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Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I do like me a Gunvolt. Luminous Avenger iX plays a little differently, being a spin-off, and this sequel continues that way, but the Mega Man-ish roots are still there and as platform shooters go, the series is probably my favourite.

iX 2 involves yer boy Copen and some of his chums getting sucked into a parallel dimension where humans have died out and robots guard a huge tower. For story based reasons, the mission is to scale this tower (which helpfully has different biomes on each floor, in order to facilitate the genre tropes of ice/fire/jungle/etc. worlds), beat the bosses, nick their weapons (each of which is a weakness for another boss), and somehow return home.

Or, you ignore all that and have fun jumping and shooting and using loads of bizarre weapons.

Unlike all the other Gunvolt and Gunvolt-adjacent games, this one was a total breeze. Normally, the bosses at least would require many, many attempts, but here I stormed through the entire game with nary a death, and although the final boss took an age to defeat (perhaps I didn’t find the right weapon to beast it), it wasn’t difficult. Most of this was probably down to the addition of a power that lets you heal whenever you want, as often as you want, which is unlocked from the start. I suspect using this may lower your score, but I’m not score-attacking the game so I used it with impunity. Which, actually, wasn’t even all that often.

Luminous Avenger iX 2 is probably a weaker game than iX 1 in many ways – easier, shorter, less interesting story, forgettable bosses, and so on, but it’s still tremendous fun.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I talked about this a lot more on the ugvm Podcast, but for those who don’t listen (who even are you?), here’s a written account instead.

Firstly, I want to point how how bad I thought the Little Big Planet games are. As toyboxes, as creation tools – they’re great. Clunky, but great. As actual platformers? Awful. Some really great ideas, totally ruined by stupid controls and physics and wonkiness. For this reason, I never even looked at Sackboy: A Big Adventure, which took away the good bit of the series (makin’ stuff) and left the bad bit (jumping about). PS+ thrust it upon me, however, so I thought I could at least have a peek.

And I’m so, so glad I did because it is glorious. By binning the construction, they’ve concentrated on the platforming and they absolutely nailed it. The physics feels right! The levels don’t feel bodged into existence! It’s fun, it’s cute, it’s inventive and it’s brilliant. Seems all they needed to do was completely remove the entire point of the series. Who knew?

I played through it in co-op with my daughter, which was another revelation. In LBP, “co-op” was misused. No matter how much you wanted and tried to work together, invariably you’d end up in each other’s way, grabbing them by mistake, causing death and being left behind and making the game unnecessarily harder. Here, it’s real proper co-op, where a second player is an asset not an obstacle. You can throw them to reach bonuses and secrets, take down baddies quicker, and zip through areas that need lots of button/switch/object manipulation. Two player improves the experience rather than causes frustration.

The levels themselves are varied and feel so much like Nintendo platformers it’s uncanny. You know the thing about Super Mario Galaxy where they bombard you with ideas that are often one-and-done and never used again, but there are so, so many of them? This feels like that. In fact, if you were to replace Sackboy with Kirby or Yoshi, this could very easily be a Nintendo platformer. Yes, that’s high praise – because Sony platformers are generally terrible. Between this and Astrobot on the PS5, my mind is being changed.

Oh, and it has Dawn French in it and you can slap each other. What more do you want?

The Procession to Calvary (Switch): COMPLETED!

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One question I’m sure you often ask yourself, is what would a point and click adventure game animated by Terry Gilliam look like? It’s something I’ve certainly pondered hundreds of times, and now there’s a conclusive answer: The Procession to Calvary.

Mechanically, it’s “just another adventure game” in the style of Monkey Island or Sam & Max. The humour is veering that way too, via Monty Python. But graphically, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever played. You see, all the visuals are ripped straight from classic paintings. Which I would love to name for you but I haven’t a clue what they’re called. But I do recognise most of them.

The story follows you, as a soldier, at the end of a Bad Holy War where you did a lot of Murdering, being told “No More Murdering” by Immortal John, the new king. Except this one guy, you know, the real bad guy: Heavenly Peter. So off you trot to find him, solving puzzles of the sort you’d expect from the genre but wrapped up in absurdity and these old paintings. It’s stupid, but in absolutely the best way.

