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The second game of the day, with Heroes in the title!
I never completed Gunstar Heroes back in the day. In fact, I don’t think I ever played it much (I didn’t buy it until many years after release anyway). Or even enjoyed it. Yeah, I’m a heretic.
But there’s something about these 3D ports on the 3DS that make you want to play them anyway, isn’t there? Otherwise why did I buy Altered Beast again? Hmm.
My main issue with Gunstar Heroes previously is it’s too hard. Or so I thought. One I’d picked up the “chaser/shot” combo it all suddenly became a lot easier to progress. Sure, I struggled a bit with some (most!) of the bosses, but the actual levels themselves were a walkover in comparison to previous attempts to play the game.
And it was fun! A lot of mostly mindless fun! Aside from Golden Silver at the end. He can do one. So many attempts.
I think this may actually be the first Lego game I’ve completed entirely in co-op. Lego Batman 2 and 3 were both mostly co-op, but Lego Marvel Super Heroes I’ve played only in co-op with my daughter. Which is nice.
There’s a lot of mopping up bricks to do, as usual. We’ve done some, after finishing the story, but we’re still only at around 52/250. Finding the rest is going to be a pain, as although most of them are on the New York City map, it’s often not clear what you need to do when you get to them. Of course, a fair few are going to come from redoing the levels again in Free Play. Having said that, in recent games I’ve not bothered going for 100%. I think Lego Harry Potter 2 was the first where I didn’t, and although I had a pretty good stab at it for Lego Batman 2, I haven’t tried at all for Lego Batman 3. I really should. It’s a lot of fun.
Anyway! This is telling you nothing about this game. Which there isn’t a great deal to talk about, actually. It’s more Lego super heroing, only with Marvel characters instead of DC ones like Batman 2 and 3. Like Batman 2 there’s a massive open hub world (New York City), which seems more dense and full of life than Gotham. The split up mini-hubs of Batman 3 were a step back, I thought. There’s also a handful of things to do on the SHIELD helicarrier, up int he sky above the city.
The story revolves around Galactus heading for Earth, and Doctor Doom, Loki and Magneto (as well as a few other less important baddies) seem to be taking advantage of this for a project of their own. As, variously, several Avengers, the Fantastic 4, Spider-Man and a few X-Men, you progress through the levels trying to beat these baddies and take back the Cosmic Bricks they’re stealing. The levels are all pretty standard Lego fare – different characters can activate different things, access different areas, or destroy or build certain types of blocks. They’re pretty varied, with settings underwater, in the Statue of Liberty and on a space station, and the characters you use are swapped frequently so you don’t get bored with the same ones.
The star of the show is Deadpool. He shows up for some of the bonus levels, and has his own room on the helicarrier where you buy found red bricks and watch the in-game movies and so on. In one of of the main levels, Doctor Octopus smashes through the Daily Bugle offices, and then in a bonus level later Deadpool narrates (with silly voices) as you, as Agent Coulson and Doc Ock, have to tidy up the mess. It’s very funny, and a memorable moment.
There aren’t any real surprises in the gameplay, and it’s a shame that two player “screen each” play sometimes makes the framerate nosedive (more so than in Batman 3, in fact, and that was bad at times), but it’s a solid Lego title and probably one of the best too. Although they’re all pretty great, truth be told.
Now I just need to find copies of Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego the Hobbit, and Lego Jurassic World and I’ll be up to date. Apart from Lego Dimensions (so called because your wallet needs a 4th dimension to hold all the money needed for it) which is out soon. Sigh.
I find the term “walking around simulator”, which games like this have often been categorised as, somewhat derogatory. It’s as if there’s nothing to the game at all, bar walking around, and it should be derided because of this. Which is missing the point. The aim of these games is not to “win”, not to solve puzzles and leap gaps and shoot Nazis, but to discover the story. Yes, you do this by walking around, but there’s more to it than that.
In Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, erm, everybody’s gone to the rapture. You start off as an unknown person on the outskirts of a Shropshire village in 1984, near an observatory. You can’t enter the observatory as the gates are locked, so you need to travel a massive loop of the village to try and get in the back way. As soon as you set off you hear a radio message which alerts you to “an event”, and as you explore the village radios and telephones start to fill in some of the story behind what happened.
Along the way, orbs of light direct you to places of interest, where you see some conversations and actions leading up to The Event played out. Technically, you can just walk past everything and head for the end of the game, but then you really do have just a walking around simulator on your hands, and you’re missing both the point and the game.
When you reach the end, there’s no decisive conclusion and no full exposition of exactly what happened. It’s up to you to formulate in your head what you think occurred based on what you’ve seen and heard, and how you interpret what the “glowing light” actually is.
Almost as much fun as putting this together yourself, is reading what other people thought and how their theories compare to your own. With that in mind, here’s a big spoiler:
Obviously, there’s more to it than all this, but I’m not intending to write a dissertation! There are a lot of side stories as well, like the love triangle between Stephen, Lizzie and Kate, or Frank’s difficult relationship with his sister, all of which are explored literally by exploring. It’s intriguing and compelling finding out everything you can from the clues left behind, and the English village setting is beautiful to wander round.
The only minor negatives I have are that sometimes the walking pace, even with the “jog” button, is much too slow (especially when you realise you’ve missed something and have to backtrack for miles), and that there is a huge amount of asset reuse. The same shed, greenhouse, plastic garden table, white sheets on the washing line, Raleigh Burner-alike BMX bike and books are everywhere, repeated over and over again. Houses all have the same kitchen. Even the two pubs in the village have exactly the same “special offers board” and virtually the same layout inside. The worst copy and paste job is the large number of cars that are around the village – of which there are only about 5 or 6 types. This wouldn’t be a problem but they’re not just the same type of car, they’re exactly the same car with the same colour and same number plate.
Sometimes you can see that it’s intentional, with, for example, a car appearing in one location with a Peter Pan hat and swords inside, then appearing later at the holiday camp where the kids were performing Peter Pan, but most of the time it’s just jarring. In one case there’s a carpark with two instances of the exact same van in it! There’s no reason why they couldn’t have replaced the number plates and colour-swapped the cars to mix it up a bit, surely? Or had a red-and-yellow Burner instead of a blue-and-yellow one occasionally? I realise it was a small team making the game, but this would surely have been a tiny job compared to the rest?
Another thing which was unimportant in the end but seemed necessary to record along the way was all the numbers broadcast on the radios (identical radios…). I started to get a little paranoid that I might miss one. Then I wondered if the names of the books were important. Or the times on the clocks (which were all stopped at the same time, as it turned out). Or the car number plates. I ended up documenting everything and – of course – none of it was needed. In fact, there was nothing you could even do with this information anyway. This wasn’t the game’s fault of course, more mine for not having any idea what to expect and not wanting to miss anything that may be required later on. For new players: read and listen, but don’t bother making notes.
Should you play Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture? Absolutely. Will you understand what you’ve just played when you come to the end? Possibly. Will it matter if you don’t? No, I don’t think so.