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| Anger Foot, Bomb Rush Cyber Funk, Nine Sols by Rafiki 12/20/2024, 6:01pm PST | ||||
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| Anger Foot
Hotline Miami as an FPS. The gimmick is that your foot is your primary attack, and you can use it to kick the shit out of people and kick doors in. Doors fly across the room and kill people, and the angle of your kick determines the angle the door flies into an opposing wall. You can pick up guns from enemies, you can only discard a gun to pick up a new one (no ammo refills), and you can throw a gun at an enemy to stun them. You run and gun and kick through levels as fast as possible to reach the exit. Ok, not necessarily as fast as possible, you can bait enemies and there's no timer, but you're clearly encouraged to move quicker. You can unlock new shoes that have a variety of effects, like double jump, take less damage but die if you stop killing, change your size, etc. Unless you're going for 100%, none of them are necessary, just some variety. My favorite one was shoes that made doors explode when you kicked them in. Most of the time this meant the door immediately exploding in my face because either an enemy was placed right behind the door or the opposing wall was too close, but the benefit of sending a grenade flying into a room outweighed the downside of taking temporary damage. It was also more fun. There are 16 levels per world and a boss at the end. The boss fights are all terrible. The last one made me so angry I uninstalled the game in a fit of rage and then reinstalled a day later to actually finish the game. The last phase of the fight has you switch from FPS controls used throughout the entire game to awful vehicle controls, like a worse version of the HL2 hovercraft. Each world introduces at least 3 new enemies each, so there's actually some surprising variety compared to standard FPS games that aren't as one-note as Anger Foot. The AI won't win any awards, but it keeps things fresh. They also borrowed more from HL here, because the riot cops will definitely remind you of the Combine and the corporate assassins are a copy of the ninjas from HL1. The whole theme and aesthetic is sleazy and juvenile. You are in a city literally named Shit City. Every level has the color scheme and lighting of a scummy rave. There's the Violence, Debauchery, Business, and Pollution gang. Everyone talks about how they like all of those things. There's a boss that's a floating brain with a huge pair of testicles as a chin, and another boss that's a big fat pig in leather bondage gear. The game isn't any great satire or comedy, it just doesn't care what it is. It knows its dumb and runs with it. The soundtrack is one single, repetitive, non-stop techno beat that amps up and winds down depending on whether you're in combat. Despite that, I somehow never really got tired of it. RECOMMENDED. It's a good pick-up-and-play game that's fun for a few hours. Also has one of the best chunkiest, bassiest, shotgun blast of any game I've ever played. Every enemy dies in 1 hit so it's not like it was more powerful, but damn did I enjoy shooting the shotgun. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Haven't gotten far into it. I mostly like it. It plays smooth, it's accessible, performing tricks and combos is a breeze. Too many fucking cutscenes, though. Another game that needs an editor because it does that thing where you come out of a cutscene, walk 10 feet, and then go into another cutscene that should have just been a continuation of the previous one. Also, the artwork has kind of a drab look to it, whereas I kind of want to see more vibrant colors. Maybe this was to make the characters stand out more, but it makes the game look duller. Nine Sols Continuing From Software's influence on absolutely everything, Nine Sols is a 2D Metroid game heavily influenced by the Souls games. It's called Nine Sols, has a health flask (pipe) that works just like estus flasks and can be upgraded, has "bonfires" for restoration, skill upgrades, setting character augmentations, teleportation, and will reset the world while resting, and combat where enemies knock off half your health bar in one hit. It bills itself as being inspired by Sekiro, which was a derivative of the core Souls gameplay, and like Sekiro the primary combat focus is on timing and reflexes to execute successful parries so you can follow up with powerful counterattacks. Somewhere on here I said that Sekiro had probably the best melee combat of all time, so it's a good system to copy. I find this type of combat more fun and engaging than just button spamming hack n' slash with occasional jumps over attacks and projectiles. It just feels more involved. If you find Souls/Sekiro combat exhausting and unfun, the game tries to strike a balance by being more forgiving. Enemies have smaller move sets with less variety, and you have more leeway to react. You're still punished for fucking up, but it doesn't demand relentless precision like Sekiro does, and you can still technically beat bosses without parrying but it'll take longer. On top of that, of the few mini-bosses and one main boss I've fought, I died a lot but found that I struggled because I was approaching the fights in a stupid way. They're a lot easier than they seemed. I've only finished one "area," so I'm assuming I'm only 1/9th of the way through the game so I don't know how much that challenge is going to ramp up and become more demanding. I'm also assuming I'm only 1/9th of the way through because it sets up 9 potential bosses and I don't yet know if it's going to follow through or do that thing where they obviously ran out of development time and then cut 5 bosses or make you fight 3 at once or some other kind of cop out. Movement is smoooooooooth and the controls are perfectly responsive. So far, everything is pretty intuitive, and new abilities build off of other ones and are logical extensions of existing button assignments. As far as navigation, the game does a really good job of unlocking shortcuts and having areas loop back on themselves in typical Metroid fashion. Artwork was obviously inspired by Hollow Knight and goes for hand drawn animation with some light 3D blended in really well in the background from time to time. The game also has the first story in a long, long time that made me actually start paying attention right from the start and reading everything I come across. I'm tempering my expectations because it's not that it has mind-blowing writing or some bold, original idea, the ultimate reveal it's hinting at is probably going to be dorky, there is a slight comic-booky feel (some of the cutscenes are styled like manga, which I know nothing about. So, for all I know this could be some generic manga plot), and the game is called Nine Sols because you play a cat in a world of hyper-intelligent space cats, but it grabbed my attention just because of how shockingly dark it got. I mean, the visual it presented in one of the opening scenes instead of fading to black or otherwise alluding to it offscreen. So consider it a ringing endorsement that I didn't just instantly write it off as shitty video game writing. The other nice thing is that conversations are fairly brief and to the point, and the dialogue doesn't sound like it was written by someone that works for Bad Robot. The only downsides I'd really note are:
Overall: RECOMMENDED (so far). If you want Hollow Knight with deeper, more challenging combat. |
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Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom by 12/14/2024, 2:59pm PST  We don't deserve this NT by 12/14/2024, 7:41pm PST Anger Foot, Bomb Rush Cyber Funk, Nine Sols by 12/20/2024, 6:01pm PST Beat the second boss of Nine Sols by 12/21/2024, 8:42am PST |
