Caltrops - The Last Guardian - 3rd-person stumbler

Forum Overview :: The Last Guardian

by Rafiki 02/25/2018, 10:14pm PST

Walk across steel cables like a tightrope suspended a million miles in the air in the wind, perform Prince of Persia acrobatic climbing and leaps, but an uneven floor is the bane of your existence. A superhero with cerobellar hypoplasia.

GAMEPLAY VIDEO:

I think I heard the ratbirddog controls were bad, and if that's the case, they're not! Ironically, controlling the AI beast was the least irritating part of the game. There were a few times I felt like I was tard wrangling, but overall it's perfectly fine. When you issue a command you see Trico react right away in response, BUT he'll typically turn and look toward where you were commanding, wait a beat, and then turn to orient himself and then do what you asked. I'm pretty sure they did it this way to give it the feel of it being a real creature reasoning and figuring things out and it's not bad at all. If you keep hammering commands expecting him to instantly perform you'll probably get annoyed, but once you figure out the pacing and flow it's fine. I honestly didn't find it frustrating to wait for him to act once I understood the delay. So what's usually the worst part of modern games, dealing with dipshit AI companions, was ok, but all of the parts where you have direct control over you own character sucked.

Even things that were solved problems years ago are problems in this game. In most games nowadays, when you want to interact with something the game will helpfully pop or slide you into place when you're within range so you don't have to tediously orient yourself with meticulous precision. Not in this game. Did you run just a single footstep too far and wind up standing slightly on top of a barrel you were trying to pull out of the ground? TOO BAD, circle back around and try again, PAL. You can hold down the interact button and your character will try to trot over to something close by automatically, but I found it to be hit and miss. And sometimes there would be a single pebble right next to the object, so I'd just glitch out in an infinite loop of bumping into it and backing up.

Even petting the dog was fucked up. You could hold the interact button in front of it and it would lower it's head for you to rub it's face and snout, but because they couldn't be bothered to temporarily disable the goddamn physics engine his head movement would bump you and send you stumbling back, cancelling the action. BUILD A LOVING BOND WITH YOUR ADORABLE COMPANION HA HA HA HA FUCK YOU *bonk* *ragdolling across a room and through a castle wall*

Best moment of the game: Homeboy just rescued me in a death-defying race against a collapsing platform, leapt away up onto a safe place, and gently set me down. It was all very epic and cinematic. Then he grabbed me by my shirt, flipped me up into the air over his head and onto his back because we bros now, but the game made me land on MY back so I didn't grab on and instead tumbled off and over a cliff.