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Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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While I’m a big fan of 2D Metroid games, and I did enjoy the first Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2 just left me cold and so I never played the third game. Oh, and Hunters was terrible. As a result, I did not rush out and buy Metroid Prime 4 at launch like I did with Metroid Dread. I did, however, get bought it as a present recently.

I was worried it would be incredibly hard (like Prime 1), and concerned the Samus Onna Bike bits would be terrible because those bits certainly looked terrible, but, actually, I was pleasantly surprised. Aside from a few times on some of the bosses, I didn’t die. I remember one of the later bosses on Prime 1 in particular taking about a billion attempts and when I did finally beat it I was down to almost no health, so I’m glad it wasn’t like that at all. No, the real “difficulty” was more in finding where to go than most of the battles, and one of the soldiers you rescue early on (annoyingly, it has to be said) helps with not getting lost most of the time. As for the bike, it’s OK. Completely unnecessary, adds nothing to the game bar making the game a bit longer as there’s a sizable desert to criss-cross hundreds of times which only seems to exist to have somewhere to use the bike. ANYWAY.

The gameplay, the graphics, the performance, the power-ups, the exploration, however, are all excellent. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable adventure from start to finish. It’s just missing a little something. Maybe it’s the rubbish Big Bad, and lack of other Metroid baddies like Ridley or Kraid or Mother Brain. Maybe it’s the slightly soulless desert. Maybe, just maybe, it’s that Metroid is intrinsically better in 2D than in 3D? It’s by no means a bad game at all, it’s just not quite the game Dread is.

Ball X Pit (Switch 2): COMPLETED!

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What if Arkanoid was Vampire Survivors? Well, you’d (sort of) have Ball X Pit. Instead of a bat, you have a person who throws balls to destroy enemies, which are essentially blocks, that move slowly towards you. You can gain XP from gems dropped by defeated baddies, as per Survivors games, and levelling up lets you choose a number of upgrades for your balls – such as balls that set things on fire or cause area damage like earthquakes.

Eventually, you get the chance to combine ball powers, so you can have a laser which hits all blocks in a column but also poisons them, or balls that can pass through blocks but also freezes them for a few seconds. You also get passive power-ups like increasing the damage to blocks from behind, or increasing the chance you’ll dodge an attack, and often these too can be combined.

As well as XP as you play each run to level you up for run itself, you also gain another XP type which gives permanent bonuses, and gold to buy things. Outside of the runs there’s a sort of farming game, where you buy land and buildings, plant crops, and then use all the characters you’ve unblocked as balls to bounce off everything to build the buildings and harvest the crops. Crops (grain, wood and stone) unlock and pay for additional buildings, and these building add extra bonuses to your characters, like faster movement or more HP.

Each character has its own quirks and runs can play out very differently as a result. Firstly, they all start with a different type of special ball, but then they have features like balls being launched from the back of the field instead of the front, or all balls pass through blocks or something. Later in the game you get the ability to take two characters into a run together, and that sort of amalgamates their abilities, further altering how the run plays out.

You can’t just stick to your favourite characters either, as in order to unlock the next level you have to complete the previous one a number of times with different characters. At first I hated this, as I thought I’d found the “best” character and wanted to stick with them, but it forced me to play differently and, actually, most of them have merit.

To complete the game, you have to have a number of successful runs on each level (with, as I said, a range of characters), and I did that. It unlocks a sort of NewGame+ which is really just an extra difficulty for each level you can choose. I’ve played quite a bit of that too, but it doesn’t really add anything to what is an already excellent game. Addictive Survivors gameplay loop and a surprising amount of variety add up to a must-buy title.

Proverbs (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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One massive Picrossy/Minesweepery puzzle which takes about 20 hours to complete? Why yes, sir, I will boogie. Especially at the peanuts-price it was going for.

Imagine a big old painting depicting pictures of lots of proverbs that have pretty much all fallen out of use, made up of groups of pixels all split into areas. Each area has some pixels with numbers in, and those numbers – a bit like minesweeper – says how many yellow pixels are touching it (including the numbered pixel itself). All other pixels are red. Fill them all in correctly, and the area redraws as a bit of the painting, your percentage complete in the top right corner goes up by a minuscule amount, and you might unlock a proverb and its meaning.

And then you do some more.

Like Picross, it’s very relaxing and did tend to make me fall asleep while playing. I wasn’t bored, just zen’d out.

One thing I do need to mention is the horrible default controls on a Steam Deck. After I’d modified them to match the Picross E/S control scheme, and enabled “hold down the button to fill pixels as you move” in the customisation, all was well with the world. The defaults are probably fine if you play on a big monitor with a mouse, but handheld it needs to be Picross-like!

Gambler’s Table (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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It’s another clicker game! How rare.

This one is themed around flipping coins. You click on a coin, and if it’s tails (or heads? I genuinely can’t remember and it makes no difference anyway) you get money. You spend the money on having more coins on the table, and higher value coins, and little helper people to flip coins for you, or upgrades where you just have to move the pointer vaguely near coins to flip them, or coins that flip themselves randomly, or coins that flip other coins, or coins that flip more than once per flip. Flip! Flip! FLIP. And you unlock different tables, which, like the seasons in Trees Inc, have special modifiers for that run.

Like some of these games you get to a point where progressing further is really slow, but you can reset everything and gain some permanent upgrades to make the next run faster and get you a bit further. Oh, and you can unlock pointless hats for your helpers to wear.

It’s nothing new, but it’s well put together and if you’re in the mood for brainless gaming it, like many of the other clicker games I’ve played recently, is perfect.

Trees Inc (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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If I were to describe this game it would sound very much like it was the same as Timber Rush, which I also played recently. And, I suppose it is. Trees Inc is a cookie clicker type game where you chop trees, get money for chopping trees, and spend that money to chop faster, get more money, and buy helpers to chop on your behalf. So yes, it’s the same game.

Well, not quite. It looks a lot more basic, and you grow different types of trees rather than just have one tree, and you have to wait for them to re-grow (although helpers and upgrades can speed that up). Oh, and you unlock different seasons that have different modifiers (like things grow slower or there are lightning storms) that you can swap between. But it’s still a clicker game about trees. And it was pretty good.