matter so much.  

This game is huge.  There's a ton of content and I don't really think I'll have the time to get through all of it.  This is probably a game I'll keep coming back to over time though.  Just exploring a single building or completing an individual quest should use around an hour and was an enjoyable way to spend time for me.  I recommend this game.

Spoiler alert:  I picked the Institute.

8/10

Rocket League

I'd like to think that the person who came up with this idea was kind of a lazy kid.  Daydreaming while playing a game of soccer one day thinking "I like to hit the ball but I'd really rather not run around".  Rocket League is a game about car soccer.  Jumping cars to be exact.

Really it's a pretty simple concept.  1-4 cars compete against each other trying to get a giant soccer ball into a net.  There are no fouls, outs, off-sides, or other more complicated soccer rules.

The controls are somewhat intuitive but I didn't really get it until after I went through the tutorial.  I think some moves like the double-jump and activating the ball cam are crucial to having any kind of success in this game.  I'm also not sure that the ability to rocket around while airborne will ever come in handy.

Probably the most interesting thing from the development side of this game is how it came into the market.  At first Rocket League was free to PlayStation Plus members.  Now it's 20 dollars.  By releasing the game for free they were able to get a ton of publicity on reddit's gaming channel.  I'm not sure how reproducible of a strategy it is but for them at least it was a great way to launch a new IP.  However, if too many companies were to adopt this plan it'd be the same problematic race to the bottom that happened in the mobile games market.

Also, it's interesting to me that on their website they list a title called "Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars" released in 2008.  I guess they've been sitting on this idea for a while.  I'm not sure what they contributed to Mass Effect 3 and X-Com: Enemy Unknown.

All in all it's a pretty good game.  Well-polished, simple and easy to pick up and put down.

7/10

Tales from the Borderlands

Telltale did a good job of working with an already developed title.  They were able to get many of the voices from the previous games and the art is pretty on point.  It has a good soundtrack too.

I wonder how it would be different if this whole interactive story genre came from the other side.  If the movie industry were to begin it instead.  Do you think they would give the player small meaningless choices instead of allowing them to effect the story in substantial ways?  Would they would stretch the movie across 5 episodes and have it last around 10 hours in total?  How many of these little walk around and talk to everything parts would make the cut?  

It actually seems like this is the direction Telltale is going (not counting whatever they did before the walking dead).  In The Walking Dead there are many puzzle sections and areas where the player has a lot of interactivity in general.  In Tales from the Borderlands I can leave the controls for 20 minutes and the game will play on without any real impact.

If I could just show up at Telltale and tell everybody what to do it'd be this:

Make something shorter and use the extra production time to layer over the same content.  Remove the walking parts entirely.  It should have more branches to the story and real consequences.  I'm convinced this is a genre can gain more mass market appeal than it already has.  Maybe try getting a movie actor.

Anyways, overall the game was funny and I thought the character customization was a neat thing to add.  Check it out if you like the borderlands universe or Telltale Games in general.

6/10

Super Meat Boy

I grabbed this game as it became free this month on playstation plus but it is 5 years old.  I don't know that I love the mechanic of jumping around and dodging obstacles but I think the game does an excellent job of rewarding the player for doing this.  Even though this game requires the player to fail constantly, it also rewards the player constantly.

The first several levels are really quite easy giving an early feeling of accomplishment.  Once the levels get harder and the player dies more often, they are still rewarded by getting a cool replay showing where all their Meat Boys died throughout the level.  Honestly I think the replays are one of the most major if not the most major reason why this game was a success.

The plot of this game takes a backseat and isn't really all that deep (or good).  I didn't really appreciate the humour so much either but I suppose somebody might.  It stays consistent though and I'm assuming the flash roots of this title have the same feel.  In Indie Game the Movie, there's a scene where Edmund McMillen explains how Meat Boy is exposed and vulnerable, and how he doesn't just love bandage girl he needs her.  Maybe to a less cynical person that may have seemed like a sweet or deep sentiment but personally I can't help but think that the real reason he's made of meat is to keep the gore but get a lower age rating.

They did a great job with the level design in this.  I noticed in many of the more complicated levels with a difficult part a bit later on, they'd have a very similar part at the beginning so I could experiment with the motions.  When it had especially strange mechanics though they would almost always be at the start of the level which helped me avoid some frustration.  Many of the mechanics get reused in different ways and when a new mechanic is introduced for the first time it's always very simple which is a nice touch.  Another nice thing is that some of the levels also have some less obvious paths that can save me a lot of time but that I only noticed after dying several times, growing tired of the motions, and experimenting.

One thing I found myself wondering while playing this is how much do I really enjoy getting through the frustrating parts of a game like this if I don't get to brag about it afterwards?  I feel like the bragging right factor is a pretty important piece of the success of this type of game.  I'm not sure if this game allowed players to share their replays on social media at all but it could've been a nice touch.

7/10