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Concrete Genie (PS4): COMPLETED!

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I thought this game was going to be about painting murals on walls, which then come to life. And, for a while, it is. You paint genies who can help you move objects, activate power or open doors, and you can paint random stuff on most vertical surfaces. However, it’s a lot darker than that and the first third of the game involves a lot of hiding from some not very nice bullies.

There’s quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed style traversal, which I wasn’t expecting. Not sure how Ash, the boy you control, has the skills needed to use the underside of a crane arm as monkey bars without freaking out he’s going to die. There’s a lot of collecting scrapbook pages that float around the rooftops, again giving the feel of Assassin’s Creed III.

But it isn’t Assassin’s Creed of course – it’s a painting game as I said. Until it isn’t. The final part of the game introduces attacks, a skating mechanic, and a health bar, as you suddenly have enemies to fight. It also introduced a bug where one of the enemies wouldn’t move and was invincible. These bits of the game, and the final boss, aren’t really what I signed up for and don’t really fit. It doesn’t help that the “lock on” button very rarely actually locks on to the baddies, and when it does it doesn’t stay locked on for long. I don’t know if that’s a bug or by design, but either way it hampers beating them and just adds annoyance to the end of the game.

Concrete Genie is a very pretty game (perhaps more so as I played it on the PS5), with some clever bits and a nice world and story, and the painting bits are enjoyable, but the world traversal is clunky and the game style switch was a bad idea.

The post Concrete Genie (PS4): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Super Robin Hood (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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This reminds me a lot of every single platformer for the Spectrum. Especially Ghost Hunters, for some reason. Which is also a Codemasters game. Yes, i know there was a Spectrum version of this too, but I never played it.

Anyway, you explore a castle, collect treasure, and eventually reach Maid Marion. Except when I got there, a ladder to reach her was broken. Turns out, you have to get all the treasure to fix the ladder (for some reason that isn’t explained). Of course.

So I had to spend half an hour backtracking (thankfully I’d killed many of the baddies and opened a few shortcuts so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been) and then another half an hour returning to the final screen again. With the ladder complete, so was the game!

Not a fantastic game, but a more than competent 8bit platformer. Providing you don’t miss any treasure, obviously.

The post Super Robin Hood (Evercade): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Slay the Spire – Uncompleted Review

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Just one more try, before you look up it will be 1am and you have work in the morning. Slay the Spire should come with a warning. The monsters in the game will chomp away at your health but this game will devour your time.

You start the game with The Ironclad character and play strikes & block cards to defeat monsters. Along the way you will unlock new cards, open treasure chests to receive a relic, gain a boon, receive a curse & even visit a merchant to spend your hard earned gold. At some point eventually you will die usually at the hands of the end of act boss fight or an elite monster. Thus begins the one more try loop, let’s go again and see how far we get this time. 

After a while you will unlock two more characters in The Silent a huntress who uses daggers and poison and The Defect a machine who uses elemental orbs to attack. There is also a fourth character called The Watcher but you need to complete a run before she is unlocked. I prefer to play with The Silent and if I get some poison cards I can get a decent run together.

I usually play games that have a story and an ending because the time I can spend on video games is limited. Therefore I avoid rogue like games or as I like to call them timesinks like Spelunky, Binding of Isaac and FTL Faster Than Light because of the amount of hours you have to play to either upgrade or get lucky to complete a run. Although at some point I am looking forward to playing Hades.

Slay the Spire is no exception to this formula, after 30 hours playing I finally made it to Act 3! & promptly died at the first fight. I read a post on Reddit recently where someone mentioned they had played for 300 hours and had still not completed the game, that made me stop and think about the time commitment this game needs and whilst I won’t quit just yet it is time to move on. I will continue to slowly chip away at Slay the Spire and if I’m lucky I may just complete a run before the PlayStation 6 is released.

I’m going to start playing The Pathless an open world action game developed by Giant Squid who also made Abzu. Just let me have one more try on Slay the Spire.

Mystery World Dizzy (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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Two things about this game struck me. Firstly, it’s very much like a much shorter version of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy what with many of the same (again) puzzles and locations. Secondly, there’s no way this is a NES game, surely? It looks way too good. And when you drop three items on the same screen it doesn’t flicker like mad. And it’s so smooth! And the music is way ahead of that in the other Dizzy games!

As I said, it’s a lot shorter than the previous Dizzy game I’d played, so it wasn’t long before I was done with this too. It’s really good though – very impressive.

The post Mystery World Dizzy (Evercade): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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Good grief that was a long game. Not helped by the fact that nearly two hours in I discovered I’d somehow managed to accidentally sequence break and ended up somewhere without items I needed to progress and no way to return to where they were located. Apparently that isn’t possible, but I did it anyway.

So I started again, and that took five hours. Five hours! For a NES Dizzy game with no password system or save games. On the Evercade, i can save and quit when I want, but on the original NES that would have been ridiculous. I’m reminded of another Codemasters game – Rolo to the Rescue – on the Mega Drive which, after four hours play, I realised there was no way to save or continue later. After turning it off, I never played it again. At least, until emulators were a thing.

Back to the game though. Well, it’s the same as all the other Dizzy games, isn’t it? It’s much, much larger with way more to-ing and fro-ing, but it rehashes a lot of previous puzzles and locations, and adds four sort of mini-games that must be completed to continue. I remember two of them – Dizzy Down the Rapids and Bubble Dizzy – as standalone releases on the Spectrum.

Aside from getting stuck on my first playthrough, I didn’t find it all that difficult (although the cloud jumping section was frustrating). It was just really long!

The post The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy (Evercade): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.