It’s short, at around two hours long, and none of the puzzles are going to sweat your brains, but it’s frequently hilarious and just so damn ridiculous you simply can’t not love it. I’ll leave you with this:

Superhot (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes, yes. I’m late to the party. I know. And no, I have no excuse because I’ve owned it on Steam for ages, and it’s been on PS+ seemingly forever. But I’m here now, and that’s all that counts, right?

And, as it turns out, Superhot is bloody excellent. The “things only move when you do” mechanic is so obvious now that you wonder why it wasn’t really done before, and here it turns a first person shooter into a puzzle game. It’s not just shooting, either – throwing your gun with spent ammo into the face of a baddie only to have him drop his gun which you then pick up and shoot him (and his mates) with will never get old.

It’s all so slick and clean and fluid. And, something I didn’t realise, is there’s a weird hacking/uploading-yourself-to-the-cloud plot which plays out in your fake OS front end too. And some additional game mechanics (that I won’t spoil) that come later on in the game. Such a joy to play and near-instant restarts for your inevitable (multiple) retries just removes any friction for just-one-more go.

Biomutant (PS5): COMPLETED!

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I do wonder sometimes what it is that makes me decide to play certain games. I’d cast a rough eye over reviews of Biomutant around the time it came out and it seemed to be an average open world adventure/explorey game, so ignored it. It’s now on PS+ (or possibly PS++ or PS+++: It’s hard to tell these days) and I downloaded it for reasons unknown, then started to play it.

After picking the fur colours for my… rat? Meerkat? I was set off in a world which immediately made me think of Fallout crossed with Stray – full of post-apocalyptic ruins and areas of poisoned air. Only with a narrator who won’t shut the hell up (I later discovered you can, thankfully) and keeps calling things by silly childish names. The plot is a mashup of three main stories – avenge the death of your parents by some big bad creature, unite all the tribes by joining one than either convincing them to join together (by fighting them) or helping them wipe the others out (by, uh, fighting them), and finally Save the World by stopping four huge Puffs (and no piano) from eating the roots of the World Tree or whatever it’s called. The latter seems to be the “main” quest.

Gameplay is like a cross between Zelda: Breath of the Wild and $random_ubisoft_title, with a large map and regions each with things to do. Tribes to take down, missions to complete, and loads of rubbish “knob twiddling” puzzles to solve. These puzzles are all virtually identical, whether they’re to activate washing machines, telephones, locked doors, record players, or other “old world relics”, and although there’s a side quest for each type, I really couldn’t be bothered tracking them all down.

Combat is a mix of smacking things with sword or club type weapons, or shooting with gun type weapons. It’s serviceable, but not really as fun or as fluid as other similar games You can build and modify your weapons and armour by swapping out parts and adding items to them for more damage or better healing or whatever, and this bit of the game is (I found, at least) pretty addictive – I was always trying to get the numbers up for, to be honest, little actual difference. I was always hilariously overpowered and near indestructible, and actually, the only time I died was when I jumped of a cliff into oblivion and the game reloaded an autosave which put me back just as I died. Helpful.

Graphically, Biomutant can look very, very pretty. Some incredible vistas, great sunsets, and amazing landscapes. Most of the characters are furry and the way the fur moves is wonderful. However, when it gets dark – especially in caves and underground – it looks dreadful. As in, you can’t see a bloody thing. If I fiddle with the gamma everything just goes grey instead of black, and looks worse. I don’t think it’s my TV, and I don’t think it’s HDR, as I don’t have this issue with other games. It’s like anything more than 30% black is 100% black. It affects the game too, as it makes these areas difficult to navigate and ugly on the eyes. You have a sort of torch, but it has a really narrow cone of effect so doesn’t help much.

To sum up, it’s a mix. There are some really nice bits, like the world and the characters and bits of the story. There are some rubbish bits, like the seemingly half-baked (and totally unnecessary, aside from needing to use that game title for something) power-up unlocking system and the puzzles. There are sections wholesale “borrowed” from other games, like Link’s glider, “horse”riding and Assassin’s Creed-like loot-chests. There’s a whole light/dark choice aspect which seems to get mostly ignored when you talk to people anyway. I went full “light” and kept being told that I might consider forgiving rather then destroy the guy who killed my family, but when it comes down to it, you’re not given that option. Too much of the fringes of the game feel under-done or incomplete. What is good, is really good, but it’s let down in so many ways.